A study on dogs showed a 16% increase in life span for a calorie restricted diet -- thats a couple of extra dog years or perhaps decade or two of more life for a person. Sounds good, right? The problem was that the dogs had to eat 25% less than normal to get 16% more life than normal.
As someone who enjoys his kibble, I would argue that less chow = lower quality of life. So for 25% less quality of life, I get 16% more quantity of life. Sounds like a bad deal to me.
Moreover, the report said nothing about the energy levels of these poor long-starving mutts -- do starved creatures have any energy for fun and games? Due to the realities of physiology, I'd bet that a 25% reduction in energy input leads to a more that 25% reduction in energy available for discretionary, fun activities. On a restricted diet, a greater fraction of the meager intake is diverted to basic maintenance of the body.
I'm not saying that obesity is not a real killer of both quantity and quality of life. I'm only saying that restricted calorie diets come with tradeoffs.
Perhaps I did not explain the idea well enough. Since manufacturer A has to also run the anti-manufacturer B test suite, any sleep calls will effect both of them. Because every card as to run ALL of the tests (both the "best-case" tests and "worst-case" tests of all cards), each manufacturer must make sure that their own card can handle whatever they are trying to throw at the competitor's card.
Sleep calls cannot bias the results unless the two cards have different definitions of "sleep." Bypassing sleep would not improve performance. I would assume that if one card ignored a sleep call, that would be scored as a failure by the card to execute a valid command.
This would drive both vendors to improve the robustness of their chips and drivers. Knowing that the competitor is goign to try to crash your system would put pressure on the development team to avoid or fix bugs.
These would be true test suites as opposed to nice speed demo suites. As a graphic board customer, I do want speed. But I would probably say that robustness has a higher implicit priority. A graphics chip that crashes is the last thing I want, regardless of how fast it is on some more limited set of code.
One possibility is to have each vendor create two test suites -- a suite that the vendor thinks highlights the best performance features of their own system and a suite that highlights the worst performance features of the competitor's system. For two vendors, this results in a total for 4 test suites (vendor 1's favorites, vendor 1's killer for vendor 2, vendor 2's favorites, vendor 2's killer for vendor 1).
Then run all four suites on both systems and take normalized averages. The best system can win only by being robust and of overall high performance. With four tests in all, the vendor's own "best foot forward" suite can't overweight the result. And with the other vendor looking for any weaknesses, the downsides of each vendor's system becomes quite evident.
Such testing may not produce over-optimized one-application super-stars, but it should lead to well-rounded graphics boards for high performance on a range of graphical display tasks.
I bet that ATI and NVidia will never go for this approach becuase it would lead to real head-to-head fair competition as opposed to carefully staged, optimized, marketing-controlled demos.
As an engineer I can appreciate all the ways in which the internals of the computer revolve around powers of 2 -- bus structures, block sizes, address spaces, buffer sizes, registers, long int and short int counters, etc. To a programmer, base 1024 measurements of memory and file sizes are very natural. But as a user, I could care less and would prefer a consistent measurement scale that adheres to international standards (i.e., SI). As a user I would prefer 1GB = 1000 MB = 1000000 kB = 1000000000 bytes. Buying and using a 512 MiB RAM module is just as strange and idiosyncratic as having a 536 MB RAM module -- neither are "nice round numbers" for the average person.
And this shift to base 1000 should be easy to do. The power of modern software is in its ability to hide all the geeky details of the lower layers of the implementation (especially those in hardware). Since the average user does not think in base 2, the measurements reported by the user interface should not be expressed in base 2 terms.
Moverover, if the OS coders have done their job well, switching between base 1000 and base 1024 representations of memory and file sizes should be a simple matter of changing a single value in preference/defaults file someplace. In reality, I'd bet that divide-by-1024s are scattered throughout the code base. A simple grep for "1024" on the OS source code would reveal the poor level of reuse of code that converts integer bytes to kB/MB/GB notation.
Perhaps my rant is really about these poor engineering practices that create a confusing and inconsistent user experience. And these practices are worse than inconveniences. These are the same poor practices that have created input and buffer overrun security holes all over every operating system and application. Rather than patch a single, or a few, input buffer-handling code libraries to prevent overrun-based exploits, we seem to have to patch every single use of a buffer.
