Project Jennifer is also discussed in Blind Man's Bluff, which is mainly about John Craven. He appeared to be a slightly ditzy, slightly absurd little man who was always nattering about the law of the sea. The manganese nodule cover was carried out so brilliantly that there was a UN study undertaken to see what the economics were and which country ought to "share" in the "common treasure".
I used to see the Glomar Explorer, off the south coast of Maui.
This is why juries exist, to provide the skepticism required during a trial. If the prosecution says we did a drimblefratz match, the jury should ignore that evidence unless drimblefratz matching is demonstrated to be a reasonable technique. "DNA evidence" sounds great, for example, but it should be particularly worrying if the difference between mitochondrial DNA and genetic DNA isn't explained or if the evidence is the result of mitochondrial DNA matching.
The scandal is that the linkage between a test result and a conclusion is so very frequently glossed over in trials. Any lawyer worth his salt will bring this stuff up explicitly as the parent points out.
In any case where a test result was offered in evidence whose criteria were not explained, an intelligent juror would maintain the reasonable doubt that is the boundary between proven guilt and innocence.
The iphone cannot do a lot that my K-Jam can: 1) Voice dialing. Handsfree is a requirement in California when you're driving. 2) HP-41C calculator emulation (eV41). 3) fine-grained phone/SMS blocking (CallFirewall).
A lot of this is add-on functionality, which is exactly the point. Poor dumb M$ at least left WM5 open enough to add stuff I want.
The iphone does things I absolutely hate: 1) requires iTunes, which is the most idiotic app Apple's ever released. 2) annoys you when you are passing Starbucks on your way to getting some coffee.
Apple has a winner as far as the fanboys and dullish gadget freaks are concerned, and it's a gorgeous object, but it does too little to please me. I'm hopeful the Google phone will be on an open platform.
Funny this should come up. I just left a company where "innovation" was stated as a core value, except you had better not do any of that unless it was guaranteed to work. The CEO of that place is an accountant and he treats "innovation" as something you sprinkle on mediocre profits to get better ones.
Inventing things involves taking risk, that the hole you're digging is going to come up dry. That's the way it is; if you could -guarantee- innovation you're much too valuable to be an employee because you're a real magician.
During the interviews for my new job I was pretty careful to sound the staff out about what happens when something new you're trying doesn't work. The answer was "document and move on", because they have a way of reviewing these dry holes from time to time and seeing if new avenues to solve problems have surfaced. I thought that was more reasonable. The CEO of this place is a physicist.
The assumption is that kids shouldn't see boobies. This is a load of crap. There are kids, right now, on beaches all across France co-existing with topless females. This doesn't seem to have hurt the French any - in fact, a call to protect kids from boobies would probably be viewed in France like a call to protect kids from wine. "Well, eventually they will have some wine, and eventually they will either have or play with boobies, so why get excited about this?"
"Whenever 'A' annoys or injures 'B' on the pretext of saving or improving 'X', 'A' is a scoundrel." -H.L.Mencken
spikesahead picked the stations and the rationale that I'd have thought would work earlier. Internet radio is where I first heard cuts from eighteen of nineteen CDs purchased in the last six months.
Eventually RIAA will become irrelevant and the value of "eventually" is decreasing with every ratcheting up of their cash demands.
MS needs to enable WiFi in order to open an enormous spamvertising hole in the device. Want to bet you'll be able to tell what's a Zune on a network? I'll bet you a buck the way it works is like this: 1) any Zune sends a broadcast message-like "I'm a Zune" when the wifi goes on; 2) if you now turn on sharing you will automatically -receive- shared content from a device - including a hotspot within range - with an "approved" (by M$) header.
It was pretty impressive to start with: in my little town 10 km from Narbonne, I get 10 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up for euro 30 or so. Compare that with USD 70 for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 Kbps up in my little town 15 km from Santa Cruz.
Last month there was a lot of digging going on next door to the France house. They were installing water for someone, but France Telecom took the opportunity to put in shiny new fibers. That initiative is 2.4 Gbps down, divided, I understand, among 32 clients. Ethernet speed for Internet connectivity. FT rules.
I live in a small town in the USA when I am not living in a small town in France. These towns are equidistant (MOL) from large telecoms centers.
In France I pay something like euros 37 a month for 8 Mbps/1.2 Mbps ADSL. In the USA I pay $69 a month for 1.5 Mpbs/128 Kbps ADSL. Both run without problems.
Even in non-select towns - burgs in the sticks with farm tractors driving through the streets - France Telecom kicks every US provider's butt.
OK, you have developed some software and know the hardware you need. Think of how you got there. You had some requirements, you had a budget, you had a schedule. What you need now is to apply the same kind of thinking to your hardware.
