Does the support estimate for the commercial product include the %FTE on your end?
In my experience, getting something useful out of vendor support had been a monumentous task. You call up (wait on hold), bluster and technobabble at the first line tech until you get upgraded. Then educate the second-level tech until they have some inkling of what your problem is. They go away and talk to an engineer for between 2 hrs and 2 days. They email you back with the wrong answer. Repeat several times, until your problem gets fixed. This is a significant amount of employee time. Additionally, since your employee doesn't deeply understand the solution, so it isn't well-documented. If you've got an on-staff expert, this whole thing happens in 2 days tops, and you have an opportunity to collect the exact specifics of the problem.
This, of course, doesn't apply if your support contract says that they'll fly out an expert if your situation isn't resolved in under 24 hrs.
Up-front vs. incremental costs
The up-front costs of the open-source product are vastly lower than the closed-source, in almost every new-developemnt case. So, what if you took your last 5 years of open-source support budget (presumably this is pretty close to the up-front cost of the commercial solution?) and stuck it in 5-year CDs. Well, at current rates, that's another 10 grand when the CDs mature. No mention if this study took this into account.
Risks of closed-source
These are not insignificant! What is the chance that your product will receive good support 10 years from now? Will the company even be in business? How's Corel doing these days? Remember when WordPerfect was king? Remember WordPerfect Corporation? They sold WP to Novell, who sold it to Corel. How's that for stability? Will One Trick Pony Search Engines, Inc. be around in 10 years? Lots of other posters have brough this up, but this is just unavoidable. Does your service contract specify that you get to choose what version they're supporting? What's your recourse if they refuse to support the version you're using? What recourse do you have if they go belly-up?
Not that I'm denying that an open-source product must have lower TCO than a commercial project. After all, if you're the only developer/user, your economy of scale is zero. So, obviously, there needs to be some critical mass of user/developer interest before open source support costs start to really drop. Eventually, you end up with apache, etc. where you can get commercial support, etc.
2) More importantly for some applications, if there are over-broad patents that concern your device, supplying source code can easily make the difference between your opponents having grounds for suit and not having them. Your source code reveals your intent behind your arrays, and the purpose of your function calls. When a lawyer is trying to prove your product is infringing, this is significantly better ammunition than hundreds of lines of debugger output that has to be "interpreted" by their experts.
If you only have binary drivers, they just ask the court to force you to turn over the source. It's called "discovery."
IANAL, but my ex-employer was sued, and had to turn over all sorts of proprietary information.
Re:TCo, it's not just for megacorporations!
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West village, just off Broaday. It's NYU student housing (fincee is law student), so it's pretty expensive. OTOH, it has really fast net.:-) And a quite nice little kitchen. And I can't wait to move out and get a cheaper place, anyway.
Re:The resolution still isn't up to par...
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With blurry, indistinguishable pixels, d'accord.
Having ultra-small pixels has its advantages, like decent hardware anti-aliasing. However, at least with MacOSX (and a superb Apple LCD), the OS's anti-aliasing is better. Looking at blurry things causes eyestrain, the andvantage of software anti-aliasing is that it can keep sharp edges sharp, so that your brain is confident that your eyes are properly focused.
TCo, it's not just for megacorporations!
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One thing that really upsets me about thes LCD reviews is that the authors are totally lazy. They say "LCD's are more expensive up-front, but they're smaller and save desk space." Fine, but that statement is useless without numbers.
1) Real estate
Save desk space? Whatever, LCDs let you save floor space by getting a smaller desk. So, how's this pay? Well, the initial cost of the LCD should probably go up a bit, since most folks don't have a narrow desk. So, tack on $50 as a base cost for a new desk. (If you shop at IKEA, you can get a new top and re-use your existing legs, driving the cost down towards like $25. If you're seriously rich, maybe you'll drop $500 on a new desk, but you probably already own the LCD.)
So, now the repeating costs. A 2' desk that's 6 feet wide will save you 6 aq'. In Manhattan, a 1000 sq' apartment is $2000/mo. or $2/sq'/mo. In Pittsburgh, it's more like $.10/sq'/mo. Obviously, where you live makes a difference. So, annually, we have:
LCD Savings
Cheap cities: $7/yr
Expensive cities: $144/yr (no wonder that every business in Manhattan buys LCDs as a matter of course)
Note that the payoff period for the desk is more than 9 years in Pittsburgh, so there is about 0 space savings.
2) Power
Unless you live in California, I think electricity's about $.07/kW/h. Let's assume you use power saving reasonably and stuff. If you work at home, or multiple people use your computer throughout the day, the monitor's probably going to be on like 12 hrs/day. If you're a more causal user, it's probably more like 4. If you use your computer to read email once a week, you don't read slashdot.
So, according to the article, monitors use 100w, LCDs use 50. Assume you use your computer 260 days per year (5 weeks/year not using). For the heavy user, CRT is 100*12*260*.07/1000 = $21/yr. The causal user is $7/yr. LCDs are half that, for a cost savings of $10 and $4.
