There is a very little true relationship between openness and monopolism other than many monopolies choose not to be open. Some monopolies, like Sun, choose to be open and to maintain their monopoly amongst their chosen target group in other ways such as just via the use of their size or via the use of the religions they create and further for their own gain. Put another way, Sun's openness is simply a part of the character that defines the community that they are a monopoly within. A company is a monopoly when it has a particular community that is locked into their religion enough to allow them to utilize monopolistic practices without losing the community. Sun definitely has that community and has definitely utilized monopolistic practices such as buying out those that are competing for their particular community.
This was just Sun being Sun. They utilized the standard technique of all monopolies. Buy out the low cost competitors and trash them. Why do I say monopoly? Because that's what they are. Those that lump Sun, Oracle, and MS together in the same business are wrong. Each camp has a monopoly within its own religion and effects the others very little. The people that belong to these various camps are not likely to convert to another. No product gets everything right for everybody. It takes at least this many camps to cover most of the belief systems.
I'm with SBC DSL and have had a revelation about the outages. They were all at the ISP, not at the switch. I changed my ISP to one that has far better connections to the backbone and I now get a full 1.5MB all the way to the net (not just to the ISP) all of the time with no more than an hour or so a year of outages even though SBC is still providing the line.
I can't remember the precise numbers but can approximate fairly easily as long as we change the rules so that I don't have to know what portion of a sphere you can view at full resolution without changing the angle of your head. When browsing photog newsgroups in the past, I found that the generally accepted resolution beyond which a photo to be viewed at a little less than arms length (like holding it in your hand) would not be improved is 170 pixels / inch or 28,900 pixels / sq inch. That is approximately This was based on calculations utilizing the minimum arc that the human eye can distinguish. I just pulled out a tape measure and see that the distance from the approximate center of my head to my hand while holding a picture at a comfortable viewing distance is about 24 inches. The surface area of a sphere with 24" radius is 4*pi*24^2 or 7238 sq inches. At 28,900 pixels / sq inch, that would be 209,168,200 pixels. So, assuming that you must stay at the center of the sphere but that you can look in any direction, this gigapixel photo contains far more resolution than is actually required to meet your specified goals.
More interesting to me would be the answer to a question like, what storage capacity per day is required to capture a full motion, with depth information for every pixel, 360d spherical recording of every moment of ones life with sound, some zoom capacity (I've utilized 35X in my photog experience and would like to see that), and reasonable ability to freeze frame motion of the speeds encountered in everyday life and extract nicely focused still images from that. When someone can either carry storage capacity like that in a pocket sized computer or when the future WIFI equivalent can send that much bandwidth to a home server, our lives will be drastically changed. Roughly calculating this out it comes to about 87 Petabytes / day uncompressed. Compression technology might drop that to 1 PB/day. Should happen about 39 years from now so I'll likely see the day. What a future.
These projections look like those of an economist, not someone in the biz. I'm sincerely hoping that in 4 years WIFI will be near dead and we'll be up to one of the other standards being developed with 10 mile ranges and faster speed. Longer ranges would better fit the footprint of the existing cell towers and allow us to reuse infrastructure. And the faster speed would keep me from needing to plug into the wall during meetings because the speed of the office WIFI network sucks.
Perhaps though, I'm speaking as an American. My unique problem is that a place I'm looking to move to has cell coverage, but has no chance at DSL or cable. If you look at the coverage of the 3, cellular actually has greater coverage in America. So, the deployment about 4 years from now of a broadband system on a cell tower footprint with a speed matching what cable will be in 4 years would very likely wipe out cable and DSL in this country and give us a unified system whether we're roaming, at home, or in the office. Some of the standards being developed today could do that.
Just did a little calculation and figure, if you plan on 10 (a few TVs and cameras + many lower bandwidth channels for audio in every room) simultaneous 480MBaud channels (good match for either Firewire or USB 2.0) as a starting point, the home's fiber bundle backbone should be constructed with materials and numbers of fibers that allow for a theoretical limit of around 10 TBaud in order to be capable of following Moore's law for 20 years.
We need to learn how to judge these systems. It takes years to develop and deploy a technology like this, and after you do, it would be very nice if it could be stretched for years to come. 10 MBaud might sound nice now, especially if its a real 10 MB unlike WiFi, but will it meet the need 5 years from now? At least some of the energies of the industry need to be focusing on how to get residential baud rates back onto a long term Moore's law-like development curve without killing us with new home or community infrastructure rollouts every few years.
A good wireless fit into the home network should aim itself to eliminating the mass of cables behind my entertainment center and making it possible to have many high fidelity video bandwidth devices that can be easily moved around without concern about the cost of fishing new cables. To match it to existing hardware, it probably should aim at IEEE 1394 per device speeds. If a small module were available to convert IEEE 1394 ports or USB 2 ports to the new backbone, many devices would be hostable on the home's network today. In order to host a large number of devices, preferably multiple security cameras, multiple LCDs or projectors, multiple speaker systems, etc, I suspect that this means that it should be a cellular network with a fiber backbone and cells that are room sized. It might actually be beneficial if the signal could not easily penetrate walls. The fiber backbone should use a type and quantity of fiber that we know can satisfy needs for about 20 years (approximately 11 Moore's generations) so that we can just upgrade the cells without fishing the walls again. The cell stations should be easily swappable, overpowered (for growth) modules. They should be placed so that if a future generation decided to use a spread spectrum light solution along with the RF for backwards compatibility, their placement would support it. The modules should be designed with the expectation of a 3 year lifetime before the owner would want to upgrade at least some of the rooms. Hopefully, with the range limited to rooms, the size and amount of power of the mobile side could be kept down.
Why would we need this kind of switched bandwidth? The only answer a geek should need is, if you build the infrastructure, the need will come. My personal desire would be to gradually turn my home into a lab that is ubiquitously connected so that I can start experimenting with using electronics as a means to bridge gaps, not just between man and computer, but between people and also to start using electronics to ease more of the mundane tasks of life and increase quality of life rather than for pure entertainment.
One aspect in particular that could have prevented the last several deaths/major disabilities in my family would be continuous medical monitoring and analysis. Detecting heart attacks and strokes at an early stage through continuous monitoring so that the benefits of existing treatments that must be administered in a timely fashion can be fully realized could save or preserve the quality of over a million lives a year in the US alone.
