Apple bought the company to make their SoC solutions to keep size down and get an exclusive license on the tech. The problem with the 'others' is that they're trying to imitate rather than innovate. I went to a Verizon store yesterday to see what they got. Basically it's about 30 Android devices ranging from iPhone imitations to BlackBerry imitations vs. 2 iOS devices (and 2 very crappy Windows 7 devices which we won't mention).
The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a piece of shit (and I don't use that word very often to describe tech), it didn't respond to 10% of my touches even when I was trying to use the buttons and was just plain choppy. Then you have the rest of the Androids which all behave slightly different, look different and try to improve on each other by making the screen bigger or make the casing louder (more buttons, led's, color spirals...) seem to be loaded in the store with Verizon crapware, Motorola trialware, bundled GPS applications which get included on your monthly contract similar to how Dell's come with unnecessary software. Some of those things have become so unwieldy I'm thinking they should've just called it a small handheld internet device (a la Nokia N900) instead of a phone.
With computer games coming pretty darn close to realistic it's only a matter of time before we can simulate full games without people seeing the difference. Most high-profile games are already fully digitalized with lines and arrows being drawn on the field in real-time.
The thing that makes sports enjoyable to watch however will have to be simulated as well - the sheer unpredictability of humans, rapid and unexpected changes in strategy in response to the other side's lineup, injuries etc.
Ever tried an IR-source? That is the geeky (and probably legal) way to do it. You can build them yourself or several surveillance stores sell them pre-packaged. Just get a powerful enough one, it's invisible, doesn't bother anybody and they won't get any pictures of whatever you're hiding (and you may even help out the people that are driving past a couple of miles too fast.
I would be happy to pay a nominal, non-compulsory fee for unlimited, DRM-free media (monthly on a bill or yearly in my taxes). Surveys show that in the US we spend about $6/mo per capita on digital music and probably around the same for DVD's and rentals like NetFlix. This would be $12-15/mo and account for all my media downloads.
The industry is greedy but they can't sustain it anymore. Normal people don't have that kind of money anymore to go to the movies AND rent the DVD AND buy the DVD AND upgrade to BluRay. We've been making way less money when adjusted for inflation and still have been spending more on entertainment, there is not much left to squeeze.
As for 3 - the tax on the media carriers was introduced just for that and the **AA had been whining for it for years, they got it practically worldwide even in the US and several of those countries found that when you get money for something, you should be giving something back (which quite common outside the US a contract is not enforceable unless both parties benefit). However now they don't think it was enough and actually hamstrung themselves when the market moved on to computer media which was considered not to be included in the tax deal. They got their quick bonuses though.
There are people that build their own cars from scratch (or from a kit) and I know at least 2 instances where those people got their cars through a special inspection and got them registered, plates and driving them around. Why wouldn't this be possible? Hack your Linux car, get the code certified and drive it around.
All that is necessary to do then is upload the new RH tree to your own git/svn and see what changed compared to either the last RH kernel or the original.
This guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Wall_YAPC_2007.jpg can probably quote you a Perl script to walk through and diff the whole tree in his sleep.
100 Windows PC's won't cut it. Once you get near the 4 digits or if you're a high profile developer you could be talking. And yes, the people that sell the OS to a company (internal or external) DO get kickbacks. I worked for one of those Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, it's disgusting when you read the contracts. I nearly got fired once for recommending Linux to one of our biggest clients even though it would fit their needs better.
That's what you get for embarrassing the communist republicrat party. Freedom of speech, bah, if you embarrass the wrong people you don't have no right to it, it says it right there in the patriot act.
Whaddayamean hard pressed to image your brain? Never heard of fMRI (non-invasive). I work with someone who has a device that will actually take your brain, slice it in sub-millimeter portions and then automatically image the whole thing onto a computer (2 TB/hour).
This has always been an argument that is badly contended, the data people (Americans) use for these comparisons is definitely flawed just to keep their nationalistic pride. The reason you get those numbers is 1) you are taking Western Europe and Eastern Europe together - the latter has only in the last couple of years been able to afford to pick up the pace. The Russian Federation and China have the same issue - you're adding both poor and rich together while the US is in general considered, very rich throughout.
