...don't run a vanilla kernel that they tweaked themselves, they run the subfork (if I can use that as a term) kernel that their distro uses, so in that sense it's useful to -again-most people. Vanilla kernels, no idea, day to day *practical* kernels, the way it is now with bug reports is a lot better than nothing.
Maybe some sort of open source P2P weather service? I'd pop to put in some sort of hardware reporting node and contribute, weather info is just too vital to ignore. It probably exists (distributed community weather dealie), anyone know of one?
I had the same exact idea and have been saving up my nickles to try and build one (was going to try and use the mini itx-12volt board as a start-maybe, hadn't decided yet really), glad to see someone actually did it. It makes sense in a niche way. You have your PDA, Laptop and Desktop all combined, but as portable or as full featured stuck in place as you want. From my perspective it should have been *cheaper* than buying all three separate though, that's the real point #2, because the main computing functionality you only need to buy *once*, not three times.
I hope it takes off and the price drops more, that's all. If they can get it down to a grand for all three devices (core/PDA and the laptop shell and desktop dock) they'll have a winner.
I downloaded it and tried it out awhile back. Works Great! Definetly the ticket for older hardware. Biggest problem I had was actually finding clean good floppies to burn the images to, had to go through a pile of them to get any that would work. After that though, fast boot, got online easy, surfed well.
would you have any reference URLs to look at for one of those ads? I think it would be interesting to analyse the actual words used, to look at the legal angle.
I have an interestiung anecdotal from ye olden days. Way back when, I had a girlfriend who was an artist, and going to an art school. They had a black tie affair for the students faculty and parents,so we went. Hey, free food and champers! Me in a tux, too funny! Anyway, one of the students mom's there lost a diamond out of a setting, fell on the floor someplace. So here's a couple dozen people in gowns and tuxes all bent over squinting at the floor. We saw it, went over to ask "what's up"? Got told about the loose stone, girlfriend glanced down, immediately spotted it, went over and picked it up, like one second. She saw it from her extraordinary ability to see colors. She had been tested in the school and won, ran 10,000 colors in ROYGBIV sequence not missing a single shade, the only student to get all of them correct.
I ain't seeing it. No telco, cable or woreless guy has a broadband offering to millions of US residents yet. I can't speak for heavily urban, but in rural areas it's as close to SOL as it can get. You have your choice of crappy, restricted and very expensive satellite service or nothing.
If local areas want to put up wireless, I say let them, that's what local government is all about, to help the local people. If that means co-op electric power, county water and sewer, county trash hauling, etc, so what, at least it gets there. Same with internet connections, they are just another utility now, so either the private sector does it,and if they don't, local government can do it if they people want it and fund it.
I don't want private toll roads either, another potential major rip off.
Some things are just better when it's a muni doing it, some aren't, utilities are one place where it needs to be done, and coordinated and run at cost, not for profit. Utilities are necessities, not luxuries, and in modern USA things like roads, power, etc are necessities. I say we are at the point now that a decent net connection qualifies as a utility service. 10 years ago, no, now, yes, the future, yes. This is called the information age for a *reason*.
...the masses will run open source after you convince a handful of big vendors to offer open source alternatives on the systems they ship. Dell, IBM/Lenovo, HP/Compaq, Sony, Toshiba, etc, those are the people you need to sell on open source to the point that it's common to see it on the store shelves next to the closed source stuff. And you won't be "selling" them until the distro wars consolidate better. You need a linux standards base, integrated, also something that doesn't need as much RAM and processor power as the competition,(don't underestimate that selling point to the big vendors if you can pull it off) open source equivalency apps that work and don't suck, and a lot of games. Then this "the masses" guy will be "sold".
From the write up: "many users never use a program on their computer that did not come pre-installed"..sorta true, skip spywarez which people install, but ya, what he said. It simply has to come pre installed to make major inroads, until that is driven home to developers and the "me too" distrologists, nope, it's gonna be slow hard pickin's.
