Why do you need a good desktop? Seriously? I have a laptop for surfing/typing, a router for networking, a few Arduinos for hacking, a rack of servers for Real Work (TM), and if I wanted to play games with awesome graphics I would probably break down and use a console. What purpose does a desktop serve?
When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock.
Solving this problem would save energy on the hundreds of thousands of NSA computers that are currently decrypting all of your e-mail and Skype conversations.
Specialization is the dumbest possible idea. This is an ambulance. Best case, you need none. Worst case, you need one for every soldier. How many redundant, specialized vehicles do you want to take with you half way around the world?
And about a multi-role fleet: being able to do a lot of stuff ok means you can't do anything good.
Of course it doesn't. That's the brilliance of open-source. It's about creating standard interfaces and specializing beyond them. It's about re-using what works, and evolving a design that is both flexible and specialized.
A tractor does a lot of stuff okay. It will drive you across town if necessary. But it does one thing very well: It drives in mud. And when you combine it with some other piece of equipment via a standard interface, it does several things very well, like plowing, or planting, or cutting, or harvesting, or fertilizing.
The same concept applies. You need a rescue vehicle? Okay, start with a vehicle that drives in a war zone. That means heavy-duty, 4wd, diesel. Then add to it via a standard interface. And you get something like the existing HMMV. So what's wrong with that? Why does it need to be re-designed? And why can't an improved design just replace the existing ambulance add-ons? That would be real open-source design. This just looks like drawing pictures of things that will never be built.
That's more like it. Maintaining security is a definite, present cost. Securing a breach is a potential cost and, at worst, a future cost. Corporations tend to ignore potential costs. And they will always discount future costs. The first is because, if they didn't, their competitors would, and would grow faster than they do, secure more investment, capture economies of scale, and put them out of business. The second is because, thanks to institutionalized wage slavery, future costs will always be less than present costs.
I suppose it could reduce overall cost if there weren't new, different externalities built right into the regulations. Just like subsidizing subprime borrowers "could" have reduced the overall cost of housing, in fantasy land.
I have yet to see one single study that finds economical benefits in using DST
There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy
These are all totally separate concepts and it's as though you are all talking past one another in completely different languages. When Western governments say they want to "stimulate the economy", they really want to stimulate trade, not savings. They want to increase the transfer of wealth from savers to workers or consumers. And, more importantly, they want to increase the tax revenue that comes from this.
So of course there are no economical benefits in anything governments do to "stimulate the economy". Stimulating the economy destroys savings and increases resource consumption creating pointless make-work. It increases energy usage, and that is by design.
That seems to be a common complaint but remember in Jeopardy you lose money if you ring in with the wrong answer. So even though Watson can ring in first every time, it has to be extremely confident that it has the right answer.
It's more like a fire station burning down because the fire chief was being paid by the mayor to make molotov cocktails and throw them at local teenagers and one day they decided to throw one back and instead of putting the fire out the firemen screamed and ran around in circles and poured gasoline on it and the fire station exploded. But, yeah.
For many non-typical computer users, their smartphones already *are* their only computer. These are people for whom a computer is basically an advanced communications device. It surfs the web and enables social networking. And that's most of what they need. Throw in a few basic apps and games and they're happy to fork over $500 and $60/mo for the rest of their lives.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's likely that smartphones will become the portable hard drives of the future, attached to a generic monitor and keyboard as necessary. This is the reason that Microsoft is fighting so hard for the mobile market even though they are obviously far behind. Their desktop bloatware doesn't run on phones today, and there is an opportunity for others to unify the desktop and mobile software markets with apps that operate seamlessly everywhere.
I hastily threw together an incubator and vastly underestimated the natural instinct of one-day-old chicks to climb over obstacles and perch on interesting objects.
Arduino is a microcontroller prototyping board with some useful things like standard add-ons, an IDE and some libraries. A microcontroller is basically a small, low-power low-cost computer on a chip that runs a single program and has input and output to things like sensors and relays.
What does "won" mean, exactly?
These days the competition is over developer mindshare. 'Won' means that developers are learning on this platform and toolset rather than some other.
Is this just a hobbyist platform?
Yes but it's mostly just an Atmel AVR so it's easy to transfer to high-volume applications.
Does this dominate all microcontroller applications world-wide?
When it comes down to it, an arduino is a $15 minicomputer.
This. I'm using my Arduinos for things that I was planning to do with a few old 486s at one point. And they are far more useful. I can easily write programs in C, with lots of libraries available to make it easy. I don't have to learn proprietary BASIC or assembly or anything goofy. If one breaks (lost one so far -- a chicken pooped on it), I can buy a new one for $20 or use the reference info to repair it. There is a huge community of support, add-ons, and tutorials on controlling and interfacing with basic stuff. Basically, it is a general computer. It's not perfect for everything, but it's useful for enough things to justify having a few around, and if I feel like optimizing something I can dig in at any time and do so.
