I always hate when people say things like this. There aren't any clear alternatives to fossil.
If you are in America then you are free to start a company and sell your idea of building these types of power plants. If you think that these solutions are so much better than fossil plants then you should have no trouble competing with fossil plants.
The problem is that these "clear" solutions always cost a lot more than a fossil plant. Not just a little more but a lot more.
There are a few instances where geothermal or hydro power make electricity cheaper to produce. In those instances they are built but in most cases it is very hard to beat fossil fuel.
You also have to remember that this includes the cost of all of the environmental control equipment. My previous company built a coal plant that was $400M worth of electric production equipment and $600M worth of environmental emissions control equipment. It was still dirt cheap power compared to anything else available. The plant has been base loaded generating 1200MW of electricity for over 10 years now. A solar or wind powered plant that size would host many times more and would take a maintenace for many time larger to maintain. It just can't be done economically yet.
I say yet because I am optimistic that there will be better alternatives. I think that in my lifetime that distributed generation will take hold and I will have a small fuel cell outside my house to make power and some solar cells on the roof to run the A/C in the summer. For the time being though it can't be done economically.
I agree that desktop apps are a hassle to maintain. In any cases where a server based app will do I am all for it. There are just a ton of applications that are not suitable for web apps using the current technology.
As for desktops being low margin. Are you crazy? One of my customers is preparing to roll out XP Pro to their desktops. The cost is $200k for the licensing. Even if MS prints the license agreement on really fancy paper and sends them a really nice CD, they still make a pretty good margin on the deal. Pretty much every company in the US and much of the rest of the world will be ponying up a check for Bill. The incremental cost for each user is probably in the cents. Each desktop license costs considerably more. Old Bill figured out a long time ago that getting a couple of hundred bucks from each user on the planet is better than a few fat contracts with Fortune 500 companies.
Like I said in the original post, Sun has chosen their market and MS theirs. Last I checked Sun was losing a ton of dough. JAVA had/has some real promise but they haven't capitalized on their tremendous head start on MS in this area.
Anyway, Bill seems to agree with you that server apps are a promising direction. He is betting the farm on.NET and will begin to seriously compete with JAVA based solutions. Despite Sun's 5 years or so head start, I think that they will begin to have trouble with.NET competition. They may pull it out but past experience has shown MS to be a very intense competitor. He has billions of dollars sitting around from all of the desktop software that he has been selling to fuel his campaign. If Sun doesn't start making some profit off of their high margin server software, I doubt that they will be able to borrow enough to compete.
Java will be around for a good long time. There are plenty of server based applications that are built around Java and for them, portability is a major plus.
On the desktop however you would have to be crazy to build your apps around Java. Java apps run slower, require more resources, and just feel funny on the desktop. C# and VB.NET along with good old fashioned C++ will dominate. Portability is not an issue on the desktop. Everyone runs Windows or a Windows emulator/VM anyway.
I have always liked the Java language but never the results on the desktop. I have put up with VB and Visual C++ for a long time because they produce better desktop apps. I'm glad that MS took some notes from Java and made life easier with C# and VB.NET. I know have many of the nice features of Java (don't care about portability) while still being able to produce good desktop apps.
It must really piss off McNealy and gang that MS followed their lead and will probably make more money in 1 year with.NET than they ever have with Java but those are the breaks. Sun made their choices and stuck to their course. If they wanted.NET type financial success they could have catered more to the desktop market. That isn't what they wanted to do. They have been very successful in their chosen space. It's just a little smaller than the one that MS concentrates on.
There is plenty of room for Java. I don't want to live in a world without competition. MS pulls a lot of crap but Jeez, Sun had a good 5 years on them on this one and didn't do much with it.
This is pretty sad commentary on our society. We put old people away in the prune farm with a TV and a robot for companionship while they wait around to die.
I sure hope that we learn to treat the elderly a little better before I become one. I'm sure that we will have some really cool robots by then and they will be cheap enough that maybe I could even have two. Maybe HDTV will be rolled out by then also.
I'm reminded of the quote from Adam Sandler movie
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Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 1
At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I studied robotics and Brooks' work for a couple of years in graduate school. I built several robots using some of his ideas with some pretty spectacular results (I was impressed anyway) considering that they were able to navigate around and perform some very simple tasks using less code than your average mouse driver. Brooks turned the whole notion of robotic intelligence upside down and started from the bottom up, keeping things simple.
Its pretty striking to me how different an engineer's life can be depending on his area of interest. There are some topics where we are essentially on the "right track". Some genius has made the initial breakthrough in thinking. Steady progress can be made by moderately intelligent people such as myself by following the premise to its logical conclusions. While I was studying robotics, the Web was really taking off. Ideas spread like wild fire and advances are still being made fairly rapidly.
