You must be confused about what thread your in. This entire discussion is about computers that are in the same computing class as a 32 bit 1.3Ghz Athlon XP. They are putting them in this new fangled devices called "Smart Phones" and "Tablets". They seem to be all the rage with the kids these days.
Seriously, your comment makes absolutely no sense what so ever.
True. A point that many in this thread are missing is that the limiting factor is no longer screen resolution. 1080p works fine on TVs for photo realistic graphics. Heck NTSC was pretty darn good for photo realistic graphics.
I don't expect desktop expectations to go beyond 1080p in 2 years. More likely, in 2 years desktop expectations will go DOWN to 1080p and peg there. We are seeing the reconvergence of TV and PCs. (hand held and desktop) Economies of scale are going to make 1920x1080 the cheapest screen size to run. The general public has bought into 1080p being an awesome picture, and that isn't likely going to change due to the TV market.
For handhelds, you won't be able to see a better picture than 1080p. I doubt you could tell a 1080p from a 720p on that 10" tablet anyway.
You do realize that the desk isn't why PCs use so much power right? You also realize that people will still use desks whether they have an x86 PC or not, just as they did before the x86 was invented right? ARM is absolutely working towards competing with x86. In what way is trying to get people to buy an Arm computing device instead of an x86 computing device not competing?
The ARM was just as much a desktop CPU as the x86 was. The difference is that ARM got crushed in the desktop market. At the time, the desktop market demanded computing power at any energy cost, and ARM simply couldn't keep up with Intel. With Intel's focus on the desktop, ARM proceded to pick up Intels scraps. All of the little markets that Intel decided were too small to worry about.
Fast forward to the 2000, and desktop speeds start outpacing most user's needs. The last 5-6 years of desktop speed improvements have basically been a CPU bubble. CPU speeds have increased faster than most people have any use for. We are currently seeing a state where people are realizing that they are vastly over paying in energy for their CPU processing power usage. The bubble is bursting. ARM is way behind in ramping up the processing power of their CPUs as well as way behind in ramping up their CPU power usage. Like many other bubbles, suddenly people realize that what they were chasing isn't worth it, and they would rather have what was available 10 years ago.
In today's post CPU bubble environment, we are seeing a situation where Intel's CPU's are not low power enough to cover the entire market, and ARM's CPUs are not fast enough. They are both racing to hit the sweet spot that gives them market dominance, but don't be fooled into thinking that they are not racing to the same goal. They are just at opposite ends of the field.
The question is who will reach the goal first. On the Intel side, you have dominance in the traditional computing environment as well as market mindshare. Most people know who Intel is and that their PC uses an Intel processor, but most could not tell you what kind of processor their ARM device uses. On ARM's side, you have a new market that did not care about Intel compatibility, and settled on ARM.
Intel will continue to push downward to smaller devices, while ARM will continue to push upward with larger ones.
You are fooling yourself. YOU defined your mother's usage as:
My mom uses her $1100 iMac for email, browsing, and games like Bejeweled.
The is nothing about those tasks that cannot be done 100% on a sub $300 laptop and none of them are easier on an iPad. Email reading is equivalent on both, writing is easier on the laptop. Browsing is equivalent on both platforms as long as you are not trying to do things like post to forums, at which time it is easier on the laptop. Casual gaming is a wash. There are certain types of casual gaming that works better on the tablet, and certain types of casual gaming that works better on the laptop. On either platform casual games will be generated faster than any human could hope to play them all, so the specific game becomes largely irrelevant.
Having a real keyboard is going to be useful to people for the foreseeable future. Having a large monitor is going to be desirable for a long time to most people. The uses for them (even for your mom) are not going away anytime soon, and pretending like they are is just self delusion.
I wouldn't doubt if we see a "MacBook Touch" from Apple that involves a hardware keyboard and either a more powerful (that is, less restricted) version of iOS or a version of OS X with a touch UI layer
So, you agree, laptops are useful. You just think they are only useful if they are made by Apple.
P.S. Using inflammatory adjectives like "low-end" and "shoddy" only makes you look petty. The low end laptops are way more powerful than the high end iPad, and there is nothing "shoddy" with the vast majority of the laptops.
