Re:What about deep oil?
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Out of Gas
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Yeah, mostly lepidodendrons, the ancient ancestors of the modern club mosses that once covered the continents hundreds of feet tall. But see, that's not very funny to say how did all those lepidodendrons get out there on Europa because most people don't know what a lepidodendron is.
I read last year that oil was found in the ocean off of Thailand much deeper than it was supposed to exist. The author of the report was apparently something of a crusader for the idea that oil didn't come from buried organic material, but was a basic part of the earth.
While that sounds silly at first, the rather intriguing issue is that sprectonomy has shown fairly conclusively that there are seas and atomspheres filled with hydrocarbons on the moons of other planets in our solar system. If hydrocarbons on earth come from the dinosaurs, this does lead to the interesting question of how they got so many dinosaurs out there on Europa.
So let's do devil's advocate and say this guy was right. There's an endless supply of deep oil and the northern oceans are simply bursting with hydrate deposits. In fact, there's so much hydrocarbon energy around it's not even funny. What we've really got is a great conspiracy between the Bush's and the Sauds to take everybody's money.
But what the hell are they going to do with all the money? That's the real question.
I think the security issue is a bit of a red herring is someone is going to install PostNuke just for a blog.
I cast my vote for PostNuke and currently use it for two sites. For the people who don't use it, I'd like to mention that it's an FSF project. So, if you like to antagonize people with hippier-than-thou geekiness it's the top choice CMS.
The legitimate use argument is apparently going to get a lot stronger. Didn't we just see an article about a mirror in Britain losing funding. If resources are so tight, then efficient systems are the way to go and we already have them --P2P.
Besides, as far as I recall, the only two cases that have gone to court in the States from the RIAA's lawsuits against P2P users were both no-shows where the defendants lost by default for failing to appear in court. The interesting part hasn't even started and that will be when people go to court and plead not guilty. Even if they lose, it's still just the beginning because the appeals courts are where the RIAA is going to be getting real nervous. The DMCA is known be problematic. That's why Congress is looking to cut it back before the courts do it for them.
Check Wikipedia for some great Bush quotes.
"There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."
George W. Bush
o 2004 April 30, welcoming Paul Martin to the Whitehouse
Well that dentist analogy is an interesting one in light of the recent story about teeth being grown from stem cells. I'd rather not have dentists at all. If the vision of the distant future is a vision that still includes such barbarous professions as dentistry then it sound dystopian to me.
Perhaps the link to computing skills seems tenuous, but high performance computing and network attached storage are essential for the kind of medical research being done today. In fact, even shell scripting skills and knowledge of the unix filesystem are important skills in medicine. So, as others have pointed out, it's not so simple as saying we shouldn't emphasize computer skills.
I think I can answer this one at least in part and I doubt it will make the list. So, allow me.
The largest part of the educational multimedia market uses software built with either Macromedia Director or Authorware or some other very high level authoring system as opposed to C++. This is because typically these applications are heavy on realtively simple mulitmedia interactions and light on intensive computing that requires stramlined code.
For the most part, these systems do already work quite flawlessly under Wine. I've developed a few of these type apps and I used to go to the Marcomedia corporate newsgroups and harrangue then to come out with a GNU/Linux run-time so educational authors could create native GNU/Linux apps in addition to Windows and Mac. But then Wine came out and I discovered that not only did my own apps, but several dozen other Macromedia based apps I tried all worked under Wine. Not only that, the authoring environment itself works under Wine. And that was at least four years ago. Probably more like six.
Since then, I've assisted a number of teachers who simply assumed that their apps wouldn't work under Wine to make them work. In every case what I have found is that Wine already did work, but the real problem was the teacher in question didn't understand how Wine worked and how to setup the fake_Windows directory. So, it's not really a Wine problem as much as a lack of familiarity with the Linux filesystem among those people who would be responsible for making the switch, ie teachers.
I don't know the Reader Rabbit series per se, but I do know that the average public school in California and Colorado where I have had direct experience in such things has purchased a copy of Macromedia Authorware for just about every single staff and the janitors too in hopes that they would take a crack at putting some multimedia lessons together and very very few of them have. However, there are a number of existing and many many bankrupt companies that devoted themselves to producing these type of titles and since they all use similar run-times which use only a limited subset of the Windows API that was supported in Wine a long time ago, the chances are your app quite likely might already work.
