A while ago I read a paper about setting up line-of-sight radio on each rooftop. A standing device with four horisontally rotating antennas would find four similar devices to hook up with.
With the LED technology to do the same, a whole city could be a web of pair-to-pair connections. You could literally route past around pigeons once there is a multitude of connections.
Match this technology with standard web techniques for routing.
My girlfriend is visiting her family in MA, so I'm stuck with my parents. That gives me some time to get a bit of coding done, but it would still be better with her around.
Anybody else spending their days off with Verilog and Xilinx, or am I the only one around who thinks that relaxing with FPGA coding isn't the worst thing to do?
Let's say that you have to pay $0.01 in tax for each recepient of your message. For an ordinary user sending ten daily messages to friends this would amount to $3 a month.
A "mail tax server" signs your header and your mail program can check for the validity of this signature. No signature means good old-fashioned mail with a risk of spam
What will this get us? To you and me it'll mean slightly increased ISP costs, to the spammers there would be sizeable bills. The tax money could go to the ISP, who in terms reduces costs. But the tax has to be protected by state or national law.
So what if you have legitimate reasons to send piles of mail? Put your name and domain on a public list - and secure your mail servers - and you get the tax refunded.
Would this work? Are we willing to pay for mail in order to avoid spam?
Doesn't that just explain why Linux isn't hitting the desktop? You can be pretty dumb and still get around in today's desktop environments, but as long as this attitude is widespread, a large majority of the population (the dumb ones) will have a hard time enjoying (or even hearing about)the benefits of Linux.
It's great to see KDE and Gnome developing these days, but things are still missing. A simple example:
When I inserted my ISDN card, the installation in Windows was done in 10 minutes, including taking the box off to check the name of the chip.
When I tested RedHat 7.2 on a fresh disk, the point-and-click sequence to get the ISDN card was basically the same. BUT: nothing worked. It turns out the script tries to insmod a module which isn't there. Sure, I can modify the script, but when I got some work that has to be done, I boot windows and dial up (and try to avoid answering slashdot posts)...
There seems to be two alternative ways to get things done in our open-source world: ten-point installation guides or scripts that with more or less success wrap around them.
I used to work writing software for 40-year-old female secretaries. You know what the spec said about the user interface? "If there are three possible buttons to push, that's one button too much".
Okay, sorry for the ranting, but my point is that as long as elaborate debugging is required, the desktop will be for our kind only. (What a 15-year-old does often manages two minutes can be pretty elaborate, if not impossible, for his father.) Linux on the desktop will take off when your aunt can do the same ting with her Linux box as with her iMac, that is opening the cardboard box and connecting to the net _unguided_.
--
Børge
Allow only sane computers
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Make a list of some minimum requirements. My brother used to install cable modems (which require a NIC in the PC), and now and then he came across W95 machines with 16 megs of RAM, 20 megs of free hard drive space, and full of all imagineable add-on cards.
In the pamphlet or something point out that computers should have at least
- 32 megs of RAM
- 100 megs of free hard drive
- cd drive
Also, the computer should be operational before you start with the NIC, else they'll first ask you to fix all other kinds of things.
Fruit flies like a banana, what do the other flies like?
CD players with a digital output use the "Sony Philips Digital InterFace" to connect to external D/A converters, and in quite a few cases their own internal D/A converters too. (With a little luck you can even find an S/PDIF pin on the chips inside your CD player even though there is no plug on the back.)
S/PDIF is converted into a standard digital interface in a chip from Crystal named CS8412. Place that part on a PCI board and you got yourself a CD copier. The hardware isn't harder than what can be made during a colleage course.
--
Fruit flies like a banana, what do the other flies like?
One should suppose the movie business would like DVD going to Linux, opening a new market.
Therefore it's a little strange to see them suieing someone who lets players be more abundant. Do you agree that their real fear might be raw video from DVDs being modified and republished?
I'm paying some attention to what's going on with gEDA and PCB. Those are programs for electronics CAD. I can only speak for my self, but I guess many people, like electrical engineers, know their "trade" much better than the inner workings of a user interface.
What I am requesting is a general CAD toolkit etc for which you can write (parts of) your particular application as a plugin. One candidate (though I haven't mentionied this idea to their development list) is dia.
Slashdot Mirror
A while ago I read a paper about setting up line-of-sight radio on each rooftop. A standing device with four horisontally rotating antennas would find four similar devices to hook up with.
With the LED technology to do the same, a whole city could be a web of pair-to-pair connections. You could literally route past around pigeons once there is a multitude of connections.
