It is evident that TI have now won the calculator war against HP. In the 80's, HP were clearly winning at the top end with the 41C and 48SX. What happened?
Here are a few suggestions: 1) HP were winning at the top end, but paid insufficient attention to the bottom end. TI got the cheap school market, and once graphing calculators became a cheap commodity, the top end evaporated, and TI held the bottom. 2) RPN was loved by many geeks, but presented too much of an entry barrier to neophytes. HP tried to counter this by using algebraic notation on their low-end (starting around 1990). Was it too little too late? Did the lack of unity through the range hurt them? 3) Fiorina dropped the ball. She killed a vibrant part of the company because it didn't fit her printer-and-PC-empire vision of the company.
(I've been a long-time partisan of HP calculators, and have a collection of about 20 of them.)
In my view, the police and justice system exist to minimize the cost of (crime+police+justice). Prison acts as a deterent, and keeps dangerous people out of harm's way. Fines act as a deterent and restitution.
Prison is appropriate for dangerous criminals, and when fines or other punishment do not provide sufficient deterent. In the case of non-violent financial crime, fines are insufficient if the criminal has little money to take (and, if you're into indentured servitude, as the grandparent seems to be, little future earnings potential) and/or the gain is seen to be sufficiently large, and chance of being caught sufficiently small.
If there are cheaper ways, why is there a market for 10K rpm drives? The cheapest local price I can find for a 74Gb Raptor (10K) is NZ$316, compared to $82-$110 for standard size 80Gb 7.2K drives, i.e. a 3-4 times price premium. If it cost twice as much to manufacture (everything duplicated except platters and spindle motor) I could still get 14.4K rpm performance for 2/3 the price of a Raptor.
A thought I've had in the past, which I was reminded of looking at the low RPM of this drive:
Why not make drives with two sets of heads, 180 degrees apart on the platters? This could double access rates, and seems like it should be fairly cheap. Even if it weren't cheap, some people are prepared pay over twice as much for a 10K rpm rather than 7.2K rpm drive today.
This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?
It is important to travel on a trajectory, called the transfer orbit, that requires the least energy.
While this is usually the case, it wouldn't be for a manned Mars mission. For relatively modest increases in available fuel (delta-v) (or equiavlently, decrease in payload) you can get quite large decreases in travel time.
I don't have numbers, but you might be able to reduce 26 months to 15 months for 20% more delta-V. This is, however, a dimishing-returns situation, e.g. a 3 month trip would be hugely expensive in delta-v.
I would have added an extra step: (1) In one engine, find a search that generates fewer* than 1000 hits. (2) Select one** of those pages at random. (3) Search for that page in the other engine. (4) Repeat, starting with the other engine.
Then at the end we have a count of how many pages each engine has which the other does not.
* not "less", as consistently used in the article ** ideally, for independence of sampling, we'd chose just one, but for effiency we might choose more.
The pictures have huge dishes to collect heat, but what about the other end? How do they keep the cool part of the cycle cool?
I was expecting to see the engine behind the dish (receiving light via a secondary mirror) and big radiator fins attached to the engine in the shadow of the dish.
...copy and paste code that looks applicable to the task at hand, and then lose valuable time trying to make it all work and control what was created...
This is what I call "Cargo cult programming" -- when you copy something that worked somewhere else, make what look to be the appropriate changes, and hope.
Although not admirable, I have done this a number of times. (JCL! Argh!) Sometimes you just need to make a minor change to a program in a language you don't know.
Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64? Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it.
So, they had a business plan of selling hardware at a loss and making up for it with games sales. The games were piratable, which meant they sold lots of hardware. And now you think they're foolish for wanting to sell more games, possibly at the "expense" of selling less hardware?
This reminds me of a quote from the ancient TI-99A vs Commodore VIC-20 price war: "Texas Instruments are losing money on every computer they sell, but they're making up for it with quantity."
