For $320 you get new tools as they become available. Let's say each version of Photoshop saves you 5 minutes a day in increased productivity and efficiency and your billable hours is $100 an hour.
That's $8.33 a day in savings. * 240 work days. Take that into account and the numbers work out completely differently.
Creative Cloud: $1,320 for 6 years.
Box: $1,000 + ($8.33 * 240 * 6) = $13,000
Even if you only saved 30 seconds a day by having the latest upgrades when they become available compared to the old versions you would still be paying dearly for failing to upgrade.
I run into this all the time at studios. It's suicidal stupidity. You pay someone $80,000 a year but they sit around for an extra 30 minutes a day because of outdated computers and software. Instead of spending $1,000 on a new computer and $240 on new software they waste $10,000 worth of labor and overhead with an employee sitting idle just 30 minutes every day.
Lost opportunity costs. The new "toys" are cool and they aren't at all expensive. I fully encourage people to stick with CS2. Why? Because while they usually charge $10 an hour I'm able to charge $100-$200 an hour because I can work faster and do work that you just can't get done in a reasonable amount of time without the toys.
$49.99 a month works out to about... ($49.99 * 12 months)/(48 work weeks * 5 days a week = 240 workdays) = $2.50 per day for the full creative suite.
If I'm charging $100 an hour and some toy like say the Clone Brush Preview saves me 5 minutes a day that works out to $100/60 * 5 = $8.30 in productivity per day. Over the course of the year *NOT* upgrading costs me $8.30-$2.50* 240 = $1,392.
Oops! And that was just one toy that saved me 5 minutes a day. I love people who are penny wise and pound foolish. Less competition. The bet is that when the Ludite goes up against me, all else being equal, I can beat them on price by $5-10 an hour because I can do it faster. On an 80 hour project if you have two companies, all else being equal, and one uses toys and saves 15 minutes per day. The other sticks to their old software... on an 80 hour project that works out to... $250-$500 difference in bid on a 2 week project. Admittedly pretty small difference but inevitably you lose work. More likely you'll save a couple hours per week by using those "toys" and save about $1,000 on your bid. Now you've landed a $22,000 project while the other guy lost the bid and is looking for his next project. If they miss out on one day of work because they lost the bid then out twice the cost of Creative Suite for an entire year by sitting idle.
You're right, there is no bet. You're guaranteeing the slow creeping failure of a company by failing to stay up to date with the latest hardware and software. This is also doubly true with hardware. If you're sitting around waiting for a video to render for an extra 15 minutes a day... over the course of a year you've lost the equivalent of 4-5 high end workstations in productivity.
You're shooting yourself in the foot by sticking with "ok" hardware and software. And I've seen this over and over again where it becomes a viscous downward spiral: they're too cheap to invest in their tools and then as a result they lose work... so they have less money to invest in their tools... so they lose more work... so they lower their rates and can afford even less tools... and then they wash out frustrated that the industry is too expensive. What's really expensive is failing to invest in needed equipment.
Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it.
Obscene? $49.99 per month? Most people pay twice that per month for Cable.
If you're a graphic designer you can get by with just the creative suite for all of your software needs. That works out to about 31 cents per hour for Adobe software. You're probably charging your client $50-$100 per hour. So that means the software which enables your entire business to run is as little as 0.3%-0.6% of your billable rate.
Credit card servicing fees are 2.5% of a retail business' overhead. So to all the whining I just yawn. Does Creative Suite offer 31 cents an hour in value? Of course. The reason you won't see any backlash is because Creative Suite is ridiculously cheap even on subscription. @ $2.5 per day, it only has to save you $2.5/$75hr * 60 = 2 minutes of productivity per day. Using photoshop probably saves me 2 *hours* of productivity per day over gimp. It definitely saves me 2 minutes. So I could stop paying Adobe and lose 2 hours of productivity per day... or I could pay Adobe the equivalent of 2 minutes of productivity.
Using GIMP is incredibly expensive. It costs way more than $49.99 a month in lost productivity.
The last I heard was Adobe wants to shake us down for $587,000 ***A YEAR***.
Let's see @ $29.99 per month per computer * 12 = $360 per year.
$587,000 / $360 = 1,630 computers that need photoshop!? Wow! That's quite the design program you've got going at your university! Congrats, you have nearly 3,000 design students?
