First off, you can't live off historical significance. For example: it doesn't matter who was the leader in mainframes, as this is now a dead technology. You have to be significant in the next technology to be relevant. BTW, I look at the original post as a tongue-in-cheek post to highlight that the US is also the leader in scumbags out to make a quick buck - here represented by spammers. My follow-up was just to highlight that your jibe at the Finns was totally unfounded and that Finland actually has a huge tech industry compared to its size.
Also, disregarding mobile phones as the future shows your US-centricity. The US is 300 million people, the world has 6.6 billion. The US is only 5% (granted this is by population - but not all Americans can afford internet access or a cellphone either).
Funny you bring up Qualcomm and TI. CDMA represents only 20% of the total market, and is only deployed in three major countries (the US, Japan and Korea). With regards to TI, yes it is a US company, but 90% of the cell-phone related development is being done in Europe. And just who invented GSM again?
And don't come jibing to me about freeloaders, I don't even run Linux. I regard it as a significant technological development, however, and it is becoming a more and more likely alternative for me instead of moving over to Vista.
Best advice i can give: get yourself a passport and go travel the world. I come from a small country, so I'm used to idea that my country is just a small piece of the world, I think that Americans need to become aware of this as well.
Funnily enough, Finland is also home of the world's biggest cellphone manufacturer (40% market share). If you take into consideration that Finland is a country with a population of 5 million people (vs. the US' 300 million), I think that being the home of both Nokia and Linux is pretty damn impressive.
Also, if you consider that the US is the market where Nokia has the least market share, their dominance is even more impressive on a global level. Also, the only US players, Motorola and Apple, do most of their business inside the US. So, be careful about thinking that the US is leading in technology.
The DVD is only half the truth. What made the PS2 what it is is a decent initial run, followed by a blowout when they got the price down to reasonable levels and sold the thing to the masses. What Nintendo has understood, Sony has only half understood and Microsoft hasn't understood at all is that you can only sell large amounts of consoles by catering to the masses. This means low price, fun games, easy controllers and games that you can play in groups.
My analysis of the current field of consoles is that the Wii and the PS2 currently cater to this group, and are doing well (remember that the PS2 was by far the best-selling console last christmas). The PS2 has an awesome collection of good games, sells at a very reasonable price and is arguably the best value for money out there. The only things going against it is the somewhat obsolete graphics and poor online connectivity. Wii has everything going for it at the moment, but personally I've always been disappointed with third-party games on Nintendo consoles, and I have the feeling that the 3rd parties aren't really building games around the controller (they probably would rather want to do multi-platform games, of course)
The Xbox360 and the PS3 are in trouble right now, the Xbox360 because of Microsoft's shoddy quality control (probably poor design) and over-focus on the die-hard shooter crowd. Very few games for non-die-hards (mostly Arcade titles and Guitar Hero - but who buys Guitar Hero for Xbox when it came out almost a year later than the PS2 version?). Microsoft thinks that Halo 3 and GTA will save them - I think they may be in for a bad surprise. The PS3 is over-speced and over-priced. Still, $499 is starting to sound decent (I would buy it if I could at that price - in my country it is priced at $999). Still not a lot of games, but that should pick up over the next year. Still, the PS3 is a year behind the 360 and needs to catch up. Microsoft's big problem is that they probably are not as good on reducing cost as Sony is, and I wouldn't be surpised if the Xbox360 ends up being sold at a loss even at the end of its life (like the original Xbox). Over time, the over-speccing of the PS3 will mean less and less and also the Blue-ray will not be the cost-adder it was at launch. Overall, I think time is working for Sony and against Microsoft (BTW: I'm no Sony fan-boy, I have a 360, but not a PS3. My 360 is currently being fixed for BRoD, however)
The Neo-Geo was a full arcade system - running the same games as those in the arcade (yeah, I know that arcades aren't important anymore - but they were then). Besides, it was aimed at the arcade enthusaist, not at the broad market. The Neo-Geo actually did quite well for what it was, and is pretty damn collectable these days.
