They had some nice mock up graphics as well. Perhaps it was a bit new age looking, but it was fun stuff. The fmf website had that old Omni magazine/Heavy Metal flavor.
I recall folling their news archives and it seemed that there was a fairly talented voluteer who started questioning Hilbertz' results and he was having a hard time duplicating them despite what seemed to be fairly rigorous efforts.
It sounded like the problem was that the calcite was hard to keep homogenous and it tended to be too soft unless really large amounts of electricity were used which made it non cost competitive with cement and so it became somewhat besides the point.
But floating concrete cities still sound like a rad idea to me. And you don't need OTEC either. Just use generators and buy oil for starters. Park over the top of thermal vents and harvest nasty toxic chemicals fun and profit. So what if the seacrete thing costs too much at this point. Let's build it on shore and launch it. I'm there man.
I am a big fan of HighLift and the tiny nanotube thread, but I'm just not convinced that a steel tower is impossible given the right geometry. (Note, I'm not suggesting the ascii below is such a geometry, it's just to illustrate the point)
Sure, maybe a steel cable could never work, but at some scale it must be possible to build up a tower or, alternately, to build down a beam of of interconnected steel tubes.
Building down it seems we could use steel beams made of elaborate geometries like we see in some space frame construction. The members could be spring loaded to distribute stresses therby adding vast amounts of tensile strength. Just because the material itself lacks tensile strength over a given length, that doesn't mean all structures composed of that material would share that property.
A mass of steel triangles or other geometries is not not as elegant as using a single strand of nanotube composites, but it uses existing materials in plentiful supply at a good price.
At some scale a steel mesh tower must be capable of reaching into the edges of the atmosphere. They're building 500 meter buildings left front and center all over Asia. It would only be necessary to stack up a few hundred of them in an octet "truss" type formation to make a nice dent in a trip to orbit.
|X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X| |X|
Now this rather homely ASCII art is not meant to be a prototype, but you get the idea. Replace each leg of an X with a 500meter steel tower and you could easily imagine a ten kilometer tower. Sure, that's not even close to orbit, but it's higher than Everest. At some scale this has to make a dent in the cost of launching to orbit if you build up from the ground.
Of course coming down from space instead of builduing up you have the issue of materials transport. But I think it's got to be possible even with steel.
That's partly true of Canada if you look at the original colonization only, but there were numerous skermishes over the borders in which many lives were lost. You will recall Polk's campaign was based on a threat of renewed war with Canada.
Vancouver was especially contentious and was originally a military fortification that included people of Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, African and Samoan descent that fought according to varying loyalties though usually about financial affairs rather than nationalist.
I missed this one the first time around, but luckily comments are still enabled.
I got this one all figured out.
If there was a workable method of life extension then people who wanted to use it would have to agree to leave the earth and live off-world after a certain period of time.
The reason I think this is such a great idea is because politically I believe you could win over a large part of the religious community which would be where you'd see resistance. Using this solution, everybody would still reach the end of their normal life span and go to heaven!
Is that beautiful or what?
Well, not to nitpick, but your hypothetical equivalency of travesties seems lacking. Perhaps hiring the people to manage unused open source would also be a tragedy, but that doesn't go away when you replace it with proprietary solutions. In fact, I would argue that the nature of the closed source procurement process makes the situation dire going the other way.
The assumption that closed source is some kind of labor savor is hopeful at best. It is precisely because of the vast sums of money that are invested in these proprietary solutions that extra man hours are justified. Spending begets spending.
Mandating open source is a far far better thing than mandating monopoly interests and that is what is going on in the world today with your tax dollars.
If you want to get into ideal solutions for an ideal world, well that's another story but one more suited to children's bedtime.
What is the definition of "work best" here? I've personally witnessed school districts paying obscene amounts of money for per-seat licenses of software they don't even use on the advice of district "authorities" who are highly suspect of recieving kick backs and are blatantly showered with perks by software companies.
That is corruption my dear skeptic.
