Iridium Flash - lots of questions
on
R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 2
I've never heard about the Iridium Flash thing either. But if Iridium's satellites are a nuisance to astronomers, is it merely because of the way they were made?
What if, instead, they were not made of reflective material?
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely.
Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
The whole idea of the document was that they do not want any unlimited proliferation of copies from a single source. They point out that with the Internet and the digital technologies we have today, a single person can cause them a lot of 'damage' by being able to create copies and giving them to people who can in turn do the same. And as such, the cascading effect will mean that many, many copies can result from a single original.
They are trying to put a stop to it by saying that as long as you are limited in your ability to copy (basically, only a limited number of generations) then they will not be so severely and easily 'damaged'. Analog copies limited by the deterioration of quality, and licensed CD copiers that prevents you from making copies from copies are the only things they allow.
So this is nothing new. It just means that yeah, they'll allow you to copy for personal use (the law allows that anyway). But it won't allow you to make unlimited copies and share with your millions of friends on the Internet.
Why should this be surprising? This undermines their revenue source, which is to sell as many originals as they can. Since they are the ones who invested money into advancing money to the artists, promote the artists, pay the artists, and distribute the artists' material on different media, they want to recoup the cost of all of that. It's investment. To allow unauthorized copies means they get less on their investment. If you had investment like this, wouldn't you fight to get more return for your money?
On the other hand, if taken to extremes, it is just greed. People in the position to abuse the power will exploit it to no end.
This is a great first step toward academic studies into a brand new field. As the article mentioned, it would be on par to where film and television was a while back.
Gaming is a very significant field in the next step of human communication. Human communication started with simple gestures, growing in complexity to be more expressive, systematically "cleaned up" to provide more consistent meaning to the messages.
We then got speech, words and writing. All significant advances in human communication. These were great, but bandwidth was low. The bandwidth limitation was due to geographic restrictions. You couldn't speak to millions of people around the world, because there were no means to do so.
Then came the technology for telecommunication. We got phones, we got radios, we got television. Phones were relatively low bandwidth, while radio and television were relatively high bandwidth. Of course, we all know that the architecture of that was hierarchical in nature, as broadcast media are wont to be.
We communicate to share ideas. But more importantly, we inherently want others to see our ideas, be influenced by our ideas, and become one of 'us'. This is the concept of memes, of course. Religion has very deep roots in the idea of memes. So do movies, tv shows, books, and more blatantly capitalistically, advertisement. They all want to sell you an idea, pass on the idea, and let you pass it on to yet more people. We are a people whose personality is defined by the memes that have infected us throughout the years with the (now) 'traditional' media.
Gaming is one step further (much like the Internet is, but they are on different conceptual levels, so there's no comparing them). Gaming also spreads memes (good vs. evil, what is mean by good and what is meant by evil, etc.) Gaming takes it one step further than broadcast media like movies, etc., in that it is actually allowing you to train in a 'practical' application of the memes in question.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about: In many games, we are constantly trying to defeat an evil archvillan and his (usually of male gender) henchmen, who are bent on taking over the world, dominating the population, destroying the spirit of goodness, etc. Where there is actually a slight hint of plot and morality, this is the archetypical theme.
It is no surprise, then, that these ideas often reflect historical governments and events. Now that we are living in a democracy, and (mostly) everyone sees it's good, then the games will depict anti-democratic ideas as evil.
Games, then, are neat little workbooks that now only teach us how to think and act, but gives us the opportunity to practice. Of course, there are many more lessons being taught in these games, many of them involve something along the lines of 'practice makes perfect' or 'journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' kind of morals. These morals were taught in fables and stories. Now that we have computers and interactivity, games have increasingly taken on these roles.
I think that in the future, games will become like storybooks of the past. In fact, it won't be that different than the book as depicted by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. So active academic pursuit of gaming will be crucial in the fields of humanities and communication. So this is a great first step. Don't fall into the trap of shallow assumption that this is not a serious thing. It's more serious than studying computer science (in that it is more interdisciplinary, and consequently cares about the sociological impacts).
