The article leaves out some interesting details. Like--how many antennas per square kilometer do you need to get this kind of speed? When I lived in Santa Cruz, Ricochet did one of their first deployments around town. This was in the early 90s, so you were getting 2400bps (yeah, bps) wireless all over town, which was kind of cool. Except they had to hang transmitters from every other light pole to blanket town. I think that's one of the reasons they never caught on: deploying infrastructure was too expensive.
It sounds to me like Verizon has something with much better range going here, but I guess Pegoraro didn't think to ask.
One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream. The town (population 500) is about an hour's drive over a terrible mountain road from civilization, so the local CLEC never bothered to run phone lines in: they just set up this crappy microwave link on top of a mountain.
No cable, no wired phone lines: needless to say, broadband is impossible (satellite being the unacceptable semi-exception). Which makes going back to hang out at the ranch pretty annoying.
The point (I'm getting there!) is that if these guys have figured out a way to get high speed internet to travel a good long distance, this could help solve the access problem for rural america.
Of course, I've seen so many supposed solutions come and fade away, that I sort of doubt it.
Of course, if you'd REALLY read the article, you'd realize that avoiding Infinium products is your only option, since Infinium doesn't actually seem to have a product, according to Steve & Kyle.;)
It's foolish and ill-informed when people accuse columnists (or anyone else who isn't a journalist) of being poor journalists. Columnists aren't journalists in the same way that a reporter is: they have a much wider ambit--commentary, opinion, whatever.
Annalee Newitz's job isn't to go to a conference and report the facts: it's to ramble, amuse and, yeah, maybe inform a little.
And it's not merely "publishable on the internet," purdue. As far as I'm concerned, she's one of the few reasons to pick up the Bay Guardian, a very much dead-trees-and-ink city weekly.
You have to be careful about conventional wisdom when it comes to economics.
Here's a pretty good case study from the Motley Fool on why taking on corporate debt is often better than trading away shares to make acquisitions. Basically, in this case, taking on a lot of debt is fine if it increases cash flow.
In general, if a company's risk rating is good, you could say that it is in fact wasting money by NOT taking on some debt in order to build infrastructure or make acquisitions.
As the Economist points out in an article called Debt is Good For You," "dividends are paid out of companies' net-of-tax income,and are then taxed again in the hands of the recipients. Interest payments on debt, on the other hand, are tax-deductible."
"This means that a firm's overall value should increase as it substitutes debt for equity."
The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that Apple is making exactly no money at all on their 99 cent downloads. That's right, no profit. Unless they can get better deals from the record companies, or push down the credit card costs, or otherwise somehow get some economies of scale, ITMS will continue to be a loss leader for the Ipod (which does make lots of money for Apple).
Re:Vinge's True Names invented cyberpunk
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A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 1
Ralph's right of course. I was thinking of True Names when I wrote the bit about cyberpunk, I suppose. The Realtime series plays with a lot of the augmented reality augmented consciousness ideas Vinge came up with in True Names, but True Names is the story/novel that "invented" cyberpunk.
Not to offend anyone, but I've never really gotten the whole obsession with Ender's game. (I've only read the first book in the series). It seemed like a pretty good story to me, but it's not like you put it down after reading it and think "that story completely changed the way I see the world."
If I were going to recommend a couple of really excellent books for hacker summer reading, I'd aim for some quality writers who are also going to make you sit down and think a bit afterwards.
First, I'd go with Jack Womack. Strictly in terms of how he writes, I think he's one of the most interesting SF writers around. His books experiment very interestingly with language (although they are page-turner readable), with ideas about the post-national or post-government future of the world, with artificial intelligence, and even with mutant post human freaks.
The first book I read by him was Ambient, about a corporate assasin in New York City in the not-so-distant future. The main character thinks and tells the story in an oddly compelling near-future english slang that will have you thinking in Ambient yourself by the end of the book. Another, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, is a kind of prequel to Ambient, in which a young Upper East Side rich girl watches her world collapse into post-national chaos. The language in the book changes from proper english (with a snotty schoolgirl attitude) to Womack's invented post-English gradually to reflect the character's own slide into violent street life as the city collapses around her.
Another hacker classic I have not seen mentioned here (surprisingly) is Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime series(there are three, read them all), which many people credit with inventing cyberpunk (the first one precedes Gibson). A more recent Vinge book, and my favorite, is A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge is not (I would say) as good a writer as Womack, but he is a hell of a lot better than most of the hacks I've seen mentioned in this discussion, and he's had by far some of the most interesting and influential ideas in SF writing.
