I'm sorry, but am I the only one who doesn't think that anything being on crack is a good thing? Given the choice, I'd take the thing that was not on crack any day.
As a previous poster pointed out, at least for the Roomba, there is a little flexible rotating brush that flicks dust out of corners and gets up close to objects.
My Roomba does a fine job on our hardwood floors, all I need to do is sweep out the places it can't reach once a month or so (I usually run the Roomba every night).
It seems that some people have the notion that robots have to be "humaniod", essentially useless, and prohibitively expensive. One of the best examples of what robots in the near term will look like is the Roomba, which is a small robot designed for a specific job, and is only $200. I've got one, and it really does do a good job of vacuming the house with little intervention. I'd imagine that a home sentry robot would most likely look like a roving webcam with a WiFi interface to your home computer, rather than something with legs and a face. Now, if you're looking to get something to cook and serve you dinner...
Let's not forget about Computer Engineers, who usually get most of the education of an electrical engineer, but have enough knowledge of programming and software engineering to improve computer architectures and implementations.
Don't get me wrong. I'm and Electrical engineer, and wouldn't want to be mistaken as anything less [puts on flame resistant suit...].
It seems that many people think that the reason people buy things over the internet is that they can get it "tax-free" (same goes for catalog sales), but it seems that it you look at the shipping charges for most mailorder/internet sales, they'd exceed the sales tax you'd pay if you bought it at a store in your home state (if your state has no sales tax, then shipping costs become a potential advantage for the local Mall store -- assuming that the states don't load up the tax burdens in other ways for merchants). In reality, mailorder/internet sales increase competition between merchants (by increasing choice for consumers), tending to lower prices. It also forces state governments to be more aware of the effects policy has on local industries, because the retailers have to compete with other retailers in other states (which may not have as high a per-capita tax burden). While forcing collection of "use taxes" for out-of-state buyers may seem to boost the competitive position of local retailers, it also adds additional administrative costs to each retailer's bottom line (so now we have a hidden tax on retailers to become tax collectors for other states!).
Until the companies try to import the goods back into the US. Then all the great competition-equalizing duties kick in and the government gets its money anyway.
It's hard for me to believe that people actually buy stuff pitched to them over the phone, but there must be a good number of them to make telemarketing economically viable.
In our household we have a standard speech/line: "In this household, we do not respond to phone solicitations. Could you please take me off your call list? Thankyou. Have a nice day/night".
Seriously, if no one bought anything from telemarketers, they'd very quickly go out of business.
The Vivato technology, which stems from 1950's research for so-called phased-array antennas for military applications, makes it possible to electronically steer numerous radio beams from a single point. Focusing the beams increases their signal strength, and using large numbers of them greatly increases the antenna's traffic capacity.
While the implementation of fixed beam patterns does not require DSPs to generate the phase delays required, anything that has to adapt to new environments would generally require some processing on the receiver elements. The article does not say whether or how often the antenna is configured by either a connected computer or DSP, or whether it reconfigures itself every time a new connection is made. It really is reasonable to suspect that a DSP (perhaps a Texas Instruments C54-based fixed point type) would be used to adapt the beam pattern. I'm not sure how much the price would be affected, though, considering how cheap and small some of the fixed-point DSPs are these days.
Even better, taxes should be voluntary, like our contributions to PBS/NPR. The government should have to make a case (every year) as to why they need to spend out money in any particular way.
Before you go "whoa, that means that no one would pay any taxes and the government would stop working," let me say that I think there would be plenty of people willing to contribute if they could see the utility of thier contribution. A strong national defense benefits everyone, but how much is really needed? Would I like to contribute to my own retirement fund (I already do, assuming that I'm going to get my own money back)? How much should I send to feed hungry children? Orgainizations like the United Way make some of these choices easier for us, why can't the government?
At the risk of being redundant, many states have "use taxes" on the books to cover this. If I cross state borders to another state that has a lower sales tax rate than my home state, use tax laws require me to declare the item and pay sales tax (or the balance of the difference) to my home state. This is the case for anything purchased over the phone/internet/mail. The problem is that this kind of tax law is impractical to enforce, so the money hungry state governments are looking for ways to get thier piece of the action.
What's really funny about this is the "paper loss" mentality many people have about this kind of commerce. From the article:
Colorado is projected to lose $686.4 million in revenue in 2006 if it does not tax interstate e-commerce, according to a study released last year by the University of Tennessee for the Institute for State Studies.
