Their Intel chipset business has been very bad from a profit perspective for a long time while their small form factor Epia line has been doing quite well and has been a bright spot of cooperation between FOSS software and a major hardware producer. The problem is that the latter is a tiny fraction of the former in terms of revenues because everything is marketed in terms of gaming performance these days despite the fact that a huge segment of PC users don't play cutting edge games.
At least in part, the parent company is at fault here. While Epia systems could be far more successful, they get minimal marketing support at best.
I went into a store that had a giant Epia billboard prominently displayed at the entrance and asked to see the display models. There were none. The sales drones didn't even know what it was. Finally a manger told me I could special order one if I knew the model number, but he couldn't tell me the price. Whoa, way to go there.
It would make more sense if they split the two divisions into separate companies altoghter. The strategy of simultaneously suing Intel and then licensing their technology doesn't sound too promsing for the long run.
Here's a nice Sandia link that makes it absolutely clear that even a small-scale solar thermal installation can produce temperatures comparable to those in "nuclear explosions" the article here is only talking about 2000C. This solar furnace is used to test the "failure thresholds of high temperature ceramic and refractory materials." So why in the hell is a nuclear power plant the only option to produce the heat they need to use with their fancy ceramic filter? No doubt the solar furnace in that photo produces temperatures far in excess of what their ceramic filter can even tolerate.
Try a search on SEGS and Sandia. You don't need sterlings. Sterlings are great and they look cool with sunflower reflectors, but more conventional designs work great right now today here in California. Each of the newer SEGS units is 90MW and they use conventional steam turbines and trough reflectors. Nothing fancy. George Bush Sr. had nothing but praise for them because they were totally for profit and private and on a scale that no backyard solar freak could afford.
The intriguing thing about the SEGS literature, which is abundant, is that you find that they really didn't know what to expect when they started and were typically surprised by the amount of heat they had generated.
Which brings us to this Slashdot topic. SEGS uses elongated troughs, but using hemispheric dishes, or sunflowers as they are known, creates enormous point heat. After all, you're focusing the energy of a vast nuclear fusion reaction. In fact, the heat is often compared to that created in nuclear reactions for the obvious reason that it literally IS the direct result of fusion in the Sun.
So, why not try this same experiment with a, say thirty meter, sunflower?
Solar thermal and geothermal potentially put wind and PV and even hydro to shame and yet the surface has only been scratched because they involve such large scale projects there has to be a critical mass of political will.
This is an interesting and amusing way to put it. It's trivial to create treaties and even push though laws in other countries, but when it comes to enforcement it's like pushing a freight train up a hill with a well cooked spaghetti noodle. It's not that you didn't find the train that needs to go up the hill or that you didn't get your noodle ready. The problem is, that noodle will not push the train.
The trick here is that the assumption that you can force other countries to enforce so-called IP laws as they are enforced in the US is to assume that other countries already have similar law enforcement systems in other respect, ie, outside of this fig newton of the imagination called IP, and that assumption is an outrageous leap into fantasy.
So, "overseeing" is a nice way to put it. This new tax payer funded office will be very busy "overseeing" the enforcement, and the lack of it as well.
I can hear the Czar already.
"Yep, I can see a long ways from this office. Hell of a view."
While the old incentive tune is certainly a familiar one here on/., the other side is also well known. Here's an example going the other way.
This link shows you that by sharing protocols on the web, it is a fact that researchers can save money and even get better results than the crap that is being pushed in a lot of these kits. In fact, the profit motive typically acts contrary to the ends of good science.
And speaking of on-line protocols, this is what I expected to see from something called "BioForge." I'm not dismissing them as it's fairly clear they're still in the starting stage, but it's worth noting that there are already many open protocol sites on the web with incredible amounts of information. A quick google for "biological protocols" turns up quite a few.
I'm reporting to you live from an apartment about one hundred yards from the Shi Da University campus in lovely downtown Taipei and I'm pleased to tell you that, although I'm on a landline DSL connection, Taiwan's Internet connectivity is quite GNU/Linux friendly and has been for many years so there is no reason to believe the wireless will be any different.
In fact, early on, the local ISPs were quick to provide free IP sharing routers with DSL connections. Many of those devices were really just embedded Linux systems. This was back in the days when ISPs in the US were still arguing whether you could have a home network on a brodband line. Here, quite to the contrary, the idea of sharing a connection between multiple PCs was being pushed by the ISPs. So making the best use of connectivity in the manner that the user sees fit has never been a real issue here since the advent of broadband. Intriguingly, in the modem days not so many years ago things were terrible. Once DSL came out though. everything changed for the better to put it mildly. That's is truly putting it mildly, the connectivity here is awesome. It's fast, cheap and hassle free and apparently just getting more so as time goes by.
But in terms of GNU/Linux in Taiwan, I might as well mention that I'm currently writing to you on an IBM Thinkpad notebook running BVA1L Knoppix which is a custom version of the Knoppix LiveCD with a pre-configured Chinese environment including a version of the Chinese character input system called XCin. I am led to believe this customized version of Knoppix is maintained by a local boy at Tai Da which is another university that coincidentally is also just down the street from where I'm camping out this evening. So far, it's mostly only the younger people who have caught on to the fact that there is finally a totally convenient way to use Chinese with a Linux desktop, but it's spreading fast because people in Taiwan hate to feel like they're getting left out of a trend.
