It may; however lower power consumption is a goal that can't be achieved for free. Even better overall engineering costs more than a sloppy engineering. Sure, we can come up with scenarios where a company just happens to have a better team for the same money, but statistically it's not important. In most cases the cheaper team is paid less, works faster, does fewer simulations, owns substandard tools and uses questionable design practices (no design reviews.)
When two products have the same price one should decide on primary characteristics (for a TV that would be screen size, connectors, brightness, etc.) and not on secondary, derivative characteristics that may or may not flow from desirable primaries. For example, if you want a better electrical design then buy that better design, and not a box that is thinner (or runs colder) and because of that you think it may be better designed.
Electrically speaking, most of power dissipation in silicon of modern TVs comes from switching components. The faster a FET switches the less power is lost. However faster FETs cost more money, and they are more fragile. By using cheaper parts you can actually achieve higher reliability, at expense of somewhat hotter heatsink. That's why it is important to be careful with conclusions.
How many times have you been buying something and been confronted by two very similar products at the same price point? Happens to me all the time. Having power consumption info would be great!
Yes. This way your purchasing decision can be instantly decided by a largely irrelevant factor(*) instead of something that you may care about if you spend some extra time comparing the products in depth and reading reviews online.
(*) Lower power consumption does not offer an advantage if, due to the same price point, the design had to sacrifice something else instead. For example, it may be using less reliable components - something that many discover the next day after the warranty expires.
You can cut a water melon with a flat ended knife.
Sure, you only need to hammer the knife in:-) I guess we are opening new markets here, for knifes that don't do their job and for hammers that compensate for that deficiency.
But law-abiding British subjects will be required to simply smash the watermelon against the floor, then pick up the pieces and further cut them, if there is anything left to cut, with a "safe" knife.
One way would be to reduce access to long pointed knives.
And how will you cut a whole watermelon then, or similar produce?
I would be happy not to have a pointed kitchen knife if it would save only one life.
Millions of people should be inconvenienced only so that someone can lose his life not through stabbing but through bashing his head in? Security theater indeed...
...but we can assume that they were fired for being incompetent, not for being evil.
We should assume that they were fired for becoming a worn out tool, a liability. In politics the term is "throw them under the bus."
The reasons for that are obvious - they lied too much, they broke the law several times, they were shown to be incompetent, use unproven, arbitrary methods, and so on. RIAA simply couldn't use them any more, since every witness from MediaSentry would be immediately confronted with their own earlier contradictory statements, and RIAA would lose the case.
Those are probably Tasers. The holsters with yellow grip things are on the wrong side. Crossdraw is not popular with police because it's too easy for the other guy to grab your weapon. It's usable only when you are in a car. You can read more here.
In other pictures you can see that they have another holster, for the right hand draw, and the grip of the gun in it is black. That's the firearm.
A free clinic in, say, Canada is paid by your taxes. In fact, doctors send their bills to the government - so the money is paid, and the service is not free. It's just prepaid by all citizens. If it's flawed then anyone who is affected can complain.
On the other hand, if you go to a private person and he gives you a wrong treatment for free then, outside of regulations on medical practice, you can't do much. To make the case clearer (since doctors are heavily regulated,) if someone repairs your iPod for free and the repair is bad you can't do anything about it. You can sue the guy, of course, but chances are that his liability is limited by the money paid (zero.)
The reality would be a netbook equipped with Android would be an oversized cell-phone. It wouldn't offer anything meaningfully advantageous over a cell phone (same apps, same amount of data, happens to be bigger), without the portability of the cell phone.
It will have a keyboard. That alone allows it to run applications that would be pointless on a cell phone. Specifically, word processor and spreadsheet come to mind, and those are the most important applications outside of email. There are more, of course - you'd get a reasonably sized screen and you can browse the Web without scrolling and/or magnifying pages, for example.
This does not mean that netbooks are here to stay - it's not the first wave of mini-notebooks on record, and previous waves weren't that much of a success. It's a specialty product. However these notebooks do offer something that a cell phone can't provide.
The marshals on the plane should have been smart and mature enough to see through that crap after 2 minutes of talking with that family.
