You are giving away your password to every counter you lean on, to every door whose knob you turn. And you've only got one or two hands anyway. Right?
Your hand changes as you grow, learn a sport, take martial arts classes, sustain injuries, wash your hands in hot water, get infected, get writers cramp, develop an allergic reaction, or just age. Right?
By the way I wonder if for example a keyboard module could be developed to subtly assist in typing. It might be useful for sighted people too. I'm thinking that instead of making an audible click when you hit a key, it speaks the name of the letter you typed in a very soft voice at the edge of your hearing (you can adjust the volume, and it will also adjust the volume a little lower if it can or louder if you make more mistakes). The idea would be to try to train the user to create a subconscious process monitoring the difference between intended and struck keys using audio cues. It could also be used to speak phonetically or through a dictionary. Might be more useful too if you are typing a phonetic alphabet. Which also is not a bad idea. For example Japanese is like that.
Also I recently tried out a new 5.1ch system with Star Wars in a shop in Akihabara, it looked like inexpensive equipment. I don't know about 13.1ch but at any rate, it seems to me that sound effects, 3D placement and simulated motion (of self or objects) through such a system might provide a very rich array of audio cues. Imagine watching for example a fantasy movie (Star Wars, LoTR, etc.) with your eyes closed. You are journeying through different environments, different creatures talk, etc. Could be more fun computing with this. Next step for Xorg?
Anyway there are undoubtedly lots of possible directions for experimentation and also a lot of prior art to study if you are really asking this question seriously. Good luck and maybe you can share your results later with us!
Caveat/. is maybe not the best place to ask, and I'm not experienced in this area either..
Windowing systems, in that they simulate objects moving spatially (in front/behind, and in 2 dimensions across screen) and require hand-eye coordination to click on widgets, are basically not a great idea. You will always be fighting to translate these difficult things into a different realm, not that it can't be done.
If you instead think about what work needs to be done, possibly it could be handled using mainly audio clues and novel tactile interfaces. For example do users even type well? Aside from the hardware and UI nitty-gritty, something like emacs or ratpoison might be more useful. I could see how a new frame being created would speak its name at a different pitch for example, so by hitting one key on your custom keyboarding device you can get all the visible frames to say their names in order from low pitch to high pitch, maybe you can scroll through them audibly with a scroll wheel type mechanism. Anyway I know lots of people are not fully blind and can use computers well so presumably you want two systems, one close to the current system and one that is a radical departure for non-sighted people. I am not even sure what the jobs are that they would want to do but I imagine the most important things will be to visualize one's surroundings and danger (for example a rangefinding and sonar type device) and interacting with at least part of the web in some way (just because it is so inexpensive to develop for it).
Of course I doubt any partially blind people are going to be reading slashdot with its tons of text but maybe?
I predict the RIAA will be the number one revenue stream for malware authors, whose spyware and viruses will primarily be used to detect illegal files on the home network and alert the DVD player server to lock you out. I figure that's the main reason for the Java, to make it easy to calculate and update encryption. Conceivably an i-Mode type network could be built but it's hard to imagine all companies working together in step on it..
Here's another thing you could add. Go to staticcling.org and get a free domain name for the machine. Install a script to run the updater every day, it will work up to a month offline. This will register the current IP address of the machine to a dynamic IP provider and if you had a GPS in it you could even find the machine.. or get a photo of the user from the webcam maybe. Or erase everything remotely over vnc, etc.
I was able to just paste some of my local viewing coordinates determined interactively at Heavens Above, a free star and satellite finder, into the input field for google maps. I found Stowe, Vermont but for Japan just got a total blank, with Japan's landmass in a solid color. It's a bug though because the world heritage urls do show you a limited res. kyoto, and also by typing in "tokyo" in the main maps.google.com/maps page you do get Tokyo, at res enough that you can zoom in on the imperial palace (oops!)
Last I read in the paper (could be late) Japan said they still wanted it but would be willing to give up the demand if pushed (sounded like "please" would be enough if said by an elite enough person..) since they calculate they will get enough reciprocated back still from the joint project even if in France.
So it is with glee I note that Japan has basically decided to forgo hosting the project for the lucrative system integration project. Now am just waiting for a quieter, secret version to be found by satellite to be built by the cold, stormy Hokkaido sea. All staff will wear black and have neat gear!
