Productivity enhancements have always been a tug of war between capital owners and workers. Capital owners have generally been winning - just look at real wages in the US.
Widescreen doesn't necessarily cost scan lines. Almost all widescreen DVDs are encoded using an anamorphic squeeze. This means that the 16:9 picture is squeezed into the 4:3 frame. The DVD player can then determine whether to add letterbox bars for a 4:3 TV or send the signal directly to a 16:9 TV.
Even if you don't have a widescreen TV or an HDTV there are plenty of Sony CRT based TVs that can squeeze the 480 scanlines into a 16:9 shape on the 4:3 tube and show the movie at full DVD resolution.
What could be move distracting than amputated frames and obvious pans across the original material?
You can't make something cold without making something else hot. Evaporative cooling (a swamp cooler) could help but you'll need to circulate the air in room - otherwise you'll wind up with hot, damp air.
I can vouch for that. It is a distinct major at MIT (I was course 6 which is EE).
A buddy of mine got his PhD in Ocean Engineering by studying the cavitation of submarine propellors. Like many departments at MIT, Ocean is closely tied to military research.
Back in the good ol' days of silver or gold backed currency the government placed controls on personal holdings and transport of those metals. It used to be ILLEGAL to stash physical gold ( see the Gold Confiscation Act of 1933). That law only changed in 1975, not that long ago.
We may have "worthless" paper currency now but you are not restricted from holding silver and gold in your home or transporting it within and outside the US. You can always cash in your paycheck every week and buy ingots. I'd recommend holding some cash though for things like groceries and utility bills. You might be able to find a bank that will let you check against a balance held in gold though. That would solve your problem wouldn't it?
Production cost is a VERY small fraction of the retail price of a DVD. I think the market penetration of the player is far more important to the desirability of a format.
Both have a chicken and egg problem. Blu-ray's might be bigger but PS3 solves it.
I agree with your Apple comment. They are innovators with the special gift of creating solid new products. Many innovators suffer from weak initial execution and are swamped with competition by the time the bugs are worked out. Apple doesn't suffer from that problem. Their products are generally rock solid from the get go. That gives lets them crack a market wide open but it doesn't stop the imitators.
Brooks and Safire are pretty different in style. I think of Brooks more as a considered commentator on conservatism, IE somewhat detached. That comes across more after you have seen his delivery on TV.
Safire seemed more participatory in his commentary. I also found his political views more centrist, practical and libertarian (at least to my thinking).
Last but not least calling Krugman a center-liberal is a little odd. Even Krugman happily embraces his full left-winger status. He takes shots at the right which a centrist might also but a full read of his writings clearly shows his liberal stripes. What I find disturbing is that his emotional connection to a subject often clouds his commentary on economic issues which deserve more professional handling from a distiguished MIT economist. It makes me think that his non-economic commentary is similiarly rabid. You may disagree with Brooks but you can't fault his considered style.
In fact the most obvious characteristic of a jewelry grade, man-made diamond is its quality - its PERFECT. Natural stones have inclusions - ribbons of crystal defects, which the synthetic diamonds do not have. Of course the industrial process doesn't make a perfect stone - I'm talking about these emerging techniques.
It will take some deft marketing by DeBeers to convince a woman to except a lower quality just because its "natural" With all the plastic surgery out there you'd think women were already convinced that science can make something more beautiful than nature intended;^)
In the end to comes down to DeBeers brilliant linking of expected engagement ring cost to the man's earning level, IE two months salary. The man is expected to put a large monetary investment into the marriage proposal to prove his dedication.
Women want to receive a ring which signals this dedication, demonstates their future husband's earning potential and earns the envy of their girlfriends. It isn't romantic but that's the calculus underlying the whole transaction. Synthetic, flawless, cheap diamonds don't do those things and therefore won't be accepted into the tradition, at least not "officially"
You bring up a good point: Programming languages and their interpretors, where applicable, need to be MT safe and they often aren't.
A large matrix calculation is the perfect place for two processors to work on a problem, but if you ned to copy memory back and forth it loses a lot of efficiency. If you pass a pointer to save time you have created a sync problem.
That is exactly what I meant. Synchronization is a tricky issue but I'd consider it far more rare than the problem of cycle hogging single-threaded apps.
I'm not professional programmer and my hobby style projects have all been single threaded. That said, if my multi-threaded app performed poorly on a dual processor system I'd consider the good single processor performance to be a fluke more than anything. Threads cease to be threads when you need to worry about their low level interactions. The abstraction and communication protocol should be all that is necessary for hardware, OS and app to work nicely with threads.
In most programming environments I'd expect the operating system to handle the allocation of threads to processors and for the secondary threads to have an asynchronos relationship with the master thread anyway. I'm sure the details can get tricky - they usually do.
