All the engineers who actually have to build these devices obviously never had the brilliant flash of insight after a few minutes of thought that our intrepid slashdot armchair engineers had, of course!
I've noticed that they take a fairly liberal definition of "chess", as they simply discard certain rules, such as en passant pawn capture or castling moves, which are pretty important chess moves. It's a bit hard to argue that this is really "chess" if they just decide to leave out inconvenient rules ("chess lite?"). I probably wouldn't complain about other ommissions such as the 3-repetition rule, but castling?
Even so, a very cool accomplishment in micro-optimization techniques.
They made that argument for Windows 8, and one could conceivably buy that argument for the Metro UI running on very low-powered devices, as MS phones often are. However, there's no conceivable reason to skin your traditional Windows applications in the same way, which are obviously going to be running on desktops and laptops. For a modern GPU, whether or not they're rendering a transparent windows or rounding a border isn't even remotely a concern in terms of efficiency.
No, I think this is an aesthetic decision through and through. I think the "efficiency" angle was probably just an argument made to help sell it. I'm really hoping the "flat, boring, and ugly" trend dies a fiery death soon.
Sigh... I absolutely agree about the conclusion. But it's a stretch to say this trend is copying Apple. Windows 8 came out long before Apple's new "flat" look came out, unless I'm aware of a trend that started before that in the Apple camp.
Seriously, though, I'm already completely sick of this "flat, clean, simple" trend. But more importantly, the usability is often worse, sacrificed on the alter of the new aesthetic. In the new design language, button borders are uncool, so they've simply done away with them in many cases, and don't offer any indications of what you can click, or where clickable regions are. Windows 8 was particularly bad with this, so we'll see if Windows 10 does any better, despite using the same basic theme. I understand that aesthetics are important, but they should always, always, always take a back seat to functionality and usability.
With any luck, after a few years, when everyone else gets sick of flat, uninspired graphics, someone will create a new, "retro" look and start adding some bevels, gradients, gloss, and transparency back into the UI.
Nope. Throwing faster hardware at a problem is much cheaper than having a team of developers spend weeks optimizing a framework or making a new one.
Generally true, but extremely large scales can flip this around. It's the reason C++ is still being used, especially in places like the data center. When your apps have to scale up to millions of users, efficiency still matters, because it translates directly into CPU cycles, which translates directly into ongoing overhead costs. Admittedly, a relatively small percentage of developers are likely working at that scale, but I thought I'd mention that caveat.
And where do those frameworks come from, genius? They were built by the very people you call "too arrogant to use someone else's solution". You sir, are not a programmer. You are a cobbler-togetherer.
We all build on layers of software written by others, and those layers grow deeper and more expressive as we move forward in time and those layers grow and mature. People like to bitch about how bloated today's software is, but the simple fact of the matter that a lot of those "bloated" layers we bitch about also give us a tremendous leg up in raw productivity and functionality. And yes, everyone knows those layers and abstractions come at the expense of CPU efficiency, and while it's still important to a degree, it's often not the most critical metric (if it is, then that's a signal to move down a layer and write a more efficient abstraction for the problem you're trying to solve). Some people freak out about how very few programmers understand modern system from top to bottom anymore. However, that separation of knowledge is what allows more specialization of technology as it broadens into ever-widening and diverse arenas. While it's good to have some depth, it's also often handy to have breadth of knowledge as well.
I'm not a web developer - I program videogames. In my field, twenty years ago, I was writing directly to the hardware with DOS. Nowadays, I have a rich set of OS-level abstractions for many of those same tasks. Or, if I use a commercial engine, I can jump right into creating content even before the first game-specific code has been written. Does that make me a "cobbler-togetherer" as well? I would be insane to start writing a new game today by creating my own device drivers, or my own low-level rendering abstraction instead of using Direct3D, OpenGL, etc. Or, if I didn't have specific requirements that a commercial game engine couldn't cover, I'd be equally foolish for writing my own game engine.
