whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge
Critical infrastructure challenge is lobbing Wi-Fi in cities? Exactly how for the vast majority of people is this a more important issue than roads, rail and airline infrastructure? Even for the techo-geek community there are options like 3G that are delivering this in most civilised countries already. How the hell does Wi-Fi bridge the digitial divide? If you don't have a computer it hardly helps, and if you do have a computer its liable to be in your house, not travelling around a city. And if its in a house in a city (these efforts are NOT aiming at remote communities for the most part) then you can get relatively cheap Cable or DSL. Wi-Fi, WiMax etc etc will do nothing to bridge the digitial divide, and in many cases would just help the digitially mobile increase their advantage.
This isn't a big challenge, its not even a big issue. In the question of what tends to deliver the most cost effective infrastructure its always the private sector. Goverments get involved when those companies go bust due to commoditisation and errosion of profit margins.
Biggest Challenge ? A sense of perspective for where Wi-Fi access sits in the list of important issues in America today.
"Gotta love hot those Russians have worked out that the cheapest thing to do is build a big parachute and some retro rockets, not invest billions in something they just don't need"
The Russians have done engineering, while NASA has done politics.
I know this is Slashdot and all. But if people expect that everytime a company releases a product for Linux that they MUST OpenSource it or they have "only made a start" then there will never be a market for Linux.
So if Adobe released Photoshop for Linux should they OpenSource it? Are Oracle "only making a start" by supporting Linux because they don't Open Source their database ?
Wake up people. This is good news that people consider Linux a platform worth supporting. This isn't the "start" this is the game.
Religious Studies people and Sociologists generally attribute this to the fact that America has no state support of religion. In European countries one church is usually given a monopoly of sorts; it is state funded and presumes to count all members of the dominant ethnic group as members. Because it has this safety net, the church is protected from having to keep up with the religious needs of the populace and as a result religion in general wanes in social importance.
Then explain France... which is secular by design.
I worked in an industry that used VR, you can probably guess which one if I say its not for entertainment. What we found was that for simulation elements and "gaming" it worked well, but for command and control type functions it was too much information to process and a flat 2D model worked better, the 3D model lead to things being missed as they were out of scope and also on periferal vision elements being given too much weight over the central image (the human eye reacts better to movement at the edges, its where the tigers are coming from).
So great that its getting cheaper, but please god can all those "cool a VR desktop" people just have a think for a second. Maybe zoom out (ala the Mac and Looking Glass) to get your windows, or rotate (looking glass) but a full VR would be dreadful, we found users getting lost and disoriented as they tried to navigate unstructured information (and most people's directory structures are very unstructured).
The people that download music/movies will always be about 10 steps ahead of them.
Quick summary of what you said
"Run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man"
I'm assuming in this downloading that you are making direct contributions to the artists that made the films/music rather than just ripping it off ? Didn't think so.
In my book that makes you an equal git with the RIAA. They might be over-zealous, but you are a plain and simple thief.
financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets.
A signed up member of IBM's marketing department. It sounds a slightly odd slashdot line.
Nice advertising though, and an interesting proposition.
This is how the procurement works, and no doubt the new craft will have some "anti-terrorism" purpose as well (to get extra budget).
a) We could just go for a low cost solution that does the job, like the russians
b) But this would mean that we couldn't give large subsidies to the R&D programmes at folks like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
c) And it might not even be more expensive than what those pesky Europeans are doing with Ariane.
So the end result is a massive white elephant of a programme that aims at huge complex problems and will either fail, delivery 1/10th what was predicted or just massively over-run.
But this is the BEST option for the Pentagon and NASA is the massive, multi-year project on which they can all retire to the contractors who are building it.
Is it any suprise that the US still doesn't have a modern integrated Air Traffic Control system ?
And the genius of the Russian programme is that they took an engineers approach to the whole thing of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". So they built simple, and built to last. The mechanics are miles simpler, and are a major reason for the Russians keeping going despite budget reductions.
Maybe NASA should be made to concentrate on basic engineering rather than fancy shuttles.
You are missing the real point. The idea is that actually the stuffed bear will dynamically generate the pictures of the child, thus enabling parents to have a "virtual child", probably as part of Longhorn. Parents will turn the bear on, it will then ship the kid direct to Microsoft where it will form part of their child army which is set to take over the world.
The parents won't care because they will keep seeing the photos generated from the bear.
Of course little bits of rock are probably more of a threat than big bits of rocks. Sure the big ones might make a dent but the surface area of a small one is much less and therefore much more likely to make a puncture mark.
