Fer instance.
If we could really jam on such terriffic amounts of bandwidth for insignificant tasks, it may enable new hardware.
I don't know if we have any rapid prototype deverlopers in the house this evening, but having a printer for objects is definitely real and must be an application where exponential data speed increases could lead to dramatic increases in productivity and perhaps the use --or in this case, use and production-- of materials that are prohibitive with current technology.
Let's hear about nano printers!
The catch is that the notion of intellectual property will have a to change a lot before the kind of bandwidth that might make really out there science fantasy come true will be available. The hardware is forcing the issue on software and it's been going that way for a long time. It's getting faster and faster, but it's not like it has to be all bad. Perhaps after intellectual property, real property will become ubiquitous.
Who would complain then? You could still complain all you wanted and probably live out some wild fantasys about taking out your frustrations too, but there wouldn't really be that much to complain about outside your bad dreams and personally imposed limitations. There's certainly plenty to complain about right there for most people though so we don't need to be scared of a future where nobody complains. Nonthless, it's not hard to imagine a race of satisfied humanoids from the strictly technological perspective. It's gettin' there that's gonna be a big fight apparently if these RIAA, MPAA clowns are signs of things to come. We'll see what happens. One thing about ubiquitous high speed networks is they sure facilitate communication. It's all negotiable once we can see the advantages of working together for a brighter future.
I was just thinking about the storage market. Somebody on ZDNet was going on about FDS or whatever that new plastic shit is.
Anyway, I let him have it. I was like, fuck that mechanical/optical stuff. Hard drives are already clearly in the path of the speed bullet. Talking about new optical whatever is cute and whatever, but RAM is where it's at. That's the whole problem with the RAM market, they can't stabilize because they're feeding off the broader tech trends in semi. It was never supposed to be the way it is already and it could get a lot steeper. When RAM keeps stepping up with expontential growth as circuits shrink, it's hard to avoid. Especially when it's the only thing besides CPUs that can really take advantage of fiber and fast switches. You know, even fast ethernet can tax hard drives and the 10GhE standard is being finalized this year. D-Link 1G downstream switches are only three hundred bucks.
How about some futurists being interviewed by a journalist who can think of a halfway reasonable near-term forecast.
Perhaps then it would be a political interview though more suited to people looking at the real politics of the near term techno future. Hmm, how about that russian hacker dude what does he think about a pack of 20X100Gig Ram sticks with a fuel cell drinking vodka? How about some russian BBS hacker crazy guys. Let's have an interview with someone from the Top50 or Astalavista about what it would mean to have fiber, laser or a higher speed wireless direct to your CPU/RAM banks.
We have to get past that point to get to the even better stuff and it's out there.
Let's not have age wars goin' down on every story shall we? This thread didn't get much life.
But as the discussing winds down, I'd like to pitch in on the notion that these predictions were short cited. Language translation is impossible to stay ahead of. Machines can only play catch up because languages are human made and we've known that all along throughout the history of technology. It's no mystery at all. To think that a machine can hadle translation is to think that machines can come very very close to mimicking humans. We're very close to that, but that's totally different from machines being able to "comprehend" human language. That is, to have an understanding of human languages that encompasses the existing human knowledge bank. That will not happen in our lifetimes and if we live for centuries, that will not happen for centuries.
I know, it's redundant and a bit off topic, but it's so fun to talk aobut it.
The 10 gig ethernet standard will be finalized in a few months. It's fiber only, no copper. There are some products already available. Broadcom's website says they have an 8 port switch that's currently available for around $2000 per port.
What I want to know is that if this Broadcom switch has eight ports at 10Gb each, does that mean it can take an 80Gb fiber and distribute it into 8 10Gb streams? Or is it that each port is a 1Gbps stream and the whole switch can handle 8Gbps?
If it's the former, wow! Managing such oceans of bandwidth for the price of a mid range automobile. You could set up quite a promiscuous wireless network with a feed like that eh? Hosin' down the whole city with bandwidth. Let's see, how many 1Mbps streams can you cut 80Gbps into? Or perhaps more importantly, how much can you get bandwidth for at such wholesale volumes?
Hey, I'm typing into a Windows PC right now and I can even say that I am a huge fan of Microsoft's way excellent OS. I love Mac too. This being the case, I'm hardly an OS bigot, but the same can't be said for Starband. Having read the Starband Q&A pages, I found that they specifically do not support Linux or Mac and they say uploads are about 40k. That sounds fairly lame for a $500 setup fee.
This is especially the case when we consider that the 10GbE standard is being finalized next year and the 10GbE switches are aimed directly at the currently in-place dark fiber. Just one strand and one switch into a remote community would allow an 802.11 provider to offer a thousand customers 10Mbps wireless connections. This would be creeping up on hard drive access speeds and the costs aren't exactly going to be stellar if the 10GbE forum is correct in estimating these switches are going to be entering the market at about 3X current generation Gigabit switches. If installing fiber in rural areas is as cheap as previous posters have suggested, then it's hard to see where the costs emerge that would make Starband look attractive with such laggard performance and proprietary drivers.
You can argue the math anyway you like, but I have a more or less spherical bass enclosure for home use that rocks hard on a 200watt car amp that cost thirty bucks. People standing right in front of it can't believe all that bass is coming from that funky thing.
