I worked in this field for awhile, and the liscencing and other issues sent the company I was with running in the other direction. JPEG was good enough, everyone was using it, so JPEG it was.
Fractal compression is cool.. but encumbered by IP issues. Too bad.
A contract I was working on put me in a similar problem to the poster; I needed a portable way to get a machine with a PCI port.
I put a mini-ITX machine together in an ammo box after reading an article somewhere on the web. You can cram everything in there, and it is very durable. The total cost of the project was under $400 CDN.
Rather than carry a screen around, I installed a VFD display on the front of the case to tell me that the system was ready for use. You could do this with a simple LED connected to the parallel port, too, or any variant of the above.
Then I connect via VNC to the box from my powerbook. Problem solved. The update speed is marginal, so I'll probably be installing windows XP to get the remote desktop functionality. I wish the application allowed me to run X11, but unfortunately it doesn't.
Can confirm this as well. Actually, I've seen prototypes from several years ago, but the mobile phone providers haven't exactly encouraged this along. Continued strong growth of wireless hotspots will make this inevitable though, and provide the catalyst for some real distruptive technologies.
If you have time and brains, cars are VERY cheap
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 1
Things change. If you're able to learn how to do basic repairs to cars, you can get a car on the road for less than $1000. $2000 in nice shape. Get a old honda civic, find a junkyard with parts, and there you go - those motors are good for 300,000 or more miles. They are also easily rebuilt with minimal special tools.
It's a myth you can't fix cars, and people are insane for buying new ones the way they do. Insurance on a car like that even with a bad driving record is only a few hundred dollars per year, and in a stripped down state a 91 hatch is capable of 40+mpg. I have one in my driveway with 450,000km on it.
Now, if you want a penis replacement or status symbol, that's different. If you want a cheap, reasonably safe way around and are crafty about it - it can be done.
The same effect can be realized by buying a newer, used car in good repair (96-98 honda, for example), and keeping the maintenance up on it. There is no reason you can't get 20 years out of a properly maintained car. Even rust has been licked for the most part; both my 91 and 98 civics are washed weekly in our salted, atlantic canadian winters and both of them have little or no rust.
I find myself using this program over and over because it's quick and does what I need quickly, and I don't need to use a tutorial or a manual to accomplish it.
Perhaps some pointers can be taken from there? I'm still looking for a good open-source alternative to PSP for my Powerbook.
This isn't a bad idea, but I was hoping he was using the PIC to drive the panel directly. It'll cost a few bucks to keep this picture frame running.
I've driven VGA monitors from a FPGA before, but never a LCD panel directly - they're typically nightmares to work with. It strikes me that a digital picture frame might be a great project for someone to work on, and a practical application for some of the stuff over at OpenCores.
A low-end Spartan FPGA would do the trick (or maybe even something more lowly than that). You'd need to implement a driver core for SVGA or a DVI interface, a interface to a compactflash card, some glue logic for that, and not much else. And a PCB to hold it together.
Unfortunately I'm much too busy to tackle something like this myself right now, but if anyone would like to try it, I could point them in the right direction to get started.
There's a hidden trick in OSX to get a graphic calculator from the standard one. I never knew why it wasn't there all the time - there's one or two easter eggs in there - and they're all fully functional from what I can tell.
This would explain it nicely, or at least, provide more romantic one than a plain old easter egg.
Hey, I used to work @ iMagicTV on the motorola dev team - small world.
Good concept, telephone lines don't have the bandwidth to make mpeg2 viable alongside the inexpensive DSS market. FTTH or other options might change that, though. Nevermind the DRM and encryption issues, equally as big a problem - it's no good having a TV distribution solution if you don't have any content to distribute.
Even from the beginning, technology played a huge part in racing. And as far atheletism, it plays a bigger part in F1 than in many other forms of auto racing.
I take it you're speaking from a position of complete ignorance. Auto racing is one of the most exhausting activities you can do - you need absolutely flawless concentration and a LOT of upper body strength to toss around ANY kind of competitive racecar, even a shifter kart. To say nothing of the temperatures and cornering forces you are subjected to.
Getting out of a car after a 20 lap sprint is equivilant to a huge workout, and if you think otherwise - I suggest you try it.
You simply can't crank the average power consumption of a PC beyond 200W before people start rejecting them because of power bills and excess heat.
