The implication here is that no one can claim legitimate use of that kind of bandwidth on an individual basis.
The reality is that it is very easy to show legitimate use of lots of bandwidth. I'll share my individual case as an example. My company is an IBM Business Partner. We provide professional services for over 10 different IBM software products, across five different operating systems, and three different databases. We pull all of our software media and documentation from electronic repositories which we pay an annual subscription to gain access to. Add in patches, version upgrades, and marketing collateral on top of that. For each consultant, pulling over 10 GB of material in a month is not unusual, and it's even more when someone wants to skill up in a new product, which happens all the time if they want to stay alive in this industry.
For strictly personal usage, I don't use a whole lot myself. Mostly email, though there are a lot of email lists I archive. But I hardly know anyone in the IT industry at least who uses the Net for just personal enjoyment; most people I know consume more bandwidth in their role as a business user than a private individual.
What I would really like to know is why bandwidth is so expensive in the U.S., even in the urban cores. Even if you are willing to tap directly into a MAP, and take other measures to drop out the middlemen. The wholesale price of bandwidth is much higher than all that dark fiber sitting out there would lead one to believe.
In day to day life, we buy insurance for, say, a house fire, at much lower odds than that (chance of your house catching fire is 0.01%).
The climate change expert is making an educated guess at the odds. The insurance figures are based upon actuarial tables built from empirical data. The scientific rigor used to evaluate probabilities in each scenario is drastically different, and not comparable at all, thus making the evaluation method used to peg the climate change probabilities unsuitable as the basis of declaring that billions of dollars be spent on a Kyoto Accord-style insurance policy.
All who are pro-Kyoto Accord based upon the "insurance policy" reasoning should be seriously looking into weather futures (and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is not the only weather futures exchange, Google it up). If you are certain about your probability levels and the market has not priced in those levels (which they have not, check the quotes), then there is a killing to be made. That no advocates of the Accord are putting up their own funds to bank on what they say are the facts or probabilities, makes me wonder why they are so eager to put up other people's money.
Carrying concealed is allowed in select states in the United States, provided an individual goes through a licensing process that is renewed every few years. Very irritating that we have to ask the Leviathan Government permission to defend ourselves, but a minor nit compared with some of the grosser violations of our freedoms that are more important to roll back.
If your data is that sensitive that you can conceive of someone killing to get at it, you hire pros to transport it. There are professional courier services that work with this kind of risk, though they are expensive. Otherwise, life is full of risk, deal with it and move on or continue to cower and whimper on your knees.
...but when your in transit couldn't someone stop you and take the tapes from you (by force if needed)?
My associates Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson will be pleased to make the acquaintance of that someone. Actually, I conceal carry a.45 ACP manufactured by a company called Kimber, but few Slashdotter's would recognize that name. I'm one of the principals of the company, so carrying concealed at the office is condoned.
Could this be another way for Microsoft to levy an OEM-level tax, but on the sly (at first)?
I currently very happily build my company's own servers so I can get exactly the feature set that I want. A pleasant side effect: the OS tax is very low when purchasing the bare parts (still some Microsoft tax in the form of R&D dollars spent by manufacturers to make their stuff run under Windows). But if/when Microsoft weasels their way into the motherboard level of components, and creates tying agreements that require the motherboard manufacturers to pay an OS tax or something similar (DRM tax) through leveraging Microsoft intellectual property inserted into the BIOS, then even when we consciously eschew Microsoft solutions we are still funding them. Imagine an explicit part of the cost of every motherboard, perhaps every hard disk drive sold down the road, being a payment to Microsoft... Phoenix might even happily agree to do this, under a barter arrangement where they receive Microsoft intellectual property now for free in exchange for agreeing to count every motherboard licensed for their BIOS as a Windows box, and think they have "first mover advantage".
I've been meaning to visit my local university's library to resolve this, but since this Ask Slashdot has come up I might as well tell others what I have figured out so far.
Digital Speech Standard (DSS) is not necessarily proprietary in the sense that you or I cannot lay our hands on it. It might not be open source, but it can possibly be available for licensing from the International Voice Association (IVA) on terms that might be practically useful (see below for more on this). IVA is a joint venture between Grundig, Phillips, and Olympus. The reason I need to go to the library is because the IVA is apparently not on the Net. Go figure.
To establish an industry standard for digital voice recording, DSS was developed by the International Voice Association (IVA). The members of the IVA include Philips Electronics N.V. of the Netherlands and Grundig A.G. of Germany as well as Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. DSS ensures full compatibility with its specifications for data compression, file format and storage medium.
I emailed Olympus USA Technical Support and asked them to direct me to someone who can license the spec to me, but predictably nothing useful came out of that:
You have reached the Digital Technical Support Department. Unfortunately, we do not handle this issue. For assistance with this issue please contact the Customer Service Department at 1-800-622-6372 ext 2701.
Three guesses what the result was when I called a Customer Support monkey.
This guy figured out some basic encoding characteristics of the Olympus DS-3000, the model that I use. An FAQ from a New Zealand distributor lists some other characteristics like the compression ratio of the format (approximately 12:1 over WAV).
Note that apparently the encoding algorithm can only be licensed for use on hardware devices, but decoding is allowed in software. This is what I meant when I mentioned above that it might be possible to license the format on practically useful terms. For my project where I want a Linux-based DSS decoder, I don't need software encoding, so this works for me. I found this in a link on the Net somewhere, but I can't Google it up now.
