I even said as much three months later, between my fifth plate of lousy sushi and my sixth Sapporo
My congrats to the author of the article for taking a the fine art of minimalism in japanese food and massacring it with gluttony...the kind of self-servitude that Microsoft will undoubtedly perpetrate with any sort of monolopy over tha gaming market. I shudder to think what kind of horrors we'll be seeing if the xbox takes off...
The saving grace, i suppose, is that developers for the console won't be working directly for Microsoft. Then again, when we put technology into the wrong hands, and give control to the wrong people, you get the wrong solutions. Like in this case, for instance (a thread about internet usage).
All that being said - and me being a hypocrite - if the xbox is all that then i might even cave and pick one up. More likely i'll wait for some cracker to break it wide open for all us Linux people though.;)
And i should REALLY start reading over my own posts carefully. Sorry for all the stupid typos, i'll be a good Slashdotter from now on...
For more typo-filled but somewhat interesting comments try my user info. If anyone has a serious beef with my statements, spelling, or thinks i should be booted from engineering because of my new-age design paradigm beliefs, then feel free to email me at your leisure...the above address works, minus the SPAM? for the few who haven't figured it out.
Somebody mod up Kinetic Kit please...much respect for pointing out something of this significance. Think about it, Atlanta was hailed for their major turnaround, with the implementation of viable transportation methods in time for the games. Now, in the aftermath, no one seems to have noticed that the whole thing has fallen apart again...the extra roads fixed nothing.
I mentioned Toronto in my list of model cities (the only one i can talk about with any surety, since i live there). Toronto happens to be one of the top three contenders in the bid for the next games (Paris and Beijing being the other two, Osaka and Istanbul a distant threat). In terms of key contention categories, Toronto is 1st in Sports Facilities and security, 2nd in Transportantion. Paris, with their excellent transit system and well-centred venues, edged out Toronto. What will be interesting to see is the rapid infrastructure changes that will be made by Istanbul (Trans:5th) and Beijing (Trans:4th). Don't be surprised if, ten years from now, the car problems in China's core are far worse than they are now.
note:
Yes, i was making a big assumption. it was light-hearted, my mistake...i don't honestly believe with any sort of conviction that Apple decided they needed publicity desperately so they engaged an employee to 'fake' a leak in order to generate all this hoopla and have people wonder about this magical new Cube.
In this case, he would in fact, be a martyr for the Jobs cause.
As for the other stuff here, i absolutely agree that if you've signed an NDA, you better be ready when the heat comes down after you spill the goods. That's just a matter of principles. What surprises me is that companies put faith into these NDAs, knowing there will always be some knob who breaks the agreement anyways...if you leave a Ming vase with a 3-year-old before you go to work, you're a fool to be angry when, hours later, your kitchen is covered in once-priceless slivers of blue and white porcelain.
Anyways, for something substantial to read, check out another post of mine that i somewhat like...my sympathies to you, Mr. Leak, whatever your circumstances.
"We drill for oil in Alaska, send it through pipelines, refine it, and ship it to an oil-fired electrical utility. The oil is burned, producing steam to push turbines that generate elecricity. The electricity is sent to the grid, travelling hundreds of miles with transmission losses along the way, and thence to your clothes dryer. Here the electrical energy is converted to the mechanical energy of the revolving drum and the thermal energy of the heating coil of your dryer, allowing your clothes to dry. On the other hand, you could have just hung your clothes out to dry on a clothesline!" (Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, Ecological Design)
You don't give a nuclear reactor to a third-world country. This much is obvious, for a number of reasons. What's less obvious is that we give more than we need to ourselves...why not? It's only a matter of convenience. The simple answer: when we all take more than we need, everyone is shafted.
A PalmVx has enough storage capacity to keep track of all the things you will ever do for the rest of your life in text. Your 20 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP has enough storage space to keep track of just about anything in the correct (read: simplest) format. When everyone has this data stored on a local drive, the situation isn't that big of a deal...the consequences are internalized. When we all share a fixed space, like the net, then there's a problem.
There is no such thing as a fat or thin pipe. Take my Coke as an example. Obviously, there are limitations on the acceptable width of the straw in the can. It has to be fat enough to allow passage of the soda (pop in Canada) with surface tension taken into effect. It has to be thin enough to fit in my mouth. Other than that, the straw's effectiveness depends on how hard one sucks.
There's merit to what you say. I have, in fact, presented the argument at a rudimentary level: Roads cause cars, like you say.
Which is, in fact, a part of the problem, but not when separated from the whole view, namely urban development as an entirety. Take a step back to Portland, to San Diego, to Toronto. All of these cities have large urban populations and busy downtown cores, with major potential for traffic...but the cities in question have alleviated the problems by favoring inmprovements to transit rather than road infrastructure. portland took things one step further, drawing on traffic calming projects in germany (they know cars). What followed was a a series of laws that eliminated free parking for company employees, and large subsidies for transit and carpooling (either monetary, or physical allowances. In all three cities, one can find car lanes that are only for use by cars with three or more passengers, or buses).
