You're right, project management is for suits. Nobody here wants to talk about that crap. Let's have another Slashdot thread about Reiser4 and the Linux kernel, which SCM solution Linus wants to try next, the latest OSS project to fork its code base, or some juicy public acrimony between Free Software figureheads. God knows its better than talking about project management.
As the head of sales of one of the largest PM training companies in the world, I was interested in this book. Upon reading this chapter however, all I can say is... what crap! The author has no concept of what project management really is, or how it works.
Describe some of the large software projects you have managed, and then maybe we'll take your word on it.
Sometimes experience trumps expertise. Sometimes practice outshines theory. Scott's book is written for practitioners. I'll wager that you are not the target audience.
Nope, you're still wrong. God could have created a universe where plausible evolutionary mechanisms are sufficient to have created the observable complexity of life. The ID proponents claim that, in our own universe, He did not. They do not claim that God is incapable of creating a universe where evolution is a plausible theory, just that it is not a plausible theory in our own universe.
ID posits that there are structures that cannot have resulted from evolution (eyes are one frequently cited example). Now, if God created the universe, this is equivalent to saying that God can't have created it in such a way as to evolve these structures. Thus, according to ID, God is not omniscient and/or omnipotent. Sure sounds like heresy to me.
No, it is not equivalent at all; your inference contains a logical fallacy. ID observes that there are structures God created which cannot have been created by evolution. If true, this simply means that the universe God chose to create is incompatible with evolution. That doesn't mean He couldn't have created a universe which would have appeared perfectly compatible with evolution, just that he didn't. So it is not heresy in any way shape or form.
Then I guess you'll be a monkey's uncle. The phenomenon you've discovered is the brain's ability to find patterns in randomness. The definitional characteristic of a fractal is that it is self similar on all scales. A little clustering does not a fractal make. Martin
The failure rates, in fact, will likely be fractal -- you'll have long periods without failures, or with few failures, and then a bunch of failures will occur in a short period of time, seemingly all at once.
Not to nitpick or anything, but drive failure rates aren't fractal.
IMHO, the Leap is better than the famous Herman Miller Aeron for most purposes. It may not be as sexy, but it is more adjustable and more comfortable in long term use. In particular, the lumbar support of the Aeron is poorly thought out and uncomfortable, whereas the Leap has extremely adjustable and well designed lower back support. The one advantage of the Aeron is the breathable mesh. Whether this is important or not depends on the air conditioning in your office, and maybe whether you are prone to a sweaty ass.
You can buy the Leap chair online, but I recommend finding a local dealer. You get to sit in the chair, you get more options, more color and fabric choices, and to my suprise it was actually cheaper (at OneWorkplace in Milpitas, CA).
The Jerker is a cheap ripoff of the fantastically expensive AnthroBench style technical workbenches. Either one provides flexible, configurable workspaces with space for everything you need in easy reach. They also let you choose your desk height for better ergonomics, even standing height if that's what you prefer. If you're spending your own money, the Jerker I believe has a much better price/performance ratio. It's cheap but well designed and well built. It holds up to office use. Of course we'll see what I think after the next earthquake.
Check this page out to see how various people have pimped out their Jerker desks:
I can't think of a single explanation for this strange move that would be even remotely positive for Google's stock price.
1) If Google really wants to acquire companies, they can do so with stock rather than cash. Wall Street would look more kindly on an all stock transaction, rather than an offering followed by a cash transaction. In that context, the only reason to do this offering is to monetize stock that is seen as overpriced by the management of either Google or its acquisition targets, or both.
2) If instead Google wants to use this money to fund organic growth, the scale of investment it implies is staggering. Google has a few billion in cash and is generating free cash flow at a rate closing in on a billion a year. If that is not enough cash for Google's organic growth needs, one has to wonder whether they are in need of some adult supervision.
