"Budget" means different things to different people.
I was ecstatic to find a Dell Vostro deal a couple weeks ago where you could get an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2.0Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB 7200RPM disk, 15.4" glossy 1680x1050 display, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB, 8x DVD dual-layer burner, Intel 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR for around $1000 (USD).
That's a pretty decent machine, for a thousand dollars. It's not an XPS, or an uber-gaming rig, and it's way more than what you need to just browse the web and check your email. But for what I like to do (run virtual machine instances, test out apps, play some recent PC games) it's perfect.
If all you need is web and email access with document and spreadsheet software, the Asus EEE PC and (rapidly arriving) competitors is great. It's small, light, and good enough.
If you want to run memory- or disk- or video-intensive apps, obviously the EEE PC doesn't work for that.
All of us here on Slashdot need to remember that not everyone uses their PC in the same way.:)
The real kicker is that the county a couple miles to the south line has DSL access available for every home from its telco cooperative (Shentel). But not Verizon. Verizon will wire up FiOS all day long to its precious consumer base in densely-populated Northern Virginia and the DC suburbs, but will hardly lift a finger to provide even decent dial-up service out in rural areas.
Y'know what modem speed I get when I dial up my local Verizon access number? 23.4kbps if I'm lucky, 19.2kbps if I'm not. Not even a 28.8kbps connection. Welcome to 1995.
I'm only laughing since I've been on WildBlue's satellite service at home since November-ish of 2005, when I moved into a house in the Shenandoah Valley.
Please note that this is a mere 70 miles west from DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT and the crowded den of datacenters and fiber connectivity that infest western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County VA. For people not familiar with the United States, this is (by some measures) the Internet hub of the eastern seaboard, with a huge number of peering/exchange points and hosting facilities. I work at one of those datacenters where we have a primary 10GB (yes, ten gigabit Ethernet) link to our upstream provider.
You probably would not notice it for web surfing, but anything requiring two communication would suffer.
You notice this when web surfing. 900ms typical latency and 2% packet loss on a good day. Bad days are more like 2000ms latency and 30% packet loss, or "let's reset the modem again and maybe it'll sync up and shove some packets across before it dies from rain fade" or whatever is causing loss today. It's not so bad on static HTML pages or plain text, but AJAX pages can suffer horribly if they're coded to constantly pump data back and forth, and without AdBlock or similar addons/extensions for a browser, it's horrible. Flash-based pages actually work well, once they download.
Imagine a terminal application with a 1 second latency, each keystroke would have a 2 second delay.
SSH over a VPN is pretty painful, but if you have your environment set up decently (i.e., alias the top 50 commands you run most often to two-letter combinations) it's workable for remote admin. Character-interactive apps like `vi` are still bad, but with patience you may prevail.
Remote desktop access is just out of the question. I've tried TightVNC and variants, and it's still just baaaaad.
Online gaming would be pretty bad too. VOIP would have an added pause.
Yeah, I cancelled Xbox Live since any multiplayer game was unplayable. WoW can be playable, under certain conditions, and MMORPGs fare better (i.e. it's theoretically playable) than other online games, but it's still painful. Ended up cancelling WoW too.
VOIP just doesn't work. Skype screeches along and you get a 1.5s-delayed echo. Oh yay.
I'm not bitter. I'm just pissed off, since I literally can't get anything better where I am.
9/10 of the world's population in mud huts is a rather large overestimate, with 6.5 billion people on Earth that would mean everyone outside of the US and Western Europe, which obviously isn't the case. If you go by GDP purchasing-power-parity per capita (that's one long ugly acronym there, GDP-PPP-PC, maybe GD5PC?), it's more like 2 billion people on the planet who are really bad off, living on under $1 per day, with another 3.5 billion in actively developing economies like Brazil, China, India and Russia who are quite a bit better off, and a bit over 1 billion in the United States, the EU, Japan, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand who enjoy a standard of living that would be the envy of kings and emperors from any previous point in history.
Numbers aside, there's places on the planet like the Niger Delta which, from our perspective among the most prosperous billion people, look like a nightmarish science-fiction story. Shinra Electric Power Company, anyone?
