I think this kind of optional redeeming of charity stamps is the core of what would make this idea work. But we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrasture to make it possible, and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties. Creating a new system like this would pose enormous problems, but it sounds workable. I think the bottom line is that the spam problem can almost certainly be reigned in, but whatever approach is used, it's going to take big money, government intervention, and a partial redesign of how email servers currently operate.
Why would this work? Spammers *already* pay significant amounts of money sending spam. A few more cents per transaction isn't going to amount to a hill of beans worth of difference.
Bandwidth, equipment, employee time, none of this is free. What? Do you think most spammers use free AOL accounts? No. Most spammers are like AdVal Message Networks: legitimate companies that have real employees and real equipment to send out real spam. Their costs are real. A few pennies more won't make any difference to AdVal, why should they care? They'll just pass the cost onto their customers. Duh.
1024x768 is generally the most-used resolution on 17" CRTs, while 1280x1024 is most often used on 19" CRTs. 1600x1200 really should only be used on 20" or higher CRTs. 17" LCDs have a native resolution of 1280x1024. Have you USED 1600x1200 on a 17" or 19" monitor? And are you blind yet?
Seriously, as I discussed in the answer to question #2, I haven't seen a way to provide Reasoning's shareholders with an equivalent (much less superior) return by making our source code Open. I think this is one of the most significant challenges that advocates of Open Source have yet to successfully address.
Since there is no way to "track" a bug through various stages, through resolution, many bugs, and likely many fixes also just fall through the cracks. Since XFree86.org doesn't really have any way for various distributions to share patches efficiently, or to keep track of the status of an issue, or to even find out if a bug has been fixed or not, and if so, if it is in CVS or not, distribution development tends to needlessly end up with each vendor/distro doing a lot of duplication.
Ummm, have these guys never heard of Bugzilla or what?
Seems to me that that solution would go a long way to towards fixing some of their problems.
There just isn't enough violent crime in the US anymore. Let's all thank the Texan for finding a way to correct that problem.
Bingo! That's the real purpose of prisons anyway -- training grounds for violent criminals. It perpetuates crime which persuades citizens to increasingly be in support of laws that turn this country into a police state.
The worry I have about batteries is my experience with laptop, cordless, and cell phone batteries: after one year you lost 50-100% of the battery's capacity...
I saw a flatscreen LCD monitor in CompUSA the other day going for $2000. Sure it looked great, but $2000 is wacko. $200 maybe, but not $2000.
There are plenty of 17" LCDs in the sub $500 range. Remember that a 17" flatpanel is equivalent in viewable area to a 19" CRT. People often think 17" LCD=17" CRT and should be comparable in price, but 17" LCD is closer in price to 19" CRT for good reason.
The fact that the cable company does not press charges is what should be amazing here.
Why should that be amazing? For all we know, the bloody cable company MADE the friggin' boxes and sold them under guise of criminals, with the intent of getting increased revenue. Think about it. If you think you're getting a free ride you're going to order more PPV. More PPV means more PPV charges, even if they don't come in til 2-3 weeks later, who cares right?:)
Version control. A while ago, I juggled three computers, home computer, work computer, and a laptop. Could never tell where the latest document was, and would often fork my own documents constantly, or not have the info I thought I had because it had been done on one of the other systems. Which one? Who knows.
That's not the fault of the laptop...that's the fault of having no centralized document management system. With wireless internet connectivity, you could maintain all of your documents on a server somewhere over a VPN connection and just make sure that you upload your latest changes whenever your finished, no matter where you are. Not unlike how software development is done -- when your finished for the day, you "check in" your changes.
Weight...I gotta carry this thing around all day. Sure I can get my 8 hours...I could probably get 8 hours or even more if I lugged around a car battery, too, but you don't see me doing that!:)
That's where fuel cells will come into play. A fuel cell will give your laptop enough power to run all of the wizbang stuff that many people want, as long as they want.
Don't forget *weight*. Remember, you've gotta carry this thing around all day... fuel cells are heavy in case you hadn't noticed. And they can explode too. I don't want my laptop to be considered munitions.
Operating positive means that your operating expenses are less than your operating income. Free-cash-flow positive means that you basically always have a positive cash-flow situation -- you always have cash on-hand. Net-income-profitable means that after taxes, overhead, and direct expenses, yada yada, you have a positive net income... Err...IOW you made money after you paid everything out, including taxes.
Re:This is going to be a joyous thing
on
BusinessWeek on Wi-Fi
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· Score: 4, Insightful
At the risk of sounding somewhat like the Mac fanboy the parent poster is (as I am not a Mac fanboy myself), I'll point out that iBooks are supposed to get something like 5 hours of battery life in real-life use. Centrinos are supposed to get 5-7, I'm guessing 4-5 in real-life use. Personally I'd like to see notebooks that can do 8-10 hours -- IOW, a full day's work.
