To be fair, ARM and MIPS don't need cutting-edge performance. They are fabbed on whatever slightly older, absolutely dirt-cheap process is available. They're so small and low power already that a process shrink or two doesn't noticeably affect the overall performance of the embedded device.
Part of the reason it works so well is because companies that need to be on the cutting edge of chip tech (like Intel and AMD) pay the huge expense of building high tech fabs, then, when the technology moves on, they've got to do SOMETHING with the obsolete fabs, so they might as well contract out and make dirt cheap chips at minimal profits. After all, little profit is better than no-profits, on a fab you've long since paid for and (hopefully) profited from.
And I believe AMD was already trying to better utilize their old fabs, making (low-power) Geode chips for embedded apps and the like with spare capacity.
And this really shouldn't have surprised anyone... They've contracted out other fabs to produce AMD cores in addition to their own, but only as contingencies when they couldn't immediately meet demand... I suppose they don't have that problem anymore.
If you think insurance is a scam, tell that to the people whose entire earthly possessions were wiped out in Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, or the California wildfires.
Both were declared state emergencies. Those without insurance still got reimbursed for their losses.
"Insurance" isn't an inherent scam, but MANY of the companies offering insurance are cheaters liars and scammers.
See Allstate offering ridiculously, illegally low levels of coverage. See any of the insurers that up tons of risk, and teeter on the edge of bankruptcy when they have to pay-up. See insurance companies offering plans that have fine print to specifically EXCLUDE the MOST LIKELY form of natural disaster in an area, so that the plan you're paying for is utterly worthless.
Conversely, I also believe it is being forced upon those that don't need it in many situations:
Those who drive safe, and/or very little, still pay ridiculous amounts for required automotive liability insurance in some states, because it is blanket required. Those who could afford to pay off more than the liability amount aren't allowed to, unless they jump through ridiculous hoops.
Home-owner's insurance for a cheap house in a very low-risk area should not be required for a mortgage... I consider that equivalent to a hidden premium levied on numerous home buyers. And for the reasons above, it often doesn't help, anyhow...
And what happens when I want to sell some of my "privately invested" [...] to support myself during my retirement?
The greatest myth of the stock market, and a very recent one, is that you NEED to sell off stock to get value from it. That's just playing a pyramid scheme.
Let's see, it's... oh my, a 1.4 L 4-cylinder engine. Tenth of a liter difference? Doesn't sound that much smaller, now does it?
Not if you're an idiot. If you know anything about cars, however, you're aware that the "engine" (proper) is only a small portion of the power-train of a conventional automobile, and an even smaller portion of the overall "stuff" under the hood that is needed to keep it running at all times.
Transmission, drive axle, alternator, radiator, fan, etc. All kinds of things you can completely eliminate, and many more you can vastly downsize, when you aren't directly powering the wheels with a conventional engine.
The gasoline engine is just so much dead weight in that regard, UNLIKE in a Prius, where the engine can also kick in to help out when needed in a much more symbiotic relationship.
This is also idiotic. The Prius' electric motor is half, not 1/3rd of the power. The fact that the Chevy Volt concept is much bigger and heavier doesn't remotely imply that it's an inherent defect of serial hybrids.
My nightmare is having an electric car during and evacuation for a hurricane. It is hard enough now to find gas to get out, not to mention if you screw up, and are in traffice for up to 20 hours
Electric has HUGE advantages in such a situation. If your electric car has a 100 mile range, it can go 100 miles at 55MPH, or at 1MPH, it doesn't matter! (actually, it does, but lower speed is BETTER).
Now, you have a point about running the AC... But I suspect, as people watch their energy meters going down, they're going to wise-up pretty quick and shut off that AC. With an electric car, that'll stop the drain, and put your range back up where it should be. With a traditional car, you'll still be burning (almost) as much fuel with/without the AC, so you're screwed either way...
Batteries make the difference between a sweaty person DRIVING out of town, and a very sweaty person WALKING out of town.
look at Houston, there are STILL areas there without power. No electricity, no car...
There are small areas without power, just as there are small areas without gasoline. So you'll have to drive a little further to charge up when there's a disaster.
As an added bonus, the emergency services can bring in (instead of large quantities of fuel) a much smaller quantity of fuel, and a few large generators for each neighborhood, allowing everyone to charge up their cars, and run a few of the basic necessary appliances.
And you can bet, if this was more of a necessity, electric companies would give very high priority to getting at least one central location in each town (with a few car-chargers) wired for power before spending time on the much longer process of repairing the very elaborate, with numerous points of failure, house to house distribution network.
