I wish I had tracked this a little more closely, but for a couple of decades ordinary maps of Kentucky in atlases like Rand McNally and Hammond did not indicate the existence of the city of Fort Knox, despite showing far smaller cities.
It was actually a little bit exciting to see the map in Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger, showing the United States Bullion Depository located at the intersection of Bullion Boulevard and Gold Vault Road. In those days before Wikipedia and Google Earth, this gave at least one reader frisson of forbidden information. I wondered whether Fleming would be the target of any mysterious reprisals for publishing it.
1) rear projection onto a deeply curved screen? Getting even illumination at the edges, where the light is striking at an angle, is going to be quite a trick, due to Lambert's law.
2) How are they going to avoid the problem of washout and reduced contrast due to light from one side of the screen reaching the other side? This is always a problem with deeply curved screens. It's very noticeable in IMAX Dome (Omnimax) screens. The only system I've personally seen that avoided it was the original Cinerama screen, which was a very specially built screen made of hundreds of individual strips. And that only worked because the screen was huge and you were sitting very far from it.
Cinerama and IMAX screens are huge and far away. They're almost at optical infinity. The texture of the screen is invisible. There's very little binocular depth cues to tell you that you're looking at a flat screen, and if you move your head (as you always do unless it's in a clamp), that doesn't give you any parallax cues to speak of. This means that the screen itself is hard to see, and there are practically no binocular depth cues. That in turn means that there's nothing to contradict the numerous depth cues you get from any flat picture (light, shade, interposition, etc.--see any perceptual psychology text). The screen itself falls away, the non-binocular depth cues dominate, and you have a distinct feeling of being in 3D space.
But this is a small screen a short distance away from you. That means:
a) The texture of the screen may be visible unless they're using some rather special screen material.
b) Again, because it's a small screen a short distance away from you, there will be enough binocular disparity between your two eyes for you to form a stereo image: that will tell you that you're looking at flat image in a bowl, and in the battle between those cues and other cues, it's not clear which will win. The same thing will happen when you move your head. In fact, if you move your head a few inches, you will probably be far enough from the center, as a percentage of the radius, that the image will show geometrical distortions.
I am very, very, very skeptical that this system will produce a high-quality 3D-like image in the way the IMAX does, or Cinerama did.
I think you miss my point, which is precisely that games and video should not be delivered in the same format.
The fact that they are is the result of ill-considered technical convenience. The two formats could have been separated at no cost or inconvenience to gamers.
There ought to have been a hardware distinction between a digital VIDEO disc, containing what the viewer believes to be and intends to use as passively viewable content, and a digital VERSATILE disc, which holds arbitrary data... interactive, executable, computer files, whatever.
A lost cause, I suppose, but it seems to me that the root cause of this is a series of insanely bad decisions made by the industry as a whole and by Microsoft in particular, in blurring the line between data and programs in viewable media.
There is no good reason why an email program should willy-nilly try to execute any attachment it sees, and no good reason why a computer should execute stuff on a DVD.
99.99% of the time, the end-user thinks of a.jpg or a DVD as passively viewed content.
An unholy alliance between technical sweetness (oooh, generality), possibilities for commercial exploitation (this DVD could display ads with a "buy" button on them), and DRM, has created a terrible situation.
The mischief comes in when there are so many parties that have an interest in creating media that are not what they appear to be to the end-user.
When the end-user thinks he's just watching something, the system should enforce the will of the user... not the will of the media provider. If the media does what the vendor wants and not what the user wants, that's a bad capability in itself--but it also is a gaping whole for malware which can subvert that capability to purposes neither user nor vendor want.
(I meant to say... yes, I used Preview but I didn't look at it...)...in which people are shown a series of images on a matched pair of these displays, placed side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.
I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether HP is just using 30 bits because they can.
Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).
...in which people are shown the a series of images on two of these displays, side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.
I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether they're just doing it because they can.
Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).
