I guess one problem that I do see is that India does need to have a lot of people who are proficient with proprietary solutions from MS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. A large part of their tech economy is involved in providing outsourced development and integration services to companies that want to take advantage of the cheap labor.
Nothing earth shattering here. Free software is a necessity in such a poor country. The cost of Windows XP and a copy of Office XP would wipe out about one third of the average person's annual income.
From the CIA World Factbook 2002 edition...
India: GDP per capita: $2,540 Population below poverty line: 25% Unemployment rate: 8.8% Internet service providers: 43 Internet users: 7 million
True that there are over a billion people in India but the vast majority are involved in agriculture, are uneducated, and most likely will never be able to afford a computer. Its not like this is a major blow to MS.
From a government standpoint, India is much better off using free software and saving money for public health and other more pressing issues.
It all goes back to the old saying that easy for the programmer, hard for the user. Easy for the user, hard for the programmer.
I think that you are right that most programmers will get it working and then move on. They don't have the time or patience to keep working to make things easier for the user.
MS on the other hand can afford to take a few programmers and give them the task of implementing a specific feature. It then becomes their life until it is finished.
In many respects I think that this is why a lot of windows software tends to be a little more unstable in the beginning than an OSS alternative. Basic functionality is easier to achieve and debug. Once you start to add all of these features to make it easy for the user you find that you have 25% of the code for the function and 75% to make a user interface. There is a lot more complexity for the programmer.
Unfortunately I think that MS is pulling ahead on the useability front and not just for the unsophisticated user. I have been doing a lot of development in the.NET environment. I know that there are a lot of times where you would need to use an alternative but for department level internal projects it works really well and I am amazed at how much easier it is to develop a very good quality web app or desktop app using C# and the framework than using other approaches. My anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that there are a lot of users that are starting to choose.NET for their small to moderately sized projects because it is easier to develop and debug.
I have never participated in an open source project so I can't say but I have worked on projects for pay.
Supporting standards is a lot of work and most of it is not particularly fun or intellectually rewarding. It is just a pain in the butt. Who want's to do that for free?
Once the code is "complete" (code is never complete) it must be tested to insure that your implementation of the standard will work with other implementations of the standard. This testing is tedious, time consuming, and diverts resources from other parts of the project. You usually also have to have programmers who worked on each implementation available so that they can work out any inconsistencies. I've done this before for pay and I still didn't want to do it.
Another thing that always pops up is whose implementation is more standard? When an inconsistency arises one side has to make a change. I've gotten in the middle of pissing contests with programmers who each insist that the other is wrong and they aren't going to change their code to work around their bug. What fun!
I know that there are a lot of OSS developers out there who take their work very seriously and put out the highest quality product but they also have day jobs, lives (I hope), etc. that compete for their time. If I was doing the work on my time, I would probably tend to do the stuff that I found more rewarding. Things like rigorously supporting standards and all of the sh*t work that goes along with that would probably take a back seat to working on a new feature or something else that I considered challenging and exciting.
The tough metal case makes if perfect for air travel as well.
I got a stern look for having a nail file on my fingernail clippers and they broke it off an took it away. I bet this one would be fun. Try explaining to your friendly new federal employee that your magazine case plays music.
Be sure to pack it on you next trip to Israel. They have a great sense of humor there. It will go great with your camo travel pants and Timothy McVeigh haircut.
I disagree about the article's assertion that there is no liability for defects in software.
I deal with embeddeded controls in industrial control equipment all of the time. I just had to change my insurance company last year and my rates went up because companies are being held accountable and insurance companies are paying out when people screw up. Many companies don't want to insure programmers anymore. Sounds like the hammer is coming down to me.
You may not be able to sue MS the next time Excel craps out on you but I assure you that you could sue a programmer because the system that he programmed dumped 1000 gallons of a toxic substance into your containment area or because you just released a toxic cloud of ammonia from your plant.
