Scanning the posts so far, I haven't seen the view rebutted that the deal itself is not bad for the "common good" that should be government's aim.
In summary, that the short-term construction work generated combined with the 200 (and probably growing, that's a good bet) permanent job count, will gain the economy in general and the government coffers in particular, more than $89M/30y tax expenditure.
Whereas the "evil" seems to lie entirely in the deal having been cut outside public view. Like about half the deals any government does involving public funds, if they involve a new business arrangement.
The government should do as little as possible outside public view, and nothing outside public REVIEW, very preferably review before the next election, but that level of disclosure seems to be met here. As soon as the deal was cut and could be disclosed without compromising google's strategy to its business competitors, it was.
If the citizens the politicos are working for don't like the deal, they can be fired, and the next bunch thereby warned not to take even good deals that will improve the state, if they involve an NDA for even temporary secrecy.
Wow. I bet if Bill Gates were to stand on a railroad track and watch a train approaching in the distance for several minutes, he could also conclude that in several minutes more, the train would pass by.
Any high-school kid could also have 'predicted' this, but I suppose they don't get invites to Davos.
Why anybody would want the man's predictions after the embarrassment of "The Road Ahead", I don't know. I think it's the only book to predict the next 30 years of IT history ever to have to be re-released just a year later with major corrections...the second edition mentioned the Internet more than twice.
Using the article's own figures of $100K up-front capital cost, the annualized cost over 25 years is not $4000/year, because of that same time-value of money. Put it this way: give me $35,234.86 today, and an investment that pays 5% per year for 25 years, and I will be able to pay his $2500 power+heat+gasoline bills for 25 years to come. $35,234 is the "Net Present Value" of 25 years of his future energy bills.
Or, vice-versa, if you want to buy this system and don't have $100K lying about, you'd have to borrow $100K. And if you could get 5% interest on your solar mortgage (ha!), you'd be paying out around $7250/year in mortgage payments.
And, needless to say, we haven't yet touched the maintenance costs on the system, or the insurance costs. Insurance being merely the way to annualize the risk of his equipment being among the unknown, but non-zero, percentage of product that leaves the factory a little defective and not going to last 25 years; if it breaks, the insurance fixes it. Ditto, you'd want insurance for yourself or a workman getting injured while up on the roof, or maintaining tanks full of explosive materials, or batteries which I imagine are lead-acid.
So, alas, that annualized cost isn't $4K but about $8K.
And, oh...does any of this stuff have environmental costs when being disposed of? (I assume the $100K cost includes the environmental cost of *manufacture* which the manufacturer has to pay and includes in his price). So $8K/year for sure, even if $750/year for maintainance and insurance is a little high.
$8K/year for energy instead of $2500 is only going to happen if we put huge costs (through taxes or regulation) on top of any fossil-fuel-based energy use, introducing a significant drag on the economy. That affects competitiveness, so you need other countries doing it too.
OK, suppose you do that - you've also raised up fossil costs to the point where nuclear starts to look very good, even if it spends extremely conservative amounts on safety and waste disposal. And wind farms will be everywhere, making grid power environmental that way.
Bottom line: THIS DOESN'T WORK. Economically. Not for whole nations. It's particularly silly in cities, where grid connections to centralized generation are cheap.
What this DOES work for is somebody who wants modern comforts in locations so remote they have no grid. Then the extra $100K makes the half-million-dollar house with the ten-million-dollar VIEW of the Rockies (on a $50,000 acreage that's cheap because it's nowhere serviceable)...possible at all.
And not enough people are talking about one thing solar would make sense for already: air conditioning in the insanely-fast-growing US southwest - Arizona, Nevada, etc where the summer sun is the power-spike problem...and could be the solution.
I have degrees in both Computer Science and in Engineering, and for more contrast, the engineering (Civil, municipal, specifically water & sewer systems) is utterly unrelated to the Comp.Sci, unlike EE. However, *everything* these days of course relates to IT, and so I switch back & forth between IT systems development and problems like managing construction schedules & supply - and I have to context-switch several times a day.
I'll give you what for me is the crucial difference in a sentence: Engineering has one set of standards, IT has both none and too many. Engineering standards of acceptable construction are industry-wide (national and state-level standards vary but little from each other, generally within a +/- range of 10%). IT "standards" vary from company to company and year to year. My employer has completely turned over it's IT "development methodology" four times in 20 years. All IT is very, very much "let the buyer beware" - just look at the "guarantees" you get with software vs. how utterly sue-able your engineer is if the house falls down.
This goes beyond my opinion, to some extent - I can't recall any identifying details, but about 15 years back, there was a court case that hinged on whether IT was "professional engineering" of any sort. The court concluded that IT developers fell short of the definition in four ways. Two of which I still remember: lack of a commonly-accepted standard of education for IT developers, and lack of professional standards bodies to regulate at what level of expertise and experience a person could take on the title of "software engineer".
Until then, "Software Engineer" to me reflects an *aspiration* to uphold the same standards in IT development that are adhered to when one is pouring concrete. This aspiration, by the way, is met in a couple of areas of IT: financial systems banks use (ever had an ATM fail on you? I've never seen it, never heard of a friend having it; I think I've read one news story about such in two decades - about the same failure rate as bridges). The other, of course, is basically electrical engineering with some software added, viz, real-time systems that manage anything expensive or life-threatening, like satellites and water treatment plants.
For both those areas, I believe that the dollars/line-of-code number is SEVERAL TIMES as high as in most IT development. I recall about 10 years back a magazine story saying that it was a buck-per-line for most IT, and ten dollars per line-of-code that NASA paid for shuttle control software.
With most engineering, you're paying 95% for the building or water main or whatever and 5% for the engineering calcs (and drawings and plans and management time...) It makes little sense to economize that 5% down to 1% by having self-taught twentysomethings just wing the calcs for the thickness of the foundation.
For software, the development staff are about 90% of the total cost, so you're really saving money by not requiring everybody to be a BSc with a rigid set of standards and checks and double-checks. So far, we prefer our software to be cheap and only moderately reliable, unless of course lives or vast fortunes depend upon it.
Seems to be my job in these threads to mention that MEPIS is based upon the Ubuntu libraries and repositories, but in addition defaults to KDE - probably better for a Windows-emigre - and comes with codecs, playing MP3s out of the box and so forth.
A lot of thought has gone into its "packaging", i.e. the selection and setup of packages, the menu defaults, etc. By far the closest thing in the Linux world I've seen to "it just works".
Also has a fanatic user base, google "mepislovers" for the fan/support site that's separate from the vendor's.
>"KDE doesn't even come close to Vista in complexity or sheer number of lines of code.."
I really shouldn't reply to a zero-modded flame, but I had to grin, because it reminds me of a documentary where Steve Ballmer laughed at how they just had to break with IBM during the OS/2 project because IBMers were obsessed with "KLOCs" (kilo-Lines-of-Code) and paying MS *less* for contributions where the feature took fewer KLOCs than originally estimated.
