Well it's specualtion of course, but using the analogy of a turbine with no moving parts made me wonder.
After all movement is only relative. In fact, the water being pumped into the tubes is moving, so there is movememnt. But it could be the water, or it could be the body of the tube array.
What about using larger tubes in the open ocean, say on the order of a few millimeter? Obviously the larger surface area is going to reduce the efficiency by orders of magnitude, but you'd probably have less problems with clogging.
It's not a new idea per se, but using this new observation in conjunction with tidal energy might be interesting. It seems this would cause a lot more suited to harnessing tidal power than a traditional turbine. But, then again, it didn't look patricularly efficient for large scale use in its prototype stages.
And what if you were to locate it in deep water like an OTEC system. Perhaps you could rotate the tube array housing instead of puping the water? Sure, you've got to compensate for moving this monstrous thing, but who knows.
Okay, I'm filling up the bath right now. I've got some tubing and wire dowstairs I'll let you know what happens.
Let's say you had a friend who had some numbers assigned a long time ago in the early nineties say. They were still in the ARIN registry, but they weren't being routed. It was a situation where he registered at the time and had an ISP for awhile, but then things slowed down for a long time and he didn't use them. Newer numbers require fees and would revert back to the pool of open numbers, but these were registered before that policy came into effect, so they fall under the old policy which is that the numbers just stay there. And, in fact, you can do a whois to see them. There's this class C address space sitting there, but no way to use it with his ISP's configuration. Or is there?
How would you get started trying to make those numbers work?
I was looking around the web at this last night when I saw the news releases and I saw them talking about pencil beams as though it was very directional. That made me wonder what it's got over laser. At first I thought perhaps it was because it was more resistant to weather variations, is there more to it than that?
They're talking about Ghz speeds over a mile. But technically you could achieve a similar bandwidth with laser as well, right?
While this particular device may not be what I'm thinking, I've long assumed that government prohibitions against drugs will eventually be made irrelevant by similar technologies.
So much of the furor over "drug abuse" is truly about drug dosage and unhygenic methods of taking them.
The whole argument against, for instance, coke, heroin and amphetamines becomes quite different when you take out overdoses, needles and high temperature pipes.
At that point you're left arguing against euphoria from the obviously puritanical moral position that really does underlie many people's attitude's towards drug use. But, while those people will remain, by getting separating off the social evils of bad hygeine, dangerous paraphenalia and the medical compications of overdose, it should be much easier to win the majority over to the side of free choice.
But it's not really going to be necessary to win people over, because just as the next generation of doage devices are maturing, so are micro labs. Chemical engineering is seeing a huge revolution in on-chip synthesis. It's obviously just a matter of time before illicit drug labs on-a-chip make their way into the consumer market. And coupled with new dosage devices, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
It may be the only way to knock out the money element in the drugs trade which I personally feel is the single greatest source of damage and destruction to human life in the whole prohibition game.
Microsoft's role in the Pocket PC is worth noting
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The PDA market was heated up a lot by a lot of hype from Microsoft about their Pocket PC OS.
What happened was they came here to Taiwan and met with hardware OEM/ODMs and said look we're only going to license this to a few of you guys, but we guarantee this is the next big thing. You know, like the Tablet PC. A lot of local companies bought into it and some of the smaller ones leveraged everything they had to get in on the action.
I can't say for sure, but I suspect some of those guys that weren't diversified are hurting at this point. I do know that reports three years ago placed 2003 sales in the 100Million units. So much for prognostications.
So, the death of the PDA story is really about the failure of Microsoft's market planning efforts. Before the hype of the PocketPC OS, the PDA market was relatively stable. They really fueled the hype with what ended up being nothing but hot air.
It's interesting to consider that if a government technology office had made such a blunder there would be hell to pay because governments are accountable, but when a private corporation does the same thing it's just quietly forgotten because the whole affair was never the public's business to begin with --not even the shareholders. But despite the fact that it is all done quietly, the effects are still real. People lose their jobs, assets are wasted.
Everybody wants to move that obsolete electronics. Can't blame them for trying, but for the price of just the drive you could have two 120Gig HDs in a RAID AND a CDR to make ten copies if it's so damn important to back up those old copies of Firebird and Open Office.
If you wait a few months you'll be able to swap the CDR with a DVDR and get a free color cell phone with a 1.3Megapixel CMOS camera built in. Did I mention the free printer?
Well, talking about probabilities. The US is probably ripe for a new look at the advantages of a welfare state as we've apparently moved well into, or perhaps right past, the post-industrial stage at this point.
Trust me, we'll all be better off in the long run by reducing income disparity and de-emphasizing a system in which only those with investment capital can live comfortable lives.
I had also heard that perhaps China was doing someting with an Alpha clone.
I thought there was someting based on Alpha at OpenCores. But I went to look and didn't see anything.
So then I went over to the CPU Howto and following a link at the bottom I learned that there is a real problem with the Alpha in that compared to some of the designs we're seeing today it was power hungry. It was scaleable, but not really suitable to a power conscious consumer market.
At first I thought it wouldn't work because of the missing part of the premise that it's not certain exactly what science is.
But after looking at all the other negative posts, I was inspired to jump to the other side and now I think it can easily be done.
In fact, I've got a bit of experience in this trying to start and on-line forum on biotech. At first I started off monitoring RSS feeds looking for content. But soon I realized that the vast majority of the content being presented as news was simply summaries of the latest research published in scholarly journals.
So, it's not all that complicated really. You would just need some resources to maintain a staff. Generating the stories would be fairly easy as long as you had staff to review scholarship as it gets published and do a bit of Googling to make it digestible for for a wider crowd.
