but then I read articles like this one that made me realize that I had just idealized this job as somehow different from the rest of the cubicle farms...
First, let it be said that I am not an expert on these matters, nor did I RTFA.
However, that being said, It definitely appears that the high cost of entry into this market is the source for most of the industry's issues. It leads to less competition and a sort of oligarchical group think by the participating bodies (usually corporations). To me, this seems obvious. If it costs an astronomical sum to enter into a market, it seems only natural that the only people (corporations) in the market would be the ones that can be relatively sure that they can extract large sums of money from the market. The inevitable consequence of this is business model entitled "How can I screw the customer the most and still get away with it?"
Perhaps I'm not well informed enough, but it would seem to me that the real solutions for "high cost" markets is government ownership of infrastructure (like sewers and roads), or at least a mandate for non-reproduction of distribution (like power lines or water lines). It is true that government usually finds the least efficient method of doing anything, I will not dispute that. However, we can all agree that have three or four sets of sewers, roads, power lines, and/or water lines would be even more stupid than current government management of these items.
The point is that the real cost of entry into this market is the creation of cell phone towers and other associated infrastructure. Granted, the big boys may have contracts that allow them to share resources, but I would bet dollars to donuts that they make a point of mutually excluding start ups from these contracts in order to prevent competition that doesn't agree with their business model (see above).
In short, the government is full of idiots, and the free market is full of idiots, because we are a nation composed mostly of idiots. Lacking a Philosopher King capable of determining Merit (with a capital M), we should probably just bet on pitting the government idiots against the free market idiots and hope that they beat the stupid out of each other until something usable is made. Leaving one or the other to their own devices is the worst thing we could do.
Wait... you mean that a city who has laid its own communication lines, shouldn't be able to subsidize the price of providing said communication to the citizens that want it by absorbing those subsidies into other utilities? By that logic, shouldn't TWC also be prohibited from discrepant pricing structures in competitive markets, like the Utopia pricing mentioned in replies above? Isn't this a case of a (multi)national company taking advantage of the jurisdiction of laws to have its cake in one area and eating it in another? That doesn't offend your senses at all?
I have thought on this a little myself. The major question that I have been unable to answer is this. The peltier device must also provide some resistance to the transfer of heat while in the process of generating energy. Assuming that the radiator of the engine is engineered for the smallest possible weight (dubious I'm sure, but for the sake of argument...) then is the amount of added weight necessary to compensate for the peltier device and its additional cooling requirements made up by the energy harvested?
There is an equation in there which I have never been smart enough to build appropriately. The equation simply asks the question is the energy required to move the extra required weight greater than or less than the energy harvested by the device? If it is greater than, then it is a worthwhile improvement, if it is less than, then it is not. Anyone with a more physics oriented mind care to drum up the variables? Anyone with some math background care to put those variables together?
The construction of your argument is sound, but the foundation is not. Obviously, communication protocol is something that requires a predetermined agreement between both parties. Just sending someone out into space with no agreement as to what axis to analyze is equivalent to sending someone out into space with no agreement on which radio frequency to listen on; only with a more ludicrous selection of possibilities. The real trouble is this, you have a limited amount of bits that can be transmitted that must be transported from the source to the destination... This is not a practical solution until we can remotely entangle (or at least re-entangle) these elements. My quantum physics, quite frankly, sucks, so I have no idea if this is even a remote possibility.
self sustaining? You mean there's a thermonuclear bomb still going off somewhere after being tested? That's pretty cool! I, for one, would like to buy tickets and some heavily lead lined underpants and go see that.
my my my... aren't we getting cranky? maybe its time for a nap and a bottle? or perhaps you could just sit down and consider for a moment that the right to free speech implies the right to anonymous free speech because what may be illegal today, may not be illegal tomorrow.
assuming you are right, this would seem to work off the basic principles of electric motors. two perpendicular E fields will generate force in the direction perpendicular to them both. This would be the cross product of the fields for you math heads and the "right hand rule" for the amateur physicists. Thus, we treat the water as a very flat, malleable wire and we expose it to a (comparatively) uniform perpendicular E field. Then we run current through the wire, thus generating two perpendicular E fields. The mutual force between the two then cause the water to accelerate... in one direction... Interestingly, my little thought experiment does not allow for two different forces... Now, I will RTFA and see how close I was.
wow... it's almost like you refuse to even try and understand... amazing. Let me spell that out clearer for you: claiming that the need for FREE SPEECH is equivalent to the need for CRIME is a false equivalency. HOWEVER, if FREE SPEECH facilitates CRIME, then the need for FREE SPEECH over-rides the need to STOP CRIME. is that any clearer?
