This notion that software must have formal specs and testing in order to be trusted is similar to the notion in the manufacturing industry that you must be ISO 9000 certified in order to be trusted to produce quality products. ISO 9000 is said to be a quality assurance standard, but it is basically a rigid certification process to show that business processes are specified and standardized. In other words, it doesn't mean the manufacturer makes good parts. In fact, it makes no measurements or judgements with regard to actual product quality. It just means that the company uses the same design process, the same production process, and the same testing process for every product, and that all of these are specified and audited. It's an assurance that no one does anything except "by the book". The book may be recipe for quality or not, but they are certified to be following it regardless. So if the manufacturer makes products of a certain quality, you can trust that future products, designed and built with the same processes, will have similar quality. A competitor may build superior products, but lack the same rigid procedures (maybe they trust the intelligence and experience of their employees), and therefore not be certified.
ISO certification is a great comfort to purchasing managers who prefer trusting a bureaucratic process to trusting individuals or their own judgment. This is similar to companies that require job candidates to have a certification, rather than independently assessing the candidate's skills and knowledge. It's not meant to be an equal opportunity process. It's meant to be a discriminating process that allows a decision to be made without anyone having to exercise their own judgment and thereby risk their reputation. It means you aren't risking your own reputation, and you don't trust anyone else's.
The fact is that making judgments of quality or security is difficult, and most people are lazy. Nothing prevents anyone from coming up with a way to measure security and putting OpenBSD to the test. This mentality, however, would make it an imperative that the software be retested with every change. Any what assurance is there that the test itself, or the person conducting it, can be trusted. ("We'll need to see some certification").
Certain types of people will always have greater confidence in the legal recourse to hold someone else accountable than they have in their own judgment. It's just too bad that those people are given so much credit.
From a stregic perspective, Penguin and VA have always been vulnerable. They cannot compete with the big boys on production volume or price. COMPAQ has been trying to do what DELL does for years, with limited success, so the likelihood of VA or Penguin ever being able to compete head to head with DELL is nil. But for a while that didn't matter, because their edge was in Linux expertise. Even today, they still have this edge. The problem for them is that there are no "barriers to entry" to prevent DELL from being able to duplicate that edge. All it will take is closer cooperation with Red Hat, or if they want to get aggressive, the purchase and LinuxCare, and DELL could be competitive on Linux expertise.
What Penguin and VA should do is find ways to differentiate themselves from the DELL and IBM Linux offerings. It's no longer enough just to say "our pre-install is slightly better". It needs to be a lot better, or they need to offer additional services that DELL and IBM don't offer.
Another good strategic move would be for VA and Penguin to partner or merge with a larger-scale manufacturing company, which is the "if you can't beat em, join em" strategy. Of course, if they want to remain small players, that's fine (although it would disappoint their shareholders, in the case of VA). There are plenty of small high-end hi-fi manufacturers who make kick-ass products at great expense to serve the audiophile market and could care less if they don't compete head-to-head with SONY.
Not to be confused with a marketroid, let's just say I'm a fan of Michael Porter, who is the leading expert in Competitive Strategy, and probably the most respected marketing professor at Harvard Business School. It pays to know your enemy;)
He's working hard to get Silicon Valley support so he can have a fighting chance in California. If the Valley is behind this case (and AFAIK they are) then Bush would have a lot of reasons not to interfere.
Besides, dropping the case would be politically equivalent to Ford pardoning Nixon combined with passing a special "Bill Gates Only" tax cut. Bush may be pro-business, but he still wants to look like he cares for the little guy too.
That brings to mind one of my favorite early Dilbert strips, where Dilbert shows his new ultra-thin computer chip to Ratbert, who eats it. Dilbert screams, "Hey, you ate my computer!", to which Ratbert replies, "I am a cyborg."
I must disagree with this statement, that there is something wrong with using an OS or a programming language that is 30+ years old. This is why we study Computer Science, and not just Programming.
We're still using the same mathematical equations that the Greeks and Eqyptians used thousands of years ago. Does that make them out of date?
We should all be thankful that we don't have to learn "new", "better", or more "up to date", programming languages as often as we need to upgrade our PCs. If that were the case, then we'd all need Who's Afraid Of... books.
