What would be perfect is if there were places where you could rent time on a CNC mill, sort of like kinko's for engineers.
Try your local high school or middle school industrial technology teacher. I betcha you could work a deal where you could use their equipment if you can provide something of value to them in return, other than money (although a few bucks for the budget never hurts). Most valuable is your time and expertise. Least valuable, most likely to get you a no answer is anything that is going to take up any of his/her most valuable asset--time.
It is a big hassle to have to help a newbie set up a mill and even if the user has experience, it is generally a hassle to help them find the tools, widgets, and toolbits needed for your particular project. So make it clear from the get-go that you are going to make it worth their time, or you will probably not get near the equipment.
The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity
Uh, yeah, isn't that the point?
Not to be glib, but the network doens't grow symmetrically. There are always going to be bottlenecks, but there are always going to be improvements. When you build a new apartment complex, it makes sense to assume that the permanent network infrastructure in the building should, where economically feasible, be overbuilt as much as possible.
It will be a while, if ever, before they can use all of their bandwidth, but when the time comes they are ready, eh.
My only question that just popped into my head: the Internet was built-out as an extension of a government program. If the Internet had been a private sector project, would it have been built?
Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL all attempted it, but I think they were all doomed to the extent they tried to maintain walled gardens.
The nearlynet/permanet problem has also been exacerbated by the walled garden approach, I think.
A moped will do everything the Segway will do for approximately 1/5 the price. A zero-emissions moped is still much less than 1/2 the price. It's a toss-up as to which one makes you look like a bigger doofus:-)
Mopeds are for the street. Mopeds cannot go backwards, nor can they blend easily with pedestrian traffic. They need probably 5 foot radius (?) for turning around.
Segway can effortlessly blend with traffic of between 0 and 12 mph. I can ride my bicycle very slowly, but it is not fun and only physically fit people who are very good at riding bicycles can ride them very slowly. Mopeds would have an even more difficult time blending with pedestrians.
Mopeds cannot go backwards. Many people in this thread have complained about the 80 lbs weight of Segway, but all the mopeds I have ever seen certainly weight more than 80 lbs. (I don't know much about mopeds, though.)
I have seen video of Dean Kamen zipping around in his kitchen on a Segway grabbing things from the fridge and the cupboards, etc. Try that on a moped or a bicycle.
It is incorrect to say that a moped can do everything a Segway can do, just as it would be inocrrect to say a Segway can do anything a moped could do.
Or you could buy a really really nice bicycle for half that price (or a really nice one for under 1/5 the price). As an added bonus, you wouldn't be a fat lump looking stupid standing on a self balancing Jetsonesque piece of kitch.
Just to get this straight--I am not going to buy a Segway. I have a very nice bicycle I ride all summer long, but I can comprehend the possiblity that some people do not want to ride bicycles on busy city streets or do not have the physical skills or stamina to ride a bicycle. Saying they should ride a bicycle because it would be good for them does not work. It never has, and most likely never will. Segway is an alternative for those who prefer not to drive a car for a 5 mile trip, but who will not or cannot use a bicycle.
Why does that make you feel threatened enough to insult people on Segways?
Its amazon.com page tries in vain to sell it, protesting its uncanny ability to go backwards, go up slopes (gasp!), and even "self balance". The trouble is - people with fully functional legs can do all those things for free right now, and people without generally can't use a segway.
Can your fully functional legs carry you 12 mph for 5 miles?
The self-balance thing is what makes it different from the typical scooter that has a much larger footprint and turning radius, requires active balance by the rider, and generally prevents them from being used by anyone who doesn't have good mobility to begin with.
I fail to understand the hostility in the responses to Segway. Is it really that threatening to people's sensibility that there might be a real alternative to driving cars on short trips or in places where it is too congested to drive a car. Wasn't it like yesterday that they started charging a usage fee for driving in downtown London? I think it was something like US$8 a day just to enter the busiest part of town in a car, and that doesnt' include parking it once you're there.
I could be wrong with the figures but wouldn't a Segway pay for itself in a couple years if you could save $8 a day on that one fee alone? ($5000/8=625)
Google shows over 4k hits for cobianchi, why should yours be on the first page? You are alone in the world. According to Google no one links to your site, therefore you are not worthy of high listing.
