my problem with video editing, has been reliability... i hate it when FOSS causes the audio and video to desynchronize! but i haven't tried hard to see if all tools are bad.
same body, different engine. i liked the swift/metro design, with the backseat folded down i could sleep in the back, on road trips...
I loved that back in the day it only took a 10 spot and I'd get change back. people still called the car a death-trap though even in the day, one person who sold me theirs did so because they started having kids, and were worried they might die in a car crash in that thing.
"Big houses - especially big houses built on the cheap (ie: McMansions) - tend to have relatively high heating and/or cooling energy requirements"
i don't know about where you live, but 6" walls and double pane windows are part of code where i live, you can't build a house or apartment if it doesn't have 6" walls that are inspected and insulated. even the cheapest insulation (recycled news paper) makes a huge difference with 6" instead of 4"
i know the south is atrocious when it comes to building codes, even though a well insulated house costs less to cool, but just for instance my parents own a twin home built in the 2000's (rental property) and a home built in the 60's the one built in the 60's has utility bills 3x higher than the one built in the 2000's
thanks for the numbers, but they started up with money from aol, i did say today they get their $ from google, but i didn't know the $$$ involved, wow... with $58 million they have more money than Canonical Ltd...
no wonder Opera went free and did the same deal with google as firefox has.
suburban America is real, and the McMansion trend proves there is a market. Also people in the burbs often have very little awareness about poverty, or people living in the 'real' world. Beside, mathematically speaking every American could have 3,500 SQ Ft if we used the same percentage of land for residences as japan does. (see my other post for the math on this)
oh and hey, my sister who has 8 kids has a 50" plasma, thanks to George W for his 'tax breaks' for large families, she Should have put every penny of that return against her outstanding debt, but that would be un-American. and the thing is, when she declares bankruptcy in a few years from now because she doesn't understand she needs to not buy fancy crap supporting such a large family, they won't even take her fancy plasma TV away, she has few enough assets to declare it as exempt.
"they fail fast because the current trend is to not have a mantle so now you have the heat rolling directly to the set."
Aren't mantles required by zoning laws? if TV sets are getting hot enough to melt, the wall material itself has to be completely fireproof, by any zoning law i know of..
mounting the TV so low that it overlaps the fire barrier is foolish, even if there is no true 'mantle' drywall is combustible and as such cannot be used anywhere hot enough to burn, thus not hot enough to melt plastic.
how many houses have you seen that have a real wood fireplace? all the ones I see are gas fireplaces and as such have no particulate problems, and are usually sealed completely to avoid CO problems even if natural gas wasn't so clean burning.
And i live in the back woods of wisconsin, it's cheaper right now to burn wood of any type than to use any other fuel source, natural gas included (though by next winter the price of wood will be higher, than Some Fuels)
seriously i have been in 2 houses in the past 7 years that was capable of burning wood, 1 was my parents and was built in the 1960s the other had a pellet stove, in an old house, with an even older man who got it because his house was previously burning propane, and his fixed income couldn't support the 'modern' price of propane, so he got a pellet burner which was in his price range.
"if for no other reason than the space constraints - most people don't live in houses big enough to dedicate a whole room just to watching movies (to say nothing of those living in apartments)."
your grandparents (or great grandparents, don't know how young you are) probably lived and raised a family of 10 in a one room shack. i remember back in 96, when a large apartment complex company built about 10 new apartment structures, brand new, and the zoning laws had changed so much they had to put in 10% fewer units per building, to accommodate new zoning laws.
they fought tooth and nail, and lost, the result the apartments were in the $800 range. but they were bigger than apartments built only 10 years earlier, and this in a small metro are where including 7 cities the population was still under 1 million.
Houses are getting bigger, last year i learned a new phrase. "McMansion" for overbuilding a very large house on a normal sized lot, and having very little green space.
for this phrase to have gotten onto TV, specifically on the stock and news channel, it has to have been happening for a while, and there have to have been a lot of these houses built.
keep in mind America has tons of space. we have 300 million living in a nation that has 9,826,630 SQ KM, compare that to japans are of only 377,835 SQ KM. we have 26 times as much land, and japan has almost 130 million people, so we only have 230% more people and 2600% more land. Everyone in america could live in a house 10 times bigger than the size house each person in japan could have.
now for size... wiki tatami "In Japan, the size of a room is typically measured by the number of tatami mats (-ç -jÅ). The traditional dimensions of the mats were fixed at 90 cm by 180 cm (1.62 square meters) by 5 cm"
http://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/tatamimats.html "If you've been looking around the web and have noticed that many Japanese apartments have tatami mats in them and are wondering what they are, how big they are and how big your 20 tatami apartment really is read on.."
so an apartment in japan is 20 tatami mats? 32.4 square meters... so 10 times that is 324 square meters which is 3,487.50698 square feet the size of, a 2 floor 20' by 80' home. Every renter could have 40' by 80' if we dedicated as much area to housing for individuals as we have free space available per capita.
"This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again."
