It was Norm's laser-guided miter saw that made me quit watching his show about ten years ago. I have one of my own now (actually an armature attachment "add on peripheral"), but at the time couldn't even dream of owning one. I'm sure he's got a computer-driven CNC machine by now.
I figure that when his tools are orders of magnitude more complex than anything I can buy at the time, I can't learn anything from him. Of course, the same thing goes the other way with that guy that does everything (including lathe work) on hand (or foot) powered tools.
This unit does have some good uses, nailed down public access terminals and switch minimalist offices, but for mainstream thin-client usage I can't see it being very successful.
Think again. Software as a service is here. Even Microsoft thinks so, and they're usually the last to know such things. I hate to throw out such things in this environment, but the TCO of an 80-watt desktop machine, complete with floorspace considerations, ongoing maintenance of peripherals, power consumption, etc. drives the price of even the cheapest machines fairly high, putting this unit in competition.
Furthermore, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who would pay a premium for a unit embedded in a wall that replaced a freestanding thing. For evidence of this, check out the market for in-wall speakers. Sure, you can buy a Polk Audio bookshelf speaker for much less than an equivalent wall-mount speaker, and it's much easier to install after the wall has been built, but there's definitely a healthy market for in-wall speakers.
I think the real test of this unit for the home market will be how well it streams video. If people can install these anywhere they would want a television (in America, that's a lot of places) and stream video off of a central server either in their house or from the Internet, plus do a bunch of other Internet-type things at the same location, they'll sell well.
For the commercial market, a unit that performs modestly well as a desktop replacement will interest cube farmers who have a lot of clients that do most of their work either by single-application (data entry, customer service, etc.), by terminal server, or via web-based apps. In schools, libraries, and other common-access places, these will make maintenance and theft protection much easier.
Um... That was my point. Don't you find it odd that there are two sci-fi classics starring Harrisson Ford where there are ongoing fanbase controversies about whether or not his character shot someone first? And, years after the initial theatrical release, "remastered" versions with possible story changes are coming out?
But then, maybe you don't see the ironic correlation. Sorry for disturbing you.
Have you ever wondered if Google just registers domains, then waits for the Googlewatching community to post punditry on what it might be, then decide what to do with it? Stranger things have happened.
Another one of the lesser-known reasons for closing Trojan is the high cost of fighting the annual barrage of lawsuits from said environmentalists. It takes an army of lawyers to keep their army of lawyers at bay. Also, paying the small army of people who's only job it was to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of federal regulations. Trojan was designed to be run by a very small staff, maybe 250. By the time it closed, there were at least that many in the group responsible for keeping up the documentation on the place, let alone making it squeeze out power.
But yes, nuclear power plants are all one-off designs with no "off the shelf" replacement parts available, unless you count the doorknobs and lightbulbs. Toshiba seems to be testing a novel new approach to distributed nuclear power that makes a lot more sense. It'll do battle with the NIMBY crowd, but you can't please everyone.
One advantage to designs like Toshiba's is that they're small. Yet another issue with Trojan was that if it was cranking out power at it's peak (1100 MW) and it suddenly went offline, the whole Western U.S. felt the hit. Smaller plants cause less havoc when they trip. Furthermore, economic right-sizing for plants seems to be at about 500 MW. Power traders seem to like to manage plants of that size, though I can't say I completely understand why.
In all, I hope to see something of a resurgence in popularity of nuclear power, particularly as we see rising fuel costs for gas fired plants and continued environmental issues around the existence of hydroelectric dams. I don't think we know much at all about the long-term impacts of wind farms.
This is a bit off topic, but the Trojan nuclear power plant's cooling tower was demolished yesterday. Our local paper's web site has a nice spread of photos covering the event.
Right. So, throw out your portable CD player, because it has a buffer in it to store about five seconds of music so that it doesn't jitter when you go jogging.
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot. Sorry for accusing you of exercise.
