The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack
Hmm, the obvious alternative would seem to be prepaid cards, sold over the counter. If I was them, though, I'd build in a system like this just because people will probably try to hack the cards or system; I'd really want some way to know if hackers had been successful, so I could update the firmware.
If they want users to pay by credit card or similar, the need for a phone connection is obvious....
Geez, you might as well point out that 600 dollars [....] Is about half the price of a video iPod
The most expensive ipod I can find is 60GB/$400. One third cheaper than $600, rather than twice $600. $600 *is* about half the price of a 2GHz MacBook, though.
Granted, $400 and $600 are of the same order of magintude, but if the PS3 was $400, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.
There is a great desire among slashdotters to see Sony fail.
This may be true, I'm not sure. Personally I'm just plain incredulous; the PS2 cost $300 on release. I don't think I've ever witnessed a product doubling in price from one generation to the next.
One day China, Saudi Arabia, and all the other countries that own US dollars are going to decide that the US dollar is not a good investment (would you buy stock in any company that year after year goes further into debt?). That day is not far off.
I agree with most of your post, but this point raises an interesting point; when you have 10 trillion dollars, if you get rid of the first 5 trillion dollars, you'll find he second 5 trillion dollars are worth a lot less. Big increase in supply, no increase in demand, price point plumets.
In a sense the dollar has some stability simply because those who own it own volumes too large to practically sell...
On another note, no offense to the people in the article, but do we really call someone a computer support 'pro' after two hours of training and a pizza delivery job?
Camera phones are fast replacing a number of regular phones
Are they? The "article" quotes no source and no statistics for this claim. How can anyone be sure?
Well, it is my personal experience that nearly everyone getting a new (GSM) phone gets a camera phone. Contract users often get 'free' phones and 'upgrades' (new phones) on renewing the contracts (often yearly). This means there's not much of a market for cheap, low-featured phones; why pay for a cheap phone with a no colour screen, no camera, no IrDA and no bluetooth, when I can get a phone with all those features just by getting a friend's old contract phone unlocked?
And with single-chip 640x480 CMOS sensors availaible for less than $10, it's not suprising that manufacturers are keen to integrate them. $10 increase in cost, $20 increase in selling price = profit.
An increasing number of mobile phones are being produced and sold with camera capabilities.
"The convenience factor is very high but the quality and flexibility of digital cameras still far surpass camera phones," said Liz Cutting, senior imaging analyst, The NPD Group.
In 2005, 45 percent of all mobile phones sold in the U.S. were camera phones, up from 26 percent in 2004. Asia followed a very similar trend. Western Europe had a higher incidence of camera phones at 64 percent, and Japan had a much greater adoption rate with more than 90 percent of all mobile phones sold with camera capabilities both in 2004 and 2005.
"Even though there are an increasing number of mobile phones with camera capabilities, people are using them more for spur-of-the-moment picture taking and not for planned events where they are taking along better quality and higher resolution digital cameras," said Knoche.
InfoTrends projects that worldwide camera phone shipments will grow from 233 million units in 2004 to 903 million units in 2010. By 2010, camera phones are expected to account for 87% of all mobile phone handsets shipped.
The primary drivers behind this explosion are improvements in imaging functions (i.e. image sensors, zoom, and auto focus); rapid declines in prices for this functionality; higher speed wireless bandwidth; and easier-to-use handsets, services, and peripherals.
I'm sure people like Mintel have lots of reports availiable. You just often have to pay to see this stuff...
Like many of you, it's hard for me to remember a time when the word "Playstation" was synonymous with gaming. Sony has held the all mighty hardware thrown for an astounding eleven years at the time of writing this.
I would have said it's hard to remember a time when the word playstation wasn't synonymous with gaming. After all, Sony has held the console throne for a fair time.
I'm not sure I agree that a buyout is on the cards myself. If Sony's only product was the playstation, maybe, but look at their financial highlights; gaming only represents 10% of their income. Would Microsoft want a record label, a film studio or a consumer electronics business?
Sony's market cap is $48 billion. Granted, Microsoft might be able to stretch to this, but why not spend a little more and buy Apple for $59 billion? Apple is in the computer industry, and has the iPod. Seems like a much better purchase to me.
