Wireless my dear AC bitch, wireless. The "phone companies" would be irrelevant if wireless would take off and guess who is trying to prevent that from happening. Yeah, that's right big Dubya.
And as for what he did to be impeached and imprisoned, don't you read the news? The Enron kids are confessing that the "California Energy Crisis" was all a big hoax perpretrated not just by Enron but by a whole consortium of Energy traders based in Houston with ties to both Bush and Cheney. I don't make the news, I just read it. That's stealing and possibly murder. People lost their lives because of those outages.
And on a personal note, I can't stand to use the damn telephone. I leave mine unplugged most of the time.
It's not just that they got caught buying the wrong equipment, the big telecoms players have specficially resisted IP over ethernet in order to keep entry costs as high as possible. The most ridiculous thing in the world is these suggestions that they had to stick with ATM and Sonet in order to cash in on the huge potential of video conferencing and video on demand and all this utter crap that only seventy year old technophobe shareholders would believe.
Compare an OC3 from a Bell -vs- an OC3 from a native ethernet provider like Cogent. These are two different worlds of cost.
But hey, let the FCC do what they will, we'll just add it to the list of criminal frauds already commited when it's time to impeach and imprison Bush and his administration.
Yeah, but did you check that Lessig presntation to the Supreme Court the other day? Apparently Justice O'Conner thinks that Lessig is right that the Bono act was unconstitutional and several of the justices are concerned that the the earlier extension may also have been unconstitutional. We could be looking at everything before '83 on the net free for download.
If you're closer to a hospital then that would be a reasonable idea, but when you've got cyanide poisoning you don't have much time. If you're just ingested cyanide, USP grade -vs- technical grade antidote is not a priority, time is.
No, it's not just a density isue. It's about the market in the States being screwed by a collusion of government and telecoms monopolies. I now live in the far northern tip of Taiwan miles from any small town and I still get 512K DSL for thirty bucks a month and no hassles. Next year we're supposed to be upgraded to 1.5Meg just like they upgraded us from 256K earlier this year. This is not limited to high density areas by any means.
The funny thing is I know so many people in the States who are under the illusion that there's some technical limitation that's preventing them from getting cheap broadband. It's like the people who thought the California electricity crisis was about the costs of power generation. Guess again.
What you're saying has been true so far, but probably won't stay that way. There are already nationwide ISPs like Congent willing to offer 100Meg ethernet for about a thousand a month and this isn't DSL, it's real ethernet and it's the same speed up and downstream. It's true the existing players have done just that --played the American consumer for a sucker. But it will change and the most likely candidate for that change is wireless mesh networks. Seeing as how Taiwan is gearing up to push down prices on wireless hardware this should be happening in the next year or two.
Of course until then, this story is a sad testiment to the lies perpetuated by the scandalous telecoms players in the US. It's too bad the American people are too complacent to elect leaders that represent their interests. Here I refer, among other things, to the recent commerce department attempts to force the FCC to limit all 802.11 products to indoor use. That is a scandal that goes right to the Bush administration. Give that guy enough rope and he'll hang us all.
Perhaps the best cyanide fact to keep in mind is that before you die of cyanide poisoning, you'll probably get extremely ill and at that point you can still be saved by drinking some sodium thiosulphate. Almost any photo shop will have some. If you're working with cyanide keep some handy. It's easy to come by.
Eh hem, I'd just like to point out that the single biggest blow to personal aviation in the twentieth century was Ronald and Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs and the unfortunate masses of Americans who supported this misguided policy. It's not about safety, it's about control. Personal air travel is like the internet for physical goods including contraband -- it knows no borders. One of the first actions in the War on Drugs was to immediately close thousands of private air strips most of which remain abandoned to this day to protect you and me from smoking a joint or doing some coke.
There is every reason to believe that personal aviation will beome a huge industry as soon prohibition ends at the national level. Apparently many of the posters in this discussion are unaware that there already are giant "yellow dividers" all over America placed there after WWII in preparation for the immense popularity of personal aviation that was squashed in the name of drug control.
We'll see how long US copyright law and entire information economy lasts when UMC and TSMC go full tilt boogie on 12inch fabs at 90nm outside Shanghai and start producing state of the art System on a Chip devices using Alpha clone cores running Linux for a few bucks a pop.