But it's also a cross between a comment on Google and a comment on the next story about the 2ch web site in Japan.
And it's somewhat on topic because in a way e-mail is like a blog.
So, let me spit it out.
What I'd love to see is an addition to Google News that allowed you to comment on news stories.
As the 2ch story points out, being able to comment on stories is such a huge idea that has yet to really catch on in the mainstream press.
Just look at what happens on Slashdot. People are dying to debate the non-tech news stories that they're excited about so they post off-topic on Slashdot because it's their only outlet.
Mainstream news sites don't want to deal with the liability of accepting comments, but how about just having a comment system available to people who entered the article through Google News.
The collected and threaded comments could be thought of us a part of Gmail. After all, comments systems are really just take-offs of usenet and e-mail and usenet have always been closely related.
This could lead to some hot debates becuase Google News already has a huge readership so there would be a ready made body of posters and the topics are right there. It just needs to be combined and let the debates bgin.
The one thing is that you'd want to be able to assure a certain degree of anonymity, but something like the Slashdot system should be good enough. It may not be genuine anonymity, but close enough to allow people to speak their minds.
Having lived in ferrocement framed buildings for many years in Taiwan, I can tell you that it's yet another case of the knife cutting both ways. It can be an advantage and a disadvantage and in the course of a year you'll get both. Of course these buildings in Taiwan aren't built to make maximum use of thermal storage, there's simply no other feasible building material on a subtropical island.
I helped build a tire house in Colorado at one point that used thermal storage walls with abundant insulation on the outside and that place was incredibly comfortable, unfortunately it wasn't cheap to build by any means because even using low cost and volunteer labor the labor bill alone was more than most houses.
And even that place had a tendency to overheat in the summer. It's really tough to engineer a building with a perfect balance using just insulation thermal mass and solar gain. You simply can't predict the weather years in advance and passively designing for just the right amount of cooling and heating is part art, part luck.
For a warm climate, I'm interested in passive circulation designs, but of course it all really needs to be tailored for the location. There is no simple or ultimate solution.
So much for stating the obvious. But I wanted to add that LEDs are not particularly efficient. Flourescents are still the most efficient lighting you can buy, they just have long lifespans. That's the bad news. The good news is that the much maligned halogens are actually more efficient than standard incandescents and since they can easily be bought native twelve volt, they're easy to add to a simple DC solar system.
For what it's worth, I think the grid-tie systems are wonderful. Twenty years ago if you has said that soon power companies would be forced to read the meter backwards and free you from the need to buy batteries for your solar and wind generation storage people would just laugh and say, you don't get it --there's no profit in it for them, they'll never let that happen. But now it's real and it's interesting to see that people are still not satisfied.
You honestly think Intel has trashed hundreds of millions in development costs because they are ahead of schedule? Hmm. Are you sure that makes sense?
On the other hand, have you noticed the latest P4 heat sinks? I just saw one the size of an econo can of whole peeeled tomatos. You can find those next to the 500watt power supplies. Hmm, and notice that these formerly insignificant items are now costing more than the CPUs themselves?
I believe the "year ahead" theory is an amusing bit of spin at best.
I agree and that wouldn't mean much, were it not for the fact that I work with a publisher that produces book/CD sets and we turn out tens of thousands of CDs a year and we do them all by hand on standard CD burners using standard CD-R blanks. It's nowhere near as hard as it sounds. A thousand a week can be done with very little effort and since we have secretaries sitting around doing nothing most of the time, the labor is essentially free and they don't mind because it gives them an excuse to surf the net while they're changing disks. At one point we outsourced the copying, but it was apparent the company we outsourced to was just using CDRs, so we decided to do it ourselves for far, far less money. Outsourcing probably starts to make sense around ten thousand copies and at that point, you are probably doing quite well and not so worried about costs. But doing one at a time is indeed quite fast once you get started on several machines simultaneously.
Of course the downside to all this is that since we started adding CDs to our books, our sales have actually declined and the same is true for our competitors. It's easy to guess why, if it's so cheap and easy for us to make copies . . .
And I'd say that you're in the mainstream. I tend to follow the PC market with some interest being a resident of Taiwan who likes to freelance and wants to know who's who.
