Re:Is Opera Google's doorway to beating Microsoft?
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Google to Buy Opera?
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Sir,
For a power-CEO, you seem to spend a lot of time on Slashdot!
Not integrated with personalized Google page
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Gmail Gets RSS
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· Score: 1
It would have been cool if the list of feeds automatically included the feeds I use on http://www.google.com/ig (Google's try at my.yahoo that I've come to like), but no such luck.
You can turn off web clips easily enough in GMail's settings. Right now I find it distracting, but I'll give it a week or so.
If the recycling is cost-effective, it necessarily must be fairly energy-efficient (otherwise it would cost a lot).
For energy-intensive systems like batteries, wind turbines, solar cells, etc., the start/end energy costs, while not trivial, are *generally a fraction* of the energy created/consumed/whatever during the service life.
NIMH batteries Nickel, potassium, hydrogen. Maybe some less-friendly metals. Not too scary.
Comparing solid waste and air pollution is tough to do- how do you compare the certainty of airborne pollutants with the risks of, say, groundwater cotamination from improperly buried solid waste? Hard to say. But at least you know what the impacts of the latter are, and who might be affected.
Also, you can recycle NIMH batteries; I believe the value of the recovered nickel makes this worthwhile.
So find another problem; the environmental impact of the batteries of a hybrid are probably not a deal-killer.
This has been studied many, many times. I've done so myself.
The answer is that, assuming New England's generating mix, full-electric vehicles produce signficantly less emissions than conventional vehicles (except for sulphur oxides). This is for well-to-wheel (i.e. after all transmission, charging, etc. losses). This is b/c power plants tend to be much more efficient, and have more effective emissions controls, than cars. Of course, this result is heavily dependent on the your generating mix- coal is not very clean; hydro and nuclear are (at least from an airborne emissions standpoint).
Telling people that they have to meet their deadlines does not make you an asshole. It's *how* you tell them that differentiates the assholes from the (rare) good managers.
the 'and laugh in their faces derisively' comment is just an indication that Linus thinks this is important. I don't know Linus, and I think I only know one person who ever might Linus, but I know from reading enough articles what his personality and sense of humor are like. Threatening to laugh derisively at someone is a little different from throwing a chair in anger...
Ok, now that you are writing with a slightly less insulting tone, this conversation is more fun.
Where to start...
Let's see, you claim that If I were an exec and someone came up to me and said "if we use smaller batch sizes, we can save on overall costs", I can 100% guarantee you I would not say "but small batch sizes are inefficient!"., and yet, despite my repeated assertions to the contrary, you insist that I understand completely. I'm missing nothing.. To be true to your claim, I would have expected that you might ask a (non-rhetorical) question or two about what I'm trying to educate you about- you know, maybe try to do some due diligence, rather than dismiss an idea (that lean manufacturing is actually a significant improvement in operating a company) outright. You have acted *exactly* like your "Ivy League genius". But that's not directly relevant to our discussion.
For the record, since you brought it up, I am a highly-(over)-paid consultant, who also attended an Ivy League institution. Summa cum laude. I have a degree from MIT, too. But I really learned about lean concepts from someone with no college education. Go figure.
You have demonstrated that you have a good textbook understanding of how to maximize ROR. Well done. However, the thrust of lean methods (of which JIT is but one component) is not "hey, you should really try to maximize ROR." Lean concepts represent a coherent methodology for determining *how* to maximize ROR in ways that clearly have not always been obvious.
You seem to view the exercise of maximizing ROR as a reductionist exercise. If you start with a business with certain characteristics, all you have to do is evaluate where the biggest bang for the buck is, and that's where you invest in to optimize ROR. While all well and good in a textbook, this is oversimplified bullshit in practice. Let's say your business has 10 important parameters (cost of labor, etc.), and that some of these are tightly or weakly (or negatively) coupled with others. Do you know how many degrees of freedom there are in such a system? How do you analyze that? Do you construct models of the 1000's of different possible paths forward (if you do, I mentioned I'm a consultant, give me a call so I can book you through to my retirement)? Do you have perfect data to feed these models, and perfectly rational managers to evaluate the results? No, no, and no. So what do you do? You develop some theories, evaluate them with the best data you can get, and fumble around in mediocrity for years. Or you develop or embrace a set of principles that allow you to set up a system that is almost self-optimizing. That is lean.