Toss in a bit of rudimentary animation and some voice overs and you've got something that would probably be quite tasty to tech freaks. You could do the materials science channel, the biotech channel, the nano channel, the IC channel. You could easily create a whole network if you had the resources.
If.
This is the name of a book that goes into more depth in an area that apparently this book just touches on in Chapter four. It sounds like she just brushes up against a very complex idea that underlines all notions of style which is the interaction between style and culture.
And aesthetics is a really loaded word. You have to wonder about an author who throws around terms like "aesthetics" without establishing some very strict historical definitions of what that means in the context of the work at hand.
If you want to check out that other book, the author's name is Dick Hebdige. It's a book from the eighties that sets out to seriosuly examine what it means to be punk or a rapper and look at how the style influences the culture.
That was beautiful man. It clearly illustrates something that perhaps surprisingly for some, was foretold by Marx.
Marx was the first to suggest that a society that tried to go straight from an agricultural base to full blown communist utopia would have to either fail or at least go through an extended period of intolerable despotism like the Soviet Union or Red China.
Marx assumed that England, or perhaps America would be the countries that would lead the world into genuine Communism simply because real Communism required a post-industrial stage of the economy like we clearly have in the States.
When you read his works, you find that Marx was a critic and a philosopher, but not really a revolutionary like those who followed him, say Trotsky or a militant like Che Guevara.
I think Open Source is communist in the sense that Communism is like Heaven. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
It's all good. The bottom line is that from the beginning the GPL is about playing ball with the corporate, legal world. Instead of just saying screw those guys we're just going to ignore their rules, the GPL is all about playing by the rules and making the rules work.
I think a similar strategy can work in the P2P mess. People who get their networks scanned by vigilante enforcement agencies need to stand up and resist instead of just playing dumb and ignoring it or pretending to hide. You can just write up a network policy and contact the admins of the violating networks and let them know they're violating your network policy. The law works both ways. That's what the GPL is all about.
So, I didn't think the article was too harsh. Sure, maybe Kuhn's quote at the end about not selling proprietary software is going to piss people off, but whatever. The fact is, the FSF is working within the law. The suits should be pleased that they've at least got the opportunity to define the battlefield. Just because they're still losers, well whose fault is that?
Yes, BioMedCentral is awesome. I've been printing out all sorts of PDFs from their abundant journals and look forward to doing the same with PLOS.
It might seem to be a bit of a tangent, but I want to mention something that I think is fairly important, if minor, detail about these on-line journals which is the format they are consumed in.
While it's fine to get the gist of what's going on on-line, I perfonally prefer to print them out. With a refillable ink-jet model that prints front and back simultaneously it's really quite simple and low cost to make print copies. The only quesiton is the binding.
What I do is print out all the articles in a journal for a year, stack them together and then use a regular electric drill with a small bit to drill some holes along the binding edge. Then, using a bit of thin guage wire, I bind a shish-ja-bob skewer to the front and back through the holes. A strip of cloth tape along the binding and a bit of glue to a card stock cover leaves me with a handsome bound volume that looks great on the bookshelf.
I can hear the snickering even in cyberspace. But whatever, it works great and it's not really that much hassle once you have all the materials handy.
Perhaps it's just my isolated little world that is so different from the rest of humanity, but even my parents have at least three PCs in the house on top of a few Macs and an assortment of old who-knows-what. As for people closer to my age, I can't think of one that doesn't use both Windows and Linux and several with BSD and Solaris and whatever other assorted mass of software in their enormous archive.
This whole switch business seems rather strange given the fact that I don't know a single household without at least two OSs. Why throw away something you've paid for? On the other hand, why not use something that's free? But most importantly, why not do both? Why do surveys always seem to phrase it as though it's one or the other? I switch OSs every few minutes.
The big if there is that ISPs will agree to do other people's billing. This is a big hole in this plan. RIAA loves it, Kazaa loves it, but they're sticking the ISPs with the dirty work. Neither of them can get money out of the user's pocket, so let's ahve the ISP do it.
Look at this from the perspecitve of the customer getting this huge bill that is going to the RIAA and Kazaa. What does it say, it says your ISP wants $200. Who's going to have to send the collection agency after people who don't pay? The ISP.
Quite convenient for the RIAA and Kazaa to decide this is a workable plan. But I think they're skipping the hard part and that's what makes it seem so palatable.
Kinda bizarre I got modded off-topic up there. Proprietary e-book formats is the topic no? But whatever. Must be somebody who holds a lot of Time Warner shares. Magazines are one of their only remaining profit bases in recent years I hear.
But, I don't mean that nobody would scan books on a flatbed. That's obviously not true. It's just that a lot of people think "getting into the flow" is too much to ask. Any time you're waiting for a machine, you feel like you're working. As fast as you can turn the pages is more like the amount of time most people are willing to wait. I read that the Mavica 5MP takes one second to recharge between shots, that sounds more like it. Say a three hundred page book in ten minutes or so with times for breaks. Not too bad.
But as you mentioned, the way to go is certainly to automate it. Set up a little stand made out of coat hangers and crazy glue or whatever and set it to auto-shoot every two seconds while you turn the pages. click, turn, click, turn, click turn.
But depite the hasles of flat beds, I've scanned in some chapters of a few hard-to-find titles myself. What I was thinking was particularly printed materials that you can't take out of a library like research journals. A high res camera seems to alter the equation there. And after all, it's fair use. There's no doubt about that because libraries already have xerox machines and it's clearly fair use to use them. In fact, many libraries even allow you to check out digital cameras to take color shots if you don't have your own. So, it's not a big legal issue, but it potentially changes the publising equation and it's for the better in my opinion and I know most faculty organizations feel the same way.
