Those $15/mo DSL prices are not real, long-term rates. They are generally 1 year only and will go up to $30/mo, and don't include a mydriad of fees and taxes that adds another $10-15/mo. Furthermore, it is for the lowest end "broadband" service, sometimes as slow as 384kbit/s (which admittedly is still better than dialup).
So bottomline, the pricing is still around $40-60/mo for "broadband", which for many *is* too expensive. Even for me, who can afford it. Given that I have multiple T1 access at work, paying another $50/mo for cable modem is *very* marginally worth it to me...
I would think it is pretty difficult for the common American to think that that species haven't changed with time after seeing Spielberg's Jurassic Park. There is no way fundie parents are going to succeed in explaining to their little Johnny that dinosaurs 1) didn't exist, 2) exist now, 3) existed only a few thousand years ago. I'd say that imagery is pretty powerful and slams right into the notion that the species didn't evolve and the Earth is only 5,000 years old...
This new device is still to thick and too small. It needs to be a real replacement for 8.5x11" sheet of paper, so it should be like a magazine in size and thickness: 8.5x11x.5", no more than 0.5" thick. But it won't be long now... It also needs Wifi and a browser and support for PDF/PS.
mmmm it doesn't sound like you understand that these fuelcells ARE "rechargeable"... you simply pour more fuel into them (or insert new cartridges, if that is how the manufacturer decides to construct them. For example, with the methanol cells, just pour some more methanol into the cell and that's it...
The human eye can only see so much. I mean, can you really tell the difference between 100,000 to 1 and 1,000,000 to 1?
Well, if the backlight of the LCD is the sun, then, YES, a black pixel would be only 10e-6 (million) down from the sun, and we can "see" as little as a few photons PROVIDED that we are dark-adapted. HOWEVER, if there is a white pixel next to a black pixel, then NO. We cannot see SIMULTANEOUS luminance contrast of a million, and we would not be dark adapted in that case anyways.
Nevertheless it is hard to believe that this 1000000:1 spec is meaningful. Max brightness is quoted as 500cd/m2, so that means that minimum (black) is 500/1000000 or 0.5mcd/m2. That's pretty dim (and unlikely). Turn one pixel on and the light scatter would wash this dim level of light out...
Seems like such a narrow use device that could be completely subsumed by using webbrowsers (driven from either laptops or cellphones or Wifi PDAs). Everyone in school these days (even highschool) has at least a laptop, cellphone or PDA. And schools are often forcing the purchase of a laptop or similar.
So you mean a classroom poll like this?
Do you brush your teeth before sex in the morning ? () Yes () No () I don't have sex. () I don't have teeth. () I don't awake up til the afternoon
I'm not a mathematician and I didn't read his book, though I read the 1st chapter: interesting, but...
I think it is obvious why the Ancients cared a lot about distances and why distances are more intuitive. If I want to drive back to Kansas, or if Achilles wants to go to Thebes, he cares about distances, even if there might be a detour to Troy (NY that is... hence a triangle). Ok, I can perhaps swallow that quandrances are a computational convenience at times -- I don't like square roots either, but...
Most of his thesis actually rests on the notion that angles are not fundamental. The spin (hah!) that he uses involves the Greeks loving circles, but circles aren't the most basic object. Maybe not geometrically, but... there's that important practical notion of TIME... which then ties into MOTION...
I would argue that what is fundamental is CIRCULAR MOTION. It is intuitive that many things in our world rotate and pivot: wheels, planets, joints, eyeballs, AND... VECTORS, from which one gets the use of sines in describing waves, etc.
I simply don't see us replacing angles with spreads for many uses, because of ubiquitiousness of rotational motion.
After all, the men and women in Congress work for, and report to, those same corporations, right?
Well yes and no... Who stands to gain from all these lawsuits ? LAWYERS. What is Congress mostly made up of ? LAWYERS. It is extremely difficult for Congress to pass legislation that in anyway hurts lawyers and their bread and butter.
