Posts by a pressbutton 538 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2011
... and I expected better from el reg.
"Indefinite growth on a finite planet is not possible."
well, what 'growth' is is not overly well explained.
(a) Things will carry on growing (and dying) until the sun goes out.
(b) If you read some of the post 2000 views on what money is, money is a proxy partly for energy and partly of information complexity.
I think there is a likely challenge coming their way:-
Art 17. Right to property
Definition
1. Everyone has the right to own, use, dispose of and bequeath his or her lawfully acquired possessions. No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss. The use of property may be regulated by law insofar as is necessary for the general interest.
2. Intellectual property shall be protected.
The strong point is ...subject to fair compensation being paid...
I read the emperors new mind back in the 90s
Basically a few hundred pages that said that
'human minds cannot be replicated by computers'
because
'human minds have some features where quantum phenomena may be able to occur'
on the same level as searles chinese room example - good for provoking argument in class, but does not hold up once you think a bit.
+1
When a chinese no-name android tablet can be bought for ~30usd in Asia and the phone probably isnt much more, all this does is encourage the rest of the world to solve problems that are relevant to it.
These actions damage the interests of US consumers (they dont get cheap stuff) and US manufacturers (cost of business, and their interests are diverging from the rotw).
Those no-name asian sellers certainly wont be paying dangeld to Rockstar (I thought the drinks manufacturer / games publisher might have had something to say about the name) but is Google is lucky, may have google on it.
... because it is the future.
In 2-3 years time high-end ARM based phones will be powerful enough to perform most things you do on a PC / Laptop except the battery will last for a couple of days.
At some client sites, Ipads are already used for about 80% of the time.
All you need is a dock that provides keyboard/monitor/network when at your desk
Windows / Office on Intel does not have a guaranteed place in that future.
WRT / Win Phone might.
Apple already calls it's phone 'desktop-class' and that is for a reason.
He was a product development manager.
Normally he worked on the bakery side (he was project manager on the team that invented carob).
LEO was used to manage payroll.
One day the printer run did not quite work - the payslips did not get separated.
There was ~4 piles 2 ft high that needed to be separated.
For some reason he was called in. So he made thin plywood templates, clamped the paper in a sandwich and got a saw out.
- back in the days when debugging really did mean insects.
you are...
Notebooks became popular because they were laptops that didnt need a weight training course to carry around.
Thanks to progress, most laptops, notebooks weigh ~1.5-2.5kg - so they are now commodity items.
They all do the same things and have as much differentiation as toilet paper - actually arguably less.
(Q if a macbook was toiletpaper what brand would it be comments...)
The manufacturer needs to find something that
(a) I want to do but cannot or
(b) don't know I want to do but would really really want to if I knew
My suggestions :
(a) - Phone-style (or faster) instant on -Not having to think about the battery from 6am to 10pm
(b) - Screencast to a 4k screen wirelessly. These screens will be 40-60ins. Something that allows me to work on a doc / picture / code etc etc genuinely co-operatively in parallel on the same screen (like gaming). That other person need not be next to me, but might be.
5 years ago most people had pcs, now the chance is you have a laptop.
5 years ago most homes were still in transition to flat tvs, but they were expensive
in 5 years time he thinks there will be big display units in every room that you connect to wirelesly and the thing you will be using to connect will be a blackberry
one of those 2 predictions might be right
When I got my degree in the 80s I got all my tuition fees paid and a nice grant.
It would have been quite reasonable for the rest of society (you) to have a say over the course I chose, but you were polite enough not to.
Today students will pay tuition fees and their own expenses.
If they are not smart enough to understand that a degree in media studies probably wont get them a nice job at the end, they probably are not smart enough to graduate.
Unlike me when I got my A levels, most of todays 18-19 year olds will have few illusions about the course they choose and the immediate prospects on graduation.
Best of luck to them.
Consider 2 photons passing a line A close together (but far enough apart so you can tell which is which) at exactly the same time, passing through empty (as empty as it gets) space and then being detected when they cross another line B (parallel to A)
On the face of it you would expect them to pass B at the same time.
These guys say not so.
What is the speed of light - is it when the first photon hits or the second/last one?
I always wondered why photos of distant galaxies looked blurry - over v.v. long distances instantaneous events will be 'smeared' according to this.
The best smartphone used to be Palm - remember them?
It was really good for making calls, sms and built in diary.
Trouble was it was not so good at teh inteweb and web type apps - which IOS and Android and (so I am told ) WinPho 8 do.
At the moment they all do about the same things about as well - as much a case of personal taste as anything else.
Wait until one of them do something the others cannot - and then we can play remember when xxx was...
My betting is that it will be Android that provides the disruptive innovation - not because it is Android but because the hardware vendors that sell Android phones are providing more powerful phones faster and someone will come up with something that makes use of that processing power sooner or later.
the a500 has both a full size and a micro usb port and either will power a 2.5 in hdd over usb
other posters mention that ipads have no hdmi/usb/sd
i would miss an sd but the others i use almost never -i dont plug a tablet into a tv/monitor and the file manager stops you switching usb keys too often
.. and you will sell millions.
You already see people watching TV (Iplayer), reading books (Kindle app) if it gets to the same price as an Ipod, it will become a christmas pressie for millions of children.
One other major strength is that it does not have a sim-card - so there are no data costs compared to a smartphone.
It will be £99 by christmas '13
i am sure that there are switches in a nosql db that effectively enforce acid compliance
equally if you set up autogenerating keys on a table with cols s1...sn in a cluster of databases that are synchronised once every n hours, you get a lot of the flexibility of nosql
if the cost of failure to correctly store data is low - a facebook post - and the recording of that item relative to other unrelated data items is not important - whether your facebook post wwas stored before someone elses or not - or possibly stored twice - nosql may be for you
the other area that nosql does not discuss overmuch is that an sql db can be queried on an ad-hoc basis by a vsst range of other third party apps includin office products (openoffice and ms) and there is a vast pool of people who can do that.
Infinite storage is impossible
However there will be limited bandwidth, and limited time.
Like an unlimited mobile phone contract, you cannot talk for more than (60*24*31=) 44640 mins a month, and most people (they hope) talk for about 150-600.
Unlike voice, you can throttle bandwidth for heavy users (as isps do) - or ask heavy users to pay more for more bandwidth - but the storage is still free :)
Deduplication I leave to others, but would wonder how many of us encrypt our MP3/4 collections.
Of ~60GB of files, I have 30GB mp3, 20GB mp4/avi, 8GB photos and 2gb other
So, 1/6th cannot be deduped.
Getting clever, you could look at my music collection and make good geusses on things I would like if there was enough of a user base. Privacy is a subject for historians to invade
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