It's made of hand formed fiber-cement with walls about an inch thick and exterior dimensions of about three feet wide and two feet high so it's more of a jelly donut than a perfect sphere. It weighs at least a few hundred pounds and distortion is not a problem at volumes acceptable in my building. Also does awesome home theater effects. High$ audio is a suckers game. Weight and strength is what matters for bass-- use reinforced portland. Build them so heavy they can't be moved and so cheap it doesn't matter if they have to be cut up to get out the door. (Great for dorms, prisons and hospitals I'm sure.)
The hard part is initially bringing the hundred pound bags of portland cement into the house without provoking all the second guessing know-it-alls into insisting on talking you out of it.
You'd like to hope so.
From what you're describing it sounds like it would really benefit from some detailed geometry. Perhaps it just needs the right modeling environment.
And, while we're at it, let's get some standard models for nanotech bioimplants.
I think the average tradesman would agree that a oil derrick-like configuration would make a lot of sense. You know, something floating up top and a set of jointed tubes going in. Close hatch on overpressure and just fall off, no blood.
At least at the University of Michigan, they say they've got nano light tubes for use within the blood stream pretty well licked.
They use UV light filled tubes to zap bad guys, but I got a better idea and that's use nicotine brought in through a tube or set of tubes. Kill the bad guys and get a little buzz when it hits the liver. That must be God's will! This will fly in Kentucky.
Just have a little refill cartridge on top. Perhaps it won't start in the States now that I consider it a bit more closely.
Too hip. Must come from europe.
isn't even the net access part. It's the bandwidth itself as an interconnect between all those processors and RAM distributed all over the place.
It's not even being considered a commodity yet in real terms. The idea has been floated in the past, but it always lacked scale and interconnectedness at CPU speeds has been non-existant.
There are projects out there like SETI and whatever DIY stuff goes on, but a market hasn't evolved well. I guess it's because there are no apps.
Hmm.
I'm sure it's redundant by now as I didn't real all the other posts and there were so many, but this article is clearly giving MS too much credit. Perhaps 8.3 naming is a DOS convention, but it's not an exclusive trademark of or patent by Microsoft Corporation and I assume it predates them by many many decades.
And file extensions in general are used in all OSes, and there was no reason you couldn't have used them with the original Macs if you wanted to. You didn't have to. But if you wanted to, you still could. So, pinning this on MS is like saying they control the ASCII code standards or something ridiculous like that. They may have a stake in these things and maybe a big stake, but these aren't very productive battlefronts from my perspective. More like trying too hard to be cute. Or, no wait, it's karma whoring on Salon.
Besides, what's better than giving MS too much credit is giving them too much rope to hang themselves with and I think they've already picked up the rope with this.net stuff. The net IS unix. That was such an idiot move you know there is nobody at the helm. The ship is heading for rocks and has been for ages.
Here in Taiwan, I've seen tourists shopping for software and giving each other that knowing wink when they see a copy of Photoshop for six bucks right out in front of a well-lit display case for everyone to see.
What they don't pick up on is that a lot of this stuff is older product that is licensed for sale at prices that seem free in the States, but are considered reasonable here. So, tourist go back with these stories about rampant and scandalous piracy when actually they're seeing is simply discounted merchandise that is totally legit.
Now I'm not saying there are no pirate software sales. Hong Kong used to have a great market near the Mong Kok subway station where you could even get alleged Windows source code CDs, but it had a definite air of secrecy with fidgety teenagers chain smoking and scanning the crowds for signs of cops who did eventually make them get rid of all the fun stuff.
So, I'm not saying there is no piracy, but I've also seen legitimately discounted merchandise that fooled Americans into assuming that it MUST be pirated just because it didn't cost hundreds of US bucks and had a familiar logo. That's simply a problem with American perception and the above post is yet another example.
Perhaps I got it wrong, I can't remember the URL, it was one of those Google searches, you can look up LED and check for yourselves if you're interested, but I seem to recall that the blue LEDs are less efficient in terms of lumen output than compact flourescents althoug the latter give off a lot more heat.
This question is off topic! This isn't even a topic to begin with. It's just a sucker come on.
But before you call that off-topic, let me explain that in academia, we don't tolerate misleading questions like this. So, a well rounded education includes basic academic principles that this question doesn't fullfill.
This question is like, what's the definiton of a full sex life? It's all fucking opinion. What is this, interview the slashdot community with a bullshit interview question? There's no real point to it except to get stories out of people. If you're just taking an opinion poll, put it over there on the side with all the other worthless polls and put Cowboy Neal as an option.
Anything that can make the dark half of a solar cycle work is very intriguing and if it's small time enough for a small timer, all the better.
Doing home steam can, or course, be dangerous and isn't a great answer for even a minority of the people. But for those who are into solar steam, the danger is just part of the problem. The night cycle is a non-insignificant issue. Things like flywheels are talked about, but the prices are not reasonable for a homesteader budget. If these things are really heading for the consumer market, it could have a spillover effect on solar steam.
And if the small scale picture bores you, what about the big side?
