The problem is that they are stored in a suspended state for decades, and start to break down. That's why women who get pregnant past 35 or so have a higher chance of concieving children with certain chromosomal defects, like Down's Syndrome.
The "500" figure comes from the rough number of periods a woman is going to have in life. It's just a number.
So while a woman has more ammunition in her belt than your health class gave her credit, past a certain point they will only produce diseased, and eventually non-viable offspring.
"Hardware, on the other hand, is the more expensive"
You have seriously misunderstood something. Man-hours is the most expensive thing there is.
Stuff that mostly uses robots in factories to produce is generally cheap. Hardware is an example of this.
Stuff that is man-hour intensive, like software for example, is expensive.
Having worked in the semiconductor industry, robots aren't used a whole lot because people in third world countries work very cheap. Well, for a while and then the company shutters in one country and moves to a more depressed economy.
Now while the manufacturing of hardware is more or less a science today, the folks who actually design this stuff are a rare commodity. A chip designer, a good one, generally has a PhD in electrical engineering, and has been in the field for a decade at least. True, PhD's can also be found in other countries for far cheaper than in the US, and most of them have equivilent experience, but they still don't work for a bowl of rice. While they don't make as much as in the US, they are still pretty damn expensive.
And you can't just modify a chip like you modify computer code. The circuits are laid out in space, in multiple layers that interconnect like a tapestry. There are automation tools to help keep things in order, but you still need to be a flipping genius to design a microprocessor. My hats off to anyone who does that for a living, regardless of what flag you fly.
Every new "feature", every bug fix in hardware could potentially require a massive redesign of the circuitry inside the chip. Prototyping and testing this stuff is not cheap. In fact it's measured in the millions of dollars.
What makes hardware profitable is that the cost of R&D is spread over a few million copies. It seems cheap the same way a nuclear power plant is "cheap."
This model would only work if you didn't drop a dime into hardware R&D. That's silly.
x86 is hobbled by memory bus speed, competing standards, and backward compadibility with some pretty arcane architectures. x86 is designed from the ground up for single processor systems. They have some hardware hacks to handle SMP, but you don't get nearly the performance of a system that was designed from the ground up to be parallel processing.
Yes, there are some parlor tricks that allow you to use a few milliion x86 boxes running in parallel for certain types of scientific computing. It still doesn't hold a candle to a Cray or an Z-series mainframe in terms of real-time throughput.
Yes, an x86 box makes a great replacement for a Mini like a Vax or a old Solaris box. But mini's were never really considered "high performance", save in the area of network servers.
Did I just not live the last 10 years or so, or are you taking economic doctrine from a company that used to give it's software (Solaris) away to drive hardware sales.
They seem to forget that competing software is readily available, functionally equivilent if not superior, free of licensing restrictions, and free of monetary outlay.
It would be like me trying to sell people cans of Air.
You still have the upfront costs for the console and the individual copies of the software. The "subscription" is to a general purpose network to interconnect your console to others on the internet.
There is a significant difference. In this model, the publishers and producers of the software make off with a good portion of the proceeds on the sale of the copy of the software. Microsoft makes its money on the console, and also on license fees paid by the publishers and producers.
If microsoft were to suddenly decide to sell only games on the network, they would suddenly find themselves with no outside developers willing to create new games for the platform. Unless, of course, they developed a play for pay system by which developers are given a share of the subscription fees based on how often their titles are played.
There are 2 problems with that. 1) Microsoft's reputation for screwing third party developers preceeds it. 2) Such a model would make Microsoft a software distributor, which would upset the Anti-Trust apple cart in a way that even GW's croneys can't save them from.
I seem to recall a time where you didn't own the telephone in your house either, but the phone company gave you one with your subscription. Anyone know how&why that model changed?
In the US AT&T was raked across the coals as a monopoly in the late 70's. Local service was split from long distance, and the exclusive lock Bell had on what customers could install was thrown out as unlawful. As a result people could suddenly purchase phones for a fraction of what it would cost to rent and that business model dried up quickly.