The fact that we cannot imagine a world with less automobiles speaks volumes our selfishness and short-sightedness.
It's a simple fact that individual transit has numerous benefits that mass transit can't hope to match.
(subway, train, bus, street car, walking, cycling)
I always love it when people say we should dump all our cars, and ride bicycles to save the planet.
Draw a 2-seat recumbent quadracycle (4-wheeled bike) at one end, and a small 2-seat car at the other.
Now, draw about a dozen stages between the two... Not quite bicycle, not quite car. Now, point out the exact stage at which the cycle transitions from acceptable mode of transport, to the root of all evil in the western world. What are the features that distinguish a good people-mover, from a bad people-mover? Shock absorbers? Enclosed compartments? Solid wheel hubs? Seat belts? Motor?
I'd really like to know, so that cars in the near future can be built without all the pure evil features...
You missed the 19th century. Every other decade had at best a bad recession
Yes, but that was way back when the US Fed had practically no mechanisms available to them to regulate and balance out the stock market (or the economy as a whole), so it's an entirely different and non-comparable situation than the past ~70 years.
removed the alternator and added a deep cycle battery.
That's a bit insane.
Batteries are meant to give you just enough power to reliably start the vehicle, for good reason. Batteries are horribly inefficient, and generating electricity on the fly is much better all-around.
Deep cycle batteries are expensive, large, heavy, etc., and no batteries last long when you're regularly charge/discharge cycling them.
And safety would be a serious problem. Your headlights will be substantially dimmer, and continue to dim throughout your drive, and would very likely drain your battery completely in perhaps 4 hours. Might not be a problem for summer-only vehicles, not too far outside the tropics, but horrible for most people.
I bet you could get comparable results, for very little money less money, by just putting a (heavy duty) diode with a 2-volt drop, on the alternator line. Then, it puts out 12V, and the battery is only maintained at about 50% charge capacity. Never any over-charging or wasted energy trickle charging.
For a bit more money (but far less than solar panels and a deep-cycle battery) you could REPLACE your alternator with a fixed-magnet generator, at least doubling electrical generation efficiency.
one could easily rotate that pink line counter clockwise just a couple of degrees, until the peak in 2000 just barely pokes out the top,
It doesn't work. If you rotate it anymore, you'll have entire decades falling out the bottom, UNDER that median line, and it look very OBVIOUSLY wrong. 75-90 is just barely staying on the bottom edge.
Of course you could fudge it, and widen that pink line, but that would be pretty obvious, and also wouldn't hide the bubble, which stands out far more than any other peak.
to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system
Uhh, no. It's just the foundation of the stock market. Our economy could get along just fine without any stock market at all. Private investment would do the job just fine, without being nearly as susceptible to fraud.
And I should also point out that this is all a brand new phenomenon. It's been less than 20 years that the stock market has gone so grotesquely out-of-whack, throwing us into several bubble and burst cycles. See: http://www.downside.com/charts/sp500asmall.gif
That's what happens when you change the tax code to eliminate dividends, and make all investors dependent on capitol gains, which requires a lot of finesse, and mostly luck (if not out and out fraud) to make sure you "getting out" at just the right time, when you can still find a bigger idiot with more money.
However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time.
First, it's not unreasonable for a company to want a non-compete clause, particularly when you could so very easily steal all their thunder.
And it's not for-"ever". You're unlikely to work for this particular company for long, and I haven't seen a non-compete clause last more than a year after the end of employment. It may be an eternity in the software world, though.
Personally, I'd say get every cent you can out of them and go work on SOME OTHER open source project that interests you, in your spare time.
If you feel bad about abandoning the project, you could donate a small cut of your newfound salary to the project, which, for many, many projects I've seen, would do more than any amount of (free) coding from you ever could.
china is big enough that companies cannot afford to boycott them...
No. China is EXPECTED to become big. Right now, the per-capita is so low that, even having so many people, they can't hope to match the buying power of even a small country in the more developed world.
Cutting ties with china on the other hand, would significantly hurt other countries
Cutting off a trading partner will always hurt. However, "other countries" would take a short hit, and quickly rebound. China, however, would be DEVASTATED in short order, as their economy immediately slips into a depression, with no hope of growth. Their domestic economy is based on government subsidies, trying to prop-up local tech enough that they won't need those damn foreigners for everything. But they're not there yet.
Besides that, seeking penalties from the WTO doesn't require cutting all ties. Even a small country can use its weight to cause severe penalties to be imposed, which must be paid on risk of losing ALL free trade.
but software typically comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTEE
This is the Chinese government we are talking about. They can MUCH MORE EASILY require that software be guaranteed to work, than they could force companies to release their proprietary magic.