I don't think the air marshals are allowed to reveal themselves. Otherwise the first group of terrorists finds out who air marshals are, and the second group later takes them out. The air crew would be the only people who could talk to the passengers; not being trained police officers, they couldn't investigate the case on the spot and called FBI. Past that point I agree, the airline failed to gracefully recover.
I was in a startup that recently imploded. It would have been easy to start pointing fingers, but no one did.
There is a big difference. I don't know anything about your particular case, but when a startup goes down there is nothing left to fight for. One could point fingers, but why? On the other hand, when bad things happen in a viable company fingerpointing is a method of survival, and there is a job to fight for.
I kind of agree with people who say that such a job is not worth keeping. However many people don't have a luxury of quitting - they have loans, mortgage, family and so on. If the family was barely making it with that "bad" job, losing it may mean moving out of the house and under the bridge. In this economy it may be simply impossible for an engineer to find a job, especially in a fixed area (if you have a house and can't easily move to where the new job may be.)
I sure as hell wouldn't tell the police the next day! Where I live they'd probably laugh in my face anyway!
They won't be laughing if younger person's parents will bring a criminal complaint against the older one. And I can think of many reasons why they might want to do that.
It is getting worse in the USA; the USSR quit the police state mode after Nikita cleaned the house from Stalin's henchmen. Since then, and until, say, last days of the USSR, there was no witch hunts, no war on drugs, no aggressive policing... only people who rocked the boat were "talked to" by the KGB, and if you don't work for a long time then your friendly local policeman will be visiting you and talking to you about that, wondering why you don't want to help the society.
The only exception I could think of is Andropov's idea of checking people in the street and in movie theaters during the day why they are not at work. I don't remember if it went anywhere. And of course the dragnet for 18-y.o. men twice a year... I hear it's still popular.
Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why
It's a nontrivial task to retrain 20,000 employees. I'm willing to bet it will cost not $50 per MSO license, but at least $5,000 per seat, considering not just training but also lost productivity, larger support staff, difficulties with legacy documents, problems communicating with other businesses, and so on. In one word, it isn't worth it, and since it's a business expense it is not taxed, but your additional support personnel will be, through payroll tax. Add to that a few lost multi-million contracts because OOO failed to import a few paragraphs of the document, and the disaster scene is complete.
countries with high drinking ages tend to have more alcohol problems (esp since these ages are often high enough that the parents are not even involved at that point)
This also ensures that practically every teen has a chance to, probably first time in his life, seriously break the law (especially if fake ID is involved.) Peer pressure is a serious factor, and the "child's" mindset, cultivated by parents, schools and laws, does not permit him to tell his buddies to go to hell, as I can do today without a second thought if I were to be dragged into an unwanted situation.
Exposure to erotica is a fun one to examine too (I've found people who don't run into it until their 30s-40s go overboard for instance)
I watched a French (I think) movie many years ago. I don't recall the title of the movie. A celibate young catholic priest has to leave his abbey and take a train somewhere to do some church affairs. On the train he falls, hits his head and forgets who he is. While he is on the floor, a young woman (scantily clad, naturally:-) comes to his help. Being on the floor, the priest sees more of the woman that he ever saw before, and since he doesn't remember anything about himself he goes with the woman. By the next morning the woman jokingly declares him a sex maniac, so tireless he is, and still he wants more! The movie continues to a funny end, but your point is proven:-)
I have a book called Flies from the Amber and it depicts a future society where a 30-35 years old man is called a child, and consequently not allowed to vote.
But it is true that with development of the society the "child/adult" borderline is creeping higher and higher. The main reason is longer lifespan; another reason is economic ability to keep children away from adult activities until males grow long beards, literally. Consider that the optimal age for a woman to have a child is somewhere between 18 and 25 years old, but a good chunk of it is spent in the "child" limbo. Parents want to keep their precious offspring in child state as long as possible because they got used to it; some say that children are not mature enough to make adult decisions - but I think most people are not mature enough to make those decisions by any age (divorces aplenty).
People do not necessarily become more mature if they are kept in diapers longer. Real world makes people mature, and everyone has to make their own, personal set of mistakes to learn from. It hardly matters, IMO, if the person does that when she is 18 or 21 or 25 years old. But the earlier they start, the earlier they learn.
The rebuttal to that would be that without capitalism, no one would be wealthy enough to afford to donate a $10M prize.
