even people who are fairly poor (by American standards) will often have a big-screen TV, VCR, DVD player, and sometimes a PVR as well
That shouldn't surprise you too much. If you watch a large amount of TV, the cost per hour of all that stuff is not that bad. Compare that to the cost of a night at the movie theater, dining out, drinking at a bar, or even drivng the family car...er...truck, out to go camping.
Get a good TV, get the neighbors to buy the pizza & beer when they come over, and you might actually come out ahead.
In some ways I suppose it is. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications has pretty much gone from CB to FRS. But FRS, being FM, is technically superior. And the UHF band is better suited to portable radio. (Why the FCC mandated amplitude modulation for CB is beyond me...any cost saved by a cheaper reciever is lost on a more expensive transmitter...and designating the 10 meter band for short range line-of-sight is something of a travesty.) And CB had a usenet-like community flavor (channel 19 for truckers, channel 11 as a meeting place, channel 9 for emergency, a well-developed jargon, etc.). FRS seems to be used exclusively to talk to people you already know who are traveling with you.
It just seems to me that there was too long of an hiatus, and the technologies a bit too different, to count the two as manifestations of the same phenomenon.
I'm with you on color displays. They are a waste of money, space, and most importantly, battery energy, not just on PDA's but on cellphones. If you want the long battery life of a monochrome display, your only choices are the cheap low end stuff (cellphones with no IR for example). All the good stuff is hobbled by color displays. Color displays are for cameras.
You can still find used Psion Revos/Diamond Makos, the best monochrome PDA ever made, on eBay. The chiclet keyboard, Opera web browser and IR modem is not too bad, enough to get by anyhow.
I am one (of the apparent minority) who, like you, resist the trend toward integrating PDA's into cellphones or musicplayers.
Any phone with non-sucky PDA function will be much bigger than a non-smart phone (dumbphone?) can be. That makes a big difference when wearing a suit (sometimes you gotta). You can leave the PDA in your briefcase. Further, I would never let my long-in-tooth Palm IIIxe out of my sight with all that personal information inside. But I can lend a cellphone to a co-worker as needed. Also, my PDA has lived through 3 cellphones, so having separate devices has spared me 2 device migrations.
For similar reasons, I resist phones with cameras on them. When visiting customers' premises, that camera is a liability; you can't take your phone with you anymore.
These are ergonomic and social considerations; I don't see technical solutions no matter how many MIPS/watt we get. Therefore I expect to be a separate PDA-cellphone user for many more years.
A decent digital camera needs optics of a respectable aperture simply because the photonic performance of silicon is not as good as film (or the human retina), so cameras integrated into PDA's are going to be mediocre (or bulky) no matter how finely we can etch circuits. So I don't expect to be able to combine PDA and camera (without it sucking) until a new type of photosensor becomes available, and that's no happening nytime soon.
Though when 100 GB of flash memory costs $10, I do see PDA's and musicplayers merging.
Seems plausible...it certainly happened with cellphones (which are now recovering) and PC's (around 1985). But then again it happened to CB's, which never recovered and turned out to be a fad. Nor do I think telephone installations ever dipped after explosive growth in the 19-teens. Gotta link for that study?
Heh...if you look in the manpages directory,/usr/doc/man or wherever-the-hell-it-is, all the files are gzipped. The man program unzips them for display. Saves a megabyte or two on my hard drive!
Cool idea, that coLinux. But what I really want is the reverse, to run Windows inside Linux, in a secured sandbox, of course. Extra points if it gives me detailed control over the sandbox. Like, "play this WMA stream and access nothing else from the network.
Y'know, with the early versions of Windows, you could run a second Windows session inside a window. At least the guy at Byte magazine could do it on hardware I couldn't afford. By Win 3.0, when I first tried, that didn't work anymore.
You may want to consider bundling ISP service with support. Run your own mailserver so you have control over spam filtering (it will also allow you to switch the ISP of your whole customer bloc without changing the email addresses, in case they go under or their service isn't very good). Include support, dial-up internet, and mail service all in one fee. Or go even further and lease the computer, so customers don't even have to worry about hardware.