..is it those companies property to store, anyway? It's all these various peoiple's "Intellectual Property", it should be treated with the same level of laws that some copyrighted song or patented software, etc, is at a minimum. It should be default illegal to just take it, store it, trade it, sell it, etc without express written legal contract between the person and the data mining company. Just because you are forced to *use* your personal data IP to engage in some business transaction shouldn't mean they now own all that IP, it's still *yours*. The gas station doesn't get to own my car when I go in to buy some gas. But these shady and shoddy industries (yes they are, they are slimy) are allowed to just steal your info and property and treat it like their product and property. since when is this supposed to be cool? Serious wrongness going on.
THAT is what needs to change more than more grade B rube goldberg "security" features which are the best any of them could pull off anyway if they even tried. If they don't have it and store it in the first place, it can't be compromised later on, can it? That would be real security, nothing there to steal in the first place. I say put em completely out of business, make it illegal the way it stands now. If someone wants to sell their personal data, then fine, write up a contract and let's see some serious folding cash change hands for it, it shouldn't be the default they ownzors you just to conduct some transaction with some doofus merchant.
the time frame you mention has a pretty serious economic indicator for the US you might have missed. We have gone from being the worlds largest creditor nation to now we are the worlds largest debtor nation, with your mentioned country Japan holding a decent chunk of that IOU. And lately, they are getting a little uneasy about holding even that, because they realise we are close to being forced to just defaulting on these debts, most likely through the time honored fiat currency method called "cranking up the printing presses". I mean right now we are being funded by selling IOUs (federalgovernment paper) backed by other IOUs (FRNs backed by future promises to pay, ie, your kids and grandkids labor in jobs that may or may not exist, and our actual tangible real estate in the form of outsourced mortgages).
This is unsustainable for any length of time beyond historically "short"
Now, we haven't sunk completely yet, but to insist we haven't hit the iceberg and don't have major leaks and haven't taken on a considerable amount of water is not being realistic either. all is not rosy, and *this time* it looks to be unfixable in the short and medium term (one to three generations). The violin players eventually stopped playing.
And if the planet doesn't come up with some unusually cheap and abundant energy source, and soon, we might all be sunk, the US, Europe, China, India, Japan, you name it.
All this growth in the 20th century has been based on almost ridiculously cheap energy, notable petroleum.
That is just not a fact anymore. Demand is exploding, supplies are peaking and will dwindle fast after peaking. Two lines, one graph, results should be easy to see.
My best SWAG is a lot of wars over dwindling resources. Some folks say that has started already. These various economic wars are just the warmup, the prelude to what is really coming.
Go all the way, you have some serious clout and lobbying resources. See if you can get a bipartisan bill introduced to BAN software patents completely, before it's too late. You can still patent tangible hardware, that's enough, you got great R&D. That is the ONLY long term fix and you at least suspect it if not know it. Go ahead, you dipped your toe in the water, it feels good, jump in all the way, you'll like it!
Well, that but they could save a license and sell it to someone who wanted it and would really use it, and maybe it would help offset the shipping costs. Right now today I think is a bad time to get a new PC because dual cores are coming out and the switch to 64 bit computing. sort of a major transition period. Locally to me the best I could get barebones with no drives and one stick of 128 was 240$, some athlon, forget which one now. Used pentium 3's are still hovering at 200 clams, some under 1 gig speed. It's ridiculous, I would rather just drop 50 or 100 and get something good enough used to last for a couple years, *at this juncture*, then at that time get something a lot more decent. I wasn't planning on getting anything right now, but bad power fried my two desktops and I had to snag my girlfriends machine just to get online with.
My loot comes dear, even 10 or 20 isn't chump change to me, I just now got back from culling 6 broiler houses. I don't think in terms of money, I think in terms of nasty "fowl" work that I swap for consumer goods, heh.
Dell has a 299$ desktop on sale right now, bumping the ram to half a gig makes it to 329$, and you get a free 17 inch CRT with it, and kb and mouse. I couldn't determine what shipping costs are though without actually buying the thing. This was just last night as I have been shopping for a low end or a barebones I can stick my own drives in.
