So what they're doing is not an improvement to restoration, it's just an improvement to defect detection.
That's still helpful, isn't it? It seems to me that part of the problem with any algorithm to automatically fix photos is that you have to make sure the software knows the difference between a defect and a detail. If it detects what it thinks is a crease or a scratch, but it's really part of the image, it might edit out something you don't want it to.
From the examples shown in the.PDF [hp.com] it seems that it is once again a case of a quick fix that only works on low-res and low detail photos, preferably in single color.
That doesn't seem like a terribly bad thing to me. If you were a professional looking for extremely high-quality results, then yes, you're going to want to spend a lot of time screwing around with things manually on each photo. Even if it's a largely automatic procedure, you'll probably still want to tweak the parameters a little for each photo, including things like brightness, contrast, and hue.
However, there's another real-world application for this sort of thing: someone like my grandmother scanning lots of old pictures that may have been folded, crumpled, or otherwise damaged. Even if it's not giving the highest quality results, if the results are at all better than not processing the photo, then it's probably fine. Without automatic quick fixes, people might either scan it and leave the damage, or decide not to scan it at all. Giving even barely passable results is an improvement.
Yes, the law says you can make and keep a backup copy of your DVD. But since the law also says that making or delivering a tool to do that is illegal, what are consumers expected to do?
Find some better representation?
Ultimately, this isn't the judge's fault, and it's not the judge's job to answer that question. A judge is typically restrained by the law. Every now and then they're in a situation where they can rule that a given law is unconstitutional, but otherwise, they just have to go by the law. The problem is the law is bad.
So why is the law bad? Because a bunch of morons in Washington DC wrote a bad law. These morons weren't thinking about your best interest or my best interest. They were either (a) seriously misunderstanding the results the law would have; or (b) specifically catering to the publishing, music, and movie industries without concern about the damage to society. Either way, they weren't doing a good job of representing our interests.
So what are we supposed to do? I say, we have to find better representation. We have to put better people and smarter people into office so that they can make the law right.
If the system is really rigged so badly that we can't do that, then (as crazy as it sounds) at some point we should revolt. The government and these large companies are allowed to exist by us, collectively, by way of social contract. If no one is representing our interests, then the social contract is void, and we should stop allowing them to exist. Governments and companies have no intrinsic power or right to exist.
More robust media would actually mean that the media in question should come with it's own backup, in a burnable format so that a consumer could make a duplicate of the DVD/BlueRay/CD/etc *when* that physical media gets scratched or damaged in such a way as to make it non-playable on the intended media reader.
Drop the DRM and the media already comes with a copy that can be copied for backup purposes: the original copy.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like you're saying that someone should invent a kind of media that comes with its own second copy, which consumers can access when, and only when, the original media becomes unreadable. So when my first copy becomes unreadable, I can get access to my second copy. What about when my second copy becomes unreadable? Do I get a third? Is it infinitely recursive so that an infinite number of copies are stored on this medium?
And what's the point of trying to make it more complicated? The only thing that denies people the right to make unlimited copies of media which they own for any purpose they like is copyright. Copyright was designed to prevent publishers from profiting from exploiting authors, and therefore has exemptions that allow people to make backups of the media they own. Movie studios don't have any particular right to deny you your right to back up your movies.
there is no possible way to exercise your right to a single backup of a DVD for your personal use
You can write your own tool to do it, you just can't obtain one or give it to anyone else.
Note carefully that I didn't say that makes any sense, but the letter of the law does allow each individual to create and use such a tool, purely for their own personal use.
Your interpretation seems right, but I'm going to go ahead and say this doesn't make sense. It's legal to backup your own DVDs, but it's illegal for someone to provide you with software to help you do that. Why should it be illegal to facilitate private actions which are themselves perfectly legal?
I'm not sure the judge has it wrong, in that this is the law that Congress passed. I'm not sure which courts can rule on the constitutionality of which kinds of laws. But in any event, what really needs to happen is that Congress needs to change the law.