This third-party product can decode DSS format files, so there is the proof that we need that the format can indeed be decoded by someone outside of the IVA founding members. This Windows-only shareware program performs all sorts of handy audio format batch conversions, but it requires the Windows-only DSS Player in order to decode DSS format files. Hopefully that means DSS Player (which can only be obtained/licensed through the purchase of an Olympus DSS recorder) can be manipulated through Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) in a worst case scenario (running DSS Player from a VMware instance on Linux, and communicate between the two using some socket-based protocol).
When I actually did this many years back in my first startup before the Dot.Com Era, I went out and purchased a plain door from Home Depot. If I recall correctly, it cost me about $75, including some 2x4 cut to spec, some of those nifty brackets that turn 2x4s into a sawhorse, and some wood screws. It was sturdy than all get out; the damn thing took longer to take apart than to put together. That was small change after the cost of the equipment and a year's rent was figured in; less than 1/100th the cost of all that. If your startup capital is that tight that $75 will break the bank, maybe you might want to rethink your capitalization plan. I think I figured out that on a per square inch basis for anything else of comparable sturdiness, that setup was cheaper than anything else I could find at the time. Standing on top of it while loaded down with gear was not a problem; you could probably even jump up and down but I wasn't about to risk my gear in the pursuit of geek research.
That startup went bust, but I've since started another company. When I move into a bona fide office later next year, I'll probably try to patronize a Habitat for Humanity Re-Store because of their good works. I like Joel's idea of one long desk, and this time I'll build two such desks side-by-side. I screwed down a power strip along the back of the desk the last time, and this time I'll be adding network hubs as well.
There are many Americans working overseas, and they are required to pay federal taxes in additional to local taxes (in contrast to almost every other non-America citizen).
Very simplistically, first $70,000 under the foreign earned income exclusion is exempt from U.S. federal income tax for expatriates. Unlike all other nations except for Libya however, all income beyond that is subject to federal income tax.
So, about 420 grams of sugar (a bit under a pound) is needed to produce 1 kilowatt.
Hm, someone correct my maths and futures interpretation if they are wrong (rushed this out before going to work), but here goes. New York Board of Trade Sugar No. 11 (World) futures for October 2003 delivery stands at 610 cents per pound this morning as I type (NYBOT last day closings also available for future reference). This is raw centrifugal cane sugar based on 96 degrees average polarization. Assume that this is the cost for the raw feedstock for the bacteria.
Given 420 grams per kilowatt, 454 grams per pound, 610 cents per pound, that works out to 1.343 cents per gram, or 564.317 cents per kilowatt. I pay at most $0.0720 per kWh. 1 kWh is 3.6 x 10^6 joules. 1 W is one J per second, so 1 kW is 1000 J per second. Dunno what the maximum power dissipation of these batteries are, so I'm making some simplifying assumptions here. Given that electric utility rate above, I pay $0.0720 per kWh, I figure it costs $0.00002 per kW through the electric utility. Another way of looking at this is 564.317 cents per kW works out to 564.317 * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = $20,315.412 per kWh. The batteries won't solve the world's energy needs anytime soon, but the differential in cost might be easily justified with its form factor and other design advantages that it brings to the engineer's table. I can see why only the military is looking at this device.
I was looking into the Savannah GNU project, but the GForge project seems much further along, from a superficial glance I took after reading the threads here. Has anyone done an in-depth comparison of both projects?
IMHO, it is because Bluetooth recognition/adoption by both manufacturers and users has been slower than WiFi. Also, the implementations of Bluetooth have been pretty uninspiring. I can create a Bluetooth net with a Tungsten, headset and SonyEricsson, and with the phone in my briefcase place a call using the Tungsten. Neat. When a call comes in however, the Caller ID information is not passed back to the Tungsten through the Bluetooth net so I can see on the Tungsten who is calling (the Mac OS X Address Book supports this). Almost a textbook illustration of flashy demo technology that is impractical in daily use.
Palm's choice of data architecture unfortunately makes it difficult to take advantage of these technologies that bring a Unix-like philosophy to devices (make 'em small and usable in different contexts, allow users to combine and recombine, sometimes in ways the original designers never thought of). These types of devices really come into their own when they can fluidly share data between themselves; their utility grows far beyond the hardware's core benefit, and is only limited by the software. The Apple Newton's Lisp'ish soups data architecture held a lot of promise, and worked really well when vendors took advantage of it.
Manufacturers also share some responsibility however for lacking some marketing foresight. Not being able to reprogram the Bluetooth support in their devices limits their future utility. It also places a cap on possible revenue streams for software upgrades, implementing features for increased and diverse uses, often driven by businesses, that the market finds. These uses sometimes fall outside of the original vision of the device, and add revenue streams from unexpected places. And That's A Good Thing (tm). A lot of people who hear about Bluetooth, and it seems these people might include the device manufacturers, do not understand that simply implementing the Bluetooth transport doesn't make magic happen. Just as simply expressing your invoices into XML doesn't replace your EDI system overnight. The magic happens because a protocol is exploited by both sides of a transaction. Locking up your protocol support implementation into non-replaceable firmware means you just locked yourself out of exploiting different uses of your hardware that become apparent later on. This drives up the useful lifecycle of your product line's core implementation, drives down R&D costs, and drives up the number of revenue sources to tap into.
These are a very rich vein of sales and marketing possibilities that Palm and manufacturers spending R&D money on Bluetooth support for their product lines have failed to grasp. They implemented Bluetooth without grasping these possibilities and taking action upon them, then stood aside expecting the world to beat a path to their door. When that didn't happen, they charged off to chase the next chimera of profitability, which you see today.
