You know, it's just sad. Here was MS, successful, had a good lead, was developing product, then they just got so absurdly greedy they lost it into corporate insanity, megalomania or something. I just don't get it, how steenking rich do you need to be before it's "enough", anyway?
It don't matter, the future will get here, and it's free and open source. In between it's gonna get real fugly, but eventually, FOSS is gonna rule. Inevitable. Anyone paying attention can see it, even if they don't/won't/can't admit it now.
... got away with most anything, UNTIL he announced he was going to charge euros or gold for whatever oil he was allowed to sell, and not accept US federal reserve notes. He got invaded then. That was the real tipping overpoint for the oil administration. Your observations are right on, no one cared about massacres and despotism uganda or whatever,they don't care much about the sudan now, no oil there of note. BUT, iraq, iran, REAL interesting places to the oil guys. What-a-coincidence.
The rest of the muslim world will be gradually changing over to the gold dinar for their internal balance of trade payments with themselves,(they started already and it's a pretty good success so far) and eventually they will most likely (that is my belief at this time) only accept gold or manufactured goods for their oil. Of course, we will be in full bore ww3 by then, because we want it, europe wants it, china wants it, india is gonna want it, and so on, and there's only enough for ONE of those groups or places worth of oil exisiting in total.
whoops!
Not only are petroleum's days numbered, but the US fiat artifical dollar's days are numbered, too. The rest of the planet sees no need to keep subsisidising the US, especially as we don't really have anything they want that they can't get elsewhere for cheaper. They will take our JOBS, that's our real biggest export now, that and our future debt. Foreigners own most of our government paper and most of our mortgages.
Our "leaders" are really greedy, insane ignoramuses. But, they call the shots, so we will be the nation to go down in history as eventually turning the most war-like, because it's what we have left, and everyone wants the oil.
And THAT'S why we have been forcefully turned into an expansionist looter nation, because that's what we still have, military power primarily, so that's all we can use. When we still manufactured everything, all our oil dollars got re-spent back inside the US primarily, so that helped our economy, but now... nope. It's totally different. And when our economy was booming, I mean really ripping along with true produced wealth, oil was 2-5$ a barrel. Heck, I've paid as little as 12 cents a gallon before. I also paid one time 10$ a gallon for 2 gallons max, during the OPEC embargo.
Stuff can sure change fast, people forget it seems. Too bad we didn't learn our lesson back then in the 70s.
Ain't that cheap now. Never gonna be that cheap ever again.
That's why I think it's critically important that we just "do it", put the rust belt back to work, open up hundreds of factories,and start pumping out wind gennys, solar panels, you name it, throw everything we got at it before oil gets so expensive in terms of dollars and BTU's needed to get it and refine it that we CAN'T switch to alternatives. We have a short window, relatively speaking, of affordable oil left, and if we use it all on giant cars and big screen TVs and ski boats and whatnot, well...none of them things makes any energy. They just cost energy, and there never *can be* a payback with them, but the oil they represent is gone anyway.
When people say to me "what's the payback?" on alternate energy I can say "sometime", because the alternative is doing it their way, the way we are "officialy" doing it now, which consists of "studying it" and waiting forever for the back yard Mr. Fusion Unit. That method means "never", it's not going to happen any time soon, if ever. That's the only two choices we have now, just "do it", and make it get better, or ignore it until we can't do it.
I'm doing my part, some solar, and a small wind genny, and I'm going to do more. If everyone did similar, depending on their locale and circumstances and budget, etc, we'd get "there", to a better and more safe and energy rich future, a lot sooner.
... that's just not true. It is quite easy to make 99.999 whatever percent of cars run on something like ethanol or methanol. A lot of race cars run on methanol, doesn't seem to slow them down any or present any huge problems. Henry ford DESIGNED the model T to run on ethanol, he thought petroleum stuff was way too dirty, and would gunk up the engines (which it does, bad, that's one of the reasons your crankcase lubrication oil gets so dirty) They would burn cleaner, too,much less air pollution, and not even need as much of that expensive computer controlledc crap they put on cars now to make petroleum products burn clean, and your engine would last much longer as well. You could run them on methane, another huge untapped energy source just going begging, using similar pressurised carbs as the quite common propane powered generators use that are installed on farms by the hundreds of thousands now all over the place. A lot of RVs now are dual fuel, propane and gasoline, it's quite common.
If you want to just speak in general terms, "alternate energy" became practical years ago, the big energy monopolies, and their paid off shills in government, do everything they can to keep people faked out so they can keep getting a check out of you every month forever and ever. Just mandating a doubling of insulation in new homes and buildings via the "building codes" laws they already think up would make energy demand drop severely, but they don't want that, they want your money by the bucketful. I've helped build two super insulated houses, and several heavily modified houses, the energy savings are nothing short of incredible, and the comfort level goes up immediately, and the "payback" is a few years starting with the first months utility bills. You see, "alternate energy" along with it's corrolay "sane useage" and "saner appliances" is greatly suited (in a lot of ways) to smaller independent set ups run by the owners, not some giant public 'service" corporation with their for-profits giant "suppliers", and THOSE guys being filtered through hordes of "commodity traders" who skim off even more mega billions nation wide for doing basically nothing. The REAL problem with alternate energy is joe bigco hasn't figured out how to charge you for "alternate energy" forever like they do with the current "energy" market, because you can actually pay-off your personal production, and they certainly don't want that, they want "vendor lock in" and for you to pay their "subscription",to basically stay as a renter, with no long term price negotiations allowed, rather than an owner with some sort of fixed price, totally in their favor, for perpetuity.
... it's worth it for people to see it and read it.
also note: Shell Oil just got busted heavy for over reporting what they swore up and down was their reserve, and I bet some of the other companies do it too. You just are not going to get any truth or action out of the big power/energy monopolies, and you have no control over how/when/why and what it will cost in the future to stay dependent on those companies for all your energy needs. It IS a valid consideration. You CAN mitigate future events personally though, by taking action yourself. To me, waiting for this "other guy" to do it, or big government/big business to "do" something is not practical, when I can "do" my own right now, at least to some extent, and to a practical extent. And "energy" doesn't exist in a vacuum all by itself,like "just oil/gas" or whatever, it's interconnected, all the various forms, and price increases on one side tend to make the others go up as well, broadly speaking. Like how many people know that the huge demand coming up on the north american natural gas supply by 1500 new natgas powered electric peaker plants will directly cause much higher food prices? That's because fertiliser is made from that stuff. It's a direct hidden energy cost everyone will be paying,because we all eat, but most people won't know they "why" part of it, and won't consider it as part of their monthly "utility" bill. Same as middle eastern oil is never all completely priced at the pump or in your fuel oil bill or in your electric rate, a big part over the years has gone into HUGE military expenditures related to our continued involvement in the middle east(oil is the major reason of course), and that comes out of your income tax, but you don't see it as an "energy bill".
Anyway, glad someone else has seen the dieoff.org site and read the olduvai gorge paper, it's pretty good, as is the rest of the site. Several evenings sobering reading there.
You can do the vast amount of work yourself, save thousands, literally thousands. shop around for the various components. it is no way any harder than building your own peecee, just much larger. You have panels, their mounts, some simple wiring, a charge controller, then usually an inverter/charger for adding grid juice into the mis, and a battery bank. You run the output to your panel box you already have, or just pick a few circuits to power. You can hire an electrician to look it over one day and do the last install to the panel, that's really the only person you need to hire. You *might* need a permit, that varies locale to locale, same as any other home construction action. It's just not that hard if you can use a few normal tools and first sit down and plan out what you need and the steps to take.
As to the batteries, look into a local forklift dealer, look at their traction battery banks for the electric forklifts. Significantly cheaper per amp-hour than deep cells with "solar" printed on them. they come into 12VDC to 48VDC configs, pick out what ya need, it'll probalby run at least 50% under "solar" batteries for the same amp hours.
And look into the new "desulphator" devices to keep batteries and battery banks clean (they run 100-150$ or so), they will keep batteries working MUCH longer than batteries without them, and are very cheap for what they do. I have some deep storage batts I use (some cheap 6 volt golf cart batts, wired in series, then parallel to give me 12 volt dc circuitry) that are still fine,and are already a few years past when they were supposed to go bad according to the literature for them, I got a desulphator and it cleaned them up just spiffy within a few weeks.
