OK, postulating the component you describe, I understand that in simple terms it would store or release charge (like a capacitor)as the magnetic flux through it changed, or it would modify a magnetic field based on the charge added to or removed from it. As field strength and charge are potentials, under static conditions it would have a particular magnetic field around it based on charge stored. Is this correct? you state that the equation is d(phi)=M*dq.
How does this relate to a resistor which undergoes a discontinuous resistance change under critical conditions? Can you explain how it relates to the advertised device? Where is the charge being stored? Please continue to assume that I'm stupid, and explain the reasoning. My electromagnetic theory is thirty five years in the past now.
This is pure marketing hype. The three basic components - resistance, capacitance and inductance - are time invariant and their values in a theoretical circuit are constant. The behaviour of an invariant circuit topology to an electrical stimulus can be completely predicted and will always be the same for that stimulus.
These things are not invariants. They are in the same class as magnetic core memories/hard drives or DRAM, i.e. they retain for a time a change in their electrical state. They may be a better future short term memory technology than either, though this is yet to be shown. But there is nothing fundamentally theretically new about them.
If Glastonbury shopkeepers can really hear the noise from Worthy Down, which is at Pilton, then I'm impressed. Especially if they can hear it above their own continuous whining.
It's worse than you realise. This is being led by people who have a vested interest in peddling FUD - one of the "protestors" claims to run an independent consultancy on EMC, but actually runs a company that sells tinfoil hats and so on. (See the Ben Goldacre Bad Science columns in the Guardian for information). The real issue seems to be that Glastonbury has a small but vocal number of people who don't want the town to develop, and want to stop anything that might make it more attractive to small businesses.
The local paper (Fosse Way) published this story without the slightest critical analysis whatsoever. As someone who has worked on, inter alia, the EMC Directive, I wrote to them asking whether the person complaining of headaches had taken part in a blind test. Perhaps needless to say, the letter has not been published and indeed I've had no acknowledgement of it.
BTW, they do not have a "way of life which draws on 5000 years of hocus pocus". The Glastonbury thing dates back to no more than the 19th century: it's as fake as Druidism in Wales. Glastonbury is just a small town in Somerset that used to make its money from the leather industry till it went bust under Thatcher. Now it's a retirement suburb, the most Conservative part of the district. Currently a few protestors are trying to stop the demolition of the old factory buildings to put up an industrial estate - the old buildings cannot be brought up to modern standards and are a complete eyesore.
Why do I complain about this? Because I live in the part of Somerset that is a net contributor of taxes to keep the residents of Glastonbury from having to have industry and jobs, that's why.
Well, treating this seriously for a few milliseconds, it's questionable whether robots are consumer electronics. Dishwashers and washing machines do some of the jobs originally done by human servants, but they are classed as "white goods", not electronics, because they mainly depend on motors and pumps for operation. Do you class a car as "consumer electronics"? However, the other answer to the question is, see my point 1 (batteries are a major stumbling block.) And the cost of motors, gears, servos, hydraulics etc. haven't really come down to consumer equipment levels.
It's like the flying car: it happened but it turned out to be too expensive, hard to fly and dangerous for public use (helicopter). Robots work fine in a controlled industrial environment where the overall costs jusrtify them, but not in a normal house.
Consumer electronics nowadays basically do everything consumers want, in an affordable way. As far as I can see there are currently something like 4 breakthrough technologies needed to change that, and they didn't happen last year:
Roughly a doubling of battery capacity for the present size
Affordable large panel OLED or equivalent displays
Cheap A4/USL size electronic paper
a really cheap and effective universal home automation system
Apple releasing a large laptop with a non-user-replaceable battery is a sign of desperation on the battery front, not success. LED backlighting is no longer an expensive technology and has found its way into netbooks, so a new technology is needed there to create significant improvement. And e-readers are just too small. Everything else really works well enough. Consumer electronics is getting to be like plumbing, or refrigerators, or cookers. You don't have Whirlpool fanboys or people who endless post on the Internet on the virtues of push fit versus compression joints. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity of the industry.
