Plus: how are you going to hold a curved device comfortably long enough to watch a video? And where are you going to watch it, besides -- like you said -- flights? You can't use it for road trips...at least not in cali. And it's too expensive to use on the bus. As for on-the-go storage, the ipod already does this with an add-on. Granted, you can view your photos, at low resolution, and the premium for this is that the device is too delicate to carry in your pocket.
It seems like this is a neat proof-of-concept piece. But it's a far cry from the ipod's pervasive, use-anywhere, one-handed-operation design. The iPod was lifestyle changing because it made it easy for a lot of people to take all their music with them, and get it without much trouble. I'm afraid this thing is going to be a LOT of trouble for little value, which means it's going to be geeks-only.
1) It doesn't matter, since it has video components from two companies known for pathetically weak video elements. No matter how high quality your cabling or your TV, if you output crummy video, it doesn't get better. My Apex DVD player used to be so bad that I would turn down the sharpness on my TV.
2) What the hell are you talking about? This case design screams "boring, plastic, generic."
3) Not necessarily. My Apex DVD player -- and many others I've heard of -- was pre-assembled with parts guaranteed to work, and it didn't. It would overheat, and crash, and have terrible artifacts. Plus i'm willing to bet the EXACT parts will be interchanged according to market prices...which means quirks may be introduced. As long as it plays DVDs like it says, they figure they're okay.
4) You're assuming. It isn't "wide open," it's running a crippled Windows XP! We don't yet know how easy it will be, or even if it's possible, to install another OS. Even if it's plug and play, why would you see significant Linux development for a device that runs XP by default? What makes it so different from cheap PCs, especially since people making PVR, games, etc rarely write their own sound, gfx and chipset drivers? Macs no doubt have more of a marketshare, fewer sound, gfx and chipset "worries," and yet the Mac platform is not the defacto Linux standard for video, either.
Valve doesn't have to spend time making sure their games work on brand X's gfx card. Valve writes for the DX standard, and it knows that brand X will optimize its drivers to make their card run the games best. Why? Brand X wants to have the high benchies, so their cards sell! Valve won't suddenly shift its development to a shitty media box with an S3 card!
What a dumb post. 5 non-points marked informative.
My first DVD player was an Apex, and it was decidedly poor quality. It would overheat, for christ's sake! I had to install a FAN in my DVD PLAYER! It also had terrible video on every output, a dumb interface, a remote that had the wrong company's name on it and half the time didn't even control the TV.
I have since upgraded to a Pioneer DV-C36, which is probably more than my TV can handle. It is a very nice DVD player with accurate color and great sound...but you geeks wouldn't want one, because it doesn't do MP3 like the Apex did (poorly).
Windows CE is not that bad. It's also not called "Windows CE" anymore. But anyway: there are several reasons this is not an iPod killer per se. Mostly because it does not beat the iPod in any of the areas in which the iPod excels: being a very small, very light, fairly durable, tightly enclosed music device with good battery life and a nice interface. MS's stuff is going to be necessarily larger, necesarily heavier, necesarily more precarious unless they ruggedize the HELL out of those LCDs and reinforce the plastic grating over the speaker. Battery life will probably be about the same as a portable DVD player, and if the interface is anything like Pocket Media Player, it's got NOTHING on the iPod.
In short: this looks like it has exactly the same features and price point as the device I traded in for my iPod, a Toshiba PocketPC. And just like the PocketPC, it'll have limited appeal which becomes even MORE limited when Joe Q. Fancydevice realizes how hard it is to get first run movies onto it...i mean, how fast can the processor be in these things and still keep battery life?
Still, competition is good for the industry. The market pressure will force Apple to make iTunes even better (and there's room for that). But I don't think they have too much to worry about...a bigass laptop wannabe is NOT in the same league as a tiny little music device.
Anything that helps to standardize data models, etc. etc. would be a big help in this area.
A bigger, more efficient help in this area would be a single project developed and offered for free to law enforcement agencies from a national agency. This has happened with several segments of the computer industry in my state, and has proven surprisingly cost effective. The property tax system is the big one...integrating all the various possibly taxable variables of all the properties in the state into one big database (driven by entries from smaller localized databases operated by municipal and county tax agencies) has resulted in a much more controllable tax roll system.
In other words, the state paid to have a program developed and forced everybody to use it. They allowed other companys to bid and create alternate versions, as long as they met a stringent export standard (which is easily done...it's a one day task for anybody using an RDBMS). And the effort paid for itself in increased tax revenue due to fewer freeloaders slipping through the cracks.
I don't think a truly open project will have the same drive as a privately produced one, mainly because there's no carefully delineated accountability (nobody to blame when it fails) and no responsibility (nobody to act proactively to prevent failure). These two elements are essential to the politics inherent to all government contracts. Which is the big problem. If the software becomes a political issue -- and it often sometimes -- there needs to be somebody to call to move the project along, somebody to push.