I know it doesn't exactly hit your price quotient, but it's close considering the monitor with it. It would be nice though if you could get it sans XP with some more dollars off the price.
We've talked about an aircar here before. The Korean model is a hybrid, this one the Aircar just uses the compressed air tank.
One perceived advantage of compressed air over batteries is that it can be refilled a lot faster than a battery bank can be recharged.(yes I saw the exception those new lions mentioned with the one minute recharge, that's pretty recent though). Some others are the tank itself is significantly lighter than batteries, probably much cheaper to make as well and doesn't have a lot of toxicity to it as batteries do. Another would be cycles of filling, I wouldn't expect it to wear out near as fast as batteries would.
All these various designs and techniques have plusses and minuses to them. Sort of like the early computer days with a plethora of hardware and differing OSes, etc. One of my pet ideas for this deal of having a high mileage cleaner car is to have a pure electric for the commuter car part, for extended range on trips just attach a trailer where a small diesel generator is located, turning the car into a "hybrid". That way most of the time you don't need to be hauling around two motors inside the vehicle, which the hybrids do, the electric motor and the fuel burning engine. Most of the time it could be recharged at your house overnight, ready to go back in the morning, and if you combined this with some solar panels at home (whatever alt energy do dad you like), it would eventually get to pretty cheap per mile to drive. You could "store" your juice during the day while you are gone back into the grid in those places that mandate netmetering, or have your own battery bank at home to plug into.
If they can bolt a rocket on to Hubble to de-orbit it (the current announced scheme), why can't they just bolt on a rocket and increase it's orbit and park it, until such a time as repairs are cheaper/easier? Why do they have to trash the entire telescope? Once it's orbit is increased, it's maintenance costs are minimal, just needs to be kept track of, same as all the other space stuff. And they already do that.
My best guess is the people making the decisions are basing the decision on some weird behind the scenes politics, not the science involved or engineering. It costs a lot of money per lb to get stuff up, Hubble is there, weighs a lot and is still sort of working and could be repaired, just the money isn't there at this time and they want to not have to rely on the Shuttle to do it. OK, I can see that, shuttle is old now and just not in that good of shape. That doesn't mean ten years from now (whatever) it wouldn't be possible given tech advances.
You are basing that 10 year cost analysis/payback on a contract you probably don't have with the electric utility. You actually have no way of knowing what your electricity will cost years down the road, or next year for that matter, so it's pretty hard to do these sorts of bar knapkin calculations. You have zero data to use beyond conjecture. AFAIK, there is only one utility in the US (austin area I think, but not sure) that will give joe home owner a ten year contract on electricity, and that one non surprisingly enough is based on buying "green" electricity from them. Everyplace else you are more or less at their mercy, with some help from the local PSC. Your light bill might be a hundred clams average a month this year,in 3 years it might be 200$. Or 50 if they develop fusion. We just don't know really. If you bought the solar now though, you would know exactly what it cost, and it would be installed and running at your home.
bird in hand, bird in bush deal.
I like solar now because I own it, that's worth it to me beyond a dollars and cents cost criteria only, I'm a geek, I have to know I'll have electricity no matter what enron scams or not happen in the future, and I really don't think energy scams are gone away now, just much better hidden.
I'd watch it most likely. Would be interesting to see how they arranged the tech of that era using todays production qualities. And if they stuck to the timeline, just 20 years earlier, they could clear up a lot of stuff from the original, like bones' first still in his dorm room, kirk's hotrod, stuff like that there.....
And there would be a ton of academy babes, too.......
ahh, I'm in the same boat with downloading distros, stuck on dialup here for the time being. the minis I am able to download and burn though, usually just start it at night before I go to bed, done in the morning. For larger ones I either send away mailorder for a few dollars to any of the clone makers, or I get a friend of mine in a local whitebox shop who has a dsl connection there to download and burn them for me (handier than mailorder). I give him a buck or two per disk. That's how I got my copy of simply mepis this week. That's what I use for my girlfriends computer (an older one that has 98se on it), I just give her a live CD linux to run, eliminates quite a few cross room "service calls", heh! And I don't worry about the hardrive getting hosed at all either with that technique. It's as close to a no brainer as it gets.
