In response to some of the feedback to my original post:
My proposition was along these lines.
Lets assume Windows costs 300Euros per machine
Lets assume Linux costs 0Euros per machine
Lets assume we have 5000 machines - thats a total of 1.5M Euros saved
Lets assume support for some flavour of Linux can be sourced locally, from a smaller company, or by directly hiring a pool of techs.
Whoever these guys n gals work for they are local, and get paid, and then spend the money locally. THAT is how this adds to the local economy - instead of shipping barrels of cash over to the US you spend it on local grunts. So long as the computers are as effective for the money this is the right thing to do.
One need only look at the issue of airport security before 9/11for an example of how delivering services at a low cost is not a relevant consideration. This is a much cited example at the moment, but does NOT in any way imply that governments would operate a better airline business. It simply points out that the US government was complacent about the threat of hijacking on domestic flights. Government should have established the core safety, security and decency boundaries with impartiality - they did not - they listened to the airlines and passengers talk about cost, waiting times, and a million other things. Are you seriously suggesting the average US citizen would be better served by a government run airline, if not this is irrelevent.
Apologists for corporate efficiency simply slough off the recent dotcom debacle as the price one pays for a free market. Very few of the companies involved were to blame, it was the financial institutions that caused the dot com bubble. You could argue that government, again, should have imposed tougher regulations on speculative trading.
Virtually none of the original Dow Jones 30 companies, the strongest companies in the economy, are still in business. This is a key STRENGTH of the open market. As a company loses its edge it is got rid of, people simply stop using it. If true market forces were at work in the UK Health market the government run NHS would no longer exist. It did a fantastic job well into the late 60s, early 70s, but since then other providers have lept ahead of it.
An organisation does not have to be long lived to be great. Is Ali any lesser a boxer because he retired? No.
We do not, however, have the opportunity to close down most government institutions, meaning all the dead wood just keeps slowing them down.
Even if they need 5x the number of support techs to run on Open Source, this has to be A Good Thing for the German economy. Why spend all that money on a foreign product when you can spend it on your own engineers? Quality jobs instead of low quality imports.
Any government could use that as a driving reason for change - especially with a downturn happening around us. Every little helps!
Toejam and Earl!!! - I mailed those guys a while back, asking them to open up the source to that baby, or turn it into a java game or something! they said no:-(
Can't dig out their contacts... anyone know where these guys are now?
SEGA has done two great things for the world. Hedgehogs and driving games. SEGA should do hedgehogs and driving games. Simple as that.
Do one or two things exceptionally well, bugger volume! I'd pay a premium to play SEGA hedgehog or driving games on ANY platform - Arcade(yes please!), PC, Xbox, PS2, gamecube, handheld... you name it, I'll play it.
Hedgehogs and driving games!
Sonic Team - the U2 of games!
#2 is the most relevant for most people. How many times has someone with an ageing Win machine called you up (thats right - they cant use email because their machine broke) asking 'could I borrow a win95 CD?
I have about half a dozen of these loaned out to various people who needed a new hard drive, or had to reinstall for whatever reason. The fact that they didn't get media, or they got a Win98 upgrade disk but no 95, means they would have to go out and buy a NEW MS OS for £100+ to run on an old P100 32Mb RAM. They wouldn't.
MS should either sell win95 CDs in supermarkets for £20, or let you sell your copy for what you like. A current OS is perhaps a different matter - they have to make a living you know!
This could work in a couple of easy ways, if assume the world runs Win.
Simply release a great free sound player that incorporates some drice and network sweeping functions "to make it easier to find the music you want to play".
If an M3 is found the software can do one of two things;
1 Delete it, but keeping a copy within some HUGE archive file so the user can still play it but not copy or share it
2 Resave the file with your name, address, etc embedded.
Now if you share the file your info is going along with it. If the software finds a file with someone elses details, it gets deleted from your PC.
Keep the files playable so people dont go back to the old copy of REAL on a cover CD somewhere to get their old files back (as if 90% of users would know how).
That'd do it, quietly, like the way copy protection on CDs just slipped onto the market. They dont have to hack you - they just give you free software a la MS-IE
Having been THE most hated character on TeeVee generally for years, ruining many a fine episode for me, now that you are one of those freaky super beings would you travel back in time and just, like, not turn up for the audition or something!
