SCO will just continue to do anything it can to damage the GPL and Linux even if it is detrimental to SCOs business or share price. In the last "halloween" document MS identified legal attacks as being the only effective way to fight Linux, and now this is happening.
I am the CTO of a small corporation, and unfounded as SCO's claims are, we might have to delay release of product until this is resolved. Their liscence is several times the price of the product in whole!
Legal fights are very, very effective indeed. I hope this is resolved quickly. I also hope that SCO executives are investigated to the fullest extent of US law for their actions in this matter.
X.25 based ham radio bulletin boards have been in existance for a long, long time - including e-mail and text messaging in addition to binary file transfers. The patent issues seem pretty thin here.. does anyone have more information on their claim?
5 years of calculus; no calculator. There's nothing to caluclate in calculus!
That said, I hope they didn't cheap out on the keyboard, it looks like those crappy rubber non-tactile buttons in that picture, and the keys on my hp48 are why I still have one.
Nothing is free. Replicating something, and doing it without consuming kilowatts of power are two different things. Very few nanotech papers discuss the amount of energy required to break the bonds that make up materials.
If you break down very strong materials down to the molecular level, you have the same elements present in everything. If a machine could be devised that accepted raw materials in the form elemental matter - a container for hydrogen, a container for iron, a container for gold, a container for silicon - and then arranged those elemental molecules in perfect replication of forged steel, or cold-rolled alumnimum you'd have the ability to create nearly anything.
Unless we have free energy, the requirements for what you just described will not be practical for some time. Nanoscale manufacturing for common materials doesn't make much sense at the consumer level, at least for the forseeable future. Metal is cheeeeep.
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? "
No. Talking to inanimate devices in my home is something I do not what to do, and while cute, gets REALLY OLD FAST.
Don't ever invest in anything that uses "voice recognition technology" as a selling point for a consumer product. It's all pointless and it sucks. Are you realistically going to sit there and listen to your SO talk to the TV?
The killer app for voice recognition technology is in automating call centers. The first person to develop transparent dialog with a computer will become a multi-billionaire as you've just found a way to eliminate tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in front line technical support.
Desktop manufacturing is a long, long, long way off. You can do it with plastic bits, MAYBE circuit boards, but not much else. Technologies like these have revolutionized the manufacturing process - rapid mold prototyping for casting, and C&C machining of parts.
The fact remains though that you're not going to get the strength of cast aluminum or forged metal without very expensive equipment - that's not pessimism, that's physics.
Uuuuh.. you can get an industrial form factor PC with CF drives and IDE headers for between $300-500. Mount it in the trunk, and run your I/O some other way. Don't see the appeal of the DIN mounting here.. especially with mp3 players rampant / cheap.
I'm waiting to install a Arcom Controls board in the trunk, with 802.11 onboard so I can copy music from my home PC into the car transparently.
I very much doubt that any computer brain will feasibly be able to act fast enought to handle these types of split-second occurances. Certainly not in 10 years.
Our brains are actually pretty slow at this. Try balancing a broomhandle upside down on your hand. You can do it for awhile. It's a classic experiment to build a control system that will hold it at vertical, or at an angle, indefinately, dispite deliberate impulses to try and knock it into an unstable plane. Robotic drivers have the potential to be a lot safer than human drivers - they aren't constrained by our limited vision. IR can detect ice far in advance of the trucke ever hitting it!
Robots could very easily deal with these situations, perhaps even safer, because you could drive a robotic truck into the ditch without as much remorse or thought to self-preservation.
Creativity will be very hard to duplicate. Driving, however, is mind-numbing boredom.
I guess you fail to consider the possibility that you might be killed too...
Everybody dies someday. I have two brothers in the military. It's a pretty good deal, all things considered. Beats whining about being unemployed on Slashdot, anyhow! Ha.