I recently picked up a case of Perrier from Costco and have been tunneling through that. I went in to get Talking Rain, but it only came in cases of mixed flavors, and all I wanted was the lime (love the lime, can't stand the berry flavor). Anyhow, the Perrier is great, and not any more expensive than Talking Rain, either, even though it's purportedly imported.
Once you get away from the sweetness of soda, beverages in general taste better. I can't believe the amount of sugar in a can of soda. If you tried to put six teaspoons of sugar in a 12 oz. up of coffee, it would be nigh undrinkable (unless you're Cuban; they like it that way, it seems).
Starbucks sells a brand of soda (I haven't seen it elsewhere) called Izze, which is fruit juice and carbonated water. The sugar content is far lower, the taste is great, and it's reasonably healthy. Unfortunately, it's also very expensive. Half a case a day could really eat into your video game budget.
What I don't get is what they expect to happen to the light coming from behind the object being cloaked. Do they have some method for making it continue through the space that the object is occupying? That would be a neat trick. I think the last round of this sort of article talked about some sort of mixed camera/display setup that shot a movie of what was going on on one side of a vehicle and played it on the other, making the vehicle less than noticible by casual glance.
I guess it's just a wait-and-see thing. If you told someone in the 1940s that most households would eventually have a box in the kitchen that cooked things with radio waves, they would have laughed at you. If you were to tell them that you would be discussing things with peers from all over the world by way of an interconnected network of personal computing machinery, much of which was sized such that it could be carried in a briefcase, they would have considered locking you up.
I'd be interested in reading that article if you can remember where you saw it (or how to Google it).
I think there's a fairly strong and unsubstantiated knee-jerk reaction from a lot of business people around the implementation of open source software in their organization, particularly financial ones. They seem to feel like there's some lack of control over the code that gets compiled in, and fear that there may be some Office Space-like hidden worm that's siphoning off resources. I've sat and explained to some very intelligent people why there's just as much reason to worry about closed source (even more, actually), but they just can't seem to get past the "anybody can contribute" concept. "With a vendor, we have contracts in place..."
Close. Very close. Three pounds is a lot, though. Maybe that's what it takes, though; I don't know what the weight of a 10.5" screen is. Still, for three pounds, you'd think the battery would last longer. And what's with all the non-screen real estate? I'm after something that's essentially an up-size of the Palm V, sleek and minimalist.
Actually, it's more like getting a book for free (usually unbound cut sheets, with some vague instructions on an arcane process called "binding" followed by another called "finishing"), reading through it, then asking around to others who have written the book about what they thought some vague reference in the middle was about that seems critical to the plot. Maybe you even send the author a polite e-mail saying you didn't understand. The answers you get back tend to be along the lines of, "You idiot, don't bother me until you've read every available text on early Mesopotamian food processing an consumption, followed by the associated works on early Arabian religious rituals. Only then can you even think about talking to me."
This is why a lot of readers like mainstream authors. The books they write are approachable, with easy to understand concepts or with well-written appendices that explain more abstract or unclear concepts. They know what their audiences want and how to package it for mass consumption. Furthermore, if anything remains unclear, chances are that someone around has read the book in question and is happy to talk about it, sharing their experiences and thoughts on it.
Of course, that's books and this is software. The metaphors are really hard to line up.
I'd be more than happy if someone constructed a Palm device the size of the Steno pad I carry around to all my meetings. It's an extreme upscale from the current crop of Palm or WinCE devices, and not sized right for a pocket, but right in line with the usability that people in an office are used to. The Palm OS has all the features the thing would need, and a battery the size of one you could get in a package that size would run the thing quite a while.
For those of you not familiar with the common, top spiral bound Steno pad, think of the PADD from ST:TNG. That's the device I'm talking about.
Realize that what you're asking for is free money. You're pretty clear about it, I will say, as you are asking about "donations" and not "investment." An investment implies a future return (hence the acronym ROI). Free money is hard to come by. Investments are easier, but require some assurance that the money, plus some other money to go with it, is coming back.
