I helped with a recycling facility design that would separate out the plastics from electronics waste ( yes, that actually occurs without going across the water also ). It can be done.
Electronics: Electronic Recycling generally involves precious metals along with Lead and Nickel. I learned years ago at Amateur Radio Swapmeets (Hamfests) that there is blast furnace in Rockford, IL that will burn your circuit boards down and provide you with an ingot of GOLD, Silver, and another with all of the rest of the metals that were in the circuit boards ( again, no shipping of goods across the water involved ).
Goodwill has always been a willing recipient of my junk computers and monitors. The PCs don't even need to work!
Picture tubes from TVs and Monitors are definitely a separate difficult case though. - I cannot address this myself at this time.
I expect that much of this should go away shortly from the manufacturer's level due to most large and especially multi-national manufacturers having internal committees in-place for probably at least 10years that help ensure that their products and methods don't pollute the landfills as they want to live here also.
Tax It? We presently have a deposit on Soda and Alcohol containers in Iowa. Years ago, this deposit was really an incentive for people to return the bottles as they were so expensive to make. However, it has now turned into a container tax. Perhaps we now need deposits on Milk Jugs, Cereal Boxes, Cans, Glass Jugs, any Plastic Containers, and even plastic bags also? - not.
I recommend that our communities and businesses develop recycling plans to reduce the amount of recycleables that end-up in the land-fills in general rather than considering new ways of taxing this relatively budding industry - Scrap metal was at a premium up until last summer when the economy tanked.
I wrote a 12 page Meeting Report in Open Office in.doc format in February which was mostly text with two graphics inserts. However, at 20mb, the document was too large to email to others on my team and the graphics were about like dots when opened in MSOffice. I recreated the document in MSWord with only a 500kb footprint. Granted with.odf files, OO's file interchangeability with MSOffice should be better.
I found reasonably large tables to crash earlier versions of Open Office (4 years ago). Our team had to switch to MSWord just to use that.
It just seems like someone didn't test these features when developing that part of the project. I can only hope that Open Office 3.0 corrects a few of these issues.
My XP slowed to a crawl and seem to loose almost all but major functionality when WinZip copied about 20k files to XP's desktop. It was like it had a virus.
It took some time to hunt down what the actual culprit was. Then it took hours to delete those files. Once deleted, it worked normally again.
Scanner support on Linux has been the one thing that I've found to be elusive.
This past summer, I called a few of the major scanner companies such as Visioneer, Mustek, and I believe one or two others asking if anyone marketed a scanner that had linux drivers ( I wasn't asking about scanning software as I was planning to use the GIMP ).
Nobody made a scanner that had linux support 'out of the box' at any price.
The support people that I talked to appeared to have a disconnect with the driver realm also such that I speculated that a third party may have wrote their windows drivers.
The general public should be informed about this new economic market segment.
A local control automation panel manufacturer here in Cedar Falls, IA who works with regional recycling centers nationwide described to me that many of the systems have a conveyor that in the case of computer monitors feeds the monitors into a 'crusher' which breaks it into small pieces.
These pieces are then mechanically and automatically separated into plastic, glass, and electronics bins each of which are then sold. The state of California has a good general information website about recycling plastic here.
The Control Panel Manufacturer also described how recycling centers alternatively have people take the plastic off first before it gets fed into the conveyor depending on their respective equipment and capabilities.
Regarding the electronics:
With gold ~$600/ounce, silver at ~$13.00/ounce, and copper at ~3.40/pound it's more economical to recycle these metals than to mine new.
Some additional recycled plastics prices:
12-27 cents per pound on the west coast.
Market prices for recycled plastic are currently $200 to $1000/ton from local recycling centers based on recent surveys in selected regions...
FWIIW, my firefox 1.5.0.4 still crashes in updated Fedora Core 5 OS everytime that I load it up with a few too many tabs or whenever it feels like it ( i.e. If I do something like interrupt an operation such as stopping a heavilyladen pdf from displaying.
BTW, I don't have this issue in WinXP using 1.5.0.6... (The linux distro at 1.5.0.4 was recently updated also ).
I'd expect the community to start advocating unit testing, an agile development practice, at some point to increase the reliabilty of code before it is even merged into the nightly builds.