Re:I'll worry when it finds my webpage.
on
Should you Fear Google?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've submitted my webpage 10x to google, yahoo,... and it's not a common name or like anything else. Yet I do a search, no link on the first 5 pages (I give up after that).
You don't understand Google. It doesn't really care if you submit your site or not. It ranks pages according to who links to you and some other arcane criteria.
If you are one in a millions hits, it is probably because there are a million pages just like yours. I have never submitted anything to any search engines, but the sites I have done are listed high in Google, because they are either related to obscure subjects, or are considered authoritative because they have been linked to many times.
I have an old Fujitsu from 1996 that still holds a good charge, but I also have an IBM thinkpad that someone gave me, I'm guessing it's about a 1998 or 1999 model and the battery is stone dead.
Actually, I am a little ashamed to admit it, but I'm kind of a fair weather proofer. If the first page I see is complicated I will do it, but I almost never go back to that book. I like the low hanging fruit.
Anatomy was something else. It was like that relative who drops in unannounced and never leaves for a month.
What's wrong with displaying plain text books in, suprisingly, plain text?
You would be surprised how few books are truly just text. Join Distributed Proofreaders today and you'll soon find yourself faced with everything but plain text. And most of those books are around 100 years old. Assuming anything else is ever allowed to become public domain, it will only get more difficult to get meaning out of a plain text book in PG.
Way cool. I've been working there once in a while since the first/. story, and I think it's the one of the most important things happening on the web.
It's only a matter of time before someone with a relatively massive audience like NPR does a story on DP and then we'll see what it's really like to be slashdotted. I would like to see the international membership increase, as well.
I recommend it to anyone who reads. A page a day or a week or a month helps save another book. Most of these old books will become extinct if they are not saved to the web sooon.
you CAN NOT run a business by selling GPL'd software. It is impossible.
The point is you cannot be the next Microsoft by selling gpl software, but just because you cannot become the richest man in the universe does not mean you cannot build a decent business.
The best model so far is the Lindows strategy:
1. dumb down Debian to bare minimum, and change the names of the apps to "cd player", "email", and "Word processor" so people who are afraid to click on things they do not understand will not be afraid to click on them. 2. sell subscriptions to the 1click download site 3. avoid at all costs the impression that you are just another "distro" (even though that's the simple truth) 4. market to people who really don't understand what they are getting, so they won't really understand that they don't have to pay $ for the OS. 5.Profit! For real.
Someone is going to eventually make the breathrough to the mainstream, and that company is going to have a lot of power over what people do with thier computers. Imagine if the bastards at RealPlayer put out a distro, and it became hugely successful, and you can imagine some of the ways that a company could make a few bucks off of gpl software. Geeks can always roll their own, so marketing to geeks isn't the answer, marketing to the average luser is potentially very lucrative, just not as lucrative as proprietary software, but neither is it as expensive or risky to produce.
don't underestimate the amount of R&D Microsoft has put into hardware support since Windows 95.
I would venture a guess that the hardware mfrs spent more r&d than Microsoft has in this arena. If you manufacture hardware, it is imperative that it work with Windows or you will not sell much hardware. If they support other OS's it is only an afterthought.
Certainly, the Supremes are intelligent folk, but surely this kind of decision (like the presidential election fiasco) indicates some severe emotional immaturity for our oh so esteemed court.
The presidential election decision shows not the immaturity, but rather the political nature of the court. It is republican controlled.
This decision shows they will usually side with big business. Like I said, the court is under Republican control.
That said, 7-2 is a pretty strong majority, especially since Ginsberg signed on, you can hardly say it's a "conservative" decision.
There is a fair argument to scrap Patents and move it into copyright law.
There is certainly room for improvement in all areas of IP legislation. But what I'm getting at is this idea that you seem to be pushing that it is basically a bad idea for gov't to interfere with business and industry because the free market will take care of it much better. You hand wave "market failure" as a problem caused by gov't rather than something mitigated by gov't intervention.
You will find no argument here that the results of gov't regulation are indeed mixed, and the law of unintended consquences applies as well, but to say that the market will take care of market failures is farcical on it's face.
