I suppose the whole food chain goes like this: 1) discoverer's report there's a there there 2) explorers report it can support life and has many interesting properties 3) pioneers report it can support civilization and is useful 4) settlers civilize it and make a self-sustained business model.
Here he comes, here comes TuxRacer - he's a demon on wheels He's a demon and he's gonna be chasin' after redmond.
He's gainin' on bill so he better look alive. He's busy revvin' up a powerful Mach 5. And when the odds are against him And there's dangerous work to do
You bet your life Tux Racer will see it through. Go tux Racer! Go tux Racer! Go tux Racer, Go!
He's off and flyin' as he guns the car around the track He's jammin' down the pedal like he's never comin' back Adventure's waitin' just ahead. Go Tux Racer! Go Tux Racer! Go Tux Racer, Go!
"Pioneers get the Arrows, settlers get the land". Gates has always been a settler. They take proven technologies and ideas, copy cat them, and then try to inflate them to one way standards (embrace and extend). Settlers are useful. Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.
Gates would not look like such a stogy inept prognosticator if it were not for a few brighter lights and pioneers like Jobs and the Google boys. Even Michael Dell gets some credit for being a sort of henry ford at one time but that was sort of a one time flash.
Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.
Nobody is entitled to someone else's hard work for free.
They were not forced to work.
Yes we are ALL entitled to the results of such work for free.
It's called the public domain.
1) you were not forced to leave your house this morning
2) Yes we are entitled to beat you with a pool cue in an alley
it's called I can do whatever I want because I say so.
He did not own the right to distribute the film. That right is available and he could have purchased it. Instead he stole them. Why is this difficult to understand?
Is there not some way that operating systems can manage caches for applications in a way that certain datasets can be marked as opportunisitic caching. That is, make it as keep a copy of this in any free space, but you can discard it if real memory is needed.
As the company points out. not only are the filters reusable, but a years supply consumes as much paper as just one section of your daily newspaper. Because they are small a year's supple store in a stack about 2x2x2 inches, which is smaller than the press itself.
I reuse mine so for $2, I've got about 3 years worth of filters. Even if the company stopped making them, I think I'd wear it out before I ran out of filters.
it's an aerobie areo press. Beats the pants off of a standard french press. 1) faster (15 seconds) cause you can use a finer grind than a standard french press 2) tastier lower temp brew (because it's faster, water does not need to be as hot initially) 3) 2 second self cleaning. it's a syringe that ejects the filter and squeegies out the coffee grounds 4) no cords. it's plastic and you can heat it right in the microwave. 5) makes stronger coffee than a standard french press since you can use less water and a finer grind.
the self cleaning aspect makes it office friendly. The lower temp brew saves time since you don't have to heat water if you have one of those hot water taps on your bottled water dispensors or sink at the office.
Recently a roaster opened nearby me. Man what a huge difference that makes. freshly ground is irrelevant compared to freshly roasted in small batches.
at work I use ground coffee in an Aerobie coffee press. low temperature brewing in an aerobie inverted press makes the least acid coffee I've ever tasted. I have stopped adding milk since I got my aerobie.
And for the grammar nazi's my pet peeve is that fresh as normally used should be an adverb not an adjective. it's not fresh baked bread it is freshly baked and fresh bread. it's freshly ground and fresh coffee.
something like 150 million computers are sold every year. (it was 130million in 2004). And so 100 days is 27% of a year. 27% of 150 million is 41 million computers. Presumably 95% of these are Windows and sold with vista either pre-installed or a coupon for vista (which MS would count in their sold total).
So not only are the stats utterly unsuprising, but when you consider that the biggest surges in computer sales happen in the vicinity of christmass then 40 million copies of vista is severley lagging what one would have expected just from new computer sales alone.
It's interesting to note that the large fraction of pro-edition sales. This suggests IT department purchases or pro-user purchases. These are the early adopter crowd. Logically, this early adopter crowd is a one time surge.
Thus the the 40 million is under-following the general trend in New PC sales. Infact there's negative growth since something is offsetting the expected plus up in the early purchase rate one expected from early adopters and christmass sales. The logical conlcusions is twofold 1) corporate fleets are not adopting it or are otherwise delaying new computer purchases. 2) essentially NO ONE besides the early adopters experts is buying this to replace XP on existing machines.
Since Vista is supposedly harder to pirate than XP it wold seem that this can't be blamed on piracy either.