...last year. They were offering a low-end laptop with Vista Home for, IIRC, $550. I thought I had a need for a Windows laptop at the time, and I called to inquire whether I could get it with XP instead.
The rep said, "Certainly, sir, but it will cost a little more. What do you want for your configuration?"
I said "Exactly the same hardware configuration, just with XP instead of Vista."
The rep said... "OK. Your price on that will be... $950."
I said "Whoa! That doesn't seem right to me. Why are you charging $400 more for XP?"
They said "We aren't, sir. $950 is our standard price. The system you saw advertised is a specific configuration and that's a special promotional price, which only applies if you take the exact configuration that was advertised."
The book calls itself a "A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities," and I didn't hold a gun to their head and force them to call it that.
So, it's fair to ask: regardless of how much interesting background it on how terrorist groups function, does the book
1) give specific guidance on predicting and identifying terrorist activities?
2) present any evidence at all that these methods are effective? More effective than graphology, or trial by ordeal, or the use of witch cakes?
It's quite one thing to say that (say) "suicide bombers are rarely insane. They are most often intelligent, rational individuals."
It's quite another to say that if wiretaps on an organization show that it is rife with intelligent, rational individuals, those organization should be targeted as a likely terrorist group.
Exoskeletons were described by H. G. Wells in 1898, in The War of the Worlds:
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer.
Of course, these exoskeletons were piloted by Martians, not humans.
Exoskeletons also appeared in Robert Heinlein's 1959 (or was it 1958 in the magazine serial?) Starship Troopers:
Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence (in the military meaning), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability. The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push.
I contributed to the G1G1 program on the premise that this was an open source project, that kids would have complete "freedom to tinker," and that the XO had a "view source" button that would allow the source for all of the code in it to be inspected. That's what I thought I was "buying" with my donation.
If OLPC never thought this was important to their project, they shouldn't have made such a big point of mentioning it in all of their public descriptions of the project.
To have this happen within months of my contribution feels to me like "bait-and-switch."
In the seventies, all the undergraduates whose computer science courses used PASCAL thought themselves to be very superior beings and looked down their noses at any hobbyist hacking away in BASIC. They would usually parrot a distorted echo of Dijkstra's famous rant, which had perhaps been conveyed to them, accurately or inaccurately, by a teaching assistant, and tell you that it was a scientific fact that BASIC rotted your brain.
So for the record it's worth noting that Dijkstra wasn't ranting against BASIC, specifically. He was ranting against anything that wasn't ALGOL or a derivative thereof, and he was equally harsh about the other major languages of the day:
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
The products he's been involved in have been either truly silent or blessedly quiet.
There's a difference, by the way, and truly silent is better.
They may overheat, of course... but until they do, they're a pleasure to use. You don't realize how fatiguing fan noise is until you work with a machine that doesn't have any.
It was a sad day when I had to clip a Kensington fan to my Apple ][+
I would have thought that in a laptop, solid state drives would have a noticeable advantage in terms of power consumption leading to increased battery life.
Admittedly the article described itself as a performance showdown, but I'm disappointed that the reviewer made no attempt to compare power consumption and battery life.
If nothing else, I would have thought a solid state drive would eliminate that annoying pause when a hard drive awakes from sleep and spins up, and that this would feel like a worthwhile "performance" improvement--though whether it's worth the cost is another question.
Why didn't Psystar "use the modern EFI system," then?
Why does this interfere with Software Update, but not with installing from an installation DVD? How does it boot from the installation DVD?
To say that this is capable of running "unmodified OS X Leopard kernels" is either logic-choppping with the word "kernel," or it's like saying a NASCAR vehicle is an "unmodified" retail car...
I haven't seen an explanation yet. If, as claimed, you can load an "actual Leopard retail package with genuine installation disc..." then why wouldn't it load the next version of the actual Leopard retail package? If it runs the next version, then what's the difference between loading it from a disc and making the same updates via Software Update?
If, in fact, it replaces parts of Leopard with custom-tailored substitutes for this specific hardware, then I don't think it's accurate to say it's really running retail Leopard.