Well, since you ask, Sony is definitely looking to acquire a "Sony OS." It's called Palm. As Nobuyuki Idei says in this Register article, they would buy PalmSource 'given half a chance.' Sony invested $20 million in Palmsource upon its creation, and would love to own it outright.
I think it's pretty clear that Sony's been hedging their bets against MS's operating system hegemony for a long time by shipping their PDAs with Palm's OS. They didn't go with Palm just because it's a superior handheld OS (though it is in some ways). They went with it because it's not Microsoft, and I suspect they already saw Microsoft as their chief competitor years before the Xbox came to try to wreck their most profitable division. Forbes has been following the increasing rivalry between MS and Sony for years
What's interesting about the main story in this thread is that if Apple buys Universal, they will be throwing themselves into the same battle, and will essentially be challenging the Microsoft/Sony duopoly on their own turf (integrated hardware/software/Intellectual property publishing). The guys running these companies see the future, and it is integrated entertainment.
This is an extraordinarily ambitious project, if Apple is serious about it. But I suspect Jobs doesn't think Apple will survive if it doesn't get ambitious.
yup, a simple space blanket (you know, the little silver colored emergency blankets) makes a great thermal cloak.
1 Stops almost all radiated heat. 2 Obviously there is no convection if you are wrapped in a blanket. 3 And conduction isnt much of a factor for thermo-imaging.
I think part of the reason slashdotters are a little bit leery of the Ipaq and are reflexively supportive of Palm is the instinctive (and laudable) mistrust of Microsoft products.
And Windows for Pocket PC defintely gives ground to Palm's OS in a few usability areas.
But Compaq really put some work into the Ipaq, even making up for some of Microsoft's omissions.
An example? The 'Q' button on the Ipaq. Push it, and up pops a menu with all of your running tasks, which you can switch to, or quit out of. This is both an extremely easy way to navigate the OS, and a way around one of the biggest problems with WinCE(or whatever they are calling it now): Microsoft assumes you never need to quit a program, so after you open a few, other PocketPCs run out of memory and slow to a crawl.
The main reason I bought the Ipaq over a palm, though, was the memory, not the color screen and fancy-pants multimedia capabilities, or the ability to play Quake (which it does fine, contrary to speculation here. To me, 64 megs is just enough to store large amounts of writing, my daily downloads of a dozen newspapers, magazines and news sites, my email and contacts, and a few ebooks.
And, of course, the numbers don't lie, and Compaq, with their greater committment to innovation, and basically superior product, is going to eat Palm's lunch.
Yeah, I've been using a C1 for about a year; it is very nearly the perfect laptop.
Keyboard is the right size: small as possible while retaining complete functionality. And it dispenses with those stupid trackpads for a joysticklike pointer.
Screen is hella bright, and the odd aspect ratio lets you do two word pages side by side.
So light you barely notice it in a backpack or bag, so small you can stick it in a jacket pocket.
The camera on the original C1 is kind of marginal, but the later models are very detailed.
And the one downside is the 1 hour 20 minute battery life. Retch. That's why we c1 phanaticks are all freaking out at the prospect of a five hour transmeta processor assisted battery life.
In the first sentence,"14k modem" is a measure of time past; read "7 years" or so... In this context, "now it takes 30 seconds" clearly makes sense, since "now" means with cable, adsl, etc.
The idea that global population will eventually start to shrink has started to be bandied about quite a bit recently. See, for example, the Atlantic Monthly last month.
However, this is predicated upon a number of factors, chief among them that world-wide trends will follow the path laid out by us in the first world.
Here's how it has worked here: at around the turn of the century, our life spans here started to go way up; then we all started to get better educated and most of us started putting off having kids til later in life. Then in the middle of the century, women all of a sudden got sick of hanging out at home cleaning up and cooking. So they all went off to college and got jobs, and all of a sudden first-worlders stopped having kids, cause we were all too busy getting smart, getting rich, and having protected sex.
Try to imagine this scenario in India/China/Malawi/Nigeria.
There is no middle class of any substantial size (>20%/population) in any of these countries, and there won't be anytime soon. Therefore the populations will not start shrinking anytime soon. Therefore, when American population has shrunk to 100m, (which it will, barring unforseen catastrophes), most of the world will still be accelerating into a hell-hole of environmental destruction and continued overpopulation.
Yes, there are positive scenarios out there, but no, they are not realistic unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the first world deals with the third world (i.e. reduces exploitation in favor of assistance).
Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)
That doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they are all coming from a similar ideological perspective, which, despite protestations to the contrary, CAN affect how science is interpreted.
