I don't think that Sun's recent Open Source moves are going to help either. What is the problem that they want to solve? until that statement doesn't involve the words "selling large servers" Sun will continue to spiral into oblivion.
Open sourcing their software portfolio generates a large base of developers that contribute to the quality of the products and maybe they will even reccomend Sun hardware to their CIO. It is really no different than OpenOffice.org. Basically you get a huge amount of goodwill assosiated with your brand. Then you can sell hardware and support. The big customers will not consider buying the software without the support contracts. This model has proven to work for companies like Redhat, Mysql, Suse and others as well.
The workings of government should be transparent to citizens.
In some cases it should be transparent, but in others, it shouldn't. For example, should the war plans which include information on a strike in a particular city within Iraq be transparent?
And if there's a law stating otherwise, it should be removed.
So, you're saying that any email, letter, conversation, etc in govt. should be 100% open. This is not realistic. No one will want to work for the govt. if they know their every word would be published as a book. This came up in the Roberts debate. Top tallent will refuse to express opinions if they know that their very formulation of that opinion could be taken out of context by the media. I think we need to keep the laws as they are. Currently, private communications within govt. can stay that way. I agree that govt. should not hide stuff from us, but if they are, we will find out. That's very different from saying that govt. can't have any private discussions about issues before stating public policy.
Hopefully there's not some sort of feedback loop in which the earthquake causes an the building to move which causes a greater earthquake in an endless cycle.
This University Prof. is coming out here saying that he's going to basically show that they are inept. I think he's going to have a hard time though. I mean who is this guy anyways? He may be smart. He may be good at designing laptops, but making 100 million laptops at a price less than one third that of the closest mass produced models is quite ambitious. Given that he has no experience doing this, I think he's likely to fail. There is already a trend for cheaper laptops as we speak. Some models are selling at below $400. I believe companies like Dell will release sub $100 laptops before this guy can ship 100 million.
Yes, I'm always amazed by the technology they used in that movie. How did they get John Travolta to look just like Nick Cage and vice-versa!?!?! Amazing. *sigh*
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I never liked packages. I like self extracting installs much better. jdk is a good example of this. It's a single.bin file. You execute and poof, you've got a working jdk installed.
municipal wi-fi. It is going to come down to a competition between municipal funded wi-fi vs. ad funded wi-fi, with the later ultimatly wining out. As computers and wi-fi hardware gets cheaper, we will definitly see ads be sufficient to fund the hardware/support needed. Corporations can sell ad space more efficiently than govt. so I think we'll see them win in the end when hardware gets cheap enough. For now, there's a short period of time where this model makes sense. In any case, this will be interesting.
OTOH photovoltaics and biodiesel are both ways of collecting and using solar energy
Hydrogen is a better storage mechanism than vegetable oil.
Photovoltaics cost much money (and also have heavy environmental costs)
My main point from my original post is that it's currently not economically feasable, but it's getting VERY close. The only environmental costs of photovoltaics are in their production. After that they are a-ok. Their production costs energy. It's true that if we generate that energy from something that is dirty we have an environmental impact, but if we use solar energy that we've already brought online, we don't have any issues. This is what we should do. What it comes down to is: Do you think we can produce energy more efficiently using biological processes (biodisel)? Or can we produce energy more efficiently using purely mechanical processes (photovoltaics - with hydrogen storage mechanism). I bet one photovoltaics/hydrogen long term
Ok, Mr. Technical. If you want to get right down to it, Oil is Solar power as well because it came from the Sun and the Algea absorbed that energy and 'rotted' into Oil. You will probably point out that there are several other theories as to how this happened and that the one I mentioned is the wrong one, so incase you do I've mentioned that I'm aware some people think Oil came from dinosuars, etc.....In any case, if you want to be technical I should have said, photovoltaics instead of 'solar' power. So, congrats. The point is that same. That's the way to go long term.
While this is interesting as you've pointed out, I still think we ought to focus on Solar power in particular for third world nations. Solar is the real solution to the future energy production issues. I've found quotes for Solar power setups (including batteries for storage) for "large" houses that cost about $25,000. If you roll this into your home mortgage (assuming 5.8%), the extra cost per month is only about $120. This is probably a little bit higher than the electric bill, but it's at least in the ballpark for a large house. With some govt. subsidy and a continued drop in these prices, I really think it will soon be economically viable. This is really the way to go. As it is, it's much cheaper to do a solar setup than to pay for the whole grid infrustructure to be created for remote areas. This is why it's popoular in places like Africa that don't have well built out energy grids. Imagine if it the prices droped by 50% over the next ten years for this setup. Then it would really make sense to setup your own solar panels for energy. This would have dramatic effects on society. We could virtually eliminate most power plants including natural gas plants and nuclear. Their replacement would be an incredibly distributed grid of solar panels that can produce much more power than current forms of electricity generation. Solar power would only become more and more efficient and we'd have such an abundance of electricity for powering our dwellings that we could consider powering vehicles. This would require us to make more efficient cars that are lighter and have better batteries, but it's all possible and our dependance on foreign oil and polution would be gone. On top of that we will have tapped into an almost unlimited supply of energy that will never go away (as long as the Sun is out). We would also be energy self-reliant on an individual basis. The energy companies would have no power. We could trade energy amoungst ourselves. All we'd need is an energy broker, but their role would be limited to maintaining the grid and ensuring fair transactions occur between buyer and seller on the individual energy market.