A good programmer understand and knows the tools of his trade. Understanding the benefits and tradeoffs of various abstractions (i.e. "frameworks") and when you should or shouldn't use them is part of being a professional.
Stop with the semantic nitpicking. For the record, I own a copy of Windows 8, and I installed and used it long enough to figure out that I really didn't like the new OS's interface. And no, I'm not sure parroting other negative reviews - I only started reading about those after I started looking online to see if I was the only one who hated it. Sure enough, there were a lot of others like me.
Opinions are subjective. It's rather silly to argue with people that "no, your opinion is wrong". It's like arguing with someone about how root beer is the best drink ever with someone who just happens to dislike the taste of root beer.
I tried it and absolutely loathed it. It's pretty clear a significant number of users clearly either disliked the interface or were confused by it. The incredibly lethargic adoption rates of Window 8 support that assertion. The interface was probably very nice for a touch device, but it was clunky and absolutely sub-optimal for mouse+keyboard devices. I tried it out and absolutely hated it almost from the moment I started using it. And I don't consider the requirement to hack in a third-party start button a viable solution.
In contrast, Windows 10 is very much what Windows 8 should have been, if MS had actually listed to user feedback from the start. It very much feels like Windows 7, which is what Windows Vista should have been. I've been trying Windows 10 out in a VM, and it's pretty much a checklist of all the things that went horribly wrong with Windows 8 that are getting fixed. Well, all fixed save one: the flat, ugly styling is still there. I wish that trend would just die already.
So, the answer is "Yes, Microsoft will probably get this one right. Their user base, especially the business community, essentially slapped MS upside the head with non-adoption of Windows 8, giving them a very clear message that they won't update until Windows actually works like Windows again.
And from the article, he envisions turning this into a subscription service since it costs money to run, and will cost more if it scales up.
I didn't see any indication of a subscription in the articles I read. May I ask where you read that?
Also, from your various posts, you seem rather opposed to this app, or perhaps the general concept. As someone who may be facing more sight-related challenges in the future, it seems like you'd have a lot to gain if this actually works out well in practice as it sounds in concept. May I ask what your specific concerns or complaints are?
I agree that there are a lot of theoretical ways that vision-impaired people could perhaps be better helped than this app, but this seems like something practical that can actually help people right now. That is to say, maybe we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good with these sorts of things.
If they understood significant digits, they wouldn't have measured the changing of an epoch down to the day. That's like me celebrating my birthday down to the millisecond.
For one thing, who would bother with a $2000 desktop, except for a gamer with money to burn?
There are some professionals who think nothing of spending $5,000 to $10,000 for a high end PC workstation, let alone $2000. Hell, the software alone can cost many times that much, so why would they balk at buying the best hardware money can buy? Digital audio workstations are a good example of this sort of high-end niche industry.
When pretty much every English dictionary is in agreement on a revised definition, then we can safely conclude it's more than just a few ignorant kids posting on Facebook and Twitter.
I find it somewhat amusing to be defending the use of the "non-correct" definition of "literally" because honestly, it really irritates me as well. So, you and I can continue being irritated until the day we die, or we can accept that people are going to use the term in a figurative sense (rather ironic, given the original definition), and get on with our lives. If it makes you feel any better, keep in mind that even the new dictionary definition indicates that this is an "informal" use, so it's still not appropriate to use in most written works.
So what you are saying is it's much ado about nothing?
As you like it. Naturally, one can conclude that, despite the process of defining the English language being an occasional comedy of errors, we must admit that measure for measure, all's well that ends well,
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules. If common language usage becomes inconsistent with the current written rules, at some point it makes more sense to change the rules to reflect the actual usage than to try to correct usage en mass*. This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Languages continually evolve over time - there's nothing more or less "official" about our modern English language versus the English language of 500 years ago, even though there are significant differences. The point of a language is to communicate with each other, and just as our technology continues to evolve, so does the way in which we communicate.
