Given that the US government now effectively owns GM (and therefore On-Star), does anyone really want to buy a car that already has GPS tracking built-in?
The On-Star client is most likely at an age where privacy begins to look more like loneliness and isolation. I ran the back roads long enough to know that feeling intimately.
Maybe instead of continuing to focus on the dinosaur that is the automobile, more effort should be put into building very a efficient mass transit infrastructure. Just a thought.
Mass transit is efficient only when it moves point to point along a narrow and very densely populated corridor.
The Manhatten Transfer. The Chicago Loop.
It is efficient in the city that never sleeps.
It is effcient in moving passengers with a single small carry-on bag - nothing too awkward or fragile. Passengers wth mobility problems - the very young and the very old need not apply.
The electric lines of the 1890s were in serious financial trouble before World War I.
The Ford automobile was on-demand and portal-to-portal.
It could cruise comfortably at thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour. That made the twenty minute commute a realistic possibility.
Operating costs were about a penny a mile when a token cost five cents. Cheaper than walking - when you priced a good pair of shoes.
The border patrol has approx 25,000 officers to cover the 2,000 mile border.
Think again. Think harder.
[ U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP] is responsible for guarding nearly 7,000 miles of land border the United States shares with Canada and Mexico and 2,000 miles of coastal waters surrounding the Florida peninsula and off the coast of Southern California. The agency also protects 95,000 miles of maritime border in partnership with the United States Coast Guard.
[There are] more than 17,000 CBP Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP Air and Marine agents, and almost 22,000 CBP officers and agriculture specialists, together with the nation's largest law enforcement canine program.
On a typical day in fiscal year 2008, CBP processed approximately 1 million passengers and pedestrians; 70,000 containers; and 331,000 privately owned vehicles.
257,000 international arrivals by air. 43,000 by ship.
There were 73 arrests of criminals 2,796 apprehensions...for illegal entry
Seized -
7,621 pounds of narcotics $296,000 in undeclared or illicit currency
4,125 prohibited meat, plant materials or animal products, including 400 agricultural pests at ports of entry
Rescued 3 illegal crossers in distress or dangerous conditions
Deployed -
1,275 canine enforcement teams
18,276 vehicles, 275 aircraft, 180 watercraft, and 252 equestrian patrolsThis is CBP
That is one way to grow linux use. Once people figure out they can no longer "borrow" their buddies disk, they will start looking for alternatives.. and really, you don't even have to be 100% successful. If you make the process difficult enough, people will give up!
I haven't been asked to reactivate XP in eight years.
Activation and be one-click, fire-and-forget.
If you opt for automated updates you won't be spending much time at the Windows Update site -
or losing sleep over WGA.
The OEM system install is the norm in this market. Users almost never make significant hardware changes.
The geek looks in the mirror and thinks he sees every user in a reflection of own needs and values.
100 years ago you would have to be able to fix your own car: they were new technology, quite rare, and for a select audience only.
The Model T was introduced in 1908. The Ford could be sophisticated in materials and manufacturing where it mattered - in the four cylinder engine cast in one block. But basic maintenance and repair was kept well within the reach of any rural mechanic. That made perfect sense in an era when the paved road ended at the city line.
[If you've seen a antique harvester or baler in action you'll know that the mechanic of that era had to know his business]
It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip.
The benchmark that looks good in the lab.
YMMV.
The "objective" benchmark that has been "especially kind to Theora."
What the hell am I to make of that?
It's one clip -
apparently of a geek dead on his feet after pulling one too many all-nighters.
You can drown in techno-babble.
I want to see video.
Richly detailed backgrounds.
Textures. Wood and fur and cloth and grass. Subtle rendering of flesh tones.
Give me a real taste of how well your codec handles action. Take your camera outdoors. In the rain. Out on a boat. Take it on stage.
The average computer user doesn't need multi-core systems and DDR3 RAM. They run a web browser, email client, and IM client. Maybe watch a movie. A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that.
I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.:
In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]
In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.
This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.
I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.
It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here. It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.
If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:
Windows 7 runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great.
That would seem to say something about the quality and performance of your Aspire's integrated graphics - or maybe that the geek was just spitting out nonsense when he ranted on and on about Aero.
