Interestingly enough, 5 bucks is my personal cutoff point for durable "entetainment" media, vhs tape or CD/DVD, and has been for many years now. I just got disgusted with the predatory pricing and obvious control-freakism of the **AAs. I do yard sales or like the bargain bins, etc. Picked up a VHS tape yesterday in fact from blockbuster in the "previously viewed rack", 4.99$. That's it, won't pay more than that for those things, so downloading would have to be cheaper than that by some amount, as it is more work and requires you to provide the storage media, whether reburnt to optical disk or placed on your hard drive.
These big companies should buy a clue, reproduction at high numbers level would allow even lower cost production, which could mean lower end user price structure, with more volume sales and, IMO, potentially higher profit margins. At 20$ and up a pop I buy *no* movies, they make nothing from me directly. They want all the economic benefits of better technology for themselves, but simply refuse to grant customers the same deal, which lead, again, IMO, in large part to the wide acceptance of file sharing. I don't do file sharing, but I understand the mindset of dealing with large scale ripoff cartels. Basic human psychology, people lose any sort of respect for companies (or governments for that matter), that are obviously acting in an adversarial manner. They piss people off, so the people start to react accordingly and not care about them. It's a natural backlash that was to be expected.
The people at these cartels who make the ultimate decsions on pricing are all millionaires. They are never going to have the same mindset or awareness about cost and money as joe and jane bubba. They may intellectually think and believe they understand, but their actions prove that they don't really "get it".
tribalism mostly. They have a medieval level of social networking. And pretty much a universally corrupt set of governments. Not your garden variety corrupt, mega overwhelmingly obscenely corrupt. I mean, they give people like robert Mugabwe some sort of cred as a "leader". He's right up there in the kim il jung level of competency. As such, the rest of the planet engages in a wink wink nod nod massive exploitation over there, because it's abpout all the effort it is worth, then turns around and returns one penny on the dollar in "humanitarian aid" for publicity purposes, and most of that winds up-after several steps-in offshore bank accounts of their corrupt leaders.
...and how about the routers it jumps through? Any squid caches anyplace? It's silly, hope he fights it hard, I would.
It gets complicated unless you restrict it to where the human is located. That should be the criteria. Unfortunately, this would then apply to sales taxes,where you are sitting when you click "buy" determines where the taxes go, but I think it's a small price to pay to get it straightened out. The ruling was hideously counter intutitive and bogus. If it sticks hard, I can see many companies relocating to no income tax states and being done with it. heck, incorporate, have one token sysadmin employee there to run all the machines and do the rest remotely.. Frankly, IMO, NY and California are losing their luster in the informaton world. There's little benefit for companies anymore when your primary product is data, and the rest of the nation has (more or less generally speaking) much cheaper places to live for the workers. For what folks pay for a modest townhouse in California you can get a whopper house sitting on acres of nice land over here in Georgia, and have enough left over for new cars and a skiboat....whatever. And not have to live totally remote. Good way for companies to cut costs bigtime withoput going all the way overseas, just move to a "flyover" state and get away from the coastal axis of uber cost of living areas..
I had forgotten about that cheap wind up laptop. Yes, that will certainly get linux out there by the millions. Hardware vendors and peripherals with good divers, games, the OS preinstalled on the computer, and then advertised seems to be the solution. Adoption at the workplace will help somewhat, but I think that was back before most homes had computers at all, and it just happned to be MS. Now though, you'd be hard pressed (in industrialized richer areas of the world) to find many families without at least one computer.
From a software only perspective, if a mainstream non computer magazine shipped a single disk as a freebie inside the magazine it might help. One kids magazine, one young adult, one weekly "popular" celebrity news mag, then some others. I think seeing a linux distro in the AARP magazine would be a hoot! Several demographics to choose from and add the appropriately designed and configured distro. It would have to be "live" with the HD install option most likely to be used.
There's a thought for a large ISP as well, if they wanted to turn their clientele onto a more secure way to be on the net. Heck, even a mom and pop ISP could offer that to their customers.
With that said, though, it really would be better if the hardware vendors did it, so the printer and whatnot worked out of the box. Those "bundles" are pretty popular and sell well.
Hmm, a "bundle" I have never seen yet is multiple computers sold already pre networked and configured. A server and thin client bundle maybe.
In particular, what is, IMO, the greatest strength of the "linux desktop", *thousands* of applications available in a simple and easy manner. Advertise THAT. Easy updates, tons of apps. Windows per se, the company, has nothing like that, not even close. And they barely update their own stuff, let alone the various applications people like to use. I honestly don't think most joe and janes out there are even aware what you can get with a default install of any of the major linux distros. With a few tweaks and sops to economic and social reality (MP3s are not going away anytime soon, costs money, the distro vendors need to suck it up economically and politically at this time, same with DVD playback, etc), primarily in the media playback and games areas, you'd have a winner IF it came preinstalled from joe large company with significant public nameshare. The rest would follow, even the largest companies are herd animals.
Just needs some *advertising*. FF proved that it is possible to go from relatively obscurity "to the masses" to a quite respectable showing in a short period of time.
That and some larger hardware vendors actually offering it on their machines. AOpen has just announced their miniPC will be shipping with Linspire Linux as the default installed OS. It's starting to crack-slowly. XP is a hundred dollar extra option. And IF the big vendors shipped it installed, their usual bundle offerings would work out of the box, eliminating a lot of that obscure driver foobar nonsense. Acme & Odds, ltd. videocards and printers and USB widgets of various kinds and assorted add-on whatnots WOULD listen to some folks like Dell and provide drivers that work, and work well, facing a potential order in the hundreds of thousands or millions. No fooling around then, they would get to work and do the coding. Right now it is "meh, who cares?" with them guys,they throw some slop out and have a tiny webpage and forum someplace on their site for linux...mostly to shut up the whiners, in their opinion.. pretty obvious really. This is because there's no established market, a chicken and egg deal so far. Someone *big* has to blink and blink hard and make a move, a normal high stakes semi-risky business move. Joe Bob at the local whitebox shop buying 5 machines doesn't show up on their radar. It needs to be the large hardware vendors and game company devs push this, they are the only ones who can really crack it, it is NOT, repeat NOT, going to come primarily from the software side of the equation by some billion humans deciding one morning to "tryout this li-nux thing" they heard about. Ain't happenin'. Not any time soon, anyway. You aren't going to change human reality that people run what comes pre-installed. It just "is" is all.