So the fact that the now-even-more-broken USPTO means that getting a patent granted is meaningless (even more now than before) and that everything is REALLY decided in the courts by lawsuits, is just fine as far as most of Congress is concerned. More feedgrounds and revenue stream for the LAWYERS...
The freedom to run and modify software is more important than what you call it, according to the GNU founder...
Part of the issue isn't so much as what you call "it", but what others call "Linux".
And yes there is a bit of a hypocrisy in RMS's position here, since his insistence on calling "it" GNU/Linux doesn't jibe with "it doesn't matter what you call it".
Trademarking is just another intrusion of the Real World(TM) on our ideals, unfortunate but necessary...
Part of the equation of "why trademark Linux" is not so much to control the usage of "Linux", but to insure that nobody else will.
You can imagine that if Linus et al doesn't push forward with trademarking "Linux" and then properly enforcing it, that another company might come in and trademark "Linux" and start imposing its own rules, etc.
Then of course there is the usual Company XY (or MS) might market a "Linux for Windows" product, that turns out it is utter crap, misleading or nothing of the sort, scenerio.
So, yeah, despite RMS's arguments and points, however valid, going ahead and trademarking "Linux" was the right thing to do. PERIOD. (and all that that entails...)
Agreed. The current wave of "christianity" (small 'c') is a symptom, not a cause. It is just another consequence of the rise of ignorance, the decline of the perceived value of education and overall lack of discipline. It is true that folks (that I knew in the US) were much more "Christian" in the 60's. Along with that came a set of morals and ethics that were not blind nor ignorant, but instilled strong sense of the value of higher education, learning, which of course carries with it achievement in science, math, etc.
It is truly sad to see the death of centers of excellence like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc...
Nextel was facing a multibillion technology upgrade to keep up with the other major carriers, plus mandatory costs in moving its customers off spectrum (near emergency bands) the FCC has de-allocated to Nextel (as a result of a deal). iDEN is a deadend. All carriers will be using CDMA technology in the near future because it is most spectrum efficient (greatest amount of information carried for a given bandwidth allocation). Even GSM will move to CDMA, though the details (WCDMA) will make it non-interoperable with current US CDMA carriers. But it will be a major technology overhaul for GSM carriers as well, whereas current CDMA carriers will face only incremental upgrades.
OTOH, it seems likely that all roads will probably also lead to VOIP, and wireless cell carriers will end up with wireless IP networks that carry voice and data via IP.
The only thing that Nextel brings to the table is a bunch of customers with high ARPU (average revenue per user) (business/corporate) that expect good PTT (DC). Although Sprint presently has a fair implementation of PTT over CDMA, it is expected that Sprint/Nextel will implement QCHAT, a much better form of PTT (also developed by Qualcomm), that Nextel owned the rights to. This will give Sprint/Nextel the path to wean DC customers to PTT over CDMA. iDEN/DC though a dead end, will remain alive through 2010, so they say...
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it.
Really? Then why do I have a firewall (block network traffic selectively)? Why do I have "spam filters" on my e-mail?
On your own personal machine, of course you have that right. You aren't providing services to others. But a phone company's or ISP's or university's servers are subject to a different set of considerations.
Some university's provide dialup numbers, charge for Internet access and even sell that access to those outside the university. In other words, they begin to look and smell like an ISP, hence a common carrier. Don't think this has ever been tested in court...
My ISP filters my e-mail through its antispam/antivirus software, in addition to my e-mail provider, etc. and Grisoft AV on my computer.
Only recently have laws been put into place that fully legitimizes an ISP (a common carrier) to filter and reject spam. The ISP, despite bandwidth issues, may well prefer to give the user/customer software for a firewall and spam control rather than filter at the ISP itself. Why ? because the last thing a common carrier wants to do is to filter and control content. That jeopardizes its status as a common carrier. Pretty soon, parents, DOJ and god-knows will ask that ISPs filter out porn, "terrorist" content, subversive material, and request IP addresses of those who access that stuff... and back logs and back emails of people the FBI wants to target, etc. Its a slippery slope, so ISPs are better off not touching anything and leaving the filtering to the customer.
