Mod parent up. Succinct statement of reality, rare.
Actually, it's been bad to be a startup for awhile. You can't invent any one thing, then bring it to market without stepping on 100's of patents at least, if it is significant - and why bother if it's not? Your one measly patent has no hope against a well-lawyer armed adversary who wants to lawyer you into the ground and steal your one patent from you in bankruptcy. You need a portfolio of 100's to 1000's of patents to get them interested in cross licensing. No startup can generate that.
I was a business owner (software dev for customers), then a VC. I've had to give up both, it's just too dangerous out there to be creative.
Heck, they even published my book! This, after having bought it from another publisher (...). None of the three publishers who have owned my book report positive sales numbers, yet I continue (years out) to get emails from people who have read the code that was provided with it, and which the book is about.
.
Yes, if you believe them, it's possible to sell negative numbers of books when it comes to figuring out how not to pay me the royalties. These guys make the **AA's look like pikers with their "hollywood accounting". Sure, I know I never sold a million copies, but...I know I sold tens of thousands because I've had that many unique emails; the original publisher, Miller Freeman, sanitized the book text of my email address - but didn't bother actually reading the code!
.
And now they are selling an e-book version, without asking me. One wonders what you'll do with a ton of fancy MFC code on a kindle....if they even provide it anymore.
.
These guys can go to hell - all of them. They are holding back science progress. Go check on the individual subscription rate for say, Rev Sci Ins with all the discounts. The cable TV guys need to learn how to bundle and overprice from them - for me, last I checked, it was $60k/year with all discounts to get hold of back issues of that one journal (in a bundle you can't pick and choose). I mean, wow, 60k/year per customer? Wonder how many servers they maintain for that - one? It's not like they wrote or even paid for those papers...I did, you did - tax paid research on which they got an additional publisher copyright to play this game with. Sure, if you can find the original author, they'll often send you a copy of the paper free, but if you're going through old physics looking for low hanging fruit - those guys are dead.
You can probably guess from my handle what kind of research I do for a living. While that's working on the future, yes, my Volt drives just fine on the solar power I produce on the roof of my lab. It's never even been charged from power co power since I bought it a year ago. Solar works, end of story, period, if you've got the room for it. The problem is, the human race tendency to bunch up way too tight in dirty cities with no room for solar - who then expect those of us wise enough to live in the countryside to donate our views, resources and so on to them so they can continue their insane way of doing things - while exporting their trash and pollution to us - by force, since there are less of us to vote than there are stupid people who think it's all owed to them by magic.
Yes, it's been known, and for years I've been telling the "Thorium is safe" whack jobs about it, so it's good to get "official" confirmation to shut those idiots up. I'm not against nuclear power, understand, just idiots who think that there's a magic/trivial solution to all the problems - most of which are human. We might not yet be responsible enough as a species to use this stuff wisely.
I'm a Volt owner, have onstar (you can pull the plug on that if you like, but lose things like the nice phone if you do), and hardly ever "hypermile". I didn't opt in to Voltstats, because yes, some people appear to drive downhill only to game the numbers. But not all of us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk6106_9IrE should say enough, but I have a lot more of these that are more exciting (but longer).
I drive on almost traffic-free twisty roads, where I have my choice - haul a&&, or hypermile without holding anyone up.
Screw a prius - every prius owner who has ridden in or driven my Volt gets real crestfallen - and now wants a Volt, end of story. No comparison between a total econo box and a sports car, c'mon. People trade in beemer 3 series, camaros, etc for these little rockets, and are still happy over at gm-volt.com (not a GM site).
Catch me if you can...and don't confuse a prius with a Volt - it's not the same world at all. Volts handle. I regularly find myself 5 lengths ahead when the lights turn green - I'm not holding anyone up, they can't catch me -
Back in the day, my band just got its own site. We gave away crap quality mp3's of our stuff, posted our gig schedules, and told people that if they wanted the good quality, they needed to send us money. We didn't "push" spam out to people, though that's also trivial with your email account and a simple list. Gheesh, it's not like it's all that expensive to just have your own site, and if they are fans, they probably prefer to visit when *they* feel like it, rather than get "spam announcements/ads" from you anyway. It worked well enough for us to pay off a couple of mortgages.
