So where is the infringement on Microsoft's questionable claim on Windows (Microsoft didn't get an injunction in the US because the judge agreed that there is a serious question about the validity of the Windows trademark).
Is X Windows an infringement on Windows? If not, why not?
At the time Microsoft applied for the registered trademark status, Windows was an application layer just as X Windows was.
You might respond that my claim that Windows is not a valid trademark and that my logic doesn't make my position true.
Well, likewise, just because you claim that Lindows was chosen to infringe on Microsoft's Windows trademark doesn't make that true - alternative reasons exist, eg., the contraction of Linux Windows. So, the question becomes "is there confusion?" and Microsoft isn't arguing that anyone is confused.
If emachines ran big ads promoting their AMD64 system and when you got to the store there were only the non-AMD64 emachines available, you'd be screaming "Bait and Switch".
Now when you go to the store and actually find one, you'll say, "this proves its a piece of shit, because no one has bought it".\
Or when you go to the store you will say, "see emachines are crap because they can't make them fast enough to keep them in stock".
If you looked at where broadband is available, I think you'll find that its only available in the US where the population density is certain to be higher than 250 users per sq km.
The cost of serving low population density areas causing high rates doesn't wash since the low density areas cost zero because there is no service.
79% of the zipcodes in Alaska have no high speed internet providers, Arkansas 39%, Iowa 49%, Kansas 35%, Kentucky 40%, Maine 35%, Minnisota 35%, Montana 48%, Nebraska 44%, New Mexico 34%, North Dakota 72%, South Dakota 63%, West Virginia 58%, Wyoming 47%. Those represent a lot of sq km.
From an FCC report: "High population density has a positive correlation with reports that high-speed subscribers are present, and low population density has a negative correlation. For example, as of June 30, 2001, high-speed subscribers are reported to be present in 97% of the most densely populated zip codes and in 49% of zip codes with the lowest population densities."
"For this comparison, we consider the most densely populated zip codes to be those with more than 268 persons per square mile (the top three deciles),and the least densely populated zip codes to be those with fewer than 25 persons per square mile (the bottom three deciles)"
"Our analysis indicates that 97% of the country's population lives in the 78% of zip codes where a provider reports having at least one high-speed service subscriber. Moreover, numerous competing providers report serving high-speed subscribers in the major population centers of the country."
Wait until Bill Gates becomes the architect for car computers. He won't stop at just disabling vehicles, he'll offer to steer them to their destination.
This will make Windows viruses look like minor annoyances.
For two decades, the US attempted to keep oil pumping by drilling more oil wells. In fact, about 2 million oil wells were drilled. There were many tax incentives to fund this drilling. 99% of all oil wells in the world were drilled in the US, lower 48.
But gee, all efforts didn't manage to keep US production in step with growing demand. In fact, all the drilling failed to keep US oil production constant.
So, growing demand, improved technology, and new sources failed to produce the oil needed to meet demand.
The oil embargo brought forth new oil supplies, but those new oil supplies were previously known.
In fact, the most recent oil find of any significance is Saudi Arabia, not a new field in Saudi Arabia, but just oil in Saudi Arabia. That was circa 1950.
The oil in the North Sea was known by then. But the technology for drilling in deep water was not known. And that technology has been used in the Gulf of Mexico.
The areas with the greatest reserves of oil are, not surprisingly, the areas where there is no transparency. In other words, no one has any scientific data about the oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Think of all the claims by Reagon about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, or by Bush about Iraq.
If Saudi Arabia fails to meet world demand in 5 years or 3, what are you going to do? Send in teams of geologists looking for the lost or hidden oil? Prove that the oil really exists in Saudi Arabia.
And even if Saudi Arabia actually has 200 years of oil, that is with Saudi Arabia producing 4-5 million barrels a day, but in 10 years the forecast is for world oil consumption to be 100 to 125 million barrels a day.
And if you want to babble on about oil shale, etc, consider that the oil shale production in Canada is going to use most of the available fresh water in the region and also cut gas exports to the US even as Canada brings new gas fields on line. The mineral resources required to extract oil from oil sands/shale are huge.
The cost of extracting fossil fuel is going up and can only go up. All the new technology of the past three decades has not reduced the cost of producing oil. It has merely made it possible to extract oil at a higher price from places were it would not have been possible before at any realistic price. Like drilling millions of oil wells.
Btw, the method used to show growing oil reserves is sort of like estimating the supply of your favorite vintage wine by buying a bottle or two to drink every few weeks. Let's see, I've bought 10 bottles so far, so the proven reserves must be at least 10 plus there were 6 more bottles on the shelf. Two years later, you have bought 200 bottles and there were 4 bottles still on the shelf, although the price is double what it was. So you estimate that the ultimate recoverable bottles of wine are at least 500 bottles because you've struck it rich and you're willing to pay 10 times the current asking price. Surely the higher price will keep the supply of your favorite wine coming for at least another 10 years if not 20. And if you strike really big, well, you'll be able to pay 100 times as much so that the supply of that 1987 vintage wine will increase to at least 1000.
The problem is that when you add up all the wine that everyone else has bought and their rate of buying, the only way that the there will be sufficient supply is if that 50 acre vineyard bottled 1 million bottles in 1987.
Ah, but someone will invent a time machine so you can go back in time and buy the wine in 1988?
The point of the article is that the oil we pump and burn was produced over millions of years and that the process is, at best, able to turn 1 million Joules of solar energy into 1 Joule of energy from oil.
On the other hand, a solar cell or passive solar can turn 100 Joules of solar energy into 15 Joules of electricity or heat.
So long ago, a lot of solar energy was stored in plants and then stored for millions of years and very little useful energy is available today.
400 years ago, some people bottled some grape juice, which can be drunk today.
The cost of the oil is set based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground.
In like manner, the cost of a glass of a 400 year old wine should be the cost to have a waiter open the bottle and pour it into a glass. Ie, a buck for the tip.
Economists go to great lengths to explain why a bottle of wine, not much different from any other bottle of wine is worth $10,000. But they can't seem to figure out that oil, something that was produced 100 million years ago, and thus far more rare than wine, is worth a whole lot more than the cost to pump it.
I'm sure that oil will be pumped for 10,000 years, but it won't be for fuel.
The amount of time that oil will be able to meet American transportation "needs" is MAYBE 20 years and more likely less than 10. $100 a barrel in 2010 is optimisticly low, but it would probably result in far less oil being used for US transportation than would be the case with oil at Bush's goal of $10 a barrel.