I realize that this is not the same as testing the entire package on dissimilar hardware like he is doing here; For instance, there are bound to be a few issues when developers of code and its underlying code base both submit updates the same evening. IMHO, it'd especially help new developers if there existed unit tests distributed with the source packages allowing the developers to test to ensure that they aren't breaking anything else with their new/revised code.
In any case, if this is a start, its a nice start, and it means that linux is going to get a LOT easier to compile and install for people from my perspective...
The one thing that I wouldn't dare get on-board is video. If you have on-board video, the manufacturer usually leaves off the AGP Slot or other appropriate Connector that allows you to install in a decent high-end graphics card. Historically these boards are also notoriously difficult to disable the on-board video on. These types of MBs appear to be destined for terminal work (...rather not high-end graphics, gaming, or CAD work ).
I just purchased a socket 775 PCI Express MB with the 915 chipset. It only has 3 PCI slots with 2 PCI express slots. However, about the only thing that it doesn't have is on-board video.
I plan to use the onboard ethernet, perhaps audio, and such.
"But YOU try motivate someone to hack on a sewerage management system in their spare time."
I get the impression that government doesn't want to compete with private enterprise in this arena. For instance, I believe that it was a Linux User Group meeting in Des Moines about 2 years ago where a person employed by the State of Iowa developing software for the state described their policy as 'not to release it into the public domain' so as not to compete with private enterprise. This was considered pro free-nterprise.
Your best funding to software in this field may be for lobbying government and/or government developers to release appropriate government developed software to the public domain. You might find an immense amount of software in this area if that succeeded.
My parents (They are grandparents) live in Dimock, South Dakota a little town of ~150 people 25 miles south of Mitchell, South Dakota (not a whole lot larger population wise at ~10,000 or so... Mitchell is the home of the Corn Palace.).
Their telephone company, Santel ( http://www.santel.net/ ), out of Woonsocket, South Dakota just installed this type of system for them this last summer.
My folks get everything over their telephone line, TV, Broadband Internet, and Telephone. When their phone rings, the telephone # shows up on the TV Set. Additionally, they have 3 TVs that can all get separate channels. Its pretty sweet.
Based on what I've seen in small communities like this, its the larger cities that probably need updating...I live in Cedar Falls, IA, and haven't seen anything that comes even close to that technology around here....don't get me wrong, it may be in some communities around here, but I haven't seen it.
1. Probably to take advantage Gaim's large user base. 2. Probably for the hetrogeneous environments that Gaim works with.
Gaim runs on both Windows and Linux (and probably others if you're inspired to compile it on that particular OS). Additionally, it works with most chat accounts such as Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, MSN, as well as others making it extremely versatile and therefore able to bridge "borders" that other clients cannot; therefore leading to a greater diversity of friends.
1. What open source community initiatives do you think are desirable/necessary to make Linux appeal more to 1st time computer users/buyers and also to 'shorten the learning curve' for these people in-terms of desktop help, application-driver integration, etc.
2. I've noticed that linux/unix software that is or was sold (before becoming open-source or free) generally is easier to install and configure probably because the company wished to keep support costs low.
Additionally, 1st-time users don't care about the underlying OS and software, they just want to get their work done. For instance, I haven't run-across a GUI interface for setting up LDAP yet(Its just an example of many apps are typically setup manually or via scripting). It just seems like a GUI desktop version of www.tldp.org combined with applicable man-pages is in-order.... something like a Unix Expert System. For those of us who enjoy 'tinkering' and customizing manually is great, however, what initiatives would help that 'lowest common denomiator' or newbie.
...Perhaps an automatic tarball package expander/installer that parses the respective configuration file for application/library dependencies, similar to Debian's apt-get packager, (only for tarballs) and installs/verifies them as well?...providing reasonable automated assistance in the process as needed?
3a. According to your research in the original post, OS Research was pretty much dead before Windows. I would then take Windows to be a paradigm shift in the OS world. Do you see any other paradigms on the horizon that can/will change OSs? For instance, neural-learning algorithms that make users more productive, recommending breaks and/or alerting them to tasks and alternative methods, providing file/application links based on the user's current tasks similar to a 'virtual assistant/secretary'(analogous to the Linux Expert System)?