Is there any technical reason for believing that whatever it is that prevents Software Update from working can't affect other software as well? Have the SQAed the product with iDVD, with Aperture, with Epson's printer drivers, etc.? If not, who has?
This sounds like one of those boring "99%-compatible" PC clones of the early 1980s... a friend of mine bought one for use ina a research laboratory, found that it wouldn't work with some Tecmar I/O card, called the company, and their response was to thank him for the information and say that they would be sure to add it to their list of products that was known to be incompatible.
First of all, they shouldn't be comparing "gallons," they should be comparing energy. Ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy per gallon of gasoline.
So, today, with the "50% efficiency," the implication is that they could produce $2 a gallon ethanol... which, guess what, is equivalent to $3 a gallon gasoline.
Second of all, we've all seen umpteen press releases that tout how great something is going to be. Remember how OLPC's $100 laptop became a $200 laptop?
Third, even if "It generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it..." (is that for what they're actually doing now, or what it will be after the double the efficiency?) it does use energy, and the cost of that energy is going to rise.
Fourth, even flex-fuel cars don't use pure ethanol, they use E85... which means the fuel the car uses will cost more than the ethanol cost.
By the time they get done with it, my guess is that it may be a very important incremental improvement, but I don't look to be putting "$1 a gallon gasoline" in my car "within five to ten years." For one thing, I don't own a flex-fuel vehicle right now. Do you?
My understanding is that one of the reasons big corporations are slow to adopt new versions of Windows is that they're risk-averse. They don't want science projects, they don't want works in progress, they want something that's solid and has the backing of another big corporation behind it.
If Ballmer is openly saying that Vista is a "work in progress," I think corporate CIOs will say "OK, then, let's wait until it's finished."
The first time I noticed such occurrence, it was in 2006 in connection with a claim that in the days when the Ivy League was being organized, Rutgers was invited to join, but declined. This claim was originally unreferenced, then referenced to a hard-to-verify source. The editor who inserted the claim said he had seen it in microfilm records of Rutger's student newspaper, The Targum, and mentioned a year, but never gave an exact date and page number, giving varying reasons for not so doing.
One day, there was great excitement because someone found a good, verifiable print reference in a mass-circulation newspaper. It was quickly added to the article, and many of us thought the matter was settled.
The newspaper story, of course, did not mention its source. Someone found an email address for the reporter and queried the reporter... who acknowledged that his source had been Wikipedia!
I dislike Wal*Mart. And if they were fined I'm sure they deserved it.
But my personal experience is that I've only seen those notices twice within the last year, and both times were in Wal*Marts. One was in Wisconsin, late last summer; the other in Massachusetts. I didn't see any notices at all when I was recently in Best Buy.
And: the day I received my converter coupons in the mail, which was February 29th--I must have been among the very first to get them--I called Wal*Mart to see if they had converter boxes; they said yes, I got there and they had a huge display of them in a featured location in the aisle just outside their electronics department, the pre-coupon price was $50, and they were ready and happy to process my $40 coupons.
Based on my highly scientific sample size of two, I don't see any indication that Wal*Mart is dragging its feet. Offhand I'd think they're making a good-faith effort to comply. If they haven't been getting the notices up I'd attribute it to general chaos and cluelessness, not to any systematic attempt to unload analog sets on unsuspecting customers.
This approach could have worked. But if they really meant for it to work, then developers would have been required to embed usable contact information in the application. When the UAC prompt came up it would explain that this was a result of an action taken by the application, and that if it seemed unnecessary to you, you should click a button and send feedback to the developer.
It would also identify and tag the particular circumstances so that there could be a option, "don't warn me about this again."
This latter option would have been particularly useful during the beta phase.
After a couple of years, Microsoft might then assume that developers had been given adequate warning and adequate feedback, and the option to ignore warnings could have been retracted.