IANAL, but I don't think that GPLing the Unix kernel automatically gets them off the hook. They can still be sued for damages for the period when they were in violation of the GPL. It is just that GPLing the whole program is a bigger bribe/inducement to settle than merely removing violating code, so in cases where simple removal was not enough restitution to settle, GPLing might be accepted.
"Bad Guy will then villainize the people or things which are telling them how things really stand. And in the end if it goes far enough, the Bad Guy will actually go out and try to destroy the things or people which are making them look stupid as stupid as they are. --Usually while crying, "Evil!" or some such clattering nonsense."
This description certainly rings true - I can think of individuals and groups which exhibit exactly this behaviour. The problem is that many of them would believe that they are the Good Guy who sees clearly, and I am the Bad Guy who is blind to reality.
Socialists vs Libertarians Environmentalists vs developers Atheists vs Christians (or other religions) Those who blame Palistinians for the conflict in Israel/Palistine vs those who blame the Israelis.
The analysis they'd need to do to prove that this object orbits the sun, and get some idea of the orbit, is to get both a parallax and a proper motion.
Parallax is the apparent motion of a nearby object relative to distant ones, caused by the Earth's orbit around the sun (i.e. because our viewpoint location is changing.) To get a parallax, you need to observe its position at several times of the year, so this inherently takes at least about 6 months. The size of the parallax is inversely proportional to the distance (so for a solar system object it will be very large.) (Incidentally, the definition of a parsec is the distance to an object with a parallax of one second of arc.)
Proper motion is the apparent motion of an object relative to distance ones due to the object's own straight-line motion through space. Again, it takes time to measure proper motion - you have to wait long enough for the object to move appreciably. In this case, the period between 2003 and now should easily suffice - except that you need to disentangle the effect of parallax, so you can't do this until you have a parallax measurement (or reimage at the same time of year as your previous image.)
Proper motion is an angular measurement. Combined with the distance, we can calculate its true velocity perpendicular to our line of sight.
They might also have taken a third measurement, the Doppler shift. This requires taking a spectrum, which for such a dim object would require a very large telescope, if it is possible at all. The Doppler shift gives the velocity parallel to the line of sight.
Those three measurements (parallax (hence distance), proper motion and doppler shift) suffice to completely determine the orbit. In practice, after such a short period of observation, the measurements will have low precision and the orbit known imprecisely. This imprecision will decrease with time and more observations. This is why we every so often get an object on possible Earth collision orbit (initial orbit determination has large error bars, which cannot preclude a collision) which then later is announced not to be a danger afterall (precision has improved.) To get a really good orbit, we want to observe the object through an appreciable fraction of its orbit. From memory, the orbit for this object is about 600 years, so this will take a long time.
Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.
They first suspected they had a planet in January of this year. In October 2003, all they had was a star-like object in a photographic image. If they'd announced that as a possible planet, we'd be getting about 100,000 such announcements per day from astronomers.
Are they building two fabs? Or are they building a single fab in the overlap between Arizona and Israel? Will the Arizona fab produce chips, or just wafers of silicon?
The/. post says two plants, wafers in Arizona, chips in Israel. One Reuters article says that Israel says Intel will build a plant there, making goodness knows what. The other article says that Intel will make chips in Arizona, and are "no comment"ing on the Israel plant.
"There is a new version of something, and it is really cool. Something is probably software or just possibly hardware (as if it being reported on/. wasn't enough to figure that out anyhow)."
Fortunately we have editors to filter the submissions so we don't have to see incomprehensible ones.
That's what the US military did to the Iraqi's the first Gulf War
I'm going way off-topic here, but this really should be the second Gulf War. 1st Gulf War: Iraq vs Iran 2nd Gulf War: Iraq vs Kuwait, USA (Bush Sr.) vs Iraq 3rd Gulf War: USA (Bush Jr.) vs Iraq
The term "Gulf War" was in common circulation before Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Same old advice for such questions on slashdot: SEE AN EMPLOYMENT LAWYER.