This chart is more detailed: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg and while the density of those countries has something to do with it (Japan and some European countries) other European countries are far less dense than the US. The difference (through history) is who invested in the infrastructure.
If I keep the boxes dry, U-Haul boxes can last for 10 years in storage. Why wouldn't this thing last for 2-3 years or however long a PC lasts? This would be great for datacenters and stuff where all you need is processing power. Just pop out the box, fill with RAM and CPU, hook up to a 12/5V power tree, network and stack it in a rack. The flashpoint of cardboard is high enough that I don't think it will be a problem.
Big shops like Google can do a simple re-imaging job because they have enough cheap servers so they can just throw a server out if it misbehaves, they know it's not their software because it runs fine on millions of other computers and if it misbehaves, usually it's the machine going bad. Only when multiple machines start having the same issue do they look into it as a possible bug, fix it and roll out an update to all their systems.
In a smaller shop usually, there is no space to have multiple downtimes because it will just re-image the same problem over and over again. The sysadmin is also the programmer and the help desk and simply doesn't have time to make a super stable system and usually has to use some 'legacy software' which basically means a custom developed piece of crap that nobody has the source code to. Virtualization has caused some idiot sysadmins to think they have a Google-like infrastructure by using virtualization on one or two boxes as an imitation datacenter while running some unstable software.
A good sysadmin does not have to nuke their server installation from orbit every time something goes wrong. I can understand imaging desktops because users will do some modification that makes it crash but they're never able to tell you exactly what they did. But a server is (or should be) well documented and has only few items that can go wrong. Finding out why your SCSI bus does a reset after a few weeks will be much more advantageous than rebooting or re-imaging it because eventually it will reset the wrong way and you'll end up with a corrupted RAID array.
Tobii is not necessarily considered a startup. It's been around for a while now and has been selling eye tracking solutions to the scientific community. Hopefully the 'general market' will drive prices down on these suckers though. 8k for what is basically a 120fps camera is a bit much. Where I work, we do gaze and eye tracking with a single IR camera.
USB 1.0 was not a viable bus in 1996 - if you remember, all cables had to be very short so you wouldn't run into power and/or timing issues, no (good) devices whatsoever existed (what can you really do with 1.5Mbps of transfer) and it was basically a stillborn technology. In 1998 when USB1.1 came out, Apple had USB across the board the same year even though everybody (and most true computer geeks still do) liked SCSI and FireWire better (more transfer and more power) and the first devices weren't without issues. Even Windows didn't go on supporting USB until late 1997 and was one of the 'great' features showed off during which Gates famously got a Windows 98 blue screen.
Sure wireless was rebadged but also one of the first to include it in a home-desktop environment. You could spec PC's without floppy's but until 3 years ago you couldn't go without when you had to install Windows XP on any system with a newer I/O card.
The only thing that the Obama administration did was delay a revolt that was about to happen by appeasing it's subjects with free healthcare promises and making you feel like you have rights by paying lip service to the basic rights of a minority group.
And it's not him personally, the whole government from local to federal is corrupt. Everywhere (look critically at your news sources) both dem's and rep's are pushing to limit your rights to and staging government takeovers of civil services (banks, car manufacturers, school districts, unions, press, religion...) all the while making the gap between them (the aristocracy) and us (the plebes) bigger.
Large companies will find a way around it. Smaller companies will not be able to compete using those rules. It's always been that way. Look at how Cisco, Microsoft etc. ships stuff to Cuba and Iran, Korea etc. while smaller suppliers that don't have that kind of network get locked out of the business.
All they would have to do is put a few local people that pick up the phone, listen to the person 5 seconds and then say, sorry I can't help you with that, let me connect you to my colleague in India, he'll fix it for you.
Well, you could still have a undo operation but hide it and make it automatic (clean up after 2 hours or so). Undelete tools are also available since deletion is only a removal of link in a file allocation table/database. Also, working with Unix long enough (since the late '80's) I have learned not to delete anything, ever until you're absolutely sure you can get rid of it.