So, burn all your CD's and DVDs, go get a life and forget worrying about this mafia outfit entirely. Then they'll have to do like the cops do - "find" some coke or pot they dropped on your property when it turns out you're not actually guilty. Step it up a notch.
Uh, because code that only contains 32 bit pointers instead of 64 bit ones - even if it's only pointing 3 bytes from here - is tighter and runs faster on the same hardware in 32 bit mode? Test it. I'm not kidding. Not a windows guy anymore, but I do run windows in VB sometimes, on a 32 bit linux host. With PAE, I ca have more than 4gb of usable memory, just not more than that in any one process...so I can run multiple virtual machines that each think they own the 32 bit world...fast.
I'm doing it too, though not on such scale, here (see my sig). Doing the best I can to show how people really do things (often despite their PhD training).
And doing a lot of it myself. Off grid since '80 or so, drive electric car - nothing to do with green, all about freedom to NOT have to work for the man, and live my life as I choose. The one bill I pay is the one that gets me online.
Yup. I own a shooting range. Some kid brought a tec-9 to shoot, he bought it because it looked good on TV. Not a very scary gun as these things go. The kid was a decent shot with other guns, but with this one? At 10 paces he had trouble hitting a 30 gal water heater tank once between jams. My results weren't much better, and I'm an often-winning competitive shooter. I'd never own such a piece of crap myself.
I have NO credit rating, which evidently is worse than having a bad one. So, no CC's. But I just keep a separate checking account for the debit card.
And I turn off any "bounce proofing" by stealing from other accounts for it. Bingo, no problem, just don't keep any serious amount of money in the debit- card-only account.
.
I've had a debit card hacked. It was the payroll account for a company I ran, and some sucker was stealing $100/day from it. His timing was rotten, as he started 3 days before I got my statement - and what he was buying was prepaid phone cards at a time I was developing VoIP for a large customer and had zero need for such things (probably a junkie selling them at half price on the street). Lucky he had no way of knowing how much was in there...
.
So I pop on down to my small-town small bank. They tell me there's no protection on debit cards. I say, how much do I have with you, half a million or so?
Let's just cut me a cashier's check for the entire amount, and I'll go across the street where my money is safe. Short story - they initiated a fraud investigation, caught the guy, and made me whole *immediately* before the investigation got going. Being a big fish in a small pond is cool.
Mod parent up, wish I had mod points. Those of us who code and type very fast can't even find comfort in most laptops, much less that tiny crap. And, without us, or some magic new language that programs them by itself - those little pieces of crap will die. Game over.
Though with no intention I know of to become a product. Many page detailed write up of how this has been done with mostly junkyard parts, yet to great accuracy on my site (I didn't do this, one of the other members did).
6 pages of just how Jerry Biehler did it here: (with pix and videos) http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=78&hilit=laser+cutter
When hackaday linked this last month, we got slashdotted (but our servers handled it OK).
I live in the middle of nowhere myself, and a couple of places have turned out to be semi-major dump sites for washing machines, refridgerators, general junk from gas grills to tires and so on.
.
I take my lawn tractor and cart to these places and load that stuff up, then take it to the metal recyclers. Makes a few bucks if you wait till you have a load big enough to counter your gas money for the trip. A little extra work to separate the copper from the iron pays off nicely too.
.
Since I also heat with wood, snail mail spam is always welcome here - free btu's.
.
But if you just want to be angry - yeah, get a deer cam and experience the frustration that the cops aren't going to do diddly squat for you on this.
And the money spent on DHS and TSA isn't a white elephant? Oh, I forgot they now have all the dirt on their source of funding, and are sooo important in the creation of the police state we're heading towards in headlong fashion.
I NEVER buy a PC already built. I always just get a box (usually have one needs an upgrade around) a mobo, the parts. Easy-peasy. Having several (for the price of a single manufactured one, often) means I can have a hot-spare ready to go at all times, though the failure rates of the ones I build from parts (without the windows tax too) are very low and tend to occur early (the infamous bathtub failure curve), so tend to be inside the parts warranty anyway.
This is a case where educating yourself on what is after all, a relatively simple skill, pays off large.
Yep, that's another place GM, of all people, kicks ass in this business. You get 10.5 kwh out of the middle of a 16kwh battery, and it has a battery temperature management system, unlike the Leafs, which are dropping like....in hot climates.
