The concept of the everyday man zooming around in a flying car is a grand concept of the future planted in our minds by fantastical books and movies, but it isn't really a realistic notion in today's civilized society.
How about in an uncivilized society, or perhaps just one that is a little less set in its ways?
The African Union should adopt a continent wide free fly zone. They have a lot more to gain economically from the freer and quicker flow of commerce. The geography of the interior and apparent condition of the road infrastructure would mean that there would be far greater benefit than to a society that has invested Billions in fixed transport systems. And with fewer suburbs, it would be a lot less likely for an aircraft to drop on a house.
I agree the politics of chicken little make common air travel less likely in the US or Europe. But maybe, just maybe, Africa could lead the way on this. But since their governments are as corrupt as anywhere else, so just as unlikely to allow the added freedom of travel and open borders that would be needed for a successfull open skies economy.
There's better ways to spend $7500 pre vehicle if you want to make them more green.
Yes and it is called a motorcycle. For $7500 you could just buy a nice scooter or motorcycle which uses much less fuel and use it for all those little trips to the store and whatnot that you don't really need a whole car, truck or SUV for.
Of course it isn't really the cost of the extra vehicle that makes that hard to make practicle, but the cost of insurance. If it weren't for outrageous insurance costs, then more people would be able to afford multiple types of vehicles that are each more suited to the types of travel that are needed.
People don't buy SUVs because they need an SUV all the time, but most people do buy an SUV because they need it part of the time and they end up driving it all the time because they can't afford the insurance costs of multiple cars. Far better to have them buy multiple cars or motorcycles and only use the gas guzzler when they need to.
Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.
Once BeOS went x86 it went head to head with Linux as the alternative OS and the Linux open source model won hearts and minds. Why put all your effort into a closed source alternative which could go the way of the dodo while Linux offered the stability of openness?
Then Be tried to go niche and instead of going for the high end server market where they could have played the stability and performance card with multiprocessor systems, which was to be where all the money was going over the next 5 years, they decided go high end multimedia which was just as highly competitive but was a much smaller market.
I just got an OLED based VR visor from eMagin for $899, it has 800x600 resolution, headtracking, earbuds, and microphone built in. It was rumored for a while that it would be paired with the revolution for a complete VR experience, but that rumor has unfortunately since been dispelled. But I could definately see how the nintendo controllers could be paired with it to good effect.
At $900, the z800 is a big leap for VR in terms of quality. The closest LCD version sells for several hundred dollars more (many VR helmets costs many thousands of dollars) and is of lesser qaulity. It works very well with off the shelf first person shooters like HL2, Call of Duty, Doom and such and really adds a lot of depth to objects. It really helps, i mean both the wowness factor and being able to navigate and interact with close at hand objects.
At this point ATI doesn't support stereoscopic output, so you have to go with an nvidia card with their stereo 3d drivers.
Here is someone's (not mine) blog on what they have been doing with their eMagin 3d visor.
Maybe not ready for everyone, but certainly VR type equipment is starting to come back off the drawing board with many years of refinement and new technology being used to make the price and experience much better.
How do you define exactly what a blog is? I'd love to see "Bob's whining about life" containing 3,625 pages of rambling to be excluded from the index, but at the same time there is a huge amount of useful information on blogs.
I'm sorry could you provide a link. I've been wondering how Bob was doing.
Sure, Peer review is an important editorial mechanism in publishing scientific results for other scientists, especially in the academic community.
But saying you cannot judge the relative merit of a paper without peer review is what I find fault with. Either the assertions are testable and repeatable or they are not.
Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard the BBC following one refugee around the Houston Astrodome trying to find the right organization to talk to in order to get some relief. The point is that she was particularly tenacious following rumor and hearsay until she finally found FEMA and began the process to get some help, I believe it took her 4 hours and people were there on site to help.
Each and every impediment costs time, and time is of critical importance in this situation, so sure this one particular issue may seem insignificant and probably is to the majority of survivors. But clearly there are people that won't be able to get through to the understaffed telephone operators and you are saying that they should suffer yet another roadblock on the way to recovery simply because a web developer didn't know enough to make their site work simply and correctly for all major platforms.
