To partially answer my own question, I found this: http://www.iclei.org/efacts/tidal.htm
Here's a summary of one of the explanations as to why it's not more popular, from that link (to help avoid slashdotting it:-):
One of the main barriers to the increased use of tidal energy is the cost of building tidal generating stations. For example, it has been estimated that the construction of the proposed facility on the Severn River in England would have a construction cost of $15 billion. Operating and maintenance costs of tidal power plants are very low because the "fuel", sea-water, is free; but the overall cost of electricity generated is still very high.
The major factors in determining the cost effectiveness of a tidal power site are the size (length and height) of the barrage required, and the difference in height between high and low tide. These factors can be expressed in what is called a site's "Gibrat" ratio. The Gibrat ratio is the ratio of the length of the barrage in metres to the annual energy production in kilowatt hours (1 kilowatt hour = 1 KWH = 1000 watts used for 1 hour). The smaller the Gibrat site ratio, the more desireable the site. Examples of Gibrat ratios are La Rance at 0.36, Severn at 0.87 and Passamaquoddy in the Bay of Fundy at 0.92.
Still, one can't help but think that as the other methods become more problematic, it will be worth the initial cost; or, with some creativity, the construction costs could be lowered by a magnitude.
(Grrrr, and if IE doesn't stop going to the *previous* page whenever I type backspace in this form, I am gonna freak!!!! I've typed this three times!!! )
suitti's post has some good points, and an interesting summary of existing and future power technologies.
Are the existing technologies really only 50% efficient? I would expect more like 90%-95% efficiency in this modern era.
One power source which wasn't mentioned, and seems to get little attention, seems to me that it should be the most promising: the trillions of trillions of gallons of water that are raised and lowered six feet several times a day by the gravitational effect of the moon, represents a phenomenal amount of energy. Why isn't tidal power more prominent?
One would think that the energy involved in raising the weight of even a small cove's water six feet several times a day would be huge.
Yes, a tidal generation facility would border on a "megaproject", but given the relative safety and simplicity, you'd think it'd be worth the investment. (Although maybe as compared to nuclear plants, the construction and maintenance don't stack up...?) The math as to how big an area of water is required for a given amount of energy output should be pretty straight forward to figure out.
Similar to wind and solar, tidal provides very safe energy with no harmful byproducts. And *unlike* wind and solar, it's fully predictable. The wind may not blow, and the clouds and night may block solar generation, but the tides are gonna happen, period. If they don't, we have far bigger problems (hmmmm, did anyone see the moon lately? Shudder. The interruption of monthly circadian cycles could be devastating to biology.)
Does anyone know why tidal isn't more prominent (other than the traditional oil company conspiracy theories:-)?
If law enforcement has identified child porn servers, why don't they just confiscate the servers, rather than make isp's block access?
It's like if Fox TV started broadcasting porn (it happened so gradually, nobody noticed:-), and it was up to the cable companies to police the content. It need to be handled at the source, not at the infrastructure level.
The only argument I can think of is for internation sites beyond the jurisdiction of the US government. I didn't see that mentioned in the article. And even if that were the point, attacking the local ISP's is a waste of time; there are a limited number of backbones going to other countries, which would be *far* easier to police. And companies like ATT and Sprint (or whoever has the links that hop overseas) would be better equipped resource-wise to do this type of thing. (And given the fact that international telecom already has a larger number of regulations that must be adhered to; this is a natural point to add this as an additional regulation requirement.)
To me, it seems like the law is well-intentioned, but missing the point by more than a bit.
This sounds a lot like the method that GPS satellites use to be able to all transmit on the same frequency. As I understand it, each uses pseudo-random noise as a carrier. The GPS unit knows the algoritms and parameters behind each of the satellites' noise, and is thus able to filter out the signals, which all share the same frequency range.
If only software systems were as simple as buildings.
Well, I think there is an argument that many buildings are indeed more complex than many computer programs.
I think the key to the relatively higher quailty of building contruction, is standardization and modularity.
If you took all of the details that had to be attended to in a given house, and compared them to an average program, I think one would clearly be more complex. For houses, off the top of my head, you're looking at site preparation, foundation, framing, sheathing, drywall, painting, trim, subfloor, flooring, doors, windows, tile, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, waste disposal, and dozens if not hundreds of other items to take care of. And each area often has detailed building codes that must be adhered to (these alone, would likely outweigh most source code bundles).