As you point out, Via is doing incredibly well and the Epia is a big part of their success. But it's not just Via, it's the whole industrial computing segment which is essentially what the Epia is: a branded industrial PC. And while they're traditionally called industrial PCs, a better description would be small form-factor, low power PCs.
And note that shortly after announcing that they were withdrawing the MHz labeling from their CPUs, Intel has moved the M series which was originally for mobile use into their mainstream desktop product line. One can easily imagine that this is partly in reaction to the undeniable strength of Via and the overall industrial computing market where low power requirements are the key selling points
But the most intriguing issue here for me comes from the front page of the EETimes where there has been a white paper posted for months in which a senior Intel engineer claims that in order to produce a 10GHz Pentium, the power requirements would be ten kilowatts --really, go read it yourself, it's shocking.
So, with all that evidence in favor of lower powered PCs, I have to assume that either Microsoft is going under or this report is inaccurate. Guess which one I suspect.
Follow the money.
Look at the history of Microsoft doublespeak. It's no secret that Microsoft has been the single largest beneficiary of software "piracy" in history. This kind of doublespeak is core to Microsoft's business.
Now consider this, Microsoft Corporation has distanced itself from media investments. If they were so sure they were going to secure digital media, wouldn't they be buying movie studios and record labels? They could afford to buy some of the biggest in cash.
Certainly that strategy has some problems though, not the least of them is anti-trust. Well, now imagine you were in that situation. You can't join them, so what should you do? Beat them.
How to beat them? Easy, same ol' doublespeak game. Say you're going to fight "piracy," but actually enable the hell out of it by simple incompetence. You guarantee all your media partners that you've got the unbeatable secret solution just like you did with all your softwre partners before. Of course they believe you because they're greedy.
So you roll it out and presto, there's holes in it and suddenly these huge media collections you've given the public access to are owned. The public cheers again and your competitors in media, ie Sony, Time Warner etc take a hard, hard hit.
It's the same ol' game. And nobody is going to complain because why should they?
Insightful? Great Leaping Mel Gibson, what's going on here?
The term "stem cell" covers a freakin' vast range of cell types. It's not A thing. It's a huge category of thingS. And the most promising ones were the ones that Bush did inded ban and it is costing the US every day the ban is in place.
However, a major part of that conversion wave is going to start off with Knoppix based LiveCDs and once they see it working, they'll say OK, stop. I want that. Just that. It's so simple and that's what people want. At least I know I've already seen it with quite a few people.
Now whether you want to argue that a KNoppix LiveCD is different than a REAL Debian install is another case although I think such a debate is rather academic and more about the definition of "real" than Debian.
That USENET post goes on and on about XML formats and such and I'm not saying that's irrelevant, but XML is really more of a concern for people in specialized projects. I thought that was the whole point of XML. The browser just has to follow the standards.
I think in the browser game it's the little things like pop-up blockers and being able to manage your configs across multiple desktops are what make Firefox kick ass all over IE.
These are the things that closed source has no reason to compete on. It doesn't make anybody money to prevent ads. There's no way MS is going to compete on that front, and yet it's a huge factor for most end users.
Indeed, my '79 Celica just tested in at 0.00 for CO after I put in a new long block. I asked the guy at the smog station how that could be possible, he said it wasn't really zero, it was just too low to detect. Not bad. Gotta do something about that rust though.
I wasn't going to put it quite that way because the paper on his historical contributions made me think he's not such a bad guy, but I did definitely notice something I thought was a bit contradictory in the Scientific American article.
On the first page he says "The culture of theft that turns around MP3 is detestable, and I'm very disappointed about that."
Which made me think this guy is on the wrong side of the fence using phrases like "culture of theft", but then in the second page he goes on to say
"I also see a great potential for peer-to-peer. It's a wonderful system. If it is used to distribute contents legally, it will create new business opportunities."
But by definition peer-to-peer means that the content is being hosted and distributed in a non-commercial exchange. He conveniently skips the part about why consumers would pay for the right to freely exchange data in a non-commercial exchange. So, he seems to be simply playing games in order to appear to straddle the fence.
One can only guess his intentions, but perhaps those vineyards cost money to maintain.
I was wondering the same thing.
Living outside of Taipei and commuting into town, I'm already exposed to quite a few digital billboards. I think they're cool and seem perfectly normal in Taiwan, but it's worth noting that Taiwan's sign standards are a lot closer to Vegas than any other western city I've seen. And I recall that in San Diego and LA even flashing neon signs are prohibited except in certain "historical" districts.
