That he just made it up as a suitably non-sequitur answer. In fact, there are 42 Laws of Cricket, and cricket features heavily as a key plot mover in HHGG. Fenchurch is easily explained. It's a joke about people who name their offspring after where they think they were conceived (e.g. Brooklyn?). Fenchurch Street was the grubbiest and most dismal of the London railway termini at the time, and that was saying a lot. To have a particularly beautiful (and randy) woman conceived by her parents at Fenchurch St. Station in a moment of boredom is pure Adams.
The Lib Dems may well hold the balance, and they dissent from the major parties on this issue. They also have a few heavyweights who know how the world works and are critical of it - Vince Cable is a former chief economist of Shell, no less, and has just delivered a speech attacking the failure to tax rich immigrants.
It may come as a surprise, but the attitude to things like crew safety in the old USSR was actually pretty good. In WW2 Stalin executed his head of the Air Force for attacking the safety of Soviet aircraft, but Stalin was a monster and his successors weren't. Spaceflight was post-Stalin, you know. Kruschev, whatever his faults, was probably no worse as a human being than Kennedy.
People who have investigated the ejector seats on Soviet military aircraft have commented that in some ways they were better than ones used on many NATO planes,and the armor on Soviet helicopters was truly impressive. After all, who do you think worked on the Soviet space and military aircraft programs? Hint: they weren't heroic Stakhanovite peasants. They were the sons and daughters of Party members, the people who were on top in the Soviet Union. And middle class people are notorious for caring an awful lot what happens to their children.
So I guess what I am saying is, there is no a priori reason for believing that the US and USSR attitude to space flight safety was significantly different, but, as Arthur Clarke once commented, the Russians preferred to go with solid, proven, perhaps over-engineered systems even if they were bigger and heavier.
Perhaps a little off topic, but why are US space programs named after Greek mythology? It's not like it is appropriate. Apollo, Nike-Zeus, Atlas,Orion, Ares - what was wrong with names like Redstone, Columbia etc.?
Not only does the majority of the Anglican church (includes US Episcopalians) not oppose the idea of biological evolution, many of the scientists who, in the 19th Century, started to establish the age of the Earth and the fossil record were, in fact, ordained Anglican clergymen.
Not to complain of the Jesuits. I was actually taught about Newton by a Jesuit. When someone pointed out to him that Newton was, in effect, a somewhat socially dysfunctional Unitarian, his view was in effect, "well, Newton was a genius, God creates geniuses, ergo since God knows what he is doing, that was right for Newton."
It's true Galileo wasn't tortured, but the rest of this seriously misrepresents his thought.
Galileo basically disproved Aristotelianism - the belief that the Universe was made of 5 elements, that 4 of them comprised the corruptible lower Universe, and that the perfect outer Universe was made of the 5th element. He did this experimentally by pointing a telescope at the supposedly perfect bodies and showing that they had surface features.
He also identified the orbits of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, thus demonstrating that, in the Universe, small bodies could orbit round a large one. He showed that a system of satellites was not unique.
He also did valuable early work in dynamics - the cannon ball story is long exploded - by building precise apparatus and timing systems for measuring the movement of balls rolling down slopes. It was not his fault that he did not know that gravitational potential energy was partly converted into rotational kinetic energy as well as translational energy, or that, in the absence of a definition of velocity, he did not get the formulae of motion into their modern forms. It is also not his fault that he got frustrated because the reaction of the people who he tried to demonstrate his evidence to was, in effect, to stick their hands over their ears and scream "can't hear you". It is also not his fault that Kepler was addicted to mystical ideas (such as that the orbits of the planets fit inside a nesting of the Platonic solids), and lacked a modern marthematical framework, which, at the time, greatly obscured the value of what he was doing.
As for suggesting that Galileo would "cluelessly" hope the Pope would find Simpleton funny, anybody who knows anything about Italian society at that era would know that to be nonsense. This was a society in which men fought to the death over perceived insults. My guess is that Galileo hoped the Pope would see arguments he supported being made by an idiot, and decide to forget about them quietly.
However, the Inquisition and its mates had far too much invested in Aristotle (and not being made to look ridiculous) and the rest is history.