I have bought some cheap LED's from Home Depot and they work great as a general spot and I bought some others for a candelabra which also work great. I don't know where you bought an $80 LED but unless it's a Cree (which are great) or so you've been seriously duped or you bought the wrong application one (given a couple of years (5) ago there was not much more than spotlights available. There is LED stage-lighting these days for crying out loud which illuminates, I don't know, 20 cube areas.
Saving 10% on your electricity saves you $100 which you can then spend elsewhere in your local economy thus spurring invention in your country and local businesses to invest in your economy. Giving this $100 to your electric company makes them transfer it to an account somewhere in the Carribeans where they'll use it to get yet another Lamborghini or private jet and actually make the environmental situation worse. Look who are the owners of your energy company to see where your money goes. Mine was recently bought by a Spanish company who is now building a really nice office building somewhere halfway across the world.
If they lose 10% revenue across the board that won't mean they lose more than 10% of their profit. They'll still operate at roughly the same profit margin and probably make more profit because they'll have to produce and transport less energy (the wear and tear is less, they won't have to expand as soon). I haven't heard anything about them making any innovation in the energy market even though they're a big market player. If anything they would like to prevent innovation because they have a vested interested in doing things the way it's done now and innovation means they'll have to invest in order to compete. True innovation is not done in big companies whether it's Microsoft, MPAA or IBM. It's done in small startups and by individuals like Google in the '90's (look at how much innovation/employee Google is really doing now that it's big compared to when they were small) and those companies usually reside somewhere in your neighborhood.
You're simply stupid and uneducated. Perhaps you can't see backward and see what really has been driving innovation throughout the ages and how well big companies do in the field of innovation.
Get the better ones then or the LED's. The LED's are GREAT for generic lighting. I have some in my kitchen as spots and some dimmable ones in a candelabra. I'm currently working on my mancave with LED DMX stagelights, dimmable, lots of light, color or white and controllable. It's a bit more expensive at ~$120 per panel but well worth it.
Depends on where you're at. In large(r) cities, they don't do that anymore. You get to talk to a bureaucrat (not a judge) which just gives you the ticket unless you can prove that you were not guilty of driving. They allow hearsay (from the cop) and have no right to a supporting deposition with the only treshold being convincing evidence and the whole sham being funded by tickets (I think it's 70-80% conviction rate required to keep it afloat).
You're talking about VMS? That wouldn't be quite the same. You see VMS' ideas were used in the Windows NT Kernel but I don't think that VMS was used directly in the development of Windows NT. That's like saying AT&T's Unix became one of the most popular open source operating systems. If Windows NT would've been based on VMS however and we wouldn't have Win16/32 now then you could say that.
However Mac OS X is NeXTStep. The same kernel, the same way the interface is drawn (PostScript), the same object oriented model. Basically when Steve Jobs went to work back at Apple, they bought NeXTStep (or the other way around), polished and branded it (although Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 weren't great yet) and further developed it (with products like AppleScript, WebObjects, Objective-C etc. eventually directly evolving from this).
But those you can make redundant. I like the way Mac OS X does it. The Unix-way with individual files for individual programs and the Mac-way with each individual file following a certain format (XML) which is well-documented. The Windows-way is to take all those individual files the old-Unix-way (each program using their own format), stuffing it into a singular file and making it utterly unreadable (using GUID's, allowing proprietary binary code and very deeply nested trees) then giving everyone, everywhere access to it. And then still applications (Office, Internet Explorer) make directories and files in hidden folders with settings, caches etc. so it's apparently not the best solution even for Microsoft themselves.
Ever tried to delete every trace of a program out of Windows? It's nearly impossible. In Linux or Mac you just go to/etc and ~/.program or ~/Library and do a find and delete.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple bought the company to make their SoC solutions to keep size down and get an exclusive license on the tech. The problem with the 'others' is that they're trying to imitate rather than innovate. I went to a Verizon store yesterday to see what they got. Basically it's about 30 Android devices ranging from iPhone imitations to BlackBerry imitations vs. 2 iOS devices (and 2 very crappy Windows 7 devices which we won't mention).
