Tony Tether (whom I've met) did a reasonably good job with DARPA. Especially in robotics. He was behind the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was done partly to give academic robotics departments a serious butt-kick. Academic robotics had been funded by DARPA for decades, but nothing fieldable was coming out. The reason that major universities devoted entire departments to the Grand Challenge was that DARPA had told them quietly that if they didn't do well, their funding was going away. Prior to the Grand Challenge, a typical academic robotics project was one professor and a few grad students producing a thesis on an obscure topic. Universities weren't organized to do system integration and make all the subsystems play together. Now they are.
It was time to cut back on Government-funded R&D in computer science, because it's a mature technology. DARPA shouldn't be funding "high performance graphics" - industry, Hollywood, and the game industry are doing that just fine. Networking is in good shape. DARPA hasn't been influential in operating systems since the 1980s.
DARPA never had much of a role in personal computing at all.
DARPA isn't the NSF. Their job is to develop technology DoD can use.
Is it possible to travel to USA from Europe by ship?
The Queen Mary II crosses the Atlantic in 7 days. (It only took four days in the heyday of transatlantic liners.) List price starts at $907.00, and big discounts are available. Includes
movie theater, live theater, disco, hot tubs, video arcade, basketball court, swimming pools, tennis court, laundromats, casino, cell phone service, WiFi, an Internet center, and a library. Eastbound sailing dates for 2010 are Apr 29, May 21, Jun 07, Jul 06, Jul 19, Sep 12.
Their fulfillment centers are pretty impressive. Before I started working there I would have never realized that so much though, planning and technology went into packing the right stuff into the right boxes.
The basic system is a century old and was invented at Sears, Roebuck and Company, the first really big mail order operation. They had several city blocks in Chicago for what they called "The Works", their fulfillment center.
In the "schedule system" at Sears, orders came in, and each order was assigned a assembly bin for a 15-minute window. Picking tickets were generated for the various departments, each with the bin number and 15-minute window. The stock pickers in each department started on a new batch of tickets every 15 minutes, and as they picked items in their department, they attached the pick ticket to the item or a basket containing it, and sent it to the order assembly area by chute, conveyor, or pneumatic tube. At the order assembly area, incoming items were routed to the appropriate bin. At the end of each 15 minute window, each assembly bin was dumped to a basket, which went on a conveyor to the checking and accounting section. There, the items in the bin were matched against the order and the bill totaled up. The baskets then went to the packaging and shipping section and out of the Works.
Amazon's plant works about the same way, except that their computers know what's in inventory, so they don't have many "fails", where an item can't be found. They don't have to work to such a rigid clock-driven timetable, because the computers know when an order is fully assembled, and can allow more or less time depending on the complexity of the order. The basic concept, that a set of orders is being picked at any one time, picking orders fan out to departments, and items come back to an assigned bin for checking and packaging, remains the same.
There's an ongoing Linux problem with crashing when a program needs more memory, the file cache is using all available memory, and a locking problem prevents paging out a file. Search for "prune_one_dentry" oops (about 4000 hits in Google, from 2002 to 2009). Despite years of patches, this is usually fixed in practice by throwing more RAM at the server. This failure is likely to happen when very large files are open and in use (as with a busy database) and programs are being launched at a high rate (as on an server).
On the other hand, it can be a pain if it's done wrong.
Over the last year, Google's spelling correction has steadily become more aggressive. At first, Google just suggested "Did you mean X?", but gave you the results for what you'd specified. Then they started displaying "Did you mean X", and gave you the results for X. Then they just gave you the results after spelling correction and don't even tell you they did. Recently, they've backed that off a little, and now intermix results from the original query and the spelling-corrected form.
If you want literal search with Google, quote the words being searched.
After the crap articles in "gizmo" rags, the actual announcement from Panasonic was released on December 25.
"Panasonic Corporation today announced the development of two new 18650-type (18 mm in diameter, 65 mm in height) high-capacity lithium-ion battery cells[1] for use in laptop computers and environmentally-friendly energy technologies. The company boosted the capacity of 18650-type battery cells, which are widely used in laptops, by improving electrode materials. By improving the positive electrode, it has achieved the 3.4 Ah cell which offers 20 percent greater capacity than the current 2.9 Ah model. The 3.4 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2012 ending in March 2012. The 4.0 Ah cell, which has 30 percent greater capacity compared to the 2.9 Ah cell, uses a next generation electrode material, a silicon based alloy for the negative electrode, substituting carbon. The 4.0 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2013 ending in March 2013."
