Don't forget that there's also a certain amount of subconcious racism that happens in our culture. For example, there was a study done in the last year or two where identical resumes were submitted to companies. One resume would have traditionally white names and one would have traditionally black names. The white name resumes received much greater responses than the black name ones. I think you'd find that a similar study using asian names would probably not get the same differential.
It's a matter of economics but it is also a matter of cultural heritage and perceptions. Economics is something realtively simple to solve, but the cultural heritage will take decades of effort to deal with. I'm not saying that affirmative action is a good solution, but we have to be honest about the fact that it's not just about economics.
I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
What I suspect they failed to say there was that THEIR ISP only offered support for Oracle. So, they could have run other database solutions if they had the expertise to do it themselves or if they found a different ISP.
What about the new pebble bed reactor designs? The original generation of nuclear reactors were terribly complicated, required constant monitoring, and were almost by design, prone to accidents. New pebble bed reactors can be completely fail safe.
On a similar train of thought, do you feel that Nader's campaign in 2000 will be more helpful or detrimental to the Green party going forward? Clearly there's been a backlash against Nader, but how much of that has carried over to the greens. Is the backlash offset by the higher visibility that the green party might now possess because of it?
A system like this would have been great in my unsuccessful hunt for LotR Marathon tickets.
That wouldn't have done you a damn bit of good. I was on-line when they went on sale and I immediately tried to purchase. And so did everybody else on earth and their system crashed.
Rule of thumb is that computers make things easier when they work and MUCH MUCH harder when they don't.
So: they will use a stick and a carrot. The stick: lawsuits against prominent OOo developers for patent infringement. The carrot: MSOffice for Linux. I predict within the next 6 months, since every day that OOo is free makes it harder for MS to squash it.
MS Office for Linux is not going to happen. Microsoft's power comes through control of the desktop platform. If they ran office on Linux, a lot of people would lose their only reason for sticking with Windows. Besides, the vast majority of people using OOo are using it on Windows, not Linux.
Sure their desktop is under assault from Internet malware but has this eroded their market share in the slightest? No. As long as the applications people want to run only run on Windows then Microsoft will continute to dominate the market. I hate Windows but I run it at home because the games I play don't run on Linux. As for Malware, I'm behind a firewall, and I don't use IE or Outlook so what do I care.
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
When was the last time you seriously needed to look at a spread sheet and did not have a laptop or desktop computer handy?:)
Note taking and sketching, sure. I totally agree that those are useful things. It's something I can do on a PDA I bought a decade ago with aplomb. It's also something I can do with a piece of paper and a pen:).
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
Right, but I guess my point is this:
How many applications require a slightly larger ok interface with low processing power? How many applications are truly ideal for that platform?
Like the cell phone is an ideal platform for voice calls. The desktop is ideal for gaming, software development, CAD, etc. The laptop gives you most of the power of the desktop with a major gain in portability. The PDA gets you what? A note pad with a search engine? Honestly at $50, that sounds good as long as I have spare room in my pockets (I don't). But otherwise, why bother?
I agree with you completely. But how often do I need to create a memo when I'm not near a computer?
Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The major failing in most PDA's or palmtops is that there's very little you can usefull do with them. Everybody carries cell phones because cell phones are obviously useful. They are compact, simple (well, not so much anymore), and they are VERY useful.
I used to carry around a PDA. I used it to keep track of phone numbers and my calendar. I now have a cell phone which is ideal for the first task, and is passably useful for the second. So why would I carry around another device?
Name me one thing that I can do with a PDA I cannot do with a simple cell phone that makes it worth carrying around. Surf the web? Well it's not really that easy to do it effectively on either device. Watch videos? The displays suck for that, they don't have enough memory, and frankly I can't imagine needing this "on the go".
PDA's are the bad middle ground. They are not as compact as cellphone and they are not as useful as full size laptop. Until somebody comes up with a good reason for people to lug around yet another device, there's not much left to say about it.
If that were true then the market for these computers would be sustainable. People wouldn't pay more to get less. They are buying these clusters because they can get equal or superior processing capabilities at a fraction of the cost.
You cannot buy 10 or 50 or 100 cessnas and make a fighter plane. You can buy a cluster and make it as effective as a vector system.
Yes, that factor of 3.75 is a big deal, that's why you buy a cluster that's big enough to make up for that 3.75. It will still be cheaper than the 1000 node supercomputer.
