At the volume lots we're talking about, these are off the shelf components. It's just that the shelf is labelled "Reserved for Microsoft"
Custom parts only drive the price up in small volumes. In large volumes, custom parts drive the cost down because you don't pay for features/bits you don't need. (Hint, this is why cars have so many parts customized to one or two model lines rather than a "standard" part that would fit multiple models.)
do you think it's worth it for intel to keep a fab line up for this one chip design compare to what they could be putting out for mass market runs on the same equipment?
The thing is, they can't use the same equipment for something else. It costs a lot of money to set up and tune a (high volume) fab line to a particular chip. Anything produced after that's paid off is almost pure profit. Switching the line to a different chip (newer technology) runs up the cost all over again.
Sure, Intel has absolutely zero incentive to sell $10 700MHz Celerons when it could be selling $100+ P4s, but it can't make P4s on a Celeron fab line. And Microsoft is about the only company that could give Intel a big enough incentive to keep the Celeron line running. (Hint, it ain't just the purchase price of those Celeries.)
Exercise certainly helps, in many ways. But you've lost an average of 0.5 lbs a day. That's about 2500 calories' worth of fat over and above your normal caloric expenditure.
Unless you're biking uphill both ways, I don't think you can write all that off to exercise.
Of course, losing a big chunk of weight up front makes it that much easier to exercise, too.
If you routinely have a high caffeine intake, don't quit cold turkey. Withdrawal can be painful (headache, mostly). Taper off.
Years ago I'd go through eight to ten cups of coffee a day weekdays (a couple at home, the rest at work) and go into near withdrawal on the weekends, end up with a splitting headache on Sundays.
Now I limit it to one or two cups of coffee and one or two cans of Diet Coke. I can drop it completely with no side effect beyond needing more sleep.
To the guy talking about losing 20 pounds in a week on Atkins - dude, you went into ketosis and dehydrated yourself. Nothing to do with the diet.
On the contrary, everything to do with the diet. The whole point of the induction phase of the diet is to throw you into ketosis -- you use ketostrips to check this. (And he's drinking plenty of water, so no dehydration.)
Certain metabolic diseases aside, ketosis is simply a sign that the body is burning stored fat rather than ingested sugar.
I agree with Barrett's conclusion - that most of the "success stories" of Atkins dieters are merely the logical end result result of caloric restriction,
No fsking way. I know in my case and others I've known on the diet their caloric intake went up. (Of course, that's calories as measured in the conventional food-calorie sense -- burn the food in a calorimeter bomb and calculate it that way, which certainly doesn't match what actually happens in the body.)
And forget double cheesburgers. Trying to eat the meat without the bread is a messy proposition,
Just use the bun to hold the meat but don't eat it -- just another part of the wrapper.
Yes, the induction phase of the diet gets boring quickly, but you get to add stuff later. Meanwhile, with a bit of effort there are lots of variations and alternatives. Umpteen cuts of beef, pork, chicken, fish, etc. Different kinds of cheese (imagine the Monty Python "Cheese Shop" sketch here), sugar-free jello, sugar-free jello whipped together with cream, etc.
The really hard part is cutting out caffeine (apparently because it affects insulin levels). It worked for me without doing that, but I really had to cut the carbs down to zero in the induction phase to get ketosis to kick in without eliminating caffeine.
True, I'm not privy to the contracts between Microsoft and its suppliers, so I have no way of knowing for sure. But I know what other things sell for and I know the kind of deals that manufacturers give to large-lot buyers (because it's that much per-item marketing overhead they don't have on a volume sale).
What is the price of a 700 MHz Celeron, nowadays? [..] anywhere between $US 3 and $US 100
My estimate would be closer to the $3 than to the $100. Old technology and Intel has I'm sure long ago made back the investment on the fabs. Similarly with the graphics chip, although that probably costs more than the CPU.
The DVD-ROM drive is probably less than $10 (you can buy cheap ones retail for less than $40, you can buy a consumer DVD player for well under $100. The hard drive might be a little more but not much. The case is a few cents worth of plastic, and so on.
Buying Xboxes for purposes other than playing games (without buying any games) hurts microsoft financially,
You make it sound like Microsoft is (still) selling the boxes for less than it costs to make them. Sorry, that isn't the case.
