Hypothetical: If EVERYTHING were designed and built overseas and then brought back here and sold, who here would have enough money to buy it?
GDP = gross domestic product. Less producing = less GDP. It's an interesting conundrum. Companies think they can save money by building stuff in China. That was ALWAYS debatable but the beancounters made it look good. Now, I would wager that the cost of shipping it all back is edging up.
Let's hear it for the beancounters! Making questionable managerial decision look good through moving beans strategically from one bucket to another!
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine was dating the "racially indeterminant" guy. Couldn't tell "the ethnic origin of his parents", staying consistent with trolltalk's post above. And in the end he thought she was a Latino, IIRC.
Personally, I like it when people put down "human" as their race.
I've been reading through the comments looking for someone to post something like this.
In my area (small town Indiana) ATT owns all the copper. I have mediacom cable internet at home, and at work we have some real slow "business" level DSL connection that's pretty cheesy. I suspect that at some point both ISP's hop onto the ATT copper, because one two week period both my internet at home and work were barely functional, always dropping out. Then, magically both fixed. I blame an upstream ATT problem.
My point -(I do have one) was this:
I wanted to go out and buy a T1 to my house, and then find a sufficient (x) amount of people who would use technology (y) to buy bandwidth from me to offset my cost. I would become a tiny self sufficient ISP, and all involved would enjoy fast, reliable internet at a (z) cost, where z is better than the other options.
My question - how large is (x), how large is (z), and what is (y)? A quick google search says a speakeasy full T1 is $279??
Any slashdotters with extra time who were fed up with local ISP options ever do this? Surely someone has.
It's that 1% to 2% of the time, IE on an airplane, at the airport (without wifi) or when the ubiquitous high speed internet at home or at the office is mysteriously down due to a)The backhoe effect b)bad storms, flooding, hurricane, c) maintenance, d) ISP Messup, e)your modem gets hit by lightning e) gremlins
That 2% of the time, which could be 10%, or 1%, really stinks because it never happens at a convenient time. Offline would be good then.
My wife uses google calendar EXTENSIVELY. It really stinks for her when the internet is down at home (not very often, but like I said, she uses it extensively) because if she needs to check something on the calendar, it's... it's... GONE! We now have internet enabled phones so now if the main intarweb tubes are down we can still get online. Whew! I need to install a local calendaring app for her and have it sync'd with google calendar. I saw a nice article in maximum PC which showed some real easy steps to do it right.
(I know it's april 1st, but I really do have a wife)
very auto maker is already working this, with or without an X-prize
Are they really?
I know that they ARE, yes, working on THINGS that might affect fuel economy. The are doing what is required by law (CAFE standards) and they are R+D'ing alternate fuels. They're toying with hybrids. But are they really?
The X-prize is not a bad idea. I see some advantages to doing the X prize for this.
1) Automakers are mired in corporate inertia, bureaucracy, and shareholders 2) Automakers "might" be somewhat "sympathetic" to big oil. (tinfoil hat) 3) Automakers will kill to save a penny on a $20k car, and fuel efficiency isn't necessarily cheap 4) Automakers employ lots of smart people, but there might be someone smarter out there with the balls and the brains to make something innovative 5) Automakers could make a 100 mpg car that could win the race, but no-one would buy it because they'd have to charge too much money for it. 6) Automakers R+D things, sure, but automakers also rely heavily on vendors for the latest gizmo to do X for $Y. The group that comes up with some innovation to win this race might be just what automakers need. 7) Automakers are trying to SURVIVE, thus year after year mostly just do what they are required to do by law and what will sell well enough to satisfy the shareholders.
For low-tech home users there would be no difference in usability btwn XP and linux. I recommend linux for the grandma-grandpa users, and for anything that is basically a 'netPliance. Linux is stable, requires minimal equipment, and does not get corrupted like XP does. It is perfect for those things. Once virtualization becomes more accessible I think there will be even more subsets of users who can ditch XP as the primary install. I just read an article on Lifehacker where they were doing neat things with virtualbox. http://lifehacker.com/367714/run-windows-apps-seamlessly-inside-linux
For those people who us geeks are "responsible for" like my in-laws, my neighbor, my pastors, etc, those machines I've fixed and/or set up from scratch, I would like to be able to put linux on there so that it's harder for it to get screwed up. Some day.
Reminds me of a friend from college with a 10.000 maniacs t-shirt. He didn't appreciate my joke telling him that "Wow, that is a VERY precise quantity of maniacs you have there..."