Well, I was going to lambast you for your vigorous defense and eagerness to spout invective, but then a much better idea came to me. Do you think that you are doing anything wrong by posting this message? I am going to hazard a guess and say no, and go even further out on a limb and say that you think you are firmly within your rights to voice your opinion. If I am wrong, feel free to hurl more invective at me until the sheer force of your words causes me to curl up in a ball and cry for the rest of the day.
That being said, I am sure that you value the right you (currently) have to post these views *anonymously* on Slashdot. Therefore you don't have to *fear* my displeasure or wrath. This is the foundation of free speech, correct? Good.
Now, I know that you are going to claim this as a false equivalency, and that's okay, because it is. It, however, serves at the foundation for the next step of our argument. We have to ask ourselves why the freedom of speech exists. This concept was drawn up by the very same men who planned the Boston Tea Party, evaded taxes, and fought a Revolutionary War. All of which was illegal at the time. I am sure that they grew fond of a communication system that appreciated the value of privacy over the value of justice because justice can change depending on what is being done with freedom of speech.
Please, feel free to respond if I failed to make anything clear.
well, maybe this will make the point clearer. What are you sending in the mail that you don't want three tiers of post office inspectors checking? What are you cooking on your barbecue on Saturday that you don't want the police coming over and sampling? What are you doing late at night in front of the computer that you don't want a federal trace record of that is available as a matter of public record? Personally, I don't want a federal public record of my internet traffic because I don't think my neighbors really need to know what kind of porn I enjoy...
Okay, so I'm not a rocket scientist, nor an engineer on staff for a power company, or any such thing. However, having a college education has allowed me this much insight on this topic. Space based solar collectors offer no real advantage to ground power grids. However, establishing a space based solar array would greatly facilitate all future space missions and conceivably (read if built right) provide a platform for assisted launches, crap cleanup (space junk is a serious problem, it is like we are building our own private meteorite shower in orbit), and provide high intensity remote power for long distance missions within the solar system. Assisting the ground power grid would only be an added, and very inefficient, benefit. So, in conclusion, I am for the building of space based solar arrays, but trying to say that it will fix our ground power problems is fallacious.
I personally was hoping for the prophesied Great Merging of the SIM titles (e.g. Sim Earth, Sim Life, Sim City, etc..) . I look at how old those games are, and think to myself, "wow.. if an older, less powerful platform could run just one of the these individual simulations, couldn't our newer, bigger, stonger, faster platforms run them all *together*?" It turns out that, no... no they can't.. because Will Wright is a dream killer...
I know that it wasn't stated specifically that you had any updates recently, but my g/f's laptop recently took a similarly stinky dump. I have changed HDDs and totally wiped the o/s (low level format of the drive... can't beat THAT). After fully re-installing, it was still slow. I have narrowed the problem down to a driver issue, it would appear that two of the drivers are arguing over resources and that is causing the computer to spaz out every so often (say every one or two seconds?) . I have yet to locate the angry drivers because windows does not report any conflicts. So, long story short, if you are experiencing a regular near stoppage of processing that lets up after a second you may be experiencing an un-announced resource sharing conflict. To identify this, get into safe mode and see if it works better there, if it does, then remove all the drivers and start into normal mode. If it works well while re-installing drivers, but takes the same dump after restart, my guess is you are in the same boat as I am! Good luck and god speed sir!
