It's clear they did put a lot of effort in designing the UI. We've got a couple netbooks around the office and I'm tempted to try it out. But from another review, the reviewer noted that it's not packaged with binary drivers. So if you are stuck with certain Wifi cards it may suffer the same pain in the ass that linux generally does: having to track down a damned driver.
That being said, using it with a netbook preloaded with Mobilin where all the hardware is designed to work with linux from the get go....it's worth considering.
If implemented as described in the article: not much. With "cut power" they actually mean "limit power to reach only the maximum allowed speed" and you can override it if you wish. (Emergency transport to the hospital, speed limit out of date etc.)
I have this friend named Murphy, I think you two should be introduced. Because once this technology is there, it will start to be used for other purposes.
My iPhone costs me $87.91 a month after all the taxes. I barely use 200 of my 400 minutes of call time a month. Only about 150 of my 5000 night/weekend minutes and average about 150 texts per month. On an average month, I use about 500MB of data bandwidth, a little more if I am in an area with 3G. (still edge where I reside most of the time).
I'm the COO and still the lead developer for our online services. We're to the point where I am no longer doing most of the day to day development work, but I still know the code an systems better than anyone else in the company. Before I got my iPhone in December, company paid for it, I pretty much kept my laptop in the car at all times and had to make sure that I was always around an internet connection. If anything went down, I had to be somewhere that I could fix it. Gets really annoying to be out to dinner with friends and get a phone call that the mail service needs to be reset and have to get up and leave. At least now I can SSH, restart the service or even log into the web-based admin panel and reboot the server.
Well, if I go to visit my dad down on the farm, he doesn't even have dial up, let alone DSL or cable. I could have gotten an air time card that costs $60 a month for 5GB of bandwidth. I was already paying $54 a month for my regular cell phone. So combined that would have been $114 a month.
Instead I got the iPhone. I have VNC, RDP, VPN, and SSH. The other day I set up a new production server while on a boat using SSH and VNC. Was it ideal, no, but it was nice not to have to be tied to a desk and still get work done. And I feel a lot better carrying a $300 phone in my pocket than having a $2k laptop in the car at all times.
The fact I can travel down the farm to visit my Dad, go out to dinner or movies with friends and not have to worry about being near a wireless access point...well worth $87.91 a month to me.
And for most of his life, Hawking would have agreed with you. Take a look at the book Physics of the Impossible. http://mkaku.org/
Some of the modern theories on black holes are that they are actually ring shaped, not an infinitely small point. You pass through the ring and you wind up in another universe. Of course the amount of power required not to end up being ripped apart by the tidal forces et. al. are astronomical, there is apparently a loop hole that allows for this in the math.
If you're doing 3D Animation, there are a couple good tools for Linux like Maya. But if you are talking about video editing, you're only choices are PC and OSX. No one has a quality video editing program for Linux. And if you need to do compositing, it's still cheaper to buy a MacBook Pro and Shake for OSX than Shake for Linux. (In fact a MacBook Pro and Shake for OSX will cost you the same as just Shake for Linux). A 24" iMac and Shake will cost you a lot less than Shake for Linux.
Personally I would go Apple all the way. Depending how much you'll be traveling, I'd suggest an iMac with 8GB of ram if you are going to be shooting in one location for days or weeks and then moving on and a couple MacBook Pros with 4GB of ram each. Also get copies of Windows XP. Then you can use any of the video editing applications you want. Someone suggested using VMFusion, but I would avoid using any VM's and use Bootcamp. Yes you'll have to reboot you're machine to switch OS's, but in video editing you want to use as much of the machines resources as possible.
Premiere or Vegas for windows runs okay through parallels, but I've found that they run much faster when loading XP via Bootcamp.
Here is the problem with SaaS: what happens when the internet connection goes down? Not Possible? Well it just happened to us due to mother nature.
We had 100MPH straight line winds here last Friday. I have an iPhone and was able to keep on top of Email, but we just got power restored today. We won't have internet until next week sometime and maybe even the week after. It's a problem. So much so that I had to leave town and stay at my Dad's house because we run a SaaS platform.