I have wondered if the Win 7 netbook would benefit from "Ready Boost" Flash - easy to find almost anywhere for under $20.
That would seem about right to me. However, many systems cannot be ordered without MS Windows of some sort pre-installed, yet people remove that and install Linux, or dual-boot their systems with Linux.
How many?
In the Net Applications stats IE 7 and IE 8 have about 50% of the global desktop and Vista around 25%.
How many of these people do you suppose have ever heard of a "user agent" or would be willing to chance editing it if they did?
Mac and Linux users are DYING to play games. Meaning that a lower market share could still have higher game adoption.
The console markets take priority. The big bucks are in porting to [or more likely from] the XBox, the PS3 and the Wii.
iD opens the source to its old game engines. That doesn't mean it is about to release the commercially valuable source code of its latest-and-greatest.
If Linux users see something of value, they will no doubt buy it to encourage companies to continue.
I have heard this before.
The main problem with linux desktop usage is that all the games are made for Windows
No.
The main problem is that the PC took its recognizable - adult - form in 1980.
The IBM PC struck all the right notes.
The IBM keyboard. The 80 column display. The 16 bit CPU.
The IBM PC and PC clone would evolve into something easily adapted to any environment from shop room floor to the executive suite.
There were successful MS-DOS PCs on the market before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
The OEM system install - unpack the box and you are good to go - is a milestone. The default Microsoft install is a milestone.
The integration of hardware and software may never be as polished as OSX and the Mac. But it will work.
In 2009 that takes the fear of ordering the refurbished quad core 64 bit Vista PC with 8 GB RAM, wireless, Blu-Ray, HDMI, and NVIDIA gamer-graphics video from TigerDirect.
In the mid-nineties you have Win 3 and Win 95 - and Windows has built up an all-but-unstoppable momentum.
Linux as a client OS needed to hit the ground running no later than Win 3. It needed OEM support from Day 1.
I've gotten several people in my family started with Ubuntu, and one weird thing I've observed is that none of them ever seem to spontaneously figure out how to install applications -- they don't even seem to realize that the open-source apps are out there, or that it might be desirable to install them.
Your distro packages 25,000 apps.
How do you find the fifty or so that are right for you?
The Windows user relies on independent editorial reviews, screen shots and other resources to help make his choice.
Think Download.com.
The Windows user will tune out your lecture on the virtues of free and open source.
He doesn't much care about free-as-in-beer either:
The GIMP isn't competing with Photoshop, it's competing with Paint Shop Pro. $40 at Amazon.com.
He knows the real bite in photo editing is in consumables.
Ink and paper.
Gog.com has classic MSDOS and Windows games updated for Vista at $6 and $10.
Apt-get and its kind are partial solutions for the narrow technical problem of distributing Linux software that doesn't have to be compiled from source.
It's become rather too easy for the geek to use the repository as a soap box. In an attempt to re-shape every user into his own image.
"Just give me the damn driver."
Too easy to count the number of programs in the repository and forget to ask the right questions about their quality and their target audience.
Linspire had the right idea with CNR.
Create and maintain a repository who is not and will never be a geek. Stop shoveling everything into the bin. Sell a legit - fully licensed - media player. Sell games produced in this millennium. Games that don't suck. Keep your presentation lively and informative.
$100 that would have otherwise paid for Windows. Also, the ability to install applications over the internet without putting in any CDs or paying any money.
Who the hell cares about the OEM price of Windows?
I am retiring an aging Dell workhorse PC for 64 bit Vista. [and Win 7 RC1] It will in all likelihood sit beside this desk for the next five years - the next eight years. The most I ever expect to pay is for a one-time upgrade to Win 7 - and that won't break the bank.
The geek over-values "free." I don't lose sleep when I chose PSP over the GIMP. Not when I price photo-quality inks and papers.
Vista and 7 tried to be a $500 way of running Windows apps, while XP was a $100 way of running Windows apps. And compared to XP, Vista also needed $400 worth of hardware.
The geek thinks like a home builder, an almost extinct species.
He'll quote retail list for the most expensive box he can find - or imagine.