3) If Google wants to sit on the cash and earn interest, without any other near term goal, that is an admission that in the view of management, Google's stock appreciation potential is no better than current 4 or 5% interest rates. That would hardly be good news for investors, who are paying a high P/E premium in the expectation of market-beating growth. This inescapable conclusion seems to be lost on Mark Rowen at Prudential, who claims that the dilutative impact of this offering will be offset by interest earned on the proceeds, all the while reaffirming his price target of $400! Only an fool would want a stock with 40% appreciation potential diluted with cash earning 4%. Such a statement can only be disingenuous; either Rowen is desperate to put a positive spin on bad news, or he does not believe his own price target.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone can come up with a financially rational positive spin on this news.
Look, I know righteous indignation is inevitable with a story like this, but the ESRB's actions are eminently reasonable. I can't imagine what else they could have done under the circumstances.
1) Clearly, if this scene were in the game when it was rated, it would not have gotten an M rating. Now that the situation appears to be one where Rockstar circumvented the ESRB's ratings process, the ESRB must do what they can to enforce their standards. Whatever you think of their silly standards, they are the standards they have chosen and they have to enforce them. The fact that a third party hack is involved is irrelevant as long as there is reasonable suspicion that Rockstar intentionally circumvented the ESRB.
2) Violence OK, sex bad? I think there is an internal logic to this that has nothing to do with prudishness. Look at the argument that the video game industry makes to justify violent games. "This game is a fantasy. The very extremity of the violence serves to isolate it from real world behavior. Any player with an intact moral compass will instantly distinguish fantasy violence from reality. ESRB ratings help assure that children with insufficient maturity to make this distinction do not play the game." The same argument clearly does not apply to sexuality.
Parents can be expected to instill simple and clear cut distinctions with respect to violence from a very early age. With sexuality, the distinctions are not nearly so clear cut, the age where children are exposed to them is much later, and the social consensus for acceptable behavior is much fuzzier. Hence it is quite reasonable to use a younger age threshold for violence in games than for sexuality in games.
Finally, violence is arguably fundamental to the existence of many genres of computer games. You can reasonably argue that standards which eliminate violence would destroy the industry. The same can hardly be said of sexual content.
Google is being priced at a growth stock but in terms of market capitalization, it is half again as valuble as Yahoo, more than 4 times as valuble as Amazon, twice the value of EBay, and almost a third as valuble as Microsoft. Even if Google were to become the next Microsoft, the return on investment would not be exceptional. When even the most optimistic assumptions result in unexceptional returns, a wise investor stays away.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives.
Humans From Earth T-Bone Burnett
We come from a blue planet light-years away Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate We're out here in the universe buying real estate Hope we haven't gotten here too late
chorus: We're humans from earth We're humans from earth You have nothing at all to fear I think we're gonna like it here
We're looking for a planet with atmosphere Where the air is fresh and the water clear With lots of sun like you have here Three or four hundred days a year
chorus
Bought Manhatten for a string of beads Brought along some gadgets for you to see Heres a crazy little thing we call TV Do you have electricity?
chorus
I know we may seem pretty strange to you But we got know-how and a golden rule We're here to see manifest destiny through Ain't nothing we can't get used to
Slashdot overreacts to tongue-in-cheek article by non expert computer user? Shocker.
I must say I was also miffed by Jaschan's light sentence. One thing that Tierny doesn't mention was that Jaschan was tried as a minor, having been apprehended a few days before his 18th birthday. It apparently makes a big difference in sentencing.
Personally I think Tierny's (and Landsburg's) analysis of the social impact of hacking and the potential deterrent is intriguing. Take the article for what it is, a quite successful attempt to use humor to dramatize a serious problem and a unique way of looking at it.
Much more disturbing to me than Tierney's joking around is the apparently dead serious blame-the-users-and-sysadmins attitude of many of the responses here. WTF are you guys thinking? This is like saying, "Those Londoners deserved to die, they weren't careful enough watching for people with heavy backpacks!" Maybe in today's world we have to take evil for granted and take on the onus of defending ourselves from it, but that does not justify shifting the moral burden from the criminal to the victim.