The place I work departmentally cross-charges $65/mo to do this. That includes a fileserver, Office, & MS Exchange/Outlook, but not hardware or network infrastructure. That's with all MS products (& yea verily it sux). You should be able to beat that handily.
When I want to get pictures off a digital camera and onto Linux, I use a usb-attached CF card reader & mount it on/mnt/flash. Those things are under $20 now (the multi-card SD/XD/CF readers are about $40), so why even bother (& risk hosing your system) with the camera driver?
That's not the only reason. In my experience, if it doesn't work in Linux, then it usually (merely) sux under Windows. Winmodems are the classic example, but I have seen this with networking cards and routers too. Haven't figured out why...whether its because the drivers are written using some crappy MS development environment, or if those who don't grok open source aren't smart enough to make good hardware, or some other reason.
I have come to the conclusion that no general-purpose computer can operate without some maintenence from the tech-savvy. It is, after all, the same way with automobiles; we don't expect Joe Sixpack or Jenny Ponytail install a hitch or mount tires.
So the real question is how often maintenence is required, how easy is it to get, and how much does it cost. Microsoft has the authorized dealership model, while Linux is the backyard mechanic model. In the automotive world, the backyard mechanic model has mostly won out. Who goes to a dealership to get a hitch put on? But consumer electronics goes mostly with the dealership model: you take a fritzed Tivo to the place you bought it.
This also points up an opportunity. As linux slowly gains ground, there will be a market for full-time Linux fixers and modifiers. Like a good mechanic, once you can prove yourself as trustworthy, customers will find you through word-of-mouth.
Converting these customers to paying customers is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ok, "natively" was a poor choice of wording...I meant to ask if Macs come with a bittorrent client in the default OS install, or alternately, if a well-featured nice-n-clicky client was common enough that it can be treated like Winzip or Adobe Acrobat; ie, safe to assume any power user would have it.
Given recent Macs' BSD nature, of course there is a port.
You can't assume that, because special-purpose chips aren't available for vorbis decoding, such decoding is done in software. I suspect that vorbis deoding on Neuros, iRiver, Rio is done in an FPGA. I could tell you for sure, but the wife will kill me if I crack open her Neuros to take a look!
The only thing (of things that impact unit cost) really required for Ogg support is allocating some silicon area to programmable logic.
The pre-Julian Roman calandars used true lunar months, so the solstice could have been just about anywhere. At the onset of the Julian calandar, the solstice fell around the 23rd. (To get to the 25th maybe you have to account for precession of the equinoces). The Julian calandar had too many leap years, gradually pushing the solstices back. The Gregorian calandar corrected the occurence of the solsitces by inserting an 11-day hiatus, but the correction didn't bring the calandar in line with Julius Cearsar's, so two extra leap days were kept. Instead, the calandar was corrected to 325 AD, the Council of Nicea, when all the bishops convened and decided (among other things) when Easter occurred.
But back to the OP, the gospel accounts are consistent with a birth in March (The shepherds were in the fields all through the night to tend to the folaing ewes or some such.)
Well, my original point about gadgets is that they have to be seen to be sold. Cellular rollout and broadband penetration are different matters; everyone knows what those things are: a phone for your car (later, your pocket) and internet faster than a modem.
And on cellular, the US led Europe through the 80's. It was 90's-era GSM, standarized across nat'l boundaries, that shot Europe past the US. Corporate hype of CDMA technology played a part in forming our fractured cellular infrastructure, so you are partly right, but there was more to it than that. Part of it was existing infrastructure in analog FM cellular (IS-54 style TDMA is smilar in concept to GSM, but the design is retro-fit compatible with the analog-FM AMPS). The FCC's bone-headed lottery system for allocating spectrum was another. Another is that the competing landline service wasn't as bad as in Europe. And yes, lower population density doesn't help either.