I was one of the people very pissed off at windows 95, at the time i swore i'd never pay for a windows OS again... so i used my 95 install floppies over and over again and again... with 98 and xp i used pirate software, the anger was still there, but then in 2006 commercial hackers got into my 'warez' windows installs laughing at my complete lack of security, and since then, i caved and now only pay for windows OSes and even then keep them behind a smoothwall machine or vm properly configured to protect them from perennial windows vulnerabilities. the VM would be on a linux system, that is also a linux desktop, since doing so on windows doesn't protect you from hackers, as even with a software firewall, and default routes through a VM hackers can still force packets through if the core OS is infected with a rootkit. i have had a desktop linux machine since i got the rootkit on windows in 06, and i have yet to find an AV/AR/suite that can block the one i got in 06, although i can detect the 06 problem in Linux using diff.
btw i started using freebsd in 1996 because of how bad windows 95 was, i just got lazy and stopped 'putzing around' with linux and BSD because it was hard keeping up with everything especially the x.org fiasco... and besides linux never supported my gaming addiction quite the way I'd like it too. so I've always been stuck with at least 1 windows machine.
until OEMs push for linux support, gaming companies won't switch to linux. it doesn't matter how many people switch to apple, or ubuntu, gaming companies won't go without a serious gamer base and early efforts to make a linux based console tanked. If nintendo decided, for whatever reason to go with a linux/open GL console for the next generation and did dev tools for it, there would be a chance... i know the PS2 and PS3 can run linux, but it's not the same, it's a mod to the console, real games don't actually run in linux... and i seriously doubt that nintendo or sony would ever be convinced to make a console where you boot up a linux distro to install and play games.
sony has already made it possible to use linux as well as games, but that's the most anyone has done towards making linux synonyms with a real gaming platform. BTW yes i know of transgaming, etc i know of wine, transgaming forked wine, and could play some copy-protected games wine wouldn't ever run... but they're in limbo now with not enough cash to keep going, and new wine releases are reported to support more 'new' games than transgaming's efforts.. a double edged blade, and they were just trying to make windows games run in linux, not make a 'real' native linux gaming platform.
freeciv and the like are great too, but freeciv has nothing on civ3/4. linux just isn't going to cut it as a real windows replacement til they get game support (everyone ditches direct x for open gl, for instance) and it's kind of a chicken/egg problem, without a chicken you can't have eggs, without eggs you can't have chickens... and linux gaming won't come without the real lure of money to be made, and there won't be a real gaming switch to linux by end users without a horde of modern cool games already running on linux platforms.
a truly linux based console would be sweet, but the console market is too competitive for a 'linux' console to work unless a 'billionaire with something to prove' backs a linux based game console using opengl and modern gaming hardware etc..
maybe with the vista fiasco gaming companies will switch to windows+ open GL, so they can have modern graphic features in XP, so long as microsoft keeps directx 10 on vista, and so long as vista is hated by all.. that much of a push to open GL might make linux gaming one step closer, one step easier, with all these knowledgeable Open GL programmers that would be created by shifting away from directx...
"..or Firefox which is starting to chip away the monopoly/OEM acquired marketshare of IE?"
There fixed that for you, netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner whatever is basically dead, as now even AOL is shipping firefox, instead of netscape. both were based off gecko, and firefox is to date developed by a grant from netscape that was paid for when AOL bought out netscape as one of the deal clauses.
it's a complicated thing, but right now google is paying for more of firefox's development than AOL is, because firefox is independent of the company that AOL acquired known as 'netscape'
Remember when they thought the internet was not important?
Yeah, they still haven't come back from that mistake. That's a big part of the motivation to buy Yahoo. If there is one thing that Microsoft has proven they are good at, it is buying a company and diminishing its value as they try assimilate it.
Embrace, extend, extinguish...
With microsoft in charge of yahoo, 10 years down the road $40 a share is going to sound an expensive price, whereas i am wagering that 10 years from now, left in the capable hands who run yahoo now, it'll be worth more than quadruple that figure. Yahoo is a strong #2 in the internet space, some might argue with the number of market ares they've penetrated that google has no space in they're really number 1, kinda like how pepsi cola as the #2 soda company, has a vastly diverse set of holdings, while coke the number one has stayed more focused on the beverage industry and have had to do less diversification.
people don't say pepsi is going to be gone next year because they can't beat coke in annual sales, but some fools are suggesting the same about yahoo, driving share prices down with FUD.
Yahoo is a far more diverse company than google, even if they're not the #1 search engine anymore, i expect them to continually beat the street year after year as long as 'but what about google' keeps holding analysts from evaluating yahoo's real worth.
and yahoo in their own estimates down play their own value, Why? to get headlines saying they beat their own estimates, and nobody on wall street calls them on it because they're all locked in a foolish mindset about Google being #1 in search engines.
shipit is definitely cool, but i can dl and burn 8.04 lts in under an hour, waiting 10 weeks to get a cd of ubuntu is really only for those who have no access to either high speed internet, or else a cd burner, a few people fall into that category, but how many of them want ubuntu that much?.
fuel cells aren't wide scale practical, the energy that goes into building them, the precious metals needed to get fuel economy... yeah Iceland and Sweden might be able to switch to a hydrogen economy, but america, china, india, japan... there aren't enough of the metals used in fuel cells to make fuel cell cars for all the nations i listed, much less adding in all of europe.
nor is there enough atomic fuel to make such a switch environmentally friendly. unless you think you'd rather be grazing dinosaurs when all the cattle die of heat exhaustion from the rising CO2 levels.. the problem is real, in one generation we've gone back 600,000 years, in 3 more 300 million years. if we don't stop using fossil fuels there will be a few places in Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, and Antarctica where you can still raise cattle, or other warm blooded creatures, and that's about it.. within 3 generations of humans ignoring what they're doing to the global weather... pictures don't lie, look at any glaciated region of the world even Antarctica ice shelves have become non existent in one generation of humanity.
the smart fotwo uses the same engine, and thus gets the about the same efficiency as the geo metro. the suzuki swift used a 1.3 liter engine, so got slightly worse, I've only owned metros and swifts, never any other kind of car, and their real highway was around 42 and 39 respectively, their real city was around 37-38 but i was notorious for not using breaks for lights/stop signs, and that changes city mileage greatly. (i would take the engine out of gear, half a block before a red light or a stop sign, if i needed to stop i would in the last 20 feet.) the rolling stop is illegal, but i did it anyways.
the point was if you throw out safety standards you can get 100 mpg. there is room in-between, but to really drop energy usage, you have to go full bore, because the number of countries that drive vehicles are increasing as Asian nations becomes wealthier.
