What I did was get a degree in electrical engineering (from Arizona State, not a particularly well-respected university - it's known more for being a "party school" than anything) and then, my first job was programming related, and I got sucked into this career. I wanted to avoid spending my whole life staring at a monitor, and getting carpal tunnel syndrom, but that's what I do. (So far my wrists aren't too bad though.) But I really honestly miss a lot of things that I didn't learn, which I would have learned if I had gotten a CS degree. I never had compilers or operating systems classes. I didn't learn Lisp well enough. I didn't learn OO concepts at all. I had an AI class and one that covered some advanced knowledge representation techniques, but they didn't go deep enough. (Now, however, I have done most of these things in the course of various jobs I've had, and perhaps have learned almost as much as if I had had the classes. It was just a steeper learning curve for me than it should have been.)
I would recommend you go to a college where you will get an immersion in Scheme. That means either MIT or University of Indiana in Bloomington. Urbana-Champagne might not be too bad either; I'm not sure what they teach but at least they have a good reputation. At many other places you will only learn Java, which is too simple and doesn't expose you to some really advanced, powerful concepts, which are not used in industry as widely as they should be, precisely because too few people know about them. And it really takes some time and experience to wrap your head around them, too; a mere explanation does not suffice. The low quality of education that people are getting is holding back the whole industry. If you are sure you want to do CS work for the rest of your life, get the best education you can get, money be damned. That's what financial aid is for. You are only young once, and you have maximum intelligence while you are young, so make the most of it. I mean, you want to be a computer _scientist_ not a web programmer right? The other advice you are getting here seems to be more along the lines of doing as little as possible to get some kind of programming job and survive. But those jobs are going to India now, and maybe in a decade or two the computers will be doing more of the grunt work as well, leaving only really creative, intelligent, high-level work for first-world countries to do.
On the other hand, some circuit theory, digital logic classes, computer architecture, assembler programming etc. will be very useful to you even if they seem to be more in the hardware realm than what is required for CS. What has been least useful to me was the semiconductor physics (way too much of it) and analog IC design. I was pretty lousy in those classes too, and don't remember a lot. The active devices class I took at a community college was more useful than the university-level stuff.
Another thing is to make sure you can be friendly with the professors. Many ASU professors are terrible about that; they just don't care about students very much. Of course it's hard to tell about that until you try to interact with them. But I worked with a U of I student a few months ago, who worked at my company for the summer. He really impressed me with how smart he was (knew tons more than I did at that age), and he said he really liked his professors too. So I think it must be a pretty good school.
I emailed the Mozilla mailing list a couple years ago with a suggestion that they ought not to be developing a mozilla widget set, because it's better to have native widgets on each platform. But they thought it would be better to have Mozilla look the same on every platform. (Always mistaken logic IMO. People who think that their application is the only one that certain users will need, are the ones who usually think that way, but it's never actually true. Consistency of UI on the platform that you have chosen is way more important than having one app that looks the same on every platform. Not to mention that it's inefficient to re-invent all the widgets.) So now after they have spent so much time doing that, and debugging it, and re-inventing the idea of skin as if _that_ had never been done before, it gets thrown out due to excessive bloat and speed issues, and Firefox becomes way more popular because it uses the native widgets available on each platform, and leaves out some other less popular faatures. If only they had done Firefox first, maybe we users wouldn't have had to spend so darn many years running Netscape 4 because nobody had succeeded in improving on it. Gecko was ready years ago but they spent so much time doing stuff that didn't need to be done at all, and Mozilla wasn't actually useable until around 1.0. (But I did use Galeon for a while.)
Remember the early handheld TV sets from the early 80's or so? They were sortof flat CRT's, fit in a package about the same size as the color LCD handheld TVs nowadays, and had similar screen size too. Of course it's probably easier to do with black-and-white than color, but still. There is just no excuse for typical computer monitors that are deeper than they are wide.
But what we really need is a high-res display that doesn't wear out. Maybe e-ink will be it, or maybe some kind of DLP projector with a better lamp, or LED displays with longer lifetimes. Phosphors get dim over time and LCD backlights wear out too. Displays have such a long way to go, and this idea is probably only good for a few years until something better comes along.
Maybe this is what they call a Weather Control Grid on Star Trek.:-) Maybe it could reduce tornadoes.
Anyway making the arctic regions cooler might help to offset global warming there. Too bad for the tropics though.
What if the windmills were built in the tropics? Wouldn't that have the effect of cooling the whole globe a little? (Due to removal of kinetic energy from the air, which is what otherwise drives the winds.)