Besides, a piece of important software is very easily replaced piecemeal, as needed. Software becomes most important when combined with hardware, as is more and more often the case. 747s come to mind.
The Chinese government is well within it's rights to make decisions regarding what goes on within it's borders.
Of course it's in their rights. What idiot would say otherwise?
Countries do, however, have issues bigger than themselves to keep in mind... How onerous rules like this will affect their standing in the WTO for instance, and hence, their entire market for exports.
In this case, seeing the source code of electronic devices being sold in China is very much in their interest,
Stealing from you is very much in MY interest.
What happens when companies refuse, the WTO gets upset, and China ends up crippling their own economy? Gee, what's in "their interest" isn't so mindlessly simple and cut and dried, now is it?
why should the chinese government trust foreign corporations to supply black box equipment when they have no idea how it works?
For the same reason they can trust ANYTHING ELSE supplied by foreign corporations... Warranties, service agreements, et al.
If you don't like their rules, go somewhere else.../blockquote> I'm not sure if you're throwing up straw men left and right to make a point, or if you really are just so banal that you have to constantly restate the plainly obvious.
Mammals and birds are AFAIK the only things that could be detected easily with IR receptors,
You don't seem to know what infrared is. It's not thermal-vision (ala. Predator). It's just another wavelength of light.
While it's peculiar that warm objects emit IR, that is most certainly not the only way to see an object. You'll still see the blocked and/or reflected IR signature of an object, hot or cold.
Infrared is generally classified as being comprised of 3 different bands. One of the three is highly absorbed by water. The rest are not...
I must also point out that humans don't see ultraviolet, either, so your this is an irrelevant argument, as your pet theory doesn't stand in either case.
I have no desire to argue the point. Believe what you wish.
Yes, unless you're making any long-distance calls. Boy are they unreliable! What with being relayed between hundreds of microwave towers... Hence "MCI" WorldCom (formerly: Microwave Communications, Inc.).
My wireless home network gets frazzled when the microwave runs and cant go 30ft through walls without significant signal loss.
My satellite dish keeps dropping my TV signal. Clearly, satellite communications are a failed technology that will never catch on. That must explain why nobody, anywhere, wants to put up any satellites. It's wires across the globe for me!
My wireless home network gets frazzled when the microwave runs and cant go 30ft through walls without significant signal loss.
My satellite dish keeps dropping my TV signal. Clearly, satellite communications are a failed technology that will never catch on. That must explain why nobody, anywhere, wants to put up any satellites. It's wires across the globe for me!
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, ARM and MIPS don't need cutting-edge performance. They are fabbed on whatever slightly older, absolutely dirt-cheap process is available. They're so small and low power already that a process shrink or two doesn't noticeably affect the overall performance of the embedded device.
Part of the reason it works so well is because companies that need to be on the cutting edge of chip tech (like Intel and AMD) pay the huge expense of building high tech fabs, then, when the technology moves on, they've got to do SOMETHING with the obsolete fabs, so they might as well contract out and make dirt cheap chips at minimal profits. After all, little profit is better than no-profits, on a fab you've long since paid for and (hopefully) profited from.
And I believe AMD was already trying to better utilize their old fabs, making (low-power) Geode chips for embedded apps and the like with spare capacity.
And this really shouldn't have surprised anyone... They've contracted out other fabs to produce AMD cores in addition to their own, but only as contingencies when they couldn't immediately meet demand... I suppose they don't have that problem anymore.
Both were declared state emergencies. Those without insurance still got reimbursed for their losses.
"Insurance" isn't an inherent scam, but MANY of the companies offering insurance are cheaters liars and scammers.
See Allstate offering ridiculously, illegally low levels of coverage. See any of the insurers that up tons of risk, and teeter on the edge of bankruptcy when they have to pay-up. See insurance companies offering plans that have fine print to specifically EXCLUDE the MOST LIKELY form of natural disaster in an area, so that the plan you're paying for is utterly worthless.
Conversely, I also believe it is being forced upon those that don't need it in many situations:
Those who drive safe, and/or very little, still pay ridiculous amounts for required automotive liability insurance in some states, because it is blanket required. Those who could afford to pay off more than the liability amount aren't allowed to, unless they jump through ridiculous hoops.
Home-owner's insurance for a cheap house in a very low-risk area should not be required for a mortgage... I consider that equivalent to a hidden premium levied on numerous home buyers. And for the reasons above, it often doesn't help, anyhow...
The same reason the $1000 you deposited in your bank account 10 years ago keeps getting bigger...
