wavephorm

Hey quit being a letdown, this really amazing stuff. You should reword it more like:

"The video is showing amazing new thingamabobs that will get less expensive over the next few years, and pretty soon you will all be able to use robots like this in your everyday life".

Doesn't matter. Given the authoritarian manner the US federal government has been acting lately pretty much guarantees some sort of ban on recording authorities at "international events" will be in effect for Chicago G8 meeting in May. And when the shit inevitably hits the fan they'll just use the revolt as an excuse to implement similar nation-wide bans.

This sounds like a delusional way of saying "We'll wait until we can replicate the premium cable channel model over the Internet". They clearly don't understand that the concept of a "channel" is what's being disrupted.

What I can't comprehend is how any VC's are still dumb enough to invest old-school ICQ/AIM clones. They never go anywhere or make any money. When we're living in a world where I can spin up a NodeJS chat server in an afternoon there really is no pot of gold here.

I thought this sounded familiar:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9124638/Zune_chokes_o...

You'd have to already know CoffeeScript and Rails to benefit from this framework. I've used neither so personally I'd have a lot of trouble and a steep learning curve.

This builds on top of two other frameworks (Connect and Express) so I imagine the dependency stack for this framework is really long which might make debugging painful.

It failed for a couple other important reasons too. A web desktop is an anti-pattern. With my current OS I can already open a web browser fullscreen and access web apps on the internet. And I can also do other things like attach peripherals, copy my music and pictures, use photoshop and desktop publishing. I don't gain anything by abandoning my current OS and restrict myself to web apps. There never was any killer apps for WebOS, or any real reason to switch.

  Node.js + WebKit (or Gecko?:) HTML5 UI desktop Linux

The WebOS concept has been tried a number of times, and failed every time. Most spectacularly with HP blowing about $3 billion in the process. There's really nothing stopping HP's WebOS to used as a desktop OS, and it'll be open sourced later this year.

To play devil's advocate, why is a service like this even necessary anymore?

You don't need a users GeoLocation to find out what timezone they are in. In a web page this information is already available in javascript:

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_getTimezoneOffset.asp

On the server and your DB you should always store UTC, and your server app should avoid localization if possible, and move all Date-to-String conversion to the client. Then all this timezone nonsense completely disappears.

Then what is the web?

My experience tells me that WebSockets will absolutely dominate in web apps using private API's. They're just so much easier to work with, and superior performance. But REST will still be the preferred way to build public API's because Websockets require a certain amount of resource per user that you probably don't want in a public API.

This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...

RPC's over WebSockets is what will replace REST/Ajax.

On the client-side you have code like this:

  clientapp.sendRPC.doSomething(123);

And on the server you write code to receive it:

  serverapp.receiveRPC.doSomething = function(number) {
    write(number)
  };

No Ajax, no URLs, no REST-ful religion. In fact ajax just feels wrong now. I unfortunately have to add some backward compatibility to my websocket apps, and I just get this really icky feeling like I really shouldn't be doing this arcane stuff anymore.

We all know software patents are bullshit. The problem is the law doesn't care, and politicians are paid not to care.

You'd think an article about top tier graduates working in mailrooms might have an interview with one such person, or some rough numbers to back up this claim.

Then they go on to state this will create a situation where people no longer need to be innovative or creative... which these jobs didn't require in the first place.

This article is fluff and full of fallacies.

But bugs in my software don't prove Einstein wrong. There's a difference.

Shouldn't they have tried to eliminate instrumentation errors before going public with findings that conflict with all human understanding of physics?

You can use whatever keyboard you like, whatever input device you like, but there is no inherent reason why your computer has to be an ATX desktop form factor and anchored to the wall. If you could accomplish everything you currently do on your computer right now, with your phone and plugging your phone into a base station, then there would literally be no reason to have a desktop at all. We are only about 1-2 years away from this reality.

Um yeah so this why you should have a QA department.

Yeah so everything I look at is going to go through Google's servers, and be processed and display Google ads constantly no matter where I'm looking. Yeah right. Google is flat-out lunatic if they think consumers want this level of invasion into their lives. They're taking the Orwellian computing idea, big brother always on everywhere, to the absolute extreme here.

You really think desktop computers in an ATX case, with a full ATX-motherboard, and 5" hard drives are going to be around in 10 years? Seriously? They're becoming rare even today.

That's kinda the same as saying Mini-Computers will always outperform Desktop PC's.

The general trend of hardware is that it gets smaller, faster, and more efficient simultaneously. It is highly likely within 10 years you'll be walking around with a smartphone more than 10 times as powerful than the fastest 16-core desktop PC you can buy today, and possibly desktop PC's won't even be sold by then because there won't be any need for them.

Wonderful, so Desktop Linux, on a phone. Because Desktop Linux, on a desktop PC worked so flawlessly, and Ubuntu was so user-friendly that they needed to replicate that awesome experience to mobile devices. (sarcasm intended)

I would be much, more interested in a raw, low-level Linux platform, upon which others can build a fresh new touchscreen-oriented UI, minus all the KDE/Gnome cruft. I really don't want my phone looking like a clone of Windows 3.1.

Sounds like this might be okay then. My new software wasn't built with Xcode, it isn't a conventional iOS app, that's why jailbreaking is really my only option for distributing it on iOS.

Looks like it's a front end to Google Image Search, so use at your own risk.

But on Google Plus, you can't easily make that red square go away. You can't just right click "clear". You can't even open it open and click "clear". It forces you to go down the list and manually click on each action, before it makes it go away. It's extraordinarily annoying.

The 1920's and 1930's Italian and German interpretation of fascism clearly isn't relevant today. The exact definition fascism is by no means definitive, but I consider the broad definition that Google provides to be concise and relevant to what's currently happening and accelerating in the US:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=define+fascism&ie=utf-8...

You're arguing a point I never made. I said the United States is "converting toward" fascism. I really think that the majority of Americans have no idea what fascism really is, because they're so engrossed inside a propaganda machine that makes the current political situation seem completely normal.

I think articles like this really need to be read by Americans more often:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/04/20114261271...

How many civil liberties need to be eradicated before you're living in what could be described a fascist regime?

Or a better way to come to think about it is to ask yourself how many civil liberties have been gained compared to how many have been lost over the past 10 years. And do you see this trend continuing?

I didn't say Nazi. I said fascist. If I mean the "United States is converting toward a right-wing authoritarian regime", then fascism is the correct word for this. Arguing the semantics of this word, or saying I shouldn't use that word because of its associations, really does not make my opinion less valid, and doesn't make any argument to the contrary.