As a matter of fact, the maintainer of this distro made a rather smart move by placing pictures of various cities from around Taipei as the default desktop so, as opposed to the generic Microsoft desktop experience, this system immediately creates a sense of recognition, pride and even ownership among the users. Just in the last month or so several Taiwanese people I've shown this to have dumped XP or 2K and stuck with a hard drive install of this distro. The key point is the character input that works with Open Office and Firefox but the little touches like the localized wallpaper also has a powerful psychological impact that makes people more willing to put up with having to mount devices and learn how to cut and paste the right way and these other trivialities. If people are not interested in a new system these minor issues are insurmountable, but if you create subtle motivation by massaging the edges and making things cozy and targeted precisely for a very specific audiance it is surprising how eager people can be to learn.
Hard to believe how fast things change, but people's tastes are fickle and the older alternatives have a great disadvantage in that once you were trendy in the past you've got a hell of a battle being trendy in the future.
So, if you're afraid GNU/Linux is being squeezed out of the action in Taiwan, you may relax because it is hardly the case.
I was living in Taiwan in the nineties and doing tons of computer work on a little 15" monitor for weeks on end. My eyes were seriously going out. It was quite obvious. I was having trouble focusing.
So, there were all these Chinese medicine shops around where I lived and I decided to go in and ask for some herbs or accupuncture.
I got a Chinese friend to go with me and I communicated to the Doc that my eyes were going blurry from using the computer constantly.
The guy told me --stop using the computer.
I was impressed with his skill.
Thanks for emphasizing my point. It being an important one, I'm glad to have the chance to dwell on it a bit further. Even under labratory conditions with species that breed thousands of times faster than humans variations in subtle characteristics such as wing shape or eye coloration develop at a glacial pace and only to the degree that population statistics will allow. That is to say, these changes are only detectable statistically rather than being absolute changes that suddenly and drastically affect the entire population. This population statistics element is the basis for the science of genetics. Changes in fruit fly populations are not dramatic in the sense that fruit flies attain some seemingly advanced behaviors through selective breeding as you so wittily pointed out.
On the other hand, corporations have a very specific timing: the quarterly reporting cycle in which the corporate analogy of species --product lines-- live and die in a clearly ordained manner. It's not like one percent of the population of a certain Cisco router product line develops a blue LED in the third quarter and then on a quarter-by-quarter basis the population begins to adopt this characteristic according to how the market accepts the change. No, that's how evolution works, that's not how corporations work.
In a corporate environment, entire product lines can appear and disappear completely within a single fiscal quarter based on the whims of an executive. The similarities to evolution are about as strong as the similarities between evolution and creationism. They both seek to describe a similar topic, but they are nonethless quite discinct and even contrary.
The corporate world is much more along the creationist lines of thinking, ie the CEO is God and all the creatures of the world live and die in accordance with his wishes. This is not evolution, this is competition. Competition and evolution are NOT synonyms. This is a subtle but significant point that I am quite pleased to have the opportunity to inform you of.
Re:I haven't taken anything like this...
on
IT Literacy Test
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a rather poignant observation.
I've written practice tests for the ETS TOEFL and GRE for about ten years. This year, my publisher is withdrawing from the market for a number of reasons, but a big part of the reason is that the market for ETS products is simply shrinking with the decline of overseas students going to the US. So, when I saw this the first thing that came to mind was --ah, new revenue stream. Good luck.
But the reason I say this "essay test" approach is so right-on-the-money is that ETS themselves in their core test markets like TOEFL and GRE is also moving towards the essay format in a big way. The GRE now requires an essay examination and the the TOEFL has gone fron zero essay question several years ago to almost half the test being essay style.
So, I think this is a very interesting point. If ETS themselves are moving towards essay intensive exams, what kind of value are they really going to be adding to a market that is already highly saturated with tests and licensing systems galore from major software vendors.
In my opinion, integrating voice and video into a single application is really not essential and tends to lead to fairly troublesome results. Eventually it will work and the solution will be free and open and common. But for now it is simpler to keep the video and audio separated. The results are far more rewarding in my opinion, especially if you're dealing with people who have different connectivity on the other side like family memebers.
If you want voice and video I think the best way is to simply use a dedicated voice program that works, or even just a phone with a calling card, because this is the part of the link-up that absolutely cannot accept delays. The video is the less important part because even very slow refreshes are acceptable as long as the sound is unbroken. After all, as long as you have voice contact, you can explain the video problems. Try doing it the other way around. I know I have. It's fun the first few times, but it gets old fast.
So, once you have the audio all squared away, you can just add a conventional web cam that has no audio stream and simply tell the URL of your server the person you are calling. That way no matter what happens with the video you've still got audio. I've found this to be a far, far better solution than any all-in-one package where a video crash kills the audio too. That can be too frustrating especially for the less geeked out family members.
Of course I'm talking about calling family members for fun rather than a dedicated work situation where you can guarantee both ends. But if you're in that position, then you don't need any advice I suppose.
I think the most intriguing use of camera phones is for OCR. Of course to make it work you'd need WiFi or WiMax rather than regular wireless telephone protocols. But if you could stitch together a few shots per page and quickly upload them to your home computer form the library, well that would be interesting.
In the surprise over this news about the lawsuits from the MPAA, it seems that there has been little thought about one of the major differences between the MPAA and the RIAA.
The difference is summarized in one word: theaters.
My understanding was that this was one of the major reasons the MPAA wasn't going to sue customers because the association between the MPAA and theaters is too strong creating a very vulnerable and public target.
