If I'm reading the text of their patent correctly, it's not for the motor, but for the magnet assembly used in the motor. Maybe I'm missing something, but even with that limitation the patent looks pretty weak. Doesn't it cover just about any use of permanent magnets in a variable configuration to modify a magnetic field?
Yeah, their pseudo-science is laid on thick, but it looks to me like a variant on the Lutec scam which is, funnily, always going to be ready "at the end of the year X" where X is whatever calendar year you are currently in. Check out their site. They even quote an anonymous but "notable" physicist, color me impressed:
Why is it that every new PMM for the last two decades has involved permanent magnets? Is there some kind of mad-scientist cabal that decrees these things?
Wikipedia's entry on Perpetual Motion Machines has a good explanation of the obsession with permanent magnets:
As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.
Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.
I completely agree. This is a meaningless poll, something I've written to Ric Ford about a couple of times, without reply. The Macintouch folks don't seem to understand how to conduct a meaningful survey and don't seem to care that their results are likely misleading. To be accurate, we have no way of knowing if their result are meaningful or not, since they have no way of measuring the biases in their sampling.
A pity this kind of nonsense is published by Macintouch and an equal pity that a site that claims to be "news for nerds" propagates an unscientific poll like this.
If the Gulf Stream isn't pushing as much water toward Europe, then the water is lingering longer in the Gulf of Mexico, which goes a long way to explain why so many storms churned up to Category 5 hurricanes as soon as they reached the Gulf all through this autumn.
"NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming. "
Their research suggests the major factors are changes to the east-west convection currents and the periodic El Nino cycle.
A small side note: Chapter 11 is not an option for companies in the UK. Better to use the more generic phrase "bankruptcy" than the US-specific "Chapter 11".
Personalized ads will be just as invisible, thanks to AdBlock.
My behavior with AdBlock: if the ad contains movement of any sort - animated GIFs, Flash etc. - I will always AdBlock it. Small, stationary ads I generally leave in place, especially if they are around the border of the article I am reading. As Firefox/Mozilla usage increases and tools like AdBlock become (hopefully) widespread, it will be interesting to see if advertising changes in response. The "conventional wisdom" in advertising is you need to make your ad stand out, hence pop-ups and wildly animated adverts. These are the most noxious and instrusive. If users start to react to this sort of ad, maybe it will die out over time? I could live with a world of small, static ads like Google's text ads - they can even be useful sometimes.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
- Roy Batty, Blade Runner
Great speech to go out on. Most spectacular beams in movies and they're not even shown. Sometimes what you don't see is the most compelling of all.
There is a scene early in the HHGTTG movie where Arthur Dent is enjoying a nice cup of tea; he leans back to contemplate the immenent destruction of his house and the camera tilts upwards to show a simply lovely faux-Elizabethen wooden beam on the ceiling. I'd say it was early B&Q, probably from their "homely cottage" period. Magnificent: ripe, woody and with that nice fake crackulature effect. Sadly this scene was cut from the theatrical release, but we can hope its restored in the DVD with full commentary from cast members and local archeologists.
Distinguish non-profit from non-revenue. These publishers may not be making profits but they still need revenues to continue to publish current and future books. Books cost money to author and print. If the publishers believe that Google's effort will impact their revenue streams they should oppose it. Whether they are right about the Google impact is a different question, of course...
It is interesting to note the products of unintended consequences. Just a few: Post-Its, Microwave Ovens, and Vasoline.
Probably the most lucrative example of this is Viagra, which was originally developed as a heart medication. I heard that the original developers considered its unintended side effect so unfortunate that they ceased development of the heart medicine until someone at Pfizer realized that perhaps the side effect might be worth something. I suspect that's an urban legend though....
The linked article says Morgan Stanley predicts...
Why on earth does the Slashdot headline say "Forbes predicts..." ?
Good to see the usual quality control procedures are in place. Sheesh.
