The trouble with "Money seems less important now, compared to some greater things in life" is that it goes from being plain good sense to (depending on your position) either being Just Plain Wrong or Epic Stoicism pretty sharply at a certain level, defined by your local costs of living and social safety net, if any. Also, if whatever you have in mind requires purchasing inputs(such as legal time), there exists a point where the project goes from being possible to being impossible.
Worrying about money, in itself, is a hobby at best and a psychological condition at worst. However, a substantial majority of people don't have the luxury of worrying about money, in itself(particularly if you are talking a $200k bill and enough time in court that you'd probably lose your day job). They are worrying about "money" as a proxy for worrying about homelessness, or lack of medical care, or hunger, or their children, or fighting with their spouse all the time, or whatever.
Estimates vary; but the PPP adjusted GDP per capita of the UK is only ~$35k. If a libel defense costs ~5.5 years of that, it is essentially a certainty that most of the population simply doesn't have a choice about whether they want to mount one or not, regardless of whether they care about money or not.
Calling out specific systems(without research: "did the NES/SNES keep more asses in more seats for longer than the Playstation" is a perfectly valid empirical question) seems counterproductive at best, libelous at worst.
The basic fact that consuming more energy than you use makes you fat, though, seems too obvious to even bother arguing about anymore. This is conservation of energy, not subtle epidemiology.
Does "faces significant challenges" mean "Is no longer capable of satisfying the bloated expectations of parasitic wall-streeters because it basically just produces an unsexy commodity in quantity, like steel or potatoes" or does it mean "is seriously fucked because corporations will only buy if they can get a "total enterprise solution" from one company, by cutting a single PO?
The former seems like a largely perceptual problem. Earth to investors, not every industry segment can double its profit every quarter forever, and if it can, it is probably a scam. Civilizations are built on largely low-margin commodities. Cement, steel, sulfuric acid, corn, potatoes, x86s. Go find a Ponzi scheme if you can't deal with that.
The latter, though, seems like a real issue for Dell, one that could seriously impact their mid to long-term viability.
TFA says that they were using polycrystalline(commonly seen in photovoltaic panels and similar), rather than the monocrystaline wafers that the chip guys use.
I'm not sure if this was an economic choice, or if there is some impenetrable-to-mere-laymen solid state physics reason; but they say they are using polycrystalline slices...
The PowerMac G6 would be pretty impressive. The PowerBook G6 manual would include the following phrase:
"Please note: The revolutionary new MagsafePro 3-Phase/480 power connector is not backwards compatible with the Magsafe connectors of prior, non-containerized Mac Portables."
I don't think I do. More money will (typically) speed a process; but there are hard limits. You can pay overtime, run lights all night, bribe permitting guys; but concrete still takes time to set. Steel still takes time to assemble. Fine-tuning touchy chemical processes isn't instant.
You can certainly hire better people faster by throwing more money at them; but that isn't instant either.
The exact shape of the tradeoff curve between time and money varies by enterprise; but it never passes through T=0...
Were we to run out of silicon, it'd be time to find a new rock because something very serious has happened to this one. That said, the fact that silicon is among the most common of atoms tells us nothing about the short to medium term supply of sufficiently pure and correctly structured polycrystaline silicon.
If it takes 18 months to bring a plant online, that is pretty much the limit of the market's ability to cope with surprise demand(minus any slack in existing capacity that can be wrung out). For highly predictable stuff, no big deal, the plant will be built by the time we need it; but surprises can and do happen, even for common materials(especially given the degree to which "just in time" has come to dominate the supply chain. This isn't your merchant-princes of old, sitting on warehouses piled high. Inventory that isn't flowing like shit through a goose is considered a failure, with the rare exception of "national security" justified stockpiles or the rare hedge or futures position that is actually stored in kind, rather than in electronic accounts somewhere...)
