Yes, this is nice work. Kudos to the researchers. However the biggest problem with building a commercial fusion reactor isn't sustaining the reaction but how to handle all those neutrons. Even if you magically make fusion work, we simply do not know how to capture the heat needed to generate power in any economical way because of the whomping high neutron flux.
For the full explanation, see Fusion Power: Will It Ever Come? on page 1380 of the March 10th, 10 2006 issue of Science. Since full article is behind a paywall, I'll quote the concluding paragraph here:
New physics knowledge will emerge from this work. But its appeal to the U.S. Congress and the public has been based largely on its potential as a carbon-sparing technology. Even if a practical means of generating a sustained, net power-producing fusion reaction were found, prospects of excessive plant cost per unit of electric output, requirement for reactor vessel replacement, and need for remote maintenance for ensuring vessel vacuum integrity lie ahead. What executive would invest in a fusion power plant if faced with any one of these obstacles? It's time to sell fusion for physics, not power.
That is, fusion power is still where is was in 1955: "twenty years away."
Because this is not my experience.I live five miles from the west coast facility and often get one day turnaround, so I have a pretty sensitive measure of warehouse delay. I was told about this, but it hasn't happened to us. Now, it's rare that we watch more than 3 movies in a week, so maybe we aren't heavy enough users to trigger the effect.
Besides, if you're watching that many movies, you really need to get a life 8).
I, too, live in the OC with a career, wife, kids,and a suburban tract home.
My advice: move to Irvine, and either join a church [*] or club.
Why, just last night, my wife and I were finishing walking our dog when one of our neighbors was having tea on his front porch with another of our neighbors. So we dropped my. (the fresh blueberries were delicious). I filled in my neighbors on the details of fourth neighbor whose mother had just died of a heart attack, so we took up a collection to send flowers to the funeral.
So either :
(1) the Suburbs are isolating, anti-intellectual hell, or (2) you've forgotten what your mama should have taught you: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
[*] If you're looking for a group that enjoys intellectual challenge but aren't too religious themselves, I recommend the Unitarians of Mission Viejo (http://www.tapestryuu.org/ ). They have a lot of UCI people who are warmly accepting of atheists, pagans, skeptics, and others whom most churches want to "convert."
For game consoles, perhaps. But back in 1903 a guy named king started handed out razors for Free. Surely you've heard of him. His last name was Gillette.
Moreover, this business model has been in use in the computer industry since at least the 1960s. Color me unimpressed by the acts of gord.
One must remember that the FDIC approached Microsoft
FDIC stands for "Federal Deposit Insurance Company" and insures checking and savings accounts. The FDIC has exactly jack squat to do with Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't even use savings accounts. So your premise is laughable.The US government doesn't care how much cash a company piles up, so long as all the taxes are paid and the accounting is up to snuff. Indeed, Micrsoft isn't even the record holder; back in the day, IBM had an even bigger pile.
And they can now point to such investment in order to avoid fines and legal lawsuits from the investment end.
This is incoherent beyond belief. Any time Bill Gates or his shareholders decide Microsoft has too much cash laying around they can declare a special dividend and simply give that cash to shareholders. Indeed, Microsoft did just that last year, to the tune of $30 Billion.
Microsoft is trying capture market with the old "lose money on the razors, make money on the razor blades" model. Mabye it'll work, maybe it won't, but the FDIC and goverment pressure have nothing to do with Xbox pricing.
After you left, Politzer became famous at Caltech for other reasons: Sloth.
As of the early 90s, he had done literally nothing of interest besides his teaching. There was a lot of grumbling on the part his fellow faculty members -- to the point that Politzer circulated a (locally) famous memo about 1990, where he announced he'd be returning to research. But just barely -- I think he's done a half-dozen papers in the past 10 years.
Moral of the story: If your graduate work is brilliant enough, you can demand tenure at a prestigious university spend three decades coasting to a Nobel. Wish I could have pulled that of....
You might have a ton of songs on your PC's HD, but How many tracks do you actually listen to? The average radio station might have access to thousands of songs on their premises, but in a typical broadcast day they're only going to use about 40 to 50 of them.
I agree that the iPodmini hits the sweet spot for a lot of people, but your above quote misses the key point:
*which* 50 songs are you going to want during the day? I have 10 gig iPod and at least once a week I go, "darn, I wish _blank_ was loaded up."