(I'd also subtely alert workmates - e.g. "Have you signed the new contract yet? I'm worried about some of the clauses." Careful - if you start giving rousing anti-management speaches it might be insubordination or something - ask and employment lawyer. But if the most of the rest of your company are also complaining, it strengthens your case, and you might be able to all share a consultation with the lawyer.)
I had a slightly less extreme case, four things worried me in the contract. I talked to a lawyer for half an hour. (He decided he couldn't be bothered billing me for it, so it was free!) Result: two issues were 'standard practice', one was unreasonable but probably not worth fighting. The last was the "all your thoughts are belong to us" clause. I convinced the company to change it. ("All your thoughts directly related to the company's business are belong to us")
There was a non-compete clause, which the lawyer was worried about, but I said if I left that job, it wouldn't be for one in the same industry anyhow. (Indeed it wasn't - I'm now a university researcher.)
If they try to fire you for not signing the "friendly" contract, you may well have cause to sue for unjustifiable dismisal - again, SEE AN EMPLOYMENT LAWYER.
I remember when I was about 15, and had done some programming in BASIC. Someone told me that professional programmers averaged about 6 lines of code per hour. I couldn't belive such a low number. Now I've been a professional programmer, it seems quite reasonable.
At 300k characters and one year to produce, thats a bit over 1k per day (allowing one day off per week.) Even hand calligraphed, that isn't a lot.
Are there rules saying certain bits have to be written on certain days? (Which would raise its own questions: can a scribe work on several copies at once? What if they're sick and can't write a bit on the appointed day?)
Or is the calligraphy just a whole lot more challenging than I thought?
I'm sure they're talking about fossilized soft tissue, similar to the (even older) Burgess Shale, or the fossilized feathers of proto-birds. This means that exceptionally favourable fossilization conditions preserved an imprint of non-bone material - it is very different from a hunk of preserved meat. The soft-tissue fossil is still stone, and has little if any material in common with the original tissue.
Even if miraculously tissue survived so long, it wouldn't have usable DNA - slow random chemical reactions would have long since scrambled it beyond any recovery. Imagine taking a hard drive and putting it on a shelf for 80 million years - the magnetic domains simply wouldn't last that long, and no technology could recover the information.
Makes more sense than hydrogen
on
Filling Up On Algae
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For some time I've thought the future of automotive fuel lies in biodiesel rather than hydrogen. Hydrogen is just very hard to work with because of its low energy density and the fact it is normally a gas. Generation, transportation, storage and utilization all face large challenges. For biodiesel, all the steps except generation are already solved and the infrastructure in place, and the generation problems do not seem large. (Even without the existing infrastructure, I suspect biodiesel wins economically.)
Generation from algae is particularly promising, as it doesn't require arable land, and can use salt water.
You have an object that transmits information to the player via two methods: optical disk, and RFID. What is the point? Why not just put the data from the RFID onto the disk instead? Is it just a techinical issue that it is easer to add a unique ID to each disk by gluing on an RFID than to write it to the disk?
Meanwhile, people will get one of the new players, record the movie off the video output, redigitize and distribute. It is easer than smuggling a video camera into the theatre.
My sysadmin experience is only my own Linux system, but here is how I think it works:/usr/local should contain any programs *not* installed from your distribution's native packaging system - typically locally written, or locally compiled from downloaded source.
Ideally, if you have a complete list of the packages on your system, you should be able to completely recreate your system from that list, and backups of/etc,/usr/local and/home. (and/var if you care about logs etc.) (At least, that is how I'd *like* it to work. I bet in the real world there will be lots of configuration information missed if you try it.)
I think/opt is just a varient on/usr/local (from Solaris?). If present, it can be symlinked with/usr/local.
Slashdot Mirror
(and heavily criticized) here.
It is evident that TI have now won the calculator war against HP. In the 80's, HP were clearly winning at the top end with the 41C and 48SX. What happened?
