Apple will have what you want, albeit at a huge cost increase (business deductible maybe?). But it will work to take orders, plus retain the info, and be transferable probably wirelessly to the restaurants main computer system, etc. Heck, it might transfer in real time as you are writing on it at the table back into the kitchen, or to the bartender to start mixing and pouring. Plus, you will be able to do other stuff with it--if all these rumors are true. So wait three days..or get both! See which is better for your purpose.
You know what? When it comes to face, I think the rest of the planet needs to make it so they lose face all the time. They need to, untrustworthy gangster scum need to "lose face". We should stop kowtowing to them like that, ALL the time. The only face they really want is your face with their economic and physical boot in it. Screw that.
The Chinese "leaders" are the direct unbroken political descendants of a regime that murdered millions of their own people and engaged in genocide with other people. I have no idea why we even set out on this path to make them richer and more powerful, we wouldn't have done that with the stalinists, nope, nor hitlerites if they were still in power, but for some reason, these murderers get a free pass, like we are just supposed to play make believe history didn't happen and today's reality isn't happening.
The industrialized and more civilized nations (in cahoots with various big business trader traitors and their political puppets) handed them for free, or sold cheap, or they outright stole, and continue to steal, most of the crown jewels of the knowledge and techniques of said industrialization and modernization and *still* we are supposed to be oh so freaking worried about their "face". Well...too bad!
*(*&&*( their dang tyrannical despotic "face", they *need* to "lose face" for being mass jerks. (**&*^ all this bowing and scraping and treating them like they are civilized and honorable. They aren't, they are just modernized thugs, same as they have always been, and getting more powerful daily. They are and have been a major serious threat to the rest of the planet.
The best thing we could do is pull out, make all these stupid global companies just pull the heck out as well, or kick them out, before we are too poor and too far gone into stupid debt, before it is too late to build back up the west's industrial base, the true wealth creation parts of our economies.
That's the main reason we are hurting economically, we let them billionaire traitorous skunks with their despotic allies with their precious "face" swap out our manufacturing for that conman crap about being a "service" economy and emphasizing high stakes casino gambling as some sort of wealth creation "industry". Then they ran that little multi trillion bail out pure extortion racket on top of that!
There's been ZERO quid pro quo budge with them people, no reform inside that nation, no freedoms there except the freedom to be global class crooks, with caveat emptor products, since we handed them the means for wealth creation. All they have done is gone on an around the world grabbing spree, grabing industry after industry, and now raw resource after raw resource, and every time some one dares to point this out, the wall street gangster tools and their chinese mafia brothers cry "protectionism!" BS, they have been "protecting" that cooperating mob gang since day one, it's time for a little more proactive self defense *protection* back.
Why is bundling multiple changes/patches better? Seems like if you did it one at a time, if something broke, you would be pretty confident the new code was doing it. With multiple simultaneous changes, if something broke, you would have to sort out *which* of the new changes was responsible first, or also contemplate if the random combination of any of the changes was responsible, which greatly ups the number of potential problems to look at.
You don't get it on how to make loot with this FLOSS business model stuff. I'm not even a dev and I get it. I will try and 'splain this.
Here is the example I have used before: Remember hard wired telephones? Once a year way back then you get a free book from the phone company called a telephone directory. Inside the directory are different colored pages, white is residential, blue is government, and yellow is commercial business. Notice they have the full alphabet covered in that "yellow pages" section, businesses A-Z, autos to..whatever, zoologists. This is 2010, ALL those businesses ALL use computers/software to make money somehow.
That's how you make money with FLOSS, use it in one of those "other" A-Z businesses. Use it tweak it customize it, then go forth boldly with computer and code in hand and build and sell your widget and service.
Stand alone software as a business directly makes some people some money, for some people, in some areas, even a few large places, but the rest of the business done on the planet simply dwarfs that, just stomps it flat. There is no comparison.
example, the article: redhat makes x-dollars supplying clients. Those clients are in OTHER business that makes 1000x. Which looks to be where to head to make the rent and food budget?
They make so much money, they can afford to pay for software and service and still make a lot of other loot, tons more than what redhat makes. I bet most of their big clients are giants and make billions, compared to what redhat makes, which is low millions.
Home depot makes money selling tools. The people who buy those tools and materials makes thousands of times more money than home depot building houses and commercial buildings and being plumbers and electricians and landscapers etc.
Not everyone will work at home depot, but a whole lot of people can work someplace else and just use home depot just as an easy way to stay up with the tools and materials they need to go make some REAL money.
Now, cooperating on code in general terms, all the floss dudes all over, lets all those guys who are in other businesses stay focused on their real business, and "make money". By sharing code, they all get spiffier tools, for free or real cheap. They then use those tools to go to work doing something useful and make money.
Before the machines they used scrub boards in a washtub. It's a flat board with ripples in it, you scrub the wet clothes against it. Then the clothes were hand wrung and hung dry, or they had mechanical crank "wringers" to get the extra water out. (I still own this stuff as backup, and yes, have used them enough to get fair at it). I also have one of these things as a further, more modern biodrive backup washing machine. Does small loads, but it does work.
Anyway, check that whole catalog/site out, tons of neat "no electricity required" gadgets, including a more full size hand cranked washing machine.