So, how expensive are LCDs? Well, 4 years seems a reasonable length of time to own a monitor. So here's a comparison for a 17" LCD and 19" CRT (which have about the same viewable area). Assumes the initial cost of the LCD is $650(+50 in Manhattan), CRT is $250. Lists the cost difference of an LCD:
Manhattan (heavy use): $152 less
Manhattan (light use): $144 less
Pittsburgh (heavy use): $260 more
Pittsburgh (light use): $384 more
Hopefully this ads a touch of rigor to your buying decision. I suspect that if you live outside the energy-subsidized US, the energy costs will become more significant. If you live in a hot climate, you might want to factor in A/C costs (see below). Also not factored in is the reduced eyestrain with LCDs. For those of you who work long hours, this is probably worth the LCD price on its own.
For another take on TCO, which is more detailed WRT power & cooling, but seems less useful to me, check out this page.
Re:The resolution still isn't up to par...
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I'm a real estate whore... I'm currently running 2 19" monitors at 1600x1200 (3200x1200) and I'm seriously considering getting a third.
Mitigating factor: LCD resolution is more useful than CRT resolution. I used to run my 19" CRT at 16x12. I was seriously worried about the lower res of my 12x10 LCD. However, the LCD is SOOOOO much sharper than the CRT, I just lowered all my font sizes. IMO, a 17" LCD at 12x10 is about as useful as a 19" CRT at 16x12.
"Wouldn't it be easier just to write better software than to try to change the world?"
Not at all. If you write some good software, you have some good software. If you change the world, other people will write gobs and heaps of good software.
Besides, the plan outlined it to change the world *by* writing better software.
First of all, I pretty much agree. But, you know, debating sociology is fun!:-P
Ack, the blockquote tag doesn't nest. How layme.
> >
The production of art wasn't that high, since not that many people could afford to patrons
>It isn't yet and never will be. Most of what gets peddled
>as art is narcisist and boring on one side, or mass consumption
>narcisist trash on the other. To do art requires not only talent,
>but discipline, sensibility, willingness to serve one's work and
>to communicate it with the world.
If you're willing to count TV, movies, comics, etc. as art, then you're clearly incorrect. For the purposes of this discussion, I think that they count. Relative the the renissance, the production of art is sky-high. The fact that we have a large middle class greatly increases the number of people who can afford art and other non-survival products.
> >
It requires a huge, empty gap between the
> >median and highest incomes.
> Well, this gap has always existed and will always be there, simply
>because most people can't be bothered to try to become rich, and
>many couldn't for their lives. But that it is required is doubtful:
>enterprises, governments, foundations are also patrons. And sure
>the gap needn't be empty, why it should?
At least in a world of unique objects and non-Free intellectual property, the gap needs to be empty in order for patronage to be the dominant form. A large middle class won't be able to be patrons themselves, but will be able to buy art objects/experiences. Hence movies, posters, CDs of music, etc. Don't get me wrong, this form existed in the renaissance, what with traveling actors' troupes and the like, but not nearly to extent that is does today. Mechanical reproduction also contributed to the rise of non-patron art, but live performances are alive and well today, much more so than they were in the renaissance.
As to your later points, I certainly agree that they are correct. I haven't seen any patronage-based organizations dedicated primarily to interaction design, but I'm sure that they exist. I believe that, the issues involved in producing outstanding interfaces with open-source software are different than those involved in producing open-source software with outstanding technical merits.
Look, I love free software and I am a great proponent of it where it is suitable... but claiming free software is suitable everywhere is just as wrong as claiming that MS software is suitable everywhere.
First off, I agree that current Free software doesn't work in a lot of environments. However, this is not to say that it *can't*. It certainly *won't* for a long time, but there clearly is a way. Back in the day, artists could afford to eat via the patronage process. A rich person would employ them to do their art thang, and they did. A few problems with this:
The production of art wasn't that high, since not that many people could afford to patrons
It requires a huge, empty gap between the median and highest incomes.
However, due to The Power of The Internet, this model could be resuscitated today, and in fact is. Distributed patronage allows a large quantity of moderately wealthy people to make small donations to the artist. It's currently emerging in the area of web cartoons. Although web cartoons are a horrible application for distributed patronage (micropayments would be much better), it almost works.
So how would this work with Free software? I'd imaging that there would be a virtual firm consisting of interface designers and programmers. They'd accept donations to design or redesign some app (Let's use the GIMP in this example). Perhaps the donations would go to an escrow service until a critical mass was reached. Details. Anyway, these folks would, once they got started, incrementally improve the app, working as funding was available. If people liked what they were doing, presumably they'd donate more money. Eventually, the GIMP would be serious competition for PhotoShop. This model is now without its flaws:
They, for political reasons, would probably have to fork the code. People would get mad that you've buried or removed their features, etc. The continued maintenance of the fork would depend on it becoming more popular than the original, and thus gaining new developers and winning back new ones. Presumably having some people making money off the project (while others volunteered) wouldn't be too much of a problem, as it happens today.
Maintenance would be tricky. Perhaps bug fixes, small updates, ports, etc. could be handled by volunteers, but the original designers would have to keep the UI consistent. This could be achieved by partnering with an organization that sold support services for the project.
So, the final question is: How can such a system come into being? I think that an environment that was conducive to this would need a few things:
A large class of semi-working consultants.