Other areas of study stagnate for years with random dispersed periods of growth and euphoria followed by periods of disappointment and disillusionment. In AI/machine intelligence, we have had several small breakthroughs that allow us to progress a little before hitting the brick wall again. We're all waiting for someone to make the leap in thought that will allow us to progress.
My opinion now is that we have some fairly specialized approaches that work well in specific circumstances but we are all essentially still on the wrong track.
Rodney Brooks caused quite a bit of excitement in the early '90's with Ghengis and some of his other robots but it wasn't that breakthrough that we are all waiting for.
From what I understand, if you have read his papers and publications through the years then this book doesn't offer much new information. If you aren't familiar with his work and are interested in the subject then definitely read the book. Even if Brooks doesn't turn out to be the genius who makes the breakthrough, his work has definitely contributed to the field and brings us a little closer.
In the mean time I guess I'll just have to wait for the big breakthrough by building some more little robots to keep me busy. I've been thinking about a little robot with a single board Linux computer for a controller and a WIFI adapter. That way I can sit at my desk or laptop and watch what is going on a tune code and develop behaviors from the comfort of my couch instead of having to track the little bugger down and stick a serial cable in its ass to upload new programs and download data. I was also thinking that I could then give real time performance feedback and let some genetic algorithms and/or neural networks tune the parameters. That should keep me preoccupied for a while while the geniuses work on the really heady stuff.
If you are one of those geniuses, quit screwing around reading/. and get back to work. Let me know when you make the breakthrough, I'll buy you a six pack.
I think that it will be a while before you start seeing a lot of upgrades to support IPv6. Most ISP are still in a lot of debt from installing the first round of equipment. With the industry in such bad shape, it is hard to believe that any of them will be shelling out the bucks to upgrade to v6 until there is a major incentive to do so.
With all of the things that IPv6 provides, I don't see anything in the short term that is going to necessitate a move. As long as we can work around the existing problems, nobody is going to invest the money in an upgrade.
I'm a geek and would love to see it happen but you have to convince the guy with the MBA that he can make money by investing in the upgrades. I don't see the economic incentive right now.
I used to have a Nokia phone/PDA. We had static routes and ACL's setup with the service provider so that we could get to our Unix boxes and Cisco gear using telnet. It was great in theory.
There were a few problems. We called them bricks because they were so damn big. This was a minor problem but one that I could life with because it was useful. Battery life turned out to be the big problem. It seemed that the battery was only good enough to get you between the cigarette lighter in your car and the next electrical outlet that you could find. The phone combined with the big LCD and backlight sucked a lot of juice.
I have a tiny Nokia now. I love it. I can usually go for a least 2 days without a recharge and it recharges very quickly in the car. I have never run out of juice.
If the battery life is good then this looks great.
Employee surfing - hard learned lessons
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Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I see a lot of posts which seem to imply that employee surfing should be ignored. Why is it a big deal if an employee does some personal surfing? Why not measure an employee's productivity and leave it at that?
I used to work at a company that had a very liberal internet use policy. We were pretty early adopters as far as the corporate world goes. We wanted people to use the Internet as a tool and didn't want to micromanage or scrutinize its usage.
Over the years we had to tighten our policy as abuses started to mount. The final straw was an idiot who was collecting kiddie porn and saving it on our network server! We immediately notified the police and he has arrested and prosecuted. The guy literally had hundreds of pictures carefully organized into directories to categorize them. It was obvious (1) that he had been doing it for a while, (2) he had invested a great deal of thought and time in these activities.
The company was dragged into the employee's defense trial. We spent a lot of time and money on attorneys, depositions, etc. It was a nightmare. We were forced to implement a system to control and monitor access to the Internet to insure that this type of thing did not happen again. It is one thing to get caught in that type of situation once but it can't happen again.
So we spent a lot of time and money watching and controlling Internet access. It sucks but it only takes one idiot to mess things up for everyone and there are a lot of idiots out there.
I still think that ideally Internet usage should be the employees' responsibility but in the real world things often get much more complicated.
Honestly though, this seems like a silly way to deteremine language requirements.
If you are a computer science professor, the list sounds great. In the real world you are a little more limited.
JAVA and.NET (C#, VB.Net, managed C++) do not support multiple inheritance. It would be nice to have but it is a bitch to implement in the VM's so it was put off. In practice you will find that most of the languages available are compromises between the ideal language and what can be implemented in an economical amount of time.
I would base my decisions on other issues. What are you developing for? server or workstation? Is this a Windows, Unix/Linux, or other type of platform. If this is going to run in a Windows environment then it doesn't make much sense to go with anything other then Visual Studio. If this is a server based Unix system then start looking at IDE's for JAVA development.