This is a very different situation from that of the RIAA. While you could argue that a concert is a close analogy to a movie theater, there are some subtle differences that make theaters much more vulnerable to public action such as picketing.
whether hard drive technology is maxing out.
All you need to do is observe how many platters are being used. If there truly is no way to increase the density of platters, you can simply add more platters. Since we're still seeing drives with two to three platters then it is safe to assume there is still a capacity ramp in the works.
Well, it's merely an amusing anecdote not meant to demonstrate anything much one way or the other, but this is true.
A year before the protest and massacre in Tien An Men, I visited Beijing as a backpack tourist and went to Tien An Men square where I proceeded, along with some British accomplices, to do hand stands and various low end acrobatics in an attempt to attract attention.
Well, it worked great. In seconds we had a huge crowd. It wasn't really that we were so impressive, but more that people wanted to see what everybody else was gawking at and the crowd itself was what was drawing the crowd.
So, the higher up cops --there's actually many, many different levels of cops in Mainland China with only some actually having any authority-- came in and pulled the crowd apart and told us we were being bad and not to do it again.
That's it. That's all that happened. We were clearly trouble makers, but we weren't arrested or even hassled.
So, yeah what happened in that same sqauare a year later was a terrible tragedy, but Mainland China might not be as scarry as you think.
On the other hand, I've been called names by cops in the US over the loudspeaker of their partol cars and when I get pulled over, I regularly have my car searched from top to bottom looking for drugs when the stop was allegedly for things like a bent license plate or some such nonsense.
See, this is what I'm talking about. I hadn't even thought of going to a pet supply store to look for cell culture incubators. This stuff is still so ground level for the home market. Sharing these sorts of tips is invaluable.
Of course what's more intriguing is doing the elctronics to make your own, but knowing where to get stuff that is easily adaptable is good too. Sometimes it's good to improvise completely from scratch, sometimes it's better to take something that gets you halfway there.
For kitchen cultures like yogurt and sourdough I've used a variety of incubators from rice cookers and crock pots to all sorts of lamps. While the DIY lamp jobs are more fun and impressive looking, the crock pots are easier to clean which is an important issue once you get beyond the first experiments.
I really recommend sourdough to anybody. It's so simple and even if you skip the bread and just make pancakes it's awesome.
It's incredibly simple to make starter, but don't trust me. Google for the sourdough FAQ and then look for the answer to how to make starter. It's amazing how it works.
Biotechhobbyist is right along the lines of a PostNuke forum I set up a few years ago and have been slowly updating. I'm so pleased to see more of this sort of thing.
I strongly believe that biotech is the logical next place for the DIY revolution or the hacker approach to innovation or whatever you want to call it and that a key to getting there is for people to digest the journal articles and make it doable for people at home.
This is such a hot area for the DIY enthusiast because its an intersection of so many skills that are already honed by being a computer geek.
I'm quite impressed and I can't wait to see more.
Interesting that Biotechhobbyist seems to be from UCSD. I've covered a really cool story coming out of the same campus called the Discode project which calls itself an open-source biotech hardware project. It uses CD-ROMs and inkjet printers to enable DIY molecular interaction screening. Amazing stuff.
I hear they're still looking for Linux kernel hackers with good understading of CD-ROM drivers. If you're in San Diego and you're a CD hacker, you should check out the project.
Well you also touch on the very real issue which is completely obfuscated in the fear mongering over child pornography which is the fact, and this is a very well documented fact, that the vast, vast majority of child molestation cases take place within the family and have absolutely nothing to do with this mythical image of the child predator.
Sure, you can document the sick twisted case of the totally whacked out career child killer freak all you like, but those are the extreme exceptions to the rule. The rule is that child molestation occurs within the home at the hands of an offender who is either a member or the family or close associate.
But the hype over child pornography literally pays thousands of people's salaries and forms the backbone of political careers and so you won't see it going away soon depite the fact that it has little to do with the real situation regarding the crime that it supposedly is targeting --child molestation.
Yeah, I tend to lean on the Pascal implementation in Macromedia Authorware. I actually use it to script the process of writing bash scripts. I know it sounds bass ackwards but it's so familiar from previous work that I can't resist. I can get a lot of work done fast that way.
I've been told previously here on Slashdot that the Pascal implementation in Authorware is quite similar to what was in the original Mac.
I've also read that BASIC is really just a derivative of Pascal and VB even more so.
I thought the same thing. I really enjoyed the answers. It was genuinely a pleasure to read up until the end.
I was just at one of the giant chain bookstores in town, these have replaced several of the smaller ones that are already gone. They do the overpriced coffee thing and it does have the function as a public space, but I'm not sure this is a long term sustainable business. There were tons of people reading books as though it were a library and the books looked like library books as well, the pages were well thumbed through and most wrapped books had long since been unwrapped. So, it was filled with people, but I noticed that for the few hours I was there practically nobody purchased a thing and the four check-out lanes were occupied by staff chatting amongst themselves. Perhaps they make it up by volume?
And as for publishers. Well, that seems to have been conveniently skipped over. I mean I happen to have some small publishers in my family and in my experience they're first and foremost precisely about changing books for money and that role is indeed quite threatened by the Net. That's a good thing as far as I'm concnered despite the fact that it means people I love need to get a new business and go through rough times. I still believe it is for the better. It would have been nice to see some more thoughtful reflection on what's really going on here.