* For example, since this is Slashdot, consider the attempt to encourage the public to distinguish between "hacker" and "cracker". That distinction never gained any ground, and it's likely it never will. Likewise, almost no one calls the Linux operating system GNU/Linux outside a few die-hard FSF folks.
First off, it's not as though these words have been struck from the English lexicon. Seriously... do kids nowadays rely exclusively on the Oxford Junior Dictionary instead of doing a quick web search or consulting a more complete dictionary? I don't recall ever in my life using a "kid's" dictionary during my school years. We used the big ones right from the start.
It wasn't always perfect, of course. I recall asking my teacher what a word meant, and she correctly told me that I should look it up in the dictionary myself. I did so, found the word, and it was defined by a different word I didn't know. I looked up that word, and it used the first word in it's definition. My teacher then relented and explained the word to me herself. That's why kids have teachers and parents.
All in all, a tempest in a teacup. Kids will learn these words once they graduate to more complete resources. No big deal. Side note: I'll bet "tempest" isn't in the junior dictionary either.
We used to forcibly institutionalize mentally ill people instead of kicking them out on the street en mass to fend for themselves. A significant portion of what we call "homeless" have mental health and substance abuse issues, of course. Is releasing them to life in the streets more compassionate or humanitarian than confining them to an institution where they can actually get some help? I'm not sure there's an easy answer there, to be honest. In my neck of the woods, people are getting robbed and assaulted on the streets by homeless people on a pretty regular basis. It's not a good situation for anyone.
Chaiscript looks interesting - something like what I would have probably designed for a language if I was writing one from scratch. I'm currently using Lua for my game engine, but integrating the raw C API with C++ requires a lot of ugly boilerplate code.
A question while you're here - one of the most useful features of Lua for game development (at least for me) is the support for co-routines. Each lua script (or "chunk") can have it's own stack, and can therefore suspend execution and resume later. This allows a script to sleep for a specified period of time, for example, giving the appearance of being threaded without actually requiring each script to execute on a real thread - which would be far too much overhead.
This enables me to write simple Lua scripts like:
DoSomething() Sleep(5) DoSomethingElse()
Is there a way to do something similar in Chaiscript? Note: it takes a bunch of external C++ code to be able to pull this off in Lua as well, so doing it via external code is fine.
IOP is not the only metric that must be considered. Spinning disks are still at least eight time cheaper than SSDs *right now*, and in some use cases the speed at which that data is retrieved is not as important as the cost per GB. Of course that's going to change eventually, but until it does, if you want 6TB of local storage you can either buy one 6TB spinning disks at $270 or six 1TB SSDs at about $475 each for $2850 total.
SSDs are simply not as economical for bulk storage (not speed-critical databases) at the moment. Sure, solid state will eventually catch up, but until it does, spinning disks will still be with us.
Flash is definitely the future, but is still about eight times as expensive per GB. That means if you want to store a lot of data, spinning disks is still the most economical route by far. There's another use-case for disks as well, when a disk is require to do a huge amount of writes - flash is actually very slow to write, and of course, has limited write capacity even with wear-leveling algorithms.
Eventually, of course, flash will reach price parity, and it's unlikely anyone will continue to manufacture spinning disks after that, since the benefits obviously outweigh any drawbacks. The only real question is the time frame, and I'm not sure I'd even hazard a guess.
You don't buy spinning disks for their speed. You buy them for their capacity relative to cost. In other words, they're really the only practical solution for online bulk storage on a budget. Different technology - different tradeoffs.
Obligatory car analogy to follow: It's sort of like declaring that semi-trucks are too bulky, slow, and inefficient to be used as modern vehicles. Well, that's true, but only if you're considering the sole use cases to be "commuting" or "family outings", and completely overlooking "bulk commercial transport".
It seems likely that solid-state technology will someday surpass magnetic disks in terms of capacity and cost per GB, but we're nowhere near that point yet. In ten years time? I think it's a reasonable bet that we'll be close to parity by then, at which point we'll probably see the end of disk drives.