Yeah, but that's not really what's happening. It's more like if you hopped into a plane and told the pilot, "Take me New Jerk," and he responded by saying, "I don't know where New Jerk is. Are you sure you didn't mean New York or New Jersey? Maybe you mean New Hampshire? I have a list of thousands of other possible destinations you might mean. Do you want to look through them all?"
That might not be how you want the pilot to respond. Maybe you just want him to say, "I don't know where New Jerk is. Get off the plane now." But it's not really unreasonable behavior.
Well even more to the point IMO: IE isn't "hijacking" NXDOMAIN because IE is the program you're requesting the domain from. Saying IE is hijacking your domain query is a little like claiming the normal pilot of a plane is hijacking it whenever he flies. No, he's not, he's the pilot. It's kind of his job.
What I mean is, if I dropped to the command prompt and typed "nslookup [whatever]", is IE changing the results that I get? If not, then it isn't really fair to say they're "hijacking" anything. If you're typing a domain into your address bar of your browser, and you want something to figure out what you're trying to type and possibly redirecting to a search engine, then the browser is the appropriate place for that to happen. The complaints about DNS "hijacking" is because it's being done by the DNS server and not the browser, but the browser is actually the right place for this to happen.
Now maybe they should offer the option to turn this on or off, but really as long as they're respecting your choice in search engines, I don't think there's a problem. It's a little like complaining that Firefox's Awesome Bar tries to guess what sites you're trying to find.
Cell phone services over here are just dreadful. Why you all pay so much for such mediocre service, I really don't know.
You're visiting America right now, and apparently you're paying for our mediocre service. Why are you doing it?
Probably for the same reason we do: there isn't much of a choice. It's either pay for bad service, or don't get service. No one is offering good service at a decent price.
I understand why you want to focus on CO2 emissions, but that's hardly the only bad stuff that comes out of car exhaust.
This is what bothers me about obsessing over the global warming debate. I have no reason to deny that global warming is bad, but it's certainly not our only problem. It's not very responsible to act like pollution is perfectly fine, just so long as it doesn't eject CO2 into the air. Now you may want to argue that CO2 is our biggest problem, and that may even be true. However, it's also possible that there is some other much more serious problem that we simply haven't noticed yet, or even if we have noticed, we may be underestimating the danger it presents.
I remember a few short years ago, we were all freaking out about the ozone layer. Now that's pretty well fixed, and we're all freaking out about CO2. Who knows, maybe in a few years, we'll all be freaking out about something else. I think we should be striving for efficiency of energy use and seeking to make our production and consumption have the lowest possible impact on our environment.
So let's assume that those cell phone tower maintenance (more harsh weather conditions across the US than Finland also) and building costs are passed on to the consumer....Of course this isn't the only factor, for example: I would assume China's median household income would affect their cell phone charges and cause them to drop despite country size.
Well aren't these two different explanations as to why cell phone prices are expensive? In the first one, you're assuming that the cost to the consumer is pretty close to the cost to the carriers for providing the service. If that's the case then yes, increased costs to the carriers would require them to pass those costs along to consumers.
But in the second explanation, China could only lower their charges to make it affordable to people with low incomes if you assume that the profit margin is wide to begin with. In such a case, an increase in cost would not need to be passed along to the consumers.
There may be several factors-- I'm not disagreeing with that aspect of your argument. I don't really know, but I suspect that the prices they're charging in the US is more about what they think they can convince people to pay, rather than having any relation to their actual costs. The reason I think this is because of the outlandish cost of SMS messages, in spite of the fact that, as I understand it, they're tiny in size and transmitted in what would otherwise be wasted bandwidth.
Obviously that'd require that your compute device knows where you're looking, but we already have technology for that. Not sure about the size though.
Yeah, I think this is ultimately another piece of the "bulk" that needs to be figured out. I think to make the system work very well, we'll need to have multiple cameras. We would probably be well server to have at least four, 2 looking out at the world so the computer can analyze depth, and one on each eye. You could have one on both eyes, but it's hard to figure where you could mount cameras on your glasses such that it could have an unobstructed view of both eyes at the same time.
I think eye-tracking will be more important than people think for this sort of thing. Not just for the issue you mention (the possibility of focussing the displays), but I think it will be helpful in allowing the computer to know what to display and what to show you.