What followed was a "the establishment of an urban growth boundary adopted in 1980, middle-class neighborhoods continue to grow and thrive close to the downtown instead of engaging in a suburban exodus, while more distant, exurban communities remain undeveloped, leaving the people there in therir pastoral splendour...this contrasts sharply with cities such as Detroit where 30% of the downtown core remains empty and the only people who live there are either the very rich who inhabit 'fortress' areas which are access controlled and patrolled by private police, or the very poor who live in run down areas with a decayed infrastructure...the stabilizing (emphasis mine) middle-class having fled to the suburbs long ago." [Namir Khan, Healthy Cities Report]
The pattern is cyclical...roads --> people --> traffic --> roads --> people...you can add elements to the cycle ad infinitum, as guaranteed by the butterfly effect. Pointedly, the statement worth making is not "roads cause cars", but instead "roads do not cause less cars, only more traffic".
It's interesting to think about the middle-class as the stabilizing factor in urban development (and by extension, traffic use). If we were to categorize a hierarchy of internet users, what would be the defining parameter? In the urban case, it's clearly money...on the web, i would argue that the class system of internet usage revolves around bandwidth speed (the obvious conclusion), but rather the wealth of knowledge and information in transfer. The premium is web space, just as in cities the premium is land. The purchasing power is in the value of your information...large multinational companies constitute wealthy, gated communities with private intranet policing and limited access, whereas the 'poor' netizens spend their time chained to useless IRC events and porn surfing. in this case, the stabilizing factor happens to be people with legitimate interests in technology and even a hand in the process. The stabilizing factor is Slashdot.
Talk about a sacrificial lamb...some poor schmoe violates a fluffy nondisclosure stipulation, puts - horror of horrors - photos up on the web, and in the process makes waves and waves of publicity for Apple. What happens? We have a martyr on our hands, of course.
What i'd like to see is some sort of follow-up on this employee...if anyone spots this person on a 10-year island getaway, then that's a pretty good indication of a set-up stunt.
You hear that, Mr. Leak? You'd better be living a miserable life now, or you'll be sorry...;)
Does anybody see the parallel between internet traffic and road traffic? (yes i'm being a bit facetious, may i add, before you slap me with the Information Superhighway or similar phrase).
More than 30 years ago, an author by the name of Helen Leavitt argued that expanding roads led to MORE traffic, not less. The argument was fairly simple...sure, you may get a little more breathing room for a while, but that doesn't address the real problem: too many people are driving on this road. Having more space leads to, well, more people driving on the road. (Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax. Must reading for the next generation of civil engineers...some of the fluffier tree-hugging ones have taken the cause to heart at this site).
If you stop to think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Now i'm going to continue my line of thought, asuming you follow with the whole "more road = more road rage" theorem. (For those of you who still aren't convinced, either you're an old-school civil engineer in which case there's no hope for you, or you're not, in which case you'll be swayed by case studies like the city of Portland. In the 60-70s, Portland was having huge traffic problems. to solve the situation, they demolished a downtown freeway.) the question is: does the same logic apply to the internet?
Obviously, with a larger backbone you're going to see both a decrease in transfer time and an increase in usage. But is the decrease a temporary effect? I have a lot of friends who have seen their broadband service deteriorate to the point where they can get their kicks faster on a free isp. I'm sure you do too. Coincidence? Hardly...
The key difference between real traffic and internet traffic is that physical space is not at a premium. In the real world, land is the bottleneck factor. On the Web, the difference between 5 lanes and 50 lanes is also real, just not in the same way it is in your suburb. What does that mean? There is a greater allowance for 'lane width' patches on the Net...this still doesn't change the fact that to solve information transfer problems, we need to come up with better ways to shift packets, with better cars if you will, rather than expanding the avenues for that data infinitely (a solution doomed to failure because there will always be more data than road. How many of you thought your X-gigabyte hard drve was enough space, only to find it filled yet again).
What are these solutions? I don't know, i'm (almost) an electrical engineer not a magician...try sifting through Jane Jacobs or Peter Calthorpe or some other engineering conceptualists for answers...it's more likely that a new wave of net design theorists will need to stpep forward and shed some light on the rampant growth, kind of like hacking through jungle foliage with a machete so we can actually aget somewhere.
1.) Who wins?
We can sit, talk this over, point fingers and call graphics companies dirty names as much as we please...we can even come to a consensus among ourselves as to whether the plaintiff or defendant in this lawsuit deserves the verdict. But in the end, nothing is going to change the fact that the decision is out of our hands (GASP! You mean to say we CAN'T directly Slashdot-effect the judicial system?)
2.) Who cares?
