And regarding your "lowly" plumber, chances are he has some kind of desktop or maybe mini-network going in his business and may even keep his inventory in a spreadsheet. However, someone needs to man the "stores" (or warehouses) where the parts he needs are stored. Despite Sony's release of Aibo, we still don't have Rosie the Robot there to hand you your goods.
Yes, so? Neither did Service Merchandise; what they had was a warehouse where the order ticket was printed out and stuck in a box, somebody went and pulled the items and stuck them in the box, and it went down a conveyor to the pickup point. People did the picking, the computer did the inventory tracking and routing. That's playing to the strength of each.
The real advantage will come to the plumber when s/he (why be sexist?) can know that the parts for the job are in stock before completing the phone call with the customer. When the customer can look at pictures of, say, new faucets and have one all picked out before the net.plumber gets in the truck, and the net.plumber can go directly to the supply store which has what the customer wants, and have it already waiting when s/he gets there. If the customer wants something that isn't in stock, the net.plumber can have it ordered in 2 minutes; it comes in by FedEx overnight instead of waiting 3 days. The customer is happy, the customer tells friends, neighbors and co-workers, net.plumber is just as busy as s/he wants to be while others wonder why they aren't getting calls.
My paper and pencil contingency is ALWAYS within reach...;-)
So's mine, and I use it a lot. But it doesn't harness the power of being able to get data and contact people quickly and without hassle. This is why we'll move to the electronic systems; they have so much potential for getting rid of useless waiting and pointless phone calls to the wrong people. --
Apparently you live in a town where there are loads of plumbers, all competing with one another to serve the customer better. Apparently, in your town, plumbers have to compete all the time against each other, or go out of business.
I just picked up a rather small telephone book I have lying around. It's under an inch thick. In the yellow pages, there are about 24 column-inches of entries for plumbing contractors, plumbing parts providers, and miscellaneous. This does not include the display ads.
Fortunately, there are two phenomena which will heavily counter this desire to "own" workers:
People being paid fifteen cents an hour are not going to be motivated, and motivation is the greater part of what drives knowledge workers.
The people who have serious earnings potential are unlikely to wind up in prison; they generally have better things to do than robbery and the like, and even the zero-tolerance laws are more likely to cost them their cars than their freedom.
Yes, there will be a few who actually have the ability to begin with, then "get religion" behind bars and become captive knowledge workes for the duration of their sentences. Just don't expect them to be a big fraction or a competitive threat. --
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster.
I think you're describing a rather old phenomenon, namely scientific communities. The entire peer-reviewed, status-based, publication-driven phenomenon of science is just a mechanism for sharing knowledge and giving status based (more or less) on contributions to it.
The major new element of the Net is that you can find knowledge outside your specialty and the specialties of your peers much more easily. However, some things cannot change. The old limitation of what one human being has time to research and understand is still the bottleneck, and will continue to drive the phenomenon of specialization where lots of people know more and more about less and less. --
There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
Let's see: the pay-at-the-pump credit card and "speed pass" machines are removing the cashier from many gasoline purchases, and fast-food chains have been looking at automation for some of their cooking processes for years (it's only a matter of time until they deploy something). "Light industry" covers too much ground to appraise in one sentence, but electronic assembly has already been revolutionized by automatic parts insertion, surface mount and wave- and reflow-soldering. Even floors can be swept by robots. I don't think we're going to have too many jobs for the ultra-dumb.
Which means Aldous Huxley was wrong, I guess. The deltas and epsilons aren't going to have a place in the Brave New World. --
While the wealth moves into the hands of the "knowledge workers" the grunt work will in turn get passed on to people not willing to adapt as quickly.
Who says that the slow-to-adapt will survive even there? Consider the lowly plumber. The one who works the traditional way, showing up to a job, scribbling on paper, going out to the store for parts, coming back... that guy is going to lose his shirt to the one who takes a look at the site over the customer's webcam on the first phone call, picks out a list of parts on his wireless webpad, and has a box containing his order waiting for him when he gets to the parts store. He might not even go inside to pick it up, unless he wants to have a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze. When he gets to the job, he has everything he needs and can be done and on to the next one... or off to fish for the afternoon. Meanwhile, the non-wired plumber is stuck in the rat race, wasting costly fuel and his precious time without doing anything for his margins.
