I should be clearer - it was a good idea at the time, but thanks to the French penchant for bureaucracy and NIH syndrome in the face of rapidly changing technology, the minitel couldn't keep pace, and declined into inferior technology as the rest of the world jumped by leaps and bounds.
You're correct in that it did slow the adoption of the internet in France, but, thankfully, not that much.
I demonstrated in some detail how:
a: the bandwidth isn't there
b: advanced (compared to dumb terminals) hardware is extremely cheap and getting cheaper, and how machines far more powerful than dumb terminals are being dumped on the street for lack of a good home, like last year's pet Easter chickens.
c: components for these machines, especially the ones that differentiate a terminal from a computer (i.e., the hard drive) are also driving down in price to absurdly low prices for massive storage.
But SOMEHOW, you see a dumb terminal and all of your data on someone else's drive as Better? what if you DON'T WANT to be connected? What if you CAN'T be connected? You can't have access to the data that is rightfuly yours? how is that BETTER?
1. Bandwidth
When the idiotic notion came up that broadband will kill the DVD, I responded here, noting that even in the middle of San Francisco, DSL is still painfully slow, and here it is, 2005. We're supposed to have jet packs by now, right? And TFA is talking about editing video over the web? Sure - in who's life time?
2. Storage Costs.
Continue to plummet. I remember when Ellison was barking about dumb terminals - RAM was extortionate. In '94 I bought a ONE GIGABYTE drive from HP for $580 and thought I'd gotten the deal of the decade. Now, for $80 less I can get a MiniMac and dozens of time more drive space PLUS a pile of RAM and processing power that totally smokes my creaky old Centris 650. I can now put on the end of my keychain what used to be a huge SCSI drive. Storage is no longer a problem.People not backing their stuff up is another issue, but it's not from lack of cheap drive space.
3. Computer Costs.
Which brings us to the cost of computers - I'm typing this on my old Blue and White G3 Yosemite. It's running in OS 9.2 and will do so as long as I own it. Why? Because it works. It has 80 gigs of drive space on three different drives - plenty of room for email and back up. I can do basic image editing in Photoshop 6, layout in FreeHand 9 or Quark 4, HTML editing in Dreamweaver 4, and ya know what? It fuckin' works. You can pick up a computer like this on eBay for next to nothing. What "Dumb Terminal" is going to compete with that? I saw someone dumping a perfectly good Dell P3 / 700 on the street last month - he was moving and couldn't give it away. I didn't want it - I already have my G3 / 350...
There is no economic incentive (as computers drive down in cost), there is no technical advantage (as storage drives down in cost) and, crucially: the bandwidth simply isn't there, period.
And won't be - for a very very long time.
Therefore: it's a dumb idea, it won't work, and it's as good as dead in the water.
TFA is full of crapola - typical techno-positivist day-dreaming nonsense - people who smoked the dotcon crack pipe and believed.
So, if I got this right, Dispatch phoned the Red Cross two days before the catastrophe occurred for which the alleged trust fund was set up? What the hell. I smell a rat here.
No rat. It's obvious. (loony theory factor? Check. tin foil hat? check. Capslock disability? CHECK. PUNCTUATION DISABILITY? CHECK!!!)
KAZAA CAUSED THE EARTHQUAKE AND USED THEIR SECRET MINIONS FROM THE MIDDLE EARTH TO DIRECT THE TSUNAMI AWAY FROM AUSTRALIA SO IT WOULD DEVASTATE THE POORER COUNTRIES OF THE INDIAN OCEAN!!! THEY ARE EVIL AND IN LEAGUE WITH THE NAZI HELL CREATURES WHO THREATEN OUR VITAL BODILY FLUIDS AND AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!!! THEY MUST BE DESTROYED!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA AND REICHSFUEHRER BUSH FOR KEEPING US ON THE ONE TRUE PATH TO SALVATION!!!
(end previous processes)
On other points, I think the story was very badly written and researched, and I'm not surprised by any of the problems. In fact, it may have come across by way of sheer stupidity, so instead of them being one day ahead, the writer might have thought they were one day behind, and compensated in the wrong direction, ending up with the date completely incorrect.
Damn. Now I can't get this tinfoil hat off. Guess I'll have to go see my clients like this tomorrow. No biggie. They've seen worse.
Look. It's 2005. OK? And I live in the MIDDLE OF FUCKING SAN FRANCISCO. Draw a big X over the city, and I live about 1500 feet west of that, roughly.
I have Broadband - YOU FUCKIN BETCHA!!!!
And what is my precious bandwidth?
All of 326k!!!!
Yep. And that's on a good night. Tonight is fucked -I'm barely pulling 280 right now.
Now: it's 2005, and I can barely get 326 on DSL, thanks to SBC. And these clowns want to pump 1080i into my house? Even if you compress the living fuck out of it, you're still nowhere NEAR what I can do on DSL. And Cable is BETTER?
Well, let's see: Cable's kind of dodgey around here, thanks to a 900 foot tall TV tower cluttered with all manner of telecommunications transmitters. My wife can't even open the door to her car with the remote...
But: It's a Nice Place to Grow Yer Kids Up, only without the churches and liquor stores...
So Cable sucks.
And these clowns want to put HD over broadband.
Bunch a' maroons I TELL YA!
By the time I can get enough bandwidth into the Spoilsport rat hole to do that, I'll be too old to fuckin care, and it'll be TO HELL WITH THE LOT A YOU - YA YOUNG PUNKS!