Fortunately, we don't host our own servers. They are in 3 different data centers managed by 2 different company in different parts of the country expressly for this purpose. So all of our clients not in the weather affected area were okay unless they tried to call for tech support because the phones where out.
As it stands now, we have power at the office. But they are cut off from email and the web still. Normally we use Google Docs a lot, but everyone has either MS Office or Open Office. But the developers outside of me are cut off. Our SVN repo is remotely hosted. No internet, no SVN updates.
At homes now, at least people can pop in a play-station disc or CD-ROM game and play it for a few hours without the internet.
The next rover to mars is costing $1.8B to build. Spirit and Opportunity costs around $4M per year to operate. So I think you can fund a lot of years of operations for $1.8B. Hell what does a Delta IV heavy launch cost these days? $50M? $100M?
One area: Graphics rendering. And I'm not talking about games, but Lightwave et al. especially when one is rendering a single very large image (say billboard). Currently most renders allow splitting of that frame across several machines/core where each one renders a smaller block and then reassembles the larger image. However, not all the rendering engines out there allow the splitting of a single frame. Also, if the render farm is currently being tasked for another project (animation) and you need to render, I could see where 4 cores acting at one using all the available RAM is going to be a tad bit faster than splitting into separate tasks and rendering on each core with limited RAM.
-- annual farm-commodity payouts to no more than $250,000 per person and a phasing out of the direct payment of subsidies to farms with sales exceeding $500,000 per year. Savings: $143 million.
Why that has something to do with science I'm not sure. But on another level, you don't have to be some big mega farmer to reach $500k on farm sales. We own about 600 acres that was inherited from my grandparents. We rent this out. The farmer that farms it is a family operation, father/son, and they farm about 1600 acres total. End of the year, they may bring home about $50- 60k each. Oh, and don't forget a rainy day fund incase a field floods, or a hurricane comes through and knocks the crap out of the yield.
They sell in excess of $1 Million worth a crops a year, but farming is expensive. A tractor will cost you $80 - 100k+, need a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks, chemicals, seed, diesel to power the irrigation systems, repairs, etc..
It's gotten to the point where the son is debating whether or not to continue after his father gives it up after this year. He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
$500k isn't a lot when your talking about farming.
I own 2 cars and a van. A Chevy Impala that I drive 60% of the time, a Honda S2000 that I drive in the spring/summer for fun trips, and our old Chevy Astro van that I keep down on the farm as a farm truck to haul crap around (tools/diesel for the tractor/parts/etc..)
I like to drive. It's fun and it is enjoyable. That's why I bought a little roadster. Especially around where I live with plenty of pretty scenes and curvy 2-lane roads.
I could have bought a boat. Plenty of lakes around. I like to go out on boats, but honestly, I may only get the chance to take one out 5 - 6 times a year. I get the chance to drive a fun car 5 days a week, especially when it's warm and sunny out.
Do I need 2 cars for just me? No. But that's what I wanted, I could afford it, so I did.
Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.
It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.
Actually, you got something backwards there and Helen Thomas touched on this in her book. People will read interesting stories of local interest, but that takes a news room and reporters to do, and that is expensive. As newspapers looked to cut costs, they slashed the news room. Well, less local stories and investigative journalism meant less interest and more people stopped reading. So what did the news papers do? They continued to cut the local reporting and news room staff, and guess what, they continued to loose readership. It becomes a vicious cycle where the newspapers are slowing killing themselves with paper cuts. (Bad pun, I know)
I rarely agree with the woman on anything, but that was her insights after 40+ years in the business. And I think she nailed it.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We always had a subscription and I used to read it in the morning before going to school. Well, skimmed major articles, and looked at the comics and sports pages mostly, but the daily newspaper was fairly thick and had a decent metro section.
