precision laser arrays? a coiling mechanism that condences water at a constant rate in a non-closed system? integrated motion sensors? this is a very slick piece of equipment, who's complexity is on par, at the very least, with an ultrasound machine or an xray machine. also, i imagine that this thing's resolution is more accurately measured in voxels, rather than pixels.
Where did you get that last? This is a 2D display. Period. It does NOT accept 3D information. Precision laser arrays? Try three lasers (RGB) with mirrors on very fast stepper motors for positioning. Integrated motion sensing is no big deal at all- we've had that for a while on the light projecting keyboards. Though they might be using ultrasound instead- the company I worked for back in 1996 had an ultrasonic chip tray cheap enough for a casino to put in every blackjack table, that would read the stack of chips and give you the value of the tray.
I suspect that this is truly a first foray into the home consumer market- and as such, the price should drop quickly.
Why would that be? It's not like this is a huge increase in resolution (it's only HDTV, barely). It's not like it's that big of a new thing- you could simulate the same thing with a lot more equipment with a flat panel monitor and a mirror.
The ideal cost of an object is the maximum each individual customer is willing to pay for it.
That was back before the Wal*Mart Effect took over. Now the ideal cost of an object is the maximum ALL individual customers are willing to pay for it- as long as the manufacturing costs are less than 60% of that. You can slide up to 80%, but unless the retailer can make a 20% profit they simply won't carry the item.
By not publicly setting a price one can "personalize" the price for each individual customer, maximizing profit while not turning away lower paying customers.
Which just insures that some third world nation will have a manufacturer that will poach your patent- and undersell you by thousands on the wholesale level.
Of course this only works when you can adequately segment your market, and make sure customers don't collude with each other. Sometimes, for big ticket items, contracts even specify that one can't release pricing or performance information. Whether they are enforcable is another matter...
If anybody ever tries to get me to sign such a contract, they will not only lose the sale- they'll find their pricing information all over the internet within 24 hours.
As opposed to a web form that when filled out, leads to a 503 error because this was posted on both Slashdot and Technocrat within the same 5 hour period, leading to signs of stress in their webserver.
It's that second one that will convince your boss- but it needs rewording. Plugging into the Dogbert Buzzword Generator for a second, try:
"I wish to maximize my productivity by leveraging the efforts of the Open Source Development Community, thus getting us development resources at no extra cost to the company."
The real question the Bush Admin seems to be missing isn't between an internet with a red light district and a clean interent- it's between an internet with a red light district and an internet where every third.com that pops up on a search for breast cancer on yahoo is a pornographic site.
26 plugs is just about right for a kid's bedroom if your kid is as geeky as most parents on slashdot become.
2 choices: Reliable (hardwired) or cheap (PLC)
on
Creating a Clever Home?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Reliable or cheap. That's your major choice here. If you want reliable, what you want is an extra run of CAT 5e to every outlet and switch in the house, so that you can choose from a variety of hardwired remote control switches. If you want cheap- you'll want to go with X10, A10, or one of it's variants, in which case you'll want 3-wire power to every switch, including ground, and while you're rewiring all the electric anyway you'll want to install a signal bridge in the switch panel, so that the electirical phases are linked.
For software, well, that depends on your favorite operating system and programming language: HAL or HomeSeer for Windows, Mr. House for Linux, all three of these choices have a variety of dynamic libraries that allow them to control most whole-house controllers.
I personally went cheap- but still ran out of money about $1200 into my system. So I've got PLC, in a house that doesn't have 3 wire to every outlet, with only the incandescents and only 2 flourescents actually computer controlled. I also never got my infrared breakout boxes done to control my A/V equipment- and PLC turned out to be rather non-secure in my neighborhood for controling garage door opener and the like (in that it would leave my garage door open and illegal immigrant meth adicts would steal from me in the middle of the night). So if you have the money, you're much better off with a hardwired system. And go for a discount wholesaler like http://www.worthdist.com/ as opposed to somebody like http://www.smarthouse.com/>.
