Yeah, Google, You Tube and others changed the world this year just as much as Amazon changed the world in 2000. Nothing against Amazon or You Tube, great new outlets for books and clips, but I thought we were now beyond hollow phrases like "the New Economy" and "You of the year". L'histoire se repete.....
Substitute the word Google in this story with Microsoft,...
The funny thing is that the license for live.local (aka Virtual Earth) from Microsoft is much more liberal than Google's maps. IANAL, but I understand that MS' maps and sat-image material can even be used for commercial applications.
What is of course interesting, is that also Microsoft doesn't have satellites flying around the globe and is probably dependent on the same content providers as Google. Maybe MS has better negotiation skills, when it comes to buying IP...:-)
OK, if that was 1968, I was 11 at the time. Yep, the perfect age for a little boy to be fascinated by an Apollo mission. I still remember how I saw it on TV while visiting an old, old (at least in my perspective:) aunt of mine. For a kid she was a bit of a drag, but the good news was, you would get lots of cake, I guess lemonade (don't remember), and the best of all, they had a TV, which we didn't have.:-)
Imagine you are a member of the shuttle design team and you can make a choice (for the next 20 years) to either know for sure that you're with the kids at home on X-mas and New Year.... or you can suggest a software feature that could result in your New Year's Eve being spoiled down the road because you have to be for days in a dumb control room. Hey, what would you do??
And I still remember, when I was a kid, that we had that Apollo flight during X-mas. I think it was the one that would for the first time go behind the moon. Someone in the control room that year made it into an important enough person on the Shuttle program so that this WOULD NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.:-)
Big change since "the old days" in clean rooms is that in the past the whole factory was kept at let's say 1 ppm level. Nowadays it's just the encapsulated equipment that's kept at a low particle level, while the clean room itself can be more moderate. Still not your average neighborhood garage of course.:-)
Besides the huge cost savings in air treatment equipment, the big advantage is also that for workers in the fabs the conditions become much better. As an example, for 10 ppm simple suits and caps are enough. For let's say 100x better you suddenly need space-suits and plexiglas caps. You get the picture.
It's a while back I worked actively in semiconductor. But at that time it was Nikon, Canon and ASML who were the biggest wafer stepper manufacturers. Given the investments needed, I would be surprised if that has changed a lot.
If you don't like 6-12 hour downloads for a whole distro (I'm in the same boat, even when my ISP is pretty fast), you could always opt for sites like linuxcentral.com (there are others) that will send you the regular Linux distro's for a few bucks per CD/DVD. It saves you the costs of burning, marking, sleeves, etc. and the end result looks much better than those filtpen scribbled CDROMs.
But MS-DOS had nothing more to offer than CP/M, Word wasn't better than WordPerfect and Windows wasn't better than Mac or X-Windows. And we can go on and on.... When coming from Redmond, the first version is normally even worse than the competition, version 2 is normally on-par and then with version 3, MS takes over.
Besides the quality and feature set of the products, this has of course also to do with the fact that by then the marketing machine is running at full throttle.
I stand corrected!!! I was the one bringing up pawnshops into this discussion. My whole argument got sidetracked (which is OK, this is/.), because I was only trying to oppose the argument that "if the price is so low that you can suspect illegal activity, people WON'T buy it". Where I expressed that I didn't believe that people are not buying things because they suspect/think/can know the item is stolen.
Maybe unfortunately I used pawn-shops as an example. It was just based on the "common thinking" that a lot of stolen goods are going around there. And (maybe in the past) there is some truth in that, otherwise there wouldn't be so much process around it, that you describe so clearly.
So, I was wrong regarding pawnshops, but that was not my main point, I was more talking about people willing to buy stolen goods. But I'm still happy I brought this up, because you gave us a really insightful story on how pawnshops are managed nowadays. Thx.
I would give you mod-points!! I even have mod-points today... but unfortunately I'm not allowed to because I'm also a contributor in this thread.
I don't know where you live, but I haven't seen many trollies, cable-cars, buses, cabs, trains, or really any vehicles that are driver-less.
Don't know where you live:), but many US airports nowadays (Denver, Atlanta spring to mind) have a no-driver subway system to interconnect the terminals. Or the light-rail that interconnects SFO with the rental car garage. Those systems run pretty smooth. I personally trust a computer more to "stop for a red signal" than a driver, that maybe had a fight with his dear one the night before.
For the rest this topic is IMHO pretty much crap, because a taxi brings you from anyware to anyware and even more from door to door. Don't think that these pilot projects are getting anyware close to that. What most airports need is a railway connection with the downtown they belong to. But because all around the world the taxi operators (not the drivers but the license holders) are one big mafia with good connections into local politics, that hardly happens anywhere.