If you think our tax dollars are best spent subsidizing corporate welfare for closed source software companies and their good ol' boy sales techniques then that's your business. But I suspect you're not even aware that this is the position you are defending. Do you really know the ins and outs of public school district tech budget allocations? What do you mean by "work best" anyway? Who do you trust to make that judgement?
Your point is well taken, but I'd suggest that there are numerous factors involved in the example you've given. You can imagine about a dozen of them in a few moments I'm sure. So, your observation is a bit misleadingly simple, isn't it?
Also it depends what you're defining as "developer." If you include people using multimedia presentation stuff like Director or an e-learning system like Authorware, there's really very little difference between targeting Linux -vs- Microsoft because the media these products produce runs fine under Wine when built with a windows runtime.
These closed source tools don't have much nerd crediblity as they were built to hide the "programming" so they are often ignored by the open source community, but they're interesting because of their deep integration in education. We're talking huge taxpayer bucks have been spent on this stuff.
I think it's really important that we get people to vote on the upcoming legislation directing government money towards open souce and education is a huge part of that. One of the arguments that you're going to hear is that the schools will have to toss all their old software because it only runs on Windows. Well, that's total bullshit. I've never seen one of these Macromedia education apps that won't run under Wine.
If we introduce open source in the K-12 schools, it's just a matter of time till Windows becomes little more than a history lesson.
It's a fact that the air we breathe, even in the cleanest environments is composed of a large percentage of free radicals. That's a basic fact of life on Earth.
The people who created the original microbial test for cancer later became its loudest critics when it was found that almost anything in excess can cause cancer. The air itself is toxic without any form of man made pollution.
I'm all for prolonging life through stem cell reasarch, cloning, genetic repairs, whatever. But trying to avoid, rather than repair, cellular damage is ridiculous. You can't do it.
Playing the blame game just keeps money in lawyers pockets. Don't participate in that crap.
The economic trouble we're in now began back in the eighties with Reagan's service economy bullshit. Essentially IT and the stockmarket has been little more than a multi-player rehash of the 1930s Ponzi game. These Republican bastards represent greed, not American capitalism. American capitalism is about growth through managed competition, not supporting vicious monopolies in a desperate grab for power.
The likelihood of biotech taking up the slack from IC and software is very low. On the one hand you have Affymetrix and the chip players with their promising well paying plan for tailored therapies, but on the other hand you have magic bullets like stem cell therapy that could totally wipe out profits.
If we want to keep going with the capitalist experiment, we've got to get back to our roots --exploration. The promises are as enormous as the American frontiers seemed in the eighteenth century. The only way this will happen is with a genuinely cheap ticket to orbit. America needs a space elevator.
I'm surprised.
I've got a LexmarkX73. It's one of those scan and print combo deals. It was about a hundrded bucks.
I've printed about two or three reams a week since I bought it about a month ago and I've refiled it with raw ink rather than replacing carriedges. My ink refill cost six bucks for the black and eight for the color. I've used about half the black so far and about a sixth of the color in the process of printing about 5000 sheets front and back.
I'd say it's a great deal. The thing is I'm not in the States. I don't think you can buy these dirt cheap ink refills in the US. The people of the US --and I am an American citizen born and raised-- have allowed themselves to be trapped by being too permissive with monopolies.
Just because you limit yourself, don't pin your shortcomings on others. I know guys in their sixties who nail coeds every weeek and if you live in a touristy area keg parties are not exactly rare.
And have you read any of his philosophy? I mean either he is unaware of earlier work in the field or he's intentionally repackaging old theories under new names. Sure does seem to lead credence to the theory that the DNA "discovery" might have been less than pure inspiration.
Thanks for the well written response to a somewhat rude and off-the-cuff comment. I'm particularly compelled by your mention of the real world conditions that a hardware engineer has to face. While you're speaking of the real world of physics --and I don't doubt the importance of this in hardware design-- I was thinking about the real world of politics.