All your math and reasoning is sound, this proposal makes *zero* economic sense for the general civilian electricity market (most cases). But I think, from what they are shooting for as customers eventually, that this won't matter as much, the cost part. They are defense and space contractors and what they want to build is a near-virtual instant completely mobile power plant, and sell that service to governments/militaries. ex: All of a sudden they need a megawatt or three of reliable power over here behind this sand dune in east ashcanistan, they need a lot of power. they need it *today*. Try to truck or fly in the all hardware plus fuel for the whole plant, directly through "bad guy" territory, get it set up and running, or only have to have a smaller receiver station, perhaps delivered in one fast helo load? I think that's the real target and business model.
Another use would be for disaster relief, a fast big power supply at the scene. Situations like that can justify a higher cost and being highly mobile.
I was reading last month or so ago what it costs to run fuel generators in ashcanistan out in the boonies there..man..it winds up costing them something like 400 bucks a gallon to get fuel delivered. The cost is hugemongous to run those gennies in some circumstances then. This thing might actually turn out to be cheaper for extreme niche purposes like that.
Of course, on the other hand.. I don't care what they say, a huge electricity source in space, connected to a wicked powerful laser with precise aiming abilities...they can *claim* it ain't a weapon all day long...;)
got it, thanks, but I'm having a retardo brane phart here, maybe you can help one more time, and TIA if you can. I've gone all through that involved menu, and cannot get the new linked tab to show up exactly to the right of the original tab where the link came from. That's really all I want, nothing else. I have checked and unchecked what looks like that option, and nothing changes, both ways a new tab being opened shows up at the far end of the set of tabs that are already there.
Divide and keep them conquered. Works really well for the goons. It's the most effective idea tyrants ever had, beats even the bread and circuses dodge. 1% of the population, or even less, can control all the others completely and profit forever with it. The people who are getting really shafted will vent their anger on other victims, who are getting equally shafted, claiming it is "all their fault". All it takes is a little brainwashing of the children in the schools to get them conditioned in the first place, then life long "continuing education" adult brainwashing via their psyops combined propaganda "infotainment" corps.
That's not canonical/ubuntu though is it? Dell offers some models with ubuntu as well, but it isn't the same. I was meaning that *they* would do it, expand from just software to an integrated hardware/software/peripherals stack, which would give them a guaranteed "just works" offer for people, to help make them cash. Not really sure how large that market is, but I would bet it would be much better than zero. I *think* it would probably do pretty well.
I know all sorts of smaller systems builders do it, offer linux preinstalled, but Canonical might have the juice and cash to go upscale a little more, get economies of scale deals, keep the prices *really* competitive. Like I said, pull an Apple with the integration, but not be dickheads about people running software on "unauthorized" hardware like Apple does.
Nice idea, and I keep wondering why Ubuntu doesn't do this, in an "it's up to you" option deal how to go about things. Normal distro, then take your chances on whatever hardware you got, or, something they can make money at, a set of a small variety of competitively priced machines-netbook, notebook, desktop, server- that they sell, that their main devs, for at least the long term releases, do absolute testing on so that everything "just works" 100% guaranteed, along with recommended peripherals.
Sort of like the apple model of matched software and hardware, *but* with the distinction of no hissy fits from the company about using other hardware, either. Buy their gear, with their software preinstalled, you get priority warranty and useability support. Buy or build your idea/choice of hardware, you get such support as exists today, which is hit or miss, go lurk on the forum if you have any problems.
Ha! At least some one read it! Had some more pieces over the weekend that I think are still virgins. I am afflicted with a bad case of "amateur futurist" with a side dressing of keyboard sadism, I love to write, which means type, and suck really bad at the typing part, I demolish the poor things. I even killed a Model M. So I appreciate it when I get read, it gets to be a lot like work for me...luckily this past weekend was cold wet and rainy so I had some spare time inside where I could write. I do farming, and this time of year just isn't all that much work for me besides getting in the firewood for next year and taking care of some beefers. Spring/summer/fall though..a lot more work.
I checked out your journals, you need to catch up some!
If they don't like the deal, then they shouldn't take it (and I wouldn't blame them either). They could take their really cheap sugar and make it a value added more lucrative product by turning it into ethanol fuel, like Brazil does, for instance. Or repurpose the extra sugar cane fields into another valuable food crop, rice maybe? Probably any number of good crops can be grown in that sort of soil.
I don't think Costa Rica has much of anything for a domestic oil supply, it's all imported, so making their own fuel makes more economic sense for them long range, plus adds to national energy independence, which in today's world is a big security issue. Every time you add an additional value added layer to a raw resource..well, that's why they call it "value added". The good stuff distilled from sugar cane squeezings you drink or sell, it is rum, all the other, in the tank.
Then maybe they wouldn't need the US market all that much and could just ignore it.
And it works both ways, as a farmer I am tuned to the security issues of both food and fuel, I think it is *perfectly* acceptable and understandable why any nation would want to maintain a core minimum amount of both food and fuel produced domestically, even if temporarily it might be cheaper on some global market. Heck, look at Japan, they go way out of their way to make sure they have *some* intact farming..they want to at all times be able to feed themselves and not be held hostage for such a critical necessity. Ya it costs them a *lot* more, but it is food insurance. And you really can't put a price on that insurance until some theoretical time when if you didn't have it, all of a sudden your imports stop and..well, that would suck. You'd figure out it was worth it..after the fact. Too late then.
And frankly, if you look at some of the nations that run huge monoculture farms to supply the US or Europe (or now it will be China using African farmland and some of the richer oil exporting mideast nations doing the same), they do so at the expense of the bulk of their own people, instead of growing a variety of food *first*, to feed their own people first as a national priority, they fixate on this external trade large crop, usually run by some local fatcats/cartels, that go to those foreign markets. Makes these fatcats rich, while their own people go hungrier than they should.
