A couple of the devices are actually good ideas (most aren't). But if there was ever a good way to make sure a product will never have a prayer of hitting the market, it's to put it on a model. Nothing ever modelled (sp?) in those freak shows would ever be bought by any decent human being. The most extreme case: if you ever wanted to make sure nobody ever imitated a piece of clothing you design, have Cher wear it to the Oscars. Guaranteed. (you may now moderate this to -100)
If I had received it, I wouldn't want M$'s prototype either. Too big for a doorstop, too heavy for a bookend, and too dorky to use. But I wouldn't give it back, just to keep them worried;-)
I see a more important market for this in devices for finding stolen items (electronics, paintings, cars, whatever), which the article states will be another version. Such GPS devices available today are typically huge and expensive, only appropriate for the most expensive luxury cars. These miniaturized versions will make it much more practical. Since it could be years before it's going, does anybody know of any good links to existing equipment to do the same thing (minus the GPS) in a way that can be hidden in electronics? (radio tags, whatever) I've heard it's extremely effective. The case I heard of was a thief robbing gear from all of the churches in my area. Some locations put in some transmitters, and within two weeks he stole again and they nailed the guy (in fact, he hadn't managed to fence almost anything yet from the previous locations, so nearly everything was recovered). I need such transmitters for the gear in my recording studio, home theater, and computers.
I immediately started buying any books from places like Barnes & Noble, and making sure any DVD's I buy are from 800.com or anybody else. More importantly, I emailed them to voice my complaint, and immediately got a personalized response (so yes, they are worried!).
If I remember correctly, the law states that if you don't put in a serious effort to defend your trademark you lose it. Microsoft no longer could do anything about the company that owns windows95.com and such, because it's too late now. So even if you have a universal lock on a name, the guy who owns the.com version doesn't have to have it very many years (maybe 2-3) to no longer have any trademark conflicts (in fact, he could begin to sell exactly the same kind of services as you, and if you let him do it for a while without filing against him he would get away with it indefinitely!). Ask a lawyer for verification.
The zoomed view on military FLIR systems is something like 6 degrees. It's probably even less than that on the Cadillac system (extreme tunnel vision, often looking the wrong way).
Something nobody has mentioned (at least not when I read through everything), but which is important: the Cadillac system only points directly forward. So the moment you start to go around any kind of a curve, it only tells you whats off to the side of the road on the wrong side. The correct way to do it is for the camera angle to change in real time according to the angle of the steering wheel and your velocity. So as you curve to the right, it would angle to the right to point at where you're actually going to go (and maybe a little further to the right, since often what's critical is what's on the edge of the road). Added cost? Yes. Expensive? Probably not significantly more than the current system (assuming the camera fits in a small housing). But _so_ much more useful!
I believe we were the first place in the world to allow digital signatures. Our governor has an amazingly high emphasis on anything computer-related (especially surprising considering the fact that he reminds me of Dan Quayle;-).
Since NetBSD already has an iMac and G3 version, it will probably soon have iBook support. If the Linux guys would cooperate more with the BSD guys, things would get supported sooner and with less effort from any group.
So I guess Microsoft would come after me if I register domains like "chiquitoaguado.com" or "smallandflaccid.com" or "teenysoggyweenie.com" or "notuptothetask.com" or "maybeViagrawillhelp.com" or "strangethingtobragabout.com"?
...as are many of the houses in my neighborhood. It was wired throughout with Cap5 as part of its construction (the phone lines in the house are actually some of the Cap5 wires, so it's very thorough). It's becoming more common in the west (I'm in Utah, and I bet you'd see it even more in California).
