Next big "megatrend" pushed by the research firms three to five years from now: "In-Housing - bring your IT operations in-house and save! Leverage your internal domain expertise!" Of course, by then there may be few U.S. programmers left.
Installed SP4 on a working stable networked box. After installation, the PC could access the LAN and the router, but could no longer access the Internet. Checked the network settings - nothing had changed. Checked (and reset) the router. Uninstalled and reinstalled the TCP/IP stack. Still no go. Finally uninstalled SP4 and everything's back to normal. I guess I'll wait for SP5.
I recall reading some years ago, that a guy in San Francisco was owed money by the local telco (at the time Pac Bell). He won in small claims court, but Pac Bell still ignored him. To make a long story short, the sheriff filed the paper work to sell one of Pac Bell's downtown buildings in order to collect the money. No one else showed, so the the guy ending up buying it for $1. At that point, he got Pac Bell's attention. He ended up selling them back their building for the amount owed plus court costs.
Voyager ranged from disappointing to bad. The few episodes of Enterprise I saw were very bad indeed. What the show needs is a few well-written scripts. What we're getting is new aliens, hair-do's etc. Doesn't sound worth watching to me.
Computer Surplus Outlet occasionally has old used Itronix units available. I just ordered a P133 color unit with 32 MB and a 1.6 GB drive. I'm hoping I can get the thing to run Linux. It has no floppy, no CD - so I'll either have to find a cheap PCMCIA CDROM, or (hopefully) I can load it via a parallel port Zip drive.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment.
Not to mention the enormous hole in the ground (over 1 mile deep) in Arizona caused by this vile substance.
I gave some thought to the whole licensing issue - what if the apps were misused, or used for purposes that I might not agree with? What if they were used by terrorists, or hate groups, or criminals, or the RIAA? In the end I put them out under the GPL. Here's the rationale for my decision:
1) I'm not Robert Oppenheimer ("Physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.") and the apps are not WMD's.
2) The type of people that might misuse the apps are unlikely to honor my license anyway.
3) Enforcement of the licence is at best, likely to be very difficult.
4) Restrictions on who is allowed to use an application could easily get out of hand. I do not look forward to the day, when I want to use an OSS app - only to discover it's only licensed to left-handed female Otaku freemasons.
Personally, I think if an OSS application has legitimate non-destructive uses, it should be licensed in a manner that does not restrict who can use it. The type of restrictions proposed will only lead to political correctness that will undermine the whole OSS movement.
Probably Lead Iodide - take a solution of Lead Acetate (clear solution), mix with solution of Potassium Iodide (clear solution) and bright yellow Lead Iodide should precipitate out. Obviously, keep kids AWAY from solutions containing lead - which is poisonous!
Many years ago, I did a couple of science programs as part of a science after-school program at a downtown middle school.
First one was chemistry. Did a mixture of hands on plus some interesting demos. Hands on was stuff that was designed to be SAFE - indicators, baking soda and vinegar, etc. Demos were designed to be visually interesting. Burning magnesium, volcano (ignite ammonium dichromate), thermite, fun with liquid nitrogen. (Keep the kids WELL BACK for these). The kids loved it.
Second one was on crypto - simple encoding, decoding, and cryptanalysis (breaking caesar cipher by brute force, and substitution cipher by letter frequency analysis). Kids were divided into teams of four for a set of exercises. One of the teachers told me the kids were passing encoded messages in class for weeks afterwards.
Make sure the kids have fun AND learn something and you'll be successful. Good luck.
Slight OT I admit but how on earth did you Americans get to the insane pricing structure of your mobile phones?
That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it? Sure, you could argue that you pay for the privilidge of people being able to connect you - but as far as I'm concerned, if someone calls me, they should foot the bill because they are the one that is doing the contacting. It's worked with fixed line long enough, why should it be the other way around.
I agree - it's a mess. Probably has to do with the large numbers of competing services, each with their own independent billing system. To make calling party pay, you'd have to get all the wireless carriers to agree on billing standards, and to be inter-operable. Then you'd have to have accounting systems in place for wired / wireless carriers to arrange appropriate settlements. Not impossible, since carriers do this with wired lines, but it would require agreeing to standards and some investment on the part of the telecomms. In the current economic environment this is unlikely to happen.