Malawi in Africa figured this out, crops for export *as the priority* was bankrupting them and leaving their people to starve all the time. A few people were getting rich there, everyone else.... They switched to "feed the nation first" as their ag policy, including government subsidies and so on, and now they are doing much better. Both their domestic food supply got better, and now they can export more again, just by shifting priorities and working smarter with what they have.
"Pod"casting or podcast are now recognized words, so Apple has at least one score there based on a successful product that overwhelmed the market so much that their branding becomes the noun or verb for what already existed. Not the first player, not the first downloadable audio file, but the first to have those "owned" so much that everyone knows what you mean.
There's always been the military high ground aspect to the "civilian" space program. They can't ignore it. Sputnik was a HUGE kick in the pants to the US. That just can't be overstated. Official governmental involvement with space in general terms won't end, although a lot of it might disappear into the black budget (and a lot is probably there as well, right now). Manned or unmanned, it's the high ground, and any superpower knows this. They have and will continue to throw any number of civilian oriented scientific endeavors at the situation, but in the background, is always the "high ground" aspect.
If you followed the first link and did some more research, in particular to the Argentinian examples, you will see that they have become successful after the bosses and investors had just given up and closed the factories down, walking away, leaving the rest of the workers high and dry with no jobs, even when they had taken pay cut after pay cut all the way to the point that they couldn't even afford to get to work.. These allegedly "professionally well managed" factories, etc were NOT successful with the strict capitalist model of paying the big bucks to some "executive" decision makers and order givers, plus funding outside shareholder investors, they failed or where darn close to it. After this turns out to be unnecessary overhead bloat and expense was removed, the workers, and the factory, or other businesses, were able to go back to being profitable.
So I agree with you, layoffs might be necessary, just WHO gets laid off is at issue. It doesn't always have to be the guys down on the shop floor that are costing the company too much money to be profitable, it well could be too many heavy layers of quite expensive management is where the true waste is, and what needs to be "laid off" as a sane cost cutting move.
As to you "investing" in one of those places, that's the point in many of these sorts of situations, you would have to actually work, as in physical labor of some sort "work", there to be a part owner for your "share", you would have to "invest" labor in getting up and going there for your shift work if you wanted any of the profits.
There's nothing all that exotic to this model, it is a co-op, just for employment, which also seeks to be more efficient and profitable by eliminating waste, even "jobs and wages" waste, something all sorts of companies do now, they look around for labor arbitrage advantages. Just in this case they found their best advantage was eliminating a lot of jobs at the top, not at the bottom. They found out it isn't necessarily carved in stone that you have to have an all managerial class separate from the blue collar workers, that in some instances, they were quite able to self manage themselves, and by eliminating this false necessity of paying for all the managerial overhead and outside investors demands, the rest of the employees there found out they could make a living and return the company itself to profitability.
The workers are the owners, there is no distinction there.
Co-ops to save money for all the members are not a new idea at all, say look at food co-ops, or a local co-op for telco or power instead of having an all privately owned utility or telco. Another example might be a local member owned credit union as opposed to a traditional bank.
This worker co-op model just runs it even closer to an effective share and share alike model, realizing it takes all the parts to make the whole, and as they are all in it together, there is no internal war between the traditional "job" and income classifications and barriers, the white collar versus the blue collar versus shareholder demands.
There's a really big variation of a "workers co-op" we are familiar with here on slashdot, and it is very successful to "boot", pun intended, on a global scale, able to compete quite well "in the market", and this is the Linux kernel, as is also the entire FOSS movement. It is a global workers co-op.
All the contributors or "workers" get paid, at a minimum, this is the basest "minimum wage" pay and it goes up from there, with an "in kind" currency model, which is equal access to the code, and given that said code can then be used in OTHER business, A to Z, as most business today relies on computers and code, then you can "make money to pay the rent" etc, using the first "in kind" currency, as an economic force multiplier and cost saving measure to make additional national currencies of desire. It's a very successful variation on a workers' co-op model that is expanding daily, and it makes a lot of people stay employed, doing us
Not so sure on tearing them down, I agree it is better most times to rebuild, retrofit, make better. I think a lot of bad cities could be saved with two steps, the first, with the federal level as a guide, end the war on some drugs. 40* years is enough, it is a failed experiment just like liquid drugs prohibition was. It's just stupid, costs way too much, doesn't work, actually creates more crime. The illegal drug trade and the huge profits are the major impetus for organized violent gangs and crime, etc, plus official corruption,which is much higher than the suits want to admit. You can't tell me there's not a major involvement in the global drugs trade with banks, paramilitary enforcement services, etc, the legal "system" people, etc. Huge money, especially black market money, leads to massive official corruption, it isn't just street level crime, although they really like to emphasize that. So anyway, end that stupid war.
The second step, is to repurpose abandoned factories and make new stuff (like where are the millions of "really cheap and good enough" model A small windchargers out there, or solar thermal collection panels, and hot water heaters?), or they can keep manufacturing what they were making, the old stuff *with* the exception of the employees being majority owners, or the complete owners, which I think is an even better idea.
Go from unprofitable to being profitable by eliminating bloat and excessive costs. The wall street way is to screw over the actual workers who make the stuff. Well, that's a dumb way to cut costs,if you look at the company as a whole rather than just a short term cash cow for the Cxx crowd. How about start at the top instead of the bottom and cut out *those* jobs instead?
Detroit auto industry semi collapsed from the three existing established factors involved being at economic war with each other, meaning there never was a coordinated business, the unions versus the management versus the outside shareholders, all trying to run a company together. Nuts. A house divided will not stand.
