In this specific case, the government wouldn't be meddling in just some business. It is a business, but it is also a major component of the free press, which is a key ingredient of democracy.
I have debian running chrooted on my pre already, and I've read that tapping into a gui (probably a very stripped down gui with an ancient feather-light window manager) via VNC is doable. Regardless of the fact that WebOS is a fantastic GUI that I'm drooling to use on a tablet, being able to pop a window and run any X11 app that's got an arm.deb sounds pretty enticing. I'm sure far better programmers than me could do some pretty slick stuff with that foundation alone.
Also, as far as being "real," I'm running ondemand frequency scaling, powertop, echo'ing to/proc to set stuff etc, while ssh'd into it. I know "real operating system" is a wildly subjective term, but it *feels* a lot like working on a standard linux box.
Have you actually used webOS? It's the slickest UI out there, and I wish I had it running on more devices. Now I'm off to install Debian on it, thanks to the helpful link down-thread.....;)
That it will have pitiful market share and languish in relative obscurity, despite being in many ways technically superior. Also, that there will be far less catering to it by commercial app vendors, relying far more on free contributions by community members (like WebOS Quick Install, WebOS Doctor, the 800 Mhz patch, frequency scaling, the virtual keyboard, etc etc). Lastly it's similar to linux in that it seems to me (and I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong) to be the most open of the three major smartphone platforms (it, android, iphone os).
I also considered the possible longevity of palm before purchasing the pre. Then I remembered it's a phone, not a mortgage, and adjusted my calculation to cover the next two years. Two years from now the hardware available is going to blow whatever we're drooling about now away, and I'll probably be getting something else. WebOS is, in many ways, the desktop linux of cell phone OS's.
Having read through most of the comments in this thread, I'll make a second, lonely plug for palm's WebOS. It seems to address many of your complaints with android, while being far more open than the iPhone. I had no particular loyalties to palm before purchasing one, but it does seem to be a sweet spot.
I jumped on the palm pre plus from verizon a few weeks ago, mainly for the free mifi included with it. I didn't do a lot of homework before getting the phone, but it's turned out to be awesome. After I got mine, 4 other friends and co-workers signed up for one as well. Now one of those friends is thinking about jumping to the incredible since we are still in our 30 day window. He's trying to persuade me to, so I've been doing a lot of reading about android vs. iphone vs. webos. Even when I go to android-centric forums, the reviews are consistent: webos is by far the superior UI. Where it falls behind the others is in the build quality (can't beat glass and aluminum), and the smaller number of apps. Both valid points; you will never achieve the network effect on webos that you'll see on the iphone and android. However, it's the most open phone available right now (except perhaps the Nokia N900, which I don't have any experience with, and is expensive as hell), and I don't really care if it gets the market share the other two have, any more than I've cared for the past ten years about desktop linux' paltry market share. It's a superior OS, there's a really active free software community, and I can write my own stuff down to the metal if I care to learn to do so (thinking about writing a dice roller app for the board game Descent).
Just some thoughts while I cram down a little breakfast and coffee. To each their own, but I'm sold on webos, despite some flaws in the pre itself.
I guess I fall under the category of "liberal," although I think in just about any other developed democracy I'd be far closer to the center. And I watch FOX news from time to time, but only in the sense of being fascinated by the train wreck. Maybe there are other liberals who watch for other reasons, but I suspect that is the common one.
MSNBC is for liberals? Somebody better tell Joe Scarborough that. The day FOX hires, say, Phil Donahue, I might start considering their slants equivalent.
Wizards of the Coast published Everway. They didn't *completely* dumb down table top RPGs. Granted it was a long time ago, but it is an historical fact.
I installed the kuki kernel on my eee pc 900A (4 gb ssd) and it cold boots to the desktop (automatic login) in 10 seconds. Resumes from suspend in just a few. That may not quite be "instant on" but it's good enough for me.
Just to add my $.02, I also have had Ubuntu server deployed in the enterprise for several years, supporting LAMP, java, sendmail, imap, squirrelmail, sftp, internal IM, wikis, and a clutch of scientific utilities. I freely confess there are realms of security of which I am ignorant, so perhaps I've just been lucky, but it's worked out very well so far.
I wouldn't think of it as fodder with which to mine movies, but something along the lines of an HBO series, like the one being done for Song of Ice and Fire. I think it would be pretty cool.... first episode opens up with the creation of the world, move on to the crashing of the pillars, the awakening of the elves, the poisoning of the trees, the elf on elf genocide..... on and on. I think it would all be cool.