But the key is standardized components. You know that if you get a certain furnace with appropriate specifications, you can plunk it in, hook it to standard wiring, standard duct work, standard oil/gas supply connectors. You don't have to design a furnace from scratch to put one in a house. There is creativity and problem solving involved, but the core standards and available components are well defined. And there is choice galore for every component.
Compare that to the world of software, where you have dozens of competing standards for almost everything, and often non-published proprietary protocols and standards you don't have a chance to interface with. And attempts at modular libaries are incomplete, inflexible, or properietary.
I don't think the problem of software is that much harder, just more poorly standardized and organized. (And faster evolving, making everything more complex.) In housing to a far greater degree, lives are at stake, so governments have created clearly defined standards, and enforced adherence to them. This is not a bad nor restrictive thing; I can still "innovate" and create the best next generation heating system that blows all the others away, which interfaces to standard 120V wiring and standard ductwork.
If someone came out with such a system that required you to buy their electrical generator, their ductwork, their oil/gas, they'd be laughed out of the market. But this is very much the situation we face in the software industry.
With the growing dependance upon software and computers in our society, I think it's an interesting question as to whether or not government should get involved in ensuring there are open and enforced standards.
Only 8 hours a day? Next thing you know the drives will be demanding 15 minute coffee breaks twice a day, full medical and dental, three weeks vacation each year, job security, and so on.
I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.
My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy:-)
Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.
Knuth truly does represent much of what is good an interesting about our profession.
For those who didn't read the article, or didn't come across this fact elsewhere, Knuth actually personally writes a cheque to anyone who finds errors in his books.
While the algorithms and theory that he wrote about in his classic texts are used by computer programmers worldwide every day, it's unfortunate that the kind of pride of workmanship that he personally demonstrates, doesn't seem to be the norm.
I've always felt like the programming profession was, and still is, a bit of a joke as far as standardized quality goes, as compared to other engineering disciplines. The old joke, "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs..." is still frighteningly true; other engineering professions do not often have a commonplace equivalent of a blue-screen or core-dump. There are occasional engineering failures, but none as widespread as programming errors.
Maybe because we're still forging new ground so quickly that it can't be expected to have solid results. Still, for things as standardized, commonplace, and essential as operating systems, the design should be such that a blue screen is unheard of.
3)FreeBSD was a good enough OS to have Apple base their new flagship OS (MacOSX) on it. (I don't see them planning to make a Linux based MacOS)
I think this has a lot more to do with the licensing. No commercial vendor in their right mind would base their custom OS with value-added proprietary extensions, upon an OS that places such heavy dependencies upon the GPL license. (The term GNU/Linux just makes me shudder.)
The FreeBSD license doesn't preclude commercialization, which makes it far, far, far, more appealing for putting on commercial users' desktops.
Of course, the rock solid stability, better planned releases, centralized control, yadda, yadda, yadda, are no doubt factors that made it more appealing than Linux as a base. But even if those things were all equal, the GPL alone would have prevented Apple from basing OS X upon Linux.
Similarly, I'm working on two projects that will be commercialized; I'm using FreeBSD as the base, and sleeping well knowing that I won't have any licensing grief down the road. Linux and it's supporting utilities are just too fraught with GPL restrictions; if the core technology of Linux were leaps and bounds above FreeBSD, it would be more of a dilemma. But in terms of the kernel and core utilities, they really are neck and neck. I make my living creating this value-added code, I can't afford to give the source away for my modifications or extensions, and live off of services or whatever. (And the zealots will no doubt scream "if you don't like the GPL, don't use software that uses it!" Well, despite the kneejerk reaction that might be, that's exactly the right advice in my case, I'll use FreeBSD.)
I do think it's a shame for Linux, though. If Linux didn't have this restriction, and had four or five offshoots of commercialization, I think it'd be taken a lot more seriously on the desktop. With the release of OS/X, BSD really did leapfrog Linux in terms of popular acceptance on the desktop. Linux might have been the beneficiary of this, if it were more BSD-like in its licensing. And FreeBSD seem to be gaining even more momentum every day.
