A koan... is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition.
Does that mean it cannot be not understood by rational thinking? Hmmm, I'll have to think about that one.
Not necessarily. Even without accurate airspeed readings, the pilots should have still been able to maintain safe airspeed by setting the engines to a specific power output and trimming to a specific angle of attack. Probably pilot error (i.e. being distracted with alarms and not remembering to adjust throttle and angle....) but without that box it's hard to really know.
Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.
Continuous Transmission? Send all of the recorded data to both the black box and some remote data center, too. If this is too much to transmit continuously, then maybe a subset of the data? I know planes are becoming increasingly complex and automated, so there's probably loads more data that *could* be considered for transmission. Still, something is better than nothing (what we have now.) Pick some subset of the available data and send it periodically.
Burst Transmission? Instead of a continuous stream of data, when the pilot (or plane) detects a "dangerous condition", it starts sending a high-speed burst of accumulated data, and continuously until things look "normal" again. Say the plane takes a sudden 200-foot drop in altitude. Or banks unusually sharply. Or... whatever. Just ignore the values that appear 99.9% of the time, and only trigger outside that normal range.
(numbers pulled out of thin air; pick whatever works best.)
At this point, there's nothing much to go on. Imagine if we had the last few minutes' airspeed, altitude, as well as settings for the flaps, rudder, and engine would be an enormous improvement over what we've got now.
I suspect the pilots' unions might raise a concern about monitoring and potential for it to be help against them, but I could also imagine some kind of escrow mechanism where the data is sent and stored, but only to be accessed upon certain, predefined circumstances.
Admittedly, this is quite rough. I'd like to think that there is at least some part of this which could be implemented in parallel to the provision of internet access on planes. I'd appreciate it if anyone who knows more about these things could comment on the viability of this and/or the technical limitations/challenges which I'm missing here.
For example, Chip $foo has functions A B C D E & F. E is used on average once every gigaflop, so using the CPU/other functions, they implement E and cut out all parts for E.
The best part is that this can be applied iteratively. Once E is eliminated there's a new "least used" function which can be eliminated. By extension, any CPU can ultimately be pruned down to a single NOP instruction, with the entire rest of the instruction set emulated in software.
Given the fact that they're facing similar problems today, we can conclude that MIT failed to come up with anything useful in response to the mayor's query. It would be nice to know what their response was, if they responded at all.
tl;dr: Here's a summary of the response (dated Jan 28, 1948)
Use salt; corrodes cars and roads.
Use hot water: Fuel consumption would be high.
"The use of flamethrowers to dissipate snow would be neither practicable nor efficient. Even the earlier types of flamethrower were designed so that combustion took place about twenty yards away from the nozzle. Obviously it would be hazardous to use a flame thrower for snow removal at this distance. If used at a closer range, there would be an excess of vaporized fuel on the snow, resulting in poor combustion, a considerable amount of black smoke and relatively low hear per unit of fuel consumed."
"...On the basis of such information as we have, only the salt method appears to be an economical alternative to the present method of snow removal."
Just imagine a beowolf cluster of these? No, let's have some fun with math, instead.
FTFS:
'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to.
Okay, bear with me here:
45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Hold True? ("Intel has packed just shy of a billion transistors into the 216 square millimeters of silicon that compose its latest chip... which linked article goes on to report: "The quad-core desktop Sandy Bridge die clocks in at 995 million transistors." )
Researchers Claim 1,000 Core Chip Created (By using FPGAs, Glasgow University researchers have claimed a proof of concept 1,000 core chip that they demonstrated running an MPEG algorithm at a speed of 5Gbps.)
Intel Talks 1000-Core Processors ("An experimental Intel chip shows the feasibility of building processors with 1,000 cores, an Intel researcher has asserted. The architecture for the Intel 48-core Single Chip Cloud Computer processor is 'arbitrarily scalable,' according to Timothy Mattson. 'This is an architecture that could, in principle, scale to 1,000 cores,' he said. 'I can just keep adding, adding, adding cores.'")