"BTW, this will change in the middle of this month since SCS is releasing their Blu-Ray authoring tool then to match my new Blu-Ray writer."
Just out of curiosity, will this SCS tool, allow you to put AVC (mpeg-4 ver10) on Blu-ray discs?
If it Does, i can understand why you'd want to switch from DVDs to Blu-ray, even though burnable Blu-ray media is still sky high. i mean $60 for a 5 pack, compared to 50 dvd-+r for anywhere from $15-30(depending on where and what grade media you buy) you're effectively quadrupling(or octupling*) the price of storing your movie, with the advantage of holding 5 times the data on 1 disc. DVD-9 discs are a lot cheaper, although they burn at 2.4x speed (at least the ones I've used did! 2.4x speed, that's crazy long an hour for 9gb of data) and 2.7 dvd9 discs store as much as a BD-r 25 gb... BD-50 media cost an astounding $35 A disc, for about 5 times the capacity of a dvd-9.. then again, if wiki is correct, AVC gives you about 6 minutes per GB**. 300 minutes might be worth the $35 if you don't make many home movies that long without charging for it (eg: professional HD wedding recording, and mastering, if it costs $1,200 for the camera, and $1000 for the computer, and $35 for the media, you can still profit easily by charging $1,000 or more per wedding, plus $50 per copy they want on Blu-ray 50, and offer price points etc based on the media used etc)
I can't wait to actually play around with Blu-ray content... but the fact that the discs can use mpeg-2, av-1 or avc, complicates the matter greatly.
*= this was not in my firefox dictionary running ff-3.0b5 on Ubuntu 8.04 lts
**= wiki said this was for full HD, but they also used 1080i, which isn't full hd, only 1080p is full hd, so confusing.
"And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here?"
I've heard that some people believe the price of gasoline will go up around a dollar every year because of the post peak problem. if energy prices do go up, then technology, which depends on energy, and the availability of cheap energy will slow down. it takes a lot of money to 'research' new technologies, using technology already researched is cheap. for an example, consider modern CPU pricing, multi-core designed processors have allowed cpu vendors to rely on the same basic die technology for their cores, even while following moore's law. this is why a high end quad core costs only $400 while long ago far away in the past a 'brand spanking new' 1 ghz chip cost over $1,200. designing new chips has been hit or miss, the itanium is a perfect example of how redesigning something, doesn't always create a viable product.
the point being, if energy prices go up and up, people will have less disposable income, making technology higher and higher risk. making existing technology work better will always be cheaper and safer, than designing new technology.
to keep energy costs lower(and thus keep technology moving at a rapid pace), there are 3 solutions i can think of, off hand.
1. Under Sea Drilling platforms off both arctic and antarctic coasts (under sea so they don't break when the ice forms every winter) the cons are, that nobody (that i know of) has a working undersea drilling platform that is practical. you could go with a telescoping design only producing oil in summer months, or have undersea pipelines to beyond the icy region where tankers can fill up so the 'undersea platforms' can produce year round, underneath the sea.. and possibly a few ideas i haven't though of, the problem with this is it's still dependence on fossil fuels, and putting more co2 into the environment is the last thing we need to be doing.
2. bio-fuels could start taking up the slack, this is really only feasible if large scale bio-fuel from algae is started, and so far at least one texas energy company is starting a major bio-fuel from algae product cycle. How that company does, might drastically change the face of bio-fuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, if they're successful and profitable.
3. use less energy. it's simple, just push aside the American car safety standards, so vehicles can be lighter, and use cheaper engines, and mandate fuel efficiency. sure, a lighter car is a death trap if you hit a big truck, or a heavy car, but if all the cars on the road have to meet higher fuel economy targets (like they have to in japan and china) then they're only more dangerous when hitting old 'legacy' vehicles.
i don't know how the car does for safety, in crashes. in general, concept cars that get over 120 mpg tend to be labeled as 'death traps' in a crash with conventional cars, and some use expensive technology that will never scale to the mass market.
cars aren't the only place where we can save energy, but they are a big one, if we'd just say cars can be a lot lighter, even if they're not as safe, just to get better fuel economy. when i owned cars i owned the kind that would have been fatal in any highway collision, yet the type of car accidents i did have, were generally ones involving only me, with 3 exceptions (1 was completely not my fault) and the 3 i did have were at city speeds, not highway.
the point is we could stop the rise in gasoline prices, just by pushing fuel economy.
"But the fact is the world is not responsible enough for the technology."
I can agree with that in regard to flying cars, we have enough problems with ones limited to the ground, and with flight it only added another dimensions, and exponential problems.
