The parent post is crap. The government is spending loads of cash on a network that isn't even needed. The major broadband providers like Shaw and the alliances of former telco monopolies (Stentor and Telus/BCTel) have run or leased their own national fiber networks in addition to leasing space on major US networks especially @home until recently.
The government didn't do anything to make access cheaper or more widespread, discounting the CBC-led research that funded the invention of cable television in the 1960s. All it's doing now is trying to impress dumb voters with buzzwords in it's election 'redbook' while pissing away the people's money.
yeah yeah, I was trying to figure out how you'd do this in the back of my mind since I posted it. I had to say "may" jsut to avoid someone complaining about not being able to trust any of their friends.
I was thinking that you might be able to use something like the Cryptographic File System to encrypt the entire volume and that that level of abstractin would still let rsync be used effeciently. I have
*no* experience with CFS though, no idea how it would affect rsync, or what sort of access controls it uses or are available for it. I still wouldn't quite call it impossible.
Seriously though, good friends are still an easy alternative for most people.
rsync over ssh is a great solution. You should be able to find a friend with a spare IDE channel who you can convince to be your "backup buddy". Each of you can rsync your data to a drive how ever you want it: as a bootable copy or just essential data from several machines. Trade drives, setup accounts on eachother's machines; you may be able to figure out a way to encrypt the volume if you don't trust your friends.
Then rsync over ssh at night, use RSA "passwordless" Authentication as explained here , set up a nice little script, cron it you've got reasonably accessable cheap off-site backups.
I saw ads using the same, or an extremely similar technology (sound and animation, on theonion today. I won't stop going there. And if my brand recognition for Crown Royal has gone up for it, good for them. The ads were tastefully done, and even though I've bought a few onion books as a result of reading the site, that isn't close to matching the value I've recieved from reading it over the years.
Why do you think television advertising works the way it does? A simple banner off to the side is not an effective way to raise brand consciousness. VCs aren't going to fund your favorite content for you forever. Sides, these ads aren't particularly annoying if you can browse with more than one window open at once. Just like channel surfing, those who's tolerance is exceeded adapt.
I also don't know why everyone keeps talking about IE, did anyone bother to check the boston.com ads out or do all the ie bashers run ie? They loaded in galeon for gosh sakes! The media kit obviously mis-stated it: I'm sure that the inclusion and downloading of flash5 in ie makes it a gauranteed platform, while others are a little hit and miss, mostly hit though.
Nebby, you're like the people I know who feel so bad about their addiction/obsession that they *have got to* get other people hooked up to make themselves feel better.
Man, I'm so glad I never got obsessed with.5e. Your user classification system alone fits so well into the evily addicting MUD archetype.
It's even sicker than you think as demonstrated in these quotes:
NAT also raises issues for forthcoming cable-delivered home-networking services. A crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear.
Does the prospect of 'ongoing care processes' provided by the cable company strike anyone else as extremely dubious? I was having a problem with line strength which was causing my cable modem to drop its connection (something that quite frankly should have been tested during initial installation) and it took three appointments over three consecutive days before an Adelphia guy finally showed up, the problem was fixed by lunchbucket contractor who also showed up since due to a billing problem they had to order an installation even though I already had all the equipment.
With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won't be able to see into all connected devices-making remote troubleshooting difficult-because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices. It's the data communications equivalent of, "You wanna talk to her, you go through me"-except you don't even know she's there to talk.
The technical support people working the cable companies I've had to deal with are some of the most useless maroons I've ever had the displeasure of talking to. I don't know whether it's because of the incompetent HR departments that invariably develop in monopoly culture or if the reps are handicapped by poor training and, policy, or if they are truely just stupid, but you'll never find me relying on a cable company to manage or troubleshoot my "computer connected devices".
I believe that the sucessful software and hardware of the future will be that which is designed well enough that it can be administered effectively by the end user as more and more people learn to hate the legal monopolies that are modern cable corps.
This is one of my favorite onion articles from the time that the last book was released. There isn't much I can add besides the link, it's too damn hilarious.
Rambling warning, I'm sicker than hell, and extremely tired from playing civ all night... mod down at will.
I've been thinking about this for a while, nothing frustrates me more than having windows obscured behind something else, and having to either drag the front window out of the way, or else alt-tab through everything. In a lot of ways this is what first got me hooked on linux as a desktop replacement for windows, the well developed multiple desktops system. So I can hit a key combination and cycle from one desktop to another. One has my mail and IM open on it, the other one browsers, the next nothing but terminals, and then filemanagers/xmms.
A lot of application shave taken a better look at how they're actually used. Sometimes the UI is bad bad bad (StarOffice 5.2). Other times it's really appropriate, like the tabs in galeon which are great for organizing all the browsing into different windows based on subject (for those of us that like to have 20 pages open at once. Right clicking to open in a new tab is great for s site like slashdot, K5 or Adequacy, where there might be 7 or 8 links on the main page that i want to get to, but not forget if I get sidetracked.
