It's about 50-70 watts on the latest 3GHz PCs. An idling 3GHz Pentium 4 takes about 20 watts and a fully loaded one about 70-90 watts. At 15 cents the kilowatt-hour (that's what NYC pays), that comes out to an extra 21.6 cents/day or $79 per year compared to leaving the computer idle all year long.
So, yes, power is a substantial cost consideration. NYC power is also primarily gernerated with coal, so every joule of electricity used is that much more CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, if the CPU cycles are going to a good cause, $79 is a quite affordable donation.
I almost never look at my case. When I do, it's for a few seconds to change a CD or press the power button. Why should I spend $20-$100 on a fancy case that I'll hardly look at?
Well, since it already has Linux and Windows, we won't count those.
1 - Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) - Essential for compiling all those programs you download for Linux. 2 - XWindows - Webbrowsing with Lynx isn't much fun, and doing graphical work is very hard in text mode. 3 - KDE or Gnome - Same reason as XWindows. 4 - Konqueror - Great webbrowser. Lets you stop pop-up ads and lets you control cookies and javascript on a per-domain level. Also doubles as a file browser. 5 - Wine - Lets you run Windows apps from Linux. 6 - fdisk - Good for deleting that pesky Windows partition. With Wine, why do you need to waste a few GB on that Windows partition that will just gather dust. 7 - DCGUI - Helps in getting zero-cost programs for Wine to run, as well as zero-cost movies and mp3s. 8 - Kaboodle - Plays most movie files that you download with DCGUI. 9 - XMMS - Good mp3 player. 10 - apache - Nice webserver program. Every person needs their personal webpage, and apache is the most elegant way of putting up those photographs of your pet for the world to see.
Note: Outside of DCGUI and Wine, all of the above are included with Mandrake, so you only have to download the other two (which are free).
Well, many people know how big a movie is, or a CD (both will fit in 700MB), and they might figure that # of movies in a harddrive = (size of drive / size of movie). I would get upset if I was in England and I was sold a gallon of gasoline and it turns out it was a US gallon. I would also get upset if I was sold a harddrive and it came up about 8% short (especially when 10 years ago hard drives were the right size).
Now ask yourself, would companies ever have switched to using GB=.9313225746 * 2^30 (ie., 1 billion) if they weren't profit-driven and without morals? Considering that the US still doesn't use metric after all these years, I think not.
Also, although I hate coffee and you'd have to stuff it down my throat, I don't expect any drink to be 180F hot. Drinks are supposed to be cool enough to drink, and 180F will burn on the way down, especially when they were warned by inspectors that it was unsafe. I don't see any problem with storing it at 180F though, as long as they cool it down before serving it.
While percentages would be better to use for gun death, in this case they say the same story. I read a Scientific American article about the same topic, and they used deaths/100,000/year as their unit of measurement, and the US pointed out like a sore thumb. If Japan has 30 deaths by guns and 100,000,000 people, and the US 11,000 dead out of 300,000,000, than either by percentage or absolute number, a lot more die in the US. As Moore's not a statistician and it doesn't change the results, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
This seems like a trojan horse virus to me. The text on the disclaimer reads as follows: THIS CD IS ENHANCED WITH MEDIAMAX SOFTWARE
A trojan horse is a program that has an extra, unexpected, and hidden function on top of what is advertised.
While the rules for fair advertising are quite loose, especially when descriptive and non-quantitative words are used, the PATRIOT act and anti-hacking laws aren't. I don't see how garbling the CD by inserting a hidden little program can possibly be construed as 'enhancing' the CD, so it fits the unexpected part, and as it automatically installs, it fits the hidden part.
Consider the flip side. What would happen if I wrote a self-installing program that instead of modifying an audio stream, sent back to me all the credit card and sensitive database files it could find on the host computer and put a disclaimer on my disc that "the disk is enhanced with DataSafe". Or what about a copy of Amerika's Army that I bundled with a copy of FatherlandProtector (which forwards credit card and military info to Al-Queda and the Taliban).
Ashcroft should give these guys the statutory 10 years or so in prison for the music executives who signed off on this, or is his "you do the crime, you do the time" policy only for stuff like avoiding censorship and exercising fair use?
