so they found a problem with a preliminary design. big deal. that's why they call it research and development.
how long did it take to design the saturn Ib/saturn V and make sure that they'd mate well with the apollo capsule? how long did it take to come up with skylab, an orbiting lab that could be mounted on a saturn V?
i expect it'll take about five to six years to bring the orion program to a complete first generation system.
i don't know what the record companies plan to get out of this. broadcast radio is their best marketing tool for new music. all the radio broadcasters have to do is boycott the broadcast of new music for a few months and the record companies will capitulate. it might not even take months.
reminds me of the univac memories website and how 28, von fastrand's number, influenced univac programming. even after the fastrand disk drive became history, the legacy programs required univac programmers to keep on doing everything in groups of 28 for years afterward.
the fastrand ii was, of course, the next generation or so after the 305 ramac. transistors instead of tubes, it was a 90 megabyte drum that wieghed 2.5 tons. so storage went from 5 MB per ton in 1956 to 35 MB per ton in 1968.
i find it odd that there are still people out there who think that content filtering, for censorship purposes or, as in this case, for copyright enforcement, is still workable.
consider spam. content filtering has hardly made a dent in the amount of spam moving across the internet. and everyone agrees that spam comes from the ninth circle of hell. where do these people get the idea that content filtering is going to work where its use is so much more controversial?
the article describing the limitations on the iphone's wifi cites an 'anonymous at&t store manager'. not exactly an athoritative source.
that the iphone's key features might be disabled without a mobile phone contract is all too believable in light of how mobile phones are marketed by the wireless companies. it's one of the reasons why so many people (myself included) insist on keeping the phone as simple as possible and using a second device for the pda, camera, wifi, and mp3 functions. makes it easy to change carriers also.
however, before completely going ape over this, i'd suggest waiting until someone in authority actually spells out at&t's contracts and service plans for the iphone, or to see how an iphone actually comes out of an apple store.
at&t doesn't really need a contract since the iphone only works on their network. granted, the mobile phone company contracts don't require much of the carrier, but why would at&t make any requirements for itself at all when it doesn't have to?
as for potential ipod users who want iphone features without having a phone contract; i suspect that the iphone is only the first of a new generation of ipods. over the next few years, i expect the entire ipod line will get an iphone makeover sans mobile phone features.
that's because since acquiring cbs/columbia pictures, the media side has taken firm control of sony and nothing gets made unless it passes muster with the media division.
for example, the minidisc was saddled with format killing drm because that's how sony music wanted it. it's an excellent example of what consumer electronics would be like if the media companies had their way. contrast that to the sony of the 1970s that could make the the betamax without having to first ask permission of the movie division.
it's a bizarre turnaround to what the purchase of columbia pictures was supposed to be: a captive library of audio and video material used to drive sony's next consumer electronics innovation into the market. when the media division made more money than the elctronics division for a few years, the media executives were able to take over. furthermore, crippling the consumer electronics division's ability to make audio and video devices that customers might want to buy also prevents the consumer electronics division from being successful enough to take back control of sony. in a way sony is a microcosm of the conflict between the consumer electronics industry and the media industry.
it seems like the last really runaway consumer electronics hit sony had was the original playstation. made because sony executives were annoyed at having to kowtow to nintendo's licensing requirements, as i recall, the original playstation was designed to be easy to develop for and the company even made a hobbiest development kit. the original playstation may have been that last piece of electronics sony made that came, unmodified, from the engineering side. i expect all that drm and pita development on the playstation 2 and later all comes at the 'request' of the media executives who only want their customers to be passive consumers and not users.
the main sin, to me, of hershey's varietals is the texture.
if you compare milk chocolate to dark chocolate, besides letting more of chocolate's bitter taste through, dark chocolate also has a lighter texture. dark chocolate breaks cleanly, melts differently, and has a cleaner finish - that is, it clears from you mouth faster and leaves less of an aftertaste. milk chocolate has a thickness or stickyness. an inexpensive milk chocolate will be almost chewey and has a thick, sticky texture.
when i tried hershey's single bean origin chocolate, it seemed that they were trying to recreate the texture of their milk chocolate in a dairy free dark chocolate bar. their dark chocolates were thick, sticky, and chewey. assuming that they developed their dark chocolate bars with the help of focus groups, it was as if their taste testers were so focused on the 'creaminess' of milk chocolate, they missed on one of the reasons why dark chocolate is preferred over milk chocolate.