Oracle is all PR and no extra substance. They are the Microsoft of enterprise databases (from what I can tell, their goal in life is to destroy M$ and replace them as the worthless evil empire). DB/2 is just as powerful and stable, easier to program for (e.g. tools that automatically generate code for it, good documentation, etc.), though still a bit pricy. If you write code handling transactions, MySQL is a huge cost saver, and very fast/stable. On a project we just put a proposal in for, they had suggested Oracle. Pretty quickly we discovered that the pure Oracle licenses were going to cost more than they had planned to spend on the entire project. BAD!!! The costs of Oracle are absolutely pathetic. If we get the project, we found it will be more practical to use something more affordable and spend a little bit more time on the transactions (writing a tad of Java code will give me my transactions on MySQL, and will probably get as fast or faster performance; I've done transactions in Java before, and it worked just fine).
The best way is to write everything as ODBC/JDBC, not vendor-specific code, allowing portability. Working with legacy databases is a nightmare, especially when you have any reason to port them to another DB. Yes, specialized commands can buy you a bit, but in the long run are rarely worth it.
Seems to me like the next logical step is to have a graphic card that can handle more of the game duties. If a box is built right, the CPU can be slow but everything flies because the work is handed out to chips specialized in different tasks (see: Amiga, mid 1980's, which is still a superior design than any current PC). This chip makes a good first step in that direction, taking over the lighting and such, eliminating the need for faster AGP transfers and such. Ideally, I would like to see a graphics board that actually takes over some of the program itself. Of course it would be even better to have a NUMA motherboard and have chips dedicated to I/O, another to graphics, another to sound (not through the ISA/PCI slot), thus the CPU itself wouldn't have to be the latest greatest to turn out incredible results. These guys are turning out a chip in the ballpark of $100/piece wholesale that runs circles around any CPU. The whole computer needs to get that way. The only time you should ever need a fast CPU is for science/math, not for a normal desktop machine. ***Of course Transmeta might change the whole scenario, because if their chip can be reprogrammed on the fly to do things like graphics then there's no need for so much hardware.
Yes, schools teach those. It's called a community college. But they just teach you how to use existing solutions, not how to create better solutions. I use many of the mentioned items in my work, but often find that no tool does what I want in a very complete or efficient manner. So I'm in the process of writing new software tools to accomplish what I need (which I can of course resell besides using for myself, so it's a good idea). It's from my training in how to find needs, build use cases, design software, test it, support it, bugproof it, etc., that I can pull that off. That only comes from a proper education in how to solve a problem, not from how to use somebody else's software which hopefully already has the problem solved (in my case the study was at the University of Utah, which, while not as well known, has a fantastic program, dealing in the same theory and such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT).
Europe is known for nobody wanting to pay for software. If Mandrake does any decent advertising, they will blow Red Hat away by a bigger margin than in the US, due to pricing.
The Ultra 5 is cheap because it's a 2D machine. It's probably not much different from a $800 PC with Solaris installed, but can't be used for video games;-)
12. Igermanium (for use in greenhouses, or for people in Berlin) 11. Ifrancium (because the French like to be incompatible with everybody) 10. Iboronium (for people who speak in a monotone) 9. Iluminum (for people who are convinced they are highly intelligent) 8. Isiliconium (for women;-) 7. Iargonium (for people with really bad grammar) 6. Iscandium (for use by reporters) 5. Iironium (for your health, or for use while doing the laundry) 4. Ikryptonium (for sci-fi fanatics, or for deciphering messages) 3. IHoSilverium (for Lone Ranger fans) 2. Iridium (name available again now that the satellite system went under) 1. Iranium (faulty product for sale to countries we don't like)
See: http://www.cs.utah.edu/vision/virtual_prototyping. html (it's currently used for large stuff, but what you actually control could be any size, really)
On the atom level, they prototyped an artificial eye (lifelike response, persistence of vision) a long time ago, but I don't remember the link;-)
If any other country has anything similar to a long-range cruise missile (very possible; our university science departments are packed with people from the "enemy", learning directly from us how to blow us up, often on American scholarships), then any kind of defense system is rendered completely ineffective. It would only take one reaching DC, one for LA, one for NY, one for Dallas, and one for maybe Chicago to effectively wipe us out. And there would be nothing we could do about it. A fairly low-budget Armaggeddon. Kinda' scary, when you think about it. Makes me glad I don't live in a really big city, since I would only get nuked on accident;-)
I'm left wondering if there isn't a way that Milberg Weiss could be sued by 4Kids for its actions (libel, etc., etc.), and maybe by the family who started the lawsuit (there has to be a law allowing damage recovery against legal services that have been paid by the competition not to provide proper counsel, which in a way they have. I would prefer they were disbarred, but I'm sure we aren't that lucky!). That would be sweet!
