Dell and IBM don't really compete in the home market, their bread and butter is corporate sales and what home market they get is gravy. (Dell sells a lot of home systems in Texas, for obvious reasons, but I doubt they do elsewhere). Compaq does, but there's not a whole lot of love there anymore. PCs are a small part of HP's business. Gateway might see some loss.
M$ sees the end of the constant upgrade cycle for consumers. I just built my in-laws a box that'll last them 6-8 years, and which can be component upgraded if for some reason they find an 800 Athlon or 256 MB to be insufficient for logging into the mainframe at my mother-in-law's employer. They'll never have to upgrade past 98SE for the life of that box. Hell, the box I'm typing this on at work runs *95*. After 2000/XP, M$ had better find another cash cow.
XBox is currently the #1 contender, and.NET is waiting in the wings.
KGSR 107.1 comes in pretty well for 30 miles to the north, south and east of Austin. (Nothing comes in well 30 miles to the west.) KUT 90.5 makes it about 50-70 depending on the conditions, and they rebroadcast on 90.1 KUTX out of San Angelo.
Other than that, though, you're pretty much hosed. You can, however, skip the Whitesnake tape and just tune in KLBJ 93.7, they'll be sure to play Whitesnake within 30 minutes.
(logic cubes? were those the little blocks that he used with different words on them and rearranged them randomly to try and figure out a problem that seemed to have no answer?:)
The thing that struck me most about this system when I was kicking around Britian were the movies. The abscence of commercials meant that they showed (to cite two examples that were on when I was over there) Basic Instinct (uncut) and Schinder's List in their entirity, just as though I'd rented the video. This was in the fall of '97, so at least Schindler's List was somewhat recent.
I'd guess that y'all pay about 1-2[there's no pound sign on this friggin' keyboard] to rent a video, so providing you liked their selections, I'd guess it's a good deal from that point alone. Of course, I've always been more inclined to watch old BBC stuff on PBS than most of the American channels (pre-cable, anyway) so I'm probably biased. Coughing up $150 per year wouldn't be very much fun for 2 channels.
Believe me, though, I'm thankful that y'all subsidize the World Service for me.
I worshiped Avon when I was 12. Still have my square logic cubes sitting next to my monitor - it's amazing how effective they can be for problem solving.
If, on the other hand, they had tried to design an OS that would support classic apps natively, they likely would have had to sacrifice system stability and performance to do it.
Oh they tried, they tried for the better part of 10 years make that happen, and finally gave up, settling on Rhapsody for new apps and BlueBox (now known as Classic) for legacy apps.
The stroke of genius that is allowing Apple to perform the impossible for a second time (ie a major architechural change without more than trivial backwards compatability issues) is Carbon. A subset of the old API which can be multithreaded and memory protected. So, rather than ask Adobe to rewrite Photoshop, Illustrator, et al. from the ground up, they only have to tweak the existing code a little, recompile, and they've got an OS X app. I'm sure that in time Photoshop will be rewritten with the Cocoa API, as will many other major apps (ProTools, with it's...memory issues...almost certainly requires it) but Carbon puts a stepping stone in the middle of that river so that everyone can migrate at a speed more in line with their comfort level.
The solar wind has almost nothing to do with solar sails. They derive power from the impact of photon, not from the impact of the charged particle known as solar wind.
The power from photons is orders of magitude greater. If they relied on the solar wind, they wouldn't go anywhere.
Don Negro
planetary society has more on their mission
on
How Solar Sails Work
·
· Score: 3
It was much quicker than I had been led to believe.
Config: Rev 1 Blue and White G3 400Mhz, 256MB, 1 9 GB UltraSCSI 2 HD, 1 8.4 GB ATA HD.
I was previously running MacOS 8.6, and I chose to wipe my 8.4 GB HD and copy my old system folder over en masse, mainly because I have ProTools/Powermix, Bias Peak, and Reason all happily coexisting on that system, and I'll be damned if I screw up that happy accident for *any* new OS.