I couldn't disagree more. I remember pre-Google search days quite well, and it was awful. You ended up wading through page after page after page of irrelevant crap because those search engines simply ranked pages based only on their content, and it was stupidly easy to game. Tag clouds were a direct result of this. Google entered the field and made every other search engine obsolete almost overnight, because the damn thing actually worked. In fact, it worked so well that you were even pretty likely to get the result you wanted in the very first slot - thus, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which in other engines might as well have been labeled "I Feel Like I Might Have Won the Lottery".
Even today, I use Google, because every time I experiment with another search engine, the results simply aren't as good. With Google search, I nearly always find what I'm looking for right at the top of my search. It's unbelievably rare that I have to traverse to a second page.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Google search actually does a lot more than simply search now. It's allows you to find out a lot of basic facts without even leaving the search page. For instance, try typing in calories in an apple or dollars to yen. They even present those results to me before I finish typing.
I'm sure that Google is working on new ways to improve search... after all, it's what drives eyeballs to their advertisements, so they have a huge incentive to make it work better, faster, and more intuitively than anyone else. My guess is that searches will continue to be able to answer more detailed and specific questions that people have rather than only point them to pages that have the answers. What other innovations, who can say? But I think we're past the big "disruptive" search breakthroughs - that happened once, and it was Google inventing search that actually worked.
What I want to know is what he means by "work for it". What work will these students have to perform to get this "free" education?
I presume he's just talking about students working to maintain a minimal GPA. In other words, work as "effort", not work as "employment".
And yes, of course it will be up to taxpayers to shoulder this additional burden, at a time when the federal deficit is still spiraling out of control. Naturally, that makes it the perfect time to propose expensive new entitlement programs. Precious few people and even fewer politicians care that we're spending ourselves into a real financial mess. There's just too much delicious government gravy to hand out, and no one wants to stop the train.
Slashdot Mirror
All the engineers who actually have to build these devices obviously never had the brilliant flash of insight after a few minutes of thought that our intrepid slashdot armchair engineers had, of course!
I've noticed that they take a fairly liberal definition of "chess", as they simply discard certain rules, such as en passant pawn capture or castling moves, which are pretty important chess moves. It's a bit hard to argue that this is really "chess" if they just decide to leave out inconvenient rules ("chess lite?"). I probably wouldn't complain about other ommissions such as the 3-repetition rule, but castling?
Even so, a very cool accomplishment in micro-optimization techniques.
Now if google would just announce no more flash allowed in ads, we'd be set.
Since I don't have Flash installed, I've been delighted that so many ads are Flash-based.
They made that argument for Windows 8, and one could conceivably buy that argument for the Metro UI running on very low-powered devices, as MS phones often are. However, there's no conceivable reason to skin your traditional Windows applications in the same way, which are obviously going to be running on desktops and laptops. For a modern GPU, whether or not they're rendering a transparent windows or rounding a border isn't even remotely a concern in terms of efficiency.
No, I think this is an aesthetic decision through and through. I think the "efficiency" angle was probably just an argument made to help sell it. I'm really hoping the "flat, boring, and ugly" trend dies a fiery death soon.
Sigh... I absolutely agree about the conclusion. But it's a stretch to say this trend is copying Apple. Windows 8 came out long before Apple's new "flat" look came out, unless I'm aware of a trend that started before that in the Apple camp.
Seriously, though, I'm already completely sick of this "flat, clean, simple" trend. But more importantly, the usability is often worse, sacrificed on the alter of the new aesthetic. In the new design language, button borders are uncool, so they've simply done away with them in many cases, and don't offer any indications of what you can click, or where clickable regions are. Windows 8 was particularly bad with this, so we'll see if Windows 10 does any better, despite using the same basic theme. I understand that aesthetics are important, but they should always, always, always take a back seat to functionality and usability.
With any luck, after a few years, when everyone else gets sick of flat, uninspired graphics, someone will create a new, "retro" look and start adding some bevels, gradients, gloss, and transparency back into the UI.
