After the Bush v Gore infamous recount during the 2000 presidential elections, the Democratic party has been rushing full force to discredit the "traditional" voting methods, through a constant political & media barage against punchcard & butterfly ballots. The general public now has a perception that paper is "bad" and the "better" alternative is via technology... the electronic booth.
In reality it is statistically no more or no less accurate than traditional means, still has no audit trail, and still has no security between the time when the poll closes and the machines delivered to the final counting place (which is when I believe the real funny business takes place...) You read these reports where they "find" sealed ballot boxes that were never delivered, days after the election is finalized. What was that about Stalin counting the votes?
Until the legal system completely decides if/when a human fetus is human, I doubt we can decide if a machine intelligence can be elevated to a state where it "must" be preserved.
If a woman can "take ownership" of the life created in her womb and have the legal right to terminate said creation, then a computer scientist can have the right to terminte his/her electronic creation, as a matter of precident.
On a personal and moral note, I don't agree that this should be the case, in either situation.
1. It's easier to control (& tax) the product. 2. It's another form of state welfare, because you've created a whole host of new jobs for your voting citizens to run these stores.
When given the opportunity, states loves to grab power. New Jersey won't let you pump your own gas. Pennsylvania issues liquor licences; you can't serve alcohol in your resteraunt without one, and there's a finite amount in the state, you have to wait till another business closes before you can get a new one. And that "progressive" (*cough*) New York has these state-run liquor stores practically forever; my dad tells me stories of him & his buddies driving from Philly to NY when he was young for a beer run, it used to be that much cheaper. Nowadays, burocracy has set in, and its no cheaper than anywhere else.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. -- The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
A strict definition is the government shall not pass any law that restricts the content or distribution of information via the press. Last time I checked, online journalists (who you might say provide press services on the internet) are not restricted what they are or are not allowed to publish. In this case, the government is exploring their legal rights to determine the source of the material that is being distributed.
As you can see from the DoE summary, the grid entered a cascade state (failed) on about the 9th redundancy.
Breaker trips in New Jersey, and north of NYC, were examples of "good" operations, where it halted the voltage collapse by isolating load. South and West were spared, but it sucked if you were on the wrong side of the Hudson station.
1. The problem is not in de-regulated generation markets, the blackout's root cause was failure of regulated transmission. In the "How to Fix It", this is the first thing he says to fix.
2. Re-Regulating the industry will not solve the fundamental problems of poor communication, which was cited as another cause of the 8/14 blackout. First Energy territory (a vertical utility) loosely operates under a regional authority called MISO; essentially, FE does its thing and lets MISO know when it has problems. On that day, FE was doing what a regulated utility does best -- keeping its mouth shut. They had large problems that cascaded into regional problems, which cascaded into an interconnection blackout. Re-regulating more companies will only complicate long-distance communication (because you remove the scheduling authority), and no company will have the view of the big picture.
3. The east coast USA has not only met its capacity needs, but because of construction of generation in de-regulated markets, we are at a comfortable over-capacity level. De-regulation of generation was not the problem out west, it was governmental restrictions that prevented them from building, and they weren't ready in time for demand growth. Because the east markets have a large choice of generation, they are forced to compete with each other to lower costs, which has led to billions in savings and billions more projected. Yet, with spot markets offering cheaper prices, most residents are still locked into regulated prices-per-kW set a decade ago... do you like being told you have to buy energy at a higher cost than it is being produced?
4. What our fellow doesn't consider is how much NIMBY has affected the status of the grid. If companies are re-regulated back to their small territories, some zones are no longer self-sufficient; some were importing power even before de-regulation. They're not going to magically be able to provide their own energy tomorrow, so they still need to import just like they do now in a de-regulated system. You're back to the old days of each small company makes bilateral schedules with its surrounding zones, and you just have the same problems you see today. Except now, you've forced everyone to duplicate scheduling services, and you force inefficiency back into the system.