So that's it. Lithium-ion batteries with 20% more capacity in 2012, and another 17% for 2013, or a 38% improvement over the next 3 years. Nice for laptops, very helpful for electric cars.
If religion in games was done right, it would make kids too cynical. Imagine this game:
"SimChurch - start your own religion, gain adherents, build a church, advertise, and grow. You can tweak your theology - too loose, and your people lose interest; too strict, and your people backslide. You can ask your followers for financial support, but ask too hard and they'll drop out. You can train fanatics to help you expand, but they may turn against you."
"In multiplayer mode, you can try to convert people from other religions to yours. Become strong enough in an area, and you can convert your country to a theocracy. Then you can have wars with other theocracies."
"If your theology calls for miracles, they might just happen. But they won't always help you. You can also fake miracles, once you have enough assets, and gain adherents that way."
This would teach kids way too much about how religion really works.
Yes. The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance. Then it's worth deploying in places where the educational system has broken down.
In practice, "easy_install" usually doesn't work. The problem is that it makes assumptions about where things are supposed to be that aren't followed by the rest of the Python community. Nobody is pulling the whole thing together into a coherent distribution.
The page linked to is an ad laden (carefully selected related items, yeah right) mess that has this third or fourth hand.
True. The source is a badly written Bloomberg story which says the new battery has a capacity of "3.4 amperes per hour". I wrote to the reporter pointing out the meaninglessness of that number. The useful numbers for battery technologies are $/KwH and Kg/KwH, and they don't have those. The only useful piece of information in the story is that Panasonic will make a real announcement tomorrow.
At least the Perl crowd tries to solve this problem. The Python crowd has a terrible time coordinating distribution of third-party modules. That's why it's taking forever for Python 3.x to get deployed. Red Hat Enterprise 5, Red Hat's flagship product, still uses Python 2.4, released in 2004. (There's a Python 2.5 included, but it's not the one the system tools use.)
Perl has CPAN, which is reasonably well organized and well run. Python has the Python Package Index (formerly called Cheese Shop), but it's not well coordinated with Python releases. Things seem to be improving, but Python is 20 years old now and ought to have a mature distribution system.
I just tried "exercise bike clearance" on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu, AltaVista, and Cuil. Only Google picks up the bogus Target pages.
The problem, I suspect, is Google's "site map" scheme, which allows sites to explicitly specify their page tree for indexing purposes. Those bogus pages don't have links to them, so the link-based search engines don't find them.
A solution to this is for Google to detect sites with large numbers of pages in their site map that are similar and lack external links. When that's found, mark the site map as search spam, and index the site based on links only. That will drop all the bogus pages from the index. Webmasters will notice this via the webmaster tools and stop doing it.
I just heard a "cool nerd" in a radio ad. He was an articulate guy, he'd worked up to an IT manager position, and he'd bought a house in Pleasanton, CA.
Then his company had a major downsizing.
So what's he advertising? The homeless shelter and food bank where he now lives. Really.
The downside is that a boat propeller will turn it into confetti.
So far, one hasn't been run over by a large ship.
But they think the bow wave may
just push it under for a while.
Their control center on shore
steers the Wave Riders of the way of large ships (for which position reporting is
available.)
They had discussions with the U.S. Coast Guard. Should they
have the thing show a light? The Coast Guard decided it was better if
they didn't, because ships would then expect it to obey the Rules of the Road, or attempt to rescue it. So the Coast Guard classifies it as "floating debris". The floater is basically a surfboard.
Wave Gliders, from Liquid Robotics, have already made autonomous trips from Hawaii to California. They sent one up the coast from California to Alaska and back. They could probably do the Atlantic, but they're based in Hawaii, so they tend to work the Pacific Ocean.
Those are cute little machines. There are two parts; the floater, which looks like a surfboard with solar panels, and the glider, which is tethered to the floater by a cable of about 10 meters. The gilder has
elevator-like flaps, which are spring-loaded to return to center. As wave action moves the floater up, the pull on the cable pulls the glider upward too, which forces the flaps down. The water pushing against the flaps pushes the glider forward, towing the floater. On down waves, the glider sinks further, the flaps are pushed up, and in that position, the falling glider then pulls the floater forward.