Yes, systems like that exist, but deployment is too selective and too expensive. If we build out the infrastructure and sensor networks as a multiuse system, the only part that has to come from the medical industry would be the software. And I suspect they couldn't keep the open source community out of that as long as it is served from countries that don't regulate equipment and software intended for medical use.
Many have pointed out that chips essentially don't wear out, but that's only in a world where every motherboard has a perfect design. In reality, given any motherboard, there will be some bad parts of the design and the lifetime may indeed be effected by how much it is stressed, especially those with an error in the design as regards to heat dissapation though underspeced drivers can be a big issue to. Also, many use capacitors whose values change after a few years due to chemicals cooking out of them. This is why many of the cheaper motherboards on the market will just stop working or become unreliable after about 3 years. If those motherboards are run hotter for a larger percentage of time, certainly there will be a reduction in life.
Even so, the cost amortized over time is still minor. If a motherboard goes bad after 2 years instead of 3, then you've "spent" 1/3 of the lifetime of a $100 or so component on the task. So, maybe about 34ish bucks split over 2 years or 17ish bucks a year. Not free, but not much money either.
Not only do they not typically reach more than half those speeds in actual throughput, but 802.11g reverts all of its users to 11b speeds in the presence of any 11b client and that is a shared bandwidth. I live in condominiums and my 11b gets so much interference that my connection is lost from 10 feet away about once every 3 minutes (multiple stations and client cards, same problem, so not a hardware issue). And since the bandwidth is shared, there really is no possibility of creating home multimedia networks with this. So, one of the biggest hopes, that it can eliminate the need for wiring home devices that are not mobile, is really hopeless with this standard.
It is sad that scientists continue to make such ridiculous conclusions on the basis of a few variables that probably aren't even the dominant ones in the equation. It seems that the world is full of scientists who would rather shock to get money and fame than make any real attempt at even identifying the variables. It has reached the point that science is more of a religion in terms of its requirement for "belief" than most religions.
The most blatant assumption here is that the predominant factor in the expansion of life expectancy is medicine. Perhaps it is, but I find it unproven and even if so, few of the advances have dealt with aging. A few years ago I noted that many famous figures of past centuries lived to ripe old ages. The average age seemed much greater than one would expect considering that the average life expectancy of the population was 35ish. Further investigation showed that there were some great distortions in the average life expectancy numbers that should be factored out in order for them to have meaning in comparison of general medicine's impact on all but a few special cases. For example, yes, we've virtually eliminated many deadly childhood illnesses. Childhood deaths account for a huge portion of the life expectancy difference but are meaningless to a 20something comparing their chances to the past. The second biggest example is death of females during childbirth. While meaningful to women, its not so meaningful to a man. And most advances in this area occurred long enough ago to hardly be called the advances of modern medicine. Death of men due to occupational hazards has almost disappeared in relation to the past, but has little to do with medicine. Death due to malnutrition has also reduced greatly, though if "malnutrition" includes being overweight, it could be argued that it hasn't. These, and many other non-medical advances have reduced our death rate. If you look at males of the past that did not die of childhood diseases, did not have to perform dangerous work, were wealthy enough to eat well, and were somewhat isolated from children (who were prime distributors of disease) and compare them to older males today, the life expectancy has only marginally increased.
But what of all of our wonderful advances? Many do not increase life expectancy. Once again, this is largely due to junk science. For example, we see that people dying of heart disease have high blood pressure. So, we jump to the simplistic first order conclusion that high blood pressure causes deadly heart disease. We create medicines that lower blood pressure and we perform tests to prove that they lowered blood pressure and didn't overtly kill people in the process. Only years after prescribing them to millions of people do we discover in many cases that they REDUCED life expectancy and only in a precious few caused an average increase. We've yet to do the studies to determine quality of life differences and may never. The simpletons will kill us for sure.
Another, transplants, can help such a precious few as to have virtually no statistically significant impact. Transplanting a heart into someone with heart disease most often won't allow them to live much longer. It just addresses a small part of a body wide problem. So we don't usually bother.
Bypasses have been somewhat more successful, but have a clear end to how long they can delay the problems. Eventually, the capillaries become the problem and you just can't bypass every little tube in the body.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that if medicine wants to make a real advance, they've got to change their methods. Instead of following the money, they need to systematically follow the statistical problems. First, attack heart disease. Look for the medical root causes and find out how to truly zero in on them and fix them. And stop using people's diets as an excuse for everything. If you want to change a person's diet, you need to help them by finding what genetically caused imbalance in their messaging system
That implies that problems found by the customers and complained about to product support personnel will be reported to some programming team that will fix them. That seems to rarely be the case. I know of many organizations that have near zero communication between product support and development and many more that even disband the development team when a version of software is complete and come up with another team if and when they decide to do another version.
From a business perspective, especially in the case of small companies set up as a front to milk a single product (there are many examples of this), if people are buying your product and complaining about it, in many cases, you've already won. They bought the product. As long as you sell enough copies to recoup the development costs and your Indian product support service doesn't cost more than what you're pulling in, you're going to walk with a profit that you can use to build the next company. Some companies don't even seem to have to go that far. There are companies that seem to go on forever selling crap that makes Microsoft look mil spec for $10 a copy to uninformed consumers.
So, what incentive does a company have to make software better? If they spend more time and money on it while some crap house builds market share and name recognition, they will lose the marketing game and their investment shirts.
for good reasons. Netware has been finely tuned for 20 years to be an unbeatable peformance and reliability machine. When they ported, they discovered just how fine tuned it was. The Netware OS doesn't have to do anything at all but run Netware. It isn't really an OS so much as a framework for a program and as such can be tuned far more than any general purpose OS. Sure, with Linux you have the source and could do the tuning, but they had the Unix source before and backed off when they realized that it wouldn't be Unix any more by the time they finished tuning. It would be Netware. There is no reason to think that Linux would be any different. By the time they cut out every bit of general purpose fluff and hardcoded every little thing to their exact needs, it would be Netware.
Hope They Are Looking for Outdoor Markets
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Walk-thru Fog Screen
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Because the load on the air conditioning for removing all of that humidity from an indoor setup will be huge.