Other than 3dfx, of course. Does NVIDIA (look, all caps, won't they be pleased) really want to remove a competitor entirely? I suppose they do, but will it help them as much as they believe it will? Maybe the problem here is that i'm thinking like someone who's primary goal is a job well-done: it would be more important to maintain a lively, hostile development environment to me than to gain a monopoly over a market and saturate it with trash (ahem. sound familiar?). Really though, i don't think NVIDIA truly expects to come out on top here, which raises the issue...
3.) Is the outcome secondary?
Yes, assuming NVIDIA doesn't really expect to win the suit. If this is the case, then the entire industry stands to gain...with one about-face of the lawyer brigade, suddenly message boards and forums across the tech world are once again debating the superiority of graphics cards, - my 3dfx this beats your TNTx that - the media is having a field day with the back-and-forth antics of these companies, and some people are even thinking about which card to buy next in order to show their loyalty. Clearly this is a no-lose situation for NVIDIA, whose monetary situation is solid, with or without the revenue from the lawsuit. What would surprise me the least is if there were some sort of collusion between the factions here..."Oh, it's that time of the month again. OK, your turn to pick out a shaky patent and start a frivolous lawsuit to cause a stir."
I just had to put in the fact that effective writing is read far more than it is written...the savings in reading time would outweigh even a four-fold cost in the production time of the document.
That makes sense, but i wouldn't let them off the hook so fast.
If you enlist the aid of malaysian masons who use glue sticks to lay bricks, is anyone surprised when the house falls down before it's finished? This is the kind of problem i could find early.
More to the point, would i sell you a house like this?
Of course goal #1 is money. But did you ever stop to consider what the IMMEDIATE goal is in order to GET all that cash?
It's nice to sit around and say "yeah, we'd like some money. Let's focus our efforts on making money". You still need to DO something to earn that green...for a multinational, i would argue that the immediate concern is publicity. To be known, admired, watched, loathed; any sort of attention is desirable, because then people (and by extension, $$$) are suddenly looking at a bright blue logo thinking profound thoughts like 'are you ready?'
Case in point: consider this new venture of Microsoft's. story at cnet Will it be profitable? You may think so, but anyone who's been paying attention to the book industry knows that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of those outlets) are all taking huge losses on internet sales. Some transactions are being made at a loss, for a number of reasons. Why then would Microsoft choose to parlay a hand into this opportunity? Probably because the exposure is worth the expected loss.
That sort of freewheeling i can accept. If a really fat company needs to shed a few million dollars to make itself look like it's at the forefront of things, then by all means drop the cash. It's just sound business. But marketing faulty products to make waves? That might also be good business sense, but it's still WRONG...
No, if i were head of Intel, my chief concern wouldn't be our profit margin. Which is probably why i'll never be CEO of Intel.
Fight Club? That's the Ford Pinto story in a nutshell, only Ford was off by a couple zeros in their lawsuit estimates...
Yes, i know...should have been more explicit. That's what i was implying with the "Ford --> time bomb --> showrooms" statement. The key difference being that Ford underestimated the magnitude of the lawsuits AFTER they'd put the cars on the market, not knowing that they were prone to blow up on people.
What i'm trying to say is that i think Intel has taken it a step further; having tallied up the cost of recall, they decided to let the chips fly anyways, for two reasons:
1.) to intel, the financial hurt incurred by this recall is ridiculously low. Would you cry if you dropped a nickel down the sewer?
2.) no one will care. To a lot of people, Linux is still just a buzzword. I would argue that at least 50% of all computer users have never seen a Linux desktop before in their lives. If this problem only affects certain kernels of Linux, then people will write it off as trivial, since the chip was designed to facilitate Windows anyways.
Maybe this can change though, if we can use the power of/.-ing for good...
"Intel executives said it was too soon to say how much the bug might cost, but the cost will not be material to Intel's earnings."
"For a long time, Intel was this machine that couldn't break and AMD couldn't take two steps without tripping," Gwennap said. "For the past year, Intel has been having problem after problem, and AMD keeps cranking out more and more chips."
Is anybody else repulsed here? I find myself reminded of a premise in 'Fight Club', that car companies tally up the repercussions of a recall before bringing the faulty vehicles back to the manufacturing plants...if the cost of all the lawsuits is lower than the cost of the recall, it's never issued.
This is similar, with a twist...i find it really difficult to believe that intel couldn't find fundamental errors in the architecture of this chip before it was shipped. Like the article says, they've been doing this for far too long without a hitch for things to suddenly start going wrong. So if they found the problem, why was the chip released?
This is where the other quote comes in: Intel doesn't care. The market value of beating AMD to the punch was far, far greater than the cost of pulling a few thousand chips back to the plant, and angering a handful of Linux users in the process. Much like a couple of passengers burned to a crisp wouldn't stop the SUVs from rolling out onto the pavement, why should Intel let poor products keep them off the front pages of tech columns around the world?