What Microsoft did doesn't sound as if they serously wanted the approach to work. They just wanted to be able to say that users "didn't want" security, just the way Detroit said for decades that car buyers "didn't want" safety.
Little motors are everywhere--in electric toothbrushes, electric shavers, camcorders, disk drives, CD player.
Why do we need little motors in everything?
There used to be just a few big motors in most peoples' houses: the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and the refrigerator. Then suddenly they started using them in things like electric drills, blenders, and food processors. And then tiny motors started showing up everywhere.
What was wrong with the old way? What's the fetish with motors, motors everywhere? Just because modern magnetic materials and electronic controls make it possible doesn't mean we should do it.
All of these "artificial reef" projects seem questionable to me.
The idea that tossing junk into offshore waters is beneficial... well, as the Church Lady used to say, "Isn't that convenient?"
In the 1970s, there was a similar project in Florida, involving discarded tires. The system used to hold the tires in place failed after a few years, tires started to come loose, the fact that it wasn't stable made it a failure as an artificial reef, mildly toxic stuff started to leech out of the tires, and the whole thing was an environmental disaster. The process of cleaning up the tires, now in progress, is expensive and labor-intensive. Read about it here
The sea is a very corrosive environment. Before starting this project, did anyone check to see whether there are any subway cars that have already been in the ocean for a few decades to see what's happened to them?
In the case of these subway cars, I'd worry about copper. Copper is deadly poison to most marine organisms. It's the bane of people who try to set up salt-water aquaria.
I notice that the article doesn't say that the subway cars contained no electric wiring. Nor does it say that all the copper was removed from them before scuttling them.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had tracked this a little more closely, but for a couple of decades ordinary maps of Kentucky in atlases like Rand McNally and Hammond did not indicate the existence of the city of Fort Knox, despite showing far smaller cities.
It was actually a little bit exciting to see the map in Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger, showing the United States Bullion Depository located at the intersection of Bullion Boulevard and Gold Vault Road. In those days before Wikipedia and Google Earth, this gave at least one reader frisson of forbidden information. I wondered whether Fleming would be the target of any mysterious reprisals for publishing it.
1) rear projection onto a deeply curved screen? Getting even illumination at the edges, where the light is striking at an angle, is going to be quite a trick, due to Lambert's law.
2) How are they going to avoid the problem of washout and reduced contrast due to light from one side of the screen reaching the other side? This is always a problem with deeply curved screens. It's very noticeable in IMAX Dome (Omnimax) screens. The only system I've personally seen that avoided it was the original Cinerama screen, which was a very specially built screen made of hundreds of individual strips. And that only worked because the screen was huge and you were sitting very far from it.
Cinerama and IMAX screens are huge and far away. They're almost at optical infinity. The texture of the screen is invisible. There's very little binocular depth cues to tell you that you're looking at a flat screen, and if you move your head (as you always do unless it's in a clamp), that doesn't give you any parallax cues to speak of. This means that the screen itself is hard to see, and there are practically no binocular depth cues. That in turn means that there's nothing to contradict the numerous depth cues you get from any flat picture (light, shade, interposition, etc.--see any perceptual psychology text). The screen itself falls away, the non-binocular depth cues dominate, and you have a distinct feeling of being in 3D space.
But this is a small screen a short distance away from you. That means:
a) The texture of the screen may be visible unless they're using some rather special screen material.
b) Again, because it's a small screen a short distance away from you, there will be enough binocular disparity between your two eyes for you to form a stereo image: that will tell you that you're looking at flat image in a bowl, and in the battle between those cues and other cues, it's not clear which will win. The same thing will happen when you move your head. In fact, if you move your head a few inches, you will probably be far enough from the center, as a percentage of the radius, that the image will show geometrical distortions.
I am very, very, very skeptical that this system will produce a high-quality 3D-like image in the way the IMAX does, or Cinerama did.
I think you miss my point, which is precisely that games and video should not be delivered in the same format.
The fact that they are is the result of ill-considered technical convenience. The two formats could have been separated at no cost or inconvenience to gamers.
