I made the mistake of putting some Red Hat CDs under the tree last year. Now RMS won't leave me alone, he keeps trying to get me to call it GNU/Christmas.
Now, not only do I get to try and dodge all the morons with their cell phones and in-dash dvd players. Now, I have to avoid people compiling their kernels on the road. Sheesh.
Nothing to worry about! Everyone knows Linux machines never crash!
Panasonic surely isn't the leader in quality. Way too many returns of defective equiptment.
Optimus is a GREAT brand. Especially their audio equiptment.
Optimus is Radio Shack's house brand. Radio Shack doesn't actually build any of this stuff, it's rebadged equipment... and often, it's built by Matsushita Electric (Read: Panasonic.)
Another example of this: IBM's low-end laptops were (and probably still are) made by Acer. Curiously, laptops sold under the "Acer" brand tended to have exactly the same specs as the low-end IBM laptops, and cost about $500 less.
It's not just the high-technology sector. Back in the mid '90s, the Toyota Corolla sold for a couple thousand more than the Geo Prism-- even though they were the same car built in the same factory in Fremont, California. But since Japanese cars are "much more reliable" than American cars, the one with the American (Geo/General Motors) nameplate couldn't sell for as much as the Japanese marque. I'd guess that this sort of idiocy's been going on for centuries.
Colloquially we speak of Moore's Law and we mean "Chips get twice as fast every 18 months."
This is not what Gordon Moore said. Moore's statement was based on transistor density. Indeed, perhaps we may not be able to cram transistors together as much in the not too distant future.
Does this mean that chips won't continue to get twice as fast every 18 months? It would surprise me if processors slowed down their rate of speed growth much this decade. As people begin playing with digital video on the desktop, as people write games that can actually push enough information to a GeForce4 FX to make it worth spending money on, people are still going to want faster and faster machines. And while AMD still exists as a competitor to Intel, even those people who don't really need a 7 GHz machine are going to find that that's what's available.
So while Moore's law, as it was stated, may be nearing its end, Moore's law, as it is usually spoken will probably stick around for a good while longer.
...and why I'm not sure Ricochet is the right answer:
Currently, I'm using a RIM pager and SSH via Mobitex to do "wireless internet access"-- not bad, but there are a lot of places where I don't have quite enough signal to send and this small 8 line screen is insufficient for many things-- it works okay for a geek like me, but it ain't ready for the masses.
What I think that people can use is a technology that is
a) largely ubiquitous and easy to deploy and cover large areas. Issues buying space on celltowers notwithstanding, Ricochet looks like a better answer than wifi here. b) Reasonable speed. Face it, you're pretty much guaranteed to not be able to play Quake on any wireless link longer than the one between your Airport base station and your laptop in your home. Reasonable means I need to be able to interactively browse the web with a minimal amount of waiting and read my email-- and Ricochet is "fast enough" for this-- but wifi would be better. c) "I want all of that... in here." This is my big problem with any of the Mobitex solutions, like a RIM pager or a Palm VII-- you get a small subset of the web, you can get mediocre SSH. An easy rule of thumb is if you don't have an IP address, chances are you're not "on the internet". d) Size. Here's where Ricochet really loses-- I've never seen a Ricochet modem that wasn't larger than the object I wanted to plug it into (like a Palm or an iPaq.) Ricochet's great if you just want to use your laptop on the train in to work (until it goes into a tunnel...) but it's not a solution for "Hey, when's Nemesis playing at the Cineplex 1000? Lemme whip out my PDA and find out!" Wi-fi can be done in a PCMCIA card.
The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
My college has these iMacs that we used to use for our homework assignments. One day, I editting my photos and downloading to my iPod on it when all of a sudden a letter from the registrar's office came in. They said I flunked out, and they took my Mac. All of it! The printer, too! I had to move out back to my dad's house quickly. Needless to say, dad's house isn't nearly as good, and I blame that iMac for failing out.
I'm happy to report my dad has a PC and it crashes too much to actually do anything fun on, so now I just rush my papers and they're good enough for the local community college, and my grades have all been really good.
One of the coolest places I saw when I was doing a lot of travelling last year was Dover, England. Dover's in an interesting place given its geography, and it's been an interesting place for a long time-- The grounds of Dover Castle contain everything from a 1st century Roman lighthouse all the way up through tunnels dug into the white cliffs in the 1900s that they ran Operation Dynamo from, and lots of stuff from eras between them.
It's quite interesting if you're into engineering over the centuries...
So imagine you're a record company. You see a problem: People are downloading.mp3 files that they can then do what they want with of your intellectual property off the internet. You know from seeing it happen that people like.mp3 files that they can do what they want with. You think, "Gee. I'd like a piece of that action."