The deflation of BTC as it appreciates does seem to be a significant problem. It will really encourage people to hang on to the currency instead of spend it. Why would I buy a pound of coffee this week for 3BTC if I could buy one next week for 2BTC. I've not seen anyone address this.
I fail to see why this is a problem. It will encourage people to save and to defer gratification instead of to mindlessly consume? It will lessen the amount of work done by coffee bean pickers? I mean, it's not a legally-mandated standard currency, or the only currency in the world. If people irrationally horde bitcoins instead of buying goods and services, their value will go down.
Well, ideally, currency represents energy. It is a way of storing energy for future use in order to convert into future goods and services. This has taken several forms throughout history, from food and other commodities to slaves, pharmaceuticals, precious metals, fossil fuels, scarce objects and, now, prime factors. Each of these functions as currency because it has some relation to future energy, some more direct than others. Ideally, again, energy should become cheaper over time, given technological advances, resource conservation, and rising efficiency and productivity. So currency should naturally devalue over time.
The problem of course is that unless your currency supply is relatively limited, it will not be used, there will be no incentive for technological advancement, resources will not be conserved, productivity and efficiency will not rise and thus the currency will not naturally devalue. The US, and the Federal Reserve, attempt to circumvent this little problem by basically just ignoring it, instead engaging in artificial inflation (money printing), warfare, taxation, confiscation and a bunch of hand-waving political claptrap. This tends to distort and destroy the real economy in the process.
Those exchanges are just currency exchanges. The actual Bitcoin network is P2P. The website being down is just like a bank being closed, not a huge deal. Bitcoin is dependent upon the internet for money creation. But Bitcoins can be exchanged without it. From my understanding, the only difference is that there is then some risk of fraudulent double-spending, so it's good to have access to the network periodically in order to clear transactions. This could be accomplished with periodic connections through almost any low-bandwidth communications medium, including dial-up, cell phones, wi-fi, ham radio links, in-person exchanges or perhaps even via USB keys in various public locations.
Slashdot Mirror
What versions of Ubuntu are THOSE?
Re-compilin' Ricer, Distro Du-Jour and Configuration Clusterfuck, respectively.
Why do you need a good desktop? Seriously? I have a laptop for surfing/typing, a router for networking, a few Arduinos for hacking, a rack of servers for Real Work (TM), and if I wanted to play games with awesome graphics I would probably break down and use a console. What purpose does a desktop serve?
When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock.
Solving this problem would save energy on the hundreds of thousands of NSA computers that are currently decrypting all of your e-mail and Skype conversations.
So a conference in Vegas is like a half-price party weekend. That's assuming you make a lot of money, which you don't.
So it's more like being stuck in a cheap hotel in the middle of a desert and paying twice as much for all your meals.
Gveronment
You know, you might speed up your old computer a bit if you put Linux on it. There are some free typing tutor programs available as well.
Specialization is the dumbest possible idea. This is an ambulance. Best case, you need none. Worst case, you need one for every soldier. How many redundant, specialized vehicles do you want to take with you half way around the world?
And about a multi-role fleet: being able to do a lot of stuff ok means you can't do anything good.
Of course it doesn't. That's the brilliance of open-source. It's about creating standard interfaces and specializing beyond them. It's about re-using what works, and evolving a design that is both flexible and specialized.
A tractor does a lot of stuff okay. It will drive you across town if necessary. But it does one thing very well: It drives in mud. And when you combine it with some other piece of equipment via a standard interface, it does several things very well, like plowing, or planting, or cutting, or harvesting, or fertilizing.
The same concept applies. You need a rescue vehicle? Okay, start with a vehicle that drives in a war zone. That means heavy-duty, 4wd, diesel. Then add to it via a standard interface. And you get something like the existing HMMV. So what's wrong with that? Why does it need to be re-designed? And why can't an improved design just replace the existing ambulance add-ons? That would be real open-source design. This just looks like drawing pictures of things that will never be built.
That's more like it. Maintaining security is a definite, present cost. Securing a breach is a potential cost and, at worst, a future cost. Corporations tend to ignore potential costs. And they will always discount future costs. The first is because, if they didn't, their competitors would, and would grow faster than they do, secure more investment, capture economies of scale, and put them out of business. The second is because, thanks to institutionalized wage slavery, future costs will always be less than present costs.
I suppose it could reduce overall cost if there weren't new, different externalities built right into the regulations. Just like subsidizing subprime borrowers "could" have reduced the overall cost of housing, in fantasy land.
hopefully in turn stimulate the economy
I have yet to see one single study that finds economical benefits in using DST
There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy
These are all totally separate concepts and it's as though you are all talking past one another in completely different languages. When Western governments say they want to "stimulate the economy", they really want to stimulate trade, not savings. They want to increase the transfer of wealth from savers to workers or consumers. And, more importantly, they want to increase the tax revenue that comes from this.
