Fwiw, for about eight years now I've been naming each box after a progressively more recent person who brought us closer to databases. Hesiod MarcusB (after Marcus Aurelius) FrancisBacon Sam (after Samuel Johnson) etc.
Always wanted to have a Voltaire but ended up using that one for a machine that fubared.
I've just now decided to switch entirely. Maybe colors this time.
Back in the eighties all of my files and apps were kept for years on . . . . wait for it . . . 3 and a half inch floppies, all kept in a little box. Each new disk was named it after some "cute girl" I knew or had known, mostly ones from the NYC high school I went to, which was perfect since I got my first "real" computer at CMU in Pittsburgh. Each one was for a given subject with that subject meant to match the personality of the girl in question. Audrey was science, Rosemary was english, Anna was organizational stuff, etc. I even drew little pictures on each disk label.
In those days disks were expensive and more robust than you would think so my little stack lasted for years. Long enough for me to have moved back to NYC and have the inevitable happen - various of these girls ended up dropping by my place and discovering "their" disk. This rarely went well. And if you think that that was dicey, it didn't even compare to the reactions of girls who would come by my place for the first time and discover these so very thought out evocations of previous girls they didn't know about.
"So who is Audrey? Who is Simona?" "Will you name a disk after me?" "What subject would I be?"
Trust me on this, guys, don't do it. It will only end in grief.
Hey, man, welcome to the 21st century. Private companies do space stuff now, too. Since when do we need to get everybody to "work together" to do such a thing? Anyway, we could create a station faster than it takes most proposals to get written these days by using approaches like this one.
And fwiw, the ISS is famously a boondoggle whose costs are grotesquely outscale in no small part because of how well it worked to have "each nation...work together". For the amount of money and time that was blown on the ISS we could have gotten a colony built on the moon by now. Seriously. Maybe two of them.
So if you want to see us working together like that my question becomes, so, what are YOU doing to help, cobber? It's real easy to say what others should or could do, not so easy to do it.
You're right that 70ly is a long, long way. But three things counter that: 1.) Suspended animation is getting closer to real all the time and most of the supposed problems with that (such as radiation exposure in transit) are actually just matters of cost, not absolute limits. 2.) Generation ships. 3.) Yes, but what about getting to the nearer stars in part in the knowledge that the next generation would take the next step further away?
Perhaps the first two are examples of what you meant by "survive in space for a long time".
And keep in mind that what we can already see of a solar system is very far from complete. We may not be able to see anything orbiting Alpha Centauri yet but our resolution is rough indeed. In fact, our current techniques are in large part not even direct viewing but just imperfect means of derivation. I think that it's safe to say that we would find something there beyond just a ball of plasma.
As for your "they would go mad" absurdity, citation please. People have gotten by without contact with "civilization" for years on a regular basis for most of history. Look into how most of the Pacific islands were first settled. Or at some of the long duration nuclear sub cruises, which were shorter but still in very cramped spaces. Just bloody well watch Master and Commander or anything decent about 1500's to 1800's sailing ships.
People are tough. They adapt. Many of the proposals for ships to other solar systems have long proposed crews of several dozen or even more, quite enough to create a small society of their own. And if we were to choose to do it that way, we could send ships in clusters so that they would not all be at risk from one point of failure but could still communicate across the ships in transit and know that others would be there by the time they reached their destination.
Not only that, there are always some people out there who find the idea of near total isolation a feature rather than a bug. Just look at the history of forest service fire watch towers or lighthouse personnel. The travelers have plenty of ways to deal with human factors. Hell, maybe some of them would use up most of the trip smoking pot and playing video games. Add in a "real doll" and plenty of people would find it an improvement on their current level of social interaction. And if you think that I'm joking you're not paying attention.
Seems to me like all the more reason to stop buying "refrigerators" and start just having big insulated boxes built in when we redo a kitchen or build a house. Look at the suggestions above. Heat exchanger linked with outside air and house HVAC. Big block of thermal mass inside. Networked controller. Chiller a bit off to the side. Add all this up and you'll get a much more robust result where even if the chiller or some other part breaks down, all that you do is replace it with another chiller (or whatever). And since that chiller is a separate component in its own little cabinet off to the side or even through the wall, it's no big deal if the new one is a different design. As long as it still provides that stream of cold air it can be made of nanomachinery-linked magic Fritos for all that your fridge will care.
You're right. Current appliances are cobbled together crap that's built of cheap parts, includes a shitty manual, and is a pain to repair or even modify. Why the hell do/.ers, of all people put up with this?
Well, there are all sorts of points of technology, even this one. But I think that a key factor of TFA is being missed by the posters here, which is that this system is meant to cool a dedicated thermal mass stored within the fridge. Unfortunately, TFA doesn't go into detail but I've seen others that do. Part of optimizing such a system is to maximize that thermal mass, maybe through such simple techniques as having people keep a few gallon jugs of water in the fridge at all times, perhaps through integrating things like slabs of cement into the interior of the fridge. Either way, the greater the mass within the insulated envelope, the longer the viable interval between periods of active cooling.