These would be the people who would form the first firms. There need to be enough people who can support themselves working around 30 hours a week as independent consultants or in loosely collaborative arrangement. That's leisurely enough that people have time and energy to work on these projects for very little money. At least initially, donations would be really low, so people would have to be willing to work for nearly free. Work on the projects would, however, be an excellent self-promotional activity. "If you like the GIMP, just imagine what I can do for your intranet applications!" etc.
More use of Free software in business
This is actually pretty much inevitable. It's only a matter of time before, say, PaintShop Pro is entirely replaced by the GIMP. Desktop Free software has to have enough mindshare among corporations' IT departments that they seriously consider using it to replace retail/shareware.
Businesses need to be a bit smart
This, of course, is the hard one. Say you're a design shop, and you have 20 seats of Photoshop. Upgrades are like $130/seat. You need to have enough foresight and trust in your peer organizations to donate, say, $20/seat/year to the improvement of the GIMP. It represents a 30% increase in your PhotoShop expenses for a few years, with the promise of a 70% reduction in a few years. This, of course, is collective action problem.
Any economist will tell you that this plan is doomed to failure, because there is no solution, except Men With Guns, to the collective action problem. Well, if the government of a few countries was feeling cool, they could fund this stuff for their internal use. However, I don't know if the economists are right. Their version of people as "rational actors" is pretty far from reality. People solve the collective action problem all the time. They recycle, they give to charity, they hold the door for people. As standards of living improve (assuming that standards of living continue to improve), people may be less and less "rational," and more proactive about working towards the common good.
Oh, and if anyone else wants to form one of these Free software design firms, I'm game.
Greenpeace are no more terrorists than Gandhi was. Interfering with somebody's business is not terrorism. Hell, "promoting the destruction of crops" isn't even terrorism. You may think that they are misguided, but terrorist they are not. (If you're looking for negative press about greenpeace, you may wish to check out greenpiece.org, but you may want to bring a few grains of salt with you.
Now, if you're looking for terrorists, look no further than Sea Shepherd. Once upon the time, a Greenpeace activist took the club away from a guy who was clubbing a baby seal. He was ejected from the organization, and started Sea Shepherd. Among other activities, one night they sank half of Iceland's whaling fleet. No lives were lost. (Compare this to the French government who can't sink one measly ship without killing somebody.) History of Sea Shepherd here. Feel free to make your own judgments about whether they're the Good Guy or the Bad Guys.
Here on Slashdot if you spend $$$$$$$$ doing case/chair/screen/fridge modifications you are heralded as an amazing person. Everybody for the moment wants to be/act like you and have what you have. Yet the second anything is mentioned about people spending money friviously, be it a baloon trip around the world or a diamond ring for your girlfriend (yes a few slashdot readers have girlfriends, amazing isn't it) there is immediate backlash.
This is because, when you are making a wacky fridge mod, you are using your creativity, craftsmanship, and mad sk1Llz to make something. When you're buying a diamond ring, you're following a rather odd tradition. (My fiance loves her sapphire ring, BTW:-P) The slashdot community values the former over the latter. Pretty simple. Even an ancient 27 year old like me can understand it. It's not just technology, either. Note that the periodic table was very favorably received, despite its low techiness content.
The amusing thing, of course, being that NTK occasionally brings down little sites. Guess the medium fish eat the little fish, and are in turn eaten by the big fish, until/. jumps in the pond and splashes out all the other fish.
Well, here's a quick back-of-the envelope: Dell sells servers. You can get a variety of OS's installed on them. They'll install RedHat for $169. They'll install Win2k Server (5 clients) for $799. So, Linux's 1% revenue share would work out to about 5%. So, say half of Linux sales are actually replacing OEM copies of XP home edition or whatever, that still works out to 3% of the seats of Windows. That's quite a lot.
Not that at the end of the NeoAudio license, they didn't even remove the commentary about how to claim copyright and how you should get your employer's signature. I suspect that they didn't even read the whole thing, and this this is a case of copyright infringement due to ignorance/stupidity, instead of malice. Still highly illegal, tho.
You're right that companies are not inherently evil. Neither are they inherently good.
Actually, I think the scale is actually tipped slightly towards the "evil" side for publicly traded corporations. A corporation and its officers have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. If they don't do this, they get sued. The problem is that many shareholders are interested in short-term gains, and will sue if they don't see them. Thus, the corporation is driven towards amorality. In the long term, a free market tends to punish this, but the effect is not noticeable in the short term. So publicly held corporations are slightly evil. However, when these corporations are huge, this manifest itself in tens of millions of dollars on lobbying. Ouch.
To the assertion that Lego is not as good `cause of all the special-purpose parts, cross-merketing, etc. It doesn't matter. In fact, it's better. The expressiveness of Legos is strictly greater with the special parts. Of course, you can still buy big buckets of random (basic) parts.
Besides, the Technic parts are much cooler than they were when I was a kid, not to mention mindstorms. The Star Wars etc. stuff is part of a general expansion of the Lego product line. If it gets some kids into Legos who would not ordinarily play with them, more power to them.
You, sir, are an ass. A well-intentioned ass, to be sure, but an ass nonetheless.
First, you mention specific political situations in the 1930's. You are dangerously close to forfeiting via Godwin's Law. But enough about that, I'll merely point out that straw men do not an argument make.