Only, this hypothesis is somewhat more insidious...i'd go so far as to claim that Intel was aware of the problems before the release of the chip, and shipped it anyways...i doubt if Ford Motors would put a time bomb into showrooms simply because there was a profit to be found in it. of course, the fallout press in that scenario would be cataclysmic to their PR, but who is going to shed a tear over some poor Slackware hacker?
This isn't the same at all...the patent in question concerns a concept rather than an object or process. If Postel had patented SMTP, then who knows what would have happened...people would probably use some other mail protocol (they already do) for free, and Postel would reap nothing from his patent. In this case, there IS no such alternative...net-to-net trading is vital. I can't imagine a company reverting to phone transactions of telegrams to conduct business overseas as a way to avoid paying a tiny royalty to the knob who filed this patent.
Sure, if the patent is frivolous and there is an alternative to the goods or services the patent covers, then the inventor will be penalized. On something this big, it's a sure win...the biggest reason why this patent should have been tossed from the beginning.
Ahh, how true it is...touche. To extend the analogy, i suppose we would have to file a patent on the entire concept of patents in order to win the 'war' and bring the patent clerks to 'justice'.
Who's up for jury duty on the international tribunal for Violations of Copyright Rights?
Just another example of the Cathedral mindset at work...did they really think that the news wouldn't leak? It never ceases to amaze me that major corporations still put absolute faith into privacy clauses and no-disclosure agreements, let alone attempts to cover-up obvious and wide-spread mistakes.
In the end, company X will always come out looking more foolish than ever, having been peekabooed behind their useless disguise...the time would have been better spent fixing the problem. I don't see what Sun stands to benefit from its actions. Is anyone else reminded of duck-and cover?
Then again, i'm thinking like an open-source advocate instead of a bureaucrat, maybe that's the real problem.
I suppose you could expose the faults in the system by exploiting every single one of them. Then again, when someone patents the judicial system, you might have to pay them to take their stupidity to court.
If you honestly think a catastrophe is what it takes to bring the framework down, just remember, it took the Holocaust to get the Nazis to Nuremburg...
Like i was saying in another post, it won't matter about your girlfriend's folks' dialect...all you have to do is make a webpage for them in Chinese (after racking your brains for those Mandarin characters), then they can read it, having been brought up Cantonese.
English has a whole lot of faults as a language. Face facts, remembering all of the bizarre grammatical constructions would be tedious if you hadn't been hearing them your whole life. Chinese has a whole lot of faults as a language. The simplified tense system leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation.
Both languages have a whole lot of faults when you look at their literacy system...in English, you've got the advantage of phonemes, as in, anyone who can read the alphabet can pronounce a word, even if he/she has no idea what it means. You can read a newspaper out loud while clueless about what ithe words mean (this is true of a lot of languages with phonetic script...hebrew, arabic, greek, cyrillic just for starters). The problem with this is that words with many syllables are well...LONG. Chinese is not phonetic. There are certain root characters that hint at the pronunciation of a pictogram, but other than that, the only way to recognize a word is to have it memorized. There are two advantages of a pictographic language: first, the word on paper is a definition unto itself. If the root component of a pictograph means "mouth", then you can be fairly sure the whole word is related to speaking, eating, dentistry, etc. Second, the overall size of script falls dramatically. This entire comment could be written in Chinese characters in far less space...while disk space would probably be the same if not larger, the reading time for a passage is usually shorter in Chinese.
Is there a common ground? Is there a script in the world that combines the phonetic advantages of an alphabetic system with the reading speed and pictographic nature of Chinese? Sure, it's Korean...not a lot of people know this, but those odd, curvy characters are both pictorial AND phonetic. With a few minutes of work, you can learn to read Korean newspapers or street signs out loud, having NO idea what any of it means. Some mathematicians have decided that the Korean script is the most perfect writing system ever devised (invented by one man apparently, but don't take this at face value. Some Korean schoolbooks claim that a Kim or a Song invented the car and telephone, too)...too bad the majority of the world speaks Chinese or English or both (like me), and has no idea how to speak Korean (also like me).
This should appeal to all you Slashdotters out there who are part of a minority of computer users with a superior OS, one who's usefulness is crippled by the fact that no one else can understand it.
Just to get the numbers and concepts right, you can't really type in 'Mandarin' or 'Cantonese' or any other dialect of Chinese. You can only write in Chinese...the words (pictographs) are all the same.
For example, a Mandarin businessman would read a letter out loud in his language, and it would sound totally different from how a Cantonese girl would pronounce it, but mean the exact same thing...although they cannot carry out a conversation with each other, they CAN write down what they want to say, and the other person will understand it.
So, the number tally for Mandarin speakers is accurate at ~835 mil, but the number of people who would be able to interpret a Chinese webpage is in the billions...think Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, any Fukien, any other dialect of Chinese, and some Japanese (the script has been partially borrowed).