Trevor Baylis, of Wind Up Radio fame, is also working on this kind of technology. The approaches are pretty standard, and are ALL dependent on new materials which combine the ability to generate a current from flexing motion with a long lived flexibility to withstand many 100,000s of flexes over a number of years - often of highly variable force (walking vs running for example).
At the moment the energy that can be created from these is tiny, roughly analagous to the energy created in a self winding watch mechanism pound for pound.
This is going nowhere fast.
Some one should tell all the 'little girlies' that seem to buy new mobile phones every other month to keep up with the latest ring tone, vibrator mode, or plastic cover with mickey mouse on that a proper web able phone would let them use chatrooms.
That would immediately become the new killer app. They would kill their brother for one! They would become mass market items, the price would plummet!
Then 'we' wouldn't be forced to pay stupid amounts of money for this kind of kit, on expensive tarriffs.
They'd be Xmas present territory!
How good would that be? We should start a campaign!
Using methanol sounds great to me, generate it from biomass, even from side products of crops - the inedible bits from corn for example. It can be made to burn _relatively_ cleanly already - although I'm sure this can be approved over time.
However, a lot of articles have been popping up in New Scientist essentially calling Methanol a demon fuel. It takes more energy to produce than it generates. By the time you use fertilizers, transport the stuff to the processing plant, run the plant, transport it to the pumps you've used more of the stuff than you can produce!
This sounds like Oil industry propoganda, but its getting a lot of column inches! anyone know anything?????
Patent and secrecy issues prevent these details coming out, so you might be right that this is BS, but...
Some pretty incredible advances have been made in flat panel speakers AND in producing rigid inflatable structures (space, life saving equipment, temporary structural supports in the construction industry) which, if brought together COULD give the kind of rigidity needed to make some QUITE loud low frequency speakers.
New materials offering incredible strength can be inflated to high pressures with minimal distortion, and be heat sealed into pretty complex shapes - so the kind of bracing needed wouldn't be a problem. Most of these, however, are manufactured using complex multi stage processes basing on a woven substructure with plastic coatings. Great - but expensive.
I agree, however, that the article in the New Scientist certainly fals below their usual high standards by skipping over ALL of the obvious questions with the lame old 'they wont say'. If they won't say how it works, how do we know this isn't just BS?
"...overcome useless overhead in the corporation (read, the CEO, CTO, C??, and much of the marketing dept.)"
I'm sorry, but this is bollocks. A good CEO, and a well structured marketing plan backed by a focussed department (no matter how big or small) is VITAL to the success of these companies.
This is WHY a lot of the smaller ISPs are being bought out - they just don't have the quality people heading them up with the savvy to grow, rather than be assimilated.
The CEO is not in and of itself a bad thing - most are crap at their jobs, and are rightly criticised. But put Jack in charge of even the crudiest little Linux friendly ISP and I guarantee that within a year its 20 times the size and a national brand... at least.
I'm sick of the 'top brass bashing' on/. - its petty, misguided, and makes/. look even more like a bunch of opinionated geeks letting off their frustrations than it is!
Senate will be openly considering legislation to put a committee of corporations in charge of deciding which hardware and OS configurations will be legal and illegal
This, if it happens, will be a step FAR too far. While we can't trust the legislators to get this right because they simply dont understand it, we sure as hell can't trust companies with it.
Every Company Rule #1 Exploit each and every opportunity presented to you to make money.
Every Company Rule #2 see Rule 1
Of course, if it was left to/.ers to handle computer laws would we be any better off? Seriously! Would we??
I would think that if I could give strong evidence that my great grandparents believed in a 'religion' which had been consistently expressed during the past 100ish years I could swing 'official' status even without an ethnicity / old god / holy weed to wave around.
That the key practices of the religion had been suppressed by the government during that 100 years shouldn't prevent them being applicable once official status has been gained.
The question is - what do we call this religion? And what are its core beliefs?
How about slashdot and freedom. Simple. The key practices of the followers is to share what they have with other followers - slashdotters are as one!