So, I installed 9.1 on the 9 GB, then installed OS X. The initial 'welcome' screen played the QT movie that others have written about, but the music was what caught my attention. It was almost certianly remixed Portishead - no one else does the ambient vibraphone thing like they do.
I chose to skip the internet set-up. I connect to SBC DSL via PPPoE and I was a little apprehensive. I shouldn't have worried. It took 2 minutes with the Internet Connect App. I selected Built-In Ethernet, the protocol pulldown menu changed from PPP to PPPoE, and I selected that. Typed in my username and password, and I had IP connectivity.
I was installing off an Apple Internal CD, which has a reduced software set, so I used my new connection to go the apple.com and download a copy of OmniWeb. Slick little browser, that. Clean, small, uncluttered. My wife used to work for AT&T Wireless (a large NeXTSTEP installation) and she had nothing but good things to say about OmniWeb, and she was right.
I spent most of the rest of the night digging around for printer drivers for my Epson Photo 1200, to no avail. It would recognize it from the USB bus, but listed it as unsupported. Supposedly there were new drivers from Epson available via iDisk, so I created a new iTools account and dug around in there for a while, but was unable to find them. I did download some nifty software, though.
Some people have bitched about the anti-aliased fonts being blurry or hard to read. I can see how this could happen. I have an Apple Studio Display 17", which has a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube with a.25 dot pitch. With a less-tightly grained monitor, 10 pt. fonts would have been hard to read. I was running 1152X870, millions of colors, 75 Hz, and the small text got *easier* to read between 18" and 3' back from the monitor. Closer, and it got progressively more grey as I could better resolve the anti-aliasing.
I was able to hang a few processes, which were easily killed off via ProcessViewer (second thing I aliased to the Dock, right behind the terminal). Click on process, Apple-Shift-Q. Gone.
My explorations were cut short by the fact that I had to go run errands, but I expect to spend most of tonight screwing around with it, and I expect that I'll be able to give better anecdotal evidence about OS X in the new future.
In the Hyde Park area of Austin (5-8 square miles north of the University of Texas) I get ~1.12 Mbit sustained down from servers which I know to have big pipes -- Mozilla, Apple, Dell, -- and I can get 128 Kbits up with no problem.
I have DSL from SBC, it costs ~$40/month. I suffer with PPPoE. For ~$20 more a month (anecdotal evidence, salt to taste), I could get DHCP and way better website/email service from jump.net. If I had a better job or a roommate to split the cost with, it'd be worth it, but since it's only my wife and I, I can live with it for the time being. If I could get DSL speed and io.com as my ISP for that price, it'd be worth the money, but io is now wisely waiting out the DSL storm.
SBC has been mostly clueless, but on the whole decent as an ISP (considering I don't rely on them for email, web hosting, or anything but an IP address and a line). If I had the money, I would consider upgrading to their small business class service, and get the 5 static IPs. When I need hosting that's important enough not to impose on a friend's linux box, I'll probably go to io.
It's true that most people don't have the equipment necessary to distinguish between an MP3 and a RedBook CD, but that's only a small part of the story.
We listen to music because we enjoy it. Seems obvious, but think about it. It generates pleasure. It causes our brains to release the neurochemicals which create positive emotions. The reaction takes place in our brains, not our ears. Our brains are already doing error correction on the signals that our ears hear, especially if we've heard a particular recording before.
This is why radio has the power that it does. It's quality is generally shit, as are the conditions surrounding its use (job sites, engine noise and road hum in our cars, small crappy speakers in general) none of this matters, since we're not listening to the sound, we're listening to the song.
People started buying recordings so that they could hear songs that they liked when and as often as they liked. That's the value of recorded music. Audio quality is of secondary concern for most people, unless it is so bad that their brains can't error correct around it.
This means two things to me. One, that copy protection that degrades the signal won't affect sales much. The corelary is that lossy formats won't hinder adoption, provided that other value is present. Why have MP3s taken off like a bad weed? Because of the incredible value present in being able to sit in your home and get a copy of virtually any song you can think of (***Warning: I'm going to call a spade a spade here***) for free. That value proposition is hard to argue with, especially if you have broadband and can thus remove the time factor.