You can't watch anime as far as I know due to the paper-like monochrome screen not being able to refresh quickly. Actually when I tried it, it seemed to take two separate "passes" to completely erase a screen (remove all black dots) however sometimes it would leave some dots from the previous screen which if it was an image would be interesting.
It's easy on the eyes though, I would have considered buying one if I could get all my English ascii books off memory stick or ethernet into it.
Trees do a pretty good job of it too. That is why environmentally conscious pr departments of big companies laud burning wood since it just returns to the atmosphere the CO2 that was sequestered by the tree in the first place. The next step is NOT TO BURN THE WOOD! Just let it keep growing.
Or even cut down the tree and plant another. You can even cut off most of the trunk and branches of some trees and you will get new trees coming out of the stump. Planting trees is one of the few ways I know that ought to require far less CO2 to plant than is sequestered. Pumping gas into a hole is not obviously going to sequester the gas as a solid, and sounds dangerous.
At Linuxworld Japan 2 weeks ago
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I met an officer of Zeta and they were showing a wide screen monitor running zeta, and it looked wonderful! And apparently they have sold a lot in Germany, anybody bought and used it there? It looks pretty much like BeOS did when it was running on my 9600 Mac with dual 200MHz 604e cpus. Which I have to say, was much, much smoother multitasking/multimedia wise than my 128MB, mobile Pentium III 450 MHz Dell Inspiron 7.5K with RH9. I wonder if the latest linux kernel can match the smoothness of performance I had then. Anyway I found Pulse (the cpu monitor) somewhere in the app bar, it comes with a lot of apps and has a nice greek ZETA. What more could you want? Seriously I remember when my Mom bought a dedicated word processor at Staples years ago, it was $70 bucks and a pretty clunky green screen but it worked great. Then advanced to various macs. I'd pick an iMac for my Mom again if it wasn't a matter of money, but Zeta for wordprocessing probably would be great for Mom too. Apparently Zeta uses CUPS so it can handle "lots" of printers too.
Actually I would really like to have Be's live filesystem query in a rightclick popup for windowmaker. Anybody know if that tracker project makes it so?
I can only give one data point, a friend of mine from England living in Japan runs an English language preschool for young children. She has a tatoo.
Basically nothing good comes from it and she got it so long ago it isn't important to her anymore. The problems or fears it causes include:
Fear of customers (moms) finding out and either dropping the school or telling other moms.
Has been kicked out of public bathhouses, due to a blanket rule aimed at the tatoo-wearing mafia (she has covered it with a towel which looks suspicious but works sometimes)
They had a fire recently so presumably any problem the tatoo could cause would be a more dire problem now.
The point is not that tattoos are bad, they're fine. Maybe attention getting, sexy, self-affirming, fit in with a crowd, etc. But people change as time goes on, and with a more globally connected world you may end up travelling to more conservative countries or places where physical intimacy (saunas in Finland, bathhouses in Japan, etc.) is more taken for granted. When you travel outside your own culture, people won't know what your tattoo means and half the time may think worse of you for it. They may even think it's a mark of weakness or irrationality (not that these are bad things either necessarily). So unless you really need one for some important reason I'd say don't.
Finally you probably will change roles during your life, for example what if you start your own business or move into a sales or more responsible position where you meet customers? It could be positive in some cultural niches but my guess is generally, it will very often work against you. As Shakespeare said, "There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio." Or take a page from Doctor Who. Who seems to say with his Police Box tardis craf, if you really want to screw with people's minds and/or travel widely in a lubricated manner, go for protective coloration.
Well this is just my take, I have nothing personal against tattoos or piercings (well on girls tattoos are sexy to me but I feel less professionally interested in pierced people.. and my eyes are always going to the piercing instead of their eyes so it hinders my communication with them I think). If you think you might work in a conservative national or corporate culture one day it probably is better to go with a small tattoo than a piercing is my guess, but if you can make it without either until you are out of school you'll probably be happier later on I'd guess. Whatever!
