Yes, we need to discover yet another way to deliver high speed internet to people in cities. They don't have enough choices for their broadband.
While we in rural communities who are not served by broadband, can be skipped by another technology. Yeah, TV transmitters will give internet. Too bad there's no TV transmitters around here.
I have no broadband choices (I connect at 26.4kbps) but at least I get 0 over-the-air-channels. All right! Problem solved.
I guess Wal*Mart has no effect on your life. Why don't you go to your favorite store and buy a box of matches?
The fact that a box of matches is no longer a usable product is due to the "race to the bottom" started by Wal*Mart. The quality of matches is so poor now because they must be made ever cheaper for the big suppliers to carry it and anyone not making them cheaper is cut off from the market. Matches are now so cheap, they are essentially no longer available (the ones you can buy are not really 'matches' in the sense that you could start a fire with them).
I dare say that your inability to buy matches is due to Wal*Mart regardless of where you actually try to buy your matches.
Now follow this reasoning with about a million other formerly useful products which are all rapidly disappearing from the market and you are affected by Wal*Mart without actually shopping there.
My friend, who developed some of DragonSoft's algorithms, was a founder of the company. I estimated his equity in the company (based on many conversations) at about $50 million US in 1999. His equity in 2001? Less than a million.
Yowza, did those sleazy Belgians ever take him for a ride!
Yes, let's make http get the entire site in one swoop. That way, the people in the cities will get a marginal improvement in speed. In the meantime, we dial-up customers will not be able to flash-block and ad-block and image-block and actually read some content. Instead our connections will be completely disabled.
Nice of you to think of yourself as the only internet user in the world. This is the kind of thinking that really makes the world a better place.
There's a reason Google has a proprietary algorithm. It's not so it can control the world and generate cash, it's so the results are better.
Back when google actually used pagerank, the results were OK, but they soon sucked as everyone started to game the system. Knowing the algorithm means sites designed specifically for high standings rather than for best content. They continually avoid this problem by changing the algorithm in secret.
With an open source search algorithm, every result will not be the best site, but the one where the designer is willing to torture the content in a particular way. Then everyone will torture their content, and the results will be completely irrelevant.
This is one of the rare places where closed, proprietary, secret systems actually make things better.
I've heard of terror groups misusing charitable donations. Guess if you give to charity, you are fostering an atmosphere of giving, which the terrorists can exploit. So stop giving to any cause or you will be helping the terrorists.
I'm a network admin at a little rural hospital which is not the cutting edge of medical technology. And yet I sit a few feet from half a dozen Linux servers. And there are several more embedded ones used by clinical people--e.g., our bone density imager is Linux.
There are certainly more windows-based diagnostic devices than other OSes, but I would hardly call Linux "rare" out on the floor.
Why don't you come out to my house and install your solar panels on my roof? I'm sure it will be no problem that they are under a few feet of snow for 4 months a year. Or that we get 50 sunny days (on average) a year, half of which are when we have snow. Or that at 44 degrees north, even at the solstice at high noon we have low wattage/area.
Gee, I guess I'll be selling all my extra power to the grid.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
Come spring, the snowbanks melted and we found a USB stick that had obviously been dropped in the parking lot and plowed into a snowbank. The metal sheath around the pins had been crushed and was RUSTY! I jammed a screwdriver into the end to open the metal casing a bit and jammed it into a USB slot.
We could tell who owned it because we recognized all the people in all the photos which were perfectly readable. On getting it back, the owner remembered losing it months before and thought it was gone forever.
The Detroit Free Press did the research back in 2002 that showed shaving just 2 seconds off the yellow jumped tickets by over 50%. And, surprise surprise, where for-profit cameras were run, yellow lights were shorter than average.
What exactly was made safer by shorter yellows? Just the corporations' money.
You cannot achieve a lower death rate. The death rate for all of us is pegged at 100%.
The implication in all these kinds of stories is "If you don't die from fill-in-the-blank disease, then you will never die." Of course, the real case is you will die from something else.
If I have to choose, I choose to die from being a lazy, gluttonous pig. If you are working hard to not be a lazy gluttonous pig, guess what? You'll die too. At least I had fun.
Yeah, I'm the one with the Master's from Harvard. Looks like I'm within $1k of the national median for Males with Master's. So that would put me in the middle quintile--actually the bottom 50%--not the top 10%. And that's after 25 years in the biz.
To me that's certainly "reasonable," but it shows that CS isn't the way to get "lots."
