The superconductor industry has detailed plans which are known set several years in advance.
If 65nm technology is possible, actual design specs have already been approved and work has already started on the design of a fab facility. So there is no speculation in the report.
The article claims that "the average life span of a web page is 100 days". This is a very misleading statistic. What it really means is that the average web page is updated every 100 days, not that the page dies and goes away after 100 days.
Moreover, as you can imagine, authorative sources (the type that people are likely to quote) are updated much less frequently.
The grandparent poster was correct. Microsoft subsidized their risky projects with Windows and Office.
When Microsoft made some of its early mistakes, Windows and Office didn't even exist. DOS was not yet the dominant OS, and Lotus was bigger than Microsoft by an order of magnitude.
an expert at selling failures, such as Windows 95, which was crap outside of it's new UI.
Win95, however buggy, was way better than Windows 3.11. That was the choice regular folk had and guess what? they chose win95!
At the time the only realistic alternatives to Win 95 on Intel were (a) the expensive (but much more stable) WinNT or (b) the dying OS/2 Warp.
Experience? Insight into how to avoid mistakes? A list of what works and what doesn't? a better understanding of history?
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
Which proves that in/. all you need is to diss M$ to get the inanest of comments moderated to "Score:5 Insightful".
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
BS. None of the mistakes were fatal because Microsoft has always been very good at picking up the pieces and moving forward. Many other companies had revenue sources/large war chests on which to fall back (Lotus, Novell, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Apple) yet they didn't.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes.
Nope. They made more than their fair share of mistakes.
Read Accidental Empires, where Cringley shows this was in great part due to the inexperience of their managers.
The whole concept is basically stupid. Even when we build a true AI, put it in an andriod body and teach it to do everything better than we can do it - so what?
Well, some people's perception of their place in this world is that we are somehow superior (as an intelligent species) to anybody else. So we get quite uncomfortable when some of our "uniqueness" is replicated by a bunch of wires.
Personally, I'm ok with that, but many others aren't hence the heated debates about who runs faster, who looms faster and who plays chess better.
By depending on price cuts for Athlon-64 and Opteron, AMD is predicting that it's sales of 32-bit CPUs will fall off and obsolete 32-bit systems in less than 3 years.
I've heard that one before, in 1992 when DEC was working on its Alpha chip. It didn't happen. 64 bit addresses are wasteful in terms of cache lines. Hence the VLIW architecture of the itanium. If you end up with a processor where most instructions (with operands) are 16 bits wide but processed four at a time is that really a 64 bit CPU?
The CNN article incorrectly suggests that the Mexican version of silbo is derived from the Canaries' Silbo Gomero. The Mexican whistled language develeped independently in a mountanous area far more rugged as the Canaries. This is an example of parallel development under similar circumstances.
In the European Alps, the solution was to develop yoddling (seriously).
Overall, money invested in science has historically paid off at better than 10-1.
True in general, but generally false for big science. As Luis Alvarez (a famous experimentalist) pointed out large amounts of research money tend to lead to wasteful experimental science. Michelson-Morley done today would have been along the lines of
1. Send satellite to orbit 2. Satellite doesn't work, send repair crew 3. Send second satellite to orbit moving in reverse direction 4. Send super duper high power laser beam from satellite A to satellite B 5. Measure speed difference using built in atomic clocks 6. Conclude that speed of light is independent of "ether"
Total bill: a few billion dollars.
Total cost of Michelson-Morley as originally done: a few thousand dollars.
Yes it does say that if a company has an employment agreement with provisions saying employees must assign the rights of their inventions to their employer, those sections do not apply if the employee developed it on his or her own time, without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1. Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
2. Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
This is the part deleted by whoever submitted the story.
Notice that he maps the paths from his computer to the rest of the world. That is not the same as a map of the entire Internet.
To illustrate, if I map routes from, say Chicago, I'm likely to miss the direct connection between Seattle and San Francisco, as there is no traffic I could generate that would take that path.
"Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." - Paul Saffo
Actually you can get a tactical nuke not much larger than ten D batteries. It was called a David Crocket by the US Army. Weight would be a problem though, as uranium/plutonium is really high density (almost twice the weight of lead per unit of volume).
This book by Richard Feynman is [from the ] 1980s. In it he discusses Reversible Computation and the Thermodynamics of Computing and quantum computing.
As usual, Feynman was way ahead of his time.
Reversible computing had been proposed twenty years earlier by an IBM engineer and widely recognized as an important idea, so one can hardly credit Feynman for this one.
There has been steady research on reversible computation over the last ten years or so. In fact the best paper award at one of the major CS conferences in 1993 was for a reversible computing paper.
Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'
In related news, Tim O'Reilly was shot dead when coming out of his appartment building this morning. Witnesses described the shooter as a middle-aged, bald guy with a wide grin who ramsacked the bookshelves before escaping on foot.
This is old news in investment forums, where people quickly figured that the impact on the top line would be small, and in the bottom line darn near zero. Most of the money ($0.75 to be precise) goes to the artist/copyright holder, another chunk goes to the record company and Apple is left with about $0.10 measly cents per song or just about enough to pay for the bandwidth required. They don't seem to be losing money either, so it is not a loss leader.
The climate change expert is making an educated guess at the odds. The insurance figures are based upon actuarial tables built from empirical data.
Really? what reliable data do we have about the terror threat level of _today_, and how high would it be tomorrow? This does not stop the insurance industry from hazarding their best guess and allowing insurance against terrorist acts. In fact, 9/11 seems to suggest they underestimated the risk.
The big stumbling block here is not even Bush. It is the US Senate. If it were solely the President's job, surely Clinton would have entered the US into the Kyoto treaty.
I see. As I said in my other reply the president can sign, as they often did in past arms treaties, and the senate can later choose to ratify or not to as has also happened in the past.
Considering that he gave his opinion to Bush in an official capacity as advisor to the President in this isse, I'm pretty sure he was made aware of the various political options, although he didn't mention this point specifically during the conversation.
First, you have to evaluate insurance by its price.
Which he did.
Your friend was an idiot.
He has a Nobel prize, you don't. Given the evidence thus far, I'll assume the converse.
More importantly, Bush couldn't sign Kyoto for the same reason Clinton never did -
On the contrary, he could sign it subject to ratification as it was always done with arms treaties during the cold war.
In some cases the senate ratified, in others they didn't. The president can still choose to enforce the treaty in as much as he can through his executive orders (admittedly something that is more effectively done with the military than with pollution control).
All Bush did to stop pretending that we were ever going to ratify it.
I had a chance to ask an expert on climate change and Nobel Prize winner about the climate change controversy. His response, summarized was:
1. Evidence of some warming is incontrovertible. 2. This warming may or may not be due to C02 emissions. 3. At this point in time, since evidence is still preliminary, he estimates the chances of the greenhouse effect being a real, scientific fact at about 10%. 4. In day to day life, we buy insurance for, say, a house fire, at much lower odds than that (chance of your house catching fire is 0.01%). 5. Hence he supports a moderate version of the Kyoto protocol as insurance against the possibility of the greenhouse effect being real. 6. That was his recommendation to President George W. Bush: sign Kyoto. 7. Bush chose not to follow his advice.
but the Globe is so far left of center it is easy to notice.
What?? You gotta be kidding me.
The Globe considers itself a business newspaper, and hence panders to a conservative, fiscally responsible audience. To wit over the last few elections the Globe has endorsed the Conservatice party candidate most of the times, the liberal party candidate some times, and never the NDP candidate...
Seriously, if you find a newspaper that regularly supports conservative candidates leftist you should consider skipping some of your KKK meetings...
Slashdot Mirror
The superconductor industry has detailed plans which are known set several years in advance.
If 65nm technology is possible, actual design specs have already been approved and work has already started on the design of a fab facility. So there is no speculation in the report.
The article claims that "the average life span of a web page is 100 days". This is a very misleading statistic. What it really means is that the average web page is updated every 100 days, not that the page dies and goes away after 100 days.