In any case, choice is good. I love Linux, but I choose BSD.:-)
Could easily be smaller if they got rid of the serial and parallel i/o. Ps/2 needs to go too! There's enough usb stuff out there that something like this shoudln't need them.
I haven't used serial/parallel/ps2 in over a year at least. Disable them all in the bios to save interupts.
Hey, this is Slashdot, and a lot of people here use Linux:-) USB support for Linux devices isn't exactly, ahem, what I'd call "universal" yet.
One of the biggest disadvantages to the latest breed of laptops, IMO, is the lack of built-in serial (and to a lesser extent parallel) ports. Switches, filers, servers, and many other devices still have serial consoles these days, and for a lot of embedded purposes, serial is even more useful.
One smart approach to get the best of both worlds is to just have jumpers or other small connectors on the motherboard, to allow people to wire up a serial/parallel port if they wish, but they don't take up much space if you choose to ignore them.
PowerLeap's Renaissance product does just that, and while it's designed to use your existing motherboard (as just a benign card holder, with no power to it), and hook up to your existing power supply, it could rock as a single board computer, giving the Mini ITX a run for it's money size-wise.
Imagine a proposed law that said, since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, all customers at every store will be stopped, background-checked, and strip-searched.
Yet another sensational, inappropriate analogy on/. Imagine...:-)
A better anology is that "since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, stores will raise their prices to compensate." Which is exactly what they do today. So it's not unprecedented.
Now, in the case of stores, it is within their power to control shoplifting, and they have to compete price-wise with other stores, so it's subject to free economy forces and such.
In the case of this tax (which is ludicruous, in my opinion), it's would be applied across the board by law, and no doubt distributed in unfair and political ways. If they tax data CD's (whatever *that* distinction really means), then it's going to seriously hurt many consumers and businesses who rely upon low cost CD's for distribution, backup, and so forth.
The level of the tax is also ridiculous, in relation to the cost of a blank CD. If it were 5% or whatever, it wouldn't be such a show stopper, just an annoyance. In Canada, almost every product is subject to a 15% HST tax. And income taxes are over 50% over $50K or so. Adding a 20% tax on top of that for CD's is insane.
You have to earn something like $4.00 of salary, to be able to afford a $1.00 CD. (Of course, one doesn't have to sell your house if you have a serious prolonged illness with no insurance:-)
I knew a site that was a popular AvantGo channel, but didn't bother paying them big fees when they didn't let partners be AvantGo partners for free. That no doubt hurt their content severely. Now they're charging customers, which will probably reduce their popularity even further.
AvantGo would best exist as a technology to allow sites to provide content, not as a portal/service to funnell all the content.
-me
Re:Doesn't have much on the good old Libretto
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
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· Score: 3, Funny
One more point. With the Libretto, people were impressed by the size and the slick look. With the Tiqit, I think most people will assume you're playing with an oversized label maker, which in certain circumstances would look even geekier than normal.:-)
-me
Doesn't have much on the good old Libretto
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It doesn't strike me as much smaller than the good old Libretto 110CT, and the specs are only slightly more impressive; the Libretto was something like 233 mhz (vs 266), 64M RAM (vs 128; this is probably the most significant item), 7G HD (vs 10), 800x480 display (vs 640x480), dual PCMCIA, serial, parallel, video out, and a more usable keyboard than the Tiqit.
(Oh yeah, and the Libretto suffers from being discontinued; very sad how this amazing machine was never marketed well in North America at all. Everyone who saw mine, immediately assumed it was a CE machine due to it's size, and was blown away to see it running Win98 and Linux; several people I showed ended up buying one right away. But Libretto only targeted the Japenese market that well. And their new Librettos are bigger and less appealing to me; they're kinda turning to Viao Picturebooks, rather than keeping their own charm.)
The big issue with the Tiqit will be price. The Libretto was something like $1K when I bought it. I'm guessing the Tiqit will be several times that, judging by their historical pricing on their Matchbox computer (which was cool, but *way* too pricey). Here's hoping they'll prove me wrong by pricing it $1K (and then I'll end up buying one, dammit!)
they will now be able to eliminate potential suspects just by looking at light that was leaked from their residences
But isn't this exactly the same as the case where they used thermal imaging to determine a pot growing operation? I think that case was thrown out, as an invasion of privacy.