When you say 5MP isn't enough for anything serious, well I guess that depends on how you define serious, right? Like I said, I've seen so-so results with only 1 megapixel. Clearly even with one megapixel you can see printed text clearly enough to read in the image file as long as you used decent light and weren't out of focus.
Also, when I use my home scanner for OCR, I only set it to 150DPI and it works fine. So, again, it depends on what you mean by serious. I'm talking about not serious enough to do preservation work, but serious enough to get the job done at 98% quality which is better than most xerox jobs.
And then the fact that the files will be digital, well that's the gravy part and the part that means e-books will take over the world soon. But they won't be coming from pubishers you've heard of, they'll be coming from hundreds of thousands of individuals across the net. E-books will hit print publishers like a stack of bricks.
And for all the people focused on displays. It seems to me that they're all missing the point. You don't need digital displays. You just need a decent double sided printer that uses inkjet technolgy with wax sticks like the system Xerox is selling right now as a high end color business printing solution. That system is expensive, but only because the patents on it are so tight. Well, one thing about patents, they only last twelve years. That technology is potentially even cheaper than water soluble inkjet becasue the pigments are embedded in a wax that is very easy to produce and much easier to handle than inkjet cartridges. They're essentially just big fat crayons.
So, the issue isn't displays. Paper is cheap and always will be. People like to read print, but that doesn't mean e-books still won't take over.
E-books are all about distribution. That's what DRM is all about and that's why they've not made much inroads so far. But let's not kid ourselves, the future of print distribution is all digitial and all P2P.
will make it irrelevant.
Nobody is going to scan a book on a flatbed scanner. It's just not convenient. But OCR works great with a nice fat TIFF file taken instantly with a camera.
I've tried it and it works even with a one megapixel camera if you use a book with nice big print. It works, but the accuracy is about 70 percent and with small text like a magazing it drops to about twenty percent.
With a three megapixel things get much better. Go ahead and try it, but remember not to send a jpeg to the OCR. If it isn't TIFF, the OCR will probably ignore it. At least mine did and I understand most of them are based on one or two SDKs.
But at five megapixel, it's game over. As fast as you can turn the pages you can scan it to OCR. I think magazines are going to be blind sided by this even more than books.
These things are already in the consumer market, they're just a bit pricey, but I know from reading the industry rags that almost all the DSCs come from Taiwan these days and in the next generation we can expect 5MP even in the cheap no brand models.
And then you have the storage issue with those massive TIFF files you're clicking away at. No problem. The Sony Mavica started with a floppy, now they use mini-CDs. So how much you want to bet we're going to see mini-DVD format coming up real quick.
Sell those media stocks kids.
No doubt there are mechanical issues that weren't accounted for with deregulation, but the political issues are far more complex than the mechanical problems. If this wasn't the case, there would never have been an Enron.
From its origins electricity has been a utopian technology emerging into a world that is staunchly opposed to utopian solutions.
The industrial revolution was exactly that, a revolution and the development of the steam turbine led to prices so low that it seemed electricity would sweep the world in a matter of decades powering every manner of device. Just look at the movie Metropolis. Clearly these expectaions of a great high tech all electric future started long before any of us were born.
Take, for example, the Nazis. One of the things that gave the people such hope during the rise of the national socialists was the promise of electrochemistry. With nothing but air, water and electricity they would live in a world of plenty.
After the Second World War it was nuclear power and unmetered electricity. Near the town where I grew up on the Central Coast of California there was once a billboard outside a small town called Nipomo that advertised the coming age of unmetered electricity.
Then when the problems of nuclear fission became apparent it was fusion just around the corner.
An amazing fact is that all these promises are true. Turbines are amazingly efficient, electrochemistry does work and so does fission and fusion too. But as real as all these technologies are, they overlook the political side of things.
If the real goal was just to provide cheap electricity and everybody agreed, it would be quite simple. We'd just connect the world's grids together and reduce the need for peak load by using existing capacity efficiently. But that's too utopian and it's overlooking the reality of power politics.
The reality is that as a society we advocate greed. Really you can't blame the Enron people. They were just doing what they believed to be the right thing --fuck everybody. Competition has become a moral value in its own right. In a society that holds greed as a value the problem is not merely mechanical.
I know it doesn't apply in all cases, but if you're just running a web server my experience is that running it all out of Knoppix RAMDisk just makes sense in every way. It's faster, it's cheaper and if it screws up, just start from scratch. But since it's so cheap why not run redundant servers? It's a winner from every angle.
Yeah, you need to make a few little scripts to automate your rebuilding process, but once you've done that it's about as maintenance free as you can possibly imagine.
Of course a web server is a limited example and I assume the book covers more than just such a simple case, but for a lot of net server tasks it's the way to go and yet I get the impression a lot of people don't quite get it yet.
Alright, I grant I just woke up and hadn't had any coffee, so I was being a bit snipish.
But it's not just sequencing that is becoming accessible to bio-newbies, proteomics is the next step and the current head of the NIH is surprisngly proactive about open government funded databases. In fact, he's taking flack from industry people about his ambitious proposal for a large molecule mapping project.
And then speaking of drop at a time instead of useless but impressive sounding mega cluster number crunching, how about this one --in India, they've gone through copies of all the written literature they could find on Proteins and using individual human researchers instead of computers, they've mapped out all known protein interactions. The definition of "known" is the cool part because this wasn't done by a machine, it was done by real people. Apparently they organized the project using ZOME which is an open source App Server that can run on Knoppix Live CD. Pretty cool stuff.