Well, year after year it kept getting thinner and thinner with more generic articles purchased from Ruters or the AP. In the past 5 years my Dad and I can think of a single major multi-part story they did on the corruption going on in local fire protection districts. It was a damn interesting read and something people needed to know about (like how many wives were on fire boards voting for pay increases, etc..) But that was one investigation in 5 years. Meanwhile the business section was cut down to the top local stocks and that was the death nail. Why pay $0.35 a day for the same wire stories you had already read online and he can go to the website and get the local sports stories.
If they brought back more local investigations and reported more about what was going on around town, you know have content that was interesting and worth reading, he'd get a subscription.
I think news magazines are in the same boat. Time, Newsweek, etc. all seem to be thinner than I remember once upon a time. It's gotten to the point where the only ones I read on a regular basis are The Economist and Der Speigel when I can find a copy.
Currently iPhone accounts for 73% of our mobile hits followed by Windows Mobile and Blackberry with about 12 percent each. We've registered a grand total of 4 hits from android phones. We see about 600 unique mobile visitors per day.
If we had a lot of people using Android, we'd develop for it. But so far, it's available from one carrier, that doesn't even compete in our local market.
Do you already have a wireless phone with mobile dataplan? If so, you might be able to tether the device to a laptop if the phone uses a USB cable. I used to use it with my Motorola phone and laptop before switching to the iPhone. Since the iPhone I've had a company issued USB cell card for AT&T. Our cap is higher than 5GB a month (15GB I think), but it's really designed for business travellers who are checking Email, remoting in via VPN, and downloading power point presentations and word documents, not heavy broad band usage.
Typically I use maybe 450MB a month doing just that plus FTPing/SSHing into our servers from home. (Since I got the wireless card, I cancelled cable/DSL at home).
This is true. Recently I was doing the database and related php code for an autoparts site. To display part #, make/model/year, and price, I had a PHP loop that printed the output to a table, which was in a div with classes added to the various elements, and handed it off the graphics people. The designer went ape-shit because I had defiled his grand design with tables, and how tables should never appear in a "web 2.0" site and some other bullshit.
I don't know what the hell they teach in design school, but when you have tabular data, use a table. I even showed him a few websites that said just that: use CSS for layout, tables for displaying tables of information.
I like CSS for a lot of reasons. But it is also a fucking pain in the ass, primarily thanks to IE.
I use the same Motorola bluetooth ear borg piece for Skype on my PowerBook as I do with my iPhone. Works fine. Now if Skype Mobile on my iPhone could use the headset I'd be ready to go.
I was looking at noise cancelling head phones for Skype and good wired set of headphones was $60. (Or the only ones not sold out at the store I was looking at) I had put off getting one of those borgish ear pieces, but if I was going to spend the money, why not spend $80, get a good Bluetooth one that I could use with both the laptop and the iPhone.
It's in the terms and conditions. While they advertise "Unlimited", most of the contract specific a clause of "fair and reasonable use" which can mean whatever the hell they want. However, go back and reread your internet contract, because several I've seen already include a GB per month CAP. I remember the last one I signed spelled out 40GB per month with "Unlimited" online time. At least reading the contract that was the way it sounded. The marketeers made it sound like you were getting unlimited bandwidth. No where in the contract did it specify you had unlimited bandwidth. If you read the fine print, it says something different.
We have mediacom for a 10/3 business cable connection. It specifies a 500GB cap in the contract. It's one of the reasons why we added a 7MB/2.5MB Verizon business DSL connection and use a dual WAN load balanced router in the office. (The other reason is that the internet is critical to our business. And Mediacom would have outages of 6 - 8 days a year. It generally cost us $500 a day we were down. Now the only time we've gone down was when we had an ice storm and lost power. )
We switched to PostgreSQL about a year ago after SUN bought MySQL and it became clear that Sun really didn't know what direction they were going with it.
All our code used database abstraction, so it was just a matter of porting the existing databases.
Slashdot Mirror
It's clear they did put a lot of effort in designing the UI. We've got a couple netbooks around the office and I'm tempted to try it out. But from another review, the reviewer noted that it's not packaged with binary drivers. So if you are stuck with certain Wifi cards it may suffer the same pain in the ass that linux generally does: having to track down a damned driver.
