I dislike the idea of a person being able to moderate their own comments, but if there have been times that if such a system were in place, I'd burn Karma points to lift someone else's particularly insightful comment, (like your ideas perhaps)into a higher score than one point would do, or if I didn't have moderator points that day.
As far as default posts at "2", you make some good points. In the current system, my understandign is that someone posts at "2" they risk getting dinged down, so the risk is to "lose voice" if they drop below the "cap". This is sort of like letting the folks who have had something valuable to say in the past act sort of like trusted guests on a News show.
Hmmm... two thoughts, putting them up for devil's advocacy:
What if instead of an overall karma score/cap, they changed the code so that a person developed karma in the areas they have been moderated up in? Then they could sort of choose the type of post they were trying to make. For example, I'm usually about as funny as a freeze dried potato, so unless I had a bunch of karma for funny posts, I wouldn't be able to post an attempted funny at a default higher score.
The second is right in line with your idea of (2,funny). I wonder how hard it would be to put a more specific filter than "browse at +2", so that if I wanted, I could browse for the (2, funnys), or the (2, insightful), etc. Not sure, but it seems like it could lower the overall bandwidth requirement as less text per page might be sent, but could also cost machine time if a person reloaded and read each page using several different filter sets.
Hmmm. May have to jump back into the / code and see what it would take for my own site to use this idea. What do y'all think?
First of all, in terms of web technology patents, this seems to be very, very good news.
After I RTF-D (read the f---ing decision), the main thing I came away with is the sense that the bar has been raised for what a company can get away with in terms of preliminary injunctions related to the so-called "business method, internet, etc." patents. To quote the article:
the CAFC ruled that preliminary injunctive relief is only appropriate in patent cases if the patentee can show a likelihood of infringement by the defendant, and that the infringement claim would likely withstand challenges to the validity and enforceability of the patent. "
No one questioned whether or not Barnes and Noble, et. al were using "one-click" type website buying mechanisms that most likely violated Amazon's patent. But the circuit court found that unless the patent is solid enough to withstand a challenge, a preliminary injunction shouldn't be granted. Which I agree with, BTW.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the practical meaning of this is that before Amazon or anybody decides to go for a preliminary injunction, they had now better be prepared to spend the legal dollars for a full-fledged trial to defend the validity of a patent right up front.
My concern is this: what about the little inventor who gains a patent, and does not have the money to fight that kind of legal battle against, for example, a larger company? Could this decision be used by companies with deep legal pockets in a way that actually makes it alot more difficult for the small guys to succeed in developing, patenting, and bringing a product to the market? What do you think?
Actually, the weather would be my first concern. No use having a system if it either dies a weather related death, or can't be used because of the weather. So an optically neutral case camera shell like they use underwater would be important, but for cycling, this would have to be made or purchased in a low-drag version. Water-proof, low drag casings for the electronics and computing devices would be required as well. As to Heat and humidity dissipation--those are good questions, don't have the answers myself.
10 lbs can be quite a load when biking for 500 milesActually, I would hope to optimize this down to maybe 5-6 pounds, but your point is still valid. However, it seems like with a mix of uphill/downhill parts of the ride, that minimizing aerodynamic drag would be a larger concern --> cyclers, what do you think?
Finally as to the actual electronics, I like the idea of the Handspring, as you described it, but I thought the whole point was semi-real time updating of the race web-site. Secondarily, the reason I would go with a digicam with a microdrive is that it holds 340 MB, presumably enough for a whole day's shooting, without requiring the rider to either stop and swap, or hot-swap the high-res image storage.
BTW, you can send the crazy party pictures to my website at http://.... *grin*
I understand your point, but don't have enough knowledge to realistically agree or disagree, which is why I put this secondary post up.
The two questions which IMHO would need to be answered to favor a dynamo over a solar panel would be
a) which creates more of a drag burden, the dynamo on the wheel, or the weight and aerodynamic drag of the solar panel? and
b)if the base drag in item a) favors the dynamo, does this advantage continue even with the supporting electronics required to deliver the kind of presumably non-spiky power to the electronic devices in terms of voltage?
By the way, if you look at these voltage and current output figures for a crystalline solar cell, a small (12"x12") module would provide well more than enough power (over 100 watts) to the system. So huge isn't required.
This is a classic case of knowing which problem to solve first, then building a system that doesn't break the solution (to the first problem). What I am getting at is that if you don't consider the camera POV, you might end up with a wonderful system to collect and transmit ultimately worthless pictures in terms of quality. It also almost goes without saying that all of the electronic equipment needs to be suitably protected from bad weather and road dust/muck, etc.
So here's my specs for a cam setup that could get reasonably interesting pictures:
Vibrational stability. No use getting jittery, blurred pix, right?
Aimability. What if the most interesting pic of the moment isn't directly ahead? This might include lens with a moderate amount of wide angle/zoom capability. This could probably be accomplished with a semi-custom tripod head fitting.