Laptops aren't THAT much smaller for the price increase
On this point I would have to disagree. I just recently performed a survey of portable desktop solutions. I needed a solution that would let me haul 8-10 individual workstations through an airport if necessary (though they would usually be shipped). Yes, the Mini-ITX form factor is very small. But not compared to a laptop after all components are considered.
This is primarily because of the LCD monitor. The total volume for the compute box, screen, keyboard and pointing device is way lower in laptops than in any separate boxen solution like the Mini-ITX. Using 5- or 7-inch screens is not a feasible option for my application, so a standard Viewsonic VE150mb would have to do.
The IBM Thinkpad R31 measures 12 W x 10 D x 1.42 H inches and thus occupies 170.4 cubic inches. The Viewsonic VE150mb measures 14.9 W x 13.8 H x 5.4 D inches and occupies 1,110.3 cubic inches. The monitor alone for a Mini-ITX solution are about 6.5X the volume of an IBM Thinkpad R31, the bottom of the line Thinkpad. Other, much more expensive monitors specifically designed to take up less space are not much slimmer, and that would blow the price parity of the Mini-ITX solution anyways. The case, keyboard and pointing device are not even factored in at this stage. By the time those were factored in, I figured out the Mini-ITX solution was approaching 8X the volume. That kind of difference costs lots of money to ship around, and would completely rule out the possibility of checking in 8-10 units as baggage in an emergency.
So if anyone has a pointer to ultra-slim, SVGA monitors 12" and up that cost $300 USD or less delivered, please let me know. That might make the Mini-ITX solution competitive again as a portable desktop.
By the way, there is an entire new category of PCs called portable desktops that are built in the notebook form factor but are really only intended for use as power- and LAN-tethered systems hauled between places. If you really want something that is very compact, powerful (full P4), don't care if it is power-tethered, don't need to insert PCI cards, and comes with its own compact screen, keyboard and pointing device, these are a good solution. The Mini-ITX seems much more appropriate to headless-style applications, or applications where PCI cards need to be inserted.
Trouble is, I can't just pick one up and play around with it like I do with all of the other technologies I know.
I just picked this comment at random out of all the comments that expressed the same frustration of lack of training facilities. I've looked into this issue a lot because I run into z/OS boxen enough in my consulting work that it would be useful to know the mainframe.
If you are in a college or university, you're in luck. The IBM Scholars Program basically gives any university to a huge variety of free and deeply discounted training material. You will need to pester a willing CS or MIS professor into teaching a class that can be taken for degree credits, and a local IBM Business Partner needs to participate as well. IBM supplies the mainframe services through the web. Steep requirements, but not impossible, especially if the course is structured like a 1-hour credit course, and you can convince the professor that your local IEEE or ACM chapter will handle all of the administrative tasks.
If you are not associated with an university, Marist College offers a degree credit course remotely. A little spendy, but doable.
If you are not associated with an university and want a self-study option, options are pretty grim. This is my situation. I cannot predict the time demands of my consulting business enough to guarantee I can set aside time for a structured course, and pretty much everything I've learned is by self-study. Some Googling turned up only one vendor who sells z/OS timeshare services. The minimum block of services from Internet TimeShare Resources costs $500 USD per month. Gulp. Another option is to purchase your own mainframe; the minimum configuration I could find through IBM, refurbished, was well into five figures. After I passed out and came to, I decided to try Hercules and the turnkey MVS based upon a much older version of MVS, as mentioned earlier in this thread.
If you're in the same situation as I am and want some MVS timeshare just to play around in, I think five people or companies can feasibly split the cost of the timeshare, by agreeing to use the timeshare only on a particular weekday, with access rotating on the weekend days, so you get access two days out of a week every two weeks, and the rest of the time you get access one day a week. If this kind of setup intrigues you, drop me a note at maildrop001 at yahoo com
Judging by the comments on this article, there is probably a market demand out there for $20/month accounts that would give newbies a pico-LPAR to install MVS programs, install Linux for z/OS, play around in, etc. Wrap some basic web services that let the newbies punch a button to wipe the LPAR to its initial state, download datasets they created, and such so that the support can be bare-bones ("fubar'd your LPAR? Reset it, bud.") and the costs can be kept low. I found three such firms offering this kind of service for OS/400 access.
IMHO, contrary to what the article claims, I don't think the shortage is real. There is and always will be a shortage of top-flight folks, just as in any field, but for a rank and file that is dedicated to just mainframe work, the rates are not reflecting any shortage. There is demand however for folks who can fluidly cross the distributed and mainframe worlds, but as always, industry-specific and domain-specific knowledge is really what is prized by clients, not just straight technical skill. Furthermore, a lot of people's retirement accounts took a serious hit in the dob bomb, so hordes of mainframers retiring is not likely to happen anytime soon. Maybe in 20-30 years we might have a shortage, but to start talking about it now is premature.
If you still know how to contact this salesman, please email it to maildrop001 at yahoo.com. I know two companies that would hire him in an instant if that kind of behavior is indicative of his overall sales approach.
In case anyone else is interested, this is not quite a "dump your kitchen waste into the food processor-like chute" device, a la Mr. Fusion. The article specifically states that the organic material has to be liquified and refined to extract a glucose mixture that the bugs (which are the heart of the device) eat. Thus, if we want to use kitchen waste, it has to be recycled, in much the same manner that people who compost their kitchen waste save it.
The article goes on to mention that Sharp and Kyoto University hope that "such garbage glucose can be sold at retailers, much the way kerosene is sold today." I'm specifically interested in the refining process, its required energy inputs and its resultant waste stream, but couldn't Google up anything useful because I'm not familiar with organic chemistry.