In short, put more stuff that stays cool within the fridge and you can leave the chilling means turned off longer.
What's your point? There are thousands of things that people "could" do that they don't. They could superinsulate their homes with dirt, straw, and a few weekend days. They could teach their kids the basics of astronomy in an afternoon or two. They could all show up at the polling place and vote for every single election. Hell, we could all build cantennas and have free wireless in every city in the world by the end of this week.
Reality isn't about what people in theory could do. It's about what they will do. And out here in the real world less than one percent of the population has the skills to do what you're suggesting and less than one percent of that one percent actually might. No comparison to a plan like this, not even taking into account the fundamental issues of determining protocols and load calculations.
Humans are not random operators, especially in industrialized societies. Spikes can come in as little as fifteen to twenty seconds in a society like ours. Rush hour starts and within fifteen minutes you starts seeing a wave spreading away from centers of workplaces of air conditioners being turned on or up and lights going on as people get home. The Superbowl starts and everybody comes indoors from the barbeque to watch the game, air conditioners get turned up as the patio doors get shut. Ad breaks come and toilets all across the area flush within thirty seconds of each other all over the time zone. A big audience tv show has whispering or something else quiet and air conditioners get turned off so people can hear what's on screen.
We live in a society where most people get up around the same time, go about the same distances, stay away for about the same durations, and come back in to do the same damn things as big chunks of their neighbors for hundreds of miles around. And some of these things, like rushes during ad breaks or when a popular show ends have noticable peaks and drops that can be measured in tens of seconds. This doesn't even get into things like what happens when all the living soil is replaced with pavement and, for example, stormwater load spikes get much higher and then drop off much faster. And then, with all that water moving faster everywhere, again more people turn devices on and off to deal with the consequences.
No averages have nothing much to do with such demand at all.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement. They put a whopping big heat source under the chamber they're trying to keep cool. They use room air from the hottest part of the house, even though in most homes that room is a foot or two away from outside air that is much cooler, if not actually even cooler than the fridge interior should be. In general, they're an agglomeration of kluges and marketroid idiocies. So yeah, this could be a key part of a rethinking of what a fridge is and how it works that could eventually cut power usage by as much as eighty to ninety percent. The same could be said of quite a lot of appliances and HVAC components. Hell, done right, we now know that comfortable homes can be built that require no conventional heating or cooling systems at all.
Kinda makes you wonder why we're supposed to need this "smart grid" for all this massive increased demand we supposedly have no way to avoid, doesn't it?
The internet is, by some standards, an excellent example of what you're saying can't be done and the reason that it works is that the shared protocols are adhered to.
Keep in mind that our current road systems are, literally from the ground up, products of over a hundred years of mass organization thinking. Everything about how they're built, from signage to surface composition, to determination and enforcement of traffic regulations, is an outgrowth of how we handle vehicular rights of way. And then remember that all of this has been subject to vast bribery and subversion by car companies, oil companies, and the like. As such, not much of it would qualify as good engineering. And trust me, I've spent plenty of hours of my life being ranted at by engineers and managers at various DOTs bemoaning this in great detail.
Anyway, go, read the blog post, and think about open standards and shared protocols. Then think about implementation of transparency of operations, another thing that organizational procedures have been advancing for at great speed. This kind of thing can be done. And we're getting better at it all the time.
A company must turn a profit to succeed. A government just needs to accomplish a decent rate of return on their investment for the entire aggregated economy it governs. If Blah Corp takes on the risk of creating a new design it fails if Goo Corp copies it and gets to market first. If the U.S. government takes on the "risk" of, say, putting in more internet capacity, the "downside" is limited to overestimating demand. That's what everybody was saying Korea did in the nineties. Now that those fat pipes have helped Korea become a powerhouse in a dozen fields, nobody is saying that anymore. The only real risk that government faces is if the level of corruption is so vast that nothing gets built. This is a real risk, as anybody who has watched the fiasco of the "digitizing" of the patent system call tell you about. But it is addressable and is a risk for corporations, too. Look at what happened to the OLPC project. Their own devices have been meh at best. But it's pretty damn obvious that they inspired the netbook market, which has been a vast win for everybody, including their intended recipients. No OLPC, no Intel Classmate, no EEE PC, and so forth. And, from the looks of it, we'll be seeing the Pixel Qi tech coming out in another year or two, which will be yet another vast win for their intended result. Have they "turned a profit"? No. Have they achieved an excellent return on investment? Hell fucking yes. In short, most of what makes a project "risky" to a profit-making entity is a null-value statement in a case like this.
I agree that putting people to work is good but if we're going to do so, why the f*ck not have them do that work building manufacturing capacity instead of just assembling and installing yet more parts we're depend on others to support and upgrade?