Wave Gliders have only one powered moving part, the rudder. That's on the glider. Up top, on the floater, there's a GPS, a compass, an Iridium transceiver, and a microcontroller. This is enough to keep the Wave Glider
on course. It normally stays within 50m of the desired track, and averages about 1 knot; more in storms, less on calm days. Storms don't bother it too much; the glider pulls the floater through big waves, like a surfboard.
It only takes a few watts to run the electronics and keep the Wave Glider on course. The solar panels and a rechargeable battery provide that. So there's nothing to run out of. It just keeps going.
The problem is that Google created a system that needs to be updated, but is sold as an appliance. Appliances shouldn't need software updates.
Software updates for appliance-type devices are huge headaches. Do you send users a message "New updates are available for your computer", like Microsoft? Do you install them forcibly by remote control? What if someone is relying on their phone and an update fails? Who provides tech support?
"Agile" development for appliances is a recipe for user misery.
Javascript
"increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks."
Yeah, right. I'm getting really tired of web sites that use 100% of the CPU while doing essentially nothing. It's bad enough on a desktop machine. On a phone, that eats the battery.
I have strict "-all" SPF records on all my web sites. But I still get mail bounces from joe-jobs that the recipient host should have rejected during the SMTP session from the spammer.
If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
Even from an advertiser perspective, Google's system sucks. On the forums for "search engine optimization", one discovers that ad clicks from Google search results tend to result in sales, while ad clicks from Google ads on non-Google sites (what Google euphemistically calls the "Google Content Network") don't. 50% of ad clicks come from 10% of the user base, and that 10% doesn't buy anything.
Google ads on non-search pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. So why are there so many of them? Because they're opt-out for the advertiser.
Many Google advertisers have ads on the "content network" only because they haven't found the hidden button on Google's screens for opting out, as an unhappy Google advertiser reports: "I am running many Google ads and their CTR is around 10%-15% for search page impressions; However the CTR on the content network is 0.02%! I can exclude my ads appearing on certain sites however at the bottom of the URL list it states "Other Domains" which have a total CTR of 0.01% with well over 300,000 impressions in a month! This is driving my overall CTR down massively! If I can not view these sites and choose to exclude them...I need to opt out of all content based placements immediately. How can I do this?"
Also see "Good Reasons to Avoid Content Targeting: "The AdWords user interface misleads new advertisers. Industry consensus suggests that content targeting ought to be used selectively and one should bid lower on content than on search inventory. This is because ads on content inventory tend to convert at a lower rate than ads on search inventory. But when you walk through Google's campaign setup, you find that you've been automatically opted into the content network at the same high bid as your search campaigns."
Much of the "bottom feeder" problem on the Web comes from this one trick of Google's.
We measure some of this at SiteTruth, and some of the results are here.
I'm surprised that someone hasn't written something like BusyBox starting from FreeBSD's utilities. Busybox is just "cat", "echo", "grep", etc. all in one executable with some common code merged. It's not like it's a significant original work. FreeBSD has all those components with the BSD license.
I've been running Sumatra PDF for the last year, and there's less drama.
The trouble with Adobe Reader is that Adobe keeps trying to make it into a proprietary web browser. It knows about links, it runs Javascript, and it has a DRM scheme. None of which are needed by 99.9+% of PDF documents. Forms are a bit more popular, but PDF forms are kind of lame anyway; you can fill them up, but they don't do anything.
It's only 65% more per watt-hour for the laptop battery. That's not a big deal. Laptop batteries have trickier form factors, a lower packaging weight budget, and tougher heat management problems. It's not like ink-jet printer ink pricing, which is a known scam.
Apple, with their non-replaceable iPod/iPhone batteries, is a much bigger deal. Now that's a ripoff designed to make customers buy a new unit every two or three years.
Slashdot Mirror
Tony Tether (whom I've met) did a reasonably good job with DARPA. Especially in robotics. He was behind the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was done partly to give academic robotics departments a serious butt-kick. Academic robotics had been funded by DARPA for decades, but nothing fieldable was coming out. The reason that major universities devoted entire departments to the Grand Challenge was that DARPA had told them quietly that if they didn't do well, their funding was going away. Prior to the Grand Challenge, a typical academic robotics project was one professor and a few grad students producing a thesis on an obscure topic. Universities weren't organized to do system integration and make all the subsystems play together. Now they are.
