I have my phone in my hand more often than I do my wallet - and even if my wallet were in my hand, taking a card out of it would take time. When I've got the cup of coffee I'm buying in one hand and my phone in the other, being able to pay for the one with the other is quite handy.
Eee pad transformer. Better is subjective (it's better for me, but someone else might like iOS more, or think thinner and lighter is the most important thing), but cheaper and faster are objectively true.
I've got a radeon under my desk that lets me choose between two monitors or 3D rendering. I don't see any more evil in nvidia's support - with either nvidia or AMD, you get the choice of crappy open drivers, or better binary-only drivers. The only difference is nvidia's binary-only drivers are much better than AMD's.
the US economy is not thriving, it's nowhere near thriving. The only thing that makes any economy thrive is production capacity
No, the US has plenty of production capacity - look at any corporate quarterlies, they're running well below capacity because there's no demand. What makes an economy thrive, and what's missing, is consumer spending - and the way to get that back is to put money into the hands of people who will actually spend it.
A rich person is NOT benefiting from his wealth when he is NOT spending it, the rest of economy IS benefiting from his wealth, because he is not just holding cash in a bank, he is investing that money.
If investment were what was needed we'd be hearing very different things from businesses. Some small businesses are having trouble attracting investment, but the overwhelming message is that companies have plenty of capital to invest and grow - but they're sitting on it because the demand isn't there.
Give 100 people $10k each and they'll buy and sell to each other, growing the economy. Give 99 of them nothing and 1 of them $1m and it doesn't matter how much he "invests" by buying businesses, they won't have anyone to sell to. We don't have an investment problem, we have a demand problem, and redistribution is an appropriate solution.
It's called two-way HD video chat with realtime collaborative desktop sharing. Incoming video from the other guy? Check. Video-capture and encoding to send him? Check. RDP, VNC, or some comparable protocol? Check. Gimp? Check.
Hmm. Point, I guess, I've just never seen it used that way - even on beefy office desktops people tend to go to full screen desktop when sharing it rather than keep the video chat running at the same time. I really think we have hit a plateau in performance requirements - video rendering has traditionally been the biggest user of increasing CPU power, but nowadays it's at or nearly at the point where the detail on the artist's models is far more of a limiting factor than the software side. I'm sure we'll keep getting more and more efficient video codecs, but as bandwidth increases they become less relevant (I don't even bother encoding my audio any more, the space it takes up is so minimal)
Any long-term strategy that depends upon reducing speed for the sake of power savings is doomed, because mainstream software and consumer expectations will outstrip it and render it obsolete long before it hits the store shelves.
Yes and no; the low-power machines being made today are selling well enough. Five years ago I wouldn't have considered buying anything less than the fastest x86 on the market. But a few weeks ago I bought the aforementioned tegra 2 device (an eee transformer) because 16 hours of battery life is more valuable to me than the few things an x86 could do that it can't. At some point processing power becomes good enough, because there's really only so much you want to do with it.
Nonsense, you could immediately tell them useful things they could do with it - send letters to friends across the ocean that arrive instantly (or indeed videochat with them), have a map that would speak and guide them around a strange town, have an encyclopedia in their pocket, order any piece of shopping without having to leave their home or office, ask for music or books or videos and retrieve them instantly. Things like social networks might take a little more effort to explain, but fundamentally they improve your life in ways that you could explain to anyone. What I'm saying is not that life is perfect right now, but that I don't see how a faster processor is going to make it any better - what can I do with a faster processor?
You watch videos while taking other videos and editing 3 photos at the same time? Often enough that you'd pay more for a processor that lets you do that?
either I am seriously missing something or people are nutters for not thinking that a modern chip architected to run something as bulky as windows and it's countless applications of bloat will easily smear ARMs face in the mud when it comes to performance.
Performance as in bigger numbers on the box? Sure, x86 is always going to win that. But what can I actually do with an x86 that I can't do with my tegra 2? If it can play HD video (and it already can) then what else do I want performance for?
If you approach "improve energy efficiency" from the perspective of "when old, inefficient devices wear out, replace them with high-efficiency devices", then no argument.
At a government level that translates into "introduce regulations requiring new devices sold to be high-efficiency". And there are plenty of people who get angry when you try and do that, despite it frequently being the best thing to happen to the industry in question in years (e.g. lightbulbs).
And security may be important for the clueless, but I'm a careful surfer and haven't had a virus for years.
