Every time my 17-year-old car starts showing early signs of doom, I feed it some new OEM parts that will last another decade or more.
I term the expense of the parts a "car payment". I term the time spent a "learning exercise." If it's beyond my ability to repair, I call it a "boat payment" (in homage to Car Talk).
It is both the least expensive and most awesome car I've ever driven, even counting a transmission swap. The car even includes a factory toolkit which can accomplish a variety of maintenance tasks, which I've found very useful indeed (though mostly on other people's cars when I find someone stranded and in need of a quick fix, who I normally find to be cursing their cars very existence until they see how easy some things can be with an ounce of preparedness and a willingness to think).
I'd be well into the payments on second brand-new car, by now, if I weren't interested in maintaining things when they wear out. But instead I'm currently thinking about minor bodywork and paint: Expensive, but still cheaper than throwing it away and buying something else that is comparable.
And yes, I also tear down my refrigerator when it misbehaves: It just takes a few screws to get to the guts. I also fix my own vacuum cleaner instead of toss it and buy another. And I service my own HVAC gear. And my dishwasher. And when the head gasket blew up on my air compressor, I made a new one out of a Dr. Pepper can.
FFS, when the faucet on the kitchen sink was acting wonky, I was annoyed. But I didn't call someone else to replace it -- I called the manufacturer, who sent out the parts to repair it for free...which is their policy. Service!
My first PDA was a Handspring Visor, and the factory stylus included a screwdriver just in case the device needed disassembling for some reason.
Things wear out. That doesn't mean they're used up, but just that they need a little bit of attention. But if maintenance is actively prohibited by the design of a product, I find myself actively repelled from buying it.
On the other hand, I don't see many people lamenting anymore that TVs no longer have user-serviceable parts.
Whatever.
My TV has firmware which can be updated ("serviced") by an end-user, and I found the hardware itself to be remarkably easy to service when it decided to go "click-click-click-click-click-click-click" one day instead of turn on: Two capacitors, costing a total of exactly two dollars, and it's been right as rain since.
Tools needed: Soldering iron, solder, and the ability to visually identify obviously-swollen capacitors.
The hardest part was moving the thing around, but it's not the manufacturer's fault that I decided to buy a big LCD. Everything else was easy, including disassembly. The failed caps were mounted on a single-sided board, so even if I totally botched the job the first time it'd have been easy to try again.
And nevermind DLP and LCD projectors with light bulbs that eventually get tired, which are often rather pain-free to replace.
(And, yes: I expect normal people to be able to do this sort of stuff, just as I expect them to be able to jump start their own car without incidental electrical fires. Your expectations may vary.)
If the money supply is hoarded then more and more economic power goes to the hoarders, who are doing nothing but sitting on it.
Therein lies the difference between energy and potential energy.
A clockspring can be wound up a few dozen turns and have a relatively large amount of potential energy.
But it's a fucking loss if the clockspring is never allowed to unwind (ie, it is hoarded) because it doesn't do anything. And if it is only allowed to unwind a little bit at a time, its relative energy impact is relatively minimal.
To bring things back to context:
A person can hoard bitcoin and have a relatively large amount of potential economic power.
But it's a fucking loss if they never use any of that bitcoin (ie, it is hoarded) because it doesn't do anything. And if they only use a little bit at a time, their relative economic power is relatively minimal.
Now sure: They could hoard everything they can grasp and keep it until some rainy day when they just want to Ruin Everything, and then let large amounts of it go all at once. But they won't earn any money ("power") doing this as the currency crashes, so why bother worrying about it any more than we worry about terrorists or earthquakes or tornados any other unpredictable thing that we cannot control?
(Next time I'll try to throw a car analogy in here, somehow.)
You'd be surprised just how much "high-end" you can find in small towns, if you bother to go looking.
I do some work for a local audio shop (population ~40k). They've got things from cheap ($20 ear buds for a kid's iPod) to excellent (Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser).
They sell a lot more of the cheap products because everyone seems to assume that if you want to pay real money for better gear, you have to drive at least an hour to find it (to find a "big city").