I'm really into all this stuff as I've started a news forum focused on biotech for students and newbies with an emphasis on biotech. It's still not ready for prime time, but I've already got about six links to some cool stories if you're interested.
Plos is great, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. When you're reading journal articles, the references are as important as the article and since most of them are only available in research libraries or by way overpriced subscription the disenfranchised researchers are still left having to find other means.
I think there's an answer along the lines of MP3 that will be upsetting to some, but in many ways it's simply inevitable. If you have a 3Megapixel digital camera and some OCR software, try taking a picture of a page at full resolution and then reading it with the OCR. For the purposes of your experiment, send it to the OCR as TIFF even if it was originally saved as JPG. I've found the results are quite nice. The original text image is crisp and readable and the OCR works too.
I think you can see where I'm going with this. So far 3MP cameras are in the sweet spot, but the 5MPs are coming on strong and when we get a mini-DVD version of the Sony Mavica series at 5MP in the two hundred dollar price range --say a few years down the road still-- there will be little excuse for material like scientific journals to remain trapped in the libraries. Interestingly, from a legal standpoint this is going to be hard to stop. Fair use explicitly allows academic copying for individual esearch use and this has already been done over and over in court. It's clearly fair use for an individual to make copies, there's no way to stop that. The catch is when those copies can be easily traded over the network they can recombine into volumes. You can't really stop that without cutting back fair use even further and I believe that will be politically challenging in these times.
Don't you think it's more like pruning a tree's genes? I don't buy this idea that there's some inherent depth that is lost as soon as the technology becomes available at lower costs. That sounds like an outlook that subcribes to the mythology of unknown; anything that is known is somehow degraded. I believe such thinking is based in the religion metaphor of Heaven. It has to be unknown and unknowable to be powerful.
And I'm also quite curious why people are so quick to look at the down side when there's so much up side. What about developing home diagnostic kits and even tailored therapies? Those things can't happen until this technology becomes cheap. I think the sad truth is that academic papers need funding and the money is flowing in defence, not in healing man's ills.
All that media power might go both ways.
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TV's Tipping Point
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· Score: 1
I'm also a person who has not watched TV with any regularity in a long time, so I'm not too concerned what the channels of the future may be like. I don't watch much full motion video at all. But when I do, I like to watch things that deserve my attention.
I know that in order for their to be enough power to make a new user experience possible, there will be a need for both high bandwidth and high resolution monitors. What doesn't seem to be fully considered is that those resources might be detrimental to the the conventional role of the passive viewer.
Look how much television viewing time has been lost to the simple innovation of being able to key in text across a slow network as I'm doing now.
If what was once called "the audiance" is presented with a set of tools to manipulate more media in a larger work space with more speed the result may be something that is more similar to an bottomless film festival than it is to television. In a sense that degree of choice isn't too far from the position in the article. However, a kalaidescope doesn't sound like a very good metaphor. That metaphor sounds so fragmented, it's as though there's an unclear vision of what is possible.
I believe that people will always seek structured narratives for entertainment. You can blend genres all you want, but they're like colors on a pallette. If the work sucks, it doesn't save it to just be colorful. You've got to have some substance.
I think end users are capable of creating works of great substance which is something that television and movie producers are loathe to face. They're not really that talented and their works are far too generic to excite the exotic and worldly modern palate.
Going back to text for a minute. I strongly believe that we have not not even begun to see the influence of large monitor spaces on composition. This may be too subtle for some to find intriguing, but organizing a large body of text such as the plot of a story is exceedingly complex. Anything that can make the process easier also makes it more accessible to the outsiders. I think this is the more likely direction we're heading. We'll still have conventional highly focused narratives without a lot of clutter, but we'll see them coming from independent sources outside the traditional media and outside of the financing that makes that media so droll.
It's nothing so dramatic or orwellian as "the new" TV, it's just that TV inevitably succumbs to the Internet. One by one, they all shall be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Despite the way some have tried to dismiss it, the doctrine of first sale is a very unresolved issue in law that has everything to do with the definition of "copy" and the technical details of the functions of digital devices.
So, if this system is working that angle, as it seems to be, then it could be quite interesting. It's one thing to charge for music like I-tunes, but it's quite another to set up an E-Bay like exchange network for digital music where the participants can also make cash dollars.
On the one hand, since it's commercial, you create a record of each transaction and hence there is a degree of individual liability.
On the other hand, since it's commercial you create the opportunity for REAL piracy: illicit trade in copyrighted works for cash.
It is possible to imagine that this could turn out to be the system that makes the RIAA say --damn, we should have worked with Kazaa. At least up to this point nobody in the digital world is challenging the RIAA as the body to collect profits from the works in its collections. This could change soon and ironically, though not surprisingly, due to the RIAA's own efforts.
A secondary E-Bay like market could be huge and it's not clear at all that it would not be legal as well. In concept it would be completely acceptable under the law, but in practice it is quite easy to imagine people bending the rules about deleting thier existing copy. They speak of Windows2997 Super Duper Double Cross Your Fingers Stick a Needle in Your Eye encryption, but imagine some outgoing young innovator finding a way to convert his existing MP3 collection to this format and forging his ID in the market. Whoo, tempting proposition.
Well, that's a beautiful example and I'll be glad to remind you that the only reason the PC revolution took off was because Xerox was scared to death of a term you rarely hear these days, but that used to be in the headlines nightly in the seventies --consent decrees.