That would be the thinking. Basic "tamper evident" switches, with BIOS logs, have been a standard feature in corporate desktops for years. They aren't totally foolproof, some clever knife work will usually get you past them; but they are simple, cheap, and make unauthorized opening pretty tricky for somebody who doesn't know exactly what to expect.
In consoles(which aren't designed for trivial toolless repair) you could presumably build rather more robust ones for a similarly low price and potentially do much nastier things(like burning them against further XBox Live play, or deleting the AACS keys required for Blu-Ray playback...)
Mostly obsolete in consumer electronics, where small is a big selling point and "user-serviceable" is "not user-friendly".
Pop open just about any but the absolute cheapest and nastiest of servers, say, (which is usually a toolless operation, unless you've locked the provided lock) and you'll see the fans right there. Often in convenient hot-swap mounts, no less.
I suspect that the hot swap issues are (indirectly) an artefact of the fact that eSATA has basically zero traction as anything other than a low-cost replacement for SCSI for the "External disks as fast as internal ones" market.
Back in the bad old days, just about any use of USB beyond the very simplest was liable to be fraught with issues in some setups, including some quite common, at the time, ones. BIOSes you couldn't configure with a USB keyboard, seriously broken USB peripherals and chipsets, utterly crap drivers, etc.
However, because USB was pretty clearly on the right trajectory, most of that got ironed out over time. Shipping stuff where the USB didn't Just Work went from being acceptable to being a customer support money sink.
Since eSATA shows much weaker signs of ever getting to that point(and, also since some of the people want their eSATA device not marked as removable, so they can install an OS on it, and some want it marked as removable so they can eject it, further complicating things) the odds of it being ironed out to the point where you can basically trust any set of components, from any collection of manufacturers, to actually work, will be rather a while in coming.
The one major eSATA issue(I don't know why they overlooked this the first time) is power. For 3.5inch drives, or multi drive external towers/shelves, this doesn't matter at all. An external PSU is a given. For the "single 2.5 inch or smaller in portable case" case, the fact that USB3 delivers the bandwidth(and is backwards compatible right back to the two-1.1-ports stuff that they were shipping in the mid 90s) and the power, while eSATA delivers only the bandwidth, requiring a seperate connector for power, pretty much ruins things. If eSATA had included power from the start, it might have been a much better contender.
As a replacement for SCSI type use cases, of course, USB is a toy and eSATA or SAS is the natural replacement; but for the vast market for flash drives, 2.5 inch externals, and mass-market, works-with-anything 3.5 inch externals, eSATA is doomed compared to USB(especially since a USB port can be used for non storage purposes, while an eSATA port is pretty much storage only. In principle, a high speed serial interconnect like SATA could be used for other stuff; but I've never seen it actually done in practice.
Anybody who files an indecency complaint with the FCC should be required to swear, under penalty of perjury, that all of their children(if any) were delivered by C-section, exclusively bottle fed, and bathed and changed only in the dark.
If two seconds of Janet Jackson nipple leads to depravity, our vile custom of allowing mere innocent babies to freely gratify their sickening bodily desires on bare breasts must be the reason that we can't build prisons fast enough to contain the criminal element.
Frankly, given all the cool things that you can do with a chunk of spectrum, the "airwaves are for public use" argument is much better ammunition for the extirpation of broadcast TV and the creation of vast chunks of spectrum that are either unrestricted or "free for use by all devices conforming to $OPEN_INDUSTRY_STANDARD_WIRELESS_PROTOCOL" rather than the bowdlerization of daytime TV.
It really doesn't help that, in addition to Oxygen being fairly peppy, many of the chemicals we care about sufficiently to transport and process in quantity are either foodstuffs(which wouldn't be foodstuffs if they weren't a good source of energy) or fuels(ditto) or chemical intermediates(which tend to be reactive in some way, or they wouldn't be useful as chemical intermediates).