Which will make exactly zero difference when there's a buffer overflow in your TCP stack. It's an unfortunate fact of life that internet-facing software needs security updates.
But most of the time when you're working on something for a long time it's with the keyboard, not the mouse. I recently bought an eee pad transformer, expecting to use it as a normal laptop with a long battery life, but I've found myself turning off the trackpad and using keyboard+touchscreen to do everything. No gorilla arm because I'm only touching for as long as it takes to launch an application (or choose the right text-input box), then it's all on the keyboard.
Um, no, they've been cut, see "bush tax cuts". That's why the country's bankrupt (well, that and the wars).
Taking more away from "the rich" (the definition of which BTW will eventually encompass you if left alone) will mean that they will just leave, taking all the money they have with them.
Bollocks, that's just what they want you to think. Here in Britain we used to have a top tax rate of 95%; the sky didn't fall, in fact it was one of the better times in our country's history. Call their bluff.
- Stop eating so much meat/processed food and eat the raw ingredients instead since it is so much more efficient?
It generally isn't, and in any case it's not a sustainability problem. Indeed, the resulting health problems would likely damage future food production, making this less sustainable than current behavior. Eating meat also provides a very useful damping effect, because there's a price elasticity - in hard times, people eat less meat because it's more expensive. Put everyone on a starvation diet to start with, and there's then nowhere to go.
Stop just wasting resources and completely retarded things that add no value to the world apart from cheap thrills and/or convenience for the lazy?
Convenience for the lazy is the source of all progress; it's what's driven human innovation and got us to the point where we can sustain a population as big as we can.
Every first worlder to pay a "repair the world" tax which is managed internationally by the UN and goes towards fixing the world's global problems long term. (Member states of the "security council" are banned from having any influence over said fund at all, ever)
Again, sustainability - what do you do when people are used to relying on these handouts, increase the tax? What do you do about a country that's not currently on the security council (Brazil?) getting big and powerful? Where's the oversight to prevent corruption?
Level all major cities and have the 1st worlders live like 3rd worlders?
Which accomplishes what? If you're talking about doing centralized allocation of resources, see Soviet Russia for how that works out.
Drop nukes on all major cities causing an apocalyptic future that long term will be far more energy efficient for the world as a whole?
Cities are a more efficient way of living, for rich or poor - it's no coincidence that the big slums are around major cities, not out in the country.
I assume of course that all these suggestions are far more abhorrent to most 1st worlders than letting children die of starvation by the million, right? Because after all they are little more than animals that should really just be culled like you would do with any other animal population that is out of control.
Charity can be just as self-indulgent as anything else. Look at the people who "set captive animals free" - into a world where they have no idea how to survive, and quickly die. I wouldn't say let the children die, but just handing out food isn't the answer either, unless you're prepared to keep doing it forever - see the old saw about giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish.
It's time to start doing our making our charity more accountable. Set measurable goals, follow up on whether we're achieving them, and stop giving money to things that don't work. Otherwise we end up with charitable organizations that work mainly to perpetuate their own existence, food handouts getting siphoned off by local warlords and sold to buy weapons, and the aforementioned dependence problem.
If you have free energy and goods, the only thing that is valuable is other people's labor, because it's the only thing that's scarce. So if you needed money for something, the only way would be working for someone else - either directly, or by selling something where being made by human hands was a selling point (maybe original works of art if the robots weren't good at them, or etsy-style craft goods). And the only thing you'd ever want to spend it on would be other people.
The OS is actually quite a small amount of code, and has been more-or-less done for the past decade. I'm perfectly happy to leave the OS running in C; what really matters are the interfaces with the rest of the world. Having a standard higher-level language interface (one that understood objects and closures) for making system calls would really help, and that's the most exciting thing about.net.
What good is an open source OS that has to be run on proprietary hardware? What good are open-source extensions to proprietary programs? Open source is supposed to be about pragmatism - the open source model produces better code - and that's true regardless of the underlying platform.
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I have my phone in my hand more often than I do my wallet - and even if my wallet were in my hand, taking a card out of it would take time. When I've got the cup of coffee I'm buying in one hand and my phone in the other, being able to pay for the one with the other is quite handy.
Eee pad transformer. Better is subjective (it's better for me, but someone else might like iOS more, or think thinner and lighter is the most important thing), but cheaper and faster are objectively true.