Maybe, but at least there is a multitude of readers, which bodes well for longevity. But again, the best approach is to continue to re-save your documents in more recent versions of the format. Simply open the document in Acrobat Pro, and re-save it. Being an archievist doesn't mean you should be constantly working on your files.
OK, so maybe databases was a bad example. However, I can see plenty of cases where you might not be able to get the source code (preservation of old commercial games etc.). Don't discount emulators. I can run C64, Amiga, CPM and so on in a very decent fashion using emulators. This also solves the problem of obsolecent media (C64 tapes can be stored on harddisk, for example). I agree that open formats should be used whenever possible. However, I can see that there are some cases where you have to store binaries.
I think the main lesson to learn from this is if that if you are tasked with preserving information, you need to take an active stance and make sure to do conversion and storage on new media all the time. You can't just put your old tapes in a closet and expect to be able to read them in 20 years. This goes for individuals as well; make sure to transfer those old pictures and wedding videos to digital and then back up, back up, back up!
Step 1: When you archive a document, make a PDF of it (pretty much anything with a CPU in it will display PDFs these days, I even have homebrew for my PSP that does it). For older text-only documents, ASCII text does the same job. For graphics, make sure to keep converting data to newer file formats (ie..pcx ->.png)
Step 2: Make sure to copy the files to new storage media once they become widely available (ie. copy the documents from the tape onto DVDs and hard disks). Continue doing this when new holographic/whatever media become available.
For not easily-convertible formats (databases, binary code, etc.), make sure to archieve the original program, and hunt for emulators that will emulate the appropriate hardware.
Is it just me, or does the "music industry" look more and more like the mob? They'll start demanding protection money next (oh wait, they already did that with Internet Radio).
I think Bladerunner is a prime example that well done model-based SFX actually look better than CGI. Another example is the first Star Wars trilogy. If you look closely at the scenes in Bladerunner, they have a gritty quality, with plenty of film grain on the dark spots. CGI typically doesn't have this. I don't know if this is the primary reason, but the CGI in the newest Star Wars movies just looks too "perfect" and not real. Maybe they need to start reducing the picture quality, like intentionally bring in noise? If you look closely when you are in a dark room, your eyes actually exibit something like ISO noise. This is natural for any light-detecting mechanism, either biological or electronic. But this is lacking in CGI.
$20 sounds sweet, but over here we have pretty good 3G (UMTS) coverage in metropolitan areas and good EDGE coverage otherwise. If it got down to $20/month then I would actually consider it.
That said, it's interesting that you are overjoyed about not having a crippled phone. If somebody tried that over here, I don't think they would have many customers left...
£100/month for 20 MB? WOW! Over here it is £40/month for unlimited data, and personally I think that is expensive. I can't see that they should find any takers at that price.
I think the offer was never made in the first place. Why should Apple make a device that could only be sold in the US, versus one that could be sold everywhere (except Japan and Korea)?
You are on to something here. Notice that Nokia has refused to play the bondage game with US carriers. Apple is trying to do the same: get people to focus on the phone and forget the carrier. Face it, in the high-end markets it is the phones that are unique, the carriers are in a commodity business. If you are a manufacturer making an excellent phone, you shouldn't want to be tying yourself to any exclusive deals, you want to sell it to as many people as possible.
Force a carrier? In Europe, Apple doesn't need to work with carriers at all. The high-end phones are pretty much sold without contracts. Just buy the phone, pick whatever service plan from whichever carrier you want, stick the SIM-card in the phone, and off you go.
The T-Mobile UK example sounds horribly expensive compared to Scandinavian prices. I don't know the UK market that well, so I can't say whether you managed to pick the worst offering in all of Europe or whether the UK market is more expensive than Europe as a whole.
In Scandinavia, you generally pay less than $0.20 a minute, text messages are $0.10, and the concept of "allowance" is not that common. I checked out the lowest cost offering for 500 minutes/month, and with that you pay $0.10 a minute, $0.10 per text message and there is no monthly fee. This includes a "family" plan, so that you can designate up to 5 numbers that are using the same operator and have all those numbers call each other for free. We don't pay for receiving calls (except when roaming), what a ridicolous concept.