Well, this article was about an American wasn't it? The service (or lack thereof) is out of control in some of the socialist regimes (but not all of them). The cost is out of control here. Nowadays the service is getting just as bad as it is in the socialist countries; doctors are more worried about avoiding lawsuits, getting rich and retiring as early as possible, and they don't give a shit about people anymore. The end result is worse here than it is there IMO - people are not getting served, either because the doctors don't want to be bothered, or because they can't afford it, or both at the same time. I believe in capitalism but something is seriously fucked up with the system we have here.
Well what do you think is in a UPS? Batteries right? So why are batteries more expensive than a UPS solution? And UPSs tend to die every couple years too.
I do grant you that solar panels are expensive. But it could be a worthwhile expense.
My approach is that everything that I want to keep running when the power goes out should run from either 12V or 24V. I have a 24VDC system. Two 12V batteries in series for 24V, and a third 12V battery which is kept charged by a DC/DC converter. (This was mostly because I had surplus batteries; 12V alone would be fine for many purposes. My earlier attempt was with a pair of 6V golf-cart batteries in series. These are capable of storing a lot of energy, and they last a long time if well taken care of, but they do consume water.) The 24V system is charged by a pair of large solar panels on the roof, which I got used on ebay. I'm a little underwhelmed though with the current that I'm getting out of them, so suggest you should get new ones with the best efficiency you can find. Today I was getting a peak of 3 amps charge current. That's only 72 watts, and it is not providing that much all day long, either. Consequently my "secondary" grid-powered battery charger is providing most of the charging. I have 2 computers running on batteries now, and together they draw about 4 amps continuously from the 24V supply. One is an Athlon with an Orion 24V ATX power supply, and the other is a fanless Epia 600, supposedly low power, but it is drawing a bit over 2 amps off the 12V supply (which translates to a bit over 1 amp off the 24V supply). The Epia has one of these, which gives me the flexibility to run from either voltage.
CRTs are line-powered but LCDs typically run from a lower voltage. Right now I have two big CRTs for my main system and they are power hogs, and generate a lot of heat. Some day I will upgrade, and I think it's possible to find LCDs which have wall-wart power supplies rather than built-in. I would bet some of them are 12V too. So then I will be set - I could do any kind of computing I like even during a power outage. A laptop is also a good solution, but those usually charge from less standard voltages, like 16 or 18. It's unfortunate.
12V lighting is easy, because RVers use so much of it. You can find 12V fluorescent lights, halogen track lights (but that's kindof wasteful), LED lights etc. In an extended power outage I would turn off one or both of the computers, and then the 24V battery would keep the 12V battery charged, and I could have lighting indefinitely as the solar panels charge the 24V battery every day. The kitchen has a drop ceiling with several 4' grid-powered fluorescent lights already. I added a 2' 12V powered RV light. It is well hidden above the translucent ceiling panels, and provides enough light to get by.
For my computer rack I made a panel with efficient switching DC/DC converters that supply 5V and 3.3V as well, for things that would otherwise have been powered by inefficient "wall wart" power supplies. Just consolidating all of those to a single source should save a lot of power. The panel has a bunch of these connectors. I use red & black for 12V, blue & black for 24V, orange & black for 5V and yellow & black for 3.3V. (I debated about whether to follow the PC power supply color convention, but the ham radio guys have already chosen red for 12V, and that doesn't match.) I plan to use brown for any other odd voltage that I may need later; I notice a lot of things running from 7.5V, for instance (hubs and scanners and stuff like that). I used some panel-mount holders like these to mount them on a rack panel. If you don't want to make your own p
A few weeks ago there was an Ask Slashdot about filesystem search tools. Somebody mentioned Swish-e or Swish++. I have been using Swish++ in 2 applications since then - to search documents uploaded to a MediaWiki, and also to search a big pile of source code, libraries, documents etc. It has worked well in both situations. I even have it pulling symbols out of library files, so with a single search for a function I can find which header file it's defined in, and which library to link. It's very fast too, basically instantaneous. However the index file is a bit large (274 megs for about 5.2 gigs of data). (Yes I know Swish settings can change the index size radically.)
Somebody needs to write a good distributed search tool which could replace find, locate, grep -r, swish etc. You should be able to specify which file types you are interested in, on which machines, and have the option to limit it to certain directories or regular-expression filenames or file owners/permissions; and search file names only, or all file metadata (including embedded metadata like EXIF tags, ID3 tags, HTML tags, etc.), or the file contents, or some combination. I would probably implement it by putting a.index file in every directory, and having a daemon running on every machine which can aggregate query results from other machines. Obviously, files inside tarballs should be indexed too. I suspect Reiser4 would make some of this stuff easier, that it will be done eventually.