Meanwhile, alongside the mass-market Onkyo and Teac components are the likes of Parasound, Lexicon, and Krell.
So, my advice (to anyone, not just Prune) is as such: If you're convinced you need to get in the car and drive over to $bigcity in order to spend money on gear, then do so. But at least do yourself the favor and stop at the local audio shop on your way out of town -- you might be surprised at the gems you'll find, and the local service is likely unbeatable.
Please do drop me an email. I have a simple hand-drawn logo that I need cleaned and vectorized for my small-time PC-fixit business. Limited budget (isn't it always?), simple black-and-white, and easy for anyone skilled with the toolchain (but not for myself or the others that I've asked), but not free.
It just needs to be good enough for business cards and web pages for now. Billboard- and newsprint-scale detail (if it ever makes it that far) will pay more, if you're still game.
Have you tried using an AJAX-ey chat client on a dumb terminal?
My God, man. If there isn't an ncurses interface, at least, then count me out: I'd rather key SMTP commands directly into the recipient's mail server than try to use something like Meebo with a dumb terminal connected to a host running Links or somesuch.
That all said, I do miss ytalk.
(Sorry, but I'm simply very literal today. Yes, it's my fault. No, nothing you say will improve it.)
It's the truth, so I don't need to post about it as AC.
I can't sleep sometimes because of it. I often have horrible dreams about spiders. I remember spider encounters when I was young, particularly with some horrifically weird, big, leaf-crunching monsters of the arachnid family that were all pink and had long, tubular legs, and wouldn't die from just one well-placed blow from my mother's foot -- it took several before it stopped running, let alone stopped trying.
And the sad part is, I used to like spiders -- a long, long time ago.
It still makes me twitch uneasily, just now. Cry? No, not normally. But thanks, asshole: Now I'll be up all night wondering if my house is sufficiently poisoned, with my skin crawling in fear that something has made its way past my indoor chemical defenses and the fleet of toads that I keep around the foundation of my house as a first-tier defense.
What kind of life is that?
(And the point is that there's a lot of things that can result in recurring emotional trauma for a human being. Some of them are chemistry-related, some of them are environmental, and most are probably a combination of both.)
Android has a task bar type thing. When you hold the "Home" button for 3 seconds it brings up you most recent applications. Tapping on an application pulls it's most recent state from the stack and restores it exactly as you left it.
Depends on the application, and the device.
On my OG Droid, for instance, there's an excellent chance that switching from $randomapp to $randombrowser, doing some browsing, and then switching back is going to fail at resurrecting $randomapp's state due to RAM starvation issues.
Now, sure: In a perfect world where RAM is unlimited and programmers know what they're doing, this all works fine, every time.
But that's the same mythological world where pulleys are frictionless, rope doesn't stretch, love is free, and unicorns are real.
For a moment, I thought the title of TFS was "California City May Make Sugary Drinks Taste Like Cigarettes," and my mind nearly exploded at the thought of the concept.
t's not just the TVs. Or any one section of product. It's the customer service. The local Best Buy has eliminated checkout lanes. To actually buy something you need to get in line behind the people returning items (in a poorly laid-out fashion, which extends into the store), and wait while the person in front of you explains that, no, really, the dog didn't chew on his new game, it was just damaged in the packaging. And then wait as they go through some ten-step process to actually process the return.
I went into the local Best Buy recently, and noticed the same thing: The checkout line was closed, and there was a permanent-looking sign instructing customers to go elsewhere to conduct business. Which, I must say, was a little bit weird.
I was only there because they actually had new DDR1 RAM in stock at a reasonable price, and I needed some today for a client. So I waited in the CS line while someone spilled their longwinded tale of woe in front of me, and a minute or so later one of the Geek Squad goons motioned me over to the non-operational checkout counter so I could get on my way quicker (thanks!).
While he was logging into the till and ringing things up, he asks "So, are you just upgrading or...?" I told him it was for a customer of mine, and that today Best Buy was simply my warehouse today.
