You misunderstood: CableCard is a common receiver spec with a service-issued card to enable access to their DRM'd content. This is a feature found in a number of digital TV monitors.
See here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1749012,00.as p it turns out TiVo is already planning this, and here: http://engadget.com/entry/123400030002 5456/ for an Engadget report on Cable Card.
The Sat receivers have no such common format -- you're stuck with their receivers, and transfer to other devices is analog (except for HD)
I really, really like my 1st-gen Tivo. Streaming the whole world's content is probably not in their cards, because of the enormous legal costs to get that started (and defended).
A good first step would be a CableCard-enabled TiVo, so that it can sit directly on those DRM-laden digital cable nets. But there has to be a significant [b]perceived[/b] improvement over the existing cableco-owned PVR. Multiple tuners, better UI, HD... but it's going to be awfully hard to generate revenue when the cableco's give their boxes away.
Too bad there's no CableCard equivalent for DirecTV, VOOM, and EchoStar.
I'm with another poster, where my old Palm m515 is only good for a few games and e-books on flights where there isn't really room to unlimber my laptop.
Of course it would really, really help if Verizon would 'open' the phone, so it wasn't a fee to play any games on it. C'mon, at least my old Nokia had MasterMind, Concentration and Snakes!
But what would I really want? I've been debating to myself recently whether I'd want a 'does everything' box, or a Bluetooth (or its successor)-controlled personal network sitting on my (cough) utility belt.
MP3/Movie Player -- I figure these will be up to 200GB by Xmas 2006, a 40GB player should be squeezable into a phone and still leave space for a decent battery life. This and the screen will *have* to be part of the 'main' unit even if I go with the utility belt scheme.
Headset should be wireless, for both music listening and making calls. An eyephone is probably more than I can ask for (would that be more bandwidth than Bluetooth can handle?).
But the other features... Gotta have an OS that will permit loading personally-chosen software. Linux, some portable Windows OS of the week, or Palm would all be acceptable to me. Gotta run MAME.
I can see that with decent wireless networking (WiMax), this could be my PC, portable at all times if the voice-activated, thumbboard and touchscreen all work well together (ooh, touchscreen is something my phone needs too). A trip to an internet cafe would be just to have a bigger screen and keyboard to use with my truly personal computer.
Camera? Sounds like a good case for a utility belt. There's no way to strap a decent zoom lens to a PDA. Now we're talking higher-speed wireless, if we want automatic transfer to the main unit.
GPS? Probably on the base. Today's phone-based stuff won't be too useful out of cell range for the geocachers. You can already get headless bluetooth modules for Palm/Win PDAs.
Anything else on a possible utility belt? heart rate or blood sugar monitoring, laser pointer, multitool, avalanche airbag, hydration pack, pencil...
With a big character set, you could do the Matrix scrolling characters through the RAM, which has a certain geeky appeal.
ASCII porn within your computer, mentioned above, has its appeal, but since you're not likely to have more than, say, four rows by 16 columns, it's pretty low-res even for ASCII art.
With scrolling, though, it would be sort of an ASCII peephole.
USB Drives and TV Shows
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
I just had to comment on USB drives: This week's "Crossing Jordan" (which is often lots more fun than CSI) had them find a thumb drive on an FBI agent, which a) Had a huge amount of data (50GB? A terabyte? I don't remember, but it was ridiculous) (cough) b) Had USB *and* firewire (cough) c) Had *serious* encryption, yet they broke it in an afternoon (cough, cough, bird flipped at screen)
Why must you insult our intelligence? Bad enough they have to scroll through fingerprints on-screen, and show web pages appearing instantly. At least get somebody to check your facts!
Moore's Law isn't Speed Doubling, it's Transistors
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The fallacy here is that the clock speed has to keep doubling. Moore's law says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles each 18 month period, and we're still pretty close to that.
Intel has just caved on the speed doubling in particular, by knocking the clock speed off their product designations, mainly because the Pentium M chips were running significantly faster than the same-speed P4's. AMD's Athlons have been 'fudging' their numbers by having the product number match not their clock speed, but that of the roughly equivalent P4 chip.