When I first grasped mozilla's power as a platform I had the epiphany that since 90% of the apps I ran were network based and mozilla provided an API for creating spiffy looking network applications, it wouldn't be a stretch to do everything in tabs within one maximized window, and that it could eventually function as an OS for lightwieght computers. If you type chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul in mozilla you can get the entire mail application dropped into your browser window. Press ctrl-T on a recent build and you have a new tab to browse in, but you can switch back to your mail real fast. Add Jabberzilla to your sidebar. Throw in a few more apps from MozDev.org and you can do most of what you'd want within a single window. It's in no way complete or stable, but it's enough to shed some light on a usable way to avoid the worst of window overlap. Apparantly there is a company that's working on using mozilla as an operating environment for appliances called OEone. You can check out the screenshots of their calender application here.
We already have a modern successful non overlapping interface, and it's called PalmOS. Just as it took a limited use platform to accept "modeing", probably not a lot of desktop users will be willing to give up the poer that free windowing gives them, but for appliances, or special uses, such as subject-centered web browsing. Things like tabbing and fullscreen interfaces are a good idea, and have already been implemented.
I'm not sure of all the details on this implementation, but the Northern Lights School district in northern Alberta, Canada did something similar. I tried to find some information for you, and only have time to dig this up, but there is some contact information, and further digging should reveal more.
Northern Lights School Division No. 69
Project brings the internet to rural school division
Northern Lights School Division defied conventional wisdom to bring the world to the desktop of over 6,700 students and 700 staff in 25 schools. Using Wi-LAN technology the jurisdiction established the world's biggest wireless education system in both geographical area (5,714 square miles) and number of sites. It cost them $650,000.
The project has been recognized for its innovation and successful implementation both within the educational community and the industry. ASBO International awarded project manager Gary Krawchuk the Pinnacle Award for Excellence, making him the first Canadian to receive this prestigious award.
For more information contact Ed Wittchen,
Superintendent, at 1.780.826.3145.
As others have pointed out in replies to this comment, distilled water is something that once you start on, you get used to. Going back to regular tap water can be really unpleasant depending on the quality in your area.
When I was growing up we used distilled water almost exclusively since our water on our acreage had a high sodium content and wasn't really the tastiest stuff around. What many people complain about as the "rubber hose taste" (as one comment put it), is often the taste that comes from the white plastic bottles it's stored in, which it completely unobscured by salts. We resued the plastic bottles and when a new one came into the rotation the water tasted like a rubber hose for weeks. Distilled water straight out of a distiller has zero taste at all, and I would assume that a feul cell would work similarly.
As for the idea that distilled water sucks salts and minerals out of your body by osmotic forces. I can't say if this is a real threat or not, but most health food stores do sell concentrated trace minerals which can make 4 gallons of distilled water taste a bit more natural with just a few drops.
A lot of the comments to this article are saying that you should go to the gym, and I couldn't agree more. A good workout program will do wonders for anyone, most of all people with inactive lifestyles. I don't have the time right now to detail a good workout program for you, but why don't you check out my slash-clone website for working out, I'm sure you'll be able to figure out the interface.
bullshit. capitalism in it's truest sense is the moral code that promotes individual rights not only in the availability of choice in buying/selling products, but also in the choice available to us in creation. I find it highly unlikely that the GPL would ever have been developed in a socialist state, and in fact the way that the Chinese government breaks the terms of the GPL constantly with their so-called red star linux lends credence to that notion.
Invoking John Galt as a model for self-interested capitalism, as the original poster did, presents a scheme where the accent is on the rights of the creators, not the rights of the parasitic embracers (bill gates / orrin boyle) who, while possibly rich now, can hardly be said to be perfect models of capitalism.
The GPL presents a set of alternate choices allowing the 'motive power of humans' to be more finely directed through the rational choice of the actual individual creator and not some over-arching collective. In that sense, it's highly supportive of the core freedoms that have historically only existed in capitalist societies.
Giving away something is perfectly in line with capitalism. Having it stolen/appropriated from you is what you actually mean by socialism.
where the majority of the world's working women are severely underpaid and overworked
This is one of those statements that while probably true in a major sense globally is grossly distorted when applied to NA and Western Europe.
The fact is that the majority of humans couple and form an economic bond called a marriage. All recent studies in NA have shown the income of women who don't have children and men who don't have children is EQUAL!!!!
And all income generated by either couple in a standard marriage contract is considered communal property. So dicing it both of those ways, women have wage equality here, regardless of how dreary the UN statistics look (the most unfair situation a woman can be in is a divorced single mother who has no work experience, but I've also talked to enough divorced fathers living in basement suites and eating kraft dinner for the right to see thier children once every 2 weeks who aren't exactly the happiest people around either.)