So let's perform a few calculations, shall we? There are 995,000,000 transistors in the Sandy Bridge Quad Core die. There are 3,150 transistors in the 6502. That means that within the space of the Sandy Bridge chip, there could be, instead, 315,873 complete 6502 cores!!
But wait, it gets better! Back in its day, IIRC the 6502 ran at what, 1MHz? 2MHz? With today's technology, we could run each of these cores at least one-thousand times faster than the original! That's like having another thousand times as many 6502 cores.
So, finally, in the space of just one Sandy Bridge Quad Core die, we could have the processing equivalent of over 300 Million 6502 cores!(*)
(*) Okay, granted, it would take a not insignificant amount of space on die to connect all these together, along with a metric ton of lines for sending data and address info to/from each 6502 processor. Nevertheless, I'm just boggled to see how far we've come from the chip that was in the first computer I ever bought!
Okay, so the summary points to the root of the web site. If you'd rather not navigate through the different missions and
multimedia items to find it, here's a direct link to the "Houston, we've had a problem" quote:
02 07 55 19 Fred Haise (LMP) Okay, Houston --
02 07 55 20 Jack Swigert (CMP) I believe we've had a problem here.
02 07 55 28 Jack Lousma (CAPCOM) This is Houston. Say again, please.
02 07 55 35 Jim Lovell (CDR) Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.
Also, if you'd like to make recommendations for next year's list, here are some ideas on possible films to nominate. You can nominate up to 50 titles per year by sending an email to: dross@loc.gov.
I read the linked article and wondered why they stopped at 14 days. Still not certain, but it appears they made a decision to do so, instead of some malfunction or loss of elevation, according to their press release:
QinetiQ will today bring Zephyr, its solar powered high-altitude long endurance (HALE) Unmanned Air System (UAS) back to earth after two weeks in the air - smashing a number of long-standing official and unofficial world records.
Zephyr was launched on 09 July and is currently still flying above the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Today Zephyr will have been aloft for 14 nights continuously, achieving the objective of the trial and setting a number of performance and altitude records. At this point QinetiQ's Zephyr team in Yuma will bring the aircraft back to earth.
Does anyone have further details? Were they just tired, met the design/test objectives, and wanted to process all of that? I'd think if it were "eternal", it could have just been left there flying and would still be up there today. My *guess* is that it may be unmanned, but not entirely autonomous, so it required people on-site to monitor and control it.
There's an article
on the University of Queensland's web site (where the researchers hail from).
The land surface that the asteroid hit is now buried under layers of sedimentary rock and Dr Uysal thinks the original crater most likely eroded away.
"Dr Uysal and Dr Glikson will present their findings at the Australian Geothermal Energy Conference in Adelaide, 16-19 November 2010."
To read more about their research, see their
conference paper (pdf). (This may not be specifically on the impact, but on their geothermal research, instead.)
In short, not the biggest, oldest, newest, or any other superlative. Still, given the estimated size of the impact, I'd expect it to have had a major impact on the Earth's weather for quite a while.
Some marketing drones who don't understand the technologies they're pushing have made a mistake and mislabeled them while attempting to make them sound better than they are.
I'm sure they could come up with some new advertising slogan... Lessee there was the old standard, 3G, and we're so much better than THAT. But, we cannot say we meet the new standard, 4G. What we need is something that's better than 3... I've got it!
That said, is the "expansion pack" even worth the small amount? For all we know the two amounts listed are "more money than it's worth" and "way much more money than it's worth" and this is all a poor-man's advertising gimmick.
You raise an interesting point: how do I know, beforehand, what the DLC is worth TO ME? It's like buying the proverbial "pig in a poke". Caveat emptor and all that.
I'm not sure how to fix that, though. Nagware has been tried, to varying degrees of effectiveness. (If it were REALLY effective, it seems to me that it would have become the overriding norm and I've not seen that happen.)