People are attesting here that the site works fine without IE and I believe them. So what if it only helps one person get the help they need, maybe it will be a hundred, maybe it will be a thousand. The point is that someone sitting high and dry at FEMA headquarters, that certainly will hear about this now, is going to fix this problem and it will help people.
If one impediment is ignored, then how many others will be?
Can't happen? It already has -- See Antarctica. No one owns it. Most of the countries of the world have a treaty not to exploit it.
Antarctica will be exploited and divvied up politically as soon as resources in other places become more scarce.
The Antarctic treaty merely delayed the innevitable and prevented armed conflict in the short term.
Even now some limited colonization is being encouraged by Argentina and many nations hold onto their territorial claims.
If an economic case can be made for mining mars, then it will be done eventually, as long as we retain the technological means to do so. Fact is that no minerals are so rare and useful on earth as to make mining them on Mars make any economic sense. Think of the most rare substances on earth and likely it would cost far more to bring them from Mars. The only thing that would make mars mining feasibile would be a radically more efficient means of transportation.
Yes, it would be nice to see it supported in MS Office but it won't happen because MS will lose market share by doing it.
MS is already losing market share. Sure the numbers might be anecdotal at this point but how many people here on slashdot still use MS unless it is mandated and paid for by their company?
At the 3000+ seat location where I work the IT manager has been looking at moving away from MS Office. Moving big organizations is always slow and measured in many months and years, but it is starting to happen.
I overheard a student talking about how expensive MS Office was and I told him about OpenOffice. That was at least a minus 1 for MS market share.
I think OpenOffice.org being free and fully featured is a no brainer and MS Office Killer. Comeptition will at least force MS to cut the price significantly, or else OpenOffice adoption will just keep accelerating.
If you want those things, put them in some other computer format, but don't warp the meaning of 'document' to mean 'anything you can hold and represent on a computer, mushed into one file', because that's just silly.
We already have html and associated xml for integrating the presentation of other electronic media. And with SVG enabled to be a part of the default firefox install, we will have a very rich open and standard way of integrating media for publishing online.
The only thing lacking might be better open source editors for creating combined documents and a nice way to package the media and associated binary files into one portable file.
Well, simply put supply is now less than what demand would be naturally, so the increase prices serve to decrease demand. It is probably the most efficient system of rationing around, no centrally deciding who is the most deserving, no handing out ration cards, no overhead, just increase prices and whomever can still afford it gets it.
Sure it screws over people who don't have the flexibility to absorb increase costs like that, but it is far less a hit to the economy than the inneficiency of some sort of political system of rationing or having gas availability be unreliable.
Sure we could choose to cap prices, but then fewer people would be dissuaded from using gasoline and thus the supply would run out more quickly. So, we choose, would we rather have gas cost more or would we rather be uncertain when we leave for work in the morning whether there would be enough gas available to get home.
Fortunately, our 'superior' intellect has saved us from evolution. Now we can select based merely on aesthetics since medicine (and our societal support structure) assures most babies will survive to produce children of their own no matter what.
So, exactly how is human intellect not a result of evolution?
And do you really think a hundred years or so of "societal support structures" is going to have a lasting effect on the gene pool? There is nothing in our history to suggest that this level of civilization is stainable for a long enough period of time to have much of any long term effect on the gene pool. And I think you overestimate our abilities to stave off death, it may happen and I hope it does, but life is still fragile and will likely to continue to exert selective pressure on the gene pool.
That's right. Because we all know that government's never do anything beneficial to the community: like roads, education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it, public transportation, water supplies, defense, the police...
"to" the community?
Remember "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"?
Who said anything about security, we were talking about "Trusted Computing" Meaning that the companies don't trust that they will make enough money selling versatile computers, so they want to make a computer's usefullness a function of how much money you give them by restricting the software you are allowed to run.
It would be like a car manufacturer hobbling an engine so that you can go 5 mph faster for every $10k you give them. Oh and brakes are included in every car but you get charged $5 everytime you use them.