This whole powers of 1000 vs. powers of 1024 for sizes is silly. The disk makers report capacities based on powers of 1000 (standard SI definition of mega, giga, etc.) and the OS reports sizes based on powers of 1024. Presto chango, a brand new 200 GB (GB = 1000^3) drive reports that it has 186 GB (GB = 1024^3) of space after formatting.
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
Seems like a simple patch to the OS would have everything reporting based on powers of 1000. As a side benefit, I'd get my "missing" 14 GB of space back on that new firewire drive.
I first read about this in a 1996 Science News article. This article mentions work by Philip H. Kass and his colleagues at the University of California, Carl A. Batt of Cornell University and his colleagues, and Dean O. Cliver. Sorry, but I don't have any citations for articles in more scholarly journals.
Most importantly, it appears that even if you cut up another food on a previously contaminated (by now dry) wooden cutting board, the likelihood of contamination is low. Wood apparently pulls the bacteria fairly deeply into the board (about 1 mm down), out of reach of subsequent activities. By contrast, bacteria can survive in the knife-cuts of plastic cutting boards and spread during subsequent uses.
I agree that current casual applications of wireless networking mean that few will care about the reliability of these networks. Yet proponents of the technology would have us use wireless in more intensive and all-encompassing ways.
Today, nobody really cares if the laptop in an empty and dark executive office becomes disconnected during a hurricane. Tomorrow, we may care a great deal if our phone/data networks or municipal services control systems are knocked offline because an underlying wireless network failed.
Personally, I suspect that wireless is more robust than wireline because physical wires are so prone to flooding or downed trees. But I would like to see examples, like those provided by Isabel, on how these systems operate during and survive natural disasters.
It will be interesting to see if any building-to-building WiFi links or other wireless networking tech can operate in a hurricane. I'd bet that high rain, very wet vegitation, and the odd flying bit of sheet metal will kill reception or reduce reliability. Also, external high gain antennas will be prone to wind-induced misaligment and damage.
Isabel should be an interesting test of any mesh networks in the area -- assuming that they have independent power sources, of course.
Studies of cutting boards show that wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic ones. The research shows that you can find bacteria on plastic cutting boards (even ones that where hand-scrubbed), but that even unwashed wooden boards have no bacteria on the surface after they dry. Apparently capilliary action pulls bacteria into the wood's pores and away from the surface of the wood, leaving the surface sterile.
Wooden cellphone skins would make a nice retro-fashion statement. For extended use, the wooden phone skins could be removed and autoclaved.
If cell phones harbor nasty germs, what about those PDA and Tablet PC medical terminals? The construction is equivalent -- lots of plastic, elastomeric buttons, touch screens, stylus, etc. Worse, medical terminals are more likely than are cell phones to be handled by multiple people.
Yes, a personal (but oft misplaced) sense of control explains why people don't fear driving a car. But why is there so little fear of riding in cars. Other than riding with that weird drunk uncle, most people think nothing of getting into the passenger seat of a car. They've been doing it all their lives (complacency with the commonplace).
As to survival rate, I would grant you that cars have a greater fraction of survivable accidents, than do planes -- crashing at 35 MPH vs. from 35,000 feet wil do that. The surivability of the millions of minor car accidents probably contributes to the public's non-fear of being a car passenger(more complacency with the commonplace). Yet the real issue is that airplane accidents are extremely rare -- IIRC there were 0 fatalities on commercial airliners in 2002. Hence, the old adage that one is more likely to die on the short drive to and from the airport than on the long flight between the airports.
The human brain is immensely bad at assessing risks and consequences. Just look at the relative frequencies of fear-of-flying vs. fear-of-riding-in-a-car and compare those frequencies with the objective safety data for the two modes of transport. Add in fear of the unknown vs. complacency with the commonplace and all logic of probability and expected value go out the window. Since most people have never experienced an asteroid strike and since most asteroids never strike the Earth, it is easy to discount the possibility of the event.