5. Congestion. The article goes on and on about congestion being caused by long distance energy trades, but few people know what this is. When I sell energy from Ohio to NY, say 100 MW, my zone produces 100MW more than my load, and the sink underproduces 100MW less than their load. That energy adds to the flows along the transmission network, according to path of least resistance.
Well, sometimes that energy doesn't flow the way you contracted it to flow. It might go 80% along the way you want, but 20% goes through parallel paths through the neighbors, at which point it's called circulation. The author thinks that by eliminating energy trading, these problems magically go away. It's not like circulation never happened while the system was regulated; it's just that the utilities never made an issue of it. And again, this is a problem in already-regulated transmission; letting things remain the same is not solving our problems.
6. Network utilization. Now if I build a line with a 2200 MW limit, and I only put 200MW through it, that doesn't seem like a good return of investment, does it? What you find in regulated systems (which is everyone but GridAmerica) is there's low interest in building high capacity wires; a majority of the mid-west still runs on 138 kV. It doesn't help that government regulations & PUCs are fighting new placement every step of the way. What's worse is that there has been very little research into high-power transmission technology; at least since de-regulation, companies are investigating new technologies like superconductors, because now they have to become more efficient to survive.
The bad capacitors were faulty because some manufacturers opted for cheaper electolytics that expanded too much when they heated up... fixed volume, increasing pressure due to temperature, and they pop.
Nokia claims that they haven't changed materials... my guess is that these phones are getting hotter faster, probably drawing more current to run all the new features they keep adding, and the chemical batteries aren't reacting well.
"... specifically citing the criminal case of Texas plague expert Thomas Butler who has been charged by federal authorities after he reported he lost some plague samples. Prosecutors said he illegally transported samples from Tanzania and lied to the FBI about how he disposed of them."
There is an old saying, "Is this the hill you want to die on?" If I was going to speak out about scientists being harassed by the government, I wouldn't choose to defend one that was caught lying about illegally importing plague, and lost them! We're not talking fuzzy bunnies here, this is a toxic substance, scientific negligence, and fraud. How about we defend leaking classified rocket technology to the Chinese? Information wants to be free, after all. Or what if someone "accesses" a computer, downloads, and distributes the source code to a soon-to-be-released game? Oh, the oppression!
This man made some awesome discoveries, and for that he was awarded. Of all people, you would think he'd recognize bad scientific practices. I can only hope that he never engaged in moving his samples like this other scientist... but now you have to wonder why he'd defend it.
The other day, ther was a Slashdot article that supposed that reality (as we know it) is a 3-dimensional surface lying on a larger multidimensional surface, of 6+ dimensions. All of this was to bring the relative force of Gravity in line with the strengths of other microscopic forces.
In the case of "magnetic monopoles"... putting aside everything I've ever learned in my years as an electrical engineer... lets suppose that these actually exist.
The first pattern we see in nature is that matter exists in pairs... particles appear out of vacuum as matter and antimatter, we have electrostatic charge from protons and electrons, so I would think that you'd still have to have a "sink and source" arrangement when dealing with magnetic monopoles. Another law that we hate to break is the conservation of energy. Over a closed space, all exchange of energy nets to zero. So, I would think that for a field emitter to exist, there must be a field receiver... the only question is where does the energy go.
Tieing these two theories together, what's to say that a "monopole" in 3-space isn't really still a dipole in multidimensional space? In 3-space, we'd see a discontinuity, but over the whole space, we'd still have the continuity that Maxwell's classic equations require.... There really are "returning" field lines, they're just not directly observable because they don't interact with our form of matter; like dark matter in gravitic space, who's to say that similar objects can't exist in electromagnetic fields?
Reading the site, his theory appears to be along the lines that AIDS results from recreational drug use triggering latent genetic sequences that are alraady in our DNA. Interesting theories, but it is hard to believe that there is an international conspiracy to get millions of people to use expensive drugs that actually make you worse... but I guess if you're into this "every corporation is out to get you" thing, then you're probably going to believe this one too.