You don't measure software by the size of the code or it's "complexity", but by the features presented that are useful to the user, and how productive they are when using the product. (Arguably, you then DIVIDE by the size & "complexity" to rate how good the programmer is...)
Presumbaly, if MS does really stupid architecture on the next OS so that it is infernally complex to do the same thing, and writes it extra-bloated so it's way bigger than it has to be, their glory will only be redoubled!
The Calgary Unix User's Group got a great lecture from Aaron Seigo of KDE last week,
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/past-meetings/meetings.06-07 .html...during which he either lied through his teeth about easily checkable claims for the near future, or KDE 4 is coming out in 2007 with significant improvements, and not just "chasing the taillights" of Mac and Vista, but leapfrog improvements upon them.
Assuming KDE 4 does come out in 2007, that'll be exactly 5 years behind KDE 3, about the same time from XP to Vista. They're developing as fast as a $100 Billion corporation, exactly how much more do you want?
The headline on this article is certainly senseless - in a "market" overwhelmed by a monopoly provider, there can be no bubbles to start with, at best you can incrementally develop a market share in small fringe areas where the monopoly's hold is weak. Mostly meaning non-US regions concerned about a lock-in by a foreign provider, especially governments. Also, particularly poor customers that can't avoid the $50 MS "tax" by piracy, because they have to play honestly, like educational institutions.
And in those areas at least, there's been slow but encouraging growth through 2006 and prospects for more. That's only a "bubble bursting" if you were deluded into imagining some take-off point of explosive growth was coming.
I admit I only surf Slashdot at 4, but at that level, a search showed the word "live" has not come up in the discussion.
If you really, really, want music quality, support live music. Quality is about more than the studio and the recording and the codec and the player. All those could be perfect and it still wouldn't be live music. The best classical recording I've ever heard doesn't *touch* a concert hall. (And our local orchestra is struggling to fill the seats. And I don't need to talk about how poor most rock musicians are.) I think a lot of guys (emphasis on "guys") like to go overboard with their music technology more for bragging rights than because they could actually pass a double-blind test to distinguish their beloved perfect sound system from something that costs a quarter as much money and time and trouble.
I think the guy who actually gets out of the house and hits a club (or a concert hall) and hears live music in all its imperfect, bouncing-off-the-walls glory has more bragging rights than the lot of them.
Second, the question is about PORTABLE music. I see ZERO point in spending effort on high-quality sound for my portable. I hate cranking the thing way up, and even with those keen soft-silicon noise-blocking ear buds, the music is usually competing with:
a) traffic b) wind c) my own feet thumping down as I run d) the sound of the earbud's wire rubbing against my clothes...and on and on. Sometimes I grab the controls and back up a few seconds when I lose a whole passage to a bus going by or plane overhead, but mostly I accept that the music is background and what I'm doing out there is foreground, suck it up.
I don't buy a new one because of the battery compartment - I do the same as you, although you must find it a pain to remove & replace the tape every battery change - finish my post and you'll come to the rubber band bit. But I consider it broken and failed at the point, because it's inconveniencing me and pissing me off and not giving value for money, even if I am grumpily still making it work.
And I really, really DID try the soldering. I had to break the case, it wasn't made to open. And I struggled with the problem of soldering a tiny contact with others right beside it for an hour before believing I'd done it...but the player would no longer boot, I'd grounded something. You can't repair those things with a civilian, $25 soldering iron from Radio Shack. What am I supposed to do, build my own pro-level electronics repair bench? Or pay somebody $50 to fix a $90 player?
1) DON'T blame the user - when you're selling an MP3 player, phone, etc, dropping it from waist height to a floor surface *IS* normal usage, and the product should be designed for that.
2) DON'T say the problem is anybody's illusion, consumer products in general and personal electronics in particular are lasting less long over the decades. I'll concede that's from personal experience and those of friends, not some study, but I've got data running back 50 years - my Mom kept a notebook of "major purchases" and the dates they occurred - and they're coming closer together every generation.
2) DON'T say the lifespan is "what you should expect" - it is not just possible to design things to last longer, it costs VERY little more money.
I have *drawer* now of electronics, every one of which failed not because the hugely sophisticated electronics let the team down, the chips are all still great. They break because a cubic MILLIMETRE of plastic broke off that was the catch that held the battery compartment closed. (1 MP3 player, 1 cell phone, one camera). They break because the female 1/8" audio jack loses contact with the wires inside as it loosened. (3 MP3 players, 2 CD "discmans", 3 cassette "walkmans") of the eight jacks, six lost the right ear contact, only two the left ear. (OK, that's probably just a meaningless statistical variation.)
Few of my personal electronics lack rubber bands around them - I like the big thick wide ones that hold broccoli together in the store. The rubber bands hold closed the battery compartment for up to a year after the catch breaks, or pull hard on the audio jack in one direction that makes the right ear sound keep coming in for a few months before it loosens even further. And needless to say, all that rubber wrapped around it adds a layer of cushioning when it gets dropped.
WORST was the goddamn "Logitech Wireless Headphones" that were supposed to eliminate the wire altogether. (Catching the earphone wire on my bike handle or with a moving hand was a frequent reason the player gets yanked off my belt.) But the first set of headphones just lost bluetooth connections after a month, the second set, the plastic simply broke when I dropped them down on a table from about eight inches height. Just...broke. From eight inches. A weak seam where the thin plastic was joined. I didn't bother to return them again, why spend hours of travel time and hassle time to get another pair when the product is that frustrating? I'll just never buy Logitech sound equipment again.
MOST of this crap could be eliminated by:
- using more than a tiny dot of solder on the audio jack connection.
- making the internal structural members cast into the plastic of the case 30% thicker (that's twice as strong in terms of stiffness).
- making the case material a millimetre thicker.
I don't know if it's a big "conspiracy" to sell me the next player - I think it's more about them regarding money as wasted if it makes the device last one day longer, not than the warranty, but longer than the owner tends to keep the receipt and be up for the hassle of the return. (As opposed to getting the latest & greatest.) The warranty is usually a year, but the "receipt+hassle" period is more like 4-5 months.
Perhaps this reasoning will work less well when "the end of Moore's Law" means the next years model doesn't have twice as much Flash RAM or whatever. I'm starting to look forward to it.
I would LOVE to deal with this as a consumer by paying a little more for products that are made by people who care about a rep for reliability and solid workmanship - the BMW/Mercedes/Volvo of electronics. But I can't FIND such a manufacturer. You'd think it would be Apple, but one still hears the same complaints about them.
So, recently, I started buying CHEAPER MP3 players and so forth - why pay more when it's not going to last a year? Alas, the MPIO MP3 player I got was the first to be
I'm dumfounded to scan down through so many posts and see "Sue Microsoft" only once, and that on a post about "force them to show their cards".