For example, wouldn't it be great if your glasses could tell that you're focusing on something particular and to "get out of the way" (i.e. move any part of the HUD obstructing the view) to another part of the display? Or to note that your focusing on a particular thing and feed you additional information based on what you're looking at, without having to issue additional commands?
Isn't that just a camera strapped to the glasses? Cameras are easy. It's the displays that are hard.
Or are you talking about piping the image directly into people's brains? That's fairly invasive and dangerous, and not perfected in a way that would allow us to put high-resolution overlays onto the images already being transmitted from your eyes.
It seems to me that the real hindrance is in getting a transparent display into a set of glasses. By this, I don't mean getting a bulky display mounted on the outside of a set of glasses, but in getting a transparent display built directly into the lenses, such that when the display is turned off, it's just a set of glasses.
I think we'll start to see real products once we can build both those sorts of lenses and a camera into a set of glasses, and not have them be too ridiculously heavy, bulky, and ugly. Also, it can't be too expensive.
People keep saying it's "almost ready" because there are practical and functional HUDs, but they all require this bulky machinery to be strapped to your head in a way that looks stupid. For geeks or specialized purposes (e.g. soldiers in combat, who are carrying heavy equipment anyway and care more about functionality than looks) that's all fine. But it won't be productized until people can walk down the street wearing them and still look cool.
Yeah, I'd that that, given the current rate of technological growth and 500 million years to work on this, if we're still around, can't either fix the situation, and are unable to pick up and leave, then I'll eat my hat.
Of course, I feel very comfortable saying that, because in the off chance that I live long enough to see it happen, then I won't live any longer (because we'll all be dead) and so I won't have time to feel stupid.
Well I'm not sure that quite works. It seems like that's a better argument that life as it is found in the Sun/Earth system is the perfect sort of life for that system, but that doesn't mean that it's the perfect system for us. We may thrive better elsewhere.
As to security, the only reason non-Windows machines sem more secure is because market share is too low for most malware writers to waste their time.
This is the only part of your post that I have a real aversion to. It's true that which OS is "best" depends on who is using it for what, and that Apple isn't immune to security problems. However, Microsoft's appearance of insecurity is not simply because they're the biggest target for malware writers, but because they spent many years putting absolutely no thought into security.
Go back to Windows 95, and there's no security on the filesystem, and no real protection against users accessing/altering each others' files if you used it as a multi-user system. Early versions of IE were basically designed to allow web pages and plugins to be able to do anything on the computer. Go up through Windows 2000, and everything is designed as though, by default, you're always operating on a completely trusted network, and every user should be an administrator of the computer. It really wasn't until the past few years that Microsoft started trying to get developers to make software work when run by an unprivileged user account, or until they started limiting the number of services running at startup or providing a firewall. But they've gotten better, and most of the perception of insecurity is from past problems that have since been fixed. However, in many people's minds, this highlighted a bigger perceived problem (true or not): that Microsoft wasn't interested in exercising forethought or building things properly.
In fairness, Mac OS wasn't all that secure until OSX, and they've shown some bad security design even in recent years. However, many of the unix variants (by which I mean to include both Linux and BSD) have shown themselves to be very interested in exercising forethought and building things "the right way". Along with everything else, the fact that these systems are often open source means that they can't rely on security through obscurity, and doing things "the wrong way" usually causes open controversy within the public community. Linux and BSD can't really get away with cutting too many corners, and so they often have very good security design, even if occasional bugs are found.
Well even if Google focuses on "net applications", that doesn't necessarily mean that people won't be able to keep their files and processing under their own control. Google (and others) have been working for some time on the idea of enabling browsers to cache web applications for offline use. So it's at least theoretically possible that Google is planning to have Chrome use that sort of approach, opening the possibility for "net applications" where the only thing distinguishing them from "native applications" is that they run on web languages and use HTML/CSS to render the UI. So they might be able, for example, to let you run Google Docs in such a way that isn't meaningfully different from running a native word processor on your local machine.
So Windows and Macs will run all the Win32 and Mac programs like Office and Photoshop and also run the same web apps that Chrome will run. That means Google Chrome won't have a Killer App, except for the UI, security and cost? So Chrome has to be THAT GOOD in order to make people switch from Windows since stuff like Gmail already runs well in browsers.