The biggest factor is the bargaining power on all sides of the equation. This is why a union worker and a non-union worker doing the exact same thing are paid differently.
The majority of America has no real bargaining power- union or no union. If bargaining power is the majority of the value of money to you- you're sunk. The oligarchy sets the prices and if you don't follow that pricing structure, you will be put out of business one way or another.
We wanted a Windows device driver developer because we produce embedded medical imaging systems. Our systems have from two to ten specialized boards. One of our platforms uses WinXP Embedded. Thus the need. While I personally think the choice of Windows a very poor one for this application, the fact remains that we would have needed device drivers even if we had went with vxWorks, LynxOS, QNX, Linux or NetBSD.
And you do realize that if you just advertised for a good general purpose Windows Assembly Language Developer, it's not really that hard to transfer those skills to device driver writing, correct?
3 lumens is all anybody needs to do usefull work or read. When camping, I use a single LED flashlight to read.
Take a look at the history of factory productivity sometime- I think it was Henry Ford who sponsored the research, but that's what they discovered- no decrease in human productivity down to three lumens. HOWEVER- lighting a full area effectively with only three lumens is much harder.
Watch out - I've heard that this crazy term called gravity is based on junk science, too - you just might go flying off the end of the earth (which we all know is flat, right?) at any moment! Hang On!
The difference being that when I test gravity, by dropping say, a pencil on the floor, it always works. When I test the GDP by going down to my local department store and counting the items stamped "Made in China" vs the number of items claimed to be "Made in America", the GDP always loses out.
And don't go trying to throw non-production items like the Stock Market and Banking and Real Estate into the GDP- because we already know that none of that is any more than con artistry.
"deficit spending" and "trade deficit" are two completely different things. The first is how much the government spends over and above its receipts, and the second is the balance of trade. And we don't "create FAR less than we import". We (the US) exports much less than we import, hence the trade deficit.
No- we've actually swtiched in the last decade or so to creating far less (in real, physical goods) than we import. Most of the Made In America stuff is really just Chinese and Mexican parts assembled here because it's cheaper to ship small things than big things.
That's the result of NAFTA- and GATS- and it's about to get worse with CAFTA which basically forces our farmers to live on subsidies and market EVERYTHING at less than the cost of raising it.
Where you might be confused is the difference between GNP and GDP. GNP, which doesn't back out the trade deficit, used to be cited as the main indicator of economic growth, but was dropped in favor of GNP years and years ago.
No- you don't understand. Both are fake numbers based on junk science that has no bearing with what's really happening in small towns and medium sized cities all over America. A good example is the Comparative Advantage lie- thanks to America's main comparative advantage being that our dollars are the only thing OPEC used to accept for oil payments, we've been able to run up a good deal of both governmental and consumer debt for the last 40 years. We've used that money to pump up our GDP far in excess of what it REALLY is. But that comparative advantage really isn't OURS- it's Saudi Arabia's, it's Mexico's, it's Venezula's, it's Iraq's. It's a number built upon a lie. And as such, it has no validity whatsoever. At this point, our net is far different- enough different that basically the United States is consuming 8% more resources than it creates each and every year and has been doing that for far longer than you and I have been alive.
The real problem here is that you accept classical economics as a set of rules that are inviolate and true- and I don't. In fact, I'm to the point that I consider the whole thing to be a big lie- GDP doesn't take the trade deficit into account because if it did, it would be instantly obvious that the United States is no longer a manufacturing country. All we produce is natural resources, which we send elsewhere to be turned into product, which come back and are sold to the American public as "Made in America" even though not a single component in them was. As for the Balance of Trade- Ricardo was a liar paid for his opinion by big business. His entire concept of "comparative advantage" is complete bunk because it fails to take into account the difference in standard of living and regulation (probably because such differences between governments didn't exist in the 18th century). Wake up and smell the coffee- classical economics is a failure at controlling economic activity. It just allows more parasites to hurt more people.
Wow, the lack of basic economic understanding you've displayed here is astounding. Head off to school and learn about a few things like inflation [wikipedia.org], GDP [wikipedia.org], and Balance of Trade [wikipedia.org]. Pursuing the discussion here is a waste of time...