Chips have always been a great medium for negotiations. If you aint got no chips, you're out of the game. Suckas.
When my parents graduated from college with BAs in the 70s they were actually sent invitations for jobs through the post. Neither one of them really interviewed. They just chose the job they wanted and went to work. In time they went on to other careers where their experience served as all the credential they needed. They got started with an invitation and they never looked back. I looked forward to the day when I would enter the work force like my parents.
When I got my BA in '91 the career counselor told me and my buddy that there were two alternatives, go to grad school or leave the country. There were no jobs including her own. She was being dismissed as part of budget cuts at the time. My buddy went to Japan and I went to grad school.
A few years later with a Master's degree there were still no jobs so I left the country as well. I'm still outside the country almost ten years later and I only go back for Christmas vacation.
Of the friends that stayed in the States, a surprising number are already dead. My brother born in '74 finally landed a teaching job a few years ago, but it's not clear how stable it is and he's got two kids.
Out of all my cousins only a few made big bucks and the only way they made it was hustling in the worst way. I'm talking backstabbing salespeople types. There is a total lack of people who just had normal career lives among family members in my generation. It has been either balls out money or jack shit. Education seems to be meaningless. The price of your school means everything, but the degree is nothing except perhaps a shot at a part time teaching gig at best.
I do think people in my generation were trapped by circumstances. Those who made it didn't make it simply by being good citizens and playing by the rules and most of the people I know don't have shit and have little chance of ever making it work out.
I think the part that surprises me the most is that there isn't more outright hostility than there already is. Probably now that we're riding down the back side of the distraction of the IP bubble we'll start to see some more active participation --cough-- in social affairs by members of this generation.
"This war will be won by us in a legal grassroots way"
There is no war, they lost a long time ago. This isn't a war, it's corporate grieving. Corporations don't have parents, they have business models. These corporations have all lost their business model due to advances in technology and they're in the process of grieving their loss. I think it would all make more sense to you if you read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work On Death and Dying. This is not a war, this is denial of a painful reality by a wealthy family that is being played out in the courts.
In essence, the judge is being forced to act as a counselor for a grieving family that refuses to face their loss. This is not an uncommon role for the courts and that's partly why we're seeing so much integration of mandatory mediation by counseling professionals into the court system.
In this particular instance I thought the judge's reference to the issue of "constitutional avoidance" was very telling. The lawyer for the plaintif tried to tell the judge when his own interpretation of the facts was and was not appropriate. This suggestion that the judge's thinking is muddled mirrors the counseling situation in which the client tells the counselor that the counselor is acting irrationally when all the counselor is doing is listening to the client. As a counselor, that's the kind of clue you look for to help your client begin their recovery.
Almost, but it's a bit early to put it quite like that. Taiwan is still the fab center of Asia and while China does some assembly, even packaging is high tech in the PC world so much of that is also done in Taiwan still. That is changing fast, but the economic slow down has put a chill on the pace of the changes. In the long term it is expected that China will become a fab center, but not until TSMC and UMC relocate there with planned 12inch fabs and that's looking like several years down the road at this point because of market conditions. Long term it has been decided that it will happen, but it hasn't happned yet. In fact, if you read the better known semi trade web pages you will notice that packaging and testing tech transfer from Taiwan are currently some of the big issues of contention at Grace and SMIC --the two big mainland fabs. So, it's not quite as simple as you outlined it.
I don't see it mentioned in the text. I can't see the point of adding it either because it wouldn't fit the description. I'm under the impression Kazaa Lite is not a profitable enterprise. I could be wrong.
That's the key point right there. The paper that the article was based on used the analogy of a pond being polluted. Well, there are good anaolgies and there are bad analogies and a fishing pond not a very good analogy here because a P2P network is much more like a swimming pool with not one or two, but millions of high powered filters. A standard filter and chlorine/ozone system on a swimming pool can remove enormous amounts of excrement. A pool with a million filters is going to require a hell of a waste stream to pollute for any length of time. Given that these filter systems are also the water inlets for the pool, the task of polluting the majority of the water for any length of time is problematic at best and unlikely to succeed.