If you have 3,000 design students who are paying $30,000 a year in tuition then your program is pulling in 3,000 * 30,000 = $90,000,000 in tuition. I think you can afford 0.5% of your budget to go to Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition and Illustrator for your students.
Yep. Let's break this down since we-geeks like numbers.
Airfare domestic: $400 round trip. Hotel: $75 Parking @ Airport: $30 Taxi to customer site or rental car: $100 Per Diem x2: $150 ----------------------- For a full day on-site trip you're looking at about $750.
If you have 5 sales guys that works out to about 66 trips per year each.
You also have to look at an international trip since a lot of people have international customers. Look at a trade show for instance to put up a booth:
$50k booth easy, two people @ $1,200 airline ticket + $175 hotel, $150 per diem, $30 per day parking * 5 days for a trade show and you're looking at about $60k per trade show for a really small presence. If you do two trade shows a year there's $100k right there and you're down to even less on-site visits.
That's also not including any advertising in magazines or newsletters, no google ad-sense, no PR or Agency work. Probably doesn't include hiring a graphic designer who is a service not an employee. If you want to shoot a short video it's probably going to cost $5-10k for a promotional video at least.
These exact same fears were written about in 1880. Every wave of automation works the same way - as costs fall, people can buy stuff (or services) they couldn't before, and different industries need more workers.
Not even close. We've had waves of automation and machine enhancement of our lives.
1) We cultivated food through farming and husbandry. This freed us to remain in one place and we 'automated' the hunting of food by keeping it one place where it couldn't escape.
2) We leveraged the power of nature to enhance our own physical strength by using animals to plow the fields, water wheels drive mills and eventually steam to run machines. What once took physical labor now could be guided by a person and one man could do more than a person alone could before.
3) We invented calculating machines which could do directed arithmetic and operation. Calculators and applications could leverage the human mind to achieve more faster than a person alone.
4)[THE FUTURE] We invent thinking machines that solve problems and can learn and understand visually and conceptually tasks.
#4 is totally completely different. Stages 1-3 includes a human explicitly directing the machine to amplify their existing capabilities whether that was mental or physical. We are very very close to stage 4. Stage 4 is where machines simply do the entire task and no person is required to direct them. Automated manufacturing is the gray zone between 3 and 4. There are 'dark' factories where people feed it resources every few weeks and it operates independently. In stage 4 there is no job which is safe. The really highly abstract design jobs will probably be the last to go but we just don't have any need for that many high-level people and they need to be amazingly good.
It was relatively simple to take an uneducated farm hand and teach them how to work in a factory. Even very developmentally challenged special ed students can work in a fast food restaurant or grocery store as a clerk. Even with a proper education there just aren't enough people with the intelligence and raw talent to say... invent a new type of microprocessor. That takes a top 10% mind regardless of education.
Computers right now are functionally less talented at most tasks than even the bottom 10% of human intelligence. I could teach a 25th percentile person the rules to backgammon. A computer would have a hard time easily learning due to language barrier and intelligence paradigms. But the human mind is already overqualified for most tasks like driving or working in retail. That's a substantial portion of the market. You can't just take every store clerk at the local GAP or forever21 and up-train them to work as a web developer at Amazon... and Amazon doesn't *need* that many people to write their front end.
Another shift is that once we solve a problem it can be solved *forever*. Once you write a program which say... drives a car--you don't need to keep revising that program. It can very easily reach a "good enough" level that you don't need to keep developing it.
If you develop an accountant intelligence--accounting hasn't really changed in the last hundred or thousand years. The laws change but you only need to "teach" one computer program the new laws. If it's as easy to teach a computer as an accountant then your accounting university only has one student. There goes a few dozen university programs around the country.
Something like 1/4 of all police officer homicides are shot by their own firearms. I don't know that it needs to handle hundreds of thousands of rounds. How many times does a police officer shoot and kill someone to save his life while in service? Even if this trigger control had a 1% failure I still imagine the risk of it being used against them is higher than the risk of it failing to stop an assailant. Especially if there are two police officers in which case you're looking at a fraction of a % for a simultaneous failure of two weapons.
I suspect what would happen is that there would be a DDOS attack on day one and the whole exercise would be pointless since the only thing compromised would be the internet gateways to those IPs.
