The blind mice ran after the farmer's wife and got their tails cut off with a carving knife.
So we have mice that can see but can't run... that is just the way things should be. What do they do? They get them running, and you know how this ends.
Is Mozilla actually Elly the Elephant? The Pearls Before Swine Oct 18, 2009 strip shows Elly the Elephant using blocks to save the world. I think the Internet has made me feel closer to others...
How long till I see one of these chasing me down a dark alley?
Chases are overrated. I've only seen 4 police chases out of the thousands of times I've ever seen police cars. The police don't even buy the highest powered cars any more.
Ergo, people can be caught without chases, or those who run aren't worth chasing.
Sneakier surveillance technology could cause a major upheaval. Wall mounted cameras are still on a human scale, but if the fly on the wall is actually a spy robot, one can imagine how the stock market would react. A wall-colored insect could be flown into a CEO's office to get the latest insider scoop and then flown out. Talk about scanning for bugging devices.
Hiding information may become economically infeasible, and new discoveries may become open sourced rapidly. Indeed, the sheer volume of information may become the new method of hiding, although that tends to make important information marginalized (i.e., not worth hiding), as there would be a lot more important information, and always some that is more important.
If you run a 30 W load over 1 second, it will use 30 joules of energy (because a 1 W power draw means it consumes 1 J per second). But if you run a 500 W load over 1/100 sec, you'll only use 5 J of energy.
Idealistic math... and I get the instinctive thought (because you don't explicitly say wtf you are throwing these numbers out for) that the 30 J run and the 5 J run achieve the same goal. Such thoughts are misleading!
I don't claim to know which power states are the most efficient on a CPU. To speak of a real-life case, my stinkin laptop has an AMD processor, and I found out that it has a lot of different power states, and even the other components have a lot of power states (or so it seems) so that the entire system really dogs it when it is in a low power state. The slow states just spin the disk longer - doesn't appear to save any energy. So I run in the fastest state.
The upshot is that it may be better if software could decide (or at least let you tell it) whether it needs to run fast. Windows has so many things busy busy busy even when you are just doing some simple typing. Services need a pill to keep them quiet. And some of them don't need to run at maximum speed even when you want some performance, so if you want to save energy, there should be known states of maximum efficiency (including reduced disk thrashing), and the software should pick the optimum times to run.
Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years
The two sets {1, 1x, 2, 2x, 3, 3x,...} and {1, 2, 3,...} are both infinite. If both sets represent the pages counts on printouts of websites, and the first set contains both the content and the waste due to the extra junk on the pages, an argument may be made that the waste would be infinitely less if there wasn't so much extra crap on each page.
The extra stuff is what drives the finances of the Internet, but it is infinitely more costly in bandwidth, time consumed, memory, CPU cycles, etc.
Since technology keeps improving, we condone all this waste. Indeed without all the junk, there would be little incentive to keep improving technology - who would personally sustain usage of the full bandwidth they're paying for? It's paradoxical. We can't live a good life without knowing how to waste the things we can't use.
Moreover, the article seems to suggest that it took at least 20 other servers to replace a single 12 year old mainframe, and that's even using virtualization on the new servers.
Replaced is such a misunderstood word. The new servers would be way faster than the old clunker. The only replacing is the physical displacement.
That leads one to question. If the old machine was measured for performance and an equivalent performing set of servers were specified, what would be the calculated outcome?
One wonders how many (more) servers the House could have replaced with a single new mainframe.
Having a number of servers makes sense in terms of incremental upgrades - just add one or two more at a low cost. But replacing hardware with bigger also makes sense because the software could just be copied over.
I don't have enough info to decide which is better, and maybe that's why a lot of people don't see mainframes as their choice of computer. Mainframe marketing doesn't target enough people so mainframes are perceived as dinosaurs with less flexibility and expertise. The budget makers probably have their own laptops, quickly understood the power and flexibility of small computers, and have never come close to an actual mainframe. To me, mainframes are a curiosity. The Top 500 is getting set to publish a new list - I don't see the word mainframe sticking out, even though IBM is prominent. Instead, the word parallel occurs frequently, suggesting the smart way to achieve computing horsepower is to put together lots of little computing nodes.