PA-RISC, MIPS and SPARC had nothing going for them - no competitive advantage, certainly not over AMD64. they were each tied to old-fashioned name-brand-Unix machines, which are now thankfully extinct.
PA-RISC, MIPS, and SPARC were killed off by the mere threat of Itanium about 5 years before AMD64 first shipped. MIPS scrapped Beast and Capitan back in 1998. AMD64 was barely a glint in its designers' eyes at that point.
We'll never know if they would have been competitive. However, the one company that didn't shitcan their 64 bit RISC development, IBM, now holds a dominant position in high performance computing. Someone clearly thinks they have a competitive advantage or they wouldn't be selling supercomputers.
There's about two decades of prior work in this field. I've always found the non-photorealistic rendering papers at Siggraph to be particularly interesting and creative. Chinese and Japanese painting are a rich area of study since they are well suited for physical simulation and offer a significant challenge.
The paper that started things off was "Hairy Brushes" by Steve Strassmann at Siggraph '86. I haven't seen this paper in a long time and I can't find it online.
One oft cited work, perhaps the first to look specifically at Japanese painting in computer graphics, is Guo and Kunii, "Modeling the diffuse paintings of 'sumie'", 1991. I can't find a copy of this either.
A more recent paper is "Two Methods for Creating Chinese Painting" by Chan, Akleman and Chen. Available online here. In addition, this paper has a good summary of previous research in the field.
One of my favorites is Barbara Meier, "Painterly Rendering for Animation", from Siggraph '96. It's devoted more to European painting styles but it is a great paper. Found here.
First, you're missing three zeros. AMD's net earnings are in millions, not thousands.
Second, AMD's flash business is deadweight, it's been losing money for several quarters, and they're looking to get rid of it. On the other hand, their CPU business is actually profitable. Exactly the opposite of what you say.
Third, your original claim was that Intel includes the cost of the fab in their selling prices whereas AMD does not. If that were the case AMD would be losing billions of dollars a year. And if Intel were in a competitive, cost driven market, they would not be earning 30% gross margins.
Fourth, even if AMD were losing money, that would hardly disprove the existence of artifically inflated CPU prices. The chip business has massive economies of scale which makes chip production much cheaper the larger your market share. (Incidentally, this is why AMD has sometimes sells CPUs at a loss, not because they're too dumb to amortize their fabs.) AMD's claim is that Intel has denied AMD market share through illegal anticompetitive practices, keeping AMD's costs artificially high, allowing Intel to earn it's 30% operating margins.
Keep your day job, whatever it is, because you'd never make it as a financial analyst.
Look, this has nothing to do with "pricing the cost of the fab in the chip"... of course every chip manufacturer does that or they'd be out of business. Other than R&D and a little bit of ultrapure sand, most of the cost of your Pentium or Athlon is amortizing the fab.
What Intel is pricing into their chips, which AMD is not, is a crapload of operating margin, some 30%. By contrast, AMD is earning about 3% and Dell, the most fiscally secure company in the PC supply chain after Intel, about 9%. (Trailing twelve months, from finance.yahoo.com.)
From the responses to this article it seems that most of you haven't read AMD's actual complaint. It's very interesting, it's written for humans not lawyers, and anyone who cares about the computer industry would do well to read it.
Martin
Re:What about Commercial Aircraft?
on
Liquid Hydrogen UAV
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What makes you think hydrogen has any advantages over kerosene (jet fuel) for commercial aircraft? Hydrogen has a lower energy density, it's far more expensive, and it's much harder to store. The only (debatable) advantage is environmental and that hardly outweighs the crushing disadvantages.
The press release is mighty short on details, but I assume this UAV uses electric motors. Presumably liquid hydrogen and a fuel cell is lighter than batteries. It's a great solution if your goal is to fly very slowly for a long, long time. Not so good if you want to move half a million pounds at 600mph.
The most incredible wirewrap project I ever saw was CMU's original Warp computer, a 10 CPU array computer, all wirewrapped and running at 10 MHz. Each cell had 255 chips and drew 136 watts peak. The whole array delivered 100 MFLOPS peak and about 30 MFLOPS on real problems. Apparently the price/performance was quite good by the standards of the day (1986).