Civil war in Saudi Arabia could bring us $100 a barrel oil in a year or two....
In a span of two decades years, the US drilled between 1 and 2 million oil wells.
They didn't make sense other than the tax shelter aspect. And that is currently going on with reprocessing coal by spraying it with oil which results in a tax credit equal to the cost of the "product" (coal sprayed with oil).
But if the US could drill a million oil wells that produced no more than 10 barrels of oil a day, why can't a million wind mills be erected? (The average oil production from US oil wells is less than 10 barrels; the median oil production is 1 barrel of oil per day, and 75% of all the oil produced in the US comes from about 1000 wells. There are currently about 500,000 producing oil wells in the US today. In fact, more than 99% of all producing oil wells are in the US.
There are few products these days that don't include software and many of these products are sold in the millions.
Take MP3 players. Without software it wouldn't be possible. It includes hardware. And software.
Its a complete computer.
So why does the whole thing sell for less than Windows?
The price paid for the software in an MP3 player and billions of other products is less than the price paid for the CD that Windows is shipped on.
Software has no more value than any of the other engineering that makes a product possible. That means that a programmer/software engineer shouldn't get paid more than the manufacturing engineer who figures out how to get 5000 widgets an hour spit out of the machine.
What has happened in the US is that people who turn ideas into software get paid a lot of money while the people who turn ideas into concrete products get paid peanuts.
The result is that almost no one goes into manufacturing in the US and many companies find that the lowest costs and highest tech is available outside the US in Asia and Europe and Russia.
But there is nothing special about turning ideas into software. There are lots of European and Russian programmers. What happens when 99% of the programming for products is done outside the US.
We won't get paid for turning ideas into software and we won't get paid for turning ideas into hardware.
A plumber is more valuable than a programmer. The programmer can be replaced with someone from Europe or Asia that has a masters or PHD while no one from India or China is going to be able to replace the burst pipes when you can't pay the heat bill because you can't compete with illegals working for Wal-Mart and Tyson.
Still, the answer isn't to build a wall between the US and the rest of the world.
Instead, let's build into fossil fuel and everything made with fossil fuels, the value of the rapidly depleted reserves.
The point of technology is to make better use of resources to provide more goods. What the US is leading at is using technology to deplete resources at a high rate in a rush to collapse. Only America would value, and pay lots of money, for technology that uses 2-10 times as much fuel to go from point A to B, so that in 20 years, no one will be able to get from point A to B by any means other than walking.
There are a small number of companies that are seriously investing in energy technologies and they will make a killing if the current trend of poor people in foreign countries expands. The are increasingly refusing to pump their oil and ship it to the US for only $20 or even $30 a barrel.
There are some who won't be happy with even $100 a barrel. A rocket hitting the right spot in Saudi Arabia would cause that state to fall into civil war. The unfolding civil war in Iraq might spill into Saudi Arabia and $100 a barrel oil wouldn't be far behind.
No amount of software will eliminate the need for huge numbers of wind mills or solar panels or massive new quantities of fiber glass insulation in buildings....
Why can't I just run a wire into AT&T's switch room and connect to the internet?
Instead I'm forced to deal with some ISP who already part of the internet core "club".
What AT&T is doing is simply forcing a similar structure on SMTP connections.
If you want to send mail to AT&T you either
1) go to the trouble of peering with AT&T
2) become an AT&T customer
3) be a customer of someone who peers with AT&T and send your email through their relay.
Of course this is the start of a system for charging for sent email. AT&T will allow its customers to send only x messages per month for a given service charge. Other ISPs will do the same.
What will be interesting is what happens at yahoo and MSN where certain email related services are still "free".
My guess is that yahoo has the critical mass to negotiate with the likes of AT&T - AT&T wouldn't want to piss off its customers by demanding a big fee from yahoo to accept email from yahoo, but AT&T wouldn't hesitate to demand payment from potential competitors to yahoo. This will strengthen yahoos hold on these services, making it impossible to bill yahoo for mail sent.
The likely outcome is the consolidation of the email system into a core set of relays and relays that accept messages only from affilliated relays - ie customers.
In any case, its unlikely that the change will have an adverse affect on 99.9999% of all internet users, just as the consolidation of the internet core to a small number of corporations has affected 99.99% of the users who were part of the internet before formation of and consolidation of the core.
the standard thing in corporations is for email to be "look at me" or "cover my ass".
It reminds me when I worked for Compaq after being bought as part of DEC - the standard practice in Compaq was to send email and then call to ask if you gotten it and read it.
But then again, email at Compaq was very different from at DEC (although DEC had been devolving) in that it wasn't uncommon to get dozens of content free "action" memos a day addressed to a hundred people who had absolutely nothing to do with the issue other than being some form of manager, consultant, adminstrative staff,....
All my experience since indicates that email has truely replaced the interoffice memos that merely consumed forests. Of course, there are some people in corporations who have their admins print the email and file it. And best of all, neither the email or the paper copy is actually read....
Ok, so we agree that you have to pay to use email
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Another Whack at Spam
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So the only real question is, which is better, the sender pays or the current the victim, errr, receipient, pays.
I've preferred email for most of the past two decades, but in the last couple of years, the best way to get in touch with me is to see me in person.
Email has become just too expensive in terms of my personal time. Once or twice a week I'll check email, but until a way of making the cost to the sender at least as high as it is for me, I can no longer recommend email to anyone.
Btw, if we assume that my ISP is spending $1 a month to provide bundled email, then I'm paying at least $.10 per message I send, and that's on a good month, other months I'm paying $1 a message.
The current system is victim pays, not free email
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Another Whack at Spam
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Please explain how you manage to get truely free email?
How do you not pay for an email account AND not pay for transporting email AND not pay for storing the email AND not pay for filtering email AND not spend your own time reading email?
Force me to PAY to GET mail, but not to SEND it???
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Another Whack at Spam
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"How can a pay mail service even work?"
Simple, the current system requires that you PAY TO GET SPAM along with the mail you want.
Your ISP provides email service and bundles the cost into the ISP monthly fee you PAY.
If you're ISP merely provides a connection, then you PAY for the bandwidth required to deliver the SPAM to your mail relay, and you PAY the computer and storage to process the SPAM and PAY for electric power.
Even if you run the best filter in the world, you have to pay for the hardware that runs the filter and you have to PAY for the bandwidth to deliver the SPAM to be discarded and PAY for the power to run the filter.
