Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it.
I think this oversimplifies things. Homo Sapiens adapted a more sophisticated strategy than churning out offspring ten-to-the-dozen. We have long gestation periods, and twins are fairly rare.
You want your genes to survive, you could have 12 kids and watch 10 of them die or screw up, or you could have 2 kids and give them the best care possible.
Third-world agrarian cultures have a high rate of attrition: if you simply count babies born you'll likely get a skewed result, because many of those children won't live very long.
Resulting the counter-intuitive notion, that by reducing infant mortality, you reduce population growth. If people believe their children will die, they'll have more as an insurance policy.
True turn-by-turn, where the receiver has to keep up with your position in a few meters so it can warn you a turn is coming up? They are not nearly as good at that. When you are moving in a car, they can often lag or veer in weird ways.
Is that merely a software thing? As in, the navigation software infers your current position from:
- The last good GPS reading
- Velocity based on the last two GPS readings
- Its knowledge that you're supposed to be on a road
I know my dedicated TomTom sometimes shows me carrying on down a road, when I stop at lights and there's no clear view of the sky.
I don't think this is true. Note we're talking about phones containing a GPS receiver, not phones that do geolocation by triangulating masts.
and they work where there are no Cell Phone towers.
See above. Some devices need a phone signal to get their maps, but that's an implementation choice. Google's implementation caches the image data for the route.
They are also (usually) easy to extract the information from in standard forms and then use in your own applications (such as google earth pro) to make your own maps.
I hope this is true for Android, since openness is supposed to be its strength.
Anyone who backpacks, hikes, uses ORVs, hunts, fishes, camps, etc, needs a rugged outdoor/backcountry GPS. A cell phone, no matter how cool, does not do the trick.
What's needed is a rugged outdoor/backcountry cellphone. Of course it would lose some functionality when it was off the network, but it would still do enough offline to be useful. Including GPS duties.
I have seen this on alot of gps, including my tomtom.
How old is your TomTom?
Mine is uncannily good at routing, and more often than not, estimates the arrival time for a 3 hour journey, down to the nearest 5 minutes.
It might be that the UK maps are better than the US ones. I absolutely can't fault its algorithms.
Admittedly, I sometimes overrule it based on preferred driving conditions (e.g. I want to go on this pretty road instead of the motorway). It tells me to turn around a few times, then gives up and recalculates, giving me its new, later, estimated arrival time.
Garmin at Navman at least, and probably TomTom, sell their software for use on Blackberries and iPhones. So they don't seem to mind too much whether you get the hardware from them or from someone else.
What they'll need to do is convince potential buyers that it's worth paying money for their software, instead of sticking with Google's free version.
Here's a question: are standalone GPS significantly better than a cell phone GPS?
Well. I don't think there's very much to separate the actual GPS receivers. They can all pinpoint your position on the globe to a similar level of accuracy.
The differentiator is the navigation software that uses that information, its usability, its quality and its features. You're looking for clear maps, accurate journey time estimates, various easy ways to find a destination, clear audio instructions, etc.
Now, on platforms like iPhone and Blackberry, basic "you are here" apps are standard. There are simple free turn-by-turn navigation apps, but the platform owners charge a fee to approve apps that get you door to door.
On the Blackberry at least, you can buy Garmin or Navman (etc.) software, which is going to be pretty much equivalent to having a standalone unit from one of those companies.
If like me, you live in a small European country, where within the country there is practically no need for the GPS because you know most of the country by heart.
How small? Monaco?
There are two situations where I feel GPS is useful for driving:
1. For the last few miles of your journey to an unfamiliar town. I can easily find my way from London to Manchester without GPS. Sat Nav is a big help finding my way to a specific street address once I'm there.
2. For finding back-roads, when the route you know is blocked. There's really only one 'A' road leading from my parent's home in West Wales, to the Midlands. When a motorbike accident caused the police to close it for several hours, satnav was able to guide me over the hills on single-track unpaved roads, around the blockage.
I really can't think of a European country small enough that you could know it well enough to avoid these benefits.
By analogy, if I tell someone 'look that guy's left his lawnmower unsecured', am I responsible when it later gets stolen?
I think it's ambiguous.