The article should read "Colorado is projected to gain $686.4 million in additional revenue in 2006 if it finds a way to enforce existing tax law regarding interstate [e-]commerce..."
Simply because they estimate a dollar amount leaving the state doesn't mean that the money can magically be had for additional government spending. Once they find a way to do this, the e-conomy will adapt accordingly.
I'd be afraid for my wallet if they actually do figure out a way to do this, because it would be an additional incentive for states to have a higher tax rates relative to thier neighbors. If state A has lower use taxes than state B, then it won't get any additional revenue from its citizens buying out-of-state products. Even better (the constitution be damned), they could start setting up checkpoints at the state borders.
It's funny, My wife has a 400MHz ruby iMac G3, which also is convection cooled (CRT, powersupply, HD, CDROM all inside), and all I can hear is the disk drive spinning. The CD makes a little noise while in use, but that's about it. Put it to sleep and *total* silence.
Well, evey distro has it's quirks. The 'bone' I'd like to pick with YellowDog (sorry) is that it *requires* MacOS to install on older ('Old World') machines like my Wallstreet Powerbook. A Linux distro that depends on another OS to boot? My LinuxPPC 2KQ4 CD had *no* problems booting or installing without MacOS installed (it used miboot for oldworld machines). The funny thing is that BootX (the MacOS bootloader) comes with miboot included, so why didn't the install cd default to that, and then give the user the choice of boot methods after the install was complete?
Here's one interesting point. Most PPC machines have a bunch more interrrupts than the legacy x86 machines. When are PC makers going to give us more than 15 usable interrupts?
We bought a Dell machine a while back with linux (RH7.1) installed, and it would have been easier just to have wiped the HD clean and install RH ourselves. The machine shipped with an Nvidia video card, but Dell didn't install the (closed) Nvidia drivers. I called Dell, and got the eternal run-around:
Support Staff: "can you get to a DOS prompt" Me: "No, there is no DOS on this machine" Support Staff: "what do you mean, 'no DOS'?" Me: "We purchased this machine with Linux pre-installed" Support Staff: "please hold"
10 minutes later...
Support Staff: "I'm sorry I can't help you"
Eventually, I went through the leaflet on Linux Support and it mentioned the possiblility that the latest Nvidia driver might be available at the Nvidia website.
I'm by no means an expert, but Marx was concerned with the industrial revolution and the "means of production" (aka capital). By personal property rights, I was refering to rights to the results of your labor. Beyond what Marx was talking about, the actual interpretations of communism vary greatly. US law views software as copyrightable material, but the argument could be made that Marx would have viewed software as just another means of production, which should be owned by the state. The Open-Source movement (at least from the GNU standpoint) does not view GPL'd source as "owned" by the collective, but still by the original "author". Did the Soviet-flavor of communism recognize copyrights? I don't know enough of Chinese Communism.
It depends on the type of open-source you're talking about. GPL'd source is still copyrighted, and the original authors still hold intellectual property rights to their work. The GPL is just another usage agreement. Under most interpretations, communism doesn't recognize personal property rights, while capitalism does .
From the Apple HW website pictures, it appears that the CPUs still only need a heat sink (rather than a fan strapped on top). At 1 GHz, I'd like to see any Intel variant touch that...
I get a.doc attachment, and it's 269312 bytes long, I save it as.rtf, and *bingo*, it's now only 77621 bytes long. Microsoft adds alot of stuff in the file format for objects and such, which isn't needed if you are simply trying to send content. If several people are co-authoring a document, they shouldn't do it via email anyway. Send a.rtf file to a Word user, and Word automatically recognizes it.
I get these MB+.doc files that reduce to KB+ files when saved as Rich Text Format. That's why *I* don't like to see.doc attachments.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but am I the only one who doesn't think that anything being on crack is a good thing? Given the choice, I'd take the thing that was not on crack any day.
I believe that running MacOS on anything but Apple-approved HW would be in violation of the MacOS Users License.
As a previous poster pointed out, at least for the Roomba, there is a little flexible rotating brush that flicks dust out of corners and gets up close to objects.
My Roomba does a fine job on our hardwood floors, all I need to do is sweep out the places it can't reach once a month or so (I usually run the Roomba every night).
It seems that some people have the notion that robots have to be "humaniod", essentially useless, and prohibitively expensive. One of the best examples of what robots in the near term will look like is the Roomba, which is a small robot designed for a specific job, and is only $200. I've got one, and it really does do a good job of vacuming the house with little intervention. I'd imagine that a home sentry robot would most likely look like a roving webcam with a WiFi interface to your home computer, rather than something with legs and a face. Now, if you're looking to get something to cook and serve you dinner...