These guys ought to read The Merchant of Venice. They were trying for two pounds of flesh, but like in the book won't receive even one.
Why is it good for Linux/BSD? Because it will get people started on using the good Unix utilities on NT. When there's yet another crash on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to Linux/BSD, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a pointless expense, while Linux/BSD would be nearly free and more stable.
I've been working for a while on some wireless projects, and making a box handle more than one frequency properly can be very difficult and expensive. Chip sets are sold optimized for a specific frequency, and each band range can have such totally different characteristics that it becomes and apples-and-oranges situation. Reflections, what types of material the signal can pass through, possible bandwidth, etc... many things change, and can cause a total rethinking of how it works. The only way for Apple to handle France is a fairly thorough redesign, and a unit capable of many bandwidths would be more expensive than I want to think about.
I agree. While Windows kinda does OK on installs, the only computer that actually does it right is: the Mac. The best installers for the PC still don't match it. It's no wonder it's so popular in schools and such... it's basically zero-admin. I thought it was cool in my school labs how, without doing anything special, they had the machines set up to revert to their correct installed state on each startup, even if a newbie (or a hacker) attempted to break something. Very cool. But yes, I'm a Linux guy (I've been running it since the 0.X.X days, when the best distribution was Slackware!).
The one thing Microsoft has done right in that regard is the Office2K installer; it sets everyting up for autorepairs (even cooler than the Mandrake self-update, in some regards). We need an installer that's an imitation of it (but better!).
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of the devices are actually good ideas (most aren't). But if there was ever a good way to make sure a product will never have a prayer of hitting the market, it's to put it on a model. Nothing ever modelled (sp?) in those freak shows would ever be bought by any decent human being. The most extreme case: if you ever wanted to make sure nobody ever imitated a piece of clothing you design, have Cher wear it to the Oscars. Guaranteed. (you may now moderate this to -100)
If I had received it, I wouldn't want M$'s prototype either. Too big for a doorstop, too heavy for a bookend, and too dorky to use. But I wouldn't give it back, just to keep them worried ;-)
I see a more important market for this in devices for finding stolen items (electronics, paintings, cars, whatever), which the article states will be another version. Such GPS devices available today are typically huge and expensive, only appropriate for the most expensive luxury cars. These miniaturized versions will make it much more practical. Since it could be years before it's going, does anybody know of any good links to existing equipment to do the same thing (minus the GPS) in a way that can be hidden in electronics? (radio tags, whatever) I've heard it's extremely effective. The case I heard of was a thief robbing gear from all of the churches in my area. Some locations put in some transmitters, and within two weeks he stole again and they nailed the guy (in fact, he hadn't managed to fence almost anything yet from the previous locations, so nearly everything was recovered). I need such transmitters for the gear in my recording studio, home theater, and computers.
I immediately started buying any books from places like Barnes & Noble, and making sure any DVD's I buy are from 800.com or anybody else. More importantly, I emailed them to voice my complaint, and immediately got a personalized response (so yes, they are worried!).
If I remember correctly, the law states that if you don't put in a serious effort to defend your trademark you lose it. Microsoft no longer could do anything about the company that owns windows95.com and such, because it's too late now. So even if you have a universal lock on a name, the guy who owns the .com version doesn't have to have it very many years (maybe 2-3) to no longer have any trademark conflicts (in fact, he could begin to sell exactly the same kind of services as you, and if you let him do it for a while without filing against him he would get away with it indefinitely!). Ask a lawyer for verification.
The zoomed view on military FLIR systems is something like 6 degrees. It's probably even less than that on the Cadillac system (extreme tunnel vision, often looking the wrong way).