Meanwhile, cache sizes are up, instruction pipes are up, hyperthreading has been here a while, multi-core chips are coming down the pike... we're still getting speed gains, just not in raw clocks.
At the same time, the Amiga philosphy of offloading to other processors is truth, with more transistors on the high-end graphics processors than there are on the CPUs!
I hate to say it, but what do you think you need 10GHz for anyway? Unless you've got a REALLY fat pipe, there's a limit on how much pr0n you can process;^)
The high-end machines do make good foot-warmers in cold climes.
This will show my age, but the first kid in the neighborhood who had a computer was someone whose father owned a business and got an IMSAI 8080. Ten minutes of flipping switches let us load a boostrap casette, which let us load the OS cassette, which let us load the Collosal Cave cassette, which would typically run for about 15 minutes before static electricity would crash the whole darn thing.
When TRS-80 model 1 started showing up in the local Radio Shacks during Jr. High and High School, it was great fun to do 10 PRINT "BOB IS A WEENIE" 20 GOTO 10 and even better when you knew the trick to prevent the Break key from working (which I've long forgotten)
In high school, I was lucky enough to join the Apprentice Program Experimental School, a weekend program run out of this guy's basement crammed with 1960's electronics, including a full recording studio. During the '80s computers became a stronger focus, including the donation of an ancient, core-memory-based Data General computer that took an entire rack, without any permanent storage other than paper tape (don't put the mylar in the tape punch on the TTY!).
Meanwhile, the school dropped the use of time sharing (remind me to tell you about early hackage someday), and began the use of a PDP-11/03 with four users on MUBAS (Multi-User basic) or one on RT-11-based Fortran. More hackage ensued there. The business dept. of the school also had Cobol via punch cards sent overnight to the business office.
All in all, I thought I was pretty lucky. Right after I graduated, they brought in about 100 Apple II's, and I felt ripped off;^)
My own kids took to computers pretty much along with reading (ages 3-4) and video games. At around 10, my younger son was working on Inform (and now Flash), at 15 my older son has already taken AP CS (first year of Java).
Frankly, I'd start 'em with PowerPoint! There's enough automation, animation, etc. to get them started, and the slide transitions and sound effects will get them hooked.
(On the other hand, I hate the way PowerPoint is dumbing down kids' thinking, so there's no need to flame over that)
Aint-It-Cool news reported on the 11th that Nausicaa.net had a news item on 11/23 that Pete Docter, the director of Monsters, Inc., would be directing the US release.
Remember Cryptonomocon? The best message is binary: 1 or 0. Prearrange your message to appear somewhere, anywhere (AOHell, rec.arts.nascar (heh), Slashdot Anonymous Cowards, whatever), and wait.
There's no way of knowing what message means 0 and what means 1, let alone what 0 and 1 imply.
Steganography? Hardly. Now, delivering detailed instructions is a lot harder, but still child's play. Like XBox Live, for instance.
1) Apple's stock price is inflated because of the iPod 2) HP won't want to give up their marketing of the iPod, or the perceived loss of control if IBM snatches up Apple 3) A bidding war between HP and IBM for the whole of Apple's biz would benefit neither, only Apple shareholders.
So my conclusion is that IBM isn't going to buy up Apple, unless it was silly enough to have a deal planned to spin off the iPod/iTunes unit to HP, and that's quite a cash cow to give up.
The biggest side benefit of that might be that it could diffuse the Apple Corp. (Beatles) lawsuit, if Apple Computer is no longer the owner of a music-related product. A spinoff might be the only way to end that suit (Apple or whoever owns them would still have to cough up a big chunk of bullion to Yoko and Sir Paul, but it would end the long-term problems).
I'm not fond of CF bulbs: most of the reasonably-priced ones I've installed lately have a slow warmup period, during which time they're very red in color, and rather dim.