Quite frankly, in the face of such negative public outcry, what else would you do? They admitted they made a mistake - not of the act itself, but of wanting to the act in the absence of government regulation. What this means is that they will still go ahead with it, and no doubt, they will spend lots of money to lobby hard for what they had in mind anyway. Except when that happens, they can point to the law that says they can.
Karma fits better with the chameleon, and certainly, Slashdot. But Geeko fits better with the Open Source roots of Linux.
I wonder if they can change their mind? I think it's a poor choice. Instead of trying to force the lizard(or whatever) motif, they could've went with something a little bit different, maybe something with the color, who knows.
So when's an Open Source Penguin Robot gonna come out? What with all the stories about embedded Linux, it could be developed by the community. The most difficult part of it would be the hardware - sensors and things like that. But other than that, it's mostly software.
Crusoe could even be used to keep it running longer than the one hour that Tama can run at.
It could be a new distro dubbed RoboLinux, or something like that.
Hey, with these things going so fast, they can double as gyroscopes in airplanes and stuff. Well, at least for now, they can act as stabilizers for our computers.
With encryption cracking efforts, it is easy to know if the solution was correct. But for problems like OGR, who verifies the results of such computations? I mean, I think there must be at least two other separate efforts that arrive at the same solution for me to be convinced that 'yeah, this is the answer'. Does anyone know how this is currently being done? Can they prove it mathematically?
The way I see it, in an extremely simple way, people fall into these categories:
1. People who do not have "reasonable" access to online news sources. 2. People who do, and reads both traditional paper and online news sources. 3. People who only reads news from online news resources.
In #1, reasonable means the person has decent Internet access and is savvy enough to know where to get good, reliable and broad range of news. This is usually not difficult.
I think most people on Slashdot may fall in #2, leaning or moving toward #3. (Well, for me this is the case).
The appeal of information on the Internet for us is the same as the appeal of paper for those who do not sit in front of the computer 10+ hours a day. It's accessible. We who read online have the added advantage of being able to check several sources constantly, be able to filter by preference, and more importantly, we can have some kind of community feedback mechanism.
The newspaper is still a great medium to deliver information en masse. That's why we demand so much of it. Because it is spreading to so many different people. Online, the potential audience is huge. With newspapers, the actual audience is very large.
So would old style newspapers cease to exist? Not very soon. Will people read more stuff online? Absolutely.
But news online needs to be different from the traditional paper-based news simply because it is a different culture, a different audience. There needs to be real efforts to make good information and content available online, rather than just copy from the paper medium. Creators of said content must also see the potential for interactivity by the online community and leverage it. It's not like I'm saying anything new here, Slashdot happens to fall into this category. But the quality of the online only sources have not been as good as the traditional paper based ones. They are not as rigorous about the journalistic standards the traditional newspapers have (or should have) adhere to. Credibility is important.
Sheesh, I wish I wasn't doing other things when writing this. It might have come out a little more coherent.
Once in a while, having come up with an idea, and having to search the web to see if the domain name that describes the idea in all of its permutations (i.e. noun, verb, verb-noun, adjective-noun, noun-adjective, verb-adjective-noun, etc.), I think it is totally ridiculous, though it's a great exercise for the mind to think of all the synonymous/homonymous words/names.
And certainly, all the domain-squatting may decrease a little.
However, people are not likely to change this until there is deemed an urgency. Some well-intentioned people (much like the ones who invented the Internet, and the open-source community, etc.) will not sit passively and wait, and will instead actively plan on it.
But then again, it's like one of those things that was a bad idea originally, but then becomes a feature because everyone is using it that way. It becomes the accepted norm, by popularity, and gets infused into the culture.
My question is, how do you change things now that the Internet has gotten so much momentum? It's easier to change things if you are not changing directions so much (like all the versions of HTML - incremental changes that goes with the flow with little corrective steps). If it's going to be in a fundamentally different direction, even if it is the greatest idea in the world, it will face considerable probability of failure.
and, it's only going to get worse, because the 'net's still growing!