From what I heard, he invented the moves. He was the mastermind behind all of IBM's strategies to drag the case out, because he knew that the longer it took to get a verdict, the less relevant it would be. He succeeded for 13 years and the government eventually gave up the case. It's clear when you look at the Microsoft case that the government did everything possible to prevent Microsoft from succeeding in the same way.
I'm a bit concerned about the appeal, because it seems that much of Microsoft's arguments are that the first trial went too fast and that they were denied the opportunity to call witnesses at the end. Basically, they're saying, "this isn't fair because we didn't get to drag the case out for years". I think the appeal is going to be all about the process and not about the facts. If the Circuit Court of Appeals decides that the process was too rushed and unfair, then it not only would mean that M$ gets away with it, but it means that the government will never be able to successfully try an anti-trust case because the drag-it-out-like-IBM strategy will work every time. On the other hand, it will be a great victory for anti-trust enforcement if the streamlined process gets the higher court's blessing.
Hey, NBC needs a hit too, so why not launch a dozen contestants into space and put them on Mir. They'd need two tribes... astronauts and cosmonauts? Teambuilding challenges... spacewalk relay races, zero-air-pressure endurance marathon, how many "space ice creams" can you eat without adding water before your mouth dries out?
Of course, the losing team votes off a member each week. "Please exit through the airlock of shame."
The outrageous price of electricity during peak demand is paid by the utility to whoever has spare electricity to sell them; it is not paid directly by the consumer. It is much cheaper for the utility to pay exorbitant rates for a short period of time than to fail to meet the load. A brownout could fry every running motor in the area, and a blackout, as you mentioned, can lead to deaths from heat exposure.
I'm not positive, but I'd bet utilities have insurance for this type of thing. In any case, the high costs represent a free exchange in a fair market, which the utility can capitalize over the rest of the year. The utility doesn't suddenly bill people for 10x what they usually pay for electricity.
The high prices make it worthwhile for the small power developers to invest in building mini-plants. Without them, we'd have a lot more outages.
You're right about nuclear, but it'll never happen in the US. The French did nuclear right, but they seem to accept it over there. We build every plant unique, so the design and certification costs were outrageous. The French standardized and planned things much more effectively, but they're also nationalized.
Unless you live in Tennessee, AFAIK, your power company is a commercial entity, not government affiliated. Power production has long been a "natural monopoly" because it would be inefficient to have 2 sets of power lines on every street. For this reason, the power industry has long been heavily regulated by the DOE. In recent years, there has been a lot of deregulation, which has allowed companies like Enron to become power brokers, buying and selling electricity across the power grid, giving consumers some choice.
There is some fear-mongering here. The fact is that there is plenty of electricity in most markets throughout the year. It's only peak demand periods, like we get in cities during a heat wave, that overload the system.
The article is correct about the price of energy increasing exponentially during these peak demand conditions. That is why many small private power companies are building gas turbine plants which can be started in about 20 minutes to meet peak demand. These micro-plants are idle most of the time, because they are less efficient than conventional plants and therefore unprofitable to operate when the price of electricity is at a normal level. But at peak demand, the price increases by one or two orders of magnitude, and these microplants become very lucrative.
These microplants are being built as fast as good locations can be found. The developers are targeting locations that can serve the largest peak demand nodes. Better than any government regulations, private industry is going to supply the electricity that we need. It may be a few more years before the capacity is there to prevent blackouts altogether, but the power industry is working very hard to solve this problem.
Incidentally, the increase in demand from computers is not seasonal, so it isn't contributing significantly to this problem. The power industry has expanded capacity gradually over the past 100 years to keep pace with steady demand. Unlike having your AC or lighting down for a few hours once a year, however, companies can't afford to have their computers go down, but they are not causing the power problem, they just feel the effects.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Oil tycoons give the best advice
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
J. Paul Getty gave famous advice once that it's best to own appreciating assets and rent depreciating assets. Owning a house is an investment. Owning a car isn't.
Let's get some perspective here. This isn't a trend, it's just the greater availability of consumer credit. With all this consumer renting and leasing going on, stock ownership is higher and more widespread than ever before.
The site lets voters speak their minds and then automatically email it to their reps and the president. This once inundated the servers at the White House, which set up a filter to limit the # of emails coming from vote.com. I guess Morris didn't mind pissing off his former employer, and the administration isn't really interested in listening to the views of regular citizens.
