I haven't seen an ad on the internet in months. www.floppymoose.com for users of safari or mozilla, proximotron for IE users. Block ads, pop-up and other anoyances. I am amazed when I use someone elses computer at the volume of crap that pops up when using the web. On mine is is perhaps more bland, but definitely less noisy.
As I understand the situation, the complaint is mainly about making local information available that is not available everywhere. By using location information in the receiver, a user will be able to have the news/weather/traffic for their local area be filtered out of the stream for them. Since voice traffic can be encoded at a much higher compression than high quality music, XM/Sirius could take 1 or 2 channels worth of bandwidth to broadcast talk/voice data with a localization flag. The receiving unit would extract from this stream the information specific to them. Alternatively, and probably more practically, the repeaters locally could extract this data and send it on the local channel. This would eliminate the marketting argument that users of sattelite radio have no access to local content, especially since the most desired local content is weather and traffic with news/sports probably next (My guess based upon a completely unscientific survey of mine and my friends listenning habits). The bandwidth saved by this multiplexing of the data would allow them to provide local information for a large number of areas rather than a few of the largest markets. If the Sat. providers were required to deliver the same content to all users everywhere in the country, the number of channels available would become overwhelming and a barrier to entry for all but the technocracy. It is much nicer to say tune to channel 49 for all of your local news and information, with the receiver being smart enough to determine what is local. Directv only started offering local channels to subscribers when they put up a third sattelite. Even now this is only available in major markets. As far as localization goes, one rarely moves their directv across country (unless you have it on an RV), while the model for Sat. radio really appeals if you drive alot (long haul trucking).
Presently the policy of outsourcing works to boost the bottom line by quickly reducing labor costs on contracts that were probably bid assuming inhouse develolpment. In many industries today, labor costs form a significant if not the largest part of the companies costs. If you make hardware, the cost of your material is pretty well established, if you make software then almost all of your costs are labor. To increase profitability labor costs must be reduced, or sales must be increased. Logically I want to do both. I could reduce labor costs by eliminating some positions, but that effects schedule and thus decreases sales. If I instead replace my high cost local labor with lower cost labor elsewhere, I can make schedule. If I further reduce my technical staff locally and increase my sales staff, I may both reduce cost and increase sales. There is cost associated with overseeing the outsourced work that must be considered, but if if the task is big enough, that can be considered equal to the oversight a local team would get from management. Overseeing contractors is not like managing employees, and overseeing off-shore contractors is different from that. To effectively oversee this work one must have the technical experience to know what is being asked of the contractor and how to gauge the quality of work and the schedule. This is typically being done by senior engineers today. Where will the next group of senior engineers come from to oversee the contracts if we outsource/off-shore all of our work today? Either we need to limit the out-sourcing, keeping some work in-house if for nothing more than to grow these senior staff, or we must plan on importing the senior engineers from the countries where they will be grown, those very same countries where the outsourcing was done. Now ask yourself, does it make sense to import this senior engineer, putting them in a strange country, where you need to pay them significantly more and putting them 9-12 hours different (timezones) than the work they are overseeing. Logically we would hire them to oversee the contracts, and station them right where they are. At this point the entire technical staff is securely positioned off-shore, saving me millions in labor. With no technical staff (or very little) locally, It makes sense to reduce management locally and increase the overseas management to match the companies demographics. You can see the natural progression here, eventually the entire company except for the board, CEO, CFO will be overseas. In a global economy I can easily run a sales force from anywhere, and since I eliminated all of the middle income jobs, there has been nobody in the US able to buy my product for some time. Naturally I could reduce the price of my product to account for this, but that reduces my profit. A certain amount of this would have occurred during the life (death) cycle. This hypothesis of course ignores the feedback effect from the process. If I consider how the labor force would react to the change locally, at some point the local labor would be willing to work for lower wages and less benefits since all I need to do is compete against Walmart, and instead of paying my engineer $100/hour, I can pay $10/hr. At this point my local labor cost will equal that of the overseas and I may start shifting work back here again. This settling effect would result ultimately (world economy right) in labor costs in all developed countries being approximately equal. Those on top have increased their position significantly and those on the bottom have lowered theirs, effectively eliminating the middle.