The really great thing about the iPod is that you have all your music whenever you want it --- not only when you planned to use it. And some of us have a heck of of lot of music... (30 GB and counting, in my case. well-enconded symphonies chew up a lot of space...)
I have always felt that the large consumer bands (e.g. Coke, McDonalds, Marlboro ) would replace the labels (Universal, Warner, etc) as the incubators for large-scale pop acts. Think of the sales for Proctor & Gamble if every time your Mom or Aunt saw a box of Tide they thought of Andrew Bocelli or George Strait.
But I had missed that using the boxtops and bottle caps completely circumvents the micropayment-over-credit card payment issue. Once a month, Apple will send an email to, say, General Mills, and General Mills cuts one check. Same cost if the promotion moved 10 songs or 10 million. (ok, there's some auditing involved, but you get the picture) So apple can sell this promotion to the consumer products folks for about 70 cents/track for any Big Label act-- the same as a good coupon-- and a lot less for acts that have cut a deal with the consumer product company.
iTunes credits on Box tops. Brilliant. My daughters would *kill* for this.
Legal music, free for the consumer, is going to be the most disruptive force in the industry
yep. The new corporate masters (for a changing of the guard is what is at issue here) are going to cause a nifty, subtle shift. Their business model does not rely solely on screwing the artist -- they're making their main money on the associated consumer product. However, the artists will be under even greater pressute to stay "on message." If you're selling to 12 year old girls, then any whiff of sex scandal will be dealt with "directly" by your corporate overlord. If you're selling to 17 year old boys, then a sex scandal will probably be a contract requirment.
iTumes key advantage is that you can use with any CD player on the planet. The CD player is world's proferred music platform, here, not Windows or OS X. If Jane User can't got from her Dell to her Discman with one click, she's not going to use it for music. period.
So my question, which is: which online stores besides iTuines, support one-click burning to CD-R? These are the only viable competitors. (possbile exception: if most of the*cheap* CD players suppport "some other format," than a competitor may be able to survive on that. )
Steve understands that all comes down to: "Rip. Mix. Burn."
Seems like more storage doesn't make a difference at some point (ooh 15,000 songs instead of 10,000).
I, for one, have been waiting over a year for the iPod to get to 40gb. I bought a 5 gb, and replaced with a 10 gb. But my music collection is currently 27 gb and growing at almost 5 gigs/ years [*]. At 40 GB, I'll finally be able to get my music portable, for the first time ever. Of course, I'll still need a biger one in three years....
[*] All legit, most listened to regularly. I have a serious classical music collection ripped at 192 combined with an emusic subscription (all you can eat DRM-free 128 mp3s for $10/month. i listen to several hours a music a day and listening to the SAME music day after day doesn't work for me. I can't even stand my local classical station (KUSC) because even they are too repetitious for me.
While there are several projects out there, I have heard rave reviews for MythTV from folks who do digital video and linux for a living.
Mythtv records multiple channels, it archives, it does playback, it runs on compartively modest hardware, it's C++ on linux under GPL: no stinking DRM for these folks!
So, what are you waiting for? build your own TODAY!
p.s. don't be fooled by the lack of activity on sourceforge; the project really lives on mythtv.org, where there is plenty of activity.
I recently moved my 8 year old to Mozilla. Ater seeing the improvment, my six year declared at dinner "Daddy, upgrade my browser to Mozilla." Really -- that's a verbatim quote. Both kids *love* Mozilla.
Never underestimate the marketing power of a fire-breathing dinosaur.
Last month I was chatting with a shockingly knowledgeable service tech at my ISP, cox.net (cable provider in S. California). She admitted that cox does cap bandwidth, but also told me that they don't give a whit about NAT. In fact, they had the manual for my Linksys router in their support system and helped me troubleshoot.
Remember: all technologies are morally neutral, it's how we choose to use them that determines if a given technology is "good" or "bad."
On rechecking my sources, I discovered my original My post is wrong. I was confusing several DVD/ video software companies -- there's more than one nowadays. My bad. Please disregard any brand names or company names in my post.
Does anybody else remember the "good ole days" when people could actually talk about technology and one didn't have to rely on guesswork and hearsay? I hate the way NDAs are killing Silicon Valley. At least part of my post was correct: NDAs are a bad thing. God Bless Open Source.