In fairness to Newton, after your multiple references that he "lost", Quantum Mechanics doesn't disprove Newtonian Physics, it just places it at a differnt level of abstraction. Outside of pure mathematical abstraction, all science is made of theories which model the workings of the universe to the best degree of accuracy and measurement that exists. Someday, physicists will probably unlock the secrets of the sub-sub-sub-atomic particles and declare that quantum physics of the 20th century was a primitive approximation for how things really work. In our current frame of reference, our present theories hold up. In Newton's frame of reference, his theories also hold up.
You can argue that theoretically, Newtonian physics can't fully explain the physics of a 90mph pitch of a baseball, but if you try to pull out transformations to take relativity into account, your corrections will be many orders of magnitude too small to affect a significant digit. Newton deserves the same respect we give Einstein, who may someday be just as "wrong".
IIRC, in loco parentis is the legal basis for schools to censor student speech and conduct searches of student property. This doesn't override parental rights, but I believe it does grant these limited rights to the school. I disagree with it, of course, but I believe it's still valid.
Things would certainly be different if schools had to grant students the same rights that they and all other employers in the US are required to grant to their employees.
The school can act "in loco parentis" to basically take away any rights that kids might otherwise have. When I was a HS newspaper editor, the school had the right to censor us because they were paying for the publishing and it was the "official" student newspaper. Even if we published a newsletter on our own at Kinko's, the school could prevent it from being distributed on school property if they didn't like it. Now, if I went just off school property and handed out a newsletter, I was a private citizen with full rights.
I don't understand what legal grounds the school and police have to confiscate this kid's computer or even arrest him. The judge who issued that court order should be taken to task on this, because unless there was some evidence that the site represented a danger, it should be protected by the first amendment up until such time as it is proven libelous in civil court.
Can someone out there explain what "criminal libel" is? Does the state get special treatment if the libel is allegedly committed against its own officers, mainly the teachers and school officials? What's the legal basis for this, the Sedition Act?
Does anyone know if the original Aloha Network is still running, and how to connect to it? Do you have an Alto on your sailboat?
Seriously, you have two realistic options: Inmarsat and cellular. Either way you're using a modem and getting a slow connection. Inmarsat is expensive, as in an investment that becomes part of the boat. Probably beyond your vacation budget. As some others have speculated, I can confirm that this is what the Navy uses for unclassified Internet email on all but its largest ships. Alternatively, Cellular is probably the most cost-effective and easy to use option. The downside is the range is limited to about 10-15 miles offshore, depending on conditions. You will want to use a marine-grade cell phone, rather than a hand-held, in order to get the best range. You can probably rent one of these.
Even more seriously, doesn't email sort of defeat the whole purpose of sailing as a vacation?
A ladder diagram is used to represent basic logic circuits. Basically you have two lines going down the sides of your drawing, representing a voltage, and you put draw little circuits across to make rungs. A straight line across would be a short circuit.
For example: |--Switch1---lightbulb1---| |--Switch2-/
This represents two switches in parallel, so lightbulb1 will get juice if either Switch is on. So this is the equivalent of OR.
|--Switch1--Switch2--Light1---| This is AND.
You can add new rungs and include relays, so that a switch3 could be a relay driven off of lightbulb1. By cascading with relays, you can have states, which can represent steps in a process. Switches can be sensors and lightbulbs can be actuators, so you can build a very simple circuit that can control a multi-step process with safety conditions, such as "only activate the forge if there is a blank in place(detected by a proximity sensor), and the temperature is withing certain limits(sensors), and previous steps were completed successfully, and the operators hands are safely out of the way holding down switches 8 and 9." Instead of wiring all this up as actual circuits, you can connect all of the sensors and actuators to the PLC. That allows you to store your programs, it simplifies the wiring, and you don't need to use actual relays, timers, etc. (You'll still use some relays of course if you need the low voltage coming out of the PLC to activate heavy equipment.)
Simple do-it-yourself application: You could connect all your home lighting, along with motion sensors and switches to a PLC, and set up any number of different logical relationships. So a single switch could be "home/away" which could control a large number of lights throughout the house. A single "movie lighting" switch could turn off certain lights, turn others on, dim a few more, turn off the dishwasher, and set a timer to go back to normal in two hours in case you fall asleep.