I'm no big fan of DoubleClick but think about this for just a moment. All those sites that you go to that have these ads are staying in business because of them. If DoubleClick went away so would a lot of that content.
Yeah I went to NCAR a year or so ago and their new top of the line was racks and racks of IBM RS6000's. Sure, it doesn't look as sexy as the old Cray they now use as a couch in the museum, but it does appear to get the job done.
How do you define better? Sure an uber powerful supercomputer might be better in terms of raw efficiency, but if you can have twice the computer for half the price by going with something a little less efficient, who really cares?
What's key here is the amount of processing power you get for a given dollar. Clusters of general purpose systems may not be as efficient as a vector system, but in the end, the price makes up for the inefficiencies.
If the cost of the system plus the cost of the geek to run it is cheaper per unit of work than it is for a vector machine then that's all there is to it.
We are innovating by squeezing more and more processing power into smaller and smaller spaces and by improving on the interfaces for intercommunication between nodes.
If there truly is a demand for those kind of processors, then somebody will likely meet that demand. Right now, it seems that actual demand is so low that they have to drum up this legislation a as a sort of wellfare for vector processor manufacturers.
It's a simple cost tradeoff. If you can save millions in purchasing computers, it means more money to pay for people to run those computers and do the real work.
The problem we see here and throughout the SCO case is that copyright was never designed with software in mind. The nature of software licensing is such that there's frequent cases of derrived works from different sources, which is rarely the case in books.
If you write a book, it's unlikely that somebody's going to excerpt part of your book for their own use. It's even more unlikely that the excerpt they do make will get used by somebody else in their book. This is a standard practice in software.
Linux uses Elf. SCO claims that the committee that opened up that standard didn't have the authority to do so. Well, it's now years later, and there are countless works derived off of that original standard, and now SCO wants to undo it.
Basically this has the effect of destroying copyright in software. How can anybody feel legally safe using any software product at any time when the history of every piece of code isn't out there for our perusal? How many times do we here of code that's out there, gets implemented countless times, and then somebody comes along and claims patent or copyright on some ancestor. The GIF patents are a perfect example of this.
I'm aware of no good solution to this problem. Every year, more code is written like this, and more copyright issues and patent issues arise. This will lead to legal fights, and overall increase the cost of developing software exponentially over time. Keep in mind that the code were dealing with don't date back much further than 1970, so it's only going to get worse.
What we're talking about is filing a report, not a real time tracking of cellphone outages. So it really wouldn't make sense in that regard. They'd find out the outage happened three months later, and realize why they didn't get any warning.
The problem with fiber to the door is that it has to be to every door. If you put up one blimp, you get coverage to everybody within line of site. Rural areas are not cost effective to provide service to because you have to run so much cable to cover only a few customers. One blimp and you are good to go.
Now, in areas where fiber is already to the door, this brings in a benefit: competition. Your local bell or cable company can't extort you for access to that fiber because you've got an alternative overhead. Furthermore, you can fit many blimps into the same coverage area, which means, you can have a lot of people competing for your dollar.
The problem with orbital systems is that the cost to launch an object in to space is extreme. Furthermore, once it is in space, hardware upgrades are completely impossible. Then there's also the issue of latency as you accruately point out.
But with a blimp at 65K feet, you solve all of those problems. It's cost is primarily in assembly. Getting it on station is just a matter of letting gravity do it's thing. Once it's there, if you need to perform maintenance on it, you launch a replacement, and then bring down the old blimp for repairs. As for latency:
C = 186K miles per second Distance to cover: about 25 miles round trip
So, if it can go 186K miles in one second, it would only take.00013 seconds to go 25 miles. Compare that to satellite service where you typically get.5 seconds of latency.
Now, what I am curious about is the survivability of these blimps over the long term in the stratosphere. How will weather effect the quality of the services provided by the blimp, etc?
The other thing that occurs to me is that blimps like this could totally replace satellite coverage even outside metro areas. Create a mesh network of blimps and then route signals from blimp to blimp to cover wider areas. This would allow for far greater bandwidth than provided by satellites at a much lower cost. Furthermore, this is much better suited to creating redundancy, allowing blimps to reroute if there's an outage.
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Don't forget that there's also a certain amount of subconcious racism that happens in our culture. For example, there was a study done in the last year or two where identical resumes were submitted to companies. One resume would have traditionally white names and one would have traditionally black names. The white name resumes received much greater responses than the black name ones. I think you'd find that a similar study using asian names would probably not get the same differential.