Trusted Computing is a business model not a security model. A business model which seeks to limit computing power and information to those that can afford it and give the rest only the barest functionality.
"The pretext of the BTP was to protest the imposition of import taxes, it had nothing to do with opening up the market to American tea traders."
I'm guessing the American tea traders saw it different.
Whatever historical movement you are talking about , being Open Software or American Independence, there are many actors with their own motivations. You are correct to point out the overarching issues that emerged and were probably intended by quite a few people. But to dismiss minority or individual motivations is to ignore the richness of history. Certainly John Hancock was involved because he was made an outlaw by the Townshend acts.
There are many convergent reasons to switch from MS, to discount any of them is to dismiss any number of people's motivations. Sure one motivation or another may not have swayed the final decision making at a higher or aggregate level, but likely did persuade some of those supporters that made the final decision easier to make.
Some reasons for massachusetts may include: - Massachusetts has a lot of universities and those students and faculty are embracing open source for cost and intelectual reasons - Sun has a larger presence in Massachusetts than MS - MS is a bully and people don't like to be told what to do. - people don't like to be constrained by their tools - proprietary and incompatible document formats among MS Office versions. - OpenOffice has become a mature product with many good features and is free. - Many people are stuck with older versions of MS Office or bootlegged versions that they can't afford to upgrade.
not really a boycott when a product does not have all the features you want. a boycott is when you would otherwise buy or use a product, but refuse to do so for polical reasons largely removed from the features of the product itself. Google talk lacks interoperability (not with AOL and MSN which I realize will disallow interoperability, but with other jabber IM servers) until it does or they say that they will, I think it is just another dead end communications platform.
I realize that by saying that gmail works fine with their IM like conversations and that I don't need to use google talk, then it seemingly leaves little incentive for google to improve their product. But google is much more ambitious than that. Heck if they don't like the jabber protocols or implementations, then they are in a position that they could just release a new reference implementation and set of protocols. At least then we would have hope of email like interoperability for IM.
Google is a company, people, it runs off money, not fanaticism. They don't have to do all the other things that the open source geeks do, that's not important, they use the piece of the code that's useful for them.
Yes, but I'm entitled not to use it like I have not used AOL's, MSN's or other proprietary IMs. If google chooses to follow the same model of message incompatibility and closed directories that AOL has then they should not shun the comparison.
That is, after all, the point of open source, is it not?
Not when talking about network and messaging protocols, the point is interoperability and ability to communicate with others, not setting up an island of users that can only communicate with themselves. Remember when AOL users could only email eachother? AOL resisted for years making their email able to communicate with people on other networks, the same has held true for IM except they didn't have serious competition from a simple open architecture alternative. It is the same dumb (for users) model done over and over.
Thanks, but no thanks, if google is not supporting an interoperable IM framework then i'll just continue to use gmail as my IM substitute until something better comes along. If interoperability and distributedness is on google talk's immediate roadmap then they need to say so and i'll hang around to see how it goes.
Seems that society has many reasons that it set up a public school system. And that it has somewhat failed to meet the main reason, which was to level the playing field and make upward social mobility more meritorious. The other reason was simply to keep a lot of young people out of the labor pool so that older workers could support families. So, yes we are left with public schools acting as babysitters or as a trial run for those that can afford to go to college.
Kids are on their own for the most part. They need to be told as early as possible that they need to choose their future and start working towards it.
As a short term measure, I think that cities and towns should start graduating kids a year early so they can pursue college early and perhaps spend the 5-10k that would have otherwise been spent on them attending high school as a grant towards a state university.
Yes, because big companies pay attention when a few dozen people sue them in small claims court. Face it, refusing to terminate service is illegal, or should be.
You think corporate lawyers charge less per hour for small claims court?
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of the everyday man zooming around in a flying car is a grand concept of the future planted in our minds by fantastical books and movies, but it isn't really a realistic notion in today's civilized society.
How about in an uncivilized society, or perhaps just one that is a little less set in its ways?
The African Union should adopt a continent wide free fly zone. They have a lot more to gain economically from the freer and quicker flow of commerce. The geography of the interior and apparent condition of the road infrastructure would mean that there would be far greater benefit than to a society that has invested Billions in fixed transport systems. And with fewer suburbs, it would be a lot less likely for an aircraft to drop on a house.