I would stay away from obscure languages and language implementations. You will find more bugs in the compilers, IDE's, whatever. Support will be more limited and most importantly no one else will know what the hell you are talking about. C++, JAVA, VB, etc all have large developer communities. You are more likely to find help on the net and it will be easier to hire experienced developers.
Let's face it, network programming is just there to attact people to watch commercials. Pure and simple. Yes you can record stuff on the VCR and skip past the commercials but it is a pain in the butt and most people don't do it. Networks were intially worried but it didn't turn into much of a problem for them.
PVR's make it easier and more convenient. More people will skip the commercials. I think they really do have a reason to worry now. PVR's seem to modify the way that people watch TV in a way that the VCR's never have.
You can sit down for the evening and watch your programs 30 minutes delayed and easily skip through the commercials. With a VCR you had to wait until everything was finished recording before you watched it.
As these things become more common prices will drop and they will be connected to every TV in the house. It won't be long before you will be able to pick one up at WalMart for $100.
If this happens I wouldn't feel to secure if I made my living trying to get people to watch commercials.
There really hasn't been that much innovation in the Palm line since it was introduced. The form factors have changed, the devices are smaller, the screens are better, but the OS and software are nearly identical to the Palm Pro that I was using 3 or more years ago.
The wireless cabilities are great but this capability has been available for a while with Minstrel modems, etc. This is just a more compact form factor.
What has Palm done that is really innovative over the past 3 years? Microsoft has improved their products 300% and will continue to do so until they beat Palm into submission. What is Palm doing to compete with Microsoft? It seems that their marketshare is eroding. A few people will use this product instead of buying another Palm and a CDPD modem but I don't see this helping to gain any marketshare.
This is the same old story. I don't like MS dominating everything but this looks like another case where the leader in the market is going to sit on their laurels and let MS overtake them. Bill Gates will continue to introduce new features into the PocketPC platform and incrementally improve it at a steady pace until he overtakes Palm.
Here are just a few things that MS has added that I don't think that Palm has ansererd:
- VPN support
- 802.11 support
- Poket IE is still pretty good
- App development in VB, much easier to pick up than C++ for Palm. (You can do this with some 3rd party tools for Palm but of course MS give it away)
- Mobile device support in.NET
This is not to tout MS software, just to point out that I think that Palm is letting themselves fall behind. Not a wise move with MS on your tail.
Obviously Sun will only pursue an Open Source strategy if they are convinced that they can achieve higher revenue growth than with the existing strategy.
As I see it, Sun sells hardware/software solutions. In most cases it is your software that makes your hardware so valuable. If you give away the software and make it freely available to competitors then your margins will inevitably shrink as you lose competitive advantage.
How will Sun maintain its margins and how will an Open Source strategy lead it to higher revenue growth?
The plain and simple truth of the matter is that these companies are not making a lot of money. Broadband is a commodity business that has huge upfront costs, high operating costs, and a rather meager income stream.
How much did it cost to connect you as a customer in the first place, probably $1000 or more. How much does it cost a month to service you, maybe $10 or more. All to receive $50/month. It takes forever to even recoup the initial investment.
Charging business customers more helps them to make some money. A % or two makes a big difference in such a tight business. It can mean the difference between losing money and breaking even. Look at the balance sheets of some of these ISP's. They don't look pretty.
If you use broadband for work then you are getting much more benefit from it than a residential customer. I use it to connect to my customers without leaving home. This saves me in travel time and travel costs. It also means that I can fix things when they call me without getting on a plane. I get more done in less time and make more money.
Have you noticed how slowly new services are being added? How long before the broadband speeds are increased? Probably never in the current business climate. The simple truth is that nobody will invest in it if there is no profit to be made. By insisting on the cheapest connection you are condemning yourself to poor service and no upgrades in the future.
Also, to the original poster. If your company can't afford an extra $50/month then their business model is probably worse than that of the broadband suppliers. You may want to brush up on your resume.
Cat 5 is unnecessary, go WiFi in most rooms
on
Wiring A New House?
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· Score: 1
I ran Cat 5 to every room of my house when I built it 3 years ago. Since then WiFi has gotten really cheap. I now find myself using my 802.11 card in my laptop most of the time.
I still use Cat 5 in my office and my wife's office but when roaming the house the WiFi is greater.
Remember that the cable is cheap but the faceplates in every room and the patch panel will add up quickly. You can go wireless more cheaply.
Also, I would run big fat conduit to the rooms that you will have your TV/stereo, computers, etc. It will make it easier to upgrade to newer technologies in the future.
All of these posts about sending up a machine to generate/liberate the CO2 and we can live on Mars in 20 years.
If it is that easy, why don't we just build a big plant here on earth to suck up all of the greenhouse gases and CFC's? Surely it must be easy to counteract the effects of the worlds ENTIRE industrial production. Then I can go buy an SUV and blast the A/C without any guilt.