Now, what if I set up a bulletin board with a list of gardens containing unsecured lawnmowers?
What TPB does is just that. "If you go here, you can download a movie". I don't think it's by any means clear whether that's incitement, being an accessory, or not. And it will depend on varying national laws.
I think Wave might be ideal for playing Diplomacy. In Dip, you want to be having numerous conversations, some public, some private, in various combinations of players.
Even without a board widget or an automated adjudicator, it would be a great way for the designers to test out various approaches to Wave privacy (fork this wave privately; attach a confidential comment to this part of a wave; etc.)
'High Availability' is a bit of an overloaded term.
For example, I worked with some people for whom it meant a specific IBM product, and if you achieved reliability by some other means, you weren't 'HA' and therefore weren't meeting standards!
By one definition, data on Google Docs is more 'available' than data on a physical drive in my office. Since he former is only available when I'm at work, whereas the Google Doc is available from home, from work, or from any arbitrary location with Web access.
More importantly to me, on Google Docs, someone else is managing backups and upgrades.
Ahhh so if you outsource to the lowest bidder quality goes down the toilet.
So don't go to the lowest bidder. You buy vegetables, right? That's outsourcing your gardening. Do you go to the cheapest vegetable supplier regardless of quality? No.
Actually they probably used you until they realised how BAD most outsourcing is, and re-insourced the project.
Outsourcing your data is a security risk and an expensive mistake.
If it's an expensive mistake, then MAJOR companies are taking their sweet time -- 40 years -- realizing it. There are just some things it makes sense to pay someone else to do.
Providing outsourced basic IT operations has paid my wages for the last 10 years, and some of my colleagues for 40.
Your bank, your insurer, your car dealer, your supermarket probably use us.
There's nothing new about trusting 3rd parties with your data, and if it gives you more security, flexibility and reliability, for less money, it's worth doing.
Cloud computing is just a new(ish) way for providers to run things.
I don't see what's pretentious about observing that it's daft to say "stop using silly words like 'synergy' when you can perfectly easily use 'it's some things that work well together innit'".
I wouldn't have o be a vocabulary snob, if I wasn't constantly faced by inverse vocabulary snobs.
Especially when having a technical or business oriented conversation.
So netbooks are now considered a different market than PCs?
I reckon so, in so far as few existing PC users would buy a netbook to replace their PC - but to augment it.
In the early days of the netbook market, most of them came with Linux, the logic being that Windows would add a good 10% to the unit price, and who needs Windows for web browsing and light word processing?
Could someone translate the above post to English please?
If you don't know what "fundamental", "traditional", "notion", "platform", "operating system", "API", "proprietary", "client/server", "ubiquitous", "standards based", "commoditize", "scalable", "infrastructure", "capital expenses" or "operating expenses" mean, then the whole discussion of cloud computing is probably not relevant to you.
Aha, I see what you did there. You strung a load of meaningless buzzwords together! Very clever! Monetize. Synergy. Methodology. Reactive. Transitional.
Except those are all perfectly good words with clear meanings. When people deride them, the only assumption I can make is that they've not taken the time to understand them.
FFS, someone once tried to tell me that "paradigm" was a pointless buzzword, because it could always be substituted with "idea". He was a halfwit.
Likewise, "cloud computing" has a meaning, which its detractors ceaselessly seem to ignore or misrepresent.
What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
In the long term, I'd guess there is no (local) IT admin. If an employee has an IT problem, they call Google directly.
However, if *I* was starting a new business (which admittedly, I'm not planning to do) with no legacy documents, I'd buy a Google Apps contract, and make it the company standard.
Anyone demands to have MS Office, I explain why they don't need it, explain our reasons for using Google Apps, and tell them to suck it up. They might come back with a very good reason, in which case I'd make them an exception, but I wouldn't expect this to be common.
The most common reason would be that Office is what they're used to. A couple of weeks adjustment should sort that out.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it.
I think this oversimplifies things. Homo Sapiens adapted a more sophisticated strategy than churning out offspring ten-to-the-dozen. We have long gestation periods, and twins are fairly rare.
You want your genes to survive, you could have 12 kids and watch 10 of them die or screw up, or you could have 2 kids and give them the best care possible.