I guess some of that depends. It seems to me that the situation for Chrome isn't too much different than any potential competitor to Windows. So what does it depend on? Well, it seems to me that some people I talk to genuinely like Windows, are comfortable using it, and for those people Chrome would have to have some kind of serious "killer app" in order to get them to switch from Windows.
Then there are other people I talk to who don't particularly care about the OS they're running just so long as they can use the apps they're used to, and for those people Chrome just needs to run enough of the things they really want to run, and do it without too many problems or too much confusion. Once you reach that threshold, they really just need one little thing to push them over the edge to get them to switch. It could be that they think an alternative is cooler or cheaper or whatever, but it doesn't need to be a very big advantage to get them to jump to something else.
The with some Windows users, they already dislike something about the experience of using Windows, whether it's political or practical or whatever else. For these people, Chrome really just needs to be viable. That is, they have to be able to do whatever it is that they do on Windows, just like the last group. The only difference is that something has already pushed them over the edge, and they just need someplace else to jump to.
So it seems to me that, if you agree with that assessment of the situation, then the success of a potential Microsoft competitor (or the sum of all Microsoft competitors) depends on two things:
How many current Windows users fall into which groups? Are there lots of people who love Windows and would need a killer app to switch, or are there lots who are ready to jump on the first alternative that's viable for them?
What is the threshold for "viability"? What applications or features are currently missing from Windows alternatives that are keeping people stuck on Windows?
Now that Slashdot knows about it, it's only a matter of time before someone starts trying to hack these things. Countdown: Someone here installs Linux and runs a NES emulator on his own pacemaker in 3....2....
Well I wouldn't write Chrome off so simply as that. First, for every bit that Apple is cool and stylish, there's also a tremendous backlash against it. There are people who absolutely hate Apple for its trendiness alone.
Second, OSX is good, and you can even argue that it's "the best desktop OS available", but that doesn't mean that it's "the best desktop OS for meeting every single person's needs". It's not perfect, and in fact often aims for the lowest common denominator. I don't mean that to be insulting (I use OSX), but if there's a feature that Apple thinks will make things more complicated and won't be used by 90% of users, they'll drop that feature. That may even be the right choice when you get down to it, but it means that they're not addressing the needs of that 10%.
Third, Apple doesn't have an extremely varied hardware line, and OSX is (theoretically/legally) bound to Apple's hardware. That means that even if OSX meets your needs, if Apple's hardware doesn't also meet your needs, then you can't use it.
And fourth, Apple *has* made a dent in the PC market. How much depends on who you ask and how you measure it. Is it market share? OSX sales? Dollars spent on Apple/OSX products vs. Windows products? You'd probably need a lot of data and experts to hash it all out, and those are things I don't have. But you know who does have them? Microsoft. And why do you think they've focused most of their recent advertising in attaching good feelings to the phrase "I'm a PC," while claiming that Macs are too expensive? If Apple weren't a genuine threat, they wouldn't bother.
Of course, none of this is to say that Chrome is going to kill Windows.
Me, personally, would be impressed if you can get better hardware support and either work around Flash or pinch Adobe into supporting Flash on Linux. Those would be huge and I think would be highly decisive.
Well personally I'm kind of hoping that some of the work going into HTML5 and CSS3 will remove a lot of the need for flash. You can get some decent animations going with only HTML, CSS, and Javascript these days. A lot of people only use Flash for video, but now the "video" tag in HTML can provide a fair amount of the same control. With Google purchasing On2, maybe the Theora/h264 thing will get settled too.
Take away the video issue and provide better control with CSS, and the utility of Flash AFAICT is mostly in making casual games. That's not useless, but it's not quite something that most of us can't live without.
Yeah, don't price drops often coincide with "slim" versions? My impression is the slim versions of these things are a result of improved manufacturing of the chips and such, which often (though I suppose not necessarily) means that they're able to produce equivalently powerful chips more cheaply.
I'd be happy if they just made a flat-topped PS3, so I could stack other things on top of it.