Of course, this number will still be far less than the total Chinese population of the world, because only literate persons would be able to use the technology.
Why doesn't this technology seem to amaze anyone? If it's all that they make it out to be, a focused audio device could change our world as much as the laser did. There's a lot more to be done with this device than put fixed lectures in front of museum paintings or airport instructions at terminals.
The implications are far-reaching...vastly improved communication and sonar devices for naval purposes across the world. Imagine a totally undetectable sonar, or the underwater equivalent of a laser tripwire.
Instant miniaturization of all conventional loudspeaker technology. An array of these devices could broadcast a concert or convention across a huge space, with tiny speakers. Just line them up and send out these lines of sound in a big hemisphere. Since the beam is focused, you shoulnd't experience the same kind of audio degeneration that loudspeakers produce.
A totally new form of music, one that uses truly immersive qualities. The laser changed visual representations by adding a spatial element to pictures...we got holograms. That same effect would be possible with a similar audio device. you could get something more than a new genre of music...an entirely new audio art form could come out of this.
Medicine could be changed forever. Ultrasound techniques might move beyond scanning, into a world where non-invasive surgery can be performed with an audio device...if the specs are correct, then the area closest to the 'spotlight' is ultrasound waves, but past that you get sound waves, which can exert force. If a beam like this could pass harmlessly through skin and fascia, but push or cut vital organs and tissues, think what a difference it could make.
Really, these are still trivial kinds of uses for something like this...all of these ideas come from extensions or comparisons of existing technology. Sure, the audio loudspeaker could make clubbing way better, but someone with real smarts could also come up with a way to use this device, a way that no one else has ever dreamed of.
Slashdot Mirror
My congrats to the author of the article for taking a the fine art of minimalism in japanese food and massacring it with gluttony...the kind of self-servitude that Microsoft will undoubtedly perpetrate with any sort of monolopy over tha gaming market. I shudder to think what kind of horrors we'll be seeing if the xbox takes off...
The saving grace, i suppose, is that developers for the console won't be working directly for Microsoft. Then again, when we put technology into the wrong hands, and give control to the wrong people, you get the wrong solutions. Like in this case, for instance (a thread about internet usage).
All that being said - and me being a hypocrite - if the xbox is all that then i might even cave and pick one up. More likely i'll wait for some cracker to break it wide open for all us Linux people though. ;)
-j
For more typo-filled but somewhat interesting comments try my user info. If anyone has a serious beef with my statements, spelling, or thinks i should be booted from engineering because of my new-age design paradigm beliefs, then feel free to email me at your leisure...the above address works, minus the SPAM? for the few who haven't figured it out.
-j, where the jon is short for jonathan.
I mentioned Toronto in my list of model cities (the only one i can talk about with any surety, since i live there). Toronto happens to be one of the top three contenders in the bid for the next games (Paris and Beijing being the other two, Osaka and Istanbul a distant threat). In terms of key contention categories, Toronto is 1st in Sports Facilities and security, 2nd in Transportantion. Paris, with their excellent transit system and well-centred venues, edged out Toronto. What will be interesting to see is the rapid infrastructure changes that will be made by Istanbul (Trans:5th) and Beijing (Trans:4th). Don't be surprised if, ten years from now, the car problems in China's core are far worse than they are now.
-j
In this case, he would in fact, be a martyr for the Jobs cause.
As for the other stuff here, i absolutely agree that if you've signed an NDA, you better be ready when the heat comes down after you spill the goods. That's just a matter of principles. What surprises me is that companies put faith into these NDAs, knowing there will always be some knob who breaks the agreement anyways...if you leave a Ming vase with a 3-year-old before you go to work, you're a fool to be angry when, hours later, your kitchen is covered in once-priceless slivers of blue and white porcelain.
Anyways, for something substantial to read, check out another post of mine that i somewhat like...my sympathies to you, Mr. Leak, whatever your circumstances.
-j
You don't give a nuclear reactor to a third-world country. This much is obvious, for a number of reasons. What's less obvious is that we give more than we need to ourselves...why not? It's only a matter of convenience. The simple answer: when we all take more than we need, everyone is shafted.
A PalmVx has enough storage capacity to keep track of all the things you will ever do for the rest of your life in text. Your 20 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP has enough storage space to keep track of just about anything in the correct (read: simplest) format. When everyone has this data stored on a local drive, the situation isn't that big of a deal...the consequences are internalized. When we all share a fixed space, like the net, then there's a problem.
There is no such thing as a fat or thin pipe. Take my Coke as an example. Obviously, there are limitations on the acceptable width of the straw in the can. It has to be fat enough to allow passage of the soda (pop in Canada) with surface tension taken into effect. It has to be thin enough to fit in my mouth. Other than that, the straw's effectiveness depends on how hard one sucks.