Granted it completely depends on white knights (IBM - oh, the irony...) funding it, but so many companies have their business model at stake, I think a fund could be put together in short order. It would strike the whole industry as upsetting to see a largish group of multi-billion-dollar companies sueing Microsoft. Bad for business.
Then they hit Microsoft with about a hundred GPL violations. Spurious ones? Well, maybe...maybe not. For a court to decide. At length. During it, Microsoft should have to hand over every punctuation mark of its source code for examination with a proctoscope. (I know that phrase usually ends with "microscope", but in this case...)
And not sued for mere filthy *money*, of course, no way to buy off the OSS community with that stuff; sue for compliance with the GPL. Which is to say, making public all source code in which allegedly GPL'd material is embedded. Stop and think about how the mere possibility of that would sit with Microsoft investors and the consequent drag on their stock price while litigation went on.
The OSS community is not rich in dollars, but the litigation possibilities inherent in massive amounts of GPL'd code that MS programmers in a hurry to make deadline (they always are) may have quietly lifted mean that, legally, the OSS bunch are actually the ones with a nuke in their pocket. Fines are "conventional weaponry" - being forced to reveal source code is being nuked.
But the standard is harder to make with GPL violations than patent violations because they have to have stolen the EXACT copyrighted code? That sure as hell didn't end the SCO suit in a few days, did it? It's STILL dragging on, though it only did damage for a mere year or so before everybody but the slow court process realized they hadn't any real smoking guns.
I'm not advocating frivolous suits, of course - I happen to have a gut feel there are at least dozens of entirely reasonable questions to ask about almost any proprietary code out there these days, written by people under pressure with a free solution readily available a download away. If the functional result is the same as a GPL solution, it's not unreasonable to suspect, and demand a check.
I have doubts about this project of my own - in sufficient volume, the real cost of books is about $2 each, so you're trading 50 books for the gadget; but there's just no question that while some places could use 50 almost infinitely rugged (by comparison) books more than a laptop, there are also many, many places that could use the laptop.
A very small percentage of the world is actually unable to feed itself - and which percentage keeps shifting, that's more about drought, war and other temporary emergencies than a permanent condition.
Required reading is this very sharp, short column by historian / columnist Gwynne Dyer:
We are constantly bombarded with the comparison between our own wealthy fifth of the world and the poorest fifth, most of them in Africa. In the above column, he reminds us that most of Africa had a fairly good standard of living as recently as the 60s and has declined in recent decades because of apalling governments, not "natural" problems like more people than the land can feed.
And the "middle three-fifths" of humanity are a success story, recently - China and India get the press for their economic rise because they are so large, but all over the world (Dyer writes the above from Turkey) people of this generation have risen from subsistence to a level of comfort that most of our grandparents would recognise - or even envy. (See the series "1900 house" to realize how far we've come since our grandparents day.) That middle 3/5ths don't need the laptop for light, they have food, clothing, shelter, some light and water at least at the end of the street. What they need are opportunities to earn more cash so they can get water to the house and sewer that isn't the gutter.
Three-fifths of six billion is quite a "market". And the sooner they migrate up from $10/day to $50, the sooner we'll have *help* with the tough problem of the poorest fifth. Reviewing the recent economic changes, there's no reason to imagine this can't happen in a generation.
What's the hardware for encoding analogue HDTV? About six posters to this note expressed interest in that, not so much in the SD-only product under discussion.
My commercial, (DRM-loving-and-obeying) Pioneer DVR meets about 90% of my needs, I can't be bothered making a MythTV box just to copy DVDs or video tapes (yes, it obeys even the old "ARM" on tapes).
Nor do I want to "steal" HDTV content, by any reasonable definition, just do with it what I've been doing with VCR tapes for 20 years and my DVR (which can burn DVD-R's) for 2 years: time-shift TV, mostly for a few days, sometimes for several years. Yes, I might sometimes watch it twice, a very few three times, over a decade or so; but I just consider that protected "personal home use", fair use if you will, and I think most courts would agree unless the DRM proponents take away existing rights with a broadcast flag enshrined in law.
Bottom line, I think a card that can digitize analogue HDTV from component jacks is (so far) legal as a Sony Betamax, with at least one non-infringing use. So there OUGHT to be some decent ones for sale by now, since digitizing analogue SD has been possible, real-time, for years.
I've been considering getting a HD-DVR through a satellite company as a package, but it won't, of course, burn any kind of file, so the time-shifting is limited to days - only so much space on the disc. But with MPEG4 files, you should be able to put a typical 42-minute TV episode on a DVD-R and save it a few years.
Digitizing HD would make me buy some technology, nothing short of it will; I've got a DVR. I'm certain no HD DVR's will be offered for sale except as (closed) packages from satellite & cable providers. This is Linux's chance to shine.
But where's the HDTV digitizer cards? Nothing visible at any Calgary parts vendor, a few of which have a lot of variety...
Well, "sez you"... I was working from the post of the one guy who claims to work in the business.
>they are high because they can be.
I *think* you are agreeing with me. Prices CAN'T be high in a free market because a competing author and publisher will produce a book of equal quality and be happy with a 10% profit instead of 200%. So the only way for "because they can be" to be true would imply market failure.
If the educators forcing you to use the product were getting kickbacks, it would all make sense, a closed-loop racket. Yet many posts appear to indicate that profs are distressed by the situation as well. Leading to the assumption that the profs have no meaningful choices outside a tight little publishing cartel that limits choice.
Cartels can only form where the barriers to entry are high, or again some maverick will start up a publishing house and offer cheaper books. Is that the case, or have we missed something?
The British poster who works in the industry is the most useful post on this topic so far. Combined with the backing of the Russian poster, we seem to have the following conclusions:
1) The marginal production cost of the product is a few dollars for paperback, several for hardback.
2) The base production cost varies - books on.NET that only sell for a few years and take $100K in salaries to produce may need many dollars per book to defray that cost unless they can grab the whole market, but books that have hardly changed (I mean REALLY changed) for decades would add less than a dollar per copy for "creative effort".
3) Book costs in Russia reflect these costs and little else.
4) Book costs in the UK are raised a little and in the USA a lot by (drum roll please):
MARKETING COSTS.
Yes, MARKETING, that eternal enemy of both the scientific and artistic talent that come out of Universities, the internal corporate nemisis of quality and honesty in the product production groups - yes, MARKETING is actually their enemy from before they ever get OUT of school and into a job!
The explanation certainly sounds a little simplistic - heck, almost "communistic". By which I mean, that the free-market process of having many textbook products to choose from, and marketers that make all options known to the professor/customers, is SUPPOSED to result in top products for rock-bottom prices. It certainly works that way with DVD players. Whereas this explanation for the situation seems to be saying we'd all be paying a fraction of the price if some (benevolent) dictator picked THE "Physics 201" text and had enough printed for everybody, and no damn marketing costs, just $1 for the author, $7 for the printers, $2 for shipping and bookstore cuts, final sale price $9.99.
