And tell them that there stuff sucks. Better then there competition, and better then TodaysVersion-1, but it still sucks.
Dont make the upgrade today. Say that its not worth it. We can survive for a bit, the incremental difference is not worth the cost. Talk to me in a year when you come out with another major version.
I hate to say it, but this isn't insightful. It's pure-dee wrong. I really am not being a troll here, so bear with me. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH SOFTWARE LIFECYCLES right now.
The above quote's statements are, for most people, compatible.
For a software developer, they should, by now, be completely incompatible or even seem insanely orthogonal/contradictory.
Good code is not more features. Do NOT send your vendor back and tell them to make a new major version. They'll add more features.
Instead, say Your stuff sucks. And I don't mean number of features. Most features aren't getting used, because they and the most simple aspects of this code are all so buggy we're afraid to leave certain narrow ruts because stuff fails. GO BACK AND FIX STUFF. SIMPLIFY. EDIT. SIMPLIFY. REFACTOR. DON'T THINK MAJOR VERSION. Give me a point-revision mindset that cleans stuff up and works well, that is modularized and well-engineered.
We're coders. The I/T image should be of Engineers. Not technobabble-spouting primadonna ballerinas. Done well, most coding should seem a bit boring. Until we learn and internalize that, we're going to watch customer-respect remain in free-fall.
Perhaps efiling works for you, (heck, for MOST people) but I don't fit that model:
We've got 5 businesses (3 employers, 2 self-employed businesses), trusts, investments, a family corporation, significant claimable debt carryover from a failed business a few years ago, I'm not the right age, I hammer the hell out of Schedule C (schedule C is your friend, everyone... every dollar off there is a buck off your pre-deductions income!!!), there's lots of 1099 paperwork (interest/dividends and contract work), our pre-dividends income is approx. 100k, and since the wife and I both work and we have kids, there's not a LOT of time I'm eager to devote to managing bills each month. I'm not in the military, I'm not old, and in general, I don't qualify for any of the freebie e-file frameworks this year.
In boycotting Turbotax (I have every version going back to Parsons and before... the rude, greedy, dumb bastards), I looked at TaxAct, too. For most people, it'd be great. 1040-ez, 1040-A, no sweat. Minor 1040 stuff, still fine. Unfortunately, every review I've seen says TaxAct (the program, not the online version, so I may be wrong here, but I doubt it) suffers (or fails) under a complex return like mine. I'm cool that most of the country files the easy forms... but I can't afford to.
With planning, I could do it all completely by hand, and have done in the past. But the notes/worksheets I make during tax prep are going to be priceless when/if I get audited. So, I pretty much think the software is a must-have.
I could pay someone, but I know my business and tax situation intimately and have yet to meet an accountant that knows my tax situation's nuances well enough to save me anything more than I will save myself. Heck, as I'm sorting receipts I'll remember (and dig for receipts, cancelled checks, etc.) for other deductible transactions that account for an additional grand in refund money. For that matter, I don't have them to blame if I do get audited and owe penalties.
I treat what I do like hacking. I'm Hackin' taxes to get every last nickel of performance out of my return. I like reading tax law and knowing it better than almost anyone I know. And, unlike this, each hour spent on my taxes tends to be worth a few hundred bucks in found money.
I'm also paranoid, so remote-hosting of my mondo tax return ain't happening any time soon. Don't know why... I just don't wanna share all my info any more than legally required.
So, I pretty much will be the last guy to use or qualify for various free programs. Being a WASP male, I'm used to not getting special favors at times like these (and yes, that's a dig at Affirmative Action, despite my being quite in favor of AAction).
$30 (deductible, so net cost after tax-refund is $20ish) gets me complete control of my data, lets me record post-its about how/why I qualify for esoteric deduction X, lets me print/save those in case I get audited, lets me work anywhere/anytime I can slip it in between Jan 31 and April 15. My $30 gets me relatively complete IRS documentation (I usually have to hit the IRS for 1 or 2 advisories or instructions in a given year), plus some great tutorial material to watch/read. And this year I got copies of 2003 antivirus, Microsoft Money (ooh, masster, it burnses!), and a legal advisor as free add-ons. I'd have bought the antivirus, so that was a direct savings that takes my net after-tax-and-value-received expense to $10 or less. And I get a free e-file.
Perhaps web-file will get improved. And I really hope either some filing software or online forms become platform-independent (so I can work under Linux) or that someone will come up with a way I trust to do online paperwork (data saved locally with a viewer mechanism, perhaps?).
To be honest, the one part of the whole e-file process that just CHAPS MY ASTERISK is getting charged $10 for the privilege of helping the IRS avoid labor-intensive hand-data-entry. I am paying them to save themselves money. That's just sick and wrong. If it isn't a matter of the potential interest on a few thousand dollars on my return, I'll submit the stuff manually and tell them to fsck themselves about paying for the electronic return.
Most users don't give a damn about the philosophy behind the software. When my managers hear "Linux" and "Open Source" they really hear "free". They like it because it doesn't cost them anything.
and then the thread degenerated into TCO comparisons.
On the Microsoft's radar article recently, someone else argued that people that think free(beer) is important are somehow clueless, because the true objective is free(speech).
My objective is usability and efficiency for me. I do my own cost/savings ratios. From these, I see I sometimes waste time on inefficient tasks, and I REGULARLY get paid lots of money for my time, when I could have more cheaply bought a solution. I've learned to not question it when I'm told to do so, since it's usually fun and interesting work.
I think the reason for regularly getting told to do something inefficiently rather than buy a solution, is because it 'seems' more expensive to buy a fix since they'll be paying me either way. With that in mind:
Sure, most people pick 'Free' rather then spendy. TCO requires mental discipline or attention to details.
Causing microsoft's price to drop is a good thing on so many levels. It diminishes an exhorbitant markup ratio (99%?) which silences FUD marketing, puts money back into consumer pockets so they can spend it on me (hey, I can dream!), and if we're lucky, it'll slow down Microsoftian feature creep and let us develop for stable API's and start acting more like engineers and less like ballerina's and egotistical artiste's.
More users means more of a market in Linux. That means the stuff I like that hasn't ported over from windows *might* get ported. There's always something. Right now, it's TaxCut (die, TurboTax, die!).
More attention means better code on linux-side.
So... do most people overlook the pseudo-progressive leanings of FSW and just think 'free as in beer'? Sure. Am I ok with that? A helluva lot more ok than I am with spending money on you-know-who.
You know, a recent story about who really discovered the telegraph could use this story as compelling evidence. Most stories get rejected by slashdot. On the other hand, some stories' time has come. They burst to the surface and are so new/hip/relevant that multiple editors deem the story noteworthy/newsworthy and slap the 'publish' button. This mirrors how reality works: so many inventions, patents, movies, etc. see similar near-simultaneous 'discoveries.'
Couldn't a bayesian filter be rigged that would give slashdot's "editors" a tool for avoiding dupes like this?
Hmm... Tools for tools, thus avoiding dupes from dupes. What next, new news?! Unthinkable, Absurd.
And another thing: if we're going to be upset about P2P music trading, why aren't we upset about used CDs? Artists don't get a *dime* from those transactions, and those transactions lead to the purchaser actually obtaining the thing of real value - a physical copy!
Um, you've just described the software industry's history so far...
First, copying was rampant.
Then there was a strong attempt to prevent piracy via copy protection.
Users became well-informed enough that they selected unprotected software over protected that almost all software stopped being protected.
-- About then also came the BSA and slogans to the effect that copying is theft.
Now, software is so aggressively licensed that users are being forced back into an unacceptable realm:
you pay full a stiff price for something that can be installed on one computer,
has no warranty or guarantee of servicability,
cannot be resold,
etc.
Lately, copyprotection is reappearing.
If I had to guess, I'd say that a consumer backlash will come next. That might be linux's role.
If we see the same sort of thing in the music industry, we're going to watch
legal, propaganda (more or less) and technological attempts to reign in music sharing. So far, none of the technical measures have succeeded, but propaganda is working a bit, and legal is successful to the point of overkill/backlash. The industry also could be planning to use propaganda and shifting from sale to licensure. This will make it so that resold music will be illegalized and the resellers will be branded thieves and shut down.
It's all about the money. People have found ways of selling air (advertising, music, movies, etc.), and any effort to throttle these venues off is going to be fought. Hard. The important part for the rest of us is to keep in mind that, while it isn't important in a cosmic/grand-scheme sort of way, most of us are paying more in this 'Disney Tax' than most other taxes. So, what we need here is a nice citizen's tax initiative...
How many people ACTUALLY make calls from their computer?... quality still doesn't compare... I remember making calls back in '98 when this was a new technology, and I stopped after about 2 weeks.
Well, things have improved in 4-5 years. I know several people that spent most of those years installing hardware VoIP for businesses!