If you read the article, you'll note the following sentence: "The court did not need to rule on whether the state university e-mail servers are public or private."
That is, it is not completely clear from a legal standpoint whether the university has total rights on what material gets sent through their servers EVEN IF THEY OWN THEM. The phone company example shows that mere ownership is an insuffient condition for total control and censorship. Yes, the phone company is a common carrier, but it is not completely established that a university isn't subject to at least some of the same issues that a common carrier has, depending on just how it operates its email services, etc. And just because a university has a TOS doesn't mean that that TOS will hold up in court, or can protect the university from these issues.
The original point is that *none* of these issues were the basis for the decision. Instead, it was merely that the university did not interfere with whatever First Amendment rights of the spammers.
If you read the article, you'll note the following sentence: "The court did not need to rule on whether the state university e-mail servers are public or private."
That is, it is not completely clear from a legal standpoint whether the university has total rights on what material gets sent through their servers EVEN IF THEY OWN THEM. The phone company example shows that mere ownership is an insuffient condition for total control and censorship. Yes, the phone company is a common carrier, but it is not completely established that a university isn't subject to at least some of the same issues that a common carrier has, depending
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it. A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block. A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
I'm not saying that the decision is wrong, on the contrary, its great that the university blocks spam. But I do not think your analysis is the right basis for the decision.
Actually I'm still running several AMD DX4's, with various versions of FreeBSD. A DX4 133 is about the same speed as a Pentium 100 and allowed many to upgrade their CPU speed without changing their motherboard, so actually there was a decent market for them, for a while anyways. AMD made 486's that could be clocked to 40Mhz bus speeds, and so the DX4 was actually capable of 160Mhz, which generally beat out Pentium 100's for many things (except floating point). Such machines have plenty of horsepower to run simple websites.
All the features that you list as missing are included in the Creative Zen Nano Plus player, which is also about the same size and volume. I just got one and its great! It also runs off of common AAA batteries, alkaline or NiMH, so no issues of propriety batteries that need to be replaced by Apple CS.
So my BMW is about 350 hp and I'd like it to run at least 10 hours on a fillup. So that is over 2 million watt hours. Now a typical lithium laptop battery that costs well over $100 is about 40 watt hours. so that would be over $20 million for that lithium battery. I'll grant you a factor of 100X in performance/cost improvements, which is very generous. So that would be $200,000 for the battery. Oh, and such batteries die after a few years of usage. So $200K every few years...
I presume you know that this idea of a super-supercomputer simulating the entire universe including all the sentient beings who ever lived and will live is one of the central theme's of the book The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead
by Frank Tipler...
I thought what you were paying for was for DNS service. You need to pay someone else to actually put it on the DNS server? What do you pay for with a domain "registration"?
Well it is admitted a bit intertwined, but there are two separate issues in owning an Internet domain:
1) That you exist -- there is only one of you (your domain),
2) Who is the authority on your domain -- where can people (hosts) find out about the domain.
So, registering a domain deals with issue 1, that you exist, and uniquely. This is done by entering information about the domain's existence in the root servers (the top level). However what is entered is just the minimal information about the domain, essentially a pointer to issue 2. You still need an "authority", a place where all the details of the domain, which could be quite sprawling.
Registering the domain gives you your existence and tells people where to go (DNS servers) to learn about the domain. It is the domain owner's responsibility to provide issue 2. In the early days, (well middle-early days), people all ran their own DNS servers. But now with every Joe owning their own domain, but not doing their own hosting of the domain, you can find DNS services to provide the second part as well. (The third part of course is hosting the actual domain, depending on what the domain is supposed to be).
I currently have Time Warner Road Runner. Its been very decent and reliable. However I think it is too pricey. I would switch to Verizon DSL, since it is $15 less, BUT... my understanding is that Verizon DSL is PPPOE, which I detest.