You are correct on the history part, I got the two events confused, so *thanks*.
As to being a "goldbug", not exactly, I am in favor of a *multiple* tangibles based monetary unit, on a national relevance basis. The base idea (short version) would be the past fiscal year top 100 traded commodities, because they are quantifiable using existing data and the true growth of the economy could be ascertained, thereby indicating the appropriate amount to add to the currency supply, and that it would adequately reflect the dynamic change and evolving nature of society and business.
I am fully aware that there doesn't exist enough physical gold or silver for everyone to use that as carry around money. I think, though, that precious metals would be inside the top 100 list, and that there should be official coinage to reflect that, similar to what we have now with the official Eagles. But for day to day normal business, a representative supply that was transparent and open and run entirely by the Treasury would be preferable to what we have now with the closed shop private Federal Reserve bank.
The telecommuter is physically sitting in his chair in front of his computer working wherever he is physically located. that is where the work is. THAT is where "the work" of typing stuff is being done, in that state. Until we have quantum computing with teleporting bits, joe work is done at joe location, it is not being done "over there" at the other end of the pipe. Now, MORE work may be done over at the other end of the pipe by someone else who gets the transmitted data bits, and it's at that geographical location and is subject to the laws THERE then. Two different sets of work here, it is not "one" set of work subject to one places total control.
This is as close as I can call it.
I see no difference from this and someone working in one state, while their parent corporation who employs them has its incorporation papers filed in Delaware or Nevada or some other geographical area of *corporate tax convenience*. Where is the *work* of this corporation being done then? In Delaware or Nevada if all the buildings and personnel are located in other states?
Government prints the money up out of thin air. Thin. Air. Data entries that unelected leet doofuses are allowed to create and profit from immensely an in perpetuity, they and their progeny. The federal reserve bank "note" is a perpetual debt instrument, a glorified IOU that puts the holder of said notes into debt, and is backed by *nothing* other than you are bonded to always be in tyheir debt, ie, future labor.
"Income" taxes are a massive political control tool, a big hammer they hold over the heads of everyone who is non-elite, and nothing more. They killed President Kennedy (primarily) over his vow to bust up the Fed and bring back real money.
Back before the congame happened that created the fed and brought us the "income" tax, the federal government was funded primarily by excise taxes, and was held to a much smaller size, as it was supposed to be. That started the ball rolling on political control and inflation, and Nixon finished it off with the Bretton Woods agreement.
This is a very involved subject, no way to really address it even in a series of posts, but it's a fascinating bit of history to go back and do some research on.
There is certainly some amazing tech out there now. I would imagine that nanotech and materials science will be able to provide some more increases in what can be squeezed out of ICE engines.
If you READ what I wrote, getting it from some duplication place DOESN'T make the original releaser very much money. The clone outfits buy it one time, or download it for free, and that's it, which means ONE SALE or NO SALE instead of many sales to the official distro place. I would PREFER to give the original place the loot, just not as much, preferally for a lite version without all the extras. I am FULLY aware of all the clone outfts, an that's where I get the bulk of my "tryout" distros. If it's something I really, really like, then I would go to the full priced version from the original companies. Like when I first started out, free cloned tryout redhat disks, I liked it enough, worked well enough, so I went to their 60 buck model to support them, thought I was being a righteous dude there. When they dropped that and went to OM freekin G prices, I went to fedora, bought for a few bucks from clone vendors. The result, redhat gets ZERO money from me when they could be getting "some" money yearly. Their call. Now it's OpenBSDs call on that. I want the whole shebang on disks, I despise downloading tons of crap, I can barely keep up with patches and updates. Most other distros, same deal, they want ridiculous prices to get the disks from them,, forcing people to go to the clone vendors. I think it's *nutz* and a bad business move. I prefer to order disks through the mail, DLing over dialup (all I can get here) is just not happening except for mini distros.
It's very similar to music or video disks, the **AA folks just don't get it on volume sales with a cheaper price. They could have nipped file sharing and napster in the bud if they had dropped from $15-20 and up a disk to 5$, sold millions and millions more copies and actually made more money at it, but NO, that makes too much sense.
I do not know what it is with companies, whether data or entertainment, these places that slap crap on disks then charge out the ying yang for it, it must affect the brain or something, but if they bought three clues they would find out that most people are more than willing to pay a reasonable price for whatever, and "reasonable price" to "freekin cheap" can be brought into the equation *easily* with what-have-you on CDs or DVDs now-a-days, and they can still "make money" at it, lotsa money.
50 bucks for the de-luxe version, or ftp over a flaky dialup? Hmmm
easy decision - no open bsd here! One way is unobtanium, the other is nonobtanium
Perhaps if they offered a "lite" version, just the disks in paper sleeves in a one dollar mailer for a lot less, say 10$? Way way WAY too many distros out there that you can try for the first time cheaper. I understand it's a whizz bang secure OS, designed primarily for servers, and etc, but sheesh. A lot of folks just like trying out new things, but at those prices, well.... it's nice to support your distro of choice, or a few, that they get some actual money in their pockets for thieir efforts. Buying from clone vendors cheap doesn't translate to much for the OS distributors, and a lot of various distros charge too much directly (IMO & relatively speaking, Y economic MMV most likely), but seems like a middle ground price setup would be a nice option, not only for these guys but a host of other OSes.
Would this result in multiple instances of the DRM rootkit beng installed if multiple CDs with the same software were run by the user? Or after the first one would it just see it is already there? Just wondering if eventually, if it is cumulative, if the machine would just bog down into 100% CPU usage and become non functional.
... a long time ago with HTML in general. Would have avoided a lot of nonsense on the web. Develop any browser or web enabled app you want, as long as it meets open specs of useability and access for the public internet.
man, just ain't no pleasin some folks. Just commenting generally. books are data packed, a tremendous amount of data contained in a relatively small manufactured and mass produced package. That's why I used the book/printed word analogy, because it's still in use today in a widespread manner and is still used in a legal sense with official documents on paper that anyone who can read may access and understand. It doesn't require any upgrading to grok a book. You don't need to pay some company for your book upgrade to continue to access a book you already have. The "format" remains viable across centuries. Your book doesn't go obsolete and become impossible to access as long as it physically exists still. Sure, clay or stone tablets last a long time, too,but it might take you a room full to contain what is in one small paperback, and there is no large scale production or use of them any longer except as curiosities. Modern society is data rich, so we need a way to store and use data that is compact, concentrated, portable, and easy to use and in some manner be able to withstand the sands of time. Paper is an outstanding invention! if we are going to try and replace it, it needs to be thought about. this effort in mass. shows at least some people are thinking about it, not being lead around by the nose by some goofball billionaire crook who's good at sleazy marketing.