Whenever something is going wrong with a free-market solution, either the product doesn't work well in a free market, or you don't actually have a free market and somebody is taking advantage of a (near) monopoly.
The notion of "free" books, a la Free Software - basically, a suggestion that a collection of Wikipedia articles on a topic be expanded into a WikiTextBook - does not strike me as inherently impossible. I didn't think the Wikipedia would go so far, I didn't see so many good writers taking the time to contribute to a free product. But I was wrong, very wrong - and now I can't help wondering if the almost heartbreakingly great effort, sustained for a year or two, that is necessary to write a good textbook, could actually be generated by a free-contributory process.
If so, it could sweep away the whole system, long-term. I do think professors can consider working from sources that don't have big Seal-of-Approval stickers all over the names involved. They are professors, after all, able to check the veracity and value of the work all by themselves, or they couldn't teach the course. And once it caught on, it would spread rapidly.
Because markets that actually aren't free and are creating falsely high prices, are TERRIBLY vulnerable to genuine competition.
...and like Br'er Rabbit, we'll get away from them.
They could be shooting themselves in the foot with this one because it so clearly subtracts a capability that everybody has had for nearly 25 years with VCRs. I imagine even FCC commissioners and congressmen fast-forward now and then.
And if they succeed? TV becomes less watchable and just buying the show, more desireable. More and more people will give up on anything not enhanced by it's "live" nature (sports, Idol, etc) and just get the download (legal or not) or of course buy or rent the series on DVD a year later.
Which means the production company still has a business model, but the TV network, not.
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
- Rod Serling
I managed to get DSL working on a 256MB USB key. Then I installed their package for OpenOffice, which was 75MB all by itself. OK, my USB key is now 50% taken up by DSL+OO, and half empty for my files.
Then I did nothing more than
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=DSL_OO.image
and stuck in other 256MB USB keys and did:
dd if=DSL_OO.image of=/dev/sda1...to copy the memory key, DSL, OO, 128MB free personal disk space, and all.
and was able to hand out $25 "thank you" tokens to speakers at our local Unix User Group (www.cuug.ab.ca) that consisted of a bootable USB Linux with full OpenOffice functionality. Ran fine on 256MB PCs with all software loaded into RAM - OO starts faster on these old machines than much faster ones that have to pull OO off the HD.
In short, you could ALWAYS pump up DSL with a good selection of softare they've made available in packages. It only starts off at 50MB.
It's not Blu-Ray that's bad, as many posters on that thread pointed out, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use the same digital file format. The only reason to choose between them is:
1) higher cost on blu-ray (-) 2) higher storage on blu-ray (+) 3) supposedly blu-ray discs harder to scratch. (+)
Kaleidescape sounds nice, but $5K is ludicrous. You can also do all that with a MythTV box that can be assembled for a quarter that price.
My decision was already made the other day, courtesy of Slashdot's story on the first 3 Blu-Ray offerings, of which "50 First Dates" was given as the reason to go HD and see Adam Sandler's every pore. Clearly, these people are not SERIOUS about selling to any but the most fanatic Early Adopters.
I can wait. Specifically, I can wait until they issue "Apocalypse Now" and other cinematographer's triumphs in 1080p and you can get a large 1080p TV and a player for it (that either plays the winning format, or both formats if the War is protracted) for a total under $1500.
With DVDs, I note that one can currently get computers (MythTV, etc) that will ignore all the playing restrictions. Here's my "horror" story on that.
I have a nice Pioneer DVR/DVD player (520H) that never met a DRM instruction it didn't obey slavishly. Not only will it not so much as record from a protected video tape, or tape made from DVD (that THAT, analogue hole) but it won't FFWD during the FBI warning or any of the corporate logos, or *ADS* if they choose to put that rule on their disc. The screen shows "That Operation is Forbidden by This Disc" when you hit the remote button repeatedly while waiting some minutes for your movie to actually start.
The other day, I popped in a disk while some news was on, and it started loading. Just at that moment, major breaking news hit the TV channel...and the DVD screen started showing the FBI warning. Frantically, I hit the STOP, then the EJECT buttons on the remote. But no, even those just got "That Operation is Forbidden By This Disc". Nothing could make it stop showing the FBI Warning and go back to the TV feed.
On discs with trailers and ads you can't skip, I've learned to pop in the disc and walk away from the TV for several minutes, because I get so mad if I stay. It's so great to put DVDs in my computer upstairs, where Kaffiene cheerfully skips all that crap and goes right to the movie I paid for, when I hit "go to Menu".
Maybe the computer world will defeat the DRM on an HD disk enough so that I can be the one to say what the computer is forbidden and allowed to do; that would make me opt in to this new technology, too.
But for a couple of years, I'm just going to wait and see. See DVDs. With a Linux media-computer that puts me in charge of my own damn living room.
Probably the two biggest issues that many have with Ubuntu are that it takes extra work to install MP3 support - not to mention every other codec or player.
MEPIS has recently confirmed the fears of some that Ubuntu is turning into a platform, displacing Debian itself...MEPIS is/was a KDE desktop based on Debian. The founder's concern with the stability and reliability of the Debian base recently led him to base his distro on Ubuntu sources instead.
So now with MEPIS, you get Ubuntu, except that it's KDE default, and it comes with every player (Real, Quicktime) and codec plugin for Kaffeine that can be found. Plus, the general layout of menus and the installer have won good reviews all around.
They're currently a week into beta4 on the new version based on the Dapper base and will likely have an RC1 out by mid-June.
For the second time (and we're hoping for an annual tradition) the Hackathon has agreed to come up for air long enough to give a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group.
This year, Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will give a talk to the group and many Hackathon participants on their directions in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support.
Page 53 of the hardback (2 pages into Ch. 3, "White Noise", it describes Ellie sitting beside the billion-channel signal analyser and also using headphones to listen to a couple of channels at a time. And knowing it was futile to imagine she could find a signal in a few that the computer monitoring the billion could not, "but it gave her a modest illusion of utility".
Subsequent paragraphs make it clear she's also fooling around with different listening patterns - two narrow-band frequencies against each other in different earphones, two planes of polarization, etc - to hone her own ideas of what a pattern recognition approach might be. And also because one often hears pleasant "patterns" in the noise. (Sagan gets poetic here about stars that sing and glissandos of sound.)
It was a very nice evocation of the drives and thinking patterns of the curious scientist at work - poking around in the data personally, kicking it from every angle.
Slashdot Mirror
Scanning the posts so far, I haven't seen the view rebutted that the deal itself is not bad for the "common good" that should be government's aim.
In summary, that the short-term construction work generated combined with the 200 (and probably growing, that's a good bet) permanent job count, will gain the economy in general and the government coffers in particular, more than $89M/30y tax expenditure.