Re:Stephenson vs. Sterling
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Snow Crash
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· Score: 1
I think you are right that Stephenson gets an advantage here because he is interested in coding and computer related stuff, but I really think you are selling him a little short
Personally, I think Sterling's recent obsession with the environment is probably right on the money. Our future is a drowned planet, full of weeds and rats, and almost empty of all the little creatures that used to live on it. And that is pretty bleak, and Sterling is right to write about it.
I just think, having read a few of his books (Distraction most recently) that he just isn't as gifted a writer as Gibson or even Stephenson.
Gibson, as I intimated previously, is without a doubt one of the most talented prose stylists in the SF genre. Though people here seem to resent him for thinking independently about the future of the net, he almost certainly helped create the web just with the power of his imagination.
Stephenson is clever and insightful and funny. And although Cryptonomicon kind of turned me off by throwing in a lot of math that was not really necessary to advance the plot, it had a couple of rather interesting ideas about the effects e-commerce is going to have on civilization. And a really interesting examination of information warfare, past and present.
Neal Stephenson would be an excellent person to interview on/.
Of the interviews we've done here so far, John Carmack was definitely the most responsive and insightful. Sterling (surprisingly) was the worst.
Stephenson consistently strikes me as not only one of the cleverest SF writers around right now--Gibson may be a better prose stylist, but Stephenson is much funnier--but one of the brightest.
In each of his books, he seems to have had a number of deep insights into contemporary culture, and extrapolated it into a future world-view. The "franchise" society in Snow Crash, for example, was a profound meditation on the commercial balkanization of American culture.
I, for one, would love to have a (mediated) discussion with him about the future.
As a newspaper reporter for a huge regional newspaper (Philadelphia Inquirer) that is a subsidiary of a gigantic mega-corporation (Knight Ridder), I respectfully submit that the media can often be characterized as a lumbering homogenous mass of information dissemination.
Because unfortunately, most of the stories your paper runs from outside the local area are probably from one source (the AP collective). And because, like it or not, if the NYT or the WSJ or the Washington Post prints it, most reporters think something is true. And because if a newspaper prints it, the TeeVee drones dutifully put it on the air, minus 99 percent of the content and analysis. And because most of the media (probably including yours) is owned by gigantic evil mega-corporations obsessed with increasing shareholder value at the expense of their viewers'/readers' minds.
More importantly, though, your average local reporter knows a little about a lot, but a lot about only a little, of what she or he covers. That means we rely on experts, and I think too often, we anoint experts without really knowing too much about how much they actually know.
And I think using the Nexis-Lexis database to find experts is just about the WORST thing a reporter can do. Because that leads to the kinds of vicious spirals that turn idiots like Vranesevich into spokesmen for things they know little or nothing about. We should spend a little extra time and find our own experts by researching the field we report on, talking to the relevant players, and figuring out who they respect.
This is an interesting discussion, so don't be offended by my self righteous tone. I sometimes rely on these anointed experts too, but I wish I didn't.
[ps-this was already posted once, but somehow ended up in a completely different article]
It's surprising how long it took for the print media to catch on to the fact that Antionline is full of it.
Once Vranisevich got himself quoted in the New York Times, all the rest of us media people saw him every time we ran a Nexis-Lexis (newspaper database) search on a tech issue. Since the New York Times is the PAPER OF RECORD, and never gets anything wrong, Vranisevich was now a Trusted Source.
But as anyone who reads their weekly Circuits section knows, the Times is no expert on tech issues. They get things wrong all the time--mostly little details that don't seem so important unless you are a rarefied expert in the field, but they do get them wrong.
And they, and the Washington Post, and a few others, really misjudged little Jon Vranisevich.
What is odd is that so few tech reporters seem to really follow the online scene closely. Antionline has been dismissed as a fraud by the hacker/security community at large at least since last year (lots of others thought he was full of it before that, I am sure, and yet the mainstream press kept quoting him.
Forbes has probably done us all a huge service here. Even if the NYT/WashPost/WSJ don't pay attention to Attrition/L0pht/Slashdot enough (yet), they do read Forbes.
Paul Krugman, an MIT professor, Slate Magazine columnist and economist I respect, considers Lester Thurow a, shall we say, less-than-gifted theorist. In fact, in a book(Pop Internationalism) I read by Krugman, he more or less dismisses Thurow and his theories of International economic competition between countries as complete junk.
Thurow throws around metaphors like --"Think of the United States as a giant corporation, a General Motors, say." Then he tells his readers to imagine this giant corporation competing with other ones--Toyota, say.