I know we're not to this point yet, but what intrigues me so much about FPGAs is the idea that you might someday be able to buy a hardware product intended to be used in one way and use it in another way much as an Intel PC loaded with Microsoft at the time of purchase can be repurposed as a Linux PC.
This seems like such a powerful political issue. This could be THE political issue of the 21st century. The seduction of such thoughts were the inspiration for my comment. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that hardware design no longer remains a very sophistiacted realm of engineering. But to be fair there are still elements of, for instance, kernel programming that are not accessible to the novice or even the apprentice programmer. However, that doesn't stop millions of end users from reformatting their Windows drives with Linux distros.
I think that the more we get people who are taking the total bonzai approach to programming their own FPGAs, the better because it creates a knowledge base that comes from this out-in-left-field orientation. That kind of knowledge base eventually makes it into blogs, discussion boards, mailing lists, newsgroups and becomes the basis of a FAQ or a How-To that addresses the issues that a novice is most likely to face based on the real world experience of legions of such individuals.
While there is a snowball's chance in hell that such work will result in well engineered designs, it's still important. Well engineered designs will come from individuals such as yourself who have the dedication and competence to make then happen. What concerns me is not so much who will create the good designs, but how will those designs be used by the public, who will make those decisions about how those designs are used and how will those decisions be enforced.
Having said that, I'm sure you're right that there are dangers in letting incompetent people play with powerful toys. One great danger is that shoddy products will be marketed by irresponsible jokers. In fact, the irresponsibility that we've seen by so many software designers has led us to this point where it's almost impossible to sell software partly because the users insist on trying it first because they're so wary of being ripped off yet again. Well that may be a gross oversimplification of an issue that is complicated in many ways, but poor design and outright scams certainly haven't helped matters.
For now, the hardware and software worlds are still far apart, but it seems that the FPGA is drawing them closer. This may be ominous, but it may also be liberating in many senses of the word.
No kidding, this sounds compelling when you make it sound like there was no airplane and no turbine technology and suddenly jets appeared because of the magic of WWII making modern aviation possible. That's far from the case. Airplanes obviously predated WWI and both gas and steam turbines were in use for electricity production all the way back in the nineteenth century. The fact that the two finally got cozey so late says more about how incredibly lazy and unmotivated to try new things people can be than it does about the amazing inspiration that only war can make possible.
Last time this was on/., it seemed there was mention of an unspecified Japanese auto manufactuer that was using nanotubes in a resin of some sort and I thought there was some suggestion that this was already an acceptable material. Anybody recall that or know of anything along those lines?
It seems the logic of this thread relies a bit too heavily on strict definitions of software engineers and hardware engineers. What about those of us who think there are two kinds of engineers: those who drive trains, and those with sticks up their asses?
Now that's not meant to be a personal attack, just a little joke from someone who comes from a family littered with engineers. But it also goes straight to my point which is that FPGAs do begin to move chip functionality into the realm of the hacker.
By definition, these are people who tend to flaunt conventions. That's not to say that they might not have impressive technical backgrounds; on the contrary, it's usually one of the defining elements of such an individual. But this is a category of people who are looking for answers to problems that might not even attract the attention of a more rigorous professional engineer.
For these people, the FPGA is truly a revolutionary advance. Take OpenCores for instance. Here we see black box IP cores that enable people who have neither hardware nor software design skills to begin tinkering with FPGAs. I know a guy who is a total computer idiot who works downloading video encoders onto FPGAs for video production units. This guy couldn't program a DOS batch file or re-wire a broken lamp, but his job description makes him and FPGA Engineer. Given such realities, I think the assertion that a typical programmer type is somehow dangerous at the controls of an FPGA is a bit of an overreaction.
Yeah, this was the topic in the "I Cringely" or whatever his name is/. discussion sometime last year.
I thought the coolest thing was the notion of the traffic on the freeway becoming a moving extension of the network. Basically an internet backbone feed in one town could be connected all the way to another town through a roving vehicular trail of access points. Although rolling nodes would be constantnly passing in and out of range of the network, a certain density would be enough to make a highway work as a data pipe, especially with QoS built into the protocol. Bizarre thought. The internal combustion enhanced wireless network.