Oh, sure, that might have been true for the first production run when MS was writing down their development costs, doing small hardware volumes and paying the setup charges for plastic molds and the like. Those are all sunk costs now, written off of last year's taxes.
Anybody who still thinks that unit cost of an Xbox now isn't less than what MS sells them to the stores for hasn't looked at the price of bulk lots of components lately. Hell, or even the finished price of a lot of consumer electronics.
I guarantee you that MicroSoft makes money now on every box sold, even if they don't sell any games with it. Gates & co. are laughing all the way to the bank that some anti-microsofters are buying the things because they still think MSFT loses money on the deal.
Sure, plastic fiber isn't optically as good as glass, but it's good enough for some things. The new 1394B spec, as I recall, goes to 3.2 Gbit over up to 50 meters of plastic fiber. And it's a lot less fragile than glass fiber.
Plastic fiber to the workstation seems eminently practical.
Actually, pulsejets don't need forward speed to start.
Yeah, I know, but figured the details would get in the way of my original message. The details you give are incomplete. A pulsejet still needs a source of incoming air to start -- a blower will do it -- and will only continue to run when the blower is removed if (a) the pulsejet is in forward motion, or (b) the reed valves and length of the pulse jet are tuned to each other such that the partial vacuum in the jet after the detonation pulse sucks the reed valves open without sucking the exhaust back into the jet.
That's another reason the things are so damn loud: they have run at the resonant frequency of the pipe.
As for flying to orbit without rockets, the drag penalty of flying through the air to get your oxidizer, even with a scramjet (so you don't have to accelerate the mass of air -- of which 80% is useless mass (nitrogen) -- to the speed of the vehicle), isn't worth the benefit. It's easier to just carry a tank of LOX with you and get above the atmosphere as fast as possible.
Lazy, ignorant, demanding SOB, aren't you? Okay, take a look at XWT, for one. Also take a look here and here.
Of course, the executable for a native Java app isn't going to look any different to the casual file(1) command than one compiled from C, C++ or even Fortran.
Why not? Why do people do anything? Curiosity, for one.
But from the description of the image (made up of fine droplets of melted bitumen) it sounds like the plate may have been coated with a layer of powdered bitumen and the image perhaps fused by the heat of the sunlight. Which would make this not just the first photograph, but the forerunner of the laser printer and xerographic copying.:)
Jet engines, on the other hand, though they superficially make look like a rocket because they have very hot gases coming out from the back, actually use a turbine to push the air;
Some jets do, some don't. Pulse jets and ram jets don't use a turbine -- the turbine is used to suck in and compress air for combustion. Ram and pulse jets use their forward motion through the air to do this (so they need a push to get started). Jets work on the action-reaction principle too.
thus they pull themselves through the air in a way similar to a boat propeller (or, for that matter, an airplane propeller).
One particular type of jet, the turbofan, works this way (partly). Take a regular turbojet and mount a honking big ducted fan on the same shaft as the turbine. Runs a bit quieter and more efficiently than a pure turbojet, but limits your top speed (subsonic).
Jet engines cannot work in space.
Well, they could if you carried a great big tank of compressed air along -- but that'd be kind of silly. The tank would be heavy and the mass of all that nitrogen is unwanted.
This is probably a dead thread, but what the hell...
"Nautical" is a mistake. The original article refers to "50 miles" as the boundary of space -- a related graphic labels that as "50 nautical miles".
That's plain wrong. In the X-15 program, flight above 264,000 feet qualified the (USAF) pilot for astronaut wings. This is 50 statute miles (do the math). This is the figure I alluded to in my original post. 62 statute miles is also approximately 100 km, which is the internationally recognized boundary of space.
The article's author messed up, perhaps mislead by a bogus graphic from the rocket folks, either way they didn't check. The "114 km" figure comes from blindly converting the bogus 62 "nautical" miles. The "insightful" follow-up to my post was anything but because the dummy clearly exhibited a total lack of insight by not understanding that.
How is this "insightful" when I corrected that about ten hours before AC posted?
Oh, and the URL is wrong. No legal URL has spaces, whatever MSIE thinks. s//%20/ to fix. But why use that when units(1) is standard with Unix and Linux?
