Bingo. Today we have chemical batteries of all kinds for storing electricity. We have nothing to store photons. How will optical processors be supplied with photons to do their work? LEDs? What device will be controlling the LEDs to make them turn on and off at the high frequencies needed to produce useful pulses of light? Transistors? What will be so special about those transistors that lets them switch the LEDs on and off at sufficiently fast frequencies, that we wouldn't just use those transistors for electrical logic signaling in the first place?
It's too late for them to claim a patent, unless they filed for it within a year of the first release of the movie. Interestingly, one could make a case that because of the movie, nobody can patent it now, because the concept was already published in 1986. I.e., publishing without a patent by definition puts the idea in the public domain.
All these comparisons to Sun are pretty funny, considering that Sun sells Opteron machines, and their previous generation of Opteron systems were designed by Newisys. Those Newisys guys clearly have solid experience designing around the Opteron. I don't think it will take long before platforms built around Horus prove themselves worthwhile, and probably Sun and other AMD builders will adopt it en masse.
Since Sun is already in the Opteron camp, none of this news hurts them. With the cheapness of x86 hardware, they can spin out Opteron workstations and servers at a fraction of the cost of their lumbering Sparc solutions, and the difference is pure profit. Even if it hurts Sparc sales, they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
Send all of the company directors and officers to prison. Of course, the prisons are run by our government, and our government is broken too, but it may be a start. See my longer rant in my journal
Remember, I was talking about a home theater system.
That means multi-channel. That means you can't just broadcast to a single broadcast address. That means you have to configure the speakers so they know which channel they're on. They *could* use a hardcoded multicast group, and embed the channel ID in the audio data, but that would be inefficient and would require faster processors in each speaker, because they would have to sift through all the data to parse out the audio packets that are just meant for them. And hardcoding a single multicast address is a bad idea.
Pure digital effects processors have been around for ages. You can do all the eq / volume / balance adjustments you want totally in the digital domain.
A lot of folks seem pretty skeptical about these things working. I'm sure they'll work fine, I'm just skeptical about their value. What do you have to do to set the IP address of one of these things? If you set up a home theater with 6 remotes in the theater room, plus a couple more scattered around the house, soon you start having to learn to be a real IP network manager. What kind of OS is on the controller, does it use a web server to provide you a configuration interface? It obviously needs to have some amount of (NV)RAM on it to work, what happens when somebody hacks the servers?
"Yeah, I had my firewalls set up and anti-virus stuff on my PCs, but some damn worm got into my speakers and started flooding spam all over the place..."
What delays are incorporated in the IP transport? And why are you even talking about IP as a stream transport? IP isn't a transport at all, it's a network layer, and its performance is pretty much dominated by the underlying media layer. If you had an IP speaker and a PC transmitter on two opposite ends of a crossover ethernet cable, there would be no switching delays, and wire propagation speed is the same as for analog cable. In fact you can deliver the data several times faster than realtime and let the speaker buffer it and play it back at realtime with its own jitter-free clock. Thinking that there may be delays just because they use IP is downright ignorant.
Of course, to me what doesn't make sense here is the use of a bidirectional communications network for what is obviously a unidirectional job. Unless you plan to mount microphones in each speaker so they can report back balance and room delay characteristics back to the central console. That would be a smart use of technology, but I don't see anybody doing that.
My notebook will "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to disk" so again, assuming nothing has flaked out, I don't need to reboot it either. Currently my uptime on the notebook is about 12 days; I shut it down a while ago before heading thru an airport, otherwise it's always ready to use.
See Nantero's press releases; they announced their 10Gbit wafer in May 2003. Their partnership with LSI Logic isn't news either, that was announced June 2004. The fact that they're still signing new partnerships on a steady basis tells me this technology is not a dead-end (yet).
Good point. It's funny, the article starts with "Will computers that require no time to boot up become a reality?" but that's kind of a stupid question. I reboot my Linux machine once every year or so, maybe a little more often if I'm installing a new kernel. But once it's up, it stays up for weeks or months at a time. The time required to boot is totally insignificant.