Based on current designs, yes. Power consumption is not a function of MIPS, it is a function of process size and clock rate, and the existing architecture. Much of the power consumption is a function of intel's shortsighted push of higher clock rates as a marketting ploy and not an engineering decision. That's when I stopped using their chips on the desktop.
There are many applications for much faster processors than we have now; just as there are many existing design models that haven't been investigated, and whole new architectures and applications to discover.
What Intel's announcement says to me is they no longer want to be part of that, and that's fine and dandy. I interpret it as a signal to move my money elsewhere because I think those things will be very important in the future. YM(and money)MV.
I think people said that in 1978.. and 1985.. 1989.. and 1994.. and blah blah blah.
There is a long way to go before we hit the physical limits of existing technology. Then there is the technology that hasn't been invented yet. I'd like to own stock in the company that is most likely to come up with the latter, thanks.
The strategy is a significant shift - a "right-hand turn," as Mr. Otellini likes to say - from Intel's long-term obsession with making ever-faster computer chips. Instead, the company is now concentrating on what he calls platforms: complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.
What's that sound? That's intel. Flushing itself down the toilet. Hello, you're INTEL. You make CHIPS. Long term obsession? That's what the company DOES! I haven't checked this guy's past out - but something tells me engineering is not in his blood.
If I had intel stock - I'd be twitching to get rid of it in a hurry. I do, however own AMD stock. I rather like their long-term obession with making ever faster chips, and I expecially like the single-minded focus at doing it better and better and better.
Is the Casimir Effect. Magic energy from the quantum field. Poorly understood, although it doesn't violate any of the laws of thermodynamics or physics as we understand them - and the experiment is easily replicatable for anyone who cares to try.
Be it this, helium-3, or something else, the western world needs a way to generate one whopping pile of energy through a renewable means.
First off, there's this thing called deprecation you get to write against your profits. If they're leasing, the picture is even better - most of the wear items are deductions and that drops the effective cost by a large margin. Leasing would be pretty perfect for an arrangment like this, as the machines can be maintained or replaced on a regular planned schedule.
A place like this is going to run 24h or 18h/day, not 8h/day. Unless my sleeping habits do not extrapolate, that is - I suspect there are a lot of semi-nocturnal technical people out there.
$5/h might just be an introductory rate - if they move that up even a small amount, say $7.50/h - this has dramatic impacts on the bottom line if the utilization rates are high. $5 or even $8/h is a bargain - it costs time to maintain a state of the art system, and it costs real money too. Not everyone has the time (or money) to do this.
Another consideration a lot of people here haven't mentioned is the fact it gives everyone an even playing field. Either a lot of people here don't lan and don't know WTF they are talking about - or maybe everyone has money, I don't know - but there is nothing that sucks worse at a LAN than when somebody has inferior hardware, or the bare minimum hardware, and is getting their ass fragged because of it. This gives a top of the line reference platform to go have some fun with.
This hasn't factored in concessions - likely huge, movie theatres operate at a near loss and make it up on popcorn, for example. A place like this could make a fortune with a liscenced area selling alcohol, pizza, whatever - no mess, no fuss.
I have a major lan party every Xmas, and my time isn't worth bothing pirating the games;
Now, pardon my french, but I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE NEEDING THE CD TO PLAY THE GAMES. I want the option to be able to install a patch - or hell, write my OWN patch - or image the CD - so I don't need that CD. Swapping CDs sucks, and they get damaged and lost. There is NO POINT.
Requiring the CD is stupid because it's a measure that is so easily circumvented and dries people who legitimately buy the game mad. That's a great idea, guys. Rocket science.
I don't mind online activation; It would be a good compromise to not needing the CD. I'll even call a 800 number and do it voice. One thing I want though is once that copy is activated, is ability to NOT NEED A DAMN CD. What makes this especially inane is people who download it via steam don't need the CD; people who buy it do! Hahaha. Great.
There is, however, an easiy solution to this: An escrow clause in the contract. If the company ceases to provide online authentication, it has to provide a means to play the game under the terms of the contract. This is common in the software industry in the closed source critical applications field; so why can't we get this out of the way here? It's easy; it shows good faith on the part of Valve; and the game isn't going to be worth selling in 10 years anyway.
The bad press valve is picking up is not worth it. Maybe I'm wrong.. but this is going to snowball. Way to flush years of community goodwill down the toilet.
Hope to be getting another SD card soon; cheap off ebay and does a lot more than the ipod for a comparable price. Good sound quality with an aftermarket player, plays videos, etc etc etc etc.
