Re:Google is the memory of the global village
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Knoppix 3.9 Released
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· Score: 1
Um, I grew up in a small town that tourists have overrun and it's changed quite a bit. It's still recognizable, but in a century I am sure it's going to look just like another New York suburb.
I've been to cities that are history - well what I mean is that they're remarkably preserved. And this isn't an America vs. Europe thing - Salem (Mass.) has a downtown with many buildings over 200 years old, some over three centuries old. Whereas, many cities in Europe were bombed flat during ww2 and rebuilt by people who wanted to obliterate the past, such as the Soviets (I haven't been there, but my understanding is that Dresden is like this).
Now, this is really tangential to the who knoppix release, and a tangent off of the long-term nature of debian. In my opinion, Debian doesn't hold old releases long enough. I think that there ought to be an ULTRA STABLE Debian that would be maintained for ten years or longer.
Yes, they probably don't want these floating around the used market, as some people know how to replace the batteries apple used for planned obsolencense.
Ipod is an ugly, overhyped, expensive, unreliable, disposable piece of junk. I think my Create Muvo FM TX 512MB is far better. And it cost only $84. And now they have a 1gb model available for around $120. It's cheaper, lighter, stronger than an iPOD, and takes a single AAA battery - wow, a replacable battery, what a great idea.
Thank you and some others for pointing this out. I was about to do the same. There wasn't much knowledge of the long-term effects of "seondary fission products" at the time (and now, there's misconceptions). Even if they had known how to build a dirty bomb and were able to produce and use it, I doubt it would be used. The Nazis wanted to colonize certain areas (Poland, Ukraine, parts of Russia) and prop up 'friendly' governments in France, Netherlands and the U.K. Neither of these goals is compatible with long-term nuclear poisoning of the land, and a dirty bomb has little tactical value. In spite of Hitler's battle cry "Totaler Krieg!" (Total War), most of the generals were more practical than this, and later in the war could not spare the resources for a pure 'vengeance' weapon.
Germany had the technological advantage leading up to World War II. As the nationalist tempo quickened into the fanatical, many scientists saw the handwriting on the wall (often literally) and emigrated (even if they were not of the races being vilified). I believe that it is likely that even those who initially believed in the Aryan cause became frigtened of the idea of Hitler having the A-bomb, and may have either actively or passively kept the project from being completed. This results of this could have been a number of exaggerated or deceptive scientific reports based on a scientist's needs to keep himself and his family alive at the end of the war.
Of course they are 'exploiting' it: but in a morally aceptable way, i.e. exploiting a vein of a mineral by use of a mine. It is the purpose of a business organization to make money. This is done by the process of value addition: Buy cheap, do something, sell at a higher price. The value proposition of open source software is the ability to respond to a customer's needs. The end result of this process, if GPL source is the raw material, must also be under the GPL. But the code has been 'exploited', and this is good.
The question of business exploiting the open source movement doesn't warrant alarm. As long as the legal requirements are fulfilled, there is no problem. If a company promises one thing and delivers another, then that is a question of corporate malfeasance that is a separate issue than business use of open source software.
Business exploitation of Open Source Software is GOOD
Sitting around in a coffee shop with a laptop is in itself a fashion statement; it has nothing to do with drinking coffee and nothing to do with sitting in front of a laptop doing interesting stuff.
Maybe that's the case: It would certainly explain the great prevalence of new, high-end Apple laptops seen at cafes. Along with European-styled glasses, and metrosexual haircuts.
Back in 2000, it was pretty hip to be on the net and sucking down an espresso-chocolate drink on the sidewalk gawking at all the girls staring at you, and talking about them on some chat thing (irc, aol, etc) as you did so, occasionally sneaking a pic with the built-in camera as you did so of the latest fashionable young thing showing her marvelous legs as she ambled by as you did. But it's now five years on, and it's not so special any more.
Maybe having that laptop connected to an LCD projector and showing a pirated copy of star warz episode III would be worthy of attention. But I wouldn't want to have to lug around all the batteries you'd need to power such a toy.
How about just making it so you have to buy something to use the net? Or otherwise pay? Yeah, a system like that would cost a bit of money, but if they have that many laptop users they could make it back pretty quickly.
But the prices shouldn't be too high: Buy a coffee, get 45 minutes, or something.
I want to MURDER people who say "Sequel" instead of S-Q-L...
Yes, I know what you mean: Perfect solutions is to join in the fun. Use a different word each time "Suckel" "sequel" "squirrel", "sahtah" and "say-tay" and "sahtay" and "satan"
Everytime I see an ad about some 2mbps DSL service for $30/month, I get excited, and think: to hell with comcast! I want more bandwidth for less money!...and then I read an article like this and decide to stay with what I have.
It's hard to be an educated consumer in a technological age. Every consumer wants to buy commodity products at the lowest prices, and every business wants to differentiate in the market in order to NOT be bound by commodity economics. What this generally means is, that there are advantages and disadvantages to each service. Too many times I haven't been sophisticated enough in my shopping and have ended up with something worse than what it replaced. A DSL provider that uses PPPoE...oops didn't think of how that degrades reliability and performance. A cellular service using GSM...erf, these codecs aren't as nice as CDMA's, the voice quality is degraded. A web hosting company that doesn't have any phone number for technical support -- oh, is that even legal? And on, and on. Sometimes it's better to just pay a little more for something that you have, that works, than to try to save a few dollars and end up with frustration. Please note that I am NOT saying you get what you pay for - you don't, you get what you negotiate. Rather, I am just saying that the devil you know is better than a brand new satan. So Comcast is where I stay for Internet service, even if DSL is cheaper, because it works and the performance is decent and they aren't (yet) blocking any TCP ports.