I have an appointment book that fits in my jacket pocket which is the law. Then I also have a 00-NEW folder into which I save emails or jot notes, saved with filenames like "0613-xx-mtg" which I can easily list in an xterm (06* is everything in June). I'm not necessarily happy with this yet. There is also a system I built for appointments (many teachers to many students) which I don't use myself, however it had a phpicalendar viewer to read ical format files, and the ical files were written based on an appointment making web page. I think if someone took on the perl ICal project again and something with perlgtk was made (or an appointment server) it would be quite interesting. I may make a pretty simple version of that for an upcoming app but if someone else knows of an oss server to make appointments between multiple people and share calendars, this is where to post it! When I was making this last year I found Mac OSX had a very nice tool but other os's were not there.
It's real. Just about all major Japanese firms are taking serious steps to reduce environmental impact and also to comply with personal information protection act, all the way down to rewriting their articles of incorporation. The former is part due to the government and part due to pr benefits. The government is serious about it mainly I would expect because their claim to fame on the global stage, i.e. the proof they are fit to get a permanent seat on the security council, is their ability to lead Asia and be a diplomatic power.. the result of the Kyoto accord however is that it is very hard to live up to their promise. As it happens the Chairman of Toyota is also the head of the federal industry organization, and is located in Nagoya which is where the World Expo is currently running, neither of which hurt. Not versed in what other incentives may be provided though. Environmental programs are extremely visible in all parts of Japanese companies now, including product R&D, sales, advertising, etc. For example there is an air conditioner out now (EcoCute) that uses carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, and uses a heat pump to pull heat from the air and use only nighttime electricity for a 300% efficiency gain IIRC.
I have donated effort to a non-profit for several years, which is run by a hard-nosed journalist. It is amazing how much can get done (build 200 schools, a hospital, an orphanage, a newspaper company, attracting donations of $250,000 for food, 2000 boxes of clothing, corporate alliances from major newspapers and manufacturers,...) by one experienced guy (the journalist, Bernie Krisher) who hates spending money and is good at getting donations and assistance.
My recommendations:
Discuss the problem with well-known people involved in finance and nonprofits, and maybe lawyers of FSF. Though FSF is not just about linux I think it is a good idea.
Money should not be completely consumed, but should be made into a fund (hence LinuxFund) and the annual interest used for awards.
Make a new fund for open source software development, maybe call it the "Open Software Fund". The LinuxFund money up to now and in the future is put into this fund. This will allow other revenue streams to be created to grow the principal, and the increased size of the fund will make it easier to pay for administration/overhead (though this should be kept as close to zero as possible).
Get corporate and private moneys into this fund. It's a tax writeoff! Think about how much companies spend on opening booths in software fairs and this is a drop in the ocean. Every OSS-related fair could also have a donations box too, and publishers or users of OSS related software/documentation might like to get a tax break by donating too. Allow donations to specify certain uses, for example you could put a box for development of language-learning software at a school fair, etc.
Who gets fund money is beyond this thread. But here are three possibilities:
a. $1000 per project is a lot for the third world but not much for advanced economies. Instead consider allocating a percentage of the available interest based on votes, judging, or best yet actual needs of the project. How the money is used should be monitored. There can be a reporting requirement and money could be allocated on a quarterly or biannual basis to the same project depending on progress.
b. Like the Perl Foundation, money could be used to hire the services of great developers, business people, documentation writers, or illustrators to work solely on behalf of this Fund or particular projects.
c. In the U.S. at least, it is common practice to contribute to politicians (senators, etc.) who match your views, and in this case you want people with political clout to increase the uptake of OSS, push software freedom, and increase jobs for OSS developers. Consider paying for development of materials, or partial financial support for a person, who would be able to push this agenda with politicians.
Finally, a web team (programmer, illustrator, writer, producer) should be assembled (donating their efforts but posting their names on the site). The object of the site they create should be:
a. Clearly explain objective of fund, how it is managed, tax writeoff status, voting and judging results, applications for funding, and results of funding.
b. To create a feedback loop using an mailing list archive, screenshots of apps, photos of developer teams, photos of donators, video clips, case studies of how projects are being used by users and why for example the funded addition will be useful, etc., all frequently updated. This will allowing individuals and companies to see the results of their efforts and build a positively reinforced cycle. I used this method several years ago to raise a quarter million dollars for an ngo providing disaster food aid, including email to the project and responses to the email, a list of who each donator was and how much they donated, faxes, photos, videos, diaries of trips to the location and how food was distributed, and periodic reports. Also in our schools program we name the school after the donator and post a photo of the named school. Also, the World Bank contributes
Amazing, that guy who paid (?) a million bucks to neutralize the FUD SCO was dishing out and protect his hosting business, in fact ended up providing them more than 10% of their annual revenue!
