1. Four active (in use) desktops all with Debian. Shared MacMiniPPC, my wife's Athlon, my son's P4 and 2-3 in my office out of which I use one.
2. Three active (in-use) laptops, all with Debian: a 1GHz PPC TiBook (my roadwarrior machine), a PentiumM (shared), and a Athom Netbook (shared ultraportable).
3. Three active (in use) media centers: one in the sitting room, one portable made out of a 2003 laptop for the kitchen, car and holidays and one old thin client based for the guest room.
That is a total of: 10 linux desktops in use in _ONE_ household and I am by no means the worst offender out of the other linux desktop users I know.
Typing this on a Linux Desktop. A very fragmented one.
What exactly is wrong with the database tool in OpenOffice and MySQL. You get all you get from access, similar UI and it werks. Has been werking for years for the ones who need a GUI on their database.
I used to stand-in for most of of the IT director duties in a small development shop (around 50-100 employees, 200 or so machines). Armed with a Serbian doing procurement we ran at half of that most of the time.
While we did not assemble PCs ourselves (I used to do that for a living 15 years ago), we repaired everything to the hilt and did rolling tech shift - newest tech for servers using _OEM_ parts there, in 1-2 years recycle the server as a developers desktop, in 2-3 more years retire to the spare parts bin. This way developers got to work on something very close to what their kit will actually run on and it was fitting very nicely with server/service capacity upgrades and migrations.
This works however _ONLY_ if you use OEM kit for servers, no "branded stuff". You simply cannot take the motherboard out of an HP or Dell server and build a desktop with it. No way. It is also problematic in countries like the UK where the server brand is commonly added to the buzzword list for junior IT personnel. People see lack of "buzzword compliance" as a career problem and do whatever they can to sabotage the policy despite it having an obvious benefit to the company's long term future.
This survey is not statistically representative by all means. It is done amidst users that already use Linux and done by a Linux advocacy. I am no MSFT fan. I have not had a Windows machine in my house since 1997 (and even that was Win 3.x running under OS2 Warp). However, the reality is not as rosy as this survey would like us to see.
First of all, the majority of Windows users are SMEs and they are Windows _ONLY_. They _WILL_ buy more of the same and that is a definite. A lot of the rest is desktop estate and its essential dependencies - Exchange and their friends. 95% of these will be buying more of the same. There are very few successful desktop migrations to account for anything more than that. Even that will be an underestimate. 99% buying more of the same is more likely.
That leaves "enterprise" backend use which is pretty much what this survey is about. There is a lively migration racket going on there nowdays as most of this runs in the form of Java and friends on top of middleware stacks. Every 1-2 years the latest and greatest backend idea comes along with its migration programme. As a result servers and stacks get chucked out and replaced by others.
There Linux is gaining and the numbers are about right. However that is a very small portion of the market and misrepresenting it for the whole market is to the very best disingenuous. Additionally, it also completely ignores the "Elephant In The Corner of The Room". The merger of Sun and Oracle has created a vertical stack which will once again effectively compete for their place under the sun (pun intended) in the server room. Any stats regarding enterprise migration that assign (Sn)Oracle a negative year on year growth are frankly wishful thinking.
A well designed home or branch office server has no problem being QUIETER than a laptop or a Xbox/PS3 type device.
Size matters and servers are no exemption. In a small case you need 3-4 times the revs on fans to get the same airflow. A good example is the old version of the Antec Sonata. Because of its size it can put disks perpendicular to the disk cooling fan. As a result you get 24-27C average disk temperatures with case fans at sub-1700K revs. To get the same temperatures in a 1U case or a laptop for that matter you need fans running at 5000 RPM+. This is also why miniITX failed as a proposition. The smaller cases required more cooling which defeated most of the gains from making the kit smaller and cooler.
Also fans (especially on the power supplies) are not created equal, some are more equal than the others. There is a reason why your average OEM PS made by FoxConn costs 15 quid and an Akasa costs 40 and that reason is the 10db+ difference and 10%+ difference in power efficiency. Ditto for CPU, case fans, etc. It costs around 30-40£ extra per server to make it really quiet. This is less than the premium you pay for a laptop or a a modded console.