Let me follow up on a couple of other thoughts. One, I find your comment if delivering goods "just in time" would have induced a higher ROI in the Middle Ages, people would have done it then absolutely fantasticly naive. My friend, in the Middle Ages, people had lost the institutional knowledge developed by the Romans and others hundreds of years earlier that public sanitation is a really good thing. People had forgotten in the Dark Ages that burying your shit properly saves lives. Yeah, these people were all about optimizing ROR. This may seem like a digression, but I have a point: you seem to subscribe to the notion that people are paragons of reason, so as a consequence we inherently progress forward in a more efficient and enlightened manner over time. People, left to their own devices, will naturally migrate to optimal methods. This is crap. How many counter-examples should I provide? People behave in an approximately rational manner, but it is a loose approximation at best.
Let me take one final shot in this installment that perhaps will help. Let's take your HQP ("High-Quality-Production") parody. Yes, I agree that the observation that you may be able to increase profit by improving quality is trivial. But here's the thing: If you developed a *method* that *minimized* the investment X necess
First, why do you have to write like such a smart-ass? Especially when it is clear, as I have pointed out repeatedly, that you are missing something?
You still are missing it. Lean manufacturing, of which JIT is a component, is not about prioritizing optimizations. It is about optimizing the whole, which often results in steps that appear, in isolation, to be sub-optimal. It is not about optimizing a, then b, then c, etc., in the order of greatest return. It is about realizing that a, b, c, etc. are linked, and the best optimization for (a) actually might suck for (b) and (c). It is about realizing that large batch sizes, which optimize the isolated per-piece cost of any particular step, actually totally suck, and, counter-intuitively, small batch sizes, which are not optimal for any isolated case, actually allow you to reduce waste everywhere in the supply chain.
One would think that optimizing across the whole supply chain would be obvious, but history clearly shows that it is not. Toyota gets it; the Japanese learned the general idea from Deming; plenty of companies that should know better still do not get it.
Please read Lean Thinking. From your posts, it is clear that you have not. That, plus your attitude, makes further discussion fruitless. You have the same attitude as auto execs who still do not understand why Toyota is eating their lunch by any measure (market share, profit- you name it).
JIT is one component of lean manufacturing. What lean manufacturing aims to do is *not* optimize just (g), or (b), or (c). What lean manufacturing does is optimize (a + b + c + d + e + f + g), in particular by focusing on (d, e, f, g), which in turn have positive impacts on (a, b), which are your largest costs.
I agree that JIT as a method of just minimizing (g) is nothing new. And that's how a lot of companies use it. But that's not how Toyota uses it.
You are really not understanding some important concepts about how JIT fits into a bigger picture. Read the book Lean Thinking and get back to me.
There's a lot of unimportant crap that gets published in scientific journals and/or accepted for conferences (I know; I've written some of this crap). Important papers (published research that actually has implications for anyone other than the authors) tends to get reviewed more thoroughly- the whole "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" principle. That's not to say that fabrication doesn't happen, it's just that eventually it's going to get caught, at least for the stuff that matters. The issue is whether it gets caught sooner rather than later.
I respectfully disagree. JIT by itself it just an optimization, but it is a core a component of lean manufacturing, which was in many respects a novel concept, at least as compared with classic mass manufacturing. I know this viscerally because in my job we try to teach lean concepts to many of our clients, and some Just Don't Get It. It seems so counter-intuitive to them ("Why would I want small batch sizes? That takes more set-up time!")
Of course, it's a matter of semantics, what is truly "new" vs. what is an improvement on existing methods. You could argue that Calculus was just an improvement on existing methods; same for the transistor. I would disagree and call those new; same with lean manufacturing (although not quite as dramatic a jump).
Reading:
Go to Lean.org and read Lean Thinking, The Machine that Changed the World, etc.
My post was not intended to be a comprehensive list of great events in World History. I also omitted, e.g., the expulsion of the Persians from Greece circa 480 BC, and so forth.
What matters with Rosa Parks was what happened afterward. A civil rights movement that fundamentally impacted US culture, and the rights of ~20M African Americans. Maybe not up there with WWII, but not inconsequential.
And it was also a nod to acknowledge her due to her recent death.