Lets do it people - in 2121 they'll make documentaries about us and our insightfulness! interestingness! and funnyness! and thank us for eliminating redundant comments from the world!;-)
... this won't solve many of the real problems in getting published.
During my time in academia I was incredibly frustrated by the senior staffs refusal to support certain PHD and post-Docs in their attempts to get published, for fear that a refused paper would sully the reputation of the department within that journal.
Further, they refused to allow these individuals to publish their work directly online as it was copyrighted to the department, even though they did not wish to put it to use.
We need a far reaching rethink of the whole publishing cycle to be led by a small team of forward thinking academics to route out these issues and propose a new system.
You may be thinking 'poor diddums not getting published' but there is a good ercentage of the output of the worlds academic research that is valid, moves the knowledge forward, but fails to get published. If it ain't published a corporation can come along and re-invent it under a patent - which most/.ers would agree is a BAD THING.
Show me a cyberspace jail and I'll start taking this seriously. We cannot proclaim cyberspace to be a 'place' without throwing out all hope of redress when someone commits a crime there.
The only arguement against this is that it is nigh on impossible to kill someone online, or even do them physical harm (anyone challenge this??) and as such the worst crimes cannot be commited entirely online, and so will come under a physical locations jurisdiction.
Crime against property, stealing the contents of someones bank account, wiping their hard drive, any act committed online are relatively minor and so it doesn't matter that we can't 'get justice'. This is the brave new world we just chose to live with that.
As I said - that would be the only arguement I could think of to support the 'other place' concept - and personally I think its so full of holes to be a joke.
I would pay! This is how we get to Mars guys! Its so simple! Bernie Ecclestone is quaking in his boots - F1 Rockets are on their way and the tobacco industry is going to pay for it!
Is there any true relationship between res and productivity. I know I FELT a hell of a lot more productive for a few days everytime I switched up a size 12 > 14 > 15 > 17 > 19 over the past how ever many years.
BUT I recently started using my 14.1" LCD laptop as my main machine simply because I found it more convenient most of the time - and I can't say, thinking about it, that I've ACTUALLY become any less productive.
Maybe I'll switch to my 19" again and report back in a week as to how much more or less work I get done! I know I alt-tab more than I used to.
A phone that I can say this to:
PHONE
!ready!
Email Dave
!send email to dave!
Hey Dave - meet in Prince of Wales at 7 OK!
SEND
!email sent - I love you!
and the phone emails dave! and the email goes to his phone or voice or whetever he has set up. I could use that SO often!
New power sources have the potential to revolutionise the world of electronics. Some interesting things are happenning with Wind Up, Fuel Cells, ultra low poer consumption circuits etc... that could soon mean we hardly think about charging at all.
Personally I'd rather crank up my notebook for 2 minutes every half hour than have it burning methane!!! Environmentally sound AND I get to excercise one of my arms more than the other legitimateley!
While I, like many others, am sick of being offered a sugar-only diet, retirement at 40 and unlimited sex appeal 400 times a day, I am nervous of legislation like this.
This makes it illegal to send certain types of email. Illegal.
How is that a good thing?
If I have a service, and I have reasonable expectation that you would like to know about it, why shouldn't I be able to email you about it? I can write to you on paper, or call you up (although I realise legislation could also restrict these).
To make this illegal is overkill and folly. B2B 'spam' is pretty useful actually!
Our experience with our access provider is interesting in relation to the Code Red effects described in this report.
We live in a block of office units with shared network access. Our landlord is about as non tech as they come, the whole company, and outsource the LAN provision.
The phones and LAN went down twice due to Nimda, although our machines were unaffected - being patched!
The operator has given our landlord the following advice "Cut them off unless they have Norton". So we get a visit from a suit asking if we have Norton on our computers. We don't we have McAfee. His response?
"Get Norton by Friday or your being disconnected"
People just don't understand this stuff. We have fully patched machines, which run good virus software, but our PHB landlord denies us access to the network that WE PAY FOR beause we chose a different software solution.
Slashdot Mirror
In response to some of the feedback to my original post:
My proposition was along these lines.
