If this becomes a reality, it could be one of the most brilliant concepts in the history of manufacturing. However, I'm more than a little skeptical. The first time around on this story we were all impressed, but we assumed it was like all concept car ideas: never destined to see the light of day.
But now the hype machine has been given another turn, and we are seeing more stories about this skateboard chassis. NPR ran a story about it last week, saying that it would be going into production in Europe. (!) Well, hydrogen delivery infrastructure aside, that got my attention. Still, with the story cropping up in mostly unchanged form nine months later, I'm still claiming honorary Missouri citizenship. You gotta show me!
The reason people think (or rather know) that banner ads are ineffective is because you can measure it. There's no such technology for TV ads
Actually, it is much easier than you would think to measure the effectiveness of advertising on television. Nobody really cares how many people watch their commercials. All they care about is the money. If 80% of the people get up to pee, but I still get $80k in additional sales off of that $10k I spent for a couple of TV spots, then I'm happy as a clam. Ratings are just a tool to help businesses decide where their money is most likely to be effective. They measure the effectiveness of advertising by its effect on sales, or more precisely, profit.
Re:Solar-array hydrogen-generator grid
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Build several (or several hundred) big (square-mile-plus) mirror-array collectors throughout the world... The startup costs for this can't be any higher than for exploration, drilling, and refining of oil in the millions of wells we've sunk.
One would think so, but this hasn't proven to be the case. All of the variants tried so far (wind, solar heat boilers, photovoltaics..) have proven to be much more expensive to build and operate than fossil fuels. That's why we don't have them everywhere. I guarantee that if I could make electricity for even 90 cents on the dollar versus coal and natural gas plants, I'd be one wealthy S.O.B. Unfortunately, alternative energy sources are still requiring government subsidies just to keep a "pilot project" level going. Maybe someday soon we'll get that breakthrough in efficiency that makes it pay off, but it sure doesn't appear that we are there yet.
I have no idea why NASA is even looking at this. The weight of the growth medium will necessarily always be much greater than the weight of the meat produced, so there is no reason to grow the meat in space. You might as well just ship out with the meat flash frozen and shrinkwrapped.
All of these oil/auto company conspiracy theories are laughable. If anyone comes up with a cheap, reliable renewable energy source, they'll be able to buy all the oil companies out of pocket change in short order. Same thing goes for all of the other theories about great conspiracies keeping increadible inventions from the public. If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
Moller's aircar as an invention of the year? This guy has been hawking this thing for more than 30 years and has yet to come up with more than a wild spec. sheet and some fancy marketting. What the heck is up with journalism in America!? This "invention of the year" has to be the dumbest thing on the list, including "IT", which is pretty dang stupid too, since the editors have no idea what "IT" is.
Unless of course you want to count shares and preorders in Moller as a successful scam, but then you'd have to admit that this was invented long before the year 2001.
Instead of things being written directly to Harddrives, etc. I think we're going into the error of solid state memory.
Yes, this will lead to big problems if there are power outages etc. but I think this will all be "built in".
The only way this quick retrival is possible is through solid-state solutions...
Actually, I remember reading a couple of different articles about holographic work being done at IBM that is a slow write, but amazingly fast reads. If I remember correctly, they were talking about accessing gigabytes sized pages all at once. That'd do it! Of course, don't hold your breath either....
There is a lot here to stimulate discussion. Most obvious is the decision to continue with x86 backward compatibility, but more interesting to me is the integrated memory controller. This should lead to much higher memory access performance, but I'm a little worried that it will lock the processor into a particular memory architecture. Alternately, it could allow motherboards to accept newer memory types with a CPU upgrade, since there is no northbridge on the motherboard anymore. Not being a board architect, I don't know for sure what the implication is for future upgrade paths, but the integrated northbridge is definitely a bold step that should help aleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks for the CPU.
I don't know whether to be glad that Tolkien is finally being given proper attention in the mainstream or concerned about the wave of commercialism that is about to engulf his work.
It's going to be disturbing when kids start getting nine-fingered Frodo action figures in their happy meals...
Actually, the action figure includes all 10, but the ring finger is actually a socket that holds a french fry so you can bite it off...
