...edubuntu...worth a look too if you run linux and have kids..."
Looked at it, loved it, got it running now on an old laptop for the 4yo. Can't get the wireless networking running, but she's still working through the "games". Wish there were some more puzzles; for some reason they're her favorite.
Back in 1986 lots of people weren't used to buying VHS tapes
Of course they weren't. Two reasons - the simple one is that the playback possibilities were somewhat limited, and even those with the cash for a 3 gun FP system still only had 200 lines of resolution. The second, which most people forget, is that in the early 80s, VHS tapes were $70-90. In the early 80s - a sizeable chunk of cash today, and about a factor of two over todays dollar. Top Gun was the first to include an advertisement at the beginning, and at a time when the blockbusters were selling for $90, it was released at the unheard of price of $29.95. Absoluetly insane. And it worked - the movie sold like hotcakes. Note that at the time I was pimply faced teenager working at a video rental store, so I saw the shift. Until then, we had regular customers who would come in, rent three new releases and buy a blank tape and a nice box. Hmmmm...I wonder what was hapenning there? We sold a lot more movies after the ads were put in. Whether you like em or (like me) hate em, they pushed the cost down to affordable.
Nowadays, the movie can be purchased on the open market for less than the soundtrack. Imho, somethings wrong with that.
That's alright. Most of the population finds Bose speakers to be far more pleasant than studio reference monitors. Don't feel bad, though - you're in plentiful company.
(you lost me at "USB" and "through my computer" - between the A/D->D/A conversions happening and the emi/rfi noise associated with computer hardware, you're hearing ghosts)
This is simple case of the law not keeping up with technology. Prior to this biofuel craze the primary way to skirt the gas tax was to puchase fuel meant for off rad use (which is not taxed with the fuel/road tax rate). This law was to get those people using tractor diesel and heating oil.
Gas taxes are, by and large, the best of many imperfect ways to recover road use costs. Everybody finds some niche exception, but for the most part a car which weighs more takes more gasoline/diesel to run, and imposes more wear and tear on the roads. For two people driving the same vehicle, the user of 15,000 road miles will pay 15% in raod tax as the user who drives 100,000 miles.
Of course there are exceptions, but over all averages it tends to hit the people who use the road, in approximate relation to their usage.
As for your electric car - yes, you're not paying your share. Neither are the hybrid drivers. Otoh, the soccer moms who are driving their excursions around empty are overpaying for their usage. In a way, it's both a use tax and a carbon tax. You can really screw over the govenment by walking. Veggie diesel, in its own twisted way, circumvents both the road use tax, but still spews out lots of carbon (surprise! its a hydrocarbon - and if you use waste oil, the carbon would have remaind bound at the bottom of a landfill instead of in our atmosphere...well, mostly). But using SVO is also like flipping the middle east oil producers the bird...and there's got ot be some value ot the government in that these days;-)
Okay, I like Harold Faltermyer as much as the next guy, but I'm going to have to say that it's not exactly what I think of for Guitar Hero. Next thing I know there's going to be a keyboard hero and you're going to want Axel F!
I'm not sure to mod or reply...guess by the time you read this I've chosen.
I'm not certain that really good linux admins are more or less expensive than really good windows admins. The key for schools is that - given 20 or 30 adults in one building - someone on staff probably knows enough to load windows and do very basic OS maintenance. They can't do it well, and they're likely to screw something up, but they are "free" in teh sense that you don't have to pay them extra to do that work. The chance of having one of those same adults even know what Linux is is depressingly small, and to be confronted with something that doesn't look _exactly_ like their box at home is truly frightening to them.
Although I'd like to say that F/OSS software is "vendor neutral" or "corporate neutral", I think another poster was onto somehting bigger - freedom from licensing accounting. Shools have as much budget for mundane IT tasks as they have for the hardcore ones - none. I'm sure there are enough applications to satisfy most needs on either side of the fence, but the installed base of training is high enough for the corporate software that it would take real effort to switch people over. And as anyone in a school system is aware, teachers are some of the most stubborn, change-averse creatures in the universe.
It is my general opinion that for F/OSS to take over the schools, it will take an effort equivalent to the corporate "free dime-bags" that is academic software pricing. In this case, it will need to be local volunteers providing the service side of the equation for free. For MS et. al., low cost software and free/low-cost installed-base support can only be countered by F/OSS software and _reliable, long term_ donated support. Until that is a reality on a large scale, corps will always win.
