What you mention is similar to a new transit system that just broke ground in Cleveland: The Euclid Corridor. High capacity, diesel electric busses running in dedicated lanes. Traffic lights will automatically turn green for the buses. Pay at the platform. Stops every 1/4 mile or so. They refer to this as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).
It will be interesting to see if it works. Cleveland has been trying for 25 years to develop a new transit system along Euclid Avenue. For those who aren't familiar with Cleveland, Euclid runs from Public Square (The center of downtown Cleveland) east to Playhouse Square (The 2nd largest performing arts center in the US after Lincoln Center), Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Circle (home to my alma mater Case Western Reserve University).
I hope it works out. Euclid Ave has fallen on hard times (apart from the bright spots I mentioned). They are definitely getting started, as Federal money has been committed to the project (and is 70% of the budget). The current administration is advocating this style of transit over trains and the Euclid Corridor is intended as a demonstration project for the entire USA.
I have mod points, but I figured I'd answer your question instead.
When you do a die shrink, you can lower the power required at particular clock rate, or you can run at a higher clock speed with the same power dissipated. So when IBM went from 130nm for the 970 to 90nm for the 970FX, the top clock speed went up from 2GHz to 2.5GHz. Other than the process change, I believe there were very few changes to the chip.
Now, when you go from 130 nm to 90nm, the linear dimension across the chip is ~70% of what is was, and the area of the chip is (70%)^2 or about 50% of the previous chip.
Lets use some numbers, these may not be 100% accurate, but they'll explain the basic concept. The 2GHz 970 had a die size of about 121mm^2 and put out a maximum of 42W. That is about 350mW/mm^2. If we assume that the 2.5GHz 970FX has that same power consumption, but has a die size of 60mm^2, then the 970FX will produce 700mW/mm^2. So you have the same amount of power, but you are trying to suck it out of a smaller piece of silicon. So you need much more efficient cooling to keep the chip temperature the same. Hence, the liquid cooling system in the dual 2.5GHz G5.
Apple operates the biggest movie trailer website on the internet and the most popular legal music download service. I don't think that Apple is hurting for bandwidth.
The issue here is that the.Mac email is different from GMail. For one, it is IMAP based (Webmail is available too). Plus, mac.com emails are completely ad free, even the webmail site. At 15MB, it was a questionable value, but 250MB is a nice bump.
.Mac also goes beyond just email too. iSync will use the.Mac service to sync your address book and calendar data between multiple Macs. It also syncs Safari's bookmarks. Really, how many times have you said: "Oh damn, I bookmarked that website on my Laptop". You can also access your address book from the.Mac webmail, so you don't have to keep multiple address books in sync.
Finally, the iDisk feature is pretty nice too, especially after the upgrade to Panther. In Panther, your iDisk is cached on all of your local computers and synchronized automatically with Apple's servers. So if you create a file on your laptop that you will need to look at later on your home desktop, just save it to your iDisk and it will automagically be synced to.Mac and then to your desktop. Plus, there is a "Sites" folder in the iDisk that also serves as webserver space. Just save foo.html to iDisk/sites and it will sync to Apple's server and then be available at http://homepage.mac.com/yourusername/foo.html
.Mac and GMail are not directly comparable services, and you get more utility out of Apple's 250MB than Googles 1GB. (GMail hacks notwithstanding).
I remember seeing a demonstration on conductive polymers, and I immediately took notice of the fact that they had a metallic sheen to them. The same properties that lead to conduction also lead to the reflective properties of metal.
Actually, I think most of the "conductive polymers" have a significant amount of metal particles in them.
If you just want something transparent that is very durable, you can use something like this alumina technology, or even something crazy like panes of diamond glass or something like that (I'm not sure how strong diamond glass would be, but I'm guessing pretty strong).
On the other hand, a true transparent metal would have lots of desirable properties that none of these materials have. Metals are malleable and ductile, conduct heat well, can withstand stress by deforming, and conduct electricity. All of these properties have to do with the metallic bonds between metal atoms, and consequently they are incompatible with being transparent. That isn't to say that you can't make a nonmetallic material that can transfer heat, or which can bend - but it wouldn't be by the same mechamism as how a metal works.
A couple of things here. Diamond "glass" would be amorphous carbon and would be (and is) very weak. As far as "transparent metal" goes, you've pretty much hit it on the head, it is an oxymoron, but you can combine some properties in other materials. For example, beryllium oxide has roughly the same thermal conductivity as copper (!), yet is an electrical insulator. Cobalt oxide is surprisingly ductile. You are correct, though, the mechanisms are different.