Actually though, that criticism also applies to his lack of originality on the future of money. Money is not such an ancient or impenetrable concept really. There are many many ways to distribute wealth in societies besides paper currency.
But overall it was quite entertaining.
Id' say that is the real problem for MS right there. Most businesses don't use the latest version of Word. Not only that, a huge number aren't using the latest version of the OS either. They're already their own biggest competition. That's a real problem.
This is the squeeze play problem and its a very serious problem from a business perspective. For the lazy, if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it crowd you've got this unwillingness to upgrade. Then on the other side you've got the geeks who want the latest toys and love to tweak everything. Hmm, already lost them to Open Source. So, they're stuck in the middle trying to sound innovative and yet unable to change too much. The only guaranteed clients are those that are somehow forced to buy the product or those who aren't too concerned about IT budgets. In times of growth, the latter can be found in adbundance if you market your upgrade as the safe thing to do. But growth is patchy these days.
Business wise, where they're at is not a good place to be right now.
But anyhow, while I can see this guy's point I don't think the Blacksmith is such a great example because metalworking is still a vital part of the economy. The Blacksmith per se may be a thing of the past, but metalworking, which is what Blacksmiths did, had not diminished at all. It has become such an essential part of so many trades that it is no longer reasonable to assign it to just one group of workers. Almost all manufacturing deals with metal fabrication at some point.
I guess this was meant to be funny and it is but it highlights a key point about software which is that software doesn't require economies of scale which is why FOSS is unstoppable. You can't out-produce open source to shut it down and drive it out of the market. This is a common tactic with conventional products that no longer applies to software because it scales so easily that scalability is not longer a significant factor.
Once you get past a few tens of thousands of individuals, a genuinely representative democracy is no longer a realistic possibility because you lose the ability of every member to directly address the forum deciding the issues. What is fucked up is that we still refer to the US's government as a democracy when that's really no longer an appropriate term.
A true democracy would be based on referrendums on issues which people would vote on directly. Real democracy does not require representatives to speak on issues. Anybody who wishes to participate in the congress may participate. Representatives in a real democracy only serve to organize the democratic institutions, not decide upon issues for the citizens. The citizens must decide on the issues for themselves in a public forum in a real democracy.
That's how a real democracy works. But, like I pointed out, you really can't use this system once your population grows too large because the possibility for direct dialogue that is an essential part of the decision making process becomes unmanageable.
Intriguingly, a forum system not unlike Slashdot could be used to modernize the ancient concept of direct participation in democracy and apparently can scale up to around a million users and still maintain some functionality.
So, Slashdot could become the replacement for the misused sense of democracy that we now have in the States. We'll just break the granularity down into sections of one million instead of States.
For some less populated states this won't be much of a change. But for places like California or New York it will create the issue of major legal distinctions between geographically close districts. You'll be able to traffic in kilos of Coke in Santa Monica, but be careful when you cross over into Orange County.
Whether this is true about American programming jobs or not is debateable, but putting all the emphasis on overseas workers seems rather misplaced to me. It's always the easy way to play on that fear of the other and its usually a misguided effort. I think the reality is that there was a huge rush to create software with the acceptance of the GUI that exaggerated the size of the long-term job market for programming skills.
This wasn't helped by corporations like Microsoft who blatantly hyped the potential economic returns of programming as a business. The only way their version of the development world worked was if everyone essentially joined into a pyramid scheme. And like any good pyramid scheme, only the guys on top got fat.
The fact is, although it looked like there was endless work to be done when the GUI desktop was a novel metaphor in people's lives, a few years later the work doesn't seem so endless. Much has been accomplished. Just look at how far FOSS has come in the last few years. It's not just impressive, it's astounding and to ignore that seems to take a bit of willfull ignornce. The fact is, the basic tools seem to have been done to death at this point.
So, at that stage you do have to ask yourself if it might not just be a fact that as software matures it simply doesn't require hundreds of thousands of individuals constantly creating new products day in and day out when the basic products aren't really changing much. It's not like a conventional physical manufacturing industry like autos where you need staff just to keep the product flowing even if the product isn't changing. Unlike conventional products, software is a product that continues to flow even when it is no longer being produced or even marketed.
Finally, you have to look at hardware. This should say something to you that a lot of programmers just don't want to face. When harware becomes so cheap it's like a disposable item then you simply cannot sustain the kind of software market that companies like Microsoft or Sun have assured developers will exist. If you believed the lies, well who's to blame? The evidence of reality is available at any consumer electronics store. The only dark, menacing conspiracy is the one that comes from within. If you wanted to believe something that couldn't be true and obviously wasn't, then is the best solution to blame "foreigners"? I think this is a seriously problematic response to a reality that is standing right before us quite plainly.
As though even the Pentium M was a cool chip. Not even close. Those things are fiercely hot.
I just tried to diagnose a P4M 1.7Ghz IBM thinkpad that was intermittently cutting out when running XP.
Any time it was under load while running XP, the built-in high speed fan would kick up to high speed and this thing turned into a hair dryer. That's exactly what it was like. A freaking hair dryer.
It was just cranking out a stream of baking hot air. This was supposed to be notebook, but there's no way in hell you could operate in on your lap and even on a wooden desk it was iffy.
Then XP would freeze up and it needed reboot. This thing is like a month old.