But, I don't really see how having more bandwidth would cause anymore damage... people would still use it for the same purpose, just more of it (information, music, movies, porn, maliciousness, et el)
on the subject of flying cars, flying, although not in cars, is fairly practical, depending on where you're going and how you fly.
ultralight aircraft hardly use any fuel at all, (although they only carry about 2 hours worth of fuel, and you can only go about 25-35 mph, although if you have good updrafts, the ultra light can fly without using any fuel at all..) and small, fixed wing aircraft can be more fuel efficient than a SUV. Ultra-lights don't require a full fledged pilots license (you're basically using a hang glider, and a backpack engine) and if you live somewhere somewhat remote, you can possible take an ultralight from destination to destination, in good weather anyways.
although a small fixed wing aircraft does require a pilots license, and can only travel between airports or private air strips, it is possible to get a plane for anywhere from the cost of a SUV to the cost of a luxury car, (plus maintenance, hanger fees etc) that gets as good mileage as a SUV, sometimes even better mileage. it costs around $100 to fill up an SUV, a small, light airplane might use even less fuel for a flight of several hundred miles.
big passenger jets use way more fuel, but the cost per person on average is way less than the cost for all those people driving. obviously with flights, filling the seats takes priority, a plane that is less than half full is wasting a lot of fuel, compared to a plane that is completely booked. the reason why a charter to vegas only takes $90, and a commercial flight depending on where you are might go as much as $400 is because the charter is always full both ways, and only flies nearly completely full, while the other flight has to cover the expenses of flying that route with less passengers all through the year.
i know there are quite a few people who rely on small aircraft to fly for work etc, because they're cheaper than the big jets.
so basically, the analogy here is that it's better to have a variety of aircraft sizes, rather than send everything via and airbus a320 because sending only 5 people on an airbus a320 is insanely impractical... or with internet bandwidth, it's more logical not to over build the network, if paying customers are only willing to pay $50 a month, it's up to isps to find the most practical method of delivering and sharing that bandwidth with everyone who needs to use it.
traffic shaping basically treats p2p badly, because p2p technology is predatory to web browsing, etc. basically, p2p users 'get what's available' instead of getting the 'full speed' the provider claims web browsing users will receive.
there is nothing wrong with traffic shaping, and it's really easy to set up to play with in your own home with the various linux firmware replacements for various home routers, or smoothwall linux, or you can roll your own with any linux/*bsd/apple/windows system (although with windows, if you don't want to pay money, then you're probably going to run a VM, of smoothwall)
even with QoS enabled, p2p applications will still work almost as well as without QoS, only high priority traffic like web browsing, or online gaming won't be slowed down terribly. the whole idea of traffic shaping is to make the network run smooth as glass, even when the link is 100% saturated. obviously pings won't always get through at 100% saturation, i used to use pings to tell when a network was saturated, and ISPs that didn't use traffic shaping where a nightmare, when napster first came out, but now with high speed cable and so many people using to
complicated electrical devices, especially where varying current can cause undesirable operation of the device, are the kinds of electrical devices that make a big bang when they go up in smoke, the conventional data center can put these parts far away from the server, so even with 3 walls going down no servers were harmed... but if it's all tightly integrated into a 'box' what happens to all the servers and the data?
i suppose if the thing is as big as a semi trailer, it could have a blast barrier, between servers, and power unit... otherwise, a data center in a box is a potentially less safe method of implementing a data center than the conventional approach.
I know you are a troll, and connecting at a full 56kbps was almost impossible, but back in the day, newsgroups could be downloaded with compression, and if you ran FreeBSD you could use the same compression on packet headers (if your ISP supported it, most did) i could easily pull 112 kbps off 7-bit ASCII from usenet, with both header compression, and compression on the newsgroup posting, albeit uu-encoded files were 30% larger, but getting 2:1 compression offset that more than enough.
BTW, my freebsd machine, with a hardware modem (serial style) tended to connect at or near 56 kbps, even for web browsing, not at the 52-48kbps winmodems would get, then again, my 56k modem was released before the 56kbps standard, yada yada yada.
you do have to play around with your network configuration to route it through smoothwall in the vmware player, and i don't know if you can have vmware player automatically load the smoothwall vm on boot, but there probably is a way.
a smoothwall VM will need a little cpu resource and a little ram, not as much as a full desktop linux would need though, and i've had a full debian desktop using 128 mb of ram..
"You can make your own iptables script for the down stream though. I'm not sure how it works in implementation but I've set mine to give http full bandwidth over nntp on a certain port."
this is why i like smoothwall, the best part of smoothwall is that it will run on slow, cheap computers, some have even managed to get it to run on 386's. I know old computers use more power than a linksys, but you can get a new computer based on cheap System on a chip parts, that uses about as much power as a linksys, but with all the features of a full linux machine.
i don't know if you have to play with iptables on smoothwall express* for inbound QoS, but the 'commercial' smoothwall product has user friendly inbound configuration...
Slashdot Mirror
"there is nothing like Photoshop,"
http://www.gimpshop.com/
"no killer video capture and editing software"
i don't know if any of these are 'killer' and some are not editors... but
sourceforge has 300+ linux/bsd apps for avi
my problem with video editing, has been reliability... i hate it when FOSS causes the audio and video to desynchronize! but i haven't tried hard to see if all tools are bad.
i think using onions routers or whatever would be easier.
but where will we get a jury of their peers? the local area network?
same body, different engine. i liked the swift/metro design, with the backseat folded down i could sleep in the back, on road trips...