Though my original post was somewhat unkind to Scott Adams, I have to say that I happen to feel the same way as you do. I AM a big fan of both, though again, I favor Calvin and Hobbes because it is more 'artistic', whatever that might mean. I agree that Bill Watterson certainly was a little too austere about his attitude about commercialism. But I respect his integrity with regards to that. Whenever I see Scott Adams going off on another cross-marketing, I think about Bill Watterson's insistence on the opposite.
Thankfully, the real world lies somewhere between the two extremes of Scott Adams and Bill Watterson.
Scott Adams really is like Dogbert as he himself claims. He could market anything based on Dilbert! Unlike Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) who refused to market his creation to death and dilute and cheapen it, Scott Adams seems to do the exact opposite.
hey, all power to Scott Adams if he could pull all of this off, but at some point, you just gotta question if there's anything he WOULDN'T get into.
In case you didn't realize, I like Calvin & Hobbes more than Dilbert. But then, they are apples and oranges, aren't they?
In one of the comments about the DoS attack on Yahoo, et al., someone raised the possibility of a government conspiracy of staging such an attack to further its case for greater power to keep such attacks in check.
This story raises some more questions, then, for why is the FBI out with this tool, so conveniently, so quickly, after the attacks?
I thought we already think of computer screen like that. It is, after all, our interface to the computer, and the computer is our interface to the Internet, and therefoer the world. So by this reasoning, it would just mean that my view of everyone in the world will not be as blurry anymore.
Computer games is about learning and entertainment. Well, more specifically, it's about learning, training, and role-playing, which can all be loosely categorized under learning.
Computer games are the interactive lesson books, made fun by positive reinforcement of winning (the endorphin rush after fragging someone, the adrenaline pumping as you turn the corner and faces someone with a much bigger gun than you). There are, of course, philosophical and moral lessons that we are constantly bombarded with in computer games.
Computer games is an art, and art, imitates life.
And computer games, after all, are a higher level of interface between us and the rest of the world than the input/output devices. (A little extrapolation: since computer games ARE computer art, and since the Internet has become, for many of us, the main channel of communication, and since Internet computer games only seem to grow in numbers, it would seem that in the future, we would all communicate with each other, collaborate with each other by being plugged in and playing computer games all the time. So in that sense, you are right, computer art will ascend to great heights).
In any case, I can't believe the NYT article thought that "many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV". What kind of monitor are they using? This may have been true back in the Apple ][ days.
Most important, though, If they can get this to a size suitable for a webpad or an eBook of some sort, with a certain low-power consuming CPU, then you have your ideal portable electronic reading (as in words, and not viewing, as in pictures, although it'd be good for that too)device. From the article, though, it seems that size is not the issue, rather it's the cost. But hopefully, that will come down soon enough.
I think that like the Crusoe chip, its immediate application would best be in small mobile devices. This way, they could keep the cost down. Much like the way the original LCD screens were first used as displays for smaller portable computers way back, it will be the same path for the hi-res LCD screen.
Now, if they could just make the LCD made out of some flexible fiber/polymer material (I know they are already working on it), we would have web pads that can be rolled up...that'd be awesome.
FWIW, I think that having all this documentation and HOWTO's just points out certain fallacies in Linux. Now, don't get me wrong, I know Linux is far from being where we all want it to be (and, pray tell, where would that be?). And it is more difficult for beginners/non-technical users to setup and go. There are quite a number of companies out there doing an admirable job of making things easier for the user. But nonetheless, it is nowhere near the ease-of-use of say...a Mac (thought I was gonna say Windows? Nahh...the wealth of PC/Windows support services out there attest to the fact that Windows is not all that easy either).
The point is, companies like Redhat are providing support services for Linux. That's because it needs to be supported! How much does that say to how easy it is to use Linux if a company can base a large part of its business on supporting Linux?
Of course, if Linux wasn't supposed to be used by regular, non-technical users, then it shouldn't be sold that way. I don't see why it couldn't, eventually, though.