Yeah, Sony would not make that mistake. My digital 8mm camcorder from 2001 actually detects Macrovision encoded sources and refuses to even try to record. (I was trying to use my fair-use rights to make a backup copy of a DVD in order to watch it in a different location on the camcorder's nice big LCD.) Laserdiscs however, I can copy just fine.:-)
Well I figure why does it have to go all the way to LEO? The lion's share of the fuel is burned just getting the rocket off the ground, usually; so anything that can give you a little kinetic energy using ground-based power is an improvement. Just running a train to the top of Mt. Everest, at any speed, at the right angle, and doing launches from the end of the track, would be an improvement; if the air is so thin you can't breathe without oxygen, it's got to be a lot less resistance for launches too. Gradually the technology will be developed to get such trains going higher and higher but we wouldn't have to do it all at once.
Anyway nanotech really will change the world someday, and I think the space elevator is possible, if we don't get a better idea in the meantime.
Well when each blade costs several dollars I use them for several months whether they were intended to last that long or not. I'm not sure whether I get a better shave from a 3-month-old triple-blade razor or a week-old single-blade one. At least the triple ones let the hair pass through instead of clogging up.
First of all you have to have a large area of solar panels to get enough electricity in a day to power a typical commute; the surface area of the car is not enough. Second, once you've got electricity, there's no way that splitting water to make hydrogen and then burning it in an inefficient engine is going to be better than charging batteries and running a high-efficiency electric motor.
Here's the practical solution: cover your garage roof with solar panels, and charge an electric car with lithium-ion batteries. Some of the rich folks in Scottsdale are actually doing that today. The problem is that large enough lithium-ion batteries are only beginning to become available, and still quite expensive (10's of thousands for a typical car) despite the fact that they are being made in China. But I think they will come down quickly enough. (The fact that the large automakers are building hybrids now will force that to happen; they need the same kinds of batteries, just not as large.) In the mean time a couple of high-performance cars (the TZero, and that new Fetish, both extreme-performance cars) have been put into production with massive numbers of laptop batteries. Range in excess of 100 miles/day is possible that way, covering nearly everyone's commuting needs (and you still need something else for cross-country trips, or else pull along a trailer with a generator. That's been done too.)
I got iConnectHere service a while back and have been mostly disappointed with the connections sometimes working, mostly not working.
But also, the phone has a lot of apparent features which their firmware (or service?) doesn't support - half the buttons don't do anything (I have to use a web page to get voicemail - the phone will not do it), and I wish the LED backlighting would stay on longer (oddly, if the phone doesn't succeed in doing DHCP then it stays on constantly; otherwise it only stays on a few seconds after you pick up the handset and you are left dialing in the dark.) Surely somebody is improving the plain-jane firmware from Grandstream? Or is it just iConnectHere that's so retarded and not the firmware?
Sounds like I need to incorporate telephony into my "next-generation gateway" box (currently an old dual-pentium, dual-LAN box connecting my cable modem to my LAN) which I plan to base on a dual-LAN Via Epia board. It has one PCI slot for the telephony card, perfect. Anybody running a setup like that?
My wife's been nagging me about resuscitating vgetty again so we have voicemail. This sounds like a nice step up.
Well I just saw a 17" LCD for $299 at Office Max. If I had the spare cash I'd get a couple of them.
Where I work they seem to consider CRT's mostly obsolete. New systems come with LCD monitors, and nice 19" and 21" CRTs are lying about, and there are salvage bins full of them outside (probably presumed dead, but I wonder sometimes). (I scavenged one I found in the office for my desk because it's still worth the space sacrifice to get 1600x1200 rather than 1280x1024; furthermore I stuck in a second video card (also scavenged) so I could do Xinerama and extend my main desktop onto my LCD, as a secondary monitor.)
I went to a private school for 3 years, at a price around a thousand bucks a year. My single mom was poor and it was very tough for her, but she believed in the idea of getting a quality education for me. Concurrently the school was run by people whose mission in life was to provide children with a quality education - more as a form of community service than as a comfortable career. To this day I'm not the least bit sorry about those 3 years; from grades 1-8 I learned more in those years than I did in the others combined, despite the lack of the latest technology or the newest most overpriced books or even decent salaries for the teachers.