If you look at what our dear Commander in Chief has commented on so glowingly in the corporate funded Solar Electricity Generation System projects in California what you find is that at the early stages,
SEGS (Check the huge trough halfway down the page) one of the biggest concerns for investors was the night time part. Since these troughs are hooked to conventional turbogenerator units, downtime every night is totally unacceptable because it means losing steam in the turbine every night and inevitable damage to the turbine from condensation making it a losing investment all around.
Initially, the answer for the SEGS projects was to use gas cogeneration, but the biggest plants, the ones Bush commented on (an interesting interview with the president is somewhere on those DOE/Sandia pages) eventually overcame the lack of sunlight issue by simply using vast insulated swimming pools filled with oil field toxic sludge that they heated up during the day with sunlight and supposedly can run the 80MW turbogen set for days without light.
If the problem with hydrogen is the cost of producing and compressing the hydrogen, then the problem has been solved and the president already said he likes it because it's controlled by a corporate body and isn't revolutionary.
Hell, in the end it's all about extremely minor changes in the overall balance. That's why nothing ever seems to change. Things do change, this may be part of where we're going. Sounds cool to me. When do we start blasting the shit down as microwaves?
Yeah baby. I want to see some huge steel/aluminum alloy architecture in the 21st century. Let's see the electricity squandering seacrete cities floating in the South Pacific, dirgible cities thousands of miles across flashing ads down on the unenclosed lands, all that Bucky Fuller/PK Dick futuropolis stuff. I, for one, am into it. You know the Japanese and Chinese are into it too. The future looks bright, intense even.
If you want to see stupid compressed gas tricks Taiwan kicks ass all over Texas. Fifty liter propane tanks are delivered in sets of three by motorcycle ridin' cowpokes wearing flip flop rubber sandals in the perpetually pouring rain.
I've seen one of these good ol' biker boys go down under the tire of a bus and them tanks got kicked around by the oncoming traffic like it was a damn soccer tournament and none of them exploded. Of course traffic in Taipei is awful slow.
All this kind of thing will do is give those who have made hidden archives of subversive materials into isolated pockets of power. It's like certain martial arts, the harder the oposing force pushes, the greater the force coming back at them. The target slips to the side at the last minute and the concrete wall takes the force of the fist breaking every finger in the bloody hand of these idiots.
If anybody can use a search engine to find their --fill in the blank subversive material these guys are looking for-- then everybody is a pro and nobody is a leader. But as soon as you start trying to pinpoint who's doing what, you scare people into looking for the "secret" way so they don't get caught. Bang, up step the wannabee disenfranchised pros with their encrypted magic decoder rings and assorted gang paraphanalia.
Now you've creating leaders and gangs and mafiettes where there were nothing but curious or perhaps malicious individuals. Okay, so the Senators say, Great! That's what we wanted, targets, an orgainzed conspiracy.
Alright, now who are the bad guys?
Slashdot IS a political tool of enormous value which will no doubt leave a huge mark in the history that is to come. Why? Because the heart of Slashdot is something very much like the newsgroups which were and are an invaluable source of information. The free and open flow of information is already happening over the internet and this is partly due to the power of electronic discussion groups.
The sheer volume of discussion on the newsgroups throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century created the FAQs that we all know and love. They've been like the Bible of the Internet. Okay, the Man pages is the Old Testament. But the FAQs are the Protestant and Catholic additions. Perhaps the Koran as well.
Slashdot takes it to the next level. You don't even need FAQs with Slashdot. Just look back a few stories and you can find lots of valuable knowledge. That knowledge base in itself is a form of power. Trying to make that particular form of power into something blatantly political is fraught with difficulties.
Here's a sig from a letter I wrote to my Mom last night.
How boring if we ever come to all killing and no fucking to save the children.
This comment by an apparent teenager really caught me off guard with its naive assumptions about the technically inept grumps. It's cute and all, but it made me think that the ultimate lameness filter would be to categorize posts by user age.
Not only would this clean up a lot of the technical discussions, it would lure away a lot of the hardcore trolls who are trying to reach the younger audiance with their whacky scatagraphical antics.
It's not a realistic suggestion. Slashdot thrives on anonymity, so such measures can never be put into place and really shouldn't be, but I had to post. I've got mod points to burn, but I thought it would be more appropriate to put on my cop hat and tell the youngins to mind their own business and let the adults worry about what the other adults know how to do. If you've got a contribution, share it. If you're just speculating that everybody over eighteen is an idiot then you're more redundant than I'm being right now.
I don't want to argue about whether the user sees the "do you trust this" message every time or whether it can be hidden using BudAPI or something you cook up on your own, but basically Authorware is worthless unless you can make local system calls. If you just want to display text and some pics and play some sounds, why not just put up a web page? This explains why Macromedia started pushing Dreamweaver so hard even when they already had superior products from a development point of view. Nobody was downloading the plug-ins.
It still stands that people don't want to download the plug-ins even though they're only a meg or so. That was my point. I'm not acusing these tools of being a security concern or saying security concerns are why they aren't downloaded, the fact is these plug-ins aren't downloaded by most users for whatever reason. The Flash plug-in was an anomaly because people are like fish and other creatures possessed of eyes and they like to see flashes of light. It was stupid human trick. Plug-ins as a solution suck. Browsers are already way overloaded and it's all MS's attempt to focus everything on the web because it's the one part of the net where buzinezz ownz ur azz.