Whereas the "evil" seems to lie entirely in the deal having been cut outside public view. Like about half the deals any government does involving public funds, if they involve a new business arrangement.
The government should do as little as possible outside public view, and nothing outside public REVIEW, very preferably review before the next election, but that level of disclosure seems to be met here. As soon as the deal was cut and could be disclosed without compromising google's strategy to its business competitors, it was.
If the citizens the politicos are working for don't like the deal, they can be fired, and the next bunch thereby warned not to take even good deals that will improve the state, if they involve an NDA for even temporary secrecy.
I doubt they will.
Wow. I bet if Bill Gates were to stand on a railroad track and watch a train approaching in the distance for several minutes, he could also conclude that in several minutes more, the train would pass by.
Any high-school kid could also have 'predicted' this, but I suppose they don't get invites to Davos.
Why anybody would want the man's predictions after the embarrassment of "The Road Ahead", I don't know. I think it's the only book to predict the next 30 years of IT history ever to have to be re-released just a year later with major corrections...the second edition mentioned the Internet more than twice.
Using the article's own figures of $100K up-front capital cost, the annualized cost over 25 years is not $4000/year, because of that same time-value of money. Put it this way: give me $35,234.86 today, and an investment that pays 5% per year for 25 years, and I will be able to pay his $2500 power+heat+gasoline bills for 25 years to come. $35,234 is the "Net Present Value" of 25 years of his future energy bills.
Or, vice-versa, if you want to buy this system and don't have $100K lying about, you'd have to borrow $100K. And if you could get 5% interest on your solar mortgage (ha!), you'd be paying out around $7250/year in mortgage payments.
And, needless to say, we haven't yet touched the maintenance costs on the system, or the insurance costs. Insurance being merely the way to annualize the risk of his equipment being among the unknown, but non-zero, percentage of product that leaves the factory a little defective and not going to last 25 years; if it breaks, the insurance fixes it. Ditto, you'd want insurance for yourself or a workman getting injured while up on the roof, or maintaining tanks full of explosive materials, or batteries which I imagine are lead-acid.
So, alas, that annualized cost isn't $4K but about $8K.
And, oh...does any of this stuff have environmental costs when being disposed of? (I assume the $100K cost includes the environmental cost of *manufacture* which the manufacturer has to pay and includes in his price). So $8K/year for sure, even if $750/year for maintainance and insurance is a little high.
$8K/year for energy instead of $2500 is only going to happen if we put huge costs (through taxes or regulation) on top of any fossil-fuel-based energy use, introducing a significant drag on the economy. That affects competitiveness, so you need other countries doing it too.
OK, suppose you do that - you've also raised up fossil costs to the point where nuclear starts to look very good, even if it spends extremely conservative amounts on safety and waste disposal. And wind farms will be everywhere, making grid power environmental that way.
Bottom line: THIS DOESN'T WORK. Economically. Not for whole nations. It's particularly silly in cities, where grid connections to centralized generation are cheap.
What this DOES work for is somebody who wants modern comforts in locations so remote they have no grid. Then the extra $100K makes the half-million-dollar house with the ten-million-dollar VIEW of the Rockies (on a $50,000 acreage that's cheap because it's nowhere serviceable)...possible at all.
And not enough people are talking about one thing solar would make sense for already: air conditioning in the insanely-fast-growing US southwest - Arizona, Nevada, etc where the summer sun is the power-spike problem...and could be the solution.
I have degrees in both Computer Science and in Engineering, and for more contrast, the engineering (Civil, municipal, specifically water & sewer systems) is utterly unrelated to the Comp.Sci, unlike EE. However, *everything* these days of course relates to IT, and so I switch back & forth between IT systems development and problems like managing construction schedules & supply - and I have to context-switch several times a day.
I'll give you what for me is the crucial difference in a sentence: Engineering has one set of standards, IT has both none and too many. Engineering standards of acceptable construction are industry-wide (national and state-level standards vary but little from each other, generally within a +/- range of 10%). IT "standards" vary from company to company and year to year. My employer has completely turned over it's IT "development methodology" four times in 20 years. All IT is very, very much "let the buyer beware" - just look at the "guarantees" you get with software vs. how utterly sue-able your engineer is if the house falls down.
This goes beyond my opinion, to some extent - I can't recall any identifying details, but about 15 years back, there was a court case that hinged on whether IT was "professional engineering" of any sort. The court concluded that IT developers fell short of the definition in four ways. Two of which I still remember: lack of a commonly-accepted standard of education for IT developers, and lack of professional standards bodies to regulate at what level of expertise and experience a person could take on the title of "software engineer".
Until then, "Software Engineer" to me reflects an *aspiration* to uphold the same standards in IT development that are adhered to when one is pouring concrete. This aspiration, by the way, is met in a couple of areas of IT: financial systems banks use (ever had an ATM fail on you? I've never seen it, never heard of a friend having it; I think I've read one news story about such in two decades - about the same failure rate as bridges). The other, of course, is basically electrical engineering with some software added, viz, real-time systems that manage anything expensive or life-threatening, like satellites and water treatment plants.
For both those areas, I believe that the dollars/line-of-code number is SEVERAL TIMES as high as in most IT development. I recall about 10 years back a magazine story saying that it was a buck-per-line for most IT, and ten dollars per line-of-code that NASA paid for shuttle control software.
With most engineering, you're paying 95% for the building or water main or whatever and 5% for the engineering calcs (and drawings and plans and management time...) It makes little sense to economize that 5% down to 1% by having self-taught twentysomethings just wing the calcs for the thickness of the foundation.
For software, the development staff are about 90% of the total cost, so you're really saving money by not requiring everybody to be a BSc with a rigid set of standards and checks and double-checks. So far, we prefer our software to be cheap and only moderately reliable, unless of course lives or vast fortunes depend upon it.
...a penny for your thoughts.
Seems to be my job in these threads to mention that MEPIS is based upon the Ubuntu libraries and repositories, but in addition defaults to KDE - probably better for a Windows-emigre - and comes with codecs, playing MP3s out of the box and so forth.
A lot of thought has gone into its "packaging", i.e. the selection and setup of packages, the menu defaults, etc. By far the closest thing in the Linux world I've seen to "it just works".
Also has a fanatic user base, google "mepislovers" for the fan/support site that's separate from the vendor's.
>"KDE doesn't even come close to Vista in complexity or sheer number of lines of code.."
I really shouldn't reply to a zero-modded flame, but I had to grin, because it reminds me of a documentary where Steve Ballmer laughed at how they just had to break with IBM during the OS/2 project because IBMers were obsessed with "KLOCs" (kilo-Lines-of-Code) and paying MS *less* for contributions where the feature took fewer KLOCs than originally estimated.