"Also, as soon as a contracting company knowingly falsifies data about you or otherwise misrepresents you, make it clear to them that the first time was the last time. If they keep it up, drop them."...
At no time what so ever do you ever tolerate someone making up lies about you when it affects something so fundamental as your ability to earn money.
For people without experience though, the misrepresenting headhunter can be the proverbial foot in the door. Experience is often useful, but with some jobs someone without experience can get in and get experienced fast without letting inexperience be an issue. In the world, there are a lot of people who will lie their way to get ahead of you, and if you have someone to do the lying for you (a headhunter is like a professional lier), you can keep up with the other bastards. If someone calls the bluff, and if your cards are really bad, you can say something like "I submitted my resume to the headhunter, who clearly misunderstood xyz for abc", so go to plan B, which is to say what you are good at, and see what happens.
Not that I know how headhunters work in the long term, but they seem to treat each person as an asset, and if that person can be plunked into a bunch of short term projects to build up experience, then a career is in the making. If an inexperienced person gives the headhunter a chance to be a bit creative, this person can at least get some income.
There are so many little projects and little companies that people will take a chance on hiring. Once the job is obtained, if the person is sharp and doesn't cause any problems, there's little chance someone will look for a reason to hire someone else. It's a win-win for the headhunter and the employee, as long as the truth isn't stretched to the breaking point.
Keep in mind that all companies do a bit of "creative" marketing, so they will give employees a bit of "creativity" in their own sales pitch. Some employers look for people who can lie well enough to not scare off a client. So show your performance abilities at the audition/interview.
Profits may motivate patents, and patents and profits may motivate difficult research, but one has to wonder along this tangent: if the result promises to be very beneficial, would the research be done well enough to obtain the result? Not that this is an argument against patents and profit (we wouldn't have such a nice world without patents to urge investment in inventiveness). As an insight to the motivations that we have, many of the Nobel awards were for efforts that were made without followup patents. For challenges that are great enough, there will be people to attack them.
You can worry a bit less about the weather. If the shingles or anything on your roof is fragile, install a covering mechanism to keep it safe.
But I imagine these shingles should have some kind of polymer coating that will keep them durable.
Shingles are good for one-size-fits-all installations, but why not introduce the product as single large sheets so that people can try out the technology without having to install individual shingles with the high labor costs?
If you are really concerned with having a better outcome, and better education, with kids learning more - give us vouchers.
Let people go to private schools who would never be able to otherwise
Why private schools? Let's push this envelope. Suppose a longer school year lets kids graduate a year earlier so that they can go that much earlier into university. That's expensive, just like private school, but university is the most respected education.
When I was in public school, the first 6 grades didn't seem to teach much. The system seemed designed to shock kids into working in grade 7. An astute kid could probably jump straight into grade 6 and with a wee bit of help learn all it takes to be ready for grade 7. If kids were diligently guided to start working hard from grade 3, they would be able to start university after grade 8.
Kids like to run around and play, but so do adults. Schools should do much more to help people play and achieve throughout their lives. A lot of people find that they have no inclination to do more than watch TV for amusement, so that they can focus on their careers. It doesn't seem to be a healthy way of life.
People are faced with pressures above and below. Industry wants to treat people as pawns so that no marginalized pawn is irreplaceable. Individuals want to accumulate wealth, and the quickest way for a poor schmuck to do that is to achieve something extraordinary.
Obama had to work his way to the top, and an education system overhaul is what is needed to help people elevate themselves in this era of mature markets. He may talk of something concrete and day-to-day such as a longer school year, but underneath the thoughts touch on an upgraded education system. Politically, there is so much deficit and debt that the opposition would try to quash the message if anything with a big dollar sign was introduced, but if Obama does a sell job with a simpler message that people could look forward to more fulfilling lives with just a little longer education every year, then he could later have people coming back and asking for more education spending. That could be the politically smart way of improving education for a new era.
Why would resusciation be needed? In a cross fertilization between Iron Man and Darth Vader, you can imagine the heart never stopping while a machine regulates the breathing, all running on a practically limitless power supply.
The minute hand on mortality has been moved back a little. Cell and organ aging - small machines to replace cells?
Basically, Oracle takes a calculated risk of a bad reputation vs. making buyers hold off on purchases from competitors for a short time. My guess is that Oracle will be able to produce something living up to the hype.