Now then, you claim that Yahoo should pull out of China rather than bend to the will of the Chinese government. I wonder what you hope to gain by this? Do you hope to make the lot of the Chinese people better by denying them even a censored Yahoo? To you expect the Chinese government to cave in and embrace the unfiltered net? No. Dictators love embargoes. Compare China, North Korea, and Cuba. Which is the most free? What have our policies of isolation done to promote freedom? Nothing. They have buttressed up Castro and Kim, allowing them a death-grip on their people. Supposedly most North Koreans don't even realize that starving to death is unusual in the wider world.
So, yes. Appeasement. It is a wonderful strategy for fighting totalitarianism. Beats invasion, beats embargoes. Why? The center cannot hold. People do not want to be repressed. If you isolate them, they cannot even get an inkling of freedom. If you let them peek out through the thick curtains of censorship, they can see that there's a different world outside. You make the choice - the windowless room of isolation or the thin slit of censorship. Which would you offer the Chinese people?
I'm still curious about your previous soundbite. ("Yahoo! Where your civil liberties are what your government tells us they are.") What other kinds of civil liberties are there?
Yahoo! Where your civil liberties are what your government tells us they are.
Yes, I do believe that's pretty close to a definition of Civil Liberties.
Look, I don't like censorship of any kind. I believe that the solution to bad speech is good speech. I give hundreds of dollars a year to the ALCU. But, there's really not an option here. Either Yahoo censors its Chinese portal, or the Chinese government censors Yahoo. The banned content is already illegal in China, and spreading it can get you a bullet in the head with a bill to your family.
It's not as if Yahoo China can say "Hell no! Screw the Man, we're putting a big Free Tibet banner on our home page!" The best result of this for Yahoo China would having their site banned by the Great Firewall. More likely they would find their employees harassed and jailed, their company fighting trumped-up charges, etc.
The real criminal here is the Chinese Communist Party. If you have a problem with their actions, try to convince your elected representative to kick China out of the WTO. Yahoo has no leverage in this situation.
"power" = volts * farads. The guy who built the electromagnetic can crusher used 120uf (that's picofarads) caps, but at 10kV. Those puppies have a lot of juice. That said, I did manage to dig up a 1 farad (12v) cap at some point. I charged it up to test it, then discharged it using the head of a hammer. The heat from the spark welded (soldered?) the capacitor to the head of the hammer.
But really, I think the way to think about P2P downloading is to use non-interactive search agents. These guys are on the right path, the random walkers appear to be a bit brighter than an exponentially widening search.
The problem with current p2p networks is that the database is constantly churning. It's not like the web, where data is relatively stable. Two identical searches performed within minutes of each other will return different results. The problem, of course, is that polling the network with these huge searches inflicts a massive bandwidth cost.
A better system would be to have a search agent. You would enter a set of search criteria (with a richer syntax than the existing model), and every 30 seconds or so the software would fire off an agent. The agent does a random walk, then downloads anything that matches. You then go on about your business. When the agents have collected a sufficient number of results. it alerts you.
This lacks the immediate satisfaction of searching and getting results right now, but when you're looking for obscure stuff, you don't get that satisfaction anyway.
Also note that the autonomous downloading assumes you're looking for something reasonably small, like an mp3, and not Girls Gone Wild.
Of course, it also has the advantage that if gives an incentive for hosts to remain connected longer, adding to the stability of the entire system.
So, everyone here is going on about how moderation, authentication, etc. is going to solve this problem. it would, if uploading and downloading songs wasn't usually illegal. A couple people have caught on to this, but most haven't.
The problem has two aspects: 1) If the systems has strong identities, then you have a confession from every uploader - as long as you can find them. 2) If you don't have strong identities, then those who would interfere with your system can hijack the identity system.
In the strong identity case, those few people who have uploaded most of the songs that are floating around suddenly find themselves targets. A well-funded attacker, especially one with the Law on their side, could use traffic analysis to track down the high-use users. Recall, they don't need enough info from the traffic analysis to get a conviction, just enough to get a warrant. Frankly, I don't believe claims that "my system is immune to traffic analysis." If the Law can tap into UUNet's big NOCs, they can watch the majority of US internet traffic. MP3's are pretty big, and a small population of users uploads most of the songs. It doesn't matter if your data is encrypted/chunked/whatever, the Law just looks for lots of traffic and tracks the big dataflows to their source. Once they find you, they find your secret key, and you're in jail. Secondly, a digital signature is forever. If you share a bunch of files in college, but then clean up your act and lead a respectable life (in the eyes of the RIAA), your digital signature stays behind. A gun that smokes until the statute of limitations runs out is a little scary.
In the weak identity case, you're no better off than in the no-identity case. The people who want to stomp on your little piracy garden are better funded and less constrained in their action than you. Everyone has infinite moderation points? What's to stop the bad guys (good guys?) from modding everything totally randomly?Much faster than carefully listening to each song and clicking a button. Legitimate rankings get lost in the noise. Use hashes or song fingerprints? What's to stop someone from transmitting the hashes/fingerprints from non-bogus media?