Software has a market value rapidly screaming towards zero, zip, zilch, nada. This is in part because of the open source movement, but it makes too much sense and is/was largely inevitable. Tools that everyone benefits from make sense to develop collectively. "It is inevitable"
The trick is to apply those technologies to non-commodity tasks to save money by enabling more efficient or new production technologies. One example would be adapting an embedded linux to real time control applications, so you can more easily control and automate a production facility (likely putting workers out of jobs, or allowing existing staff to do more). This might have taken money from a commercial RTOS vendor, but enabled the production company to become more efficient, and created a demand for someone with the skills to implement the solution.
Resources do not necessarily dissapear because a job has gone. That means that in our economic system, it's more beneficial for that person to do something else - it just sucks balls when you are that person.
Software is a means to an end, not an end in it's own right. This is something a lot of people have forgotten. Free software puts the means to produce things in the hands of many, many more people - not all of them Americans - and allows them to try and produce something of value with it, all the while contributing those changes back to the community.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, so maybe things are worse than I understand in the US.
Nothing but patience, some tools, and the service manual is required to rebuild an engine or transmission in a car. It's a myth that engines can't be repaired; they are fairly simple. You can bore out most engines at least once, and for a modest parts outlay, you can rebuild the engine good as new for much less money than a new car.
I'm learning, slowly, how to build performance engines in my spare time. My situation might be a little bit different than the average person here (Both I and my girlfriend have a engineering degrees), but that's my backup plan. I can easily cover rent and expenses rebuilding engines in my spare time, and that's a market that increases substantially when the economy is bad for a prolonged period.
However, it is a myth cars are throw away now. Far from it. They're a lot more complicated than they used to be, but computers are what we're supposed to be good at here, right?
Atmel AVRs have been paying for my supper for awhile now. Atmel fairly recently released a internet developer kit for the platform; I imagine this could be easily moved to another platform. It's not excessively expensive for the development kit, and can be produced in volume.
This kit contains everything required to start working with embedded web designs. The Kit is using an ethernet connection to the web, and comes with a complete license free TCP-IP stack. The complete source code for the embedded web server is included in the kit.
My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?
I get it, you must be a dotbomber...Something for nothing is the way the world works. And the world can't continue unless everyone is magically and benevolently provided for.
The economy has a way of providing for basic needs, because every society is three missed meals away from a revolution, or thereabouts. If things ever got so bad people weren't eating, then there are much worse things to worry about than IT.
I wouldn't call that baseless optimism. Realism, perhaps. You just might have to learn how to do something else. Like fix cars. Or weld. I'm an engineer, primarily involved in embedded systems, but I'm learning how to rebuild engines and weld as a way to feed myself if I spend a long time out of work.
Tech is simply too volatile to base your whole life's career on. And those who don't adapt and change, will die a slow, horrible death.
People should focus on being able to do something that produces value for a company or society. Learn to make something. Software as a product has a value that is rapidly speeding towards zero. Other sectors, like the embedded market, industrial controls, specialized welding, manufacturing automation and more all have jobs available, but require more learning and experience than your average network installation does. These are also jobs that by their nature cannot be outsourced.
I think IT as it was is going to die hard. The future is in finding new applications of technology to improve the bottom line.
This isn't the end of the world. Everyone needs to eat, and the economy has a way of providing for that. If the economy crashes to the point where there are no jobs, then there's no market for those foriegn produced goods, is there?
Any source of cheap, unlimited and free energy would be the end of man. Any source of unlimited energy can likely be scaled to the point where it becomes a tremendously devasating weapon, or is used to produce WMD inexpensively. Anyone naieve enough to think that this wouldn't happen in kidding themselves.
I read an essay or interview with Tesla (who was interested in the possibilities of "free" energy) that expressed similar views; his approach was to look at ways to develop defensive shields that made weapons ineffectual. Unfortunately, I do not believe he was aware of the devasating power of nuclear weapons or any high-energy source.
There are many very good ideas for ways to exploit quantum and zero-point behaviour to extract energy from nothing. If a device like that existed, we'd be doomed. Remember; at some point, when the universe was created - quite a pile of energy was created from, well, nothing. That's another debate.