You're right, the software isn't the problem. How many plastic items do we buy in a month? A year? Not many. We buy lots of things that have plastic in them but without circuit boards or metal etc 3D printing is just a fun hacker toy.
The original article also misses the point: 3D software is *EASIER* than MSPaint. And even if it were trivial to use it would still be too difficult. Everybody can use a pencil, not very many people can draw anything interesting. 3D software is cheap (blender) and easy to use. If you need more than your average MSPaint Joe can use then you can also justify the cost of Lightwave or Modo, if you need more than Modo or Lightwave you can afford 3ds Max or Maya of Softimage.
There are tons of relatively simple and cheap/free CAD applications as well.
1) Theoretically we could get to a point where political pressure would be inescapable. Imagine if you lived in the Matrix but there was no Morpheus to release you. How do you escape when the laws of nature are stacked against you? More importantly you wouldn't *want* to 'escape' since you would be a part of the hive mind. Or more importantly if you were a Morpheus time... there is no reason to believe that either the hive collective mind or you would want to leave. Perhaps it's a seeming paradise and you're perfectly free to spend eons traveling the empty boring dark space or stay home and hang out inside the internet.
2) "see it for ourselves" is again a lame excuse if you're a cyborg. Your "eyes" are as real as a CCTV. We're already getting close to such immersive experiences that we could give you extremely high resolution, high dynamic range stereo imagery that tracks your head. Give it 5-10 years and we'll be there easy for 'sight seeing'. I guess you could have bragging rights but maybe we'll just not care about physically being somewhere when a probe would give us the exact same experience. 3) Most war is ideological or material. In a post-scarcity world what exactly would you bother fighting over? It would be like a war on a reddit post. Also killing people could prove to be nearly impossible with sufficient backups and highspeed wireless networking. You kill someone and they just download into another body. It would be like fighting a war to destroy every Dell computer in the world. It might be possible but it would be nigh on impossible. Cockroaches anyone? I think people wouldn't bother because it would just be too hard to launch an effective attack against an enemy. Asymetric warfare would be nigh on impossible. The only war you could win would be one of attrition and the larger force would have access to more resources which would by virtue of having resources give them access to more resources etc... Effective small forces that overcame 'the odds' almost always just won by making the enemy emotionally incapable of accepting the cost. When the cost is "free" why not send waves of attack machines to be destroyed when you can just build waves more for nothing. 4) A perfect physics sim should be able to stimulate the exact neurons to give you that sensation without leaving your bedroom. 5) I would imagine that even marginally more intelligent creatures would have a better political system. Especially with a few more hundred years of practice through trial and error. 6) Perhaps more convincing.;)
My guess would be that they don't widely deploy this for exactly this reason. But if someone on their terror watch list forgets about this headline and they get flagged for "enhanced" security they'll "wipe down" their laptop behind the white wall and in the process go to your history and download your email before returning it without making much of a fuss.
Most of the web's video is streamed from Netflix. That's mostly streamed through Silverlight or browser specific plugins.
How does letting HTML5 natively stream Netflix encourage proprietary browser plugins!? If just Netflix switched over (and they've said they intend to once DRM is in the spec) then by definition the majority of HTML5 streaming will be using less not more browser plugins.
This is something though that's improving. I was having horrific back pain 2 years ago. It came on suddenly and I had to lay down in a hot shower to try and get through the pain. It was a "migraine" of back pain. I was "in town" but I was at a friends about 30 minutes out in the suburbs. There was no chance I could drive the 45 minutes (extra 15 in the other direction) to my doctor's office and even if I had a friend drive me they would be closed. I tried googling a 24/hour clinic in the area but couldn't find one and even if I had I would have had to call and see if my insurance covered it.
One thing I did know my insurance covered was ER care and if my back didn't get any better I was ready to go get a muscle relaxant ASAP. About an hour later it subsided but fast forward to today and I know of about four 24-hour emergency clinics within driving distance. If the rest of the country had the same awaken in the last few years then hopefully the ERs can return to being trauma centers and the 'sniffles' like my back can go to a 24hour clinic.
Because clearly the same sort of people who would want to run a large distributed web application are the same people who would also spend millions of dollars on TV shows but only if it streams to a laptop which doesn't have Windows or OSX.
Yep. If we really want to "survive a catastrophe" it's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to build a sustainable submarine station on multiple sides of the earth that only open their hatches once every year or so than to send one colony to mars.