Oh, Intervideo has plenty of working DVD-on-LInux product. They just haven't delivered LinDVD as a standalone product. So where is LinDVD? Inside Sony's new Tivo-like player/80 GB disk drive/DVD burner that was on slashdot last week.
How do I know this? Um, you gotta trust me and my high karma on this one...Those NDAs are a bitch.
The logic doesn't apply; as you said the future is uncertain, the fiber isn't being used and probably will never be used.
What makes you so certain? Let's do a quick back of the envelope. A reasonable estimated is that 'net traffic doubles every 2 years. I can find references that say "9 months" and "100 days," I really feel 2 years is closer to the mark. Please feel free to correct this number. Our source article claimed "95% unused. So we need demand to go up by a factor of twenty. 2^5 = 32, so we get there with 5 x2 years == a decade. One decade. Similar nfrastructure projects like sewers and powerlines are planned across multipe decades, so I don't buy you "not used for the foreseeable future" claim.
But even it I did, I stand by my claim that laying additional fibre in the trench was not wasteful investment at the the time of construction.
You're final sentence (Did you really save money) betrays you: it's not about saving money, it about making a reasoable gamble on the future. If you were focused on avoiding loss, you weren't in this business in the first place. Given that you've already rented the backhoes, it's totally reasonable toss a little extra cable in the trench. If you didn't believe a market existed, than you would never have rented the backhoe. The "waste," as I understand your position, was not the extra fiber but digging the trench in the first place.
Hindsight is 20/20: obviously the less wasteful way to this was to sit on you money and buy one of these networks out of bankruptcy. But few of us have such proficient crystal balls.
You assume that you know how many customers you will have before you build. Only monopolies have that luxury. Yeah, once it's built, you discover you don't have enough customers. But you never actually know how many customers you have until you have already built that darn thing -- and then it's too late to add more strands.
Look back to my original post: with 95% over-capacity, even if each builder had only put in a tenth as much fiber, we'd be in the identical place: (almost) the same money spent, the same prices, the same bankruptcies. Once you decide to build one of these things, you're a fool not to put in "too much" capacity.
Using our toy example, let's assume customers are willing pay to $1500/strand, but you don't know how many customers there are. Now, to keep this simple, let's examine the case of 0 customers and 3 customers. Then, in our highly contrived example, we get four possible outcomes:
"non wasteful" (single fibre) build: cost: $1020
no customers, $1020 loss or, three customers, $l500 - $1020 - $200 - = $280 profit. remember, you only put one strand down.
"wasteful" (10 fibre) build: cost: $1200
no customers, $1200 loss three cusomers: $4500 - $1200 - $600 = $2700 And your next 7 customers, if you can find them, are pure gravy.
Notice that the "waste" when no customers turn up in the "wasteful" and "non-wasteful" builds only differ by 20%, but in the three customer case the "wasteful" build makes almost ten times as much money.
Once again, as outlined in my first post, once you decide to build one of these things, the rational thing to do is lay more fibre than you currently need. If you don't think you have any customers, don't build. If you think you have *any* customers, build big. There is no middle ground here. Yes, that extra $20 for the next unused fibre is a "waste" at this moment in time, but if you don't spend the $20 bucks now, you'll never get another customer.
Let me turn this around: do you consider your car insurance premium "wasted" if you don't get into a wreck? because the idential logic applies there as well. The future is uncertain, you make changes at the margin (additional fibre in the trench, paying your insurance premiums) that have the greatest potential to influence the future (serving extra customers cheaply if they appear, not being rendered carless by a wreck). The future turning unexpectedly does not mean, perforce, that the original marginal expense was "wasted."
Your car analogy is deeply flawed: the marginal (additional) cost for a second car is about the same as the first one. If additional cars cost 1/20th as much as the first one, I suspect most americans would have extra cars sitting all over the place.
you are confusing cost with marginal cost. Let me make up some numbers to be the idea across.
Assume it costs $1000 to dig the trench, $200 to light the fibre, and $20 to add an an additional fiber while the trench is open. You have a paying customerfor one fiber -- who you can provision fo $1000 + $200 + $20 = $1220 dollars. To avoid your concept of "waste", that's what you'd do: lay the single fiber for $1220.
Great, now, comes the next customer. Except that you've already buried the trench, so you have dig everything up again. That's another $1220.