That being said, using it with a netbook preloaded with Mobilin where all the hardware is designed to work with linux from the get go....it's worth considering.
If implemented as described in the article: not much. With "cut power" they actually mean "limit power to reach only the maximum allowed speed" and you can override it if you wish. (Emergency transport to the hospital, speed limit out of date etc.)
I have this friend named Murphy, I think you two should be introduced. Because once this technology is there, it will start to be used for other purposes.
My iPhone costs me $87.91 a month after all the taxes. I barely use 200 of my 400 minutes of call time a month. Only about 150 of my 5000 night/weekend minutes and average about 150 texts per month. On an average month, I use about 500MB of data bandwidth, a little more if I am in an area with 3G. (still edge where I reside most of the time).
I'm the COO and still the lead developer for our online services. We're to the point where I am no longer doing most of the day to day development work, but I still know the code an systems better than anyone else in the company. Before I got my iPhone in December, company paid for it, I pretty much kept my laptop in the car at all times and had to make sure that I was always around an internet connection. If anything went down, I had to be somewhere that I could fix it. Gets really annoying to be out to dinner with friends and get a phone call that the mail service needs to be reset and have to get up and leave. At least now I can SSH, restart the service or even log into the web-based admin panel and reboot the server.
Well, if I go to visit my dad down on the farm, he doesn't even have dial up, let alone DSL or cable. I could have gotten an air time card that costs $60 a month for 5GB of bandwidth. I was already paying $54 a month for my regular cell phone. So combined that would have been $114 a month.
Instead I got the iPhone. I have VNC, RDP, VPN, and SSH. The other day I set up a new production server while on a boat using SSH and VNC. Was it ideal, no, but it was nice not to have to be tied to a desk and still get work done. And I feel a lot better carrying a $300 phone in my pocket than having a $2k laptop in the car at all times.
The fact I can travel down the farm to visit my Dad, go out to dinner or movies with friends and not have to worry about being near a wireless access point...well worth $87.91 a month to me.
And for most of his life, Hawking would have agreed with you. Take a look at the book Physics of the Impossible. http://mkaku.org/
Some of the modern theories on black holes are that they are actually ring shaped, not an infinitely small point. You pass through the ring and you wind up in another universe. Of course the amount of power required not to end up being ripped apart by the tidal forces et. al. are astronomical, there is apparently a loop hole that allows for this in the math.
If you're doing 3D Animation, there are a couple good tools for Linux like Maya. But if you are talking about video editing, you're only choices are PC and OSX. No one has a quality video editing program for Linux. And if you need to do compositing, it's still cheaper to buy a MacBook Pro and Shake for OSX than Shake for Linux. (In fact a MacBook Pro and Shake for OSX will cost you the same as just Shake for Linux). A 24" iMac and Shake will cost you a lot less than Shake for Linux.
Personally I would go Apple all the way. Depending how much you'll be traveling, I'd suggest an iMac with 8GB of ram if you are going to be shooting in one location for days or weeks and then moving on and a couple MacBook Pros with 4GB of ram each. Also get copies of Windows XP. Then you can use any of the video editing applications you want. Someone suggested using VMFusion, but I would avoid using any VM's and use Bootcamp. Yes you'll have to reboot you're machine to switch OS's, but in video editing you want to use as much of the machines resources as possible.
Premiere or Vegas for windows runs okay through parallels, but I've found that they run much faster when loading XP via Bootcamp.
Here is the problem with SaaS: what happens when the internet connection goes down? Not Possible? Well it just happened to us due to mother nature.
We had 100MPH straight line winds here last Friday. I have an iPhone and was able to keep on top of Email, but we just got power restored today. We won't have internet until next week sometime and maybe even the week after. It's a problem. So much so that I had to leave town and stay at my Dad's house because we run a SaaS platform.
Fortunately, we don't host our own servers. They are in 3 different data centers managed by 2 different company in different parts of the country expressly for this purpose. So all of our clients not in the weather affected area were okay unless they tried to call for tech support because the phones where out.