Decided I'd try one before I went all in on an ipod mini, strikes me as a lot of money to spend for something that just does music - and is very likely to be obsoleted in the near future by a 4gb flash-based iPod device.
I've had the opportunity to work with QNX a lot, but never on a commercial project - I've seen it lose out to embedded Linux flavours, 1VxWorks and OS9, and even WinCE. QNX has great memory managment, is extremely robust, and has an acceptable IDE available. The IPC and messaging model they use is great. The windowing kit is nice - the GUI is a little dated, but you can make it do some neat tricks.
Unfortuantely for QNX, it's got mediocre driver support (e.g. plan on writing 'em, or paying extra for hardware that does) and it's liscencing fees are not competitive with embedded linux or BSD. Neither of those are as robust as QNX in terms of hard realtime behaviour, but for most applications they are "good enough".
Not enough people get exposed to QNX, and it's hurting them - but not as badly as the wide availability of free unix alternatives. It is a great product though, unfortunately, I can see it going the way of a lot of other great products that the market ignored.:(
I enjoy using the noncommerical version of QNX to stay up to speed on RTOS concepts and development, and I have a hobby project of trying to do engine ignition timing off a standard PC that I trust to QNX - something I wouldn't trust to linux, just yet.
If your child has any interest in electronics, get them this book - I assume it's still in print - it is the best introduction to electronics and electricity I have ever seen. I got it when I was 12 or so, and it's probably why I have an EE degree now.
It is a perfect match to one of those 200-in-one kits, or better yet, a $200 gift certificate to digikey and a prototype board.;)
Er, open source technologies help the "third world" as much as they help the "first world".
The big advantages of the "first world" - a well educated workforce, an open advanced education framework, stable government, good supply and distribution networks, and easily obtained capital investment are extremely powerful when combined with open source. While open source helps the third world, there are MANY other factors involved.
Unless you want to live like your average joe IN the third world, productivity must increase per worker by large factor.
Something I realized awhile ago - and I have been doing very well since - is that open source technologies are not about the software development and software retailing and support processes at ALL. You can make money doing this, but as you mentioned, you won't make a LOT of money. The money isn't going to be in software companies - up until now, the 0 production cost of software after initial R&D is a lisence to print money.
What I realized though was having all this technology around enables companies to apply all sorts of new, "free" technology to solve new problems. Many of the new "free" technologies help a lot of different companies; for example, an inexpensive real time OS is of benefit to many many people. As are machine control libraries, communications libraries, toolkits, etc etc. Do you have any idea how powerful libraries like FFTW are?
All of those pieces can be put together to make new companies possible and existing companies more productive. That's where the gold under the rainbow is for Open Source; commodity software that is in everyone's best interest can be jointly developed, saving thousands and thousands of man hours of duplicated effort.
The only way to compete with third world labour is to increase productivity - and open source technologies can really help here.
And -that- boys and girls is why some savvy venture capitalists are waking up. Finally.
A good majority of that 22MBPD is for refinement into Gasoline, Jet Fuel, Kerosene, Plastics, Fuel Oil (for heating), etc.
It's all burned and turned into heat. If there is no oil, or the plan is to stop burning oil - a replacement for that energy is needed. Very little is turned into hard goods. My point is that the green technologies are way, way, way, way, way off from being feasible as any kind of replacement.
So, make them 1MW. I'll do one better - make them -10MW-. You still need millions, and you are assuming high utilization rates.
Everything around you is energy. Nothing else really matters a whole lot.
Ballparked the numbers from Google; they should be reasonably accurate. Oil is a very powerful medium to transport energy.
Oil alone;
MBPD = million barrels per day
Average US consumption of oil per day: ~22MBPD World Consumption: ~85-90MBPD
Energy in a barrel of oil: ~6.1e9 J
1kWh = 3.61e6 Joules.
Doing some numbers: 1 barrel of oil ~1700kWh
1700kWh/barrel x 22e6 barrels/day x 365day/year =
1.37e13 kWh - Yes, that's 10^13
How many windmills is that?
Let's assume medium-sized windmills for an average - 500kW units. Those are some big honking windmills, but not impractical.
How much energy will one of those provide assuming a 50% cycle (a little on the high end, but hey, let's be optimists) over the course of a year?
