What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe not in the incumbents' interest to upgrade, but GPUs and multi-core CPUs have definitely advanced, creating a situation ripe for disruption.

And meanwhile a new gaming platform has actually already gained great traction and momentum: iPhone, app store, and arguably the iPad. Disruptions usually start small...

He has a point about open-source UI interfaces. Not sure it's due to "design by committee", probably more that most programmers aren't UI designers.

This will reduce star-power to that of voice actors... and copyright of an actor's image will become even more valuable. Studios will like this.

said in a talk that it was DEC's demise that inspired his PhD research that he wrote up as "The Innovator's Dilemma".

It wasn't management - it's that minicomputers were replaced by workstations (Sun and the like). They went from top to bottom in a couple of years, with the same management team.

Unobtainium floats. The mountains float. The mountains are on Pandora, which is being mined for... unobtainium. The mountains are located in a region of especially strong interference.

I'm thinking there could be a connection...

However, the plot called for the largest deposit of unobtainable to be under the local's giant tree. The non-floating tree. So, I'm not sure what to think here, except that perhaps it was a distortion to serve the plot, or (a nicer justification) that the mountains have much larger deposit, but they are too remote/difficult to mine. That is, the local's giant tree has the largest *accessible* deposit.

A quick search reveals that unobtainium is a room-temperature super-conductor, hence the magnetic levitation trick that we've all seen before; the floating mountains, and the interference. At this point, James Cameron has more credibility than our astrophysicist reviewer. Also, I'm expecting that Orson Scott Card helped out with the script/screenplay/world, because (1) he did so with Cameron's *The Abyss*; and (2) many of the ideas in the film have appeared in Card's work; and (3) Card is a notably mythic-oriented story-teller, as is Cameron. I may be wrong, but You heard it here first!

It's part of a conspiracy of a world-wide cartel of efficiency-oriented programmer that control computing, to ensure their skills remain in demand. Whenever computers start getting too fast, they contrive another layer. The iPhone is another of their strategies.

Ubuntu is already available for ARM processors.

So, if linux has already been very popular on netbooks, since Ubuntu is one of (if not) the friendliest linuxes, then the OS will be no more a barrier to adoption than it was for netbooks.

Can they take a tiny part of the deep field image, that is (apparently) black, and do the same thing again?

I've been reading "The Language Instinct" (Pinker), and his thorough development of his theme is really striking: that language in humans is a biological feature similar, in that sense, to how we walk or digest food. We don't have to try or think about it; it's a free gift. I agree it would be cool to see a syntax, or proto-syntax, or just *some* step along the way. It would really emphasize that language is, partially, just a biological instinct.

I find it odd to think of monkeys having a "word" for different predators, because a predator-specific call isn't necessarily part of a language, which the term "word" implies.

BTW: I find the linguist claim of "infinite" range of expression to be disingenuous, because, while it's technically true, the *vast* majority of them are uninteresting, not useful, and not used. e.g. "I (really)* like ice-cream"; or "(I wonder why)* I wonder." (using regular expression syntax, where "*" means 0 to an infinite number of repetitions). In contrast, simply composing different words is extremely expressive: combining just two words squares the number of expressions; three words cubes it, and so on (v^n, where v is vocabulary size; ^ is "to the power of"; and n is the number of words in the expression). As an example, it's easy to find a phrase that is unique to a document (for a google search). It's not *infinite*, but it's huge, and the results are interesting, useful, and used.

That is, assuming that your creation really is new with respect to the state of the art, and really is non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art.

EP$C is the new M$

It wouldn't matter if it was too slow when scrolling, but I think typing could be the issue. If there's a significant delay between hitting a key and the letter appearing, it would be awkward to use.

Though I'm seeing a far bit of delay on this web form right now, and I'm coping with it...

It's not always true that monitoring is a cost: JIT (Just In Time compilation) monitors execution, and has yielded significant speed-ups in Java.

I conjecture that the key to distributed computing will turn out to be wasting resources (inefficiency) in some way that serves the overall goal.

Apple lawyers are pleased to report that the wording of Genesis 3:6 has been altered to remove all reference to "Apple", and heretofore refers to "the fruit of the tree".