The hardware is never the same. The CPU is now quad core. The OS 64 bit. 4 GB of Kingston DDR2 Value RAM $50. The 1 TB HDD $90.
Slashdot Mirror
Well then it's a good thing TPB guys didn't download anything.
The ordinary meaning of infringement is "an an encroachment on the rights or privileges of others." infringement
In plain English, if you maintain a clearing house for the illicit P2P trade you are as guilty as the traders themselves.
This is not exactly a novel principle in civil and criminal law - and the geek might usefully ask himself if he really wants to see it eroded.
just make sure your bribe is big enough to get your personal law enacted...
I would like to introduce a modest compliment to Godwin's Law:
When the geek launches into a rant on the theme of bribery, all hope of intelligent discussion has ended.
What is a "millions download"?
A typo.
Next question, please.
So do countless other lawsuits. But that doesn't make headlines on Slashdot.
Given that the US government now effectively owns GM (and therefore On-Star), does anyone really want to buy a car that already has GPS tracking built-in?
The On-Star client is most likely at an age where privacy begins to look more like loneliness and isolation. I ran the back roads long enough to know that feeling intimately.
I still stand by the belief that the symbol of power, the REAL status symbol of the future, will be the ability to be completely unreachable.
If you want distance, you hire a secretary.
If you want power, you must remain approachable. Out of sight, out of mind.
Not a whole lot along the Canada border
I live across the lake from Toronto.
The Border Patrol has a very visible presence here - and cameras cover every inch of the Niagara. U.S. gets tough on Canadian border
Maybe instead of continuing to focus on the dinosaur that is the automobile, more effort should be put into building very a efficient mass transit infrastructure. Just a thought.
Mass transit is efficient only when it moves point to point along a narrow and very densely populated corridor.
The Manhatten Transfer. The Chicago Loop.
It is efficient in the city that never sleeps.
It is effcient in moving passengers with a single small carry-on bag - nothing too awkward or fragile. Passengers wth mobility problems - the very young and the very old need not apply.
The electric lines of the 1890s were in serious financial trouble before World War I.
The Ford automobile was on-demand and portal-to-portal.
It could cruise comfortably at thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour. That made the twenty minute commute a realistic possibility.
Operating costs were about a penny a mile when a token cost five cents. Cheaper than walking - when you priced a good pair of shoes.
The border patrol has approx 25,000 officers to cover the 2,000 mile border.
Think again. Think harder.
[ U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP] is responsible for guarding nearly 7,000 miles of land border the United States shares with Canada and Mexico and 2,000 miles of coastal waters surrounding the Florida peninsula and off the coast of Southern California. The agency also protects 95,000 miles of maritime border in partnership with the United States Coast Guard.
[There are] more than 17,000 CBP Border Patrol agents, 1,000 CBP Air and Marine agents, and almost 22,000 CBP officers and agriculture specialists, together with the nation's largest law enforcement canine program.
On a typical day in fiscal year 2008, CBP processed approximately 1 million passengers and pedestrians; 70,000 containers; and 331,000 privately owned vehicles.
257,000 international arrivals by air. 43,000 by ship.
There were 73 arrests of criminals
2,796 apprehensions...for illegal entry
Seized -
7,621 pounds of narcotics
$296,000 in undeclared or illicit currency
4,125 prohibited meat, plant materials or animal products, including 400 agricultural pests at ports of entry
Rescued 3 illegal crossers in distress or dangerous conditions
Deployed -
1,275 canine enforcement teams
18,276 vehicles, 275 aircraft, 180 watercraft, and 252 equestrian patrols This is CBP
That is one way to grow linux use. Once people figure out they can no longer "borrow" their buddies disk, they will start looking for alternatives.. and really, you don't even have to be 100% successful. If you make the process difficult enough, people will give up!
I haven't been asked to reactivate XP in eight years.
Activation and be one-click, fire-and-forget.
If you opt for automated updates you won't be spending much time at the Windows Update site -
or losing sleep over WGA.
The OEM system install is the norm in this market. Users almost never make significant hardware changes.
The geek looks in the mirror and thinks he sees every user in a reflection of own needs and values.
100 years ago you would have to be able to fix your own car: they were new technology, quite rare, and for a select audience only.