Your roaming profile experience matches mine precisely. I have even written scripts to change the default save/open locations for MS Office, and every employee gets a lesson in where to save files. They still end up with multimegabyte profiles. Another big (HUGE) drain... Internet Explorer. The default location for the cache on several versions of IE is in the user profile! If you have a big hard drive, that could be 60mb, maybe even 2 or three times that. All uploaded to the server every time you log out, and downloaded every time you log in. What a pain! MS definitely does not have this one figured out correctly yet.
An excellent repost from an outstanding source.
The line that I most take exception to: Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed.
America is driven by an ideal, much more so than Europe. That ideal is not greed. The quintessential American ideal is the value of the individual and the pursuit of individual excellence. Granted, this has been much muddied and softened by time and various PC and group efforts, but the fundamental culture is based on individual liberty and individual responsibility. What does this mean for business? Hard work and excellence are rewarded. Sloth and incompetence are punished. That is why America by far the most productive nation on earth. That is also why we work too many hours, have less job security and have too little free time. Everything comes with a price, even freedom. I'll leave it to you to decide if the price is too high.
The danger for privacy is that the next step is doing the match for reasons other than suspicion of criminal behavior. Marketing, intimidation, or whatever. This story is evidence that all the issues of tracking people's behavior on the Web are now a concern in the real-world too.
Absolutely! The additional systems needed to catalog everyone passing the camera along with the time of day is trivial. We already have toll road e-pass records and cell phone records being used to track our locations. Now add face recognition at public places to the list. There are also "red light" cameras being installed around the country to ticket drivers running red lights. It would be trivial to adapt those to recognize licence plate numbers and add that to the tracking database. Along with your credit card activity.... you get the picture. Damn, it makes you feel like the paranoid are justified...
I actually used a demo to obtain funds that had repeatedly been flatly refused. I was running an NIH funded study that involved over 8,000 leukemia patients and we only had 2 IBM XT computers. You try running a database with 5 million data points on a 2mb 8088 computer sometime!
Well, no matter how nicely or loudly I asked, there was just no money in the budget for a new computer. So when the big shots from NIH came for a site visit, I showed them our labs and all the nice equipment, and then proceeded to show them where all of the data for this 8.5 million dollar study lived. It took 15 minutes for the first record to load, and about 10 seconds to flip from one record to the next. Well, needless to say, before they left the building they had committed an additional $2500 for a spanking new 486/33. Nothing like making a bunch of higher-ups cool their heels for 15 minutes waiting on something to happen to make them really appreciate how important that new piece of equipment is. I used the same technique a few years later when compile times started running into the half-hour range on a project I was working on. Make the boss wait around for a half hour while you recompile and he'll start to see why that 3 year old PC might be due for a replacement!
Ayn Rand pretty much decimated this argument over 50 years ago. Give "Atlas Shrugged" a read sometime. For some more contemporary writings on eminent domain, try this opinion piece from the Ayn Rand Institute.
A synopsis: No one, man or government, has the right to another man's work or property. It doesn't matter how much you "need" it. And don't even think for a second that you can make the argument that the overriding social good demands that Metallica give over control of it's work to "society". Give me a break!
The new phrase "trafficking in software" has replaced the original talk of DMCA violations. Surely this is not simply a move to thwart the obvious criticisms which would arise were a man to be arrested in the USA for simply telling people how to break an encryption scheme. It sure does seem that they are trying to censor obviously protected speach by inventing new words to describe a made-up crime.
I mean, really, was he "trafficking with intent to distribute", or since he had less than 5 grams of software on him, will it get busted to a misdimeanor "possession of software" charge. HA! Now their new arguments sound silly too. These idiots would do well to drop the whole thing with a heart fealt "sorry dude, no hard feelings!"
You're thinking of BYU. The University of Utah is a state run school. I doubt the administration's possible religious following makes a difference anyway - would you have include a comment about the Drunken Irish Catholics if this had happened at Duke?
You're thinking of Notre Dame. Duke would be a bunch of drunken Methodists. Not nearly as obvious as a steriotype.
This is actually quite interesting... The US Federal government has repeatedly officially designated encryption algorithms as munitions. Since the US court would be required to either accept this as a stipulation and hear the first amendment argument or reject the notion of encryption as munitions, either way we would have a major victory against overzealous regulation. Nicely done!
for more privacy paranoia, check out Project ELF and My Private Planet.
We bought a DVD writer about a year ago with the intention of using it to backup critical files for archiving, with optical media being so much more stable than magnetic tape or disks. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to get any media. Score one for the movie industry. Lord knows they don't want me backing up my databases.....