To go with aimability, etc. I would add detachability -- in case the bicyle it is mounted on were damaged, the setup could be moved. Secondarily there are many more interesting pix to be had when the riders aren't actually in motion, and finally
Reasonably high resolution and color depth, because even if you are transmitting images live, how many people can watch the whole seven day race? So back at the web server end, and after the race is finished, you want to have better than average pix as a result of all the effort.
All of this says that what you probably want on the handlebars is a fairly decent megapixel camera, probably the one that uses an IBM microdrive -- one I have heard of can store 1500 pictures. (Which would be about one a minute for 12 hours), assuming that the cam uses AA batteries, so that a recharger can takes care of the continued power requirements. Nearly all the good digital cams have USB, so you have an easy connection to the device which will be responsible for image collection and transmission.
Then we have to consider the other end: transmitting the image without a high speed data link. Since high res, high color pix require major bandwidth, the collector has to be able to compress the incoming images, probably resized for web page formatting, and perhaps tagged so that the high res pix from the camera can later be uploaded and replace the lower res image or be available from a thumbnail.
Probably requires more than a PDA. So my vote goes to the smallest Transmeta-powered device capable of the image processing, equipped with a wireless PC-MIA modem of some type. (Clueless about the best communication option here, fellow/.'ers, help me out!) Finally, I would think that a person would need a small solar panel to keep all of the devices and batteries charged, so the Transmeta device would rest just under the solar panel probably on a cushioned rack above the back wheel.
Still weighs alot less than 20 lbs, I would think, and positioned properly shouldn't add that much drag. Best I can do but fellow readers, what do you think?
No, cars charge their batteries via an alternator, which is driven by the engine via a rubber belt.
As far as using a dynamo on the wheel, it wouldn't work really well because in most cases the voltage fluctuates too much based on the rider's speed, thus requiring additional electrical conditioning equipment and weight, and would in all probability tire the rider out very quickly if he/she intended to keep the whole setup powered throughout the day.
The best probably power scenario is for a small solar panel (30cm^2 or so) positioned relative to the bike's motion to provide a minimum amount of drag.
...except that I am currently registering my domains with other registrars, having had it up to the my neck with NSI.
So if ICANN says that Verisign effectively gets control of.com,.net, and to some extent, what a person can do with.org, what about the other non-NSI registrars?
Sounds dangerously like a quasi-governmental agency enforcing a business monopoly on the most important current web tld's, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?
Re: A giant expensive bunker is not necessary.
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Agreed about the major university part, except for two things, in combination with the stated design goal of rebuilding the infrastructure fairly quickly.
Assume that the catastrophe has taken down all of the electronics above ground and not shut down at the time of the cataclysmic event:
How are you going to fabricate your first chip(s)without the ability to easily create litho masks, burn the masks into silicon, etc.
Once you've got the chips and motherboard (including all of the support chips, communication chips, memory, display logic -- a huge load), compilers, etc. completed, how do you communicate the requirements, etc. so that others can build other fab plants, etc. without an operational press to print the books, specs, etc.
In order for your information to be dispersed, the equipment required to do so has to survive as well. Ergo the concrete bunker, cave, etc.
--Humor Mode On-- Of course, most of the major universities I've visited put at least part of the IT people in cubibles deep underground, don't they? Keep us out of sight, out of mind? --Humor Mode Off--
the airforce and navy would be nearly gone, there specialties rely heavily on technology. SAC/MAC/TAC missions would be un-achievable....the army and marines would be only used near military bases.
Yes, but if this was a world calamity, everyone else would be in the same boat. Even then if some large power managed to come up with an invasion force, they'd have to contend with the sheer number of firearms -- and bullets owned by us crazy Americans.
So the danger isn't from without, it's from within -- and that's why we would all have to stick together to make it through. Paraphrasing what Ben Franklin is reputed to have said, "We must all hang together, for surely if we don't we will all be hung apart". Same idea, 225 years later.
Continued good points. I aim to address just one of them: communication in a martial law environment, without electronics.
First we'll work on the communications part, then the message to be communicated.
Assume that any motor vehicle with a chip in it is dead. That still leaves alot of smaller vehicles, horses, etc. to get the word out. For the sake of argument let's also include working rail service, okay? Within a short time, assuming the right word gets out, small communication nets form, even if it is just passing paper hand to hand like the pony express. Then somebody remembers that you can send morse code over bare wires, so we have telegraph capability fairly quickly.
So the whole issue becomes one of controlling mobocracy in the early stages before it can disintegrate a rational society into us vs. them warring factions.
So what is the message? Something like this: "A major catastrophe has happened. The hospitals are still working and we are trying to restore services and transportation as soon as possible and can use all the help me can get. Martial law has been declared to prevent mobocracy, which will be punishable by immediate incarceration and or military response. If anyone among you starts hate-mongering, you will be incarcerated (free speech gets limited under martial law, remember?) Inciting to riot will get you shot... (contains the human beasts).
Now then, for the more civilization oriented folks: "Here are the rules under which we will operate until the basic infrastructure can be rebuilt. Communicate you needs within your small network, and we'll try to meet the most urgent needs amongst the various networks." From there, it is merely a matter of strengthening the trade and communications capabilities amongst and within the networks.