And those free mail boxes offered by the many "free" mail services make you PAY to use them because MUST agree to PAY for the bandwidth to deliver PAID advertisement delivered along with your mail.
Chernobyl shows that nuclear power is safe and cost effective. The WSJ is spouting marxist lies when it says that the costs from Chernobyl were 4-5 times the benefits of all those commie nuclear power plants.
The rupture in the pipe at Indian Point didn't cause any problems and shows that skipping mandated inspections is perfectly safe.
To add further proof, Davis-Besse shows there wasn't any problem after a decade of failing to deal with a problem seen repeatedly during inspections. And it was perfectly ok to delay the NRC mandated inspection to look for a corrusion problem seen in the same model reactor elsewhere. There was a full 3/8 inch of stainless steel left to contain the 10,000 PSI steam after the 6-1/2 inches of carbon steel rotted away.
The incorrectly sized emergency pipes were never a problem, nor the failing pumps, or incorrectly trained operators have never caused a problem.
The computed safety factors in the nuclear plants shows that there is at worst only three releases of radioactive material likely in 10,000 years with the likelihood being closer to 1 in a million years, and the data proves it once you eliminate Three Mile Island release. TMI was a new plant, only one year old at the time, and everyone knows that infant failures are the thing you have to worry about. Once a computer or a car has reached 10 years old, they're good for another century.
We should be encouraging nuclear power in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Cuba, so these poor countries can develop economically without competing with the US for oil. The Russian and China plan to build nuclear power plants on barges should be encouraged so that nuclear power plants can be easily deployed around the world.
The industry isn't unregulated, its less regulated than before.
The old regulatory system used profit regulation. By this method, a utility was automatically given a 6% return on investment as long as the investment was necessary. To be sure the investment was necessary, the industry got approval from the PUC. But most PUCs or laws allowed getting the return on investment if the equipment was generating power.
So, power companies would come up with all the reasons for building a huge electrical system:
- we will have twice as many customers in 10 years, but costs are rising, so we should double capacity today to save money
- a $500M nuclear power plant is the best solution because it won't require fuel like coal or oil
So, the utilities had huge incentives to over design the system.
And as long as a nuclear power plant is brought into production, the utility gets 6%, and the more expensive it was to get it into production, the greater the return on investment.
Today the regulation is different. Utilities are heading toward the day when power plants are completely out of the regulator picture. That means that you make money if you sell enough power to justify, or lose money otherwise. And there are various programs that mandate that utilities buy power such as wind and solar. So the system is now one where the utilities have no interest in building power plants because the return on those is unknown today.
The other factor is that electric power generation is moving to a distributed model. Right now, we have the "mainframes" and "mini" power plants, but the direction is toward "PC" power plants all connected together in a network. The current powerline structure is like a mainframe with thousands of terminal lines running from offices to the computer room and a small number of mainframes connected in a net. But in a decade the system will be like today's internet, millions of small power stations all connected in a mesh.
It doesn't make sense to invest a billion dollars when it might not get used and if you can't rent it, you will lose money. There is no ensured profit.
But the reason for deregulating is that the power system is changing just like mini and PCs changed the computer industry.
There are a couple of problems in the interim.
The power companies want to control everything because that's how they grow and make money.
The PUCs don't want to piss off their next employer so they don't teach the public and investors about the direction of the industry.
The politians don't want to piss off their contributors, so they don't talk too much about it either. And most of the time, they try to find "green" things to pitch that won't change the way things are done, but these green proposals are actually based on emerging technology.
And Bush is an oil man, and every energy problem is solved by oil, so we drill off Cape Cod, in Alaska, the White House lawn, and invade Iraq to protect the virtual oil pipeline of tankers.
The power industry wants things the old way but they know that the days of cheap oil are gone, that nuclear power is incredibly expensive, and that they have too much overhead to build wind power plants - a utility project requires about 100 power company employees and contractors for a year. To put up 100 wind power towers will cost $150,000 each without spending a dime on the equipment, while a small company will build them and get them online in 6 months with only 5 employees.
Returning to the old regulator system would result in 100 nuclear power plants and 500 coal plants in Canada and Mexico with billions in power lines.
Without regulation, we'll have a million wind farms in 20 years.
In a decade computers won't exist. They will have vanished into backgroud. You'll buy a computer like you buy pens, printer paper, bookbag, etc.
In a decade, 99% of computers will be bought based on price, $179 or $229, color, purple, yellow, green, and style, delicate or BMX. A key issue will be whether you can get matching pants or shoes.
Take a look at The Innovator's Dilemma by Christensen.
He talks about the backhoe revolutionizing construction.
The backhoe fit a niche between steam shovels and human ditch diggers.
The Segway fits in between electric wheelchairs that are hugely expensive and ungainly and cheap wheelchairs with pushers and walkers (the four legged crutches).
The iBot is like a supercomputer compared to the mainframe electric wheel chair.
The Segway is like a PC compared to the calculator wheel chair and the paper and pencil walker.
A lot of people would like to have an electric wheel chair, or even better, an iBot, but those weren't available. And their problem isn't severe enough to mandate the more expensive solution. Those are the people who need to have the handicap parking space be empty so they can walk into the store and get to the store provided electric cart or wheelchair cart, or to the chairs placed around the store.
The Segway won't help the people who need the wheelchair all the time, but the people who can't walk due to weakness, joint problems, etc. are finding the Segway a great solution. So, its sort of like the IBM PC. Expensive, not able to handle many of the conventional computing needs.
But, all of a sudden, the PC found entirely new customers, customers who would never have gotten a PC. The Segway is finding lots of customers who would never buy an iBot or an electric wheelchair.
Manufacturing is about figuring out how to manufacturing goods for the lowest cost with the highest quality. As more PCs were sold, the cost of making a PC dropped and the PC got better, and that fueled the market for PCs and gave more people the opportunity to figure out how to use a PC resulting in more PC sales.
The Segway will improve, drop in price, find more customers with more uses, resulting in lower manufacturing costs. The people who need the aid of something like a Segway will gain the benefit of the improved technologies.
And just as the PC sales volume drove the PC technology cycle, the mini/mainframe market were forced to compete and they "stole" as much technology from the PC world as possible. Ethernet was a minicomputer technology, but once it was installed in just a small percent of PCs, the PC market represented most of the Ethernet product market and the mini/mainframes got Ethernet at such a low cost that it was practically free.