Maybe not aluminum, but PET is just as common these days and global virgin PET resin is currently so cheap that it makes recycling plastic an economic burden that will never be justifiable in strictly market terms unless market conditions shift dramatically in reverse which is unlikely because the price reductions are due to advances in chemical engineering practice that are themselves profit bases.
The oversupply of virgin PET resin is already huge and will only grow as PET resin is seen as a sidestream profit from other chemical processing industries. A brand new crystal clear sterile one liter PET bottle costs a fraction of a cent even when you add the cost of the automated forming machines that are available from dozens of asian manufacturers in models cheaper than a new car and capable of producing thousands of bottles per day.
So while I'm not sure what the figures are like on aluminum, your premise is incorrect. It is not only possible for anyone with a small amount of investment money to produce soft drink containers for less than 1.5cents, it's the root of a serious challenge for recycling programs trying to attain profitability. The markte value of recycled PET is not worth the effort and energy it takes to collect it and probably will not become so in the future because raw PET resin in a clean, sterile and easy to handle form is so inexpensive.
I understand Xilinix is offering a 400Mhz FPGA chip these days, but it's about three grand. But more interesting to me was a presntation I found by some guy who said Xilinix's FPGA was necessarily slow because it used what could be described as a warped matrix as opposed to a simple checkerboard square.
Apparently the motivation for Xilinx to use this other design was a patent consideration rather than a decision made from a strict engineering standpoint. An open FPGA from China based on a simplified design would be interesting at the 60nm level. It would require lots of new circuit designs, but it might happen some day and that may be soon.
I think the biggest flaw in this "next time we're going to stop all this copying is that the justification for the next generation of equipment is exceedingly weak. The cat is out of the bag and was since the introduction of the Pentium class processors. I think those Play that Funky Music commercials that seemed a bit bizarre at the time summarize it quite nicely.
We just read a few days ago about Intel's lawsuit for marketing the P4 as a genuine improvement over the P3. As far as an MP3 listener or even Divx movie watcher is concerned, "improvements" have no longer been necessary since well before last year.
Besides, we've already seen that some of the BluRay DVD companies who are obviously getting fed up with the ??AA's foot dragging are convinced that exisiting security measures are all they feel are necessary. Let's see if they stay out of the martket as things get uglier in the next few business quarters. And it looks like it's going to get real ugly.
I can do a study showing that in order to make a sandwich you have to consume a hundred thousand times the calories in the sandwich by including the growing of the vegies, the meat etc. Does that mean you shoudln't eat because it's inefficient? Have you ever considered that studies themselves are products of design that consume vast sums of energy to create? Studies are works of design and engineering. It's called social engineering. There is an agenda behind every study and the more it is disguised as scientific truth the more likely it is to be motivated by specific political interests.
If you think everything you learn in school is true at face value, you're probably still in school.
Anyhow, I'm a long haired hippy and I like to use lots of power. Like many long haired hippies I like my music loud and I use big power hungry amps to achieve that effect and I don't really care how much power they use. I also like halogen lights and neon signs and big lasers. I'm not against efficiency, but I think electricity is already quite efficient. Current generation PV may not be the best answer for terrestrial applications, but that's a restricted view of their utility from my broad minded long haired, though balding, liberal perspective.
Universities may be sexy, but I think K12 is where the tax dollars are really spent and that should be a priority.
If that five year old copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches typing works under Wine but requires a five hundred dollar upgrade to work under Win2k, it is truly scandalous for a district to justify spending their money treading water on the Microsoft payment plan.
And when the schools start cranking out students who think that Microsoft created the internet it's gone too far. I just had a friend's kid beg me not to install Linux on her Dad's PC because she wouldn't be able to use the internet as everybody knows that requires Microsoft Windows. I was stunned.
I'm all for the schools having more money for technology, but let's spend it on hardware. How about DLP projectors in the classrooms and more bandwidth for the school network? There are plenty of legitimately extravagant ways of spending money for education that aren't blatant corporate welfare.
This seems like a natural first step, but it's almost impossible to discuss the possibility of using open source with real teachers in real US schools because most teachers are simply afraid of technology. You know, it's like oh the little gremlins in the box are controlled by some guy in the district office who is watching me and recording every move I make. Please, just leave me alone before they find out I was talking with you about this hacker stuff.