I personally don't see anyway for battery life to improve unless people are willing to compromise on performance and whizbang features. Battery capacity itself is as perfected as it's going to get...the key is to cut down consumption. But everytime someone figures out how to cut consumption on one component, the laptop mfrs stuff more features in rather than focusing on a laptop that has the longest possible battery life.
Unfortunately, too many people will buy laptop "X" with 17" display, DVD+R+RW/CD/R/RW combo superdrive, ultrawhizzy 300 GB hard drive, with the latest and greatest ultrawhizzy superfast processor and 1.5 hours of battery life rather than laptop "Y" which only has a 13.1" or 14" display, a relatively slow-clocked processor, with a somewhat slow, but powersaving hard drive, no removable storage and 7 hours of battery life.
That's because they've bought into the marketing hype and have forgotten that the number 1 advantage of a laptop is to be able to work anywhere, anytime. Laptops don't NEED to be desktop replacements, they should be thought of as desktop complements, rather than replacements.
Third, some factors similar to those described in the article could be at work (linux more efficient ==> less linux servers for same job). Maybe linux users are more efficient googlers? I think this is unlikely, but still a possibiility.
This isn't unlikely at all. Zeitgeist counts based on page views. Just yesterday, my aunt, a barely computer literate Windows user tried to find some sort of apartment movers' checklist for me, and spent 30 minutes typing various things into google, and browsed through pages and pages and pages.
I'm a Linux guru with almost 10 years of experience, and over 20 years of experience as a programmer and systems administrator. I put in a few choice keywords into google in the right order and found exactly what I was looking for one the first try. The content I was looking for was either the first or second link google gave me. That's because I have at least of vague notion of how google's page ranking algorithm works and so I know how to optimize my search query to return the most relevant results first.
Although a quick read on google's help pages will tell you how to do this, few Jane and Joe Sixpack's do. So yeah, I'd say more Linux users (which tend to be computer and 'Net saavy than your average Windows user) are going to be more efficient googlers.
I'm also, I have to say, doubtful that any browser-sniffing gives an accurate picture of what people out there are using, because so many people set Opera et al (on any OS) to report itself as IE for Windows.
Same with Konqueror on *nix or (I'd assume, since it's derived from Konq), Safari on OS X.
In fact, there are probably a lot more browsers that allow you to set your identity string. I don't think it's a good idea except on certain (ahem) sites which may not give you access otherwise.
Yeah, but I've noticed sometimes if there's a portage update, you've gotta emerge that *before* you emerge something else, and this sometimes breaks emerge -u world because whomever put the &*(&()& package didn't put the flag in there that says it requires portage version foo.bar.:(
That happened to me once and it frustrated me to no end until I finally figured it out:)
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Errmmmm...wait a sec here... I seem to remember something called "Microsoft Xenix", which was licensed from AT&T and then later SOLD OFF to SCO, well before they acquired the rights to AT&T code.
So, SCO is effectively denying its own existence here?
Yeah, I remember the movie Total Recall with R'Nold...a movie essentially about a colony on Mars. The scariest scene in the movie is when they show Quayle on the screen as President. I just about peed my pants!;)
When it comes to package managers, SuSE also has much better network updates and doesn't require a paid subscription like Red Hat. The paid subscription is major bummer indeed.
I've had KDE 3.1, Desktop Sharing and Gnome 2.2 for quite a while now. The whole reason is my package manager, which doesn't require a paid subscription.
Am I the only one that thinks the wearable market, at least for right now, is a little overrated?
Definitely not. Another thing to consider is the comfort factor. Did you see the size of that "Wristable" thing? I mean, I've worn watches before, and I thought the friggin' Timex Datalink watch was uncomfortable from being so large. This thing is at least twice as big. Who's going to want to go around with something that large on their wrist?
And then to interface with the watch, you need to wear this EAR PIECE, the Comport? Remember it's voice activated and is probably going to have some sort of audio feedback. (And who wants a serial port in their ear anyhow;) Sorry, old DOS joke -- had to work that in somehow.)
The heads up glasses are kinda cool, reminds me of that thing Z3r0 k001 wore in the move H4X0Rz, but hasn't that been done before?
I dunno, I just keep thinking of bad scifi movies....:)
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I think this kind of optional redeeming of charity stamps is the core of what would make this idea work. But we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrasture to make it possible, and couple it with strict laws that spammers trying to evade the charity stamp face criminal penalties. Creating a new system like this would pose enormous problems, but it sounds workable. I think the bottom line is that the spam problem can almost certainly be reigned in, but whatever approach is used, it's going to take big money, government intervention, and a partial redesign of how email servers currently operate.
Why would this work? Spammers *already* pay significant amounts of money sending spam. A few more cents per transaction isn't going to amount to a hill of beans worth of difference.
