If you live in suburbia, your neighbors are probably going to have a problem with that big prop tower you are planning to erect. Keep in mind any large trees or buildings nearby are going to degrade the quality and reliability of your wind. Do you even have good wind where you are?
If your backyard looks more like a small-scale industrial site, where you do some agriculture or fabrication or what have you, and if you are in a rural area where you have wind and can get away with it, yes, put up a prop. It will be a fun project that should eventually pay for itself.
If you like wind power you might want to see how you could support it in your community.
My power company National Grid has a 'Green Up' program i've been participating in for a few years. I pay a 2 cent per kwh premium for a 'pure wind' option, which means that they supposedly reimburse a wind power project in my state for all the money I spend on electricity from them. I know I still get my juice from the grid like everyone else, but at least I don't have to feel quite as bad when I crank up the AC all summer.
In upstate New York, we have a company that has been trying to get approval for a 12MW wind project on an old mining site in the Adirondack park. The level of opposition has been... interesting. You can read more about that project on the advocacy site here: http://www.adirondackwind.com/
I remember a story that came out a few years ago about a crab parasite that would attach to a crabs genitals, sterilize it, and then secrete hormones that would make the crab think it was a female fanning it's eggs. ( But the crab would be nurturning the parasite instead. )
Here's a link to a short essay that's full of more examples:
http://www2.nau.edu/~bah/BIO471/Reader/Sapolsky_20 03.pdf
The work is pretty neat. They put a sock thing on your head and measure your brainwaves. Apparantly not everyone can be trained to use the system. There was a long screening process where they looked for people with brain patterns that they could read. I signed up for the screening but I was never called; I guess they got all the volunteers they needed. My friend went in for the screening; they make you wear the reader thing on your head while you concentrate on a dot moving through a very simple maze. Evenutally you get to try to control the dot; that's as far as my friend reached. I know that eventually they move you up to an actual "Armitron" toy that they wired up to the monitors. It is very cool research.
This stuff isn't geared to replacing your keyboard and mouse. The hook is the promise of developing the technology for better artificial limbs; but think about it. If a disabled person can control their own artificial arm with brainwaves; why not a big crane? Why not a crane on a battleship or out in orbit?
We received an HP tablet PC as a free gift with a bunch of switching equipment that we ordered. I'm not sure if it had a model number, it seemed to be some kind of demo unit or something. The overall impression was that it was a toy.
The handwriting recognition software was not installed on the unit that we received, so the stylus was just used like a mouse. The screen would rotate around so you could use it like a tablet or more like a laptop; it was a little bulky and short on features for any real work.
For the money I'd rather have one of the new Vaio picturebooks or an ultralight Thinkpad x31...
Users came to Google for the clean interface and stayed for the consistant results. I have known so many people who just use their search engine of choice through habit and never ever think to change. I'm sure we all can think of people who stubbornly cling to obscure legacy search engines like dogpile or even msn search (shiver)...
These are the people who just use msn or aol default search tool, and then discover that it is not working for them. Sooner or later they eventually find their way to Google; what would ever make them leave?
Casual internet users don't switch search engines out of curiosity. They have work to do and want answers fast.
A new search offering would have to offer a simple, clean, easy to learn interface and consitantly great results to ever usurp Google.
Or they could give away free money...
That sort of rings a bell, I seem to remember a William Gibson novel where the same sort of system was in place. In order to pay for long distance calls advertisements were inserted into the conversation. The catch was that the more expensive the call, the more frequent the ads would be, so on an extreme long distance call the callers would be shouting to each other franticly trying to squeese their conversation in between the ads.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that it's a shame about what has happened with low-power FM, but let's be serious- FM isn't going anywhere any time soon. In my area of New England, there are still several active AM stations to be found on the dial. I mostly listen to a lot of college, ethnic, and public radio stations while I'm in the car, so for me the track and title information on digial radio would qualify as a serious advantage all by itself, not even considering the increase in sound quality.
The "technology" page on ibiquity's website is already slashdotted, but I seem to recall from something I read last week that the digital channels were going to be transmitted over existing radio frequencies.
Even if I'm wrong about that, I imagine that these digital radio channels will be carrying compressed audio, so that might allow stations to broadcast several content streams simultaneously. It would be cool if NPR could broadcast a high bitrate stream of a live concert at night, while running multiple low bitrate news and talk streams during the daytime. I would think that technology like this would increase programming diversity on the airwaves, once the price of equipment comes down.