Or as one of my university professors once said
"When you are travelling faster than a rifle bullet, its a bit of an issue when you hit something that is the size of a rifle bullet"
In the UK I've been using Orange 3G to provide network connectivity. Its still a bit patchy, but its good enough for most tasks and its superb as you get towards London or other major cities.
I had the pleasure of meeting with another ex-microsoft person last year who went to Google. And I have to say that what he demo'ed was uber-cool. Certainly nothing like an operating system, but a great 80% rule solution.
Now given that most people live in the browser, the firefox guy is at Google, the creator of IE is at Google, and now a.NET services guy is at Google...
Now if only this uber-cool stuff was available on mobile devices and could cope with disconnected working.
£104 to have the BBC in existance is well worth the money. Its reporting is superb, its comedy truly world-class and its drama often ground-breaking. I've lived and worked all around the world and there is no media organisation to compare with it in terms of breadth and honesty in its approach.
The way the BBC holds politics to account in the UK is unrivialed in any country. Tony Blair is AFRAID to go onto the BBC because of the grilling he will get. Many countries claim they have free-speech, and yet none actually challenge their leadership in the same way as the Beeb.
Blackadder, the Office, Little Britian, Newsnight, The Today Programme, Panorama etc etc etc.
Put it this way, in the UK we see the bodies of our soldiers being returned, we see the damage the suicide bombers do, and the damage that allied bombs do. Even Sky News (prop: R Murdoch) has to be unbiased and serious about the news, Fox News (prop: R Murdoch) is considered to be a comedy programme.
£104 to live in a country where Fox is a joke.... bargin.
I'd say, given that Looking Glass, which I've had the pleasure of trying out on and off for over six months, was created by someone who just wanted to show that Java wasn't slow that the target wasn't really Apple...
There are few enough decent UI designers out there who understand what is actually important over what "looks real pretty". Here was a man who was more interested in it working for people, than it looking good on a poster.
The original Mac interface is a design classic, where design is about function, not about style.
So next time you design an interface or a web page remember the creator of the Mac. What you create will be WORSE than the Mac.. BECAUSE of all the colours and "clever" bits you used.
Of course part of the point of the presentation (you did read the article right?) is that much of IT is actually about human interaction and conversation. Namely getting the requirements, designing the architecture, verifying that this is right and organising the project.
I'm in IT, and to be honest compiling a Unix system is about the most boring thing I could imagine doing. Working with a client to work out the best way to solve their supply chain demand problem.. now that I like.
In my experience women tend to have better communication skills than blokes (on average) and this is a distinct advantage when looking at senior jobs in IT away from those who compile kernels.
C# is an ECMA standard (which of course with generics et al Microsoft is breaking). This is NOT open, and certainly not in comparison to Java.
The Java Community Process go to the site and have a look at the "closed" and unchangable monstor that Sun has created. I mean its just scary to think that Java 6.0 is ASKING FOR JOINERS, to input into the next standard.
How would you become an ECMA member and propose changes to C# ?
Of course they do, otherwise their emails will continue to show in court that they are guilty as hell. There should be no different standard applied to electronic communcations over written notes. If you write a note its admissable, if its electronic it should be equally admissable (and easier to get hold of).
US People => Tend to recycle, some buy hybrids and other good cars (some do buy SUVs though). So overall just people and in some cases pretty damned good.
US Legislature => A bunch of lazy pork riddled morons whose whole aim in life is to reject anything that comes from abroad and do what ever big business wants
US President => Commander in Chief of the "not invented here" syndrome: International Criminal Court (bad), UN (bad), Chemical and biological non-proliferation treaty (bad), Geneva Convention (bad), Kyoto (bad), Steel Tarifs (good) etc.
Slashdot Mirror
whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge
Critical infrastructure challenge is lobbing Wi-Fi in cities? Exactly how for the vast majority of people is this a more important issue than roads, rail and airline infrastructure? Even for the techo-geek community there are options like 3G that are delivering this in most civilised countries already. How the hell does Wi-Fi bridge the digitial divide? If you don't have a computer it hardly helps, and if you do have a computer its liable to be in your house, not travelling around a city. And if its in a house in a city (these efforts are NOT aiming at remote communities for the most part) then you can get relatively cheap Cable or DSL. Wi-Fi, WiMax etc etc will do nothing to bridge the digitial divide, and in many cases would just help the digitially mobile increase their advantage.