Just because a judge says you can't refill a Lexmark printer doesn't mean that it's impossible. Judges also say you can't use Windows or use DirectTV without paying for it, but how many of you have pirated software or satellite? This truely only effects the uninformed, those who buy products without researching or those who buy brand names out of some misguided sense of loyalty.
Same with drugs, but have you noticed how Marajuana and Cocaine are extremely expensive (over $1,000,000/tonne) while corn is very cheap (about $100/tonne). Marajuana grows like a weed, so it isn't expensive because it's hard to grow. While government prohibition of something usually won't make it impossible, it makes legal businesses unable to compete, and only shady and underground businesses can compete, and they need to sell at a very high price to cover their overhead (drug runners, money laundering, wars with other dealers, and extra profit for the high risk of death or injury). Even with bootleg DVDs/CDs, they're much more expensive than a free market price (free market price is probably about a dollar a DVD, $.60 a CD) because of the underground nature of the operation.
If bootleg Lexmark cartridges are $50 each (because of the risks the bootleggers risk in refilling cartridges and the secrecy of their operations), Lexmark can sell theirs for about $50 each before even a small fraction of people will switch to the bootlegs, which is far above what they could get if there was open competition.
A more proper measurement of bandwidth is min(upspeed, downspeed), at least if you're running P2P. Once either uploads or downloads fill up the entire pipe, the other side side slows down to a crawl, since the TCP acknowledge packets get delayed by the backlog of packets going the other way. On a P2P network taken as a whole, total downloads must equal total uploads, so even if you're downloading more than uploading, that's because someone else is uploading more than downloading.
Here, I have 3mbit down/484k? up service, and very often, things slow down to a crawl because the 484k up cap is hit VERY easily. I'd trade my service for 1mbit both ways in a heartbeat.
a) Accompany it with the
complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
If a compiler isn't available to the recipient, than it isn't machine readable, and should be a GPL violation.
How about paying artists from the general treasury and abolishing copyright. Anyone who wants to be an artist can sign up, so long as they are US citizens or permanent residents and can prove that they are full-time artists.
Proof of being an artist would be consist of:
1 - Cannot hold a full-time job (anything over 1,000 hours a year). Anyone with a full-time job should have the money to not require government hand-outs and likely doesn't have all that much free time.
2 - Must show proof of progress. This should be somewhat lax, but not overly. This could be audited much like a tax return. Instead of having to come up with receipts, you'd have to either show them your finished work or your sketchbook/notebook/source code/etc if it's a work in progress.
3 - Your work must be made available to the public (with source code for software). This could be easily done as part of the reporting requirements to get your grant, and the governemnt could run a few (thousand) servers on P2P networks that contain a copy of all work made under the program. Anything that gets popular will quickly be spread out among the network to minimize bandwidth cost.
The size of the grant could be around $15k per annum. This is around minimum wage plus a little for supplies and should be enough to attract many artists who do it to do art (and would entice a lot of bums, but that is why there are reviews). It is small enough to keep the governemnt's tab reasonable (1 million people enrolled would cost $15b a year plus administrative expenses). Cooperatives could be formed (which would form sem-spontaneously among people inclined for such work) to handle projects like movies and software.
Although this is pricey for the government, this would mean consumers would pay just for the cost of media (or cost of bandwidth if downloaded) and would give back to the people more money (easily hundreds of billions in free games, movies, music, and software) than the government will spend on the program because the current system is horribly inefficient and employs an enourmous amount of middlemen and profiteers.
Additionally, the lower prices will push the supply-demand equilibrium to a higher level of use/enjoyment (people will buy 100 $2 CDs or download 2,000 songs/year instead of buying 20 $20 cartel CDs).
Three potential drawbacks are the government censoring material/grants, people freeloading for their grant money, and our Berne Convention agreements.
As far as freeloading goes, a reporting/auditing system much like our tax system would handle that. Having to keep semi-detailed logbooks or a record of your artistic activities isn't a bad tradeoff for a small but steady income.
Government censorship is an issue, but it's no worse than our current corporate censorship, and it's not like if the government doesn't give you a grant, you can't do art. It just means you won't be paid (much like today and corporations). The law should be written in such protect against censorship, but governments often flout their own laws or work around them.