Adding that with California's prohibition on front seet LCDs makes it seem this is going to be a difficult trick to pull off at least in California.
It's just a troll. I know, but nonethless, it raises a great point. It's good when folks like Ashcroft draw our attention to sexually explicit material as a topic of public discussion. We should speak of these things in an open public manner to clear the air on what is right and wrong and what is harmful and dangerous and what is natural and normal.
In fact, children need to learn about sex at some point. Only a fool would disagree with this point. Now some people might protest that children are harmed by learning about sexuality through pornography. Not surprisingly, psychologists have already extensively studied this subject.
What they found was that children have commonly viewed pornography for many centuries and that it was, in fact, a normal and perhaps even essential part of developing ones sexuality.
However, this was not to conclude simply that porn was okay and parents should openly allow their kids to check our pornography. This is the subtle part.
The problems came about when parents became overly involved in their childrens sexuality either in being too open about sharing sexually explicit media or in being too harsh in attempting to totally deny their children any access to sexually explicit materials as if there were not, in fact, the products of sexuality themselves who would grow up to have their own sex lives if they were to be normal.
So, the most commonly accepted approach towards dealing with childred and pornography among psychologists is to simply for the parent to state the rule that pornography will not be accepted in the home and leave it at that knowing that the rule will be broken. This is as close to an ideal policy towards children and pornography as the psychology profession has come up with.
If you're concerned about your role as a parent, it's simple. Just make it clear that it's unacceptable. If you're obsessed with actually preventing your children from learning about sexuality, then you personally have a problem and should seek therapy for yourself before you screw up your kids.
There seems to be two types in this thread, one that knows immersion is an old idea and one that thinks this is news.
If you're fascinated by this story apart from being an RIT student and think the technology of immersion is interesting, go to the EETimes and search for immersion, the archives are freely searchable. Immersion lithography was a big news item last year although it wasn't even close to new then. It was just that the stepper manufacturers were beginning to take it seriously.
At this point the three big chip manufacturing equipment companies, ASML, Cannon and Nikon all offer immersion scanners. SMIC, the large Nasdaq traded mainlaind Chinese fab, was ASML's first immersion lithography scanner customer. They bought their first machine this last winter.
There's an interesting side story there becuase prior to the Iraq invasion, Mainland China was limited to trailining edge semiconductor technology by international treaties because of the military implications. But after Bush unilaterally acted to invade Iraq, the Germans decided unilateral policy should work both ways and they allowed Infineon to sell cutting edge equipment to SMIC which made the treaty worthless. So, now SMIC is buying immersion scanners from the Dutch scanner firm ASML.
Why some engineering college called RIT is the focus of an immersion story while the technology's prominent role in the global semiconductor industry is ignored is an exercise left to the reader.
Let's go with another example.
Early theater competed directly with the church as the only form of public entertainment and it was simply banned. Furthermore, acting was considered to be a form of prostitution. Does the sexual element sound familar?
How about this solution:
This would most likely only work in conjunction with the EFF proposal to charge a minimum fee for P2P usage akin to the fees that radio stations pay to broadcast their content.
Well, if --and granted it's a big IF-- this system was in place then people who made meaningful code contributions to an open source project would gets P2P credits not only allowing them to skip the monthly fee, but to get priority downloads.
Indeed, the system wouldn't have to be limited to programming per se. These days the borderline between programming and entertainment can get rather blurry when you consider situations like game developers or CG renders. So, entertainers of all sorts could join in too. Anybody who produced digital content. As long as you contributed talent, you wouldn't have to pay to share in others' talent --a virtual commonwealth.
It's fair to point out that this system wouldn't put bread on the table and a roof over your head, but it would be more than what many open source developers get today.
Whether some trick like this makes it happen sooner rather than later only time will tell, but eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
that PCI-Express is really coming into the consumer channel in a big way in the near term.
That's great news and its about time. It makes me wonder why I never see GigE ethernet cards and switches in retails outlets though. I've seen GigE NICs as on-board features and I've seen them on-line and the prices look quite reasonable, but I've never seen them in a store yet.