But the real point is, *when* I reboot a machine, I'm doing it because I need it to run from a clean slate. I don't want the previously crashed kernel and data to hang around.
I guess many people perceive boot time as an evil thing because they have to reboot their Windows PCs so damn often. Just another case of fixing the symptom and not the real problem. The real solution would be to make Windows so reliable you don't need to reboot it.
I don't think anyone is positioning this NRAM as a replacement for DRAM/SRAM. It's clearly only being compared to FLASH, so at most it's a contender for solid-state disk drive. And from the description, I would very much look forward to using it in that application.
Well, since the 1918 virus was essentially already extinct, there was no reason to create a vaccine to defend against it today. But now that it's being reconstructed...
Eh. Big deal. Even if the next virus wipes out 99.99% of the Earth's human population there will still be tens of millions of survivors even without vaccines. More than enough to carry on the species, probably even enough to carry on civilization uninterrupted. Really, as doomsday scenarios go, it could be worse. Human existence today just isn't as fragile as it was a few hundred years ago. Individuals may not be much stronger, but we more than make up for it in numbers.
As far as I recall, the Apple Password Server is only provided for backward compatibility with previous MacOS releases. I don't wish to denigrate what Apple has achieved in shipping OpenDirectory with their OS, but anybody can install Heimdal Kerberos, OpenLDAP, and Cyrus SASL and get automatic integration of Kerberos principals with LDAP accounts and Cyrus passwords. All of these three packages support each other directly, out of the box. And likewise, since you can create a single LDAP user object with all of their Kerberos info, Unix info, and SASL info in one place, they naturally all replicate together. So there's nothing magic about OpenDirectory here. (Nevertheless, OpenDirectory is good stuff, and I'm sure it will be even better in the future.)
And yes, I'm on the OpenLDAP core team, and I wrote a lot of the code that makes Heimdal, OpenLDAP, and Cyrus SASL play together. It's been working well in the field for years. And for those people who have trouble getting configure scripts to connect everything the way they want, my company Symas Corp. offers pre-built binaries of all of these packages, already integrated, ready to run.
Ah good point. Like the tZero electric car with regenerative brakes - driving down a mountain with a charged battery pack was a problem because they had nowhere to dump the power generated by the brakes. They needed to use up the battery before heading down the mountain. (Too bad they didn't take my advice and just use twin radio antennas on the back of the car, run as a Jacobs Ladder to dump the surplus.)
But re: no free lunch - it is a proven fact that superchargers and turbochargers work to increase the power output of an engine, and they are spun by energy produced by the engine itself. So remember what you're measuring when you talk about there being no free lunch. The fact is that if you can increase the volumetric efficiency of the engine (through compressing the intake charge) you can produce more power than it costs to do the compressing.
I admit I'm a bit skeptical about this idea, but if other people have proof that adding oxygen *and hydrogen* boosts engine efficiency, fine. The problem is that everything I know about combustion says that gasoline burns best in a 14.7:1 ratio (by weight) of oxygen to gasoline. Every modern car with electronic engine controls is pre-programmed to aim to maintain this stoichiometric ratio, and most of them do a pretty good job, at least when they're new. If you simply add oxygen to the intake charge, you get a leaner burn, which burns hotter and actually detonates, instead of burning evenly. And detonation (aka "knock" or "engine ping") destroys engines.
There are newer engine designs that are specifically designated "lean-burn" engine designs, that apparently have specially designed combustion chambers that are less prone to self-destructing under high temperature conditions, but I don't think anyone is talking about them here. In any case, all that you need to do if you want to increase the ratio of oxygen to gasoline in the engine is program the fuel injectors to open for shorter intervals, thus letting in less fuel for the same amount of air. Presto, lean burn engine with more oxygen in the charge than normal.