Of course, this isn't to say there's no room for open source software in government -- just that it may not be the best choice for top down interoperability. I fear too many government purchasers see relying on open source for their software is a bit like relying on volunteer EMTs for their medical needs -- sometimes, you need the guarantee more than the expertise.
The problem is: you cannot (repeat: can not) predict everything that is going to happen in government. Relatively simple legislation can blow any application to hell. So over the course of a program's lifetime, the thing gets more and more complex -- and there's never room in the budget to pay somebody to revisit your software. It is not bad design, but DEMOCRACY itself which leads to this complexity...and "open standards" aren't going to fix this any more than closed ones, since once the thing BECOMES a standard, you can only deviate or extend it so far before it becomes either too convoluted for the end users to use efficiently, or too complex for machines to understand effectively.
Oh, and RDBMs are a relative newcomer to the local government scene...most of our customers (and support staff) still refer to such things as "lookup files."
Oh. I almost left out the key to interoperability concerns: Governments have had them for years. Speculation over open standards aside, the way they've been best met so far is when the government agency requesting the data creates the spec and a reference implementation itself. I do not think there is any benefit to relying on an Open group to do this...as the current method works really well. I'm thinking specifically of the tax assessment software we use in this state...I wrote an application which integrates with it and produces data update requests, and this was possibly one of the easiest things I've ever done despite the fact that the database structure was a little dumb. There is no problem, so there's no need for an Open solution to one! Besides...the last thing these poor goverment people need is a fancy programmer's solution to the human problem of data integration.
Besides, all it takes is a single government agency in the pocket of some software company (*cough* California *cough*) to trump any attempts at creating a single universal solution. So we may as well accept that there's going to be some conversion necessary, and not waste our time trying to hold back the deluge of incompatible formats. Far better to be the flexible party who can bring them altogether...
Apache generally runs as an unprivliged user -- IIS by default runs as the local system and on some systems I've seen has been set up to run as a privlidged network user (to get around problems with content on networked drives).
Apache is designed to do less than IIS. Comparing the two isn't even fair...IIS is a web server, an email server, an ftp server, etc etc. It's designed to do EVERYTHING. So it's not apples to apples...more like apples to an appleseed.
By default, Apache only installs a few basic modules. Almost everything is optional. IIS, designed to be an end-to-end solution for internet servers, installs everything. If you lock it down, remove the crap you don't use, it's much better off.
Apache has more people working on it and more frequent bug releases. MS has to worry about massive overhead and support costs with every release...so they space them apart further. My company does the same thing.
Anyhow, this article is a lot of FUD. I write software for local governments, and at least in this state (which is one of the richest in the US), OSS wouldn't save any money nor eliminate any problems. "Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper. Heck, if tax rolls come out twenty cents unbalanced from the invoice, we have to audit the programs line by line. And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload.
And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear. So when laws and regulations change, there's nobody to update the old software. Most of these people don't have IT departments (some don't even have computers in some departments, or use their own personal machines...the assessor in my home town runs a computer shop and that's how he got the job!). There is so little money, that only by relying on companys to help with everything from installing printers to writing custom tax logic for way less than the standard consulting rate (hoping to get a chance to use it somewhere else) can these towns get their software written.
Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? With not having a responsible party you can call when stuff breaks? You'd still have to pay somebody out of your budget (which is sometimes set five or more YEARS in advance) to support the program, only they wouldn't have any real interest invested in fixing the program quickly. There's incentive with private software to deliver the best, easiest to use stuff you can for whatever price you can get.
Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain. It seems like it'd be inviting too much uncertainty in an arena that only thrives with a stable support structure. My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing.
Actually, I'm a native American, but many of my favorite authors are British. Therefore at time my rhetoric receives a very British colour. From now on, I will endeavour to insert more Americanisms in my posts. Starting now:
Uh...
Wooo, tits and beer and guns! These colors never run! It's got a Hemi, go Yankees! Matrix rulez! Let's shop at Wal-Mart's, Wooo!
And yes, I do ocassionally refer to my trunk as a "boot," but that results in my wife kicking my ass.
Uh. My IQ is well above 100, and I've been known to do all of the things you mentioned in this post (not the makeup, but I have tied a tie while driving). I know this has probably been pointed out a thousand times to you geeks, but the ability to reason does not give you any more common sense. I know plenty of very pragmatic people who are nonetheless quite dull, logically speaking. I, on the other hand, approach absent minded. However, in most cases I quickly realized how incredibly stupid it is to be doing stuff while driving, and have been smart enough to STOP doing the distracting activity when it became obvious I was endangering the planet so I could change MP3s.
Besides, there are lots of reasons to use a laptop while driving that are pertinant TO driving. Computers are certainly better at providing exactly the directions you need than a 12 square foot folding map. The problem is that laptop functions were not designed to be performed when the user does not have most of his attention available to the laptop for opening files, scrolling, performing searches, etc. I have imposed on myself a laptop ban: when i get in the car, i put the lappy in the trunk. That way, if I get lost, I have to pull over.