The other thing worth pointing out is that there are transparent conductors, though they don't quite have the conductivity of copper. Indium Tin Oxide is one example, though I have to admit, I'm not entirely clear on why this works. I do know that you have to have a pretty thin layer of ITO, otherwise is ceases being transparent.
Anyway, one of the things you said reminded me of a story told to me by one of my ceramics professors. He was talking to a metallurgist who told him that "You know, ceramics wouldn't be such bad materials, if you could just make them a little bit ductile", to which my prof replied "I will, just as soon as you make your metals just a little bit transparent".
As I understand it, pure metals can't be transparent because light is an electromagnetic wave which gets "short-circuited" by conductive materials. Presumably the oxides disrupt this conductivity. And anyway, the alumina is combined with other oxides before being used to form glass.
Sort of....
A better way of explaining it would be that for a photon to be absorbed by an electron, there must be an empty higher energy state for the electron to move to (E = Eo + hv, where Eo is the energy state of the electron and hv is the energy of the photon). In solids with metallic bonding, there are many electrons floating around and many free electronic states for them to move to, so any photon that enters the solid can be absorbed by an electron that will then jump to a higher energy state (which will be free, because there are so many free energy states).
In the case of insulating and semiconducting materials, there is a gap in the energy states, so some transitions are not allowed. For pure, single crystal Al2O3, (aka white sapphire), there are (essentially) no transitions available that correspond to the energy of photons of visible light. If you start substituting in Cr3+ ions for the Al3+ ions, your sapphire will turn red and we call it "ruby". In this case, the Cr impurities provide transitions that can absorb wide ranges of visible light, but not red light. What is more is (if this is fairly pure), the ruby will not only absorb light of other wavelengths, but it will emit red light as well. Try putting a synthetic ruby under a UV light, it will glow red.
However, it should be noted that other defects can scatter and absorb light as well. Grain boundaries, voids, inclusions, etc. will affect your light transmittance. It has been possible for some time now to make polycrystalline alumina that is translucent (Lucalox), but polycrystalline alumina can never be transparant, so there are two ways to make alumina transparant: make it single crystal (only one grain, so no grain boundaries) or amorphous (no grain boundaries, because there is no long range crystal order).
OK, I goofed. I guess Google is looking to sell $3billion in stock, representing 10% of the company (if the IPO goes off at the $135 top of the range price). That would give them a market cap of ~$30billion total. My example was suggesting that if the market cap went up by a factor of 10 in ten years ($300billion in this case), then it would be a good investment. I was just using numbers that were an order of magnitude off of the actual IPO numbers.
OK, I haven't RTFA, but anybody who thinks that the iPod will forever be a high profit margin device for Apple is insane. Sooner or later the iPod will either have to evolve into more than an MP3 player that does a few neat tricks, or Apple will have to find another revenue source.
What other revenue source? Well, how about the iTMS? The numbers I've heard suggest that Apple could make a profit (after paying the labels, credit card fees, bandwidth, etc) of 10c/track. They sold around 100million tracks in a little over a year, which might translate into $10M profit. Not a whole lot, Apple certainly makes more money off iPods now. But if you look to the future, the iPod functionality is likely to get integrated into cell phones. iPod profit margins will go down. However, by the time that becomes a reality (5 years, maybe), I would expect Apple to be selling between $1billion and $10billion in iTMS sales annually, with an annual profit of $100million to $1billion. Given that Apple has made a profit of ~$30million in the past year, that is an attractive source of revenue. Low margin, sure, but steady....and such low margins make it difficult for any competitor to gain a foothold. I think Apple was very savvy in negotiating such low margins.
Actually, the Dutch auction works in favor of the small investor AND Google.
In traditional IPOs, the company sells itself to several investment banks at a value below the expected fair market value. These banks sell those shares to their best customers. Sometimes they even give out shares with the stipulation that the investor that received those shares must buy more shares at market price when the stock goes public (an illegal practice that drives up share prices). Once the stock goes public, the share price usually rockets (because it is undervalued) and the investment banks are free to sell their stock and pocket the difference. The company issuing the stock gets none of this money, even though it is part of the "perceived value" of the company at the point of the IPO. This system really benefits the investment banks and their big investors, to the detriment of the company issuing the IPO and small investors.
Small investors usually can only buy the stock when trading goes public. Most small investors are lucky to get in the first day, and by then, the price has skyrocketed. With the Dutch auction, every investor is on equal footing. If you are willing to buy 10 shares at $100, you will win out over somebody willing to buy 100,000 shares at $90. Everybody who gets the stock will buy it at the lowest price at which all share will sell, so if you bid $135 and the final price is $103, you will get the shares you bid for at $103, the same as everyone else.