You are missing my most of my point, and your description is why the D&R hype machine continues to convince people that voting third party is a wasted vote.
The point isn't to get someone other than D&R elected. It would be just as good if the Democrats get elected and run their positions in line with the Libertarian platform. The label isn't what matters. The policy is. Right now, we have a situation where D&R believes they will get elected no matter what they do. So, what do they do? Whatever they want. They don't answer to the voters. Thus any vote for them is wasted. Voting for third parties tells D&R that they either need do the bidding of the voters or they will lose their position. Thus the vote is not wasted.
D&R would still be in power. They would still win the elections. Why? Because at the point that they started feeling threatened by the third parties, they would change their platform to align with those third parties. That would be a win for anyone that agreed with the third party platform.
Painting the third party as just another team to vote for in a contest that is more concerned with which team wins instead of how the country is run, will not help the situation. If 60% of the population decided to start voting for the Liberation party instead of voting for whoever runs on platform that the Liberatian party currently runs on, the people running the Libertarian party would have no reason listen to the voters either.
The ironic thing is that votes for a third party the ONLY ones that matter. Why would the Ds and Rs care about what you think when they know that your vote is going to remain with the status quo? There is plenty enough bribes to go around for the two parties, and they really don't have that much difference between the two. They both know that while one of them is in power, people will start looking for an alternative. When enough people jump to the other side of the ship, people the other will be in power. Since the other side does the same things, people will start to get dissatisfied and start moving back to the first party. It really is a "we have always been at ware with EastAsia" situation.
Here is a clue. Most people will not be happy with a D or an R. If those people would vote third party, they still would be unhappy because their third party likely wouldn't win. So what though. Voting for the winning team that you hate anyways isn't any better. On the other hand, once a third party starts getting enough support to determine the winner of an election, the Ds and Rs start shifting their platform to match the third party. Do you care if your team wins? or do you want your political platform enacted? Personally, I don't care who implements my choice in government, as long as the implement MY choice.
Once someone here on Slashdot pointed out that you can get the labels back on the taskbar for running applications I would agree. The lack of labels was the one thing I disliked about 7.
The big winner will be the desktop environment that figures out how to abstract the proper elements into anchor points that phone/tablet/desktop/TVs can all connect there UI widgets to so that the UI can change, but all of the applications seamlessly shift their UI to match the device they get run on.
Most of those same people could also replace that $500 iPad with a $300 laptop and would suffice for your list tasks, and would probably work better than the iPad. It would also let her video chat with you thousands of miles away.
Honestly, the future personal computer is likely going eventually be a tablet connecting to bluetooth keyboards and mice/touchpads. This way you have a single machine that is a tablet when you are laying in bed, a desktop when you are sitting and doing serious work, and a laptop when you are out and about doing work that a tablet doesn't cut it for.
Existing tablets are just not powerful enough to replace real computers for most people. They are getting there fast though. The software is still not their yet either. They are great for what they do, but they are not good enough to replace a critical mass of the PCs... Yet.
Because then you are driving around with an extra 800 pound engine for all of your short trips. One of the perks beyond not needing to carry all that extra daily weight is that the power source can be swapped out trivially. Making a trip between LA and SF where Tesla has installed electric chargers? Use an electric trailer. Going to be driving across country where you can get diesel the whole way? Get a diesel trailer. Making that monthly trip down to grandma's house, where you know you can reliably refill propane tanks? Use propane. Heck, you could even go with natural gas, and fill up at home.
The part of the rules of the game that are broken is that rich people don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. Warren Buffet giving every penny he has to the US Government would not fix the problem. Changing the tax system would.
Claiming that he should just give his money away is a flippant ridiculous answer. It is similar to telling people who point out that the planet is overpopulated that if they think the planet is over populated, they should just kill themselves. It is neither a legitimate answer, nor helpful. The sad thing is that I think there are a lot of people who actually believe it is legitimate.