Even those who are supposed to be teaching technology will tell you that they have this huge investment in proprietary MS, educational titles so they have no choice but to stick with it. However, when you demonstrate that those same apps work under Wine they come up with this shuffle the feet thing that basically comes back to well I don't know about these important things that the district decides on and it's not really my business because the district has its policies.
Then when I push for details on how the district is in such control over the individual classrooms they come to the part that really kills me which is where they say they have to use MS because it allows them to access the net and any non MS servers on their network are forbidden by the district. Perhaps this is just a snowjob from a teacher who is giving me a bunch of shit, but this is what I was told.
At least school districts should encourage teachers to try and use open source rather than actively discouraging them with district policies set by Redmond. The situation we're in is insane and this is tax payers money. I don't see how the free market argument works in favor of closed source when we're dealing with tax dollars to begin with.
I live a few blocks from the beach on a tropical island where the humidity is almost always around a hundred percent and I find that power supplies go out like mad. The most important trick is to keep everything on constantly. The machine creates its own microclimate because of the heat it generates, but obviously it only works if the machine is kept on all the time.
My advice to your friend would be to bring at least four or five fresh power supplies wrapped in dessicant if he's going to be using a desktop system. And even better is to have a small network on board rather than a single machine. Leaving the machine(s) on as much as possible is the simplest advice though. Even extremely moist conditions don't have much effect on an active desktop system, but you have to keep it active. Eventually salty condensation will kill your PSU if you let it power down all the time.
Every other country such as?
I'm in Taiwan and I get 1.5 down 256 up no limitations whatsoever on usage DSL for forty bucks a month from the government monopoly telecom. We've been seeing ads for metro ethernet at 3+megs both ways in the thirty buck range sometime before the end of this year and that's supposedly happening here in Taiwan, in South Korea, in Hong Kong and some of the big cities in Mainland.
I think you might want to check your facts before you go talking about the state of the world next time son.
Hmm, it seems not too many people read Digitimes. TSMC and UMC have both been at.13 for a long time and I was under the impression they were doing.90nm already. That's what all the talk about SOC bottlenecks on EETimes is about. Check out the TSMC home page for more on 90nm SOC plans.
For more fun, according to Digitimes, TSMC and a German company have already begun work on a.60nm foundry in Singapore that is supposed to be in operation by 2Q 2003.
To answer an earlier question about ultimate CMOS limits, IBM says 45nm is the limit for gates at 1V and below that you lose speed in data processing applications. Of course GaAs and InP might extend that limit, but then you introduce process issues. The lithography challenges while expensive are not the primary technologcical issues. This latter point is intriguing because it leaves the door open for applications where minute dimensions are more important than processing speed such as biochips. Check out the Univeristy of Michigan for some awesome preliminary work on production level implanted bionetworks.
It sounds ominous to me.
When IBM started their big services kick one of the first things they did was to aquire the backend to Macromedia's educational software development system back end called Pathware and jack the prices through the roof. Now obviously this is profitable because one of the juciest target audiances for this program is public school districts --ie tax dollars. How's that for free market strategy?
Knowing that this is the kind of services growth strategy that IBM uses along with their alleged mobster like patent strategies I'd be a bit concerned to hear they're getting into accounting in a big way.
Hmm. I'm not sure how informative that article was. They didn't go into the different implementations of the 802.11 standards that we're seeing on the market and anticipating in the near future.
Of course some people are very interested like the government of Taiwan and the Commerce department. The former has already banned 802.11a for outdoor use and the latter is seeking the same in the States. I wonder why? They site air traffic concerns. Hmm. Anybody buy that?
Both of these entities are probably concerned that the IEEE has done too good of a job in the 802.11 standards by including network managment, QOS, encryption and all these patches for the holes that became apparent during the 802.11b rollout. If wireless was secure and came with QOS it could seriously damage a lot of markets as it could potentially drop the price of bandwidth extremely low causing more telecoms and cable companies to fall through the floor.
But whatever. I mean Business Week, come on I wouldn't even use that as a refernence for business news. That's like reading Time magazine to get a good grasp of global politics.