And even statistics is inadequate for assessing the threat. On a deeper level, no single asteroid threat scale can work if different people have different levels of risk aversion. Which would you prefer: 1) an event that has a 1-in-a-million chance of killing 1 billion people or 2) an event that has a 100% chance of killing 1000 people. Different people will argue for different preferences despite the fact that both events have the same expected value of 1000 people dead. Some, who are risk averse, would abhor even the remotest possibility that a billion people might perish. Others, who are risk seeking, would rather take a 99.9999% chance of nobody dying to avoid the option in which 1000 people are most certainly killed.
Overall, I can see why the scientists want to downplay all the preliminary sightings of asteroids. With too little tracking data, nearly every rock they find looks like it might hit the Earth sometime. The real question is: how many false alarms can the public tolerate? If it is 1 false alarm per month, then scientists should only publish a threat assessment once a month.
OK, its more a Jupiter bar -- a chewy metallic hydrogen center covered in rich fluffy methane-ammonia clouds. What every growing star needs for a burst of energy.
How many orbits does it take to get to the center of a gas-giant lollipop?
Now when I go to a strange town, I don't need to use Zagat's to find a good restaurant anymore. I just need to search RUSICK2. No hits = good eats (or at least nontoxic eats). OK, I guess I still need Zagat's, but RUSICK is a good cross-reference.
The service does have many sources of error. Illness does not always immediately follow consumption (I've seen reports that bad seafood can cause symptoms 2-3 days after eating). Thus, I would suspect that some reports will erroneously correlate sickness with the most recent meal.
I also wonder if this service will survive litigation. I can imagine some arrogant chef hiring a laywer to go after RUSICK2 for libel.
With an ever growing collection of digital photos, I've come to the same conclusion as Jim Gray. Hard disks are superior for backups.
I currently have about 100 GB of images and it takes more than 20 4.7 GB DVD-R discs to create a full backup. Although DVD media is still slightly cheaper than new large capacity IDE drives, the added time and hassle factor of burning 20 disks far out weighs any minor costs savings. Moreover a 3.5" drive in a padded anti-static bag takes up less room in the safe deposit box than 20 DVDs (especially if you have the DVDs in protective jewel cases). And if HD-based-backup lets me avoid some future artists tax on burnable media, so much the better.
A Firewire enclosure and a rotating collection of IDE drives is the way to go.
I appreciate the time you took to explain the various distros, applications, and possibilities with PDA vs. desktop Linux. I am interested in building personal knowledge management tools that would work on both platforms (with allowances for the differences in screen size, storage, CPU power, etc.). The fact that so many popular Linux apps can work PDAs is very heartening.
The Sept 12 dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on companies that deploy billboards that change throughout the day -- one intended application for these digital ink billboards.
The most interesting variant uses a roadside scanner that detects which radio stations are tuned in on the various cars going by the sign. The system then aggregates the data on who is listening to what and decides what ad message to put up. If most people are listening to the game, maybe an ad for the local sports bar will appear. If a cluster of classical music listeners drives past, then an ad for season tickets to the opera might briefly appear.
There's no word on whether the system can tell which MP3 file you are listening to. Yet.
I have no idea of the political leanings of the supporters of the proposed taxes being discussed in this thread, but my bet is they are less likely to be Republicans. As a tax, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. As a means of supporting artists that may have non-family values, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. And given the entertainment industry's general love of Clinton & Democrats, I would suspect that Republicans would generaly be against it.
Too quote a short Wired article on donations: "Artists and execs in the movie and music businesses tend to lean Democratic when it comes time to donate to political parties." A longer article also seems to confirm the Democrat's greater penchant for anti-piracy legislation. Otherwise, I agree that Republican's often stick up for business and are not the best privacy advocates in the world.
What I do know is that businesses put up with a lot of crap in the form of well-intentioned, but deleterious regulations that destroy jobs and drive up prices. An artist's subsidy tax on computer equipment and services for businesses would be an example. Having been through the startup process myself and had friends who started businesses I have seen or experienced a range of dumb regulations that only serve to make it hard to start and run a new business. Most of the crap targets businesses only, so consumers, employees, and the average voter seldom see all the fees, forms, and bureaucratic B.S. perpetrated by Federal, state, and local authorities.