But, at equivalent temperature and pressure, the 1 ton of hydrogen will occupy a substantially greater volume. "Less dense" would have been more precise; but "lighter" is a perfectly acceptable informal usage, especially when everybody involved is in the same gravity well...
True enough. I suspect that, in such cases, Google will have to pay something(either in royalties or in extra bandwidth); but will be able to bargain with the MPEG LA in the following terms:
"We both know that h.264 is somewhat better than WebM. We can get equivalent quality for x% more bandwidth, which would cost roughly $y. I hope that your proposed fee is lower..."
H.264 is a pretty standard standard, with all kinds of documentation and mutually interoperable implementations and stuff. It's just that it is patented to hell and back and even "RaND" licensing can strangle OSS implementations in patent-enforcing jurisdictions.
It is basically the complete opposite of a lot of the de-facto standards, where there are no patents of any real note because the "standard" is just some horrible set of hacks thrown together by a single company using standard CS techniques; but there is only one actually conformant implementation, and serious complexity obstacles in the way of 3rd parties.
Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.
It must have been a rather interesting looking fire.
Unlike materials that contain their own oxidizers, pure hydrogen will do basically nothing outside of the conditions that the fusion kiddies are working with. It needs to mix with air first. However, it is also substantially lighter than air, and would thus rise fairly quickly out of any non-sealed area. If you had a big hydrogen leak, burning, you'd presumably have a rising column of hydrogen, gradually mushrooming, surrounded by localized pockets of combustion in areas where turbulence had created a critical mixture of fuel, air, and temperature. That must have been an odd sight.
The "explosion" bit suggests that either there are other chemicals on site in fair quantity(quite possible, if the hydrogen is being generated locally in some way) or somebody foolishly built a confined area for the hydrogen to build up in when it leaked...
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with "Money seems less important now, compared to some greater things in life" is that it goes from being plain good sense to (depending on your position) either being Just Plain Wrong or Epic Stoicism pretty sharply at a certain level, defined by your local costs of living and social safety net, if any. Also, if whatever you have in mind requires purchasing inputs(such as legal time), there exists a point where the project goes from being possible to being impossible.
Worrying about money, in itself, is a hobby at best and a psychological condition at worst. However, a substantial majority of people don't have the luxury of worrying about money, in itself(particularly if you are talking a $200k bill and enough time in court that you'd probably lose your day job). They are worrying about "money" as a proxy for worrying about homelessness, or lack of medical care, or hunger, or their children, or fighting with their spouse all the time, or whatever.
Estimates vary; but the PPP adjusted GDP per capita of the UK is only ~$35k. If a libel defense costs ~5.5 years of that, it is essentially a certainty that most of the population simply doesn't have a choice about whether they want to mount one or not, regardless of whether they care about money or not.
Calling out specific systems(without research: "did the NES/SNES keep more asses in more seats for longer than the Playstation" is a perfectly valid empirical question) seems counterproductive at best, libelous at worst.
The basic fact that consuming more energy than you use makes you fat, though, seems too obvious to even bother arguing about anymore. This is conservation of energy, not subtle epidemiology.
Does "faces significant challenges" mean "Is no longer capable of satisfying the bloated expectations of parasitic wall-streeters because it basically just produces an unsexy commodity in quantity, like steel or potatoes" or does it mean "is seriously fucked because corporations will only buy if they can get a "total enterprise solution" from one company, by cutting a single PO?
The former seems like a largely perceptual problem. Earth to investors, not every industry segment can double its profit every quarter forever, and if it can, it is probably a scam. Civilizations are built on largely low-margin commodities. Cement, steel, sulfuric acid, corn, potatoes, x86s. Go find a Ponzi scheme if you can't deal with that.
The latter, though, seems like a real issue for Dell, one that could seriously impact their mid to long-term viability.
TFA says that they were using polycrystalline(commonly seen in photovoltaic panels and similar), rather than the monocrystaline wafers that the chip guys use.
I'm not sure if this was an economic choice, or if there is some impenetrable-to-mere-laymen solid state physics reason; but they say they are using polycrystalline slices...