If it spreads like a virus and divides like a virus, it's probably a virus. Human Immunideficiency Virus to be exact.
But isn't this really indicitive of a societal problem? You have grown up in a culture that has ingrained upon you that there are no consequences to your actions, and as a result, you prefer games that reflect this. You can play games like GTA where you can do whatever you want, explore every angle, and do things that would get you jailed in real life. Meanwhile, new online gamers have no respect for any of their opponents, and online boards are full of trash talk, elitism, & self-importance. In game, players are generally poor sports when they inevitably lose.
I remember games like Starflight, where there was no "Save As"; you had to copy the entire game to another directory if you wanted to branch off and try something. Now THAT was a hardcore game.
Method One, I lay out $500 million over a 6 year construction period, and then I start to make my money back. Meantime, I have my land sitting idle and lots of money tied up in partially assembled equipment.
Method Two, I buy a wind turbine. Whats good about these is that they can be manufactured off-site, and delivered fully-assembled by tractor trailer. From time of delievery, they can be hooked up to a transformer and pushing energy onto the grid in under 24 hours.
It takes a heck of a lot more units to match the output of a single fossil plant, but you can start your cost recovery a lot earlier, essential in the post-Enron world of energy marketing. (Oh, and thermal losses on transmission are near negligible; that's the whole point of using a high voltage transmission system.)
... and the only way that we "little" generators get paid for the energy we provide is.... (wait for it)
The Deregulated Market!
Under the regulated market, utilities are a vertical stack, and the people providing transmission service is the same person providing generation service. If we rolled back to what we was, distributed power is screwed.
So, the author reduces years of Microsoft's market dominance (with no mention of any previous versions of Windows) to:
"Windows XP has many of the features of both X and MacOS listed above, though it has no outstanding features of its own.
A common criticism of Windows XP is its over-use of eye candy. Rather than using animation to explain to the user what is going on, it is sprinkled throughout the system for no good reason. Menus 'whoosh' open and bubbles pop up from window gadgets and system tray icons. Although these often are suitable for novice users, intermediate and expert users find them patronising and annoying as they distract them from their work."
This is not an analysis of a windowing system, this is someone's predjudices and opinions showing, about how the operating system interacts with the data presentation. It is stuff like this that forces me to doubt the author's knowlege of his subject area. Is there any analysis of how MS has integrated an interpreted scripting language into their windowing system? Any mention of Remote Desktop, OLE / embedded applications & shared toolbars, HTML/XML integration?
I'm not usually a Microsoft proponent, but let's at least give a nod to MS that they have had some skilled programmers in their employ over the years, and have come up with some creative ways of blending applications into easy to use products.
Look people, enough grumbling about Microsoft and their psychology department... as a corporation who's main product is a human-machine interface, it is in their best interest to understand and maximize everything that eases these tasks.
They studied eye strain, and whipped up an improved font display system called ClearType. Windows XP has a Speech module in the control panel that's getting pretty good at speaking random text. Word and their Spelling modules are pretty good, but English isn't the only language.
Microsoft is obviously positioning itself for something big. Is this a new phase for improving Spell Checking - mimic the brain's methods for decoding scrambled text into a word? Is it time for Microsoft to take on Babelfish's language conversion -- on-the-fly language converting instant messaging with better results. New OCR technology for converting text embedded in images? Whatever it is, there's money to be made.
Finally, don't you find it ironic that an article on word recognition contains spelling errors? 2: The reader recognbises each letter in turn ...
78,000 out of an estimated 6 billion people on this planet, comes out to about 0.0013 % of the world's population. The government's 2001 statistics show that there was 1,063,732 new permanent immigrants entering the united states. Another report on visas issued (Table F) shows that in 2002, there were 13,230,001 temporary visas issued to foreigners to enter the united states. And thats just visas granted, not counts of applications. The raw data also shows the USA had a total of 27,907,139 visitors crossing our borders with visas in 2002.