I have taken 2600+ pictures this year...that's 3.7 gig sitting on magnetic media!
I don't have a tape drive. Don't want to split them on to CD, as some of the "rolls" are bigger than 700 meg.
DVD is the perfect solution...and I can even build a slideshow (glee!)
I also have a bunch of digital video source sitting on my scratch drive...i'd love to offload it, but DV tape is way too expensive, slow and prone to breakage to make a useful archive for multitrack editing. 5.6 gig is perfect for these long concert sessions i've been cutting up, about one 2 hour show per disc i imagine.
There are about 3 or 4 different footprints for portable video cameras -- HI-8 and Mini DV being the most popular nowadays, but you can still find media for the VHS-C cameras YEARS after they were replaced.
Digital camera media is available in 6 flavors: memory stick, smartmedia, compact flash, secure digital, XD and Mini CD. You can buy any of these at your local camera shop, bestbuy, or walmarts.
I mean, come on: you can still get discs for DVD-RAM drives, and they didn't even sell that many!
Oh yeah, if anyone disagrees with you it must be a troll. After all, slashdot is just for mutual ego stroking and confirmation of simplistic ideals. What was I thinking?
Actually, by definition, a Troll is someone who posts something unrelated to discussion solely to entice discussion. You responded to my post on sensible environmentalism, to inform me of your affinity for fascism. Of course I had to respond to your foolish monkey views, because as a human who doesn't slump when he walks I feel that greed and territorialism are fairly animalistic. The REASON man inherited near complete control over his surroundings was his ability to think in the abstract...the same ability that created language, technology and tactical planning.
It is these things which have permitted the human race to grow to 7 billion. And you know, it is too many people. Still, people don't have to CHOOSE TO DIE, nor do we have to slaughter them wholesale, to decrease the population. In fact, neither would work: in the years after a mass genocide, populations generally explode: see the baby boom, and a similar explosion after every major American war. Scarcity is hardly the deciding factor in population growth: if it were, do you think populations would be rising so rapidly in second wave nations?
Besides, in nature there are PLENTY of creatures who survive despite incredible weakness. It is because nature is not, as some have put, "survival of the fittest." Nature is just about survival. Occasionally populations clash...but in the absence of true want, systems remain in stasis. The green revolution and technology will make it possible to serve the needs of many billions more people -- and as they do so, the birth rate will decrease, as it has in the US (where it is nearly at 1.x%, the "stasis" rate where births slightly exceed deaths). China has negative population growth. It is through human thought, not caveman wars
Of course, i'm not really too worried about people who are assured of their own superiority, but are too foolish to look at facts. The line of the neanderthals was broken.
Wow, there's a really good troll. I find myself wanting to respond in as complete a way as possible, but since nobody cares, I'll just say this:
I am egalitarian, because I am not a big enough asshole to think that I am inherently better, or worse, than anybody else. In fact, the only people I feel qualitatively better than are those that feel they are entitled to something more than what they already have.
Just because I'm a realist doesn't mean I can't be an optimist, too. Does it?
Whoa there, hot stuff. If looking at different sides of an issue and not making snap judgments based on superficial observations makes me a bad environmentalist, then I guess you're an AMAZINGLY GOOD slashdot poster.
Well, not just aluminum but all metals -- tin, steel, copper, brass. In fact, if your waste disposal company is smart, they pore over your trash before they send it to the landfill. A few tin cans here, or a broken lamp there, and you can have a very profitable amount of salvage.
Really, if plastic recycling were this profitable (and it won't be as long as we're in a petroleum based economy), we'd have no trash problems. After all, what's left? Almost all of our trash is burnable or compostable, besides the metal, rubber and plastic. Find some guy willing to pick apart broken electronics and machines, make the plastic and rubber into building materials for decks and sheds and painted shingles, and you've got something that LOOKS CLOSE to sustainability.
I'm eating better food and my cooking ends up better
To a point. We are part of a "farm share" program with a local organic farm. Basically, we pay them $170 at the beginning of the year, and they give us crates of produce all year. Tons of it, for 26+ weeks usually, all of it fresh and still dirty.
Sounds good in a contract. But I have noticed that there is practically no quality control. Much of the food we get is small, ugly, bitter, or full of bugs. Some of it is quite good, and my wife is willing to ignore these bad vibes for the good of sustainable farming, etc. As the guy who cooks in the house, I'm not. Nothing is less appetizing than having to go to the store because the bunch of swiss chard you just got has a giant colony of maggots living in it. Furthermore, we get a lot of vegetables we don't want -- rutabagas, can't stand them -- and while we compost, a lot of people just toss them in the trash. Again, you're helping in one area, and hurting in another...those rutabaga are just going to take up a few cubic feet of space in a landfill!