The result of this internal economic warfare was too much management who thought all their ideas were just infallible, no checks on business megalomania there at all, just out to lunch (stuff like the expensive private jets bringing in the bosses to beg for bailout loans..those people are *clueless*, can't even spot hideously bad PR), short term profits mentality with shareholders, and unions demanding way more than what was reasonable for factory work, so they had to charge way more than what vehicles should go for to pay for all those salaries and profits and way too high union costs, etc. Just plain dumb.
Bad designs, always a decade or two behind the curve on what was really needed in the market, putzing around with stupid million dollar hydrogen boondoggle "concept" cars, blah, just lame, lack of focus, internecine destruction, etc. Just bad mojo, and if something like that is your dominant local employment scene like it is in Detroit..inevitable it would collapse. Detroit also suffered from some really bad racial tensions in the 60s, including riots (it was bad, saw them) leading to what they called "white flight" to the burbs, a massive shift, leaving downtown properties not worth as much, etc. Abandonedville to the gangs and junkies and the incredibly poor for the most part.
But here are examples of where something like this collapse of the local economy leading to blight, etc were remedied by the workers themselves running their own shops, eliminating a lot of expensive overhead, plus it makes them focus on doing a good job, no "us versus them versus them" thing like typical US business, it is only "us".
They've gone way out of their way to destroy ubiquitous use of replicator technology, lobbying and working for a legal precedent to enshrine on purpose artificial scarcity as akin to or equal to natural scarcity.
Digital copies are our first credible true replicator tech. Part of the 24th century got here early. The actual true cost of copies of digital products has dropped to almost zero. Instead of being hailed as one of mankind's greatest achievements, and extended across the globe so that all of humanity may share in bounty, they want to restrict, make illegal, hinder, repress and demonize this amazing scientific and engineering breakthrough. This is a hideous blow to the future, a simply terrible legal and societal precedent, for when we have tangible replicators.
What they have so far succeeded in doing is similar to if after Gutenberg's contributions, that all copies of books had to still reflect in price and access at the previous cost and access of hand scribed copies.
That would have been a terrible legal precedent..I think we are all glad it didn't happen.
We have a much more profound situation today, a total game changer, modern tech has made "expensive" copies of digital products obsolete, but the laws have carved in stone much earlier tech's pricing and access structures.
Why? How long will the hand scribers labors and prices be maintained, when there simply is no need, and they, in fact, no longer scribe? Why restrict it artificially that way, just because the older tech existed? Doesn't time move forward? Where is the endgame there? This is the clichéd buggywhip industry made to be supreme law, it must be maintained? Again, why?
I call that artificial restriction evil, basically a crime against future humanity, a serious crime against our progeny, we are inflicting this on them, to restrict simply wonderful tech advances like that, not only for now, but in the future when we have much better tangible replicators.
We already have some good beginnings in that field, but what happens when we really can eliminate "want" in a number of tangible areas technically, but legally restrict it? If this legal precedent is allowed to stand..eventually our progress as a technological civilization will slow to a crawl and then become locked in a "legal" time frame limbo, that every year thereafter falls further and further behind reality.
Evolution is very popular on this site. Shouldn't we be embracing societal and legal evolution to reflect and harmonize more with modern scientific and engineering advances? Shouldn't there be more of a balance?
The only change we have had is a change to make it *worse*, to go back in time, to make restrictions on digital copies be of much longer duration, and to be more onerous, and to devote more of our legal system in maintaining this "artificial scarcity" model, to maintain the holy guild of the hand scribers even when they no longer scribe, to maintain the illusion that this is somehow still hard or expensive, instead of just naturally embracing it and evolving along with it.
Well, this is sort of silly really, that wasn't the main point of my post after all, although it was a funny/odd reflection on this phenomenon. As to technically looking for a word, yes, I was looking for a new noun, not an adjective.
40 sat terminals are being established, along with 60 broadband terminals, from the ITU. A lot of stuff has to be moved in, because so much was destroyed
I was looking at various pics of the destruction, and it is trite and often used, but it looks like a major giant airforce just carpet bombed the place.
I have never been there, but based on other articles I have read about real poor areas with cellphones, a lot of the people depend on charging kiosks / local services to recharge their phones, because domestic electricity is so rare. I would imagine most of those facilities are now smashed as well.
I just posted, immediately before you up above, the link to the arrl coverage. They gave freqs for monitoring, and some contact has been established via batteries with hams in haiti, and they had updates on other forms of emergency support which is ongoing. US HAMS..uhh..they are HERE not in Haiti you moron.. How the heck are us based people supposed to help out over there besides monitoring and relaying any info they might receive? They are very good HERE where they live, they have solar power, charged batteries, generators, etc, but that only works HERE where their stuff is, capeche? Haiti is poor, and it has just been wiped out, it has collapsed, heck, there are probably any number of radio operator there now who can't communicate because they are freaking dead, inside collapsed buildings. Or if alive, maybe their equipment got smashed and is still under rubble, who knows. HAM gear is expensive, no one expects the poorest nation this side of the globe to have as many radio hobbyists as there are in the US or wealthier western nations. Their equivalent of the freekin whitehouse is partially collapsed. A lot of smashed stuff, get it?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple will have what you want, albeit at a huge cost increase (business deductible maybe?). But it will work to take orders, plus retain the info, and be transferable probably wirelessly to the restaurants main computer system, etc. Heck, it might transfer in real time as you are writing on it at the table back into the kitchen, or to the bartender to start mixing and pouring. Plus, you will be able to do other stuff with it--if all these rumors are true. So wait three days..or get both! See which is better for your purpose.