As far as the article itselfs - well, generating back leccy from cooling makes little sense. Laws of thermodynamics. The gains from that are less than the gains from making cooling more efficient.
Been there, done that. You also forgot to add that with all of these you can keep clean revision and change control.
The problem however is that you are not alone. There is usually an organisation around you which cannot be bothered. Even if you are "alone" as a lone software contractor you have customers who want to be bothered even less. On top of that you have an army of buzzword bingo players, sorry recruiters, that will not accept a CV in anything but MSF Word.
So I have to admit - from writing everything in LaTeX 10 years back, never touching a spreadsheet, etc I have degenerated into using an Office suite. OpenOffice in my case.
It is about the f*** time the pseudo 4x4's sold to moms on the soccer run have an appropriate urban drive. After all they never ever see any 4x4 usage (except mounting a curb by mistake during "artistic" parking).
Let's face it - electric 4x4 is an abomination. The charge in a "Tesla-like" pure electric vehicle will be down to zero in about 30 miles on a dirt track or even less on a mountain road. Even extended range will not help here. The power output of the range extension units will simply not be enough to sustain the power reqs of pushing a vehicle through the muck, sand and uphill - where you really need 4x4.
It is the same story as wit electric vs gas or oil heating. A 30-40kw gas or oil furnace is something trivial, most household units are way above that. A 30kw electric boiler requires special wiring and is nightmare to install and operate.
1. Even if there was collusion at first it went with the wind in less than a year. The race to the bottom in the PC business knows no mercy. The moment LCDs became mass market their margin became mass market - low.
2. Same for the retailers, though in their case they also got lower overall costs for selling an LCD monitor. Less weight, less floor space, less money to shift it. However, that gain in margin has once again been eaten by race to the bottom.
3. There was open collusion over here even without bought in legislation. Despite multiple requests to the regulators at least in the UK it was not investigated because it fit some misguided green agenda. However by the time collusion happened the CRTs were already a minority. The collusion finished off a process which naturally occured within the market anyway. Even if the businesses gained something margin-wise in the collusion it was again eaten by race-to-the-bottom in a very short order.
Even worse. Edge helps very little with signalling throughput.
The general problem with mobile network is deeply rooted and independent of the actual radio tech. It is the problem of deterministic thinking - everything has to be defined, nailed down hard and "guaranteed". That is all nice however it also creates a system that tends to fall over completely once its loading is past a certain level - a phenomenon known as congestion collapse.
For example in GSM, GPRS (w/wo Edge) the signalling is nailed down hard to one slot out of 8 in a cell (there is a way to couple two cells to have 1 slot out of 16 data/voice slots). That is it. If you load that to the max so nobody can talk all the mobiles covered in the cell start retrying and it only gets worse from there onwards. 3G is no different. Specific coding combinations (3G logical channels) are reserved for signalling with little or no ability to increase the capacity. In both cases the signalling logical channels are used for nearly everyting - handover, data attach/detach, voice call setup, etc.
To add insult to injury the signalling capacity upstream in the network is also limited. In GSM it is usually fixed capacity TDM channel. In 3G it is quite often also limited by processing capacity in the RNC. That one is also a classic example of mobile/telco thinking.
Someone, in his infinite wisdom, has put the MAC layer (yes, the actual MAC) not in the radio access in 3G but all the way back in the RNC. This would have been the equivalent of ripping most of the Ethernet stack in an Ethernet network consisiting of hundreds of switches and moving it to let's say the company firewall. Terminally dumb design (TM). The terminal dumbness is further exasperated by implementing the RNC "the embedded realtime way". Instead of doing most of the signalling purely in software off a shared state in a shared database which can scale to millions of handsets most RNCs do it in specialised modules with local databases which cannot be scaled up because this is the way telco switch is supposed to look like according to indoctrinated developers. As a result a 3G RNC hits the signalling buffers in no time. All it takes is enough apps like the Android app in question or even having enough plain old iPhones as ATT learned the hard way. If for example it was implemented predominantly in software instead, all it would took to increase capacity would have been throwing a couple more nodes into the compute cluster.
