how much of a 60 hour week is spent goofing around on Facebook, or Youtube?
Most people over the age of 30 have got bored with "present-eeism", the idea that because you're present in the workplace, you're somehow contributing. I'd prefer someone who did one thing well in a 4 hour working day than someone who spent the first 2 hours talking about their "awesome" new game, then just "had" to check FB every 30 minutes and tweeted every 10. Then took 2 hours for lunch because they wanted to check out the Mall (give it up, you're not 12 any more) and spent the whole afternoon playing a "hey dude, look at this" website they stumbled across. And after that stayed at work to watch TV online because the connection was faster that they got at their parents' place.
So a 60 hour working week rapidly changes into 30 hours of "work" and 30 more freeloading, or worse: distracting the people with actual talent, who could achieve the same results in half the time, if they weren't being continually diverted off at a tangent by the individuals who didn't have the self-discipline to get their heads down and do their jobs.
I'm bald.
But the good news is I never get called away from work because of an emergency with the children, they left home long ago. I don't have to take time off for pre or post natal activities. Or to watch some 6 year-old in a school activity. I don't break a leg on "adventure" holidays and require all my co-workers to subsidise my recklessness. I don't get drunk every weekend and have "off" days every Monday. I don't spend half my working day trying to chat up my co-workers (for which they're very grateful) and I don't feel so insecure that I need to challenge every decision, or jostle for promotions - no matter how meaningless.
The point I was trying (and apparently, failed) to make was that a lot of the countries that are well placed to generate electricity from solar arrays are also the ones that are short of water. Economically, they will be able to make more money by using the power they generate to desalinate water and sell the water, than they could from merely exporting the electricity itself.
The result could well be that countries neighbouring the Sahara will install PV generation. However, it's not at all clear that europe will be able to exploit this, as there's no guarantee that these places will want to sell their electricity to european countries.
Spain is already building large solar arrays (just drive around the country). It has also built a lot of wind farms. It's a mountainous country - contrary to what people who only ever fly to beach resorts might think, and gets a lot of wind as a result.
In the future I foresee a lot of the power generated by solar power in dusty countries being used by them to power desalination, rather than selling to rich countries who don't want to litter their landscapes. Water will be a bigger problem for them in the decades to come than lack of electricity.
Laws of marketing, definitely not laws of aerodynamics.
The biggest driver in car design since the oil crises of the 70's has been miles per gallon. That has improved engine technology and made car shapes more slippery. There's only one way to reduce drag, that's to be aerodynamically efficient. There's only a small number of solutions to the laws of laminar flow. That's why all cars look the same.
Mobiles have been around for over 20 years. I got my first one in 1988 and they *have* come a long way since. However, unlike PCs, mobile phones have always been more restricted by size and battery capacity. Constraints that never applied to PCs.
Before IBM created the standard platform there were a plethora of competing chips, architectures, "operating systems" approaches, price-points and failures. The phone market is in the same situation now. Just as soon as some manufacturer starts to dominate and everything becomes standardised two things will happen: the software will become much more important and the hardware will start the spiral down to commodity status.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics. While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers. So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
We know that a website can be shut down for providing links to copyrighted material. So if that can be done to newzbin.com what principle of law makes google.com immune?
How about the networks showing hours and hours of repeats, garbage and more repeats every day?
That way people would be less inclined to switch on their power-hungry TVs and would do something (hopefully less energy consuming) instead.... Oh, hang on. What's did you say? they already do that?
Companies don't like dealing with individuals. I work as a one-man limited company as this is the only way most clients are prepared to deal (they are concerned that if I freelanced for them, they would become liable for any tax I avoided paying, plus holiday pay, pension and a period of notice). I have to fill in an online VAT return every 3 months and online tax returns. Once a year I have to update my company's official listing and submit an end-of-year financial report - which involves buying an accountant for a day.
It's not a killer and takes zero time on a daily basis. If I was concerned about the 1 hour a month the paperwork takes, I could contract it out - at an exorbitant rate. The benefits this way of working brings is that I have "respectability", my clients feel more comfortable and some accountants get work.
Elektor really just does kits. Whenever I see their projects, they always seem to have some obscure IC bang int he middle of the project. Usually only available in 1000-off quantities from a single national agent, or in one-offs from the magazine's pet supplier. Same goes for surface mount devices. All you're effectively doing with Elektor's projects is assembling a kit of parts. There's little or no scope for customising the project or substituting components that you already have in your junk box.
