Multiple Administrators? I think most companies see IT as an expense that needs to be minimized, so you're lucky if they have one Administrator who is competent.
Meh, how about all these programs that load "pre-lauch" tools in the boot sequence, things like MS Office and OpenOffice, the Adobe stuff. Just so they can claim that program X now loads much faster by burdening the boot time instead.
My 4 year old Macbook Pro goes from suspend to fully usable in under a second. I put it on the table, flip open the lid, and I can start working. Even a cold reboot only takes 21 seconds. With suspend, it saves to disk, but keeps the RAM alive, so for the first ten days or so of turning it off, it can resume within a second. After that the battery runs out and it has to resume from disk, which takes 5-6 seconds more. This of course returns any applications to their previous state. It's all these small annoyances that are no longer there that made my switch to Apple such a pleasure.
EFI BIOS. My 4 year old Macbook is done with POST in under a second, even if the hardware configuration has changed (external monitor/harddisk, etc.). With suspend to RAM, it means that by the time I finished flipping the lid open, it's ready to start working. There is no noticable delay any more. Even booting from a complete poweroff takes only 23 seconds, incuding logging in and starting the groupware client.
I think you do have to take the BIOS POST times into account in a fair comparison. It's where my Macbook with it's EFI bios saves a lot of time, especially noticeable when returning from suspend/hibernate, as it's back to a workable state, with any changes in hardware detected, in under a second. This is a 4 year old machine, so no fancy SSD or fast CPU/loads of RAM.
One of the problems with the IBM BIOS and the various MicroSoft OS'ses in general is that they have to support a much bigger variety in hardware and software, and thus usually have very generous time-outs, like the WaitForNetwork you mention. My personal experience is mostly with the TAPI, which had time-out values of up to 5 minutes. I have tweaked my home PC to be a lot faster as well, which mainly means minimizing what it actually loads to the bare essentials. The nice thing about my Macbook is that I don't need to tinker with it. It's my work machine and I need to get things done, I'll tinker with stuff at home.
This is partly due to the nature of the "IBM-compatible" market, where a lot of cheap but sub-par solutions are available.
And back in the 80's there was systems that was up and running a lot faster since the core was in PROM. Availability within a second.
But for some reason IBM and Microsoft was never really willing to go the fast and friendly path.
My 4 year old Macbook Pro I use for work returns from hibernate in under a second. A compleet reboot takes about 20 seconds. This is not a very powerful machine by today's standards, no SSD just a normal slow laptop HD, 2 GHz Core Duo, OSX 10.6. It does of course have an EFI bios. I also have Windows XP on this machine, with the default "work" install. It takes at least 15 minutes to boot, given all the stuff like anti-virus, anti-spyware, Domain logon and what have you. If I haven't used the Windows partition for more than a month, it's even longer, as then the anti-Spyware wants to do a full scan of the machine making it unusable for nearly an hour.
Maybe I should blame Windows XP, but on my home machine it's blazingly fast, boots to a useful state in under a minute. And that's not even a super fast machine, no SSD or anything like that either. Just a very clean XP install, with only a virus scanner.
I really like how fast my laptop returns from hibernate. I flip it open and it's done booting by the time I finish that movement and I can immediately start working. I hardly ever turn it completely "off".
I think one of the reasons that Windows is slow, is because MS has to support a lot of different hardware, so needs very generous time-outs on everything. No I have no real experience with Vista or 7, as I basically jumped ship before they arrived, so things could have improved, although I haven't really heard or seen anything indicating that.
The real difference except for the EFI bios and some neat suspend to RAM stuff, is in how much is loaded on startup. The difference between my minimal XP setup at home, and the XP "work" environment is staggering. Part of it seems to be the Norton tools they're using, I've spent a lot of time trying different anti-virus programs for my home setup, until I found one that's the least obtrusive and burdening the machine.
