It's good politics to reassure your core constituents that you've got their back with federal assistance when a natural disaster strikes. Given the current economy, the last thing you want to hear is "NYT to skip three days due to storm, NYSE down indefinitely due to storm". I roll my eyes just as hard as the next guy west of the Mississippi any time there's some NE-centric story about weather, but most of our global financial sway is in NYC until something drastic changes.
I think the other problem was that everyone saw the iPad coming, and spun up development of iPad knockoffs. By the time the writing was on the wall that nobody wanted a tablet unless it was an iPad, HP had already bought a $1 billion mistake and had already paid for the tooling for the 2nd gen ipad knockoff, the TouchPad.
Apple had 8 years and $billions of R&D behind the iPad and associated ipod/iphone line. I think when the TouchPad didn't meet sales goals they realized that WebOS was going to be an enormous loss leader for years and years while they tried to break in to the market (see also: Microsoft's XBox department, ran at a loss to this date since 2001)
Kicking Boeing for being chronically late on delivery and grossly overbudget. Either you're new to the aviation industry, or you didn't grow up in washington state;) You're forgetting that you're talking about a defense contractor. over half their revenue comes from defense spending. This is completely par for the course. In the 1990's there was a big hubbub about Boeing not even being sure if they were running at a profit or a loss.
As far as risk management goes, I think they already wrote off the WebOS as a loss, and sitting on that inventory for more than two months would have been a much worse story for HP and their "lack of vision and leadership" as bloggers frothed at the mouth, writing even more scathing articles about "hp's tablet was so bad it didn't even sell at cost. half their inventory is still unsold". Once the decision to can WebOS was made, unloading the tablets and announcing closing down the department was the smart move from a fiscal and PR viewpoints.
Canning WebOS perhaps wasn't the best plan, but by cutting their losses now, they still have an albatross around their neck, but at least they don't have the limp corpse of WebOS tied around their ankle creating turbulence in the media for months and months as they try and move forward.
If it were my job to keep people from dying in hurricanes in addition to the general welfare of the people, I'd be making a lot of noise, too.
It's probably not a bad idea to push the squishy sad sack couch potatoes out of their comfort zone every once in a while. We spend so much time worrying about the best coupon deal to have pizza delivered to our houses, the "survival" portion of their brain has atrophied so badly that if some minor inconvenience like a tropical storm didn't roll through once a decade, we might actually end up like those caricatures in the pixar movie Wall-E.
Cue the wistful waxing poetic about when men were men, and John Wayne was simply "average"...
I saw the pics of lake travis pretty much completely dry a few years ago. I'm surprised the green movement didn't fund some sort of lake dredging party while it was down so low. Brings a new meaning to "shovel ready project";)
re: block party - the three streets of my neighborhood (Dallas, Texas) were out of power for almost two days recently from a spring storm. I was amazed at how friendly everyone was, just coping with the power outage and telling stories *gasp* being sociable. It was about 95F with 100% humidity at 10pm, and the entire neighborhood was out and about, sitting on the front porch with coolers full of ice and beer from the one corner store in the area that had power. I met all sorts of great new neighbors who lived around me. Sadly once the power (and more importantly) AC kicked back on, everyone went back inside and I haven't seen any of them since.
The neighborhood is full of houses with giant front porches and swing benches, with manicured outdoor seating areas in the front of the house. If you go north about 10 miles where houses were built after 1970 when AC became cheap and readily available, there's a striking complete lack of front porches, or even trees in the front yard. Technology like air conditioning has isolated neighbors, yet the internet brings complete strangers together.
Let me preface this by saying I received no less than four instant messages about this slashdot article today.
I discovered Slashdot early in high school, and before long, all my friends had heard about it as well. I lurked for a few years before registering, which is why I ended up with an early 6-digit ID instead of the 5-digit.
But besides that, Slashdot was the premier site for news and discussion of tech news. In the early days, the only other options were news.com (now cnet) and msnbc's "science and technology" section. In my mind, it was slashdot that launched the tech news sector as we know it today, and I don't think any other site is so rooted in bringing the issue of patent law and privacy law to the average user.
I now supplement my daily tech news from places like google news, but I was recently down in austin hanging out with several friends from high school and their coding/engineer buddies. We now have other things to talk about besides computers, but here we were, occasionally punctuating conversation with "did you see that article on Slashdot?" "yeah! isn't that wild?". Many of my friends still scan the front page at least daily, and a few months don't go by that some slashdot headline doesn't make our internal mailing list.