I'll be sittin' there with my DVD collection on my multi-terabyte RAID array entertainment computer, which will be in the form of the Lenovo Home Pro, which was sold to me for 99$ at Fry's 2 (the original was burned down 20 years earlier, during the food riots of 2015, during the second American Civil War.) and it frickin ROCKS - my entire music collection and video collection on a raid. I bought them, ripped then (there is NO perfect crypto) and now I get to see and hear whatever the fuck I want, when I want.
but, I hate it when i get unstuck in time like that.
And I'll still clean all the seeds out of my pot using the gatefold cover to "Close to the Edge" by Yes. Even when I'm 90.
You're basing your idea of what it takes to innovate on Drexler's dreams of nanotech? You're basing your idea of what it takes to develop software on the Microsoft model... in 2005, with Microsoft's products looking pale and dowdy next to the bronzed and hearty open-source products?
Oddly, you just proved my point. Extremely small things require machines that can move extremely small things. Drexler can *dream* of nanotech in his garage, but it takes a shitload of gear and a lot of people to make an atomic hinge or pulley...
Also: OSS really pretty much is the same as MS, only the pay sucks and you get to work at home. Whether you have several thousand engineers merrily typing away in a room full of Veal Fattening Pens in some building in Redmond WA, or several thousand engineers merrily typing away at their kitchen tables in their bunny slippers, you still have several thousand engineers working on something.
As I said - the next level of innovation is going to take large teams of people working together to make things happen - the age of the solo engineer in the garage is, for the most part, but not entirely, Over.
I applaud the parent's emotional center on the subject, but disagree with this statement:
t is our nature to innovate. If it is not happening at Lucent, HP or wherever, it will revert back to the garage where countless American innovations have started. Analysts that look to HP and Lucent (Bell Labs) for innovation in the future are sure to be blind-sided by the invention they didn't see coming from some garage or shed somehwere in this great land of ours.
I'm of the opinion that most of the real basic stuff is done. It's going to take Huge Sums Of Money and Large Professional Staffs of Very Smart People to really kick over the next cycle of innovation.
Example: software. Sure: anyone can code stuff, but most of the simple things have been done. I'm sure someone in a garage somewhere will eventually find that one or two points ofentry, but most of the big innovations are going to come at very great expense with large teams of people - some doing programming, others QA, other hardware, bla bla bla, and a support staff and marketing group to make it happen and give it some penetration in the market.
Another example: nanotechnology. I don't see someone in a garage gettin' down with some electron microscope to build micro-buckyball bearings. Heck - he microscoe would eat up most of the garage, never mind the material science machines that made the damn things, andthe hyper-short wavelength lasers, etc. Back in the 1930s - sure - H & P could cobble together some electronics and build a fucking oscillator in a garage, but the kind of innovations in basic research needed today are mostly beyond the reach of some guy in a garage.
don't get me wrong: I truly wish this weren't so, which is why I applaud the parent's attitude. I've just been around long enough and have noticed the trends enough that I seriously doubt we're going to see much value coming out of low-end entreprenuerial efforts.
Which is what makes the historical fiasco that is the person of Carly Fiorina such a complete and unmitigated disaster.
She wasn'tthe undoing of Lucent, but she set Lucent up so that with mediocre management, it could only fail. Which is precisely what happened. And the world (not just the USA, not just Central New Jersey, but THE WORLD) lost a Really Important source of innovative technology that transformed the planet. No Bell Labs? No CD players.
Her greedy shortsighted dismantling of HP and its R&D facilities is just part and parcel of her evil legacy, and shows how she, and all the other self-centered nihilistic freakazoid neocon shitbags like her are really enemies of the People. I'm not being some Commie - I mean what I say in the most democratic (smal d) sense - she and her other plutocratic asswipe buddies are simply pillaging the planet and whatever government or economy stands in their way, and are hellbent on leaving the rest of us "holding the bag" when they (finally) drop dead.
The only thing I can gloat over is:
For all her narcissism and cultivation of celebrity, I can *guarantee you* that she will be forgotten, just like the rest of us. Her priorities are completely misplaced and in the end, she will end up disappearing from the cosmic stage, just like the rest of us.
Unlike the rest of us, she will have left a vast swath of wreckage behind her.
1. If the energy going into a computer erodes due to degradation of the internal battery and other components (manifested in the erosion of the accuracy of the clock), wouldn't that effect the components and "change" the fingerprint?
2. What about multi-processors? If you're cranking from processor A one day, but the next day processor B is the one doing the talking,won't they have different skews? And if the thing is multi-threaded or multi-cored, one could get the skews changing erratically depending on which processor is "speaking" for that particular section of data.
Then there will be the guy who builds data skew randomisers, or the internet data equivalent of a video Time Base Corrector in his garage and sells them on that internet thingie for $200... (Actually I think a digital TBC would be a great idea, in general...)
I think the author of that paper is onto something, but that something is very historic for this moment. From what I can gather, a few basic changes in machinery could obviate his plans.
Let's pretend your a famous celebrity, and you don't want what happened to Paris Hilton
(yeah - she's an incredibley rich idiot, but a pretty cute incredibley rich idiot, if you go for that sort of plasticky Los Angeles coke head look, and on a basic human level, hacking her phone was pretty lame...)
to happen to you.
So, you get one of these phones. Then, one day, some stalker asshat sees you and steals your phone. you figure: who cares? They need to have my face to get in!