I'd have to dig out some anthropology textbooks or do some research ( which, given that this is Slashdot and reading TFA is considered overachieving, seems unlikely ) but if you look back at other massive leaps forward in human history, they're kinda lumpy. Fire, language, first domestication of animals and improved stone tools all happened (ahem, relatively) close together; and then 10k to 12k years ago, you get agriculture, cities, new and more complex political structure; followed by 4k to 6k years ago with writing, codes of law, etc. Maybe our perspective on the recent rapid rate of change is skewed by being towards the tail end of industrialization and informationization (yeah, Firefox spellcheck says that's not a word).
As an alternative to the Singularity theory, what if we're just going to be in a developmental lull for the next few decades while society and individuals and businesses adapt to the massive changes we've gone through? Heck, most individuals in big modern metro areas are still adapting to not having extended families nearby, commuting to work, etc. which are relatively recent introductions. If your grandparents weren't doing it, odds are you're still trying to figure out how to do it right.:)
I'd love to have flying cars and self-sustaining off-world colonies and fiber to the home across the entire continental US, but those might need some new cheap energy source or an improved finance system or more humane living conditions for people before they come along.
This particular model (Shuttle XPC SN27P2) has a 400W PSU, and I've googled around and read through some discussion boards where people claim, at least, that they have run the SN27P2 with an 8800GT. I'd like to find some more specs on the actual power output per rail from the PSU before buying this all together, though.
NVIDIA has a neat graphics and PSU comparison Flash webpage where you can drag sliders to specify your PSU wattage, and it'll recommend video cards accordingly. At least according to them, a 400W PSU should be sufficient to power 8800GT class cards.
Promo codes were $10 off the CPU and $10 off the RAM. So that's a $20 difference, or (at most) 3% more than the lower total price. And if you want to clip UPC codes and send in the mail-in rebates, that's another $60 off the price if you go to the effort.
DVD burners just aren't that expensive in the States. Newegg has a whole bunch of DVD burners (even dual-layer capable and with LightScribe support) for under $40, with some good Samsung and Sony/NEC drives for under $25, including shipping. I haven't spent more than $35 on a new internal CD/DVD burner for 7 or 8 years.
Here's the little gaming box i spec'd out earlier today from Newegg for $752, including shipping and promo code discounts, and not counting mail-in rebates:
It's not an uber gaming rig, but it'll play most games fairly decently, and it's only $200 to $300 more expensive than an Xbox 360 or PS3 + accessories. You could drop the 8800GT card down to a 8600GT and save another $110 off the total price, bringing it down to $642.
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but $1200 is not the entry point for PC gaming, and you'd have to go back to the mid to late 1990s to find the last time that it was.
... but with two small kids in the family, one 4 years old and the other 17 months old, babies and toddlers pick up things INCREDIBLY fast. Accomplishments that would take near-inconceivable amounts of processing power, memory and storage to do with current AI algorithms are done by kids under two years old every single day.
It makes me think that human brains are either hard-wired from birth for language and cognition, or have an astounding amount of capability compared to *anything* in computing, even on the distant horizon.
But, of course, the linguistic-cognitive miracles still get spaghetti sauce all over the table at dinner.:)
CNN actually has a pretty good breakdown on the vote counts for each primary and caucus, along with other statistical data. It just takes a while to drill down through the "Election '08" BS on their site to find it:
Just use Firefox + AdBlockPlus + NoScript (need to temporarily allow cnn.com, cnn.net and turner.com to get the content to load on the pages above) and you can safely ignore most of the blinking commercialized crap.
I outright refuse to watch CNN on TV, but there's still some useful junk on their site now and then.
*Ideally* they should be trained as engineers, but in too many cases, CS graduates end up with the equivalent of a trade school or technical degree. Which is fine for employers, but not so much for the profession as a whole and certainly not for the graduate.
I've had multiple managers tell me they'd rather hire EE or mathematics grads than CS grads for positions that require actual thought and skill.
As a species, homo sapiens is really really good at only a handful of things:
* having sex * communicating * building * killing
Say what you will about individual persons, good or bad, but as a species we have systematically and deliberately killed off all possible threats and competition (mammoths, neanderthals, large predators) and have become the deadliest intelligent force on this planet. As groups of people, mankind will always resort to violence against others past a certain threshold of hunger, pain, dishonor or other provocation. That's why true pacifists can be so respected - they are so few and far between that they truly stand out on the backdrop of the rest of human society.
You can argue (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that civilization, over time, reduces the relative amount of violence in a population - see "A History of Violence" by Steven Pinker. While that may be true, the other side of civilization's influence is that the tools of violence inevitably become more sophisticated and deadly, even if the frequency of their use declines.