No, I'm afraid that the solution is the same as the solution to the wAr3z distribution problem. Small groups can share with full impunity (this is actually legal to do with music). But sharing music with perfect strangers is not just illegal, it means that the Man can play, too -- and do everything in his power to stop you.
Shit, for the purpose of the exercise we could build Saturn V's, or the Russians could build their 200-ton booster design they had on the drawing board.
Actually, building saturn V's is not nearly as straightforward as one might expect. They tossed the moulds, the spare parts, pretty much everything. We'd pretty much be starting from scratch. Besides, NASA seems to have some big troubles making launch vehicles. Seems you need a real, scary arms race to cut through the political BS associated with today's aerospace contractors.
I hope the FCC is paying attention. Government regulation of airwaves was a good idea back before cheap digital electronics, and it still has its place, but the clear message here is that non-dedicated frequencies should be the rule, not the exception.
It seems like the endgame should be some variant ofUltra Wideband. It wouldn't broadcast in all frequencies, just a wide swath of them. Frequencies that had dedicated purposes would be outside this range. This would allow much higher transmitter power, which means longer ranges.
Then let the market jump in. Interference isn't a problem due to lowish power and efficient airwave usage. Let whoever wants to set up base stations. Use p2p mesh networking. Do whatever. The devices are cheap and don't interfere. This may be one of the technology market segments that actually acts like a market.
Motion captured acting is bad. Really bad. I've seen believable acting in a few video games (notably a couple of the cut-scenes in Onimusha), and it shocked me. Most of the time, it looks like the actors are all on `ludes. They are quite literally in their own little worlds, going through the motions.
Now, real-time rendering, even if it wasn't production-quality, could change this. Just giving the actors decent HUDs so that they could actually talk to the CG creatures would help a lot. Real force-feedback stuff would mean that they could actually touch each other. This is what we need for cg to replace real actors. Then it would really be the Future, what with Virtual Light and etc. being reality. (And we'll have flying cars, damnit.)
This is closer to an optical trackpad than a mouse. Why is it useful? Well, you could use it to replace the up-down/d-pad that many phones have. Instead of two or four big mechanical buttons, you have one tiny non-moving lens. Smaller phones, less breakage.
Of course, in order for this to work well, there would have to be haptic feedback that you had moved an item, otherwise you'd have to stare at your phone to see where the cursor was. I suspect that this will only become popular in ultra-tiny phones (like ones that you can't buy outside of Asia), and perhaps in palmtops (although I'd much prefer a touch-screen).
Slashdot Mirror
- Does the support estimate for the commercial product include the %FTE on your end?
- Up-front vs. incremental costs
- Risks of closed-source
Not that I'm denying that an open-source product must have lower TCO than a commercial project. After all, if you're the only developer/user, your economy of scale is zero. So, obviously, there needs to be some critical mass of user/developer interest before open source support costs start to really drop. Eventually, you end up with apache, etc. where you can get commercial support, etc.In my experience, getting something useful out of vendor support had been a monumentous task. You call up (wait on hold), bluster and technobabble at the first line tech until you get upgraded. Then educate the second-level tech until they have some inkling of what your problem is. They go away and talk to an engineer for between 2 hrs and 2 days. They email you back with the wrong answer. Repeat several times, until your problem gets fixed. This is a significant amount of employee time. Additionally, since your employee doesn't deeply understand the solution, so it isn't well-documented. If you've got an on-staff expert, this whole thing happens in 2 days tops, and you have an opportunity to collect the exact specifics of the problem.
This, of course, doesn't apply if your support contract says that they'll fly out an expert if your situation isn't resolved in under 24 hrs.
The up-front costs of the open-source product are vastly lower than the closed-source, in almost every new-developemnt case. So, what if you took your last 5 years of open-source support budget (presumably this is pretty close to the up-front cost of the commercial solution?) and stuck it in 5-year CDs. Well, at current rates, that's another 10 grand when the CDs mature. No mention if this study took this into account.
These are not insignificant! What is the chance that your product will receive good support 10 years from now? Will the company even be in business? How's Corel doing these days? Remember when WordPerfect was king? Remember WordPerfect Corporation? They sold WP to Novell, who sold it to Corel. How's that for stability? Will One Trick Pony Search Engines, Inc. be around in 10 years? Lots of other posters have brough this up, but this is just unavoidable. Does your service contract specify that you get to choose what version they're supporting? What's your recourse if they refuse to support the version you're using? What recourse do you have if they go belly-up?
West village, just off Broaday. It's NYU student housing (fincee is law student), so it's pretty expensive. OTOH, it has really fast net. :-) And a quite nice little kitchen. And I can't wait to move out and get a cheaper place, anyway.
With blurry, indistinguishable pixels, d'accord.
Having ultra-small pixels has its advantages, like decent hardware anti-aliasing. However, at least with MacOSX (and a superb Apple LCD), the OS's anti-aliasing is better. Looking at blurry things causes eyestrain, the andvantage of software anti-aliasing is that it can keep sharp edges sharp, so that your brain is confident that your eyes are properly focused.
One thing that really upsets me about thes LCD reviews is that the authors are totally lazy. They say "LCD's are more expensive up-front, but they're smaller and save desk space." Fine, but that statement is useless without numbers.