This is getting beside the original conversation because I am only talking about NA where we have enough of a culture of personal freedom to accept women into the workforce, but this topic is one of those things that really needs to be cleared up, since it is a statistic that is trotted it in a real inflammatory manner. Marriage and childbearing are choices that most women make gladly, and most women still prefer the idea of raising thier own children, even at the expense of their carreers.
how did this get moderated up to 5? Honestly, I am not one to post to slashdot just to trash what it has become, but this post really takes the cake. It's so obviously a troll, and the moderators can't spot the false logic, identity-based reasoning and complete lack of even reading the article. Was the author actually serious? If he was then he must be in grade 7 because arguments like that actually might make sense to an coddled jungster.
I was going to write a scathing attack on this comment but after reviewing the comments that follow it I can see that there is enough good wisdom left on this board to actually overcome the tyranny of the weak (minds).
If anyone knows of a decent word to use instead of capitalism then I would like to hear it, because there are too many kids who have read too much half-baked socialist propaganda while never taking the time to actually read, oh I don't know, Adam-freaking-Smith to actually understand what the term capitalism means historically, poilitically, and personally.
Corporations are socialist. Each corporation is defined by a corporate charter which is granted as sanction by the government, to act under a 'publicly' sanctioned purpose with special rights that don't naturally apply to groups of individuals. This is a command economy. Once the government sanctions the commerce that occurs in a nation, we have no truly free market, only the outside threat of one.
Taxation of blank media is the government abusing its monoploy on force for the interests of one segment of society over another, a segment that percieves a need which it asks to be subsidized. This is coercion, and in reality there is no objective difference between the 'need' of the RIAA and the 'need' of a lesbian artist applying for a grant.
When intelligent people talk about freedom, they mean freedom from coercion, not freedom to coerce - which incidentaly is what the original poster accuses corporations of doing but seeks to do himself.
I'm assuming that the MP3 suggestions are not what you're looking for.
The college radio station that I once volunteered at had the same problem. They sourced out a really great product that was basically a small plastic envelope that held one cd with a seperate pocket for liner notes, and a pocket on the other side for the back U-card. The edge of the U-card with the title/artist was designed to bend so that you could put your cds in normal shelves and quickly flip through the collection by running your fingers along the edge. This was incredibly compact, you could hold 50 CDs in the palm of your hand easily. It also gave the satisfaction of random access to the collection and full liner notes/track listings in one place so you could carry a few "cases" to the couch to browse the notes while you listened.
I wish I could tell you where they got these, actually I wish I knew myself.
There were two things that I started to get really heavy into at the same time. Lifting weights and learning Debian. Since I had some spare time to kill and wanted to learn perl, I used slash to make a discussion board about bodybuilding.
It sure is a headache to promote a site like that. I should have just made a debian help site and relied on Taco and the boys intense love for Debian to get a debian site in front of a million eyes two days after launch. t;P>
Ah, just kidding, I hope this site does great, and I'll to contribute whenever I can to it.
Debian is my favorite distro, and I'd like to see Corel and Storm continue to smooth the gradient for people new to it.
There has been a strong resentment building up against Intel for a long time amongst the "in-the-know" technical community. Whether you are on an over-clocking site, a gamer site, slashdot, tom's hardware, etc. etc, the animosity towards Intel has been building for some time.
And people seem really happy with AMD, sure there was a minor flap when they were accused of covering up a bug with their chipset not doing full AGP speeds with Nvidia boards, but over all I see people who know what they are doing with hardware drooling over AMD and raising thier eyebrows at Intel.
Until now, it's been kind of hard to tell someone who doesn't understand technology why they should like AMD (except for the price). Not every one is willing to listen to a lecture about the evils of unfair patent law and the whole Rambus affair. Not everybody can even understand or care, how schizophrenic Intel as a company has become, shipping chips with no decent chipset support (i820 anyone?), announcing releases of high-speed chips that they can't supply in any reasonable quantity, and ignoring the needs of not only large accounts (I worked at a school board last year and had to fight tooth an nail to gaurantee a supply of celerons for student workstations) but also niche accounts that hold the strength of their image in their hands.
I'm a big believer that, public perception be damned, if your deailing in tech and you lose the respect of the technical community then, over time, you will lose the respect of the rest of the market.
I don't think the public has had much bad intel publicity that they can fully understand. However, I think that Intel's move to increase clock speed at the expense of performance will ultimately have a negative effect across all segments of the market.
What is the message going to be from you people when you are asked about which computer people should buy? It will be, "yeah you could get the intel system, but it's actually way slower than the AMD that costs a lot less too." And the psuedo-experts who read the free computer monthly will pick the argument up and spread it even further.