It really wasn't that many years ago that most of what was inside a computer was made in America, not just the design for the box. If we're so all fired up to undo the damage that shortsighted corporations have done to this country, then we should get our act together and subsidize and assist the creation of new manufacturing capacity. Not commodity stuff like RAM chips but more high end components and maybe even a few strategic assets like LEDs.
We're finally getting more factories running that make photovoltaics in this country. Why the hell are we still allowing ourselves to be held by the shorthairs in what is supposed to be one of the few fields where Americans still excel?
Oh, no doubt, my primary concern in that post was refuting the common statement that netbooks are just about cost. But as for the market for small tablets and "netbooks" being not worth it I've written about this market twice before, though I focused more on keyboarded devices and, in short, having actually done quite a bit of research on this, some of it as an IT director for big enough departments to get honest answers out of the manufacturers, I'm pretty damn sure that the markets are more than big enough to justify the cost. They didn't get withdrawn from lack of users. They got withdrawn because of Microsoft sabotage and corporate groupthink. To go broad, the fucking MARINE CORPS was looking into the Newton when it got canceled. Doctors loved it and were starting to get it specced for hospital use. Insurance companies were handing them out to their agents. Plenty of users there to pay for a product line that's already up and running and has no real competitors. This wasn't rational behavior. Seriously.
It's dangerous to assume that because companies did something, they should have done that thing. Companies do stupid shit all the time. That's a large part of why U.S. automakers are in such trouble right now. They do what is best for the executives making the decisions. Or what their friends think is cool. Or simply what's easiest to understand. I've done corporate workflow consulting and I can tell you that there's a reason that the Nobel prize in Economics went a few times back to a guy (Thaler) who specialized in articulating repeated patterns of irrational decisionmaking. One of the hottest management books right now is something called The Innovators Dilemma. Personally, I think that it wusses out on some key factors, but it shows that even in "c-level" offices they're starting to figure out that the current management paradigm frequently leaves them with their head up their asses. And, even worse, telling each other how sweet the smell is up there.
Go ahead, prognosticate. It can be fun. But don't succumb to the assumption that just because a product went south, that kind of product isn't viable.
Exactly. "Software and usage was clunky, and the weight was just too much". You were using a previous gen device, probably clunkily ruggedized, almost certainly hobbled by bullshit specs required by Microsoft when they stepped in and sabotaged the whole market, in part to undermine the growing competition from Palm OS devices. Good old "embrace, extend, extinguish."
A tablet of the sort being discussed wouldn't be an "iPod class device", just one that we are speculating would run some variation on what Apple quite insistently refers to as the "iPhone/iTouch platform".
Go back and watch the video on Apple's site that they put up when they brought the SDK public. Interesting in quite a few ways. All the way through it is the theme that this platform has broader potential, and that Apple has broader plans for it than just current devices doing current types of apps. The featuring of the dedicated Kleiner Perkins venture capital pool was a pretty blatant tell for those of us who were paying attention.
There are plenty of reasons for a netbook other than cost, as Liliputing has argued quite articulately again and again. - Being able to throw it in a bag and not have to sacrifice as many other things to make the weight manageable. - Being able to work more efficiently in small spaces like airline or commuter rail seats. - Better for women and children who have smaller hands and don't gain from larger systems. - Low enough weight to be used while standing, as is desired by, say people working inventory in a factory or looking over drug interaction data in a hospital corridor.
For about half of these, a tablet would be just as good or considerably better than a keyboard oriented device, especially with the new Swype-style onscreen keyboards.
As for apps, well, how many of those are one buck quickies? How many from vendors who used them to promote desktop apps? And how many simply not the same kinds of things one would choose for a tablet? I'm sorry but I'm seeing plenty of opportunity, plenty of possible demand, and no real third party barriers. But then, hell, I've been waiting for a chance to buy such a device for about fifteen years now.
Personally, I can't help but wonder if this "leak" was actually Apple orchestrated to stir demand but fuzz specifics before next week's MacWorld Expo. As I've said a hundred times before, let's see what's out by January 10th and then talk about longer term trends.
I agree wholeheartedly with your idea but wonder about where the best use of your time is. Would you be willing to use that time to convince a couple of other coders and or users to take the time to personally schedule appointments with the staff (real staff, not "constituent relations" drones) of local legislators and explain this all to them? It's easy to get a feel that government should do this. It's much harder to actually get the relevant government and school officials to agree. Getting journalists, local, non-tech section journalists to understand the relevance of this to, say, school funding is pretty damn important, too.
Personally, I would recommend printing out a couple of copies of this whole thread, all the way down to -1 comments, sitting down over beer with some friends, going over it comment by comment, and using it as a series of starting points to explaining all of this. I've been excerpting parts of recent/. threads and forwarding them for a while now.
Yes, we need more code. But it seems to me that there's a much higher multiplier, especially right now with every level of government deciding on stimulus measures for the next few years, to getting better understanding among the folks in government than in being one more coder.
