I wouldn't argue with most of what you have to say. However:
I think a single key for this keyboard would cost at least $1 USD to build. After all, each key would have a 32x32-64x64 OLED display, matching driver circuitry, probably RFID-powered and programmed. This would probably cost at least $2 USD/key.
I think you're a little off here. Firstly, RFID-powered and programmed? Unlikely. You'd have to then throw in a receiver and that's just plain unlikely. It's undoubtedly a USB powered keyboard if they're hoping to have the SDK truly open and platform agnostic. I can't argue your cost figures, but I think you're probably on the low side. However, I doubt even the most serious gamer would shell out $400 for a keyboard with sexy pictures on them.
The true market for this keyboard is people working on multiple platforms or those who use programs with countless keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps even typists doing international documents (no more Keyboard Viewer on the screen when typing in OS X and needing international characters). I would be surprised to see the entry cost of this keyboard more than $300. I would be even more surprised if this keyboard ever did make it to market given the costs and slim margins. I doubt there's a niche big enough to sustain this product.
Then there are the phones that cost upwards of $250~$300
Good question. Let's just hope it doesn't cost as much as a Motorola RAZR (~$500 CAD). I'd be willing to pay a maximum of $100. However, I may be willing to pay less once the "Oh, that's sexy," feeling I have wears off.
I don't think there's a problem with bandwidth. What does your computer do all day with the bandwidth? Nothing. Most everyone has plenty of bandwidth to spare.
Especially if the Blockbuster is just around the corner. Of course, it beats going out, but at what price? Something about the business model just doesn't add up to me.
As another poster mentioned, Netflix is in cahoots with Tivo. As such, I'd expect TV and movie delivery over the 'net. I'm intrigued to see how they'll price it out. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay to rent a show or movie via this mechanism. I would, however, be interested in purchasing movies and TV shows.
O/T Addendum: it just occurred to me that the Xscale processor would be more than able to handle video playback on a PSP-like device. Could this be further impetus for Apple's IBM -> Intel switch? i.e. a forth coming "Apple PSP", if you will, with ensuing iTMS service for movies/TV/games?
No one said you are going to. The very fact that a G5 isn't in a Powerbook right now is a good chunk of the reason why Apple is switching to Intel chips.
Apple's sales, along with the rest of the industry, are growing most rapidly in notebooks
Neither IBM or Freescale has a dedicated notebook division. Intel does.
Intel is best able to meet Apple's supply demands.
This is a little late, but thanks for this info! I'll definitely look into this (I wasn't the a/c, but I happened to catch your comment and was hoping someone asked for links, articles, etc.)
If you're really skeptical, visit the natural history museum at the University of Kansas to see skeletons and pictures of catfish taken (by hand by divers) in the Kansas River just a hundred years ago. (Emphasis mine)
Skeletons of catfish? I thought catfish were boneless like sharks?
Am I correct to understand that the difference between RSS as found in Tiger and Longhorn is that the latter integrates it directly into the OS, versus the former which has RSS as a seperate component? If this is true, what sort of moron... oh, never mind. Obvious answer to that question;)
I'm not sure how the revenue stream works, but basically legions of people are hired to click ads. Sounds silly doesn't it? However, AFAIK, the website the ad is displayed on gets paid a certain amount, as does Google, by the company paying for the ad to be put on Google's service. Hence the lawsuit.
With my friend Google (Google, meet jasongetsdown. jasongetsdown, meet Google), I was able to find some links that may help you understand the situation better, including TFA we're talking about in the first place:-P
In his defense though, it's the news source, Yahoo, sensationalizing his mods and not his own blog entry (i.e. he doesn't claim that this is some grand crack). His candor in his blog entry doesn't even hold up to the grandiose imagery of a scheming, brilliant hacker striking another blow against "the man" as painted by Yahoo. I actually feel sort of sorry for the guy given the magnitude of the patch being so inflated.
This may be slightly offtopic insofar that it doesn't directly deal with the subject (sorting with a GPU) at hand, but I was wondering how these sorts of research projects overcome "floating point number weirdness" I've heard about doing GPU calculations (as per the implementation being non-IEEE)? Doubly, would someone in the know help explain what the aforementioned "weirdness" means?
Given that everyone and their dog is downloading TV shows or movies now, wouldn't it make more sense for these studio types to get the jump on the market instead of jumping on the law suit bandwagon?
Do you all remember the/. discussions when MP3 lawsuits started picking up? Everyone was saying they wanted a legal service, and they'd pay $0.99/track. Now people are saying the same thing, and I'm willing to bet most of you would pay $3-5 per TV show. Where are you Apple? Give us our iTMS for TV and movies and we'll open our wallets. Hell, it doesn't even have to be Apple, just someone with decent software that doesn't use that godawful WMP codec.
I was a little surprised by the amount of dirt they had on Intel too. What I thought was doubly surprising was that so many people were willing to vouch for AMD's position. If these claims can all be substantiated, I imagine AMD will do quite well with their case.