I had a great Geology course in college (I'm an ME) and it was very fun. We had a hard end of term project where we had to identify a box of rocks, had some good field trips to a local strip mine, so on. Definitely interesting and enlightening.
It probably helped that the course was taught by someone who had a real interest in the field.
I guess one point of my mini-rant was that, in my opinion, gimp is so well known and so far along what's the point in getting photoshop working and not focus on CAD and video instead? Or, more fairly, CAD and video as well as photoshop?
Your links may indeed invalidate half of the point (I haven't checked out the native DWG and DXF packages from your link).
I found a commercial video package for linux about 1.5 years ago. It is done by MainConcept IIRC. It is very nice, had interesting features and promising ease-of-use. But there were fatal flaws. The demo was available in RPM and DEB. I was using Ubuntu. IIRC the RPM by alien was missing vital features, and the deb was unstable. So close. Yes maybe I could have recompiled but it's commercial software... Maybe it's worth another look at the demo again!
What I do with video is much more than home videos and shots of the dog doing funny tricks, I've basically worked up to the pro-sumer level and have pretty extensive projects in Vegas, putting video out to actual audiences (church) on a weekly basis, and TV in the next month or 2. - I'm probably a little picky.
Thanks for the tips, seriously. It has been about 1.5 years+ since I've looked hard at Linux video editing, and I'm due to look again. I'm putting together a new box (soon) or maybe a laptop with a big HD, and I plan to dual boot. So I'll have a good platform to explore the latest packages at leisure. My first Linux experience was back at redhat 5.2 I've checked it out thoroughly 3 or 4 times and it has made leaps and bounds, IMO, in the last 2-3 years. Especially but not just Ubuntu.
I have a slightly older thinkpad set up with Ubuntu as a dedicated recording station at church, and it is fantastic.
Yes, Yes, having photoshop would be nice. I see that.
But, for many more people I think the missing 'killer apps' for Linux are two things:
REAL CAD (2d and 3d, in particular AutoCAD)
Video Editing. Don't TELL me about Cinelerra. I've MADE a presentation quality video on Cinelerra. In the time it took me to do that, I could have gone to the dentist and had teeth pulled and made 6 videos in Vegas, and had a more enjoyable experience.
I have windows on my home machine SOLELY to run Vegas Video. For work the one windows-only app I used for a year was AutoCAD.
I want video editing software in linux that WORKS and is as EASY to use as Vegas. Or, perhaps when they figure out Photoshop they can figure out Vegas and even Premier. And AutoCAD.
If the person isn't really DOING anything much that is dumb or stupid, like posting bank accounts, personal info like SS# or even real name or address or phone number, then maybe they have enough common sense. Not everyone really needs to be using TOR. But, if they ARE doing stupid stuff then it fits the "driving towards a cliff" analogy I saw further up the page.
The other thought is that if people think they don't have anything to hide, if there was an easy demonstration that would show them that they do have some things they should hide (see above) then they might be convinced to take a more active approach to privacy protection. It would be a strange person indeed who would gladly want to use the toilet while living in a glass house.
Ok, here's a third thought - If you would write your name, address and phone number on the wall in the bathroom stall of a filthy highway rest stop, the fine, put it on the website.
For me, I don't have any personal info out on the web. My usernames are never my real name. I have a patent, and that shows up on the web, but that's it.
As far as I know.... [cue twilight zone music, look around suspiciously]
What we need here is a good car analogy. Let me give it a go.
GM makes one, admittedly average, car and it cost them $1,000,000 to make it. They then duplicate the car by the hundreds of thousands, and sell them for $2000 each. The problem is, most people only want the doors or the wheels which are the only appealing part of the car, and millions of people in the world have the ability to exactly copy the wheels and doors, even the entire car if they want, for $50, using similar technology to what GM uses to copy the original car. So, GM is upset by that and starts suing people that copied the car, even though nothing was actually stolen from GM.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of thing is coming, and it WILL revolutionize the world.
Rapid prototyping and even direct-to-manufacture with the selective sintering machines is becoming much more accessible and widespread.
Think of it as mimeograph and dot matrix from 20 years ago vs the mundane throwaway photo-quality walmart variety printers now.
"Hang on, mama, I need to print out a new carburetor before we can go to the tractor pull!"
Naw, they're talking about the apes movie quite a lot as well.
Hypothetical: If EVERYTHING were designed and built overseas and then brought back here and sold, who here would have enough money to buy it?