Chemical film is not lasting, older movies are in a lot of cases gone because of the fast entropy with chemical based films. Electronic tape degrades quickly. Hard drives fail easily. Optical disks are proving to not have the shelf life originally claimed. And document "formats"? Closed source, something that exists and remains accessible only at the whim of some company, a company with a track record of destroying as much as they create in order to force profits? For OFFICIAL RECORDS? SAY WHUT??
If we as a society are going to electronic storage, we BETTER be smart about it. An open document format is the MINIMAL requirement to accomplish this task, if we want our progeny to be able to access this information hundreds or thousands of years from now. Heck, we need this _now_ just to cover small single digit year spans!
This is one of those deals you either "get it" immediately, or you most likely never will. Not going to get bogged down into minutiae of old cuniform tablets or not, although I will say I certainly appreciate scholars in the past going out of their way to provide an "open source" long range solution for document archival to the best of their technical ability at the time. That shows that at least some human nature was good and remains good over the years and centuries and millenia, and that intelligence and logic can beat out "this quarter's profits" greed mentality in some situations. I enjoy and use modern tech, just wish to see it used WISELY, and paying tax money to insure that you WON'T be able to access important documents in the future short of mortgaging your economic reality to a single monopoly company is *not wise*. Corporations who do that are nuts and not looking at the longer term,so they'll pay for that mistake, over and over and over again, and governments that do that are guilty of short sighted and ill-advised malfeasance and incompetence, IMO.
the only precedent we have for long range storage has been books. ( I will leave out stone tablets, etc, I mean semi modern historical precedent) Stored properly and made with good quality paper, they last quite a long time, and the only requirement for data retrieval is the ability to read. Electronic media has a more dismal track record so far, precisely from evolving hardware and software abandonment. Instead of centuries like with books, it is mere small number years, and poof, hard to get access unless one maintains a computer and software museum.
There really *does* need to be a guaranteed open access document format, especially for public governmental documents.
The willingness of most business to voluntarily get locked in to a forced upgrade cycle, and government the same, based on ONE monopoly's dictates and profit concerns, is mind boggling. It's contemptuous really, beyond idiotic. Imagine the discussion if books were similar, write something, ten years or so later, after you paid for an eyeball upgrade because "everyone else does it", you could no longer view the decade old book. It's ludicrous but that is what the closed document format people want with electronic records.
I was able to get a small pushrod engine to reliable run at 8 grand, but took some precise shop work. Was an old 1969 fiat engine. I worked my way down to less than a gram balance with the connecting rods and pistons. And the pistons were forged, the rods shot peened, had the headwork and valve action done by people who knew what they were doing, etc.
A friend of mine, who's dad was a vp at ford and pulled strings to get him one, had one of those 427 ford nascar SOHC engines, simply awesome. He stuck it in an old ratty comet, quite the street sleeper. It ran mid tens.
Not really, that is too simplistic. You leave out some critical factors. Many mammalian societies make use of grand parents and older relatives in order to insure the continuity of the community. The societies start to fragment and go down hill once those influences are removed. Applies to humans as well, IMO. For instance, take elephants, it is hard for younger mothers to go off and feed all the time without having the older auntie elephants watch and guard the young ones. The species itself is in danger if there's too much stress on the still child bearing years members. Part of the genetic makeup, that gives the evolutionary advantage, is precisely this "caring for the young" DNA imprint pattern that actually *cares for the young* with the older members, and the older members *have to be there* for this evolutionary advantage to be effective. If you bork out one generation of the older ones the entire group starts to decline, which in the long term might wipe out the species, even if the genetic code stayed intact,with no adequate care for the young if the elders are absent, then the young have too many opportunities to not make it to childbearing age and the raw numbers slip into decline.
Atmospheric pressure on mars is ~ 1% of Earth pressure (just googled that). That's a lot of giant dust storm with not much gasses to move it around, eh wot? The dust must be ultra fine and very light for this to happen.
Don't blame the line workers for bad engineering and even worse management decsions, even if rush limbaugh tells you to. They assemble the parts they get handed in the manner specified. THAT'S IT. They have zero say in the matter. If management wants to make crap and not compete, it's not the rank and files fault. If your IT boss/management tells you to code crap, not test, ship crap by such and such a date, well???? You follow orders, cash check, that's how it works... when they turn around and blame the coders, is it really their fault if they haven't been given the time and resources to code something good? Same with being a manufacturing drone, a drone is a drone, you follow orders.
With that said, I think the unions are missing the boat for a long time in not gong on strike to demand higher quality engineering. They go on strike for any other issues, there's no law per se saying they couldn't negotiate that as well. Radical idea, but it's possible. Go on strike, demand the same pay and benefits, ask for nothing new, no difference, but demand management cut their pay and design better products. That would be a HOOT! I know way way back when I was in the UAW I tried to push this idea, but this was during the horsepower wars and throw away cars era, no one cared about mileage or reliability, just horsepower. meh, old news.. Anyway, the labor costs of assembly are *the same*, whether it's crap part A or better part B going into crap designed car A or nice piece of work B.
US tech can be very very good, look at all the various professional motorsports, there's some outstanding design and engineering there. Racing is sexy and pays well for the winners, hence, they get very good engineers and mechanics. Innovation just takes a couple of decades to filter back down to Detroit big three management, I mean, look how long they have insisted on using pushrod engines. Look how long it took them to adopt multiple valve per cylinder heads. and etc. That's 100% pure MANAGEMENT fault.
And they would also have to pay their engineers MORE than what a first year rookie car lot salesman makes if they want to keep good people and make better cars. The auto industry in the US is a good parallel of the business climate in general, manage, study, re arrange the furniture,powerpoint, business junkets, power lunches, sell, market. Engineering and keeping quality help is way way WAY down the list of what is important to them, because of "this quarters profits" mentality. The stock market is *killing* business, if that makes some sense. It's nutz and getting worse. Ford is sort of starting to "get it", they have a pretty decent forward looking set of design goals and are embracing hybrids, etc NOW, finally. Took them way too long, but we'll see what happens. GM and daimler chrysler mercedes whatever they are called now, who knows. maybe.... I am more pessimistic on them long range. GM hasn't really made any money on cars in years I think, they make money on financing, paper pushing.
yes, we've all read of the lost gulf productivity from the hurricanes...but..but.. where are the actual shortages at the retail pump??? You seen 'em? Not seeing them here. You can go get all the gas and diesel you want, at the much inflated price.