1) Real estate
Save desk space? Whatever, LCDs let you save floor space by getting a smaller desk. So, how's this pay? Well, the initial cost of the LCD should probably go up a bit, since most folks don't have a narrow desk. So, tack on $50 as a base cost for a new desk. (If you shop at IKEA, you can get a new top and re-use your existing legs, driving the cost down towards like $25. If you're seriously rich, maybe you'll drop $500 on a new desk, but you probably already own the LCD.)
So, now the repeating costs. A 2' desk that's 6 feet wide will save you 6 aq'. In Manhattan, a 1000 sq' apartment is $2000/mo. or $2/sq'/mo. In Pittsburgh, it's more like $.10/sq'/mo. Obviously, where you live makes a difference. So, annually, we have:
LCD Savings
Cheap cities: $7/yr
Expensive cities: $144/yr (no wonder that every business in Manhattan buys LCDs as a matter of course)
Note that the payoff period for the desk is more than 9 years in Pittsburgh, so there is about 0 space savings.
2) Power
Unless you live in California, I think electricity's about $.07/kW/h. Let's assume you use power saving reasonably and stuff. If you work at home, or multiple people use your computer throughout the day, the monitor's probably going to be on like 12 hrs/day. If you're a more causal user, it's probably more like 4. If you use your computer to read email once a week, you don't read slashdot.
So, according to the article, monitors use 100w, LCDs use 50. Assume you use your computer 260 days per year (5 weeks/year not using). For the heavy user, CRT is 100*12*260*.07/1000 = $21/yr. The causal user is $7/yr. LCDs are half that, for a cost savings of $10 and $4.
So, how expensive are LCDs? Well, 4 years seems a reasonable length of time to own a monitor. So here's a comparison for a 17" LCD and 19" CRT (which have about the same viewable area). Assumes the initial cost of the LCD is $650(+50 in Manhattan), CRT is $250. Lists the cost difference of an LCD:
Manhattan (heavy use): $152 less
Manhattan (light use): $144 less
Pittsburgh (heavy use): $260 more
Pittsburgh (light use): $384 more
Hopefully this ads a touch of rigor to your buying decision. I suspect that if you live outside the energy-subsidized US, the energy costs will become more significant. If you live in a hot climate, you might want to factor in A/C costs (see below). Also not factored in is the reduced eyestrain with LCDs. For those of you who work long hours, this is probably worth the LCD price on its own.
For another take on TCO, which is more detailed WRT power & cooling, but seems less useful to me, check out this page.
Besides, the plan outlined it to change the world *by* writing better software.
First of all, I pretty much agree. But, you know, debating sociology is fun! :-P
Ack, the blockquote tag doesn't nest. How layme.
If you're willing to count TV, movies, comics, etc. as art, then you're clearly incorrect. For the purposes of this discussion, I think that they count. Relative the the renissance, the production of art is sky-high. The fact that we have a large middle class greatly increases the number of people who can afford art and other non-survival products. At least in a world of unique objects and non-Free intellectual property, the gap needs to be empty in order for patronage to be the dominant form. A large middle class won't be able to be patrons themselves, but will be able to buy art objects/experiences. Hence movies, posters, CDs of music, etc. Don't get me wrong, this form existed in the renaissance, what with traveling actors' troupes and the like, but not nearly to extent that is does today. Mechanical reproduction also contributed to the rise of non-patron art, but live performances are alive and well today, much more so than they were in the renaissance.As to your later points, I certainly agree that they are correct. I haven't seen any patronage-based organizations dedicated primarily to interaction design, but I'm sure that they exist. I believe that, the issues involved in producing outstanding interfaces with open-source software are different than those involved in producing open-source software with outstanding technical merits.
First off, I agree that current Free software doesn't work in a lot of environments. However, this is not to say that it *can't*. It certainly *won't* for a long time, but there clearly is a way. Back in the day, artists could afford to eat via the patronage process. A rich person would employ them to do their art thang, and they did. A few problems with this:
- The production of art wasn't that high, since not that many people could afford to patrons
- It requires a huge, empty gap between the median and highest incomes.
However, due to The Power of The Internet, this model could be resuscitated today, and in fact is. Distributed patronage allows a large quantity of moderately wealthy people to make small donations to the artist. It's currently emerging in the area of web cartoons. Although web cartoons are a horrible application for distributed patronage (micropayments would be much better), it almost works.So how would this work with Free software? I'd imaging that there would be a virtual firm consisting of interface designers and programmers. They'd accept donations to design or redesign some app (Let's use the GIMP in this example). Perhaps the donations would go to an escrow service until a critical mass was reached. Details. Anyway, these folks would, once they got started, incrementally improve the app, working as funding was available. If people liked what they were doing, presumably they'd donate more money. Eventually, the GIMP would be serious competition for PhotoShop. This model is now without its flaws:
So, the final question is: How can such a system come into being? I think that an environment that was conducive to this would need a few things:
These would be the people who would form the first firms. There need to be enough people who can support themselves working around 30 hours a week as independent consultants or in loosely collaborative arrangement. That's leisurely enough that people have time and energy to work on these projects for very little money. At least initially, donations would be really low, so people would have to be willing to work for nearly free. Work on the projects would, however, be an excellent self-promotional activity. "If you like the GIMP, just imagine what I can do for your intranet applications!" etc.