As it stands now, we have power at the office. But they are cut off from email and the web still. Normally we use Google Docs a lot, but everyone has either MS Office or Open Office. But the developers outside of me are cut off. Our SVN repo is remotely hosted. No internet, no SVN updates.
At homes now, at least people can pop in a play-station disc or CD-ROM game and play it for a few hours without the internet.
The next rover to mars is costing $1.8B to build. Spirit and Opportunity costs around $4M per year to operate. So I think you can fund a lot of years of operations for $1.8B. Hell what does a Delta IV heavy launch cost these days? $50M? $100M?
One area: Graphics rendering. And I'm not talking about games, but Lightwave et al. especially when one is rendering a single very large image (say billboard). Currently most renders allow splitting of that frame across several machines/core where each one renders a smaller block and then reassembles the larger image. However, not all the rendering engines out there allow the splitting of a single frame. Also, if the render farm is currently being tasked for another project (animation) and you need to render, I could see where 4 cores acting at one using all the available RAM is going to be a tad bit faster than splitting into separate tasks and rendering on each core with limited RAM.
-- annual farm-commodity payouts to no more than $250,000 per person and a phasing out of the direct payment of subsidies to farms with sales exceeding $500,000 per year. Savings: $143 million.
Why that has something to do with science I'm not sure. But on another level, you don't have to be some big mega farmer to reach $500k on farm sales. We own about 600 acres that was inherited from my grandparents. We rent this out. The farmer that farms it is a family operation, father/son, and they farm about 1600 acres total. End of the year, they may bring home about $50- 60k each. Oh, and don't forget a rainy day fund incase a field floods, or a hurricane comes through and knocks the crap out of the yield.
They sell in excess of $1 Million worth a crops a year, but farming is expensive. A tractor will cost you $80 - 100k+, need a new combine, those are about $200k. Don't for get grain trucks, chemicals, seed, diesel to power the irrigation systems, repairs, etc..
It's gotten to the point where the son is debating whether or not to continue after his father gives it up after this year. He can make just about as much working a regular job without the risk. Kill their subsidy, and that is one less family in the farming business.
$500k isn't a lot when your talking about farming.
I own 2 cars and a van. A Chevy Impala that I drive 60% of the time, a Honda S2000 that I drive in the spring/summer for fun trips, and our old Chevy Astro van that I keep down on the farm as a farm truck to haul crap around (tools/diesel for the tractor/parts/etc..)
I like to drive. It's fun and it is enjoyable. That's why I bought a little roadster. Especially around where I live with plenty of pretty scenes and curvy 2-lane roads.
I could have bought a boat. Plenty of lakes around. I like to go out on boats, but honestly, I may only get the chance to take one out 5 - 6 times a year. I get the chance to drive a fun car 5 days a week, especially when it's warm and sunny out.
Do I need 2 cars for just me? No. But that's what I wanted, I could afford it, so I did.
That's okay. There are plenty of us that can live with the rules and profit from it.
Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.
It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.
Actually, you got something backwards there and Helen Thomas touched on this in her book. People will read interesting stories of local interest, but that takes a news room and reporters to do, and that is expensive. As newspapers looked to cut costs, they slashed the news room. Well, less local stories and investigative journalism meant less interest and more people stopped reading. So what did the news papers do? They continued to cut the local reporting and news room staff, and guess what, they continued to loose readership. It becomes a vicious cycle where the newspapers are slowing killing themselves with paper cuts. (Bad pun, I know)
I rarely agree with the woman on anything, but that was her insights after 40+ years in the business. And I think she nailed it.
It's called Europe. Where liberals are conservatives and conservatives are liberals.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We always had a subscription and I used to read it in the morning before going to school. Well, skimmed major articles, and looked at the comics and sports pages mostly, but the daily newspaper was fairly thick and had a decent metro section.
Well, year after year it kept getting thinner and thinner with more generic articles purchased from Ruters or the AP. In the past 5 years my Dad and I can think of a single major multi-part story they did on the corruption going on in local fire protection districts. It was a damn interesting read and something people needed to know about (like how many wives were on fire boards voting for pay increases, etc..) But that was one investigation in 5 years. Meanwhile the business section was cut down to the top local stocks and that was the death nail. Why pay $0.35 a day for the same wire stories you had already read online and he can go to the website and get the local sports stories.