FWIW, the estimated market cap for Google, based on those share prices, is more than McDonalds, but roughly the level of Yahoo. Is Google worth as much as Yahoo? That is for you to decide. If you think that those prices overvalue Google, don't buy. If you think Google is going to grow to be a $30 billion company in the next decade, then it is a very good investment. You decide...there are always risks in buying stocks.
My understanding was that Apple makes about 10c/song after paying the record label and credit card fees. Which isn't much money when you consider that they've sold maybe 100M songs so far in the US. That means $10Million profit, not counting setup costs.
However, if Apple gets to the 1 billion songs/year mark, then you are looking at $1billion in revenue, and $100million in profit, which is not too shabby. I think Apple knows this. They aren't going to be able to maintain such high profit margins on the iPod forever (unless it morphs into a completely different device over the next few years), but perpetual revenue from iTMS might be a serious chunk of change in a few years.
why run expensive fiber when you can run cheapo Cat 5
Becase it's a big undertaking to rewire a campus, so you'd better do it right and prepare for the future, instead of locking yourself into today/yesterday's technology.
Funny you should say that. Case is using fiber optic cables they put in in 1992 or so. Their network has long been fiber only, which has forced them into using expensive NICs, but has allowed them to upgrade to ATM (big mistake), and now to switched gigabit without having to rip open any walls. I went there from 1994-1998 and even then they were running 10 megabit ethernet over fiber.
Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve
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Fiber To The Dorm Room
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· Score: 4, Informative
Q: Why did they use fiber instead of coper cables?
A: Because they are using the fiber optic cables they installed into the dorm rooms in the early ninties. I'm not sure of the exact year, but I believe that the wiring was completed in 1992 or 1993. I started at Case in 1994 and every dorm room had a faceplate with phone, cable, and multimode and singlemode fiber optic. The multimode fiber was used for the network connection. Even back then, my brand spanking new PowerMac 7100/66, which had a built-in AAUI Ethernet port, required an AAUI to AUI adapter and then an AUI to 10-baseFL converter to hook to the wall.
The reason Case can go to gigabit in the first place is that they don't have to replace the Cat 3 cable that they probably would have installed back then. Unfortunately, the bet did not pay of in the sense that copper is still the standard, and fiber optic NICs are very expensive. It did pay off in the sense that they can switch to Gigabit for the cost of expensive NICs, rather than the cost of having to lay new cable.
Oh, and that whole "Most Wired Campus" thing from Yahoo Internet Life was a bunch of bunk. The head network guy fabricated most of what was reported in that article. He finally got fired, and it seems the network is in much better hands now. Back in 1996, Case began an ill-fated switch from Ethernet to ATM, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but the ATM network never worked well, and ATM has never, and probably will never, catch on as a technology to the desktop. Old users never got ATM, they remained on the old, reliable, 10-Megabit network. They finally scrapped that system a few years ago and announced that they were going to convert the entire network over to switched gigabit, which should be pretty damn cool, and is an established technology.
Yes, but this doesn't take into account that diesel has much higher particulate output than gasoline. Yes, this can be dealt with, but only for low sulphur fuel, and at significant cost.
Switching to low-sulphur diesel was not trivial, either. most existing diesel engines actually required the sulphur to lubricate the valves
In Europe you can already buy several cars fitted with Diesel cleaner (oxydation catalysator), and the Diesel is required to be low in sulfur.
This statement practically proves my point. Yes, improved diesel emission systems are coming down the pipeline, but they are not standard yet, and they cost about the same as adding a hybrid-electric system to a gas powered car.
I would be happy to put the best gas powered car against the best diesel powered car and compare what actually comes out of the tailpipe. My understanding is that a good gas engine still has an order of magnitude lower emissions than a good diesel engine. Diesel is catching up, but it is not there yet.
Frankly, though. The thing that annoys me most is idiots running around in a 30 year old VW bus retrofited to burn biodiesel and patting themselves on the back thinking they are doing something good for the environment. In reality, they are probably spewing out thousands of times more pollutants into the atmosphere than a 2004 Hummer H2.
I've heard it makes your car exhaust smell like french fries... Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Actually, there is. If you have complete combustion, then you would not be able to smell the exhaust, you would only be left with CO2 and H2O. If your exhaust smells like the source fuel, then you are putting unburned hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Unburned hydrocarbons are one of the principle components of smog. Ask anyone who lived in LA during the 50's and they will tell you about how your eyes would start burning when you walked outside.