It's a matter of economics but it is also a matter of cultural heritage and perceptions. Economics is something realtively simple to solve, but the cultural heritage will take decades of effort to deal with. I'm not saying that affirmative action is a good solution, but we have to be honest about the fact that it's not just about economics.
I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
What I suspect they failed to say there was that THEIR ISP only offered support for Oracle. So, they could have run other database solutions if they had the expertise to do it themselves or if they found a different ISP.
What about the new pebble bed reactor designs? The original generation of nuclear reactors were terribly complicated, required constant monitoring, and were almost by design, prone to accidents. New pebble bed reactors can be completely fail safe.
On a similar train of thought, do you feel that Nader's campaign in 2000 will be more helpful or detrimental to the Green party going forward? Clearly there's been a backlash against Nader, but how much of that has carried over to the greens. Is the backlash offset by the higher visibility that the green party might now possess because of it?
Good theory. Unfortunately the theater wasn't selling them at the box office, only online.
A system like this would have been great in my unsuccessful hunt for LotR Marathon tickets.
That wouldn't have done you a damn bit of good. I was on-line when they went on sale and I immediately tried to purchase. And so did everybody else on earth and their system crashed.
Rule of thumb is that computers make things easier when they work and MUCH MUCH harder when they don't.
So: they will use a stick and a carrot. The stick: lawsuits against prominent OOo developers for patent infringement. The carrot: MSOffice for Linux. I predict within the next 6 months, since every day that OOo is free makes it harder for MS to squash it.
MS Office for Linux is not going to happen. Microsoft's power comes through control of the desktop platform. If they ran office on Linux, a lot of people would lose their only reason for sticking with Windows. Besides, the vast majority of people using OOo are using it on Windows, not Linux.
Sure their desktop is under assault from Internet malware but has this eroded their market share in the slightest? No. As long as the applications people want to run only run on Windows then Microsoft will continute to dominate the market. I hate Windows but I run it at home because the games I play don't run on Linux. As for Malware, I'm behind a firewall, and I don't use IE or Outlook so what do I care.
When was the last time you seriously needed to look at a spread sheet and did not have a laptop or desktop computer handy? :)
:).
Note taking and sketching, sure. I totally agree that those are useful things. It's something I can do on a PDA I bought a decade ago with aplomb. It's also something I can do with a piece of paper and a pen
Right, but I guess my point is this:
How many applications require a slightly larger ok interface with low processing power? How many applications are truly ideal for that platform?
Like the cell phone is an ideal platform for voice calls. The desktop is ideal for gaming, software development, CAD, etc. The laptop gives you most of the power of the desktop with a major gain in portability. The PDA gets you what? A note pad with a search engine? Honestly at $50, that sounds good as long as I have spare room in my pockets (I don't). But otherwise, why bother?
I agree with you completely. But how often do I need to create a memo when I'm not near a computer?
The major failing in most PDA's or palmtops is that there's very little you can usefull do with them. Everybody carries cell phones because cell phones are obviously useful. They are compact, simple (well, not so much anymore), and they are VERY useful.
I used to carry around a PDA. I used it to keep track of phone numbers and my calendar. I now have a cell phone which is ideal for the first task, and is passably useful for the second. So why would I carry around another device?
Name me one thing that I can do with a PDA I cannot do with a simple cell phone that makes it worth carrying around. Surf the web? Well it's not really that easy to do it effectively on either device. Watch videos? The displays suck for that, they don't have enough memory, and frankly I can't imagine needing this "on the go".
PDA's are the bad middle ground. They are not as compact as cellphone and they are not as useful as full size laptop. Until somebody comes up with a good reason for people to lug around yet another device, there's not much left to say about it.
If that were true then the market for these computers would be sustainable. People wouldn't pay more to get less. They are buying these clusters because they can get equal or superior processing capabilities at a fraction of the cost.
You cannot buy 10 or 50 or 100 cessnas and make a fighter plane. You can buy a cluster and make it as effective as a vector system.
Yes, that factor of 3.75 is a big deal, that's why you buy a cluster that's big enough to make up for that 3.75. It will still be cheaper than the 1000 node supercomputer.
I'm no big fan of DoubleClick but think about this for just a moment. All those sites that you go to that have these ads are staying in business because of them. If DoubleClick went away so would a lot of that content.