I'd like to see a 2-D equivalent of a habitrail, where you have wells connected by thin tubes, with wires dunked in all over the place. Fill a well with neurons (or stem cells???) and start up a circuit you've programmed before to send specific analog or digital pulses to different wires. Then let it grow throughout the network with the circuit running. Would this not be an interesting way to learn about brain organization and also organic computing? Maybe you could even heat the wells differently or otherwise treat them? Give them a way to output to your circuit and create feedback?
The successor to Tokyo University's GRAPE-6 (GRAvity PipE) was recently announced, the 5 year GRAPE-DR program. GRAPE-6 boards contain asics (GRAPE processors) for many body gravity calculations and a few FPGAs (for network I believe). The GRAPE-DR (Data Reservoir) system will apparently also be useable as a general purpose machine and is to get 1 petaflop per node. This is based on 1-2 Tflops per chip each of which integrates 1024 processors. Apparently a 256 node machine is to give 1 petaflop.
Anyway, if you are in Tokyo this week, today and I think tomorrow is open house at the Advanced Research Lab so you could probably see what they have. Today is also linuxworld..
All I can say is Intel must be hurting from all the ball-kicking IBM and AMD are giving it. Why else would they muddy? -- no, SHIT on their fine name by stooping to such crappy activities as this. It is hard to imagine that they will gain more than they lose on this, even before anyone has actually bought a working unit. Bad idea and legally actionable. Turn back the clock to 1999 Intel, to get a look at your future, when Apple won a lawsuit against a PC manufacturer (Sotec's eOne model) that also tried to copy their design. I remember Apple's response was something like "they have a whole universe of designs and they picked ours". It was comical how every step of the way just made Sotec look worse, and Apple look better and better. "Shares of companies related to Sotec plunged following the injunction."
I have nothing against a nicer looking PC but this is bullshit. If Intel wants me to buy a machine of theirs, they should give me one that can be upgraded component by component. I'd pay another $100 if I knew I could seriously upgrade performance in a year or two. I bought a Dell Inspiron 7.5K partly for that reason but it turned out their promise of a spacious extra hard disk was a lie, I ended up looking through their expired retreads forum. As it is they are going to have to take a major cut if they want me back now. Makes me want to buy a Mac!
Sorry typo, I meant "May indicate likelihood that sentient races are well organized and only one is in charge of our sector." Although this would also cover that they are here but invisible.
Oh and I forgot the one we all hope for which is a coming breakthrough in instant communications, warp drive, or ability to see phenomena that are now invisible, etc. i.e. there is more to physics than we know yet.
At the recent WSIS conference which I discussed just now in the Researching Open Source thread, Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT Media Lab talked about his $100 laptop again. I think he said they have 3-4 companies and need another 1 or 2, located in different countries, to manufacture the device.
He gave some rough calculations about how it would become cheaper than an ordinary pc, and the biggest cost reduction was the display, which he thinks can be brought down to $30 (presumably by electronic ink). FYI. Anyway they're planning to make enough for 1 per student. Millions not trillions though.
What was quite interesting is an anecdote about how he was interviewing a candidate to run the company. The candidate was apparently turned down because he immediately talked about creating more expensive "pro" versions, which is just what Negroponte does not want to have. He says he wants a single full powered machine, and he wants to be able to make it continually cheaper instead of continually rising in cost. For whatever you want to say about the project, you have to admit this is a massive change from the way U.S. industry and M$ in particular work to bloat everything so you never have enough power.
For example, I was really happy with my Apple II running PIE (Programmer's Interactive Editor).. it had lots of control key combinations and a great feature which would jump you to recent cursor positions by hitting the 0 key. I also loved writing newspaper stories on the dedicated word processor at high school think it was a Wang (vertical green screen, 8" floppies). I think I'd really enjoy having that program on my linux laptop and do without OOo if I can. (The point being not to flame but that you don't really need bloatware, and anyway the laptop is a 1GHz machine!).