What does this have to do with BT, deregulation, and the rest? I told the story because it tells you the pressure that companies to improve their market presence, sell more service, and raise profits. Some of this is done with good work and value for the dollar. Often it isn't, it's just to con customers into buying what they don't need, having fine print that gets you out of the expensive neccessity of troubleshooting, and, most importantly, of being able to cherry-pick customers:
In the monopoly days, the deal was: Provide universal service, and you can charge universal prices. But all customers had to be served, regardless of the expense (within the legal limits). It costs much more money to wire rural areas with electricity and telephone service, but it had to be done, because telephone service was valuable only as much as it was universal(hence the joke: "Who was dumb enough to be the first one to buy a telephone?"). City telephone customers subsidizes rural ones, but since most of the telephone jobs were created in towns and cities, it was sort of a fair trade.
It was thought that once universal service was achieved by the telecom syndicate (AT&T, GTE, etc. in the US, BT in the UK), that it could be transformed into a free market where the customer could choose one of several telecom providers. For long distance service, the reduction of costs a hundred fold was significant, and benefitted the customer (so far). However, the problem with leocal service is that, regardless of a customer's statistical location in a metropolitan area or not, some are more difficult to serve than others. It is now the case that no company wants the problem customers, so if you're line doesn't qualify for DSL they're happy to let you try to jump ship to another provider. The obligation of universal service is non-existant in some places, and only given lip-service in others. Some sort of system has to be worked out, wherein the 'problem customers' are assigned to telecom companies who are obligated to provide service at some mandated level of quality and price. This is why we have regulated telecom.
I like the excitement caused by VOIP and cellular and other technology that has had a drastic effect on lowering the cost of telecom to the consumer. However, if the problem of universal service is not properly addressed, we're going to hear many more stories like this BT horrorshow, especially in older areas where the copper infrastructre is already a hundred years old and there is little money or incentive to maintain it.
I'd walk out, and hire a lawyer, and have the lawyer tell them the scoop.
You may be worried about getting a bad reference. Don't be. An employer may not lie about the length of time you have been at a job. If they do, you can sue and collect lots of money and get them a criminal record, possibly jail time. But most won't even do that, because, in many jurisdictions, the bort case law and legislation very much favors the employee in this type of dispute. Some places now won't do more than confirm the position you held, for how long, and possibly your salary (and maybe if you managed others).
I had an employer threaten me once, in a similar way. After I talked to their lawyer and informed him of my position in the case, and let him know I saw the problem, and that I knew how things like this worked, I never heard any more from the employer - the lawyer no doubt told them they didn't have a leg to stand on. For a reference, I used someone who had already left the company.
The woman who threatened me, later got in a dispute with her father, who owned the company, was fired and disinherited. The company later went bankrupt, and was dissolved. Good riddance! Too bad, they had some really nice technology patents in the industrial water treatment industry, but the family was just crazy.
Yea, don't forget Cessna...sued out of existance by the heirs of a fool who didn't know how to fly. Raytheon bought the carcass. Because of this disaster, the small aircraft industry has become very conservative and expensive. So has the FAA, it costs a ton of money to get a new aircraft certified these days, which is why people are restarting manufacturing of old aircraft designs, approved fifty years ago.
When a company breaks the law, on purpose, it deserves to be punished, as does the management who made the decision. The liability lawsuit goldmine for lawyers started in the 70s, was tempered somewhat in the 90s, but is still a huge business, and something that many other jurisdictions (China?) don't have to worry about. Yet another reason why so many jobs have been lost from Europe and America to the rest of the world.
The current administration is spending money at a rate that should make everyone in the country want to start burying cash in jam jars.
Actually, yu'd want to do just the opposite: we're entering a period of high inflation (due to oil prices, the budget defecit, the low prime rate, and loss of confidence by third-world cleptocrats in the dollar) and economic doldrums at the same time - the 'stagflation' which was endemic in the late seventies.
A good, conservative investment for the cautious person right now would be something like a coal mine.
Your figure of 10 cars of coal to crack RC5 are misleading. First of all, most of the electricity produced was not the result of burning coal. Second of all, if is hard to determine the actual amount of any fuel used to create a given amount of electricity because the efficiency of generators varies between units and the efficiency of a specific unit varies depending on the load, properties of the fuel, etc. Third, distribution of electricity has variable efficiency, depending on distance and the design of the grid (high voltage line transport electric current more efficiently).
Next there's the consumption on the consumer end. You assume that these systems are doing NOTHING but cracing RC5, and would be turned off if they were not cracking RC5. I know that many organizations leave their workstations on all night, so they would not be used otherwise, therefore RC5's use of these workstations cost nothing. That was then. These days, however, CPUs like the Pentium-M scale CPU speed to application demand, so RC5 WOULD use more power than and idle workstation.