The way to deal with alternate energy is work both ends towards the middle, reduce consumption (better apliances, saner useage, better built home with more insulation, better natural lighting, etc), then add in your production, at some point you'll hit a sweet spot where those two personal supply/demand lines cross and you are independent and it becomes very affordable.
And it IS a concern with the politics involved with electricity, and here's something else to consider, with solar (any alternative energy scheme really), you can get an upfront, bottom-line price. With grid supplied, you have zero guarantees on the price a year from now, 5 years, ten years, etc. You are going on a price comparison for looking at years in the future which has no basis in any contract you have, because it doesn't exist. Various areas in the US have had doublings of rates in as little as a one year time span, and it RARELY ever goes down, does it? As far as I know, no utility out there gives a homeowner even a chance at a set carved in stone price/contract for KWH for 10 years from now. You have NO idea what it might cost in the future, nor will you know if it will be even available like it is now, we live in an uncertain world, yes?; and "energy" is sure a politically connected product, so you never know what might happen......
The second consideration is, why do you have to jump to whole house? Just use it as a daily adjunct (for your home office and boxes, it's a great UPS system for example), and as a backup to have *some* power if/when the grid goes down. You might not have enough to run the AC if it's a heatwave and the grid borks, but you can still run some fans, for an example, along with some small appliances, your boxes, a radio maybe, etc. it's a backup for a critical thing for most geeks,, ain't a one of us here DON'T not-like electricity, if I am allowed that double negative. We dig JUICE, so having at least some of your own juice you can control is *slickerissimo*. No law says you have to have either/or, you can have both, just be smart about the first install and scale the components (notably the inverter/charger/controler parts) so you can add to the PV array and the battery banks as you can afford it and have more interest in it. So instead of dropping 20 grand, try 5 with some on site stora
--and maybe when you get to junior high you'll grow some hair and stop posting insults as an AC. Casual posts on a bulletin board are not classed as some expensive bought and paid for finished product, they are "casual posts". The meanings can be ascertained, and frankly, I am older and my fingers don't work all that well anymore, so combined with mild dyslexia myself and my two brothers have, I could give two cents for typos, misspellings or other grammatical errors, including the run on sentences I know I write. It's like, who cares, the meaning is still there. If anyone really can't understand what I write,and they want to know, they can just ask for a clarification, and I will give a reply back as best as I am able.
And to reiterate, gates is no better than any mafic chieftain, and he gives away money he conned people out of. Pretty easy to do that, when you haven't worked for it. He's a crook. A long time ago I gave him the benefit of the doubt, I actually thought MS was an OK company, but not now, the evidence just keeps coming out, and the people who support that crookedness are just as crooked, that means his corporate officers and the shareholders. Because unless they are senile and the shares are held in a trust, they KNOW he and his company engage in *crimes* to "make" their money. That's called being an accessory.
... a VERY good hacker releasing a virus but making it look like it came from someone else, perhaps someone the hacker is at war with, or just some random victim? And tyhen joe victim would be stuck, trying to prove they didn't do it, with the evidence all over their computer.
sucks. It could be done JUST to get the reward for that matter, although that would be risky, but still possible.
microsoft got a mega buhzillion dollars in the bank from not hiring coders and not insisting on great code since forever and a day. I think what is more appropriate when money is being talked about is a class action lawsuit from thousands of joe MS users, not the government, joe users large and small who have been victimised by insecure OS that they got *suckered and conned* into running, and I mean suckered by their abusive monopoly tactics and vendor lockins for OS that happened over the past decade especially. Most people didn't "choose" to run microsoft, they got faked into it by it being installed on their boxes when they bought them. Then all of microsofts profits from not doing their job, combined with the ridiculous no warranty deal that profitable software gets, turned into the victimized end user's problems, where you get borken computers, anger, frustration, and in the case of businesses, millions of dollars in actual-for real damages, probably billions, I don't know. A big ole pile of cash, call it that. I bet in a lot of cases the constant and recurring damages exceed the cost of the software installed by many factors.
That sucks too. viruses and worms are BOTH the fault of evil hackers AND filthy rich monopolists who did NOT give a care about security until the past coupla of years, and even then it was half assed. MS as a total company gets it's corporate mindshare from william gates, always has, and he just don't and never has given a crap as long as he can rake in the dough, he's an extreme predator, and I don't care how "compassionate" and"giving" with his "foundation" some mafia don is with ill gotten gains, he's still a mafia chieftain, and made his loot by being a crook. Easy to give away free money you stole and conned people for.
Same with MS and gates, he needs to go to JAIL as far as I am concerned,he's a chronic serial crook, a repeat offender to boot, hidng behind the corporate wall of almost near immunity, and he shows no sign of stopping being a crook, although I will grant he's apparently trying to fix security in longhorn, but that's a long ways offf and doesn't address past crimes, and I think he's only doing it because he is being forced to by market pressures.
WYSIWYG styled coding machine program specifically to adjust a few things in a browser to make it unique, so it could be re branded. Then most anyone could spend an hour and make their own browser, like building a web page. They would all be similar, but different enough. Browsers do that now in a sense via preferences and themes, etc, so it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to make a "browser editor".
of course, IANAC, so what do I know.
I think eventually, and soon relatively in years, it won't be operating systems that are as important as just the apps. We got enough ram and harddrive size now so that apps could all load their own OS,and just be done with it, and all run inside their own user space. The drives and devices could have their own OS and ram as well. And so on.
The OS in these apps and devices could even recognize different architectures, so it would be super cross platform, it wouldn't matter what hardware they were installed on.
probably the number. Assuming it's only ten, but stating it as fact is most likely what happened to your karma.
note: just guessing, total WAG. I also guess the real number is way high over ten. And if you include the cute term "collateral damage" to "unfortunate close by civilians" I guess getting blown up or shredded or ventilated or whatnot in a normal way in war might count as torture. Also, over to the other war in ashcanistan, they offed three thousand prisoners by locking them in steel containers for days, Whomever didn't croak of thirst and heat, then got machine gunned and plowed into mass graves then. And torture and whatnot was and is still common there, it's common all over the place actually. That story came and went rapidly.
The first general at gitmo (when they started transferring prisoners there, and no I won't call them "detainees", that's intellectually just insulting and wrong) quit, because he wouldn't condone or participate in torture under his watch, that's back in the news someplace, I read it several times, too lazy to google for it now though.
... middlemen. If CR (and patenting of intangibles)_ were to "vanish",or be re-severely restricted- primarily the middlemen's jobs would be in jeopardy,because that is where the bulk of the cash, or wealth, gets skimmed off --> to. The thinkers and doers would still work, because they want to, because they can,and because they have the motivation,because they are humans and not lazy, they want to be productive, and this "the industry" would evolve to a new model with more producing,much less skimming, and the wealth staying more where it belongs, with the thinkers and doers, who mostly realise they profit immensely from collaboration, but not with the middlemen. That's something that is basic, you "get it" or you don't, just generally speaking.
We had in man's history the fasted growth and most advances following the most free sharing of information and when technology making knowledge transfer virtually instantenous and pervasive.
Back when knowledge was locked up in some monks chambers and in a few closed guilds, we stayed mostly stagnant, productive change was painfully slow, and the bulk of the people alive lived in total misery and in helpless exploitation. You can't have it both ways. Some seek a return to the old ways by insisting on more and more to keep knowledge "all theirs", even though they get great benefit from millions of others work and knowledge-they tend to forget that all the time.
It's just historical data, and it's true facts. More knowledge shared, and the cheaper and faster, the better off things get.
Over all it would improve the over all wealth structure of society as a whole, not undermine it. short term, yes, some chaos, but medium and long term, nope, it would make it much better. It would force (they would be more free to do so actually) more and more people to become thinkers and doers in actual effect.
... you'll do well when you do your stream of consciousness writing, it's easy to follow and to the point. Keep it up. And yes, you need all the data bits for forecasting, and the ability to separate data from opinion to do it accurately. My advice is specialise in a market segment without losing trace of over-all macro trends, this would be economic trends globally, currency trends, energy trends, following the politics of the major players around the world, etc. then apply that broad set of data-bits to the specialised forecast you need.