Presuming that it doesn't take more energy to refine raw organic material into the glucose stockfeed than the device emits (in which case the utility of the device is its energy storage properties), and the waste stream from the refining process is benign in quantity and in its toxicity properties, this would be a very cool way to generate/store energy. They don't say how long a matchbox-sized device could power an LCD TV, but if the power density is anywhere near pure hydrogen cell-based units, this would be way handy for laptops and other portable devices. However, I'm a little skeptical that it could eventually even partially displace fossil fuels because the sheer quantity of glucose needed is probably impractical to produce.
Re:Alternative fuels in the US
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A couple of years ago, it was waste product!
You are thinking of the raw oil. The processing costs of turning that raw plant oil into biodiesel are significant. What makes standard diesel and gasoline so cheap are the network effects of the processing infrastructure. Raw plant oil is waste product to its initial user like your local McDonald's, but there exists a substantial industry that specializes in hauling it away, refining out particulate matter, and recycling it into industrial purposes (manufacturing of soaps and cosmetics, some fuel oil burning, etc.). That's why you sometimes hear of restaurants finding their waste oil has been swiped. There is money to be made in that "waste".
I seriously looked into building my own biodiesel generation facility a few years back. The total energy costs are significant, and I'm not sure I ever reconciled that to my satisfaction. In other words, biodiesel is touted as a sustainable fuel but after adding in all the costs of growing the raw plant for its oil and processing the oil, the true cost is quite a bit more than the parent post mentioned. One of the reactants in the processing is sodium hydrochloride (more commonly encountered by laymen as household lye). In small scale processing some of this is left over as waste and I never found a satisfactory solution to reclaiming it; as far as I could tell most people simply dilute it and dump it. But then again I'm not an industrial engineer so I'm likely ignorant of some reclamation technology that would work; but it likely would require a massive scaling up of the processing facility.
I'm not sure that is even a meaningful way to approach the analysis. In the end, we are all simply sucking up solar fuel and not replenishing that; hard to come by raw fuel for the sun in any meaningful quantities. As part of a fuel diversification strategy however, I think biodiesel holds much promise.
Check out Jay Abraham before you give up. Most people in general, and this is doubly so of technical people, know jackshit about sales and marketing. By applying just a smidgen of sales and marketing principles to my technical specialist work, I trebled my income. I know you said you marketed, but believe me, just as there is an order of magnitude difference between unskilled and highly skilled programmers, there are a lot of crap marketers out there, and only a few gems.
All the replies to this thread so far have echoed a common perception of unions: they exist to enforce mediocrity and prop up the lowest common denominator. Question for those who hold such a view: where did you get it? From the newspaper? From TV? From a series of reports on-line?
From union fucktards that won't let me haul my own equipment at trade shows, then use 3X more manpower, take 2X more time and demand 5X more money to move 1U boxen a couple hundred yards.
Is there any way for the free market to supply a solution for the disabled? There are tons of travel sites that aggregate travel options for the non-disabled, one of them would want the additional business if the different disabled communities communicated the market potential to the site owners.
Instead of foisting the cost of accessibility upon all travelers who will not benefit from it, why not let the disabled pay for the added cost of accessibility by supporting a site (or sites) that cater to their needs for a small additional fee? And if enough market demand exists, an additional surcharge would not even be necessary.
Litigating this will simply ensure that the disabled get the lowest-possible cost solution after a court judgement finds in the plaintiff's favor. That translates into offerings that meet the bare minimum legal requirements, and provide no value-add features that the non-disabled might enjoy.
As long as Massachusetts citizens continue to embrace welfare pork barrel politics and voting professional looters into office, don't act surprised when shit like this happens. Same goes for all the other states in the country.
It should also be noted that the Soups data structures (see a brief description of how they work, which would be immediately familiar to Lisp/Scheme hackers) has still not been recognized, embraced and exploited by the PDA community to date. This one innovation would make it far easier for Palm developers to leverage off of each others' work instead of the ludicrous workarounds we have today to try to store related data in other Palm applications' databases.
If you (especially hagbard5235 and patrickje), had a good PM that has since moved on but you are still in touch with them, please let them know that my company is looking for PM's that are getting kudos from the developers/programmers that work with them. Please have them email me if they are interested.
Re:currency tracking hardly needs rfids
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If it means "within a few hours" (or whatever time period, really), then they are going to be getting a whole lot of false positives.
No, all they have to do is know the GPS coordinates of each scanner in the system. As each bill's serial number is scanned, its global coordinate is also noted. As the crow flies, the maximum speed between any two points on the planet today for most citizens is a maximum of mach 1; it will surely increase in the future, but likely not by much for a couple of generations. The energy costs are quite high already for existing speeds, and nothing on the horizon seems to indicate that higher speed civilian transport with the same or lower energy costs are in the offing. The government is not in the habit of transporting cash by supersonic military craft as far as I know, so overrides are likely not necessary.
The detection of the same serial number in two different locations simply must not violate the theoretical maximum speed someone can transport cash from one location to another.
The flaw in this scheme is that as the maximum speed increases, so does the size of the potential pool of counterfeit bills. The scheme completely falls apart if we ever figure out Trek-like transporter technology, for example.
Finally, the parent post forgot to note that the majority of U.S. cash is used and held outside of the continental United States. Remember, greenbacks are the de facto reserve currency of the world, so every central bank wants a chunk of greenbacks to "back" their local currency. The scheme is only effective if it is expanded to private enterprises in other nations.