Saying you went into CS because you enjoy computers is like saying you got into banking because you enjoy coins. Sure, banking is ostensibly about the movement of coinage, but the concerns of a banker are far beyond that of a coin collector.
Computers are the tools used to explore computer science, not the end product. If you think they are, then you are actually studying computer engineering and not computer science.
I got my Bachelor's in CS back in 1985 and got my Master's in IT from Harvard in 2003. Not to toot my own horn, but I was the best programmer there. If anyone was in a position to make lots of money in CS, it'd be me. I'm still waiting.
Then again I believe the more you know, the less you need.
There's a reason there are no self-driving cars and it has nothing to do with technology. Check out Why there are no flying cars. Despite the title, it's actually about self-driving cars. Why there are no flying cars is implied by extension.
OK, higher frequency generally means higher bandwidth, I get it. But how does this get translated into "wireless for video?"
When we upgraded to 100Mb ethernet, we didn't say that was "for porn." It was for whatever happened to be on the pipe. Why is this different? It's a fatter pipe. It will be used for video, sure, but can't it be used for, I don't know, any DATA?
Check out my new 1Gb network connection. I've got the new chipset specially made "for downloading cake recipes." Hope they've got another chipset waiting in the wings when I want to download cookie recipes.
I have a couple of programs that do various NP-hard optimizations using genetic algorithms. They are very simple (in concept), give excellent results, but are massively inefficient.
And I've had an idea for another genetic program, where the input is only a few hundred bytes, the output is only a few hundred bytes, (so I/O bandwidth is a non-issue), but it takes many trillions of clock cycles to get from point A to point B. The Amazon system may be an ideal system for me.
I might balk at buying a new box, trying to find a space for it in my house, then powering it up and keeping it powered up while it runs for MANY YEARS. With this service I could do all the computation in a SINGLE DAY for not very much more money. Me like.
I guess this is just the kind of thing we WON'T be seeing more of, coming as it did from MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs). There was a story a few months ago about how MERL is packing its bags and getting out of the biz.
Having been a researcher at MERL, I have to say its a darn shame.
Everyone who says "But now my hospital will send my info to a central insecure database and it'll be hacked...." has been asleep for a few years.
I work at a hospital and we send your records not to one central database, but to dozens of central databases. The state cancer commission, infectious disease control, health and human safety, insurance checkers, bill scrubbers, etc, etc, etc. Many of these are mandated by law.
So if you think one database might be hacked, how secure is your info residing in 20 databases?
Good luck with all that.
Anyone who said "just connect to a neighbor who does have connectivity." No problem, that's SEVEN MILES away.
Anyone who said "Just shoot over the top of the hill." Great, that's FOUR MILES from here.
Anyone who said "Cut down trees." Do you know what a forest is? I'd have to cut a swath through the trees over a mile long to shoot close to the horizon, but I don't own that much land.
And no, no wireless broadband and only 1 carrier is on the cell tower so far, no broadband equipment yet (we've been promised it's coming by 2012).
The real problem is it doesn't matter how this gets solved. The day my new 1MB connection is hooked up in a few years (whatever the solution turns out to be), it will ALREADY BE OBSOLETE. By 2012, there'll be 100M connections in the cities, all services and websites will be designed with that speed in mind.
Then everyone will be screaming about how they are slow, it'll take a few years for 90% of the country to catch up to those 100M speeds (of course my town won't be included), and by then the cities will be at a Gig. And there I'll be, with a useless 1M connection and my thumb up my ass.
This must be great news for ISPs who now will get plenty of new customers who need broadband just to use google.
My problem is I have a 26.4k connection (less than HALF 56k dial-up). And, no, I'm not cheap, I live where no broadband exists (not even satellite). So I have to move in order to do a web search? Great. The internet has gone from providing the people not in cities with the same library access they have, back to where you have to live in a city to get any info.
Yeah, sure 22 minute episode is padded with 8 mintues of commercials THE FIRST TIME THE SHOW IS AIRED. After that one-time event, the show is cut to 18 minutes with 12 minutes of commercials. This is much more typical since the show debuts once, but may run hundreds of times in the hit-you-over-the-head mode.
TiVo rules. And you do not have to 'fast-forward' the commercials. I use the instant 30-second skip (and it really is instant, i.e., 1/30 of a second).
-------
Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. Now your skip-to-end button is a 30-second-skip button.