So the fundamental question is then how do I make money from developing software? Or is this the fundamental question. There is as has been pointed out a middle ground to everything. I may make my living writing embedded systems software (and I do) while in my free time choose to write or work on some music or graphics editting software. Why would I do this? Why not sell my work on both ends? Simply put, there are often great ideas that I would like to see develop, but that I do not have the resources to develop on my own. Similarly, there may already be a killer application for sale in that arena that I would end up competing with and could not. It takes time (man hours) to develop a high quality application with features and stability. If I want to compete with Photoshop, I need to offer as high of a quality program with comparable features at a sufficiently lower price to justify the consumer making the switch. Adobe has an insurmountable lead on me in this endeavor, thus it is an unwise business to pursue. If however I can come to an agreement with like minded programmers who also would like to have this application available to them, we can pool our time and talents and develop the application together. We also need to assemble a group to perform testing of the application and find users to provide feedback to improve the product. As the scale of this endeavor increases, the open source (gpl) approach starts to look like a good choice. You can thus end up with something like the Gimp, arguable not equal to photoshop for the professional (lack of 16 bit support for example), but more than adequate for the amature shutter bug to play with some powerful features. This model arose out of the huge gap between the high end product (Photoshop) and the low end alternatives (mostly provided free with cameras or scanners) and initially from a total lack of availability on my OS. When planning a business, you first go after the biggest market that you can. You must, you have slaaries to pay and capital to recoup. If the market will not support your entry, you can either go anyway and fail or abandon the attempt and try something else. In the end a for profit only model in this arena supports the existing giants only. Is Microsoft evil for wanting to generate profits for their investors? Of course not, that is the function and responsibility of a corporation. Can another company come along and have the resources to invest to unseat them in the desktop world? Probably not without violating some serious patents and they will be persecuted for trying. The abundance of software written to use the windows platform and libraries gives them a tremendeous advantage. To unseat them, my OS would need to provide the same amount of features/applications that the potential consumer wants, and at a significantly lower price to entice them to take the risk. Since we already know that Microsoft can operate at a loss long enough to kill off my business should I get to that point, and that interoperability with their applications would be requried in mine since they have the mindshare, while they would have no such obligation, clearly there is no business model there. Therefore, there is no profit currently to be made in fighting the Desktop war. Thus only a not-for-profit motive can fuel this. Working on a free word processor is not preventing me from making money to feed my family. I could not make money from writing a Word processor anyway. By freely contributing my work to that of others, I do provide for myself and my family a free (in money) program that saves me the $500 I would have spent for the Microsoft program. It scales nicely too. If my labour provides free cost alternatives that organizations funded by me (either by donations or taxes) then my money can be used for other purposes. If the existence of these free alternatives and the source code that makes them work can help a developing society (country) then the long term benefit to humanity is a nice side-effect. If the long term resul
If you have a $300-400 budget, you should look into buying a real oscilloscope and scrap the PC based idea. Outpost has a 30MHz scope with dual channel inputs for $369. If you need a digital scope (unlikely for what you described doing), then the cost rises sharply.
You may be interrested in a new service that just launched. Inmarsat has a new service called Regional BGAN. It is a 144 kbps portable sattelite terminal with ethernet, USB or bluetooth connectivity. I believe that the coverage area is northern Africa, europe, and asia, but am not sure. A google search should provide more info. I have seen this product demonstrated, and it is pretty nice. I do not know the cost of the hardware or service though.
The USB devices such as DirecPC typically are USB slave devices. You would need a USB master device to translate the USB propriatary protocol into ethernet. If you assume that everyone is using a generic rndis interface (which they are not) then you could make a device capable of doing this translation. It would be equal to running a computer to act a bridge between the two networks. It would be far more useful to have some standard exist for this type of interface however, then you could just plug the thing into your laptop.
Now, before you go and flame me, here is where he is right.
He is saying (although in a very inflamatory way) that research conducted under government funding should be released into the public domain, and not be placed under someting like the GPL.
I agree with this. Although I appreciate and agree with the concept of free (as in speach) software, By placing code developed with government funding into the public domain, individuals and corporations alike are free to use this in a manner most beneficial to themselves.
I Free software developer can use that code as the basis of a free software project, and a commercial software developer can take the exact same code and base a commercial package on it. Since the funding for this code came from tax payers, and corporations as well as individuals pay taxes, then to prevent a corporation from benefitting in the same way that an individual may is unfair. Both parties have paid for that code to be developed, and ownership belongs to all tax paying citizens.
The only party with the right to release code under a specific license is the owner.