I'm sad to see Rob go, but I'll be interested to see what he does next in life, and what the yet-as-unannounced new head of Slashdot decides which direction to take it in.
Probably not very important. When file transfer is all but completely broken even in Win 7 (try moving a 3gb file across the network, then try moving a second, third, fourth file 30 seconds after the first has started some time) and bogs to shit, imagine the sales rep pointing to file transfer time in Windows Server and saying "wow look at this! if you upgrade to server your concurrent file transfer time will improve by 6000%! Look at the infrastructure savings you'll save by not having to upgrade your network!" etc etc.
Actually, if you played your cards right, you might be able to swing a ticket (or ticket package) from Paris to NY via Moscow. From what I understand, the transsiberian RR is a pretty miserable experience. Third class has to provide their own coal for the stoves in the box cars, and it's something like a 12-14 day trip during the summer; longer during the winter.
Besides the fact that this news is breaking on slashdot (which should be a huge red flag), I would suspect the chinese (and a huge chunk of Asia) would be willing to bankroll this, especially if it was designed so that they could ship 300' wind power blades through the tunnel. This would be like the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, except on a grander scale: http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
Isn't this pretty much standard operating procedure though? Release game with "always on" mega-DRM, get free press (any press is good press) to try and bait the pirates in to actually buying instead of pirating your product; wait 24hrs -2 weeks after release, dial down the DRM to something bordering on reasonable. Get more sales from the PR of "lessening DRM". The most piracy happens in the first week anyways (most consumer's attention spans aren't that long - how long did you play Portal 2 after release?).
With a reputation like Ubisoft's, the bad press can't really hurt your sales at this point. If it weren't for the bi-monthly slashdot "ubisoft drm is bad!" article, I wouldn't know that they still exist; their franchise portfolio is pretty poor.
This is pretty much textbook ubisoft marketing 101. Has anything in this strategy changed at all since Spore (EA game)? I wouldn't really call this news anymore.
I had to measure the draw all the computers and monitors in our office when we moved locations. Most of them clocked in at 1.1-1.4 amps, which is 130-170watts at idle. Most of those machines (cheap office Dells) had 200-225w power supplies. I haven't had a chance to measure mine but I suspect it's about 20% higher at idle. Decoding a video file and showing it at 1080p probably bumps it up quite a bit. 200w is a lot when it's 111F today here in Dallas, Texas and you have to spend an additional 66W to pump all that waste heat out of the house. It won't get below 100F until after 10pm here.
On the flip side, this is enabling censorship groups (or whatever you want to label them). While on a personal level, humans are generally good, but the whole of humanity can do some pretty horrific things. Censoring these ugly facts about ourselves certainly don't do anything to help bridge the wealth/income gap.
I used to use OTA for political speeches (2008 presidential inaguration, etc) and live news, but in recent times I've found that YouTube's streaming video has improved dramatically. The white house streams most of it's video live over youtube now, and Al Jazeera has a great live streaming (English Language) channel for world events. I watched hours of footage online during the "Arab Spring" Egypt/Libya protests and the hours following Joplin, Mo.
In terms of sitcoms... well, they'll always be around! I'm usually busy doing things when they air and tend to watch them in chunks of 2-4 episodes at a time. That's what Hulu and Netflix is for:)
I *DO* have an "HD" antenna + tuner (from the 2008 presidential inauguration), but in two years I haven't bothered to unpack it since I moved.
Heck, you can buy a 460gtx which is 2-3x as powerful as a 8800GTS for $120 these days. $100 for an 8800GTS is wasting your money. I was in the BF3 alpha and can confirm that BF3 runs at a solid 60fps on a 460gtx.
I totally agree! I was running Bad Company 2 (BF3 lite) on a 8600GT and a midrange Core 2 for a few years (I've since upgraded). BF3 is definitely geared towards turning the screws on even a high end PC with all the settings maxed out... but at the same time, the engine still has to run on six-year old hardware *cough* consoles *cough*. I don't think (most) console owners are in denial that their hardware is ancient, but the stark reality is that games are written to run on consoles first, and PC is generally an afterthought*. You'll note that I highlighted "PC Guy" in quotes in the original post; I definitely agree you get a higher quality experience on the PC, particularly in terms of resolution. I don't think I'm forgetting that consoles run on ancient hardware. My point was that the console market is something like 10x the size of the PC market. I've run across some really sharp people, but have zero motivation and would rather have a console than a PC. There's a huge segment of the population that wants the "bleeding edge", but at the same time want bleeding edge technology that "just works". Consoles represent the equivalent of a toaster with an HDMI port on the back. Insert bread, press start button, receive 46" glorious 3D gaming toast. Asking the general public sitting on their couch after a 10 hour day + 1 hr commute each way with their boss breathing down their neck, a dog and 2.6 children to do any more is madness.