Anyhow, all the tests showed nothing wrong with the hardware. The problem seems obvious. It's not that anything is broken per se, it's just overheating. That's not right. That's fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
Their Intel chipset business has been very bad from a profit perspective for a long time while their small form factor Epia line has been doing quite well and has been a bright spot of cooperation between FOSS software and a major hardware producer. The problem is that the latter is a tiny fraction of the former in terms of revenues because everything is marketed in terms of gaming performance these days despite the fact that a huge segment of PC users don't play cutting edge games.
At least in part, the parent company is at fault here. While Epia systems could be far more successful, they get minimal marketing support at best.
I went into a store that had a giant Epia billboard prominently displayed at the entrance and asked to see the display models. There were none. The sales drones didn't even know what it was. Finally a manger told me I could special order one if I knew the model number, but he couldn't tell me the price. Whoa, way to go there.
It would make more sense if they split the two divisions into separate companies altoghter. The strategy of simultaneously suing Intel and then licensing their technology doesn't sound too promsing for the long run.
Here's a nice Sandia link that makes it absolutely clear that even a small-scale solar thermal installation can produce temperatures comparable to those in "nuclear explosions" the article here is only talking about 2000C. This solar furnace is used to test the "failure thresholds of high temperature ceramic and refractory materials." So why in the hell is a nuclear power plant the only option to produce the heat they need to use with their fancy ceramic filter? No doubt the solar furnace in that photo produces temperatures far in excess of what their ceramic filter can even tolerate.
Try a search on SEGS and Sandia. You don't need sterlings. Sterlings are great and they look cool with sunflower reflectors, but more conventional designs work great right now today here in California. Each of the newer SEGS units is 90MW and they use conventional steam turbines and trough reflectors. Nothing fancy. George Bush Sr. had nothing but praise for them because they were totally for profit and private and on a scale that no backyard solar freak could afford.
The intriguing thing about the SEGS literature, which is abundant, is that you find that they really didn't know what to expect when they started and were typically surprised by the amount of heat they had generated.
Which brings us to this Slashdot topic. SEGS uses elongated troughs, but using hemispheric dishes, or sunflowers as they are known, creates enormous point heat. After all, you're focusing the energy of a vast nuclear fusion reaction. In fact, the heat is often compared to that created in nuclear reactions for the obvious reason that it literally IS the direct result of fusion in the Sun.
So, why not try this same experiment with a, say thirty meter, sunflower?
Solar thermal and geothermal potentially put wind and PV and even hydro to shame and yet the surface has only been scratched because they involve such large scale projects there has to be a critical mass of political will.
This is an interesting and amusing way to put it. It's trivial to create treaties and even push though laws in other countries, but when it comes to enforcement it's like pushing a freight train up a hill with a well cooked spaghetti noodle. It's not that you didn't find the train that needs to go up the hill or that you didn't get your noodle ready. The problem is, that noodle will not push the train.
The trick here is that the assumption that you can force other countries to enforce so-called IP laws as they are enforced in the US is to assume that other countries already have similar law enforcement systems in other respect, ie, outside of this fig newton of the imagination called IP, and that assumption is an outrageous leap into fantasy.
So, "overseeing" is a nice way to put it. This new tax payer funded office will be very busy "overseeing" the enforcement, and the lack of it as well.
I can hear the Czar already.
"Yep, I can see a long ways from this office. Hell of a view."
This link shows you that by sharing protocols on the web, it is a fact that researchers can save money and even get better results than the crap that is being pushed in a lot of these kits. In fact, the profit motive typically acts contrary to the ends of good science.
And speaking of on-line protocols, this is what I expected to see from something called "BioForge." I'm not dismissing them as it's fairly clear they're still in the starting stage, but it's worth noting that there are already many open protocol sites on the web with incredible amounts of information. A quick google for "biological protocols" turns up quite a few.
I'm reporting to you live from an apartment about one hundred yards from the Shi Da University campus in lovely downtown Taipei and I'm pleased to tell you that, although I'm on a landline DSL connection, Taiwan's Internet connectivity is quite GNU/Linux friendly and has been for many years so there is no reason to believe the wireless will be any different.
In fact, early on, the local ISPs were quick to provide free IP sharing routers with DSL connections. Many of those devices were really just embedded Linux systems. This was back in the days when ISPs in the US were still arguing whether you could have a home network on a brodband line. Here, quite to the contrary, the idea of sharing a connection between multiple PCs was being pushed by the ISPs. So making the best use of connectivity in the manner that the user sees fit has never been a real issue here since the advent of broadband. Intriguingly, in the modem days not so many years ago things were terrible. Once DSL came out though. everything changed for the better to put it mildly. That's is truly putting it mildly, the connectivity here is awesome. It's fast, cheap and hassle free and apparently just getting more so as time goes by.
But in terms of GNU/Linux in Taiwan, I might as well mention that I'm currently writing to you on an IBM Thinkpad notebook running BVA1L Knoppix which is a custom version of the Knoppix LiveCD with a pre-configured Chinese environment including a version of the Chinese character input system called XCin. I am led to believe this customized version of Knoppix is maintained by a local boy at Tai Da which is another university that coincidentally is also just down the street from where I'm camping out this evening. So far, it's mostly only the younger people who have caught on to the fact that there is finally a totally convenient way to use Chinese with a Linux desktop, but it's spreading fast because people in Taiwan hate to feel like they're getting left out of a trend.