The groups doing the GUI development have come a long way and it's looking better and better all the time. But aside from all its other uses like mobile computing, embedded applications, and server computing, does Linux want to become a regular home user's OS? Should Linux strive to be as easy, if not easier to setup and use than Windows and Mac for a non-technical user?
Like I said, all that documentation, as far as a non-technical user is concerned, is just too much. I would say that the documentation is simply going to be the knowledge base of the Linux community to draw from in the interim while developing the easier, simpler and less error-prone generations of Linux in the future.
I won't say that I have such insightful ideas of what I believe freedom and the Internet means. But I will say that I think that in order for the Internet to truly be free (both in freedom and in price) these should be true: 1. Free access to all. I think that all the companies providing free internet access is starting in the right direction. Basically, all people should be entitled to at least a free low-bandwidth (56K, right now) access to the Internet, anywhere our communication architecture reaches. These should be as basic as having public telephones or mailboxes on corners off the streets. Although I think they should be in booths like telephones were, with ATM like cnosole display and touch-screens and all of that. 2. The infrastructure must remain accessible to all. Right now, all those wires and fibers are owned by the large cable/telephone companies. The government has done a good(?) job in keeping those companies from monopolizing their access, opening up competition. The important thing is, as long as they are held in the power of corporations they will figure out someway to use that to restrict access and exert control. Nevermind that they haven't really tried or succeeded. 3. The device with which we use to access the Internet should also be as commonplace as public telephones (see #1). They should be everywhere. It should be more ubiquitous than the telephones and ATMs. This can be a great equalizer to bring access to more of the population. Get them in different languages! Touch screens to make things easy! We've all seen all the sci-fi movies like Star Trek and bladerunner and such.
Off on a different topic: I wonder about one thing, though. If creative contents and intellectual properties are so easily copied and disseminated, what would be the incentive for people to create? I mean, other than to give to the community? I mean, sure, information wants to be free, but how do we make sure that the creators get rewarded with means of sustenance, not just kudos and a pat in the back? Who will sponsor them (for obviously, they need to get sponsored).
Thank you, that's very insightful for me. Having only known three gay people in my life (I worked with two of them - one of them was my boss - an ex-interior decorator - and a DTP guy who has aspirations to be a screenwriter), it is hard for me to figure out if there are significant number of geek/hackers who are homosexual. I didn't doubt that there were - but just that I thought that living in a relatively homophobic society, perhaps some homosexuals would avoid choosing to become geeks/hackers because it might make it even tougher for themselves socially.
Or, it could be the opposite - having found themselves in a position where they are less socially accepted, they choose a vocation where there's an opportunity to have less contact with people, and yet be successful, career-wise.
While I agree with you, I think the idea of a women-oriented community, at this stage, may be more like an affirmative action movement, something that kind of allows a little more opportunity to a minority. I'm not an advocate of affirmative action either - but I think that it's original aim - to give a chance to minorities to show their merits - well, has some merit.
I think you are absolutely right in that they should just become part of mainstream.
But in order for them to be integrated, they will need the support of a community - a little more help to get them going, a little more affirmation that what they are trying to do is right.
Ask most male geeks -- particularly those who are young, straight, and single
When I saw this, I thought, are there many homosexual male hackers? Has there been any studies or reports on this kind of thing?
I'm asking because I geuinely want to know if geekdom is also a primarily a heterosexual male domain.
I think that when most people think of geeks, they think of socially-challenged but heterosexual males who are always lusting after girls but could never get them (or is that nerds?). I think that many or most of the computer games out there precisely target the geek population (young straight and single) because they are more willing to sit in front of computers for hours on end, obsessed with getting further or higher scores - an activity akin to hacking, I would say.
Also, do stereotypical homosexual male traits preclude them from being geeks?
Slashdot Mirror
What if, instead, they were not made of reflective material?
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely.
Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
They are trying to put a stop to it by saying that as long as you are limited in your ability to copy (basically, only a limited number of generations) then they will not be so severely and easily 'damaged'. Analog copies limited by the deterioration of quality, and licensed CD copiers that prevents you from making copies from copies are the only things they allow.