You also can not EVER use them with a rheostat (dimmer). If the LED-based lamps can be used with dimmers, they've got a market advantage (I was trying to find out when the site got slashdotted)
CF bulbs started in the $20-30 range, and were somewhat large and bulky. The current 60-100 watt direct replacement lamp bulbs are as cheap as 3 for $10 at Ikea.
Sulfur Microwave lamps have two major disadvantages: 1) They're big, not designed for desk lamps and such 2) They use a 2.45GHz microwave generator. That number should sound familiar.... yup, they jam 802.11b/g. For that reason alone, many government installations can not use WiFi.
My kids (16 & 14) are getting a little old to be interested in Lego much, except for the Robotix system (Thing2 is currently in the FIRST Lego League).
MtG is still big.
D&D is still occasionally played.
Board/Boxed games such as Settlers of Catan still proves popular, although newer ones such as Munchkin, Apples to Apples, etc. get more play time. I'm trying to get them interested in some old Avalon-Hill boxes I've got lying around such as Kingmaker, Diplomacy (probably not mature enough) and Rail Baron.
I've got the oldest PC in the house (not counting the Mac Plus in the basement I can't bear to throw away) set up as a server with a pair of silent 160GB drives, an ATA133 card and new USB 2.0 ports (nice front panel with most flash media readers). Total investment under $250 to upgrade the machine to be the home server.
Over 500 CD's have been loaded into it using WMA at 192kbps, and they're now available to the computers each of us have in the house (six other machines for the four of us).
I've got an ancient TiVo with a lifetime sub, so no ethernet, no streaming.
But I bought a GoVideo DVD player for $100 (progressive scan, decent output) that comes with a PCMCIA ethernet card (can be replaced with WiFi), and streams off the server using software from Gateway or GoVideo (or anything Universal Plug and Play). The Gateway/GoVideo server software sucks, I've been looking for the time to put something else that uses UPP up on that machine.
I haven't tried streaming video on that setup, but the old machine is too slow to recode anyting anyway. Besides, my DVDs are all in one room.
have a TV tuner, and PVR software on my XBOX than just playback.
There are enough media players out there (such as the GoVideo 2730) able to play anything Universal Plug & Play provides, that making my XBOX another player is, frankly, dull.
It would seem to me that a simple USB port and the ability to read the structure or database off a mass-storage compliant digital audio player would give you full artist/title browse access and full playback of anything from a thumbdrive to a 60GB player.
The catch is that the 65+% iPod isn't mass-storage compliant, and their wire remote protocol is proprietary.
It shouldn't cost much: if I can have a DVD player that sits on my home ethernet and reads anything uPNP, plays DVDs in progressive scan, has full digital audio outputs for $100, I should be able to get all the features I want for $50 over the cost of a standard head unit.
More than just application quality, price, ease of use, etc. will be needed to get OSS into big corporations. Many of them have spent significant $$$ on add-ins and custom development in Word, Excel and Access. If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Those apps are a big part of my business -- I'd happily migrate them, but nobody's the least bit interested in the Pharmaceutical industry in moving away from MS Word and Excel.
It's bad enough that broadcast TV is held to different standards than cable and sat stations, given that more houses have the latter than don't at this point.
But if there's regular payments to the feds for the right to broadcast TV, that's going to give the feds a stronger claim to regulate and censor content.
And who's going to pay for that extra fee? The stations? The networks? Nope, it'll get passed back to the advertisers, causing an inflationary cycle on consumer products. And those advertisers will put an even stronger grip on content, if they're paying for it.
Sure, I don't need to see Dennis Franz' @$$ ever again, but when shows like The Shield and Rescue Me have a free reign (and commercials, hmm...), and the best drama and comedy in the Emmys were on HBO, making the networks pay more will only decrease the quality of programming.
It's not that different from taking bids for contract work, just on a micro scale.
For me, it's acceptable for nurses and similar occupations because nurses are government certified to meet certain standards (your average IT job isn't certified at all, and the ones that are aren't by the state).
Except for the fact that it could be a single 8-hour shift, this isn't any different than requesting bids for building a building (architects and engineers are also government certified).
