Buy? Intel has decent compilers available for Itanium. Just recompile your source on them. And yes, they do exist, I've seen them. Sure, you can't buy GTA Vice city and the like for them, but that's not the point, is it?
And what exactly are you going to run that compiler and software on? Last time I checked, neither Intel nor AMD was actually selling 64-bit processors to the consumer(or even professional) market- big corporate iron only. Apple's turning 64-bit technology loose on the average Joe, and they ARE the first company to do so.
The amazing thing here is that for less than $13k (cheaper educational), I can get a system with 2 big flat panels that absolutely SPANKS the $40k SGI Octanes.
Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed; the memory can talk to the processor while the processor writes to the disk subsystem while the video card...and none of it ever has a collision and can operate at Crossbar's full point-to-point speed without effect from other subsystems.
Not only that, but as you add processor modules(which if I remember right, have memory on them?), you add Crossbar bus bandwidth; adding modules adds extra Crossbar channels(I think. It's been a long time since that technology briefing).
It's a quad-processor-capable system- so I don't think you are giving it a very fair shake; on a 4-processor system, I think each processor would have about +14GB/sec access to anything in the system(including memory), which is just a few GB shy of double the G5 which can only manage 8GB/sec for access to main memory. Oh, and let me remind you Crossbar is 5-6 years old...
Thanks, but if I want to push around multi-gigabyte datasets, I'll take the Octane. I find Hypertransport, at only 16 bits wide, destinctly unimpressive...
There's a distributed project to crypto-crack the Xbox private key. This would allow runnning Linux or anything else on an unmodified Xbox (no mod chip), and would keep the warranty intact.
Methinks voiding the warranty will not be a problem by the time the project finishes.
Remember Distributed.net? Aka, the guys who took years(and years...) to prove how easily they could crack RC5 given all that distributedcomputing power?:-)
In darkest times of communist terror in Poland, there was a common saying "Don't worry, they can find a paragraph for everyone". Seems this law is just one more of such paragraphs to "match everyone".
Ah, like the MA state law which makes it illegal to "misuse" the equipment in your vehicle, which cops use to stop you when there's something hanging from your rear-view mirror, if they don't like the looks of you? Then there's the popular-in-movies "[smack] Gee, your taillight is out..."
How about an even better one- speed limits. Everyone exceeds them at least a little bit, and the cops pretty much don't care except in two cases: a)when they don't like the looks of you and need an excuse to stop you and b)when they've got a quota of sorts to fill on tickets.
The big tires and the modifications to the engine's software just show that he had the complete intention of speeding.
Try inserting, say, skin color into that statement- and see how ignorant you sound. Nothing like good old stereotyping.
Typically on normally aspirated cars, computer mods yield a few HP tops or a little more torque...and usually they mostly shift the torque and HP characteristics across the rev range. On turbocharged cars, it's a whole other matter. In both cases, however, HORSEPOWER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW SAFE A DRIVER YOU ARE. If I've got 280hp, and you've got 160- I'm gonna get to 65 coming off that on-ramp faster than you are. That's all. Just because you like to get going fast doesn't mean you like to speed.
There are a variety of reasons for changing rim and tire sizes. Asthetics. Performance. Ride characteristics.
Yes, I said 'performance'. Performance as in, maybe you want to fit larger brakes under the wheels. Maybe you want less sidewall flex under cornering. Maybe you want a wider tire(and wider tires are easier to find in larger diameters). Most of those reasons actually make your vehicle perform better in an emergency situation- especially upgraded brakes, or better tires. In fact, those who modify their cars are often far safer on the road not just because of their upgrades, but because they care about driving, they value their car(and take good care of it)...the list goes on and on. The soccer mom putting on her lipstick while ordering pizza via on-star in her Suburban is far more of a danger to the motoring public than me and my 'hot rod'...
I understand some of the privacy pundits bitching all around about how this is an "invasion of privacy."
You know, there's no legitimate reason for that claim, and I have yet to hear a 'privacy pundit' explain WHY it's an invasion of privacy. I'm very pro-personal-privacy, and I didn't like the idea when I heard about it- but I've long since realized that there really wasn't any basis for those feelings- that it was just a knee-jerk reaction.