I don't have one, but I think the cheapest models are probably under $100. They never crash, they can run for years, they're extremely reliable, easy to use, and cheap. If you can program a VCR, then you can program a PLC. Unfortunately, that rules it out as a product for the home market.
This is why most manufacturing and heavy machinery systems are controlled by programmable logic controllers (PLCs). You can't risk someone getting hurt because of software bugs, so either you go through the rigorous and expensive process that the FSW team uses, or you keep the system so simple that rigorous testing can be achieved at low cost. PLCs are very simple, reliable, cheap and flexible. They're just NOT general purpose. You can't play Quake on them, but if you want to program a sequence of control switches, they can't be beat. It doesn't hurt that programming a PLC is about as easy as drawing a ladder diagram.
I second that opinion. My SprintPCS STAR-TAC works pretty well, for quotes and such, and can receive email. I bought the phone for it's size and battery life, without really caring about the web service. When I activated, I discovered I could get ten messages/pageviews a month for $2, so I gave it a try. If I start using it more the unlimited service is only about $11/month.
Whether you consider Sprint or not, PCS is probably the way to go because it's a device you're carrying around anyway, rather than an extra device. It's also a rather small addition to a monthly expense that you're probably paying already, rather than a completely separate service. If you end up buying the next Palm or the fabled Transmeta web pad in a few years, just turn off the feature and you still have a nice cell phone.
Theory one: Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for saying that in order for a new product/brand to overthrow the market leader, it has to be ten times better. This is because of the high cost in time and effort of switching. If we're talking in terms of uptime, I think Linux is thousands of times better than Windows. But by other measures, like ease of use, it may or may not be better and it certainly isn't ten times better. If Linux were a company, it would take too long and the company would go out of business before it supplanted Windows. Since Linux is free, it can't go out of business and we can all wait as long as it takes for Linux to gradually supplant Windows. To reduce the very long wait, we'd have to improve Linux to make it ten times better.
Theory two: I'm just starting to read The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker. His thesis is that by applying theories from the field of epidemiology to other situations you can find explanations for seemingly inexplicable fads or trends. He argues that the same rules that apply to the spread of the flu apply to anything that is contagious. We all can attest to the contagious nature of Linux, so according to Gladwell it is simply a matter of reaching critical mass. He would say that there is a threshold, perhaps a percentage of users who switch to Linux, which acts as a "tipping point" where suddenly the balance is shifted and suddenly everyone else will switch. One of his examples in the book is fax machines, which came on the market in the seventies, but didn't reach critical mass until 1987 when enough people had them that it suddenly became something that everyone had to have. For cell phones, he says this happened in 1998, when the late adopters started buying them in droves. So we need to keep spreading the Linux germ, infecting our friends and acquaintances until we reach critical mass. It would be interesting to look at past shifts, like Wordperfect->MSWord or Lotus123->MSExcel, to see what percentage threshold was the tipping point. It may still be years away, but I like this theory, because it would be fun to see Linux flying off the shelves in glory as Windows drowns in its own $#!%.
Look, I wouldn't have risked my +1 bonus if was just trying to go for points. You say the links to the portals weren't necessary, but actually none of my links were necessary. I was trying to show an extreme example of maximal linking which is common on most nodes at everything2.com. I wouldn't plug/. if it weren't important to the point I was making, which is that unlike most major web sites, it allows every visitor to contribute not only comments, but links as well.
BTW, if you hadn't pissed away your karma, you might have been able to moderate me down.
I probably know to little about AI to be suggesting anything here, but disclaimers aside:
I've always found it disappointing that systems which try to profile customer preferences aren't smart enough to understand that people can like the same thing for completely different reasons. A smarter system should be able to model the motivations and intentions of consumers to better match them to products and services. It would need to be able to store partial information, which may not make sense initially, but which could provide meaning after sufficient accumulation.
I think consumers would be very willing to answer questions like, "Why did you buy this product" or, "Click the attributes you like/dislike about this product." Most people who browse the internet are often actually looking for in-depth product information. In fact, the ideal way to collect this information would be to interact intelligently with the user when they are using a search engine, trying to find a specific piece of information. It would be great if AI software could help them find what they are looking for and be able to suggest truely similar alternatives.