3b. How about integrating speech recognition (Similar to IBM's implementation on OS/2), and/or hand-writing recognition into the kernel for broadened appeal and useage of the OS and its applications?
4. How much more 'critical mass' (in terms of # of PCs running Linux) does the open source community need to entice mainstream manufacturers into providing better driver support for new products?
Actually, I think that is why they've been settling for $3,000 on average. It'll take a minimum of $2500 just to get a lawyer into court for you these days. $3.000 is basically a pricepoint at which an accused person can cap their losses without anymore time/expense aggravation.
A few weeks back, I recommended to one Gateway Salesman that they create a wall of flat screen monitors in their store. I figured that it'd help sell their flat-screen Monitors and foster interest in larger more powerful upscale PCs and PC systems for Multimedia and home theatre.
The salesman didn't think that the typical customer profile would be interested in it enough to justify setting it up though.
Marketing, it's all how you view your customer base.
Bear Refining in Rockford, IL melts circuit boards down into the rare metals that they are made of. In fact, there are people who used to attend Hamfests(Amateur Radio Swapmeets http://www.arrl.org/hamfests.html... http://www.arrl.org) who would pay for old circuit boards due to the amount of gold in them.
It takes a fair amount of circuit boards to make it economical, however, corporations could easily reduce landfills and get paid for the circuit boards if they reclaimed these metals this way. Common metals recovered include GOLD, SILVER, and LEAD as well as others. It's more profitable than going through the trouble of mining for these metals.
I agree that the question at hand is individual privacy.
In that respect, I think that the real question here is why does your employer need that information? Is it critical to performing your job? If not, they shouldn't have access to it.
I found a nixie tube multimeter in a government surplus pallet that I purchased last year. I remembered the nixie tubes from a calculater in our math room from high school and also from some of the frequency counters we used in college.
I took it out and plugged it in. It didn't work. I then got curious and took it apart to find a fuse blown. I replaced it and it lit up like a brand new multimeter.
There is something about the 3-Dimensionality of it. The numbers that it comes up with literally jump out at you or jump away from you. It's soo cool...even if its got a beige plastic case.
Unfortunately people at work didn't share my admiration for it(Something about being out of date). I had to take home here where it commands a distinguished place on my bookshelf.
In the early to mid 90s TCI dropped MTV and possibly a couple of other channels to Cedar Falls, IA. If I recall correctly, some people decided that broke TCI's contract with the city and decided to start a Cable TV Commission. To this end the City put a bond issue on the ballot that passed thereby bringing the Cable TV Commission to reality.
Cedar Falls, IA has a Municipal Electrical Company. The utility here was already familiar with fiber optics with their local generating plant. They also already owned telephone poles to hang the cable on because of the municipal power company. The Cable TV Commission was responsible for building a fiber optic network between all government buildings including the library, hospitals, police, and fire stations. In addition, it was responsible for supplying cable TV to the City.
Approximately 1 year after Cable TV was installed the city was demonstrating Cable Modems to the citizens. I believe that this was in 1995 or 1996. We had cable modem service in this town about 3-4 years before TCI/AT&T brought it to either Waterloo or Cedar Falls. A friend ran his internet company using the city's business cable modem service for several years before it outgrew his house. AT&T also dropped their cable modem prices in this market to compete.
I understand that several other area towns have now installed their own Cable TV & Cable Modem systems.
You're right about the ATV, Nick. Kenwood offers a readymade total solution for what he is describing with the THD-7AG Handheld and the VC-1 accompanying Camera or equivalent.
I was at one of Kenwood's seminars at the Dayton, OH Hamfest 2 years ago. Kenwood described at that seminar how a person could automatically send pictures from this unit to a website(Basically what this inquiring person is asking about). The legalities are okay since it would be a ham sending it and the communications would be one way(It would be illegal for non-hams to send send anything back to this unit via the web without directly involving a ham...he would need to get a Ham-Radio license if he doesn't have one now is all).
Kenwood's URL for this unit is:
http://www.kenwood.net/products/index.cfm?AMA=op en &ama_hheld=open&radio=TH-D7AG&selection=Amateur&ID =80
The URL for the Accompanying Kenwood VC-1 is: http://www.kenwood.net/products/index.cfm?AMA=open &ama_hheld=open&radio=VC-H1&selection=Amateur&ID=5 1
Slashdot Mirror
Good Point!
