Lol, no offense meant....I'm in rural Tennessee, half a mile from the paved road, 34 miles from a town larger than 10000, and just got cable broadband this month. Wootah!
Its the interstate highway or rural electrification of the 21st century. Delivering 10Mbs or greater broadband to every residence or town no matter how poor or remote should be the governments primary domestic project.
Why outsource to India if you can outsource to Arkansas?
Seriously you can get cheap $$ per square foot space, lower cost of labor and a higher quality of life in rural or pre-industrial states. A $80K per year job lives like a King in Arkansas while it only gets by in LA, Atlanta or NY.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Solaris full of copyrighted, licensed SysV code? Solaris is also a SCO License holder. How on earth could Sun even attempt to OpenSource it?
Hmmm. The lynksys gateway devices have a 200Mhz MIPS cpu, some memory and sell for under $80US. Figure out a way to add a display and some storage for $20US and you are set.
Slashdot'ers know the concept of a honeypot. Put out a choice target and wait for an attacker, who is difficult or impossible to locate, to come to you. Iraq is a honeypot. They are not reporting the casualty stats, but they are in the 200-300:1 range.
Iraq was chosen because it was the most convenient nation in the middle east to drop a military force into.
"Big Brother" Blunkett. Once his "agenda" is in place, elections will no longer matter in G.B. Every political person will be under the thumb and control of the groups managing the surveillance state. Step of of line and oops....the PMs DNA suddenly appears on a murder victim. Etc. etc.
"We had that kind of houses for YEARS in europe, at least in germany."
My mom lives in Germany. I have seen the result of "years" of green housing....very very high prices for very little space with long waiting lists an nasty pollution.
Again, the G8 are consumer driven economies that are organized to support the mass industrial production of Stuff to be consumed. All the "green" houses, cars and whatnot don't change that as they all require the same environmentally damaging industrial infrastructure to operate.
Even if the entire world shifted to a "green" economy based on knowledge work..the production of one computer is the result of a massively damaging chain of industrial production. In fact/. had a story a year or so ago documenting the environmental costs of computer production.
What a joke. The greatest agent of environment destruction is the concentration of the population in unsustainable urban areas. (I unclude suburban sprawl in this) Urban areas are by definition consumers of resources at a ravenous pace with almost zero return to the environment.
Second, the environmental cost of producing the components of the "green" house has to be taken into account. It may be greater than the house will ever return. The same goes for cars. The industrial infrastructure to produce cars is worse than the cars themselves. On those lines a hybrid/hydrogen vehicle is just as damaging as a gasoline vehicle.
If you want to save the environment, MOVE OUT OF CITIES AND STOP BEING A CONSUMER!
The "middle class" fears disorder more than injustice. Injustice implies limited, correctable imbalances. Disorder implies no rules at all.
So it stands to reason that the middle class would gladly give up thier rights (injustice) in the vain attempt to protect themselves from crime (disorder).
" but why exactly is it the Governments responsiblity to get you the internet service you desire ?"
Quite simply the internet is a strategic resource and competitive advantige similar to the national highway system.
Strategically, the lack of uniform broadband access relegates rural backwaters within the nation to a future of remaining a rural backwater while jobs that could be located there outsource overseas to thirdworld backwaters that have uniform broadband.
Economically, it limits the delivery potential of business to their audiences. No online movies, broadcasts, etc. Uniform broadband would lower the cost of opening a branch in a remote location to teh point that it might be feasible for small operations to locate beyond the urban metroplexes and breaking Walmart's hold on smalltown USA.
Both of the facts, combined with the fact that the internet is a shared national/world resource that should be availale to every citizen make access a government priority.
It would certainly be a more worthwhile use of government cheese than most of the existing useless programs.
'Ultimately, as population grows and greed runs rampant, the commons collapses and ends in "the tragedy of the commons"' (Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243, 1968).
That is what will happen to OSS as more and more commercial companies build mechanisms to profit from the OSS work of others. Remember, that Sun or any other public company holds primary concern for the shareholders, not the "community".
Any system based on the good will and selflessness of others will be victim to the most ruthless member. Therefore the system will collapse. This is the primary flaw in most "peace" initiatives, and would be a flaw in the proposed new economic system. In this case the most ruthless corporation would rule.