Consumers think that businesses should pay their "fair share of taxes" and that is a understandable, if shortsighted view. In reality, no business pays any taxes, they simply pass them on to the customer or to the shareholder. Yet the taxes are frustrating because they make a business less competative and dealing with the paperwork serves no business purpose.
But, I could be wrong on all this. After all, I am a moron.
A large fraction of computers, writable DVD drives, media, and ISP service is bought and used by companies for everyday business purposes. Under the proposed system it would seem that businesses would be doubly screwed. First, the business suffers from the lost productivity incurred when employees download music for personal use. Second, the business has to pay a tax on this activity as well.
Why should I pay any tax on DVD drives, writable media, ISP service, etc. if I never have and never will download any artists material? All of these items which might have this proposed compulsory licensing fee have legal uses unrelated to the theft, use, or enjoyment of "artists" copyrighted material. For example, most of my HD space, DVD backups, and internet bandwidth is consumed by my own digital pictures.
If people want music, then they should pay for music. Hidden taxes that penalize all for the misbehavior of some seem like a very bad idea.
I guess if this goes through, I will have to sign up as a licensed creator of digital photographs and then assign all these "artists" tax dollars to myself.
With more mobile and portable devices running Linux, it raises the issue of running the same Linux applications on both the desktop and the palmtop. For example, do the various Linux Office-oid applications have counterparts on the PDA side? Are the PDA Linux distros identical/similar/compatible-in-name-only with their desktop breathern? Or are desktop distros far too bloated to run on lighter platforms?
I, for one, would look more seriously at both developing for and using Linux if many/most applications ran easily on a range of device sizes.
Perhaps some Penguinophilic/.ers might shed some packets on this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
A study on dogs showed a 16% increase in life span for a calorie restricted diet -- thats a couple of extra dog years or perhaps decade or two of more life for a person. Sounds good, right? The problem was that the dogs had to eat 25% less than normal to get 16% more life than normal.
As someone who enjoys his kibble, I would argue that less chow = lower quality of life. So for 25% less quality of life, I get 16% more quantity of life. Sounds like a bad deal to me.
Moreover, the report said nothing about the energy levels of these poor long-starving mutts -- do starved creatures have any energy for fun and games? Due to the realities of physiology, I'd bet that a 25% reduction in energy input leads to a more that 25% reduction in energy available for discretionary, fun activities. On a restricted diet, a greater fraction of the meager intake is diverted to basic maintenance of the body.
I'm not saying that obesity is not a real killer of both quantity and quality of life. I'm only saying that restricted calorie diets come with tradeoffs.
Perhaps I did not explain the idea well enough. Since manufacturer A has to also run the anti-manufacturer B test suite, any sleep calls will effect both of them. Because every card as to run ALL of the tests (both the "best-case" tests and "worst-case" tests of all cards), each manufacturer must make sure that their own card can handle whatever they are trying to throw at the competitor's card.
Sleep calls cannot bias the results unless the two cards have different definitions of "sleep." Bypassing sleep would not improve performance. I would assume that if one card ignored a sleep call, that would be scored as a failure by the card to execute a valid command.
This would drive both vendors to improve the robustness of their chips and drivers. Knowing that the competitor is goign to try to crash your system would put pressure on the development team to avoid or fix bugs.
These would be true test suites as opposed to nice speed demo suites. As a graphic board customer, I do want speed. But I would probably say that robustness has a higher implicit priority. A graphics chip that crashes is the last thing I want, regardless of how fast it is on some more limited set of code.
One possibility is to have each vendor create two test suites -- a suite that the vendor thinks highlights the best performance features of their own system and a suite that highlights the worst performance features of the competitor's system. For two vendors, this results in a total for 4 test suites (vendor 1's favorites, vendor 1's killer for vendor 2, vendor 2's favorites, vendor 2's killer for vendor 1).
