Unless I am reading this wrong, the thermodynamic efficiency drop you mention seems to me as taking place before the cooling point, i.e., the method of cooling isn't as effective as vapor compression. So unless you are taking 106 degrees F showers -- and nearly- or actually scalding yourself (not to the spermicidal effects of that much heat) the actual heat gain in the water should be pretty good.
Here's my logic: Counter Flow heat exchangers can be up to about 90% efficient, heat pipes possibly more so, and keep in mind that the refridgerator is operating much more of the time than you are taking the shower. So it has a lot of time to supply heat into the water supply So assume an ambient water temp of say 70 degrees (F), and 90% of your 40 degree heat drop. (70 +.9*40 = 106).
Granted, this isn't enough to kill all of the household microbial nasties (IIRC that takes something like 140 degrees F). Still, if all I have to do is heat the water the rest of the way to the required final temp, it'd would still make a fairly significant dent in the home energy bill, especially if (like I do in my house) you're using radiant heating instead of a furnace. Assuming that the efficiency of the fridge isn't too much lower than the currently marketd ones.
These babies are quiet -- unless the housing containing the driver is ruptured. Your question: Is the cost of soundproofing going to be cheaper than the current insulation? doesn't make sense in terms of economics on two points:
First, for soundproofing the easiest method would be to place the sound source and the hot/cold plates in a "double, hollow walled box" evacuate most of the air between the hollow walls. This leaves no way for the sound waves to propogate outside the cooling unit. The cooling effect takes place outside of the hollow walled box because the fridge will still presumably circulate a fluid (which has absorbed heat in the refrigerator box through the cooling unit and back to the fridge/freezer. So there's wouldn't be a sound source even when the refridgerator is opened. Then put a sound sensor outside the box that shuts down the fridge if the vacumn fails and the sound rises above a certain level.
The second reason is that the current insulation in the refridgerator is still required --and the more the better-- to keep the heat from the rest of the world outside of the refrigerator or freezer box.
I have been reading about sound-driven refrigerators in some of the electronics weeklies, etc. for more than a decade now, but it looks like the technology may be moving out of the lab into a prototype "consumer" unit.
What I find more interesting than the projected "energy" savings (which I would have to see the science and the experimental data before I'd bank on), is that there is no compressor to wear out, no refrigerants, etc. Conceivably a service call would be something on the order of "open the sound box, unclip the sound driver, put in a new one", right?
I wonder what the heat output on the hot side is -- enough to supply a home's hot water needs, perhaps?
This is impressive work. As an avid follower of any technological improvement that can be used to lower the cost of creating high quality CAE (computer aided education), this looks like a winner -- but more so at a lower resolution than the top end of 1280x1024. Consider the author's text:
"There are a couple things that need to be cleaned up to fix that frame skipping, and then the camera will provide 15fps at 1280x1024 pixels, 60 fps at 640x480 pixels, and 240 fps at 320x240 pixels over the LAN connection."
Interpolating a bit, it seems reasonable that the camera could send 800x600 images at around 40 fps, which is a faster frame rate than standard NTSC video (60 half frames per second interpolated, 30 fps real), and at a resolution supportable by nearly all recent vintage consumer grade PC's, etc.
Granted, this is hardware speed, so encoding the massive data steam from the camera into a compressed but high quality playback format is another task for another machine or machines. But I'm still impressed.
As an example of why, take three of these, throw in some quality studio lighting, and come up with some editing software and hardware to mix the feeds together -- it looks to me like a person [with the technical knowledge to use the equipment and get good looking results] could create their own low cost production facility -- while still delivering image quality higher than is currently broadcast by most network and/or cable TV channels.
To me the WWW seems like a near perfect solution for people whose "disability demographic" can be in a wide number of disabled groups, but only if service infrastructure forms around the 'Net to serve these individuals.
For example, if regardless of disability (deaf, blind, motion disabilities come to mind) an individual could access a common site to call for a local taxicab service, etc. However, I doubt that there's a cab company in existence that would spend the money to create and maintain a web site designed from the ground up with accessibility in mind.
So my question is this: how can we as programmers etc. make accessibility to a web site (or set of web sites) translate into increased accessibility to service resources, etc. in the real world?
The idea that Open Source won't be mainstream because "...the developers tend to listen only to their smartest customers" because the smartest customers are also the early adapters that make any technology succeessful.So the literature review strikes me as being a statistical anomaly, that is asking the wrong question gets you the wrong answer.
Most Open Source software has historically had limited scope -- until the Web came along with all of the accompanying standards which anyone could right to. Oh, and a little known OS called Linux came along.
My view is that the problem hasn't been the overall software, it's the hardware and hardware interfaces.
Let's face it: no matter how sophisticated a user might be, if they don't want to configure my own machine, but I do want to use things like:
State of the art Graphics Cards,
scanners and digital cameras,
MIDI interfaced keyboards, etc.