He stood there for a second, seeming to take in my black T-shirt, camo pants and Jesus creepers -- an unashamedly free man, doing his own thing for the and getting paid for it. A moment later his face melted into a sad form of jealousy. I took my change, and left him to his corporate grindstone.
If someone sells me a toaster that does not toast, it's no different than selling me a computer that does not compute, a cable that does not conduct, or some RAM that does not remember.
There's so many different angles on it that it's almost meaningless to discuss them, but simply: If I trade them money for a widget that does X, they owe me a widget that does X. If it turns out that they cannot supply such a widget, they can return my money instead, and we'll both move on to other things.
IANAL, but I've never been unsuccessful in returning (or simply exchanging for something else that Actually Works) any item, ever.
Perhaps you misunderstand: I don't care about energy cost in terms of dollars: Energy, on the scale that I deal with, is damn-near monetarily free.
I care about two things: How efficiently a multi-user (or otherwise-loaded) machine can use the program, and how long I (as a single user) can operate between charges, or without the device overheating and slowing down or becoming unusable in other ways (dual 1.2GHz ARM cores and no meaningful heatsink == thermal dissipation issues, often to the extent that the device will refuse to charge the battery because the battery is too damned hot to be charged).
Things I don't care about: How long it takes a programmer to figure it out, how convoluted the programmer's learning curve is, and how much he/she hates the process of coding efficiently. With far more honesty than snideness, I really don't care about your problems.
I'm a user and sometimes an administrator, but never a programmer. (Fault me for this if you like.)
It's cool that you can combine all of those things ("error free") in 15 minutes, but: What does it cost? (And, again, I don't mean dollars. Human time is more valuable than money.)
You're right: There won't be 100 users running an admin tool (though I view smbtree, in particular, as more of a user tool...at least on the networks I've been paid to use). But there could easily be 100 users running 100 different Python apps which could be more-efficiently coded in...almost anything else.
The problem I see (and I see it more and more, and not just with Python) is that things are becoming more runtime-interpreted and less efficient. Going back some decades, it is often explained that it doesn't matter "these days", but I submit that it does matter -- and always has.
Instead of battling execution time (the CPU in my cell phone is ridiculously faster than my first half-dozen computers even if they're all combined and quadrupled), we're now battling energy efficiency. But other than terminology it's exactly the same game: Interpreted languages may be fast to develop, but cost more for people to use.
Case in point: I, a single user, notice when I'm running inefficient programs on my phone. Things generally happen very fast, but they also cause the hardware to get (sometimes uncomfortably) hot and the battery voltage starts to dive.
smbtree in particular is such a light-duty single-shot thing that it really won't ever matter to me, by itself, but the confluence of that and every other inefficient program makes a real dent in my ability to use my pocket computer and stay away from a charger, which has a real and tabulable cost in terms human time.
And not to be too pessimistic, but to extrapolate: It ought to be possible for a sufficiently-motivated person to ascertain the cost of such inefficient programming techniques in terms of human lives lost.
TFS says the thing can redefined quickly. That's good enough for me, for now, too.
But in addition to my previously-stated concerns, the whole thing seems about as likely to catch on as keyboard condoms: It can't as much as fun as the real thing.
What about the other users on the same computer who are also using software which is running 100x slower than it could, just because Python (or whatever) is the new hotness?
On a machine that's actually, you know, doing work, cycles count. Hell, even on a single-user netbook or tablet, cycles count, since it negatively influences both heat generation and battery life -- even if it's "fast enough" for a human's interaction.
Intentional (or even incidental) inefficiency is never a positive thing when it comes to computing.
I could care less the textures are of fixed position, or on a finely-detailed grid. For the uses that its useful for, this probably doesn't matter much for a first draft of the concept.
Instead, I worry about the fluid and surface acting as a lens, obfuscating the details below. And I worry about durability: Gorilla Glass is awesome in ways that I never fully appreciated until I myself tested it to destruction, but a squishy membrane over top of it can't be any improvement.
(And nevermind the effects of scratching and trapped dirt that soft surfaces suffer from, especially (in practical use) with sunlight.)