This may seem nefarious, but I don't think advertising would be an intrusion if it were driven by true interests of individuals rather than the sales goals of marketing execs.
Slashdotters, and especially Everything noders, are good at including relevant links in their posts, and presumably on their own pages. The problem is that most of the content being created for the web is written the same way as traditional magazine or newspaper copy. It's the old 90/10 rule: 90% of the eyeballs are viewing 10% of the available content, and that 10% is generally on commercial sites one or two clicks away from the Yahoo, Netscape, MSN, or AOL main pages.
Look at the money going into streaming media. A large segment of the business world still sees the internet as just another medium for TV or radio broadcasting. By it's very nature broadcasting is not interconnected, it's passive and linear.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web that the main obstacle to the web being a true information web of shared knowledge is that content is controlled by too few. He was upset that browsers were developed which could not edit web pages like his original browser/editor.
The silver lining to this, IMHO, is the "weblog" phenomenon, including sites like Slashdot, where ordinary users can contribute their ideas, especially in html format so that they can contribute links. I really believe that some day soon the conventional media sites will be forced to give this kind of capability to their readers, or else risk losing all those eyeballs to Slash-like sites.
I don't remember where I heard this, but I heard once that there were nukes buried along the eastern border with the Warsaw Pact nations in Europe. The idea was that they'd allow the invading Soviet tanks to gain some ground and then once in position, they'd set off the nukes beneath them. Any truth to this? Are they still there?
Mr. President, I have a plan...
It would not be difficult, Mein Fuhrer... Oh, sorry, Mr. President.
Slashdot Mirror
ISO certification is a great comfort to purchasing managers who prefer trusting a bureaucratic process to trusting individuals or their own judgment. This is similar to companies that require job candidates to have a certification, rather than independently assessing the candidate's skills and knowledge. It's not meant to be an equal opportunity process. It's meant to be a discriminating process that allows a decision to be made without anyone having to exercise their own judgment and thereby risk their reputation. It means you aren't risking your own reputation, and you don't trust anyone else's.
The fact is that making judgments of quality or security is difficult, and most people are lazy. Nothing prevents anyone from coming up with a way to measure security and putting OpenBSD to the test. This mentality, however, would make it an imperative that the software be retested with every change. Any what assurance is there that the test itself, or the person conducting it, can be trusted. ("We'll need to see some certification").
Certain types of people will always have greater confidence in the legal recourse to hold someone else accountable than they have in their own judgment. It's just too bad that those people are given so much credit.
What Penguin and VA should do is find ways to differentiate themselves from the DELL and IBM Linux offerings. It's no longer enough just to say "our pre-install is slightly better". It needs to be a lot better, or they need to offer additional services that DELL and IBM don't offer.
Another good strategic move would be for VA and Penguin to partner or merge with a larger-scale manufacturing company, which is the "if you can't beat em, join em" strategy. Of course, if they want to remain small players, that's fine (although it would disappoint their shareholders, in the case of VA). There are plenty of small high-end hi-fi manufacturers who make kick-ass products at great expense to serve the audiophile market and could care less if they don't compete head-to-head with SONY.
Not to be confused with a marketroid, let's just say I'm a fan of Michael Porter, who is the leading expert in Competitive Strategy, and probably the most respected marketing professor at Harvard Business School. It pays to know your enemy ;)
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Besides, dropping the case would be politically equivalent to Ford pardoning Nixon combined with passing a special "Bill Gates Only" tax cut. Bush may be pro-business, but he still wants to look like he cares for the little guy too.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
We're still using the same mathematical equations that the Greeks and Eqyptians used thousands of years ago. Does that make them out of date?
We should all be thankful that we don't have to learn "new", "better", or more "up to date", programming languages as often as we need to upgrade our PCs. If that were the case, then we'd all need Who's Afraid Of... books.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
I'm a bit concerned about the appeal, because it seems that much of Microsoft's arguments are that the first trial went too fast and that they were denied the opportunity to call witnesses at the end. Basically, they're saying, "this isn't fair because we didn't get to drag the case out for years". I think the appeal is going to be all about the process and not about the facts. If the Circuit Court of Appeals decides that the process was too rushed and unfair, then it not only would mean that M$ gets away with it, but it means that the government will never be able to successfully try an anti-trust case because the drag-it-out-like-IBM strategy will work every time. On the other hand, it will be a great victory for anti-trust enforcement if the streamlined process gets the higher court's blessing.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Of course, the losing team votes off a member each week. "Please exit through the airlock of shame."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
- Mettalika
- Brytni Spiers
- M-and-M
- Broose-remove-Spring-me-stene
These are all legitimate garage bands, I swear!"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
I'm not positive, but I'd bet utilities have insurance for this type of thing. In any case, the high costs represent a free exchange in a fair market, which the utility can capitalize over the rest of the year. The utility doesn't suddenly bill people for 10x what they usually pay for electricity.