But of course, as Krugman points out, this is an utter nonsense metaphor. Countries and economies don't go out of business, as companies do, they don't have anything like the same variables, and in fact the entire metaphor of international economic competition is misleading and worthless.
All of this is by way of saying that Thurow is by no means respected by real economists; he is a classic interventionist political meddler, as far as they are concerned. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of suggestion coming out of him.
"...fewer than [all others] combined..." is a pretty meaningless/misleading statement since if you combine them all, you get a big number, and almost anything else will be smaller.
I think your point was more along the lines of: Marijuana is the second-most used recreational drug, yet it causes fewer ER admissions than any other recreational drug. Which is an impressive fact; it means that on a per-use basis, there is virtually no risk.
By the way, an excellent post, and a good rebuttal to the one that started the thread.
Though we all seem to have strong feelings on this matter, I rather doubt that the estimable members of the Kansas board of Ed read slashdot. Instead of mouthing off to each other, let the people who matter know what you think:
If you have any comments about Board action, send your email to Penny Plamann, Board secretary, at pplamann@ksbe.state.ks.us. She will forward your comments to the Kansas State Board of Education.
region of N Europe, consisting of NORWAY and SWEDEN (on the Scandinavian Peninsula), DENMARK, and usually also including FINLAND, ICELAND, and the FAEROE ISLANDS. Its people share similar histories and cultures, and most, except for the Finns and Lapps (see LAPLAND), speak closely related Germanic languages.
I don't know where you learned *your* geography, Coward, but keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about...
I think/. readers need to become more attuned to machine beauty. Your box doesn't have to be an ugly piece of crap.
What the iMac (and even more profoundly, the 20th Century Mac, which as one reader pointed out is the obvious inspiration for the Z1) did is break out of the mold for consumer boxes, for the first time making the machine something you wouldn't necessarily want to hide under the desk.
Other machines, like the sony VAIO slimline and my personal favorite the stunning Rock City, have made similar design efforts, but with the iMac, Apple made it commercially viable.
The only downside I can see is really crappy upgradeability on this box. It (and the VAIO) use PC card slots. No TNT-2's (or -3's...) to upgrade the damn thing's Q3 performance.
For that reason, the Rock City, which takes standard ATX motherboards, still has to take the cake...
This is actually their smartest move yet, when you think about it for a minute.
They are going to allow us to play MP3's on the machine. And they are going to push it really hard to manufacturers of recording equipment--the big ones, like Panasonic, Sony(who have proprietary tech, but might abandon it) and Phillips. And believe me, the RIAA has some pull with these guys. So all the big consumer electronics guys will release these devices.
And we will buy them, because they don't threaten our beloved MP3 collections.
More importantly, the general public will probably end up buying the RIAA approved devices in far greater quantities than old stuff like the RIO, etc, because the big boys (Sony, etc)have marketing budgets several orders of magnitude beyond. Their manufacturing and design abilities are also much better (admit it, the Rio is an ugly, badly built piece of crap compared to a Sony minidisc player), so the RIAA devices will be spiffier and work better too, meaning even those of us who generally hate all things RIAA will probably buy the Sharp or Sony model.
So, now they have all the market share, and everything is groovy for MP3 lovers too.
But my bet is that the new SDMI spec will end up sounding a hell of a lot better than MP3.
Which basically sucks, if you want my opinion, or if you don't just siddown and play a tune ripped at 128b versus the same song off a CD for yourself, back to back.
My guess is that the SDMI spec will be close to CD or ATRAC-6 MD quality. So people will play free MP3s, but buy SDMI versions of songs they really like.
There is really no reason for the watermarked CD option RIAA is pushing, except that somebody would probably figure out a way to open up the SDMI algorithm and rip their own without watermarked CDs.
I don't even think this is such a bad scenario overall. (except that like most of you I would like to see the music industry crushed beneath the heel of the music-buying public. I just don't think that will happen.)
It appears that this writer had some kind of a preconception about this robot dog, which he couldn't back up with his reporting, but decided to go with anyway--that this robot dog is trying to sneak Sony tech into our homes.
If that is the mission of the robot dogs, he might have asked himself about their VAIO computers, Trinitron monitors, Walkmen, portable CD players, Playstations,and even credit cards.
Sony has been pretty damned successful at sneaking their technology into my life--and that of many or most other Americans.
As for the robodog--it's fairly dumb, doesn't appear to have much upgrade potential (from my brief investigation), and has little, if any market potential. Way too expensive, for one thing. They'll probably sell a few thousand of this model.
But check back in three years. I suspect Sony will be selling a robot assistant that tags along in your house, offers advice and info, and does simple tasks.