They didn't share the GUI, the mouse and all that because they were kind hearted capitalists, they did it because they felt they had no choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it's specualtion of course, but using the analogy of a turbine with no moving parts made me wonder.
After all movement is only relative. In fact, the water being pumped into the tubes is moving, so there is movememnt. But it could be the water, or it could be the body of the tube array.
What about using larger tubes in the open ocean, say on the order of a few millimeter? Obviously the larger surface area is going to reduce the efficiency by orders of magnitude, but you'd probably have less problems with clogging.
It's not a new idea per se, but using this new observation in conjunction with tidal energy might be interesting. It seems this would cause a lot more suited to harnessing tidal power than a traditional turbine. But, then again, it didn't look patricularly efficient for large scale use in its prototype stages.
And what if you were to locate it in deep water like an OTEC system. Perhaps you could rotate the tube array housing instead of puping the water? Sure, you've got to compensate for moving this monstrous thing, but who knows.
Okay, I'm filling up the bath right now. I've got some tubing and wire dowstairs I'll let you know what happens.
Let's say you had a friend who had some numbers assigned a long time ago in the early nineties say. They were still in the ARIN registry, but they weren't being routed. It was a situation where he registered at the time and had an ISP for awhile, but then things slowed down for a long time and he didn't use them. Newer numbers require fees and would revert back to the pool of open numbers, but these were registered before that policy came into effect, so they fall under the old policy which is that the numbers just stay there. And, in fact, you can do a whois to see them. There's this class C address space sitting there, but no way to use it with his ISP's configuration. Or is there?
How would you get started trying to make those numbers work?
I was looking around the web at this last night when I saw the news releases and I saw them talking about pencil beams as though it was very directional. That made me wonder what it's got over laser. At first I thought perhaps it was because it was more resistant to weather variations, is there more to it than that?
They're talking about Ghz speeds over a mile. But technically you could achieve a similar bandwidth with laser as well, right?
While this particular device may not be what I'm thinking, I've long assumed that government prohibitions against drugs will eventually be made irrelevant by similar technologies.
So much of the furor over "drug abuse" is truly about drug dosage and unhygenic methods of taking them.
The whole argument against, for instance, coke, heroin and amphetamines becomes quite different when you take out overdoses, needles and high temperature pipes.
At that point you're left arguing against euphoria from the obviously puritanical moral position that really does underlie many people's attitude's towards drug use. But, while those people will remain, by getting separating off the social evils of bad hygeine, dangerous paraphenalia and the medical compications of overdose, it should be much easier to win the majority over to the side of free choice.
But it's not really going to be necessary to win people over, because just as the next generation of doage devices are maturing, so are micro labs. Chemical engineering is seeing a huge revolution in on-chip synthesis. It's obviously just a matter of time before illicit drug labs on-a-chip make their way into the consumer market. And coupled with new dosage devices, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
It may be the only way to knock out the money element in the drugs trade which I personally feel is the single greatest source of damage and destruction to human life in the whole prohibition game.
The PDA market was heated up a lot by a lot of hype from Microsoft about their Pocket PC OS.
What happened was they came here to Taiwan and met with hardware OEM/ODMs and said look we're only going to license this to a few of you guys, but we guarantee this is the next big thing. You know, like the Tablet PC. A lot of local companies bought into it and some of the smaller ones leveraged everything they had to get in on the action.
I can't say for sure, but I suspect some of those guys that weren't diversified are hurting at this point. I do know that reports three years ago placed 2003 sales in the 100Million units. So much for prognostications.
So, the death of the PDA story is really about the failure of Microsoft's market planning efforts. Before the hype of the PocketPC OS, the PDA market was relatively stable. They really fueled the hype with what ended up being nothing but hot air.
It's interesting to consider that if a government technology office had made such a blunder there would be hell to pay because governments are accountable, but when a private corporation does the same thing it's just quietly forgotten because the whole affair was never the public's business to begin with --not even the shareholders. But despite the fact that it is all done quietly, the effects are still real. People lose their jobs, assets are wasted.
Everybody wants to move that obsolete electronics. Can't blame them for trying, but for the price of just the drive you could have two 120Gig HDs in a RAID AND a CDR to make ten copies if it's so damn important to back up those old copies of Firebird and Open Office.
If you wait a few months you'll be able to swap the CDR with a DVDR and get a free color cell phone with a 1.3Megapixel CMOS camera built in. Did I mention the free printer?
Well, talking about probabilities. The US is probably ripe for a new look at the advantages of a welfare state as we've apparently moved well into, or perhaps right past, the post-industrial stage at this point.
Trust me, we'll all be better off in the long run by reducing income disparity and de-emphasizing a system in which only those with investment capital can live comfortable lives.
I thought there was someting based on Alpha at OpenCores. But I went to look and didn't see anything.
So then I went over to the CPU Howto and following a link at the bottom I learned that there is a real problem with the Alpha in that compared to some of the designs we're seeing today it was power hungry. It was scaleable, but not really suitable to a power conscious consumer market.
At first I thought it wouldn't work because of the missing part of the premise that it's not certain exactly what science is.
But after looking at all the other negative posts, I was inspired to jump to the other side and now I think it can easily be done.
In fact, I've got a bit of experience in this trying to start and on-line forum on biotech. At first I started off monitoring RSS feeds looking for content. But soon I realized that the vast majority of the content being presented as news was simply summaries of the latest research published in scholarly journals.
So, it's not all that complicated really. You would just need some resources to maintain a staff. Generating the stories would be fairly easy as long as you had staff to review scholarship as it gets published and do a bit of Googling to make it digestible for for a wider crowd.