So, from the numbers above, they have 78,000 applicants as suspect, which is roughly 0.28 % of all visitors. Not exactly a huge amount relative to the sheer number of people trying to get in.
Yes, I can believe a number that large. They could be ex-soldiers from suspect countries, foreign "students" registering in obscure american colleges for odd majors, maybe someone trying to get in with an H1-B who doesn't seem to match his job description, or anything that appears out of the ordinary when cross referenced with other security lists. Did our visa applicant recently travel from Iraq to North Korea, next to the USA? Flag him. Did our visa applicant happen to be in a particular Afghanistan town 2 years ago, when we know that other known terrorists were there at the same time frame? Flag him too.
There are thousands upon thousands of people trying to enter the united states every day, and our government has a monumental task to validate their reasons for entering. Obviously they are trying to research the histories of everyone to the best of their ability, which is why getting the different law enforcement agencies talking to each other was such an issue for the Bush administration. Some people say we're scrutinizing too much, but even more believe it's not enough. Thinking that we have secure borders is a fallacy the US public needs to wake up to and recognize how easy it is for individuals to slip in under false pretenses. We can't be isolationists, but we can certainly do a better job than we've done in the past.
I've been told that some of the more expensive cars have relay sensors scattered about the front and rear bumpers that close when the bumper is first hit... the recorder activates at that point, and can begin capture a second or so before airbag activation, as the frame crumples.
I guess the desire is that you can record the other sensors around the engine block to determine angle of impact, speed of impact, etc, and react accordingly. In the early 90s, there were serious issues with "low velocity airbag activation", where cars were "tapped" at red lights at 5 mph activating the airbags. Several children were killed, because they were in the front seat leaning forward (seat belts do not lock when stopped) just enough to catch the full force under their chins, snapping their necks. Accident data helped locate the causes of the deaths, and modern airbags have much more sophisticated controls.
Riddle me this: what's stopping all of these tax-producing companies from moving out of the state of California, so some other state with less harsh spam laws?
The net effect is to drive tech employers out of his state (few though they are, but they seem to have lots of advertising cash), reducing the funds flowing into the state budget. This isn't a solution, this is realizing you're about to be recalled and screwing the next governor.
Re:are all the reviews by idiots?
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
Riiiight...
By your logic, executing 0x0A + 0x0B on a 64-bit processor will be twice as fast as executing on a 32-bit processor? I've doubled the compexity of my chip, added more multiplexors all over the place to handle another 32 bits. More interconnect & gates means you have to wait longer for your signals to resolve, so you've effectively lowered the top MHz of your clock (for the same design material as your 32-bit chip). You can only hope that you can optimize your design a little more, or pray for some new miracle fabrication process. Given that your 32-bit chip is probably running near its max MHz speed, your new chip is marginally slower at executing the same simple instructions.
Where you're going to save time is the compilation level. Any subroutine that used to operate at > 32bit resolution (huge ints, etc) can now be condensed into one operation. Extending the width of your opcode also gives you the option of creating new functions (one of the drawbacks to CISC computers, every function has a special opcode, making processing much more complicated than RISC). Doing these reduces the amount of data going into the pipeline, which nets an overall increase in operations per second. This is a marginal increase, which is why the estimate is a low 10-15%.
If any of this interests you, go back to school and take a VLSI course or three.
Slashdot Mirror
After the Bush v Gore infamous recount during the 2000 presidential elections, the Democratic party has been rushing full force to discredit the "traditional" voting methods, through a constant political & media barage against punchcard & butterfly ballots. The general public now has a perception that paper is "bad" and the "better" alternative is via technology ... the electronic booth.
In reality it is statistically no more or no less accurate than traditional means, still has no audit trail, and still has no security between the time when the poll closes and the machines delivered to the final counting place (which is when I believe the real funny business takes place...) You read these reports where they "find" sealed ballot boxes that were never delivered, days after the election is finalized. What was that about Stalin counting the votes?