Ask for full payment up front and then after a particularly interesting/rewarding point in the game, ask if they want a rebate, or let the full payment stand? I can see a nest of implementation issues with that one!
Offer tiered pricing up front (as in TFA), and if they opted for the lower price, put up a nag screen at the
end asking if they enjoyed it and would like to pay up for the full price? Maybe give them access to some more features if they do (e.g. record their score on the "Hall of Fame.")
I see no easy, obvious answer. Hence we still see people playing around with different payment mechanisms.
The main thing that comes to my mind is to ask for payment at the "sweet spot". The question is what is the sweet spot? Beforehand, after a person has heard some buzz about the DLC and they really want it? At the culmination of a quest where the exhilaration of accomplishment is great? At game completion? Or, at a harrowing spot in some challenge with an offer for some kind of non-essential "extra" to help them through? (i.e. arcade video games have had this for a LONG time -- if your character died, you could put in more quarters to continue from the current point in the game.)
In short, I think the answer is "it depends." On one's disposable income and what amount is considered an acceptable impulse purchase, how much one thinks the DLC (will-be/is/was) worth it. In short what is the perceived value versus perceived cost and at what time does the player make that assessment? I don't think there is one, final, be-all end-all answer to the question. Different mechanisms each have their place depending on the content and the audience.
If they didn't turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
True, but I would argue that it's worse than that; it's a matter of PERCEPTION:
If they didn't THINK they COULD turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
Right or wrong, the perceived reward to the perceived risk is such that many continue to attempt it. As you say, some likely do turn a profit. Of those that do not, and close up shop, there are still others who think THEY CAN, and set up shop to start spamming. And so the spamming continues.
Until such time as those who might spam conclude the potential risk exceeds the potential reward, we will continue to have spammers among us. Technological means can go a long way, yes, but given past experience, there always seems to be yet another new way to bypass these controls. Heck, I was on the internet when the first spam message was posted on usenet and saw the huge reaction. Nothing has yet been able to stop it.
Yikes! It's worse than I thought! I just looked up spam on wikipedia and discovered this:
In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers.
Alas, human nature being what it is even though the technology may change, I fear that spam will be with us for a long time to come.
but only on the drives which were oriented north-south; those oriented east-west were not affected. So came the directive that all drives, henceforth, needed to be oriented north-south.
That seems counter-productive. They were oriented into the less optimal position?
Yes, I blew that one... Oops! But let me take this opportunity to point out something that I realized only after posting the GP post... That I was able to deduce the problem I had with the PBX, because I applied what I learned from the situation with the cleaning staff using a slot on a rack's outlet strip to plug in their vacuum cleaner.
IOW, although some of these stories seem funny in retrospect, they can also prove to be great learning opportunities, too! I'm looking forward to reading the other posts in this thread. I should probably head over to the "daily wtf" web site, again, too.
Ah, the memories! Here are some of the stories I've heard and or witnessed over the years.
Orientation: As a co-op student at DEC in 1980, I was told this (possibly apocryphal) story. On seemingly random occasions, a fixed-head disk drive would crash at the main plant in Maynard, Massachusetts. Not all of the drives, just a couple. Apparently the problem
was isolated when someone was midway between the computer room and the loading dock. They heard the bump
of a truck backing hard into the loading dock followed very shortly by a curse from the computer room!
It apparently caused enough of a jolt to cause platters to tilt up and hit the heads... but only on the drives
which were oriented north-south; those oriented east-west were not affected. So came the directive that
all drives, henceforth, needed to be oriented north-south.
Hot Stuff: Seems that a mini-computer developed a nasty tendency to crash in the early afternoon.
But only on some days. Diagnostics were run. Job schedules were checked and evaluated. All the software
and hardware checked out A-OK. This went on for quite a while until someone noticed that there was a big
window to the outside and that in the early afternoon the sun's light would fall upon the computer. This
additional heat load was enough to put components out of expected operational norms and caused a crash.