The Model T was introduced in 1908. The Ford could be sophisticated in materials and manufacturing where it mattered - in the four cylinder engine cast in one block. But basic maintenance and repair was kept well within the reach of any rural mechanic. That made perfect sense in an era when the paved road ended at the city line.
[If you've seen a antique harvester or baler in action you'll know that the mechanic of that era had to know his business]
This isn't basic research. It's engineering.
The benchmark that looks good in the lab.
YMMV.
The "objective" benchmark that has been "especially kind to Theora."
What the hell am I to make of that?
It's one clip -
apparently of a geek dead on his feet after pulling one too many all-nighters.
You can drown in techno-babble.
I want to see video.
Richly detailed backgrounds.
Textures. Wood and fur and cloth and grass. Subtle rendering of flesh tones.
Give me a real taste of how well your codec handles action. Take your camera outdoors. In the rain. Out on a boat. Take it on stage.
It is never $100 cheaper.
You know the drill:
The Linux box with bottom-feeder specs gets its turn on the WalMart Merry-Go-Round.
Wi-Fi works or more likely it doesn't.
It has the software but no modem - or the modem and no software.
The Distro From Hell was conceived and packaged somewhere in Lower Slobovia and you wish to God it had stayed there.
Carloads of this junk are unloaded to the ever-hopeful geek.
Hardware prices drop.
The Atom netbook arrives with a gig of RAM, a 9" screen and a 160 GB HDD and is priced to sell.
The Linux product does not get a refresh.
Life returns to normal.
Linux fading out of the picture faster than the Polaroid your Grandad left out in the Florida sun.
[> With apologies to all that have found the occasional gem among the dross - perhaps a Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu and a solid-state drive]
I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.
Bestsellers in Software
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]
In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.
This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.
I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.
It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.
If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:
Best sellers in PC Games
Windows 7 runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great.
That would seem to say something about the quality and performance of your Aspire's integrated graphics - or maybe that the geek was just spitting out nonsense when he ranted on and on about Aero.
I have wondered if the Win 7 netbook would benefit from "Ready Boost" Flash - easy to find almost anywhere for under $20.
Really is a bridge to far for average Joe... :-/
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one.
It won't be an old PC.
Joe trashes his aging - faltering - P4 when he can't stop drooling at the thought at what he what he can afford new or refurbished.
The quad core system with 64 Bit Vista Home Premium, Blu-Ray, 8 GB of RAM, a terabyte HDD, and the HDMI video card.
It ships to his door and comes with a warranty, a service contract and a toll free number for technical support.
It works, it gets fixed, or the seller tales it back.
That is Joe's comfort level.
Not Google. Not IRC Chat.
Not the neighborhood geek who makes promises he can't keep.
3) choose guided install
Joe expects all configuration and performance issues to be resolved at the factory.
He is not a technician. He is not a system builder. He does not resemble the geek in any way, shape or form.
Not once in thirty years has Joe or any member of his family installed an OS from scratch.
All they gotta do is strip out the DRM and get a boost.
The overhead in managing the protected path is trivial - always has been.
In return the buyer gets protected media play and a single-cable HDMI audio and video solution for his 3-D Ready HDTV.
The quad core desktop with a 2.4 GHz Cpu, 8 GB RAM and 64-Bit Vista is $800 at WalMart.
It's lunatic to fret over the "loss" of an occasional clock cycle when the mass market PC has specs in this class.
That would seem about right to me. However, many systems cannot be ordered without MS Windows of some sort pre-installed, yet people remove that and install Linux, or dual-boot their systems with Linux.
How many?
In the Net Applications stats IE 7 and IE 8 have about 50% of the global desktop and Vista around 25%.
How many of these people do you suppose have ever heard of a "user agent" or would be willing to chance editing it if they did?
Open about:config in Firefox.
Intimidating, ain't it?
The console markets take priority. The big bucks are in porting to [or more likely from] the XBox, the PS3 and the Wii.
iD opens the source to its old game engines. That doesn't mean it is about to release the commercially valuable source code of its latest-and-greatest.
If Linux users see something of value, they will no doubt buy it to encourage companies to continue. I have heard this before.