Actually, I see it mostly being deployed in new development around my area of the east coast. That's where its cheapest. Putting new fiber into old (sometimes very old) places can be stupid expensive, and no matter how expensive the old houses are, they're still only going to get $40/mo back on each house they wire. Payback measured in years instead of decades is good. Payback measured in months (for new devels where install costs are a simple swap instead of an add) is even better.
I didn't eactly say what I meant about the competition thing...should have hit preview. The sentense in my head was "That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by the same for-profit corporations which provide the data service - there is effectively no room for competition." Verizon has effectively squeezed out any other dsl carriers by charging them more for the lines than they charge themselves. Not that that's illogical - I'd do it to if I owned Verizon. Cable does put some pressure on telco, but the service areas in which they compete are still very thinly distribited around the US. I happen to live in a very wired town, and niether the (single) cable company nor the (single) telco offers any overlapping services except internet. There is one alternate provider in town, but their coverage, by my estimate, is less than 3% and consists of recently built condos (both res and business) which are rentals where the owner chose them. In those locations, the other providers are unavailable (isolated monopoly).
I think they're deploying because there is a possibility of more revenue streams - phone, internet, and now tv/media services. It's less a fear of cable and more a new opportunity to expand their revenue.
It amy not be a great parallel, but I've always been amazed at how fantastic the service/price ratio has been on long distance since the service was separated from the local carriers. Everybody gets carried on the "same" (not really true...but bear with me) infrastructure, and the "service" of routing and connecting your packets, and billing, support, and marketing is done by a myriad of competitors. Now _that's_ the kind of competition I'd like to see in the internet and video arenas. Of course, my daughter would like a pony, too, but that's not going to happen either!
Look, trademarks work very similarly, and nobody appears to be whining and complaining about that. I'm not tied up in a day number (though it did spur the discussion!) - jus that you are required to defend your patent on a continual basis or lose it. There's no significant allowance for selective defense or ignoring "the small guy" - your patent is being infringed or not. Most of the really techincal fields are pretty small - and most people know the big players; very few products are produced commercially (not covertly, or in sample quantities, or stealthily) that don't circulate in the trade rags or the on the net in a quarter.
Remember, we're into advancing art and science, not figuring out ways to create lotto winners. I say invalidating lots of the patents for little shit that's hidden in all sorts of places is a good thing. And I don't think I'm alone here at/. Remember - if you're afraid of someone else, you can always make it a trade secret.
SCO may be going down the drain, but he seems to be raking in quite a healthy sum while they continue to circle the drain. Maybe not profit for the investors, but certainly profit for the board.
if the patent isn't defended within (name your short time frame - I say 90 days*) from the first commercial, non-licensed implementation, the patent automatically expires and falls into the public domain.
Show of hands on the proposal?
*For those who say 90 days is too short, let me preemptively reply that if you are so involved in a particular industry that you can patent something in that field, you damned well ought to notice when someone announces or commercially uses that idea _in your field_ within three months. Otherwise, you really are just a troll.
I hate to make the same comment more than once in the same day, but this is why the infrastructure needs to be separated from the service. If everybody pays the same access fee for the basic infrastructure (everybody meaning either the end user, or the service provider on a per-user basis), then there can be more providers and more competition. Long distance phone service, by a series of odd fates, has essentially this arrangement, and there are quite a number of competing (and competitive) plans and providers out there.
Providers have to create or cross license their infrastructure, and that is massivly expensive. The only reason that there is lock in to undesirable providers is that they have premium or exclusive coverage areas. This is especially true in non-dense populations. Verizon sucks donkey balls when it comes to getting anything without an added fee, but they have good coverage where other providers (like at&t which, while also evil, at least offers gsm/3g) have little or none.
Take all those towers, switch them to gsm, consolidate the bands, put the infrastructure under better, tigher regulation owned by a (network of) (possibly gov't overseen) corps. Forbid those corps from selling any direct services except the infrastrucutre access, then provide standard per user/per packet rates to all providers. It won't happen, but it sure would help if it did.