The other really interesting historical development in violence over the past hundred years is the vastly increased cost and destructive power of high-end weaponry. The most destructive forms of warfare used to require literal armies of people bent upon pillage and destruction. Now, governments (and really only governments, not individuals or corporations) can instead spend gigantic amounts of money and acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of immense destructive power. Or they can firebomb cities into submission, like the Allies did in WWII against Dresden and Tokyo.
That changes a lot of the balance in warfare and politics. Much as heavy cavalry and standing armies helped to transform city-states into nation-states, air forces and navies and nuclear weapons play a role in transforming nations into continental powers.
Robotics may start to swing the pendulum back in the other direction. R&D costs for robots really aren't that expensive compared to traditional Big Weapons Systems. $14m is way less than a new US Air Force fighter jet costs, let alone a typical new system deployed by the US DoD. The resulting technology stands a good chance of becoming commoditized, which means that smaller groups and individuals may be able to afford them.
Ultimately, that may not be good for World Peace, given that peace (as perceived by the people in powerful countries who tend to write history) is best maintained by a clear balance of power and not by uncertainty and threats to power.
I'd like to suggest a new anti-Internet-death-meme: the Internet is a giant collection of cockroaches. You can step on as many as you want with your HD video torrents, it just keeps on multiplying and scurrying around anyway.
I've noticed the same sort of dramatic change in the suburban neighborhoods where I grew up, from the mid 1980s to the present. I was a pretty nerdy kid, spent a fair amount of time cobbling together BASIC programs on my parents' IBM model 5150 PC and playing NES games, but I also spent a lot of time outside. My friends and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood and down to the local reservoir, played pick-up games of basketball and baseball and football in the street and at the local school yard, went fishing, raised hell, blah blah blah. Much like kids have done since the dawn of time.
But when I drive around those same neighborhoods now, I don't see kids running around outside, playing ball games or on their bikes. If I see any sports played on school fields, it's of the highly organized and scheduled team variety, complete with circling hordes of SUVs and minivans. I talk with my brother-in-law, who's graduating from high school next year, and he says that a lot of his friends spend all their time inside, chatting online, playing Xbox or Playstation or PC games, watching TV and texting each other.
I don't know what has happened in modern American suburban society that broke childhood, but there's not anywhere near enough importance being placed on this. I talk to people my age (~ 30) and older about it, and while there's some agreement about the problem, no one seems to know what to do about it.
I think you're on to something about being afraid of other people. If you live somewhere outside of suburbia, people talk to you, strike up conversations, and talk with your kids, especially if they're being cute. Inside suburbia, that isn't the case.
I don't think it's deliberate (maybe I'm wrong), but some combination of mass media, particularly TV, the Eternal Emergency model used by government and "news" to communicate with The People, a broken civil justice and litigation system and the suburban model of work, commuting and home life has begun to destroy the most basic elements of human civilization.
People are notoriously bad at judging risk on a large scale (hearing about lions eating someone when you're in a hundred-person tribe == large risk to self; hearing about lions eating someone when you're in a multiple-hundred-million-person continental superstate == incredibly small risk to self). People who are increasingly isolated from the full range of daily human contact and interaction become even worse at, surprisingly enough, acting like other people.
My question is, how do you stop this? Do you work at forming relationships within your neighborhood so that it starts to act like a community instead of a random agglomeration of worker drones and dronettes? Do you bug the hell out and live somewhere outside the blast zone where jobs are harder to find but property is cheap and people are friendly and welcoming? Do you campaign to slowly force back and correct the social maladjustments resulting from the rational choices of people subject to broken systems?
The Western Roman Empire sustained itself for almost two centuries after its near-collapse in the late 2nd century AD by eliminating all that was left of individual rights in favor of state-based militarism, price controls and Imperial power over everything.
Events move faster nowadays, but the whole process of decline and collapse is rarely quick, and I hope your extensive plans cover not just the next decade, but the next couple generations.
How convenient, then, that the only adversaries of the United States government and military are Iraqi terrorists; since obviously no one else on the entire planet would be interested in this sort of information.
Believe me when I say that if a reporter can find it, so can any number of motivated, interested parties from any number of nationalities and motivated for any number of reasons.
Maybe it's inevitable that the metaverse will start off as individual islands. Look at the history of computer networks - they started off as individual LANs, then people started bolting on wide-area connectivity through the phone network, and then after a great deal of work you get to something like ARPAnet circa 1977 with its disparate links to military, commercial and educational sites. And then it takes another 15 or 20 years to get to the point where an average PC user can easily get connected and Do Something Useful on the Internet.