Overall, it is "nothing unexpected, told ya so". I have tried arguing this with "great architects" and "great developers" in one of my past jobs. Pointless excercise. This will happen again, again and again until the main vendors eat their deterministic realtime humble pie and switch to a more probabilistic control and scalability for the architecture. That however is least likely to be forthcoming. In fact, in some areas 3GPP in their infinite wisdom has prohibited that at a standard level.
Wrong, the amount of trolling has changed the IPR law landscape.
Companies the size of Apple and Google now have fully blown IPR department which also have _JUNIOR_ and _TRAINEE_ lawyers. These need to clock some courtroom hours to be able to litigate the real cases and in some jurisdictions to pass their additional qualification exams.
These trainees are generally in the top graduate bracket from the various career paths leading to IPR law. The chance of them losing a case for reasons of competency is pretty slim. Also, in the rare case of fubar, the appeal can be taken over by the senior law team. The same is valid for corps which outsource the IPR process completely to an IPR management company. There they also have trainees and trainees need to practice.
So for an IP troll attacking these two types of targets is pretty much a suicide run. In either case the defendant will definitely litigate or at least go through the pre-trial motions because it needs to in order to maintain and advance its IPR team.
Flat panel was hugely expensive for many years. Its transition from early adoption to consumer technology took nearly 5 years. Once the prices dropped under a certain threshold the CRTs disappeared off the shelves virtually overnight.
The replacement of BW by Colour took even longer. We are talking decades here. Once again, once the price difference dropped under a certain level BW disappeared overnight.
HD TV crawled to HD through "HD Ready" for more than 4 years.
12 months are not indicative of an adoption rate. The first 12 months in consumer electronics are often the same for tech that eventually dies and for tech that becomes the de-facto standard. Will the 3D TV live or die is yet undecided. It will become clear in 3-4 years (earliest).
The study is from the department of the "Bleeding Obvious".
That is what society is based on. If everyone of us changed their social alliances in accordance to the current maximal profit, civilisation as we know it would not exist. In fact even the monkey society would not exist if it tried to work along those lines. Even baboons and macacs adhere to social alliances in preference to momentary profit like for example getting the best banana right this moment. The monkey, ape and human as a representative of the family are social species. The normal ones cannot live without social interactions and they implicitly assign a significant intrinsic value to maintaining them.
From there on it is quite normal for them to take seemingly suboptimal "business" decisions when friends, family, the good of country or other social factors are involved. That is what makes the human a social animal.
The efficiency of this one is less than the efficiency of producing biofuel which is staggeringly low in the first place. Separating CO2 from the air requires a staggering amount of energy as you have to liquefy air first. We are looking at under 5% efficiency for the entire process end-to-end here if not even less - around 1%.
No thanks.
I'd rather invest into finding ways to transport, store and use electricity and/or "simple" hydrogen more efficiently.
And probably you have a point. The biggest advantage of a purely electric drive is that it is likely to be mechanically more reliable than the hideously complicated transmission used on the like of Prius. Volt fails on that.
As far as "buying a Prius", no thanks. I will stick with my Pocket Rockets (Daihatsu Sirion model 1 mark 3 - 2002-2005). I got two of them now - a 4x4 version for the wife and a 2wd LPG for me. It is a basic petrol car, no bells and whistles. However when you combine all the money that goes into making the batteries, generating leccy, etc it clearly has _LOWER_ overall environmental footprint than a Prius or any of the plug in hybrids. That is especially valid if you do not change it every 3 years on fashionista grounds like a spoiled primadonna.
Both USA and USSR used to have unmarked or falsely marked trains with Minuteman (USA) and Topol (Russia). That is a target hidden amidts the mother of all decoys - the entire country's train network.