A statistic from that same time period (the early 80's) was that government schools were spending $8k per student.
Now of course there has been inflation. Both figures have gone up. But it is a fact that the least efficient way to get something done is for the government to do it. At every level of employment, people get used to the idea that the money issues aren't their problem, and there is a lot of waste. And outside the organization, or at the upper levels of management, it is perceived that every problem has the same solution - throw more money at it.
I'm also afraid that if everyone had to pay for education separately, some of the poorest students or the ones with stupid parents would get left behind. But hopefully it would be a small enough fraction that some charities could take care of it. At worst, a few of the native-born Americans would be on the same level as the immigrants. There will continue to be jobs for such people at least as long as the poverty which is an impediment to their education continues. You don't need much of anything to work at McDonald's; and some people will end up working there no matter how hard society tries to pound more education into their skulls.
I still believe it's achievable. What's needed are rugged displays (not made of glass like LCDs) built into rugged, thin packages that are mostly display, without mechanical stuff that can break (buttons, knobs, slots, etc.). Like the PADDs on Star Trek. We keep getting closer but some of the technology doesn't quite exist yet. Also some good software is needed. Some of what's available for tablet PCs comes close. Of course it ought to be free software, and there should be a reusable library for certain features needed by pen-based apps which are rare and are considered advanced now but really are necessary for usability. I intend to work on it eventually.
Once the technology becomes mature, the changes and upgrades need to be managed carefully so that old devices do not become obsolete. Planned obsolescence is what makes computers bad for the environment. The ultimate PADD should be built rugged enough to last decades, and as its processor becomes slow relative to the newest ones, it should be able to depend more on resources that are available on the network, so that it is still useable. (Past a certain point, the amount of speed and memory and resolution that a device has is going to dwarf most everyday 2D work, and the devices can be considered mature. We just aren't there yet.) The network protocols should not change too much; it must be very easy to share information between them. (For a while you could count on being able to send business cards via IR between Palms and phones etc. and that was very cool, but now that feature is getting left out of some newer devices, or replaced with things like Bluetooth, which is probably also ephemeral.) One appeal of paper is that you can have many sheets of it and spread them around, putting a lot of information within your field of view; but if the PADDs were also abundant, you could do the same thing; so there would be no reason to throw them out just because they are not the latest models. If all else fails you could put them on a shelf like books and they could participate in a distributed computing grid, until you need an extra display for something. At 1/4" thick they wouldn't constitute the kind of clutter that extra desktop PCs do now. And eventually even the homeless will be carrying them around and have internet access via ubiquitous free wireless networks.
I don't think that printing books is so terrible for the environment, and can relate to those who say that they will never get past the need to read books on real paper, even as I imagine that they will really be mostly obsolete eventually. But a lot of paper sure gets wasted on temporary printouts of stuff at work, newspapers, and junk mail. If all of that got done electronically in a couple decades or so it would be a big improvement. The reasons that it hasn't IMO are lack of standards, and too much incompatibility and immaturity in the technology.
BTW the idea in this article was already done at least once... remember the Cross digital pen? And there are a lot of varieties of digital whiteboards (some scan the board, some use ultrasound or optical methods to track the markers).
Yep, I agree. But an indexing/search engine still needs to be written, after they get done arguing about who can stand the silent semantic changes and who can't. And then there will be those who use other filesystems wanting the same functionality, or at least the same interface to an inferior functionality...
So the best way to test it is for Slashdot to add a user preference to append nyud.net to every inline href, so that if you turn that on you don't have to do it manually.
Yes with batteries you may only get 50 miles range but that is enough for most commuting purposes. Never visit a gas pump again or care what the prices are up to - you can refill at home or any outlet anywhere. (Of course keep an old SUV or pickup around for the longer trips, hauling stuff etc.)
Here's the idea for a hybrid on the other hand - take all the complexities, idiosyncracies, maintenance woes, hazards etc. of both gas-powered and electric cars and combine them into a single design. Sounds like a recipe for a nightmare to me if not well-executed.
Just in case you think electric cars cannot be quick or powerful enough check this out:
After my experiences with the Zip and Jaz (the latter died right around the time its warranty expired, back when they cost $400) I wouldn't trust those guys. Not to mention such things have a rather short life before obsolescence; even if the hardware were to actually last, pretty soon it just isn't cost-effective anymore. There must be a hundred obsolete MO and cartridge drives, at least. (Not counting all the myriad tape formats)
Is the surface area of the moon the size of Boulder, or is it the cross-section that has similar dimensions? Or is it by volume, based on the idea that only the dirt down to a certain depth can be considered to be within the city limits?