Sound Cards,
DVD players,
most inkjet or laser printers, etc.
and have them work somewhat seemlessly out of the box(es) then I am pretty much stuck with the first ubiquotous / mainstream GUI OS's, AKA Windows or Macintosh.
Most of the knowledgable people I have talked to agreed that the thing that killed OS-2 in the short term was lack of good hardware drivers, not the lack of a killer application. Couple that with the lack of inexpensive, commonly available programming tools (IIRC IBM's Visual Age compilers were close to $1000 at tha time) meant that sophisticated but self-funded programmers (like yours truly) gave up trying to do any decent development work on anything but WinXX machines.
Linux changes all that because the tools are there or coming, many hardware drivers are also coming along (Open Sourced as well), and there are even Linux BIOS initiatives coming out. So I expect that within a similar period of time (5 years (?)) Open Source will have a much stronger market presence than it does now -- unless the US Gov't + big business (AKA MPAA, RIAA, and M$) manage to kill the whole movement dead for the average American consumer.
Admittedly weak about the lens sizes and other critical details, but I'm wondering if the Hubble Space telescope could be pointed at one of the sites where the astronauts rolled around in one of the Moon Buggies and getting a) tire tracks,or b) footprints
My personal favorite proof would be if NASA could turn a specific camera back on -- the one where the moon buggy sent back a picture of the LEM ascent module blasting off. 'Course the camera would have had been set up originall to be battery powered and solar rechargeable, etc. But if it was -- NASA could turn the thing back on, then let independent analysts verify the signal, location, timing, etc. -- and hopefully silence the cranks with a little thing known as the truth.
'xcuse me -- thought I'd pulled a Rip Van Winkle and woke up just in time for a Malda & Co. April Fools Joke.....Microsoft admitting that that content from Microsoft can't be trusted?
--note to self--
Consider buying stock in proposed Hades Ski and Ice Skating resort... it must be getting real cold down there about now, somewhere between slushy and completely frozen over.
Define major please....As pointed out in a number of previous articles and a/. interview , Janis Ian might not be on the mega- level, but she is considered a top level artist and she's already taken a stance against the establishment on these exact issues.
The question isn't one person: the artists are under contract to the recording labels and can get sued for breech. The question is if all, or enough of the major artists would work together as a group -- which they may not do unless they can be shown an economic advantage to take on their "bosses" in such a way that they can't be individually sued or blacklisted.
For those who will claim that the reason Mass Transit doesn't work is because it's not convenient, trying living in Japan for two to three months.
Although massively underwritten by the government originally -- and perhaps currently, I don't know -- you can get from point to point in Japan very reliably, whether the points are airports, train stations, or what is effectively a rice paddy at each end. Usually you'll depart and arrive within 1-3 minutes of your desired time without having to walk more than about a quarter kilometer. The schedules are published well in advance and worked out well enough that most of them haven't had to be changed in years. The transit is safe enough for children that they don't even need a separate school bus system. And, get this -- the system has been operating reliably for at least 25 years now, probably more, integrating buses, ferries, regular rail, and high speed (bullet train or "shinkansen") as the travel backbone through the whole country. In fact, 80% of the traffic on the major highways is small, highly efficient diesel trucks.
So why hasn't a similar system been developed in the US? Mainly for three reasons: the more expensive and difficult (but not impossible) to plan part being the scale of the system -- Japan has 120 million plus people in an area about the size of the state of California, the US about 2-1/2 times that -- in an area probably 25 times bigger (?)(not counting Alaska and Hawaii). The second reason? [BTW not the oil companies, who can't control what the people want or do nearly as well as most cranks think they can.] The structure of government in the US is very ineffective and dominated by special interests. Such that in the local areas, political machines try to design expensive "alternate" transportation systems such as light rail instead of "integrated rail corridors", within state governments where other spending priorities always manage to come first, and then nationally, where big government and big labor usually combine to promote an ineffecient status quo (preserves jobs, they say...), and special interest (pork barrel politics) projects take more precedence in the minds of Congress than the national interest -- even in case of emergency. Oh, and lest we forgot -- there's always a turf and money war between the municipalities, counties, states, and the fed for who gets to spend our hard earned money (taxes) and for what.
The final reason? a combination of necessity because for most non-mega urban and rural areas whatever mass transit exists is usually poorly connected and unreliable in terms of schedule, and consumer laziness. It's easier to get up and just drive to work than it is to arrange a car pool, park and ride, or efficient route plan where buses or buses/light rail etc. could actually do the job. So (at least in the mid - large city where I live, 86% of the vehicles during the rush hour periods are driving +15 miles each way with exactly one passenger (AKA the driver), while the mass transit are 70% empty.