Well, different designs of motor have different performance characteristics.
For example, the starting torque of an asynchronous motor is actually well below the maximum torque, since at that point slip is infinite. Also, one would need a precise, low-speed control option for a mars rover; the speed of an induction motor depends on (among other things) the frequency of signal driving it. But the current in the rotor is created by induction, and at low frequencies, one gets less inductance. Obviously, one could use gearing to run the motor fast and the wheel slowly, but that would limit maximum speed.
An induction motor is a good choice for a solar-powered car, since the solar powered car is basically a constant load that gets driven at a constant speed. It's not so ace for a mars rover since, though you want a nice maximum speed, you also want to be able to do slow/precise positioning.
IMHO this discussion about the motor choice is 'swings and roundabouts' anyway:- Off-the-shelf coreless brushed DC motors can be 80% efficient, and a doubling of control electronics complexity for a 20% increase in efficiency doesn't seem like the greatest trade-off.
As to the people in this thread talking about brushless motors: its true that there are no brushes to wear out on brushless motors (and they have other benefits), but that mode of failure might not have been a priority at the design stage.
Reliability theory considers product failure to follow a "bathtub curve", with three modes of failure: Early failure, random failure and wear-out failure. Brushes wearing down would be a 'wear out failure'. The specification for the rovers called for 90 days of life; if the brushes are known to last longer than 90 days (which they have) there's no point in increasing the chance of a random failure during those 90 days just to extend the possible total lifetime.
To put it another way, if the specification says "90 days" it's better to have "90 days, 99% chance" than "900 days, 75% chance".
That's why I don't like unions, because I've seen the end game, not because of some "meme" or because I'm pro-employee-exploitation.
The union you describe in your post certainly sounds bad, I'd agree.
However, I'm not sure its true to say that "at least one union is bad, hence all unions are bad". That seems as incorrect as saying "at least one company is bad, hence all companies are bad".
I don't think much of a review that starts by copy-and-pasting the manufacturer's vague ad-speak like "Comfortable and Stable" "Use it anywhere!". Who the hell wants to read that? And for that matter, why are we looking at a "real world comparison" of a large and a small product from the same manufacturer? And why is the photo on the first page so unhelpful? It hardly comumunicates anything about what the product does at all. And the description doesn't help any. And if you read the article it basically says "I recommend the company that sent me these things for free".
Indeed, this article doth make me seethe with indignant rage.
Ahem. Physicist here. First of all, he _said_ that he had electric heat. If you have electric heat, then running your computer while the heat is on is free, just as he says.
Are you talking about the original poster? Because he said he had gas heating;
The house has gas central heating and a gas cooker.
Of course, electricity is approximately 3 times the cost of gas, per joule.
If my computer, power amp, water heater, or even incandescent lights, are running during the winter... every watt of power they generate will reduce my heating bill by almost exactly that watt.
It should be noted that electrically generating heat is approximately three times as expensive as generating the same heat from, say, piped gas.
This is because electricity is generated by converting (say) gas to heat then heat to electricity, and the heat-to-electricity stage is pretty inefficent. That means that if you use the gas directly, you need less gas in total, making things cheaper.
That's why people go to the bother of having piped gas for e.g. water heating, when electricity is so much easier to work with, control, install etc.
The inefficency can be counteracted with 'combined heat and power' power stations but these don't seem to be common, for some reason....
The worst case of abuse I have seen was when she took a class called "Capitalism and the Environment". Every single book and handout that she had was without exception Marxist.
It's always struck me as odd that in some subjects there is so much mention of Marx; I asked about this and learned that Marxist Theory is in fact distinct from the Marxist political philosophy; it just happened that the inventor of this useful step in dialectics was Marx.
I suggested to him that people might be better off not putting the name of such a polarising political figure into thier course and book titles; he suggested that once you are knowledgable enough to write a book you would no longer notice the oddness of the name. In computer parlance the notion of executing executables has nothing to do with firing squads, but someone with enough experience to influence word use in the computer industry is probably used to seeing executables called executables.
Of course, in the particular course you refer to, there may have been quite a bit of Marxist political philosophy; I havn't read the course material so it's hard to be sure. But I can say that in some academic areas you see lots of things with Marx written on them which don't actually suggest we should overthrow capitalism.
