Aaah, but what you describe are DISRUPTIVE technologies. The boosts will come to new sectors of the economy, and perhaps a big part of the problem is that many of those who comprise today's economy simply don't want disruption. Think ??AA and Internet, for instance. Only this time extend the concept to Big Energy, automakers, etc. For instance, no matter how paltry a step hybrids may be, they're a step, and at the moment, Detroit is way behind the curve, and they're being disrupted. (Ford Escape doesn't really count.)
One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse, Famine, was in the food business.
They talked about two of his finest products, F.O.O.D. and M.E.A.L.S., apologies for what the acronyms stood for. The general gist was something you could eat that made you fat, unhealthy, and malnourished. Or perhaps one of the products helped you waste away. For the character Famine, the desired result was a corpse, over whichever path.
Give them a break, they're suing as fast as they can. Didn't they recently open another 8000 lawsuits? There are now 3e8 people in the US, so it will take them a big to give us all our opportunity.
Not only is it lopsided, but it's got stuff embedded in the side away from the USB connector.
With simply an oddly-shaped CD, it's a relatively simple 2D problem to convince yourself that it's not going to wobble. Even at that, all wobble should be perpendicular to the axis or rotation - a simple vector problem. With this thing, on the far side, the CD has to have some sort of hole, and the electronics have to be embedded in that hole. So things are near the edge of rotation, giving maximum angular momentum. Plus if those things aren't exactly on the centerline of the plane of the CD, you now have a tensor problem, and the CD will have a wobble aligned with the axis of rotation.
To take a parallel, regular drills are designed to take the force along the axis, as in feeding the bit into the work. They're not very strong crossways to the axis - that's what routers are for. I'm sure CD drives are built to take wobble crossways to the axis because that's to be expected. I'm not sure how much wobble they're meant to take along the axis. Perhaps this CD could destroy a drive??
Is Intel making a standalone graphics card, again?
Last I heard of were the underpowered 740/780, quite a few years ago. More recently I'd heard that they have embedded 3D graphics, but that meant Intel chipset, and that meant Intel CPU, and that isn't really something you put into an AMD/nForce4 system.
Just checked google... GMA X3000 is still embedded in a motherboard chipset.
This should be a little bothersome for pool owners, too.
My late mother-in-law used to chlorinate her pool with calcium hypochlorite granules from a fairly decently-sized bucket that carried caution warnings all over it. She passed away in 1999, before all of this heated up, but as far as I know, you can still buy the buckets with the same warnings, and nothing more. A few years back I was investigating an "oxygen shock," potassium monopersulphate. One of the earlier links I dug up led me to a page on making your own explosives with common household chemicals, which I didn't think was a good place to be shortly after 9/11. For other reasons, namely expense and a reference that suggested that oxygen shocks changed chloramines into hypochlorous + nitrates (essentially fertilizer) I discontinued use. Since then, for "purist" reasons of minimizing in-pool residues, I've simplified my chemistry to a pumped feed of diluted shock. As a positive side-effect, I don't keep any potentially explosive pool chemicals around the house or garage, any more. (Thinking of the house and garage, but post-9/11 may be a bonus.)
A few topics ago, someone's wife was quoted as thinking, "Why should I object to these steps, since they'll only be used against lawbreakers, and I'm not a lawbreaker." My response was that it can be difficult to know if you're really not a lawbreaker, these days. Potentially explosive household chemicals may be one more example of this.
The thing that scares me about this is that it creates a "bucket of money" out of those recycling fees. In some essence, the surcharge is supposed to go into the bucket when you buy the thing, STAY there while you use it, and be used for disposal when you're done with it. Buckets of money set aside for the future just don't seem to ever stay set aside, in Washington. Think Social Security.
Perhaps one might say that less government interference is better, but I think the basic idea is that the current situation is not acceptable. We never seem to know the real price of our actions until way later than we should have.
Back in the old days, the speed limit on the NYST was 55mph, like other limited-access highways. But NOBODY went 55mph, and in fact it was quite common to drive past police cars at 70mph, assuming they weren't driving right beside you at that speed, or faster.
In essence, EVERYONE was breaking the law. That also meant that had they wanted to, or if they had to fill a quota of some sort, they could stop ANYONE for at least a speeding ticket. Beyond that, they could probably add reckless endangerment, etc. But the reality is, since everyone was breaking the law, they could adopt alternate criteria for stopping you, say they don't like your looks, or your car's looks.
To be honest, I don't know that the system was ever abused in this way. I never heard of any abuse, that that doesn't mean that there was or wasn't any.