It is nice if it is just a workstation. Imagine if it is for example a small country size phone system.
Anything that is more than 5 years old usually has unknown upgrade costs as well as unknown upkeep costs. I have never seen anything trying to deal with such a beast hit time, targets and money.
There is the answer of "continuous upgrade" of course , however explaining that to a business is often a very difficult task especially if the 30 year old system still works and generates revenue.
Disclaimer: I worked and still work in commercial R&D in the UK and my wife till recently worked in academic R&D so I am biased here.
Who told you that it is globally competitive and creates wealth? That is a Labour proclaimed PR delusion along the lines of "time to bury bad news".
Intel had R&D in UK. It is across town from me. It got cut down to a fraction of what it was. IBM had R&D in the UK. It got closed completely more than 8 years ago. Done in Switherland, Germany, etc now. Sun had R&D in the UK. Across town next door to Intel. It got closed. Mostly marketing and sales in London now. Microsoft had R&D in the UK. It has been trimmed back considerably. Ericsson had R&D in the UK. It got closed. Motorola had multiple R&D locations across the UK. Cut down and all but one closed. Google is refusing to do R&D in the UK. It is all marketing, deployment and BD. You have to relocate to Switherland or USA to do R&D for them or agree to do an operations job in Ireland for a chance to do some research in your company mandated "free playtime".
I can continue this list for a few pages and these are just companies I am familiar or have dealt with in the past. Cisco, Juniper, the major biotech companies, major chemical, engineering, etc all have gone elsewhere.
There is a reason why R&D is being closed across the UK and it is not the price for it. The fact that most of the above companies are happy to pay salaries as per the Swiss or Californication living standards is very clear that the price is not the problem. Different people blame different reasons, however one thing is certain - in the UK you do not get the same ROI you get in Swiss, Israel, USA or even continental Europe. Less work is being done for the same buck. At least that is what IBM said as they were one of the very few that were honest why they are closing down the facilities. And honestly, I tend to agree with them.
Let's be real here - the universities are not being trimmed far enough. They need to be trimmed way more so that their "production" is in line with the little remaining industry jobs that can accept their graduates. If they were trimmed in line with that the cut would have been in excess of 60% if not even 70%.
You do not understand the actual setup. I had to help a friend of mine recently (from the USA) who had 500$ clocked on his asterisk in a day or so from his parents VOIP extension in Canada. It is basically a version of the old "porn dialer" scam.
1. The criminals call high-toll lines (AKA porn numbers) and get a cut back. In order to do that there has to be at least one operator assisting them. In most cases it is the incumbent telco in some god foresaken lawless country in Africa. If the telco, police and the SIP provider actually cared they could have cut of that operator and that country for that matter at interconnect until it cleans up its act. That is never done. If it was half of Africa would have been sitting without phone access to the rest of the world for most of the time.
2. In most cases there is active assistance from the ISP providing Broadband access to the scam. Either the ISP is hacked or its staff is corrupt or both. The scammers use the legal intercept system or just sniff on smaller ISPs where you can do that to hijack SIP. non-secure SIP is md5 auth which can be cracked fairly easily. Credentials are usually verified by transparently proxying the SIP somewhere else and doing a Man In The Middle.
From there on the credentials are resold on the warez market. There is a very lively market for that going on.
So do you secure your PBX or not - does not matter. If you happen to be on one of these ISPs (which was the case of my friend's parents) you are "game". Also - if you see any registration failures either on server side or on client side on your VOIP client change your ISP IMMEDIATELY.
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An average Linux user is a nerd.
I have in total of 10+:
1. Four active (in use) desktops all with Debian. Shared MacMiniPPC, my wife's Athlon, my son's P4 and 2-3 in my office out of which I use one.
2. Three active (in-use) laptops, all with Debian: a 1GHz PPC TiBook (my roadwarrior machine), a PentiumM (shared), and a Athom Netbook (shared ultraportable).
3. Three active (in use) media centers: one in the sitting room, one portable made out of a 2003 laptop for the kitchen, car and holidays and one old thin client based for the guest room.