There's not only something fishy going on here, there's a whole school of "fishys". Check todays news? Exxon just broke the all time US world record quarterly sales, 100 billion, and quarterly net profit, 9.9 billion. They are taking advantage of the situation and gouging, plain and simple.
And no, I am not a "global free trader", I think that is misnamed and ill advised, so any arguments that "it's the market" mean little to me, because that IS the problem. The market is rigged and fixed, the cartels and middlemen "traders" design the scams, run the scams and bribe off the governments to perpetuate the scams, and brainwash people into accepting it. There is no reason that we as consumers don't have much better autos and cleaner greener and cheaper fuels other than they can make more money the way they are running the scams now. The market is run for the top 1%, not the other 99%. Bass ackwards. It's changing, as the net has enabled more and more people to get more and more information, and bypass the industry FUD.
Alternate energy is a booming market now, because people finally realised that it was out there and viable, defeating three decades of industrial cartel lies.
And finally, because of that, we are seeing significant tech advances. TOO BAD we were forced to waste all those years listening to them doofusses that "'it' wouldn't work", with "it" being anything but petroleum products. We listened to them kinda "free market" jerks for a year as california experienced 'rolling balckouts' and massive price increases for grid juice, that now turns out to have been caused by industrial scamsters cartel collusion and artificial scarcity. Grok cartel, collusion, price fixing? Does that sound "free"? Sure, "free" as in a thief gets your stuff for "free", or a flim flam artist gets your money after running a congame on you. that's the so called 'free market" as it exists in reality, not in quaint academic theory. I'm for FAIR markets, not that scam "free market" crap. That's for crooks and conmen.
It's not totally fixed yet, but at least we, people who follow this "we", are aware that these sorts of shenanigans have been going on. What we are seeing here now with gasoline prices is very similar appearing.
..and run all that waste heat through a stirling cycle generator? Not perpetual motion, but beats *dumping it* outside and they could probably get quite a bit of electric back..
Re:every single bit of that...
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I have no idea what it costs, quite a bit though, it's fairly extensive and tied into automatic feed and watering, heating and cooling, etc. It's been built in stages as different tech became available so I bet even the owner really doesn't know without sitting down and doing a lot of "gazintas" cipherin'..heh. Diesel gennys figure 5- 10 grand for a nice one, probably overkill for a cell tower though, a smaller one might be enough. No idea really, a SWAG. maybe someone reading this works on them and might know their actual electrical needs. I think one of the new quiet fuel cells might be preferrable actually in somesituations (you can get them now, seen them for sale), and use propane for the fuel (unlimited storage life with that fuel). Now start throwing embedded systems and wireless at it to taste.
I would imagine (back to the farm) the total automated infrastructure now costs more than the naked buildings. Recently they've added weight scales to the remote administering, so all the big grain bins can be monitored for fullness and use compared to growth rates. They cut one leg at a time and added the sensors on the (large) feed bins. I thought that was kinda interesting. JIT catering for cluckers.
As to what is necessary and what isn't, sure, we don't need any high tech to actually *live*, I lived almost totally feral for 4.5 years once, kinda fun, but... but modern civilization needs communication, and relying on one type is silly, redundancy is key, and that means both POTS and cell and also HAM radio as you point out, of which I am a proponent, although unlicensed (another discussion sometime). For instance where I live the bulk of the POTS is still above ground wires, as such, most windstorms and winter ice storms I lose my net connection (dialup only here, only affordable option), along with grid supplied electric. I'm not on that massive diesel genny area of the farm,(we live way over yonder on the other side and run the cattle and small airport part) but I have a small solar array and two gas gennys as backup power, but for the net--well, no backup yet. A local ISP keeps threatening some sort of wireless, but so far, not in my area but "coming soon", Motorola canopy brand. I'll pop for it once it gets here. Whenever all that stuff goes down in the storms, I rely on Mr. Sangean and an old battery powered sony watchman. mostly........and the cell phone, which so far, knock on wood, has always stayed up even when POTS goes absent. Now, the last place I lived was reversed, it was more mountainous and cell coverage sucked and was intermittent, especially during storms, but the POTS was completely buried, and always worked.
...list of requirements can be entirely automated after install, and remotely administered. Running the gennys periodically is called "exercising" them, check, can do it remotely from a console. Monitoring status, check. Automatic startup and shutdown via sensors,or manually administered, check. Battery maintenance is trivial if you install hydrocaps and sensors. I live on a big farm and we already have that sort of setup, in three locations. They keep (this is the theory anyway) 16 buildings (LARGE buildings, 600 feet long poultry houses that take serious juice) running 24/7/365 with the grid supplied as primary, but the backups can do it for days at a time, until the fuel runs out, something like two weeks worth of onsite fuel. In 15 years (what I have been told, I've only been here going on 3 years) it's failed *once*, in one building, and that was due to a design glitch with an expensive circuit breaker that wasn't redundant which in turn failed to notify the wireless alarm system. That is being fixed now.. This is all just off the shelf stuff, nothing exotic. The only thing non automated is the fuel delivery, that comes by a human driving a tanker truck once in awhile, and I bet within a decade that might be automated as well.
Cell towers *could* be redundantly powered for emergencies, that they aren't is entirely political and economic in nature, it is not an engineering problem. And I am guessing with the new e911 requirements for cell phones that there will be some court cases challenging local munis who say "no" to generators. I bet eventually it's required that they have backup at the towers. A little public pressure after major disasters will do wonders for this purpose. A few articles in the local paper outlining why cell coverage went down could possibly light some fires under some "ooooo, evil loud generators!" luddite politicians butt. And if it costs the cell guys more loot, who cares. This is 2005, the human race needs redundant reliable communications, at all times, end of story. It's *especially* necessary during disasters.
If I was a local cell company trying to get business in a competitive market, I would put in the gennys *somehow* and turn around and use it for advertising as in "our service has backup power in emergencies for your important phone calls, while x,y,z local service here has bupkis". See who gets the consumer traffic then.