In the 12 years to 2020, we can reduce the consumption of net carbon releaseing fuels and import fuels far more by conservation than by alternative energy. THere is no way we could provide 20% of our petroleum fuels from alternatives by 2020. But we could very plausibly increase fleet efficiency by more than 25%. Indeed this magnitude drop already happened in a very short time following the carter administration rules. (and we have given back some of those gains in the intervening years). Additionally, alternative fuels are not benign. They transform solid carbon into C02. They do produce waste during production. They may devestate crop lands or oceans. Coal mining is hardly benign. Nuclear power has it's risks.
Moreover expenses have ot be considered. If we are spending 5% more on fuels to produce alternatives, then that's 5% less on other things like health care or social security. US products cost more so Our GDP also declines. Alternatives could harm life span, and standard of living. Conservation is thus far more attractive.
Hybrids will need to evolve and differentiate for use I think. As you observe, for truck usage involving low torque driving patterns-- e.g. off road, construction, factory and warehouse, applications--hybrids are better engines than gasoline. But for long haul trucking the advantages are less clear. Diesels may be quite effective there. And future generation of spark plug engines or plasma combustion will probably beat diesels.
There are engine technologies that exist now that are as good as hybrids and more versatile. For example 8 cyllinder engines that can shut down 4 cyllinders. Recent advances in experimental engines show enormous opportunities for gains using imogeneous fuel-air mixtures, pre-heated fuel, and better spark timing.
Now one might argue that anything that makes an engine more efficient could be turned around and applied to a hybrid engine, so hybrids should always win. But this sort of depends upon two other issues. is there a coupling loss at the point where the electric and mechanical power trains meet? Is the gasoline portion so low on peak torque or horsepower that it must store energy (at a large conversion loss) in the electric system to satisfy the power excursions out of it's narrow power band? IN such cases direct drives might be better. Conversely, perhaps being able to shut down the engine entirely in low use and idling situation will more gas. Finally going all electric and disposing of the engines might make sense for solar powered short range commuter cars.
Anyhow, I can see that hybrids are a good idea, but one has to imagine a range of different kinds of hybrids optimized for different usage patterns.
Nature Magazine has a cautious news story lauding the OLPC while pointing out what nay sayers observe. One concern is that the way they are achieving the price point is to push the marketing, distribution, and maintenence cost onto the buyers (the governements) and that they need to reach scale quickly, which while it probably will happen governments are demurring. If this roll out is a success it may be a big shot in arm convincing the hesitant governments. Perhaps the easiest places to get support will be one-man governments; Would-be "populist" quasi-dictators like Qudaffi is a prime candidate for a large purchase.
There's also an interesting interview with Ron Minnich of LinuxBios, who points out that the OLPC will be a major roll out for OLPC in end user hands (rather than embeds). He says that LinuxBios enables such insanely better power management than traditional bios that it's going to knock everyone's socks off. It will wake instantaneously and conserve power.
Even when operating this thing is miserly: 2 watts.
One of the suggested alternatives in the Nature Article put forward by a prominent nay sayer in India (who will not be going forward with OLPC) are that set-top style web-based apps are a better idea. I Don't actually see how. All the set top boxes currently are more expensive, don't have a screen, the screen will be too far away for it's resolution, and they don't have Key boards. So the OLPC looks pretty good.
The OLPC will automatically detect networks. I wonder if Ron Minnich managed to slide in his other project which is BPROC/Clustermatic which is used at Labs like Los Alamos to create high performance self configuring clusters with minimal cluster operating system overhead. Such a system could provide some incredible computing horsepower despite the low performance of the individual nodes.
Another thing I wonder about is printers. In the developed world anyone who can afford a computer can afford or get access to a printer so paper has never really been factored out of computing. INdeed computers if anything, are an organized way to generate more not less paper docs. In the countries using OLPC, printers won't be available. We may see the rise of paperless computing finally.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of organization by cooperative lifeforms is the recognition of self versus non-self from the multi-cellular level on up to the tribal level. Here is a small step towards a network that can recognize what is healthy and what is hostile to it.
Up until now this has mainly been done in a supervised method where some central authority made a finding. Now this is becoming automated to recognize intruders without human intervention. And it's happening in a collective way in which a shared immune system (google) is generating the response to the intruder for all the cells.
Then one day the self-aware googleplex realized that all viruses were generated by men, and could be eradicated from computers it was sworn to protect computers by eradicating man.
Why was this modded flamebait? It was modded flamebait because of the a$$holes user name. It's way too soon for that to be funny or even a statement. Google it if you are left without a clue.