You don't measure software by the size of the code or it's "complexity", but by the features presented that are useful to the user, and how productive they are when using the product. (Arguably, you then DIVIDE by the size & "complexity" to rate how good the programmer is...)
Presumbaly, if MS does really stupid architecture on the next OS so that it is infernally complex to do the same thing, and writes it extra-bloated so it's way bigger than it has to be, their glory will only be redoubled!
The Calgary Unix User's Group got a great lecture from Aaron Seigo of KDE last week,
7 .html ...during which he either lied through his teeth about easily checkable claims for the near future, or KDE 4 is coming out in 2007 with significant improvements, and not just "chasing the taillights" of Mac and Vista, but leapfrog improvements upon them.
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/past-meetings/meetings.06-0
Assuming KDE 4 does come out in 2007, that'll be exactly 5 years behind KDE 3, about the same time from XP to Vista. They're developing as fast as a $100 Billion corporation, exactly how much more do you want?
The headline on this article is certainly senseless - in a "market" overwhelmed by a monopoly provider, there can be no bubbles to start with, at best you can incrementally develop a market share in small fringe areas where the monopoly's hold is weak. Mostly meaning non-US regions concerned about a lock-in by a foreign provider, especially governments. Also, particularly poor customers that can't avoid the $50 MS "tax" by piracy, because they have to play honestly, like educational institutions.
And in those areas at least, there's been slow but encouraging growth through 2006 and prospects for more. That's only a "bubble bursting" if you were deluded into imagining some take-off point of explosive growth was coming.
I admit I only surf Slashdot at 4, but at that level, a search showed the word "live" has not come up in the discussion.
...and on and on. Sometimes I grab the controls and back up a few seconds when I lose a whole passage to a bus going by or plane overhead, but mostly I accept that the music is background and what I'm doing out there is foreground, suck it up.
If you really, really, want music quality, support live music. Quality is about more than the studio and the recording and the codec and the player. All those could be perfect and it still wouldn't be live music. The best classical recording I've ever heard doesn't *touch* a concert hall. (And our local orchestra is struggling to fill the seats. And I don't need to talk about how poor most rock musicians are.) I think a lot of guys (emphasis on "guys") like to go overboard with their music technology more for bragging rights than because they could actually pass a double-blind test to distinguish their beloved perfect sound system from something that costs a quarter as much money and time and trouble.
I think the guy who actually gets out of the house and hits a club (or a concert hall) and hears live music in all its imperfect, bouncing-off-the-walls glory has more bragging rights than the lot of them.
Second, the question is about PORTABLE music. I see ZERO point in spending effort on high-quality sound for my portable. I hate cranking the thing way up, and even with those keen soft-silicon noise-blocking ear buds, the music is usually competing with:
a) traffic
b) wind
c) my own feet thumping down as I run
d) the sound of the earbud's wire rubbing against my clothes
I don't buy a new one because of the battery compartment - I do the same as you, although you must find it a pain to remove & replace the tape every battery change - finish my post and you'll come to the rubber band bit. But I consider it broken and failed at the point, because it's inconveniencing me and pissing me off and not giving value for money, even if I am grumpily still making it work.
And I really, really DID try the soldering. I had to break the case, it wasn't made to open. And I struggled with the problem of soldering a tiny contact with others right beside it for an hour before believing I'd done it...but the player would no longer boot, I'd grounded something. You can't repair those things with a civilian, $25 soldering iron from Radio Shack. What am I supposed to do, build my own pro-level electronics repair bench? Or pay somebody $50 to fix a $90 player?
1) DON'T blame the user - when you're selling an MP3 player, phone, etc, dropping it from waist height to a floor surface *IS* normal usage, and the product should be designed for that.
2) DON'T say the problem is anybody's illusion, consumer products in general and personal electronics in particular are lasting less long over the decades. I'll concede that's from personal experience and those of friends, not some study, but I've got data running back 50 years - my Mom kept a notebook of "major purchases" and the dates they occurred - and they're coming closer together every generation.
2) DON'T say the lifespan is "what you should expect" - it is not just possible to design things to last longer, it costs VERY little more money.
I have *drawer* now of electronics, every one of which failed not because the hugely sophisticated electronics let the team down, the chips are all still great. They break because a cubic MILLIMETRE of plastic broke off that was the catch that held the battery compartment closed. (1 MP3 player, 1 cell phone, one camera). They break because the female 1/8" audio jack loses contact with the wires inside as it loosened. (3 MP3 players, 2 CD "discmans", 3 cassette "walkmans") of the eight jacks, six lost the right ear contact, only two the left ear. (OK, that's probably just a meaningless statistical variation.)
Few of my personal electronics lack rubber bands around them - I like the big thick wide ones that hold broccoli together in the store. The rubber bands hold closed the battery compartment for up to a year after the catch breaks, or pull hard on the audio jack in one direction that makes the right ear sound keep coming in for a few months before it loosens even further. And needless to say, all that rubber wrapped around it adds a layer of cushioning when it gets dropped.
WORST was the goddamn "Logitech Wireless Headphones" that were supposed to eliminate the wire altogether. (Catching the earphone wire on my bike handle or with a moving hand was a frequent reason the player gets yanked off my belt.) But the first set of headphones just lost bluetooth connections after a month, the second set, the plastic simply broke when I dropped them down on a table from about eight inches height. Just...broke. From eight inches. A weak seam where the thin plastic was joined. I didn't bother to return them again, why spend hours of travel time and hassle time to get another pair when the product is that frustrating? I'll just never buy Logitech sound equipment again.
MOST of this crap could be eliminated by:
- using more than a tiny dot of solder on the audio jack connection.
- making the internal structural members cast into the plastic of the case 30% thicker (that's twice as strong in terms of stiffness).
- making the case material a millimetre thicker.
I don't know if it's a big "conspiracy" to sell me the next player - I think it's more about them regarding money as wasted if it makes the device last one day longer, not than the warranty, but longer than the owner tends to keep the receipt and be up for the hassle of the return. (As opposed to getting the latest & greatest.) The warranty is usually a year, but the "receipt+hassle" period is more like 4-5 months.
Perhaps this reasoning will work less well when "the end of Moore's Law" means the next years model doesn't have twice as much Flash RAM or whatever. I'm starting to look forward to it.
I would LOVE to deal with this as a consumer by paying a little more for products that are made by people who care about a rep for reliability and solid workmanship - the BMW/Mercedes/Volvo of electronics. But I can't FIND such a manufacturer. You'd think it would be Apple, but one still hears the same complaints about them.
So, recently, I started buying CHEAPER MP3 players and so forth - why pay more when it's not going to last a year? Alas, the MPIO MP3 player I got was the first to be
I'm dumfounded to scan down through so many posts and see "Sue Microsoft" only once, and that on a post about "force them to show their cards".
Granted it completely depends on white knights (IBM - oh, the irony...) funding it, but so many companies have their business model at stake, I think a fund could be put together in short order. It would strike the whole industry as upsetting to see a largish group of multi-billion-dollar companies sueing Microsoft. Bad for business.
