The rise of PowerPoint for teaching is something I've been annoyed with for years. Honestly the best teaching tool my Professors ever used was the overhead transparency projector -- the type where the transparency was on a spool that the professor cranked to get a clean surface. This was far more legible then chalk, plus you could go crank the transparency spool in the opposite direction after class if you missed something. Not chalk dust either.
Powerpoint is annoying as professors tend to only put meaningless bullet points and skip working out the equations in real time, explaining as they go along. A good professor is interactive with the class, not just someone who reads from a script pointed at the screen. Sadly, this is way most (but not all) PowerPoint professors operate.
Like the iPods, the mechanics (structure) involved to make the battery as easy to remove as say, the macbook, would add a significant amount to the size of the unit. The battery latch on the macbook is roughly the size of a nickel. Would you like your ipod to be 1/8" thicker just to add a latch for the battery?
That just isn't true. Look at the bottom of a Macbook Pro and notice the little flap with two little screws -- behind that is where the user can easily replace the memory. The metal flap is
Apple may have their reasons for making a battery that can't be replaced but don't say they couldn't have added one of they wanted. If apple can figure out how to solve much more complex design and manufacturing problems, they could have figured out a way to make a replaceable battery and still kept the computer under 1".
I got FIOS installed a few days ago. We decided we didn't want cable TV service and 20/6Mbit for $45 is so much cheaper then the 6/2Mbit we were getting from Comcast for $57/month. From my experiences there seems to be a lot of disinformation about the Verizon install.
1. They didn't cut the existing copper to the house. The installer said they don't do that if there is more then one family or if the customer asks them not to. But even if they had I could still get phone only service over fiber for the same price as over copper. It doesn't matter much as we don't have a LAN lane, only cell phones.
2. They install a battery backup with the fiber that will keep it alive for 6+ hours if the power goes out. But honestly, most people have cordless phones and other phones that require 120v AC so they lose phone when the power goes out anyway. True, if you power goes out frequently and you need to use the phone then FIOS isn't for you. But most places like that are rural areas where FIOS isn't being installed anyway.
3. The worst part of FIOS is that we now need to pay for the 15 watts the transformer uses. This really does piss me off but even with the $30 a year it will cost me it is still a much better deal then Comcast. Oh, and I can still use Comcast for Internet/TV/Phone if I so I have not lost my choice of connections. I would need two separate coax runs if I wanted both at the same time though. The installer asked me if I wanted him to run new coax in the house which I declined.
I'm not overly impressed with the actual speed of FIOS now that we have it but it still is a better deal then Comcast. When Comcast becomes cheaper, I'll probably switch again. We have more competition now then we ever had in the past and it is saving us money.
There isn't one type of energy source that is the solution -- it is a little of everything. Small wind turbines that can be installed on top of buildings, on roofs, and in backyards will go a long way. Even if all it can do is cover the "base" electric need for most homes (the power a house needs when people are not home), this will be a major help. Solar cells on roofs and buildings will help too, more so now that the tech is starting to get better. Even if backyard generation could provide %15 of needed power, it would be a huge improvement. And most houses could stand to save a considerable amount by basic and cheap conservation. (New appliances, low power bulbs, better insulation, etc.) For large scale production, nuclear seems to be best of the worst. But in the future we need to think about how to get our power form as many sources as possible -- both on a large and micro scale.
There was a lot of talk a few months ago about how Florida is now trying to clean up millions of tires that were dumped off the coast in 1972 in order to create reefs.
Perhaps there is some way to use tires to make good reefs, but this certainly is not. Stuff like this shows that what might seems like a good use for trash may come back as an ever bigger problem years latter.
If they were test marketing it, they went far beyond Phily. I remember it being big in NJ and southern CT where I spent a lot of time. It seemed to be a response to the surge of popularly with the "Seattle" coffee movement. I even remember TV ads and such. I always assumed it was a national product that flopped big time. It was horrible, as I recall.
Shortly after that was Clear Pepsi and/or Coke -- a version that tasted the same but without the brown dye. Also very shortly lived, as I recall.
True, and I have spent a fair amount of money through Safari. What I like is that it lets me pick and choose what I need instead of buying an pricey book for only one chapter. The result: I get what I need, O'Reilly makes money, and the book authors make money. The best of both worlds.
Making books searchable (and buyable) will result in more money for everyone, not less. This is what Safari has shown.