I helped with a recycling facility design that would separate out the plastics from electronics waste ( yes, that actually occurs without going across the water also ). It can be done.
Electronics:
Electronic Recycling generally involves precious metals along with Lead and Nickel. I learned years ago at Amateur Radio Swapmeets (Hamfests) that there is blast furnace in Rockford, IL that will burn your circuit boards down and provide you with an ingot of GOLD, Silver, and another with all of the rest of the metals that were in the circuit boards ( again, no shipping of goods across the water involved ).
Goodwill has always been a willing recipient of my junk computers and monitors. The PCs don't even need to work!
Picture tubes from TVs and Monitors are definitely a separate difficult case though. - I cannot address this myself at this time.
I expect that much of this should go away shortly from the manufacturer's level due to most large and especially multi-national manufacturers having internal committees in-place for probably at least 10years that help ensure that their products and methods don't pollute the landfills as they want to live here also.
Tax It?
We presently have a deposit on Soda and Alcohol containers in Iowa. Years ago, this deposit was really an incentive for people to return the bottles as they were so expensive to make. However, it has now turned into a container tax. Perhaps we now need deposits on Milk Jugs, Cereal Boxes, Cans, Glass Jugs, any Plastic Containers, and even plastic bags also? - not.
I recommend that our communities and businesses develop recycling plans to reduce the amount of recycleables that end-up in the land-fills in general rather than considering new ways of taxing this relatively budding industry - Scrap metal was at a premium up until last summer when the economy tanked.
I agree with #3.
I wrote a 12 page Meeting Report in Open Office in .doc format in February which was mostly text with two graphics inserts. However, at 20mb, the document was too large to email to others on my team and the graphics were about like dots when opened in MSOffice. I recreated the document in MSWord with only a 500kb footprint. Granted with .odf files, OO's file interchangeability with MSOffice should be better.
I found reasonably large tables to crash earlier versions of Open Office (4 years ago). Our team had to switch to MSWord just to use that.
It just seems like someone didn't test these features when developing that part of the project.
I can only hope that Open Office 3.0 corrects a few of these issues.
My XP slowed to a crawl and seem to loose almost all but major functionality when WinZip copied about 20k files to XP's desktop. It was like it had a virus.
It took some time to hunt down what the actual culprit was. Then it took hours to delete those files. Once deleted, it worked normally again.
Scanner support on Linux has been the one thing that I've found to be elusive.
This past summer, I called a few of the major scanner companies such as Visioneer, Mustek, and I believe one or two others asking if anyone marketed a scanner that had linux drivers ( I wasn't asking about scanning software as I was planning to use the GIMP ).
Nobody made a scanner that had linux support 'out of the box' at any price.
The support people that I talked to appeared to have a disconnect with the driver realm also such that I speculated that a third party may have wrote their windows drivers.
Circuit Boards:
Integrated Circuit Recycling from Finished Product Printed Circuit Boards
PCs Don't Die--They Become Road Fill
What to do with your printed circuit boards?
USNavy: PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD RECYCLING
Printed Circuit Board Recycling Equipment
CRT Glass:
Cascade's CRT Glass-to-Glass Recycling Program
EPA: Glass-to-Glass Recycling
WRAP identifies four potential markets for television glass (26.01.04)
Cathode ray tube glass recycling: an example of clean technology, mostly in Italian usage in ceramic tiles.
The general public should be informed about this new economic market segment.
A local control automation panel manufacturer here in Cedar Falls, IA who works with regional recycling centers nationwide described to me that many of the systems have a conveyor that in the case of computer monitors feeds the monitors into a 'crusher' which breaks it into small pieces.
These pieces are then mechanically and automatically separated into plastic, glass, and electronics bins each of which are then sold. The state of California has a good general information website about recycling plastic here .
The Control Panel Manufacturer also described how recycling centers alternatively have people take the plastic off first before it gets fed into the conveyor depending on their respective equipment and capabilities.