That is a total of: 10 linux desktops in use in _ONE_ household and I am by no means the worst offender out of the other linux desktop users I know.
Typing this on a Linux Desktop. A very fragmented one.
Why are you trolling dude?
What exactly is wrong with the database tool in OpenOffice and MySQL. You get all you get from access, similar UI and it werks. Has been werking for years for the ones who need a GUI on their database.
My thoughts exactly - shoot your procurement guy.
I used to stand-in for most of of the IT director duties in a small development shop (around 50-100 employees, 200 or so machines). Armed with a Serbian doing procurement we ran at half of that most of the time.
While we did not assemble PCs ourselves (I used to do that for a living 15 years ago), we repaired everything to the hilt and did rolling tech shift - newest tech for servers using _OEM_ parts there, in 1-2 years recycle the server as a developers desktop, in 2-3 more years retire to the spare parts bin. This way developers got to work on something very close to what their kit will actually run on and it was fitting very nicely with server/service capacity upgrades and migrations.
This works however _ONLY_ if you use OEM kit for servers, no "branded stuff". You simply cannot take the motherboard out of an HP or Dell server and build a desktop with it. No way. It is also problematic in countries like the UK where the server brand is commonly added to the buzzword list for junior IT personnel. People see lack of "buzzword compliance" as a career problem and do whatever they can to sabotage the policy despite it having an obvious benefit to the company's long term future.
This survey is not statistically representative by all means. It is done amidst users that already use Linux and done by a Linux advocacy. I am no MSFT fan. I have not had a Windows machine in my house since 1997 (and even that was Win 3.x running under OS2 Warp). However, the reality is not as rosy as this survey would like us to see.
First of all, the majority of Windows users are SMEs and they are Windows _ONLY_. They _WILL_ buy more of the same and that is a definite. A lot of the rest is desktop estate and its essential dependencies - Exchange and their friends. 95% of these will be buying more of the same. There are very few successful desktop migrations to account for anything more than that. Even that will be an underestimate. 99% buying more of the same is more likely.
That leaves "enterprise" backend use which is pretty much what this survey is about. There is a lively migration racket going on there nowdays as most of this runs in the form of Java and friends on top of middleware stacks. Every 1-2 years the latest and greatest backend idea comes along with its migration programme. As a result servers and stacks get chucked out and replaced by others.
There Linux is gaining and the numbers are about right. However that is a very small portion of the market and misrepresenting it for the whole market is to the very best disingenuous. Additionally, it also completely ignores the "Elephant In The Corner of The Room". The merger of Sun and Oracle has created a vertical stack which will once again effectively compete for their place under the sun (pun intended) in the server room. Any stats regarding enterprise migration that assign (Sn)Oracle a negative year on year growth are frankly wishful thinking.
A well designed home or branch office server has no problem being QUIETER than a laptop or a Xbox/PS3 type device.
Size matters and servers are no exemption. In a small case you need 3-4 times the revs on fans to get the same airflow. A good example is the old version of the Antec Sonata. Because of its size it can put disks perpendicular to the disk cooling fan. As a result you get 24-27C average disk temperatures with case fans at sub-1700K revs. To get the same temperatures in a 1U case or a laptop for that matter you need fans running at 5000 RPM+. This is also why miniITX failed as a proposition. The smaller cases required more cooling which defeated most of the gains from making the kit smaller and cooler.
Also fans (especially on the power supplies) are not created equal, some are more equal than the others. There is a reason why your average OEM PS made by FoxConn costs 15 quid and an Akasa costs 40 and that reason is the 10db+ difference and 10%+ difference in power efficiency. Ditto for CPU, case fans, etc. It costs around 30-40£ extra per server to make it really quiet. This is less than the premium you pay for a laptop or a a modded console.
As far as the article itselfs - well, generating back leccy from cooling makes little sense. Laws of thermodynamics. The gains from that are less than the gains from making cooling more efficient.
Been there, done that. You also forgot to add that with all of these you can keep clean revision and change control.