If you could never get enough of Lego when you were a kid, then this is the game for you.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
D) Sell a lot of the vacant, unused and generally worthless land holdings the US has. While selling it in the bottom of the market isn't ideal, it will help reduce unneeded staff, and gain the government more revenue.
Several governments have already tired to. The government still owns a lot of valuable land, but usually it has some strings attached which makes it difficult to sell. Look for example at this track of land in Las Vegas (I forgot the name), which was given as a grant for the benefit of the local veterans hospital. Selling it to fund the bail out of GM would get you in all kinds of trouble (or has for the past 15 years as everyone since Clinton has tried to sell it).
Yeah. For top athletes, something like that already happens, pro prevent doping abuse. Now athletes get banned not because they used doping, but just because they couldn't get online, the website didn't work, or they forgot.
Sorry, but a lot of developed countries pay a lot less for their universal health care then the USA, per capita. Sure it means that medical specialists might earn a little less. They're not going to earn millions, most people in the semi-public sector are limited to the amount the Prime Minister earns, which is about 250,000 euro. Still pretty decent in my view.
The Dutch government has defined a "standard healthcare package", which all insurance companies must cover for a fixed amount (just over 1000 euro a year). They can compete on service and extra options. They also can't refuse you the standard package, so anyone can get this basic set of healthcare and it's mandatory to be insured. Only people like the homeless aren't insured, jobless people and those on minimum wages are helped by the government to pay for their insurance. And for what's covered: Currently the discussion is if support for giving up smoking should be covered. That should give you an idea. There's optional extra packages for things like modifications in the home, electric wheelchairs, TV and newspapers at your bedside in the hospital.
We also struggle with rising costs for medical care, but as you can see, we're in a much better place than the USA which pays about twice as much.
Yeah, it's about the same in the Netherlands. It's 1100-1300 euro per year. The difference is in things like if you get TV and newspaper at your bed when in hospital, not in the stuff covered. This is the "standard healthcare package" as defined by the government. Insurance companies all have to provide it, and compete on the extra options. There's also additional packages but I won't go into that, basically everything you really need is covered in the standard package.
But yeah, no matter if you're 20 or 100, healthy or chronically ill, have a history of smoking, being overweight or anything like that. This is what you pay in The Netherlands.
The iPhone has now been for sale here for just over 3 years. All of that with an unlimited data plan.
But even with that, I find that I only use a few 100 MB/month. A lot of traffic happens on Wifi connections, at home, at work, in the train, there's free Wifi almost everywhere nowadays.
This whole Cloud thing is never going to really work. As the topic hints at, the bandwidth just isn't there. The problem is that storage and CPU power have scaled much faster than network bandwidth. This means that there is plenty of CPU power in the cloud, and a fair amount of storage space, but it's too expensive to get large amounts of data transported to and from the cloud. So only if you have CPU intensive problems, is the cloud a real solution. There's not much that falls into that category, certainly not on the consumer end of the spectrum. I found that it gets nicely expressed in the Ahmdahl number (ratio between the number of operations and the amount of I/O of your problem). Stuff with a number like 0.01 is very good for the cloud. Most stuff lives around 0.1, my problems live close to 1.0.
So it's good for making weather simulations, it's not so good for storing your photos or documents.
Yeah, this article is very bad. It almost has no information, no facts or anything. It's just a guy stating he doesn't like one thing and likes another thing.
Now I have an iPhone and a Macbook, and in general like Apple's products. I'm also a long time/. reader, so I don't expect too much from the editors. But this shouldn't be on/.
I don't live in the US, so I know very little about this Fox News, but it does live down to it's reputation here.
Sometimes there is just stuff that's no longer useful for science, either because it can't be calibrated any more, or uses a technology that is no longer useful. But for someone tinkering, and not concerned about measurable, reliably repeatable outcomes, they can still be useful.
For example I have an old oil based vacuum pump from a lab I used to work. It's no use in today's semiconductor physics, because things have gotten so small that the oil pollutes any experiment, and the vacuum it creates isn't high grade enough anyway, but if you only care about creating a modest vacuum for some tinkering, and don't care about scale or repeatability, than it's still fun to play with.