Yeah, stand alone apps are great when you are in a car but what about all of us who need to plan for a trip knowing we can't take anything along? I'm frequently using the online map services to figure out a bike route to some location 10-15 miles way. I do have a handheld GPS but it take a long time to load, is slow, and is not something I want to take with me when I'm ridding across town to pick something up. At the same time I know I can't ride on certain roads (interstates) and there are certain turns I can make but cars can't. It would be so great to have a decent online service that could take that into consideration. I already print out a large map of the location I'm going so if I do get lost at least I have something to reference.
The parent poster was correct about the improvements google can make this system that much better then anything else. I have a feeling if the "beta" period goes well they will start to work on those features, but a little encouragement won't hurt.
A little screen, lack of searching, no playlists in playlists, and no listing of file names, to name a few. For almost all my thousands of MP3s on the device I have a different album, song, and artist. Try looking though your song list of 5000 for one song. It takes a long time and I find it annoying.
For most people the browser they have is great. For me it isn't. On my computer I still use a directory structure for my songs. I can see 50 directories at once and can have directories in directories. I also use a database for ID3 tags that allows searching and will show me the file names.
Sure, I could edit all the ID3 tags of all my songs, but not only would that take forever, I like the info they currently have. For most people the apple iPod Browser is great but not for all. If the ipod was an open platform for development then people could "scratch their itch" without resorting to running Linux, but Apple has made it clear that you should be happy with what they give you and if you are not, then you are doing something wrong. Well, I for one paid a lot of money for my ipod and it fails to do what I want well so I'm going to support people that can change that for me.
Anyway, that is my issue with it in a nutshell. For your sake, I'm glad you don't find the browser as annoying as I do. I just wish apple would open the platform so we could both be happy.
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef
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Piezo-Acoustic iPod Hack
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Honestly, I can think of a hundred valid reasons to run Linux on an iPod. I plan on doing it soon, now that this very creative hack has been accomplished.
We know the ipod CPU power and abilities (in the 4G ones and up) is might higher then what apple is using it for. I would love to see an alternative music/playlist browser, as the one they have sucks when you have thousands of songs that all have different artists, albums, etc. All my songs are in mp3 (sorry ogg) so I'm not really concerned about playback of other formats. I know the ipod linux team has a long way to go, but you think with so many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of ipods, at least a few people would be interested in hacking it to do more then what apple wants.
Look at the TI calculators. They might be intended for mathematics functions but people have written thouands of programs that do a ton of different things. Some are pretty stupid, true, but some do some helpfully tasks. And if you bought the hardware, why should you not use it to its fullest extent?
Yes, SecureID costs a fair amount now, but I suspect more people then you think would be willing to pay for it. (I would have no problem paying $50/yr to know someone can't steal my CC number or PIN.) Not to mention the price would decrease if millions of Americans had one as opposed to the somewhat limited usage right now. And considering how many millions of dollars banks and credit companies lose to such scams, they might be getting to the point where it is cheaper to issue ScecureIDs (or something similar) then lose the money due to ID thefts.
For those of you who don't remember, when MSNBC first went on-air (1996?) all the screen shots they displayed on the network showed them using Netscape. (And they would cut to a shot of a computer screen very frequently.) Of course, this was at the beginning on the browser war when MS was still the minority, but my friends and I got a good laugh knowing MS had spent some huge amount of money for the channel and yet they will were not using IE. It took them a week to figure it out.
You are right. I was in a focus group a while ago (1999) for a Fiber-to-the-Home test by a large cable op. In the final group meeting they asked the 10 of us if they should continue the rollout. I was the most technical of the group.
Everyone else was very enthusiastic about it. My response was that no one in their right mind would pay more for fiber and a trench in there front yard if the speeds would not be much faster then DSL/cable and the usage was just as restricted. For that reason I thought it was a bad idea. (It really wasn't all that impressive compared to my superfast cablevision cable ISP.)
So yes, I agree. Either they really need to do better at focus groups or they need to ask people who have a clue about tech and know how much various services are really worth. (Fast internet on a small phone without getting a USB/RJ45 IP and paying $$$ is NOT worth it and will fail.)
Agriculture may employee less then %3 of the workforce but it accounts for a hell of a lot more then that in output. (How much dose the government spend in farm subsidies?) We [ADM] grow more food now then ever before.
