That bit about leaving the party early resonates with me. A very long time ago, I couldn't look at a Peanuts strip without laughing. Then after a decade or so, I couldn't look at it without grimacing.
Still, I do miss that young sociopath and his tiger.
Another brave thing Watterson did: no licenses for animated cartoons, coffee cups, etc. He said he couldn't stand the idea of some voice actor doing Hobbes. Neither could I, but I'm not sure I could have walked away from the millions of dollars those licenses would have paid.
You young folk don't know how good you've got it. I cut my teeth doing all-nighters at the campus computer center, that being the only way to get decent turnaround on the 360 mainframe. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Google "batch processing" and "IBM cards".) With that training, I was able to pull all-nighters well into my 40s. Though it wasn't nearly as much fun by then — everybody else was gone by 6, the wimps.
The w3schools.com is very impressive. Not only do they provide a huge amount of well-written content, they have these cool web apps that let you fiddle with code and see the results immediately. I've never worked through any of their tutorials, but when I google for information on some HTML or CSS feature, I end up on w3schools.com about 75% of the time. That should tell you something.
W3.org is also a valuable resource. They are, after all, the authoritative source for HTML, CSS, and lots of other web technologies. Two pitfalls: their target audience is implementers and standards wonks, not web developers; and you have to watch out for features that never got implemented.
Despite these issues, it's really a good idea to write web code that targets the W3C specs rather than specific browsers. That way you'll have web pages that work on most browsers and don't break whenever somebody tinkers with Gecko or Trident.
Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.
It's not so much planning for Slashdotting as knowing that you have to.
That said, Slashdot doesn't have to be equivalent to a DoS attack, not in this era of cloud computing. And cloud web servers are not very hard to set up.
I think there's more overlap between space travel and setting up a web server than there is between surgery and cooking. In any case, this isn't so much about specific technical skills as an ability to plan. If somebody can't anticipate the problems of running a web site, they probably can't anticipate the problems of running a much bigger project.
They've got plenty of traffic now. Rather more than they can handle, it seems. If they can't build a web server that scales up, what makes them think they can build a spaceship?
Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model? Because the big problem with space travel is that there's never been one. Yeah, yeah, if Congress hadn't cut off the tap, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that space travel is going to have to start paying for itself eventually. Otherwise you'll never see anything except political vanity projects like Apollo and the ISS. These do produce some good science and technological spinoffs, but never enough to justify the billions poured into them.
You don't hear a lot about waste disposal period. And yet it's a big problem. Not enough landfill, huge islands of plastic crap in the oceans, toxics leaking into the water supply, people being made sick by incinerators.
You've heard the saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? On waste issues we don't even have absence of evidence, just indifference.
I did a little googling, hoping to shoot down that $10 manufacturing overhead figure. No hard figures are published for the iPhone (which is not a laptop, damnit) but figures for the Droid tend to back you up.
Don't celebrate yet. Your estimate for materials cost for a smart phone are way off. Like by a factor of 2.5:
And if you really think a laptop doesn't use any more parts than a smart phone, you live in a different plane of reality from me, so I won't bother to argue with you.
Now I'm skeptical even of the $100 wholesale price cited in TFA. Probably going to be more like $200. Which means it will retail for twice that. Which means it won't be a lot cheaper than Atom-based netbooks. Which makes me skeptical that anybody will buy it.
Conflicts with my experience. When I worked at Borland, I had a Pentium II box running Linux (usually Red Hat) and a Pentium III box running W2K. The P2 was actually more responsive than the P3.
That was when VMware first put in an appearance. Just to check it out, I installed it on the P2, then installed Windows (don't remember the version) on the virtual machine. It ran well enough for me to play pinball full screen.
Perhaps Ubuntu was the culprit in your case. I don't have much experience with that distro, but I dimly recall being disappointed by its performance on low-end machines. I think maybe its fancy GUI is a bit of a memory hog. Ubuntu was a latecomer, and they appear to have targeted newer machines. They have a separate distro, Xubuntu, for legacy machines.
Uh, have you every compared the insides of a calculator to the insides of a computer? Of course the manufacturing costs are lower. When somebody figures out a way to replace a hard disk with a 5-cent IC, then yeah, you'll have $5 dollar computers.