I realized that the data would only help me if I was not at fault, since it would be more accurate than 'accident' reconstruction. It could help me even if I was at fault. In either case, maybe a witness claims I was doing "at least 60", and the black box shows them to be dead wrong(I won't say lie- people are very bad at speed estimation as a rule, and that's under excellent circumstances). The box shows I was doing 40. A 60-in-a-35 now turns into a 40-in-a-35; still speeding, but a whole other picture.
Suddenly the "speed freak murderer who couldn't avoid that kid in the road because of his speed" turns into "that driver couldn't avoid that kid who ran out into the road without looking."
However, the 5 seconds leading up to a crash can provide important data for the manufacturers and accident investagators...particularly if the driver of the car is killed in the crash.
...or if the driver simply doesn't remember, as often happens to people involved in collisions. Someone I know was rear-ended by an SUV-driving-moron doing about 80. One second, the other driver was doing 25 in the right lane(slowed traffic), minding his own business. The next thing he remembered was lying in the grass with an EMT leaning over him saying, "hey, you okay buddy?" He remembers nothing about getting rear-ended by the SUV driver.
Built into a wall, these bricks could monitor a building's temperature, vibration and movement.
...and built into a wall, there's no way to fix the 'brick' when it breaks down and stops working. All of the above functions can be performed by sensors ON the wall,floor, ceiling, etc- or post-construction inside the wall, accessible via an access panel. Or you can make a brick that's not completely 'built in'- ie, you make a place for it, a box or something- and the sensor can still be serviced, you still get advantages of easy installation, etc.
So maybe you put a slew of them in-I suppose ease of installation counters the increased cost of deploying more of them. But still, that's great- now you've raised the chances that one of them will fail(since there are more of them)...and they're possibly more unreliable, and accuracy or precision will be worse since, well, you made 'em cheaper.
- Everyone invovled dies of old age (Roswell was what, fifty years ago -- another twenty or thirty years and no first-hand witnesses will be around)
Yes, but their clones shall live forever, mwuahahahah!
Re:But can it still be used as a floatation device
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The Buttocks Have It
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I'd hate to have my plane land gracefully in the Atlantic Ocean
Planes, particularly very large ones, don't "gracefully" anything in the water. Almost all of the time, they cartwheel- usually when one engine or wingtip touches the water before another.
like foxes building the henhouse
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Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"My impression is this (company) is motivated by people who know we can't go on burning oil and not destroy our climate," said Ritchie, whose group has been working with Cargill Dow and other companies to create a set of sustainable farming standards for bio-industrial crops.
These standards, he said, would emphasize renewing soil fertility, protecting scarce water resources and reducing fertilizers and pesticides.
Last time I looked, Cargill makes a SHITLOAD of money off pesticides, fertilizers, animal feed chemicals, and so on- just check out their website if you don't believe me. We're supposed to believe they're working on stuff that will eliminate/reduce demand for those products?
What's Cargill going to sell, information booklets? Patent the compost process?:-)
David Colburn's stature at AOL grew to such epic proportions that he earned a nickname: God.
Hey. That's reserved for sysadmins.
Not so. According to the infamous job description sheet:
http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Find_Your_Ro le.html
(there are many versions of that sheet, with anything from executive secretaries to programmers to users being the ultimate end-point. Having dealt with executive secretaries, they're not far off the mark, they wield the most amazing power- and abuse it handily. Hell hath no fury like a pissed off executive secretary.)
Limiting shuttles to flights to the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope.
So they can see any stuff that has fallen off better and so they have a place to stay when bad stuff happens.
There's no place like home like a telescope that fits inside the bay of the shuttle, with no place you could even stick your arm into, much less hang out while waiting for someone to come get you.
No, this sounds more like the public way of saying "no more military or commercial payload missions". They're not saying it outright, because the last thing NASA wants to do right now is remind the public that they haul up a -lot- of military and commercial satellites; it's not all mostly-useless scientific experiments.
Why the only-scientific-missions policy? Same reason. Just imagine the fallout if a shuttle blew up on a commercial payload mission. I can see the congressional hearing now: "Our brave astronauts lost their lives to bring us 500 channels?"
So is there been something screwy with the IDE-CD subsystem in Linux lately?
I'll second that. I noticed after going to 2.4.20 that whenever I burn a CD(and this is on an 8x writer, not exactly 'fast'), the CPU(Athlon 1.5ghz) goes to 30%, all of it system time-and the system slows to a crawl, cursor jumping and everything-which is new- and I've got 32bit IO and unmasked IRQs set on all my IDE devices....