Your standard flamethrower is capable of operation at well above 121c. Should be no big deal...
The gigantic glowing logo, on the other hand...
The PowerMac G6 would be pretty impressive. The PowerBook G6 manual would include the following phrase:
"Please note: The revolutionary new MagsafePro 3-Phase/480 power connector is not backwards compatible with the Magsafe connectors of prior, non-containerized Mac Portables."
I don't think I do. More money will (typically) speed a process; but there are hard limits. You can pay overtime, run lights all night, bribe permitting guys; but concrete still takes time to set. Steel still takes time to assemble. Fine-tuning touchy chemical processes isn't instant.
You can certainly hire better people faster by throwing more money at them; but that isn't instant either.
The exact shape of the tradeoff curve between time and money varies by enterprise; but it never passes through T=0...
Do the controllers still come with a copy of the bluetooth HID spec, printed on nice soft 2-ply paper and conveniently rolled for bathroom use?
Were we to run out of silicon, it'd be time to find a new rock because something very serious has happened to this one. That said, the fact that silicon is among the most common of atoms tells us nothing about the short to medium term supply of sufficiently pure and correctly structured polycrystaline silicon.
If it takes 18 months to bring a plant online, that is pretty much the limit of the market's ability to cope with surprise demand(minus any slack in existing capacity that can be wrung out). For highly predictable stuff, no big deal, the plant will be built by the time we need it; but surprises can and do happen, even for common materials(especially given the degree to which "just in time" has come to dominate the supply chain. This isn't your merchant-princes of old, sitting on warehouses piled high. Inventory that isn't flowing like shit through a goose is considered a failure, with the rare exception of "national security" justified stockpiles or the rare hedge or futures position that is actually stored in kind, rather than in electronic accounts somewhere...)
It would take a fair bit of archival research(and a great deal of definitional quibbling) to actually answer that question; but consider this:
Every breakthrough you have ever had the opportunity to purchase started out like this.
That would be the thinking. Basic "tamper evident" switches, with BIOS logs, have been a standard feature in corporate desktops for years. They aren't totally foolproof, some clever knife work will usually get you past them; but they are simple, cheap, and make unauthorized opening pretty tricky for somebody who doesn't know exactly what to expect.
In consoles(which aren't designed for trivial toolless repair) you could presumably build rather more robust ones for a similarly low price and potentially do much nastier things(like burning them against further XBox Live play, or deleting the AACS keys required for Blu-Ray playback...)
Mostly obsolete in consumer electronics, where small is a big selling point and "user-serviceable" is "not user-friendly".
Pop open just about any but the absolute cheapest and nastiest of servers, say, (which is usually a toolless operation, unless you've locked the provided lock) and you'll see the fans right there. Often in convenient hot-swap mounts, no less.
It's the sound of continuity/anti-tamper sensors being added to the external housings of the next generation of consoles...
I suspect that the hot swap issues are (indirectly) an artefact of the fact that eSATA has basically zero traction as anything other than a low-cost replacement for SCSI for the "External disks as fast as internal ones" market.
Back in the bad old days, just about any use of USB beyond the very simplest was liable to be fraught with issues in some setups, including some quite common, at the time, ones. BIOSes you couldn't configure with a USB keyboard, seriously broken USB peripherals and chipsets, utterly crap drivers, etc.
However, because USB was pretty clearly on the right trajectory, most of that got ironed out over time. Shipping stuff where the USB didn't Just Work went from being acceptable to being a customer support money sink.
Since eSATA shows much weaker signs of ever getting to that point(and, also since some of the people want their eSATA device not marked as removable, so they can install an OS on it, and some want it marked as removable so they can eject it, further complicating things) the odds of it being ironed out to the point where you can basically trust any set of components, from any collection of manufacturers, to actually work, will be rather a while in coming.
The description of this incident makes BPG sound as brittle as it is trusting...