*yes, I'm acutely aware that "PC is the lead platform for BF3"
I know quite a few people who have consoles and are looking at buying a new video card for their PC instead of getting BF3 on their console (PS3). The PS3 getting the price drop before several high end games (MW3, BF3, Mass Effect 3, etc) come out this fall doesn't seem like a huge surprise. For the less technically inclined, a $250 console might look like a better option than a $200-250 video card + installation + buggy drivers.
Heck, as a "PC guy", I might finally consider getting a PS3 simply as a HTPC replacement. Blu-Ray + Netflix + PC for web browsing on my TV @ $250 is way cheaper than buying a used mac mini or similar device. Not to mention the much better resale value...
Hydrogen is far too dangerous for an airship; if we're going to combat the German zeppelins effectively, we ought to be using helium for our lighter than air craft.
Yeah, now you have to worry about depleted uranium in aerosol form, which is guaranteed to give you cancer, in addition to dealing with the car insurance company and whatever law enforcement arrives at the scene of the accident.
But yeah, I suspect 1g of thorium inside of a solid stainless steel canister the size of a walnut, wrapped in kevlar with 1mm rubberized coating would be the general shape and/or design of the "fuel cell".
Don't forget that you could eschew oil changes as well. Other than paying someone to condition your leather and rotate your tires, there's not much maintenance to be done on an electric car.
Can you explain this in more detail? As I understand it, if gasoline has a known energy density, then MPG can loosely determine the average amount of energy required to push a vehicle down the road. 1g of Thorium obviously is going to have a peak energy output, and radioactive fuel "burn down" rates are going to work differently, but I'm curious how you could ballpark a similar figure using other methods.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good politics to reassure your core constituents that you've got their back with federal assistance when a natural disaster strikes. Given the current economy, the last thing you want to hear is "NYT to skip three days due to storm, NYSE down indefinitely due to storm". I roll my eyes just as hard as the next guy west of the Mississippi any time there's some NE-centric story about weather, but most of our global financial sway is in NYC until something drastic changes.
I think the other problem was that everyone saw the iPad coming, and spun up development of iPad knockoffs. By the time the writing was on the wall that nobody wanted a tablet unless it was an iPad, HP had already bought a $1 billion mistake and had already paid for the tooling for the 2nd gen ipad knockoff, the TouchPad.
Apple had 8 years and $billions of R&D behind the iPad and associated ipod/iphone line. I think when the TouchPad didn't meet sales goals they realized that WebOS was going to be an enormous loss leader for years and years while they tried to break in to the market (see also: Microsoft's XBox department, ran at a loss to this date since 2001)
Kicking Boeing for being chronically late on delivery and grossly overbudget. Either you're new to the aviation industry, or you didn't grow up in washington state ;) You're forgetting that you're talking about a defense contractor. over half their revenue comes from defense spending. This is completely par for the course. In the 1990's there was a big hubbub about Boeing not even being sure if they were running at a profit or a loss.
As far as risk management goes, I think they already wrote off the WebOS as a loss, and sitting on that inventory for more than two months would have been a much worse story for HP and their "lack of vision and leadership" as bloggers frothed at the mouth, writing even more scathing articles about "hp's tablet was so bad it didn't even sell at cost. half their inventory is still unsold". Once the decision to can WebOS was made, unloading the tablets and announcing closing down the department was the smart move from a fiscal and PR viewpoints.
Canning WebOS perhaps wasn't the best plan, but by cutting their losses now, they still have an albatross around their neck, but at least they don't have the limp corpse of WebOS tied around their ankle creating turbulence in the media for months and months as they try and move forward.
If it were my job to keep people from dying in hurricanes in addition to the general welfare of the people, I'd be making a lot of noise, too.
It's probably not a bad idea to push the squishy sad sack couch potatoes out of their comfort zone every once in a while. We spend so much time worrying about the best coupon deal to have pizza delivered to our houses, the "survival" portion of their brain has atrophied so badly that if some minor inconvenience like a tropical storm didn't roll through once a decade, we might actually end up like those caricatures in the pixar movie Wall-E.
Cue the wistful waxing poetic about when men were men, and John Wayne was simply "average"...