500kW x 24h/day x 365d x 0.5 = 2.2e6kWh
1.37e13kWh / 2.2e6 kWh = ~6,234,000 windmills. That's six MILLION windmills...that is JUST to replace oil consumption..and that's JUST for the USA alone..and that assumes an optimistic 50% productivity..and that assumes 100% energy transfer like oil provides - you'd probably have 50% transfer loss on top of the above - how's 12,000,000 500kW windmills sound?..and that assumes 0 growth in USA oil production
In short.. fusion, hot or cold, or someone better find out how to extract energy from the quantum vacuum (e.g. casimir effect) or we're all fu.. er, finished.
I live in a part of Canada that has a 25% - yeah, 25% - unemployment rate. I have never had a problem getting work, even here. The key is to recognize your market is global and plan accordingly.
Optimism is contagious and the world needs more of it. If you are tired of being beat down by the man, create your own company doing -whatever-. There are HUGE markets out there for any number of products, IT related or no. If companies want things that help them become more productive - go looking for things you can make or develop to do that. Remember all that hype about the internet? Providing instant access to the globe? It's us here that did that and made that possible. Who wrote the rules that we can't take advantage of that and profit from it?
Take all those programming skills and apply them to a real-world problem. Programming itself is worthless. It's programming applied to a problem that becomes valuable - and at the end of the day, that's what people forgot.
Job security of the past is finished. The sooner people understand that the better. The only security you get is by becoming master of your own fate - and that means running your own show. You have every advantage in front of you - easy communication, cheap computers and equipment - find a niche and prosper.
I don't know what's wrong with people these days. Find a problem and fix it. Profit.
Thanks for the reply even if you don't know what you're talking about.
Come again? I design embedded software for CNC machines. Every one of the manufacturing companies I work for is in the process of moving away, has completely moved away, or wants nothing to do with Autocad. They are all using the more attractively priced and (subjectively) easier to use Solidworks and the solid modelling approach, something Autocad was late to the game with.
It strikes me that there is enough resources being spent for the small manufacturing sector to make a large open source project of this nature possible. There are some open source CAD programs out there, but they're a long long way from being commercially useful.
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I worked in this field for awhile, and the liscencing and other issues sent the company I was with running in the other direction. JPEG was good enough, everyone was using it, so JPEG it was.
Fractal compression is cool.. but encumbered by IP issues. Too bad.
A contract I was working on put me in a similar problem to the poster; I needed a portable way to get a machine with a PCI port.
I put a mini-ITX machine together in an ammo box after reading an article somewhere on the web. You can cram everything in there, and it is very durable. The total cost of the project was under $400 CDN.
Rather than carry a screen around, I installed a VFD display on the front of the case to tell me that the system was ready for use. You could do this with a simple LED connected to the parallel port, too, or any variant of the above.
Then I connect via VNC to the box from my powerbook. Problem solved. The update speed is marginal, so I'll probably be installing windows XP to get the remote desktop functionality. I wish the application allowed me to run X11, but unfortunately it doesn't.
Can confirm this as well. Actually, I've seen prototypes from several years ago, but the mobile phone providers haven't exactly encouraged this along. Continued strong growth of wireless hotspots will make this inevitable though, and provide the catalyst for some real distruptive technologies.
Things change. If you're able to learn how to do basic repairs to cars, you can get a car on the road for less than $1000. $2000 in nice shape. Get a old honda civic, find a junkyard with parts, and there you go - those motors are good for 300,000 or more miles. They are also easily rebuilt with minimal special tools.
It's a myth you can't fix cars, and people are insane for buying new ones the way they do. Insurance on a car like that even with a bad driving record is only a few hundred dollars per year, and in a stripped down state a 91 hatch is capable of 40+mpg. I have one in my driveway with 450,000km on it.
Now, if you want a penis replacement or status symbol, that's different. If you want a cheap, reasonably safe way around and are crafty about it - it can be done.
The same effect can be realized by buying a newer, used car in good repair (96-98 honda, for example), and keeping the maintenance up on it. There is no reason you can't get 20 years out of a properly maintained car. Even rust has been licked for the most part; both my 91 and 98 civics are washed weekly in our salted, atlantic canadian winters and both of them have little or no rust.
I find myself using this program over and over because it's quick and does what I need quickly, and I don't need to use a tutorial or a manual to accomplish it.
Perhaps some pointers can be taken from there? I'm still looking for a good open-source alternative to PSP for my Powerbook.
This isn't a bad idea, but I was hoping he was using the PIC to drive the panel directly. It'll cost a few bucks to keep this picture frame running.