Flight Simulator was originally developed by SubLOGIC Corporation in 1979. Complete history available, as well as other stuff like Artwick's history (as far as I can tell, he works for Microsoft these days, ever since selling Bruce Artwick Organization to Microsoft). All the box designs are also available. Man, I was hooked on that Apple ][ version.
Slashdot Mirror
The implication here is that no one can claim legitimate use of that kind of bandwidth on an individual basis.
The reality is that it is very easy to show legitimate use of lots of bandwidth. I'll share my individual case as an example. My company is an IBM Business Partner. We provide professional services for over 10 different IBM software products, across five different operating systems, and three different databases. We pull all of our software media and documentation from electronic repositories which we pay an annual subscription to gain access to. Add in patches, version upgrades, and marketing collateral on top of that. For each consultant, pulling over 10 GB of material in a month is not unusual, and it's even more when someone wants to skill up in a new product, which happens all the time if they want to stay alive in this industry.
For strictly personal usage, I don't use a whole lot myself. Mostly email, though there are a lot of email lists I archive. But I hardly know anyone in the IT industry at least who uses the Net for just personal enjoyment; most people I know consume more bandwidth in their role as a business user than a private individual.
What I would really like to know is why bandwidth is so expensive in the U.S., even in the urban cores. Even if you are willing to tap directly into a MAP, and take other measures to drop out the middlemen. The wholesale price of bandwidth is much higher than all that dark fiber sitting out there would lead one to believe.
In day to day life, we buy insurance for, say, a house fire, at much lower odds than that (chance of your house catching fire is 0.01%).
The climate change expert is making an educated guess at the odds. The insurance figures are based upon actuarial tables built from empirical data. The scientific rigor used to evaluate probabilities in each scenario is drastically different, and not comparable at all, thus making the evaluation method used to peg the climate change probabilities unsuitable as the basis of declaring that billions of dollars be spent on a Kyoto Accord-style insurance policy.
All who are pro-Kyoto Accord based upon the "insurance policy" reasoning should be seriously looking into weather futures (and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is not the only weather futures exchange, Google it up). If you are certain about your probability levels and the market has not priced in those levels (which they have not, check the quotes), then there is a killing to be made. That no advocates of the Accord are putting up their own funds to bank on what they say are the facts or probabilities, makes me wonder why they are so eager to put up other people's money.
Carrying concealed is allowed in select states in the United States, provided an individual goes through a licensing process that is renewed every few years. Very irritating that we have to ask the Leviathan Government permission to defend ourselves, but a minor nit compared with some of the grosser violations of our freedoms that are more important to roll back.
If your data is that sensitive that you can conceive of someone killing to get at it, you hire pros to transport it. There are professional courier services that work with this kind of risk, though they are expensive. Otherwise, life is full of risk, deal with it and move on or continue to cower and whimper on your knees.
My associates Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson will be pleased to make the acquaintance of that someone. Actually, I conceal carry a .45 ACP manufactured by a company called Kimber, but few Slashdotter's would recognize that name. I'm one of the principals of the company, so carrying concealed at the office is condoned.
Could this be another way for Microsoft to levy an OEM-level tax, but on the sly (at first)?
I currently very happily build my company's own servers so I can get exactly the feature set that I want. A pleasant side effect: the OS tax is very low when purchasing the bare parts (still some Microsoft tax in the form of R&D dollars spent by manufacturers to make their stuff run under Windows). But if/when Microsoft weasels their way into the motherboard level of components, and creates tying agreements that require the motherboard manufacturers to pay an OS tax or something similar (DRM tax) through leveraging Microsoft intellectual property inserted into the BIOS, then even when we consciously eschew Microsoft solutions we are still funding them. Imagine an explicit part of the cost of every motherboard, perhaps every hard disk drive sold down the road, being a payment to Microsoft... Phoenix might even happily agree to do this, under a barter arrangement where they receive Microsoft intellectual property now for free in exchange for agreeing to count every motherboard licensed for their BIOS as a Windows box, and think they have "first mover advantage".
I've been meaning to visit my local university's library to resolve this, but since this Ask Slashdot has come up I might as well tell others what I have figured out so far.
Digital Speech Standard (DSS) is not necessarily proprietary in the sense that you or I cannot lay our hands on it. It might not be open source, but it can possibly be available for licensing from the International Voice Association (IVA) on terms that might be practically useful (see below for more on this). IVA is a joint venture between Grundig, Phillips, and Olympus. The reason I need to go to the library is because the IVA is apparently not on the Net. Go figure.
Quoting Olympus as an authoritative source:
I emailed Olympus USA Technical Support and asked them to direct me to someone who can license the spec to me, but predictably nothing useful came out of that:
Three guesses what the result was when I called a Customer Support monkey.
This guy figured out some basic encoding characteristics of the Olympus DS-3000, the model that I use. An FAQ from a New Zealand distributor lists some other characteristics like the compression ratio of the format (approximately 12:1 over WAV).
Note that apparently the encoding algorithm can only be licensed for use on hardware devices, but decoding is allowed in software. This is what I meant when I mentioned above that it might be possible to license the format on practically useful terms. For my project where I want a Linux-based DSS decoder, I don't need software encoding, so this works for me. I found this in a link on the Net somewhere, but I can't Google it up now.
This third-party product can decode DSS format files, so there is the proof that we need that the format can indeed be decoded by someone outside of the IVA founding members. This Windows-only shareware program performs all sorts of handy audio format batch conversions, but it requires the Windows-only DSS Player in order to decode DSS format files. Hopefully that means DSS Player (which can only be obtained/licensed through the purchase of an Olympus DSS recorder) can be manipulated through Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) in a worst case scenario (running DSS Player from a VMware instance on Linux, and communicate between the two using some socket-based protocol).