Go ahead and laugh, but I work for a company that still writes/maintains qbasic software and sells it to unsuspecting clients for $50,000 bucks a pop. I think we need a "software purchasing for dummies" book.
Solaris is easy to get started on
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Sun's Last Stand
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well, obviously it's easier for someone to cut their teeth on linux, since anyone can download a distro and install it. not so easy with sun/solaris.
Not true. Assuming you have only one system at home and you don't have a couple gigs to spare- it's actually easier to try solaris, given that one can find Sun pizzaboxes for well under $100- more like $50. They don't need much ram or disk space, especially with older Solaris versions- and it's a good way to get to know Solaris.
Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating?
Because infrastructure and reliability costs money(no no, trust me, I get more insightful below. Well, maybe not insightful. It's hard to answer this story insightfully, I just point out the facts.) Communications mediums are WORTHLESS if they are unreliable, which is one of the reasons cell phones took decades to "take off"(realize that it's been at least 3 decades since the cell phone was invented, and only in the last 5-6 has there really been a cell phone boom, at least in the US. Realize that the # complaint with cell phones is still how unreliable they are.)
Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices.(snip) What are the technological barriers?
Well, you asked, so here goes:
Latency- you're multiplying the hop count astronomically.
Routing- the internet has something of a routing crisis already, with routes being incredibly complex. Now, you've passed the buck to each system or workstation- and it has to know, geographically, where it is and where all the other nodes within range are, so that it knows who to pass a packet to(no sense in passing it to the laptop sitting right next to you, is there?) This might be possible, if the routes were at least semi-permanent, but they're not- they're constantly moving, nodes are going up+down...which brings us to...
Reliability- systems will crash while handling a packet, or simply never see a packet due to interference- RF or physical(something blocks the signal). That's just on a pure network level. On a higher level, communications are worthless without reliability. You've GOT to be able to pick up the phone and get a dialtone for so many reasons- emergency services, business...
Speed. Due to extreme unreliability, retransmission will be a severe problem. That means TCP windows won't get very big- and remember how high latency is? That means data transfer rates will be incredibly, incredibly low. Overhead will skyrocket. Even a couple percent packet loss can seriously affect performance.
Leeching. People will hack their devices to simply refuse to answer routing requests. This is what's happening, basically, on p2p networks...and believe it or not, accounting/policing it is almost impossible without a centralized system.
There are also some hidden consequences, like "everyone's mobile device is no longer idle, it's processing someone else's packets, so its battery life goes into the toilet".
How would you solve problems of geographic isolation?
That's just it- you'd need wires/fiber/something...and that would cost money. But, reliability would be far better- so people would opt for wired connections they had to pay for. Oops, right back where you started.
Also related- the reason high-speed access costs so much money in the US is because of geographic isolation and population density. It's no surprise that several Asian countries have DSL service in the megabyte-per-second range to your door for $10-20/mo; after all, you're probably in a huge apartment complex, in a city.
If the population density isn't high enough to support pricing high speed access low enough, I doubt you'll have enough nodes to even occasionally get any kind of connectivity to anything else- much less guarantee it.
Back to the cell phone example- look at how many billions(if not trillions?) of dollars have been poured into the cellphone network(which in turn is reliant upon a larger wired network.) I don't care what network you're on, soon as you get a little bit beyond the suburbs, off a major highway- forget it, you're screwed.
Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?
Well, for one, if you did telephone calls over this "system", I'd move to another country. When I pick up the phone, I damn well expect a dialtone, because, oh, say, my house could be on fire. There are no doubt thousands of o
Answer: Who the fuck cares? The only reason they didn't announce his departure is that they probably would have been overloaded with "YAAAAY!" comments.
Seriously, did you notice that every single "article" he wrote had a slew of comments ripping apart his entire premise? Usually there'd also be one -highly moderated(up)- comment saying something along the lines of "Katz is a fucking moron smoking crack, why is he still allowed to post stories"?.
The guy was almost universally hated(mostly because the only thing more annoying than a philosopher is an incompetent philosopher.)
Probably the only thing he has to be proud of is that he was the biggest reason people bothered to register(to block his articles.)
Why can't Slashdot get partner status with The NYT?
Sure, why not- in fact, why stop there. Jason Blair would be the perfect slashdot story submitter and editor(most story-posters simply copy, outright, the first paragraph of whatever story they're linking to; Slashdot editors do zero factchecking, etc.)