Now consider a "wasteful" competitor. While the trench was open, they laid 10 fibers, so that spent $1000 + $200 + 10 * $20 = $1,400 dollars provisioning the first customer. But now, each additional customer only costs $200. By the second customer, the "wasteful" competitor has only stpen $1,600 and is clobbering the "non-wasteful" who has spent $2,440.
This is bascically what happened: while the trenches were open, companies laid all the fiber that would fit, but did't light it. The potential "waste" of this approach was slight next to the waste of digging up the streets again in a couple of years.
Having 95% of the fibre dark is NOT wasteful --- it's smart investing. Let me explain.
What is the single biggest expense in laying fiber? Digging trench.All those rights of way are expensive, and those guys in hardhats with the cool digging toys won't work for stock options.
What is the second biggest expense? lighting the fiber. All that hardware at both end is expensive, and it's support staff expects to get paid every month.
Once you are laying the first cable of fibre, what is the additional cost of laying an additional fibre? not much.
Once you've decided to lay fiber, the economically rational move is to lay as much fibre as you think you might ever might ever need, becuase laying more fibre later will require you to dig everything up and do it all over again. Don't light any particular strand until you've actually got paying customer -- the cost of the boxes drops with Moore's law.
The problem is not the too much fibre was laid, it's that too many different companies invested in fibre creating a buyers market for the customers. Given the current demand, even if each company had laid only a tenth of much fibre, we'd be in the identical place: same costs, same prices, same bankrupticies. However, when bandwidth demand catches up (and it will someday, I assure you), you'll be really glad all that "wasted fibre" is there.
Put another way, if you lay a small amount of fibre, you are doomed to lose - by design, you've only got a small amount to sell. If you lay a lot of fibre, you might make a lot of money because you've haven't spent much more,and you'll be able to sell a lot more if/when the demand does turn up.
A great place to download mp3's is emusic. $10/month. no DRM, no proprietary player crap, no technical restrictions. Just all you the 128k mp3s you can eat.
If you're looking for the latest stuff you heard on the radio, it's ain't here. But there is a lot of good stuff if you're willing to dig around. In addition to serious bands that didn't quite make it ( lots of They Might Be Giants and Sonic Youth, for example and checkout Airplane Man's Moanin') they have incredible breadth: In addition to some hard to find symphonic and a great Chilean Reggae band (no, really!) they have hours of George Carlin, and even Noam Chomsky if you're into that.
I have no connection with emusic, other than being a very happy customer.
{begin parochialism}I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.{end parochialism}
It's pretty easy - just leave pop music behind and explore "serious" music (eg. classical or jazz).
First, you really can tell the difference betwee 128 and 192, particularly in the bass when the full dynamic rage is blasting (think a Beethoven finale). Also, some high end voice loses some clarity (think Ella Fitzgerald). So that increases storage needs 50% right there. Next, the typical pop CD contains a bit over 1/2 an hour of music, while classical CD's often run to 70 minutes or more. Lastly, with serious music, it's not just the piece, but the performance. The same composition with a different performer can be a completely different experience. You can hear this easily with Chopin and operas, but it is also true of any symphonic work worth hearing. Talking about jazz without referencing the performer (and the performance for the really good stuff) is a complete waste of time. "remixes" are as old as music performance itself. So if you like a piece, you will have multiple, high-quality copies. I personally have three copies each of Shostakovich's 8th string quartet and Beethoven's symphonies.
If you are into live performances, then you're using.shm or something simlar, and those run about 5 times the size of the equivalent mp3. Lastly, the true audio file/snob will leave his/her music as.wav. For me, that would immediately move my collection over the 100 gig mark. And who says this is just about mp3? This drive would only hold 100 DVDs. If you wanted to capture in HDTV format, it would hold even less.
Never underestimate the human need to fill all available disk space.
because success would merit attention, and there are a heck of a lot more politically-wacko fundamentalist Christians in America than politically wacko geeks....
This is for trans-oceanic, not regional travel. It's efficiency will give it a monster range, so you can go LA-> Singapore in one shot, I think. For the distances that trains are practical, airlines tend to prefer smaller planes (eg 737s) and more numerous departure times.
With every other machine out there, including notebooks and flat-panels, you still have to put the monitor *in* your prime work area. With this sunflow design, the LCD hovers above your desk, while you can still take notes / doodle/ read on the your actual desk surface. It may look funny, but it's functionally brilliant.