And GUESS WHAT? HE DOES!!!
Where? From your own website! The thief downloaded your headshot from the website, or from some tabloid or fan site, blew it up, printed it out and simply HELD THE PICURE IN FRONT OF THE CELL PHONE CAMERA.
So much for Celebrity Protection.
It also fails the ordinary citizen. How?
Like so: Crack Head asswipe scum sucking FREEK pulls a gun on your ass, and relieves you of your wallet and cellphone. To get at you data in the cellphone, he just goes down to Kinko's, scans the picture off your driver's license, blows it up, prints it out, and then simply HOLDS THE PICURE IN FRONT OF THE CELL PHONE CAMERA. Ding. In like flint.
This is Yet another Example of a technology in search of a problem. It happens too often.
And yet another example of peole failing to realise that with Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, everything always already exists in a state of simulation. there is no "original face" to "photograph".
The camera doesn't "understand" the idea of "face". It just mechanically/electronically matches specific electrical charges between two sets of electrical charges. If they match by certain preset criteria (which are also stored as electrical charges) then it does one thing, if not, it does another.
It doesn't think, it doesn't decide. It's like a wind up toy.
RS
"the average idiot in the street needs more toys, more stimulation, harder drugs, faster fucks to just keep from slipping into a coma - maybe an iPod with a dildo that shoots coke up their ass. I fear their bloodlust."
- TTE
I agree with you, re: point #1, although I have had problems getting my old scanner (SCSI) to work on Linux (SuSe). That aside, driver installation and support has dramatically improved with Linux, and will continue to do so.
I also agree with point #2 - a big chunk of the kernal code is device management, and for MS to come galloping in, but the code, and glue in their own driver support seems... silly.
Where I think Dvorak (as usual) misses the point at hand is (as usual) on the basic fundamentals of the technology. He crowed about the death of Apple for YEARS. But Apple's doing great. Why? Because there are millions of people out there who want a computer that Just Works and does so in a way that is elegant and inoffensive. So, Apple survived.
Same goes for Linux. How? The FUNDAMENTALS: Linux :
a: Is Free and Open.
b: Requires less I.T. head count per workstation than Windows.
Point (a) is the metaphysical reason for adopting Linux: it gives Linux an ethical basis for one's support, similar to Apple's aesthetic appeal. Point (b) is the hook that convinces - it reduces labour costs to a corporation.
The dynamics of these basic points, combined with the simple fact that much of the software on Linux is Free (as in beer), makes Linux an even more attractive platform, regardless of the driver situation.
Just do a thought experiment: irrationally limit Linux driver support to zero. But then, irrationally boost its benfits (say, it requires zero I.T. personnel to maintain). When you combine that with its inherent Open nature, the driver situation takes care of itself over time.
From such logic, and what he said in TFA, I can only conclude that, as usual, John C Dvorak is speaking from his final voluntary sphincter. As usual.
I'm not some tree hugging freak, but I think there are FAR more useful and constructive places the time, money and energy being pissed away on trying to save a mediocre TV series can be spent.
Face it: it's network television. Its fundamental purpose is to keep your attention between commercials. It wasn't doing a very good job of that, so they canned it. It has nothing to do with art. It has everything to do with commerce.
If they could show nothing but TV commercials and keep an audience that way, they would. But they can't - people get bored - so they put dollops of infantile fantasy, emotional pornography, and corporate disinformation masquerading as news to simply keep your attention between the commercials.
The death of Enterprise is just the latest example of this process.
Don't count on HP recovering, though. Business doesn't DO that anymore.
I disagree - look at Apple. Back in the 1990s, people were drinkin' 40s just waitin' for Apple to die so they could go pee on the grave.
When I was there (At Apple) the stock sank to $17. Now it's way up over $70, and they're talking about a split!
So, I DO think HP can recover and come back stronger than ever - but they're going to do it with their printing and imaging division innovating their way out of the present mess. Not with some tacky gltzy nitwit like Carly running the train into the ground... if you know what I mean.
You are ABSOLUTELY correct about her time at Lucent. Lucent didn't fail until she left, but it was the kind of freewheeling idiocy that she brought to their sales systems (where they were loaning money to clients that were about to go belly up) that set up the obvious train wreck that followed immediately upon her departure.
I like your image of Carly in stocks....
I was thinking of her in an orange jumpsuit at Pelican Bay for 20 years, but maybe you're right - a month or two in the stocks, covered in her own filth would be good...
It'll probably be some kind of magnetic strip that built into the card. Just put a big fat magnet on top of it for a week or three. Then go on about your business.
If you get pulled over and the card "doesn't work" that's "Not Your Problem". It means that the cop WILL have to type in your DL # and then wait for the data to come back (like many of them do now).
The card itself is of no consequence, really. What is of consequence is the sharing of data on demand, as triggered by the card. But the card could just as easily be your SS# or your State+DL# or any number of unique identifying data points.
As noted in other posts - most of this info is already shared. So, the problem seems ot be the convenience factor for Officer Krupke of the Donut Patrol - apparently people feel threatened if the denizens of the Krispy Kreme Brigade have instant access to one's entire driving and legal record.
They *Already* have that access, they just have to work for it. So, if you think their convenience is deniable, then demagnetise the card and go on with your life. It just means that a 5 minute traffic stop that would have been "Hey Asshole^H^H^H^H^H^Citizen - you were doing 73 in a 65, so you're getting a ticket!" that would last 5 minutes will now drag out into a 20 minute disaster, ending with "Hey Asshole^H^H^H^H^H^H^Citizen - you're National ID Card has been demagnetised. Better get a new one, OK?"