I agree the politics of chicken little make common air travel less likely in the US or Europe. But maybe, just maybe, Africa could lead the way on this. But since their governments are as corrupt as anywhere else, so just as unlikely to allow the added freedom of travel and open borders that would be needed for a successfull open skies economy.
There's better ways to spend $7500 pre vehicle if you want to make them more green.
Yes and it is called a motorcycle. For $7500 you could just buy a nice scooter or motorcycle which uses much less fuel and use it for all those little trips to the store and whatnot that you don't really need a whole car, truck or SUV for.
Of course it isn't really the cost of the extra vehicle that makes that hard to make practicle, but the cost of insurance. If it weren't for outrageous insurance costs, then more people would be able to afford multiple types of vehicles that are each more suited to the types of travel that are needed.
People don't buy SUVs because they need an SUV all the time, but most people do buy an SUV because they need it part of the time and they end up driving it all the time because they can't afford the insurance costs of multiple cars. Far better to have them buy multiple cars or motorcycles and only use the gas guzzler when they need to.
Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.
Once BeOS went x86 it went head to head with Linux as the alternative OS and the Linux open source model won hearts and minds. Why put all your effort into a closed source alternative which could go the way of the dodo while Linux offered the stability of openness?
Then Be tried to go niche and instead of going for the high end server market where they could have played the stability and performance card with multiprocessor systems, which was to be where all the money was going over the next 5 years, they decided go high end multimedia which was just as highly competitive but was a much smaller market.
I just got an OLED based VR visor from eMagin for $899, it has 800x600 resolution, headtracking, earbuds, and microphone built in. It was rumored for a while that it would be paired with the revolution for a complete VR experience, but that rumor has unfortunately since been dispelled. But I could definately see how the nintendo controllers could be paired with it to good effect.
At $900, the z800 is a big leap for VR in terms of quality. The closest LCD version sells for several hundred dollars more (many VR helmets costs many thousands of dollars) and is of lesser qaulity. It works very well with off the shelf first person shooters like HL2, Call of Duty, Doom and such and really adds a lot of depth to objects. It really helps, i mean both the wowness factor and being able to navigate and interact with close at hand objects.
At this point ATI doesn't support stereoscopic output, so you have to go with an nvidia card with their stereo 3d drivers.
Here is someone's (not mine) blog on what they have been doing with their eMagin 3d visor.
Maybe not ready for everyone, but certainly VR type equipment is starting to come back off the drawing board with many years of refinement and new technology being used to make the price and experience much better.
Much better to have development disagreements settled behind closed doors at the flip of a coin.
How do you define exactly what a blog is? I'd love to see "Bob's whining about life" containing 3,625 pages of rambling to be excluded from the index, but at the same time there is a huge amount of useful information on blogs.
I'm sorry could you provide a link. I've been wondering how Bob was doing.
Sure, Peer review is an important editorial mechanism in publishing scientific results for other scientists, especially in the academic community.
But saying you cannot judge the relative merit of a paper without peer review is what I find fault with. Either the assertions are testable and repeatable or they are not.
Peer review itself has no bearing on the facts.
How do I know this has any more credibility than the original study by Addison Bain and Richard Van Treuren?
You could try reading it and see if it makes sense to you.
Slashdottings contribute to .023% increase in CO2 emmissions due to increased power consumption.
However, the sedentary nature of its readers cancels out this effect.
Its a non-issue
Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard the BBC following one refugee around the Houston Astrodome trying to find the right organization to talk to in order to get some relief. The point is that she was particularly tenacious following rumor and hearsay until she finally found FEMA and began the process to get some help, I believe it took her 4 hours and people were there on site to help.
Each and every impediment costs time, and time is of critical importance in this situation, so sure this one particular issue may seem insignificant and probably is to the majority of survivors. But clearly there are people that won't be able to get through to the understaffed telephone operators and you are saying that they should suffer yet another roadblock on the way to recovery simply because a web developer didn't know enough to make their site work simply and correctly for all major platforms.