I don't see how decoding blue light leaking from a residence would differ from decoding infrared radiation leaking from a residence.
I'm all for catching bad guys every way possible, (and even for reducing the rights of the masses to do this) but given the current state of affairs, I don't think this would work without the same warrants required for other monitoring.
Neat technology, though. One night, after seeing the neighbors TV glow flickering on their wall, I had thought about how it should be possible to monitor people's TV viewing habits, but spotting the patterns of illumination, comparing it to known broadcasts. Should be trivial to find the best match. Just one more thing for the paranoid conspiracy theorists to worry about.:-)
Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.
The way the SmartBoard works is that it has four trays at the bottom, one for red, green, and blue markers, and one for an eraser. There's a led/photocell on each, which lets the board determine when you've picked up a given marker, and thus will draw in the appropriate color (or erase). If you wanted to actually physically write on the board, you could use a regular red/green/blue dry erase marker (personally, I never wrote on it, just let the LCD project digital ink, to keep the surface from looking cruddy after awhile).
When all markers were in their places, then touching the unit gave mouse-like behaviour, so you could use windows applications just by touching the screen with your finger. Very cool. Similarly, if you didn't want to use the stylus, you could just pick it up (so the unit saw the marker missing), then draw with your finger, which seems weird at first, but I prefer it at times.
Oh yeah, another big feature of interest to/. folks, is that SmartTech has Linux support. At first glance, Mimio doesn't appear to.
I've used SmartTech's SmartBoard regularly over the past few years. Here's my impressions:
There is a bit of a learning curve; it's not a huge one, but enough that unless someone makes a small bit of an effort, they never will use the technology.
*However*, once you put the time in to know how to effectively use it, it is an amazing technology.
Being able to flip to a new page with a tape on the board, and flip back and forth between pages is huge. Also, in cases where you need *just* a little more room but don't have it, you can select the whole area, and reduce it in size a bit, and draw the stuff you wanted to add. Extremely handy. It's cases like these that it *saves* you a lot of time.
Being able to have a full web/printable transcript of a session is also a huge timesaver.
SmartTech's software also has features for timing agenda's, assigning task responsibilities, and other very neat conferencing features. (Also supports remote whiteboarding, good for those videoconferences).
I've always wanted to try Mimeo's unit to compare, but never had the time. Hardly new technology, but definitely very useful.
The biggest problem is that in order to make best use of these types of units, you also need an LCD projector, which makes the cost of the SmartBoard/Mimeo unit look pretty small.
Great, so now when I do the immediate "skip flash" that is now ingrained in me, to skip the stupid fluff, and get to the meat, I'll end up skipping entire sites.:-)
That MS has dumbed down their software to the point that you realy need very little learning to be able to be very effective with it. with Unix, you need to more time and resources. If you are able to learn how to admin using Unix, you can then pick up a book on win 2k and learn what you need from it to be able to admin a windows network. you make better use of your resources in the University if you spend it learning Unix than if you spent it learning somthing that a book and 3 months on the job caouls teach you.
Huh? That may be true for installing and maintaining the system (the trivial part, of least interest to University students). When it comes to programming, the Win32 suite of API's is intentionally kept huge and constantly changing, as compared to the Posix and other Unix-like API's, which are far easier to use.
And in Win32, you constantly have to deal with bugs, inconsistent behaviour, GUI bug workarounds, and so on and so forth. I think Unix is a far better learning (and production) environment.
The whole problem with ESR and RMS is they're preaching a religion when all we want are tools and options to get our jobs done. People don't liked to be preached too, they just want thier options. It doesn't matter if you're right and you have the insight of King Solomon, people still don't want to hear you preach.
Boy, you hit the nail on the head there. I coudn't agree more.
People like Linus, Alan Cox, and many, many others provide leadership, results, and useful progress to Microsoft alternatives, without preaching a religion. It's much more useful, IMO, than the extreme Stallman aapproach.
The problem for the MPAA is that they cannot understand that as far as the economy goes they are not all that important. The computer industry is an order of magnitude larger. The not very hard to spot plan here is to bribe enough congressmen to push through their scheme. that is a pretty hopeless approach if the computer industry has more money.