MySpace generates revenue primarily through ad revenues. With around 70 million subscribers, I can't imagine the number of impressions they get daily, but at $25 per thousand impressions (a reasonable rate for web ads), they're raking in the dough. If you had a site with even a small fraction of that type of income, you'd have a line of investors ready to help you become the next MySpace.
Developing software to put up a site, particularly software that's going to be distributed free of charge, makes it more difficult for investors to be interested. Two methods for an income stream, and therefore investor interest, come to mind: Support contracts and royalties.
Open Source Software companies survive on support contracts. Use the software for free if you want, but if you want to have your phone calls answered in the middle of the night when your site's down, pay up. It's a tough row, and you have to have a MySQL or JBoss type of fame to generate any significant revenue, or be the only player in your domain.
Now on the royalties side, if your business plan said that you had some software that everyone was going to want to use to set up a web site, and you had some other software that served ads into that first piece of software, generating revenue for you, you'd have an obviously viable income stream potential. If your plan was to share the ad revenue with the people hosting the sites as a method of encouraging them to set up sites, therefore encouraging adoption of your software, you'd have a viable method.
But in the end you need a plan to communicate your method. Like the parent said, write it down. When you get your first draft done, go ask your tightwad uncle if it sounds like something he'd invest in, and when he tells you, "No," ask why not. Polish and repeat as necessary until you've got it right.
One other piece of advice: If you can't clearly state your idea and why it's worth doing (usually in financial terms) verbally in 30 seconds or less, you don't have it right yet.
On the product page, the pricing was "per administrator" with two levels (1-10 systems or unlimited). If you have nine systems and two administrators, you need two licenses, each costing $299. If you have three administrators and fifty systems or five hundred systems, you need three licenses, each costing $499.
For enterprise-class software, it seems like a bargain to me.
Chances are that Apple would have come up with some sort of "Educational Discount" if they didn't already have one for the situation you describe. If they're giving her $10K worth of hardware (arbitrary guess), they may have popped for $500 worth of software for the asking. Did she ask them?
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It was Norm's laser-guided miter saw that made me quit watching his show about ten years ago. I have one of my own now (actually an armature attachment "add on peripheral"), but at the time couldn't even dream of owning one. I'm sure he's got a computer-driven CNC machine by now.
I figure that when his tools are orders of magnitude more complex than anything I can buy at the time, I can't learn anything from him. Of course, the same thing goes the other way with that guy that does everything (including lathe work) on hand (or foot) powered tools.
More likely, "OMG! Ponies!"
Think again. Software as a service is here. Even Microsoft thinks so, and they're usually the last to know such things. I hate to throw out such things in this environment, but the TCO of an 80-watt desktop machine, complete with floorspace considerations, ongoing maintenance of peripherals, power consumption, etc. drives the price of even the cheapest machines fairly high, putting this unit in competition.
Furthermore, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who would pay a premium for a unit embedded in a wall that replaced a freestanding thing. For evidence of this, check out the market for in-wall speakers. Sure, you can buy a Polk Audio bookshelf speaker for much less than an equivalent wall-mount speaker, and it's much easier to install after the wall has been built, but there's definitely a healthy market for in-wall speakers.
I think the real test of this unit for the home market will be how well it streams video. If people can install these anywhere they would want a television (in America, that's a lot of places) and stream video off of a central server either in their house or from the Internet, plus do a bunch of other Internet-type things at the same location, they'll sell well.
For the commercial market, a unit that performs modestly well as a desktop replacement will interest cube farmers who have a lot of clients that do most of their work either by single-application (data entry, customer service, etc.), by terminal server, or via web-based apps. In schools, libraries, and other common-access places, these will make maintenance and theft protection much easier.
Yup. Truckloads for sure.
Um... That was my point. Don't you find it odd that there are two sci-fi classics starring Harrisson Ford where there are ongoing fanbase controversies about whether or not his character shot someone first? And, years after the initial theatrical release, "remastered" versions with possible story changes are coming out?
But then, maybe you don't see the ironic correlation. Sorry for disturbing you.
Oh, wait...