Dean Kamem understands that price/cost is critical to any successful technology. To develop a technology and then confine it to a low volume produce/market, the price is going to be too high to result in rapid success.
Back to the steam shovel and ditch digger, because the principle applies to clunking mechanical stuff and not just to microelectronics.
Backhoes were underpowered compared to steam shovels, but they could allow a couple of ditch diggers to run water and sewage to 5 homes a day instead of 1, even when the backhoe broke down.
But today, I doubt that many people have even seen a picture of a steam shovel because the pictures are so old that there are no women in the picture and thus it can't be used in textbooks (to have only men operating a steam shovel would imply that women aren't capable of operating a steam shovel). The backhoe has improved to the point where there are almost no jobs that require a steam shovel, almost, but not none.
The Segway will drive down the cost of the iBot. The iBot will drive down the costs of electric wheel chairs (really, what can justify a price of $15,000!!!?). The lower costs will allow more people to do things they can't do today.
Wheel chair technology has been dramatically improved by the people who race in marathons, etc. The Segway and iBot will be modified to allow athletes injured in accidents to resume play in sports they're excluded from today. Basketball? Field hockey? Soccer? But that will drive the technology and drive up demand and drive down costs.
DirectTV suing its customers must be a tactic stolen from Monsanto.
For one story out of thousands, see http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Monsanto sued Percy Schmeiser for growing a Roundup tolerant crop that resulted from Monsanto genetically modified seed crop fertilizing his crop, devaluing it - he can't sell it in Europe.
He has fought back and has recently the Canadian "supreme court" has agreed to hear an appeal of the ruling in Monsanto's favor.
The thousands of American and Canadian farmers have been forced to settle with Monsanto because they can't afford the legal fees to fight Monsanto.
This is what is so great about America - when you can't figure out how to make a product, all you need to do is figure out some way to sue the people who do.
Technology has no intrinsic value. The code you have is technology. It appears at present time to be worthless.
The question is are you an innovator and entrepreneur?
If the answer is "yes" and more important, "I AM able to make things happen", then you will turn the technology into something of value, but the value will come from your efforts and not from the technology.
Your profit from the venture will come from convincing the one who legally owns the technology that the deal you offer them is the best one they can expect, ie., the owners ability to innovate will result in less profit than you offer for the technology.
If you aren't motivated by the profit to make it happen, then the profit requires too high an opportunity cost to you to bother with, or you lack the required skills and commitment to actually innovate.
You don't want to pay, neither to I
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Replacing SMTP?
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"I believe we need a trusted protocol. This might be as simple as having all emails PGP signed and everything else being sent to the bit-bucket (if you want to be aggressive) or only passed through to the user if the unsigned message had an extremely low spam score."
Ok, implement the protocol, software, system, and adminstrate it for free and I'm in.
But if you say "that's too expensive, I can't afford it", then what you are saying is that you should be allowed to act like a spammer and its the one receiving the mail that has to pay the costs.
If your mail isn't worth paying to send, then why are you sending it?
The marginal cost of paying for sending email should not be higher than the current marginal cost of receiving the email is today; the only difference is who is paying for the email. Actually, the marginal cost will be lower because there will be less traffic and that will reduce the cost of resources required to handle the email.
Note that if the marginal cost is $.001, the cost to someone sending one million spam messages to get 2 responses for $25 become unprofitable. Its unprofitable even at $.0001 per message.
The key is to offer multiple email classes which will allow priority mail to subsidize bulk mail. But with the bulk mail marked as such as it transits the system, user agents will be able to readily separate the bulk mail from the priority mail.
But in any case, decades of experience has shown that there isn't any chance of a public good being well utilized without a market to allocate it. Even communists have embrace markets to allocate resources. Yeah, the "free market" has its share of abuses, but when you dig deep you find that every free market failure is due to a known externality that is not applied because of political power. My current view is that political power is forcing the receiver of mail to pay the cost of spammers sending email "for the good of the community". And then they go a step further and basically say that the problem with spammers is because the victims of spam aren't spending enough (effort, dollars, whatever) to prevent spam from overwhelming the system. This ranks up there with the failures of communist command and control to produce an acceptable level of goods.
The challenge is to design a low cost system that allows for
I didn't look though all the repies, but they're as creative as "I'm responsible for training people in Quickbooks, what should I teach:
- the joys of double entry bookkeeping
- typing without looking at the keyboard
- transferring data to tax prep application
- how to find free alternatives to quickbooks"
Computering as a field is as relevant as blacksmithing was in 1900. Or typing was in 1975.
Yes, typist was a growing profession until about 1975. Computer and web code monkeys are going the way of the typist.
So, what is the future of computing. Well, it's a basic skill, like reading and writing, typing, presenting ideas in an organized manner.
The future of computing is integrating it with products. We see it everywhere but don't see it. How many people look at a VCR and say "What a great software design and implementation!". How many people drive down the road and say, "Man those coders really did a great job on the engine control loop!".
The quick and easy way to excite kids especially is with Mindstorms. You combine embedded system design with mechanical design and system integration. BUT, there is lots more beyond the software that LEGO provides. There is software that does all the embedded system design tricks of tool suites, cross compilers, etc. You can implement distributed control systems.
But you can go beyond that system. Parallax has focused increasingly on the education market with its BOEBOT, and various other prototyping systems and tools. They even have a gate array system. Why do I mention Parallax out of the hundreds of companies offering similar systems and components - merely that they have focused specifically on the education market after coming from the hobby/lab world where their advantage was that they saved a chunk of time for a modest premium - as they move "up market" they are charging a higher premium, but they are adding value by bringing together components from multiple vendors.
There is a growing amount of interest in "CNC" and with it a growing body of components, both software and hardware. There are several somewhat ready made packages of motors, controls, and software to allow building some simple, but very interesting machines. The costs start getting up there - certainly well in excess of a couple new computers. (Mindstorms are slightly less than a computer.)
To provide a simple, somewhat focused activity, you could go the Sumobot route. There are a few pretty much turnkey somobot kits available and the emphasis would be on developing good automous programs to competition. The competition rings are inexpensive and small (about 5 feet square to the ring and an area around them, minus the space for people).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if Santa can't deliver that, I'll be happy with a Haas Toolroom Mill (which at $20K is less than most cars.)
Today's real geek programmer doesn't settle for flashing some bits on a little screen, he cuts chips in metal.
And when a machine tool programmer crashes his problem, its exciting....