I'm not disputing anything that you wrote. I'm simply saying that the quality we loosely describe as "intelligence" can inhere in an isolated autonomous unit, even if it could never have naturally arisen that way. Therefore, I conclude that it would be possible to have AI in a set-top box. Or at least, there's nothing in our natures that refutes it.
But I could stick you on a deserted island all by yourself and you would still be intelligent, right? I'm not denying that we are deeply social creatures, nor that a full definition of an organism must necessarily include a description of its environment. But I think you are confusing the process by which we become intelligent with intelligence itself.
Moblin is off to a good start, but the lack of apps in the repos currently keep it from being a serious option *for me*. If you are satisfied with the browser and some IM, then it is already an excellent option, even in its current rough state. If I could get Comix and pppd (for tethering my cell phone) on it easily, I probably would already be using it as my full time OS. And, yes, I know that compiling is an option. I tried to compile a few things and quickly found myself running down dependency after dependency, and gave up. That kind of time investment is not what I'm looking for in a netbook.
I had been using rtorrent, pytvshows, screen, and rtgui to manage media downloads on my mythbox. I've since switched over to boxee, although it's running on top of the same mythbuntu install I was using before, and could easily revert back to. I don't really use the streaming apps boxee includes, not do I need to use its torrent capabilities since my own system is more robust. Boxee won me over simply because the interface looks slicker, it grabs cover art and show information automatically, gives one-click access to the apple trailer if available, grabs subtitles with a click, and my downloaded shows are automatically in my media library without having to manually rebuild the database every time I add something.... all things mythtv does not do. If and when mythtv adds these things, I would probably switch back.
Re:Too few computers, too little bandwidth
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
You may be correct about the dictation systems. I never had to touch those. As far as PACS, though, there were open source projects sufficient for our needs. And I wrote my own flat-text database system with a patient scheduler and routines to calculate doseage injection and decay for coordination with the cyclotron guys whipping up our doses, along with an ncurses-based UI. Kinda ugly, but not really any uglier than the "professional" stuff they were using for similar tasks and for which we hemhorraged license fees. The techs and administrative staff used it just fine. Like I said, YMMV.
Re:Too few computers, too little bandwidth
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1
1) Open source software? When I was in IT in a Radiology clinic, I was mandated to do everything possible with FOSS (not everything *was* possible, but I was expected to make the effort, and usually succeeded. YMMV)
2) In the example I was replying to, I believe the situation cited was people queuing up to use too few computers. It's the "too expensive to buy more" bit that I was responding to, so I assume the training would be moot.
3) I attempted to address the support angle by assuming a competent *nix admin team could handle the load with minimal addition of manpower.
Granted, your points may be totally valid from a Windows perspective. But I'm a FOSS guy, and had management that supported that.
Re:Too few computers, too little bandwidth
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I used to work in Hospital IT (not any more though). I'm not disputing your insight, but it does surprise me a little..... the idea that the cost for data input of text records could translate into such a significant cost. I know just walking around the hospital I would routinely see old computers sitting outside of office doors in the hallway, waiting to be carted off and destroyed. Now, granted, these *were* old POS computers. But if all you really needed to do was provide a terminal for some data input, how bad-ass do they need to be? I'm just suggesting, if the budget issue really is that bad, there are probably ways that older, less-sexy, equipment could be re-purposed to bring that down a bit. Analysis of the server end gets more complex but, if we can assume we're dealing mostly with text, I doubt it would be that horrendous. The cost of a new server or a few more TB of disk space is practically nothing compared to other expenses I observed being routinely shelled out. And an oft-touted meme around Slashdot is that part of the point of paying for a *nix admin is that he or she can handle more boxes simultaneously than comparable Windows admins, due to the differences in platforms. I'm not saying that's true, either, but it seems a lot of smart people posting around here believe that it is. If so, it casts some skepticism towards the notion that man-power would increase drastically for a doubling or trebling of a bunch of text records.
So, those are a lot of questions I have about your statement. They are questions, though, not challenges.
I am curious which free PACS you are referring to? I built a custom PACS system for a major hospital consisting of bits of dcm4chee, the dcmtk toolkit, and a bunch of bash scripts that glued it all together. Our research staff were comfortable enough with the command line to be able to go "fetch [HISTORY NUM] [# previous studies]" as well as several other utilities, and it worked well enough for us. The main advantage of the system was to be able to cron-job the fetching of the next day's patients prior studies in the middle of the night, something none of the commercial systems (all GUI-fied) allowed us to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod you up, if I could. Mind you, I'm not saying I think a tax on electronics is the best way to go about it.