Personal use is getting approachable, too. Someone recently had a column (eweek, ddj, infoworld... I read too much and can't find it!) that talked about links on dslreports.com that talked about switching to Vonage, a hardware VoIP vendor. Their base price is $25-40 per month, with lots of services, cheap int'l, and TRUE number portability!
Poll Question - Do you really make calls that often from your computer?
The more fair question is who uses VoIP and is it hardware? Since there's so much evidence (lag-times during generic phone calls (try counting in unison with someone on a phone call to measure lagtime), the mere presence of some sort of multiplexer between my home and the phone company's Central Office, and noise-cancellation effects (where the other side LITERALLY goes silent rather than transmit minor background noise) I think we're all using a lot more VoIP than we realize.
Speaking of which, it really chaps my asterisk to think the phone companies managed to make this sort of massive savings (to datastreams rather than a copper pair per call) and our rates went up, not down. As much as people complain about the **AA's, telcos top my list of companies that have rip-off pricing. Despite my losing about $30k in value on my telco stock last year, I am thrilled to see them cratering.
Sorry to hear the project's in trouble. Man, it sucks that big companies keep enforcing these frivolous patents.
If it helps in proving prior art, some guy invented something similar about 500 years ago, but I can't remember his name...
projects not in trouble
Man, I was going for obscure joke, but not so obscure that I wanted to screw my karma and get corrected...
Maybe I should have gone with the other joke that came to mind: Feature creep is killing the project. Who needs a printing press with OCR and voice recognition?
Disdainfully,
-- advaitavedanta
My grandpa was an engineer. Pretty much spent his day doing a lot of what I do, solving problems. He was freelancing/contracting when he died in his 80's.
My uncle got into computers before I was born. Retired and freelancing.
I've been at this since I was a teenager. Every project/process I have used has long since gone away and been replaced by something more complex. The amount of available work has grown exponentially throughout.
What'll I be doing in 20 years? Retiring... and by that I mean shifting to part-time and being selective about the projects I do.
Do I think the specific work type I'll be doing will change? Yeah. Appreciably? Nah. I'll be teaching things how to do stuff. It might be computers, it might be lightwave-based tools, and it might be little microbes. Assembling logic-based tools is what I like, regardless of what the tool looks like. I/T, to me, is the epitome of wise laziness... rather than doing it all myself, I spend all day inventing ways to automate tasks.
Sorry to hear the project's in trouble. Man, it sucks that big companies keep enforcing these frivolous patents.
If it helps in proving prior art, some guy invented something similar about 500 years ago, but I can't remember his name...
Re:Unbelievably depressing?
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
Is it just me, or is that story just unbelievably depressing? The writer didn't really acknowledge this - those two people who spent their lives working on Dragon Dictate wound up completely hosed, and can't hack on their lifes' work anymore. I mean, *ouch*!
It's just you.
First off, they broke their own long-standing rule, and tried to sell their life's work for $300 Million. Who the Fsck needs 300 mills, considering that they could have had a much greater control over their life's work if they'd accepted a pheaper price? THEY SOLD THEIR LIFE'S WORK. THEY CHOSE TO SELL OUT. THEY DID NOT SELL LICENSES. THEY WERE CASHING OUT OF THE BUSINESS. Anything less of a goal would have a cheaper price-tag and more legal recourse now.
Second, they could go 'a couple dozen exits' up the road and APPLY FOR A JOB. Sheesh, I should feel sorry for these people?! They're arguably expert in the field, and they live near the code's owner. If the new owner doesn't hire them, then some competitor will.
Third, they could start over. Lessons learned come cheap the second time around. Ironically, I'd point to this when they started thinking of taking VeeCee money.
Fourth, fifth, and sixth: Open Source, frequently release old versions to open source, and did I mention Open Source.
No, it doesn't tear my heartstrings out. They grabbed at a damned valuable prize, and nowhere does the article talk about their current net worth. Somehow, I suspect this is because they are worth a STINKLOAD. Pity the poor rich capitalist? Not I. The ideas and knowledge they have are intact. The problem isn't solved. They could resume their pursuit of the goal, and they no doubt are financially well enough off that this won't be a hardship for them.
On the other hand, 40000 companies went bankrupt in 2001. Assuming small-businesses dominate that list, for an average of just a few people per company, that still is a fraction of a Million people who are out of work. That's pain and suffering. This isn't. This is whining about ending up a millionaire instead of a billionaire, and MAN, I don't have time to listen to it...
(waves hand) These are not the suffering masses you're looking for. Move along, now.
This is very popular among US Government employees. Some people who get a lot of email can have their personal folders file grow to 2GB in a year or less. At this level MS recommends breaking it up since corruption can occur.
Hmm... is that the filesystem or the Government that gets corrupt when it gets too fat?
I also laughed at the thought of a convicted monopolist like MS recommending this breakup.
With the upcoming superbowl, I sure do appreciate seeing folks warming up their armchair quarterback skills.
Short of weather, taxes, sports and personal hygiene, it seems like environmentalism just brings out the stupidest and hastiest when it comes to holding-forth-like-an-expert.
I mean, I've just read comments from people that worked in a fab (who claim to therefore know all the details of the fab's environmental remediation processes), people inventing an environmental impact metric based on goods/fuel ratio comparisons between cars (largely steel and plastic, with a per-device weight in the tons, and ironically containing many microchips) and microchips (which weigh tens of grams... the comparison is ABSURD), and lots of people advocating all sorts of half-assed remedies.
It's good to explore ideas, but frankly I haven't seen this much evidence at how unscientific techies can be since I taught a freshman physics lab. C'mon, be as critical of your own methodology as you are of the facilities involved.
The fabs I have toured or audited all had room for improvements, but seemed to:
Have existing and prototype materials-reuse mechanisms implemented to minimize environmental impact. Solvents, the most obvious and arguably the most hazardous, almost always cost so much in terms of purchasing and RCRA-compliant disposal, that a distillation or recovery mechanism costing six figures (dollars) pays for itself easily. This means there are financial benefits and PR benefits, so companies are very open/willing to clean things up.
Admittedly use an insane amount of water. A large chunk of this is a byproduct of Reverse Osmosis distillation to get water to Megohm pure and better. My point is, the water isn't just pumped thru their wastewater stream to dilute things. It comes in, is superduper-distilled (basically), and then used at an insane rate for processes & rinsing. Water consumption is the biggest environmental problem of most fabs, but the problem isn't how dirty they make it... it's the regional impact of so much water being consumed.
Either directly treat all wastewater (including their own special steps to precipitate out metals or other problem materials, and are constantly testing/evaluating water quality) or discharge it to a community-owned facility that they work extensively with (to get all the above items). My experience is that much of the water pollution is precipitated out, sludge-pressed, and shipped/handled as low-grade hazardous waste.
Are, by all the environmental engineers I've ever worked with, greener in most every sense of the word than most other industries. By this I mean the staffs always seem to be proactively reducing their environmental impact. They've started since the US's environmental awakening around 1970, so they don't have to struggle to keep up with competitors grandfathered in doing things some old/cheap/dirty way, etc.
Last of all, the head story mentions HF and arsine. I've been out of this a long time, but if memory serves both are very reactive in a way that they readily degrade into safer compounds and are generally considered to have *NO* long-term environmental impact. They can't survive in the wild enough to be a community/wastewater/landfill concern. The moment I hit this part, I felt like I was reading an econut's rant about highly-radioactive long-lived isotopes... all scientific credibility goes to hell when you spout off half-truths to make a headline. The only people that need to worry about HF or AsH3 are people in the room when it leaks and emergency responders. Anyone else (even a block away) has zero risk short- or long-term to these. Nasty? Hell, yes. Silane (common in fabs) scares me even more (it absorbs thru tissue and makes swiss cheese out of your bones, I'm told). But a community's worst fear from their local fab should be DNAPL's (Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids). TCE, Perc and other DNAPL's can pollute a town's groundwater for a few hundred years, costing the town tens of millions of dollars for air-scrubbers or other remediation hardware.
Just to dodge the karma damage a bit, I'm very very much an environmentalist. But I'm an engineer. And I feel environmental protections suffer when people use half-truths and poor science like this. We need to treat it like racism or other societal ills... question everything (including proposed remedies) and stick to an ethical high road that demands that we NEVER sneak by a scientific half-truth. Otherwise, we risk losing our credibility and accidentally creating a legal framework that strangles the innovations and self-improvements we need to advance.
... the next generation of flexible flat panel display technologies...
I realize I've been on a bender since New Year's Eve, but... where was the first generation of these?
The only flexible flat panel I've ever seen was this palmpilot my friend sat down on, 'tho I really doubt it qualified as a display technology after he crushed it.
Re:wierd but nice
on
SAUNAAB
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I especially like the roof. For most of us writing
software all day, it's nice to see things crafted
out of steel and wood. Something real, not made
from bits that are on the road to being obsolete
and forgotten as soon as it's built.