It was time to cut back on Government-funded R&D in computer science, because it's a mature technology. DARPA shouldn't be funding "high performance graphics" - industry, Hollywood, and the game industry are doing that just fine. Networking is in good shape. DARPA hasn't been influential in operating systems since the 1980s. DARPA never had much of a role in personal computing at all.
DARPA isn't the NSF. Their job is to develop technology DoD can use.
Is it possible to travel to USA from Europe by ship?
The Queen Mary II crosses the Atlantic in 7 days. (It only took four days in the heyday of transatlantic liners.) List price starts at $907.00, and big discounts are available. Includes movie theater, live theater, disco, hot tubs, video arcade, basketball court, swimming pools, tennis court, laundromats, casino, cell phone service, WiFi, an Internet center, and a library. Eastbound sailing dates for 2010 are Apr 29, May 21, Jun 07, Jul 06, Jul 19, Sep 12.
The one thing they don't have is single cabins.
Their fulfillment centers are pretty impressive. Before I started working there I would have never realized that so much though, planning and technology went into packing the right stuff into the right boxes.
The basic system is a century old and was invented at Sears, Roebuck and Company, the first really big mail order operation. They had several city blocks in Chicago for what they called "The Works", their fulfillment center.
In the "schedule system" at Sears, orders came in, and each order was assigned a assembly bin for a 15-minute window. Picking tickets were generated for the various departments, each with the bin number and 15-minute window. The stock pickers in each department started on a new batch of tickets every 15 minutes, and as they picked items in their department, they attached the pick ticket to the item or a basket containing it, and sent it to the order assembly area by chute, conveyor, or pneumatic tube. At the order assembly area, incoming items were routed to the appropriate bin. At the end of each 15 minute window, each assembly bin was dumped to a basket, which went on a conveyor to the checking and accounting section. There, the items in the bin were matched against the order and the bill totaled up. The baskets then went to the packaging and shipping section and out of the Works.
Amazon's plant works about the same way, except that their computers know what's in inventory, so they don't have many "fails", where an item can't be found. They don't have to work to such a rigid clock-driven timetable, because the computers know when an order is fully assembled, and can allow more or less time depending on the complexity of the order. The basic concept, that a set of orders is being picked at any one time, picking orders fan out to departments, and items come back to an assigned bin for checking and packaging, remains the same.
The logs should tell you why the machine crashed.
How busy was the server?
There's an ongoing Linux problem with crashing when a program needs more memory, the file cache is using all available memory, and a locking problem prevents paging out a file. Search for "prune_one_dentry" oops (about 4000 hits in Google, from 2002 to 2009). Despite years of patches, this is usually fixed in practice by throwing more RAM at the server. This failure is likely to happen when very large files are open and in use (as with a busy database) and programs are being launched at a high rate (as on an server).
On the other hand, it can be a pain if it's done wrong.
Over the last year, Google's spelling correction has steadily become more aggressive. At first, Google just suggested "Did you mean X?", but gave you the results for what you'd specified. Then they started displaying "Did you mean X", and gave you the results for X. Then they just gave you the results after spelling correction and don't even tell you they did. Recently, they've backed that off a little, and now intermix results from the original query and the spelling-corrected form.
If you want literal search with Google, quote the words being searched.
After the crap articles in "gizmo" rags, the actual announcement from Panasonic was released on December 25. "Panasonic Corporation today announced the development of two new 18650-type (18 mm in diameter, 65 mm in height) high-capacity lithium-ion battery cells[1] for use in laptop computers and environmentally-friendly energy technologies. The company boosted the capacity of 18650-type battery cells, which are widely used in laptops, by improving electrode materials. By improving the positive electrode, it has achieved the 3.4 Ah cell which offers 20 percent greater capacity than the current 2.9 Ah model. The 3.4 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2012 ending in March 2012. The 4.0 Ah cell, which has 30 percent greater capacity compared to the 2.9 Ah cell, uses a next generation electrode material, a silicon based alloy for the negative electrode, substituting carbon. The 4.0 Ah cell will be mass produced in fiscal 2013 ending in March 2013."