The problem is the wait. I'd have bought one instead of the Volt I have had I not had to put money at risk for a year or more to maybe finally get one. But it's all good, I love my Volt.
Me either, when you can buy a Volt. I'm getting near 50 miles per charge, off solar - so depending on how you figure the money, that's pretty cheap. Then the gas engine kicks in and gets me around 40 mpg - and I have an 8 year bumper to bumper warranty, and a cool car, not a rigged up bad compromise. And no, more than 50% of our energy does NOT come from coal, thank heavens. You have old-bad numbers. But even if I paid power company rates for that charge, you're talking the first 40-50 miles for about $1.25....my lifetime average is about 180 mpg, because I burn gas so rarely going on my normal errand loops.
Obviously you haven't tried win 7 on virtual box. Update VB, change *anything*, try to export to another machine, it says it's pirated and no, the web reset doesn't work, so you get a few hours with "steve in india" to get it turned back on again. What a PITA - I only run one instance at a time, and there's only one of me, I paid, this DRM is crap. It's nice when it works, I agree, but I still prefer linux for reasons like this, and the fact I can customize it more to my tastes.
Volt has 8 year warranty on the battery. It takes just as long to put gas into it as any other car, no - less time, the tank is smaller. Mine gets 180 mpg daily, but when I go on long trips, it gets about 40 mpg on gas-only. Your arguments are specious. I can and have put two full size bicycles into the back without having to cram or bend anything. I sold all my other cars except for the truck I use to move firewood and horse crap. I haven't needed the truck for anything else, and the problem has become running it enough to keep *its* battery charged and the tires not flat-spotted.
I am NOT tied to a utility, I've been off grid since '79 and my PV system charges the car. What's not to like? Built in America by Americans, fuelled off the sun (panels largely made by BP solar(!) - and a little bit of gasoline. I may own this car for much more than a year before I can change the oil at this rate - it's not broken in yet.
Did I mention fun to drive?
Yeah, fossil fuels are great till they get scarce and you have to kill (and be killed) people to keep them flowing, like now - and subsidize the companies more than the car companies on top of that. You don't have to carry the oxidizer is the reason.
Buy American, the job you save might be your own. My car is American, as are the solar panels that charge it (yes, it takes lots but then you get no power bill either - for anything else). Quit paying rent to the man, own your own infrastructure. It makes you rich in more than one way. Freedom, dude.
Yeah, I'm crazy. I traded in a perfectly fine 2010 Camaro SS to get a Volt the instant GM offered it in my market area. I LOVE this car. I can make nearly all my common trips on the battery alone, but if I can't, no worries, the gas engine fires up and you wouldn't usually be able to tell without looking at one of the color displays in the dash or console. Mine is charged off my solar power system, which is totally off-grid. I have used 18 gallons of gas in 2012 so far, in 6k or so miles, some of that because I *wanted* to run the engine to break it in.
I haven't looked back. The Volt is far more agile in traffic and more fun on the twisty roads where I live than even the Camaro - and easier to see out of. It's not an econo box like a prius, it's a lux car. No, it's not as fast as the Camaro, but it's in some senses quicker, and eats ricky rice-racer for lunch on mountain roads.
Despite claims to the contrary by ditto heads, GM is at or near breakeven on this car, by the car, now. Some of the hate on electrics is due to taking all the NRE and billing it to the number of cars sold already - by that metric, the first hamburger sold at a new burger joint franchise is losing a million bucks per. Check the facts. By all means do NOT drive a Volt unless you can afford to take it home - because you'll just be upset if you can't.
You will also find a lot of the hate coming from funds provided by big oil, who get even more subsidies, not even counting the deaths overseas we create to keep oil "cheap". You don't think astroturfing was invented just for slashdot, right? GM's drivetrain is unique here - 2 electric motors and an ICE all connected to a dual input shaft CVT - patents Toyota doesn't want to have to buy, yet it's clearly the best way - and the clutches can be made to drop only at matched revs so they don't wear, and you don't feel it.
I used to chuckle at the fanbois of other product lines. Now I understand. This thing is game-changing.