Yes, that may be true. But if that cluster costs 1/3 the price it's break even and in reality they cost far less than that.
Yeah I went to NCAR a year or so ago and their new top of the line was racks and racks of IBM RS6000's. Sure, it doesn't look as sexy as the old Cray they now use as a couch in the museum, but it does appear to get the job done.
How do you define better? Sure an uber powerful supercomputer might be better in terms of raw efficiency, but if you can have twice the computer for half the price by going with something a little less efficient, who really cares?
What's key here is the amount of processing power you get for a given dollar. Clusters of general purpose systems may not be as efficient as a vector system, but in the end, the price makes up for the inefficiencies.
If the cost of the system plus the cost of the geek to run it is cheaper per unit of work than it is for a vector machine then that's all there is to it.
We are innovating by squeezing more and more processing power into smaller and smaller spaces and by improving on the interfaces for intercommunication between nodes.
If there truly is a demand for those kind of processors, then somebody will likely meet that demand. Right now, it seems that actual demand is so low that they have to drum up this legislation a as a sort of wellfare for vector processor manufacturers.
It's a simple cost tradeoff. If you can save millions in purchasing computers, it means more money to pay for people to run those computers and do the real work.
The good news: soon we'll discover the radio signals of an advanced alien civilization.
The bad news: their messages will likely be encrypted beyond comprehension so that we don't copy their programming and distribute it on P2P networks.
The problem we see here and throughout the SCO case is that copyright was never designed with software in mind. The nature of software licensing is such that there's frequent cases of derrived works from different sources, which is rarely the case in books.
If you write a book, it's unlikely that somebody's going to excerpt part of your book for their own use. It's even more unlikely that the excerpt they do make will get used by somebody else in their book. This is a standard practice in software.
Linux uses Elf. SCO claims that the committee that opened up that standard didn't have the authority to do so. Well, it's now years later, and there are countless works derived off of that original standard, and now SCO wants to undo it.
Basically this has the effect of destroying copyright in software. How can anybody feel legally safe using any software product at any time when the history of every piece of code isn't out there for our perusal? How many times do we here of code that's out there, gets implemented countless times, and then somebody comes along and claims patent or copyright on some ancestor. The GIF patents are a perfect example of this.
I'm aware of no good solution to this problem. Every year, more code is written like this, and more copyright issues and patent issues arise. This will lead to legal fights, and overall increase the cost of developing software exponentially over time. Keep in mind that the code were dealing with don't date back much further than 1970, so it's only going to get worse.
What we're talking about is filing a report, not a real time tracking of cellphone outages. So it really wouldn't make sense in that regard. They'd find out the outage happened three months later, and realize why they didn't get any warning.
Kill two birds with one stone and hire the guy to fix the website. I guarantee that he's cheaper than the lawyers. It'd also make great publicity.
The problem with fiber to the door is that it has to be to every door. If you put up one blimp, you get coverage to everybody within line of site. Rural areas are not cost effective to provide service to because you have to run so much cable to cover only a few customers. One blimp and you are good to go.
Now, in areas where fiber is already to the door, this brings in a benefit: competition. Your local bell or cable company can't extort you for access to that fiber because you've got an alternative overhead. Furthermore, you can fit many blimps into the same coverage area, which means, you can have a lot of people competing for your dollar.
The problem with orbital systems is that the cost to launch an object in to space is extreme. Furthermore, once it is in space, hardware upgrades are completely impossible. Then there's also the issue of latency as you accruately point out.
.00013 seconds to go 25 miles. Compare that to satellite service where you typically get .5 seconds of latency.
But with a blimp at 65K feet, you solve all of those problems. It's cost is primarily in assembly. Getting it on station is just a matter of letting gravity do it's thing. Once it's there, if you need to perform maintenance on it, you launch a replacement, and then bring down the old blimp for repairs. As for latency:
C = 186K miles per second
Distance to cover: about 25 miles round trip
So, if it can go 186K miles in one second, it would only take
Now, what I am curious about is the survivability of these blimps over the long term in the stratosphere. How will weather effect the quality of the services provided by the blimp, etc?
The other thing that occurs to me is that blimps like this could totally replace satellite coverage even outside metro areas. Create a mesh network of blimps and then route signals from blimp to blimp to cover wider areas. This would allow for far greater bandwidth than provided by satellites at a much lower cost. Furthermore, this is much better suited to creating redundancy, allowing blimps to reroute if there's an outage.