People are attesting here that the site works fine without IE and I believe them. So what if it only helps one person get the help they need, maybe it will be a hundred, maybe it will be a thousand. The point is that someone sitting high and dry at FEMA headquarters, that certainly will hear about this now, is going to fix this problem and it will help people.
If one impediment is ignored, then how many others will be?
Can't happen? It already has -- See Antarctica. No one owns it. Most of the countries of the world have a treaty not to exploit it.
Antarctica will be exploited and divvied up politically as soon as resources in other places become more scarce.
The Antarctic treaty merely delayed the innevitable and prevented armed conflict in the short term.
Even now some limited colonization is being encouraged by Argentina and many nations hold onto their territorial claims.
If an economic case can be made for mining mars, then it will be done eventually, as long as we retain the technological means to do so. Fact is that no minerals are so rare and useful on earth as to make mining them on Mars make any economic sense. Think of the most rare substances on earth and likely it would cost far more to bring them from Mars. The only thing that would make mars mining feasibile would be a radically more efficient means of transportation.
Yes, it would be nice to see it supported in MS Office but it won't happen because MS will lose market share by doing it.
MS is already losing market share. Sure the numbers might be anecdotal at this point but how many people here on slashdot still use MS unless it is mandated and paid for by their company?
At the 3000+ seat location where I work the IT manager has been looking at moving away from MS Office. Moving big organizations is always slow and measured in many months and years, but it is starting to happen.
I overheard a student talking about how expensive MS Office was and I told him about OpenOffice. That was at least a minus 1 for MS market share.
I think OpenOffice.org being free and fully featured is a no brainer and MS Office Killer. Comeptition will at least force MS to cut the price significantly, or else OpenOffice adoption will just keep accelerating.
If you want those things, put them in some other computer format, but don't warp the meaning of 'document' to mean 'anything you can hold and represent on a computer, mushed into one file', because that's just silly.
We already have html and associated xml for integrating the presentation of other electronic media. And with SVG enabled to be a part of the default firefox install, we will have a very rich open and standard way of integrating media for publishing online.
The only thing lacking might be better open source editors for creating combined documents and a nice way to package the media and associated binary files into one portable file.
Cool, I guess.. This really isn't news, but eh, it's still pretty neat.
It's not news, it's fark... oh wrong site.
Well, simply put supply is now less than what demand would be naturally, so the increase prices serve to decrease demand. It is probably the most efficient system of rationing around, no centrally deciding who is the most deserving, no handing out ration cards, no overhead, just increase prices and whomever can still afford it gets it.
Sure it screws over people who don't have the flexibility to absorb increase costs like that, but it is far less a hit to the economy than the inneficiency of some sort of political system of rationing or having gas availability be unreliable.
Sure we could choose to cap prices, but then fewer people would be dissuaded from using gasoline and thus the supply would run out more quickly. So, we choose, would we rather have gas cost more or would we rather be uncertain when we leave for work in the morning whether there would be enough gas available to get home.
So, what happens next? They win?
Either way they will tell you that you won.
Fortunately, our 'superior' intellect has saved us from evolution. Now we can select based merely on aesthetics since medicine (and our societal support structure) assures most babies will survive to produce children of their own no matter what.
So, exactly how is human intellect not a result of evolution?
And do you really think a hundred years or so of "societal support structures" is going to have a lasting effect on the gene pool? There is nothing in our history to suggest that this level of civilization is stainable for a long enough period of time to have much of any long term effect on the gene pool. And I think you overestimate our abilities to stave off death, it may happen and I hope it does, but life is still fragile and will likely to continue to exert selective pressure on the gene pool.
That's right. Because we all know that government's never do anything beneficial to the community: like roads, education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it, public transportation, water supplies, defense, the police...
"to" the community?
Remember "that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"?
Who said anything about security, we were talking about "Trusted Computing" Meaning that the companies don't trust that they will make enough money selling versatile computers, so they want to make a computer's usefullness a function of how much money you give them by restricting the software you are allowed to run.