I loved that back in the day it only took a 10 spot and I'd get change back. people still called the car a death-trap though even in the day, one person who sold me theirs did so because they started having kids, and were worried they might die in a car crash in that thing.
"Big houses - especially big houses built on the cheap (ie: McMansions) - tend to have relatively high heating and/or cooling energy requirements"
i don't know about where you live, but 6" walls and double pane windows are part of code where i live, you can't build a house or apartment if it doesn't have 6" walls that are inspected and insulated. even the cheapest insulation (recycled news paper) makes a huge difference with 6" instead of 4"
i know the south is atrocious when it comes to building codes, even though a well insulated house costs less to cool, but just for instance my parents own a twin home built in the 2000's (rental property) and a home built in the 60's the one built in the 60's has utility bills 3x higher than the one built in the 2000's
thanks for the numbers, but they started up with money from aol, i did say today they get their $ from google, but i didn't know the $$$ involved, wow... with $58 million they have more money than Canonical Ltd...
no wonder Opera went free and did the same deal with google as firefox has.
"Yup the GP lives in a fantasy world where everyone has 2500Sq ft homes or larger and have >$8000.00US to spend on frivolity."
You mean, 'the burbs' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096734/
suburban America is real, and the McMansion trend proves there is a market. Also people in the burbs often have very little awareness about poverty, or people living in the 'real' world. Beside, mathematically speaking every American could have 3,500 SQ Ft if we used the same percentage of land for residences as japan does. (see my other post for the math on this)
oh and hey, my sister who has 8 kids has a 50" plasma, thanks to George W for his 'tax breaks' for large families, she Should have put every penny of that return against her outstanding debt, but that would be un-American. and the thing is, when she declares bankruptcy in a few years from now because she doesn't understand she needs to not buy fancy crap supporting such a large family, they won't even take her fancy plasma TV away, she has few enough assets to declare it as exempt.
"they fail fast because the current trend is to not have a mantle so now you have the heat rolling directly to the set."
Aren't mantles required by zoning laws? if TV sets are getting hot enough to melt, the wall material itself has to be completely fireproof, by any zoning law i know of..
mounting the TV so low that it overlaps the fire barrier is foolish, even if there is no true 'mantle' drywall is combustible and as such cannot be used anywhere hot enough to burn, thus not hot enough to melt plastic.
"but there are smokeless fuels"
how many houses have you seen that have a real wood fireplace? all the ones I see are gas fireplaces and as such have no particulate problems, and are usually sealed completely to avoid CO problems even if natural gas wasn't so clean burning.
And i live in the back woods of wisconsin, it's cheaper right now to burn wood of any type than to use any other fuel source, natural gas included (though by next winter the price of wood will be higher, than Some Fuels)
seriously i have been in 2 houses in the past 7 years that was capable of burning wood, 1 was my parents and was built in the 1960s the other had a pellet stove, in an old house, with an even older man who got it because his house was previously burning propane, and his fixed income couldn't support the 'modern' price of propane, so he got a pellet burner which was in his price range.
"if for no other reason than the space constraints - most people don't live in houses big enough to dedicate a whole room just to watching movies (to say nothing of those living in apartments)."
your grandparents (or great grandparents, don't know how young you are) probably lived and raised a family of 10 in a one room shack. i remember back in 96, when a large apartment complex company built about 10 new apartment structures, brand new, and the zoning laws had changed so much they had to put in 10% fewer units per building, to accommodate new zoning laws.
they fought tooth and nail, and lost, the result the apartments were in the $800 range. but they were bigger than apartments built only 10 years earlier, and this in a small metro are where including 7 cities the population was still under 1 million.
Houses are getting bigger, last year i learned a new phrase. "McMansion" for overbuilding a very large house on a normal sized lot, and having very little green space.
for this phrase to have gotten onto TV, specifically on the stock and news channel, it has to have been happening for a while, and there have to have been a lot of these houses built.
keep in mind America has tons of space. we have 300 million living in a nation that has 9,826,630 SQ KM, compare that to japans are of only 377,835 SQ KM. we have 26 times as much land, and japan has almost 130 million people, so we only have 230% more people and 2600% more land. Everyone in america could live in a house 10 times bigger than the size house each person in japan could have.
now for size...
wiki tatami
"In Japan, the size of a room is typically measured by the number of tatami mats (-ç -jÅ). The traditional dimensions of the mats were fixed at 90 cm by 180 cm (1.62 square meters) by 5 cm"
http://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/tatamimats.html
"If you've been looking around the web and have noticed that many Japanese apartments have tatami mats in them and are wondering what they are, how big they are and how big your 20 tatami apartment really is read on.."
so an apartment in japan is 20 tatami mats? 32.4 square meters... so 10 times that is 324 square meters which is 3,487.50698 square feet the size of, a 2 floor 20' by 80' home. Every renter could have 40' by 80' if we dedicated as much area to housing for individuals as we have free space available per capita.
"This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again."