You know what? When it comes to face, I think the rest of the planet needs to make it so they lose face all the time. They need to, untrustworthy gangster scum need to "lose face". We should stop kowtowing to them like that, ALL the time. The only face they really want is your face with their economic and physical boot in it. Screw that.
The Chinese "leaders" are the direct unbroken political descendants of a regime that murdered millions of their own people and engaged in genocide with other people. I have no idea why we even set out on this path to make them richer and more powerful, we wouldn't have done that with the stalinists, nope, nor hitlerites if they were still in power, but for some reason, these murderers get a free pass, like we are just supposed to play make believe history didn't happen and today's reality isn't happening.
The industrialized and more civilized nations (in cahoots with various big business trader traitors and their political puppets) handed them for free, or sold cheap, or they outright stole, and continue to steal, most of the crown jewels of the knowledge and techniques of said industrialization and modernization and *still* we are supposed to be oh so freaking worried about their "face". Well...too bad!
*(*&&*( their dang tyrannical despotic "face", they *need* to "lose face" for being mass jerks. (**&*^ all this bowing and scraping and treating them like they are civilized and honorable. They aren't, they are just modernized thugs, same as they have always been, and getting more powerful daily. They are and have been a major serious threat to the rest of the planet.
The best thing we could do is pull out, make all these stupid global companies just pull the heck out as well, or kick them out, before we are too poor and too far gone into stupid debt, before it is too late to build back up the west's industrial base, the true wealth creation parts of our economies.
That's the main reason we are hurting economically, we let them billionaire traitorous skunks with their despotic allies with their precious "face" swap out our manufacturing for that conman crap about being a "service" economy and emphasizing high stakes casino gambling as some sort of wealth creation "industry". Then they ran that little multi trillion bail out pure extortion racket on top of that!
There's been ZERO quid pro quo budge with them people, no reform inside that nation, no freedoms there except the freedom to be global class crooks, with caveat emptor products, since we handed them the means for wealth creation. All they have done is gone on an around the world grabbing spree, grabing industry after industry, and now raw resource after raw resource, and every time some one dares to point this out, the wall street gangster tools and their chinese mafia brothers cry "protectionism!" BS, they have been "protecting" that cooperating mob gang since day one, it's time for a little more proactive self defense *protection* back.
Why is bundling multiple changes/patches better? Seems like if you did it one at a time, if something broke, you would be pretty confident the new code was doing it. With multiple simultaneous changes, if something broke, you would have to sort out *which* of the new changes was responsible first, or also contemplate if the random combination of any of the changes was responsible, which greatly ups the number of potential problems to look at.
You don't get it on how to make loot with this FLOSS business model stuff. I'm not even a dev and I get it. I will try and 'splain this.
Here is the example I have used before: Remember hard wired telephones? Once a year way back then you get a free book from the phone company called a telephone directory. Inside the directory are different colored pages, white is residential, blue is government, and yellow is commercial business. Notice they have the full alphabet covered in that "yellow pages" section, businesses A-Z, autos to ..whatever, zoologists. This is 2010, ALL those businesses ALL use computers/software to make money somehow.
That's how you make money with FLOSS, use it in one of those "other" A-Z businesses. Use it tweak it customize it, then go forth boldly with computer and code in hand and build and sell your widget and service.
Stand alone software as a business directly makes some people some money, for some people, in some areas, even a few large places, but the rest of the business done on the planet simply dwarfs that, just stomps it flat. There is no comparison.
example, the article: redhat makes x-dollars supplying clients. Those clients are in OTHER business that makes 1000x. Which looks to be where to head to make the rent and food budget?
They make so much money, they can afford to pay for software and service and still make a lot of other loot, tons more than what redhat makes. I bet most of their big clients are giants and make billions, compared to what redhat makes, which is low millions.
Home depot makes money selling tools. The people who buy those tools and materials makes thousands of times more money than home depot building houses and commercial buildings and being plumbers and electricians and landscapers etc.
Not everyone will work at home depot, but a whole lot of people can work someplace else and just use home depot just as an easy way to stay up with the tools and materials they need to go make some REAL money.
Now, cooperating on code in general terms, all the floss dudes all over, lets all those guys who are in other businesses stay focused on their real business, and "make money". By sharing code, they all get spiffier tools, for free or real cheap. They then use those tools to go to work doing something useful and make money.
Before the machines they used scrub boards in a washtub. It's a flat board with ripples in it, you scrub the wet clothes against it. Then the clothes were hand wrung and hung dry, or they had mechanical crank "wringers" to get the extra water out. (I still own this stuff as backup, and yes, have used them enough to get fair at it). I also have one of these things as a further, more modern biodrive backup washing machine. Does small loads, but it does work.
Anyway, check that whole catalog/site out, tons of neat "no electricity required" gadgets, including a more full size hand cranked washing machine.
All your math and reasoning is sound, this proposal makes *zero* economic sense for the general civilian electricity market (most cases). But I think, from what they are shooting for as customers eventually, that this won't matter as much, the cost part. They are defense and space contractors and what they want to build is a near-virtual instant completely mobile power plant, and sell that service to governments/militaries. ex: All of a sudden they need a megawatt or three of reliable power over here behind this sand dune in east ashcanistan, they need a lot of power. they need it *today*. Try to truck or fly in the all hardware plus fuel for the whole plant, directly through "bad guy" territory, get it set up and running, or only have to have a smaller receiver station, perhaps delivered in one fast helo load? I think that's the real target and business model.