What could kill the human race? - Disease. It's trivial to filter out microbes and viruses from air supplies here on earth. An antarctic base is also extremely unlikely to get a pathogen spread to it quickly. Avoiding contact with wildlife and all travel to and from would essentially guarantee even an unfiltered antarctic base would be free of disease transmission. - Asteroid/comet. It's highly unlikely that an asteroid would incinerate everybody on every continent. A small underwater base would be easier and safer. Nuclear submarines already provide a perfectly safe refuge if you have multiple subs in multiple oceans preventing the chance of simultaneous impacts. The dust would be problematic and the temperature but with a space heater from Home Depot and some grow-lamps you could just put on a hepa filter and be perfectly fine inside of an insulated aircraft hanger. - Nuclear War: It would be nearly impossible to hit a hidden submarine which can hold as many people as proposed martian bases. Also the radiation and fallout from a nuclear war is probably less than just the regular radiation a mars colony would experience on a daily basis from cosmic radiation. - The sun goes supernova: This is pretty much the only thing that we would need to be a space faring species to overcome and that's unlikely to happen not to mention we would need interstellar not just interplanetary travel to avoid.
Any problem that an apocalyptic catastrophe would cause--would only render the earth almost as uninhabitable as everywhere else in our solar system is every single day.
Grid based icons are way more efficient than a single list. You have two axis to arrange on which means for any distance X from the start menu the grid based start menu has 4x as many icons.
To be doubly clear labor also includes AI, Software and Robots. If a country has an automated factory assembling iPhones it still counts as labor. Or if a company in a country has proprietary software that performs task "X" faster than people in another country then that can also count towards labor.
Usually these are included under a third category "Efficiency".
Except perfectly safe drivers still almost run over pedestrians. I've almost hit 1 or 2 in my days. Car making left hand turn in middle lane. Pedestrian walks out in front--almost dead pedestrian. The more regular city driving where you make a right hand turn and someone comes up behind your car and onto the cross walk as you make a right hand turn. Etc.
They would be no-fault accidents but people can still die when you try to do everything as best as humanely possible. Humanely possible though isn't all that great. There was someone in my home town who dropped something looked down for a second, and hit a bicycle on the other side of the hill. Yes they screwed up by taking their eyes off the road but beyond drunk-driving there is still plenty of perfectly acceptable drivers who kill people. Automatic cars will undoubtedly kill a few people too--but statistically I'm sure it'll be less than good drivers let alone the guy who is constantly in fender benders.
I'm always amused when people say that people are "being driven away from windows 8 because it's too simplistic." Where do these people claim users are going? The Ipad. Wait.. the ipad? The device which doesn't multi-task... at all, that has an even more dumbed down UI screen etc.. For everything you can complain about Windows 8 it's nowhere near as feature anemic as an ipad.
Hopefully they'll soon realize that the desktop and mobile platforms need different UI models, and start supporting the separate primary interface models...
I doubt they will learn that lesson in part because it's not a lesson that needs to be learned. If you look at the 'disasterous end of windows' numbers you'll note that Lenovo experienced no drop in sales--they were selling Windows 8 just as much as everyone else they just sold good machines. HP announced last year that they were going to stop making PCs--shock and amazing people stopped buying their PCs. Dell just announced that they wanted to go private and possibly get out of the PC business and people stopped buying their PCs. Even Apple in those same numbers saw substantial drops in Macbook sales.
Tablets are eating into PC sales and many of the PC makers are shooting themselves in the foot and running around with their hair on fire. Doubling down on traditional PCs and PC manufacturers is a losing proposition. Lenovo released some solid hardware and good battery life and they prospered.
I'm seeing expensive ugly technological watches everywhere. They're called Nike Fuel and they don't even tell time!
I think a fitness watch that happens to also display your inbox could be a hit. And I think the tech has miniaturized to the point where it's feasible finally. The Pebble should be proof of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Creative Cloud user:
$240 * 6 = $1,440 - $120 for introductory rate = $1,320
Box:
$650 up front + $350 upgrade = $1,000
For $320 you get new tools as they become available. Let's say each version of Photoshop saves you 5 minutes a day in increased productivity and efficiency and your billable hours is $100 an hour.