We shouldn't proclaim that if no individual ("a capitalist") is rich enough to donate $10M then nobody is rich enough to do that. The government is usually the richest of them all, and it plays an active role in socialism. During the space race in 1960's money was flowing freely in both countries, and it wasn't VC money - it was a blank check from the government.
Yes, it is a horrible engineering. However these are one-off designs that never existed before and will never exist after. There is no legacy to build upon, and there is no "Release 1" to learn from. The very first release flies the mission, and if there are bugz... too bad. To confound the problem, much of this work is probably done by scientists and not by engineers; that's why if the gap between doors is above zero it's all good to go. An experienced mechanical engineer would consider thermal expansion, free play in all pivot points, and other things - but first she'd try to increase the gap to some reasonable size, so that none of those secondary effects could affect the mission.
Really, I think the biggest risk is upsetting Russia with it, even though it really doesn't make sense because there's no way we could stop a barrage from them. But demagogues and presidents trying to look tough on the world stage won't necessarily approach it logically, at least not in public.
It's a matter of responsibility. Imagine that your neighbor has a long history of accidental and negligent firearm discharges. Will you permit him to point a loaded gun at you while he tells you that he doesn't really want to kill you, and the whole setup is a self-defense from Godzilla that might come at him from behind you?
Presidents and politicians have to deal not just with the current situation, but with future developments as well. You probably would not allow Shah of Iran (in 1970, for example) to install Iranian nuclear weapons in Mexico? Shah was your best friend, but the safety of a nation is above friendship (real or political) with a mortal person.
Russia saw a lot of unfriendly moves in last decade - expansion of NATO (that was promised to not happen), Colored revolutions in Russia's backyard, and now these radar and antimissile sites. Russia suggested a better location in Azerbaijan (better to cover NK and Iran) but that was rejected. This told exactly who the target is (Russia) because this specific location in Eastern Europe is optimal to only cover Russia. Anyone would eventually become upset if his neighbor starts buying rifles and positioning them toward your house, one by one, over time - and whenever you ask what's the deal he just tells you some nonsense. If your neighbor also has a massive history of violence and has a couple of shooting wars right now, you might be really worried what he has in store for you.
In many cases "a quality solution" is a fixed size, fixed cost item (like, for example, a 10 TB NAS and 100 engineers who use it.) The other option is to hire one engineer at a time, and buy for him one small USB HDD for his storage needs. If the business is growing slowly and step by step then the second option is far more interesting even if it costs more in the end. A small business usually can't afford "a quality solution" on day one. But on the other hand, if a large business opens a new R&D facility, in a planned manner, then definitely it should design it well and order it as one package.
My answer is twofold. In previous post I mentioned that protection of the Constitution is in hands of elected (or selected) officials, and those officials (as we saw already) can and do violate the law. It is up to the people to stop them, but the people are silent. If this continues unchallenged, then Bush was right after all, calling the Constitution a mere piece of paper.
But there is also a technical answer to your question, and it may be interesting. There is a bunch of guys (incl. lawyers) who claim that such distribution of money is not just "not mentioned" in the Constitution, but explicitly forbidden. I stumbled upon this only now and haven't read much there, but here is their position.
In a separate writing one of these guys says:
On August 4th, we filed suit in State Supreme Court, Albany County and asked the court to permanently enjoin the state from giving out your tax money to private firms for "economic development." The Constitution bars such grants:
"The money of the state shall not be given or loaned to or in aid of any private corporation or association, or private undertaking." Article VII, 8. 1.
Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics."
So they compared one unusable (and dirt cheap) setup to another, super-expensive and still unusable one, and then they brag about sucking 20% less?
This is typical for MS. They are mostly a software company, and there are too many people who advocate software-only solutions that make no sense, just because that's the only thing they know how to do (maybe.)
Sorry about replying to my own post, but I found the movie - plays in Flash with reasonable quality. There is also download for some small cash, but I haven't tried that. The flash player has ads, but they are not too bad. There are no subtitles, though, and that's sad because I'm watching it now and the dialog (in the council chamber) is not meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
It may; however lower power consumption is a goal that can't be achieved for free. Even better overall engineering costs more than a sloppy engineering. Sure, we can come up with scenarios where a company just happens to have a better team for the same money, but statistically it's not important. In most cases the cheaper team is paid less, works faster, does fewer simulations, owns substandard tools and uses questionable design practices (no design reviews.)