So this thing comes out. You can download music off the internet now, and it's legal! It's not ridiculously priced, but there are problems-- it's not.mp3 files that people can do whatever they want with.
The question becomes, then: Were people interested in digital music that they didn't have to go to a CD store to get? Or were they interested in.mp3 files they can do what they want with?
I suspect that, particularly since the.mp3 files are free, people for the most part want.mp3 files that they can do what they want with.
So, if you're a record company, how should you go after a piece of that action?
Well, let's look at p2p programs. Say you want the latest track from Foo, called Bar. You ask for bar on the p2p client. You get back 142 responses. Now, of these 142 responses, 100 were bogus entries trying to get you to download their porno virus spam. 30 are busy and won't talk to you now, 5 have something completely bogus, 5 are people on the wrong end of a 14.4 modem, and two actually have what you want and open slots to download it, but one of those has it at 96 kilobits.
Now, if I haven't made it sufficient of a hint, perhaps the proper way to sell digital music online is to
a) Sell people.mp3s they can do what they want with, and, b) Make a reliable service to get them in good quality so you don't have to sort through 142 options to find the one that actually has what you want and will disconnect you halfway through the download anyhow.
How do you make money selling something that's free? Make it convenient. You can offer people both of those things and still get as much money for them.
I made it a point to use DirecTV's DSL service ( it's still regular DSL ) instead of Bellsouth's DSL service so can in some way support the underdog.
Of course, if BellSouth was the other option, some of the money you sent to DirecTV goes to BellSouth anyhow, since it's all their lines and the hardware in the CO belongs mostly to them...
In my case, it's even worse. I pretty much only have landline phone service [0] because of DSL (well, that and my Tivo wants to dial out.) So I pay BellSouth there and DirecTV DSL pays them again so I can get DSL through DirecTV, and I don't even have a voice telephone hooked to the line...
[0] I work for a wireless phone company [1], so why the heck would I want a landline phone?
[1] Of course, I didn't pick DirecTV due to a moral opposition against BellSouth since they own 45% of the company I work for.:) I picked it because the AUP effectively read, "Q: Can I run servers? A: That's why we give you a static IP!"
I for one, am willing to have a little bit of product placement in my video games to defray the cost.
That, you see, is the real problem.
People aren't pissed off that McD's is unhealthy or whatever else. They're pissed off that Maxis is getting money from Big Mac and putting product placement ads in the game, but it's not reducing the price of their game.
People like to talk up a good cause, but let's face it: they're pissed because they're not getting a cut.
I know that I, and I'd guess that most slashdotters, use notably more bandwidth than the average person.
In my case, it only happens once every two or three months, but I'll have days when I mooch down five gig or more in a day. I run my own mail server and web server, both of which are quite small. (My web server pushed out 42 meg in August. And that's the big number for the year...)
I've resigned myself to the fact that eventually, to continue doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to buy a T-1 line. I'll enjoy it while I can do what I want for the same price as everyone else doing what they want, but eventually, it's just not going to be possible. The ISP I'm using now may currently have a very liberal AUP, but it's going to slowly get whittled away by the beancounters. So eventually, if I want to keep doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to be my own ISP.
A Canadian regiment sent to Europe for WWI had a regimental mascot, a bear named Winnie (short for Winnipeg). Deciding that bringing the bear actually onto the continent with the fighting was a bad idea, they donated Winnie to the London Zoo.
Mr. Milne and his younger relative (a certain Christopher Robin...) visited the London zoo, where they met this Canadian bear.
Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?
Of course. While this gets thrown about as a bad thing, a company must have profit as one of its highest motives.
You can talk about doing all sorts of wonderful and interesting things _as well as_ turning a profit, but let's face it: If you don't turn a profit, you only get to do the other stuff once.
If you pay someone else to do your support for you, they get a cut.
If you're big enough that you've got an IT staff instead of an IT guru, you're probably big enough to do your support on open-source software in-house, and save money on it. If not, then yeah, outsourcing probably saves you money on training and whatever else and that may offset the cost of buying the closed-source software and the support.
But once you're in the similar "economies of scale" range, buying support from someone else just adds a middleman.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the mistake of putting some Red Hat CDs under the tree last year. Now RMS won't leave me alone, he keeps trying to get me to call it GNU/Christmas.
This is what I get for being such a cheapskate...
-JDF
Now, not only do I get to try and dodge all the morons with their cell phones and in-dash dvd players. Now, I have to avoid people compiling their kernels on the road. Sheesh.
Nothing to worry about! Everyone knows Linux machines never crash!
-JDF
Hokey Spokes look pretty much like a spirograph for your bicycle...
I rate Amazon's reviews at five stars! Nothing could be better!
-G. Cooke, TX
Review * 1/2
I rate Slashdot at a star and a half. Definitely take anything you hear there with a grain of salt.