Additionally, you have to take into account government. In the US, government consumes roughly 36% of the total economy. In European nations it consumes more. The workforce in these nations must be continually driven to work more, work harder, and work more efficiently to satisfy the monetary needs of the ruling elites. The new economic model would be crushed under this burden.
Finally, the new model is incompatible with 90% of the worlds pre-industrial societies and would not function at all unless the society had a solid foundation of rule of law, property rights, and a highly educated, liberal-humanist population.
100% Right on. MS should mail out patch CDs on a monthly basis to all registered users of MS products. Given the high prices of MS software, its only right that they do that. Today, I manually download patches at work and burn my own CD for my personal windows and linux at home. Its a pain, but my boxes are patched, and I have NIST/SANS security configurations applied before they ever get on the network.
Given that the majority of US consumer computers are still using dial up, expected them to take several days to download XP patches is insane. (Don't get me started on why Korea has 30Mb broadband and we don't).
Apple is a publicly held company. As such its mission to to return value to its shareholders. Size, marketshare, dominance over MS are irrelevent as long as the company achieves value for its share holders.
Apple at 2% of the PC market providing a 20% gain to its shareholders is a more successful company than a hypothetical one with 80% market share and only 10% return to customers. Thats a simplified example. There are lots of other variables to shareholder value, but the analogy holds.
In fact, shareholders don't care about Macs. If Apple were to be a better investment as a IPod/content distributor than a computer maker, then the shareholders would force the company that way.
PBS has free speach, but they do not own the medium through which they transmit that speach. Ergo, the owners of the resource have a say in how that resource is used. If PBS doesn't like it, then get their own transmission medium and target private subscribers.
With the advent of the internet NO ONE has any legs to stand on complaining about censorship. Speach is freer than ever before. PBS is just whining because the government is placing restrictions on state owned bandwidth. You may not reach as many ears and eyes as a national network, but anyone can say anything on the internet.
"Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal..."
I never realized that "accessable" and "vernacular" defined a novel. Amazing. As far as I can tell, oral stories, pictograms, comics, graphic novels, novels, poems, and other forms of storytelling have been around since the dawn of time.
I have been down this path. Past employers would pay for dedicated ISDN. Current would expense cable or DSL connectivity. Current now is starting to push back on expensing.
I will not guarantee that I will respond to email, phone calls, or any other form of contact during non-busines hours. I do not supply anything other than my home phone number.
The company can pay for the company's connectivity to me. There are plenty of employers and only one of me.
The first Matrix was great and I own it on DVD. The second was so bad that I never got the DVD and never even bother to see the 3rd installment in the theater.
Current: Ford F150 5.4L V8, I average 19mpg with a heavy focus on highway driving and light emphasis on difficult offroad or towing duties (live in a very rural area). It does OK and beats the sticker mpg mpg by 2.
Towing heavy loads in the 5000-7000lb range, mpg drops to roughly 10mpg which is bad. My next truck will have to be a diesel.
Ironically, my car in highschool and college was a 1.8L Diesel VW Rabbit with extended fuel tank. It averaged 60mpg and with the extra fuel tank I could fill it up at the start of summer and not need to refill to school started in the fall. Fuel economy has been solved way back in the day, sadly no one in the US wants diesels.
MS, IBM, HP, and a few others are probably the ONLY companies capable of creating a sustainable, profitable business out of open source.
Imagine this, MS Linux. OSS Linux with full OSS GNU toolsets combined with MS proprietary toolsets, full Win32/64 compatibility and backed by a worldwide support and prof. services team for a contract fee roughly equal to what MS gets for Windows/Office from businesses today. Or, substitute IBM for MS. Both work.
The logic is the companies are not selling software per se; they are selling services that include software. With a judicious use of OSS and proprietary code, they could easily dominate the market while at the same time sponging off all of the free R&D taking place in the OSS world. Once a developer releases GPL code they cannot stop these giants from using it.
The current software model is dead, although it may take a while to shake all the fleas out. Open Source is attracting development of most of the new, cool technologies.
On the user side, once they get a taste OSS and the ease (and low cost) with which software can be updated, replaces, and the speed with which tools can be found (although the sheer volume of code releases can be daunting), they won't want to go back.
Slashdot Mirror
Lol, no offense meant....I'm in rural Tennessee, half a mile from the paved road, 34 miles from a town larger than 10000, and just got cable broadband this month. Wootah!