Honestly, that is an option that is ridiculously overlooked. Engineer these electric vehicles so that they can pull a trailer of batteries. All of my driving is either under 20 miles or over 150. My guess is that this is not that unusual. I am not really interested in using the energy required to haul around 300 miles worth of batteries on a day to day basis, and I wouldn't be interested in a car that cannot drive 300 miles in a fill up. I wouldn't think twice about hooking up a trailer for that cross country drive if I could unhook it at home and at the destination.
If done right, you could even have companies like U-Haul and Hertz renting the trailers, so car owners wouldn't even need to own the trailer.
One should go one step further. The problem with your proposal is that a free speech argument would be made. You are not offering a service to the individual, and there is no way that receiving any kind of mail is going to be counted as a service by any court. You need to supply a service to the spammer.
Ad to your letter that one of the services that your business provides is "marketing consulting", and that the address they are sending the spam to is the evaluation request address. Thus, by submitting their work to that address they are requesting your "marketing consulting" services. Then when you send them your bill, make sure that you give them a fair assessment of their marketing strategy. E.G. "After careful consideration, we have determined that your marketing method is a poor choice." You have then had services requested, and you have services supplied. Personally, my marketing consulting is really good, and due to the nature of the work is not an billed at an hourly rate. My rates are $1500 as a promotional price for the first analysis, further analysis are $10,000 for standard email evaluation, and $20,000 for drug, dating, or sex industries email evaluation.
The promotional price would work out well because it falls within the values covered by small claims court, so you don't need a lawyer. If you get a judgement in the first case, it seems unlikely that a court would not recognize that the spammer was in a preexisting business relationship with you, give that he has previously been order by the court to pay his bill for those exact same services. This should make it much easier to find a lawyer who would be willing to take the subsequent, higher value cases on contingency.
I don't know Quebec law well enough to know if this would apply to them.
That is a red herring. Buffet is advocating correcting the rules of the game. You are suggesting that he play by a different set of rules, and not interfere with those abusing the rules. That doesn't solve the problem.
No one is claiming that it made the French extinct. Bluefoxlucid is pointing out that at some point the have nots find it worth it to cut the heads off of the haves. As a have not, I don't want to see us get to that point. I would presume that the haves feel the same way.
Whether you are right or wrong, actually responding to the statements you are quoting works much better at creating discussion than making non-sequitur statements, and then claiming that the other person is wrong because your non-sequitur makes no sense.
This is a major part of the problem, and rarely gets brought up. Taxes are a social program as much as a money collection system. This is a VERY bad system. Because of it, we get bad financial decisions being made because it is the social outcome that is being considered instead. It is also an end run around our legal system. The Federal Highway Funds are a perfect example. When the feds want a state to do something that they cannot legislate, they tax everybody, and refund the taxes to the states that do what they want. If they tax enough, they make it all but impossible for the states to make their own legislation.
Until we can break the money collection away from the unethical use of taxes as a way to force through legislation that is unpassable as an actual law, our tax system is screwed.
Don't forget that they leave out the courses on things that you WILL have a use for. Things like basic plumbing, electrical, sheet-rock repair, and carpentry. Apparently, they expect knowledge of medieval genealogy to be used more often than knowing how to fix a leaky toilet.
If you don't know how to sweat a copper water pipe or safely change an electrical outlet, you are NOT well rounded.
If a well rounded education were really what was being attempted, colleges would require courses on electrical wiring, plumbing, and carpentry along with the math and physics. Claiming that a physics major is going to have more use for medieval history than he is carpentry or plumbing is ridiculous. The "well rounded" education claim falls apart when you look at what courses are required. What is being called "well rounded" is closer to a complex club hand shake than anything else. It isn't secret, but it is trivia that all of the colleges train their graduates to know in common so that they can make claims about being able to carry on conversations in a wide range of subjects. It is still trivia though.
The trick is finding a way to get them to actually make the products responsibly as opposed to just slapping a "responsible" sticker on it and charging more for that.
Slashdot Mirror
It is physics that make it hard for Intel to ramp up speed. Not design flaws.
Intel was well entrenched long before most people ever even heard of Windows.