I'd love to use apple workstations, but they need to get out there and make some sells to the big names - someone has to listen, because I am sick of paying mad money to buy overpriced Sun crap to run EDA tools because there's not much choice for >4GB workstations, and sick of bugs in Windows versions of software.. and I want Unix, damnit!
QCad. I'm sure it's a nice package. But 2D? That's so 1980's. Apple should get some hot sales reps over to some big names.. an open source package being made to run (non native) isn't worthy of news.
How about any one of the following, that would immediately justify the purchase of a G5 for me.. although I'll break down eventually, ha. These would be news:
On the mech front:
Solidworks AutoCAD Pro/Engineer UniGraphics On the EE front:
Synopsys Anything Cadence Anything Hell even OrCAD.. Mentor Graphics Anything..
Come on, apple! The memory limit is gone, so get some big guys on board.
It's easy to be flippant about this but in an terrible job market, if the question is whether to pee in a cup & feed one's family or protest on principle and go hungry the decision is pretty obvious
Everyones principles have a price. My point is that if privacy and principles mattered, the problem would be self-solving.
Re:I'm sure it will do wonders for..
on
Swiping Out Cancer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Insurance companies as well.
Go to your job interview, pee in this cup, swipe this in your mouth.
In one simple step eliminate drug users, and possible insurance deadweights... Joy!
Those who subject to drug tests have nobody to blame but themselves for their proliferation to other industries like insurance. If nobody submits to a test, or a signifigant fraction of the exceptional workers refuse, a competitive advantage exists for those companies who do not test.
The process of pre-employment drug testing is rare (and, I think, illegal) in Canada, and our country has not fallen apart as a result. I have no information to assume there is any difference in levels of drug addiction between Canada and the USA.
Drug testing is easily remedied outside the courts if it truely bothers you. It seems most people are content to piss in a cup for a job. To each their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know if the 1 Gig of ram will work with the 12" PB?
Yup, if if you have the bucks.
SCO will just continue to do anything it can to damage the GPL and Linux even if it is detrimental to SCOs business or share price. In the last "halloween" document MS identified legal attacks as being the only effective way to fight Linux, and now this is happening.
I am the CTO of a small corporation, and unfounded as SCO's claims are, we might have to delay release of product until this is resolved. Their liscence is several times the price of the product in whole!
Legal fights are very, very effective indeed. I hope this is resolved quickly. I also hope that SCO executives are investigated to the fullest extent of US law for their actions in this matter.
X.25 based ham radio bulletin boards have been in existance for a long, long time - including e-mail and text messaging in addition to binary file transfers. The patent issues seem pretty thin here.. does anyone have more information on their claim?
5 years of calculus; no calculator. There's nothing to caluclate in calculus!
That said, I hope they didn't cheap out on the keyboard, it looks like those crappy rubber non-tactile buttons in that picture, and the keys on my hp48 are why I still have one.
Nothing is free. Replicating something, and doing it without consuming kilowatts of power are two different things. Very few nanotech papers discuss the amount of energy required to break the bonds that make up materials.
If you break down very strong materials down to the molecular level, you have the same elements present in everything. If a machine could be devised that accepted raw materials in the form elemental matter - a container for hydrogen, a container for iron, a container for gold, a container for silicon - and then arranged those elemental molecules in perfect replication of forged steel, or cold-rolled alumnimum you'd have the ability to create nearly anything.
Unless we have free energy, the requirements for what you just described will not be practical for some time. Nanoscale manufacturing for common materials doesn't make much sense at the consumer level, at least for the forseeable future. Metal is cheeeeep.
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? "
No. Talking to inanimate devices in my home is something I do not what to do, and while cute, gets REALLY OLD FAST.
Don't ever invest in anything that uses "voice recognition technology" as a selling point for a consumer product. It's all pointless and it sucks. Are you realistically going to sit there and listen to your SO talk to the TV?
The killer app for voice recognition technology is in automating call centers. The first person to develop transparent dialog with a computer will become a multi-billionaire as you've just found a way to eliminate tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in front line technical support.
Desktop manufacturing is a long, long, long way off. You can do it with plastic bits, MAYBE circuit boards, but not much else. Technologies like these have revolutionized the manufacturing process - rapid mold prototyping for casting, and C&C machining of parts.