As a way to assault the corporate desktop it is truly creative. Imagine your typical cube farm. Tight quarters, no one has enough room, and most of the available desk space is consumed by monitors. Now, one stylin' freakin' mac dude brings in his sunflower iMac LCD from home. POW. Not only does he now have more desk space than anyone else, he has more useable desk space than the *boss*. Immediate Mac envy in what was moments before a WinTel monoculture.
Will it work? I don't know. But it's a helluva creative idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this is not my experience.I live five miles from the west coast facility and often get one day turnaround, so I have a pretty sensitive measure of warehouse delay. I was told about this, but it hasn't happened to us. Now, it's rare that we watch more than 3 movies in a week, so maybe we aren't heavy enough users to trigger the effect.
Besides, if you're watching that many movies, you really need to get a life 8).
I, too, live in the OC with a career, wife, kids,and a suburban tract home.
My advice: move to Irvine, and either join a church [*] or club.
Why, just last night, my wife and I were finishing walking our dog when one of our neighbors was having tea on his front porch with another of our neighbors. So we dropped my. (the fresh blueberries were delicious). I filled in my neighbors on the details of fourth neighbor whose mother had just died of a heart attack, so we took up a collection to send flowers to the funeral.
So either :
(1) the Suburbs are isolating, anti-intellectual hell, or
(2) you've forgotten what your mama should have taught you: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
[*] If you're looking for a group that enjoys intellectual challenge but aren't too religious themselves, I recommend the Unitarians of Mission Viejo (http://www.tapestryuu.org/ ). They have a lot of UCI people who are warmly accepting of atheists, pagans, skeptics, and others whom most churches want to "convert."
For game consoles, perhaps. But back in 1903 a guy named king started handed out razors for Free. Surely you've heard of him. His last name was Gillette.
Moreover, this business model has been in use in the computer industry since at least the 1960s. Color me unimpressed by the acts of gord.
One must remember that the FDIC approached Microsoft
FDIC stands for "Federal Deposit Insurance Company" and insures checking and savings accounts. The FDIC has exactly jack squat to do with Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't even use savings accounts. So your premise is laughable.The US government doesn't care how much cash a company piles up, so long as all the taxes are paid and the accounting is up to snuff. Indeed, Micrsoft isn't even the record holder; back in the day, IBM had an even bigger pile.
And they can now point to such investment in order to avoid fines and legal lawsuits from the investment end.
This is incoherent beyond belief. Any time Bill Gates or his shareholders decide Microsoft has too much cash laying around they can declare a special dividend and simply give that cash to shareholders. Indeed, Microsoft did just that last year, to the tune of $30 Billion.
Microsoft is trying capture market with the old "lose money on the razors, make money on the razor blades" model. Mabye it'll work, maybe it won't, but the FDIC and goverment pressure have nothing to do with Xbox pricing.
After you left, Politzer became famous at Caltech for other reasons: Sloth.
As of the early 90s, he had done literally nothing of interest besides his teaching. There was a lot of grumbling on the part his fellow faculty members -- to the point that Politzer circulated a (locally) famous memo about 1990, where he announced he'd be returning to research. But just barely -- I think he's done a half-dozen papers in the past 10 years.
Moral of the story: If your graduate work is brilliant enough, you can demand tenure at a prestigious university spend three decades coasting to a Nobel. Wish I could have pulled that of....
I believe there are twelve step programs for peple like you.
You might have a ton of songs on your PC's HD, but How many tracks do you actually listen to? The average radio station might have access to thousands of songs on their premises, but in a typical broadcast day they're only going to use about 40 to 50 of them.
I agree that the iPodmini hits the sweet spot for a lot of people, but your above quote misses the key point:
*which* 50 songs are you going to want during the day? I have 10 gig iPod and at least once a week I go, "darn, I wish _blank_ was loaded up."
The really great thing about the iPod is that you have all your music whenever you want it --- not only when you planned to use it. And some of us have a heck of of lot of music... (30 GB and counting, in my case. well-enconded symphonies chew up a lot of space...)
Briliant analysis, barfy.
I have always felt that the large consumer bands (e.g. Coke, McDonalds, Marlboro ) would replace the labels (Universal, Warner, etc) as the incubators for large-scale pop acts. Think of the sales for Proctor & Gamble if every time your Mom or Aunt saw a box of Tide they thought of Andrew Bocelli or George Strait.