Since a modern car's engine control typically already meters the fuel flow to match the quantity of incoming oxygen (based on mass air sensors, exhaust gas pipe oxygen sensors, and various other devices / methods ) I would expect that the only result of dumping more oxygen into the intake charge like they do here would be to burn *more* fuel. That is, the engine controller will detect the leanness of the charge based on the sensor data, and increase the fuel injector duty cycle to compensate. You might get more power, but you can't get more *efficiency* from the burn - you still burn oxygen & gasoline at a 14.7:1 ratio, that's just the way the chemistry works.
Now, having a bunch of free hydrogen in there as well may alter the reaction balance, but the net change ought to be zero since you're adding in a balanced amount of hydrogen and oxygen. That is, you started with
2C8H18 + 25O2 = 16CO2 + 18H2O
You added
2H2 + O2 = 2H2O
The added hydrogen and oxygen does nothing to the overall gasoline combustion reactions. How can it alter the "cleanness" of the exhaust gases? (I suppose it's possible, since none of these reactions run 100% to conclusion and there are side reactions producing CO and NOx. But if the added oxygen is offsetting these side reactions, where is the hydrogen going? Without oxygen to react with, it's doing nothing. And if it's reacting with the oxygen, then those side reactions keep occurring the same as before.)
And another thing - what the heck are they talking about, feeling the tailpipe and proving that since it was cool to the touch, the hydrogen was doing it's job? The laws of thermodynamics have something disagreeable to say here...
Keep about a dozen of the best you have to support your legacy systems from now till Hell Freezes over if that's what it takes
The best engineers will be the first to leave for better jobs as soon as cuts start happening. If you're lucky management will be able to identify the deadwood and cut them, leaving just the mediocre people who didn't feel like job-hunting to stick around. But most PHBs are too stupid to recognize deadwood vs productive staff, so you're just as likely to have the mediocre people cut and the deadwood remain.
Of course, M68000-based Ataris and Amigas have been excellent for this type of task for over two decades. x86 PCs and Macs have always had inferior clock stability, regardless of the OS on top. I suppose part of that may be because M68K hardware is more suited to embedded systems anyway, and part of that may be because the designers of those Atari and Amiga systems came from the arcade game culture, which is a ridiculously demanding programming environment to begin with, where responsiveness makes or breaks the game. (If the game is unresponsive, it gets unpopular fast, loses money fast...) I suppose that's why M68xx and Coldfire chips are still so popular for embedded systems.
I kinda agree with you, except that there are definitely gains in efficiency by cramming all the components as close together as possible on a single chip.
But yeah, personally I'd like to have a cluster of 68030s built on a modern fab process. Most of what you need a PDA to do could easily be handled by one of those processors, and you could probably fit a dozen of them in the same silicon as a Pentium 4 core...
Yes, same in the US. There's a bit more confusion because you can go to the trouble of registering a trademark in an individual state, but only federal registration allows you to use the (R) mark, and only federal registration actually means much in a legal proceeding.
This is probably a bad example, since BMW probably does sell clothing with their logo on it.
I have a US trademark on my band name Highland Sun registered in 3 classes - live performance, musical recordings, and clothing, because I sell T-shirts and stuff with my band logo on it. If I didn't have the mark registered on clothing, then 3rd parties could sell such swag without my permission, and they could interfere with my own sales of such items. (Obviously I'm not in any great danger of losing sales for this. But it happens to larger bands all the time, when they don't have savvy managers.)
In a lot of industries, not just entertainment, peripheral merchandising is just as important as the main product. So you'll find lots of companies registering trademarks in a wide range of classes, to cover the main product and anything else they can use to aid in their marketing.
Look at the common stereotypes - techies or programmers for example. Think about professional programmers, getting paid by the hour, and what happens when they make typos in their code.
For a C program, the compiler spits out a slew of error messages, of which probably only the first message is meaningful and the rest are spurious. After you've seen this happen a few times, the most common reaction is one of annoyance, swearing at the computer and/or compiler, while editing to fix all the problems.
What observations can you make about this work cycle?