As a matter of fact, the maintainer of this distro made a rather smart move by placing pictures of various cities from around Taipei as the default desktop so, as opposed to the generic Microsoft desktop experience, this system immediately creates a sense of recognition, pride and even ownership among the users. Just in the last month or so several Taiwanese people I've shown this to have dumped XP or 2K and stuck with a hard drive install of this distro. The key point is the character input that works with Open Office and Firefox but the little touches like the localized wallpaper also has a powerful psychological impact that makes people more willing to put up with having to mount devices and learn how to cut and paste the right way and these other trivialities. If people are not interested in a new system these minor issues are insurmountable, but if you create subtle motivation by massaging the edges and making things cozy and targeted precisely for a very specific audiance it is surprising how eager people can be to learn.
Hard to believe how fast things change, but people's tastes are fickle and the older alternatives have a great disadvantage in that once you were trendy in the past you've got a hell of a battle being trendy in the future.
So, if you're afraid GNU/Linux is being squeezed out of the action in Taiwan, you may relax because it is hardly the case.
I was living in Taiwan in the nineties and doing tons of computer work on a little 15" monitor for weeks on end. My eyes were seriously going out. It was quite obvious. I was having trouble focusing.
So, there were all these Chinese medicine shops around where I lived and I decided to go in and ask for some herbs or accupuncture.
I got a Chinese friend to go with me and I communicated to the Doc that my eyes were going blurry from using the computer constantly.
The guy told me --stop using the computer.
I was impressed with his skill.
Thanks for emphasizing my point. It being an important one, I'm glad to have the chance to dwell on it a bit further. Even under labratory conditions with species that breed thousands of times faster than humans variations in subtle characteristics such as wing shape or eye coloration develop at a glacial pace and only to the degree that population statistics will allow. That is to say, these changes are only detectable statistically rather than being absolute changes that suddenly and drastically affect the entire population. This population statistics element is the basis for the science of genetics. Changes in fruit fly populations are not dramatic in the sense that fruit flies attain some seemingly advanced behaviors through selective breeding as you so wittily pointed out.
On the other hand, corporations have a very specific timing: the quarterly reporting cycle in which the corporate analogy of species --product lines-- live and die in a clearly ordained manner. It's not like one percent of the population of a certain Cisco router product line develops a blue LED in the third quarter and then on a quarter-by-quarter basis the population begins to adopt this characteristic according to how the market accepts the change. No, that's how evolution works, that's not how corporations work.
In a corporate environment, entire product lines can appear and disappear completely within a single fiscal quarter based on the whims of an executive. The similarities to evolution are about as strong as the similarities between evolution and creationism. They both seek to describe a similar topic, but they are nonethless quite discinct and even contrary.
The corporate world is much more along the creationist lines of thinking, ie the CEO is God and all the creatures of the world live and die in accordance with his wishes. This is not evolution, this is competition. Competition and evolution are NOT synonyms. This is a subtle but significant point that I am quite pleased to have the opportunity to inform you of.
This is a rather poignant observation.
I've written practice tests for the ETS TOEFL and GRE for about ten years. This year, my publisher is withdrawing from the market for a number of reasons, but a big part of the reason is that the market for ETS products is simply shrinking with the decline of overseas students going to the US. So, when I saw this the first thing that came to mind was --ah, new revenue stream. Good luck.
But the reason I say this "essay test" approach is so right-on-the-money is that ETS themselves in their core test markets like TOEFL and GRE is also moving towards the essay format in a big way. The GRE now requires an essay examination and the the TOEFL has gone fron zero essay question several years ago to almost half the test being essay style.
So, I think this is a very interesting point. If ETS themselves are moving towards essay intensive exams, what kind of value are they really going to be adding to a market that is already highly saturated with tests and licensing systems galore from major software vendors.
In my opinion, integrating voice and video into a single application is really not essential and tends to lead to fairly troublesome results. Eventually it will work and the solution will be free and open and common. But for now it is simpler to keep the video and audio separated. The results are far more rewarding in my opinion, especially if you're dealing with people who have different connectivity on the other side like family memebers.
If you want voice and video I think the best way is to simply use a dedicated voice program that works, or even just a phone with a calling card, because this is the part of the link-up that absolutely cannot accept delays. The video is the less important part because even very slow refreshes are acceptable as long as the sound is unbroken. After all, as long as you have voice contact, you can explain the video problems. Try doing it the other way around. I know I have. It's fun the first few times, but it gets old fast.
So, once you have the audio all squared away, you can just add a conventional web cam that has no audio stream and simply tell the URL of your server the person you are calling. That way no matter what happens with the video you've still got audio. I've found this to be a far, far better solution than any all-in-one package where a video crash kills the audio too. That can be too frustrating especially for the less geeked out family members.
Of course I'm talking about calling family members for fun rather than a dedicated work situation where you can guarantee both ends. But if you're in that position, then you don't need any advice I suppose.
I think the most intriguing use of camera phones is for OCR. Of course to make it work you'd need WiFi or WiMax rather than regular wireless telephone protocols. But if you could stitch together a few shots per page and quickly upload them to your home computer form the library, well that would be interesting.
In the surprise over this news about the lawsuits from the MPAA, it seems that there has been little thought about one of the major differences between the MPAA and the RIAA.
The difference is summarized in one word: theaters.
My understanding was that this was one of the major reasons the MPAA wasn't going to sue customers because the association between the MPAA and theaters is too strong creating a very vulnerable and public target.