Think of -how many- widgets you want to build. If you can make a living doing 100 of them, it's senseless to make plastic parts. If you need to make a million of them, it is senseless to make anything but the minimum plastic part that will satisfy the requirements, even one cc of plastic * 1 million parts = $BIGNUMBER. Tailor the mechanical bits to the number of widgets you're making, just as you tailored the software and electronics to the number of bits/sec of throughput. The more parts you have to make, the more sensitive the profit/loss will be to the cost of each part, but you pay for that kind of value engineering in higher cost of engineering services.
Think of the integration between the parts of the widget. If the parts are very cheap but it takes a long time to assemble them, you are making a trade-off. Is it the correct one?
Is anybody going to drop the product? Spill coffee on it? If so, have someone look at it from that point of view. Designing to environmental requirements (especially aggressive ones) is different from designing for the office.
Look at a product you -know- is good and that has about the volume and usage of your product. Take one apart and see how they did their tradeoffs. Try to explain to yourself what the features are for. Nobody puts "mysterious" parts in, they cost money. Everything in there serves a purpose. See if you understand what it is.
Lots of people have done what you are doing and you can do it. Think clearly and as though you are writing down requirements in a statement of work.
Shuji Nakamura got boned by his employer Nichia, and it's got to feel sweet for him that he's getting recognized for his work anyway.
"The court actually valued Nakamura's contribution to the company at 60.4 billion yen, based on Nichia's sales and the revenue that it might theoretically have received from licensing a key patent relating to the epitaxial growth of LED material."
Can you not understand that well-paid, highly-cleared NSA employees do not scuttle their careers without good reason? The people doing the leaking are being asked to do something really evil, and they are not happy about it.
They're also taking a good-sized risk of winding up in an unmarked jail cell, or grave.
They're good people, they are saying "this is out of control and the citizenry must not take it any more".
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? "
If there is ever a sign that a company is losing its relevance, it's when it stops innovating and starts copying its successful rivals. All this story says is that M$ has lots of places to put ads, and they're going to do it. What better way to please customers can you imagine?
An employer is not liable for a tort committed by one of its employees if the injured party was also an employee of the same employer who was also acting within the scope of his or employment at the time the tort occurred. (This is the fellow servant doctrine. It is an exception to the normal rule of respondeat superior.)
The elephant in the room here is Congress' acquiescence to unconstitutional "reforms" in the US. Tom Lantos spouts off about how reprehensible Google and Yahoo are, and his voting record is not bad in a lot of cases, but he sure thinks you ought not to have a gun and he voted for a fair number of "patriot" act constitutional infringements.
I'd far prefer to see him working for Americans' civil liberties than those of the Chinese.
Toshiba is AFAIK the only remaining supplier of low-pressure steam turbines in the world. A principal reason why "The Geysers" PG&E plant went off line is because Toshiba was for some years restricted from doing business in the USA, and PG&E couldn't get decent turbines from anyone else.
Apple is slightly less bad than industry leaders Dell and HP. Only slightly, though. That is why, although I have a 1G iPod, the new ones didn't seem to me to be worth the premium. I got an iAudio X5.
It is not really worth selecting a manufacturer based on support because every support issue is a hassle out of proportion to its cost. The only criterion I use any more is the likelihood of getting a problem-free product. Again, Apple is slightly less bad than the industry leaders, but never, ever buy a newly-launched product from Apple. They have a tendency to launch flawed products, then stonewall when the flaws surface.
If you are a captain, it is up to you (not "they") to do what's needed to make sure you are safe. That means you have a mechanical chronometer, a sextant and an HO229 with you when you take command. And you know how to use them, plus your common sense and coastwise skills, to navigate safely. Celestial navigation is not subject to governmental fiat and it is the ultimate fallback, if you know how to use it.
Celestial navigation is not that hard to learn. You don't have to be terribly talented to get a fix that encompasses a couple square miles of ocean. If you are out in the middle of the north Pacific that is generally good enough.
If you find an un-lit shore you stay the hell away until you can see what you are doing.
Navigation to this standard has been done for hundreds of years, there is nothing stopping anyone from being a competent navigator except perhaps blindness or terminal stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Project Jennifer is also discussed in Blind Man's Bluff, which is mainly about John Craven. He appeared to be a slightly ditzy, slightly absurd little man who was always nattering about the law of the sea. The manganese nodule cover was carried out so brilliantly that there was a UN study undertaken to see what the economics were and which country ought to "share" in the "common treasure".
I used to see the Glomar Explorer, off the south coast of Maui.