The boards themselves were an incredibly dense thicket of wire wrap. You could barely see the board for the layers and layers of wiring. I looked for a photo on the web but couldn't find one. Here's a paper describing the project:
AMD has no incentive to reduce prices below the point where they sell every chip they can build.
All evidence suggests that AMD is constrained by supply, not demand. In that context, the high price is a reflection of AMD's competitiveness, not a hindrance to their competitiveness.
The real downside to those high prices is that they indicate that AMD continues to be significantly constrained by manufacturing.
Holy jumping to conclusions, Batman. Apart from all the posts about how much porn and torrents you could fit in 850 gigs, and proclaiming the death of tape backup, has anyone considered that this seems to be a read only technology?
I briefly skimmed the patent and I didn't see anything to suggest that these discs are rewritable. All the usage examples in the patent are bulk distribution related. I didn't see any mention of how the data could be changed on disk. My (admittedly poor) intuition for how this works and how rewritable media work makes it seem farfetched that this could ever be made rewritable.
Can anyone with good knowledge of the patent or optics or materials science comment on whether this technique could be adapted to rewritable discs?
You are arguing for basic science and technology research. You do not seem to be arguing for investing in space exploration for survival purposes at this time. If so, we are in complete agreement.
However, if indeed science and/or technology save the human race from extinction, it will be long before our sun dies out, and through far more prosaic means than colonizing other solar systems. There are more imminent threats.
As for why explore space, my own rationale would be simple curiousity.
Ah, so you would like to not only colonize space, but use space as a means to continue growing as a species. That means at some point soon, we need to start shipping 6 million people a month into self sufficient space colonies.
Once again, terrestrial solutions are cheaper and easier. Condoms, anyone?
None of your hyper-disasters would be addressed by anything we can do today, on or off the Earth. We are, for the forseeable future, utterly powerless to avert any disaster that would affect our entire solar system. So remind me again what this has to do with investing in space exploration today?
Just to clarify my own motives, I think exploring space is extremely important, I just think human survival is a stupid pretext for an otherwise worthy goal.
I want to elaborate on this. I am quite convinced that the survival argument for space travel is fundamentally an excuse used by people whose real reasons are less rational. How else could such a patently nonsensical argument have gained such passionate support among a community of otherwise intelligent and rational people?
The counterargument is as follows: what could anybody or anything possibly do to our planet to make it as hostile an environment as, say, Mars?
Even nuclear war or an asteroid strike would be unlikely to eliminate the oxygen from the atmosphere or change the mean surface temperature by more than, say, 20 or 30 degrees Celsius. Still quite hospitable in the grand scheme of things.
Rather than shipping a self sufficient colony of humans to Mars, at extraordinary difficulty, expense, and risk, why not just build the same colony in a physically and environmentally isolated place on Earth, like some mine shaft somewhere? Heck, build two for redundancy. The engineering and political risk to such a project would be vastly reduced by avoiding the need to shlep everything between gravity wells. Space travel is extraordinary difficult, and as a result, space engineering projects have a remarkably poor success rate. The survival of the species hardly seems like an area where we should choose to take on vast and unnecessary risks.
If our goal were truly to protect the survival of the species, we would start with that premise and consider the technical merits of all the possible solutions. Yet we seem to be entering this debate with a preconception that space colonization is the answer. I believe that the answer is preordained simply because survival of the species never was a goal, and never will be; it is simply a rationalization for our desire to explore a new frontier!
I think nothing illustrates this better than the political absurdity of actually implementing a realistic human survival plan here on Earth. Can you imagine getting Congress to spend a few billion dollars for a self sufficient colony on Earth? It would be laughed out of committee. Even at the height of the Cold War, we were telling schoolchildren to hide under their desks instead of seriously trying to protect our future. And just writing these words, I am starting to sound like a survivalist crackpot!