In summary, I find such polticially charged, off-the-cuff calculations as you are presenting to be worse than useless. It is acceptable to say that a CPU that uses less electricity does present environmental benefits. It isn't acceptable to make such very rough estimates of CPU power to coal consumption, and use them in any argument.
Assuming time travel is possible, it's impossible to alter the past.
Think of it this way, the way something happened, is the way it happened. If you travel back in time, then you're participating in events however, your paticipation would already have happened. Therefore, anything you've already done would already have happened.
You're not getting it. These types of things go on. Remember the chicken and egg paradox? Well, you're the egg...which will grow up to be a chicked, and travel back in time...
From the web site:Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don't have time travel....
Time travel either exists, or it does not. There is no question of 'having' it in a year, or not. Are any methods of traveling into the past well known in 2005, here on earth, among homo sapiens? no. By its very nature, powerful time-travel tends to be kept quiet, John Titor not withstanding.
This shocking ignorance of the basics in time-travel caused many time-travelers to scoff at the event. Nontheless, it is useful as a 'zero point' reference.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to lay down some hundred-year old wine to bring to the event.
Well, soldering itself isn't too difficult to comprehend:
- don't be hung over, or have drank too much coffee. Your hands need to be steady.
- when working on small circuits, a magnifying glass is helpful. There's things called 'helping hands' which will hold the components to be soldered in the right position, and also have a positionable magnifying glass with a light.
- clean all oxidation off of the metal surfaces to be soldered, using light duty sandpaper, steel wool, or a chemical compound called "rosin". Make sure you use rosin acceptable for electronics, plumbing rosin is often acidic and will damage electronic components.
- use solder of appropriate guage to what you're working on. Probably you want really tiny solder.
- physically attach the two metal surfaces, with a vise or what have you. Make you you leave enough room to get the iron in, and still be able to see what's going on.
- clean the tip of the iron, heat it up, then apply a small amount of solder to the iron itself. This is known as 'tinning' the iron.
- apply the solder on one side of the metal surfaces, and put the soldering iron on the other. The idea here is that the metal surfaces have to be hot enough to keep the solder from 'balling up' and running off the board, or otherwise creating a 'cold solder joint'. it shouldn't take more than ten seconds from the tip you place the soldering iron on the metal joint to when the solder on the other side starts to melt. If it takes longer, use a higher power soldering iron
- don't use too much solder or too little. It's hard to explain this in words, just look at other soldering joint done by professionals and you should see what it looks like
- apply heat just long enough to completely melt and spread the solder around the joint. Leaving the iron on too long can overheat components.
- if you don't apply heat long enough, or if you bump the joint while its cooling, you may create acold solder joint. This will have a pitted or scaley appearance, sometimes greyish. You want something smooth and shiney.
One of the things I've learned though experience, is the importance of the proper heating power. Some places will tell you 'use a low wattage iron' to avoid overheating. Well, this is bullshit. If you use an iron that is too wimpy, like those cheap $5 radio shack ones, the joint isn't heated up quickly enough, but the heat has time travel away to the components while you're sitting there with the iron on the joint for 30 seconds wondering when the solder is going to melt. The best irons are the ones with adjustable settings and a trigger, a 'soldering gun'.
- remember when soldering that while solder provides some physical strength, in electronics that is not its main purpose. Any wires that are under strain should not depend entirely on solder to keep them together. Use some sort of strain relief when called for.
1. Who's going to pick up and move to some centralized location (in this day of computers) without the incentive of money? We're not hippies, we don't live on carma and jane. Who's gonna pay for all the practical needs of yer coding collective? (room and board, food, etc)"
Some people are hippies. Other than hippies, some people just love being surrounded by mounds of old computers and hacking around with them (I live in Cambridge, Mass., where the problem is the lack of space for this project and not the lack of interested hackers).
Payment will have to be handled by donations, or contracts.
So you get someone to finance this "shangrala of OpenSource coding"...and...so...it becomes a business...where coding work...gets done for money... Hmm. Code work for profit...hmm...
I think you mean "Shangri-La". In any case, you
are assuming that people only code for money, and the only value that programmers produce is in their lines of code, so that it must be kept valuable to force people to give money to pay the programmers, and to do so it must be a rare thing, and the only way to do that is to enforce a monopoly through intellectual property rights.
In other words, you're saying that Open Source can't work, as it is not a viable economic model. Hrm, I'd say that history has already disproven this.
3. Who's gonna pay, and who controls that pay? lets say you do make this shangrala. So you opt up for companies (who benifit from this stuff) to pay (ie - scam them into "donating")...Fine. But when companies pay, what's their insentive to pay at all? Or pay that much? Company X gave $20, while company Z gave 2-million. Both paid, do both get support? Do both get the code that comes out? Which leads me to comment 4:
Such negativity, tsk tsk. There's several different ways for this to operate. One is that certain complex and generic products (The Linux kernel, for instance) take donations to pay for testing. A process is set up to exhaustively test each kernel pre-release. Once a kernel version has passed all the tests, it is given a seal of testing.
Other products, such as special kernel patches, may have their testing funded, by directed donations or contract with a commercial organization.
Further testing is done based upon the priority schedule, set up by a manager working with a board of directors.