Its the interstate highway or rural electrification of the 21st century. Delivering 10Mbs or greater broadband to every residence or town no matter how poor or remote should be the governments primary domestic project.
Why outsource to India if you can outsource to Arkansas?
Seriously you can get cheap $$ per square foot space, lower cost of labor and a higher quality of life in rural or pre-industrial states. A $80K per year job lives like a King in Arkansas while it only gets by in LA, Atlanta or NY.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Solaris full of copyrighted, licensed SysV code? Solaris is also a SCO License holder. How on earth could Sun even attempt to OpenSource it?
Agree. Sun is starting its slide into oblivion.
Hmmm. The lynksys gateway devices have a 200Mhz MIPS cpu, some memory and sell for under $80US. Figure out a way to add a display and some storage for $20US and you are set.
Slashdot'ers know the concept of a honeypot. Put out a choice target and wait for an attacker, who is difficult or impossible to locate, to come to you. Iraq is a honeypot. They are not reporting the casualty stats, but they are in the 200-300:1 range.
Iraq was chosen because it was the most convenient nation in the middle east to drop a military force into.
"Big Brother" Blunkett. Once his "agenda" is in place, elections will no longer matter in G.B. Every political person will be under the thumb and control of the groups managing the surveillance state. Step of of line and oops....the PMs DNA suddenly appears on a murder victim. Etc. etc.
It will make a GREAT novel.
"We had that kind of houses for YEARS in europe, at least in germany." My mom lives in Germany. I have seen the result of "years" of green housing....very very high prices for very little space with long waiting lists an nasty pollution. Again, the G8 are consumer driven economies that are organized to support the mass industrial production of Stuff to be consumed. All the "green" houses, cars and whatnot don't change that as they all require the same environmentally damaging industrial infrastructure to operate. Even if the entire world shifted to a "green" economy based on knowledge work..the production of one computer is the result of a massively damaging chain of industrial production. In fact /. had a story a year or so ago documenting the environmental costs of computer production.
"The greenest house in Portland"
What a joke. The greatest agent of environment destruction is the concentration of the population in unsustainable urban areas. (I unclude suburban sprawl in this) Urban areas are by definition consumers of resources at a ravenous pace with almost zero return to the environment.
Second, the environmental cost of producing the components of the "green" house has to be taken into account. It may be greater than the house will ever return. The same goes for cars. The industrial infrastructure to produce cars is worse than the cars themselves. On those lines a hybrid/hydrogen vehicle is just as damaging as a gasoline vehicle.
If you want to save the environment, MOVE OUT OF CITIES AND STOP BEING A CONSUMER!
The "middle class" fears disorder more than injustice. Injustice implies limited, correctable imbalances. Disorder implies no rules at all.
So it stands to reason that the middle class would gladly give up thier rights (injustice) in the vain attempt to protect themselves from crime (disorder).
" but why exactly is it the Governments responsiblity to get you the internet service you desire ?"
Quite simply the internet is a strategic resource and competitive advantige similar to the national highway system.
Strategically, the lack of uniform broadband access relegates rural backwaters within the nation to a future of remaining a rural backwater while jobs that could be located there outsource overseas to thirdworld backwaters that have uniform broadband.
Economically, it limits the delivery potential of business to their audiences. No online movies, broadcasts, etc. Uniform broadband would lower the cost of opening a branch in a remote location to teh point that it might be feasible for small operations to locate beyond the urban metroplexes and breaking Walmart's hold on smalltown USA.
Both of the facts, combined with the fact that the internet is a shared national/world resource that should be availale to every citizen make access a government priority.
It would certainly be a more worthwhile use of government cheese than most of the existing useless programs.
'Ultimately, as population grows and greed runs rampant, the commons collapses and ends in "the tragedy of the commons"' (Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243, 1968).
That is what will happen to OSS as more and more commercial companies build mechanisms to profit from the OSS work of others. Remember, that Sun or any other public company holds primary concern for the shareholders, not the "community".
Statistically, US Republican and Democrat policies differ by roughly 5% across the board. There is little or no difference in electing either pary.
If both parties are functionally the same, how can any differences in brain organization incline an individual to one or the other party?
Any system based on the good will and selflessness of others will be victim to the most ruthless member. Therefore the system will collapse. This is the primary flaw in most "peace" initiatives, and would be a flaw in the proposed new economic system. In this case the most ruthless corporation would rule.