Then run all four suites on both systems and take normalized averages. The best system can win only by being robust and of overall high performance. With four tests in all, the vendor's own "best foot forward" suite can't overweight the result. And with the other vendor looking for any weaknesses, the downsides of each vendor's system becomes quite evident.
Such testing may not produce over-optimized one-application super-stars, but it should lead to well-rounded graphics boards for high performance on a range of graphical display tasks.
I bet that ATI and NVidia will never go for this approach becuase it would lead to real head-to-head fair competition as opposed to carefully staged, optimized, marketing-controlled demos.
This is definitely another step toward world domination. How long before Bill Gates graces the front of the new $1024 bill?
If I get cash from an Microsoft ATM, do I have to put it in a Microsoft Wallet?
As an engineer I can appreciate all the ways in which the internals of the computer revolve around powers of 2 -- bus structures, block sizes, address spaces, buffer sizes, registers, long int and short int counters, etc. To a programmer, base 1024 measurements of memory and file sizes are very natural. But as a user, I could care less and would prefer a consistent measurement scale that adheres to international standards (i.e., SI). As a user I would prefer 1GB = 1000 MB = 1000000 kB = 1000000000 bytes. Buying and using a 512 MiB RAM module is just as strange and idiosyncratic as having a 536 MB RAM module -- neither are "nice round numbers" for the average person.
And this shift to base 1000 should be easy to do. The power of modern software is in its ability to hide all the geeky details of the lower layers of the implementation (especially those in hardware). Since the average user does not think in base 2, the measurements reported by the user interface should not be expressed in base 2 terms.
Moverover, if the OS coders have done their job well, switching between base 1000 and base 1024 representations of memory and file sizes should be a simple matter of changing a single value in preference/defaults file someplace. In reality, I'd bet that divide-by-1024s are scattered throughout the code base. A simple grep for "1024" on the OS source code would reveal the poor level of reuse of code that converts integer bytes to kB/MB/GB notation.
Perhaps my rant is really about these poor engineering practices that create a confusing and inconsistent user experience. And these practices are worse than inconveniences. These are the same poor practices that have created input and buffer overrun security holes all over every operating system and application. Rather than patch a single, or a few, input buffer-handling code libraries to prevent overrun-based exploits, we seem to have to patch every single use of a buffer.
This whole powers of 1000 vs. powers of 1024 for sizes is silly. The disk makers report capacities based on powers of 1000 (standard SI definition of mega, giga, etc.) and the OS reports sizes based on powers of 1024. Presto chango, a brand new 200 GB (GB = 1000^3) drive reports that it has 186 GB (GB = 1024^3) of space after formatting.
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
Seems like a simple patch to the OS would have everything reporting based on powers of 1000. As a side benefit, I'd get my "missing" 14 GB of space back on that new firewire drive.
I first read about this in a 1996 Science News article. This article mentions work by Philip H. Kass and his colleagues at the University of California, Carl A. Batt of Cornell University and his colleagues, and Dean O. Cliver. Sorry, but I don't have any citations for articles in more scholarly journals.
Most importantly, it appears that even if you cut up another food on a previously contaminated (by now dry) wooden cutting board, the likelihood of contamination is low. Wood apparently pulls the bacteria fairly deeply into the board (about 1 mm down), out of reach of subsequent activities. By contrast, bacteria can survive in the knife-cuts of plastic cutting boards and spread during subsequent uses.
I agree that current casual applications of wireless networking mean that few will care about the reliability of these networks. Yet proponents of the technology would have us use wireless in more intensive and all-encompassing ways.
Today, nobody really cares if the laptop in an empty and dark executive office becomes disconnected during a hurricane. Tomorrow, we may care a great deal if our phone/data networks or municipal services control systems are knocked offline because an underlying wireless network failed.
Personally, I suspect that wireless is more robust than wireline because physical wires are so prone to flooding or downed trees. But I would like to see examples, like those provided by Isabel, on how these systems operate during and survive natural disasters.
It will be interesting to see if any building-to-building WiFi links or other wireless networking tech can operate in a hurricane. I'd bet that high rain, very wet vegitation, and the odd flying bit of sheet metal will kill reception or reduce reliability. Also, external high gain antennas will be prone to wind-induced misaligment and damage.