I was one of the people very pissed off at windows 95, at the time i swore i'd never pay for a windows OS again... so i used my 95 install floppies over and over again and again... with 98 and xp i used pirate software, the anger was still there, but then in 2006 commercial hackers got into my 'warez' windows installs laughing at my complete lack of security, and since then, i caved and now only pay for windows OSes and even then keep them behind a smoothwall machine or vm properly configured to protect them from perennial windows vulnerabilities. the VM would be on a linux system, that is also a linux desktop, since doing so on windows doesn't protect you from hackers, as even with a software firewall, and default routes through a VM hackers can still force packets through if the core OS is infected with a rootkit. i have had a desktop linux machine since i got the rootkit on windows in 06, and i have yet to find an AV/AR/suite that can block the one i got in 06, although i can detect the 06 problem in Linux using diff.
btw i started using freebsd in 1996 because of how bad windows 95 was, i just got lazy and stopped 'putzing around' with linux and BSD because it was hard keeping up with everything especially the x.org fiasco... and besides linux never supported my gaming addiction quite the way I'd like it too. so I've always been stuck with at least 1 windows machine.
until OEMs push for linux support, gaming companies won't switch to linux. it doesn't matter how many people switch to apple, or ubuntu, gaming companies won't go without a serious gamer base and early efforts to make a linux based console tanked. If nintendo decided, for whatever reason to go with a linux/open GL console for the next generation and did dev tools for it, there would be a chance... i know the PS2 and PS3 can run linux, but it's not the same, it's a mod to the console, real games don't actually run in linux... and i seriously doubt that nintendo or sony would ever be convinced to make a console where you boot up a linux distro to install and play games.
sony has already made it possible to use linux as well as games, but that's the most anyone has done towards making linux synonyms with a real gaming platform. BTW yes i know of transgaming, etc i know of wine, transgaming forked wine, and could play some copy-protected games wine wouldn't ever run... but they're in limbo now with not enough cash to keep going, and new wine releases are reported to support more 'new' games than transgaming's efforts.. a double edged blade, and they were just trying to make windows games run in linux, not make a 'real' native linux gaming platform.
freeciv and the like are great too, but freeciv has nothing on civ3/4. linux just isn't going to cut it as a real windows replacement til they get game support (everyone ditches direct x for open gl, for instance) and it's kind of a chicken/egg problem, without a chicken you can't have eggs, without eggs you can't have chickens... and linux gaming won't come without the real lure of money to be made, and there won't be a real gaming switch to linux by end users without a horde of modern cool games already running on linux platforms.
a truly linux based console would be sweet, but the console market is too competitive for a 'linux' console to work unless a 'billionaire with something to prove' backs a linux based game console using opengl and modern gaming hardware etc..
maybe with the vista fiasco gaming companies will switch to windows+ open GL, so they can have modern graphic features in XP, so long as microsoft keeps directx 10 on vista, and so long as vista is hated by all.. that much of a push to open GL might make linux gaming one step closer, one step easier, with all these knowledgeable Open GL programmers that would be created by shifting away from directx...
"..or Firefox which is starting to chip away the monopoly/OEM acquired marketshare of IE?"
There fixed that for you, netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner whatever is basically dead, as now even AOL is shipping firefox, instead of netscape. both were based off gecko, and firefox is to date developed by a grant from netscape that was paid for when AOL bought out netscape as one of the deal clauses.
it's a complicated thing, but right now google is paying for more of firefox's development than AOL is, because firefox is independent of the company that AOL acquired known as 'netscape'
Yeah, they still haven't come back from that mistake. That's a big part of the motivation to buy Yahoo. If there is one thing that Microsoft has proven they are good at, it is buying a company and diminishing its value as they try assimilate it.
Embrace, extend, extinguish...
With microsoft in charge of yahoo, 10 years down the road $40 a share is going to sound an expensive price, whereas i am wagering that 10 years from now, left in the capable hands who run yahoo now, it'll be worth more than quadruple that figure. Yahoo is a strong #2 in the internet space, some might argue with the number of market ares they've penetrated that google has no space in they're really number 1, kinda like how pepsi cola as the #2 soda company, has a vastly diverse set of holdings, while coke the number one has stayed more focused on the beverage industry and have had to do less diversification.people don't say pepsi is going to be gone next year because they can't beat coke in annual sales, but some fools are suggesting the same about yahoo, driving share prices down with FUD.
Yahoo is a far more diverse company than google, even if they're not the #1 search engine anymore, i expect them to continually beat the street year after year as long as 'but what about google' keeps holding analysts from evaluating yahoo's real worth.
and yahoo in their own estimates down play their own value, Why? to get headlines saying they beat their own estimates, and nobody on wall street calls them on it because they're all locked in a foolish mindset about Google being #1 in search engines.
well there is a lot better name too, 'gapple' sounds trendier, or maybe you could just call them iGoogle, or something... goople is the worst by far.
shipit is definitely cool, but i can dl and burn 8.04 lts in under an hour, waiting 10 weeks to get a cd of ubuntu is really only for those who have no access to either high speed internet, or else a cd burner, a few people fall into that category, but how many of them want ubuntu that much?.
fuel cells aren't wide scale practical, the energy that goes into building them, the precious metals needed to get fuel economy... yeah Iceland and Sweden might be able to switch to a hydrogen economy, but america, china, india, japan... there aren't enough of the metals used in fuel cells to make fuel cell cars for all the nations i listed, much less adding in all of europe.
nor is there enough atomic fuel to make such a switch environmentally friendly. unless you think you'd rather be grazing dinosaurs when all the cattle die of heat exhaustion from the rising CO2 levels.. the problem is real, in one generation we've gone back 600,000 years, in 3 more 300 million years. if we don't stop using fossil fuels there will be a few places in Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, and Antarctica where you can still raise cattle, or other warm blooded creatures, and that's about it.. within 3 generations of humans ignoring what they're doing to the global weather... pictures don't lie, look at any glaciated region of the world even Antarctica ice shelves have become non existent in one generation of humanity.
the smart fotwo uses the same engine, and thus gets the about the same efficiency as the geo metro. the suzuki swift used a 1.3 liter engine, so got slightly worse, I've only owned metros and swifts, never any other kind of car, and their real highway was around 42 and 39 respectively, their real city was around 37-38 but i was notorious for not using breaks for lights/stop signs, and that changes city mileage greatly. (i would take the engine out of gear, half a block before a red light or a stop sign, if i needed to stop i would in the last 20 feet.) the rolling stop is illegal, but i did it anyways.
the point was if you throw out safety standards you can get 100 mpg. there is room in-between, but to really drop energy usage, you have to go full bore, because the number of countries that drive vehicles are increasing as Asian nations becomes wealthier.
and what do you do when all of a sudden, someone crucial to the storyline Lags out and someone else says "omg stop dling porn!"