Taleb is very arrogant. But he still cannot see beyond his limited perspective as a quant. He is right in arguing that the fundamental error in the model was to assume that the binomial distribution works for everything, but there also seems to have been a "conservation" error - assuming that risk scaled linearly with the axes. Any statistician with experience knows that reliance can only be placed on the outliers of a distribution when there is enough data around those outliers.
As an example, suppose that the distribution suggests the chance of losing 50 million dollars is +3 sigma for some measure. The problem is that there is a subtle effect - say panic, herd effect or some interaction of derivative models - which only becomes significant around the 3 sigma mark. The result could be that the exposure at a 4 sigma event is billions of dollars. A proper risk model would need to take this into account
My conclusion based on what I have read so far is that the physicists (in particular) involved in developing quantitative models would have benefited from a lot more exposure to real world experiment. They would then have had more of a clue about the unreliability of data away from the mean, scatter, and the importance of the fact that in physics subtle errors turn out to be signs that the model is wrong - e.g. relativistic effects only become important at a significant fraction of c.
I was referring to the majority of office users. Production of high quality documents, presentations and training materials requires a high skill level. I was complaining about the people who think that having the right program is a substitute for those skills, resulting in poor quality being the norm rather than the exception. How many managers really need PowerPoint to present misapplied statistics and add clip art to a boring diatribe?
I hope this happens, and I hope it starts to create a paradigm shift.
As far as office workers are concerned, the last 20 years can be seen as a terrible mistake. The problem is, basically, Office. It's interesting, reading discussions on Slashdot, to see people defending things like Word because OOo can't exactly reproduce the (usually visually illiterate) exact form of a Word document. The great majority of people in offices need to create files containing relatively transitory information, possibly with a shelf life of less than a day. Yet they spend absolutely hours fiddling with formatting and decoration, and thinking that thereby they are in some way adding value. Salesmen and people in marketing spend lots of time messing around with Powerpoint producing crappy presentations, and think that somehow this makes their message more convincing (perhaps at a subliminal level one corporate drone is influenced by the presentations of another, but education should be able to fix that.)
Email came as a huge relief - so immediately Microsoft tried to extend email with formatting features to convert a text medium into a presentation medium, or turn it into a vehicle to shuttle Office documents around the Internet.
The rise and rise of the netbook creates an opportunity to get rid of some of this shit. The netbook and the e-reader work well with plain black text on a white ground conveying information in a neutral way that allows it to be consciously read and analysed. They don't work well with overblown office applications.
On the other hand they do work very well for delivering basic search, mapping, information retrieval and messaging, and Chrome works very well as a browser on netbooks (I run Firefox on my corporate laptop and Chrome on my netbook because it is just easier that way.)
The cost of hardware is now so low that it probably makes more sense to have multiple single function devices than a general purpose PC again. The current obstacle to this is the cost of operating systems and the perceived need for Office. Get rid of most of this, and manufacturers can stop making minute variations on a theme and produce optimised devices - like why do I need top end sound or 3D on my photo editor, where what I want is reliable colour output from high res monitors and accurate rendition of color from the print drivers?
First, I was commenting on the "unpaid muse". The Muses, the ennead, were daughters of Zeus and so, of course, they didn't get paid. Which was the basis of my (feeble) joke, but was making the serious point that the original idea (inspiration) was attributed to them, while human beings did all the work.
Second, your point about drama, even if correct, is badly made because I did not include the Muse of Drama in my list, as I was making a joke about the RIAA. My point, in fact, was that there is hardly any original music about nowadays, it is almost all derivative, so why does it deserve copyright protection?
Third, your point about drama is just plain wrong. In Athens, plays were put on by nominated rich citizens (if you thought someone else was richer and should put the play on instead, you could swap possessions with him if he refused to agree - an interesting tax system). The rich citizen paid the didaskalos, the chorus, the actors, the musicians and, presumably, the playwright. The prize money nowhere near covered expenses. This was, after all, a religious festival. Fourth, you have completely missed my point anyway. If someone else has an idea (Hey, Aristophanes, how about writing a play in which jurors are represented by wasps?") Aristophanes does the actual dramaturgic work, and he and his sponsor win the prize. Exactly the same as envisaged here for Google.