Word: Where do I start? So many quirks that can literally suck hours out of the day, especially when editing a large, complex, structured document (and yes, I do use styles correctly). Change tracking works well, except when it totally fails. I *hate* Word. Powerpoint: Aside from the fundamental shortcomings, Powerpoint is OK, unless, say, you want more than 2 basic layouts (masters) per presentation. Or what any sort of structure beyond a basic outline. All that said, PowerPoint is better at what is does than Word. Excel: Not too many complaints, other than it's used for lots of things it probably isn't the best tool for (e.g. statistical analysis of huge datasets). Actally a pretty good RAD tool. Overall, I like Excel a lot. Access: Great front-end for query and report building (though formatting reports has some strange bugs), horrible, horrible, horrible built-in DB engine (that, e.g., silently truncates any data over 2GB or so, and tend to hang indefinately on moderately complex queries). Outlook: Great for groupware features and online/offline syncing (some bugs, not terrible); terrible security and span control (even with the latest stuff). Integration between components: Sometimes fine, sometimes horribly lame (e.g. occasional truncation of text strings after 256 characters, pasting tables between apps is rarely clean). Scripting: Apart from the broken security model and the horrible nature of VB, the scripting capabilities of Office are pretty great.
I'm not claiming that other office suites are better, but I would say that for each task, there are generally better tools for the job. And integrating data from disparate tools isn't necessarily a big problem (I can pretty easily pipe stat. charts from R to Powerpoint, for example).
In sum, Office is not bad, but I would hardly say it is the pinnacle of what an office suite could be. We can do better, I'm just not sure that OO.o is it (I'd say it'll take 'til OO.o 5.x or so).
MS's greatest product? I'd have to vote for SQL Server. MapPoint also was an advance when it first came out.
I think that's going a bit far. Good for them and everything, but world history? V-E day, Einstein's 1905, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus- these events impact world history (sorry for the all-Western examples); making a chip oscillate faster than an arbitrary threshold does not.
Do you think a law degree or a medical degree is so lucrative compared to a good engineering degree?
You forgot an MBA. Regardless, the answer to your qestion, here in the US, is generally *yes*.
Now, most doctors (at least the ones I know) work crazy hours, and their job description is increasing crappy, thanks to our wonderful health care system. And corporate lawyers (at least the ones I know) tend to work crazy hours, and man I can't imagine anything more life-sucking than corporate law.
Me, I am trained as an evironmental engineer, but chose to cash out as a management consultant instead. I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied, though, and plan at some point to give up some $ for something more meaningful with less travel (young kids at home).
I think Wine is a Good Thing, and I think porting FLOSS applications to Windows is a Good Thing. Both approaches provide a conduit for gradual transition away from proprietary operating systems, and that is a Good Thing.
Of course, developing true cross-platform applications is the best, but that's not always so easy with regard to legacy applications.
Apparently, very many times. Key points: It wasn't 1995, it was 1988, and Hansen wasn't off by 300%, he was frickin' on the money.
Also, remember that Arrhenius predicted anthropogenic CO2 global warming over 100 years ago. The basic premise- more atmospheric CO2 means more trapped heat- is well-understood and not controversial. The open question is the strength of the climate's negative feedback cycles.
When I'm working overseas, and I want to *see* my kids
When I want to type with both hands and communicate at the same time
When I want to *see how the other person reacts to what I say*
Text is a useful and efficient means of interpersonal communications, but it doesn't capture the full range of live interpersonal communication. Video sure as hell doesn't either, but it's a lot better than text. Audio only is somewhere between the two.
For some long-distance communications (like to answer a quick question), text is sufficient. For others, it is sorely lacking.
I, for one, would love cross-platform videoconferencing that Just Works (open protocols, please).
Atmospheric ozone chemistry is really dynamic and variable. It's not necessarily inconsistent to observe that we may see a record-setting hole this year, but in general, the trend for global ozone is improving. If you RBFA you'll see that they are not entirely in conflict.
BBC: Two years ago researchers produced the first evidence that damage to the ozone layer is slowing down; globally, they showed, destruction continues, but at a slower rate than before.
That is down to the Montreal Protocol, established in 1987, which has limited production and use of CFCs and related substances.