But the possiblity was there.
Now to bring it home to your wife...
Do you KNOW that you're not breaking any laws? When was the last time you sat down and read ALL the laws, to sort out which ones are applicable to you? How about Blue Laws? I've heard that some places have laws on the books that the Missionary Position is the only legal method for sexual intercourse. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do remember some time in the past few years, a high court ruling that upheld a law against sex toys in your own bedroom. There was recently a rider forbidding mail-order purchase prescription drugs from Canada, and it was tacked onto a completely unrelated bill. It turns out that sometimes these riders are added late in the process, too late to be in the version of the bill given to legislators for review. Things can sail right under the radar, leaving room for "selective enforcement."
In these days, I'd mostly fear not knowing enough about who I'm doing business with. In a completely innocent fashion, it's possible to "make material contributions to terrorist organizations," by simply buying something from the wrong people.
I now think it just a little bizarre that I participated in a walk-a-thon on the first Earth Day.
I also went to the first Science Fiction Movie Marathon at Case Western Reserve University, and was recently surprised to see that it's still running every year.
A year or two back they interviewed Temple Grandin on NPR, and she talked about this machine. Oddly related to the linked article, she was being consulted by the beef industry to lessen the trauma of slaughter, and helped institute the squeeze chute there, too.
Sure you can take a TFT LCD to the john, but when you have to do your paper work, hardcopy conveniently tucks behind the dispensor or can be jimmied between the coathook and the side wall. I tend to prefer not to do something so precarious with a laptop. Laptops might break when they fall 5 feet, paper won't.
Don't count on it. When they're inconvenienced by DRM, the answer will be the same as when Windows crashes or bogs down (when riddled with spyware) today. "That's just how computers work, and I guess we have to live with it." If they say "screw this; what alternatives are out there?" they'll likely just go buy an appliance, like buying a DVD player instead of playing DVDs on their computer.
THIS is what will kill the great "convergence." As long as it's an appliance, it's fixed-function and DRM is "ok" because it lets you blame the manufacturer for a stupid product, but you can't find a better one. Once it gets that hint of generality, once there's room for the camel's nose to get under the tent, it all becomes a whole different game - a game that can't be won with DRM in it.
Heck, I hold semiconductor patents that are already expired. Much of the basic technology is already public domain. The bleeding edge may be neither necessary nor desirable in the third world.
Besides, I'm guessing that the real way to bootstrap an Indian semiconductor company is as a 'contract foundry' that can minimize exposure to the US company. This gives them a base of process and design tools, as well as a base volume of wafer starts. They can bootstrap their own business on the side, with careful attention to IP pitfalls. You also need to choose your markets carefully. A good start would be products useful and necessary in many parts of the world, but essentially worthless in the US. (Think rural wireless links with non-US frequencies and modulations.)
The unspoken side is that the MOST overpaid jobs are not the R&D, but the executives.
Obviously as you offshore the workers, you end up offshoring the first-line managers next. At some point, it becomes sensible to offshore some second-line managers, and so on. This continues up the chain, until those left see the logical conclusion, circle the wagons, and say, "It doesn't make financial sense to offshore any higher-level jobs." Or course they mean, "financial sense for me" to offshore higher-level jobs.
But by this time, there will be a lot of experience - some of it quite high-level, walking around the streets of India, which another post has suggested has more of a revolving door than Silicon Valley in its heyday. So how long before fully Indian semiconductor companies emerge? They won't have the Intel name, but that isn't as important outside the US and Europe, especially at a much lower price.
Once we've offshored every aspect of technical operation, what's left? Is the corner office really that valuable, especially outside the US?
When my son and I went to his orientation during the summer, I checked the campus bookstore. They had list-price copies of Windows, etc. I asked, and they had dropped their Microsoft deal for students as too expensive, and most of the students already had the software. For him I bought some random hunk of hardware, and got an OEM copy of XP for about $140. Ain't competition great - I never paid that much for OS/2.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, "reign." Mea Culpa.
Same message goes to mrchaotica.
He's indirectly quoting Lucifer, "Better to rein in Hell than to serve in Heaven."
Not just demonic nature, but all too often, human nature, too.
Aaah, but what you describe are DISRUPTIVE technologies. The boosts will come to new sectors of the economy, and perhaps a big part of the problem is that many of those who comprise today's economy simply don't want disruption. Think ??AA and Internet, for instance. Only this time extend the concept to Big Energy, automakers, etc. For instance, no matter how paltry a step hybrids may be, they're a step, and at the moment, Detroit is way behind the curve, and they're being disrupted. (Ford Escape doesn't really count.)