When two products have the same price one should decide on primary characteristics (for a TV that would be screen size, connectors, brightness, etc.) and not on secondary, derivative characteristics that may or may not flow from desirable primaries. For example, if you want a better electrical design then buy that better design, and not a box that is thinner (or runs colder) and because of that you think it may be better designed.
Electrically speaking, most of power dissipation in silicon of modern TVs comes from switching components. The faster a FET switches the less power is lost. However faster FETs cost more money, and they are more fragile. By using cheaper parts you can actually achieve higher reliability, at expense of somewhat hotter heatsink. That's why it is important to be careful with conclusions.
How many times have you been buying something and been confronted by two very similar products at the same price point? Happens to me all the time. Having power consumption info would be great!
Yes. This way your purchasing decision can be instantly decided by a largely irrelevant factor(*) instead of something that you may care about if you spend some extra time comparing the products in depth and reading reviews online.
(*) Lower power consumption does not offer an advantage if, due to the same price point, the design had to sacrifice something else instead. For example, it may be using less reliable components - something that many discover the next day after the warranty expires.
You can cut a water melon with a flat ended knife.
Sure, you only need to hammer the knife in :-) I guess we are opening new markets here, for knifes that don't do their job and for hammers that compensate for that deficiency.
But law-abiding British subjects will be required to simply smash the watermelon against the floor, then pick up the pieces and further cut them, if there is anything left to cut, with a "safe" knife.
One way would be to reduce access to long pointed knives.
And how will you cut a whole watermelon then, or similar produce?
I would be happy not to have a pointed kitchen knife if it would save only one life.
Millions of people should be inconvenienced only so that someone can lose his life not through stabbing but through bashing his head in? Security theater indeed...
Personally, I would like such ban just to see what tool will become next super weapon.
A broken bottle.
We should assume that they were fired for becoming a worn out tool, a liability. In politics the term is "throw them under the bus."
The reasons for that are obvious - they lied too much, they broke the law several times, they were shown to be incompetent, use unproven, arbitrary methods, and so on. RIAA simply couldn't use them any more, since every witness from MediaSentry would be immediately confronted with their own earlier contradictory statements, and RIAA would lose the case.
What is the yellow grip on their handguns for?
Those are probably Tasers. The holsters with yellow grip things are on the wrong side. Crossdraw is not popular with police because it's too easy for the other guy to grab your weapon. It's usable only when you are in a car. You can read more here.
In other pictures you can see that they have another holster, for the right hand draw, and the grip of the gun in it is black. That's the firearm.
I can't seem to find the area on google earth now.
Obviously it had been deleted...
A free clinic in, say, Canada is paid by your taxes. In fact, doctors send their bills to the government - so the money is paid, and the service is not free. It's just prepaid by all citizens. If it's flawed then anyone who is affected can complain.
On the other hand, if you go to a private person and he gives you a wrong treatment for free then, outside of regulations on medical practice, you can't do much. To make the case clearer (since doctors are heavily regulated,) if someone repairs your iPod for free and the repair is bad you can't do anything about it. You can sue the guy, of course, but chances are that his liability is limited by the money paid (zero.)
The reality would be a netbook equipped with Android would be an oversized cell-phone. It wouldn't offer anything meaningfully advantageous over a cell phone (same apps, same amount of data, happens to be bigger), without the portability of the cell phone.
It will have a keyboard. That alone allows it to run applications that would be pointless on a cell phone. Specifically, word processor and spreadsheet come to mind, and those are the most important applications outside of email. There are more, of course - you'd get a reasonably sized screen and you can browse the Web without scrolling and/or magnifying pages, for example.
This does not mean that netbooks are here to stay - it's not the first wave of mini-notebooks on record, and previous waves weren't that much of a success. It's a specialty product. However these notebooks do offer something that a cell phone can't provide.
The marshals on the plane should have been smart and mature enough to see through that crap after 2 minutes of talking with that family.