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
Excuse me? That's Reaganite nonsense. It's perfectly true that the marketplace does a lot of good work, but the way you word it implies that mutual benefit is the prime motivator.
The prime motivator is profit. Somebody who sells me something will try to get the most money out of me they can. That's true even if they're selling me something that essential to life, such as medicine or food. (In this context, it's meaningless to say that I value the commodity more than the money; I just plain don't want to die.) And if they can find a way to restrict the supply so they'll get a better price, they'll often do it, regardless of consequences. Even if people die. And people do die because of not being able to afford stuff they need.
Of course, people of good will won't pull crap like that, but the motivation to do so comes from outside the marketplace. The marketplace itself is purely about selfishness.
Before you use the S word or the M word, understand that I'm not against a free market. But freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum: Tony Soprano's unrestrained economic freedom is somebody else's severed finger.
And Zilog is still making the Z80, which is much older than than the 80386. But both stopped being used in computer systems a long time ago. Nowadays the market is embedded systems — and I doubt that the current price for a Z80 is less than it was in 1976.
I shouldn't have implied that chips are guaranteed to disappear after a while. If they find the right niche, they can survive a long time time. More than 3 decades after its first release, you can still buy Z80 processors.
But that's for simple embedded uses. Nobody's building computer systems around them. And a $10 CP/M system would probably have quite a following!
TFA uses a simplistic economic fallacy to argue that the price will be around $100:
The price has not yet been announced officially... But you can understand that if Hivision was able to sell those types of laptops for $98 to distributors more than a year ago (when I filmed my popular video from IFA 2008), then surely the mass manufacturing price has not gone up since then. My expectation is that if a giant consumer electronics reseller such as Walmart or Best Buy approaches Hivision today to order huge quantities of this laptop, it could be sold below $100 to end users.
He's assuming that any given tech drops in price by a huge percentage every year. If that were true, IBM would still be making 8088-based PCs and selling them for a few bucks. (Take the $2K 1981 price and divide by 2 about 15 times.) Instead, you can't buy a new 8088-based system for any price — it's not worth Intel's while to even manufacture the chip, never mind somebody else to build a system around it.
There's always a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process. Scaling up reduces costs, and so does Moore's law, but only to a point. You'll always have to pay for materials, factory space, workers, shipping, marketing, etc. Some of these things are cheaper outside the U.S., but again, only to a point.
I'm not sure what the minimum cost for manufacturing a computer is, but I very much doubt that it's much below $100. When manufacturers reach that minimum, they can't keep cutting prices, no matter how much the electronics improve, bang-for-buck-wise. So instead, they find a good price point, and provide the best product they know how to for that price. The result: low end products don't get cheaper, they get better.
I couldn't begin to guess how much these new ARM laptops will sell for. It will have to be a lot less than the competing Atom-based systems, or else no one will buy them. But I doubt if the retail price will ever go below $200, not if they're sold by anybody who's in it for the money.
Of course, even a $200 laptop would be damned popular. And a couple years after they come out, you'll be able to buy used ones on eBay for a pittance.
Look, I was making a humorous comparison between the way we do politics and the way we sell stuff. I was joking when I suggested that there's no difference between the political parties and some brand-obsessed distributor of cleaning products.
But since you insist on drawing a bright line between special interest groups and voters, I have to point out a big flaw in your logic. Who do you think "special interests" are? They're groups of people with a common, special interest. And in this context, "people" is pretty much the same as "voters." AARP is a "special interest" that advocates for older people. Unions are "special interests" that advocate for unionized workers. Corporations are "special interests" that advocate for their owners and even in some ways for their employees. And so on.
Now, I'm not saying this is a good setup. It fosters corruption and guarantees domination by those with the deepest pockets. And too often the leaders of special interests are less than honest about how they do their jobs. But the fact remains that these SIGs are not aliens from another dimension who want to make us all slaves. They're citizens legitimately protecting their own interests.
This has always been a basic problem with democracies, that "the people" have a certain tendency to protect their own interests first, often to detriment of the nation as a whole. (When I say "always", I have in mind the first documented pork barrel project, created 25 centuries ago to keep Athenian trireme rowers occupied between wars.) It's always going to be a problem. You can do your best to curb it, but you're not going to eliminate it. Not unless you want to abandon popular rule and switch to monarchy, dictatorship, feudalism, anarchy, or some other such alternative. Though I might remind you that all these systems tend to be really unpleasant to live under.