Have you ever wondered if Google just registers domains, then waits for the Googlewatching community to post punditry on what it might be, then decide what to do with it? Stranger things have happened.
But yes, nuclear power plants are all one-off designs with no "off the shelf" replacement parts available, unless you count the doorknobs and lightbulbs. Toshiba seems to be testing a novel new approach to distributed nuclear power that makes a lot more sense. It'll do battle with the NIMBY crowd, but you can't please everyone.
One advantage to designs like Toshiba's is that they're small. Yet another issue with Trojan was that if it was cranking out power at it's peak (1100 MW) and it suddenly went offline, the whole Western U.S. felt the hit. Smaller plants cause less havoc when they trip. Furthermore, economic right-sizing for plants seems to be at about 500 MW. Power traders seem to like to manage plants of that size, though I can't say I completely understand why.
In all, I hope to see something of a resurgence in popularity of nuclear power, particularly as we see rising fuel costs for gas fired plants and continued environmental issues around the existence of hydroelectric dams. I don't think we know much at all about the long-term impacts of wind farms.
This is a bit off topic, but the Trojan nuclear power plant's cooling tower was demolished yesterday. Our local paper's web site has a nice spread of photos covering the event.
Right. So, throw out your portable CD player, because it has a buffer in it to store about five seconds of music so that it doesn't jitter when you go jogging.
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot. Sorry for accusing you of exercise.
Or did you mean "Inconceivable" ??
I recently picked up a case of Perrier from Costco and have been tunneling through that. I went in to get Talking Rain, but it only came in cases of mixed flavors, and all I wanted was the lime (love the lime, can't stand the berry flavor). Anyhow, the Perrier is great, and not any more expensive than Talking Rain, either, even though it's purportedly imported.
Once you get away from the sweetness of soda, beverages in general taste better. I can't believe the amount of sugar in a can of soda. If you tried to put six teaspoons of sugar in a 12 oz. up of coffee, it would be nigh undrinkable (unless you're Cuban; they like it that way, it seems).
Starbucks sells a brand of soda (I haven't seen it elsewhere) called Izze, which is fruit juice and carbonated water. The sugar content is far lower, the taste is great, and it's reasonably healthy. Unfortunately, it's also very expensive. Half a case a day could really eat into your video game budget.
What I don't get is what they expect to happen to the light coming from behind the object being cloaked. Do they have some method for making it continue through the space that the object is occupying? That would be a neat trick. I think the last round of this sort of article talked about some sort of mixed camera/display setup that shot a movie of what was going on on one side of a vehicle and played it on the other, making the vehicle less than noticible by casual glance.
I guess it's just a wait-and-see thing. If you told someone in the 1940s that most households would eventually have a box in the kitchen that cooked things with radio waves, they would have laughed at you. If you were to tell them that you would be discussing things with peers from all over the world by way of an interconnected network of personal computing machinery, much of which was sized such that it could be carried in a briefcase, they would have considered locking you up.
How about an import utility? Or is it already there?
There are several avenues to procure support for open source products.
I'd be interested in reading that article if you can remember where you saw it (or how to Google it).
I think there's a fairly strong and unsubstantiated knee-jerk reaction from a lot of business people around the implementation of open source software in their organization, particularly financial ones. They seem to feel like there's some lack of control over the code that gets compiled in, and fear that there may be some Office Space-like hidden worm that's siphoning off resources. I've sat and explained to some very intelligent people why there's just as much reason to worry about closed source (even more, actually), but they just can't seem to get past the "anybody can contribute" concept. "With a vendor, we have contracts in place..."
Grr....
I made the same argument about utility companies. My basic argument is that, since profit margins are regulated, reduced costs mean reduced power prices.
Close. Very close. Three pounds is a lot, though. Maybe that's what it takes, though; I don't know what the weight of a 10.5" screen is. Still, for three pounds, you'd think the battery would last longer. And what's with all the non-screen real estate? I'm after something that's essentially an up-size of the Palm V, sleek and minimalist.