One of Macromedia's problems is they assumed the plug-in was the way to go because Flash worked out so well. But Flash was just that, Flash. Essentially vector graphics handling in a browser. It can be used to create complex and enchanting interfaces, but it's based on a set of standards that are already being incoorporated into newer browsers.
Macromedia's product line can certainly do more than just vector graphics with paths and animations, but if you look at some of the more sophisticated tools in the product line, they required their own plug-ins and just never got good penetration because of end user hesitation to go for it.
The plugins for higher level tools like Director and more so Authorware go way beyond the capabilites of a normal browser particularly in the sense that can they read and write and delete files as they please. And much more than that, they can execute remote system functions like shutdown reboot or add registry key. So, why didn't everybody download these plug-ins? They're free just like Flash plug-ins are. I think part of the answer is that these things give a browser powers that people don't want browsers to have and so they never get downloaded. If you can make it into the HTML specs, get in a browser, if not. . .
This whole notion of letting the web turn into more than it is seems like it's the source of as many problems as it solves and it seems to be pushed by MS with this whole web sevices bullshit campaign. Fuck that, everything shouldn't happen on the web. Why does it have to be integrated into the browser instead of being its own application? All multitasking windowed computing environments allow multiple applcations to run at the same time. They can all use net bandwidth, why do they all have to be in a web browser?
And ditch the case while you're at it. I just put together a board and a bunch of pieces that turned out to be workable and left them on top of a speaker cabinet. A setup like that is no good for something with a bunch of peripherals, but if it's just a server with some network cards and a single drive, why not let gravity keep things in place and keep it simple. Cases are so damn ugly at this point anyway.
Setting up a tray of boards on a musician style rack mount with one big fan for three or four boards sounds like the way to go these days. Forget the 1U cases, just stack some sheet metal on a rack and leave them exposed. The boards look kewler than the cases anyway. At one point assuming a household user would have three or four separate boards would have been excessive, but I'm not sure that's still true. Probably not at many/. reder's homes anyway. Dumping the case completely is one way of taking care of circulation and eliminating awkward mounting problems.
The sure fire way to get a good telecommuting situation is to make yourself absolutely indispensible to a project and then take matters into your own hands. Don't ask for telecommuting, simply tell your boss you're not going to be getting most of your work done in the office. This might sound ridiculous at first, but you have to bring it on slow like a splitting wedge going into a slice of tree trunk.
Obviously making demands from your boss isn't going to work. So, start doing your work at home in advance and build up a better infrastructure at home than you have at the office. Any time you have a chance to interact with the boss about your work, explaing that you did most of it at home and that you did it there because you have better faster machines, more control over the network etc. Go into detail on this at every chance you get so that when the time comes you're way ahead of the game. The time that's waiting to come is the time when you have some personal emergency and you come back from a week at home with twice as much done as you would do at the office. Now you have facts to back up your position and the burden of evidence starts to shift to your employer.
Of course this is a lot more likely to be effective in a very small company where the management isn't ten layers deep in ugly assholes. In the latter case, you've got little wiggle room for the obvious reason that multi-tiered management schemes collapse without the divide and conquer mentality towards the staff. If you don't force the staff to act as a herd, how can you play the shepherd role adequately?
In this situation, you probably have to ask what makes your company tick. If the company is bloated and living off some patents or ancient brand names that enables thick layers of blood-sucking management leaches to thrive, you might as well adapt to the status quo, because that's the way it's going to stay. If you're into that environment, you may want to get an MBA and spend your free time memorizing important people's names, looking for that perfect tie and practicing your firmest handshake. That's right, it's just like church because it's all based on faith in conservative icons.
Expecting to get your way just because you have mad satanic programming skillz best done naked covered in chicken blood in the basement is not going to impress this bunch. Maybe you should just buy a big sack of flour, a fifty-five gallon drum of soybean oil and some green onion seeds and quit working altogether. You can raise healthy kids on green onion pancakes and the occasional eggs from the sacrificial chickens.
As a big multi-armed god fan, I would like to elaborate on this comment a bit.
While there may be many armed gods in Hindu beliefs, Buddhist tradition in many countries, particularly in eastern China/western MidEast also feature statues of multi-armed gods and goddesses dating back many centuries.
These ancient dieties are also found in Far Eastern and even Pacific Islander temples. Furthermore, to get back to the idiotic parent post, these gods are very real as long as someone continues to have faith in them such as myself.
In fact, there is nowhere in the Koran or either the new or old testaments of the the Bible or the book of Mormon that indicates that the Judeo Christian/Muslim monotheistic deity does not, in fact have multiple arms, faces or perahps even a vagina or two, bulbous breasts and groovy hips.
Obfuscation is a rhetorical tactic. Effective rhetoric is often far from elegant.
Look at Reagan! Jeez, talkin' about a hustling bitch. The man didn't --nor does-- know truth from fiction, but he was effective rhetorically.
DubYa is just doing what a good ol' boy oughtta by tearin off a page from the ol' Gipper's play book.
I wrote that line before you sucked off my first cock and I had to grow a new one.