We do have some GREAT farmer's markets though. I live outside of Albany, NY, and there's a farm kitty corner to my house. We buy berries, tomatoes, corn and other veggies direct from them for WAY cheap, and they're just amazing. In fact, one of the NICE things about the movement of the sprawl around here is that it isn't really displacing the farmers that have had the tenacity to stick around. There's even a veal farm operating down the road from me...and while I'm personally not down with keeping baby cows in plastic crates on MY lawn, I think it's great that these guys are able to make a living off of what's otherwise a VERY dangerous trend.
You are correct. I agree with you. Hence, I made a statement to the converse. This sort of ironical reversal we refer to as either "cynicism" or "sarcasm."
It's a manner of discourse that's all the rage with today's "gothic" youth.
There are two problems here, problems which aren't inherently linked. One: birds are dying. Two: some of those birds are endangered.
I think more people are okay with One than are okay with Two. I'm a meat eater, yet I'm not okay with the reduction of biodiversity. I think a lot of people are fascinated with biodiversity, and this is why it easier to get money to "save" endangered animals than it is to get money to save, say, the supermarket seagull.
There may be some very simple controls which can prevent Two...not putting wind farms up in the flight path of an endangered bird species, for example. I have no problem with this. However, if it is only wrens or starlings or robins being killed, and the damage can be shown not to be detrimental to their population overall, fuck it. How many birds die in American cities every year, flying into skyscrapers? We lose 10 or twenty a year at our old building, and it wasn't even that big...three stories, maybe 5,000 square feet.
Some folks won't rest until we are all subsistence-farming vegetarians
Who, ironically, are against intolerance and fascism in all its forms.
I have many, many vegetarian and pro-subsistance friends. Hell, I myself have been known to dabble in these causes, because it's true -- the American lifestyle is FAR too damaging to the environment. But some of these cats need to lighten the fuck up. Organizations like PETA and some of the more extreme eco-nazis do a ton of damage to the perception of environmentalism in the public's eye.
I am an environmentalist who does not believe in recycling (it is a complex, time consuming, inefficient and expensive process generally ignored by those in waste management. It will only become viable when we run so low on resources that it is cheaper to recycle old material than to use new material. In the short term, a much more efficient plan to make resources last as long as possible is to reduce overall waste through reuse, composting, and burning whatever can be burnt for fuel).
I am an environmentalist who believes in allowing the lumber and oil industries into public lands (while maintaining government management of resources and routing the resulting money from the sale of rights into other conservation programs. See what Canada has done with the Algonquin park, one of the most heavily travelled but CLEANEST parks I've ever been to, whose forestry is far better managed than the privatized areas of the Adirondack park).
I am an environmentalist who believes in hunting (as legalized, managed hunting makes for strong tourism and gives impetus for the conservation of wild private lands. Push hunters off your land and in come the developers, who strip hillsides, put up strip malls and sprawls to soak up tax breaks for a fewer years, and leave behind blight. In fact, a friend of mine was telling me last week that her park's best friend in the state legislature is the Turkey Hunter's Association).
I am an environmentalist who isn't sold on organic farming (which results in a slightly more unreliable food source. It also imposes a number of severe restrictions on farmers which, while well meaning, can cause costs to rise as profits rise -- for example, you can't sow an organic field with manure from cows which aren't fed organic feed. Furthermore, organic practices necesitate stricter controls to prevent spoilage, resulting in more plastics, styrofoams and more rotten fruit thrown into dumpsters).
I am an environmentalist who isn't dead set against nuclear energy (because the potential for widespread damage to the population of the earth is still less than that caused by burning coal and oil).
I am an environmentalist because I look at the environment and say "Here is something I like. Here is something that is dirty. Here is something that is disappearing, and these are problems we need to solve." I don't pretend they aren't there and don't manipulate data to make others feel better about purchasing an inefficient vehicle. But I know that hyperventilating over every detail isn't going to get the crud out of the Hudson, or slow the exponential growth of the trash mound just west of town. Like these people, I see dead birds and think "we have to stop this." Yeah, we do. Eventually. Right now, we're far better off with a slight birdkill than the massive dangers imposed by our reliance on fossil fuels. And maybe if these cats would pump their resources into getting some good government subsidies for solar shingles and so forth, we wouldn't have to worry so much about either.
Your arguments are really quite impressive. I'm amazed at how much a person can learn about macs and their performance when they've obviously never used one. Can't say that about PCs!
Scale? Not really. You're right here. You can buy a $300 machine with a Celeron 1000 to run your PC application. It just won't run it very well. Which is fine if you're writing a simple windows application, or a Point of Sale device, or any client application.
But if you're writing a complex data storage app, or a game, or a server application, you're looking at $800 plus to start. Which is right where the Apple machines start, with nearly identical abilities to their cousins in that segment of the PC market.
And apple's G5s, which round out about $3k, have more bang for your realtime video tools than similarly priced PCs.