Same thing with old amplifiers that can't be properly calibrated any more.
about the only possible hope is a free software massively collaborative effort, based around existing work and engines,
I don't think this is going to happen. Any such community will fracture, because people feel passionately about game content. It might work to develop a half decent engine, or maintain and expand one. But it's not going to work to build something on the scale of World of Warcraft, the project would go down in arguing.
Oh, nice website. It indeed already has all the games I would mention.
It also shows the problem with Indie games: Overall they are quite limited. Minecraft is nr2 on their Top List, and that's still in Beta. It's very ambitious for an Indie game and I really like it, because it's different.
I'm not saying some of those games aren't great fun. I think they are. But it also shows that in today's game market people you need a level of perfection and an amount of content and art quality that is very hard to achieve alone or with a small team. If you want to reach the masses that is. It's amazing what such Indie developers can accomplish with the limited resources they have. But it also shows that there is a difference in scale compared to something like Blizzard.
It's a bit longwinded, but indeed a very good read. I really liked this part, it gives deep insight and is still true today:
"But even that isn't enough, you know.... There's talk nowadays in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically, a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your books on it.... You buy the book as a floppy and you stick it in... And just think, wow you can even have graphics with your book... you can have music, you can have a soundtrack.... Narration.... Animated illustrations... Multimedia... it can even be interactive.... It's the New Hollywood for Publisher's Row, and at last books can aspire to the exalted condition of movies and cartoons and TV and computer games.... And just think when the ReadMan goes obsolete, all the product that was written for it will be blessedly gone forever!!! Erased from the memory of mankind!
Now I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite ladies and gentlemen, but when I contemplate this particular technical marvel my author's blood runs cold... It's really hard for books to compete with other multisensory media, with modern electronic media, and this is supposed to be the panacea for withering literature, but from the marrow of my bones I say get that fucking little sarcophagus away from me. For God's sake don't put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope. Don't put me into the stereograph, don't write me on the wax cylinder, don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be. Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking place.
Okay.... Now I've sometimes heard it asked why computer game designers are deprived of the full artistic respect they deserve. God knows they work hard enough. They're really talented too, and by any objective measure of intelligence they rank in the top percentiles... I've heard it said that maybe this problem has something to do with the size of the author's name on the front of the game-box. Or it's lone wolves versus teams, and somehow the proper allotment of fame gets lost in the muddle. One factor I don't see mentioned much is the sheer lack of stability in your medium. A modern movie-maker could probably make a pretty good film with DW Griffith's equipment, but you folks are dwelling in the very maelstrom of Permanent Technological Revolution. And that's a really cool place, but man, it's just not a good place to build monuments.
Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I hope I've demonstrated that I face a lot of the same problems you face... Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future has passed it by."
Apple frankly does not "suck at innovation", thats narrow minded myopic thinking. They have revolutionized industrial design with their products over the past 10 years
Not just the past 10 years. The Apple I, II, Macintosh, Powerbook 100, Newton, iMac were are revolutionary products in their design. I can probably name a few more if I start digging, this is just of the top of my head.
Apple isn't very good at inventing, they are good at innovating. Apple has some inventions, but what it's really good at, is combining existing ideas in new and innovative ways. And when they come up with something new, it puts all Apple's momentum behind making it a success. Sometimes they also have spectacular failures. But it's willingness to take big leaps into the unknown has given us a lot of things that we take for granted now, but were not so obvious back then. But Apple made a lot of technologies go from little gimmicks in a research lab, to consumer products. The graphical desktop, laptop, online music store, smartphone, heck even the PDA. Every one of those out there today still carries a lot of Apple design DNA, even if it's not made by them and doesn't run their software.
Microsoft on the other hand, is all about protecting its existing cash cows and sometimes buying someone else's bright idea or copying it. Can you name one real innovation from them? Something where you can say they changed how we interact with technology and everyone copied their design?