1) Presumably you've looked into 'home automation' and suchlike? I've never used it, but I understand there is a home automation standard known as X10. A quick search for "X10 HVAC" reveals there'safewabout.
2) You talk about VNCing in from work. A system that needs a PC on 24/7 probably won't lead to a net energy saving, since your computer is probably consuming more than 100W any time it's on. If you would have your computer on anyway, consider turning it off and getting a $10/month shell account somewhere for your server needs - that may well represent an overall saving for you.
3) Captive tappets rock my world. No stupid digital timer with a tedious 3-button interface, and much better than most other designs of mechanical timer. Not that appliccable to your needs, I know, but I thought I'd mention them anyway.
4) Get a radio-controlled system! I always thought they were a bad idea since you have the bother of batteries, but as I recently discovered, it means you don't have to mount the control unit anywhere, meaning you can keep it right by the door, or on a convenient shelf. Beats going into some upstairs cupboard to set things up - especially if you're changing it regularly.
So IBM are apparently claiming $20,350 at $50/hour to investigate the incident. That's 50 man days.
Perhaps the server had to be taken down for a quarter of a day (2 hours) and the company has 200 employees? That's 50 man days lost right there. Perhaps the intruder deleted the logs and the entire security setup had to be audited to detect and remove any other back doors he may have put in. Perhaps they got hit with fines due to some data protection law.
I can only think of one appliance that runs without intervention--that's the refrigerator. Everything else in my house that requires significant electricity is run on demand. I'm not sure I see how helpful this is going to be overall.
I don't know if you've looked at the 'dynamic demand' link above but basically it talks about reducing power consumption to deal with short-term grid fluctuations, i.e. people boiling the kettle during TV comercial breaks. At the moment short fluctuations are dealt with by having excess power plant capacity that can kick in really fast. They propose letting certain devices adjust thier consumption during these periods so less adjustment is needed at the power plant end.
In my house, because my landlord is too cheap to install a better system, we heat our water with electricity. The washing machine can reheat it's water, or heat all it's own water if you don't connect a hot supply. The dishwasher takes cold water only and heats it internally (and reuses it to save power, of course).
These devices could reduce the rate of heating during TV commercial breaks if they want to; it wouldn't matter to me. And given that each of the appliances listed above takes about as much power as a kettle, the compensation would work quite effectively.
As well as reducing the costs ascociated with dealing with these spikes in demand (i.e. in excess power generation capacity) this system would allow demand to increase when supply increases. That would be good for green power generation:- if your wind farm produces more power due to a big gust of wind, you can put it out onto the grid and demand will automatically increase to use it.
The really clever thing about the Dynamic Demand proposal is that increased demand slightly reduces the frequency of the mains, due to the increased load on the generators. This means you just have to measure the frequency of the mains to know what demand is like at the moment, making it possible to implement thier proposal cheaply and easily.
Do you really think we have maps are accurate to 1 cm?
Were anyone looking to implement an automated driver system (and it seems unlikely they would in the immediate future, since quite advanced technlolgy would be needed in addition to GPS in order to make a safe system) they could gather 1cm precision data by attatching a GPS reciever to thier vechicle and driving the route in question. Future cars would simply follow the same route.
Granted, driving down every road in the world would be a challenging proposition, but it wouldn't be an impossible one, considering the amount of money an auto-drive system could make.
I can see why governments would like the idea of more accurate GPS; vechicle navigation.
Knowing a location to plus-or-minus-10-meters might be fine for a guided missile, but for navigation it's pretty lousy; it couldn't tell which side of the road you were on, let alone whether you were in the right lane. With centimeter-level accuracy, though, you could practically make a car drive itself.
I suggest you study the history of the procurement of the Beretta 9mm pistol, replacement for the old.45 auto. Pay careful attention to the bits about known problems with metal fatigue, and slide recoil injuring shooters.
"The two unexpected slide breakage incidents occurred with non-NATO certified ammunition during non-standard, continuous endurance firing. Field use of the weapon was limited to 3,000 rounds each while a study of the cause of the breakage was being conducted"
and, later
"both breakage incidents occurred with a suspect lot of M882 ammunition."