But I'd guess the MPAA has more *concentrated* money than the computing industry. The record labels and movie studios number in the dozens, and can pool their efforts. The number of computer companies, hardware and software and otherwise, is probably in the tens of thousands. And one of the biggest entities, MicroSoft, is supportive of all this copy protection crud.
I could certainly see the MPAA, ahem, "exerting enough influence" to get their way in the computing industry. Especially with the major OS manufacturer sharing similar interests and giving them support.
MicroSoft could certainly make it's future OS's only support hardware that provides the protection the MPAA wants. Yes, there'd be hacks around it eventually, but if it's not the default install of the OS, the majority of consumers won't use it. (Plus, cnsider how long the DVD hack took, and only due to a Xing slip-up).
I think the threat is very real.
-me
Re:Subject to the ``Skating Force'' of LP days
on
Perpetual Skislope
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· Score: 2
Anyone here actually old enough to remember LPS and the skating force?
Sigh... Didn't you read the article? This is about skiing, not skating, so the problems you describe are irrelevant.:-)
Seriously though, I don't know whether the skating force would be an issue; the LP and tea-leave examples have very little friction downwards as compared to skiing, so that effect might not be as pronounced. (I could be completely wrong, though:-)
I think the constant-left-turn thing would take a lot of the fun out of it. And the fact there's a place to get off in the middle doesn't help you a lot when you crash. Crawling from the outside to the inside, while going uphill then downhill, with other people whizzing by, sounds like a disaster in the making. Cute idea, but sounds impossible to execute successfully.
It's likely even more than that. While they may not have employees (plural), they undoubtedly have creditors and shareholders, who have a vested interest in maximizing whatever they can out of the company. And if Be's value was seriously harmed by illegal monopoly activity, it is within their rights (and even their duty) to seek appropriate damages, to compensate creditors (and if there's anything left, shareholders).
Hey, where else are you going to get a big, cheap, sturdy unit, with a full sized keyboard, that's more powerful than a calculator, and lasts for two months on a couple of AA's. I think it'd be ideal for scientist who don't need the power or cost of modern laptop, but want a solid unit with a big keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a summary of one of the explanations as to why it's not more popular, from that link (to help avoid slashdotting it
Still, one can't help but think that as the other methods become more problematic, it will be worth the initial cost; or, with some creativity, the construction costs could be lowered by a magnitude.
(Grrrr, and if IE doesn't stop going to the *previous* page whenever I type backspace in this form, I am gonna freak!!!! I've typed this three times!!! )
-me
suitti's post has some good points, and an interesting summary of existing and future power technologies.
:-)?
Are the existing technologies really only 50% efficient? I would expect more like 90%-95% efficiency in this modern era.
One power source which wasn't mentioned, and seems to get little attention, seems to me that it should be the most promising: the trillions of trillions of gallons of water that are raised and lowered six feet several times a day by the gravitational effect of the moon, represents a phenomenal amount of energy. Why isn't tidal power more prominent?
One would think that the energy involved in raising the weight of even a small cove's water six feet several times a day would be huge.
Yes, a tidal generation facility would border on a "megaproject", but given the relative safety and simplicity, you'd think it'd be worth the investment. (Although maybe as compared to nuclear plants, the construction and maintenance don't stack up...?) The math as to how big an area of water is required for a given amount of energy output should be pretty straight forward to figure out.
Similar to wind and solar, tidal provides very safe energy with no harmful byproducts. And *unlike* wind and solar, it's fully predictable. The wind may not blow, and the clouds and night may block solar generation, but the tides are gonna happen, period. If they don't, we have far bigger problems (hmmmm, did anyone see the moon lately? Shudder. The interruption of monthly circadian cycles could be devastating to biology.)
Does anyone know why tidal isn't more prominent (other than the traditional oil company conspiracy theories
-me
If law enforcement has identified child porn servers, why don't they just confiscate the servers, rather than make isp's block access?
:-), and it was up to the cable companies to police the content. It need to be handled at the source, not at the infrastructure level.
It's like if Fox TV started broadcasting porn (it happened so gradually, nobody noticed
The only argument I can think of is for internation sites beyond the jurisdiction of the US government. I didn't see that mentioned in the article. And even if that were the point, attacking the local ISP's is a waste of time; there are a limited number of backbones going to other countries, which would be *far* easier to police. And companies like ATT and Sprint (or whoever has the links that hop overseas) would be better equipped resource-wise to do this type of thing. (And given the fact that international telecom already has a larger number of regulations that must be adhered to; this is a natural point to add this as an additional regulation requirement.)