Revisiting this before posting I am tempted to add that there is a great deal of misunderstanding of people like Newton, Galileo and Kepler due to anachronism. They did not live in a modern society, they did not have access to modern mathematics, instruments and communications. You cannot write about them without researching their background. But, believe me, if you do it is endlessly fascinating and there is much to learn for our own time. There is a huge amount of published material, in fact these were guys who could write their own books. They are worth reading. Both the Dialogue (Galileo) and at least part of the Principia (Newton) should be on every nerd's reading list, if only because it cures you of the idea that everything exciting in science happened since 1940.
The proper place for the statue is surely outside the Museum of the History of science at Florence. This ought to be on the itinerary of any self-respecting nerd visiting Italy. They have some of Galileo's own equipment, and a religious relic - a finger bone of the man himself. They have a full size model of his gravitational experiment (no jokes about cannonballs please) and the last time I visited there was an Italian school party there getting an accurate account of his experiments from their enthusiastic woman science teacher. It's even better than the Whipple in Cambridge, which is in some ways a temple to Newton, because you really get the sense of just how exciting and disruptive Galileo's thought actually was. If you read the Dialogue on Two World Systems, you rapidly realise that Galileo was a modern man who today would be on television being incredibly rude and funny about Kansas boards of education. (This is not hype. You only need to read his letters to Kepler to realise that what probably really pissed off the Pope and the Inquisition wasn't that he said they were wrong, but that he made jokes about their ideas.)
Sadly for Giordano Bruno, he didn't have Galileo's powerful protectors and was a bit too all-out mystical. Roger Bacon just got locked up for years for suggesting that Arab science should be adopted to ease the work of the poor - can't have peasants having free time to think about things. However, the Church at least has a history of adopting ideas once they've been safely mainstream for a few hundred years. Some of the Protestant sects seem intent on actually going backwards, hence the drive towards Bible literalism (which wouldn't have been understood by most of the early Church fathers, but is a peculiar product of 19th century Protestantism separated by an ocean from its roots.)
Two years ago, about to re-engine my boat, I did a study of converting that to a plug in hybrid. I have a quite unnecessarily large engine room so there is plenty of room for batteries, the electric motor generator in the shafting etc. My plan was to replace the 30HP motor (which rarely runs at more that 15% except when manouevering) with an engine producing max 8 HP at 1500rpm, in line with a 24HP electric motor which would then on full power give about 3000rpm at 30HP. This would be quiet, efficient, and by using shore power (the plug in bit) would not normally need to use the Diesel in the marina at all. On the water at cruising speed, the batteries would recharge in under an hour.
From an engineering point of view this was a relatively straight forward system, and I could use an off the shelf waterproof DC motor sourced in the US. Unfortunately, adding in control gear, custom parts, my time and forecast engineer and technician time, I was looking at a total around $50000, versus $10000 all up for a new 30HP engine and gearbox. I imagine that fitting a much larger engine into a car with very limited space, heat problems, the difficulty of fitting very heavy wiring safely, the change to the vibration characteristics, you name it, you would probably want to budget several times as much. It is far from easy to drop an electric motor into a car power train, unlike a boat where the only deflection (in a steel hull) is due to engine vibration, not axle movement. If you are a sufficiently skilled engineer to do it yourself, factor in the loss of earnings. It is not just like dropping a different but similar engine into a car. (For instance, I have seen a gas to Diesel Rolls-Royce conversion, but turns out that it uses a like for like compatible engine block and is relatively trivial to implement.)
I think you will find carbon is actually a little more dense than aluminium, and the numbers quoted are not compelling since heat treatable aluminium alloys are much stronger than the native metal. As for rigidity, you have somehow managed to get to be old enough to post on Slashdot without ever seeing aluminium baking foil.
The truth is, wonder materials that are not yet in real production never actually turn out to be that wonderful. Aluminium has not replaced cast iron in many applications. Cars and ships continue to be made of mild steel. Titanium has not replaced aluminium in aircraft. Both Airbus and Boeing are struggling to make large composite airframes and wings.
When I hear a technology being touted as useful for some application that does not yet exist (such as solar sails) my bullshit detector switches up 6 ranges and still goes into overload. If a new technology does not offer significant benefits on an established volume engineering problem, it will fail to get traction.
This does not make any kind of sense. The screen uses much more power than the HDD, so the idea that consumption of the whole laptop would more than double is frankly bizarre.
What is critical is the drive settings. If the new drive doesn't shut down properly on request you will use more power.