I assume you are speaking of Bonobos. Off the top of my head, vervet monkeys also have promiscuous sex to enhance social bonds. Then there are "ritual mountings" and other sex-related behaviors not leading to procreation in numerous species.
it's a shame to see something like this shut down to be aligned with their 'strategy,' despite Tim's own admission that the projects were profitable.
I used to wonder that myself. As long as you can make a profit on a product, why kill it off? I often thought this of the auto industry, where they never used to actually produce any of their "concept cars", not because they couldn't make and sell a few of them at a modest profit, but because they would never sell five million of them.
Now that I am involved in running a business at an executive level, I take it all back. The problem is that there are only so many hours in the day for the key people in any organization, and they have to focus their efforts accordingly. I have watched divisions struggle because there wasn't anyone available to focus on them. I'm sure that O'Reilly would love to do both, but when resources get streched thin, you have to focus on what you do best.
For the user to be able to do an "edit page" is one thing, that really can't be helped. But the "publish" function means that the server admin left an FTP port wide open. Who in there right mind allows unauthenticated ftp on a server that handles anything on the Internet, much less "aiee-commerce"?
I think they meant that you would publish your altered page to your local machine and run it from there. I don't think anyone is altering the website itself. You could probably do the same hack by simply examining the URL that is returned from the submit button. Security this lax probably means the price was sent as +Price=29.99+ etc in the URL.
Reading the various accounts it seems clear that the major objective seems to be testing teh deployment of a large, lightweight structure using inflatable tubes. I'm a bit surprised that they aren't aiming for more than a minor boost in orbital attitude from solar pressure.
Still, I've often wondered why there aren't more space installations based on inflatable structures. You could build a collosal laboratory in space out of some sort of plastic sandwich (to make it self-healing from micrometeor hits). A structure larger than a football stadium could fit in the shuttle bay and inflated in orbit. You probably wouldn't want to live in one of them (radiation shielding), but you could certainly do materials science and agricultural experiments in one of them. Heck, you could make a giant inflatable wheel and spin it for "artificial gravity"
Slashdot Mirror
If this becomes a reality, it could be one of the most brilliant concepts in the history of manufacturing. However, I'm more than a little skeptical. The first time around on this story we were all impressed, but we assumed it was like all concept car ideas: never destined to see the light of day.
But now the hype machine has been given another turn, and we are seeing more stories about this skateboard chassis. NPR ran a story about it last week, saying that it would be going into production in Europe. (!) Well, hydrogen delivery infrastructure aside, that got my attention. Still, with the story cropping up in mostly unchanged form nine months later, I'm still claiming honorary Missouri citizenship. You gotta show me!
The reason people think (or rather know) that banner ads are ineffective is because you can measure it. There's no such technology for TV ads
Actually, it is much easier than you would think to measure the effectiveness of advertising on television. Nobody really cares how many people watch their commercials. All they care about is the money. If 80% of the people get up to pee, but I still get $80k in additional sales off of that $10k I spent for a couple of TV spots, then I'm happy as a clam. Ratings are just a tool to help businesses decide where their money is most likely to be effective. They measure the effectiveness of advertising by its effect on sales, or more precisely, profit.
Build several (or several hundred) big (square-mile-plus) mirror-array collectors throughout the world ... The startup costs for this can't be any higher than for exploration, drilling, and refining of oil in the millions of wells we've sunk.
One would think so, but this hasn't proven to be the case. All of the variants tried so far (wind, solar heat boilers, photovoltaics..) have proven to be much more expensive to build and operate than fossil fuels. That's why we don't have them everywhere. I guarantee that if I could make electricity for even 90 cents on the dollar versus coal and natural gas plants, I'd be one wealthy S.O.B. Unfortunately, alternative energy sources are still requiring government subsidies just to keep a "pilot project" level going. Maybe someday soon we'll get that breakthrough in efficiency that makes it pay off, but it sure doesn't appear that we are there yet.
I have no idea why NASA is even looking at this. The weight of the growth medium will necessarily always be much greater than the weight of the meat produced, so there is no reason to grow the meat in space. You might as well just ship out with the meat flash frozen and shrinkwrapped.