So yeah, it doesn't scale from $300-$3000. It scales from $800-$3000...cutting out the no-margin ultra-cheap segment entirely. Which is a good thing...most of the hardware issues we see with OUR apps are with bargain basement PCs. It's enough to make you curse the name "PC Chips."
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently they have the technology to update back .sigs ;)
Plus: how are you going to hold a curved device comfortably long enough to watch a video? And where are you going to watch it, besides -- like you said -- flights? You can't use it for road trips...at least not in cali. And it's too expensive to use on the bus. As for on-the-go storage, the ipod already does this with an add-on. Granted, you can view your photos, at low resolution, and the premium for this is that the device is too delicate to carry in your pocket.
It seems like this is a neat proof-of-concept piece. But it's a far cry from the ipod's pervasive, use-anywhere, one-handed-operation design. The iPod was lifestyle changing because it made it easy for a lot of people to take all their music with them, and get it without much trouble. I'm afraid this thing is going to be a LOT of trouble for little value, which means it's going to be geeks-only.
1) It doesn't matter, since it has video components from two companies known for pathetically weak video elements. No matter how high quality your cabling or your TV, if you output crummy video, it doesn't get better. My Apex DVD player used to be so bad that I would turn down the sharpness on my TV.
2) What the hell are you talking about? This case design screams "boring, plastic, generic."
3) Not necessarily. My Apex DVD player -- and many others I've heard of -- was pre-assembled with parts guaranteed to work, and it didn't. It would overheat, and crash, and have terrible artifacts. Plus i'm willing to bet the EXACT parts will be interchanged according to market prices...which means quirks may be introduced. As long as it plays DVDs like it says, they figure they're okay.
4) You're assuming. It isn't "wide open," it's running a crippled Windows XP! We don't yet know how easy it will be, or even if it's possible, to install another OS. Even if it's plug and play, why would you see significant Linux development for a device that runs XP by default? What makes it so different from cheap PCs, especially since people making PVR, games, etc rarely write their own sound, gfx and chipset drivers? Macs no doubt have more of a marketshare, fewer sound, gfx and chipset "worries," and yet the Mac platform is not the defacto Linux standard for video, either.
Valve doesn't have to spend time making sure their games work on brand X's gfx card. Valve writes for the DX standard, and it knows that brand X will optimize its drivers to make their card run the games best. Why? Brand X wants to have the high benchies, so their cards sell! Valve won't suddenly shift its development to a shitty media box with an S3 card!
What a dumb post. 5 non-points marked informative.
My first DVD player was an Apex, and it was decidedly poor quality. It would overheat, for christ's sake! I had to install a FAN in my DVD PLAYER! It also had terrible video on every output, a dumb interface, a remote that had the wrong company's name on it and half the time didn't even control the TV.
I have since upgraded to a Pioneer DV-C36, which is probably more than my TV can handle. It is a very nice DVD player with accurate color and great sound...but you geeks wouldn't want one, because it doesn't do MP3 like the Apex did (poorly).
Windows CE is not that bad. It's also not called "Windows CE" anymore. But anyway: there are several reasons this is not an iPod killer per se. Mostly because it does not beat the iPod in any of the areas in which the iPod excels: being a very small, very light, fairly durable, tightly enclosed music device with good battery life and a nice interface. MS's stuff is going to be necessarily larger, necesarily heavier, necesarily more precarious unless they ruggedize the HELL out of those LCDs and reinforce the plastic grating over the speaker. Battery life will probably be about the same as a portable DVD player, and if the interface is anything like Pocket Media Player, it's got NOTHING on the iPod.
In short: this looks like it has exactly the same features and price point as the device I traded in for my iPod, a Toshiba PocketPC. And just like the PocketPC, it'll have limited appeal which becomes even MORE limited when Joe Q. Fancydevice realizes how hard it is to get first run movies onto it...i mean, how fast can the processor be in these things and still keep battery life?
Still, competition is good for the industry. The market pressure will force Apple to make iTunes even better (and there's room for that). But I don't think they have too much to worry about...a bigass laptop wannabe is NOT in the same league as a tiny little music device.
Anything that helps to standardize data models, etc. etc. would be a big help in this area.
A bigger, more efficient help in this area would be a single project developed and offered for free to law enforcement agencies from a national agency. This has happened with several segments of the computer industry in my state, and has proven surprisingly cost effective. The property tax system is the big one...integrating all the various possibly taxable variables of all the properties in the state into one big database (driven by entries from smaller localized databases operated by municipal and county tax agencies) has resulted in a much more controllable tax roll system.
In other words, the state paid to have a program developed and forced everybody to use it. They allowed other companys to bid and create alternate versions, as long as they met a stringent export standard (which is easily done...it's a one day task for anybody using an RDBMS). And the effort paid for itself in increased tax revenue due to fewer freeloaders slipping through the cracks.