The problem however is that you are not alone. There is usually an organisation around you which cannot be bothered. Even if you are "alone" as a lone software contractor you have customers who want to be bothered even less. On top of that you have an army of buzzword bingo players, sorry recruiters, that will not accept a CV in anything but MSF Word.
So I have to admit - from writing everything in LaTeX 10 years back, never touching a spreadsheet, etc I have degenerated into using an Office suite. OpenOffice in my case.
Oh definitely.
It is about the f*** time the pseudo 4x4's sold to moms on the soccer run have an appropriate urban drive. After all they never ever see any 4x4 usage (except mounting a curb by mistake during "artistic" parking).
Let's face it - electric 4x4 is an abomination. The charge in a "Tesla-like" pure electric vehicle will be down to zero in about 30 miles on a dirt track or even less on a mountain road. Even extended range will not help here. The power output of the range extension units will simply not be enough to sustain the power reqs of pushing a vehicle through the muck, sand and uphill - where you really need 4x4.
It is the same story as wit electric vs gas or oil heating. A 30-40kw gas or oil furnace is something trivial, most household units are way above that. A 30kw electric boiler requires special wiring and is nightmare to install and operate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
1. Even if there was collusion at first it went with the wind in less than a year. The race to the bottom in the PC business knows no mercy. The moment LCDs became mass market their margin became mass market - low.
2. Same for the retailers, though in their case they also got lower overall costs for selling an LCD monitor. Less weight, less floor space, less money to shift it. However, that gain in margin has once again been eaten by race to the bottom.
3. There was open collusion over here even without bought in legislation. Despite multiple requests to the regulators at least in the UK it was not investigated because it fit some misguided green agenda. However by the time collusion happened the CRTs were already a minority. The collusion finished off a process which naturally occured within the market anyway. Even if the businesses gained something margin-wise in the collusion it was again eaten by race-to-the-bottom in a very short order.
Exactly. And the business goes away the moment 1000 people start doing it because of oversupply.
Even worse. Edge helps very little with signalling throughput.
The general problem with mobile network is deeply rooted and independent of the actual radio tech. It is the problem of deterministic thinking - everything has to be defined, nailed down hard and "guaranteed". That is all nice however it also creates a system that tends to fall over completely once its loading is past a certain level - a phenomenon known as congestion collapse.
For example in GSM, GPRS (w/wo Edge) the signalling is nailed down hard to one slot out of 8 in a cell (there is a way to couple two cells to have 1 slot out of 16 data/voice slots). That is it. If you load that to the max so nobody can talk all the mobiles covered in the cell start retrying and it only gets worse from there onwards. 3G is no different. Specific coding combinations (3G logical channels) are reserved for signalling with little or no ability to increase the capacity. In both cases the signalling logical channels are used for nearly everyting - handover, data attach/detach, voice call setup, etc.
To add insult to injury the signalling capacity upstream in the network is also limited. In GSM it is usually fixed capacity TDM channel. In 3G it is quite often also limited by processing capacity in the RNC. That one is also a classic example of mobile/telco thinking.
Someone, in his infinite wisdom, has put the MAC layer (yes, the actual MAC) not in the radio access in 3G but all the way back in the RNC. This would have been the equivalent of ripping most of the Ethernet stack in an Ethernet network consisiting of hundreds of switches and moving it to let's say the company firewall. Terminally dumb design (TM). The terminal dumbness is further exasperated by implementing the RNC "the embedded realtime way". Instead of doing most of the signalling purely in software off a shared state in a shared database which can scale to millions of handsets most RNCs do it in specialised modules with local databases which cannot be scaled up because this is the way telco switch is supposed to look like according to indoctrinated developers. As a result a 3G RNC hits the signalling buffers in no time. All it takes is enough apps like the Android app in question or even having enough plain old iPhones as ATT learned the hard way. If for example it was implemented predominantly in software instead, all it would took to increase capacity would have been throwing a couple more nodes into the compute cluster.