Some seem to think that it doesn't matter if Microsoft loses millions or billions on the XBox, because they will just release the XBox 2, and everybody will buy that, according to some larger Microsoft "strategy" to "own the living room". Game consoles don't work that way, for some reason. If the XBox goes the way of the Dreamcast, nobody... NOBODY is going to be clamoring for the XBox 2 (how many millions of people are eagerly awaiting Dreamcast 2? That's right, zero million.)
After all these years of typing, I can write way faster and more accurately with a keyboard than I could with a pen. My handwriting is for shit these days. And I couldn't imagine trying to write code with a pen!
I have never heard of this codec, but it seems to me that this is more or less what the LGPL is intended for. Take a quick look at the LGPL
and note this section:
For example, on rare occasions,
there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License.
(Emphasis mine)
Seems to me that the people at VP3 would like as many people as possible to start working with their codec, allowing it to gain ascendancy over other codecs so that someday they will be able to make money selling their own "enhanced" version.
Not a bad deal for GNU, because we get something badly needed. I hope that we start to hear more about this codec being used in some interesting projects in the future now that it has become more available.
I imagine that if human civilization ever came to accept this type of technology, it would be possible to one day use it to colonize far away solar systems. Instead of massive self-sustaining 'generation' ships, we could send unmanned robotic prospecting missions out to look for life-sustaining planets. If the ship found a promising new home, it would drop landing vehicles and build temporary shelters. Food plants could then be grown indoors from seeds transported in cold storage, and the planetary atmosphere tested further. If everything checked out, the ship could then start to give birth to and raise a "crew" from a cold-store of embryos.
The crew would grow up and be taught how to build more complicated structures and machinery; one day they would move out of the temporary shelters and onto the land itself. They would have access to an archive of our culture and knowledge to guide them as they adapted to the land and built a new culture from available resources. Maybe one day they would decide to 'phone home...', and we would meet aliens from space... ourselves!
Obviously, I am talking science fiction here; anyone who has seen a 2-year-old on a rampage realizes that it would require insane artificial-parent technology to bring about a new genesis of humanity on a far away planet, (I don't think the talking Barney and a VCR would cut it), but I do think that advances like the artificial womb are exciting, and bring all of this speculation closer to the realm of the possible.
The DMA will also require members that buy access to mailing lists--in which consumers have agreed to receive sales pitches from third parties--to check those names against an e-mail preference roster on its Web site. Addresses on this roster belong to consumers who have chosen not to receive any commercial e-mail.
So one of the ingenious ways they have of preventing spam is by posting a list of addresses on their website... anyone else see a problem with that? It is obvious to me that they don't really care about the spam problem, they just want to look like they are self-regulating so that congress doesn't interfere with their marketing plans.
From time to time I take a look at the pie chart
on Google's
Zeitgeist page, where they display the relative proportions of operating systems used to access Google. I figure it is a pretty good rough benchmark, as I know they get a lot of traffic from Linux users, so I would expect the representation of Linux on that chart to be high, but we are reading one percent!
It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.
I understand that it isn't really reasonable to expect that there would be a large proportion of Linux users though. I agree with some of the other posters that measurements like this are probably more likely to move our way once more people begin to access the internet through Linux embedded devices like cellphones and PDA's, set-top boxes, etc. "Linux on the desktop" probably won't seem like such a big deal as the desktop paradigm begins to fade. I imagine a future where the only people who even use a PC like we do now would be developers or scientists. Regular types will probably surf the web with all manner of specialized devices, and maybe not even think of it as 'surfing', but 'checking the weather', or 'looking something up'.
I don't understand why these companies can't come up with a product that would give the public what it wants... an all in one, home media server!
If there was a device that sold at somewhere close to TIVO price ranges, and could store video and mp3 audio, throw in an ethernet jack, some svideo and RCA hookups on the back so we could connect it to the rest of the entertainment system, and a DVD drive so I could stream DVD's over the home LAN, everybody and his brother would want one.
I don't think this type of product is too far fetched considering what you could already build from off the shelf commodity hardware and readily available free software. I know people are already working on hacking this type of device together.
The only people who are going to buy this thing for $1500 have too much money and too little understanding of what they are getting for the money.
Hey, that's a great idea! Maybe we could start a project where we dream up obnoxious methods of advertizing, and then obtain patents on them. If anyone tries to use one of the methods that we have already patented, we can take up donations and sue them to put an end to it; claiming that their method of advertizing violates our patent...