When I actually did this many years back in my first startup before the Dot.Com Era, I went out and purchased a plain door from Home Depot. If I recall correctly, it cost me about $75, including some 2x4 cut to spec, some of those nifty brackets that turn 2x4s into a sawhorse, and some wood screws. It was sturdy than all get out; the damn thing took longer to take apart than to put together. That was small change after the cost of the equipment and a year's rent was figured in; less than 1/100th the cost of all that. If your startup capital is that tight that $75 will break the bank, maybe you might want to rethink your capitalization plan. I think I figured out that on a per square inch basis for anything else of comparable sturdiness, that setup was cheaper than anything else I could find at the time. Standing on top of it while loaded down with gear was not a problem; you could probably even jump up and down but I wasn't about to risk my gear in the pursuit of geek research.
That startup went bust, but I've since started another company. When I move into a bona fide office later next year, I'll probably try to patronize a Habitat for Humanity Re-Store because of their good works. I like Joel's idea of one long desk, and this time I'll build two such desks side-by-side. I screwed down a power strip along the back of the desk the last time, and this time I'll be adding network hubs as well.
There are many Americans working overseas, and they are required to pay federal taxes in additional to local taxes (in contrast to almost every other non-America citizen).
Very simplistically, first $70,000 under the foreign earned income exclusion is exempt from U.S. federal income tax for expatriates. Unlike all other nations except for Libya however, all income beyond that is subject to federal income tax.
So, about 420 grams of sugar (a bit under a pound) is needed to produce 1 kilowatt.
Hm, someone correct my maths and futures interpretation if they are wrong (rushed this out before going to work), but here goes. New York Board of Trade Sugar No. 11 (World) futures for October 2003 delivery stands at 610 cents per pound this morning as I type (NYBOT last day closings also available for future reference). This is raw centrifugal cane sugar based on 96 degrees average polarization. Assume that this is the cost for the raw feedstock for the bacteria.
Given 420 grams per kilowatt, 454 grams per pound, 610 cents per pound, that works out to 1.343 cents per gram, or 564.317 cents per kilowatt. I pay at most $0.0720 per kWh. 1 kWh is 3.6 x 10^6 joules. 1 W is one J per second, so 1 kW is 1000 J per second. Dunno what the maximum power dissipation of these batteries are, so I'm making some simplifying assumptions here. Given that electric utility rate above, I pay $0.0720 per kWh, I figure it costs $0.00002 per kW through the electric utility. Another way of looking at this is 564.317 cents per kW works out to 564.317 * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = $20,315.412 per kWh. The batteries won't solve the world's energy needs anytime soon, but the differential in cost might be easily justified with its form factor and other design advantages that it brings to the engineer's table. I can see why only the military is looking at this device.
I was looking into the Savannah GNU project, but the GForge project seems much further along, from a superficial glance I took after reading the threads here. Has anyone done an in-depth comparison of both projects?
Any Ideas why it hasn't been included ?
IMHO, it is because Bluetooth recognition/adoption by both manufacturers and users has been slower than WiFi. Also, the implementations of Bluetooth have been pretty uninspiring. I can create a Bluetooth net with a Tungsten, headset and SonyEricsson, and with the phone in my briefcase place a call using the Tungsten. Neat. When a call comes in however, the Caller ID information is not passed back to the Tungsten through the Bluetooth net so I can see on the Tungsten who is calling (the Mac OS X Address Book supports this). Almost a textbook illustration of flashy demo technology that is impractical in daily use.
Palm's choice of data architecture unfortunately makes it difficult to take advantage of these technologies that bring a Unix-like philosophy to devices (make 'em small and usable in different contexts, allow users to combine and recombine, sometimes in ways the original designers never thought of). These types of devices really come into their own when they can fluidly share data between themselves; their utility grows far beyond the hardware's core benefit, and is only limited by the software. The Apple Newton's Lisp'ish soups data architecture held a lot of promise, and worked really well when vendors took advantage of it.
Manufacturers also share some responsibility however for lacking some marketing foresight. Not being able to reprogram the Bluetooth support in their devices limits their future utility. It also places a cap on possible revenue streams for software upgrades, implementing features for increased and diverse uses, often driven by businesses, that the market finds. These uses sometimes fall outside of the original vision of the device, and add revenue streams from unexpected places. And That's A Good Thing (tm). A lot of people who hear about Bluetooth, and it seems these people might include the device manufacturers, do not understand that simply implementing the Bluetooth transport doesn't make magic happen. Just as simply expressing your invoices into XML doesn't replace your EDI system overnight. The magic happens because a protocol is exploited by both sides of a transaction. Locking up your protocol support implementation into non-replaceable firmware means you just locked yourself out of exploiting different uses of your hardware that become apparent later on. This drives up the useful lifecycle of your product line's core implementation, drives down R&D costs, and drives up the number of revenue sources to tap into.
These are a very rich vein of sales and marketing possibilities that Palm and manufacturers spending R&D money on Bluetooth support for their product lines have failed to grasp. They implemented Bluetooth without grasping these possibilities and taking action upon them, then stood aside expecting the world to beat a path to their door. When that didn't happen, they charged off to chase the next chimera of profitability, which you see today.
Laptops aren't THAT much smaller for the price increase
On this point I would have to disagree. I just recently performed a survey of portable desktop solutions. I needed a solution that would let me haul 8-10 individual workstations through an airport if necessary (though they would usually be shipped). Yes, the Mini-ITX form factor is very small. But not compared to a laptop after all components are considered.