Hmmm. Sounds an awful lot like what happens in the good ole USA, or for that matter, any rationally functioning society after a flood, tornado, earthquake, etc., doesn't it? Which is I have faith that we as a people would survive, and then shortly thereafter, decide to make this world a place in which we all can not only survive, but thrive.
"But how would be get our computers back" the geek wails, utterly oblivious...blah blah blah..."
<RANT MODE>
Okay, let's play slam the geeks. Oblivious to what 90% of the geeks are up to which is not playing quake.
Want a good job pre-apocalypse? Try specializing in medical technology using computers. You know, those little computers that can read if you have a heartbeat, interpret an MRI, let skilled doctors around the world communicate...
Or Telecommunications, letting those doctors communicate. Or CAM (computer aided manufacturing). I could go on for pages on how the silicon God we've created is our servant, and not just a plaything.</RANT MODE>
The original question about rebuilding comes down to knowing how to build the tech. And even if the only thing that survived were a late '90's PC with the appropriate software, CD-ROM knowledge collections, etc. and a printer, we'd still be reable to rebuild everything else faster. So, surprise, surprise, many geeks -- otherwise known as technologists -- are greatly involved in your current reality, and not just on the fringes you attacked.
Re:Loss of computers == America as 3rd world count
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Interesting. I agree with most of your points, but not the conclusions, especially the idea that America would equal a 3rd World country.
That assumes the total collapse of the American people as a group willing to help each other rebuild. 'Xcuse me but the last time I checked the good people of the USA are leading the world in charitable contributions.
As to the rest of your points, doctors aren't suddenly going to go stupid -- they still know that vaccines and antibiotics are the front line against disease. One gallon of chlorine bleach will still decontaminate somewhere around a thousand gallons of water, and putting water in a clear, sealed bottle in the sunlight will do the same thing in about 4 hrs.
The farmer still needs to milk his cattle and get crops out, so the real question isn't loss of the IT economy, it's how to survive without the petroleum economy. (biodiesel, btw).
Thus the most important question of all is why I think America would still lead the world, if not economically, then in the self-evident truths that made us who we are: if most of us still believe, that for the most part we're all in this together -- though we may have different skin colors, hold belief(s) in a different God(s) -- that all men, created equal, deserve a chance to not only survive, but thrive.
And whether you, I and enough like minded people keep believing in the American dream fought for in many wars, and not just the economic self-interest first version we're currently wallowing in.
How to create a survivable knowledge base. Obviously the ability to recreate an electronic world is based on the ability to re-create the fabrication technologies required to build the circuit boards and chips. Wiping the slate clean of current systems doesn't allow a quick restoration, because the fabrication technology is based on those current systems and the very intelligent people who designed them, current limitations and all.
So the real questions become:
How do we isolate a system capable of holding the fabrication knowledge base (to survive all but a world-ending catastrophe). A concrete bunker outside the catastrophe zone with a powered down system, generator, and fuel accomplishes this.
Obviously the right software needs to be available to the system, with the right i/o devices: we might as well be able to create the litho masks for current transistor technologies rather than returning to the circuit densities of the '60's; C++, Java, and other web tech instead of Cobol and CICS); scanners with OCR as opposed to keypunch machines, etc.)
What is the required publication technology, so that the needed information can be reproduced in a non-electronic matter? A small web-press with appropriate paper supplies, ink, and water would accomplish this, with the appropriate supporting bindery equipment (to make leaflets, brochures, magazines, and books).
Highly intelligent, ethical people willing to look at and seek to avoid past mistakes (including those inherent in the powered down system, supporting agriculture and trade (for raw materials), and a defending army to allow them to restore the tech base.
Say, sounds something like David Brin's novel The Postman doesn't it? (not the movie version, btw).
Hey, I'll provide the cave and the backup systems. Anybody want to lend me a few bazillion dollars to do the rest? *grin*
More seriously though how long do you think it will be before M$ comes up with some kind of "fix" for WinXX that essentially breaks Plex86's ability to run? (Like they tried to do with the install of Win98 -- which disables other boot managers...
I'm sure that those who know kernel issues better than I do will correct any inaccuracies in my admittedly basic response, but the reason which I've heard stated most often is that the big iron requires features that just aren't needed, and are in fact monstrous resource hogs on "little iron", i.e. lesser powered PC's. So putting in those resources risks losing alot of users on lower powered machines to gain a few users on extremely powerful ones, which IMHO is not the best trade.
There is also some talk of actually having a fork in the code so that there can be a big iron Linux and regular Linux, by the way.
Assume Judge R. were to recuse himself from the case, and we now have eight justices. What happens in the event of a 4-4 vote?
Has anything like that happened before, and if so, what would happen next? Would the lower court's ruling stand, or would M$ be in the clear? Hmmmm....
Okay/. legal scholars, (including the IANAL bunch), whadya think?
The text introducing the link leads one to believe that someone got their hands on an internal company document such as the Halloween documents (someone post the URL, if needed, please) which caused Microsoft so many problems.
Even if some of the details were supposed to be "highly confidential", the fact that Intel employees were giving information to what is essentially a content website erases that idea somewhat.