Another use would be for disaster relief, a fast big power supply at the scene. Situations like that can justify a higher cost and being highly mobile.
I was reading last month or so ago what it costs to run fuel generators in ashcanistan out in the boonies there..man..it winds up costing them something like 400 bucks a gallon to get fuel delivered. The cost is hugemongous to run those gennies in some circumstances then. This thing might actually turn out to be cheaper for extreme niche purposes like that.
Of course, on the other hand.. I don't care what they say, a huge electricity source in space, connected to a wicked powerful laser with precise aiming abilities...they can *claim* it ain't a weapon all day long...;)
Thanks a lot man! Wanted that for *years* now.
got it, thanks, but I'm having a retardo brane phart here, maybe you can help one more time, and TIA if you can. I've gone all through that involved menu, and cannot get the new linked tab to show up exactly to the right of the original tab where the link came from. That's really all I want, nothing else. I have checked and unchecked what looks like that option, and nothing changes, both ways a new tab being opened shows up at the far end of the set of tabs that are already there.
I always wanted the tabs to work that way, to keep them grouped
Divide and keep them conquered. Works really well for the goons. It's the most effective idea tyrants ever had, beats even the bread and circuses dodge. 1% of the population, or even less, can control all the others completely and profit forever with it. The people who are getting really shafted will vent their anger on other victims, who are getting equally shafted, claiming it is "all their fault". All it takes is a little brainwashing of the children in the schools to get them conditioned in the first place, then life long "continuing education" adult brainwashing via their psyops combined propaganda "infotainment" corps.
That's not canonical/ubuntu though is it? Dell offers some models with ubuntu as well, but it isn't the same. I was meaning that *they* would do it, expand from just software to an integrated hardware/software/peripherals stack, which would give them a guaranteed "just works" offer for people, to help make them cash. Not really sure how large that market is, but I would bet it would be much better than zero. I *think* it would probably do pretty well.
I know all sorts of smaller systems builders do it, offer linux preinstalled, but Canonical might have the juice and cash to go upscale a little more, get economies of scale deals, keep the prices *really* competitive. Like I said, pull an Apple with the integration, but not be dickheads about people running software on "unauthorized" hardware like Apple does.
Nice idea, and I keep wondering why Ubuntu doesn't do this, in an "it's up to you" option deal how to go about things. Normal distro, then take your chances on whatever hardware you got, or, something they can make money at, a set of a small variety of competitively priced machines-netbook, notebook, desktop, server- that they sell, that their main devs, for at least the long term releases, do absolute testing on so that everything "just works" 100% guaranteed, along with recommended peripherals.
Sort of like the apple model of matched software and hardware, *but* with the distinction of no hissy fits from the company about using other hardware, either. Buy their gear, with their software preinstalled, you get priority warranty and useability support. Buy or build your idea/choice of hardware, you get such support as exists today, which is hit or miss, go lurk on the forum if you have any problems.
Ha! At least some one read it! Had some more pieces over the weekend that I think are still virgins. I am afflicted with a bad case of "amateur futurist" with a side dressing of keyboard sadism, I love to write, which means type, and suck really bad at the typing part, I demolish the poor things. I even killed a Model M. So I appreciate it when I get read, it gets to be a lot like work for me...luckily this past weekend was cold wet and rainy so I had some spare time inside where I could write. I do farming, and this time of year just isn't all that much work for me besides getting in the firewood for next year and taking care of some beefers. Spring/summer/fall though..a lot more work.
I checked out your journals, you need to catch up some!
If they don't like the deal, then they shouldn't take it (and I wouldn't blame them either). They could take their really cheap sugar and make it a value added more lucrative product by turning it into ethanol fuel, like Brazil does, for instance. Or repurpose the extra sugar cane fields into another valuable food crop, rice maybe? Probably any number of good crops can be grown in that sort of soil.
I don't think Costa Rica has much of anything for a domestic oil supply, it's all imported, so making their own fuel makes more economic sense for them long range, plus adds to national energy independence, which in today's world is a big security issue. Every time you add an additional value added layer to a raw resource..well, that's why they call it "value added". The good stuff distilled from sugar cane squeezings you drink or sell, it is rum, all the other, in the tank.
Then maybe they wouldn't need the US market all that much and could just ignore it.
And it works both ways, as a farmer I am tuned to the security issues of both food and fuel, I think it is *perfectly* acceptable and understandable why any nation would want to maintain a core minimum amount of both food and fuel produced domestically, even if temporarily it might be cheaper on some global market. Heck, look at Japan, they go way out of their way to make sure they have *some* intact farming..they want to at all times be able to feed themselves and not be held hostage for such a critical necessity. Ya it costs them a *lot* more, but it is food insurance. And you really can't put a price on that insurance until some theoretical time when if you didn't have it, all of a sudden your imports stop and..well, that would suck. You'd figure out it was worth it..after the fact. Too late then.
And frankly, if you look at some of the nations that run huge monoculture farms to supply the US or Europe (or now it will be China using African farmland and some of the richer oil exporting mideast nations doing the same), they do so at the expense of the bulk of their own people, instead of growing a variety of food *first*, to feed their own people first as a national priority, they fixate on this external trade large crop, usually run by some local fatcats/cartels, that go to those foreign markets. Makes these fatcats rich, while their own people go hungrier than they should.