if i were to judge, i'd say that hershey's special dark is their best semi-sweet chocolate. special dark is still a milk chocolate (read the ingredients) but it has a lighter texture than hershey's milk chocolate.
one of the trends i'm seeing in chocolate is for what i call dark milk chocolate. cheap american chocolate is something like 10% - 25% cocoa solids. a good milk chocolate is in the upper 30s for cocoa solids. but now there are a lot of milk chocolates with cocoa content in the 40% - 50% range and i've even seen one up at 65% cocoa solids. at a guess i'd say that the makers are either trying to combine a stronger semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate taste with a bit of the smoothness from the dairy ingredients or make a milk chocolate with a lighter texture.
you should try some single origin chocolates. get half a dozen different single origins and taste them side by side. you'll be surprised at how different they can be. i would suggest guittard's single origins (they have four now) since they are all the same 65% cocoa solids and getting one of each won't cost a fortune.
don't be silly. the italians know for a long time how to make pasta. how much brains do you think a roman soldier would need to figure out that if they mixed their ration of flour with their ration of olive oil they might get a positive result.
m&m mars has been responsible for a lot of the research developing claims that chocolate is healthy (high in antioxidents, etc.). they want to convince everyone that you can make yourself healthier by eating candy.
well, i don't have a problem with people thinking that chocolate is health food, i don't think it's a good idea to make the claim. i think i prefer my chocolate to be bad for me. makes it taste better.
anyway, m&m mars has been doing a lot of work at making chocolate with enhanced antioxident and flavinol content. they want to make chocolate a 'functional' food.
whichn is why hershey is going to utterly fail at their current project of offering single bean origin chocolate bars.
copying the gourmet chocolate manufacturers, hershey recently came out with chocolate bars made with beans sourced from sao tome, madagascar, and an assortment of other regions.
but, as they have probably alwyas done, they are tailoring the taste and texture of these new bars to what the typical hershey bar customer expects in an ordinary hershey milk chocolate bar. people who buy hershey milk chocolate bars already have a low expectation - meeting that expectation has resulted in a bunch of lousy and expensive chocolate bars.
oh yeah. and every time the federal government makes a change in the definition of a good or service at the request of an industry group, it's always in the cause of improving quality.
let's go tell everyone that the ilecs' suggestion that abandoning net neutrality will be good for comunications.
food manufacturers only want to make their products cheaper to make. give them a chance and they'll have the fda determine that crisco is health food.
even if this has only limited impact on the foods sold in supermarkets (because customers have this annoying habit of reading the labels) it will have a serious impact on the quality and healthyness of foods used in school lunches, hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, etc. where the only people who might read the labels only want to buy foods as cheap as possible.
the best chocolate is indeed central and south american. face it, central and south america are the mothership for cacao varieties. it's where all the heirloom varieties grow and where there are the maximum number and varieties of hybrids.
the best chocolate i've ever had was a brand called "Tallon" from brazil and it was made with cashew butter. it has been impossible to get since the brazillian cacao trees were ravaged by witches' broom fungus.
good chocolates i like are El Rey (venezuela), Plantations (ecuador), and Santander (columbia). even when you get chocolate made in europe or the us, the best ones are often made with central and south american beans.
don't think that it hasn't dawned on the russians that with the inevitability of global warming northern territories like alaska, central canada, and siberia are going to be prime real estate. look at the value of the north american heartland (you know, the flyover states) and shift that, say, a few hundred miles north.
in a world of global warming, the band of territory from 50 degrees north to 80 degrees north could very well be where all the action is over the next few hundred years. natural resources in this region are still relatively untapped, distances are shorter, and the arctic ocean is gradually becoming more navigable during the summer months. a rail link at 70 degrees north could nearly circle the globe (so to speak) without breaks from scandinavia at one end to hudson's bay at the other.
Slashdot Mirror
so they found a problem with a preliminary design. big deal. that's why they call it research and development.
how long did it take to design the saturn Ib/saturn V and make sure that they'd mate well with the apollo capsule? how long did it take to come up with skylab, an orbiting lab that could be mounted on a saturn V?
i expect it'll take about five to six years to bring the orion program to a complete first generation system.
take that homebrew computer club! i'll bet none of those guys ever made their own transistors!
i don't know what the record companies plan to get out of this. broadcast radio is their best marketing tool for new music. all the radio broadcasters have to do is boycott the broadcast of new music for a few months and the record companies will capitulate. it might not even take months.