Nope. Throwing faster hardware at a problem is much cheaper than having a team of developers spend weeks optimizing a framework or making a new one.
Generally true, but extremely large scales can flip this around. It's the reason C++ is still being used, especially in places like the data center. When your apps have to scale up to millions of users, efficiency still matters, because it translates directly into CPU cycles, which translates directly into ongoing overhead costs. Admittedly, a relatively small percentage of developers are likely working at that scale, but I thought I'd mention that caveat.
And where do those frameworks come from, genius? They were built by the very people you call "too arrogant to use someone else's solution".
You sir, are not a programmer. You are a cobbler-togetherer.
We all build on layers of software written by others, and those layers grow deeper and more expressive as we move forward in time and those layers grow and mature. People like to bitch about how bloated today's software is, but the simple fact of the matter that a lot of those "bloated" layers we bitch about also give us a tremendous leg up in raw productivity and functionality. And yes, everyone knows those layers and abstractions come at the expense of CPU efficiency, and while it's still important to a degree, it's often not the most critical metric (if it is, then that's a signal to move down a layer and write a more efficient abstraction for the problem you're trying to solve). Some people freak out about how very few programmers understand modern system from top to bottom anymore. However, that separation of knowledge is what allows more specialization of technology as it broadens into ever-widening and diverse arenas. While it's good to have some depth, it's also often handy to have breadth of knowledge as well.
I'm not a web developer - I program videogames. In my field, twenty years ago, I was writing directly to the hardware with DOS. Nowadays, I have a rich set of OS-level abstractions for many of those same tasks. Or, if I use a commercial engine, I can jump right into creating content even before the first game-specific code has been written. Does that make me a "cobbler-togetherer" as well? I would be insane to start writing a new game today by creating my own device drivers, or my own low-level rendering abstraction instead of using Direct3D, OpenGL, etc. Or, if I didn't have specific requirements that a commercial game engine couldn't cover, I'd be equally foolish for writing my own game engine.
A good programmer understand and knows the tools of his trade. Understanding the benefits and tradeoffs of various abstractions (i.e. "frameworks") and when you should or shouldn't use them is part of being a professional.
Stop with the semantic nitpicking. For the record, I own a copy of Windows 8, and I installed and used it long enough to figure out that I really didn't like the new OS's interface. And no, I'm not sure parroting other negative reviews - I only started reading about those after I started looking online to see if I was the only one who hated it. Sure enough, there were a lot of others like me.
Opinions are subjective. It's rather silly to argue with people that "no, your opinion is wrong". It's like arguing with someone about how root beer is the best drink ever with someone who just happens to dislike the taste of root beer.
I tried it and absolutely loathed it. It's pretty clear a significant number of users clearly either disliked the interface or were confused by it. The incredibly lethargic adoption rates of Window 8 support that assertion. The interface was probably very nice for a touch device, but it was clunky and absolutely sub-optimal for mouse+keyboard devices. I tried it out and absolutely hated it almost from the moment I started using it. And I don't consider the requirement to hack in a third-party start button a viable solution.
In contrast, Windows 10 is very much what Windows 8 should have been, if MS had actually listed to user feedback from the start. It very much feels like Windows 7, which is what Windows Vista should have been. I've been trying Windows 10 out in a VM, and it's pretty much a checklist of all the things that went horribly wrong with Windows 8 that are getting fixed. Well, all fixed save one: the flat, ugly styling is still there. I wish that trend would just die already.
So, the answer is "Yes, Microsoft will probably get this one right. Their user base, especially the business community, essentially slapped MS upside the head with non-adoption of Windows 8, giving them a very clear message that they won't update until Windows actually works like Windows again.
And from the article, he envisions turning this into a subscription service since it costs money to run, and will cost more if it scales up.
I didn't see any indication of a subscription in the articles I read. May I ask where you read that?
Also, from your various posts, you seem rather opposed to this app, or perhaps the general concept. As someone who may be facing more sight-related challenges in the future, it seems like you'd have a lot to gain if this actually works out well in practice as it sounds in concept. May I ask what your specific concerns or complaints are?