Bandwidth, equipment, employee time, none of this is free. What? Do you think most spammers use free AOL accounts? No. Most spammers are like AdVal Message Networks: legitimate companies that have real employees and real equipment to send out real spam. Their costs are real. A few pennies more won't make any difference to AdVal, why should they care? They'll just pass the cost onto their customers. Duh.
1024x768 is generally the most-used resolution on 17" CRTs, while 1280x1024 is most often used on 19" CRTs. 1600x1200 really should only be used on 20" or higher CRTs. 17" LCDs have a native resolution of 1280x1024. Have you USED 1600x1200 on a 17" or 19" monitor? And are you blind yet?
SleepyCat (Berkely DB)
Zope Corporation (Zope)
Covalent Technologies (Apache)
ActiveState
I deliberately haven't included Apple for reasons cited above, but Apple is almost as much a software company as it is a hardware company.
Seriously, as I discussed in the answer to question #2, I haven't seen a way to provide Reasoning's shareholders with an equivalent (much less superior) return by making our source code Open. I think this is one of the most significant challenges that advocates of Open Source have yet to successfully address.
Really? No open source advocates have addressed this at all?
Yeah I know... I can't stand what those fhqwhgads pass as humour. :-P
That's nothing. 7840 is 4.5 years old and is still not fixed. :)
Since there is no way to "track" a bug through various stages, through resolution, many bugs, and likely many fixes also just fall through the cracks. Since XFree86.org doesn't really have any way for various distributions to share patches efficiently, or to keep track of the status of an issue, or to even find out if a bug has been fixed or not, and if so, if it is in CVS or not, distribution development tends to needlessly end up with each vendor/distro doing a lot of duplication.
Ummm, have these guys never heard of Bugzilla or what?
Seems to me that that solution would go a long way to towards fixing some of their problems.
There just isn't enough violent crime in the US anymore. Let's all thank the Texan for finding a way to correct that problem.
Bingo! That's the real purpose of prisons anyway -- training grounds for violent criminals. It perpetuates crime which persuades citizens to increasingly be in support of laws that turn this country into a police state.
The worry I have about batteries is my experience with laptop, cordless, and cell phone batteries: after one year you lost 50-100% of the battery's capacity...
You mean like the one in your car?
(Yeah, that was a rhetorical question)
I saw a flatscreen LCD monitor in CompUSA the other day going for $2000. Sure it looked great, but $2000 is wacko. $200 maybe, but not $2000.
There are plenty of 17" LCDs in the sub $500 range. Remember that a 17" flatpanel is equivalent in viewable area to a 19" CRT. People often think 17" LCD=17" CRT and should be comparable in price, but 17" LCD is closer in price to 19" CRT for good reason.
No, no, no ... that's T-GNU/TRON/GNU/Linux
-- rms
The fact that the cable company does not press charges is what should be amazing here.
:)
Why should that be amazing? For all we know, the bloody cable company MADE the friggin' boxes and sold them under guise of criminals, with the intent of getting increased revenue. Think about it. If you think you're getting a free ride you're going to order more PPV. More PPV means more PPV charges, even if they don't come in til 2-3 weeks later, who cares right?
Version control. A while ago, I juggled three computers, home computer, work computer, and a laptop. Could never tell where the latest document was, and would often fork my own documents constantly, or not have the info I thought I had because it had been done on one of the other systems. Which one? Who knows.
That's not the fault of the laptop...that's the fault of having no centralized document management system. With wireless internet connectivity, you could maintain all of your documents on a server somewhere over a VPN connection and just make sure that you upload your latest changes whenever your finished, no matter where you are. Not unlike how software development is done -- when your finished for the day, you "check in" your changes.
Weight...I gotta carry this thing around all day. Sure I can get my 8 hours...I could probably get 8 hours or even more if I lugged around a car battery, too, but you don't see me doing that! :)
That's where fuel cells will come into play. A fuel cell will give your laptop enough power to run all of the wizbang stuff that many people want, as long as they want.
Don't forget *weight*. Remember, you've gotta carry this thing around all day... fuel cells are heavy in case you hadn't noticed. And they can explode too. I don't want my laptop to be considered munitions.
Operating positive means that your operating expenses are less than your operating income. Free-cash-flow positive means that you basically always have a positive cash-flow situation -- you always have cash on-hand. Net-income-profitable means that after taxes, overhead, and direct expenses, yada yada, you have a positive net income... Err...IOW you made money after you paid everything out, including taxes.
At the risk of sounding somewhat like the Mac fanboy the parent poster is (as I am not a Mac fanboy myself), I'll point out that iBooks are supposed to get something like 5 hours of battery life in real-life use. Centrinos are supposed to get 5-7, I'm guessing 4-5 in real-life use. Personally I'd like to see notebooks that can do 8-10 hours -- IOW, a full day's work.