Overall, it is "nothing unexpected, told ya so". I have tried arguing this with "great architects" and "great developers" in one of my past jobs. Pointless excercise. This will happen again, again and again until the main vendors eat their deterministic realtime humble pie and switch to a more probabilistic control and scalability for the architecture. That however is least likely to be forthcoming. In fact, in some areas 3GPP in their infinite wisdom has prohibited that at a standard level.
Wrong, the amount of trolling has changed the IPR law landscape.
Companies the size of Apple and Google now have fully blown IPR department which also have _JUNIOR_ and _TRAINEE_ lawyers. These need to clock some courtroom hours to be able to litigate the real cases and in some jurisdictions to pass their additional qualification exams.
These trainees are generally in the top graduate bracket from the various career paths leading to IPR law. The chance of them losing a case for reasons of competency is pretty slim. Also, in the rare case of fubar, the appeal can be taken over by the senior law team. The same is valid for corps which outsource the IPR process completely to an IPR management company. There they also have trainees and trainees need to practice.
So for an IP troll attacking these two types of targets is pretty much a suicide run. In either case the defendant will definitely litigate or at least go through the pre-trial motions because it needs to in order to maintain and advance its IPR team.
Flat panel was hugely expensive for many years. Its transition from early adoption to consumer technology took nearly 5 years. Once the prices dropped under a certain threshold the CRTs disappeared off the shelves virtually overnight.
The replacement of BW by Colour took even longer. We are talking decades here. Once again, once the price difference dropped under a certain level BW disappeared overnight.
HD TV crawled to HD through "HD Ready" for more than 4 years.
12 months are not indicative of an adoption rate. The first 12 months in consumer electronics are often the same for tech that eventually dies and for tech that becomes the de-facto standard. Will the 3D TV live or die is yet undecided. It will become clear in 3-4 years (earliest).
2+2=5 for sufficiently big values of 2.
The study is from the department of the "Bleeding Obvious".
That is what society is based on. If everyone of us changed their social alliances in accordance to the current maximal profit, civilisation as we know it would not exist. In fact even the monkey society would not exist if it tried to work along those lines. Even baboons and macacs adhere to social alliances in preference to momentary profit like for example getting the best banana right this moment. The monkey, ape and human as a representative of the family are social species. The normal ones cannot live without social interactions and they implicitly assign a significant intrinsic value to maintaining them.
From there on it is quite normal for them to take seemingly suboptimal "business" decisions when friends, family, the good of country or other social factors are involved. That is what makes the human a social animal.
The fast forms for all of these use convolutions based formulae. This are best done using vector processing.
If Nvidia and SGI do not have prior art here I can think of someone who does. IBM and altivec and IBM/Sony and Cell.
You could have said it in two sentences.
Present here: http://www.despair.com/power.html
And smiling at me from the wall above my desk.
The efficiency of this one is less than the efficiency of producing biofuel which is staggeringly low in the first place. Separating CO2 from the air requires a staggering amount of energy as you have to liquefy air first. We are looking at under 5% efficiency for the entire process end-to-end here if not even less - around 1%.
No thanks.
I'd rather invest into finding ways to transport, store and use electricity and/or "simple" hydrogen more efficiently.
And probably you have a point. The biggest advantage of a purely electric drive is that it is likely to be mechanically more reliable than the hideously complicated transmission used on the like of Prius. Volt fails on that.
As far as "buying a Prius", no thanks. I will stick with my Pocket Rockets (Daihatsu Sirion model 1 mark 3 - 2002-2005). I got two of them now - a 4x4 version for the wife and a 2wd LPG for me. It is a basic petrol car, no bells and whistles. However when you combine all the money that goes into making the batteries, generating leccy, etc it clearly has _LOWER_ overall environmental footprint than a Prius or any of the plug in hybrids. That is especially valid if you do not change it every 3 years on fashionista grounds like a spoiled primadonna.
This is the classic phase array antenna approach from radar tech applied to sound. Cool application though.
In fact it is easier for sound because the amount of data per element is much smaller than in let's say a radar.