This is *just a test marketing project* y'all. Think of it as a public beta. They will do extensive research on the problems people run into with this version, and come back to market in a few years with an amazing toy for rich geeks.
I can't really tell what they are selling here. Have they integrated cooling onto the CPU, or are they selling some kind of box with active cooling built in?
If this is just Kryotech getting a stamp of approval from AMD, I can't really see it as news.
But if they start selling chilled-down K7 cpus on the Chip Merchant, that would be pretty spiffy.
Slashdot Mirror
The article leaves out some interesting details. Like--how many antennas per square kilometer do you need to get this kind of speed? When I lived in Santa Cruz, Ricochet did one of their first deployments around town. This was in the early 90s, so you were getting 2400bps (yeah, bps) wireless all over town, which was kind of cool. Except they had to hang transmitters from every other light pole to blanket town. I think that's one of the reasons they never caught on: deploying infrastructure was too expensive.
It sounds to me like Verizon has something with much better range going here, but I guess Pegoraro didn't think to ask.
One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream. The town (population 500) is about an hour's drive over a terrible mountain road from civilization, so the local CLEC never bothered to run phone lines in: they just set up this crappy microwave link on top of a mountain.
No cable, no wired phone lines: needless to say, broadband is impossible (satellite being the unacceptable semi-exception). Which makes going back to hang out at the ranch pretty annoying.
The point (I'm getting there!) is that if these guys have figured out a way to get high speed internet to travel a good long distance, this could help solve the access problem for rural america.
Of course, I've seen so many supposed solutions come and fade away, that I sort of doubt it.
Of course, if you'd REALLY read the article, you'd realize that avoiding Infinium products is your only option, since Infinium doesn't actually seem to have a product, according to Steve & Kyle. ;)
...humorless literalism.
It's foolish and ill-informed when people accuse columnists (or anyone else who isn't a journalist) of being poor journalists. Columnists aren't journalists in the same way that a reporter is: they have a much wider ambit--commentary, opinion, whatever.
Annalee Newitz's job isn't to go to a conference and report the facts: it's to ramble, amuse and, yeah, maybe inform a little.
And it's not merely "publishable on the internet," purdue. As far as I'm concerned, she's one of the few reasons to pick up the Bay Guardian, a very much dead-trees-and-ink city weekly.
You have to be careful about conventional wisdom when it comes to economics.
Here's a pretty good case study from the Motley Fool on why taking on corporate debt is often better than trading away shares to make acquisitions. Basically, in this case, taking on a lot of debt is fine if it increases cash flow.
In general, if a company's risk rating is good, you could say that it is in fact wasting money by NOT taking on some debt in order to build infrastructure or make acquisitions.
As the Economist points out in an article called Debt is Good For You," "dividends are paid out of companies' net-of-tax income,and are then taxed again in the hands of the recipients. Interest payments on debt, on the other hand, are tax-deductible."
"This means that a firm's overall value should increase as it substitutes debt for equity."
The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that Apple is making exactly no money at all on their 99 cent downloads. That's right, no profit. Unless they can get better deals from the record companies, or push down the credit card costs, or otherwise somehow get some economies of scale, ITMS will continue to be a loss leader for the Ipod (which does make lots of money for Apple).
Ralph's right of course. I was thinking of True Names when I wrote the bit about cyberpunk, I suppose. The Realtime series plays with a lot of the augmented reality augmented consciousness ideas Vinge came up with in True Names, but True Names is the story/novel that "invented" cyberpunk.
Not to offend anyone, but I've never really gotten the whole obsession with Ender's game. (I've only read the first book in the series). It seemed like a pretty good story to me, but it's not like you put it down after reading it and think "that story completely changed the way I see the world."
If I were going to recommend a couple of really excellent books for hacker summer reading, I'd aim for some quality writers who are also going to make you sit down and think a bit afterwards.
First, I'd go with Jack Womack. Strictly in terms of how he writes, I think he's one of the most interesting SF writers around. His books experiment very interestingly with language (although they are page-turner readable), with ideas about the post-national or post-government future of the world, with artificial intelligence, and even with mutant post human freaks.
The first book I read by him was Ambient, about a corporate assasin in New York City in the not-so-distant future. The main character thinks and tells the story in an oddly compelling near-future english slang that will have you thinking in Ambient yourself by the end of the book. Another, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, is a kind of prequel to Ambient, in which a young Upper East Side rich girl watches her world collapse into post-national chaos. The language in the book changes from proper english (with a snotty schoolgirl attitude) to Womack's invented post-English gradually to reflect the character's own slide into violent street life as the city collapses around her.