I don't think I'd have carpentry skills but I'm considering
getting out of programming and doing something with
atoms. Glassblowing seems like it would be fun and
rewarding. Certainly more fun than declaring my two
millionth variable...
Jesus. Yes, get out of this business. You have no business being here.
Get a grip, man.
I think you'd be surprised how many computer professionals feel an air of intangibility about what we write or maintain, and I've written five times more worthless on-demand code than stuff I treasure.
The lead developer in my last job had a PhD in applied math, was leading the charge in a full J2EE implementation so we WOULD have a stronger likelihood of writing useful reusable code elegantly... and his true love was woodworking.
His words: "it's nice to make something that is tangible and that will still be around and usable twenty or a hundred years from now".
Me, if I could do it all over again, I swore midway through grad school, I'd be a chef. I'm a positively brilliant cook, there's pretty good pay, less schooling, great relocatability to let me live/move anywhere I want, and it has a great immediate feedback system: In all my years, nobody's ever walked up to me and said "Ya know, that is one incredible integral equation you've worked out there."
But that's just one physics/computer geek talking...
Spread the cost out, man... ask 'Who can afford a few grand a year?!'
Young people. 15 to 25, no mortgage or significant debt, a job, and lots of exposure via friends to help thin out the good music from the bad before buying...
I bought music from when I was 15 to about 28 yrs old, and didn't buy much compared to most of my music-fanatic friends. Since then, I've tapered off to a few cd's a year, plus a few more as gifts. I've got well over 100 tapes, 150 in vinyl, 250 cd's, and one 8-track (Abbey Road, don't ask why). And I repeat, I wasn't SERIOUSLY into music like several friends I had...
So, 1000 seems quite plausible. What's more, a lot of those I got via cheap sources: rummage & yard sales, used bins, friends, etc. Nowadays, I pick up a cd when I hear a good concert or live band in a bar. Since the night's bar tab has usually cost me a lot more than the $10-15 for the CD, I consider it a tip to a good band and a chance to reminisce later.
Round down to 15k (that's being charitable compared to your $20 per album), give me 1/5 the needed collection, and spread it over the last 30 years, and it seems laughably cheap... $100 a YEAR on average. Rich?! Shee-it, I spent more last weekend on sushi! Throw in the wife's similarly-sized music collection, not force me to waste a wall in my li'l house (not to mention portability like ipods and archos units have) and give me access to stuff that's only available on out-of-print vinyl and I'd probably start collecting old, good music like a fiend.
Aiieee... Who thought this was intelligent? How the screamin' George Jetson did that get to a 5!? This is arguably the dumbest damn mod-5 posting I've ever been subjected to. Thank the gods at least one person has -1'd it for being 'overrated'.
C'mon, folks, this isn't 'news for nimrods' or Networking for Idiots! I expect this sort of post-hallucinagenic half-witted technobabble based on guesses from normal people who discover I'm a computer expert, but not from technically-inclined geeks!
This post seems to imply a whole slew of people (moderators and poster) don't digest the technical basics in/. stories enough to understand basics like digital signals allowing better noise cancellation (taking the ring out of untwisted copper well enough to enable DSL or T-1's), frequency-based filtering (notch filters, chokes, ham radio, and LRC circuits), and a slew of other concepts probably involved that I have no clue on, since I'm no expert on stuff that involves digital via telecom systems (opto-isolators, for example).
But, for crissake, I don't pop off with my half-baked stupid/fearful ramblings because a misinstalled cheap-ass Radio Shack intercom based on 20-year-old analog technology buzzed a lot, and/or moderate up stuff that I don't know beans about as 'insightful'.
Here's a simple (and I thought obvious) rule, moderators:
If you don't know the subject well enough to know who is an expert and who isn't, don't GUESS. Just don't moderate the posting. Wait for an expert to do the peer review.
Ohmigod. I just noticed the grammar gaff in the title. Will it work as well, not good. That clinches it. Slashdot's been hacked or redirected to some wierd Jeff Foxworthy Redneck alternate Slashdot. I can't wait for the Monster Truck, WWF and Nascar stories to flood in...
You wanna abuse stock and revenue statistics to make a false point? Here are a few for you:
Microsoft's share price had it's worst year ever last year. Admittedly, that just means it hasn't doubled. Yeah, they've got a license to print money all right. Uh-huh. Suuurre they do. They're bumping their heads against something. It could be a revenue ceiling (saturated markets) or they could be losing ground thanks to Product Activation, high license fees, and inroads made by alternatives like Linux. Having twice seen the industry migrate away from proprietary restrictions like copy protection and mainframe-era protections, I'd be willing to declare Ediron's Law: People will pay extra for piracy-enabling technologies. Hmm... divx makes three. By 2004, we'll hopefully see TurboTax as a latest example of people flooding away from copy-protection. It'll take another year or two to be obvious about Microsoft, because they're too intertwined into businesses today to be abandoned immediately.
Yeah, Red Hat's profit is 300k. But that's not sad. That's not 300k in revenue. That's 300k left over after paying their entire staff professional-grade salaries. It isn't 300k divvied up among them all, or anything else pathetic like you seem to believe. That was on 24 million in revenue. In 3 months. 100 Million in revenue off free software is the diametric opposite of pathetic, in my view. It's Fscking miraculous. They're also reporting a 14-21% revenue growth curve (looking back a quarter and a year, respectively). This means, since costs are headed downward, they will likely see profitability continue to climb.
What's more, since Red Hat's officially in the black, a whole segment of nay-sayers just got a key argument silenced: RED HAT WILL BE AROUND IN A FEW YEARS. That makes it easier for Red Hat to win contracts.
Red Hat's market cap means the free market believes they're a billion dollar company. So what if you disagree, they haven't lost 99% of their net worth like a lot of firms I can name:
Red Hat's market cap and share price has done a lot better than all those other nice companies like Lucent, AT & T, (insert litany of telecom names), (insert litany of dot-bomb names), (insert litany of software firms).
(Now, flaming my overall favorite Linux flavor for a moment... )
The fact that Mandrake can't pull their own market up is their own damn stupidity on marketing. I WOULD LOVE TO BUY a Mandrake product. Each new version's ISO goes online a month ahead of any retail copy. Further, each new version NEVER GETS TO A STORE NEAR ME. I can't blame them on the latter, but the first one is just sheer idiocy. I won't wait a month, and I won't buy something a month after I've burned the ISO's.
Mandrake can fix this, or even invert the timeline completely, and I wouldn't complain a bit. Most profitable: sell their new release for 30 days before setting out free ISO downloads. Or they could restrict downloads for 30 days. Or (heaven forbid) they could adhere to a 'right way', and fix their product stream and have the disks available for purchase and shipment immediately upon release, and keep everyone happy. I know I'd pay $50 to avoid a few days of iso-hunting. Fact is, they could do ANYTHING akin to this, and I'd buy it. However, paying for something I already have installed legally is nothing more than charity. Work and charity shouldn't overlap, in my opinion. I say make your money, then spend your profits however you see fit (including charitable acts).
(please, Mandrake, grab a clue here. You're doing this so badly that I find myself making annoyed anti-frog remarks like I do when your nation legislates your language, it seems so incompetent!)
I don't pay attention to VA lately (their preassembled machines running linux cost enough more than bare boxen that it also looks like charity). Shame. The one machine of theirs I bought had a hefty chassis. I just can't convince anyone I work for to pay the hefty surcharge they want for that hardware.
IBM has always been about embracing the strongest competition. They are strongest when they act like the diametric opposite of NIH-syndrome (Not Invented Here, or Not In House) shops like HP. It would be impossible to swallow up linux, though. This would be like inhaling too much air (only more so, since technically air is limited. Free software isn't).
I don't even know any of the activists behind linux, but my view is that the cause, for most people, is to create good software, get it widely used, and make a decent living (not a rape-n-pillage 95% royalty like MSFT's per-package markup). In other words, even if Microsoft embraces linux *appropriately*, it'd be a victory. System prices would go down, code robustness and flexibility would go up, and linux systems would be deployed where needed and not be denied because 'linux isn't legitimate'.
While proofing this, it occurs to me that *either* version of Divx proves my point about the perceived value of piracy-enabling technologies. I was talking about the pay-per-play DVD's, but the new one has such a rabid following that it makes an interesting case, too.
Last of all, it occurs to me that you're a troll. Unfortunately, nobody seems to get it on the moderations, so I'm still going to post this.
I say the internet makes an excellent source of a cheap 2nd opinion.
For instance, take the PDR. Few physicians I know regularly use it; it's simply a list of drug-company inserts, where they list every possible side effect of every possible...
A few weeks after my doc put me on Imuran, I started having the Technicolor Yawns ~30 minutes after each pill. When I asked if it could the meds, I was told "No, it's not the med, but perhaps you should try taking it just before bedtime". Distrustful bastard that I am, I checked the PDR and learned that a small percentage of Imuran recipients will develop a reaction after a few weeks that makes them talk to ralph about his buick after every dose. After that, they'll upchuck if they ever take even a single dose.