You must be confused about what thread your in. This entire discussion is about computers that are in the same computing class as a 32 bit 1.3Ghz Athlon XP. They are putting them in this new fangled devices called "Smart Phones" and "Tablets". They seem to be all the rage with the kids these days.
Seriously, your comment makes absolutely no sense what so ever.
True. A point that many in this thread are missing is that the limiting factor is no longer screen resolution. 1080p works fine on TVs for photo realistic graphics. Heck NTSC was pretty darn good for photo realistic graphics.
I don't expect desktop expectations to go beyond 1080p in 2 years. More likely, in 2 years desktop expectations will go DOWN to 1080p and peg there. We are seeing the reconvergence of TV and PCs. (hand held and desktop) Economies of scale are going to make 1920x1080 the cheapest screen size to run. The general public has bought into 1080p being an awesome picture, and that isn't likely going to change due to the TV market.
For handhelds, you won't be able to see a better picture than 1080p. I doubt you could tell a 1080p from a 720p on that 10" tablet anyway.
Don't count on it. ARM is doing the speed improvements that Intel did years ago. The job gets harder the faster you go.
You do realize that the desk isn't why PCs use so much power right? You also realize that people will still use desks whether they have an x86 PC or not, just as they did before the x86 was invented right? ARM is absolutely working towards competing with x86. In what way is trying to get people to buy an Arm computing device instead of an x86 computing device not competing?
The ARM was just as much a desktop CPU as the x86 was. The difference is that ARM got crushed in the desktop market. At the time, the desktop market demanded computing power at any energy cost, and ARM simply couldn't keep up with Intel. With Intel's focus on the desktop, ARM proceded to pick up Intels scraps. All of the little markets that Intel decided were too small to worry about.
Fast forward to the 2000, and desktop speeds start outpacing most user's needs. The last 5-6 years of desktop speed improvements have basically been a CPU bubble. CPU speeds have increased faster than most people have any use for. We are currently seeing a state where people are realizing that they are vastly over paying in energy for their CPU processing power usage. The bubble is bursting. ARM is way behind in ramping up the processing power of their CPUs as well as way behind in ramping up their CPU power usage. Like many other bubbles, suddenly people realize that what they were chasing isn't worth it, and they would rather have what was available 10 years ago.
In today's post CPU bubble environment, we are seeing a situation where Intel's CPU's are not low power enough to cover the entire market, and ARM's CPUs are not fast enough. They are both racing to hit the sweet spot that gives them market dominance, but don't be fooled into thinking that they are not racing to the same goal. They are just at opposite ends of the field.
The question is who will reach the goal first. On the Intel side, you have dominance in the traditional computing environment as well as market mindshare. Most people know who Intel is and that their PC uses an Intel processor, but most could not tell you what kind of processor their ARM device uses. On ARM's side, you have a new market that did not care about Intel compatibility, and settled on ARM.
Intel will continue to push downward to smaller devices, while ARM will continue to push upward with larger ones.
My mom uses her $1100 iMac for email, browsing, and games like Bejeweled.
The is nothing about those tasks that cannot be done 100% on a sub $300 laptop and none of them are easier on an iPad. Email reading is equivalent on both, writing is easier on the laptop. Browsing is equivalent on both platforms as long as you are not trying to do things like post to forums, at which time it is easier on the laptop. Casual gaming is a wash. There are certain types of casual gaming that works better on the tablet, and certain types of casual gaming that works better on the laptop. On either platform casual games will be generated faster than any human could hope to play them all, so the specific game becomes largely irrelevant.
Having a real keyboard is going to be useful to people for the foreseeable future. Having a large monitor is going to be desirable for a long time to most people. The uses for them (even for your mom) are not going away anytime soon, and pretending like they are is just self delusion.
I wouldn't doubt if we see a "MacBook Touch" from Apple that involves a hardware keyboard and either a more powerful (that is, less restricted) version of iOS or a version of OS X with a touch UI layer
So, you agree, laptops are useful. You just think they are only useful if they are made by Apple.