Knowledge work is going to change everything, even those things we don't think of as knowledge work. It's going to be all over the place. --
I don't see how it could be the "The First Public Access UNIX System" considering that Usenet existed in 70's and before that there were many user forums.
"Public access" in this context means accounts are free to any member of the public with a modem. Corporate and academic systems require (well, back then they did) you to have some association with the organization to get access to their equipment; M-Net didn't even have a separate class of financially-supporting users until 1984 or 1985, you could just call in. --
This is pretty much an example of "EDI", or electronic data interchange. I can't see any part of the description of this thing that doesn't fit the definition of EDI, so I'm going to go with it.
Is Linux a good fit for this? Hell, yes! If there is any group which has proven that it can make reliable, extensible and fast software that sticks to standards like barnacles to rocks, it's the open-source people. And I think that would be a wonderful thing to do with it as a very first step; port the protocols (if not the actual code) to Linux, and show schools how much they can increase their system reliability and reduce their costs by using Linux/Samba/OpenSIF instead of proprietary solutions. Given the legendary cheapness of schools (as noted by so many here), that should be an easy sell. --
How long before the human brains becomes an obselete storage mechanism?
They're already obsolete as storage media; humans have long since added huge external memory subsystems, ranging from cave paintings to DVD's. On the other hand, they are still unparalleled as pattern-matching, processing and inference systems. Until someone figures out how to build something that works anywhere near as well out of silicon or holographic crystals or whatever, expect the brain to be in high demand.
And maybe afterwards; after all, brains can be made by unskilled labor who enjoy their work, and may enjoy a cost advantage for some time. --
As long as MD5, RSA, and PGP sigs remain impossible to counterfeit, then the smarter half of the whole Linux community (who verify packages before installation) should be safe from viruses and trojans.
Trojans, perhaps. Not from viruses or worms, and this is by far the greater threat just because of the enormously greater rate of spread. The Morris worm and the BubbleBoy virus didn't have anything to do with normal distribution channels; they relied on defects in the system software to take control of it.
The real source of Linux's protection against viruses isn't user vigilance per se, it is the architecture of the OS and its utilities. There are no ActiveX security craters on Linux because there is no ActiveX, and Linux developers have (so far) been smart enough not to write too many utility programs with scripting languages capable of hosting a virus. Even Java, the most conspicuous exception to this rule, has a security model which tries to ham-string malware. Ultimately, the difference between Windows "security" and Linux security is the driving force behind the features; Windows is pushed by marketeers who couldn't care less, Linux by geeks who have to live with their work. --
I suspect that there is some interesting method for checking the surface for minor cracks which might later propagate through the platter.
There's one other trick I forgot about, and that's pre-stressing, aka tempering. By immersing the glass in a molten salt bath which includes lots of larger positive ions (e.g. potassium), the surface layers can be made physically bigger than the interior. This places the surface under permanent compressive stress, making it nearly impossible for a surface crack to propagate. (It also means that a fracture will turn the entire platter into little glass crumbs, but you probably didn't want it flying away in huge sharp chunks.)
Yes, this is the same technology used to make car windows. --
If your house gets hit by lightning, or you have a fire, or you get hit by the police\\\\\\\\\\thieves, redundancy inside your box doesn't help you much. The real problem is that this technology is inherently inapplicable to removable media, because it needs extreme cleanliness. The requirement for high dimensional stability rules out tape. This may not be solved any time soon, because the economic pressures for hard-drive expansion just don't apply to backup devices. (If only people insisted on backups, because then they would.) --
How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar?
I'd guess not. These disks are TINY; the 40GV states "an areal density record of 14.3 billion bits per square inch." With 5 platters, you'd only need about 6 square inches per platter, double-sided. You make some assumptions about the hub-diameter ratio, and the diameter comes out to about 2.5 inches. The "exposed" portion of the platter (sticking out beyond the hub) would only be about 5/8 inch (or even less for a larger outside diameter). Plus, they're probably using borosilicate or other glasses which are a lot stronger than soda glass, and on top of that they have to polish them to extremes to get the surface they need with the consequent elimination of stress concentrations from surface defects. All of this adds up to a level of durability you'd never suspect from the result of dropping your tumbler on the kitchen tile. --
75 GB is enough to hold 8 DVD movies, more or less. This drive has got to be the MPAA's and DVD-CCA's worst nightmare to date. --
You have a technical solution to a jail cell?
on
Geographic Screening
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· Score: 2
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Case in point:
I seriously think that there'll always be some way to work around any screening in place. Traditionally, there have always been work-arounds to any kind of security.