And couldn't perform well enough to warrant releasing it as the flagship product. The Netware OS is written to do one job very very well, both in terms of reliability and performance. You can't beat that with a general purpose OS. Even after they bought Unix, they still couldn't change it enough to do the job without rewriting it to be Netware.
Supporting Linux clients is a natural move on their part, but don't think that they'd jump at making the mistake of porting the file server again.
Sorry, but spying is spying. Spying by authorities on the people of this nation, whether they be government or employer or any other type of authorities, is reprehensible.
Most of the work in an off the shelf XML parser is verifying that the XML is "good" or matches some schema specification. If its coming from one of your programs and going to one of your programs and you've done reasonable debugging, its good. You just parse it and use it. Not enough has been done to optimize the "trusted" app communications scenario even though in reality, that's probably 95%+ of the actual usage of XML. Very few sites are actually publishing XML that is really getting used by programs and pages other than the ones they've written.
Parsing it is very easy and quick if you're in full control of the encoding. You can optimize your parser greatly by choosing not to handle the general case, but to instead handle only what your specific encoder generates.
Use the protocol, pick up the buzz word for your app, but leave the pain of the generalities meant to handle some free data exchange world that is 15 years in the future out. When the semantic net comes about and applications can actually use any XML without needing to be written to use that XML schema, then you can worry about the general case.
by changing our education system to try to produce millions of cookie cutter programmers who aren't capable of producing visionary changes. Any country can copy a mass production tech school style education system and get the same results in. Feed humans in, get programmers out. What we've given up by producing so many programmers is the ability to innovate that made us great. Thus, we will no longer be great after a couple of decades of riding on our past.
Boeing in St. Louis (military fighter division) uses goggle technology for several manufacturing processes. One example is when making wiring harnesses for aircraft. The wiring harnesses are very complex and can span over 100 feet. They used to have specific pattern boards for every different harness with pegs to support the wires and drawings to follow right on the boards. Now, they use a generic board with a grid of supports and they put a pair of goggles on that superimposes the wiring diagram on the board so that they can manufacture the harness of the day.
I believe they have also applied this technology to the maintenance task to the degree that someone at a remote site can put on a pair of the goggles and be guided by visual highlighting superimposed over the aircraft parts to a task. They may also access schematics that do not superimpose and listen to guidance through the same networked device as they perform their task.
I have ADHD and wouldn't treat it for anything
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Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Because I believe it to be a large contributor to some of my more differentiating characteristics. Yes, I have tremendous troubles staying on task. Unless there is a moderating influence around, like when you're talking to someone else who keeps you on track, I don't even try. Sometimes I miss deadlines. Others I completely forget that a task exists (I figure it must not have been too important if I forgot it, so I don't try to track them... call it my means of time management). I constantly go to the store for things and come back with other things and not the thing I wanted and have to go back again. All of these and many more present real difficulties.
But, on the flipside, I have a unique (to the degree that I've never met an equal at it) ability to break free of paradigms in my thinking. This manifests itself in an extremely high degree of creativity and ability to design solutions that others haven't thought of (frequently to problems that they didn't recognize either). Because I can't think through large problems in a methodical way very easily, I've learned to trust my instincts and think with my intuition. Oddly enough I come up with the right answers most of the time though proving them or explaining them can be nearly impossible as I have to translate the "feelings" I think with to language. Some have told me that they think I'm just thinking in a traditional way subconsciously, but I don't think so. I think that is shown by the fact that I could go into a math test in college completely cold (never read the section in the book) and derive the theorems needed to find the solution on the fly. I think what I do is more of a massively parallel search for an answer with a pattern matching engine that works at levels I don't understand. In any case, though I can't be tested easily in traditional ways because my approaches to problem solving are so radical, and on some traditional tests that depend on narrow criteria have scored in the mildly mentally retarded range, some that studied me determined my IQ to be roughly equivalent to that of someone with normal thought patterns in the 180-220 range. But once again, the comparison just doesn't hold because my methods of arriving at solutions can escape the paradigms that someone with more normal thought patterns can't escape no matter what their IQ. They have to think their way through paradigm boundaries that I just leap over.
So, please, bring on the ADHD. Go with it, don't cope with it. Structure your life to accomodate it. In particularly bad times, I had so much trouble making decisions that I couldn't decide what to wear, so I replaced all of my clothing with several copies of the same outfit. Problem solved. The brain fog thing is also very nasty. There have been times that I was afraid of getting out of bed because my capabilities were so lowered that I was definitely a danger to myself. There have been far more when I really shouldn't have been driving due to far lowered reaction time as I was trying to think my way through problems (there is a part of my thinking that is uneffected by the fog that I can leverage to replace the missing, instinct based, fast analysis functions, but its slower).
Put another way, what is genius? Its obviously abnormal. Do you think it comes without side effects in a system as complex as the human brain? Do you really think we know enough to treat some undesirable side effects without getting rid of some of the desirable ones?
I can't remember the details, but the gist was simply this,,, if you were an hourly worker, federal law would require compensation for you overtime and that compensation would be at an inflated rate. If a company chooses to make you a salaried employee, the concept is supposed to include a certain amount of flexibility in your job that acts as compensation for the overtime pay an hourly employee would get paid. Things like flexible lunch breaks and flexibility in when you work are expected.
In the case I heard about, a company had treated their employees like hourly employees, absolutely dictating every detail about their schedule and even requiring them to punch clocks for record keeping purposes. The employees brought a lawsuit against the company for back pay on their overtime using the same 1.5X normal pay to 60hours, 2X normal pay on Sundays, 3X normal pay on holidays rules that they would have received by law if they had been classified hourly employees. I heard that they won, but didn't hear whether any appeals process was followed.
So, there is a limit to what they can demand. If they are offering some form of compensation like 3 day weeks for a while later, I would think that you've got no case. If not, and they are treating you like hourly employees, you should consider breaking the business relationship if you can as a first resort, but if that isn't possible (i.e. another job can't be found) you should keep careful records including anything written that describes this policy and any other policies that seem like the kind that would be employed with hourly workers and consult an attorney.