When the stakes are high, programmers tend to have to test a lot more. You still have to remain economically viable though. Three lines of code a day may work for NASA but the rest of us can't afford to be that inefficient. Of course the stuff that I can blow up is at most worth 10's of millions of $, not billions.
When it comes to embedded control apps, I don't think that things are much worse than they are for our physical counterparts. Yeah a plane crashed because of a bug in an altitude control system but they also crash because of other design problems in the mechanical, electrical, and materials engineering areas. I don't think that programmers are any less aware that lives depend on their work than any other type of engineer.
If you are doing number crunching types of applications, you also tend to run the code through a battery of tests. You can definitely be sued for screwing that stuff up.
Now little controllers in your dishwasher and your run of the mill desktop apps are held to a lower standard, I agree. You are rewarded by the market for getting new stuff out the door cheaply and quickly. You can certainly argue that it shouldn't be that way but the masses have spoken. If your stuff gets too far out of hand then the market will let you know. MS is definitely feeling the pressure from OSS and rightly so. I can bet you that they are atleast trying to respond. I can definitely see a big improvement between the Windows XP that I run on my notebook and desktop and the NT 4 that I ran a few years ago. I can also see that Windows 2000 is much better than NT 4 was on the server, but it isn't good enough yet and that is why a lot of people are moving to Linux for things like web servers, DB machines, etc. The market is speaking.
I would say that programmers are ultimately held accountable. I would hate to see things swing too far out of hand as I do think that it would ultimate stiffle innovation.
Your performance depends a whole lot less on what technology you use than the provider that you use.
Where I live I get better performance with my DSL than my neighbors get with their cable modems. It's not drastic but it is noticeable and measureable. In this area cable has a much higher market share so more people are sharing the available bandwidth.
The cable company has also changed hands a few times. When the old companies were looking to sell, they weren't looking to put a lot of money into upgrades and maintenance. I imagine that they were more likely to let things become oversubscribed rather than pour capital into a system that they were looking to unload anyway.
Some poor geek pours his heart into a project turning what a few years ago would have been just a wild ass dream into a common place occurance using off the self components and a free OS.
I felt exactly the same way when I started to use Perl. Like everything else it just takes getting used to. After a while you have screwed your brain up and it all starts to make sense. You look at the goofy syntax and it means something to you. Then the syntax actually starts to feel elegant.
The funny thing is that I now wish the other languages that I use had some of the Perl shortcuts in them. It really speeds things up.
This is just another case where new technologies conflict with established business models. I can see that this type of content caching is the wave of the future. There are so many possibilities here.
Mass broadcasting is definitely the old way of doing things but that is the methodology that all of the old business practices are based on.
By far the easiest part of this type of project is to develop the technology. To make it doable from a technical standpoint. The hard part is to work it into our social framework. There are a lot of established business relationships and ways of doing things that are going to be totally turned on their head with this stuff (as with so many new technology products). It is going to take a lot of hard work to establish new business models and relationships and make this all work. I applaud AOL for trying.
I've seen a lot of doom and gloom posts about the job market and things going down hill. If you look at things like this, there are so many opportunities out there but you have to be a little more than the really smart guy/gal in the back room with really good technical skills and bad social skills.
The experimentation and the hacking don't stop when the technical product is developed. There is another level of hacking and experimentation on the social/business level. It is every bit as frustrating/challenging/rewarding as any of the technical challenges if you approach it with the right attitude and realize that we are blazing new ground here. You are bound to meet resistance but it is just another nut to crack.
If you grasp the technology concepts (most people don't) and you have the patience to learn the social/business concepts then you make yourself much more valuable and you have many more opportunities. The negativity and impatience with the social aspects of change that I see represented in so many/. posts just repel people.
I believe that the GDP or total goods and services produced in the US each year adds up to about $10 trillion/year.
Re:Meteor strikes not that uncommon
on
Meteor Over Midwest
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, I'm calling bullshit on this one.