And if you do want to get serious about curbing the excesses of special interests, try to remember that everybody in part of at least one of them. Including you.
For once I was trying for "Funny" but instead I get two "Insightfuls" and an "Infomative." Despite their fondness for low humor, geeks take themselves way too serious.
Nowadays everything is about branding, even politics. In order to differentiate their brand from brand of the Democrat Party (as they like to call it), the Republic Party (as I like to call them) has to avoid showing any support for anything Obama does. Their marketing division (or, to use an old-fashioned term, their political strategists) understand that any show of bipartisanship confuse the consumers (I guess most people still call them "voters") and dilute the brand. So the party has to maintain a uniform anti-Democrat (not to be confused with anti-Democratic) message, even when the Democrats propose a product (officially a "policy") that the Republics invented in the first place.
Obama's attempts to achieve a consensus show his utter contempt for the way business (isn't government a business? if not it should be) is done in the 21st century. If that doesn't convince you he's a communist, nothing will!
Your two scenarios of insecure (electronic) and secure (in person) is a false dichotomy. There's no such thing as "secure" or "insecure", just degrees of security. How much communication security do you need? That depends on how badly you want privacy — and how badly somebody else wants to deprive you of it.
The real lesson here is the one Bruce Schneier keeps trying to teach (with little success, it seems): security is a process, not a product. If you're worried about somebody listening in, look for weak points in the channel. Don't try to find a magic 128-bit shield at Radio Shack.
Slashdot Mirror
That bit about leaving the party early resonates with me. A very long time ago, I couldn't look at a Peanuts strip without laughing. Then after a decade or so, I couldn't look at it without grimacing.
Still, I do miss that young sociopath and his tiger.
Another brave thing Watterson did: no licenses for animated cartoons, coffee cups, etc. He said he couldn't stand the idea of some voice actor doing Hobbes. Neither could I, but I'm not sure I could have walked away from the millions of dollars those licenses would have paid.
You young folk don't know how good you've got it. I cut my teeth doing all-nighters at the campus computer center, that being the only way to get decent turnaround on the 360 mainframe. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Google "batch processing" and "IBM cards".) With that training, I was able to pull all-nighters well into my 40s. Though it wasn't nearly as much fun by then — everybody else was gone by 6, the wimps.
The w3schools.com is very impressive. Not only do they provide a huge amount of well-written content, they have these cool web apps that let you fiddle with code and see the results immediately. I've never worked through any of their tutorials, but when I google for information on some HTML or CSS feature, I end up on w3schools.com about 75% of the time. That should tell you something.
W3.org is also a valuable resource. They are, after all, the authoritative source for HTML, CSS, and lots of other web technologies. Two pitfalls: their target audience is implementers and standards wonks, not web developers; and you have to watch out for features that never got implemented.
Despite these issues, it's really a good idea to write web code that targets the W3C specs rather than specific browsers. That way you'll have web pages that work on most browsers and don't break whenever somebody tinkers with Gecko or Trident.
Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.
It's not so much planning for Slashdotting as knowing that you have to.
That said, Slashdot doesn't have to be equivalent to a DoS attack, not in this era of cloud computing. And cloud web servers are not very hard to set up.
I think that's the business model they're currently using. It doesn't have a great track record.
I think there's more overlap between space travel and setting up a web server than there is between surgery and cooking. In any case, this isn't so much about specific technical skills as an ability to plan. If somebody can't anticipate the problems of running a web site, they probably can't anticipate the problems of running a much bigger project.
"Goofy projects" do have a point: having fun. Fun is an important part of being human.
This isn't a goofy project. It's a lame one.
They've got plenty of traffic now. Rather more than they can handle, it seems. If they can't build a web server that scales up, what makes them think they can build a spaceship?
Offtopic, but it needs to be asked any time somebody has a scheme like this: what's your business model? Because the big problem with space travel is that there's never been one. Yeah, yeah, if Congress hadn't cut off the tap, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that space travel is going to have to start paying for itself eventually. Otherwise you'll never see anything except political vanity projects like Apollo and the ISS. These do produce some good science and technological spinoffs, but never enough to justify the billions poured into them.