Imagine several nights of waking up to bolt and bargle . I'm not a lawsuit sort of person, but I hate retching even more than lawyers. In fact, callin' home the dinosaurs late at night because someone else is too proud/stupid to RTFM makes me want to sue them personally for incompetence in a nice sympathetic Texas court.
OK...
Flopsy is, to all appearances, a shill for the dark side.
In the few moments it took me to read his posting on alterslash, I was appalled at the idea that this thing was rated 5-insightful, considering how many instances of bad logic it exhibits:
In his comments, Klawans makes reference to old Jazz 78 rpm records that he has transfered to CD, AND which he says record companies will not reissue because they are not profitable.
This argument is strongly flawed.
First, the preservation of art form has little to do with profitability and everything to do with art lover's willingness to preserve those forms.
Art lovers cannot preserve anything under Bono or DMCA, since they are not creators of that content. This RIGHT has been denied, despite constitutional language that puts forth this right.
History is full of examples of obscure books, art, and music that have been preserved while more popular (profitable) works fell by the wayside.
And pointing to one artifact from the past and declaring that it is proof that all worthwhile art has been preserved is just silly. Every historian I've met says old documents are rife with references to other stuff that they'd kill to see, but which has disappeared.
Furthermore, the proper way to preserve musical recordings like 78 rpm records is to preserve the means of playing those records.
That's an opinion. Considering the fallibility of media and the fact that this prevents anyone but an obsessive or enthusiast from experiencing anything created solely on 78's, I say it's a pretty poor opinion. I like old jazz, but not enough to build/maintain an old Victrola (sp?).
For example. 78 rpm record players are still readily available, they just take some work to find.
Do you hear how intellectually elitist you sound? Telling us that we're not worthy of early jazz recordings unless we suffer a bit?
Putting these recordings on P2P networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.
Rightful. That's when I lost it. YOU DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT FOR PREVENTING COPIES. WE HAVE A RIGHT TO COPY. YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN A PRIVILEGE TO CONTROL THE COPYING FOR A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME.
Besides, nobody deserves anything they didn't earn directly. I don't like royalty (as in kings), I am not sure I like huge inheritances, and I sure as hell don't think that anyone's great-grandkids deserve anything special.
I'm in favor of fair use, but no progress will be made against the DMCA's overly restrictive policies by using bad logic.
Based on all the rest of the bad logic, this is when I decided you're a shill. Because that seems so trite. A half dozen of Atwater-esque Big Lies, wrapped up nicely with a 'and I'm on your side.' If you're so for fair use, let's see you argue for it, rather than using tricks and poor logic to try to pollute the pool.
ultralow frequency is all that passes more than a few meters into water. I defy you to communicate electromagnetically with anything in deep water at >60hz. (Again, I'm not going to grab the physics book to remind myself just how thick skin depth is for water at 60 hz, but memory says a few meters). If you're only able to spread spectrum over 60 hz, I think it'll be noticeable by E.T.
Certain frequencies bounce atmospherically. Others can't penetrate trees and walls. Spread spectrum mechanisms will have to work around the latter, and will never achieve non-line-of-sight without remaining in a narrow band for the former.
Chemically, similar tricks/issues abound. I don't have an example in mind, but can imagine issues like: auto-immune rejection of an implanted device restricting it's composition, and the RF equivalent of bic shavers (throwaway communicators?).
Strict Physics/Chemistry dependencies aren't going away, even in a few billion years, unless you expect all subaquatics to use a non-RF method (or a damn-long extension cord/leash) and for the skies to have a cloud of redirect/forward sat's to COMPLETELY obviate the advantages of atmospheric bounce under every circumstance (including experimental and hobbyist use).
Transmissions and pointing: I'll assume you plan this to all happen in hardware/software. I'll similarly assume protocols that allow sharing lists of 'public broadcasts available' and other mechanisms to allow the economies of one-to-many to remain, or that you're just planning bandwidth to exceed demand and become as free as air. Both are plausible. Otherwise, initiating a conversation is impossible (if both parties don't know who to look for to see if 'they' want to talk to 'me'). This 'hailing frequencies' concept never seems to die, but I can at least work around it with protocols akin to the 'net or cell phones.
Dunno where '10k better' comes from. Source of the number? Data compression gets Video down 10x in demanded bandwidth. God himself won't get that to 100x improvement. Advanced methods of signal compression can get you another 20x. You popped off about almost infinite compression into an existing 6mhz band of television last time, and I wasn't buying it. Still not. Certainly not *better* than 10000x. An exception would be by shrinking the geographical footprint of each transmitter. And that'd make things harder to notice. But you're still not getting my base point here, either. How does this improve prospects for one-many that we have using current methods?!
A $10 chip? Compared to a three-cent radio? That's how simple RF is. No matter how fast you rush downward on the former's price, the latter will always be a helluva lot cheaper and more ubiquitous.
All of my above-mentioned constraints stand. Your way is nice, but not compellingly cheaper, easier, better or physics-advantageous compared to existing solutions. The wheel didn't go away. Fire comes out of devices that are hugely different than its origins, and light/heat is available in variations that would stagger the mind of someone born in the 1860's. But it's pretty much still a safe bet that we'll always have a *FIRE* source (perhaps completely unlike a bic lighter) around.
Likewise, you're arguing against a concept that won't go away: it is convenient and easy to oscillate, then perturb that oscillation to generate a means of communication. No matter how we shift and advance the details on complex engines to exploit this, the basics will always pop up and get used.
What you're saying isn't akin to something like saying books will go away. That issue is strictly technology-oriented, and while slow to happen, is likely to largely (I won't say completely) happen over millenia. You're saying that a concept, RF oscillators, will cease to have a use.
Do you really think so?
Smoke signals: funny you should mention them. People still use 'em. Because of simplicity, they have their use: rescue fires, signal flares, and (in some ways similarly) plumes of dye released by people stranded at sea. Technology provides better solutions to all these problems, but complexity tends to rob us of the complex solutions. The more parts there are, the more there are to break. This flows nicely along my argument that things don't tend to get more complex to overcome jamming, which I notice you didn't respond to.
Oh, and thanks to the slashdot interface, I can't easily trace back to verify, but weren't you talking about RF going away in a few hundred years initially? If not, that's really all that matters, since we're stuck with that part where signal strength fades at 1/r^3.
Billions of years? Agreed. Total unknown. Rocks and spears or gravitationally-powered pulse cannons. It's a crapshoot. But who cares. I wanna live forever and even THAT is too far ahead for me to plan...
Your argument focusses on a single definition of better:
Better bandwidth.
My disagreement looks on the variety of reasons for using a technology:
easier cheaper faster hassle of change outweighs improvement better handling of narrow circumstance narrow physics/chemistry constraints for chosen technology (low-freq for talking to subs, certain other freq's because of atmospheric bounces)
I do dispute your definition of 'best possible radio scheme'. It's too narrow a definition. Shutting down wasteful use of RF isn't likely, either, since, as you said, there are a zillion ways to better utilize some areas while leaving others alone. The use of RF will remain a hodgepodge, likely forever. I don't dispute that lots will shift to spread-spectrum or the likes. But it'll never be all of it. Human nature doesn't work that way, physics doesn't work that way, and economics don't work that way. You're suggesting that a hammer is all the tool anyone needs, so to speak.
I was just digging into a lengthy screed about the BS you're peddling above, but it'd be a waste of my time and not convince you of beans.
Short version:
Stuff never goes away. AM is not at risk for FCC reallocation, last time I checked. Why? Because it is cheap and easy. It works. And as you'll unfortunately likely see over the next twenty years (my bet), killing TV will never happen like the FCC wants it to. Millions of voters will scream bloody murder at the cost of throwing out a perfectly-good TV they bought in 2005.
Stuff gets replaced only when something truly better comes along. I saw a discarded mimeograph the other day and thought immediately through the sequence and agreed that it was a good thing to go.
Aimed focussed beams are labor-intensive and labor costs are the limiting factor in anything I do, so I doubt this is truly the whole future.
Broadcast, on the other hand, is a consumer oriented medium. And efficiencies of scale without having to teach consumers how to do something more complex than programming a vcr... that's the future, kid. Aimed beams are a narrow niche until we ALL pass trig (i.e., never!)
You're also blowing smoke up the wrong skirt on your claims of infinite compression into 6mhz of television bandwidth, the odds of any design opting for more complexity in the face of excessive jamming or noise, etc. Just saying it doesn't make it so, joe.