The pro lighting story is interesting (CNN is playing the story in rotation) but I hardly think that aesthetics are going to be the next "Big industry". There has always been cottage industries performing limited-use services for the very rich. These people probably have a skilled craftsmen working on one part of the house or another on a weekly basis...
I have known a few truckers who work their own rigs. (As opposed to driving in a fleet.) First off, a good long-distance truck driver can make a reasonable sum of money. Not that of an Enron CEO, but enough to buy a laptop and not sweat it. Secondly, most of them are very high-tech as it is. If you have ever seen the inside of a modern cab, you would know. The people I know spend a lot of time planning the route in such a way to use the least fuel/tolls as possible.
So I think wireless internet would be a big hit. As it is, you would not need more then a few APs to cover a lot of the rest/truck stops on the major interstates in the middle of the country. And a lot more then truckers would be interested in them.
I'm not sure what your link to google is supposed to mean, but I think it is about the fact the British government owns the BBC. Normally I would agree with you, but because everyone in the world knows that BCC is owned by the government, it gets a lot more scrutiny and criticism. The result? Much better reporting which is much less slanted then things like FoxNews.This is why many Americans turned to the BBC during the war to get better coverage. Many people wrongly assume that foxnews is not related to the government and therefor reports more honestly. Yet as we can all see, this is not the case at all. In fact Rupert Murdock is a friend of GWB and will not let his news network report negatively on the Bush admin. (He has been quoted as saying this.) It would not be possible for the BBC to say the same thing because of all the public outcry.
Note, I'm not saying the BBC is great or unbiased. It would be better if the BBC was scrutinized without being owned by the government. But the BBC is still a much better place for news then the three major cable network of the US, which are not owned by the FEDs.
OK, where is the proof. Every time there is a story on Microsoft/Xbox someone has to come out and say "They lose money on everything but windows/office." I don't buy that for a second. MS is huge company with lots of cash. It can afford to lose on some ventures (Xbox) but they make a hell of a lot of money on many other things. Server apps, business aps, other homes apps. MS makes a lot.
Before pushing the standard MS lines, try to provide some proof, as I have never read (becides from slashdot) that MS loses money on everything but Win/Office. I don't love MS, but I hate posts pushing "facts" which make little logical sence when there is little proof to back them up. Just becuase we may not like MS dosen't mean they don't have a lot of products making a lot of cash.
Over last summer I took a road trip from New Jersey to Vancouver, B.C. I took my laptop and barrowed a freinds GPS. I had the time of my life. No, I didn't play games and the only music I played over it was 3-hour radio archives.
What the Laptop/GPS allowed me to do is really plan my route and not worry about having a ton of maps. I could zoom in on my location or see myself in perspective. I know some people might say "Get a handheld GPS" but honstly a laptop with CDs of Maps and good software was what was needed. A small GPS screen and limited storage just won't do.
So I would say I enjoyed my trip much better with the laptop, GPS, and ability to go on back roads and not get lost. I would have stayed on I-80 had I not had it....
Google has by in large done good thing for searching and the internet in general. They showed that you don't need $100 million ad budgets and hundreds of images. They provide a very good service to users (Search, Groups, etc) and they make a good profit at it. Their interface is very clean and neat, fast loading, and works with allmost everything. No only is their advertising not annoying like most sites, it is sometimes very helpfull. I click on google "placement" ads and never click on banner ads. They provide good searches for things like linux and most major universities. They are a "good" company, as far as companies go.
The effects of google on the internet can been seen. I have seen many sites trying to get away from the thousands of banners in favor of clean neat data in the google manner.
If this new company does all of this and provide better searches, then I will use them. But if they place ads in searches without making it very clear they are ads (unlike google) and use some ad-ridden interface and still "lead" then this won't be good for internet in general.
I like the google school of thaught when it comes to a internet company. Even if google fails, I would like to see this concept continue to do so well in the marketplace and with technical users.
I know many cities, small and large, ban the ridding of bicycles on the sidewalks. The reasoning behind this decision is often becuase it is hard to stop a bicycle and there is a safty risk riding one when people are comming out of stores.
I don't know if I agree with many of these bans (I like a bike a lot and sometimes you need to ride on the sidewalk) but there is some logic behind this decision. I think the idea of banning anything electric powered (becides wheelchairs, etc) on the sidewalk might not be a bad idea so long as room is available on the steet. I would hate to have to get hit when I was walking to a store becuase someone wanting to ride their segway at 12mph. (That would still hurt a lot if it hit you.)