So, in summary, my reply to you has to be "brek-ek-ek ex, ko-ax,ko-ax!"- which as everybody knows is what the frogs said to Dionysius.
Not to carp, but as far as I know none of the Ennead ever got paid. Of course, had they existed in the days of the RIAA, Euterpe,Polyhymnia and probably Terpsichore would have been served with writs pronto. This would have been a Good Thing, because Zeus had a thoroughgoing way of dealing with people who pissed off his relatives. But I digress...
As I keep telling our sales people, there is something of a gulf between having an idea and actually implementing it. Also, an invention is supposed to solve a problem, not just to state it. I may think it is a good idea to find a way of checking the extent to which bears poo in the woods, but when someone patents the improved device and process for facilitating mensuration and analysis of the sylvan/urban mass ratio of ursine faeces, I really shouldn't expect to profit.
and they are both what/.ers think. IE6 is slower than watching diluted gloss paint dry in sub-zero temperatures, and lots of quite ordinary stuff just doesn't work properly. This is enough for me, I don't also need conspiracy theories. Anybody who is using IE6 nowadays is probably on a corporate network and MSN isn't their default home any more, or they are so clueless that they don't even know what MSN is.
You also missed in your list a last class: software developers writing reasonably modern code whose applications run like the aforementioned drying paint in IE6 and would like corporates to use FF3 or Chrome because then end users will be pleased by the improvement in the way their pages load and run.
Pratchett is in the tradition of what the Victorians called "triple-decker novelists". Examples are Trollope, who wrote a series of fat books about the corruption of the clergy in 19th century England, based on one imaginary town (OK, Salisbury) Powell wrote a 12-volume sequence in which he traced the gradual social changes in upper class England from WW1 to the 1960s through the eyes of a single set of characters and their children, and Proust did the same for an earlier phase of French society. I won't bore you with the details because this sort of thing is obviously not for you, but Pratchett's world idea is so closely modelled on Powell and Proust that I am sure he is familar with the canon. For Pratchett readers, a lot of the interest is the way that his imaginary society evolves with time. It starts out in an imagined near-Medieval environment, and within 30 years it is early Victorian. This affects all his imagined social groups from the urban (Ankh-Morpork) through the rural world of Lancre and the complex, unevolved shifting allegiances of Uberwald. There is even a back story of an accelerated version of Christianity which goes from theocracy to Jehovah's Witnesses in about 120 years.
Someone above has written about a world of literature out there. I've read (more than once) Trollope, Powell, Proust, along with all the usual stuff including the Russians in translation and the easier French and German classics, and I find it possible to appreciate them all. On the other hand, I couldn't get into Rowling.
DNA, there I agree with you. I read the books with pleasure but they are comparatively froth. Good froth, but not arise sir Douglas froth even had he not died young.
First, he's English not American. As I guess are almost all the posts so far - except for insomniacs.
Second, he has made his attitude quite clear as regards honours in his books. They're fine so long as they are earned. His Prince Charles character goes from jester to king. Vimes goes from the gutter to a dukedom - but you have to earn the right to call him "mister". Witches get paid in the "solid coin of respect"; Magrat goes from witch to Queen but the witches think she has settled for second best. Obviously you should not read too much into what a writer says in his books, but Pratchett's take is very consistent.
Pratchett has been collaborating for a long time. It's one of his strengths; he absorbs information from all kinds of sources and then turns it into books full of ideas that teenagers actually want to read.
Not to harp too strongly on this, but reading Rowling, or Tolkien, actually doesn't do much. Reading Pratchett exposes people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, psychological and sociological ideas. He actually manages, not only to make political correctness and liberal tolerance funny, but also attractive. Just compare his ueber-policeman, Vimes, to Jack Bauer, and you see what I mean. Although they're both cardboard, Vimes has depth. He is a middle aged man who has accidentally married into high society and learns to adapt to it, even as marriage to a woman who understands powerful men opens opportunities to him he would otherwise not have had.