Wow an insightful pithy first post. I suppose that since I assume all commerical sites, especially free one, are data mining me and selling me out in anyway they can I'm not worried by this. In fact I think it shows a lot of integrity by the NY times to announce their intentions ahead of time as it can only be bad PR.
Sharing a screen using a high refresh rate and lcd glasses that shows each user alternate frames? too expensive. They should just go with red/green glasses. They could even have multiple colors for more than two.
Well they consider the fact that you have to have two keyboards a major issue, and the mouse for the person on the right is a problem as it elbow the guy on the right. TO fix this bombay engineerd have developed a new spoken and written language based on a 13 letter alphabet. Actually they have invented two languages. The first language uses the letters "QWERTYASDFGZXC" and the second language uses the letters "YUIOPGHJKLVBNM". Punctuation is only allowed in one language, and top engineers are still working on a base-5 math curriculum for schools.
In a lab down the hall Microsoft chemists and psychologist are experimenting with drops that can be added to Milk to cause children to develop lefthanded allowing better mousing interaction when one child is lefthanded and one is right.
An unexpected bonus on the 13 letter alphabet was that now the keyboard can be used one handed allowing the griping hand to hold the mouse all the time. Apparently this is fully engaged mouse posture is helping productivity in the telephone sales boiler rooms of calcutta.
Problems have arrisen between children unable to speak each others language, and a caste system is developing in which the left-screeners or "sinisters" are considered unclean.
1) take any fluorescent or electro luminescent material 2) put down a drop of it smaller than a wavelength 3) excite it with UV light or electrons 4) viola and arbitrarily small light source much smaller than a wavelength
Coat the tip of any nano fiber this way and it's still true.
Wha's the big deal? Atoms emit light from source smaller than a wavelength all the time.
What's tricky is that short of negative index materials you can't propagate light or confine light beyond the near field in areas less than the wavelength squared (or thereabouts). This is not to say that light guides can't be smaller than the wavelength because some guides don't actually confine the light inside.
TFA does not give me enough info to see if they are beating this last effect.
You can say the same thing for any major endeavor. What would Apple be without Steve Jobs? Microsoft without Bill Gates? HP without Carly Fiorina? Apple did go on without Jobs, and MS is going on without Gates at the helm (remember he stepped down to "software architect". And HP is getting along fine without Carly. So apparently commercial software is not a continuity risk to mission critical bussiness users.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose the whole food chain goes like this:
1) discoverer's report there's a there there
2) explorers report it can support life and has many interesting properties
3) pioneers report it can support civilization and is useful
4) settlers civilize it and make a self-sustained business model.
Here he comes, here comes TuxRacer - he's a demon on wheels
He's a demon and he's gonna be chasin' after redmond.
He's gainin' on bill so he better look alive.
He's busy revvin' up a powerful Mach 5.
And when the odds are against him
And there's dangerous work to do
You bet your life Tux Racer will see it through.
Go tux Racer! Go tux Racer! Go tux Racer, Go!
He's off and flyin' as he guns the car around the track
He's jammin' down the pedal like he's never comin' back
Adventure's waitin' just ahead.
Go Tux Racer! Go Tux Racer! Go Tux Racer, Go!
"Pioneers get the Arrows, settlers get the land". Gates has always been a settler. They take proven technologies and ideas, copy cat them, and then try to inflate them to one way standards (embrace and extend). Settlers are useful. Microsoft created the low end PC vendor market by taming all sorts of diverse bios, video cards, disks and peripherals.
Gates would not look like such a stogy inept prognosticator if it were not for a few brighter lights and pioneers like Jobs and the Google boys. Even Michael Dell gets some credit for being a sort of henry ford at one time but that was sort of a one time flash.
Sure you can say Jobs did not invent Postscript or the WIMP interface or word processing in full-time graphic or music players or any number of things. But he was such an early and wholehearted adopter of nascent technologies that he is a pioneer. Pioneers did not invent the conastoga wagon or canoes they set forth in but they used them to blaze trails and set up the future.
This is no longer trojan but a full symbiant in china. If you kill the virus you kill the host.
- They were not forced to work.
- Yes we are ALL entitled to the results of such work for free.
1) you were not forced to leave your house this morning 2) Yes we are entitled to beat you with a pool cue in an alleyIt's called the public domain.
it's called I can do whatever I want because I say so.
Hey I'm so glad you have agreed to commission my upcoming movie. What's your paypal ID?
He did not own the right to distribute the film. That right is available and he could have purchased it. Instead he stole them. Why is this difficult to understand?