Eliot Spitzer is one of the few people in this country which seems to be doing his job right when it comes to justice and protecting consumers. While this is good, most people will remember him for going after Merrill Lynch for all types of charges related to fraud that the federal goverment wanted to overlook. His state office is doing more then federal offices like SEC and even aspects of DOJ. But what has ge gotten in return?
After Enron & Worldcom went down in flames and congress scrambled to enact some sort of legislation that made it look like they were trying to fix the problems, they included clauses which makes it very hard for states to go after companies in cases like Eliot Spitzer did with Merrill Lynch. Lobbists & Feds knew that if states have active people like Spitzer, it might risk the good system of oversights the federal goverment is becoming so good at.
So I agree, make Eliot Spitzer a Supreme Court Justice. I'm sure many other reasonable citizens who like their rights being protected would agree. But somehow I don't think Congress would ever elect anyone who has as much guts and insight as Spitzer. He is simply to great of a risk to the people with the real money.
I've been using pine for about 7 years. I found out about it when I got my first linux install, in 1995. Not long after that I got an ISP which gave a free Unix shell account (via dialup/telnet) with the PPP account (you could buy just the shell account if you wanted.) Since it took a few days for the PPP to start working and the shell account was ready right away I started using pine and liked it.
Now at my final year at my huge university it is still what I use. It is very quick, very small, and I can get to it using every differant computer I use. (I use a *lot* of differant computers.) I see absolutly no advantage that a GUI mail client offers me. I use procmail for spam anyway, and I don't exactly have the most complex mail needs. Pine just works well and I have never said, "Oh, If only I could be able to do X".
So that is why I still use pine. Most of my freinds use it too. In a few months when I leave college I will just setup fetchmail and continue to ssh into my own box to check mail with pine.
And speaking of mutt, it is not installed on the student unix cluster my school maintains so I have never had the chance to use it.
I'll admit I haven't read the artical, but this is what they do at the University I attend:
There are several levels of computing resources. Everyone gets an account on an AIX cluster, students in more advanced classes get an account on a SUN cluster, and spesical people get accounts on the high end CRAY and other supercomputers. Once you get an account on one of thoes computers, you are given a certian amount of processing time. (300 Minutes by default or something like that. You can get more.) You use up your minutes as you run more and longer programs.
IBM could do something like charge $100 for an account on one of their supercomputers. For that you get, say, 50 Gig transfer. Then you pay per computing minute you use. This solve issue 1 in your problem.
As for calling it a utility, it won't be a natural monopoly the way that the cable/phone/electric compony is. SUN/SGI could be easy competitors as they don't exactly need to run a cable to your office to allow you to use their mainframes. Calling it a "Utility" is more of a marketing ploy then it is when we call the power company a utilty, so I don't think spesific regulation will be needed.
I'm not exactly sure why anyone would be against this. IBM will still sell supercomputers, I'm sure. They are just trying to capture the small part of the market where a compony has a need for computing power but dosen't have so much need (or money) to spend hundred of thouands on a super computer. And I'm sure people know that there is a difference between a cluster of PIII's a supercomputer.
I disagree with the RIAA/DCMA on allmost everything, but you need to think about what your saying.
A Major FM radio station still needs to pay a *lot* of cash for transmitters, FCC fees, power, etc. If a "major" radio station had only 7 listeners, the cost per listener per song would be greatly higher then for a small webcaster paying CARP rates. I know as a fact a small NJ/NY non-profit FM station with a volenteer staff just makes it by with a $600,000.00 budget. Thats a lot of listeners/bandwidth if they were only webcasting.
Of course, radio can scale well without increasing costs whereas webcasting (bandwidth, CARP) can not. One extrea listener on FM costs nothing while it costs a little more on webcasting.
But lets not forget what we're talking about mainly is small webcasters being hurt. The reason many small webcasters are webcasters is becuase they could never afford the costs of actully getting FCC licenced. (Even if the equipment and music was free.)
What we need is some sort of fair flat rate or percentage rate fee for webcasting. The recent bill, while still unfair to many groups, is closer to this then the orginal CARP rates. We should still push for more fairness for small non-profit webcasters, but to imply that FM is cheaper or that webcasters should pay absolutly nothing is just wrong.