Wikipedia is a big part of the problem- it's just a shill for people with an agenda. If you redefine the language you can prove anything.
(hint: GDP does take the trade deficit into account)
If GDP took the real trade deficit into account, as opposed to the fake numbers usually put forth by the government- our 8% deficit spending over the last 40 years would now mean that our GDP would be negative, since we now create FAR less than we import. Since that is not the case- it's obvious that somebody is lying about the GDP.
I was kinda hoping you'd make that idiotic argument. Global per-capita GDP has grown 2.1% [wikipedia.org] annually from 1950-2003, which tells you right away that something more than a zero-sum game is at work.
Really? And where did they get the additional atoms for that GDP? GDP is as much a fake number as anything else- for instance the American GDP fails to take into account our trade deficit.
In a dynamic economy, of course the gap between rich and poor will increase.
Which should be a signal that dynamic economies will reduce freedom over the long term.
What we need are periodic updates to the social "safety net" (i.e. minimum wage levels, aid programs) so that the whole of society can benefit from the economy's gains.
All that does is increase inflation and end up decreasing the buying power for the poor. What you need to do is put in a MAXIMUM wage for the rich- and the numbers don't matter, because the increasing gap is what causes inflation. The minimum wage could be $.01/hr and the maximum wage be $10/hr, and that would be exactly the same as the minimum wage being $10/hr and the maximum wage being $10000/hr.
Can we do a better job of that in the US? Absolutely. I'm of the opinion that if you have a full-time job, even if its as a cashier at WalMart, you should be able to afford a basic, decent living. But in the final analysis, the market system is by far the best economic foundation for the overall population.
The market system is what makes that gap between the rich and the poor in the first place, causing inflation and making sure that the poorest will NOT be able to afford a basic, decent living. If they were able to, that would just raise prices to the point that they wouldn't be able to again. A dynamic economy is neither sustainable nor stable- and that's why it's a mistake that will always cause more harm than good.
didn't say "never". we've downsized plenty - but darn little of that has been because of moving jobs. mostly it's been because of product changes and reorganizations.
If it wasn't for your competitors outsourcing, you wouldn't need to reorganize and have continuous product changes- because you'd still be playing the game on a level field.
I'd rather not say where I work.
Why? Are you ashamed of working there? Still, doesn't matter- if you can't escape the downsizings, then you haven't truly escaped the cost of outsourcing- it's just outsourcing by your competitors causing change in your business. And of course- the people you've downsized find a far smaller job market when they leave.
I still say that if corporations want to not be villified for downsizing they need to provide PRIVATE unemployment insurance for their people that covers 3-4 years worth of salary.
We made a dire mistake- three actually. During the chaos of the Civil War, Virgina's state house was burned to the ground. This gave the parasites the opening they needed. They started by getting the original 13t Amendment nullified due to an accident of history (the ratification from Virgina was never actually delivered to Washington DC, and records of it didn't exist outside of the Virginia State House). This allowed lawyers to become judges- something that had not previously happened (in fact rightly, by the original 13th Amendment, Abraham Lincoln was not eligible to serve as President- for as a lawyer he had taken the title Esquire, a title of nobility, and had therefore given up his citizenship). The industrialists from Wall Street also took the opportunity to hijack the abolisionist movement- replacing slavery with wage slavery, in which the slave owner has no actual requirement to provide a living for his slaves/employees. But the real blow to the right to rule ourselves came about 25 years later- in 1889, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment and soon after Southern Pacific Railroad's claim to personhood for corporations. With that- money, corporate money in particular, became the loudest free speech in the country, and we've been going downhill ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to the trolls above- but if you're having problems viewing the Coral'd links above, try going directly to http://goscon.org/
precision laser arrays? a coiling mechanism that condences water at a constant rate in a non-closed system? integrated motion sensors? this is a very slick piece of equipment, who's complexity is on par, at the very least, with an ultrasound machine or an xray machine. also, i imagine that this thing's resolution is more accurately measured in voxels, rather than pixels.