This is a very different situation from that of the RIAA. While you could argue that a concert is a close analogy to a movie theater, there are some subtle differences that make theaters much more vulnerable to public action such as picketing.
whether hard drive technology is maxing out.
All you need to do is observe how many platters are being used. If there truly is no way to increase the density of platters, you can simply add more platters. Since we're still seeing drives with two to three platters then it is safe to assume there is still a capacity ramp in the works.
Well, it's merely an amusing anecdote not meant to demonstrate anything much one way or the other, but this is true.
A year before the protest and massacre in Tien An Men, I visited Beijing as a backpack tourist and went to Tien An Men square where I proceeded, along with some British accomplices, to do hand stands and various low end acrobatics in an attempt to attract attention.
Well, it worked great. In seconds we had a huge crowd. It wasn't really that we were so impressive, but more that people wanted to see what everybody else was gawking at and the crowd itself was what was drawing the crowd.
So, the higher up cops --there's actually many, many different levels of cops in Mainland China with only some actually having any authority-- came in and pulled the crowd apart and told us we were being bad and not to do it again.
That's it. That's all that happened. We were clearly trouble makers, but we weren't arrested or even hassled.
So, yeah what happened in that same sqauare a year later was a terrible tragedy, but Mainland China might not be as scarry as you think.
On the other hand, I've been called names by cops in the US over the loudspeaker of their partol cars and when I get pulled over, I regularly have my car searched from top to bottom looking for drugs when the stop was allegedly for things like a bent license plate or some such nonsense.
See, this is what I'm talking about. I hadn't even thought of going to a pet supply store to look for cell culture incubators. This stuff is still so ground level for the home market. Sharing these sorts of tips is invaluable.
Of course what's more intriguing is doing the elctronics to make your own, but knowing where to get stuff that is easily adaptable is good too. Sometimes it's good to improvise completely from scratch, sometimes it's better to take something that gets you halfway there.
For kitchen cultures like yogurt and sourdough I've used a variety of incubators from rice cookers and crock pots to all sorts of lamps. While the DIY lamp jobs are more fun and impressive looking, the crock pots are easier to clean which is an important issue once you get beyond the first experiments.
I really recommend sourdough to anybody. It's so simple and even if you skip the bread and just make pancakes it's awesome.
It's incredibly simple to make starter, but don't trust me. Google for the sourdough FAQ and then look for the answer to how to make starter. It's amazing how it works.
Biotechhobbyist is right along the lines of a PostNuke forum I set up a few years ago and have been slowly updating. I'm so pleased to see more of this sort of thing.
I strongly believe that biotech is the logical next place for the DIY revolution or the hacker approach to innovation or whatever you want to call it and that a key to getting there is for people to digest the journal articles and make it doable for people at home.
This is such a hot area for the DIY enthusiast because its an intersection of so many skills that are already honed by being a computer geek.
I'm quite impressed and I can't wait to see more.
Interesting that Biotechhobbyist seems to be from UCSD. I've covered a really cool story coming out of the same campus called the Discode project which calls itself an open-source biotech hardware project. It uses CD-ROMs and inkjet printers to enable DIY molecular interaction screening. Amazing stuff.
I hear they're still looking for Linux kernel hackers with good understading of CD-ROM drivers. If you're in San Diego and you're a CD hacker, you should check out the project.
Well you also touch on the very real issue which is completely obfuscated in the fear mongering over child pornography which is the fact, and this is a very well documented fact, that the vast, vast majority of child molestation cases take place within the family and have absolutely nothing to do with this mythical image of the child predator.
Sure, you can document the sick twisted case of the totally whacked out career child killer freak all you like, but those are the extreme exceptions to the rule. The rule is that child molestation occurs within the home at the hands of an offender who is either a member or the family or close associate.
But the hype over child pornography literally pays thousands of people's salaries and forms the backbone of political careers and so you won't see it going away soon depite the fact that it has little to do with the real situation regarding the crime that it supposedly is targeting --child molestation.
Yeah, I tend to lean on the Pascal implementation in Macromedia Authorware. I actually use it to script the process of writing bash scripts. I know it sounds bass ackwards but it's so familiar from previous work that I can't resist. I can get a lot of work done fast that way.
I've been told previously here on Slashdot that the Pascal implementation in Authorware is quite similar to what was in the original Mac.
I've also read that BASIC is really just a derivative of Pascal and VB even more so.
I thought the same thing. I really enjoyed the answers. It was genuinely a pleasure to read up until the end.
I was just at one of the giant chain bookstores in town, these have replaced several of the smaller ones that are already gone. They do the overpriced coffee thing and it does have the function as a public space, but I'm not sure this is a long term sustainable business. There were tons of people reading books as though it were a library and the books looked like library books as well, the pages were well thumbed through and most wrapped books had long since been unwrapped. So, it was filled with people, but I noticed that for the few hours I was there practically nobody purchased a thing and the four check-out lanes were occupied by staff chatting amongst themselves. Perhaps they make it up by volume?
And as for publishers. Well, that seems to have been conveniently skipped over. I mean I happen to have some small publishers in my family and in my experience they're first and foremost precisely about changing books for money and that role is indeed quite threatened by the Net. That's a good thing as far as I'm concnered despite the fact that it means people I love need to get a new business and go through rough times. I still believe it is for the better. It would have been nice to see some more thoughtful reflection on what's really going on here.
Actually though, that criticism also applies to his lack of originality on the future of money. Money is not such an ancient or impenetrable concept really. There are many many ways to distribute wealth in societies besides paper currency.