But the indications are that the ozone layer will not be back to its pre-industrial condition for at least another 50 years.
CNN: The ozone layer has stopped shrinking but it will take decades to start recovering, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday....
An analysis of satellite records and surface monitoring instruments shows the ozone layer has grown a bit thicker in some parts of the world, but is still well below normal levels, the scientists report in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
For my industry, the business case (benefits vs. costs) for RFID just isn't attractive right now.
From what I've heard, one of Wal-Mart's real motivations is that they have not-great in-store inventory management- they have problems keeping the front of the store properly replenished from the back of the store, b/c checking for empty shelf locations is time-consuming and slow. And an empty shelf = lost sales.
There are (at least) 2 solutions to this problem: better processes and management, and RFID, which will make it easier to find out where the hell the inventory is in the store.
With 2500+ stores in the U.S. alone, standardizing processes and ensuring a high-quality management and workforce is a tall order (esp. given Wal-Mart's pay and benefits); Wal-Mart seems to have decided that it'd be better to implement RFID, which will let them know how much inventory is on the shelf vs. in the back room.
In this case, though, the answer is you could (if you store energy by splitting or raising water or whatever). It just has got to get cost-competitive.
Sure it is; it gives you a sense of whether large-scale use of this type of solar-thermal would use too muhc land. If the answer was that you'd need 200% of U.S. land area to provide 10% of our electrical demand, that would tell you something.
Using 100% of U.S. demand as a reference is entirely relevant. Please note that I did not advocate supplying 100% of electrical demand via solar (though the calcs show that you could without using an absurd amount of land).
#1: Fair enough. I'll still take the land use impact over emissions of CO2, SOx, NOx, mercury, etc.
#2: It was a scaling exercise. I did not propose supplying 100% of our electricity, nor did I recommend 1 huge array. I was merely demonstrating that it's feasible, from a land-use perspective, to get a lot of juice from these things.
Me, I'd install these all of the U.S. in greyfield areas (parling lots, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Sir,
For a power-CEO, you seem to spend a lot of time on Slashdot!
It would have been cool if the list of feeds automatically included the feeds I use on http://www.google.com/ig (Google's try at my.yahoo that I've come to like), but no such luck.
You can turn off web clips easily enough in GMail's settings. Right now I find it distracting, but I'll give it a week or so.
If the recycling is cost-effective, it necessarily must be fairly energy-efficient (otherwise it would cost a lot).
For energy-intensive systems like batteries, wind turbines, solar cells, etc., the start/end energy costs, while not trivial, are *generally a fraction* of the energy created/consumed/whatever during the service life.
Here are your stats.
NIMH batteries Nickel, potassium, hydrogen. Maybe some less-friendly metals. Not too scary.
Comparing solid waste and air pollution is tough to do- how do you compare the certainty of airborne pollutants with the risks of, say, groundwater cotamination from improperly buried solid waste? Hard to say. But at least you know what the impacts of the latter are, and who might be affected.
Also, you can recycle NIMH batteries; I believe the value of the recovered nickel makes this worthwhile.
So find another problem; the environmental impact of the batteries of a hybrid are probably not a deal-killer.
This has been studied many, many times. I've done so myself.
The answer is that, assuming New England's generating mix, full-electric vehicles produce signficantly less emissions than conventional vehicles (except for sulphur oxides). This is for well-to-wheel (i.e. after all transmission, charging, etc. losses). This is b/c power plants tend to be much more efficient, and have more effective emissions controls, than cars. Of course, this result is heavily dependent on the your generating mix- coal is not very clean; hydro and nuclear are (at least from an airborne emissions standpoint).
Telling people that they have to meet their deadlines does not make you an asshole. It's *how* you tell them that differentiates the assholes from the (rare) good managers.
the 'and laugh in their faces derisively' comment is just an indication that Linus thinks this is important. I don't know Linus, and I think I only know one person who ever might Linus, but I know from reading enough articles what his personality and sense of humor are like. Threatening to laugh derisively at someone is a little different from throwing a chair in anger...
Ok, now that you are writing with a slightly less insulting tone, this conversation is more fun.
Where to start...