-j
Which is, in fact, a part of the problem, but not when separated from the whole view, namely urban development as an entirety. Take a step back to Portland, to San Diego, to Toronto. All of these cities have large urban populations and busy downtown cores, with major potential for traffic...but the cities in question have alleviated the problems by favoring inmprovements to transit rather than road infrastructure. portland took things one step further, drawing on traffic calming projects in germany (they know cars). What followed was a a series of laws that eliminated free parking for company employees, and large subsidies for transit and carpooling (either monetary, or physical allowances. In all three cities, one can find car lanes that are only for use by cars with three or more passengers, or buses).
What followed was a "the establishment of an urban growth boundary adopted in 1980, middle-class neighborhoods continue to grow and thrive close to the downtown instead of engaging in a suburban exodus, while more distant, exurban communities remain undeveloped, leaving the people there in therir pastoral splendour...this contrasts sharply with cities such as Detroit where 30% of the downtown core remains empty and the only people who live there are either the very rich who inhabit 'fortress' areas which are access controlled and patrolled by private police, or the very poor who live in run down areas with a decayed infrastructure...the stabilizing (emphasis mine) middle-class having fled to the suburbs long ago." [Namir Khan, Healthy Cities Report]
The pattern is cyclical...roads --> people --> traffic --> roads --> people...you can add elements to the cycle ad infinitum, as guaranteed by the butterfly effect. Pointedly, the statement worth making is not "roads cause cars", but instead "roads do not cause less cars, only more traffic".
It's interesting to think about the middle-class as the stabilizing factor in urban development (and by extension, traffic use). If we were to categorize a hierarchy of internet users, what would be the defining parameter? In the urban case, it's clearly money...on the web, i would argue that the class system of internet usage revolves around bandwidth speed (the obvious conclusion), but rather the wealth of knowledge and information in transfer. The premium is web space, just as in cities the premium is land. The purchasing power is in the value of your information...large multinational companies constitute wealthy, gated communities with private intranet policing and limited access, whereas the 'poor' netizens spend their time chained to useless IRC events and porn surfing. in this case, the stabilizing factor happens to be people with legitimate interests in technology and even a hand in the process. The stabilizing factor is Slashdot.
What i'd like to see is some sort of follow-up on this employee...if anyone spots this person on a 10-year island getaway, then that's a pretty good indication of a set-up stunt.
You hear that, Mr. Leak? You'd better be living a miserable life now, or you'll be sorry... ;)
-j
i don't know, when i want to write in chinese, i write in chinese, not pinyin ;)
-j
More than 30 years ago, an author by the name of Helen Leavitt argued that expanding roads led to MORE traffic, not less. The argument was fairly simple...sure, you may get a little more breathing room for a while, but that doesn't address the real problem: too many people are driving on this road. Having more space leads to, well, more people driving on the road. (Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax. Must reading for the next generation of civil engineers...some of the fluffier tree-hugging ones have taken the cause to heart at this site).
If you stop to think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Now i'm going to continue my line of thought, asuming you follow with the whole "more road = more road rage" theorem. (For those of you who still aren't convinced, either you're an old-school civil engineer in which case there's no hope for you, or you're not, in which case you'll be swayed by case studies like the city of Portland. In the 60-70s, Portland was having huge traffic problems. to solve the situation, they demolished a downtown freeway.) the question is: does the same logic apply to the internet?
Obviously, with a larger backbone you're going to see both a decrease in transfer time and an increase in usage. But is the decrease a temporary effect? I have a lot of friends who have seen their broadband service deteriorate to the point where they can get their kicks faster on a free isp. I'm sure you do too. Coincidence? Hardly...
The key difference between real traffic and internet traffic is that physical space is not at a premium. In the real world, land is the bottleneck factor. On the Web, the difference between 5 lanes and 50 lanes is also real, just not in the same way it is in your suburb. What does that mean? There is a greater allowance for 'lane width' patches on the Net...this still doesn't change the fact that to solve information transfer problems, we need to come up with better ways to shift packets, with better cars if you will, rather than expanding the avenues for that data infinitely (a solution doomed to failure because there will always be more data than road. How many of you thought your X-gigabyte hard drve was enough space, only to find it filled yet again).
What are these solutions? I don't know, i'm (almost) an electrical engineer not a magician...try sifting through Jane Jacobs or Peter Calthorpe or some other engineering conceptualists for answers...it's more likely that a new wave of net design theorists will need to stpep forward and shed some light on the rampant growth, kind of like hacking through jungle foliage with a machete so we can actually aget somewhere.
-j
We can sit, talk this over, point fingers and call graphics companies dirty names as much as we please...we can even come to a consensus among ourselves as to whether the plaintiff or defendant in this lawsuit deserves the verdict. But in the end, nothing is going to change the fact that the decision is out of our hands (GASP! You mean to say we CAN'T directly Slashdot-effect the judicial system?)