The problem is that they're not just letting copper go by the wayside where they're installing FiOS, they're letting copper go down the tubes (so to speak) everywhere - even where they have no real plans to install fiber. Fiber is expensive and they are cherry picking the hig-density, high disposable income areas. To fund this expansion of service, they are shorting funds to maintain copper to the rest of the area.
Now, that's all fine and good - I can always switch to any of a number of other telephone carriers who do a better job of maintaining my phone service. Oh, right - I can't because Verizon has a de facto monopoly on telco services in my area - much of it due to government regulation and exclusive rights.
That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by for-profit corporations - there is effectively no competition. Between rights of way, exclusive rights for areas, and a century of stacked up regulations the barriers to entry are insurmoutable for all but the most dense, wealthy areas of the country. Were I king, I would separate the infrastructure from the services. Sadly, I'm not (as I hear it's good to be the king). It would not solve all the issues, but it would at least start down the road of reducing the anticompetitive behavior of the incumbent utility operators against data (and power) providers which do not own infrastructure.
You missed the transition from a person being defined as a white male landowner, to a corporate CxO. The same thing, really, just a different era.
Besides, I've many of these "people" you refer to (having lived in both metro and non-metro areas) - you really don't want many of those people running the government. That's not to say that the CxO class is doing a good job - quite the contrary. But you're not going to get magical parity by letting the general poulation make decisions - they are very poor at seeing pat the end of their nose. At least the CxOs see all the way to their fingertips...which is where they hold the paper with their bottom line.
If you grabbed 1000 people at random - heck, I'll even give you 1000 people between the ages of 20 and 40, you'd be hard pressed to find 20 that have ever heard of DCT or Fourier analysis, and phenominally lucky to find one that could actually describe what it means.
Oh, and the answer to your question is "yes." Saying "Frequency Space" as part of a description to anyone who is not involved in either said data analysis, compression, or vibrations (my former, and sometimes current, field) is guaranteed to be met with a blank stare.
Every time the come up with a DRM method, they also patent every circumvention method they can think of. That way, nobody can legally create a "decoder" for their wares. Sneaky, tehy are. It really adds weight to the idea of "produce in commercial quantities or default to statutory licensing set by the government."
You are correct. Except in politics and love, there is generally a "right" and a "wrong" side. That's what's so nice about science and mathematics - eventually we will be able to sort out who was right and who was wrong, even if we aren't terribly certain of which side is which today.
Perhaps the difficulty here is that from the perspective of creationists, this a politcal issue, and for scientists it's a scientific matter. Similar tension exists in the global warming debate. For some people its a scientific discussion, but for many (on both "sides") it is more of a political issue.
FWIW, I skimmed your article, and was not impressed. It was a literalist baptist who got a bunch of warm fuzzies from the creatinist descriptions while his kids played with the dinosaur models. No doubt a fun day, but it sounded a bit like a [democrat/republican going] to a [democratic/republican] working group meeting while the kids played (Don't break the ice/Monopoly], and coming out energized and ready to change the world for the better.
There's a documentary series about an island off of costa rica (I think) that has lots of dinosaurs. It was out before the whole penguin-documentary (i.e. happy feet, et. al.) craze, so you might have missed it. The first in the series was very informative, and very well done. They spared no expense - they even got John Williams to do the score.
Don't necessarily discount solar sources. Solar can produce quite a bit of heat, and being able to produce power from a 500-700F element could feasibly produce 30-40% efficient devices if the acoustic conversion is highly efficient. One poster mentioned poor output, with high voltages and small current, but a parallel set of such devices might deliver a net current that is into the useful range. Even 30% of 1200W/m is a nice return. I suppose it depends on the longevity of the components at higher temps and the cost to manufacture as to whether the net value is enough to make it commercially viable.
I know that solar farms have been built with a central heated tower (very cool looking, if not terribly efficient and subject to large fires stirling cycle?), but this might allow a bunch of independent modules and would tend to fail gracefully, since running a larger number of units in parallel would allow for individual units to fail without taking the whole system down (I would hope).
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...edubuntu...worth a look too if you run linux and have kids..."
Looked at it, loved it, got it running now on an old laptop for the 4yo. Can't get the wireless networking running, but she's still working through the "games". Wish there were some more puzzles; for some reason they're her favorite.
Another stroke of linux name/marketing genius.