So is this still true (I know it used to be in NYC) ? I hate to force my little BSD box to munge through that God-awful PPPOE protocol instead of a good-ol fashioned simple Ethernet/TCP-IP connection. But I sure wish TW/RR would lower their prices to be in line with Verizon DSL...
Nope, PC and Internet penetration in the US is about 40-50%. That means many/most folks have purchased a PC. A PC today is actually cheaper than a color TV was 20 years ago. And solutions like WebTV are cheaper still, much less than PS2 or Xbox. So no, the barrier to entry is NOT cost (of the PC/thin client). Yes broadband is still expensive. That remains one big barrier, though penetration in the US for broadband is getting better (around 15-20% I think). I disagree and believe that complexity IS a major barrier for *successful* computing. My parents clearly have the $$ and they have a PC, and they have broadband but the PC is down half the time for a wide variety of reasons going back to complexity: viruses, network/router configuration issues, etc. People DO want a turn-key appliance to do computing.
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Those $15/mo DSL prices are not real, long-term rates. They are generally 1 year only and will go up to $30/mo, and don't include a mydriad of fees and taxes that adds another $10-15/mo. Furthermore, it is for the lowest end "broadband" service, sometimes as slow as 384kbit/s (which admittedly is still better than dialup).
So bottomline, the pricing is still around $40-60/mo for "broadband", which for many *is* too expensive. Even for me, who can afford it. Given that I have multiple T1 access at work, paying another $50/mo for cable modem is *very* marginally worth it to me...
I would think it is pretty difficult for the common American to think that that species haven't changed with time after seeing Spielberg's Jurassic Park. There is no way fundie parents are going to succeed in explaining to their little Johnny that dinosaurs 1) didn't exist, 2) exist now, 3) existed only a few thousand years ago. I'd say that imagery is pretty powerful and slams right into the notion that the species didn't evolve and the Earth is only 5,000 years old...
This new device is still to thick and too small. It needs to be a real replacement for 8.5x11" sheet of paper, so it should be like a magazine in size and thickness: 8.5x11x.5", no more than 0.5" thick. But it won't be long now... It also needs Wifi and a browser and support for PDF/PS.
mmmm it doesn't sound like you understand that these fuelcells ARE "rechargeable"... you simply pour more fuel into them (or insert new cartridges, if that is how the manufacturer decides to construct them. For example, with the methanol cells, just pour some more methanol into the cell and that's it...
Sounds like the Keanu (Whoa!) Reeves movie, Chain Reaction... I don't suppose Dr. Mills is working with Donald Sutherland...
Nevertheless it is hard to believe that this 1000000:1 spec is meaningful. Max brightness is quoted as 500cd/m2, so that means that minimum (black) is 500/1000000 or 0.5mcd/m2. That's pretty dim (and unlikely). Turn one pixel on and the light scatter would wash this dim level of light out...
Seems like such a narrow use device that could be completely subsumed by using webbrowsers (driven from either laptops or cellphones or Wifi PDAs). Everyone in school these days (even highschool) has at least a laptop, cellphone or PDA. And schools are often forcing the purchase of a laptop or similar.
So you mean a classroom poll like this?
Do you brush your teeth before sex in the morning ?
() Yes
() No
() I don't have sex.
() I don't have teeth.
() I don't awake up til the afternoon
I'm not a mathematician and I didn't read his book, though I read the 1st chapter: interesting, but...
I think it is obvious why the Ancients cared a lot about distances and why distances are more intuitive. If I want to drive back to Kansas, or if Achilles wants to go to Thebes, he cares about distances, even if there might be a detour to Troy (NY that is... hence a triangle). Ok, I can perhaps swallow that quandrances are a computational convenience at times -- I don't like square roots either, but...
Most of his thesis actually rests on the notion that angles are not fundamental. The spin (hah!) that he uses involves the Greeks loving circles, but circles aren't the most basic object. Maybe not geometrically, but... there's that important practical notion of TIME... which then ties into MOTION...