Hmm, example. Say I many years ago was sounding the alarm on the *way* we were trading with china. it was because of WHAT they bought from us, compared to what we bought from them. Looking at that, you could see it was a worse deal than the raw numbers, even taking into consideration the now over hundred billion a year deficit we are running with them, which is a form of direct foreign aid, because they use that deficit to purchase our future debt.
anyway, I digress. China has been buying factories, machine tools, and snagging data, R&D, getting information on the incredible cheap, allowing them to use that trade imbalance as a form of force mulitplier for their economy. They bought tools that make tools that make the ultimate stuff. it has given them a 4 to 1 advantage in raw costs from the hardware side, couipled with a 20 to 1 (initially) labor advantage. that's why they are kicking butt, and will be thw worlds dominant economy within ten years or so. I wrote on that about 3 years after nixon and kissinger decided to open up china (bad idea at the time, IMO, we didn't insist on quid pro quos, it was lamer).
Anyway, that's what has happened, just by looking past raw numbers to the actual "stuff" the numbers represented, you could get a much better forecast than the TV and rag pundits, well, they are mostly shills too but that's beside the point. there wasmore to it, especially some high level blackmailing going on during the past two administrations, but that was the important reason, and it was done on-purpose for the purpose of some extreme high level skimming, which we can see happened and now is the accepted norm. When we adopted a one china policy, it was in effect a defacto national anti protectionist policy which if you follow a lexicological extrapolation means it was a "pro" the other guys, in that case china, now it's extended all over, with very little thought given to what was really needed, a full replacement economy, which was never possible in the first place, given a default a nation our size can't be one industry, we needed to always be vertically integrated and widely diversified.
They screwed the pooch on that one, sad to say...
Spooky stuff really, because now, if you look at global oil supply mixed into this, strip the numbers towards the middle (throw out the phony highs and lows) to avoid the stock manipulation pseudo prices, we are in *some hurt* coming up, almost exactly the time china's (and the rest of the now industrialising second world's) demands for oil will quadruple by the calendar and some rational projections. That's by the end of this decade, or close enough to not matter for this purpose. Gonna get fugly then.
And the only way we in the US can stay competitive from now to then is by vastly diluting our money supply,by increasing the supply of less and less valuable digits into circulation, which is a no-win eventuality. It's a lock there.
How this will aplly to the niche of computer tech will mean, really cheaper hardware, but offset by devaluation of what our money represents, so that offsets and balances (+ ~ - ) , so we'll see a leveling soon, within a couple of years I think.
OS and softwares in general will drop drastically in real and perceived worth, to follow your example of throw-away on the hardware side, outside of very specialised niche markets. I agree on that. With 10 million (or more) programmers hitting the market within a couple of years all over, softwares
That was my point. The 90s being the exuberant decade(everyone is going to get rich doing each others laundry, ie, the stock bubble), people who had never gone into personal computing went out and got one, at huge cost for the time, a brand new major appliance expense, equivalent historically to-say-electric refigeration talking over from ice boxes in terms of advances,or TVs replacing radios in the 50's, in terms of tech complexity, and totally new cost to be added to the family budget. It had to be squeezed in somehow, and the euberance part was the tipping over point, when the decision was made and that sweet spot of around 1200$ was hit for a decent desktop, people didn't want to get "left behind". They saw references to dot com this and that, people were asking for their email addy, etc, so they had to, consumerism pressures.
The rest is as you say, and what I said, it's good enough now, there's very little need (VERY broadly speaking)to upgrade either hardware or software OS, either on the personal desktop or in office-type business. Really, the only practical need is more RAM on most machines, and firewalls and antivus softwares. Hence, slumping sales, dropping prices, etc.. the industry could have dropped prices earlier, but they still had huge untapped market, so they kept profits up, which further exasperated the market exuberance,they believed their own hype, went nuts, it was a false profit potential that got projected beyond a reasonable level of maintainance, it couldn't be sustained, so prices dropped as the newer assemblers and vendors hit the markets, by-passing a lot of the mainstream vendors,in other words, the rise of the whitebox and the local mom and pop and getting boxes in regular department stores really helped bust the bubble.
Then the horror stories sunk in, viruses, patches, viruses, patches, crashes, etc. The machines kept working *sorta well enough* obviously, but by now, 2004, folks are leery, they is no native trust like there was even 6 years ago, they don't swallow the marketspeak, they got sophisticated in their lookings. People aren't that stupid, they learn from getting burned, and are holding out now for uber cheap almost free hardware before going forward again. it has to be orders of magnitude like 4 times better for 1/4 the cost, or something like that, before they will consider it, and they assume the OS is just free, no desire to go pay 1/2 or 3/4ths of what a new basic entry level pc costs at a whitebox shop for a disk in a wrapper on the shelf, when that new peecee has an OS on it anyway.
Frankly, OSes are not worth 100$, or 189$ now, they are worth like 10-20 bucks, tops, what an entertainment cd or dvd costs, because that's all it is, bits and bytes on a disk. That's the only rational OS market level left, for in the future, IMO. Even server OS will go that route, inevitable, it's becoming almost common place for google and the admin you are paying already to be "the support infrastructure" of note.
It's a freaking piece of plastic, people can see that. What past market prices were reflected ultra new, emphasis on sparkling, new, and improved, now it's just mostly new, and only very slightly improved,and not worth any major expense really.
I don't know the stats, but I would guess (really is a guess I'll admit) XP installs are 90% or better OEM sale with new boxes, not people going out to upgrade their older boxes on purpose "just because" its new and shiny and sitting on the shelf.
... only the one glaring typo, too (cpu/gpu). Certainly as good a (general public) market forecast as you can see in any of the name brand rags on the web, and certainly more honest. You analyse tech market like I do geopolitics, very similar, probably why I liked it. This leads to this leads to this, etc,the connections and odds and probabilities,and so on, what a futurist does.
Have you done this in the past, say 5-6 years ago, and, if so, what did you think then, and how did it turn out?
... only live in their own little worlds, with NYC or LA or DC rent structures guiding what they think things should cost, flying everywhere, lunches that cost what a working family uses at the grocery store for food for a week. And etc rantage there.
quote-age here:
``The overwhelming majority of PCs are not running Windows XP and the opportunity is quite good for the Windows XP product wave ahead of Longhorn,'' Connors said in an interview in April.
DUH, earth to rich guys, no it's NOT Mr. Connors, the overwhelming number of people are using 98, have gotten used to it, their hardware they paid MOST serious folding money for just a few short years ago still works,they get everything done they want to do, And there's *little to no reason* for them to get EITHER a new computer or a new operating system. Most folks could get by quite handily dropping 50$ on a new stick of ram, good to go for several more years, if they even feel like it, and people are actually getting hip to firewalls, ad aware action, etc. It's slowly turning around, but folks are learning and they aren't as easy to fake out with blinkenlights stuff any longer.
Time for the hardware and for-sale OS guys to buy a clue, they can use some of their dot bomb stocks as "money" for that, there used to be a decade called the 90s, they all made tons of cash, OBSCENE huge amounts, now it's back to the real world. They will sell SOME, they will make SOME money, they won't *make* (sell ridiculous cheap to make 10 cents copies of stuff for huge $$$) money like the 90s, because people are now over that period of "irrational exuberence". Same like the movie and music guys need to bingo to that, people are just buying less of "stuff" now, especially stuff that is still more or less working OK, they are concentrating on the essentials, like paying the mortgage, the car off, kids in school, paying down CCs down that are already maxed, fed state and insane property taxes, etc. In fact, I can't think of a single person I know who is "clamoring" for some new windows OS, either XP or son of XP. People, when and if they get a new box, expect some OS on it, that's it for the most part. That's when they upgrade, and frankly, even the dullest is hip to whatever you buy brand new next week is borken and needs to be patched, so they figger, why spend an extra 100 clams just to download more patches starting the next week. They are already doing that now. Now from win 3.1 to 95 and then to 98 you got a lot of folks switched, since 98, it has slowed way way down, for the reasons I stated. They see "upgrading" as getting snookered now more than GEE WHIZZ, JISS CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT THAT NEW XPTURBO STUFF, GOT TO GET ME SOME RIGHT NOW!