I don't think the air marshals are allowed to reveal themselves. Otherwise the first group of terrorists finds out who air marshals are, and the second group later takes them out. The air crew would be the only people who could talk to the passengers; not being trained police officers, they couldn't investigate the case on the spot and called FBI. Past that point I agree, the airline failed to gracefully recover.
I was in a startup that recently imploded. It would have been easy to start pointing fingers, but no one did.
There is a big difference. I don't know anything about your particular case, but when a startup goes down there is nothing left to fight for. One could point fingers, but why? On the other hand, when bad things happen in a viable company fingerpointing is a method of survival, and there is a job to fight for.
I kind of agree with people who say that such a job is not worth keeping. However many people don't have a luxury of quitting - they have loans, mortgage, family and so on. If the family was barely making it with that "bad" job, losing it may mean moving out of the house and under the bridge. In this economy it may be simply impossible for an engineer to find a job, especially in a fixed area (if you have a house and can't easily move to where the new job may be.)
I sure as hell wouldn't tell the police the next day! Where I live they'd probably laugh in my face anyway!
They won't be laughing if younger person's parents will bring a criminal complaint against the older one. And I can think of many reasons why they might want to do that.
It is getting worse in the USA; the USSR quit the police state mode after Nikita cleaned the house from Stalin's henchmen. Since then, and until, say, last days of the USSR, there was no witch hunts, no war on drugs, no aggressive policing... only people who rocked the boat were "talked to" by the KGB, and if you don't work for a long time then your friendly local policeman will be visiting you and talking to you about that, wondering why you don't want to help the society.
The only exception I could think of is Andropov's idea of checking people in the street and in movie theaters during the day why they are not at work. I don't remember if it went anywhere. And of course the dragnet for 18-y.o. men twice a year... I hear it's still popular.
Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why
It's a nontrivial task to retrain 20,000 employees. I'm willing to bet it will cost not $50 per MSO license, but at least $5,000 per seat, considering not just training but also lost productivity, larger support staff, difficulties with legacy documents, problems communicating with other businesses, and so on. In one word, it isn't worth it, and since it's a business expense it is not taxed, but your additional support personnel will be, through payroll tax. Add to that a few lost multi-million contracts because OOO failed to import a few paragraphs of the document, and the disaster scene is complete.
countries with high drinking ages tend to have more alcohol problems (esp since these ages are often high enough that the parents are not even involved at that point)
This also ensures that practically every teen has a chance to, probably first time in his life, seriously break the law (especially if fake ID is involved.) Peer pressure is a serious factor, and the "child's" mindset, cultivated by parents, schools and laws, does not permit him to tell his buddies to go to hell, as I can do today without a second thought if I were to be dragged into an unwanted situation.
Exposure to erotica is a fun one to examine too (I've found people who don't run into it until their 30s-40s go overboard for instance)
I watched a French (I think) movie many years ago. I don't recall the title of the movie. A celibate young catholic priest has to leave his abbey and take a train somewhere to do some church affairs. On the train he falls, hits his head and forgets who he is. While he is on the floor, a young woman (scantily clad, naturally :-) comes to his help. Being on the floor, the priest sees more of the woman that he ever saw before, and since he doesn't remember anything about himself he goes with the woman. By the next morning the woman jokingly declares him a sex maniac, so tireless he is, and still he wants more! The movie continues to a funny end, but your point is proven :-)
I have a book called Flies from the Amber and it depicts a future society where a 30-35 years old man is called a child, and consequently not allowed to vote.
But it is true that with development of the society the "child/adult" borderline is creeping higher and higher. The main reason is longer lifespan; another reason is economic ability to keep children away from adult activities until males grow long beards, literally. Consider that the optimal age for a woman to have a child is somewhere between 18 and 25 years old, but a good chunk of it is spent in the "child" limbo. Parents want to keep their precious offspring in child state as long as possible because they got used to it; some say that children are not mature enough to make adult decisions - but I think most people are not mature enough to make those decisions by any age (divorces aplenty).
People do not necessarily become more mature if they are kept in diapers longer. Real world makes people mature, and everyone has to make their own, personal set of mistakes to learn from. It hardly matters, IMO, if the person does that when she is 18 or 21 or 25 years old. But the earlier they start, the earlier they learn.