Two, unless all copying hardware is restricted (I'm not real worried, if a U.S. in which that is possible comes to pass, we'll have much bigger concerns than ease of music copying -- like, how to get to the border.) we will be able to make all of the fair use copies we want, since a little signal degradation isn't going to ruin anybody's day. I've got a lot of nifty mastering software, and it's pretty easy to beef a digital->analog->analog->digital copy back into it's original shape, automate that (it's on my project list) so that the correction is even 50% as good as what a trained human with good ears is capable of, and another big hole appears in the gauze that they're trying to stopper that genie bottle with.
Maybe, maybe not. Sats cost a lot and cost a lot more to get to orbit. Then, you have the latency issue.
IIRC, the ping to GEO and back is around half a second. The ping 102,000 feet (51,000 up and back) is somewhat less noticable.
If the service can turn a gross revenue of $50 per subscriber, and they can get 10,000 subscribers per market, then they can probably turn a operating profit after they amortize the cost of the aircraft over a few years.
The deal with the U.S. is that it's an oligarchy with a blow-by valve in the form of regular elections. So when the oligarchy gets up to something that would get it overthrown in a bloody popular uprising, it simply gets voted out of office for a few years instead. And it works pretty well -- since most people would rather have a long vacation than their head on a pike.
There are many other factors to the equation of power distribution in America, but that is a primary one.
I think the point here is that the primary focus of most public schools is on instilling these characteristics, and that actual education is of secondary importance.
Of course it's not bad to teach people to show up on time (much as I hated it while I was there)
As for the others, I can take them or leave them. Respect for authority, in particular, should be limited to authority worth respecting.
I hate to tell you this, but it happens every election season in the U.S., it's called the primary system. There are many congressional districts where the real election is the primary and it's a given that the Democrat or Republican will win. But, and here's the kicker, since there is no real societal support for voting in the primary (televised speeches, debates, media commentary, ect) only a very, very small percent of the electorate comes out to vote, often as few as 20,000 in a congressional district, and each congressional district represents ~450,000.
It happens all the time in Texas. From Reconstruction on, the only way to get elected to anything - from dog-catcher to governor - was to be a Democrat. That changed in the 80's, and now the only way to get elected in most areas (though there are some notable holdouts - which is one of the reasons I live in Austin) is to be a Repubican.
For instance, how did Ron Paul - a radical Libertarian who was once their candidate for president - knock off Greg Laughlin, the sitting incumbent of Texas District 14? He brought his small crew of true believers out for the primary, forced a run-off (indicating how small the number of true believers actually was) and then, as is always the way with true believers, they all came back out for the run-off, where they beat the pants off of Laughlin. At that moment, Ron Paul was as good as elected. Which he was in Novenber by a large margin.
That's just one example; there are many more like it.
The point being that in real terms, people win elections with 5% of the electorate all the time. That can be scary, but at the same time it means that a little strategy goes a long way in American politics, should you choose to go that route.
You are right insofar as you say that we live in a self-regulating system. We do.
But consider this - we also act on that system, and our interferences can and will be regulated by the system.
Since Gaia isn't real merciful or discriminate when it comes time to do a little regulating, perhaps we should reduce the need for self-regulation, rather than crying 'Damn the torpedoes' and getting our energy via the cheapest means available.
I'd rather not be indiscriminately killed off during a self-regulation incident.
Phone companies *could* be laying DSL to every home, building, or apartment but they're not.
God, I wish that were true, but it's not.
My small apartment complex has 30 units, if we all had 1.5 Mbit DSL (as I do), we would need a full T-3 - 45 Mbit - to handle our traffic. Hell, we'd need 10 Mbits just to handle our minimum guaranteed bandwidth of 384 Kbits.
There's another such apartment complex right next door. In fact, if you draw a box around the square mile north of the University of Texas campus, and figured that every business, house and apartment in this moderately dense urban area was fed by 1.5 Mbit DSL, you'd quickly get an amount of potential traffic that would saturate every piece of fiber leaving Austin.