The information may be completely accurate or not, but it is the writer(s) at Sharkey Extreme who have put together the roadmap which we are reading, not Intel.
1/2 credit for an almost correct summation of why many of us are boycotting Amazon. By itself, most of us wouldn't care that Amazon patented the "One click" idea, no matter how obbious it was, because some other company could have applied for and probably got the same patent.
The main thing we are worried about is that instead of using the patent defensively the way most big operations do, Amazon decided to use it offensively in that they launched legal action(s) against other companies / websites using the same idea.
Which means that potentially Amazon's lawyers could go after every mom and pop web site out there that came up with a way of allowing their own customers to "one click order", even if those mom and pop businesses don't even compete with Amazon in any way.
The clarification is that I don't think that Sun bought Cobalt to kill them off. My question is much more along the lines of "Will the cost of maintaining Sun's mammoth presence in the "Big Iron" marketing arena keep them from properly supporting Cobalt?"
The best comparisons that I can think of are Microsoft buying Foxpro and Lotus' decision to not market the highly touted Improv spreadsheet which they had purchased and which was clearly superior to the company cash-cow (1-2-3) in many ways.
Granted, you can still by Foxpro, but it is way behind MS-Access and MS-SQL Server in terms of marketing priority.
Think about it this way: given equivalent marketing resources, do you put higher priority on marketing the high dollar product with a 10:1 profit margin, or the low dollar market with a 1.1 to 1 profit margin. The only time you go for the second is when you can sell sufficient volume to overcome the loss of revenue in the high profit area due to the dilution of the marketing budget.
So the mucking up Cobalt happens if some Sun exec sees that they can't make as much money on the Cobalt line (at least in the short term) and pulls the marketing and support dollars away from the lower end servers in order to prop up sales of the high end, like IBM did to OS-2, effectively killing an otherwise superior OS.
How long it will take Sun to essentially ruin the Cobalt product line?
I mean, sure -- the press release is full of good intentions about Sun wanting to compete in the low-end server market, but AFAICT, there's not a whole lot of profit in that area because of the wide availability of cheap hardware that can run Linux. And, with Linux being freely available, I don't see much profit in Sun putting Solaris onto the Cobalt hardware (unless it's a no-brainer -- I'm not knowledgable enough to say aye/nay on this one).
So this strikes me as either an attempt to buy eyeballs (using Cobalts as is with Sun logos etc.), or the easiest way to remove a competitive force from the marketplace -- buy and kill by obsoleting the hardware or by poorly supporting it.
Remember that a well written explanation of why it is not in Sun's best interest to violate the GPL will do a lot more good for the cause, and less damage to the reputation of Open Source proponents as a group than the typical knee jerk response (deluging the offending company with flame mails).That said, my initial inclination is to be highly critical of Sun's decision, even if Bruce Perens says that technically Sun isn't in violation.
What seems to be the most stupid thing part of this is that all Sun has to do is release the converted source to be in compliance with the GPL, right? Also, I fail to see why having more people able to look at the source code is a "bad" thing, unless there is some kind of major security hole, and even then, Apache has proven many times over that security through obscurity doesn't work as well as the additional sets of eyes in the OS world.
Good point, which I have thought about many times since then, but according to a lawyer who I asked about it later, I did the right thing.
An example: if a doctor were on a jury, and the "facts" presented by the prosecution / plaintiff's attorney could not in reality be correct, and the defense didn't rebut the specific so-called facts, should the rest of the jury be kept in the dark about why the "presentation" isn't truthful? This is the exact reason that attorney's usually seek to qualify or disqualify jurors that they think will aid or hinder their side of the presentation when the jury goes to deliberate. Off topic perhaps but related, alot of legal pundits point to the choices made by the prosecuting attorneys in selecting the respective juries as one of the key reasons that O.J. Simpson walked out of his criminal trial a free man, but got nailed to the wall in the civil trial.
One final point. Lawyer's aren't supposed to be able to rebut/object/etc. to what goes on in the jury room. The discussion in the jury room is unmonitored, unfiltered, and unrecorded, and therefore (at least in theory), more able to come to an objective and fair decision about "the truth", leading to a legal decision based on that truth, AKA the verdict.
Probably the best one I know was at An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos in the O'Reilly Website, however they cut off the signatures at 10,000 (of which I was one--no brag, just info). Anyway, if even a third of the ten thousand who signed up are techies who buy as many books as I do in a year, that would mean that Amazon is losing out on the opportunity to profit on $100 million dollars annually in sales just on books, not counting CD's, etc. Wouldn't it be fun (if a person were lucky/unlucky enough to own some stock in Amazon.Com) to stand up and mention that little bit of info at an Annual Shareholder's meeting...?
By the way, if anyone in the/. community knows of an active list, let us all know so that we can sign there as well.
"I'd love to be a fly on the wall while the interns are sorting all that material.... "
You and me both. With the hopes that the interns are clued in, and that the "ornery bunch" uses it's oppportunity to whap Mister(s) Bill and Ballmer up side the head with a definition of the law which they can undertand, AKA "break it up, boys..."