But I had missed that using the boxtops and bottle caps completely circumvents the micropayment-over-credit card payment issue. Once a month, Apple will send an email to, say, General Mills, and General Mills cuts one check. Same cost if the promotion moved 10 songs or 10 million. (ok, there's some auditing involved, but you get the picture) So apple can sell this promotion to the consumer products folks for about 70 cents/track for any Big Label act-- the same as a good coupon-- and a lot less for acts that have cut a deal with the consumer product company.
iTunes credits on Box tops. Brilliant. My daughters would *kill* for this.
Legal music, free for the consumer, is going to be the most disruptive force in the industry
yep. The new corporate masters (for a changing of the guard is what is at issue here) are going to cause a nifty, subtle shift. Their business model does not rely solely on screwing the artist -- they're making their main money on the associated consumer product. However, the artists will be under even greater pressute to stay "on message." If you're selling to 12 year old girls, then any whiff of sex scandal will be dealt with "directly" by your corporate overlord. If you're selling to 17 year old boys, then a sex scandal will probably be a contract requirment.
iTumes key advantage is that you can use with any CD player on the planet. The CD player is world's proferred music platform, here, not Windows or OS X. If Jane User can't got from her Dell to her Discman with one click, she's not going to use it for music. period.
So my question, which is: which online stores besides iTuines, support one-click burning to CD-R? These are the only viable competitors. (possbile exception: if most of the*cheap* CD players suppport "some other format," than a competitor may be able to survive on that. )
Steve understands that all comes down to: "Rip. Mix. Burn."
Does Bill?
Seems like more storage doesn't make a difference at some point (ooh 15,000 songs instead of 10,000).
I, for one, have been waiting over a year for the iPod to get to 40gb. I bought a 5 gb, and replaced with a 10 gb. But my music collection is currently 27 gb and growing at almost 5 gigs/ years [*]. At 40 GB, I'll finally be able to get my music portable, for the first time ever. Of course, I'll still need a biger one in three years....
[*] All legit, most listened to regularly. I have a serious classical music collection ripped at 192 combined with an emusic subscription (all you can eat DRM-free 128 mp3s for $10/month. i listen to several hours a music a day and listening to the SAME music day after day doesn't work for me. I can't even stand my local classical station (KUSC) because even they are too repetitious for me.
While there are several projects out there, I have heard rave reviews for MythTV from folks who do digital video and linux for a living.
Mythtv records multiple channels, it archives, it does playback, it runs on compartively modest hardware, it's C++ on linux under GPL: no stinking DRM for these folks!
So, what are you waiting for? build your own TODAY!
p.s. don't be fooled by the lack of activity on sourceforge; the project really lives on mythtv.org, where there is plenty of activity.
I recently moved my 8 year old to Mozilla. Ater seeing the improvment, my six year declared at dinner "Daddy, upgrade my browser to Mozilla." Really -- that's a verbatim quote. Both kids *love* Mozilla.
Never underestimate the marketing power of a fire-breathing dinosaur.
Last month I was chatting with a shockingly knowledgeable service tech at my ISP, cox.net (cable provider in S. California). She admitted that cox does cap bandwidth, but also told me that they don't give a whit about NAT. In fact, they had the manual for my Linksys router in their support system and helped me troubleshoot.
Remember: all technologies are morally neutral, it's how we choose to use them that determines if a given technology is "good" or "bad."
On rechecking my sources, I discovered my original My post is wrong. I was confusing several DVD/ video software companies -- there's more than one nowadays. My bad. Please disregard any brand names or company names in my post.
Does anybody else remember the "good ole days" when people could actually talk about technology and one didn't have to rely on guesswork and hearsay? I hate the way NDAs are killing Silicon Valley. At least part of my post was correct: NDAs are a bad thing. God Bless Open Source.
Oh, Intervideo has plenty of working DVD-on-LInux product. They just haven't delivered LinDVD as a standalone product. So where is LinDVD? Inside Sony's new Tivo-like player/80 GB disk drive/DVD burner that was on slashdot last week.
How do I know this? Um, you gotta trust me and my high karma on this one...Those NDAs are a bitch.
The logic doesn't apply; as you said the future is uncertain, the fiber isn't being used and probably will never be used.