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The rise of PowerPoint for teaching is something I've been annoyed with for years. Honestly the best teaching tool my Professors ever used was the overhead transparency projector -- the type where the transparency was on a spool that the professor cranked to get a clean surface. This was far more legible then chalk, plus you could go crank the transparency spool in the opposite direction after class if you missed something. Not chalk dust either.
Powerpoint is annoying as professors tend to only put meaningless bullet points and skip working out the equations in real time, explaining as they go along. A good professor is interactive with the class, not just someone who reads from a script pointed at the screen. Sadly, this is way most (but not all) PowerPoint professors operate.
That just isn't true. Look at the bottom of a Macbook Pro and notice the little flap with two little screws -- behind that is where the user can easily replace the memory. The metal flap is
Apple may have their reasons for making a battery that can't be replaced but don't say they couldn't have added one of they wanted. If apple can figure out how to solve much more complex design and manufacturing problems, they could have figured out a way to make a replaceable battery and still kept the computer under 1".
I got FIOS installed a few days ago. We decided we didn't want cable TV service and 20/6Mbit for $45 is so much cheaper then the 6/2Mbit we were getting from Comcast for $57/month. From my experiences there seems to be a lot of disinformation about the Verizon install.
1. They didn't cut the existing copper to the house. The installer said they don't do that if there is more then one family or if the customer asks them not to. But even if they had I could still get phone only service over fiber for the same price as over copper. It doesn't matter much as we don't have a LAN lane, only cell phones.
2. They install a battery backup with the fiber that will keep it alive for 6+ hours if the power goes out. But honestly, most people have cordless phones and other phones that require 120v AC so they lose phone when the power goes out anyway. True, if you power goes out frequently and you need to use the phone then FIOS isn't for you. But most places like that are rural areas where FIOS isn't being installed anyway.
3. The worst part of FIOS is that we now need to pay for the 15 watts the transformer uses. This really does piss me off but even with the $30 a year it will cost me it is still a much better deal then Comcast. Oh, and I can still use Comcast for Internet/TV/Phone if I so I have not lost my choice of connections. I would need two separate coax runs if I wanted both at the same time though. The installer asked me if I wanted him to run new coax in the house which I declined.
I'm not overly impressed with the actual speed of FIOS now that we have it but it still is a better deal then Comcast. When Comcast becomes cheaper, I'll probably switch again. We have more competition now then we ever had in the past and it is saving us money.
There isn't one type of energy source that is the solution -- it is a little of everything. Small wind turbines that can be installed on top of buildings, on roofs, and in backyards will go a long way. Even if all it can do is cover the "base" electric need for most homes (the power a house needs when people are not home), this will be a major help. Solar cells on roofs and buildings will help too, more so now that the tech is starting to get better. Even if backyard generation could provide %15 of needed power, it would be a huge improvement. And most houses could stand to save a considerable amount by basic and cheap conservation. (New appliances, low power bulbs, better insulation, etc.) For large scale production, nuclear seems to be best of the worst. But in the future we need to think about how to get our power form as many sources as possible -- both on a large and micro scale.
There was a lot of talk a few months ago about how Florida is now trying to clean up millions of tires that were dumped off the coast in 1972 in order to create reefs. Perhaps there is some way to use tires to make good reefs, but this certainly is not. Stuff like this shows that what might seems like a good use for trash may come back as an ever bigger problem years latter.
If they were test marketing it, they went far beyond Phily. I remember it being big in NJ and southern CT where I spent a lot of time. It seemed to be a response to the surge of popularly with the "Seattle" coffee movement. I even remember TV ads and such. I always assumed it was a national product that flopped big time. It was horrible, as I recall. Shortly after that was Clear Pepsi and/or Coke -- a version that tasted the same but without the brown dye. Also very shortly lived, as I recall.
True, and I have spent a fair amount of money through Safari. What I like is that it lets me pick and choose what I need instead of buying an pricey book for only one chapter. The result: I get what I need, O'Reilly makes money, and the book authors make money. The best of both worlds.
Making books searchable (and buyable) will result in more money for everyone, not less. This is what Safari has shown.
I think that is the RIAA wet dream -- to have every web page point to it. Don't they belive the only way to save music is to kill the web?