I saw the pics of lake travis pretty much completely dry a few years ago. I'm surprised the green movement didn't fund some sort of lake dredging party while it was down so low. Brings a new meaning to "shovel ready project" ;)
re: block party - the three streets of my neighborhood (Dallas, Texas) were out of power for almost two days recently from a spring storm. I was amazed at how friendly everyone was, just coping with the power outage and telling stories *gasp* being sociable. It was about 95F with 100% humidity at 10pm, and the entire neighborhood was out and about, sitting on the front porch with coolers full of ice and beer from the one corner store in the area that had power. I met all sorts of great new neighbors who lived around me. Sadly once the power (and more importantly) AC kicked back on, everyone went back inside and I haven't seen any of them since.
The neighborhood is full of houses with giant front porches and swing benches, with manicured outdoor seating areas in the front of the house. If you go north about 10 miles where houses were built after 1970 when AC became cheap and readily available, there's a striking complete lack of front porches, or even trees in the front yard. Technology like air conditioning has isolated neighbors, yet the internet brings complete strangers together.
Any comments on those DIY-ers that mount a lawn mower engine and a car alternator to a piece of plywood?
Let me preface this by saying I received no less than four instant messages about this slashdot article today.
I discovered Slashdot early in high school, and before long, all my friends had heard about it as well. I lurked for a few years before registering, which is why I ended up with an early 6-digit ID instead of the 5-digit.
But besides that, Slashdot was the premier site for news and discussion of tech news. In the early days, the only other options were news.com (now cnet) and msnbc's "science and technology" section. In my mind, it was slashdot that launched the tech news sector as we know it today, and I don't think any other site is so rooted in bringing the issue of patent law and privacy law to the average user.
I now supplement my daily tech news from places like google news, but I was recently down in austin hanging out with several friends from high school and their coding/engineer buddies. We now have other things to talk about besides computers, but here we were, occasionally punctuating conversation with "did you see that article on Slashdot?" "yeah! isn't that wild?". Many of my friends still scan the front page at least daily, and a few months don't go by that some slashdot headline doesn't make our internal mailing list.
I'm sad to see Rob go, but I'll be interested to see what he does next in life, and what the yet-as-unannounced new head of Slashdot decides which direction to take it in.
Probably not very important. When file transfer is all but completely broken even in Win 7 (try moving a 3gb file across the network, then try moving a second, third, fourth file 30 seconds after the first has started some time) and bogs to shit, imagine the sales rep pointing to file transfer time in Windows Server and saying "wow look at this! if you upgrade to server your concurrent file transfer time will improve by 6000%! Look at the infrastructure savings you'll save by not having to upgrade your network!" etc etc.
Actually, if you played your cards right, you might be able to swing a ticket (or ticket package) from Paris to NY via Moscow. From what I understand, the transsiberian RR is a pretty miserable experience. Third class has to provide their own coal for the stoves in the box cars, and it's something like a 12-14 day trip during the summer; longer during the winter.
Besides the fact that this news is breaking on slashdot (which should be a huge red flag), I would suspect the chinese (and a huge chunk of Asia) would be willing to bankroll this, especially if it was designed so that they could ship 300' wind power blades through the tunnel. This would be like the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, except on a grander scale: http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
Isn't this pretty much standard operating procedure though? Release game with "always on" mega-DRM, get free press (any press is good press) to try and bait the pirates in to actually buying instead of pirating your product; wait 24hrs -2 weeks after release, dial down the DRM to something bordering on reasonable. Get more sales from the PR of "lessening DRM". The most piracy happens in the first week anyways (most consumer's attention spans aren't that long - how long did you play Portal 2 after release?).
With a reputation like Ubisoft's, the bad press can't really hurt your sales at this point. If it weren't for the bi-monthly slashdot "ubisoft drm is bad!" article, I wouldn't know that they still exist; their franchise portfolio is pretty poor.
This is pretty much textbook ubisoft marketing 101. Has anything in this strategy changed at all since Spore (EA game)? I wouldn't really call this news anymore.
I had to measure the draw all the computers and monitors in our office when we moved locations. Most of them clocked in at 1.1-1.4 amps, which is 130-170watts at idle. Most of those machines (cheap office Dells) had 200-225w power supplies. I haven't had a chance to measure mine but I suspect it's about 20% higher at idle. Decoding a video file and showing it at 1080p probably bumps it up quite a bit. 200w is a lot when it's 111F today here in Dallas, Texas and you have to spend an additional 66W to pump all that waste heat out of the house. It won't get below 100F until after 10pm here.