Companies are trenching fiber as fast as they can, but they can only lay it so fast. I'm pretty sure DSL/Cable prices are set to ensure an adoption rate slow enough to keep the backbones from being overloaded. If they dropped it $20/month, they wouldn't be able to push packets fast enough to handle the traffic.
He's the head librarian for a large county library system in Texas. Last time I was visiting my parents, I dropped in on him for a chat. He mentioned that based on his observations the average income level of library patrons has dropped a good 50% in the last five years - especially among people who use the library for research. The lower income research patrons mainly use the free net connections. The library used to be full of high school students researching any number things, but that number has declined sharply since so much of their research gets done on the net.
Now, how interesting is it that libraries come under fire when they no longer serve a large section of the populace that buys stuff.
But I agree with the posters above, this will raise quite a stink if the publishing house(s) push to hard.
Slashdot Mirror
M$ sees the end of the constant upgrade cycle for consumers. I just built my in-laws a box that'll last them 6-8 years, and which can be component upgraded if for some reason they find an 800 Athlon or 256 MB to be insufficient for logging into the mainframe at my mother-in-law's employer. They'll never have to upgrade past 98SE for the life of that box. Hell, the box I'm typing this on at work runs *95*. After 2000/XP, M$ had better find another cash cow.
XBox is currently the #1 contender, and
Don Negro
Other than that, though, you're pretty much hosed. You can, however, skip the Whitesnake tape and just tune in KLBJ 93.7, they'll be sure to play Whitesnake within 30 minutes.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Yep.
Don Negro
He's obviously trolling, and you're only encouraging the signal degradation around here.
Please, stop it.
(The sad thing is I have mod points right now, but I've only got 3 left, and he can post infinitely, which given the evidence, he probably will.)
Don Negro
I'd guess that y'all pay about 1-2[there's no pound sign on this friggin' keyboard] to rent a video, so providing you liked their selections, I'd guess it's a good deal from that point alone. Of course, I've always been more inclined to watch old BBC stuff on PBS than most of the American channels (pre-cable, anyway) so I'm probably biased. Coughing up $150 per year wouldn't be very much fun for 2 channels.
Believe me, though, I'm thankful that y'all subsidize the World Service for me.
Don Negro
Hell, buy two hard drives, a big 60 or 80 GB IDE monster for MP3s, ect, and a small (9 GB or so) fast-as-hell drive for your OS commonly-used apps.
[1] When I'm not running OS X, which is never anymore, but I digress...
Don Negro
I worshiped Avon when I was 12. Still have my square logic cubes sitting next to my monitor - it's amazing how effective they can be for problem solving.
Don Negro
Oh they tried, they tried for the better part of 10 years make that happen, and finally gave up, settling on Rhapsody for new apps and BlueBox (now known as Classic) for legacy apps.
The stroke of genius that is allowing Apple to perform the impossible for a second time (ie a major architechural change without more than trivial backwards compatability issues) is Carbon. A subset of the old API which can be multithreaded and memory protected. So, rather than ask Adobe to rewrite Photoshop, Illustrator, et al. from the ground up, they only have to tweak the existing code a little, recompile, and they've got an OS X app. I'm sure that in time Photoshop will be rewritten with the Cocoa API, as will many other major apps (ProTools, with it's...memory issues...almost certainly requires it) but Carbon puts a stepping stone in the middle of that river so that everyone can migrate at a speed more in line with their comfort level.
Don Negro
The solar wind has almost nothing to do with solar sails. They derive power from the impact of photon, not from the impact of the charged particle known as solar wind.
The power from photons is orders of magitude greater. If they relied on the solar wind, they wouldn't go anywhere.
Don Negro
They also have a good high-level overview of solar sails, and theirs in particular.
Good to see Carl's people still working to promote his dreams. I got all nostalgic reading the site.
Don Negro
Config: Rev 1 Blue and White G3 400Mhz, 256MB, 1 9 GB UltraSCSI 2 HD, 1 8.4 GB ATA HD.