Will Sturgeon reports that more than two-thirds of mobile phone users have received spam on their cell phones
Two thirds of who? Unless they surveyed the soccer moms, the 15 year old kids etc- I'd guess the statistic is heavily biased. For example, if it was an internet survey, you just nix'd a HUGE percentage of the population- a percentage of the population which is highly unlikely to have their #'s published on the internet, or use SMS, or even know what the hell SMS is- and I bet companies that send SMS messages to you legitimately(news/sports updates, and the article-mentioned ringtones) are happily selling out every address.
I've -never- recieved spam on my phone. Why? I don't give it to anyone unless they -need- it. I also don't advertise it on my webpage. I don't use sports/news/weather alert crap. There are groups of people who have to give their # out to clients etc, and who put it on their company/personal webpages. They're gonna get spam, that simple.
So where'd that statistic come from? If you scan through the article, you find the source:
"A recent survey conducted by Silicon.com reveals that 69 percent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone." (side note: the entire article is actually from Silicon.com, some two-bit site).
So, we have a no-name site giving no information about how the survey was conducted(online? People off the street? Telephone? Magazine card? Mobile device convention? All will return drastically different results). We have no information about the demographics of the respondants, and whether they match cell phone users as a whole. Thus it is impossible to verify their claim of "all cell phone users".
When are people going to learn that you CANNOT generalize? You MUST be specific. As an example(and not implying that this is the exact situation in the story)- "Two thirds of respondants at a mobile communications conference said they had received spam on their cell phone". Yet some marketdroid would happily turn that into "two thirds of cell phone users get spam on their cellphone!"
There are extremely many professional Mac users in advertising and graphic production that still use OS9 just because of QuarkXPress.
Well, all the smart ones moved to InDesign- and by the way, publishing is much bigger, and unlike the advertising industry, they're not going down the tubes- in fact, publishing is doing very well, a relative who edits textbooks says companies can't hire staff fast enough.
Besides that- Quark is the posterchild for "what happens when you don't pay attention to your users." Users vote with their feet and wallets, and once they've switched, they're probably never going to switch AGAIN back to you. 4.0 sucked, and Quark didn't adopt OSX. Even before OS X was even in beta, Quark was loosing marketshare to InDesign. OSX just gave InDesign that much more power.
Now, they're not only buying OS X.. they need to replace their old G3's with new hardware
That's right- and let's get this straight- you think that people who are still running OS 9 and Quark 3.x are going to, in one fell swoop, upgrade to new a)operating systems b)publishing software c)hardware ??
Most shops don't have that kind of capital. You're talking many thousands of dollars in equipment+software per workstation. Now add downtime and labor from setup and problems, and a healthy amount of $ for OS and Quark training for staff...I could see per-workstation/employee costs hitting $5-6k easily($2k for the system, $1k for Quark, $1k for setup, lost productivity/lost business...and several $k for training).
Yeah, no shit. It's been "announced" for...uh...years.
and will be available as of next week
Yes, and Quark's really looking to make up for all those years of not having a current release- they've bundled Duke Nukem Forever.
On a more serious note, Quark has other problems. When 4.0 came out, a few people upgraded- and they hated it. Everyone else saw how much they hated it, and refused to upgrade. A few shops bought 4.0 in case someone came to them with a 4.0 file, but for the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up.
Now, the interesting question is, how many people are still using 3.x on OS 9? How many of them are going to feel like upgrading both operating system and publishing software? When I worked as a tech for a publishing company, I found the employees to be COMPLETELY fixated on ONE method of doing any particular task- these people will have mental breakdowns switching...
Slashdot Mirror
And what exactly are you going to run that compiler and software on? Last time I checked, neither Intel nor AMD was actually selling 64-bit processors to the consumer(or even professional) market- big corporate iron only. Apple's turning 64-bit technology loose on the average Joe, and they ARE the first company to do so.
Except that the Octane's bus is theoretically much, much faster. It has an end-to-end point speed of only about 3 and half GB/sec, but it can connect any of the individual systems to each other simultaneously at full speed; the memory can talk to the processor while the processor writes to the disk subsystem while the video card...and none of it ever has a collision and can operate at Crossbar's full point-to-point speed without effect from other subsystems.
Not only that, but as you add processor modules(which if I remember right, have memory on them?), you add Crossbar bus bandwidth; adding modules adds extra Crossbar channels(I think. It's been a long time since that technology briefing).