I don't think a truly open project will have the same drive as a privately produced one, mainly because there's no carefully delineated accountability (nobody to blame when it fails) and no responsibility (nobody to act proactively to prevent failure). These two elements are essential to the politics inherent to all government contracts. Which is the big problem. If the software becomes a political issue -- and it often sometimes -- there needs to be somebody to call to move the project along, somebody to push.
Of course, this isn't to say there's no room for open source software in government -- just that it may not be the best choice for top down interoperability. I fear too many government purchasers see relying on open source for their software is a bit like relying on volunteer EMTs for their medical needs -- sometimes, you need the guarantee more than the expertise.
The problem is: you cannot (repeat: can not) predict everything that is going to happen in government. Relatively simple legislation can blow any application to hell. So over the course of a program's lifetime, the thing gets more and more complex -- and there's never room in the budget to pay somebody to revisit your software. It is not bad design, but DEMOCRACY itself which leads to this complexity...and "open standards" aren't going to fix this any more than closed ones, since once the thing BECOMES a standard, you can only deviate or extend it so far before it becomes either too convoluted for the end users to use efficiently, or too complex for machines to understand effectively.
Oh, and RDBMs are a relative newcomer to the local government scene...most of our customers (and support staff) still refer to such things as "lookup files."
Oh. I almost left out the key to interoperability concerns: Governments have had them for years. Speculation over open standards aside, the way they've been best met so far is when the government agency requesting the data creates the spec and a reference implementation itself. I do not think there is any benefit to relying on an Open group to do this...as the current method works really well. I'm thinking specifically of the tax assessment software we use in this state...I wrote an application which integrates with it and produces data update requests, and this was possibly one of the easiest things I've ever done despite the fact that the database structure was a little dumb. There is no problem, so there's no need for an Open solution to one! Besides...the last thing these poor goverment people need is a fancy programmer's solution to the human problem of data integration.
Besides, all it takes is a single government agency in the pocket of some software company (*cough* California *cough*) to trump any attempts at creating a single universal solution. So we may as well accept that there's going to be some conversion necessary, and not waste our time trying to hold back the deluge of incompatible formats. Far better to be the flexible party who can bring them altogether...
Anyhow, this article is a lot of FUD. I write software for local governments, and at least in this state (which is one of the richest in the US), OSS wouldn't save any money nor eliminate any problems. "Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper. Heck, if tax rolls come out twenty cents unbalanced from the invoice, we have to audit the programs line by line. And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload.
And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear. So when laws and regulations change, there's nobody to update the old software. Most of these people don't have IT departments (some don't even have computers in some departments, or use their own personal machines...the assessor in my home town runs a computer shop and that's how he got the job!). There is so little money, that only by relying on companys to help with everything from installing printers to writing custom tax logic for way less than the standard consulting rate (hoping to get a chance to use it somewhere else) can these towns get their software written.
Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? With not having a responsible party you can call when stuff breaks? You'd still have to pay somebody out of your budget (which is sometimes set five or more YEARS in advance) to support the program, only they wouldn't have any real interest invested in fixing the program quickly. There's incentive with private software to deliver the best, easiest to use stuff you can for whatever price you can get.
Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain. It seems like it'd be inviting too much uncertainty in an arena that only thrives with a stable support structure. My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing.
Actually, I'm a native American, but many of my favorite authors are British. Therefore at time my rhetoric receives a very British colour. From now on, I will endeavour to insert more Americanisms in my posts. Starting now:
Uh...
Wooo, tits and beer and guns! These colors never run! It's got a Hemi, go Yankees! Matrix rulez! Let's shop at Wal-Mart's, Wooo!
And yes, I do ocassionally refer to my trunk as a "boot," but that results in my wife kicking my ass.
Uh. My IQ is well above 100, and I've been known to do all of the things you mentioned in this post (not the makeup, but I have tied a tie while driving). I know this has probably been pointed out a thousand times to you geeks, but the ability to reason does not give you any more common sense. I know plenty of very pragmatic people who are nonetheless quite dull, logically speaking. I, on the other hand, approach absent minded. However, in most cases I quickly realized how incredibly stupid it is to be doing stuff while driving, and have been smart enough to STOP doing the distracting activity when it became obvious I was endangering the planet so I could change MP3s.
Besides, there are lots of reasons to use a laptop while driving that are pertinant TO driving. Computers are certainly better at providing exactly the directions you need than a 12 square foot folding map. The problem is that laptop functions were not designed to be performed when the user does not have most of his attention available to the laptop for opening files, scrolling, performing searches, etc. I have imposed on myself a laptop ban: when i get in the car, i put the lappy in the trunk. That way, if I get lost, I have to pull over.
Funny. I flashed my US Robotics card and all I got was my penis stuck in the processor fan.
I do.
I have taken 2600+ pictures this year...that's 3.7 gig sitting on magnetic media!
I don't have a tape drive. Don't want to split them on to CD, as some of the "rolls" are bigger than 700 meg.
DVD is the perfect solution...and I can even build a slideshow (glee!)