So where is the infringement on Microsoft's questionable claim on Windows (Microsoft didn't get an injunction in the US because the judge agreed that there is a serious question about the validity of the Windows trademark).
Is X Windows an infringement on Windows?
If not, why not?
At the time Microsoft applied for the registered trademark status, Windows was an application layer just as X Windows was.
You might respond that my claim that Windows is not a valid trademark and that my logic doesn't make my position true.
Well, likewise, just because you claim that Lindows was chosen to infringe on Microsoft's Windows trademark doesn't make that true - alternative reasons exist, eg., the contraction of Linux Windows. So, the question becomes "is there confusion?" and Microsoft isn't arguing that anyone is confused.
If emachines ran big ads promoting their AMD64 system and when you got to the store there were only the non-AMD64 emachines available, you'd be screaming "Bait and Switch".
Now when you go to the store and actually find one, you'll say, "this proves its a piece of shit, because no one has bought it".\
Or when you go to the store you will say, "see emachines are crap because they can't make them fast enough to keep them in stock".
If you looked at where broadband is available, I think you'll find that its only available in the US where the population density is certain to be higher than 250 users per sq km.
t s/ FCC-State_Link/IAD/hspd0202.pdf.
The cost of serving low population density areas causing high rates doesn't wash since the low density areas cost zero because there is no service.
79% of the zipcodes in Alaska have no high speed internet providers, Arkansas 39%, Iowa 49%, Kansas 35%, Kentucky 40%, Maine 35%, Minnisota 35%, Montana 48%, Nebraska 44%, New Mexico 34%, North Dakota 72%, South Dakota 63%, West Virginia 58%, Wyoming 47%. Those represent a lot of sq km.
From an FCC report:
"High population density has a positive correlation with reports that high-speed subscribers are present, and low population density has a negative correlation. For example, as of June 30, 2001, high-speed subscribers are reported to be present in 97% of the most densely populated zip codes and in 49% of zip codes with the lowest population densities."
"For this comparison, we consider the most densely populated zip codes to be those with more than 268 persons per square mile (the top three deciles),and the least densely populated zip codes to be those with fewer than 25 persons per square mile (the bottom three deciles)"
"Our analysis indicates that 97% of the country's population lives in the 78% of zip codes where a provider reports having at least one high-speed service subscriber. Moreover, numerous competing providers report serving high-speed subscribers in the major population centers of the country."
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Repor
Wait until Bill Gates becomes the architect for car computers. He won't stop at just disabling vehicles, he'll offer to steer them to their destination.
This will make Windows viruses look like minor annoyances.
After all, without Microsoft designing the features so easily exploited, there would be none of these viruses.
For two decades, the US attempted to keep oil pumping by drilling more oil wells. In fact, about 2 million oil wells were drilled. There were many tax incentives to fund this drilling. 99% of all oil wells in the world were drilled in the US, lower 48.
But gee, all efforts didn't manage to keep US production in step with growing demand. In fact, all the drilling failed to keep US oil production constant.
So, growing demand, improved technology, and new sources failed to produce the oil needed to meet demand.
The oil embargo brought forth new oil supplies, but those new oil supplies were previously known.
In fact, the most recent oil find of any significance is Saudi Arabia, not a new field in Saudi Arabia, but just oil in Saudi Arabia. That was circa 1950.
The oil in the North Sea was known by then. But the technology for drilling in deep water was not known. And that technology has been used in the Gulf of Mexico.
The areas with the greatest reserves of oil are, not surprisingly, the areas where there is no transparency. In other words, no one has any scientific data about the oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Think of all the claims by Reagon about the threat posed by the Soviet Union, or by Bush about Iraq.
If Saudi Arabia fails to meet world demand in 5 years or 3, what are you going to do? Send in teams of geologists looking for the lost or hidden oil? Prove that the oil really exists in Saudi Arabia.
And even if Saudi Arabia actually has 200 years of oil, that is with Saudi Arabia producing 4-5 million barrels a day, but in 10 years the forecast is for world oil consumption to be 100 to 125 million barrels a day.
And if you want to babble on about oil shale, etc, consider that the oil shale production in Canada is going to use most of the available fresh water in the region and also cut gas exports to the US even as Canada brings new gas fields on line. The mineral resources required to extract oil from oil sands/shale are huge.
The cost of extracting fossil fuel is going up and can only go up. All the new technology of the past three decades has not reduced the cost of producing oil. It has merely made it possible to extract oil at a higher price from places were it would not have been possible before at any realistic price. Like drilling millions of oil wells.
Btw, the method used to show growing oil reserves is sort of like estimating the supply of your favorite vintage wine by buying a bottle or two to drink every few weeks. Let's see, I've bought 10 bottles so far, so the proven reserves must be at least 10 plus there were 6 more bottles on the shelf. Two years later, you have bought 200 bottles and there were 4 bottles still on the shelf, although the price is double what it was. So you estimate that the ultimate recoverable bottles of wine are at least 500 bottles because you've struck it rich and you're willing to pay 10 times the current asking price. Surely the higher price will keep the supply of your favorite wine coming for at least another 10 years if not 20. And if you strike really big, well, you'll be able to pay 100 times as much so that the supply of that 1987 vintage wine will increase to at least 1000.
The problem is that when you add up all the wine that everyone else has bought and their rate of buying, the only way that the there will be sufficient supply is if that 50 acre vineyard bottled 1 million bottles in 1987.
Ah, but someone will invent a time machine so you can go back in time and buy the wine in 1988?
The point of the article is that the oil we pump and burn was produced over millions of years and that the process is, at best, able to turn 1 million Joules of solar energy into 1 Joule of energy from oil.
On the other hand, a solar cell or passive solar can turn 100 Joules of solar energy into 15 Joules of electricity or heat.
So long ago, a lot of solar energy was stored in plants and then stored for millions of years and very little useful energy is available today.
400 years ago, some people bottled some grape juice, which can be drunk today.
The cost of the oil is set based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground.
In like manner, the cost of a glass of a 400 year old wine should be the cost to have a waiter open the bottle and pour it into a glass. Ie, a buck for the tip.
Economists go to great lengths to explain why a bottle of wine, not much different from any other bottle of wine is worth $10,000. But they can't seem to figure out that oil, something that was produced 100 million years ago, and thus far more rare than wine, is worth a whole lot more than the cost to pump it.
I'm sure that oil will be pumped for 10,000 years, but it won't be for fuel.