The high prices make it worthwhile for the small power developers to invest in building mini-plants. Without them, we'd have a lot more outages.
You're right about nuclear, but it'll never happen in the US. The French did nuclear right, but they seem to accept it over there. We build every plant unique, so the design and certification costs were outrageous. The French standardized and planned things much more effectively, but they're also nationalized.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
There is some fear-mongering here. The fact is that there is plenty of electricity in most markets throughout the year. It's only peak demand periods, like we get in cities during a heat wave, that overload the system.
The article is correct about the price of energy increasing exponentially during these peak demand conditions. That is why many small private power companies are building gas turbine plants which can be started in about 20 minutes to meet peak demand. These micro-plants are idle most of the time, because they are less efficient than conventional plants and therefore unprofitable to operate when the price of electricity is at a normal level. But at peak demand, the price increases by one or two orders of magnitude, and these microplants become very lucrative.
These microplants are being built as fast as good locations can be found. The developers are targeting locations that can serve the largest peak demand nodes. Better than any government regulations, private industry is going to supply the electricity that we need. It may be a few more years before the capacity is there to prevent blackouts altogether, but the power industry is working very hard to solve this problem.
Incidentally, the increase in demand from computers is not seasonal, so it isn't contributing significantly to this problem. The power industry has expanded capacity gradually over the past 100 years to keep pace with steady demand. Unlike having your AC or lighting down for a few hours once a year, however, companies can't afford to have their computers go down, but they are not causing the power problem, they just feel the effects.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Let's get some perspective here. This isn't a trend, it's just the greater availability of consumer credit. With all this consumer renting and leasing going on, stock ownership is higher and more widespread than ever before.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
The site lets voters speak their minds and then automatically email it to their reps and the president. This once inundated the servers at the White House, which set up a filter to limit the # of emails coming from vote.com. I guess Morris didn't mind pissing off his former employer, and the administration isn't really interested in listening to the views of regular citizens.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
You can argue that theoretically, Newtonian physics can't fully explain the physics of a 90mph pitch of a baseball, but if you try to pull out transformations to take relativity into account, your corrections will be many orders of magnitude too small to affect a significant digit. Newton deserves the same respect we give Einstein, who may someday be just as "wrong".
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Things would certainly be different if schools had to grant students the same rights that they and all other employers in the US are required to grant to their employees.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
I don't understand what legal grounds the school and police have to confiscate this kid's computer or even arrest him. The judge who issued that court order should be taken to task on this, because unless there was some evidence that the site represented a danger, it should be protected by the first amendment up until such time as it is proven libelous in civil court.
Can someone out there explain what "criminal libel" is? Does the state get special treatment if the libel is allegedly committed against its own officers, mainly the teachers and school officials? What's the legal basis for this, the Sedition Act?
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Seriously, you have two realistic options: Inmarsat and cellular. Either way you're using a modem and getting a slow connection. Inmarsat is expensive, as in an investment that becomes part of the boat. Probably beyond your vacation budget. As some others have speculated, I can confirm that this is what the Navy uses for unclassified Internet email on all but its largest ships. Alternatively, Cellular is probably the most cost-effective and easy to use option. The downside is the range is limited to about 10-15 miles offshore, depending on conditions. You will want to use a marine-grade cell phone, rather than a hand-held, in order to get the best range. You can probably rent one of these.
Even more seriously, doesn't email sort of defeat the whole purpose of sailing as a vacation?
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
For example:
|--Switch1---lightbulb1---|
|--Switch2-/
This represents two switches in parallel, so lightbulb1 will get juice if either Switch is on. So this is the equivalent of OR.
|--Switch1--Switch2--Light1---|
This is AND.