Both USA and USSR used to have unmarked or falsely marked trains with Minuteman (USA) and Topol (Russia). That is a target hidden amidts the mother of all decoys - the entire country's train network.
It is nice if it is just a workstation. Imagine if it is for example a small country size phone system.
Anything that is more than 5 years old usually has unknown upgrade costs as well as unknown upkeep costs. I have never seen anything trying to deal with such a beast hit time, targets and money.
There is the answer of "continuous upgrade" of course , however explaining that to a business is often a very difficult task especially if the 30 year old system still works and generates revenue.
Disclaimer: I worked and still work in commercial R&D in the UK and my wife till recently worked in academic R&D so I am biased here.
Who told you that it is globally competitive and creates wealth? That is a Labour proclaimed PR delusion along the lines of "time to bury bad news".
Intel had R&D in UK. It is across town from me. It got cut down to a fraction of what it was.
IBM had R&D in the UK. It got closed completely more than 8 years ago. Done in Switherland, Germany, etc now.
Sun had R&D in the UK. Across town next door to Intel. It got closed. Mostly marketing and sales in London now.
Microsoft had R&D in the UK. It has been trimmed back considerably.
Ericsson had R&D in the UK. It got closed.
Motorola had multiple R&D locations across the UK. Cut down and all but one closed.
Google is refusing to do R&D in the UK. It is all marketing, deployment and BD. You have to relocate to Switherland or USA to do R&D for them or agree to do an operations job in Ireland for a chance to do some research in your company mandated "free playtime".
I can continue this list for a few pages and these are just companies I am familiar or have dealt with in the past. Cisco, Juniper, the major biotech companies, major chemical, engineering, etc all have gone elsewhere.
There is a reason why R&D is being closed across the UK and it is not the price for it. The fact that most of the above companies are happy to pay salaries as per the Swiss or Californication living standards is very clear that the price is not the problem. Different people blame different reasons, however one thing is certain - in the UK you do not get the same ROI you get in Swiss, Israel, USA or even continental Europe. Less work is being done for the same buck. At least that is what IBM said as they were one of the very few that were honest why they are closing down the facilities. And honestly, I tend to agree with them.
Let's be real here - the universities are not being trimmed far enough. They need to be trimmed way more so that their "production" is in line with the little remaining industry jobs that can accept their graduates. If they were trimmed in line with that the cut would have been in excess of 60% if not even 70%.
You do not understand the actual setup. I had to help a friend of mine recently (from the USA) who had 500$ clocked on his asterisk in a day or so from his parents VOIP extension in Canada. It is basically a version of the old "porn dialer" scam.
1. The criminals call high-toll lines (AKA porn numbers) and get a cut back. In order to do that there has to be at least one operator assisting them. In most cases it is the incumbent telco in some god foresaken lawless country in Africa. If the telco, police and the SIP provider actually cared they could have cut of that operator and that country for that matter at interconnect until it cleans up its act. That is never done. If it was half of Africa would have been sitting without phone access to the rest of the world for most of the time.
2. In most cases there is active assistance from the ISP providing Broadband access to the scam. Either the ISP is hacked or its staff is corrupt or both. The scammers use the legal intercept system or just sniff on smaller ISPs where you can do that to hijack SIP. non-secure SIP is md5 auth which can be cracked fairly easily. Credentials are usually verified by transparently proxying the SIP somewhere else and doing a Man In The Middle.
From there on the credentials are resold on the warez market. There is a very lively market for that going on.
So do you secure your PBX or not - does not matter. If you happen to be on one of these ISPs (which was the case of my friend's parents) you are "game". Also - if you see any registration failures either on server side or on client side on your VOIP client change your ISP IMMEDIATELY.
I will give you my mom's siamese to hold.
It is roughly the same size, is very old for a cat (17y), frail, slow and has terminal cancer.
Wanna try? I am happy to call the ambulance afterwards.
Never judgde a creature solely by its size. That is a very fine set of fangs and razorblades I see there...