The amount of time that oil will be able to meet American transportation "needs" is MAYBE 20 years and more likely less than 10. $100 a barrel in 2010 is optimisticly low, but it would probably result in far less oil being used for US transportation than would be the case with oil at Bush's goal of $10 a barrel.
Civil war in Saudi Arabia could bring us $100 a barrel oil in a year or two....
In a span of two decades years, the US drilled between 1 and 2 million oil wells.
They didn't make sense other than the tax shelter aspect. And that is currently going on with reprocessing coal by spraying it with oil which results in a tax credit equal to the cost of the "product" (coal sprayed with oil).
But if the US could drill a million oil wells that produced no more than 10 barrels of oil a day, why can't a million wind mills be erected? (The average oil production from US oil wells is less than 10 barrels; the median oil production is 1 barrel of oil per day, and 75% of all the oil produced in the US comes from about 1000 wells. There are currently about 500,000 producing oil wells in the US today. In fact, more than 99% of all producing oil wells are in the US.
There are few products these days that don't include software and many of these products are sold in the millions.
Take MP3 players. Without software it wouldn't be possible. It includes hardware. And software.
Its a complete computer.
So why does the whole thing sell for less than Windows?
The price paid for the software in an MP3 player and billions of other products is less than the price paid for the CD that Windows is shipped on.
Software has no more value than any of the other engineering that makes a product possible. That means that a programmer/software engineer shouldn't get paid more than the manufacturing engineer who figures out how to get 5000 widgets an hour spit out of the machine.
What has happened in the US is that people who turn ideas into software get paid a lot of money while the people who turn ideas into concrete products get paid peanuts.
The result is that almost no one goes into manufacturing in the US and many companies find that the lowest costs and highest tech is available outside the US in Asia and Europe and Russia.
But there is nothing special about turning ideas into software. There are lots of European and Russian programmers. What happens when 99% of the programming for products is done outside the US.
We won't get paid for turning ideas into software and we won't get paid for turning ideas into hardware.
A plumber is more valuable than a programmer. The programmer can be replaced with someone from Europe or Asia that has a masters or PHD while no one from India or China is going to be able to replace the burst pipes when you can't pay the heat bill because you can't compete with illegals working for Wal-Mart and Tyson.
Still, the answer isn't to build a wall between the US and the rest of the world.
Instead, let's build into fossil fuel and everything made with fossil fuels, the value of the rapidly depleted reserves.
The point of technology is to make better use of resources to provide more goods. What the US is leading at is using technology to deplete resources at a high rate in a rush to collapse. Only America would value, and pay lots of money, for technology that uses 2-10 times as much fuel to go from point A to B, so that in 20 years, no one will be able to get from point A to B by any means other than walking.
There are a small number of companies that are seriously investing in energy technologies and they will make a killing if the current trend of poor people in foreign countries expands. The are increasingly refusing to pump their oil and ship it to the US for only $20 or even $30 a barrel.
There are some who won't be happy with even $100 a barrel. A rocket hitting the right spot in Saudi Arabia would cause that state to fall into civil war. The unfolding civil war in Iraq might spill into Saudi Arabia and $100 a barrel oil wouldn't be far behind.
No amount of software will eliminate the need for huge numbers of wind mills or solar panels or massive new quantities of fiber glass insulation in buildings....
Why can't I just run a wire into AT&T's switch room and connect to the internet?
Instead I'm forced to deal with some ISP who already part of the internet core "club".
What AT&T is doing is simply forcing a similar structure on SMTP connections.
If you want to send mail to AT&T you either
1) go to the trouble of peering with AT&T
2) become an AT&T customer
3) be a customer of someone who peers with AT&T and send your email through their relay.
Of course this is the start of a system for charging for sent email. AT&T will allow its customers to send only x messages per month for a given service charge. Other ISPs will do the same.
What will be interesting is what happens at yahoo and MSN where certain email related services are still "free".
My guess is that yahoo has the critical mass to negotiate with the likes of AT&T - AT&T wouldn't want to piss off its customers by demanding a big fee from yahoo to accept email from yahoo, but AT&T wouldn't hesitate to demand payment from potential competitors to yahoo. This will strengthen yahoos hold on these services, making it impossible to bill yahoo for mail sent.
The likely outcome is the consolidation of the email system into a core set of relays and relays that accept messages only from affilliated relays - ie customers.
In any case, its unlikely that the change will have an adverse affect on 99.9999% of all internet users, just as the consolidation of the internet core to a small number of corporations has affected 99.99% of the users who were part of the internet before formation of and consolidation of the core.
the standard thing in corporations is for email to be "look at me" or "cover my ass".
It reminds me when I worked for Compaq after being bought as part of DEC - the standard practice in Compaq was to send email and then call to ask if you gotten it and read it.
But then again, email at Compaq was very different from at DEC (although DEC had been devolving) in that it wasn't uncommon to get dozens of content free "action" memos a day addressed to a hundred people who had absolutely nothing to do with the issue other than being some form of manager, consultant, adminstrative staff,....
All my experience since indicates that email has truely replaced the interoffice memos that merely consumed forests. Of course, there are some people in corporations who have their admins print the email and file it. And best of all, neither the email or the paper copy is actually read....
So the only real question is, which is better, the sender pays or the current the victim, errr, receipient, pays.
I've preferred email for most of the past two decades, but in the last couple of years, the best way to get in touch with me is to see me in person.
Email has become just too expensive in terms of my personal time. Once or twice a week I'll check email, but until a way of making the cost to the sender at least as high as it is for me, I can no longer recommend email to anyone.
Btw, if we assume that my ISP is spending $1 a month to provide bundled email, then I'm paying at least $.10 per message I send, and that's on a good month, other months I'm paying $1 a message.
Please explain how you manage to get truely free email?
How do you not pay for an email account
AND
not pay for transporting email
AND
not pay for storing the email
AND
not pay for filtering email
AND
not spend your own time reading email?
"How can a pay mail service even work?"
Simple, the current system requires that you PAY TO GET SPAM along with the mail you want.
Your ISP provides email service and bundles the cost into the ISP monthly fee you PAY.
If you're ISP merely provides a connection, then you PAY for the bandwidth required to deliver the SPAM to your mail relay, and you PAY the computer and storage to process the SPAM and PAY for electric power.
Even if you run the best filter in the world, you have to pay for the hardware that runs the filter and you have to PAY for the bandwidth to deliver the SPAM to be discarded and PAY for the power to run the filter.