GDP = gross domestic product. Less producing = less GDP. It's an interesting conundrum. Companies think they can save money by building stuff in China. That was ALWAYS debatable but the beancounters made it look good. Now, I would wager that the cost of shipping it all back is edging up.
Let's hear it for the beancounters! Making questionable managerial decision look good through moving beans strategically from one bucket to another!
I remember taking lots of knapps in college. Although I usually spelled it "nap".
While I learned how to do it much earlier than college, I could say that I perfected the skill there.
You keep using the word WE. Are YOU with THEM?
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine was dating the "racially indeterminant" guy. Couldn't tell "the ethnic origin of his parents", staying consistent with trolltalk's post above. And in the end he thought she was a Latino, IIRC.
Personally, I like it when people put down "human" as their race.
I've been reading through the comments looking for someone to post something like this.
In my area (small town Indiana) ATT owns all the copper. I have mediacom cable internet at home, and at work we have some real slow "business" level DSL connection that's pretty cheesy. I suspect that at some point both ISP's hop onto the ATT copper, because one two week period both my internet at home and work were barely functional, always dropping out. Then, magically both fixed. I blame an upstream ATT problem.
My point -(I do have one) was this:
I wanted to go out and buy a T1 to my house, and then find a sufficient (x) amount of people who would use technology (y) to buy bandwidth from me to offset my cost. I would become a tiny self sufficient ISP, and all involved would enjoy fast, reliable internet at a (z) cost, where z is better than the other options.
My question - how large is (x), how large is (z), and what is (y)? A quick google search says a speakeasy full T1 is $279??
Any slashdotters with extra time who were fed up with local ISP options ever do this? Surely someone has.
Online / Offline isn't an issue.
... it's ... GONE! We now have internet enabled phones so now if the main intarweb tubes are down we can still get online. Whew! I need to install a local calendaring app for her and have it sync'd with google calendar. I saw a nice article in maximum PC which showed some real easy steps to do it right.
Most of the time.
It's that 1% to 2% of the time, IE on an airplane, at the airport (without wifi) or when the ubiquitous high speed internet at home or at the office is mysteriously down due to a)The backhoe effect b)bad storms, flooding, hurricane, c) maintenance, d) ISP Messup, e)your modem gets hit by lightning e) gremlins
That 2% of the time, which could be 10%, or 1%, really stinks because it never happens at a convenient time. Offline would be good then.
My wife uses google calendar EXTENSIVELY. It really stinks for her when the internet is down at home (not very often, but like I said, she uses it extensively) because if she needs to check something on the calendar, it's
(I know it's april 1st, but I really do have a wife)
I like your sig
Are they really?
I know that they ARE, yes, working on THINGS that might affect fuel economy. The are doing what is required by law (CAFE standards) and they are R+D'ing alternate fuels. They're toying with hybrids. But are they really?
The X-prize is not a bad idea. I see some advantages to doing the X prize for this.
1) Automakers are mired in corporate inertia, bureaucracy, and shareholders
2) Automakers "might" be somewhat "sympathetic" to big oil. (tinfoil hat)
3) Automakers will kill to save a penny on a $20k car, and fuel efficiency isn't necessarily cheap
4) Automakers employ lots of smart people, but there might be someone smarter out there with the balls and the brains to make something innovative
5) Automakers could make a 100 mpg car that could win the race, but no-one would buy it because they'd have to charge too much money for it.
6) Automakers R+D things, sure, but automakers also rely heavily on vendors for the latest gizmo to do X for $Y. The group that comes up with some innovation to win this race might be just what automakers need.
7) Automakers are trying to SURVIVE, thus year after year mostly just do what they are required to do by law and what will sell well enough to satisfy the shareholders.
I'd rather stay with XP, thanks.
For low-tech home users there would be no difference in usability btwn XP and linux. I recommend linux for the grandma-grandpa users, and for anything that is basically a 'netPliance. Linux is stable, requires minimal equipment, and does not get corrupted like XP does. It is perfect for those things. Once virtualization becomes more accessible I think there will be even more subsets of users who can ditch XP as the primary install. I just read an article on Lifehacker where they were doing neat things with virtualbox. http://lifehacker.com/367714/run-windows-apps-seamlessly-inside-linux
For those people who us geeks are "responsible for" like my in-laws, my neighbor, my pastors, etc, those machines I've fixed and/or set up from scratch, I would like to be able to put linux on there so that it's harder for it to get screwed up. Some day.