Yeah, stand alone apps are great when you are in a car but what about all of us who need to plan for a trip knowing we can't take anything along? I'm frequently using the online map services to figure out a bike route to some location 10-15 miles way. I do have a handheld GPS but it take a long time to load, is slow, and is not something I want to take with me when I'm ridding across town to pick something up. At the same time I know I can't ride on certain roads (interstates) and there are certain turns I can make but cars can't. It would be so great to have a decent online service that could take that into consideration. I already print out a large map of the location I'm going so if I do get lost at least I have something to reference.
The parent poster was correct about the improvements google can make this system that much better then anything else. I have a feeling if the "beta" period goes well they will start to work on those features, but a little encouragement won't hurt.
A little screen, lack of searching, no playlists in playlists, and no listing of file names, to name a few. For almost all my thousands of MP3s on the device I have a different album, song, and artist. Try looking though your song list of 5000 for one song. It takes a long time and I find it annoying.
For most people the browser they have is great. For me it isn't. On my computer I still use a directory structure for my songs. I can see 50 directories at once and can have directories in directories. I also use a database for ID3 tags that allows searching and will show me the file names.
Sure, I could edit all the ID3 tags of all my songs, but not only would that take forever, I like the info they currently have. For most people the apple iPod Browser is great but not for all. If the ipod was an open platform for development then people could "scratch their itch" without resorting to running Linux, but Apple has made it clear that you should be happy with what they give you and if you are not, then you are doing something wrong. Well, I for one paid a lot of money for my ipod and it fails to do what I want well so I'm going to support people that can change that for me.
Anyway, that is my issue with it in a nutshell. For your sake, I'm glad you don't find the browser as annoying as I do. I just wish apple would open the platform so we could both be happy.
Honestly, I can think of a hundred valid reasons to run Linux on an iPod. I plan on doing it soon, now that this very creative hack has been accomplished.
We know the ipod CPU power and abilities (in the 4G ones and up) is might higher then what apple is using it for. I would love to see an alternative music/playlist browser, as the one they have sucks when you have thousands of songs that all have different artists, albums, etc. All my songs are in mp3 (sorry ogg) so I'm not really concerned about playback of other formats. I know the ipod linux team has a long way to go, but you think with so many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of ipods, at least a few people would be interested in hacking it to do more then what apple wants.
Look at the TI calculators. They might be intended for mathematics functions but people have written thouands of programs that do a ton of different things. Some are pretty stupid, true, but some do some helpfully tasks. And if you bought the hardware, why should you not use it to its fullest extent?
Yes, SecureID costs a fair amount now, but I suspect more people then you think would be willing to pay for it. (I would have no problem paying $50/yr to know someone can't steal my CC number or PIN.) Not to mention the price would decrease if millions of Americans had one as opposed to the somewhat limited usage right now. And considering how many millions of dollars banks and credit companies lose to such scams, they might be getting to the point where it is cheaper to issue ScecureIDs (or something similar) then lose the money due to ID thefts.
For those of you who don't remember, when MSNBC first went on-air (1996?) all the screen shots they displayed on the network showed them using Netscape. (And they would cut to a shot of a computer screen very frequently.) Of course, this was at the beginning on the browser war when MS was still the minority, but my friends and I got a good laugh knowing MS had spent some huge amount of money for the channel and yet they will were not using IE. It took them a week to figure it out.
Here is a Business week artical about that:
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/39/b349417.htm
You are right. I was in a focus group a while ago (1999) for a Fiber-to-the-Home test by a large cable op. In the final group meeting they asked the 10 of us if they should continue the rollout. I was the most technical of the group.
Everyone else was very enthusiastic about it. My response was that no one in their right mind would pay more for fiber and a trench in there front yard if the speeds would not be much faster then DSL/cable and the usage was just as restricted. For that reason I thought it was a bad idea. (It really wasn't all that impressive compared to my superfast cablevision cable ISP.)
So yes, I agree. Either they really need to do better at focus groups or they need to ask people who have a clue about tech and know how much various services are really worth. (Fast internet on a small phone without getting a USB/RJ45 IP and paying $$$ is NOT worth it and will fail.)
Agriculture may employee less then %3 of the workforce but it accounts for a hell of a lot more then that in output. (How much dose the government spend in farm subsidies?) We [ADM] grow more food now then ever before.