Trillions of dollars? You realize that the US economy is about $10 trillion a year. Do you really think that we spent that much on the patriot system and SDI research?
Secondly: Maybe I am really uninformed. I can't remember anyone that I know every being hurt my a meteor. I can't even remember any friend of a friend type stories. Is it really that serious? Worth spending a significant portion of the GDP (trillions) on?
Maybe I am just nieve and my grandma was really hit by a meteor and didn't have a stroke. Maybe the stroke was caused by a meteor?
I guess this proves the Dilbert adage that intelligence has very little practical application.
I guess that Sun is going to compete against the entire low margin commodity PC business?
The reason that people stick with MS on the desktop is that they have VB apps, Excel Spreadsheets, Access databases, etc. that they have built over the years that they depend on everyday. There is also that 10% of applications that are special niche apps that are available for the Windows platform only.
Sure you can use Open Office or other Office alternative but everybody knows that the files that everyone uses are too complicated to convert easily. It takes a lot of time and usually manual effort to convert each of these files and there always seems to be a function or two that you must have that does not exist in the alternative.
About 10% of software that users us are special purpose programs that are used in every company by a few people here and a few people there that would have to be converted to run on a new system. This is no small task either.
Remember all of the trouble that you had to go through for Y2K? You would have to do it all over again. The big difference is that every vendor offered a Y2K upgrade path. Few are going to provide a Linux path in addition to the Windows version that they already support.
Remember the days of DOS, Windows, OS/2? It sucked developing software because you had to pick a platform or choose to develop on multiple platforms. Either way you made less money and increased your costs. Most software vendors are happy that they only have to support 1 platform, Windows. Yes there are problems but it still reduces their costs dramatically having to support only one platform.
Even though you can provide a replacement for 90% of the functionality, providing a replacement for the remaining 10% is probably 90% of the work.
I just don't see Sun being able to sell enough of these units at low margin to make a lot of money off of them. As such, why bother? Can't they think of anything to spend their time on that will actually produce profits? That is after all what a company is supposed to do.
I travel a lot. It would be great if they can get this even in podunk little towns. If it was the one sure place that I could get wifi access I would go there just for that.
I can see this being used by a lot of travellers and ultimately attracting a lot of customers. They just need to work on the menu so that I can get some business done without becoming a fat boy.
I wish that I had more information but the engines where modified specifically for this purpose and are used in a lot of installations.
The main problem is that you usually don't get enough off gasing from even a large landfill to build a very large power plant. The economy of scale is very difficult to achieve.
We have gotten really good at burning fossil fuels and providing large quantities of energy very cheaply. It is difficult to compete. I would love to see this type of thing take off and I would definitely like to see things like solar energy develop more fully. Its just that it is very hard to beat the economics of fossil fuels. It will probably be that way until we start to run out which probably won't be in my lifetime.
It is actually very common to burn these waste products to create electricity. I've been involved in several of these projects myself.
One project involved modified diesel engines that burned landfill gas to make electricity. The other involved piping landfill gas to an existing power plant to burn in the boiler.
In both cases these projects would not have been economically viable except for govt incentives, tax credits, and environmental regulations.
While it may sound appealling to use this free energy source, it is actually pretty expensive to make it all work. The electricity produced ends up costing more in the long run than regular old power from coal or natural gas.
The landfill gas is usually pretty nasty and it is difficult to keep things running. Everything corrodes quickly. These facilities also produce very little power, on the order of 10's of MW whereas a large coal unit is usually 500MW or more. Diverting your maintenance people to the little installation to keep it running is very inefficient. It is much better to keep them working on the large units.
These combined devices are too big and the battery life typically sucks. I think that you make too many compromises by throwing everything into the same device. I think that it is better to split them up.
The phone should be as small as possible with awesome battery life. Simple email, contact list, and calendar access is a must. I always carry the phone.