Is diesel less expensive to use? Yes. Does it come anywhere near the clean combustion of a good gas engine with a catalytic converter? No. There are some new exhaust systems that bring diesel up to the cleanliness of gasoline, but only if you are using low sulphur diesel, and they add about $3000 to the cost of the car, and are not required yet.
The Toyota Echo does the same thing that the Ford Focus and a handful of other small cars do: raise the roof. I know when the Focus replaced the Escort as Ford's entry-level car, a lot was made of the fact that it was 3" taller than the escort. In fact, the Focus is noticeably taller than the Taurus. If you ever see two of them parked next to one another, you'll see what I mean.
I'm 6'3" and I drive a Ford Focus wagon. I can sit in the back seat without slouching. Even better, the car came with a manual seat hight adjust, plus a steering wheel that tilts AND telescopes. The wagon model has more headroom in the back seat than either the sedan or the hatchback models, on account of the fact that the roof doesn't start sloping down over the rear seat.
The other thing to avoid if you are concerned about headroom: Moonroofs. They take a good 2-3 inches away from your noggin. Often they extend back over the back seat, too (where the glass goes when you open it).
There was one business mag that suggested that Apple should spin off the iPod and iTMS into a separate company and issue an IPO for it. It would net Apple lots of cash, and it could isolate Apple from the eventual decline of the iPod.
This does make some sense, as it is hard to envision Apple keeping the iPod as a high profit margin device for more than 5 years or so. I don't know about you, but I kind of expect the functionality of my iPod, my Palm, and my cell phone to converge by then. I suspect that Apple hopes that by the time that happens, they will have a large share of the legal downloads market, and that sales for iTMS will be large enough to produce a good profit, even with the razor thin margins they have now.
for example, Aqua skins for other OSes-- they tend to choose to base their legal complaints on means other than patents, other forms of intellectual property.
Actually, in the case of the Aqua skins, I believe Apple's complaints had to do with copyright and trademark, not patent. In fact, I think the Aqua skins that they C&D'd were ones that actually copied the bitmaps of the elements directly from the files in MacOS X, which is pretty clear copyright infringement. I believe that Apple doesn't care if people try to recreate the Aqua look on their own, they just don't want people copying their files.
When Ford introduced the Focus, the Escort was relegated to fleet sales only. No Ford dealers in the US carry them, and none have since the Focus was introduced. The only exception to that was the ZX2, and that shed the Escort name. For all intents and purposes, the Focus replaced the Escort (and the Contour, for that matter). Ford completely stopped marketing the Escort and threw all of their money into the Focus. The fact that the production of the two cars overlap is really irrelevant here, as it was made clear by Ford that the Escort was being phased out in favor of the Focus.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Ford replaced the Escort with the Focus in 2000, and the Focus has moved from LEV, to SULEV (which is Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle, BTW), and is even available in PZEV format (Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle). PZEV is basically the same standard as SULEV, but manufacturer has to warranty the entire emissions system will maintain that level for a minimum ten years. Keep in mind, in this context, CO2 is not considered a pollutant. This counts NOx, SOx, unburned hydrocarbons, particulates, etc.
In any case, the "cleanliness" of the emissions has more to do with how efficient the combustion is, and how good the catalytic converter is. Which is why diesel cars do not come close to satisfying LEV, or SULEV. diesel combustion is not anywhere near as complete as gasoline combustion, and no catalytic converters are available for diesel (yet, it is being worked on).
Huh. Well, I don't know about a binary download, but the source to Apple's X11 package is available. I assume that it could be compiled for Jag, but I'm not an expert.
As far as I can tell, the source includes the Quartz window manager, which is really the part that integrates it into OS X.
It includes the full X11R6.6 technology including an X11 window server, Quartz window manager, libraries, and basic utilities such as xterm.
My reasons to do this would be to access the wealth of software out there. Does OS-X have the ability to support gnome and/or Kde apps? I figure it can be done, but how much hassle would it be?
I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.
KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.
Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.
Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.
I don't think this is a problem for Apple at all. Apple specializes in offering an integrated computing experience. Apple makes the hardware and the OS and some key pieces of software and makes sure they all work together. There is never going to be a computer company with that degree of control over Linux to compete in the comodity PC world.
Nevertheless, any Linux adoption is good for Apple, as virutally any software for Linux can be ported to MacOS X without too much difficulty. Just look at all the software that has been ported already.
No memory buffer on the drive is no big deal if you are just going to:
Spin up the hard drive
Load content into onboard memory
Spin down the drive
The memory buffer on the HD itself is so the electronics on the drive can try to guess ahead what data will be asked for next. So on something like the iPod, where the HD only spins up once every 20 minutes, the buffer integrated into the drive only adds expense and doesn't help performance.