While 62 standard miles is about 100 km, the original post said 62 nautical miles. However, the rest of the post stands, and I wonder if "nautical" was a mistake.
Um, no. Actually 62 miles is just a shade under 100 km. 100 km would be about 62.14 miles. And this significance of this is... (wait for it)
(12 miles higher than the 50-mile altitude largely regarded as the boundary of space)
Um, no. The 50 mile altitude is what the USAF awarded astronaut wings for to X-15 pilots who exceeded it, and may even be the US legal definition of where space begins, but it's 100 km (ah!) that is the boundary of space as far as the International Aeronautical Federation is concerned.
I don't know if the original poster was kidding or not, but several other posters seem to think he was an idiot for suggesting it.
However, those of us with an appreciation for the history of the technology of cinema recognize that the term "Xinerama" is a play on the name "Cinerama" for good reason.
True Cinerama technology was not merely wide screen but highly curved, partially wraparound screen that required three projectors (in sync!) to cover. The visual effect was simply awesome (the first time I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" was in a Cinerama theatre. Wow.)
Xinerama lets you, if you want, set up three (or more) monitors side-by-side, with the outer ones angled slightly, and place a wide-screen window across all three. Just like Cinerama. I don't know well the video rendering for, say, a DVD or MPEG player interacts with Xinerama, but yeah, you could have better movies.
That is, assuming you have a spec at all beyond some vague handwaving and perhaps some marketing viewgraphs (er, power point presentations).
Specifications almost invariably need to go through a step that I refer to as "debugging the spec" -- looking for internal inconsistencies and contradictions, vagueness, ambiguity, etc. Of course many projects aren't given the time to do that -- meaning that additional time is wasted on the back end fixing all the design and code problems that lack of a good spec caused.
The projects I've been involved with that went fastest and smoothest all started with a good spec that had gone through several iterations of "debugging" and review with the end users. In one case that "spec" was the Nth draft of the user manual -- we "prototyped" the thing on a whiteboard in front of a small group who would be the first users. (Of course you need a pretty experienced designer/developer involved so as not to commit to something that can't be implemented in the available time.)
Of course you need to make sure that the business side signs off on the spec so that they can't later say that it wasn't what they asked for. (It may not be what they meant, but that's their problem -- although it is the analyst/designers responsibility to double check if that's what they really meant if there seems to be an obvious problem.)
And a good spec means that the test cases can be written in parallel with the actual code.
Software likes to think of itself as 'engineering' but it's not.
Well, it can be (think aircraft control systems). It just generally isn't. Which tells us that there is some reason(s) buyers don't want well-engineered software.
Bingo!
For some idea of what real software engineering implies, take a look at, for example, RTCA's DO-178B, the guidelines for airborne systems equipment software (a quicky intro can be found here, a project to make these steps easier for open source), or at MIL-STD-498 or IEEE 12207.
These aren't about algorithms or programming languages, they're about the process and the documentation thereof. Development plans, requirements documents, design documents, coding standards, test plans, etc, etc. A ton of boring paperwork -- exactly the sort of thing that goes into the design and construction of any other critical piece of engineering, be it a building, a bridge or an aircraft. (Of course, following one of these doesn't guarantee correct software, but it does make it more likely, and does provide the information to determine where the error first cropped up (code, design, specification, etc) if something goes horribly wrong.)
Of course, all that is expensive in terms of time and salaries, and frankly for much software it just doesn't matter. How often is it life-threatening if your word processor crashes, even if it wipes out your document when it does?
OTOH, it can be easily argued (post 9/11) that anything that compromises the security of or rapid dissemination of critical information could be life threatening -- so perhaps the above standard processes ought to apply to any software used by governmental organizations...
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At the volume lots we're talking about, these are off the shelf components. It's just that the shelf is labelled "Reserved for Microsoft"
Custom parts only drive the price up in small volumes. In large volumes, custom parts drive the cost down because you don't pay for features/bits you don't need. (Hint, this is why cars have so many parts customized to one or two model lines rather than a "standard" part that would fit multiple models.)
do you think it's worth it for intel to keep a fab line up for this one chip design compare to what they could be putting out for mass market runs on the same equipment?
The thing is, they can't use the same equipment for something else. It costs a lot of money to set up and tune a (high volume) fab line to a particular chip. Anything produced after that's paid off is almost pure profit. Switching the line to a different chip (newer technology) runs up the cost all over again.
