Yeah, I tend to view 'china brand' products as being like software demos. You pay next to nothing for them, and you expect them to work maybe twice before they die. Case in point, I built a chicken coop recently, and I bought a $20 staple gun to fix the chicken wire in place. It choked on probably 1/3 of the staples I ever put through it, and now that the coop's finished I'll never use it again - but it's cemented in my mind that NEXT time I have a project, a decent quality staple gun will be a sound investment because it's going to be useful.:)
As for the comment about luxury tech vs old Jaguars, you're quite right. That's why you build your own from quality commodity parts, or if you can't (as with your laptop case) you buy something mid-range that's made in large quantities, so hopefully they've amortised a larger engineering cost over the increased volume. Same with cars - you want something nice, get a moderate-volume sports car and mod it until it's fast and comfortable enough for you.
But if the Chinese factory leaks your specs and a knock-off is released into your market, reducing your profits, that impacts your savings.
Leaks your specs? Nah, they just do another complete production run using the same factory line that they used to build your order.
When it becomes interesting is when they actually tweak your design a little, add a few more features that you missed. It seems to me that a totally free market like this actually drives innovation far harder than a traditional, copyright-and-patent-protected market because if the only market exclusivity your product has is the three months it takes your competitors to clone it, you'd damn well better come up with something new and _good_ in those three months to stay ahead of the curve. I would say that in 10 to 20 years' time, Chinese products will be more advanced than 'western' ones, purely due to this incredible market force.
Plus the Russians will always be more relaxed because, you know, they've got cool tunes to listen to.
Actually, I think lack of respect for patents and copyright laws is probably one of the big drivers in the Chinese economic boom. Because there's no artificial limitations on what you can build and sell, all manner of artefacts are effectively 'open source'.
Isn't there a small issue with this being a government-funded space mission, and VLC being somewhat in breach of the DMCA or software patents or something due to its inclusion of a not-paid-up DVD decoder? I may be out of date on this issue, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have VLC for the same reason they wouldn't encode mp3s with LAME.
Fair enough.:) And as your example proves, natural gas is far, far cheaper to heat with than electricity. Assuming half of your $206 was service fees etc. that's still 7000kWh worth of heating, and assuming you pay the same prices I pay (~US$0.10 per kWh), it'd cost you about 3.5 times as much to heat with electricity. Go go gas! (Or wood fired, which is not only pretty close to carbon neutral but which gives you a chance to play with axes and chainsaws! You can't lose!)
Dunno if it'd quite be worth repainting the roof if you have decent insulation, though.:P
You only used 929 kWh of _electrical_ energy. Natural gas is sold per MMBTU, or million BTU of heat. I don't know your local market price but global prices are around US$4 per MMBTU, or roughly 264 MJ (73kWh) per USD. So your $206 worth of natural gas (assuming that doesn't include a service fee, just the gas) provided up to 15,000 kWh of heat.
Okay, I'll bite. Why do you think a non-expanding government is a fundamental human right? Remember, a dictatorship is one of the smallest governments imaginable.
I'd wager that his definition of 'expanding government' has nothing to do with the number of public servants employed, and everything to do with what powers the government grants itself.
Suspected terrorists are not prisoners of war. The "war on terror" is a fabrication which can be extended indefinitely as long as there is one nutjob on the planet who has the United States in their sights.
At an old job of mine I was asked to build a GIS workstation. We had $3k left in the budget and not long to spend it, but my boss could only authorise expenditure up to $1.5k without getting approval from higher management, so I had to spread the parts across multiple invoices.:P
I saw some rain ahead, and planned to pull over at the next place I could. Within 30 seconds I was drenched, as I pushed over to the shoulder as fast as I could.
There's your mistake - you should have planted your foot and gone fast enough that the raindrops didn't get into your car.;)
Well, I don't know if that'd work for your model of car but I know that in my car, the rear windscreen is nearly horizontal and it still doesn't get wet if I'm doing over about 60km/h no matter how hard it's raining.
You're going to be a lot more worried about the lime in the cement than the heat given off by it curing. Lime can give you some pretty nasty burns on skin, let alone corneas.
What I don't understand is why, in TFS, they claim "...since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface." What the hell does the method of focussing have to do with the projection surface? I mean, laser projector is cool but it doesn't change the laws o' physics, captain. Small diode lasers only tend to stay coherent for a short distance (sometimes only inches) so this should work just as well with any collimated light source. I'd be interested to know how it scans, though - rotating mirrors seems a bit risky in a device that people are going to be moving around while it's on.