Regarding the electronics:
With gold ~$600/ounce, silver at ~$13.00/ounce, and copper at ~3.40/pound it's more economical to recycle these metals than to mine new.
Some additional recycled plastics prices:
12-27 cents per pound on the west coast.
Market prices for recycled plastic are currently $200 to $1000/ton from local recycling centers based on recent surveys in selected regions...
I run Firefox on WinXP & Fedora Core 5:
... (The linux distro at 1.5.0.4 was recently updated also ).
FWIIW, my firefox 1.5.0.4 still crashes in updated Fedora Core 5 OS everytime that I load it up with a few too many tabs or whenever it feels like it ( i.e. If I do something like interrupt an operation such as stopping a heavilyladen pdf from displaying.
BTW, I don't have this issue in WinXP using 1.5.0.6
So, are there plans to integrate CinePaint and Gimp back into one program again, perhaps using Gegl libraries, at some point in the future?
I realize that this is not the same as testing the entire package on dissimilar hardware like he is doing here; For instance, there are bound to be a few issues when developers of code and its underlying code base both submit updates the same evening. IMHO, it'd especially help new developers if there existed unit tests distributed with the source packages allowing the developers to test to ensure that they aren't breaking anything else with their new/revised code.
In any case, if this is a start, its a nice start, and it means that linux is going to get a LOT easier to compile and install for people from my perspective...
I just purchased a socket 775 PCI Express MB with the 915 chipset. It only has 3 PCI slots with 2 PCI express slots. However, about the only thing that it doesn't have is on-board video.
I plan to use the onboard ethernet, perhaps audio, and such.
While Tom's Hardware Guide has a comparison chart: http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20020422/c hipset-01.html
it appears to be somewhat dated.
"But YOU try motivate someone to hack on a sewerage management system in their spare time."
I get the impression that government doesn't want to compete with private enterprise in this arena. For instance, I believe that it was a Linux User Group meeting in Des Moines about 2 years ago where a person employed by the State of Iowa developing software for the state described their policy as 'not to release it into the public domain' so as not to compete with private enterprise. This was considered pro free-nterprise.
Your best funding to software in this field may be for lobbying government and/or government developers to release appropriate government developed software to the public domain. You might find an immense amount of software in this area if that succeeded.
My parents (They are grandparents) live in Dimock, South Dakota a little town of ~150 people 25 miles south of Mitchell, South Dakota (not a whole lot larger population wise at ~10,000 or so ... Mitchell is the home of the Corn Palace.).
Their telephone company, Santel ( http://www.santel.net/ ), out of Woonsocket, South Dakota just installed this type of system for them this last summer.
My folks get everything over their telephone line, TV, Broadband Internet, and Telephone. When their phone rings, the telephone # shows up on the TV Set. Additionally, they have 3 TVs that can all get separate channels. Its pretty sweet.
Based on what I've seen in small communities like this, its the larger cities that probably need updating...I live in Cedar Falls, IA, and haven't seen anything that comes even close to that technology around here....don't get me wrong, it may be in some communities around here, but I haven't seen it.
1. Probably to take advantage Gaim's large user base.
2. Probably for the hetrogeneous environments that Gaim works with.
Gaim runs on both Windows and Linux (and probably others if you're inspired to compile it on that particular OS). Additionally, it works with most chat accounts such as Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, MSN, as well as others making it extremely versatile and therefore able to bridge "borders" that other clients cannot; therefore leading to a greater diversity of friends.
2. I've noticed that linux/unix software that is or was sold (before becoming open-source or free) generally is easier to install and configure probably because the company wished to keep support costs low. Additionally, 1st-time users don't care about the underlying OS and software, they just want to get their work done. For instance, I haven't run-across a GUI interface for setting up LDAP yet(Its just an example of many apps are typically setup manually or via scripting). It just seems like a GUI desktop version of www.tldp.org combined with applicable man-pages is in-order. ... something like a Unix Expert System. For those of us who enjoy 'tinkering' and customizing manually is great, however, what initiatives would help that 'lowest common denomiator' or newbie.