Moreover, as you can imagine, authorative sources (the type that people are likely to quote) are updated much less frequently.
The grandparent poster was correct. Microsoft subsidized their risky projects with Windows and Office.
When Microsoft made some of its early mistakes, Windows and Office didn't even exist. DOS was not yet the dominant OS, and Lotus was bigger than Microsoft by an order of magnitude.
an expert at selling failures, such as Windows 95, which was crap outside of it's new UI.
Win95, however buggy, was way better than Windows 3.11. That was the choice regular folk had and guess what? they chose win95!
At the time the only realistic alternatives to Win 95 on Intel were (a) the expensive (but much more stable) WinNT or (b) the dying OS/2 Warp.
What do you get out of reading this book?
/. all you need is to diss M$ to get the inanest of comments moderated to "Score:5 Insightful".
Experience? Insight into how to avoid mistakes? A list of what works and what doesn't? a better understanding of history?
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
Which proves that in
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
BS. None of the mistakes were fatal because Microsoft has always been very good at picking up the pieces and moving forward. Many other companies had revenue sources/large war chests on which to fall back (Lotus, Novell, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Apple) yet they didn't.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes.
Nope. They made more than their fair share of mistakes.
Read Accidental Empires, where Cringley shows this was in great part due to the inexperience of their managers.
The whole concept is basically stupid. Even when we build a true AI, put it in an andriod body and teach it to do everything better than we can do it - so what?
Well, some people's perception of their place in this world is that we are somehow superior (as an intelligent species) to anybody else. So we get quite uncomfortable when some of our "uniqueness" is replicated by a bunch of wires.
Personally, I'm ok with that, but many others aren't hence the heated debates about who runs faster, who looms faster and who plays chess better.
By depending on price cuts for Athlon-64 and Opteron, AMD is predicting that it's sales of 32-bit CPUs will fall off and obsolete 32-bit systems in less than 3 years.
I've heard that one before, in 1992 when DEC was working on its Alpha chip. It didn't happen. 64 bit addresses are wasteful in terms of cache lines. Hence the VLIW architecture of the itanium. If you end up with a processor where most instructions (with operands) are 16 bits wide but processed four at a time is that really a 64 bit CPU?
The CNN article incorrectly suggests that the Mexican version of silbo is derived from the Canaries' Silbo Gomero. The Mexican whistled language develeped independently in a mountanous area far more rugged as the Canaries. This is an example of parallel development under similar circumstances.
In the European Alps, the solution was to develop yoddling (seriously).
You wouldn't have any references, would you?
I think it is in his autobiography "Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist".
Overall, money invested in science has historically paid off at better than 10-1.
True in general, but generally false for big science. As Luis Alvarez (a famous experimentalist) pointed out large amounts of research money tend to lead to wasteful experimental science. Michelson-Morley done today would have been along the lines of
1. Send satellite to orbit
2. Satellite doesn't work, send repair crew
3. Send second satellite to orbit moving in reverse direction
4. Send super duper high power laser beam from satellite A to satellite B
5. Measure speed difference using built in atomic clocks
6. Conclude that speed of light is independent of "ether"
Total bill: a few billion dollars.
Total cost of Michelson-Morley as originally done: a few thousand dollars.
(insert "priceless" joke here)
Read the Labor Code:
Yes it does say that if a company has an employment agreement with provisions saying employees must assign the rights of their inventions to their employer, those sections do not apply if the employee developed it on his or her own time, without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1. Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
2. Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
This is the part deleted by whoever submitted the story.
Notice that he maps the paths from his computer to the rest of the world. That is not the same as a map of the entire Internet.
To illustrate, if I map routes from, say Chicago, I'm likely to miss the direct connection between Seattle and San Francisco, as there is no traffic I could generate that would take that path.
Why? just because it has a correct, informed answer?
Hah! try again kido.
"Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." - Paul Saffo
Actually you can get a tactical nuke not much larger than ten D batteries. It was called a David Crocket by the US Army. Weight would be a problem though, as uranium/plutonium is really high density (almost twice the weight of lead per unit of volume).