Actually, it's more like getting a book for free (usually unbound cut sheets, with some vague instructions on an arcane process called "binding" followed by another called "finishing"), reading through it, then asking around to others who have written the book about what they thought some vague reference in the middle was about that seems critical to the plot. Maybe you even send the author a polite e-mail saying you didn't understand. The answers you get back tend to be along the lines of, "You idiot, don't bother me until you've read every available text on early Mesopotamian food processing an consumption, followed by the associated works on early Arabian religious rituals. Only then can you even think about talking to me."
This is why a lot of readers like mainstream authors. The books they write are approachable, with easy to understand concepts or with well-written appendices that explain more abstract or unclear concepts. They know what their audiences want and how to package it for mass consumption. Furthermore, if anything remains unclear, chances are that someone around has read the book in question and is happy to talk about it, sharing their experiences and thoughts on it.
Of course, that's books and this is software. The metaphors are really hard to line up.
I'd be more than happy if someone constructed a Palm device the size of the Steno pad I carry around to all my meetings. It's an extreme upscale from the current crop of Palm or WinCE devices, and not sized right for a pocket, but right in line with the usability that people in an office are used to. The Palm OS has all the features the thing would need, and a battery the size of one you could get in a package that size would run the thing quite a while.
For those of you not familiar with the common, top spiral bound Steno pad, think of the PADD from ST:TNG. That's the device I'm talking about.
Mod this post up, it's straight to the point.
Realize that what you're asking for is free money. You're pretty clear about it, I will say, as you are asking about "donations" and not "investment." An investment implies a future return (hence the acronym ROI). Free money is hard to come by. Investments are easier, but require some assurance that the money, plus some other money to go with it, is coming back.
MySpace generates revenue primarily through ad revenues. With around 70 million subscribers, I can't imagine the number of impressions they get daily, but at $25 per thousand impressions (a reasonable rate for web ads), they're raking in the dough. If you had a site with even a small fraction of that type of income, you'd have a line of investors ready to help you become the next MySpace.
Developing software to put up a site, particularly software that's going to be distributed free of charge, makes it more difficult for investors to be interested. Two methods for an income stream, and therefore investor interest, come to mind: Support contracts and royalties.
Open Source Software companies survive on support contracts. Use the software for free if you want, but if you want to have your phone calls answered in the middle of the night when your site's down, pay up. It's a tough row, and you have to have a MySQL or JBoss type of fame to generate any significant revenue, or be the only player in your domain.
Now on the royalties side, if your business plan said that you had some software that everyone was going to want to use to set up a web site, and you had some other software that served ads into that first piece of software, generating revenue for you, you'd have an obviously viable income stream potential. If your plan was to share the ad revenue with the people hosting the sites as a method of encouraging them to set up sites, therefore encouraging adoption of your software, you'd have a viable method.
But in the end you need a plan to communicate your method. Like the parent said, write it down. When you get your first draft done, go ask your tightwad uncle if it sounds like something he'd invest in, and when he tells you, "No," ask why not. Polish and repeat as necessary until you've got it right.
One other piece of advice: If you can't clearly state your idea and why it's worth doing (usually in financial terms) verbally in 30 seconds or less, you don't have it right yet.
It seems to be working fine now.
The similar Microsoft product is SMS, not Remote Desktop. The Apple-compatible product similar to Microsoft's Remote Desktop is VNC.
On the product page, the pricing was "per administrator" with two levels (1-10 systems or unlimited). If you have nine systems and two administrators, you need two licenses, each costing $299. If you have three administrators and fifty systems or five hundred systems, you need three licenses, each costing $499.
For enterprise-class software, it seems like a bargain to me.
Chances are that Apple would have come up with some sort of "Educational Discount" if they didn't already have one for the situation you describe. If they're giving her $10K worth of hardware (arbitrary guess), they may have popped for $500 worth of software for the asking. Did she ask them?
I was thinking of putting that in as a tag, but decided just to wait for the comment to come along. I didn't have to wait long, though. Thanks.