Wrong, Mr Troll. She voted AGAINST the merger. Everyone in her group voted against the merger.
She had no illusions of "getting rich". She's been with HP for many years, and saw the merger as a VERY bad thing. She simply expected HP to act like a grown up and be fair, just, and reasonable with its employees, as it had been for so many years. That is, until Carly came aboard.
After all, sounds like she still has a job, which is more than a lot of other folks in the valley can say.
Kindly fuck off. That's like saying "WHAT? Eating GRUBS??? At least you got FOOD!!!" Sorry, that doesn't wash. Not any more. Not with responsible adults, anyway.
/*copyright © 1991 Digital Equipment Corporation. VMS is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation*/ <P> /*This giant hole left for VB script kiddies to drive virus trucks through is on purpose and exists to force customers to upgrade. Do not seal this hole. Our business model depends on it.*/ <P> /*This line will create a massive memory leak in any app that calls the printer. If the machine is left on for more than a day or two, it will slow down and blue screen. We then get developers to pony up for the fix in a printer driver SDK update.*/ <P> /*this comment is here because I get paid by the line of code, and I need the extra few dollars to buy some pr0n.*/ <P> /*Bill Gates is a DICK!!!*/ <P> /*I would have done a better job on this module, but Monkeyboy Ballmer wants this turd to alpha next month. fix it in a dot release.*/ <P> /*sure this line is insecure - but who cares? It's not like the lemmings who buy this crap are ever going to sue us...*/ <P> RS
1. The Compaq deal had NOTHING to do with market share or "growing the company". It had EVERYTHING to do with labour. The HP my wife signed on for back so many years ago was a VERY well paid and excellent place to work. That was expensive to HP, but it made for some of the highest productivity and (yes, it was true at the time) innovation in the industry. Carlyu, like the rest of the ultra-greedy industrial plutocrats in history, saw all that as an expense. By merging with Compaq, the FIRST thing they did was adopt Compaq HR policies, which meant my wife LOST a week of vacation, and was no longer in the middle of her pay curve, but was now at the top, and wasn't going to see a raise for YEARS, if ever.
This resulted in massive gains to the bottom line of HP. This was followed by massive layoff. Between the layoffs and the destruction of the HP HR system, morale went to the bottom of (pick a Pacific Trench of your choice). Anyone left was marshalled into doing 3 persons of work, and the work of well paid, family raising computer programmers with mortgages in Palo Alto were replaced by well paid family raising computer programmers in India. This didn't add anything positive to the mood at HP.
2. The merger's cover story of "synergy / growth / blah blah bullshit to become #1 copmuter maker" finally unravelled when it was revealed that after all was said and done, they were STILL #2 behind Dell.
3. The HP branding of iPods has been a waste of time, and has only served to "debase the currency" of the HP name and moniker "HP: invent!"
4. The spin off of the Scientific division (now known as Agilent) was in the works for a while, so Carly isn't to blame for the failures associated with that, but the bizarrely mishandled aftermath IS her fault, and is one of the direct reasons the Compaq deal got any traction at all.
Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed. What I'm hoping is that her criminal decontruction of HP (calling it mismanagement doesn't begin to tap the suffering she caused for so many thousands of people) has been nipped soon enough, and that HP will somehow be able to regain the trust of its customers and employees.
I remember when you bought an HP PC, It Was A Good PC. Built like a truck, reliable, and even if it was running a crappy OS like Windows, it did so competently. And when you bought an HP printer, it worked. (The Macintosh drivers always sucked great steaming tourdes, but that's a minor quibble - if you were on a PC, they worked GREAT.) And it worked really well.
Now, if you want an HP MP3 player - you do get a GREAT and reliable piece of gear: BUILT BY APPLE.
They need to take the kind of quality that separates Apple from the rest, and apply it to the PC world at a reasonable price. THEN they will be bigger than Dell, and who knows? Maybe my wife will get a raise for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS.
And I remember when you worked for HP, it was like working for Apple, only without the Kool-Aid effect or the Reality Distortion Fields. You were On Top of the pile - maybe not the bigest, but certainly the BEST, and everyone knew it. I hope those days can return to HP. With Carly gone, they just might!
As noted above, the Theremin was invented in the early 1920s. Before that there was Thaddeus Cahill and his Teleharmonium from the 1890s. Sure - it was the size of a railroad car - but it came MANY years before, and it was completely electronic.
And before that there was Elisha Gray's Singing Telegraph of 1876 (IIRC).
The person who posted the article should have done a little bit of research on he subject...
I don't do much support, and I ONLY do support on the Macintosh platform (cuz it's easy) as I figure my best friends and family I need around for a long time.
Friends - i.e., favourable acquaintances, I charge $25 an hour. It's not too much, and I only do it once in a blue moon.
But if someone calls me out of the blue as some friend of a friend of a co-worker's neice, it'sa $50 an hour.
Once the system is up and going and everything is squared away, I make it clear to my paying customers that *IT WORKS* and if they want me here again, the clock starts ticking again. No Freebie "Wah! It Doesn't Work Now" nonsense.
I only do computer support rarely, and I really don't enjoy it.
but if It's a slow month, I'll pick up a few extra $ that way.