That's $8.33 a day in savings. * 240 work days. Take that into account and the numbers work out completely differently.
Creative Cloud:
$1,320 for 6 years.
Box:
$1,000 + ($8.33 * 240 * 6) = $13,000
Even if you only saved 30 seconds a day by having the latest upgrades when they become available compared to the old versions you would still be paying dearly for failing to upgrade.
I run into this all the time at studios. It's suicidal stupidity. You pay someone $80,000 a year but they sit around for an extra 30 minutes a day because of outdated computers and software. Instead of spending $1,000 on a new computer and $240 on new software they waste $10,000 worth of labor and overhead with an employee sitting idle just 30 minutes every day.
Lost opportunity costs. The new "toys" are cool and they aren't at all expensive. I fully encourage people to stick with CS2. Why? Because while they usually charge $10 an hour I'm able to charge $100-$200 an hour because I can work faster and do work that you just can't get done in a reasonable amount of time without the toys.
$49.99 a month works out to about... ($49.99 * 12 months)/(48 work weeks * 5 days a week = 240 workdays) = $2.50 per day for the full creative suite.
If I'm charging $100 an hour and some toy like say the Clone Brush Preview saves me 5 minutes a day that works out to $100/60 * 5 = $8.30 in productivity per day. Over the course of the year *NOT* upgrading costs me $8.30-$2.50* 240 = $1,392.
Oops! And that was just one toy that saved me 5 minutes a day. I love people who are penny wise and pound foolish. Less competition. The bet is that when the Ludite goes up against me, all else being equal, I can beat them on price by $5-10 an hour because I can do it faster. On an 80 hour project if you have two companies, all else being equal, and one uses toys and saves 15 minutes per day. The other sticks to their old software... on an 80 hour project that works out to... $250-$500 difference in bid on a 2 week project. Admittedly pretty small difference but inevitably you lose work. More likely you'll save a couple hours per week by using those "toys" and save about $1,000 on your bid. Now you've landed a $22,000 project while the other guy lost the bid and is looking for his next project. If they miss out on one day of work because they lost the bid then out twice the cost of Creative Suite for an entire year by sitting idle.
You're right, there is no bet. You're guaranteeing the slow creeping failure of a company by failing to stay up to date with the latest hardware and software. This is also doubly true with hardware. If you're sitting around waiting for a video to render for an extra 15 minutes a day... over the course of a year you've lost the equivalent of 4-5 high end workstations in productivity.
You're shooting yourself in the foot by sticking with "ok" hardware and software. And I've seen this over and over again where it becomes a viscous downward spiral: they're too cheap to invest in their tools and then as a result they lose work... so they have less money to invest in their tools... so they lose more work... so they lower their rates and can afford even less tools... and then they wash out frustrated that the industry is too expensive. What's really expensive is failing to invest in needed equipment.
Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it.
Obscene? $49.99 per month? Most people pay twice that per month for Cable.
If you're a graphic designer you can get by with just the creative suite for all of your software needs. That works out to about 31 cents per hour for Adobe software. You're probably charging your client $50-$100 per hour. So that means the software which enables your entire business to run is as little as 0.3%-0.6% of your billable rate.
Credit card servicing fees are 2.5% of a retail business' overhead. So to all the whining I just yawn. Does Creative Suite offer 31 cents an hour in value? Of course. The reason you won't see any backlash is because Creative Suite is ridiculously cheap even on subscription. @ $2.5 per day, it only has to save you $2.5/$75hr * 60 = 2 minutes of productivity per day. Using photoshop probably saves me 2 *hours* of productivity per day over gimp. It definitely saves me 2 minutes. So I could stop paying Adobe and lose 2 hours of productivity per day... or I could pay Adobe the equivalent of 2 minutes of productivity.
Using GIMP is incredibly expensive. It costs way more than $49.99 a month in lost productivity.
The last I heard was Adobe wants to shake us down for $587,000 ***A YEAR***.
Let's see @ $29.99 per month per computer * 12 = $360 per year.
$587,000 / $360 = 1,630 computers that need photoshop!? Wow! That's quite the design program you've got going at your university! Congrats, you have nearly 3,000 design students?
If you have 3,000 design students who are paying $30,000 a year in tuition then your program is pulling in 3,000 * 30,000 = $90,000,000 in tuition. I think you can afford 0.5% of your budget to go to Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition and Illustrator for your students.