Some decent minis to try are Feather, Puppy, DamnSmall, Austrumi. The last three are at 50 megs, Feather is over 100 now, but that is still quite a bit smaller than any of the normal full bloaterised distros. Of those 4 I like Austrumi. A note on that one, the developer is quite good at packaging and coding, etc, but he is Latvian so it default boots into that language. Once it boots, hover your mouse at the bottom of the screen to raise the task bar, mash the start menu button, look around for a UK British Union Jack flag symbol, mash that thing, it will reboot into (mostly) English. Had me faked out deluxe until I rebooted back into my regular desktop and went to their forums to see how to do that, pretty funny really. Besides that it's a small fast distro, has enough for your normal surfing needs, along with some other proggies of course. The console dialup tool works quite well with my external serial modem, but I don't know about the broadband connection scripts, although apparently from reading their forums it works as well. The developer chose Opera over Firefox browser, he says it's a much smaller resource program than FF, and that's what his distro is about, small, fast, complete enough to be practical.
Anyway, good luck, hate to see someone so turned off from windows malwarez that they stop using the net. Sort of telling isn't it?
The computer isn't broken, it just has a hosed windows install. And you don't have to "fix" it,why waste your time with bug be gone crapola just to have to do it again next week, when there is no absolute need for it, you can just ignore it. No reason to abandon the internet, the net is just too useful. Why don't you be a pal and get your friend a live linux Cd to play with? He can be back online surfing relatively safely in five minutes. It's a nice break from malwarez and there are a ton of them out there now, knoppix being the most famous of course. And they are about as easy to use as you can find out there.
The latest I have used, just got them this week, are austrumi 0.94 (IMO the best mini distro, runs entirely from RAM, then ejects and frees up the optical drive, and is *fast*) and SimplyMempis 3.3 (full complete distro, nice polish to it). Run them live or option to install to hard drive from the same disk if you like it. Cool beans and stuff.
I agree but want to expand on it some. Linux isn't on most peoples radar yet, they may have heard the word but frankly do NOT even know the difference between an OS and an application. The main reason this hasn't happened is because the major vendors don't (conversationally speaking now, in general) ship linux pre installed by the millions, and the main reason they don't do that is because there is *no* standard linux OS for them to ship. Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to do tech support for the few hundred linux distros out there, once people had "A" distro and then wanted to expand it with some more "Linux apps"? The vendors aren't that tarded. Something like autopackage has been needed, along with a true LSB layout. Get those two concepts running more, and maybe end the DE wars as well and you got you a more acceptable "product". this and that larger commercial linux vendors are trying, to get their distros pre installed on more machines, but those result in a locked down propietary dealie again, something that needs to be avoided somehow.
The main deal is, you can't talk about hobbiest distros and then try to make them into some universal bigtime distro for this "the masses" guy. You can go right down the pike and look at so called debian based distros, frequently even those have enough of a difference to make this or that not work. Hundreds of guys all re inventing the same wheel, over and over again, said wheels not fitting on any car but their own. Fun for them, but it's not going to result in "linux on the desktop" this decade. And installation is a big part of that problem.
apples and oranges. No one wants to remove enthusiasts ways of doing things, but what they want to do is to take the concept of a linux desktop mainstream. Being able to deal with applications and installation is a prime concern. This is a good thing if you care about something like that. The two camps can still co exist splendidly. If someone wants to make "fred"s distro" that works completely different from everyone else, no probs, go right ahead, just they shouldn't expect it to become bigtime mainstream any time soon.
I applaud the autopackage guys and the LSB guys. That edges it much closer to a viable alternative for millions more people, they are way useful standardization schemes, long overdue.
Slashdot Mirror
...don't run a vanilla kernel that they tweaked themselves, they run the subfork (if I can use that as a term) kernel that their distro uses, so in that sense it's useful to -again-most people. Vanilla kernels, no idea, day to day *practical* kernels, the way it is now with bug reports is a lot better than nothing.