But if boards are going for the big speed upgrade, then it's time for the home networks to step up a notch too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, mostly lepidodendrons, the ancient ancestors of the modern club mosses that once covered the continents hundreds of feet tall. But see, that's not very funny to say how did all those lepidodendrons get out there on Europa because most people don't know what a lepidodendron is.
I read last year that oil was found in the ocean off of Thailand much deeper than it was supposed to exist. The author of the report was apparently something of a crusader for the idea that oil didn't come from buried organic material, but was a basic part of the earth.
While that sounds silly at first, the rather intriguing issue is that sprectonomy has shown fairly conclusively that there are seas and atomspheres filled with hydrocarbons on the moons of other planets in our solar system. If hydrocarbons on earth come from the dinosaurs, this does lead to the interesting question of how they got so many dinosaurs out there on Europa.
So let's do devil's advocate and say this guy was right. There's an endless supply of deep oil and the northern oceans are simply bursting with hydrate deposits. In fact, there's so much hydrocarbon energy around it's not even funny. What we've really got is a great conspiracy between the Bush's and the Sauds to take everybody's money.
But what the hell are they going to do with all the money? That's the real question.
I think the security issue is a bit of a red herring is someone is going to install PostNuke just for a blog.
I cast my vote for PostNuke and currently use it for two sites. For the people who don't use it, I'd like to mention that it's an FSF project. So, if you like to antagonize people with hippier-than-thou geekiness it's the top choice CMS.
The legitimate use argument is apparently going to get a lot stronger. Didn't we just see an article about a mirror in Britain losing funding. If resources are so tight, then efficient systems are the way to go and we already have them --P2P.
Besides, as far as I recall, the only two cases that have gone to court in the States from the RIAA's lawsuits against P2P users were both no-shows where the defendants lost by default for failing to appear in court. The interesting part hasn't even started and that will be when people go to court and plead not guilty. Even if they lose, it's still just the beginning because the appeals courts are where the RIAA is going to be getting real nervous. The DMCA is known be problematic. That's why Congress is looking to cut it back before the courts do it for them.
Check Wikipedia for some great Bush quotes.
"There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."
George W. Bush
o 2004 April 30, welcoming Paul Martin to the Whitehouse
Well that dentist analogy is an interesting one in light of the recent story about teeth being grown from stem cells. I'd rather not have dentists at all. If the vision of the distant future is a vision that still includes such barbarous professions as dentistry then it sound dystopian to me.
Perhaps the link to computing skills seems tenuous, but high performance computing and network attached storage are essential for the kind of medical research being done today. In fact, even shell scripting skills and knowledge of the unix filesystem are important skills in medicine. So, as others have pointed out, it's not so simple as saying we shouldn't emphasize computer skills.
I think I can answer this one at least in part and I doubt it will make the list. So, allow me.
The largest part of the educational multimedia market uses software built with either Macromedia Director or Authorware or some other very high level authoring system as opposed to C++. This is because typically these applications are heavy on realtively simple mulitmedia interactions and light on intensive computing that requires stramlined code.
For the most part, these systems do already work quite flawlessly under Wine. I've developed a few of these type apps and I used to go to the Marcomedia corporate newsgroups and harrangue then to come out with a GNU/Linux run-time so educational authors could create native GNU/Linux apps in addition to Windows and Mac. But then Wine came out and I discovered that not only did my own apps, but several dozen other Macromedia based apps I tried all worked under Wine. Not only that, the authoring environment itself works under Wine. And that was at least four years ago. Probably more like six.
Since then, I've assisted a number of teachers who simply assumed that their apps wouldn't work under Wine to make them work. In every case what I have found is that Wine already did work, but the real problem was the teacher in question didn't understand how Wine worked and how to setup the fake_Windows directory. So, it's not really a Wine problem as much as a lack of familiarity with the Linux filesystem among those people who would be responsible for making the switch, ie teachers.
I don't know the Reader Rabbit series per se, but I do know that the average public school in California and Colorado where I have had direct experience in such things has purchased a copy of Macromedia Authorware for just about every single staff and the janitors too in hopes that they would take a crack at putting some multimedia lessons together and very very few of them have. However, there are a number of existing and many many bankrupt companies that devoted themselves to producing these type of titles and since they all use similar run-times which use only a limited subset of the Windows API that was supported in Wine a long time ago, the chances are your app quite likely might already work.