And if the starting bid is too low? Nobody takes the job, and the free market forces them to move their bar up. If a nurse bids too high? You don't work. That's not likely to happen, given the number of nursing vacancies out there and the limited pool to fill them.
Now a clever app would act as a neutral broker for what shift-jobbers are willing to work for and the available openings, so that as many people as possible get the maximum value for their time. It gets more complicated when you factor in favorable shifts, locations and specialties (e.g., a warn nurse isn't going to bid high on an ER triage on graveyard shift on a Saturday in an inner-city hospital 100 miles away).
But the problem really goes back to hospitals not wanting to pay enough for nurses, while loading more responsibilities (and potential liabilities) upon them.
The result is that fewer students get Bachelors of Nursing degrees, schools close, and the cycle deepens.
Does that mean that, just like horses, 100 years from now they'll have olympic events using them, even though it shows little athleticism on the part of the human being involved?
I'm all in favor of this, and let's mass produce it to get the costs down. I'm sick of the price of auto parts and labor. Recent repairs have involved $200 to replace door hinges that were sticking, and $380 to replace a computerized security module that would decide not to recognize my key on damp mornings.
You can't diagnose a car without closed-source software, specific to the brand. You can't get parts from just anybody.
Build cars like we build PC's and they'll be cheaper to repair, more efficient, and full of cruft in 6 months, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstood: CableCard is a common receiver spec with a service-issued card to enable access to their DRM'd content. This is a feature found in a number of digital TV monitors.
s p it turns out TiVo is already planning this, and2 5456/ for an Engadget report on Cable Card.
See here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1749012,00.a
here:
http://engadget.com/entry/12340003000
The Sat receivers have no such common format -- you're stuck with their receivers, and transfer to other devices is analog (except for HD)
I really, really like my 1st-gen Tivo. Streaming the whole world's content is probably not in their cards, because of the enormous legal costs to get that started (and defended).
A good first step would be a CableCard-enabled TiVo, so that it can sit directly on those DRM-laden digital cable nets. But there has to be a significant [b]perceived[/b] improvement over the existing cableco-owned PVR. Multiple tuners, better UI, HD... but it's going to be awfully hard to generate revenue when the cableco's give their boxes away.
Too bad there's no CableCard equivalent for DirecTV, VOOM, and EchoStar.
So what happens if I'm a retailer who sells a product at a discount (legally, not gray market), that is also sold by the manufacturer?
Can I put an ad, for, say, a Dior fragrance to sell on my site if Dior also sells direct? Or are they cutting off our market?
I'm with another poster, where my old Palm m515 is only good for a few games and e-books on flights where there isn't really room to unlimber my laptop.
Of course it would really, really help if Verizon would 'open' the phone, so it wasn't a fee to play any games on it. C'mon, at least my old Nokia had MasterMind, Concentration and Snakes!
But what would I really want? I've been debating to myself recently whether I'd want a 'does everything' box, or a Bluetooth (or its successor)-controlled personal network sitting on my (cough) utility belt.
MP3/Movie Player -- I figure these will be up to 200GB by Xmas 2006, a 40GB player should be squeezable into a phone and still leave space for a decent battery life. This and the screen will *have* to be part of the 'main' unit even if I go with the utility belt scheme.
Headset should be wireless, for both music listening and making calls. An eyephone is probably more than I can ask for (would that be more bandwidth than Bluetooth can handle?).
But the other features...
Gotta have an OS that will permit loading personally-chosen software. Linux, some portable Windows OS of the week, or Palm would all be acceptable to me. Gotta run MAME.
I can see that with decent wireless networking (WiMax), this could be my PC, portable at all times if the voice-activated, thumbboard and touchscreen all work well together (ooh, touchscreen is something my phone needs too). A trip to an internet cafe would be just to have a bigger screen and keyboard to use with my truly personal computer.
Camera? Sounds like a good case for a utility belt. There's no way to strap a decent zoom lens to a PDA. Now we're talking higher-speed wireless, if we want automatic transfer to the main unit.