Maybe some sort of open source P2P weather service? I'd pop to put in some sort of hardware reporting node and contribute, weather info is just too vital to ignore. It probably exists (distributed community weather dealie), anyone know of one?
I had the same exact idea and have been saving up my nickles to try and build one (was going to try and use the mini itx-12volt board as a start-maybe, hadn't decided yet really), glad to see someone actually did it. It makes sense in a niche way. You have your PDA, Laptop and Desktop all combined, but as portable or as full featured stuck in place as you want. From my perspective it should have been *cheaper* than buying all three separate though, that's the real point #2, because the main computing functionality you only need to buy *once*, not three times.
I hope it takes off and the price drops more, that's all. If they can get it down to a grand for all three devices (core/PDA and the laptop shell and desktop dock) they'll have a winner.
I downloaded it and tried it out awhile back. Works Great! Definetly the ticket for older hardware. Biggest problem I had was actually finding clean good floppies to burn the images to, had to go through a pile of them to get any that would work. After that though, fast boot, got online easy, surfed well.
thanks for the reference. sounds similar to the online things I have read with their "get the facts" campaign.
would you have any reference URLs to look at for one of those ads? I think it would be interesting to analyse the actual words used, to look at the legal angle.
I have an interestiung anecdotal from ye olden days. Way back when, I had a girlfriend who was an artist, and going to an art school. They had a black tie affair for the students faculty and parents,so we went. Hey, free food and champers! Me in a tux, too funny! Anyway, one of the students mom's there lost a diamond out of a setting, fell on the floor someplace. So here's a couple dozen people in gowns and tuxes all bent over squinting at the floor. We saw it, went over to ask "what's up"? Got told about the loose stone, girlfriend glanced down, immediately spotted it, went over and picked it up, like one second. She saw it from her extraordinary ability to see colors. She had been tested in the school and won, ran 10,000 colors in ROYGBIV sequence not missing a single shade, the only student to get all of them correct.
I ain't seeing it. No telco, cable or woreless guy has a broadband offering to millions of US residents yet. I can't speak for heavily urban, but in rural areas it's as close to SOL as it can get. You have your choice of crappy, restricted and very expensive satellite service or nothing.
If local areas want to put up wireless, I say let them, that's what local government is all about, to help the local people. If that means co-op electric power, county water and sewer, county trash hauling, etc, so what, at least it gets there. Same with internet connections, they are just another utility now, so either the private sector does it,and if they don't, local government can do it if they people want it and fund it.
I don't want private toll roads either, another potential major rip off.
Some things are just better when it's a muni doing it, some aren't, utilities are one place where it needs to be done, and coordinated and run at cost, not for profit. Utilities are necessities, not luxuries, and in modern USA things like roads, power, etc are necessities. I say we are at the point now that a decent net connection qualifies as a utility service. 10 years ago, no, now, yes, the future, yes. This is called the information age for a *reason*.
those two and the "bucket of balls" episode.
That was a seriously funny show.
..and obligatory Kramer...
"I'm OUT!"
...the masses will run open source after you convince a handful of big vendors to offer open source alternatives on the systems they ship. Dell, IBM/Lenovo, HP/Compaq, Sony, Toshiba, etc, those are the people you need to sell on open source to the point that it's common to see it on the store shelves next to the closed source stuff. And you won't be "selling" them until the distro wars consolidate better. You need a linux standards base, integrated, also something that doesn't need as much RAM and processor power as the competition,(don't underestimate that selling point to the big vendors if you can pull it off) open source equivalency apps that work and don't suck, and a lot of games. Then this "the masses" guy will be "sold".
From the write up: "many users never use a program on their computer that did not come pre-installed"..sorta true, skip spywarez which people install, but ya, what he said. It simply has to come pre installed to make major inroads, until that is driven home to developers and the "me too" distrologists, nope, it's gonna be slow hard pickin's.