with a much less expensive catalyst (between 10 and 50 times cheaper) than what is currently used.
Note: the catalyst is 10 - 50 times cheaper, not biodisel fuel itself, while the breakthrough is meaningful, the headline is misleading. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the total cost of producing biodisel is related to the cost of this catalyst.
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
You can do push with AJAX using persistant http connections using XMLHTTP. This is very useful and allows you to do basically any type of interactive application.
...know how to use javascript and XML in unison to produce yet another...
The interesting thing is....the X in AJAX which does stand for XML is not all that applicable. You don't need to use XML to be doing pure AJAX. X is just a sexy letter. I think that's the only reason it's in this acronym.
I did say, "almost" $0. I find it hard to believe that it's more expensive to download a song than it is to run brick and mortar stores accross the country.
Well, I suppose that's true, but the point is people have a certain buget for music. If they buy cds, they get 10 - 20 tracks. With this, if they played it right, people would spend about the same amount (or more) and reduce their distribution costs to nothing. As it is these music companies are worried about survival.
$2.50 per download. When a cd costs about $12 - $18. That means even for a cd with 10 tracks, the cost is $25. So, they lower their distribution cost to almost nothing and raise the price?!?!?! This is crazy. If they want people to not download the songs for free, why don't they make it affordable. If they charged a reasonable fee (like $0.25 per download, people would download songs like hotcakes around the world). Imagine the worldwide market of say 1 billion internet users and rising as opposed to the few people who will actually download this stuff.
You can talk about how it's not really the US government running things, but as long as US law binds ICANN, it is ultimately our government that has the power.
I guess I just don't see this as a concern. If the US government wanted to they could storm the data center that has the root servers and force them to block out Iran for example. Putting this in UN control will not change that fact. It will never happen because the concequences in terms of trade, etc would be too much of a deterant. This is like saying that because the ITER (Nuclear Fusion power plant research project) is in France, there's a possibility that the French somehow turn this into a bomb and blow up the US. I just don't see either of these scenarios playing out. That's why to me there's as little reason to put this under UN control.
Nope, sitting pretty in the land of the free. Hence my use of the phrase, "our method of governance" referring to our laissez-faire, entrepreneurial approach. But I don't seem to arbitrarily despise France either, so I'm not very American in that regard.
First of all, I don't arbitrarily despise France (as you may have guessed my name is French), but the point is (and I don't even think a Frenchman would disagree about this), in France the govt has more power than the US govt. and the corporations have less power than US corporations. I think we can at least agree on that right?
The implementation isn't important, the implications are. If those few sysadmins could make a mess of things, it makes other nations nervous.
Ok, I agree that these sys admins _could_ do a lot of damage. So, what do you think the UN will do if they're in charge? Hire magical sys admins that are incapable of doing a lot of damage? It would probably end up being the same sys admins, or people with similar qualifications. The same people will be capable of doing a lot of damage if the UN "runs the internet".
ICANN hasn't shit on anyone's lawn, but it certainly can in theory
This is your best point yet! So, given that ICANN hasn't done anything wrong, why would we want to turn this, as you called it: "helluva responsibility", over to an organization that _has_ done a number of things wrong?
ICann,...non-profit entity, is the international organization responsible for the management and oversight of the coordination of the Internets domain name system and its unique identifiers.
The ICANN Board and staff reflect the international nature of the organization. The staff hails from seven different countries (Australia, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Niger, the United Kingdom, and the United States), exhibiting fluency in more than 14 languages. Similarly, the Board represents twelve nationalities and is fluent in many languages. ICANN is in the process of opening offices in France, Belgium and Australia. Immediate internationalization and outreach plans call for physical ICANN presence in African, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Sun's Open Source credibility is increasing. Now that they've decided to open source everything, it will only improve more.
I don't think that Sun's recent Open Source moves are going to help either. What is the problem that they want to solve? until that statement doesn't involve the words "selling large servers" Sun will continue to spiral into oblivion.