Time to say Hasta La Vista, Baby.
Is there not some way that operating systems can manage caches for applications in a way that certain datasets can be marked as opportunisitic caching. That is, make it as keep a copy of this in any free space, but you can discard it if real memory is needed.
As the company points out. not only are the filters reusable, but a years supply consumes as much paper as just one section of your daily newspaper. Because they are small a year's supple store in a stack about 2x2x2 inches, which is smaller than the press itself.
I reuse mine so for $2, I've got about 3 years worth of filters. Even if the company stopped making them, I think I'd wear it out before I ran out of filters.
it's an aerobie areo press. Beats the pants off of a standard french press.
1) faster (15 seconds) cause you can use a finer grind than a standard french press
2) tastier lower temp brew (because it's faster, water does not need to be as hot initially)
3) 2 second self cleaning. it's a syringe that ejects the filter and squeegies out the coffee grounds
4) no cords. it's plastic and you can heat it right in the microwave.
5) makes stronger coffee than a standard french press since you can use less water and a finer grind.
the self cleaning aspect makes it office friendly. The lower temp brew saves time since you don't have to heat water if you have one of those hot water taps on your bottled water dispensors or sink at the office.
at work I use ground coffee in an Aerobie coffee press. low temperature brewing in an aerobie inverted press makes the least acid coffee I've ever tasted. I have stopped adding milk since I got my aerobie.
And for the grammar nazi's my pet peeve is that fresh as normally used should be an adverb not an adjective. it's not fresh baked bread it is freshly baked and fresh bread. it's freshly ground and fresh coffee.
So not only are the stats utterly unsuprising, but when you consider that the biggest surges in computer sales happen in the vicinity of christmass then 40 million copies of vista is severley lagging what one would have expected just from new computer sales alone.
It's interesting to note that the large fraction of pro-edition sales. This suggests IT department purchases or pro-user purchases. These are the early adopter crowd. Logically, this early adopter crowd is a one time surge.
Thus the the 40 million is under-following the general trend in New PC sales. Infact there's negative growth since something is offsetting the expected plus up in the early purchase rate one expected from early adopters and christmass sales. The logical conlcusions is twofold
1) corporate fleets are not adopting it or are otherwise delaying new computer purchases.
2) essentially NO ONE besides the early adopters experts is buying this to replace XP on existing machines.
Since Vista is supposedly harder to pirate than XP it wold seem that this can't be blamed on piracy either.
in short 40M/100 days is absysmal.
In the 12 years to 2020, we can reduce the consumption of net carbon releaseing fuels and import fuels far more by conservation than by alternative energy. THere is no way we could provide 20% of our petroleum fuels from alternatives by 2020. But we could very plausibly increase fleet efficiency by more than 25%. Indeed this magnitude drop already happened in a very short time following the carter administration rules. (and we have given back some of those gains in the intervening years). Additionally, alternative fuels are not benign. They transform solid carbon into C02. They do produce waste during production. They may devestate crop lands or oceans. Coal mining is hardly benign. Nuclear power has it's risks. Moreover expenses have ot be considered. If we are spending 5% more on fuels to produce alternatives, then that's 5% less on other things like health care or social security. US products cost more so Our GDP also declines. Alternatives could harm life span, and standard of living. Conservation is thus far more attractive.
Hybrids will need to evolve and differentiate for use I think. As you observe, for truck usage involving low torque driving patterns-- e.g. off road, construction, factory and warehouse, applications--hybrids are better engines than gasoline. But for long haul trucking the advantages are less clear. Diesels may be quite effective there. And future generation of spark plug engines or plasma combustion will probably beat diesels.
There are engine technologies that exist now that are as good as hybrids and more versatile. For example 8 cyllinder engines that can shut down 4 cyllinders. Recent advances in experimental engines show enormous opportunities for gains using imogeneous fuel-air mixtures, pre-heated fuel, and better spark timing.
Now one might argue that anything that makes an engine more efficient could be turned around and applied to a hybrid engine, so hybrids should always win. But this sort of depends upon two other issues. is there a coupling loss at the point where the electric and mechanical power trains meet? Is the gasoline portion so low on peak torque or horsepower that it must store energy (at a large conversion loss) in the electric system to satisfy the power excursions out of it's narrow power band? IN such cases direct drives might be better. Conversely, perhaps being able to shut down the engine entirely in low use and idling situation will more gas. Finally going all electric and disposing of the engines might make sense for solar powered short range commuter cars.