I think linux was clearly included under the umbrella of "a product by geeks for geeks".
The only really successful mainstream linux distributions are FOSS but essentially just commercial products developed by a single company.
Yep. Let's break this down since we-geeks like numbers.
Airfare domestic: $400 round trip.
Hotel: $75
Parking @ Airport: $30
Taxi to customer site or rental car: $100
Per Diem x2: $150
-----------------------
For a full day on-site trip you're looking at about $750.
If you have 5 sales guys that works out to about 66 trips per year each.
You also have to look at an international trip since a lot of people have international customers. Look at a trade show for instance to put up a booth:
$50k booth easy, two people @ $1,200 airline ticket + $175 hotel, $150 per diem, $30 per day parking * 5 days for a trade show and you're looking at about $60k per trade show for a really small presence. If you do two trade shows a year there's $100k right there and you're down to even less on-site visits.
That's also not including any advertising in magazines or newsletters, no google ad-sense, no PR or Agency work. Probably doesn't include hiring a graphic designer who is a service not an employee. If you want to shoot a short video it's probably going to cost $5-10k for a promotional video at least.
These exact same fears were written about in 1880. Every wave of automation works the same way - as costs fall, people can buy stuff (or services) they couldn't before, and different industries need more workers.
Not even close. We've had waves of automation and machine enhancement of our lives.
1) We cultivated food through farming and husbandry. This freed us to remain in one place and we 'automated' the hunting of food by keeping it one place where it couldn't escape.
2) We leveraged the power of nature to enhance our own physical strength by using animals to plow the fields, water wheels drive mills and eventually steam to run machines. What once took physical labor now could be guided by a person and one man could do more than a person alone could before.
3) We invented calculating machines which could do directed arithmetic and operation. Calculators and applications could leverage the human mind to achieve more faster than a person alone.
4)[THE FUTURE] We invent thinking machines that solve problems and can learn and understand visually and conceptually tasks.
#4 is totally completely different. Stages 1-3 includes a human explicitly directing the machine to amplify their existing capabilities whether that was mental or physical. We are very very close to stage 4. Stage 4 is where machines simply do the entire task and no person is required to direct them. Automated manufacturing is the gray zone between 3 and 4. There are 'dark' factories where people feed it resources every few weeks and it operates independently. In stage 4 there is no job which is safe. The really highly abstract design jobs will probably be the last to go but we just don't have any need for that many high-level people and they need to be amazingly good.
It was relatively simple to take an uneducated farm hand and teach them how to work in a factory. Even very developmentally challenged special ed students can work in a fast food restaurant or grocery store as a clerk. Even with a proper education there just aren't enough people with the intelligence and raw talent to say... invent a new type of microprocessor. That takes a top 10% mind regardless of education.
Computers right now are functionally less talented at most tasks than even the bottom 10% of human intelligence. I could teach a 25th percentile person the rules to backgammon. A computer would have a hard time easily learning due to language barrier and intelligence paradigms. But the human mind is already overqualified for most tasks like driving or working in retail. That's a substantial portion of the market. You can't just take every store clerk at the local GAP or forever21 and up-train them to work as a web developer at Amazon... and Amazon doesn't *need* that many people to write their front end.
Another shift is that once we solve a problem it can be solved *forever*. Once you write a program which say... drives a car--you don't need to keep revising that program. It can very easily reach a "good enough" level that you don't need to keep developing it.
If you develop an accountant intelligence--accounting hasn't really changed in the last hundred or thousand years. The laws change but you only need to "teach" one computer program the new laws. If it's as easy to teach a computer as an accountant then your accounting university only has one student. There goes a few dozen university programs around the country.
Something like 1/4 of all police officer homicides are shot by their own firearms. I don't know that it needs to handle hundreds of thousands of rounds. How many times does a police officer shoot and kill someone to save his life while in service? Even if this trigger control had a 1% failure I still imagine the risk of it being used against them is higher than the risk of it failing to stop an assailant. Especially if there are two police officers in which case you're looking at a fraction of a % for a simultaneous failure of two weapons.
I suspect what would happen is that there would be a DDOS attack on day one and the whole exercise would be pointless since the only thing compromised would be the internet gateways to those IPs.
That could be really popular! Imagine an electric fence that's just a bush! :D
Cheap parts at astronomical prices.