Ain't happening, and them rich dudes with degrees and status and hanging out with all the other rich dudes can't figger it out why not..
Now, this isn't slashdot readers, or *some* businesses, but for everyone else, there is NO need, sales will stay slumped. And all the rich analysts and marketing folks trying to resurrect that gravy train just will not get it that spending another grand (whatever, I am ranting) for a new box and OS is not all that vital to people to whom that represents a real important level of "spare" cash to come up with, to do *exactly* what in essence they are already doing. If a new box and OS represented only like 25$ to joe paycheck, sure, they would go buy a new one. It's all relative.
The future 5 to 10 years down the road now- is free software and real cheap hardware,almost throw away when it's broken hardware, and THAT'S IT, time for them boys to come up with a new business plan soon, hanging on to the 90s won't cut it for too many more years.
I tend to agree. After the first sentence I was lost, so they are either damn smart, or a great job of (que: jon lovitz) acttt-tinggg in the interview.
...actually remember that ad, back classified pages of popular mechanics.
As an aside, those ads were the coolest place to browse far out inventions/gadgets evah. They ruled the garage inventor space. I'd like to see a website were all of them are reproduced, going back to day one of that magazine. Like build your own pedal kayak, send off here for plans for your electric bulldozer, etc. Carbide cannons give big boom (heh), and etc. Neat stuff.
both kinds exist
on
RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are both passive and active rfid tags. Some are powered from the reader externally like you say (from the right up extremely close all the way out to dozens of feet), but there are others that are completely self powered.
Nokia also announced recently they have software & hardware that can turn your cellphone into a tag reader.
Wonder how long until the later gets "improved" upon by "outside independent researchers", the kind of dudes who wear darker colored chapeaus.....
He has a lot of nice videos out, and he lets folks copy them free for giving away purposes, so I imagine they might be on some of the P2P networks, if you got broadband and an interst in looking for them. I am not setup for that so I never looked. If you go to his main page you can find the link to the titles. I have "9-11, road to tyranny" here on VHS, it's quite good, I heard that the DVD version is better and longer. He has some other stuff at prisonplanet.tv, for cheap download "officially". Basically he's trying to cover bandwith and his other expenses as far as he has said on his talk show.
My pet theory is it is basically the same guys and their progeny and advocates who whacked kennedy, keep getting us into wars, stick dictators in, smuggle drugs using US assets, etc. Same guys or their handlers. Eisenhower in his address to the nation on retiring as president warned us about them,the goons in the military/industrial complex, the "profits at any cost" crowd as I like to think of them, it is QUITE chilling taken in the context of when he said it and what he was privy to, being both the allied supreme comander of ww2 and also US prez. He wouldn't have said that unless he had a good reason to do so.
Gets complex, I've been a real enthusiast of this stuff since way back when, I know enough to know I don't have all the answers, but I DO know they rarely tell the truth on anything important, so I always look for the angles whenever something weird goes down. 9-11 qualifies as weird, in spades. Kennedy getting whacked got me going (I was a young teen then but it was obvious to me it wasn't just oswald, especially after ruby whacked him), then I had an uncle who was a spook,he told me stuff I know he wasn't supposed to, but he was an honest guy & a patriot, didn't like some of what he was seeing. He still thought all in all what he was doing was "right" (cold war years basically), but he knew some wasn't, and that a lot of it got lied about and the people manipulated into believing it, media propoganda is old "news" to those guys...
He's gone now so I can reference it, I kept my mouth shut while he was still alive in deference to his wishes. but since then,it's been a major interest and I have followed through with just dozens of sources, a lot of them very well connected, plus what I can research on my own,and it all boils down and all points (more or less) to basically a shadow government, out to ownz and control the whole shebang as much as possible.
I have seen the links here to MS updarte disks they send through the mail. I've never gotten one or really looked into it yet, just wondering, do they cost any cash to get for the older systems , the 9x series, and do they require individual activation keys to use them? Reason I ask is I have some older used boxes I bought as scrap, and would like to apply the updates to them before giving them away. The ones I have given so far had disks now I am feeling guilty about giving them away, although I don't think any of them are used to go online with as far as I know so far, but still...they might sometime. And no, installing linux is not an option, these are older pentium 1's with very low ram installed, there isn't a linux OS distro that will run a GUI efficiently on something with 8 or 16 megs ram suitable for a raw noobie right out of the box, already been through that several times here with some other conversations. As soon as that happens I'll do that, but for now they go out the door with windows, whatever came on them that works. How do you get that with a used computer you got that didn't come with any disks? Or is this not "the rules" or what? I have only a very few original disks with the keys and running out fast, I think I have 2 win 95 disks left total, and zero 98. Just wondering from anyone who's gotten the mail order updates, how do they work,can you use them on multiple machines or what, does MS require a separate key for each disk shipped (no burner here to make any copies anyway of anything) and do they cost cash to get?
they'll watch you for quite a while now, and you'll always be in a database someplace. A "person of interest". Whether or not they'll let you fly won't be answered until you try to board the plane, and even if they don't let you fly, you should check on "refund" status. Heh, try a short cheap trip first as a test!
Dumb question but I'm gonna ask it anyway, I mean, you KNEW you were gonna rattle cages with that request, correct? I don't care one way or the other, why you asked is your business, I don't get a sense from what you have written or are quoted on you were doing more than being curious,perhaps pushing the envelope a tad, but surely you must have thought of the ramifications of it beforehand? Either way, now you know for sure you are dealing with a paranoid government who hires paranoids, and I mean both delusions of grandeur and persecution types. The more you find out about power politics, the more you will find out there are no rules, no limits, no one plays fair, lies are more common than truths, and they are usually always mixed together anyway, and there's no such thing as the constitution or born-with rights. None. Zee-ro. That went buh bye decades ago, but now they are *serious* about it.
Anyway, interesting story,welcome to the being on the lists club, Good Luck, have a good time in yurrpe if you get there!
..., I mean, just this minute as I was reading this thread finished listening to a recording made from an NBC broadcast early in the morning of 9-11. In it the reporter is relating a quick interview he had with the head honcho fire chief, who relates to him reports he was getting from his firemen about secondary bombs going off in the towers, which jibes with other eyewirtness accounts, and the observations of how the building fell and the "poofs" you can see, ie, controlled demolitions planted inside the building. It was clear, unambiguous what was being said.
OH, if you never heard of it, that they had "no clue", google for "project bojinka", read up on that, see what you think if they had "no clue anyone would attack the US". Then there's Putin himself warning them, David Schippers trying to get to ashcroft for weeks to warn him, and some others. A lot really, this subject is a major interest of mine, but this is just a short post.
As to FBI investigation, there are several now involved in lawsuits against the government, whistleblower agents who refused to go along with the coverup,because they were ordered OFF the cases by higher ups (it gets vague how far up the food chain the orders came down from obviously, but far enough up it represents serious juice), agents who were hot on the trail of some of the alleged terrorist hijackers, and got pulled when they got close. This happened multiple times so it wasn't a coincidence, it was on-purpose orders to back-off the cases. That's serious clue-age there. Norad not scrambling when at least 4 airliners hijacked for a record l-o-n-g time. please....
Oh man, there's SO much out there now, where to start...
There's lots more unanswered questions now on a huge variety of websites, just TONS of evidence. Just a post with links would be huge now. Google is your friend.
The FBI is being "cute", they aren't investigating the *real* terrorists, they are investigating the lower level patsies. The *real* crime IS some shadowy cartel/gang inside government using this event are actually having a part in it.
9-11 REEKS of coverup and guys in business suits and uniforms involvement, it is a reichstagg fire event IMO, a serious, coordinated gamble of a complete coup d'etat.
... not that I was really annoyed, more puzzled, so the "huh?" comment. Oh well, don't matter, I bet the question gets asked anyway, someone else will have asked it(similar anyway) and it will be modded to+5 so it gets included in the list. So I get what I want anyway...heh
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that's a zinger, man! I hadn't heard it before.