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What I did was get a degree in electrical engineering (from Arizona State, not a particularly well-respected university - it's known more for being a "party school" than anything) and then, my first job was programming related, and I got sucked into this career. I wanted to avoid spending my whole life staring at a monitor, and getting carpal tunnel syndrom, but that's what I do. (So far my wrists aren't too bad though.) But I really honestly miss a lot of things that I didn't learn, which I would have learned if I had gotten a CS degree. I never had compilers or operating systems classes. I didn't learn Lisp well enough. I didn't learn OO concepts at all. I had an AI class and one that covered some advanced knowledge representation techniques, but they didn't go deep enough. (Now, however, I have done most of these things in the course of various jobs I've had, and perhaps have learned almost as much as if I had had the classes. It was just a steeper learning curve for me than it should have been.)
I would recommend you go to a college where you will get an immersion in Scheme. That means either MIT or University of Indiana in Bloomington. Urbana-Champagne might not be too bad either; I'm not sure what they teach but at least they have a good reputation. At many other places you will only learn Java, which is too simple and doesn't expose you to some really advanced, powerful concepts, which are not used in industry as widely as they should be, precisely because too few people know about them. And it really takes some time and experience to wrap your head around them, too; a mere explanation does not suffice. The low quality of education that people are getting is holding back the whole industry. If you are sure you want to do CS work for the rest of your life, get the best education you can get, money be damned. That's what financial aid is for. You are only young once, and you have maximum intelligence while you are young, so make the most of it. I mean, you want to be a computer _scientist_ not a web programmer right? The other advice you are getting here seems to be more along the lines of doing as little as possible to get some kind of programming job and survive. But those jobs are going to India now, and maybe in a decade or two the computers will be doing more of the grunt work as well, leaving only really creative, intelligent, high-level work for first-world countries to do.
On the other hand, some circuit theory, digital logic classes, computer architecture, assembler programming etc. will be very useful to you even if they seem to be more in the hardware realm than what is required for CS. What has been least useful to me was the semiconductor physics (way too much of it) and analog IC design. I was pretty lousy in those classes too, and don't remember a lot. The active devices class I took at a community college was more useful than the university-level stuff.
Another thing is to make sure you can be friendly with the professors. Many ASU professors are terrible about that; they just don't care about students very much. Of course it's hard to tell about that until you try to interact with them. But I worked with a U of I student a few months ago, who worked at my company for the summer. He really impressed me with how smart he was (knew tons more than I did at that age), and he said he really liked his professors too. So I think it must be a pretty good school.
I emailed the Mozilla mailing list a couple years ago with a suggestion that they ought not to be developing a mozilla widget set, because it's better to have native widgets on each platform. But they thought it would be better to have Mozilla look the same on every platform. (Always mistaken logic IMO. People who think that their application is the only one that certain users will need, are the ones who usually think that way, but it's never actually true. Consistency of UI on the platform that you have chosen is way more important than having one app that looks the same on every platform. Not to mention that it's inefficient to re-invent all the widgets.) So now after they have spent so much time doing that, and debugging it, and re-inventing the idea of skin as if _that_ had never been done before, it gets thrown out due to excessive bloat and speed issues, and Firefox becomes way more popular because it uses the native widgets available on each platform, and leaves out some other less popular faatures. If only they had done Firefox first, maybe we users wouldn't have had to spend so darn many years running Netscape 4 because nobody had succeeded in improving on it. Gecko was ready years ago but they spent so much time doing stuff that didn't need to be done at all, and Mozilla wasn't actually useable until around 1.0. (But I did use Galeon for a while.)
Remember the early handheld TV sets from the early 80's or so? They were sortof flat CRT's, fit in a package about the same size as the color LCD handheld TVs nowadays, and had similar screen size too. Of course it's probably easier to do with black-and-white than color, but still. There is just no excuse for typical computer monitors that are deeper than they are wide.
But what we really need is a high-res display that doesn't wear out. Maybe e-ink will be it, or maybe some kind of DLP projector with a better lamp, or LED displays with longer lifetimes. Phosphors get dim over time and LCD backlights wear out too. Displays have such a long way to go, and this idea is probably only good for a few years until something better comes along.
Maybe this is what they call a Weather Control Grid on Star Trek. :-) Maybe it could reduce tornadoes.
Anyway making the arctic regions cooler might help to offset global warming there. Too bad for the tropics though.