This isn't a big challenge, its not even a big issue. In the question of what tends to deliver the most cost effective infrastructure its always the private sector. Goverments get involved when those companies go bust due to commoditisation and errosion of profit margins.
Biggest Challenge ? A sense of perspective for where Wi-Fi access sits in the list of important issues in America today.
Or put it another way
"Gotta love hot those Russians have worked out that the cheapest thing to do is build a big parachute and some retro rockets, not invest billions in something they just don't need"
The Russians have done engineering, while NASA has done politics.
I know this is Slashdot and all. But if people expect that everytime a company releases a product for Linux that they MUST OpenSource it or they have "only made a start" then there will never be a market for Linux.
So if Adobe released Photoshop for Linux should they OpenSource it? Are Oracle "only making a start" by supporting Linux because they don't Open Source their database ?
Wake up people. This is good news that people consider Linux a platform worth supporting. This isn't the "start" this is the game.
Who the hell are you with ? I'm on Orange, and can browse everything I want to (including Slashdot) from my nice little 6630.
The lesson here is TEST THE SERVICE IN THE SHOP first. And of course the old caveat emptor still applies.
Religious Studies people and Sociologists generally attribute this to the fact that America has no state support of religion. In European countries one church is usually given a monopoly of sorts; it is state funded and presumes to count all members of the dominant ethnic group as members. Because it has this safety net, the church is protected from having to keep up with the religious needs of the populace and as a result religion in general wanes in social importance.
Then explain France... which is secular by design.
I worked in an industry that used VR, you can probably guess which one if I say its not for entertainment. What we found was that for simulation elements and "gaming" it worked well, but for command and control type functions it was too much information to process and a flat 2D model worked better, the 3D model lead to things being missed as they were out of scope and also on periferal vision elements being given too much weight over the central image (the human eye reacts better to movement at the edges, its where the tigers are coming from).
So great that its getting cheaper, but please god can all those "cool a VR desktop" people just have a think for a second. Maybe zoom out (ala the Mac and Looking Glass) to get your windows, or rotate (looking glass) but a full VR would be dreadful, we found users getting lost and disoriented as they tried to navigate unstructured information (and most people's directory structures are very unstructured).
The people that download music/movies will always be about 10 steps ahead of them.
Quick summary of what you said
"Run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man"
I'm assuming in this downloading that you are making direct contributions to the artists that made the films/music rather than just ripping it off ? Didn't think so.
In my book that makes you an equal git with the RIAA. They might be over-zealous, but you are a plain and simple thief.
financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets.
A signed up member of IBM's marketing department. It sounds a slightly odd slashdot line.
Nice advertising though, and an interesting proposition.
The mainframe is dead... long live the mainframe
This is how the procurement works, and no doubt the new craft will have some "anti-terrorism" purpose as well (to get extra budget).
a) We could just go for a low cost solution that does the job, like the russians
b) But this would mean that we couldn't give large subsidies to the R&D programmes at folks like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
c) And it might not even be more expensive than what those pesky Europeans are doing with Ariane.
So the end result is a massive white elephant of a programme that aims at huge complex problems and will either fail, delivery 1/10th what was predicted or just massively over-run.
But this is the BEST option for the Pentagon and NASA is the massive, multi-year project on which they can all retire to the contractors who are building it.
Is it any suprise that the US still doesn't have a modern integrated Air Traffic Control system ?
And the genius of the Russian programme is that they took an engineers approach to the whole thing of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". So they built simple, and built to last. The mechanics are miles simpler, and are a major reason for the Russians keeping going despite budget reductions.
Maybe NASA should be made to concentrate on basic engineering rather than fancy shuttles.
your fridge comes with an evaporator that hooks up conviently to your cpu?
Of course, that was a major part of my reason for buying it. What sort of geek asks such an obvious question ?
Next you'll be telling me that your local Pizza place doesn't have a trebuchet to speed delivery through your window onto your PC desk.
1) Go and look at your fridge.
2) If you want your chip REALLY cold
a) Host in deep-space
b) Rotate winters in the Artic/Antartic
3) If you want your chip REALLY REALLY cold
a) Get your wife to stand next to the box, then tell her you've forgotten her birthday.
4) And for the ultimate in cold, you just need to create the conditions where Bill Gates admits publically that he prefers Linux.
You are missing the real point. The idea is that actually the stuffed bear will dynamically generate the pictures of the child, thus enabling parents to have a "virtual child", probably as part of Longhorn. Parents will turn the bear on, it will then ship the kid direct to Microsoft where it will form part of their child army which is set to take over the world.