You know, it's just sad. Here was MS, successful, had a good lead, was developing product, then they just got so absurdly greedy they lost it into corporate insanity, megalomania or something. I just don't get it, how steenking rich do you need to be before it's "enough", anyway?
It don't matter, the future will get here, and it's free and open source. In between it's gonna get real fugly, but eventually, FOSS is gonna rule. Inevitable. Anyone paying attention can see it, even if they don't/won't/can't admit it now.
... got away with most anything, UNTIL he announced he was going to charge euros or gold for whatever oil he was allowed to sell, and not accept US federal reserve notes. He got invaded then. That was the real tipping overpoint for the oil administration. Your observations are right on, no one cared about massacres and despotism uganda or whatever,they don't care much about the sudan now, no oil there of note. BUT, iraq, iran, REAL interesting places to the oil guys. What-a-coincidence.
The rest of the muslim world will be gradually changing over to the gold dinar for their internal balance of trade payments with themselves,(they started already and it's a pretty good success so far) and eventually they will most likely (that is my belief at this time) only accept gold or manufactured goods for their oil. Of course, we will be in full bore ww3 by then, because we want it, europe wants it, china wants it, india is gonna want it, and so on, and there's only enough for ONE of those groups or places worth of oil exisiting in total.
whoops!
Not only are petroleum's days numbered, but the US fiat artifical dollar's days are numbered, too. The rest of the planet sees no need to keep subsisidising the US, especially as we don't really have anything they want that they can't get elsewhere for cheaper. They will take our JOBS, that's our real biggest export now, that and our future debt. Foreigners own most of our government paper and most of our mortgages.
Our "leaders" are really greedy, insane ignoramuses. But, they call the shots, so we will be the nation to go down in history as eventually turning the most war-like, because it's what we have left, and everyone wants the oil.
And THAT'S why we have been forcefully turned into an expansionist looter nation, because that's what we still have, military power primarily, so that's all we can use. When we still manufactured everything, all our oil dollars got re-spent back inside the US primarily, so that helped our economy, but now... nope. It's totally different. And when our economy was booming, I mean really ripping along with true produced wealth, oil was 2-5$ a barrel. Heck, I've paid as little as 12 cents a gallon before. I also paid one time 10$ a gallon for 2 gallons max, during the OPEC embargo.
Stuff can sure change fast, people forget it seems. Too bad we didn't learn our lesson back then in the 70s.
Ain't that cheap now. Never gonna be that cheap ever again.
That's why I think it's critically important that we just "do it", put the rust belt back to work, open up hundreds of factories,and start pumping out wind gennys, solar panels, you name it, throw everything we got at it before oil gets so expensive in terms of dollars and BTU's needed to get it and refine it that we CAN'T switch to alternatives. We have a short window, relatively speaking, of affordable oil left, and if we use it all on giant cars and big screen TVs and ski boats and whatnot, well...none of them things makes any energy. They just cost energy, and there never *can be* a payback with them, but the oil they represent is gone anyway.
When people say to me "what's the payback?" on alternate energy I can say "sometime", because the alternative is doing it their way, the way we are "officialy" doing it now, which consists of "studying it" and waiting forever for the back yard Mr. Fusion Unit. That method means "never", it's not going to happen any time soon, if ever. That's the only two choices we have now, just "do it", and make it get better, or ignore it until we can't do it.
I'm doing my part, some solar, and a small wind genny, and I'm going to do more. If everyone did similar, depending on their locale and circumstances and budget, etc, we'd get "there", to a better and more safe and energy rich future, a lot sooner.
... that's just not true. It is quite easy to make 99.999 whatever percent of cars run on something like ethanol or methanol. A lot of race cars run on methanol, doesn't seem to slow them down any or present any huge problems. Henry ford DESIGNED the model T to run on ethanol, he thought petroleum stuff was way too dirty, and would gunk up the engines (which it does, bad, that's one of the reasons your crankcase lubrication oil gets so dirty) They would burn cleaner, too,much less air pollution, and not even need as much of that expensive computer controlledc crap they put on cars now to make petroleum products burn clean, and your engine would last much longer as well. You could run them on methane, another huge untapped energy source just going begging, using similar pressurised carbs as the quite common propane powered generators use that are installed on farms by the hundreds of thousands now all over the place. A lot of RVs now are dual fuel, propane and gasoline, it's quite common.
If you want to just speak in general terms,
"alternate energy" became practical years ago, the big energy monopolies, and their paid off shills in government, do everything they can to keep people faked out so they can keep getting a check out of you every month forever and ever. Just mandating a doubling of insulation in new homes and buildings via the "building codes" laws they already think up would make energy demand drop severely, but they don't want that, they want your money by the bucketful. I've helped build two super insulated houses, and several heavily modified houses, the energy savings are nothing short of incredible, and the comfort level goes up immediately, and the "payback" is a few years starting with the first months utility bills. You see, "alternate energy" along with it's corrolay "sane useage" and "saner appliances" is greatly suited (in a lot of ways) to smaller independent set ups run by the owners, not some giant public 'service" corporation with their for-profits giant "suppliers", and THOSE guys being filtered through hordes of "commodity traders" who skim off even more mega billions nation wide for doing basically nothing. The REAL problem with alternate energy is joe bigco hasn't figured out how to charge you for "alternate energy" forever like they do with the current "energy" market, because you can actually pay-off your personal production, and they certainly don't want that, they want "vendor lock in" and for you to pay their "subscription",to basically stay as a renter, with no long term price negotiations allowed, rather than an owner with some sort of fixed price, totally in their favor, for perpetuity.
also note: Shell Oil just got busted heavy for over reporting what they swore up and down was their reserve, and I bet some of the other companies do it too. You just are not going to get any truth or action out of the big power/energy monopolies, and you have no control over how/when/why and what it will cost in the future to stay dependent on those companies for all your energy needs. It IS a valid consideration. You CAN mitigate future events personally though, by taking action yourself. To me, waiting for this "other guy" to do it, or big government/big business to "do" something is not practical, when I can "do" my own right now, at least to some extent, and to a practical extent. And "energy" doesn't exist in a vacuum all by itself,like "just oil/gas" or whatever, it's interconnected, all the various forms, and price increases on one side tend to make the others go up as well, broadly speaking. Like how many people know that the huge demand coming up on the north american natural gas supply by 1500 new natgas powered electric peaker plants will directly cause much higher food prices? That's because fertiliser is made from that stuff. It's a direct hidden energy cost everyone will be paying,because we all eat, but most people won't know they "why" part of it, and won't consider it as part of their monthly "utility" bill. Same as middle eastern oil is never all completely priced at the pump or in your fuel oil bill or in your electric rate, a big part over the years has gone into HUGE military expenditures related to our continued involvement in the middle east(oil is the major reason of course), and that comes out of your income tax, but you don't see it as an "energy bill".
Anyway, glad someone else has seen the dieoff.org site and read the olduvai gorge paper, it's pretty good, as is the rest of the site. Several evenings sobering reading there.
You can do the vast amount of work yourself, save thousands, literally thousands. shop around for the various components. it is no way any harder than building your own peecee, just much larger. You have panels, their mounts, some simple wiring, a charge controller, then usually an inverter/charger for adding grid juice into the mis, and a battery bank. You run the output to your panel box you already have, or just pick a few circuits to power. You can hire an electrician to look it over one day and do the last install to the panel, that's really the only person you need to hire. You *might* need a permit, that varies locale to locale, same as any other home construction action. It's just not that hard if you can use a few normal tools and first sit down and plan out what you need and the steps to take.
As to the batteries, look into a local forklift dealer, look at their traction battery banks for the electric forklifts. Significantly cheaper per amp-hour than deep cells with "solar" printed on them. they come into 12VDC to 48VDC configs, pick out what ya need, it'll probalby run at least 50% under "solar" batteries for the same amp hours.
And look into the new "desulphator" devices to keep batteries and battery banks clean (they run 100-150$ or so), they will keep batteries working MUCH longer than batteries without them, and are very cheap for what they do. I have some deep storage batts I use (some cheap 6 volt golf cart batts, wired in series, then parallel to give me 12 volt dc circuitry) that are still fine,and are already a few years past when they were supposed to go bad according to the literature for them, I got a desulphator and it cleaned them up just spiffy within a few weeks.