Why not have a little excitement and see if a competitor will match what Oracle is predicting? I can bet that in the labs a lot of products do a lot better in some areas than the released versions. Maybe IBM can loosen the reins and run with Oracle.
The premise that IT is for supporting a business (due to the business paying for it) is quite possibly a mistaken way of thinking about IT.
IT, Information Technology, should be all about informing people so that they can make smarter decisions or have richer lives. To some extent the Internet has achieved this, though one may imagine an Information Czar to put pressure on filling the deficiencies on the Net.
In the workplace, computers play a very managed role. A computer mistake can be a costly one, and the more channels of information, the more chances for something to go wrong. Furthermore, computer programming is actually very difficult work - making a computer do something actually smart is hard, let alone creating enough smart software to cover every variety of personnel. So the ideal of IT is not happening. The desire of IT being useful for helping people elevate their earning power conflicts with the cost of ensuring that computer projects are progressing and making sure the computers, which are really stupid, don't bring down the company. Instead, IT can devolve into a small technical job of making sure the pieces that break are fixed and when everything goes down a relatively cheap fix is at hand. IT for some is a drudging responsibility without opportunity for making a change.
Naturally, IT evolves though. Tools and machines are increasingly being endowed with computer powers, and once the path for using these capabilities for further productivity becomes clear, the machine becomes the man, that is, the decision making or control is gradually granted to the hardware.
The corollary is for people to keep trying to use technology to solve problems. Computers are going to take over much of the tried and trued production in every sector, and people will have to find their own way to earning a living, more than likely through the use of computers to work on challenging problems. Businesses that have been avoiding the risk of computer projects will find that staying the course will lead to thinner margins due to competition. Dullness in IT may be the calm before the storm.
The ribbon can be useful, but it would be nice to have the old menus there so as not to force people to figure out the ribbons.
In theory, people will be buying big screens so in the future expect even more complex button groups and 2-D arrays of buttons rather than the old 1-D toolbar.
Of course, practice and theory drive the opposite ways. What else is new, right? For the last few months I've noticed that many laptops have gone back to being 768 in height (though the width went up to 1366), ostensibly to match TVs. What's next? 1280x600?
While software makes you want more hardware, hardware makes you want more hardware. You are forced to want to upgrade, even if you should be able to buy the appropriate machine now. Case in point - laptop features have gone stupid to match the dropping prices. Screens that reflect the lighting, speakers so quiet you can't hear shit, and now screens sizes that offer less area just when you thought the old sizes were going away for good.
It makes you wonder - are software makers getting paid to sneak in features that waste hardware?
It's entirely possible that this conjecture is false, and some of the numbers they found are actually not congruent numbers
Surely a number less or equal to a trillion is testable for congruentness. The algorithm to test n would be find rational numbers x and y such that sqrt(x^2 + y^2) is rational and n = xy/2. It could be hard work for some of the numbers, but that's the whole point - to have done the work once and for all.
The claim is 3,148,379,694 congruent numbers were found - a finite number of numbers - so it would be just a matter of time to confirm them all. Would they even make the claim without checking every one of these?
The answer may lie in the quantity of content, as far as selling is concerned.
Fact: the Internet allows a lot of free content in small page-sized elements.
Hypothesis: want to sell content? Make it a lot bigger than a page.
If you are a typical person, an article will often make you scratch your head. People won't buy such small scraps of information because they don't see long-term value. It's cheap for the writer to whip the stuff out, but it's selling strength is very low. The economics of buying news is simply that people usually find news reporting to be entertainment and not much use in helping them gain financially. The news is very hit and miss in terms of helping people make a good bargain, improve their life, or make a better decision. As a result, the media is marketing to the point that they give away their content, and after all, putting news on the Internet is in a large part marketing.
What if writers put in the effort to make book-sized stories and filled in the background as well as the many things that are omitted for lack of space in the one-page article? It would take a lot more time to get the info and write about it, but in the computer age it may be viable. Many objections besides the cost and risk come to mind such as readers would go nuts distinguishing between facts and opinions, as opinions inevitably creep into such large hunks of verbiage, or wading through different versions from different publishers, or even the sheer cost of spending more than X dollars a day to get the lowdown on big news.