More technical introduction to Quant analysis?
on
My Life as a Quant
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Thanks for the review - sounds like an interesting book. On this topic, can anyone recommend a good technical introduction to the techniques used for quantative analysis on Wall Street? Derman's book is more of a memoir than a technical introduction: does the latter exist?
Well, it's called "Internet Explorer". It's got the keyword - internet. That's what they're looking for. How in the nine hells are they supposed to know what "Firefox" is (most of them do not read the times). Firefox is not an intuitive name. It gives the average person absolutely no idea what it does by just looking at what the name is.
I'm not totally convinced by this argument. After all what does an "iPod" do? Does a "Ford Focus" give you a very sharp river crossing? What on earth has "Google" got to do with searching?
There are ways other than naming to successfully reach a broad consumer market. Firefox isn't a bad name: its reasonably memorable and its very different from IE which is an advantage for building the brand.
Part of IBM is smart...the stupid part of IBM (the mini/mainframe side) is still trying to charge $200k for an AS/400... that is comparable to a $5k HP Linux box."
I know what you're actually saying, but: if you're IBM and you're selling a $5k machine for $200k and can find 700,000 people a year who will buy it, that sounds pretty damn smart to me.
"Marvin the depressed robot"? WTF? He's Marvin the Paranoid Android. I know he is a robot who is depressed, but sheesh he is, was, and always will be the paranoid android.
If they can't even get that right... let's hope its just the phone sanitizers at Yahoo who made the mistake and not the movie's writer(s).
Looks like it's largely spilling out from the major industrial areas, which doesn't jive with the article you quote, but does go along w/ the article that the picture is in. It's spilling largely from the Detroit/Chicago area in the USA (as well as Pittsburgh/south NJ), eastern China, and southern England on that map, which coincides nicely w/ industrial centers. There really wasn't anything on top of Canada, I grew up under the northern end of that big red blob, and I was in upstate NY.
England isn't a major industrial nation - hasn't been for about 50 years. What remains of its heavy industry is concentrated in the north of the country, not the south, so this doesn't seem to align. I'd guess its actually the (mostly non-industrial) pollution from London.
Likewise I'm not sure what accounts for the large concentration of NO2 shown over the north of Italy. It looks like the Alps are generating a lot of pollution. That can't be right...
FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck
While I agree with the second part of this statement, FAQs significantly pre-date the web. They were certainly common back in the pre-Web Internet days of Usenet newsgroups - I contributed to several back in the late 80s. Did they start with Usenet, or do they predate that too? Perhaps we need a FAQ FAQ?
Look at it this way -- on any given night, in any given casino, there might be one or two players who play extremely well, several more who are pretty good, and literally hundreds who play like crap. The casinos make most of their money on that last group, and dole out a relatively small sum (compared to what they're taking in) to the truely gifted players.
And its not just whether the player is gifted. All casino games involve a strong element of luck as well as skill and sometimes the luck runs against the house. A few years ago I worked with a project manager who had worked cruise ships casinos. He loved to tell the tale of working on the original "Love Boat" - the ship that inspired the TV series. The casino was a major money making enterprise for the cruise line. On his first voyage, the casino hit a run of bad luck and the guests broke the bank on the first night. The ship literally didn't have enough cash to cover the bets; and they couldn't easily run out to an ATM, being at sea and all.
But they continued to play, even though they couldn't cash out all the chips, knowing that most of the guests wouldn't try to convert their winnings into cash until they hit the next port of call. They also knew that while they were down in the short term, in the long run the odds work in their favor. And sure enough by the time they hit port five days later they were ahead and the guests owed them.
If you're the house, you need substantial cash on hand because some days you'll loose big. In the long run, though, its a licence to print money.
...stop making decisions in your purchasing habits based solely on price (aka Wal*Mart shopping), and encourage those around you to do the same. Support a heterogenous shopping environment where quality, service, support AND price are all factors in the purchasing decision, rather than the first three being secondary considerations.