Slashdot Mirror
FTSummary:
Where do babies come from?
From the sixties:
Babies come from the sixties?
Far out.
So what they're doing is not an improvement to restoration, it's just an improvement to defect detection.
That's still helpful, isn't it? It seems to me that part of the problem with any algorithm to automatically fix photos is that you have to make sure the software knows the difference between a defect and a detail. If it detects what it thinks is a crease or a scratch, but it's really part of the image, it might edit out something you don't want it to.
From the examples shown in the .PDF [hp.com] it seems that it is once again a case of a quick fix that only works on low-res and low detail photos, preferably in single color.
That doesn't seem like a terribly bad thing to me. If you were a professional looking for extremely high-quality results, then yes, you're going to want to spend a lot of time screwing around with things manually on each photo. Even if it's a largely automatic procedure, you'll probably still want to tweak the parameters a little for each photo, including things like brightness, contrast, and hue.
However, there's another real-world application for this sort of thing: someone like my grandmother scanning lots of old pictures that may have been folded, crumpled, or otherwise damaged. Even if it's not giving the highest quality results, if the results are at all better than not processing the photo, then it's probably fine. Without automatic quick fixes, people might either scan it and leave the damage, or decide not to scan it at all. Giving even barely passable results is an improvement.
Is the law really all that vague? I was under the impression that it was clear, and that distributing DRM-cracking technology was considered illegal.
Yes, the law says you can make and keep a backup copy of your DVD. But since the law also says that making or delivering a tool to do that is illegal, what are consumers expected to do?
Find some better representation?
Ultimately, this isn't the judge's fault, and it's not the judge's job to answer that question. A judge is typically restrained by the law. Every now and then they're in a situation where they can rule that a given law is unconstitutional, but otherwise, they just have to go by the law. The problem is the law is bad.
So why is the law bad? Because a bunch of morons in Washington DC wrote a bad law. These morons weren't thinking about your best interest or my best interest. They were either (a) seriously misunderstanding the results the law would have; or (b) specifically catering to the publishing, music, and movie industries without concern about the damage to society. Either way, they weren't doing a good job of representing our interests.
So what are we supposed to do? I say, we have to find better representation. We have to put better people and smarter people into office so that they can make the law right.
If the system is really rigged so badly that we can't do that, then (as crazy as it sounds) at some point we should revolt. The government and these large companies are allowed to exist by us, collectively, by way of social contract. If no one is representing our interests, then the social contract is void, and we should stop allowing them to exist. Governments and companies have no intrinsic power or right to exist.
More robust media would actually mean that the media in question should come with it's own backup, in a burnable format so that a consumer could make a duplicate of the DVD/BlueRay/CD/etc *when* that physical media gets scratched or damaged in such a way as to make it non-playable on the intended media reader.
Drop the DRM and the media already comes with a copy that can be copied for backup purposes: the original copy.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like you're saying that someone should invent a kind of media that comes with its own second copy, which consumers can access when, and only when, the original media becomes unreadable. So when my first copy becomes unreadable, I can get access to my second copy. What about when my second copy becomes unreadable? Do I get a third? Is it infinitely recursive so that an infinite number of copies are stored on this medium?
And what's the point of trying to make it more complicated? The only thing that denies people the right to make unlimited copies of media which they own for any purpose they like is copyright. Copyright was designed to prevent publishers from profiting from exploiting authors, and therefore has exemptions that allow people to make backups of the media they own. Movie studios don't have any particular right to deny you your right to back up your movies.
You can write your own tool to do it, you just can't obtain one or give it to anyone else.
Note carefully that I didn't say that makes any sense, but the letter of the law does allow each individual to create and use such a tool, purely for their own personal use.
Your interpretation seems right, but I'm going to go ahead and say this doesn't make sense. It's legal to backup your own DVDs, but it's illegal for someone to provide you with software to help you do that. Why should it be illegal to facilitate private actions which are themselves perfectly legal? I'm not sure the judge has it wrong, in that this is the law that Congress passed. I'm not sure which courts can rule on the constitutionality of which kinds of laws. But in any event, what really needs to happen is that Congress needs to change the law.