Actually, switching to a fast drive can often save power. This is because the faster drive is active for shorter periods when reading and writing to the disk. If you use a 4200rpm drive to copy large files, other things being equal it will take 60% longer than a 7200 drive. If (as I have found) the 7200 drive uses about 20% more power when active and about the same when idle, you can easily see where the saving comes from.
In fact you can still buy, heavily discounted, the 1000. (Mind you the supplier I went to is down to their last 5). I did, because both the alternatives in the price band only came with Vista and there was no guarantee that XP drivers were available for everything.
As for the toughness or otherwise of Acer laptops, just as with the Mac it depends on the range. We still have a 4+ year old 1501 which has been so heavily abused that numerous keys have lost part of their labelling, yet everything still works and, placed side by side with a Compaq equivalent, similarly used and a year newer, the Acer looks in much better condition. Admittedly it is on its second hard drive but, having been used for two years as a development test web server and database engine, it has an excuse.
The 1000, at its discounted price, is OK. It will happily run a presentation for 4 hours on the 6 cell battery. It doesn't get as hot as you would expect when both processors are churning away near 100%. The 5400rpm drive is adequate and the bundled utilities are pretty good. The absence of a built in DVD drive is no great sweat under office conditions; but then I use the thing for work. The carbon fibre layer in the case is possibly a bit silly, the badging is ludicrous, though possibly no sillier than calling clothes Diesel, but I have an XP laptop with dual CPU and 4G of RAM which should be still perfectly usable for all on the road needs and is warranted until Jan 2011.
To have bought the Macbook Air I would have had to have spent a great deal more money - including buying an Apple backup device and an external DVD drive - a lot more money to get the same warranty, and still not been able to buy a cheap second 6 cell battery to give me a total 8 hour operational life.
Interesting that this got modded off topic. I wonder why? Are the shills out? I consider it to be extremely relevant that a senior Microsoft exec did not seem to know the significance of a low end embedded graphics system on a laptop, or of likely driver support from a second tier printer manufacturer. Given that this is about how Microsoft underestimated the Vista compatibility issues, such ignorance suggests that at least one Microsoft exec did not have good technical knowledge of the environment in which his own platform worked.
Wouldn't you expect someone like that to know who the most active driver developers were for his platform, or to know about the market shares of different printer makers? I bet a Ford exec doesn't expect a non-franchise garage to be able to get the diagnostics off his 2008 model.
Air molecules move in a nonlinear fashion. Water molecules move in a nonlinear fashion. People move in a nonlinear fashion in crowds. At a macroscopic level, this doesn't mean hoses (or subways) don't work.
In certain fields (e.g. audio) "nonlinear" is often used to mean not describable by the function mx + c, but here I think it means that the motion is not describable by a continuous function, which is what you expect of all very small particles in any kind of non-vacuum. Don't they teach Brownian motion nowadays?
A VP in Microsoft buys a Sony laptop with 915 graphics and a Brother multifunction printer? I've suggested elsewhere on these pages that Microsoft management may not always be of the same high quality as their scientific and engineering staff, but two such misjudgements from one exec is worrying. Especially as one assumes that the guy didn't do it for lack of cash.
National stereotypes collide. Anal Swiss bankers meet predatory American lawyers. No good can come of it.
Now a story (from an Italian friend living in Zug) to explain the Swiss mentality. A bit off topic, but you need to understand the Swiss to get the background.
A small factory owner lives in Zug, a few miles from Zurich, and has a son. The son grows up and marries a girl from Zurich, then goes to live there. For eighteen months he commutes back to work in his father's factory, then suddenly his father sacks him. He asks why. Reply: "All you people from Zurich are untrustworthy".
Since the fall of the Wall in 1990, _nobody_ in Europe does guilt by association like the Swiss.
European VWs are different. In over 60000 miles mine stopped once: when the battery gave out and failed to start it, and an hour later it was off again with a new battery. It did throw a fault: the oil pressure warning light came on in error. But, as someone experienced in Diesels, I just had to listen to the engine to know it was the light and not the engine.
The Prius is made uneconomically by Totota to buy market mindset, hence the build quality etc., and for that reason you might want one (it's a bargain). But the VW hybrid most likely will be the same in the first release, so is probably worth waiting for.
Especially because of the dirty litle secret they really do not want you to know. Diesel is much safer in crashes because it is so much denser, unlikely to form explosive mixtures with air. As well as producing less CO2, it is less likely to fry you.