Let's not forget about Computer Engineers, who usually get most of the education of an electrical engineer, but have enough knowledge of programming and software engineering to improve computer architectures and implementations.
Don't get me wrong. I'm and Electrical engineer, and wouldn't want to be mistaken as anything less [puts on flame resistant suit...].
At this point, comments like this should automatically be modded down to (-1 Redundant)
Just let it go.
It seems that many people think that the reason people buy things over the internet is that they can get it "tax-free" (same goes for catalog sales), but it seems that it you look at the shipping charges for most mailorder/internet sales, they'd exceed the sales tax you'd pay if you bought it at a store in your home state (if your state has no sales tax, then shipping costs become a potential advantage for the local Mall store -- assuming that the states don't load up the tax burdens in other ways for merchants). In reality, mailorder/internet sales increase competition between merchants (by increasing choice for consumers), tending to lower prices. It also forces state governments to be more aware of the effects policy has on local industries, because the retailers have to compete with other retailers in other states (which may not have as high a per-capita tax burden). While forcing collection of "use taxes" for out-of-state buyers may seem to boost the competitive position of local retailers, it also adds additional administrative costs to each retailer's bottom line (so now we have a hidden tax on retailers to become tax collectors for other states!).
Until the companies try to import the goods back into the US. Then all the great competition-equalizing duties kick in and the government gets its money anyway.
It's hard for me to believe that people actually buy stuff pitched to them over the phone, but there must be a good number of them to make telemarketing economically viable.
In our household we have a standard speech/line: "In this household, we do not respond to phone solicitations. Could you please take me off your call list? Thankyou. Have a nice day/night".
Seriously, if no one bought anything from telemarketers, they'd very quickly go out of business.
While the implementation of fixed beam patterns does not require DSPs to generate the phase delays required, anything that has to adapt to new environments would generally require some processing on the receiver elements. The article does not say whether or how often the antenna is configured by either a connected computer or DSP, or whether it reconfigures itself every time a new connection is made. It really is reasonable to suspect that a DSP (perhaps a Texas Instruments C54-based fixed point type) would be used to adapt the beam pattern. I'm not sure how much the price would be affected, though, considering how cheap and small some of the fixed-point DSPs are these days.
Even better, taxes should be voluntary, like our contributions to PBS/NPR. The government should have to make a case (every year) as to why they need to spend out money in any particular way.
Before you go "whoa, that means that no one would pay any taxes and the government would stop working," let me say that I think there would be plenty of people willing to contribute if they could see the utility of thier contribution. A strong national defense benefits everyone, but how much is really needed? Would I like to contribute to my own retirement fund (I already do, assuming that I'm going to get my own money back)? How much should I send to feed hungry children? Orgainizations like the United Way make some of these choices easier for us, why can't the government?
At the risk of being redundant, many states have "use taxes" on the books to cover this. If I cross state borders to another state that has a lower sales tax rate than my home state, use tax laws require me to declare the item and pay sales tax (or the balance of the difference) to my home state. This is the case for anything purchased over the phone/internet/mail. The problem is that this kind of tax law is impractical to enforce, so the money hungry state governments are looking for ways to get thier piece of the action.
..."
What's really funny about this is the "paper loss" mentality many people have about this kind of commerce. From the article:
Colorado is projected to lose $686.4 million in revenue in 2006 if it does not tax interstate e-commerce, according to a study released last year by the University of Tennessee for the Institute for State Studies.
The article should read "Colorado is projected to gain $686.4 million in additional revenue in 2006 if it finds a way to enforce existing tax law regarding interstate [e-]commerce
Simply because they estimate a dollar amount leaving the state doesn't mean that the money can magically be had for additional government spending. Once they find a way to do this, the e-conomy will adapt accordingly.
I'd be afraid for my wallet if they actually do figure out a way to do this, because it would be an additional incentive for states to have a higher tax rates relative to thier neighbors. If state A has lower use taxes than state B, then it won't get any additional revenue from its citizens buying out-of-state products. Even better (the constitution be damned), they could start setting up checkpoints at the state borders.
that someone fills the void left by Geeks-in-Space. We've been without a techno-rant show for some time now.
http://maconlinux.net/news.html
It's funny, My wife has a 400MHz ruby iMac G3, which also is convection cooled (CRT, powersupply, HD, CDROM all inside), and all I can hear is the disk drive spinning. The CD makes a little noise while in use, but that's about it. Put it to sleep and *total* silence.