That's a blanket answer that doesn't hold up to detailed scrutiny. The priority of price, service, quality and support varies depending on what I'm purchasing and what my goals are. For low-cost commodity goods I care more about price than about service. Most people don't care that Wal*Mart have crappy service because they can save a few bucks on toilet paper. I don't want my loaf of bread to cost $20 because it comes with a "free" technical support phone service. But when I buy a computer for mission-critical work I care a great deal about the quality of the goods and the support services that come with it, and price is at the bottom of my list.
One size does not fit all in purchasing decisions. The great thing about a free market is I can choose what criteria to consider depending on my own circumstances and needs. I happen to shop at Whole Foods Market rather than Wal*Mart because that fits my income level and lifestyle, and I'm a fou-fou liberal eliteist. If I was earning minimum wage you can bet I'd be glad Wal*Mart was there to provide me with life's necessities at affordable prices and the quality of the service be damned.
From the review: "Then there's all the great stuff that, like so much on the Internet, no longer exists..." to which list we can, sadly, add apress.com.
However consider that the content in a big text field still has structure. If it is text data it is comprised of paragraphs, words, sentences, letters, etc. -- the structure is there just slightly more difficult for computers to work out.
Does 'common usage' trump the 'actual' definition here (e.g. structured vs. unstructured)?
I wish it didn't. Personally, as one in the DBMS field, I would much rather prefer people not use unstructured incorrectly (as 'common usage' does): technically "unstructured data" is an oxymoron. Data has structure otherwise it is not data (just random noise?).
Obviously at some level you are correct. But by your definition almost everything has structure, so its power as a term is reduced to almost nothing.
Structure is, like semantics, context dependent. In fact a useful definition of "structure" is: the organizing principle recognized by a particular mechanism. What is structure to one mechanism is meaningless "noise" to another. So although natural language text has a lot of structure to a person, it has no structure to a SQL database, while binary files are stuffed full of stucture for the appropriate software but remain meaningless to humans.
In fact to most software, natural language text that seems so rich in structure to you is something that cannot be manipulated - it can merely be stored and retrieved. Again, going back to databases, text blobs are just that: unstructured blocks of "noise" unless the database supports a text search engine, for example the SQL Server Full Text Engine.
When you are speaking in the context of software - which we are - it is useful to distinguish between structured data: that which is already in a structure our software can manipulate and unstructured data: that which requires separate parsing in order to manipulate.
Unstructured data? What are you talking about? Data is by definition structured!
This is a common term in the database, search and information retrieval fields. Broadly, "Structured data" refers to information that is split up into well-defined component fields; "unstructured data" is data in one undifferentiated field.
As usual this is context-specific and not truly a binary distinction, but consider an HTML web page that has been generated from a database. In the database the information is highly structured: stored as fields that have both syntactic and semantic rules associated with them. On the web page you have essentially a block of text, usually with minimal structure to it. Both contain the same information but one has lots of structure, the other has much less.
SQL is a good language for querying structured data, Google is a good "language" for querying unstructured data.
am i the only person that finds ever changing interfaces an annoyance??
Ever changing interfaces would indeed be an annoyance, but the point of skins is to let you find the UI you like and stick with it. For any individual user the UI is the same (unless you really want to keep changing it) its just that different users can have different UIs.
Its a bit like the "bloat" in large applications like Word. Of course most users only use 10-20% of Word's features, but each person can use a subtly different 10-20%. You choose to learn the subset of features that are useful to you and ignore the rest. Those others are only a minor distraction.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm reading the text of their patent correctly, it's not for the motor, but for the magnet assembly used in the motor. Maybe I'm missing something, but even with that limitation the patent looks pretty weak. Doesn't it cover just about any use of permanent magnets in a variable configuration to modify a magnetic field?