This book by Richard Feynman is [from the ] 1980s. In it he discusses Reversible Computation and the Thermodynamics of Computing and quantum computing.
As usual, Feynman was way ahead of his time.
Reversible computing had been proposed twenty years earlier by an IBM engineer and widely recognized as an important idea, so one can hardly credit Feynman for this one.
There has been steady research on reversible computation over the last ten years or so. In fact the best paper award at one of the major CS conferences in 1993 was for a reversible computing paper.
Wedding photographer.
Surely the most overpaid job in the world is supermodel photographer.
I would gladly do the job for ten grand, so long as I can pay in instalments...
Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'
In related news, Tim O'Reilly was shot dead when coming out of his appartment building this morning. Witnesses described the shooter as a middle-aged, bald guy with a wide grin who ramsacked the bookshelves before escaping on foot.
This is old news in investment forums, where people quickly figured that the impact on the top line would be small, and in the bottom line darn near zero. Most of the money ($0.75 to be precise) goes to the artist/copyright holder, another chunk goes to the record company and Apple is left with about $0.10 measly cents per song or just about enough to pay for the bandwidth required. They don't seem to be losing money either, so it is not a loss leader.
For the next two points, one would consult an economist;
From Enron...
for the last two, an expert in US politics.
Like the ones who planned the "transition" to democracy in Iraq.
It's perfectly reasonable to ignore his non-expert advise.
Just like George Bush did...
The climate change expert is making an educated guess at the odds. The insurance figures are based upon actuarial tables built from empirical data.
Really? what reliable data do we have about the terror threat level of _today_, and how high would it be tomorrow? This does not stop the insurance industry from hazarding their best guess and allowing insurance against terrorist acts. In fact, 9/11 seems to suggest they underestimated the risk.
The big stumbling block here is not even Bush. It is the US Senate. If it were solely the President's job, surely Clinton would have entered the US into the Kyoto treaty.
I see. As I said in my other reply the president can sign, as they often did in past arms treaties, and the senate can later choose to ratify or not to as has also happened in the past.
Considering that he gave his opinion to Bush in an official capacity as advisor to the President in this isse, I'm pretty sure he was made aware of the various political options, although he didn't mention this point specifically during the conversation.
First, you have to evaluate insurance by its price.
Which he did.
Your friend was an idiot.
He has a Nobel prize, you don't. Given the evidence thus far, I'll assume the converse.
More importantly, Bush couldn't sign Kyoto for the same reason Clinton never did -
On the contrary, he could sign it subject to ratification as it was always done with arms treaties during the cold war.
In some cases the senate ratified, in others they didn't. The president can still choose to enforce the treaty in as much as he can through his executive orders (admittedly something that is more effectively done with the military than with pollution control).
All Bush did to stop pretending that we were ever going to ratify it.
Did I ever say otherwise?
Given his complete and utter ignorance of the American political process
Care to explain this?
I had a chance to ask an expert on climate change and Nobel Prize winner about the climate change controversy. His response, summarized was:
1. Evidence of some warming is incontrovertible.
2. This warming may or may not be due to C02 emissions.
3. At this point in time, since evidence is still preliminary, he estimates the chances of the greenhouse effect being a real, scientific fact at about 10%.
4. In day to day life, we buy insurance for, say, a house fire, at much lower odds than that (chance of your house catching fire is 0.01%).
5. Hence he supports a moderate version of the Kyoto protocol as insurance against the possibility of the greenhouse effect being real.
6. That was his recommendation to President George W. Bush: sign Kyoto.
7. Bush chose not to follow his advice.
but the Globe is so far left of center it is easy to notice.
What?? You gotta be kidding me.
The Globe considers itself a business newspaper, and hence panders to a conservative, fiscally responsible audience. To wit over the last few elections the Globe has endorsed the Conservatice party candidate most of the times, the liberal party candidate some times, and never the NDP candidate...
Seriously, if you find a newspaper that regularly supports conservative candidates leftist you should consider skipping some of your KKK meetings...