And, yes, I am working with my local government on several projects related to this kind of thing.
Uh, huh. So coders are "logically" available as volunteers but all those other folks are external factors who need to be paid to do as they're told and then go away.
Interesting mindset, methinks. Sound about like what I've seen out there in the programmer world.
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners? I'm truly curious. 'cause I've known a few folks who have tried to help from those angles and they've usually gotten sick of being treated as "too girly" and therefore not really people to be respected or given any decisionmaking authority.
Obviously, I have an opinion here and equally obviously I think that what we're looking at is some combination of insecurity, misogyny, and homophobia by a culture that is still proud to maintain the habits and attitudes of typical insecure teenaged boys. Frankly, as a straight male techie with more credentials and experience than most of you put together, I'm damn sick of it. My other posts in this thread and others on open source have made that pretty clear. From what I've read the number of women going into technical fields is decreasing and has been for years. Wonder why that is?
I'm seriously curious, if this is the case, does the Mongolian government contribute to OO.o? Are there any Mongolian schools that do so? Or NGOs that are meant to address Mongolian concerns? Seems like this a rare case of OO.o having a chance to get help that will be judged by usability metrics, which sure sounds to me like a damned good thing.
That would be great but who is going to take on the low coolness factor job of creating and maintaining that documentation?
I must admit, I'm curious, is there a reason that no school has been approached to help with this? There are people who are actually training to be technical writers and project managers out there and could really gain from time put in on a real, in-use project like OO.o. Seems to me like there should be some way to portion out some of these tasks to designated groups of students under some professor who can be persuaded to have some degree of investment in the project.
You are a perfect example of why I don't take OO.o seriously. Look at your wording. "office slaves", "suits" Blah, blah, blah. Because only "secretaries" actually do trivial stuff like writing or analysis, while you're a (woo-hoo!) ENGINEER with your manly coding skills. As if you are somehow proving how superior you are in your contempt for, y'know, the actual intended users of the product.
I don't eat food by cooks who have contempt for what those eating it will taste. I don't wear clothes by people who have contempt for how their products will fit. I don't read books by writers who have contempt for their reading public. And ya know what? I've dealt with programmers from inside Adobe and DEC and HP and Apple and, yes, Microsoft who bloody well *loved* the tiny, "mundane" little problem they were spending years on. How can we get this line screen algorithm to better deal with heavier paper stock? How can we change this header to be more fault-tolerant for people using degraded documents? And so on. And you can see that love in the quality of their work.
If you hold the users of a feature in contempt then, frankly, I think that you should get the fuck off that part of the project. Because chances are your code will suck and it will look like the feature or bug has been addressed when, in reality, it has just morphed into a new problem.
There are a hell of a lot more of us out there unwilling to use O.O than PHBs. My new laptop (an HP 2133) came with OO and I tried to actually use it. Silly me. The PDF converter crashed. The RTF converter created garbage. The text converter missed most of what was there. And this with files from several apps. This is kid's stuff here. It looks pretty enough but when I went to use it, it only worked to the level of a proof of concept. "Oooh! Look at what a cool programmer I am! I wrote a PDF converter!"
This isn't rocket science here, folks. I could be pretty happy with something that had the features of Wordperfect DOS circa 1988 or even Simpletext circa 1990. NotaBene circa 1995 would make me very happy indeed. But if a feature is there, it needs to actually work. The vibe I get instead is a piece of crap judged not by actually providing a trustworthy tool for users but rather as a series of project bullet points for Sun managers and programming exercises and resume items for coders.
Fwiw, I've been using Macs since 1984. I run a print publishing company. I used to work for big "content creation" companies like Omnicom and Time/Warner. And at this rate I figure I'll put up with about three more years of Mac OS whatever until there's some rough analogue of InDesign and Photoshop that actually works well on some open source OS and I'll be gone. But the one feature that would get me using another os just like that is a decent implementation of Windowshade. It worked like a dream back in the early nineties. It made it possible to work with literally several HUNDRED documents at a time. And OS X has nothing even close. I've tried three different third party windowshade apps and all three crashed my machine deader than Dr DOS.
Apple paid for a huge range of breathtaking work in interface design, much of it ignored by or openly fought by the supposedly sainted Steve Jobs. The Applesauce 3D document management interface, the various things that went to make up the Newton, and on and on and on. At this point I'm just grudgingly putting up with each new OS version and I get more impatient to switch to something else every year.
Apple, I loved you guys. I fought for you guys. But I'm so very ready to go.
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Fwiw, for about eight years now I've been naming each box after a progressively more recent person who brought us closer to databases.
Hesiod
MarcusB (after Marcus Aurelius)
FrancisBacon
Sam (after Samuel Johnson)
etc.
Always wanted to have a Voltaire but ended up using that one for a machine that fubared.