2.) Who cares?
Other than 3dfx, of course. Does NVIDIA (look, all caps, won't they be pleased) really want to remove a competitor entirely? I suppose they do, but will it help them as much as they believe it will? Maybe the problem here is that i'm thinking like someone who's primary goal is a job well-done: it would be more important to maintain a lively, hostile development environment to me than to gain a monopoly over a market and saturate it with trash (ahem. sound familiar?). Really though, i don't think NVIDIA truly expects to come out on top here, which raises the issue...
3.) Is the outcome secondary?
Yes, assuming NVIDIA doesn't really expect to win the suit. If this is the case, then the entire industry stands to gain...with one about-face of the lawyer brigade, suddenly message boards and forums across the tech world are once again debating the superiority of graphics cards, - my 3dfx this beats your TNTx that - the media is having a field day with the back-and-forth antics of these companies, and some people are even thinking about which card to buy next in order to show their loyalty. Clearly this is a no-lose situation for NVIDIA, whose monetary situation is solid, with or without the revenue from the lawsuit. What would surprise me the least is if there were some sort of collusion between the factions here..."Oh, it's that time of the month again. OK, your turn to pick out a shaky patent and start a frivolous lawsuit to cause a stir."
-j
I just had to put in the fact that effective writing is read far more than it is written...the savings in reading time would outweigh even a four-fold cost in the production time of the document.
-j
If you enlist the aid of malaysian masons who use glue sticks to lay bricks, is anyone surprised when the house falls down before it's finished? This is the kind of problem i could find early.
More to the point, would i sell you a house like this?
-j
I might have known if i had my driver's license.
-j
yay sawfish
It's nice to sit around and say "yeah, we'd like some money. Let's focus our efforts on making money". You still need to DO something to earn that green...for a multinational, i would argue that the immediate concern is publicity. To be known, admired, watched, loathed; any sort of attention is desirable, because then people (and by extension, $$$) are suddenly looking at a bright blue logo thinking profound thoughts like 'are you ready?'
Case in point: consider this new venture of Microsoft's. story at cnet Will it be profitable? You may think so, but anyone who's been paying attention to the book industry knows that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of those outlets) are all taking huge losses on internet sales. Some transactions are being made at a loss, for a number of reasons. Why then would Microsoft choose to parlay a hand into this opportunity? Probably because the exposure is worth the expected loss.
That sort of freewheeling i can accept. If a really fat company needs to shed a few million dollars to make itself look like it's at the forefront of things, then by all means drop the cash. It's just sound business. But marketing faulty products to make waves? That might also be good business sense, but it's still WRONG...
No, if i were head of Intel, my chief concern wouldn't be our profit margin. Which is probably why i'll never be CEO of Intel.
-j
Yes, i know...should have been more explicit. That's what i was implying with the "Ford --> time bomb --> showrooms" statement. The key difference being that Ford underestimated the magnitude of the lawsuits AFTER they'd put the cars on the market, not knowing that they were prone to blow up on people.
What i'm trying to say is that i think Intel has taken it a step further; having tallied up the cost of recall, they decided to let the chips fly anyways, for two reasons:
1.) to intel, the financial hurt incurred by this recall is ridiculously low. Would you cry if you dropped a nickel down the sewer?
2.) no one will care. To a lot of people, Linux is still just a buzzword. I would argue that at least 50% of all computer users have never seen a Linux desktop before in their lives. If this problem only affects certain kernels of Linux, then people will write it off as trivial, since the chip was designed to facilitate Windows anyways.
Maybe this can change though, if we can use the power of /.-ing for good...
-j
"For a long time, Intel was this machine that couldn't break and AMD couldn't take two steps without tripping," Gwennap said. "For the past year, Intel has been having problem after problem, and AMD keeps cranking out more and more chips."
Is anybody else repulsed here? I find myself reminded of a premise in 'Fight Club', that car companies tally up the repercussions of a recall before bringing the faulty vehicles back to the manufacturing plants...if the cost of all the lawsuits is lower than the cost of the recall, it's never issued.
This is similar, with a twist...i find it really difficult to believe that intel couldn't find fundamental errors in the architecture of this chip before it was shipped. Like the article says, they've been doing this for far too long without a hitch for things to suddenly start going wrong. So if they found the problem, why was the chip released?
This is where the other quote comes in: Intel doesn't care. The market value of beating AMD to the punch was far, far greater than the cost of pulling a few thousand chips back to the plant, and angering a handful of Linux users in the process. Much like a couple of passengers burned to a crisp wouldn't stop the SUVs from rolling out onto the pavement, why should Intel let poor products keep them off the front pages of tech columns around the world?