GPS? Probably on the base. Today's phone-based stuff won't be too useful out of cell range for the geocachers. You can already get headless bluetooth modules for Palm/Win PDAs.
Anything else on a possible utility belt? heart rate or blood sugar monitoring, laser pointer, multitool, avalanche airbag, hydration pack, pencil...
This should disincetivize one class of blogspam: the pagerank pimps.
However, it doesn't prevent clicking on those links, or having to scroll past general pointless posts.
Phishing links are popping up regularly, as are the "Help me get my free iPod" crap. This does not get reduced by adding the nofollow tag.
With a big character set, you could do the Matrix scrolling characters through the RAM, which has a certain geeky appeal.
ASCII porn within your computer, mentioned above, has its appeal, but since you're not likely to have more than, say, four rows by 16 columns, it's pretty low-res even for ASCII art.
With scrolling, though, it would be sort of an ASCII peephole.
I just had to comment on USB drives: This week's "Crossing Jordan" (which is often lots more fun than CSI) had them find a thumb drive on an FBI agent, which
a) Had a huge amount of data (50GB? A terabyte? I don't remember, but it was ridiculous) (cough)
b) Had USB *and* firewire (cough)
c) Had *serious* encryption, yet they broke it in an afternoon (cough, cough, bird flipped at screen)
Why must you insult our intelligence? Bad enough they have to scroll through fingerprints on-screen, and show web pages appearing instantly. At least get somebody to check your facts!
The fallacy here is that the clock speed has to keep doubling. Moore's law says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles each 18 month period, and we're still pretty close to that.
;^)
Intel has just caved on the speed doubling in particular, by knocking the clock speed off their product designations, mainly because the Pentium M chips were running significantly faster than the same-speed P4's. AMD's Athlons have been 'fudging' their numbers by having the product number match not their clock speed, but that of the roughly equivalent P4 chip.
Meanwhile, cache sizes are up, instruction pipes are up, hyperthreading has been here a while, multi-core chips are coming down the pike... we're still getting speed gains, just not in raw clocks.
At the same time, the Amiga philosphy of offloading to other processors is truth, with more transistors on the high-end graphics processors than there are on the CPUs!
I hate to say it, but what do you think you need 10GHz for anyway? Unless you've got a REALLY fat pipe, there's a limit on how much pr0n you can process
The high-end machines do make good foot-warmers in cold climes.
This will show my age, but the first kid in the neighborhood who had a computer was someone whose father owned a business and got an IMSAI 8080. Ten minutes of flipping switches let us load a boostrap casette, which let us load the OS cassette, which let us load the Collosal Cave cassette, which would typically run for about 15 minutes before static electricity would crash the whole darn thing.
;^)
When TRS-80 model 1 started showing up in the local Radio Shacks during Jr. High and High School, it was great fun to do
10 PRINT "BOB IS A WEENIE"
20 GOTO 10
and even better when you knew the trick to prevent the Break key from working (which I've long forgotten)
In high school, I was lucky enough to join the Apprentice Program Experimental School, a weekend program run out of this guy's basement crammed with 1960's electronics, including a full recording studio. During the '80s computers became a stronger focus, including the donation of an ancient, core-memory-based Data General computer that took an entire rack, without any permanent storage other than paper tape (don't put the mylar in the tape punch on the TTY!).
Meanwhile, the school dropped the use of time sharing (remind me to tell you about early hackage someday), and began the use of a PDP-11/03 with four users on MUBAS (Multi-User basic) or one on RT-11-based Fortran. More hackage ensued there. The business dept. of the school also had Cobol via punch cards sent overnight to the business office.
All in all, I thought I was pretty lucky. Right after I graduated, they brought in about 100 Apple II's, and I felt ripped off
My own kids took to computers pretty much along with reading (ages 3-4) and video games. At around 10, my younger son was working on Inform (and now Flash), at 15 my older son has already taken AP CS (first year of Java).