Let's see, you claim that If I were an exec and someone came up to me and said "if we use smaller batch sizes, we can save on overall costs", I can 100% guarantee you I would not say "but small batch sizes are inefficient!"., and yet, despite my repeated assertions to the contrary, you insist that I understand completely. I'm missing nothing.. To be true to your claim, I would have expected that you might ask a (non-rhetorical) question or two about what I'm trying to educate you about- you know, maybe try to do some due diligence, rather than dismiss an idea (that lean manufacturing is actually a significant improvement in operating a company) outright. You have acted *exactly* like your "Ivy League genius". But that's not directly relevant to our discussion.
For the record, since you brought it up, I am a highly-(over)-paid consultant, who also attended an Ivy League institution. Summa cum laude. I have a degree from MIT, too. But I really learned about lean concepts from someone with no college education. Go figure.
You have demonstrated that you have a good textbook understanding of how to maximize ROR. Well done. However, the thrust of lean methods (of which JIT is but one component) is not "hey, you should really try to maximize ROR." Lean concepts represent a coherent methodology for determining *how* to maximize ROR in ways that clearly have not always been obvious.
You seem to view the exercise of maximizing ROR as a reductionist exercise. If you start with a business with certain characteristics, all you have to do is evaluate where the biggest bang for the buck is, and that's where you invest in to optimize ROR. While all well and good in a textbook, this is oversimplified bullshit in practice. Let's say your business has 10 important parameters (cost of labor, etc.), and that some of these are tightly or weakly (or negatively) coupled with others. Do you know how many degrees of freedom there are in such a system? How do you analyze that? Do you construct models of the 1000's of different possible paths forward (if you do, I mentioned I'm a consultant, give me a call so I can book you through to my retirement)? Do you have perfect data to feed these models, and perfectly rational managers to evaluate the results? No, no, and no. So what do you do? You develop some theories, evaluate them with the best data you can get, and fumble around in mediocrity for years. Or you develop or embrace a set of principles that allow you to set up a system that is almost self-optimizing. That is lean.
Let me follow up on a couple of other thoughts. One, I find your comment if delivering goods "just in time" would have induced a higher ROI in the Middle Ages, people would have done it then absolutely fantasticly naive. My friend, in the Middle Ages, people had lost the institutional knowledge developed by the Romans and others hundreds of years earlier that public sanitation is a really good thing. People had forgotten in the Dark Ages that burying your shit properly saves lives. Yeah, these people were all about optimizing ROR. This may seem like a digression, but I have a point: you seem to subscribe to the notion that people are paragons of reason, so as a consequence we inherently progress forward in a more efficient and enlightened manner over time. People, left to their own devices, will naturally migrate to optimal methods. This is crap. How many counter-examples should I provide? People behave in an approximately rational manner, but it is a loose approximation at best.
Let me take one final shot in this installment that perhaps will help. Let's take your HQP ("High-Quality-Production") parody. Yes, I agree that the observation that you may be able to increase profit by improving quality is trivial. But here's the thing: If you developed a *method* that *minimized* the investment X necess
First, why do you have to write like such a smart-ass? Especially when it is clear, as I have pointed out repeatedly, that you are missing something?
You still are missing it. Lean manufacturing, of which JIT is a component, is not about prioritizing optimizations. It is about optimizing the whole, which often results in steps that appear, in isolation, to be sub-optimal. It is not about optimizing a, then b, then c, etc., in the order of greatest return. It is about realizing that a, b, c, etc. are linked, and the best optimization for (a) actually might suck for (b) and (c). It is about realizing that large batch sizes, which optimize the isolated per-piece cost of any particular step, actually totally suck, and, counter-intuitively, small batch sizes, which are not optimal for any isolated case, actually allow you to reduce waste everywhere in the supply chain.
One would think that optimizing across the whole supply chain would be obvious, but history clearly shows that it is not. Toyota gets it; the Japanese learned the general idea from Deming; plenty of companies that should know better still do not get it.
Please read Lean Thinking. From your posts, it is clear that you have not. That, plus your attitude, makes further discussion fruitless. You have the same attitude as auto execs who still do not understand why Toyota is eating their lunch by any measure (market share, profit- you name it).
No. No. No.
JIT is one component of lean manufacturing. What lean manufacturing aims to do is *not* optimize just (g), or (b), or (c). What lean manufacturing does is optimize (a + b + c + d + e + f + g), in particular by focusing on (d, e, f, g), which in turn have positive impacts on (a, b), which are your largest costs.