I can't stand it when people steal my material and then do around posting it anonymously.
Slashdot Mirror
Fer instance.
If we could really jam on such terriffic amounts of bandwidth for insignificant tasks, it may enable new hardware.
I don't know if we have any rapid prototype deverlopers in the house this evening, but having a printer for objects is definitely real and must be an application where exponential data speed increases could lead to dramatic increases in productivity and perhaps the use --or in this case, use and production-- of materials that are prohibitive with current technology.
Let's hear about nano printers!
The catch is that the notion of intellectual property will have a to change a lot before the kind of bandwidth that might make really out there science fantasy come true will be available. The hardware is forcing the issue on software and it's been going that way for a long time. It's getting faster and faster, but it's not like it has to be all bad. Perhaps after intellectual property, real property will become ubiquitous.
Who would complain then? You could still complain all you wanted and probably live out some wild fantasys about taking out your frustrations too, but there wouldn't really be that much to complain about outside your bad dreams and personally imposed limitations. There's certainly plenty to complain about right there for most people though so we don't need to be scared of a future where nobody complains. Nonthless, it's not hard to imagine a race of satisfied humanoids from the strictly technological perspective. It's gettin' there that's gonna be a big fight apparently if these RIAA, MPAA clowns are signs of things to come. We'll see what happens. One thing about ubiquitous high speed networks is they sure facilitate communication. It's all negotiable once we can see the advantages of working together for a brighter future.
I was just thinking about the storage market. Somebody on ZDNet was going on about FDS or whatever that new plastic shit is.
Anyway, I let him have it. I was like, fuck that mechanical/optical stuff. Hard drives are already clearly in the path of the speed bullet. Talking about new optical whatever is cute and whatever, but RAM is where it's at. That's the whole problem with the RAM market, they can't stabilize because they're feeding off the broader tech trends in semi. It was never supposed to be the way it is already and it could get a lot steeper. When RAM keeps stepping up with expontential growth as circuits shrink, it's hard to avoid. Especially when it's the only thing besides CPUs that can really take advantage of fiber and fast switches. You know, even fast ethernet can tax hard drives and the 10GhE standard is being finalized this year. D-Link 1G downstream switches are only three hundred bucks.
How about some futurists being interviewed by a journalist who can think of a halfway reasonable near-term forecast.
Perhaps then it would be a political interview though more suited to people looking at the real politics of the near term techno future. Hmm, how about that russian hacker dude what does he think about a pack of 20X100Gig Ram sticks with a fuel cell drinking vodka? How about some russian BBS hacker crazy guys. Let's have an interview with someone from the Top50 or Astalavista about what it would mean to have fiber, laser or a higher speed wireless direct to your CPU/RAM banks.
We have to get past that point to get to the even better stuff and it's out there.
Let's not have age wars goin' down on every story shall we? This thread didn't get much life.
But as the discussing winds down, I'd like to pitch in on the notion that these predictions were short cited. Language translation is impossible to stay ahead of. Machines can only play catch up because languages are human made and we've known that all along throughout the history of technology. It's no mystery at all. To think that a machine can hadle translation is to think that machines can come very very close to mimicking humans. We're very close to that, but that's totally different from machines being able to "comprehend" human language. That is, to have an understanding of human languages that encompasses the existing human knowledge bank. That will not happen in our lifetimes and if we live for centuries, that will not happen for centuries.
I know, it's redundant and a bit off topic, but it's so fun to talk aobut it.
The 10 gig ethernet standard will be finalized in a few months. It's fiber only, no copper. There are some products already available. Broadcom's website says they have an 8 port switch that's currently available for around $2000 per port.
What I want to know is that if this Broadcom switch has eight ports at 10Gb each, does that mean it can take an 80Gb fiber and distribute it into 8 10Gb streams? Or is it that each port is a 1Gbps stream and the whole switch can handle 8Gbps?
If it's the former, wow! Managing such oceans of bandwidth for the price of a mid range automobile. You could set up quite a promiscuous wireless network with a feed like that eh? Hosin' down the whole city with bandwidth. Let's see, how many 1Mbps streams can you cut 80Gbps into? Or perhaps more importantly, how much can you get bandwidth for at such wholesale volumes?
Hey, I'm typing into a Windows PC right now and I can even say that I am a huge fan of Microsoft's way excellent OS. I love Mac too. This being the case, I'm hardly an OS bigot, but the same can't be said for Starband. Having read the Starband Q&A pages, I found that they specifically do not support Linux or Mac and they say uploads are about 40k. That sounds fairly lame for a $500 setup fee.
This is especially the case when we consider that the 10GbE standard is being finalized next year and the 10GbE switches are aimed directly at the currently in-place dark fiber. Just one strand and one switch into a remote community would allow an 802.11 provider to offer a thousand customers 10Mbps wireless connections. This would be creeping up on hard drive access speeds and the costs aren't exactly going to be stellar if the 10GbE forum is correct in estimating these switches are going to be entering the market at about 3X current generation Gigabit switches. If installing fiber in rural areas is as cheap as previous posters have suggested, then it's hard to see where the costs emerge that would make Starband look attractive with such laggard performance and proprietary drivers.