Traditionally, the police and courts have thrown people in jail for having those "security work-arounds" without good reason. They call it things like "possession of burglar tools", but it's all the same. It doesn't matter how reasonable your reasons are for getting around locks, if you're acting suspiciously you will be busted for having those lock picks.
This is the same thing with the software. While you may have an absolute moral right to view your DVD with whatever player you see fit, the law doesn't see it that way. (The law is an ass.) All your technical solutions won't save you from having your computers confiscated, losing a lot of time and money and getting a criminal record. This is why the "I've got a hammer" school of thought needs a reality check; you're not going to solve this problem without fixing the legal system, meaning "ya gotta use the right tool for the job".
And if the geeks can make this DMCA idiocy cost a few politicians their careers, I'll be cheering. --
Once they said that it was going to be centered around video footage of "geniuses and leaders," I was skeptical. We're not at broadband just yet.
It wouldn't matter if we were. The problem isn't that you need broadband to distribute video (go to Blockbuster to refute that), the problem is that "video footage" is a fixed medium and isn't any more interactive, insightful or engaging than a book. Is a video going to respond to a question in real time and try to get inside the student's head to see how to phrase the answer, or be able to pose counter-questions to lead someone's thought processes in the right direction? No more so than ink on kaolin-coated wood pulp. The real limitation is that true education is an interactive process, and the amount of interaction you have is closely related to the quality of the result. The geniuses and leaders aren't going to have any more time for these classes than before, and they probably aren't going to go back and tailor the next semester of the class to fix some of the shortcomings of the last; because of the lack of interactivity, they may not even know what the shortcomings are.
This is kind of like the difficulty of attaining utopia; it's extremely difficult, because nobody's yet made a perfect human being to live in it. --
i firmly believe that your education is what you make it.
When hasn't that been true? But this isn't about education as such, this is about the recognizable and verifiable value of the degree conferred by this university. A holder of an associate's degree from a community college may be a guru like few others, but you can't get any idea of that from their sheepskin. If this on-line university is going to issue degrees which mean anything, it will grade its students hard so that people who haven't made something of their education don't get degrees from there.
if his degree really is just a con job, he'll ultimately fail, or get fired, or be 'found out' in some way.
That can be a very time-consuming, expensive and sometimes painful process for a business, and it's one reason they use credentials to help evaluate their applicants. --
Typical MS bashing from someone who's never even seen a DOS prompt.
Typical troll from someone who has no concept of a poster's length, breadth or depth of experience. I've probably been programming for MS-DOS since before you knew how to read. Or is that a Denial-Of-Service prompt, aka BSOD? I don't have those at home, only at work where they refuse to get sensible about development OS's. --
I'm trying to figure out for myself how much of a problem spam is in the community at large.
Consider the aggregate damage.
Suppose that this spammer sent 1 million spams per week. Further suppose that each spam took someone 10 seconds to download, examine, and delete. (This is probably very low, but let's follow it and see where it goes.) This equates to 10 million seconds of wasted time per week. 10 million seconds is about 2778 hours, so if people's time is worth US$ 10/hour then the spammer is wasting US$ 27,780 of un-consenting people's time every week. This is the ultimate meaning of denial-of-service; if you cannot use e-mail because you don't have the time to waste, throwing out all the spam to find the stuff which was your reason for having e-mail, you might as well not have e-mail at all.
Unlike spam, paper circulars are inherently damage-limited. Only so many will fit in your mailbox, and you don't have to waste your time downloading them. They are also easy to distinguish from bank statements, personal letters and bills; I need about one second to toss out a circular, not including the time needed to bring all of the mail inside. I'd much rather have junk snail-mail than spam. --
Exactly. With Red Hat, you know exactly what your money is going for, and if you don't think you're getting a good deal... you can go buy certification from someone else.