I agree that JIT as a method of just minimizing (g) is nothing new. And that's how a lot of companies use it. But that's not how Toyota uses it.
You are really not understanding some important concepts about how JIT fits into a bigger picture. Read the book Lean Thinking and get back to me.
There's a lot of unimportant crap that gets published in scientific journals and/or accepted for conferences (I know; I've written some of this crap). Important papers (published research that actually has implications for anyone other than the authors) tends to get reviewed more thoroughly- the whole "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" principle. That's not to say that fabrication doesn't happen, it's just that eventually it's going to get caught, at least for the stuff that matters. The issue is whether it gets caught sooner rather than later.
I respectfully disagree. JIT by itself it just an optimization, but it is a core a component of lean manufacturing, which was in many respects a novel concept, at least as compared with classic mass manufacturing. I know this viscerally because in my job we try to teach lean concepts to many of our clients, and some Just Don't Get It. It seems so counter-intuitive to them ("Why would I want small batch sizes? That takes more set-up time!")
Of course, it's a matter of semantics, what is truly "new" vs. what is an improvement on existing methods. You could argue that Calculus was just an improvement on existing methods; same for the transistor. I would disagree and call those new; same with lean manufacturing (although not quite as dramatic a jump).
Reading:
Go to Lean.org and read Lean Thinking, The Machine that Changed the World, etc.
Cuz I already had one WWII event.
My post was not intended to be a comprehensive list of great events in World History. I also omitted, e.g., the expulsion of the Persians from Greece circa 480 BC, and so forth.
What matters with Rosa Parks was what happened afterward. A civil rights movement that fundamentally impacted US culture, and the rights of ~20M African Americans. Maybe not up there with WWII, but not inconsequential.
And it was also a nod to acknowledge her due to her recent death.
My Office gripes:
Word: Where do I start? So many quirks that can literally suck hours out of the day, especially when editing a large, complex, structured document (and yes, I do use styles correctly). Change tracking works well, except when it totally fails. I *hate* Word.
Powerpoint: Aside from the fundamental shortcomings, Powerpoint is OK, unless, say, you want more than 2 basic layouts (masters) per presentation. Or what any sort of structure beyond a basic outline. All that said, PowerPoint is better at what is does than Word.
Excel: Not too many complaints, other than it's used for lots of things it probably isn't the best tool for (e.g. statistical analysis of huge datasets). Actally a pretty good RAD tool. Overall, I like Excel a lot.
Access: Great front-end for query and report building (though formatting reports has some strange bugs), horrible, horrible, horrible built-in DB engine (that, e.g., silently truncates any data over 2GB or so, and tend to hang indefinately on moderately complex queries).
Outlook: Great for groupware features and online/offline syncing (some bugs, not terrible); terrible security and span control (even with the latest stuff).
Integration between components: Sometimes fine, sometimes horribly lame (e.g. occasional truncation of text strings after 256 characters, pasting tables between apps is rarely clean).
Scripting: Apart from the broken security model and the horrible nature of VB, the scripting capabilities of Office are pretty great.
I'm not claiming that other office suites are better, but I would say that for each task, there are generally better tools for the job. And integrating data from disparate tools isn't necessarily a big problem (I can pretty easily pipe stat. charts from R to Powerpoint, for example).
In sum, Office is not bad, but I would hardly say it is the pinnacle of what an office suite could be. We can do better, I'm just not sure that OO.o is it (I'd say it'll take 'til OO.o 5.x or so).
MS's greatest product? I'd have to vote for SQL Server. MapPoint also was an advance when it first came out.
have made world history
I think that's going a bit far. Good for them and everything, but world history? V-E day, Einstein's 1905, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus- these events impact world history (sorry for the all-Western examples); making a chip oscillate faster than an arbitrary threshold does not.
Do you think a law degree or a medical degree is so lucrative compared to a good engineering degree?
You forgot an MBA. Regardless, the answer to your qestion, here in the US, is generally *yes*.
Now, most doctors (at least the ones I know) work crazy hours, and their job description is increasing crappy, thanks to our wonderful health care system. And corporate lawyers (at least the ones I know) tend to work crazy hours, and man I can't imagine anything more life-sucking than corporate law.