Yeah, their pseudo-science is laid on thick, but it looks to me like a variant on the Lutec scam which is, funnily, always going to be ready "at the end of the year X" where X is whatever calendar year you are currently in. Check out their site. They even quote an anonymous but "notable" physicist, color me impressed:
http://www.lutec.com.au/
Anyway, this looks like another in a long line of "use permanent magnets to make a perpetual motion device" concepts.
Yup, no doubt.
Why is it that every new PMM for the last two decades has involved permanent magnets? Is there some kind of mad-scientist cabal that decrees these things?
Wikipedia's entry on Perpetual Motion Machines has a good explanation of the obsession with permanent magnets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion
Take a look at the "techniques" section. The core mistake in these theories is that work done by permanent magnets doesn't weaken the magnet.
As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.
Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.
I completely agree. This is a meaningless poll, something I've written to Ric Ford about a couple of times, without reply. The Macintouch folks don't seem to understand how to conduct a meaningful survey and don't seem to care that their results are likely misleading. To be accurate, we have no way of knowing if their result are meaningful or not, since they have no way of measuring the biases in their sampling.
A pity this kind of nonsense is published by Macintouch and an equal pity that a site that claims to be "news for nerds" propagates an unscientific poll like this.
If the Gulf Stream isn't pushing as much water toward Europe, then the water is lingering longer in the Gulf of Mexico, which goes a long way to explain why so many storms churned up to Category 5 hurricanes as soon as they reached the Gulf all through this autumn.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report the recent hurricane season is not related to global warming or a shift in the Gulf Stream:
"NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming. "
Their research suggests the major factors are changes to the east-west convection currents and the periodic El Nino cycle.
An anonymous coward spews:
One of the longest running jokes in Internet history revolves around VRML... etc.
"Hilarious" and stolen from:
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=926
A small side note: Chapter 11 is not an option for companies in the UK. Better to use the more generic phrase "bankruptcy" than the US-specific "Chapter 11".
Personalized ads will be just as invisible, thanks to AdBlock.
My behavior with AdBlock: if the ad contains movement of any sort - animated GIFs, Flash etc. - I will always AdBlock it. Small, stationary ads I generally leave in place, especially if they are around the border of the article I am reading. As Firefox/Mozilla usage increases and tools like AdBlock become (hopefully) widespread, it will be interesting to see if advertising changes in response. The "conventional wisdom" in advertising is you need to make your ad stand out, hence pop-ups and wildly animated adverts. These are the most noxious and instrusive. If users start to react to this sort of ad, maybe it will die out over time? I could live with a world of small, static ads like Google's text ads - they can even be useful sometimes.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
- Roy Batty, Blade Runner
Great speech to go out on. Most spectacular beams in movies and they're not even shown. Sometimes what you don't see is the most compelling of all.
There is a scene early in the HHGTTG movie where Arthur Dent is enjoying a nice cup of tea; he leans back to contemplate the immenent destruction of his house and the camera tilts upwards to show a simply lovely faux-Elizabethen wooden beam on the ceiling. I'd say it was early B&Q, probably from their "homely cottage" period. Magnificent: ripe, woody and with that nice fake crackulature effect. Sadly this scene was cut from the theatrical release, but we can hope its restored in the DVD with full commentary from cast members and local archeologists.
Shouldnt non-profit people be in favour of this?
Distinguish non-profit from non-revenue. These publishers may not be making profits but they still need revenues to continue to publish current and future books. Books cost money to author and print. If the publishers believe that Google's effort will impact their revenue streams they should oppose it. Whether they are right about the Google impact is a different question, of course...
It is interesting to note the products of unintended consequences. Just a few: Post-Its, Microwave Ovens, and Vasoline.
Probably the most lucrative example of this is Viagra, which was originally developed as a heart medication. I heard that the original developers considered its unintended side effect so unfortunate that they ceased development of the heart medicine until someone at Pfizer realized that perhaps the side effect might be worth something. I suspect that's an urban legend though....