As far as the Berne convention goes, that's what our $400B a year military is for. Just tear that piece of paper up and tell the rest of the world "If you don't like it, then discuss it with our army." (Probably diplomatic means will work quite well, since the Berne convention hurts the rest of the world, so resorting to tearning up the treaty might not be necessary).
It isn't necessarily cost free, but it can be VERY low cost.
You don't need graphics or javascripts or a shitload of meta tags.
The article itself doesn't take much (maybe 1000-2000 bytes for a 500-word article using embedded gzip). The sidebar or links don't take that much either (use plain HTML, and keep paths reasonably short).
All in all, 2,500 bytes might be used per hit, so you could serve 400,000 hits/GB. I'll assume web bandwidth is $1/GB, which would put the cost of a hit at 2.5 u$ (microdollar, or 1/1000000 dollars). Banner ads pay about 8 CPM, or about 80 u$ per hit.
Even if no graphics would't work out well, you can stuff up to about 80kB of stuff per article and still break even.
Perhaps if people reduced the cruft in their HTML and kept graphics to a minimum, the bandwidth load would be kept quite modest.
Couldn't this be defeated by running a Pentium-with-palladium emulator. It would implment all the normal instructions (like add, jmp, etc) properly, it would handle the authentication instructions by always saying yes, and it would handle encryption and decryption opcods with noops. For the icing on the cake, it could log all keys sent to it to/var/www/html/keys.txt.
You would start with a freshly formatted harddrive (prefferably non-DRM crippled, but as long as it can run Linux and your emulator, it's fine) and install Linux on it. Then you would install your Pentium emulator with fake DRM support (a bit like Wine). Then you would install your Windows-with-DRM through the emulator. All the DRM software wouldn't know the difference.
Assuming that a DRM system will allow unsigned code to run (and just stop you from modifying/copying signed data), this will allow crackers and rippers to make perfectly functional non-DRM programs and media files that will run on normal (DRM-crippled) systems, and if not, then there will be a HUGE incentive to get uncrippled machines, much like mod chips for game consoles.
On the contrary, my guess is these low-noise jets will be even bigger gas guzzlers than normal supersonic jets, for three reasons.
1 - Fuel efficiency wasn't mentioned in the article. If it were better, I figure they'd be bragging about it.
2 - Apparantly the main advancement that they did was to have the air heat up near the nose of the aircraft, to make a smooth pressure gradient. Now that heating must come from friction, which takes energy (quite a bit when the air is rushing by at Mach 2).
3 - Current aircraft are designed with loads of computer aerodynamics modelling, with the main design goal being low drag (ie., high fuel efficiency), so if reducing the sonic boom reduced drag, it already would have been discovered and implemented long ago. In subsonic aircraft, design improvements of 0.01% are fairly typical and worth going after, as this is a very mature field of engineering.
I guess we can forget about those 4 hour NYC to Tokyo flights for the time being.
1. Most obviously, a larger and color display. Well, I guess OLEDs are the answer, since this is basically a toy which does not need years of lifespan.
2. Larger size, based on CDROM format. So we can use normal CDRs.
3. Basic video decoding so that the CD can hold a full movie. This should be possible in hardware, I'm sure chips or PGAs already exist for this.
It already exists, it's called a VCD and it's really popular in Asia. It uses MPEG-1 compression and can be played back on a normal TV. You get 80 minutes or so of video on a disc, and they can be burned with a standard CDR burner. I'm guessing that the MPAA doesn't exactly like them, since there is no restrictive software like CSS on VCDs.
I'm curious though... what is the average usage of a laptop... something tells me 12 watts is not enough.
Well, I've been reading about new 110 watt power supplies being designed because the existing 90 watt power supplies aren't good enough for the latest, fastest, and ever hotter chips being put in high-end laptops. Sorry, can't remember where I read it, but it was on a site like tomshardware.
I'm guessing most new laptops will need a lot more than the 12 of so watts that that fuel cell will give, especially considering that 12 watts is peak power. It'd be a shame for you to boot up a 3d game and have the laptop shut off because the voltage dropped too low.