The pro lighting story is interesting (CNN is playing the story in rotation) but I hardly think that aesthetics are going to be the next "Big industry". There has always been cottage industries performing limited-use services for the very rich. These people probably have a skilled craftsmen working on one part of the house or another on a weekly basis...
I have known a few truckers who work their own rigs. (As opposed to driving in a fleet.) First off, a good long-distance truck driver can make a reasonable sum of money. Not that of an Enron CEO, but enough to buy a laptop and not sweat it. Secondly, most of them are very high-tech as it is. If you have ever seen the inside of a modern cab, you would know. The people I know spend a lot of time planning the route in such a way to use the least fuel/tolls as possible.
So I think wireless internet would be a big hit. As it is, you would not need more then a few APs to cover a lot of the rest/truck stops on the major interstates in the middle of the country. And a lot more then truckers would be interested in them.
I'm not sure what your link to google is supposed to mean, but I think it is about the fact the British government owns the BBC. Normally I would agree with you, but because everyone in the world knows that BCC is owned by the government, it gets a lot more scrutiny and criticism. The result? Much better reporting which is much less slanted then things like FoxNews.This is why many Americans turned to the BBC during the war to get better coverage. Many people wrongly assume that foxnews is not related to the government and therefor reports more honestly. Yet as we can all see, this is not the case at all. In fact Rupert Murdock is a friend of GWB and will not let his news network report negatively on the Bush admin. (He has been quoted as saying this.) It would not be possible for the BBC to say the same thing because of all the public outcry.
Note, I'm not saying the BBC is great or unbiased. It would be better if the BBC was scrutinized without being owned by the government. But the BBC is still a much better place for news then the three major cable network of the US, which are not owned by the FEDs.
OK, where is the proof. Every time there is a story on Microsoft/Xbox someone has to come out and say "They lose money on everything but windows/office." I don't buy that for a second. MS is huge company with lots of cash. It can afford to lose on some ventures (Xbox) but they make a hell of a lot of money on many other things. Server apps, business aps, other homes apps. MS makes a lot.
Before pushing the standard MS lines, try to provide some proof, as I have never read (becides from slashdot) that MS loses money on everything but Win/Office. I don't love MS, but I hate posts pushing "facts" which make little logical sence when there is little proof to back them up. Just becuase we may not like MS dosen't mean they don't have a lot of products making a lot of cash.
Over last summer I took a road trip from New Jersey to Vancouver, B.C. I took my laptop and barrowed a freinds GPS. I had the time of my life. No, I didn't play games and the only music I played over it was 3-hour radio archives.
What the Laptop/GPS allowed me to do is really plan my route and not worry about having a ton of maps. I could zoom in on my location or see myself in perspective. I know some people might say "Get a handheld GPS" but honstly a laptop with CDs of Maps and good software was what was needed. A small GPS screen and limited storage just won't do.
So I would say I enjoyed my trip much better with the laptop, GPS, and ability to go on back roads and not get lost. I would have stayed on I-80 had I not had it....
Well, I care.
Google has by in large done good thing for searching and the internet in general. They showed that you don't need $100 million ad budgets and hundreds of images. They provide a very good service to users (Search, Groups, etc) and they make a good profit at it. Their interface is very clean and neat, fast loading, and works with allmost everything. No only is their advertising not annoying like most sites, it is sometimes very helpfull. I click on google "placement" ads and never click on banner ads. They provide good searches for things like linux and most major universities. They are a "good" company, as far as companies go.
The effects of google on the internet can been seen. I have seen many sites trying to get away from the thousands of banners in favor of clean neat data in the google manner.
If this new company does all of this and provide better searches, then I will use them. But if they place ads in searches without making it very clear they are ads (unlike google) and use some ad-ridden interface and still "lead" then this won't be good for internet in general.
I like the google school of thaught when it comes to a internet company. Even if google fails, I would like to see this concept continue to do so well in the marketplace and with technical users.
I know many cities, small and large, ban the ridding of bicycles on the sidewalks. The reasoning behind this decision is often becuase it is hard to stop a bicycle and there is a safty risk riding one when people are comming out of stores.
I don't know if I agree with many of these bans (I like a bike a lot and sometimes you need to ride on the sidewalk) but there is some logic behind this decision. I think the idea of banning anything electric powered (becides wheelchairs, etc) on the sidewalk might not be a bad idea so long as room is available on the steet. I would hate to have to get hit when I was walking to a store becuase someone wanting to ride their segway at 12mph. (That would still hurt a lot if it hit you.)