The way to deal with alternate energy is work both ends towards the middle, reduce consumption (better apliances, saner useage, better built home with more insulation, better natural lighting, etc), then add in your production, at some point you'll hit a sweet spot where those two personal supply/demand lines cross and you are independent and it becomes very affordable.
And it IS a concern with the politics involved with electricity, and here's something else to consider, with solar (any alternative energy scheme really), you can get an upfront, bottom-line price. With grid supplied, you have zero guarantees on the price a year from now, 5 years, ten years, etc. You are going on a price comparison for looking at years in the future which has no basis in any contract you have, because it doesn't exist. Various areas in the US have had doublings of rates in as little as a one year time span, and it RARELY ever goes down, does it? As far as I know, no utility out there gives a homeowner even a chance at a set carved in stone price/contract for KWH for 10 years from now. You have NO idea what it might cost in the future, nor will you know if it will be even available like it is now, we live in an uncertain world, yes?; and "energy" is sure a politically connected product, so you never know what might happen......
The second consideration is, why do you have to jump to whole house? Just use it as a daily adjunct (for your home office and boxes, it's a great UPS system for example), and as a backup to have *some* power if/when the grid goes down. You might not have enough to run the AC if it's a heatwave and the grid borks, but you can still run some fans, for an example, along with some small appliances, your boxes, a radio maybe, etc. it's a backup for a critical thing for most geeks,, ain't a one of us here DON'T not-like electricity, if I am allowed that double negative. We dig JUICE, so having at least some of your own juice you can control is *slickerissimo*. No law says you have to have either/or, you can have both, just be smart about the first install and scale the components (notably the inverter/charger/controler parts) so you can add to the PV array and the battery banks as you can afford it and have more interest in it. So instead of dropping 20 grand, try 5 with some on site stora
--and maybe when you get to junior high you'll grow some hair and stop posting insults as an AC. Casual posts on a bulletin board are not classed as some expensive bought and paid for finished product, they are "casual posts". The meanings can be ascertained, and frankly, I am older and my fingers don't work all that well anymore, so combined with mild dyslexia myself and my two brothers have, I could give two cents for typos, misspellings or other grammatical errors, including the run on sentences I know I write. It's like, who cares, the meaning is still there. If anyone really can't understand what I write,and they want to know, they can just ask for a clarification, and I will give a reply back as best as I am able.
And to reiterate, gates is no better than any mafic chieftain, and he gives away money he conned people out of. Pretty easy to do that, when you haven't worked for it. He's a crook. A long time ago I gave him the benefit of the doubt, I actually thought MS was an OK company, but not now, the evidence just keeps coming out, and the people who support that crookedness are just as crooked, that means his corporate officers and the shareholders. Because unless they are senile and the shares are held in a trust, they KNOW he and his company engage in *crimes* to "make" their money. That's called being an accessory.
... a VERY good hacker releasing a virus but making it look like it came from someone else, perhaps someone the hacker is at war with, or just some random victim? And tyhen joe victim would be stuck, trying to prove they didn't do it, with the evidence all over their computer.
sucks. It could be done JUST to get the reward for that matter, although that would be risky, but still possible.
microsoft got a mega buhzillion dollars in the bank from not hiring coders and not insisting on great code since forever and a day. I think what is more appropriate when money is being talked about is a class action lawsuit from thousands of joe MS users, not the government, joe users large and small who have been victimised by insecure OS that they got *suckered and conned* into running, and I mean suckered by their abusive monopoly tactics and vendor lockins for OS that happened over the past decade especially. Most people didn't "choose" to run microsoft, they got faked into it by it being installed on their boxes when they bought them. Then all of microsofts profits from not doing their job, combined with the ridiculous no warranty deal that profitable software gets, turned into the victimized end user's problems, where you get borken computers, anger, frustration, and in the case of businesses, millions of dollars in actual-for real damages, probably billions, I don't know. A big ole pile of cash, call it that. I bet in a lot of cases the constant and recurring damages exceed the cost of the software installed by many factors.
That sucks too. viruses and worms are BOTH the fault of evil hackers AND filthy rich monopolists who did NOT give a care about security until the past coupla of years, and even then it was half assed. MS as a total company gets it's corporate mindshare from william gates, always has, and he just don't and never has given a crap as long as he can rake in the dough, he's an extreme predator, and I don't care how "compassionate" and"giving" with his "foundation" some mafia don is with ill gotten gains, he's still a mafia chieftain, and made his loot by being a crook. Easy to give away free money you stole and conned people for.
Same with MS and gates, he needs to go to JAIL as far as I am concerned,he's a chronic serial crook, a repeat offender to boot, hidng behind the corporate wall of almost near immunity, and he shows no sign of stopping being a crook, although I will grant he's apparently trying to fix security in longhorn, but that's a long ways offf and doesn't address past crimes, and I think he's only doing it because he is being forced to by market pressures.
WYSIWYG styled coding machine program specifically to adjust a few things in a browser to make it unique, so it could be re branded. Then most anyone could spend an hour and make their own browser, like building a web page. They would all be similar, but different enough. Browsers do that now in a sense via preferences and themes, etc, so it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to make a "browser editor".
of course, IANAC, so what do I know.
I think eventually, and soon relatively in years, it won't be operating systems that are as important as just the apps. We got enough ram and harddrive size now so that apps could all load their own OS,and just be done with it, and all run inside their own user space. The drives and devices could have their own OS and ram as well. And so on.
The OS in these apps and devices could even recognize different architectures, so it would be super cross platform, it wouldn't matter what hardware they were installed on.
probably the number. Assuming it's only ten, but stating it as fact is most likely what happened to your karma.
note: just guessing, total WAG. I also guess the real number is way high over ten. And if you include the cute term "collateral damage" to "unfortunate close by civilians" I guess getting blown up or shredded or ventilated or whatnot in a normal way in war might count as torture. Also, over to the other war in ashcanistan, they offed three thousand prisoners by locking them in steel containers for days, Whomever didn't croak of thirst and heat, then got machine gunned and plowed into mass graves then. And torture and whatnot was and is still common there, it's common all over the place actually. That story came and went rapidly.
The first general at gitmo (when they started transferring prisoners there, and no I won't call them "detainees", that's intellectually just insulting and wrong) quit, because he wouldn't condone or participate in torture under his watch, that's back in the news someplace, I read it several times, too lazy to google for it now though.
... middlemen. If CR (and patenting of intangibles)_ were to "vanish",or be re-severely restricted- primarily the middlemen's jobs would be in jeopardy,because that is where the bulk of the cash, or wealth, gets skimmed off --> to. The thinkers and doers would still work, because they want to, because they can,and because they have the motivation,because they are humans and not lazy, they want to be productive, and this "the industry" would evolve to a new model with more producing,much less skimming, and the wealth staying more where it belongs, with the thinkers and doers, who mostly realise they profit immensely from collaboration, but not with the middlemen. That's something that is basic, you "get it" or you don't, just generally speaking.
We had in man's history the fasted growth and most advances following the most free sharing of information and when technology making knowledge transfer virtually instantenous and pervasive.
Back when knowledge was locked up in some monks chambers and in a few closed guilds, we stayed mostly stagnant, productive change was painfully slow, and the bulk of the people alive lived in total misery and in helpless exploitation. You can't have it both ways. Some seek a return to the old ways by insisting on more and more to keep knowledge "all theirs", even though they get great benefit from millions of others work and knowledge-they tend to forget that all the time.
It's just historical data, and it's true facts. More knowledge shared, and the cheaper and faster, the better off things get.
Over all it would improve the over all wealth structure of society as a whole, not undermine it. short term, yes, some chaos, but medium and long term, nope, it would make it much better. It would force (they would be more free to do so actually) more and more people to become thinkers and doers in actual effect.
... you'll do well when you do your stream of consciousness writing, it's easy to follow and to the point. Keep it up. And yes, you need all the data bits for forecasting, and the ability to separate data from opinion to do it accurately. My advice is specialise in a market segment without losing trace of over-all macro trends, this would be economic trends globally, currency trends, energy trends, following the politics of the major players around the world, etc. then apply that broad set of data-bits to the specialised forecast you need.