Then they hit Microsoft with about a hundred GPL violations. Spurious ones? Well, maybe...maybe not. For a court to decide. At length. During it, Microsoft should have to hand over every punctuation mark of its source code for examination with a proctoscope. (I know that phrase usually ends with "microscope", but in this case...)
And not sued for mere filthy *money*, of course, no way to buy off the OSS community with that stuff; sue for compliance with the GPL. Which is to say, making public all source code in which allegedly GPL'd material is embedded. Stop and think about how the mere possibility of that would sit with Microsoft investors and the consequent drag on their stock price while litigation went on.
The OSS community is not rich in dollars, but the litigation possibilities inherent in massive amounts of GPL'd code that MS programmers in a hurry to make deadline (they always are) may have quietly lifted mean that, legally, the OSS bunch are actually the ones with a nuke in their pocket. Fines are "conventional weaponry" - being forced to reveal source code is being nuked.
But the standard is harder to make with GPL violations than patent violations because they have to have stolen the EXACT copyrighted code? That sure as hell didn't end the SCO suit in a few days, did it? It's STILL dragging on, though it only did damage for a mere year or so before everybody but the slow court process realized they hadn't any real smoking guns.
I'm not advocating frivolous suits, of course - I happen to have a gut feel there are at least dozens of entirely reasonable questions to ask about almost any proprietary code out there these days, written by people under pressure with a free solution readily available a download away. If the functional result is the same as a GPL solution, it's not unreasonable to suspect, and demand a check.
I have doubts about this project of my own - in sufficient volume, the real cost of books is about $2 each, so you're trading 50 books for the gadget; but there's just no question that while some places could use 50 almost infinitely rugged (by comparison) books more than a laptop, there are also many, many places that could use the laptop.
2 0article_%20%20Human%20Development.txt
A very small percentage of the world is actually unable to feed itself - and which percentage keeps shifting, that's more about drought, war and other temporary emergencies than a permanent condition.
Required reading is this very sharp, short column by historian / columnist Gwynne Dyer:
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%
We are constantly bombarded with the comparison between our own wealthy fifth of the world and the poorest fifth, most of them in Africa. In the above column, he reminds us that most of Africa had a fairly good standard of living as recently as the 60s and has declined in recent decades because of apalling governments, not "natural" problems like more people than the land can feed.
And the "middle three-fifths" of humanity are a success story, recently - China and India get the press for their economic rise because they are so large, but all over the world (Dyer writes the above from Turkey) people of this generation have risen from subsistence to a level of comfort that most of our grandparents would recognise - or even envy. (See the series "1900 house" to realize how far we've come since our grandparents day.) That middle 3/5ths don't need the laptop for light, they have food, clothing, shelter, some light and water at least at the end of the street. What they need are opportunities to earn more cash so they can get water to the house and sewer that isn't the gutter.
Three-fifths of six billion is quite a "market". And the sooner they migrate up from $10/day to $50, the sooner we'll have *help* with the tough problem of the poorest fifth. Reviewing the recent economic changes, there's no reason to imagine this can't happen in a generation.
...by a "necessarily". For future reference EVERYTHING is a consequence of global warming.
Nope. It has only S-Video inputs. HDTV output maybe, but not input.
It can handle cable, but not digital cable. Which all HDTV is, AFAIK.
So I'm still looking...
What's the hardware for encoding analogue HDTV? About six posters to this note expressed interest in that, not so much in the SD-only product under discussion.
My commercial, (DRM-loving-and-obeying) Pioneer DVR meets about 90% of my needs, I can't be bothered making a MythTV box just to copy DVDs or video tapes (yes, it obeys even the old "ARM" on tapes).
Nor do I want to "steal" HDTV content, by any reasonable definition, just do with it what I've been doing with VCR tapes for 20 years and my DVR (which can burn DVD-R's) for 2 years: time-shift TV, mostly for a few days, sometimes for several years. Yes, I might sometimes watch it twice, a very few three times, over a decade or so; but I just consider that protected "personal home use", fair use if you will, and I think most courts would agree unless the DRM proponents take away existing rights with a broadcast flag enshrined in law.
Bottom line, I think a card that can digitize analogue HDTV from component jacks is (so far) legal as a Sony Betamax, with at least one non-infringing use. So there OUGHT to be some decent ones for sale by now, since digitizing analogue SD has been possible, real-time, for years.
I've been considering getting a HD-DVR through a satellite company as a package, but it won't, of course, burn any kind of file, so the time-shifting is limited to days - only so much space on the disc. But with MPEG4 files, you should be able to put a typical 42-minute TV episode on a DVD-R and save it a few years.
Digitizing HD would make me buy some technology, nothing short of it will; I've got a DVR. I'm certain no HD DVR's will be offered for sale except as (closed) packages from satellite & cable providers. This is Linux's chance to shine.
But where's the HDTV digitizer cards? Nothing visible at any Calgary parts vendor, a few of which have a lot of variety...
>The prices aren't high because of marketing
... I was working from the post of the one guy who claims to work in the business.
Well, "sez you"
>they are high because they can be.
I *think* you are agreeing with me. Prices CAN'T be high in a free market because a competing author and publisher will produce a book of equal quality and be happy with a 10% profit instead of 200%. So the only way for "because they can be" to be true would imply market failure.
If the educators forcing you to use the product were getting kickbacks, it would all make sense, a closed-loop racket. Yet many posts appear to indicate that profs are distressed by the situation as well. Leading to the assumption that the profs have no meaningful choices outside a tight little publishing cartel that limits choice.
Cartels can only form where the barriers to entry are high, or again some maverick will start up a publishing house and offer cheaper books. Is that the case, or have we missed something?
The British poster who works in the industry is the most useful post on this topic so far. Combined with the backing of the Russian poster, we seem to have the following conclusions:
.NET that only sell for a few years and take $100K in salaries to produce may need many dollars per book to defray that cost unless they can grab the whole market, but books that have hardly changed (I mean REALLY changed) for decades would add less than a dollar per copy for "creative effort".
1) The marginal production cost of the product is a few dollars for paperback, several for hardback.
2) The base production cost varies - books on
3) Book costs in Russia reflect these costs and little else.
4) Book costs in the UK are raised a little and in the USA a lot by (drum roll please):
MARKETING COSTS.
Yes, MARKETING, that eternal enemy of both the scientific and artistic talent that come out of Universities, the internal corporate nemisis of quality and honesty in the product production groups - yes, MARKETING is actually their enemy from before they ever get OUT of school and into a job!