Until the legal system completely decides if/when a human fetus is human, I doubt we can decide if a machine intelligence can be elevated to a state where it "must" be preserved.
If a woman can "take ownership" of the life created in her womb and have the legal right to terminate said creation, then a computer scientist can have the right to terminte his/her electronic creation, as a matter of precident.
On a personal and moral note, I don't agree that this should be the case, in either situation.
1. It's easier to control (& tax) the product.
2. It's another form of state welfare, because you've created a whole host of new jobs for your voting citizens to run these stores.
When given the opportunity, states loves to grab power. New Jersey won't let you pump your own gas. Pennsylvania issues liquor licences; you can't serve alcohol in your resteraunt without one, and there's a finite amount in the state, you have to wait till another business closes before you can get a new one. And that "progressive" (*cough*) New York has these state-run liquor stores practically forever; my dad tells me stories of him & his buddies driving from Philly to NY when he was young for a beer run, it used to be that much cheaper. Nowadays, burocracy has set in, and its no cheaper than anywhere else.
Thanks to American Capitalism, it was a commerical satellite, not government.
South Park did it best...
New Hellion #5: Hey, wait a minute! I shouldn't be here! I was a totally strict and devout Protestant! I thought we went to Heaven!
Hell Director: Yes, well, I'm afraid you were wrong!
New Hellion #6: I was a practicing Jehova's Witness!
Hell Director: Uh, you picked the wrong religion as well!
New Hellion #7: Well, who was right?! Who gets into Heaven?!
Hell Director: I'm afraid it was the Mormons! Yes! The Mormons were the correct answer!
New Hellions: AWW!
Perhaps it's time for everyone to re-read "Brave New World" so we can picture what happens when a society relies on artificially created children...
Insightful, aint it?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
-- The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Text & Description
A strict definition is the government shall not pass any law that restricts the content or distribution of information via the press. Last time I checked, online journalists (who you might say provide press services on the internet) are not restricted what they are or are not allowed to publish. In this case, the government is exploring their legal rights to determine the source of the material that is being distributed.
As you can see from the DoE summary, the grid entered a cascade state (failed) on about the 9th redundancy.
Breaker trips in New Jersey, and north of NYC, were examples of "good" operations, where it halted the voltage collapse by isolating load. South and West were spared, but it sucked if you were on the wrong side of the Hudson station.
1. The problem is not in de-regulated generation markets, the blackout's root cause was failure of regulated transmission. In the "How to Fix It", this is the first thing he says to fix.
... do you like being told you have to buy energy at a higher cost than it is being produced?
2. Re-Regulating the industry will not solve the fundamental problems of poor communication, which was cited as another cause of the 8/14 blackout. First Energy territory (a vertical utility) loosely operates under a regional authority called MISO; essentially, FE does its thing and lets MISO know when it has problems. On that day, FE was doing what a regulated utility does best -- keeping its mouth shut. They had large problems that cascaded into regional problems, which cascaded into an interconnection blackout. Re-regulating more companies will only complicate long-distance communication (because you remove the scheduling authority), and no company will have the view of the big picture.
3. The east coast USA has not only met its capacity needs, but because of construction of generation in de-regulated markets, we are at a comfortable over-capacity level. De-regulation of generation was not the problem out west, it was governmental restrictions that prevented them from building, and they weren't ready in time for demand growth. Because the east markets have a large choice of generation, they are forced to compete with each other to lower costs, which has led to billions in savings and billions more projected. Yet, with spot markets offering cheaper prices, most residents are still locked into regulated prices-per-kW set a decade ago
4. What our fellow doesn't consider is how much NIMBY has affected the status of the grid. If companies are re-regulated back to their small territories, some zones are no longer self-sufficient; some were importing power even before de-regulation. They're not going to magically be able to provide their own energy tomorrow, so they still need to import just like they do now in a de-regulated system. You're back to the old days of each small company makes bilateral schedules with its surrounding zones, and you just have the same problems you see today. Except now, you've forced everyone to duplicate scheduling services, and you force inefficiency back into the system.