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Interestingly enough, 5 bucks is my personal cutoff point for durable "entetainment" media, vhs tape or CD/DVD, and has been for many years now. I just got disgusted with the predatory pricing and obvious control-freakism of the **AAs. I do yard sales or like the bargain bins, etc. Picked up a VHS tape yesterday in fact from blockbuster in the "previously viewed rack", 4.99$. That's it, won't pay more than that for those things, so downloading would have to be cheaper than that by some amount, as it is more work and requires you to provide the storage media, whether reburnt to optical disk or placed on your hard drive.
These big companies should buy a clue, reproduction at high numbers level would allow even lower cost production, which could mean lower end user price structure, with more volume sales and, IMO, potentially higher profit margins. At 20$ and up a pop I buy *no* movies, they make nothing from me directly. They want all the economic benefits of better technology for themselves, but simply refuse to grant customers the same deal, which lead, again, IMO, in large part to the wide acceptance of file sharing. I don't do file sharing, but I understand the mindset of dealing with large scale ripoff cartels. Basic human psychology, people lose any sort of respect for companies (or governments for that matter), that are obviously acting in an adversarial manner. They piss people off, so the people start to react accordingly and not care about them. It's a natural backlash that was to be expected.
The people at these cartels who make the ultimate decsions on pricing are all millionaires. They are never going to have the same mindset or awareness about cost and money as joe and jane bubba. They may intellectually think and believe they understand, but their actions prove that they don't really "get it".
tribalism mostly. They have a medieval level of social networking. And pretty much a universally corrupt set of governments. Not your garden variety corrupt, mega overwhelmingly obscenely corrupt. I mean, they give people like robert Mugabwe some sort of cred as a "leader". He's right up there in the kim il jung level of competency. As such, the rest of the planet engages in a wink wink nod nod massive exploitation over there, because it's abpout all the effort it is worth, then turns around and returns one penny on the dollar in "humanitarian aid" for publicity purposes, and most of that winds up-after several steps-in offshore bank accounts of their corrupt leaders.
...and how about the routers it jumps through? Any squid caches anyplace? It's silly, hope he fights it hard, I would.
It gets complicated unless you restrict it to where the human is located. That should be the criteria. Unfortunately, this would then apply to sales taxes,where you are sitting when you click "buy" determines where the taxes go, but I think it's a small price to pay to get it straightened out. The ruling was hideously counter intutitive and bogus. If it sticks hard, I can see many companies relocating to no income tax states and being done with it. heck, incorporate, have one token sysadmin employee there to run all the machines and do the rest remotely.. Frankly, IMO, NY and California are losing their luster in the informaton world. There's little benefit for companies anymore when your primary product is data, and the rest of the nation has (more or less generally speaking) much cheaper places to live for the workers. For what folks pay for a modest townhouse in California you can get a whopper house sitting on acres of nice land over here in Georgia, and have enough left over for new cars and a skiboat....whatever. And not have to live totally remote. Good way for companies to cut costs bigtime withoput going all the way overseas, just move to a "flyover" state and get away from the coastal axis of uber cost of living areas..
I had forgotten about that cheap wind up laptop. Yes, that will certainly get linux out there by the millions. Hardware vendors and peripherals with good divers, games, the OS preinstalled on the computer, and then advertised seems to be the solution. Adoption at the workplace will help somewhat, but I think that was back before most homes had computers at all, and it just happned to be MS. Now though, you'd be hard pressed (in industrialized richer areas of the world) to find many families without at least one computer.
From a software only perspective, if a mainstream non computer magazine shipped a single disk as a freebie inside the magazine it might help. One kids magazine, one young adult, one weekly "popular" celebrity news mag, then some others. I think seeing a linux distro in the AARP magazine would be a hoot! Several demographics to choose from and add the appropriately designed and configured distro. It would have to be "live" with the HD install option most likely to be used.
There's a thought for a large ISP as well, if they wanted to turn their clientele onto a more secure way to be on the net. Heck, even a mom and pop ISP could offer that to their customers.
With that said, though, it really would be better if the hardware vendors did it, so the printer and whatnot worked out of the box. Those "bundles" are pretty popular and sell well.
Hmm, a "bundle" I have never seen yet is multiple computers sold already pre networked and configured. A server and thin client bundle maybe.
In particular, what is, IMO, the greatest strength of the "linux desktop", *thousands* of applications available in a simple and easy manner. Advertise THAT. Easy updates, tons of apps. Windows per se, the company, has nothing like that, not even close. And they barely update their own stuff, let alone the various applications people like to use. I honestly don't think most joe and janes out there are even aware what you can get with a default install of any of the major linux distros. With a few tweaks and sops to economic and social reality (MP3s are not going away anytime soon, costs money, the distro vendors need to suck it up economically and politically at this time, same with DVD playback, etc), primarily in the media playback and games areas, you'd have a winner IF it came preinstalled from joe large company with significant public nameshare. The rest would follow, even the largest companies are herd animals.
Just needs some *advertising*. FF proved that it is possible to go from relatively obscurity "to the masses" to a quite respectable showing in a short period of time.
That and some larger hardware vendors actually offering it on their machines. AOpen has just announced their miniPC will be shipping with Linspire Linux as the default installed OS. It's starting to crack-slowly. XP is a hundred dollar extra option. And IF the big vendors shipped it installed, their usual bundle offerings would work out of the box, eliminating a lot of that obscure driver foobar nonsense. Acme & Odds, ltd. videocards and printers and USB widgets of various kinds and assorted add-on whatnots WOULD listen to some folks like Dell and provide drivers that work, and work well, facing a potential order in the hundreds of thousands or millions. No fooling around then, they would get to work and do the coding. Right now it is "meh, who cares?" with them guys,they throw some slop out and have a tiny webpage and forum someplace on their site for linux...mostly to shut up the whiners, in their opinion.. pretty obvious really. This is because there's no established market, a chicken and egg deal so far. Someone *big* has to blink and blink hard and make a move, a normal high stakes semi-risky business move. Joe Bob at the local whitebox shop buying 5 machines doesn't show up on their radar. It needs to be the large hardware vendors and game company devs push this, they are the only ones who can really crack it, it is NOT, repeat NOT, going to come primarily from the software side of the equation by some billion humans deciding one morning to "tryout this li-nux thing" they heard about. Ain't happenin'. Not any time soon, anyway. You aren't going to change human reality that people run what comes pre-installed. It just "is" is all.