What if the windmills were built in the tropics? Wouldn't that have the effect of cooling the whole globe a little? (Due to removal of kinetic energy from the air, which is what otherwise drives the winds.)
Well, this article was about an American wasn't it? The service (or lack thereof) is out of control in some of the socialist regimes (but not all of them). The cost is out of control here. Nowadays the service is getting just as bad as it is in the socialist countries; doctors are more worried about avoiding lawsuits, getting rich and retiring as early as possible, and they don't give a shit about people anymore. The end result is worse here than it is there IMO - people are not getting served, either because the doctors don't want to be bothered, or because they can't afford it, or both at the same time. I believe in capitalism but something is seriously fucked up with the system we have here.
I do grant you that solar panels are expensive. But it could be a worthwhile expense.
My approach is that everything that I want to keep running when the power goes out should run from either 12V or 24V. I have a 24VDC system. Two 12V batteries in series for 24V, and a third 12V battery which is kept charged by a DC/DC converter. (This was mostly because I had surplus batteries; 12V alone would be fine for many purposes. My earlier attempt was with a pair of 6V golf-cart batteries in series. These are capable of storing a lot of energy, and they last a long time if well taken care of, but they do consume water.) The 24V system is charged by a pair of large solar panels on the roof, which I got used on ebay. I'm a little underwhelmed though with the current that I'm getting out of them, so suggest you should get new ones with the best efficiency you can find. Today I was getting a peak of 3 amps charge current. That's only 72 watts, and it is not providing that much all day long, either. Consequently my "secondary" grid-powered battery charger is providing most of the charging. I have 2 computers running on batteries now, and together they draw about 4 amps continuously from the 24V supply. One is an Athlon with an Orion 24V ATX power supply, and the other is a fanless Epia 600, supposedly low power, but it is drawing a bit over 2 amps off the 12V supply (which translates to a bit over 1 amp off the 24V supply). The Epia has one of these, which gives me the flexibility to run from either voltage.
CRTs are line-powered but LCDs typically run from a lower voltage. Right now I have two big CRTs for my main system and they are power hogs, and generate a lot of heat. Some day I will upgrade, and I think it's possible to find LCDs which have wall-wart power supplies rather than built-in. I would bet some of them are 12V too. So then I will be set - I could do any kind of computing I like even during a power outage. A laptop is also a good solution, but those usually charge from less standard voltages, like 16 or 18. It's unfortunate.
12V lighting is easy, because RVers use so much of it. You can find 12V fluorescent lights, halogen track lights (but that's kindof wasteful), LED lights etc. In an extended power outage I would turn off one or both of the computers, and then the 24V battery would keep the 12V battery charged, and I could have lighting indefinitely as the solar panels charge the 24V battery every day. The kitchen has a drop ceiling with several 4' grid-powered fluorescent lights already. I added a 2' 12V powered RV light. It is well hidden above the translucent ceiling panels, and provides enough light to get by.
For my computer rack I made a panel with efficient switching DC/DC converters that supply 5V and 3.3V as well, for things that would otherwise have been powered by inefficient "wall wart" power supplies. Just consolidating all of those to a single source should save a lot of power. The panel has a bunch of these connectors. I use red & black for 12V, blue & black for 24V, orange & black for 5V and yellow & black for 3.3V. (I debated about whether to follow the PC power supply color convention, but the ham radio guys have already chosen red for 12V, and that doesn't match.) I plan to use brown for any other odd voltage that I may need later; I notice a lot of things running from 7.5V, for instance (hubs and scanners and stuff like that). I used some panel-mount holders like these to mount them on a rack panel. If you don't want to make your own p
Feh. Optical or RF proximity communications will have replaced USB by then.
A few weeks ago there was an Ask Slashdot about filesystem search tools. Somebody mentioned Swish-e or Swish++. I have been using Swish++ in 2 applications since then - to search documents uploaded to a MediaWiki, and also to search a big pile of source code, libraries, documents etc. It has worked well in both situations. I even have it pulling symbols out of library files, so with a single search for a function I can find which header file it's defined in, and which library to link. It's very fast too, basically instantaneous. However the index file is a bit large (274 megs for about 5.2 gigs of data). (Yes I know Swish settings can change the index size radically.)
.index file in every directory, and having a daemon running on every machine which can aggregate query results from other machines. Obviously, files inside tarballs should be indexed too. I suspect Reiser4 would make some of this stuff easier, that it will be done eventually.