Yeah, but that's not really what's happening. It's more like if you hopped into a plane and told the pilot, "Take me New Jerk," and he responded by saying, "I don't know where New Jerk is. Are you sure you didn't mean New York or New Jersey? Maybe you mean New Hampshire? I have a list of thousands of other possible destinations you might mean. Do you want to look through them all?"
That might not be how you want the pilot to respond. Maybe you just want him to say, "I don't know where New Jerk is. Get off the plane now." But it's not really unreasonable behavior.
Well even more to the point IMO: IE isn't "hijacking" NXDOMAIN because IE is the program you're requesting the domain from. Saying IE is hijacking your domain query is a little like claiming the normal pilot of a plane is hijacking it whenever he flies. No, he's not, he's the pilot. It's kind of his job.
What I mean is, if I dropped to the command prompt and typed "nslookup [whatever]", is IE changing the results that I get? If not, then it isn't really fair to say they're "hijacking" anything. If you're typing a domain into your address bar of your browser, and you want something to figure out what you're trying to type and possibly redirecting to a search engine, then the browser is the appropriate place for that to happen. The complaints about DNS "hijacking" is because it's being done by the DNS server and not the browser, but the browser is actually the right place for this to happen.
Now maybe they should offer the option to turn this on or off, but really as long as they're respecting your choice in search engines, I don't think there's a problem. It's a little like complaining that Firefox's Awesome Bar tries to guess what sites you're trying to find.
Cell phone services over here are just dreadful. Why you all pay so much for such mediocre service, I really don't know.
You're visiting America right now, and apparently you're paying for our mediocre service. Why are you doing it?
Probably for the same reason we do: there isn't much of a choice. It's either pay for bad service, or don't get service. No one is offering good service at a decent price.
I understand why you want to focus on CO2 emissions, but that's hardly the only bad stuff that comes out of car exhaust.
This is what bothers me about obsessing over the global warming debate. I have no reason to deny that global warming is bad, but it's certainly not our only problem. It's not very responsible to act like pollution is perfectly fine, just so long as it doesn't eject CO2 into the air. Now you may want to argue that CO2 is our biggest problem, and that may even be true. However, it's also possible that there is some other much more serious problem that we simply haven't noticed yet, or even if we have noticed, we may be underestimating the danger it presents.
I remember a few short years ago, we were all freaking out about the ozone layer. Now that's pretty well fixed, and we're all freaking out about CO2. Who knows, maybe in a few years, we'll all be freaking out about something else. I think we should be striving for efficiency of energy use and seeking to make our production and consumption have the lowest possible impact on our environment.
So let's assume that those cell phone tower maintenance (more harsh weather conditions across the US than Finland also) and building costs are passed on to the consumer....Of course this isn't the only factor, for example: I would assume China's median household income would affect their cell phone charges and cause them to drop despite country size.
Well aren't these two different explanations as to why cell phone prices are expensive? In the first one, you're assuming that the cost to the consumer is pretty close to the cost to the carriers for providing the service. If that's the case then yes, increased costs to the carriers would require them to pass those costs along to consumers.
But in the second explanation, China could only lower their charges to make it affordable to people with low incomes if you assume that the profit margin is wide to begin with. In such a case, an increase in cost would not need to be passed along to the consumers.
There may be several factors-- I'm not disagreeing with that aspect of your argument. I don't really know, but I suspect that the prices they're charging in the US is more about what they think they can convince people to pay, rather than having any relation to their actual costs. The reason I think this is because of the outlandish cost of SMS messages, in spite of the fact that, as I understand it, they're tiny in size and transmitted in what would otherwise be wasted bandwidth.
Obviously that'd require that your compute device knows where you're looking, but we already have technology for that. Not sure about the size though.
Yeah, I think this is ultimately another piece of the "bulk" that needs to be figured out. I think to make the system work very well, we'll need to have multiple cameras. We would probably be well server to have at least four, 2 looking out at the world so the computer can analyze depth, and one on each eye. You could have one on both eyes, but it's hard to figure where you could mount cameras on your glasses such that it could have an unobstructed view of both eyes at the same time.