Third-world agrarian cultures have a high rate of attrition: if you simply count babies born you'll likely get a skewed result, because many of those children won't live very long.
Resulting the counter-intuitive notion, that by reducing infant mortality, you reduce population growth. If people believe their children will die, they'll have more as an insurance policy.
True turn-by-turn, where the receiver has to keep up with your position in a few meters so it can warn you a turn is coming up? They are not nearly as good at that. When you are moving in a car, they can often lag or veer in weird ways.
Is that merely a software thing? As in, the navigation software infers your current position from:
- The last good GPS reading
- Velocity based on the last two GPS readings
- Its knowledge that you're supposed to be on a road
I know my dedicated TomTom sometimes shows me carrying on down a road, when I stop at lights and there's no clear view of the sky.
Yes, they are Far, far more accurate,
I don't think this is true. Note we're talking about phones containing a GPS receiver, not phones that do geolocation by triangulating masts.
and they work where there are no Cell Phone towers.
See above. Some devices need a phone signal to get their maps, but that's an implementation choice. Google's implementation caches the image data for the route.
They are also (usually) easy to extract the information from in standard forms and then use in your own applications (such as google earth pro) to make your own maps.
I hope this is true for Android, since openness is supposed to be its strength.
Anyone who backpacks, hikes, uses ORVs, hunts, fishes, camps, etc, needs a rugged outdoor/backcountry GPS. A cell phone, no matter how cool, does not do the trick.
What's needed is a rugged outdoor/backcountry cellphone. Of course it would lose some functionality when it was off the network, but it would still do enough offline to be useful. Including GPS duties.
I agree, but I think driving GPS represent the bulk of the consumer GPS business.
GPSs dedicated to marine or wilderness use are pretty safe, precisely because they're not quite as mainstream.
I have seen this on alot of gps, including my tomtom.
How old is your TomTom?
Mine is uncannily good at routing, and more often than not, estimates the arrival time for a 3 hour journey, down to the nearest 5 minutes.
It might be that the UK maps are better than the US ones. I absolutely can't fault its algorithms.
Admittedly, I sometimes overrule it based on preferred driving conditions (e.g. I want to go on this pretty road instead of the motorway). It tells me to turn around a few times, then gives up and recalculates, giving me its new, later, estimated arrival time.
Garmin at Navman at least, and probably TomTom, sell their software for use on Blackberries and iPhones. So they don't seem to mind too much whether you get the hardware from them or from someone else.
What they'll need to do is convince potential buyers that it's worth paying money for their software, instead of sticking with Google's free version.
People still buy MS Office...
Here's a question: are standalone GPS significantly better than a cell phone GPS?
Well. I don't think there's very much to separate the actual GPS receivers. They can all pinpoint your position on the globe to a similar level of accuracy.
The differentiator is the navigation software that uses that information, its usability, its quality and its features. You're looking for clear maps, accurate journey time estimates, various easy ways to find a destination, clear audio instructions, etc.
Now, on platforms like iPhone and Blackberry, basic "you are here" apps are standard. There are simple free turn-by-turn navigation apps, but the platform owners charge a fee to approve apps that get you door to door.
On the Blackberry at least, you can buy Garmin or Navman (etc.) software, which is going to be pretty much equivalent to having a standalone unit from one of those companies.
If like me, you live in a small European country, where within the country there is practically no need for the GPS because you know most of the country by heart.
How small? Monaco?
There are two situations where I feel GPS is useful for driving:
1. For the last few miles of your journey to an unfamiliar town. I can easily find my way from London to Manchester without GPS. Sat Nav is a big help finding my way to a specific street address once I'm there.
2. For finding back-roads, when the route you know is blocked. There's really only one 'A' road leading from my parent's home in West Wales, to the Midlands. When a motorbike accident caused the police to close it for several hours, satnav was able to guide me over the hills on single-track unpaved roads, around the blockage.
I really can't think of a European country small enough that you could know it well enough to avoid these benefits.
By analogy, if I tell someone 'look that guy's left his lawnmower unsecured', am I responsible when it later gets stolen?
I think it's ambiguous.
Now, what if I set up a bulletin board with a list of gardens containing unsecured lawnmowers?