The one major eSATA issue(I don't know why they overlooked this the first time) is power. For 3.5inch drives, or multi drive external towers/shelves, this doesn't matter at all. An external PSU is a given. For the "single 2.5 inch or smaller in portable case" case, the fact that USB3 delivers the bandwidth(and is backwards compatible right back to the two-1.1-ports stuff that they were shipping in the mid 90s) and the power, while eSATA delivers only the bandwidth, requiring a seperate connector for power, pretty much ruins things. If eSATA had included power from the start, it might have been a much better contender.
As a replacement for SCSI type use cases, of course, USB is a toy and eSATA or SAS is the natural replacement; but for the vast market for flash drives, 2.5 inch externals, and mass-market, works-with-anything 3.5 inch externals, eSATA is doomed compared to USB(especially since a USB port can be used for non storage purposes, while an eSATA port is pretty much storage only. In principle, a high speed serial interconnect like SATA could be used for other stuff; but I've never seen it actually done in practice.
Anybody who files an indecency complaint with the FCC should be required to swear, under penalty of perjury, that all of their children(if any) were delivered by C-section, exclusively bottle fed, and bathed and changed only in the dark.
If two seconds of Janet Jackson nipple leads to depravity, our vile custom of allowing mere innocent babies to freely gratify their sickening bodily desires on bare breasts must be the reason that we can't build prisons fast enough to contain the criminal element.
Frankly, given all the cool things that you can do with a chunk of spectrum, the "airwaves are for public use" argument is much better ammunition for the extirpation of broadcast TV and the creation of vast chunks of spectrum that are either unrestricted or "free for use by all devices conforming to $OPEN_INDUSTRY_STANDARD_WIRELESS_PROTOCOL" rather than the bowdlerization of daytime TV.
It really doesn't help that, in addition to Oxygen being fairly peppy, many of the chemicals we care about sufficiently to transport and process in quantity are either foodstuffs(which wouldn't be foodstuffs if they weren't a good source of energy) or fuels(ditto) or chemical intermediates(which tend to be reactive in some way, or they wouldn't be useful as chemical intermediates).
But, at equivalent temperature and pressure, the 1 ton of hydrogen will occupy a substantially greater volume. "Less dense" would have been more precise; but "lighter" is a perfectly acceptable informal usage, especially when everybody involved is in the same gravity well...
True enough. I suspect that, in such cases, Google will have to pay something(either in royalties or in extra bandwidth); but will be able to bargain with the MPEG LA in the following terms:
"We both know that h.264 is somewhat better than WebM. We can get equivalent quality for x% more bandwidth, which would cost roughly $y. I hope that your proposed fee is lower..."
H.264 is a pretty standard standard, with all kinds of documentation and mutually interoperable implementations and stuff. It's just that it is patented to hell and back and even "RaND" licensing can strangle OSS implementations in patent-enforcing jurisdictions.
It is basically the complete opposite of a lot of the de-facto standards, where there are no patents of any real note because the "standard" is just some horrible set of hacks thrown together by a single company using standard CS techniques; but there is only one actually conformant implementation, and serious complexity obstacles in the way of 3rd parties.
Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.
It must have been a rather interesting looking fire.
Unlike materials that contain their own oxidizers, pure hydrogen will do basically nothing outside of the conditions that the fusion kiddies are working with. It needs to mix with air first. However, it is also substantially lighter than air, and would thus rise fairly quickly out of any non-sealed area. If you had a big hydrogen leak, burning, you'd presumably have a rising column of hydrogen, gradually mushrooming, surrounded by localized pockets of combustion in areas where turbulence had created a critical mixture of fuel, air, and temperature. That must have been an odd sight.
The "explosion" bit suggests that either there are other chemicals on site in fair quantity(quite possible, if the hydrogen is being generated locally in some way) or somebody foolishly built a confined area for the hydrogen to build up in when it leaked...