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I haven't seen an ad on the internet in months.
www.floppymoose.com for users of safari or mozilla,
proximotron for IE users.
Block ads, pop-up and other anoyances.
I am amazed when I use someone elses computer at the volume of crap that pops up when using the web. On mine is is perhaps more bland, but definitely less noisy.
As I understand the situation, the complaint is mainly about making local information available that is not available everywhere. By using location information in the receiver, a user will be able to have the news/weather/traffic for their local area be filtered out of the stream for them. Since voice traffic can be encoded at a much higher compression than high quality music, XM/Sirius could take 1 or 2 channels worth of bandwidth to broadcast talk/voice data with a localization flag. The receiving unit would extract from this stream the information specific to them. Alternatively, and probably more practically, the repeaters locally could extract this data and send it on the local channel. This would eliminate the marketting argument that users of sattelite radio have no access to local content, especially since the most desired local content is weather and traffic with news/sports probably next (My guess based upon a completely unscientific survey of mine and my friends listenning habits). The bandwidth saved by this multiplexing of the data would allow them to provide local information for a large number of areas rather than a few of the largest markets.
If the Sat. providers were required to deliver the same content to all users everywhere in the country, the number of channels available would become overwhelming and a barrier to entry for all but the technocracy. It is much nicer to say tune to channel 49 for all of your local news and information, with the receiver being smart enough to determine what is local.
Directv only started offering local channels to subscribers when they put up a third sattelite. Even now this is only available in major markets. As far as localization goes, one rarely moves their directv across country (unless you have it on an RV), while the model for Sat. radio really appeals if you drive alot (long haul trucking).
Presently the policy of outsourcing works to boost the bottom line by quickly reducing labor costs on contracts that were probably bid assuming inhouse develolpment.
In many industries today, labor costs form a significant if not the largest part of the companies costs. If you make hardware, the cost of your material is pretty well established, if you make software then almost all of your costs are labor. To increase profitability labor costs must be reduced, or sales must be increased. Logically I want to do both. I could reduce labor costs by eliminating some positions, but that effects schedule and thus decreases sales. If I instead replace my high cost local labor with lower cost labor elsewhere, I can make schedule. If I further reduce my technical staff locally and increase my sales staff, I may both reduce cost and increase sales.
There is cost associated with overseeing the outsourced work that must be considered, but if if the task is big enough, that can be considered equal to the oversight a local team would get from management. Overseeing contractors is not like managing employees, and overseeing off-shore contractors is different from that. To effectively oversee this work one must have the technical experience to know what is being asked of the contractor and how to gauge the quality of work and the schedule. This is typically being done by senior engineers today. Where will the next group of senior engineers come from to oversee the contracts if we outsource/off-shore all of our work today?
Either we need to limit the out-sourcing, keeping some work in-house if for nothing more than to grow these senior staff, or we must plan on importing the senior engineers from the countries where they will be grown, those very same countries where the outsourcing was done.
Now ask yourself, does it make sense to import this senior engineer, putting them in a strange country, where you need to pay them significantly more and putting them 9-12 hours different (timezones) than the work they are overseeing. Logically we would hire them to oversee the contracts, and station them right where they are.
At this point the entire technical staff is securely positioned off-shore, saving me millions in labor. With no technical staff (or very little) locally, It makes sense to reduce management locally and increase the overseas management to match the companies demographics.
You can see the natural progression here, eventually the entire company except for the board, CEO, CFO will be overseas. In a global economy I can easily run a sales force from anywhere, and since I eliminated all of the middle income jobs, there has been nobody in the US able to buy my product for some time. Naturally I could reduce the price of my product to account for this, but that reduces my profit. A certain amount of this would have occurred during the life (death) cycle.
This hypothesis of course ignores the feedback effect from the process. If I consider how the labor force would react to the change locally, at some point the local labor would be willing to work for lower wages and less benefits since all I need to do is compete against Walmart, and instead of paying my engineer $100/hour, I can pay $10/hr.
At this point my local labor cost will equal that of the overseas and I may start shifting work back here again.
This settling effect would result ultimately (world economy right) in labor costs in all developed countries being approximately equal. Those on top have increased their position significantly and those on the bottom have lowered theirs, effectively eliminating the middle.
So the fundamental question is then how do I make money from developing software? Or is this the fundamental question. There is as has been pointed out a middle ground to everything. I may make my living writing embedded systems software (and I do) while in my free time choose to write or work on some music or graphics editting software. Why would I do this? Why not sell my work on both ends?