Apps that are written with multiple threads are typically also written with care to avoid locking up the computer.
Single threaded apps are typically written with far less care and don't leave cycles free for the GUI and OS functions.
That is why having the second processor is nice. It has free cycles when an app is hogging the other one. A multi-threaded app will use both but will probably not hog both, leaving the GUI still "snapppy".
Those countries don't harbor terrorists like Afghanistan and would likely help us capture him. Denmark and Brazil would HELP us capture him.
A captured high level Bin Ladin associated said that the Taliban warlords were reluctant to endorse his 9/11 plans because they were worried about taking heat from the US. Note two things - firstly they knew about the attack and endorsed it; second, that they appreciated the consequences to their rule.
If terrorists were coming out of Brazil we would give the Brazilian government some time to clamp down on it. If they failed we would go in - guns blazing. What else would you think? Look at what the US did in Central America in the 80s, and that was just Cold War/Drug War stuff.
If the "Greek guy" in your thought experiment had gotten permission from the US Congress to carry out the attack I wouldn't be surprised at all if Brazil attempted to retaliate.
And about training camps in the US.... ever heard of Ruby Ridge? Our government isn't shy about shutting down "camps" anywhere they might exist.
The parent has a good point. It is still called the "Theory of Gravity" (Or Gravitation). That doesn't mean, on a practical level, that anyone thinks the earth will stop orbiting the sun or that jumping of a tall building will result in anything but a quick trip to the morgue.
The theory of evolution is not as strong as the theory of gravity. The theory of intelligent design has almost no observational support that does not also support evolution. The reverse cannot be said.
Like most things that are matters of faith theories intelligent design conviently not be confirmed. We aren't going to find a devine design laboratory with a species catalog signed by our creator. While some may argue that our creators stamp on us is manifest, it just doesn't bare scrutiny like the theory of evolution.
The article is talking about marketting spam launched using VOIP on the caller side. The receiver will get the call on any old telephone hook-up IE POTS or VOIP.
A firewall won't do a thing to protect you. A caller ID based black list of challenge/response system could though.
rereading my post I realized I needed to clarify something. The American Indian comment was soley related to the pre-industrialization and colonization period, IE the cultural heritage type of mystism refered to in the parent.
I'm not coming down on current researchers who happen to have some (or all) native blood!
Incredibly cogent deconstruction. Typically the people you are refering to believe that they are very smart.
They use these analogies to cheapen an area study in which they have not invested the requisite years (decades) to understand a highly specialized subject. After all if American Indians came up with then he can too.
One of the great things about Slashdot is that a critical mass of actual experts on the topic gets involved in the discussion. The "cocktail party" scientists really stick out, which is worth considering before posting a "cocktail party" comment.
The phosphor screen has a persistence once it is excited. Perhaps hundreds of electron stimulations are running their course on the screen but the actual electron strikes are happening individually and spread across time.
I imagine the screen was design specifically to glow for much longer then a CRT for instance. Old low bandwidth oscilliscopes used screens like that to show a more stable image.
Air conditioning is indeed one element for which demand matches solar output very well.
1, 2, and 3 are all true and yet people still don't use solar panels as often as you would guess.
Solar power systems still need a huge amount of batteries or a grid connection. Most people don't want to put in the effort. Perhaps if everyone paid 15-16 cents/kwh like I do that would change.
Maybe I was unclear but we are agreeing on coal. It is really cheap and much more profitable than natural gas most of the time.
The demand curve isn't totally different then the solar supply curve through the day, unless of course it's raining and the PVs are producing zero electricity.
That brings us to the solution to both storage and solar output variability - tie the panels to the grid. Well how do we power the grid then? If end users have no energy storage then power plants and transmission lines will need to sized assuming no contribution by the PVs. Certainly there will be cloudy days with near peak energy consumption won't there?
Grid tied systems only work for the consumer because the meter runs backwards at the consumer rate. After costs and transmission losses the power company loses a lot of money. If most customers ran PV systems on reverse meters the cost of power would have to rise significantly.
We are up to date on the competition. All the studies in the world don't necessarily add up to anything more then tenure for an academic. I wish ultra cheap, efficient PVs were all it took, but the problems are just so much bigger then getting 24 volts DC out of some panels when the sun happens to be shining.
As an aside I think thermal solar systems using concentrators looks far more promising. YMMV
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But that one "director" has a sweet house!
Productivity enhancements have always been a tug of war between capital owners and workers. Capital owners have generally been winning - just look at real wages in the US.
That must be why certain vintages of Silver Oak sell for hundreds of dollars.