Another thing about Pratchett which may reflect his collaborationism: he can view his characters from outside. For instance, Vimes appears in books in which he is not the central character, and then we see him quite differently. Even minor characters do this: we see Cheery Littlebottom as a dwarf coming out as a woman in a gender-averse society, with all the conflicts that causes, but in another book we see her from outside the police force just as another faceless instance of authority. It's depth like this that justifies a knighthood.
There was, as I recall, a TV programme in the UK called "Tomorrow's World" in which the presenter once prophetically ridiculed the idea of handheld computers. After all, what could you possibly use them for?
Combine this kind of idea with recent research on PNA (a more robust molecule than DNA which shares many of the properties) and the long term prospects could be very interesting - self-assembling memory, for instance.
I don't know why anybody would, but the standard of literacy of this post, and what purports to be a further post below, is way below what I would expect of an English barrister (and yes, my family is infested with lawyers, thank you.) Despite the claim to represent "important corporate" clients (below) I don't think so.
However, the attitude that a corporation having to settle out of court can avoid humiliation with a gag order is not unknown at the English bar. Out of court settlements between corporations are one thing, those in which an overbearing corporation takes on a small defendant and then discovers that the case will be lost in an embarrassing and humiliating way should, if anything, be extensively publicised.
My suspicion is, and I am sorry if this comes over as somewhat prejudiced, that the decline in the standards of the Bar is partly due to the admission of people with different, less democratic traditions than our own, and that the standards of law in England and Wales have been suffering as a result. I suspect that the parent is one of these people.
Microsoft has built a business out of bad design which happens to fit the sloppy thinking and training of office workers.
Excel is a program that means that you can create shitty models with no proper auditability - which means that people who cannot be bothered to understand databases can think they are being clever (right up till all those quants got their last paychecks during 2008...). Word completely confuses the processes of content creation, editing, proofreading and typesetting, and allows the visually incompetent to waste hours pretending to be proper typesetters on a memo. Powerpoint is...oh, Tufte has said it all, I've paid for his books, you go and do the same and strike a blow for proper presentation of data.
People like MS Office because it enables them to waste lots of time and think they are being productive. Why can I write a 6 page white paper in a morning and it then takes the "customer facing" people a week to pretty it up? Because I was brought up on exercise books and typewriters, and was taught to leave presentation to people with presentation skills.
I use OOo because I need to read the documents produced by these people. But all my models are generated in SQL - usually nowadays in Transact-SQL running on SQL Server, so this is not an anti-MS rant - and my output is in plain text and PDF for things like flowcharts and system diagrams.
Fortunately, as I'm a dinosaur, I can do this stuff in Office and so I'm less likely to suffer a mass extinction event.
I unreservedly apologise for our stupid politicians. Unfortunately, many of them don't reveal themselves as barking until after they get elected and then get given a Government job. I believe that you in the US have had similar problems in the past.
Globalsolar of Tucson, Az. make 6W panels using the latest (and relatively efficient) non-silicon technology, but in most locations you will need at least 5 of them to run even a netbook. You certainly don't want them on the back of the lid as (a) they would take up far too much space but (b) do you really want to run a laptop while facing full sunlight?
I am building an experimental rig to measure the actual power available from 2 of them mounted in the best position (i.e. facing south at the best angle for each season) over the year, and I hope to report on this for the south of the UK in early 2010. In the meantime, don't hold your breath for a feasible, lightweight solution.
My father is 89 and has now been running Ubuntu for 3 years, after the last Mac blew up. He mentioned casually to me the other day that he had upgraded it from 8.04 to 8.10.
Read my post. Rolls-Royce don't have a GM badge on the hood.
Actually, your example is also counter-intuitive, because the ML is not a real Mercedes. It has a Merc engine and gearbox but the rest of it is thrown together by the US auto industry. It's well known in Europe to be below Merc standards. But that doesn't stop people buying real (i.e. Stuttgart) Mercs.