For example, imagine if the only way you could send letters was the US postal service.
Actually... the USPS does have a monopoly on first-class letters. Competition is only allowed for other services, such as parcels and expedited mailing.
I need to buy a furnace for the upstairs portion of my house sometime in the not-distant future.
I was considering just implementing a high-efficiency natural gas unit (since that's relatively cheap around here), but your suggestion changes things.
Speaking of high-definition video feeds, you may as well assume that at prime time hours at least half and maybe all of the units are watching HD Netflix, Hulu, Youtube or some other video source. That is 7 Mbps each, minimum, right there.
Indeed. And at this point, the dollars and cents probably cease to make any sense anymore: Half a gigabit/s of bandwidth, just for one "medium-sized" condo? I'm a decade or two behind on my terminology and pricing for "big pipes," but I'm thinking that 80 people won't want to pay for all that -- especially it they also have to pay for the folks who manage it.
My suggestion: Make sure the building has good wiring, and excellent service availability with whatever established providers that already exist.
Pander to the needs and wants of existing providers. Run coax and twisted pair all over the place, and multimode fiber if that ever seems like a real possibility (and it almost never does). Ask ISPs what it is that they want from you (this takes footwork, phone calls, and meetings) to ensure stellar service in the building..
Resist the temptation to combine spaces and designate wiring closets which are only for communications, and organize them so that they're easy to use without Larry the Cable Guy fucking everything up on accident.
And then, if they want it managed for them, do so: Charge the tenants for access, both per wired port and per wireless access point, since that part is easy to manage. And then allow their own ISP to handle the bandwidth requirements.
Or just modernize. Give them their own wiring closet (it need only be a cubby) where things come together, inside of their own unit, and let the ISP (or the end-user, or both) just deal with it, as they would in any other well-wired dwelling, and write off the cost of the prewire exactly as one would that of the carpet and the blinds.
The wood houses tend to disenigrate in 50 to 70 years, and economical concrete supplies are already limited
I live in a wooden house which was built somewhere between 1850 and 1890. It's not currently disintegrating in any structurally meaningful way.
The house itself is built on a limestone ridge. Indeed, limestone is very abundant around here. And IIRC, to get concrete, you pretty much just have to smash it, heat the smaller bits, and then recombine with water. It's not exactly high-tech, though parts of it may be energy-intensive.
Last time I was in Chicago, my Droid (which did do an excellent job of triangulating my location, and was accurate within a couple dozen feet even inside of a hotel as long as there was sufficient visible WiFi) failed miserably at getting me back to Ohio.
But it kept insisting I turn right from Lakeshore Drive where turning right was impossible due to physical barriers, while pretending to know where I was: It thought I was on a parallel road just to the south, and I wasn't.
Meanwhile, my cheap Garmin Nuvi was all too eager to get completely lost in the downtown areas, but at least would inform me of the fact that it had no clue where I was. And it was able to bring me to a road that actually headed east out of town, whereas the Droid completely failed.
It's plain to me that they both have their own strengths and weaknesses. As an out-of-towner, sans both atlas and navigator, it took a combination of both of these devices to get me anywhere.
And that, I shudder to say, was a win. (And if you've ever tried to find a place to simply stop a car en-route to read a map in downtown $bigcity, you'll likely agree.)
That said: The worst GPS-related navigation fault I've ever experienced occured while I was in the flat part of Ohio, in the late evening, with a clear view of the sky. I was in a parking lot and asked my OG Droid for directions. Both amusingly and uselessly, it insisted that I had a northwest heading over Canada at close to Mach 1.
I (just now) turned sync off on my D4, and it is still instantly responsive to commands over the Internet.
But anyway, one of the commands available by SMS is to turn on a polling service, which gets rid of the necessity for push to work at all.
So, scenario: You lose your phone, and push is broken/turned off/logged out/whatever.
Just send a "startpoll" command to it via SMS (maybe also in conjunction with "data start" and "wifi start"), and it becomes interactive....though the method is pull instead of push.