Another hacker classic I have not seen mentioned here (surprisingly) is Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime series(there are three, read them all), which many people credit with inventing cyberpunk (the first one precedes Gibson). A more recent Vinge book, and my favorite, is A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge is not (I would say) as good a writer as Womack, but he is a hell of a lot better than most of the hacks I've seen mentioned in this discussion, and he's had by far some of the most interesting and influential ideas in SF writing.
I think it's pretty clear that Sony's been hedging their bets against MS's operating system hegemony for a long time by shipping their PDAs with Palm's OS. They didn't go with Palm just because it's a superior handheld OS (though it is in some ways). They went with it because it's not Microsoft, and I suspect they already saw Microsoft as their chief competitor years before the Xbox came to try to wreck their most profitable division. Forbes has been following the increasing rivalry between MS and Sony for years
What's interesting about the main story in this thread is that if Apple buys Universal, they will be throwing themselves into the same battle, and will essentially be challenging the Microsoft/Sony duopoly on their own turf (integrated hardware/software/Intellectual property publishing). The guys running these companies see the future, and it is integrated entertainment.
This is an extraordinarily ambitious project, if Apple is serious about it. But I suspect Jobs doesn't think Apple will survive if it doesn't get ambitious.
yup, a simple space blanket (you know, the little silver colored emergency blankets) makes a great thermal cloak.
1 Stops almost all radiated heat.
2 Obviously there is no convection if you are wrapped in a blanket.
3 And conduction isnt much of a factor for thermo-imaging.
And Windows for Pocket PC defintely gives ground to Palm's OS in a few usability areas.
But Compaq really put some work into the Ipaq, even making up for some of Microsoft's omissions.
An example? The 'Q' button on the Ipaq. Push it, and up pops a menu with all of your running tasks, which you can switch to, or quit out of. This is both an extremely easy way to navigate the OS, and a way around one of the biggest problems with WinCE(or whatever they are calling it now): Microsoft assumes you never need to quit a program, so after you open a few, other PocketPCs run out of memory and slow to a crawl.
The main reason I bought the Ipaq over a palm, though, was the memory, not the color screen and fancy-pants multimedia capabilities, or the ability to play Quake (which it does fine, contrary to speculation here. To me, 64 megs is just enough to store large amounts of writing, my daily downloads of a dozen newspapers, magazines and news sites, my email and contacts, and a few ebooks.
And, of course, the numbers don't lie, and Compaq, with their greater committment to innovation, and basically superior product, is going to eat Palm's lunch.
Yeah, I've been using a C1 for about a year; it is very nearly the perfect laptop.
Keyboard is the right size: small as possible while retaining complete functionality. And it dispenses with those stupid trackpads for a joysticklike pointer.
Screen is hella bright, and the odd aspect ratio lets you do two word pages side by side.
So light you barely notice it in a backpack or bag, so small you can stick it in a jacket pocket.
The camera on the original C1 is kind of marginal, but the later models are very detailed.
And the one downside is the 1 hour 20 minute battery life. Retch. That's why we c1 phanaticks are all freaking out at the prospect of a five hour transmeta processor assisted battery life.
In the first sentence,"14k modem" is a measure of time past; read "7 years" or so... In this context, "now it takes 30 seconds" clearly makes sense, since "now" means with cable, adsl, etc.
However, this is predicated upon a number of factors, chief among them that world-wide trends will follow the path laid out by us in the first world.
Here's how it has worked here: at around the turn of the century, our life spans here started to go way up; then we all started to get better educated and most of us started putting off having kids til later in life. Then in the middle of the century, women all of a sudden got sick of hanging out at home cleaning up and cooking. So they all went off to college and got jobs, and all of a sudden first-worlders stopped having kids, cause we were all too busy getting smart, getting rich, and having protected sex.
Try to imagine this scenario in India/China/Malawi/Nigeria.
There is no middle class of any substantial size (>20%/population) in any of these countries, and there won't be anytime soon. Therefore the populations will not start shrinking anytime soon. Therefore, when American population has shrunk to 100m, (which it will, barring unforseen catastrophes), most of the world will still be accelerating into a hell-hole of environmental destruction and continued overpopulation.
Yes, there are positive scenarios out there, but no, they are not realistic unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the first world deals with the third world (i.e. reduces exploitation in favor of assistance).
Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)
That doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they are all coming from a similar ideological perspective, which, despite protestations to the contrary, CAN affect how science is interpreted.