P.S. Using inflammatory adjectives like "low-end" and "shoddy" only makes you look petty. The low end laptops are way more powerful than the high end iPad, and there is nothing "shoddy" with the vast majority of the laptops.
You are missing my most of my point, and your description is why the D&R hype machine continues to convince people that voting third party is a wasted vote.
The point isn't to get someone other than D&R elected. It would be just as good if the Democrats get elected and run their positions in line with the Libertarian platform. The label isn't what matters. The policy is. Right now, we have a situation where D&R believes they will get elected no matter what they do. So, what do they do? Whatever they want. They don't answer to the voters. Thus any vote for them is wasted. Voting for third parties tells D&R that they either need do the bidding of the voters or they will lose their position. Thus the vote is not wasted.
D&R would still be in power. They would still win the elections. Why? Because at the point that they started feeling threatened by the third parties, they would change their platform to align with those third parties. That would be a win for anyone that agreed with the third party platform.
Painting the third party as just another team to vote for in a contest that is more concerned with which team wins instead of how the country is run, will not help the situation. If 60% of the population decided to start voting for the Liberation party instead of voting for whoever runs on platform that the Liberatian party currently runs on, the people running the Libertarian party would have no reason listen to the voters either.
The ironic thing is that votes for a third party the ONLY ones that matter. Why would the Ds and Rs care about what you think when they know that your vote is going to remain with the status quo? There is plenty enough bribes to go around for the two parties, and they really don't have that much difference between the two. They both know that while one of them is in power, people will start looking for an alternative. When enough people jump to the other side of the ship, people the other will be in power. Since the other side does the same things, people will start to get dissatisfied and start moving back to the first party. It really is a "we have always been at ware with EastAsia" situation.
Here is a clue. Most people will not be happy with a D or an R. If those people would vote third party, they still would be unhappy because their third party likely wouldn't win. So what though. Voting for the winning team that you hate anyways isn't any better. On the other hand, once a third party starts getting enough support to determine the winner of an election, the Ds and Rs start shifting their platform to match the third party. Do you care if your team wins? or do you want your political platform enacted? Personally, I don't care who implements my choice in government, as long as the implement MY choice.
I haven't used it much, but it really does look right.
Once someone here on Slashdot pointed out that you can get the labels back on the taskbar for running applications I would agree. The lack of labels was the one thing I disliked about 7.
The big winner will be the desktop environment that figures out how to abstract the proper elements into anchor points that phone/tablet/desktop/TVs can all connect there UI widgets to so that the UI can change, but all of the applications seamlessly shift their UI to match the device they get run on.
Most of those same people could also replace that $500 iPad with a $300 laptop and would suffice for your list tasks, and would probably work better than the iPad. It would also let her video chat with you thousands of miles away.
Honestly, the future personal computer is likely going eventually be a tablet connecting to bluetooth keyboards and mice/touchpads. This way you have a single machine that is a tablet when you are laying in bed, a desktop when you are sitting and doing serious work, and a laptop when you are out and about doing work that a tablet doesn't cut it for.
Existing tablets are just not powerful enough to replace real computers for most people. They are getting there fast though. The software is still not their yet either. They are great for what they do, but they are not good enough to replace a critical mass of the PCs... Yet.
Because then you are driving around with an extra 800 pound engine for all of your short trips. One of the perks beyond not needing to carry all that extra daily weight is that the power source can be swapped out trivially. Making a trip between LA and SF where Tesla has installed electric chargers? Use an electric trailer. Going to be driving across country where you can get diesel the whole way? Get a diesel trailer. Making that monthly trip down to grandma's house, where you know you can reliably refill propane tanks? Use propane. Heck, you could even go with natural gas, and fill up at home.
The part of the rules of the game that are broken is that rich people don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. Warren Buffet giving every penny he has to the US Government would not fix the problem. Changing the tax system would.
Claiming that he should just give his money away is a flippant ridiculous answer. It is similar to telling people who point out that the planet is overpopulated that if they think the planet is over populated, they should just kill themselves. It is neither a legitimate answer, nor helpful. The sad thing is that I think there are a lot of people who actually believe it is legitimate.