To me, it seems like the law is well-intentioned, but missing the point by more than a bit.
-me
This sounds a lot like the method that GPS satellites use to be able to all transmit on the same frequency. As I understand it, each uses pseudo-random noise as a carrier. The GPS unit knows the algoritms and parameters behind each of the satellites' noise, and is thus able to filter out the signals, which all share the same frequency range.
-me
I think the key to the relatively higher quailty of building contruction, is standardization and modularity.
If you took all of the details that had to be attended to in a given house, and compared them to an average program, I think one would clearly be more complex. For houses, off the top of my head, you're looking at site preparation, foundation, framing, sheathing,
drywall, painting, trim, subfloor, flooring, doors, windows, tile, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, waste disposal, and dozens if not hundreds of other items to take care of. And each area often has detailed building codes that must be adhered to (these alone, would likely outweigh most source code bundles).
But the key is standardized components. You know that if you get a certain furnace with appropriate specifications, you can plunk it in, hook it to standard wiring, standard duct work, standard oil/gas supply connectors. You don't have to design a furnace from scratch to put one in a house. There is creativity and problem solving involved, but the core standards and available components are well defined. And there is choice galore for every component.
Compare that to the world of software, where you have dozens of competing standards for almost everything, and often non-published proprietary protocols and standards you don't have a chance to interface with. And attempts at modular libaries are incomplete, inflexible, or properietary.
I don't think the problem of software is that much harder, just more poorly standardized and organized. (And faster evolving, making everything more complex.) In housing to a far greater degree, lives are at stake, so governments have created clearly defined standards, and enforced adherence to them. This is not a bad nor restrictive thing; I can still "innovate" and create the best next generation heating system that blows all the others away, which interfaces to standard 120V wiring and standard ductwork.
If someone came out with such a system that required you to buy their electrical generator, their ductwork, their oil/gas, they'd be laughed out of the market. But this is very much the situation we face in the software industry.
With the growing dependance upon software and computers in our society, I think it's an interesting question as to whether or not government should get involved in ensuring there are open and enforced standards.
-me
Only 8 hours a day? Next thing you know the drives will be demanding 15 minute coffee breaks twice a day, full medical and dental, three weeks vacation each year, job security, and so on.
-me
I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.
:-)
My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy
Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.
-me
Knuth truly does represent much of what is good an interesting about our profession.
..." is still frighteningly true; other engineering professions do not often have a commonplace equivalent of a blue-screen or core-dump. There are occasional engineering failures, but none as widespread as programming errors.
For those who didn't read the article, or didn't come across this fact elsewhere, Knuth actually personally writes a cheque to anyone who finds errors in his books.
While the algorithms and theory that he wrote about in his classic texts are used by computer programmers worldwide every day, it's unfortunate that the kind of pride of workmanship that he personally demonstrates, doesn't seem to be the norm.
I've always felt like the programming profession was, and still is, a bit of a joke as far as standardized quality goes, as compared to other engineering disciplines. The old joke, "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs
Maybe because we're still forging new ground so quickly that it can't be expected to have solid results. Still, for things as standardized, commonplace, and essential as operating systems, the design should be such that a blue screen is unheard of.
-me
The FreeBSD license doesn't preclude commercialization, which makes it far, far, far, more appealing for putting on commercial users' desktops.
Of course, the rock solid stability, better planned releases, centralized control, yadda, yadda, yadda, are no doubt factors that made it more appealing than Linux as a base. But even if those things were all equal, the GPL alone would have prevented Apple from basing OS X upon Linux.
Similarly, I'm working on two projects that will be commercialized; I'm using FreeBSD as the base, and sleeping well knowing that I won't have any licensing grief down the road. Linux and it's supporting utilities are just too fraught with GPL restrictions; if the core technology of Linux were leaps and bounds above FreeBSD, it would be more of a dilemma. But in terms of the kernel and core utilities, they really are neck and neck. I make my living creating this value-added code, I can't afford to give the source away for my modifications or extensions, and live off of services or whatever. (And the zealots will no doubt scream "if you don't like the GPL, don't use software that uses it!" Well, despite the kneejerk reaction that might be, that's exactly the right advice in my case, I'll use FreeBSD.)