The polling service can also start automatically when a sim card change is detected at boot, which is another thing that's very clever about it.
That would be like IHOP being required to frisk you down, take your smartphone and tablets, and then somehow check to see if you have the legal entitlements to all IP on your person.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time my 17-year-old car starts showing early signs of doom, I feed it some new OEM parts that will last another decade or more.
I term the expense of the parts a "car payment". I term the time spent a "learning exercise." If it's beyond my ability to repair, I call it a "boat payment" (in homage to Car Talk).
It is both the least expensive and most awesome car I've ever driven, even counting a transmission swap. The car even includes a factory toolkit which can accomplish a variety of maintenance tasks, which I've found very useful indeed (though mostly on other people's cars when I find someone stranded and in need of a quick fix, who I normally find to be cursing their cars very existence until they see how easy some things can be with an ounce of preparedness and a willingness to think).
I'd be well into the payments on second brand-new car, by now, if I weren't interested in maintaining things when they wear out. But instead I'm currently thinking about minor bodywork and paint: Expensive, but still cheaper than throwing it away and buying something else that is comparable.
And yes, I also tear down my refrigerator when it misbehaves: It just takes a few screws to get to the guts. I also fix my own vacuum cleaner instead of toss it and buy another. And I service my own HVAC gear. And my dishwasher. And when the head gasket blew up on my air compressor, I made a new one out of a Dr. Pepper can.
FFS, when the faucet on the kitchen sink was acting wonky, I was annoyed. But I didn't call someone else to replace it -- I called the manufacturer, who sent out the parts to repair it for free...which is their policy. Service!
My first PDA was a Handspring Visor, and the factory stylus included a screwdriver just in case the device needed disassembling for some reason.
Things wear out. That doesn't mean they're used up, but just that they need a little bit of attention. But if maintenance is actively prohibited by the design of a product, I find myself actively repelled from buying it.
Your mileage, I gather, varies. Best of luck!
Whatever.
My TV has firmware which can be updated ("serviced") by an end-user, and I found the hardware itself to be remarkably easy to service when it decided to go "click-click-click-click-click-click-click" one day instead of turn on: Two capacitors, costing a total of exactly two dollars, and it's been right as rain since.
Tools needed: Soldering iron, solder, and the ability to visually identify obviously-swollen capacitors.
The hardest part was moving the thing around, but it's not the manufacturer's fault that I decided to buy a big LCD. Everything else was easy, including disassembly. The failed caps were mounted on a single-sided board, so even if I totally botched the job the first time it'd have been easy to try again.
And nevermind DLP and LCD projectors with light bulbs that eventually get tired, which are often rather pain-free to replace.
(And, yes: I expect normal people to be able to do this sort of stuff, just as I expect them to be able to jump start their own car without incidental electrical fires. Your expectations may vary.)
Therein lies the difference between energy and potential energy.
A clockspring can be wound up a few dozen turns and have a relatively large amount of potential energy.
But it's a fucking loss if the clockspring is never allowed to unwind (ie, it is hoarded) because it doesn't do anything. And if it is only allowed to unwind a little bit at a time, its relative energy impact is relatively minimal.
To bring things back to context:
A person can hoard bitcoin and have a relatively large amount of potential economic power.
But it's a fucking loss if they never use any of that bitcoin (ie, it is hoarded) because it doesn't do anything. And if they only use a little bit at a time, their relative economic power is relatively minimal.
Now sure: They could hoard everything they can grasp and keep it until some rainy day when they just want to Ruin Everything, and then let large amounts of it go all at once. But they won't earn any money ("power") doing this as the currency crashes, so why bother worrying about it any more than we worry about terrorists or earthquakes or tornados any other unpredictable thing that we cannot control?
(Next time I'll try to throw a car analogy in here, somehow.)
You'd be surprised just how much "high-end" you can find in small towns, if you bother to go looking.
I do some work for a local audio shop (population ~40k). They've got things from cheap ($20 ear buds for a kid's iPod) to excellent (Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser).