Open sourcing their software portfolio generates a large base of developers that contribute to the quality of the products and maybe they will even reccomend Sun hardware to their CIO. It is really no different than OpenOffice.org. Basically you get a huge amount of goodwill assosiated with your brand. Then you can sell hardware and support. The big customers will not consider buying the software without the support contracts. This model has proven to work for companies like Redhat, Mysql, Suse and others as well.
The workings of government should be transparent to citizens.
In some cases it should be transparent, but in others, it shouldn't. For example, should the war plans which include information on a strike in a particular city within Iraq be transparent?
And if there's a law stating otherwise, it should be removed.
So, you're saying that any email, letter, conversation, etc in govt. should be 100% open. This is not realistic. No one will want to work for the govt. if they know their every word would be published as a book. This came up in the Roberts debate. Top tallent will refuse to express opinions if they know that their very formulation of that opinion could be taken out of context by the media. I think we need to keep the laws as they are. Currently, private communications within govt. can stay that way. I agree that govt. should not hide stuff from us, but if they are, we will find out. That's very different from saying that govt. can't have any private discussions about issues before stating public policy.
Yeah, urine flavor.
Hopefully there's not some sort of feedback loop in which the earthquake causes an the building to move which causes a greater earthquake in an endless cycle.
This University Prof. is coming out here saying that he's going to basically show that they are inept. I think he's going to have a hard time though. I mean who is this guy anyways? He may be smart. He may be good at designing laptops, but making 100 million laptops at a price less than one third that of the closest mass produced models is quite ambitious. Given that he has no experience doing this, I think he's likely to fail. There is already a trend for cheaper laptops as we speak. Some models are selling at below $400. I believe companies like Dell will release sub $100 laptops before this guy can ship 100 million.
Yes, I'm always amazed by the technology they used in that movie. How did they get John Travolta to look just like Nick Cage and vice-versa!?!?! Amazing. *sigh*
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I never liked packages. I like self extracting installs much better. jdk is a good example of this. It's a single .bin file. You execute and poof, you've got a working jdk installed.
municipal wi-fi. It is going to come down to a competition between municipal funded wi-fi vs. ad funded wi-fi, with the later ultimatly wining out. As computers and wi-fi hardware gets cheaper, we will definitly see ads be sufficient to fund the hardware/support needed. Corporations can sell ad space more efficiently than govt. so I think we'll see them win in the end when hardware gets cheap enough. For now, there's a short period of time where this model makes sense. In any case, this will be interesting.
"has been building and developing technology companies such as Altiris Inc. and SCO Group Inc." Yes, that SCO group.
Another thing this research proves is that despite the affordable deployment cost with Linux systems, and perhaps even security advantages,
Perhaps?!?!?! Yeah, perhaps Linux is cheaper than windows too. This guy wins the award for the understatement of the year.
OTOH photovoltaics and biodiesel are both ways of collecting and using solar energy
Hydrogen is a better storage mechanism than vegetable oil.
Photovoltaics cost much money (and also have heavy environmental costs)
My main point from my original post is that it's currently not economically feasable, but it's getting VERY close.
The only environmental costs of photovoltaics are in their production. After that they are a-ok. Their production costs energy. It's true that if we generate that energy from something that is dirty we have an environmental impact, but if we use solar energy that we've already brought online, we don't have any issues. This is what we should do. What it comes down to is: Do you think we can produce energy more efficiently using biological processes (biodisel)? Or can we produce energy more efficiently using purely mechanical processes (photovoltaics - with hydrogen storage mechanism). I bet one photovoltaics/hydrogen long term
Ok, Mr. Technical. If you want to get right down to it, Oil is Solar power as well because it came from the Sun and the Algea absorbed that energy and 'rotted' into Oil. You will probably point out that there are several other theories as to how this happened and that the one I mentioned is the wrong one, so incase you do I've mentioned that I'm aware some people think Oil came from dinosuars, etc.....In any case, if you want to be technical I should have said, photovoltaics instead of 'solar' power. So, congrats. The point is that same. That's the way to go long term.