Something nobody has mentioned (at least not when I read through everything), but which is important: the Cadillac system only points directly forward. So the moment you start to go around any kind of a curve, it only tells you whats off to the side of the road on the wrong side. The correct way to do it is for the camera angle to change in real time according to the angle of the steering wheel and your velocity. So as you curve to the right, it would angle to the right to point at where you're actually going to go (and maybe a little further to the right, since often what's critical is what's on the edge of the road). Added cost? Yes. Expensive? Probably not significantly more than the current system (assuming the camera fits in a small housing). But _so_ much more useful!
I believe we were the first place in the world to allow digital signatures. Our governor has an amazingly high emphasis on anything computer-related (especially surprising considering the fact that he reminds me of Dan Quayle ;-).
Since NetBSD already has an iMac and G3 version, it will probably soon have iBook support. If the Linux guys would cooperate more with the BSD guys, things would get supported sooner and with less effort from any group.
So I guess Microsoft would come after me if I register domains like "chiquitoaguado.com" or "smallandflaccid.com" or "teenysoggyweenie.com" or "notuptothetask.com" or "maybeViagrawillhelp.com" or "strangethingtobragabout.com"?
...as are many of the houses in my neighborhood. It was wired throughout with Cap5 as part of its construction (the phone lines in the house are actually some of the Cap5 wires, so it's very thorough). It's becoming more common in the west (I'm in Utah, and I bet you'd see it even more in California).
Oracle is all PR and no extra substance. They are the Microsoft of enterprise databases (from what I can tell, their goal in life is to destroy M$ and replace them as the worthless evil empire). DB/2 is just as powerful and stable, easier to program for (e.g. tools that automatically generate code for it, good documentation, etc.), though still a bit pricy. If you write code handling transactions, MySQL is a huge cost saver, and very fast/stable. On a project we just put a proposal in for, they had suggested Oracle. Pretty quickly we discovered that the pure Oracle licenses were going to cost more than they had planned to spend on the entire project. BAD!!! The costs of Oracle are absolutely pathetic. If we get the project, we found it will be more practical to use something more affordable and spend a little bit more time on the transactions (writing a tad of Java code will give me my transactions on MySQL, and will probably get as fast or faster performance; I've done transactions in Java before, and it worked just fine).
The best way is to write everything as ODBC/JDBC, not vendor-specific code, allowing portability. Working with legacy databases is a nightmare, especially when you have any reason to port them to another DB. Yes, specialized commands can buy you a bit, but in the long run are rarely worth it.
Seems to me like the next logical step is to have a graphic card that can handle more of the game duties. If a box is built right, the CPU can be slow but everything flies because the work is handed out to chips specialized in different tasks (see: Amiga, mid 1980's, which is still a superior design than any current PC). This chip makes a good first step in that direction, taking over the lighting and such, eliminating the need for faster AGP transfers and such.
Ideally, I would like to see a graphics board that actually takes over some of the program itself. Of course it would be even better to have a NUMA motherboard and have chips dedicated to I/O, another to graphics, another to sound (not through the ISA/PCI slot), thus the CPU itself wouldn't have to be the latest greatest to turn out incredible results. These guys are turning out a chip in the ballpark of $100/piece wholesale that runs circles around any CPU. The whole computer needs to get that way. The only time you should ever need a fast CPU is for science/math, not for a normal desktop machine.
***Of course Transmeta might change the whole scenario, because if their chip can be reprogrammed on the fly to do things like graphics then there's no need for so much hardware.
Yes, schools teach those. It's called a community college. But they just teach you how to use existing solutions, not how to create better solutions. I use many of the mentioned items in my work, but often find that no tool does what I want in a very complete or efficient manner. So I'm in the process of writing new software tools to accomplish what I need (which I can of course resell besides using for myself, so it's a good idea). It's from my training in how to find needs, build use cases, design software, test it, support it, bugproof it, etc., that I can pull that off. That only comes from a proper education in how to solve a problem, not from how to use somebody else's software which hopefully already has the problem solved (in my case the study was at the University of Utah, which, while not as well known, has a fantastic program, dealing in the same theory and such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT).