I would argue that what is fundamental is CIRCULAR MOTION. It is intuitive that many things in our world rotate and pivot: wheels, planets, joints, eyeballs, AND... VECTORS, from which one gets the use of sines in describing waves, etc.
I simply don't see us replacing angles with spreads for many uses, because of ubiquitiousness of rotational motion.
So the fact that the now-even-more-broken USPTO means that getting a patent granted is meaningless (even more now than before) and that everything is REALLY decided in the courts by lawsuits, is just fine as far as most of Congress is concerned. More feedgrounds and revenue stream for the LAWYERS...
Part of the issue isn't so much as what you call "it", but what others call "Linux".
And yes there is a bit of a hypocrisy in RMS's position here, since his insistence on calling "it" GNU/Linux doesn't jibe with "it doesn't matter what you call it".
Trademarking is just another intrusion of the Real World(TM) on our ideals, unfortunate but necessary...
You can imagine that if Linus et al doesn't push forward with trademarking "Linux" and then properly enforcing it, that another company might come in and trademark "Linux" and start imposing its own rules, etc.
Then of course there is the usual Company XY (or MS) might market a "Linux for Windows" product, that turns out it is utter crap, misleading or nothing of the sort, scenerio.
So, yeah, despite RMS's arguments and points, however valid, going ahead and trademarking "Linux" was the right thing to do. PERIOD. (and all that that entails...)
It is truly sad to see the death of centers of excellence like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc...
Nextel was facing a multibillion technology upgrade to keep up with the other major carriers, plus mandatory costs in moving its customers off spectrum (near emergency bands) the FCC has de-allocated to Nextel (as a result of a deal). iDEN is a deadend. All carriers will be using CDMA technology in the near future because it is most spectrum efficient (greatest amount of information carried for a given bandwidth allocation). Even GSM will move to CDMA, though the details (WCDMA) will make it non-interoperable with current US CDMA carriers. But it will be a major technology overhaul for GSM carriers as well, whereas current CDMA carriers will face only incremental upgrades.
OTOH, it seems likely that all roads will probably also lead to VOIP, and wireless cell carriers will end up with wireless IP networks that carry voice and data via IP.
The only thing that Nextel brings to the table is a bunch of customers with high ARPU (average revenue per user) (business/corporate) that expect good PTT (DC). Although Sprint presently has a fair implementation of PTT over CDMA, it is expected that Sprint/Nextel will implement QCHAT, a much better form of PTT (also developed by Qualcomm), that Nextel owned the rights to. This will give Sprint/Nextel the path to wean DC customers to PTT over CDMA. iDEN/DC though a dead end, will remain alive through 2010, so they say...
Some university's provide dialup numbers, charge for Internet access and even sell that access to those outside the university. In other words, they begin to look and smell like an ISP, hence a common carrier. Don't think this has ever been tested in court...
Only recently have laws been put into place that fully legitimizes an ISP (a common carrier) to filter and reject spam. The ISP, despite bandwidth issues, may well prefer to give the user/customer software for a firewall and spam control rather than filter at the ISP itself. Why ? because the last thing a common carrier wants to do is to filter and control content. That jeopardizes its status as a common carrier. Pretty soon, parents, DOJ and god-knows will ask that ISPs filter out porn, "terrorist" content, subversive material, and request IP addresses of those who access that stuff... and back logs and back emails of people the FBI wants to target, etc. Its a slippery slope, so ISPs are better off not touching anything and leaving the filtering to the customer.If you read the article, you'll note the following sentence: "The court did not need to rule on whether the state university e-mail servers are public or private." That is, it is not completely clear from a legal standpoint whether the university has total rights on what material gets sent through their servers EVEN IF THEY OWN THEM. The phone company example shows that mere ownership is an insuffient condition for total control and censorship. Yes, the phone company is a common carrier, but it is not completely established that a university isn't subject to at least some of the same issues that a common carrier has, depending on just how it operates its email services, etc. And just because a university has a TOS doesn't mean that that TOS will hold up in court, or can protect the university from these issues. The original point is that *none* of these issues were the basis for the decision. Instead, it was merely that the university did not interfere with whatever First Amendment rights of the spammers.