I was previously running MacOS 8.6, and I chose to wipe my 8.4 GB HD and copy my old system folder over en masse, mainly because I have ProTools/Powermix, Bias Peak, and Reason all happily coexisting on that system, and I'll be damned if I screw up that happy accident for *any* new OS.
So, I installed 9.1 on the 9 GB, then installed OS X. The initial 'welcome' screen played the QT movie that others have written about, but the music was what caught my attention. It was almost certianly remixed Portishead - no one else does the ambient vibraphone thing like they do.
I chose to skip the internet set-up. I connect to SBC DSL via PPPoE and I was a little apprehensive. I shouldn't have worried. It took 2 minutes with the Internet Connect App. I selected Built-In Ethernet, the protocol pulldown menu changed from PPP to PPPoE, and I selected that. Typed in my username and password, and I had IP connectivity.
I was installing off an Apple Internal CD, which has a reduced software set, so I used my new connection to go the apple.com and download a copy of OmniWeb. Slick little browser, that. Clean, small, uncluttered. My wife used to work for AT&T Wireless (a large NeXTSTEP installation) and she had nothing but good things to say about OmniWeb, and she was right.
I spent most of the rest of the night digging around for printer drivers for my Epson Photo 1200, to no avail. It would recognize it from the USB bus, but listed it as unsupported. Supposedly there were new drivers from Epson available via iDisk, so I created a new iTools account and dug around in there for a while, but was unable to find them. I did download some nifty software, though.
Some people have bitched about the anti-aliased fonts being blurry or hard to read. I can see how this could happen. I have an Apple Studio Display 17", which has a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube with a
I was able to hang a few processes, which were easily killed off via ProcessViewer (second thing I aliased to the Dock, right behind the terminal). Click on process, Apple-Shift-Q. Gone.
My explorations were cut short by the fact that I had to go run errands, but I expect to spend most of tonight screwing around with it, and I expect that I'll be able to give better anecdotal evidence about OS X in the new future.
Don Negro
I have DSL from SBC, it costs ~$40/month. I suffer with PPPoE. For ~$20 more a month (anecdotal evidence, salt to taste), I could get DHCP and way better website/email service from jump.net. If I had a better job or a roommate to split the cost with, it'd be worth it, but since it's only my wife and I, I can live with it for the time being. If I could get DSL speed and io.com as my ISP for that price, it'd be worth the money, but io is now wisely waiting out the DSL storm.
SBC has been mostly clueless, but on the whole decent as an ISP (considering I don't rely on them for email, web hosting, or anything but an IP address and a line). If I had the money, I would consider upgrading to their small business class service, and get the 5 static IPs. When I need hosting that's important enough not to impose on a friend's linux box, I'll probably go to io.
Don Negro
We listen to music because we enjoy it. Seems obvious, but think about it. It generates pleasure. It causes our brains to release the neurochemicals which create positive emotions. The reaction takes place in our brains, not our ears. Our brains are already doing error correction on the signals that our ears hear, especially if we've heard a particular recording before.
This is why radio has the power that it does. It's quality is generally shit, as are the conditions surrounding its use (job sites, engine noise and road hum in our cars, small crappy speakers in general) none of this matters, since we're not listening to the sound, we're listening to the song.
People started buying recordings so that they could hear songs that they liked when and as often as they liked. That's the value of recorded music. Audio quality is of secondary concern for most people, unless it is so bad that their brains can't error correct around it.
This means two things to me. One, that copy protection that degrades the signal won't affect sales much. The corelary is that lossy formats won't hinder adoption, provided that other value is present. Why have MP3s taken off like a bad weed? Because of the incredible value present in being able to sit in your home and get a copy of virtually any song you can think of (***Warning: I'm going to call a spade a spade here***) for free. That value proposition is hard to argue with, especially if you have broadband and can thus remove the time factor.