It would be like a car manufacturer hobbling an engine so that you can go 5 mph faster for every $10k you give them. Oh and brakes are included in every car but you get charged $5 everytime you use them.
Trusted Computing is a business model not a security model. A business model which seeks to limit computing power and information to those that can afford it and give the rest only the barest functionality.
"The pretext of the BTP was to protest the imposition of import taxes, it had nothing to do with opening up the market to American tea traders."
I'm guessing the American tea traders saw it different.
Whatever historical movement you are talking about , being Open Software or American Independence, there are many actors with their own motivations. You are correct to point out the overarching issues that emerged and were probably intended by quite a few people. But to dismiss minority or individual motivations is to ignore the richness of history. Certainly John Hancock was involved because he was made an outlaw by the Townshend acts.
There are many convergent reasons to switch from MS, to discount any of them is to dismiss any number of people's motivations. Sure one motivation or another may not have swayed the final decision making at a higher or aggregate level, but likely did persuade some of those supporters that made the final decision easier to make.
Some reasons for massachusetts may include:
- Massachusetts has a lot of universities and those students and faculty are embracing open source for cost and intelectual reasons
- Sun has a larger presence in Massachusetts than MS
- MS is a bully and people don't like to be told what to do.
- people don't like to be constrained by their tools
- proprietary and incompatible document formats among MS Office versions.
- OpenOffice has become a mature product with many good features and is free.
- Many people are stuck with older versions of MS Office or bootlegged versions that they can't afford to upgrade.
And all that excess heat will become important this winter with oil and natural gas prices going up.
BOYCOTT GOOGLE! USE GOOGLE INSTEAD!
not really a boycott when a product does not have all the features you want. a boycott is when you would otherwise buy or use a product, but refuse to do so for polical reasons largely removed from the features of the product itself. Google talk lacks interoperability (not with AOL and MSN which I realize will disallow interoperability, but with other jabber IM servers) until it does or they say that they will, I think it is just another dead end communications platform.
I realize that by saying that gmail works fine with their IM like conversations and that I don't need to use google talk, then it seemingly leaves little incentive for google to improve their product. But google is much more ambitious than that. Heck if they don't like the jabber protocols or implementations, then they are in a position that they could just release a new reference implementation and set of protocols. At least then we would have hope of email like interoperability for IM.
Google is a company, people, it runs off money, not fanaticism. They don't have to do all the other things that the open source geeks do, that's not important, they use the piece of the code that's useful for them.
Yes, but I'm entitled not to use it like I have not used AOL's, MSN's or other proprietary IMs. If google chooses to follow the same model of message incompatibility and closed directories that AOL has then they should not shun the comparison.
That is, after all, the point of open source, is it not?
Not when talking about network and messaging protocols, the point is interoperability and ability to communicate with others, not setting up an island of users that can only communicate with themselves. Remember when AOL users could only email eachother? AOL resisted for years making their email able to communicate with people on other networks, the same has held true for IM except they didn't have serious competition from a simple open architecture alternative. It is the same dumb (for users) model done over and over.
Thanks, but no thanks, if google is not supporting an interoperable IM framework then i'll just continue to use gmail as my IM substitute until something better comes along. If interoperability and distributedness is on google talk's immediate roadmap then they need to say so and i'll hang around to see how it goes.
Seems that society has many reasons that it set up a public school system. And that it has somewhat failed to meet the main reason, which was to level the playing field and make upward social mobility more meritorious. The other reason was simply to keep a lot of young people out of the labor pool so that older workers could support families. So, yes we are left with public schools acting as babysitters or as a trial run for those that can afford to go to college.
Kids are on their own for the most part. They need to be told as early as possible that they need to choose their future and start working towards it.
Here is what they should see in junior high school so they can start planning:
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcst.htm
As a short term measure, I think that cities and towns should start graduating kids a year early so they can pursue college early and perhaps spend the 5-10k that would have otherwise been spent on them attending high school as a grant towards a state university.
Yes, because big companies pay attention when a few dozen people sue them in small claims court. Face it, refusing to terminate service is illegal, or should be.
You think corporate lawyers charge less per hour for small claims court?