Just like MS, Intel is being investigated by the European Union Competition department. I imagine their lawyers will be scrutinising the "Vista compatible" fiasco now with great care since there seems to be a suggestion that MS tried to benefit Intel at the expense of a rival.
Myself, I don't think Intel is evil at all, just a little bit naive about the seriousness with which Europe takes the "level playing field".
I am sorry to rain on your parade, but while your idea is very good for leisure transport it is not so good for trade. Unfortunately owing to the tendency of the wind to blow in more or less one direction in different latitudes at different times of year, you will have to do a bit more than that. You will need to work out a routing system for global transport that takes account of wind and tide, and still have to deal with the minor issue that you may find voyages are unduly delayed because the wind fails to blow at all for extended periods.
Waves are more consistent, which is why this is ingenious. Unfortunately they can also come in pretty big sizes, which may cause trouble. This thing won't be visiting the Bay of Fundy, or for that matter the Mediterranean, any time soon.
If on the other hand you are talking about the niche market that is photo printers, it's manifest that the people who control the ink technology can also do the best job of specifying the paper. In the old days of silver photography, it was wise to use Kodak chemicals with Kodak film, and Ciba formulations with Cibachrome. On the other hand, anybody who builds a volume office laser printer that won't work with commodity paper stock will not be long in the business.
Because the European Union is a progressive liberal democracy, she is allowed to have more balls than her US opposite number.
Microsoft needs to get a move on. The fine is in Euros, and if the Euro continues to appreciate against the dollar when they eventually pay it may bankrupt them. (this is a joke. It is a feeble joke but a joke nonetheless.)
Incidentally, and this is quite true, one of the lawyers for Microsoft summarised their case like this: "We are Microsoft. We are the good guys. So what we want to do is right." Now compare that with HP, who have people based in Europe who talk to the Commission and say, in effect "We would like to do so-and-so. Is that all right?". Strangely, you don't hear about massive fines for HP over their dominance of the office printer market.
It has been clear to me for a number of years that Microsoft simply needs to grow up as a company, like small children who, if their parents do a half decent job, learn to get what they want by politeness and cooperation, not by kicking, screaming and stealing toys. But, in order to change, they have to recognise the need for change. I suspect that their technical people are well aware of this, but some of the management is still in "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mode. The MS XML saga is pretty conclusive evidence of this. I bet there are project managers in ISO who by now will do their best to sabotage any Microsoft standards project, simply because they have been so pissed off by them.
You gave it away! (as another ex technical director and general manager now back doing systems development). If _everybody_ goes back to doing useful work, projects will get finished on time and the whole basis of the industry will collapse.
Seriously, why is it that if an artist dresses like a tramp and snarls at anyone who tries to distract him (or her) while working, that's just how talent operates, but when it's engineers or programmers, that just shows how dysfunctional they are? I think Toby Young had a handle on it in an article last weekend. "Management types" are often not too bright, therefore they want people to perceive factors other than intelligence as important in the workplace. You can be as thick as two bricks, but given enough money you can wear expensive suits and haircuts and drive a Porsche. So hey, suits and haircuts and expensive cars are evidence of managerial talent. Of course, you can have all those things and be a good manager, but the correlation, to my mind, does not imply causation.
The SS were not the last ones in the West to target civilians. The Russians, the US and the UK all did it before and after D-Day. This is an extremely difficult ethical question, and before some kneejerk moderates this flamebait, please read on.
Max Hastings, the military historian, has written in his remarkably fair and balanced book Armageddon about the British policy of carpet bombing civilians, and how it probably lengthened the war (because it diverted resources from protecting shipping in the Atlantic, and because strategic attacks on oil plants could have caused the German army to come to a stop much sooner. He describes revenge attacks by many Allied groups. Apart from Bomber Harris, the Allied commanders were in general much more careful than the Russians, and this reduced casualties in the West. In the east, knowing what the Russians would do, the Germans fought with more desperation.
Hastings points out, very fairly, that Japan suffered far less than Germany because the result of the A-bomb attacks was surrender without invasion. Therefore, paradoxically, the A-Bomb may well have reduced the death rate in the Far East very considerably.
This shows how ethically difficult the whole thing is in the context of all out war.
It is also very difficult nowadays to define who is a civilian. Is a worker in an oil production plant a civilian when a tanker driver is a soldier? They are part of the supply chain, and the oil plant could well be a legitimate military target. In a country where the majority of men carry guns, how do you tell a civilian from a soldier?