But if the information is proven to serve readers in a way that helps them earn more, then they will be more likely to actually pay for it. If a person could pick up on some news in such completeness that s/he could go to an employer or a client and say "I learned such and such to the degree that I can actually turn it into business value," then some extra dollars might flow in the way of the news consumer. This kind of cause-effect would loosen many a purse string when it comes to spending for daily news.
I'm really waiting for the day when you (can) just leave your computer on at all times
I can! - but it's plugged in.
Prolonged battery power is better if you put the computer to sleep, though my computer likes to thrash the disk when it wakes up. For people willing to spend a tad more an external battery will help.
If in ten years you have a hit, then you will have made so much more money that the next ten years is not worth all that much
If Michael Jackson was still alive, he could use any money he gets after the first 10 years.
Regarding works that are about money: anything that is a good seller should retain copyright, but once it has phased out for X years based on previous sales and relative size of the market, the clock should start ticking and either the marketers should get busy or copyright expires if the sales don't add up.
There are works that still have value even if sales are low though. The entirety of the work might not appeal to the market, but there could be portions that are valuable for certain purposes, so copyright expiry would have to be based on the lack of new copies, references, or usages to totalities or unique (relative to all creative output) portions of the work being made after X years.
India and China have people that want to invest in advanced technology. That's good for humanity.
If IBM is giving up some of its US strength, all the easier for competitors, so it's up to people to make opportunities rather than just worry. The tech world is all about trying new things anyways.
To prevent forgery and the extra walk back, simply have the machine take the license plate number. The meter reader then enters all the plate numbers and instantly sees who is expired/not paid. Also can have a more friendly feature: let the driver repark somewhere else as long as time is on the plate.
Even smarter way - charge more money and keep cars out of the inner city. Surely the parking fees are comparable to cab fare anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
The blind mice ran after the farmer's wife and got their tails cut off with a carving knife.
So we have mice that can see but can't run ... that is just the way things should be. What do they do? They get them running, and you know how this ends.
72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts
With this kind of usage share, one may reasonably expect Internet Explorer to also stick around for another century and a quarter.
Mozilla previously blocked
Is Mozilla actually Elly the Elephant? The Pearls Before Swine Oct 18, 2009 strip shows Elly the Elephant using blocks to save the world. I think the Internet has made me feel closer to others ...
How long till I see one of these chasing me down a dark alley?
Chases are overrated. I've only seen 4 police chases out of the thousands of times I've ever seen police cars. The police don't even buy the highest powered cars any more.
Ergo, people can be caught without chases, or those who run aren't worth chasing.
Sneakier surveillance technology could cause a major upheaval. Wall mounted cameras are still on a human scale, but if the fly on the wall is actually a spy robot, one can imagine how the stock market would react. A wall-colored insect could be flown into a CEO's office to get the latest insider scoop and then flown out. Talk about scanning for bugging devices.
Hiding information may become economically infeasible, and new discoveries may become open sourced rapidly. Indeed, the sheer volume of information may become the new method of hiding, although that tends to make important information marginalized (i.e., not worth hiding), as there would be a lot more important information, and always some that is more important.
If you run a 30 W load over 1 second, it will use 30 joules of energy (because a 1 W power draw means it consumes 1 J per second). But if you run a 500 W load over 1/100 sec, you'll only use 5 J of energy.
Idealistic math ... and I get the instinctive thought (because you don't explicitly say wtf you are throwing these numbers out for) that the 30 J run and the 5 J run achieve the same goal. Such thoughts are misleading!
I don't claim to know which power states are the most efficient on a CPU. To speak of a real-life case, my stinkin laptop has an AMD processor, and I found out that it has a lot of different power states, and even the other components have a lot of power states (or so it seems) so that the entire system really dogs it when it is in a low power state. The slow states just spin the disk longer - doesn't appear to save any energy. So I run in the fastest state.
The upshot is that it may be better if software could decide (or at least let you tell it) whether it needs to run fast. Windows has so many things busy busy busy even when you are just doing some simple typing. Services need a pill to keep them quiet. And some of them don't need to run at maximum speed even when you want some performance, so if you want to save energy, there should be known states of maximum efficiency (including reduced disk thrashing), and the software should pick the optimum times to run.
Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years
The two sets {1, 1x, 2, 2x, 3, 3x, ...} and {1, 2, 3, ...} are both infinite. If both sets represent the pages counts on printouts of websites, and the first set contains both the content and the waste due to the extra junk on the pages, an argument may be made that the waste would be infinitely less if there wasn't so much extra crap on each page.
The extra stuff is what drives the finances of the Internet, but it is infinitely more costly in bandwidth, time consumed, memory, CPU cycles, etc.
Since technology keeps improving, we condone all this waste. Indeed without all the junk, there would be little incentive to keep improving technology - who would personally sustain usage of the full bandwidth they're paying for? It's paradoxical. We can't live a good life without knowing how to waste the things we can't use.
Moreover, the article seems to suggest that it took at least 20 other servers to replace a single 12 year old mainframe, and that's even using virtualization on the new servers.
Replaced is such a misunderstood word. The new servers would be way faster than the old clunker. The only replacing is the physical displacement.
That leads one to question. If the old machine was measured for performance and an equivalent performing set of servers were specified, what would be the calculated outcome?
One wonders how many (more) servers the House could have replaced with a single new mainframe.
Having a number of servers makes sense in terms of incremental upgrades - just add one or two more at a low cost. But replacing hardware with bigger also makes sense because the software could just be copied over.
I don't have enough info to decide which is better, and maybe that's why a lot of people don't see mainframes as their choice of computer. Mainframe marketing doesn't target enough people so mainframes are perceived as dinosaurs with less flexibility and expertise. The budget makers probably have their own laptops, quickly understood the power and flexibility of small computers, and have never come close to an actual mainframe. To me, mainframes are a curiosity. The Top 500 is getting set to publish a new list - I don't see the word mainframe sticking out, even though IBM is prominent. Instead, the word parallel occurs frequently, suggesting the smart way to achieve computing horsepower is to put together lots of little computing nodes.
"Also, as soon as a contracting company knowingly falsifies data about you or otherwise misrepresents you, make it clear to them that the first time was the last time. If they keep it up, drop them." ...
At no time what so ever do you ever tolerate someone making up lies about you when it affects something so fundamental as your ability to earn money.
For people without experience though, the misrepresenting headhunter can be the proverbial foot in the door. Experience is often useful, but with some jobs someone without experience can get in and get experienced fast without letting inexperience be an issue. In the world, there are a lot of people who will lie their way to get ahead of you, and if you have someone to do the lying for you (a headhunter is like a professional lier), you can keep up with the other bastards. If someone calls the bluff, and if your cards are really bad, you can say something like "I submitted my resume to the headhunter, who clearly misunderstood xyz for abc", so go to plan B, which is to say what you are good at, and see what happens.
Not that I know how headhunters work in the long term, but they seem to treat each person as an asset, and if that person can be plunked into a bunch of short term projects to build up experience, then a career is in the making. If an inexperienced person gives the headhunter a chance to be a bit creative, this person can at least get some income.
There are so many little projects and little companies that people will take a chance on hiring. Once the job is obtained, if the person is sharp and doesn't cause any problems, there's little chance someone will look for a reason to hire someone else. It's a win-win for the headhunter and the employee, as long as the truth isn't stretched to the breaking point.
Keep in mind that all companies do a bit of "creative" marketing, so they will give employees a bit of "creativity" in their own sales pitch. Some employers look for people who can lie well enough to not scare off a client. So show your performance abilities at the audition/interview.
Sounds like perpetual motion!
Profits may motivate patents, and patents and profits may motivate difficult research, but one has to wonder along this tangent: if the result promises to be very beneficial, would the research be done well enough to obtain the result? Not that this is an argument against patents and profit (we wouldn't have such a nice world without patents to urge investment in inventiveness). As an insight to the motivations that we have, many of the Nobel awards were for efforts that were made without followup patents. For challenges that are great enough, there will be people to attack them.
You can worry a bit less about the weather. If the shingles or anything on your roof is fragile, install a covering mechanism to keep it safe.
But I imagine these shingles should have some kind of polymer coating that will keep them durable.
Shingles are good for one-size-fits-all installations, but why not introduce the product as single large sheets so that people can try out the technology without having to install individual shingles with the high labor costs?