I've just now decided to switch entirely. Maybe colors this time.
Back in the eighties all of my files and apps were kept for years on . . . . wait for it . . . 3 and a half inch floppies, all kept in a little box. Each new disk was named it after some "cute girl" I knew or had known, mostly ones from the NYC high school I went to, which was perfect since I got my first "real" computer at CMU in Pittsburgh. Each one was for a given subject with that subject meant to match the personality of the girl in question. Audrey was science, Rosemary was english, Anna was organizational stuff, etc. I even drew little pictures on each disk label.
In those days disks were expensive and more robust than you would think so my little stack lasted for years. Long enough for me to have moved back to NYC and have the inevitable happen - various of these girls ended up dropping by my place and discovering "their" disk. This rarely went well. And if you think that that was dicey, it didn't even compare to the reactions of girls who would come by my place for the first time and discover these so very thought out evocations of previous girls they didn't know about.
"So who is Audrey? Who is Simona?"
"Will you name a disk after me?"
"What subject would I be?"
Trust me on this, guys, don't do it. It will only end in grief.
Hey, man, welcome to the 21st century. Private companies do space stuff now, too. Since when do we need to get everybody to "work together" to do such a thing? Anyway, we could create a station faster than it takes most proposals to get written these days by using approaches like this one.
And fwiw, the ISS is famously a boondoggle whose costs are grotesquely outscale in no small part because of how well it worked to have "each nation...work together". For the amount of money and time that was blown on the ISS we could have gotten a colony built on the moon by now. Seriously. Maybe two of them.
So if you want to see us working together like that my question becomes, so, what are YOU doing to help, cobber? It's real easy to say what others should or could do, not so easy to do it.
You're right that 70ly is a long, long way. But three things counter that:
1.) Suspended animation is getting closer to real all the time and most of the supposed problems with that (such as radiation exposure in transit) are actually just matters of cost, not absolute limits.
2.) Generation ships.
3.) Yes, but what about getting to the nearer stars in part in the knowledge that the next generation would take the next step further away?
Perhaps the first two are examples of what you meant by "survive in space for a long time".
And keep in mind that what we can already see of a solar system is very far from complete. We may not be able to see anything orbiting Alpha Centauri yet but our resolution is rough indeed. In fact, our current techniques are in large part not even direct viewing but just imperfect means of derivation. I think that it's safe to say that we would find something there beyond just a ball of plasma.
As for your "they would go mad" absurdity, citation please. People have gotten by without contact with "civilization" for years on a regular basis for most of history. Look into how most of the Pacific islands were first settled. Or at some of the long duration nuclear sub cruises, which were shorter but still in very cramped spaces. Just bloody well watch Master and Commander or anything decent about 1500's to 1800's sailing ships.
People are tough. They adapt. Many of the proposals for ships to other solar systems have long proposed crews of several dozen or even more, quite enough to create a small society of their own. And if we were to choose to do it that way, we could send ships in clusters so that they would not all be at risk from one point of failure but could still communicate across the ships in transit and know that others would be there by the time they reached their destination.
Not only that, there are always some people out there who find the idea of near total isolation a feature rather than a bug. Just look at the history of forest service fire watch towers or lighthouse personnel. The travelers have plenty of ways to deal with human factors. Hell, maybe some of them would use up most of the trip smoking pot and playing video games. Add in a "real doll" and plenty of people would find it an improvement on their current level of social interaction. And if you think that I'm joking you're not paying attention.
So if "swimming" isn't the right approach, how about those little handheld fans that they always give out at trade shows?
Seems to me like all the more reason to stop buying "refrigerators" and start just having big insulated boxes built in when we redo a kitchen or build a house. Look at the suggestions above. Heat exchanger linked with outside air and house HVAC. Big block of thermal mass inside. Networked controller. Chiller a bit off to the side. Add all this up and you'll get a much more robust result where even if the chiller or some other part breaks down, all that you do is replace it with another chiller (or whatever). And since that chiller is a separate component in its own little cabinet off to the side or even through the wall, it's no big deal if the new one is a different design. As long as it still provides that stream of cold air it can be made of nanomachinery-linked magic Fritos for all that your fridge will care.
You're right. Current appliances are cobbled together crap that's built of cheap parts, includes a shitty manual, and is a pain to repair or even modify. Why the hell do /.ers, of all people put up with this?
Yours doesn't already?
Well, there are all sorts of points of technology, even this one. But I think that a key factor of TFA is being missed by the posters here, which is that this system is meant to cool a dedicated thermal mass stored within the fridge. Unfortunately, TFA doesn't go into detail but I've seen others that do. Part of optimizing such a system is to maximize that thermal mass, maybe through such simple techniques as having people keep a few gallon jugs of water in the fridge at all times, perhaps through integrating things like slabs of cement into the interior of the fridge. Either way, the greater the mass within the insulated envelope, the longer the viable interval between periods of active cooling.