The Bluetooth in the phone allows it to broker communications to the network for all of your other devices.
PDA's should be able to connect to the Internet through the bluetooth giving you better access to your email, contacts, calendar. It also gives you better web browsing and the ability to run other programs.
Up another notch and your laptop should use the phone via the bluetooth to connect to the Internet.
Your digital camera should use the Bluetooth connection to upload pictures to your server via the Internet as you take pictures. In this case, the local CF card only acts as a cache while the pictures are uploaded in the background. Your pictures are safe if you loose the camera. A 128MB CF card could also last on a long trip because it is only the cache. It doesn't have to store all of the pictures from the whole trip.
If standards are established, any vendor's device could work. You are your own little walking intranet. You could pick the camera, PDA, laptop, phone combination that meets your needs. You also only carry around the things that you need.
It was literally 'found' in a rock pool. They stumbled across it.
I guess having a bunch of scientists on the payroll travelling around the world searching, testing, developing methods to mass produce it, doing clinical trials, seeking FDA approval, etc. is practically free.
Hell, they probably found it in the first rock pool that they looked in.
Sounds like maybe I should get into this easy low risk business. Sounds like an easy way to make the big bucks.
All kidding aside, somebody has to front the money for this research and it is very expensive and very risky. It is not uncommon to spend 10's of millions of dollars and never see a dime in return. When they do find something, they have to make enough profit off of it to make up for money they lost on all of the things that didn't work out. They also have to be able to invest in the research to find more products.
When will the govt learn that monopolies stifle growth and innovation?
I was reading in the Wall Street Journal recently that an 8Mb/sec DSL line in South Korea goes for the equivalent of about $33US. They said that the competitive environment and lack of govt restriction meant that the South Korean companies were able to provide better service at a cheaper price while making a profit.
Contrast that to the US were many broadband companies are going tits up and only the monopoly companies remain. They have no reason to innovate. They can charge high prices for mediocre service.
One of the reasons that many of the military projects continue is that we are afraid of losing the experienced people who build these projects.
The SeaWolf submarine is an excellent expample. We don't really need the new subs but if we don't build at least a couple of them, all of the engineers and craftsmen that build them will be out of a job and more on. Some of the needed skills will be lost forever.
It seems to me that we could use the space program to help to keep the people employed and the skills up to date. Keep bright minds and talented hands busy while getting the benefits of science and exploration.
I'm sure that I am making it sound simpler than it is but we could divert some of the money that is being used for unneeded military projects and maybe get something more useful out of it while still preserving the high tech skill sets that we need.
I think that you are exactly right. A GUI is all about offering the user a lot of information quickly and in an easy to understand manner. This will be a move forward. You will be able to create stateful icons that give you a lot of information at a glance. That is what it is all about.
I know that there are a lot of proprietary ways to do this right now but moving towards SVG is a step forward. As one user pointed out, it will allow users to make their own custom icons with custom functionality without really having to program.
I don't think that the RIAA is being dumb here. They don't really care about little artists and the consumer having the most choice.
What they care about is getting the most money out of their investment. I think that it is more profitable for them to limit the number of successful acts out there. They can more carefully target their money and get a bigger return on their investment because there is a lot less risk. When there are only about 40-50 songs on the radio at a time it is much easier to control. If there is more choice for us then it raises their risks. Where do you put your money? You are likely to back a lot of acts that ultimately don't go anywhere. Right now if they get a song on the top 40 station, they know that they will make money on it.
They are obviously scared by all of the file swapping. If people have a lot of choice then the money gets spread around too much and they don't have control. They are trying to keep control of things as they have it now where they don't have to risk money to make money.
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Sorry if I insulted. That wasn't the intention.
I guess one problem that I do see is that India does need to have a lot of people who are proficient with proprietary solutions from MS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. A large part of their tech economy is involved in providing outsourced development and integration services to companies that want to take advantage of the cheap labor.