..is it those companies property to store, anyway? It's all these various peoiple's "Intellectual Property", it should be treated with the same level of laws that some copyrighted song or patented software, etc, is at a minimum. It should be default illegal to just take it, store it, trade it, sell it, etc without express written legal contract between the person and the data mining company. Just because you are forced to *use* your personal data IP to engage in some business transaction shouldn't mean they now own all that IP, it's still *yours*. The gas station doesn't get to own my car when I go in to buy some gas. But these shady and shoddy industries (yes they are, they are slimy) are allowed to just steal your info and property and treat it like their product and property. since when is this supposed to be cool? Serious wrongness going on.
THAT is what needs to change more than more grade B rube goldberg "security" features which are the best any of them could pull off anyway if they even tried. If they don't have it and store it in the first place, it can't be compromised later on, can it? That would be real security, nothing there to steal in the first place. I say put em completely out of business, make it illegal the way it stands now. If someone wants to sell their personal data, then fine, write up a contract and let's see some serious folding cash change hands for it, it shouldn't be the default they ownzors you just to conduct some transaction with some doofus merchant.
the time frame you mention has a pretty serious economic indicator for the US you might have missed. We have gone from being the worlds largest creditor nation to now we are the worlds largest debtor nation, with your mentioned country Japan holding a decent chunk of that IOU. And lately, they are getting a little uneasy about holding even that, because they realise we are close to being forced to just defaulting on these debts, most likely through the time honored fiat currency method called "cranking up the printing presses". I mean right now we are being funded by selling IOUs (federalgovernment paper) backed by other IOUs (FRNs backed by future promises to pay, ie, your kids and grandkids labor in jobs that may or may not exist, and our actual tangible real estate in the form of outsourced mortgages).
This is unsustainable for any length of time beyond historically "short"
Now, we haven't sunk completely yet, but to insist we haven't hit the iceberg and don't have major leaks and haven't taken on a considerable amount of water is not being realistic either. all is not rosy, and *this time* it looks to be unfixable in the short and medium term (one to three generations). The violin players eventually stopped playing.
And if the planet doesn't come up with some unusually cheap and abundant energy source, and soon, we might all be sunk, the US, Europe, China, India, Japan, you name it.
All this growth in the 20th century has been based on almost ridiculously cheap energy, notable petroleum.
That is just not a fact anymore. Demand is exploding, supplies are peaking and will dwindle fast after peaking. Two lines, one graph, results should be easy to see.
My best SWAG is a lot of wars over dwindling resources. Some folks say that has started already. These various economic wars are just the warmup, the prelude to what is really coming.
Go all the way, you have some serious clout and lobbying resources. See if you can get a bipartisan bill introduced to BAN software patents completely, before it's too late. You can still patent tangible hardware, that's enough, you got great R&D. That is the ONLY long term fix and you at least suspect it if not know it. Go ahead, you dipped your toe in the water, it feels good, jump in all the way, you'll like it!
Well, that but they could save a license and sell it to someone who wanted it and would really use it, and maybe it would help offset the shipping costs. Right now today I think is a bad time to get a new PC because dual cores are coming out and the switch to 64 bit computing. sort of a major transition period. Locally to me the best I could get barebones with no drives and one stick of 128 was 240$, some athlon, forget which one now. Used pentium 3's are still hovering at 200 clams, some under 1 gig speed. It's ridiculous, I would rather just drop 50 or 100 and get something good enough used to last for a couple years, *at this juncture*, then at that time get something a lot more decent. I wasn't planning on getting anything right now, but bad power fried my two desktops and I had to snag my girlfriends machine just to get online with.
My loot comes dear, even 10 or 20 isn't chump change to me, I just now got back from culling 6 broiler houses. I don't think in terms of money, I think in terms of nasty "fowl" work that I swap for consumer goods, heh.
Dell has a 299$ desktop on sale right now, bumping the ram to half a gig makes it to 329$, and you get a free 17 inch CRT with it, and kb and mouse. I couldn't determine what shipping costs are though without actually buying the thing. This was just last night as I have been shopping for a low end or a barebones I can stick my own drives in.