So this is nothing new. It just means that yeah, they'll allow you to copy for personal use (the law allows that anyway). But it won't allow you to make unlimited copies and share with your millions of friends on the Internet.
Why should this be surprising? This undermines their revenue source, which is to sell as many originals as they can. Since they are the ones who invested money into advancing money to the artists, promote the artists, pay the artists, and distribute the artists' material on different media, they want to recoup the cost of all of that. It's investment. To allow unauthorized copies means they get less on their investment. If you had investment like this, wouldn't you fight to get more return for your money?
On the other hand, if taken to extremes, it is just greed. People in the position to abuse the power will exploit it to no end.
There must be some happy median, somewhere.
Gaming is a very significant field in the next step of human communication. Human communication started with simple gestures, growing in complexity to be more expressive, systematically "cleaned up" to provide more consistent meaning to the messages.
We then got speech, words and writing. All significant advances in human communication. These were great, but bandwidth was low. The bandwidth limitation was due to geographic restrictions. You couldn't speak to millions of people around the world, because there were no means to do so.
Then came the technology for telecommunication. We got phones, we got radios, we got television. Phones were relatively low bandwidth, while radio and television were relatively high bandwidth. Of course, we all know that the architecture of that was hierarchical in nature, as broadcast media are wont to be.
We communicate to share ideas. But more importantly, we inherently want others to see our ideas, be influenced by our ideas, and become one of 'us'. This is the concept of memes, of course. Religion has very deep roots in the idea of memes. So do movies, tv shows, books, and more blatantly capitalistically, advertisement. They all want to sell you an idea, pass on the idea, and let you pass it on to yet more people. We are a people whose personality is defined by the memes that have infected us throughout the years with the (now) 'traditional' media.
Gaming is one step further (much like the Internet is, but they are on different conceptual levels, so there's no comparing them). Gaming also spreads memes (good vs. evil, what is mean by good and what is meant by evil, etc.) Gaming takes it one step further than broadcast media like movies, etc., in that it is actually allowing you to train in a 'practical' application of the memes in question.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about: In many games, we are constantly trying to defeat an evil archvillan and his (usually of male gender) henchmen, who are bent on taking over the world, dominating the population, destroying the spirit of goodness, etc. Where there is actually a slight hint of plot and morality, this is the archetypical theme.
It is no surprise, then, that these ideas often reflect historical governments and events. Now that we are living in a democracy, and (mostly) everyone sees it's good, then the games will depict anti-democratic ideas as evil.
Games, then, are neat little workbooks that now only teach us how to think and act, but gives us the opportunity to practice. Of course, there are many more lessons being taught in these games, many of them involve something along the lines of 'practice makes perfect' or 'journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' kind of morals. These morals were taught in fables and stories. Now that we have computers and interactivity, games have increasingly taken on these roles.
I think that in the future, games will become like storybooks of the past. In fact, it won't be that different than the book as depicted by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. So active academic pursuit of gaming will be crucial in the fields of humanities and communication. So this is a great first step. Don't fall into the trap of shallow assumption that this is not a serious thing. It's more serious than studying computer science (in that it is more interdisciplinary, and consequently cares about the sociological impacts).
Quite frankly, in the face of such negative public outcry, what else would you do? They admitted they made a mistake - not of the act itself, but of wanting to the act in the absence of government regulation. What this means is that they will still go ahead with it, and no doubt, they will spend lots of money to lobby hard for what they had in mind anyway. Except when that happens, they can point to the law that says they can.
I wonder if they can change their mind? I think it's a poor choice. Instead of trying to force the lizard(or whatever) motif, they could've went with something a little bit different, maybe something with the color, who knows.
Crusoe could even be used to keep it running longer than the one hour that Tama can run at.
It could be a new distro dubbed RoboLinux, or something like that.
But, with the platters spinning so fast, they can be used as gyroscopes.
even better, they can also be used as flywheels to store backup power for our computers! :)
Hey, with these things going so fast, they can double as gyroscopes in airplanes and stuff. Well, at least for now, they can act as stabilizers for our computers.