Cool!: A friend of mine was a field engineer for DEC back in the day when minicomputers had
core memory. He was called into a site where their system had some intermittent crashes. He ran diagnostics.
All seemed to be within spec. He replaced memory boards. Still crashed. Replaced mother boards. Reloaded the OS from fresh tapes. Still crashed. He finally noticed that one of the fans on the rack was not an
official DEC fan. Though it WAS within spec for airflow and power draw, it was NOT within spec for magnetic
shielding... it would sporadically cause bit flips in the (magnetic) core memory. Swapping out the fan solved the problem.
This sucked: Another place had a problem with a computer that would sometimes crash in the early
evening after everyone went home for the day. Well, not everyone. The cleaning staff apparently noticed a convenient power strip on a rack and plugged their vacuum cleaner into it. The resulting voltage sag took down the server!
Buttons: Every couple years, IBM would hold an open house where anyone in the community
could come in and get a tour of the facility (Kingston, NY). This was back in 1984, IIRC. PCs were just starting to make an impact at this time... big iron was king. We're talking about a huge raised-floor area
with multiple mainframes, storage, tape drives... MANY millions of dollars per system. A few hundred users on a system was quite an accomplishment back then and these boxes could handle a thousand users. We were
also in the midst of a huge test effort of the next release of VM/SP. I had come in that Sunday afternoon to get several tests done (death marches are no fun). All of a sudden the mainframe I was on crashed. Hard. I'd grown accustomed to this as we were at a point where we were "eating our own dog food"; the production system was running the latest build of the OS. But, an hour later and it was STILL down. Apparently, a tour guide had led a group to one of the operator consoles and a child could not resist pressing buttons. Back in those days, booting a mainframe meant "re-IPL" Initial Program Load. Unless the computer was REALLY messed up and wouldn't boot. Only then would someone re-IML the system. Initial Microcode Load. Guess which button the kid pressed? It left the system in such a wonky state that it had to be reloaded from tape. All the
development work of that weekend was lost and had to be recreated and rebuilt. (It was a weekend and backups
were only done on weekday nights.) It took us a week to get things back to normal.
My only tiny little concern is that you might introduce artifacts into your photos - which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be better to store a raw image and the data from these sensors independently? I wonder if there is a scenario where you might be moving but the object you're taking a picture of is stationary relative to your movement.
I suspect in the majority of cases, this would improve photos. As to your query, my first thought of a problematic environment would be trying to take a photo of a friend sitting next to you--in a moving roller coaster as it hurls around a bend. You and your friend are [mostly] stationary WRT each other, but you (and the camera) are all undergoing acceleration, which the camera dutifully attepts to remove from the photo. Certainly a comparatively rare event compared to the majority of photo-ops.
A customer in this context is a network operator - like Verizon. There are a few biggies that Motorola has (Verizon - CDMA, CMCC - GSM, Zain - GSM) and there are lots of small ones. The small ones will spend a few mill on network equipment, the biggies will spend a few hundred mill
Duh! Don't know how I didn't realize that when I posted; thanks for your kind reply!
Note that this has nothing to do with either Nokia or Motorola phones themselves, but the network infrastructure business. There are a lot of pieces between the handsets such as antennas, switches, media gateways, routers, etc. That's the part that's being acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks (not Nokia proper, the handset manufacturer).
Oh! I just RTFA and was confused when I came to this:
The joint venture of Nokia Oyj and Siemens AG will gain or expand access to more than 50 customers, it said in a statement today. (Emphasis added)
Now I understand... But that works out to... $24,000,000 per customer.
Now I don't understand!;)
It wasn't until the late 80's IIRC, that the first software company takeover occurred: PR1ME Computer and MAI Basic4.
Up until then, software companies lived (and died) on their own. Though there was an awareness of takeovers in other industries, there was a pervasive sense that it would never happen in high tech. (At least at the companies I worked at.)