Re:yeah right
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Global Dimming
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· Score: 4, Informative
a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have
Don't kid yourself. The US is responsible for a very large chunk of the greenhouse gas output of the world. It is something like 40%. That is despite the fact that the US has around 5% of the world's population.
But through the Nineties, air quality started to get worse again, and we're now just about back to where we were when the laws came into effect. Halve the average emissions, double the population... the math ain't hard.
Don't forget that average fuel economy of cars sold in the US is at its lowest level in 20 years. Think about that for a moment. The average car sold today has roughly the same fuel economy as a car sold in 1983! Why? Looser resrtictions on "light trucks", because they were used for work purposes. Then the automakers realized they could make glorified station wagons and call them SUVs and sell them as "light trucks", as though they were being used for work. Heck, the Chevy Suburban is so big that it isn't even considered a "light truck" and is therefore not subject to fuel economy regulations at all. For fuel economy purposes, a Suburban is treated as though it were the same type of vehicle as a dump truck.
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What you mention is similar to a new transit system that just broke ground in Cleveland: The Euclid Corridor. High capacity, diesel electric busses running in dedicated lanes. Traffic lights will automatically turn green for the buses. Pay at the platform. Stops every 1/4 mile or so. They refer to this as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).
It will be interesting to see if it works. Cleveland has been trying for 25 years to develop a new transit system along Euclid Avenue. For those who aren't familiar with Cleveland, Euclid runs from Public Square (The center of downtown Cleveland) east to Playhouse Square (The 2nd largest performing arts center in the US after Lincoln Center), Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Circle (home to my alma mater Case Western Reserve University).
I hope it works out. Euclid Ave has fallen on hard times (apart from the bright spots I mentioned). They are definitely getting started, as Federal money has been committed to the project (and is 70% of the budget). The current administration is advocating this style of transit over trains and the Euclid Corridor is intended as a demonstration project for the entire USA.
You apparently missed the announcement the same day that iTMS Canada will open this month.
So you Canadians can stop whining already.
I have mod points, but I figured I'd answer your question instead.
When you do a die shrink, you can lower the power required at particular clock rate, or you can run at a higher clock speed with the same power dissipated. So when IBM went from 130nm for the 970 to 90nm for the 970FX, the top clock speed went up from 2GHz to 2.5GHz. Other than the process change, I believe there were very few changes to the chip.
Now, when you go from 130 nm to 90nm, the linear dimension across the chip is ~70% of what is was, and the area of the chip is (70%)^2 or about 50% of the previous chip.
Lets use some numbers, these may not be 100% accurate, but they'll explain the basic concept. The 2GHz 970 had a die size of about 121mm^2 and put out a maximum of 42W. That is about 350mW/mm^2. If we assume that the 2.5GHz 970FX has that same power consumption, but has a die size of 60mm^2, then the 970FX will produce 700mW/mm^2. So you have the same amount of power, but you are trying to suck it out of a smaller piece of silicon. So you need much more efficient cooling to keep the chip temperature the same. Hence, the liquid cooling system in the dual 2.5GHz G5.
Apple operates the biggest movie trailer website on the internet and the most popular legal music download service. I don't think that Apple is hurting for bandwidth.
The issue here is that the .Mac email is different from GMail. For one, it is IMAP based (Webmail is available too). Plus, mac.com emails are completely ad free, even the webmail site. At 15MB, it was a questionable value, but 250MB is a nice bump.
.Mac also goes beyond just email too. iSync will use the .Mac service to sync your address book and calendar data between multiple Macs. It also syncs Safari's bookmarks. Really, how many times have you said: "Oh damn, I bookmarked that website on my Laptop". You can also access your address book from the .Mac webmail, so you don't have to keep multiple address books in sync.
Finally, the iDisk feature is pretty nice too, especially after the upgrade to Panther. In Panther, your iDisk is cached on all of your local computers and synchronized automatically with Apple's servers. So if you create a file on your laptop that you will need to look at later on your home desktop, just save it to your iDisk and it will automagically be synced to .Mac and then to your desktop. Plus, there is a "Sites" folder in the iDisk that also serves as webserver space. Just save foo.html to iDisk/sites and it will sync to Apple's server and then be available at http://homepage.mac.com/yourusername/foo.html
.Mac and GMail are not directly comparable services, and you get more utility out of Apple's 250MB than Googles 1GB. (GMail hacks notwithstanding).
Actually, I think most of the "conductive polymers" have a significant amount of metal particles in them.