They sell a lot more of the cheap products because everyone seems to assume that if you want to pay real money for better gear, you have to drive at least an hour to find it (to find a "big city").
Meanwhile, alongside the mass-market Onkyo and Teac components are the likes of Parasound, Lexicon, and Krell.
So, my advice (to anyone, not just Prune) is as such: If you're convinced you need to get in the car and drive over to $bigcity in order to spend money on gear, then do so. But at least do yourself the favor and stop at the local audio shop on your way out of town -- you might be surprised at the gems you'll find, and the local service is likely unbeatable.
You're a self-employed graphic artist?
Please do drop me an email. I have a simple hand-drawn logo that I need cleaned and vectorized for my small-time PC-fixit business. Limited budget (isn't it always?), simple black-and-white, and easy for anyone skilled with the toolchain (but not for myself or the others that I've asked), but not free.
It just needs to be good enough for business cards and web pages for now. Billboard- and newsprint-scale detail (if it ever makes it that far) will pay more, if you're still game.
Have you tried using an AJAX-ey chat client on a dumb terminal?
My God, man. If there isn't an ncurses interface, at least, then count me out: I'd rather key SMTP commands directly into the recipient's mail server than try to use something like Meebo with a dumb terminal connected to a host running Links or somesuch.
That all said, I do miss ytalk.
(Sorry, but I'm simply very literal today. Yes, it's my fault. No, nothing you say will improve it.)
Sure. Voice is agnostic to such things. It doesn't care if you're black or white, American or Tommy. It doesn't care if you like Chevy or Ford.
*shrug*
And in other news, I'm very scared of spiders.
It's the truth, so I don't need to post about it as AC.
I can't sleep sometimes because of it. I often have horrible dreams about spiders. I remember spider encounters when I was young, particularly with some horrifically weird, big, leaf-crunching monsters of the arachnid family that were all pink and had long, tubular legs, and wouldn't die from just one well-placed blow from my mother's foot -- it took several before it stopped running, let alone stopped trying.
And the sad part is, I used to like spiders -- a long, long time ago.
It still makes me twitch uneasily, just now. Cry? No, not normally. But thanks, asshole: Now I'll be up all night wondering if my house is sufficiently poisoned, with my skin crawling in fear that something has made its way past my indoor chemical defenses and the fleet of toads that I keep around the foundation of my house as a first-tier defense.
What kind of life is that?
(And the point is that there's a lot of things that can result in recurring emotional trauma for a human being. Some of them are chemistry-related, some of them are environmental, and most are probably a combination of both.)
Depends on the application, and the device.
On my OG Droid, for instance, there's an excellent chance that switching from $randomapp to $randombrowser, doing some browsing, and then switching back is going to fail at resurrecting $randomapp's state due to RAM starvation issues.
Now, sure: In a perfect world where RAM is unlimited and programmers know what they're doing, this all works fine, every time.
But that's the same mythological world where pulleys are frictionless, rope doesn't stretch, love is free, and unicorns are real.
For a moment, I thought the title of TFS was "California City May Make Sugary Drinks Taste Like Cigarettes," and my mind nearly exploded at the thought of the concept.
I went into the local Best Buy recently, and noticed the same thing: The checkout line was closed, and there was a permanent-looking sign instructing customers to go elsewhere to conduct business. Which, I must say, was a little bit weird.
I was only there because they actually had new DDR1 RAM in stock at a reasonable price, and I needed some today for a client. So I waited in the CS line while someone spilled their longwinded tale of woe in front of me, and a minute or so later one of the Geek Squad goons motioned me over to the non-operational checkout counter so I could get on my way quicker (thanks!).
While he was logging into the till and ringing things up, he asks "So, are you just upgrading or...?" I told him it was for a customer of mine, and that today Best Buy was simply my warehouse today.
He stood there for a second, seeming to take in my black T-shirt, camo pants and Jesus creepers -- an unashamedly free man, doing his own thing for the and getting paid for it. A moment later his face melted into a sad form of jealousy. I took my change, and left him to his corporate grindstone.
It's also got ties into the UCC, and common law.