But it's also a cross between a comment on Google and a comment on the next story about the 2ch web site in Japan.
And it's somewhat on topic because in a way e-mail is like a blog.
So, let me spit it out.
What I'd love to see is an addition to Google News that allowed you to comment on news stories.
As the 2ch story points out, being able to comment on stories is such a huge idea that has yet to really catch on in the mainstream press.
Just look at what happens on Slashdot. People are dying to debate the non-tech news stories that they're excited about so they post off-topic on Slashdot because it's their only outlet.
Mainstream news sites don't want to deal with the liability of accepting comments, but how about just having a comment system available to people who entered the article through Google News.
The collected and threaded comments could be thought of us a part of Gmail. After all, comments systems are really just take-offs of usenet and e-mail and usenet have always been closely related.
This could lead to some hot debates becuase Google News already has a huge readership so there would be a ready made body of posters and the topics are right there. It just needs to be combined and let the debates bgin.
The one thing is that you'd want to be able to assure a certain degree of anonymity, but something like the Slashdot system should be good enough. It may not be genuine anonymity, but close enough to allow people to speak their minds.
Having lived in ferrocement framed buildings for many years in Taiwan, I can tell you that it's yet another case of the knife cutting both ways. It can be an advantage and a disadvantage and in the course of a year you'll get both. Of course these buildings in Taiwan aren't built to make maximum use of thermal storage, there's simply no other feasible building material on a subtropical island.
I helped build a tire house in Colorado at one point that used thermal storage walls with abundant insulation on the outside and that place was incredibly comfortable, unfortunately it wasn't cheap to build by any means because even using low cost and volunteer labor the labor bill alone was more than most houses.
And even that place had a tendency to overheat in the summer. It's really tough to engineer a building with a perfect balance using just insulation thermal mass and solar gain. You simply can't predict the weather years in advance and passively designing for just the right amount of cooling and heating is part art, part luck.
For a warm climate, I'm interested in passive circulation designs, but of course it all really needs to be tailored for the location. There is no simple or ultimate solution.
So much for stating the obvious. But I wanted to add that LEDs are not particularly efficient. Flourescents are still the most efficient lighting you can buy, they just have long lifespans. That's the bad news. The good news is that the much maligned halogens are actually more efficient than standard incandescents and since they can easily be bought native twelve volt, they're easy to add to a simple DC solar system.
For what it's worth, I think the grid-tie systems are wonderful. Twenty years ago if you has said that soon power companies would be forced to read the meter backwards and free you from the need to buy batteries for your solar and wind generation storage people would just laugh and say, you don't get it --there's no profit in it for them, they'll never let that happen. But now it's real and it's interesting to see that people are still not satisfied.
"I mean, Intel is a year a head of schedule."
You honestly think Intel has trashed hundreds of millions in development costs because they are ahead of schedule? Hmm. Are you sure that makes sense?
On the other hand, have you noticed the latest P4 heat sinks? I just saw one the size of an econo can of whole peeeled tomatos. You can find those next to the 500watt power supplies. Hmm, and notice that these formerly insignificant items are now costing more than the CPUs themselves?
I believe the "year ahead" theory is an amusing bit of spin at best.
I agree and that wouldn't mean much, were it not for the fact that I work with a publisher that produces book/CD sets and we turn out tens of thousands of CDs a year and we do them all by hand on standard CD burners using standard CD-R blanks. It's nowhere near as hard as it sounds. A thousand a week can be done with very little effort and since we have secretaries sitting around doing nothing most of the time, the labor is essentially free and they don't mind because it gives them an excuse to surf the net while they're changing disks. At one point we outsourced the copying, but it was apparent the company we outsourced to was just using CDRs, so we decided to do it ourselves for far, far less money. Outsourcing probably starts to make sense around ten thousand copies and at that point, you are probably doing quite well and not so worried about costs. But doing one at a time is indeed quite fast once you get started on several machines simultaneously.
Of course the downside to all this is that since we started adding CDs to our books, our sales have actually declined and the same is true for our competitors. It's easy to guess why, if it's so cheap and easy for us to make copies . . .
And I'd say that you're in the mainstream. I tend to follow the PC market with some interest being a resident of Taiwan who likes to freelance and wants to know who's who.
