Google homepage looks almost the the same as in early 90's. I know the Wikipedia page says "Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California" but there must be something wrong there because someone showed me the google homepage while I was at university describing to me how revolutionary it was because it used the web itself to rank pages. Now as I graduated in 1994 that's the latest it could be, but I believe the event I just described was way back in 1990 - and I said goodbye to webcrawler, excite, yahoo(!), altavista and magellan on the spot. Perhaps 1996 was the year they incorporated? I've just realized I'm an absolute dinosaur.

People made the same argument amount about graphics cards... that the revenue from gaming was so large that the cards could never be "separated off" for for general purpose- or scientific- computing. But now general purpose computing on graphics processing units is an industry with its own conferences, journals and "off-the-shelf" vendors even though only a tiny fraction of graphics cards end up in such clusters. Now, I don't know about the feasibility of using a Kinect in the manner suggested, but revenue from gaming is not going to slow them up. If there is another "buck" to be made, it will be made.

From the article... "The response time needed goes down as the pole gets bigger" Not so. In fact the reverse is true... If the pole gets bigger, the response time needed goes up. I can balance a broom handle quite easily because the response time needed is so large I have plenty of time to respond, but I can't balance a pencil (and even less so a needle) because I am required to respond in such a tiny amount of time to keep it upright. The response time needed goes down as the pole gets *smaller*.

I remember opening my brand new Red Hat 9 manual and reading in those first pages that I was holding about a billion dollars of software in my hand. It went banging on about the delights of open source for another half a page, but I never got any further. I immediately listed my sweet find on amazon - offering a hefty 20% discount off the (Like New) book. But even at 800 million US, I couldn't get a byte (sorry). Obviously I had nothing to lose and reduced the asking price to a mir eight figures (sorry), but still no joy - and I never did get cups to work. But it's got me thinking. Other slashdotters must have had similar experiences. Surely we can scrape together another 99 copies of the said tome between us, and then we can offer the International Space Station Cooperative the full $100 billion, and we'd all know one way or the other. Let me know.

I can't get behind that!

I love The Shat. No, I do. But one forget's he can be *such* a luvvy, sometimes, darling.

sic!

" I'm Lovin' IT "

A system taking a week to discover a bombing that will occur in a day's time will (by Moore's law) break even in 33.9 month's time. I.e., in 33.9 month's time, it won't take week - it'll take a day. So keep developing - it'll be viable in three years.

I heartily concur... and I'd like to ask further: Why the.. did I have to scroll down this far to see the real question asked?

"Control unit on back" - sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

Er... Bletchley Park anyone? Shhhhh - don't mention the war!

An author who understands that the word "myriad" is in fact an adjective and not a noun.