If VOIP is to take off, the same standards need to be applied to it for residential telephone service.
But isn't this exactly the opposite of the point of the article? The article even includes a quote that mirrors your statement:
Telcos gain billions in service fees from [...] services like Call Forwarding and Call Waiting [...]. Hence, capex programs that shift a telco, say, from TDM to IP, as in a softswitch approach that might have less capital intensity, must absolutely preserve the revenue stream. [ http://www.proberesearch.com/alerts/refocusing.htm ]
VoIP is fundamentally different than what we currently think of as a telephone. We shouldn't try to fit it into the same box.
911 is one feature of telephones. It worked becaue a telephone was attached to a certain place. It improved emergency vehicle response time. Cell phones don't work well with 911, either, but emergency vehicle response time is far better now because when there is an accident there are usually people on the scene within seconds who can immediately contact 911 dispatch without having to find a friendly farmhouse, etc.
VoIP will eventually do the same thing, but more so.
Yes, Microsoft has a big market share, but linux is severly impinging on the server market, and threatens the desktop market.
Linux is not "competition" to M$. Linux is not a company. It may be a threat, but it is not economic competition in the classic sense. It is technological/social competition. No less threatening to M$, but indicative of how powerful the monopoly is--the only real threat to the monopoly is one that cannot be beaten economically. M$ cannot buy the company, cannot undercut it's pricing, cannot cut off its air supply. The competition has evolved gills which allow it to breathe without air.
But it's the government restrictions on who could enter the market that causes market irregularities.
If gov't restrictions cause monopolies, shouldn't the intellectual property laws which created the M$ monopoly be repealed, freeing the markets? M$ is not a monopoly if cannot copyright or patent their work. Wouldn't that be the logical next step in laissez faire? It would certainly make for a lot more competition.
This is a simple receiver -- in a commercial device, it could be no bigger than a dongle with an Ethernet jack on one end and two RCA plugs (or a SPDIF port) on the other
I haven't been in the market for a stereo for a long time, so perhaps this is already availalbe, but shoudln't something like this be built into new stereo receivers/amplifiers, etc? They've been saying for a decade that all our appliances will be internet devices, and this seems more immediately useful than a tcp/ip enabled refrigerator.
Also, let me add my thumbs up to the hack. I want one (since I probably won't be buying a new stereo for the next ten years, either.
Windows XP has workspace switching too. It's called Virtual Desktop Manager [microsoft.com].
I tried it a couple months ago. It's pretty lame, without features like drag between desktops and has annoying behaviors with windows/alarms popping up in wrong desktops and so on. I uninstalled it after a week or two.
Remember this next time they say that OSS is not "innovative".
I started computing on a 286 DOS machine (no win 3.1) so a CLI didn't scare me.
So explain again why a newbie should be be enthusiastic about having to learn to use CLI?
Let's see, a 286 pre-win3.11 means about, what, 1990? 1988? So you have over a decade of CLI experience.
See, to you, a CLI is your first environment, so you feel comfortable there, but to the billions of recent and soon to be computer users, a CLI is not a challenging but rewarding intellectual problem, but is instead a daunting and puzzling waste of time.
Remember that slashdotters are not "users", we are "experts". If you bought a car and the first thing the salesperson did was explain that to make it go all you haved to do is get our your toolbox and solder together these two wires and make a couple adjustments to the timing, you would quickly be out the door.
M$ and Apple, and I think Lindows, understand and accept the simple fact that users do not have any interest in becoming experts. I think Lindows is currently our last best hope for a really user-friendly (to us experts that means "crippled") interface.
But experts should not care if Lindows is crippled, because we know how to get through to the useful parts, not that we would be using Lindows on our own machines, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be perfect is if there were places where you could rent time on a CNC mill, sort of like kinko's for engineers.
Try your local high school or middle school industrial technology teacher. I betcha you could work a deal where you could use their equipment if you can provide something of value to them in return, other than money (although a few bucks for the budget never hurts). Most valuable is your time and expertise. Least valuable, most likely to get you a no answer is anything that is going to take up any of his/her most valuable asset--time.