I do think it's part of the two party system. See also my post #36261500 in this thread
In a two party, first past the post system, elections get decided on a few major issues, or even which candidate you like more. As I write in my other post, if I look at the system in my own country, where we have representative voting, parties are actually divided along multiple lines: [liberal vs. conservative, religious vs. atheist, socialist vs. capitalist, enviromentalist vs. industrialist]
Governments are formed though coalition, where sometimes even a small party can be the deciding factor, if it gives two other parties a majority.
My point with this is that if there is a topic that is only interesting to a small minority, and a large part of the population doesn't care, then by organizing, this group can get it's point into a coalition agreement if it's willing to compromise on a lot of other grounds.
See for example what now happened in the UK with the Liberals. They formed a coalition with the Conservatives, giving a way a lot of points, to get their most important point, the voting system change.
Another example is the Pirate Party in countries like Sweden and Germany. Over 90% of the population just doesn't really care about copyright legislation. If at some point the Pirate Party would be needed to create a majority in parliament in either country, they could get some real changes to the copyright legislation enacted, even if they would represent only 1-2% of the voters.
Having representative voting has the big advantage that a small minority that's passionate about an issue where a large majority doesn't care about, can have a real effect on policy.
The advantage of two party systems is that you nearly always have one party with a majority and you can't get into trouble forming a government because coalition negotiations fail.
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Multiple Administrators? I think most companies see IT as an expense that needs to be minimized, so you're lucky if they have one Administrator who is competent.
Meh, how about all these programs that load "pre-lauch" tools in the boot sequence, things like MS Office and OpenOffice, the Adobe stuff. Just so they can claim that program X now loads much faster by burdening the boot time instead.
My 4 year old Macbook Pro goes from suspend to fully usable in under a second. I put it on the table, flip open the lid, and I can start working. Even a cold reboot only takes 21 seconds. With suspend, it saves to disk, but keeps the RAM alive, so for the first ten days or so of turning it off, it can resume within a second. After that the battery runs out and it has to resume from disk, which takes 5-6 seconds more. This of course returns any applications to their previous state.
It's all these small annoyances that are no longer there that made my switch to Apple such a pleasure.
EFI BIOS. My 4 year old Macbook is done with POST in under a second, even if the hardware configuration has changed (external monitor/harddisk, etc.). With suspend to RAM, it means that by the time I finished flipping the lid open, it's ready to start working. There is no noticable delay any more. Even booting from a complete poweroff takes only 23 seconds, incuding logging in and starting the groupware client.
I think you do have to take the BIOS POST times into account in a fair comparison. It's where my Macbook with it's EFI bios saves a lot of time, especially noticeable when returning from suspend/hibernate, as it's back to a workable state, with any changes in hardware detected, in under a second. This is a 4 year old machine, so no fancy SSD or fast CPU/loads of RAM.
One of the problems with the IBM BIOS and the various MicroSoft OS'ses in general is that they have to support a much bigger variety in hardware and software, and thus usually have very generous time-outs, like the WaitForNetwork you mention. My personal experience is mostly with the TAPI, which had time-out values of up to 5 minutes. I have tweaked my home PC to be a lot faster as well, which mainly means minimizing what it actually loads to the bare essentials. The nice thing about my Macbook is that I don't need to tinker with it. It's my work machine and I need to get things done, I'll tinker with stuff at home.
This is partly due to the nature of the "IBM-compatible" market, where a lot of cheap but sub-par solutions are available.
And back in the 80's there was systems that was up and running a lot faster since the core was in PROM. Availability within a second.
But for some reason IBM and Microsoft was never really willing to go the fast and friendly path.