reminds me of the univac memories website and how 28, von fastrand's number, influenced univac programming. even after the fastrand disk drive became history, the legacy programs required univac programmers to keep on doing everything in groups of 28 for years afterward.
the fastrand ii was, of course, the next generation or so after the 305 ramac. transistors instead of tubes, it was a 90 megabyte drum that wieghed 2.5 tons. so storage went from 5 MB per ton in 1956 to 35 MB per ton in 1968.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/fastrand.html
i find it odd that there are still people out there who think that content filtering, for censorship purposes or, as in this case, for copyright enforcement, is still workable.
consider spam. content filtering has hardly made a dent in the amount of spam moving across the internet. and everyone agrees that spam comes from the ninth circle of hell. where do these people get the idea that content filtering is going to work where its use is so much more controversial?
forget that. go though airport screening with an armload of loompanics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics/ books.
clearly, it's the andromeda strain.
so whose going to take on the job of porting 'Adventue' to the iPhone?
the toruble with wankel engines is that they gulp down gas by the gallon.
how about retrofitting a delorean with an electric power plat a la the tesla?
great, another spaceship that doesn't go anywhere.
the article describing the limitations on the iphone's wifi cites an 'anonymous at&t store manager'. not exactly an athoritative source.
that the iphone's key features might be disabled without a mobile phone contract is all too believable in light of how mobile phones are marketed by the wireless companies. it's one of the reasons why so many people (myself included) insist on keeping the phone as simple as possible and using a second device for the pda, camera, wifi, and mp3 functions. makes it easy to change carriers also.
however, before completely going ape over this, i'd suggest waiting until someone in authority actually spells out at&t's contracts and service plans for the iphone, or to see how an iphone actually comes out of an apple store.
at&t doesn't really need a contract since the iphone only works on their network. granted, the mobile phone company contracts don't require much of the carrier, but why would at&t make any requirements for itself at all when it doesn't have to?
as for potential ipod users who want iphone features without having a phone contract; i suspect that the iphone is only the first of a new generation of ipods. over the next few years, i expect the entire ipod line will get an iphone makeover sans mobile phone features.
maybe we can get the beeb to hire manny coto to manage the series for a few years...
best comparison might be to when ronald reagan was shot.
yeah, it looks like bad haiku.
the discussion of global climate change always reminds me of a terminal patient going through the six stages of death:
d eath.html
http://www.cusd.claremont.edu/safe/epp/stages_of_
we've been through denial and anger and now it seems bargaining has set in.
that's because since acquiring cbs/columbia pictures, the media side has taken firm control of sony and nothing gets made unless it passes muster with the media division.
for example, the minidisc was saddled with format killing drm because that's how sony music wanted it. it's an excellent example of what consumer electronics would be like if the media companies had their way. contrast that to the sony of the 1970s that could make the the betamax without having to first ask permission of the movie division.
it's a bizarre turnaround to what the purchase of columbia pictures was supposed to be: a captive library of audio and video material used to drive sony's next consumer electronics innovation into the market. when the media division made more money than the elctronics division for a few years, the media executives were able to take over. furthermore, crippling the consumer electronics division's ability to make audio and video devices that customers might want to buy also prevents the consumer electronics division from being successful enough to take back control of sony. in a way sony is a microcosm of the conflict between the consumer electronics industry and the media industry.
it seems like the last really runaway consumer electronics hit sony had was the original playstation. made because sony executives were annoyed at having to kowtow to nintendo's licensing requirements, as i recall, the original playstation was designed to be easy to develop for and the company even made a hobbiest development kit. the original playstation may have been that last piece of electronics sony made that came, unmodified, from the engineering side. i expect all that drm and pita development on the playstation 2 and later all comes at the 'request' of the media executives who only want their customers to be passive consumers and not users.
the main sin, to me, of hershey's varietals is the texture.
if you compare milk chocolate to dark chocolate, besides letting more of chocolate's bitter taste through, dark chocolate also has a lighter texture. dark chocolate breaks cleanly, melts differently, and has a cleaner finish - that is, it clears from you mouth faster and leaves less of an aftertaste. milk chocolate has a thickness or stickyness. an inexpensive milk chocolate will be almost chewey and has a thick, sticky texture.
when i tried hershey's single bean origin chocolate, it seemed that they were trying to recreate the texture of their milk chocolate in a dairy free dark chocolate bar. their dark chocolates were thick, sticky, and chewey. assuming that they developed their dark chocolate bars with the help of focus groups, it was as if their taste testers were so focused on the 'creaminess' of milk chocolate, they missed on one of the reasons why dark chocolate is preferred over milk chocolate.