It's a quad-processor-capable system- so I don't think you are giving it a very fair shake; on a 4-processor system, I think each processor would have about +14GB/sec access to anything in the system(including memory), which is just a few GB shy of double the G5 which can only manage 8GB/sec for access to main memory. Oh, and let me remind you Crossbar is 5-6 years old...
Thanks, but if I want to push around multi-gigabyte datasets, I'll take the Octane. I find Hypertransport, at only 16 bits wide, destinctly unimpressive...
Um...might as well be, since you can't buy anything to run that on yet.
All jokes about apple's supply chain aside, these things will be widely available in less than a month.
Methinks voiding the warranty will not be a problem by the time the project finishes.
Remember Distributed.net? Aka, the guys who took years(and years...) to prove how easily they could crack RC5 given all that distributedcomputing power? :-)
Ah, like the MA state law which makes it illegal to "misuse" the equipment in your vehicle, which cops use to stop you when there's something hanging from your rear-view mirror, if they don't like the looks of you? Then there's the popular-in-movies "[smack] Gee, your taillight is out..."
How about an even better one- speed limits. Everyone exceeds them at least a little bit, and the cops pretty much don't care except in two cases: a)when they don't like the looks of you and need an excuse to stop you and b)when they've got a quota of sorts to fill on tickets.
Try inserting, say, skin color into that statement- and see how ignorant you sound. Nothing like good old stereotyping.
Typically on normally aspirated cars, computer mods yield a few HP tops or a little more torque...and usually they mostly shift the torque and HP characteristics across the rev range. On turbocharged cars, it's a whole other matter. In both cases, however, HORSEPOWER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW SAFE A DRIVER YOU ARE. If I've got 280hp, and you've got 160- I'm gonna get to 65 coming off that on-ramp faster than you are. That's all. Just because you like to get going fast doesn't mean you like to speed.
There are a variety of reasons for changing rim and tire sizes. Asthetics. Performance. Ride characteristics.
Yes, I said 'performance'. Performance as in, maybe you want to fit larger brakes under the wheels. Maybe you want less sidewall flex under cornering. Maybe you want a wider tire(and wider tires are easier to find in larger diameters). Most of those reasons actually make your vehicle perform better in an emergency situation- especially upgraded brakes, or better tires. In fact, those who modify their cars are often far safer on the road not just because of their upgrades, but because they care about driving, they value their car(and take good care of it)...the list goes on and on. The soccer mom putting on her lipstick while ordering pizza via on-star in her Suburban is far more of a danger to the motoring public than me and my 'hot rod'...
You know, there's no legitimate reason for that claim, and I have yet to hear a 'privacy pundit' explain WHY it's an invasion of privacy. I'm very pro-personal-privacy, and I didn't like the idea when I heard about it- but I've long since realized that there really wasn't any basis for those feelings- that it was just a knee-jerk reaction.
I realized that the data would only help me if I was not at fault, since it would be more accurate than 'accident' reconstruction. It could help me even if I was at fault. In either case, maybe a witness claims I was doing "at least 60", and the black box shows them to be dead wrong(I won't say lie- people are very bad at speed estimation as a rule, and that's under excellent circumstances). The box shows I was doing 40. A 60-in-a-35 now turns into a 40-in-a-35; still speeding, but a whole other picture.
Suddenly the "speed freak murderer who couldn't avoid that kid in the road because of his speed" turns into "that driver couldn't avoid that kid who ran out into the road without looking."
However, the 5 seconds leading up to a crash can provide important data for the manufacturers and accident investagators...particularly if the driver of the car is killed in the crash.
...or if the driver simply doesn't remember, as often happens to people involved in collisions. Someone I know was rear-ended by an SUV-driving-moron doing about 80. One second, the other driver was doing 25 in the right lane(slowed traffic), minding his own business. The next thing he remembered was lying in the grass with an EMT leaning over him saying, "hey, you okay buddy?" He remembers nothing about getting rear-ended by the SUV driver.
...and built into a wall, there's no way to fix the 'brick' when it breaks down and stops working. All of the above functions can be performed by sensors ON the wall,floor, ceiling, etc- or post-construction inside the wall, accessible via an access panel. Or you can make a brick that's not completely 'built in'- ie, you make a place for it, a box or something- and the sensor can still be serviced, you still get advantages of easy installation, etc.