In short, put more stuff that stays cool within the fridge and you can leave the chilling means turned off longer.
What's your point? There are thousands of things that people "could" do that they don't. They could superinsulate their homes with dirt, straw, and a few weekend days. They could teach their kids the basics of astronomy in an afternoon or two. They could all show up at the polling place and vote for every single election. Hell, we could all build cantennas and have free wireless in every city in the world by the end of this week.
Reality isn't about what people in theory could do. It's about what they will do. And out here in the real world less than one percent of the population has the skills to do what you're suggesting and less than one percent of that one percent actually might. No comparison to a plan like this, not even taking into account the fundamental issues of determining protocols and load calculations.
You might as well start with a spherical cow.
Humans are not random operators, especially in industrialized societies. Spikes can come in as little as fifteen to twenty seconds in a society like ours. Rush hour starts and within fifteen minutes you starts seeing a wave spreading away from centers of workplaces of air conditioners being turned on or up and lights going on as people get home. The Superbowl starts and everybody comes indoors from the barbeque to watch the game, air conditioners get turned up as the patio doors get shut. Ad breaks come and toilets all across the area flush within thirty seconds of each other all over the time zone. A big audience tv show has whispering or something else quiet and air conditioners get turned off so people can hear what's on screen.
We live in a society where most people get up around the same time, go about the same distances, stay away for about the same durations, and come back in to do the same damn things as big chunks of their neighbors for hundreds of miles around. And some of these things, like rushes during ad breaks or when a popular show ends have noticable peaks and drops that can be measured in tens of seconds. This doesn't even get into things like what happens when all the living soil is replaced with pavement and, for example, stormwater load spikes get much higher and then drop off much faster. And then, with all that water moving faster everywhere, again more people turn devices on and off to deal with the consequences.
No averages have nothing much to do with such demand at all.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement. They put a whopping big heat source under the chamber they're trying to keep cool. They use room air from the hottest part of the house, even though in most homes that room is a foot or two away from outside air that is much cooler, if not actually even cooler than the fridge interior should be. In general, they're an agglomeration of kluges and marketroid idiocies. So yeah, this could be a key part of a rethinking of what a fridge is and how it works that could eventually cut power usage by as much as eighty to ninety percent. The same could be said of quite a lot of appliances and HVAC components. Hell, done right, we now know that comfortable homes can be built that require no conventional heating or cooling systems at all.
Kinda makes you wonder why we're supposed to need this "smart grid" for all this massive increased demand we supposedly have no way to avoid, doesn't it?
I have at least a partial response to that. Open source, shared protocol transit systems.
The internet is, by some standards, an excellent example of what you're saying can't be done and the reason that it works is that the shared protocols are adhered to.
Keep in mind that our current road systems are, literally from the ground up, products of over a hundred years of mass organization thinking. Everything about how they're built, from signage to surface composition, to determination and enforcement of traffic regulations, is an outgrowth of how we handle vehicular rights of way. And then remember that all of this has been subject to vast bribery and subversion by car companies, oil companies, and the like. As such, not much of it would qualify as good engineering. And trust me, I've spent plenty of hours of my life being ranted at by engineers and managers at various DOTs bemoaning this in great detail.
Anyway, go, read the blog post, and think about open standards and shared protocols. Then think about implementation of transparency of operations, another thing that organizational procedures have been advancing for at great speed. This kind of thing can be done. And we're getting better at it all the time.
A company must turn a profit to succeed. A government just needs to accomplish a decent rate of return on their investment for the entire aggregated economy it governs. If Blah Corp takes on the risk of creating a new design it fails if Goo Corp copies it and gets to market first. If the U.S. government takes on the "risk" of, say, putting in more internet capacity, the "downside" is limited to overestimating demand. That's what everybody was saying Korea did in the nineties. Now that those fat pipes have helped Korea become a powerhouse in a dozen fields, nobody is saying that anymore.
The only real risk that government faces is if the level of corruption is so vast that nothing gets built. This is a real risk, as anybody who has watched the fiasco of the "digitizing" of the patent system call tell you about. But it is addressable and is a risk for corporations, too.
Look at what happened to the OLPC project. Their own devices have been meh at best. But it's pretty damn obvious that they inspired the netbook market, which has been a vast win for everybody, including their intended recipients. No OLPC, no Intel Classmate, no EEE PC, and so forth. And, from the looks of it, we'll be seeing the Pixel Qi tech coming out in another year or two, which will be yet another vast win for their intended result. Have they "turned a profit"? No. Have they achieved an excellent return on investment? Hell fucking yes.
In short, most of what makes a project "risky" to a profit-making entity is a null-value statement in a case like this.
I agree that putting people to work is good but if we're going to do so, why the f*ck not have them do that work building manufacturing capacity instead of just assembling and installing yet more parts we're depend on others to support and upgrade?