It is a big hassle to have to help a newbie set up a mill and even if the user has experience, it is generally a hassle to help them find the tools, widgets, and toolbits needed for your particular project. So make it clear from the get-go that you are going to make it worth their time, or you will probably not get near the equipment.
The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity
Uh, yeah, isn't that the point?
Not to be glib, but the network doens't grow symmetrically. There are always going to be bottlenecks, but there are always going to be improvements. When you build a new apartment complex, it makes sense to assume that the permanent network infrastructure in the building should, where economically feasible, be overbuilt as much as possible.
It will be a while, if ever, before they can use all of their bandwidth, but when the time comes they are ready, eh.
My only question that just popped into my head: the Internet was built-out as an extension of a government program. If the Internet had been a private sector project, would it have been built?
Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL all attempted it, but I think they were all doomed to the extent they tried to maintain walled gardens.
The nearlynet/permanet problem has also been exacerbated by the walled garden approach, I think.
Gotta second Fandango for the AC. Waaay funny. Probably the most unappreciated movie I've seen anyone mention so far.
"That car's afflicted."
"Nah, it just needs a little alignment hygiene."
Roger Ebert also says: "Battlefield Earth" is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time.
Now that's what I call getting bad reviews.
A moped will do everything the Segway will do for approximately 1/5 the price. A zero-emissions moped is still much less than 1/2 the price. It's a toss-up as to which one makes you look like a bigger doofus :-)
Mopeds are for the street. Mopeds cannot go backwards, nor can they blend easily with pedestrian traffic. They need probably 5 foot radius (?) for turning around.
Segway can effortlessly blend with traffic of between 0 and 12 mph. I can ride my bicycle very slowly, but it is not fun and only physically fit people who are very good at riding bicycles can ride them very slowly. Mopeds would have an even more difficult time blending with pedestrians.
Mopeds cannot go backwards. Many people in this thread have complained about the 80 lbs weight of Segway, but all the mopeds I have ever seen certainly weight more than 80 lbs. (I don't know much about mopeds, though.)
I have seen video of Dean Kamen zipping around in his kitchen on a Segway grabbing things from the fridge and the cupboards, etc. Try that on a moped or a bicycle.
It is incorrect to say that a moped can do everything a Segway can do, just as it would be inocrrect to say a Segway can do anything a moped could do.
Or you could buy a really really nice bicycle for half that price (or a really nice one for under 1/5 the price). As an added bonus, you wouldn't be a fat lump looking stupid standing on a self balancing Jetsonesque piece of kitch.
Just to get this straight--I am not going to buy a Segway. I have a very nice bicycle I ride all summer long, but I can comprehend the possiblity that some people do not want to ride bicycles on busy city streets or do not have the physical skills or stamina to ride a bicycle. Saying they should ride a bicycle because it would be good for them does not work. It never has, and most likely never will. Segway is an alternative for those who prefer not to drive a car for a 5 mile trip, but who will not or cannot use a bicycle.
Why does that make you feel threatened enough to insult people on Segways?
It looks stupid
So you are hostile to anything stupid looking?
Its the price of a decent (secone hand) car.
Most of the people I know drive $30k vehicles, so which is 6x the cost of Segway.
Battery power is ridiculous.
It is plenty to get you to work and back if you live less than 10 mi round trip, 20 if you can charge during your work day.
Large & Heavy, so hard to stow
A car is probably 300x heavier, and far more difficult to stow. You could park maybe 20 Segways in the parking spot for one Ford Exhibition.
A couple of years? A lot of people don't intend on keeping their cars that long.
Not sure what this has to do with your argument.? You might want to take a course in logic.
Its amazon.com page tries in vain to sell it, protesting its uncanny ability to go backwards, go up slopes (gasp!), and even "self balance". The trouble is - people with fully functional legs can do all those things for free right now, and people without generally can't use a segway.
Can your fully functional legs carry you 12 mph for 5 miles?
The self-balance thing is what makes it different from the typical scooter that has a much larger footprint and turning radius, requires active balance by the rider, and generally prevents them from being used by anyone who doesn't have good mobility to begin with.