1) "DWIMS" - Do What I Mean, Stupid! - programmers are quick to blame anything but themselves for their own mistakes.
2) Programmers hate to have their mistakes pointed out to them.
3) Programmers have extremely low regard for anyone/thing that points out their mistakes to them.
4) Programmers being paid hourly make more money for making mistakes, and otherwise doing anything that stretches out the development time of a project.
Once you understand 1-3 you can easily see how the same attitude transfers over into verbal communication. The fact is, a large number of supposedly savvy techies are lousy at paying attention to detail, whether communicating with people or with computers. With the computer work they can get away with being sloppy because the computer can only complain about bad syntax, and can seldom identify bad semantics, and they can take as many tries as necessary to tweak their input until the computer accepts it. With human communication you usually only get one shot at communicating a point, and these people who are too lazy and used to getting multiple chances to refine their output come out looking bad.
Anyway, whether poor spelling or grammar reflects on your intelligence or knowledge or not, it certainly reflects on your attitude. And in most human interaction, that can be more important than any other factor.
The price someone sees fit to charge is purely artificial, it has no connection to the actual cost of creating information.
A lot of new ideas come after many hours of toil and sweat. Some come after all the labor, in a sudden flash. Some come in a flash, with no labor at all. What is the true cost of any of those ideas? There's the saying "time is money" but that's clearly false. (You can't deposit time into a savings account and accumulate it, and withdraw more of it later, can you?) So really, you cannot honestly put a price tag on the time spent leading up to a discovery or invention or creative product. It is, literally, priceless.
What is the value of new knowledge vs old? A lot of ideas lose their power over time. A lot of songs lose their appeal over time. Some don't; they become "classics" that are appreciated by generation after generation. So I guess you could say that some products of human creativity are worth more than others, and they may have expiration dates, like perishable food items...
mentions that the device runs on "Sony Linux" - if Sony is using any version of Linux in devices that they're mass marketing, then right now they are either violating the GPL, or somewhere they have an FTP site where you can download all of the source code for operating this device. If the former, then someone needs to bitch-slap them hard. If the latter, then it's time we made "OpenMG" live up to its name and got some other implementations running (e.g., accessing NetMD on platforms other than Windows).
For a clock like this the electronics are still brain-dead simple because the digits are still only seven segments each. But they surely can't be far behind with a 1-meter wide high resolution flat screen monitor. Now *that* would be seriously cool, with the 180 degree viewing angle and all the other goodies. And if they put it in a flexible mount, you could just roll it up into a poster tube to carry it around with you. No more lugging around bulky "compact" LCD projectors to do presentations, just unroll a several-meter-wide screen and hang it on a wall. This E-ink is some seriously cool stuff.
As you already said, a solution that works for breast cancer may not work for other cancers.
As such "This approach will have to show it's better than the others that will be on the market already when approval time comes along" doesn't make a ton of sense. It just has to show that it is extremely effective against at least one type of cancer to be worthwhile. Why should we discard good treatments just because they are not "the best" (whatever "best" means)? Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen have come onto the market, but that hasn't made us take Aspirin off the market. It's important to have a wide array of choices for treatments; there will never be a single universal cure.
We all have to live in this world, so wouldn't heads of large corporations be more interested in how best to conduct business with the least amount of disruption to the natural order of things?
It doesn't make any sense to you or me, but we're not those people. One of the concepts the Founding Fathers adhered to was that power does not originate in the government, it originates in the people, and the people assign powers to the government as needed to insure the peoples' well-being. Some may see this as just one political theory, but it has proven itself to be true.
When you want to increase your personal power and influence, that necessarily means you have to take it away from someone else. The only people who rise to positions of great power are those people who are willing to steal power from larger numbers of people with no remorse for their actions or the associated costs. Having to live in the world they create is what peons do, powermongers live in their stratospheric heights of power...
Perhaps you haven't noticed the extraordinary measures required to take a lawmaker to task for their own illegal actions? Arrogant, maybe, out of touch, probably not. Most of them can flaunt the law and go their merry way.