It all sounds very simple in theory. Do you realize the volume of gas that you would have to generate? How about the amount of energy that you would have to produce to power the devices? Even the staunchest proponents of global warming say that it will take hundreds of years for the cumulative effects of our ENTIRE industrial system to spoil the Earth's atmosphere. What makes everyone thing that a couple of little plants that we put on Mars could do anything?
A friend of mine designs embedded systems for the military. He told me about one prototype that was tested. They drop it, freeze it, cook it, and shake it to see if it will withstand the torture.
The prototype passed the military testing with flying colors. It was then destroyed beyond repair by UPS. They could not fully insure the replacement cost of the prototype
(parts and engineering time) so they were screwed.
"If you know enough to log on to the Internet and you're not make $67,000/yr, what are you waiting for?"
Sorry, this goofy ad came on the radio just as I was reading your post.
Why don't you try a co-op'ing for a semester? You'll get a little real world experience, get to apply some of what you've learned, and realize that there are still some very cool problems to work on. It will give you a short break from school and the experience will help you get a job when you get out.
The DMCA and other recent legislation place a great deal of power in the rights of license holders at the expense of the greater population. It also seems to limit research and intellectual freedom to study security and encryption such as the recent Skylarov (sp?) case. I think that most of us on/. believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction in regards to these issues.
Why is this? I can think of a few reasons:
1. They are following the money. Philosophical arguments are great but they have to raise $xx,xxx per day for the reelection campaign.
2. They don't spend much time thinking about these things and the license holders who benefit from such legislation do a very good job of informing and educating the legislators to encouraging them to think their way.
3. The legislators have thought about these issues, understand the arguments and are well informed. Their philosophical beliefs lead them to believe that this is the right thing to do.
Why do you think that this type of legislation has been passed and do you agree that it will be harmful to the country in the long term?
Maybe they couldn't decrypt them but they may be able to identify them more easily. Encrypted messages without the backdoor might be easily flagged and bring attention to the sender.
I don't agree with the proposed legislation but I don't think that they are foolish in believing that it will make their job easier.
I have been using a Palm device for about 2.5 years now. I loved it but I recently bought a Jornada with a CDPD modem and I live on the thing. The CDPD service could be faster but pocket IE rocks. I now have email and web access anywhere (except Atlanta so far) that I go.
Palm had it going on for a long time but they haven't added much in the last 2.5 years and that is an eternity in this business. Simplicity is great but I'm willing to live with the increased complexity of PocketPC to get what I want. Palm needs to work on their screens and offer some more up scale hardware. Browsing at 160x160 resolution sucks. 1/4 VGA isn't optimal but it is much better. Compact Flash support is a must these days. I can add dirt cheap memory to the PocketPC and store all of my reference docs on the thing.
The only thing that I really like better on the Palm is the handwriting recognition. Grafitti is better than the PocketPC equivalent. I used grafitti for 2.5 years before starting to us the PocketPC so my brain may just be fucked up that way now.
Yet another post to an article that was obviously intended to be read by people whose VCR clocks flash "12:00" at them.
"Hey Maw, thur gonna use them new fangled neural networks on that robot!"
How about sticking to links for people who hack into their TIVOs and put extra drives in them so that they can record all of their favorite shows and then watch them on their laptop via an 802.11 connection from the hammock in the backyard.
You definitely have a good point. I've seen automation projects scrapped because of union complaints. There is a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
I did some work for NASA at Kennedy Space Center last year. It was the coolest job I've ever had and at the same time it was a little sad. I was struck by how primitive everything is on the ground. Ground handling costs dominate the cost of space flight. Much of the ground handling is amazingly primitive. The manpower costs and time involved are astounding. Everything is done manually. Practically nothing is automated. There is much room for improvement.
Much of this is due to union and labor issues. There is definitely an entitlement mentality there. The lab that I worked in was littered with old robots and machines developed to speed things up and reduce costs. In many cases the unions complained and had the machines removed. More efficiency = less entitlement.
I worked with some very cool people who were passionate about their work. Many of them worked very hard. Unfortunately the majority are not as fired up. Many young and creative people work there after school, get frustrated, and leave.
NASA is stuck in a rut that I believe there is very little chance of them escaping. Let's face it, they aren't rewarded for taking risks. They can waste millions on inefficient processes and they get a gee wizz report on CNN. Spend the same money on a failed probe and you might get your funding cut.
Still after 20 years of space shuttle flight shouldn't it be getting cheaper to maintain with faster turnaround? Shouldn't it be cheaper to launch things into space?
I always imagined by this time there would be space tourism. I never imagined that you would be able to become a cosmonaut for $20 million. I thought that America was supposed to be the land of entrepreneurs? So the Russians have the first man in space and then the first paying customer?