I fail to understand the hostility in the responses to Segway. Is it really that threatening to people's sensibility that there might be a real alternative to driving cars on short trips or in places where it is too congested to drive a car. Wasn't it like yesterday that they started charging a usage fee for driving in downtown London? I think it was something like US$8 a day just to enter the busiest part of town in a car, and that doesnt' include parking it once you're there.
I could be wrong with the figures but wouldn't a Segway pay for itself in a couple years if you could save $8 a day on that one fee alone? ($5000/8=625)
I've submitted my webpage 10x to google, yahoo, ... and it's not a common name or like anything else. Yet I do a search, no link on the first 5 pages (I give up after that).
You don't understand Google. It doesn't really care if you submit your site or not. It ranks pages according to who links to you and some other arcane criteria.
If you are one in a millions hits, it is probably because there are a million pages just like yours. I have never submitted anything to any search engines, but the sites I have done are listed high in Google, because they are either related to obscure subjects, or are considered authoritative because they have been linked to many times.
I have an old Fujitsu from 1996 that still holds a good charge, but I also have an IBM thinkpad that someone gave me, I'm guessing it's about a 1998 or 1999 model and the battery is stone dead.
I'm the one responsible for Anatomy of Melancholy
You BASTARD!
Actually, I am a little ashamed to admit it, but I'm kind of a fair weather proofer. If the first page I see is complicated I will do it, but I almost never go back to that book. I like the low hanging fruit.
Anatomy was something else. It was like that relative who drops in unannounced and never leaves for a month.
What's wrong with displaying plain text books in, suprisingly, plain text?
You would be surprised how few books are truly just text. Join Distributed Proofreaders today and you'll soon find yourself faced with everything but plain text. And most of those books are around 100 years old. Assuming anything else is ever allowed to become public domain, it will only get more difficult to get meaning out of a plain text book in PG.
How cool is that?
/. story, and I think it's the one of the most important things happening on the web.
Way cool. I've been working there once in a while since the first
It's only a matter of time before someone with a relatively massive audience like NPR does a story on DP and then we'll see what it's really like to be slashdotted. I would like to see the international membership increase, as well.
I recommend it to anyone who reads. A page a day or a week or a month helps save another book. Most of these old books will become extinct if they are not saved to the web sooon.
you CAN NOT run a business by selling GPL'd software. It is impossible.
The point is you cannot be the next Microsoft by selling gpl software, but just because you cannot become the richest man in the universe does not mean you cannot build a decent business.
The best model so far is the Lindows strategy:
1. dumb down Debian to bare minimum, and change the names of the apps to "cd player", "email", and "Word processor" so people who are afraid to click on things they do not understand will not be afraid to click on them.
2. sell subscriptions to the 1click download site
3. avoid at all costs the impression that you are just another "distro" (even though that's the simple truth)
4. market to people who really don't understand what they are getting, so they won't really understand that they don't have to pay $ for the OS.
5.Profit! For real.
Someone is going to eventually make the breathrough to the mainstream, and that company is going to have a lot of power over what people do with thier computers. Imagine if the bastards at RealPlayer put out a distro, and it became hugely successful, and you can imagine some of the ways that a company could make a few bucks off of gpl software. Geeks can always roll their own, so marketing to geeks isn't the answer, marketing to the average luser is potentially very lucrative, just not as lucrative as proprietary software, but neither is it as expensive or risky to produce.
don't underestimate the amount of R&D Microsoft has put into hardware support since Windows 95.
I would venture a guess that the hardware mfrs spent more r&d than Microsoft has in this arena. If you manufacture hardware, it is imperative that it work with Windows or you will not sell much hardware. If they support other OS's it is only an afterthought.
Certainly, the Supremes are intelligent folk, but surely this kind of decision (like the presidential election fiasco) indicates some severe emotional immaturity for our oh so esteemed court.
The presidential election decision shows not the immaturity, but rather the political nature of the court. It is republican controlled.
This decision shows they will usually side with big business. Like I said, the court is under Republican control.
That said, 7-2 is a pretty strong majority, especially since Ginsberg signed on, you can hardly say it's a "conservative" decision.
When one starts to value his time, he quickly realizes the true cost of these things.
I bet you're a lot of fun at parties.
There is a fair argument to scrap Patents and move it into copyright law.