How open? Are we talking GPL open, BSD open or what? Will there be attached technologies to read and understand said XML files that will be required that isn't open, or will be open?
What I envision happening is someone will come out with a hardware design and software that is good enough at a price that is good enough. However, the iPod itself is only half the equation; the software is what is winning the battle.
Back when I was a Windows user, the day iTunes came out for Windows was relevatory: the ease of use was dramatically improved. MusicMatch was thrown out the proverbial window, as was numerous other substitute tools used to sync with my iPod.
When someone can offer me an iPod substitute and an iTunes/iTMS substitute, I'll give it a shot. Until then, I'll keep enjoying my 4G iPod.
This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?
I would. I don't own a TV, nor do I feel like paying for cable or satellite to watch the few shows I'm interested in. An iTMS-like service offering TV shows would go over quite well. I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't released one already. I'd be even more suprised if they aren't working on one now (IMHO it'd be the legal crap holding them back as the technology is already there).
I suppose it could slow the research of growing artificial limbs, but I would personally hope to see mechanical limbs as a sort of "loaner" until your new biological limb can be grown (much like you would borrow a car from a dealership when your car is being fixed). More so, I would posit that growing limbs is much further down the line than mechanical limbs. The two streams of research will probably continue unabated by the other for quite some time to come.
You have some interesting ideas here I'd like to talk about for a moment.
More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.
I'm really leery about something like this. In my experience, an extreme of anything is never a good thing. Perchance an overabundance of this bacteria have an effect that makes the lake worse than before. For example, trees are good, but many trees can be bad. More specifically, if you plant too many evergreens in a confined area, the soil becomes exceedingly acidic. I'm more inclined to try to find out how to finesse the lake back to it's normal condition.
Your next statement is moot, imho, given the time required to compress critters into oil or coal. Hopefully by then our progeny have developed more interesting and efficient means of energy harvesting.
With small amounts of electrical wiring as byproducts of the "biological" process of the microbe, we may even be able to "harvest" our wiring needs in much the same way we harvest seaweed or shellfish today for consumption.
This would be seriously cool and is not hard to envision. It'd be really neat if we could engineer the little buggers to poop transistors too.
Supply and demand, my friend. When you have a customer base willing to shell out the big scrilla for a new piece of kit, why not charge them as much as they're willing to pay for it?
I'm at work so I can't try NO/j at the moment, but if your sister is a student (or teacher) she may qualify for Microsoft's Office Student Edition which has all the goodies anyone could ask for at a reasonable price (I think I paid ~$80 CAD for an old version of Office vX and then upgraded to the new version for free:). There's also a trial version on their website.
I know many/nerds may have their quibbles with MS, but IMHO MS Office for OS X is pretty darn good, if not better than it's Window's counterpart. Your sister might like it. Give it a go.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't argue with most of what you have to say. However:
I think you're a little off here. Firstly, RFID-powered and programmed? Unlikely. You'd have to then throw in a receiver and that's just plain unlikely. It's undoubtedly a USB powered keyboard if they're hoping to have the SDK truly open and platform agnostic. I can't argue your cost figures, but I think you're probably on the low side. However, I doubt even the most serious gamer would shell out $400 for a keyboard with sexy pictures on them.The true market for this keyboard is people working on multiple platforms or those who use programs with countless keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps even typists doing international documents (no more Keyboard Viewer on the screen when typing in OS X and needing international characters). I would be surprised to see the entry cost of this keyboard more than $300. I would be even more surprised if this keyboard ever did make it to market given the costs and slim margins. I doubt there's a niche big enough to sustain this product.
Are you serious? Do you have a link for that? I'm in the market for a new cellphone.
For those of us naive on the subject matter, could you explain what you mean by "USSR/Warsaw Pact style [education]"?
I don't think there's a problem with bandwidth. What does your computer do all day with the bandwidth? Nothing. Most everyone has plenty of bandwidth to spare.
As another poster mentioned, Netflix is in cahoots with Tivo. As such, I'd expect TV and movie delivery over the 'net. I'm intrigued to see how they'll price it out. I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay to rent a show or movie via this mechanism. I would, however, be interested in purchasing movies and TV shows.O/T Addendum: it just occurred to me that the Xscale processor would be more than able to handle video playback on a PSP-like device. Could this be further impetus for Apple's IBM -> Intel switch? i.e. a forth coming "Apple PSP", if you will, with ensuing iTMS service for movies/TV/games?
I see they still haven't fixed that bug that causes Windows to be hideously ugly when you turn your computer on...
- Apple's sales, along with the rest of the industry, are growing most rapidly in notebooks
- Neither IBM or Freescale has a dedicated notebook division. Intel does.
- Intel is best able to meet Apple's supply demands.
Make sense?This is a little late, but thanks for this info! I'll definitely look into this (I wasn't the a/c, but I happened to catch your comment and was hoping someone asked for links, articles, etc.)
Oh, too late. We're wirelessly networked thanks to Big Brother. I opted out with my tinfoil hat though.