Of which I am one, guilty as charged, but I don't have two hours to go 12 miles (buses only here) because of the bad connection, and my attempts to find or set up a car pool (3-4 people would work fine) have thus far gone nowhere.
More knowledgeable folks please correct me where I am wrong, but my initial reading of this section was that a outside vendor can't just willy put things into all menus, etc. For example, I would assume that Microsoft could prevent an outside vendor from putting links into the startup menu listed under "Microsoft Office". Similarly, if the Scientists OEM tools are on the platform, they have to be limited to their own menus and sub-menus, etc.
If my understanding is correct, this clause would prevent a vendor from essentially co-opting the menus of M$ installed software with their own tools, etc. which even an avowed M$ hater like myself would consider to be unethical.
You nailed it there. As a published playwright, (i.e. non-local production, paid admission, etc.) I can tell you that even though I'm not that old in calendar years, I've sometimes been labeled "old school" in terms of script writing style -- because I don't try to tell the directors how to direct and the actors how to act within the confines of the script. Which I hope translates to a freer story line and characterizations that more people can identify with.
Contrast the approach of "great dialogue + great plot = great story" with alot of what I have been reading lately -- supposedly great and prize winning recent plays -- which when read are "not much story, not much dialogue, endless staging instructions."
Which for a play or novel, etc. pretty much says pretty package, no depth, does it not?
I understand your point, but in this case, the asset was the right to "re-sell" (via a sales channel) the same number of licenses which were acquired in return for the $$.
But if K-mart chooses to re-sell the licenses as an asset en-block (having paid for the right to do so) to another company --even at the same dollar figure perhaps --apparently M$ thinks that they have the right to say no to HOW the licenses are resold.
Assuming that I was willing to buy any new x86 machines with an M$ operating system (which I'm not...), what difference is there when I as an end-user acquire the license to use the software on one machine by purchasing the PC, and then selling the whole PC to a friend, or giving it to my kid for college (if I was that old)? Is my kid supposed to pay for the license again now that I am no longer using it?
By the same logic, assuming that DVD's are coverd by digital copyright and the shrink wrap EULA says that it is license to view a digital product, doesn't that mean that if I buy a DVD and watch it once, then give it to a friend that the MPAA can't consider it a license and try to collect on the DVD again or brand my friend as a pirate?
My bottom line is that I hope that M$ gets smacked down hard and their butts sued all the way to the moon any time they try crap like this.
So it looks to me like this: If I pay $X million dollars to Microsoft for Y thousand licenses to Microsoft software, meaning I have exchanged a tangible asset (money) for a tangible asset (Y thousand boxes of licensed software).
I then decide to sell my asset(s) to another company Z, and Microsoft says that an unopened box of software which I paid for can't be resold to another company as an asset when as a retailer I could have sold it to that same company as "goods"? Where's the logic in that?
The web site may be out of date, but good writing never does. Laura, your HTML books are some of the best "tech training" manuals I have ever had the pleasure of reading and I hope you made more than a few pennies for your efforts. In fact, when I mentor new folks in web programming I tell the person I am mentoring to try to find one of your books at the library, Amazon, or where ever they can come up with it.
Folks, if you've never had the pleasure, consider this: How often do you end up laughing out loud about the supposed dangers of "ostrich farming" when you are actually learning what is essentially a programming language? So my thanks to Ms. Lemay and dannyg (plus the php crew) for many hours of amusement that got me from being literate as a C++ and SQL database designer to being able to do pretty darn good database backed web sites from design all the way through to release.
Granted I am dating myself here, but way back in 1981 I helped tweak a screen reader for the Apple II so that it would correctly read either the original 40x25 screen (which was interlaced, which made reading it from assembly a rather weird bit of code), or for one of the original 80x25 mod cards. The text was then sent out as a stream through the RS-232 port to an Echo 2 Speech synthesizer which had a phoneme chip and speaker, etc. Granted, compared to today's tech the Echo II is a piece of junk -- but at the time it had the advantages of being both cheap and somewhat easy to program in terms of phoneme translations. We also altered the reader code and text to speech sections of the code (in Applesoft Basic BTW) to implement a reader that would correctly pronounce text displayed on the screen that was written in Spanish or Romanized Japanese -- the only languages besides English which I spoke well enough to code for.) As far as I know it was the first "personal computer" based reader for the blind in the state where it was developed.
Not coincidentally, one on my pet projects that I want to spend time on is to make (or find if it already exists) a generic plug-in module in Mozilla that can do the same thing with no external hardware outside a vanilla PC sound card (or on board chip). Links anyone?
Although I don't have the 2nd edition yet, let me add a recommendation for anyone looking to learn or improve their coding and browswer scripting capabilities: Danny Goodman is one of the two authors whose books and sites are my "backbone" and reference points for all things Javascript and HTML/DHTML, the other being Laura Lemay. [Note: be nice to Laura and don't drop the/. effect on her web site -- copy the link or wait a bit and look it up later when the ravening/. hordes have moved on.]