4. How do you keep control of what you produce? If you create this coding Shagrala, and put a bunch of people to work coding and testing, who do you send the finished product to? If everyone gets it, why should I pay? If only those who pay get it, then how do you prevent people from just swiping it from you or others? So you start licensing/copyrighting/protecting/etc your work. Now what? What's to stop me from buying your code, then tearing off with it on my own, using your code and giving it to others freely through my products, without them paying?
This would be against Open Source, and therefore prohibited. See above.
5. Why the heck do we need a centralized location, in this day and age of computer networking and communications?
As hinted at, but not fully explained in my first post, various hardware configurations are the problem of many difficulties. These require hands-on reconfiguration of systems from a stock of components, with a well organized system to make sure the hardware itself is properly functional, and that is set up in a manner adequeate for testing.
Why not develope a way for people to do the same thing they would in Shangrala, in their own homes, all over the world? You could run the entire infrastructure out of a cubicle. You don't need a building somewhere, full of chairs and donated computers, running on corporate funds and the stomachs of hippies.
Do you mean for your tone to be repetitive and offensive? I am going to assume not for the time being. Anyhow, it can't all be run out of a
For a couple of years now, I have realized that testing is the 'unsexy' part of open-souce development that doesn't 'scratch any itch'. As such, QA can sometimes not be adequate, and what's left is a few brave souls trying to sort through a myraid of user bug reports. It's not the way things should be done.
What the Open Source world needs is coordinated testing. The involves a well-designed bug tracking and QA system, with enough attention and kudos to keep people interested in working on things.
My vision is a comprehensive test lab, set up somewhere on cheap real estate, with numerous system representing the broad spectrum of hardware configurations, shepherded by some talented sysadmins, and used locally or remotely by a vast, well coordinated league of testers.
Without going into great details, I believe that the confluence of inexpensive real estate, good infrastructure, and reasonably easy reach of talented admins and programmers, leaves two cities at the top of the list, one for each two continents with which I feel I have the knowledge to make some rough qualifications.
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA - Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
People and resources are needed. First, we need people to rally around and work out that this is a good idea. Second, we need QA testing prople with a lot of expertise to design systems for testing. Third, we need space for the computers, fourth, we need the computers (I'll donate most of the pile in my basement!), fifth, we need the on-site sysadmins and builders, sixth, we need bandwidth and IP space (IP space may end up being more important than high bandwidth. Seventh, we need a way to financially support the equipment and people onsite.
I live in one of the places that is lucky (ha ha) enough to be photographed in hi-res (Boston area). The resolution was high enough so that I could see the ham radio antenna on my roof. This isn't a large antenna: it's a magnetic loop antenna which is a 2.5 foot in diameter ring of 3" aluminum tube. And it was visibile, along with its shadow. Quite amazing!
What was disturbing is that I had to use the up-arrow on the map a few times. Google/KH was approximately 300 feet off of my actual location. Yahoo maps was quite accurate, so what gives? I am wondering if these were intentionally skewed to prevent people from launching missles, or something. Sort of like 'selective availability'.
I noticed that the KH program has the capability of much higher resolution that google maps. I guess that keeps the servers from being swamped. Or mapes people buy keyhole.
I wouldn't pay for the service, with the accuracy and coverage problems. And the fact that there's nothing in Europe.
These phones usually violate FCC regulations. Most phones are licensed under part 15 rules, which limits power output, antenna size, etc, with the idea being to limit range and therefore inference. I doubt that any phone claiming more than a hundred meters could pass FCC muster.
Others of these phones are black market imports. THey operate outside of the FCC entirely, often in public safety or ham radio bands. Senao makes some of these phones. These cause a large amount of interference and many people have been caught and fined for their use. But the manufacturers don't seem to be doing enough to keep them from coming into the U.S.
School districts where a large number of students are falling behind, fall to computer industry propaganda (initiated by Apple) and think that a computer is going to make great students out of all the kids. It's no surprise that it doesn't, but I doubt that it causes them to do worse. What may is what is removed to pay for the computers: people. Students learn better in an environment with an adequately staffed school. Staff doesn't just mean teachers, it takes all sorts to keep the place operational and safe. Teacher's don't need to all have PhDs, either: it's more important that they like their job and their students, though a minimal base level of instructor and programme competancy is required.
But what really makes for good students is environment outside of the classroom. Students need a peer group that doesn't place a negative value on academic achievement (i.e. glamorizing being uneducated). They need parents who are both care about the child's general welfare and education in specific, and is capable of giving the time, affection, and discipline that raising a child requires.
Computers are useful tools for education, and become more important the higher the school grade of the student. While it is still possible for a student to use a typewriter to complete an assignment, it is impractical. Word processing skills have become expected from young people entering higher education and the job market in this age. Secondarily, general computer savvyness (is that a word?) is a general sign of education for the times.
But this doesn't mean that each student needs his or her own brand new laptop or desktop. That's just computer industry marketing pressure at work. While the State of Maine did provide many brand new powerbooks to its students and has reported positive results, I wonder if more intense research into the changes brought about by this give-away would turn up some unpleasant results.
What kids need is a pile of donated old hardware in the school, as parts for when their school or home PC has problems, but also to experiment and learn with. But how many schools encourage such tinkering?