Eventually places like Southern California and the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Baltimore will have to become vast mesh wireless networks. It's hard to see how that couldn't happen without legislative interference and even then it's hard to imagine how it will be prevented.
Where was that announcement? I read about Spheral on/. some time last year and I went around blabbing about it to everyone in my family and then people started getting interested and asking me questions so I went back to their web page over and over and it was never updated and it seems it still isn't.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that reference to the 20MW plant seem to suggest that it still hasn't happened? I'd love to hear some good news here because I've taken some grief from a few skeptics already who blamed me for hyping these guys. The web page looks the same as it has since last Fall to me. If they're so active, why is the web page so infrequently updated?
Hmm. What are those drawbacks?
I just read a Bell CEO talking about how the reason they don't want to introduce tiered pricing is because the bandwidth isn't their real cost, their costs are more related to service and billing infrastructure and golf games and executive stock options and important shit like that. Although the raw bandwidth is technically the product, it's not where the real costs come in.
The bottom line in that interview was why support low priced customers when you could just skim the cream of the top. I mean why not when you're in a monopoly position. I don't see how a new competitor would face this same "drawback" as you put it.
The drawbacks for the Bells are that they don't like to waste their time with the mass priced market while there is still plenty of low hanging fruit. A new competitor would have to reach out to new customers and the new customers are the ones who aren't going to pay the unreasonable fees the telcos are asking.
Spending most of the last ten years in Taiwan, it's becoming very odd for me when I go back to the States and find even harcore nerds still using modems. Broadband has been cheaper than modem use here for almost four years now. Clearly something very ugly is going on in the US telecoms markets.
It is amusing to note that internationally if you look at where the cheap broadband is, you see very little correlation between deregulation and low rates with the US being the perfect example of where it just doesn't work. Perhaps unregulated competition isn't the panacea it's billed as. After all, what makes a mega corporate bureaucracy inherently more efficient than its government counterpart where this is at least some possibility of accountability.
I think the obvious answer in the States is what we're already beginning to see sprinkled around here and there which is broadband as a community utility like the highways or the water or the power. There are those who say that this is somehow a danger to freedoms of speech, but I don't quite follow the logic there when we have Verizon ratting out their users as it is.
For all you old geezers who know everything, just skip this, but for those truly curious about how patents have gotten so out of hand, you may find this common knowledge of use.
Before the Great Depression, there was a very similar state of patent affairs to what we have now. The laws were worded in a way that gave patent holders enormous rights and patent holders tended to win in court.
During the reforms that took place after the Depression, patents were seen as monopolistic and were closely watched by a division of the Justice Department called Antitrust. In courts, the value of patents was distinctly weakened to the point that patent holders tended to lose in court and patents became an unprofitable way to manage one's business.
These anti-patent reforms were in place through the growth decades from the end of the war and into the sixties allowing many of our favorite toys like the Xerox GUI based PC to come into existence relatively free of patent issues. If you're old enough, you might even remember hearing about consent decrees on the news at night when you were a kid. They used to be common, but I haven't heard the phrase in the headlines in decades although that's no mystery.
In the 80s, an odd but charismatic man was elected president in a tide of big business friendly politics and himself and his associates immediately reformed the legal system regarding patents by creating a brand new court that specialized in patent cases only. This new court was called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit AKA, the CAFC and it essentially reversed the reforms that had taken place since the Great Depression.
Subsequently a great bubble formed in the stock market and then. . .
Anything that keeps the existing big money players in place will be fine, but anything that smacks of increasing freedoms of speech and fair use --AKA market disruption-- will get the smack down from one or another federal agency. Commerce recently advised the FCC to ban the import of 802.11a devices intended for outdoor use citing air traffic concerns. Reaching an accord with the Pentagon is nice, but it's a small battle in a much larger war.