Where did you get that last? This is a 2D display. Period. It does NOT accept 3D information. Precision laser arrays? Try three lasers (RGB) with mirrors on very fast stepper motors for positioning. Integrated motion sensing is no big deal at all- we've had that for a while on the light projecting keyboards. Though they might be using ultrasound instead- the company I worked for back in 1996 had an ultrasonic chip tray cheap enough for a casino to put in every blackjack table, that would read the stack of chips and give you the value of the tray.
I suspect that this is truly a first foray into the home consumer market- and as such, the price should drop quickly.
Why would that be? It's not like this is a huge increase in resolution (it's only HDTV, barely). It's not like it's that big of a new thing- you could simulate the same thing with a lot more equipment with a flat panel monitor and a mirror.
The ideal cost of an object is the maximum each individual customer is willing to pay for it.
That was back before the Wal*Mart Effect took over. Now the ideal cost of an object is the maximum ALL individual customers are willing to pay for it- as long as the manufacturing costs are less than 60% of that. You can slide up to 80%, but unless the retailer can make a 20% profit they simply won't carry the item.
By not publicly setting a price one can "personalize" the price for each individual customer, maximizing profit while not turning away lower paying customers.
Which just insures that some third world nation will have a manufacturer that will poach your patent- and undersell you by thousands on the wholesale level.
Of course this only works when you can adequately segment your market, and make sure customers don't collude with each other. Sometimes, for big ticket items, contracts even specify that one can't release pricing or performance information. Whether they are enforcable is another matter...
If anybody ever tries to get me to sign such a contract, they will not only lose the sale- they'll find their pricing information all over the internet within 24 hours.
If that's the truth, then it will only be a year or two before China entirely ignores the patent and they'll be giving them away with Dell computers.
I'm asking because I suspect, that due to far fewer actual parts, it's cheaper than LCD based technology.
And still no freakin' price list- who puts up a ecommerce site and fails to tell people how much the damn thing COSTS?
As opposed to a web form that when filled out, leads to a 503 error because this was posted on both Slashdot and Technocrat within the same 5 hour period, leading to signs of stress in their webserver.
That's because you did breast+cancer. Try doing breast%20cancer (which is what most people do, and which is interpreted as an OR rather than an AND).
It's that second one that will convince your boss- but it needs rewording. Plugging into the Dogbert Buzzword Generator for a second, try:
"I wish to maximize my productivity by leveraging the efforts of the Open Source Development Community, thus getting us development resources at no extra cost to the company."
The real question the Bush Admin seems to be missing isn't between an internet with a red light district and a clean interent- it's between an internet with a red light district and an internet where every third .com that pops up on a search for breast cancer on yahoo is a pornographic site.
26 plugs is just about right for a kid's bedroom if your kid is as geeky as most parents on slashdot become.
Reliable or cheap. That's your major choice here. If you want reliable, what you want is an extra run of CAT 5e to every outlet and switch in the house, so that you can choose from a variety of hardwired remote control switches. If you want cheap- you'll want to go with X10, A10, or one of it's variants, in which case you'll want 3-wire power to every switch, including ground, and while you're rewiring all the electric anyway you'll want to install a signal bridge in the switch panel, so that the electirical phases are linked.
For software, well, that depends on your favorite operating system and programming language: HAL or HomeSeer for Windows, Mr. House for Linux, all three of these choices have a variety of dynamic libraries that allow them to control most whole-house controllers.
I personally went cheap- but still ran out of money about $1200 into my system. So I've got PLC, in a house that doesn't have 3 wire to every outlet, with only the incandescents and only 2 flourescents actually computer controlled. I also never got my infrared breakout boxes done to control my A/V equipment- and PLC turned out to be rather non-secure in my neighborhood for controling garage door opener and the like (in that it would leave my garage door open and illegal immigrant meth adicts would steal from me in the middle of the night). So if you have the money, you're much better off with a hardwired system. And go for a discount wholesaler like http://www.worthdist.com/ as opposed to somebody like http://www.smarthouse.com/>.