Joe hired me right out of a graduate class he was giving at Harvard. He had used a simulated annealing algorithm to do NP-hard cartographic labeling and I beat his results using a genetic algorithm of my own devising. He was impressed since I had gotten the best results in the 7 years he'd taught the class.
Joe is a very impressive man--he can spot talent a mile away. The people gathered together at the offices in Cambridge were extremely good at what they do. I was lucky enough to have Micheal Mitzenmacher (an inventor of digital "fountains") as a co-author on a MERL research paper. Unfortunately, one of the results of the regime change seems to be the research paper store in Cambridge seems to have gone offline, so no link to that paper exists anymore.
The prototype bar glass that would signal the server when it was nearing empty was actually on a special table directly across from my cubicle. And the foot long white paper mache VW bug which served as a 3D screen for driving videos (you'd have to see it to believe it) was in the photo studio under the stairs.
As to whether Joe made good Mitsubishi products or not, I think it was obvious that he did not. But he was committed to making the lab world class (in a block crowded with world-class labs) which doesn't mean designing the Lancer's windshield wipers. However, since it cost him his job, maybe doing best for the world rather than for one's own advancement isn't a winning strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
While we in rural communities who are not served by broadband, can be skipped by another technology. Yeah, TV transmitters will give internet. Too bad there's no TV transmitters around here.
I have no broadband choices (I connect at 26.4kbps) but at least I get 0 over-the-air-channels. All right! Problem solved.
The fact that a box of matches is no longer a usable product is due to the "race to the bottom" started by Wal*Mart. The quality of matches is so poor now because they must be made ever cheaper for the big suppliers to carry it and anyone not making them cheaper is cut off from the market. Matches are now so cheap, they are essentially no longer available (the ones you can buy are not really 'matches' in the sense that you could start a fire with them).
I dare say that your inability to buy matches is due to Wal*Mart regardless of where you actually try to buy your matches.
Now follow this reasoning with about a million other formerly useful products which are all rapidly disappearing from the market and you are affected by Wal*Mart without actually shopping there.
Yowza, did those sleazy Belgians ever take him for a ride!
Nice of you to think of yourself as the only internet user in the world. This is the kind of thinking that really makes the world a better place.
Back when google actually used pagerank, the results were OK, but they soon sucked as everyone started to game the system. Knowing the algorithm means sites designed specifically for high standings rather than for best content. They continually avoid this problem by changing the algorithm in secret.
With an open source search algorithm, every result will not be the best site, but the one where the designer is willing to torture the content in a particular way. Then everyone will torture their content, and the results will be completely irrelevant.
This is one of the rare places where closed, proprietary, secret systems actually make things better.
I've heard of terror groups misusing charitable donations. Guess if you give to charity, you are fostering an atmosphere of giving, which the terrorists can exploit. So stop giving to any cause or you will be helping the terrorists.
There are certainly more windows-based diagnostic devices than other OSes, but I would hardly call Linux "rare" out on the floor.
Gee, I guess I'll be selling all my extra power to the grid.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
We could tell who owned it because we recognized all the people in all the photos which were perfectly readable. On getting it back, the owner remembered losing it months before and thought it was gone forever.
You probably meant FARside.
The Detroit Free Press did the research back in 2002 that showed shaving just 2 seconds off the yellow jumped tickets by over 50%. And, surprise surprise, where for-profit cameras were run, yellow lights were shorter than average. What exactly was made safer by shorter yellows? Just the corporations' money.
The implication in all these kinds of stories is "If you don't die from fill-in-the-blank disease, then you will never die." Of course, the real case is you will die from something else.
If I have to choose, I choose to die from being a lazy, gluttonous pig. If you are working hard to not be a lazy gluttonous pig, guess what? You'll die too. At least I had fun.
To me that's certainly "reasonable," but it shows that CS isn't the way to get "lots."
Computers are the tools used to explore computer science, not the end product. If you think they are, then you are actually studying computer engineering and not computer science.
I got my Bachelor's in CS back in 1985 and got my Master's in IT from Harvard in 2003. Not to toot my own horn, but I was the best programmer there. If anyone was in a position to make lots of money in CS, it'd be me. I'm still waiting.
Then again I believe the more you know, the less you need.
There's a reason there are no self-driving cars and it has nothing to do with technology. Check out Why there are no flying cars. Despite the title, it's actually about self-driving cars. Why there are no flying cars is implied by extension.