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I always hate when people say things like this. There aren't any clear alternatives to fossil.
If you are in America then you are free to start a company and sell your idea of building these types of power plants. If you think that these solutions are so much better than fossil plants then you should have no trouble competing with fossil plants.
The problem is that these "clear" solutions always cost a lot more than a fossil plant. Not just a little more but a lot more.
There are a few instances where geothermal or hydro power make electricity cheaper to produce. In those instances they are built but in most cases it is very hard to beat fossil fuel.
You also have to remember that this includes the cost of all of the environmental control equipment. My previous company built a coal plant that was $400M worth of electric production equipment and $600M worth of environmental emissions control equipment. It was still dirt cheap power compared to anything else available. The plant has been base loaded generating 1200MW of electricity for over 10 years now. A solar or wind powered plant that size would host many times more and would take a maintenace for many time larger to maintain. It just can't be done economically yet.
I say yet because I am optimistic that there will be better alternatives. I think that in my lifetime that distributed generation will take hold and I will have a small fuel cell outside my house to make power and some solar cells on the roof to run the A/C in the summer. For the time being though it can't be done economically.
I agree that desktop apps are a hassle to maintain. In any cases where a server based app will do I am all for it. There are just a ton of applications that are not suitable for web apps using the current technology.
.NET and will begin to seriously compete with JAVA based solutions. Despite Sun's 5 years or so head start, I think that they will begin to have trouble with .NET competition. They may pull it out but past experience has shown MS to be a very intense competitor. He has billions of dollars sitting around from all of the desktop software that he has been selling to fuel his campaign. If Sun doesn't start making some profit off of their high margin server software, I doubt that they will be able to borrow enough to compete.
As for desktops being low margin. Are you crazy? One of my customers is preparing to roll out XP Pro to their desktops. The cost is $200k for the licensing. Even if MS prints the license agreement on really fancy paper and sends them a really nice CD, they still make a pretty good margin on the deal. Pretty much every company in the US and much of the rest of the world will be ponying up a check for Bill. The incremental cost for each user is probably in the cents. Each desktop license costs considerably more. Old Bill figured out a long time ago that getting a couple of hundred bucks from each user on the planet is better than a few fat contracts with Fortune 500 companies.
Like I said in the original post, Sun has chosen their market and MS theirs. Last I checked Sun was losing a ton of dough. JAVA had/has some real promise but they haven't capitalized on their tremendous head start on MS in this area.
Anyway, Bill seems to agree with you that server apps are a promising direction. He is betting the farm on
Java will be around for a good long time. There are plenty of server based applications that are built around Java and for them, portability is a major plus.
.NET than they ever have with Java but those are the breaks. Sun made their choices and stuck to their course. If they wanted .NET type financial success they could have catered more to the desktop market. That isn't what they wanted to do. They have been very successful in their chosen space. It's just a little smaller than the one that MS concentrates on.
On the desktop however you would have to be crazy to build your apps around Java. Java apps run slower, require more resources, and just feel funny on the desktop. C# and VB.NET along with good old fashioned C++ will dominate. Portability is not an issue on the desktop. Everyone runs Windows or a Windows emulator/VM anyway.
I have always liked the Java language but never the results on the desktop. I have put up with VB and Visual C++ for a long time because they produce better desktop apps. I'm glad that MS took some notes from Java and made life easier with C# and VB.NET. I know have many of the nice features of Java (don't care about portability) while still being able to produce good desktop apps.
It must really piss off McNealy and gang that MS followed their lead and will probably make more money in 1 year with
There is plenty of room for Java. I don't want to live in a world without competition. MS pulls a lot of crap but Jeez, Sun had a good 5 years on them on this one and didn't do much with it.
This is pretty sad commentary on our society. We put old people away in the prune farm with a TV and a robot for companionship while they wait around to die.
I sure hope that we learn to treat the elderly a little better before I become one. I'm sure that we will have some really cool robots by then and they will be cheap enough that maybe I could even have two. Maybe HDTV will be rolled out by then also.
At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I studied robotics and Brooks' work for a couple of years in graduate school. I built several robots using some of his ideas with some pretty spectacular results (I was impressed anyway) considering that they were able to navigate around and perform some very simple tasks using less code than your average mouse driver. Brooks turned the whole notion of robotic intelligence upside down and started from the bottom up, keeping things simple.
/. and get back to work. Let me know when you make the breakthrough, I'll buy you a six pack.
Its pretty striking to me how different an engineer's life can be depending on his area of interest. There are some topics where we are essentially on the "right track". Some genius has made the initial breakthrough in thinking. Steady progress can be made by moderately intelligent people such as myself by following the premise to its logical conclusions. While I was studying robotics, the Web was really taking off. Ideas spread like wild fire and advances are still being made fairly rapidly.