It's a whore when I'm posting from work. And here's some links for which I likewise didn't want my daring googlation appearing in company logs... (unsurprisingly NSFW)
+1, Please God Let Me Stop Using Borland Turbo C++
I've always used MSVC++ for Windows development, and it's excellent. There are occasional technical glitches but in general the interface, workflow etc. are great... and it's never been highlighted to me more than now, when I'm working with Turbo C++. You can clearly see the divide between the MS products that their "B Arc" programmers worked on (Office 07 for starters, eew) and the products that their core tech team worked on.
When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc.
If you're talking about a project, 10,000 lines is not big. A single _file_ of 10k lines is big, but why for the love of god would you do that?
Clearly thought out code structure will keep your project pretty easy to read and work with up to maybe 20-30k lines (more if you're smarter than me, less if you're working on unfamiliar code). After that, an IDE becomes increasingly helpful because it saves you time searching for variable definitions, members of structs/classes etc. The application I'm working on (accounting software yay) at my current job has probably ~2mil lines of code, and is small in comparison with the codebase at my old job (an MMO game client).
In the broadest view, any restrictive state definitions of marriage would be discriminatory.
Aren't they? Assuming the marriages take place between consenting adults, that is. Even then, this is still discrimination, but discrimination against people who take child brides (or grooms) is condoned by our ethical system.
Well, your post there was at least fondling the English language, if not quite all-out raping it. Not that that qualifies, since said language is hundreds of years old, but still...
Because all those 3D animators should totally get on to fixing that server code, right? The guy who's worked for years honing his skill at storyboarding ought to be annoying^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhelping the engine programmers while they try and fix that stupid graphical bug, right?
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Yeah, I tend to view 'china brand' products as being like software demos. You pay next to nothing for them, and you expect them to work maybe twice before they die. Case in point, I built a chicken coop recently, and I bought a $20 staple gun to fix the chicken wire in place. It choked on probably 1/3 of the staples I ever put through it, and now that the coop's finished I'll never use it again - but it's cemented in my mind that NEXT time I have a project, a decent quality staple gun will be a sound investment because it's going to be useful. :)
As for the comment about luxury tech vs old Jaguars, you're quite right. That's why you build your own from quality commodity parts, or if you can't (as with your laptop case) you buy something mid-range that's made in large quantities, so hopefully they've amortised a larger engineering cost over the increased volume. Same with cars - you want something nice, get a moderate-volume sports car and mod it until it's fast and comfortable enough for you.
But if the Chinese factory leaks your specs and a knock-off is released into your market, reducing your profits, that impacts your savings.
Leaks your specs? Nah, they just do another complete production run using the same factory line that they used to build your order.
When it becomes interesting is when they actually tweak your design a little, add a few more features that you missed. It seems to me that a totally free market like this actually drives innovation far harder than a traditional, copyright-and-patent-protected market because if the only market exclusivity your product has is the three months it takes your competitors to clone it, you'd damn well better come up with something new and _good_ in those three months to stay ahead of the curve. I would say that in 10 to 20 years' time, Chinese products will be more advanced than 'western' ones, purely due to this incredible market force.
Plus the Russians will always be more relaxed because, you know, they've got cool tunes to listen to.
Actually, I think lack of respect for patents and copyright laws is probably one of the big drivers in the Chinese economic boom. Because there's no artificial limitations on what you can build and sell, all manner of artefacts are effectively 'open source'.
Isn't there a small issue with this being a government-funded space mission, and VLC being somewhat in breach of the DMCA or software patents or something due to its inclusion of a not-paid-up DVD decoder? I may be out of date on this issue, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have VLC for the same reason they wouldn't encode mp3s with LAME.
So what you're saying is "If you stare too long into the abyss, you get bored and wanna watch DVDs"?
Fair enough. :) And as your example proves, natural gas is far, far cheaper to heat with than electricity. Assuming half of your $206 was service fees etc. that's still 7000kWh worth of heating, and assuming you pay the same prices I pay (~US$0.10 per kWh), it'd cost you about 3.5 times as much to heat with electricity. Go go gas! (Or wood fired, which is not only pretty close to carbon neutral but which gives you a chance to play with axes and chainsaws! You can't lose!)