Yes, I know the many exceptions (Amsterdam, Tokio, Heathrow), but I know 10x more cities (Singapore, Toronto, La Guardia, Denver, Vancouver, Mexico City, etc.) where you can absolutely forget it to have decent public transport from the airport to city center. In many of those cities a subway/metro/lightrail system comes even close to the airport, but just doesn't bridge the gap of "the last mile".
... and it was fairly rugged until I dropped it down 30 concrete steps in Singapore. I had accidentally poured beer over it the night before...
Could it be that some of the beer that night did not go over the keyboard but in into your throat, which caused the next day the unfortunate 30 step drop ???:-)
You often don't understand where/.-ers love goes. Hating Sun is the norm, loving IBM is cool, and Google is of course the ultimate goddess, although if you follow a link from the RFA to Google's Writely Help Center, it states "We've heard from some folks who run Writely running on Linux, but don't support it because there have been too many problems with it". So, keep things in perspective folks....
Would be interesting to know what the efficiency is of a 380 -> 12/5 DC-DC converter, compared to a traditional 110 AC -> 12/5 DC converter. This is of course only just a part of the total picture, but in the past this has often been mentioned as the reason for _not_ going DC. Maybe with modern switching power supplies, that problem has disappeared.
Better put some of the super-glue (or PUR foam) in the Mosquito (little night expedition required here:-). The good thing is that the old guy can not hear himself if the Mosquito works or not!!
Given that HW manufacturers pay only couple of bucks (don't know the exact number, but I understand it's around $30) for the Windows license, I would guess that Lenovo will price this SUSE TP the same as an XP ThinkPad. So, there will be no real price advantage in buying a Linux notebook and then putting an illegal copy of Windows on it. I could be wrong, but that's my guess.
If the designers of these systems have done their work well, I hope these kids won't see any Linux (ls, vi, etc.) at all. I expect that that's all hidden below an appropriate GUI. What remains a winning point of course is that they are not confronted with a green-hill-blue-sky landscape during their first computer experiences.
Ehhh, 1M computers for 1M dollars??? Forget about the factor 1.5x built cost. I guess you forgot some zeroes here and there. On my little calculator 1 million $100 computers is still 100,000,000 dollars.:-)
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Yeah, Google, You Tube and others changed the world this year just as much as Amazon changed the world in 2000. Nothing against Amazon or You Tube, great new outlets for books and clips, but I thought we were now beyond hollow phrases like "the New Economy" and "You of the year". L'histoire se repete.....
The funny thing is that the license for live.local (aka Virtual Earth) from Microsoft is much more liberal than Google's maps. IANAL, but I understand that MS' maps and sat-image material can even be used for commercial applications.
What is of course interesting, is that also Microsoft doesn't have satellites flying around the globe and is probably dependent on the same content providers as Google. Maybe MS has better negotiation skills, when it comes to buying IP... :-)
Do you want to supersize your telescope ???
OK, if that was 1968, I was 11 at the time. Yep, the perfect age for a little boy to be fascinated by an Apollo mission. I still remember how I saw it on TV while visiting an old, old (at least in my perspective :) aunt of mine. For a kid she was a bit of a drag, but the good news was, you would get lots of cake, I guess lemonade (don't remember), and the best of all, they had a TV, which we didn't have. :-)
Imagine you are a member of the shuttle design team and you can make a choice (for the next 20 years) to either know for sure that you're with the kids at home on X-mas and New Year .... or you can suggest a software feature that could result in your New Year's Eve being spoiled down the road because you have to be for days in a dumb control room. Hey, what would you do??
And I still remember, when I was a kid, that we had that Apollo flight during X-mas. I think it was the one that would for the first time go behind the moon. Someone in the control room that year made it into an important enough person on the Shuttle program so that this WOULD NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. :-)
Big change since "the old days" in clean rooms is that in the past the whole factory was kept at let's say 1 ppm level. Nowadays it's just the encapsulated equipment that's kept at a low particle level, while the clean room itself can be more moderate. Still not your average neighborhood garage of course. :-)
Besides the huge cost savings in air treatment equipment, the big advantage is also that for workers in the fabs the conditions become much better. As an example, for 10 ppm simple suits and caps are enough. For let's say 100x better you suddenly need space-suits and plexiglas caps. You get the picture.
It's a while back I worked actively in semiconductor. But at that time it was Nikon, Canon and ASML who were the biggest wafer stepper manufacturers. Given the investments needed, I would be surprised if that has changed a lot.
FreeDB2 will be bought by IBM....