That's simple. they have a brand that resembles rawhide with hair on it. It can be in black, brown, or white. Utters and horns are also signs of their brand.
Is Darl going to be able to start shooting off his mouth again? Will we get a new laugh every few days as he makes outrageous claims, sues more people, contradicts himself publicly, etc.
I just can't wait. Perhaps they'll sue the penguin lovers society first, followed by 'all programmers', then on to some bizarre victims of their wrath.
Or maybe he'll just be filed away in our collective databank as a crackpot not to be trusted with grocery money let alone investment capital.
And I'm trying so hard not to make a Bud Dwyer reference and failing miserably.
Well some of use actually want to live in our house for a little bit before we lose it to the bank. "Sorry sweety, you can't have new shoes because daddy lost big short selling stock" really doesn't cut it.
I have the TJ-35, and my wife has the TJ-25. Beautiful machines.
If anything Sony would head over to the Linux camp. There has been some bad blood between Sony and Microsoft for years.
Add to that, the US PDA market has been getting progressively more cutthroat. You aren't just competing against other PDA's, you now have the iPod, big-screen digital cameras, and ever more powerful portable gaming systems.
My guess is Sony's next PDA will be Linux or BSD based. No liscense fee, and they can write custom drivers for their proprietary chips. Having played with my Clie for a while, the fact it's a Palm device is immaterial. Sony loads it with a ton of custom software, the user interface includes a custom peripheral, and the menu system is a custom job. They must have finally gotten to the point that the Palm OS was getting in their road more than it was providing a salable product.
I've got the TJ35/U. It's got an MP3 decoder built in. I got it last Christmas after pricing out MP3 players, and realizing for a few extra bucks I could get a palm device.
Ironically it's not the MP3 nor the Palm functions I that endeer me most to the brand (though I use them both.) It's the memory stick and the built in image viewer. My wife and I had a baby back in November, and I'm constanty filling my memory stick with picture of the little one to tote around. I have a Sony digital camera, so I just pop the stick out of the camera, into the Clie, and I have a nice bright screen to show my gallery off to.
My wife liked the feature so much I bought her one so she'd stop filching mine at parties.
Give them credit though. Television is not a medium designed for in-depth reviews.
Television is often called a medium. It is neither rare, nor particularly well done.
Re:Can it die the rest of the way, please?
on
TechTV.com RIP
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· Score: 1
It's really hard to cater to a crowd that prides itself on eliteism and non-conformity. Any declaritive sentence is gaurenteed to piss off half your viewership. And it's hard to develop a product line that caters to both the BWM driving corperate Ubergeek, the long-haird berkie wearking guru, and the starving code poet all tat the same time.
Besides any programming decision is met by threats from your hard core viewership to fork it's own network./tongue in cheek
I don't mind the re-runs so much. I don't have cable at home (It's a quasi-religious thing I've made up and my wife hasn't called me to the carpet on.... yet.) About the only time I do watch cable is when we drop the baby off at my Mom's, at which point everything I see on the channel (for the hour I'm there) is new to me.
"Friendly" for me has less to do with a sugar coated install than it does being able to handle wierd installation issues. 2 summers ago I had a pair of 486 laptops I wanted to install a minimal system on to use them as X terminals.
Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.
The Gentoo "installer" is really just a boot prompt. The instructions are pretty straightforward and the steps very thoroughly explained. I just wish I had known about it back when I was building those laptops. (And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)
Yes, coal shoot out more radiation than nuclear power. In terms of what your average Joe is exposed to. Another way to double your radiation exposure is to drink a few extra cases of beer a year. People, the radiation amounts we are talking about are negligable.
And for the record, not all of us yanks have forgotten about fuel efficiency. I snicker every time I pull up to the gas station in my lil' Ford Focus. Made in America. Well, the drive train was made in Mexico, and the rest of the major components in Canada, but I think they still paint it here...
And how do you propose we get the electricity back to land? Most of these platforms are hundreds of miles out to sea. Transmitting electricty that far requires electric lines, the construction of which is no trivial task.