Then MAI Basic4 proposed a hostile takeover of the MUCH larger PR1ME Computer (where I was working at the time.). PR1ME took on a huge amount of debt to raise funds to buy out Bennet S. Lebow (sp?). Then followed several rounds of cost-cutting and layoffs.
I've survived several others since then. In every single case it had NO BENEFIT to the customer that I could see; it was ALL about corporate profits.
Yes, I know anecdote is not the singular of data, but thought I'd toss my first-hand experience into the discussion. (BTW this occurred not very long after Robert Morris unleashed the first internet worm; I was at PR1ME when that hit, too.)
I propose that to the fullest extent permissible by whatever law they propose, they further agree to have every member of goverment published in real time to a publically available website, and have it published in each day's conressional record.
Okay, the details may need some work, but I think the intent is clear. I'm open to any suggestions on improvement.
Thanks for your reply and correction!!! I blew it and calculated the height of a cylinder of water, the base of which had an area equal to the surface area of the moon. Blegh. I stand corrected. Thanks again!
Depth of covering the moon with the contents of the Great Lakes, just once:
(GreatLakesVolume) / (SurfaceAreaOfMoon) = (2.256 x 10E4)/(3.793 x 10E7) => .0005947798 km => .597 m
So, approximately 0.6 meters (just under 2 feet)!
If we use BooksInLoC of Great Lakes, that works out to:
(29 x 10E6)(0.6 m) => 17.4 x 10E6 m
So, to answer the original question: 17,400 Km (or approx. 10,800 miles) deep!
P.S. This was a fun exercise... I knew the Great Lakes were "big", and I knew the Moon was "big", but to think the Great Lakes alone could cover the entire Moon to a depth of about 2 feet... Just. Plain. Wow!
Extra Credit Question: If the moon were entirely covered by the water from the Great Lakes, how much brighter would it make a Full Moon seem on earth? Bonus: how bright is that compared to the Sun at noon?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if we name the input bits i0 (LSB) to i3 (HSB) and the output bits o0 (LSB) and o1(HSB) then the calculation to do is:
I like what you did there! But... i0 is not used, and i4 is not defined. If we adjust the formula by shifting the indices down by one so that we have:
Then it seems to work just fine! (Please forgive the appearance; workaround to overcome /.'s formatting and lameness filter limitations.)
What I'd like to know: is that the MINIMAL set of logic operations required to compute this? How could one prove it?
But that suddenly stopped in March, with no code releases for the last two updates to the iOS version of the browser, for reasons unkown.
Is that like an un-koan?
A koan ... is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition.
Does that mean it cannot be not understood by rational thinking? Hmmm, I'll have to think about that one.
Not necessarily. Even without accurate airspeed readings, the pilots should have still been able to maintain safe airspeed by setting the engines to a specific power output and trimming to a specific angle of attack. Probably pilot error (i.e. being distracted with alarms and not remembering to adjust throttle and angle....) but without that box it's hard to really know.
Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.
Continuous Transmission? Send all of the recorded data to both the black box and some remote data center, too. If this is too much to transmit continuously, then maybe a subset of the data? I know planes are becoming increasingly complex and automated, so there's probably loads more data that *could* be considered for transmission. Still, something is better than nothing (what we have now.) Pick some subset of the available data and send it periodically.
Burst Transmission? Instead of a continuous stream of data, when the pilot (or plane) detects a "dangerous condition", it starts sending a high-speed burst of accumulated data, and continuously until things look "normal" again. Say the plane takes a sudden 200-foot drop in altitude. Or banks unusually sharply. Or... whatever. Just ignore the values that appear 99.9% of the time, and only trigger outside that normal range. (numbers pulled out of thin air; pick whatever works best.)
At this point, there's nothing much to go on. Imagine if we had the last few minutes' airspeed, altitude, as well as settings for the flaps, rudder, and engine would be an enormous improvement over what we've got now. I suspect the pilots' unions might raise a concern about monitoring and potential for it to be help against them, but I could also imagine some kind of escrow mechanism where the data is sent and stored, but only to be accessed upon certain, predefined circumstances.