If you don't like 6-12 hour downloads for a whole distro (I'm in the same boat, even when my ISP is pretty fast), you could always opt for sites like linuxcentral.com (there are others) that will send you the regular Linux distro's for a few bucks per CD/DVD. It saves you the costs of burning, marking, sleeves, etc. and the end result looks much better than those filtpen scribbled CDROMs.
Maybe breasts are just more beautiful and attractive than prostates.
But MS-DOS had nothing more to offer than CP/M, Word wasn't better than WordPerfect and Windows wasn't better than Mac or X-Windows. And we can go on and on.... When coming from Redmond, the first version is normally even worse than the competition, version 2 is normally on-par and then with version 3, MS takes over.
Besides the quality and feature set of the products, this has of course also to do with the fact that by then the marketing machine is running at full throttle.
That's called concrete (with rubar reinforcement). Also works great against hurricanes. :-)
I stand corrected!!! I was the one bringing up pawnshops into this discussion. My whole argument got sidetracked (which is OK, this is /.), because I was only trying to oppose the argument that "if the price is so low that you can suspect illegal activity, people WON'T buy it". Where I expressed that I didn't believe that people are not buying things because they suspect/think/can know the item is stolen.
... but unfortunately I'm not allowed to because I'm also a contributor in this thread.
Maybe unfortunately I used pawn-shops as an example. It was just based on the "common thinking" that a lot of stolen goods are going around there. And (maybe in the past) there is some truth in that, otherwise there wouldn't be so much process around it, that you describe so clearly.
So, I was wrong regarding pawnshops, but that was not my main point, I was more talking about people willing to buy stolen goods. But I'm still happy I brought this up, because you gave us a really insightful story on how pawnshops are managed nowadays. Thx.
I would give you mod-points!! I even have mod-points today
But popcorn is definitely part of a home theater, so you can't disconnect the microwave... :-)
Duh ?!?!?
If the price is right, people will buy anything. Why do you think pawn shops are doing good business?
Don't know where you live
For the rest this topic is IMHO pretty much crap, because a taxi brings you from anyware to anyware and even more from door to door. Don't think that these pilot projects are getting anyware close to that. What most airports need is a railway connection with the downtown they belong to. But because all around the world the taxi operators (not the drivers but the license holders) are one big mafia with good connections into local politics, that hardly happens anywhere.
Yes, I know the many exceptions (Amsterdam, Tokio, Heathrow), but I know 10x more cities (Singapore, Toronto, La Guardia, Denver, Vancouver, Mexico City, etc.) where you can absolutely forget it to have decent public transport from the airport to city center. In many of those cities a subway/metro/lightrail system comes even close to the airport, but just doesn't bridge the gap of "the last mile".
I lived for 4 years in Singapore, so still trying to imagine where those 30 steps were located ..... :)
Could it be that some of the beer that night did not go over the keyboard but in into your throat, which caused the next day the unfortunate 30 step drop ???
You often don't understand where /.-ers love goes. Hating Sun is the norm, loving IBM is cool, and Google is of course the ultimate goddess, although if you follow a link from the RFA to Google's Writely Help Center, it states "We've heard from some folks who run Writely running on Linux, but don't support it because there have been too many problems with it". So, keep things in perspective folks ....
Why the raincoat? I never noticed an airplane that was leaking water when going through a cloud .... :)
Would be interesting to know what the efficiency is of a 380 -> 12/5 DC-DC converter, compared to a traditional 110 AC -> 12/5 DC converter. This is of course only just a part of the total picture, but in the past this has often been mentioned as the reason for _not_ going DC. Maybe with modern switching power supplies, that problem has disappeared.
Better put some of the super-glue (or PUR foam) in the Mosquito (little night expedition required here :-). The good thing is that the old guy can not hear himself if the Mosquito works or not!!
Given that HW manufacturers pay only couple of bucks (don't know the exact number, but I understand it's around $30) for the Windows license, I would guess that Lenovo will price this SUSE TP the same as an XP ThinkPad. So, there will be no real price advantage in buying a Linux notebook and then putting an illegal copy of Windows on it. I could be wrong, but that's my guess.
If the designers of these systems have done their work well, I hope these kids won't see any Linux (ls, vi, etc.) at all. I expect that that's all hidden below an appropriate GUI. What remains a winning point of course is that they are not confronted with a green-hill-blue-sky landscape during their first computer experiences.
Ehhh, 1M computers for 1M dollars??? Forget about the factor 1.5x built cost. I guess you forgot some zeroes here and there. On my little calculator 1 million $100 computers is still 100,000,000 dollars. :-)