The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a piece of shit (and I don't use that word very often to describe tech), it didn't respond to 10% of my touches even when I was trying to use the buttons and was just plain choppy. Then you have the rest of the Androids which all behave slightly different, look different and try to improve on each other by making the screen bigger or make the casing louder (more buttons, led's, color spirals...) seem to be loaded in the store with Verizon crapware, Motorola trialware, bundled GPS applications which get included on your monthly contract similar to how Dell's come with unnecessary software. Some of those things have become so unwieldy I'm thinking they should've just called it a small handheld internet device (a la Nokia N900) instead of a phone.
With computer games coming pretty darn close to realistic it's only a matter of time before we can simulate full games without people seeing the difference. Most high-profile games are already fully digitalized with lines and arrows being drawn on the field in real-time.
The thing that makes sports enjoyable to watch however will have to be simulated as well - the sheer unpredictability of humans, rapid and unexpected changes in strategy in response to the other side's lineup, injuries etc.
I remember when SMS was free and was hidden in the advanced menu of a 3-line text display of a phone.
Ever tried an IR-source? That is the geeky (and probably legal) way to do it. You can build them yourself or several surveillance stores sell them pre-packaged. Just get a powerful enough one, it's invisible, doesn't bother anybody and they won't get any pictures of whatever you're hiding (and you may even help out the people that are driving past a couple of miles too fast.
I would be happy to pay a nominal, non-compulsory fee for unlimited, DRM-free media (monthly on a bill or yearly in my taxes). Surveys show that in the US we spend about $6/mo per capita on digital music and probably around the same for DVD's and rentals like NetFlix. This would be $12-15/mo and account for all my media downloads.
The industry is greedy but they can't sustain it anymore. Normal people don't have that kind of money anymore to go to the movies AND rent the DVD AND buy the DVD AND upgrade to BluRay. We've been making way less money when adjusted for inflation and still have been spending more on entertainment, there is not much left to squeeze.
As for 3 - the tax on the media carriers was introduced just for that and the **AA had been whining for it for years, they got it practically worldwide even in the US and several of those countries found that when you get money for something, you should be giving something back (which quite common outside the US a contract is not enforceable unless both parties benefit). However now they don't think it was enough and actually hamstrung themselves when the market moved on to computer media which was considered not to be included in the tax deal. They got their quick bonuses though.
There are people that build their own cars from scratch (or from a kit) and I know at least 2 instances where those people got their cars through a special inspection and got them registered, plates and driving them around. Why wouldn't this be possible? Hack your Linux car, get the code certified and drive it around.
I use a pocket watch thank you very much, my watch comes ATTACHED to it's slip case.
All that is necessary to do then is upload the new RH tree to your own git/svn and see what changed compared to either the last RH kernel or the original. This guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Wall_YAPC_2007.jpg can probably quote you a Perl script to walk through and diff the whole tree in his sleep.
100 Windows PC's won't cut it. Once you get near the 4 digits or if you're a high profile developer you could be talking. And yes, the people that sell the OS to a company (internal or external) DO get kickbacks. I worked for one of those Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, it's disgusting when you read the contracts. I nearly got fired once for recommending Linux to one of our biggest clients even though it would fit their needs better.
That's what you get for embarrassing the communist republicrat party. Freedom of speech, bah, if you embarrass the wrong people you don't have no right to it, it says it right there in the patriot act.
Whaddayamean hard pressed to image your brain? Never heard of fMRI (non-invasive). I work with someone who has a device that will actually take your brain, slice it in sub-millimeter portions and then automatically image the whole thing onto a computer (2 TB/hour).
This has always been an argument that is badly contended, the data people (Americans) use for these comparisons is definitely flawed just to keep their nationalistic pride. The reason you get those numbers is 1) you are taking Western Europe and Eastern Europe together - the latter has only in the last couple of years been able to afford to pick up the pace. The Russian Federation and China have the same issue - you're adding both poor and rich together while the US is in general considered, very rich throughout.