The high-end 40-pin DIPs compare favourably to entire home computers from the Byte era. They are programmed in C, can interface to USB, can be set up with their own bootloaders. The code to interface them to SD cards is well known and if you dan't want that, a 4MBit eeprom has more capacity than a 360kB floppy disk.
And that's without even getting to the 32bit controllers.
Talk is cheap. Scare stories even cheaper. In fact, if you want one try this
There is a possibility that a change in the Sun sometime in the next few years could potentially put some people at risk
Totally non-specific. risk of what (sunspots? x-rays? sunburn? supernova?) How much risk? When - next week? this year? tomorrow? Who - me? my family? everyone? a group of foreign people I've never met?
Unless a pronouncement can provide specific, actionable and geographically relevant information that a person can use to mitigate any harm to themselves or people they care about, all this sort of thing does is raise the level of anxiety, which is already too high due to all the other dumb and dire warnings that we see everywhere, every day. To the point where they all just blur together and we become inured to danger signals..
So when I see NASA putting metalised blankets over its satellites, hardening its computers and issuing staff with factor 1million sun cream, I'll think about what I need to do. Until that time, I have every intention of ignoring this useless press release.
Assuming the acceleration is provided by mechanical means. But if the body in question is a conductor and the accelerating field is a uniform magnetic field, the acceleration is applied to all the particles in the body at the same time and in the same amount. Provided the accelerating force is uniform, it can still, theoretically be distinguished from gravity by its lack of a gradient.
When a body accelerates all its components are accelerated at the same rate. However, when body is subjected to a gravitational attraction, the part of the body nearest the attractor experiences a slightly larger attraction than is experienced by the other end of the attracted body (since the force experienced depends on the distance ** 2 from the attracting body). Unless you start talking about single point, infinitely small bodies, the difference in attraction across the gravity gradient will be real.
So in practical terms there is a difference, even if the effect is extremely small.
Although this needs some server software, it sounds like all the network connections stay alive while the PC client is (as near as dammit) powered off. That means no tedious having to restart all the IP connections, network shares and applications that would otherwise get disconnected or timed out. (It also means you keep the same IP address - guess?).
You can make a few $Mil on the basis of your own hard and honest work. However to get to the next step requires the "entrepreneur" to start exploiting people, using coercion, marginally honest (I'm being polite here) tactics, restrictive contracts - in short no longer being a "nice person".
Once you get into the $Bns you become responsible for causing suffering, hardship, using litigation and loopholes, throwing your weight around, metaphorically "knifing" people in the back and being a nasty PoS. By then any of the attributes that attracted you to Open Source have withered and died.
Every datacentre I've been in has a quiet or soundproofed control room for the operators and most of the time no-one at all in the machine room itself. Apart from the obvious desire not to have individuals wandering around, breaking things it's not a good working environment. The only people who should be working in there would be "hard hat" types like installers, wiring people and cleaners. None of which will need to make calls so much that a 30-second walk to the control room will matter.
They will also have supervision, for health and safety reasons (minimum number of staff in attendance) so any calls TO them can let someone from the control room go find them.
In short, you shouldn't need any phones that can't be connected up to hard-wired sockets. Even these could easily be specified as phones for the hard of hearing, to get over the environmental noise problems.
The other weak link is new software that is rushed to market without being tested properly Adobe Since the market pressures require as short a development time (and preferably no testing - since yo might find bugs that have to be fixed: more delays) in order to keep the cash-flow flowing.
Only government agencies can afford to spend a year designing a bullet-proof system, then another year writing the software and a year or two more making sure that no-one can ever break in to it. Are yo prepared to slow down software development by a factor of 8, from 6-monthly release cycles to a new version every 4 years? It would be commercial suicide and far too expensive.
For software to be used by "everyone" it must put as few complications as possible between its users and their objectives. Since most people's objectives are focussed on results, not security, if you try to make an operating system or application suite secure, people will find a simpler, more direct way of achieving their goals. One where their perceived balance of speediness and security (i.e. as fast as possible and damn the consequences) is met.
Once you get away from using popular applications and O/S's, the price rises incredibly quickly. Instead of spreading (say) a billion dollar development costs across 100 million product sales, you have maybe 10,000 customers who can be persuaded to pay for a product. This immediately means no-one will buy it unless forced to by law, or unless they can in turn, pass on the costs to their customers. The smaller market also means there will be fewer suppliers - probably just one. Which in turn will drive up costs due to lack of competition and decrease any incentives to fix problems or develop new wares in a timely fashion.