Admittedly, this is quite rough. I'd like to think that there is at least some part of this which could be implemented in parallel to the provision of internet access on planes. I'd appreciate it if anyone who knows more about these things could comment on the viability of this and/or the technical limitations/challenges which I'm missing here.
For example, Chip $foo has functions A B C D E & F. E is used on average once every gigaflop, so using the CPU/other functions, they implement E and cut out all parts for E.
The best part is that this can be applied iteratively. Once E is eliminated there's a new "least used" function which can be eliminated. By extension, any CPU can ultimately be pruned down to a single NOP instruction, with the entire rest of the instruction set emulated in software.
Not quite to THAT degree, but Mark Twain suggested something along those lines: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/marktwain.cfm I'll leave it to the reader to provide a coding sample to implement this.
Given the fact that they're facing similar problems today, we can conclude that MIT failed to come up with anything useful in response to the mayor's query. It would be nice to know what their response was, if they responded at all.
It's actually an interesting read: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/curley/index1.html; the link contains the original letter AND MIT's response.
tl;dr: Here's a summary of the response (dated Jan 28, 1948)
Just imagine a beowolf cluster of these? No, let's have some fun with math, instead.
FTFS:
'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to.
Okay, bear with me here:
So let's perform a few calculations, shall we? There are 995,000,000 transistors in the Sandy Bridge Quad Core die. There are 3,150 transistors in the 6502. That means that within the space of the Sandy Bridge chip, there could be, instead, 315,873 complete 6502 cores!!
But wait, it gets better! Back in its day, IIRC the 6502 ran at what, 1MHz? 2MHz? With today's technology, we could run each of these cores at least one-thousand times faster than the original! That's like having another thousand times as many 6502 cores.
So, finally, in the space of just one Sandy Bridge Quad Core die, we could have the processing equivalent of over 300 Million 6502 cores!(*)
(*) Okay, granted, it would take a not insignificant amount of space on die to connect all these together, along with a metric ton of lines for sending data and address info to/from each 6502 processor. Nevertheless, I'm just boggled to see how far we've come from the chip that was in the first computer I ever bought!
Okay, so the summary points to the root of the web site. If you'd rather not navigate through the different missions and multimedia items to find it, here's a direct link to the "Houston, we've had a problem" quote:
Thanks for the link to wikipedia... but for those who would like to go to the actual National Film Registry (NFR) site:
Also, if you'd like to make recommendations for next year's list, here are some ideas on possible films to nominate. You can nominate up to 50 titles per year by sending an email to: dross@loc.gov.
I read the linked article and wondered why they stopped at 14 days. Still not certain, but it appears they made a decision to do so, instead of some malfunction or loss of elevation, according to their press release:
QinetiQ will today bring Zephyr, its solar powered high-altitude long endurance (HALE) Unmanned Air System (UAS) back to earth after two weeks in the air - smashing a number of long-standing official and unofficial world records.
Zephyr was launched on 09 July and is currently still flying above the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Today Zephyr will have been aloft for 14 nights continuously, achieving the objective of the trial and setting a number of performance and altitude records. At this point QinetiQ's Zephyr team in Yuma will bring the aircraft back to earth.
Does anyone have further details? Were they just tired, met the design/test objectives, and wanted to process all of that? I'd think if it were "eternal", it could have just been left there flying and would still be up there today. My *guess* is that it may be unmanned, but not entirely autonomous, so it required people on-site to monitor and control it.
There's an article on the University of Queensland's web site (where the researchers hail from).
The land surface that the asteroid hit is now buried under layers of sedimentary rock and Dr Uysal thinks the original crater most likely eroded away.
"Dr Uysal and Dr Glikson will present their findings at the Australian Geothermal Energy Conference in Adelaide, 16-19 November 2010."
To read more about their research, see their conference paper (pdf). (This may not be specifically on the impact, but on their geothermal research, instead.)