Nothing earth shattering here. Free software is a necessity in such a poor country. The cost of Windows XP and a copy of Office XP would wipe out about one third of the average person's annual income.
From the CIA World Factbook 2002 edition...
India:
GDP per capita: $2,540
Population below poverty line: 25%
Unemployment rate: 8.8%
Internet service providers: 43
Internet users: 7 million
True that there are over a billion people in India but the vast majority are involved in agriculture, are uneducated, and most likely will never be able to afford a computer. Its not like this is a major blow to MS.
From a government standpoint, India is much better off using free software and saving money for public health and other more pressing issues.
It all goes back to the old saying that easy for the programmer, hard for the user. Easy for the user, hard for the programmer.
.NET environment. I know that there are a lot of times where you would need to use an alternative but for department level internal projects it works really well and I am amazed at how much easier it is to develop a very good quality web app or desktop app using C# and the framework than using other approaches. My anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that there are a lot of users that are starting to choose .NET for their small to moderately sized projects because it is easier to develop and debug.
I think that you are right that most programmers will get it working and then move on. They don't have the time or patience to keep working to make things easier for the user.
MS on the other hand can afford to take a few programmers and give them the task of implementing a specific feature. It then becomes their life until it is finished.
In many respects I think that this is why a lot of windows software tends to be a little more unstable in the beginning than an OSS alternative. Basic functionality is easier to achieve and debug. Once you start to add all of these features to make it easy for the user you find that you have 25% of the code for the function and 75% to make a user interface. There is a lot more complexity for the programmer.
Unfortunately I think that MS is pulling ahead on the useability front and not just for the unsophisticated user. I have been doing a lot of development in the
I have never participated in an open source project so I can't say but I have worked on projects for pay.
Supporting standards is a lot of work and most of it is not particularly fun or intellectually rewarding. It is just a pain in the butt. Who want's to do that for free?
Once the code is "complete" (code is never complete) it must be tested to insure that your implementation of the standard will work with other implementations of the standard. This testing is tedious, time consuming, and diverts resources from other parts of the project. You usually also have to have programmers who worked on each implementation available so that they can work out any inconsistencies. I've done this before for pay and I still didn't want to do it.
Another thing that always pops up is whose implementation is more standard? When an inconsistency arises one side has to make a change. I've gotten in the middle of pissing contests with programmers who each insist that the other is wrong and they aren't going to change their code to work around their bug. What fun!
I know that there are a lot of OSS developers out there who take their work very seriously and put out the highest quality product but they also have day jobs, lives (I hope), etc. that compete for their time. If I was doing the work on my time, I would probably tend to do the stuff that I found more rewarding. Things like rigorously supporting standards and all of the sh*t work that goes along with that would probably take a back seat to working on a new feature or something else that I considered challenging and exciting.
The tough metal case makes if perfect for air travel as well.
I got a stern look for having a nail file on my fingernail clippers and they broke it off an took it away. I bet this one would be fun. Try explaining to your friendly new federal employee that your magazine case plays music.
Be sure to pack it on you next trip to Israel. They have a great sense of humor there. It will go great with your camo travel pants and Timothy McVeigh haircut.
Have a happy trip!
I disagree about the article's assertion that there is no liability for defects in software.
I deal with embeddeded controls in industrial control equipment all of the time. I just had to change my insurance company last year and my rates went up because companies are being held accountable and insurance companies are paying out when people screw up. Many companies don't want to insure programmers anymore. Sounds like the hammer is coming down to me.
You may not be able to sue MS the next time Excel craps out on you but I assure you that you could sue a programmer because the system that he programmed dumped 1000 gallons of a toxic substance into your containment area or because you just released a toxic cloud of ammonia from your plant.
When the stakes are high, programmers tend to have to test a lot more. You still have to remain economically viable though. Three lines of code a day may work for NASA but the rest of us can't afford to be that inefficient. Of course the stuff that I can blow up is at most worth 10's of millions of $, not billions.