I was just getting ready to make a second post (link here if you're interested), but you stated the issues much better than I would have.
With the obligatory and hated "IANAL" ( I am not a lawyer ), aside, if you're still reading SimonK, I hope you will explain a little bit more about how the expert panel worked. (see mu jury story behind my request for further comment a bit later in this post.)
I also wonder if an expert panel in technically oriented cases (such as DeCSS, 2600, etc.) might force a biased judge to act more rationally and above board in his decisions.
Now then, if I might comment just a little bit on one of your statements, highlighted here:
"The implicit statement is that only supersmart people who speak techiegook are competent to judge these cases, and only similarly rarefied souls are competent to testify in them."
IMHO, the only thing that keeps the entire judiciary system from being a bought and paid for arm of the corporation and the state (which is what Congress appears to be becoming) is that one sentence in the constitution which guarantees the right to a jury trial. My jury experience(s) tell me that what you named as a likely consequence strikes me as how things already are, at least here in the U.S.: "You'd end up with a hoard of especially expensive technolawyers, mostly in the pay of big corporations, who'd be the only people who could afford them. This would be a recipe for more and more pro-corporate decisions." Secondarily -- considering that almost all judges ARE lawyers, we already have "great tottering piles of incomprehensible precedent couched in a combination of techspeak and lawyerese."
My jury story: As a juror, on more than one occasion, I've gotten really mad because I could tell that neither the plaintiff's attorney nor the defense attorney were really interested inthe truth, which is what a verdict is supposed to expose -- they were interested in spinning a story which would let their particular side "win". [Side note: A couple of the other jurors thought I should be tossed out of the jury room, because I kept naming facts which I knew from my college training, but neither side had presented. Most of the other folks as or more knowledgeable than me in the particular area in the prospective jury pool got excluded by the plaintiff's attorney, by the way.] Ultimately, it was a combination of those facts which exposed enough of the truth to allow us all to agree on a fair settlement for the plaintiff BTW, but at a reasonable, even wise level not the exhorbitant, extortive amounts the lawyers were going after. The amazing thing is that when I talked to the defense attorney after the case concluded, he said the jury had made a fairer decision than he expected.
My point is being, unless the truth is evident, the whole judicial process falters, and like you, I am suspicious that a "techno-court" would subtract, rather than add, from the common person's ability to get a fair decision based on the truth of what is coming before the court in their particular cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike the idea of a person being able to moderate their own comments, but if there have been times that if such a system were in place, I'd burn Karma points to lift someone else's particularly insightful comment, (like your ideas perhaps)into a higher score than one point would do, or if I didn't have moderator points that day.
As far as default posts at "2", you make some good points. In the current system, my understandign is that someone posts at "2" they risk getting dinged down, so the risk is to "lose voice" if they drop below the "cap". This is sort of like letting the folks who have had something valuable to say in the past act sort of like trusted guests on a News show.
Hmmm... two thoughts, putting them up for devil's advocacy:
- What if instead of an overall karma score/cap, they changed the code so that a person developed karma in the areas they have been moderated up in? Then they could sort of choose the type of post they were trying to make. For example, I'm usually about as funny as a freeze dried potato, so unless I had a bunch of karma for funny posts, I wouldn't be able to post an attempted funny at a default higher score.
- The second is right in line with your idea of (2,funny). I wonder how hard it would be to put a more specific filter than "browse at +2", so that if I wanted, I could browse for the (2, funnys), or the (2, insightful), etc. Not sure, but it seems like it could lower the overall bandwidth requirement as less text per page might be sent, but could also cost machine time if a person reloaded and read each page using several different filter sets.
Hmmm. May have to jump back into the / code and see what it would take for my own site to use this idea. What do y'all think?After I RTF-D (read the f---ing decision), the main thing I came away with is the sense that the bar has been raised for what a company can get away with in terms of preliminary injunctions related to the so-called "business method, internet, etc." patents. To quote the article:
No one questioned whether or not Barnes and Noble, et. al were using "one-click" type website buying mechanisms that most likely violated Amazon's patent. But the circuit court found that unless the patent is solid enough to withstand a challenge, a preliminary injunction shouldn't be granted. Which I agree with, BTW.Correct me if I am wrong, but the practical meaning of this is that before Amazon or anybody decides to go for a preliminary injunction, they had now better be prepared to spend the legal dollars for a full-fledged trial to defend the validity of a patent right up front.
My concern is this: what about the little inventor who gains a patent, and does not have the money to fight that kind of legal battle against, for example, a larger company? Could this decision be used by companies with deep legal pockets in a way that actually makes it alot more difficult for the small guys to succeed in developing, patenting, and bringing a product to the market? What do you think?
10 lbs can be quite a load when biking for 500 milesActually, I would hope to optimize this down to maybe 5-6 pounds, but your point is still valid. However, it seems like with a mix of uphill/downhill parts of the ride, that minimizing aerodynamic drag would be a larger concern --> cyclers, what do you think?