A couple of things here. Diamond "glass" would be amorphous carbon and would be (and is) very weak. As far as "transparent metal" goes, you've pretty much hit it on the head, it is an oxymoron, but you can combine some properties in other materials. For example, beryllium oxide has roughly the same thermal conductivity as copper (!), yet is an electrical insulator. Cobalt oxide is surprisingly ductile. You are correct, though, the mechanisms are different.
The other thing worth pointing out is that there are transparent conductors, though they don't quite have the conductivity of copper. Indium Tin Oxide is one example, though I have to admit, I'm not entirely clear on why this works. I do know that you have to have a pretty thin layer of ITO, otherwise is ceases being transparent.
Anyway, one of the things you said reminded me of a story told to me by one of my ceramics professors. He was talking to a metallurgist who told him that "You know, ceramics wouldn't be such bad materials, if you could just make them a little bit ductile", to which my prof replied "I will, just as soon as you make your metals just a little bit transparent".
Sort of....
A better way of explaining it would be that for a photon to be absorbed by an electron, there must be an empty higher energy state for the electron to move to (E = Eo + hv, where Eo is the energy state of the electron and hv is the energy of the photon). In solids with metallic bonding, there are many electrons floating around and many free electronic states for them to move to, so any photon that enters the solid can be absorbed by an electron that will then jump to a higher energy state (which will be free, because there are so many free energy states).
In the case of insulating and semiconducting materials, there is a gap in the energy states, so some transitions are not allowed. For pure, single crystal Al2O3, (aka white sapphire), there are (essentially) no transitions available that correspond to the energy of photons of visible light. If you start substituting in Cr3+ ions for the Al3+ ions, your sapphire will turn red and we call it "ruby". In this case, the Cr impurities provide transitions that can absorb wide ranges of visible light, but not red light. What is more is (if this is fairly pure), the ruby will not only absorb light of other wavelengths, but it will emit red light as well. Try putting a synthetic ruby under a UV light, it will glow red.
However, it should be noted that other defects can scatter and absorb light as well. Grain boundaries, voids, inclusions, etc. will affect your light transmittance. It has been possible for some time now to make polycrystalline alumina that is translucent (Lucalox), but polycrystalline alumina can never be transparant, so there are two ways to make alumina transparant: make it single crystal (only one grain, so no grain boundaries) or amorphous (no grain boundaries, because there is no long range crystal order).
OK, I goofed. I guess Google is looking to sell $3billion in stock, representing 10% of the company (if the IPO goes off at the $135 top of the range price). That would give them a market cap of ~$30billion total. My example was suggesting that if the market cap went up by a factor of 10 in ten years ($300billion in this case), then it would be a good investment. I was just using numbers that were an order of magnitude off of the actual IPO numbers.
OK, I haven't RTFA, but anybody who thinks that the iPod will forever be a high profit margin device for Apple is insane. Sooner or later the iPod will either have to evolve into more than an MP3 player that does a few neat tricks, or Apple will have to find another revenue source.
What other revenue source? Well, how about the iTMS? The numbers I've heard suggest that Apple could make a profit (after paying the labels, credit card fees, bandwidth, etc) of 10c/track. They sold around 100million tracks in a little over a year, which might translate into $10M profit. Not a whole lot, Apple certainly makes more money off iPods now. But if you look to the future, the iPod functionality is likely to get integrated into cell phones. iPod profit margins will go down. However, by the time that becomes a reality (5 years, maybe), I would expect Apple to be selling between $1billion and $10billion in iTMS sales annually, with an annual profit of $100million to $1billion. Given that Apple has made a profit of ~$30million in the past year, that is an attractive source of revenue. Low margin, sure, but steady....and such low margins make it difficult for any competitor to gain a foothold. I think Apple was very savvy in negotiating such low margins.
Actually, the Dutch auction works in favor of the small investor AND Google.
In traditional IPOs, the company sells itself to several investment banks at a value below the expected fair market value. These banks sell those shares to their best customers. Sometimes they even give out shares with the stipulation that the investor that received those shares must buy more shares at market price when the stock goes public (an illegal practice that drives up share prices). Once the stock goes public, the share price usually rockets (because it is undervalued) and the investment banks are free to sell their stock and pocket the difference. The company issuing the stock gets none of this money, even though it is part of the "perceived value" of the company at the point of the IPO. This system really benefits the investment banks and their big investors, to the detriment of the company issuing the IPO and small investors.