No.
The main problem is that the PC took its recognizable - adult - form in 1980.
The IBM PC struck all the right notes.
The IBM keyboard. The 80 column display. The 16 bit CPU.
The IBM PC and PC clone would evolve into something easily adapted to any environment from shop room floor to the executive suite.
There were successful MS-DOS PCs on the market before the cloning of the PC-BIOS.
The OEM system install - unpack the box and you are good to go - is a milestone. The default Microsoft install is a milestone.
The integration of hardware and software may never be as polished as OSX and the Mac. But it will work.
In 2009 that takes the fear of ordering the refurbished quad core 64 bit Vista PC with 8 GB RAM, wireless, Blu-Ray, HDMI, and NVIDIA gamer-graphics video from TigerDirect.
In the mid-nineties you have Win 3 and Win 95 - and Windows has built up an all-but-unstoppable momentum.
Linux as a client OS needed to hit the ground running no later than Win 3. It needed OEM support from Day 1.
Your distro packages 25,000 apps.
How do you find the fifty or so that are right for you?
The Windows user relies on independent editorial reviews, screen shots and other resources to help make his choice.
Think Download.com.
The Windows user will tune out your lecture on the virtues of free and open source.
He doesn't much care about free-as-in-beer either:
The GIMP isn't competing with Photoshop, it's competing with Paint Shop Pro. $40 at Amazon.com.
He knows the real bite in photo editing is in consumables.
Ink and paper.
Gog.com has classic MSDOS and Windows games updated for Vista at $6 and $10.
Apt-get and its kind are partial solutions for the narrow technical problem of distributing Linux software that doesn't have to be compiled from source.
It's become rather too easy for the geek to use the repository as a soap box. In an attempt to re-shape every user into his own image.
"Just give me the damn driver."
Too easy to count the number of programs in the repository and forget to ask the right questions about their quality and their target audience.
Linspire had the right idea with CNR.
Create and maintain a repository who is not and will never be a geek. Stop shoveling everything into the bin. Sell a legit - fully licensed - media player. Sell games produced in this millennium. Games that don't suck. Keep your presentation lively and informative.
Exactly right. Morphing Linux into a Windows software platform would be a major mistake.
This is the developer speaking.
Not the user. Not the office manager. Not the kid manning the help desk.
Users like having one way of doing things.
It makes their life easier.
The astonishing thing about The Ribbon in Office 2007 is how quickly and easily this fundamental change in the Office UI took hold.
That doesn't happen unless you really, really, understand the user and the task.
The proprietary developer has to do this.
The FOSS developer can find excuses not to.
He may not have the skills or the resources. He may not even know where to begin.
$100 that would have otherwise paid for Windows. Also, the ability to install applications over the internet without putting in any CDs or paying any money.
Who the hell cares about the OEM price of Windows?
I am retiring an aging Dell workhorse PC for 64 bit Vista. [and Win 7 RC1] It will in all likelihood sit beside this desk for the next five years - the next eight years. The most I ever expect to pay is for a one-time upgrade to Win 7 - and that won't break the bank.
The geek over-values "free." I don't lose sleep when I chose PSP over the GIMP. Not when I price photo-quality inks and papers.
We're not going to try and base our business model on WINE.
Much better to have native apps.
How do you keep the "Linux" app from being ported to Windows?
The market 20X - 100X - larger.
Thoughts about funding - staffing - marketing - profits - are going to start creeping into the mind of any FOSS developer, no matter how pure.
Google doesn't fund Firefox out of charity.
It expects to see real numbers - big numbers - delivered in return.
The "native" Linux app is most likely a UNIX-like utility. I am not sure it can be anything else.
The geek thinks like a home builder, an almost extinct species.
He'll quote retail list for the most expensive box he can find - or imagine.
The hardware is never the same. The CPU is now quad core. The OS 64 bit. 4 GB of Kingston DDR2 Value RAM $50. The 1 TB HDD $90.
This is what $700 buys this week:
Gateway LX6810 Refurbished Desktop - Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz, 8GB DDR2, 640GB HDD, NVIDIA GT 120 w 1 GB RAM, 500 watt PS, Vista Home Premium 64-bit