Finally as to the actual electronics, I like the idea of the Handspring, as you described it, but I thought the whole point was semi-real time updating of the race web-site. Secondarily, the reason I would go with a digicam with a microdrive is that it holds 340 MB, presumably enough for a whole day's shooting, without requiring the rider to either stop and swap, or hot-swap the high-res image storage.
BTW, you can send the crazy party pictures to my website at http://.... *grin*
The two questions which IMHO would need to be answered to favor a dynamo over a solar panel would be
By the way, if you look at these voltage and current output figures for a crystalline solar cell, a small (12"x12") module would provide well more than enough power (over 100 watts) to the system. So huge isn't required.So here's my specs for a cam setup that could get reasonably interesting pictures:
- Vibrational stability. No use getting jittery, blurred pix, right?
- Aimability. What if the most interesting pic of the moment isn't directly ahead? This might include lens with a moderate amount of wide angle/zoom capability. This could probably be accomplished with a semi-custom tripod head fitting.
- To go with aimability, etc. I would add detachability -- in case the bicyle it is mounted on were damaged, the setup could be moved. Secondarily there are many more interesting pix to be had when the riders aren't actually in motion, and finally
- Reasonably high resolution and color depth, because even if you are transmitting images live, how many people can watch the whole seven day race? So back at the web server end, and after the race is finished, you want to have better than average pix as a result of all the effort.
All of this says that what you probably want on the handlebars is a fairly decent megapixel camera, probably the one that uses an IBM microdrive -- one I have heard of can store 1500 pictures. (Which would be about one a minute for 12 hours), assuming that the cam uses AA batteries, so that a recharger can takes care of the continued power requirements. Nearly all the good digital cams have USB, so you have an easy connection to the device which will be responsible for image collection and transmission.Then we have to consider the other end: transmitting the image without a high speed data link. Since high res, high color pix require major bandwidth, the collector has to be able to compress the incoming images, probably resized for web page formatting, and perhaps tagged so that the high res pix from the camera can later be uploaded and replace the lower res image or be available from a thumbnail.
Probably requires more than a PDA. So my vote goes to the smallest Transmeta-powered device capable of the image processing, equipped with a wireless PC-MIA modem of some type. (Clueless about the best communication option here, fellow /.'ers, help me out!) Finally, I would think that a person would need a small solar panel to keep all of the devices and batteries charged, so the Transmeta device would rest just under the solar panel probably on a cushioned rack above the back wheel.
Still weighs alot less than 20 lbs, I would think, and positioned properly shouldn't add that much drag. Best I can do but fellow readers, what do you think?
As far as using a dynamo on the wheel, it wouldn't work really well because in most cases the voltage fluctuates too much based on the rider's speed, thus requiring additional electrical conditioning equipment and weight, and would in all probability tire the rider out very quickly if he/she intended to keep the whole setup powered throughout the day.
The best probably power scenario is for a small solar panel (30cm^2 or so) positioned relative to the bike's motion to provide a minimum amount of drag.
So if ICANN says that Verisign effectively gets control of .com, .net, and to some extent, what a person can do with .org, what about the other non-NSI registrars?
Sounds dangerously like a quasi-governmental agency enforcing a business monopoly on the most important current web tld's, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?
Assume that the catastrophe has taken down all of the electronics above ground and not shut down at the time of the cataclysmic event:
- How are you going to fabricate your first chip(s)without the ability to easily create litho masks, burn the masks into silicon, etc.
- Once you've got the chips and motherboard (including all of the support chips, communication chips, memory, display logic -- a huge load), compilers, etc. completed, how do you communicate the requirements, etc. so that others can build other fab plants, etc. without an operational press to print the books, specs, etc.
In order for your information to be dispersed, the equipment required to do so has to survive as well. Ergo the concrete bunker, cave, etc.--Humor Mode On--
Of course, most of the major universities I've visited put at least part of the IT people in cubibles deep underground, don't they? Keep us out of sight, out of mind?
--Humor Mode Off--
Yes, but if this was a world calamity, everyone else would be in the same boat. Even then if some large power managed to come up with an invasion force, they'd have to contend with the sheer number of firearms -- and bullets owned by us crazy Americans.
So the danger isn't from without, it's from within -- and that's why we would all have to stick together to make it through. Paraphrasing what Ben Franklin is reputed to have said, "We must all hang together, for surely if we don't we will all be hung apart". Same idea, 225 years later.
First we'll work on the communications part, then the message to be communicated.
Assume that any motor vehicle with a chip in it is dead. That still leaves alot of smaller vehicles, horses, etc. to get the word out. For the sake of argument let's also include working rail service, okay? Within a short time, assuming the right word gets out, small communication nets form, even if it is just passing paper hand to hand like the pony express. Then somebody remembers that you can send morse code over bare wires, so we have telegraph capability fairly quickly.
So the whole issue becomes one of controlling mobocracy in the early stages before it can disintegrate a rational society into us vs. them warring factions.
