By the logic in this story, we've already run out of copper.
To oversimplify, today's copper mines are simply large industrial plants that take what is essentially ordinary earth and turn it into a small amount of copper and a large amount of ordinary earth.
Of course, these mines use earth that has more copper than ordinary earth: it is.06 percent copper rather than ordinary earth's.006 percent. Not a big difference! As the price goes up, the amount of copper that's profitable to extract also goes up..006 percent isn't a lot..006 percent * 6 * 10^24 kg is a lot. We're never going to run out of copper. Anybody who tries to tell you differently is a scare-mongerer.
The same story applies to pretty much any other mineral (zinc, for example), and probably applies to the trace minerals as well.
The same argument does not apply to oil, if it was produced by organic processes, as many believe.
I'm not sure whether you were trying to be sarcastic or not.
But yes, many universities are patent trolls, and pretty egregious ones at that. They take public money (and student's tuition) to perform research, and then extort those who try to use it (and whose tax dollars paid for it). They profess to be in the business of disseminating knowledge, and then lock it behind paywalls. They should be in the best position to understand "standing on the shoulder of giants" but instead they insist that nobody can stand on theirs (unless you pay).
Why you don't need WiFi on your phone.
on
Wi-Fi Phones Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I own a Sharp Zaurus and a Palm Treo 650 along with a WiFi card for both. I never use WiFi. Here's why.
There are several scenarios where you think it'll be useful to have WiFi on your phone, either for e-mail, browsing or VoIP.
At Home or Work
Once the novelty wears off, you will realize that the computer in the corner is much better suited for internet and e-mail usage. If you want to curl up on the couch or wander the house doing chores while talking to your Mom via VoIP, add a $20 bluetooth dongle onto your computer, router or NSLU2 and use that instead; you'll double your battery life.
At a Friend's House
Most friends have computers they'll let you borrow. Extensive surfing or VoIP'ing is antisocial, you won't be taking advantage of that as much as you think you will.
Out on the street
By the time you find a free, open WiFi hotspot, your battery will be dead. GPRS is so much more reliable that once you hook it up, you'll just end up using that instead.
On vacation
I spent two months in Europe and blogged every day for the entire trip using my Treo 650 and a bluetooth keyboard. I brought along the WiFi adaptor and never used it because it was such a pain to find and connect to a hot spot. Instead, I transferred articles from the Treo to computers in Internet Cafe's via the SD card and a USB adaptor.
At a coffeeshop to work outside the office
A laptop is so much more usable that you'll end up lugging the heavy thing to the coffeeshop rather than taking along just your phone.
Summary
WiFi is nice to have, but it shouldn't significantly affect purchase decisions. Don't ignore beautiful phones like the Neo1973 or Treos just because they don't have WiFi.
$54K is way too much for a house in Kipling. You can buy houses in Saskatchewan cities for less than that, let alone small town Saskatchewan. I would expect the house to be worth approximately $20K-$30K.
My brother once bought a 500 square foot house in Redvers, Saskatchewan for $7500. Redvers and Kipling are very similar towns.
Does anybody know if that clause applies if I buy a new iMac? Could I take the Tiger CD that comes with the new iMac and install it on my iBook as well? Is it technically possible? If it's technically possible, is it legally possible?
I'm sure Apple would rather get $500 than $130 from me...
Perforce is a "better CVS", and uses a centralized repository. If you have a centralized development model and everybody has broadband or better access to a central server, Perforce works great.
The open source world is finally catching up to Perforce: Subversion is almost as good.
Bitkeeper uses a distributed model, so it doesn't require a centralized development model nor does it require continuous broadband access to a single central server.
There seems to be about 20 different projects trying to take on Bitkeeper. Nobody's quite there yet. My personal favorite is Darcs.
Sorry, I'm employee #1 in a successful startup. We didn't have money. We did have the last two, but the reason we succeeded was because we also had the three things that Paul talks about.
The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".
For me, I much preferred Civ 1 over Civ 2. Civ 2 just added a whole bunch of new units, technologies and wonders, without adding anything distinctive to the game. They turned a nice 8 hour game into an exhausting 16 hour game.
Civ 3, on the other hand, added depth to the game. Culture is awesome, and those strategic resources really opened up the diplomatic and trading game.
Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game. Without it, however gets the most cities planted early wins. Only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium. You may hate it, because it's what's holding you back on your preferred strategy, but without it, it'd be a much inferior game.