Malawi in Africa figured this out, crops for export *as the priority* was bankrupting them and leaving their people to starve all the time. A few people were getting rich there, everyone else.... They switched to "feed the nation first" as their ag policy, including government subsidies and so on, and now they are doing much better. Both their domestic food supply got better, and now they can export more again, just by shifting priorities and working smarter with what they have.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200907020548.html
The answer got leaked a long time ago
"Pod"casting or podcast are now recognized words, so Apple has at least one score there based on a successful product that overwhelmed the market so much that their branding becomes the noun or verb for what already existed. Not the first player, not the first downloadable audio file, but the first to have those "owned" so much that everyone knows what you mean.
There's always been the military high ground aspect to the "civilian" space program. They can't ignore it. Sputnik was a HUGE kick in the pants to the US. That just can't be overstated. Official governmental involvement with space in general terms won't end, although a lot of it might disappear into the black budget (and a lot is probably there as well, right now). Manned or unmanned, it's the high ground, and any superpower knows this. They have and will continue to throw any number of civilian oriented scientific endeavors at the situation, but in the background, is always the "high ground" aspect.
If you followed the first link and did some more research, in particular to the Argentinian examples, you will see that they have become successful after the bosses and investors had just given up and closed the factories down, walking away, leaving the rest of the workers high and dry with no jobs, even when they had taken pay cut after pay cut all the way to the point that they couldn't even afford to get to work.. These allegedly "professionally well managed" factories, etc were NOT successful with the strict capitalist model of paying the big bucks to some "executive" decision makers and order givers, plus funding outside shareholder investors, they failed or where darn close to it. After this turns out to be unnecessary overhead bloat and expense was removed, the workers, and the factory, or other businesses, were able to go back to being profitable.
So I agree with you, layoffs might be necessary, just WHO gets laid off is at issue. It doesn't always have to be the guys down on the shop floor that are costing the company too much money to be profitable, it well could be too many heavy layers of quite expensive management is where the true waste is, and what needs to be "laid off" as a sane cost cutting move.
As to you "investing" in one of those places, that's the point in many of these sorts of situations, you would have to actually work, as in physical labor of some sort "work", there to be a part owner for your "share", you would have to "invest" labor in getting up and going there for your shift work if you wanted any of the profits.
There's nothing all that exotic to this model, it is a co-op, just for employment, which also seeks to be more efficient and profitable by eliminating waste, even "jobs and wages" waste, something all sorts of companies do now, they look around for labor arbitrage advantages. Just in this case they found their best advantage was eliminating a lot of jobs at the top, not at the bottom. They found out it isn't necessarily carved in stone that you have to have an all managerial class separate from the blue collar workers, that in some instances, they were quite able to self manage themselves, and by eliminating this false necessity of paying for all the managerial overhead and outside investors demands, the rest of the employees there found out they could make a living and return the company itself to profitability.
The workers are the owners, there is no distinction there.
Co-ops to save money for all the members are not a new idea at all, say look at food co-ops, or a local co-op for telco or power instead of having an all privately owned utility or telco. Another example might be a local member owned credit union as opposed to a traditional bank.
This worker co-op model just runs it even closer to an effective share and share alike model, realizing it takes all the parts to make the whole, and as they are all in it together, there is no internal war between the traditional "job" and income classifications and barriers, the white collar versus the blue collar versus shareholder demands.
There's a really big variation of a "workers co-op" we are familiar with here on slashdot, and it is very successful to "boot", pun intended, on a global scale, able to compete quite well "in the market", and this is the Linux kernel, as is also the entire FOSS movement. It is a global workers co-op.
All the contributors or "workers" get paid, at a minimum, this is the basest "minimum wage" pay and it goes up from there, with an "in kind" currency model, which is equal access to the code, and given that said code can then be used in OTHER business, A to Z, as most business today relies on computers and code, then you can "make money to pay the rent" etc, using the first "in kind" currency, as an economic force multiplier and cost saving measure to make additional national currencies of desire. It's a very successful variation on a workers' co-op model that is expanding daily, and it makes a lot of people stay employed, doing us
Not so sure on tearing them down, I agree it is better most times to rebuild, retrofit, make better. I think a lot of bad cities could be saved with two steps, the first, with the federal level as a guide, end the war on some drugs. 40* years is enough, it is a failed experiment just like liquid drugs prohibition was. It's just stupid, costs way too much, doesn't work, actually creates more crime. The illegal drug trade and the huge profits are the major impetus for organized violent gangs and crime, etc, plus official corruption,which is much higher than the suits want to admit. You can't tell me there's not a major involvement in the global drugs trade with banks, paramilitary enforcement services, etc, the legal "system" people, etc. Huge money, especially black market money, leads to massive official corruption, it isn't just street level crime, although they really like to emphasize that. So anyway, end that stupid war.
The second step, is to repurpose abandoned factories and make new stuff (like where are the millions of "really cheap and good enough" model A small windchargers out there, or solar thermal collection panels, and hot water heaters?), or they can keep manufacturing what they were making, the old stuff *with* the exception of the employees being majority owners, or the complete owners, which I think is an even better idea.
Go from unprofitable to being profitable by eliminating bloat and excessive costs. The wall street way is to screw over the actual workers who make the stuff. Well, that's a dumb way to cut costs,if you look at the company as a whole rather than just a short term cash cow for the Cxx crowd. How about start at the top instead of the bottom and cut out *those* jobs instead?
Detroit auto industry semi collapsed from the three existing established factors involved being at economic war with each other, meaning there never was a coordinated business, the unions versus the management versus the outside shareholders, all trying to run a company together. Nuts. A house divided will not stand.