There ought to have been a hardware distinction between a digital VIDEO disc, containing what the viewer believes to be and intends to use as passively viewable content, and a digital VERSATILE disc, which holds arbitrary data... interactive, executable, computer files, whatever.
A lost cause, I suppose, but it seems to me that the root cause of this is a series of insanely bad decisions made by the industry as a whole and by Microsoft in particular, in blurring the line between data and programs in viewable media.
.jpg or a DVD as passively viewed content.
There is no good reason why an email program should willy-nilly try to execute any attachment it sees, and no good reason why a computer should execute stuff on a DVD.
99.99% of the time, the end-user thinks of a
An unholy alliance between technical sweetness (oooh, generality), possibilities for commercial exploitation (this DVD could display ads with a "buy" button on them), and DRM, has created a terrible situation.
The mischief comes in when there are so many parties that have an interest in creating media that are not what they appear to be to the end-user.
When the end-user thinks he's just watching something, the system should enforce the will of the user... not the will of the media provider. If the media does what the vendor wants and not what the user wants, that's a bad capability in itself--but it also is a gaping whole for malware which can subvert that capability to purposes neither user nor vendor want.
(I meant to say... yes, I used Preview but I didn't look at it...) ...in which people are shown a series of images on a matched pair of these displays, placed side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.
I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether HP is just using 30 bits because they can.
Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).
...in which people are shown the a series of images on two of these displays, side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.
I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether they're just doing it because they can.
Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).
...without disclosing the fact that I want to hide the fact that I'm hiding something?
Because, of course, if I haven't got anything to hide, why would I want to hide the fact that I'm hiding something?
Maybe Freenet 0.8 will provide a way to hide the fact that I'm hiding the fact that I'm hiding something.
...last year. They were offering a low-end laptop with Vista Home for, IIRC, $550. I thought I had a need for a Windows laptop at the time, and I called to inquire whether I could get it with XP instead.
The rep said, "Certainly, sir, but it will cost a little more. What do you want for your configuration?"
I said "Exactly the same hardware configuration, just with XP instead of Vista."
The rep said... "OK. Your price on that will be... $950."
I said "Whoa! That doesn't seem right to me. Why are you charging $400 more for XP?"
They said "We aren't, sir. $950 is our standard price. The system you saw advertised is a specific configuration and that's a special promotional price, which only applies if you take the exact configuration that was advertised."
The book calls itself a "A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities," and I didn't hold a gun to their head and force them to call it that.
So, it's fair to ask: regardless of how much interesting background it on how terrorist groups function, does the book
1) give specific guidance on predicting and identifying terrorist activities?
2) present any evidence at all that these methods are effective? More effective than graphology, or trial by ordeal, or the use of witch cakes?
It's quite one thing to say that (say) "suicide bombers are rarely insane. They are most often intelligent, rational individuals."
It's quite another to say that if wiretaps on an organization show that it is rife with intelligent, rational individuals, those organization should be targeted as a likely terrorist group.
Of course, these exoskeletons were piloted by Martians, not humans.
Exoskeletons also appeared in Robert Heinlein's 1959 (or was it 1958 in the magazine serial?) Starship Troopers:
I contributed to the G1G1 program on the premise that this was an open source project, that kids would have complete "freedom to tinker," and that the XO had a "view source" button that would allow the source for all of the code in it to be inspected. That's what I thought I was "buying" with my donation.
If OLPC never thought this was important to their project, they shouldn't have made such a big point of mentioning it in all of their public descriptions of the project.
To have this happen within months of my contribution feels to me like "bait-and-switch."
In the seventies, all the undergraduates whose computer science courses used PASCAL thought themselves to be very superior beings and looked down their noses at any hobbyist hacking away in BASIC. They would usually parrot a distorted echo of Dijkstra's famous rant, which had perhaps been conveyed to them, accurately or inaccurately, by a teaching assistant, and tell you that it was a scientific fact that BASIC rotted your brain.