On the flip side, this is enabling censorship groups (or whatever you want to label them). While on a personal level, humans are generally good, but the whole of humanity can do some pretty horrific things. Censoring these ugly facts about ourselves certainly don't do anything to help bridge the wealth/income gap.
I used to use OTA for political speeches (2008 presidential inaguration, etc) and live news, but in recent times I've found that YouTube's streaming video has improved dramatically. The white house streams most of it's video live over youtube now, and Al Jazeera has a great live streaming (English Language) channel for world events. I watched hours of footage online during the "Arab Spring" Egypt/Libya protests and the hours following Joplin, Mo.
:)
In terms of sitcoms... well, they'll always be around! I'm usually busy doing things when they air and tend to watch them in chunks of 2-4 episodes at a time. That's what Hulu and Netflix is for
I *DO* have an "HD" antenna + tuner (from the 2008 presidential inauguration), but in two years I haven't bothered to unpack it since I moved.
Recording is only important if you subscribe to live TV
Currently rocking a C2D 2.6ghz/8600GTX/4GB RAM; the only down side is a) noisy power supply and b) pulls almost 360w continuous.
The most recent PS3 only pulls 100w on average; the PS3 would pay for itself in 3 years at current electric rates. http://www.edepot.com/playstation3.html#PS3_Model_Differences
Heck, you can buy a 460gtx which is 2-3x as powerful as a 8800GTS for $120 these days. $100 for an 8800GTS is wasting your money. I was in the BF3 alpha and can confirm that BF3 runs at a solid 60fps on a 460gtx.
I totally agree! I was running Bad Company 2 (BF3 lite) on a 8600GT and a midrange Core 2 for a few years (I've since upgraded). BF3 is definitely geared towards turning the screws on even a high end PC with all the settings maxed out... but at the same time, the engine still has to run on six-year old hardware *cough* consoles *cough*. I don't think (most) console owners are in denial that their hardware is ancient, but the stark reality is that games are written to run on consoles first, and PC is generally an afterthought*. You'll note that I highlighted "PC Guy" in quotes in the original post; I definitely agree you get a higher quality experience on the PC, particularly in terms of resolution. I don't think I'm forgetting that consoles run on ancient hardware. My point was that the console market is something like 10x the size of the PC market. I've run across some really sharp people, but have zero motivation and would rather have a console than a PC. There's a huge segment of the population that wants the "bleeding edge", but at the same time want bleeding edge technology that "just works". Consoles represent the equivalent of a toaster with an HDMI port on the back. Insert bread, press start button, receive 46" glorious 3D gaming toast. Asking the general public sitting on their couch after a 10 hour day + 1 hr commute each way with their boss breathing down their neck, a dog and 2.6 children to do any more is madness.
*yes, I'm acutely aware that "PC is the lead platform for BF3"
I know quite a few people who have consoles and are looking at buying a new video card for their PC instead of getting BF3 on their console (PS3). The PS3 getting the price drop before several high end games (MW3, BF3, Mass Effect 3, etc) come out this fall doesn't seem like a huge surprise. For the less technically inclined, a $250 console might look like a better option than a $200-250 video card + installation + buggy drivers.
Heck, as a "PC guy", I might finally consider getting a PS3 simply as a HTPC replacement. Blu-Ray + Netflix + PC for web browsing on my TV @ $250 is way cheaper than buying a used mac mini or similar device. Not to mention the much better resale value...
Hydrogen is far too dangerous for an airship; if we're going to combat the German zeppelins effectively, we ought to be using helium for our lighter than air craft.
Yeah, now you have to worry about depleted uranium in aerosol form, which is guaranteed to give you cancer, in addition to dealing with the car insurance company and whatever law enforcement arrives at the scene of the accident.
But yeah, I suspect 1g of thorium inside of a solid stainless steel canister the size of a walnut, wrapped in kevlar with 1mm rubberized coating would be the general shape and/or design of the "fuel cell".
Don't forget that you could eschew oil changes as well. Other than paying someone to condition your leather and rotate your tires, there's not much maintenance to be done on an electric car.
You've clearly never bought color printer ink before. Or godiva chocolate for that matter.
Can you explain this in more detail? As I understand it, if gasoline has a known energy density, then MPG can loosely determine the average amount of energy required to push a vehicle down the road. 1g of Thorium obviously is going to have a peak energy output, and radioactive fuel "burn down" rates are going to work differently, but I'm curious how you could ballpark a similar figure using other methods.