Other areas of study stagnate for years with random dispersed periods of growth and euphoria followed by periods of disappointment and disillusionment. In AI/machine intelligence, we have had several small breakthroughs that allow us to progress a little before hitting the brick wall again. We're all waiting for someone to make the leap in thought that will allow us to progress.
My opinion now is that we have some fairly specialized approaches that work well in specific circumstances but we are all essentially still on the wrong track.
Rodney Brooks caused quite a bit of excitement in the early '90's with Ghengis and some of his other robots but it wasn't that breakthrough that
we are all waiting for.
From what I understand, if you have read his papers and publications through the years then this book doesn't offer much new information. If you aren't familiar with his work and are interested in the subject then definitely read the book. Even if Brooks doesn't turn out to be the genius who makes the breakthrough, his work has definitely contributed to the field and brings us a little closer.
In the mean time I guess I'll just have to wait for the big breakthrough by building some more little robots to keep me busy. I've been thinking about a little robot with a single board Linux computer for a controller and a WIFI adapter. That way I can sit at my desk or laptop and watch what is going on a tune code and develop behaviors from the comfort of my couch instead of having to track the little bugger down and stick a serial cable in its ass to upload new programs and download data. I was also thinking that I could then give real time performance feedback and let some genetic algorithms and/or neural networks tune the parameters. That should keep me preoccupied for a while while the geniuses work on the really heady stuff.
If you are one of those geniuses, quit screwing around reading
I think that it will be a while before you start seeing a lot of upgrades to support IPv6. Most ISP are still in a lot of debt from installing the first round of equipment. With the industry in such bad shape, it is hard to believe that any of them will be shelling out the bucks to upgrade to v6 until there is a major incentive to do so.
With all of the things that IPv6 provides, I don't see anything in the short term that is going to necessitate a move. As long as we can work around the existing problems, nobody is going to invest the money in an upgrade.
I'm a geek and would love to see it happen but you have to convince the guy with the MBA that he can make money by investing in the upgrades. I don't see the economic incentive right now.
I used to have a Nokia phone/PDA. We had static routes and ACL's setup with the service provider so that we could get to our Unix boxes and Cisco gear using telnet. It was great in theory.
There were a few problems. We called them bricks because they were so damn big. This was a minor problem but one that I could life with because it was useful. Battery life turned out to be the big problem. It seemed that the battery was only good enough to get you between the cigarette lighter in your car and the next electrical outlet that you could find. The phone combined with the big LCD and backlight sucked a lot of juice.
I have a tiny Nokia now. I love it. I can usually go for a least 2 days without a recharge and it recharges very quickly in the car. I have never run out of juice.
If the battery life is good then this looks great.
I see a lot of posts which seem to imply that employee surfing should be ignored. Why is it a big deal if an employee does some personal surfing? Why not measure an employee's productivity and leave it at that?
I used to work at a company that had a very liberal internet use policy. We were pretty early adopters as far as the corporate world goes. We wanted people to use the Internet as a tool and didn't want to micromanage or scrutinize its usage.
Over the years we had to tighten our policy as abuses started to mount. The final straw was an idiot who was collecting kiddie porn and saving it on our network server! We immediately notified the police and he has arrested and prosecuted. The guy literally had hundreds of pictures carefully organized into directories to categorize them. It was obvious (1) that he had been doing it for a while, (2) he had invested a great deal of thought and time in these activities.
The company was dragged into the employee's defense trial. We spent a lot of time and money on attorneys, depositions, etc. It was a nightmare. We were forced to implement a system to control and monitor access to the Internet to insure that this type of thing did not happen again. It is one thing to get caught in that type of situation once but it can't happen again.
So we spent a lot of time and money watching and controlling Internet access. It sucks but it only takes one idiot to mess things up for everyone and there are a lot of idiots out there.
I still think that ideally Internet usage should be the employees' responsibility but in the real world things often get much more complicated.
Honestly though, this seems like a silly way to deteremine language requirements.
.NET (C#, VB.Net, managed C++) do not support multiple inheritance. It would be nice to have but it is a bitch to implement in the VM's so it was put off. In practice you will find that most of the languages available are compromises between the ideal language and what can be implemented in an economical amount of time.
If you are a computer science professor, the list sounds great. In the real world you are a little more limited.
JAVA and
I would base my decisions on other issues. What are you developing for? server or workstation? Is this a Windows, Unix/Linux, or other type of platform. If this is going to run in a Windows environment then it doesn't make much sense to go with anything other then Visual Studio. If this is a server based Unix system then start looking at IDE's for JAVA development.