I've got a radeon under my desk that lets me choose between two monitors or 3D rendering. I don't see any more evil in nvidia's support - with either nvidia or AMD, you get the choice of crappy open drivers, or better binary-only drivers. The only difference is nvidia's binary-only drivers are much better than AMD's.
Why do you want pure RISC? I'd rather have a more efficient processor than theoretical purity. Even ARM has moved away from pure RISC with Thumb.
the US economy is not thriving, it's nowhere near thriving. The only thing that makes any economy thrive is production capacity
No, the US has plenty of production capacity - look at any corporate quarterlies, they're running well below capacity because there's no demand. What makes an economy thrive, and what's missing, is consumer spending - and the way to get that back is to put money into the hands of people who will actually spend it.
A rich person is NOT benefiting from his wealth when he is NOT spending it, the rest of economy IS benefiting from his wealth, because he is not just holding cash in a bank, he is investing that money.
If investment were what was needed we'd be hearing very different things from businesses. Some small businesses are having trouble attracting investment, but the overwhelming message is that companies have plenty of capital to invest and grow - but they're sitting on it because the demand isn't there.
Give 100 people $10k each and they'll buy and sell to each other, growing the economy. Give 99 of them nothing and 1 of them $1m and it doesn't matter how much he "invests" by buying businesses, they won't have anyone to sell to. We don't have an investment problem, we have a demand problem, and redistribution is an appropriate solution.
So if you want that extra $10k you have to work $14k's worth harder rather than $13k's worth. Sounds like you've got that incentive right there.
Composite means that any of those old TVs and or monitors will work just fine
No it doesn't. Most old monitors are VGA-only.
Yup, and that's what makes it much worse for shell usage - it's like using tcl or perl as your shell. Worse is better.
It's called two-way HD video chat with realtime collaborative desktop sharing. Incoming video from the other guy? Check. Video-capture and encoding to send him? Check. RDP, VNC, or some comparable protocol? Check. Gimp? Check.
Hmm. Point, I guess, I've just never seen it used that way - even on beefy office desktops people tend to go to full screen desktop when sharing it rather than keep the video chat running at the same time. I really think we have hit a plateau in performance requirements - video rendering has traditionally been the biggest user of increasing CPU power, but nowadays it's at or nearly at the point where the detail on the artist's models is far more of a limiting factor than the software side. I'm sure we'll keep getting more and more efficient video codecs, but as bandwidth increases they become less relevant (I don't even bother encoding my audio any more, the space it takes up is so minimal)
Any long-term strategy that depends upon reducing speed for the sake of power savings is doomed, because mainstream software and consumer expectations will outstrip it and render it obsolete long before it hits the store shelves.
Yes and no; the low-power machines being made today are selling well enough. Five years ago I wouldn't have considered buying anything less than the fastest x86 on the market. But a few weeks ago I bought the aforementioned tegra 2 device (an eee transformer) because 16 hours of battery life is more valuable to me than the few things an x86 could do that it can't. At some point processing power becomes good enough, because there's really only so much you want to do with it.
Nonsense, you could immediately tell them useful things they could do with it - send letters to friends across the ocean that arrive instantly (or indeed videochat with them), have a map that would speak and guide them around a strange town, have an encyclopedia in their pocket, order any piece of shopping without having to leave their home or office, ask for music or books or videos and retrieve them instantly. Things like social networks might take a little more effort to explain, but fundamentally they improve your life in ways that you could explain to anyone. What I'm saying is not that life is perfect right now, but that I don't see how a faster processor is going to make it any better - what can I do with a faster processor?
You watch videos while taking other videos and editing 3 photos at the same time? Often enough that you'd pay more for a processor that lets you do that?
either I am seriously missing something or people are nutters for not thinking that a modern chip architected to run something as bulky as windows and it's countless applications of bloat will easily smear ARMs face in the mud when it comes to performance.
Performance as in bigger numbers on the box? Sure, x86 is always going to win that. But what can I actually do with an x86 that I can't do with my tegra 2? If it can play HD video (and it already can) then what else do I want performance for?
If you approach "improve energy efficiency" from the perspective of "when old, inefficient devices wear out, replace them with high-efficiency devices", then no argument.
At a government level that translates into "introduce regulations requiring new devices sold to be high-efficiency". And there are plenty of people who get angry when you try and do that, despite it frequently being the best thing to happen to the industry in question in years (e.g. lightbulbs).
And security may be important for the clueless, but I'm a careful surfer and haven't had a virus for years.