As you point out, Via is doing incredibly well and the Epia is a big part of their success. But it's not just Via, it's the whole industrial computing segment which is essentially what the Epia is: a branded industrial PC. And while they're traditionally called industrial PCs, a better description would be small form-factor, low power PCs.
And note that shortly after announcing that they were withdrawing the MHz labeling from their CPUs, Intel has moved the M series which was originally for mobile use into their mainstream desktop product line. One can easily imagine that this is partly in reaction to the undeniable strength of Via and the overall industrial computing market where low power requirements are the key selling points
But the most intriguing issue here for me comes from the front page of the EETimes where there has been a white paper posted for months in which a senior Intel engineer claims that in order to produce a 10GHz Pentium, the power requirements would be ten kilowatts --really, go read it yourself, it's shocking.
So, with all that evidence in favor of lower powered PCs, I have to assume that either Microsoft is going under or this report is inaccurate. Guess which one I suspect.
Follow the money.
Look at the history of Microsoft doublespeak. It's no secret that Microsoft has been the single largest beneficiary of software "piracy" in history. This kind of doublespeak is core to Microsoft's business.
Now consider this, Microsoft Corporation has distanced itself from media investments. If they were so sure they were going to secure digital media, wouldn't they be buying movie studios and record labels? They could afford to buy some of the biggest in cash.
Certainly that strategy has some problems though, not the least of them is anti-trust. Well, now imagine you were in that situation. You can't join them, so what should you do? Beat them.
How to beat them? Easy, same ol' doublespeak game. Say you're going to fight "piracy," but actually enable the hell out of it by simple incompetence. You guarantee all your media partners that you've got the unbeatable secret solution just like you did with all your softwre partners before. Of course they believe you because they're greedy.
So you roll it out and presto, there's holes in it and suddenly these huge media collections you've given the public access to are owned. The public cheers again and your competitors in media, ie Sony, Time Warner etc take a hard, hard hit.
It's the same ol' game. And nobody is going to complain because why should they?
Insightful? Great Leaping Mel Gibson, what's going on here?
The term "stem cell" covers a freakin' vast range of cell types. It's not A thing. It's a huge category of thingS. And the most promising ones were the ones that Bush did inded ban and it is costing the US every day the ban is in place.
However, a major part of that conversion wave is going to start off with Knoppix based LiveCDs and once they see it working, they'll say OK, stop. I want that. Just that. It's so simple and that's what people want. At least I know I've already seen it with quite a few people.
Now whether you want to argue that a KNoppix LiveCD is different than a REAL Debian install is another case although I think such a debate is rather academic and more about the definition of "real" than Debian.
That USENET post goes on and on about XML formats and such and I'm not saying that's irrelevant, but XML is really more of a concern for people in specialized projects. I thought that was the whole point of XML. The browser just has to follow the standards.
I think in the browser game it's the little things like pop-up blockers and being able to manage your configs across multiple desktops are what make Firefox kick ass all over IE.
These are the things that closed source has no reason to compete on. It doesn't make anybody money to prevent ads. There's no way MS is going to compete on that front, and yet it's a huge factor for most end users.
Indeed, my '79 Celica just tested in at 0.00 for CO after I put in a new long block. I asked the guy at the smog station how that could be possible, he said it wasn't really zero, it was just too low to detect. Not bad. Gotta do something about that rust though.
I wasn't going to put it quite that way because the paper on his historical contributions made me think he's not such a bad guy, but I did definitely notice something I thought was a bit contradictory in the Scientific American article.
On the first page he says
"The culture of theft that turns around MP3 is detestable, and I'm very disappointed about that."
Which made me think this guy is on the wrong side of the fence using phrases like "culture of theft", but then in the second page he goes on to say
"I also see a great potential for peer-to-peer. It's a wonderful system. If it is used to distribute contents legally, it will create new business opportunities."
But by definition peer-to-peer means that the content is being hosted and distributed in a non-commercial exchange. He conveniently skips the part about why consumers would pay for the right to freely exchange data in a non-commercial exchange. So, he seems to be simply playing games in order to appear to straddle the fence.
One can only guess his intentions, but perhaps those vineyards cost money to maintain.
I was wondering the same thing.
Living outside of Taipei and commuting into town, I'm already exposed to quite a few digital billboards. I think they're cool and seem perfectly normal in Taiwan, but it's worth noting that Taiwan's sign standards are a lot closer to Vegas than any other western city I've seen. And I recall that in San Diego and LA even flashing neon signs are prohibited except in certain "historical" districts.