My first exposure to the GNU project was through programs like GNU chess ported to Windows, and the djgpp C compiler for DOS. I think that as people are given the opportunity to see that GNU software solves their problems, they will become more interested, leading to more interest in Linux and GNU software in general. This could be a great way for more of the public to "stick their toes in the water".
Slashdot Mirror
If you live in suburbia, your neighbors are probably going to have a problem with that big prop tower you are planning to erect. Keep in mind any large trees or buildings nearby are going to degrade the quality and reliability of your wind. Do you even have good wind where you are? If your backyard looks more like a small-scale industrial site, where you do some agriculture or fabrication or what have you, and if you are in a rural area where you have wind and can get away with it, yes, put up a prop. It will be a fun project that should eventually pay for itself.
If you like wind power you might want to see how you could support it in your community. My power company National Grid has a 'Green Up' program i've been participating in for a few years. I pay a 2 cent per kwh premium for a 'pure wind' option, which means that they supposedly reimburse a wind power project in my state for all the money I spend on electricity from them. I know I still get my juice from the grid like everyone else, but at least I don't have to feel quite as bad when I crank up the AC all summer.
In upstate New York, we have a company that has been trying to get approval for a 12MW wind project on an old mining site in the Adirondack park. The level of opposition has been ... interesting. You can read more about that project on the advocacy site here: http://www.adirondackwind.com/
I remember a story that came out a few years ago about a crab parasite that would attach to a crabs genitals, sterilize it, and then secrete hormones that would make the crab think it was a female fanning it's eggs. ( But the crab would be nurturning the parasite instead. ) Here's a link to a short essay that's full of more examples: http://www2.nau.edu/~bah/BIO471/Reader/Sapolsky_20 03.pdf
The work is pretty neat. They put a sock thing on your head and measure your brainwaves. Apparantly not everyone can be trained to use the system. There was a long screening process where they looked for people with brain patterns that they could read. I signed up for the screening but I was never called; I guess they got all the volunteers they needed. My friend went in for the screening; they make you wear the reader thing on your head while you concentrate on a dot moving through a very simple maze. Evenutally you get to try to control the dot; that's as far as my friend reached. I know that eventually they move you up to an actual "Armitron" toy that they wired up to the monitors. It is very cool research.
This stuff isn't geared to replacing your keyboard and mouse. The hook is the promise of developing the technology for better artificial limbs; but think about it. If a disabled person can control their own artificial arm with brainwaves; why not a big crane? Why not a crane on a battleship or out in orbit?
We received an HP tablet PC as a free gift with a bunch of switching equipment that we ordered. I'm not sure if it had a model number, it seemed to be some kind of demo unit or something. The overall impression was that it was a toy.
The handwriting recognition software was not installed on the unit that we received, so the stylus was just used like a mouse. The screen would rotate around so you could use it like a tablet or more like a laptop; it was a little bulky and short on features for any real work.
For the money I'd rather have one of the new Vaio picturebooks or an ultralight Thinkpad x31 ...
Users came to Google for the clean interface and stayed for the consistant results. I have known so many people who just use their search engine of choice through habit and never ever think to change. I'm sure we all can think of people who stubbornly cling to obscure legacy search engines like dogpile or even msn search (shiver)...
These are the people who just use msn or aol default search tool, and then discover that it is not working for them. Sooner or later they eventually find their way to Google; what would ever make them leave?
Casual internet users don't switch search engines out of curiosity. They have work to do and want answers fast. A new search offering would have to offer a simple, clean, easy to learn interface and consitantly great results to ever usurp Google. Or they could give away free money...
That sort of rings a bell, I seem to remember a William Gibson novel where the same sort of system was in place. In order to pay for long distance calls advertisements were inserted into the conversation. The catch was that the more expensive the call, the more frequent the ads would be, so on an extreme long distance call the callers would be shouting to each other franticly trying to squeese their conversation in between the ads.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that it's a shame about what has happened with low-power FM, but let's be serious- FM isn't going anywhere any time soon. In my area of New England, there are still several active AM stations to be found on the dial. I mostly listen to a lot of college, ethnic, and public radio stations while I'm in the car, so for me the track and title information on digial radio would qualify as a serious advantage all by itself, not even considering the increase in sound quality.
The "technology" page on ibiquity's website is already slashdotted, but I seem to recall from something I read last week that the digital channels were going to be transmitted over existing radio frequencies.