The explanation certainly sounds a little simplistic - heck, almost "communistic". By which I mean, that the free-market process of having many textbook products to choose from, and marketers that make all options known to the professor/customers, is SUPPOSED to result in top products for rock-bottom prices. It certainly works that way with DVD players. Whereas this explanation for the situation seems to be saying we'd all be paying a fraction of the price if some (benevolent) dictator picked THE "Physics 201" text and had enough printed for everybody, and no damn marketing costs, just $1 for the author, $7 for the printers, $2 for shipping and bookstore cuts, final sale price $9.99.
Whenever something is going wrong with a free-market solution, either the product doesn't work well in a free market, or you don't actually have a free market and somebody is taking advantage of a (near) monopoly.
The notion of "free" books, a la Free Software - basically, a suggestion that a collection of Wikipedia articles on a topic be expanded into a WikiTextBook - does not strike me as inherently impossible. I didn't think the Wikipedia would go so far, I didn't see so many good writers taking the time to contribute to a free product. But I was wrong, very wrong - and now I can't help wondering if the almost heartbreakingly great effort, sustained for a year or two, that is necessary to write a good textbook, could actually be generated by a free-contributory process.
If so, it could sweep away the whole system, long-term. I do think professors can consider working from sources that don't have big Seal-of-Approval stickers all over the names involved. They are professors, after all, able to check the veracity and value of the work all by themselves, or they couldn't teach the course. And once it caught on, it would spread rapidly.
Because markets that actually aren't free and are creating falsely high prices, are TERRIBLY vulnerable to genuine competition.
...and like Br'er Rabbit, we'll get away from them.
They could be shooting themselves in the foot with this one because it so clearly subtracts a capability that everybody has had for nearly 25 years with VCRs. I imagine even FCC commissioners and congressmen fast-forward now and then.
And if they succeed? TV becomes less watchable and just buying the show, more desireable. More and more people will give up on anything not enhanced by it's "live" nature (sports, Idol, etc) and just get the download (legal or not) or of course buy or rent the series on DVD a year later.
Which means the production company still has a business model, but the TV network, not.
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
- Rod Serling
I managed to get DSL working on a 256MB USB key. Then I installed their package for OpenOffice, which was 75MB all by itself. OK, my USB key is now 50% taken up by DSL+OO, and half empty for my files.
...to copy the memory key, DSL, OO, 128MB free personal disk space, and all.
Then I did nothing more than
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=DSL_OO.image
and stuck in other 256MB USB keys and did:
dd if=DSL_OO.image of=/dev/sda1
and was able to hand out $25 "thank you" tokens to speakers at our local Unix User Group (www.cuug.ab.ca) that consisted of a bootable USB Linux with full OpenOffice functionality. Ran fine on 256MB PCs with all software loaded into RAM - OO starts faster on these old machines than much faster ones that have to pull OO off the HD.
In short, you could ALWAYS pump up DSL with a good selection of softare they've made available in packages. It only starts off at 50MB.
Yes, I meant "take THAT", sorry.
It's not Blu-Ray that's bad, as many posters on that thread pointed out, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use the same digital file format. The only reason to choose between them is:
1) higher cost on blu-ray (-)
2) higher storage on blu-ray (+)
3) supposedly blu-ray discs harder to scratch. (+)
Kaleidescape sounds nice, but $5K is ludicrous. You can also do all that with a MythTV box that can be assembled for a quarter that price.
My decision was already made the other day, courtesy of Slashdot's story on the first 3 Blu-Ray offerings, of which "50 First Dates" was given as the reason to go HD and see Adam Sandler's every pore. Clearly, these people are not SERIOUS about selling to any but the most fanatic Early Adopters.
I can wait. Specifically, I can wait until they issue "Apocalypse Now" and other cinematographer's triumphs in 1080p and you can get a large 1080p TV and a player for it (that either plays the winning format, or both formats if the War is protracted) for a total under $1500.
With DVDs, I note that one can currently get computers (MythTV, etc) that will ignore all the playing restrictions. Here's my "horror" story on that.
I have a nice Pioneer DVR/DVD player (520H) that never met a DRM instruction it didn't obey slavishly. Not only will it not so much as record from a protected video tape, or tape made from DVD (that THAT, analogue hole) but it won't FFWD during the FBI warning or any of the corporate logos, or *ADS* if they choose to put that rule on their disc. The screen shows "That Operation is Forbidden by This Disc" when you hit the remote button repeatedly while waiting some minutes for your movie to actually start.
The other day, I popped in a disk while some news was on, and it started loading. Just at that moment, major breaking news hit the TV channel...and the DVD screen started showing the FBI warning. Frantically, I hit the STOP, then the EJECT buttons on the remote. But no, even those just got "That Operation is Forbidden By This Disc". Nothing could make it stop showing the FBI Warning and go back to the TV feed.
On discs with trailers and ads you can't skip, I've learned to pop in the disc and walk away from the TV for several minutes, because I get so mad if I stay. It's so great to put DVDs in my computer upstairs, where Kaffiene cheerfully skips all that crap and goes right to the movie I paid for, when I hit "go to Menu".
Maybe the computer world will defeat the DRM on an HD disk enough so that I can be the one to say what the computer is forbidden and allowed to do; that would make me opt in to this new technology, too.
But for a couple of years, I'm just going to wait and see. See DVDs. With a Linux media-computer that puts me in charge of my own damn living room.
Probably the two biggest issues that many have with Ubuntu are that it takes extra work to install MP3 support - not to mention every other codec or player.
MEPIS has recently confirmed the fears of some that Ubuntu is turning into a platform, displacing Debian itself...MEPIS is/was a KDE desktop based on Debian. The founder's concern with the stability and reliability of the Debian base recently led him to base his distro on Ubuntu sources instead.
So now with MEPIS, you get Ubuntu, except that it's KDE default, and it comes with every player (Real, Quicktime) and codec plugin for Kaffeine that can be found. Plus, the general layout of menus and the installer have won good reviews all around.
They're currently a week into beta4 on the new version based on the Dapper base and will likely have an RC1 out by mid-June.
For the second time (and we're hoping for an annual tradition) the Hackathon has agreed to come up for air long enough to give a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group.
This year, Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will give a talk to the group and many Hackathon participants on their directions in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support.
At SAIT, June 1, 6PM - all details at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/
RTF Novel.
Page 53 of the hardback (2 pages into Ch. 3, "White Noise", it describes Ellie sitting beside the billion-channel signal analyser and also using headphones to listen to a couple of channels at a time. And knowing it was futile to imagine she could find a signal in a few that the computer monitoring the billion could not, "but it gave her a modest illusion of utility".
Subsequent paragraphs make it clear she's also fooling around with different listening patterns - two narrow-band frequencies against each other in different earphones, two planes of polarization, etc - to hone her own ideas of what a pattern recognition approach might be. And also because one often hears pleasant "patterns" in the noise. (Sagan gets poetic here about stars that sing and glissandos of sound.)
It was a very nice evocation of the drives and thinking patterns of the curious scientist at work - poking around in the data personally, kicking it from every angle.