1) Can't compare consoles vs. $3000 PC's because PC hardware is more advanced and PC's are multi-purpose. Well, of course you're right on both counts. However, I'm comparing a console with a $3000 PC being marketed as a high-end game machine. Sure, it might be great as a Web server, super as a file-server, build engine, etc. but the company building it is targeting it specifically for gamers. So, sure it can be used for other things, but that's not the way the manufacturer is positioning the product.
2) Any game that involves an hour or more of patching / configuration is defective. Again, I agree with you. However, it's been my experience that in the rush to get products to market, game companies frequently ship defective products. When testing PC games, game companies have to deal with a combinatoric explosion of different hardware and software configurations, with consoles - few (frequently one). Furthermore, with PC games, companies can get sloppy - knowing that gamers can always be expected to download the patch(es). With console games - they need to get it right the first time.
3) Broadband for games has been coming "real-soon-now" for a long time. Without keyboards, players miss the social aspects of the games. Console makers have announced broadband and multi-player services which are coming "real-soon-now". I believe them - from the perspective of a console maker, they promise increased demand for their consoles and games, but most importantly, promise an on-going stream of revenue (subscriptions) for the company. Consoles are sold at a loss, games make money but are a one-shot deal. Subscription fees for multi-player gaming are virtually pure profit once the servers are in place. I trust that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will follow through on broadband - as it's in their own self-interest. As for a keyboard, there's no reason that the console makers could not add a keyboard or even a microphone (VoIP) to existing consoles.
Please don't get me wrong - I'd love to own a high end PC with lots of processing power, memory, and RAID disks. It would be a great development box. Just a little hard to justify as a game mahine.
Why would anyone pay three thousand dollars for a PC to play games?? Earlier this week - Slashdot ran a thread about PCs Losing Out as a Gaming Platform?. Game companies are developing for consoles first. PC games typically involve an hour or more (if you're lucky) of patch / configuration hell vs. load and go with console games. Soon most consoles will support broadband and multiplayer games. They might be able to sell a $3000 box to a business for CAD applications, but as a gaming box; high end PC's are dead.
This is bad news for PC makers, as well as Intel and AMD. I've read numerous articles stating that the market for high-end machines in the home is driven by gaming. With consumers buying game consoles, there will be far less motivation to upgrade. Typically, the high-end systems carry the biggest profit margins for PC & chip makers.
Console sales will not compensate for this. The big three consoles are sold at a loss. Sony uses a proprietary CPU, Nintendo uses an IBM PowerPC chip. Only Microsoft's Xbox uses an Intel chip - in this case a low end 733 Mhz PIII - a fairly low margin chip.
Don't like Palladium - write to Intel and AMD and tell them that you won't buy processors that support Palladium. Intel backed-off CPU-ID's (for the Pentium III) quickly when they realized that it would cost them sales. In general, pissing off your best customers is not a smart long term business practice.
If you write - remember: be concise and polite:
Intel:
Chairman: Andy S. Grove
CEO: Craig R. Barrett
Corporate Offices:
2200 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, California 95052, USA
AMD:
Chairman: W. J. Sanders III
CEO: Hector de J. Ruiz
Corporate Offices:
One AMD Place
P.O. Box 3453
Sunnyvale CA 94088, USA
Seems to me that you and your fellow artists and the open source community have at least one thing in common - a strong dislike for the RIAA. Given that, perhaps the two communities could get together and take on the recording industry by developing a replacement for it.
Today, the industry supplies the artist with:
1) Funding - supply up front funding to artist to create music
(i.e venture capital).
2) Recording - they provide a studio,(optional) other musicians
to record with, technicians to record the music, mixing, editing, etc.
3) Manufacture - create physical CD's, art-work, etc.
4) Distribution - distribute the CD's to record stores.
5) Accounting - Track sales, send payments to artists, songwriters, etc.