5. Congestion. The article goes on and on about congestion being caused by long distance energy trades, but few people know what this is. When I sell energy from Ohio to NY, say 100 MW, my zone produces 100MW more than my load, and the sink underproduces 100MW less than their load. That energy adds to the flows along the transmission network, according to path of least resistance.
Well, sometimes that energy doesn't flow the way you contracted it to flow. It might go 80% along the way you want, but 20% goes through parallel paths through the neighbors, at which point it's called circulation. The author thinks that by eliminating energy trading, these problems magically go away. It's not like circulation never happened while the system was regulated; it's just that the utilities never made an issue of it. And again, this is a problem in already-regulated transmission; letting things remain the same is not solving our problems.
6. Network utilization. Now if I build a line with a 2200 MW limit, and I only put 200MW through it, that doesn't seem like a good return of investment, does it? What you find in regulated systems (which is everyone but GridAmerica) is there's low interest in building high capacity wires; a majority of the mid-west still runs on 138 kV. It doesn't help that government regulations & PUCs are fighting new placement every step of the way. What's worse is that there has been very little research into high-power transmission technology; at least since de-regulation, companies are investigating new technologies like superconductors, because now they have to become more efficient to survive.
7. Markets failures caused the blackou
The bad capacitors were faulty because some manufacturers opted for cheaper electolytics that expanded too much when they heated up... fixed volume, increasing pressure due to temperature, and they pop.
Nokia claims that they haven't changed materials... my guess is that these phones are getting hotter faster, probably drawing more current to run all the new features they keep adding, and the chemical batteries aren't reacting well.
"... specifically citing the criminal case of Texas plague expert Thomas Butler who has been charged by federal authorities after he reported he lost some plague samples. Prosecutors said he illegally transported samples from Tanzania and lied to the FBI about how he disposed of them."
There is an old saying, "Is this the hill you want to die on?" If I was going to speak out about scientists being harassed by the government, I wouldn't choose to defend one that was caught lying about illegally importing plague, and lost them! We're not talking fuzzy bunnies here, this is a toxic substance, scientific negligence, and fraud. How about we defend leaking classified rocket technology to the Chinese? Information wants to be free, after all. Or what if someone "accesses" a computer, downloads, and distributes the source code to a soon-to-be-released game? Oh, the oppression!
This man made some awesome discoveries, and for that he was awarded. Of all people, you would think he'd recognize bad scientific practices. I can only hope that he never engaged in moving his samples like this other scientist... but now you have to wonder why he'd defend it.
The other day, ther was a Slashdot article that supposed that reality (as we know it) is a 3-dimensional surface lying on a larger multidimensional surface, of 6+ dimensions. All of this was to bring the relative force of Gravity in line with the strengths of other microscopic forces.
In the case of "magnetic monopoles"... putting aside everything I've ever learned in my years as an electrical engineer... lets suppose that these actually exist.
The first pattern we see in nature is that matter exists in pairs... particles appear out of vacuum as matter and antimatter, we have electrostatic charge from protons and electrons, so I would think that you'd still have to have a "sink and source" arrangement when dealing with magnetic monopoles. Another law that we hate to break is the conservation of energy. Over a closed space, all exchange of energy nets to zero. So, I would think that for a field emitter to exist, there must be a field receiver... the only question is where does the energy go.
Tieing these two theories together, what's to say that a "monopole" in 3-space isn't really still a dipole in multidimensional space? In 3-space, we'd see a discontinuity, but over the whole space, we'd still have the continuity that Maxwell's classic equations require.... There really are "returning" field lines, they're just not directly observable because they don't interact with our form of matter; like dark matter in gravitic space, who's to say that similar objects can't exist in electromagnetic fields?