I know it doesn't exactly hit your price quotient, but it's close considering the monitor with it. It would be nice though if you could get it sans XP with some more dollars off the price.
Seems to be sort of what you are looking for.
fiber optic gyro tracking stuff for warehouses
Just ran across the release and remembered this past ask slashdot. Hope it's useful info.
We've talked about an aircar here before. The Korean model is a hybrid, this one the Aircar just uses the compressed air tank.
One perceived advantage of compressed air over batteries is that it can be refilled a lot faster than a battery bank can be recharged.(yes I saw the exception those new lions mentioned with the one minute recharge, that's pretty recent though). Some others are the tank itself is significantly lighter than batteries, probably much cheaper to make as well and doesn't have a lot of toxicity to it as batteries do. Another would be cycles of filling, I wouldn't expect it to wear out near as fast as batteries would.
All these various designs and techniques have plusses and minuses to them. Sort of like the early computer days with a plethora of hardware and differing OSes, etc. One of my pet ideas for this deal of having a high mileage cleaner car is to have a pure electric for the commuter car part, for extended range on trips just attach a trailer where a small diesel generator is located, turning the car into a "hybrid". That way most of the time you don't need to be hauling around two motors inside the vehicle, which the hybrids do, the electric motor and the fuel burning engine. Most of the time it could be recharged at your house overnight, ready to go back in the morning, and if you combined this with some solar panels at home (whatever alt energy do dad you like), it would eventually get to pretty cheap per mile to drive. You could "store" your juice during the day while you are gone back into the grid in those places that mandate netmetering, or have your own battery bank at home to plug into.
If they can bolt a rocket on to Hubble to de-orbit it (the current announced scheme), why can't they just bolt on a rocket and increase it's orbit and park it, until such a time as repairs are cheaper/easier? Why do they have to trash the entire telescope? Once it's orbit is increased, it's maintenance costs are minimal, just needs to be kept track of, same as all the other space stuff. And they already do that.
My best guess is the people making the decisions are basing the decision on some weird behind the scenes politics, not the science involved or engineering. It costs a lot of money per lb to get stuff up, Hubble is there, weighs a lot and is still sort of working and could be repaired, just the money isn't there at this time and they want to not have to rely on the Shuttle to do it. OK, I can see that, shuttle is old now and just not in that good of shape. That doesn't mean ten years from now (whatever) it wouldn't be possible given tech advances.
You are basing that 10 year cost analysis/payback on a contract you probably don't have with the electric utility. You actually have no way of knowing what your electricity will cost years down the road, or next year for that matter, so it's pretty hard to do these sorts of bar knapkin calculations. You have zero data to use beyond conjecture. AFAIK, there is only one utility in the US (austin area I think, but not sure) that will give joe home owner a ten year contract on electricity, and that one non surprisingly enough is based on buying "green" electricity from them. Everyplace else you are more or less at their mercy, with some help from the local PSC. Your light bill might be a hundred clams average a month this year,in 3 years it might be 200$. Or 50 if they develop fusion. We just don't know really. If you bought the solar now though, you would know exactly what it cost, and it would be installed and running at your home.
bird in hand, bird in bush deal.
I like solar now because I own it, that's worth it to me beyond a dollars and cents cost criteria only, I'm a geek, I have to know I'll have electricity no matter what enron scams or not happen in the future, and I really don't think energy scams are gone away now, just much better hidden.
I'd watch it most likely. Would be interesting to see how they arranged the tech of that era using todays production qualities. And if they stuck to the timeline, just 20 years earlier, they could clear up a lot of stuff from the original, like bones' first still in his dorm room, kirk's hotrod, stuff like that there.....