The parents won't care because they will keep seeing the photos generated from the bear.
Of course little bits of rock are probably more of a threat than big bits of rocks. Sure the big ones might make a dent but the surface area of a small one is much less and therefore much more likely to make a puncture mark.
Or as one of my university professors once said
"When you are travelling faster than a rifle bullet, its a bit of an issue when you hit something that is the size of a rifle bullet"
I've got a 3G phone, Broadband at home, WiFi in cafe's and now there is internet on the trains and planes.
Time to buy that Faraday cage.
In the UK I've been using Orange 3G to provide network connectivity. Its still a bit patchy, but its good enough for most tasks and its superb as you get towards London or other major cities.
I had the pleasure of meeting with another ex-microsoft person last year who went to Google. And I have to say that what he demo'ed was uber-cool. Certainly nothing like an operating system, but a great 80% rule solution.
Now given that most people live in the browser, the firefox guy is at Google, the creator of IE is at Google, and now a
Now if only this uber-cool stuff was available on mobile devices and could cope with disconnected working.
Others have said it, but so shall I.
£104 to have the BBC in existance is well worth the money. Its reporting is superb, its comedy truly world-class and its drama often ground-breaking. I've lived and worked all around the world and there is no media organisation to compare with it in terms of breadth and honesty in its approach.
The way the BBC holds politics to account in the UK is unrivialed in any country. Tony Blair is AFRAID to go onto the BBC because of the grilling he will get. Many countries claim they have free-speech, and yet none actually challenge their leadership in the same way as the Beeb.
Blackadder, the Office, Little Britian, Newsnight, The Today Programme, Panorama etc etc etc.
Put it this way, in the UK we see the bodies of our soldiers being returned, we see the damage the suicide bombers do, and the damage that allied bombs do. Even Sky News (prop: R Murdoch) has to be unbiased and serious about the news, Fox News (prop: R Murdoch) is considered to be a comedy programme.
£104 to live in a country where Fox is a joke.... bargin.
I'd say, given that Looking Glass, which I've had the pleasure of trying out on and off for over six months, was created by someone who just wanted to show that Java wasn't slow that the target wasn't really Apple...
But Slashdot readers who claim that Java is slow.
First there was Chinese relativity
"All of your problems, no matter how big or small, 1.2 billion chinese people could give a fuck"
and then there was relative relativity
"No matter what your achievements, your aunt will continue to tell your girlfriend/wife about the time when you ran nude in the garden aged 5"
and now I bring you the Scientific relativity theory
"No matter how smart you think you are, you still look smart to a time splitting physicist"
Bugger.
There are few enough decent UI designers out there who understand what is actually important over what "looks real pretty". Here was a man who was more interested in it working for people, than it looking good on a poster.
The original Mac interface is a design classic, where design is about function, not about style.
So next time you design an interface or a web page remember the creator of the Mac. What you create will be WORSE than the Mac.. BECAUSE of all the colours and "clever" bits you used.
Of course part of the point of the presentation (you did read the article right?) is that much of IT is actually about human interaction and conversation. Namely getting the requirements, designing the architecture, verifying that this is right and organising the project.
I'm in IT, and to be honest compiling a Unix system is about the most boring thing I could imagine doing. Working with a client to work out the best way to solve their supply chain demand problem.. now that I like.
In my experience women tend to have better communication skills than blokes (on average) and this is a distinct advantage when looking at senior jobs in IT away from those who compile kernels.
C# is an ECMA standard (which of course with generics et al Microsoft is breaking). This is NOT open, and certainly not in comparison to Java.
The Java Community Process go to the site and have a look at the "closed" and unchangable monstor that Sun has created. I mean its just scary to think that Java 6.0 is ASKING FOR JOINERS, to input into the next standard.
How would you become an ECMA member and propose changes to C# ?
Of course they do, otherwise their emails will continue to show in court that they are guilty as hell. There should be no different standard applied to electronic communcations over written notes. If you write a note its admissable, if its electronic it should be equally admissable (and easier to get hold of).
US People => Tend to recycle, some buy hybrids and other good cars (some do buy SUVs though). So overall just people and in some cases pretty damned good.
US Legislature => A bunch of lazy pork riddled morons whose whole aim in life is to reject anything that comes from abroad and do what ever big business wants
US President => Commander in Chief of the "not invented here" syndrome: International Criminal Court (bad), UN (bad), Chemical and biological non-proliferation treaty (bad), Geneva Convention (bad), Kyoto (bad), Steel Tarifs (good) etc.