You must have some strange meaning of the word "smart" that I have not previously been aware of.
The biggest factor is the bargaining power on all sides of the equation. This is why a union worker and a non-union worker doing the exact same thing are paid differently.
The majority of America has no real bargaining power- union or no union. If bargaining power is the majority of the value of money to you- you're sunk. The oligarchy sets the prices and if you don't follow that pricing structure, you will be put out of business one way or another.
We wanted a Windows device driver developer because we produce embedded medical imaging systems. Our systems have from two to ten specialized boards. One of our platforms uses WinXP Embedded. Thus the need. While I personally think the choice of Windows a very poor one for this application, the fact remains that we would have needed device drivers even if we had went with vxWorks, LynxOS, QNX, Linux or NetBSD.
And you do realize that if you just advertised for a good general purpose Windows Assembly Language Developer, it's not really that hard to transfer those skills to device driver writing, correct?
3 lumens is all anybody needs to do usefull work or read. When camping, I use a single LED flashlight to read.
Take a look at the history of factory productivity sometime- I think it was Henry Ford who sponsored the research, but that's what they discovered- no decrease in human productivity down to three lumens. HOWEVER- lighting a full area effectively with only three lumens is much harder.
Watch out - I've heard that this crazy term called gravity is based on junk science, too - you just might go flying off the end of the earth (which we all know is flat, right?) at any moment! Hang On!
The difference being that when I test gravity, by dropping say, a pencil on the floor, it always works. When I test the GDP by going down to my local department store and counting the items stamped "Made in China" vs the number of items claimed to be "Made in America", the GDP always loses out.
And don't go trying to throw non-production items like the Stock Market and Banking and Real Estate into the GDP- because we already know that none of that is any more than con artistry.
"deficit spending" and "trade deficit" are two completely different things. The first is how much the government spends over and above its receipts, and the second is the balance of trade. And we don't "create FAR less than we import". We (the US) exports much less than we import, hence the trade deficit.
No- we've actually swtiched in the last decade or so to creating far less (in real, physical goods) than we import. Most of the Made In America stuff is really just Chinese and Mexican parts assembled here because it's cheaper to ship small things than big things.
That's the result of NAFTA- and GATS- and it's about to get worse with CAFTA which basically forces our farmers to live on subsidies and market EVERYTHING at less than the cost of raising it.
Where you might be confused is the difference between GNP and GDP. GNP, which doesn't back out the trade deficit, used to be cited as the main indicator of economic growth, but was dropped in favor of GNP years and years ago.
No- you don't understand. Both are fake numbers based on junk science that has no bearing with what's really happening in small towns and medium sized cities all over America. A good example is the Comparative Advantage lie- thanks to America's main comparative advantage being that our dollars are the only thing OPEC used to accept for oil payments, we've been able to run up a good deal of both governmental and consumer debt for the last 40 years. We've used that money to pump up our GDP far in excess of what it REALLY is. But that comparative advantage really isn't OURS- it's Saudi Arabia's, it's Mexico's, it's Venezula's, it's Iraq's. It's a number built upon a lie. And as such, it has no validity whatsoever. At this point, our net is far different- enough different that basically the United States is consuming 8% more resources than it creates each and every year and has been doing that for far longer than you and I have been alive.
The real problem here is that you accept classical economics as a set of rules that are inviolate and true- and I don't. In fact, I'm to the point that I consider the whole thing to be a big lie- GDP doesn't take the trade deficit into account because if it did, it would be instantly obvious that the United States is no longer a manufacturing country. All we produce is natural resources, which we send elsewhere to be turned into product, which come back and are sold to the American public as "Made in America" even though not a single component in them was. As for the Balance of Trade- Ricardo was a liar paid for his opinion by big business. His entire concept of "comparative advantage" is complete bunk because it fails to take into account the difference in standard of living and regulation (probably because such differences between governments didn't exist in the 18th century). Wake up and smell the coffee- classical economics is a failure at controlling economic activity. It just allows more parasites to hurt more people.