2 weeks ago, these were moving slowly on ebay for around $30. Now it looks like they're going for around $50. Thanks.
Well, evey distro has it's quirks. The 'bone' I'd like to pick with YellowDog (sorry) is that it *requires* MacOS to install on older ('Old World') machines like my Wallstreet Powerbook. A Linux distro that depends on another OS to boot? My LinuxPPC 2KQ4 CD had *no* problems booting or installing without MacOS installed (it used miboot for oldworld machines). The funny thing is that BootX (the MacOS bootloader) comes with miboot included, so why didn't the install cd default to that, and then give the user the choice of boot methods after the install was complete?
cha-ching ($0.02)
Here's one interesting point. Most PPC machines have a bunch more interrrupts than the legacy x86 machines. When are PC makers going to give us more than 15 usable interrupts?
/proc/interrupts
cat
CPU0 CPU1
9: 24405 0 OpenPIC Edge Built-in Sound out
10: 0 0 OpenPIC Edge Built-in Sound in
19: 2776759 0 OpenPIC Level ide0
20: 9516 0 OpenPIC Level ide1
24: 1 0 OpenPIC Level Built-in Sound misc
25: 0 0 OpenPIC Level VIA-PMU
27: 3704799 0 OpenPIC Level usb-ohci
28: 0 0 OpenPIC Level usb-ohci
41: 123719306 0 OpenPIC Level eth0
47: 0 0 OpenPIC Level GPIO1/ADB
55: 0 0 OpenPIC Edge NMI - XMON
72: 11137 13059 OpenPIC Edge IPI0 (call function)
73: 172139016 235590613 OpenPIC Edge IPI1 (reschedule)
74: 0 0 OpenPIC Edge IPI2 (invalidate tlb)
75: 0 0 OpenPIC Edge IPI3 (xmon break)
IPI (recv/sent): 407753825/407753914
BAD: 4
We bought a Dell machine a while back with linux (RH7.1) installed, and it would have been easier just to have wiped the HD clean and install RH ourselves. The machine shipped with an Nvidia video card, but Dell didn't install the (closed) Nvidia drivers. I called Dell, and got the eternal run-around:
Support Staff: "can you get to a DOS prompt"
Me: "No, there is no DOS on this machine"
Support Staff: "what do you mean, 'no DOS'?"
Me: "We purchased this machine with Linux pre-installed"
Support Staff: "please hold"
10 minutes later...
Support Staff: "I'm sorry I can't help you"
Eventually, I went through the leaflet on Linux Support and it mentioned the possiblility that the latest Nvidia driver might be available at the Nvidia website.
Hmmm.~~~~~~
I'm by no means an expert, but Marx was concerned with the industrial revolution and the "means of production" (aka capital). By personal property rights, I was refering to rights to the results of your labor. Beyond what Marx was talking about, the actual interpretations of communism vary greatly. US law views software as copyrightable material, but the argument could be made that Marx would have viewed software as just another means of production, which should be owned by the state. The Open-Source movement (at least from the GNU standpoint) does not view GPL'd source as "owned" by the collective, but still by the original "author". Did the Soviet-flavor of communism recognize copyrights? I don't know enough of Chinese Communism.
It depends on the type of open-source you're talking about. GPL'd source is still copyrighted, and the original authors still hold intellectual property rights to their work. The GPL is just another usage agreement. Under most interpretations, communism doesn't recognize personal property rights, while capitalism does .
From the Apple HW website pictures, it appears that the CPUs still only need a heat sink (rather than a fan strapped on top). At 1 GHz, I'd like to see any Intel variant touch that...
Here's another reason why:
.doc attachment, and it's 269312 bytes long, I save it as .rtf, and *bingo*, it's now only 77621 bytes long. Microsoft adds alot of stuff in the file format for objects and such, which isn't needed if you are simply trying to send content. If several people are co-authoring a document, they shouldn't do it via email anyway. Send a .rtf file to a Word user, and Word automatically recognizes it.
.doc files that reduce to KB+ files when saved as Rich Text Format. That's why *I* don't like to see .doc attachments.
I get a
I get these MB+
The shadows on the "unit" don't seem to match those cast by the cig box right next to it.
Although the announcement doesn't seem to mention it, it seems that 8.1 is only available for i586 machines. The best PPC users can get is still 8.0
Too bad...