If the procurement problems you refer to are with respect to two slide breakages while using defective and non-standard ammunition, I find it hard to blame the gun:- one could produce faulty ammunition to break even the most well-designed of guns.
Clearly, you can easily question my reply since I am not a gun expert; I'm really just reposting what I read in the article cited above. It's possible the problems and articles addressed in the article cited above are not the ones you have in mind; if this is the case, I would appreciate being pointed to a good article on the problems you describe.
Remember, the CEOs of tech companies failed to constrain costs in the late 1990s, and we know what happened to them. Be very careful in spending. Consider whether this port is absolutly necesssary.
Of course, Branson is a businessman with a successful track record, and his personal fortune of approximately $5,300 million would allow him to absorb the complete failure of this $225 million spaceport (although obviously no-one would want to lose that much money).
You could be worried about it but if you read it more narrowly and in context, it's not that scary. The USAF will fight in space, air, and cyberspace as it relates to warfare. Given how dependent the US miliary and other militaries are on information, it's reasonable to expect them to practice techniques for attacking and defend networks.
A good point, but I'm not sure I agree.
I would expect the USAF to be using 'cyberspace' to transport data in support of thier primary goals (air combat) and I would expect them to know how to defend that support infrastructure.
However, the USAF also transports things by road in trucks. I would expect them to know how to defend that support infrastructure. I don't see "ground combat" in the USAF's mission statement, though.
I infer from this that defending thier own support infrastructure will be done, even though it's not in thier "mission statement".
So why is defending cyberspace in thier mission statement?
What's really interesting about this article is this quote:
"Selling 1 million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests there is a market for legal video downloads," Steve Jobs, chief executive officer, said in a statement. "Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods."
Interpret that how you will, but I take it to mean apple wants to offer a larger number of TV shows for download to your Mac or PC.
First quarter fund raising earned a miniscule $96,648.70 and if they did as well (surpassing their goal by 25%) every quarter, they'd still be $352,605.20 shy of the 2005 budget.
True, but if instead of citing the Q1 fund drive you'd cited the more recent Q3 fund drive, you would have reported a rather more upbeat $243,930 USD. If they did as well every quarter, they would have $975,720 -- 32% over what they are budgeted to spend.
Given that the Q1 fundraising came in 25% over target (target $75,000) and the Q3 fundraising came in 22% over target (target $200,000) and the foundation didn't feel the need to run any Q2 fundraising, I don't think they're exactly about to declare themselves bankrupt.
I'll admit the servers get a little on the slow side at times, though....
Of course, consequences of improved design abilities (and the unlimited energy that results from it) will include (1) improved abilities to make materials, (2) improved materials, and (3) improved ability to efficently use the ones we've got.
(1) Take Aluminium, for example. It's extracted from the ore Bauxite using electricity. Bauxite is 7% of the earth's surface - with recycling, an effectlvely inexhaustable amount. The reason aluminium is so expensive is the cost of electricity required to extract it from the ore by a process called electrolysis. At the moment, Aluminium is only used in expensive cars like Audis. With unlimited energy, the price would drop below that of steel. Every car could use it.
(2) Furthermore, the better our technology, the better our high-tech materials. Carbon nanotubes improve year on year, and we already know that carbon nanotube-reinforced concrete has improved tensile strength and crack-resistance.
(3) Finally, good design can substantially cut material usage:- cars used to have a frame with metal panels attatched; modern cars combine the two, cutting weight and saving materials.
Granted, no amount of technology will give fake leather the 'snob value' of real leather, but the point where the two are indistinguishable? Attainable.
Isn't it a little premature to call Rokr a failure? I mean, sure, it wasn't the Apple-designed mana-from-heaven iPod phone many wanted, but other than that, what's so bad about it?
Well, I can think of three main things that make ipods desirable:
1) The user interface
The click wheel is reputedly excellent, and the shuffle's simplistic design makes it easy to operate without looking at.
2) The styling, which looks cool to others
Consider the picture of it. It looks nothing like an ipod and every bit like a generic mobile phone. It's not even white, so it probably doesn't come with ipod headphones.
With no ipod styling and no ipod headphones, you no longer have the 'ipod image'.
3) iTunes Music Store
Is pretty easy to use.