I would stay away from obscure languages and language implementations. You will find more bugs in the compilers, IDE's, whatever. Support will be more limited and most importantly no one else will know what the hell you are talking about. C++, JAVA, VB, etc all have large developer communities. You are more likely to find help on the net and it will be easier to hire experienced developers.
Let's face it, network programming is just there to attact people to watch commercials. Pure and simple. Yes you can record stuff on the VCR and skip past the commercials but it is a pain in the butt and most people don't do it. Networks were intially worried but it didn't turn into much of a problem for them.
PVR's make it easier and more convenient. More people will skip the commercials. I think they really do have a reason to worry now. PVR's seem to modify the way that people watch TV in a way that the VCR's never have.
You can sit down for the evening and watch your programs 30 minutes delayed and easily skip through the commercials. With a VCR you had to wait until everything was finished recording before you watched it.
As these things become more common prices will drop and they will be connected to every TV in the house. It won't be long before you will be able to pick one up at WalMart for $100.
If this happens I wouldn't feel to secure if I made my living trying to get people to watch commercials.
There really hasn't been that much innovation in the Palm line since it was introduced. The form factors have changed, the devices are smaller, the screens are better, but the OS and software are nearly identical to the Palm Pro that I was using 3 or more years ago.
.NET
The wireless cabilities are great but this capability has been available for a while with Minstrel modems, etc. This is just a more compact form factor.
What has Palm done that is really innovative over the past 3 years? Microsoft has improved their products 300% and will continue to do so until they beat Palm into submission. What is Palm doing to compete with Microsoft? It seems that their marketshare is eroding. A few people will use this product instead of buying another Palm and a CDPD modem but I don't see this helping to gain any marketshare.
This is the same old story. I don't like MS dominating everything but this looks like another case where the leader in the market is going to sit on their laurels and let MS overtake them. Bill Gates will continue to introduce new features into the PocketPC platform and incrementally improve it at a steady pace until he overtakes Palm.
Here are just a few things that MS has added that I don't think that Palm has ansererd:
- VPN support
- 802.11 support
- Poket IE is still pretty good
- App development in VB, much easier to pick up than C++ for Palm. (You can do this with some 3rd party tools for Palm but of course MS give it away)
- Mobile device support in
This is not to tout MS software, just to point out that I think that Palm is letting themselves fall behind. Not a wise move with MS on your tail.
Obviously Sun will only pursue an Open Source strategy if they are convinced that they can achieve higher revenue growth than with the existing strategy.
As I see it, Sun sells hardware/software solutions. In most cases it is your software that makes your hardware so valuable. If you give away the software and make it freely available to competitors then your margins will inevitably shrink as you lose competitive advantage.
How will Sun maintain its margins and how will an Open Source strategy lead it to higher revenue growth?
The plain and simple truth of the matter is that these companies are not making a lot of money. Broadband is a commodity business that has huge upfront costs, high operating costs, and a rather meager income stream.
How much did it cost to connect you as a customer in the first place, probably $1000 or more. How much does it cost a month to service you, maybe $10 or more. All to receive $50/month. It takes forever to even recoup the initial investment.
Charging business customers more helps them to make some money. A % or two makes a big difference in such a tight business. It can mean the difference between losing money and breaking even. Look at the balance sheets of some of these ISP's. They don't look pretty.
If you use broadband for work then you are getting much more benefit from it than a residential customer. I use it to connect to my customers without leaving home. This saves me in travel time and travel costs. It also means that I can fix things when they call me without getting on a plane. I get more done in less time and make more money.
Have you noticed how slowly new services are being added? How long before the broadband speeds are increased? Probably never in the current business climate. The simple truth is that nobody will invest in it if there is no profit to be made. By insisting on the cheapest connection you are condemning yourself to poor service and no upgrades in the future.
Also, to the original poster. If your company can't afford an extra $50/month then their business model is probably worse than that of the broadband suppliers. You may want to brush up on your resume.
I ran Cat 5 to every room of my house when I built it 3 years ago. Since then WiFi has gotten really cheap. I now find myself using my 802.11 card in my laptop most of the time.
I still use Cat 5 in my office and my wife's office but when roaming the house the WiFi is greater.
Remember that the cable is cheap but the faceplates in every room and the patch panel will add up quickly. You can go wireless more cheaply.
Also, I would run big fat conduit to the rooms that you will have your TV/stereo, computers, etc. It will make it easier to upgrade to newer technologies in the future.
All of these posts about sending up a machine to generate/liberate the CO2 and we can live on Mars in 20 years.
If it is that easy, why don't we just build a big plant here on earth to suck up all of the greenhouse gases and CFC's? Surely it must be easy to counteract the effects of the worlds ENTIRE industrial production. Then I can go buy an SUV and blast the A/C without any guilt.