Eliot Spitzer is one of the few people in this country which seems to be doing his job right when it comes to justice and protecting consumers. While this is good, most people will remember him for going after Merrill Lynch for all types of charges related to fraud that the federal goverment wanted to overlook. His state office is doing more then federal offices like SEC and even aspects of DOJ. But what has ge gotten in return?
After Enron & Worldcom went down in flames and congress scrambled to enact some sort of legislation that made it look like they were trying to fix the problems, they included clauses which makes it very hard for states to go after companies in cases like Eliot Spitzer did with Merrill Lynch. Lobbists & Feds knew that if states have active people like Spitzer, it might risk the good system of oversights the federal goverment is becoming so good at.
So I agree, make Eliot Spitzer a Supreme Court Justice. I'm sure many other reasonable citizens who like their rights being protected would agree. But somehow I don't think Congress would ever elect anyone who has as much guts and insight as Spitzer. He is simply to great of a risk to the people with the real money.
I've been using pine for about 7 years. I found out about it when I got my first linux install, in 1995. Not long after that I got an ISP which gave a free Unix shell account (via dialup/telnet) with the PPP account (you could buy just the shell account if you wanted.) Since it took a few days for the PPP to start working and the shell account was ready right away I started using pine and liked it.
Now at my final year at my huge university it is still what I use. It is very quick, very small, and I can get to it using every differant computer I use. (I use a *lot* of differant computers.) I see absolutly no advantage that a GUI mail client offers me. I use procmail for spam anyway, and I don't exactly have the most complex mail needs. Pine just works well and I have never said, "Oh, If only I could be able to do X".
So that is why I still use pine. Most of my freinds use it too. In a few months when I leave college I will just setup fetchmail and continue to ssh into my own box to check mail with pine.
And speaking of mutt, it is not installed on the student unix cluster my school maintains so I have never had the chance to use it.
I'll admit I haven't read the artical, but this is what they do at the University I attend:
There are several levels of computing resources. Everyone gets an account on an AIX cluster, students in more advanced classes get an account on a SUN cluster, and spesical people get accounts on the high end CRAY and other supercomputers. Once you get an account on one of thoes computers, you are given a certian amount of processing time. (300 Minutes by default or something like that. You can get more.) You use up your minutes as you run more and longer programs.
IBM could do something like charge $100 for an account on one of their supercomputers. For that you get, say, 50 Gig transfer. Then you pay per computing minute you use. This solve issue 1 in your problem.
As for calling it a utility, it won't be a natural monopoly the way that the cable/phone/electric compony is. SUN/SGI could be easy competitors as they don't exactly need to run a cable to your office to allow you to use their mainframes. Calling it a "Utility" is more of a marketing ploy then it is when we call the power company a utilty, so I don't think spesific regulation will be needed.
I'm not exactly sure why anyone would be against this. IBM will still sell supercomputers, I'm sure. They are just trying to capture the small part of the market where a compony has a need for computing power but dosen't have so much need (or money) to spend hundred of thouands on a super computer. And I'm sure people know that there is a difference between a cluster of PIII's a supercomputer.
I disagree with the RIAA/DCMA on allmost everything, but you need to think about what your saying.
A Major FM radio station still needs to pay a *lot* of cash for transmitters, FCC fees, power, etc. If a "major" radio station had only 7 listeners, the cost per listener per song would be greatly higher then for a small webcaster paying CARP rates. I know as a fact a small NJ/NY non-profit FM station with a volenteer staff just makes it by with a $600,000.00 budget. Thats a lot of listeners/bandwidth if they were only webcasting.
Of course, radio can scale well without increasing costs whereas webcasting (bandwidth, CARP) can not. One extrea listener on FM costs nothing while it costs a little more on webcasting.
But lets not forget what we're talking about mainly is small webcasters being hurt. The reason many small webcasters are webcasters is becuase they could never afford the costs of actully getting FCC licenced. (Even if the equipment and music was free.)
What we need is some sort of fair flat rate or percentage rate fee for webcasting. The recent bill, while still unfair to many groups, is closer to this then the orginal CARP rates. We should still push for more fairness for small non-profit webcasters, but to imply that FM is cheaper or that webcasters should pay absolutly nothing is just wrong.