And then Joe Lunchpail goes to work and tells his buddies, "yeah, I never heard of this AMD, but I guess they are making faster computers than intel, even though intel says they're faster, so that's what I bought."
And this kernel of information, meme if you must, will start to weaken the Intel brand and the public's perception of Mhz. It isn't hard to understand. Faster clock speeds are just for marketing. Even John Dvorak could bold that entire line in his zdnet column.
And for all the PowerPC zeolots, give it up, you can't actually buy those chips yet either.
I'm not saying that this issue will kill Intel, but it will damage them. It is a short-sighted and ignorant move by their marketing department, how, like most marketing departments, overestimates word-of-mouth when it's in their favour, and underestimates it when it's potentially negative.
My impression of NPLI from their press releases, and from having the chance to talk to its executives has always been that the i-opener hardware was more of a way of getting their market established, building a recognizable brand and then, as soon as possible, farming their services out to other providers as an internet company.
The fact that they want to stop their cash bleed on the hardware should have been very apparant to anyone with eyes when they raised the price of the i-opener back up to $399 instead of the $99 that they had offered for some time. Anyone with a basic grip on economics should have known that it was going to happen way before that.
Basically they are a software company that everyone kept treating like an appliance company. In a July interview on Raging Bull president Kent Savage had to go to pains to get this point across,
Cyber: But isn't a large part of Netpliance's premise to sell that hardware, the I-opener?
Savage: No, not at all. We did that because we had to. We're a market maker and a first mover, and we had to innovate in order to reach this market.
It's really predictable and sad the way that the geek community has so heavily focused on the device. Unfortunately, it was really nothing too special technology-wise and the interesting things that NPLI was up to was its interface and "OS-agnostic" software package. Also it's client-server infrastructure kind of resurrected 'push' in a market and environment where it almost starts to make sense.
The "i-opener experience" is not nearly as stupid as it sounds, if you step outside of your "master of the source" persona and pretend you are on the other-side of the digital divide for a second. Sure, I prefer to navigate the net with Enlightenment as my interface of choice, but I doubt most of the flashing-12:00-on-the-VCR crowd would. The i-opener interface is just clean and as simple and dumbed-down as you can get, which is great for the market they were targetting.
They signed major strategic relations with big cable companies a long time ago (check the press releases on their web site), and their client software is well suited to be rolled out as an adjunct to set-top boxes and appliance offerings from telcos like At&T. It's curious what difficulties they might be going through negotiating "managed services" contracts with these companies because if I was running the company I would have made this shift in business plans a long long time ago. However you feel about it, they'll probably be around for a while yet, especially if they can convince US West or AT&T subsidize the hardware side of things instead of blowing all their IPO capital on it.
Kalin
Metamuscle - Building better bodies through hypertext. Slashdot for bodybuilders.
This is actually a pretty old story, well old as in at least 12 hours. I've been following the company pretty closely cause I shorted their stock abour 3 months ago. They dropped down as low as $36 a share yesterday as investors finally took their collective heads out of their asses and realized that Rambus has quickly developed one of the worst brands in the industry. Today's great news only resulted in a relatively mild increase (8% or so).
The point is that the company has been artificially propped up in stature and prominence for a long time and these supports are slowly being removed one by one. But it's taking a long time.
Intel has gone sour with RMBS and according to the public portions of the contract they signed with them all they have to do to cancel their commitments to promoting RDRAM with their new systems is write a letter terminating the contract. Why hasn't this been done then you ask?
There are portions of the contract that are blacked out and the speculation is that RMBS has Intel by the balls on some IP issue that no one is talking about. Though that's just a good theory at this point.
At any rate, even if RMBS manages to collect royalties on SDRAM and DDR-RAM and it still looks to me like Micron et al have a strong case on the whole RMBS breaking the JEDEC agreement and patenting jointly developed technology.
Intel put together a group called the Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) to develop a future RAM standard slated for 2003 and they didn't invite RMBS to the table. Regardless of whether RMBS has any claim on the patents that cover SDRAM and DDR, it's obvious that the rest of the industry (regardless of Samsung's licensing deal they are also working on the RMBS free standard) will be working very hard to bypass RMBS royalties as soon as possible.
Even if RDRAM was viable on the desktop (it's not, as others have pointed out), it's gettign to the point where associating with RMBS is bad public relations. Doesn't it make you feel sick to think that your new PS2 purchase has contributed to the financial health of these leaches?
There is a great article about this at Tom's Hardware from back in July. It makes some long-range predictions, many of which are now being played out nicely. The whole article and, actually, all of the Rambus coverage on Tom's is excellent.