I am not in favor of indiscriminate war, believe me. Thanks to my father and my uncle and their friends, my only experience of the military has been as an R&D engineer. But I do think we often expect the military to solve ethical problems that philosophers give up on, and that when it comes to people who want to run a country so they can torture and abuse women versus people who, basically, don't, I think we need to be very careful before sounding off.
"FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software."
Why, exactly? At the worst it would mean a return to a world in which corporations had to design their own applications from scratch, and in which expert programmers moved from job to job and moved the skills around. Before long big corporations in different but related business areas would get together and say, OK guys, let's co-operate on designing what we need. I think somebody a bit cleverer than I am wrote a book about it. How did you think those medieval cathedrals got built?
In fact it is difficult to point to a single NECESSARY business or other process which cannot be done with FOSS. It may not be as pretty as with paid-for software, it may in fact be as much as 5-10 years behind but some of us remember there was a fully functioning computer industry 10 years ago.
You may not remember, you may not be old enough, but you could originally obtain the source code to Unix for basically the cost of the media. This actually antedated DOS. You could support the document production and simple program development needs of eight people on a box with a 16MHz processor, a couple of MBytes of RAM, a couple of disk drives and a tape drive. Everything that has happened since, other than networking, has basically been icing on the cake, and even networking is still basically about shipping a clever pattern of ones and zeroes down a wire.
In a world in which digital cameras have face and smile recognition (perhaps the most pointless development of neural network technology anywhere?) how long before the touchpad is replaced by a little short focus digital camera that detects the fingers? In which case, rather than multitouch, you could have three dimensional object recognition and a hugely expanded gesture set.
This is one case where an industry standard is the only thing that makes sense. Make the gesture set standard and allow people to patent specific implementations (physical not software) which offer new features.
Unfortunately, in my experience it's the marketing and sales departments who, because of their competitive mindset, don't understand the benefits of collaboration in growing the overall market. When they do turn up at standards meetings as observers, the results are sometimes laughable but usually cringeworthy for the engineers from their companies. Microsoft XML is a case in point. I confidently expect these people to continue to act as a brake on the wheels of input mechanism progress.
Proves nothing. When Feynmann did IQ tests they were considerably less developed than they have been for the last 20 years or so. Also, the score is strongly affected by, among other things, motivation. They also do not measure, of course, the ability to think for extended periods about a single subject, which is important for theoretical physicists. Feynmann characterised himself as a slow thinker but his history shows he had an excellent memory and could think about the same subject for hours at a time. His ability to work in night-clubs also showed an ability to resist distraction.
IQ is important, but as part of a set of longer term tests which demonstrate the ability to apply it over time. In the case of some management schemes, three days of testing is not considered too long.
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That he just made it up as a suitably non-sequitur answer. In fact, there are 42 Laws of Cricket, and cricket features heavily as a key plot mover in HHGG. Fenchurch is easily explained. It's a joke about people who name their offspring after where they think they were conceived (e.g. Brooklyn?). Fenchurch Street was the grubbiest and most dismal of the London railway termini at the time, and that was saying a lot. To have a particularly beautiful (and randy) woman conceived by her parents at Fenchurch St. Station in a moment of boredom is pure Adams.
The Lib Dems may well hold the balance, and they dissent from the major parties on this issue. They also have a few heavyweights who know how the world works and are critical of it - Vince Cable is a former chief economist of Shell, no less, and has just delivered a speech attacking the failure to tax rich immigrants.
People who have investigated the ejector seats on Soviet military aircraft have commented that in some ways they were better than ones used on many NATO planes,and the armor on Soviet helicopters was truly impressive. After all, who do you think worked on the Soviet space and military aircraft programs? Hint: they weren't heroic Stakhanovite peasants. They were the sons and daughters of Party members, the people who were on top in the Soviet Union. And middle class people are notorious for caring an awful lot what happens to their children.
So I guess what I am saying is, there is no a priori reason for believing that the US and USSR attitude to space flight safety was significantly different, but, as Arthur Clarke once commented, the Russians preferred to go with solid, proven, perhaps over-engineered systems even if they were bigger and heavier.
Perhaps a little off topic, but why are US space programs named after Greek mythology? It's not like it is appropriate. Apollo, Nike-Zeus, Atlas,Orion, Ares - what was wrong with names like Redstone, Columbia etc.?