The fact remains though that you're not going to get the strength of cast aluminum or forged metal without very expensive equipment - that's not pessimism, that's physics.
Uuuuh.. you can get an industrial form factor PC with CF drives and IDE headers for between $300-500. Mount it in the trunk, and run your I/O some other way. Don't see the appeal of the DIN mounting here.. especially with mp3 players rampant / cheap.
I'm waiting to install a Arcom Controls board in the trunk, with 802.11 onboard so I can copy music from my home PC into the car transparently.
I very much doubt that any computer brain will feasibly be able to act fast enought to handle these types of split-second occurances. Certainly not in 10 years.
Our brains are actually pretty slow at this. Try balancing a broomhandle upside down on your hand. You can do it for awhile. It's a classic experiment to build a control system that will hold it at vertical, or at an angle, indefinately, dispite deliberate impulses to try and knock it into an unstable plane. Robotic drivers have the potential to be a lot safer than human drivers - they aren't constrained by our limited vision. IR can detect ice far in advance of the trucke ever hitting it!
Robots could very easily deal with these situations, perhaps even safer, because you could drive a robotic truck into the ditch without as much remorse or thought to self-preservation.
Creativity will be very hard to duplicate. Driving, however, is mind-numbing boredom.
I guess you fail to consider the possibility that you might be killed too...
Everybody dies someday. I have two brothers in the military. It's a pretty good deal, all things considered. Beats whining about being unemployed on Slashdot, anyhow! Ha.
Software has a market value rapidly screaming towards zero, zip, zilch, nada. This is in part because of the open source movement, but it makes too much sense and is/was largely inevitable. Tools that everyone benefits from make sense to develop collectively. "It is inevitable"
The trick is to apply those technologies to non-commodity tasks to save money by enabling more efficient or new production technologies. One example would be adapting an embedded linux to real time control applications, so you can more easily control and automate a production facility (likely putting workers out of jobs, or allowing existing staff to do more). This might have taken money from a commercial RTOS vendor, but enabled the production company to become more efficient, and created a demand for someone with the skills to implement the solution.
Resources do not necessarily dissapear because a job has gone. That means that in our economic system, it's more beneficial for that person to do something else - it just sucks balls when you are that person.
Software is a means to an end, not an end in it's own right. This is something a lot of people have forgotten. Free software puts the means to produce things in the hands of many, many more people - not all of them Americans - and allows them to try and produce something of value with it, all the while contributing those changes back to the community.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, so maybe things are worse than I understand in the US.
Nothing but patience, some tools, and the service manual is required to rebuild an engine or transmission in a car. It's a myth that engines can't be repaired; they are fairly simple. You can bore out most engines at least once, and for a modest parts outlay, you can rebuild the engine good as new for much less money than a new car.
I'm learning, slowly, how to build performance engines in my spare time. My situation might be a little bit different than the average person here (Both I and my girlfriend have a engineering degrees), but that's my backup plan. I can easily cover rent and expenses rebuilding engines in my spare time, and that's a market that increases substantially when the economy is bad for a prolonged period.
However, it is a myth cars are throw away now. Far from it. They're a lot more complicated than they used to be, but computers are what we're supposed to be good at here, right?
There is a great deal of competition for defense jobs -- your "last resort" was the first choice for a whole lot of super-qualified people.
Enlist.
Problem solved, you're not going to starve, and with an education, you'll do pretty well.
Just buy more hard drives. 70,000meg isn't actually that much anymore. RAID, remember?
Atmel AVRs have been paying for my supper for awhile now. Atmel fairly recently released a internet developer kit for the platform; I imagine this could be easily moved to another platform. It's not excessively expensive for the development kit, and can be produced in volume.
p ?t ool_id=2727
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.as
This kit contains everything required to start working with embedded web designs. The Kit is using an ethernet connection to the web, and comes with a complete license free TCP-IP stack. The complete source code for the embedded web server is included in the kit.
My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?