Do mobile plans in the States really have mobile-to-mobile options that don't use up your minutes? That's cool. I don't think any of the providers in Canada have that, but getting unlimited local calling is pretty easy.
I've got my cell on a plan with unlimited local evenings & weekends, and then use one of those ubiquitous call #X, enter account, password and destination # type plans. Similar to calling cards, but it's 500 minutes/month for CAD10. www.onlinetel.com. It's pretty easy to enter the entire sequence into your cell phone directory.
The same way any poor person pays for a lawyer: give the lawyer a cut. If you've got a good case, many lawyers would be happy to take the case: they stand to make much more money by taking 40% of the winnings than by being paid per hour...
I'm one of those who can't pay attention to a real human right in front of me.
I finally figured out why. I grew up on a farm without a TV. Even the radio usually wasn't turned on unless somebody was actually listening to it: it wasn't just background noise.
I completely lack the ability to ignore the TV in a bar or restaurant, no matter how cute my date is. I ordered several of these units, and I'm going to use them.
And if it ends in fisticuffs, so be it. I lost many of the fights I was involved in during my "formative years", but that was against farmboys and working men. City punks are a different story...
Sweet spot? I call it uninteresting void. It seems to me that most programming is either:
1) operating system kernel or core library, embedded or high-performance programming. This niche only finished moving from assembly to C a few years ago. C++ is usually too slow & big & unwieldy for this niche, let alone C# or Java, although we may be ready for it in 5 years or so.
2) application programming. Here development speed is more important than execution speed. Python and kin provide 'good enough' execution speed when coupled with proper libries (QT, etc) with the fastest development speed.
What kind of code falls between the 2? Sure there is some, but is it interesting?
A lot of the argument comes down to "Sun hardware is more reliable and has really cool reliabilty features that PC hardware doesn't."
Nobody's going to argue with that.
The other big contender for bullet proof software, (IBM's big iron) runs Linux inside a VM. The VM has the neato bullet-proof stuff, so IBM didn't need to add it to Linux.
Growing wheat or canola profitably on the land is damn difficult, but possible. It's good hayland though. Let the cows graze it in the summer, bale it up to feed them in the winter.
Great article. Unfortunately their numbers are way off. You can buy marginally productive land in Saskatchewan, Canada for under USD100 per acre, which presumably is worth a lot more than land on the moon or mars, which has low utility and is not scarce...
Money spent researching beowulf type systems advances the start of the art of Linux, communication systems and other stuff related to what I do. Supercomputer research only benefits me peripherally.
Sorry, I'm selfish, but I like the previous status quo.
Plugging your car in doesn't help if your fuel has gelled. diesel fuel in North America comes in four different mixtures: summer (pure diesel), 1, 2, Canadian (approximately half kerosene, half diesel).
People in Winnipeg don't have trouble with gelling diesel fuel simply because they're using Canadian Winter Diesel. But occasionally somebody's diesel will gel because they've let their truck sit for a few months and it has to be towed into a garage to warm up for a few hours...
So the answer for biodiesel seems to be the same as for regular diesel: mix with kerosene.
That manure is more valuable as crop fertilizer than as energy. But then all of you city folks start whining about the aroma of properly fertilized fields. Bah, you should be out with me on the tractor when I actually spread the stuff: now that's stinky.
yep, games will suck on a small-screen phone, but they'll suck a hell of a lot less than being stuck on the bus without your GBA or playing "snake" on your old Nokia....
It's not exactly fixed hardware, but it's nothing like the chaos you get in the PC world, and there's some damn good games out on the PC.
If there's a market, the games will come, fixed platform or no.
"The N-Gage might succeed as a phone, but I don't ever see it succeeding as a game machine. "
That's the point! Once it has succeeded as a phone, even if each N-Gage user buys an average of 0.5 games versus a GBA user's 5, it's still a larger market than the gameboy market.
Slashdot Mirror
By the logic in this story, we've already run out of copper.
To oversimplify, today's copper mines are simply large industrial plants that take what is essentially ordinary earth and turn it into a small amount of copper and a large amount of ordinary earth.
Of course, these mines use earth that has more copper than ordinary earth: it is .06 percent copper rather than ordinary earth's .006 percent. Not a big difference! As the price goes up, the amount of copper that's profitable to extract also goes up. .006 percent isn't a lot. .006 percent * 6 * 10^24 kg is a lot. We're never going to run out of copper. Anybody who tries to tell you differently is a scare-mongerer.