Inflation is always rising. To prove ANYTHING about costs "THEN" versus "NOW" you MUST adjust for inflation.
Personally, I'm paying about a 1/3rd as much for car insurance now as I was 3 years ago, but that's primarily due to switching to a better company.
Okay. Prove it. Prove that a human producing X amount of energy is more efficient, by any measure, than a tiny engine producing the same.
Defensive? No. I'm calling it out as the baseless, idiotic dogma that it is.
And what mechanism is this that you believe will kill a lead-acid battery if it's not regularly topped-off?
The greatest myth of the stock market, and a very recent one, is that you NEED to sell off stock to get value from it. That's just playing a pyramid scheme.
Not if you're an idiot. If you know anything about cars, however, you're aware that the "engine" (proper) is only a small portion of the power-train of a conventional automobile, and an even smaller portion of the overall "stuff" under the hood that is needed to keep it running at all times.
Transmission, drive axle, alternator, radiator, fan, etc. All kinds of things you can completely eliminate, and many more you can vastly downsize, when you aren't directly powering the wheels with a conventional engine.
This is also idiotic. The Prius' electric motor is half, not 1/3rd of the power. The fact that the Chevy Volt concept is much bigger and heavier doesn't remotely imply that it's an inherent defect of serial hybrids.
Electric has HUGE advantages in such a situation. If your electric car has a 100 mile range, it can go 100 miles at 55MPH, or at 1MPH, it doesn't matter! (actually, it does, but lower speed is BETTER).
Now, you have a point about running the AC... But I suspect, as people watch their energy meters going down, they're going to wise-up pretty quick and shut off that AC. With an electric car, that'll stop the drain, and put your range back up where it should be. With a traditional car, you'll still be burning (almost) as much fuel with/without the AC, so you're screwed either way...
Batteries make the difference between a sweaty person DRIVING out of town, and a very sweaty person WALKING out of town.
There are small areas without power, just as there are small areas without gasoline. So you'll have to drive a little further to charge up when there's a disaster.
As an added bonus, the emergency services can bring in (instead of large quantities of fuel) a much smaller quantity of fuel, and a few large generators for each neighborhood, allowing everyone to charge up their cars, and run a few of the basic necessary appliances.
And you can bet, if this was more of a necessity, electric companies would give very high priority to getting at least one central location in each town (with a few car-chargers) wired for power before spending time on the much longer process of repairing the very elaborate, with numerous points of failure, house to house distribution network.
It's a simple fact that individual transit has numerous benefits that mass transit can't hope to match.
I always love it when people say we should dump all our cars, and ride bicycles to save the planet.
Draw a 2-seat recumbent quadracycle (4-wheeled bike) at one end, and a small 2-seat car at the other.
Now, draw about a dozen stages between the two... Not quite bicycle, not quite car. Now, point out the exact stage at which the cycle transitions from acceptable mode of transport, to the root of all evil in the western world. What are the features that distinguish a good people-mover, from a bad people-mover? Shock absorbers? Enclosed compartments? Solid wheel hubs? Seat belts? Motor?
I'd really like to know, so that cars in the near future can be built without all the pure evil features...
Yes, but that was way back when the US Fed had practically no mechanisms available to them to regulate and balance out the stock market (or the economy as a whole), so it's an entirely different and non-comparable situation than the past ~70 years.
That's a bit insane.
Batteries are meant to give you just enough power to reliably start the vehicle, for good reason. Batteries are horribly inefficient, and generating electricity on the fly is much better all-around.
Deep cycle batteries are expensive, large, heavy, etc., and no batteries last long when you're regularly charge/discharge cycling them.
And safety would be a serious problem. Your headlights will be substantially dimmer, and continue to dim throughout your drive, and would very likely drain your battery completely in perhaps 4 hours. Might not be a problem for summer-only vehicles, not too far outside the tropics, but horrible for most people.
I bet you could get comparable results, for very little money less money, by just putting a (heavy duty) diode with a 2-volt drop, on the alternator line. Then, it puts out 12V, and the battery is only maintained at about 50% charge capacity. Never any over-charging or wasted energy trickle charging.
For a bit more money (but far less than solar panels and a deep-cycle battery) you could REPLACE your alternator with a fixed-magnet generator, at least doubling electrical generation efficiency.
It doesn't work. If you rotate it anymore, you'll have entire decades falling out the bottom, UNDER that median line, and it look very OBVIOUSLY wrong. 75-90 is just barely staying on the bottom edge.
Of course you could fudge it, and widen that pink line, but that would be pretty obvious, and also wouldn't hide the bubble, which stands out far more than any other peak.