Widescreen doesn't necessarily cost scan lines. Almost all widescreen DVDs are encoded using an anamorphic squeeze. This means that the 16:9 picture is squeezed into the 4:3 frame. The DVD player can then determine whether to add letterbox bars for a 4:3 TV or send the signal directly to a 16:9 TV.
Even if you don't have a widescreen TV or an HDTV there are plenty of Sony CRT based TVs that can squeeze the 480 scanlines into a 16:9 shape on the 4:3 tube and show the movie at full DVD resolution.
What could be move distracting than amputated frames and obvious pans across the original material?
You can't make something cold without making something else hot. Evaporative cooling (a swamp cooler) could help but you'll need to circulate the air in room - otherwise you'll wind up with hot, damp air.
Multi-casting is an obvious benefit of IPv6. Sure IPv4 can support it but IPv6 guarrantees it.
I can vouch for that. It is a distinct major at MIT (I was course 6 which is EE).
A buddy of mine got his PhD in Ocean Engineering by studying the cavitation of submarine propellors. Like many departments at MIT, Ocean is closely tied to military research.
My thought exactly. This has kook written all over it. You might as well invest in BlackLight Power while you are at it.
Pick your poison.
Back in the good ol' days of silver or gold backed currency the government placed controls on personal holdings and transport of those metals. It used to be ILLEGAL to stash physical gold ( see the Gold Confiscation Act of 1933). That law only changed in 1975, not that long ago.
We may have "worthless" paper currency now but you are not restricted from holding silver and gold in your home or transporting it within and outside the US. You can always cash in your paycheck every week and buy ingots. I'd recommend holding some cash though for things like groceries and utility bills. You might be able to find a bank that will let you check against a balance held in gold though. That would solve your problem wouldn't it?
Gold bugs sure are silly.
At MIT Scheme is the programming language taught in CS1 (AKA 6.001)
Production cost is a VERY small fraction of the retail price of a DVD. I think the market penetration of the player is far more important to the desirability of a format.
Both have a chicken and egg problem. Blu-ray's might be bigger but PS3 solves it.
I agree with your Apple comment. They are innovators with the special gift of creating solid new products. Many innovators suffer from weak initial execution and are swamped with competition by the time the bugs are worked out. Apple doesn't suffer from that problem. Their products are generally rock solid from the get go. That gives lets them crack a market wide open but it doesn't stop the imitators.
Brooks and Safire are pretty different in style. I think of Brooks more as a considered commentator on conservatism, IE somewhat detached. That comes across more after you have seen his delivery on TV.
Safire seemed more participatory in his commentary. I also found his political views more centrist, practical and libertarian (at least to my thinking).
Last but not least calling Krugman a center-liberal is a little odd. Even Krugman happily embraces his full left-winger status. He takes shots at the right which a centrist might also but a full read of his writings clearly shows his liberal stripes. What I find disturbing is that his emotional connection to a subject often clouds his commentary on economic issues which deserve more professional handling from a distiguished MIT economist. It makes me think that his non-economic commentary is similiarly rabid. You may disagree with Brooks but you can't fault his considered style.
In fact the most obvious characteristic of a jewelry grade, man-made diamond is its quality - its PERFECT. Natural stones have inclusions - ribbons of crystal defects, which the synthetic diamonds do not have. Of course the industrial process doesn't make a perfect stone - I'm talking about these emerging techniques.
;^)
It will take some deft marketing by DeBeers to convince a woman to except a lower quality just because its "natural" With all the plastic surgery out there you'd think women were already convinced that science can make something more beautiful than nature intended
In the end to comes down to DeBeers brilliant linking of expected engagement ring cost to the man's earning level, IE two months salary. The man is expected to put a large monetary investment into the marriage proposal to prove his dedication.
Women want to receive a ring which signals this dedication, demonstates their future husband's earning potential and earns the envy of their girlfriends. It isn't romantic but that's the calculus underlying the whole transaction. Synthetic, flawless, cheap diamonds don't do those things and therefore won't be accepted into the tradition, at least not "officially"
You can also match speed with the bus through the use of a rotating habitat in earth orbit.
Small transfer capsuls can be exchanged between the "bus" and the earth station with near zero net delta V.
You bring up a good point: Programming languages and their interpretors, where applicable, need to be MT safe and they often aren't.
A large matrix calculation is the perfect place for two processors to work on a problem, but if you ned to copy memory back and forth it loses a lot of efficiency. If you pass a pointer to save time you have created a sync problem.
That is exactly what I meant. Synchronization is a tricky issue but I'd consider it far more rare than the problem of cycle hogging single-threaded apps.