This is why juries exist, to provide the skepticism required during a trial. If the prosecution says we did a drimblefratz match, the jury should ignore that evidence unless drimblefratz matching is demonstrated to be a reasonable technique. "DNA evidence" sounds great, for example, but it should be particularly worrying if the difference between mitochondrial DNA and genetic DNA isn't explained or if the evidence is the result of mitochondrial DNA matching.
The scandal is that the linkage between a test result and a conclusion is so very frequently glossed over in trials. Any lawyer worth his salt will bring this stuff up explicitly as the parent points out.
In any case where a test result was offered in evidence whose criteria were not explained, an intelligent juror would maintain the reasonable doubt that is the boundary between proven guilt and innocence.
The iphone cannot do a lot that my K-Jam can:
1) Voice dialing. Handsfree is a requirement in California when you're driving.
2) HP-41C calculator emulation (eV41).
3) fine-grained phone/SMS blocking (CallFirewall).
A lot of this is add-on functionality, which is exactly the point. Poor dumb M$ at least left WM5 open enough to add stuff I want.
The iphone does things I absolutely hate:
1) requires iTunes, which is the most idiotic app Apple's ever released.
2) annoys you when you are passing Starbucks on your way to getting some coffee.
Apple has a winner as far as the fanboys and dullish gadget freaks are concerned, and it's a gorgeous object, but it does too little to please me. I'm hopeful the Google phone will be on an open platform.
Funny this should come up. I just left a company where "innovation" was stated as a core value, except you had better not do any of that unless it was guaranteed to work. The CEO of that place is an accountant and he treats "innovation" as something you sprinkle on mediocre profits to get better ones.
Inventing things involves taking risk, that the hole you're digging is going to come up dry. That's the way it is; if you could -guarantee- innovation you're much too valuable to be an employee because you're a real magician.
During the interviews for my new job I was pretty careful to sound the staff out about what happens when something new you're trying doesn't work. The answer was "document and move on", because they have a way of reviewing these dry holes from time to time and seeing if new avenues to solve problems have surfaced. I thought that was more reasonable. The CEO of this place is a physicist.
Replaced by the "Think of the children, kittens and butterflies" database, duh.
The assumption is that kids shouldn't see boobies. This is a load of crap. There are kids, right now, on beaches all across France co-existing with topless females. This doesn't seem to have hurt the French any - in fact, a call to protect kids from boobies would probably be viewed in France like a call to protect kids from wine. "Well, eventually they will have some wine, and eventually they will either have or play with boobies, so why get excited about this?"
"Whenever 'A' annoys or injures 'B' on the pretext of saving or improving 'X', 'A' is a scoundrel." -H.L.Mencken
Begging's fine, if she's cute and on her knees. M$ is neither, but I think she'll finally kneel after a few more months of poor Vista sales.
why in the world would anyone run emulation when they can run Windows natively with bootcamp?
s/Windows/WinXP. Bootcamp is supported for XP only. I have and prefer W2K.
spikesahead picked the stations and the rationale that I'd have thought would work earlier. Internet radio is where I first heard cuts from eighteen of nineteen CDs purchased in the last six months.
Eventually RIAA will become irrelevant and the value of "eventually" is decreasing with every ratcheting up of their cash demands.
Then you want a Cowon iAudio X5. http://www.cowonglobal.com/product/product_X5_feat ure.php
MS needs to enable WiFi in order to open an enormous spamvertising hole in the device. Want to bet you'll be able to tell what's a Zune on a network? I'll bet you a buck the way it works is like this: 1) any Zune sends a broadcast message-like "I'm a Zune" when the wifi goes on; 2) if you now turn on sharing you will automatically -receive- shared content from a device - including a hotspot within range - with an "approved" (by M$) header.
It was pretty impressive to start with: in my little town 10 km from Narbonne, I get 10 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up for euro 30 or so. Compare that with USD 70 for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 Kbps up in my little town 15 km from Santa Cruz.
Last month there was a lot of digging going on next door to the France house. They were installing water for someone, but France Telecom took the opportunity to put in shiny new fibers. That initiative is 2.4 Gbps down, divided, I understand, among 32 clients. Ethernet speed for Internet connectivity. FT rules.
I live in a small town in the USA when I am not living in a small town in France. These towns are equidistant (MOL) from large telecoms centers.
In France I pay something like euros 37 a month for 8 Mbps/1.2 Mbps ADSL. In the USA I pay $69 a month for 1.5 Mpbs/128 Kbps ADSL. Both run without problems.
Even in non-select towns - burgs in the sticks with farm tractors driving through the streets - France Telecom kicks every US provider's butt.
OK, you have developed some software and know the hardware you need. Think of how you got there. You had some requirements, you had a budget, you had a schedule. What you need now is to apply the same kind of thinking to your hardware.