Not to complain of the Jesuits. I was actually taught about Newton by a Jesuit. When someone pointed out to him that Newton was, in effect, a somewhat socially dysfunctional Unitarian, his view was in effect, "well, Newton was a genius, God creates geniuses, ergo since God knows what he is doing, that was right for Newton."
Galileo basically disproved Aristotelianism - the belief that the Universe was made of 5 elements, that 4 of them comprised the corruptible lower Universe, and that the perfect outer Universe was made of the 5th element. He did this experimentally by pointing a telescope at the supposedly perfect bodies and showing that they had surface features.
He also identified the orbits of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, thus demonstrating that, in the Universe, small bodies could orbit round a large one. He showed that a system of satellites was not unique.
He also did valuable early work in dynamics - the cannon ball story is long exploded - by building precise apparatus and timing systems for measuring the movement of balls rolling down slopes. It was not his fault that he did not know that gravitational potential energy was partly converted into rotational kinetic energy as well as translational energy, or that, in the absence of a definition of velocity, he did not get the formulae of motion into their modern forms. It is also not his fault that he got frustrated because the reaction of the people who he tried to demonstrate his evidence to was, in effect, to stick their hands over their ears and scream "can't hear you". It is also not his fault that Kepler was addicted to mystical ideas (such as that the orbits of the planets fit inside a nesting of the Platonic solids), and lacked a modern marthematical framework, which, at the time, greatly obscured the value of what he was doing.
As for suggesting that Galileo would "cluelessly" hope the Pope would find Simpleton funny, anybody who knows anything about Italian society at that era would know that to be nonsense. This was a society in which men fought to the death over perceived insults. My guess is that Galileo hoped the Pope would see arguments he supported being made by an idiot, and decide to forget about them quietly.
However, the Inquisition and its mates had far too much invested in Aristotle (and not being made to look ridiculous) and the rest is history.
Revisiting this before posting I am tempted to add that there is a great deal of misunderstanding of people like Newton, Galileo and Kepler due to anachronism. They did not live in a modern society, they did not have access to modern mathematics, instruments and communications. You cannot write about them without researching their background. But, believe me, if you do it is endlessly fascinating and there is much to learn for our own time. There is a huge amount of published material, in fact these were guys who could write their own books. They are worth reading. Both the Dialogue (Galileo) and at least part of the Principia (Newton) should be on every nerd's reading list, if only because it cures you of the idea that everything exciting in science happened since 1940.
Sadly for Giordano Bruno, he didn't have Galileo's powerful protectors and was a bit too all-out mystical. Roger Bacon just got locked up for years for suggesting that Arab science should be adopted to ease the work of the poor - can't have peasants having free time to think about things. However, the Church at least has a history of adopting ideas once they've been safely mainstream for a few hundred years. Some of the Protestant sects seem intent on actually going backwards, hence the drive towards Bible literalism (which wouldn't have been understood by most of the early Church fathers, but is a peculiar product of 19th century Protestantism separated by an ocean from its roots.)
From an engineering point of view this was a relatively straight forward system, and I could use an off the shelf waterproof DC motor sourced in the US. Unfortunately, adding in control gear, custom parts, my time and forecast engineer and technician time, I was looking at a total around $50000, versus $10000 all up for a new 30HP engine and gearbox. I imagine that fitting a much larger engine into a car with very limited space, heat problems, the difficulty of fitting very heavy wiring safely, the change to the vibration characteristics, you name it, you would probably want to budget several times as much. It is far from easy to drop an electric motor into a car power train, unlike a boat where the only deflection (in a steel hull) is due to engine vibration, not axle movement. If you are a sufficiently skilled engineer to do it yourself, factor in the loss of earnings. It is not just like dropping a different but similar engine into a car. (For instance, I have seen a gas to Diesel Rolls-Royce conversion, but turns out that it uses a like for like compatible engine block and is relatively trivial to implement.)
The truth is, wonder materials that are not yet in real production never actually turn out to be that wonderful. Aluminium has not replaced cast iron in many applications. Cars and ships continue to be made of mild steel. Titanium has not replaced aluminium in aircraft. Both Airbus and Boeing are struggling to make large composite airframes and wings.
When I hear a technology being touted as useful for some application that does not yet exist (such as solar sails) my bullshit detector switches up 6 ranges and still goes into overload. If a new technology does not offer significant benefits on an established volume engineering problem, it will fail to get traction.