You're right, the software isn't the problem. How many plastic items do we buy in a month? A year? Not many. We buy lots of things that have plastic in them but without circuit boards or metal etc 3D printing is just a fun hacker toy.
The original article also misses the point: 3D software is *EASIER* than MSPaint. And even if it were trivial to use it would still be too difficult. Everybody can use a pencil, not very many people can draw anything interesting. 3D software is cheap (blender) and easy to use. If you need more than your average MSPaint Joe can use then you can also justify the cost of Lightwave or Modo, if you need more than Modo or Lightwave you can afford 3ds Max or Maya of Softimage.
There are tons of relatively simple and cheap/free CAD applications as well.
1) Theoretically we could get to a point where political pressure would be inescapable. Imagine if you lived in the Matrix but there was no Morpheus to release you. How do you escape when the laws of nature are stacked against you? More importantly you wouldn't *want* to 'escape' since you would be a part of the hive mind. Or more importantly if you were a Morpheus time... there is no reason to believe that either the hive collective mind or you would want to leave. Perhaps it's a seeming paradise and you're perfectly free to spend eons traveling the empty boring dark space or stay home and hang out inside the internet.
2) "see it for ourselves" is again a lame excuse if you're a cyborg. Your "eyes" are as real as a CCTV. We're already getting close to such immersive experiences that we could give you extremely high resolution, high dynamic range stereo imagery that tracks your head. Give it 5-10 years and we'll be there easy for 'sight seeing'. I guess you could have bragging rights but maybe we'll just not care about physically being somewhere when a probe would give us the exact same experience. ;)
3) Most war is ideological or material. In a post-scarcity world what exactly would you bother fighting over? It would be like a war on a reddit post. Also killing people could prove to be nearly impossible with sufficient backups and highspeed wireless networking. You kill someone and they just download into another body. It would be like fighting a war to destroy every Dell computer in the world. It might be possible but it would be nigh on impossible. Cockroaches anyone? I think people wouldn't bother because it would just be too hard to launch an effective attack against an enemy. Asymetric warfare would be nigh on impossible. The only war you could win would be one of attrition and the larger force would have access to more resources which would by virtue of having resources give them access to more resources etc... Effective small forces that overcame 'the odds' almost always just won by making the enemy emotionally incapable of accepting the cost. When the cost is "free" why not send waves of attack machines to be destroyed when you can just build waves more for nothing.
4) A perfect physics sim should be able to stimulate the exact neurons to give you that sensation without leaving your bedroom.
5) I would imagine that even marginally more intelligent creatures would have a better political system. Especially with a few more hundred years of practice through trial and error.
6) Perhaps more convincing.
My guess would be that they don't widely deploy this for exactly this reason. But if someone on their terror watch list forgets about this headline and they get flagged for "enhanced" security they'll "wipe down" their laptop behind the white wall and in the process go to your history and download your email before returning it without making much of a fuss.
Most of the web's video is streamed from Netflix. That's mostly streamed through Silverlight or browser specific plugins.
How does letting HTML5 natively stream Netflix encourage proprietary browser plugins!? If just Netflix switched over (and they've said they intend to once DRM is in the spec) then by definition the majority of HTML5 streaming will be using less not more browser plugins.
This is something though that's improving. I was having horrific back pain 2 years ago. It came on suddenly and I had to lay down in a hot shower to try and get through the pain. It was a "migraine" of back pain. I was "in town" but I was at a friends about 30 minutes out in the suburbs. There was no chance I could drive the 45 minutes (extra 15 in the other direction) to my doctor's office and even if I had a friend drive me they would be closed. I tried googling a 24/hour clinic in the area but couldn't find one and even if I had I would have had to call and see if my insurance covered it.
One thing I did know my insurance covered was ER care and if my back didn't get any better I was ready to go get a muscle relaxant ASAP. About an hour later it subsided but fast forward to today and I know of about four 24-hour emergency clinics within driving distance. If the rest of the country had the same awaken in the last few years then hopefully the ERs can return to being trauma centers and the 'sniffles' like my back can go to a 24hour clinic.
Because clearly the same sort of people who would want to run a large distributed web application are the same people who would also spend millions of dollars on TV shows but only if it streams to a laptop which doesn't have Windows or OSX.