Only, this hypothesis is somewhat more insidious...i'd go so far as to claim that Intel was aware of the problems before the release of the chip, and shipped it anyways...i doubt if Ford Motors would put a time bomb into showrooms simply because there was a profit to be found in it. of course, the fallout press in that scenario would be cataclysmic to their PR, but who is going to shed a tear over some poor Slackware hacker?
-j
Sure, if the patent is frivolous and there is an alternative to the goods or services the patent covers, then the inventor will be penalized. On something this big, it's a sure win...the biggest reason why this patent should have been tossed from the beginning.
-j
Who's up for jury duty on the international tribunal for Violations of Copyright Rights?
-j (tm)
In the end, company X will always come out looking more foolish than ever, having been peekabooed behind their useless disguise...the time would have been better spent fixing the problem. I don't see what Sun stands to benefit from its actions. Is anyone else reminded of duck-and cover?
Then again, i'm thinking like an open-source advocate instead of a bureaucrat, maybe that's the real problem.
-j
If you honestly think a catastrophe is what it takes to bring the framework down, just remember, it took the Holocaust to get the Nazis to Nuremburg...
-j
ni de gou yi tzang hen hao.
-j
Both languages have a whole lot of faults when you look at their literacy system...in English, you've got the advantage of phonemes, as in, anyone who can read the alphabet can pronounce a word, even if he/she has no idea what it means. You can read a newspaper out loud while clueless about what ithe words mean (this is true of a lot of languages with phonetic script...hebrew, arabic, greek, cyrillic just for starters). The problem with this is that words with many syllables are well...LONG. Chinese is not phonetic. There are certain root characters that hint at the pronunciation of a pictogram, but other than that, the only way to recognize a word is to have it memorized. There are two advantages of a pictographic language: first, the word on paper is a definition unto itself. If the root component of a pictograph means "mouth", then you can be fairly sure the whole word is related to speaking, eating, dentistry, etc. Second, the overall size of script falls dramatically. This entire comment could be written in Chinese characters in far less space...while disk space would probably be the same if not larger, the reading time for a passage is usually shorter in Chinese.
Is there a common ground? Is there a script in the world that combines the phonetic advantages of an alphabetic system with the reading speed and pictographic nature of Chinese? Sure, it's Korean...not a lot of people know this, but those odd, curvy characters are both pictorial AND phonetic. With a few minutes of work, you can learn to read Korean newspapers or street signs out loud, having NO idea what any of it means. Some mathematicians have decided that the Korean script is the most perfect writing system ever devised (invented by one man apparently, but don't take this at face value. Some Korean schoolbooks claim that a Kim or a Song invented the car and telephone, too)...too bad the majority of the world speaks Chinese or English or both (like me), and has no idea how to speak Korean (also like me).
This should appeal to all you Slashdotters out there who are part of a minority of computer users with a superior OS, one who's usefulness is crippled by the fact that no one else can understand it.
if it's not in your head, it ain't private.
For every encryption there's a decryption...you just have to want the info badly enough, or be disgusted enough by an Orwellian nightmare of a scheme.
For example, a Mandarin businessman would read a letter out loud in his language, and it would sound totally different from how a Cantonese girl would pronounce it, but mean the exact same thing...although they cannot carry out a conversation with each other, they CAN write down what they want to say, and the other person will understand it.
So, the number tally for Mandarin speakers is accurate at ~835 mil, but the number of people who would be able to interpret a Chinese webpage is in the billions...think Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, any Fukien, any other dialect of Chinese, and some Japanese (the script has been partially borrowed).
Of course, this number will still be far less than the total Chinese population of the world, because only literate persons would be able to use the technology.
The implications are far-reaching...vastly improved communication and sonar devices for naval purposes across the world. Imagine a totally undetectable sonar, or the underwater equivalent of a laser tripwire.
Instant miniaturization of all conventional loudspeaker technology. An array of these devices could broadcast a concert or convention across a huge space, with tiny speakers. Just line them up and send out these lines of sound in a big hemisphere. Since the beam is focused, you shoulnd't experience the same kind of audio degeneration that loudspeakers produce.
A totally new form of music, one that uses truly immersive qualities. The laser changed visual representations by adding a spatial element to pictures...we got holograms. That same effect would be possible with a similar audio device. you could get something more than a new genre of music...an entirely new audio art form could come out of this.
Medicine could be changed forever. Ultrasound techniques might move beyond scanning, into a world where non-invasive surgery can be performed with an audio device...if the specs are correct, then the area closest to the 'spotlight' is ultrasound waves, but past that you get sound waves, which can exert force. If a beam like this could pass harmlessly through skin and fascia, but push or cut vital organs and tissues, think what a difference it could make.
Really, these are still trivial kinds of uses for something like this...all of these ideas come from extensions or comparisons of existing technology. Sure, the audio loudspeaker could make clubbing way better, but someone with real smarts could also come up with a way to use this device, a way that no one else has ever dreamed of.