We know what a secure operating system for the year 2010 will look like. It will look like VMS from 1995, for all the reasons discussed above. Now, which are we prepared to pay for: Microsoft products on every store shelf, running the country or critical systems with the security, features, lack of connectivity from the mid-90s?
He's making up a whole bunch of stuff. A cursory check (OK, it's was only wikipedia) suggests that 20/20 vision requires an acuity of 1 arc-minute, not the 0.6 this guy quotes.
I'm still on 2000, you insensitive clod! I'm planning to *upgrade* to XP in the next year or so. Provided my hardware can run it, that is. Everyone knows that XP is a resource hog.:)
I'm still running a W2K box, too. It does all I need of it - Office97, Photoshop and other apps. So long as it keeps running the software I've bought I can't see any need to change it.
The only slight. issue is that Microsoft won't allow upgrades from IE6, so I'm just using modern versions of Firefox instead. I fully expect to keep running W2K for at least another 5 years - probably even longer. It's not about the operating system, it's about the applications - and they're fine.
Slashdot Mirror
shouldn't that be a sign to the powers that be ...
Except that TPTB are even less trusted than the media.
do you honestly believe our country could be more divided ...
If you don't think it could be worse, that's just a limit to your powers of imagination.
Most people over the age of 30 have got bored with "present-eeism", the idea that because you're present in the workplace, you're somehow contributing. I'd prefer someone who did one thing well in a 4 hour working day than someone who spent the first 2 hours talking about their "awesome" new game, then just "had" to check FB every 30 minutes and tweeted every 10. Then took 2 hours for lunch because they wanted to check out the Mall (give it up, you're not 12 any more) and spent the whole afternoon playing a "hey dude, look at this" website they stumbled across. And after that stayed at work to watch TV online because the connection was faster that they got at their parents' place.
So a 60 hour working week rapidly changes into 30 hours of "work" and 30 more freeloading, or worse: distracting the people with actual talent, who could achieve the same results in half the time, if they weren't being continually diverted off at a tangent by the individuals who didn't have the self-discipline to get their heads down and do their jobs.
I'm bald. But the good news is I never get called away from work because of an emergency with the children, they left home long ago. I don't have to take time off for pre or post natal activities. Or to watch some 6 year-old in a school activity. I don't break a leg on "adventure" holidays and require all my co-workers to subsidise my recklessness. I don't get drunk every weekend and have "off" days every Monday. I don't spend half my working day trying to chat up my co-workers (for which they're very grateful) and I don't feel so insecure that I need to challenge every decision, or jostle for promotions - no matter how meaningless.
The result could well be that countries neighbouring the Sahara will install PV generation. However, it's not at all clear that europe will be able to exploit this, as there's no guarantee that these places will want to sell their electricity to european countries.
In the future I foresee a lot of the power generated by solar power in dusty countries being used by them to power desalination, rather than selling to rich countries who don't want to litter their landscapes. Water will be a bigger problem for them in the decades to come than lack of electricity.
Laws of marketing, definitely not laws of aerodynamics.
The biggest driver in car design since the oil crises of the 70's has been miles per gallon. That has improved engine technology and made car shapes more slippery. There's only one way to reduce drag, that's to be aerodynamically efficient. There's only a small number of solutions to the laws of laminar flow. That's why all cars look the same.
Mobiles have been around for over 20 years. I got my first one in 1988 and they *have* come a long way since. However, unlike PCs, mobile phones have always been more restricted by size and battery capacity. Constraints that never applied to PCs.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics. While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers. So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
We know that a website can be shut down for providing links to copyrighted material. So if that can be done to newzbin.com what principle of law makes google.com immune?
That way people would be less inclined to switch on their power-hungry TVs and would do something (hopefully less energy consuming) instead. ... Oh, hang on. What's did you say? they already do that?
It's not a killer and takes zero time on a daily basis. If I was concerned about the 1 hour a month the paperwork takes, I could contract it out - at an exorbitant rate. The benefits this way of working brings is that I have "respectability", my clients feel more comfortable and some accountants get work.