Lets assume Windows costs 300Euros per machine
Lets assume Linux costs 0Euros per machine
Lets assume we have 5000 machines - thats a total of 1.5M Euros saved
Lets assume support for some flavour of Linux can be sourced locally, from a smaller company, or by directly hiring a pool of techs.
Whoever these guys n gals work for they are local, and get paid, and then spend the money locally. THAT is how this adds to the local economy - instead of shipping barrels of cash over to the US you spend it on local grunts. So long as the computers are as effective for the money this is the right thing to do.
Simple
One need only look at the issue of airport security before 9/11for an example of how delivering services at a low cost is not a relevant consideration.
This is a much cited example at the moment, but does NOT in any way imply that governments would operate a better airline business. It simply points out that the US government was complacent about the threat of hijacking on domestic flights. Government should have established the core safety, security and decency boundaries with impartiality - they did not - they listened to the airlines and passengers talk about cost, waiting times, and a million other things. Are you seriously suggesting the average US citizen would be better served by a government run airline, if not this is irrelevent.
Apologists for corporate efficiency simply slough off the recent dotcom debacle as the price one pays for a free market.
Very few of the companies involved were to blame, it was the financial institutions that caused the dot com bubble. You could argue that government, again, should have imposed tougher regulations on speculative trading.
Virtually none of the original Dow Jones 30 companies, the strongest companies in the economy, are still in business.
This is a key STRENGTH of the open market. As a company loses its edge it is got rid of, people simply stop using it. If true market forces were at work in the UK Health market the government run NHS would no longer exist. It did a fantastic job well into the late 60s, early 70s, but since then other providers have lept ahead of it.
An organisation does not have to be long lived to be great. Is Ali any lesser a boxer because he retired? No.
We do not, however, have the opportunity to close down most government institutions, meaning all the dead wood just keeps slowing them down.
Even if they need 5x the number of support techs to run on Open Source, this has to be A Good Thing for the German economy. Why spend all that money on a foreign product when you can spend it on your own engineers? Quality jobs instead of low quality imports.
Any government could use that as a driving reason for change - especially with a downturn happening around us. Every little helps!
Toejam and Earl!!! - I mailed those guys a while back, asking them to open up the source to that baby, or turn it into a java game or something! they said no :-(
Can't dig out their contacts... anyone know where these guys are now?
OK - Hedgehogs, Driving games, and aliens!
This may be seen as off topic, but...
SEGA has done two great things for the world. Hedgehogs and driving games. SEGA should do hedgehogs and driving games. Simple as that.
Do one or two things exceptionally well, bugger volume! I'd pay a premium to play SEGA hedgehog or driving games on ANY platform - Arcade(yes please!), PC, Xbox, PS2, gamecube, handheld... you name it, I'll play it.
Hedgehogs and driving games!
Sonic Team - the U2 of games!
#2 is the most relevant for most people. How many times has someone with an ageing Win machine called you up (thats right - they cant use email because their machine broke) asking 'could I borrow a win95 CD?
I have about half a dozen of these loaned out to various people who needed a new hard drive, or had to reinstall for whatever reason. The fact that they didn't get media, or they got a Win98 upgrade disk but no 95, means they would have to go out and buy a NEW MS OS for £100+ to run on an old P100 32Mb RAM. They wouldn't.
MS should either sell win95 CDs in supermarkets for £20, or let you sell your copy for what you like. A current OS is perhaps a different matter - they have to make a living you know!
This could work in a couple of easy ways, if assume the world runs Win.
Simply release a great free sound player that incorporates some drice and network sweeping functions "to make it easier to find the music you want to play".
If an M3 is found the software can do one of two things;
1 Delete it, but keeping a copy within some HUGE archive file so the user can still play it but not copy or share it
2 Resave the file with your name, address, etc embedded.
Now if you share the file your info is going along with it. If the software finds a file with someone elses details, it gets deleted from your PC.
Keep the files playable so people dont go back to the old copy of REAL on a cover CD somewhere to get their old files back (as if 90% of users would know how).
That'd do it, quietly, like the way copy protection on CDs just slipped onto the market. They dont have to hack you - they just give you free software a la MS-IE
Having been THE most hated character on TeeVee generally for years, ruining many a fine episode for me, now that you are one of those freaky super beings would you travel back in time and just, like, not turn up for the audition or something!