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Wireless my dear AC bitch, wireless. The "phone companies" would be irrelevant if wireless would take off and guess who is trying to prevent that from happening. Yeah, that's right big Dubya.
And as for what he did to be impeached and imprisoned, don't you read the news? The Enron kids are confessing that the "California Energy Crisis" was all a big hoax perpretrated not just by Enron but by a whole consortium of Energy traders based in Houston with ties to both Bush and Cheney. I don't make the news, I just read it. That's stealing and possibly murder. People lost their lives because of those outages.
And on a personal note, I can't stand to use the damn telephone. I leave mine unplugged most of the time.
It's not just that they got caught buying the wrong equipment, the big telecoms players have specficially resisted IP over ethernet in order to keep entry costs as high as possible. The most ridiculous thing in the world is these suggestions that they had to stick with ATM and Sonet in order to cash in on the huge potential of video conferencing and video on demand and all this utter crap that only seventy year old technophobe shareholders would believe.
Compare an OC3 from a Bell -vs- an OC3 from a native ethernet provider like Cogent. These are two different worlds of cost.
But hey, let the FCC do what they will, we'll just add it to the list of criminal frauds already commited when it's time to impeach and imprison Bush and his administration.
Yeah, but did you check that Lessig presntation to the Supreme Court the other day? Apparently Justice O'Conner thinks that Lessig is right that the Bono act was unconstitutional and several of the justices are concerned that the the earlier extension may also have been unconstitutional. We could be looking at everything before '83 on the net free for download.
If you're closer to a hospital then that would be a reasonable idea, but when you've got cyanide poisoning you don't have much time. If you're just ingested cyanide, USP grade -vs- technical grade antidote is not a priority, time is.
No, it's not just a density isue. It's about the market in the States being screwed by a collusion of government and telecoms monopolies. I now live in the far northern tip of Taiwan miles from any small town and I still get 512K DSL for thirty bucks a month and no hassles. Next year we're supposed to be upgraded to 1.5Meg just like they upgraded us from 256K earlier this year. This is not limited to high density areas by any means.
The funny thing is I know so many people in the States who are under the illusion that there's some technical limitation that's preventing them from getting cheap broadband. It's like the people who thought the California electricity crisis was about the costs of power generation. Guess again.
What you're saying has been true so far, but probably won't stay that way. There are already nationwide ISPs like Congent willing to offer 100Meg ethernet for about a thousand a month and this isn't DSL, it's real ethernet and it's the same speed up and downstream. It's true the existing players have done just that --played the American consumer for a sucker. But it will change and the most likely candidate for that change is wireless mesh networks. Seeing as how Taiwan is gearing up to push down prices on wireless hardware this should be happening in the next year or two.
Of course until then, this story is a sad testiment to the lies perpetuated by the scandalous telecoms players in the US. It's too bad the American people are too complacent to elect leaders that represent their interests. Here I refer, among other things, to the recent commerce department attempts to force the FCC to limit all 802.11 products to indoor use. That is a scandal that goes right to the Bush administration. Give that guy enough rope and he'll hang us all.
Perhaps the best cyanide fact to keep in mind is that before you die of cyanide poisoning, you'll probably get extremely ill and at that point you can still be saved by drinking some sodium thiosulphate. Almost any photo shop will have some. If you're working with cyanide keep some handy. It's easy to come by.
Eh hem, I'd just like to point out that the single biggest blow to personal aviation in the twentieth century was Ronald and Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs and the unfortunate masses of Americans who supported this misguided policy. It's not about safety, it's about control. Personal air travel is like the internet for physical goods including contraband -- it knows no borders. One of the first actions in the War on Drugs was to immediately close thousands of private air strips most of which remain abandoned to this day to protect you and me from smoking a joint or doing some coke.
There is every reason to believe that personal aviation will beome a huge industry as soon prohibition ends at the national level. Apparently many of the posters in this discussion are unaware that there already are giant "yellow dividers" all over America placed there after WWII in preparation for the immense popularity of personal aviation that was squashed in the name of drug control.
We'll see how long US copyright law and entire information economy lasts when UMC and TSMC go full tilt boogie on 12inch fabs at 90nm outside Shanghai and start producing state of the art System on a Chip devices using Alpha clone cores running Linux for a few bucks a pop.