Hey while I was there looking for the link I found this new bit about the Samsung deal which totally jives with what I just wrote and also points out that many analysts beleive RMBS gave Samsung major concessions to stage a well-timed deal and that Samsung is possibly avoiding legal costs while waiting for Micron et al to take RMBS to court. It's also woth noting that Samsung has been one of RMBSs biggest allies for a long time.
This thread started with a pretty insightful post I thought.
I can agree with you that many of the points I made about the economic viability of Netpliance selling hacker boxes seem pretty obvious. But at the same time, this was something that wasn't immediatley grasped by a lot of people out there. Just read the feedback that I got from slashdotters on this issue overwhelmingly asking them to sell hardware to hackers at a reasonable price as a sound business move.
I thought it was important to speak to that response since it was obviously indicative of how a lot of people felt. Looking back, I can't say that I regret writing the article the way I did.
Spending time explaining what a majority of people wanted explained may have made me look amatuerish in some ways, but I thought it was important to do considering the tone of the debate up till now. I personally agree with most of what you said above, and the article was partly an attempt to help make these economic concepts easier to understand by the masses of open source people out there, because/yes/, that is something we need.
Thanks, Kalin
PS. I certainly don't purport to be a spokesperson, or "emmisary", for anything but my own perspective.
Microsoft are not a good representant of what capitalism is meant to be. They represent what capitalism can degenerate into if unchecked. Daniel Actually, M$ more closely represents what capitalism can degenerate into if left unchampioned.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent post is crap. The government is spending loads of cash on a network that isn't even needed. The major broadband providers like Shaw and the alliances of former telco monopolies (Stentor and Telus/BCTel) have run or leased their own national fiber networks in addition to leasing space on major US networks especially @home until recently.
The government didn't do anything to make access cheaper or more widespread, discounting the CBC-led research that funded the invention of cable television in the 1960s. All it's doing now is trying to impress dumb voters with buzzwords in it's election 'redbook' while pissing away the people's money.
I was thinking that you might be able to use something like the Cryptographic File System to encrypt the entire volume and that that level of abstractin would still let rsync be used effeciently. I have *no* experience with CFS though, no idea how it would affect rsync, or what sort of access controls it uses or are available for it. I still wouldn't quite call it impossible.
Seriously though, good friends are still an easy alternative for most people.
Then rsync over ssh at night, use RSA "passwordless" Authentication as explained here , set up a nice little script, cron it you've got reasonably accessable cheap off-site backups.
Kalin
Why do you think television advertising works the way it does? A simple banner off to the side is not an effective way to raise brand consciousness. VCs aren't going to fund your favorite content for you forever. Sides, these ads aren't particularly annoying if you can browse with more than one window open at once. Just like channel surfing, those who's tolerance is exceeded adapt.
I also don't know why everyone keeps talking about IE, did anyone bother to check the boston.com ads out or do all the ie bashers run ie? They loaded in galeon for gosh sakes! The media kit obviously mis-stated it: I'm sure that the inclusion and downloading of flash5 in ie makes it a gauranteed platform, while others are a little hit and miss, mostly hit though.
Kalin
Man, I'm so glad I never got obsessed with .5e. Your user classification system alone fits so well into the evily addicting MUD archetype.
NAT also raises issues for forthcoming cable-delivered home-networking services. A crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear.
Does the prospect of 'ongoing care processes' provided by the cable company strike anyone else as extremely dubious? I was having a problem with line strength which was causing my cable modem to drop its connection (something that quite frankly should have been tested during initial installation) and it took three appointments over three consecutive days before an Adelphia guy finally showed up, the problem was fixed by lunchbucket contractor who also showed up since due to a billing problem they had to order an installation even though I already had all the equipment.
With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won't be able to see into all connected devices-making remote troubleshooting difficult-because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices. It's the data communications equivalent of, "You wanna talk to her, you go through me"-except you don't even know she's there to talk.
The technical support people working the cable companies I've had to deal with are some of the most useless maroons I've ever had the displeasure of talking to. I don't know whether it's because of the incompetent HR departments that invariably develop in monopoly culture or if the reps are handicapped by poor training and, policy, or if they are truely just stupid, but you'll never find me relying on a cable company to manage or troubleshoot my "computer connected devices".
I believe that the sucessful software and hardware of the future will be that which is designed well enough that it can be administered effectively by the end user as more and more people learn to hate the legal monopolies that are modern cable corps.
Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism among children
I've been thinking about this for a while, nothing frustrates me more than having windows obscured behind something else, and having to either drag the front window out of the way, or else alt-tab through everything. In a lot of ways this is what first got me hooked on linux as a desktop replacement for windows, the well developed multiple desktops system. So I can hit a key combination and cycle from one desktop to another. One has my mail and IM open on it, the other one browsers, the next nothing but terminals, and then filemanagers/xmms.