Yabba Dabba Doo!
Evolution will progress from the Stone Age to the Stone Age to the Stone Age.
If you are really concerned with having a better outcome, and better education, with kids learning more - give us vouchers.
Let people go to private schools who would never be able to otherwise
Why private schools? Let's push this envelope. Suppose a longer school year lets kids graduate a year earlier so that they can go that much earlier into university. That's expensive, just like private school, but university is the most respected education.
When I was in public school, the first 6 grades didn't seem to teach much. The system seemed designed to shock kids into working in grade 7. An astute kid could probably jump straight into grade 6 and with a wee bit of help learn all it takes to be ready for grade 7. If kids were diligently guided to start working hard from grade 3, they would be able to start university after grade 8.
Kids like to run around and play, but so do adults. Schools should do much more to help people play and achieve throughout their lives. A lot of people find that they have no inclination to do more than watch TV for amusement, so that they can focus on their careers. It doesn't seem to be a healthy way of life.
People are faced with pressures above and below. Industry wants to treat people as pawns so that no marginalized pawn is irreplaceable. Individuals want to accumulate wealth, and the quickest way for a poor schmuck to do that is to achieve something extraordinary.
Obama had to work his way to the top, and an education system overhaul is what is needed to help people elevate themselves in this era of mature markets. He may talk of something concrete and day-to-day such as a longer school year, but underneath the thoughts touch on an upgraded education system. Politically, there is so much deficit and debt that the opposition would try to quash the message if anything with a big dollar sign was introduced, but if Obama does a sell job with a simpler message that people could look forward to more fulfilling lives with just a little longer education every year, then he could later have people coming back and asking for more education spending. That could be the politically smart way of improving education for a new era.
Why would resusciation be needed? In a cross fertilization between Iron Man and Darth Vader, you can imagine the heart never stopping while a machine regulates the breathing, all running on a practically limitless power supply.
The minute hand on mortality has been moved back a little. Cell and organ aging - small machines to replace cells?
Basically, Oracle takes a calculated risk of a bad reputation vs. making buyers hold off on purchases from competitors for a short time. My guess is that Oracle will be able to produce something living up to the hype.
Why not have a little excitement and see if a competitor will match what Oracle is predicting? I can bet that in the labs a lot of products do a lot better in some areas than the released versions. Maybe IBM can loosen the reins and run with Oracle.
Fun in the capitalist sun. Or is that Sun?
The premise that IT is for supporting a business (due to the business paying for it) is quite possibly a mistaken way of thinking about IT.
IT, Information Technology, should be all about informing people so that they can make smarter decisions or have richer lives. To some extent the Internet has achieved this, though one may imagine an Information Czar to put pressure on filling the deficiencies on the Net.
In the workplace, computers play a very managed role. A computer mistake can be a costly one, and the more channels of information, the more chances for something to go wrong. Furthermore, computer programming is actually very difficult work - making a computer do something actually smart is hard, let alone creating enough smart software to cover every variety of personnel. So the ideal of IT is not happening. The desire of IT being useful for helping people elevate their earning power conflicts with the cost of ensuring that computer projects are progressing and making sure the computers, which are really stupid, don't bring down the company. Instead, IT can devolve into a small technical job of making sure the pieces that break are fixed and when everything goes down a relatively cheap fix is at hand. IT for some is a drudging responsibility without opportunity for making a change.
Naturally, IT evolves though. Tools and machines are increasingly being endowed with computer powers, and once the path for using these capabilities for further productivity becomes clear, the machine becomes the man, that is, the decision making or control is gradually granted to the hardware.
The corollary is for people to keep trying to use technology to solve problems. Computers are going to take over much of the tried and trued production in every sector, and people will have to find their own way to earning a living, more than likely through the use of computers to work on challenging problems. Businesses that have been avoiding the risk of computer projects will find that staying the course will lead to thinner margins due to competition. Dullness in IT may be the calm before the storm.
The ribbon can be useful, but it would be nice to have the old menus there so as not to force people to figure out the ribbons.
In theory, people will be buying big screens so in the future expect even more complex button groups and 2-D arrays of buttons rather than the old 1-D toolbar.