You can argue the math anyway you like, but I have a more or less spherical bass enclosure for home use that rocks hard on a 200watt car amp that cost thirty bucks. People standing right in front of it can't believe all that bass is coming from that funky thing.
It's made of hand formed fiber-cement with walls about an inch thick and exterior dimensions of about three feet wide and two feet high so it's more of a jelly donut than a perfect sphere. It weighs at least a few hundred pounds and distortion is not a problem at volumes acceptable in my building. Also does awesome home theater effects. High$ audio is a suckers game. Weight and strength is what matters for bass-- use reinforced portland. Build them so heavy they can't be moved and so cheap it doesn't matter if they have to be cut up to get out the door. (Great for dorms, prisons and hospitals I'm sure.)
The hard part is initially bringing the hundred pound bags of portland cement into the house without provoking all the second guessing know-it-alls into insisting on talking you out of it.
You'd like to hope so.
From what you're describing it sounds like it would really benefit from some detailed geometry. Perhaps it just needs the right modeling environment.
And, while we're at it, let's get some standard models for nanotech bioimplants.
I think the average tradesman would agree that a oil derrick-like configuration would make a lot of sense. You know, something floating up top and a set of jointed tubes going in. Close hatch on overpressure and just fall off, no blood.
At least at the University of Michigan, they say they've got nano light tubes for use within the blood stream pretty well licked.
They use UV light filled tubes to zap bad guys, but I got a better idea and that's use nicotine brought in through a tube or set of tubes. Kill the bad guys and get a little buzz when it hits the liver. That must be God's will! This will fly in Kentucky.
Just have a little refill cartridge on top. Perhaps it won't start in the States now that I consider it a bit more closely.
Too hip. Must come from europe.
isn't even the net access part. It's the bandwidth itself as an interconnect between all those processors and RAM distributed all over the place.
It's not even being considered a commodity yet in real terms. The idea has been floated in the past, but it always lacked scale and interconnectedness at CPU speeds has been non-existant.
There are projects out there like SETI and whatever DIY stuff goes on, but a market hasn't evolved well. I guess it's because there are no apps.
Hmm.
I'm sure it's redundant by now as I didn't real all the other posts and there were so many, but this article is clearly giving MS too much credit. Perhaps 8.3 naming is a DOS convention, but it's not an exclusive trademark of or patent by Microsoft Corporation and I assume it predates them by many many decades. .net stuff. The net IS unix. That was such an idiot move you know there is nobody at the helm. The ship is heading for rocks and has been for ages.
And file extensions in general are used in all OSes, and there was no reason you couldn't have used them with the original Macs if you wanted to. You didn't have to. But if you wanted to, you still could. So, pinning this on MS is like saying they control the ASCII code standards or something ridiculous like that. They may have a stake in these things and maybe a big stake, but these aren't very productive battlefronts from my perspective. More like trying too hard to be cute. Or, no wait, it's karma whoring on Salon.
Besides, what's better than giving MS too much credit is giving them too much rope to hang themselves with and I think they've already picked up the rope with this
Here in Taiwan, I've seen tourists shopping for software and giving each other that knowing wink when they see a copy of Photoshop for six bucks right out in front of a well-lit display case for everyone to see.
What they don't pick up on is that a lot of this stuff is older product that is licensed for sale at prices that seem free in the States, but are considered reasonable here. So, tourist go back with these stories about rampant and scandalous piracy when actually they're seeing is simply discounted merchandise that is totally legit.
Now I'm not saying there are no pirate software sales. Hong Kong used to have a great market near the Mong Kok subway station where you could even get alleged Windows source code CDs, but it had a definite air of secrecy with fidgety teenagers chain smoking and scanning the crowds for signs of cops who did eventually make them get rid of all the fun stuff.
So, I'm not saying there is no piracy, but I've also seen legitimately discounted merchandise that fooled Americans into assuming that it MUST be pirated just because it didn't cost hundreds of US bucks and had a familiar logo. That's simply a problem with American perception and the above post is yet another example.
Perhaps I got it wrong, I can't remember the URL, it was one of those Google searches, you can look up LED and check for yourselves if you're interested, but I seem to recall that the blue LEDs are less efficient in terms of lumen output than compact flourescents althoug the latter give off a lot more heat.
This question is off topic! This isn't even a topic to begin with. It's just a sucker come on.
But before you call that off-topic, let me explain that in academia, we don't tolerate misleading questions like this. So, a well rounded education includes basic academic principles that this question doesn't fullfill.
This question is like, what's the definiton of a full sex life? It's all fucking opinion. What is this, interview the slashdot community with a bullshit interview question? There's no real point to it except to get stories out of people. If you're just taking an opinion poll, put it over there on the side with all the other worthless polls and put Cowboy Neal as an option.
Doing home steam can, or course, be dangerous and isn't a great answer for even a minority of the people. But for those who are into solar steam, the danger is just part of the problem. The night cycle is a non-insignificant issue. Things like flywheels are talked about, but the prices are not reasonable for a homesteader budget. If these things are really heading for the consumer market, it could have a spillover effect on solar steam.
And if the small scale picture bores you, what about the big side?