Other authors may do more for back end programming in your specific back end platforms and tools of choice, but you won't do much better than these two for front end browser programming.
Good point, AC, I'd give you a moderator point if I had one available and you'd logged in.
In my case, for example, consider this: having done this for a few years now, I can set up one Linux or BSD based machine as a great web server capable of fully loading a T-1 or larger data pipe. Static pages, images, streaming software, dynamic pages, the whole nine yards. Could probably do a passable job setting up a set of machines to act as a transparent site even if it took setting up a small cluster of machines to handle the load (images on one machine, data on another, apps, etc. on the main web server, email somewhere else, etc.). I won't say that I could do it with half my brain tied behind my back, no sleep in a couple of days, one hand in a cast, or some big brag, but it's just not that difficult once you have done it a few times and hung around the security conscious folks enough to learn what it takes to secure a machine or set of machines from malicious outsiders. [Give me a couple decent developers and together we'd could make any site you wanted really scream in just a few days].
With my average or better web server setup skills, does this mean I am using my own server setup? No, and I don't plan to any time soon, because none of my skills can prevent a wonderfully configured site from getting/.'ed because the bottleneck isn't usually in the machine, but the size of the data pipe connected to it.
Consider this as well: I usually locate my sites at one of a few good web hosting companies that have good co-location points and massive datas pipe to/from their server farm(s). So the server and the data pipe can handle it, if I want. However, for most sites I set up, I don't want or need the risk of getting a surprise high dollar bandwidth bill because/. or similar is suddenly pointing at my site and hogging all of the hosting company's bandwidth? No. Do I want have or want to spend the money to set up my own data center? No.
Why not? Because IMHO one of the best things about the 'net is that it gives many people who would not otherwise be "heard" a place to give voice to whatever message they deem important. One of the worst things about the net is that some people confuse tech savvy with message, just as the previous poster did.
Do I have something worthwhile to say? Occasionally. Should you respect what I or another writer has to say, when it is worthwhile, no matter what bandwidth they have available to them? I hope so, and for myself I would rather listen to and support the person with one wise voice pushing text messages on a slow data pipe than spend my time and money on a thousand fools pushing worthless content on a fat one.
My thought exactly. Of course, as the SR-71's have shown, out of service does not necessarily mean gone. I mean, unless they gut the airframes for some really assinine reason, the EFs can probably still be reactivated easily should the need arise.
--humour mode on--
Probably won't happen. Might screw with the newz media too much if the USAF inadvertantly jammed all of the satellite phones in an area.
Well drop my jaw -- I didn't know that the EF-111's were gone!!
I wonder if this was a good thing i.e. the airframes and technology are now outdated and redundant or a McNamara-esque cost cutting trick a la destroying the tooling for the SR-71 Blackbird back in the late '60s...
Continuing your thoughts, for previous posters and any others that think that seeing it on a radar == the ability to shoot down a stealth craft, I'd like to offer a few reminders:
Spotting a fast moving (500 MPH plus is quicker than you might think....) plane on radar is one thing, keeping a fix on a stealthy one is another. When I was in northern Japan years ago, they did a test where some USAF air pilots were allowed to stage a mock attack (limited to subsonic speeds, BTW) on US airbase to see well how the ground forces could fight off an attack without an AWAC providing early warning. Not one missile controller or anti-aircraft unit was even aimed close enough to even be considered as pointed in the right direction -- before that unit would have disappeared in a brief but spectacular bang/boom/blast.
All USAF aircraft have had increasingly sophisticated ECM gear (electronic countermeasures), decoys, etc. since the mid 1980's. So even if you get a missile or missiles airborn, you still have to track the craft long enough to hit it with four or five different attempts.
Stealth aircraft usually don't fly solo. Hard to get your radar pointed at the stealth aircraft when either the stealth craft or some friendly F-15 that just happens to usually be in the neighborhood is dropping anti-radar missiles on your radars, command and control sites, etc. Similarly if there just happens to be an EF-111 jammer in the neighborhood, the only radars that can work are those the USAF doesn't choose to jam. IIRC eight EF-111's can jamn a region the size of Eutope...
The Saudi Air force called the F-117 a "devil plane", because they could point their radar units at it while it was sitting still on the runway and not get a good return.
There's a good reason that the USAF and USN air wing, etc. take out the enemy's high tech immediately in a conflict, and very few countries in the world that can even dream of stopping that kind of aerial onslaught for more than a few hours.