What is critical is the drive settings. If the new drive doesn't shut down properly on request you will use more power.
Actually, switching to a fast drive can often save power. This is because the faster drive is active for shorter periods when reading and writing to the disk. If you use a 4200rpm drive to copy large files, other things being equal it will take 60% longer than a 7200 drive. If (as I have found) the 7200 drive uses about 20% more power when active and about the same when idle, you can easily see where the saving comes from.
As for the toughness or otherwise of Acer laptops, just as with the Mac it depends on the range. We still have a 4+ year old 1501 which has been so heavily abused that numerous keys have lost part of their labelling, yet everything still works and, placed side by side with a Compaq equivalent, similarly used and a year newer, the Acer looks in much better condition. Admittedly it is on its second hard drive but, having been used for two years as a development test web server and database engine, it has an excuse.
The 1000, at its discounted price, is OK. It will happily run a presentation for 4 hours on the 6 cell battery. It doesn't get as hot as you would expect when both processors are churning away near 100%. The 5400rpm drive is adequate and the bundled utilities are pretty good. The absence of a built in DVD drive is no great sweat under office conditions; but then I use the thing for work. The carbon fibre layer in the case is possibly a bit silly, the badging is ludicrous, though possibly no sillier than calling clothes Diesel, but I have an XP laptop with dual CPU and 4G of RAM which should be still perfectly usable for all on the road needs and is warranted until Jan 2011.
To have bought the Macbook Air I would have had to have spent a great deal more money - including buying an Apple backup device and an external DVD drive - a lot more money to get the same warranty, and still not been able to buy a cheap second 6 cell battery to give me a total 8 hour operational life.
Wouldn't you expect someone like that to know who the most active driver developers were for his platform, or to know about the market shares of different printer makers? I bet a Ford exec doesn't expect a non-franchise garage to be able to get the diagnostics off his 2008 model.
In certain fields (e.g. audio) "nonlinear" is often used to mean not describable by the function mx + c, but here I think it means that the motion is not describable by a continuous function, which is what you expect of all very small particles in any kind of non-vacuum. Don't they teach Brownian motion nowadays?
A VP in Microsoft buys a Sony laptop with 915 graphics and a Brother multifunction printer? I've suggested elsewhere on these pages that Microsoft management may not always be of the same high quality as their scientific and engineering staff, but two such misjudgements from one exec is worrying. Especially as one assumes that the guy didn't do it for lack of cash.
Now a story (from an Italian friend living in Zug) to explain the Swiss mentality. A bit off topic, but you need to understand the Swiss to get the background.
A small factory owner lives in Zug, a few miles from Zurich, and has a son. The son grows up and marries a girl from Zurich, then goes to live there. For eighteen months he commutes back to work in his father's factory, then suddenly his father sacks him. He asks why. Reply: "All you people from Zurich are untrustworthy".
Since the fall of the Wall in 1990, _nobody_ in Europe does guilt by association like the Swiss.
The Prius is made uneconomically by Totota to buy market mindset, hence the build quality etc., and for that reason you might want one (it's a bargain). But the VW hybrid most likely will be the same in the first release, so is probably worth waiting for.
Especially because of the dirty litle secret they really do not want you to know. Diesel is much safer in crashes because it is so much denser, unlikely to form explosive mixtures with air. As well as producing less CO2, it is less likely to fry you.
Myself, I don't think Intel is evil at all, just a little bit naive about the seriousness with which Europe takes the "level playing field".
Waves are more consistent, which is why this is ingenious. Unfortunately they can also come in pretty big sizes, which may cause trouble. This thing won't be visiting the Bay of Fundy, or for that matter the Mediterranean, any time soon.
If on the other hand you are talking about the niche market that is photo printers, it's manifest that the people who control the ink technology can also do the best job of specifying the paper. In the old days of silver photography, it was wise to use Kodak chemicals with Kodak film, and Ciba formulations with Cibachrome. On the other hand, anybody who builds a volume office laser printer that won't work with commodity paper stock will not be long in the business.
Because the European Union is a progressive liberal democracy, she is allowed to have more balls than her US opposite number.
Microsoft needs to get a move on. The fine is in Euros, and if the Euro continues to appreciate against the dollar when they eventually pay it may bankrupt them. (this is a joke. It is a feeble joke but a joke nonetheless.)