And there would be a ton of academy babes, too.......
good memory there
ahh, I'm in the same boat with downloading distros, stuck on dialup here for the time being. the minis I am able to download and burn though, usually just start it at night before I go to bed, done in the morning. For larger ones I either send away mailorder for a few dollars to any of the clone makers, or I get a friend of mine in a local whitebox shop who has a dsl connection there to download and burn them for me (handier than mailorder). I give him a buck or two per disk. That's how I got my copy of simply mepis this week. That's what I use for my girlfriends computer (an older one that has 98se on it), I just give her a live CD linux to run, eliminates quite a few cross room "service calls", heh! And I don't worry about the hardrive getting hosed at all either with that technique. It's as close to a no brainer as it gets.
Some decent minis to try are Feather, Puppy, DamnSmall, Austrumi. The last three are at 50 megs, Feather is over 100 now, but that is still quite a bit smaller than any of the normal full bloaterised distros. Of those 4 I like Austrumi. A note on that one, the developer is quite good at packaging and coding, etc, but he is Latvian so it default boots into that language. Once it boots, hover your mouse at the bottom of the screen to raise the task bar, mash the start menu button, look around for a UK British Union Jack flag symbol, mash that thing, it will reboot into (mostly) English. Had me faked out deluxe until I rebooted back into my regular desktop and went to their forums to see how to do that, pretty funny really. Besides that it's a small fast distro, has enough for your normal surfing needs, along with some other proggies of course. The console dialup tool works quite well with my external serial modem, but I don't know about the broadband connection scripts, although apparently from reading their forums it works as well. The developer chose Opera over Firefox browser, he says it's a much smaller resource program than FF, and that's what his distro is about, small, fast, complete enough to be practical.
Anyway, good luck, hate to see someone so turned off from windows malwarez that they stop using the net. Sort of telling isn't it?
The computer isn't broken, it just has a hosed windows install. And you don't have to "fix" it,why waste your time with bug be gone crapola just to have to do it again next week, when there is no absolute need for it, you can just ignore it. No reason to abandon the internet, the net is just too useful. Why don't you be a pal and get your friend a live linux Cd to play with? He can be back online surfing relatively safely in five minutes. It's a nice break from malwarez and there are a ton of them out there now, knoppix being the most famous of course. And they are about as easy to use as you can find out there.
The latest I have used, just got them this week, are austrumi 0.94 (IMO the best mini distro, runs entirely from RAM, then ejects and frees up the optical drive, and is *fast*) and SimplyMempis 3.3 (full complete distro, nice polish to it). Run them live or option to install to hard drive from the same disk if you like it. Cool beans and stuff.
I agree but want to expand on it some. Linux isn't on most peoples radar yet, they may have heard the word but frankly do NOT even know the difference between an OS and an application. The main reason this hasn't happened is because the major vendors don't (conversationally speaking now, in general) ship linux pre installed by the millions, and the main reason they don't do that is because there is *no* standard linux OS for them to ship. Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to do tech support for the few hundred linux distros out there, once people had "A" distro and then wanted to expand it with some more "Linux apps"? The vendors aren't that tarded. Something like autopackage has been needed, along with a true LSB layout. Get those two concepts running more, and maybe end the DE wars as well and you got you a more acceptable "product". this and that larger commercial linux vendors are trying, to get their distros pre installed on more machines, but those result in a locked down propietary dealie again, something that needs to be avoided somehow.
The main deal is, you can't talk about hobbiest distros and then try to make them into some universal bigtime distro for this "the masses" guy. You can go right down the pike and look at so called debian based distros, frequently even those have enough of a difference to make this or that not work. Hundreds of guys all re inventing the same wheel, over and over again, said wheels not fitting on any car but their own. Fun for them, but it's not going to result in "linux on the desktop" this decade. And installation is a big part of that problem.
apples and oranges. No one wants to remove enthusiasts ways of doing things, but what they want to do is to take the concept of a linux desktop mainstream. Being able to deal with applications and installation is a prime concern. This is a good thing if you care about something like that. The two camps can still co exist splendidly. If someone wants to make "fred"s distro" that works completely different from everyone else, no probs, go right ahead, just they shouldn't expect it to become bigtime mainstream any time soon.
I applaud the autopackage guys and the LSB guys. That edges it much closer to a viable alternative for millions more people, they are way useful standardization schemes, long overdue.