It is a different definition of what you need, and anyway the need is to get more connectivity as well as hardware out to the developing world and assist with solving social problems there. Raising educational levels and using these pcs to communicate better is a good start.
I recently participated in the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Conference, part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which was intended to develop a draft constitution on development of IT-enhanced society for the 21st century, with attention to north-south and social development issues. Anyway, it included a lot of people who are into open source and a lot of people interested in rural connectivity so you might be interested in some of the documents.
In particular there are maps of African connectivity (Dr. Dzvimbo's) and mentions of use in education (like Dr. Miyagawa from MIT's OpenCourseware).
The U.S. in 2003 (at the first part of this conference) apparently was against the final draft saying anything about open source or choosing open source over commercial software. However this time it seems open source is being explicitly covered.
One interesting person there was Mike Reed, Director of United Nations University's International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST). He talked about their hiring 10 open source developers to develop a standardized desktop distro for learning in the third world. He's a famous mathematician and computer scientist, in particular he wants to mathematically prove that a distro and its programs will "just work" which sounds pretty interesting. Anybody wanting to go to Macau should contact him!
I converted all the pdfs to text and grepped "open source" below FYI.
D-22ChairmansReport.txt: Be development-oriented, ensuring equitable and sustainable distribution of resources Recognize the goal of accessibility for all, emphasizing the needs of people with disabilities and the poor Respect the Internet end-to-end principles and open source, open content, open courseware, and open standards Uphold human rights, rights to self-determination, and particularly the risks to privacy and leakage of personal information
D-23chairmans_report.txt: Be development-oriented, ensuring equitable and sustainable distribution of resources Recognize the goal of accessibility for all, emphasizing the needs of people with disabilities and the poor Respect the Internet end-to-end principles and open source, open content, open courseware, and open standards Uphold human rights, rights to self-determination, and particularly the risks to privacy, for example from the leakage of personal information
S2-3DrDZVIMBO.txt:The possibilities Click to edit Master title style ClickA majorto editinitiativeMasterthattexthasstylesnow emerged is the development of Free Open Source institutions. (e.g. Nairobi, Agadir, Cape African institutions are also developing initiatives to foster the development of Learning Object Repositories by university academics and Research Networks.
S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Regional Support PEACESAT U.S. establishing Pacific ICT Academy in American Samoa MOODLE implemented in American Samoa, CNMI and Guam Open Source Squid, Apache, others
S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Regional Support Activities PEACESAT U.S. establishing Pacific ICT Academy in American Samoa Open Source Software
S2-5ProfOkamura.txt:Suggestion #3c ICT Infrastructure 3 Suggestion Open source and other inexpensive technologies should be encouraged. Rationale The cost of software and applications are potential problems. e.g. American Samoa implemented VA Clinical Information System.
S4-1BANKS.txt: Perspectives of marginilised groups, excluded communities, grassroots activists Expertise, skills, experience & knowledge human rights, sustainable development, privacy & security, education, women's empowerment & gender equality, affordable universal access, open standards & interoperability, open source, open content & universal design for all
s4-2FRAU-MEIGSDivinaRev1.txt:Tools for Open Access: An open source backbone An education exemption to IP rights A Universal Service Fund Interoperabil
Slashdot Mirror
You are giving away your password to every counter you lean on, to every door whose knob you turn. And you've only got one or two hands anyway. Right?
Your hand changes as you grow, learn a sport, take martial arts classes, sustain injuries, wash your hands in hot water, get infected, get writers cramp, develop an allergic reaction, or just age. Right?
Take a look at this conference, on auditory display: ICAD2005 and this cool paper from about 1996.
By the way I wonder if for example a keyboard module could be developed to subtly assist in typing. It might be useful for sighted people too. I'm thinking that instead of making an audible click when you hit a key, it speaks the name of the letter you typed in a very soft voice at the edge of your hearing (you can adjust the volume, and it will also adjust the volume a little lower if it can or louder if you make more mistakes). The idea would be to try to train the user to create a subconscious process monitoring the difference between intended and struck keys using audio cues. It could also be used to speak phonetically or through a dictionary. Might be more useful too if you are typing a phonetic alphabet. Which also is not a bad idea. For example Japanese is like that.