Which will make exactly zero difference when there's a buffer overflow in your TCP stack. It's an unfortunate fact of life that internet-facing software needs security updates.
But most of the time when you're working on something for a long time it's with the keyboard, not the mouse. I recently bought an eee pad transformer, expecting to use it as a normal laptop with a long battery life, but I've found myself turning off the trackpad and using keyboard+touchscreen to do everything. No gorilla arm because I'm only touching for as long as it takes to launch an application (or choose the right text-input box), then it's all on the keyboard.
Perhaps the big take-home is that it's harder to get into further education (PhD etc.) with a CS degree?
They've been raised.
Um, no, they've been cut, see "bush tax cuts". That's why the country's bankrupt (well, that and the wars).
Taking more away from "the rich" (the definition of which BTW will eventually encompass you if left alone) will mean that they will just leave, taking all the money they have with them.
Bollocks, that's just what they want you to think. Here in Britain we used to have a top tax rate of 95%; the sky didn't fall, in fact it was one of the better times in our country's history. Call their bluff.
corÂrupt/kÉ(TM)ËrÉ(TM)pt/
Adjective: Having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.
I see no requirement for illegality there.
- Stop eating so much meat/processed food and eat the raw ingredients instead since it is so much more efficient?
It generally isn't, and in any case it's not a sustainability problem. Indeed, the resulting health problems would likely damage future food production, making this less sustainable than current behavior. Eating meat also provides a very useful damping effect, because there's a price elasticity - in hard times, people eat less meat because it's more expensive. Put everyone on a starvation diet to start with, and there's then nowhere to go.
Stop just wasting resources and completely retarded things that add no value to the world apart from cheap thrills and/or convenience for the lazy?
Convenience for the lazy is the source of all progress; it's what's driven human innovation and got us to the point where we can sustain a population as big as we can.
Every first worlder to pay a "repair the world" tax which is managed internationally by the UN and goes towards fixing the world's global problems long term. (Member states of the "security council" are banned from having any influence over said fund at all, ever)
Again, sustainability - what do you do when people are used to relying on these handouts, increase the tax? What do you do about a country that's not currently on the security council (Brazil?) getting big and powerful? Where's the oversight to prevent corruption?
Level all major cities and have the 1st worlders live like 3rd worlders?
Which accomplishes what? If you're talking about doing centralized allocation of resources, see Soviet Russia for how that works out.
Drop nukes on all major cities causing an apocalyptic future that long term will be far more energy efficient for the world as a whole?
Cities are a more efficient way of living, for rich or poor - it's no coincidence that the big slums are around major cities, not out in the country.
I assume of course that all these suggestions are far more abhorrent to most 1st worlders than letting children die of starvation by the million, right? Because after all they are little more than animals that should really just be culled like you would do with any other animal population that is out of control.
Charity can be just as self-indulgent as anything else. Look at the people who "set captive animals free" - into a world where they have no idea how to survive, and quickly die. I wouldn't say let the children die, but just handing out food isn't the answer either, unless you're prepared to keep doing it forever - see the old saw about giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish.
It's time to start doing our making our charity more accountable. Set measurable goals, follow up on whether we're achieving them, and stop giving money to things that don't work. Otherwise we end up with charitable organizations that work mainly to perpetuate their own existence, food handouts getting siphoned off by local warlords and sold to buy weapons, and the aforementioned dependence problem.
Yeah, you gotta keep your data tight.
If you have free energy and goods, the only thing that is valuable is other people's labor, because it's the only thing that's scarce. So if you needed money for something, the only way would be working for someone else - either directly, or by selling something where being made by human hands was a selling point (maybe original works of art if the robots weren't good at them, or etsy-style craft goods). And the only thing you'd ever want to spend it on would be other people.
The OS is actually quite a small amount of code, and has been more-or-less done for the past decade. I'm perfectly happy to leave the OS running in C; what really matters are the interfaces with the rest of the world. Having a standard higher-level language interface (one that understood objects and closures) for making system calls would really help, and that's the most exciting thing about .net.
What good is an open source OS that has to be run on proprietary hardware? What good are open-source extensions to proprietary programs? Open source is supposed to be about pragmatism - the open source model produces better code - and that's true regardless of the underlying platform.
If you've got a freebsd machine I would expect it to work under rotor.
It's not computer-specific. Stamp collecting gets mocked as a hobby on similar grounds.