I have worked four ten hour shifts as well, and personally, I don't see any great benefit to having an extra two hours off on a work day. I did, however, see a tremendous benefit to having an extra day off during the week. That allowed me to run errands and the like on a weekday and then *actually enjoy* my weekends. Plus, there are many errands that you cannot complete on the weekends, so you try to sneak them in right after work... when everyone else is trying to do the same thing... and no one wins... except for those that had the whole day off and went out on the road early to get it done.
after looking at my post... maybe 100k is kinda ridiculous for your world chunk updates.. but I still feel that my sprite updates would require a significantly smaller (by a factor of ten or better) quantity of data.
On an MMO level, however, couldn't this end up requiring that the servers be dumping out massive quantities of data? The return of this world data would have to be relatively instant in order to maintain gameplay and these data chunks would be be... what... 100k in size... maybe more? if you have more than 10 players in a localized area where a world change happens, then you would have to dump out about a meg in less than a second. Scale that up for thousands of players and you begin to see my quandry.
I did, however, have an idea since my orginial posting. You could reduce the amount needed to update by simply populate "world modifier sprites" that would be simple creature flags in essence, but instead of causing the players interface to display a creature, they would cause the player's interface to modify the terrain. these sprites need a small amount of information transmitted (smaller than regular creatures since the have no real interactive nature) and thus would need only around maybe 1k or less. These sprites could also be transmitted on a low priority in between realtime packets so that gameplay would not be affected... right?
Actually, this is an idea I have been kicking around with my friends for about a year now... I call it a "persistent universe" for a MMO. The background coding for this actually would be fairly easy... the difficult part comes in updating the player interfaces to reflect the newly modified universe. In essence, how do you keep the data throughput down while continuously updating the "universe" that the player is interacting with? If bandwidth wasn't an issue, this would be easy, but we all know that bandwidth IS and issue... I simply cannot figure a good way to transmit at least semi real-time modifications to a players interface without dumping out huge quantities of data from my servers.
Slashdot Mirror
but then I read articles like this one that made me realize that I had just idealized this job as somehow different from the rest of the cubicle farms...
First, let it be said that I am not an expert on these matters, nor did I RTFA. However, that being said, It definitely appears that the high cost of entry into this market is the source for most of the industry's issues. It leads to less competition and a sort of oligarchical group think by the participating bodies (usually corporations). To me, this seems obvious. If it costs an astronomical sum to enter into a market, it seems only natural that the only people (corporations) in the market would be the ones that can be relatively sure that they can extract large sums of money from the market. The inevitable consequence of this is business model entitled "How can I screw the customer the most and still get away with it?" Perhaps I'm not well informed enough, but it would seem to me that the real solutions for "high cost" markets is government ownership of infrastructure (like sewers and roads), or at least a mandate for non-reproduction of distribution (like power lines or water lines). It is true that government usually finds the least efficient method of doing anything, I will not dispute that. However, we can all agree that have three or four sets of sewers, roads, power lines, and/or water lines would be even more stupid than current government management of these items. The point is that the real cost of entry into this market is the creation of cell phone towers and other associated infrastructure. Granted, the big boys may have contracts that allow them to share resources, but I would bet dollars to donuts that they make a point of mutually excluding start ups from these contracts in order to prevent competition that doesn't agree with their business model (see above). In short, the government is full of idiots, and the free market is full of idiots, because we are a nation composed mostly of idiots. Lacking a Philosopher King capable of determining Merit (with a capital M), we should probably just bet on pitting the government idiots against the free market idiots and hope that they beat the stupid out of each other until something usable is made. Leaving one or the other to their own devices is the worst thing we could do.
Wait... you mean that a city who has laid its own communication lines, shouldn't be able to subsidize the price of providing said communication to the citizens that want it by absorbing those subsidies into other utilities? By that logic, shouldn't TWC also be prohibited from discrepant pricing structures in competitive markets, like the Utopia pricing mentioned in replies above? Isn't this a case of a (multi)national company taking advantage of the jurisdiction of laws to have its cake in one area and eating it in another? That doesn't offend your senses at all?