If they brought back more local investigations and reported more about what was going on around town, you know have content that was interesting and worth reading, he'd get a subscription.
I think news magazines are in the same boat. Time, Newsweek, etc. all seem to be thinner than I remember once upon a time. It's gotten to the point where the only ones I read on a regular basis are The Economist and Der Speigel when I can find a copy.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7833143728685685343
I'll direct you to about 15:45 of the video. There are still a few very small companies using BSD.
Currently iPhone accounts for 73% of our mobile hits followed by Windows Mobile and Blackberry with about 12 percent each. We've registered a grand total of 4 hits from android phones. We see about 600 unique mobile visitors per day.
If we had a lot of people using Android, we'd develop for it. But so far, it's available from one carrier, that doesn't even compete in our local market.
That's true. For every 999 plots they successfully foil, you only hear about the one that got through.
Will it still run on my toaster?
Do you already have a wireless phone with mobile dataplan? If so, you might be able to tether the device to a laptop if the phone uses a USB cable. I used to use it with my Motorola phone and laptop before switching to the iPhone. Since the iPhone I've had a company issued USB cell card for AT&T. Our cap is higher than 5GB a month (15GB I think), but it's really designed for business travellers who are checking Email, remoting in via VPN, and downloading power point presentations and word documents, not heavy broad band usage.
Typically I use maybe 450MB a month doing just that plus FTPing/SSHing into our servers from home. (Since I got the wireless card, I cancelled cable/DSL at home).
Granted I did all my heavy downloading at work.
This is true. Recently I was doing the database and related php code for an autoparts site. To display part #, make/model/year, and price, I had a PHP loop that printed the output to a table, which was in a div with classes added to the various elements, and handed it off the graphics people. The designer went ape-shit because I had defiled his grand design with tables, and how tables should never appear in a "web 2.0" site and some other bullshit.
I don't know what the hell they teach in design school, but when you have tabular data, use a table. I even showed him a few websites that said just that: use CSS for layout, tables for displaying tables of information.
I like CSS for a lot of reasons. But it is also a fucking pain in the ass, primarily thanks to IE.
I use the same Motorola bluetooth ear borg piece for Skype on my PowerBook as I do with my iPhone. Works fine. Now if Skype Mobile on my iPhone could use the headset I'd be ready to go.
I was looking at noise cancelling head phones for Skype and good wired set of headphones was $60. (Or the only ones not sold out at the store I was looking at) I had put off getting one of those borgish ear pieces, but if I was going to spend the money, why not spend $80, get a good Bluetooth one that I could use with both the laptop and the iPhone.
It's in the terms and conditions. While they advertise "Unlimited", most of the contract specific a clause of "fair and reasonable use" which can mean whatever the hell they want. However, go back and reread your internet contract, because several I've seen already include a GB per month CAP. I remember the last one I signed spelled out 40GB per month with "Unlimited" online time. At least reading the contract that was the way it sounded. The marketeers made it sound like you were getting unlimited bandwidth. No where in the contract did it specify you had unlimited bandwidth. If you read the fine print, it says something different.
We have mediacom for a 10/3 business cable connection. It specifies a 500GB cap in the contract. It's one of the reasons why we added a 7MB/2.5MB Verizon business DSL connection and use a dual WAN load balanced router in the office. (The other reason is that the internet is critical to our business. And Mediacom would have outages of 6 - 8 days a year. It generally cost us $500 a day we were down. Now the only time we've gone down was when we had an ice storm and lost power. )
We switched to PostgreSQL about a year ago after SUN bought MySQL and it became clear that Sun really didn't know what direction they were going with it.
All our code used database abstraction, so it was just a matter of porting the existing databases.
As more people want things at home, mission to moon and the entire manned space programme shall be delayed indefinitely.
Once the shuttles are retired, I have my doubts whether the entire manned program doesn't get canned.