So for the record it's worth noting that Dijkstra wasn't ranting against BASIC, specifically. He was ranting against anything that wasn't ALGOL or a derivative thereof, and he was equally harsh about the other major languages of the day:
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Yep, not a Steve Jobs product.
The products he's been involved in have been either truly silent or blessedly quiet.
There's a difference, by the way, and truly silent is better.
They may overheat, of course... but until they do, they're a pleasure to use. You don't realize how fatiguing fan noise is until you work with a machine that doesn't have any.
It was a sad day when I had to clip a Kensington fan to my Apple ][+
I would have thought that in a laptop, solid state drives would have a noticeable advantage in terms of power consumption leading to increased battery life.
Admittedly the article described itself as a performance showdown, but I'm disappointed that the reviewer made no attempt to compare power consumption and battery life.
If nothing else, I would have thought a solid state drive would eliminate that annoying pause when a hard drive awakes from sleep and spins up, and that this would feel like a worthwhile "performance" improvement--though whether it's worth the cost is another question.
Why didn't Psystar "use the modern EFI system," then?
Why does this interfere with Software Update, but not with installing from an installation DVD? How does it boot from the installation DVD?
To say that this is capable of running "unmodified OS X Leopard kernels" is either logic-choppping with the word "kernel," or it's like saying a NASCAR vehicle is an "unmodified" retail car...
I haven't seen an explanation yet. If, as claimed, you can load an "actual Leopard retail package with genuine installation disc..." then why wouldn't it load the next version of the actual Leopard retail package? If it runs the next version, then what's the difference between loading it from a disc and making the same updates via Software Update?
If, in fact, it replaces parts of Leopard with custom-tailored substitutes for this specific hardware, then I don't think it's accurate to say it's really running retail Leopard.
Is there any technical reason for believing that whatever it is that prevents Software Update from working can't affect other software as well? Have the SQAed the product with iDVD, with Aperture, with Epson's printer drivers, etc.? If not, who has?
This sounds like one of those boring "99%-compatible" PC clones of the early 1980s... a friend of mine bought one for use ina a research laboratory, found that it wouldn't work with some Tecmar I/O card, called the company, and their response was to thank him for the information and say that they would be sure to add it to their list of products that was known to be incompatible.
This just screams optimistic spin.
First of all, they shouldn't be comparing "gallons," they should be comparing energy. Ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy per gallon of gasoline.
So, today, with the "50% efficiency," the implication is that they could produce $2 a gallon ethanol... which, guess what, is equivalent to $3 a gallon gasoline.
Second of all, we've all seen umpteen press releases that tout how great something is going to be. Remember how OLPC's $100 laptop became a $200 laptop?
Third, even if "It generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it..." (is that for what they're actually doing now, or what it will be after the double the efficiency?) it does use energy, and the cost of that energy is going to rise.
Fourth, even flex-fuel cars don't use pure ethanol, they use E85... which means the fuel the car uses will cost more than the ethanol cost.
By the time they get done with it, my guess is that it may be a very important incremental improvement, but I don't look to be putting "$1 a gallon gasoline" in my car "within five to ten years." For one thing, I don't own a flex-fuel vehicle right now. Do you?
"Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
Somebody's always heaving cinders,
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.
Factory windows are always broken.
Other windows are let alone.
No one throws through the chapel-window
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.
Factory windows are always broken.
Something or other is going wrong.
Something is rotten -- I think, in Denmark.
End of the factory-window song."
--Vachel Lindsay
My understanding is that one of the reasons big corporations are slow to adopt new versions of Windows is that they're risk-averse. They don't want science projects, they don't want works in progress, they want something that's solid and has the backing of another big corporation behind it.
If Ballmer is openly saying that Vista is a "work in progress," I think corporate CIOs will say "OK, then, let's wait until it's finished."
...although I agree that it's scary.