Something consisting of Am and Be is going to be a neutron source, and be used to make the minerals exposed to it radioactive via neutron capture. Not long ago, nearly all neutron sources for this were "Active" in that they shot a beam of mixed DT against a target holding more D and T, on batteries. They're hot as hell, and like I said - make things around them radioactive. If you have this, and a gamma spectrometer down the same hole, by the resulting gamma spectrum, you can tell what's there.
Am has only about a 6 mo half life, so if it's not found, it's getting weaker fast. I've made my ow such sources with the Am source from a staticmaster brush and some Be to convert the alpha hits to emitted neutrons. I use my source to test neutron detectors for my fusion device. I have to replace the Am fairly frequently to keep the source emitting enough neutrons for this - my homebrew source is very small and not a big risk to anybody - you can barely detect it against the neutrons made in cosmic ray showers.
But I could be wrong too - there's not enough info to say.
If only gnome three wasn't just as bad as Metro and for mostly the same reasons - trying to capture a market that's mostly either apple or android, which is where the new sales are *at the moment*. What in hell were they thinking (or being paid by who to screw up linux right when we had a chance)?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's been bad to be a startup for awhile. You can't invent any one thing, then bring it to market without stepping on 100's of patents at least, if it is significant - and why bother if it's not? Your one measly patent has no hope against a well-lawyer armed adversary who wants to lawyer you into the ground and steal your one patent from you in bankruptcy. You need a portfolio of 100's to 1000's of patents to get them interested in cross licensing. No startup can generate that.
I was a business owner (software dev for customers), then a VC. I've had to give up both, it's just too dangerous out there to be creative.
.
Yes, if you believe them, it's possible to sell negative numbers of books when it comes to figuring out how not to pay me the royalties. These guys make the **AA's look like pikers with their "hollywood accounting". Sure, I know I never sold a million copies, but...I know I sold tens of thousands because I've had that many unique emails; the original publisher, Miller Freeman, sanitized the book text of my email address - but didn't bother actually reading the code!
.
And now they are selling an e-book version, without asking me. One wonders what you'll do with a ton of fancy MFC code on a kindle....if they even provide it anymore.
.
These guys can go to hell - all of them. They are holding back science progress. Go check on the individual subscription rate for say, Rev Sci Ins with all the discounts. The cable TV guys need to learn how to bundle and overprice from them - for me, last I checked, it was $60k/year with all discounts to get hold of back issues of that one journal (in a bundle you can't pick and choose). I mean, wow, 60k/year per customer? Wonder how many servers they maintain for that - one? It's not like they wrote or even paid for those papers...I did, you did - tax paid research on which they got an additional publisher copyright to play this game with. Sure, if you can find the original author, they'll often send you a copy of the paper free, but if you're going through old physics looking for low hanging fruit - those guys are dead.
You can probably guess from my handle what kind of research I do for a living. While that's working on the future, yes, my Volt drives just fine on the solar power I produce on the roof of my lab. It's never even been charged from power co power since I bought it a year ago. Solar works, end of story, period, if you've got the room for it. The problem is, the human race tendency to bunch up way too tight in dirty cities with no room for solar - who then expect those of us wise enough to live in the countryside to donate our views, resources and so on to them so they can continue their insane way of doing things - while exporting their trash and pollution to us - by force, since there are less of us to vote than there are stupid people who think it's all owed to them by magic.
Yes, it's been known, and for years I've been telling the "Thorium is safe" whack jobs about it, so it's good to get "official" confirmation to shut those idiots up. I'm not against nuclear power, understand, just idiots who think that there's a magic/trivial solution to all the problems - most of which are human. We might not yet be responsible enough as a species to use this stuff wisely.