Of course, practice and theory drive the opposite ways. What else is new, right? For the last few months I've noticed that many laptops have gone back to being 768 in height (though the width went up to 1366), ostensibly to match TVs. What's next? 1280x600?
While software makes you want more hardware, hardware makes you want more hardware. You are forced to want to upgrade, even if you should be able to buy the appropriate machine now. Case in point - laptop features have gone stupid to match the dropping prices. Screens that reflect the lighting, speakers so quiet you can't hear shit, and now screens sizes that offer less area just when you thought the old sizes were going away for good.
It makes you wonder - are software makers getting paid to sneak in features that waste hardware?
It's entirely possible that this conjecture is false, and some of the numbers they found are actually not congruent numbers
Surely a number less or equal to a trillion is testable for congruentness. The algorithm to test n would be find rational numbers x and y such that sqrt(x^2 + y^2) is rational and n = xy/2. It could be hard work for some of the numbers, but that's the whole point - to have done the work once and for all.
The claim is 3,148,379,694 congruent numbers were found - a finite number of numbers - so it would be just a matter of time to confirm them all. Would they even make the claim without checking every one of these?
The answer may lie in the quantity of content, as far as selling is concerned.
Fact: the Internet allows a lot of free content in small page-sized elements.
Hypothesis: want to sell content? Make it a lot bigger than a page.
If you are a typical person, an article will often make you scratch your head. People won't buy such small scraps of information because they don't see long-term value. It's cheap for the writer to whip the stuff out, but it's selling strength is very low. The economics of buying news is simply that people usually find news reporting to be entertainment and not much use in helping them gain financially. The news is very hit and miss in terms of helping people make a good bargain, improve their life, or make a better decision. As a result, the media is marketing to the point that they give away their content, and after all, putting news on the Internet is in a large part marketing.
What if writers put in the effort to make book-sized stories and filled in the background as well as the many things that are omitted for lack of space in the one-page article? It would take a lot more time to get the info and write about it, but in the computer age it may be viable. Many objections besides the cost and risk come to mind such as readers would go nuts distinguishing between facts and opinions, as opinions inevitably creep into such large hunks of verbiage, or wading through different versions from different publishers, or even the sheer cost of spending more than X dollars a day to get the lowdown on big news.
But if the information is proven to serve readers in a way that helps them earn more, then they will be more likely to actually pay for it. If a person could pick up on some news in such completeness that s/he could go to an employer or a client and say "I learned such and such to the degree that I can actually turn it into business value," then some extra dollars might flow in the way of the news consumer. This kind of cause-effect would loosen many a purse string when it comes to spending for daily news.
I'm really waiting for the day when you (can) just leave your computer on at all times
I can! - but it's plugged in.
Prolonged battery power is better if you put the computer to sleep, though my computer likes to thrash the disk when it wakes up. For people willing to spend a tad more an external battery will help.
If in ten years you have a hit, then you will have made so much more money that the next ten years is not worth all that much
If Michael Jackson was still alive, he could use any money he gets after the first 10 years.
Regarding works that are about money: anything that is a good seller should retain copyright, but once it has phased out for X years based on previous sales and relative size of the market, the clock should start ticking and either the marketers should get busy or copyright expires if the sales don't add up.
There are works that still have value even if sales are low though. The entirety of the work might not appeal to the market, but there could be portions that are valuable for certain purposes, so copyright expiry would have to be based on the lack of new copies, references, or usages to totalities or unique (relative to all creative output) portions of the work being made after X years.
Quantum mechanical problems? Quantum computer! If not, has conventional transistors been proven at anything close to that size in the lab?
India and China have people that want to invest in advanced technology. That's good for humanity.
If IBM is giving up some of its US strength, all the easier for competitors, so it's up to people to make opportunities rather than just worry. The tech world is all about trying new things anyways.
To prevent forgery and the extra walk back, simply have the machine take the license plate number. The meter reader then enters all the plate numbers and instantly sees who is expired/not paid. Also can have a more friendly feature: let the driver repark somewhere else as long as time is on the plate.
Even smarter way - charge more money and keep cars out of the inner city. Surely the parking fees are comparable to cab fare anyways.
Somehow I always labored under the idea there were 3 dimensions of space. The Big Bang only creates 2 dimensions?