Reading the site, his theory appears to be along the lines that AIDS results from recreational drug use triggering latent genetic sequences that are alraady in our DNA. Interesting theories, but it is hard to believe that there is an international conspiracy to get millions of people to use expensive drugs that actually make you worse ... but I guess if you're into this "every corporation is out to get you" thing, then you're probably going to believe this one too.
If it spreads like a virus and divides like a virus, it's probably a virus. Human Immunideficiency Virus to be exact.
But isn't this really indicitive of a societal problem? You have grown up in a culture that has ingrained upon you that there are no consequences to your actions, and as a result, you prefer games that reflect this. You can play games like GTA where you can do whatever you want, explore every angle, and do things that would get you jailed in real life. Meanwhile, new online gamers have no respect for any of their opponents, and online boards are full of trash talk, elitism, & self-importance. In game, players are generally poor sports when they inevitably lose.
I remember games like Starflight, where there was no "Save As"; you had to copy the entire game to another directory if you wanted to branch off and try something. Now THAT was a hardcore game.
As long as it doesn't act like the computer in Red Dwarf, I think we're going to be ok.
It's Return on Investment.
Method One, I lay out $500 million over a 6 year construction period, and then I start to make my money back. Meantime, I have my land sitting idle and lots of money tied up in partially assembled equipment.
Method Two, I buy a wind turbine. Whats good about these is that they can be manufactured off-site, and delivered fully-assembled by tractor trailer. From time of delievery, they can be hooked up to a transformer and pushing energy onto the grid in under 24 hours.
It takes a heck of a lot more units to match the output of a single fossil plant, but you can start your cost recovery a lot earlier, essential in the post-Enron world of energy marketing. (Oh, and thermal losses on transmission are near negligible; that's the whole point of using a high voltage transmission system.)
... and the only way that we "little" generators get paid for the energy we provide is .... (wait for it)
The Deregulated Market!
Under the regulated market, utilities are a vertical stack, and the people providing transmission service is the same person providing generation service. If we rolled back to what we was, distributed power is screwed.
So, the author reduces years of Microsoft's market dominance (with no mention of any previous versions of Windows) to:
"Windows XP has many of the features of both X and MacOS listed above, though it has no outstanding features of its own.
A common criticism of Windows XP is its over-use of eye candy. Rather than using animation to explain to the user what is going on, it is sprinkled throughout the system for no good reason. Menus 'whoosh' open and bubbles pop up from window gadgets and system tray icons. Although these often are suitable for novice users, intermediate and expert users find them patronising and annoying as they distract them from their work."
This is not an analysis of a windowing system, this is someone's predjudices and opinions showing, about how the operating system interacts with the data presentation. It is stuff like this that forces me to doubt the author's knowlege of his subject area. Is there any analysis of how MS has integrated an interpreted scripting language into their windowing system? Any mention of Remote Desktop, OLE / embedded applications & shared toolbars, HTML/XML integration?
I'm not usually a Microsoft proponent, but let's at least give a nod to MS that they have had some skilled programmers in their employ over the years, and have come up with some creative ways of blending applications into easy to use products.
Look people, enough grumbling about Microsoft and their psychology department... as a corporation who's main product is a human-machine interface, it is in their best interest to understand and maximize everything that eases these tasks.
...
They studied eye strain, and whipped up an improved font display system called ClearType. Windows XP has a Speech module in the control panel that's getting pretty good at speaking random text. Word and their Spelling modules are pretty good, but English isn't the only language.
Microsoft is obviously positioning itself for something big. Is this a new phase for improving Spell Checking - mimic the brain's methods for decoding scrambled text into a word? Is it time for Microsoft to take on Babelfish's language conversion -- on-the-fly language converting instant messaging with better results. New OCR technology for converting text embedded in images? Whatever it is, there's money to be made.