So maybe you put a slew of them in-I suppose ease of installation counters the increased cost of deploying more of them. But still, that's great- now you've raised the chances that one of them will fail(since there are more of them)...and they're possibly more unreliable, and accuracy or precision will be worse since, well, you made 'em cheaper.
Yes, but their clones shall live forever, mwuahahahah!
Planes, particularly very large ones, don't "gracefully" anything in the water. Almost all of the time, they cartwheel- usually when one engine or wingtip touches the water before another.
Last time I looked, Cargill makes a SHITLOAD of money off pesticides, fertilizers, animal feed chemicals, and so on- just check out their website if you don't believe me. We're supposed to believe they're working on stuff that will eliminate/reduce demand for those products?
What's Cargill going to sell, information booklets? Patent the compost process? :-)
Hey. That's reserved for sysadmins.
Not so. According to the infamous job description sheet:o le.html
http://neil.franklin.ch/Jokes_and_Fun/Find_Your_R
(there are many versions of that sheet, with anything from executive secretaries to programmers to users being the ultimate end-point. Having dealt with executive secretaries, they're not far off the mark, they wield the most amazing power- and abuse it handily. Hell hath no fury like a pissed off executive secretary.)
Limiting shuttles to flights to the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope.
So they can see any stuff that has fallen off better and so they have a place to stay when bad stuff happens.
There's no place like home like a telescope that fits inside the bay of the shuttle, with no place you could even stick your arm into, much less hang out while waiting for someone to come get you.
No, this sounds more like the public way of saying "no more military or commercial payload missions". They're not saying it outright, because the last thing NASA wants to do right now is remind the public that they haul up a -lot- of military and commercial satellites; it's not all mostly-useless scientific experiments.
Why the only-scientific-missions policy? Same reason. Just imagine the fallout if a shuttle blew up on a commercial payload mission. I can see the congressional hearing now: "Our brave astronauts lost their lives to bring us 500 channels?"
I'll second that. I noticed after going to 2.4.20 that whenever I burn a CD(and this is on an 8x writer, not exactly 'fast'), the CPU(Athlon 1.5ghz) goes to 30%, all of it system time-and the system slows to a crawl, cursor jumping and everything-which is new- and I've got 32bit IO and unmasked IRQs set on all my IDE devices....
Man, can't a guy download a kernel via FTP without a bunch of armed dudes storming the place? Those SCO guys just don't know when to give it up.
That's especially impressive, since Linux won't run on a 286 ;-)
More like a "leaving your cave for dummies" book.
Isn't that redundant?
Not true. Assuming you have only one system at home and you don't have a couple gigs to spare- it's actually easier to try solaris, given that one can find Sun pizzaboxes for well under $100- more like $50. They don't need much ram or disk space, especially with older Solaris versions- and it's a good way to get to know Solaris.
Because infrastructure and reliability costs money(no no, trust me, I get more insightful below. Well, maybe not insightful. It's hard to answer this story insightfully, I just point out the facts.) Communications mediums are WORTHLESS if they are unreliable, which is one of the reasons cell phones took decades to "take off"(realize that it's been at least 3 decades since the cell phone was invented, and only in the last 5-6 has there really been a cell phone boom, at least in the US. Realize that the # complaint with cell phones is still how unreliable they are.)
Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices.(snip) What are the technological barriers?
Well, you asked, so here goes:
There are also some hidden consequences, like "everyone's mobile device is no longer idle, it's processing someone else's packets, so its battery life goes into the toilet".
How would you solve problems of geographic isolation?
That's just it- you'd need wires/fiber/something...and that would cost money. But, reliability would be far better- so people would opt for wired connections they had to pay for. Oops, right back where you started.
Also related- the reason high-speed access costs so much money in the US is because of geographic isolation and population density. It's no surprise that several Asian countries have DSL service in the megabyte-per-second range to your door for $10-20/mo; after all, you're probably in a huge apartment complex, in a city.
If the population density isn't high enough to support pricing high speed access low enough, I doubt you'll have enough nodes to even occasionally get any kind of connectivity to anything else- much less guarantee it.
Back to the cell phone example- look at how many billions(if not trillions?) of dollars have been poured into the cellphone network(which in turn is reliant upon a larger wired network.) I don't care what network you're on, soon as you get a little bit beyond the suburbs, off a major highway- forget it, you're screwed.
Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?