It really wasn't that many years ago that most of what was inside a computer was made in America, not just the design for the box. If we're so all fired up to undo the damage that shortsighted corporations have done to this country, then we should get our act together and subsidize and assist the creation of new manufacturing capacity. Not commodity stuff like RAM chips but more high end components and maybe even a few strategic assets like LEDs.
We're finally getting more factories running that make photovoltaics in this country. Why the hell are we still allowing ourselves to be held by the shorthairs in what is supposed to be one of the few fields where Americans still excel?
Oh, no doubt, my primary concern in that post was refuting the common statement that netbooks are just about cost. But as for the market for small tablets and "netbooks" being not worth it I've written about this market twice before, though I focused more on keyboarded devices and, in short, having actually done quite a bit of research on this, some of it as an IT director for big enough departments to get honest answers out of the manufacturers, I'm pretty damn sure that the markets are more than big enough to justify the cost. They didn't get withdrawn from lack of users. They got withdrawn because of Microsoft sabotage and corporate groupthink. To go broad, the fucking MARINE CORPS was looking into the Newton when it got canceled. Doctors loved it and were starting to get it specced for hospital use. Insurance companies were handing them out to their agents. Plenty of users there to pay for a product line that's already up and running and has no real competitors. This wasn't rational behavior. Seriously.
It's dangerous to assume that because companies did something, they should have done that thing. Companies do stupid shit all the time. That's a large part of why U.S. automakers are in such trouble right now. They do what is best for the executives making the decisions. Or what their friends think is cool. Or simply what's easiest to understand. I've done corporate workflow consulting and I can tell you that there's a reason that the Nobel prize in Economics went a few times back to a guy (Thaler) who specialized in articulating repeated patterns of irrational decisionmaking. One of the hottest management books right now is something called The Innovators Dilemma . Personally, I think that it wusses out on some key factors, but it shows that even in "c-level" offices they're starting to figure out that the current management paradigm frequently leaves them with their head up their asses. And, even worse, telling each other how sweet the smell is up there.
Go ahead, prognosticate. It can be fun. But don't succumb to the assumption that just because a product went south, that kind of product isn't viable.
The only way I can see them not getting blasted all to hell in the market if Steve is really dying is to bring back the Woz...
And doesn't that make it interesting that Woz will be presenting at MacWorld next week? Not for Apple but still becoming more visible.
Oh, and by the way, the product that he's promoting? Means to turn a Mac laptop into a tablet.
Aren't coincidences fun?
Exactly. "Software and usage was clunky, and the weight was just too much". You were using a previous gen device, probably clunkily ruggedized, almost certainly hobbled by bullshit specs required by Microsoft when they stepped in and sabotaged the whole market, in part to undermine the growing competition from Palm OS devices. Good old "embrace, extend, extinguish."
A tablet of the sort being discussed wouldn't be an "iPod class device", just one that we are speculating would run some variation on what Apple quite insistently refers to as the "iPhone/iTouch platform".
Go back and watch the video on Apple's site that they put up when they brought the SDK public. Interesting in quite a few ways. All the way through it is the theme that this platform has broader potential, and that Apple has broader plans for it than just current devices doing current types of apps. The featuring of the dedicated Kleiner Perkins venture capital pool was a pretty blatant tell for those of us who were paying attention.
There are plenty of reasons for a netbook other than cost, as Liliputing has argued quite articulately again and again.
- Being able to throw it in a bag and not have to sacrifice as many other things to make the weight manageable.
- Being able to work more efficiently in small spaces like airline or commuter rail seats.
- Better for women and children who have smaller hands and don't gain from larger systems.
- Low enough weight to be used while standing, as is desired by, say people working inventory in a factory or looking over drug interaction data in a hospital corridor.
For about half of these, a tablet would be just as good or considerably better than a keyboard oriented device, especially with the new Swype-style onscreen keyboards.
As for apps, well, how many of those are one buck quickies? How many from vendors who used them to promote desktop apps? And how many simply not the same kinds of things one would choose for a tablet?
I'm sorry but I'm seeing plenty of opportunity, plenty of possible demand, and no real third party barriers. But then, hell, I've been waiting for a chance to buy such a device for about fifteen years now.
Personally, I can't help but wonder if this "leak" was actually Apple orchestrated to stir demand but fuzz specifics before next week's MacWorld Expo. As I've said a hundred times before, let's see what's out by January 10th and then talk about longer term trends.
I agree wholeheartedly with your idea but wonder about where the best use of your time is. Would you be willing to use that time to convince a couple of other coders and or users to take the time to personally schedule appointments with the staff (real staff, not "constituent relations" drones) of local legislators and explain this all to them? It's easy to get a feel that government should do this. It's much harder to actually get the relevant government and school officials to agree. Getting journalists, local, non-tech section journalists to understand the relevance of this to, say, school funding is pretty damn important, too.