-G. Cooke, TX
Panasonic surely isn't the leader in quality. Way too many returns of defective equiptment.
Optimus is a GREAT brand. Especially their audio equiptment.
Optimus is Radio Shack's house brand. Radio Shack doesn't actually build any of this stuff, it's rebadged equipment... and often, it's built by Matsushita Electric (Read: Panasonic.)
Another example of this: IBM's low-end laptops were (and probably still are) made by Acer. Curiously, laptops sold under the "Acer" brand tended to have exactly the same specs as the low-end IBM laptops, and cost about $500 less.
It's not just the high-technology sector. Back in the mid '90s, the Toyota Corolla sold for a couple thousand more than the Geo Prism-- even though they were the same car built in the same factory in Fremont, California. But since Japanese cars are "much more reliable" than American cars, the one with the American (Geo/General Motors) nameplate couldn't sell for as much as the Japanese marque. I'd guess that this sort of idiocy's been going on for centuries.
The Ariane 5 lifts more than any commercial US rocket
Yes, but it doesn't lift it as far.
Huh. If the core was going to shut down like that, it should have been named the L1-A.
Colloquially we speak of Moore's Law and we mean "Chips get twice as fast every 18 months."
This is not what Gordon Moore said. Moore's statement was based on transistor density. Indeed, perhaps we may not be able to cram transistors together as much in the not too distant future.
Does this mean that chips won't continue to get twice as fast every 18 months? It would surprise me if processors slowed down their rate of speed growth much this decade. As people begin playing with digital video on the desktop, as people write games that can actually push enough information to a GeForce4 FX to make it worth spending money on, people are still going to want faster and faster machines. And while AMD still exists as a competitor to Intel, even those people who don't really need a 7 GHz machine are going to find that that's what's available.
So while Moore's law, as it was stated, may be nearing its end, Moore's law, as it is usually spoken will probably stick around for a good while longer.
Well, don't worry. I'm sure one of the crack Slashdot editors will just go in and fix... oh yeah.
Usually when folks say "crack", they mean "elite", not as a description of what they must be smoking...
...and why I'm not sure Ricochet is the right answer:
Currently, I'm using a RIM pager and SSH via Mobitex to do "wireless internet access"-- not bad, but there are a lot of places where I don't have quite enough signal to send and this small 8 line screen is insufficient for many things-- it works okay for a geek like me, but it ain't ready for the masses.
What I think that people can use is a technology that is
a) largely ubiquitous and easy to deploy and cover large areas. Issues buying space on celltowers notwithstanding, Ricochet looks like a better answer than wifi here.
b) Reasonable speed. Face it, you're pretty much guaranteed to not be able to play Quake on any wireless link longer than the one between your Airport base station and your laptop in your home. Reasonable means I need to be able to interactively browse the web with a minimal amount of waiting and read my email-- and Ricochet is "fast enough" for this-- but wifi would be better.
c) "I want all of that... in here." This is my big problem with any of the Mobitex solutions, like a RIM pager or a Palm VII-- you get a small subset of the web, you can get mediocre SSH. An easy rule of thumb is if you don't have an IP address, chances are you're not "on the internet".
d) Size. Here's where Ricochet really loses-- I've never seen a Ricochet modem that wasn't larger than the object I wanted to plug it into (like a Palm or an iPaq.) Ricochet's great if you just want to use your laptop on the train in to work (until it goes into a tunnel...) but it's not a solution for "Hey, when's Nemesis playing at the Cineplex 1000? Lemme whip out my PDA and find out!" Wi-fi can be done in a PCMCIA card.
You mean it's actually,
1) Collect wi-fi
2) ???
3) Don't profit?!
The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
My college has these iMacs that we used to use for our homework assignments. One day, I editting my photos and downloading to my iPod on it when all of a sudden a letter from the registrar's office came in. They said I flunked out, and they took my Mac. All of it! The printer, too! I had to move out back to my dad's house quickly. Needless to say, dad's house isn't nearly as good, and I blame that iMac for failing out.
I'm happy to report my dad has a PC and it crashes too much to actually do anything fun on, so now I just rush my papers and they're good enough for the local community college, and my grades have all been really good.
Thanks a lot, Apple.
Ellen
...to the ubiquitous question, "You moron! Didn't you read the article?!", I submit,
...probably not.
(warning: page in Japanese)
That is funny but seriously a VCR records analog which is legal to use
Of course. If they wanted VCRs to be illegal, they'd've called it the Analog Millenium Copyright Act...
-JDF
One of the coolest places I saw when I was doing a lot of travelling last year was Dover, England. Dover's in an interesting place given its geography, and it's been an interesting place for a long time-- The grounds of Dover Castle contain everything from a 1st century Roman lighthouse all the way up through tunnels dug into the white cliffs in the 1900s that they ran Operation Dynamo from, and lots of stuff from eras between them.