Well, for one, if you did telephone calls over this "system", I'd move to another country. When I pick up the phone, I damn well expect a dialtone, because, oh, say, my house could be on fire. There are no doubt thousands of o
Answer: Who the fuck cares? The only reason they didn't announce his departure is that they probably would have been overloaded with "YAAAAY!" comments.
Seriously, did you notice that every single "article" he wrote had a slew of comments ripping apart his entire premise? Usually there'd also be one -highly moderated(up)- comment saying something along the lines of "Katz is a fucking moron smoking crack, why is he still allowed to post stories"?.
The guy was almost universally hated(mostly because the only thing more annoying than a philosopher is an incompetent philosopher.)
Probably the only thing he has to be proud of is that he was the biggest reason people bothered to register(to block his articles.)
Sure, why not- in fact, why stop there. Jason Blair would be the perfect slashdot story submitter and editor(most story-posters simply copy, outright, the first paragraph of whatever story they're linking to; Slashdot editors do zero factchecking, etc.)
Two thirds of who? Unless they surveyed the soccer moms, the 15 year old kids etc- I'd guess the statistic is heavily biased. For example, if it was an internet survey, you just nix'd a HUGE percentage of the population- a percentage of the population which is highly unlikely to have their #'s published on the internet, or use SMS, or even know what the hell SMS is- and I bet companies that send SMS messages to you legitimately(news/sports updates, and the article-mentioned ringtones) are happily selling out every address.
I've -never- recieved spam on my phone. Why? I don't give it to anyone unless they -need- it. I also don't advertise it on my webpage. I don't use sports/news/weather alert crap. There are groups of people who have to give their # out to clients etc, and who put it on their company/personal webpages. They're gonna get spam, that simple.
So where'd that statistic come from? If you scan through the article, you find the source:
"A recent survey conducted by Silicon.com reveals that 69 percent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone." (side note: the entire article is actually from Silicon.com, some two-bit site).
So, we have a no-name site giving no information about how the survey was conducted(online? People off the street? Telephone? Magazine card? Mobile device convention? All will return drastically different results). We have no information about the demographics of the respondants, and whether they match cell phone users as a whole. Thus it is impossible to verify their claim of "all cell phone users".
When are people going to learn that you CANNOT generalize? You MUST be specific. As an example(and not implying that this is the exact situation in the story)- "Two thirds of respondants at a mobile communications conference said they had received spam on their cell phone". Yet some marketdroid would happily turn that into "two thirds of cell phone users get spam on their cellphone!"
There are extremely many professional Mac users in advertising and graphic production that still use OS9 just because of QuarkXPress.
Well, all the smart ones moved to InDesign- and by the way, publishing is much bigger, and unlike the advertising industry, they're not going down the tubes- in fact, publishing is doing very well, a relative who edits textbooks says companies can't hire staff fast enough.
Besides that- Quark is the posterchild for "what happens when you don't pay attention to your users." Users vote with their feet and wallets, and once they've switched, they're probably never going to switch AGAIN back to you. 4.0 sucked, and Quark didn't adopt OSX. Even before OS X was even in beta, Quark was loosing marketshare to InDesign. OSX just gave InDesign that much more power.
Now, they're not only buying OS X.. they need to replace their old G3's with new hardware
That's right- and let's get this straight- you think that people who are still running OS 9 and Quark 3.x are going to, in one fell swoop, upgrade to new a)operating systems b)publishing software c)hardware ??
Most shops don't have that kind of capital. You're talking many thousands of dollars in equipment+software per workstation. Now add downtime and labor from setup and problems, and a healthy amount of $ for OS and Quark training for staff...I could see per-workstation/employee costs hitting $5-6k easily($2k for the system, $1k for Quark, $1k for setup, lost productivity/lost business...and several $k for training).
Yeah, no shit. It's been "announced" for...uh...years.
and will be available as of next week
Yes, and Quark's really looking to make up for all those years of not having a current release- they've bundled Duke Nukem Forever.
On a more serious note, Quark has other problems. When 4.0 came out, a few people upgraded- and they hated it. Everyone else saw how much they hated it, and refused to upgrade. A few shops bought 4.0 in case someone came to them with a 4.0 file, but for the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up.
Now, the interesting question is, how many people are still using 3.x on OS 9? How many of them are going to feel like upgrading both operating system and publishing software? When I worked as a tech for a publishing company, I found the employees to be COMPLETELY fixated on ONE method of doing any particular task- these people will have mental breakdowns switching...