In this specific case, the government wouldn't be meddling in just some business. It is a business, but it is also a major component of the free press, which is a key ingredient of democracy.
I have debian running chrooted on my pre already, and I've read that tapping into a gui (probably a very stripped down gui with an ancient feather-light window manager) via VNC is doable. Regardless of the fact that WebOS is a fantastic GUI that I'm drooling to use on a tablet, being able to pop a window and run any X11 app that's got an arm .deb sounds pretty enticing. I'm sure far better programmers than me could do some pretty slick stuff with that foundation alone.
Also, as far as being "real," I'm running ondemand frequency scaling, powertop, echo'ing to /proc to set stuff etc, while ssh'd into it. I know "real operating system" is a wildly subjective term, but it *feels* a lot like working on a standard linux box.
Have you actually used webOS? It's the slickest UI out there, and I wish I had it running on more devices. Now I'm off to install Debian on it, thanks to the helpful link down-thread..... ;)
That it will have pitiful market share and languish in relative obscurity, despite being in many ways technically superior. Also, that there will be far less catering to it by commercial app vendors, relying far more on free contributions by community members (like WebOS Quick Install, WebOS Doctor, the 800 Mhz patch, frequency scaling, the virtual keyboard, etc etc). Lastly it's similar to linux in that it seems to me (and I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong) to be the most open of the three major smartphone platforms (it, android, iphone os).
I also considered the possible longevity of palm before purchasing the pre. Then I remembered it's a phone, not a mortgage, and adjusted my calculation to cover the next two years. Two years from now the hardware available is going to blow whatever we're drooling about now away, and I'll probably be getting something else. WebOS is, in many ways, the desktop linux of cell phone OS's.
Having read through most of the comments in this thread, I'll make a second, lonely plug for palm's WebOS. It seems to address many of your complaints with android, while being far more open than the iPhone. I had no particular loyalties to palm before purchasing one, but it does seem to be a sweet spot.
I jumped on the palm pre plus from verizon a few weeks ago, mainly for the free mifi included with it. I didn't do a lot of homework before getting the phone, but it's turned out to be awesome. After I got mine, 4 other friends and co-workers signed up for one as well. Now one of those friends is thinking about jumping to the incredible since we are still in our 30 day window. He's trying to persuade me to, so I've been doing a lot of reading about android vs. iphone vs. webos. Even when I go to android-centric forums, the reviews are consistent: webos is by far the superior UI. Where it falls behind the others is in the build quality (can't beat glass and aluminum), and the smaller number of apps. Both valid points; you will never achieve the network effect on webos that you'll see on the iphone and android. However, it's the most open phone available right now (except perhaps the Nokia N900, which I don't have any experience with, and is expensive as hell), and I don't really care if it gets the market share the other two have, any more than I've cared for the past ten years about desktop linux' paltry market share. It's a superior OS, there's a really active free software community, and I can write my own stuff down to the metal if I care to learn to do so (thinking about writing a dice roller app for the board game Descent). Just some thoughts while I cram down a little breakfast and coffee. To each their own, but I'm sold on webos, despite some flaws in the pre itself.
I got laid off from my IT job in March of 09. I was on unemployment until July of 09, when a landed a really good job. My checks were $476 a week.
I guess I fall under the category of "liberal," although I think in just about any other developed democracy I'd be far closer to the center. And I watch FOX news from time to time, but only in the sense of being fascinated by the train wreck. Maybe there are other liberals who watch for other reasons, but I suspect that is the common one.
Dances With Thundersmurfs
MSNBC is for liberals? Somebody better tell Joe Scarborough that. The day FOX hires, say, Phil Donahue, I might start considering their slants equivalent.
Wizards of the Coast published Everway. They didn't *completely* dumb down table top RPGs. Granted it was a long time ago, but it is an historical fact.
I installed the kuki kernel on my eee pc 900A (4 gb ssd) and it cold boots to the desktop (automatic login) in 10 seconds. Resumes from suspend in just a few. That may not quite be "instant on" but it's good enough for me.
Just to add my $.02, I also have had Ubuntu server deployed in the enterprise for several years, supporting LAMP, java, sendmail, imap, squirrelmail, sftp, internal IM, wikis, and a clutch of scientific utilities. I freely confess there are realms of security of which I am ignorant, so perhaps I've just been lucky, but it's worked out very well so far.
I wouldn't think of it as fodder with which to mine movies, but something along the lines of an HBO series, like the one being done for Song of Ice and Fire. I think it would be pretty cool.... first episode opens up with the creation of the world, move on to the crashing of the pillars, the awakening of the elves, the poisoning of the trees, the elf on elf genocide..... on and on. I think it would all be cool.