I've driven VGA monitors from a FPGA before, but never a LCD panel directly - they're typically nightmares to work with. It strikes me that a digital picture frame might be a great project for someone to work on, and a practical application for some of the stuff over at OpenCores.
A low-end Spartan FPGA would do the trick (or maybe even something more lowly than that). You'd need to implement a driver core for SVGA or a DVI interface, a interface to a compactflash card, some glue logic for that, and not much else. And a PCB to hold it together.
Unfortunately I'm much too busy to tackle something like this myself right now, but if anyone would like to try it, I could point them in the right direction to get started.
There's a hidden trick in OSX to get a graphic calculator from the standard one. I never knew why it wasn't there all the time - there's one or two easter eggs in there - and they're all fully functional from what I can tell.
This would explain it nicely, or at least, provide more romantic one than a plain old easter egg.
Hey, I used to work @ iMagicTV on the motorola dev team - small world.
Good concept, telephone lines don't have the bandwidth to make mpeg2 viable alongside the inexpensive DSS market. FTTH or other options might change that, though. Nevermind the DRM and encryption issues, equally as big a problem - it's no good having a TV distribution solution if you don't have any content to distribute.
Even from the beginning, technology played a huge part in racing. And as far atheletism, it plays a bigger part in F1 than in many other forms of auto racing.
I take it you're speaking from a position of complete ignorance. Auto racing is one of the most exhausting activities you can do - you need absolutely flawless concentration and a LOT of upper body strength to toss around ANY kind of competitive racecar, even a shifter kart. To say nothing of the temperatures and cornering forces you are subjected to.
Getting out of a car after a 20 lap sprint is equivilant to a huge workout, and if you think otherwise - I suggest you try it.
That is, until someone develops the perfect jammer and sells it widely.
That, my friend, is the argument for making the robots autonomous. Insert sci-fi armageddon of choice here.
Put a M16 in Asimo's hands and you have one hell of a prototype.
You simply can't crank the average power consumption of a PC beyond 200W before people start rejecting them because of power bills and excess heat.
Based on current designs, yes. Power consumption is not a function of MIPS, it is a function of process size and clock rate, and the existing architecture. Much of the power consumption is a function of intel's shortsighted push of higher clock rates as a marketting ploy and not an engineering decision. That's when I stopped using their chips on the desktop.
There are many applications for much faster processors than we have now; just as there are many existing design models that haven't been investigated, and whole new architectures and applications to discover.
What Intel's announcement says to me is they no longer want to be part of that, and that's fine and dandy. I interpret it as a signal to move my money elsewhere because I think those things will be very important in the future. YM(and money)MV.
Chip speed is going to hit a brick wall soon.
I think people said that in 1978.. and 1985.. 1989.. and 1994.. and blah blah blah.
There is a long way to go before we hit the physical limits of existing technology. Then there is the technology that hasn't been invented yet. I'd like to own stock in the company that is most likely to come up with the latter, thanks.
The strategy is a significant shift - a "right-hand turn," as Mr. Otellini likes to say - from Intel's long-term obsession with making ever-faster computer chips. Instead, the company is now concentrating on what he calls platforms: complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.
What's that sound? That's intel. Flushing itself down the toilet. Hello, you're INTEL. You make CHIPS. Long term obsession? That's what the company DOES! I haven't checked this guy's past out - but something tells me engineering is not in his blood.
If I had intel stock - I'd be twitching to get rid of it in a hurry. I do, however own AMD stock. I rather like their long-term obession with making ever faster chips, and I expecially like the single-minded focus at doing it better and better and better.
It's going to be fun to watch this one.
Is the Casimir Effect. Magic energy from the quantum field. Poorly understood, although it doesn't violate any of the laws of thermodynamics or physics as we understand them - and the experiment is easily replicatable for anyone who cares to try.
Be it this, helium-3, or something else, the western world needs a way to generate one whopping pile of energy through a renewable means.
First off, there's this thing called deprecation you get to write against your profits. If they're leasing, the picture is even better - most of the wear items are deductions and that drops the effective cost by a large margin. Leasing would be pretty perfect for an arrangment like this, as the machines can be maintained or replaced on a regular planned schedule.
A place like this is going to run 24h or 18h/day, not 8h/day. Unless my sleeping habits do not extrapolate, that is - I suspect there are a lot of semi-nocturnal technical people out there.