What makes you so certain? Let's do a quick back of the envelope. A reasonable estimated is that 'net traffic doubles every 2 years. I can find references that say "9 months" and "100 days," I really feel 2 years is closer to the mark. Please feel free to correct this number. Our source article claimed "95% unused. So we need demand to go up by a factor of twenty. 2^5 = 32, so we get there with 5 x2 years == a decade. One decade. Similar nfrastructure projects like sewers and powerlines are planned across multipe decades, so I don't buy you "not used for the foreseeable future" claim.
But even it I did, I stand by my claim that laying additional fibre in the trench was not wasteful investment at the the time of construction.
You're final sentence (Did you really save money) betrays you: it's not about saving money, it about making a reasoable gamble on the future. If you were focused on avoiding loss, you weren't in this business in the first place. Given that you've already rented the backhoes, it's totally reasonable toss a little extra cable in the trench. If you didn't believe a market existed, than you would never have rented the backhoe. The "waste," as I understand your position, was not the extra fiber but digging the trench in the first place.
Hindsight is 20/20: obviously the less wasteful way to this was to sit on you money and buy one of these networks out of bankruptcy. But few of us have such proficient crystal balls.
Ahhh, I see the problem.
You assume that you know how many customers you will have before you build. Only monopolies have that luxury. Yeah, once it's built, you discover you don't have enough customers. But you never actually know how many customers you have until you have already built that darn thing -- and then it's too late to add more strands.
Look back to my original post: with 95% over-capacity, even if each builder had only put in a tenth as much fiber, we'd be in the identical place: (almost) the same money spent, the same prices, the same bankruptcies. Once you decide to build one of these things, you're a fool not to put in "too much" capacity.
Using our toy example, let's assume customers are willing pay to $1500/strand, but you don't know how many customers there are. Now, to keep this simple, let's examine the case of 0 customers and 3 customers. Then, in our highly contrived example, we get four possible outcomes:
"non wasteful" (single fibre) build: cost: $1020
no customers, $1020 loss
or, three customers, $l500 - $1020 - $200 - = $280 profit. remember, you only put one strand down.
"wasteful" (10 fibre) build: cost: $1200
no customers, $1200 loss
three cusomers: $4500 - $1200 - $600 = $2700
And your next 7 customers, if you can find them, are pure gravy.
Notice that the "waste" when no customers turn up in the "wasteful" and "non-wasteful" builds only differ by 20%, but in the three customer case the "wasteful" build makes almost ten times as much money.
Once again, as outlined in my first post, once you decide to build one of these things, the rational thing to do is lay more fibre than you currently need. If you don't think you have any customers, don't build. If you think you have *any* customers, build big. There is no middle ground here. Yes, that extra $20 for the next unused fibre is a "waste" at this moment in time, but if you don't spend the $20 bucks now, you'll never get another customer.
Let me turn this around: do you consider your car insurance premium "wasted" if you don't get into a wreck? because the idential logic applies there as well. The future is uncertain, you make changes at the margin (additional fibre in the trench, paying your insurance premiums) that have the greatest potential to influence the future (serving extra customers cheaply if they appear, not being rendered carless by a wreck). The future turning unexpectedly does not mean, perforce, that the original marginal expense was "wasted."
Your car analogy is deeply flawed: the marginal (additional) cost for a second car is about the same as the first one. If additional cars cost 1/20th as much as the first one, I suspect most americans would have extra cars sitting all over the place.
My dear I_redwolf,
you are confusing cost with marginal cost. Let me make up some numbers to be the idea across.
Assume it costs $1000 to dig the trench, $200 to light the fibre, and $20 to add an an additional fiber while the trench is open. You have a paying customerfor one fiber -- who you can provision fo $1000 + $200 + $20 = $1220 dollars. To avoid your concept of "waste", that's what you'd do: lay the single fiber for $1220.
Great, now, comes the next customer. Except that you've already buried the trench, so you have dig everything up again. That's another $1220.
Now consider a "wasteful" competitor. While the trench was open, they laid 10 fibers, so that spent $1000 + $200 + 10 * $20 = $1,400 dollars provisioning the first customer. But now, each additional customer only costs $200. By the second customer, the "wasteful" competitor has only stpen $1,600 and is clobbering the "non-wasteful" who has spent $2,440.
This is bascically what happened: while the trenches were open, companies laid all the fiber that would fit, but did't light it. The potential "waste" of this approach was slight next to the waste of digging up the streets again in a couple of years.
hope that helps.