Elektor really just does kits. Whenever I see their projects, they always seem to have some obscure IC bang int he middle of the project. Usually only available in 1000-off quantities from a single national agent, or in one-offs from the magazine's pet supplier. Same goes for surface mount devices. All you're effectively doing with Elektor's projects is assembling a kit of parts. There's little or no scope for customising the project or substituting components that you already have in your junk box.
The high-end 40-pin DIPs compare favourably to entire home computers from the Byte era. They are programmed in C, can interface to USB, can be set up with their own bootloaders. The code to interface them to SD cards is well known and if you dan't want that, a 4MBit eeprom has more capacity than a 360kB floppy disk. And that's without even getting to the 32bit controllers.
Talk is cheap. Scare stories even cheaper. In fact, if you want one try this
There is a possibility that a change in the Sun sometime in the next few years could potentially put some people at risk
Totally non-specific. risk of what (sunspots? x-rays? sunburn? supernova?) How much risk? When - next week? this year? tomorrow? Who - me? my family? everyone? a group of foreign people I've never met?
Unless a pronouncement can provide specific, actionable and geographically relevant information that a person can use to mitigate any harm to themselves or people they care about, all this sort of thing does is raise the level of anxiety, which is already too high due to all the other dumb and dire warnings that we see everywhere, every day. To the point where they all just blur together and we become inured to danger signals..
So when I see NASA putting metalised blankets over its satellites, hardening its computers and issuing staff with factor 1million sun cream, I'll think about what I need to do. Until that time, I have every intention of ignoring this useless press release.
Assuming the acceleration is provided by mechanical means. But if the body in question is a conductor and the accelerating field is a uniform magnetic field, the acceleration is applied to all the particles in the body at the same time and in the same amount. Provided the accelerating force is uniform, it can still, theoretically be distinguished from gravity by its lack of a gradient.
So in practical terms there is a difference, even if the effect is extremely small.
Although this needs some server software, it sounds like all the network connections stay alive while the PC client is (as near as dammit) powered off. That means no tedious having to restart all the IP connections, network shares and applications that would otherwise get disconnected or timed out. (It also means you keep the same IP address - guess?).
blah blah, videophones. It's pretty obvious why no-one does video calls. Who wants to look at pictures of the other guys earhole?
Once you get into the $Bns you become responsible for causing suffering, hardship, using litigation and loopholes, throwing your weight around, metaphorically "knifing" people in the back and being a nasty PoS. By then any of the attributes that attracted you to Open Source have withered and died.
They will also have supervision, for health and safety reasons (minimum number of staff in attendance) so any calls TO them can let someone from the control room go find them.
In short, you shouldn't need any phones that can't be connected up to hard-wired sockets. Even these could easily be specified as phones for the hard of hearing, to get over the environmental noise problems.
Only government agencies can afford to spend a year designing a bullet-proof system, then another year writing the software and a year or two more making sure that no-one can ever break in to it. Are yo prepared to slow down software development by a factor of 8, from 6-monthly release cycles to a new version every 4 years? It would be commercial suicide and far too expensive.
Once you get away from using popular applications and O/S's, the price rises incredibly quickly. Instead of spreading (say) a billion dollar development costs across 100 million product sales, you have maybe 10,000 customers who can be persuaded to pay for a product. This immediately means no-one will buy it unless forced to by law, or unless they can in turn, pass on the costs to their customers. The smaller market also means there will be fewer suppliers - probably just one. Which in turn will drive up costs due to lack of competition and decrease any incentives to fix problems or develop new wares in a timely fashion.
We know what a secure operating system for the year 2010 will look like. It will look like VMS from 1995, for all the reasons discussed above. Now, which are we prepared to pay for: Microsoft products on every store shelf, running the country or critical systems with the security, features, lack of connectivity from the mid-90s?
I call "bull" on the whole thing.
I'm still on 2000, you insensitive clod! I'm planning to *upgrade* to XP in the next year or so. Provided my hardware can run it, that is. Everyone knows that XP is a resource hog. :)
I'm still running a W2K box, too. It does all I need of it - Office97, Photoshop and other apps. So long as it keeps running the software I've bought I can't see any need to change it.
The only slight. issue is that Microsoft won't allow upgrades from IE6, so I'm just using modern versions of Firefox instead. I fully expect to keep running W2K for at least another 5 years - probably even longer. It's not about the operating system, it's about the applications - and they're fine.
Associated
Register of
Software
Engineers
Having
Obligatory
Levels of
Education in
Science
or is that already taken? although that might be a better description