You can add new rungs and include relays, so that a switch3 could be a relay driven off of lightbulb1. By cascading with relays, you can have states, which can represent steps in a process. Switches can be sensors and lightbulbs can be actuators, so you can build a very simple circuit that can control a multi-step process with safety conditions, such as "only activate the forge if there is a blank in place(detected by a proximity sensor), and the temperature is withing certain limits(sensors), and previous steps were completed successfully, and the operators hands are safely out of the way holding down switches 8 and 9." Instead of wiring all this up as actual circuits, you can connect all of the sensors and actuators to the PLC. That allows you to store your programs, it simplifies the wiring, and you don't need to use actual relays, timers, etc. (You'll still use some relays of course if you need the low voltage coming out of the PLC to activate heavy equipment.)
Simple do-it-yourself application: You could connect all your home lighting, along with motion sensors and switches to a PLC, and set up any number of different logical relationships. So a single switch could be "home/away" which could control a large number of lights throughout the house. A single "movie lighting" switch could turn off certain lights, turn others on, dim a few more, turn off the dishwasher, and set a timer to go back to normal in two hours in case you fall asleep.
I don't have one, but I think the cheapest models are probably under $100. They never crash, they can run for years, they're extremely reliable, easy to use, and cheap. If you can program a VCR, then you can program a PLC. Unfortunately, that rules it out as a product for the home market.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Whether you consider Sprint or not, PCS is probably the way to go because it's a device you're carrying around anyway, rather than an extra device. It's also a rather small addition to a monthly expense that you're probably paying already, rather than a completely separate service. If you end up buying the next Palm or the fabled Transmeta web pad in a few years, just turn off the feature and you still have a nice cell phone.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Theory two: I'm just starting to read The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker. His thesis is that by applying theories from the field of epidemiology to other situations you can find explanations for seemingly inexplicable fads or trends. He argues that the same rules that apply to the spread of the flu apply to anything that is contagious. We all can attest to the contagious nature of Linux, so according to Gladwell it is simply a matter of reaching critical mass. He would say that there is a threshold, perhaps a percentage of users who switch to Linux, which acts as a "tipping point" where suddenly the balance is shifted and suddenly everyone else will switch. One of his examples in the book is fax machines, which came on the market in the seventies, but didn't reach critical mass until 1987 when enough people had them that it suddenly became something that everyone had to have. For cell phones, he says this happened in 1998, when the late adopters started buying them in droves. So we need to keep spreading the Linux germ, infecting our friends and acquaintances until we reach critical mass. It would be interesting to look at past shifts, like Wordperfect->MSWord or Lotus123->MSExcel, to see what percentage threshold was the tipping point. It may still be years away, but I like this theory, because it would be fun to see Linux flying off the shelves in glory as Windows drowns in its own $#!%.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
BTW, if you hadn't pissed away your karma, you might have been able to moderate me down.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
I've always found it disappointing that systems which try to profile customer preferences aren't smart enough to understand that people can like the same thing for completely different reasons. A smarter system should be able to model the motivations and intentions of consumers to better match them to products and services. It would need to be able to store partial information, which may not make sense initially, but which could provide meaning after sufficient accumulation.
I think consumers would be very willing to answer questions like, "Why did you buy this product" or, "Click the attributes you like/dislike about this product." Most people who browse the internet are often actually looking for in-depth product information. In fact, the ideal way to collect this information would be to interact intelligently with the user when they are using a search engine, trying to find a specific piece of information. It would be great if AI software could help them find what they are looking for and be able to suggest truely similar alternatives.
This may seem nefarious, but I don't think advertising would be an intrusion if it were driven by true interests of individuals rather than the sales goals of marketing execs.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Look at the money going into streaming media. A large segment of the business world still sees the internet as just another medium for TV or radio broadcasting. By it's very nature broadcasting is not interconnected, it's passive and linear.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web that the main obstacle to the web being a true information web of shared knowledge is that content is controlled by too few. He was upset that browsers were developed which could not edit web pages like his original browser/editor.
The silver lining to this, IMHO, is the "weblog" phenomenon, including sites like Slashdot, where ordinary users can contribute their ideas, especially in html format so that they can contribute links. I really believe that some day soon the conventional media sites will be forced to give this kind of capability to their readers, or else risk losing all those eyeballs to Slash-like sites.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."