Glad I was able to give you a good laugh today. Thanks for answering my question, as well. We'll need to do this again sometime!
It's open source, right? Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something?
Reminds me of a friend from college with a 10.000 maniacs t-shirt. He didn't appreciate my joke telling him that "Wow, that is a VERY precise quantity of maniacs you have there..."
I laughed tho.
I had a great Geology course in college (I'm an ME) and it was very fun. We had a hard end of term project where we had to identify a box of rocks, had some good field trips to a local strip mine, so on. Definitely interesting and enlightening.
It probably helped that the course was taught by someone who had a real interest in the field.
Mmmmm, sparkly! (reaches for wallet)
Yeah, but they're shiny.
x2, yes, this is going to eliminate video cables. Forever. yay!
Awesome links, thanks for the tips.
I guess one point of my mini-rant was that, in my opinion, gimp is so well known and so far along what's the point in getting photoshop working and not focus on CAD and video instead? Or, more fairly, CAD and video as well as photoshop?
Your links may indeed invalidate half of the point (I haven't checked out the native DWG and DXF packages from your link).
I found a commercial video package for linux about 1.5 years ago. It is done by MainConcept IIRC. It is very nice, had interesting features and promising ease-of-use. But there were fatal flaws. The demo was available in RPM and DEB. I was using Ubuntu. IIRC the RPM by alien was missing vital features, and the deb was unstable. So close. Yes maybe I could have recompiled but it's commercial software... Maybe it's worth another look at the demo again!
What I do with video is much more than home videos and shots of the dog doing funny tricks, I've basically worked up to the pro-sumer level and have pretty extensive projects in Vegas, putting video out to actual audiences (church) on a weekly basis, and TV in the next month or 2. - I'm probably a little picky.
Thanks for the tips, seriously. It has been about 1.5 years+ since I've looked hard at Linux video editing, and I'm due to look again. I'm putting together a new box (soon) or maybe a laptop with a big HD, and I plan to dual boot. So I'll have a good platform to explore the latest packages at leisure. My first Linux experience was back at redhat 5.2 I've checked it out thoroughly 3 or 4 times and it has made leaps and bounds, IMO, in the last 2-3 years. Especially but not just Ubuntu.
I have a slightly older thinkpad set up with Ubuntu as a dedicated recording station at church, and it is fantastic.
Yes, Yes, having photoshop would be nice. I see that.
But, for many more people I think the missing 'killer apps' for Linux are two things:
REAL CAD (2d and 3d, in particular AutoCAD)
Video Editing. Don't TELL me about Cinelerra. I've MADE a presentation quality video on Cinelerra. In the time it took me to do that, I could have gone to the dentist and had teeth pulled and made 6 videos in Vegas, and had a more enjoyable experience.
I have windows on my home machine SOLELY to run Vegas Video. For work the one windows-only app I used for a year was AutoCAD.
I want video editing software in linux that WORKS and is as EASY to use as Vegas. Or, perhaps when they figure out Photoshop they can figure out Vegas and even Premier. And AutoCAD.
2 thoughts -
If the person isn't really DOING anything much that is dumb or stupid, like posting bank accounts, personal info like SS# or even real name or address or phone number, then maybe they have enough common sense. Not everyone really needs to be using TOR. But, if they ARE doing stupid stuff then it fits the "driving towards a cliff" analogy I saw further up the page.
The other thought is that if people think they don't have anything to hide, if there was an easy demonstration that would show them that they do have some things they should hide (see above) then they might be convinced to take a more active approach to privacy protection. It would be a strange person indeed who would gladly want to use the toilet while living in a glass house.
Ok, here's a third thought - If you would write your name, address and phone number on the wall in the bathroom stall of a filthy highway rest stop, the fine, put it on the website.
For me, I don't have any personal info out on the web. My usernames are never my real name. I have a patent, and that shows up on the web, but that's it.
As far as I know.... [cue twilight zone music, look around suspiciously]
What we need here is a good car analogy. Let me give it a go.
GM makes one, admittedly average, car and it cost them $1,000,000 to make it. They then duplicate the car by the hundreds of thousands, and sell them for $2000 each. The problem is, most people only want the doors or the wheels which are the only appealing part of the car, and millions of people in the world have the ability to exactly copy the wheels and doors, even the entire car if they want, for $50, using similar technology to what GM uses to copy the original car. So, GM is upset by that and starts suing people that copied the car, even though nothing was actually stolen from GM.
How'd I do?
That's way handier than rooting through the trash.