I think eye-tracking will be more important than people think for this sort of thing. Not just for the issue you mention (the possibility of focussing the displays), but I think it will be helpful in allowing the computer to know what to display and what to show you.
For example, wouldn't it be great if your glasses could tell that you're focusing on something particular and to "get out of the way" (i.e. move any part of the HUD obstructing the view) to another part of the display? Or to note that your focusing on a particular thing and feed you additional information based on what you're looking at, without having to issue additional commands?
But reflected from what? That just moves the bulky equipment from your glasses onto your face.
Isn't that just a camera strapped to the glasses? Cameras are easy. It's the displays that are hard.
Or are you talking about piping the image directly into people's brains? That's fairly invasive and dangerous, and not perfected in a way that would allow us to put high-resolution overlays onto the images already being transmitted from your eyes.
It seems to me that the real hindrance is in getting a transparent display into a set of glasses. By this, I don't mean getting a bulky display mounted on the outside of a set of glasses, but in getting a transparent display built directly into the lenses, such that when the display is turned off, it's just a set of glasses.
I think we'll start to see real products once we can build both those sorts of lenses and a camera into a set of glasses, and not have them be too ridiculously heavy, bulky, and ugly. Also, it can't be too expensive.
People keep saying it's "almost ready" because there are practical and functional HUDs, but they all require this bulky machinery to be strapped to your head in a way that looks stupid. For geeks or specialized purposes (e.g. soldiers in combat, who are carrying heavy equipment anyway and care more about functionality than looks) that's all fine. But it won't be productized until people can walk down the street wearing them and still look cool.
Yeah, I'd that that, given the current rate of technological growth and 500 million years to work on this, if we're still around, can't either fix the situation, and are unable to pick up and leave, then I'll eat my hat.
Of course, I feel very comfortable saying that, because in the off chance that I live long enough to see it happen, then I won't live any longer (because we'll all be dead) and so I won't have time to feel stupid.
Well I'm not sure that quite works. It seems like that's a better argument that life as it is found in the Sun/Earth system is the perfect sort of life for that system, but that doesn't mean that it's the perfect system for us. We may thrive better elsewhere.
As to security, the only reason non-Windows machines sem more secure is because market share is too low for most malware writers to waste their time.
This is the only part of your post that I have a real aversion to. It's true that which OS is "best" depends on who is using it for what, and that Apple isn't immune to security problems. However, Microsoft's appearance of insecurity is not simply because they're the biggest target for malware writers, but because they spent many years putting absolutely no thought into security.
Go back to Windows 95, and there's no security on the filesystem, and no real protection against users accessing/altering each others' files if you used it as a multi-user system. Early versions of IE were basically designed to allow web pages and plugins to be able to do anything on the computer. Go up through Windows 2000, and everything is designed as though, by default, you're always operating on a completely trusted network, and every user should be an administrator of the computer. It really wasn't until the past few years that Microsoft started trying to get developers to make software work when run by an unprivileged user account, or until they started limiting the number of services running at startup or providing a firewall. But they've gotten better, and most of the perception of insecurity is from past problems that have since been fixed. However, in many people's minds, this highlighted a bigger perceived problem (true or not): that Microsoft wasn't interested in exercising forethought or building things properly.
In fairness, Mac OS wasn't all that secure until OSX, and they've shown some bad security design even in recent years. However, many of the unix variants (by which I mean to include both Linux and BSD) have shown themselves to be very interested in exercising forethought and building things "the right way". Along with everything else, the fact that these systems are often open source means that they can't rely on security through obscurity, and doing things "the wrong way" usually causes open controversy within the public community. Linux and BSD can't really get away with cutting too many corners, and so they often have very good security design, even if occasional bugs are found.
At least, that's my perception.
Well even if Google focuses on "net applications", that doesn't necessarily mean that people won't be able to keep their files and processing under their own control. Google (and others) have been working for some time on the idea of enabling browsers to cache web applications for offline use. So it's at least theoretically possible that Google is planning to have Chrome use that sort of approach, opening the possibility for "net applications" where the only thing distinguishing them from "native applications" is that they run on web languages and use HTML/CSS to render the UI. So they might be able, for example, to let you run Google Docs in such a way that isn't meaningfully different from running a native word processor on your local machine.