I'm not professional programmer and my hobby style projects have all been single threaded. That said, if my multi-threaded app performed poorly on a dual processor system I'd consider the good single processor performance to be a fluke more than anything. Threads cease to be threads when you need to worry about their low level interactions. The abstraction and communication protocol should be all that is necessary for hardware, OS and app to work nicely with threads.
In most programming environments I'd expect the operating system to handle the allocation of threads to processors and for the secondary threads to have an asynchronos relationship with the master thread anyway. I'm sure the details can get tricky - they usually do.
Apps that are written with multiple threads are typically also written with care to avoid locking up the computer.
Single threaded apps are typically written with far less care and don't leave cycles free for the GUI and OS functions.
That is why having the second processor is nice. It has free cycles when an app is hogging the other one. A multi-threaded app will use both but will probably not hog both, leaving the GUI still "snapppy".
Those countries don't harbor terrorists like Afghanistan and would likely help us capture him. Denmark and Brazil would HELP us capture him.
A captured high level Bin Ladin associated said that the Taliban warlords were reluctant to endorse his 9/11 plans because they were worried about taking heat from the US. Note two things - firstly they knew about the attack and endorsed it; second, that they appreciated the consequences to their rule.
If terrorists were coming out of Brazil we would give the Brazilian government some time to clamp down on it. If they failed we would go in - guns blazing. What else would you think? Look at what the US did in Central America in the 80s, and that was just Cold War/Drug War stuff.
If the "Greek guy" in your thought experiment had gotten permission from the US Congress to carry out the attack I wouldn't be surprised at all if Brazil attempted to retaliate.
And about training camps in the US.... ever heard of Ruby Ridge? Our government isn't shy about shutting down "camps" anywhere they might exist.
The parent has a good point. It is still called the "Theory of Gravity" (Or Gravitation). That doesn't mean, on a practical level, that anyone thinks the earth will stop orbiting the sun or that jumping of a tall building will result in anything but a quick trip to the morgue.
The theory of evolution is not as strong as the theory of gravity. The theory of intelligent design has almost no observational support that does not also support evolution. The reverse cannot be said.
Like most things that are matters of faith theories intelligent design conviently not be confirmed. We aren't going to find a devine design laboratory with a species catalog signed by our creator. While some may argue that our creators stamp on us is manifest, it just doesn't bare scrutiny like the theory of evolution.
The article is talking about marketting spam launched using VOIP on the caller side. The receiver will get the call on any old telephone hook-up IE POTS or VOIP.
A firewall won't do a thing to protect you. A caller ID based black list of challenge/response system could though.
rereading my post I realized I needed to clarify something. The American Indian comment was soley related to the pre-industrialization and colonization period, IE the cultural heritage type of mystism refered to in the parent.
I'm not coming down on current researchers who happen to have some (or all) native blood!
Incredibly cogent deconstruction. Typically the people you are refering to believe that they are very smart.
They use these analogies to cheapen an area study in which they have not invested the requisite years (decades) to understand a highly specialized subject. After all if American Indians came up with then he can too.
One of the great things about Slashdot is that a critical mass of actual experts on the topic gets involved in the discussion. The "cocktail party" scientists really stick out, which is worth considering before posting a "cocktail party" comment.
The phosphor screen has a persistence once it is excited. Perhaps hundreds of electron stimulations are running their course on the screen but the actual electron strikes are happening individually and spread across time.
I imagine the screen was design specifically to glow for much longer then a CRT for instance. Old low bandwidth oscilliscopes used screens like that to show a more stable image.
Air conditioning is indeed one element for which demand matches solar output very well.
1, 2, and 3 are all true and yet people still don't use solar panels as often as you would guess.
Solar power systems still need a huge amount of batteries or a grid connection. Most people don't want to put in the effort. Perhaps if everyone paid 15-16 cents/kwh like I do that would change.
Maybe I was unclear but we are agreeing on coal. It is really cheap and much more profitable than natural gas most of the time.
The demand curve isn't totally different then the solar supply curve through the day, unless of course it's raining and the PVs are producing zero electricity.
That brings us to the solution to both storage and solar output variability - tie the panels to the grid. Well how do we power the grid then? If end users have no energy storage then power plants and transmission lines will need to sized assuming no contribution by the PVs. Certainly there will be cloudy days with near peak energy consumption won't there?
Grid tied systems only work for the consumer because the meter runs backwards at the consumer rate. After costs and transmission losses the power company loses a lot of money. If most customers ran PV systems on reverse meters the cost of power would have to rise significantly.
We are up to date on the competition. All the studies in the world don't necessarily add up to anything more then tenure for an academic. I wish ultra cheap, efficient PVs were all it took, but the problems are just so much bigger then getting 24 volts DC out of some panels when the sun happens to be shining.
As an aside I think thermal solar systems using concentrators looks far more promising. YMMV