Frankly, I'd start 'em with PowerPoint! There's enough automation, animation, etc. to get them started, and the slide transitions and sound effects will get them hooked.
(On the other hand, I hate the way PowerPoint is dumbing down kids' thinking, so there's no need to flame over that)
Aint-It-Cool news reported on the 11th that Nausicaa.net had a news item on 11/23 that Pete Docter, the director of Monsters, Inc., would be directing the US release.
The Nausicaa site points back to a Japanese language press release from the 20th of November.
So this is hardly news.
Remember Cryptonomocon? The best message is binary: 1 or 0. Prearrange your message to appear somewhere, anywhere (AOHell, rec.arts.nascar (heh), Slashdot Anonymous Cowards, whatever), and wait.
There's no way of knowing what message means 0 and what means 1, let alone what 0 and 1 imply.
Steganography? Hardly.
Now, delivering detailed instructions is a lot harder, but still child's play. Like XBox Live, for instance.
HP.
1) Apple's stock price is inflated because of the iPod
2) HP won't want to give up their marketing of the iPod, or the perceived loss of control if IBM snatches up Apple
3) A bidding war between HP and IBM for the whole of Apple's biz would benefit neither, only Apple shareholders.
So my conclusion is that IBM isn't going to buy up Apple, unless it was silly enough to have a deal planned to spin off the iPod/iTunes unit to HP, and that's quite a cash cow to give up.
The biggest side benefit of that might be that it could diffuse the Apple Corp. (Beatles) lawsuit, if Apple Computer is no longer the owner of a music-related product. A spinoff might be the only way to end that suit (Apple or whoever owns them would still have to cough up a big chunk of bullion to Yoko and Sir Paul, but it would end the long-term problems).
I'm not fond of CF bulbs: most of the reasonably-priced ones I've installed lately have a slow warmup period, during which time they're very red in color, and rather dim.
You also can not EVER use them with a rheostat (dimmer). If the LED-based lamps can be used with dimmers, they've got a market advantage (I was trying to find out when the site got slashdotted)
CF bulbs started in the $20-30 range, and were somewhat large and bulky. The current 60-100 watt direct replacement lamp bulbs are as cheap as 3 for $10 at Ikea.
Sulfur Microwave lamps have two major disadvantages:
1) They're big, not designed for desk lamps and such
2) They use a 2.45GHz microwave generator. That number should sound familiar.... yup, they jam 802.11b/g. For that reason alone, many government installations can not use WiFi.
First off, the IsNot operator is not part of VB 6.0 or VB.net 2003 (I haven't checked 2005, which is still in Beta)
Second, if you undestand VB's "Is" operator, IsNot makes more sense.
"Is" is a memory location comparison commonly used to see if two variables point to the same object, e.g. . It does not compare the values of the variables, only that they are pointers to the same object.
Because there is no inverse version of this operator like there is with "=" and "", you end up with non-natural-language statements such asMuch more natural looking isWhether this is patentable is another issue. But you can certainly patent a published idea -- it's the only way to protect it.
My kids (16 & 14) are getting a little old to be interested in Lego much, except for the Robotix system (Thing2 is currently in the FIRST Lego League).
MtG is still big.
D&D is still occasionally played.
Board/Boxed games such as Settlers of Catan still proves popular, although newer ones such as Munchkin, Apples to Apples, etc. get more play time. I'm trying to get them interested in some old Avalon-Hill boxes I've got lying around such as Kingmaker, Diplomacy (probably not mature enough) and Rail Baron.
I've got the oldest PC in the house (not counting the Mac Plus in the basement I can't bear to throw away) set up as a server with a pair of silent 160GB drives, an ATA133 card and new USB 2.0 ports (nice front panel with most flash media readers). Total investment under $250 to upgrade the machine to be the home server.
Over 500 CD's have been loaded into it using WMA at 192kbps, and they're now available to the computers each of us have in the house (six other machines for the four of us).
I've got an ancient TiVo with a lifetime sub, so no ethernet, no streaming.