Here are a few suggestions:
1) HP were winning at the top end, but paid insufficient attention to the bottom end. TI got the cheap school market, and once graphing calculators became a cheap commodity, the top end evaporated, and TI held the bottom.
2) RPN was loved by many geeks, but presented too much of an entry barrier to neophytes. HP tried to counter this by using algebraic notation on their low-end (starting around 1990). Was it too little too late? Did the lack of unity through the range hurt them?
3) Fiorina dropped the ball. She killed a vibrant part of the company because it didn't fit her printer-and-PC-empire vision of the company.
(I've been a long-time partisan of HP calculators, and have a collection of about 20 of them.)
Good answer.
In my view, the police and justice system exist to minimize the cost of (crime+police+justice). Prison acts as a deterent, and keeps dangerous people out of harm's way. Fines act as a deterent and restitution.
Prison is appropriate for dangerous criminals, and when fines or other punishment do not provide sufficient deterent. In the case of non-violent financial crime, fines are insufficient if the criminal has little money to take (and, if you're into indentured servitude, as the grandparent seems to be, little future earnings potential) and/or the gain is seen to be sufficiently large, and chance of being caught sufficiently small.
If there are cheaper ways, why is there a market for 10K rpm drives? The cheapest local price I can find for a 74Gb Raptor (10K) is NZ$316, compared to $82-$110 for standard size 80Gb 7.2K drives, i.e. a 3-4 times price premium. If it cost twice as much to manufacture (everything duplicated except platters and spindle motor) I could still get 14.4K rpm performance for 2/3 the price of a Raptor.
A thought I've had in the past, which I was reminded of looking at the low RPM of this drive:
Why not make drives with two sets of heads, 180 degrees apart on the platters? This could double access rates, and seems like it should be fairly cheap. Even if it weren't cheap, some people are prepared pay over twice as much for a 10K rpm rather than 7.2K rpm drive today.
This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?
It is important to travel on a trajectory, called the transfer orbit, that requires the least energy.
While this is usually the case, it wouldn't be for a manned Mars mission. For relatively modest increases in available fuel (delta-v) (or equiavlently, decrease in payload) you can get quite large decreases in travel time.
I don't have numbers, but you might be able to reduce 26 months to 15 months for 20% more delta-V. This is, however, a dimishing-returns situation, e.g. a 3 month trip would be hugely expensive in delta-v.
I agree.
I would have added an extra step:
(1) In one engine, find a search that generates fewer* than 1000 hits.
(2) Select one** of those pages at random.
(3) Search for that page in the other engine.
(4) Repeat, starting with the other engine.
Then at the end we have a count of how many pages each engine has which the other does not.
* not "less", as consistently used in the article
** ideally, for independence of sampling, we'd chose just one, but for effiency we might choose more.
The pictures have huge dishes to collect heat, but what about the other end? How do they keep the cool part of the cycle cool?
I was expecting to see the engine behind the dish (receiving light via a secondary mirror) and big radiator fins attached to the engine in the shadow of the dish.
...copy and paste code that looks applicable to the task at hand, and then lose valuable time trying to make it all work and control what was created ...
This is what I call "Cargo cult programming" -- when you copy something that worked somewhere else, make what look to be the appropriate changes, and hope.
Although not admirable, I have done this a number of times. (JCL! Argh!) Sometimes you just need to make a minor change to a program in a language you don't know.
The Jargon file has a slightly different definition of cargo cult programming.'
Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64? Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it.
So, they had a business plan of selling hardware at a loss and making up for it with games sales. The games were piratable, which meant they sold lots of hardware. And now you think they're foolish for wanting to sell more games, possibly at the "expense" of selling less hardware?
This reminds me of a quote from the ancient TI-99A vs Commodore VIC-20 price war: "Texas Instruments are losing money on every computer they sell, but they're making up for it with quantity."