It's quite interesting if you're into engineering over the centuries...
So imagine you're a record company. You see a problem: People are downloading .mp3 files that they can then do what they want with of your intellectual property off the internet. You know from seeing it happen that people like .mp3 files that they can do what they want with. You think, "Gee. I'd like a piece of that action."
.mp3 files that people can do whatever they want with.
.mp3 files they can do what they want with?
.mp3 files are free, people for the most part want .mp3 files that they can do what they want with.
.mp3s they can do what they want with, and,
So this thing comes out. You can download music off the internet now, and it's legal! It's not ridiculously priced, but there are problems-- it's not
The question becomes, then: Were people interested in digital music that they didn't have to go to a CD store to get? Or were they interested in
I suspect that, particularly since the
So, if you're a record company, how should you go after a piece of that action?
Well, let's look at p2p programs. Say you want the latest track from Foo, called Bar. You ask for bar on the p2p client. You get back 142 responses. Now, of these 142 responses, 100 were bogus entries trying to get you to download their porno virus spam. 30 are busy and won't talk to you now, 5 have something completely bogus, 5 are people on the wrong end of a 14.4 modem, and two actually have what you want and open slots to download it, but one of those has it at 96 kilobits.
Now, if I haven't made it sufficient of a hint, perhaps the proper way to sell digital music online is to
a) Sell people
b) Make a reliable service to get them in good quality so you don't have to sort through 142 options to find the one that actually has what you want and will disconnect you halfway through the download anyhow.
How do you make money selling something that's free? Make it convenient. You can offer people both of those things and still get as much money for them.
-JDF
I made it a point to use DirecTV's DSL service ( it's still regular DSL ) instead of Bellsouth's DSL service so can in some way support the underdog.
:) I picked it because the AUP effectively read, "Q: Can I run servers? A: That's why we give you a static IP!"
Of course, if BellSouth was the other option, some of the money you sent to DirecTV goes to BellSouth anyhow, since it's all their lines and the hardware in the CO belongs mostly to them...
In my case, it's even worse. I pretty much only have landline phone service [0] because of DSL (well, that and my Tivo wants to dial out.) So I pay BellSouth there and DirecTV DSL pays them again so I can get DSL through DirecTV, and I don't even have a voice telephone hooked to the line...
[0] I work for a wireless phone company [1], so why the heck would I want a landline phone?
[1] Of course, I didn't pick DirecTV due to a moral opposition against BellSouth since they own 45% of the company I work for.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
On second thought, naah, don't bother...
I for one, am willing to have a little bit of product placement in my video games to defray the cost.
That, you see, is the real problem.
People aren't pissed off that McD's is unhealthy or whatever else. They're pissed off that Maxis is getting money from Big Mac and putting product placement ads in the game, but it's not reducing the price of their game.
People like to talk up a good cause, but let's face it: they're pissed because they're not getting a cut.
-JDF
I know that I, and I'd guess that most slashdotters, use notably more bandwidth than the average person.
In my case, it only happens once every two or three months, but I'll have days when I mooch down five gig or more in a day. I run my own mail server and web server, both of which are quite small. (My web server pushed out 42 meg in August. And that's the big number for the year...)
I've resigned myself to the fact that eventually, to continue doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to buy a T-1 line. I'll enjoy it while I can do what I want for the same price as everyone else doing what they want, but eventually, it's just not going to be possible. The ISP I'm using now may currently have a very liberal AUP, but it's going to slowly get whittled away by the beancounters. So eventually, if I want to keep doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to be my own ISP.
-JDF
I'm not as familiar with Van Gogh, but I was thinking it looked like an orange version of "Starry Night".
Probably something about it being a star, though...
Milne was indeed British.
A Canadian regiment sent to Europe for WWI had a regimental mascot, a bear named Winnie (short for Winnipeg). Deciding that bringing the bear actually onto the continent with the fighting was a bad idea, they donated Winnie to the London Zoo.
Mr. Milne and his younger relative (a certain Christopher Robin...) visited the London zoo, where they met this Canadian bear.
This is detailed on a plaque in the London zoo.
-JDF
Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?
Of course. While this gets thrown about as a bad thing, a company must have profit as one of its highest motives.
You can talk about doing all sorts of wonderful and interesting things _as well as_ turning a profit, but let's face it: If you don't turn a profit, you only get to do the other stuff once.
-JDF
If you pay someone else to do your support for you, they get a cut.
If you're big enough that you've got an IT staff instead of an IT guru, you're probably big enough to do your support on open-source software in-house, and save money on it. If not, then yeah, outsourcing probably saves you money on training and whatever else and that may offset the cost of buying the closed-source software and the support.
But once you're in the similar "economies of scale" range, buying support from someone else just adds a middleman.