If you look at what our dear Commander in Chief has commented on so glowingly in the corporate funded Solar Electricity Generation System projects in California what you find is that at the early stages, SEGS (Check the huge trough halfway down the page) one of the biggest concerns for investors was the night time part. Since these troughs are hooked to conventional turbogenerator units, downtime every night is totally unacceptable because it means losing steam in the turbine every night and inevitable damage to the turbine from condensation making it a losing investment all around.
Initially, the answer for the SEGS projects was to use gas cogeneration, but the biggest plants, the ones Bush commented on (an interesting interview with the president is somewhere on those DOE/Sandia pages) eventually overcame the lack of sunlight issue by simply using vast insulated swimming pools filled with oil field toxic sludge that they heated up during the day with sunlight and supposedly can run the 80MW turbogen set for days without light.
If the problem with hydrogen is the cost of producing and compressing the hydrogen, then the problem has been solved and the president already said he likes it because it's controlled by a corporate body and isn't revolutionary.
Hell, in the end it's all about extremely minor changes in the overall balance. That's why nothing ever seems to change. Things do change, this may be part of where we're going. Sounds cool to me. When do we start blasting the shit down as microwaves?
Yeah baby. I want to see some huge steel/aluminum alloy architecture in the 21st century. Let's see the electricity squandering seacrete cities floating in the South Pacific, dirgible cities thousands of miles across flashing ads down on the unenclosed lands, all that Bucky Fuller/PK Dick futuropolis stuff. I, for one, am into it. You know the Japanese and Chinese are into it too. The future looks bright, intense even.
If you want to see stupid compressed gas tricks Taiwan kicks ass all over Texas. Fifty liter propane tanks are delivered in sets of three by motorcycle ridin' cowpokes wearing flip flop rubber sandals in the perpetually pouring rain.
I've seen one of these good ol' biker boys go down under the tire of a bus and them tanks got kicked around by the oncoming traffic like it was a damn soccer tournament and none of them exploded. Of course traffic in Taipei is awful slow.
Who says it just came out today?
All this kind of thing will do is give those who have made hidden archives of subversive materials into isolated pockets of power. It's like certain martial arts, the harder the oposing force pushes, the greater the force coming back at them. The target slips to the side at the last minute and the concrete wall takes the force of the fist breaking every finger in the bloody hand of these idiots.
If anybody can use a search engine to find their --fill in the blank subversive material these guys are looking for-- then everybody is a pro and nobody is a leader. But as soon as you start trying to pinpoint who's doing what, you scare people into looking for the "secret" way so they don't get caught. Bang, up step the wannabee disenfranchised pros with their encrypted magic decoder rings and assorted gang paraphanalia.
Now you've creating leaders and gangs and mafiettes where there were nothing but curious or perhaps malicious individuals. Okay, so the Senators say, Great! That's what we wanted, targets, an orgainzed conspiracy.
Alright, now who are the bad guys?
Slashdot IS a political tool of enormous value which will no doubt leave a huge mark in the history that is to come. Why? Because the heart of Slashdot is something very much like the newsgroups which were and are an invaluable source of information. The free and open flow of information is already happening over the internet and this is partly due to the power of electronic discussion groups.
The sheer volume of discussion on the newsgroups throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century created the FAQs that we all know and love. They've been like the Bible of the Internet. Okay, the Man pages is the Old Testament. But the FAQs are the Protestant and Catholic additions. Perhaps the Koran as well.
Slashdot takes it to the next level. You don't even need FAQs with Slashdot. Just look back a few stories and you can find lots of valuable knowledge. That knowledge base in itself is a form of power. Trying to make that particular form of power into something blatantly political is fraught with difficulties.
Here's a sig from a letter I wrote to my Mom last night.
How boring if we ever come to all killing and no fucking to save the children.
This comment by an apparent teenager really caught me off guard with its naive assumptions about the technically inept grumps. It's cute and all, but it made me think that the ultimate lameness filter would be to categorize posts by user age.
Not only would this clean up a lot of the technical discussions, it would lure away a lot of the hardcore trolls who are trying to reach the younger audiance with their whacky scatagraphical antics.
It's not a realistic suggestion. Slashdot thrives on anonymity, so such measures can never be put into place and really shouldn't be, but I had to post. I've got mod points to burn, but I thought it would be more appropriate to put on my cop hat and tell the youngins to mind their own business and let the adults worry about what the other adults know how to do. If you've got a contribution, share it. If you're just speculating that everybody over eighteen is an idiot then you're more redundant than I'm being right now.
I don't want to argue about whether the user sees the "do you trust this" message every time or whether it can be hidden using BudAPI or something you cook up on your own, but basically Authorware is worthless unless you can make local system calls. If you just want to display text and some pics and play some sounds, why not just put up a web page? This explains why Macromedia started pushing Dreamweaver so hard even when they already had superior products from a development point of view. Nobody was downloading the plug-ins.
It still stands that people don't want to download the plug-ins even though they're only a meg or so. That was my point. I'm not acusing these tools of being a security concern or saying security concerns are why they aren't downloaded, the fact is these plug-ins aren't downloaded by most users for whatever reason. The Flash plug-in was an anomaly because people are like fish and other creatures possessed of eyes and they like to see flashes of light. It was stupid human trick. Plug-ins as a solution suck. Browsers are already way overloaded and it's all MS's attempt to focus everything on the web because it's the one part of the net where buzinezz ownz ur azz.