Jumping in late here (having a)read all of the posts, and b) having done applications for just about every type of database programming out there in one assignment or another, I think most of the posts are missing a key point: even a fairly complex GUI has to start by "keeping it simple, sir..." (Yes, I know what the fourth word is supposed to be, but hey, I'm in a nice mood today.) In other words, design the GUI by seeking to answer the question, how does a particular class of user get the exact right view of whatever it is he/she/it needs to see with the minimum amount of work? Ideally this should be done for every level of user that will interact with the data, from the lowly data entry folks on up to the CEO.
Then the second level of the design -- how do I reveal an overview of the complex issues behind the simple display? For example, assume that in an "executive dashboard" type GUI, you have a bar graph showing the status of some part of a mission critical project as "yellow", i.e. may be in trouble but isn't "red" yet. Assume that by clicking in the GUI, the executive can get an overview and that further clicks drill down to the details of why the project is at risk.
Similarly, maybe the project manager for the component sees a similar dashboard, but instead of the higher level view, it shows the parts of the project, including the critical yello piece. You can progressively use the same type of display for different job functions, and the meaning behind the yellow bar changes, but the GUI doesn't. To the data entry person logging parts into the warehouse, maybe yellow is how he looks for back orders, finds the missing component that the widget group needs, scans it in, and the effect up the chain is to "lower the amount of yellow" because it was the critical piece. The GUI code to make this happen is complex, but the design and analysis make the meanings simple to comprehend.
The best example I can think of is the heads up display in the later versions of the USAF and USN fighter aircraft -- the pilot's had way to much data to handle, so they simplified the "GUI" and projected to where it could be seen as part of the pilot doing the job without nearly as much effort. The same type of data could then be fed back to the commanders, etc. in displays so that without bothering the pilot "how much fuel do you have left?" they have a heads up that in essence tells them to get the "next set of patrol aircraft ready because Viper needs to come off-station in 20 minutes" -- because Viper two shows up yellow on the commander's head's up display. So The "++" is that if you do the design right, you can eliminate a whole lot of extra (e.g. opportunities for bad) coding and/or business decisions in the systems interfacing between between the executive level and the data entry clerk --or whatever the particular user sets might be.
Even ignoring the even more sticky realm of trademark protections, corporate copyrights would still be a sticky mess.
Assume that John Williams as a composer has the copyright on the musical score to Star Wars (1977), for example. He and/or his inheritors, for example would hold the copyright for death plus X years. If that particular part of the copyright is sold to Lucasfilm as a company, then they should in theory owns the copyright for the same number of years because it was an author's copyright, even though the author has no further financial interest [having sold it to the company]. Which is why most book publishers insist on getting the copyright instead of the author, by the way.
So how does a corporate copy "right" fit into the constitutional framework if the author, etc. has no further or future financial interest?
Or consider the opposite -- the film copyright expires, but not the musical copyright. Does this mean that John Williams and his inheritors can then de-facto control the re-distribution of Star Wars because without his score the movie just isn't the same?
You almost nailed it, except for one thing. When the U.S. Constitution was written, there was no recognized rights for what we now call a "corporation" -- that came later, around the turn of the century (1900) if I am remembering correctly. And corporations don't die, usually they are perpetual. So if a corporation owns a profitable work because of copyright, they have an incentive to extend copyrights indefinitely.
So I for one would be satisfied if the concept of a corporate copyright was much more limited than an individual's copyright, although this is probably impossible to implement because films, etc. may have more than one source in terms of composers, authors, etc.
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Here's my logic: Counter Flow heat exchangers can be up to about 90% efficient, heat pipes possibly more so, and keep in mind that the refridgerator is operating much more of the time than you are taking the shower. So it has a lot of time to supply heat into the water supply So assume an ambient water temp of say 70 degrees (F), and 90% of your 40 degree heat drop. (70 + .9*40 = 106).
Granted, this isn't enough to kill all of the household microbial nasties (IIRC that takes something like 140 degrees F). Still, if all I have to do is heat the water the rest of the way to the required final temp, it'd would still make a fairly significant dent in the home energy bill, especially if (like I do in my house) you're using radiant heating instead of a furnace. Assuming that the efficiency of the fridge isn't too much lower than the currently marketd ones.
First, for soundproofing the easiest method would be to place the sound source and the hot/cold plates in a "double, hollow walled box" evacuate most of the air between the hollow walls. This leaves no way for the sound waves to propogate outside the cooling unit. The cooling effect takes place outside of the hollow walled box because the fridge will still presumably circulate a fluid (which has absorbed heat in the refrigerator box through the cooling unit and back to the fridge/freezer. So there's wouldn't be a sound source even when the refridgerator is opened. Then put a sound sensor outside the box that shuts down the fridge if the vacumn fails and the sound rises above a certain level.
The second reason is that the current insulation in the refridgerator is still required --and the more the better-- to keep the heat from the rest of the world outside of the refrigerator or freezer box.