This is primarily because of the LCD monitor. The total volume for the compute box, screen, keyboard and pointing device is way lower in laptops than in any separate boxen solution like the Mini-ITX. Using 5- or 7-inch screens is not a feasible option for my application, so a standard Viewsonic VE150mb would have to do.
The IBM Thinkpad R31 measures 12 W x 10 D x 1.42 H inches and thus occupies 170.4 cubic inches. The Viewsonic VE150mb measures 14.9 W x 13.8 H x 5.4 D inches and occupies 1,110.3 cubic inches. The monitor alone for a Mini-ITX solution are about 6.5X the volume of an IBM Thinkpad R31, the bottom of the line Thinkpad. Other, much more expensive monitors specifically designed to take up less space are not much slimmer, and that would blow the price parity of the Mini-ITX solution anyways. The case, keyboard and pointing device are not even factored in at this stage. By the time those were factored in, I figured out the Mini-ITX solution was approaching 8X the volume. That kind of difference costs lots of money to ship around, and would completely rule out the possibility of checking in 8-10 units as baggage in an emergency.
So if anyone has a pointer to ultra-slim, SVGA monitors 12" and up that cost $300 USD or less delivered, please let me know. That might make the Mini-ITX solution competitive again as a portable desktop.
By the way, there is an entire new category of PCs called portable desktops that are built in the notebook form factor but are really only intended for use as power- and LAN-tethered systems hauled between places. If you really want something that is very compact, powerful (full P4), don't care if it is power-tethered, don't need to insert PCI cards, and comes with its own compact screen, keyboard and pointing device, these are a good solution. The Mini-ITX seems much more appropriate to headless-style applications, or applications where PCI cards need to be inserted.
Trouble is, I can't just pick one up and play around with it like I do with all of the other technologies I know.
I just picked this comment at random out of all the comments that expressed the same frustration of lack of training facilities. I've looked into this issue a lot because I run into z/OS boxen enough in my consulting work that it would be useful to know the mainframe.
If you are in a college or university, you're in luck. The IBM Scholars Program basically gives any university to a huge variety of free and deeply discounted training material. You will need to pester a willing CS or MIS professor into teaching a class that can be taken for degree credits, and a local IBM Business Partner needs to participate as well. IBM supplies the mainframe services through the web. Steep requirements, but not impossible, especially if the course is structured like a 1-hour credit course, and you can convince the professor that your local IEEE or ACM chapter will handle all of the administrative tasks.
If you are not associated with an university, Marist College offers a degree credit course remotely. A little spendy, but doable.
If you are not associated with an university and want a self-study option, options are pretty grim. This is my situation. I cannot predict the time demands of my consulting business enough to guarantee I can set aside time for a structured course, and pretty much everything I've learned is by self-study. Some Googling turned up only one vendor who sells z/OS timeshare services. The minimum block of services from Internet TimeShare Resources costs $500 USD per month. Gulp. Another option is to purchase your own mainframe; the minimum configuration I could find through IBM, refurbished, was well into five figures. After I passed out and came to, I decided to try Hercules and the turnkey MVS based upon a much older version of MVS, as mentioned earlier in this thread.
If you're in the same situation as I am and want some MVS timeshare just to play around in, I think five people or companies can feasibly split the cost of the timeshare, by agreeing to use the timeshare only on a particular weekday, with access rotating on the weekend days, so you get access two days out of a week every two weeks, and the rest of the time you get access one day a week. If this kind of setup intrigues you, drop me a note at maildrop001 at yahoo com
Judging by the comments on this article, there is probably a market demand out there for $20/month accounts that would give newbies a pico-LPAR to install MVS programs, install Linux for z/OS, play around in, etc. Wrap some basic web services that let the newbies punch a button to wipe the LPAR to its initial state, download datasets they created, and such so that the support can be bare-bones ("fubar'd your LPAR? Reset it, bud.") and the costs can be kept low. I found three such firms offering this kind of service for OS/400 access.
IMHO, contrary to what the article claims, I don't think the shortage is real. There is and always will be a shortage of top-flight folks, just as in any field, but for a rank and file that is dedicated to just mainframe work, the rates are not reflecting any shortage. There is demand however for folks who can fluidly cross the distributed and mainframe worlds, but as always, industry-specific and domain-specific knowledge is really what is prized by clients, not just straight technical skill. Furthermore, a lot of people's retirement accounts took a serious hit in the dob bomb, so hordes of mainframers retiring is not likely to happen anytime soon. Maybe in 20-30 years we might have a shortage, but to start talking about it now is premature.
If you still know how to contact this salesman, please email it to maildrop001 at yahoo.com. I know two companies that would hire him in an instant if that kind of behavior is indicative of his overall sales approach.
In case anyone else is interested, this is not quite a "dump your kitchen waste into the food processor-like chute" device, a la Mr. Fusion. The article specifically states that the organic material has to be liquified and refined to extract a glucose mixture that the bugs (which are the heart of the device) eat. Thus, if we want to use kitchen waste, it has to be recycled, in much the same manner that people who compost their kitchen waste save it.
The article goes on to mention that Sharp and Kyoto University hope that "such garbage glucose can be sold at retailers, much the way kerosene is sold today." I'm specifically interested in the refining process, its required energy inputs and its resultant waste stream, but couldn't Google up anything useful because I'm not familiar with organic chemistry.