The first time I noticed such occurrence, it was in 2006 in connection with a claim that in the days when the Ivy League was being organized, Rutgers was invited to join, but declined. This claim was originally unreferenced, then referenced to a hard-to-verify source. The editor who inserted the claim said he had seen it in microfilm records of Rutger's student newspaper, The Targum, and mentioned a year, but never gave an exact date and page number, giving varying reasons for not so doing.
One day, there was great excitement because someone found a good, verifiable print reference in a mass-circulation newspaper. It was quickly added to the article, and many of us thought the matter was settled.
The newspaper story, of course, did not mention its source. Someone found an email address for the reporter and queried the reporter... who acknowledged that his source had been Wikipedia!
The whole story (and much more) is at A Rutgers reference from the Daily news
...is whether the coffee produced by the Javabot tastes good.
Never. It talks about "machine of the future," that it's purpose is "to produce the most flavorful cup of coffee available," efficiency, control, etc.
It does not say whether that purpose was achieved.
The writer does not say that he tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
The writer does not quote anyone who says they tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
I dislike Wal*Mart. And if they were fined I'm sure they deserved it.
But my personal experience is that I've only seen those notices twice within the last year, and both times were in Wal*Marts. One was in Wisconsin, late last summer; the other in Massachusetts. I didn't see any notices at all when I was recently in Best Buy.
And: the day I received my converter coupons in the mail, which was February 29th--I must have been among the very first to get them--I called Wal*Mart to see if they had converter boxes; they said yes, I got there and they had a huge display of them in a featured location in the aisle just outside their electronics department, the pre-coupon price was $50, and they were ready and happy to process my $40 coupons.
Based on my highly scientific sample size of two, I don't see any indication that Wal*Mart is dragging its feet. Offhand I'd think they're making a good-faith effort to comply. If they haven't been getting the notices up I'd attribute it to general chaos and cluelessness, not to any systematic attempt to unload analog sets on unsuspecting customers.
This approach could have worked. But if they really meant for it to work, then developers would have been required to embed usable contact information in the application. When the UAC prompt came up it would explain that this was a result of an action taken by the application, and that if it seemed unnecessary to you, you should click a button and send feedback to the developer.
It would also identify and tag the particular circumstances so that there could be a option, "don't warn me about this again."
This latter option would have been particularly useful during the beta phase.
After a couple of years, Microsoft might then assume that developers had been given adequate warning and adequate feedback, and the option to ignore warnings could have been retracted.
What Microsoft did doesn't sound as if they serously wanted the approach to work. They just wanted to be able to say that users "didn't want" security, just the way Detroit said for decades that car buyers "didn't want" safety.
Little motors are everywhere--in electric toothbrushes, electric shavers, camcorders, disk drives, CD player.
Why do we need little motors in everything?
There used to be just a few big motors in most peoples' houses: the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and the refrigerator. Then suddenly they started using them in things like electric drills, blenders, and food processors. And then tiny motors started showing up everywhere.
What was wrong with the old way? What's the fetish with motors, motors everywhere? Just because modern magnetic materials and electronic controls make it possible doesn't mean we should do it.
All of these "artificial reef" projects seem questionable to me.
The idea that tossing junk into offshore waters is beneficial... well, as the Church Lady used to say, "Isn't that convenient?"
In the 1970s, there was a similar project in Florida, involving discarded tires. The system used to hold the tires in place failed after a few years, tires started to come loose, the fact that it wasn't stable made it a failure as an artificial reef, mildly toxic stuff started to leech out of the tires, and the whole thing was an environmental disaster. The process of cleaning up the tires, now in progress, is expensive and labor-intensive. Read about it here
The sea is a very corrosive environment. Before starting this project, did anyone check to see whether there are any subway cars that have already been in the ocean for a few decades to see what's happened to them?
In the case of these subway cars, I'd worry about copper. Copper is deadly poison to most marine organisms. It's the bane of people who try to set up salt-water aquaria.
I notice that the article doesn't say that the subway cars contained no electric wiring. Nor does it say that all the copper was removed from them before scuttling them.