Toss in a bit of rudimentary animation and some voice overs and you've got something that would probably be quite tasty to tech freaks. You could do the materials science channel, the biotech channel, the nano channel, the IC channel. You could easily create a whole network if you had the resources.
If.
This is the name of a book that goes into more depth in an area that apparently this book just touches on in Chapter four. It sounds like she just brushes up against a very complex idea that underlines all notions of style which is the interaction between style and culture.
And aesthetics is a really loaded word. You have to wonder about an author who throws around terms like "aesthetics" without establishing some very strict historical definitions of what that means in the context of the work at hand.
If you want to check out that other book, the author's name is Dick Hebdige. It's a book from the eighties that sets out to seriosuly examine what it means to be punk or a rapper and look at how the style influences the culture.
That was beautiful man. It clearly illustrates something that perhaps surprisingly for some, was foretold by Marx.
Marx was the first to suggest that a society that tried to go straight from an agricultural base to full blown communist utopia would have to either fail or at least go through an extended period of intolerable despotism like the Soviet Union or Red China.
Marx assumed that England, or perhaps America would be the countries that would lead the world into genuine Communism simply because real Communism required a post-industrial stage of the economy like we clearly have in the States.
When you read his works, you find that Marx was a critic and a philosopher, but not really a revolutionary like those who followed him, say Trotsky or a militant like Che Guevara.
I think Open Source is communist in the sense that Communism is like Heaven. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
It's all good. The bottom line is that from the beginning the GPL is about playing ball with the corporate, legal world. Instead of just saying screw those guys we're just going to ignore their rules, the GPL is all about playing by the rules and making the rules work.
I think a similar strategy can work in the P2P mess. People who get their networks scanned by vigilante enforcement agencies need to stand up and resist instead of just playing dumb and ignoring it or pretending to hide. You can just write up a network policy and contact the admins of the violating networks and let them know they're violating your network policy. The law works both ways. That's what the GPL is all about.
So, I didn't think the article was too harsh. Sure, maybe Kuhn's quote at the end about not selling proprietary software is going to piss people off, but whatever. The fact is, the FSF is working within the law. The suits should be pleased that they've at least got the opportunity to define the battlefield. Just because they're still losers, well whose fault is that?
Yes, BioMedCentral is awesome. I've been printing out all sorts of PDFs from their abundant journals and look forward to doing the same with PLOS.
It might seem to be a bit of a tangent, but I want to mention something that I think is fairly important, if minor, detail about these on-line journals which is the format they are consumed in.
While it's fine to get the gist of what's going on on-line, I perfonally prefer to print them out. With a refillable ink-jet model that prints front and back simultaneously it's really quite simple and low cost to make print copies. The only quesiton is the binding.
What I do is print out all the articles in a journal for a year, stack them together and then use a regular electric drill with a small bit to drill some holes along the binding edge. Then, using a bit of thin guage wire, I bind a shish-ja-bob skewer to the front and back through the holes. A strip of cloth tape along the binding and a bit of glue to a card stock cover leaves me with a handsome bound volume that looks great on the bookshelf.
I can hear the snickering even in cyberspace. But whatever, it works great and it's not really that much hassle once you have all the materials handy.
Perhaps it's just my isolated little world that is so different from the rest of humanity, but even my parents have at least three PCs in the house on top of a few Macs and an assortment of old who-knows-what. As for people closer to my age, I can't think of one that doesn't use both Windows and Linux and several with BSD and Solaris and whatever other assorted mass of software in their enormous archive.
This whole switch business seems rather strange given the fact that I don't know a single household without at least two OSs. Why throw away something you've paid for? On the other hand, why not use something that's free? But most importantly, why not do both? Why do surveys always seem to phrase it as though it's one or the other? I switch OSs every few minutes.
The big if there is that ISPs will agree to do other people's billing. This is a big hole in this plan. RIAA loves it, Kazaa loves it, but they're sticking the ISPs with the dirty work. Neither of them can get money out of the user's pocket, so let's ahve the ISP do it.
Look at this from the perspecitve of the customer getting this huge bill that is going to the RIAA and Kazaa. What does it say, it says your ISP wants $200. Who's going to have to send the collection agency after people who don't pay? The ISP.
Quite convenient for the RIAA and Kazaa to decide this is a workable plan. But I think they're skipping the hard part and that's what makes it seem so palatable.
Kinda bizarre I got modded off-topic up there. Proprietary e-book formats is the topic no? But whatever. Must be somebody who holds a lot of Time Warner shares. Magazines are one of their only remaining profit bases in recent years I hear.
But, I don't mean that nobody would scan books on a flatbed. That's obviously not true. It's just that a lot of people think "getting into the flow" is too much to ask. Any time you're waiting for a machine, you feel like you're working. As fast as you can turn the pages is more like the amount of time most people are willing to wait. I read that the Mavica 5MP takes one second to recharge between shots, that sounds more like it. Say a three hundred page book in ten minutes or so with times for breaks. Not too bad.
But as you mentioned, the way to go is certainly to automate it. Set up a little stand made out of coat hangers and crazy glue or whatever and set it to auto-shoot every two seconds while you turn the pages. click, turn, click, turn, click turn.
But depite the hasles of flat beds, I've scanned in some chapters of a few hard-to-find titles myself. What I was thinking was particularly printed materials that you can't take out of a library like research journals. A high res camera seems to alter the equation there. And after all, it's fair use. There's no doubt about that because libraries already have xerox machines and it's clearly fair use to use them. In fact, many libraries even allow you to check out digital cameras to take color shots if you don't have your own. So, it's not a big legal issue, but it potentially changes the publising equation and it's for the better in my opinion and I know most faculty organizations feel the same way.