$5/h might just be an introductory rate - if they move that up even a small amount, say $7.50/h - this has dramatic impacts on the bottom line if the utilization rates are high. $5 or even $8/h is a bargain - it costs time to maintain a state of the art system, and it costs real money too. Not everyone has the time (or money) to do this.
Another consideration a lot of people here haven't mentioned is the fact it gives everyone an even playing field. Either a lot of people here don't lan and don't know WTF they are talking about - or maybe everyone has money, I don't know - but there is nothing that sucks worse at a LAN than when somebody has inferior hardware, or the bare minimum hardware, and is getting their ass fragged because of it. This gives a top of the line reference platform to go have some fun with.
This hasn't factored in concessions - likely huge, movie theatres operate at a near loss and make it up on popcorn, for example. A place like this could make a fortune with a liscenced area selling alcohol, pizza, whatever - no mess, no fuss.
I think these guys are going to make a killing.
that I know to hold off on the game if they can.
I have a major lan party every Xmas, and my time isn't worth bothing pirating the games;
Now, pardon my french, but I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE NEEDING THE CD TO PLAY THE GAMES. I want the option to be able to install a patch - or hell, write my OWN patch - or image the CD - so I don't need that CD. Swapping CDs sucks, and they get damaged and lost. There is NO POINT.
Requiring the CD is stupid because it's a measure that is so easily circumvented and dries people who legitimately buy the game mad. That's a great idea, guys. Rocket science.
I don't mind online activation; It would be a good compromise to not needing the CD. I'll even call a 800 number and do it voice. One thing I want though is once that copy is activated, is ability to NOT NEED A DAMN CD. What makes this especially inane is people who download it via steam don't need the CD; people who buy it do! Hahaha. Great.
There is, however, an easiy solution to this: An escrow clause in the contract. If the company ceases to provide online authentication, it has to provide a means to play the game under the terms of the contract. This is common in the software industry in the closed source critical applications field; so why can't we get this out of the way here? It's easy; it shows good faith on the part of Valve; and the game isn't going to be worth selling in 10 years anyway.
The bad press valve is picking up is not worth it. Maybe I'm wrong.. but this is going to snowball. Way to flush years of community goodwill down the toilet.
Hope to be getting another SD card soon; cheap off ebay and does a lot more than the ipod for a comparable price. Good sound quality with an aftermarket player, plays videos, etc etc etc etc.
Decided I'd try one before I went all in on an ipod mini, strikes me as a lot of money to spend for something that just does music - and is very likely to be obsoleted in the near future by a 4gb flash-based iPod device.
It's shiney metal as well.
I've had the opportunity to work with QNX a lot, but never on a commercial project - I've seen it lose out to embedded Linux flavours, 1VxWorks and OS9, and even WinCE. QNX has great memory managment, is extremely robust, and has an acceptable IDE available. The IPC and messaging model they use is great. The windowing kit is nice - the GUI is a little dated, but you can make it do some neat tricks.
:(
Unfortuantely for QNX, it's got mediocre driver support (e.g. plan on writing 'em, or paying extra for hardware that does) and it's liscencing fees are not competitive with embedded linux or BSD. Neither of those are as robust as QNX in terms of hard realtime behaviour, but for most applications they are "good enough".
Not enough people get exposed to QNX, and it's hurting them - but not as badly as the wide availability of free unix alternatives. It is a great product though, unfortunately, I can see it going the way of a lot of other great products that the market ignored.
I enjoy using the noncommerical version of QNX to stay up to speed on RTOS concepts and development, and I have a hobby project of trying to do engine ignition timing off a standard PC that I trust to QNX - something I wouldn't trust to linux, just yet.
If your child has any interest in electronics, get them this book - I assume it's still in print - it is the best introduction to electronics and electricity I have ever seen. I got it when I was 12 or so, and it's probably why I have an EE degree now.
;)
It is a perfect match to one of those 200-in-one kits, or better yet, a $200 gift certificate to digikey and a prototype board.
Er, open source technologies help the "third world" as much as they help the "first world".
The big advantages of the "first world" - a well educated workforce, an open advanced education framework, stable government, good supply and distribution networks, and easily obtained capital investment are extremely powerful when combined with open source. While open source helps the third world, there are MANY other factors involved.
Unless you want to live like your average joe IN the third world, productivity must increase per worker by large factor.