There's a company in Texas, I can't remember its name, that does similar - builds large buildings by inflating a blaoon, straying it with resin from the inside, and then uses the as basis for a concrete shells. These are hue buildings like aircraft hangars.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, I grew up in a small town that tourists have overrun and it's changed quite a bit. It's still recognizable, but in a century I am sure it's going to look just like another New York suburb.
I've been to cities that are history - well what I mean is that they're remarkably preserved. And this isn't an America vs. Europe thing - Salem (Mass.) has a downtown with many buildings over 200 years old, some over three centuries old. Whereas, many cities in Europe were bombed flat during ww2 and rebuilt by people who wanted to obliterate the past, such as the Soviets (I haven't been there, but my understanding is that Dresden is like this).
Now, this is really tangential to the who knoppix release, and a tangent off of the long-term nature of debian. In my opinion, Debian doesn't hold old releases long enough. I think that there ought to be an ULTRA STABLE Debian that would be maintained for ten years or longer.
Yes, they probably don't want these floating around the used market, as some people know how to replace the batteries apple used for planned obsolencense.
Ipod is an ugly, overhyped, expensive, unreliable, disposable piece of junk. I think my Create Muvo FM TX 512MB is far better. And it cost only $84. And now they have a 1gb model available for around $120. It's cheaper, lighter, stronger than an iPOD, and takes a single AAA battery - wow, a replacable battery, what a great idea.
Thank you and some others for pointing this out. I was about to do the same. There wasn't much knowledge of the long-term effects of "seondary fission products" at the time (and now, there's misconceptions). Even if they had known how to build a dirty bomb and were able to produce and use it, I doubt it would be used. The Nazis wanted to colonize certain areas (Poland, Ukraine, parts of Russia) and prop up 'friendly' governments in France, Netherlands and the U.K. Neither of these goals is compatible with long-term nuclear poisoning of the land, and a dirty bomb has little tactical value. In spite of Hitler's battle cry "Totaler Krieg!" (Total War), most of the generals were more practical than this, and later in the war could not spare the resources for a pure 'vengeance' weapon.
Germany had the technological advantage leading up to World War II. As the nationalist tempo quickened into the fanatical, many scientists saw the handwriting on the wall (often literally) and emigrated (even if they were not of the races being vilified). I believe that it is likely that even those who initially believed in the Aryan cause became frigtened of the idea of Hitler having the A-bomb, and may have either actively or passively kept the project from being completed. This results of this could have been a number of exaggerated or deceptive scientific reports based on a scientist's needs to keep himself and his family alive at the end of the war.
The question of business exploiting the open source movement doesn't warrant alarm. As long as the legal requirements are fulfilled, there is no problem. If a company promises one thing and delivers another, then that is a question of corporate malfeasance that is a separate issue than business use of open source software.
Business exploitation of Open Source Software is GOOD
Maybe that's the case: It would certainly explain the great prevalence of new, high-end Apple laptops seen at cafes. Along with European-styled glasses, and metrosexual haircuts.
Back in 2000, it was pretty hip to be on the net and sucking down an espresso-chocolate drink on the sidewalk gawking at all the girls staring at you, and talking about them on some chat thing (irc, aol, etc) as you did so, occasionally sneaking a pic with the built-in camera as you did so of the latest fashionable young thing showing her marvelous legs as she ambled by as you did. But it's now five years on, and it's not so special any more.
Maybe having that laptop connected to an LCD projector and showing a pirated copy of star warz episode III would be worthy of attention. But I wouldn't want to have to lug around all the batteries you'd need to power such a toy.
How about just making it so you have to buy something to use the net? Or otherwise pay? Yeah, a system like that would cost a bit of money, but if they have that many laptop users they could make it back pretty quickly.
But the prices shouldn't be too high: Buy a coffee, get 45 minutes, or something.
Yes, I know what you mean: Perfect solutions is to join in the fun. Use a different word each time "Suckel" "sequel" "squirrel", "sahtah" and "say-tay" and "sahtay" and "satan"
But "scuzzi" just sounds right.
Everytime I see an ad about some 2mbps DSL service for $30/month, I get excited, and think: to hell with comcast! I want more bandwidth for less money! ...and then I read an article like this and decide to stay with what I have.
It's hard to be an educated consumer in a technological age. Every consumer wants to buy commodity products at the lowest prices, and every business wants to differentiate in the market in order to NOT be bound by commodity economics. What this generally means is, that there are advantages and disadvantages to each service. Too many times I haven't been sophisticated enough in my shopping and have ended up with something worse than what it replaced. A DSL provider that uses PPPoE...oops didn't think of how that degrades reliability and performance. A cellular service using GSM...erf, these codecs aren't as nice as CDMA's, the voice quality is degraded. A web hosting company that doesn't have any phone number for technical support -- oh, is that even legal? And on, and on. Sometimes it's better to just pay a little more for something that you have, that works, than to try to save a few dollars and end up with frustration. Please note that I am NOT saying you get what you pay for - you don't, you get what you negotiate. Rather, I am just saying that the devil you know is better than a brand new satan. So Comcast is where I stay for Internet service, even if DSL is cheaper, because it works and the performance is decent and they aren't (yet) blocking any TCP ports.