The same story applies to pretty much any other mineral (zinc, for example), and probably applies to the trace minerals as well.
The same argument does not apply to oil, if it was produced by organic processes, as many believe.
Here's a much better link on Jon Corbet's own site, the famous Linux Weekly News:
http://lwn.net/Articles/272011/
> All US universities are patent trolls...
I'm not sure whether you were trying to be sarcastic or not.
But yes, many universities are patent trolls, and pretty egregious ones at that. They take public money (and student's tuition) to perform research, and then extort those who try to use it (and whose tax dollars paid for it). They profess to be in the business of disseminating knowledge, and then lock it behind paywalls. They should be in the best position to understand "standing on the shoulder of giants" but instead they insist that nobody can stand on theirs (unless you pay).
I own a Sharp Zaurus and a Palm Treo 650 along with a WiFi card for both. I never use WiFi. Here's why.
There are several scenarios where you think it'll be useful to have WiFi on your phone, either for e-mail, browsing or VoIP.
At Home or Work
Once the novelty wears off, you will realize that the computer in the corner is much better suited for internet and e-mail usage. If you want to curl up on the couch or wander the house doing chores while talking to your Mom via VoIP, add a $20 bluetooth dongle onto your computer, router or NSLU2 and use that instead; you'll double your battery life.
At a Friend's House
Most friends have computers they'll let you borrow. Extensive surfing or VoIP'ing is antisocial, you won't be taking advantage of that as much as you think you will.
Out on the street
By the time you find a free, open WiFi hotspot, your battery will be dead. GPRS is so much more reliable that once you hook it up, you'll just end up using that instead.
On vacation
I spent two months in Europe and blogged every day for the entire trip using my Treo 650 and a bluetooth keyboard. I brought along the WiFi adaptor and never used it because it was such a pain to find and connect to a hot spot. Instead, I transferred articles from the Treo to computers in Internet Cafe's via the SD card and a USB adaptor. At a coffeeshop to work outside the office
A laptop is so much more usable that you'll end up lugging the heavy thing to the coffeeshop rather than taking along just your phone.
Summary
WiFi is nice to have, but it shouldn't significantly affect purchase decisions. Don't ignore beautiful phones like the Neo1973 or Treos just because they don't have WiFi.
$54K is way too much for a house in Kipling. You can buy houses in Saskatchewan cities for less than that, let alone small town Saskatchewan. I would expect the house to be worth approximately $20K-$30K.
My brother once bought a 500 square foot house in Redvers, Saskatchewan for $7500. Redvers and Kipling are very similar towns.
At one point in time, I heard something about
Apple having a "family" clause in their license. Something like this http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/macosxfamily.html.
Does anybody know if that clause applies if I buy a new iMac? Could I take the Tiger CD that comes with the new iMac and install it on my iBook as well? Is it technically possible? If it's technically possible, is it legally possible?
I'm sure Apple would rather get $500 than $130 from me...
Bryan
Perforce is a "better CVS", and uses a centralized repository. If you have a centralized development model and everybody has broadband or better access to a central server, Perforce works great.
The open source world is finally catching up to Perforce: Subversion is almost as good.
Bitkeeper uses a distributed model, so it doesn't require a centralized development model nor does it require continuous broadband access to a single central server.
There seems to be about 20 different projects trying to take on Bitkeeper. Nobody's quite there yet. My personal favorite is Darcs.
Bryan
Sorry, I'm employee #1 in a successful startup. We didn't have money. We did have the last two, but the reason we succeeded was because we also had the three things that Paul talks about.
But Paul says it much better than I can.
The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".
For me, I much preferred Civ 1 over Civ 2. Civ 2 just added a whole bunch of new units, technologies and wonders, without adding anything distinctive to the game. They turned a nice 8 hour game into an exhausting 16 hour game.
Civ 3, on the other hand, added depth to the game. Culture is awesome, and those strategic resources really opened up the diplomatic and trading game.
Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game. Without it, however gets the most cities planted early wins. Only the game before 2000BC matters, after, it's just tedium. You may hate it, because it's what's holding you back on your preferred strategy, but without it, it'd be a much inferior game.
Do mobile plans in the States really have mobile-to-mobile options that don't use up your minutes? That's cool. I don't think any of the providers in Canada have that, but getting unlimited local calling is pretty easy.