Me, I am trained as an evironmental engineer, but chose to cash out as a management consultant instead. I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied, though, and plan at some point to give up some $ for something more meaningful with less travel (young kids at home).
Yes, please call Microsoft and see what they say.
I think Wine is a Good Thing, and I think porting FLOSS applications to Windows is a Good Thing. Both approaches provide a conduit for gradual transition away from proprietary operating systems, and that is a Good Thing.
Of course, developing true cross-platform applications is the best, but that's not always so easy with regard to legacy applications.
Oh man, you were talking a good game until you came out with the The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300% LIE.
How many times must this lie be debunked?
Apparently, very many times. Key points: It wasn't 1995, it was 1988, and Hansen wasn't off by 300%, he was frickin' on the money.
Also, remember that Arrhenius predicted anthropogenic CO2 global warming over 100 years ago. The basic premise- more atmospheric CO2 means more trapped heat- is well-understood and not controversial. The open question is the strength of the climate's negative feedback cycles.
Video is NOT always an improvement.
But many times it is:
When I'm working overseas, and I want to *see* my kids
When I want to type with both hands and communicate at the same time
When I want to *see how the other person reacts to what I say*
Text is a useful and efficient means of interpersonal communications, but it doesn't capture the full range of live interpersonal communication. Video sure as hell doesn't either, but it's a lot better than text. Audio only is somewhere between the two.
For some long-distance communications (like to answer a quick question), text is sufficient. For others, it is sorely lacking.
I, for one, would love cross-platform videoconferencing that Just Works (open protocols, please).
Atmospheric ozone chemistry is really dynamic and variable. It's not necessarily inconsistent to observe that we may see a record-setting hole this year, but in general, the trend for global ozone is improving. If you RBFA you'll see that they are not entirely in conflict.
...
BBC:
Two years ago researchers produced the first evidence that damage to the ozone layer is slowing down; globally, they showed, destruction continues, but at a slower rate than before.
That is down to the Montreal Protocol, established in 1987, which has limited production and use of CFCs and related substances.
But the indications are that the ozone layer will not be back to its pre-industrial condition for at least another 50 years.
CNN:
The ozone layer has stopped shrinking but it will take decades to start recovering, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.
An analysis of satellite records and surface monitoring instruments shows the ozone layer has grown a bit thicker in some parts of the world, but is still well below normal levels, the scientists report in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
I've studied RFID a bit.
For my industry, the business case (benefits vs. costs) for RFID just isn't attractive right now.
From what I've heard, one of Wal-Mart's real motivations is that they have not-great in-store inventory management- they have problems keeping the front of the store properly replenished from the back of the store, b/c checking for empty shelf locations is time-consuming and slow. And an empty shelf = lost sales.
There are (at least) 2 solutions to this problem: better processes and management, and RFID, which will make it easier to find out where the hell the inventory is in the store.
With 2500+ stores in the U.S. alone, standardizing processes and ensuring a high-quality management and workforce is a tall order (esp. given Wal-Mart's pay and benefits); Wal-Mart seems to have decided that it'd be better to implement RFID, which will let them know how much inventory is on the shelf vs. in the back room.
At least that's what I hear.
I cannot believe the suits at Hitachi approved this. Good for them- we need more random creativity from the corporate world.
Yeah, we do see a lot of that around here.
In this case, though, the answer is you could (if you store energy by splitting or raising water or whatever). It just has got to get cost-competitive.
Sure it is; it gives you a sense of whether large-scale use of this type of solar-thermal would use too muhc land. If the answer was that you'd need 200% of U.S. land area to provide 10% of our electrical demand, that would tell you something.
Using 100% of U.S. demand as a reference is entirely relevant. Please note that I did not advocate supplying 100% of electrical demand via solar (though the calcs show that you could without using an absurd amount of land).
#1: Fair enough. I'll still take the land use impact over emissions of CO2, SOx, NOx, mercury, etc.
#2: It was a scaling exercise. I did not propose supplying 100% of our electricity, nor did I recommend 1 huge array. I was merely demonstrating that it's feasible, from a land-use perspective, to get a lot of juice from these things.
Me, I'd install these all of the U.S. in greyfield areas (parling lots, etc.).
Interesting stuff; thanks for the info.