You are not only wrong about Honda, your selected example (auto industry) demonstrates the exact opposite approach.
Honda would love to sell me their engines. Car makers love to sell one another their engines. I have a Mitsubishi car with a state of the art Mercedes engine, and a boat with a Mitsubishi engine. Honda make generators, but happily sell their engines to other generator makers. The auto industry takes in one another's washing like you wouldn't believe. Mitsubishi designs off-road chassis for Peugeot Citroen. Daihatsu sells its little 3-cylinder engine to anybody who wants to make an ultra-compact car, including Toyota.
The reasons are simple: economy of scale and security. Daihatsu is a small manufacturer, but selling its little engine all over allows it to spend more money on R&D and advanced production equipment, therefore making it cheaper for them to put in their own cars. Mercedes, which is a moderate volume manufacturer, can sell its engines into lots of different market segments. Mitsubishi can sell their chassis knowledge and make money in markets which won't buy a Japanese car.
The logic for Apple is unassailable, but they won't buy it. They should fork Mac OS X. They should make a very clear brand distinction between the in-house version and the public version, and warn that motherboard etc. compliance is entirely up to the OEMs that use it, just as the warranty on my marine engine is with Thornycroft, not Mitsubishi. It would have to be sold as something like "Dell OS powered by Darwin".
Why won't they? My suspicion, as I type this on a high-spec non-Apple notebook from a large manufacturer, is that a Dell or a Lenovo would rapidly surpass Apple in performance.
Lead acid batteries start to degrade quickly once taken below 60% of nominal capacity, and car batteries may only stand 30-40 cycles of discharge below 50%. My marine batteries weigh a total of about the same as the EEStor claimed device, and have a real-world capacity of 1.5kW/hour, if I don't want to replace them every 3 years. This is a ratio more like 30 to 1.
What point is he trying to make? Programmers do not spend 100% of their time on optimisation. They have to design front ends, create business logic, debug, document, and optimise when necessary. Let's say the average programmer spends 10% of his or her time on optimisation. That's maybe $8000 per year per programmer.
Now assume that the application has a low number - say 10 customers per programmer, for a server application, and each customer instance needs 2 boxes. So the programmer optimisation cost is currently around $400 per server per annum.
The root flaw in the article is an assumption that each application has only one customer. That may be true of some in-house projects, but in these cases the main value of programmers tends to be their specialist knowledge of the company and the application. In these cases too, the process of updating and replacing servers taking into account all the internal constraints (likely to be limited by lack of resources) is probably many times the hardware cost.
Slashdot Mirror
How does this relate to a resistor which undergoes a discontinuous resistance change under critical conditions? Can you explain how it relates to the advertised device? Where is the charge being stored? Please continue to assume that I'm stupid, and explain the reasoning. My electromagnetic theory is thirty five years in the past now.
These things are not invariants. They are in the same class as magnetic core memories/hard drives or DRAM, i.e. they retain for a time a change in their electrical state. They may be a better future short term memory technology than either, though this is yet to be shown. But there is nothing fundamentally theretically new about them.
If Glastonbury shopkeepers can really hear the noise from Worthy Down, which is at Pilton, then I'm impressed. Especially if they can hear it above their own continuous whining.
The local paper (Fosse Way) published this story without the slightest critical analysis whatsoever. As someone who has worked on, inter alia, the EMC Directive, I wrote to them asking whether the person complaining of headaches had taken part in a blind test. Perhaps needless to say, the letter has not been published and indeed I've had no acknowledgement of it.
BTW, they do not have a "way of life which draws on 5000 years of hocus pocus". The Glastonbury thing dates back to no more than the 19th century: it's as fake as Druidism in Wales. Glastonbury is just a small town in Somerset that used to make its money from the leather industry till it went bust under Thatcher. Now it's a retirement suburb, the most Conservative part of the district. Currently a few protestors are trying to stop the demolition of the old factory buildings to put up an industrial estate - the old buildings cannot be brought up to modern standards and are a complete eyesore.