My 4 year old Macbook Pro I use for work returns from hibernate in under a second. A compleet reboot takes about 20 seconds. This is not a very powerful machine by today's standards, no SSD just a normal slow laptop HD, 2 GHz Core Duo, OSX 10.6. It does of course have an EFI bios. I also have Windows XP on this machine, with the default "work" install. It takes at least 15 minutes to boot, given all the stuff like anti-virus, anti-spyware, Domain logon and what have you. If I haven't used the Windows partition for more than a month, it's even longer, as then the anti-Spyware wants to do a full scan of the machine making it unusable for nearly an hour.
Maybe I should blame Windows XP, but on my home machine it's blazingly fast, boots to a useful state in under a minute. And that's not even a super fast machine, no SSD or anything like that either. Just a very clean XP install, with only a virus scanner.
I really like how fast my laptop returns from hibernate. I flip it open and it's done booting by the time I finish that movement and I can immediately start working. I hardly ever turn it completely "off".
I think one of the reasons that Windows is slow, is because MS has to support a lot of different hardware, so needs very generous time-outs on everything. No I have no real experience with Vista or 7, as I basically jumped ship before they arrived, so things could have improved, although I haven't really heard or seen anything indicating that.
The real difference except for the EFI bios and some neat suspend to RAM stuff, is in how much is loaded on startup. The difference between my minimal XP setup at home, and the XP "work" environment is staggering. Part of it seems to be the Norton tools they're using, I've spent a lot of time trying different anti-virus programs for my home setup, until I found one that's the least obtrusive and burdening the machine.
Minecraft by Mojang is my latest addiction.
If you could never get enough of Lego when you were a kid, then this is the game for you.
D) Sell a lot of the vacant, unused and generally worthless land holdings the US has. While selling it in the bottom of the market isn't ideal, it will help reduce unneeded staff, and gain the government more revenue.
Several governments have already tired to. The government still owns a lot of valuable land, but usually it has some strings attached which makes it difficult to sell. Look for example at this track of land in Las Vegas (I forgot the name), which was given as a grant for the benefit of the local veterans hospital. Selling it to fund the bail out of GM would get you in all kinds of trouble (or has for the past 15 years as everyone since Clinton has tried to sell it).
Glow in the dark mosquitos. Now that's a useful thought.
But how to get the gene into the general population?
Yeah. For top athletes, something like that already happens, pro prevent doping abuse. Now athletes get banned not because they used doping, but just because they couldn't get online, the website didn't work, or they forgot.
Things like this are going too far.
Sir, you win the Internet Metaphore of the Day award.
Very nicely put.
Sorry, but a lot of developed countries pay a lot less for their universal health care then the USA, per capita. Sure it means that medical specialists might earn a little less. They're not going to earn millions, most people in the semi-public sector are limited to the amount the Prime Minister earns, which is about 250,000 euro. Still pretty decent in my view.
Go look up the numbers http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita
United States: $4,631.00 per capita
Netherlands: $2,246.00 per capita
The Dutch government has defined a "standard healthcare package", which all insurance companies must cover for a fixed amount (just over 1000 euro a year). They can compete on service and extra options. They also can't refuse you the standard package, so anyone can get this basic set of healthcare and it's mandatory to be insured. Only people like the homeless aren't insured, jobless people and those on minimum wages are helped by the government to pay for their insurance.
And for what's covered: Currently the discussion is if support for giving up smoking should be covered. That should give you an idea.
There's optional extra packages for things like modifications in the home, electric wheelchairs, TV and newspapers at your bedside in the hospital.
We also struggle with rising costs for medical care, but as you can see, we're in a much better place than the USA which pays about twice as much.
Yeah, it's about the same in the Netherlands. It's 1100-1300 euro per year. The difference is in things like if you get TV and newspaper at your bed when in hospital, not in the stuff covered. This is the "standard healthcare package" as defined by the government. Insurance companies all have to provide it, and compete on the extra options. There's also additional packages but I won't go into that, basically everything you really need is covered in the standard package.
But yeah, no matter if you're 20 or 100, healthy or chronically ill, have a history of smoking, being overweight or anything like that. This is what you pay in The Netherlands.
Unlimited data plan?