When it comes to embedded control apps, I don't think that things are much worse than they are for our physical counterparts. Yeah a plane crashed because of a bug in an altitude control system but they also crash because of other design problems in the mechanical, electrical, and materials engineering areas. I don't think that programmers are any less aware that lives depend on their work than any other type of engineer.
If you are doing number crunching types of applications, you also tend to run the code through a battery of tests. You can definitely be sued for screwing that stuff up.
Now little controllers in your dishwasher and your run of the mill desktop apps are held to a lower standard, I agree. You are rewarded by the market for getting new stuff out the door cheaply and quickly. You can certainly argue that it shouldn't be that way but the masses have spoken. If your stuff gets too far out of hand then the market will let you know. MS is definitely feeling the pressure from OSS and rightly so. I can bet you that they are atleast trying to respond. I can definitely see a big improvement between the Windows XP that I run on my notebook and desktop and the NT 4 that I ran a few years ago. I can also see that Windows 2000 is much better than NT 4 was on the server, but it isn't good enough yet and that is why a lot of people are moving to Linux for things like web servers, DB machines, etc. The market is speaking.
I would say that programmers are ultimately held accountable. I would hate to see things swing too far out of hand as I do think that it would ultimate stiffle innovation.
Your performance depends a whole lot less on what technology you use than the provider that you use.
Where I live I get better performance with my DSL than my neighbors get with their cable modems. It's not drastic but it is noticeable and measureable. In this area cable has a much higher market share so more people are sharing the available bandwidth.
The cable company has also changed hands a few times. When the old companies were looking to sell, they weren't looking to put a lot of money into upgrades and maintenance. I imagine that they were more likely to let things become oversubscribed rather than pour capital into a system that they were looking to unload anyway.
Some poor geek pours his heart into a project turning what a few years ago would have been just a wild ass dream into a common place occurance using off the self components and a free OS.
And this is your response.
Is your hair growing pointy yet?
I felt exactly the same way when I started to use Perl. Like everything else it just takes getting used to. After a while you have screwed your brain up and it all starts to make sense. You look at the goofy syntax and it means something to you. Then the syntax actually starts to feel elegant.
The funny thing is that I now wish the other languages that I use had some of the Perl shortcuts in them. It really speeds things up.
So much negativity in some of the posts.
/. posts just repel people.
This is just another case where new technologies conflict with established business models. I can see that this type of content caching is the wave of the future. There are so many possibilities here.
Mass broadcasting is definitely the old way of doing things but that is the methodology that all of the old business practices are based on.
By far the easiest part of this type of project is to develop the technology. To make it doable from a technical standpoint. The hard part is to work it into our social framework. There are a lot of established business relationships and ways of doing things that are going to be totally turned on their head with this stuff (as with so many new technology products). It is going to take a lot of hard work to establish new business models and relationships and make this all work. I applaud AOL for trying.
I've seen a lot of doom and gloom posts about the job market and things going down hill. If you look at things like this, there are so many opportunities out there but you have to be a little more than the really smart guy/gal in the back room with really good technical skills and bad social skills.
The experimentation and the hacking don't stop when the technical product is developed. There is another level of hacking and experimentation on the social/business level. It is every bit as frustrating/challenging/rewarding as any of the technical challenges if you approach it with the right attitude and realize that we are blazing new ground here. You are bound to meet resistance but it is just another nut to crack.
If you grasp the technology concepts (most people don't) and you have the patience to learn the social/business concepts then you make yourself much more valuable and you have many more opportunities. The negativity and impatience with the social aspects of change that I see represented in so many
with an engineering degree.
I believe that the GDP or total goods and services produced in the US each year adds up to about $10 trillion/year.
Ok, I'm calling bullshit on this one.