In order to make a cost effective wind generation system you would need a reasonably shallow section of sea. The problem is, people generally use those area for recreation and fishing, and will fight you tooth and nail if you try to drop in these huge ugly windmills where they are yachting.
Any anecdotal evidence I give is skewed because I read up on what other Linux geeks have gotten to work, and always buy what are generally geekworthy brands. My laptop is a Vaio because Tridge likes Viaos, and wrote drivers to play with the jobg dial and most of the proprietary I/O. My digital camera is a Sony, as is my PDA. Ok, I did have to hack the kernel to get the USB driver to sync with the Clie.
But then again, I'm in the "a little C programming is mandatory of proper Unix administration" school of philosphy. My idea of working is I can find/patch/steal/adapt/scratch write a driver after an afternoon on google.
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The problem is that they are stored in a suspended state for decades, and start to break down. That's why women who get pregnant past 35 or so have a higher chance of concieving children with certain chromosomal defects, like Down's Syndrome.
The "500" figure comes from the rough number of periods a woman is going to have in life. It's just a number.
So while a woman has more ammunition in her belt than your health class gave her credit, past a certain point they will only produce diseased, and eventually non-viable offspring.
mpost4, You are a kneebiting... oh wait, I've gotten you before.
Bonus, its's a computing appliance, and a furnace! If it's liquid cooled we could adapt it into being a hot water heater too!
"Hardware, on the other hand, is the more expensive"
You have seriously misunderstood something. Man-hours is the most expensive thing there is.
Stuff that mostly uses robots in factories to produce is generally cheap. Hardware is an example of this.
Stuff that is man-hour intensive, like software for example, is expensive.
Having worked in the semiconductor industry, robots aren't used a whole lot because people in third world countries work very cheap. Well, for a while and then the company shutters in one country and moves to a more depressed economy.
Now while the manufacturing of hardware is more or less a science today, the folks who actually design this stuff are a rare commodity. A chip designer, a good one, generally has a PhD in electrical engineering, and has been in the field for a decade at least. True, PhD's can also be found in other countries for far cheaper than in the US, and most of them have equivilent experience, but they still don't work for a bowl of rice. While they don't make as much as in the US, they are still pretty damn expensive.
And you can't just modify a chip like you modify computer code. The circuits are laid out in space, in multiple layers that interconnect like a tapestry. There are automation tools to help keep things in order, but you still need to be a flipping genius to design a microprocessor. My hats off to anyone who does that for a living, regardless of what flag you fly.
Every new "feature", every bug fix in hardware could potentially require a massive redesign of the circuitry inside the chip. Prototyping and testing this stuff is not cheap. In fact it's measured in the millions of dollars.
What makes hardware profitable is that the cost of R&D is spread over a few million copies. It seems cheap the same way a nuclear power plant is "cheap."
This model would only work if you didn't drop a dime into hardware R&D. That's silly.
Laughable.
x86 is hobbled by memory bus speed, competing standards, and backward compadibility with some pretty arcane architectures. x86 is designed from the ground up for single processor systems. They have some hardware hacks to handle SMP, but you don't get nearly the performance of a system that was designed from the ground up to be parallel processing.
Yes, there are some parlor tricks that allow you to use a few milliion x86 boxes running in parallel for certain types of scientific computing. It still doesn't hold a candle to a Cray or an Z-series mainframe in terms of real-time throughput.
Yes, an x86 box makes a great replacement for a Mini like a Vax or a old Solaris box. But mini's were never really considered "high performance", save in the area of network servers.
They seem to forget that competing software is readily available, functionally equivilent if not superior, free of licensing restrictions, and free of monetary outlay.
It would be like me trying to sell people cans of Air.
There is a significant difference. In this model, the publishers and producers of the software make off with a good portion of the proceeds on the sale of the copy of the software. Microsoft makes its money on the console, and also on license fees paid by the publishers and producers.