3a. According to your research in the original post, OS Research was pretty much dead before Windows. I would then take Windows to be a paradigm shift in the OS world. Do you see any other paradigms on the horizon that can/will change OSs? For instance, neural-learning algorithms that make users more productive, recommending breaks and/or alerting them to tasks and alternative methods, providing file/application links based on the user's current tasks similar to a 'virtual assistant/secretary'(analogous to the Linux Expert System)?
3b. How about integrating speech recognition (Similar to IBM's implementation on OS/2), and/or hand-writing recognition into the kernel for broadened appeal and useage of the OS and its applications?
4. How much more 'critical mass' (in terms of # of PCs running Linux) does the open source community need to entice mainstream manufacturers into providing better driver support for new products?
http://timschoenfelder.com/htpc.htmltimschoenfelde r.com/htpc.html
Its a collection of links to howtos, forums, and software(windows/linux/xbox/etc OSs) for anyone interested in building a home theatre PC.
http://www.exoticwoodcrafts.com/
Actually, I think that is why they've been settling for $3,000 on average. It'll take a minimum of $2500 just to get a lawyer into court for you these days. $3.000 is basically a pricepoint at which an accused person can cap their losses without anymore time/expense aggravation.
Anyone who cares this much about the company's product should be given serious consideration for employment.
Microsoft should hire him...
This person's publically available patent information is then provided for the public good to facilitate technological innovation in our country.
( Allows others to learn about that technology ).
The salesman didn't think that the typical customer profile would be interested in it enough to justify setting it up though.
Marketing, it's all how you view your customer base.
It takes a fair amount of circuit boards to make it economical, however, corporations could easily reduce landfills and get paid for the circuit boards if they reclaimed these metals this way. Common metals recovered include GOLD, SILVER, and LEAD as well as others. It's more profitable than going through the trouble of mining for these metals.
I agree that the question at hand is individual privacy.
In that respect, I think that the real question here is why does your employer need that information? Is it critical to performing your job? If not, they shouldn't have access to it.
I found a nixie tube multimeter in a government surplus pallet that I purchased last year. I remembered the nixie tubes from a calculater in our math room from high school and also from some of the frequency counters we used in college.
I took it out and plugged it in. It didn't work. I then got curious and took it apart to find a fuse blown. I replaced it and it lit up like a brand new multimeter.
There is something about the 3-Dimensionality of it. The numbers that it comes up with literally jump out at you or jump away from you. It's soo cool...even if its got a beige plastic case.
Unfortunately people at work didn't share my admiration for it(Something about being out of date). I had to take home here where it commands a distinguished place on my bookshelf.
Cedar Falls, IA has a Municipal Electrical Company. The utility here was already familiar with fiber optics with their local generating plant. They also already owned telephone poles to hang the cable on because of the municipal power company. The Cable TV Commission was responsible for building a fiber optic network between all government buildings including the library, hospitals, police, and fire stations. In addition, it was responsible for supplying cable TV to the City.
Approximately 1 year after Cable TV was installed the city was demonstrating Cable Modems to the citizens. I believe that this was in 1995 or 1996. We had cable modem service in this town about 3-4 years before TCI/AT&T brought it to either Waterloo or Cedar Falls. A friend ran his internet company using the city's business cable modem service for several years before it outgrew his house. AT&T also dropped their cable modem prices in this market to compete.
I understand that several other area towns have now installed their own Cable TV & Cable Modem systems.
You're right about the ATV, Nick. Kenwood offers a readymade total solution for what he is describing with the THD-7AG Handheld and the VC-1 accompanying Camera or equivalent.
p en &ama_hheld=open&radio=TH-D7AG&selection=Amateur&ID =80
n &ama_hheld=open&radio=VC-H1&selection=Amateur&ID=5 1
I was at one of Kenwood's seminars at the Dayton, OH Hamfest 2 years ago. Kenwood described at that seminar how a person could automatically send pictures from this unit to a website(Basically what this inquiring person is asking about). The legalities are okay since it would be a ham sending it and the communications would be one way(It would be illegal for non-hams to send send anything back to this unit via the web without directly involving a ham...he would need to get a Ham-Radio license if he doesn't have one now is all).
Kenwood's URL for this unit is:
http://www.kenwood.net/products/index.cfm?AMA=o
The URL for the Accompanying Kenwood VC-1 is: http://www.kenwood.net/products/index.cfm?AMA=ope