Incidentally, and this is quite true, one of the lawyers for Microsoft summarised their case like this: "We are Microsoft. We are the good guys. So what we want to do is right." Now compare that with HP, who have people based in Europe who talk to the Commission and say, in effect "We would like to do so-and-so. Is that all right?". Strangely, you don't hear about massive fines for HP over their dominance of the office printer market.
It has been clear to me for a number of years that Microsoft simply needs to grow up as a company, like small children who, if their parents do a half decent job, learn to get what they want by politeness and cooperation, not by kicking, screaming and stealing toys. But, in order to change, they have to recognise the need for change. I suspect that their technical people are well aware of this, but some of the management is still in "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mode. The MS XML saga is pretty conclusive evidence of this. I bet there are project managers in ISO who by now will do their best to sabotage any Microsoft standards project, simply because they have been so pissed off by them.
Seriously, why is it that if an artist dresses like a tramp and snarls at anyone who tries to distract him (or her) while working, that's just how talent operates, but when it's engineers or programmers, that just shows how dysfunctional they are? I think Toby Young had a handle on it in an article last weekend. "Management types" are often not too bright, therefore they want people to perceive factors other than intelligence as important in the workplace. You can be as thick as two bricks, but given enough money you can wear expensive suits and haircuts and drive a Porsche. So hey, suits and haircuts and expensive cars are evidence of managerial talent. Of course, you can have all those things and be a good manager, but the correlation, to my mind, does not imply causation.
Max Hastings, the military historian, has written in his remarkably fair and balanced book Armageddon about the British policy of carpet bombing civilians, and how it probably lengthened the war (because it diverted resources from protecting shipping in the Atlantic, and because strategic attacks on oil plants could have caused the German army to come to a stop much sooner. He describes revenge attacks by many Allied groups. Apart from Bomber Harris, the Allied commanders were in general much more careful than the Russians, and this reduced casualties in the West. In the east, knowing what the Russians would do, the Germans fought with more desperation.
Hastings points out, very fairly, that Japan suffered far less than Germany because the result of the A-bomb attacks was surrender without invasion. Therefore, paradoxically, the A-Bomb may well have reduced the death rate in the Far East very considerably.
This shows how ethically difficult the whole thing is in the context of all out war.
It is also very difficult nowadays to define who is a civilian. Is a worker in an oil production plant a civilian when a tanker driver is a soldier? They are part of the supply chain, and the oil plant could well be a legitimate military target. In a country where the majority of men carry guns, how do you tell a civilian from a soldier?
I am not in favor of indiscriminate war, believe me. Thanks to my father and my uncle and their friends, my only experience of the military has been as an R&D engineer. But I do think we often expect the military to solve ethical problems that philosophers give up on, and that when it comes to people who want to run a country so they can torture and abuse women versus people who, basically, don't, I think we need to be very careful before sounding off.
Why, exactly? At the worst it would mean a return to a world in which corporations had to design their own applications from scratch, and in which expert programmers moved from job to job and moved the skills around. Before long big corporations in different but related business areas would get together and say, OK guys, let's co-operate on designing what we need. I think somebody a bit cleverer than I am wrote a book about it. How did you think those medieval cathedrals got built?
In fact it is difficult to point to a single NECESSARY business or other process which cannot be done with FOSS. It may not be as pretty as with paid-for software, it may in fact be as much as 5-10 years behind but some of us remember there was a fully functioning computer industry 10 years ago.
You may not remember, you may not be old enough, but you could originally obtain the source code to Unix for basically the cost of the media. This actually antedated DOS. You could support the document production and simple program development needs of eight people on a box with a 16MHz processor, a couple of MBytes of RAM, a couple of disk drives and a tape drive. Everything that has happened since, other than networking, has basically been icing on the cake, and even networking is still basically about shipping a clever pattern of ones and zeroes down a wire.
This is one case where an industry standard is the only thing that makes sense. Make the gesture set standard and allow people to patent specific implementations (physical not software) which offer new features.
Unfortunately, in my experience it's the marketing and sales departments who, because of their competitive mindset, don't understand the benefits of collaboration in growing the overall market. When they do turn up at standards meetings as observers, the results are sometimes laughable but usually cringeworthy for the engineers from their companies. Microsoft XML is a case in point. I confidently expect these people to continue to act as a brake on the wheels of input mechanism progress.
IQ is important, but as part of a set of longer term tests which demonstrate the ability to apply it over time. In the case of some management schemes, three days of testing is not considered too long.