Re:This is getting really annoying
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150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 4, Informative
You're sadly misinformed. True rate ADSL as it was originally planned was capable of 7 MBaud downstream. This was designed specifically to hold a television channel with the compression capabilities of the mid 90s. The lite version that was deployed has less power, supposedly to eliminate the need for trips to the premises to install filters, is only capable of 1.5 MBaud. Supposedly, they didn't find out until after they started deploying that the real world would still require the filters. So, we got stuck with a crippled version for no reason other than perhaps to reduce the electric bill of the switch by about 60%. Furthermore, only the people closest to a switch get that. Though in a major metropolitan area, my DSL connection is limited to about 768KB. The only reason I keep it versus cable is that my provider is very good about actually giving me the whole 768KB unlike some which would bottleneck you to modem speeds at their routers during peak traffic loads.
So, a very few might be able to get 1MBaud. I can't. I've tried to view 300KBaud streams and the quality/resolution is so little as to be worthless.
Also, I think 1MB of mpeg4 falls a bit short of what I'd expect to see on an IP based video stream. Chances are I'm going to be watching that on my computer display at times and it has 2048x1536 resolution. I at least expect HDTV signal resolution with good quality. Certainly anything being thought of now and thus not fully deployed until years down the road has to at a minimum target HDTV.
So, I'd like to see a minimum of about 30MBaud guaranteed bandwidth at the worst case distance. But that is just when thinking of current day consumer side technology. There are a lot of hardware advances in the labs now (and some even out of the labs) that could make good use of far more bandwidth than that. There are even production 3D displays available today.
So, my point is that someone looking at what to deploy today and looking at lifetimes in the range of 20-50 years before the deployment cost is paid off as many of these companies are doing, needs to be planning to provide a bandwidth that will be able to grow at a rate of at least 2X every 2 years if not 18 months. We are a long ways today from the 300baud modems of the early 80s and by the early 20s, we should plan to be just as far from 1.5MBaud. That would put us at about 4GB in the 2023 time frame and over 100 PBaud in the 2043 time frame (those that are saying now that there is no way you'd ever use that must not have lived through the 64K, 640K and other barriers of the past that were more than we'd ever need). Thus there is definitely a need for high quality (not plastic) fiber to the curve to be laid by any projects wanting to compete in the long term.
This is getting really annoying
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150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 3, Insightful
DSL has been in the works for around 10 years now and still doesn't come close to its goal of providing one video bandwidth channel which is short of the goal it should have. The problem here is that it takes forever to roll out a new infrastructure. Its time the leaders of the industry realize it and make sure that the next infrastructure rollout has the latent capacity (if not the electronics at the nodes) to carry the petabaud traffic that we'll be wanting in 50 years (that's about how often we can afford to do this crap). Spending any more time and resources on copper is wasting time.
There is a market today for multiple on demand video channels, voice, and internet over a single service. As a consumer, I'd pay double just for the pleasure of dropping SBC on their !@#. Plan for that, meet that, and don't even waste a breath on anything short of that.
To reiterate, the minimum bandwidth requirement for any new deployments should be enough to serve at least three unshared video channels, 3 voice lines, and very high bandwidth internet service simultaneously with room in the medium for growth into the dedicated petabaud range over the next 50 years. Anything less is causing a delay in progress while filling fatcats pockets with the proceeds from rolling out already obsolete services.
I really don't understand why everyone wows these things. I use two 19" monitors at 1600x1200 with small fonts. They cost me $250 a piece because I had to find monitors with a good enough dot pitch to truly display 1600x1200. Every once in a while I have to focus one of them, but other than that, they are crisp and clear. So, for $500, I have 3200x1200 resolution and reasonable enough surface area that I never have to print anything out (which is good because I've never bothered to buy a printer).
I've looked at flat panels as recently as a week ago and the best price I could find on a 1600x1200 flat panel was about $1300. So, the price ratio is still running about 5:1. For what? Not having to focus as often? Greater distortion (I'm one of the 30% of the population that sees flat surfaces as curved at the edges)? To save about 3 square feet of space that only costs $80 a square foot?
As near as I can tell, its still nothing but coolness that is selling these things. The sad part is that several very promising developments including one that promised 5" deep CRTs have been set aside for the joy of having stuck on pixels and a lighter wallet.
When they start printing displays in rolls at 300DPI (IBM research has proved that a denser DPI does more to save the eyes than higher refresh rates), maybe we'll have something. Until then, I wish they'd get away from this path. Its getting harder and harder to find CRTs with the proper dot pitch. I think they have been reducing them so that the LCDs don't look so bad.
Its not just a NMCI thing. I'm on an Air Force project where we're using Oracle, Win2K, IPlanet, and PHP. Frankly, Win2K is the last problem I have with the list. We'd way prefer to use Apache or even IIS over IPlanet. We do our development with IIS running as localhost and its much easier to manage. Darn near anything is better than Oracle. And I'm personally much more impressed with the number and quality of precanned solutions for common problems I can find for Perl than PHP.
NMCI is just a symptom of the fact that the DOD infrastructure is well on its way to converting to Windows now. They are still predominantly custom solutions on Unix that are so outdated that even thinking about updating them is silly. But the momentum has shifted. Look at the CJMTK (Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit) program to replace the government's JMTK mapping technology for example. ESRI's doing it and though there is some talk of porting the existing interface, I wouldn't count on it. It will end up being a Windows product through and through.
To put it simply, it takes a couple of decades to turn the DOD ship in a different direction. When the DOD thinks of replacing its proprietary GOTS with COTS systems, they mean commercial, not free. The lead commercial system is Windows. Thus, that's where they will look.
It has taken 20 years to get the government to realize you don't need mainframes to run desktop applications. During that time, many small programs that didn't have the money of the big guys successfully delivered PC based systems, but the sea change is really still just starting.
I think it will take 20 more to go from COTS to OOTS or whatever you want to call open source off the shelf software. It was hard enough to convince these guys that they could use commercial instead of government software. It sounds crazy, but it will be way harder to convince them that they can safely use stuff that isn't even commercial.
Gimp, like almost every other GNU program I've ever needed to run, runs fine on Windows. So, what's the problem?
I work completely in a Windows environment and we use PNGs a lot to compress screen shots. They come out way smaller than JPGs and maintain all of the colors unlike GIFs. We capture them with SnagIt, a windows program, and we use them in MS Word. I wouldn't say they have no support, they work way better in MS Word than the alternatives, just that the vast majority of users in the world don't know that they exist. That's life in a world where the overwhelmingly vast majority of content producers are not literate in things like the pros and cons of gif versus png.