Since the usefulness of networks is directly related to the number of users connected to them, it makes sense that eventually these isolated corporate worlds will set up interconnections, bridges, tunnels, whatever to let people wander back and forth. And eventually there will be public interfaces, and inter-world-networks.
I see Sun + IBM's work on this and Second Life and World of Warcraft and all the other current worlds as something akin to old information services like CompuServe or GEnie or Delphi. Eventually they'll come to their senses and allow greater interconnectivity, and once the protocols get standardized, they'll end up selling different add-ons or levels of service or GUIs for your metaverse experience. WoW may be selling awesome fantasy-style avatars and Blizzard goodies for PvE/PvP games, and IBM may be selling four- or five-nines reliability and excellent customer service.
Of course, I'll be 65 years old by then and will *still* get my butt kicked by random 13-year-olds in deathmatches.:)
Please, folks with mod points, mod the above into oblivion. This is completely tasteless, even for Slashdot, despite anyone's fondness for Office Space.
If you think that the VA's CPRS system or network is good model to follow for a National Data Management Agency, I've got some real estate to sell you.
(The DoD already has an agency like this, it's called DISA. Ask your average DoD techie about DISA and see how they like it. There are DoD agencies who have gone as far as getting budgetary approval and funding contracts to build out their own non-DISA-managed wide-area networks because of the issues involved with DISA network support.:)
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w00t! Props to the bu.edu LUG. This is exactly what I was looking for. :)
Use KeePass.
I've been using it for over 3 years, and have somewhere north of 200 passwords stored for different systems, sites and organizations.
It'll even generate new random passwords for you and can keep track of expiration dates.
"Budget" means different things to different people.
:)
I was ecstatic to find a Dell Vostro deal a couple weeks ago where you could get an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2.0Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB 7200RPM disk, 15.4" glossy 1680x1050 display, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256MB, 8x DVD dual-layer burner, Intel 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR for around $1000 (USD).
That's a pretty decent machine, for a thousand dollars. It's not an XPS, or an uber-gaming rig, and it's way more than what you need to just browse the web and check your email. But for what I like to do (run virtual machine instances, test out apps, play some recent PC games) it's perfect.
If all you need is web and email access with document and spreadsheet software, the Asus EEE PC and (rapidly arriving) competitors is great. It's small, light, and good enough.
If you want to run memory- or disk- or video-intensive apps, obviously the EEE PC doesn't work for that.
All of us here on Slashdot need to remember that not everyone uses their PC in the same way.
Verizon won't even sell me an ISDN circuit. Bastards.
Not like I'm bitter. See my other post on this thread for my bitch-session on satellite Internet access.
The real kicker is that the county a couple miles to the south line has DSL access available for every home from its telco cooperative (Shentel). But not Verizon. Verizon will wire up FiOS all day long to its precious consumer base in densely-populated Northern Virginia and the DC suburbs, but will hardly lift a finger to provide even decent dial-up service out in rural areas.
Universal Service Fee, my ass.
Y'know what modem speed I get when I dial up my local Verizon access number? 23.4kbps if I'm lucky, 19.2kbps if I'm not. Not even a 28.8kbps connection. Welcome to 1995.
I'm only laughing since I've been on WildBlue's satellite service at home since November-ish of 2005, when I moved into a house in the Shenandoah Valley.
Please note that this is a mere 70 miles west from DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT and the crowded den of datacenters and fiber connectivity that infest western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County VA. For people not familiar with the United States, this is (by some measures) the Internet hub of the eastern seaboard, with a huge number of peering/exchange points and hosting facilities. I work at one of those datacenters where we have a primary 10GB (yes, ten gigabit Ethernet) link to our upstream provider.
You probably would not notice it for web surfing, but anything requiring two communication would suffer.
You notice this when web surfing. 900ms typical latency and 2% packet loss on a good day. Bad days are more like 2000ms latency and 30% packet loss, or "let's reset the modem again and maybe it'll sync up and shove some packets across before it dies from rain fade" or whatever is causing loss today. It's not so bad on static HTML pages or plain text, but AJAX pages can suffer horribly if they're coded to constantly pump data back and forth, and without AdBlock or similar addons/extensions for a browser, it's horrible. Flash-based pages actually work well, once they download.