Trillions of dollars? You realize that the US economy is about $10 trillion a year. Do you really think that we spent that much on the patriot system and SDI research?
Secondly: Maybe I am really uninformed. I can't remember anyone that I know every being hurt my a meteor. I can't even remember any friend of a friend type stories. Is it really that serious? Worth spending a significant portion of the GDP (trillions) on?
Maybe I am just nieve and my grandma was really hit by a meteor and didn't have a stroke. Maybe the stroke was caused by a meteor?
I guess this proves the Dilbert adage that intelligence has very little practical application.
I guess that Sun is going to compete against the entire low margin commodity PC business?
The reason that people stick with MS on the desktop is that they have VB apps, Excel Spreadsheets, Access databases, etc. that they have built over the years that they depend on everyday. There is also that 10% of applications that are special niche apps that are available for the Windows platform only.
Sure you can use Open Office or other Office alternative but everybody knows that the files that everyone uses are too complicated to convert easily. It takes a lot of time and usually manual effort to convert each of these files and there always seems to be a function or two that you must have that does not exist in the alternative.
About 10% of software that users us are special purpose programs that are used in every company by a few people here and a few people there that would have to be converted to run on a new system. This is no small task either.
Remember all of the trouble that you had to go through for Y2K? You would have to do it all over again. The big difference is that every vendor offered a Y2K upgrade path. Few are going to provide a Linux path in addition to the Windows version that they already support.
Remember the days of DOS, Windows, OS/2? It sucked developing software because you had to pick a platform or choose to develop on multiple platforms. Either way you made less money and increased your costs. Most software vendors are happy that they only have to support 1 platform, Windows. Yes there are problems but it still reduces their costs dramatically having to support only one platform.
Even though you can provide a replacement for 90% of the functionality, providing a replacement for the remaining 10% is probably 90% of the work.
I just don't see Sun being able to sell enough of these units at low margin to make a lot of money off of them. As such, why bother? Can't they think of anything to spend their time on that will actually produce profits? That is after all what a company is supposed to do.
I'm sure that the board really meant to vote for Pat Buchanan instead.
I travel a lot. It would be great if they can get this even in podunk little towns. If it was the one sure place that I could get wifi access I would go there just for that.
I can see this being used by a lot of travellers and ultimately attracting a lot of customers. They just need to work on the menu so that I can get some business done without becoming a fat boy.
I wish that I had more information but the engines where modified specifically for this purpose and are used in a lot of installations.
The main problem is that you usually don't get enough off gasing from even a large landfill to build a very large power plant. The economy of scale is very difficult to achieve.
We have gotten really good at burning fossil fuels and providing large quantities of energy very cheaply. It is difficult to compete. I would love to see this type of thing take off and I would definitely like to see things like solar energy develop more fully. Its just that it is very hard to beat the economics of fossil fuels. It will probably be that way until we start to run out which probably won't be in my lifetime.
It is actually very common to burn these waste products to create electricity. I've been involved in several of these projects myself.
One project involved modified diesel engines that burned landfill gas to make electricity. The other involved piping landfill gas to an existing power plant to burn in the boiler.
In both cases these projects would not have been economically viable except for govt incentives, tax credits, and environmental regulations.
While it may sound appealling to use this free energy source, it is actually pretty expensive to make it all work. The electricity produced ends up costing more in the long run than regular old power from coal or natural gas.
The landfill gas is usually pretty nasty and it is difficult to keep things running. Everything corrodes quickly. These facilities also produce very little power, on the order of 10's of MW whereas a large coal unit is usually 500MW or more. Diverting your maintenance people to the little installation to keep it running is very inefficient. It is much better to keep them working on the large units.
These combined devices are too big and the battery life typically sucks. I think that you make too many compromises by throwing everything into the same device. I think that it is better to split them up.
The phone should be as small as possible with awesome battery life. Simple email, contact list, and calendar access is a must. I always carry the phone.