Small investors usually can only buy the stock when trading goes public. Most small investors are lucky to get in the first day, and by then, the price has skyrocketed. With the Dutch auction, every investor is on equal footing. If you are willing to buy 10 shares at $100, you will win out over somebody willing to buy 100,000 shares at $90. Everybody who gets the stock will buy it at the lowest price at which all share will sell, so if you bid $135 and the final price is $103, you will get the shares you bid for at $103, the same as everyone else.
FWIW, the estimated market cap for Google, based on those share prices, is more than McDonalds, but roughly the level of Yahoo. Is Google worth as much as Yahoo? That is for you to decide. If you think that those prices overvalue Google, don't buy. If you think Google is going to grow to be a $30 billion company in the next decade, then it is a very good investment. You decide...there are always risks in buying stocks.
My understanding was that Apple makes about 10c/song after paying the record label and credit card fees. Which isn't much money when you consider that they've sold maybe 100M songs so far in the US. That means $10Million profit, not counting setup costs.
However, if Apple gets to the 1 billion songs/year mark, then you are looking at $1billion in revenue, and $100million in profit, which is not too shabby. I think Apple knows this. They aren't going to be able to maintain such high profit margins on the iPod forever (unless it morphs into a completely different device over the next few years), but perpetual revenue from iTMS might be a serious chunk of change in a few years.
Funny you should say that. Case is using fiber optic cables they put in in 1992 or so. Their network has long been fiber only, which has forced them into using expensive NICs, but has allowed them to upgrade to ATM (big mistake), and now to switched gigabit without having to rip open any walls. I went there from 1994-1998 and even then they were running 10 megabit ethernet over fiber.
Q: Why did they use fiber instead of coper cables?
A: Because they are using the fiber optic cables they installed into the dorm rooms in the early ninties. I'm not sure of the exact year, but I believe that the wiring was completed in 1992 or 1993. I started at Case in 1994 and every dorm room had a faceplate with phone, cable, and multimode and singlemode fiber optic. The multimode fiber was used for the network connection. Even back then, my brand spanking new PowerMac 7100/66, which had a built-in AAUI Ethernet port, required an AAUI to AUI adapter and then an AUI to 10-baseFL converter to hook to the wall.
The reason Case can go to gigabit in the first place is that they don't have to replace the Cat 3 cable that they probably would have installed back then. Unfortunately, the bet did not pay of in the sense that copper is still the standard, and fiber optic NICs are very expensive. It did pay off in the sense that they can switch to Gigabit for the cost of expensive NICs, rather than the cost of having to lay new cable.
Oh, and that whole "Most Wired Campus" thing from Yahoo Internet Life was a bunch of bunk. The head network guy fabricated most of what was reported in that article. He finally got fired, and it seems the network is in much better hands now. Back in 1996, Case began an ill-fated switch from Ethernet to ATM, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but the ATM network never worked well, and ATM has never, and probably will never, catch on as a technology to the desktop. Old users never got ATM, they remained on the old, reliable, 10-Megabit network. They finally scrapped that system a few years ago and announced that they were going to convert the entire network over to switched gigabit, which should be pretty damn cool, and is an established technology.
Yes, but this doesn't take into account that diesel has much higher particulate output than gasoline. Yes, this can be dealt with, but only for low sulphur fuel, and at significant cost.
Switching to low-sulphur diesel was not trivial, either. most existing diesel engines actually required the sulphur to lubricate the valves
This statement practically proves my point. Yes, improved diesel emission systems are coming down the pipeline, but they are not standard yet, and they cost about the same as adding a hybrid-electric system to a gas powered car.I would be happy to put the best gas powered car against the best diesel powered car and compare what actually comes out of the tailpipe. My understanding is that a good gas engine still has an order of magnitude lower emissions than a good diesel engine. Diesel is catching up, but it is not there yet.
Frankly, though. The thing that annoys me most is idiots running around in a 30 year old VW bus retrofited to burn biodiesel and patting themselves on the back thinking they are doing something good for the environment. In reality, they are probably spewing out thousands of times more pollutants into the atmosphere than a 2004 Hummer H2.
FWIW: I drive a 2000 Ford Focus wagon.
Actually, there is. If you have complete combustion, then you would not be able to smell the exhaust, you would only be left with CO2 and H2O. If your exhaust smells like the source fuel, then you are putting unburned hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Unburned hydrocarbons are one of the principle components of smog. Ask anyone who lived in LA during the 50's and they will tell you about how your eyes would start burning when you walked outside.
Is diesel less expensive to use? Yes. Does it come anywhere near the clean combustion of a good gas engine with a catalytic converter? No. There are some new exhaust systems that bring diesel up to the cleanliness of gasoline, but only if you are using low sulphur diesel, and they add about $3000 to the cost of the car, and are not required yet.