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It's about 50-70 watts on the latest 3GHz PCs. An idling 3GHz Pentium 4 takes about 20 watts and a fully loaded one about 70-90 watts. At 15 cents the kilowatt-hour (that's what NYC pays), that comes out to an extra 21.6 cents/day or $79 per year compared to leaving the computer idle all year long.
So, yes, power is a substantial cost consideration. NYC power is also primarily gernerated with coal, so every joule of electricity used is that much more CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, if the CPU cycles are going to a good cause, $79 is a quite affordable donation.
I almost never look at my case. When I do, it's for a few seconds to change a CD or press the power button. Why should I spend $20-$100 on a fancy case that I'll hardly look at?
Well, since it already has Linux and Windows, we won't count those.
1 - Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) - Essential for compiling all those programs you download for Linux.
2 - XWindows - Webbrowsing with Lynx isn't much fun, and doing graphical work is very hard in text mode.
3 - KDE or Gnome - Same reason as XWindows.
4 - Konqueror - Great webbrowser. Lets you stop pop-up ads and lets you control cookies and javascript on a per-domain level. Also doubles as a file browser.
5 - Wine - Lets you run Windows apps from Linux.
6 - fdisk - Good for deleting that pesky Windows partition. With Wine, why do you need to waste a few GB on that Windows partition that will just gather dust.
7 - DCGUI - Helps in getting zero-cost programs for Wine to run, as well as zero-cost movies and mp3s.
8 - Kaboodle - Plays most movie files that you download with DCGUI.
9 - XMMS - Good mp3 player.
10 - apache - Nice webserver program. Every person needs their personal webpage, and apache is the most elegant way of putting up those photographs of your pet for the world to see.
Note: Outside of DCGUI and Wine, all of the above are included with Mandrake, so you only have to download the other two (which are free).
Well, many people know how big a movie is, or a CD (both will fit in 700MB), and they might figure that # of movies in a harddrive = (size of drive / size of movie). I would get upset if I was in England and I was sold a gallon of gasoline and it turns out it was a US gallon. I would also get upset if I was sold a harddrive and it came up about 8% short (especially when 10 years ago hard drives were the right size).
Now ask yourself, would companies ever have switched to using GB=.9313225746 * 2^30 (ie., 1 billion) if they weren't profit-driven and without morals? Considering that the US still doesn't use metric after all these years, I think not.
Also, although I hate coffee and you'd have to stuff it down my throat, I don't expect any drink to be 180F hot. Drinks are supposed to be cool enough to drink, and 180F will burn on the way down, especially when they were warned by inspectors that it was unsafe. I don't see any problem with storing it at 180F though, as long as they cool it down before serving it.
While percentages would be better to use for gun death, in this case they say the same story. I read a Scientific American article about the same topic, and they used deaths/100,000/year as their unit of measurement, and the US pointed out like a sore thumb. If Japan has 30 deaths by guns and 100,000,000 people, and the US 11,000 dead out of 300,000,000, than either by percentage or absolute number, a lot more die in the US. As Moore's not a statistician and it doesn't change the results, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
This seems like a trojan horse virus to me. The text on the disclaimer reads as follows: THIS CD IS ENHANCED WITH MEDIAMAX SOFTWARE
A trojan horse is a program that has an extra, unexpected, and hidden function on top of what is advertised.
While the rules for fair advertising are quite loose, especially when descriptive and non-quantitative words are used, the PATRIOT act and anti-hacking laws aren't. I don't see how garbling the CD by inserting a hidden little program can possibly be construed as 'enhancing' the CD, so it fits the unexpected part, and as it automatically installs, it fits the hidden part.
Consider the flip side. What would happen if I wrote a self-installing program that instead of modifying an audio stream, sent back to me all the credit card and sensitive database files it could find on the host computer and put a disclaimer on my disc that "the disk is enhanced with DataSafe". Or what about a copy of Amerika's Army that I bundled with a copy of FatherlandProtector (which forwards credit card and military info to Al-Queda and the Taliban).
Ashcroft should give these guys the statutory 10 years or so in prison for the music executives who signed off on this, or is his "you do the crime, you do the time" policy only for stuff like avoiding censorship and exercising fair use?