Something I realized awhile ago - and I have been doing very well since - is that open source technologies are not about the software development and software retailing and support processes at ALL. You can make money doing this, but as you mentioned, you won't make a LOT of money. The money isn't going to be in software companies - up until now, the 0 production cost of software after initial R&D is a lisence to print money.
What I realized though was having all this technology around enables companies to apply all sorts of new, "free" technology to solve new problems. Many of the new "free" technologies help a lot of different companies; for example, an inexpensive real time OS is of benefit to many many people. As are machine control libraries, communications libraries, toolkits, etc etc. Do you have any idea how powerful libraries like FFTW are?
All of those pieces can be put together to make new companies possible and existing companies more productive. That's where the gold under the rainbow is for Open Source; commodity software that is in everyone's best interest can be jointly developed, saving thousands and thousands of man hours of duplicated effort.
The only way to compete with third world labour is to increase productivity - and open source technologies can really help here.
And -that- boys and girls is why some savvy venture capitalists are waking up. Finally.
A good majority of that 22MBPD is for refinement into Gasoline, Jet Fuel, Kerosene, Plastics, Fuel Oil (for heating), etc.
It's all burned and turned into heat. If there is no oil, or the plan is to stop burning oil - a replacement for that energy is needed. Very little is turned into hard goods. My point is that the green technologies are way, way, way, way, way off from being feasible as any kind of replacement.
So, make them 1MW. I'll do one better - make them -10MW-. You still need millions, and you are assuming high utilization rates.
Everything around you is energy. Nothing else really matters a whole lot.
Ballparked the numbers from Google; they should be reasonably accurate. Oil is a very powerful medium to transport energy.
..that is JUST to replace oil consumption ..and that's JUST for the USA alone ..and that assumes an optimistic 50% productivity ..and that assumes 100% energy transfer like oil provides - you'd probably have 50% transfer loss on top of the above - how's 12,000,000 500kW windmills sound? ..and that assumes 0 growth in USA oil production
Oil alone;
MBPD = million barrels per day
Average US consumption of oil per day: ~22MBPD
World Consumption: ~85-90MBPD
Energy in a barrel of oil: ~6.1e9 J
1kWh = 3.61e6 Joules.
Doing some numbers: 1 barrel of oil ~1700kWh
1700kWh/barrel x 22e6 barrels/day x 365day/year =
1.37e13 kWh - Yes, that's 10^13
How many windmills is that?
Let's assume medium-sized windmills for an average - 500kW units. Those are some big honking windmills, but not impractical.
How much energy will one of those provide assuming a 50% cycle (a little on the high end, but hey, let's be optimists) over the course of a year?
500kW x 24h/day x 365d x 0.5 = 2.2e6kWh
1.37e13kWh / 2.2e6 kWh = ~6,234,000 windmills. That's six MILLION windmills.
In short.. fusion, hot or cold, or someone better find out how to extract energy from the quantum vacuum (e.g. casimir effect) or we're all fu.. er, finished.
I live in a part of Canada that has a 25% - yeah, 25% - unemployment rate. I have never had a problem getting work, even here. The key is to recognize your market is global and plan accordingly.
Optimism is contagious and the world needs more of it. If you are tired of being beat down by the man, create your own company doing -whatever-. There are HUGE markets out there for any number of products, IT related or no. If companies want things that help them become more productive - go looking for things you can make or develop to do that. Remember all that hype about the internet? Providing instant access to the globe? It's us here that did that and made that possible. Who wrote the rules that we can't take advantage of that and profit from it?
Take all those programming skills and apply them to a real-world problem. Programming itself is worthless. It's programming applied to a problem that becomes valuable - and at the end of the day, that's what people forgot.
Job security of the past is finished. The sooner people understand that the better. The only security you get is by becoming master of your own fate - and that means running your own show. You have every advantage in front of you - easy communication, cheap computers and equipment - find a niche and prosper.
I don't know what's wrong with people these days. Find a problem and fix it. Profit.
Thanks for the reply even if you don't know what you're talking about.
Come again? I design embedded software for CNC machines. Every one of the manufacturing companies I work for is in the process of moving away, has completely moved away, or wants nothing to do with Autocad. They are all using the more attractively priced and (subjectively) easier to use Solidworks and the solid modelling approach, something Autocad was late to the game with.
It strikes me that there is enough resources being spent for the small manufacturing sector to make a large open source project of this nature possible. There are some open source CAD programs out there, but they're a long long way from being commercially useful.