But I bought a GoVideo DVD player for $100 (progressive scan, decent output) that comes with a PCMCIA ethernet card (can be replaced with WiFi), and streams off the server using software from Gateway or GoVideo (or anything Universal Plug and Play). The Gateway/GoVideo server software sucks, I've been looking for the time to put something else that uses UPP up on that machine.
I haven't tried streaming video on that setup, but the old machine is too slow to recode anyting anyway. Besides, my DVDs are all in one room.
have a TV tuner, and PVR software on my XBOX than just playback.
There are enough media players out there (such as the GoVideo 2730) able to play anything Universal Plug & Play provides, that making my XBOX another player is, frankly, dull.
It would seem to me that a simple USB port and the ability to read the structure or database off a mass-storage compliant digital audio player would give you full artist/title browse access and full playback of anything from a thumbdrive to a 60GB player.
The catch is that the 65+% iPod isn't mass-storage compliant, and their wire remote protocol is proprietary.
It shouldn't cost much: if I can have a DVD player that sits on my home ethernet and reads anything uPNP, plays DVDs in progressive scan, has full digital audio outputs for $100, I should be able to get all the features I want for $50 over the cost of a standard head unit.
More than just application quality, price, ease of use, etc. will be needed to get OSS into big corporations. Many of them have spent significant $$$ on add-ins and custom development in Word, Excel and Access. If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Those apps are a big part of my business -- I'd happily migrate them, but nobody's the least bit interested in the Pharmaceutical industry in moving away from MS Word and Excel.
... and closer management will mean censorship.
It's bad enough that broadcast TV is held to different standards than cable and sat stations, given that more houses have the latter than don't at this point.
But if there's regular payments to the feds for the right to broadcast TV, that's going to give the feds a stronger claim to regulate and censor content.
And who's going to pay for that extra fee? The stations? The networks? Nope, it'll get passed back to the advertisers, causing an inflationary cycle on consumer products. And those advertisers will put an even stronger grip on content, if they're paying for it.
Sure, I don't need to see Dennis Franz' @$$ ever again, but when shows like The Shield and Rescue Me have a free reign (and commercials, hmm...), and the best drama and comedy in the Emmys were on HBO, making the networks pay more will only decrease the quality of programming.
It's not that different from taking bids for contract work, just on a micro scale.
For me, it's acceptable for nurses and similar occupations because nurses are government certified to meet certain standards (your average IT job isn't certified at all, and the ones that are aren't by the state).
Except for the fact that it could be a single 8-hour shift, this isn't any different than requesting bids for building a building (architects and engineers are also government certified).
And if the starting bid is too low? Nobody takes the job, and the free market forces them to move their bar up. If a nurse bids too high? You don't work. That's not likely to happen, given the number of nursing vacancies out there and the limited pool to fill them.
Now a clever app would act as a neutral broker for what shift-jobbers are willing to work for and the available openings, so that as many people as possible get the maximum value for their time. It gets more complicated when you factor in favorable shifts, locations and specialties (e.g., a warn nurse isn't going to bid high on an ER triage on graveyard shift on a Saturday in an inner-city hospital 100 miles away).
But the problem really goes back to hospitals not wanting to pay enough for nurses, while loading more responsibilities (and potential liabilities) upon them.
The result is that fewer students get Bachelors of Nursing degrees, schools close, and the cycle deepens.
Latest reports have a 10-foot-tall fungal-like growth expanding rapidly and resisting all fire and chemical methods of containment.
Not.
But it would have been interesting.
Does that mean that, just like horses, 100 years from now they'll have olympic events using them, even though it shows little athleticism on the part of the human being involved?
I'm all in favor of this, and let's mass produce it to get the costs down. I'm sick of the price of auto parts and labor. Recent repairs have involved $200 to replace door hinges that were sticking, and $380 to replace a computerized security module that would decide not to recognize my key on damp mornings.
You can't diagnose a car without closed-source software, specific to the brand. You can't get parts from just anybody.
Build cars like we build PC's and they'll be cheaper to repair, more efficient, and full of cruft in 6 months, eh?