Just because a judge says you can't refill a Lexmark printer doesn't mean that it's impossible. Judges also say you can't use Windows or use DirectTV without paying for it, but how many of you have pirated software or satellite? This truely only effects the uninformed, those who buy products without researching or those who buy brand names out of some misguided sense of loyalty.
Same with drugs, but have you noticed how Marajuana and Cocaine are extremely expensive (over $1,000,000/tonne) while corn is very cheap (about $100/tonne). Marajuana grows like a weed, so it isn't expensive because it's hard to grow. While government prohibition of something usually won't make it impossible, it makes legal businesses unable to compete, and only shady and underground businesses can compete, and they need to sell at a very high price to cover their overhead (drug runners, money laundering, wars with other dealers, and extra profit for the high risk of death or injury). Even with bootleg DVDs/CDs, they're much more expensive than a free market price (free market price is probably about a dollar a DVD, $.60 a CD) because of the underground nature of the operation.
If bootleg Lexmark cartridges are $50 each (because of the risks the bootleggers risk in refilling cartridges and the secrecy of their operations), Lexmark can sell theirs for about $50 each before even a small fraction of people will switch to the bootlegs, which is far above what they could get if there was open competition.
A more proper measurement of bandwidth is min(upspeed, downspeed), at least if you're running P2P. Once either uploads or downloads fill up the entire pipe, the other side side slows down to a crawl, since the TCP acknowledge packets get delayed by the backlog of packets going the other way. On a P2P network taken as a whole, total downloads must equal total uploads, so even if you're downloading more than uploading, that's because someone else is uploading more than downloading.
Here, I have 3mbit down/484k? up service, and very often, things slow down to a crawl because the 484k up cap is hit VERY easily. I'd trade my service for 1mbit both ways in a heartbeat.
If a compiler isn't available to the recipient, than it isn't machine readable, and should be a GPL violation.
How about paying artists from the general treasury and abolishing copyright. Anyone who wants to be an artist can sign up, so long as they are US citizens or permanent residents and can prove that they are full-time artists.
Proof of being an artist would be consist of:
1 - Cannot hold a full-time job (anything over 1,000 hours a year). Anyone with a full-time job should have the money to not require government hand-outs and likely doesn't have all that much free time.
2 - Must show proof of progress. This should be somewhat lax, but not overly. This could be audited much like a tax return. Instead of having to come up with receipts, you'd have to either show them your finished work or your sketchbook/notebook/source code/etc if it's a work in progress.
3 - Your work must be made available to the public (with source code for software). This could be easily done as part of the reporting requirements to get your grant, and the governemnt could run a few (thousand) servers on P2P networks that contain a copy of all work made under the program. Anything that gets popular will quickly be spread out among the network to minimize bandwidth cost.
The size of the grant could be around $15k per annum. This is around minimum wage plus a little for supplies and should be enough to attract many artists who do it to do art (and would entice a lot of bums, but that is why there are reviews). It is small enough to keep the governemnt's tab reasonable (1 million people enrolled would cost $15b a year plus administrative expenses). Cooperatives could be formed (which would form sem-spontaneously among people inclined for such work) to handle projects like movies and software.
Although this is pricey for the government, this would mean consumers would pay just for the cost of media (or cost of bandwidth if downloaded) and would give back to the people more money (easily hundreds of billions in free games, movies, music, and software) than the government will spend on the program because the current system is horribly inefficient and employs an enourmous amount of middlemen and profiteers.
Additionally, the lower prices will push the supply-demand equilibrium to a higher level of use/enjoyment (people will buy 100 $2 CDs or download 2,000 songs/year instead of buying 20 $20 cartel CDs).
Three potential drawbacks are the government censoring material/grants, people freeloading for their grant money, and our Berne Convention agreements.
As far as freeloading goes, a reporting/auditing system much like our tax system would handle that. Having to keep semi-detailed logbooks or a record of your artistic activities isn't a bad tradeoff for a small but steady income.
Government censorship is an issue, but it's no worse than our current corporate censorship, and it's not like if the government doesn't give you a grant, you can't do art. It just means you won't be paid (much like today and corporations). The law should be written in such protect against censorship, but governments often flout their own laws or work around them.
