-Mouse/Keyboard control. Way superior, and while some consoles offer USB ports to add those, each PC already has it. -Lots of harddisk space for big game maps. Consoles are getting there, but the PC usually is more upgradeable when you run out of space. And due to patches, you want the game on a writable medium. -Copy protection is (almost) irrelevant, because the game needs the central server and login by design.
Looks great for "micro-hybrid" cars that use only a small battery for recovering braking energy and a boost on accelerating. In these applications, you need a lot of power density. Or simply as a starter battery (good bye lead-acid).
For plug-in hybrids or electric only cars, LiPO4 is also interesting: somewhat higher energy density, and the lower power density is not a problem due to the larger battery. An example of a system that seems to be commercially available: http://www.valence.com/products/epoch_overview.html
There is more than one company who claims to be on the way to $1/Watt.
But right now, subsidies in Germany are so high that PV vendors can sell for more than $1/Watt, and find customers. So you will get $1/Watt on the end user market when the German market is saturated, which will probably take a few more years.
On the upside, we Germans essentially pay for the development of all those nice improved PV cells, because our subsidies guarantee a market;-)
After looking at this, I'm more suspicious than before. Because the graph shows an average power output around 0.4 hp. A realistic power output for a 3liter engine might be 40hp or more, not 0.4 hp. So the authors either did something pretty irrelevant, like measuring an idling engine, or they were incredibly sloppy in putting their publication together.
If a university professor is willing to put his reputation on the line, it is reason enough to try and reproduce the results. If that fails......I think Fleischmann and Pons can tell you what that does to your career;-)
Or exactly knowing that I wrote that crap, but for various management-related reasons didn't have much of a chance to make it better. Or will ever get the time for proper refactoring.
That company is doing a round of layoffs now, I'm among them and almost glad about it.
Who in their right mind would want to edit Word documents on a mobile phone?
I can see people reading and writing emails, those can be fairly short and manageable on the small screen and rudimentary keyboard. But that is about the maximum document size for non-masochists;-)
If anyone remembers FADE they'd know what truly fucked copy protection is. I had an original version of both Operation Flashpoint and the first expansion pack. I loved it. Until fade kicked in. I bought the game, but Codemasters FADE system decided that I wasn't. Gameplay degraded to the level where it was impossible to play.
This may in some cases be hard to distinguish from simple incompetence. For instance, I loved M.A.X.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanized_Assault_%26_Exploration But it always got slow and unstable when my army reached a certain size. Now this was longe before FADE was introduced, but it could easily be confused with something like FADE kicking in.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. Broken by incompetence or broken by design, who cares? Just don't buy anymore stuff from that vendor (yes, the lousy implementation of M.A.X. got Interplay on my boycott list).
About Steam: It's great as long as it works, but there is always the possibility that Valve goes out of business some day and switches off the authentication servers. That's why I got only one Valve game after Steam was introduced (DOD: Source, online shooter), and that one only because my friends already played it.
With "beta", the company also announces "this may be an unstable POS". The user is warned of course, but at the same time this will drive away those users who expect mature and stable applications. With a free application, I don't actually mind. At worst, I lose a bit of time trying it out.
In some cases, companies think they can get away with it and still charge money. Microsoft for instance has occasionally tried charging money for beta software. I've avoided those both on principle and because I strongly suspected they were in a state I'd call "alpha";-)
When looking at my favorite mailorder shop, Blu-Ray media start at 6.49 Euros for 25 GByte. At the same time, they offer the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop Drive 500 GB (external hard disk) for 77 Euros. So you get more GByte/Euro with the external hard disk, and in a more convenient package too.
You're seriously overestimating the average consumer. "Disk go in here? Disk play." That's the mentality.
I think you're underestimating the average customer. Enough of them have something like a DVD copy program that allows them to "Use disk with MegaDVDCopy. Free film for buddies". When they notice that doesn't work with Blu-Ray, it is not far to "Blu-Ray sucks. Use DVD again".
If you believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes#Strength, the strongest nanotube tested so far has tensile strength of 63 gigapascals. Assuming the density of 1.4 g/cm^3 is also correct, this nanotube could support 4500 km of itself in a homogenous gravity field of 10 m/s^2.
I'm too lazy right now to calculate the requirements of an actual space elevator (gravity gets less as you get away from earth) but offhand I think some further improvement is required.
I remember the Amiga from the late 80s/early 90s, from the perspective of a gamer/private user. For a while it was superior to a similarly priced PC. But that advantage slipped away as PCs got cheaper and faster, and the supply of games also caught up to the Amiga. When I wanted a replacement for my aging C64 in 1991, the PC already looked more attractive overall. I ended up buying a 386SX then, which was equivalent or superior to the Amiga 3000 (as described on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_3000) in most regards.