The iPhone has now been for sale here for just over 3 years. All of that with an unlimited data plan.
But even with that, I find that I only use a few 100 MB/month. A lot of traffic happens on Wifi connections, at home, at work, in the train, there's free Wifi almost everywhere nowadays.
This whole Cloud thing is never going to really work. As the topic hints at, the bandwidth just isn't there. The problem is that storage and CPU power have scaled much faster than network bandwidth.
This means that there is plenty of CPU power in the cloud, and a fair amount of storage space, but it's too expensive to get large amounts of data transported to and from the cloud. So only if you have CPU intensive problems, is the cloud a real solution. There's not much that falls into that category, certainly not on the consumer end of the spectrum.
I found that it gets nicely expressed in the Ahmdahl number (ratio between the number of operations and the amount of I/O of your problem). Stuff with a number like 0.01 is very good for the cloud. Most stuff lives around 0.1, my problems live close to 1.0.
So it's good for making weather simulations, it's not so good for storing your photos or documents.
Yeah, this article is very bad. It almost has no information, no facts or anything. It's just a guy stating he doesn't like one thing and likes another thing.
Now I have an iPhone and a Macbook, and in general like Apple's products. I'm also a long time /. reader, so I don't expect too much from the editors. But this shouldn't be on /.
I don't live in the US, so I know very little about this Fox News, but it does live down to it's reputation here.
Sometimes there is just stuff that's no longer useful for science, either because it can't be calibrated any more, or uses a technology that is no longer useful. But for someone tinkering, and not concerned about measurable, reliably repeatable outcomes, they can still be useful.
For example I have an old oil based vacuum pump from a lab I used to work. It's no use in today's semiconductor physics, because things have gotten so small that the oil pollutes any experiment, and the vacuum it creates isn't high grade enough anyway, but if you only care about creating a modest vacuum for some tinkering, and don't care about scale or repeatability, than it's still fun to play with.
Same thing with old amplifiers that can't be properly calibrated any more.
about the only possible hope is a free software massively collaborative effort, based around existing work and engines,
I don't think this is going to happen. Any such community will fracture, because people feel passionately about game content. It might work to develop a half decent engine, or maintain and expand one. But it's not going to work to build something on the scale of World of Warcraft, the project would go down in arguing.
http://db.tigsource.com/
You are welcome.
Oh, nice website. It indeed already has all the games I would mention.
It also shows the problem with Indie games: Overall they are quite limited. Minecraft is nr2 on their Top List, and that's still in Beta. It's very ambitious for an Indie game and I really like it, because it's different.
I'm not saying some of those games aren't great fun. I think they are. But it also shows that in today's game market people you need a level of perfection and an amount of content and art quality that is very hard to achieve alone or with a small team. If you want to reach the masses that is. It's amazing what such Indie developers can accomplish with the limited resources they have. But it also shows that there is a difference in scale compared to something like Blizzard.
It's a bit longwinded, but indeed a very good read. I really liked this part, it gives deep insight and is still true today:
"But even that isn't enough, you know.... There's talk nowadays
in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a
ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like
this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically,
a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your
books on it.... You buy the book as a floppy and you stick it
in... And just think, wow you can even have graphics with your
book... you can have music, you can have a soundtrack....
Narration.... Animated illustrations... Multimedia... it can
even be interactive.... It's the New Hollywood for Publisher's
Row, and at last books can aspire to the exalted condition of
movies and cartoons and TV and computer games.... And just think
when the ReadMan goes obsolete, all the product that was written
for it will be blessedly gone forever!!! Erased from the memory
of mankind!
Now I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite ladies and gentlemen,
but when I contemplate this particular technical marvel my
author's blood runs cold... It's really hard for books to
compete with other multisensory media, with modern electronic
media, and this is supposed to be the panacea for withering
literature, but from the marrow of my bones I say get that
fucking little sarcophagus away from me. For God's sake don't
put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope. Don't put me
into the stereograph, don't write me on the wax cylinder, don't
tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware,
because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell
of a lot more mortal than I care to be. Mortality is one good
reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake
don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not
really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the
business of marking place.