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Bingo. Today we have chemical batteries of all kinds for storing electricity. We have nothing to store photons. How will optical processors be supplied with photons to do their work? LEDs? What device will be controlling the LEDs to make them turn on and off at the high frequencies needed to produce useful pulses of light? Transistors? What will be so special about those transistors that lets them switch the LEDs on and off at sufficiently fast frequencies, that we wouldn't just use those transistors for electrical logic signaling in the first place?
It's too late for them to claim a patent, unless they filed for it within a year of the first release of the movie. Interestingly, one could make a case that because of the movie, nobody can patent it now, because the concept was already published in 1986. I.e., publishing without a patent by definition puts the idea in the public domain.
All these comparisons to Sun are pretty funny, considering that Sun sells Opteron machines, and their previous generation of Opteron systems were designed by Newisys. Those Newisys guys clearly have solid experience designing around the Opteron. I don't think it will take long before platforms built around Horus prove themselves worthwhile, and probably Sun and other AMD builders will adopt it en masse.
Since Sun is already in the Opteron camp, none of this news hurts them. With the cheapness of x86 hardware, they can spin out Opteron workstations and servers at a fraction of the cost of their lumbering Sparc solutions, and the difference is pure profit. Even if it hurts Sparc sales, they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
Send all of the company directors and officers to prison. Of course, the prisons are run by our government, and our government is broken too, but it may be a start. See my longer rant in my journal
Remember, I was talking about a home theater system.
That means multi-channel. That means you can't just broadcast to a single broadcast address. That means you have to configure the speakers so they know which channel they're on. They *could* use a hardcoded multicast group, and embed the channel ID in the audio data, but that would be inefficient and would require faster processors in each speaker, because they would have to sift through all the data to parse out the audio packets that are just meant for them. And hardcoding a single multicast address is a bad idea.
Pure digital effects processors have been around for ages. You can do all the eq / volume / balance adjustments you want totally in the digital domain.
A lot of folks seem pretty skeptical about these things working. I'm sure they'll work fine, I'm just skeptical about their value. What do you have to do to set the IP address of one of these things? If you set up a home theater with 6 remotes in the theater room, plus a couple more scattered around the house, soon you start having to learn to be a real IP network manager. What kind of OS is on the controller, does it use a web server to provide you a configuration interface? It obviously needs to have some amount of (NV)RAM on it to work, what happens when somebody hacks the servers?
"Yeah, I had my firewalls set up and anti-virus stuff on my PCs, but some damn worm got into my speakers and started flooding spam all over the place..."
What delays are incorporated in the IP transport? And why are you even talking about IP as a stream transport? IP isn't a transport at all, it's a network layer, and its performance is pretty much dominated by the underlying media layer. If you had an IP speaker and a PC transmitter on two opposite ends of a crossover ethernet cable, there would be no switching delays, and wire propagation speed is the same as for analog cable. In fact you can deliver the data several times faster than realtime and let the speaker buffer it and play it back at realtime with its own jitter-free clock. Thinking that there may be delays just because they use IP is downright ignorant.
Of course, to me what doesn't make sense here is the use of a bidirectional communications network for what is obviously a unidirectional job. Unless you plan to mount microphones in each speaker so they can report back balance and room delay characteristics back to the central console. That would be a smart use of technology, but I don't see anybody doing that.
And your point is?
My notebook will "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to disk" so again, assuming nothing has flaked out, I don't need to reboot it either. Currently my uptime on the notebook is about 12 days; I shut it down a while ago before heading thru an airport, otherwise it's always ready to use.
See Nantero's press releases; they announced their 10Gbit wafer in May 2003. Their partnership with LSI Logic isn't news either, that was announced June 2004. The fact that they're still signing new partnerships on a steady basis tells me this technology is not a dead-end (yet).