Well, this phone still has iTMS support, but it doesn't have the first two features. Perhaps there isn't anything "really bad" about it, but there's nothing really good about it either, if you ask me. To me it looks like a generic mobile phone with a generic MP3 player in it. And don't we already have them? It's hardly an idea that's hard to come up with...
Slashdot Mirror
The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack
Hmm, the obvious alternative would seem to be prepaid cards, sold over the counter. If I was them, though, I'd build in a system like this just because people will probably try to hack the cards or system; I'd really want some way to know if hackers had been successful, so I could update the firmware.
If they want users to pay by credit card or similar, the need for a phone connection is obvious....
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Geez, you might as well point out that 600 dollars [....] Is about half the price of a video iPod
The most expensive ipod I can find is 60GB/$400. One third cheaper than $600, rather than twice $600. $600 *is* about half the price of a 2GHz MacBook, though.
Granted, $400 and $600 are of the same order of magintude, but if the PS3 was $400, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.
There is a great desire among slashdotters to see Sony fail.
This may be true, I'm not sure. Personally I'm just plain incredulous; the PS2 cost $300 on release. I don't think I've ever witnessed a product doubling in price from one generation to the next.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
One day China, Saudi Arabia, and all the other countries that own US dollars are going to decide that the US dollar is not a good investment (would you buy stock in any company that year after year goes further into debt?). That day is not far off.
I agree with most of your post, but this point raises an interesting point; when you have 10 trillion dollars, if you get rid of the first 5 trillion dollars, you'll find he second 5 trillion dollars are worth a lot less. Big increase in supply, no increase in demand, price point plumets.
In a sense the dollar has some stability simply because those who own it own volumes too large to practically sell...
I'm not sure why this is linked via digg. Here's direct link.
On another note, no offense to the people in the article, but do we really call someone a computer support 'pro' after two hours of training and a pizza delivery job?
Well, it is my personal experience that nearly everyone getting a new (GSM) phone gets a camera phone. Contract users often get 'free' phones and 'upgrades' (new phones) on renewing the contracts (often yearly). This means there's not much of a market for cheap, low-featured phones; why pay for a cheap phone with a no colour screen, no camera, no IrDA and no bluetooth, when I can get a phone with all those features just by getting a friend's old contract phone unlocked?
And with single-chip 640x480 CMOS sensors availaible for less than $10, it's not suprising that manufacturers are keen to integrate them. $10 increase in cost, $20 increase in selling price = profit.
But you're probably looking for a reputable citation. Google to the rescue! According to one market research group:
Or here's another (it has a nice graph, check it out):
I'm sure people like Mintel have lots of reports availiable. You just often have to pay to see this stuff...
Michael
First line:
Like many of you, it's hard for me to remember a time when the word "Playstation" was synonymous with gaming. Sony has held the all mighty hardware thrown for an astounding eleven years at the time of writing this.
I would have said it's hard to remember a time when the word playstation wasn't synonymous with gaming. After all, Sony has held the console throne for a fair time.
I'm not sure I agree that a buyout is on the cards myself. If Sony's only product was the playstation, maybe, but look at their financial highlights; gaming only represents 10% of their income. Would Microsoft want a record label, a film studio or a consumer electronics business?
Sony's market cap is $48 billion. Granted, Microsoft might be able to stretch to this, but why not spend a little more and buy Apple for $59 billion? Apple is in the computer industry, and has the iPod. Seems like a much better purchase to me.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Well, different designs of motor have different performance characteristics.
For example, the starting torque of an asynchronous motor is actually well below the maximum torque, since at that point slip is infinite. Also, one would need a precise, low-speed control option for a mars rover; the speed of an induction motor depends on (among other things) the frequency of signal driving it. But the current in the rotor is created by induction, and at low frequencies, one gets less inductance. Obviously, one could use gearing to run the motor fast and the wheel slowly, but that would limit maximum speed.
An induction motor is a good choice for a solar-powered car, since the solar powered car is basically a constant load that gets driven at a constant speed. It's not so ace for a mars rover since, though you want a nice maximum speed, you also want to be able to do slow/precise positioning.