So, yes, you are being screwed (and it seems that that goes for both Americans and UKers).
I've yet to come across somebody who actually likes Qualcomm (except for people who work there). With other semiconductor companies you have alliances and so on, while with Qualcomm it's them against the world.
Not much evidence of this happing, if anything GSM is becoming more and more prevalent in the world. Some people keep on ranting on the supposed superiority of CDMA, but in practice matching power closely enough for CDMA to work properly is challenging. Don't believe everything Qualcomm says.
I completely agree. The right thing to do (once they decided they wanted to merge with Compaq and split off test equipment) would have been to call what is today Agilent for HP, and kept the Compaq name with the computer stuff. If I remember correctly, HP didn't get into the general-purpose computer business before in the late 70s, when they bought Apollo.
- You obviously don't know much about HP. They started out making precision measurement equipment, not PCs and printers. This measurement equipment played a very important role in the development of electronics, and so behind the scenes contributed a lot to the state of electronics as it is today. The printers and PCs came much later. HP was also instrumental (heh) in the development of early calculators.
- Regardless of how much revernment you reserve for the light bulb, this is a technology that is on the verge of becoming extinct, just like the cathode ray tube. The CRT has already progressed quite far, but solid-state lighting technologies will do exactly the same to the light bulb in the next 10-20 years. There is already talk of banning incandecent bulbs (Australia, California) due to the low efficiency. In not too long, Edison's invention will join the steam engine as inventions that did mean a lot in the past, but are completely irelevant to current technology.
Very well put answer to a horrible post. What impresses me is that Ridley Scott managed to make two (Blade Runner and Alien) of the best SF movies of all time in the span of a few years, only to stay away from SF completely afterwards.
Compared to 2001, Blade Runner is a speed-demon of a movie. But if you believe that Blade Runner is all substance and no plot then you have simply not understood the movie. Contrast this with "Sci-fi" like The Matrix (OK, the plot is crap, but the visual style saves it, barely. The sequels however...)
Remember that Blade Runner came out in the early 80's, blending the then-new Cyberpunk sensibilities with 50s Film Noir and posing questions about the nature of intelligence. The "bleak, dreary" future was not a cliche then, this film predated all the other bleak future films (Total Recall etc.) The plot isn't really that complicated if you compare it to other movies like Twelve Monkeys, The Usual Suspects or Memento (both personal favourites of mine). It doesn't hurt if you have to watch the movie a couple of times to understand it, you know.
I nominate this for the "stupidest SF movie post ever" award. Now, if you switched out "Bladerunner" with "Matrix", you would be much closer to the truth...
It is not a "relatively" silly law at all. What it means is that both corporations and private individuals should reap the awards of a free market. This is how globalization should work as well. It has provided lower cost of goods to consumers (ie. low-cost DVD players made in China). So far so good. The problem is when corporations want to reap the awards of globalization but that individuals shouldn't have this right. Case in point: The record industry, who feels that customers should not be able to reap the benefits of a free market, but be forced to buy locally (restrictive lisencing and region coding). This is immoral and unjust, and has to change in the long term.
And we will! Sounds like a good option to buy songs I can't find on eMusic. The "without DRM" part is much more important than the increased bitrate. Can you drop the stupid "CD-protection" too? Pretty please?
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Also, disregarding mobile phones as the future shows your US-centricity. The US is 300 million people, the world has 6.6 billion. The US is only 5% (granted this is by population - but not all Americans can afford internet access or a cellphone either).
Funny you bring up Qualcomm and TI. CDMA represents only 20% of the total market, and is only deployed in three major countries (the US, Japan and Korea). With regards to TI, yes it is a US company, but 90% of the cell-phone related development is being done in Europe. And just who invented GSM again?
And don't come jibing to me about freeloaders, I don't even run Linux. I regard it as a significant technological development, however, and it is becoming a more and more likely alternative for me instead of moving over to Vista.
Best advice i can give: get yourself a passport and go travel the world. I come from a small country, so I'm used to idea that my country is just a small piece of the world, I think that Americans need to become aware of this as well.