As a fiscal conservative, apparently you're a liberal!
Barry Goldwater said the same thing of himself.
One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse, Famine, was in the food business.
They talked about two of his finest products, F.O.O.D. and M.E.A.L.S., apologies for what the acronyms stood for. The general gist was something you could eat that made you fat, unhealthy, and malnourished. Or perhaps one of the products helped you waste away. For the character Famine, the desired result was a corpse, over whichever path.
The conclusion and relevance is obvious.
Give them a break, they're suing as fast as they can. Didn't they recently open another 8000 lawsuits? There are now 3e8 people in the US, so it will take them a big to give us all our opportunity.
Not only is it lopsided, but it's got stuff embedded in the side away from the USB connector.
With simply an oddly-shaped CD, it's a relatively simple 2D problem to convince yourself that it's not going to wobble. Even at that, all wobble should be perpendicular to the axis or rotation - a simple vector problem. With this thing, on the far side, the CD has to have some sort of hole, and the electronics have to be embedded in that hole. So things are near the edge of rotation, giving maximum angular momentum. Plus if those things aren't exactly on the centerline of the plane of the CD, you now have a tensor problem, and the CD will have a wobble aligned with the axis of rotation.
To take a parallel, regular drills are designed to take the force along the axis, as in feeding the bit into the work. They're not very strong crossways to the axis - that's what routers are for. I'm sure CD drives are built to take wobble crossways to the axis because that's to be expected. I'm not sure how much wobble they're meant to take along the axis. Perhaps this CD could destroy a drive??
This was modded funny, and I agree it is.
But I'm surprised that this is the only comment about the mechanical balance of such a CD.
Waitaminnit...
Is Intel making a standalone graphics card, again?
Last I heard of were the underpowered 740/780, quite a few years ago. More recently I'd heard that they have embedded 3D graphics, but that meant Intel chipset, and that meant Intel CPU, and that isn't really something you put into an AMD/nForce4 system.
Just checked google... GMA X3000 is still embedded in a motherboard chipset.
This should be a little bothersome for pool owners, too.
My late mother-in-law used to chlorinate her pool with calcium hypochlorite granules from a fairly decently-sized bucket that carried caution warnings all over it. She passed away in 1999, before all of this heated up, but as far as I know, you can still buy the buckets with the same warnings, and nothing more. A few years back I was investigating an "oxygen shock," potassium monopersulphate. One of the earlier links I dug up led me to a page on making your own explosives with common household chemicals, which I didn't think was a good place to be shortly after 9/11. For other reasons, namely expense and a reference that suggested that oxygen shocks changed chloramines into hypochlorous + nitrates (essentially fertilizer) I discontinued use. Since then, for "purist" reasons of minimizing in-pool residues, I've simplified my chemistry to a pumped feed of diluted shock. As a positive side-effect, I don't keep any potentially explosive pool chemicals around the house or garage, any more. (Thinking of the house and garage, but post-9/11 may be a bonus.)
A few topics ago, someone's wife was quoted as thinking, "Why should I object to these steps, since they'll only be used against lawbreakers, and I'm not a lawbreaker." My response was that it can be difficult to know if you're really not a lawbreaker, these days. Potentially explosive household chemicals may be one more example of this.
I wonder if that professor from CMU that used to light his grill with LOX has been hauled off to Gitmo, yet.
http://www.doeblitz.net/ghg/
The thing that scares me about this is that it creates a "bucket of money" out of those recycling fees. In some essence, the surcharge is supposed to go into the bucket when you buy the thing, STAY there while you use it, and be used for disposal when you're done with it. Buckets of money set aside for the future just don't seem to ever stay set aside, in Washington. Think Social Security.
Perhaps one might say that less government interference is better, but I think the basic idea is that the current situation is not acceptable. We never seem to know the real price of our actions until way later than we should have.
How about the New York State Thruway analogy.
Back in the old days, the speed limit on the NYST was 55mph, like other limited-access highways. But NOBODY went 55mph, and in fact it was quite common to drive past police cars at 70mph, assuming they weren't driving right beside you at that speed, or faster.
In essence, EVERYONE was breaking the law. That also meant that had they wanted to, or if they had to fill a quota of some sort, they could stop ANYONE for at least a speeding ticket. Beyond that, they could probably add reckless endangerment, etc. But the reality is, since everyone was breaking the law, they could adopt alternate criteria for stopping you, say they don't like your looks, or your car's looks.