Yep. If we really want to "survive a catastrophe" it's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to build a sustainable submarine station on multiple sides of the earth that only open their hatches once every year or so than to send one colony to mars.
What could kill the human race?
- Disease. It's trivial to filter out microbes and viruses from air supplies here on earth. An antarctic base is also extremely unlikely to get a pathogen spread to it quickly. Avoiding contact with wildlife and all travel to and from would essentially guarantee even an unfiltered antarctic base would be free of disease transmission.
- Asteroid/comet. It's highly unlikely that an asteroid would incinerate everybody on every continent. A small underwater base would be easier and safer. Nuclear submarines already provide a perfectly safe refuge if you have multiple subs in multiple oceans preventing the chance of simultaneous impacts. The dust would be problematic and the temperature but with a space heater from Home Depot and some grow-lamps you could just put on a hepa filter and be perfectly fine inside of an insulated aircraft hanger.
- Nuclear War: It would be nearly impossible to hit a hidden submarine which can hold as many people as proposed martian bases. Also the radiation and fallout from a nuclear war is probably less than just the regular radiation a mars colony would experience on a daily basis from cosmic radiation.
- The sun goes supernova: This is pretty much the only thing that we would need to be a space faring species to overcome and that's unlikely to happen not to mention we would need interstellar not just interplanetary travel to avoid.
Any problem that an apocalyptic catastrophe would cause--would only render the earth almost as uninhabitable as everywhere else in our solar system is every single day.
Grid based icons are way more efficient than a single list. You have two axis to arrange on which means for any distance X from the start menu the grid based start menu has 4x as many icons.
To be doubly clear labor also includes AI, Software and Robots. If a country has an automated factory assembling iPhones it still counts as labor. Or if a company in a country has proprietary software that performs task "X" faster than people in another country then that can also count towards labor.
Usually these are included under a third category "Efficiency".
Except perfectly safe drivers still almost run over pedestrians. I've almost hit 1 or 2 in my days. Car making left hand turn in middle lane. Pedestrian walks out in front--almost dead pedestrian. The more regular city driving where you make a right hand turn and someone comes up behind your car and onto the cross walk as you make a right hand turn. Etc.
They would be no-fault accidents but people can still die when you try to do everything as best as humanely possible. Humanely possible though isn't all that great. There was someone in my home town who dropped something looked down for a second, and hit a bicycle on the other side of the hill. Yes they screwed up by taking their eyes off the road but beyond drunk-driving there is still plenty of perfectly acceptable drivers who kill people. Automatic cars will undoubtedly kill a few people too--but statistically I'm sure it'll be less than good drivers let alone the guy who is constantly in fender benders.
I'm always amused when people say that people are "being driven away from windows 8 because it's too simplistic." Where do these people claim users are going? The Ipad. Wait.. the ipad? The device which doesn't multi-task... at all, that has an even more dumbed down UI screen etc.. For everything you can complain about Windows 8 it's nowhere near as feature anemic as an ipad.
Hopefully they'll soon realize that the desktop and mobile platforms need different UI models, and start supporting the separate primary interface models...
I doubt they will learn that lesson in part because it's not a lesson that needs to be learned. If you look at the 'disasterous end of windows' numbers you'll note that Lenovo experienced no drop in sales--they were selling Windows 8 just as much as everyone else they just sold good machines. HP announced last year that they were going to stop making PCs--shock and amazing people stopped buying their PCs. Dell just announced that they wanted to go private and possibly get out of the PC business and people stopped buying their PCs. Even Apple in those same numbers saw substantial drops in Macbook sales.
Tablets are eating into PC sales and many of the PC makers are shooting themselves in the foot and running around with their hair on fire. Doubling down on traditional PCs and PC manufacturers is a losing proposition. Lenovo released some solid hardware and good battery life and they prospered.
I'm seeing expensive ugly technological watches everywhere. They're called Nike Fuel and they don't even tell time!
I think a fitness watch that happens to also display your inbox could be a hit. And I think the tech has miniaturized to the point where it's feasible finally. The Pebble should be proof of that.
This is what Seattle is doing. They already laid tons of fiber backbone through the city. They're now contracting out to GigaOM for the last mile and service.
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/seattle-is-the-latest-city-to-go-around-isps-to-get-a-gigabit-network/
OpenCL is too limited.