If someone sells me a toaster that does not toast, it's no different than selling me a computer that does not compute, a cable that does not conduct, or some RAM that does not remember.
There's so many different angles on it that it's almost meaningless to discuss them, but simply: If I trade them money for a widget that does X, they owe me a widget that does X. If it turns out that they cannot supply such a widget, they can return my money instead, and we'll both move on to other things.
IANAL, but I've never been unsuccessful in returning (or simply exchanging for something else that Actually Works) any item, ever.
Perhaps you misunderstand: I don't care about energy cost in terms of dollars: Energy, on the scale that I deal with, is damn-near monetarily free.
I care about two things: How efficiently a multi-user (or otherwise-loaded) machine can use the program, and how long I (as a single user) can operate between charges, or without the device overheating and slowing down or becoming unusable in other ways (dual 1.2GHz ARM cores and no meaningful heatsink == thermal dissipation issues, often to the extent that the device will refuse to charge the battery because the battery is too damned hot to be charged).
Things I don't care about: How long it takes a programmer to figure it out, how convoluted the programmer's learning curve is, and how much he/she hates the process of coding efficiently. With far more honesty than snideness, I really don't care about your problems.
I'm a user and sometimes an administrator, but never a programmer. (Fault me for this if you like.)
It's cool that you can combine all of those things ("error free") in 15 minutes, but: What does it cost? (And, again, I don't mean dollars. Human time is more valuable than money.)
I'd respond in context, but you're an AC. While I'm interested in discussing these concepts, I prefer to have my discussions with individuals. YMMV.
You're right: There won't be 100 users running an admin tool (though I view smbtree, in particular, as more of a user tool...at least on the networks I've been paid to use). But there could easily be 100 users running 100 different Python apps which could be more-efficiently coded in...almost anything else.
The problem I see (and I see it more and more, and not just with Python) is that things are becoming more runtime-interpreted and less efficient. Going back some decades, it is often explained that it doesn't matter "these days", but I submit that it does matter -- and always has.
Instead of battling execution time (the CPU in my cell phone is ridiculously faster than my first half-dozen computers even if they're all combined and quadrupled), we're now battling energy efficiency. But other than terminology it's exactly the same game: Interpreted languages may be fast to develop, but cost more for people to use.
Case in point: I, a single user, notice when I'm running inefficient programs on my phone. Things generally happen very fast, but they also cause the hardware to get (sometimes uncomfortably) hot and the battery voltage starts to dive.
smbtree in particular is such a light-duty single-shot thing that it really won't ever matter to me, by itself, but the confluence of that and every other inefficient program makes a real dent in my ability to use my pocket computer and stay away from a charger, which has a real and tabulable cost in terms human time.
And not to be too pessimistic, but to extrapolate: It ought to be possible for a sufficiently-motivated person to ascertain the cost of such inefficient programming techniques in terms of human lives lost.
(Ugh.)
TFS says the thing can redefined quickly. That's good enough for me, for now, too.
But in addition to my previously-stated concerns, the whole thing seems about as likely to catch on as keyboard condoms: It can't as much as fun as the real thing.
What about the other users on the same computer who are also using software which is running 100x slower than it could, just because Python (or whatever) is the new hotness?
On a machine that's actually, you know, doing work, cycles count. Hell, even on a single-user netbook or tablet, cycles count, since it negatively influences both heat generation and battery life -- even if it's "fast enough" for a human's interaction.
Intentional (or even incidental) inefficiency is never a positive thing when it comes to computing.
I could care less the textures are of fixed position, or on a finely-detailed grid. For the uses that its useful for, this probably doesn't matter much for a first draft of the concept.
Instead, I worry about the fluid and surface acting as a lens, obfuscating the details below. And I worry about durability: Gorilla Glass is awesome in ways that I never fully appreciated until I myself tested it to destruction, but a squishy membrane over top of it can't be any improvement.
(And nevermind the effects of scratching and trapped dirt that soft surfaces suffer from, especially (in practical use) with sunlight.)