And just for the record: space looks like a gray ambience of noise, with entropy spreading all the RF and matter out to a nice, cool, 3 or 7 kelvin, I forget which (that physics class was in '90). There are trademark hotspots around pulsars, quasars, and with predictable spectrums for stars, etc. But my bet is any anomaly to this is picked up, no matter how random-seeming the signal inside it. I think it'd be funny if we ended up being detected from deep space audiophiles annoyed by the 60 hz hum of our hundreds of millions of fluorescent light ballasts. (Oh, and please, everyone, I do know how unlikely that is, given inverse-r-cubed ratio on signal strength vs. distance for such small signals)
End of story. Now leave me alone while I go kick myself for returning to slashdot. I'm back to Alterslash.org and lurker mode, until someone comes up with an intelligent geek news paradigm. Clue to the slashdot editors: moderation by intelligent non-experts is NOT as good as intelligent moderation by experts. Matter of fact, it's almost indistinguishable from tabloid journalism and that shrieking talk-radio hag that calls herself Dr. Laura.
Your concern that we won't recognize complex wave methodologies (spread spectrum is one I can wrap my brain around, so I'll stop there) may be right.
However, in addition to large elaborate schemes, we have several broadcast schemes that aren't likely to change and that are simple enough to detect: Telemetry (intentionally made repetetive since spectrum's cheap when you're talking to something a zillion miles away ( V'Ger) and its antenna is an ever-shrinking dot), and WWV (The US's atomic clock broadcast). Heck, our way of talking to already-gone objects like voyager *cannot* change.
Similarly, a never-obsolete set of radar pings, carrier waves for TV and radio and *whatever* use, etc. are all just as vaguely possible. For example, WE MAY *NEVER* MANAGE TO KILL OFF FM OR SHORTWAVE BROADCASTS. And if, in this far-off civilization, two planets are settled, the first communication methodology geared to span interplanetary distances is going to be as simple as possible.
Occams razor: Noise cancellation's first and easiest technique is redundant signal (carrier waves with frequency-modulation being close enough to fit this category). No matter what, there'll always be easy opportunities for this easy way out. Anything more complex without a good reason would be illogical (I wanted to say anything less would be uncivilized, but nobody'd remember the old ad campaign).
I like your concern, though. It brings to mind a good question I'll be sending to SETI in a moment: Has SETI projected what we'll sound like in 50 or 100 years and seen how they'd score at considering us civilized if we're entirely spread-spectrum or worse by then?!
Slashdot Mirror
The above quote's statements are, for most people, compatible.
For a software developer, they should, by now, be completely incompatible or even seem insanely orthogonal/contradictory.
Good code is not more features. Do NOT send your vendor back and tell them to make a new major version. They'll add more features.
Instead, say Your stuff sucks. And I don't mean number of features. Most features aren't getting used, because they and the most simple aspects of this code are all so buggy we're afraid to leave certain narrow ruts because stuff fails. GO BACK AND FIX STUFF. SIMPLIFY. EDIT. SIMPLIFY. REFACTOR. DON'T THINK MAJOR VERSION. Give me a point-revision mindset that cleans stuff up and works well, that is modularized and well-engineered.
We're coders. The I/T image should be of Engineers. Not technobabble-spouting primadonna ballerinas. Done well, most coding should seem a bit boring. Until we learn and internalize that, we're going to watch customer-respect remain in free-fall.
Perhaps efiling works for you, (heck, for MOST people) but I don't fit that model:
We've got 5 businesses (3 employers, 2 self-employed businesses), trusts, investments, a family corporation, significant claimable debt carryover from a failed business a few years ago, I'm not the right age, I hammer the hell out of Schedule C (schedule C is your friend, everyone... every dollar off there is a buck off your pre-deductions income!!!), there's lots of 1099 paperwork (interest/dividends and contract work), our pre-dividends income is approx. 100k, and since the wife and I both work and we have kids, there's not a LOT of time I'm eager to devote to managing bills each month. I'm not in the military, I'm not old, and in general, I don't qualify for any of the freebie e-file frameworks this year.
In boycotting Turbotax (I have every version going back to Parsons and before... the rude, greedy, dumb bastards), I looked at TaxAct, too. For most people, it'd be great. 1040-ez, 1040-A, no sweat. Minor 1040 stuff, still fine. Unfortunately, every review I've seen says TaxAct (the program, not the online version, so I may be wrong here, but I doubt it) suffers (or fails) under a complex return like mine. I'm cool that most of the country files the easy forms... but I can't afford to.
With planning, I could do it all completely by hand, and have done in the past. But the notes/worksheets I make during tax prep are going to be priceless when/if I get audited. So, I pretty much think the software is a must-have.
I could pay someone, but I know my business and tax situation intimately and have yet to meet an accountant that knows my tax situation's nuances well enough to save me anything more than I will save myself. Heck, as I'm sorting receipts I'll remember (and dig for receipts, cancelled checks, etc.) for other deductible transactions that account for an additional grand in refund money. For that matter, I don't have them to blame if I do get audited and owe penalties.
I treat what I do like hacking. I'm Hackin' taxes to get every last nickel of performance out of my return. I like reading tax law and knowing it better than almost anyone I know. And, unlike this, each hour spent on my taxes tends to be worth a few hundred bucks in found money.
I'm also paranoid, so remote-hosting of my mondo tax return ain't happening any time soon. Don't know why... I just don't wanna share all my info any more than legally required.
So, I pretty much will be the last guy to use or qualify for various free programs. Being a WASP male, I'm used to not getting special favors at times like these (and yes, that's a dig at Affirmative Action, despite my being quite in favor of AAction).
$30 (deductible, so net cost after tax-refund is $20ish) gets me complete control of my data, lets me record post-its about how/why I qualify for esoteric deduction X, lets me print/save those in case I get audited, lets me work anywhere/anytime I can slip it in between Jan 31 and April 15. My $30 gets me relatively complete IRS documentation (I usually have to hit the IRS for 1 or 2 advisories or instructions in a given year), plus some great tutorial material to watch/read. And this year I got copies of 2003 antivirus, Microsoft Money (ooh, masster, it burnses!), and a legal advisor as free add-ons. I'd have bought the antivirus, so that was a direct savings that takes my net after-tax-and-value-received expense to $10 or less. And I get a free e-file.
Perhaps web-file will get improved. And I really hope either some filing software or online forms become platform-independent (so I can work under Linux) or that someone will come up with a way I trust to do online paperwork (data saved locally with a viewer mechanism, perhaps?).
To be honest, the one part of the whole e-file process that just CHAPS MY ASTERISK is getting charged $10 for the privilege of helping the IRS avoid labor-intensive hand-data-entry. I am paying them to save themselves money. That's just sick and wrong. If it isn't a matter of the potential interest on a few thousand dollars on my return, I'll submit the stuff manually and tell them to fsck themselves about paying for the electronic return.
On the Microsoft's radar article recently, someone else argued that people that think free(beer) is important are somehow clueless, because the true objective is free(speech).
My objective is usability and efficiency for me. I do my own cost/savings ratios. From these, I see I sometimes waste time on inefficient tasks, and I REGULARLY get paid lots of money for my time, when I could have more cheaply bought a solution. I've learned to not question it when I'm told to do so, since it's usually fun and interesting work.
I think the reason for regularly getting told to do something inefficiently rather than buy a solution, is because it 'seems' more expensive to buy a fix since they'll be paying me either way. With that in mind:
- Sure, most people pick 'Free' rather then spendy. TCO requires mental discipline or attention to details.
- Causing microsoft's price to drop is a good thing on so many levels. It diminishes an exhorbitant markup ratio (99%?) which silences FUD marketing, puts money back into consumer pockets so they can spend it on me (hey, I can dream!), and if we're lucky, it'll slow down Microsoftian feature creep and let us develop for stable API's and start acting more like engineers and less like ballerina's and egotistical artiste's.
- More users means more of a market in Linux. That means the stuff I like that hasn't ported over from windows *might* get ported. There's always something. Right now, it's TaxCut (die, TurboTax, die!).
- More attention means better code on linux-side.
So... do most people overlook the pseudo-progressive leanings of FSW and just think 'free as in beer'? Sure. Am I ok with that? A helluva lot more ok than I am with spending money on you-know-who.Couldn't a bayesian filter be rigged that would give slashdot's "editors" a tool for avoiding dupes like this?
Hmm... Tools for tools, thus avoiding dupes from dupes. What next, new news?! Unthinkable, Absurd.
- First, copying was rampant.
- Then there was a strong attempt to prevent piracy via copy protection.
- Users became well-informed enough that they selected unprotected software over protected that almost all software stopped being protected.
- -- About then also came the BSA and slogans to the effect that copying is theft.
- Now, software is so aggressively licensed that users are being forced back into an unacceptable realm:
- you pay full a stiff price for something that can be installed on one computer,
- has no warranty or guarantee of servicability,
- cannot be resold,
- etc.
- Lately, copyprotection is reappearing.