So that's it. Lithium-ion batteries with 20% more capacity in 2012, and another 17% for 2013, or a 38% improvement over the next 3 years. Nice for laptops, very helpful for electric cars.
If religion in games was done right, it would make kids too cynical. Imagine this game:
"SimChurch - start your own religion, gain adherents, build a church, advertise, and grow. You can tweak your theology - too loose, and your people lose interest; too strict, and your people backslide. You can ask your followers for financial support, but ask too hard and they'll drop out. You can train fanatics to help you expand, but they may turn against you."
"In multiplayer mode, you can try to convert people from other religions to yours. Become strong enough in an area, and you can convert your country to a theocracy. Then you can have wars with other theocracies."
"If your theology calls for miracles, they might just happen. But they won't always help you. You can also fake miracles, once you have enough assets, and gain adherents that way."
This would teach kids way too much about how religion really works.
Yes. The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance. Then it's worth deploying in places where the educational system has broken down.
Like Afghanistan.
easy_install works just like CPAN.
In practice, "easy_install" usually doesn't work. The problem is that it makes assumptions about where things are supposed to be that aren't followed by the rest of the Python community. Nobody is pulling the whole thing together into a coherent distribution.
The page linked to is an ad laden (carefully selected related items, yeah right) mess that has this third or fourth hand.
True. The source is a badly written Bloomberg story which says the new battery has a capacity of "3.4 amperes per hour". I wrote to the reporter pointing out the meaninglessness of that number. The useful numbers for battery technologies are $/KwH and Kg/KwH, and they don't have those. The only useful piece of information in the story is that Panasonic will make a real announcement tomorrow.
At least the Perl crowd tries to solve this problem. The Python crowd has a terrible time coordinating distribution of third-party modules. That's why it's taking forever for Python 3.x to get deployed. Red Hat Enterprise 5, Red Hat's flagship product, still uses Python 2.4, released in 2004. (There's a Python 2.5 included, but it's not the one the system tools use.)
Perl has CPAN, which is reasonably well organized and well run. Python has the Python Package Index (formerly called Cheese Shop), but it's not well coordinated with Python releases. Things seem to be improving, but Python is 20 years old now and ought to have a mature distribution system.
NASA has far too large a PR operation if they're doing this. If they're doing a full-scale game for PR, their PR budget is too big.
The promotional end of NASA may now be the most effective part of the organization.
I just tried "exercise bike clearance" on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu, AltaVista, and Cuil. Only Google picks up the bogus Target pages.
The problem, I suspect, is Google's "site map" scheme, which allows sites to explicitly specify their page tree for indexing purposes. Those bogus pages don't have links to them, so the link-based search engines don't find them.
A solution to this is for Google to detect sites with large numbers of pages in their site map that are similar and lack external links. When that's found, mark the site map as search spam, and index the site based on links only. That will drop all the bogus pages from the index. Webmasters will notice this via the webmaster tools and stop doing it.
I just heard a "cool nerd" in a radio ad. He was an articulate guy, he'd worked up to an IT manager position, and he'd bought a house in Pleasanton, CA.
Then his company had a major downsizing.
So what's he advertising? The homeless shelter and food bank where he now lives. Really.
That's where we are today.
Nah. That's what Silicon Valley is like. All that frustrated sexual energy goes into technical progress.
The downside is that a boat propeller will turn it into confetti.
So far, one hasn't been run over by a large ship. But they think the bow wave may just push it under for a while. Their control center on shore steers the Wave Riders of the way of large ships (for which position reporting is available.)
They had discussions with the U.S. Coast Guard. Should they have the thing show a light? The Coast Guard decided it was better if they didn't, because ships would then expect it to obey the Rules of the Road, or attempt to rescue it. So the Coast Guard classifies it as "floating debris". The floater is basically a surfboard.
Wave Gliders, from Liquid Robotics, have already made autonomous trips from Hawaii to California. They sent one up the coast from California to Alaska and back. They could probably do the Atlantic, but they're based in Hawaii, so they tend to work the Pacific Ocean.