So what is the message? Something like this: "A major catastrophe has happened. The hospitals are still working and we are trying to restore services and transportation as soon as possible and can use all the help me can get. Martial law has been declared to prevent mobocracy, which will be punishable by immediate incarceration and or military response. If anyone among you starts hate-mongering, you will be incarcerated (free speech gets limited under martial law, remember?) Inciting to riot will get you shot... (contains the human beasts).
Now then, for the more civilization oriented folks: "Here are the rules under which we will operate until the basic infrastructure can be rebuilt. Communicate you needs within your small network, and we'll try to meet the most urgent needs amongst the various networks." From there, it is merely a matter of strengthening the trade and communications capabilities amongst and within the networks.
Hmmm. Sounds an awful lot like what happens in the good ole USA, or for that matter, any rationally functioning society after a flood, tornado, earthquake, etc., doesn't it? Which is I have faith that we as a people would survive, and then shortly thereafter, decide to make this world a place in which we all can not only survive, but thrive.
<RANT MODE>
Okay, let's play slam the geeks. Oblivious to what 90% of the geeks are up to which is not playing quake.
Want a good job pre-apocalypse? Try specializing in medical technology using computers. You know, those little computers that can read if you have a heartbeat, interpret an MRI, let skilled doctors around the world communicate...
Or Telecommunications, letting those doctors communicate. Or CAM (computer aided manufacturing). I could go on for pages on how the silicon God we've created is our servant, and not just a plaything.</RANT MODE>
The original question about rebuilding comes down to knowing how to build the tech. And even if the only thing that survived were a late '90's PC with the appropriate software, CD-ROM knowledge collections, etc. and a printer, we'd still be reable to rebuild everything else faster. So, surprise, surprise, many geeks -- otherwise known as technologists -- are greatly involved in your current reality, and not just on the fringes you attacked.
That assumes the total collapse of the American people as a group willing to help each other rebuild. 'Xcuse me but the last time I checked the good people of the USA are leading the world in charitable contributions.
As to the rest of your points, doctors aren't suddenly going to go stupid -- they still know that vaccines and antibiotics are the front line against disease. One gallon of chlorine bleach will still decontaminate somewhere around a thousand gallons of water, and putting water in a clear, sealed bottle in the sunlight will do the same thing in about 4 hrs.
The farmer still needs to milk his cattle and get crops out, so the real question isn't loss of the IT economy, it's how to survive without the petroleum economy. (biodiesel, btw).
Thus the most important question of all is why I think America would still lead the world, if not economically, then in the self-evident truths that made us who we are: if most of us still believe, that for the most part we're all in this together -- though we may have different skin colors, hold belief(s) in a different God(s) -- that all men, created equal, deserve a chance to not only survive, but thrive.
And whether you, I and enough like minded people keep believing in the American dream fought for in many wars, and not just the economic self-interest first version we're currently wallowing in.
So the real questions become:
- How do we isolate a system capable of holding the fabrication knowledge base (to survive all but a world-ending catastrophe). A concrete bunker outside the catastrophe zone with a powered down system, generator, and fuel accomplishes this.
- What is the required publication technology, so that the needed information can be reproduced in a non-electronic matter? A small web-press with appropriate paper supplies, ink, and water would accomplish this, with the appropriate supporting bindery equipment (to make leaflets, brochures, magazines, and books).
- Highly intelligent, ethical people willing to look at and seek to avoid past mistakes (including those inherent in the powered down system, supporting agriculture and trade (for raw materials), and a defending army to allow them to restore the tech base.
Say, sounds something like David Brin's novel The Postman doesn't it? (not the movie version, btw).Obviously the right software needs to be available to the system, with the right i/o devices: we might as well be able to create the litho masks for current transistor technologies rather than returning to the circuit densities of the '60's; C++, Java, and other web tech instead of Cobol and CICS); scanners with OCR as opposed to keypunch machines, etc.)
Hey, I'll provide the cave and the backup systems. Anybody want to lend me a few bazillion dollars to do the rest? *grin*
More seriously though how long do you think it will be before M$ comes up with some kind of "fix" for WinXX that essentially breaks Plex86's ability to run? (Like they tried to do with the install of Win98 -- which disables other boot managers...
There is also some talk of actually having a fork in the code so that there can be a big iron Linux and regular Linux, by the way.
Has anything like that happened before, and if so, what would happen next? Would the lower court's ruling stand, or would M$ be in the clear? Hmmmm....
Okay /. legal scholars, (including the IANAL bunch), whadya think?
Even if some of the details were supposed to be "highly confidential", the fact that Intel employees were giving information to what is essentially a content website erases that idea somewhat.
The information may be completely accurate or not, but it is the writer(s) at Sharkey Extreme who have put together the roadmap which we are reading, not Intel.
The main thing we are worried about is that instead of using the patent defensively the way most big operations do, Amazon decided to use it offensively in that they launched legal action(s) against other companies / websites using the same idea.
Which means that potentially Amazon's lawyers could go after every mom and pop web site out there that came up with a way of allowing their own customers to "one click order", even if those mom and pop businesses don't even compete with Amazon in any way.
The best comparisons that I can think of are Microsoft buying Foxpro and Lotus' decision to not market the highly touted Improv spreadsheet which they had purchased and which was clearly superior to the company cash-cow (1-2-3) in many ways.