I personally don't see anyway for battery life to improve unless people are willing to compromise on performance and whizbang features. Battery capacity itself is as perfected as it's going to get...the key is to cut down consumption. But everytime someone figures out how to cut consumption on one component, the laptop mfrs stuff more features in rather than focusing on a laptop that has the longest possible battery life.
Unfortunately, too many people will buy laptop "X" with 17" display, DVD+R+RW/CD/R/RW combo superdrive, ultrawhizzy 300 GB hard drive, with the latest and greatest ultrawhizzy superfast processor and 1.5 hours of battery life rather than laptop "Y" which only has a 13.1" or 14" display, a relatively slow-clocked processor, with a somewhat slow, but powersaving hard drive, no removable storage and 7 hours of battery life.
That's because they've bought into the marketing hype and have forgotten that the number 1 advantage of a laptop is to be able to work anywhere, anytime. Laptops don't NEED to be desktop replacements, they should be thought of as desktop complements, rather than replacements.
It's a *bit* wordy?
E R
Son, there are professional Cobol programmers who HAVE NO FINGERS LEFT.
Join the Cure. We're trying to raise $5 billion to cure Cobol Fingers through transplants.
Call 1-800-I-REALLY-REALLY-USED-TO-BE-A-COBOL-PROGRAMM
Today!
Third, some factors similar to those described in the article could be at work (linux more efficient ==> less linux servers for same job). Maybe linux users are more efficient googlers? I think this is unlikely, but still a possibiility.
This isn't unlikely at all. Zeitgeist counts based on page views. Just yesterday, my aunt, a barely computer literate Windows user tried to find some sort of apartment movers' checklist for me, and spent 30 minutes typing various things into google, and browsed through pages and pages and pages.
I'm a Linux guru with almost 10 years of experience, and over 20 years of experience as a programmer and systems administrator. I put in a few choice keywords into google in the right order and found exactly what I was looking for one the first try. The content I was looking for was either the first or second link google gave me. That's because I have at least of vague notion of how google's page ranking algorithm works and so I know how to optimize my search query to return the most relevant results first.
Although a quick read on google's help pages will tell you how to do this, few Jane and Joe Sixpack's do. So yeah, I'd say more Linux users (which tend to be computer and 'Net saavy than your average Windows user) are going to be more efficient googlers.
I'm also, I have to say, doubtful that any browser-sniffing gives an accurate picture of what people out there are using, because so many people set Opera et al (on any OS) to report itself as IE for Windows.
Same with Konqueror on *nix or (I'd assume, since it's derived from Konq), Safari on OS X.
In fact, there are probably a lot more browsers that allow you to set your identity string. I don't think it's a good idea except on certain (ahem) sites which may not give you access otherwise.
Yeah, but I've noticed sometimes if there's a portage update, you've gotta emerge that *before* you emerge something else, and this sometimes breaks emerge -u world because whomever put the &*(&()& package didn't put the flag in there that says it requires portage version foo.bar. :(
:)
That happened to me once and it frustrated me to no end until I finally figured it out
Except for SCO, none of the primary UNIX vendors ever developed a UNIX "flavor" to operate on an Intel-based processor chip set. This is because the earlier Intel processors were considered to have inadequate processing power for use in the more demanding enterprise market applications.
Errmmmm...wait a sec here... I seem to remember something called "Microsoft Xenix", which was licensed from AT&T and then later SOLD OFF to SCO, well before they acquired the rights to AT&T code.
So, SCO is effectively denying its own existence here?
Yeah, I remember the movie Total Recall with R'Nold...a movie essentially about a colony on Mars. The scariest scene in the movie is when they show Quayle on the screen as President. I just about peed my pants! ;)
When it comes to package managers, SuSE also has much better network updates and doesn't require a paid subscription like Red Hat. The paid subscription is major bummer indeed.
:)
I've had KDE 3.1, Desktop Sharing and Gnome 2.2 for quite a while now. The whole reason is my package manager, which doesn't require a paid subscription.
My package manager: Gentoo's portage of course.
Am I the only one that thinks the wearable market, at least for right now, is a little overrated?
;) Sorry, old DOS joke -- had to work that in somehow.)
:)
Definitely not. Another thing to consider is the comfort factor. Did you see the size of that "Wristable" thing? I mean, I've worn watches before, and I thought the friggin' Timex Datalink watch was uncomfortable from being so large. This thing is at least twice as big. Who's going to want to go around with something that large on their wrist?
And then to interface with the watch, you need to wear this EAR PIECE, the Comport? Remember it's voice activated and is probably going to have some sort of audio feedback. (And who wants a serial port in their ear anyhow
The heads up glasses are kinda cool, reminds me of that thing Z3r0 k001 wore in the move H4X0Rz, but hasn't that been done before?
I dunno, I just keep thinking of bad scifi movies....