Good point. It's funny, the article starts with "Will computers that require no time to boot up become a reality?" but that's kind of a stupid question. I reboot my Linux machine once every year or so, maybe a little more often if I'm installing a new kernel. But once it's up, it stays up for weeks or months at a time. The time required to boot is totally insignificant.
But the real point is, *when* I reboot a machine, I'm doing it because I need it to run from a clean slate. I don't want the previously crashed kernel and data to hang around.
I guess many people perceive boot time as an evil thing because they have to reboot their Windows PCs so damn often. Just another case of fixing the symptom and not the real problem. The real solution would be to make Windows so reliable you don't need to reboot it.
I don't think anyone is positioning this NRAM as a replacement for DRAM/SRAM. It's clearly only being compared to FLASH, so at most it's a contender for solid-state disk drive. And from the description, I would very much look forward to using it in that application.
Well, since the 1918 virus was essentially already extinct, there was no reason to create a vaccine to defend against it today. But now that it's being reconstructed...
Eh. Big deal. Even if the next virus wipes out 99.99% of the Earth's human population there will still be tens of millions of survivors even without vaccines. More than enough to carry on the species, probably even enough to carry on civilization uninterrupted. Really, as doomsday scenarios go, it could be worse. Human existence today just isn't as fragile as it was a few hundred years ago. Individuals may not be much stronger, but we more than make up for it in numbers.
As far as I recall, the Apple Password Server is only provided for backward compatibility with previous MacOS releases. I don't wish to denigrate what Apple has achieved in shipping OpenDirectory with their OS, but anybody can install Heimdal Kerberos, OpenLDAP, and Cyrus SASL and get automatic integration of Kerberos principals with LDAP accounts and Cyrus passwords. All of these three packages support each other directly, out of the box. And likewise, since you can create a single LDAP user object with all of their Kerberos info, Unix info, and SASL info in one place, they naturally all replicate together. So there's nothing magic about OpenDirectory here. (Nevertheless, OpenDirectory is good stuff, and I'm sure it will be even better in the future.)
And yes, I'm on the OpenLDAP core team, and I wrote a lot of the code that makes Heimdal, OpenLDAP, and Cyrus SASL play together. It's been working well in the field for years. And for those people who have trouble getting configure scripts to connect everything the way they want, my company Symas Corp. offers pre-built binaries of all of these packages, already integrated, ready to run.
Ah good point. Like the tZero electric car with regenerative brakes - driving down a mountain with a charged battery pack was a problem because they had nowhere to dump the power generated by the brakes. They needed to use up the battery before heading down the mountain. (Too bad they didn't take my advice and just use twin radio antennas on the back of the car, run as a Jacobs Ladder to dump the surplus.)
But re: no free lunch - it is a proven fact that superchargers and turbochargers work to increase the power output of an engine, and they are spun by energy produced by the engine itself. So remember what you're measuring when you talk about there being no free lunch. The fact is that if you can increase the volumetric efficiency of the engine (through compressing the intake charge) you can produce more power than it costs to do the compressing.
I admit I'm a bit skeptical about this idea, but if other people have proof that adding oxygen *and hydrogen* boosts engine efficiency, fine. The problem is that everything I know about combustion says that gasoline burns best in a 14.7:1 ratio (by weight) of oxygen to gasoline. Every modern car with electronic engine controls is pre-programmed to aim to maintain this stoichiometric ratio, and most of them do a pretty good job, at least when they're new. If you simply add oxygen to the intake charge, you get a leaner burn, which burns hotter and actually detonates, instead of burning evenly. And detonation (aka "knock" or "engine ping") destroys engines.
There are newer engine designs that are specifically designated "lean-burn" engine designs, that apparently have specially designed combustion chambers that are less prone to self-destructing under high temperature conditions, but I don't think anyone is talking about them here. In any case, all that you need to do if you want to increase the ratio of oxygen to gasoline in the engine is program the fuel injectors to open for shorter intervals, thus letting in less fuel for the same amount of air. Presto, lean burn engine with more oxygen in the charge than normal.