Somebody needs to write a good distributed search tool which could replace find, locate, grep -r, swish etc. You should be able to specify which file types you are interested in, on which machines, and have the option to limit it to certain directories or regular-expression filenames or file owners/permissions; and search file names only, or all file metadata (including embedded metadata like EXIF tags, ID3 tags, HTML tags, etc.), or the file contents, or some combination. I would probably implement it by putting a
Welll... my new Epia firewall is powered by the sun too, but that's why it runs at 600 MHz... to save power.
Yeah, Sony would not make that mistake. My digital 8mm camcorder from 2001 actually detects Macrovision encoded sources and refuses to even try to record. (I was trying to use my fair-use rights to make a backup copy of a DVD in order to watch it in a different location on the camcorder's nice big LCD.) Laserdiscs however, I can copy just fine. :-)
Well I figure why does it have to go all the way to LEO? The lion's share of the fuel is burned just getting the rocket off the ground, usually; so anything that can give you a little kinetic energy using ground-based power is an improvement. Just running a train to the top of Mt. Everest, at any speed, at the right angle, and doing launches from the end of the track, would be an improvement; if the air is so thin you can't breathe without oxygen, it's got to be a lot less resistance for launches too. Gradually the technology will be developed to get such trains going higher and higher but we wouldn't have to do it all at once.
Anyway nanotech really will change the world someday, and I think the space elevator is possible, if we don't get a better idea in the meantime.
$0.10 on sale sometimes, or in big monster-packs at the warehouse club.
Well when each blade costs several dollars I use them for several months whether they were intended to last that long or not. I'm not sure whether I get a better shave from a 3-month-old triple-blade razor or a week-old single-blade one. At least the triple ones let the hair pass through instead of clogging up.
Here's the practical solution: cover your garage roof with solar panels, and charge an electric car with lithium-ion batteries. Some of the rich folks in Scottsdale are actually doing that today. The problem is that large enough lithium-ion batteries are only beginning to become available, and still quite expensive (10's of thousands for a typical car) despite the fact that they are being made in China. But I think they will come down quickly enough. (The fact that the large automakers are building hybrids now will force that to happen; they need the same kinds of batteries, just not as large.) In the mean time a couple of high-performance cars (the TZero, and that new Fetish, both extreme-performance cars) have been put into production with massive numbers of laptop batteries. Range in excess of 100 miles/day is possible that way, covering nearly everyone's commuting needs (and you still need something else for cross-country trips, or else pull along a trailer with a generator. That's been done too.)
I think that's infinitely improbable.
I got iConnectHere service a while back and have been mostly disappointed with the connections sometimes working, mostly not working.
But also, the phone has a lot of apparent features which their firmware (or service?) doesn't support - half the buttons don't do anything (I have to use a web page to get voicemail - the phone will not do it), and I wish the LED backlighting would stay on longer (oddly, if the phone doesn't succeed in doing DHCP then it stays on constantly; otherwise it only stays on a few seconds after you pick up the handset and you are left dialing in the dark.) Surely somebody is improving the plain-jane firmware from Grandstream? Or is it just iConnectHere that's so retarded and not the firmware?
Sounds like I need to incorporate telephony into my "next-generation gateway" box (currently an old dual-pentium, dual-LAN box connecting my cable modem to my LAN) which I plan to base on a dual-LAN Via Epia board. It has one PCI slot for the telephony card, perfect. Anybody running a setup like that?
My wife's been nagging me about resuscitating vgetty again so we have voicemail. This sounds like a nice step up.
Well I just saw a 17" LCD for $299 at Office Max. If I had the spare cash I'd get a couple of them.
Where I work they seem to consider CRT's mostly obsolete. New systems come with LCD monitors, and nice 19" and 21" CRTs are lying about, and there are salvage bins full of them outside (probably presumed dead, but I wonder sometimes). (I scavenged one I found in the office for my desk because it's still worth the space sacrifice to get 1600x1200 rather than 1280x1024; furthermore I stuck in a second video card (also scavenged) so I could do Xinerama and extend my main desktop onto my LCD, as a secondary monitor.)
I went to a private school for 3 years, at a price around a thousand bucks a year. My single mom was poor and it was very tough for her, but she believed in the idea of getting a quality education for me. Concurrently the school was run by people whose mission in life was to provide children with a quality education - more as a form of community service than as a comfortable career. To this day I'm not the least bit sorry about those 3 years; from grades 1-8 I learned more in those years than I did in the others combined, despite the lack of the latest technology or the newest most overpriced books or even decent salaries for the teachers.
A statistic from that same time period (the early 80's) was that government schools were spending $8k per student.