If I had to guess, I'd say that a consumer backlash will come next. That might be linux's role.If we see the same sort of thing in the music industry, we're going to watch legal, propaganda (more or less) and technological attempts to reign in music sharing. So far, none of the technical measures have succeeded, but propaganda is working a bit, and legal is successful to the point of overkill/backlash. The industry also could be planning to use propaganda and shifting from sale to licensure. This will make it so that resold music will be illegalized and the resellers will be branded thieves and shut down.
It's all about the money. People have found ways of selling air (advertising, music, movies, etc.), and any effort to throttle these venues off is going to be fought. Hard. The important part for the rest of us is to keep in mind that, while it isn't important in a cosmic/grand-scheme sort of way, most of us are paying more in this 'Disney Tax' than most other taxes. So, what we need here is a nice citizen's tax initiative...
Personal use is getting approachable, too. Someone recently had a column (eweek, ddj, infoworld... I read too much and can't find it!) that talked about links on dslreports.com that talked about switching to Vonage, a hardware VoIP vendor. Their base price is $25-40 per month, with lots of services, cheap int'l, and TRUE number portability!
The more fair question is who uses VoIP and is it hardware? Since there's so much evidence (lag-times during generic phone calls (try counting in unison with someone on a phone call to measure lagtime), the mere presence of some sort of multiplexer between my home and the phone company's Central Office, and noise-cancellation effects (where the other side LITERALLY goes silent rather than transmit minor background noise) I think we're all using a lot more VoIP than we realize.Speaking of which, it really chaps my asterisk to think the phone companies managed to make this sort of massive savings (to datastreams rather than a copper pair per call) and our rates went up, not down. As much as people complain about the **AA's, telcos top my list of companies that have rip-off pricing. Despite my losing about $30k in value on my telco stock last year, I am thrilled to see them cratering.
-- advaitavedanta
My grandpa was an engineer. Pretty much spent his day doing a lot of what I do, solving problems. He was freelancing/contracting when he died in his 80's.
My uncle got into computers before I was born. Retired and freelancing.
I've been at this since I was a teenager. Every project/process I have used has long since gone away and been replaced by something more complex. The amount of available work has grown exponentially throughout.
What'll I be doing in 20 years? Retiring... and by that I mean shifting to part-time and being selective about the projects I do.
Do I think the specific work type I'll be doing will change? Yeah. Appreciably? Nah. I'll be teaching things how to do stuff. It might be computers, it might be lightwave-based tools, and it might be little microbes. Assembling logic-based tools is what I like, regardless of what the tool looks like. I/T, to me, is the epitome of wise laziness... rather than doing it all myself, I spend all day inventing ways to automate tasks.
-- advaitavedanta
Sorry to hear the project's in trouble. Man, it sucks that big companies keep enforcing these frivolous patents.
If it helps in proving prior art, some guy invented something similar about 500 years ago, but I can't remember his name...
First off, they broke their own long-standing rule, and tried to sell their life's work for $300 Million. Who the Fsck needs 300 mills, considering that they could have had a much greater control over their life's work if they'd accepted a pheaper price? THEY SOLD THEIR LIFE'S WORK. THEY CHOSE TO SELL OUT. THEY DID NOT SELL LICENSES. THEY WERE CASHING OUT OF THE BUSINESS. Anything less of a goal would have a cheaper price-tag and more legal recourse now.
Second, they could go 'a couple dozen exits' up the road and APPLY FOR A JOB. Sheesh, I should feel sorry for these people?! They're arguably expert in the field, and they live near the code's owner. If the new owner doesn't hire them, then some competitor will.
Third, they could start over. Lessons learned come cheap the second time around. Ironically, I'd point to this when they started thinking of taking VeeCee money.
Fourth, fifth, and sixth: Open Source, frequently release old versions to open source, and did I mention Open Source.
No, it doesn't tear my heartstrings out. They grabbed at a damned valuable prize, and nowhere does the article talk about their current net worth. Somehow, I suspect this is because they are worth a STINKLOAD. Pity the poor rich capitalist? Not I. The ideas and knowledge they have are intact. The problem isn't solved. They could resume their pursuit of the goal, and they no doubt are financially well enough off that this won't be a hardship for them.
On the other hand, 40000 companies went bankrupt in 2001. Assuming small-businesses dominate that list, for an average of just a few people per company, that still is a fraction of a Million people who are out of work. That's pain and suffering. This isn't. This is whining about ending up a millionaire instead of a billionaire, and MAN, I don't have time to listen to it...
(waves hand) These are not the suffering masses you're looking for. Move along, now.
I also laughed at the thought of a convicted monopolist like MS recommending this breakup.
Kudos to cstone@boredom. Interesting & educational, with a nutty crunchy flavor.
With the upcoming superbowl, I sure do appreciate seeing folks warming up their armchair quarterback skills.
Short of weather, taxes, sports and personal hygiene, it seems like environmentalism just brings out the stupidest and hastiest when it comes to holding-forth-like-an-expert.
I mean, I've just read comments from people that worked in a fab (who claim to therefore know all the details of the fab's environmental remediation processes), people inventing an environmental impact metric based on goods/fuel ratio comparisons between cars (largely steel and plastic, with a per-device weight in the tons, and ironically containing many microchips) and microchips (which weigh tens of grams... the comparison is ABSURD), and lots of people advocating all sorts of half-assed remedies.
It's good to explore ideas, but frankly I haven't seen this much evidence at how unscientific techies can be since I taught a freshman physics lab. C'mon, be as critical of your own methodology as you are of the facilities involved.
The fabs I have toured or audited all had room for improvements, but seemed to:
- Have existing and prototype materials-reuse mechanisms implemented to minimize environmental impact. Solvents, the most obvious and arguably the most hazardous, almost always cost so much in terms of purchasing and RCRA-compliant disposal, that a distillation or recovery mechanism costing six figures (dollars) pays for itself easily. This means there are financial benefits and PR benefits, so companies are very open/willing to clean things up.
- Admittedly use an insane amount of water. A large chunk of this is a byproduct of Reverse Osmosis distillation to get water to Megohm pure and better. My point is, the water isn't just pumped thru their wastewater stream to dilute things. It comes in, is superduper-distilled (basically), and then used at an insane rate for processes & rinsing. Water consumption is the biggest environmental problem of most fabs, but the problem isn't how dirty they make it... it's the regional impact of so much water being consumed.
- Either directly treat all wastewater (including their own special steps to precipitate out metals or other problem materials, and are constantly testing/evaluating water quality) or discharge it to a community-owned facility that they work extensively with (to get all the above items). My experience is that much of the water pollution is precipitated out, sludge-pressed, and shipped/handled as low-grade hazardous waste.
- Are, by all the environmental engineers I've ever worked with, greener in most every sense of the word than most other industries. By this I mean the staffs always seem to be proactively reducing their environmental impact. They've started since the US's environmental awakening around 1970, so they don't have to struggle to keep up with competitors grandfathered in doing things some old/cheap/dirty way, etc.
Last of all, the head story mentions HF and arsine. I've been out of this a long time, but if memory serves both are very reactive in a way that they readily degrade into safer compounds and are generally considered to have *NO* long-term environmental impact. They can't survive in the wild enough to be a community/wastewater/landfill concern. The moment I hit this part, I felt like I was reading an econut's rant about highly-radioactive long-lived isotopes... all scientific credibility goes to hell when you spout off half-truths to make a headline. The only people that need to worry about HF or AsH3 are people in the room when it leaks and emergency responders. Anyone else (even a block away) has zero risk short- or long-term to these. Nasty? Hell, yes. Silane (common in fabs) scares me even more (it absorbs thru tissue and makes swiss cheese out of your bones, I'm told). But a community's worst fear from their local fab should be DNAPL's (Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids). TCE, Perc and other DNAPL's can pollute a town's groundwater for a few hundred years, costing the town tens of millions of dollars for air-scrubbers or other remediation hardware.Just to dodge the karma damage a bit, I'm very very much an environmentalist. But I'm an engineer. And I feel environmental protections suffer when people use half-truths and poor science like this. We need to treat it like racism or other societal ills... question everything (including proposed remedies) and stick to an ethical high road that demands that we NEVER sneak by a scientific half-truth. Otherwise, we risk losing our credibility and accidentally creating a legal framework that strangles the innovations and self-improvements we need to advance.
</soapbox>
---advaitavedanta
... the next generation of flexible flat panel display technologies ...
... where was the first generation of these?
I realize I've been on a bender since New Year's Eve, but
The only flexible flat panel I've ever seen was this palmpilot my friend sat down on, 'tho I really doubt it qualified as a display technology after he crushed it.
I think you'd be surprised how many computer professionals feel an air of intangibility about what we write or maintain, and I've written five times more worthless on-demand code than stuff I treasure.
The lead developer in my last job had a PhD in applied math, was leading the charge in a full J2EE implementation so we WOULD have a stronger likelihood of writing useful reusable code elegantly... and his true love was woodworking.
His words: "it's nice to make something that is tangible and that will still be around and usable twenty or a hundred years from now".