"BTW, this will change in the middle of this month since SCS is releasing their Blu-Ray authoring tool then to match my new Blu-Ray writer."
Just out of curiosity, will this SCS tool, allow you to put AVC (mpeg-4 ver10) on Blu-ray discs?
If it Does, i can understand why you'd want to switch from DVDs to Blu-ray, even though burnable Blu-ray media is still sky high. i mean $60 for a 5 pack, compared to 50 dvd-+r for anywhere from $15-30(depending on where and what grade media you buy) you're effectively quadrupling(or octupling*) the price of storing your movie, with the advantage of holding 5 times the data on 1 disc. DVD-9 discs are a lot cheaper, although they burn at 2.4x speed (at least the ones I've used did! 2.4x speed, that's crazy long an hour for 9gb of data) and 2.7 dvd9 discs store as much as a BD-r 25 gb... BD-50 media cost an astounding $35 A disc, for about 5 times the capacity of a dvd-9.. then again, if wiki is correct, AVC gives you about 6 minutes per GB**. 300 minutes might be worth the $35 if you don't make many home movies that long without charging for it (eg: professional HD wedding recording, and mastering, if it costs $1,200 for the camera, and $1000 for the computer, and $35 for the media, you can still profit easily by charging $1,000 or more per wedding, plus $50 per copy they want on Blu-ray 50, and offer price points etc based on the media used etc)
I can't wait to actually play around with Blu-ray content... but the fact that the discs can use mpeg-2, av-1 or avc, complicates the matter greatly.
*= this was not in my firefox dictionary running ff-3.0b5 on Ubuntu 8.04 lts
**= wiki said this was for full HD, but they also used 1080i, which isn't full hd, only 1080p is full hd, so confusing.
"And what, it's your belief that technology is only going to slow down from here?"
I've heard that some people believe the price of gasoline will go up around a dollar every year because of the post peak problem. if energy prices do go up, then technology, which depends on energy, and the availability of cheap energy will slow down. it takes a lot of money to 'research' new technologies, using technology already researched is cheap. for an example, consider modern CPU pricing, multi-core designed processors have allowed cpu vendors to rely on the same basic die technology for their cores, even while following moore's law. this is why a high end quad core costs only $400 while long ago far away in the past a 'brand spanking new' 1 ghz chip cost over $1,200. designing new chips has been hit or miss, the itanium is a perfect example of how redesigning something, doesn't always create a viable product.
the point being, if energy prices go up and up, people will have less disposable income, making technology higher and higher risk. making existing technology work better will always be cheaper and safer, than designing new technology.
to keep energy costs lower(and thus keep technology moving at a rapid pace), there are 3 solutions i can think of, off hand.
1. Under Sea Drilling platforms off both arctic and antarctic coasts (under sea so they don't break when the ice forms every winter) the cons are, that nobody (that i know of) has a working undersea drilling platform that is practical. you could go with a telescoping design only producing oil in summer months, or have undersea pipelines to beyond the icy region where tankers can fill up so the 'undersea platforms' can produce year round, underneath the sea.. and possibly a few ideas i haven't though of, the problem with this is it's still dependence on fossil fuels, and putting more co2 into the environment is the last thing we need to be doing.
2. bio-fuels could start taking up the slack, this is really only feasible if large scale bio-fuel from algae is started, and so far at least one texas energy company is starting a major bio-fuel from algae product cycle. How that company does, might drastically change the face of bio-fuel as an alternative to fossil fuels, if they're successful and profitable.
3. use less energy. it's simple, just push aside the American car safety standards, so vehicles can be lighter, and use cheaper engines, and mandate fuel efficiency. sure, a lighter car is a death trap if you hit a big truck, or a heavy car, but if all the cars on the road have to meet higher fuel economy targets (like they have to in japan and china) then they're only more dangerous when hitting old 'legacy' vehicles.
you can easily design an ultralight car that would get well over 120 mpg(without being a hybrid) these guys did. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/loremo_lives_su.php
i don't know how the car does for safety, in crashes. in general, concept cars that get over 120 mpg tend to be labeled as 'death traps' in a crash with conventional cars, and some use expensive technology that will never scale to the mass market.
cars aren't the only place where we can save energy, but they are a big one, if we'd just say cars can be a lot lighter, even if they're not as safe, just to get better fuel economy. when i owned cars i owned the kind that would have been fatal in any highway collision, yet the type of car accidents i did have, were generally ones involving only me, with 3 exceptions (1 was completely not my fault) and the 3 i did have were at city speeds, not highway.
the point is we could stop the rise in gasoline prices, just by pushing fuel economy.
"But the fact is the world is not responsible enough for the technology."