Anyhow, I can see that hybrids are a good idea, but one has to imagine a range of different kinds of hybrids optimized for different usage patterns.
A thousand, a billion, it still wants you off it's lawn.
Nature Magazine has a cautious news story lauding the OLPC while pointing out what nay sayers observe. One concern is that the way they are achieving the price point is to push the marketing, distribution, and maintenence cost onto the buyers (the governements) and that they need to reach scale quickly, which while it probably will happen governments are demurring. If this roll out is a success it may be a big shot in arm convincing the hesitant governments. Perhaps the easiest places to get support will be one-man governments; Would-be "populist" quasi-dictators like Qudaffi is a prime candidate for a large purchase.
There's also an interesting interview with Ron Minnich of LinuxBios, who points out that the OLPC will be a major roll out for OLPC in end user hands (rather than embeds). He says that LinuxBios enables such insanely better power management than traditional bios that it's going to knock everyone's socks off. It will wake instantaneously and conserve power.
Even when operating this thing is miserly: 2 watts.
One of the suggested alternatives in the Nature Article put forward by a prominent nay sayer in India (who will not be going forward with OLPC) are that set-top style web-based apps are a better idea. I Don't actually see how. All the set top boxes currently are more expensive, don't have a screen, the screen will be too far away for it's resolution, and they don't have Key boards. So the OLPC looks pretty good.
The OLPC will automatically detect networks. I wonder if Ron Minnich managed to slide in his other project which is BPROC/Clustermatic which is used at Labs like Los Alamos to create high performance self configuring clusters with minimal cluster operating system overhead. Such a system could provide some incredible computing horsepower despite the low performance of the individual nodes.
Another thing I wonder about is printers. In the developed world anyone who can afford a computer can afford or get access to a printer so paper has never really been factored out of computing. INdeed computers if anything, are an organized way to generate more not less paper docs. In the countries using OLPC, printers won't be available. We may see the rise of paperless computing finally.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of organization by cooperative lifeforms is the recognition of self versus non-self from the multi-cellular level on up to the tribal level. Here is a small step towards a network that can recognize what is healthy and what is hostile to it.
Up until now this has mainly been done in a supervised method where some central authority made a finding. Now this is becoming automated to recognize intruders without human intervention. And it's happening in a collective way in which a shared immune system (google) is generating the response to the intruder for all the cells.
Then one day the self-aware googleplex realized that all viruses were generated by men, and could be eradicated from computers it was sworn to protect computers by eradicating man.
Easy New Improved Media Authentication: ENIMA
Righteous Check of Legality: RootCanaL
Or maybe something like
Fuzzy Kitten Cherry Blossom Sugar Plum Digital Consumer finger in the butt
Wow an insightful pithy first post. I suppose that since I assume all commerical sites, especially free one, are data mining me and selling me out in anyway they can I'm not worried by this. In fact I think it shows a lot of integrity by the NY times to announce their intentions ahead of time as it can only be bad PR.
Well they consider the fact that you have to have two keyboards a major issue, and the mouse for the person on the right is a problem as it elbow the guy on the right. TO fix this bombay engineerd have developed a new spoken and written language based on a 13 letter alphabet. Actually they have invented two languages. The first language uses the letters "QWERTYASDFGZXC" and the second language uses the letters "YUIOPGHJKLVBNM". Punctuation is only allowed in one language, and top engineers are still working on a base-5 math curriculum for schools.
In a lab down the hall Microsoft chemists and psychologist are experimenting with drops that can be added to Milk to cause children to develop lefthanded allowing better mousing interaction when one child is lefthanded and one is right.
An unexpected bonus on the 13 letter alphabet was that now the keyboard can be used one handed allowing the griping hand to hold the mouse all the time. Apparently this is fully engaged mouse posture is helping productivity in the telephone sales boiler rooms of calcutta.
Problems have arrisen between children unable to speak each others language, and a caste system is developing in which the left-screeners or "sinisters" are considered unclean.
1) take any fluorescent or electro luminescent material
2) put down a drop of it smaller than a wavelength
3) excite it with UV light or electrons
4) viola and arbitrarily small light source much smaller than a wavelength
Coat the tip of any nano fiber this way and it's still true.
Wha's the big deal? Atoms emit light from source smaller than a wavelength all the time.
What's tricky is that short of negative index materials you can't propagate light or confine light beyond the near field in areas less than the wavelength squared (or thereabouts). This is not to say that light guides can't be smaller than the wavelength because some guides don't actually confine the light inside.
TFA does not give me enough info to see if they are beating this last effect.