Those are cute little machines. There are two parts; the floater, which looks like a surfboard with solar panels, and the glider, which is tethered to the floater by a cable of about 10 meters. The gilder has elevator-like flaps, which are spring-loaded to return to center. As wave action moves the floater up, the pull on the cable pulls the glider upward too, which forces the flaps down. The water pushing against the flaps pushes the glider forward, towing the floater. On down waves, the glider sinks further, the flaps are pushed up, and in that position, the falling glider then pulls the floater forward.
Wave Gliders have only one powered moving part, the rudder. That's on the glider. Up top, on the floater, there's a GPS, a compass, an Iridium transceiver, and a microcontroller. This is enough to keep the Wave Glider on course. It normally stays within 50m of the desired track, and averages about 1 knot; more in storms, less on calm days. Storms don't bother it too much; the glider pulls the floater through big waves, like a surfboard.
It only takes a few watts to run the electronics and keep the Wave Glider on course. The solar panels and a rechargeable battery provide that. So there's nothing to run out of. It just keeps going.
The problem is that Google created a system that needs to be updated, but is sold as an appliance. Appliances shouldn't need software updates.
Software updates for appliance-type devices are huge headaches. Do you send users a message "New updates are available for your computer", like Microsoft? Do you install them forcibly by remote control? What if someone is relying on their phone and an update fails? Who provides tech support?
"Agile" development for appliances is a recipe for user misery.
Now Bing has to buy something. But what? Local.com? Does Microsoft already have a recommendation service somewhere in its Live system?
Javascript "increasingly more appropriate for more intense tasks."
Yeah, right. I'm getting really tired of web sites that use 100% of the CPU while doing essentially nothing. It's bad enough on a desktop machine. On a phone, that eats the battery.
I have strict "-all" SPF records on all my web sites. But I still get mail bounces from joe-jobs that the recipient host should have rejected during the SMTP session from the spammer.
If I need "product information", I will find it - ironically - on Google. The difference is that I'll be looking for it, instead of getting it shoved down my throat, willingly or otherwise.
Even from an advertiser perspective, Google's system sucks. On the forums for "search engine optimization", one discovers that ad clicks from Google search results tend to result in sales, while ad clicks from Google ads on non-Google sites (what Google euphemistically calls the "Google Content Network") don't. 50% of ad clicks come from 10% of the user base, and that 10% doesn't buy anything.
Google ads on non-search pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. So why are there so many of them? Because they're opt-out for the advertiser. Many Google advertisers have ads on the "content network" only because they haven't found the hidden button on Google's screens for opting out, as an unhappy Google advertiser reports: "I am running many Google ads and their CTR is around 10%-15% for search page impressions; However the CTR on the content network is 0.02%! I can exclude my ads appearing on certain sites however at the bottom of the URL list it states "Other Domains" which have a total CTR of 0.01% with well over 300,000 impressions in a month! This is driving my overall CTR down massively! If I can not view these sites and choose to exclude them...I need to opt out of all content based placements immediately. How can I do this?"
Also see "Good Reasons to Avoid Content Targeting: "The AdWords user interface misleads new advertisers. Industry consensus suggests that content targeting ought to be used selectively and one should bid lower on content than on search inventory. This is because ads on content inventory tend to convert at a lower rate than ads on search inventory. But when you walk through Google's campaign setup, you find that you've been automatically opted into the content network at the same high bid as your search campaigns."
Much of the "bottom feeder" problem on the Web comes from this one trick of Google's.
We measure some of this at SiteTruth, and some of the results are here.
I'm surprised that someone hasn't written something like BusyBox starting from FreeBSD's utilities. Busybox is just "cat", "echo", "grep", etc. all in one executable with some common code merged. It's not like it's a significant original work. FreeBSD has all those components with the BSD license.
I've been running Sumatra PDF for the last year, and there's less drama.
The trouble with Adobe Reader is that Adobe keeps trying to make it into a proprietary web browser. It knows about links, it runs Javascript, and it has a DRM scheme. None of which are needed by 99.9+% of PDF documents. Forms are a bit more popular, but PDF forms are kind of lame anyway; you can fill them up, but they don't do anything.
It's only 65% more per watt-hour for the laptop battery. That's not a big deal. Laptop batteries have trickier form factors, a lower packaging weight budget, and tougher heat management problems. It's not like ink-jet printer ink pricing, which is a known scam.
Apple, with their non-replaceable iPod/iPhone batteries, is a much bigger deal. Now that's a ripoff designed to make customers buy a new unit every two or three years.