I've got my cell on a plan with unlimited local evenings & weekends, and then use one of those ubiquitous call #X, enter account, password and destination # type plans. Similar to calling cards, but it's 500 minutes/month for CAD10. www.onlinetel.com. It's pretty easy to enter the entire sequence into your cell phone directory.
Bryan
The same way any poor person pays for a lawyer: give the lawyer a cut. If you've got a good case, many lawyers would be happy to take the case: they stand to make much more money by taking 40% of the winnings than by being paid per hour...
I'm one of those who can't pay attention to a real human right in front of me.
I finally figured out why. I grew up on a farm without a TV. Even the radio usually wasn't turned on unless somebody was actually listening to it: it wasn't just background noise.
I completely lack the ability to ignore the TV in a bar or restaurant, no matter how cute my date is. I ordered several of these units, and I'm going to use them.
And if it ends in fisticuffs, so be it. I lost many of the fights I was involved in during my "formative years", but that was against farmboys and working men. City punks are a different story...
Bryan
Sweet spot? I call it uninteresting void. It seems to me that most programming is either:
1) operating system kernel or core library, embedded or high-performance programming. This niche only finished moving from assembly to C a few years ago. C++ is usually too slow & big & unwieldy for this niche, let alone C# or Java, although we may be ready for it in 5 years or so.
2) application programming. Here development speed is more important than execution speed. Python and kin provide 'good enough' execution speed when coupled with proper libries (QT, etc) with the fastest development speed.
What kind of code falls between the 2? Sure there is some, but is it interesting?
Bryan
You're missing a crucial point in your summary.
A lot of the argument comes down to "Sun hardware is more reliable and has really cool reliabilty features that PC hardware doesn't."
Nobody's going to argue with that.
The other big contender for bullet proof software, (IBM's big iron) runs Linux inside a VM. The VM has the neato bullet-proof stuff, so IBM didn't need to add it to Linux.
bryan
Growing wheat or canola profitably on the land is damn difficult, but possible. It's good hayland though. Let the cows graze it in the summer, bale it up to feed them in the winter.
Great article. Unfortunately their numbers are way off. You can buy marginally productive land in Saskatchewan, Canada for under USD100 per acre, which presumably is worth a lot more than land on the moon or mars, which has low utility and is not scarce...
Bryan
Money spent researching beowulf type systems advances the start of the art of Linux, communication systems and other stuff related to what I do. Supercomputer research only benefits me peripherally.
Sorry, I'm selfish, but I like the previous status quo.
Bryan
grr, use preview carefully!
That's 6 MONTHS versus 2 WEEKS.
Bryan
It's included with Mandrake Linux v9.2 and v10.
We estimated 6 months of development effort to do uPnP in our embedded network device, and 2 do to zeroconf.
Guess which protocol our device now supports?
uPnP may be technically superior, but more devices will support zeroconf.
Plugging your car in doesn't help if your fuel has gelled. diesel fuel in North America comes in four different mixtures: summer (pure diesel), 1, 2, Canadian (approximately half kerosene, half diesel).
People in Winnipeg don't have trouble with gelling diesel fuel simply because they're using Canadian Winter Diesel. But occasionally somebody's diesel will gel because they've let their truck sit for a few months and it has to be towed into a garage to warm up for a few hours...
So the answer for biodiesel seems to be the same as for regular diesel: mix with kerosene.
That manure is more valuable as crop fertilizer than as energy. But then all of you city folks start whining about the aroma of properly fertilized fields. Bah, you should be out with me on the tractor when I actually spread the stuff: now that's stinky.
As a Canadian, read one of the latest issues of Maclean's. Does a great job of demolishing the fricking annoying Canadian superiority complex.
yep, games will suck on a small-screen phone, but they'll suck a hell of a lot less than being stuck on the bus without your GBA or playing "snake" on your old Nokia....
Bryan
It's not exactly fixed hardware, but it's nothing like the chaos you get in the PC world, and there's some damn good games out on the PC.
If there's a market, the games will come, fixed platform or no.
"The N-Gage might succeed as a phone, but I don't ever see it succeeding as a game machine. "
That's the point! Once it has succeeded as a phone, even if each N-Gage user buys an average of 0.5 games versus a GBA user's 5, it's still a larger market than the gameboy market.
Bryan