Even if I'm wrong about that, I imagine that these digital radio channels will be carrying compressed audio, so that might allow stations to broadcast several content streams simultaneously. It would be cool if NPR could broadcast a high bitrate stream of a live concert at night, while running multiple low bitrate news and talk streams during the daytime. I would think that technology like this would increase programming diversity on the airwaves, once the price of equipment comes down.
I was wondering what the hell we were talking about here until I found this discussion of the Coble-Berman bill that would restrict fair use...
Yeah, but read the article:
After all these years of typing, I can write way faster and more accurately with a keyboard than I could with a pen. My handwriting is for shit these days. And I couldn't imagine trying to write code with a pen!
I have never heard of this codec, but it seems to me that this is more or less what the LGPL is intended for. Take a quick look at the LGPL and note this section:
(Emphasis mine)
Seems to me that the people at VP3 would like as many people as possible to start working with their codec, allowing it to gain ascendancy over other codecs so that someday they will be able to make money selling their own "enhanced" version. Not a bad deal for GNU, because we get something badly needed. I hope that we start to hear more about this codec being used in some interesting projects in the future now that it has become more available.
I imagine that if human civilization ever came to accept this type of technology, it would be possible to one day use it to colonize far away solar systems. Instead of massive self-sustaining 'generation' ships, we could send unmanned robotic prospecting missions out to look for life-sustaining planets. If the ship found a promising new home, it would drop landing vehicles and build temporary shelters. Food plants could then be grown indoors from seeds transported in cold storage, and the planetary atmosphere tested further. If everything checked out, the ship could then start to give birth to and raise a "crew" from a cold-store of embryos.
The crew would grow up and be taught how to build more complicated structures and machinery; one day they would move out of the temporary shelters and onto the land itself. They would have access to an archive of our culture and knowledge to guide them as they adapted to the land and built a new culture from available resources. Maybe one day they would decide to 'phone home...', and we would meet aliens from space... ourselves!
Obviously, I am talking science fiction here; anyone who has seen a 2-year-old on a rampage realizes that it would require insane artificial-parent technology to bring about a new genesis of humanity on a far away planet, (I don't think the talking Barney and a VCR would cut it), but I do think that advances like the artificial womb are exciting, and bring all of this speculation closer to the realm of the possible.
So one of the ingenious ways they have of preventing spam is by posting a list of addresses on their website... anyone else see a problem with that? It is obvious to me that they don't really care about the spam problem, they just want to look like they are self-regulating so that congress doesn't interfere with their marketing plans.
From time to time I take a look at the pie chart on Google's Zeitgeist page, where they display the relative proportions of operating systems used to access Google. I figure it is a pretty good rough benchmark, as I know they get a lot of traffic from Linux users, so I would expect the representation of Linux on that chart to be high, but we are reading one percent!
It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.
I understand that it isn't really reasonable to expect that there would be a large proportion of Linux users though. I agree with some of the other posters that measurements like this are probably more likely to move our way once more people begin to access the internet through Linux embedded devices like cellphones and PDA's, set-top boxes, etc. "Linux on the desktop" probably won't seem like such a big deal as the desktop paradigm begins to fade. I imagine a future where the only people who even use a PC like we do now would be developers or scientists. Regular types will probably surf the web with all manner of specialized devices, and maybe not even think of it as 'surfing', but 'checking the weather', or 'looking something up'.
I don't understand why these companies can't come up with a product that would give the public what it wants... an all in one, home media server!
If there was a device that sold at somewhere close to TIVO price ranges, and could store video and mp3 audio, throw in an ethernet jack, some svideo and RCA hookups on the back so we could connect it to the rest of the entertainment system, and a DVD drive so I could stream DVD's over the home LAN, everybody and his brother would want one.
I don't think this type of product is too far fetched considering what you could already build from off the shelf commodity hardware and readily available free software. I know people are already working on hacking this type of device together.
The only people who are going to buy this thing for $1500 have too much money and too little understanding of what they are getting for the money.
Hey, that's a great idea! Maybe we could start a project where we dream up obnoxious methods of advertizing, and then obtain patents on them. If anyone tries to use one of the methods that we have already patented, we can take up donations and sue them to put an end to it; claiming that their method of advertizing violates our patent...
My first exposure to the GNU project was through programs like GNU chess ported to Windows, and the djgpp C compiler for DOS. I think that as people are given the opportunity to see that GNU software solves their problems, they will become more interested, leading to more interest in Linux and GNU software in general. This could be a great way for more of the public to "stick their toes in the water".