Why is it so much easier for us to justify an enormously difficult, expensive, and failure prone attempt at survivalism in space when we do it so much better, faster, and cheaper here on Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, project management is for suits. Nobody here wants to talk about that crap. Let's have another Slashdot thread about Reiser4 and the Linux kernel, which SCM solution Linus wants to try next, the latest OSS project to fork its code base, or some juicy public acrimony between Free Software figureheads. God knows its better than talking about project management.
Martin
As the head of sales of one of the largest PM training companies in the world, I was interested in this book. Upon reading this chapter however, all I can say is ... what crap! The author has no concept of what project management really is, or how it works.
Describe some of the large software projects you have managed, and then maybe we'll take your word on it.
Sometimes experience trumps expertise. Sometimes practice outshines theory. Scott's book is written for practitioners. I'll wager that you are not the target audience.
Martin
Nope, you're still wrong. God could have created a universe where plausible evolutionary mechanisms are sufficient to have created the observable complexity of life. The ID proponents claim that, in our own universe, He did not. They do not claim that God is incapable of creating a universe where evolution is a plausible theory, just that it is not a plausible theory in our own universe.
Martin
ID posits that there are structures that cannot have resulted from evolution (eyes are one frequently cited example). Now, if God created the universe, this is equivalent to saying that God can't have created it in such a way as to evolve these structures. Thus, according to ID, God is not omniscient and/or omnipotent. Sure sounds like heresy to me.
No, it is not equivalent at all; your inference contains a logical fallacy. ID observes that there are structures God created which cannot have been created by evolution. If true, this simply means that the universe God chose to create is incompatible with evolution. That doesn't mean He couldn't have created a universe which would have appeared perfectly compatible with evolution, just that he didn't. So it is not heresy in any way shape or form.
Martin
(atheist)
Then I guess you'll be a monkey's uncle.
The phenomenon you've discovered is the brain's ability to find patterns in randomness.
The definitional characteristic of a fractal is that it is self similar on all scales. A little clustering does not a fractal make.
Martin
Not to nitpick or anything, but drive failure rates aren't fractal.
Martin
Chair: Steelcase Leap
IMHO, the Leap is better than the famous Herman Miller Aeron for most purposes. It may not be as sexy, but it is more adjustable and more comfortable in long term use. In particular, the lumbar support of the Aeron is poorly thought out and uncomfortable, whereas the Leap has extremely adjustable and well designed lower back support. The one advantage of the Aeron is the breathable mesh. Whether this is important or not depends on the air conditioning in your office, and maybe whether you are prone to a sweaty ass.
You can buy the Leap chair online, but I recommend finding a local dealer. You get to sit in the chair, you get more options, more color and fabric choices, and to my suprise it was actually cheaper (at OneWorkplace in Milpitas, CA).
Desk: Ikea Jerker
The Jerker is a cheap ripoff of the fantastically expensive AnthroBench style technical workbenches. Either one provides flexible, configurable workspaces with space for everything you need in easy reach. They also let you choose your desk height for better ergonomics, even standing height if that's what you prefer. If you're spending your own money, the Jerker I believe has a much better price/performance ratio. It's cheap but well designed and well built. It holds up to office use. Of course we'll see what I think after the next earthquake.
Check this page out to see how various people have pimped out their Jerker desks:
http://adam.pra.to/content/jerker/
Martin
I can't think of a single explanation for this strange move that would be even remotely positive for Google's stock price.
1) If Google really wants to acquire companies, they can do so with stock rather than cash. Wall Street would look more kindly on an all stock transaction, rather than an offering followed by a cash transaction. In that context, the only reason to do this offering is to monetize stock that is seen as overpriced by the management of either Google or its acquisition targets, or both.
2) If instead Google wants to use this money to fund organic growth, the scale of investment it implies is staggering. Google has a few billion in cash and is generating free cash flow at a rate closing in on a billion a year. If that is not enough cash for Google's organic growth needs, one has to wonder whether they are in need of some adult supervision.