With encryption cracking efforts, it is easy to know if the solution was correct. But for problems like OGR, who verifies the results of such computations? I mean, I think there must be at least two other separate efforts that arrive at the same solution for me to be convinced that 'yeah, this is the answer'. Does anyone know how this is currently being done? Can they prove it mathematically?
Looks can be deceiving, but it's cooler than PIII (temperature-wise :)
1. People who do not have "reasonable" access to online news sources. 2. People who do, and reads both traditional paper and online news sources. 3. People who only reads news from online news resources.
In #1, reasonable means the person has decent Internet access and is savvy enough to know where to get good, reliable and broad range of news. This is usually not difficult.
I think most people on Slashdot may fall in #2, leaning or moving toward #3. (Well, for me this is the case).
The appeal of information on the Internet for us is the same as the appeal of paper for those who do not sit in front of the computer 10+ hours a day. It's accessible. We who read online have the added advantage of being able to check several sources constantly, be able to filter by preference, and more importantly, we can have some kind of community feedback mechanism.
The newspaper is still a great medium to deliver information en masse. That's why we demand so much of it. Because it is spreading to so many different people. Online, the potential audience is huge. With newspapers, the actual audience is very large.
So would old style newspapers cease to exist? Not very soon. Will people read more stuff online? Absolutely.
But news online needs to be different from the traditional paper-based news simply because it is a different culture, a different audience. There needs to be real efforts to make good information and content available online, rather than just copy from the paper medium. Creators of said content must also see the potential for interactivity by the online community and leverage it. It's not like I'm saying anything new here, Slashdot happens to fall into this category. But the quality of the online only sources have not been as good as the traditional paper based ones. They are not as rigorous about the journalistic standards the traditional newspapers have (or should have) adhere to. Credibility is important.
Sheesh, I wish I wasn't doing other things when writing this. It might have come out a little more coherent.
And certainly, all the domain-squatting may decrease a little.
However, people are not likely to change this until there is deemed an urgency. Some well-intentioned people (much like the ones who invented the Internet, and the open-source community, etc.) will not sit passively and wait, and will instead actively plan on it.
But then again, it's like one of those things that was a bad idea originally, but then becomes a feature because everyone is using it that way. It becomes the accepted norm, by popularity, and gets infused into the culture.
My question is, how do you change things now that the Internet has gotten so much momentum? It's easier to change things if you are not changing directions so much (like all the versions of HTML - incremental changes that goes with the flow with little corrective steps). If it's going to be in a fundamentally different direction, even if it is the greatest idea in the world, it will face considerable probability of failure.
and, it's only going to get worse, because the 'net's still growing!
Thankfully, the real world lies somewhere between the two extremes of Scott Adams and Bill Watterson.
hey, all power to Scott Adams if he could pull all of this off, but at some point, you just gotta question if there's anything he WOULDN'T get into.
In case you didn't realize, I like Calvin & Hobbes more than Dilbert. But then, they are apples and oranges, aren't they?
How come it wasn't Letter Size or Legal Size?
hmmm...still, it doesn't mean that they hadn't been planning this for a while.
This story raises some more questions, then, for why is the FBI out with this tool, so conveniently, so quickly, after the attacks?
just wondering.
Computer games is about learning and entertainment. Well, more specifically, it's about learning, training, and role-playing, which can all be loosely categorized under learning.
Computer games are the interactive lesson books, made fun by positive reinforcement of winning (the endorphin rush after fragging someone, the adrenaline pumping as you turn the corner and faces someone with a much bigger gun than you). There are, of course, philosophical and moral lessons that we are constantly bombarded with in computer games.
Computer games is an art, and art, imitates life.
And computer games, after all, are a higher level of interface between us and the rest of the world than the input/output devices. (A little extrapolation: since computer games ARE computer art, and since the Internet has become, for many of us, the main channel of communication, and since Internet computer games only seem to grow in numbers, it would seem that in the future, we would all communicate with each other, collaborate with each other by being plugged in and playing computer games all the time. So in that sense, you are right, computer art will ascend to great heights).