I agree that there are a lot of theoretical ways that vision-impaired people could perhaps be better helped than this app, but this seems like something practical that can actually help people right now. That is to say, maybe we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good with these sorts of things.
If they understood significant digits, they wouldn't have measured the changing of an epoch down to the day. That's like me celebrating my birthday down to the millisecond.
For one thing, who would bother with a $2000 desktop, except for a gamer with money to burn?
There are some professionals who think nothing of spending $5,000 to $10,000 for a high end PC workstation, let alone $2000. Hell, the software alone can cost many times that much, so why would they balk at buying the best hardware money can buy? Digital audio workstations are a good example of this sort of high-end niche industry.
Heh, I would certainly ask you if you meant "decimate as in the Roman army definition" or "decimate as in killed a whole lot of them".
When pretty much every English dictionary is in agreement on a revised definition, then we can safely conclude it's more than just a few ignorant kids posting on Facebook and Twitter.
I find it somewhat amusing to be defending the use of the "non-correct" definition of "literally" because honestly, it really irritates me as well. So, you and I can continue being irritated until the day we die, or we can accept that people are going to use the term in a figurative sense (rather ironic, given the original definition), and get on with our lives. If it makes you feel any better, keep in mind that even the new dictionary definition indicates that this is an "informal" use, so it's still not appropriate to use in most written works.
So what you are saying is it's much ado about nothing?
As you like it. Naturally, one can conclude that, despite the process of defining the English language being an occasional comedy of errors, we must admit that measure for measure, all's well that ends well,
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules. If common language usage becomes inconsistent with the current written rules, at some point it makes more sense to change the rules to reflect the actual usage than to try to correct usage en mass*. This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Languages continually evolve over time - there's nothing more or less "official" about our modern English language versus the English language of 500 years ago, even though there are significant differences. The point of a language is to communicate with each other, and just as our technology continues to evolve, so does the way in which we communicate.
* For example, since this is Slashdot, consider the attempt to encourage the public to distinguish between "hacker" and "cracker". That distinction never gained any ground, and it's likely it never will. Likewise, almost no one calls the Linux operating system GNU/Linux outside a few die-hard FSF folks.
First off, it's not as though these words have been struck from the English lexicon. Seriously... do kids nowadays rely exclusively on the Oxford Junior Dictionary instead of doing a quick web search or consulting a more complete dictionary? I don't recall ever in my life using a "kid's" dictionary during my school years. We used the big ones right from the start.
It wasn't always perfect, of course. I recall asking my teacher what a word meant, and she correctly told me that I should look it up in the dictionary myself. I did so, found the word, and it was defined by a different word I didn't know. I looked up that word, and it used the first word in it's definition. My teacher then relented and explained the word to me herself. That's why kids have teachers and parents.
All in all, a tempest in a teacup. Kids will learn these words once they graduate to more complete resources. No big deal. Side note: I'll bet "tempest" isn't in the junior dictionary either.
We used to forcibly institutionalize mentally ill people instead of kicking them out on the street en mass to fend for themselves. A significant portion of what we call "homeless" have mental health and substance abuse issues, of course. Is releasing them to life in the streets more compassionate or humanitarian than confining them to an institution where they can actually get some help? I'm not sure there's an easy answer there, to be honest. In my neck of the woods, people are getting robbed and assaulted on the streets by homeless people on a pretty regular basis. It's not a good situation for anyone.
Chaiscript looks interesting - something like what I would have probably designed for a language if I was writing one from scratch. I'm currently using Lua for my game engine, but integrating the raw C API with C++ requires a lot of ugly boilerplate code.
A question while you're here - one of the most useful features of Lua for game development (at least for me) is the support for co-routines. Each lua script (or "chunk") can have it's own stack, and can therefore suspend execution and resume later. This allows a script to sleep for a specified period of time, for example, giving the appearance of being threaded without actually requiring each script to execute on a real thread - which would be far too much overhead.