I also have a bunch of digital video source sitting on my scratch drive...i'd love to offload it, but DV tape is way too expensive, slow and prone to breakage to make a useful archive for multitrack editing. 5.6 gig is perfect for these long concert sessions i've been cutting up, about one 2 hour show per disc i imagine.
There are about 3 or 4 different footprints for portable video cameras -- HI-8 and Mini DV being the most popular nowadays, but you can still find media for the VHS-C cameras YEARS after they were replaced.
Digital camera media is available in 6 flavors: memory stick, smartmedia, compact flash, secure digital, XD and Mini CD. You can buy any of these at your local camera shop, bestbuy, or walmarts.
I mean, come on: you can still get discs for DVD-RAM drives, and they didn't even sell that many!
Oh yeah, if anyone disagrees with you it must be a troll. After all, slashdot is just for mutual ego stroking and confirmation of simplistic ideals. What was I thinking?
Actually, by definition, a Troll is someone who posts something unrelated to discussion solely to entice discussion. You responded to my post on sensible environmentalism, to inform me of your affinity for fascism. Of course I had to respond to your foolish monkey views, because as a human who doesn't slump when he walks I feel that greed and territorialism are fairly animalistic. The REASON man inherited near complete control over his surroundings was his ability to think in the abstract...the same ability that created language, technology and tactical planning.
It is these things which have permitted the human race to grow to 7 billion. And you know, it is too many people. Still, people don't have to CHOOSE TO DIE, nor do we have to slaughter them wholesale, to decrease the population. In fact, neither would work: in the years after a mass genocide, populations generally explode: see the baby boom, and a similar explosion after every major American war. Scarcity is hardly the deciding factor in population growth: if it were, do you think populations would be rising so rapidly in second wave nations?
Besides, in nature there are PLENTY of creatures who survive despite incredible weakness. It is because nature is not, as some have put, "survival of the fittest." Nature is just about survival. Occasionally populations clash...but in the absence of true want, systems remain in stasis. The green revolution and technology will make it possible to serve the needs of many billions more people -- and as they do so, the birth rate will decrease, as it has in the US (where it is nearly at 1.x%, the "stasis" rate where births slightly exceed deaths). China has negative population growth. It is through human thought, not caveman wars
Of course, i'm not really too worried about people who are assured of their own superiority, but are too foolish to look at facts. The line of the neanderthals was broken.
It apprears that I am mistaken. You're right: a Macintosh SE is slightly less powerful than a $300 PC.
I would hazard the Mac would be more reliable, though, should you install Windows on the PC.
Wow, there's a really good troll. I find myself wanting to respond in as complete a way as possible, but since nobody cares, I'll just say this:
I am egalitarian, because I am not a big enough asshole to think that I am inherently better, or worse, than anybody else. In fact, the only people I feel qualitatively better than are those that feel they are entitled to something more than what they already have.
Just because I'm a realist doesn't mean I can't be an optimist, too. Does it?
Whoa there, hot stuff. If looking at different sides of an issue and not making snap judgments based on superficial observations makes me a bad environmentalist, then I guess you're an AMAZINGLY GOOD slashdot poster.
Hope that sentance made sense. I'm pretty drunk.
Well, not just aluminum but all metals -- tin, steel, copper, brass. In fact, if your waste disposal company is smart, they pore over your trash before they send it to the landfill. A few tin cans here, or a broken lamp there, and you can have a very profitable amount of salvage.
Really, if plastic recycling were this profitable (and it won't be as long as we're in a petroleum based economy), we'd have no trash problems. After all, what's left? Almost all of our trash is burnable or compostable, besides the metal, rubber and plastic. Find some guy willing to pick apart broken electronics and machines, make the plastic and rubber into building materials for decks and sheds and painted shingles, and you've got something that LOOKS CLOSE to sustainability.
I'm eating better food and my cooking ends up better
To a point. We are part of a "farm share" program with a local organic farm. Basically, we pay them $170 at the beginning of the year, and they give us crates of produce all year. Tons of it, for 26+ weeks usually, all of it fresh and still dirty.
Sounds good in a contract. But I have noticed that there is practically no quality control. Much of the food we get is small, ugly, bitter, or full of bugs. Some of it is quite good, and my wife is willing to ignore these bad vibes for the good of sustainable farming, etc. As the guy who cooks in the house, I'm not. Nothing is less appetizing than having to go to the store because the bunch of swiss chard you just got has a giant colony of maggots living in it. Furthermore, we get a lot of vegetables we don't want -- rutabagas, can't stand them -- and while we compost, a lot of people just toss them in the trash. Again, you're helping in one area, and hurting in another...those rutabaga are just going to take up a few cubic feet of space in a landfill!