Granted, you can still by Foxpro, but it is way behind MS-Access and MS-SQL Server in terms of marketing priority.
Think about it this way: given equivalent marketing resources, do you put higher priority on marketing the high dollar product with a 10:1 profit margin, or the low dollar market with a 1.1 to 1 profit margin. The only time you go for the second is when you can sell sufficient volume to overcome the loss of revenue in the high profit area due to the dilution of the marketing budget.
So the mucking up Cobalt happens if some Sun exec sees that they can't make as much money on the Cobalt line (at least in the short term) and pulls the marketing and support dollars away from the lower end servers in order to prop up sales of the high end, like IBM did to OS-2, effectively killing an otherwise superior OS.
I mean, sure -- the press release is full of good intentions about Sun wanting to compete in the low-end server market, but AFAICT, there's not a whole lot of profit in that area because of the wide availability of cheap hardware that can run Linux. And, with Linux being freely available, I don't see much profit in Sun putting Solaris onto the Cobalt hardware (unless it's a no-brainer -- I'm not knowledgable enough to say aye/nay on this one).
So this strikes me as either an attempt to buy eyeballs (using Cobalts as is with Sun logos etc.), or the easiest way to remove a competitive force from the marketplace -- buy and kill by obsoleting the hardware or by poorly supporting it.
What do you all think?
What seems to be the most stupid thing part of this is that all Sun has to do is release the converted source to be in compliance with the GPL, right? Also, I fail to see why having more people able to look at the source code is a "bad" thing, unless there is some kind of major security hole, and even then, Apache has proven many times over that security through obscurity doesn't work as well as the additional sets of eyes in the OS world.
An example: if a doctor were on a jury, and the "facts" presented by the prosecution / plaintiff's attorney could not in reality be correct, and the defense didn't rebut the specific so-called facts, should the rest of the jury be kept in the dark about why the "presentation" isn't truthful? This is the exact reason that attorney's usually seek to qualify or disqualify jurors that they think will aid or hinder their side of the presentation when the jury goes to deliberate. Off topic perhaps but related, alot of legal pundits point to the choices made by the prosecuting attorneys in selecting the respective juries as one of the key reasons that O.J. Simpson walked out of his criminal trial a free man, but got nailed to the wall in the civil trial.
One final point. Lawyer's aren't supposed to be able to rebut/object/etc. to what goes on in the jury room. The discussion in the jury room is unmonitored, unfiltered, and unrecorded, and therefore (at least in theory), more able to come to an objective and fair decision about "the truth", leading to a legal decision based on that truth, AKA the verdict.
By the way, if anyone in the /. community knows of an active list, let us all know so that we can sign there as well.
You and me both. With the hopes that the interns are clued in, and that the "ornery bunch" uses it's oppportunity to whap Mister(s) Bill and Ballmer up side the head with a definition of the law which they can undertand, AKA "break it up, boys..."
With the obligatory and hated "IANAL" ( I am not a lawyer ), aside, if you're still reading SimonK, I hope you will explain a little bit more about how the expert panel worked. (see mu jury story behind my request for further comment a bit later in this post.)
I also wonder if an expert panel in technically oriented cases (such as DeCSS, 2600, etc.) might force a biased judge to act more rationally and above board in his decisions.
Now then, if I might comment just a little bit on one of your statements, highlighted here:
IMHO, the only thing that keeps the entire judiciary system from being a bought and paid for arm of the corporation and the state (which is what Congress appears to be becoming) is that one sentence in the constitution which guarantees the right to a jury trial. My jury experience(s) tell me that what you named as a likely consequence strikes me as how things already are, at least here in the U.S.: "You'd end up with a hoard of especially expensive technolawyers, mostly in the pay of big corporations, who'd be the only people who could afford them. This would be a recipe for more and more pro-corporate decisions." Secondarily -- considering that almost all judges ARE lawyers, we already have "great tottering piles of incomprehensible precedent couched in a combination of techspeak and lawyerese."My jury story: As a juror, on more than one occasion, I've gotten really mad because I could tell that neither the plaintiff's attorney nor the defense attorney were really interested inthe truth, which is what a verdict is supposed to expose -- they were interested in spinning a story which would let their particular side "win". [Side note: A couple of the other jurors thought I should be tossed out of the jury room, because I kept naming facts which I knew from my college training, but neither side had presented. Most of the other folks as or more knowledgeable than me in the particular area in the prospective jury pool got excluded by the plaintiff's attorney, by the way.] Ultimately, it was a combination of those facts which exposed enough of the truth to allow us all to agree on a fair settlement for the plaintiff BTW, but at a reasonable, even wise level not the exhorbitant, extortive amounts the lawyers were going after. The amazing thing is that when I talked to the defense attorney after the case concluded, he said the jury had made a fairer decision than he expected.
My point is being, unless the truth is evident, the whole judicial process falters, and like you, I am suspicious that a "techno-court" would subtract, rather than add, from the common person's ability to get a fair decision based on the truth of what is coming before the court in their particular cases.