I think you are right that Stephenson gets an advantage here because he is interested in coding and computer related stuff, but I really think you are selling him a little short
Personally, I think Sterling's recent obsession with the environment is probably right on the money. Our future is a drowned planet, full of weeds and rats, and almost empty of all the little creatures that used to live on it. And that is pretty bleak, and Sterling is right to write about it.
I just think, having read a few of his books (Distraction most recently) that he just isn't as gifted a writer as Gibson or even Stephenson.
Gibson, as I intimated previously, is without a doubt one of the most talented prose stylists in the SF genre. Though people here seem to resent him for thinking independently about the future of the net, he almost certainly helped create the web just with the power of his imagination.
Stephenson is clever and insightful and funny. And although Cryptonomicon kind of turned me off by throwing in a lot of math that was not really necessary to advance the plot, it had a couple of rather interesting ideas about the effects e-commerce is going to have on civilization. And a really interesting examination of information warfare, past and present.
Neal Stephenson would be an excellent person to interview on /.
Of the interviews we've done here so far, John Carmack was definitely the most responsive and insightful. Sterling (surprisingly) was the worst.
Stephenson consistently strikes me as not only one of the cleverest SF writers around right now--Gibson may be a better prose stylist, but Stephenson is much funnier--but one of the brightest.
In each of his books, he seems to have had a number of deep insights into contemporary culture, and extrapolated it into a future world-view. The "franchise" society in Snow Crash, for example, was a profound meditation on the commercial balkanization of American culture.
I, for one, would love to have a (mediated) discussion with him about the future.
Because unfortunately, most of the stories your paper runs from outside the local area are probably from one source (the AP collective). And because, like it or not, if the NYT or the WSJ or the Washington Post prints it, most reporters think something is true. And because if a newspaper prints it, the TeeVee drones dutifully put it on the air, minus 99 percent of the content and analysis. And because most of the media (probably including yours) is owned by gigantic evil mega-corporations obsessed with increasing shareholder value at the expense of their viewers'/readers' minds.
More importantly, though, your average local reporter knows a little about a lot, but a lot about only a little, of what she or he covers. That means we rely on experts, and I think too often, we anoint experts without really knowing too much about how much they actually know.
And I think using the Nexis-Lexis database to find experts is just about the WORST thing a reporter can do. Because that leads to the kinds of vicious spirals that turn idiots like Vranesevich into spokesmen for things they know little or nothing about. We should spend a little extra time and find our own experts by researching the field we report on, talking to the relevant players, and figuring out who they respect.
This is an interesting discussion, so don't be offended by my self righteous tone. I sometimes rely on these anointed experts too, but I wish I didn't.
[ps-this was already posted once, but somehow ended up in a completely different article]
It's surprising how long it took for the print media to catch on to the fact that Antionline is full of it.
Once Vranisevich got himself quoted in the New York Times, all the rest of us media people saw him every time we ran a Nexis-Lexis (newspaper database) search on a tech issue. Since the New York Times is the PAPER OF RECORD, and never gets anything wrong, Vranisevich was now a Trusted Source.
But as anyone who reads their weekly Circuits section knows, the Times is no expert on tech issues. They get things wrong all the time--mostly little details that don't seem so important unless you are a rarefied expert in the field, but they do get them wrong.
And they, and the Washington Post, and a few others, really misjudged little Jon Vranisevich.
What is odd is that so few tech reporters seem to really follow the online scene closely. Antionline has been dismissed as a fraud by the hacker/security community at large at least since last year (lots of others thought he was full of it before that, I am sure, and yet the mainstream press kept quoting him.
Forbes has probably done us all a huge service here. Even if the NYT/WashPost/WSJ don't pay attention to Attrition/L0pht/Slashdot enough (yet), they do read Forbes.
Thurow throws around metaphors like --"Think of the United States as a giant corporation, a General Motors, say." Then he tells his readers to imagine this giant corporation competing with other ones--Toyota, say.
But of course, as Krugman points out, this is an utter nonsense metaphor. Countries and economies don't go out of business, as companies do, they don't have anything like the same variables, and in fact the entire metaphor of international economic competition is misleading and worthless.
All of this is by way of saying that Thurow is by no means respected by real economists; he is a classic interventionist political meddler, as far as they are concerned. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of suggestion coming out of him.
"...fewer than [all others] combined..." is a pretty meaningless/misleading statement since if you combine them all, you get a big number, and almost anything else will be smaller.
I think your point was more along the lines of: Marijuana is the second-most used recreational drug, yet it causes fewer ER admissions than any other recreational drug. Which is an impressive fact; it means that on a per-use basis, there is virtually no risk.