When you say 5MP isn't enough for anything serious, well I guess that depends on how you define serious, right? Like I said, I've seen so-so results with only 1 megapixel. Clearly even with one megapixel you can see printed text clearly enough to read in the image file as long as you used decent light and weren't out of focus.
Also, when I use my home scanner for OCR, I only set it to 150DPI and it works fine. So, again, it depends on what you mean by serious. I'm talking about not serious enough to do preservation work, but serious enough to get the job done at 98% quality which is better than most xerox jobs.
And then the fact that the files will be digital, well that's the gravy part and the part that means e-books will take over the world soon. But they won't be coming from pubishers you've heard of, they'll be coming from hundreds of thousands of individuals across the net. E-books will hit print publishers like a stack of bricks.
And for all the people focused on displays. It seems to me that they're all missing the point. You don't need digital displays. You just need a decent double sided printer that uses inkjet technolgy with wax sticks like the system Xerox is selling right now as a high end color business printing solution. That system is expensive, but only because the patents on it are so tight. Well, one thing about patents, they only last twelve years. That technology is potentially even cheaper than water soluble inkjet becasue the pigments are embedded in a wax that is very easy to produce and much easier to handle than inkjet cartridges. They're essentially just big fat crayons.
So, the issue isn't displays. Paper is cheap and always will be. People like to read print, but that doesn't mean e-books still won't take over.
E-books are all about distribution. That's what DRM is all about and that's why they've not made much inroads so far. But let's not kid ourselves, the future of print distribution is all digitial and all P2P.
will make it irrelevant.
Nobody is going to scan a book on a flatbed scanner. It's just not convenient. But OCR works great with a nice fat TIFF file taken instantly with a camera.
I've tried it and it works even with a one megapixel camera if you use a book with nice big print. It works, but the accuracy is about 70 percent and with small text like a magazing it drops to about twenty percent.
With a three megapixel things get much better. Go ahead and try it, but remember not to send a jpeg to the OCR. If it isn't TIFF, the OCR will probably ignore it. At least mine did and I understand most of them are based on one or two SDKs.
But at five megapixel, it's game over. As fast as you can turn the pages you can scan it to OCR. I think magazines are going to be blind sided by this even more than books.
These things are already in the consumer market, they're just a bit pricey, but I know from reading the industry rags that almost all the DSCs come from Taiwan these days and in the next generation we can expect 5MP even in the cheap no brand models.
And then you have the storage issue with those massive TIFF files you're clicking away at. No problem. The Sony Mavica started with a floppy, now they use mini-CDs. So how much you want to bet we're going to see mini-DVD format coming up real quick.
Sell those media stocks kids.
No doubt there are mechanical issues that weren't accounted for with deregulation, but the political issues are far more complex than the mechanical problems. If this wasn't the case, there would never have been an Enron.
From its origins electricity has been a utopian technology emerging into a world that is staunchly opposed to utopian solutions.
The industrial revolution was exactly that, a revolution and the development of the steam turbine led to prices so low that it seemed electricity would sweep the world in a matter of decades powering every manner of device. Just look at the movie Metropolis. Clearly these expectaions of a great high tech all electric future started long before any of us were born.
Take, for example, the Nazis. One of the things that gave the people such hope during the rise of the national socialists was the promise of electrochemistry. With nothing but air, water and electricity they would live in a world of plenty.
After the Second World War it was nuclear power and unmetered electricity. Near the town where I grew up on the Central Coast of California there was once a billboard outside a small town called Nipomo that advertised the coming age of unmetered electricity.
Then when the problems of nuclear fission became apparent it was fusion just around the corner.
An amazing fact is that all these promises are true. Turbines are amazingly efficient, electrochemistry does work and so does fission and fusion too. But as real as all these technologies are, they overlook the political side of things.
If the real goal was just to provide cheap electricity and everybody agreed, it would be quite simple. We'd just connect the world's grids together and reduce the need for peak load by using existing capacity efficiently. But that's too utopian and it's overlooking the reality of power politics.
The reality is that as a society we advocate greed. Really you can't blame the Enron people. They were just doing what they believed to be the right thing --fuck everybody. Competition has become a moral value in its own right. In a society that holds greed as a value the problem is not merely mechanical.
I know it doesn't apply in all cases, but if you're just running a web server my experience is that running it all out of Knoppix RAMDisk just makes sense in every way. It's faster, it's cheaper and if it screws up, just start from scratch. But since it's so cheap why not run redundant servers? It's a winner from every angle.
Yeah, you need to make a few little scripts to automate your rebuilding process, but once you've done that it's about as maintenance free as you can possibly imagine.
Of course a web server is a limited example and I assume the book covers more than just such a simple case, but for a lot of net server tasks it's the way to go and yet I get the impression a lot of people don't quite get it yet.
But it's not just sequencing that is becoming accessible to bio-newbies, proteomics is the next step and the current head of the NIH is surprisngly proactive about open government funded databases. In fact, he's taking flack from industry people about his ambitious proposal for a large molecule mapping project.
And then speaking of drop at a time instead of useless but impressive sounding mega cluster number crunching, how about this one --in India, they've gone through copies of all the written literature they could find on Proteins and using individual human researchers instead of computers, they've mapped out all known protein interactions. The definition of "known" is the cool part because this wasn't done by a machine, it was done by real people. Apparently they organized the project using ZOME which is an open source App Server that can run on Knoppix Live CD. Pretty cool stuff.