Also I recently tried out a new 5.1ch system with Star Wars in a shop in Akihabara, it looked like inexpensive equipment. I don't know about 13.1ch but at any rate, it seems to me that sound effects, 3D placement and simulated motion (of self or objects) through such a system might provide a very rich array of audio cues. Imagine watching for example a fantasy movie (Star Wars, LoTR, etc.) with your eyes closed. You are journeying through different environments, different creatures talk, etc. Could be more fun computing with this. Next step for Xorg?
Anyway there are undoubtedly lots of possible directions for experimentation and also a lot of prior art to study if you are really asking this question seriously. Good luck and maybe you can share your results later with us!
Caveat /. is maybe not the best place to ask, and I'm not experienced in this area either..
Windowing systems, in that they simulate objects moving spatially (in front/behind, and in 2 dimensions across screen) and require hand-eye coordination to click on widgets, are basically not a great idea. You will always be fighting to translate these difficult things into a different realm, not that it can't be done.
If you instead think about what work needs to be done, possibly it could be handled using mainly audio clues and novel tactile interfaces. For example do users even type well? Aside from the hardware and UI nitty-gritty, something like emacs or ratpoison
might be more useful. I could see how a new frame being created would speak its name at a different pitch for example, so by hitting one key on your custom keyboarding device you can get all the visible frames to say their names in order from low pitch to high pitch, maybe you can scroll through them audibly with a scroll wheel type mechanism. Anyway I know lots of people are not fully blind and can use computers well so presumably you want two systems, one close to the current system and one that is a radical departure for non-sighted people. I am not even sure what the jobs are that they would want to do but I imagine the most important things will be to visualize one's surroundings and danger (for example a rangefinding and sonar type device) and interacting with at least part of the web in some way (just because it is so inexpensive to develop for it).
Of course I doubt any partially blind people are going to be reading slashdot with its tons of text but maybe?
I predict the RIAA will be the number one revenue stream for malware authors, whose spyware and viruses will primarily be used to detect illegal files on the home network and alert the DVD player server to lock you out. I figure that's the main reason for the Java, to make it easy to calculate and update encryption. Conceivably an i-Mode type network could be built but it's hard to imagine all companies working together in step on it..
You may be more interested about a related project, ubiquitious id also by Ken Sakamura, at the uID Center.
Here's another thing you could add. Go to staticcling.org and get a free domain name for the machine. Install a script to run the updater every day, it will work up to a month offline. This will register the current IP address of the machine to a dynamic IP provider and if you had a GPS in it you could even find the machine.. or get a photo of the user from the webcam maybe. Or erase everything remotely over vnc, etc.
I was able to just paste some of my local viewing coordinates determined interactively at Heavens Above, a free star and satellite finder, into the input field for google maps. I found Stowe, Vermont but for Japan just got a total blank, with Japan's landmass in a solid color. It's a bug though because the world heritage urls do show you a limited res. kyoto, and also by typing in "tokyo" in the main maps.google.com/maps page you do get Tokyo, at res enough that you can zoom in on the imperial palace (oops!)
Last I read in the paper (could be late) Japan said they still wanted it but would be willing to give up the demand if pushed (sounded like "please" would be enough if said by an elite enough person..) since they calculate they will get enough reciprocated back still from the joint project even if in France.
So it is with glee I note that Japan has basically decided to forgo hosting the project for the lucrative system integration project. Now am just waiting for a quieter, secret version to be found by satellite to be built by the cold, stormy Hokkaido sea. All staff will wear black and have neat gear!
You can't watch anime as far as I know due to the paper-like monochrome screen not being able to refresh quickly. Actually when I tried it, it seemed to take two separate "passes" to completely erase a screen (remove all black dots) however sometimes it would leave some dots from the previous screen which if it was an image would be interesting.
It's easy on the eyes though, I would have considered buying one if I could get all my English ascii books off memory stick or ethernet into it.
Trees do a pretty good job of it too. That is why environmentally conscious pr departments of big companies laud burning wood since it just returns to the atmosphere the CO2 that was sequestered by the tree in the first place. The next step is NOT TO BURN THE WOOD! Just let it keep growing.
Or even cut down the tree and plant another. You can even cut off most of the trunk and branches of some trees and you will get new trees coming out of the stump. Planting trees is one of the few ways I know that ought to require far less CO2 to plant than is sequestered. Pumping gas into a hole is not obviously going to sequester the gas as a solid, and sounds dangerous.