IANAL, but I don't think that GPLing the Unix kernel automatically gets them off the hook. They can still be sued for damages for the period when they were in violation of the GPL. It is just that GPLing the whole program is a bigger bribe/inducement to settle than merely removing violating code, so in cases where simple removal was not enough restitution to settle, GPLing might be accepted.
"Bad Guy will then villainize the people or things which are telling them how things really stand. And in the end if it goes far enough, the Bad Guy will actually go out and try to destroy the things or people which are making them look stupid as stupid as they are. --Usually while crying, "Evil!" or some such clattering nonsense."
This description certainly rings true - I can think of individuals and groups which exhibit exactly this behaviour. The problem is that many of them would believe that they are the Good Guy who sees clearly, and I am the Bad Guy who is blind to reality.
Socialists vs Libertarians
Environmentalists vs developers
Atheists vs Christians (or other religions)
Those who blame Palistinians for the conflict in Israel/Palistine vs those who blame the Israelis.
The analysis they'd need to do to prove that this object orbits the sun, and get some idea of the orbit, is to get both a parallax and a proper motion.
Parallax is the apparent motion of a nearby object relative to distant ones, caused by the Earth's orbit around the sun (i.e. because our viewpoint location is changing.) To get a parallax, you need to observe its position at several times of the year, so this inherently takes at least about 6 months. The size of the parallax is inversely proportional to the distance (so for a solar system object it will be very large.) (Incidentally, the definition of a parsec is the distance to an object with a parallax of one second of arc.)
Proper motion is the apparent motion of an object relative to distance ones due to the object's own straight-line motion through space. Again, it takes time to measure proper motion - you have to wait long enough for the object to move appreciably. In this case, the period between 2003 and now should easily suffice - except that you need to disentangle the effect of parallax, so you can't do this until you have a parallax measurement (or reimage at the same time of year as your previous image.)
Proper motion is an angular measurement. Combined with the distance, we can calculate its true velocity perpendicular to our line of sight.
They might also have taken a third measurement, the Doppler shift. This requires taking a spectrum, which for such a dim object would require a very large telescope, if it is possible at all. The Doppler shift gives the velocity parallel to the line of sight.
Those three measurements (parallax (hence distance), proper motion and doppler shift) suffice to completely determine the orbit. In practice, after such a short period of observation, the measurements will have low precision and the orbit known imprecisely. This imprecision will decrease with time and more observations. This is why we every so often get an object on possible Earth collision orbit (initial orbit determination has large error bars, which cannot preclude a collision) which then later is announced not to be a danger afterall (precision has improved.) To get a really good orbit, we want to observe the object through an appreciable fraction of its orbit. From memory, the orbit for this object is about 600 years, so this will take a long time.
From the NASA press release:
Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.
They first suspected they had a planet in January of this year. In October 2003, all they had was a star-like object in a photographic image. If they'd announced that as a possible planet, we'd be getting about 100,000 such announcements per day from astronomers.
Are they building two fabs? Or are they building a single fab in the overlap between Arizona and Israel? Will the Arizona fab produce chips, or just wafers of silicon?
/. post says two plants, wafers in Arizona, chips in Israel. One Reuters article says that Israel says Intel will build a plant there, making goodness knows what. The other article says that Intel will make chips in Arizona, and are "no comment"ing on the Israel plant.
The
What I could figure out from the article:
/. wasn't enough to figure that out anyhow)."
"There is a new version of something, and it is really cool. Something is probably software or just possibly hardware (as if it being reported on
Fortunately we have editors to filter the submissions so we don't have to see incomprehensible ones.
That's what the US military did to the Iraqi's the first Gulf War
I'm going way off-topic here, but this really should be the second Gulf War.
1st Gulf War: Iraq vs Iran
2nd Gulf War: Iraq vs Kuwait, USA (Bush Sr.) vs Iraq
3rd Gulf War: USA (Bush Jr.) vs Iraq
The term "Gulf War" was in common circulation before Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Same old advice for such questions on slashdot: SEE AN EMPLOYMENT LAWYER.