It won't bother you! Your a super being!
Trevor Baylis, of Wind Up Radio fame, is also working on this kind of technology. The approaches are pretty standard, and are ALL dependent on new materials which combine the ability to generate a current from flexing motion with a long lived flexibility to withstand many 100,000s of flexes over a number of years - often of highly variable force (walking vs running for example).
At the moment the energy that can be created from these is tiny, roughly analagous to the energy created in a self winding watch mechanism pound for pound.
This is going nowhere fast.
Some one should tell all the 'little girlies' that seem to buy new mobile phones every other month to keep up with the latest ring tone, vibrator mode, or plastic cover with mickey mouse on that a proper web able phone would let them use chatrooms.
That would immediately become the new killer app. They would kill their brother for one! They would become mass market items, the price would plummet!
Then 'we' wouldn't be forced to pay stupid amounts of money for this kind of kit, on expensive tarriffs.
They'd be Xmas present territory!
How good would that be? We should start a campaign!
Using methanol sounds great to me, generate it from biomass, even from side products of crops - the inedible bits from corn for example. It can be made to burn _relatively_ cleanly already - although I'm sure this can be approved over time.
However, a lot of articles have been popping up in New Scientist essentially calling Methanol a demon fuel. It takes more energy to produce than it generates. By the time you use fertilizers, transport the stuff to the processing plant, run the plant, transport it to the pumps you've used more of the stuff than you can produce!
This sounds like Oil industry propoganda, but its getting a lot of column inches! anyone know anything?????
Patent and secrecy issues prevent these details coming out, so you might be right that this is BS, but...
Some pretty incredible advances have been made in flat panel speakers AND in producing rigid inflatable structures (space, life saving equipment, temporary structural supports in the construction industry) which, if brought together COULD give the kind of rigidity needed to make some QUITE loud low frequency speakers.
New materials offering incredible strength can be inflated to high pressures with minimal distortion, and be heat sealed into pretty complex shapes - so the kind of bracing needed wouldn't be a problem. Most of these, however, are manufactured using complex multi stage processes basing on a woven substructure with plastic coatings. Great - but expensive.
I agree, however, that the article in the New Scientist certainly fals below their usual high standards by skipping over ALL of the obvious questions with the lame old 'they wont say'. If they won't say how it works, how do we know this isn't just BS?
"...overcome useless overhead in the corporation (read, the CEO, CTO, C??, and much of the marketing dept.)"
/. - its petty, misguided, and makes /. look even more like a bunch of opinionated geeks letting off their frustrations than it is!
I'm sorry, but this is bollocks. A good CEO, and a well structured marketing plan backed by a focussed department (no matter how big or small) is VITAL to the success of these companies.
This is WHY a lot of the smaller ISPs are being bought out - they just don't have the quality people heading them up with the savvy to grow, rather than be assimilated.
The CEO is not in and of itself a bad thing - most are crap at their jobs, and are rightly criticised. But put Jack in charge of even the crudiest little Linux friendly ISP and I guarantee that within a year its 20 times the size and a national brand... at least.
I'm sick of the 'top brass bashing' on
Senate will be openly considering legislation to put a committee of corporations in charge of deciding which hardware and OS configurations will be legal and illegal
/.ers to handle computer laws would we be any better off? Seriously! Would we??
This, if it happens, will be a step FAR too far. While we can't trust the legislators to get this right because they simply dont understand it, we sure as hell can't trust companies with it.
Every Company Rule #1 Exploit each and every opportunity presented to you to make money.
Every Company Rule #2 see Rule 1
Of course, if it was left to
I would think that if I could give strong evidence that my great grandparents believed in a 'religion' which had been consistently expressed during the past 100ish years I could swing 'official' status even without an ethnicity / old god / holy weed to wave around. ;-)
That the key practices of the religion had been suppressed by the government during that 100 years shouldn't prevent them being applicable once official status has been gained.
The question is - what do we call this religion? And what are its core beliefs?
How about slashdot and freedom. Simple. The key practices of the followers is to share what they have with other followers - slashdotters are as one!