The Toyota Echo does the same thing that the Ford Focus and a handful of other small cars do: raise the roof. I know when the Focus replaced the Escort as Ford's entry-level car, a lot was made of the fact that it was 3" taller than the escort. In fact, the Focus is noticeably taller than the Taurus. If you ever see two of them parked next to one another, you'll see what I mean.
I'm 6'3" and I drive a Ford Focus wagon. I can sit in the back seat without slouching. Even better, the car came with a manual seat hight adjust, plus a steering wheel that tilts AND telescopes. The wagon model has more headroom in the back seat than either the sedan or the hatchback models, on account of the fact that the roof doesn't start sloping down over the rear seat.
The other thing to avoid if you are concerned about headroom: Moonroofs. They take a good 2-3 inches away from your noggin. Often they extend back over the back seat, too (where the glass goes when you open it).
There was one business mag that suggested that Apple should spin off the iPod and iTMS into a separate company and issue an IPO for it. It would net Apple lots of cash, and it could isolate Apple from the eventual decline of the iPod.
This does make some sense, as it is hard to envision Apple keeping the iPod as a high profit margin device for more than 5 years or so. I don't know about you, but I kind of expect the functionality of my iPod, my Palm, and my cell phone to converge by then. I suspect that Apple hopes that by the time that happens, they will have a large share of the legal downloads market, and that sales for iTMS will be large enough to produce a good profit, even with the razor thin margins they have now.
Actually, in the case of the Aqua skins, I believe Apple's complaints had to do with copyright and trademark, not patent. In fact, I think the Aqua skins that they C&D'd were ones that actually copied the bitmaps of the elements directly from the files in MacOS X, which is pretty clear copyright infringement. I believe that Apple doesn't care if people try to recreate the Aqua look on their own, they just don't want people copying their files.
When Ford introduced the Focus, the Escort was relegated to fleet sales only. No Ford dealers in the US carry them, and none have since the Focus was introduced. The only exception to that was the ZX2, and that shed the Escort name. For all intents and purposes, the Focus replaced the Escort (and the Contour, for that matter). Ford completely stopped marketing the Escort and threw all of their money into the Focus. The fact that the production of the two cars overlap is really irrelevant here, as it was made clear by Ford that the Escort was being phased out in favor of the Focus.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Ford replaced the Escort with the Focus in 2000, and the Focus has moved from LEV, to SULEV (which is Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle, BTW), and is even available in PZEV format (Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle). PZEV is basically the same standard as SULEV, but manufacturer has to warranty the entire emissions system will maintain that level for a minimum ten years. Keep in mind, in this context, CO2 is not considered a pollutant. This counts NOx, SOx, unburned hydrocarbons, particulates, etc.
In any case, the "cleanliness" of the emissions has more to do with how efficient the combustion is, and how good the catalytic converter is. Which is why diesel cars do not come close to satisfying LEV, or SULEV. diesel combustion is not anywhere near as complete as gasoline combustion, and no catalytic converters are available for diesel (yet, it is being worked on).
Huh. Well, I don't know about a binary download, but the source to Apple's X11 package is available. I assume that it could be compiled for Jag, but I'm not an expert.
As far as I can tell, the source includes the Quartz window manager, which is really the part that integrates it into OS X.
I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.
KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.
Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.
Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.
Nevertheless, any Linux adoption is good for Apple, as virutally any software for Linux can be ported to MacOS X without too much difficulty. Just look at all the software that has been ported already.
I gotta agree with this, but they might bundle it with a new Mac for $99....
The memory buffer on the HD itself is so the electronics on the drive can try to guess ahead what data will be asked for next. So on something like the iPod, where the HD only spins up once every 20 minutes, the buffer integrated into the drive only adds expense and doesn't help performance.
Don't kid yourself. The US is responsible for a very large chunk of the greenhouse gas output of the world. It is something like 40%. That is despite the fact that the US has around 5% of the world's population.
Don't forget that average fuel economy of cars sold in the US is at its lowest level in 20 years. Think about that for a moment. The average car sold today has roughly the same fuel economy as a car sold in 1983! Why? Looser resrtictions on "light trucks", because they were used for work purposes. Then the automakers realized they could make glorified station wagons and call them SUVs and sell them as "light trucks", as though they were being used for work. Heck, the Chevy Suburban is so big that it isn't even considered a "light truck" and is therefore not subject to fuel economy regulations at all. For fuel economy purposes, a Suburban is treated as though it were the same type of vehicle as a dump truck.