Okay.... Now I've sometimes heard it asked why computer game
designers are deprived of the full artistic respect they
deserve. God knows they work hard enough. They're really
talented too, and by any objective measure of intelligence they
rank in the top percentiles... I've heard it said that maybe
this problem has something to do with the size of the author's
name on the front of the game-box. Or it's lone wolves versus
teams, and somehow the proper allotment of fame gets lost in the
muddle. One factor I don't see mentioned much is the sheer lack
of stability in your medium. A modern movie-maker could probably
make a pretty good film with DW Griffith's equipment, but you
folks are dwelling in the very maelstrom of Permanent
Technological Revolution. And that's a really cool place, but
man, it's just not a good place to build monuments.
Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I hope I've
demonstrated that I face a lot of the same problems you face...
Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than
a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future
has passed it by."
I think their problem will be scaling down to laptop ans smaller displays.
I can see it working for TVs, but I have trouble seeing electro-wetting work on really small devices at the resolutions you'd need.
Disclaimer: last time I used electro-wetting for displays was in 1997 and then the "pixels" we could achieve were about 2 mm and 64x64 resolution.
Yeah, I have two old Eizo F67 monitors. They only go to 1600x1200, but I bought them used for 3 euros.
Except when watching DVDs, I find that 4:3 is still a much nicer ratio for a lot of things.
Apple frankly does not "suck at innovation", thats narrow minded myopic thinking. They have revolutionized industrial design with their products over the past 10 years
Not just the past 10 years. The Apple I, II, Macintosh, Powerbook 100, Newton, iMac were are revolutionary products in their design. I can probably name a few more if I start digging, this is just of the top of my head.
Apple isn't very good at inventing, they are good at innovating. Apple has some inventions, but what it's really good at, is combining existing ideas in new and innovative ways. And when they come up with something new, it puts all Apple's momentum behind making it a success. Sometimes they also have spectacular failures. But it's willingness to take big leaps into the unknown has given us a lot of things that we take for granted now, but were not so obvious back then.
But Apple made a lot of technologies go from little gimmicks in a research lab, to consumer products.
The graphical desktop, laptop, online music store, smartphone, heck even the PDA. Every one of those out there today still carries a lot of Apple design DNA, even if it's not made by them and doesn't run their software.
Microsoft on the other hand, is all about protecting its existing cash cows and sometimes buying someone else's bright idea or copying it. Can you name one real innovation from them? Something where you can say they changed how we interact with technology and everyone copied their design?
I do think it's part of the two party system.
See also my post #36261500 in this thread
In a two party, first past the post system, elections get decided on a few major issues, or even which candidate you like more.
As I write in my other post, if I look at the system in my own country, where we have representative voting, parties are actually divided along multiple lines: [liberal vs. conservative, religious vs. atheist, socialist vs. capitalist, enviromentalist vs. industrialist]
Governments are formed though coalition, where sometimes even a small party can be the deciding factor, if it gives two other parties a majority.
My point with this is that if there is a topic that is only interesting to a small minority, and a large part of the population doesn't care, then by organizing, this group can get it's point into a coalition agreement if it's willing to compromise on a lot of other grounds.
See for example what now happened in the UK with the Liberals. They formed a coalition with the Conservatives, giving a way a lot of points, to get their most important point, the voting system change.
Another example is the Pirate Party in countries like Sweden and Germany. Over 90% of the population just doesn't really care about copyright legislation. If at some point the Pirate Party would be needed to create a majority in parliament in either country, they could get some real changes to the copyright legislation enacted, even if they would represent only 1-2% of the voters.
Having representative voting has the big advantage that a small minority that's passionate about an issue where a large majority doesn't care about, can have a real effect on policy.
The advantage of two party systems is that you nearly always have one party with a majority and you can't get into trouble forming a government because coalition negotiations fail.