Sure, Intel has absolutely zero incentive to sell $10 700MHz Celerons when it could be selling $100+ P4s, but it can't make P4s on a Celeron fab line. And Microsoft is about the only company that could give Intel a big enough incentive to keep the Celeron line running. (Hint, it ain't just the purchase price of those Celeries.)
Exercise certainly helps, in many ways. But you've lost an average of 0.5 lbs a day. That's about 2500 calories' worth of fat over and above your normal caloric expenditure.
Unless you're biking uphill both ways, I don't think you can write all that off to exercise.
Of course, losing a big chunk of weight up front makes it that much easier to exercise, too.
Ever see a male, neutered, housecat?
Ever see how much cereal they put into pet food?
If you routinely have a high caffeine intake, don't quit cold turkey. Withdrawal can be painful (headache, mostly). Taper off.
Years ago I'd go through eight to ten cups of coffee a day weekdays (a couple at home, the rest at work) and go into near withdrawal on the weekends, end up with a splitting headache on Sundays.
Now I limit it to one or two cups of coffee and one or two cans of Diet Coke. I can drop it completely with no side effect beyond needing more sleep.
To the guy talking about losing 20 pounds in a week on Atkins - dude, you went into ketosis and dehydrated yourself. Nothing to do with the diet.
On the contrary, everything to do with the diet. The whole point of the induction phase of the diet is to throw you into ketosis -- you use ketostrips to check this. (And he's drinking plenty of water, so no dehydration.)
Certain metabolic diseases aside, ketosis is simply a sign that the body is burning stored fat rather than ingested sugar.
I agree with Barrett's conclusion - that most of the "success stories" of Atkins dieters are merely the logical end result result of caloric restriction,
No fsking way. I know in my case and others I've known on the diet their caloric intake went up. (Of course, that's calories as measured in the conventional food-calorie sense -- burn the food in a calorimeter bomb and calculate it that way, which certainly doesn't match what actually happens in the body.)
And forget double cheesburgers. Trying to eat the meat without the bread is a messy proposition,
Just use the bun to hold the meat but don't eat it -- just another part of the wrapper.
Yes, the induction phase of the diet gets boring quickly, but you get to add stuff later. Meanwhile, with a bit of effort there are lots of variations and alternatives. Umpteen cuts of beef, pork, chicken, fish, etc. Different kinds of cheese (imagine the Monty Python "Cheese Shop" sketch here), sugar-free jello, sugar-free jello whipped together with cream, etc.
The really hard part is cutting out caffeine (apparently because it affects insulin levels). It worked for me without doing that, but I really had to cut the carbs down to zero in the induction phase to get ketosis to kick in without eliminating caffeine.
Ever see a fat carnivore?
Ever see a skinny cow? (Not counting desert-like lack of food conditions).
Carbs are what food eats...
(Okay, I'm slightly kidding. Humans are omnivores.)
I just think you have no real way of knowing
True, I'm not privy to the contracts between Microsoft and its suppliers, so I have no way of knowing for sure. But I know what other things sell for and I know the kind of deals that manufacturers give to large-lot buyers (because it's that much per-item marketing overhead they don't have on a volume sale).
What is the price of a 700 MHz Celeron, nowadays? [..] anywhere between $US 3 and $US 100
My estimate would be closer to the $3 than to the $100. Old technology and Intel has I'm sure long ago made back the investment on the fabs. Similarly with the graphics chip, although that probably costs more than the CPU.
The DVD-ROM drive is probably less than $10 (you can buy cheap ones retail for less than $40, you can buy a consumer DVD player for well under $100. The hard drive might be a little more but not much. The case is a few cents worth of plastic, and so on.
Buying Xboxes for purposes other than playing games (without buying any games) hurts microsoft financially,
You make it sound like Microsoft is (still) selling the boxes for less than it costs to make them. Sorry, that isn't the case.
Oh, sure, that might have been true for the first production run when MS was writing down their development costs, doing small hardware volumes and paying the setup charges for plastic molds and the like. Those are all sunk costs now, written off of last year's taxes.
Anybody who still thinks that unit cost of an Xbox now isn't less than what MS sells them to the stores for hasn't looked at the price of bulk lots of components lately. Hell, or even the finished price of a lot of consumer electronics.