I have thought on this a little myself. The major question that I have been unable to answer is this. The peltier device must also provide some resistance to the transfer of heat while in the process of generating energy. Assuming that the radiator of the engine is engineered for the smallest possible weight (dubious I'm sure, but for the sake of argument...) then is the amount of added weight necessary to compensate for the peltier device and its additional cooling requirements made up by the energy harvested? There is an equation in there which I have never been smart enough to build appropriately. The equation simply asks the question is the energy required to move the extra required weight greater than or less than the energy harvested by the device? If it is greater than, then it is a worthwhile improvement, if it is less than, then it is not. Anyone with a more physics oriented mind care to drum up the variables? Anyone with some math background care to put those variables together?
vrooom vrooom party starter?
The construction of your argument is sound, but the foundation is not. Obviously, communication protocol is something that requires a predetermined agreement between both parties. Just sending someone out into space with no agreement as to what axis to analyze is equivalent to sending someone out into space with no agreement on which radio frequency to listen on; only with a more ludicrous selection of possibilities. The real trouble is this, you have a limited amount of bits that can be transmitted that must be transported from the source to the destination... This is not a practical solution until we can remotely entangle (or at least re-entangle) these elements. My quantum physics, quite frankly, sucks, so I have no idea if this is even a remote possibility.
does it ever bother you that you are douche Dave?
self sustaining? You mean there's a thermonuclear bomb still going off somewhere after being tested? That's pretty cool! I, for one, would like to buy tickets and some heavily lead lined underpants and go see that.
AVAST antivirus... free to home users... use it... its better than nothing... and waaaay better than NOD32 or AVG...
AVAST! Antivirus... free to home users, light on resources, and a decent real-time scanner... works for me
my my my... aren't we getting cranky? maybe its time for a nap and a bottle? or perhaps you could just sit down and consider for a moment that the right to free speech implies the right to anonymous free speech because what may be illegal today, may not be illegal tomorrow.
assuming you are right, this would seem to work off the basic principles of electric motors. two perpendicular E fields will generate force in the direction perpendicular to them both. This would be the cross product of the fields for you math heads and the "right hand rule" for the amateur physicists. Thus, we treat the water as a very flat, malleable wire and we expose it to a (comparatively) uniform perpendicular E field. Then we run current through the wire, thus generating two perpendicular E fields. The mutual force between the two then cause the water to accelerate... in one direction... Interestingly, my little thought experiment does not allow for two different forces... Now, I will RTFA and see how close I was.
wow... it's almost like you refuse to even try and understand... amazing. Let me spell that out clearer for you: claiming that the need for FREE SPEECH is equivalent to the need for CRIME is a false equivalency. HOWEVER, if FREE SPEECH facilitates CRIME, then the need for FREE SPEECH over-rides the need to STOP CRIME. is that any clearer?
Well, I was going to lambast you for your vigorous defense and eagerness to spout invective, but then a much better idea came to me. Do you think that you are doing anything wrong by posting this message? I am going to hazard a guess and say no, and go even further out on a limb and say that you think you are firmly within your rights to voice your opinion. If I am wrong, feel free to hurl more invective at me until the sheer force of your words causes me to curl up in a ball and cry for the rest of the day. That being said, I am sure that you value the right you (currently) have to post these views *anonymously* on Slashdot. Therefore you don't have to *fear* my displeasure or wrath. This is the foundation of free speech, correct? Good. Now, I know that you are going to claim this as a false equivalency, and that's okay, because it is. It, however, serves at the foundation for the next step of our argument. We have to ask ourselves why the freedom of speech exists. This concept was drawn up by the very same men who planned the Boston Tea Party, evaded taxes, and fought a Revolutionary War. All of which was illegal at the time. I am sure that they grew fond of a communication system that appreciated the value of privacy over the value of justice because justice can change depending on what is being done with freedom of speech. Please, feel free to respond if I failed to make anything clear.
I think you forgot your sarcasm tag...
well, maybe this will make the point clearer. What are you sending in the mail that you don't want three tiers of post office inspectors checking? What are you cooking on your barbecue on Saturday that you don't want the police coming over and sampling? What are you doing late at night in front of the computer that you don't want a federal trace record of that is available as a matter of public record? Personally, I don't want a federal public record of my internet traffic because I don't think my neighbors really need to know what kind of porn I enjoy...