I think the Amiga lost out against the PC in the early 90s, and no further meddling was necessary on Microsoft's part to kill it.
AFAIK Mac OS X has become less open over time as well (which is allowed by the BSD license).
Once I had the idea of checking for an OS X driver for the ATI Radeon9600 that might be ported to X or have at least its low level functionality extracted. What I found out was that only parts of OS X have their source available for download, graphics drivers among the missing parts. People on various forums also complained that the trend was towards less OS X components being available as source code, and that Apple contributed little to BSD.
So it seems that OS X as open source was a marketing ploy rather than a serious effort at being open.
Just slapping more cores on chips is the lazy way out.
In most cases it is also the faster and cheaper way out for getting the software to support a chip. For a new architecture, you'll need to create compilers first as an absolute minimum. If you do something radically different, maybe even a new programming language that supports the new concepts.
Let alone that anything non-x86 means no Microsoft products for your computer these days (except for the XBox360 with its PPC tri-core).
So I think it will take two things for something new to have success in the mass market: 1) A slowdown in Moore's Law so that the lazy way does not work well anymore 2) A bigger market share for cross-platform systems like Linux, which are more easily ported to a new architecture. That would provide more potential customers to the newcomer.
If my two-bit knowledge of US law is correct, the RIAA would not get far suing Ray for calling the Media Sentry investigations illegal. That is a legal opinion that may be wrong but he is entitled to present it. And there seems to be evidence that supports his claim.
If the RIAA can show him lying about the facts (perjury!), or excessive delaying tactics, the court could impose sanctions. In practice, however, US courts seem very reluctant to use those. I have followed SCO vs. IBM on Groklaw and it was amazing what SCO's lawyers could get away with.
Stock prices may recover if the company survives the crisis, and the investors get to keep their share of the company. And if I understand the news about AIG correctly, the stock is only taken temporarily as a security. So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
A better example of letting the investors pay for their mistakes was the emergency sale of Bear Stearns, as that stock has been actually sold for a small fraction of its former price. For those shareholders the losses are definitely real.
Besides, if Sallie, Fannie and AIG are "too big to fail", maybe they are also too big for the US taxpayer to afford the rescue? The USA had a big budget deficit before, with the recent bailout expenses it will be worse.
German history has in the past worked as a deterrent against giving the police and secret services too much power. But after 9/11 and with the generation that has lived under the Nazi regime gradually dying off, those lessons seem in danger of being forgotten.
The USA, however, have the "disadvantage" that they never had a dictatorship that was universally regarded as completely evil in hindsight. As a consequence, you guys over there have never learned these things the hard way and are (on average) way too trusting towards your government. [Flamebait] With stuff like arbitrarily detaining people ("illegal combatants" who are denied a fair trial) and torture of prisoners I think you are closer to a Fourth Reich than Germany.
If you read TFA, you will find that this is more than a case of a hard disk someone forgot to erase before selling an old computer.
This time, the wayward data are on a recovery DVD that comes with new ASUS computers, and presumably hundreds or thousands have been shipped. Which makes the following two differences: 1) Trying to keep this secret is probably futile, there are too many copies floating around. 2) Distributing stuff by accident in this way is an epic, newsworthy blunder. Much worse than forgetting to erase a single harddisk.
It think it is possible that some US car makers have agreed on not introducing spectacular MPG improvements to avoid crashing the market for other cars.
But I also think this is a spectacularly bad idea, because they cannot realistically expect the rest of the world to join their little cartel. Sooner or later someone else will introduce a comparable car to the US (maybe Toyota?), and then Ford and the others will be even more up shits creek w/o paddle.
On top of that, the original Mozilla Suite was made by Netscape, who then started the Mozilla foundation. So if you look who actually has the copyrights, you might find out that it is Mozilla Corp per donation from Netscape.
This said, I find EULAs moderately annoying, even if they only make me accept some Open Source license that I agree with in general. So switching to Iceweasel might actually be a good idea;-)
Sometimes, tech managers must make tech decisions
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
For instance, if one of your employees says "this code is a horrible mess, we should take the time to refactor it now". But it would mean delaying the project. Or the developers say "let's introduce a version control system". Sure, SVN is free to download, but it will still cost some work hours to set it up and get people introduced to it.
You, the manager, have the authority to say yes or no. But without an understanding of the subject matter, can you make a good decision? That's why I agree with Cringley that a technical manager should understand technology.
1) That steel gets soft in fire has been known long ago, the collapse of the Twin Towers is not telling us anything new. Ask any blacksmith. For heat-resistant alloys check out things like jet engines, they already use suitable materials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superalloy.
2) Keeping a nuclear fusion going is actually the more difficult task. If some experimental reactor (ITER?) can burn deuterium for a few minutes and has to stop only because of overheating walls, it will be quite a success. Worry about the walls later.