It all sounds very simple in theory. Do you realize the volume of gas that you would have to generate? How about the amount of energy that you would have to produce to power the devices? Even the staunchest proponents of global warming say that it will take hundreds of years for the cumulative effects of our ENTIRE industrial system to spoil the Earth's atmosphere. What makes everyone thing that a couple of little plants that we put on Mars could do anything?
A friend of mine designs embedded systems for the military. He told me about one prototype that was tested. They drop it, freeze it, cook it, and shake it to see if it will withstand the torture.
The prototype passed the military testing with flying colors. It was then destroyed beyond repair by UPS. They could not fully insure the replacement cost of the prototype
(parts and engineering time) so they were screwed.
"If you know enough to log on to the Internet and you're not make $67,000/yr, what are you waiting for?"
Sorry, this goofy ad came on the radio just as I was reading your post.
Why don't you try a co-op'ing for a semester? You'll get a little real world experience, get to apply some of what you've learned, and realize that there are still some very cool problems to work on. It will give you a short break from school and the experience will help you get a job when you get out.
It helped me a lot.
The DMCA and other recent legislation place a great deal of power in the rights of license holders at the expense of the greater population. It also seems to limit research and intellectual freedom to study security and encryption such as the recent Skylarov (sp?) case. I think that most of us on /. believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction in regards to these issues.
Why is this? I can think of a few reasons:
1. They are following the money. Philosophical arguments are great but they have to raise $xx,xxx per day for the reelection campaign.
2. They don't spend much time thinking about these things and the license holders who benefit from such legislation do a very good job of informing and educating the legislators to encouraging them to think their way.
3. The legislators have thought about these issues, understand the arguments and are well informed. Their philosophical beliefs lead them to believe that this is the right thing to do.
Why do you think that this type of legislation has been passed and do you agree that it will be harmful to the country in the long term?
Maybe they couldn't decrypt them but they may be able to identify them more easily. Encrypted messages without the backdoor might be easily flagged and bring attention to the sender.
I don't agree with the proposed legislation but I don't think that they are foolish in believing that it will make their job easier.
I have been using a Palm device for about 2.5 years now. I loved it but I recently bought a Jornada with a CDPD modem and I live on the thing. The CDPD service could be faster but pocket IE rocks. I now have email and web access anywhere (except Atlanta so far) that I go.
Palm had it going on for a long time but they haven't added much in the last 2.5 years and that is an eternity in this business. Simplicity is great but I'm willing to live with the increased complexity of PocketPC to get what I want. Palm needs to work on their screens and offer some more up scale hardware. Browsing at 160x160 resolution sucks. 1/4 VGA isn't optimal but it is much better. Compact Flash support is a must these days. I can add dirt cheap memory to the PocketPC and store all of my reference docs on the thing.
The only thing that I really like better on the Palm is the handwriting recognition. Grafitti is better than the PocketPC equivalent. I used grafitti for 2.5 years before starting to us the PocketPC so my brain may just be fucked up that way now.
Yet another post to an article that was obviously intended to be read by people whose VCR clocks flash "12:00" at them.
"Hey Maw, thur gonna use them new fangled neural networks on that robot!"
How about sticking to links for people who hack into their TIVOs and put extra drives in them so that they can record all of their favorite shows and then watch them on their laptop via an 802.11 connection from the hammock in the backyard.
You definitely have a good point. I've seen automation projects scrapped because of union complaints. There is a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
long time listener, first time caller, love /.
I did some work for NASA at Kennedy Space Center last year. It was the coolest job I've ever had and at the same time it was a little sad. I was struck by how primitive everything is on the ground. Ground handling costs dominate the cost of space flight. Much of the ground handling is amazingly primitive. The manpower costs and time involved are astounding. Everything is done manually. Practically nothing is automated. There is much room for improvement.
Much of this is due to union and labor issues. There is definitely an entitlement mentality there. The lab that I worked in was littered with old robots and machines developed to speed things up and reduce costs. In many cases the unions complained and had the machines removed. More efficiency = less entitlement.
I worked with some very cool people who were passionate about their work. Many of them worked very hard. Unfortunately the majority are not as fired up. Many young and creative people work there after school, get frustrated, and leave.
NASA is stuck in a rut that I believe there is very little chance of them escaping. Let's face it, they aren't rewarded for taking risks. They can waste millions on inefficient processes and they get a gee wizz report on CNN. Spend the same money on a failed probe and you might get your funding cut.
Still after 20 years of space shuttle flight shouldn't it be getting cheaper to maintain with faster turnaround? Shouldn't it be cheaper to launch things into space?
I always imagined by this time there would be space tourism. I never imagined that you would be able to become a cosmonaut for $20 million. I thought that America was supposed to be the land of entrepreneurs? So the Russians have the first man in space and then the first paying customer?