Imagine a terminal application with a 1 second latency, each keystroke would have a 2 second delay.
SSH over a VPN is pretty painful, but if you have your environment set up decently (i.e., alias the top 50 commands you run most often to two-letter combinations) it's workable for remote admin. Character-interactive apps like `vi` are still bad, but with patience you may prevail.
Remote desktop access is just out of the question. I've tried TightVNC and variants, and it's still just baaaaad.
Online gaming would be pretty bad too. VOIP would have an added pause.
Yeah, I cancelled Xbox Live since any multiplayer game was unplayable. WoW can be playable, under certain conditions, and MMORPGs fare better (i.e. it's theoretically playable) than other online games, but it's still painful. Ended up cancelling WoW too.
VOIP just doesn't work. Skype screeches along and you get a 1.5s-delayed echo. Oh yay.
I'm not bitter. I'm just pissed off, since I literally can't get anything better where I am.
+1 depressing but unfortunately possible? :)
9/10 of the world's population in mud huts is a rather large overestimate, with 6.5 billion people on Earth that would mean everyone outside of the US and Western Europe, which obviously isn't the case. If you go by GDP purchasing-power-parity per capita (that's one long ugly acronym there, GDP-PPP-PC, maybe GD5PC?), it's more like 2 billion people on the planet who are really bad off, living on under $1 per day, with another 3.5 billion in actively developing economies like Brazil, China, India and Russia who are quite a bit better off, and a bit over 1 billion in the United States, the EU, Japan, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand who enjoy a standard of living that would be the envy of kings and emperors from any previous point in history.
Numbers aside, there's places on the planet like the Niger Delta which, from our perspective among the most prosperous billion people, look like a nightmarish science-fiction story. Shinra Electric Power Company, anyone?
I'd have to dig out some anthropology textbooks or do some research ( which, given that this is Slashdot and reading TFA is considered overachieving, seems unlikely ) but if you look back at other massive leaps forward in human history, they're kinda lumpy. Fire, language, first domestication of animals and improved stone tools all happened (ahem, relatively) close together; and then 10k to 12k years ago, you get agriculture, cities, new and more complex political structure; followed by 4k to 6k years ago with writing, codes of law, etc. Maybe our perspective on the recent rapid rate of change is skewed by being towards the tail end of industrialization and informationization (yeah, Firefox spellcheck says that's not a word).
:)
As an alternative to the Singularity theory, what if we're just going to be in a developmental lull for the next few decades while society and individuals and businesses adapt to the massive changes we've gone through? Heck, most individuals in big modern metro areas are still adapting to not having extended families nearby, commuting to work, etc. which are relatively recent introductions. If your grandparents weren't doing it, odds are you're still trying to figure out how to do it right.
I'd love to have flying cars and self-sustaining off-world colonies and fiber to the home across the entire continental US, but those might need some new cheap energy source or an improved finance system or more humane living conditions for people before they come along.
This particular model (Shuttle XPC SN27P2) has a 400W PSU, and I've googled around and read through some discussion boards where people claim, at least, that they have run the SN27P2 with an 8800GT. I'd like to find some more specs on the actual power output per rail from the PSU before buying this all together, though.
NVIDIA has a neat graphics and PSU comparison Flash webpage where you can drag sliders to specify your PSU wattage, and it'll recommend video cards accordingly. At least according to them, a 400W PSU should be sufficient to power 8800GT class cards.
Promo codes were $10 off the CPU and $10 off the RAM. So that's a $20 difference, or (at most) 3% more than the lower total price. And if you want to clip UPC codes and send in the mail-in rebates, that's another $60 off the price if you go to the effort.
DVD burners just aren't that expensive in the States. Newegg has a whole bunch of DVD burners (even dual-layer capable and with LightScribe support) for under $40, with some good Samsung and Sony/NEC drives for under $25, including shipping. I haven't spent more than $35 on a new internal CD/DVD burner for 7 or 8 years.
It's not an uber gaming rig, but it'll play most games fairly decently, and it's only $200 to $300 more expensive than an Xbox 360 or PS3 + accessories. You could drop the 8800GT card down to a 8600GT and save another $110 off the total price, bringing it down to $642.
By comparison, an Xbox 360 Halo 3 Edition is $415 with shipping, or a PS3 40GB is $413 with shipping.
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but $1200 is not the entry point for PC gaming, and you'd have to go back to the mid to late 1990s to find the last time that it was.