Slashdot Mirror
They had some nice mock up graphics as well. Perhaps it was a bit new age looking, but it was fun stuff. The fmf website had that old Omni magazine/Heavy Metal flavor.
I recall folling their news archives and it seemed that there was a fairly talented voluteer who started questioning Hilbertz' results and he was having a hard time duplicating them despite what seemed to be fairly rigorous efforts.
It sounded like the problem was that the calcite was hard to keep homogenous and it tended to be too soft unless really large amounts of electricity were used which made it non cost competitive with cement and so it became somewhat besides the point.
But floating concrete cities still sound like a rad idea to me. And you don't need OTEC either. Just use generators and buy oil for starters. Park over the top of thermal vents and harvest nasty toxic chemicals fun and profit. So what if the seacrete thing costs too much at this point. Let's build it on shore and launch it. I'm there man.
I am a big fan of HighLift and the tiny nanotube thread, but I'm just not convinced that a steel tower is impossible given the right geometry. (Note, I'm not suggesting the ascii below is such a geometry, it's just to illustrate the point)
|
Sure, maybe a steel cable could never work, but at some scale it must be possible to build up a tower or, alternately, to build down a beam of of interconnected steel tubes.
Building down it seems we could use steel beams made of elaborate geometries like we see in some space frame construction. The members could be spring loaded to distribute stresses therby adding vast amounts of tensile strength. Just because the material itself lacks tensile strength over a given length, that doesn't mean all structures composed of that material would share that property.
A mass of steel triangles or other geometries is not not as elegant as using a single strand of nanotube composites, but it uses existing materials in plentiful supply at a good price.
At some scale a steel mesh tower must be capable of reaching into the edges of the atmosphere. They're building 500 meter buildings left front and center all over Asia. It would only be necessary to stack up a few hundred of them in an octet "truss" type formation to make a nice dent in a trip to orbit.
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X|
|X
Now this rather homely ASCII art is not meant to be a prototype, but you get the idea. Replace each leg of an X with a 500meter steel tower and you could easily imagine a ten kilometer tower. Sure, that's not even close to orbit, but it's higher than Everest. At some scale this has to make a dent in the cost of launching to orbit if you build up from the ground.
Of course coming down from space instead of builduing up you have the issue of materials transport. But I think it's got to be possible even with steel.
That's partly true of Canada if you look at the original colonization only, but there were numerous skermishes over the borders in which many lives were lost. You will recall Polk's campaign was based on a threat of renewed war with Canada.
Vancouver was especially contentious and was originally a military fortification that included people of Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, African and Samoan descent that fought according to varying loyalties though usually about financial affairs rather than nationalist.
I missed this one the first time around, but luckily comments are still enabled.
I got this one all figured out.
If there was a workable method of life extension then people who wanted to use it would have to agree to leave the earth and live off-world after a certain period of time.
The reason I think this is such a great idea is because politically I believe you could win over a large part of the religious community which would be where you'd see resistance. Using this solution, everybody would still reach the end of their normal life span and go to heaven!
Is that beautiful or what?
Well, not to nitpick, but your hypothetical equivalency of travesties seems lacking. Perhaps hiring the people to manage unused open source would also be a tragedy, but that doesn't go away when you replace it with proprietary solutions. In fact, I would argue that the nature of the closed source procurement process makes the situation dire going the other way.
The assumption that closed source is some kind of labor savor is hopeful at best. It is precisely because of the vast sums of money that are invested in these proprietary solutions that extra man hours are justified. Spending begets spending.
Mandating open source is a far far better thing than mandating monopoly interests and that is what is going on in the world today with your tax dollars.
If you want to get into ideal solutions for an ideal world, well that's another story but one more suited to children's bedtime.
What is the definition of "work best" here? I've personally witnessed school districts paying obscene amounts of money for per-seat licenses of software they don't even use on the advice of district "authorities" who are highly suspect of recieving kick backs and are blatantly showered with perks by software companies.
That is corruption my dear skeptic.