So Windows and Macs will run all the Win32 and Mac programs like Office and Photoshop and also run the same web apps that Chrome will run. That means Google Chrome won't have a Killer App, except for the UI, security and cost? So Chrome has to be THAT GOOD in order to make people switch from Windows since stuff like Gmail already runs well in browsers.
I guess some of that depends. It seems to me that the situation for Chrome isn't too much different than any potential competitor to Windows. So what does it depend on? Well, it seems to me that some people I talk to genuinely like Windows, are comfortable using it, and for those people Chrome would have to have some kind of serious "killer app" in order to get them to switch from Windows.
Then there are other people I talk to who don't particularly care about the OS they're running just so long as they can use the apps they're used to, and for those people Chrome just needs to run enough of the things they really want to run, and do it without too many problems or too much confusion. Once you reach that threshold, they really just need one little thing to push them over the edge to get them to switch. It could be that they think an alternative is cooler or cheaper or whatever, but it doesn't need to be a very big advantage to get them to jump to something else.
The with some Windows users, they already dislike something about the experience of using Windows, whether it's political or practical or whatever else. For these people, Chrome really just needs to be viable. That is, they have to be able to do whatever it is that they do on Windows, just like the last group. The only difference is that something has already pushed them over the edge, and they just need someplace else to jump to.
So it seems to me that, if you agree with that assessment of the situation, then the success of a potential Microsoft competitor (or the sum of all Microsoft competitors) depends on two things:
Now that Slashdot knows about it, it's only a matter of time before someone starts trying to hack these things. Countdown: Someone here installs Linux and runs a NES emulator on his own pacemaker in 3....2....
Well I wouldn't write Chrome off so simply as that. First, for every bit that Apple is cool and stylish, there's also a tremendous backlash against it. There are people who absolutely hate Apple for its trendiness alone.
Second, OSX is good, and you can even argue that it's "the best desktop OS available", but that doesn't mean that it's "the best desktop OS for meeting every single person's needs". It's not perfect, and in fact often aims for the lowest common denominator. I don't mean that to be insulting (I use OSX), but if there's a feature that Apple thinks will make things more complicated and won't be used by 90% of users, they'll drop that feature. That may even be the right choice when you get down to it, but it means that they're not addressing the needs of that 10%.
Third, Apple doesn't have an extremely varied hardware line, and OSX is (theoretically/legally) bound to Apple's hardware. That means that even if OSX meets your needs, if Apple's hardware doesn't also meet your needs, then you can't use it.
And fourth, Apple *has* made a dent in the PC market. How much depends on who you ask and how you measure it. Is it market share? OSX sales? Dollars spent on Apple/OSX products vs. Windows products? You'd probably need a lot of data and experts to hash it all out, and those are things I don't have. But you know who does have them? Microsoft. And why do you think they've focused most of their recent advertising in attaching good feelings to the phrase "I'm a PC," while claiming that Macs are too expensive? If Apple weren't a genuine threat, they wouldn't bother.
Of course, none of this is to say that Chrome is going to kill Windows.
Me, personally, would be impressed if you can get better hardware support and either work around Flash or pinch Adobe into supporting Flash on Linux. Those would be huge and I think would be highly decisive.
Well personally I'm kind of hoping that some of the work going into HTML5 and CSS3 will remove a lot of the need for flash. You can get some decent animations going with only HTML, CSS, and Javascript these days. A lot of people only use Flash for video, but now the "video" tag in HTML can provide a fair amount of the same control. With Google purchasing On2, maybe the Theora/h264 thing will get settled too.
Take away the video issue and provide better control with CSS, and the utility of Flash AFAICT is mostly in making casual games. That's not useless, but it's not quite something that most of us can't live without.
Yeah, don't price drops often coincide with "slim" versions? My impression is the slim versions of these things are a result of improved manufacturing of the chips and such, which often (though I suppose not necessarily) means that they're able to produce equivalently powerful chips more cheaply.
I'd be happy if they just made a flat-topped PS3, so I could stack other things on top of it.