IMHO this discussion about the motor choice is 'swings and roundabouts' anyway:- Off-the-shelf coreless brushed DC motors can be 80% efficient, and a doubling of control electronics complexity for a 20% increase in efficiency doesn't seem like the greatest trade-off.
As to the people in this thread talking about brushless motors: its true that there are no brushes to wear out on brushless motors (and they have other benefits), but that mode of failure might not have been a priority at the design stage.
Reliability theory considers product failure to follow a "bathtub curve", with three modes of failure: Early failure, random failure and wear-out failure. Brushes wearing down would be a 'wear out failure'. The specification for the rovers called for 90 days of life; if the brushes are known to last longer than 90 days (which they have) there's no point in increasing the chance of a random failure during those 90 days just to extend the possible total lifetime.
To put it another way, if the specification says "90 days" it's better to have "90 days, 99% chance" than "900 days, 75% chance".
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Eh, most things are sufficiently lit wherever there's sufficient light.....
That's why I don't like unions, because I've seen the end game, not because of some "meme" or because I'm pro-employee-exploitation.
The union you describe in your post certainly sounds bad, I'd agree.
However, I'm not sure its true to say that "at least one union is bad, hence all unions are bad". That seems as incorrect as saying "at least one company is bad, hence all companies are bad".
Michael
I don't think much of a review that starts by copy-and-pasting the manufacturer's vague ad-speak like "Comfortable and Stable" "Use it anywhere!". Who the hell wants to read that? And for that matter, why are we looking at a "real world comparison" of a large and a small product from the same manufacturer? And why is the photo on the first page so unhelpful? It hardly comumunicates anything about what the product does at all. And the description doesn't help any. And if you read the article it basically says "I recommend the company that sent me these things for free".
Indeed, this article doth make me seethe with indignant rage.
Ahem. Physicist here. First of all, he _said_ that he had electric heat. If you have electric heat, then running your computer while the heat is on is free, just as he says.
Are you talking about the original poster? Because he said he had gas heating;
The house has gas central heating and a gas cooker.
Of course, electricity is approximately 3 times the cost of gas, per joule.
Michael
If my computer, power amp, water heater, or even incandescent lights, are running during the winter... every watt of power they generate will reduce my heating bill by almost exactly that watt.
It should be noted that electrically generating heat is approximately three times as expensive as generating the same heat from, say, piped gas.
This is because electricity is generated by converting (say) gas to heat then heat to electricity, and the heat-to-electricity stage is pretty inefficent. That means that if you use the gas directly, you need less gas in total, making things cheaper.
That's why people go to the bother of having piped gas for e.g. water heating, when electricity is so much easier to work with, control, install etc.
The inefficency can be counteracted with 'combined heat and power' power stations but these don't seem to be common, for some reason....
Just my $0.02,
Michael
The worst case of abuse I have seen was when she took a class called "Capitalism and the Environment". Every single book and handout that she had was without exception Marxist.
It's always struck me as odd that in some subjects there is so much mention of Marx; I asked about this and learned that Marxist Theory is in fact distinct from the Marxist political philosophy; it just happened that the inventor of this useful step in dialectics was Marx.
I suggested to him that people might be better off not putting the name of such a polarising political figure into thier course and book titles; he suggested that once you are knowledgable enough to write a book you would no longer notice the oddness of the name. In computer parlance the notion of executing executables has nothing to do with firing squads, but someone with enough experience to influence word use in the computer industry is probably used to seeing executables called executables.
Of course, in the particular course you refer to, there may have been quite a bit of Marxist political philosophy; I havn't read the course material so it's hard to be sure. But I can say that in some academic areas you see lots of things with Marx written on them which don't actually suggest we should overthrow capitalism.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
1) Presumably you've looked into 'home automation' and suchlike? I've never used it, but I understand there is a home automation standard known as X10. A quick search for "X10 HVAC" reveals there's a few about.
2) You talk about VNCing in from work. A system that needs a PC on 24/7 probably won't lead to a net energy saving, since your computer is probably consuming more than 100W any time it's on. If you would have your computer on anyway, consider turning it off and getting a $10/month shell account somewhere for your server needs - that may well represent an overall saving for you.
3) Captive tappets rock my world. No stupid digital timer with a tedious 3-button interface, and much better than most other designs of mechanical timer. Not that appliccable to your needs, I know, but I thought I'd mention them anyway.