This is actually pretty much inevitable. It's only a matter of time before, say, PaintShop Pro is entirely replaced by the GIMP. Desktop Free software has to have enough mindshare among corporations' IT departments that they seriously consider using it to replace retail/shareware.
This, of course, is the hard one. Say you're a design shop, and you have 20 seats of Photoshop. Upgrades are like $130/seat. You need to have enough foresight and trust in your peer organizations to donate, say, $20/seat/year to the improvement of the GIMP. It represents a 30% increase in your PhotoShop expenses for a few years, with the promise of a 70% reduction in a few years. This, of course, is collective action problem.
Any economist will tell you that this plan is doomed to failure, because there is no solution, except Men With Guns, to the collective action problem. Well, if the government of a few countries was feeling cool, they could fund this stuff for their internal use. However, I don't know if the economists are right. Their version of people as "rational actors" is pretty far from reality. People solve the collective action problem all the time. They recycle, they give to charity, they hold the door for people. As standards of living improve (assuming that standards of living continue to improve), people may be less and less "rational," and more proactive about working towards the common good.
Oh, and if anyone else wants to form one of these Free software design firms, I'm game.
Now, if you're looking for terrorists, look no further than Sea Shepherd. Once upon the time, a Greenpeace activist took the club away from a guy who was clubbing a baby seal. He was ejected from the organization, and started Sea Shepherd. Among other activities, one night they sank half of Iceland's whaling fleet. No lives were lost. (Compare this to the French government who can't sink one measly ship without killing somebody.) History of Sea Shepherd here. Feel free to make your own judgments about whether they're the Good Guy or the Bad Guys.
The amusing thing, of course, being that NTK occasionally brings down little sites. Guess the medium fish eat the little fish, and are in turn eaten by the big fish, until /. jumps in the pond and splashes out all the other fish.
Well, here's a quick back-of-the envelope:
Dell sells servers. You can get a variety of OS's installed on them. They'll install RedHat for $169. They'll install Win2k Server (5 clients) for $799. So, Linux's 1% revenue share would work out to about 5%. So, say half of Linux sales are actually replacing OEM copies of XP home edition or whatever, that still works out to 3% of the seats of Windows. That's quite a lot.
Not that at the end of the NeoAudio license, they didn't even remove the commentary about how to claim copyright and how you should get your employer's signature. I suspect that they didn't even read the whole thing, and this this is a case of copyright infringement due to ignorance/stupidity, instead of malice. Still highly illegal, tho.
To the assertion that Lego is not as good `cause of all the special-purpose parts, cross-merketing, etc. It doesn't matter. In fact, it's better. The expressiveness of Legos is strictly greater with the special parts. Of course, you can still buy big buckets of random (basic) parts.
Besides, the Technic parts are much cooler than they were when I was a kid, not to mention mindstorms. The Star Wars etc. stuff is part of a general expansion of the Lego product line. If it gets some kids into Legos who would not ordinarily play with them, more power to them.
Woohoo, now I get to be modded down!
You, sir, are an ass. A well-intentioned ass, to be sure, but an ass nonetheless.
First, you mention specific political situations in the 1930's. You are dangerously close to forfeiting via Godwin's Law. But enough about that, I'll merely point out that straw men do not an argument make.
Now then, you claim that Yahoo should pull out of China rather than bend to the will of the Chinese government. I wonder what you hope to gain by this? Do you hope to make the lot of the Chinese people better by denying them even a censored Yahoo? To you expect the Chinese government to cave in and embrace the unfiltered net? No. Dictators love embargoes. Compare China, North Korea, and Cuba. Which is the most free? What have our policies of isolation done to promote freedom? Nothing. They have buttressed up Castro and Kim, allowing them a death-grip on their people. Supposedly most North Koreans don't even realize that starving to death is unusual in the wider world.
So, yes. Appeasement. It is a wonderful strategy for fighting totalitarianism. Beats invasion, beats embargoes. Why? The center cannot hold. People do not want to be repressed. If you isolate them, they cannot even get an inkling of freedom. If you let them peek out through the thick curtains of censorship, they can see that there's a different world outside. You make the choice - the windowless room of isolation or the thin slit of censorship. Which would you offer the Chinese people?
I'm still curious about your previous soundbite. ("Yahoo! Where your civil liberties are what your government tells us they are.") What other kinds of civil liberties are there?
Look, I don't like censorship of any kind. I believe that the solution to bad speech is good speech. I give hundreds of dollars a year to the ALCU. But, there's really not an option here. Either Yahoo censors its Chinese portal, or the Chinese government censors Yahoo. The banned content is already illegal in China, and spreading it can get you a bullet in the head with a bill to your family.
It's not as if Yahoo China can say "Hell no! Screw the Man, we're putting a big Free Tibet banner on our home page!" The best result of this for Yahoo China would having their site banned by the Great Firewall. More likely they would find their employees harassed and jailed, their company fighting trumped-up charges, etc.
The real criminal here is the Chinese Communist Party. If you have a problem with their actions, try to convince your elected representative to kick China out of the WTO. Yahoo has no leverage in this situation.