I guarantee you that MicroSoft makes money now on every box sold, even if they don't sell any games with it. Gates & co. are laughing all the way to the bank that some anti-microsofters are buying the things because they still think MSFT loses money on the deal.
"Plastic".
Sure, plastic fiber isn't optically as good as glass, but it's good enough for some things. The new 1394B spec, as I recall, goes to 3.2 Gbit over up to 50 meters of plastic fiber. And it's a lot less fragile than glass fiber.
Plastic fiber to the workstation seems eminently practical.
Actually, pulsejets don't need forward speed to start.
Yeah, I know, but figured the details would get in the way of my original message. The details you give are incomplete. A pulsejet still needs a source of incoming air to start -- a blower will do it -- and will only continue to run when the blower is removed if (a) the pulsejet is in forward motion, or (b) the reed valves and length of the pulse jet are tuned to each other such that the partial vacuum in the jet after the detonation pulse sucks the reed valves open without sucking the exhaust back into the jet.
That's another reason the things are so damn loud: they have run at the resonant frequency of the pipe.
As for flying to orbit without rockets, the drag penalty of flying through the air to get your oxidizer, even with a scramjet (so you don't have to accelerate the mass of air -- of which 80% is useless mass (nitrogen) -- to the speed of the vehicle), isn't worth the benefit. It's easier to just carry a tank of LOX with you and get above the atmosphere as fast as possible.
I have yet to see a native java app, show me one.
Lazy, ignorant, demanding SOB, aren't you? Okay, take a look at XWT, for one. Also take a look here and here.
Of course, the executable for a native Java app isn't going to look any different to the casual file(1) command than one compiled from C, C++ or even Fortran.
You might try keeping up with what's been happening over the last year or two.
Compile Java with gcc (er, gcj) and (if you want) you get native code, just like with C, but without the buffer overflows.
C is for kernels and (perhaps) heavily used libraries. Anything else should use a higher level language.
Why not? Why do people do anything? Curiosity, for one.
:)
But from the description of the image (made up of fine droplets of melted bitumen) it sounds like the plate may have been coated with a layer of powdered bitumen and the image perhaps fused by the heat of the sunlight. Which would make this not just the first photograph, but the forerunner of the laser printer and xerographic copying.
Jet engines, on the other hand, though they superficially make look like a rocket because they have very hot gases coming out from the back, actually use a turbine to push the air;
Some jets do, some don't. Pulse jets and ram jets don't use a turbine -- the turbine is used to suck in and compress air for combustion. Ram and pulse jets use their forward motion through the air to do this (so they need a push to get started). Jets work on the action-reaction principle too.
thus they pull themselves through the air in a way similar to a boat propeller (or, for that matter, an airplane propeller).
One particular type of jet, the turbofan, works this way (partly). Take a regular turbojet and mount a honking big ducted fan on the same shaft as the turbine. Runs a bit quieter and more efficiently than a pure turbojet, but limits your top speed (subsonic).
Jet engines cannot work in space.
Well, they could if you carried a great big tank of compressed air along -- but that'd be kind of silly. The tank would be heavy and the mass of all that nitrogen is unwanted.
VNC covers a whole different problem domain. Yeah, you can make it do some of the same things, but it'd be suboptimal.
It's closer to X Windows, although again the domains don't completely overlap. Some things would work better with XWT, some with X.
Okay, I'll buy "informative", barely :)
This is probably a dead thread, but what the hell...
"Nautical" is a mistake. The original article refers to "50 miles" as the boundary of space -- a related graphic labels that as "50 nautical miles".
That's plain wrong. In the X-15 program, flight above 264,000 feet qualified the (USAF) pilot for astronaut wings. This is 50 statute miles (do the math). This is the figure I alluded to in my original post. 62 statute miles is also approximately 100 km, which is the internationally recognized boundary of space.
The article's author messed up, perhaps mislead by a bogus graphic from the rocket folks, either way they didn't check. The "114 km" figure comes from blindly converting the bogus 62 "nautical" miles. The "insightful" follow-up to my post was anything but because the dummy clearly exhibited a total lack of insight by not understanding that.