There is certainly room for improvement in all areas of IP legislation. But what I'm getting at is this idea that you seem to be pushing that it is basically a bad idea for gov't to interfere with business and industry because the free market will take care of it much better. You hand wave "market failure" as a problem caused by gov't rather than something mitigated by gov't intervention.
You will find no argument here that the results of gov't regulation are indeed mixed, and the law of unintended consquences applies as well, but to say that the market will take care of market failures is farcical on it's face.
If VOIP is to take off, the same standards need to be applied to it for residential telephone service.
m ]
But isn't this exactly the opposite of the point of the article? The article even includes a quote that mirrors your statement:
Telcos gain billions in service fees from [...] services like Call Forwarding and Call Waiting [...]. Hence, capex programs that shift a telco, say, from TDM to IP, as in a softswitch approach that might have less capital intensity, must absolutely preserve the revenue stream. [ http://www.proberesearch.com/alerts/refocusing.ht
VoIP is fundamentally different than what we currently think of as a telephone. We shouldn't try to fit it into the same box.
911 is one feature of telephones. It worked becaue a telephone was attached to a certain place. It improved emergency vehicle response time. Cell phones don't work well with 911, either, but emergency vehicle response time is far better now because when there is an accident there are usually people on the scene within seconds who can immediately contact 911 dispatch without having to find a friendly farmhouse, etc.
VoIP will eventually do the same thing, but more so.
Yes, Microsoft has a big market share, but linux is severly impinging on the server market, and threatens the desktop market.
Linux is not "competition" to M$. Linux is not a company. It may be a threat, but it is not economic competition in the classic sense. It is technological/social competition. No less threatening to M$, but indicative of how powerful the monopoly is--the only real threat to the monopoly is one that cannot be beaten economically. M$ cannot buy the company, cannot undercut it's pricing, cannot cut off its air supply. The competition has evolved gills which allow it to breathe without air.
But it's the government restrictions on who could enter the market that causes market irregularities.
If gov't restrictions cause monopolies, shouldn't the intellectual property laws which created the M$ monopoly be repealed, freeing the markets? M$ is not a monopoly if cannot copyright or patent their work. Wouldn't that be the logical next step in laissez faire? It would certainly make for a lot more competition.
This is a simple receiver -- in a commercial device, it could be no bigger than a dongle with an Ethernet jack on one end and two RCA plugs (or a SPDIF port) on the other
I haven't been in the market for a stereo for a long time, so perhaps this is already availalbe, but shoudln't something like this be built into new stereo receivers/amplifiers, etc? They've been saying for a decade that all our appliances will be internet devices, and this seems more immediately useful than a tcp/ip enabled refrigerator.
Also, let me add my thumbs up to the hack. I want one (since I probably won't be buying a new stereo for the next ten years, either.
Windows XP has workspace switching too. It's called Virtual Desktop Manager [microsoft.com].
I tried it a couple months ago. It's pretty lame, without features like drag between desktops and has annoying behaviors with windows/alarms popping up in wrong desktops and so on. I uninstalled it after a week or two.
Remember this next time they say that OSS is not "innovative".
I started computing on a 286 DOS machine (no win 3.1) so a CLI didn't scare me.
So explain again why a newbie should be be enthusiastic about having to learn to use CLI?
Let's see, a 286 pre-win3.11 means about, what, 1990? 1988? So you have over a decade of CLI experience.
See, to you, a CLI is your first environment, so you feel comfortable there, but to the billions of recent and soon to be computer users, a CLI is not a challenging but rewarding intellectual problem, but is instead a daunting and puzzling waste of time.
Remember that slashdotters are not "users", we are "experts". If you bought a car and the first thing the salesperson did was explain that to make it go all you haved to do is get our your toolbox and solder together these two wires and make a couple adjustments to the timing, you would quickly be out the door.
M$ and Apple, and I think Lindows, understand and accept the simple fact that users do not have any interest in becoming experts. I think Lindows is currently our last best hope for a really user-friendly (to us experts that means "crippled") interface.
But experts should not care if Lindows is crippled, because we know how to get through to the useful parts, not that we would be using Lindows on our own machines, of course.