What a trollish statement...
And so is the insinuation, originally, that the human "sense of value" is reality.
Wow, the lack of basic economic understanding you've displayed here is astounding. Head off to school and learn about a few things like inflation [wikipedia.org], GDP [wikipedia.org], and Balance of Trade [wikipedia.org]. Pursuing the discussion here is a waste of time...
Wikipedia is a big part of the problem- it's just a shill for people with an agenda. If you redefine the language you can prove anything.
(hint: GDP does take the trade deficit into account)
If GDP took the real trade deficit into account, as opposed to the fake numbers usually put forth by the government- our 8% deficit spending over the last 40 years would now mean that our GDP would be negative, since we now create FAR less than we import. Since that is not the case- it's obvious that somebody is lying about the GDP.
I was kinda hoping you'd make that idiotic argument. Global per-capita GDP has grown 2.1% [wikipedia.org] annually from 1950-2003, which tells you right away that something more than a zero-sum game is at work.
Really? And where did they get the additional atoms for that GDP? GDP is as much a fake number as anything else- for instance the American GDP fails to take into account our trade deficit.
In a dynamic economy, of course the gap between rich and poor will increase.
Which should be a signal that dynamic economies will reduce freedom over the long term.
What we need are periodic updates to the social "safety net" (i.e. minimum wage levels, aid programs) so that the whole of society can benefit from the economy's gains.
All that does is increase inflation and end up decreasing the buying power for the poor. What you need to do is put in a MAXIMUM wage for the rich- and the numbers don't matter, because the increasing gap is what causes inflation. The minimum wage could be $.01/hr and the maximum wage be $10/hr, and that would be exactly the same as the minimum wage being $10/hr and the maximum wage being $10000/hr.
Can we do a better job of that in the US? Absolutely. I'm of the opinion that if you have a full-time job, even if its as a cashier at WalMart, you should be able to afford a basic, decent living. But in the final analysis, the market system is by far the best economic foundation for the overall population.
The market system is what makes that gap between the rich and the poor in the first place, causing inflation and making sure that the poorest will NOT be able to afford a basic, decent living. If they were able to, that would just raise prices to the point that they wouldn't be able to again. A dynamic economy is neither sustainable nor stable- and that's why it's a mistake that will always cause more harm than good.
didn't say "never". we've downsized plenty - but darn little of that has been because of moving jobs. mostly it's been because of product changes and reorganizations.
If it wasn't for your competitors outsourcing, you wouldn't need to reorganize and have continuous product changes- because you'd still be playing the game on a level field.
I'd rather not say where I work.
Why? Are you ashamed of working there? Still, doesn't matter- if you can't escape the downsizings, then you haven't truly escaped the cost of outsourcing- it's just outsourcing by your competitors causing change in your business. And of course- the people you've downsized find a far smaller job market when they leave.
I still say that if corporations want to not be villified for downsizing they need to provide PRIVATE unemployment insurance for their people that covers 3-4 years worth of salary.
This is where we started from.
Why did we change?
We made a dire mistake- three actually. During the chaos of the Civil War, Virgina's state house was burned to the ground. This gave the parasites the opening they needed. They started by getting the original 13t Amendment nullified due to an accident of history (the ratification from Virgina was never actually delivered to Washington DC, and records of it didn't exist outside of the Virginia State House). This allowed lawyers to become judges- something that had not previously happened (in fact rightly, by the original 13th Amendment, Abraham Lincoln was not eligible to serve as President- for as a lawyer he had taken the title Esquire, a title of nobility, and had therefore given up his citizenship). The industrialists from Wall Street also took the opportunity to hijack the abolisionist movement- replacing slavery with wage slavery, in which the slave owner has no actual requirement to provide a living for his slaves/employees. But the real blow to the right to rule ourselves came about 25 years later- in 1889, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment and soon after Southern Pacific Railroad's claim to personhood for corporations. With that- money, corporate money in particular, became the loudest free speech in the country, and we've been going downhill ever since.