This chart is more detailed: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg and while the density of those countries has something to do with it (Japan and some European countries) other European countries are far less dense than the US. The difference (through history) is who invested in the infrastructure.
You also have to consider the cost. Look here: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/01/us-broadband-still-lagging-in-speed-and-penetration.ars our average speed is 3.9Mbps and costs $40.
If I keep the boxes dry, U-Haul boxes can last for 10 years in storage. Why wouldn't this thing last for 2-3 years or however long a PC lasts? This would be great for datacenters and stuff where all you need is processing power. Just pop out the box, fill with RAM and CPU, hook up to a 12/5V power tree, network and stack it in a rack. The flashpoint of cardboard is high enough that I don't think it will be a problem.
Big shops like Google can do a simple re-imaging job because they have enough cheap servers so they can just throw a server out if it misbehaves, they know it's not their software because it runs fine on millions of other computers and if it misbehaves, usually it's the machine going bad. Only when multiple machines start having the same issue do they look into it as a possible bug, fix it and roll out an update to all their systems.
In a smaller shop usually, there is no space to have multiple downtimes because it will just re-image the same problem over and over again. The sysadmin is also the programmer and the help desk and simply doesn't have time to make a super stable system and usually has to use some 'legacy software' which basically means a custom developed piece of crap that nobody has the source code to. Virtualization has caused some idiot sysadmins to think they have a Google-like infrastructure by using virtualization on one or two boxes as an imitation datacenter while running some unstable software.
A good sysadmin does not have to nuke their server installation from orbit every time something goes wrong. I can understand imaging desktops because users will do some modification that makes it crash but they're never able to tell you exactly what they did. But a server is (or should be) well documented and has only few items that can go wrong. Finding out why your SCSI bus does a reset after a few weeks will be much more advantageous than rebooting or re-imaging it because eventually it will reset the wrong way and you'll end up with a corrupted RAID array.
Tobii is not necessarily considered a startup. It's been around for a while now and has been selling eye tracking solutions to the scientific community. Hopefully the 'general market' will drive prices down on these suckers though. 8k for what is basically a 120fps camera is a bit much. Where I work, we do gaze and eye tracking with a single IR camera.
USB 1.0 was not a viable bus in 1996 - if you remember, all cables had to be very short so you wouldn't run into power and/or timing issues, no (good) devices whatsoever existed (what can you really do with 1.5Mbps of transfer) and it was basically a stillborn technology. In 1998 when USB1.1 came out, Apple had USB across the board the same year even though everybody (and most true computer geeks still do) liked SCSI and FireWire better (more transfer and more power) and the first devices weren't without issues. Even Windows didn't go on supporting USB until late 1997 and was one of the 'great' features showed off during which Gates famously got a Windows 98 blue screen.
Sure wireless was rebadged but also one of the first to include it in a home-desktop environment. You could spec PC's without floppy's but until 3 years ago you couldn't go without when you had to install Windows XP on any system with a newer I/O card.
The only thing that the Obama administration did was delay a revolt that was about to happen by appeasing it's subjects with free healthcare promises and making you feel like you have rights by paying lip service to the basic rights of a minority group.
And it's not him personally, the whole government from local to federal is corrupt. Everywhere (look critically at your news sources) both dem's and rep's are pushing to limit your rights to and staging government takeovers of civil services (banks, car manufacturers, school districts, unions, press, religion...) all the while making the gap between them (the aristocracy) and us (the plebes) bigger.
Large companies will find a way around it. Smaller companies will not be able to compete using those rules. It's always been that way. Look at how Cisco, Microsoft etc. ships stuff to Cuba and Iran, Korea etc. while smaller suppliers that don't have that kind of network get locked out of the business.
All they would have to do is put a few local people that pick up the phone, listen to the person 5 seconds and then say, sorry I can't help you with that, let me connect you to my colleague in India, he'll fix it for you.