6) Promotion - promote your music to the fans. Get air play on radio, TV. Arrange for concerts, etc.
Unless the artist has recent "megahits" much of the above is done poorly or not at all. What software would you like to see the open source community develop, to enable artists to become more independent of the recording industry?
A quick study of history will show that many great cities have been destroyed and re-built. Often several times.
San Francisco - detroyed by earthquake and fire (1906)
Chicago - fire (1871)
Lisbon - earthquake (1755)
London - great fire (1666), Blitz (1940-1944)
Tokyo - Great Kanto earthquake (1923), fire-bombing (1945)
etc....
Let us hope that neither New York or any city experience a large scale disaster, again. However, do not think that even a large scale disaster is necessarily the end.
Obviously, you should get her a Java Ring. They just released a new version that not only incorporates a Java Virtual Machine, but has 134 KB of space for downloaded programs. If she still wants a diamond, simply point out that a diamond can't do an RSA calculation in under one second.
I have a Sampo DVE611 - it's cheap and a fairly decent player. It's region-free (you can set the region). You can't fast-forward over the legal boilerplate, but you can hit 'next' to advance straight to the 'root' menu. Also handles MP3, VCD, and SVCD. It's got video, S-Video, and three plug (component?) output. It also has a screen saver (bouncing logo). Got it mail-order from 'Barrel of Monkeys'.
There's a difference between being behind in gadgets and being behind in technology. Japan leads in gadgets and cheap manufacturing; they do not lead at the cutting edge of engineering.
Gadgets? You must mean things like automobiles, consumer electronics, robotics, semiconductors, fuzzy logic, AI, embedded systems, and other such gadgets. We have the lead in aerospace, though the aging space shuttle is not exactly cutting edge.
Military Autonomous Vehicles
on
Robot Wars
·
· Score: 2
Might I suggest a design like this (AV's on left and right, Doctor and companion in middle).
Slashdot Mirror
Next big "megatrend" pushed by the research firms three to five years from now: "In-Housing - bring your IT operations in-house and save! Leverage your internal domain expertise!" Of course, by then there may be few U.S. programmers left.
The French are just annoyed that English has become the 'lingua franca'. :-)
Installed SP4 on a working stable networked box. After installation, the PC could access the LAN and the router, but could no longer access the Internet. Checked the network settings - nothing had changed. Checked (and reset) the router. Uninstalled and reinstalled the TCP/IP stack. Still no go. Finally uninstalled SP4 and everything's back to normal. I guess I'll wait for SP5.
I recall reading some years ago, that a guy in San Francisco was owed money by the local telco (at the time Pac Bell). He won in small claims court, but Pac Bell still ignored him. To make a long story short, the sheriff filed the paper work to sell one of Pac Bell's downtown buildings in order to collect the money. No one else showed, so the the guy ending up buying it for $1. At that point, he got Pac Bell's attention. He ended up selling them back their building for the amount owed plus court costs.
Yahoo has the following Financial Profile information on SCO:
Market Capitalization $40.2M
Book Value (mrq) $0.67
Earnings (ttm) -$1.15
Earnings (mrq) -$0.06
Cash (mrq) $0.41
If present trends continue, that cash is going to run out.
Voyager ranged from disappointing to bad. The few episodes of Enterprise I saw were very bad indeed. What the show needs is a few well-written scripts. What we're getting is new aliens, hair-do's etc. Doesn't sound worth watching to me.
To quote Yogi Bera "It's deja vu all over again!"
Computer Surplus Outlet occasionally has old used Itronix units available. I just ordered a P133 color unit with 32 MB and a 1.6 GB drive. I'm hoping I can get the thing to run Linux. It has no floppy, no CD - so I'll either have to find a cheap PCMCIA CDROM, or (hopefully) I can load it via a parallel port Zip drive.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment.
Not to mention the enormous hole in the ground (over 1 mile deep) in Arizona caused by this vile substance.
This summer during my extended period of unemployment I developed a couple of applications . One was a Java-based Web server and one was a Java-based Web spider.