... but with two small kids in the family, one 4 years old and the other 17 months old, babies and toddlers pick up things INCREDIBLY fast. Accomplishments that would take near-inconceivable amounts of processing power, memory and storage to do with current AI algorithms are done by kids under two years old every single day.
:)
It makes me think that human brains are either hard-wired from birth for language and cognition, or have an astounding amount of capability compared to *anything* in computing, even on the distant horizon.
But, of course, the linguistic-cognitive miracles still get spaghetti sauce all over the table at dinner.
Parsec on the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. And we had a cassette deck for the system so my Dad + I could save the BASIC programs we wrote. Good times.
CNN actually has a pretty good breakdown on the vote counts for each primary and caucus, along with other statistical data. It just takes a while to drill down through the "Election '08" BS on their site to find it:
New Hampshire
Iowa
Just use Firefox + AdBlockPlus + NoScript (need to temporarily allow cnn.com, cnn.net and turner.com to get the content to load on the pages above) and you can safely ignore most of the blinking commercialized crap.
I outright refuse to watch CNN on TV, but there's still some useful junk on their site now and then.
*Ideally* they should be trained as engineers, but in too many cases, CS graduates end up with the equivalent of a trade school or technical degree. Which is fine for employers, but not so much for the profession as a whole and certainly not for the graduate.
I've had multiple managers tell me they'd rather hire EE or mathematics grads than CS grads for positions that require actual thought and skill.
Unfortunately, that's what people do.
As a species, homo sapiens is really really good at only a handful of things:
* having sex
* communicating
* building
* killing
Say what you will about individual persons, good or bad, but as a species we have systematically and deliberately killed off all possible threats and competition (mammoths, neanderthals, large predators) and have become the deadliest intelligent force on this planet. As groups of people, mankind will always resort to violence against others past a certain threshold of hunger, pain, dishonor or other provocation. That's why true pacifists can be so respected - they are so few and far between that they truly stand out on the backdrop of the rest of human society.
You can argue (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that civilization, over time, reduces the relative amount of violence in a population - see "A History of Violence" by Steven Pinker. While that may be true, the other side of civilization's influence is that the tools of violence inevitably become more sophisticated and deadly, even if the frequency of their use declines.
The other really interesting historical development in violence over the past hundred years is the vastly increased cost and destructive power of high-end weaponry. The most destructive forms of warfare used to require literal armies of people bent upon pillage and destruction. Now, governments (and really only governments, not individuals or corporations) can instead spend gigantic amounts of money and acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of immense destructive power. Or they can firebomb cities into submission, like the Allies did in WWII against Dresden and Tokyo.
That changes a lot of the balance in warfare and politics. Much as heavy cavalry and standing armies helped to transform city-states into nation-states, air forces and navies and nuclear weapons play a role in transforming nations into continental powers.
Robotics may start to swing the pendulum back in the other direction. R&D costs for robots really aren't that expensive compared to traditional Big Weapons Systems. $14m is way less than a new US Air Force fighter jet costs, let alone a typical new system deployed by the US DoD. The resulting technology stands a good chance of becoming commoditized, which means that smaller groups and individuals may be able to afford them.
Ultimately, that may not be good for World Peace, given that peace (as perceived by the people in powerful countries who tend to write history) is best maintained by a clear balance of power and not by uncertainty and threats to power.
Despite frequent attempts (often by Bob Metcalfe) to proclaim The Death Of The Internet, somehow the damn thing just keeps on surviving and expanding:
* ARPANet Co-Founder Predicts An Internet Crisis October 25th 2007
* Death of the Internet greatly exaggerated August 25 2004
* The Death Of The Internet November 4 2002
* Predicting the Death of the Internet May 18 2001
* Internet still collapsing, Metcalfe says July 7 1997
I'd like to suggest a new anti-Internet-death-meme: the Internet is a giant collection of cockroaches. You can step on as many as you want with your HD video torrents, it just keeps on multiplying and scurrying around anyway.
I've noticed the same sort of dramatic change in the suburban neighborhoods where I grew up, from the mid 1980s to the present. I was a pretty nerdy kid, spent a fair amount of time cobbling together BASIC programs on my parents' IBM model 5150 PC and playing NES games, but I also spent a lot of time outside. My friends and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood and down to the local reservoir, played pick-up games of basketball and baseball and football in the street and at the local school yard, went fishing, raised hell, blah blah blah. Much like kids have done since the dawn of time.