I do think it's a shame for Linux, though. If Linux didn't have this restriction, and had four or five offshoots of commercialization, I think it'd be taken a lot more seriously on the desktop. With the release of OS/X, BSD really did leapfrog Linux in terms of popular acceptance on the desktop. Linux might have been the beneficiary of this, if it were more BSD-like in its licensing. And FreeBSD seem to be gaining even more momentum every day.
In any case, choice is good. I love Linux, but I choose BSD.
-me
One of the biggest disadvantages to the latest breed of laptops, IMO, is the lack of built-in serial (and to a lesser extent parallel) ports. Switches, filers, servers, and many other devices still have serial consoles these days, and for a lot of embedded purposes, serial is even more useful.
One smart approach to get the best of both worlds is to just have jumpers or other small connectors on the motherboard, to allow people to wire up a serial/parallel port if they wish, but they don't take up much space if you choose to ignore them.
PowerLeap's Renaissance product does just that, and while it's designed to use your existing motherboard (as just a benign card holder, with no power to it), and hook up to your existing power supply, it could rock as a single board computer, giving the Mini ITX a run for it's money size-wise.
-me
A better anology is that "since shoplifting is common and unstoppable, stores will raise their prices to compensate." Which is exactly what they do today. So it's not unprecedented.
Now, in the case of stores, it is within their power to control shoplifting, and they have to compete price-wise with other stores, so it's subject to free economy forces and such.
In the case of this tax (which is ludicruous, in my opinion), it's would be applied across the board by law, and no doubt distributed in unfair and political ways. If they tax data CD's (whatever *that* distinction really means), then it's going to seriously hurt many consumers and businesses who rely upon low cost CD's for distribution, backup, and so forth.
The level of the tax is also ridiculous, in relation to the cost of a blank CD. If it were 5% or whatever, it wouldn't be such a show stopper, just an annoyance. In Canada, almost every product is subject to a 15% HST tax. And income taxes are over 50% over $50K or so. Adding a 20% tax on top of that for CD's is insane.
You have to earn something like $4.00 of salary, to be able to afford a $1.00 CD. (Of course, one doesn't have to sell your house if you have a serious prolonged illness with no insurance
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Cool idea, bad business model, IMO.
I knew a site that was a popular AvantGo channel, but didn't bother paying them big fees when they didn't let partners be AvantGo partners for free. That no doubt hurt their content severely. Now they're charging customers, which will probably reduce their popularity even further.
AvantGo would best exist as a technology to allow sites to provide content, not as a portal/service to funnell all the content.
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One more point. With the Libretto, people were impressed by the size and the slick look. With the Tiqit, I think most people will assume you're playing with an oversized label maker, which in certain circumstances would look even geekier than normal. :-)
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It doesn't strike me as much smaller than the good old Libretto 110CT, and the specs are only slightly more impressive; the Libretto was something like 233 mhz (vs 266), 64M RAM (vs 128; this is probably the most significant item), 7G HD (vs 10), 800x480 display (vs 640x480), dual PCMCIA, serial, parallel, video out, and a more usable keyboard than the Tiqit.
(Oh yeah, and the Libretto suffers from being discontinued; very sad how this amazing machine was never marketed well in North America at all. Everyone who saw mine, immediately assumed it was a CE machine due to it's size, and was blown away to see it running Win98 and Linux; several people I showed ended up buying one right away. But Libretto only targeted the Japenese market that well. And their new Librettos are bigger and less appealing to me; they're kinda turning to Viao Picturebooks, rather than keeping their own charm.)
The big issue with the Tiqit will be price. The Libretto was something like $1K when I bought it. I'm guessing the Tiqit will be several times that, judging by their historical pricing on their Matchbox computer (which was cool, but *way* too pricey). Here's hoping they'll prove me wrong by pricing it $1K (and then I'll end up buying one, dammit!)
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I don't see how decoding blue light leaking from a residence would differ from decoding infrared radiation leaking from a residence.
I'm all for catching bad guys every way possible, (and even for reducing the rights of the masses to do this) but given the current state of affairs, I don't think this would work without the same warrants required for other monitoring.