What TPB does is just that. "If you go here, you can download a movie". I don't think it's by any means clear whether that's incitement, being an accessory, or not. And it will depend on varying national laws.
I think Wave might be ideal for playing Diplomacy. In Dip, you want to be having numerous conversations, some public, some private, in various combinations of players.
Even without a board widget or an automated adjudicator, it would be a great way for the designers to test out various approaches to Wave privacy (fork this wave privately; attach a confidential comment to this part of a wave; etc.)
'High Availability' is a bit of an overloaded term.
For example, I worked with some people for whom it meant a specific IBM product, and if you achieved reliability by some other means, you weren't 'HA' and therefore weren't meeting standards!
By one definition, data on Google Docs is more 'available' than data on a physical drive in my office. Since he former is only available when I'm at work, whereas the Google Doc is available from home, from work, or from any arbitrary location with Web access.
More importantly to me, on Google Docs, someone else is managing backups and upgrades.
Ahhh so if you outsource to the lowest bidder quality goes down the toilet.
So don't go to the lowest bidder. You buy vegetables, right? That's outsourcing your gardening. Do you go to the cheapest vegetable supplier regardless of quality? No.
Actually they probably used you until they realised how BAD most outsourcing is, and re-insourced the project.
Outsourcing your data is a security risk and an expensive mistake.
If it's an expensive mistake, then MAJOR companies are taking their sweet time -- 40 years -- realizing it. There are just some things it makes sense to pay someone else to do.
Providing outsourced basic IT operations has paid my wages for the last 10 years, and some of my colleagues for 40.
Your bank, your insurer, your car dealer, your supermarket probably use us.
There's nothing new about trusting 3rd parties with your data, and if it gives you more security, flexibility and reliability, for less money, it's worth doing.
Cloud computing is just a new(ish) way for providers to run things.
I don't see what's pretentious about observing that it's daft to say "stop using silly words like 'synergy' when you can perfectly easily use 'it's some things that work well together innit'".
I wouldn't have o be a vocabulary snob, if I wasn't constantly faced by inverse vocabulary snobs.
Especially when having a technical or business oriented conversation.
I agree your version is much easier to read. You're a good copy editor.
But in doing so you trimmed out "ubiquitous" and "commoditized", which I think were important nuances.
Hey, I'll take a mod point, whatever the classification :)
(Does this make me a karma whore?)
So netbooks are now considered a different market than PCs?
I reckon so, in so far as few existing PC users would buy a netbook to replace their PC - but to augment it.
In the early days of the netbook market, most of them came with Linux, the logic being that Windows would add a good 10% to the unit price, and who needs Windows for web browsing and light word processing?
Could someone translate the above post to English please?
If you don't know what "fundamental", "traditional", "notion", "platform", "operating system", "API", "proprietary", "client/server", "ubiquitous", "standards based", "commoditize", "scalable", "infrastructure", "capital expenses" or "operating expenses" mean, then the whole discussion of cloud computing is probably not relevant to you.
Aha, I see what you did there. You strung a load of meaningless buzzwords together! Very clever! Monetize. Synergy. Methodology. Reactive. Transitional.
Except those are all perfectly good words with clear meanings. When people deride them, the only assumption I can make is that they've not taken the time to understand them.
FFS, someone once tried to tell me that "paradigm" was a pointless buzzword, because it could always be substituted with "idea". He was a halfwit.
Likewise, "cloud computing" has a meaning, which its detractors ceaselessly seem to ignore or misrepresent.
What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
In the long term, I'd guess there is no (local) IT admin. If an employee has an IT problem, they call Google directly.
I think that's all true.
However, if *I* was starting a new business (which admittedly, I'm not planning to do) with no legacy documents, I'd buy a Google Apps contract, and make it the company standard.
Anyone demands to have MS Office, I explain why they don't need it, explain our reasons for using Google Apps, and tell them to suck it up. They might come back with a very good reason, in which case I'd make them an exception, but I wouldn't expect this to be common.
The most common reason would be that Office is what they're used to. A couple of weeks adjustment should sort that out.
I don't think it wanted to associate Google with OSS, except to say that both represent competition for Microsoft.
He said "Google *and* OSS". Two different things (although there's a slight overlap).