What I find more interesting than the projected "energy" savings (which I would have to see the science and the experimental data before I'd bank on), is that there is no compressor to wear out, no refrigerants, etc. Conceivably a service call would be something on the order of "open the sound box, unclip the sound driver, put in a new one", right?
I wonder what the heat output on the hot side is -- enough to supply a home's hot water needs, perhaps?
Granted, this is hardware speed, so encoding the massive data steam from the camera into a compressed but high quality playback format is another task for another machine or machines. But I'm still impressed.
As an example of why, take three of these, throw in some quality studio lighting, and come up with some editing software and hardware to mix the feeds together -- it looks to me like a person [with the technical knowledge to use the equipment and get good looking results] could create their own low cost production facility -- while still delivering image quality higher than is currently broadcast by most network and/or cable TV channels.
For example, if regardless of disability (deaf, blind, motion disabilities come to mind) an individual could access a common site to call for a local taxicab service, etc. However, I doubt that there's a cab company in existence that would spend the money to create and maintain a web site designed from the ground up with accessibility in mind.
So my question is this: how can we as programmers etc. make accessibility to a web site (or set of web sites) translate into increased accessibility to service resources, etc. in the real world?
Most Open Source software has historically had limited scope -- until the Web came along with all of the accompanying standards which anyone could right to. Oh, and a little known OS called Linux came along.
My view is that the problem hasn't been the overall software, it's the hardware and hardware interfaces.
Let's face it: no matter how sophisticated a user might be, if they don't want to configure my own machine, but I do want to use things like:
- State of the art Graphics Cards,
- scanners and digital cameras,
- MIDI interfaced keyboards, etc.
- Sound Cards,
- DVD players,
- most inkjet or laser printers, etc.
and have them work somewhat seemlessly out of the box(es) then I am pretty much stuck with the first ubiquotous / mainstream GUI OS's, AKA Windows or Macintosh.Most of the knowledgable people I have talked to agreed that the thing that killed OS-2 in the short term was lack of good hardware drivers, not the lack of a killer application. Couple that with the lack of inexpensive, commonly available programming tools (IIRC IBM's Visual Age compilers were close to $1000 at tha time) meant that sophisticated but self-funded programmers (like yours truly) gave up trying to do any decent development work on anything but WinXX machines.
Linux changes all that because the tools are there or coming, many hardware drivers are also coming along (Open Sourced as well), and there are even Linux BIOS initiatives coming out. So I expect that within a similar period of time (5 years (?)) Open Source will have a much stronger market presence than it does now -- unless the US Gov't + big business (AKA MPAA, RIAA, and M$) manage to kill the whole movement dead for the average American consumer.
My personal favorite proof would be if NASA could turn a specific camera back on -- the one where the moon buggy sent back a picture of the LEM ascent module blasting off. 'Course the camera would have had been set up originall to be battery powered and solar rechargeable, etc. But if it was -- NASA could turn the thing back on, then let independent analysts verify the signal, location, timing, etc. -- and hopefully silence the cranks with a little thing known as the truth.
--note to self--
Consider buying stock in proposed Hades Ski and Ice Skating resort... it must be getting real cold down there about now, somewhere between slushy and completely frozen over.
The question isn't one person: the artists are under contract to the recording labels and can get sued for breech. The question is if all, or enough of the major artists would work together as a group -- which they may not do unless they can be shown an economic advantage to take on their "bosses" in such a way that they can't be individually sued or blacklisted.
Although massively underwritten by the government originally -- and perhaps currently, I don't know -- you can get from point to point in Japan very reliably, whether the points are airports, train stations, or what is effectively a rice paddy at each end. Usually you'll depart and arrive within 1-3 minutes of your desired time without having to walk more than about a quarter kilometer. The schedules are published well in advance and worked out well enough that most of them haven't had to be changed in years. The transit is safe enough for children that they don't even need a separate school bus system. And, get this -- the system has been operating reliably for at least 25 years now, probably more, integrating buses, ferries, regular rail, and high speed (bullet train or "shinkansen") as the travel backbone through the whole country. In fact, 80% of the traffic on the major highways is small, highly efficient diesel trucks.
So why hasn't a similar system been developed in the US? Mainly for three reasons: the more expensive and difficult (but not impossible) to plan part being the scale of the system -- Japan has 120 million plus people in an area about the size of the state of California, the US about 2-1/2 times that -- in an area probably 25 times bigger (?)(not counting Alaska and Hawaii). The second reason? [BTW not the oil companies, who can't control what the people want or do nearly as well as most cranks think they can.] The structure of government in the US is very ineffective and dominated by special interests. Such that in the local areas, political machines try to design expensive "alternate" transportation systems such as light rail instead of "integrated rail corridors", within state governments where other spending priorities always manage to come first, and then nationally, where big government and big labor usually combine to promote an ineffecient status quo (preserves jobs, they say...), and special interest (pork barrel politics) projects take more precedence in the minds of Congress than the national interest -- even in case of emergency. Oh, and lest we forgot -- there's always a turf and money war between the municipalities, counties, states, and the fed for who gets to spend our hard earned money (taxes) and for what.