I met an officer of Zeta and they were showing a wide screen monitor running zeta, and it looked wonderful! And apparently they have sold a lot in Germany, anybody bought and used it there? It looks pretty much like BeOS did when it was running on my 9600 Mac with dual 200MHz 604e cpus. Which I have to say, was much, much smoother multitasking/multimedia wise than my 128MB, mobile Pentium III 450 MHz Dell Inspiron 7.5K with RH9. I wonder if the latest linux kernel can match the smoothness of performance I had then. Anyway I found Pulse (the cpu monitor) somewhere in the app bar, it comes with a lot of apps and has a nice greek ZETA. What more could you want? Seriously I remember when my Mom bought a dedicated word processor at Staples years ago, it was $70 bucks and a pretty clunky green screen but it worked great. Then advanced to various macs. I'd pick an iMac for my Mom again if it wasn't a matter of money, but Zeta for wordprocessing probably would be great for Mom too. Apparently Zeta uses CUPS so it can handle "lots" of printers too.
Actually I would really like to have Be's live filesystem query in a rightclick popup for windowmaker. Anybody know if that tracker project makes it so?
Basically nothing good comes from it and she got it so long ago it isn't important to her anymore. The problems or fears it causes include:
Well this is just my take, I have nothing personal against tattoos or piercings (well on girls tattoos are sexy to me but I feel less professionally interested in pierced people.. and my eyes are always going to the piercing instead of their eyes so it hinders my communication with them I think). If you think you might work in a conservative national or corporate culture one day it probably is better to go with a small tattoo than a piercing is my guess, but if you can make it without either until you are out of school you'll probably be happier later on I'd guess. Whatever!
I have an appointment book that fits in my jacket pocket which is the law. Then I also have a 00-NEW folder into which I save emails or jot notes, saved with filenames like "0613-xx-mtg" which I can easily list in an xterm (06* is everything in June). I'm not necessarily happy with this yet. There is also a system I built for appointments (many teachers to many students) which I don't use myself, however it had a phpicalendar viewer to read ical format files, and the ical files were written based on an appointment making web page. I think if someone took on the perl ICal project again and something with perlgtk was made (or an appointment server) it would be quite interesting. I may make a pretty simple version of that for an upcoming app but if someone else knows of an oss server to make appointments between multiple people and share calendars, this is where to post it! When I was making this last year I found Mac OSX had a very nice tool but other os's were not there.
I didn't RTFM but no mobile malware? Just in time for the bluetooth crack mentioned the other day. Par for the course for Gartner..
Sorry, yes you are absolutely right, a hot water heater. Interested to hear how using it goes, electricity is not that cheap here..
Matt
It's real. Just about all major Japanese firms are taking serious steps to reduce environmental impact and also to comply with personal information protection act, all the way down to rewriting their articles of incorporation. The former is part due to the government and part due to pr benefits. The government is serious about it mainly I would expect because their claim to fame on the global stage, i.e. the proof they are fit to get a permanent seat on the security council, is their ability to lead Asia and be a diplomatic power.. the result of the Kyoto accord however is that it is very hard to live up to their promise. As it happens the Chairman of Toyota is also the head of the federal industry organization, and is located in Nagoya which is where the World Expo is currently running, neither of which hurt. Not versed in what other incentives may be provided though. Environmental programs are extremely visible in all parts of Japanese companies now, including product R&D, sales, advertising, etc. For example there is an air conditioner out now (EcoCute) that uses carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, and uses a heat pump to pull heat from the air and use only nighttime electricity for a 300% efficiency gain IIRC.