If you think our tax dollars are best spent subsidizing corporate welfare for closed source software companies and their good ol' boy sales techniques then that's your business. But I suspect you're not even aware that this is the position you are defending. Do you really know the ins and outs of public school district tech budget allocations? What do you mean by "work best" anyway? Who do you trust to make that judgement?
Your point is well taken, but I'd suggest that there are numerous factors involved in the example you've given. You can imagine about a dozen of them in a few moments I'm sure. So, your observation is a bit misleadingly simple, isn't it?
Also it depends what you're defining as "developer." If you include people using multimedia presentation stuff like Director or an e-learning system like Authorware, there's really very little difference between targeting Linux -vs- Microsoft because the media these products produce runs fine under Wine when built with a windows runtime.
These closed source tools don't have much nerd crediblity as they were built to hide the "programming" so they are often ignored by the open source community, but they're interesting because of their deep integration in education. We're talking huge taxpayer bucks have been spent on this stuff.
I think it's really important that we get people to vote on the upcoming legislation directing government money towards open souce and education is a huge part of that. One of the arguments that you're going to hear is that the schools will have to toss all their old software because it only runs on Windows. Well, that's total bullshit. I've never seen one of these Macromedia education apps that won't run under Wine.
If we introduce open source in the K-12 schools, it's just a matter of time till Windows becomes little more than a history lesson.
Since when do people get modded up just for bashing insightful posts with links?
It's a fact that the air we breathe, even in the cleanest environments is composed of a large percentage of free radicals. That's a basic fact of life on Earth.
The people who created the original microbial test for cancer later became its loudest critics when it was found that almost anything in excess can cause cancer. The air itself is toxic without any form of man made pollution.
I'm all for prolonging life through stem cell reasarch, cloning, genetic repairs, whatever. But trying to avoid, rather than repair, cellular damage is ridiculous. You can't do it.
Playing the blame game just keeps money in lawyers pockets. Don't participate in that crap.
The economic trouble we're in now began back in the eighties with Reagan's service economy bullshit. Essentially IT and the stockmarket has been little more than a multi-player rehash of the 1930s Ponzi game. These Republican bastards represent greed, not American capitalism. American capitalism is about growth through managed competition, not supporting vicious monopolies in a desperate grab for power.
The likelihood of biotech taking up the slack from IC and software is very low. On the one hand you have Affymetrix and the chip players with their promising well paying plan for tailored therapies, but on the other hand you have magic bullets like stem cell therapy that could totally wipe out profits.
If we want to keep going with the capitalist experiment, we've got to get back to our roots --exploration. The promises are as enormous as the American frontiers seemed in the eighteenth century. The only way this will happen is with a genuinely cheap ticket to orbit. America needs a space elevator.
I'm surprised.
I've got a LexmarkX73. It's one of those scan and print combo deals. It was about a hundrded bucks.
I've printed about two or three reams a week since I bought it about a month ago and I've refiled it with raw ink rather than replacing carriedges. My ink refill cost six bucks for the black and eight for the color. I've used about half the black so far and about a sixth of the color in the process of printing about 5000 sheets front and back.
I'd say it's a great deal. The thing is I'm not in the States. I don't think you can buy these dirt cheap ink refills in the US. The people of the US --and I am an American citizen born and raised-- have allowed themselves to be trapped by being too permissive with monopolies.
in a prosecution because it is so badly written that prosecutors won't touch it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Just because you limit yourself, don't pin your shortcomings on others. I know guys in their sixties who nail coeds every weeek and if you live in a touristy area keg parties are not exactly rare.
And have you read any of his philosophy? I mean either he is unaware of earlier work in the field or he's intentionally repackaging old theories under new names. Sure does seem to lead credence to the theory that the DNA "discovery" might have been less than pure inspiration.
Thanks for the well written response to a somewhat rude and off-the-cuff comment. I'm particularly compelled by your mention of the real world conditions that a hardware engineer has to face. While you're speaking of the real world of physics --and I don't doubt the importance of this in hardware design-- I was thinking about the real world of politics.