Interesting post :) Just to throw my $0.02 in, the vocal cords and ears can act as a bottle neck skewing the actual rates of data transport.
No, it's not a joke. I've eaten catfish, I was just always told they were boneless. I suppose the joke is on me :)
Skeletons of catfish? I thought catfish were boneless like sharks?
Am I correct to understand that the difference between RSS as found in Tiger and Longhorn is that the latter integrates it directly into the OS, versus the former which has RSS as a seperate component? If this is true, what sort of moron ... oh, never mind. Obvious answer to that question ;)
I'm not sure how the revenue stream works, but basically legions of people are hired to click ads. Sounds silly doesn't it? However, AFAIK, the website the ad is displayed on gets paid a certain amount, as does Google, by the company paying for the ad to be put on Google's service. Hence the lawsuit.
With my friend Google (Google, meet jasongetsdown. jasongetsdown, meet Google), I was able to find some links that may help you understand the situation better, including TFA we're talking about in the first place :-P
In his defense though, it's the news source, Yahoo, sensationalizing his mods and not his own blog entry (i.e. he doesn't claim that this is some grand crack). His candor in his blog entry doesn't even hold up to the grandiose imagery of a scheming, brilliant hacker striking another blow against "the man" as painted by Yahoo. I actually feel sort of sorry for the guy given the magnitude of the patch being so inflated.
This may be slightly offtopic insofar that it doesn't directly deal with the subject (sorting with a GPU) at hand, but I was wondering how these sorts of research projects overcome "floating point number weirdness" I've heard about doing GPU calculations (as per the implementation being non-IEEE)? Doubly, would someone in the know help explain what the aforementioned "weirdness" means?
Given that everyone and their dog is downloading TV shows or movies now, wouldn't it make more sense for these studio types to get the jump on the market instead of jumping on the law suit bandwagon?
/. discussions when MP3 lawsuits started picking up? Everyone was saying they wanted a legal service, and they'd pay $0.99/track. Now people are saying the same thing, and I'm willing to bet most of you would pay $3-5 per TV show. Where are you Apple? Give us our iTMS for TV and movies and we'll open our wallets. Hell, it doesn't even have to be Apple, just someone with decent software that doesn't use that godawful WMP codec.
Do you all remember the
I was a little surprised by the amount of dirt they had on Intel too. What I thought was doubly surprising was that so many people were willing to vouch for AMD's position. If these claims can all be substantiated, I imagine AMD will do quite well with their case.
How open? Are we talking GPL open, BSD open or what? Will there be attached technologies to read and understand said XML files that will be required that isn't open, or will be open?
What I envision happening is someone will come out with a hardware design and software that is good enough at a price that is good enough. However, the iPod itself is only half the equation; the software is what is winning the battle.
Back when I was a Windows user, the day iTunes came out for Windows was relevatory: the ease of use was dramatically improved. MusicMatch was thrown out the proverbial window, as was numerous other substitute tools used to sync with my iPod.
When someone can offer me an iPod substitute and an iTunes/iTMS substitute, I'll give it a shot. Until then, I'll keep enjoying my 4G iPod.
I would. I don't own a TV, nor do I feel like paying for cable or satellite to watch the few shows I'm interested in. An iTMS-like service offering TV shows would go over quite well. I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't released one already. I'd be even more suprised if they aren't working on one now (IMHO it'd be the legal crap holding them back as the technology is already there).
I suppose it could slow the research of growing artificial limbs, but I would personally hope to see mechanical limbs as a sort of "loaner" until your new biological limb can be grown (much like you would borrow a car from a dealership when your car is being fixed). More so, I would posit that growing limbs is much further down the line than mechanical limbs. The two streams of research will probably continue unabated by the other for quite some time to come.
You have some interesting ideas here I'd like to talk about for a moment.
I'm really leery about something like this. In my experience, an extreme of anything is never a good thing. Perchance an overabundance of this bacteria have an effect that makes the lake worse than before. For example, trees are good, but many trees can be bad. More specifically, if you plant too many evergreens in a confined area, the soil becomes exceedingly acidic. I'm more inclined to try to find out how to finesse the lake back to it's normal condition.Your next statement is moot, imho, given the time required to compress critters into oil or coal. Hopefully by then our progeny have developed more interesting and efficient means of energy harvesting.
This would be seriously cool and is not hard to envision. It'd be really neat if we could engineer the little buggers to poop transistors too.Supply and demand, my friend. When you have a customer base willing to shell out the big scrilla for a new piece of kit, why not charge them as much as they're willing to pay for it?
I'm at work so I can't try NO/j at the moment, but if your sister is a student (or teacher) she may qualify for Microsoft's Office Student Edition which has all the goodies anyone could ask for at a reasonable price (I think I paid ~$80 CAD for an old version of Office vX and then upgraded to the new version for free :). There's also a trial version on their website.
I know many /nerds may have their quibbles with MS, but IMHO MS Office for OS X is pretty darn good, if not better than it's Window's counterpart. Your sister might like it. Give it a go.