Now of course there has been inflation. Both figures have gone up. But it is a fact that the least efficient way to get something done is for the government to do it. At every level of employment, people get used to the idea that the money issues aren't their problem, and there is a lot of waste. And outside the organization, or at the upper levels of management, it is perceived that every problem has the same solution - throw more money at it.
I'm also afraid that if everyone had to pay for education separately, some of the poorest students or the ones with stupid parents would get left behind. But hopefully it would be a small enough fraction that some charities could take care of it. At worst, a few of the native-born Americans would be on the same level as the immigrants. There will continue to be jobs for such people at least as long as the poverty which is an impediment to their education continues. You don't need much of anything to work at McDonald's; and some people will end up working there no matter how hard society tries to pound more education into their skulls.
Coral doesn't seem to be handling slashdotting too well either. Bummer!
I still believe it's achievable. What's needed are rugged displays (not made of glass like LCDs) built into rugged, thin packages that are mostly display, without mechanical stuff that can break (buttons, knobs, slots, etc.). Like the PADDs on Star Trek. We keep getting closer but some of the technology doesn't quite exist yet. Also some good software is needed. Some of what's available for tablet PCs comes close. Of course it ought to be free software, and there should be a reusable library for certain features needed by pen-based apps which are rare and are considered advanced now but really are necessary for usability. I intend to work on it eventually.
Once the technology becomes mature, the changes and upgrades need to be managed carefully so that old devices do not become obsolete. Planned obsolescence is what makes computers bad for the environment. The ultimate PADD should be built rugged enough to last decades, and as its processor becomes slow relative to the newest ones, it should be able to depend more on resources that are available on the network, so that it is still useable. (Past a certain point, the amount of speed and memory and resolution that a device has is going to dwarf most everyday 2D work, and the devices can be considered mature. We just aren't there yet.) The network protocols should not change too much; it must be very easy to share information between them. (For a while you could count on being able to send business cards via IR between Palms and phones etc. and that was very cool, but now that feature is getting left out of some newer devices, or replaced with things like Bluetooth, which is probably also ephemeral.) One appeal of paper is that you can have many sheets of it and spread them around, putting a lot of information within your field of view; but if the PADDs were also abundant, you could do the same thing; so there would be no reason to throw them out just because they are not the latest models. If all else fails you could put them on a shelf like books and they could participate in a distributed computing grid, until you need an extra display for something. At 1/4" thick they wouldn't constitute the kind of clutter that extra desktop PCs do now. And eventually even the homeless will be carrying them around and have internet access via ubiquitous free wireless networks.
I don't think that printing books is so terrible for the environment, and can relate to those who say that they will never get past the need to read books on real paper, even as I imagine that they will really be mostly obsolete eventually. But a lot of paper sure gets wasted on temporary printouts of stuff at work, newspapers, and junk mail. If all of that got done electronically in a couple decades or so it would be a big improvement. The reasons that it hasn't IMO are lack of standards, and too much incompatibility and immaturity in the technology.
BTW the idea in this article was already done at least once... remember the Cross digital pen? And there are a lot of varieties of digital whiteboards (some scan the board, some use ultrasound or optical methods to track the markers).
Yep, I agree. But an indexing/search engine still needs to be written, after they get done arguing about who can stand the silent semantic changes and who can't. And then there will be those who use other filesystems wanting the same functionality, or at least the same interface to an inferior functionality...
So the best way to test it is for Slashdot to add a user preference to append nyud.net to every inline href, so that if you turn that on you don't have to do it manually.
Here's the idea for a hybrid on the other hand - take all the complexities, idiosyncracies, maintenance woes, hazards etc. of both gas-powered and electric cars and combine them into a single design. Sounds like a recipe for a nightmare to me if not well-executed.
Just in case you think electric cars cannot be quick or powerful enough check this out:
National Electric Drag Racing Association
And you can get a lot of help to build such a car yourself here. Disclaimer: I'm not following my own advice yet, due to lack of time; but I plan to.
After my experiences with the Zip and Jaz (the latter died right around the time its warranty expired, back when they cost $400) I wouldn't trust those guys. Not to mention such things have a rather short life before obsolescence; even if the hardware were to actually last, pretty soon it just isn't cost-effective anymore. There must be a hundred obsolete MO and cartridge drives, at least. (Not counting all the myriad tape formats)
Is the surface area of the moon the size of Boulder, or is it the cross-section that has similar dimensions? Or is it by volume, based on the idea that only the dirt down to a certain depth can be considered to be within the city limits?