But when I drive around those same neighborhoods now, I don't see kids running around outside, playing ball games or on their bikes. If I see any sports played on school fields, it's of the highly organized and scheduled team variety, complete with circling hordes of SUVs and minivans. I talk with my brother-in-law, who's graduating from high school next year, and he says that a lot of his friends spend all their time inside, chatting online, playing Xbox or Playstation or PC games, watching TV and texting each other.
I don't know what has happened in modern American suburban society that broke childhood, but there's not anywhere near enough importance being placed on this. I talk to people my age (~ 30) and older about it, and while there's some agreement about the problem, no one seems to know what to do about it.
I think you're on to something about being afraid of other people. If you live somewhere outside of suburbia, people talk to you, strike up conversations, and talk with your kids, especially if they're being cute. Inside suburbia, that isn't the case.
I don't think it's deliberate (maybe I'm wrong), but some combination of mass media, particularly TV, the Eternal Emergency model used by government and "news" to communicate with The People, a broken civil justice and litigation system and the suburban model of work, commuting and home life has begun to destroy the most basic elements of human civilization.
People are notoriously bad at judging risk on a large scale (hearing about lions eating someone when you're in a hundred-person tribe == large risk to self; hearing about lions eating someone when you're in a multiple-hundred-million-person continental superstate == incredibly small risk to self). People who are increasingly isolated from the full range of daily human contact and interaction become even worse at, surprisingly enough, acting like other people.
My question is, how do you stop this? Do you work at forming relationships within your neighborhood so that it starts to act like a community instead of a random agglomeration of worker drones and dronettes? Do you bug the hell out and live somewhere outside the blast zone where jobs are harder to find but property is cheap and people are friendly and welcoming? Do you campaign to slowly force back and correct the social maladjustments resulting from the rational choices of people subject to broken systems?
Be careful.
The Western Roman Empire sustained itself for almost two centuries after its near-collapse in the late 2nd century AD by eliminating all that was left of individual rights in favor of state-based militarism, price controls and Imperial power over everything.
Events move faster nowadays, but the whole process of decline and collapse is rarely quick, and I hope your extensive plans cover not just the next decade, but the next couple generations.
How convenient, then, that the only adversaries of the United States government and military are Iraqi terrorists; since obviously no one else on the entire planet would be interested in this sort of information.
Believe me when I say that if a reporter can find it, so can any number of motivated, interested parties from any number of nationalities and motivated for any number of reasons.
Maybe it's inevitable that the metaverse will start off as individual islands. Look at the history of computer networks - they started off as individual LANs, then people started bolting on wide-area connectivity through the phone network, and then after a great deal of work you get to something like ARPAnet circa 1977 with its disparate links to military, commercial and educational sites. And then it takes another 15 or 20 years to get to the point where an average PC user can easily get connected and Do Something Useful on the Internet.
:)
Since the usefulness of networks is directly related to the number of users connected to them, it makes sense that eventually these isolated corporate worlds will set up interconnections, bridges, tunnels, whatever to let people wander back and forth. And eventually there will be public interfaces, and inter-world-networks.
I see Sun + IBM's work on this and Second Life and World of Warcraft and all the other current worlds as something akin to old information services like CompuServe or GEnie or Delphi. Eventually they'll come to their senses and allow greater interconnectivity, and once the protocols get standardized, they'll end up selling different add-ons or levels of service or GUIs for your metaverse experience. WoW may be selling awesome fantasy-style avatars and Blizzard goodies for PvE/PvP games, and IBM may be selling four- or five-nines reliability and excellent customer service.
Of course, I'll be 65 years old by then and will *still* get my butt kicked by random 13-year-olds in deathmatches.
I'll bet that your new computer purchase is infinitely prolonged. :)
Please, folks with mod points, mod the above into oblivion. This is completely tasteless, even for Slashdot, despite anyone's fondness for Office Space.
So did someone at Sony read Snow Crash? Playstation Home sounds like the Metaverse, version 1.0.
If you think that the VA's CPRS system or network is good model to follow for a National Data Management Agency, I've got some real estate to sell you.
:)
(The DoD already has an agency like this, it's called DISA. Ask your average DoD techie about DISA and see how they like it. There are DoD agencies who have gone as far as getting budgetary approval and funding contracts to build out their own non-DISA-managed wide-area networks because of the issues involved with DISA network support.
I've found the smartest person on Slashdot.
And they're an Anonymous Coward.