Adding that with California's prohibition on front seet LCDs makes it seem this is going to be a difficult trick to pull off at least in California.
It's just a troll. I know, but nonethless, it raises a great point. It's good when folks like Ashcroft draw our attention to sexually explicit material as a topic of public discussion. We should speak of these things in an open public manner to clear the air on what is right and wrong and what is harmful and dangerous and what is natural and normal.
In fact, children need to learn about sex at some point. Only a fool would disagree with this point. Now some people might protest that children are harmed by learning about sexuality through pornography. Not surprisingly, psychologists have already extensively studied this subject.
What they found was that children have commonly viewed pornography for many centuries and that it was, in fact, a normal and perhaps even essential part of developing ones sexuality.
However, this was not to conclude simply that porn was okay and parents should openly allow their kids to check our pornography. This is the subtle part.
The problems came about when parents became overly involved in their childrens sexuality either in being too open about sharing sexually explicit media or in being too harsh in attempting to totally deny their children any access to sexually explicit materials as if there were not, in fact, the products of sexuality themselves who would grow up to have their own sex lives if they were to be normal.
So, the most commonly accepted approach towards dealing with childred and pornography among psychologists is to simply for the parent to state the rule that pornography will not be accepted in the home and leave it at that knowing that the rule will be broken. This is as close to an ideal policy towards children and pornography as the psychology profession has come up with.
If you're concerned about your role as a parent, it's simple. Just make it clear that it's unacceptable. If you're obsessed with actually preventing your children from learning about sexuality, then you personally have a problem and should seek therapy for yourself before you screw up your kids.
There seems to be two types in this thread, one that knows immersion is an old idea and one that thinks this is news.
If you're fascinated by this story apart from being an RIT student and think the technology of immersion is interesting, go to the EETimes and search for immersion, the archives are freely searchable. Immersion lithography was a big news item last year although it wasn't even close to new then. It was just that the stepper manufacturers were beginning to take it seriously.
At this point the three big chip manufacturing equipment companies, ASML, Cannon and Nikon all offer immersion scanners. SMIC, the large Nasdaq traded mainlaind Chinese fab, was ASML's first immersion lithography scanner customer. They bought their first machine this last winter.
There's an interesting side story there becuase prior to the Iraq invasion, Mainland China was limited to trailining edge semiconductor technology by international treaties because of the military implications. But after Bush unilaterally acted to invade Iraq, the Germans decided unilateral policy should work both ways and they allowed Infineon to sell cutting edge equipment to SMIC which made the treaty worthless. So, now SMIC is buying immersion scanners from the Dutch scanner firm ASML.
Why some engineering college called RIT is the focus of an immersion story while the technology's prominent role in the global semiconductor industry is ignored is an exercise left to the reader.
Let's go with another example.
Early theater competed directly with the church as the only form of public entertainment and it was simply banned. Furthermore, acting was considered to be a form of prostitution. Does the sexual element sound familar?
If you want love, buy it! If it's not vaulable to you, don't.
How about this solution:
This would most likely only work in conjunction with the EFF proposal to charge a minimum fee for P2P usage akin to the fees that radio stations pay to broadcast their content.
Well, if --and granted it's a big IF-- this system was in place then people who made meaningful code contributions to an open source project would gets P2P credits not only allowing them to skip the monthly fee, but to get priority downloads.
Indeed, the system wouldn't have to be limited to programming per se. These days the borderline between programming and entertainment can get rather blurry when you consider situations like game developers or CG renders. So, entertainers of all sorts could join in too. Anybody who produced digital content. As long as you contributed talent, you wouldn't have to pay to share in others' talent --a virtual commonwealth.
It's fair to point out that this system wouldn't put bread on the table and a roof over your head, but it would be more than what many open source developers get today.
Whether some trick like this makes it happen sooner rather than later only time will tell, but eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
that PCI-Express is really coming into the consumer channel in a big way in the near term.
That's great news and its about time. It makes me wonder why I never see GigE ethernet cards and switches in retails outlets though. I've seen GigE NICs as on-board features and I've seen them on-line and the prices look quite reasonable, but I've never seen them in a store yet.
But if boards are going for the big speed upgrade, then it's time for the home networks to step up a notch too.