Hmm, example. Say I many years ago was sounding the alarm on the *way* we were trading with china. it was because of WHAT they bought from us, compared to what we bought from them. Looking at that, you could see it was a worse deal than the raw numbers, even taking into consideration the now over hundred billion a year deficit we are running with them, which is a form of direct foreign aid, because they use that deficit to purchase our future debt.
anyway, I digress. China has been buying factories, machine tools, and snagging data, R&D, getting information on the incredible cheap, allowing them to use that trade imbalance as a form of force mulitplier for their economy. They bought tools that make tools that make the ultimate stuff. it has given them a 4 to 1 advantage in raw costs from the hardware side, couipled with a 20 to 1 (initially) labor advantage. that's why they are kicking butt, and will be thw worlds dominant economy within ten years or so. I wrote on that about 3 years after nixon and kissinger decided to open up china (bad idea at the time, IMO, we didn't insist on quid pro quos, it was lamer).
Anyway, that's what has happened, just by looking past raw numbers to the actual "stuff" the numbers represented, you could get a much better forecast than the TV and rag pundits, well, they are mostly shills too but that's beside the point. there wasmore to it, especially some high level blackmailing going on during the past two administrations, but that was the important reason, and it was done on-purpose for the purpose of some extreme high level skimming, which we can see happened and now is the accepted norm. When we adopted a one china policy, it was in effect a defacto national anti protectionist policy which if you follow a lexicological extrapolation means it was a "pro" the other guys, in that case china, now it's extended all over, with very little thought given to what was really needed, a full replacement economy, which was never possible in the first place, given a default a nation our size can't be one industry, we needed to always be vertically integrated and widely diversified.
They screwed the pooch on that one, sad to say...
Spooky stuff really, because now, if you look at global oil supply mixed into this, strip the numbers towards the middle (throw out the phony highs and lows) to avoid the stock manipulation pseudo prices, we are in *some hurt* coming up, almost exactly the time china's (and the rest of the now industrialising second world's) demands for oil will quadruple by the calendar and some rational projections. That's by the end of this decade, or close enough to not matter for this purpose. Gonna get fugly then.
And the only way we in the US can stay competitive from now to then is by vastly diluting our money supply,by increasing the supply of less and less valuable digits into circulation, which is a no-win eventuality. It's a lock there.
How this will aplly to the niche of computer tech will mean, really cheaper hardware, but offset by devaluation of what our money represents, so that offsets and balances (+ ~ - ) , so we'll see a leveling soon, within a couple of years I think.
OS and softwares in general will drop drastically in real and perceived worth, to follow your example of throw-away on the hardware side, outside of very specialised niche markets. I agree on that. With 10 million (or more) programmers hitting the market within a couple of years all over, softwares
That was my point. The 90s being the exuberant decade(everyone is going to get rich doing each others laundry, ie, the stock bubble), people who had never gone into personal computing went out and got one, at huge cost for the time, a brand new major appliance expense, equivalent historically to-say-electric refigeration talking over from ice boxes in terms of advances,or TVs replacing radios in the 50's, in terms of tech complexity, and totally new cost to be added to the family budget. It had to be squeezed in somehow, and the euberance part was the tipping over point, when the decision was made and that sweet spot of around 1200$ was hit for a decent desktop, people didn't want to get "left behind". They saw references to dot com this and that, people were asking for their email addy, etc, so they had to, consumerism pressures.
The rest is as you say, and what I said, it's good enough now, there's very little need (VERY broadly speaking)to upgrade either hardware or software OS, either on the personal desktop or in office-type business. Really, the only practical need is more RAM on most machines, and firewalls and antivus softwares. Hence, slumping sales, dropping prices, etc.. the industry could have dropped prices earlier, but they still had huge untapped market, so they kept profits up, which further exasperated the market exuberance,they believed their own hype, went nuts, it was a false profit potential that got projected beyond a reasonable level of maintainance, it couldn't be sustained, so prices dropped as the newer assemblers and vendors hit the markets, by-passing a lot of the mainstream vendors,in other words, the rise of the whitebox and the local mom and pop and getting boxes in regular department stores really helped bust the bubble.
Then the horror stories sunk in, viruses, patches, viruses, patches, crashes, etc. The machines kept working *sorta well enough* obviously, but by now, 2004, folks are leery, they is no native trust like there was even 6 years ago, they don't swallow the marketspeak, they got sophisticated in their lookings. People aren't that stupid, they learn from getting burned, and are holding out now for uber cheap almost free hardware before going forward again. it has to be orders of magnitude like 4 times better for 1/4 the cost, or something like that, before they will consider it, and they assume the OS is just free, no desire to go pay 1/2 or 3/4ths of what a new basic entry level pc costs at a whitebox shop for a disk in a wrapper on the shelf, when that new peecee has an OS on it anyway.
Frankly, OSes are not worth 100$, or 189$ now, they are worth like 10-20 bucks, tops, what an entertainment cd or dvd costs, because that's all it is, bits and bytes on a disk. That's the only rational OS market level left, for in the future, IMO. Even server OS will go that route, inevitable, it's becoming almost common place for google and the admin you are paying already to be "the support infrastructure" of note.
It's a freaking piece of plastic, people can see that. What past market prices were reflected ultra new, emphasis on sparkling, new, and improved, now it's just mostly new, and only very slightly improved,and not worth any major expense really.
I don't know the stats, but I would guess (really is a guess I'll admit) XP installs are 90% or better OEM sale with new boxes, not people going out to upgrade their older boxes on purpose "just because" its new and shiny and sitting on the shelf.
... only the one glaring typo, too (cpu/gpu). Certainly as good a (general public) market forecast as you can see in any of the name brand rags on the web, and certainly more honest. You analyse tech market like I do geopolitics, very similar, probably why I liked it. This leads to this leads to this, etc,the connections and odds and probabilities,and so on, what a futurist does.
Have you done this in the past, say 5-6 years ago, and, if so, what did you think then, and how did it turn out?
... only live in their own little worlds, with NYC or LA or DC rent structures guiding what they think things should cost, flying everywhere, lunches that cost what a working family uses at the grocery store for food for a week.
And etc rantage there.
quote-age here:
``The overwhelming majority of PCs are not running Windows XP and the opportunity is quite good for the Windows XP product wave ahead of Longhorn,'' Connors said in an interview in April.
DUH, earth to rich guys, no it's NOT Mr. Connors, the overwhelming number of people are using 98, have gotten used to it, their hardware they paid MOST serious folding money for just a few short years ago still works,they get everything done they want to do, And there's *little to no reason* for them to get EITHER a new computer or a new operating system. Most folks could get by quite handily dropping 50$ on a new stick of ram, good to go for several more years, if they even feel like it, and people are actually getting hip to firewalls, ad aware action, etc. It's slowly turning around, but folks are learning and they aren't as easy to fake out with blinkenlights stuff any longer.
Time for the hardware and for-sale OS guys to buy a clue, they can use some of their dot bomb stocks as "money" for that, there used to be a decade called the 90s, they all made tons of cash, OBSCENE huge amounts, now it's back to the real world. They will sell SOME, they will make SOME money, they won't *make* (sell ridiculous cheap to make 10 cents copies of stuff for huge $$$) money like the 90s, because people are now over that period of "irrational exuberence". Same like the movie and music guys need to bingo to that, people are just buying less of "stuff" now, especially stuff that is still more or less working OK, they are concentrating on the essentials, like paying the mortgage, the car off, kids in school, paying down CCs down that are already maxed, fed state and insane property taxes, etc. In fact, I can't think of a single person I know who is "clamoring" for some new windows OS, either XP or son of XP. People, when and if they get a new box, expect some OS on it, that's it for the most part. That's when they upgrade, and frankly, even the dullest is hip to whatever you buy brand new next week is borken and needs to be patched, so they figger, why spend an extra 100 clams just to download more patches starting the next week. They are already doing that now. Now from win 3.1 to 95 and then to 98 you got a lot of folks switched, since 98, it has slowed way way down, for the reasons I stated. They see "upgrading" as getting snookered now more than GEE WHIZZ, JISS CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT THAT NEW XPTURBO STUFF, GOT TO GET ME SOME RIGHT NOW!