Actually... the USPS does have a monopoly on first-class letters. Competition is only allowed for other services, such as parcels and expedited mailing.
I need to buy a furnace for the upstairs portion of my house sometime in the not-distant future.
I was considering just implementing a high-efficiency natural gas unit (since that's relatively cheap around here), but your suggestion changes things.
Where can I learn more about such a concept?
Indeed. And at this point, the dollars and cents probably cease to make any sense anymore: Half a gigabit/s of bandwidth, just for one "medium-sized" condo? I'm a decade or two behind on my terminology and pricing for "big pipes," but I'm thinking that 80 people won't want to pay for all that -- especially it they also have to pay for the folks who manage it.
My suggestion: Make sure the building has good wiring, and excellent service availability with whatever established providers that already exist.
Pander to the needs and wants of existing providers. Run coax and twisted pair all over the place, and multimode fiber if that ever seems like a real possibility (and it almost never does). Ask ISPs what it is that they want from you (this takes footwork, phone calls, and meetings) to ensure stellar service in the building..
Resist the temptation to combine spaces and designate wiring closets which are only for communications, and organize them so that they're easy to use without Larry the Cable Guy fucking everything up on accident.
And then, if they want it managed for them, do so: Charge the tenants for access, both per wired port and per wireless access point, since that part is easy to manage. And then allow their own ISP to handle the bandwidth requirements.
Or just modernize. Give them their own wiring closet (it need only be a cubby) where things come together, inside of their own unit, and let the ISP (or the end-user, or both) just deal with it, as they would in any other well-wired dwelling, and write off the cost of the prewire exactly as one would that of the carpet and the blinds.
I live in a wooden house which was built somewhere between 1850 and 1890. It's not currently disintegrating in any structurally meaningful way.
The house itself is built on a limestone ridge. Indeed, limestone is very abundant around here. And IIRC, to get concrete, you pretty much just have to smash it, heat the smaller bits, and then recombine with water. It's not exactly high-tech, though parts of it may be energy-intensive.
Yes, sort of.
Last time I was in Chicago, my Droid (which did do an excellent job of triangulating my location, and was accurate within a couple dozen feet even inside of a hotel as long as there was sufficient visible WiFi) failed miserably at getting me back to Ohio.
But it kept insisting I turn right from Lakeshore Drive where turning right was impossible due to physical barriers, while pretending to know where I was: It thought I was on a parallel road just to the south, and I wasn't.
Meanwhile, my cheap Garmin Nuvi was all too eager to get completely lost in the downtown areas, but at least would inform me of the fact that it had no clue where I was. And it was able to bring me to a road that actually headed east out of town, whereas the Droid completely failed.
It's plain to me that they both have their own strengths and weaknesses. As an out-of-towner, sans both atlas and navigator, it took a combination of both of these devices to get me anywhere.
And that, I shudder to say, was a win. (And if you've ever tried to find a place to simply stop a car en-route to read a map in downtown $bigcity, you'll likely agree.)
That said: The worst GPS-related navigation fault I've ever experienced occured while I was in the flat part of Ohio, in the late evening, with a clear view of the sky. I was in a parking lot and asked my OG Droid for directions. Both amusingly and uselessly, it insisted that I had a northwest heading over Canada at close to Mach 1.
I (just now) turned sync off on my D4, and it is still instantly responsive to commands over the Internet.
But anyway, one of the commands available by SMS is to turn on a polling service, which gets rid of the necessity for push to work at all.
So, scenario: You lose your phone, and push is broken/turned off/logged out/whatever.
Just send a "startpoll" command to it via SMS (maybe also in conjunction with "data start" and "wifi start"), and it becomes interactive....though the method is pull instead of push.
The polling service can also start automatically when a sim card change is detected at boot, which is another thing that's very clever about it.
IHOP is an interesting example. Sometimes, IHOP issues special IDs to employees for tax evasion, and the restaurants sometimes get burned down in search of profit.
Asking these folks to check your IP, legal or not, may not be too much of a stretch. Sometimes, it seems that they're up to no good at all.