Why do I complain about this? Because I live in the part of Somerset that is a net contributor of taxes to keep the residents of Glastonbury from having to have industry and jobs, that's why.
It's like the flying car: it happened but it turned out to be too expensive, hard to fly and dangerous for public use (helicopter). Robots work fine in a controlled industrial environment where the overall costs jusrtify them, but not in a normal house.
Apple releasing a large laptop with a non-user-replaceable battery is a sign of desperation on the battery front, not success. LED backlighting is no longer an expensive technology and has found its way into netbooks, so a new technology is needed there to create significant improvement. And e-readers are just too small. Everything else really works well enough. Consumer electronics is getting to be like plumbing, or refrigerators, or cookers. You don't have Whirlpool fanboys or people who endless post on the Internet on the virtues of push fit versus compression joints. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity of the industry.
As an example, suppose that the distribution suggests the chance of losing 50 million dollars is +3 sigma for some measure. The problem is that there is a subtle effect - say panic, herd effect or some interaction of derivative models - which only becomes significant around the 3 sigma mark. The result could be that the exposure at a 4 sigma event is billions of dollars. A proper risk model would need to take this into account
My conclusion based on what I have read so far is that the physicists (in particular) involved in developing quantitative models would have benefited from a lot more exposure to real world experiment. They would then have had more of a clue about the unreliability of data away from the mean, scatter, and the importance of the fact that in physics subtle errors turn out to be signs that the model is wrong - e.g. relativistic effects only become important at a significant fraction of c.
I was referring to the majority of office users. Production of high quality documents, presentations and training materials requires a high skill level. I was complaining about the people who think that having the right program is a substitute for those skills, resulting in poor quality being the norm rather than the exception. How many managers really need PowerPoint to present misapplied statistics and add clip art to a boring diatribe?
As far as office workers are concerned, the last 20 years can be seen as a terrible mistake. The problem is, basically, Office. It's interesting, reading discussions on Slashdot, to see people defending things like Word because OOo can't exactly reproduce the (usually visually illiterate) exact form of a Word document. The great majority of people in offices need to create files containing relatively transitory information, possibly with a shelf life of less than a day. Yet they spend absolutely hours fiddling with formatting and decoration, and thinking that thereby they are in some way adding value. Salesmen and people in marketing spend lots of time messing around with Powerpoint producing crappy presentations, and think that somehow this makes their message more convincing (perhaps at a subliminal level one corporate drone is influenced by the presentations of another, but education should be able to fix that.)
Email came as a huge relief - so immediately Microsoft tried to extend email with formatting features to convert a text medium into a presentation medium, or turn it into a vehicle to shuttle Office documents around the Internet.
The rise and rise of the netbook creates an opportunity to get rid of some of this shit. The netbook and the e-reader work well with plain black text on a white ground conveying information in a neutral way that allows it to be consciously read and analysed. They don't work well with overblown office applications.
On the other hand they do work very well for delivering basic search, mapping, information retrieval and messaging, and Chrome works very well as a browser on netbooks (I run Firefox on my corporate laptop and Chrome on my netbook because it is just easier that way.)
The cost of hardware is now so low that it probably makes more sense to have multiple single function devices than a general purpose PC again. The current obstacle to this is the cost of operating systems and the perceived need for Office. Get rid of most of this, and manufacturers can stop making minute variations on a theme and produce optimised devices - like why do I need top end sound or 3D on my photo editor, where what I want is reliable colour output from high res monitors and accurate rendition of color from the print drivers?
First, I was commenting on the "unpaid muse". The Muses, the ennead, were daughters of Zeus and so, of course, they didn't get paid. Which was the basis of my (feeble) joke, but was making the serious point that the original idea (inspiration) was attributed to them, while human beings did all the work.
Second, your point about drama, even if correct, is badly made because I did not include the Muse of Drama in my list, as I was making a joke about the RIAA. My point, in fact, was that there is hardly any original music about nowadays, it is almost all derivative, so why does it deserve copyright protection?