What does this have to do with BT, deregulation, and the rest? I told the story because it tells you the pressure that companies to improve their market presence, sell more service, and raise profits. Some of this is done with good work and value for the dollar. Often it isn't, it's just to con customers into buying what they don't need, having fine print that gets you out of the expensive neccessity of troubleshooting, and, most importantly, of being able to cherry-pick customers:
In the monopoly days, the deal was: Provide universal service, and you can charge universal prices. But all customers had to be served, regardless of the expense (within the legal limits). It costs much more money to wire rural areas with electricity and telephone service, but it had to be done, because telephone service was valuable only as much as it was universal(hence the joke: "Who was dumb enough to be the first one to buy a telephone?"). City telephone customers subsidizes rural ones, but since most of the telephone jobs were created in towns and cities, it was sort of a fair trade.
It was thought that once universal service was achieved by the telecom syndicate (AT&T, GTE, etc. in the US, BT in the UK), that it could be transformed into a free market where the customer could choose one of several telecom providers. For long distance service, the reduction of costs a hundred fold was significant, and benefitted the customer (so far). However, the problem with leocal service is that, regardless of a customer's statistical location in a metropolitan area or not, some are more difficult to serve than others. It is now the case that no company wants the problem customers, so if you're line doesn't qualify for DSL they're happy to let you try to jump ship to another provider. The obligation of universal service is non-existant in some places, and only given lip-service in others. Some sort of system has to be worked out, wherein the 'problem customers' are assigned to telecom companies who are obligated to provide service at some mandated level of quality and price. This is why we have regulated telecom.
I like the excitement caused by VOIP and cellular and other technology that has had a drastic effect on lowering the cost of telecom to the consumer. However, if the problem of universal service is not properly addressed, we're going to hear many more stories like this BT horrorshow, especially in older areas where the copper infrastructre is already a hundred years old and there is little money or incentive to maintain it.
I'd walk out, and hire a lawyer, and have the lawyer tell them the scoop.
You may be worried about getting a bad reference. Don't be. An employer may not lie about the length of time you have been at a job. If they do, you can sue and collect lots of money and get them a criminal record, possibly jail time. But most won't even do that, because, in many jurisdictions, the bort case law and legislation very much favors the employee in this type of dispute. Some places now won't do more than confirm the position you held, for how long, and possibly your salary (and maybe if you managed others).
I had an employer threaten me once, in a similar way. After I talked to their lawyer and informed him of my position in the case, and let him know I saw the problem, and that I knew how things like this worked, I never heard any more from the employer - the lawyer no doubt told them they didn't have a leg to stand on. For a reference, I used someone who had already left the company.
The woman who threatened me, later got in a dispute with her father, who owned the company, was fired and disinherited. The company later went bankrupt, and was dissolved. Good riddance! Too bad, they had some really nice technology patents in the industrial water treatment industry, but the family was just crazy.
Yea, don't forget Cessna...sued out of existance by the heirs of a fool who didn't know how to fly. Raytheon bought the carcass. Because of this disaster, the small aircraft industry has become very conservative and expensive. So has the FAA, it costs a ton of money to get a new aircraft certified these days, which is why people are restarting manufacturing of old aircraft designs, approved fifty years ago.
When a company breaks the law, on purpose, it deserves to be punished, as does the management who made the decision. The liability lawsuit goldmine for lawyers started in the 70s, was tempered somewhat in the 90s, but is still a huge business, and something that many other jurisdictions (China?) don't have to worry about. Yet another reason why so many jobs have been lost from Europe and America to the rest of the world.
So, that's why the layoffs at IBM - they've finally finished discovery on the SCO case....
Actually, yu'd want to do just the opposite: we're entering a period of high inflation (due to oil prices, the budget defecit, the low prime rate, and loss of confidence by third-world cleptocrats in the dollar) and economic doldrums at the same time - the 'stagflation' which was endemic in the late seventies.
A good, conservative investment for the cautious person right now would be something like a coal mine.
Some would say that is part of George W. Bush's other project: The war in Iraq.
Your figure of 10 cars of coal to crack RC5 are misleading. First of all, most of the electricity produced was not the result of burning coal. Second of all, if is hard to determine the actual amount of any fuel used to create a given amount of electricity because the efficiency of generators varies between units and the efficiency of a specific unit varies depending on the load, properties of the fuel, etc. Third, distribution of electricity has variable efficiency, depending on distance and the design of the grid (high voltage line transport electric current more efficiently).
Next there's the consumption on the consumer end. You assume that these systems are doing NOTHING but cracing RC5, and would be turned off if they were not cracking RC5. I know that many organizations leave their workstations on all night, so they would not be used otherwise, therefore RC5's use of these workstations cost nothing. That was then. These days, however, CPUs like the Pentium-M scale CPU speed to application demand, so RC5 WOULD use more power than and idle workstation.
In summary, I find such polticially charged, off-the-cuff calculations as you are presenting to be worse than useless. It is acceptable to say that a CPU that uses less electricity does present environmental benefits. It isn't acceptable to make such very rough estimates of CPU power to coal consumption, and use them in any argument.
Assuming time travel is possible, it's impossible to alter the past.