In any case, I can't believe the NYT article thought that "many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV". What kind of monitor are they using? This may have been true back in the Apple ][ days.
Most important, though, If they can get this to a size suitable for a webpad or an eBook of some sort, with a certain low-power consuming CPU, then you have your ideal portable electronic reading (as in words, and not viewing, as in pictures, although it'd be good for that too)device. From the article, though, it seems that size is not the issue, rather it's the cost. But hopefully, that will come down soon enough.
I think that like the Crusoe chip, its immediate application would best be in small mobile devices. This way, they could keep the cost down. Much like the way the original LCD screens were first used as displays for smaller portable computers way back, it will be the same path for the hi-res LCD screen.
Now, if they could just make the LCD made out of some flexible fiber/polymer material (I know they are already working on it), we would have web pads that can be rolled up...that'd be awesome.
The point is, companies like Redhat are providing support services for Linux. That's because it needs to be supported! How much does that say to how easy it is to use Linux if a company can base a large part of its business on supporting Linux?
Of course, if Linux wasn't supposed to be used by regular, non-technical users, then it shouldn't be sold that way. I don't see why it couldn't, eventually, though.
The groups doing the GUI development have come a long way and it's looking better and better all the time. But aside from all its other uses like mobile computing, embedded applications, and server computing, does Linux want to become a regular home user's OS? Should Linux strive to be as easy, if not easier to setup and use than Windows and Mac for a non-technical user?
Like I said, all that documentation, as far as a non-technical user is concerned, is just too much. I would say that the documentation is simply going to be the knowledge base of the Linux community to draw from in the interim while developing the easier, simpler and less error-prone generations of Linux in the future.
Didn't we see this a few days ago in this story? I was wondering why it sounded so familiar.
1. Free access to all. I think that all the companies providing free internet access is starting in the right direction. Basically, all people should be entitled to at least a free low-bandwidth (56K, right now) access to the Internet, anywhere our communication architecture reaches. These should be as basic as having public telephones or mailboxes on corners off the streets. Although I think they should be in booths like telephones were, with ATM like cnosole display and touch-screens and all of that.
2. The infrastructure must remain accessible to all. Right now, all those wires and fibers are owned by the large cable/telephone companies. The government has done a good(?) job in keeping those companies from monopolizing their access, opening up competition. The important thing is, as long as they are held in the power of corporations they will figure out someway to use that to restrict access and exert control. Nevermind that they haven't really tried or succeeded.
3. The device with which we use to access the Internet should also be as commonplace as public telephones (see #1). They should be everywhere. It should be more ubiquitous than the telephones and ATMs. This can be a great equalizer to bring access to more of the population. Get them in different languages! Touch screens to make things easy! We've all seen all the sci-fi movies like Star Trek and bladerunner and such.
Off on a different topic:
I wonder about one thing, though. If creative contents and intellectual properties are so easily copied and disseminated, what would be the incentive for people to create? I mean, other than to give to the community? I mean, sure, information wants to be free, but how do we make sure that the creators get rewarded with means of sustenance, not just kudos and a pat in the back? Who will sponsor them (for obviously, they need to get sponsored).
Or, it could be the opposite - having found themselves in a position where they are less socially accepted, they choose a vocation where there's an opportunity to have less contact with people, and yet be successful, career-wise.
I think you are absolutely right in that they should just become part of mainstream.
But in order for them to be integrated, they will need the support of a community - a little more help to get them going, a little more affirmation that what they are trying to do is right.
When I saw this, I thought, are there many homosexual male hackers? Has there been any studies or reports on this kind of thing?
I'm asking because I geuinely want to know if geekdom is also a primarily a heterosexual male domain.
I think that when most people think of geeks, they think of socially-challenged but heterosexual males who are always lusting after girls but could never get them (or is that nerds?). I think that many or most of the computer games out there precisely target the geek population (young straight and single) because they are more willing to sit in front of computers for hours on end, obsessed with getting further or higher scores - an activity akin to hacking, I would say.
Also, do stereotypical homosexual male traits preclude them from being geeks?