Third, your point about drama is just plain wrong. In Athens, plays were put on by nominated rich citizens (if you thought someone else was richer and should put the play on instead, you could swap possessions with him if he refused to agree - an interesting tax system). The rich citizen paid the didaskalos, the chorus, the actors, the musicians and, presumably, the playwright. The prize money nowhere near covered expenses. This was, after all, a religious festival.
Fourth, you have completely missed my point anyway. If someone else has an idea (Hey, Aristophanes, how about writing a play in which jurors are represented by wasps?") Aristophanes does the actual dramaturgic work, and he and his sponsor win the prize. Exactly the same as envisaged here for Google.
So, in summary, my reply to you has to be "brek-ek-ek ex, ko-ax,ko-ax!"- which as everybody knows is what the frogs said to Dionysius.
As I keep telling our sales people, there is something of a gulf between having an idea and actually implementing it. Also, an invention is supposed to solve a problem, not just to state it. I may think it is a good idea to find a way of checking the extent to which bears poo in the woods, but when someone patents the improved device and process for facilitating mensuration and analysis of the sylvan/urban mass ratio of ursine faeces, I really shouldn't expect to profit.
You also missed in your list a last class: software developers writing reasonably modern code whose applications run like the aforementioned drying paint in IE6 and would like corporates to use FF3 or Chrome because then end users will be pleased by the improvement in the way their pages load and run.
Someone above has written about a world of literature out there. I've read (more than once) Trollope, Powell, Proust, along with all the usual stuff including the Russians in translation and the easier French and German classics, and I find it possible to appreciate them all. On the other hand, I couldn't get into Rowling.
DNA, there I agree with you. I read the books with pleasure but they are comparatively froth. Good froth, but not arise sir Douglas froth even had he not died young.
Second, he has made his attitude quite clear as regards honours in his books. They're fine so long as they are earned. His Prince Charles character goes from jester to king. Vimes goes from the gutter to a dukedom - but you have to earn the right to call him "mister". Witches get paid in the "solid coin of respect"; Magrat goes from witch to Queen but the witches think she has settled for second best. Obviously you should not read too much into what a writer says in his books, but Pratchett's take is very consistent.
Not to harp too strongly on this, but reading Rowling, or Tolkien, actually doesn't do much. Reading Pratchett exposes people to all kinds of religious, philosophical, psychological and sociological ideas. He actually manages, not only to make political correctness and liberal tolerance funny, but also attractive. Just compare his ueber-policeman, Vimes, to Jack Bauer, and you see what I mean. Although they're both cardboard, Vimes has depth. He is a middle aged man who has accidentally married into high society and learns to adapt to it, even as marriage to a woman who understands powerful men opens opportunities to him he would otherwise not have had.
Another thing about Pratchett which may reflect his collaborationism: he can view his characters from outside. For instance, Vimes appears in books in which he is not the central character, and then we see him quite differently. Even minor characters do this: we see Cheery Littlebottom as a dwarf coming out as a woman in a gender-averse society, with all the conflicts that causes, but in another book we see her from outside the police force just as another faceless instance of authority. It's depth like this that justifies a knighthood.
Combine this kind of idea with recent research on PNA (a more robust molecule than DNA which shares many of the properties) and the long term prospects could be very interesting - self-assembling memory, for instance.
However, the attitude that a corporation having to settle out of court can avoid humiliation with a gag order is not unknown at the English bar. Out of court settlements between corporations are one thing, those in which an overbearing corporation takes on a small defendant and then discovers that the case will be lost in an embarrassing and humiliating way should, if anything, be extensively publicised.
My suspicion is, and I am sorry if this comes over as somewhat prejudiced, that the decline in the standards of the Bar is partly due to the admission of people with different, less democratic traditions than our own, and that the standards of law in England and Wales have been suffering as a result. I suspect that the parent is one of these people.