4) Get a radio-controlled system! I always thought they were a bad idea since you have the bother of batteries, but as I recently discovered, it means you don't have to mount the control unit anywhere, meaning you can keep it right by the door, or on a convenient shelf. Beats going into some upstairs cupboard to set things up - especially if you're changing it regularly.
Michael
So IBM are apparently claiming $20,350 at $50/hour to investigate the incident. That's 50 man days.
Perhaps the server had to be taken down for a quarter of a day (2 hours) and the company has 200 employees? That's 50 man days lost right there. Perhaps the intruder deleted the logs and the entire security setup had to be audited to detect and remove any other back doors he may have put in. Perhaps they got hit with fines due to some data protection law.
Just some thoughts.
Michael
I can only think of one appliance that runs without intervention--that's the refrigerator. Everything else in my house that requires significant electricity is run on demand. I'm not sure I see how helpful this is going to be overall.
I don't know if you've looked at the 'dynamic demand' link above but basically it talks about reducing power consumption to deal with short-term grid fluctuations, i.e. people boiling the kettle during TV comercial breaks. At the moment short fluctuations are dealt with by having excess power plant capacity that can kick in really fast. They propose letting certain devices adjust thier consumption during these periods so less adjustment is needed at the power plant end.
In my house, because my landlord is too cheap to install a better system, we heat our water with electricity. The washing machine can reheat it's water, or heat all it's own water if you don't connect a hot supply. The dishwasher takes cold water only and heats it internally (and reuses it to save power, of course).
These devices could reduce the rate of heating during TV commercial breaks if they want to; it wouldn't matter to me. And given that each of the appliances listed above takes about as much power as a kettle, the compensation would work quite effectively.
As well as reducing the costs ascociated with dealing with these spikes in demand (i.e. in excess power generation capacity) this system would allow demand to increase when supply increases. That would be good for green power generation:- if your wind farm produces more power due to a big gust of wind, you can put it out onto the grid and demand will automatically increase to use it.
The really clever thing about the Dynamic Demand proposal is that increased demand slightly reduces the frequency of the mains, due to the increased load on the generators. This means you just have to measure the frequency of the mains to know what demand is like at the moment, making it possible to implement thier proposal cheaply and easily.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Do you really think we have maps are accurate to 1 cm?
Were anyone looking to implement an automated driver system (and it seems unlikely they would in the immediate future, since quite advanced technlolgy would be needed in addition to GPS in order to make a safe system) they could gather 1cm precision data by attatching a GPS reciever to thier vechicle and driving the route in question. Future cars would simply follow the same route.
Granted, driving down every road in the world would be a challenging proposition, but it wouldn't be an impossible one, considering the amount of money an auto-drive system could make.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
I can see why governments would like the idea of more accurate GPS; vechicle navigation.
Knowing a location to plus-or-minus-10-meters might be fine for a guided missile, but for navigation it's pretty lousy; it couldn't tell which side of the road you were on, let alone whether you were in the right lane. With centimeter-level accuracy, though, you could practically make a car drive itself.
Michael
I suggest you study the history of the procurement of the Beretta 9mm pistol, replacement for the old .45 auto. Pay careful attention to the bits about known problems with metal fatigue, and slide recoil injuring shooters.
Taking your advice, I googled for "procurement of the Beretta 9mm pistol". The first link returned (from the rec.guns FAQ) essentially said that there was no fault or problem with the gun; it said
"The two unexpected slide breakage incidents occurred with non-NATO certified ammunition during non-standard, continuous endurance firing. Field use of the weapon was limited to 3,000 rounds each while a study of the cause of the breakage was being conducted"
and, later
"both breakage incidents occurred with a suspect lot of M882 ammunition."
If the procurement problems you refer to are with respect to two slide breakages while using defective and non-standard ammunition, I find it hard to blame the gun:- one could produce faulty ammunition to break even the most well-designed of guns.
Clearly, you can easily question my reply since I am not a gun expert; I'm really just reposting what I read in the article cited above. It's possible the problems and articles addressed in the article cited above are not the ones you have in mind; if this is the case, I would appreciate being pointed to a good article on the problems you describe.