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There is a very little true relationship between openness and monopolism other than many monopolies choose not to be open. Some monopolies, like Sun, choose to be open and to maintain their monopoly amongst their chosen target group in other ways such as just via the use of their size or via the use of the religions they create and further for their own gain. Put another way, Sun's openness is simply a part of the character that defines the community that they are a monopoly within. A company is a monopoly when it has a particular community that is locked into their religion enough to allow them to utilize monopolistic practices without losing the community. Sun definitely has that community and has definitely utilized monopolistic practices such as buying out those that are competing for their particular community.
This was just Sun being Sun. They utilized the standard technique of all monopolies. Buy out the low cost competitors and trash them. Why do I say monopoly? Because that's what they are. Those that lump Sun, Oracle, and MS together in the same business are wrong. Each camp has a monopoly within its own religion and effects the others very little. The people that belong to these various camps are not likely to convert to another. No product gets everything right for everybody. It takes at least this many camps to cover most of the belief systems.
I'm with SBC DSL and have had a revelation about the outages. They were all at the ISP, not at the switch. I changed my ISP to one that has far better connections to the backbone and I now get a full 1.5MB all the way to the net (not just to the ISP) all of the time with no more than an hour or so a year of outages even though SBC is still providing the line.
I can't remember the precise numbers but can approximate fairly easily as long as we change the rules so that I don't have to know what portion of a sphere you can view at full resolution without changing the angle of your head. When browsing photog newsgroups in the past, I found that the generally accepted resolution beyond which a photo to be viewed at a little less than arms length (like holding it in your hand) would not be improved is 170 pixels / inch or 28,900 pixels / sq inch. That is approximately This was based on calculations utilizing the minimum arc that the human eye can distinguish. I just pulled out a tape measure and see that the distance from the approximate center of my head to my hand while holding a picture at a comfortable viewing distance is about 24 inches. The surface area of a sphere with 24" radius is 4*pi*24^2 or 7238 sq inches. At 28,900 pixels / sq inch, that would be 209,168,200 pixels. So, assuming that you must stay at the center of the sphere but that you can look in any direction, this gigapixel photo contains far more resolution than is actually required to meet your specified goals.
More interesting to me would be the answer to a question like, what storage capacity per day is required to capture a full motion, with depth information for every pixel, 360d spherical recording of every moment of ones life with sound, some zoom capacity (I've utilized 35X in my photog experience and would like to see that), and reasonable ability to freeze frame motion of the speeds encountered in everyday life and extract nicely focused still images from that. When someone can either carry storage capacity like that in a pocket sized computer or when the future WIFI equivalent can send that much bandwidth to a home server, our lives will be drastically changed. Roughly calculating this out it comes to about 87 Petabytes / day uncompressed. Compression technology might drop that to 1 PB/day. Should happen about 39 years from now so I'll likely see the day. What a future.
These projections look like those of an economist, not someone in the biz. I'm sincerely hoping that in 4 years WIFI will be near dead and we'll be up to one of the other standards being developed with 10 mile ranges and faster speed. Longer ranges would better fit the footprint of the existing cell towers and allow us to reuse infrastructure. And the faster speed would keep me from needing to plug into the wall during meetings because the speed of the office WIFI network sucks.
Perhaps though, I'm speaking as an American. My unique problem is that a place I'm looking to move to has cell coverage, but has no chance at DSL or cable. If you look at the coverage of the 3, cellular actually has greater coverage in America. So, the deployment about 4 years from now of a broadband system on a cell tower footprint with a speed matching what cable will be in 4 years would very likely wipe out cable and DSL in this country and give us a unified system whether we're roaming, at home, or in the office. Some of the standards being developed today could do that.
Just did a little calculation and figure, if you plan on 10 (a few TVs and cameras + many lower bandwidth channels for audio in every room) simultaneous 480MBaud channels (good match for either Firewire or USB 2.0) as a starting point, the home's fiber bundle backbone should be constructed with materials and numbers of fibers that allow for a theoretical limit of around 10 TBaud in order to be capable of following Moore's law for 20 years.
We need to learn how to judge these systems. It takes years to develop and deploy a technology like this, and after you do, it would be very nice if it could be stretched for years to come. 10 MBaud might sound nice now, especially if its a real 10 MB unlike WiFi, but will it meet the need 5 years from now? At least some of the energies of the industry need to be focusing on how to get residential baud rates back onto a long term Moore's law-like development curve without killing us with new home or community infrastructure rollouts every few years.
A good wireless fit into the home network should aim itself to eliminating the mass of cables behind my entertainment center and making it possible to have many high fidelity video bandwidth devices that can be easily moved around without concern about the cost of fishing new cables. To match it to existing hardware, it probably should aim at IEEE 1394 per device speeds. If a small module were available to convert IEEE 1394 ports or USB 2 ports to the new backbone, many devices would be hostable on the home's network today. In order to host a large number of devices, preferably multiple security cameras, multiple LCDs or projectors, multiple speaker systems, etc, I suspect that this means that it should be a cellular network with a fiber backbone and cells that are room sized. It might actually be beneficial if the signal could not easily penetrate walls. The fiber backbone should use a type and quantity of fiber that we know can satisfy needs for about 20 years (approximately 11 Moore's generations) so that we can just upgrade the cells without fishing the walls again. The cell stations should be easily swappable, overpowered (for growth) modules. They should be placed so that if a future generation decided to use a spread spectrum light solution along with the RF for backwards compatibility, their placement would support it. The modules should be designed with the expectation of a 3 year lifetime before the owner would want to upgrade at least some of the rooms. Hopefully, with the range limited to rooms, the size and amount of power of the mobile side could be kept down.
Why would we need this kind of switched bandwidth? The only answer a geek should need is, if you build the infrastructure, the need will come. My personal desire would be to gradually turn my home into a lab that is ubiquitously connected so that I can start experimenting with using electronics as a means to bridge gaps, not just between man and computer, but between people and also to start using electronics to ease more of the mundane tasks of life and increase quality of life rather than for pure entertainment.