In short, not the biggest, oldest, newest, or any other superlative. Still, given the estimated size of the impact, I'd expect it to have had a major impact on the Earth's weather for quite a while.
Some marketing drones who don't understand the technologies they're pushing have made a mistake and mislabeled them while attempting to make them sound better than they are.
I'm sure they could come up with some new advertising slogan... Lessee there was the old standard, 3G, and we're so much better than THAT. But, we cannot say we meet the new standard, 4G. What we need is something that's better than 3... I've got it!
Get your piece of the Pi! 3.14159G
<grin>
Ya, it'll never work; just Pi in the sky.
That said, is the "expansion pack" even worth the small amount? For all we know the two amounts listed are "more money than it's worth" and "way much more money than it's worth" and this is all a poor-man's advertising gimmick.
You raise an interesting point: how do I know, beforehand, what the DLC is worth TO ME? It's like buying the proverbial "pig in a poke". Caveat emptor and all that.
I'm not sure how to fix that, though. Nagware has been tried, to varying degrees of effectiveness. (If it were REALLY effective, it seems to me that it would have become the overriding norm and I've not seen that happen.)
Ask for full payment up front and then after a particularly interesting/rewarding point in the game, ask if they want a rebate, or let the full payment stand? I can see a nest of implementation issues with that one!
Offer tiered pricing up front (as in TFA), and if they opted for the lower price, put up a nag screen at the end asking if they enjoyed it and would like to pay up for the full price? Maybe give them access to some more features if they do (e.g. record their score on the "Hall of Fame.")
I see no easy, obvious answer. Hence we still see people playing around with different payment mechanisms.
The main thing that comes to my mind is to ask for payment at the "sweet spot". The question is what is the sweet spot? Beforehand, after a person has heard some buzz about the DLC and they really want it? At the culmination of a quest where the exhilaration of accomplishment is great? At game completion? Or, at a harrowing spot in some challenge with an offer for some kind of non-essential "extra" to help them through? (i.e. arcade video games have had this for a LONG time -- if your character died, you could put in more quarters to continue from the current point in the game.)
In short, I think the answer is "it depends." On one's disposable income and what amount is considered an acceptable impulse purchase, how much one thinks the DLC (will-be/is/was) worth it. In short what is the perceived value versus perceived cost and at what time does the player make that assessment? I don't think there is one, final, be-all end-all answer to the question. Different mechanisms each have their place depending on the content and the audience.
If they didn't turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
True, but I would argue that it's worse than that; it's a matter of PERCEPTION:
If they didn't THINK they COULD turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there. Right or wrong, the perceived reward to the perceived risk is such that many continue to attempt it. As you say, some likely do turn a profit. Of those that do not, and close up shop, there are still others who think THEY CAN, and set up shop to start spamming. And so the spamming continues.
Until such time as those who might spam conclude the potential risk exceeds the potential reward, we will continue to have spammers among us. Technological means can go a long way, yes, but given past experience, there always seems to be yet another new way to bypass these controls. Heck, I was on the internet when the first spam message was posted on usenet and saw the huge reaction. Nothing has yet been able to stop it.
Yikes! It's worse than I thought! I just looked up spam on wikipedia and discovered this:
In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers.
Alas, human nature being what it is even though the technology may change, I fear that spam will be with us for a long time to come.
but only on the drives which were oriented north-south; those oriented east-west were not affected. So came the directive that all drives, henceforth, needed to be oriented north-south.
That seems counter-productive. They were oriented into the less optimal position?
Yes, I blew that one... Oops! But let me take this opportunity to point out something that I realized only after posting the GP post... That I was able to deduce the problem I had with the PBX, because I applied what I learned from the situation with the cleaning staff using a slot on a rack's outlet strip to plug in their vacuum cleaner.
IOW, although some of these stories seem funny in retrospect, they can also prove to be great learning opportunities, too! I'm looking forward to reading the other posts in this thread. I should probably head over to the "daily wtf" web site, again, too.