Chips have always been a great medium for negotiations. If you aint got no chips, you're out of the game. Suckas.
When my parents graduated from college with BAs in the 70s they were actually sent invitations for jobs through the post. Neither one of them really interviewed. They just chose the job they wanted and went to work. In time they went on to other careers where their experience served as all the credential they needed. They got started with an invitation and they never looked back. I looked forward to the day when I would enter the work force like my parents.
When I got my BA in '91 the career counselor told me and my buddy that there were two alternatives, go to grad school or leave the country. There were no jobs including her own. She was being dismissed as part of budget cuts at the time. My buddy went to Japan and I went to grad school.
A few years later with a Master's degree there were still no jobs so I left the country as well. I'm still outside the country almost ten years later and I only go back for Christmas vacation.
Of the friends that stayed in the States, a surprising number are already dead. My brother born in '74 finally landed a teaching job a few years ago, but it's not clear how stable it is and he's got two kids.
Out of all my cousins only a few made big bucks and the only way they made it was hustling in the worst way. I'm talking backstabbing salespeople types. There is a total lack of people who just had normal career lives among family members in my generation. It has been either balls out money or jack shit. Education seems to be meaningless. The price of your school means everything, but the degree is nothing except perhaps a shot at a part time teaching gig at best.
I do think people in my generation were trapped by circumstances. Those who made it didn't make it simply by being good citizens and playing by the rules and most of the people I know don't have shit and have little chance of ever making it work out.
I think the part that surprises me the most is that there isn't more outright hostility than there already is. Probably now that we're riding down the back side of the distraction of the IP bubble we'll start to see some more active participation --cough-- in social affairs by members of this generation.
"This war will be won by us in a legal grassroots way"
There is no war, they lost a long time ago. This isn't a war, it's corporate grieving. Corporations don't have parents, they have business models. These corporations have all lost their business model due to advances in technology and they're in the process of grieving their loss. I think it would all make more sense to you if you read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work On Death and Dying. This is not a war, this is denial of a painful reality by a wealthy family that is being played out in the courts.
In essence, the judge is being forced to act as a counselor for a grieving family that refuses to face their loss. This is not an uncommon role for the courts and that's partly why we're seeing so much integration of mandatory mediation by counseling professionals into the court system.
In this particular instance I thought the judge's reference to the issue of "constitutional avoidance" was very telling. The lawyer for the plaintif tried to tell the judge when his own interpretation of the facts was and was not appropriate. This suggestion that the judge's thinking is muddled mirrors the counseling situation in which the client tells the counselor that the counselor is acting irrationally when all the counselor is doing is listening to the client. As a counselor, that's the kind of clue you look for to help your client begin their recovery.
Almost, but it's a bit early to put it quite like that. Taiwan is still the fab center of Asia and while China does some assembly, even packaging is high tech in the PC world so much of that is also done in Taiwan still. That is changing fast, but the economic slow down has put a chill on the pace of the changes. In the long term it is expected that China will become a fab center, but not until TSMC and UMC relocate there with planned 12inch fabs and that's looking like several years down the road at this point because of market conditions. Long term it has been decided that it will happen, but it hasn't happned yet. In fact, if you read the better known semi trade web pages you will notice that packaging and testing tech transfer from Taiwan are currently some of the big issues of contention at Grace and SMIC --the two big mainland fabs. So, it's not quite as simple as you outlined it.
I don't see it mentioned in the text. I can't see the point of adding it either because it wouldn't fit the description. I'm under the impression Kazaa Lite is not a profitable enterprise. I could be wrong.
That's the key point right there. The paper that the article was based on used the analogy of a pond being polluted. Well, there are good anaolgies and there are bad analogies and a fishing pond not a very good analogy here because a P2P network is much more like a swimming pool with not one or two, but millions of high powered filters. A standard filter and chlorine/ozone system on a swimming pool can remove enormous amounts of excrement. A pool with a million filters is going to require a hell of a waste stream to pollute for any length of time. Given that these filter systems are also the water inlets for the pool, the task of polluting the majority of the water for any length of time is problematic at best and unlikely to succeed.