One of Macromedia's problems is they assumed the plug-in was the way to go because Flash worked out so well. But Flash was just that, Flash. Essentially vector graphics handling in a browser. It can be used to create complex and enchanting interfaces, but it's based on a set of standards that are already being incoorporated into newer browsers.
Macromedia's product line can certainly do more than just vector graphics with paths and animations, but if you look at some of the more sophisticated tools in the product line, they required their own plug-ins and just never got good penetration because of end user hesitation to go for it.
The plugins for higher level tools like Director and more so Authorware go way beyond the capabilites of a normal browser particularly in the sense that can they read and write and delete files as they please. And much more than that, they can execute remote system functions like shutdown reboot or add registry key. So, why didn't everybody download these plug-ins? They're free just like Flash plug-ins are. I think part of the answer is that these things give a browser powers that people don't want browsers to have and so they never get downloaded. If you can make it into the HTML specs, get in a browser, if not. . .
This whole notion of letting the web turn into more than it is seems like it's the source of as many problems as it solves and it seems to be pushed by MS with this whole web sevices bullshit campaign. Fuck that, everything shouldn't happen on the web. Why does it have to be integrated into the browser instead of being its own application? All multitasking windowed computing environments allow multiple applcations to run at the same time. They can all use net bandwidth, why do they all have to be in a web browser?
And ditch the case while you're at it. I just put together a board and a bunch of pieces that turned out to be workable and left them on top of a speaker cabinet. A setup like that is no good for something with a bunch of peripherals, but if it's just a server with some network cards and a single drive, why not let gravity keep things in place and keep it simple. Cases are so damn ugly at this point anyway. /. reder's homes anyway. Dumping the case completely is one way of taking care of circulation and eliminating awkward mounting problems.
Setting up a tray of boards on a musician style rack mount with one big fan for three or four boards sounds like the way to go these days. Forget the 1U cases, just stack some sheet metal on a rack and leave them exposed. The boards look kewler than the cases anyway. At one point assuming a household user would have three or four separate boards would have been excessive, but I'm not sure that's still true. Probably not at many
The sure fire way to get a good telecommuting situation is to make yourself absolutely indispensible to a project and then take matters into your own hands. Don't ask for telecommuting, simply tell your boss you're not going to be getting most of your work done in the office. This might sound ridiculous at first, but you have to bring it on slow like a splitting wedge going into a slice of tree trunk.
Obviously making demands from your boss isn't going to work. So, start doing your work at home in advance and build up a better infrastructure at home than you have at the office. Any time you have a chance to interact with the boss about your work, explaing that you did most of it at home and that you did it there because you have better faster machines, more control over the network etc. Go into detail on this at every chance you get so that when the time comes you're way ahead of the game. The time that's waiting to come is the time when you have some personal emergency and you come back from a week at home with twice as much done as you would do at the office. Now you have facts to back up your position and the burden of evidence starts to shift to your employer.
Of course this is a lot more likely to be effective in a very small company where the management isn't ten layers deep in ugly assholes. In the latter case, you've got little wiggle room for the obvious reason that multi-tiered management schemes collapse without the divide and conquer mentality towards the staff. If you don't force the staff to act as a herd, how can you play the shepherd role adequately?
In this situation, you probably have to ask what makes your company tick. If the company is bloated and living off some patents or ancient brand names that enables thick layers of blood-sucking management leaches to thrive, you might as well adapt to the status quo, because that's the way it's going to stay. If you're into that environment, you may want to get an MBA and spend your free time memorizing important people's names, looking for that perfect tie and practicing your firmest handshake. That's right, it's just like church because it's all based on faith in conservative icons.
Expecting to get your way just because you have mad satanic programming skillz best done naked covered in chicken blood in the basement is not going to impress this bunch. Maybe you should just buy a big sack of flour, a fifty-five gallon drum of soybean oil and some green onion seeds and quit working altogether. You can raise healthy kids on green onion pancakes and the occasional eggs from the sacrificial chickens.
As a big multi-armed god fan, I would like to elaborate on this comment a bit.
While there may be many armed gods in Hindu beliefs, Buddhist tradition in many countries, particularly in eastern China/western MidEast also feature statues of multi-armed gods and goddesses dating back many centuries.
These ancient dieties are also found in Far Eastern and even Pacific Islander temples. Furthermore, to get back to the idiotic parent post, these gods are very real as long as someone continues to have faith in them such as myself.
In fact, there is nowhere in the Koran or either the new or old testaments of the the Bible or the book of Mormon that indicates that the Judeo Christian/Muslim monotheistic deity does not, in fact have multiple arms, faces or perahps even a vagina or two, bulbous breasts and groovy hips.
Obfuscation is a rhetorical tactic. Effective rhetoric is often far from elegant.
Look at Reagan! Jeez, talkin' about a hustling bitch. The man didn't --nor does-- know truth from fiction, but he was effective rhetorically.
DubYa is just doing what a good ol' boy oughtta by tearin off a page from the ol' Gipper's play book.
I wrote that line before you sucked off my first cock and I had to grow a new one.
I can't stand it when people steal my material and then do around posting it anonymously.