If you read the article, you'll note the following sentence: "The court did not need to rule on whether the state university e-mail servers are public or private." That is, it is not completely clear from a legal standpoint whether the university has total rights on what material gets sent through their servers EVEN IF THEY OWN THEM. The phone company example shows that mere ownership is an insuffient condition for total control and censorship. Yes, the phone company is a common carrier, but it is not completely established that a university isn't subject to at least some of the same issues that a common carrier has, depending
No, I don't believe your analysis is correct.
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it. A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block. A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
I'm not saying that the decision is wrong, on the contrary, its great that the university blocks spam. But I do not think your analysis is the right basis for the decision.
Actually I'm still running several AMD DX4's, with various versions of FreeBSD. A DX4 133 is about the same speed as a Pentium 100 and allowed many to upgrade their CPU speed without changing their motherboard, so actually there was a decent market for them, for a while anyways. AMD made 486's that could be clocked to 40Mhz bus speeds, and so the DX4 was actually capable of 160Mhz, which generally beat out Pentium 100's for many things (except floating point). Such machines have plenty of horsepower to run simple websites.
All the features that you list as missing are included in the Creative Zen Nano Plus player, which is also about the same size and volume. I just got one and its great! It also runs off of common AAA batteries, alkaline or NiMH, so no issues of propriety batteries that need to be replaced by Apple CS.
So my BMW is about 350 hp and I'd like it to run at least 10 hours on a fillup. So that is over 2 million watt hours. Now a typical lithium laptop battery that costs well over $100 is about 40 watt hours. so that would be over $20 million for that lithium battery. I'll grant you a factor of 100X in performance/cost improvements, which is very generous. So that would be $200,000 for the battery. Oh, and such batteries die after a few years of usage. So $200K every few years...
I presume you know that this idea of a super-supercomputer simulating the entire universe including all the sentient beings who ever lived and will live is one of the central theme's of the book The Physics of Immortality : Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank Tipler...
1) That you exist -- there is only one of you (your domain),
2) Who is the authority on your domain -- where can people (hosts) find out about the domain.
So, registering a domain deals with issue 1, that you exist, and uniquely. This is done by entering information about the domain's existence in the root servers (the top level). However what is entered is just the minimal information about the domain, essentially a pointer to issue 2. You still need an "authority", a place where all the details of the domain, which could be quite sprawling.
Registering the domain gives you your existence and tells people where to go (DNS servers) to learn about the domain. It is the domain owner's responsibility to provide issue 2. In the early days, (well middle-early days), people all ran their own DNS servers. But now with every Joe owning their own domain, but not doing their own hosting of the domain, you can find DNS services to provide the second part as well. (The third part of course is hosting the actual domain, depending on what the domain is supposed to be).
So is this still true (I know it used to be in NYC) ? I hate to force my little BSD box to munge through that God-awful PPPOE protocol instead of a good-ol fashioned simple Ethernet/TCP-IP connection. But I sure wish TW/RR would lower their prices to be in line with Verizon DSL...
Nope, PC and Internet penetration in the US is about 40-50%. That means many/most folks have purchased a PC. A PC today is actually cheaper than a color TV was 20 years ago. And solutions like WebTV are cheaper still, much less than PS2 or Xbox. So no, the barrier to entry is NOT cost (of the PC/thin client). Yes broadband is still expensive. That remains one big barrier, though penetration in the US for broadband is getting better (around 15-20% I think). I disagree and believe that complexity IS a major barrier for *successful* computing. My parents clearly have the $$ and they have a PC, and they have broadband but the PC is down half the time for a wide variety of reasons going back to complexity: viruses, network/router configuration issues, etc. People DO want a turn-key appliance to do computing.