I can agree with that in regard to flying cars, we have enough problems with ones limited to the ground, and with flight it only added another dimensions, and exponential problems.
But, I don't really see how having more bandwidth would cause anymore damage... people would still use it for the same purpose, just more of it (information, music, movies, porn, maliciousness, et el)
on the subject of flying cars, flying, although not in cars, is fairly practical, depending on where you're going and how you fly.
ultralight aircraft hardly use any fuel at all, (although they only carry about 2 hours worth of fuel, and you can only go about 25-35 mph, although if you have good updrafts, the ultra light can fly without using any fuel at all..) and small, fixed wing aircraft can be more fuel efficient than a SUV. Ultra-lights don't require a full fledged pilots license (you're basically using a hang glider, and a backpack engine) and if you live somewhere somewhat remote, you can possible take an ultralight from destination to destination, in good weather anyways.
although a small fixed wing aircraft does require a pilots license, and can only travel between airports or private air strips, it is possible to get a plane for anywhere from the cost of a SUV to the cost of a luxury car, (plus maintenance, hanger fees etc) that gets as good mileage as a SUV, sometimes even better mileage. it costs around $100 to fill up an SUV, a small, light airplane might use even less fuel for a flight of several hundred miles.
big passenger jets use way more fuel, but the cost per person on average is way less than the cost for all those people driving. obviously with flights, filling the seats takes priority, a plane that is less than half full is wasting a lot of fuel, compared to a plane that is completely booked. the reason why a charter to vegas only takes $90, and a commercial flight depending on where you are might go as much as $400 is because the charter is always full both ways, and only flies nearly completely full, while the other flight has to cover the expenses of flying that route with less passengers all through the year.
i know there are quite a few people who rely on small aircraft to fly for work etc, because they're cheaper than the big jets.
so basically, the analogy here is that it's better to have a variety of aircraft sizes, rather than send everything via and airbus a320 because sending only 5 people on an airbus a320 is insanely impractical... or with internet bandwidth, it's more logical not to over build the network, if paying customers are only willing to pay $50 a month, it's up to isps to find the most practical method of delivering and sharing that bandwidth with everyone who needs to use it.
traffic shaping basically treats p2p badly, because p2p technology is predatory to web browsing, etc. basically, p2p users 'get what's available' instead of getting the 'full speed' the provider claims web browsing users will receive.
there is nothing wrong with traffic shaping, and it's really easy to set up to play with in your own home with the various linux firmware replacements for various home routers, or smoothwall linux, or you can roll your own with any linux/*bsd/apple/windows system (although with windows, if you don't want to pay money, then you're probably going to run a VM, of smoothwall)
even with QoS enabled, p2p applications will still work almost as well as without QoS, only high priority traffic like web browsing, or online gaming won't be slowed down terribly. the whole idea of traffic shaping is to make the network run smooth as glass, even when the link is 100% saturated. obviously pings won't always get through at 100% saturation, i used to use pings to tell when a network was saturated, and ISPs that didn't use traffic shaping where a nightmare, when napster first came out, but now with high speed cable and so many people using to
"Did you catch the article about Google's datacenters the other day? Clearly they recognize that fact and design around it."
I wonder, http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400961 how does a 'data center' in a box go down, when it's 'power room' explodes?
complicated electrical devices, especially where varying current can cause undesirable operation of the device, are the kinds of electrical devices that make a big bang when they go up in smoke, the conventional data center can put these parts far away from the server, so even with 3 walls going down no servers were harmed... but if it's all tightly integrated into a 'box' what happens to all the servers and the data?
i suppose if the thing is as big as a semi trailer, it could have a blast barrier, between servers, and power unit... otherwise, a data center in a box is a potentially less safe method of implementing a data center than the conventional approach.
I know you are a troll, and connecting at a full 56kbps was almost impossible, but back in the day, newsgroups could be downloaded with compression, and if you ran FreeBSD you could use the same compression on packet headers (if your ISP supported it, most did) i could easily pull 112 kbps off 7-bit ASCII from usenet, with both header compression, and compression on the newsgroup posting, albeit uu-encoded files were 30% larger, but getting 2:1 compression offset that more than enough.
BTW, my freebsd machine, with a hardware modem (serial style) tended to connect at or near 56 kbps, even for web browsing, not at the 52-48kbps winmodems would get, then again, my 56k modem was released before the 56kbps standard, yada yada yada.
"I have no idea how to do it in Windows"
Free as in beer, smoothwall express http://www.smoothwall.org/get/vmware.php
vmware player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
you do have to play around with your network configuration to route it through smoothwall in the vmware player, and i don't know if you can have vmware player automatically load the smoothwall vm on boot, but there probably is a way.
a smoothwall VM will need a little cpu resource and a little ram, not as much as a full desktop linux would need though, and i've had a full debian desktop using 128 mb of ram..
at anyrate, yes you can do it in windows.
"You can make your own iptables script for the down stream though. I'm not sure how it works in implementation but I've set mine to give http full bandwidth over nntp on a certain port."
this is why i like smoothwall, the best part of smoothwall is that it will run on slow, cheap computers, some have even managed to get it to run on 386's. I know old computers use more power than a linksys, but you can get a new computer based on cheap System on a chip parts, that uses about as much power as a linksys, but with all the features of a full linux machine.
i don't know if you have to play with iptables on smoothwall express* for inbound QoS, but the 'commercial' smoothwall product has user friendly inbound configuration...
* = free as in beer