That looks just like it, only without the CD slit.
This way, one could stack the MacMini on top of the drive(s), or vice versa, in a neat little pile.
The mac mini isn't big enough to hold my MP3 collection (right now, teetering around 105 gigs) and certianly won't be big enough to deal with the video I want to run through it. So I need 7200rpm ATA drives in a MacMini box.
Personally, I would cheerfully build my own using some hideous noisy case - I'm not that picky. But Mrs Spoilsport is VERY picky about that kind of thing - heck: she thinks having visible stereo wires to te speakers is like having one's underwear showing or having toilet paper stuck to one's shoe.
She tried to get me to go to wireless speakers, and I said "You Buy 'em". We still don't have wireless speakers, thank Bog.
But, i we could get a MacMini with matching drive(s), it'll make the transition to the full on digital system a simpler effort, as it would please the aesthetes in the home (And to think - I'm the one who makes a living as an artist!)
Slashdot Mirror
The $40 billion is just "sitting in a bank".
HW
I think this fine isn't Big Enough.
RS
You're correct in that it did slow the adoption of the internet in France, but, thankfully, not that much.
Proof that it failed? The internet.
RS
I demonstrated in some detail how:
a: the bandwidth isn't there
b: advanced (compared to dumb terminals) hardware is extremely cheap and getting cheaper, and how machines far more powerful than dumb terminals are being dumped on the street for lack of a good home, like last year's pet Easter chickens.
c: components for these machines, especially the ones that differentiate a terminal from a computer (i.e., the hard drive) are also driving down in price to absurdly low prices for massive storage.
But SOMEHOW, you see a dumb terminal and all of your data on someone else's drive as Better? what if you DON'T WANT to be connected? What if you CAN'T be connected? You can't have access to the data that is rightfuly yours? how is that BETTER?
How is your question anything more than a troll?
RS
Ellison was barking about "net computers" 10 years ago.
No one paid attention and for good reason. Why?
1. Bandwidth.
2. Storage Costs.
3. Computer costs.
1. Bandwidth
When the idiotic notion came up that broadband will kill the DVD, I responded here, noting that even in the middle of San Francisco, DSL is still painfully slow, and here it is, 2005. We're supposed to have jet packs by now, right? And TFA is talking about editing video over the web? Sure - in who's life time?
2. Storage Costs.
Continue to plummet. I remember when Ellison was barking about dumb terminals - RAM was extortionate. In '94 I bought a ONE GIGABYTE drive from HP for $580 and thought I'd gotten the deal of the decade. Now, for $80 less I can get a MiniMac and dozens of time more drive space PLUS a pile of RAM and processing power that totally smokes my creaky old Centris 650. I can now put on the end of my keychain what used to be a huge SCSI drive. Storage is no longer a problem.People not backing their stuff up is another issue, but it's not from lack of cheap drive space.
3. Computer Costs.
Which brings us to the cost of computers - I'm typing this on my old Blue and White G3 Yosemite. It's running in OS 9.2 and will do so as long as I own it. Why? Because it works. It has 80 gigs of drive space on three different drives - plenty of room for email and back up. I can do basic image editing in Photoshop 6, layout in FreeHand 9 or Quark 4, HTML editing in Dreamweaver 4, and ya know what? It fuckin' works. You can pick up a computer like this on eBay for next to nothing. What "Dumb Terminal" is going to compete with that? I saw someone dumping a perfectly good Dell P3 / 700 on the street last month - he was moving and couldn't give it away. I didn't want it - I already have my G3 / 350...
There is no economic incentive (as computers drive down in cost), there is no technical advantage (as storage drives down in cost) and, crucially: the bandwidth simply isn't there, period.
And won't be - for a very very long time.
Therefore: it's a dumb idea, it won't work, and it's as good as dead in the water.
TFA is full of crapola - typical techno-positivist day-dreaming nonsense - people who smoked the dotcon crack pipe and believed.
Idiots.
RS
I'd rather see te money being pissed away on this technology be devoted to resurrecting and preserving old silent B&W films from the teens and 20s.
RS
No rat. It's obvious. (loony theory factor? Check. tin foil hat? check. Capslock disability? CHECK. PUNCTUATION DISABILITY? CHECK!!!)
KAZAA CAUSED THE EARTHQUAKE AND USED THEIR SECRET MINIONS FROM THE MIDDLE EARTH TO DIRECT THE TSUNAMI AWAY FROM AUSTRALIA SO IT WOULD DEVASTATE THE POORER COUNTRIES OF THE INDIAN OCEAN!!! THEY ARE EVIL AND IN LEAGUE WITH THE NAZI HELL CREATURES WHO THREATEN OUR VITAL BODILY FLUIDS AND AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!!! THEY MUST BE DESTROYED!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA AND REICHSFUEHRER BUSH FOR KEEPING US ON THE ONE TRUE PATH TO SALVATION!!!
(end previous processes)
On other points, I think the story was very badly written and researched, and I'm not surprised by any of the problems. In fact, it may have come across by way of sheer stupidity, so instead of them being one day ahead, the writer might have thought they were one day behind, and compensated in the wrong direction, ending up with the date completely incorrect.
Damn. Now I can't get this tinfoil hat off. Guess I'll have to go see my clients like this tomorrow. No biggie. They've seen worse.
RS
I have Broadband - YOU FUCKIN BETCHA!!!!
And what is my precious bandwidth?