Think of it this way, the way something happened, is the way it happened. If you travel back in time, then you're participating in events however, your paticipation would already have happened. Therefore, anything you've already done would already have happened.
You're not getting it. These types of things go on. Remember the chicken and egg paradox? Well, you're the egg...which will grow up to be a chicked, and travel back in time...
This is how the universe began.
They did.
Time travel either exists, or it does not. There is no question of 'having' it in a year, or not. Are any methods of traveling into the past well known in 2005, here on earth, among homo sapiens? no. By its very nature, powerful time-travel tends to be kept quiet, John Titor not withstanding.
This shocking ignorance of the basics in time-travel caused many time-travelers to scoff at the event. Nontheless, it is useful as a 'zero point' reference.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to lay down some hundred-year old wine to bring to the event.
Well, soldering itself isn't too difficult to comprehend:
- don't be hung over, or have drank too much coffee. Your hands need to be steady.
- when working on small circuits, a magnifying glass is helpful. There's things called 'helping hands' which will hold the components to be soldered in the right position, and also have a positionable magnifying glass with a light.
- clean all oxidation off of the metal surfaces to be soldered, using light duty sandpaper, steel wool, or a chemical compound called "rosin". Make sure you use rosin acceptable for electronics, plumbing rosin is often acidic and will damage electronic components.
- use solder of appropriate guage to what you're working on. Probably you want really tiny solder.
- physically attach the two metal surfaces, with a vise or what have you. Make you you leave enough room to get the iron in, and still be able to see what's going on.
- clean the tip of the iron, heat it up, then apply a small amount of solder to the iron itself. This is known as 'tinning' the iron.
- apply the solder on one side of the metal surfaces, and put the soldering iron on the other. The idea here is that the metal surfaces have to be hot enough to keep the solder from 'balling up' and running off the board, or otherwise creating a 'cold solder joint'. it shouldn't take more than ten seconds from the tip you place the soldering iron on the metal joint to when the solder on the other side starts to melt. If it takes longer, use a higher power soldering iron
- don't use too much solder or too little. It's hard to explain this in words, just look at other soldering joint done by professionals and you should see what it looks like
- apply heat just long enough to completely melt and spread the solder around the joint. Leaving the iron on too long can overheat components.
- if you don't apply heat long enough, or if you bump the joint while its cooling, you may create acold solder joint. This will have a pitted or scaley appearance, sometimes greyish. You want something smooth and shiney.
One of the things I've learned though experience, is the importance of the proper heating power. Some places will tell you 'use a low wattage iron' to avoid overheating. Well, this is bullshit. If you use an iron that is too wimpy, like those cheap $5 radio shack ones, the joint isn't heated up quickly enough, but the heat has time travel away to the components while you're sitting there with the iron on the joint for 30 seconds wondering when the solder is going to melt. The best irons are the ones with adjustable settings and a trigger, a 'soldering gun'.
- remember when soldering that while solder provides some physical strength, in electronics that is not its main purpose. Any wires that are under strain should not depend entirely on solder to keep them together. Use some sort of strain relief when called for.
I hope this has been helpful.
1. Who's going to pick up and move to some centralized location (in this day of computers) without the incentive of money? We're not hippies, we don't live on carma and jane. Who's gonna pay for all the practical needs of yer coding collective? (room and board, food, etc)"
Some people are hippies. Other than hippies, some people just love being surrounded by mounds of old computers and hacking around with them (I live in Cambridge, Mass., where the problem is the lack of space for this project and not the lack of interested hackers).
Payment will have to be handled by donations, or contracts.
So you get someone to finance this "shangrala of OpenSource coding"...and...so...it becomes a business...where coding work...gets done for money... Hmm. Code work for profit...hmm...
I think you mean "Shangri-La". In any case, you are assuming that people only code for money, and the only value that programmers produce is in their lines of code, so that it must be kept valuable to force people to give money to pay the programmers, and to do so it must be a rare thing, and the only way to do that is to enforce a monopoly through intellectual property rights.
In other words, you're saying that Open Source can't work, as it is not a viable economic model. Hrm, I'd say that history has already disproven this.
3. Who's gonna pay, and who controls that pay? lets say you do make this shangrala. So you opt up for companies (who benifit from this stuff) to pay (ie - scam them into "donating")...Fine. But when companies pay, what's their insentive to pay at all? Or pay that much? Company X gave $20, while company Z gave 2-million. Both paid, do both get support? Do both get the code that comes out? Which leads me to comment 4:
Such negativity, tsk tsk. There's several different ways for this to operate. One is that certain complex and generic products (The Linux kernel, for instance) take donations to pay for testing. A process is set up to exhaustively test each kernel pre-release. Once a kernel version has passed all the tests, it is given a seal of testing.
Other products, such as special kernel patches, may have their testing funded, by directed donations or contract with a commercial organization.
Further testing is done based upon the priority schedule, set up by a manager working with a board of directors.
4. How do you keep control of what you produce? If you create this coding Shagrala, and put a bunch of people to work coding and testing, who do you send the finished product to? If everyone gets it, why should I pay? If only those who pay get it, then how do you prevent people from just swiping it from you or others? So you start licensing/copyrighting/protecting/etc your work. Now what? What's to stop me from buying your code, then tearing off with it on my own, using your code and giving it to others freely through my products, without them paying?