I'm really into all this stuff as I've started a news forum focused on biotech for students and newbies with an emphasis on biotech. It's still not ready for prime time, but I've already got about six links to some cool stories if you're interested.
BioPacific.ath.cx
Plos is great, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. When you're reading journal articles, the references are as important as the article and since most of them are only available in research libraries or by way overpriced subscription the disenfranchised researchers are still left having to find other means.
I think there's an answer along the lines of MP3 that will be upsetting to some, but in many ways it's simply inevitable. If you have a 3Megapixel digital camera and some OCR software, try taking a picture of a page at full resolution and then reading it with the OCR. For the purposes of your experiment, send it to the OCR as TIFF even if it was originally saved as JPG. I've found the results are quite nice. The original text image is crisp and readable and the OCR works too.
I think you can see where I'm going with this. So far 3MP cameras are in the sweet spot, but the 5MPs are coming on strong and when we get a mini-DVD version of the Sony Mavica series at 5MP in the two hundred dollar price range --say a few years down the road still-- there will be little excuse for material like scientific journals to remain trapped in the libraries. Interestingly, from a legal standpoint this is going to be hard to stop. Fair use explicitly allows academic copying for individual esearch use and this has already been done over and over in court. It's clearly fair use for an individual to make copies, there's no way to stop that. The catch is when those copies can be easily traded over the network they can recombine into volumes. You can't really stop that without cutting back fair use even further and I believe that will be politically challenging in these times.
Don't you think it's more like pruning a tree's genes? I don't buy this idea that there's some inherent depth that is lost as soon as the technology becomes available at lower costs. That sounds like an outlook that subcribes to the mythology of unknown; anything that is known is somehow degraded. I believe such thinking is based in the religion metaphor of Heaven. It has to be unknown and unknowable to be powerful.
And I'm also quite curious why people are so quick to look at the down side when there's so much up side. What about developing home diagnostic kits and even tailored therapies? Those things can't happen until this technology becomes cheap. I think the sad truth is that academic papers need funding and the money is flowing in defence, not in healing man's ills.
I'm also a person who has not watched TV with any regularity in a long time, so I'm not too concerned what the channels of the future may be like. I don't watch much full motion video at all. But when I do, I like to watch things that deserve my attention.
I know that in order for their to be enough power to make a new user experience possible, there will be a need for both high bandwidth and high resolution monitors. What doesn't seem to be fully considered is that those resources might be detrimental to the the conventional role of the passive viewer.
Look how much television viewing time has been lost to the simple innovation of being able to key in text across a slow network as I'm doing now.
If what was once called "the audiance" is presented with a set of tools to manipulate more media in a larger work space with more speed the result may be something that is more similar to an bottomless film festival than it is to television. In a sense that degree of choice isn't too far from the position in the article. However, a kalaidescope doesn't sound like a very good metaphor. That metaphor sounds so fragmented, it's as though there's an unclear vision of what is possible.
I believe that people will always seek structured narratives for entertainment. You can blend genres all you want, but they're like colors on a pallette. If the work sucks, it doesn't save it to just be colorful. You've got to have some substance.
I think end users are capable of creating works of great substance which is something that television and movie producers are loathe to face. They're not really that talented and their works are far too generic to excite the exotic and worldly modern palate.
Going back to text for a minute. I strongly believe that we have not not even begun to see the influence of large monitor spaces on composition. This may be too subtle for some to find intriguing, but organizing a large body of text such as the plot of a story is exceedingly complex. Anything that can make the process easier also makes it more accessible to the outsiders. I think this is the more likely direction we're heading. We'll still have conventional highly focused narratives without a lot of clutter, but we'll see them coming from independent sources outside the traditional media and outside of the financing that makes that media so droll.
It's nothing so dramatic or orwellian as "the new" TV, it's just that TV inevitably succumbs to the Internet. One by one, they all shall be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Despite the way some have tried to dismiss it, the doctrine of first sale is a very unresolved issue in law that has everything to do with the definition of "copy" and the technical details of the functions of digital devices.
So, if this system is working that angle, as it seems to be, then it could be quite interesting. It's one thing to charge for music like I-tunes, but it's quite another to set up an E-Bay like exchange network for digital music where the participants can also make cash dollars.
On the one hand, since it's commercial, you create a record of each transaction and hence there is a degree of individual liability.
On the other hand, since it's commercial you create the opportunity for REAL piracy: illicit trade in copyrighted works for cash.
It is possible to imagine that this could turn out to be the system that makes the RIAA say --damn, we should have worked with Kazaa. At least up to this point nobody in the digital world is challenging the RIAA as the body to collect profits from the works in its collections. This could change soon and ironically, though not surprisingly, due to the RIAA's own efforts.
A secondary E-Bay like market could be huge and it's not clear at all that it would not be legal as well. In concept it would be completely acceptable under the law, but in practice it is quite easy to imagine people bending the rules about deleting thier existing copy. They speak of Windows2997 Super Duper Double Cross Your Fingers Stick a Needle in Your Eye encryption, but imagine some outgoing young innovator finding a way to convert his existing MP3 collection to this format and forging his ID in the market. Whoo, tempting proposition.
Well, that's a beautiful example and I'll be glad to remind you that the only reason the PC revolution took off was because Xerox was scared to death of a term you rarely hear these days, but that used to be in the headlines nightly in the seventies --consent decrees.
They didn't share the GUI, the mouse and all that because they were kind hearted capitalists, they did it because they felt they had no choice.