Ah, the memories! Here are some of the stories I've heard and or witnessed over the years.
My only tiny little concern is that you might introduce artifacts into your photos - which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be better to store a raw image and the data from these sensors independently? I wonder if there is a scenario where you might be moving but the object you're taking a picture of is stationary relative to your movement.
I suspect in the majority of cases, this would improve photos. As to your query, my first thought of a problematic environment would be trying to take a photo of a friend sitting next to you--in a moving roller coaster as it hurls around a bend. You and your friend are [mostly] stationary WRT each other, but you (and the camera) are all undergoing acceleration, which the camera dutifully attepts to remove from the photo. Certainly a comparatively rare event compared to the majority of photo-ops.
Ok, I'm not up on materials science and had to look this up--thought others might be curious, too: chalcogenide glass
A customer in this context is a network operator - like Verizon. There are a few biggies that Motorola has (Verizon - CDMA, CMCC - GSM, Zain - GSM) and there are lots of small ones. The small ones will spend a few mill on network equipment, the biggies will spend a few hundred mill
Duh! Don't know how I didn't realize that when I posted; thanks for your kind reply!
Note that this has nothing to do with either Nokia or Motorola phones themselves, but the network infrastructure business. There are a lot of pieces between the handsets such as antennas, switches, media gateways, routers, etc. That's the part that's being acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks (not Nokia proper, the handset manufacturer).
Oh! I just RTFA and was confused when I came to this:
The joint venture of Nokia Oyj and Siemens AG will gain or expand access to more than 50 customers, it said in a statement today. (Emphasis added)
Now I understand... But that works out to... $24,000,000 per customer. Now I don't understand! ;)
I RTFA and am pleased to report that it was *really* light reading! ;)
It wasn't until the late 80's IIRC, that the first software company takeover occurred: PR1ME Computer and MAI Basic4.
Up until then, software companies lived (and died) on their own. Though there was an awareness of takeovers in other industries, there was a pervasive sense that it would never happen in high tech. (At least at the companies I worked at.)
Then MAI Basic4 proposed a hostile takeover of the MUCH larger PR1ME Computer (where I was working at the time.). PR1ME took on a huge amount of debt to raise funds to buy out Bennet S. Lebow (sp?). Then followed several rounds of cost-cutting and layoffs.
I've survived several others since then. In every single case it had NO BENEFIT to the customer that I could see; it was ALL about corporate profits.
Yes, I know anecdote is not the singular of data, but thought I'd toss my first-hand experience into the discussion. (BTW this occurred not very long after Robert Morris unleashed the first internet worm; I was at PR1ME when that hit, too.)
Okay, the details may need some work, but I think the intent is clear. I'm open to any suggestions on improvement.
Thanks for your reply and correction!!! I blew it and calculated the height of a cylinder of water, the base of which had an area equal to the surface area of the moon. Blegh. I stand corrected. Thanks again!
Preposterous, but now I'm curious! (Caution: I've only had one cup of coffee so far this morning, so please check my math!)
Depth of covering the moon with the contents of the Great Lakes, just once:
So, approximately 0.6 meters (just under 2 feet)!
If we use BooksInLoC of Great Lakes, that works out to:
So, to answer the original question: 17,400 Km (or approx. 10,800 miles) deep!
P.S. This was a fun exercise... I knew the Great Lakes were "big", and I knew the Moon was "big", but to think the Great Lakes alone could cover the entire Moon to a depth of about 2 feet... Just. Plain. Wow!
Extra Credit Question: If the moon were entirely covered by the water from the Great Lakes, how much brighter would it make a Full Moon seem on earth? Bonus: how bright is that compared to the Sun at noon?
No No NO! I said to host a web site for the iPhone4; not on an iPhone4!
</jobs_voice="off">
Question: What would Steve Jobs call a web site where you can negotiate the best price for an iPhone4?
Answer: iDeal!