A more free-market-friendly alternative to gov't superfunds is a bonding requirement. Wanna build a dam? Gotta be bonded & insured for the damages if it bursts. Too bad they didn't have that in 1889. Lower risk permits lower premia, so enterprises now have a profit motive to protect the public safety.
Both Japan & Europe have much higher population densities than the US. The FA mentions the commensurate effect on dwelling space, but they miss another factor: New-type gadgets have to be seen to sell. In an urban environment, everyone will see the new gadgets being used (hence the focus on promoting to the young ladies: that's where everyone is looking...). They can go to a local store to check new stuff out "in the flesh."
In the US, TV ads (and to a lesser extent, radio & print ads) are the prinicipal way to get the word out. But gadgets are too complex to put together a credible sell in a 30-second spot. You need that oh-so-American invention, the infomercial.
Plus, all the tech-savvy falks have Tivos by now & don't see the ads anyway. One cool gadget to killing all that come after!
Well, how about a sub-section of a larger program? Someone might want to to write an assembly routine for the core functions (to process video for example), and link it into a much larger C program that handles everyting else. In that case you may want to write a fair amount of assembly code.
Not a very common situation though, especially when you take away any really high- or low- volume applications. In the former case it is cheaper to simply throw a faster processor at it. In the latter, one's familliarity with x86 assembly will be trumped by PPC's or ARM's lower MIPS per watt, or the possibility of using custom hardware (FPGA or ASIC).
The VAT has its advantages & disadvantages. The big plus is that it better targets consumption so it can be less corrosive on economic growth. It is also a bit friendlier to civil liberties because it requires less disclosure of personal information to the gov't. The big minus is that it lends itself to factional interest politics, even worse than income tax. You just can't expect alcoholic beverages to be taxed at the same rate as fresh vegetables, so every industry has to fight over what tax rate they get.
On balance it seems that VAT comes out ahead vs. income taxes, & there are some elements of the GOP that seem to have come to the same conclusion. But no one has figured out how to get there from here. The same fiscal hawks that propose tax reform like this are afraid to push it too hard for fear that we will end up up with both VAT & income tax.
But I have a solution: Repeal the 16th amendment. Pass an amendment to put a 50% cap in income taxes and drop it 2% a year until, after 25 years, income tax is gone. The transition to VAT will be forced. (My term-limits proplsal is similar, either time delay it, or have a lottery system with a gradually escalating percentage chance that superannuated officeholders will be inelegible for re-election.)
Maybe corporate taxation is appropriate and maybe it isn't. It's not clear to me, however, why we tax corporate profits while at the some time not similarly tax investment bank transactions. After all, both corporations and investment banks are, in the end, simply legal forms for groups of people to co-operate investing in commercial ventures. Maybe we should be asking why bank acount holders are getting a free ride.
What should corporate taxes be?
To answer that, there are a whole host of issues to be addressed. What are the merits of taxing corporate profits vs, for example, comsumption taxes like sales tax or VAT? If we tax invstment income (like corporate profits), how can we do so in a manner that doesn't distort the economy by arbitrarily favoring one type of investment over another? How much drag do investment taxes have on economic growth compared to other kinds of taxes?
One of the reasons I (along with, apparently, the consensus of policy makers in the last 50 years) am skeptical about corporate taxes is my view that corporations don't really own their profits in the same sense that a natural person would. Those profits are held in trust for the sake of the stockholders, so any tax on coporations is really a tax on the stockholders. But stockholders pay individual tax on dividends & capital gains. I say, pick one or the other, either abolish the corporate income tax and tax dividends & gains as ordinary personal income, or tax corporations at rates comparable to personal rates, and abolish personal taxes on dividends & gains. (To be consistent, the latter would require all interest income to be untaxed).
You don't have to be a neo-con to want consistent rules.
The Bush administration aggravated me when they proposed reducing the tax rate on dividend income. Correct as far as recognizing that divdend income is taxed twice, but the solution was totally backwards. The proper solution is to make options expensable; that way, dividend payments get the same treament as interest on bonds: a cost of doing business. But then folks like that americanprogress.org site would be all over him for "giving tax breaks to the corps". Arrgh!