Me, if I could do it all over again, I swore midway through grad school, I'd be a chef. I'm a positively brilliant cook, there's pretty good pay, less schooling, great relocatability to let me live/move anywhere I want, and it has a great immediate feedback system: In all my years, nobody's ever walked up to me and said "Ya know, that is one incredible integral equation you've worked out there."
But that's just one physics/computer geek talking...
Spread the cost out, man... ask 'Who can afford a few grand a year?!'
Young people. 15 to 25, no mortgage or significant debt, a job, and lots of exposure via friends to help thin out the good music from the bad before buying...
I bought music from when I was 15 to about 28 yrs old, and didn't buy much compared to most of my music-fanatic friends. Since then, I've tapered off to a few cd's a year, plus a few more as gifts. I've got well over 100 tapes, 150 in vinyl, 250 cd's, and one 8-track (Abbey Road, don't ask why). And I repeat, I wasn't SERIOUSLY into music like several friends I had...
So, 1000 seems quite plausible. What's more, a lot of those I got via cheap sources: rummage & yard sales, used bins, friends, etc. Nowadays, I pick up a cd when I hear a good concert or live band in a bar. Since the night's bar tab has usually cost me a lot more than the $10-15 for the CD, I consider it a tip to a good band and a chance to reminisce later.
Round down to 15k (that's being charitable compared to your $20 per album), give me 1/5 the needed collection, and spread it over the last 30 years, and it seems laughably cheap... $100 a YEAR on average. Rich?! Shee-it, I spent more last weekend on sushi! Throw in the wife's similarly-sized music collection, not force me to waste a wall in my li'l house (not to mention portability like ipods and archos units have) and give me access to stuff that's only available on out-of-print vinyl and I'd probably start collecting old, good music like a fiend.
C'mon, folks, this isn't 'news for nimrods' or Networking for Idiots! I expect this sort of post-hallucinagenic half-witted technobabble based on guesses from normal people who discover I'm a computer expert, but not from technically-inclined geeks!
This post seems to imply a whole slew of people (moderators and poster) don't digest the technical basics in /. stories enough to understand basics like digital signals allowing better noise cancellation (taking the ring out of untwisted copper well enough to enable DSL or T-1's), frequency-based filtering (notch filters, chokes, ham radio, and LRC circuits), and a slew of other concepts probably involved that I have no clue on, since I'm no expert on stuff that involves digital via telecom systems (opto-isolators, for example).
But, for crissake, I don't pop off with my half-baked stupid/fearful ramblings because a misinstalled cheap-ass Radio Shack intercom based on 20-year-old analog technology buzzed a lot , and/or moderate up stuff that I don't know beans about as 'insightful'.
Here's a simple (and I thought obvious) rule, moderators:
If you don't know the subject well enough to know who is an expert and who isn't, don't GUESS . Just don't moderate the posting. Wait for an expert to do the peer review.
Ohmigod. I just noticed the grammar gaff in the title. Will it work as well, not good. That clinches it. Slashdot's been hacked or redirected to some wierd Jeff Foxworthy Redneck alternate Slashdot. I can't wait for the Monster Truck, WWF and Nascar stories to flood in...
You wanna abuse stock and revenue statistics to make a false point? Here are a few for you:
Microsoft's share price had it's worst year ever last year. Admittedly, that just means it hasn't doubled. Yeah, they've got a license to print money all right. Uh-huh. Suuurre they do. They're bumping their heads against something. It could be a revenue ceiling (saturated markets) or they could be losing ground thanks to Product Activation, high license fees, and inroads made by alternatives like Linux. Having twice seen the industry migrate away from proprietary restrictions like copy protection and mainframe-era protections, I'd be willing to declare Ediron's Law: People will pay extra for piracy-enabling technologies. Hmm... divx makes three. By 2004, we'll hopefully see TurboTax as a latest example of people flooding away from copy-protection. It'll take another year or two to be obvious about Microsoft, because they're too intertwined into businesses today to be abandoned immediately.
Yeah, Red Hat's profit is 300k. But that's not sad. That's not 300k in revenue. That's 300k left over after paying their entire staff professional-grade salaries. It isn't 300k divvied up among them all, or anything else pathetic like you seem to believe. That was on 24 million in revenue. In 3 months. 100 Million in revenue off free software is the diametric opposite of pathetic, in my view. It's Fscking miraculous. They're also reporting a 14-21% revenue growth curve (looking back a quarter and a year, respectively). This means, since costs are headed downward, they will likely see profitability continue to climb.
What's more, since Red Hat's officially in the black, a whole segment of nay-sayers just got a key argument silenced: RED HAT WILL BE AROUND IN A FEW YEARS. That makes it easier for Red Hat to win contracts.
Red Hat's market cap means the free market believes they're a billion dollar company. So what if you disagree, they haven't lost 99% of their net worth like a lot of firms I can name:
Red Hat's market cap and share price has done a lot better than all those other nice companies like Lucent, AT & T, (insert litany of telecom names), (insert litany of dot-bomb names), (insert litany of software firms).
(Now, flaming my overall favorite Linux flavor for a moment... )
The fact that Mandrake can't pull their own market up is their own damn stupidity on marketing. I WOULD LOVE TO BUY a Mandrake product. Each new version's ISO goes online a month ahead of any retail copy. Further, each new version NEVER GETS TO A STORE NEAR ME. I can't blame them on the latter, but the first one is just sheer idiocy. I won't wait a month, and I won't buy something a month after I've burned the ISO's.
Mandrake can fix this, or even invert the timeline completely, and I wouldn't complain a bit. Most profitable: sell their new release for 30 days before setting out free ISO downloads. Or they could restrict downloads for 30 days. Or (heaven forbid) they could adhere to a 'right way', and fix their product stream and have the disks available for purchase and shipment immediately upon release, and keep everyone happy. I know I'd pay $50 to avoid a few days of iso-hunting. Fact is, they could do ANYTHING akin to this, and I'd buy it. However, paying for something I already have installed legally is nothing more than charity. Work and charity shouldn't overlap, in my opinion. I say make your money, then spend your profits however you see fit (including charitable acts).
(please, Mandrake, grab a clue here. You're doing this so badly that I find myself making annoyed anti-frog remarks like I do when your nation legislates your language, it seems so incompetent!)
I don't pay attention to VA lately (their preassembled machines running linux cost enough more than bare boxen that it also looks like charity). Shame. The one machine of theirs I bought had a hefty chassis. I just can't convince anyone I work for to pay the hefty surcharge they want for that hardware.
IBM has always been about embracing the strongest competition. They are strongest when they act like the diametric opposite of NIH-syndrome (Not Invented Here, or Not In House) shops like HP. It would be impossible to swallow up linux, though. This would be like inhaling too much air (only more so, since technically air is limited. Free software isn't).
I don't even know any of the activists behind linux, but my view is that the cause, for most people, is to create good software, get it widely used, and make a decent living (not a rape-n-pillage 95% royalty like MSFT's per-package markup). In other words, even if Microsoft embraces linux *appropriately*, it'd be a victory. System prices would go down, code robustness and flexibility would go up, and linux systems would be deployed where needed and not be denied because 'linux isn't legitimate'.
While proofing this, it occurs to me that *either* version of Divx proves my point about the perceived value of piracy-enabling technologies. I was talking about the pay-per-play DVD's, but the new one has such a rabid following that it makes an interesting case, too.
Last of all, it occurs to me that you're a troll. Unfortunately, nobody seems to get it on the moderations, so I'm still going to post this.
Imagine several nights of waking up to bolt and bargle . I'm not a lawsuit sort of person, but I hate retching even more than lawyers. In fact, callin' home the dinosaurs late at night because someone else is too proud/stupid to RTFM makes me want to sue them personally for incompetence in a nice sympathetic Texas court.
>xyzzy
You're in the world's most populous nation, surrounded by people needing telecom infrastructure.
In the few moments it took me to read his posting on alterslash, I was appalled at the idea that this thing was rated 5-insightful, considering how many instances of bad logic it exhibits: Art lovers cannot preserve anything under Bono or DMCA, since they are not creators of that content. This RIGHT has been denied, despite constitutional language that puts forth this right. And pointing to one artifact from the past and declaring that it is proof that all worthwhile art has been preserved is just silly. Every historian I've met says old documents are rife with references to other stuff that they'd kill to see, but which has disappeared. That's an opinion. Considering the fallibility of media and the fact that this prevents anyone but an obsessive or enthusiast from experiencing anything created solely on 78's, I say it's a pretty poor opinion. I like old jazz, but not enough to build/maintain an old Victrola (sp?). Do you hear how intellectually elitist you sound? Telling us that we're not worthy of early jazz recordings unless we suffer a bit? Rightful. That's when I lost it. YOU DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT FOR PREVENTING COPIES. WE HAVE A RIGHT TO COPY. YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN A PRIVILEGE TO CONTROL THE COPYING FOR A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME.