Think of -how many- widgets you want to build. If you can make a living doing 100 of them, it's senseless to make plastic parts. If you need to make a million of them, it is senseless to make anything but the minimum plastic part that will satisfy the requirements, even one cc of plastic * 1 million parts = $BIGNUMBER. Tailor the mechanical bits to the number of widgets you're making, just as you tailored the software and electronics to the number of bits/sec of throughput. The more parts you have to make, the more sensitive the profit/loss will be to the cost of each part, but you pay for that kind of value engineering in higher cost of engineering services.
Think of the integration between the parts of the widget. If the parts are very cheap but it takes a long time to assemble them, you are making a trade-off. Is it the correct one?
Is anybody going to drop the product? Spill coffee on it? If so, have someone look at it from that point of view. Designing to environmental requirements (especially aggressive ones) is different from designing for the office.
Look at a product you -know- is good and that has about the volume and usage of your product. Take one apart and see how they did their tradeoffs. Try to explain to yourself what the features are for. Nobody puts "mysterious" parts in, they cost money. Everything in there serves a purpose. See if you understand what it is.
Lots of people have done what you are doing and you can do it. Think clearly and as though you are writing down requirements in a statement of work.
Shuji Nakamura got boned by his employer Nichia, and it's got to feel sweet for him that he's getting recognized for his work anyway.
"The court actually valued Nakamura's contribution to the company at 60.4 billion yen, based on Nichia's sales and the revenue that it might theoretically have received from licensing a key patent relating to the epitaxial growth of LED material."
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/news/2/1/5/1
Can you not understand that well-paid, highly-cleared NSA employees do not scuttle their careers without good reason? The people doing the leaking are being asked to do something really evil, and they are not happy about it.
They're also taking a good-sized risk of winding up in an unmarked jail cell, or grave.
They're good people, they are saying "this is out of control and the citizenry must not take it any more".
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/la nguage.html
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? "
If there is ever a sign that a company is losing its relevance, it's when it stops innovating and starts copying its successful rivals. All this story says is that M$ has lots of places to put ads, and they're going to do it. What better way to please customers can you imagine?
False.
An employer is not liable for a tort committed by one of its employees if the injured party was also an employee of the same employer who was also acting within the scope of his or employment at the time the tort occurred. (This is the fellow servant doctrine. It is an exception to the normal rule of respondeat superior.)
The elephant in the room here is Congress' acquiescence to unconstitutional "reforms" in the US. Tom Lantos spouts off about how reprehensible Google and Yahoo are, and his voting record is not bad in a lot of cases, but he sure thinks you ought not to have a gun and he voted for a fair number of "patriot" act constitutional infringements.
I'd far prefer to see him working for Americans' civil liberties than those of the Chinese.
Toshiba is AFAIK the only remaining supplier of low-pressure steam turbines in the world. A principal reason why "The Geysers" PG&E plant went off line is because Toshiba was for some years restricted from doing business in the USA, and PG&E couldn't get decent turbines from anyone else.
Steam turbines. Nuclear plants. Hint, hint.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/07/17 40205
Belkin? No matter how good their plans, what they deliver can be self-serving crap. I'll wait until Linksys brings out one of these.
George Orwell mentioned in a column (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O /OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441103.html ) that melons grew freely in England between 1600 and 1650, and asks whether the climate could have changed that much in three hundred years since they wouldn't do that in 1944.
We might be returning to the way things were, instead of having an Unprecedented Catastrophe.
Apple is slightly less bad than industry leaders Dell and HP. Only slightly, though. That is why, although I have a 1G iPod, the new ones didn't seem to me to be worth the premium. I got an iAudio X5.
It is not really worth selecting a manufacturer based on support because every support issue is a hassle out of proportion to its cost. The only criterion I use any more is the likelihood of getting a problem-free product. Again, Apple is slightly less bad than the industry leaders, but never, ever buy a newly-launched product from Apple. They have a tendency to launch flawed products, then stonewall when the flaws surface.
If you are a captain, it is up to you (not "they") to do what's needed to make sure you are safe. That means you have a mechanical chronometer, a sextant and an HO229 with you when you take command. And you know how to use them, plus your common sense and coastwise skills, to navigate safely. Celestial navigation is not subject to governmental fiat and it is the ultimate fallback, if you know how to use it.
Celestial navigation is not that hard to learn. You don't have to be terribly talented to get a fix that encompasses a couple square miles of ocean. If you are out in the middle of the north Pacific that is generally good enough.
If you find an un-lit shore you stay the hell away until you can see what you are doing.
Navigation to this standard has been done for hundreds of years, there is nothing stopping anyone from being a competent navigator except perhaps blindness or terminal stupidity.