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That shouldn't surprise you too much. If you watch a large amount of TV, the cost per hour of all that stuff is not that bad. Compare that to the cost of a night at the movie theater, dining out, drinking at a bar, or even drivng the family car...er...truck, out to go camping.
Get a good TV, get the neighbors to buy the pizza & beer when they come over, and you might actually come out ahead.
It just seems to me that there was too long of an hiatus, and the technologies a bit too different, to count the two as manifestations of the same phenomenon.
You can still find used Psion Revos/Diamond Makos, the best monochrome PDA ever made, on eBay. The chiclet keyboard, Opera web browser and IR modem is not too bad, enough to get by anyhow.
Any phone with non-sucky PDA function will be much bigger than a non-smart phone (dumbphone?) can be. That makes a big difference when wearing a suit (sometimes you gotta). You can leave the PDA in your briefcase. Further, I would never let my long-in-tooth Palm IIIxe out of my sight with all that personal information inside. But I can lend a cellphone to a co-worker as needed. Also, my PDA has lived through 3 cellphones, so having separate devices has spared me 2 device migrations.
For similar reasons, I resist phones with cameras on them. When visiting customers' premises, that camera is a liability; you can't take your phone with you anymore.
These are ergonomic and social considerations; I don't see technical solutions no matter how many MIPS/watt we get. Therefore I expect to be a separate PDA-cellphone user for many more years.
A decent digital camera needs optics of a respectable aperture simply because the photonic performance of silicon is not as good as film (or the human retina), so cameras integrated into PDA's are going to be mediocre (or bulky) no matter how finely we can etch circuits. So I don't expect to be able to combine PDA and camera (without it sucking) until a new type of photosensor becomes available, and that's no happening nytime soon.
Though when 100 GB of flash memory costs $10, I do see PDA's and musicplayers merging.
Seems plausible...it certainly happened with cellphones (which are now recovering) and PC's (around 1985). But then again it happened to CB's, which never recovered and turned out to be a fad. Nor do I think telephone installations ever dipped after explosive growth in the 19-teens. Gotta link for that study?
Um, given the line
I would say probably.
Heh...if you look in the manpages directory, /usr/doc/man or wherever-the-hell-it-is, all the files are gzipped. The man program unzips them for display. Saves a megabyte or two on my hard drive!
Use the demoroniser.
Y'know, with the early versions of Windows, you could run a second Windows session inside a window. At least the guy at Byte magazine could do it on hardware I couldn't afford. By Win 3.0, when I first tried, that didn't work anymore.
The place I work departmentally cross-charges $65/mo to do this. That includes a fileserver, Office, & MS Exchange/Outlook, but not hardware or network infrastructure. That's with all MS products (& yea verily it sux). You should be able to beat that handily.
When I want to get pictures off a digital camera and onto Linux, I use a usb-attached CF card reader & mount it on /mnt/flash. Those things are under $20 now (the multi-card SD/XD/CF readers are about $40), so why even bother (& risk hosing your system) with the camera driver?
That's not the only reason. In my experience, if it doesn't work in Linux, then it usually (merely) sux under Windows. Winmodems are the classic example, but I have seen this with networking cards and routers too. Haven't figured out why...whether its because the drivers are written using some crappy MS development environment, or if those who don't grok open source aren't smart enough to make good hardware, or some other reason.
So the real question is how often maintenence is required, how easy is it to get, and how much does it cost. Microsoft has the authorized dealership model, while Linux is the backyard mechanic model. In the automotive world, the backyard mechanic model has mostly won out. Who goes to a dealership to get a hitch put on? But consumer electronics goes mostly with the dealership model: you take a fritzed Tivo to the place you bought it.
This also points up an opportunity. As linux slowly gains ground, there will be a market for full-time Linux fixers and modifiers. Like a good mechanic, once you can prove yourself as trustworthy, customers will find you through word-of-mouth.
Converting these customers to paying customers is left as an exercise for the reader.
Somebody mod that post up!