Neat technology, though. One night, after seeing the neighbors TV glow flickering on their wall, I had thought about how it should be possible to monitor people's TV viewing habits, but spotting the patterns of illumination, comparing it to known broadcasts. Should be trivial to find the best match. Just one more thing for the paranoid conspiracy theorists to worry about.
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Oh yeah, one other difference between the SmartBoard and the Mimio (sorry for the mis-spelling above), is that the SmartBoard can be used with regular styli, rather than specialized ones.
/. folks, is that SmartTech has Linux support. At first glance, Mimio doesn't appear to.
The way the SmartBoard works is that it has four trays at the bottom, one for red, green, and blue markers, and one for an eraser. There's a led/photocell on each, which lets the board determine when you've picked up a given marker, and thus will draw in the appropriate color (or erase). If you wanted to actually physically write on the board, you could use a regular red/green/blue dry erase marker (personally, I never wrote on it, just let the LCD project digital ink, to keep the surface from looking cruddy after awhile).
When all markers were in their places, then touching the unit gave mouse-like behaviour, so you could use windows applications just by touching the screen with your finger. Very cool. Similarly, if you didn't want to use the stylus, you could just pick it up (so the unit saw the marker missing), then draw with your finger, which seems weird at first, but I prefer it at times.
Oh yeah, another big feature of interest to
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I've used SmartTech's SmartBoard regularly over the past few years. Here's my impressions:
There is a bit of a learning curve; it's not a huge one, but enough that unless someone makes a small bit of an effort, they never will use the technology.
*However*, once you put the time in to know how to effectively use it, it is an amazing technology.
Being able to flip to a new page with a tape on the board, and flip back and forth between pages is huge. Also, in cases where you need *just* a little more room but don't have it, you can select the whole area, and reduce it in size a bit, and draw the stuff you wanted to add. Extremely handy. It's cases like these that it *saves* you a lot of time.
Being able to have a full web/printable transcript of a session is also a huge timesaver.
SmartTech's software also has features for timing agenda's, assigning task responsibilities, and other very neat conferencing features. (Also supports remote whiteboarding, good for those videoconferences).
I've always wanted to try Mimeo's unit to compare, but never had the time. Hardly new technology, but definitely very useful.
The biggest problem is that in order to make best use of these types of units, you also need an LCD projector, which makes the cost of the SmartBoard/Mimeo unit look pretty small.
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Great, so now when I do the immediate "skip flash" that is now ingrained in me, to skip the stupid fluff, and get to the meat, I'll end up skipping entire sites. :-)
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And in Win32, you constantly have to deal with bugs, inconsistent behaviour, GUI bug workarounds, and so on and so forth. I think Unix is a far better learning (and production) environment.
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People like Linus, Alan Cox, and many, many others provide leadership, results, and useful progress to Microsoft alternatives, without preaching a religion. It's much more useful, IMO, than the extreme Stallman aapproach.
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I could certainly see the MPAA, ahem, "exerting enough influence" to get their way in the computing industry. Especially with the major OS manufacturer sharing similar interests and giving them support.
MicroSoft could certainly make it's future OS's only support hardware that provides the protection the MPAA wants. Yes, there'd be hacks around it eventually, but if it's not the default install of the OS, the majority of consumers won't use it. (Plus, cnsider how long the DVD hack took, and only due to a Xing slip-up).
I think the threat is very real.
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Seriously though, I don't know whether the skating force would be an issue; the LP and tea-leave examples have very little friction downwards as compared to skiing, so that effect might not be as pronounced. (I could be completely wrong, though
I think the constant-left-turn thing would take a lot of the fun out of it. And the fact there's a place to get off in the middle doesn't help you a lot when you crash. Crawling from the outside to the inside, while going uphill then downhill, with other people whizzing by, sounds like a disaster in the making. Cute idea, but sounds impossible to execute successfully.
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Here's an old article, where a fellow achieved 14km in testing (not just signal strength, but actual data flowing).
Also reports of 57km achieved by Lucent engineers, staying within FCC specs.
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Hey, where else are you going to get a big, cheap, sturdy unit, with a full sized keyboard, that's more powerful than a calculator, and lasts for two months on a couple of AA's. I think it'd be ideal for scientist who don't need the power or cost of modern laptop, but want a solid unit with a big keyboard.
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