:P
Dunno if it'd quite be worth repainting the roof if you have decent insulation, though.
You only used 929 kWh of _electrical_ energy. Natural gas is sold per MMBTU, or million BTU of heat. I don't know your local market price but global prices are around US$4 per MMBTU, or roughly 264 MJ (73kWh) per USD. So your $206 worth of natural gas (assuming that doesn't include a service fee, just the gas) provided up to 15,000 kWh of heat.
You killed the funny. :(
Okay, I'll bite. Why do you think a non-expanding government is a fundamental human right? Remember, a dictatorship is one of the smallest governments imaginable.
I'd wager that his definition of 'expanding government' has nothing to do with the number of public servants employed, and everything to do with what powers the government grants itself.
Suspected terrorists are not prisoners of war. The "war on terror" is a fabrication which can be extended indefinitely as long as there is one nutjob on the planet who has the United States in their sights.
You have to laugh, if only not to cry.
:P
At an old job of mine I was asked to build a GIS workstation. We had $3k left in the budget and not long to spend it, but my boss could only authorise expenditure up to $1.5k without getting approval from higher management, so I had to spread the parts across multiple invoices.
I saw some rain ahead, and planned to pull over at the next place I could. Within 30 seconds I was drenched, as I pushed over to the shoulder as fast as I could.
There's your mistake - you should have planted your foot and gone fast enough that the raindrops didn't get into your car. ;)
Well, I don't know if that'd work for your model of car but I know that in my car, the rear windscreen is nearly horizontal and it still doesn't get wet if I'm doing over about 60km/h no matter how hard it's raining.
You're going to be a lot more worried about the lime in the cement than the heat given off by it curing. Lime can give you some pretty nasty burns on skin, let alone corneas.
That's easy to fix, break them out into part1.cpp, part2.cpp, part3.cpp etc.
:P
And then you have a main.cpp where you just go:
#include <part1.cpp>
#include <part2.cpp>
#include <part3.cpp>
...wait, what's that screaming sound?
True. Although a certain amount of quackery is required for the world to function - after all, no-one would surrender to a Dread Pirate Westley.
You may also have noticed that research causes cancer in rats.
And project an image of my ass onto a car window as I pass someone?
No, but this can. :)
What I don't understand is why, in TFS, they claim "...since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface." What the hell does the method of focussing have to do with the projection surface? I mean, laser projector is cool but it doesn't change the laws o' physics, captain. Small diode lasers only tend to stay coherent for a short distance (sometimes only inches) so this should work just as well with any collimated light source. I'd be interested to know how it scans, though - rotating mirrors seems a bit risky in a device that people are going to be moving around while it's on.
Only until you boil 'em, mash 'em or stick 'em in a stew.
It's a whore when I'm posting from work. And here's some links for which I likewise didn't want my daring googlation appearing in company logs... (unsurprisingly NSFW)
+1, Please God Let Me Stop Using Borland Turbo C++
I've always used MSVC++ for Windows development, and it's excellent. There are occasional technical glitches but in general the interface, workflow etc. are great... and it's never been highlighted to me more than now, when I'm working with Turbo C++. You can clearly see the divide between the MS products that their "B Arc" programmers worked on (Office 07 for starters, eew) and the products that their core tech team worked on.
When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc.
If you're talking about a project, 10,000 lines is not big. A single _file_ of 10k lines is big, but why for the love of god would you do that?
Clearly thought out code structure will keep your project pretty easy to read and work with up to maybe 20-30k lines (more if you're smarter than me, less if you're working on unfamiliar code). After that, an IDE becomes increasingly helpful because it saves you time searching for variable definitions, members of structs/classes etc. The application I'm working on (accounting software yay) at my current job has probably ~2mil lines of code, and is small in comparison with the codebase at my old job (an MMO game client).
Perl is not an appropriate language for monolithic applications.
In the broadest view, any restrictive state definitions of marriage would be discriminatory.
Aren't they? Assuming the marriages take place between consenting adults, that is. Even then, this is still discrimination, but discrimination against people who take child brides (or grooms) is condoned by our ethical system.
Well, your post there was at least fondling the English language, if not quite all-out raping it. Not that that qualifies, since said language is hundreds of years old, but still...
Because all those 3D animators should totally get on to fixing that server code, right? The guy who's worked for years honing his skill at storyboarding ought to be annoying^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhelping the engine programmers while they try and fix that stupid graphical bug, right?