Having 95% of the fibre dark is NOT wasteful --- it's smart investing. Let me explain.
What is the single biggest expense in laying fiber? Digging trench.All those rights of way are expensive, and those guys in hardhats with the cool digging toys won't work for stock options.
What is the second biggest expense? lighting the fiber. All that hardware at both end is expensive, and it's support staff expects to get paid every month.
Once you are laying the first cable of fibre, what is the additional cost of laying an additional fibre? not much.
Once you've decided to lay fiber, the economically rational move is to lay as much fibre as you think you might ever might ever need, becuase laying more fibre later will require you to dig everything up and do it all over again. Don't light any particular strand until you've actually got paying customer -- the cost of the boxes drops with Moore's law.
The problem is not the too much fibre was laid, it's that too many different companies invested in fibre creating a buyers market for the customers. Given the current demand, even if each company had laid only a tenth of much fibre, we'd be in the identical place: same costs, same prices, same bankrupticies. However, when bandwidth demand catches up (and it will someday, I assure you), you'll be really glad all that "wasted fibre" is there.
Put another way, if you lay a small amount of fibre, you are doomed to lose - by design, you've only got a small amount to sell. If you lay a lot of fibre, you might make a lot of money because you've haven't spent much more,and you'll be able to sell a lot more if/when the demand does turn up.
A great place to download mp3's is emusic. $10/month. no DRM, no proprietary player crap, no technical restrictions. Just all you the 128k mp3s you can eat.
If you're looking for the latest stuff you heard on the radio, it's ain't here. But there is a lot of good stuff if you're willing to dig around. In addition to serious bands that didn't quite make it ( lots of They Might Be Giants and Sonic Youth, for example and checkout Airplane Man's Moanin') they have incredible breadth: In addition to some hard to find symphonic and a great Chilean Reggae band (no, really!) they have hours of George Carlin, and even Noam Chomsky if you're into that.
I have no connection with emusic, other than being a very happy customer.
{begin parochialism}I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.{end parochialism}
.shm or something simlar, and those run about 5 times the size of the equivalent mp3. Lastly, the true audio file/snob will leave his/her music as .wav. For me, that would immediately move my collection over the 100 gig mark. And who says this is just about mp3? This drive would only hold 100 DVDs. If you wanted to capture in HDTV format, it would hold even less.
It's pretty easy - just leave pop music behind and explore "serious" music (eg. classical or jazz).
First, you really can tell the difference betwee 128 and 192, particularly in the bass when the full dynamic rage is blasting (think a Beethoven finale). Also, some high end voice loses some clarity (think Ella Fitzgerald). So that increases storage needs 50% right there. Next, the typical pop CD contains a bit over 1/2 an hour of music, while classical CD's often run to 70 minutes or more. Lastly, with serious music, it's not just the piece, but the performance. The same composition with a different performer can be a completely different experience. You can hear this easily with Chopin and operas, but it is also true of any symphonic work worth hearing. Talking about jazz without referencing the performer (and the performance for the really good stuff) is a complete waste of time. "remixes" are as old as music performance itself. So if you like a piece, you will have multiple, high-quality copies. I personally have three copies each of Shostakovich's 8th string quartet and Beethoven's symphonies.
If you are into live performances, then you're using
Never underestimate the human need to fill all available disk space.
because success would merit attention, and there are a heck of a lot more politically-wacko fundamentalist Christians in America than politically wacko geeks....
This is for trans-oceanic, not regional travel. It's efficiency will give it a monster range, so you can go LA-> Singapore in one shot, I think. For the distances that trains are practical, airlines tend to prefer smaller planes (eg 737s) and more numerous departure times.
It's not an SUV, it's a freighter for the skys.
With every other machine out there, including notebooks and flat-panels, you still have to put the monitor *in* your prime work area. With this sunflow design, the LCD hovers above your desk, while you can still take notes / doodle/ read on the your actual desk surface. It may look funny, but it's functionally brilliant.
As a way to assault the corporate desktop it is truly creative. Imagine your typical cube farm. Tight quarters, no one has enough room, and most of the available desk space is consumed by monitors. Now, one stylin' freakin' mac dude brings in his sunflower iMac LCD from home. POW. Not only does he now have more desk space than anyone else, he has more useable desk space than the *boss*. Immediate Mac envy in what was moments before a WinTel monoculture.
Will it work? I don't know. But it's a helluva creative idea.