But overall it was quite entertaining.
Id' say that is the real problem for MS right there. Most businesses don't use the latest version of Word. Not only that, a huge number aren't using the latest version of the OS either. They're already their own biggest competition. That's a real problem.
This is the squeeze play problem and its a very serious problem from a business perspective. For the lazy, if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it crowd you've got this unwillingness to upgrade. Then on the other side you've got the geeks who want the latest toys and love to tweak everything. Hmm, already lost them to Open Source. So, they're stuck in the middle trying to sound innovative and yet unable to change too much. The only guaranteed clients are those that are somehow forced to buy the product or those who aren't too concerned about IT budgets. In times of growth, the latter can be found in adbundance if you market your upgrade as the safe thing to do. But growth is patchy these days.
Business wise, where they're at is not a good place to be right now.
Here's what I said at that time.
But anyhow, while I can see this guy's point I don't think the Blacksmith is such a great example because metalworking is still a vital part of the economy. The Blacksmith per se may be a thing of the past, but metalworking, which is what Blacksmiths did, had not diminished at all. It has become such an essential part of so many trades that it is no longer reasonable to assign it to just one group of workers. Almost all manufacturing deals with metal fabrication at some point.
I guess this was meant to be funny and it is but it highlights a key point about software which is that software doesn't require economies of scale which is why FOSS is unstoppable. You can't out-produce open source to shut it down and drive it out of the market. This is a common tactic with conventional products that no longer applies to software because it scales so easily that scalability is not longer a significant factor.
cannot have a true democracy.
Once you get past a few tens of thousands of individuals, a genuinely representative democracy is no longer a realistic possibility because you lose the ability of every member to directly address the forum deciding the issues. What is fucked up is that we still refer to the US's government as a democracy when that's really no longer an appropriate term.
A true democracy would be based on referrendums on issues which people would vote on directly. Real democracy does not require representatives to speak on issues. Anybody who wishes to participate in the congress may participate. Representatives in a real democracy only serve to organize the democratic institutions, not decide upon issues for the citizens. The citizens must decide on the issues for themselves in a public forum in a real democracy.
That's how a real democracy works. But, like I pointed out, you really can't use this system once your population grows too large because the possibility for direct dialogue that is an essential part of the decision making process becomes unmanageable.
Intriguingly, a forum system not unlike Slashdot could be used to modernize the ancient concept of direct participation in democracy and apparently can scale up to around a million users and still maintain some functionality.
So, Slashdot could become the replacement for the misused sense of democracy that we now have in the States. We'll just break the granularity down into sections of one million instead of States.
For some less populated states this won't be much of a change. But for places like California or New York it will create the issue of major legal distinctions between geographically close districts. You'll be able to traffic in kilos of Coke in Santa Monica, but be careful when you cross over into Orange County.
Whether this is true about American programming jobs or not is debateable, but putting all the emphasis on overseas workers seems rather misplaced to me. It's always the easy way to play on that fear of the other and its usually a misguided effort. I think the reality is that there was a huge rush to create software with the acceptance of the GUI that exaggerated the size of the long-term job market for programming skills.
This wasn't helped by corporations like Microsoft who blatantly hyped the potential economic returns of programming as a business. The only way their version of the development world worked was if everyone essentially joined into a pyramid scheme. And like any good pyramid scheme, only the guys on top got fat.
The fact is, although it looked like there was endless work to be done when the GUI desktop was a novel metaphor in people's lives, a few years later the work doesn't seem so endless. Much has been accomplished. Just look at how far FOSS has come in the last few years. It's not just impressive, it's astounding and to ignore that seems to take a bit of willfull ignornce. The fact is, the basic tools seem to have been done to death at this point.
So, at that stage you do have to ask yourself if it might not just be a fact that as software matures it simply doesn't require hundreds of thousands of individuals constantly creating new products day in and day out when the basic products aren't really changing much. It's not like a conventional physical manufacturing industry like autos where you need staff just to keep the product flowing even if the product isn't changing. Unlike conventional products, software is a product that continues to flow even when it is no longer being produced or even marketed.
Finally, you have to look at hardware. This should say something to you that a lot of programmers just don't want to face. When harware becomes so cheap it's like a disposable item then you simply cannot sustain the kind of software market that companies like Microsoft or Sun have assured developers will exist. If you believed the lies, well who's to blame? The evidence of reality is available at any consumer electronics store. The only dark, menacing conspiracy is the one that comes from within. If you wanted to believe something that couldn't be true and obviously wasn't, then is the best solution to blame "foreigners"? I think this is a seriously problematic response to a reality that is standing right before us quite plainly.
As though even the Pentium M was a cool chip. Not even close. Those things are fiercely hot.
I just tried to diagnose a P4M 1.7Ghz IBM thinkpad that was intermittently cutting out when running XP.
Any time it was under load while running XP, the built-in high speed fan would kick up to high speed and this thing turned into a hair dryer. That's exactly what it was like. A freaking hair dryer.
It was just cranking out a stream of baking hot air. This was supposed to be notebook, but there's no way in hell you could operate in on your lap and even on a wooden desk it was iffy.
Then XP would freeze up and it needed reboot. This thing is like a month old.
Anyhow, all the tests showed nothing wrong with the hardware. The problem seems obvious. It's not that anything is broken per se, it's just overheating. That's not right. That's fraud.