You are correct on the history part, I got the two events confused, so *thanks*.
As to being a "goldbug", not exactly, I am in favor of a *multiple* tangibles based monetary unit, on a national relevance basis. The base idea (short version) would be the past fiscal year top 100 traded commodities, because they are quantifiable using existing data and the true growth of the economy could be ascertained, thereby indicating the appropriate amount to add to the currency supply, and that it would adequately reflect the dynamic change and evolving nature of society and business.
I am fully aware that there doesn't exist enough physical gold or silver for everyone to use that as carry around money. I think, though, that precious metals would be inside the top 100 list, and that there should be official coinage to reflect that, similar to what we have now with the official Eagles. But for day to day normal business, a representative supply that was transparent and open and run entirely by the Treasury would be preferable to what we have now with the closed shop private Federal Reserve bank.
The telecommuter is physically sitting in his chair in front of his computer working wherever he is physically located. that is where the work is. THAT is where "the work" of typing stuff is being done, in that state. Until we have quantum computing with teleporting bits, joe work is done at joe location, it is not being done "over there" at the other end of the pipe. Now, MORE work may be done over at the other end of the pipe by someone else who gets the transmitted data bits, and it's at that geographical location and is subject to the laws THERE then. Two different sets of work here, it is not "one" set of work subject to one places total control.
This is as close as I can call it.
I see no difference from this and someone working in one state, while their parent corporation who employs them has its incorporation papers filed in Delaware or Nevada or some other geographical area of *corporate tax convenience*. Where is the *work* of this corporation being done then? In Delaware or Nevada if all the buildings and personnel are located in other states?
"Income" taxes are a massive political control tool, a big hammer they hold over the heads of everyone who is non-elite, and nothing more. They killed President Kennedy (primarily) over his vow to bust up the Fed and bring back real money.
Back before the congame happened that created the fed and brought us the "income" tax, the federal government was funded primarily by excise taxes, and was held to a much smaller size, as it was supposed to be. That started the ball rolling on political control and inflation, and Nixon finished it off with the Bretton Woods agreement.
This is a very involved subject, no way to really address it even in a series of posts, but it's a fascinating bit of history to go back and do some research on.
Matt monitors slashdot, he'll see it, so there's another avenue that gets read by a host of political and law types in DC.
And just in case he missed it, I will now send in a "tip" on his form box.
MEGA Boss! Alien Cobra!
There is certainly some amazing tech out there now. I would imagine that nanotech and materials science will be able to provide some more increases in what can be squeezed out of ICE engines.
thanks for the information, nice additional link to the main article.
If you READ what I wrote, getting it from some duplication place DOESN'T make the original releaser very much money. The clone outfits buy it one time, or download it for free, and that's it, which means ONE SALE or NO SALE instead of many sales to the official distro place. I would PREFER to give the original place the loot, just not as much, preferally for a lite version without all the extras. I am FULLY aware of all the clone outfts, an that's where I get the bulk of my "tryout" distros. If it's something I really, really like, then I would go to the full priced version from the original companies. Like when I first started out, free cloned tryout redhat disks, I liked it enough, worked well enough, so I went to their 60 buck model to support them, thought I was being a righteous dude there. When they dropped that and went to OM freekin G prices, I went to fedora, bought for a few bucks from clone vendors. The result, redhat gets ZERO money from me when they could be getting "some" money yearly. Their call. Now it's OpenBSDs call on that. I want the whole shebang on disks, I despise downloading tons of crap, I can barely keep up with patches and updates. Most other distros, same deal, they want ridiculous prices to get the disks from them,, forcing people to go to the clone vendors. I think it's *nutz* and a bad business move. I prefer to order disks through the mail, DLing over dialup (all I can get here) is just not happening except for mini distros.
It's very similar to music or video disks, the **AA folks just don't get it on volume sales with a cheaper price. They could have nipped file sharing and napster in the bud if they had dropped from $15-20 and up a disk to 5$, sold millions and millions more copies and actually made more money at it, but NO, that makes too much sense.
I do not know what it is with companies, whether data or entertainment, these places that slap crap on disks then charge out the ying yang for it, it must affect the brain or something, but if they bought three clues they would find out that most people are more than willing to pay a reasonable price for whatever, and "reasonable price" to "freekin cheap" can be brought into the equation *easily* with what-have-you on CDs or DVDs now-a-days, and they can still "make money" at it, lotsa money.
50 bucks for the de-luxe version, or ftp over a flaky dialup? Hmmm
easy decision - no open bsd here! One way is unobtanium, the other is nonobtanium
Perhaps if they offered a "lite" version, just the disks in paper sleeves in a one dollar mailer for a lot less, say 10$? Way way WAY too many distros out there that you can try for the first time cheaper. I understand it's a whizz bang secure OS, designed primarily for servers, and etc, but sheesh. A lot of folks just like trying out new things, but at those prices, well.... it's nice to support your distro of choice, or a few, that they get some actual money in their pockets for thieir efforts. Buying from clone vendors cheap doesn't translate to much for the OS distributors, and a lot of various distros charge too much directly (IMO & relatively speaking, Y economic MMV most likely), but seems like a middle ground price setup would be a nice option, not only for these guys but a host of other OSes.
Would this result in multiple instances of the DRM rootkit beng installed if multiple CDs with the same software were run by the user? Or after the first one would it just see it is already there? Just wondering if eventually, if it is cumulative, if the machine would just bog down into 100% CPU usage and become non functional.
... a long time ago with HTML in general. Would have avoided a lot of nonsense on the web. Develop any browser or web enabled app you want, as long as it meets open specs of useability and access for the public internet.
man, just ain't no pleasin some folks. Just commenting generally. books are data packed, a tremendous amount of data contained in a relatively small manufactured and mass produced package. That's why I used the book/printed word analogy, because it's still in use today in a widespread manner and is still used in a legal sense with official documents on paper that anyone who can read may access and understand. It doesn't require any upgrading to grok a book. You don't need to pay some company for your book upgrade to continue to access a book you already have. The "format" remains viable across centuries. Your book doesn't go obsolete and become impossible to access as long as it physically exists still. Sure, clay or stone tablets last a long time, too,but it might take you a room full to contain what is in one small paperback, and there is no large scale production or use of them any longer except as curiosities. Modern society is data rich, so we need a way to store and use data that is compact, concentrated, portable, and easy to use and in some manner be able to withstand the sands of time. Paper is an outstanding invention! if we are going to try and replace it, it needs to be thought about. this effort in mass. shows at least some people are thinking about it, not being lead around by the nose by some goofball billionaire crook who's good at sleazy marketing.