The result of this internal economic warfare was too much management who thought all their ideas were just infallible, no checks on business megalomania there at all, just out to lunch (stuff like the expensive private jets bringing in the bosses to beg for bailout loans..those people are *clueless*, can't even spot hideously bad PR), short term profits mentality with shareholders, and unions demanding way more than what was reasonable for factory work, so they had to charge way more than what vehicles should go for to pay for all those salaries and profits and way too high union costs, etc. Just plain dumb.
Bad designs, always a decade or two behind the curve on what was really needed in the market, putzing around with stupid million dollar hydrogen boondoggle "concept" cars, blah, just lame, lack of focus, internecine destruction, etc. Just bad mojo, and if something like that is your dominant local employment scene like it is in Detroit..inevitable it would collapse. Detroit also suffered from some really bad racial tensions in the 60s, including riots (it was bad, saw them) leading to what they called "white flight" to the burbs, a massive shift, leaving downtown properties not worth as much, etc. Abandonedville to the gangs and junkies and the incredibly poor for the most part.
But here are examples of where something like this collapse of the local economy leading to blight, etc were remedied by the workers themselves running their own shops, eliminating a lot of expensive overhead, plus it makes them focus on doing a good job, no "us versus them versus them" thing like typical US business, it is only "us".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_self-management
In particular, scroll down that link to read about more recent "recovered factory movement" efforts in South America.
And here is another interesting way that people
They've gone way out of their way to destroy ubiquitous use of replicator technology, lobbying and working for a legal precedent to enshrine on purpose artificial scarcity as akin to or equal to natural scarcity.
Digital copies are our first credible true replicator tech. Part of the 24th century got here early. The actual true cost of copies of digital products has dropped to almost zero. Instead of being hailed as one of mankind's greatest achievements, and extended across the globe so that all of humanity may share in bounty, they want to restrict, make illegal, hinder, repress and demonize this amazing scientific and engineering breakthrough. This is a hideous blow to the future, a simply terrible legal and societal precedent, for when we have tangible replicators.
What they have so far succeeded in doing is similar to if after Gutenberg's contributions, that all copies of books had to still reflect in price and access at the previous cost and access of hand scribed copies.
That would have been a terrible legal precedent..I think we are all glad it didn't happen.
We have a much more profound situation today, a total game changer, modern tech has made "expensive" copies of digital products obsolete, but the laws have carved in stone much earlier tech's pricing and access structures.
Why? How long will the hand scribers labors and prices be maintained, when there simply is no need, and they, in fact, no longer scribe? Why restrict it artificially that way, just because the older tech existed? Doesn't time move forward? Where is the endgame there? This is the clichéd buggywhip industry made to be supreme law, it must be maintained? Again, why?
I call that artificial restriction evil, basically a crime against future humanity, a serious crime against our progeny, we are inflicting this on them, to restrict simply wonderful tech advances like that, not only for now, but in the future when we have much better tangible replicators.
We already have some good beginnings in that field, but what happens when we really can eliminate "want" in a number of tangible areas technically, but legally restrict it? If this legal precedent is allowed to stand..eventually our progress as a technological civilization will slow to a crawl and then become locked in a "legal" time frame limbo, that every year thereafter falls further and further behind reality.
Evolution is very popular on this site. Shouldn't we be embracing societal and legal evolution to reflect and harmonize more with modern scientific and engineering advances? Shouldn't there be more of a balance?
The only change we have had is a change to make it *worse*, to go back in time, to make restrictions on digital copies be of much longer duration, and to be more onerous, and to devote more of our legal system in maintaining this "artificial scarcity" model, to maintain the holy guild of the hand scribers even when they no longer scribe, to maintain the illusion that this is somehow still hard or expensive, instead of just naturally embracing it and evolving along with it.
Well, this is sort of silly really, that wasn't the main point of my post after all, although it was a funny/odd reflection on this phenomenon. As to technically looking for a word, yes, I was looking for a new noun, not an adjective.
That's a nice word but it isn't as specific as luddite is in the opposite. It also isn't a noun.
"Oh, you are against blah blah, you must be a luddite!"
"Oh, you just go along with every new gadget fad, even if it is junk, you are just a credulous!"
It doesn't work...
40 sat terminals are being established, along with 60 broadband terminals, from the ITU. A lot of stuff has to be moved in, because so much was destroyed
http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2010/02.html
I was looking at various pics of the destruction, and it is trite and often used, but it looks like a major giant airforce just carpet bombed the place.
I have never been there, but based on other articles I have read about real poor areas with cellphones, a lot of the people depend on charging kiosks / local services to recharge their phones, because domestic electricity is so rare. I would imagine most of those facilities are now smashed as well.
I just posted, immediately before you up above, the link to the arrl coverage. They gave freqs for monitoring, and some contact has been established via batteries with hams in haiti, and they had updates on other forms of emergency support which is ongoing. US HAMS..uhh..they are HERE not in Haiti you moron.. How the heck are us based people supposed to help out over there besides monitoring and relaying any info they might receive? They are very good HERE where they live, they have solar power, charged batteries, generators, etc, but that only works HERE where their stuff is, capeche? Haiti is poor, and it has just been wiped out, it has collapsed, heck, there are probably any number of radio operator there now who can't communicate because they are freaking dead, inside collapsed buildings. Or if alive, maybe their equipment got smashed and is still under rubble, who knows. HAM gear is expensive, no one expects the poorest nation this side of the globe to have as many radio hobbyists as there are in the US or wealthier western nations. Their equivalent of the freekin whitehouse is partially collapsed. A lot of smashed stuff, get it?
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2010/01/14/11290/?nc=1