One aspect in particular that could have prevented the last several deaths/major disabilities in my family would be continuous medical monitoring and analysis. Detecting heart attacks and strokes at an early stage through continuous monitoring so that the benefits of existing treatments that must be administered in a timely fashion can be fully realized could save or preserve the quality of over a million lives a year in the US alone.
Yes, systems like that exist, but deployment is too selective and too expensive. If we build out the infrastructure and sensor networks as a multiuse system, the only part that has to come from the medical industry would be the software. And I suspect they couldn't keep the open source community out of that as long as it is served from countries that don't regulate equipment and software intended for medical use.
Many have pointed out that chips essentially don't wear out, but that's only in a world where every motherboard has a perfect design. In reality, given any motherboard, there will be some bad parts of the design and the lifetime may indeed be effected by how much it is stressed, especially those with an error in the design as regards to heat dissapation though underspeced drivers can be a big issue to. Also, many use capacitors whose values change after a few years due to chemicals cooking out of them. This is why many of the cheaper motherboards on the market will just stop working or become unreliable after about 3 years. If those motherboards are run hotter for a larger percentage of time, certainly there will be a reduction in life.
Even so, the cost amortized over time is still minor. If a motherboard goes bad after 2 years instead of 3, then you've "spent" 1/3 of the lifetime of a $100 or so component on the task. So, maybe about 34ish bucks split over 2 years or 17ish bucks a year. Not free, but not much money either.
Not only do they not typically reach more than half those speeds in actual throughput, but 802.11g reverts all of its users to 11b speeds in the presence of any 11b client and that is a shared bandwidth. I live in condominiums and my 11b gets so much interference that my connection is lost from 10 feet away about once every 3 minutes (multiple stations and client cards, same problem, so not a hardware issue). And since the bandwidth is shared, there really is no possibility of creating home multimedia networks with this. So, one of the biggest hopes, that it can eliminate the need for wiring home devices that are not mobile, is really hopeless with this standard.
It is sad that scientists continue to make such ridiculous conclusions on the basis of a few variables that probably aren't even the dominant ones in the equation. It seems that the world is full of scientists who would rather shock to get money and fame than make any real attempt at even identifying the variables. It has reached the point that science is more of a religion in terms of its requirement for "belief" than most religions.
The most blatant assumption here is that the predominant factor in the expansion of life expectancy is medicine. Perhaps it is, but I find it unproven and even if so, few of the advances have dealt with aging. A few years ago I noted that many famous figures of past centuries lived to ripe old ages. The average age seemed much greater than one would expect considering that the average life expectancy of the population was 35ish. Further investigation showed that there were some great distortions in the average life expectancy numbers that should be factored out in order for them to have meaning in comparison of general medicine's impact on all but a few special cases. For example, yes, we've virtually eliminated many deadly childhood illnesses. Childhood deaths account for a huge portion of the life expectancy difference but are meaningless to a 20something comparing their chances to the past. The second biggest example is death of females during childbirth. While meaningful to women, its not so meaningful to a man. And most advances in this area occurred long enough ago to hardly be called the advances of modern medicine. Death of men due to occupational hazards has almost disappeared in relation to the past, but has little to do with medicine. Death due to malnutrition has also reduced greatly, though if "malnutrition" includes being overweight, it could be argued that it hasn't. These, and many other non-medical advances have reduced our death rate. If you look at males of the past that did not die of childhood diseases, did not have to perform dangerous work, were wealthy enough to eat well, and were somewhat isolated from children (who were prime distributors of disease) and compare them to older males today, the life expectancy has only marginally increased.
But what of all of our wonderful advances? Many do not increase life expectancy. Once again, this is largely due to junk science. For example, we see that people dying of heart disease have high blood pressure. So, we jump to the simplistic first order conclusion that high blood pressure causes deadly heart disease. We create medicines that lower blood pressure and we perform tests to prove that they lowered blood pressure and didn't overtly kill people in the process. Only years after prescribing them to millions of people do we discover in many cases that they REDUCED life expectancy and only in a precious few caused an average increase. We've yet to do the studies to determine quality of life differences and may never. The simpletons will kill us for sure.
Another, transplants, can help such a precious few as to have virtually no statistically significant impact. Transplanting a heart into someone with heart disease most often won't allow them to live much longer. It just addresses a small part of a body wide problem. So we don't usually bother.
Bypasses have been somewhat more successful, but have a clear end to how long they can delay the problems. Eventually, the capillaries become the problem and you just can't bypass every little tube in the body.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that if medicine wants to make a real advance, they've got to change their methods. Instead of following the money, they need to systematically follow the statistical problems. First, attack heart disease. Look for the medical root causes and find out how to truly zero in on them and fix them. And stop using people's diets as an excuse for everything. If you want to change a person's diet, you need to help them by finding what genetically caused imbalance in their messaging system
That implies that problems found by the customers and complained about to product support personnel will be reported to some programming team that will fix them. That seems to rarely be the case. I know of many organizations that have near zero communication between product support and development and many more that even disband the development team when a version of software is complete and come up with another team if and when they decide to do another version.
From a business perspective, especially in the case of small companies set up as a front to milk a single product (there are many examples of this), if people are buying your product and complaining about it, in many cases, you've already won. They bought the product. As long as you sell enough copies to recoup the development costs and your Indian product support service doesn't cost more than what you're pulling in, you're going to walk with a profit that you can use to build the next company. Some companies don't even seem to have to go that far. There are companies that seem to go on forever selling crap that makes Microsoft look mil spec for $10 a copy to uninformed consumers.
So, what incentive does a company have to make software better? If they spend more time and money on it while some crap house builds market share and name recognition, they will lose the marketing game and their investment shirts.
for good reasons. Netware has been finely tuned for 20 years to be an unbeatable peformance and reliability machine. When they ported, they discovered just how fine tuned it was. The Netware OS doesn't have to do anything at all but run Netware. It isn't really an OS so much as a framework for a program and as such can be tuned far more than any general purpose OS. Sure, with Linux you have the source and could do the tuning, but they had the Unix source before and backed off when they realized that it wouldn't be Unix any more by the time they finished tuning. It would be Netware. There is no reason to think that Linux would be any different. By the time they cut out every bit of general purpose fluff and hardcoded every little thing to their exact needs, it would be Netware.
Because the load on the air conditioning for removing all of that humidity from an indoor setup will be huge.