This enables me to write simple Lua scripts like:
DoSomething()
Sleep(5)
DoSomethingElse()
Is there a way to do something similar in Chaiscript? Note: it takes a bunch of external C++ code to be able to pull this off in Lua as well, so doing it via external code is fine.
Pfft, never let facts get in the way of a good monologue.
IOP is not the only metric that must be considered. Spinning disks are still at least eight time cheaper than SSDs *right now*, and in some use cases the speed at which that data is retrieved is not as important as the cost per GB. Of course that's going to change eventually, but until it does, if you want 6TB of local storage you can either buy one 6TB spinning disks at $270 or six 1TB SSDs at about $475 each for $2850 total.
SSDs are simply not as economical for bulk storage (not speed-critical databases) at the moment. Sure, solid state will eventually catch up, but until it does, spinning disks will still be with us.
Flash is definitely the future, but is still about eight times as expensive per GB. That means if you want to store a lot of data, spinning disks is still the most economical route by far. There's another use-case for disks as well, when a disk is require to do a huge amount of writes - flash is actually very slow to write, and of course, has limited write capacity even with wear-leveling algorithms.
Eventually, of course, flash will reach price parity, and it's unlikely anyone will continue to manufacture spinning disks after that, since the benefits obviously outweigh any drawbacks. The only real question is the time frame, and I'm not sure I'd even hazard a guess.
You don't buy spinning disks for their speed. You buy them for their capacity relative to cost. In other words, they're really the only practical solution for online bulk storage on a budget. Different technology - different tradeoffs.
Obligatory car analogy to follow: It's sort of like declaring that semi-trucks are too bulky, slow, and inefficient to be used as modern vehicles. Well, that's true, but only if you're considering the sole use cases to be "commuting" or "family outings", and completely overlooking "bulk commercial transport".
It seems likely that solid-state technology will someday surpass magnetic disks in terms of capacity and cost per GB, but we're nowhere near that point yet. In ten years time? I think it's a reasonable bet that we'll be close to parity by then, at which point we'll probably see the end of disk drives.
I couldn't disagree more. I remember pre-Google search days quite well, and it was awful. You ended up wading through page after page after page of irrelevant crap because those search engines simply ranked pages based only on their content, and it was stupidly easy to game. Tag clouds were a direct result of this. Google entered the field and made every other search engine obsolete almost overnight, because the damn thing actually worked. In fact, it worked so well that you were even pretty likely to get the result you wanted in the very first slot - thus, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which in other engines might as well have been labeled "I Feel Like I Might Have Won the Lottery".
Even today, I use Google, because every time I experiment with another search engine, the results simply aren't as good. With Google search, I nearly always find what I'm looking for right at the top of my search. It's unbelievably rare that I have to traverse to a second page.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Google search actually does a lot more than simply search now. It's allows you to find out a lot of basic facts without even leaving the search page. For instance, try typing in calories in an apple or dollars to yen. They even present those results to me before I finish typing.
I'm sure that Google is working on new ways to improve search... after all, it's what drives eyeballs to their advertisements, so they have a huge incentive to make it work better, faster, and more intuitively than anyone else. My guess is that searches will continue to be able to answer more detailed and specific questions that people have rather than only point them to pages that have the answers. What other innovations, who can say? But I think we're past the big "disruptive" search breakthroughs - that happened once, and it was Google inventing search that actually worked.
What I want to know is what he means by "work for it". What work will these students have to perform to get this "free" education?
I presume he's just talking about students working to maintain a minimal GPA. In other words, work as "effort", not work as "employment".
And yes, of course it will be up to taxpayers to shoulder this additional burden, at a time when the federal deficit is still spiraling out of control. Naturally, that makes it the perfect time to propose expensive new entitlement programs. Precious few people and even fewer politicians care that we're spending ourselves into a real financial mess. There's just too much delicious government gravy to hand out, and no one wants to stop the train.