If you change CDs often you might want to get a 1394 (FireWire) CD drive (or enclosure with a regular CD drive) and run a cable for that, too.
How is this "insightful" when I corrected that about ten hours before AC posted?
/%20/ to fix. But why use that when units(1) is standard with Unix and Linux?
Oh, and the URL is wrong. No legal URL has spaces, whatever MSIE thinks. s/
$ units
1378 units, 57 prefixes
You have: 62 nauticalmiles
You want: km
* 114.824
Argh, even when you preview you miss things.
While 62 standard miles is about 100 km, the original post said 62 nautical miles. However, the rest of the post stands, and I wonder if "nautical" was a mistake.
(Stupid imperial measurement system....)
62 nautical miles (114 kilometers)
Um, no. Actually 62 miles is just a shade under 100 km. 100 km would be about 62.14 miles. And this significance of this is... (wait for it)
(12 miles higher than the 50-mile altitude largely regarded as the boundary of space)
Um, no. The 50 mile altitude is what the USAF awarded astronaut wings for to X-15 pilots who exceeded it, and may even be the US legal definition of where space begins, but it's 100 km (ah!) that is the boundary of space as far as the International Aeronautical Federation is concerned.
I don't know if the original poster was kidding or not, but several other posters seem to think he was an idiot for suggesting it.
However, those of us with an appreciation for the history of the technology of cinema recognize that the term "Xinerama" is a play on the name "Cinerama" for good reason.
True Cinerama technology was not merely wide screen but highly curved, partially wraparound screen that required three projectors (in sync!) to cover. The visual effect was simply awesome (the first time I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" was in a Cinerama theatre. Wow.)
Xinerama lets you, if you want, set up three (or more) monitors side-by-side, with the outer ones angled slightly, and place a wide-screen window across all three. Just like Cinerama. I don't know well the video rendering for, say, a DVD or MPEG player interacts with Xinerama, but yeah, you could have better movies.
the overwhelming majority of specs suck
That is, assuming you have a spec at all beyond some vague handwaving and perhaps some marketing viewgraphs (er, power point presentations).
Specifications almost invariably need to go through a step that I refer to as "debugging the spec" -- looking for internal inconsistencies and contradictions, vagueness, ambiguity, etc. Of course many projects aren't given the time to do that -- meaning that additional time is wasted on the back end fixing all the design and code problems that lack of a good spec caused.
The projects I've been involved with that went fastest and smoothest all started with a good spec that had gone through several iterations of "debugging" and review with the end users. In one case that "spec" was the Nth draft of the user manual -- we "prototyped" the thing on a whiteboard in front of a small group who would be the first users. (Of course you need a pretty experienced designer/developer involved so as not to commit to something that can't be implemented in the available time.)
Of course you need to make sure that the business side signs off on the spec so that they can't later say that it wasn't what they asked for. (It may not be what they meant, but that's their problem -- although it is the analyst/designers responsibility to double check if that's what they really meant if there seems to be an obvious problem.)
And a good spec means that the test cases can be written in parallel with the actual code.
Software likes to think of itself as 'engineering' but it's not.
Well, it can be (think aircraft control systems). It just generally isn't. Which tells us that there is some reason(s) buyers don't want well-engineered software.
Bingo!
For some idea of what real software engineering implies, take a look at, for example, RTCA's DO-178B, the guidelines for airborne systems equipment software (a quicky intro can be found here, a project to make these steps easier for open source), or at MIL-STD-498 or IEEE 12207.
These aren't about algorithms or programming languages, they're about the process and the documentation thereof. Development plans, requirements documents, design documents, coding standards, test plans, etc, etc. A ton of boring paperwork -- exactly the sort of thing that goes into the design and construction of any other critical piece of engineering, be it a building, a bridge or an aircraft. (Of course, following one of these doesn't guarantee correct software, but it does make it more likely, and does provide the information to determine where the error first cropped up (code, design, specification, etc) if something goes horribly wrong.)
Of course, all that is expensive in terms of time and salaries, and frankly for much software it just doesn't matter. How often is it life-threatening if your word processor crashes, even if it wipes out your document when it does?
OTOH, it can be easily argued (post 9/11) that anything that compromises the security of or rapid dissemination of critical information could be life threatening -- so perhaps the above standard processes ought to apply to any software used by governmental organizations...