Okay, so I'm not a rocket scientist, nor an engineer on staff for a power company, or any such thing. However, having a college education has allowed me this much insight on this topic. Space based solar collectors offer no real advantage to ground power grids. However, establishing a space based solar array would greatly facilitate all future space missions and conceivably (read if built right) provide a platform for assisted launches, crap cleanup (space junk is a serious problem, it is like we are building our own private meteorite shower in orbit), and provide high intensity remote power for long distance missions within the solar system. Assisting the ground power grid would only be an added, and very inefficient, benefit. So, in conclusion, I am for the building of space based solar arrays, but trying to say that it will fix our ground power problems is fallacious.
Thank you! This is quite possibly the funniest post I have read all day. If only I had mod points for you good sir...
I personally was hoping for the prophesied Great Merging of the SIM titles (e.g. Sim Earth, Sim Life, Sim City, etc..) . I look at how old those games are, and think to myself, "wow.. if an older, less powerful platform could run just one of the these individual simulations, couldn't our newer, bigger, stonger, faster platforms run them all *together*?" It turns out that, no... no they can't.. because Will Wright is a dream killer...
I know that it wasn't stated specifically that you had any updates recently, but my g/f's laptop recently took a similarly stinky dump. I have changed HDDs and totally wiped the o/s (low level format of the drive... can't beat THAT). After fully re-installing, it was still slow. I have narrowed the problem down to a driver issue, it would appear that two of the drivers are arguing over resources and that is causing the computer to spaz out every so often (say every one or two seconds?) . I have yet to locate the angry drivers because windows does not report any conflicts. So, long story short, if you are experiencing a regular near stoppage of processing that lets up after a second you may be experiencing an un-announced resource sharing conflict. To identify this, get into safe mode and see if it works better there, if it does, then remove all the drivers and start into normal mode. If it works well while re-installing drivers, but takes the same dump after restart, my guess is you are in the same boat as I am! Good luck and god speed sir!
I have worked four ten hour shifts as well, and personally, I don't see any great benefit to having an extra two hours off on a work day. I did, however, see a tremendous benefit to having an extra day off during the week. That allowed me to run errands and the like on a weekday and then *actually enjoy* my weekends. Plus, there are many errands that you cannot complete on the weekends, so you try to sneak them in right after work... when everyone else is trying to do the same thing... and no one wins... except for those that had the whole day off and went out on the road early to get it done.
after looking at my post... maybe 100k is kinda ridiculous for your world chunk updates.. but I still feel that my sprite updates would require a significantly smaller (by a factor of ten or better) quantity of data.
On an MMO level, however, couldn't this end up requiring that the servers be dumping out massive quantities of data? The return of this world data would have to be relatively instant in order to maintain gameplay and these data chunks would be be... what... 100k in size... maybe more? if you have more than 10 players in a localized area where a world change happens, then you would have to dump out about a meg in less than a second. Scale that up for thousands of players and you begin to see my quandry. I did, however, have an idea since my orginial posting. You could reduce the amount needed to update by simply populate "world modifier sprites" that would be simple creature flags in essence, but instead of causing the players interface to display a creature, they would cause the player's interface to modify the terrain. these sprites need a small amount of information transmitted (smaller than regular creatures since the have no real interactive nature) and thus would need only around maybe 1k or less. These sprites could also be transmitted on a low priority in between realtime packets so that gameplay would not be affected... right?
Actually, this is an idea I have been kicking around with my friends for about a year now... I call it a "persistent universe" for a MMO. The background coding for this actually would be fairly easy... the difficult part comes in updating the player interfaces to reflect the newly modified universe. In essence, how do you keep the data throughput down while continuously updating the "universe" that the player is interacting with? If bandwidth wasn't an issue, this would be easy, but we all know that bandwidth IS and issue... I simply cannot figure a good way to transmit at least semi real-time modifications to a players interface without dumping out huge quantities of data from my servers.