Michael
Remember, the CEOs of tech companies failed to constrain costs in the late 1990s, and we know what happened to them. Be very careful in spending. Consider whether this port is absolutly necesssary.
Of course, Branson is a businessman with a successful track record, and his personal fortune of approximately $5,300 million would allow him to absorb the complete failure of this $225 million spaceport (although obviously no-one would want to lose that much money).
Michael
You could be worried about it but if you read it more narrowly and in context, it's not that scary. The USAF will fight in space, air, and cyberspace as it relates to warfare. Given how dependent the US miliary and other militaries are on information, it's reasonable to expect them to practice techniques for attacking and defend networks.
A good point, but I'm not sure I agree.
I would expect the USAF to be using 'cyberspace' to transport data in support of thier primary goals (air combat) and I would expect them to know how to defend that support infrastructure.
However, the USAF also transports things by road in trucks. I would expect them to know how to defend that support infrastructure. I don't see "ground combat" in the USAF's mission statement, though.
I infer from this that defending thier own support infrastructure will be done, even though it's not in thier "mission statement".
So why is defending cyberspace in thier mission statement?
Just my $0.02,
Michael
What's really interesting about this article is this quote:
"Selling 1 million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests there is a market for legal video downloads," Steve Jobs, chief executive officer, said in a statement. "Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods."
Interpret that how you will, but I take it to mean apple wants to offer a larger number of TV shows for download to your Mac or PC.
Michael
First quarter fund raising earned a miniscule $96,648.70 and if they did as well (surpassing their goal by 25%) every quarter, they'd still be $352,605.20 shy of the 2005 budget.
True, but if instead of citing the Q1 fund drive you'd cited the more recent Q3 fund drive, you would have reported a rather more upbeat $243,930 USD. If they did as well every quarter, they would have $975,720 -- 32% over what they are budgeted to spend.
Given that the Q1 fundraising came in 25% over target (target $75,000) and the Q3 fundraising came in 22% over target (target $200,000) and the foundation didn't feel the need to run any Q2 fundraising, I don't think they're exactly about to declare themselves bankrupt.
I'll admit the servers get a little on the slow side at times, though....
Michael
Raw materials are a little harder.
Of course, consequences of improved design abilities (and the unlimited energy that results from it) will include (1) improved abilities to make materials, (2) improved materials, and (3) improved ability to efficently use the ones we've got.
(1) Take Aluminium, for example. It's extracted from the ore Bauxite using electricity. Bauxite is 7% of the earth's surface - with recycling, an effectlvely inexhaustable amount. The reason aluminium is so expensive is the cost of electricity required to extract it from the ore by a process called electrolysis. At the moment, Aluminium is only used in expensive cars like Audis. With unlimited energy, the price would drop below that of steel. Every car could use it.
(2) Furthermore, the better our technology, the better our high-tech materials. Carbon nanotubes improve year on year, and we already know that carbon nanotube-reinforced concrete has improved tensile strength and crack-resistance.
(3) Finally, good design can substantially cut material usage:- cars used to have a frame with metal panels attatched; modern cars combine the two, cutting weight and saving materials.
Granted, no amount of technology will give fake leather the 'snob value' of real leather, but the point where the two are indistinguishable? Attainable.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Isn't it a little premature to call Rokr a failure? I mean, sure, it wasn't the Apple-designed mana-from-heaven iPod phone many wanted, but other than that, what's so bad about it?
Well, I can think of three main things that make ipods desirable:
1) The user interface
The click wheel is reputedly excellent, and the shuffle's simplistic design makes it easy to operate without looking at.
2) The styling, which looks cool to others
Consider the picture of it. It looks nothing like an ipod and every bit like a generic mobile phone. It's not even white, so it probably doesn't come with ipod headphones.
With no ipod styling and no ipod headphones, you no longer have the 'ipod image'.
3) iTunes Music Store
Is pretty easy to use.
Well, this phone still has iTMS support, but it doesn't have the first two features. Perhaps there isn't anything "really bad" about it, but there's nothing really good about it either, if you ask me. To me it looks like a generic mobile phone with a generic MP3 player in it. And don't we already have them? It's hardly an idea that's hard to come up with...
Just my $0.02,
Michael