I know we're not to this point yet, but what intrigues me so much about FPGAs is the idea that you might someday be able to buy a hardware product intended to be used in one way and use it in another way much as an Intel PC loaded with Microsoft at the time of purchase can be repurposed as a Linux PC.
This seems like such a powerful political issue. This could be THE political issue of the 21st century. The seduction of such thoughts were the inspiration for my comment. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that hardware design no longer remains a very sophistiacted realm of engineering. But to be fair there are still elements of, for instance, kernel programming that are not accessible to the novice or even the apprentice programmer. However, that doesn't stop millions of end users from reformatting their Windows drives with Linux distros.
I think that the more we get people who are taking the total bonzai approach to programming their own FPGAs, the better because it creates a knowledge base that comes from this out-in-left-field orientation. That kind of knowledge base eventually makes it into blogs, discussion boards, mailing lists, newsgroups and becomes the basis of a FAQ or a How-To that addresses the issues that a novice is most likely to face based on the real world experience of legions of such individuals.
While there is a snowball's chance in hell that such work will result in well engineered designs, it's still important. Well engineered designs will come from individuals such as yourself who have the dedication and competence to make then happen. What concerns me is not so much who will create the good designs, but how will those designs be used by the public, who will make those decisions about how those designs are used and how will those decisions be enforced.
Having said that, I'm sure you're right that there are dangers in letting incompetent people play with powerful toys. One great danger is that shoddy products will be marketed by irresponsible jokers. In fact, the irresponsibility that we've seen by so many software designers has led us to this point where it's almost impossible to sell software partly because the users insist on trying it first because they're so wary of being ripped off yet again. Well that may be a gross oversimplification of an issue that is complicated in many ways, but poor design and outright scams certainly haven't helped matters.
For now, the hardware and software worlds are still far apart, but it seems that the FPGA is drawing them closer. This may be ominous, but it may also be liberating in many senses of the word.
No kidding, this sounds compelling when you make it sound like there was no airplane and no turbine technology and suddenly jets appeared because of the magic of WWII making modern aviation possible. That's far from the case. Airplanes obviously predated WWI and both gas and steam turbines were in use for electricity production all the way back in the nineteenth century. The fact that the two finally got cozey so late says more about how incredibly lazy and unmotivated to try new things people can be than it does about the amazing inspiration that only war can make possible.
Last time this was on /., it seemed there was mention of an unspecified Japanese auto manufactuer that was using nanotubes in a resin of some sort and I thought there was some suggestion that this was already an acceptable material. Anybody recall that or know of anything along those lines?
It seems the logic of this thread relies a bit too heavily on strict definitions of software engineers and hardware engineers. What about those of us who think there are two kinds of engineers: those who drive trains, and those with sticks up their asses?
Now that's not meant to be a personal attack, just a little joke from someone who comes from a family littered with engineers. But it also goes straight to my point which is that FPGAs do begin to move chip functionality into the realm of the hacker.
By definition, these are people who tend to flaunt conventions. That's not to say that they might not have impressive technical backgrounds; on the contrary, it's usually one of the defining elements of such an individual. But this is a category of people who are looking for answers to problems that might not even attract the attention of a more rigorous professional engineer.
For these people, the FPGA is truly a revolutionary advance. Take OpenCores for instance. Here we see black box IP cores that enable people who have neither hardware nor software design skills to begin tinkering with FPGAs. I know a guy who is a total computer idiot who works downloading video encoders onto FPGAs for video production units. This guy couldn't program a DOS batch file or re-wire a broken lamp, but his job description makes him and FPGA Engineer. Given such realities, I think the assertion that a typical programmer type is somehow dangerous at the controls of an FPGA is a bit of an overreaction.
Yeah, this was the topic in the "I Cringely" or whatever his name is /. discussion sometime last year.
I thought the coolest thing was the notion of the traffic on the freeway becoming a moving extension of the network. Basically an internet backbone feed in one town could be connected all the way to another town through a roving vehicular trail of access points. Although rolling nodes would be constantnly passing in and out of range of the network, a certain density would be enough to make a highway work as a data pipe, especially with QoS built into the protocol. Bizarre thought. The internal combustion enhanced wireless network.