Excel is a program that means that you can create shitty models with no proper auditability - which means that people who cannot be bothered to understand databases can think they are being clever (right up till all those quants got their last paychecks during 2008...). Word completely confuses the processes of content creation, editing, proofreading and typesetting, and allows the visually incompetent to waste hours pretending to be proper typesetters on a memo. Powerpoint is...oh, Tufte has said it all, I've paid for his books, you go and do the same and strike a blow for proper presentation of data.
People like MS Office because it enables them to waste lots of time and think they are being productive. Why can I write a 6 page white paper in a morning and it then takes the "customer facing" people a week to pretty it up? Because I was brought up on exercise books and typewriters, and was taught to leave presentation to people with presentation skills.
I use OOo because I need to read the documents produced by these people. But all my models are generated in SQL - usually nowadays in Transact-SQL running on SQL Server, so this is not an anti-MS rant - and my output is in plain text and PDF for things like flowcharts and system diagrams.
Fortunately, as I'm a dinosaur, I can do this stuff in Office and so I'm less likely to suffer a mass extinction event.
I unreservedly apologise for our stupid politicians. Unfortunately, many of them don't reveal themselves as barking until after they get elected and then get given a Government job. I believe that you in the US have had similar problems in the past.
I am building an experimental rig to measure the actual power available from 2 of them mounted in the best position (i.e. facing south at the best angle for each season) over the year, and I hope to report on this for the south of the UK in early 2010. In the meantime, don't hold your breath for a feasible, lightweight solution.
My father is 89 and has now been running Ubuntu for 3 years, after the last Mac blew up. He mentioned casually to me the other day that he had upgraded it from 8.04 to 8.10.
Actually, your example is also counter-intuitive, because the ML is not a real Mercedes. It has a Merc engine and gearbox but the rest of it is thrown together by the US auto industry. It's well known in Europe to be below Merc standards. But that doesn't stop people buying real (i.e. Stuttgart) Mercs.
Honda would love to sell me their engines. Car makers love to sell one another their engines. I have a Mitsubishi car with a state of the art Mercedes engine, and a boat with a Mitsubishi engine. Honda make generators, but happily sell their engines to other generator makers. The auto industry takes in one another's washing like you wouldn't believe. Mitsubishi designs off-road chassis for Peugeot Citroen. Daihatsu sells its little 3-cylinder engine to anybody who wants to make an ultra-compact car, including Toyota.
The reasons are simple: economy of scale and security. Daihatsu is a small manufacturer, but selling its little engine all over allows it to spend more money on R&D and advanced production equipment, therefore making it cheaper for them to put in their own cars. Mercedes, which is a moderate volume manufacturer, can sell its engines into lots of different market segments. Mitsubishi can sell their chassis knowledge and make money in markets which won't buy a Japanese car.
The logic for Apple is unassailable, but they won't buy it. They should fork Mac OS X. They should make a very clear brand distinction between the in-house version and the public version, and warn that motherboard etc. compliance is entirely up to the OEMs that use it, just as the warranty on my marine engine is with Thornycroft, not Mitsubishi. It would have to be sold as something like "Dell OS powered by Darwin".
Why won't they? My suspicion, as I type this on a high-spec non-Apple notebook from a large manufacturer, is that a Dell or a Lenovo would rapidly surpass Apple in performance.
Lead acid batteries start to degrade quickly once taken below 60% of nominal capacity, and car batteries may only stand 30-40 cycles of discharge below 50%. My marine batteries weigh a total of about the same as the EEStor claimed device, and have a real-world capacity of 1.5kW/hour, if I don't want to replace them every 3 years. This is a ratio more like 30 to 1.
Now assume that the application has a low number - say 10 customers per programmer, for a server application, and each customer instance needs 2 boxes. So the programmer optimisation cost is currently around $400 per server per annum.
The root flaw in the article is an assumption that each application has only one customer. That may be true of some in-house projects, but in these cases the main value of programmers tends to be their specialist knowledge of the company and the application. In these cases too, the process of updating and replacing servers taking into account all the internal constraints (likely to be limited by lack of resources) is probably many times the hardware cost.