The final reason? a combination of necessity because for most non-mega urban and rural areas whatever mass transit exists is usually poorly connected and unreliable in terms of schedule, and consumer laziness. It's easier to get up and just drive to work than it is to arrange a car pool, park and ride, or efficient route plan where buses or buses/light rail etc. could actually do the job. So (at least in the mid - large city where I live, 86% of the vehicles during the rush hour periods are driving +15 miles each way with exactly one passenger (AKA the driver), while the mass transit are 70% empty.
Of which I am one, guilty as charged, but I don't have two hours to go 12 miles (buses only here) because of the bad connection, and my attempts to find or set up a car pool (3-4 people would work fine) have thus far gone nowhere.
If my understanding is correct, this clause would prevent a vendor from essentially co-opting the menus of M$ installed software with their own tools, etc. which even an avowed M$ hater like myself would consider to be unethical.
Contrast the approach of "great dialogue + great plot = great story" with alot of what I have been reading lately -- supposedly great and prize winning recent plays -- which when read are "not much story, not much dialogue, endless staging instructions."
Which for a play or novel, etc. pretty much says pretty package, no depth, does it not?
But if K-mart chooses to re-sell the licenses as an asset en-block (having paid for the right to do so) to another company --even at the same dollar figure perhaps --apparently M$ thinks that they have the right to say no to HOW the licenses are resold.
Assuming that I was willing to buy any new x86 machines with an M$ operating system (which I'm not...), what difference is there when I as an end-user acquire the license to use the software on one machine by purchasing the PC, and then selling the whole PC to a friend, or giving it to my kid for college (if I was that old)? Is my kid supposed to pay for the license again now that I am no longer using it?
By the same logic, assuming that DVD's are coverd by digital copyright and the shrink wrap EULA says that it is license to view a digital product, doesn't that mean that if I buy a DVD and watch it once, then give it to a friend that the MPAA can't consider it a license and try to collect on the DVD again or brand my friend as a pirate?
My bottom line is that I hope that M$ gets smacked down hard and their butts sued all the way to the moon any time they try crap like this.
Interesting -- yes. Thanks for the link.
I then decide to sell my asset(s) to another company Z, and Microsoft says that an unopened box of software which I paid for can't be resold to another company as an asset when as a retailer I could have sold it to that same company as "goods"? Where's the logic in that?
Folks, if you've never had the pleasure, consider this: How often do you end up laughing out loud about the supposed dangers of "ostrich farming" when you are actually learning what is essentially a programming language? So my thanks to Ms. Lemay and dannyg (plus the php crew) for many hours of amusement that got me from being literate as a C++ and SQL database designer to being able to do pretty darn good database backed web sites from design all the way through to release.
Not coincidentally, one on my pet projects that I want to spend time on is to make (or find if it already exists) a generic plug-in module in Mozilla that can do the same thing with no external hardware outside a vanilla PC sound card (or on board chip). Links anyone?
Other authors may do more for back end programming in your specific back end platforms and tools of choice, but you won't do much better than these two for front end browser programming.
In my case, for example, consider this: having done this for a few years now, I can set up one Linux or BSD based machine as a great web server capable of fully loading a T-1 or larger data pipe. Static pages, images, streaming software, dynamic pages, the whole nine yards. Could probably do a passable job setting up a set of machines to act as a transparent site even if it took setting up a small cluster of machines to handle the load (images on one machine, data on another, apps, etc. on the main web server, email somewhere else, etc.). I won't say that I could do it with half my brain tied behind my back, no sleep in a couple of days, one hand in a cast, or some big brag, but it's just not that difficult once you have done it a few times and hung around the security conscious folks enough to learn what it takes to secure a machine or set of machines from malicious outsiders. [Give me a couple decent developers and together we'd could make any site you wanted really scream in just a few days].
With my average or better web server setup skills, does this mean I am using my own server setup? No, and I don't plan to any time soon, because none of my skills can prevent a wonderfully configured site from getting /.'ed because the bottleneck isn't usually in the machine, but the size of the data pipe connected to it.
Consider this as well: I usually locate my sites at one of a few good web hosting companies that have good co-location points and massive datas pipe to/from their server farm(s). So the server and the data pipe can handle it, if I want. However, for most sites I set up, I don't want or need the risk of getting a surprise high dollar bandwidth bill because /. or similar is suddenly pointing at my site and hogging all of the hosting company's bandwidth? No. Do I want have or want to spend the money to set up my own data center? No.