A lot of application shave taken a better look at how they're actually used. Sometimes the UI is bad bad bad (StarOffice 5.2). Other times it's really appropriate, like the tabs in galeon which are great for organizing all the browsing into different windows based on subject (for those of us that like to have 20 pages open at once. Right clicking to open in a new tab is great for s site like slashdot, K5 or Adequacy, where there might be 7 or 8 links on the main page that i want to get to, but not forget if I get sidetracked.
When I first grasped mozilla's power as a platform I had the epiphany that since 90% of the apps I ran were network based and mozilla provided an API for creating spiffy looking network applications, it wouldn't be a stretch to do everything in tabs within one maximized window, and that it could eventually function as an OS for lightwieght computers. If you type chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul in mozilla you can get the entire mail application dropped into your browser window. Press ctrl-T on a recent build and you have a new tab to browse in, but you can switch back to your mail real fast. Add Jabberzilla to your sidebar. Throw in a few more apps from MozDev.org and you can do most of what you'd want within a single window. It's in no way complete or stable, but it's enough to shed some light on a usable way to avoid the worst of window overlap. Apparantly there is a company that's working on using mozilla as an operating environment for appliances called OEone. You can check out the screenshots of their calender application here.
We already have a modern successful non overlapping interface, and it's called PalmOS. Just as it took a limited use platform to accept "modeing", probably not a lot of desktop users will be willing to give up the poer that free windowing gives them, but for appliances, or special uses, such as subject-centered web browsing. Things like tabbing and fullscreen interfaces are a good idea, and have already been implemented.
From here:
Northern Lights School Division No. 69
Project brings the internet to rural school division
Northern Lights School Division defied conventional wisdom to bring the world to the desktop of over 6,700 students and 700 staff in 25 schools. Using Wi-LAN technology the jurisdiction established the world's biggest wireless education system in both geographical area (5,714 square miles) and number of sites. It cost them $650,000.
The project has been recognized for its innovation and successful implementation both within the educational community and the industry. ASBO International awarded project manager Gary Krawchuk the Pinnacle Award for Excellence, making him the first Canadian to receive this prestigious award.
For more information contact Ed Wittchen,
Superintendent, at 1.780.826.3145.
When I was growing up we used distilled water almost exclusively since our water on our acreage had a high sodium content and wasn't really the tastiest stuff around. What many people complain about as the "rubber hose taste" (as one comment put it), is often the taste that comes from the white plastic bottles it's stored in, which it completely unobscured by salts. We resued the plastic bottles and when a new one came into the rotation the water tasted like a rubber hose for weeks. Distilled water straight out of a distiller has zero taste at all, and I would assume that a feul cell would work similarly.
As for the idea that distilled water sucks salts and minerals out of your body by osmotic forces. I can't say if this is a real threat or not, but most health food stores do sell concentrated trace minerals which can make 4 gallons of distilled water taste a bit more natural with just a few drops.
A lot of the comments to this article are saying that you should go to the gym, and I couldn't agree more. A good workout program will do wonders for anyone, most of all people with inactive lifestyles. I don't have the time right now to detail a good workout program for you, but why don't you check out my slash-clone website for working out, I'm sure you'll be able to figure out the interface.
bullshit. capitalism in it's truest sense is the moral code that promotes individual rights not only in the availability of choice in buying/selling products, but also in the choice available to us in creation. I find it highly unlikely that the GPL would ever have been developed in a socialist state, and in fact the way that the Chinese government breaks the terms of the GPL constantly with their so-called red star linux lends credence to that notion.
Invoking John Galt as a model for self-interested capitalism, as the original poster did, presents a scheme where the accent is on the rights of the creators, not the rights of the parasitic embracers (bill gates / orrin boyle) who, while possibly rich now, can hardly be said to be perfect models of capitalism.
The GPL presents a set of alternate choices allowing the 'motive power of humans' to be more finely directed through the rational choice of the actual individual creator and not some over-arching collective. In that sense, it's highly supportive of the core freedoms that have historically only existed in capitalist societies.
Giving away something is perfectly in line with capitalism. Having it stolen/appropriated from you is what you actually mean by socialism.
This is one of those statements that while probably true in a major sense globally is grossly distorted when applied to NA and Western Europe.
The fact is that the majority of humans couple and form an economic bond called a marriage. All recent studies in NA have shown the income of women who don't have children and men who don't have children is EQUAL!!!!
And all income generated by either couple in a standard marriage contract is considered communal property. So dicing it both of those ways, women have wage equality here, regardless of how dreary the UN statistics look (the most unfair situation a woman can be in is a divorced single mother who has no work experience, but I've also talked to enough divorced fathers living in basement suites and eating kraft dinner for the right to see thier children once every 2 weeks who aren't exactly the happiest people around either.)