Honestly, that is an option that is ridiculously overlooked. Engineer these electric vehicles so that they can pull a trailer of batteries. All of my driving is either under 20 miles or over 150. My guess is that this is not that unusual. I am not really interested in using the energy required to haul around 300 miles worth of batteries on a day to day basis, and I wouldn't be interested in a car that cannot drive 300 miles in a fill up. I wouldn't think twice about hooking up a trailer for that cross country drive if I could unhook it at home and at the destination.
If done right, you could even have companies like U-Haul and Hertz renting the trailers, so car owners wouldn't even need to own the trailer.
One should go one step further. The problem with your proposal is that a free speech argument would be made. You are not offering a service to the individual, and there is no way that receiving any kind of mail is going to be counted as a service by any court. You need to supply a service to the spammer.
Ad to your letter that one of the services that your business provides is "marketing consulting", and that the address they are sending the spam to is the evaluation request address. Thus, by submitting their work to that address they are requesting your "marketing consulting" services. Then when you send them your bill, make sure that you give them a fair assessment of their marketing strategy. E.G. "After careful consideration, we have determined that your marketing method is a poor choice." You have then had services requested, and you have services supplied. Personally, my marketing consulting is really good, and due to the nature of the work is not an billed at an hourly rate. My rates are $1500 as a promotional price for the first analysis, further analysis are $10,000 for standard email evaluation, and $20,000 for drug, dating, or sex industries email evaluation.
The promotional price would work out well because it falls within the values covered by small claims court, so you don't need a lawyer. If you get a judgement in the first case, it seems unlikely that a court would not recognize that the spammer was in a preexisting business relationship with you, give that he has previously been order by the court to pay his bill for those exact same services. This should make it much easier to find a lawyer who would be willing to take the subsequent, higher value cases on contingency.
I don't know Quebec law well enough to know if this would apply to them.
That is a red herring. Buffet is advocating correcting the rules of the game. You are suggesting that he play by a different set of rules, and not interfere with those abusing the rules. That doesn't solve the problem.
No one is claiming that it made the French extinct. Bluefoxlucid is pointing out that at some point the have nots find it worth it to cut the heads off of the haves. As a have not, I don't want to see us get to that point. I would presume that the haves feel the same way.
Whether you are right or wrong, actually responding to the statements you are quoting works much better at creating discussion than making non-sequitur statements, and then claiming that the other person is wrong because your non-sequitur makes no sense.
However, many taxes are used as social nudges.
This is a major part of the problem, and rarely gets brought up. Taxes are a social program as much as a money collection system. This is a VERY bad system. Because of it, we get bad financial decisions being made because it is the social outcome that is being considered instead. It is also an end run around our legal system. The Federal Highway Funds are a perfect example. When the feds want a state to do something that they cannot legislate, they tax everybody, and refund the taxes to the states that do what they want. If they tax enough, they make it all but impossible for the states to make their own legislation.
Until we can break the money collection away from the unethical use of taxes as a way to force through legislation that is unpassable as an actual law, our tax system is screwed.
That is simply untrue. The vast majority of people who bought houses that they could not afford knew it when they bought it.
Don't forget that they leave out the courses on things that you WILL have a use for. Things like basic plumbing, electrical, sheet-rock repair, and carpentry. Apparently, they expect knowledge of medieval genealogy to be used more often than knowing how to fix a leaky toilet.
If you don't know how to sweat a copper water pipe or safely change an electrical outlet, you are NOT well rounded.
If a well rounded education were really what was being attempted, colleges would require courses on electrical wiring, plumbing, and carpentry along with the math and physics. Claiming that a physics major is going to have more use for medieval history than he is carpentry or plumbing is ridiculous. The "well rounded" education claim falls apart when you look at what courses are required. What is being called "well rounded" is closer to a complex club hand shake than anything else. It isn't secret, but it is trivia that all of the colleges train their graduates to know in common so that they can make claims about being able to carry on conversations in a wide range of subjects. It is still trivia though.
The trick is finding a way to get them to actually make the products responsibly as opposed to just slapping a "responsible" sticker on it and charging more for that.