All of these oil/auto company conspiracy theories are laughable. If anyone comes up with a cheap, reliable renewable energy source, they'll be able to buy all the oil companies out of pocket change in short order. Same thing goes for all of the other theories about great conspiracies keeping increadible inventions from the public. If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
My number one for the bottom five is the "pop behind" advertizements made so popular by X-11. What a crappy development!
Moller's aircar as an invention of the year? This guy has been hawking this thing for more than 30 years and has yet to come up with more than a wild spec. sheet and some fancy marketting. What the heck is up with journalism in America!? This "invention of the year" has to be the dumbest thing on the list, including "IT", which is pretty dang stupid too, since the editors have no idea what "IT" is.
Unless of course you want to count shares and preorders in Moller as a successful scam, but then you'd have to admit that this was invented long before the year 2001.
Tick, looking at a large map of the mega-mart where he and Arthur are shopping for a toaster; large "You Are Here" arrow denoting their location:
... Well old chum, being here is a lot like being lost!"
"Hmmmm.... You are here!
Instead of things being written directly to Harddrives, etc. I think we're going into the error of solid state memory. Yes, this will lead to big problems if there are power outages etc. but I think this will all be "built in". The only way this quick retrival is possible is through solid-state solutions...
Actually, I remember reading a couple of different articles about holographic work being done at IBM that is a slow write, but amazingly fast reads. If I remember correctly, they were talking about accessing gigabytes sized pages all at once. That'd do it! Of course, don't hold your breath either....
There is a lot here to stimulate discussion. Most obvious is the decision to continue with x86 backward compatibility, but more interesting to me is the integrated memory controller. This should lead to much higher memory access performance, but I'm a little worried that it will lock the processor into a particular memory architecture. Alternately, it could allow motherboards to accept newer memory types with a CPU upgrade, since there is no northbridge on the motherboard anymore. Not being a board architect, I don't know for sure what the implication is for future upgrade paths, but the integrated northbridge is definitely a bold step that should help aleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks for the CPU.
milkmandan9's $170 per node cluster is worthy of a feature article all to itself. Somebody run over to his place and make him write it up!
I don't know whether to be glad that Tolkien is finally being given proper attention in the mainstream or concerned about the wave of commercialism that is about to engulf his work.
It's going to be disturbing when kids start getting nine-fingered Frodo action figures in their happy meals...
Actually, the action figure includes all 10, but the ring finger is actually a socket that holds a french fry so you can bite it off...
Your roaming profile experience matches mine precisely. I have even written scripts to change the default save/open locations for MS Office, and every employee gets a lesson in where to save files. They still end up with multimegabyte profiles. Another big (HUGE) drain... Internet Explorer. The default location for the cache on several versions of IE is in the user profile! If you have a big hard drive, that could be 60mb, maybe even 2 or three times that. All uploaded to the server every time you log out, and downloaded every time you log in. What a pain! MS definitely does not have this one figured out correctly yet.
An excellent repost from an outstanding source.
The line that I most take exception to:
Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed.
America is driven by an ideal, much more so than Europe. That ideal is not greed. The quintessential American ideal is the value of the individual and the pursuit of individual excellence. Granted, this has been much muddied and softened by time and various PC and group efforts, but the fundamental culture is based on individual liberty and individual responsibility. What does this mean for business? Hard work and excellence are rewarded. Sloth and incompetence are punished. That is why America by far the most productive nation on earth. That is also why we work too many hours, have less job security and have too little free time. Everything comes with a price, even freedom. I'll leave it to you to decide if the price is too high.
The danger for privacy is that the next step is doing the match for reasons other than suspicion of criminal behavior. Marketing, intimidation, or whatever. This story is evidence that all the issues of tracking people's behavior on the Web are now a concern in the real-world too.
Absolutely! The additional systems needed to catalog everyone passing the camera along with the time of day is trivial. We already have toll road e-pass records and cell phone records being used to track our locations. Now add face recognition at public places to the list. There are also "red light" cameras being installed around the country to ticket drivers running red lights. It would be trivial to adapt those to recognize licence plate numbers and add that to the tracking database. Along with your credit card activity.... you get the picture. Damn, it makes you feel like the paranoid are justified...
I actually used a demo to obtain funds that had repeatedly been flatly refused. I was running an NIH funded study that involved over 8,000 leukemia patients and we only had 2 IBM XT computers. You try running a database with 5 million data points on a 2mb 8088 computer sometime!