Match this technology with standard web techniques for routing.
--
Boerge
My girlfriend is visiting her family in MA, so I'm stuck with my parents. That gives me some time to get a bit of coding done, but it would still be better with her around.
Anybody else spending their days off with Verilog and Xilinx, or am I the only one around who thinks that relaxing with FPGA coding isn't the worst thing to do?
Børge
This is a good one: Aim to please, shoot to kill
Let's say that you have to pay $0.01 in tax for each recepient of your message. For an ordinary user sending ten daily messages to friends this would amount to $3 a month.
A "mail tax server" signs your header and your mail program can check for the validity of this signature. No signature means good old-fashioned mail with a risk of spam
What will this get us? To you and me it'll mean slightly increased ISP costs, to the spammers there would be sizeable bills. The tax money could go to the ISP, who in terms reduces costs. But the tax has to be protected by state or national law.
So what if you have legitimate reasons to send piles of mail? Put your name and domain on a public list - and secure your mail servers - and you get the tax refunded.
Would this work? Are we willing to pay for mail in order to avoid spam?
B
Doesn't that just explain why Linux isn't hitting the desktop? You can be pretty dumb and still get around in today's desktop environments, but as long as this attitude is widespread, a large majority of the population (the dumb ones) will have a hard time enjoying (or even hearing about)the benefits of Linux.
--
Quantization noise killed the cat
It's great to see KDE and Gnome developing these days, but things are still missing. A simple example:
When I inserted my ISDN card, the installation in Windows was done in 10 minutes, including taking the box off to check the name of the chip.
When I tested RedHat 7.2 on a fresh disk, the point-and-click sequence to get the ISDN card was basically the same. BUT: nothing worked. It turns out the script tries to insmod a module which isn't there. Sure, I can modify the script, but when I got some work that has to be done, I boot windows and dial up (and try to avoid answering slashdot posts)...
There seems to be two alternative ways to get things done in our open-source world: ten-point installation guides or scripts that with more or less success wrap around them.
I used to work writing software for 40-year-old female secretaries. You know what the spec said about the user interface? "If there are three possible buttons to push, that's one button too much".
Okay, sorry for the ranting, but my point is that as long as elaborate debugging is required, the desktop will be for our kind only. (What a 15-year-old does often manages two minutes can be pretty elaborate, if not impossible, for his father.) Linux on the desktop will take off when your aunt can do the same ting with her Linux box as with her iMac, that is opening the cardboard box and connecting to the net _unguided_.
--
Børge
Make a list of some minimum requirements. My brother used to install cable modems (which require a NIC in the PC), and now and then he came across W95 machines with 16 megs of RAM, 20 megs of free hard drive space, and full of all imagineable add-on cards.
In the pamphlet or something point out that computers should have at least
- 32 megs of RAM
- 100 megs of free hard drive
- cd drive
Also, the computer should be operational before you start with the NIC, else they'll first ask you to fix all other kinds of things.
Fruit flies like a banana, what do the other flies like?
CD players with a digital output use the "Sony Philips Digital InterFace" to connect to external D/A converters, and in quite a few cases their own internal D/A converters too. (With a little luck you can even find an S/PDIF pin on the chips inside your CD player even though there is no plug on the back.) S/PDIF is converted into a standard digital interface in a chip from Crystal named CS8412. Place that part on a PCI board and you got yourself a CD copier. The hardware isn't harder than what can be made during a colleage course. -- Fruit flies like a banana, what do the other flies like?
DCC was supposed to be cross compatible with the old compact casette while bringing new digital qualities.
That did not stay as a product, so why should this? I kind of view this as taking the DCC approach to video.
Copying DVDs bitwise can be done.
One should suppose the movie business would like DVD going to Linux, opening a new market.
Therefore it's a little strange to see them suieing someone who lets players be more abundant. Do you agree that their real fear might be raw video from DVDs being modified and republished?
The movie business is not really afraid of bitwise copying of encrypted DVD. (That's ignorance or strategy.)
Their real fear is that everybody can access raw video data from DVDs and manipulate it without anyone being able to detect frauds.
--
Børge
I'm paying some attention to what's going on with gEDA and PCB. Those are programs for electronics CAD. I can only speak for my self, but I guess many people, like electrical engineers, know their "trade" much better than the inner workings of a user interface.
What I am requesting is a general CAD toolkit etc for which you can write (parts of) your particular application as a plugin. One candidate (though I haven't mentionied this idea to their development list) is dia.
--
Borge