Maybe not aluminum, but PET is just as common these days and global virgin PET resin is currently so cheap that it makes recycling plastic an economic burden that will never be justifiable in strictly market terms unless market conditions shift dramatically in reverse which is unlikely because the price reductions are due to advances in chemical engineering practice that are themselves profit bases.
The oversupply of virgin PET resin is already huge and will only grow as PET resin is seen as a sidestream profit from other chemical processing industries. A brand new crystal clear sterile one liter PET bottle costs a fraction of a cent even when you add the cost of the automated forming machines that are available from dozens of asian manufacturers in models cheaper than a new car and capable of producing thousands of bottles per day.
So while I'm not sure what the figures are like on aluminum, your premise is incorrect. It is not only possible for anyone with a small amount of investment money to produce soft drink containers for less than 1.5cents, it's the root of a serious challenge for recycling programs trying to attain profitability. The markte value of recycled PET is not worth the effort and energy it takes to collect it and probably will not become so in the future because raw PET resin in a clean, sterile and easy to handle form is so inexpensive.
I understand Xilinix is offering a 400Mhz FPGA chip these days, but it's about three grand. But more interesting to me was a presntation I found by some guy who said Xilinix's FPGA was necessarily slow because it used what could be described as a warped matrix as opposed to a simple checkerboard square.
Apparently the motivation for Xilinx to use this other design was a patent consideration rather than a decision made from a strict engineering standpoint. An open FPGA from China based on a simplified design would be interesting at the 60nm level. It would require lots of new circuit designs, but it might happen some day and that may be soon.
I think the biggest flaw in this "next time we're going to stop all this copying is that the justification for the next generation of equipment is exceedingly weak. The cat is out of the bag and was since the introduction of the Pentium class processors. I think those Play that Funky Music commercials that seemed a bit bizarre at the time summarize it quite nicely.
We just read a few days ago about Intel's lawsuit for marketing the P4 as a genuine improvement over the P3. As far as an MP3 listener or even Divx movie watcher is concerned, "improvements" have no longer been necessary since well before last year.
Besides, we've already seen that some of the BluRay DVD companies who are obviously getting fed up with the ??AA's foot dragging are convinced that exisiting security measures are all they feel are necessary. Let's see if they stay out of the martket as things get uglier in the next few business quarters. And it looks like it's going to get real ugly.
I can do a study showing that in order to make a sandwich you have to consume a hundred thousand times the calories in the sandwich by including the growing of the vegies, the meat etc. Does that mean you shoudln't eat because it's inefficient? Have you ever considered that studies themselves are products of design that consume vast sums of energy to create? Studies are works of design and engineering. It's called social engineering. There is an agenda behind every study and the more it is disguised as scientific truth the more likely it is to be motivated by specific political interests.
If you think everything you learn in school is true at face value, you're probably still in school.
Anyhow, I'm a long haired hippy and I like to use lots of power. Like many long haired hippies I like my music loud and I use big power hungry amps to achieve that effect and I don't really care how much power they use. I also like halogen lights and neon signs and big lasers. I'm not against efficiency, but I think electricity is already quite efficient. Current generation PV may not be the best answer for terrestrial applications, but that's a restricted view of their utility from my broad minded long haired, though balding, liberal perspective.
Universities may be sexy, but I think K12 is where the tax dollars are really spent and that should be a priority.
If that five year old copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches typing works under Wine but requires a five hundred dollar upgrade to work under Win2k, it is truly scandalous for a district to justify spending their money treading water on the Microsoft payment plan.
And when the schools start cranking out students who think that Microsoft created the internet it's gone too far. I just had a friend's kid beg me not to install Linux on her Dad's PC because she wouldn't be able to use the internet as everybody knows that requires Microsoft Windows. I was stunned.
I'm all for the schools having more money for technology, but let's spend it on hardware. How about DLP projectors in the classrooms and more bandwidth for the school network? There are plenty of legitimately extravagant ways of spending money for education that aren't blatant corporate welfare.
This seems like a natural first step, but it's almost impossible to discuss the possibility of using open source with real teachers in real US schools because most teachers are simply afraid of technology. You know, it's like oh the little gremlins in the box are controlled by some guy in the district office who is watching me and recording every move I make. Please, just leave me alone before they find out I was talking with you about this hacker stuff.