When we upgraded to 100Mb ethernet, we didn't say that was "for porn." It was for whatever happened to be on the pipe. Why is this different? It's a fatter pipe. It will be used for video, sure, but can't it be used for, I don't know, any DATA?
Check out my new 1Gb network connection. I've got the new chipset specially made "for downloading cake recipes." Hope they've got another chipset waiting in the wings when I want to download cookie recipes.
And I've had an idea for another genetic program, where the input is only a few hundred bytes, the output is only a few hundred bytes, (so I/O bandwidth is a non-issue), but it takes many trillions of clock cycles to get from point A to point B. The Amazon system may be an ideal system for me.
I might balk at buying a new box, trying to find a space for it in my house, then powering it up and keeping it powered up while it runs for MANY YEARS. With this service I could do all the computation in a SINGLE DAY for not very much more money. Me like.
I guess this is just the kind of thing we WON'T be seeing more of, coming as it did from MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs). There was a story a few months ago about how MERL is packing its bags and getting out of the biz. Having been a researcher at MERL, I have to say its a darn shame.
Everyone who says "But now my hospital will send my info to a central insecure database and it'll be hacked...." has been asleep for a few years. I work at a hospital and we send your records not to one central database, but to dozens of central databases. The state cancer commission, infectious disease control, health and human safety, insurance checkers, bill scrubbers, etc, etc, etc. Many of these are mandated by law. So if you think one database might be hacked, how secure is your info residing in 20 databases? Good luck with all that.
Anyone who said "just connect to a neighbor who does have connectivity." No problem, that's SEVEN MILES away.
Anyone who said "Just shoot over the top of the hill." Great, that's FOUR MILES from here.
Anyone who said "Cut down trees." Do you know what a forest is? I'd have to cut a swath through the trees over a mile long to shoot close to the horizon, but I don't own that much land.
And no, no wireless broadband and only 1 carrier is on the cell tower so far, no broadband equipment yet (we've been promised it's coming by 2012).
The real problem is it doesn't matter how this gets solved. The day my new 1MB connection is hooked up in a few years (whatever the solution turns out to be), it will ALREADY BE OBSOLETE. By 2012, there'll be 100M connections in the cities, all services and websites will be designed with that speed in mind.
Then everyone will be screaming about how they are slow, it'll take a few years for 90% of the country to catch up to those 100M speeds (of course my town won't be included), and by then the cities will be at a Gig. And there I'll be, with a useless 1M connection and my thumb up my ass.
><gts
My problem is I have a 26.4k connection (less than HALF 56k dial-up). And, no, I'm not cheap, I live where no broadband exists (not even satellite). So I have to move in order to do a web search? Great. The internet has gone from providing the people not in cities with the same library access they have, back to where you have to live in a city to get any info.
We're just bounding forward, aren't we?
Yeah, sure 22 minute episode is padded with 8 mintues of commercials THE FIRST TIME THE SHOW IS AIRED. After that one-time event, the show is cut to 18 minutes with 12 minutes of commercials. This is much more typical since the show debuts once, but may run hundreds of times in the hit-you-over-the-head mode. TiVo rules. And you do not have to 'fast-forward' the commercials. I use the instant 30-second skip (and it really is instant, i.e., 1/30 of a second). ------- Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. Now your skip-to-end button is a 30-second-skip button.
Another vote for any of the Mr Thompson stories by George Gamow. In fact, any of the books by George Gamow are good for 8th graders.
Here's an essay explaining Why There Are No Flying Cars. And it explains that no, you shouldn't hold your breath.
Joe is a very impressive man--he can spot talent a mile away. The people gathered together at the offices in Cambridge were extremely good at what they do. I was lucky enough to have Micheal Mitzenmacher (an inventor of digital "fountains") as a co-author on a MERL research paper. Unfortunately, one of the results of the regime change seems to be the research paper store in Cambridge seems to have gone offline, so no link to that paper exists anymore.
The prototype bar glass that would signal the server when it was nearing empty was actually on a special table directly across from my cubicle. And the foot long white paper mache VW bug which served as a 3D screen for driving videos (you'd have to see it to believe it) was in the photo studio under the stairs.
As to whether Joe made good Mitsubishi products or not, I think it was obvious that he did not. But he was committed to making the lab world class (in a block crowded with world-class labs) which doesn't mean designing the Lancer's windshield wipers. However, since it cost him his job, maybe doing best for the world rather than for one's own advancement isn't a winning strategy.
Good luck, Joe, and thanks.