And couldn't perform well enough to warrant releasing it as the flagship product. The Netware OS is written to do one job very very well, both in terms of reliability and performance. You can't beat that with a general purpose OS. Even after they bought Unix, they still couldn't change it enough to do the job without rewriting it to be Netware.
Supporting Linux clients is a natural move on their part, but don't think that they'd jump at making the mistake of porting the file server again.
Sorry, but spying is spying. Spying by authorities on the people of this nation, whether they be government or employer or any other type of authorities, is reprehensible.
Most of the work in an off the shelf XML parser is verifying that the XML is "good" or matches some schema specification. If its coming from one of your programs and going to one of your programs and you've done reasonable debugging, its good. You just parse it and use it. Not enough has been done to optimize the "trusted" app communications scenario even though in reality, that's probably 95%+ of the actual usage of XML. Very few sites are actually publishing XML that is really getting used by programs and pages other than the ones they've written.
Parsing it is very easy and quick if you're in full control of the encoding. You can optimize your parser greatly by choosing not to handle the general case, but to instead handle only what your specific encoder generates.
Use the protocol, pick up the buzz word for your app, but leave the pain of the generalities meant to handle some free data exchange world that is 15 years in the future out. When the semantic net comes about and applications can actually use any XML without needing to be written to use that XML schema, then you can worry about the general case.
by changing our education system to try to produce millions of cookie cutter programmers who aren't capable of producing visionary changes. Any country can copy a mass production tech school style education system and get the same results in. Feed humans in, get programmers out. What we've given up by producing so many programmers is the ability to innovate that made us great. Thus, we will no longer be great after a couple of decades of riding on our past.
Boeing in St. Louis (military fighter division) uses goggle technology for several manufacturing processes. One example is when making wiring harnesses for aircraft. The wiring harnesses are very complex and can span over 100 feet. They used to have specific pattern boards for every different harness with pegs to support the wires and drawings to follow right on the boards. Now, they use a generic board with a grid of supports and they put a pair of goggles on that superimposes the wiring diagram on the board so that they can manufacture the harness of the day.
I believe they have also applied this technology to the maintenance task to the degree that someone at a remote site can put on a pair of the goggles and be guided by visual highlighting superimposed over the aircraft parts to a task. They may also access schematics that do not superimpose and listen to guidance through the same networked device as they perform their task.
Because I believe it to be a large contributor to some of my more differentiating characteristics. Yes, I have tremendous troubles staying on task. Unless there is a moderating influence around, like when you're talking to someone else who keeps you on track, I don't even try. Sometimes I miss deadlines. Others I completely forget that a task exists (I figure it must not have been too important if I forgot it, so I don't try to track them... call it my means of time management). I constantly go to the store for things and come back with other things and not the thing I wanted and have to go back again. All of these and many more present real difficulties.
But, on the flipside, I have a unique (to the degree that I've never met an equal at it) ability to break free of paradigms in my thinking. This manifests itself in an extremely high degree of creativity and ability to design solutions that others haven't thought of (frequently to problems that they didn't recognize either). Because I can't think through large problems in a methodical way very easily, I've learned to trust my instincts and think with my intuition. Oddly enough I come up with the right answers most of the time though proving them or explaining them can be nearly impossible as I have to translate the "feelings" I think with to language. Some have told me that they think I'm just thinking in a traditional way subconsciously, but I don't think so. I think that is shown by the fact that I could go into a math test in college completely cold (never read the section in the book) and derive the theorems needed to find the solution on the fly. I think what I do is more of a massively parallel search for an answer with a pattern matching engine that works at levels I don't understand. In any case, though I can't be tested easily in traditional ways because my approaches to problem solving are so radical, and on some traditional tests that depend on narrow criteria have scored in the mildly mentally retarded range, some that studied me determined my IQ to be roughly equivalent to that of someone with normal thought patterns in the 180-220 range. But once again, the comparison just doesn't hold because my methods of arriving at solutions can escape the paradigms that someone with more normal thought patterns can't escape no matter what their IQ. They have to think their way through paradigm boundaries that I just leap over.
So, please, bring on the ADHD. Go with it, don't cope with it. Structure your life to accomodate it. In particularly bad times, I had so much trouble making decisions that I couldn't decide what to wear, so I replaced all of my clothing with several copies of the same outfit. Problem solved. The brain fog thing is also very nasty. There have been times that I was afraid of getting out of bed because my capabilities were so lowered that I was definitely a danger to myself. There have been far more when I really shouldn't have been driving due to far lowered reaction time as I was trying to think my way through problems (there is a part of my thinking that is uneffected by the fog that I can leverage to replace the missing, instinct based, fast analysis functions, but its slower).
Put another way, what is genius? Its obviously abnormal. Do you think it comes without side effects in a system as complex as the human brain? Do you really think we know enough to treat some undesirable side effects without getting rid of some of the desirable ones?
I can't remember the details, but the gist was simply this,,, if you were an hourly worker, federal law would require compensation for you overtime and that compensation would be at an inflated rate. If a company chooses to make you a salaried employee, the concept is supposed to include a certain amount of flexibility in your job that acts as compensation for the overtime pay an hourly employee would get paid. Things like flexible lunch breaks and flexibility in when you work are expected.
In the case I heard about, a company had treated their employees like hourly employees, absolutely dictating every detail about their schedule and even requiring them to punch clocks for record keeping purposes. The employees brought a lawsuit against the company for back pay on their overtime using the same 1.5X normal pay to 60hours, 2X normal pay on Sundays, 3X normal pay on holidays rules that they would have received by law if they had been classified hourly employees. I heard that they won, but didn't hear whether any appeals process was followed.
So, there is a limit to what they can demand. If they are offering some form of compensation like 3 day weeks for a while later, I would think that you've got no case. If not, and they are treating you like hourly employees, you should consider breaking the business relationship if you can as a first resort, but if that isn't possible (i.e. another job can't be found) you should keep careful records including anything written that describes this policy and any other policies that seem like the kind that would be employed with hourly workers and consult an attorney.