Ain't happening, and them rich dudes with degrees and status and hanging out with all the other rich dudes can't figger it out why not..
Now, this isn't slashdot readers, or *some* businesses, but for everyone else, there is NO need, sales will stay slumped. And all the rich analysts and marketing folks trying to resurrect that gravy train just will not get it that spending another grand (whatever, I am ranting) for a new box and OS is not all that vital to people to whom that represents a real important level of "spare" cash to come up with, to do *exactly* what in essence they are already doing. If a new box and OS represented only like 25$ to joe paycheck, sure, they would go buy a new one. It's all relative.
The future 5 to 10 years down the road now- is free software and real cheap hardware,almost throw away when it's broken hardware, and THAT'S IT, time for them boys to come up with a new business plan soon, hanging on to the 90s won't cut it for too many more years.
I tend to agree. After the first sentence I was lost, so they are either damn smart, or a great job of (que: jon lovitz) acttt-tinggg in the interview.
I did like that os filtering idea.
...actually remember that ad, back classified pages of popular mechanics.
As an aside, those ads were the coolest place to browse far out inventions/gadgets evah. They ruled the garage inventor space. I'd like to see a website were all of them are reproduced, going back to day one of that magazine. Like build your own pedal kayak, send off here for plans for your electric bulldozer, etc. Carbide cannons give big boom (heh), and etc. Neat stuff.
that's all, it's just "evil".
Nokia also announced recently they have software & hardware that can turn your cellphone into a tag reader.
Wonder how long until the later gets "improved" upon by "outside independent researchers", the kind of dudes who wear darker colored chapeaus.....
He has a lot of nice videos out, and he lets folks copy them free for giving away purposes, so I imagine they might be on some of the P2P networks, if you got broadband and an interst in looking for them. I am not setup for that so I never looked. If you go to his main page you can find the link to the titles. I have "9-11, road to tyranny" here on VHS, it's quite good, I heard that the DVD version is better and longer. He has some other stuff at prisonplanet.tv, for cheap download "officially". Basically he's trying to cover bandwith and his other expenses as far as he has said on his talk show.
My pet theory is it is basically the same guys and their progeny and advocates who whacked kennedy, keep getting us into wars, stick dictators in, smuggle drugs using US assets, etc. Same guys or their handlers. Eisenhower in his address to the nation on retiring as president warned us about them,the goons in the military/industrial complex, the "profits at any cost" crowd as I like to think of them, it is QUITE chilling taken in the context of when he said it and what he was privy to, being both the allied supreme comander of ww2 and also US prez. He wouldn't have said that unless he had a good reason to do so.
Gets complex, I've been a real enthusiast of this stuff since way back when, I know enough to know I don't have all the answers, but I DO know they rarely tell the truth on anything important, so I always look for the angles whenever something weird goes down. 9-11 qualifies as weird, in spades. Kennedy getting whacked got me going (I was a young teen then but it was obvious to me it wasn't just oswald, especially after ruby whacked him), then I had an uncle who was a spook,he told me stuff I know he wasn't supposed to, but he was an honest guy & a patriot, didn't like some of what he was seeing. He still thought all in all what he was doing was "right" (cold war years basically), but he knew some wasn't, and that a lot of it got lied about and the people manipulated into believing it, media propoganda is old "news" to those guys...
He's gone now so I can reference it, I kept my mouth shut while he was still alive in deference to his wishes. but since then,it's been a major interest and I have followed through with just dozens of sources, a lot of them very well connected, plus what I can research on my own,and it all boils down and all points (more or less) to basically a shadow government, out to ownz and control the whole shebang as much as possible.
I have seen the links here to MS updarte disks they send through the mail. I've never gotten one or really looked into it yet, just wondering, do they cost any cash to get for the older systems , the 9x series, and do they require individual activation keys to use them? Reason I ask is I have some older used boxes I bought as scrap, and would like to apply the updates to them before giving them away. The ones I have given so far had disks now I am feeling guilty about giving them away, although I don't think any of them are used to go online with as far as I know so far, but still...they might sometime. And no, installing linux is not an option, these are older pentium 1's with very low ram installed, there isn't a linux OS distro that will run a GUI efficiently on something with 8 or 16 megs ram suitable for a raw noobie right out of the box, already been through that several times here with some other conversations. As soon as that happens I'll do that, but for now they go out the door with windows, whatever came on them that works. How do you get that with a used computer you got that didn't come with any disks? Or is this not "the rules" or what? I have only a very few original disks with the keys and running out fast, I think I have 2 win 95 disks left total, and zero 98. Just wondering from anyone who's gotten the mail order updates, how do they work,can you use them on multiple machines or what, does MS require a separate key for each disk shipped (no burner here to make any copies anyway of anything) and do they cost cash to get?
For anyone serious about looking at it Here ya go,project bojinka,just data.
they'll watch you for quite a while now, and you'll always be in a database someplace. A "person of interest". Whether or not they'll let you fly won't be answered until you try to board the plane, and even if they don't let you fly, you should check on "refund" status. Heh, try a short cheap trip first as a test!
Dumb question but I'm gonna ask it anyway, I mean, you KNEW you were gonna rattle cages with that request, correct? I don't care one way or the other, why you asked is your business, I don't get a sense from what you have written or are quoted on you were doing more than being curious,perhaps pushing the envelope a tad, but surely you must have thought of the ramifications of it beforehand? Either way, now you know for sure you are dealing with a paranoid government who hires paranoids, and I mean both delusions of grandeur and persecution types. The more you find out about power politics, the more you will find out there are no rules, no limits, no one plays fair, lies are more common than truths, and they are usually always mixed together anyway, and there's no such thing as the constitution or born-with rights. None. Zee-ro. That went buh bye decades ago, but now they are *serious* about it.
Anyway, interesting story,welcome to the being on the lists club, Good Luck, have a good time in yurrpe if you get there!
..., I mean, just this minute as I was reading this thread finished listening to a recording made from an NBC broadcast early in the morning of 9-11. In it the reporter is relating a quick interview he had with the head honcho fire chief, who relates to him reports he was getting from his firemen about secondary bombs going off in the towers, which jibes with other eyewirtness accounts, and the observations of how the building fell and the "poofs" you can see, ie, controlled demolitions planted inside the building. It was clear, unambiguous what was being said.
OH, if you never heard of it, that they had "no clue", google for "project bojinka", read up on that, see what you think if they had "no clue anyone would attack the US". Then there's Putin himself warning them, David Schippers trying to get to ashcroft for weeks to warn him, and some others. A lot really, this subject is a major interest of mine, but this is just a short post.
As to FBI investigation, there are several now involved in lawsuits against the government, whistleblower agents who refused to go along with the coverup,because they were ordered OFF the cases by higher ups (it gets vague how far up the food chain the orders came down from obviously, but far enough up it represents serious juice), agents who were hot on the trail of some of the alleged terrorist hijackers, and got pulled when they got close. This happened multiple times so it wasn't a coincidence, it was on-purpose orders to back-off the cases. That's serious clue-age there. Norad not scrambling when at least 4 airliners hijacked for a record l-o-n-g time. please....
Oh man, there's SO much out there now, where to start...
There's lots more unanswered questions now on a huge variety of websites, just TONS of evidence. Just a post with links would be huge now. Google is your friend.
The FBI is being "cute", they aren't investigating the *real* terrorists, they are investigating the lower level patsies. The *real* crime IS some shadowy cartel/gang inside government using this event are actually having a part in it.
9-11 REEKS of coverup and guys in business suits and uniforms involvement, it is a reichstagg fire event IMO, a serious, coordinated gamble of a complete coup d'etat.
... not that I was really annoyed, more puzzled, so the "huh?" comment. Oh well, don't matter, I bet the question gets asked anyway, someone else will have asked it(similar anyway) and it will be modded to+5 so it gets included in the list. So I get what I want anyway...heh
95, 98 amd ME links? Or did they used to have them but no longer offer them? Or maybe I'm a tard and not just seeing them. thanks! good link anyway!