Isabel should be an interesting test of any mesh networks in the area -- assuming that they have independent power sources, of course.
Studies of cutting boards show that wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic ones. The research shows that you can find bacteria on plastic cutting boards (even ones that where hand-scrubbed), but that even unwashed wooden boards have no bacteria on the surface after they dry. Apparently capilliary action pulls bacteria into the wood's pores and away from the surface of the wood, leaving the surface sterile.
Wooden cellphone skins would make a nice retro-fashion statement. For extended use, the wooden phone skins could be removed and autoclaved.
If cell phones harbor nasty germs, what about those PDA and Tablet PC medical terminals? The construction is equivalent -- lots of plastic, elastomeric buttons, touch screens, stylus, etc. Worse, medical terminals are more likely than are cell phones to be handled by multiple people.
Yes, a personal (but oft misplaced) sense of control explains why people don't fear driving a car. But why is there so little fear of riding in cars. Other than riding with that weird drunk uncle, most people think nothing of getting into the passenger seat of a car. They've been doing it all their lives (complacency with the commonplace).
As to survival rate, I would grant you that cars have a greater fraction of survivable accidents, than do planes -- crashing at 35 MPH vs. from 35,000 feet wil do that. The surivability of the millions of minor car accidents probably contributes to the public's non-fear of being a car passenger(more complacency with the commonplace). Yet the real issue is that airplane accidents are extremely rare -- IIRC there were 0 fatalities on commercial airliners in 2002. Hence, the old adage that one is more likely to die on the short drive to and from the airport than on the long flight between the airports.
The human brain is immensely bad at assessing risks and consequences. Just look at the relative frequencies of fear-of-flying vs. fear-of-riding-in-a-car and compare those frequencies with the objective safety data for the two modes of transport. Add in fear of the unknown vs. complacency with the commonplace and all logic of probability and expected value go out the window. Since most people have never experienced an asteroid strike and since most asteroids never strike the Earth, it is easy to discount the possibility of the event.
And even statistics is inadequate for assessing the threat. On a deeper level, no single asteroid threat scale can work if different people have different levels of risk aversion. Which would you prefer: 1) an event that has a 1-in-a-million chance of killing 1 billion people or 2) an event that has a 100% chance of killing 1000 people. Different people will argue for different preferences despite the fact that both events have the same expected value of 1000 people dead. Some, who are risk averse, would abhor even the remotest possibility that a billion people might perish. Others, who are risk seeking, would rather take a 99.9999% chance of nobody dying to avoid the option in which 1000 people are most certainly killed.
Overall, I can see why the scientists want to downplay all the preliminary sightings of asteroids. With too little tracking data, nearly every rock they find looks like it might hit the Earth sometime. The real question is: how many false alarms can the public tolerate? If it is 1 false alarm per month, then scientists should only publish a threat assessment once a month.
OK, its more a Jupiter bar -- a chewy metallic hydrogen center covered in rich fluffy methane-ammonia clouds. What every growing star needs for a burst of energy.
How many orbits does it take to get to the center of a gas-giant lollipop?
Now when I go to a strange town, I don't need to use Zagat's to find a good restaurant anymore. I just need to search RUSICK2. No hits = good eats (or at least nontoxic eats). OK, I guess I still need Zagat's, but RUSICK is a good cross-reference.
The service does have many sources of error. Illness does not always immediately follow consumption (I've seen reports that bad seafood can cause symptoms 2-3 days after eating). Thus, I would suspect that some reports will erroneously correlate sickness with the most recent meal.
I also wonder if this service will survive litigation. I can imagine some arrogant chef hiring a laywer to go after RUSICK2 for libel.
With an ever growing collection of digital photos, I've come to the same conclusion as Jim Gray. Hard disks are superior for backups.
I currently have about 100 GB of images and it takes more than 20 4.7 GB DVD-R discs to create a full backup. Although DVD media is still slightly cheaper than new large capacity IDE drives, the added time and hassle factor of burning 20 disks far out weighs any minor costs savings. Moreover a 3.5" drive in a padded anti-static bag takes up less room in the safe deposit box than 20 DVDs (especially if you have the DVDs in protective jewel cases). And if HD-based-backup lets me avoid some future artists tax on burnable media, so much the better.