Slashdot Mirror
-Mouse/Keyboard control. Way superior, and while some consoles offer USB ports to add those, each PC already has it.
-Lots of harddisk space for big game maps. Consoles are getting there, but the PC usually is more upgradeable when you run out of space. And due to patches, you want the game on a writable medium.
-Copy protection is (almost) irrelevant, because the game needs the central server and login by design.
Sony are just stupid ;-)
Looks great for "micro-hybrid" cars that use only a small battery for recovering braking energy and a boost on accelerating. In these applications, you need a lot of power density. Or simply as a starter battery (good bye lead-acid).
For plug-in hybrids or electric only cars, LiPO4 is also interesting:
somewhat higher energy density, and the lower power density is not a problem due to the larger battery. An example of a system that seems to be commercially available:
http://www.valence.com/products/epoch_overview.html
There is more than one company who claims to be on the way to $1/Watt.
But right now, subsidies in Germany are so high that PV vendors can sell for more than $1/Watt, and find customers. So you will get $1/Watt on the end user market when the German market is saturated, which will probably take a few more years.
On the upside, we Germans essentially pay for the development of all those nice improved PV cells, because our subsidies guarantee a market ;-)
After looking at this, I'm more suspicious than before. Because the graph shows an average power output around 0.4 hp. A realistic power output for a 3liter engine might be 40hp or more, not 0.4 hp.
So the authors either did something pretty irrelevant, like measuring an idling engine, or they were incredibly sloppy in putting their publication together.
If a university professor is willing to put his reputation on the line, it is reason enough to try and reproduce the results. If that fails... ...I think Fleischmann and Pons can tell you what that does to your career ;-)
Or exactly knowing that I wrote that crap, but for various management-related reasons didn't have much of a chance to make it better. Or will ever get the time for proper refactoring.
That company is doing a round of layoffs now, I'm among them and almost glad about it.
Who in their right mind would want to edit Word documents on a mobile phone?
I can see people reading and writing emails, those can be fairly short and manageable on the small screen and rudimentary keyboard. But that is about the maximum document size for non-masochists ;-)
This may in some cases be hard to distinguish from simple incompetence. For instance, I loved M.A.X.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanized_Assault_%26_Exploration
But it always got slow and unstable when my army reached a certain size. Now this was longe before FADE was introduced, but it could easily be confused with something like FADE kicking in.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. Broken by incompetence or broken by design, who cares? Just don't buy anymore stuff from that vendor (yes, the lousy implementation of M.A.X. got Interplay on my boycott list).
About Steam:
It's great as long as it works, but there is always the possibility that Valve goes out of business some day and switches off the authentication servers. That's why I got only one Valve game after Steam was introduced (DOD: Source, online shooter), and that one only because my friends already played it.
With "beta", the company also announces "this may be an unstable POS". The user is warned of course, but at the same time this will drive away those users who expect mature and stable applications.
With a free application, I don't actually mind. At worst, I lose a bit of time trying it out.
In some cases, companies think they can get away with it and still charge money. Microsoft for instance has occasionally tried charging money for beta software. I've avoided those both on principle and because I strongly suspected they were in a state I'd call "alpha" ;-)
When looking at my favorite mailorder shop, Blu-Ray media start at 6.49 Euros for 25 GByte. At the same time, they offer the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop Drive 500 GB (external hard disk) for 77 Euros. So you get more GByte/Euro with the external hard disk, and in a more convenient package too.
I think you're underestimating the average customer. Enough of them have something like a DVD copy program that allows them to "Use disk with MegaDVDCopy. Free film for buddies". When they notice that doesn't work with Blu-Ray, it is not far to "Blu-Ray sucks. Use DVD again".
If you believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes#Strength, the strongest nanotube tested so far has tensile strength of 63 gigapascals. Assuming the density of 1.4 g/cm^3 is also correct, this nanotube could support 4500 km of itself in a homogenous gravity field of 10 m/s^2.
I'm too lazy right now to calculate the requirements of an actual space elevator (gravity gets less as you get away from earth) but offhand I think some further improvement is required.
I remember the Amiga from the late 80s/early 90s, from the perspective of a gamer/private user. For a while it was superior to a similarly priced PC. But that advantage slipped away as PCs got cheaper and faster, and the supply of games also caught up to the Amiga. When I wanted a replacement for my aging C64 in 1991, the PC already looked more attractive overall. I ended up buying a 386SX then, which was equivalent or superior to the Amiga 3000 (as described on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_3000) in most regards.
I think the Amiga lost out against the PC in the early 90s, and no further meddling was necessary on Microsoft's part to kill it.
AFAIK Mac OS X has become less open over time as well (which is allowed by the BSD license).
Once I had the idea of checking for an OS X driver for the ATI Radeon9600 that might be ported to X or have at least its low level functionality extracted. What I found out was that only parts of OS X have their source available for download, graphics drivers among the missing parts.