:-)
Never used a Hp48, the real deal, have you?
I get it, you must be a dotbomber...Something for nothing is the way the world works. And the world can't continue unless everyone is magically and benevolently provided for.
The economy has a way of providing for basic needs, because every society is three missed meals away from a revolution, or thereabouts. If things ever got so bad people weren't eating, then there are much worse things to worry about than IT.
I wouldn't call that baseless optimism. Realism, perhaps. You just might have to learn how to do something else. Like fix cars. Or weld. I'm an engineer, primarily involved in embedded systems, but I'm learning how to rebuild engines and weld as a way to feed myself if I spend a long time out of work.
Tech is simply too volatile to base your whole life's career on. And those who don't adapt and change, will die a slow, horrible death.
People should focus on being able to do something that produces value for a company or society. Learn to make something. Software as a product has a value that is rapidly speeding towards zero. Other sectors, like the embedded market, industrial controls, specialized welding, manufacturing automation and more all have jobs available, but require more learning and experience than your average network installation does. These are also jobs that by their nature cannot be outsourced.
I think IT as it was is going to die hard. The future is in finding new applications of technology to improve the bottom line.
This isn't the end of the world. Everyone needs to eat, and the economy has a way of providing for that. If the economy crashes to the point where there are no jobs, then there's no market for those foriegn produced goods, is there?
If we can't get our act together to get 17000 kilobucks together, then maybe we're really not worth preserving. It's something to think about.
Any source of cheap, unlimited and free energy would be the end of man. Any source of unlimited energy can likely be scaled to the point where it becomes a tremendously devasating weapon, or is used to produce WMD inexpensively. Anyone naieve enough to think that this wouldn't happen in kidding themselves.
I read an essay or interview with Tesla (who was interested in the possibilities of "free" energy) that expressed similar views; his approach was to look at ways to develop defensive shields that made weapons ineffectual. Unfortunately, I do not believe he was aware of the devasating power of nuclear weapons or any high-energy source.
There are many very good ideas for ways to exploit quantum and zero-point behaviour to extract energy from nothing. If a device like that existed, we'd be doomed. Remember; at some point, when the universe was created - quite a pile of energy was created from, well, nothing. That's another debate.
..that doesn't exist, and produces product nobody consumes.
hahahaha!
I'd love to use apple workstations, but they need to get out there and make some sells to the big names - someone has to listen, because I am sick of paying mad money to buy overpriced Sun crap to run EDA tools because there's not much choice for >4GB workstations, and sick of bugs in Windows versions of software.. and I want Unix, damnit!
QCad. I'm sure it's a nice package. But 2D? That's so 1980's. Apple should get some hot sales reps over to some big names.. an open source package being made to run (non native) isn't worthy of news.
How about any one of the following, that would immediately justify the purchase of a G5 for me.. although I'll break down eventually, ha. These would be news:
On the mech front:
Solidworks
AutoCAD
Pro/Engineer
UniGraphics
On the EE front:
Synopsys Anything
Cadence Anything
Hell even OrCAD..
Mentor Graphics Anything..
Come on, apple! The memory limit is gone, so get some big guys on board.
It's easy to be flippant about this but in an terrible job market, if the question is whether to pee in a cup & feed one's family or protest on principle and go hungry the decision is pretty obvious
Everyones principles have a price. My point is that if privacy and principles mattered, the problem would be self-solving.
Insurance companies as well.
Go to your job interview, pee in this cup, swipe this in your mouth.
In one simple step eliminate drug users, and possible insurance deadweights... Joy!
Those who subject to drug tests have nobody to blame but themselves for their proliferation to other industries like insurance. If nobody submits to a test, or a signifigant fraction of the exceptional workers refuse, a competitive advantage exists for those companies who do not test.
The process of pre-employment drug testing is rare (and, I think, illegal) in Canada, and our country has not fallen apart as a result. I have no information to assume there is any difference in levels of drug addiction between Canada and the USA.
Drug testing is easily remedied outside the courts if it truely bothers you. It seems most people are content to piss in a cup for a job. To each their own.