And those free mail boxes offered by the many "free" mail services make you PAY to use them because MUST agree to PAY for the bandwidth to deliver PAID advertisement delivered along with your mail.
Make no mistake, you PAY FOR EMAIL.
The only question is "WHO should pay"?
Chernobyl shows that nuclear power is safe and cost effective. The WSJ is spouting marxist lies when it says that the costs from Chernobyl were 4-5 times the benefits of all those commie nuclear power plants.
The rupture in the pipe at Indian Point didn't cause any problems and shows that skipping mandated inspections is perfectly safe.
To add further proof, Davis-Besse shows there wasn't any problem after a decade of failing to deal with a problem seen repeatedly during inspections. And it was perfectly ok to delay the NRC mandated inspection to look for a corrusion problem seen in the same model reactor elsewhere. There was a full 3/8 inch of stainless steel left to contain the 10,000 PSI steam after the 6-1/2 inches of carbon steel rotted away.
The incorrectly sized emergency pipes were never a problem, nor the failing pumps, or incorrectly trained operators have never caused a problem.
The computed safety factors in the nuclear plants shows that there is at worst only three releases of radioactive material likely in 10,000 years with the likelihood being closer to 1 in a million years, and the data proves it once you eliminate Three Mile Island release. TMI was a new plant, only one year old at the time, and everyone knows that infant failures are the thing you have to worry about. Once a computer or a car has reached 10 years old, they're good for another century.
We should be encouraging nuclear power in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Cuba, so these poor countries can develop economically without competing with the US for oil. The Russian and China plan to build nuclear power plants on barges should be encouraged so that nuclear power plants can be easily deployed around the world.
Yep, nuclear is the road to peace and safety.
The industry isn't unregulated, its less regulated than before.
The old regulatory system used profit regulation. By this method, a utility was automatically given a 6% return on investment as long as the investment was necessary. To be sure the investment was necessary, the industry got approval from the PUC. But most PUCs or laws allowed getting the return on investment if the equipment was generating power.
So, power companies would come up with all the reasons for building a huge electrical system:
- we will have twice as many customers in 10 years, but costs are rising, so we should double capacity today to save money
- a $500M nuclear power plant is the best solution because it won't require fuel like coal or oil
So, the utilities had huge incentives to over design the system.
And as long as a nuclear power plant is brought into production, the utility gets 6%, and the more expensive it was to get it into production, the greater the return on investment.
Today the regulation is different. Utilities are heading toward the day when power plants are completely out of the regulator picture. That means that you make money if you sell enough power to justify, or lose money otherwise. And there are various programs that mandate that utilities buy power such as wind and solar. So the system is now one where the utilities have no interest in building power plants because the return on those is unknown today.
The other factor is that electric power generation is moving to a distributed model. Right now, we have the "mainframes" and "mini" power plants, but the direction is toward "PC" power plants all connected together in a network. The current powerline structure is like a mainframe with thousands of terminal lines running from offices to the computer room and a small number of mainframes connected in a net. But in a decade the system will be like today's internet, millions of small power stations all connected in a mesh.
It doesn't make sense to invest a billion dollars when it might not get used and if you can't rent it, you will lose money. There is no ensured profit.
But the reason for deregulating is that the power system is changing just like mini and PCs changed the computer industry.
There are a couple of problems in the interim.
The power companies want to control everything because that's how they grow and make money.
The PUCs don't want to piss off their next employer so they don't teach the public and investors about the direction of the industry.
The politians don't want to piss off their contributors, so they don't talk too much about it either. And most of the time, they try to find "green" things to pitch that won't change the way things are done, but these green proposals are actually based on emerging technology.
And Bush is an oil man, and every energy problem is solved by oil, so we drill off Cape Cod, in Alaska, the White House lawn, and invade Iraq to protect the virtual oil pipeline of tankers.
The power industry wants things the old way but they know that the days of cheap oil are gone, that nuclear power is incredibly expensive, and that they have too much overhead to build wind power plants - a utility project requires about 100 power company employees and contractors for a year. To put up 100 wind power towers will cost $150,000 each without spending a dime on the equipment, while a small company will build them and get them online in 6 months with only 5 employees.
Returning to the old regulator system would result in 100 nuclear power plants and 500 coal plants in Canada and Mexico with billions in power lines.
Without regulation, we'll have a million wind farms in 20 years.
In a decade computers won't exist. They will have vanished into backgroud. You'll buy a computer like you buy pens, printer paper, bookbag, etc.
In a decade, 99% of computers will be bought based on price, $179 or $229, color, purple, yellow, green, and style, delicate or BMX. A key issue will be whether you can get matching pants or shoes.
Take a look at The Innovator's Dilemma by Christensen.
He talks about the backhoe revolutionizing construction.
The backhoe fit a niche between steam shovels and human ditch diggers.
The Segway fits in between electric wheelchairs that are hugely expensive and ungainly and cheap wheelchairs with pushers and walkers (the four legged crutches).
The iBot is like a supercomputer compared to the mainframe electric wheel chair.
The Segway is like a PC compared to the calculator wheel chair and the paper and pencil walker.
A lot of people would like to have an electric wheel chair, or even better, an iBot, but those weren't available. And their problem isn't severe enough to mandate the more expensive solution. Those are the people who need to have the handicap parking space be empty so they can walk into the store and get to the store provided electric cart or wheelchair cart, or to the chairs placed around the store.
The Segway won't help the people who need the wheelchair all the time, but the people who can't walk due to weakness, joint problems, etc. are finding the Segway a great solution. So, its sort of like the IBM PC. Expensive, not able to handle many of the conventional computing needs.
But, all of a sudden, the PC found entirely new customers, customers who would never have gotten a PC. The Segway is finding lots of customers who would never buy an iBot or an electric wheelchair.
Manufacturing is about figuring out how to manufacturing goods for the lowest cost with the highest quality. As more PCs were sold, the cost of making a PC dropped and the PC got better, and that fueled the market for PCs and gave more people the opportunity to figure out how to use a PC resulting in more PC sales.
The Segway will improve, drop in price, find more customers with more uses, resulting in lower manufacturing costs. The people who need the aid of something like a Segway will gain the benefit of the improved technologies.
And just as the PC sales volume drove the PC technology cycle, the mini/mainframe market were forced to compete and they "stole" as much technology from the PC world as possible. Ethernet was a minicomputer technology, but once it was installed in just a small percent of PCs, the PC market represented most of the Ethernet product market and the mini/mainframes got Ethernet at such a low cost that it was practically free.