I suppose next Intel will prevent us from using the letter "I" in any searchable post in a website (it really is trademarked!).
Oops! I just did it. I did it again. I did it again....
Europe is known for nobody wanting to pay for software. If Mandrake does any decent advertising, they will blow Red Hat away by a bigger margin than in the US, due to pricing.
Probably invented by government agents who don't want to get downsized like the military.
The Ultra 5 is cheap because it's a 2D machine. It's probably not much different from a $800 PC with Solaris installed, but can't be used for video games ;-)
Other bad future CPU names:
;-)
12. Igermanium (for use in greenhouses, or for people in Berlin)
11. Ifrancium (because the French like to be incompatible with everybody)
10. Iboronium (for people who speak in a monotone)
9. Iluminum (for people who are convinced they are highly intelligent)
8. Isiliconium (for women
7. Iargonium (for people with really bad grammar)
6. Iscandium (for use by reporters)
5. Iironium (for your health, or for use while doing the laundry)
4. Ikryptonium (for sci-fi fanatics, or for deciphering messages)
3. IHoSilverium (for Lone Ranger fans)
2. Iridium (name available again now that the satellite system went under)
1. Iranium (faulty product for sale to countries we don't like)
See: http://www.cs.utah.edu/vision/virtual_prototyping. html
;-)
(it's currently used for large stuff, but what you actually control could be any size, really)
On the atom level, they prototyped an artificial eye (lifelike response, persistence of vision) a long time ago, but I don't remember the link
If any other country has anything similar to a long-range cruise missile (very possible; our university science departments are packed with people from the "enemy", learning directly from us how to blow us up, often on American scholarships), then any kind of defense system is rendered completely ineffective. It would only take one reaching DC, one for LA, one for NY, one for Dallas, and one for maybe Chicago to effectively wipe us out. And there would be nothing we could do about it. A fairly low-budget Armaggeddon. Kinda' scary, when you think about it. Makes me glad I don't live in a really big city, since I would only get nuked on accident ;-)
I'm left wondering if there isn't a way that Milberg Weiss could be sued by 4Kids for its actions (libel, etc., etc.), and maybe by the family who started the lawsuit (there has to be a law allowing damage recovery against legal services that have been paid by the competition not to provide proper counsel, which in a way they have. I would prefer they were disbarred, but I'm sure we aren't that lucky!). That would be sweet!
These guys ought to read The Merchant of Venice. They were trying for two pounds of flesh, but like in the book won't receive even one.
Why is it good for Linux/BSD? Because it will get people started on using the good Unix utilities on NT. When there's yet another crash on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to Linux/BSD, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a pointless expense, while Linux/BSD would be nearly free and more stable.
It _isn't_ just a software issue.
I've been working for a while on some wireless projects, and making a box handle more than one frequency properly can be very difficult and expensive. Chip sets are sold optimized for a specific frequency, and each band range can have such totally different characteristics that it becomes and apples-and-oranges situation. Reflections, what types of material the signal can pass through, possible bandwidth, etc... many things change, and can cause a total rethinking of how it works. The only way for Apple to handle France is a fairly thorough redesign, and a unit capable of many bandwidths would be more expensive than I want to think about.
I agree. While Windows kinda does OK on installs, the only computer that actually does it right is: the Mac. The best installers for the PC still don't match it. It's no wonder it's so popular in schools and such... it's basically zero-admin. I thought it was cool in my school labs how, without doing anything special, they had the machines set up to revert to their correct installed state on each startup, even if a newbie (or a hacker) attempted to break something. Very cool. But yes, I'm a Linux guy (I've been running it since the 0.X.X days, when the best distribution was Slackware!).
The one thing Microsoft has done right in that regard is the Office2K installer; it sets everyting up for autorepairs (even cooler than the Mandrake self-update, in some regards). We need an installer that's an imitation of it (but better!).
Off-topic, I know, but only a little bit.