Back in 1986 lots of people weren't used to buying VHS tapes
Of course they weren't. Two reasons - the simple one is that the playback possibilities were somewhat limited, and even those with the cash for a 3 gun FP system still only had 200 lines of resolution. The second, which most people forget, is that in the early 80s, VHS tapes were $70-90. In the early 80s - a sizeable chunk of cash today, and about a factor of two over todays dollar. Top Gun was the first to include an advertisement at the beginning, and at a time when the blockbusters were selling for $90, it was released at the unheard of price of $29.95. Absoluetly insane. And it worked - the movie sold like hotcakes. Note that at the time I was pimply faced teenager working at a video rental store, so I saw the shift. Until then, we had regular customers who would come in, rent three new releases and buy a blank tape and a nice box. Hmmmm...I wonder what was hapenning there? We sold a lot more movies after the ads were put in. Whether you like em or (like me) hate em, they pushed the cost down to affordable.
Nowadays, the movie can be purchased on the open market for less than the soundtrack. Imho, somethings wrong with that.
That's alright. Most of the population finds Bose speakers to be far more pleasant than studio reference monitors. Don't feel bad, though - you're in plentiful company.
(you lost me at "USB" and "through my computer" - between the A/D->D/A conversions happening and the emi/rfi noise associated with computer hardware, you're hearing ghosts)
I don't know, somehow a little device just sitting out there waiting for something to happen for interaction sounds remarkably like a daemon to me.
We'll stop claiming to be heroic when we get to stop paying for the whole damned thing.
I suppose as long as the don't turn off the containment to the Martian paddock, they'll be okay.
This is simple case of the law not keeping up with technology. Prior to this biofuel craze the primary way to skirt the gas tax was to puchase fuel meant for off rad use (which is not taxed with the fuel/road tax rate). This law was to get those people using tractor diesel and heating oil.
;-)
Gas taxes are, by and large, the best of many imperfect ways to recover road use costs. Everybody finds some niche exception, but for the most part a car which weighs more takes more gasoline/diesel to run, and imposes more wear and tear on the roads. For two people driving the same vehicle, the user of 15,000 road miles will pay 15% in raod tax as the user who drives 100,000 miles.
Of course there are exceptions, but over all averages it tends to hit the people who use the road, in approximate relation to their usage.
As for your electric car - yes, you're not paying your share. Neither are the hybrid drivers. Otoh, the soccer moms who are driving their excursions around empty are overpaying for their usage. In a way, it's both a use tax and a carbon tax. You can really screw over the govenment by walking. Veggie diesel, in its own twisted way, circumvents both the road use tax, but still spews out lots of carbon (surprise! its a hydrocarbon - and if you use waste oil, the carbon would have remaind bound at the bottom of a landfill instead of in our atmosphere...well, mostly). But using SVO is also like flipping the middle east oil producers the bird...and there's got ot be some value ot the government in that these days
Okay, I like Harold Faltermyer as much as the next guy, but I'm going to have to say that it's not exactly what I think of for Guitar Hero. Next thing I know there's going to be a keyboard hero and you're going to want Axel F!
I'm not sure to mod or reply...guess by the time you read this I've chosen.
I'm not certain that really good linux admins are more or less expensive than really good windows admins. The key for schools is that - given 20 or 30 adults in one building - someone on staff probably knows enough to load windows and do very basic OS maintenance. They can't do it well, and they're likely to screw something up, but they are "free" in teh sense that you don't have to pay them extra to do that work. The chance of having one of those same adults even know what Linux is is depressingly small, and to be confronted with something that doesn't look _exactly_ like their box at home is truly frightening to them.
Although I'd like to say that F/OSS software is "vendor neutral" or "corporate neutral", I think another poster was onto somehting bigger - freedom from licensing accounting. Shools have as much budget for mundane IT tasks as they have for the hardcore ones - none. I'm sure there are enough applications to satisfy most needs on either side of the fence, but the installed base of training is high enough for the corporate software that it would take real effort to switch people over. And as anyone in a school system is aware, teachers are some of the most stubborn, change-averse creatures in the universe.
It is my general opinion that for F/OSS to take over the schools, it will take an effort equivalent to the corporate "free dime-bags" that is academic software pricing. In this case, it will need to be local volunteers providing the service side of the equation for free. For MS et. al., low cost software and free/low-cost installed-base support can only be countered by F/OSS software and _reliable, long term_ donated support. Until that is a reality on a large scale, corps will always win.