All of 326k!!!!
Yep. And that's on a good night. Tonight is fucked -I'm barely pulling 280 right now.
Now: it's 2005, and I can barely get 326 on DSL, thanks to SBC. And these clowns want to pump 1080i into my house? Even if you compress the living fuck out of it, you're still nowhere NEAR what I can do on DSL. And Cable is BETTER?
Well, let's see: Cable's kind of dodgey around here, thanks to a 900 foot tall TV tower cluttered with all manner of telecommunications transmitters. My wife can't even open the door to her car with the remote...
But: It's a Nice Place to Grow Yer Kids Up, only without the churches and liquor stores...
So Cable sucks.
And these clowns want to put HD over broadband.
Bunch a' maroons I TELL YA!
By the time I can get enough bandwidth into the Spoilsport rat hole to do that, I'll be too old to fuckin care, and it'll be TO HELL WITH THE LOT A YOU - YA YOUNG PUNKS!
I'll be sittin' there with my DVD collection on my multi-terabyte RAID array entertainment computer, which will be in the form of the Lenovo Home Pro, which was sold to me for 99$ at Fry's 2 (the original was burned down 20 years earlier, during the food riots of 2015, during the second American Civil War.) and it frickin ROCKS - my entire music collection and video collection on a raid. I bought them, ripped then (there is NO perfect crypto) and now I get to see and hear whatever the fuck I want, when I want.
but, I hate it when i get unstuck in time like that.
And I'll still clean all the seeds out of my pot using the gatefold cover to "Close to the Edge" by Yes. Even when I'm 90.
RS
You're basing your idea of what it takes to innovate on Drexler's dreams of nanotech? You're basing your idea of what it takes to develop software on the Microsoft model... in 2005, with Microsoft's products looking pale and dowdy next to the bronzed and hearty open-source products?
Oddly, you just proved my point. Extremely small things require machines that can move extremely small things. Drexler can *dream* of nanotech in his garage, but it takes a shitload of gear and a lot of people to make an atomic hinge or pulley...
Also: OSS really pretty much is the same as MS, only the pay sucks and you get to work at home. Whether you have several thousand engineers merrily typing away in a room full of Veal Fattening Pens in some building in Redmond WA, or several thousand engineers merrily typing away at their kitchen tables in their bunny slippers, you still have several thousand engineers working on something.
As I said - the next level of innovation is going to take large teams of people working together to make things happen - the age of the solo engineer in the garage is, for the most part, but not entirely, Over.
As much as I wish it really weren't so.
RS
t is our nature to innovate. If it is not happening at Lucent, HP or wherever, it will revert back to the garage where countless American innovations have started. Analysts that look to HP and Lucent (Bell Labs) for innovation in the future are sure to be blind-sided by the invention they didn't see coming from some garage or shed somehwere in this great land of ours.
I'm of the opinion that most of the real basic stuff is done. It's going to take Huge Sums Of Money and Large Professional Staffs of Very Smart People to really kick over the next cycle of innovation.
Example: software. Sure: anyone can code stuff, but most of the simple things have been done. I'm sure someone in a garage somewhere will eventually find that one or two points ofentry, but most of the big innovations are going to come at very great expense with large teams of people - some doing programming, others QA, other hardware, bla bla bla, and a support staff and marketing group to make it happen and give it some penetration in the market.
Another example: nanotechnology. I don't see someone in a garage gettin' down with some electron microscope to build micro-buckyball bearings. Heck - he microscoe would eat up most of the garage, never mind the material science machines that made the damn things, andthe hyper-short wavelength lasers, etc. Back in the 1930s - sure - H & P could cobble together some electronics and build a fucking oscillator in a garage, but the kind of innovations in basic research needed today are mostly beyond the reach of some guy in a garage.
don't get me wrong: I truly wish this weren't so, which is why I applaud the parent's attitude. I've just been around long enough and have noticed the trends enough that I seriously doubt we're going to see much value coming out of low-end entreprenuerial efforts.
Which is what makes the historical fiasco that is the person of Carly Fiorina such a complete and unmitigated disaster.
She wasn'tthe undoing of Lucent, but she set Lucent up so that with mediocre management, it could only fail. Which is precisely what happened. And the world (not just the USA, not just Central New Jersey, but THE WORLD) lost a Really Important source of innovative technology that transformed the planet. No Bell Labs? No CD players.
Her greedy shortsighted dismantling of HP and its R&D facilities is just part and parcel of her evil legacy, and shows how she, and all the other self-centered nihilistic freakazoid neocon shitbags like her are really enemies of the People. I'm not being some Commie - I mean what I say in the most democratic (smal d) sense - she and her other plutocratic asswipe buddies are simply pillaging the planet and whatever government or economy stands in their way, and are hellbent on leaving the rest of us "holding the bag" when they (finally) drop dead.
The only thing I can gloat over is:
For all her narcissism and cultivation of celebrity, I can *guarantee you* that she will be forgotten, just like the rest of us. Her priorities are completely misplaced and in the end, she will end up disappearing from the cosmic stage, just like the rest of us.
Unlike the rest of us, she will have left a vast swath of wreckage behind her.
RS
2. What about multi-processors? If you're cranking from processor A one day, but the next day processor B is the one doing the talking,won't they have different skews? And if the thing is multi-threaded or multi-cored, one could get the skews changing erratically depending on which processor is "speaking" for that particular section of data.