I gave some thought to the whole licensing issue - what if the apps were misused, or used for purposes that I might not agree with? What if they were used by terrorists, or hate groups, or criminals, or the RIAA? In the end I put them out under the GPL. Here's the rationale for my decision:
1) I'm not Robert Oppenheimer ("Physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.") and the apps are not WMD's.
2) The type of people that might misuse the apps are unlikely to honor my license anyway.
3) Enforcement of the licence is at best, likely to be very difficult.
4) Restrictions on who is allowed to use an application could easily get out of hand. I do not look forward to the day, when I want to use an OSS app - only to discover it's only licensed to left-handed female Otaku freemasons.
Personally, I think if an OSS application has legitimate non-destructive uses, it should be licensed in a manner that does not restrict who can use it. The type of restrictions proposed will only lead to political correctness that will undermine the whole OSS movement.
Probably Lead Iodide - take a solution of Lead Acetate (clear solution), mix with solution of Potassium Iodide (clear solution) and bright yellow Lead Iodide should precipitate out. Obviously, keep kids AWAY from solutions containing lead - which is poisonous!
Many years ago, I did a couple of science programs as part of a science after-school program at a downtown middle school.
First one was chemistry. Did a mixture of hands on plus some interesting demos. Hands on was stuff that was designed to be SAFE - indicators, baking soda and vinegar, etc. Demos were designed to be visually interesting. Burning magnesium, volcano (ignite ammonium dichromate), thermite, fun with liquid nitrogen. (Keep the kids WELL BACK for these). The kids loved it.
Second one was on crypto - simple encoding, decoding, and cryptanalysis (breaking caesar cipher by brute force, and substitution cipher by letter frequency analysis). Kids were divided into teams of four for a set of exercises. One of the teachers told me the kids were passing encoded messages in class for weeks afterwards.
Make sure the kids have fun AND learn something and you'll be successful. Good luck.
Slight OT I admit but how on earth did you Americans get to the insane pricing structure of your mobile phones?
That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it? Sure, you could argue that you pay for the privilidge of people being able to connect you - but as far as I'm concerned, if someone calls me, they should foot the bill because they are the one that is doing the contacting. It's worked with fixed line long enough, why should it be the other way around.
I agree - it's a mess. Probably has to do with the large numbers of competing services, each with their own independent billing system. To make calling party pay, you'd have to get all the wireless carriers to agree on billing standards, and to be inter-operable. Then you'd have to have accounting systems in place for wired / wireless carriers to arrange appropriate settlements. Not impossible, since carriers do this with wired lines, but it would require agreeing to standards and some investment on the part of the telecomms. In the current economic environment this is unlikely to happen.
OK Jimmy B - let me address the points you made:
1) Can't compare consoles vs. $3000 PC's because PC hardware is more advanced and PC's are multi-purpose. Well, of course you're right on both counts. However, I'm comparing a console with a $3000 PC being marketed as a high-end game machine. Sure, it might be great as a Web server, super as a file-server, build engine, etc. but the company building it is targeting it specifically for gamers. So, sure it can be used for other things, but that's not the way the manufacturer is positioning the product.
2) Any game that involves an hour or more of patching / configuration is defective. Again, I agree with you. However, it's been my experience that in the rush to get products to market, game companies frequently ship defective products. When testing PC games, game companies have to deal with a combinatoric explosion of different hardware and software configurations, with consoles - few (frequently one). Furthermore, with PC games, companies can get sloppy - knowing that gamers can always be expected to download the patch(es). With console games - they need to get it right the first time.
3) Broadband for games has been coming "real-soon-now" for a long time. Without keyboards, players miss the social aspects of the games. Console makers have announced broadband and multi-player services which are coming "real-soon-now". I believe them - from the perspective of a console maker, they promise increased demand for their consoles and games, but most importantly, promise an on-going stream of revenue (subscriptions) for the company. Consoles are sold at a loss, games make money but are a one-shot deal. Subscription fees for multi-player gaming are virtually pure profit once the servers are in place. I trust that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo will follow through on broadband - as it's in their own self-interest. As for a keyboard, there's no reason that the console makers could not add a keyboard or even a microphone (VoIP) to existing consoles.