Actually, I see it mostly being deployed in new development around my area of the east coast. That's where its cheapest. Putting new fiber into old (sometimes very old) places can be stupid expensive, and no matter how expensive the old houses are, they're still only going to get $40/mo back on each house they wire. Payback measured in years instead of decades is good. Payback measured in months (for new devels where install costs are a simple swap instead of an add) is even better.
I didn't eactly say what I meant about the competition thing...should have hit preview. The sentense in my head was "That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by the same for-profit corporations which provide the data service - there is effectively no room for competition." Verizon has effectively squeezed out any other dsl carriers by charging them more for the lines than they charge themselves. Not that that's illogical - I'd do it to if I owned Verizon. Cable does put some pressure on telco, but the service areas in which they compete are still very thinly distribited around the US. I happen to live in a very wired town, and niether the (single) cable company nor the (single) telco offers any overlapping services except internet. There is one alternate provider in town, but their coverage, by my estimate, is less than 3% and consists of recently built condos (both res and business) which are rentals where the owner chose them. In those locations, the other providers are unavailable (isolated monopoly).
I think they're deploying because there is a possibility of more revenue streams - phone, internet, and now tv/media services. It's less a fear of cable and more a new opportunity to expand their revenue.
It amy not be a great parallel, but I've always been amazed at how fantastic the service/price ratio has been on long distance since the service was separated from the local carriers. Everybody gets carried on the "same" (not really true...but bear with me) infrastructure, and the "service" of routing and connecting your packets, and billing, support, and marketing is done by a myriad of competitors. Now _that's_ the kind of competition I'd like to see in the internet and video arenas. Of course, my daughter would like a pony, too, but that's not going to happen either!
Look, trademarks work very similarly, and nobody appears to be whining and complaining about that. I'm not tied up in a day number (though it did spur the discussion!) - jus that you are required to defend your patent on a continual basis or lose it. There's no significant allowance for selective defense or ignoring "the small guy" - your patent is being infringed or not. Most of the really techincal fields are pretty small - and most people know the big players; very few products are produced commercially (not covertly, or in sample quantities, or stealthily) that don't circulate in the trade rags or the on the net in a quarter.
/. Remember - if you're afraid of someone else, you can always make it a trade secret.
Remember, we're into advancing art and science, not figuring out ways to create lotto winners. I say invalidating lots of the patents for little shit that's hidden in all sorts of places is a good thing. And I don't think I'm alone here at
SCO may be going down the drain, but he seems to be raking in quite a healthy sum while they continue to circle the drain. Maybe not profit for the investors, but certainly profit for the board.
if the patent isn't defended within (name your short time frame - I say 90 days*) from the first commercial, non-licensed implementation, the patent automatically expires and falls into the public domain.
Show of hands on the proposal?
*For those who say 90 days is too short, let me preemptively reply that if you are so involved in a particular industry that you can patent something in that field, you damned well ought to notice when someone announces or commercially uses that idea _in your field_ within three months. Otherwise, you really are just a troll.
I hate to make the same comment more than once in the same day, but this is why the infrastructure needs to be separated from the service. If everybody pays the same access fee for the basic infrastructure (everybody meaning either the end user, or the service provider on a per-user basis), then there can be more providers and more competition. Long distance phone service, by a series of odd fates, has essentially this arrangement, and there are quite a number of competing (and competitive) plans and providers out there.
Providers have to create or cross license their infrastructure, and that is massivly expensive. The only reason that there is lock in to undesirable providers is that they have premium or exclusive coverage areas. This is especially true in non-dense populations. Verizon sucks donkey balls when it comes to getting anything without an added fee, but they have good coverage where other providers (like at&t which, while also evil, at least offers gsm/3g) have little or none.
Take all those towers, switch them to gsm, consolidate the bands, put the infrastructure under better, tigher regulation owned by a (network of) (possibly gov't overseen) corps. Forbid those corps from selling any direct services except the infrastrucutre access, then provide standard per user/per packet rates to all providers. It won't happen, but it sure would help if it did.
just trying to bring in the nerdiest guys they could find and then have them interviewed by the porn girls and film it.
And you had a problem with this because...?