Since a modern car's engine control typically already meters the fuel flow to match the quantity of incoming oxygen (based on mass air sensors, exhaust gas pipe oxygen sensors, and various other devices / methods ) I would expect that the only result of dumping more oxygen into the intake charge like they do here would be to burn *more* fuel. That is, the engine controller will detect the leanness of the charge based on the sensor data, and increase the fuel injector duty cycle to compensate. You might get more power, but you can't get more *efficiency* from the burn - you still burn oxygen & gasoline at a 14.7:1 ratio, that's just the way the chemistry works.
Now, having a bunch of free hydrogen in there as well may alter the reaction balance, but the net change ought to be zero since you're adding in a balanced amount of hydrogen and oxygen. That is, you started with
2C8H18 + 25O2 = 16CO2 + 18H2O
You added
2H2 + O2 = 2H2O
The added hydrogen and oxygen does nothing to the overall gasoline combustion reactions. How can it alter the "cleanness" of the exhaust gases? (I suppose it's possible, since none of these reactions run 100% to conclusion and there are side reactions producing CO and NOx. But if the added oxygen is offsetting these side reactions, where is the hydrogen going? Without oxygen to react with, it's doing nothing. And if it's reacting with the oxygen, then those side reactions keep occurring the same as before.)
And another thing - what the heck are they talking about, feeling the tailpipe and proving that since it was cool to the touch, the hydrogen was doing it's job? The laws of thermodynamics have something disagreeable to say here...
Of course, M68000-based Ataris and Amigas have been excellent for this type of task for over two decades. x86 PCs and Macs have always had inferior clock stability, regardless of the OS on top. I suppose part of that may be because M68K hardware is more suited to embedded systems anyway, and part of that may be because the designers of those Atari and Amiga systems came from the arcade game culture, which is a ridiculously demanding programming environment to begin with, where responsiveness makes or breaks the game. (If the game is unresponsive, it gets unpopular fast, loses money fast...) I suppose that's why M68xx and Coldfire chips are still so popular for embedded systems.
I kinda agree with you, except that there are definitely gains in efficiency by cramming all the components as close together as possible on a single chip.
But yeah, personally I'd like to have a cluster of 68030s built on a modern fab process. Most of what you need a PDA to do could easily be handled by one of those processors, and you could probably fit a dozen of them in the same silicon as a Pentium 4 core...
Yes, same in the US. There's a bit more confusion because you can go to the trouble of registering a trademark in an individual state, but only federal registration allows you to use the (R) mark, and only federal registration actually means much in a legal proceeding.
This is probably a bad example, since BMW probably does sell clothing with their logo on it.
I have a US trademark on my band name Highland Sun registered in 3 classes - live performance, musical recordings, and clothing, because I sell T-shirts and stuff with my band logo on it. If I didn't have the mark registered on clothing, then 3rd parties could sell such swag without my permission, and they could interfere with my own sales of such items. (Obviously I'm not in any great danger of losing sales for this. But it happens to larger bands all the time, when they don't have savvy managers.)
In a lot of industries, not just entertainment, peripheral merchandising is just as important as the main product. So you'll find lots of companies registering trademarks in a wide range of classes, to cover the main product and anything else they can use to aid in their marketing.
Look at the common stereotypes - techies or programmers for example. Think about professional programmers, getting paid by the hour, and what happens when they make typos in their code.
For a C program, the compiler spits out a slew of error messages, of which probably only the first message is meaningful and the rest are spurious. After you've seen this happen a few times, the most common reaction is one of annoyance, swearing at the computer and/or compiler, while editing to fix all the problems.
What observations can you make about this work cycle?
1) "DWIMS" - Do What I Mean, Stupid! - programmers are quick to blame anything but themselves for their own mistakes.
2) Programmers hate to have their mistakes pointed out to them.
3) Programmers have extremely low regard for anyone/thing that points out their mistakes to them.
4) Programmers being paid hourly make more money for making mistakes, and otherwise doing anything that stretches out the development time of a project.