Presuming that it doesn't take more energy to refine raw organic material into the glucose stockfeed than the device emits (in which case the utility of the device is its energy storage properties), and the waste stream from the refining process is benign in quantity and in its toxicity properties, this would be a very cool way to generate/store energy. They don't say how long a matchbox-sized device could power an LCD TV, but if the power density is anywhere near pure hydrogen cell-based units, this would be way handy for laptops and other portable devices. However, I'm a little skeptical that it could eventually even partially displace fossil fuels because the sheer quantity of glucose needed is probably impractical to produce.
A couple of years ago, it was waste product!
You are thinking of the raw oil. The processing costs of turning that raw plant oil into biodiesel are significant. What makes standard diesel and gasoline so cheap are the network effects of the processing infrastructure. Raw plant oil is waste product to its initial user like your local McDonald's, but there exists a substantial industry that specializes in hauling it away, refining out particulate matter, and recycling it into industrial purposes (manufacturing of soaps and cosmetics, some fuel oil burning, etc.). That's why you sometimes hear of restaurants finding their waste oil has been swiped. There is money to be made in that "waste".
I seriously looked into building my own biodiesel generation facility a few years back. The total energy costs are significant, and I'm not sure I ever reconciled that to my satisfaction. In other words, biodiesel is touted as a sustainable fuel but after adding in all the costs of growing the raw plant for its oil and processing the oil, the true cost is quite a bit more than the parent post mentioned. One of the reactants in the processing is sodium hydrochloride (more commonly encountered by laymen as household lye). In small scale processing some of this is left over as waste and I never found a satisfactory solution to reclaiming it; as far as I could tell most people simply dilute it and dump it. But then again I'm not an industrial engineer so I'm likely ignorant of some reclamation technology that would work; but it likely would require a massive scaling up of the processing facility.
I'm not sure that is even a meaningful way to approach the analysis. In the end, we are all simply sucking up solar fuel and not replenishing that; hard to come by raw fuel for the sun in any meaningful quantities. As part of a fuel diversification strategy however, I think biodiesel holds much promise.
Check out Jay Abraham before you give up. Most people in general, and this is doubly so of technical people, know jackshit about sales and marketing. By applying just a smidgen of sales and marketing principles to my technical specialist work, I trebled my income. I know you said you marketed, but believe me, just as there is an order of magnitude difference between unskilled and highly skilled programmers, there are a lot of crap marketers out there, and only a few gems.
All the replies to this thread so far have echoed a common perception of unions: they exist to enforce mediocrity and prop up the lowest common denominator. Question for those who hold such a view: where did you get it? From the newspaper? From TV? From a series of reports on-line?
From union fucktards that won't let me haul my own equipment at trade shows, then use 3X more manpower, take 2X more time and demand 5X more money to move 1U boxen a couple hundred yards.
Is there any way for the free market to supply a solution for the disabled? There are tons of travel sites that aggregate travel options for the non-disabled, one of them would want the additional business if the different disabled communities communicated the market potential to the site owners.
Instead of foisting the cost of accessibility upon all travelers who will not benefit from it, why not let the disabled pay for the added cost of accessibility by supporting a site (or sites) that cater to their needs for a small additional fee? And if enough market demand exists, an additional surcharge would not even be necessary.
Litigating this will simply ensure that the disabled get the lowest-possible cost solution after a court judgement finds in the plaintiff's favor. That translates into offerings that meet the bare minimum legal requirements, and provide no value-add features that the non-disabled might enjoy.
I'm never gonna use the god damn thing.
As long as Massachusetts citizens continue to embrace welfare pork barrel politics and voting professional looters into office, don't act surprised when shit like this happens. Same goes for all the other states in the country.
It should also be noted that the Soups data structures (see a brief description of how they work, which would be immediately familiar to Lisp/Scheme hackers) has still not been recognized, embraced and exploited by the PDA community to date. This one innovation would make it far easier for Palm developers to leverage off of each others' work instead of the ludicrous workarounds we have today to try to store related data in other Palm applications' databases.
If you (especially hagbard5235 and patrickje), had a good PM that has since moved on but you are still in touch with them, please let them know that my company is looking for PM's that are getting kudos from the developers/programmers that work with them. Please have them email me if they are interested.
If it means "within a few hours" (or whatever time period, really), then they are going to be getting a whole lot of false positives.
No, all they have to do is know the GPS coordinates of each scanner in the system. As each bill's serial number is scanned, its global coordinate is also noted. As the crow flies, the maximum speed between any two points on the planet today for most citizens is a maximum of mach 1; it will surely increase in the future, but likely not by much for a couple of generations. The energy costs are quite high already for existing speeds, and nothing on the horizon seems to indicate that higher speed civilian transport with the same or lower energy costs are in the offing. The government is not in the habit of transporting cash by supersonic military craft as far as I know, so overrides are likely not necessary.
The detection of the same serial number in two different locations simply must not violate the theoretical maximum speed someone can transport cash from one location to another.
The flaw in this scheme is that as the maximum speed increases, so does the size of the potential pool of counterfeit bills. The scheme completely falls apart if we ever figure out Trek-like transporter technology, for example.
Finally, the parent post forgot to note that the majority of U.S. cash is used and held outside of the continental United States. Remember, greenbacks are the de facto reserve currency of the world, so every central bank wants a chunk of greenbacks to "back" their local currency. The scheme is only effective if it is expanded to private enterprises in other nations.
Flight Simulator was originally developed by SubLOGIC Corporation in 1979. Complete history available, as well as other stuff like Artwick's history (as far as I can tell, he works for Microsoft these days, ever since selling Bruce Artwick Organization to Microsoft). All the box designs are also available. Man, I was hooked on that Apple ][ version.