You're sadly misinformed. True rate ADSL as it was originally planned was capable of 7 MBaud downstream. This was designed specifically to hold a television channel with the compression capabilities of the mid 90s. The lite version that was deployed has less power, supposedly to eliminate the need for trips to the premises to install filters, is only capable of 1.5 MBaud. Supposedly, they didn't find out until after they started deploying that the real world would still require the filters. So, we got stuck with a crippled version for no reason other than perhaps to reduce the electric bill of the switch by about 60%. Furthermore, only the people closest to a switch get that. Though in a major metropolitan area, my DSL connection is limited to about 768KB. The only reason I keep it versus cable is that my provider is very good about actually giving me the whole 768KB unlike some which would bottleneck you to modem speeds at their routers during peak traffic loads.
So, a very few might be able to get 1MBaud. I can't. I've tried to view 300KBaud streams and the quality/resolution is so little as to be worthless.
Also, I think 1MB of mpeg4 falls a bit short of what I'd expect to see on an IP based video stream. Chances are I'm going to be watching that on my computer display at times and it has 2048x1536 resolution. I at least expect HDTV signal resolution with good quality. Certainly anything being thought of now and thus not fully deployed until years down the road has to at a minimum target HDTV.
So, I'd like to see a minimum of about 30MBaud guaranteed bandwidth at the worst case distance. But that is just when thinking of current day consumer side technology. There are a lot of hardware advances in the labs now (and some even out of the labs) that could make good use of far more bandwidth than that. There are even production 3D displays available today.
So, my point is that someone looking at what to deploy today and looking at lifetimes in the range of 20-50 years before the deployment cost is paid off as many of these companies are doing, needs to be planning to provide a bandwidth that will be able to grow at a rate of at least 2X every 2 years if not 18 months. We are a long ways today from the 300baud modems of the early 80s and by the early 20s, we should plan to be just as far from 1.5MBaud. That would put us at about 4GB in the 2023 time frame and over 100 PBaud in the 2043 time frame (those that are saying now that there is no way you'd ever use that must not have lived through the 64K, 640K and other barriers of the past that were more than we'd ever need). Thus there is definitely a need for high quality (not plastic) fiber to the curve to be laid by any projects wanting to compete in the long term.
DSL has been in the works for around 10 years now and still doesn't come close to its goal of providing one video bandwidth channel which is short of the goal it should have. The problem here is that it takes forever to roll out a new infrastructure. Its time the leaders of the industry realize it and make sure that the next infrastructure rollout has the latent capacity (if not the electronics at the nodes) to carry the petabaud traffic that we'll be wanting in 50 years (that's about how often we can afford to do this crap). Spending any more time and resources on copper is wasting time.
There is a market today for multiple on demand video channels, voice, and internet over a single service. As a consumer, I'd pay double just for the pleasure of dropping SBC on their !@#. Plan for that, meet that, and don't even waste a breath on anything short of that.
To reiterate, the minimum bandwidth requirement for any new deployments should be enough to serve at least three unshared video channels, 3 voice lines, and very high bandwidth internet service simultaneously with room in the medium for growth into the dedicated petabaud range over the next 50 years. Anything less is causing a delay in progress while filling fatcats pockets with the proceeds from rolling out already obsolete services.
I really don't understand why everyone wows these things. I use two 19" monitors at 1600x1200 with small fonts. They cost me $250 a piece because I had to find monitors with a good enough dot pitch to truly display 1600x1200. Every once in a while I have to focus one of them, but other than that, they are crisp and clear. So, for $500, I have 3200x1200 resolution and reasonable enough surface area that I never have to print anything out (which is good because I've never bothered to buy a printer).
I've looked at flat panels as recently as a week ago and the best price I could find on a 1600x1200 flat panel was about $1300. So, the price ratio is still running about 5:1. For what? Not having to focus as often? Greater distortion (I'm one of the 30% of the population that sees flat surfaces as curved at the edges)? To save about 3 square feet of space that only costs $80 a square foot?
As near as I can tell, its still nothing but coolness that is selling these things. The sad part is that several very promising developments including one that promised 5" deep CRTs have been set aside for the joy of having stuck on pixels and a lighter wallet.
When they start printing displays in rolls at 300DPI (IBM research has proved that a denser DPI does more to save the eyes than higher refresh rates), maybe we'll have something. Until then, I wish they'd get away from this path. Its getting harder and harder to find CRTs with the proper dot pitch. I think they have been reducing them so that the LCDs don't look so bad.
Its not just a NMCI thing. I'm on an Air Force project where we're using Oracle, Win2K, IPlanet, and PHP. Frankly, Win2K is the last problem I have with the list. We'd way prefer to use Apache or even IIS over IPlanet. We do our development with IIS running as localhost and its much easier to manage. Darn near anything is better than Oracle. And I'm personally much more impressed with the number and quality of precanned solutions for common problems I can find for Perl than PHP.
NMCI is just a symptom of the fact that the DOD infrastructure is well on its way to converting to Windows now. They are still predominantly custom solutions on Unix that are so outdated that even thinking about updating them is silly. But the momentum has shifted. Look at the CJMTK (Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit) program to replace the government's JMTK mapping technology for example. ESRI's doing it and though there is some talk of porting the existing interface, I wouldn't count on it. It will end up being a Windows product through and through.
To put it simply, it takes a couple of decades to turn the DOD ship in a different direction. When the DOD thinks of replacing its proprietary GOTS with COTS systems, they mean commercial, not free. The lead commercial system is Windows. Thus, that's where they will look.
It has taken 20 years to get the government to realize you don't need mainframes to run desktop applications. During that time, many small programs that didn't have the money of the big guys successfully delivered PC based systems, but the sea change is really still just starting.
I think it will take 20 more to go from COTS to OOTS or whatever you want to call open source off the shelf software. It was hard enough to convince these guys that they could use commercial instead of government software. It sounds crazy, but it will be way harder to convince them that they can safely use stuff that isn't even commercial.
Gimp, like almost every other GNU program I've ever needed to run, runs fine on Windows. So, what's the problem?
I work completely in a Windows environment and we use PNGs a lot to compress screen shots. They come out way smaller than JPGs and maintain all of the colors unlike GIFs. We capture them with SnagIt, a windows program, and we use them in MS Word. I wouldn't say they have no support, they work way better in MS Word than the alternatives, just that the vast majority of users in the world don't know that they exist. That's life in a world where the overwhelmingly vast majority of content producers are not literate in things like the pros and cons of gif versus png.