Lets do it people - in 2121 they'll make documentaries about us and our insightfulness! interestingness! and funnyness! and thank us for eliminating redundant comments from the world!
... this won't solve many of the real problems in getting published.
/.ers would agree is a BAD THING.
During my time in academia I was incredibly frustrated by the senior staffs refusal to support certain PHD and post-Docs in their attempts to get published, for fear that a refused paper would sully the reputation of the department within that journal.
Further, they refused to allow these individuals to publish their work directly online as it was copyrighted to the department, even though they did not wish to put it to use.
We need a far reaching rethink of the whole publishing cycle to be led by a small team of forward thinking academics to route out these issues and propose a new system.
You may be thinking 'poor diddums not getting published' but there is a good ercentage of the output of the worlds academic research that is valid, moves the knowledge forward, but fails to get published. If it ain't published a corporation can come along and re-invent it under a patent - which most
Show me a cyberspace jail and I'll start taking this seriously. We cannot proclaim cyberspace to be a 'place' without throwing out all hope of redress when someone commits a crime there.
The only arguement against this is that it is nigh on impossible to kill someone online, or even do them physical harm (anyone challenge this??) and as such the worst crimes cannot be commited entirely online, and so will come under a physical locations jurisdiction.
Crime against property, stealing the contents of someones bank account, wiping their hard drive, any act committed online are relatively minor and so it doesn't matter that we can't 'get justice'. This is the brave new world we just chose to live with that.
As I said - that would be the only arguement I could think of to support the 'other place' concept - and personally I think its so full of holes to be a joke.
I would pay! This is how we get to Mars guys! Its so simple! Bernie Ecclestone is quaking in his boots - F1 Rockets are on their way and the tobacco industry is going to pay for it!
Better get a thicker fire jacket Schumi!
Is there any true relationship between res and productivity. I know I FELT a hell of a lot more productive for a few days everytime I switched up a size 12 > 14 > 15 > 17 > 19 over the past how ever many years.
BUT I recently started using my 14.1" LCD laptop as my main machine simply because I found it more convenient most of the time - and I can't say, thinking about it, that I've ACTUALLY become any less productive.
Maybe I'll switch to my 19" again and report back in a week as to how much more or less work I get done! I know I alt-tab more than I used to.
How about a choice event for the /.ers where the most rediculous moderation gets an award.
Nominations start NOW! event in a month!
A phone that I can say this to:
PHONE
!ready!
Email Dave
!send email to dave!
Hey Dave - meet in Prince of Wales at 7 OK!
SEND
!email sent - I love you!
and the phone emails dave! and the email goes to his phone or voice or whetever he has set up. I could use that SO often!
New power sources have the potential to revolutionise the world of electronics. Some interesting things are happenning with Wind Up, Fuel Cells, ultra low poer consumption circuits etc... that could soon mean we hardly think about charging at all.
Personally I'd rather crank up my notebook for 2 minutes every half hour than have it burning methane!!! Environmentally sound AND I get to excercise one of my arms more than the other legitimateley!
While I, like many others, am sick of being offered a sugar-only diet, retirement at 40 and unlimited sex appeal 400 times a day, I am nervous of legislation like this.
This makes it illegal to send certain types of email. Illegal.
How is that a good thing?
If I have a service, and I have reasonable expectation that you would like to know about it, why shouldn't I be able to email you about it? I can write to you on paper, or call you up (although I realise legislation could also restrict these).
To make this illegal is overkill and folly. B2B 'spam' is pretty useful actually!
Our experience with our access provider is interesting in relation to the Code Red effects described in this report.
We live in a block of office units with shared network access. Our landlord is about as non tech as they come, the whole company, and outsource the LAN provision.
The phones and LAN went down twice due to Nimda, although our machines were unaffected - being patched!
The operator has given our landlord the following advice "Cut them off unless they have Norton". So we get a visit from a suit asking if we have Norton on our computers. We don't we have McAfee. His response?
"Get Norton by Friday or your being disconnected"
People just don't understand this stuff. We have fully patched machines, which run good virus software, but our PHB landlord denies us access to the network that WE PAY FOR beause we chose a different software solution.
REALLY!!! Has anyone checked sun spot activity against this??