We do have some GREAT farmer's markets though. I live outside of Albany, NY, and there's a farm kitty corner to my house. We buy berries, tomatoes, corn and other veggies direct from them for WAY cheap, and they're just amazing. In fact, one of the NICE things about the movement of the sprawl around here is that it isn't really displacing the farmers that have had the tenacity to stick around. There's even a veal farm operating down the road from me...and while I'm personally not down with keeping baby cows in plastic crates on MY lawn, I think it's great that these guys are able to make a living off of what's otherwise a VERY dangerous trend.
You are correct. I agree with you. Hence, I made a statement to the converse. This sort of ironical reversal we refer to as either "cynicism" or "sarcasm."
It's a manner of discourse that's all the rage with today's "gothic" youth.
There are two problems here, problems which aren't inherently linked. One: birds are dying. Two: some of those birds are endangered.
I think more people are okay with One than are okay with Two. I'm a meat eater, yet I'm not okay with the reduction of biodiversity. I think a lot of people are fascinated with biodiversity, and this is why it easier to get money to "save" endangered animals than it is to get money to save, say, the supermarket seagull.
There may be some very simple controls which can prevent Two...not putting wind farms up in the flight path of an endangered bird species, for example. I have no problem with this. However, if it is only wrens or starlings or robins being killed, and the damage can be shown not to be detrimental to their population overall, fuck it. How many birds die in American cities every year, flying into skyscrapers? We lose 10 or twenty a year at our old building, and it wasn't even that big...three stories, maybe 5,000 square feet.
Some folks won't rest until we are all subsistence-farming vegetarians
Who, ironically, are against intolerance and fascism in all its forms.
I have many, many vegetarian and pro-subsistance friends. Hell, I myself have been known to dabble in these causes, because it's true -- the American lifestyle is FAR too damaging to the environment. But some of these cats need to lighten the fuck up. Organizations like PETA and some of the more extreme eco-nazis do a ton of damage to the perception of environmentalism in the public's eye.
I am an environmentalist who does not believe in recycling (it is a complex, time consuming, inefficient and expensive process generally ignored by those in waste management. It will only become viable when we run so low on resources that it is cheaper to recycle old material than to use new material. In the short term, a much more efficient plan to make resources last as long as possible is to reduce overall waste through reuse, composting, and burning whatever can be burnt for fuel).
I am an environmentalist who believes in allowing the lumber and oil industries into public lands (while maintaining government management of resources and routing the resulting money from the sale of rights into other conservation programs. See what Canada has done with the Algonquin park, one of the most heavily travelled but CLEANEST parks I've ever been to, whose forestry is far better managed than the privatized areas of the Adirondack park).
I am an environmentalist who believes in hunting (as legalized, managed hunting makes for strong tourism and gives impetus for the conservation of wild private lands. Push hunters off your land and in come the developers, who strip hillsides, put up strip malls and sprawls to soak up tax breaks for a fewer years, and leave behind blight. In fact, a friend of mine was telling me last week that her park's best friend in the state legislature is the Turkey Hunter's Association).
I am an environmentalist who isn't sold on organic farming (which results in a slightly more unreliable food source. It also imposes a number of severe restrictions on farmers which, while well meaning, can cause costs to rise as profits rise -- for example, you can't sow an organic field with manure from cows which aren't fed organic feed. Furthermore, organic practices necesitate stricter controls to prevent spoilage, resulting in more plastics, styrofoams and more rotten fruit thrown into dumpsters).
I am an environmentalist who isn't dead set against nuclear energy (because the potential for widespread damage to the population of the earth is still less than that caused by burning coal and oil).
I am an environmentalist because I look at the environment and say "Here is something I like. Here is something that is dirty. Here is something that is disappearing, and these are problems we need to solve." I don't pretend they aren't there and don't manipulate data to make others feel better about purchasing an inefficient vehicle. But I know that hyperventilating over every detail isn't going to get the crud out of the Hudson, or slow the exponential growth of the trash mound just west of town. Like these people, I see dead birds and think "we have to stop this." Yeah, we do. Eventually. Right now, we're far better off with a slight birdkill than the massive dangers imposed by our reliance on fossil fuels. And maybe if these cats would pump their resources into getting some good government subsidies for solar shingles and so forth, we wouldn't have to worry so much about either.
Your arguments are really quite impressive. I'm amazed at how much a person can learn about macs and their performance when they've obviously never used one. Can't say that about PCs!
Scale? Not really. You're right here. You can buy a $300 machine with a Celeron 1000 to run your PC application. It just won't run it very well. Which is fine if you're writing a simple windows application, or a Point of Sale device, or any client application.
But if you're writing a complex data storage app, or a game, or a server application, you're looking at $800 plus to start. Which is right where the Apple machines start, with nearly identical abilities to their cousins in that segment of the PC market.
And apple's G5s, which round out about $3k, have more bang for your realtime video tools than similarly priced PCs.
So yeah, it doesn't scale from $300-$3000. It scales from $800-$3000...cutting out the no-margin ultra-cheap segment entirely. Which is a good thing...most of the hardware issues we see with OUR apps are with bargain basement PCs. It's enough to make you curse the name "PC Chips."