If microsoft were to suddenly decide to sell only games on the network, they would suddenly find themselves with no outside developers willing to create new games for the platform. Unless, of course, they developed a play for pay system by which developers are given a share of the subscription fees based on how often their titles are played.
There are 2 problems with that. 1) Microsoft's reputation for screwing third party developers preceeds it. 2) Such a model would make Microsoft a software distributor, which would upset the Anti-Trust apple cart in a way that even GW's croneys can't save them from.
In the US AT&T was raked across the coals as a monopoly in the late 70's. Local service was split from long distance, and the exclusive lock Bell had on what customers could install was thrown out as unlawful. As a result people could suddenly purchase phones for a fraction of what it would cost to rent and that business model dried up quickly.
That's simple. they have a brand that resembles rawhide with hair on it. It can be in black, brown, or white. Utters and horns are also signs of their brand.
I just can't wait. Perhaps they'll sue the penguin lovers society first, followed by 'all programmers', then on to some bizarre victims of their wrath. Or maybe he'll just be filed away in our collective databank as a crackpot not to be trusted with grocery money let alone investment capital.
And I'm trying so hard not to make a Bud Dwyer reference and failing miserably.
No, just a horse's head.
Well some of use actually want to live in our house for a little bit before we lose it to the bank. "Sorry sweety, you can't have new shoes because daddy lost big short selling stock" really doesn't cut it.
The great American dream. Money for nothing, and your chicks from your R&D department...
If anything Sony would head over to the Linux camp. There has been some bad blood between Sony and Microsoft for years.
Add to that, the US PDA market has been getting progressively more cutthroat. You aren't just competing against other PDA's, you now have the iPod, big-screen digital cameras, and ever more powerful portable gaming systems.
My guess is Sony's next PDA will be Linux or BSD based. No liscense fee, and they can write custom drivers for their proprietary chips. Having played with my Clie for a while, the fact it's a Palm device is immaterial. Sony loads it with a ton of custom software, the user interface includes a custom peripheral, and the menu system is a custom job. They must have finally gotten to the point that the Palm OS was getting in their road more than it was providing a salable product.
Ironically it's not the MP3 nor the Palm functions I that endeer me most to the brand (though I use them both.) It's the memory stick and the built in image viewer. My wife and I had a baby back in November, and I'm constanty filling my memory stick with picture of the little one to tote around. I have a Sony digital camera, so I just pop the stick out of the camera, into the Clie, and I have a nice bright screen to show my gallery off to.
My wife liked the feature so much I bought her one so she'd stop filching mine at parties.
Television is often called a medium. It is neither rare, nor particularly well done.
Besides any programming decision is met by threats from your hard core viewership to fork it's own network. /tongue in cheek
They call it "retirement."
The are waiting for the launch of "Duke Nukem Forever" and "Half Life 2."
I don't mind the re-runs so much. I don't have cable at home (It's a quasi-religious thing I've made up and my wife hasn't called me to the carpet on.... yet.) About the only time I do watch cable is when we drop the baby off at my Mom's, at which point everything I see on the channel (for the hour I'm there) is new to me.
Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.
The Gentoo "installer" is really just a boot prompt. The instructions are pretty straightforward and the steps very thoroughly explained. I just wish I had known about it back when I was building those laptops. (And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)
Fitting, I say. And a warning for anyone else who would try the same.
I just snicker because I walk to work, and my car gets 35 mpg.
And for the record, not all of us yanks have forgotten about fuel efficiency. I snicker every time I pull up to the gas station in my lil' Ford Focus. Made in America. Well, the drive train was made in Mexico, and the rest of the major components in Canada, but I think they still paint it here...
In order to make a cost effective wind generation system you would need a reasonably shallow section of sea. The problem is, people generally use those area for recreation and fishing, and will fight you tooth and nail if you try to drop in these huge ugly windmills where they are yachting.
Just look at the uproar in Nantucket sound.
But then again, I'm in the "a little C programming is mandatory of proper Unix administration" school of philosphy. My idea of working is I can find/patch/steal/adapt/scratch write a driver after an afternoon on google.