I'm a Volt owner, have onstar (you can pull the plug on that if you like, but lose things like the nice phone if you do), and hardly ever "hypermile". I didn't opt in to Voltstats, because yes, some people appear to drive downhill only to game the numbers. But not all of us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk6106_9IrE should say enough, but I have a lot more of these that are more exciting (but longer). I drive on almost traffic-free twisty roads, where I have my choice - haul a&&, or hypermile without holding anyone up. Screw a prius - every prius owner who has ridden in or driven my Volt gets real crestfallen - and now wants a Volt, end of story. No comparison between a total econo box and a sports car, c'mon. People trade in beemer 3 series, camaros, etc for these little rockets, and are still happy over at gm-volt.com (not a GM site). Catch me if you can...and don't confuse a prius with a Volt - it's not the same world at all. Volts handle. I regularly find myself 5 lengths ahead when the lights turn green - I'm not holding anyone up, they can't catch me -
Back in the day, my band just got its own site. We gave away crap quality mp3's of our stuff, posted our gig schedules, and told people that if they wanted the good quality, they needed to send us money. We didn't "push" spam out to people, though that's also trivial with your email account and a simple list. Gheesh, it's not like it's all that expensive to just have your own site, and if they are fans, they probably prefer to visit when *they* feel like it, rather than get "spam announcements/ads" from you anyway. It worked well enough for us to pay off a couple of mortgages.
So, burn all your CD's and DVDs, go get a life and forget worrying about this mafia outfit entirely. Then they'll have to do like the cops do - "find" some coke or pot they dropped on your property when it turns out you're not actually guilty. Step it up a notch.
Uh, because code that only contains 32 bit pointers instead of 64 bit ones - even if it's only pointing 3 bytes from here - is tighter and runs faster on the same hardware in 32 bit mode? Test it. I'm not kidding. Not a windows guy anymore, but I do run windows in VB sometimes, on a 32 bit linux host. With PAE, I ca have more than 4gb of usable memory, just not more than that in any one process...so I can run multiple virtual machines that each think they own the 32 bit world...fast.
I'm doing it too, though not on such scale, here (see my sig). Doing the best I can to show how people really do things (often despite their PhD training). And doing a lot of it myself. Off grid since '80 or so, drive electric car - nothing to do with green, all about freedom to NOT have to work for the man, and live my life as I choose. The one bill I pay is the one that gets me online.
Yup. I own a shooting range. Some kid brought a tec-9 to shoot, he bought it because it looked good on TV. Not a very scary gun as these things go. The kid was a decent shot with other guns, but with this one? At 10 paces he had trouble hitting a 30 gal water heater tank once between jams. My results weren't much better, and I'm an often-winning competitive shooter. I'd never own such a piece of crap myself.
.
I've had a debit card hacked. It was the payroll account for a company I ran, and some sucker was stealing $100/day from it. His timing was rotten, as he started 3 days before I got my statement - and what he was buying was prepaid phone cards at a time I was developing VoIP for a large customer and had zero need for such things (probably a junkie selling them at half price on the street). Lucky he had no way of knowing how much was in there...
.
So I pop on down to my small-town small bank. They tell me there's no protection on debit cards. I say, how much do I have with you, half a million or so? Let's just cut me a cashier's check for the entire amount, and I'll go across the street where my money is safe. Short story - they initiated a fraud investigation, caught the guy, and made me whole *immediately* before the investigation got going. Being a big fish in a small pond is cool.
Mod parent up, wish I had mod points. Those of us who code and type very fast can't even find comfort in most laptops, much less that tiny crap. And, without us, or some magic new language that programs them by itself - those little pieces of crap will die. Game over.
Though with no intention I know of to become a product. Many page detailed write up of how this has been done with mostly junkyard parts, yet to great accuracy on my site (I didn't do this, one of the other members did). 6 pages of just how Jerry Biehler did it here: (with pix and videos) http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=78&hilit=laser+cutter When hackaday linked this last month, we got slashdotted (but our servers handled it OK).
.
I take my lawn tractor and cart to these places and load that stuff up, then take it to the metal recyclers. Makes a few bucks if you wait till you have a load big enough to counter your gas money for the trip. A little extra work to separate the copper from the iron pays off nicely too.
.
Since I also heat with wood, snail mail spam is always welcome here - free btu's.
.
But if you just want to be angry - yeah, get a deer cam and experience the frustration that the cops aren't going to do diddly squat for you on this.
And the money spent on DHS and TSA isn't a white elephant? Oh, I forgot they now have all the dirt on their source of funding, and are sooo important in the creation of the police state we're heading towards in headlong fashion.
This is a case where educating yourself on what is after all, a relatively simple skill, pays off large.
Yep, that's another place GM, of all people, kicks ass in this business. You get 10.5 kwh out of the middle of a 16kwh battery, and it has a battery temperature management system, unlike the Leafs, which are dropping like....in hot climates.