By the way, an excellent post, and a good rebuttal to the one that started the thread.
If you have any comments about Board action, send your email to Penny Plamann, Board secretary, at pplamann@ksbe.state.ks.us. She will forward your comments to the Kansas State Board of Education.
You can also phone comments to 785-296-7933
Their home page is at: http://www.ksbe.state.ks.us/
-Jack
ps-be polite; they may be a little slow in the head, but even simple folk like these appreciate a rational argument.
Scandinavia
region of N Europe, consisting of NORWAY and SWEDEN (on the Scandinavian Peninsula), DENMARK, and usually also including FINLAND, ICELAND, and the FAEROE ISLANDS. Its people share similar histories and cultures, and most, except for the Finns and Lapps (see LAPLAND), speak closely related Germanic languages.
I don't know where you learned *your* geography, Coward, but keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about...
1) The iMac is better
2) The iMac sucks
3) Who needs a beautiful machine anyway?
I think /. readers need to become more attuned to machine beauty. Your box doesn't have to be an ugly piece of crap.
What the iMac (and even more profoundly, the 20th Century Mac, which as one reader pointed out is the obvious inspiration for the Z1) did is break out of the mold for consumer boxes, for the first time making the machine something you wouldn't necessarily want to hide under the desk.
Other machines, like the sony VAIO slimline and my personal favorite the stunning Rock City, have made similar design efforts, but with the iMac, Apple made it commercially viable.
The only downside I can see is really crappy upgradeability on this box. It (and the VAIO) use PC card slots. No TNT-2's (or -3's...) to upgrade the damn thing's Q3 performance.
For that reason, the Rock City, which takes standard ATX motherboards, still has to take the cake...
A few thoughts on RIAA's inititiative.
This is actually their smartest move yet, when you think about it for a minute.
They are going to allow us to play MP3's on the machine. And they are going to push it really hard to manufacturers of recording equipment--the big ones, like Panasonic, Sony(who have proprietary tech, but might abandon it) and Phillips. And believe me, the RIAA has some pull with these guys. So all the big consumer electronics guys will release these devices.
And we will buy them, because they don't threaten our beloved MP3 collections.
More importantly, the general public will probably end up buying the RIAA approved devices in far greater quantities than old stuff like the RIO, etc, because the big boys (Sony, etc)have marketing budgets several orders of magnitude beyond. Their manufacturing and design abilities are also much better (admit it, the Rio is an ugly, badly built piece of crap compared to a Sony minidisc player), so the RIAA devices will be spiffier and work better too, meaning even those of us who generally hate all things RIAA will probably buy the Sharp or Sony model.
So, now they have all the market share, and everything is groovy for MP3 lovers too.
But my bet is that the new SDMI spec will end up sounding a hell of a lot better than MP3.
Which basically sucks, if you want my opinion, or if you don't just siddown and play a tune ripped at 128b versus the same song off a CD for yourself, back to back.
My guess is that the SDMI spec will be close to CD or ATRAC-6 MD quality. So people will play free MP3s, but buy SDMI versions of songs they really like.
There is really no reason for the watermarked CD option RIAA is pushing, except that somebody would probably figure out a way to open up the SDMI algorithm and rip their own without watermarked CDs.
I don't even think this is such a bad scenario overall. (except that like most of you I would like to see the music industry crushed beneath the heel of the music-buying public. I just don't think that will happen.)
It appears that this writer had some kind of a preconception about this robot dog, which he couldn't back up with his reporting, but decided to go with anyway--that this robot dog is trying to sneak Sony tech into our homes.
If that is the mission of the robot dogs, he might have asked himself about their VAIO computers, Trinitron monitors, Walkmen, portable CD players, Playstations,and even credit cards.
Sony has been pretty damned successful at sneaking their technology into my life--and that of many or most other Americans.
As for the robodog--it's fairly dumb, doesn't appear to have much upgrade potential (from my brief investigation), and has little, if any market potential. Way too expensive, for one thing. They'll probably sell a few thousand of this model.
But check back in three years. I suspect Sony will be selling a robot assistant that tags along in your house, offers advice and info, and does simple tasks.
This is *just a test marketing project* y'all. Think of it as a public beta. They will do extensive research on the problems people run into with this version, and come back to market in a few years with an amazing toy for rich geeks.
I can't really tell what they are selling here. Have they integrated cooling onto the CPU, or are they selling some kind of box with active cooling built in?
If this is just Kryotech getting a stamp of approval from AMD, I can't really see it as news.
But if they start selling chilled-down K7 cpus on the Chip Merchant, that would be pretty spiffy.