My recommendations:
a. $1000 per project is a lot for the third world but not much for advanced economies. Instead consider allocating a percentage of the available interest based on votes, judging, or best yet actual needs of the project. How the money is used should be monitored. There can be a reporting requirement and money could be allocated on a quarterly or biannual basis to the same project depending on progress.
b. Like the Perl Foundation, money could be used to hire the services of great developers, business people, documentation writers, or illustrators to work solely on behalf of this Fund or particular projects.
c. In the U.S. at least, it is common practice to contribute to politicians (senators, etc.) who match your views, and in this case you want people with political clout to increase the uptake of OSS, push software freedom, and increase jobs for OSS developers. Consider paying for development of materials, or partial financial support for a person, who would be able to push this agenda with politicians.
a. Clearly explain objective of fund, how it is managed, tax writeoff status, voting and judging results, applications for funding, and results of funding.
b. To create a feedback loop using an mailing list archive, screenshots of apps, photos of developer teams, photos of donators, video clips, case studies of how projects are being used by users and why for example the funded addition will be useful, etc., all frequently updated. This will allowing individuals and companies to see the results of their efforts and build a positively reinforced cycle. I used this method several years ago to raise a quarter million dollars for an ngo providing disaster food aid, including email to the project and responses to the email, a list of who each donator was and how much they donated, faxes, photos, videos, diaries of trips to the location and how food was distributed, and periodic reports. Also in our schools program we name the school after the donator and post a photo of the named school. Also, the World Bank contributes
This has got to be against the law.
I'd like to see a 2-D equivalent of a habitrail, where you have wells connected by thin tubes, with wires dunked in all over the place. Fill a well with neurons (or stem cells???) and start up a circuit you've programmed before to send specific analog or digital pulses to different wires. Then let it grow throughout the network with the circuit running. Would this not be an interesting way to learn about brain organization and also organic computing? Maybe you could even heat the wells differently or otherwise treat them? Give them a way to output to your circuit and create feedback?
Anyway, if you are in Tokyo this week, today and I think tomorrow is open house at the Advanced Research Lab so you could probably see what they have. Today is also linuxworld..
I have nothing against a nicer looking PC but this is bullshit. If Intel wants me to buy a machine of theirs, they should give me one that can be upgraded component by component. I'd pay another $100 if I knew I could seriously upgrade performance in a year or two. I bought a Dell Inspiron 7.5K partly for that reason but it turned out their promise of a spacious extra hard disk was a lie, I ended up looking through their expired retreads forum. As it is they are going to have to take a major cut if they want me back now. Makes me want to buy a Mac!
Oh and I forgot the one we all hope for which is a coming breakthrough in instant communications, warp drive, or ability to see phenomena that are now invisible, etc. i.e. there is more to physics than we know yet.
He gave some rough calculations about how it would become cheaper than an ordinary pc, and the biggest cost reduction was the display, which he thinks can be brought down to $30 (presumably by electronic ink). FYI. Anyway they're planning to make enough for 1 per student. Millions not trillions though.
What was quite interesting is an anecdote about how he was interviewing a candidate to run the company. The candidate was apparently turned down because he immediately talked about creating more expensive "pro" versions, which is just what Negroponte does not want to have. He says he wants a single full powered machine, and he wants to be able to make it continually cheaper instead of continually rising in cost. For whatever you want to say about the project, you have to admit this is a massive change from the way U.S. industry and M$ in particular work to bloat everything so you never have enough power.
For example, I was really happy with my Apple II running PIE (Programmer's Interactive Editor).. it had lots of control key combinations and a great feature which would jump you to recent cursor positions by hitting the 0 key. I also loved writing newspaper stories on the dedicated word processor at high school think it was a Wang (vertical green screen, 8" floppies). I think I'd really enjoy having that program on my linux laptop and do without OOo if I can. (The point being not to flame but that you don't really need bloatware, and anyway the laptop is a 1GHz machine!).
It is a different definition of what you need, and anyway the need is to get more connectivity as well as hardware out to the developing world and assist with solving social problems there. Raising educational levels and using these pcs to communicate better is a good start.
In particular there are maps of African connectivity (Dr. Dzvimbo's) and mentions of use in education (like Dr. Miyagawa from MIT's OpenCourseware).
The U.S. in 2003 (at the first part of this conference) apparently was against the final draft saying anything about open source or choosing open source over commercial software. However this time it seems open source is being explicitly covered.
One interesting person there was Mike Reed, Director of United Nations University's International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST). He talked about their hiring 10 open source developers to develop a standardized desktop distro for learning in the third world. He's a famous mathematician and computer scientist, in particular he wants to mathematically prove that a distro and its programs will "just work" which sounds pretty interesting. Anybody wanting to go to Macau should contact him!
I converted all the pdfs to text and grepped "open source" below FYI.