Also, if you consider that the US is the market where Nokia has the least market share, their dominance is even more impressive on a global level. Also, the only US players, Motorola and Apple, do most of their business inside the US. So, be careful about thinking that the US is leading in technology.
My analysis of the current field of consoles is that the Wii and the PS2 currently cater to this group, and are doing well (remember that the PS2 was by far the best-selling console last christmas). The PS2 has an awesome collection of good games, sells at a very reasonable price and is arguably the best value for money out there. The only things going against it is the somewhat obsolete graphics and poor online connectivity. Wii has everything going for it at the moment, but personally I've always been disappointed with third-party games on Nintendo consoles, and I have the feeling that the 3rd parties aren't really building games around the controller (they probably would rather want to do multi-platform games, of course)
The Xbox360 and the PS3 are in trouble right now, the Xbox360 because of Microsoft's shoddy quality control (probably poor design) and over-focus on the die-hard shooter crowd. Very few games for non-die-hards (mostly Arcade titles and Guitar Hero - but who buys Guitar Hero for Xbox when it came out almost a year later than the PS2 version?). Microsoft thinks that Halo 3 and GTA will save them - I think they may be in for a bad surprise. The PS3 is over-speced and over-priced. Still, $499 is starting to sound decent (I would buy it if I could at that price - in my country it is priced at $999). Still not a lot of games, but that should pick up over the next year. Still, the PS3 is a year behind the 360 and needs to catch up. Microsoft's big problem is that they probably are not as good on reducing cost as Sony is, and I wouldn't be surpised if the Xbox360 ends up being sold at a loss even at the end of its life (like the original Xbox). Over time, the over-speccing of the PS3 will mean less and less and also the Blue-ray will not be the cost-adder it was at launch. Overall, I think time is working for Sony and against Microsoft (BTW: I'm no Sony fan-boy, I have a 360, but not a PS3. My 360 is currently being fixed for BRoD, however)
The Neo-Geo was a full arcade system - running the same games as those in the arcade (yeah, I know that arcades aren't important anymore - but they were then). Besides, it was aimed at the arcade enthusaist, not at the broad market. The Neo-Geo actually did quite well for what it was, and is pretty damn collectable these days.
:-) I'm pretty sure this can be automated.
Maybe, but at least there is a multitude of readers, which bodes well for longevity. But again, the best approach is to continue to re-save your documents in more recent versions of the format. Simply open the document in Acrobat Pro, and re-save it. Being an archievist doesn't mean you should be constantly working on your files.
I think the main lesson to learn from this is if that if you are tasked with preserving information, you need to take an active stance and make sure to do conversion and storage on new media all the time. You can't just put your old tapes in a closet and expect to be able to read them in 20 years. This goes for individuals as well; make sure to transfer those old pictures and wedding videos to digital and then back up, back up, back up!
Step 2: Make sure to copy the files to new storage media once they become widely available (ie. copy the documents from the tape onto DVDs and hard disks). Continue doing this when new holographic/whatever media become available.
For not easily-convertible formats (databases, binary code, etc.), make sure to archieve the original program, and hunt for emulators that will emulate the appropriate hardware.
Is it just me, or does the "music industry" look more and more like the mob? They'll start demanding protection money next (oh wait, they already did that with Internet Radio).
I think Bladerunner is a prime example that well done model-based SFX actually look better than CGI. Another example is the first Star Wars trilogy. If you look closely at the scenes in Bladerunner, they have a gritty quality, with plenty of film grain on the dark spots. CGI typically doesn't have this. I don't know if this is the primary reason, but the CGI in the newest Star Wars movies just looks too "perfect" and not real. Maybe they need to start reducing the picture quality, like intentionally bring in noise? If you look closely when you are in a dark room, your eyes actually exibit something like ISO noise. This is natural for any light-detecting mechanism, either biological or electronic. But this is lacking in CGI.
That said, it's interesting that you are overjoyed about not having a crippled phone. If somebody tried that over here, I don't think they would have many customers left...
£100/month for 20 MB? WOW! Over here it is £40/month for unlimited data, and personally I think that is expensive. I can't see that they should find any takers at that price.