Then there will be the guy who builds data skew randomisers, or the internet data equivalent of a video Time Base Corrector in his garage and sells them on that internet thingie for $200... (Actually I think a digital TBC would be a great idea, in general...)
I think the author of that paper is onto something, but that something is very historic for this moment. From what I can gather, a few basic changes in machinery could obviate his plans.
Interesting ideas, though!
RS
(yeah - she's an incredibley rich idiot, but a pretty cute incredibley rich idiot, if you go for that sort of plasticky Los Angeles coke head look, and on a basic human level, hacking her phone was pretty lame...)
to happen to you.
So, you get one of these phones. Then, one day, some stalker asshat sees you and steals your phone. you figure: who cares? They need to have my face to get in!
And GUESS WHAT? HE DOES!!!
Where? From your own website! The thief downloaded your headshot from the website, or from some tabloid or fan site, blew it up, printed it out and simply HELD THE PICURE IN FRONT OF THE CELL PHONE CAMERA.
So much for Celebrity Protection.
It also fails the ordinary citizen. How?
Like so: Crack Head asswipe scum sucking FREEK pulls a gun on your ass, and relieves you of your wallet and cellphone. To get at you data in the cellphone, he just goes down to Kinko's, scans the picture off your driver's license, blows it up, prints it out, and then simply HOLDS THE PICURE IN FRONT OF THE CELL PHONE CAMERA. Ding. In like flint.
This is Yet another Example of a technology in search of a problem. It happens too often.
And yet another example of peole failing to realise that with Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, everything always already exists in a state of simulation. there is no "original face" to "photograph".
The camera doesn't "understand" the idea of "face". It just mechanically/electronically matches specific electrical charges between two sets of electrical charges. If they match by certain preset criteria (which are also stored as electrical charges) then it does one thing, if not, it does another.
It doesn't think, it doesn't decide. It's like a wind up toy.
RS
"the average idiot in the street needs more toys, more stimulation, harder drugs, faster fucks to just keep from slipping into a coma - maybe an iPod with a dildo that shoots coke up their ass. I fear their bloodlust." - TTE
I also agree with point #2 - a big chunk of the kernal code is device management, and for MS to come galloping in, but the code, and glue in their own driver support seems... silly.
Where I think Dvorak (as usual) misses the point at hand is (as usual) on the basic fundamentals of the technology. He crowed about the death of Apple for YEARS. But Apple's doing great. Why? Because there are millions of people out there who want a computer that Just Works and does so in a way that is elegant and inoffensive. So, Apple survived.
Same goes for Linux. How? The FUNDAMENTALS: Linux :
a: Is Free and Open.
b: Requires less I.T. head count per workstation than Windows.
Point (a) is the metaphysical reason for adopting Linux: it gives Linux an ethical basis for one's support, similar to Apple's aesthetic appeal. Point (b) is the hook that convinces - it reduces labour costs to a corporation.
The dynamics of these basic points, combined with the simple fact that much of the software on Linux is Free (as in beer), makes Linux an even more attractive platform, regardless of the driver situation.
Just do a thought experiment: irrationally limit Linux driver support to zero. But then, irrationally boost its benfits (say, it requires zero I.T. personnel to maintain). When you combine that with its inherent Open nature, the driver situation takes care of itself over time.
From such logic, and what he said in TFA, I can only conclude that, as usual, John C Dvorak is speaking from his final voluntary sphincter. As usual.
RS
Face it: it's network television. Its fundamental purpose is to keep your attention between commercials. It wasn't doing a very good job of that, so they canned it. It has nothing to do with art. It has everything to do with commerce.
If they could show nothing but TV commercials and keep an audience that way, they would. But they can't - people get bored - so they put dollops of infantile fantasy, emotional pornography, and corporate disinformation masquerading as news to simply keep your attention between the commercials.
The death of Enterprise is just the latest example of this process.
RS
RS
I disagree - look at Apple. Back in the 1990s, people were drinkin' 40s just waitin' for Apple to die so they could go pee on the grave.
When I was there (At Apple) the stock sank to $17. Now it's way up over $70, and they're talking about a split!
So, I DO think HP can recover and come back stronger than ever - but they're going to do it with their printing and imaging division innovating their way out of the present mess. Not with some tacky gltzy nitwit like Carly running the train into the ground... if you know what I mean.
You are ABSOLUTELY correct about her time at Lucent. Lucent didn't fail until she left, but it was the kind of freewheeling idiocy that she brought to their sales systems (where they were loaning money to clients that were about to go belly up) that set up the obvious train wreck that followed immediately upon her departure.
I like your image of Carly in stocks....
I was thinking of her in an orange jumpsuit at Pelican Bay for 20 years, but maybe you're right - a month or two in the stocks, covered in her own filth would be good...
RS
If you get pulled over and the card "doesn't work" that's "Not Your Problem". It means that the cop WILL have to type in your DL # and then wait for the data to come back (like many of them do now).
The card itself is of no consequence, really. What is of consequence is the sharing of data on demand, as triggered by the card. But the card could just as easily be your SS# or your State+DL# or any number of unique identifying data points.
As noted in other posts - most of this info is already shared. So, the problem seems ot be the convenience factor for Officer Krupke of the Donut Patrol - apparently people feel threatened if the denizens of the Krispy Kreme Brigade have instant access to one's entire driving and legal record.