Chemical film is not lasting, older movies are in a lot of cases gone because of the fast entropy with chemical based films. Electronic tape degrades quickly. Hard drives fail easily. Optical disks are proving to not have the shelf life originally claimed. And document "formats"? Closed source, something that exists and remains accessible only at the whim of some company, a company with a track record of destroying as much as they create in order to force profits? For OFFICIAL RECORDS? SAY WHUT??
If we as a society are going to electronic storage, we BETTER be smart about it. An open document format is the MINIMAL requirement to accomplish this task, if we want our progeny to be able to access this information hundreds or thousands of years from now. Heck, we need this _now_ just to cover small single digit year spans!
This is one of those deals you either "get it" immediately, or you most likely never will. Not going to get bogged down into minutiae of old cuniform tablets or not, although I will say I certainly appreciate scholars in the past going out of their way to provide an "open source" long range solution for document archival to the best of their technical ability at the time. That shows that at least some human nature was good and remains good over the years and centuries and millenia, and that intelligence and logic can beat out "this quarter's profits" greed mentality in some situations. I enjoy and use modern tech, just wish to see it used WISELY, and paying tax money to insure that you WON'T be able to access important documents in the future short of mortgaging your economic reality to a single monopoly company is *not wise*. Corporations who do that are nuts and not looking at the longer term,so they'll pay for that mistake, over and over and over again, and governments that do that are guilty of short sighted and ill-advised malfeasance and incompetence, IMO.
the only precedent we have for long range storage has been books. ( I will leave out stone tablets, etc, I mean semi modern historical precedent) Stored properly and made with good quality paper, they last quite a long time, and the only requirement for data retrieval is the ability to read. Electronic media has a more dismal track record so far, precisely from evolving hardware and software abandonment. Instead of centuries like with books, it is mere small number years, and poof, hard to get access unless one maintains a computer and software museum.
There really *does* need to be a guaranteed open access document format, especially for public governmental documents.
The willingness of most business to voluntarily get locked in to a forced upgrade cycle, and government the same, based on ONE monopoly's dictates and profit concerns, is mind boggling. It's contemptuous really, beyond idiotic. Imagine the discussion if books were similar, write something, ten years or so later, after you paid for an eyeball upgrade because "everyone else does it", you could no longer view the decade old book. It's ludicrous but that is what the closed document format people want with electronic records.
I was able to get a small pushrod engine to reliable run at 8 grand, but took some precise shop work. Was an old 1969 fiat engine. I worked my way down to less than a gram balance with the connecting rods and pistons. And the pistons were forged, the rods shot peened, had the headwork and valve action done by people who knew what they were doing, etc.
A friend of mine, who's dad was a vp at ford and pulled strings to get him one, had one of those 427 ford nascar SOHC engines, simply awesome. He stuck it in an old ratty comet, quite the street sleeper. It ran mid tens.
Not really, that is too simplistic. You leave out some critical factors. Many mammalian societies make use of grand parents and older relatives in order to insure the continuity of the community. The societies start to fragment and go down hill once those influences are removed. Applies to humans as well, IMO. For instance, take elephants, it is hard for younger mothers to go off and feed all the time without having the older auntie elephants watch and guard the young ones. The species itself is in danger if there's too much stress on the still child bearing years members. Part of the genetic makeup, that gives the evolutionary advantage, is precisely this "caring for the young" DNA imprint pattern that actually *cares for the young* with the older members, and the older members *have to be there* for this evolutionary advantage to be effective. If you bork out one generation of the older ones the entire group starts to decline, which in the long term might wipe out the species, even if the genetic code stayed intact,with no adequate care for the young if the elders are absent, then the young have too many opportunities to not make it to childbearing age and the raw numbers slip into decline.
Atmospheric pressure on mars is ~ 1% of Earth pressure (just googled that). That's a lot of giant dust storm with not much gasses to move it around, eh wot? The dust must be ultra fine and very light for this to happen.
Don't blame the line workers for bad engineering and even worse management decsions, even if rush limbaugh tells you to. They assemble the parts they get handed in the manner specified. THAT'S IT. They have zero say in the matter. If management wants to make crap and not compete, it's not the rank and files fault. If your IT boss/management tells you to code crap, not test, ship crap by such and such a date, well???? You follow orders, cash check, that's how it works... when they turn around and blame the coders, is it really their fault if they haven't been given the time and resources to code something good? Same with being a manufacturing drone, a drone is a drone, you follow orders.
With that said, I think the unions are missing the boat for a long time in not gong on strike to demand higher quality engineering. They go on strike for any other issues, there's no law per se saying they couldn't negotiate that as well. Radical idea, but it's possible. Go on strike, demand the same pay and benefits, ask for nothing new, no difference, but demand management cut their pay and design better products. That would be a HOOT! I know way way back when I was in the UAW I tried to push this idea, but this was during the horsepower wars and throw away cars era, no one cared about mileage or reliability, just horsepower. meh, old news.. Anyway, the labor costs of assembly are *the same*, whether it's crap part A or better part B going into crap designed car A or nice piece of work B.
US tech can be very very good, look at all the various professional motorsports, there's some outstanding design and engineering there. Racing is sexy and pays well for the winners, hence, they get very good engineers and mechanics. Innovation just takes a couple of decades to filter back down to Detroit big three management, I mean, look how long they have insisted on using pushrod engines. Look how long it took them to adopt multiple valve per cylinder heads. and etc. That's 100% pure MANAGEMENT fault.
And they would also have to pay their engineers MORE than what a first year rookie car lot salesman makes if they want to keep good people and make better cars. The auto industry in the US is a good parallel of the business climate in general, manage, study, re arrange the furniture,powerpoint, business junkets, power lunches, sell, market. Engineering and keeping quality help is way way WAY down the list of what is important to them, because of "this quarters profits" mentality. The stock market is *killing* business, if that makes some sense. It's nutz and getting worse. Ford is sort of starting to "get it", they have a pretty decent forward looking set of design goals and are embracing hybrids, etc NOW, finally. Took them way too long, but we'll see what happens. GM and daimler chrysler mercedes whatever they are called now, who knows. maybe.... I am more pessimistic on them long range. GM hasn't really made any money on cars in years I think, they make money on financing, paper pushing.
yes, we've all read of the lost gulf productivity from the hurricanes...but..but.. where are the actual shortages at the retail pump??? You seen 'em? Not seeing them here. You can go get all the gas and diesel you want, at the much inflated price.