I'm not disputing anything that you wrote. I'm simply saying that the quality we loosely describe as "intelligence" can inhere in an isolated autonomous unit, even if it could never have naturally arisen that way. Therefore, I conclude that it would be possible to have AI in a set-top box. Or at least, there's nothing in our natures that refutes it.
But I could stick you on a deserted island all by yourself and you would still be intelligent, right? I'm not denying that we are deeply social creatures, nor that a full definition of an organism must necessarily include a description of its environment. But I think you are confusing the process by which we become intelligent with intelligence itself.
Moblin is off to a good start, but the lack of apps in the repos currently keep it from being a serious option *for me*. If you are satisfied with the browser and some IM, then it is already an excellent option, even in its current rough state. If I could get Comix and pppd (for tethering my cell phone) on it easily, I probably would already be using it as my full time OS. And, yes, I know that compiling is an option. I tried to compile a few things and quickly found myself running down dependency after dependency, and gave up. That kind of time investment is not what I'm looking for in a netbook.
I had been using rtorrent, pytvshows, screen, and rtgui to manage media downloads on my mythbox. I've since switched over to boxee, although it's running on top of the same mythbuntu install I was using before, and could easily revert back to. I don't really use the streaming apps boxee includes, not do I need to use its torrent capabilities since my own system is more robust. Boxee won me over simply because the interface looks slicker, it grabs cover art and show information automatically, gives one-click access to the apple trailer if available, grabs subtitles with a click, and my downloaded shows are automatically in my media library without having to manually rebuild the database every time I add something.... all things mythtv does not do. If and when mythtv adds these things, I would probably switch back.
You may be correct about the dictation systems. I never had to touch those. As far as PACS, though, there were open source projects sufficient for our needs. And I wrote my own flat-text database system with a patient scheduler and routines to calculate doseage injection and decay for coordination with the cyclotron guys whipping up our doses, along with an ncurses-based UI. Kinda ugly, but not really any uglier than the "professional" stuff they were using for similar tasks and for which we hemhorraged license fees. The techs and administrative staff used it just fine. Like I said, YMMV.
1) Open source software? When I was in IT in a Radiology clinic, I was mandated to do everything possible with FOSS (not everything *was* possible, but I was expected to make the effort, and usually succeeded. YMMV) 2) In the example I was replying to, I believe the situation cited was people queuing up to use too few computers. It's the "too expensive to buy more" bit that I was responding to, so I assume the training would be moot. 3) I attempted to address the support angle by assuming a competent *nix admin team could handle the load with minimal addition of manpower. Granted, your points may be totally valid from a Windows perspective. But I'm a FOSS guy, and had management that supported that.
I used to work in Hospital IT (not any more though). I'm not disputing your insight, but it does surprise me a little..... the idea that the cost for data input of text records could translate into such a significant cost. I know just walking around the hospital I would routinely see old computers sitting outside of office doors in the hallway, waiting to be carted off and destroyed. Now, granted, these *were* old POS computers. But if all you really needed to do was provide a terminal for some data input, how bad-ass do they need to be? I'm just suggesting, if the budget issue really is that bad, there are probably ways that older, less-sexy, equipment could be re-purposed to bring that down a bit. Analysis of the server end gets more complex but, if we can assume we're dealing mostly with text, I doubt it would be that horrendous. The cost of a new server or a few more TB of disk space is practically nothing compared to other expenses I observed being routinely shelled out. And an oft-touted meme around Slashdot is that part of the point of paying for a *nix admin is that he or she can handle more boxes simultaneously than comparable Windows admins, due to the differences in platforms. I'm not saying that's true, either, but it seems a lot of smart people posting around here believe that it is. If so, it casts some skepticism towards the notion that man-power would increase drastically for a doubling or trebling of a bunch of text records. So, those are a lot of questions I have about your statement. They are questions, though, not challenges.
I am curious which free PACS you are referring to? I built a custom PACS system for a major hospital consisting of bits of dcm4chee, the dcmtk toolkit, and a bunch of bash scripts that glued it all together. Our research staff were comfortable enough with the command line to be able to go "fetch [HISTORY NUM] [# previous studies]" as well as several other utilities, and it worked well enough for us. The main advantage of the system was to be able to cron-job the fetching of the next day's patients prior studies in the middle of the night, something none of the commercial systems (all GUI-fied) allowed us to do.
System->Preferences->Network Connections->Wired Tab->IPv4 Settings Tab->Dropdown Menu, choose manual, the Add box below lights up.