So of course there are no economical benefits in anything governments do to "stimulate the economy". Stimulating the economy destroys savings and increases resource consumption creating pointless make-work. It increases energy usage, and that is by design.
That seems to be a common complaint but remember in Jeopardy you lose money if you ring in with the wrong answer. So even though Watson can ring in first every time, it has to be extremely confident that it has the right answer.
It's more like a fire station burning down because the fire chief was being paid by the mayor to make molotov cocktails and throw them at local teenagers and one day they decided to throw one back and instead of putting the fire out the firemen screamed and ran around in circles and poured gasoline on it and the fire station exploded. But, yeah.
For many non-typical computer users, their smartphones already *are* their only computer. These are people for whom a computer is basically an advanced communications device. It surfs the web and enables social networking. And that's most of what they need. Throw in a few basic apps and games and they're happy to fork over $500 and $60/mo for the rest of their lives.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's likely that smartphones will become the portable hard drives of the future, attached to a generic monitor and keyboard as necessary. This is the reason that Microsoft is fighting so hard for the mobile market even though they are obviously far behind. Their desktop bloatware doesn't run on phones today, and there is an opportunity for others to unify the desktop and mobile software markets with apps that operate seamlessly everywhere.
By now Qt should sell itself. And as mentioned it's all open-source. So the only avenue I see is in providing on-demand technical support.
I hastily threw together an incubator and vastly underestimated the natural instinct of one-day-old chicks to climb over obstacles and perch on interesting objects.
What the heck are we talking about?
Arduino is a microcontroller prototyping board with some useful things like standard add-ons, an IDE and some libraries. A microcontroller is basically a small, low-power low-cost computer on a chip that runs a single program and has input and output to things like sensors and relays.
What does "won" mean, exactly?
These days the competition is over developer mindshare. 'Won' means that developers are learning on this platform and toolset rather than some other.
Is this just a hobbyist platform?
Yes but it's mostly just an Atmel AVR so it's easy to transfer to high-volume applications.
Does this dominate all microcontroller applications world-wide?
Not yet.
When it comes down to it, an arduino is a $15 minicomputer.
This. I'm using my Arduinos for things that I was planning to do with a few old 486s at one point. And they are far more useful. I can easily write programs in C, with lots of libraries available to make it easy. I don't have to learn proprietary BASIC or assembly or anything goofy. If one breaks (lost one so far -- a chicken pooped on it), I can buy a new one for $20 or use the reference info to repair it. There is a huge community of support, add-ons, and tutorials on controlling and interfacing with basic stuff. Basically, it is a general computer. It's not perfect for everything, but it's useful for enough things to justify having a few around, and if I feel like optimizing something I can dig in at any time and do so.
The deflation of BTC as it appreciates does seem to be a significant problem. It will really encourage people to hang on to the currency instead of spend it. Why would I buy a pound of coffee this week for 3BTC if I could buy one next week for 2BTC. I've not seen anyone address this.
I fail to see why this is a problem. It will encourage people to save and to defer gratification instead of to mindlessly consume? It will lessen the amount of work done by coffee bean pickers? I mean, it's not a legally-mandated standard currency, or the only currency in the world. If people irrationally horde bitcoins instead of buying goods and services, their value will go down.
Well, ideally, currency represents energy. It is a way of storing energy for future use in order to convert into future goods and services. This has taken several forms throughout history, from food and other commodities to slaves, pharmaceuticals, precious metals, fossil fuels, scarce objects and, now, prime factors. Each of these functions as currency because it has some relation to future energy, some more direct than others. Ideally, again, energy should become cheaper over time, given technological advances, resource conservation, and rising efficiency and productivity. So currency should naturally devalue over time.
The problem of course is that unless your currency supply is relatively limited, it will not be used, there will be no incentive for technological advancement, resources will not be conserved, productivity and efficiency will not rise and thus the currency will not naturally devalue. The US, and the Federal Reserve, attempt to circumvent this little problem by basically just ignoring it, instead engaging in artificial inflation (money printing), warfare, taxation, confiscation and a bunch of hand-waving political claptrap. This tends to distort and destroy the real economy in the process.
Those exchanges are just currency exchanges. The actual Bitcoin network is P2P. The website being down is just like a bank being closed, not a huge deal. Bitcoin is dependent upon the internet for money creation. But Bitcoins can be exchanged without it. From my understanding, the only difference is that there is then some risk of fraudulent double-spending, so it's good to have access to the network periodically in order to clear transactions. This could be accomplished with periodic connections through almost any low-bandwidth communications medium, including dial-up, cell phones, wi-fi, ham radio links, in-person exchanges or perhaps even via USB keys in various public locations.
I'm not sure how to convert Libraries of Congress to pounds.
If you use electricity to heat your house, you should be setting up a couple of dedicated boxes right now to generate Bitcoins in the process. :)
And connect a water-cooled rig to your aquarium while you're at it.
The Feds already have tried to shut it down, but not before copying the idea for themselves.
deflation
What's wrong with things getting cheaper?