Besides, nobody deserves anything they didn't earn directly. I don't like royalty (as in kings), I am not sure I like huge inheritances, and I sure as hell don't think that anyone's great-grandkids deserve anything special. Based on all the rest of the bad logic, this is when I decided you're a shill. Because that seems so trite. A half dozen of Atwater-esque Big Lies, wrapped up nicely with a 'and I'm on your side.' If you're so for fair use, let's see you argue for it, rather than using tricks and poor logic to try to pollute the pool.
In reverse order:
The examples I had in mind for physics were:
ultralow frequency is all that passes more than a few meters into water. I defy you to communicate electromagnetically with anything in deep water at >60hz. (Again, I'm not going to grab the physics book to remind myself just how thick skin depth is for water at 60 hz, but memory says a few meters). If you're only able to spread spectrum over 60 hz, I think it'll be noticeable by E.T.
Certain frequencies bounce atmospherically. Others can't penetrate trees and walls. Spread spectrum mechanisms will have to work around the latter, and will never achieve non-line-of-sight without remaining in a narrow band for the former.
Chemically, similar tricks/issues abound. I don't have an example in mind, but can imagine issues like: auto-immune rejection of an implanted device restricting it's composition, and the RF equivalent of bic shavers (throwaway communicators?).
Strict Physics/Chemistry dependencies aren't going away, even in a few billion years, unless you expect all subaquatics to use a non-RF method (or a damn-long extension cord/leash) and for the skies to have a cloud of redirect/forward sat's to COMPLETELY obviate the advantages of atmospheric bounce under every circumstance (including experimental and hobbyist use).
Transmissions and pointing: I'll assume you plan this to all happen in hardware/software. I'll similarly assume protocols that allow sharing lists of 'public broadcasts available' and other mechanisms to allow the economies of one-to-many to remain, or that you're just planning bandwidth to exceed demand and become as free as air. Both are plausible. Otherwise, initiating a conversation is impossible (if both parties don't know who to look for to see if 'they' want to talk to 'me'). This 'hailing frequencies' concept never seems to die, but I can at least work around it with protocols akin to the 'net or cell phones.
Dunno where '10k better' comes from. Source of the number? Data compression gets Video down 10x in demanded bandwidth. God himself won't get that to 100x improvement. Advanced methods of signal compression can get you another 20x. You popped off about almost infinite compression into an existing 6mhz band of television last time, and I wasn't buying it. Still not. Certainly not *better* than 10000x. An exception would be by shrinking the geographical footprint of each transmitter. And that'd make things harder to notice. But you're still not getting my base point here, either. How does this improve prospects for one-many that we have using current methods?!
A $10 chip? Compared to a three-cent radio? That's how simple RF is. No matter how fast you rush downward on the former's price, the latter will always be a helluva lot cheaper and more ubiquitous.
All of my above-mentioned constraints stand. Your way is nice, but not compellingly cheaper, easier, better or physics-advantageous compared to existing solutions. The wheel didn't go away. Fire comes out of devices that are hugely different than its origins, and light/heat is available in variations that would stagger the mind of someone born in the 1860's. But it's pretty much still a safe bet that we'll always have a *FIRE* source (perhaps completely unlike a bic lighter) around.
Likewise, you're arguing against a concept that won't go away: it is convenient and easy to oscillate, then perturb that oscillation to generate a means of communication. No matter how we shift and advance the details on complex engines to exploit this, the basics will always pop up and get used.
What you're saying isn't akin to something like saying books will go away. That issue is strictly technology-oriented, and while slow to happen, is likely to largely (I won't say completely) happen over millenia. You're saying that a concept, RF oscillators, will cease to have a use.
Do you really think so?
Smoke signals: funny you should mention them. People still use 'em. Because of simplicity, they have their use: rescue fires, signal flares, and (in some ways similarly) plumes of dye released by people stranded at sea. Technology provides better solutions to all these problems, but complexity tends to rob us of the complex solutions. The more parts there are, the more there are to break. This flows nicely along my argument that things don't tend to get more complex to overcome jamming, which I notice you didn't respond to.
Oh, and thanks to the slashdot interface, I can't easily trace back to verify, but weren't you talking about RF going away in a few hundred years initially? If not, that's really all that matters, since we're stuck with that part where signal strength fades at 1/r^3.
Billions of years? Agreed. Total unknown. Rocks and spears or gravitationally-powered pulse cannons. It's a crapshoot. But who cares. I wanna live forever and even THAT is too far ahead for me to plan...
Your argument focusses on a single definition of better:
Better bandwidth.
My disagreement looks on the variety of reasons for using a technology:
easier
cheaper
faster
hassle of change outweighs improvement
better handling of narrow circumstance
narrow physics/chemistry constraints for chosen technology (low-freq for talking to subs, certain other freq's because of atmospheric bounces)
I do dispute your definition of 'best possible radio scheme'. It's too narrow a definition. Shutting down wasteful use of RF isn't likely, either, since, as you said, there are a zillion ways to better utilize some areas while leaving others alone. The use of RF will remain a hodgepodge, likely forever. I don't dispute that lots will shift to spread-spectrum or the likes. But it'll never be all of it. Human nature doesn't work that way, physics doesn't work that way, and economics don't work that way. You're suggesting that a hammer is all the tool anyone needs, so to speak.
I was just digging into a lengthy screed about the BS you're peddling above, but it'd be a waste of my time and not convince you of beans.
Short version:
Stuff never goes away. AM is not at risk for FCC reallocation, last time I checked. Why? Because it is cheap and easy. It works. And as you'll unfortunately likely see over the next twenty years (my bet), killing TV will never happen like the FCC wants it to. Millions of voters will scream bloody murder at the cost of throwing out a perfectly-good TV they bought in 2005.
Stuff gets replaced only when something truly better comes along. I saw a discarded mimeograph the other day and thought immediately through the sequence and agreed that it was a good thing to go.
Aimed focussed beams are labor-intensive and labor costs are the limiting factor in anything I do, so I doubt this is truly the whole future.
Broadcast, on the other hand, is a consumer oriented medium. And efficiencies of scale without having to teach consumers how to do something more complex than programming a vcr... that's the future, kid. Aimed beams are a narrow niche until we ALL pass trig (i.e., never!)
You're also blowing smoke up the wrong skirt on your claims of infinite compression into 6mhz of television bandwidth, the odds of any design opting for more complexity in the face of excessive jamming or noise, etc. Just saying it doesn't make it so, joe.
And just for the record: space looks like a gray ambience of noise, with entropy spreading all the RF and matter out to a nice, cool, 3 or 7 kelvin, I forget which (that physics class was in '90). There are trademark hotspots around pulsars, quasars, and with predictable spectrums for stars, etc. But my bet is any anomaly to this is picked up, no matter how random-seeming the signal inside it. I think it'd be funny if we ended up being detected from deep space audiophiles annoyed by the 60 hz hum of our hundreds of millions of fluorescent light ballasts. (Oh, and please, everyone, I do know how unlikely that is, given inverse-r-cubed ratio on signal strength vs. distance for such small signals)
End of story. Now leave me alone while I go kick myself for returning to slashdot. I'm back to Alterslash.org and lurker mode, until someone comes up with an intelligent geek news paradigm. Clue to the slashdot editors: moderation by intelligent non-experts is NOT as good as intelligent moderation by experts. Matter of fact, it's almost indistinguishable from tabloid journalism and that shrieking talk-radio hag that calls herself Dr. Laura.
Your concern that we won't recognize complex wave methodologies (spread spectrum is one I can wrap my brain around, so I'll stop there) may be right.
However, in addition to large elaborate schemes, we have several broadcast schemes that aren't likely to change and that are simple enough to detect: Telemetry (intentionally made repetetive since spectrum's cheap when you're talking to something a zillion miles away ( V'Ger) and its antenna is an ever-shrinking dot), and WWV (The US's atomic clock broadcast). Heck, our way of talking to already-gone objects like voyager *cannot* change.
Similarly, a never-obsolete set of radar pings, carrier waves for TV and radio and *whatever* use, etc. are all just as vaguely possible. For example, WE MAY *NEVER* MANAGE TO KILL OFF FM OR SHORTWAVE BROADCASTS. And if, in this far-off civilization, two planets are settled, the first communication methodology geared to span interplanetary distances is going to be as simple as possible.
Occams razor: Noise cancellation's first and easiest technique is redundant signal (carrier waves with frequency-modulation being close enough to fit this category). No matter what, there'll always be easy opportunities for this easy way out. Anything more complex without a good reason would be illogical (I wanted to say anything less would be uncivilized, but nobody'd remember the old ad campaign).
I like your concern, though. It brings to mind a good question I'll be sending to SETI in a moment: Has SETI projected what we'll sound like in 50 or 100 years and seen how they'd score at considering us civilized if we're entirely spread-spectrum or worse by then?!