There's not only something fishy going on here, there's a whole school of "fishys". Check todays news? Exxon just broke the all time US world record quarterly sales, 100 billion, and quarterly net profit, 9.9 billion. They are taking advantage of the situation and gouging, plain and simple.
And no, I am not a "global free trader", I think that is misnamed and ill advised, so any arguments that "it's the market" mean little to me, because that IS the problem. The market is rigged and fixed, the cartels and middlemen "traders" design the scams, run the scams and bribe off the governments to perpetuate the scams, and brainwash people into accepting it. There is no reason that we as consumers don't have much better autos and cleaner greener and cheaper fuels other than they can make more money the way they are running the scams now. The market is run for the top 1%, not the other 99%. Bass ackwards. It's changing, as the net has enabled more and more people to get more and more information, and bypass the industry FUD.
Alternate energy is a booming market now, because people finally realised that it was out there and viable, defeating three decades of industrial cartel lies.
And finally, because of that, we are seeing significant tech advances. TOO BAD we were forced to waste all those years listening to them doofusses that "'it' wouldn't work", with "it" being anything but petroleum products. We listened to them kinda "free market" jerks for a year as california experienced 'rolling balckouts' and massive price increases for grid juice, that now turns out to have been caused by industrial scamsters cartel collusion and artificial scarcity. Grok cartel, collusion, price fixing? Does that sound "free"? Sure, "free" as in a thief gets your stuff for "free", or a flim flam artist gets your money after running a congame on you. that's the so called 'free market" as it exists in reality, not in quaint academic theory. I'm for FAIR markets, not that scam "free market" crap. That's for crooks and conmen.
It's not totally fixed yet, but at least we, people who follow this "we", are aware that these sorts of shenanigans have been going on. What we are seeing here now with gasoline prices is very similar appearing.
..and run all that waste heat through a stirling cycle generator? Not perpetual motion, but beats *dumping it* outside and they could probably get quite a bit of electric back..
I have no idea what it costs, quite a bit though, it's fairly extensive and tied into automatic feed and watering, heating and cooling, etc. It's been built in stages as different tech became available so I bet even the owner really doesn't know without sitting down and doing a lot of "gazintas" cipherin'..heh. Diesel gennys figure 5- 10 grand for a nice one, probably overkill for a cell tower though, a smaller one might be enough. No idea really, a SWAG. maybe someone reading this works on them and might know their actual electrical needs. I think one of the new quiet fuel cells might be preferrable actually in somesituations (you can get them now, seen them for sale), and use propane for the fuel (unlimited storage life with that fuel). Now start throwing embedded systems and wireless at it to taste.
........and the cell phone, which so far, knock on wood, has always stayed up even when POTS goes absent. Now, the last place I lived was reversed, it was more mountainous and cell coverage sucked and was intermittent, especially during storms, but the POTS was completely buried, and always worked.
I would imagine (back to the farm) the total automated infrastructure now costs more than the naked buildings. Recently they've added weight scales to the remote administering, so all the big grain bins can be monitored for fullness and use compared to growth rates. They cut one leg at a time and added the sensors on the (large) feed bins. I thought that was kinda interesting. JIT catering for cluckers.
As to what is necessary and what isn't, sure, we don't need any high tech to actually *live*, I lived almost totally feral for 4.5 years once, kinda fun, but... but modern civilization needs communication, and relying on one type is silly, redundancy is key, and that means both POTS and cell and also HAM radio as you point out, of which I am a proponent, although unlicensed (another discussion sometime). For instance where I live the bulk of the POTS is still above ground wires, as such, most windstorms and winter ice storms I lose my net connection (dialup only here, only affordable option), along with grid supplied electric. I'm not on that massive diesel genny area of the farm,(we live way over yonder on the other side and run the cattle and small airport part) but I have a small solar array and two gas gennys as backup power, but for the net--well, no backup yet. A local ISP keeps threatening some sort of wireless, but so far, not in my area but "coming soon", Motorola canopy brand. I'll pop for it once it gets here. Whenever all that stuff goes down in the storms, I rely on Mr. Sangean and an old battery powered sony watchman. mostly
...list of requirements can be entirely automated after install, and remotely administered. Running the gennys periodically is called "exercising" them, check, can do it remotely from a console. Monitoring status, check. Automatic startup and shutdown via sensors,or manually administered, check. Battery maintenance is trivial if you install hydrocaps and sensors. I live on a big farm and we already have that sort of setup, in three locations. They keep (this is the theory anyway) 16 buildings (LARGE buildings, 600 feet long poultry houses that take serious juice) running 24/7/365 with the grid supplied as primary, but the backups can do it for days at a time, until the fuel runs out, something like two weeks worth of onsite fuel. In 15 years (what I have been told, I've only been here going on 3 years) it's failed *once*, in one building, and that was due to a design glitch with an expensive circuit breaker that wasn't redundant which in turn failed to notify the wireless alarm system. That is being fixed now.. This is all just off the shelf stuff, nothing exotic. The only thing non automated is the fuel delivery, that comes by a human driving a tanker truck once in awhile, and I bet within a decade that might be automated as well.
Cell towers *could* be redundantly powered for emergencies, that they aren't is entirely political and economic in nature, it is not an engineering problem. And I am guessing with the new e911 requirements for cell phones that there will be some court cases challenging local munis who say "no" to generators. I bet eventually it's required that they have backup at the towers. A little public pressure after major disasters will do wonders for this purpose. A few articles in the local paper outlining why cell coverage went down could possibly light some fires under some "ooooo, evil loud generators!" luddite politicians butt. And if it costs the cell guys more loot, who cares. This is 2005, the human race needs redundant reliable communications, at all times, end of story. It's *especially* necessary during disasters.
If I was a local cell company trying to get business in a competitive market, I would put in the gennys *somehow* and turn around and use it for advertising as in "our service has backup power in emergencies for your important phone calls, while x,y,z local service here has bupkis". See who gets the consumer traffic then.