Why not? Because IMHO one of the best things about the 'net is that it gives many people who would not otherwise be "heard" a place to give voice to whatever message they deem important. One of the worst things about the net is that some people confuse tech savvy with message, just as the previous poster did.
Do I have something worthwhile to say? Occasionally. Should you respect what I or another writer has to say, when it is worthwhile, no matter what bandwidth they have available to them? I hope so, and for myself I would rather listen to and support the person with one wise voice pushing text messages on a slow data pipe than spend my time and money on a thousand fools pushing worthless content on a fat one.
--humour mode on--
Probably won't happen. Might screw with the newz media too much if the USAF inadvertantly jammed all of the satellite phones in an area.
I wonder if this was a good thing i.e. the airframes and technology are now outdated and redundant or a McNamara-esque cost cutting trick a la destroying the tooling for the SR-71 Blackbird back in the late '60s...
- Spotting a fast moving (500 MPH plus is quicker than you might think....) plane on radar is one thing, keeping a fix on a stealthy one is another. When I was in northern Japan years ago, they did a test where some USAF air pilots were allowed to stage a mock attack (limited to subsonic speeds, BTW) on US airbase to see well how the ground forces could fight off an attack without an AWAC providing early warning. Not one missile controller or anti-aircraft unit was even aimed close enough to even be considered as pointed in the right direction -- before that unit would have disappeared in a brief but spectacular bang/boom/blast.
- All USAF aircraft have had increasingly sophisticated ECM gear (electronic countermeasures), decoys, etc. since the mid 1980's. So even if you get a missile or missiles airborn, you still have to track the craft long enough to hit it with four or five different attempts.
- Stealth aircraft usually don't fly solo. Hard to get your radar pointed at the stealth aircraft when either the stealth craft or some friendly F-15 that just happens to usually be in the neighborhood is dropping anti-radar missiles on your radars, command and control sites, etc. Similarly if there just happens to be an EF-111 jammer in the neighborhood, the only radars that can work are those the USAF doesn't choose to jam. IIRC eight EF-111's can jamn a region the size of Eutope...
- The Saudi Air force called the F-117 a "devil plane", because they could point their radar units at it while it was sitting still on the runway and not get a good return.
There's a good reason that the USAF and USN air wing, etc. take out the enemy's high tech immediately in a conflict, and very few countries in the world that can even dream of stopping that kind of aerial onslaught for more than a few hours.Then the second level of the design -- how do I reveal an overview of the complex issues behind the simple display? For example, assume that in an "executive dashboard" type GUI, you have a bar graph showing the status of some part of a mission critical project as "yellow", i.e. may be in trouble but isn't "red" yet. Assume that by clicking in the GUI, the executive can get an overview and that further clicks drill down to the details of why the project is at risk.
Similarly, maybe the project manager for the component sees a similar dashboard, but instead of the higher level view, it shows the parts of the project, including the critical yello piece. You can progressively use the same type of display for different job functions, and the meaning behind the yellow bar changes, but the GUI doesn't. To the data entry person logging parts into the warehouse, maybe yellow is how he looks for back orders, finds the missing component that the widget group needs, scans it in, and the effect up the chain is to "lower the amount of yellow" because it was the critical piece. The GUI code to make this happen is complex, but the design and analysis make the meanings simple to comprehend.
The best example I can think of is the heads up display in the later versions of the USAF and USN fighter aircraft -- the pilot's had way to much data to handle, so they simplified the "GUI" and projected to where it could be seen as part of the pilot doing the job without nearly as much effort. The same type of data could then be fed back to the commanders, etc. in displays so that without bothering the pilot "how much fuel do you have left?" they have a heads up that in essence tells them to get the "next set of patrol aircraft ready because Viper needs to come off-station in 20 minutes" -- because Viper two shows up yellow on the commander's head's up display. So The "++" is that if you do the design right, you can eliminate a whole lot of extra (e.g. opportunities for bad) coding and/or business decisions in the systems interfacing between between the executive level and the data entry clerk --or whatever the particular user sets might be.
Assume that John Williams as a composer has the copyright on the musical score to Star Wars (1977), for example. He and/or his inheritors, for example would hold the copyright for death plus X years. If that particular part of the copyright is sold to Lucasfilm as a company, then they should in theory owns the copyright for the same number of years because it was an author's copyright, even though the author has no further financial interest [having sold it to the company]. Which is why most book publishers insist on getting the copyright instead of the author, by the way.
So how does a corporate copy "right" fit into the constitutional framework if the author, etc. has no further or future financial interest?
Or consider the opposite -- the film copyright expires, but not the musical copyright. Does this mean that John Williams and his inheritors can then de-facto control the re-distribution of Star Wars because without his score the movie just isn't the same?
So I for one would be satisfied if the concept of a corporate copyright was much more limited than an individual's copyright, although this is probably impossible to implement because films, etc. may have more than one source in terms of composers, authors, etc.