Eventually places like Southern California and the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Baltimore will have to become vast mesh wireless networks. It's hard to see how that couldn't happen without legislative interference and even then it's hard to imagine how it will be prevented.
Where was that announcement? I read about Spheral on /. some time last year and I went around blabbing about it to everyone in my family and then people started getting interested and asking me questions so I went back to their web page over and over and it was never updated and it seems it still isn't.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that reference to the 20MW plant seem to suggest that it still hasn't happened? I'd love to hear some good news here because I've taken some grief from a few skeptics already who blamed me for hyping these guys. The web page looks the same as it has since last Fall to me. If they're so active, why is the web page so infrequently updated?
Hmm. What are those drawbacks?
I just read a Bell CEO talking about how the reason they don't want to introduce tiered pricing is because the bandwidth isn't their real cost, their costs are more related to service and billing infrastructure and golf games and executive stock options and important shit like that. Although the raw bandwidth is technically the product, it's not where the real costs come in.
The bottom line in that interview was why support low priced customers when you could just skim the cream of the top. I mean why not when you're in a monopoly position. I don't see how a new competitor would face this same "drawback" as you put it.
The drawbacks for the Bells are that they don't like to waste their time with the mass priced market while there is still plenty of low hanging fruit. A new competitor would have to reach out to new customers and the new customers are the ones who aren't going to pay the unreasonable fees the telcos are asking.
Spending most of the last ten years in Taiwan, it's becoming very odd for me when I go back to the States and find even harcore nerds still using modems. Broadband has been cheaper than modem use here for almost four years now. Clearly something very ugly is going on in the US telecoms markets.
It is amusing to note that internationally if you look at where the cheap broadband is, you see very little correlation between deregulation and low rates with the US being the perfect example of where it just doesn't work. Perhaps unregulated competition isn't the panacea it's billed as. After all, what makes a mega corporate bureaucracy inherently more efficient than its government counterpart where this is at least some possibility of accountability.
I think the obvious answer in the States is what we're already beginning to see sprinkled around here and there which is broadband as a community utility like the highways or the water or the power. There are those who say that this is somehow a danger to freedoms of speech, but I don't quite follow the logic there when we have Verizon ratting out their users as it is.
For all you old geezers who know everything, just skip this, but for those truly curious about how patents have gotten so out of hand, you may find this common knowledge of use.
Before the Great Depression, there was a very similar state of patent affairs to what we have now. The laws were worded in a way that gave patent holders enormous rights and patent holders tended to win in court.
During the reforms that took place after the Depression, patents were seen as monopolistic and were closely watched by a division of the Justice Department called Antitrust. In courts, the value of patents was distinctly weakened to the point that patent holders tended to lose in court and patents became an unprofitable way to manage one's business.
These anti-patent reforms were in place through the growth decades from the end of the war and into the sixties allowing many of our favorite toys like the Xerox GUI based PC to come into existence relatively free of patent issues. If you're old enough, you might even remember hearing about consent decrees on the news at night when you were a kid. They used to be common, but I haven't heard the phrase in the headlines in decades although that's no mystery.
In the 80s, an odd but charismatic man was elected president in a tide of big business friendly politics and himself and his associates immediately reformed the legal system regarding patents by creating a brand new court that specialized in patent cases only. This new court was called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit AKA, the CAFC and it essentially reversed the reforms that had taken place since the Great Depression.
Subsequently a great bubble formed in the stock market and then. . .
Anything that keeps the existing big money players in place will be fine, but anything that smacks of increasing freedoms of speech and fair use --AKA market disruption-- will get the smack down from one or another federal agency. Commerce recently advised the FCC to ban the import of 802.11a devices intended for outdoor use citing air traffic concerns. Reaching an accord with the Pentagon is nice, but it's a small battle in a much larger war.