I think this is quite a bit better than paying $hundreds per workstation for software licenses but getting a discount on the training for the maintenance crew, especially since you'll probably need ten times as many maintenance people to keep the M$ stuff running. --
Judges should not have the power to nullify a law for any reason. If the law is unconstitutional it should be repealed through the legislative process. The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly, as Abraham Lincoln said.
The Jim Crow laws were enforced strictly throughout the South for decades, until they were overturned by the courts. The so-called Communications Decency Act would probably have forced Slashdot to censor or shut down if it hadn't met the same fate. You would rather still have White and Colored water fountains and be unable to speak your mind here, or are you ready to reconsider?
De jure (as opposed to de facto), our government has only the powers set aside for it by the Constitution. Any law which claims powers beyond these is, by the charter of the nation, invalid on its face. It's the job of the courts to determine when the legislature has gone beyond its lawful and legitimate bounds, and I wouldn't want the pols to have any more license than they have now; if anything, they need a lot less. --
My understanding is that there aren't any that don't have huge overhead. Things like doing reverse-DNS lookups to verify the sender's domain name are a serious burden on the receiving system, and many large commercial mail handlers don't allow mail recipients to check the validity of the sender's (alleged) user ID. I think; this is what I remember from a discussion some time ago, and an SMTP admin I'm not. --
Minnesota just gave a refund to its taxpayers, so don't say it never issues refunds. Then again, this is under Jesse Ventura's administration; you're not likely to see a major-party official actually do this... --
Doubtful. Very doubtful. FM radio spectrum is allocated in 200-kHz chunks, and there are guard bands (unused channels) between nearby stations to guarantee that they don't bleed through the cheap IF filters used in consumer-grade receivers and mess each other up. If digital gear was using those frequencies, it would be very likely to interfere with the radio reception by exactly the same mechanism. (If there is an FCC movement aimed at getting rid of pirate radio, it's the move to legitimize and license micropower stations.)
The sort of things they're talking about here is in areas like unused TV channels (specifically mentioned in the article). It's a lot easier to make use of a 6 MHz chunk of spectrum with no guard band requirements than a 200 kHz chunk with all kinds of power and geographic restrictions. --
Slashdot Mirror
The real advantage will come to the plumber when s/he (why be sexist?) can know that the parts for the job are in stock before completing the phone call with the customer. When the customer can look at pictures of, say, new faucets and have one all picked out before the net.plumber gets in the truck, and the net.plumber can go directly to the supply store which has what the customer wants, and have it already waiting when s/he gets there. If the customer wants something that isn't in stock, the net.plumber can have it ordered in 2 minutes; it comes in by FedEx overnight instead of waiting 3 days. The customer is happy, the customer tells friends, neighbors and co-workers, net.plumber is just as busy as s/he wants to be while others wonder why they aren't getting calls.
So's mine, and I use it a lot. But it doesn't harness the power of being able to get data and contact people quickly and without hassle. This is why we'll move to the electronic systems; they have so much potential for getting rid of useless waiting and pointless phone calls to the wrong people.--
This is EveryTown.
--
- People being paid fifteen cents an hour are not going to be motivated, and motivation is the greater part of what drives knowledge workers.
- The people who have serious earnings potential are unlikely to wind up in prison; they generally have better things to do than robbery and the like, and even the zero-tolerance laws are more likely to cost them their cars than their freedom.
Yes, there will be a few who actually have the ability to begin with, then "get religion" behind bars and become captive knowledge workes for the duration of their sentences. Just don't expect them to be a big fraction or a competitive threat.--
The major new element of the Net is that you can find knowledge outside your specialty and the specialties of your peers much more easily. However, some things cannot change. The old limitation of what one human being has time to research and understand is still the bottleneck, and will continue to drive the phenomenon of specialization where lots of people know more and more about less and less.
--
Which means Aldous Huxley was wrong, I guess. The deltas and epsilons aren't going to have a place in the Brave New World.
--
Knowledge work is going to change everything, even those things we don't think of as knowledge work. It's going to be all over the place.