This would be against Open Source, and therefore prohibited. See above.
5. Why the heck do we need a centralized location, in this day and age of computer networking and communications?
As hinted at, but not fully explained in my first post, various hardware configurations are the problem of many difficulties. These require hands-on reconfiguration of systems from a stock of components, with a well organized system to make sure the hardware itself is properly functional, and that is set up in a manner adequeate for testing.
Why not develope a way for people to do the same thing they would in Shangrala, in their own homes, all over the world? You could run the entire infrastructure out of a cubicle. You don't need a building somewhere, full of chairs and donated computers, running on corporate funds and the stomachs of hippies.
Do you mean for your tone to be repetitive and offensive? I am going to assume not for the time being. Anyhow, it can't all be run out of a
For a couple of years now, I have realized that testing is the 'unsexy' part of open-souce development that doesn't 'scratch any itch'. As such, QA can sometimes not be adequate, and what's left is a few brave souls trying to sort through a myraid of user bug reports. It's not the way things should be done.
What the Open Source world needs is coordinated testing. The involves a well-designed bug tracking and QA system, with enough attention and kudos to keep people interested in working on things.
My vision is a comprehensive test lab, set up somewhere on cheap real estate, with numerous system representing the broad spectrum of hardware configurations, shepherded by some talented sysadmins, and used locally or remotely by a vast, well coordinated league of testers.
Without going into great details, I believe that the confluence of inexpensive real estate, good infrastructure, and reasonably easy reach of talented admins and programmers, leaves two cities at the top of the list, one for each two continents with which I feel I have the knowledge to make some rough qualifications.
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
- Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
People and resources are needed. First, we need people to rally around and work out that this is a good idea. Second, we need QA testing prople with a lot of expertise to design systems for testing. Third, we need space for the computers, fourth, we need the computers (I'll donate most of the pile in my basement!), fifth, we need the on-site sysadmins and builders, sixth, we need bandwidth and IP space (IP space may end up being more important than high bandwidth. Seventh, we need a way to financially support the equipment and people onsite.
What do the rest of you think?
4 Privet Drive, Little Whingling, Surrey doesn't work! But hey, you get strange results when you try to map Hogwarts, try it.
I live in one of the places that is lucky (ha ha) enough to be photographed in hi-res (Boston area). The resolution was high enough so that I could see the ham radio antenna on my roof. This isn't a large antenna: it's a magnetic loop antenna which is a 2.5 foot in diameter ring of 3" aluminum tube. And it was visibile, along with its shadow. Quite amazing!
What was disturbing is that I had to use the up-arrow on the map a few times. Google/KH was approximately 300 feet off of my actual location. Yahoo maps was quite accurate, so what gives? I am wondering if these were intentionally skewed to prevent people from launching missles, or something. Sort of like 'selective availability'.
I noticed that the KH program has the capability of much higher resolution that google maps. I guess that keeps the servers from being swamped. Or mapes people buy keyhole.
I wouldn't pay for the service, with the accuracy and coverage problems. And the fact that there's nothing in Europe.
These phones usually violate FCC regulations. Most phones are licensed under part 15 rules, which limits power output, antenna size, etc, with the idea being to limit range and therefore inference. I doubt that any phone claiming more than a hundred meters could pass FCC muster.
Others of these phones are black market imports. THey operate outside of the FCC entirely, often in public safety or ham radio bands. Senao makes some of these phones. These cause a large amount of interference and many people have been caught and fined for their use. But the manufacturers don't seem to be doing enough to keep them from coming into the U.S.
School districts where a large number of students are falling behind, fall to computer industry propaganda (initiated by Apple) and think that a computer is going to make great students out of all the kids. It's no surprise that it doesn't, but I doubt that it causes them to do worse. What may is what is removed to pay for the computers: people. Students learn better in an environment with an adequately staffed school. Staff doesn't just mean teachers, it takes all sorts to keep the place operational and safe. Teacher's don't need to all have PhDs, either: it's more important that they like their job and their students, though a minimal base level of instructor and programme competancy is required.
But what really makes for good students is environment outside of the classroom. Students need a peer group that doesn't place a negative value on academic achievement (i.e. glamorizing being uneducated). They need parents who are both care about the child's general welfare and education in specific, and is capable of giving the time, affection, and discipline that raising a child requires.
Computers are useful tools for education, and become more important the higher the school grade of the student. While it is still possible for a student to use a typewriter to complete an assignment, it is impractical. Word processing skills have become expected from young people entering higher education and the job market in this age. Secondarily, general computer savvyness (is that a word?) is a general sign of education for the times.
But this doesn't mean that each student needs his or her own brand new laptop or desktop. That's just computer industry marketing pressure at work. While the State of Maine did provide many brand new powerbooks to its students and has reported positive results, I wonder if more intense research into the changes brought about by this give-away would turn up some unpleasant results.
What kids need is a pile of donated old hardware in the school, as parts for when their school or home PC has problems, but also to experiment and learn with. But how many schools encourage such tinkering?
There's a company in Texas, I can't remember its name, that does similar - builds large buildings by inflating a blaoon, straying it with resin from the inside, and then uses the as basis for a concrete shells. These are hue buildings like aircraft hangars.