Two, unless all copying hardware is restricted (I'm not real worried, if a U.S. in which that is possible comes to pass, we'll have much bigger concerns than ease of music copying -- like, how to get to the border.) we will be able to make all of the fair use copies we want, since a little signal degradation isn't going to ruin anybody's day. I've got a lot of nifty mastering software, and it's pretty easy to beef a digital->analog->analog->digital copy back into it's original shape, automate that (it's on my project list) so that the correction is even 50% as good as what a trained human with good ears is capable of, and another big hole appears in the gauze that they're trying to stopper that genie bottle with.
Don Negro
I'm certainly not sweating it.
(But I'll be writing my state rep and state senator, just for good measure.)
Don Negro
IIRC, the ping to GEO and back is around half a second. The ping 102,000 feet (51,000 up and back) is somewhat less noticable.
If the service can turn a gross revenue of $50 per subscriber, and they can get 10,000 subscribers per market, then they can probably turn a operating profit after they amortize the cost of the aircraft over a few years.
Don Negro
I'm surprised it didn't cause a buffer overrun or something
Don Negro
I'm guessing not, since you'd remember having to wash the blood off of your hands, knife, table, ect.
The real question is whether trolls like you have blood.
Don Negro
There are many other factors to the equation of power distribution in America, but that is a primary one.
Don Negro
Of course it's not bad to teach people to show up on time (much as I hated it while I was there)
As for the others, I can take them or leave them. Respect for authority, in particular, should be limited to authority worth respecting.
Don Negro
It happens all the time in Texas. From Reconstruction on, the only way to get elected to anything - from dog-catcher to governor - was to be a Democrat. That changed in the 80's, and now the only way to get elected in most areas (though there are some notable holdouts - which is one of the reasons I live in Austin) is to be a Repubican.
For instance, how did Ron Paul - a radical Libertarian who was once their candidate for president - knock off Greg Laughlin, the sitting incumbent of Texas District 14? He brought his small crew of true believers out for the primary, forced a run-off (indicating how small the number of true believers actually was) and then, as is always the way with true believers, they all came back out for the run-off, where they beat the pants off of Laughlin. At that moment, Ron Paul was as good as elected. Which he was in Novenber by a large margin.
That's just one example; there are many more like it.
The point being that in real terms, people win elections with 5% of the electorate all the time. That can be scary, but at the same time it means that a little strategy goes a long way in American politics, should you choose to go that route.
Don Negro
But consider this - we also act on that system, and our interferences can and will be regulated by the system.
Since Gaia isn't real merciful or discriminate when it comes time to do a little regulating, perhaps we should reduce the need for self-regulation, rather than crying 'Damn the torpedoes' and getting our energy via the cheapest means available.
I'd rather not be indiscriminately killed off during a self-regulation incident.
Thanks anyway.
Don Negro
Don Negro
God, I wish that were true, but it's not.
My small apartment complex has 30 units, if we all had 1.5 Mbit DSL (as I do), we would need a full T-3 - 45 Mbit - to handle our traffic. Hell, we'd need 10 Mbits just to handle our minimum guaranteed bandwidth of 384 Kbits.
There's another such apartment complex right next door. In fact, if you draw a box around the square mile north of the University of Texas campus, and figured that every business, house and apartment in this moderately dense urban area was fed by 1.5 Mbit DSL, you'd quickly get an amount of potential traffic that would saturate every piece of fiber leaving Austin.
Companies are trenching fiber as fast as they can, but they can only lay it so fast. I'm pretty sure DSL/Cable prices are set to ensure an adoption rate slow enough to keep the backbones from being overloaded. If they dropped it $20/month, they wouldn't be able to push packets fast enough to handle the traffic.
Don Negro
He's the head librarian for a large county library system in Texas. Last time I was visiting my parents, I dropped in on him for a chat. He mentioned that based on his observations the average income level of library patrons has dropped a good 50% in the last five years - especially among people who use the library for research. The lower income research patrons mainly use the free net connections. The library used to be full of high school students researching any number things, but that number has declined sharply since so much of their research gets done on the net.
Now, how interesting is it that libraries come under fire when they no longer serve a large section of the populace that buys stuff.
But I agree with the posters above, this will raise quite a stink if the publishing house(s) push to hard.
Don Negro