Even those who are supposed to be teaching technology will tell you that they have this huge investment in proprietary MS, educational titles so they have no choice but to stick with it. However, when you demonstrate that those same apps work under Wine they come up with this shuffle the feet thing that basically comes back to well I don't know about these important things that the district decides on and it's not really my business because the district has its policies.
Then when I push for details on how the district is in such control over the individual classrooms they come to the part that really kills me which is where they say they have to use MS because it allows them to access the net and any non MS servers on their network are forbidden by the district. Perhaps this is just a snowjob from a teacher who is giving me a bunch of shit, but this is what I was told.
At least school districts should encourage teachers to try and use open source rather than actively discouraging them with district policies set by Redmond. The situation we're in is insane and this is tax payers money. I don't see how the free market argument works in favor of closed source when we're dealing with tax dollars to begin with.
I live a few blocks from the beach on a tropical island where the humidity is almost always around a hundred percent and I find that power supplies go out like mad. The most important trick is to keep everything on constantly. The machine creates its own microclimate because of the heat it generates, but obviously it only works if the machine is kept on all the time.
My advice to your friend would be to bring at least four or five fresh power supplies wrapped in dessicant if he's going to be using a desktop system. And even better is to have a small network on board rather than a single machine. Leaving the machine(s) on as much as possible is the simplest advice though. Even extremely moist conditions don't have much effect on an active desktop system, but you have to keep it active. Eventually salty condensation will kill your PSU if you let it power down all the time.
Every other country such as?
I'm in Taiwan and I get 1.5 down 256 up no limitations whatsoever on usage DSL for forty bucks a month from the government monopoly telecom. We've been seeing ads for metro ethernet at 3+megs both ways in the thirty buck range sometime before the end of this year and that's supposedly happening here in Taiwan, in South Korea, in Hong Kong and some of the big cities in Mainland.
I think you might want to check your facts before you go talking about the state of the world next time son.
Hmm, it seems not too many people read Digitimes. TSMC and UMC have both been at .13 for a long time and I was under the impression they were doing .90nm already. That's what all the talk about SOC bottlenecks on EETimes is about. Check out the TSMC home page for more on 90nm SOC plans. .60nm foundry in Singapore that is supposed to be in operation by 2Q 2003.
For more fun, according to Digitimes, TSMC and a German company have already begun work on a
To answer an earlier question about ultimate CMOS limits, IBM says 45nm is the limit for gates at 1V and below that you lose speed in data processing applications. Of course GaAs and InP might extend that limit, but then you introduce process issues. The lithography challenges while expensive are not the primary technologcical issues. This latter point is intriguing because it leaves the door open for applications where minute dimensions are more important than processing speed such as biochips. Check out the Univeristy of Michigan for some awesome preliminary work on production level implanted bionetworks.
It sounds ominous to me.
When IBM started their big services kick one of the first things they did was to aquire the backend to Macromedia's educational software development system back end called Pathware and jack the prices through the roof. Now obviously this is profitable because one of the juciest target audiances for this program is public school districts --ie tax dollars. How's that for free market strategy?
Knowing that this is the kind of services growth strategy that IBM uses along with their alleged mobster like patent strategies I'd be a bit concerned to hear they're getting into accounting in a big way.
Hmm. I'm not sure how informative that article was. They didn't go into the different implementations of the 802.11 standards that we're seeing on the market and anticipating in the near future.
Of course some people are very interested like the government of Taiwan and the Commerce department. The former has already banned 802.11a for outdoor use and the latter is seeking the same in the States. I wonder why? They site air traffic concerns. Hmm. Anybody buy that?
Both of these entities are probably concerned that the IEEE has done too good of a job in the 802.11 standards by including network managment, QOS, encryption and all these patches for the holes that became apparent during the 802.11b rollout. If wireless was secure and came with QOS it could seriously damage a lot of markets as it could potentially drop the price of bandwidth extremely low causing more telecoms and cable companies to fall through the floor.
But whatever. I mean Business Week, come on I wouldn't even use that as a refernence for business news. That's like reading Time magazine to get a good grasp of global politics.