Please don't get me wrong - I'd love to own a high end PC with lots of processing power, memory, and RAID disks. It would be a great development box. Just a little hard to justify as a game mahine.
Why would anyone pay three thousand dollars for a PC to play games?? Earlier this week - Slashdot ran a thread about PCs Losing Out as a Gaming Platform?. Game companies are developing for consoles first. PC games typically involve an hour or more (if you're lucky) of patch / configuration hell vs. load and go with console games. Soon most consoles will support broadband and multiplayer games. They might be able to sell a $3000 box to a business for CAD applications, but as a gaming box; high end PC's are dead.
Yeah, of course ... but what about the flying cars and silver suits with big shoulders?? :-)
This is bad news for PC makers, as well as Intel and AMD. I've read numerous articles stating that the market for high-end machines in the home is driven by gaming. With consumers buying game consoles, there will be far less motivation to upgrade. Typically, the high-end systems carry the biggest profit margins for PC & chip makers.
Console sales will not compensate for this. The big three consoles are sold at a loss. Sony uses a proprietary CPU, Nintendo uses an IBM PowerPC chip. Only Microsoft's Xbox uses an Intel chip - in this case a low end 733 Mhz PIII - a fairly low margin chip.
Don't like Palladium - write to Intel and AMD and tell them
that you won't buy processors that support Palladium.
Intel backed-off CPU-ID's (for the Pentium III) quickly when
they realized that it would cost them sales. In general,
pissing off your best customers is not a smart long term
business practice.
If you write - remember: be concise and polite:
Intel:
Chairman: Andy S. Grove
CEO: Craig R. Barrett
Corporate Offices:
2200 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, California 95052, USA
AMD:
Chairman: W. J. Sanders III
CEO: Hector de J. Ruiz
Corporate Offices:
One AMD Place
P.O. Box 3453
Sunnyvale CA 94088, USA
Seems to me that you and your fellow artists and the open source community have at least one thing in common - a strong dislike for the RIAA.
Given that, perhaps the two communities could get together and take on the recording industry by developing a replacement for it.
Today, the industry supplies the artist with:
1) Funding - supply up front funding to artist to create music
(i.e venture capital).
2) Recording - they provide a studio,(optional) other musicians
to record with, technicians to record the music, mixing, editing, etc.
3) Manufacture - create physical CD's, art-work, etc.
4) Distribution - distribute the CD's to record stores.
5) Accounting - Track sales, send payments to artists, songwriters, etc.
6) Promotion - promote your music to the fans. Get air play on radio, TV. Arrange for concerts, etc.
Unless the artist has recent "megahits" much of the above is done poorly or not at all. What software would you like to see the open source community develop, to enable artists to become more independent of the recording industry?
Let us hope that neither New York or any city experience a large scale disaster, again. However, do not think that even a large scale disaster is necessarily the end.
Obviously, you should get her a Java Ring. They just released a new version that not only incorporates a Java Virtual Machine, but has 134 KB of space for downloaded programs. If she still wants a diamond, simply point out that a diamond can't do an RSA calculation in under one second.
I have a Sampo DVE611 - it's cheap and a fairly decent player. It's region-free (you can set the region). You can't fast-forward over the legal boilerplate, but you can hit 'next' to advance straight to the 'root' menu. Also handles MP3, VCD, and SVCD. It's got video, S-Video, and three plug (component?) output. It also has a screen saver (bouncing logo). Got it mail-order from 'Barrel of Monkeys'.
There's a difference between being behind in gadgets and being behind in technology. Japan leads in gadgets and cheap manufacturing; they do not lead at the cutting edge of engineering.
Gadgets? You must mean things like automobiles, consumer electronics, robotics, semiconductors, fuzzy logic, AI, embedded systems, and other such gadgets. We have the lead in aerospace, though the aging space shuttle is not exactly cutting edge.
Might I suggest a design like this (AV's on left and right, Doctor and companion in middle).
Interesting device - I'm looking forward to seeing "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" written in ILM.