Personally, I would recommend printing out a couple of copies of this whole thread, all the way down to -1 comments, sitting down over beer with some friends, going over it comment by comment, and using it as a series of starting points to explaining all of this. I've been excerpting parts of recent /. threads and forwarding them for a while now.
Yes, we need more code. But it seems to me that there's a much higher multiplier, especially right now with every level of government deciding on stimulus measures for the next few years, to getting better understanding among the folks in government than in being one more coder.
And, yes, I am working with my local government on several projects related to this kind of thing.
Good luck.
Uh, huh. So coders are "logically" available as volunteers but all those other folks are external factors who need to be paid to do as they're told and then go away.
Interesting mindset, methinks. Sound about like what I've seen out there in the programmer world.
So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners? I'm truly curious. 'cause I've known a few folks who have tried to help from those angles and they've usually gotten sick of being treated as "too girly" and therefore not really people to be respected or given any decisionmaking authority.
Obviously, I have an opinion here and equally obviously I think that what we're looking at is some combination of insecurity, misogyny, and homophobia by a culture that is still proud to maintain the habits and attitudes of typical insecure teenaged boys. Frankly, as a straight male techie with more credentials and experience than most of you put together, I'm damn sick of it. My other posts in this thread and others on open source have made that pretty clear. From what I've read the number of women going into technical fields is decreasing and has been for years. Wonder why that is?
I'm seriously curious, if this is the case, does the Mongolian government contribute to OO.o? Are there any Mongolian schools that do so? Or NGOs that are meant to address Mongolian concerns? Seems like this a rare case of OO.o having a chance to get help that will be judged by usability metrics, which sure sounds to me like a damned good thing.
That would be great but who is going to take on the low coolness factor job of creating and maintaining that documentation?
I must admit, I'm curious, is there a reason that no school has been approached to help with this? There are people who are actually training to be technical writers and project managers out there and could really gain from time put in on a real, in-use project like OO.o. Seems to me like there should be some way to portion out some of these tasks to designated groups of students under some professor who can be persuaded to have some degree of investment in the project.
You are a perfect example of why I don't take OO.o seriously. Look at your wording. "office slaves", "suits" Blah, blah, blah. Because only "secretaries" actually do trivial stuff like writing or analysis, while you're a (woo-hoo!) ENGINEER with your manly coding skills. As if you are somehow proving how superior you are in your contempt for, y'know, the actual intended users of the product.
I don't eat food by cooks who have contempt for what those eating it will taste. I don't wear clothes by people who have contempt for how their products will fit. I don't read books by writers who have contempt for their reading public. And ya know what? I've dealt with programmers from inside Adobe and DEC and HP and Apple and, yes, Microsoft who bloody well *loved* the tiny, "mundane" little problem they were spending years on. How can we get this line screen algorithm to better deal with heavier paper stock? How can we change this header to be more fault-tolerant for people using degraded documents? And so on. And you can see that love in the quality of their work.
If you hold the users of a feature in contempt then, frankly, I think that you should get the fuck off that part of the project. Because chances are your code will suck and it will look like the feature or bug has been addressed when, in reality, it has just morphed into a new problem.
There are a hell of a lot more of us out there unwilling to use O.O than PHBs. My new laptop (an HP 2133) came with OO and I tried to actually use it. Silly me. The PDF converter crashed. The RTF converter created garbage. The text converter missed most of what was there. And this with files from several apps. This is kid's stuff here. It looks pretty enough but when I went to use it, it only worked to the level of a proof of concept. "Oooh! Look at what a cool programmer I am! I wrote a PDF converter!"
This isn't rocket science here, folks. I could be pretty happy with something that had the features of Wordperfect DOS circa 1988 or even Simpletext circa 1990. NotaBene circa 1995 would make me very happy indeed. But if a feature is there, it needs to actually work. The vibe I get instead is a piece of crap judged not by actually providing a trustworthy tool for users but rather as a series of project bullet points for Sun managers and programming exercises and resume items for coders.
Come back to me when the software actually works.
Fwiw, I've been using Macs since 1984. I run a print publishing company. I used to work for big "content creation" companies like Omnicom and Time/Warner. And at this rate I figure I'll put up with about three more years of Mac OS whatever until there's some rough analogue of InDesign and Photoshop that actually works well on some open source OS and I'll be gone. But the one feature that would get me using another os just like that is a decent implementation of Windowshade. It worked like a dream back in the early nineties. It made it possible to work with literally several HUNDRED documents at a time. And OS X has nothing even close. I've tried three different third party windowshade apps and all three crashed my machine deader than Dr DOS.
Apple paid for a huge range of breathtaking work in interface design, much of it ignored by or openly fought by the supposedly sainted Steve Jobs. The Applesauce 3D document management interface, the various things that went to make up the Newton, and on and on and on. At this point I'm just grudgingly putting up with each new OS version and I get more impatient to switch to something else every year.
Apple, I loved you guys. I fought for you guys. But I'm so very ready to go.