People on various forums also complained that the trend was towards less OS X components being available as source code, and that Apple contributed little to BSD.
So it seems that OS X as open source was a marketing ploy rather than a serious effort at being open.
In most cases it is also the faster and cheaper way out for getting the software to support a chip. For a new architecture, you'll need to create compilers first as an absolute minimum. If you do something radically different, maybe even a new programming language that supports the new concepts.
Let alone that anything non-x86 means no Microsoft products for your computer these days (except for the XBox360 with its PPC tri-core).
So I think it will take two things for something new to have success in the mass market:
1) A slowdown in Moore's Law so that the lazy way does not work well anymore
2) A bigger market share for cross-platform systems like Linux, which are more easily ported to a new architecture. That would provide more potential customers to the newcomer.
If my two-bit knowledge of US law is correct, the RIAA would not get far suing Ray for calling the Media Sentry investigations illegal. That is a legal opinion that may be wrong but he is entitled to present it. And there seems to be evidence that supports his claim.
If the RIAA can show him lying about the facts (perjury!), or excessive delaying tactics, the court could impose sanctions. In practice, however, US courts seem very reluctant to use those. I have followed SCO vs. IBM on Groklaw and it was amazing what SCO's lawyers could get away with.
Nice running gag on Slashdot, but in Ray's case it would be IAAL. Spoils the pun ;-)
Stock prices may recover if the company survives the crisis, and the investors get to keep their share of the company. And if I understand the news about AIG correctly, the stock is only taken temporarily as a security. So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
A better example of letting the investors pay for their mistakes was the emergency sale of Bear Stearns, as that stock has been actually sold for a small fraction of its former price. For those shareholders the losses are definitely real.
Besides, if Sallie, Fannie and AIG are "too big to fail", maybe they are also too big for the US taxpayer to afford the rescue? The USA had a big budget deficit before, with the recent bailout expenses it will be worse.
Comments from a German:
German history has in the past worked as a deterrent against giving the police and secret services too much power. But after 9/11 and with the generation that has lived under the Nazi regime gradually dying off, those lessons seem in danger of being forgotten.
The USA, however, have the "disadvantage" that they never had a dictatorship that was universally regarded as completely evil in hindsight. As a consequence, you guys over there have never learned these things the hard way and are (on average) way too trusting towards your government.
[Flamebait]
With stuff like arbitrarily detaining people ("illegal combatants" who are denied a fair trial) and torture of prisoners I think you are closer to a Fourth Reich than Germany.
If you read TFA, you will find that this is more than a case of a hard disk someone forgot to erase before selling an old computer.
This time, the wayward data are on a recovery DVD that comes with new ASUS computers, and presumably hundreds or thousands have been shipped. Which makes the following two differences:
1) Trying to keep this secret is probably futile, there are too many copies floating around.
2) Distributing stuff by accident in this way is an epic, newsworthy blunder. Much worse than forgetting to erase a single harddisk.
It think it is possible that some US car makers have agreed on not introducing spectacular MPG improvements to avoid crashing the market for other cars.
But I also think this is a spectacularly bad idea, because they cannot realistically expect the rest of the world to join their little cartel. Sooner or later someone else will introduce a comparable car to the US (maybe Toyota?), and then Ford and the others will be even more up shits creek w/o paddle.
On top of that, the original Mozilla Suite was made by Netscape, who then started the Mozilla foundation. So if you look who actually has the copyrights, you might find out that it is Mozilla Corp per donation from Netscape.
This said, I find EULAs moderately annoying, even if they only make me accept some Open Source license that I agree with in general. So switching to Iceweasel might actually be a good idea ;-)
For instance, if one of your employees says "this code is a horrible mess, we should take the time to refactor it now". But it would mean delaying the project.
Or the developers say "let's introduce a version control system". Sure, SVN is free to download, but it will still cost some work hours to set it up and get people introduced to it.
You, the manager, have the authority to say yes or no. But without an understanding of the subject matter, can you make a good decision? That's why I agree with Cringley that a technical manager should understand technology.
Agreed.
If a boss I don't entirely trust demanded my password, I'd offer to upgrade his account to the same privileges at mine, but he'd NOT get MY password.
The reason is that if he does something stupid that will show up in logfiles, he can damn well do it on his account and get logged doing so ;-)
I agree with GP for two reasons:
1) That steel gets soft in fire has been known long ago, the collapse of the Twin Towers is not telling us anything new. Ask any blacksmith. For heat-resistant alloys check out things like jet engines, they already use suitable materials: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superalloy.
2) Keeping a nuclear fusion going is actually the more difficult task. If some experimental reactor (ITER?) can burn deuterium for a few minutes and has to stop only because of overheating walls, it will be quite a success.
Worry about the walls later.