A Firewire enclosure and a rotating collection of IDE drives is the way to go.
See Don't Touch that Radio Button, You're on Billboard Detection for a freely accessible version of this story. It sounds like the system can detect leakage from car radio antennas, although some people are skeptical of its accuracy.
I appreciate the time you took to explain the various distros, applications, and possibilities with PDA vs. desktop Linux. I am interested in building personal knowledge management tools that would work on both platforms (with allowances for the differences in screen size, storage, CPU power, etc.). The fact that so many popular Linux apps can work PDAs is very heartening.
Thanks,
G4from128k
The Sept 12 dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on companies that deploy billboards that change throughout the day -- one intended application for these digital ink billboards.
The most interesting variant uses a roadside scanner that detects which radio stations are tuned in on the various cars going by the sign. The system then aggregates the data on who is listening to what and decides what ad message to put up. If most people are listening to the game, maybe an ad for the local sports bar will appear. If a cluster of classical music listeners drives past, then an ad for season tickets to the opera might briefly appear.
There's no word on whether the system can tell which MP3 file you are listening to. Yet.
I have no idea of the political leanings of the supporters of the proposed taxes being discussed in this thread, but my bet is they are less likely to be Republicans. As a tax, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. As a means of supporting artists that may have non-family values, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. And given the entertainment industry's general love of Clinton & Democrats, I would suspect that Republicans would generaly be against it.
Too quote a short Wired article on donations: "Artists and execs in the movie and music businesses tend to lean Democratic when it comes time to donate to political parties." A longer article also seems to confirm the Democrat's greater penchant for anti-piracy legislation. Otherwise, I agree that Republican's often stick up for business and are not the best privacy advocates in the world.
What I do know is that businesses put up with a lot of crap in the form of well-intentioned, but deleterious regulations that destroy jobs and drive up prices. An artist's subsidy tax on computer equipment and services for businesses would be an example. Having been through the startup process myself and had friends who started businesses I have seen or experienced a range of dumb regulations that only serve to make it hard to start and run a new business. Most of the crap targets businesses only, so consumers, employees, and the average voter seldom see all the fees, forms, and bureaucratic B.S. perpetrated by Federal, state, and local authorities.
Consumers think that businesses should pay their "fair share of taxes" and that is a understandable, if shortsighted view. In reality, no business pays any taxes, they simply pass them on to the customer or to the shareholder. Yet the taxes are frustrating because they make a business less competative and dealing with the paperwork serves no business purpose.
But, I could be wrong on all this. After all, I am a moron.
A large fraction of computers, writable DVD drives, media, and ISP service is bought and used by companies for everyday business purposes. Under the proposed system it would seem that businesses would be doubly screwed. First, the business suffers from the lost productivity incurred when employees download music for personal use. Second, the business has to pay a tax on this activity as well.
It's no wonder business people vote Republican.
Why should I pay any tax on DVD drives, writable media, ISP service, etc. if I never have and never will download any artists material? All of these items which might have this proposed compulsory licensing fee have legal uses unrelated to the theft, use, or enjoyment of "artists" copyrighted material. For example, most of my HD space, DVD backups, and internet bandwidth is consumed by my own digital pictures.
If people want music, then they should pay for music. Hidden taxes that penalize all for the misbehavior of some seem like a very bad idea.
I guess if this goes through, I will have to sign up as a licensed creator of digital photographs and then assign all these "artists" tax dollars to myself.
With more mobile and portable devices running Linux, it raises the issue of running the same Linux applications on both the desktop and the palmtop. For example, do the various Linux Office-oid applications have counterparts on the PDA side? Are the PDA Linux distros identical/similar/compatible-in-name-only with their desktop breathern? Or are desktop distros far too bloated to run on lighter platforms?
/.ers might shed some packets on this issue.
I, for one, would look more seriously at both developing for and using Linux if many/most applications ran easily on a range of device sizes.
Perhaps some Penguinophilic