Well, you could still have a undo operation but hide it and make it automatic (clean up after 2 hours or so). Undelete tools are also available since deletion is only a removal of link in a file allocation table/database. Also, working with Unix long enough (since the late '80's) I have learned not to delete anything, ever until you're absolutely sure you can get rid of it.
I have bought some cheap LED's from Home Depot and they work great as a general spot and I bought some others for a candelabra which also work great. I don't know where you bought an $80 LED but unless it's a Cree (which are great) or so you've been seriously duped or you bought the wrong application one (given a couple of years (5) ago there was not much more than spotlights available. There is LED stage-lighting these days for crying out loud which illuminates, I don't know, 20 cube areas.
Saving 10% on your electricity saves you $100 which you can then spend elsewhere in your local economy thus spurring invention in your country and local businesses to invest in your economy. Giving this $100 to your electric company makes them transfer it to an account somewhere in the Carribeans where they'll use it to get yet another Lamborghini or private jet and actually make the environmental situation worse. Look who are the owners of your energy company to see where your money goes. Mine was recently bought by a Spanish company who is now building a really nice office building somewhere halfway across the world.
If they lose 10% revenue across the board that won't mean they lose more than 10% of their profit. They'll still operate at roughly the same profit margin and probably make more profit because they'll have to produce and transport less energy (the wear and tear is less, they won't have to expand as soon). I haven't heard anything about them making any innovation in the energy market even though they're a big market player. If anything they would like to prevent innovation because they have a vested interested in doing things the way it's done now and innovation means they'll have to invest in order to compete. True innovation is not done in big companies whether it's Microsoft, MPAA or IBM. It's done in small startups and by individuals like Google in the '90's (look at how much innovation/employee Google is really doing now that it's big compared to when they were small) and those companies usually reside somewhere in your neighborhood.
You're simply stupid and uneducated. Perhaps you can't see backward and see what really has been driving innovation throughout the ages and how well big companies do in the field of innovation.
Get the better ones then or the LED's. The LED's are GREAT for generic lighting. I have some in my kitchen as spots and some dimmable ones in a candelabra. I'm currently working on my mancave with LED DMX stagelights, dimmable, lots of light, color or white and controllable. It's a bit more expensive at ~$120 per panel but well worth it.
There already is. If you use a Music CD or a standalone CD burner you have paid for this. Other countries likewise implement something similar.
Depends on where you're at. In large(r) cities, they don't do that anymore. You get to talk to a bureaucrat (not a judge) which just gives you the ticket unless you can prove that you were not guilty of driving. They allow hearsay (from the cop) and have no right to a supporting deposition with the only treshold being convincing evidence and the whole sham being funded by tickets (I think it's 70-80% conviction rate required to keep it afloat).
You're talking about VMS? That wouldn't be quite the same. You see VMS' ideas were used in the Windows NT Kernel but I don't think that VMS was used directly in the development of Windows NT. That's like saying AT&T's Unix became one of the most popular open source operating systems. If Windows NT would've been based on VMS however and we wouldn't have Win16/32 now then you could say that.
However Mac OS X is NeXTStep. The same kernel, the same way the interface is drawn (PostScript), the same object oriented model. Basically when Steve Jobs went to work back at Apple, they bought NeXTStep (or the other way around), polished and branded it (although Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 weren't great yet) and further developed it (with products like AppleScript, WebObjects, Objective-C etc. eventually directly evolving from this).
But those you can make redundant. I like the way Mac OS X does it. The Unix-way with individual files for individual programs and the Mac-way with each individual file following a certain format (XML) which is well-documented. The Windows-way is to take all those individual files the old-Unix-way (each program using their own format), stuffing it into a singular file and making it utterly unreadable (using GUID's, allowing proprietary binary code and very deeply nested trees) then giving everyone, everywhere access to it. And then still applications (Office, Internet Explorer) make directories and files in hidden folders with settings, caches etc. so it's apparently not the best solution even for Microsoft themselves.
Ever tried to delete every trace of a program out of Windows? It's nearly impossible. In Linux or Mac you just go to /etc and ~/.program or ~/Library and do a find and delete.