The Bluetooth in the phone allows it to broker communications to the network for all of your other devices.
PDA's should be able to connect to the Internet through the bluetooth giving you better access to your email, contacts, calendar. It also gives you better web browsing and the ability to run other programs.
Up another notch and your laptop should use the phone via the bluetooth to connect to the Internet.
Your digital camera should use the Bluetooth connection to upload pictures to your server via the Internet as you take pictures. In this case, the local CF card only acts as a cache while the pictures are uploaded in the background. Your pictures are safe if you loose the camera. A 128MB CF card could also last on a long trip because it is only the cache. It doesn't have to store all of the pictures from the whole trip.
If standards are established, any vendor's device could work. You are your own little walking intranet. You could pick the camera, PDA, laptop, phone combination that meets your needs. You also only carry around the things that you need.
It was literally 'found' in a rock pool. They stumbled across it.
I guess having a bunch of scientists on the payroll travelling around the world searching, testing, developing methods to mass produce it, doing clinical trials, seeking FDA approval, etc. is practically free.
Hell, they probably found it in the first rock pool that they looked in.
Sounds like maybe I should get into this easy low risk business. Sounds like an easy way to make the big bucks.
All kidding aside, somebody has to front the money for this research and it is very expensive and very risky. It is not uncommon to spend 10's of millions of dollars and never see a dime in return. When they do find something, they have to make enough profit off of it to make up for money they lost on all of the things that didn't work out. They also have to be able to invest in the research to find more products.
When will the govt learn that monopolies stifle growth and innovation?
I was reading in the Wall Street Journal recently that an 8Mb/sec DSL line in South Korea goes for the equivalent of about $33US. They said that the competitive environment and lack of govt restriction meant that the South Korean companies were able to provide better service at a cheaper price while making a profit.
Contrast that to the US were many broadband companies are going tits up and only the monopoly companies remain. They have no reason to innovate. They can charge high prices for mediocre service.
One of the reasons that many of the military projects continue is that we are afraid of losing the experienced people who build these projects.
The SeaWolf submarine is an excellent expample. We don't really need the new subs but if we don't build at least a couple of them, all of the engineers and craftsmen that build them will be out of a job and more on. Some of the needed skills will be lost forever.
It seems to me that we could use the space program to help to keep the people employed and the skills up to date. Keep bright minds and talented hands busy while getting the benefits of science and exploration.
I'm sure that I am making it sound simpler than it is but we could divert some of the money that is being used for unneeded military projects and maybe get something more useful out of it while still preserving the high tech skill sets that we need.
I've been a Star Trek fan for a long time but I still haven't seen the latest movie. I just wasn't interested.
What we need is a movie plot where the whole thing takes place on the holodeck. I always loved those episodes (yes I am being sarcastic).
Here's the algorith.
if (new || different) { sucks == true; }
I think that you are exactly right. A GUI is all about offering the user a lot of information quickly and in an easy to understand manner. This will be a move forward. You will be able to create stateful icons that give you a lot of information at a glance. That is what it is all about.
I know that there are a lot of proprietary ways to do this right now but moving towards SVG is a step forward. As one user pointed out, it will allow users to make their own custom icons with custom functionality without really having to program.
I don't think that the RIAA is being dumb here. They don't really care about little artists and the consumer having the most choice.
What they care about is getting the most money out of their investment. I think that it is more profitable for them to limit the number of successful acts out there. They can more carefully target their money and get a bigger return on their investment because there is a lot less risk. When there are only about 40-50 songs on the radio at a time it is much easier to control. If there is more choice for us then it raises their risks. Where do you put your money? You are likely to back a lot of acts that ultimately don't go anywhere. Right now if they get a song on the top 40 station, they know that they will make money on it.
They are obviously scared by all of the file swapping. If people have a lot of choice then the money gets spread around too much and they don't have control. They are trying to keep control of things as they have it now where they don't have to risk money to make money.