Dean Kamem understands that price/cost is critical to any successful technology. To develop a technology and then confine it to a low volume produce/market, the price is going to be too high to result in rapid success.
Back to the steam shovel and ditch digger, because the principle applies to clunking mechanical stuff and not just to microelectronics.
Backhoes were underpowered compared to steam shovels, but they could allow a couple of ditch diggers to run water and sewage to 5 homes a day instead of 1, even when the backhoe broke down.
But today, I doubt that many people have even seen a picture of a steam shovel because the pictures are so old that there are no women in the picture and thus it can't be used in textbooks (to have only men operating a steam shovel would imply that women aren't capable of operating a steam shovel). The backhoe has improved to the point where there are almost no jobs that require a steam shovel, almost, but not none.
The Segway will drive down the cost of the iBot. The iBot will drive down the costs of electric wheel chairs (really, what can justify a price of $15,000!!!?). The lower costs will allow more people to do things they can't do today.
Wheel chair technology has been dramatically improved by the people who race in marathons, etc. The Segway and iBot will be modified to allow athletes injured in accidents to resume play in sports they're excluded from today. Basketball? Field hockey? Soccer? But that will drive the technology and drive up demand and drive down costs.
Finding multiple uses for technology isn't win-win, it's
Win Win Win Win Win Win Win
DirectTV suing its customers must be a tactic stolen from Monsanto.
For one story out of thousands, see
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Monsanto sued Percy Schmeiser for growing a Roundup tolerant crop that resulted from Monsanto genetically modified seed crop fertilizing his crop, devaluing it - he can't sell it in Europe.
He has fought back and has recently the Canadian "supreme court" has agreed to hear an appeal of the ruling in Monsanto's favor.
The thousands of American and Canadian farmers have been forced to settle with Monsanto because they can't afford the legal fees to fight Monsanto.
This is what is so great about America - when you can't figure out how to make a product, all you need to do is figure out some way to sue the people who do.
Why do the the initial replies always stray way off the unique part of the post?
And then, why oh why oh why do these off topic posts get moderated as "insightfull"???
What the hell do these initial responses have to do with a two wheeled robot with automous capabilities?
Technology has no intrinsic value. The code you have is technology. It appears at present time to be worthless.
The question is are you an innovator and entrepreneur?
If the answer is "yes" and more important, "I AM able to make things happen", then you will turn the technology into something of value, but the value will come from your efforts and not from the technology.
Your profit from the venture will come from convincing the one who legally owns the technology that the deal you offer them is the best one they can expect, ie., the owners ability to innovate will result in less profit than you offer for the technology.
If you aren't motivated by the profit to make it happen, then the profit requires too high an opportunity cost to you to bother with, or you lack the required skills and commitment to actually innovate.
"I believe we need a trusted protocol. This might be as simple as having all emails PGP signed and everything else being sent to the bit-bucket (if you want to be aggressive) or only passed through to the user if the unsigned message had an extremely low spam score."
Ok, implement the protocol, software, system, and adminstrate it for free and I'm in.
But if you say "that's too expensive, I can't afford it", then what you are saying is that you should be allowed to act like a spammer and its the one receiving the mail that has to pay the costs.
If your mail isn't worth paying to send, then why are you sending it?
The marginal cost of paying for sending email should not be higher than the current marginal cost of receiving the email is today; the only difference is who is paying for the email. Actually, the marginal cost will be lower because there will be less traffic and that will reduce the cost of resources required to handle the email.
Note that if the marginal cost is $.001, the cost to someone sending one million spam messages to get 2 responses for $25 become unprofitable. Its unprofitable even at $.0001 per message.
The key is to offer multiple email classes which will allow priority mail to subsidize bulk mail. But with the bulk mail marked as such as it transits the system, user agents will be able to readily separate the bulk mail from the priority mail.
But in any case, decades of experience has shown that there isn't any chance of a public good being well utilized without a market to allocate it. Even communists have embrace markets to allocate resources. Yeah, the "free market" has its share of abuses, but when you dig deep you find that every free market failure is due to a known externality that is not applied because of political power. My current view is that political power is forcing the receiver of mail to pay the cost of spammers sending email "for the good of the community". And then they go a step further and basically say that the problem with spammers is because the victims of spam aren't spending enough (effort, dollars, whatever) to prevent spam from overwhelming the system. This ranks up there with the failures of communist command and control to produce an acceptable level of goods.
The challenge is to design a low cost system that allows for
I didn't look though all the repies, but they're as creative as
"I'm responsible for training people in Quickbooks, what should I teach:
- the joys of double entry bookkeeping
- typing without looking at the keyboard
- transferring data to tax prep application
- how to find free alternatives to quickbooks"
Computering as a field is as relevant as blacksmithing was in 1900. Or typing was in 1975.
Yes, typist was a growing profession until about 1975. Computer and web code monkeys are going the way of the typist.
So, what is the future of computing. Well, it's a basic skill, like reading and writing, typing, presenting ideas in an organized manner.
The future of computing is integrating it with products. We see it everywhere but don't see it. How many people look at a VCR and say "What a great software design and implementation!". How many people drive down the road and say, "Man those coders really did a great job on the engine control loop!".
The quick and easy way to excite kids especially is with Mindstorms. You combine embedded system design with mechanical design and system integration. BUT, there is lots more beyond the software that LEGO provides. There is software that does all the embedded system design tricks of tool suites, cross compilers, etc. You can implement distributed control systems.
But you can go beyond that system. Parallax has focused increasingly on the education market with its BOEBOT, and various other prototyping systems and tools. They even have a gate array system. Why do I mention Parallax out of the hundreds of companies offering similar systems and components - merely that they have focused specifically on the education market after coming from the hobby/lab world where their advantage was that they saved a chunk of time for a modest premium - as they move "up market" they are charging a higher premium, but they are adding value by bringing together components from multiple vendors.
There is a growing amount of interest in "CNC" and with it a growing body of components, both software and hardware. There are several somewhat ready made packages of motors, controls, and software to allow building some simple, but very interesting machines. The costs start getting up there - certainly well in excess of a couple new computers. (Mindstorms are slightly less than a computer.)
To provide a simple, somewhat focused activity, you could go the Sumobot route. There are a few pretty much turnkey somobot kits available and the emphasis would be on developing good automous programs to competition. The competition rings are inexpensive and small (about 5 feet square to the ring and an area around them, minus the space for people).