To be honest, I don't know that the system was ever abused in this way. I never heard of any abuse, that that doesn't mean that there was or wasn't any.
But the possiblity was there.
Now to bring it home to your wife...
Do you KNOW that you're not breaking any laws? When was the last time you sat down and read ALL the laws, to sort out which ones are applicable to you? How about Blue Laws? I've heard that some places have laws on the books that the Missionary Position is the only legal method for sexual intercourse. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do remember some time in the past few years, a high court ruling that upheld a law against sex toys in your own bedroom. There was recently a rider forbidding mail-order purchase prescription drugs from Canada, and it was tacked onto a completely unrelated bill. It turns out that sometimes these riders are added late in the process, too late to be in the version of the bill given to legislators for review. Things can sail right under the radar, leaving room for "selective enforcement."
In these days, I'd mostly fear not knowing enough about who I'm doing business with. In a completely innocent fashion, it's possible to "make material contributions to terrorist organizations," by simply buying something from the wrong people.
I now think it just a little bizarre that I participated in a walk-a-thon on the first Earth Day.
I also went to the first Science Fiction Movie Marathon at Case Western Reserve University, and was recently surprised to see that it's still running every year.
A year or two back they interviewed Temple Grandin on NPR, and she talked about this machine. Oddly related to the linked article, she was being consulted by the beef industry to lessen the trauma of slaughter, and helped institute the squeeze chute there, too.
But now the screen is so small that it's clearly harder to read than paper, or at least more cumbersome.
Everybody's missed the obvious one...
Sure you can take a TFT LCD to the john, but when you have to do your paper work, hardcopy conveniently tucks behind the dispensor or can be jimmied between the coathook and the side wall. I tend to prefer not to do something so precarious with a laptop. Laptops might break when they fall 5 feet, paper won't.
Don't count on it. When they're inconvenienced by DRM, the answer will be the same as when Windows crashes or bogs down (when riddled with spyware) today. "That's just how computers work, and I guess we have to live with it." If they say "screw this; what alternatives are out there?" they'll likely just go buy an appliance, like buying a DVD player instead of playing DVDs on their computer.
THIS is what will kill the great "convergence." As long as it's an appliance, it's fixed-function and DRM is "ok" because it lets you blame the manufacturer for a stupid product, but you can't find a better one. Once it gets that hint of generality, once there's room for the camel's nose to get under the tent, it all becomes a whole different game - a game that can't be won with DRM in it.
What you've just said is that there will be a thriving business in cracking developers' machines, surfing for certificates.
Next you have to question how Microsoft will manage their certificates and revocation list.
Heck, I hold semiconductor patents that are already expired. Much of the basic technology is already public domain. The bleeding edge may be neither necessary nor desirable in the third world.
Besides, I'm guessing that the real way to bootstrap an Indian semiconductor company is as a 'contract foundry' that can minimize exposure to the US company. This gives them a base of process and design tools, as well as a base volume of wafer starts. They can bootstrap their own business on the side, with careful attention to IP pitfalls. You also need to choose your markets carefully. A good start would be products useful and necessary in many parts of the world, but essentially worthless in the US. (Think rural wireless links with non-US frequencies and modulations.)
Ryobi
(I actually recognized humor, but had to give a straight answer, too.)
The unspoken side is that the MOST overpaid jobs are not the R&D, but the executives.
Obviously as you offshore the workers, you end up offshoring the first-line managers next. At some point, it becomes sensible to offshore some second-line managers, and so on. This continues up the chain, until those left see the logical conclusion, circle the wagons, and say, "It doesn't make financial sense to offshore any higher-level jobs." Or course they mean, "financial sense for me" to offshore higher-level jobs.
But by this time, there will be a lot of experience - some of it quite high-level, walking around the streets of India, which another post has suggested has more of a revolving door than Silicon Valley in its heyday. So how long before fully Indian semiconductor companies emerge? They won't have the Intel name, but that isn't as important outside the US and Europe, especially at a much lower price.
Once we've offshored every aspect of technical operation, what's left? Is the corner office really that valuable, especially outside the US?
Using energy, particularly derived from fossil fuels, is a RIGHT! Nay, an OBLIGATION!
Only a terrorist or a commie pinko would think of energy usage as a cost, something to be balanced and minimized!
(yet)
When my son and I went to his orientation during the summer, I checked the campus bookstore. They had list-price copies of Windows, etc. I asked, and they had dropped their Microsoft deal for students as too expensive, and most of the students already had the software. For him I bought some random hunk of hardware, and got an OEM copy of XP for about $140. Ain't competition great - I never paid that much for OS/2.