The problem is the wait. I'd have bought one instead of the Volt I have had I not had to put money at risk for a year or more to maybe finally get one. But it's all good, I love my Volt.
Me either, when you can buy a Volt. I'm getting near 50 miles per charge, off solar - so depending on how you figure the money, that's pretty cheap. Then the gas engine kicks in and gets me around 40 mpg - and I have an 8 year bumper to bumper warranty, and a cool car, not a rigged up bad compromise. And no, more than 50% of our energy does NOT come from coal, thank heavens. You have old-bad numbers. But even if I paid power company rates for that charge, you're talking the first 40-50 miles for about $1.25....my lifetime average is about 180 mpg, because I burn gas so rarely going on my normal errand loops.
Obviously you haven't tried win 7 on virtual box. Update VB, change *anything*, try to export to another machine, it says it's pirated and no, the web reset doesn't work, so you get a few hours with "steve in india" to get it turned back on again. What a PITA - I only run one instance at a time, and there's only one of me, I paid, this DRM is crap. It's nice when it works, I agree, but I still prefer linux for reasons like this, and the fact I can customize it more to my tastes.
I am NOT tied to a utility, I've been off grid since '79 and my PV system charges the car. What's not to like? Built in America by Americans, fuelled off the sun (panels largely made by BP solar(!) - and a little bit of gasoline. I may own this car for much more than a year before I can change the oil at this rate - it's not broken in yet.
Did I mention fun to drive?
Yeah, fossil fuels are great till they get scarce and you have to kill (and be killed) people to keep them flowing, like now - and subsidize the companies more than the car companies on top of that. You don't have to carry the oxidizer is the reason.
Buy American, the job you save might be your own. My car is American, as are the solar panels that charge it (yes, it takes lots but then you get no power bill either - for anything else). Quit paying rent to the man, own your own infrastructure. It makes you rich in more than one way. Freedom, dude.
You're describing what a Volt has already and needs no trailer.
I haven't looked back. The Volt is far more agile in traffic and more fun on the twisty roads where I live than even the Camaro - and easier to see out of. It's not an econo box like a prius, it's a lux car. No, it's not as fast as the Camaro, but it's in some senses quicker, and eats ricky rice-racer for lunch on mountain roads.
Despite claims to the contrary by ditto heads, GM is at or near breakeven on this car, by the car, now. Some of the hate on electrics is due to taking all the NRE and billing it to the number of cars sold already - by that metric, the first hamburger sold at a new burger joint franchise is losing a million bucks per. Check the facts. By all means do NOT drive a Volt unless you can afford to take it home - because you'll just be upset if you can't.
You will also find a lot of the hate coming from funds provided by big oil, who get even more subsidies, not even counting the deaths overseas we create to keep oil "cheap". You don't think astroturfing was invented just for slashdot, right? GM's drivetrain is unique here - 2 electric motors and an ICE all connected to a dual input shaft CVT - patents Toyota doesn't want to have to buy, yet it's clearly the best way - and the clutches can be made to drop only at matched revs so they don't wear, and you don't feel it.
I used to chuckle at the fanbois of other product lines. Now I understand. This thing is game-changing.
Something consisting of Am and Be is going to be a neutron source, and be used to make the minerals exposed to it radioactive via neutron capture. Not long ago, nearly all neutron sources for this were "Active" in that they shot a beam of mixed DT against a target holding more D and T, on batteries. They're hot as hell, and like I said - make things around them radioactive. If you have this, and a gamma spectrometer down the same hole, by the resulting gamma spectrum, you can tell what's there. Am has only about a 6 mo half life, so if it's not found, it's getting weaker fast. I've made my ow such sources with the Am source from a staticmaster brush and some Be to convert the alpha hits to emitted neutrons. I use my source to test neutron detectors for my fusion device. I have to replace the Am fairly frequently to keep the source emitting enough neutrons for this - my homebrew source is very small and not a big risk to anybody - you can barely detect it against the neutrons made in cosmic ray showers. But I could be wrong too - there's not enough info to say.
If only gnome three wasn't just as bad as Metro and for mostly the same reasons - trying to capture a market that's mostly either apple or android, which is where the new sales are *at the moment*. What in hell were they thinking (or being paid by who to screw up linux right when we had a chance)?