Additionally, you have to take into account government. In the US, government consumes roughly 36% of the total economy. In European nations it consumes more. The workforce in these nations must be continually driven to work more, work harder, and work more efficiently to satisfy the monetary needs of the ruling elites. The new economic model would be crushed under this burden.
Finally, the new model is incompatible with 90% of the worlds pre-industrial societies and would not function at all unless the society had a solid foundation of rule of law, property rights, and a highly educated, liberal-humanist population.
100% Right on. MS should mail out patch CDs on a monthly basis to all registered users of MS products. Given the high prices of MS software, its only right that they do that. Today, I manually download patches at work and burn my own CD for my personal windows and linux at home. Its a pain, but my boxes are patched, and I have NIST/SANS security configurations applied before they ever get on the network.
Given that the majority of US consumer computers are still using dial up, expected them to take several days to download XP patches is insane. (Don't get me started on why Korea has 30Mb broadband and we don't).
Apple is a publicly held company. As such its mission to to return value to its shareholders. Size, marketshare, dominance over MS are irrelevent as long as the company achieves value for its share holders.
Apple at 2% of the PC market providing a 20% gain to its shareholders is a more successful company than a hypothetical one with 80% market share and only 10% return to customers. Thats a simplified example. There are lots of other variables to shareholder value, but the analogy holds.
In fact, shareholders don't care about Macs. If Apple were to be a better investment as a IPod/content distributor than a computer maker, then the shareholders would force the company that way.
It won't make any difference for Sun. They're finished and heading down the SGI path.
"what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors, "
Aquired traits are not passed down genetically through evolution.
PBS has free speach, but they do not own the medium through which they transmit that speach. Ergo, the owners of the resource have a say in how that resource is used. If PBS doesn't like it, then get their own transmission medium and target private subscribers.
With the advent of the internet NO ONE has any legs to stand on complaining about censorship. Speach is freer than ever before. PBS is just whining because the government is placing restrictions on state owned bandwidth. You may not reach as many ears and eyes as a national network, but anyone can say anything on the internet.
"Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal ..."
I never realized that "accessable" and "vernacular" defined a novel. Amazing. As far as I can tell, oral stories, pictograms, comics, graphic novels, novels, poems, and other forms of storytelling have been around since the dawn of time.
I have been down this path. Past employers would pay for dedicated ISDN. Current would expense cable or DSL connectivity. Current now is starting to push back on expensing.
I will not guarantee that I will respond to email, phone calls, or any other form of contact during non-busines hours. I do not supply anything other than my home phone number.
The company can pay for the company's connectivity to me. There are plenty of employers and only one of me.
The first Matrix was great and I own it on DVD. The second was so bad that I never got the DVD and never even bother to see the 3rd installment in the theater.
Current: Ford F150 5.4L V8, I average 19mpg with a heavy focus on highway driving and light emphasis on difficult offroad or towing duties (live in a very rural area). It does OK and beats the sticker mpg mpg by 2. Towing heavy loads in the 5000-7000lb range, mpg drops to roughly 10mpg which is bad. My next truck will have to be a diesel. Ironically, my car in highschool and college was a 1.8L Diesel VW Rabbit with extended fuel tank. It averaged 60mpg and with the extra fuel tank I could fill it up at the start of summer and not need to refill to school started in the fall. Fuel economy has been solved way back in the day, sadly no one in the US wants diesels.
MS, IBM, HP, and a few others are probably the ONLY companies capable of creating a sustainable, profitable business out of open source.
Imagine this, MS Linux. OSS Linux with full OSS GNU toolsets combined with MS proprietary toolsets, full Win32/64 compatibility and backed by a worldwide support and prof. services team for a contract fee roughly equal to what MS gets for Windows/Office from businesses today. Or, substitute IBM for MS. Both work.
The logic is the companies are not selling software per se; they are selling services that include software. With a judicious use of OSS and proprietary code, they could easily dominate the market while at the same time sponging off all of the free R&D taking place in the OSS world. Once a developer releases GPL code they cannot stop these giants from using it.
The current software model is dead, although it may take a while to shake all the fleas out. Open Source is attracting development of most of the new, cool technologies.
On the user side, once they get a taste OSS and the ease (and low cost) with which software can be updated, replaces, and the speed with which tools can be found (although the sheer volume of code releases can be daunting), they won't want to go back.