The summary says Morgan Stanley predicts...
The linked article says Morgan Stanley predicts...
Why on earth does the Slashdot headline say "Forbes predicts..." ?
Good to see the usual quality control procedures are in place. Sheesh.
Thanks for the review - sounds like an interesting book. On this topic, can anyone recommend a good technical introduction to the techniques used for quantative analysis on Wall Street? Derman's book is more of a memoir than a technical introduction: does the latter exist?
Well, it's called "Internet Explorer". It's got the keyword - internet. That's what they're looking for. How in the nine hells are they supposed to know what "Firefox" is (most of them do not read the times). Firefox is not an intuitive name. It gives the average person absolutely no idea what it does by just looking at what the name is.
I'm not totally convinced by this argument. After all what does an "iPod" do? Does a "Ford Focus" give you a very sharp river crossing? What on earth has "Google" got to do with searching?
There are ways other than naming to successfully reach a broad consumer market. Firefox isn't a bad name: its reasonably memorable and its very different from IE which is an advantage for building the brand.
Part of IBM is smart...the stupid part of IBM (the mini/mainframe side) is still trying to charge $200k for an AS/400... that is comparable to a $5k HP Linux box."
I know what you're actually saying, but: if you're IBM and you're selling a $5k machine for $200k and can find 700,000 people a year who will buy it, that sounds pretty damn smart to me.
"Marvin the depressed robot"? WTF? He's Marvin the Paranoid Android. I know he is a robot who is depressed, but sheesh he is, was, and always will be the paranoid android.
If they can't even get that right... let's hope its just the phone sanitizers at Yahoo who made the mistake and not the movie's writer(s).
Looks like it's largely spilling out from the major industrial areas, which doesn't jive with the article you quote, but does go along w/ the article that the picture is in. It's spilling largely from the Detroit/Chicago area in the USA (as well as Pittsburgh/south NJ), eastern China, and southern England on that map, which coincides nicely w/ industrial centers. There really wasn't anything on top of Canada, I grew up under the northern end of that big red blob, and I was in upstate NY.
England isn't a major industrial nation - hasn't been for about 50 years. What remains of its heavy industry is concentrated in the north of the country, not the south, so this doesn't seem to align. I'd guess its actually the (mostly non-industrial) pollution from London.
Likewise I'm not sure what accounts for the large concentration of NO2 shown over the north of Italy. It looks like the Alps are generating a lot of pollution. That can't be right...
FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck
While I agree with the second part of this statement, FAQs significantly pre-date the web. They were certainly common back in the pre-Web Internet days of Usenet newsgroups - I contributed to several back in the late 80s. Did they start with Usenet, or do they predate that too? Perhaps we need a FAQ FAQ?
Now I feel old.
Look at it this way -- on any given night, in any given casino, there might be one or two players who play extremely well, several more who are pretty good, and literally hundreds who play like crap. The casinos make most of their money on that last group, and dole out a relatively small sum (compared to what they're taking in) to the truely gifted players.
And its not just whether the player is gifted. All casino games involve a strong element of luck as well as skill and sometimes the luck runs against the house. A few years ago I worked with a project manager who had worked cruise ships casinos. He loved to tell the tale of working on the original "Love Boat" - the ship that inspired the TV series. The casino was a major money making enterprise for the cruise line. On his first voyage, the casino hit a run of bad luck and the guests broke the bank on the first night. The ship literally didn't have enough cash to cover the bets; and they couldn't easily run out to an ATM, being at sea and all.
But they continued to play, even though they couldn't cash out all the chips, knowing that most of the guests wouldn't try to convert their winnings into cash until they hit the next port of call. They also knew that while they were down in the short term, in the long run the odds work in their favor. And sure enough by the time they hit port five days later they were ahead and the guests owed them.
If you're the house, you need substantial cash on hand because some days you'll loose big. In the long run, though, its a licence to print money.