I think the offer was never made in the first place. Why should Apple make a device that could only be sold in the US, versus one that could be sold everywhere (except Japan and Korea)?
You are on to something here. Notice that Nokia has refused to play the bondage game with US carriers. Apple is trying to do the same: get people to focus on the phone and forget the carrier. Face it, in the high-end markets it is the phones that are unique, the carriers are in a commodity business. If you are a manufacturer making an excellent phone, you shouldn't want to be tying yourself to any exclusive deals, you want to sell it to as many people as possible.
Force a carrier? In Europe, Apple doesn't need to work with carriers at all. The high-end phones are pretty much sold without contracts. Just buy the phone, pick whatever service plan from whichever carrier you want, stick the SIM-card in the phone, and off you go.
In Scandinavia, you generally pay less than $0.20 a minute, text messages are $0.10, and the concept of "allowance" is not that common. I checked out the lowest cost offering for 500 minutes/month, and with that you pay $0.10 a minute, $0.10 per text message and there is no monthly fee. This includes a "family" plan, so that you can designate up to 5 numbers that are using the same operator and have all those numbers call each other for free. We don't pay for receiving calls (except when roaming), what a ridicolous concept.
So, yes, you are being screwed (and it seems that that goes for both Americans and UKers).
I've yet to come across somebody who actually likes Qualcomm (except for people who work there). With other semiconductor companies you have alliances and so on, while with Qualcomm it's them against the world.
Not much evidence of this happing, if anything GSM is becoming more and more prevalent in the world. Some people keep on ranting on the supposed superiority of CDMA, but in practice matching power closely enough for CDMA to work properly is challenging. Don't believe everything Qualcomm says.
I completely agree. The right thing to do (once they decided they wanted to merge with Compaq and split off test equipment) would have been to call what is today Agilent for HP, and kept the Compaq name with the computer stuff. If I remember correctly, HP didn't get into the general-purpose computer business before in the late 70s, when they bought Apollo.
- You obviously don't know much about HP. They started out making precision measurement equipment, not PCs and printers. This measurement equipment played a very important role in the development of electronics, and so behind the scenes contributed a lot to the state of electronics as it is today. The printers and PCs came much later. HP was also instrumental (heh) in the development of early calculators.
- Regardless of how much revernment you reserve for the light bulb, this is a technology that is on the verge of becoming extinct, just like the cathode ray tube. The CRT has already progressed quite far, but solid-state lighting technologies will do exactly the same to the light bulb in the next 10-20 years. There is already talk of banning incandecent bulbs (Australia, California) due to the low efficiency. In not too long, Edison's invention will join the steam engine as inventions that did mean a lot in the past, but are completely irelevant to current technology.
Very well put answer to a horrible post. What impresses me is that Ridley Scott managed to make two (Blade Runner and Alien) of the best SF movies of all time in the span of a few years, only to stay away from SF completely afterwards.
Remember that Blade Runner came out in the early 80's, blending the then-new Cyberpunk sensibilities with 50s Film Noir and posing questions about the nature of intelligence. The "bleak, dreary" future was not a cliche then, this film predated all the other bleak future films (Total Recall etc.) The plot isn't really that complicated if you compare it to other movies like Twelve Monkeys, The Usual Suspects or Memento (both personal favourites of mine). It doesn't hurt if you have to watch the movie a couple of times to understand it, you know.
I nominate this for the "stupidest SF movie post ever" award. Now, if you switched out "Bladerunner" with "Matrix", you would be much closer to the truth...
It is not a "relatively" silly law at all. What it means is that both corporations and private individuals should reap the awards of a free market. This is how globalization should work as well. It has provided lower cost of goods to consumers (ie. low-cost DVD players made in China). So far so good. The problem is when corporations want to reap the awards of globalization but that individuals shouldn't have this right. Case in point: The record industry, who feels that customers should not be able to reap the benefits of a free market, but be forced to buy locally (restrictive lisencing and region coding). This is immoral and unjust, and has to change in the long term.
And we will! Sounds like a good option to buy songs I can't find on eMusic. The "without DRM" part is much more important than the increased bitrate. Can you drop the stupid "CD-protection" too? Pretty please?