This is getting beside the original conversation because I am only talking about NA where we have enough of a culture of personal freedom to accept women into the workforce, but this topic is one of those things that really needs to be cleared up, since it is a statistic that is trotted it in a real inflammatory manner. Marriage and childbearing are choices that most women make gladly, and most women still prefer the idea of raising thier own children, even at the expense of their carreers.
I was going to write a scathing attack on this comment but after reviewing the comments that follow it I can see that there is enough good wisdom left on this board to actually overcome the tyranny of the weak (minds).
If anyone knows of a decent word to use instead of capitalism then I would like to hear it, because there are too many kids who have read too much half-baked socialist propaganda while never taking the time to actually read, oh I don't know, Adam-freaking-Smith to actually understand what the term capitalism means historically, poilitically, and personally.
Corporations are socialist. Each corporation is defined by a corporate charter which is granted as sanction by the government, to act under a 'publicly' sanctioned purpose with special rights that don't naturally apply to groups of individuals. This is a command economy. Once the government sanctions the commerce that occurs in a nation, we have no truly free market, only the outside threat of one.
Taxation of blank media is the government abusing its monoploy on force for the interests of one segment of society over another, a segment that percieves a need which it asks to be subsidized. This is coercion, and in reality there is no objective difference between the 'need' of the RIAA and the 'need' of a lesbian artist applying for a grant.
When intelligent people talk about freedom, they mean freedom from coercion, not freedom to coerce - which incidentaly is what the original poster accuses corporations of doing but seeks to do himself.
Ugh, I'm obviously too tired and pissed off to go on. try to think before you moderate .
The college radio station that I once volunteered at had the same problem. They sourced out a really great product that was basically a small plastic envelope that held one cd with a seperate pocket for liner notes, and a pocket on the other side for the back U-card. The edge of the U-card with the title/artist was designed to bend so that you could put your cds in normal shelves and quickly flip through the collection by running your fingers along the edge. This was incredibly compact, you could hold 50 CDs in the palm of your hand easily. It also gave the satisfaction of random access to the collection and full liner notes/track listings in one place so you could carry a few "cases" to the couch to browse the notes while you listened.
I wish I could tell you where they got these, actually I wish I knew myself.
It sure is a headache to promote a site like that . I should have just made a debian help site and relied on Taco and the boys intense love for Debian to get a debian site in front of a million eyes two days after launch . t;P> Ah, just kidding, I hope this site does great, and I'll to contribute whenever I can to it. Debian is my favorite distro, and I'd like to see Corel and Storm continue to smooth the gradient for people new to it.
AMD has already started to build a brand, it's just not as pervasive as intels is yet.
And people seem really happy with AMD, sure there was a minor flap when they were accused of covering up a bug with their chipset not doing full AGP speeds with Nvidia boards, but over all I see people who know what they are doing with hardware drooling over AMD and raising thier eyebrows at Intel.
Until now, it's been kind of hard to tell someone who doesn't understand technology why they should like AMD (except for the price). Not every one is willing to listen to a lecture about the evils of unfair patent law and the whole Rambus affair. Not everybody can even understand or care, how schizophrenic Intel as a company has become, shipping chips with no decent chipset support (i820 anyone?), announcing releases of high-speed chips that they can't supply in any reasonable quantity, and ignoring the needs of not only large accounts (I worked at a school board last year and had to fight tooth an nail to gaurantee a supply of celerons for student workstations) but also niche accounts that hold the strength of their image in their hands.
I'm a big believer that, public perception be damned, if your deailing in tech and you lose the respect of the technical community then, over time, you will lose the respect of the rest of the market.
I don't think the public has had much bad intel publicity that they can fully understand. However, I think that Intel's move to increase clock speed at the expense of performance will ultimately have a negative effect across all segments of the market.
What is the message going to be from you people when you are asked about which computer people should buy? It will be, "yeah you could get the intel system, but it's actually way slower than the AMD that costs a lot less too." And the psuedo-experts who read the free computer monthly will pick the argument up and spread it even further.
And then Joe Lunchpail goes to work and tells his buddies, "yeah, I never heard of this AMD, but I guess they are making faster computers than intel, even though intel says they're faster, so that's what I bought."
And this kernel of information, meme if you must, will start to weaken the Intel brand and the public's perception of Mhz. It isn't hard to understand. Faster clock speeds are just for marketing. Even John Dvorak could bold that entire line in his zdnet column.
And for all the PowerPC zeolots, give it up, you can't actually buy those chips yet either.
I'm not saying that this issue will kill Intel, but it will damage them. It is a short-sighted and ignorant move by their marketing department, how, like most marketing departments, overestimates word-of-mouth when it's in their favour, and underestimates it when it's potentially negative.
http://virusmyth.com/
don't believe the hype.