The problem is that they're not just letting copper go by the wayside where they're installing FiOS, they're letting copper go down the tubes (so to speak) everywhere - even where they have no real plans to install fiber. Fiber is expensive and they are cherry picking the hig-density, high disposable income areas. To fund this expansion of service, they are shorting funds to maintain copper to the rest of the area.
Now, that's all fine and good - I can always switch to any of a number of other telephone carriers who do a better job of maintaining my phone service. Oh, right - I can't because Verizon has a de facto monopoly on telco services in my area - much of it due to government regulation and exclusive rights.
That's the problem with the infrastructure being run by for-profit corporations - there is effectively no competition. Between rights of way, exclusive rights for areas, and a century of stacked up regulations the barriers to entry are insurmoutable for all but the most dense, wealthy areas of the country. Were I king, I would separate the infrastructure from the services. Sadly, I'm not (as I hear it's good to be the king). It would not solve all the issues, but it would at least start down the road of reducing the anticompetitive behavior of the incumbent utility operators against data (and power) providers which do not own infrastructure.
I still don't get it. Apple isn't planning on any unauthorized software on the iPhone - why would they want winshops developing random apps for it?
You missed the transition from a person being defined as a white male landowner, to a corporate CxO. The same thing, really, just a different era.
Besides, I've many of these "people" you refer to (having lived in both metro and non-metro areas) - you really don't want many of those people running the government. That's not to say that the CxO class is doing a good job - quite the contrary. But you're not going to get magical parity by letting the general poulation make decisions - they are very poor at seeing pat the end of their nose. At least the CxOs see all the way to their fingertips...which is where they hold the paper with their bottom line.
If you grabbed 1000 people at random - heck, I'll even give you 1000 people between the ages of 20 and 40, you'd be hard pressed to find 20 that have ever heard of DCT or Fourier analysis, and phenominally lucky to find one that could actually describe what it means.
Oh, and the answer to your question is "yes." Saying "Frequency Space" as part of a description to anyone who is not involved in either said data analysis, compression, or vibrations (my former, and sometimes current, field) is guaranteed to be met with a blank stare.
Every time the come up with a DRM method, they also patent every circumvention method they can think of. That way, nobody can legally create a "decoder" for their wares. Sneaky, tehy are. It really adds weight to the idea of "produce in commercial quantities or default to statutory licensing set by the government."
You are correct. Except in politics and love, there is generally a "right" and a "wrong" side. That's what's so nice about science and mathematics - eventually we will be able to sort out who was right and who was wrong, even if we aren't terribly certain of which side is which today.
Perhaps the difficulty here is that from the perspective of creationists, this a politcal issue, and for scientists it's a scientific matter. Similar tension exists in the global warming debate. For some people its a scientific discussion, but for many (on both "sides") it is more of a political issue.
FWIW, I skimmed your article, and was not impressed. It was a literalist baptist who got a bunch of warm fuzzies from the creatinist descriptions while his kids played with the dinosaur models. No doubt a fun day, but it sounded a bit like a [democrat/republican going] to a [democratic/republican] working group meeting while the kids played (Don't break the ice/Monopoly], and coming out energized and ready to change the world for the better.
There's a documentary series about an island off of costa rica (I think) that has lots of dinosaurs. It was out before the whole penguin-documentary (i.e. happy feet, et. al.) craze, so you might have missed it. The first in the series was very informative, and very well done. They spared no expense - they even got John Williams to do the score.
I think he's just blowing smoke up Congress's ass.
So, would that make his whole presentation on the topic sort of a "smoke and rim job" treatment?
Don't necessarily discount solar sources. Solar can produce quite a bit of heat, and being able to produce power from a 500-700F element could feasibly produce 30-40% efficient devices if the acoustic conversion is highly efficient. One poster mentioned poor output, with high voltages and small current, but a parallel set of such devices might deliver a net current that is into the useful range. Even 30% of 1200W/m is a nice return. I suppose it depends on the longevity of the components at higher temps and the cost to manufacture as to whether the net value is enough to make it commercially viable.
I know that solar farms have been built with a central heated tower (very cool looking, if not terribly efficient and subject to large fires stirling cycle?), but this might allow a bunch of independent modules and would tend to fail gracefully, since running a larger number of units in parallel would allow for individual units to fail without taking the whole system down (I would hope).