They *Already* have that access, they just have to work for it. So, if you think their convenience is deniable, then demagnetise the card and go on with your life. It just means that a 5 minute traffic stop that would have been "Hey Asshole^H^H^H^H^H^Citizen - you were doing 73 in a 65, so you're getting a ticket!" that would last 5 minutes will now drag out into a 20 minute disaster, ending with "Hey Asshole^H^H^H^H^H^H^Citizen - you're National ID Card has been demagnetised. Better get a new one, OK?"
RS
She had no illusions of "getting rich". She's been with HP for many years, and saw the merger as a VERY bad thing. She simply expected HP to act like a grown up and be fair, just, and reasonable with its employees, as it had been for so many years. That is, until Carly came aboard.
After all, sounds like she still has a job, which is more than a lot of other folks in the valley can say.
Kindly fuck off. That's like saying "WHAT? Eating GRUBS??? At least you got FOOD!!!" Sorry, that doesn't wash. Not any more. Not with responsible adults, anyway.
RS
Here's what I've gotten from her end:
1. The Compaq deal had NOTHING to do with market share or "growing the company". It had EVERYTHING to do with labour. The HP my wife signed on for back so many years ago was a VERY well paid and excellent place to work. That was expensive to HP, but it made for some of the highest productivity and (yes, it was true at the time) innovation in the industry. Carlyu, like the rest of the ultra-greedy industrial plutocrats in history, saw all that as an expense. By merging with Compaq, the FIRST thing they did was adopt Compaq HR policies, which meant my wife LOST a week of vacation, and was no longer in the middle of her pay curve, but was now at the top, and wasn't going to see a raise for YEARS, if ever.
This resulted in massive gains to the bottom line of HP. This was followed by massive layoff. Between the layoffs and the destruction of the HP HR system, morale went to the bottom of (pick a Pacific Trench of your choice). Anyone left was marshalled into doing 3 persons of work, and the work of well paid, family raising computer programmers with mortgages in Palo Alto were replaced by well paid family raising computer programmers in India. This didn't add anything positive to the mood at HP.
2. The merger's cover story of "synergy / growth / blah blah bullshit to become #1 copmuter maker" finally unravelled when it was revealed that after all was said and done, they were STILL #2 behind Dell.
3. The HP branding of iPods has been a waste of time, and has only served to "debase the currency" of the HP name and moniker "HP: invent!"
4. The spin off of the Scientific division (now known as Agilent) was in the works for a while, so Carly isn't to blame for the failures associated with that, but the bizarrely mishandled aftermath IS her fault, and is one of the direct reasons the Compaq deal got any traction at all.
Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed. What I'm hoping is that her criminal decontruction of HP (calling it mismanagement doesn't begin to tap the suffering she caused for so many thousands of people) has been nipped soon enough, and that HP will somehow be able to regain the trust of its customers and employees.
I remember when you bought an HP PC, It Was A Good PC. Built like a truck, reliable, and even if it was running a crappy OS like Windows, it did so competently. And when you bought an HP printer, it worked. (The Macintosh drivers always sucked great steaming tourdes, but that's a minor quibble - if you were on a PC, they worked GREAT.) And it worked really well.
Now, if you want an HP MP3 player - you do get a GREAT and reliable piece of gear: BUILT BY APPLE.
They need to take the kind of quality that separates Apple from the rest, and apply it to the PC world at a reasonable price. THEN they will be bigger than Dell, and who knows? Maybe my wife will get a raise for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS.
And I remember when you worked for HP, it was like working for Apple, only without the Kool-Aid effect or the Reality Distortion Fields. You were On Top of the pile - maybe not the bigest, but certainly the BEST, and everyone knew it. I hope those days can return to HP. With Carly gone, they just might!
Oh, and Carly, if you're reading this: Fuck Off.
RS
And before that there was Elisha Gray's Singing Telegraph of 1876 (IIRC).
The person who posted the article should have done a little bit of research on he subject...
RS
Friends - i.e., favourable acquaintances, I charge $25 an hour. It's not too much, and I only do it once in a blue moon.
But if someone calls me out of the blue as some friend of a friend of a co-worker's neice, it'sa $50 an hour.
Once the system is up and going and everything is squared away, I make it clear to my paying customers that *IT WORKS* and if they want me here again, the clock starts ticking again. No Freebie "Wah! It Doesn't Work Now" nonsense.
I only do computer support rarely, and I really don't enjoy it.
but if It's a slow month, I'll pick up a few extra $ that way.
RS
Regular or Premium?
RS
This way, one could stack the MacMini on top of the drive(s), or vice versa, in a neat little pile.
The mac mini isn't big enough to hold my MP3 collection (right now, teetering around 105 gigs) and certianly won't be big enough to deal with the video I want to run through it. So I need 7200rpm ATA drives in a MacMini box.
Personally, I would cheerfully build my own using some hideous noisy case - I'm not that picky. But Mrs Spoilsport is VERY picky about that kind of thing - heck: she thinks having visible stereo wires to te speakers is like having one's underwear showing or having toilet paper stuck to one's shoe.
She tried to get me to go to wireless speakers, and I said "You Buy 'em". We still don't have wireless speakers, thank Bog.
But, i we could get a MacMini with matching drive(s), it'll make the transition to the full on digital system a simpler effort, as it would please the aesthetes in the home (And to think - I'm the one who makes a living as an artist!)
RS
Great - I'll just fire up my video editing app on the measly 128 megs of RAM and boy, WON'T I BE STYLIN???
DooD!
HW