As far as the Berne convention goes, that's what our $400B a year military is for. Just tear that piece of paper up and tell the rest of the world "If you don't like it, then discuss it with our army." (Probably diplomatic means will work quite well, since the Berne convention hurts the rest of the world, so resorting to tearning up the treaty might not be necessary).
It isn't necessarily cost free, but it can be VERY low cost.
You don't need graphics or javascripts or a shitload of meta tags.
The article itself doesn't take much (maybe 1000-2000 bytes for a 500-word article using embedded gzip). The sidebar or links don't take that much either (use plain HTML, and keep paths reasonably short).
All in all, 2,500 bytes might be used per hit, so you could serve 400,000 hits/GB. I'll assume web bandwidth is $1/GB, which would put the cost of a hit at 2.5 u$ (microdollar, or 1/1000000 dollars). Banner ads pay about 8 CPM, or about 80 u$ per hit.
Even if no graphics would't work out well, you can stuff up to about 80kB of stuff per article and still break even.
Perhaps if people reduced the cruft in their HTML and kept graphics to a minimum, the bandwidth load would be kept quite modest.
Since Linux is GPL'ed, does that mean that one person could buy the boxed (and ad-free) version, and legally distribute it via P2P or bittorrent?
Couldn't this be defeated by running a Pentium-with-palladium emulator. It would implment all the normal instructions (like add, jmp, etc) properly, it would handle the authentication instructions by always saying yes, and it would handle encryption and decryption opcods with noops. For the icing on the cake, it could log all keys sent to it to /var/www/html/keys.txt.
You would start with a freshly formatted harddrive (prefferably non-DRM crippled, but as long as it can run Linux and your emulator, it's fine) and install Linux on it. Then you would install your Pentium emulator with fake DRM support (a bit like Wine). Then you would install your Windows-with-DRM through the emulator. All the DRM software wouldn't know the difference.
Assuming that a DRM system will allow unsigned code to run (and just stop you from modifying/copying signed data), this will allow crackers and rippers to make perfectly functional non-DRM programs and media files that will run on normal (DRM-crippled) systems, and if not, then there will be a HUGE incentive to get uncrippled machines, much like mod chips for game consoles.
On the contrary, my guess is these low-noise jets will be even bigger gas guzzlers than normal supersonic jets, for three reasons.
1 - Fuel efficiency wasn't mentioned in the article. If it were better, I figure they'd be bragging about it.
2 - Apparantly the main advancement that they did was to have the air heat up near the nose of the aircraft, to make a smooth pressure gradient. Now that heating must come from friction, which takes energy (quite a bit when the air is rushing by at Mach 2).
3 - Current aircraft are designed with loads of computer aerodynamics modelling, with the main design goal being low drag (ie., high fuel efficiency), so if reducing the sonic boom reduced drag, it already would have been discovered and implemented long ago. In subsonic aircraft, design improvements of 0.01% are fairly typical and worth going after, as this is a very mature field of engineering.
I guess we can forget about those 4 hour NYC to Tokyo flights for the time being.
1. Most obviously, a larger and color display. Well, I guess OLEDs are the answer, since this is basically a toy which does not need years of lifespan.
2. Larger size, based on CDROM format. So we can use normal CDRs.
3. Basic video decoding so that the CD can hold a full movie. This should be possible in hardware, I'm sure chips or PGAs already exist for this.
It already exists, it's called a VCD and it's really popular in Asia. It uses MPEG-1 compression and can be played back on a normal TV. You get 80 minutes or so of video on a disc, and they can be burned with a standard CDR burner. I'm guessing that the MPAA doesn't exactly like them, since there is no restrictive software like CSS on VCDs.
I'm curious though... what is the average usage of a laptop... something tells me 12 watts is not enough.
Well, I've been reading about new 110 watt power supplies being designed because the existing 90 watt power supplies aren't good enough for the latest, fastest, and ever hotter chips being put in high-end laptops. Sorry, can't remember where I read it, but it was on a site like tomshardware.
I'm guessing most new laptops will need a lot more than the 12 of so watts that that fuel cell will give, especially considering that 12 watts is peak power. It'd be a shame for you to boot up a 3d game and have the laptop shut off because the voltage dropped too low.