Given recent Macs' BSD nature, of course there is a port.
The only thing (of things that impact unit cost) really required for Ogg support is allocating some silicon area to programmable logic.
It is called the Eliza effect
That'll get us some instant bandwidth. But, given that many d'loaders will be using Macs, do Macs support torrents natively?
But back to the OP, the gospel accounts are consistent with a birth in March (The shepherds were in the fields all through the night to tend to the folaing ewes or some such.)
And on cellular, the US led Europe through the 80's. It was 90's-era GSM, standarized across nat'l boundaries, that shot Europe past the US. Corporate hype of CDMA technology played a part in forming our fractured cellular infrastructure, so you are partly right, but there was more to it than that. Part of it was existing infrastructure in analog FM cellular (IS-54 style TDMA is smilar in concept to GSM, but the design is retro-fit compatible with the analog-FM AMPS). The FCC's bone-headed lottery system for allocating spectrum was another. Another is that the competing landline service wasn't as bad as in Europe. And yes, lower population density doesn't help either.
A more free-market-friendly alternative to gov't superfunds is a bonding requirement. Wanna build a dam? Gotta be bonded & insured for the damages if it bursts. Too bad they didn't have that in 1889. Lower risk permits lower premia, so enterprises now have a profit motive to protect the public safety.
In the US, TV ads (and to a lesser extent, radio & print ads) are the prinicipal way to get the word out. But gadgets are too complex to put together a credible sell in a 30-second spot. You need that oh-so-American invention, the infomercial.
Plus, all the tech-savvy falks have Tivos by now & don't see the ads anyway. One cool gadget to killing all that come after!
Not a very common situation though, especially when you take away any really high- or low- volume applications. In the former case it is cheaper to simply throw a faster processor at it. In the latter, one's familliarity with x86 assembly will be trumped by PPC's or ARM's lower MIPS per watt, or the possibility of using custom hardware (FPGA or ASIC).
On balance it seems that VAT comes out ahead vs. income taxes, & there are some elements of the GOP that seem to have come to the same conclusion. But no one has figured out how to get there from here. The same fiscal hawks that propose tax reform like this are afraid to push it too hard for fear that we will end up up with both VAT & income tax.
But I have a solution: Repeal the 16th amendment. Pass an amendment to put a 50% cap in income taxes and drop it 2% a year until, after 25 years, income tax is gone. The transition to VAT will be forced. (My term-limits proplsal is similar, either time delay it, or have a lottery system with a gradually escalating percentage chance that superannuated officeholders will be inelegible for re-election.)
Sorry, that's "make dividend payouts expensable." Of course, options should be expensable, too, but for different reasons.
What should corporate taxes be?
To answer that, there are a whole host of issues to be addressed. What are the merits of taxing corporate profits vs, for example, comsumption taxes like sales tax or VAT? If we tax invstment income (like corporate profits), how can we do so in a manner that doesn't distort the economy by arbitrarily favoring one type of investment over another? How much drag do investment taxes have on economic growth compared to other kinds of taxes?
One of the reasons I (along with, apparently, the consensus of policy makers in the last 50 years) am skeptical about corporate taxes is my view that corporations don't really own their profits in the same sense that a natural person would. Those profits are held in trust for the sake of the stockholders, so any tax on coporations is really a tax on the stockholders. But stockholders pay individual tax on dividends & capital gains. I say, pick one or the other, either abolish the corporate income tax and tax dividends & gains as ordinary personal income, or tax corporations at rates comparable to personal rates, and abolish personal taxes on dividends & gains. (To be consistent, the latter would require all interest income to be untaxed).
You don't have to be a neo-con to want consistent rules.
The Bush administration aggravated me when they proposed reducing the tax rate on dividend income. Correct as far as recognizing that divdend income is taxed twice, but the solution was totally backwards. The proper solution is to make options expensable; that way, dividend payments get the same treament as interest on bonds: a cost of doing business. But then folks like that americanprogress.org site would be all over him for "giving tax breaks to the corps". Arrgh!