--
--
--
Is Linux a good fit for this? Hell, yes! If there is any group which has proven that it can make reliable, extensible and fast software that sticks to standards like barnacles to rocks, it's the open-source people. And I think that would be a wonderful thing to do with it as a very first step; port the protocols (if not the actual code) to Linux, and show schools how much they can increase their system reliability and reduce their costs by using Linux/Samba/OpenSIF instead of proprietary solutions. Given the legendary cheapness of schools (as noted by so many here), that should be an easy sell.
--
And maybe afterwards; after all, brains can be made by unskilled labor who enjoy their work, and may enjoy a cost advantage for some time.
--
The real source of Linux's protection against viruses isn't user vigilance per se, it is the architecture of the OS and its utilities. There are no ActiveX security craters on Linux because there is no ActiveX, and Linux developers have (so far) been smart enough not to write too many utility programs with scripting languages capable of hosting a virus. Even Java, the most conspicuous exception to this rule, has a security model which tries to ham-string malware. Ultimately, the difference between Windows "security" and Linux security is the driving force behind the features; Windows is pushed by marketeers who couldn't care less, Linux by geeks who have to live with their work.
--
Yes, this is the same technology used to make car windows.
--
If your house gets hit by lightning, or you have a fire, or you get hit by the police\\\\\\\\\\thieves, redundancy inside your box doesn't help you much. The real problem is that this technology is inherently inapplicable to removable media, because it needs extreme cleanliness. The requirement for high dimensional stability rules out tape. This may not be solved any time soon, because the economic pressures for hard-drive expansion just don't apply to backup devices. (If only people insisted on backups, because then they would.)
--
--
75 GB is enough to hold 8 DVD movies, more or less. This drive has got to be the MPAA's and DVD-CCA's worst nightmare to date.
--
This is the same thing with the software. While you may have an absolute moral right to view your DVD with whatever player you see fit, the law doesn't see it that way. (The law is an ass.) All your technical solutions won't save you from having your computers confiscated, losing a lot of time and money and getting a criminal record. This is why the "I've got a hammer" school of thought needs a reality check; you're not going to solve this problem without fixing the legal system, meaning "ya gotta use the right tool for the job".
And if the geeks can make this DMCA idiocy cost a few politicians their careers, I'll be cheering.
--
This is kind of like the difficulty of attaining utopia; it's extremely difficult, because nobody's yet made a perfect human being to live in it.
--
--
--
Suppose that this spammer sent 1 million spams per week. Further suppose that each spam took someone 10 seconds to download, examine, and delete. (This is probably very low, but let's follow it and see where it goes.) This equates to 10 million seconds of wasted time per week. 10 million seconds is about 2778 hours, so if people's time is worth US$ 10/hour then the spammer is wasting US$ 27,780 of un-consenting people's time every week. This is the ultimate meaning of denial-of-service; if you cannot use e-mail because you don't have the time to waste, throwing out all the spam to find the stuff which was your reason for having e-mail, you might as well not have e-mail at all.
Unlike spam, paper circulars are inherently damage-limited. Only so many will fit in your mailbox, and you don't have to waste your time downloading them. They are also easy to distinguish from bank statements, personal letters and bills; I need about one second to toss out a circular, not including the time needed to bring all of the mail inside. I'd much rather have junk snail-mail than spam.
--
I think this is quite a bit better than paying $hundreds per workstation for software licenses but getting a discount on the training for the maintenance crew, especially since you'll probably need ten times as many maintenance people to keep the M$ stuff running.
--
De jure (as opposed to de facto), our government has only the powers set aside for it by the Constitution. Any law which claims powers beyond these is, by the charter of the nation, invalid on its face. It's the job of the courts to determine when the legislature has gone beyond its lawful and legitimate bounds, and I wouldn't want the pols to have any more license than they have now; if anything, they need a lot less.
--
--
Minnesota just gave a refund to its taxpayers, so don't say it never issues refunds. Then again, this is under Jesse Ventura's administration; you're not likely to see a major-party official actually do this...
--
The sort of things they're talking about here is in areas like unused TV channels (specifically mentioned in the article). It's a lot easier to make use of a 6 MHz chunk of spectrum with no guard band requirements than a 200 kHz chunk with all kinds of power and geographic restrictions.
--