But, of course this is all hypothetical.
You can find a bit more about that chart here: http://www.downside.com/news.html See 2002-06-24
Only if, for some reason, you're reading some entirely different context into it...
Yes, you should always bet (everything you have) AGAINST the world ending...
If it doesn't end, you win!
If it does end, who's going to collect?
If you best FOR doomsday, you lose, and you walk around looking like the world's biggest idiot for the next 60 years... ala many cults and charlatans.
No, it's not.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/privatecompany.asp
A magnetic-pole reversal kills off all the reporters??? How can we speed this thing up?
Uhh, no. It's just the foundation of the stock market. Our economy could get along just fine without any stock market at all. Private investment would do the job just fine, without being nearly as susceptible to fraud.
And I should also point out that this is all a brand new phenomenon. It's been less than 20 years that the stock market has gone so grotesquely out-of-whack, throwing us into several bubble and burst cycles. See: http://www.downside.com/charts/sp500asmall.gif
That's what happens when you change the tax code to eliminate dividends, and make all investors dependent on capitol gains, which requires a lot of finesse, and mostly luck (if not out and out fraud) to make sure you "getting out" at just the right time, when you can still find a bigger idiot with more money.
First, it's not unreasonable for a company to want a non-compete clause, particularly when you could so very easily steal all their thunder.
And it's not for-"ever". You're unlikely to work for this particular company for long, and I haven't seen a non-compete clause last more than a year after the end of employment. It may be an eternity in the software world, though.
Personally, I'd say get every cent you can out of them and go work on SOME OTHER open source project that interests you, in your spare time.
If you feel bad about abandoning the project, you could donate a small cut of your newfound salary to the project, which, for many, many projects I've seen, would do more than any amount of (free) coding from you ever could.
In fact it most certainly could.
No. China is EXPECTED to become big. Right now, the per-capita is so low that, even having so many people, they can't hope to match the buying power of even a small country in the more developed world.
Cutting off a trading partner will always hurt. However, "other countries" would take a short hit, and quickly rebound. China, however, would be DEVASTATED in short order, as their economy immediately slips into a depression, with no hope of growth. Their domestic economy is based on government subsidies, trying to prop-up local tech enough that they won't need those damn foreigners for everything. But they're not there yet.
Besides that, seeking penalties from the WTO doesn't require cutting all ties. Even a small country can use its weight to cause severe penalties to be imposed, which must be paid on risk of losing ALL free trade.
This is the Chinese government we are talking about. They can MUCH MORE EASILY require that software be guaranteed to work, than they could force companies to release their proprietary magic.
Besides, a piece of important software is very easily replaced piecemeal, as needed. Software becomes most important when combined with hardware, as is more and more often the case. 747s come to mind.
Of course it's in their rights. What idiot would say otherwise?
Countries do, however, have issues bigger than themselves to keep in mind... How onerous rules like this will affect their standing in the WTO for instance, and hence, their entire market for exports.
Stealing from you is very much in MY interest.
What happens when companies refuse, the WTO gets upset, and China ends up crippling their own economy? Gee, what's in "their interest" isn't so mindlessly simple and cut and dried, now is it?
For the same reason they can trust ANYTHING ELSE supplied by foreign corporations... Warranties, service agreements, et al.
You don't seem to know what infrared is. It's not thermal-vision (ala. Predator). It's just another wavelength of light.
While it's peculiar that warm objects emit IR, that is most certainly not the only way to see an object. You'll still see the blocked and/or reflected IR signature of an object, hot or cold.
Infrared is generally classified as being comprised of 3 different bands. One of the three is highly absorbed by water. The rest are not...
I must also point out that humans don't see ultraviolet, either, so your this is an irrelevant argument, as your pet theory doesn't stand in either case.
I have no desire to argue the point. Believe what you wish.
Actually, you've got it backwards. Infrared (generally) penetrates further through water than any other wavelength.
Yes, unless you're making any long-distance calls. Boy are they unreliable! What with being relayed between hundreds of microwave towers... Hence "MCI" WorldCom (formerly: Microwave Communications, Inc.).
My satellite dish keeps dropping my TV signal. Clearly, satellite communications are a failed technology that will never catch on. That must explain why nobody, anywhere, wants to put up any satellites. It's wires across the globe for me!
My wireless home network gets frazzled when the microwave runs and cant go 30ft through walls without significant signal loss.
My satellite dish keeps dropping my TV signal. Clearly, satellite communications are a failed technology that will never catch on. That must explain why nobody, anywhere, wants to put up any satellites. It's wires across the globe for me!