"power" = volts * farads. The guy who built the electromagnetic can crusher used 120uf (that's picofarads) caps, but at 10kV. Those puppies have a lot of juice. That said, I did manage to dig up a 1 farad (12v) cap at some point. I charged it up to test it, then discharged it using the head of a hammer. The heat from the spark welded (soldered?) the capacitor to the head of the hammer.
Ohh, bad pun, sorry.
But really, I think the way to think about P2P downloading is to use non-interactive search agents. These guys are on the right path, the random walkers appear to be a bit brighter than an exponentially widening search.
The problem with current p2p networks is that the database is constantly churning. It's not like the web, where data is relatively stable. Two identical searches performed within minutes of each other will return different results. The problem, of course, is that polling the network with these huge searches inflicts a massive bandwidth cost.
A better system would be to have a search agent. You would enter a set of search criteria (with a richer syntax than the existing model), and every 30 seconds or so the software would fire off an agent. The agent does a random walk, then downloads anything that matches. You then go on about your business. When the agents have collected a sufficient number of results. it alerts you.
This lacks the immediate satisfaction of searching and getting results right now, but when you're looking for obscure stuff, you don't get that satisfaction anyway.
Also note that the autonomous downloading assumes you're looking for something reasonably small, like an mp3, and not Girls Gone Wild.
Of course, it also has the advantage that if gives an incentive for hosts to remain connected longer, adding to the stability of the entire system.
So, everyone here is going on about how moderation, authentication, etc. is going to solve this problem. it would, if uploading and downloading songs wasn't usually illegal. A couple people have caught on to this, but most haven't.
The problem has two aspects:
1) If the systems has strong identities, then you have a confession from every uploader - as long as you can find them.
2) If you don't have strong identities, then those who would interfere with your system can hijack the identity system.
In the strong identity case, those few people who have uploaded most of the songs that are floating around suddenly find themselves targets. A well-funded attacker, especially one with the Law on their side, could use traffic analysis to track down the high-use users. Recall, they don't need enough info from the traffic analysis to get a conviction, just enough to get a warrant. Frankly, I don't believe claims that "my system is immune to traffic analysis." If the Law can tap into UUNet's big NOCs, they can watch the majority of US internet traffic. MP3's are pretty big, and a small population of users uploads most of the songs. It doesn't matter if your data is encrypted/chunked/whatever, the Law just looks for lots of traffic and tracks the big dataflows to their source. Once they find you, they find your secret key, and you're in jail. Secondly, a digital signature is forever. If you share a bunch of files in college, but then clean up your act and lead a respectable life (in the eyes of the RIAA), your digital signature stays behind. A gun that smokes until the statute of limitations runs out is a little scary.
In the weak identity case, you're no better off than in the no-identity case. The people who want to stomp on your little piracy garden are better funded and less constrained in their action than you. Everyone has infinite moderation points? What's to stop the bad guys (good guys?) from modding everything totally randomly?Much faster than carefully listening to each song and clicking a button. Legitimate rankings get lost in the noise. Use hashes or song fingerprints? What's to stop someone from transmitting the hashes/fingerprints from non-bogus media?
No, I'm afraid that the solution is the same as the solution to the wAr3z distribution problem. Small groups can share with full impunity (this is actually legal to do with music). But sharing music with perfect strangers is not just illegal, it means that the Man can play, too -- and do everything in his power to stop you.
I hope the FCC is paying attention. Government regulation of airwaves was a good idea back before cheap digital electronics, and it still has its place, but the clear message here is that non-dedicated frequencies should be the rule, not the exception.
It seems like the endgame should be some variant ofUltra Wideband. It wouldn't broadcast in all frequencies, just a wide swath of them. Frequencies that had dedicated purposes would be outside this range. This would allow much higher transmitter power, which means longer ranges.
Then let the market jump in. Interference isn't a problem due to lowish power and efficient airwave usage. Let whoever wants to set up base stations. Use p2p mesh networking. Do whatever. The devices are cheap and don't interfere. This may be one of the technology market segments that actually acts like a market.
Motion captured acting is bad. Really bad. I've seen believable acting in a few video games (notably a couple of the cut-scenes in Onimusha), and it shocked me. Most of the time, it looks like the actors are all on `ludes. They are quite literally in their own little worlds, going through the motions.
Now, real-time rendering, even if it wasn't production-quality, could change this. Just giving the actors decent HUDs so that they could actually talk to the CG creatures would help a lot. Real force-feedback stuff would mean that they could actually touch each other. This is what we need for cg to replace real actors. Then it would really be the Future, what with Virtual Light and etc. being reality. (And we'll have flying cars, damnit.)
This is closer to an optical trackpad than a mouse. Why is it useful? Well, you could use it to replace the up-down/d-pad that many phones have. Instead of two or four big mechanical buttons, you have one tiny non-moving lens. Smaller phones, less breakage.
Of course, in order for this to work well, there would have to be haptic feedback that you had moved an item, otherwise you'd have to stare at your phone to see where the cursor was. I suspect that this will only become popular in ultra-tiny phones (like ones that you can't buy outside of Asia), and perhaps in palmtops (although I'd much prefer a touch-screen).