(I'd also subtely alert workmates - e.g. "Have you signed the new contract yet? I'm worried about some of the clauses." Careful - if you start giving rousing anti-management speaches it might be insubordination or something - ask and employment lawyer. But if the most of the rest of your company are also complaining, it strengthens your case, and you might be able to all share a consultation with the lawyer.)
I had a slightly less extreme case, four things worried me in the contract. I talked to a lawyer for half an hour. (He decided he couldn't be bothered billing me for it, so it was free!) Result: two issues were 'standard practice', one was unreasonable but probably not worth fighting. The last was the "all your thoughts are belong to us" clause. I convinced the company to change it. ("All your thoughts directly related to the company's business are belong to us")
There was a non-compete clause, which the lawyer was worried about, but I said if I left that job, it wouldn't be for one in the same industry anyhow. (Indeed it wasn't - I'm now a university researcher.)
If they try to fire you for not signing the "friendly" contract, you may well have cause to sue for unjustifiable dismisal - again, SEE AN EMPLOYMENT LAWYER.
Fair enough - I can see this taking a year.
I remember when I was about 15, and had done some programming in BASIC. Someone told me that professional programmers averaged about 6 lines of code per hour. I couldn't belive such a low number. Now I've been a professional programmer, it seems quite reasonable.
At 300k characters and one year to produce, thats a bit over 1k per day (allowing one day off per week.) Even hand calligraphed, that isn't a lot.
Are there rules saying certain bits have to be written on certain days? (Which would raise its own questions: can a scribe work on several copies at once? What if they're sick and can't write a bit on the appointed day?)
Or is the calligraphy just a whole lot more challenging than I thought?
I'm sure they're talking about fossilized soft tissue, similar to the (even older) Burgess Shale, or the fossilized feathers of proto-birds. This means that exceptionally favourable fossilization conditions preserved an imprint of non-bone material - it is very different from a hunk of preserved meat. The soft-tissue fossil is still stone, and has little if any material in common with the original tissue.
Even if miraculously tissue survived so long, it wouldn't have usable DNA - slow random chemical reactions would have long since scrambled it beyond any recovery. Imagine taking a hard drive and putting it on a shelf for 80 million years - the magnetic domains simply wouldn't last that long, and no technology could recover the information.
For some time I've thought the future of automotive fuel lies in biodiesel rather than hydrogen. Hydrogen is just very hard to work with because of its low energy density and the fact it is normally a gas. Generation, transportation, storage and utilization all face large challenges.
For biodiesel, all the steps except generation are already solved and the infrastructure in place, and the generation problems do not seem large. (Even without the existing infrastructure, I suspect biodiesel wins economically.)
Generation from algae is particularly promising, as it doesn't require arable land, and can use salt water.
Article on biodiesel.
You have an object that transmits information to the player via two methods: optical disk, and RFID. What is the point? Why not just put the data from the RFID onto the disk instead? Is it just a techinical issue that it is easer to add a unique ID to each disk by gluing on an RFID than to write it to the disk?
Meanwhile, people will get one of the new players, record the movie off the video output, redigitize and distribute. It is easer than smuggling a video camera into the theatre.
My sysadmin experience is only my own Linux system, but here is how I think it works: /usr/local should contain any programs *not* installed from your distribution's native packaging system - typically locally written, or locally compiled from downloaded source.
/etc, /usr/local and /home. (and /var if you care about logs etc.) (At least, that is how I'd *like* it to work. I bet in the real world there will be lots of configuration information missed if you try it.)
/opt is just a varient on /usr/local (from Solaris?). If present, it can be symlinked with /usr/local.
Ideally, if you have a complete list of the packages on your system, you should be able to completely recreate your system from that list, and backups of
I think
OK, I've found a reference to this strategy being used.