...stop making decisions in your purchasing habits based solely on price (aka Wal*Mart shopping), and encourage those around you to do the same. Support a heterogenous shopping environment where quality, service, support AND price are all factors in the purchasing decision, rather than the first three being secondary considerations.
That's a blanket answer that doesn't hold up to detailed scrutiny. The priority of price, service, quality and support varies depending on what I'm purchasing and what my goals are. For low-cost commodity goods I care more about price than about service. Most people don't care that Wal*Mart have crappy service because they can save a few bucks on toilet paper. I don't want my loaf of bread to cost $20 because it comes with a "free" technical support phone service. But when I buy a computer for mission-critical work I care a great deal about the quality of the goods and the support services that come with it, and price is at the bottom of my list.
One size does not fit all in purchasing decisions. The great thing about a free market is I can choose what criteria to consider depending on my own circumstances and needs. I happen to shop at Whole Foods Market rather than Wal*Mart because that fits my income level and lifestyle, and I'm a fou-fou liberal eliteist. If I was earning minimum wage you can bet I'd be glad Wal*Mart was there to provide me with life's necessities at affordable prices and the quality of the service be damned.
From the review: "Then there's all the great stuff that, like so much on the Internet, no longer exists..." to which list we can, sadly, add apress.com.
However consider that the content in a big text field still has structure. If it is text data it is comprised of paragraphs, words, sentences, letters, etc. -- the structure is there just slightly more difficult for computers to work out.
Does 'common usage' trump the 'actual' definition here (e.g. structured vs. unstructured)?
I wish it didn't. Personally, as one in the DBMS field, I would much rather prefer people not use unstructured incorrectly (as 'common usage' does): technically "unstructured data" is an oxymoron. Data has structure otherwise it is not data (just random noise?).
Obviously at some level you are correct. But by your definition almost everything has structure, so its power as a term is reduced to almost nothing.
Structure is, like semantics, context dependent. In fact a useful definition of "structure" is: the organizing principle recognized by a particular mechanism. What is structure to one mechanism is meaningless "noise" to another. So although natural language text has a lot of structure to a person, it has no structure to a SQL database, while binary files are stuffed full of stucture for the appropriate software but remain meaningless to humans.
In fact to most software, natural language text that seems so rich in structure to you is something that cannot be manipulated - it can merely be stored and retrieved. Again, going back to databases, text blobs are just that: unstructured blocks of "noise" unless the database supports a text search engine, for example the SQL Server Full Text Engine.
When you are speaking in the context of software - which we are - it is useful to distinguish between structured data: that which is already in a structure our software can manipulate and unstructured data: that which requires separate parsing in order to manipulate.
Unstructured data? What are you talking about? Data is by definition structured!
This is a common term in the database, search and information retrieval fields. Broadly, "Structured data" refers to information that is split up into well-defined component fields; "unstructured data" is data in one undifferentiated field.
As usual this is context-specific and not truly a binary distinction, but consider an HTML web page that has been generated from a database. In the database the information is highly structured: stored as fields that have both syntactic and semantic rules associated with them. On the web page you have essentially a block of text, usually with minimal structure to it. Both contain the same information but one has lots of structure, the other has much less.
SQL is a good language for querying structured data, Google is a good "language" for querying unstructured data.
am i the only person that finds ever changing interfaces an annoyance??
Ever changing interfaces would indeed be an annoyance, but the point of skins is to let you find the UI you like and stick with it. For any individual user the UI is the same (unless you really want to keep changing it) its just that different users can have different UIs.
Its a bit like the "bloat" in large applications like Word. Of course most users only use 10-20% of Word's features, but each person can use a subtly different 10-20%. You choose to learn the subset of features that are useful to you and ignore the rest. Those others are only a minor distraction.
I'm an idiot--I don't get it. Can anybody help?
Flensing means to remove the skin from something.