Once you understand 1-3 you can easily see how the same attitude transfers over into verbal communication. The fact is, a large number of supposedly savvy techies are lousy at paying attention to detail, whether communicating with people or with computers. With the computer work they can get away with being sloppy because the computer can only complain about bad syntax, and can seldom identify bad semantics, and they can take as many tries as necessary to tweak their input until the computer accepts it. With human communication you usually only get one shot at communicating a point, and these people who are too lazy and used to getting multiple chances to refine their output come out looking bad.
Anyway, whether poor spelling or grammar reflects on your intelligence or knowledge or not, it certainly reflects on your attitude. And in most human interaction, that can be more important than any other factor.
The price someone sees fit to charge is purely artificial, it has no connection to the actual cost of creating information.
A lot of new ideas come after many hours of toil and sweat. Some come after all the labor, in a sudden flash. Some come in a flash, with no labor at all. What is the true cost of any of those ideas? There's the saying "time is money" but that's clearly false. (You can't deposit time into a savings account and accumulate it, and withdraw more of it later, can you?) So really, you cannot honestly put a price tag on the time spent leading up to a discovery or invention or creative product. It is, literally, priceless.
What is the value of new knowledge vs old? A lot of ideas lose their power over time. A lot of songs lose their appeal over time. Some don't; they become "classics" that are appreciated by generation after generation. So I guess you could say that some products of human creativity are worth more than others, and they may have expiration dates, like perishable food items...
The screen may look great, but the DRM on that thing makes it a total joke. But here's something interesting from that review page:
1 200034,00.html
This article
http://books.guardian.co.uk/ebooks/story/0,11305,
mentions that the device runs on "Sony Linux" - if Sony is using any version of Linux in devices that they're mass marketing, then right now they are either violating the GPL, or somewhere they have an FTP site where you can download all of the source code for operating this device. If the former, then someone needs to bitch-slap them hard. If the latter, then it's time we made "OpenMG" live up to its name and got some other implementations running (e.g., accessing NetMD on platforms other than Windows).
This is a wall clock, not a wrist watch. It is 1 meter wide.
0 616/105862/
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
For a clock like this the electronics are still brain-dead simple because the digits are still only seven segments each. But they surely can't be far behind with a 1-meter wide high resolution flat screen monitor. Now *that* would be seriously cool, with the 180 degree viewing angle and all the other goodies. And if they put it in a flexible mount, you could just roll it up into a poster tube to carry it around with you. No more lugging around bulky "compact" LCD projectors to do presentations, just unroll a several-meter-wide screen and hang it on a wall. This E-ink is some seriously cool stuff.
As you already said, a solution that works for breast cancer may not work for other cancers.
As such "This approach will have to show it's better than the others that will be on the market already when approval time comes along" doesn't make a ton of sense. It just has to show that it is extremely effective against at least one type of cancer to be worthwhile. Why should we discard good treatments just because they are not "the best" (whatever "best" means)? Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen have come onto the market, but that hasn't made us take Aspirin off the market. It's important to have a wide array of choices for treatments; there will never be a single universal cure.
Hey guys, pollution is bad, right?
We all have to live in this world, so wouldn't heads of large corporations be more interested in how best to conduct business with the least amount of disruption to the natural order of things?
It doesn't make any sense to you or me, but we're not those people. One of the concepts the Founding Fathers adhered to was that power does not originate in the government, it originates in the people, and the people assign powers to the government as needed to insure the peoples' well-being. Some may see this as just one political theory, but it has proven itself to be true.
When you want to increase your personal power and influence, that necessarily means you have to take it away from someone else. The only people who rise to positions of great power are those people who are willing to steal power from larger numbers of people with no remorse for their actions or the associated costs. Having to live in the world they create is what peons do, powermongers live in their stratospheric heights of power...
Perhaps you haven't noticed the extraordinary measures required to take a lawmaker to task for their own illegal actions? Arrogant, maybe, out of touch, probably not. Most of them can flaunt the law and go their merry way.