The rebuttal to that would be that without capitalism, no one would be wealthy enough to afford to donate a $10M prize.
We shouldn't proclaim that if no individual ("a capitalist") is rich enough to donate $10M then nobody is rich enough to do that. The government is usually the richest of them all, and it plays an active role in socialism. During the space race in 1960's money was flowing freely in both countries, and it wasn't VC money - it was a blank check from the government.
Yes, it is a horrible engineering. However these are one-off designs that never existed before and will never exist after. There is no legacy to build upon, and there is no "Release 1" to learn from. The very first release flies the mission, and if there are bugz ... too bad. To confound the problem, much of this work is probably done by scientists and not by engineers; that's why if the gap between doors is above zero it's all good to go. An experienced mechanical engineer would consider thermal expansion, free play in all pivot points, and other things - but first she'd try to increase the gap to some reasonable size, so that none of those secondary effects could affect the mission.
Really, I think the biggest risk is upsetting Russia with it, even though it really doesn't make sense because there's no way we could stop a barrage from them. But demagogues and presidents trying to look tough on the world stage won't necessarily approach it logically, at least not in public.
It's a matter of responsibility. Imagine that your neighbor has a long history of accidental and negligent firearm discharges. Will you permit him to point a loaded gun at you while he tells you that he doesn't really want to kill you, and the whole setup is a self-defense from Godzilla that might come at him from behind you?
Presidents and politicians have to deal not just with the current situation, but with future developments as well. You probably would not allow Shah of Iran (in 1970, for example) to install Iranian nuclear weapons in Mexico? Shah was your best friend, but the safety of a nation is above friendship (real or political) with a mortal person.
Russia saw a lot of unfriendly moves in last decade - expansion of NATO (that was promised to not happen), Colored revolutions in Russia's backyard, and now these radar and antimissile sites. Russia suggested a better location in Azerbaijan (better to cover NK and Iran) but that was rejected. This told exactly who the target is (Russia) because this specific location in Eastern Europe is optimal to only cover Russia. Anyone would eventually become upset if his neighbor starts buying rifles and positioning them toward your house, one by one, over time - and whenever you ask what's the deal he just tells you some nonsense. If your neighbor also has a massive history of violence and has a couple of shooting wars right now, you might be really worried what he has in store for you.
In many cases "a quality solution" is a fixed size, fixed cost item (like, for example, a 10 TB NAS and 100 engineers who use it.) The other option is to hire one engineer at a time, and buy for him one small USB HDD for his storage needs. If the business is growing slowly and step by step then the second option is far more interesting even if it costs more in the end. A small business usually can't afford "a quality solution" on day one. But on the other hand, if a large business opens a new R&D facility, in a planned manner, then definitely it should design it well and order it as one package.
My answer is twofold. In previous post I mentioned that protection of the Constitution is in hands of elected (or selected) officials, and those officials (as we saw already) can and do violate the law. It is up to the people to stop them, but the people are silent. If this continues unchallenged, then Bush was right after all, calling the Constitution a mere piece of paper.
But there is also a technical answer to your question, and it may be interesting. There is a bunch of guys (incl. lawyers) who claim that such distribution of money is not just "not mentioned" in the Constitution, but explicitly forbidden. I stumbled upon this only now and haven't read much there, but here is their position.
In a separate writing one of these guys says:
On August 4th, we filed suit in State Supreme Court, Albany County and asked the court to permanently enjoin the state from giving out your tax money to private firms for "economic development." The Constitution bars such grants:
"The money of the state shall not be given or loaned to or in aid of any private corporation or association, or private undertaking." Article VII, 8. 1.
The Congress, and ultimately the people.
Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel's DirectX 10 integrated graphics."
So they compared one unusable (and dirt cheap) setup to another, super-expensive and still unusable one, and then they brag about sucking 20% less?
This is typical for MS. They are mostly a software company, and there are too many people who advocate software-only solutions that make no sense, just because that's the only thing they know how to do (maybe.)
Sorry about replying to my own post, but I found the movie - plays in Flash with reasonable quality. There is also download for some small cash, but I haven't tried that. The flash player has ads, but they are not too bad. There are no subtitles, though, and that's sad because I'm watching it now and the dialog (in the council chamber) is not meaningless.
Anyway, here is the working link.