if i were to judge, i'd say that hershey's special dark is their best semi-sweet chocolate. special dark is still a milk chocolate (read the ingredients) but it has a lighter texture than hershey's milk chocolate.
one of the trends i'm seeing in chocolate is for what i call dark milk chocolate. cheap american chocolate is something like 10% - 25% cocoa solids. a good milk chocolate is in the upper 30s for cocoa solids. but now there are a lot of milk chocolates with cocoa content in the 40% - 50% range and i've even seen one up at 65% cocoa solids. at a guess i'd say that the makers are either trying to combine a stronger semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate taste with a bit of the smoothness from the dairy ingredients or make a milk chocolate with a lighter texture.
you should try some single origin chocolates. get half a dozen different single origins and taste them side by side. you'll be surprised at how different they can be. i would suggest guittard's single origins (they have four now) since they are all the same 65% cocoa solids and getting one of each won't cost a fortune.
olive oil and garlic
e FifthFoodGroup
alfredo sauce (or other types of cheese sauces)
white clam sauce
pesto sauce
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
don't be silly. the italians know for a long time how to make pasta. how much brains do you think a roman soldier would need to figure out that if they mixed their ration of flour with their ration of olive oil they might get a positive result.
e FifthFoodGroup
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
Ethal M is owned by m&m mars.
e FifthFoodGroup
m&m mars has been responsible for a lot of the research developing claims that chocolate is healthy (high in antioxidents, etc.). they want to convince everyone that you can make yourself healthier by eating candy.
well, i don't have a problem with people thinking that chocolate is health food, i don't think it's a good idea to make the claim. i think i prefer my chocolate to be bad for me. makes it taste better.
anyway, m&m mars has been doing a lot of work at making chocolate with enhanced antioxident and flavinol content. they want to make chocolate a 'functional' food.
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
whichn is why hershey is going to utterly fail at their current project of offering single bean origin chocolate bars.
e FifthFoodGroup
copying the gourmet chocolate manufacturers, hershey recently came out with chocolate bars made with beans sourced from sao tome, madagascar, and an assortment of other regions.
but, as they have probably alwyas done, they are tailoring the taste and texture of these new bars to what the typical hershey bar customer expects in an ordinary hershey milk chocolate bar. people who buy hershey milk chocolate bars already have a low expectation - meeting that expectation has resulted in a bunch of lousy and expensive chocolate bars.
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
Guittard has a line of 2 ounce chocolate bars, including some single bean origins.
e FifthFoodGroup
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
oh yeah. and every time the federal government makes a change in the definition of a good or service at the request of an industry group, it's always in the cause of improving quality.
let's go tell everyone that the ilecs' suggestion that abandoning net neutrality will be good for comunications.
food manufacturers only want to make their products cheaper to make. give them a chance and they'll have the fda determine that crisco is health food.
even if this has only limited impact on the foods sold in supermarkets (because customers have this annoying habit of reading the labels) it will have a serious impact on the quality and healthyness of foods used in school lunches, hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, etc. where the only people who might read the labels only want to buy foods as cheap as possible.
the best chocolate is indeed central and south american. face it, central and south america are the mothership for cacao varieties. it's where all the heirloom varieties grow and where there are the maximum number and varieties of hybrids.
e FifthFoodGroup
the best chocolate i've ever had was a brand called "Tallon" from brazil and it was made with cashew butter. it has been impossible to get since the brazillian cacao trees were ravaged by witches' broom fungus.
good chocolates i like are El Rey (venezuela), Plantations (ecuador), and Santander (columbia). even when you get chocolate made in europe or the us, the best ones are often made with central and south american beans.
http://stores.ebay.com/TheFifthFoodGroup?refid=Th
two words
global warming
don't think that it hasn't dawned on the russians that with the inevitability of global warming northern territories like alaska, central canada, and siberia are going to be prime real estate. look at the value of the north american heartland (you know, the flyover states) and shift that, say, a few hundred miles north.
in a world of global warming, the band of territory from 50 degrees north to 80 degrees north could very well be where all the action is over the next few hundred years. natural resources in this region are still relatively untapped, distances are shorter, and the arctic ocean is gradually becoming more navigable during the summer months. a rail link at 70 degrees north could nearly circle the globe (so to speak) without breaks from scandinavia at one end to hudson's bay at the other.