You don't hear a lot about waste disposal period. And yet it's a big problem. Not enough landfill, huge islands of plastic crap in the oceans, toxics leaking into the water supply, people being made sick by incinerators.
You've heard the saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? On waste issues we don't even have absence of evidence, just indifference.
Please read the thread I started. Don't feel like answering all those arguments again.
I did a little googling, hoping to shoot down that $10 manufacturing overhead figure. No hard figures are published for the iPhone (which is not a laptop, damnit) but figures for the Droid tend to back you up.
Don't celebrate yet. Your estimate for materials cost for a smart phone are way off. Like by a factor of 2.5:
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=713312
And if you really think a laptop doesn't use any more parts than a smart phone, you live in a different plane of reality from me, so I won't bother to argue with you.
Now I'm skeptical even of the $100 wholesale price cited in TFA. Probably going to be more like $200. Which means it will retail for twice that. Which means it won't be a lot cheaper than Atom-based netbooks. Which makes me skeptical that anybody will buy it.
Conflicts with my experience. When I worked at Borland, I had a Pentium II box running Linux (usually Red Hat) and a Pentium III box running W2K. The P2 was actually more responsive than the P3.
That was when VMware first put in an appearance. Just to check it out, I installed it on the P2, then installed Windows (don't remember the version) on the virtual machine. It ran well enough for me to play pinball full screen.
Perhaps Ubuntu was the culprit in your case. I don't have much experience with that distro, but I dimly recall being disappointed by its performance on low-end machines. I think maybe its fancy GUI is a bit of a memory hog. Ubuntu was a latecomer, and they appear to have targeted newer machines. They have a separate distro, Xubuntu, for legacy machines.
And where on earth do you get that figure?
Uh, have you every compared the insides of a calculator to the insides of a computer? Of course the manufacturing costs are lower. When somebody figures out a way to replace a hard disk with a 5-cent IC, then yeah, you'll have $5 dollar computers.
So you think the parts add up to about $60? What about the cost of actually making the thing?
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
Excuse me? That's Reaganite nonsense. It's perfectly true that the marketplace does a lot of good work, but the way you word it implies that mutual benefit is the prime motivator.
The prime motivator is profit. Somebody who sells me something will try to get the most money out of me they can. That's true even if they're selling me something that essential to life, such as medicine or food. (In this context, it's meaningless to say that I value the commodity more than the money; I just plain don't want to die.) And if they can find a way to restrict the supply so they'll get a better price, they'll often do it, regardless of consequences. Even if people die. And people do die because of not being able to afford stuff they need.
Of course, people of good will won't pull crap like that, but the motivation to do so comes from outside the marketplace. The marketplace itself is purely about selfishness.
Before you use the S word or the M word, understand that I'm not against a free market. But freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum: Tony Soprano's unrestrained economic freedom is somebody else's severed finger.
And Zilog is still making the Z80, which is much older than than the 80386. But both stopped being used in computer systems a long time ago. Nowadays the market is embedded systems — and I doubt that the current price for a Z80 is less than it was in 1976.
Actually, a Pentium II system can run Linux quite well. It's only Microsoft feature bloat that requires all that extra horsepower.
I shouldn't have implied that chips are guaranteed to disappear after a while. If they find the right niche, they can survive a long time time. More than 3 decades after its first release, you can still buy Z80 processors.
But that's for simple embedded uses. Nobody's building computer systems around them. And a $10 CP/M system would probably have quite a following!
Where exactly do you get $60?
TFA uses a simplistic economic fallacy to argue that the price will be around $100:
The price has not yet been announced officially... But you can understand that if Hivision was able to sell those types of laptops for $98 to distributors more than a year ago (when I filmed my popular video from IFA 2008), then surely the mass manufacturing price has not gone up since then. My expectation is that if a giant consumer electronics reseller such as Walmart or Best Buy approaches Hivision today to order huge quantities of this laptop, it could be sold below $100 to end users.