Finally, don't you find it ironic that an article on word recognition contains spelling errors?
2: The reader recognbises each letter in turn
I know, I know!
Instead of X-Plus-Plus, lets just shorten it to XP!
78,000 out of an estimated 6 billion people on this planet, comes out to about 0.0013 % of the world's population. The government's 2001 statistics show that there was 1,063,732 new permanent immigrants entering the united states. Another report on visas issued (Table F) shows that in 2002, there were 13,230,001 temporary visas issued to foreigners to enter the united states. And thats just visas granted, not counts of applications. The raw data also shows the USA had a total of 27,907,139 visitors crossing our borders with visas in 2002.
So, from the numbers above, they have 78,000 applicants as suspect, which is roughly 0.28 % of all visitors. Not exactly a huge amount relative to the sheer number of people trying to get in.
Yes, I can believe a number that large. They could be ex-soldiers from suspect countries, foreign "students" registering in obscure american colleges for odd majors, maybe someone trying to get in with an H1-B who doesn't seem to match his job description, or anything that appears out of the ordinary when cross referenced with other security lists. Did our visa applicant recently travel from Iraq to North Korea, next to the USA? Flag him. Did our visa applicant happen to be in a particular Afghanistan town 2 years ago, when we know that other known terrorists were there at the same time frame? Flag him too.
There are thousands upon thousands of people trying to enter the united states every day, and our government has a monumental task to validate their reasons for entering. Obviously they are trying to research the histories of everyone to the best of their ability, which is why getting the different law enforcement agencies talking to each other was such an issue for the Bush administration. Some people say we're scrutinizing too much, but even more believe it's not enough. Thinking that we have secure borders is a fallacy the US public needs to wake up to and recognize how easy it is for individuals to slip in under false pretenses. We can't be isolationists, but we can certainly do a better job than we've done in the past.
I've been told that some of the more expensive cars have relay sensors scattered about the front and rear bumpers that close when the bumper is first hit... the recorder activates at that point, and can begin capture a second or so before airbag activation, as the frame crumples.
I guess the desire is that you can record the other sensors around the engine block to determine angle of impact, speed of impact, etc, and react accordingly. In the early 90s, there were serious issues with "low velocity airbag activation", where cars were "tapped" at red lights at 5 mph activating the airbags. Several children were killed, because they were in the front seat leaning forward (seat belts do not lock when stopped) just enough to catch the full force under their chins, snapping their necks. Accident data helped locate the causes of the deaths, and modern airbags have much more sophisticated controls.
Riddle me this: what's stopping all of these tax-producing companies from moving out of the state of California, so some other state with less harsh spam laws?
The net effect is to drive tech employers out of his state (few though they are, but they seem to have lots of advertising cash), reducing the funds flowing into the state budget. This isn't a solution, this is realizing you're about to be recalled and screwing the next governor.
Riiiight...
By your logic, executing 0x0A + 0x0B on a 64-bit processor will be twice as fast as executing on a 32-bit processor? I've doubled the compexity of my chip, added more multiplexors all over the place to handle another 32 bits. More interconnect & gates means you have to wait longer for your signals to resolve, so you've effectively lowered the top MHz of your clock (for the same design material as your 32-bit chip). You can only hope that you can optimize your design a little more, or pray for some new miracle fabrication process. Given that your 32-bit chip is probably running near its max MHz speed, your new chip is marginally slower at executing the same simple instructions.
Where you're going to save time is the compilation level. Any subroutine that used to operate at > 32bit resolution (huge ints, etc) can now be condensed into one operation. Extending the width of your opcode also gives you the option of creating new functions (one of the drawbacks to CISC computers, every function has a special opcode, making processing much more complicated than RISC). Doing these reduces the amount of data going into the pipeline, which nets an overall increase in operations per second. This is a marginal increase, which is why the estimate is a low 10-15%.
If any of this interests you, go back to school and take a VLSI course or three.