While this is interesting as you've pointed out, I still think we ought to focus on Solar power in particular for third world nations. Solar is the real solution to the future energy production issues. I've found quotes for Solar power setups (including batteries for storage) for "large" houses that cost about $25,000. If you roll this into your home mortgage (assuming 5.8%), the extra cost per month is only about $120. This is probably a little bit higher than the electric bill, but it's at least in the ballpark for a large house. With some govt. subsidy and a continued drop in these prices, I really think it will soon be economically viable. This is really the way to go. As it is, it's much cheaper to do a solar setup than to pay for the whole grid infrustructure to be created for remote areas. This is why it's popoular in places like Africa that don't have well built out energy grids. Imagine if it the prices droped by 50% over the next ten years for this setup. Then it would really make sense to setup your own solar panels for energy. This would have dramatic effects on society. We could virtually eliminate most power plants including natural gas plants and nuclear. Their replacement would be an incredibly distributed grid of solar panels that can produce much more power than current forms of electricity generation. Solar power would only become more and more efficient and we'd have such an abundance of electricity for powering our dwellings that we could consider powering vehicles. This would require us to make more efficient cars that are lighter and have better batteries, but it's all possible and our dependance on foreign oil and polution would be gone. On top of that we will have tapped into an almost unlimited supply of energy that will never go away (as long as the Sun is out). We would also be energy self-reliant on an individual basis. The energy companies would have no power. We could trade energy amoungst ourselves. All we'd need is an energy broker, but their role would be limited to maintaining the grid and ensuring fair transactions occur between buyer and seller on the individual energy market.
with a much less expensive catalyst (between 10 and 50 times cheaper) than what is currently used.
Note: the catalyst is 10 - 50 times cheaper, not biodisel fuel itself, while the breakthrough is meaningful, the headline is misleading. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the total cost of producing biodisel is related to the cost of this catalyst.
You can do push with AJAX using persistant http connections using XMLHTTP. This is very useful and allows you to do basically any type of interactive application.
...know how to use javascript and XML in unison to produce yet another...
The interesting thing is....the X in AJAX which does stand for XML is not all that applicable. You don't need to use XML to be doing pure AJAX. X is just a sexy letter. I think that's the only reason it's in this acronym.
I did say, "almost" $0. I find it hard to believe that it's more expensive to download a song than it is to run brick and mortar stores accross the country.
Well, I suppose that's true, but the point is people have a certain buget for music. If they buy cds, they get 10 - 20 tracks. With this, if they played it right, people would spend about the same amount (or more) and reduce their distribution costs to nothing. As it is these music companies are worried about survival.
$2.50 per download. When a cd costs about $12 - $18. That means even for a cd with 10 tracks, the cost is $25. So, they lower their distribution cost to almost nothing and raise the price?!?!?! This is crazy. If they want people to not download the songs for free, why don't they make it affordable. If they charged a reasonable fee (like $0.25 per download, people would download songs like hotcakes around the world). Imagine the worldwide market of say 1 billion internet users and rising as opposed to the few people who will actually download this stuff.
You mean other than the $299 for XP professional and $199 for office?
You mean other than the $299 for XP Proffessional and the $199 for MS Office?
You can talk about how it's not really the US government running things, but as long as US law binds ICANN, it is ultimately our government that has the power.
I guess I just don't see this as a concern. If the US government wanted to they could storm the data center that has the root servers and force them to block out Iran for example. Putting this in UN control will not change that fact. It will never happen because the concequences in terms of trade, etc would be too much of a deterant. This is like saying that because the ITER (Nuclear Fusion power plant research project) is in France, there's a possibility that the French somehow turn this into a bomb and blow up the US. I just don't see either of these scenarios playing out. That's why to me there's as little reason to put this under UN control.
Nope, sitting pretty in the land of the free. Hence my use of the phrase, "our method of governance" referring to our laissez-faire, entrepreneurial approach. But I don't seem to arbitrarily despise France either, so I'm not very American in that regard.
First of all, I don't arbitrarily despise France (as you may have guessed my name is French), but the point is (and I don't even think a Frenchman would disagree about this), in France the govt has more power than the US govt. and the corporations have less power than US corporations. I think we can at least agree on that right?
The implementation isn't important, the implications are. If those few sysadmins could make a mess of things, it makes other nations nervous.
Ok, I agree that these sys admins _could_ do a lot of damage. So, what do you think the UN will do if they're in charge? Hire magical sys admins that are incapable of doing a lot of damage? It would probably end up being the same sys admins, or people with similar qualifications. The same people will be capable of doing a lot of damage if the UN "runs the internet".
ICANN hasn't shit on anyone's lawn, but it certainly can in theory
This is your best point yet! So, given that ICANN hasn't done anything wrong, why would we want to turn this, as you called it: "helluva responsibility", over to an organization that _has_ done a number of things wrong?
From the Icann.org:
...non-profit entity, is the international organization responsible for the management and oversight of the coordination of the Internets domain name system and its unique identifiers.
The ICANN Board and staff reflect the international nature of the organization. The staff hails from seven different countries (Australia, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Niger, the United Kingdom, and the United States), exhibiting fluency in more than 14 languages. Similarly, the Board represents twelve nationalities and is fluent in many languages. ICANN is in the process of opening offices in France, Belgium and Australia. Immediate internationalization and outreach plans call for physical ICANN presence in African, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
ICann,