He's assuming that any given tech drops in price by a huge percentage every year. If that were true, IBM would still be making 8088-based PCs and selling them for a few bucks. (Take the $2K 1981 price and divide by 2 about 15 times.) Instead, you can't buy a new 8088-based system for any price — it's not worth Intel's while to even manufacture the chip, never mind somebody else to build a system around it.
There's always a certain minimum cost to any manufacturing process. Scaling up reduces costs, and so does Moore's law, but only to a point. You'll always have to pay for materials, factory space, workers, shipping, marketing, etc. Some of these things are cheaper outside the U.S., but again, only to a point.
I'm not sure what the minimum cost for manufacturing a computer is, but I very much doubt that it's much below $100. When manufacturers reach that minimum, they can't keep cutting prices, no matter how much the electronics improve, bang-for-buck-wise. So instead, they find a good price point, and provide the best product they know how to for that price. The result: low end products don't get cheaper, they get better.
I couldn't begin to guess how much these new ARM laptops will sell for. It will have to be a lot less than the competing Atom-based systems, or else no one will buy them. But I doubt if the retail price will ever go below $200, not if they're sold by anybody who's in it for the money.
Of course, even a $200 laptop would be damned popular. And a couple years after they come out, you'll be able to buy used ones on eBay for a pittance.
Look, I was making a humorous comparison between the way we do politics and the way we sell stuff. I was joking when I suggested that there's no difference between the political parties and some brand-obsessed distributor of cleaning products.
But since you insist on drawing a bright line between special interest groups and voters, I have to point out a big flaw in your logic. Who do you think "special interests" are? They're groups of people with a common, special interest. And in this context, "people" is pretty much the same as "voters." AARP is a "special interest" that advocates for older people. Unions are "special interests" that advocate for unionized workers. Corporations are "special interests" that advocate for their owners and even in some ways for their employees. And so on.
Now, I'm not saying this is a good setup. It fosters corruption and guarantees domination by those with the deepest pockets. And too often the leaders of special interests are less than honest about how they do their jobs. But the fact remains that these SIGs are not aliens from another dimension who want to make us all slaves. They're citizens legitimately protecting their own interests.
This has always been a basic problem with democracies, that "the people" have a certain tendency to protect their own interests first, often to detriment of the nation as a whole. (When I say "always", I have in mind the first documented pork barrel project, created 25 centuries ago to keep Athenian trireme rowers occupied between wars.) It's always going to be a problem. You can do your best to curb it, but you're not going to eliminate it. Not unless you want to abandon popular rule and switch to monarchy, dictatorship, feudalism, anarchy, or some other such alternative. Though I might remind you that all these systems tend to be really unpleasant to live under.
And if you do want to get serious about curbing the excesses of special interests, try to remember that everybody in part of at least one of them. Including you.
For once I was trying for "Funny" but instead I get two "Insightfuls" and an "Infomative." Despite their fondness for low humor, geeks take themselves way too serious.
Nowadays everything is about branding, even politics. In order to differentiate their brand from brand of the Democrat Party (as they like to call it), the Republic Party (as I like to call them) has to avoid showing any support for anything Obama does. Their marketing division (or, to use an old-fashioned term, their political strategists) understand that any show of bipartisanship confuse the consumers (I guess most people still call them "voters") and dilute the brand. So the party has to maintain a uniform anti-Democrat (not to be confused with anti-Democratic) message, even when the Democrats propose a product (officially a "policy") that the Republics invented in the first place.
Obama's attempts to achieve a consensus show his utter contempt for the way business (isn't government a business? if not it should be) is done in the 21st century. If that doesn't convince you he's a communist, nothing will!
read it and make up your own mind.
What are you, some kind of commie? This is America! We think what our favorite cable news pundit tells us to think! That's how democracy works!
And what if the room is bugged? Possibly by the very software described in the article. So leaving your cellphone outside helps, but is still no guarantee.
Your two scenarios of insecure (electronic) and secure (in person) is a false dichotomy. There's no such thing as "secure" or "insecure", just degrees of security. How much communication security do you need? That depends on how badly you want privacy — and how badly somebody else wants to deprive you of it.
The real lesson here is the one Bruce Schneier keeps trying to teach (with little success, it seems): security is a process, not a product. If you're worried about somebody listening in, look for weak points in the channel. Don't try to find a magic 128-bit shield at Radio Shack.