Well, no matter how nicely or loudly I asked, there was just no money in the budget for a new computer. So when the big shots from NIH came for a site visit, I showed them our labs and all the nice equipment, and then proceeded to show them where all of the data for this 8.5 million dollar study lived. It took 15 minutes for the first record to load, and about 10 seconds to flip from one record to the next. Well, needless to say, before they left the building they had committed an additional $2500 for a spanking new 486/33. Nothing like making a bunch of higher-ups cool their heels for 15 minutes waiting on something to happen to make them really appreciate how important that new piece of equipment is. I used the same technique a few years later when compile times started running into the half-hour range on a project I was working on. Make the boss wait around for a half hour while you recompile and he'll start to see why that 3 year old PC might be due for a replacement!
Ayn Rand pretty much decimated this argument over 50 years ago. Give "Atlas Shrugged" a read sometime. For some more contemporary writings on eminent domain, try this opinion piece from the Ayn Rand Institute.
A synopsis: No one, man or government, has the right to another man's work or property. It doesn't matter how much you "need" it. And don't even think for a second that you can make the argument that the overriding social good demands that Metallica give over control of it's work to "society". Give me a break!
The new phrase "trafficking in software" has replaced the original talk of DMCA violations. Surely this is not simply a move to thwart the obvious criticisms which would arise were a man to be arrested in the USA for simply telling people how to break an encryption scheme. It sure does seem that they are trying to censor obviously protected speach by inventing new words to describe a made-up crime.
I mean, really, was he "trafficking with intent to distribute", or since he had less than 5 grams of software on him, will it get busted to a misdimeanor "possession of software" charge. HA! Now their new arguments sound silly too. These idiots would do well to drop the whole thing with a heart fealt "sorry dude, no hard feelings!"
You're thinking of BYU. The University of Utah is a state run school. I doubt the administration's possible religious following makes a difference anyway - would you have include a comment about the Drunken Irish Catholics if this had happened at Duke?
You're thinking of Notre Dame. Duke would be a bunch of drunken Methodists. Not nearly as obvious as a steriotype.
This is actually quite interesting... The US Federal government has repeatedly officially designated encryption algorithms as munitions. Since the US court would be required to either accept this as a stipulation and hear the first amendment argument or reject the notion of encryption as munitions, either way we would have a major victory against overzealous regulation. Nicely done!
for more privacy paranoia, check out Project ELF and My Private Planet.
We bought a DVD writer about a year ago with the intention of using it to backup critical files for archiving, with optical media being so much more stable than magnetic tape or disks. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to get any media. Score one for the movie industry. Lord knows they don't want me backing up my databases.....
I assume you are speaking of Bonobos. Off the top of my head, vervet monkeys also have promiscuous sex to enhance social bonds. Then there are "ritual mountings" and other sex-related behaviors not leading to procreation in numerous species.
I used to wonder that myself. As long as you can make a profit on a product, why kill it off? I often thought this of the auto industry, where they never used to actually produce any of their "concept cars", not because they couldn't make and sell a few of them at a modest profit, but because they would never sell five million of them.
Now that I am involved in running a business at an executive level, I take it all back. The problem is that there are only so many hours in the day for the key people in any organization, and they have to focus their efforts accordingly. I have watched divisions struggle because there wasn't anyone available to focus on them. I'm sure that O'Reilly would love to do both, but when resources get streched thin, you have to focus on what you do best.
I think they meant that you would publish your altered page to your local machine and run it from there. I don't think anyone is altering the website itself. You could probably do the same hack by simply examining the URL that is returned from the submit button. Security this lax probably means the price was sent as +Price=29.99+ etc in the URL.
Reading the various accounts it seems clear that the major objective seems to be testing teh deployment of a large, lightweight structure using inflatable tubes. I'm a bit surprised that they aren't aiming for more than a minor boost in orbital attitude from solar pressure.
Still, I've often wondered why there aren't more space installations based on inflatable structures. You could build a collosal laboratory in space out of some sort of plastic sandwich (to make it self-healing from micrometeor hits). A structure larger than a football stadium could fit in the shuttle bay and inflated in orbit. You probably wouldn't want to live in one of them (radiation shielding), but you could certainly do materials science and agricultural experiments in one of them. Heck, you could make a giant inflatable wheel and spin it for "artificial gravity"