Simply put, there are often great ideas that I would like to see develop, but that I do not have the resources to develop on my own. Similarly, there may already be a killer application for sale in that arena that I would end up competing with and could not. It takes time (man hours) to develop a high quality application with features and stability. If I want to compete with Photoshop, I need to offer as high of a quality program with comparable features at a sufficiently lower price to justify the consumer making the switch. Adobe has an insurmountable lead on me in this endeavor, thus it is an unwise business to pursue.
If however I can come to an agreement with like minded programmers who also would like to have this application available to them, we can pool our time and talents and develop the application together. We also need to assemble a group to perform testing of the application and find users to provide feedback to improve the product. As the scale of this endeavor increases, the open source (gpl) approach starts to look like a good choice. You can thus end up with something like the Gimp, arguable not equal to photoshop for the professional (lack of 16 bit support for example), but more than adequate for the amature shutter bug to play with some powerful features. This model arose out of the huge gap between the high end product (Photoshop) and the low end alternatives (mostly provided free with cameras or scanners) and initially from a total lack of availability on my OS.
When planning a business, you first go after the biggest market that you can. You must, you have slaaries to pay and capital to recoup. If the market will not support your entry, you can either go anyway and fail or abandon the attempt and try something else. In the end a for profit only model in this arena supports the existing giants only. Is Microsoft evil for wanting to generate profits for their investors? Of course not, that is the function and responsibility of a corporation. Can another company come along and have the resources to invest to unseat them in the desktop world? Probably not without violating some serious patents and they will be persecuted for trying. The abundance of software written to use the windows platform and libraries gives them a tremendeous advantage. To unseat them, my OS would need to provide the same amount of features/applications that the potential consumer wants, and at a significantly lower price to entice them to take the risk. Since we already know that Microsoft can operate at a loss long enough to kill off my business should I get to that point, and that interoperability with their applications would be requried in mine since they have the mindshare, while they would have no such obligation, clearly there is no business model there.
Therefore, there is no profit currently to be made in fighting the Desktop war. Thus only a not-for-profit motive can fuel this. Working on a free word processor is not preventing me from making money to feed my family. I could not make money from writing a Word processor anyway. By freely contributing my work to that of others, I do provide for myself and my family a free (in money) program that saves me the $500 I would have spent for the Microsoft program. It scales nicely too. If my labour provides free cost alternatives that organizations funded by me (either by donations or taxes) then my money can be used for other purposes.
If the existence of these free alternatives and the source code that makes them work can help a developing society (country) then the long term benefit to humanity is a nice side-effect.
If the long term resul
If you have a $300-400 budget, you should look into buying a real oscilloscope and scrap the PC based idea. Outpost has a 30MHz scope with dual channel inputs for $369.
If you need a digital scope (unlikely for what you described doing), then the cost rises sharply.
You may be interrested in a new service that just launched. Inmarsat has a new service called Regional BGAN. It is a 144 kbps portable sattelite terminal with ethernet, USB or bluetooth connectivity. I believe that the coverage area is northern Africa, europe, and asia, but am not sure. A google search should provide more info.
I have seen this product demonstrated, and it is pretty nice. I do not know the cost of the hardware or service though.
The USB devices such as DirecPC typically are USB slave devices. You would need a USB master device to translate the USB propriatary protocol into ethernet. If you assume that everyone is using a generic rndis interface (which they are not) then you could make a device capable of doing this translation. It would be equal to running a computer to act a bridge between the two networks.
It would be far more useful to have some standard exist for this type of interface however, then you could just plug the thing into your laptop.
Now, before you go and flame me, here is where he is right. He is saying (although in a very inflamatory way) that research conducted under government funding should be released into the public domain, and not be placed under someting like the GPL. I agree with this. Although I appreciate and agree with the concept of free (as in speach) software, By placing code developed with government funding into the public domain, individuals and corporations alike are free to use this in a manner most beneficial to themselves. I Free software developer can use that code as the basis of a free software project, and a commercial software developer can take the exact same code and base a commercial package on it. Since the funding for this code came from tax payers, and corporations as well as individuals pay taxes, then to prevent a corporation from benefitting in the same way that an individual may is unfair. Both parties have paid for that code to be developed, and ownership belongs to all tax paying citizens. The only party with the right to release code under a specific license is the owner.