The fact that they want to stop their cash bleed on the hardware should have been very apparant to anyone with eyes when they raised the price of the i-opener back up to $399 instead of the $99 that they had offered for some time. Anyone with a basic grip on economics should have known that it was going to happen way before that.
Basically they are a software company that everyone kept treating like an appliance company. In a July interview on Raging Bull president Kent Savage had to go to pains to get this point across,
Cyber: But isn't a large part of Netpliance's premise to sell that hardware, the I-opener?
Savage: No, not at all. We did that because we had to. We're a market maker and a first mover, and we had to innovate in order to reach this market.
It's really predictable and sad the way that the geek community has so heavily focused on the device. Unfortunately, it was really nothing too special technology-wise and the interesting things that NPLI was up to was its interface and "OS-agnostic" software package. Also it's client-server infrastructure kind of resurrected 'push' in a market and environment where it almost starts to make sense.
The "i-opener experience" is not nearly as stupid as it sounds, if you step outside of your "master of the source" persona and pretend you are on the other-side of the digital divide for a second. Sure, I prefer to navigate the net with Enlightenment as my interface of choice, but I doubt most of the flashing-12:00-on-the-VCR crowd would. The i-opener interface is just clean and as simple and dumbed-down as you can get, which is great for the market they were targetting.
They signed major strategic relations with big cable companies a long time ago (check the press releases on their web site), and their client software is well suited to be rolled out as an adjunct to set-top boxes and appliance offerings from telcos like At&T. It's curious what difficulties they might be going through negotiating "managed services" contracts with these companies because if I was running the company I would have made this shift in business plans a long long time ago. However you feel about it, they'll probably be around for a while yet, especially if they can convince US West or AT&T subsidize the hardware side of things instead of blowing all their IPO capital on it.
Kalin
Metamuscle - Building better bodies through hypertext. Slashdot for bodybuilders.
The point is that the company has been artificially propped up in stature and prominence for a long time and these supports are slowly being removed one by one. But it's taking a long time.
Intel has gone sour with RMBS and according to the public portions of the contract they signed with them all they have to do to cancel their commitments to promoting RDRAM with their new systems is write a letter terminating the contract. Why hasn't this been done then you ask? There are portions of the contract that are blacked out and the speculation is that RMBS has Intel by the balls on some IP issue that no one is talking about. Though that's just a good theory at this point.
At any rate, even if RMBS manages to collect royalties on SDRAM and DDR-RAM and it still looks to me like Micron et al have a strong case on the whole RMBS breaking the JEDEC agreement and patenting jointly developed technology.
Intel put together a group called the Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) to develop a future RAM standard slated for 2003 and they didn't invite RMBS to the table. Regardless of whether RMBS has any claim on the patents that cover SDRAM and DDR, it's obvious that the rest of the industry (regardless of Samsung's licensing deal they are also working on the RMBS free standard) will be working very hard to bypass RMBS royalties as soon as possible.
Even if RDRAM was viable on the desktop (it's not, as others have pointed out), it's gettign to the point where associating with RMBS is bad public relations. Doesn't it make you feel sick to think that your new PS2 purchase has contributed to the financial health of these leaches?
There is a great article about this at Tom's Hardware from back in July. It makes some long-range predictions, many of which are now being played out nicely. The whole article and, actually, all of the Rambus coverage on Tom's is excellent. Hey while I was there looking for the link I found this new bit about the Samsung deal which totally jives with what I just wrote and also points out that many analysts beleive RMBS gave Samsung major concessions to stage a well-timed deal and that Samsung is possibly avoiding legal costs while waiting for Micron et al to take RMBS to court. It's also woth noting that Samsung has been one of RMBSs biggest allies for a long time.
here it is for all you 1+ers:
This thread started with a pretty insightful post I thought.
I can agree with you that many of the points I made about the economic viability of Netpliance selling hacker boxes seem pretty obvious. But at the same time, this was something that wasn't immediatley grasped by a lot of people out there. Just read the feedback that I got from slashdotters on this issue overwhelmingly asking them to sell hardware to hackers at a reasonable price as a sound business move.
I thought it was important to speak to that response since it was obviously indicative of how a lot of people felt. Looking back, I can't say that I regret writing the article the way I did.
Spending time explaining what a majority of people wanted explained may have made me look amatuerish in some ways, but I thought it was important to do considering the tone of the debate up till now. I personally agree with most of what you said above, and the article was partly an attempt to help make these economic concepts easier to understand by the masses of open source people out there, because /yes/, that is something we need.
Thanks,
Kalin
PS. I certainly don't purport to be a spokesperson, or "emmisary", for anything but my own perspective.
Microsoft are not a good representant of what capitalism is meant to be. They represent what capitalism can degenerate into if unchecked. Daniel Actually, M$ more closely represents what capitalism can degenerate into if left unchampioned.