3) If Google wants to sit on the cash and earn interest, without any other near term goal, that is an admission that in the view of management, Google's stock appreciation potential is no better than current 4 or 5% interest rates. That would hardly be good news for investors, who are paying a high P/E premium in the expectation of market-beating growth. This inescapable conclusion seems to be lost on Mark Rowen at Prudential, who claims that the dilutative impact of this offering will be offset by interest earned on the proceeds, all the while reaffirming his price target of $400! Only an fool would want a stock with 40% appreciation potential diluted with cash earning 4%. Such a statement can only be disingenuous; either Rowen is desperate to put a positive spin on bad news, or he does not believe his own price target.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone can come up with a financially rational positive spin on this news.
Martin
Look, I know righteous indignation is inevitable with a story like this, but the ESRB's actions are eminently reasonable. I can't imagine what else they could have done under the circumstances.
1) Clearly, if this scene were in the game when it was rated, it would not have gotten an M rating. Now that the situation appears to be one where Rockstar circumvented the ESRB's ratings process, the ESRB must do what they can to enforce their standards. Whatever you think of their silly standards, they are the standards they have chosen and they have to enforce them. The fact that a third party hack is involved is irrelevant as long as there is reasonable suspicion that Rockstar intentionally circumvented the ESRB.
2) Violence OK, sex bad? I think there is an internal logic to this that has nothing to do with prudishness. Look at the argument that the video game industry makes to justify violent games. "This game is a fantasy. The very extremity of the violence serves to isolate it from real world behavior. Any player with an intact moral compass will instantly distinguish fantasy violence from reality. ESRB ratings help assure that children with insufficient maturity to make this distinction do not play the game." The same argument clearly does not apply to sexuality.
Parents can be expected to instill simple and clear cut distinctions with respect to violence from a very early age. With sexuality, the distinctions are not nearly so clear cut, the age where children are exposed to them is much later, and the social consensus for acceptable behavior is much fuzzier. Hence it is quite reasonable to use a younger age threshold for violence in games than for sexuality in games.
Finally, violence is arguably fundamental to the existence of many genres of computer games. You can reasonably argue that standards which eliminate violence would destroy the industry. The same can hardly be said of sexual content.
Martin
http://hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc050613.htm
http://hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc050620.htm
My paraphrase:
Google is being priced at a growth stock but in terms of market capitalization, it is half again as valuble as Yahoo, more than 4 times as valuble as Amazon, twice the value of EBay, and almost a third as valuble as Microsoft. Even if Google were to become the next Microsoft, the return on investment would not be exceptional. When even the most optimistic assumptions result in unexceptional returns, a wise investor stays away.
Martin
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives.
Humans From Earth
T-Bone Burnett
We come from a blue planet light-years away
Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate
We're out here in the universe buying real estate
Hope we haven't gotten here too late
chorus:
We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
You have nothing at all to fear
I think we're gonna like it here
We're looking for a planet with atmosphere
Where the air is fresh and the water clear
With lots of sun like you have here
Three or four hundred days a year
chorus
Bought Manhatten for a string of beads
Brought along some gadgets for you to see
Heres a crazy little thing we call TV
Do you have electricity?
chorus
I know we may seem pretty strange to you
But we got know-how and a golden rule
We're here to see manifest destiny through
Ain't nothing we can't get used to
We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
Slashdot overreacts to tongue-in-cheek article by non expert computer user? Shocker.
I must say I was also miffed by Jaschan's light sentence. One thing that Tierny doesn't mention was that Jaschan was tried as a minor, having been apprehended a few days before his 18th birthday. It apparently makes a big difference in sentencing.
Personally I think Tierny's (and Landsburg's) analysis of the social impact of hacking and the potential deterrent is intriguing. Take the article for what it is, a quite successful attempt to use humor to dramatize a serious problem and a unique way of looking at it.
Much more disturbing to me than Tierney's joking around is the apparently dead serious blame-the-users-and-sysadmins attitude of many of the responses here. WTF are you guys thinking? This is like saying, "Those Londoners deserved to die, they weren't careful enough watching for people with heavy backpacks!" Maybe in today's world we have to take evil for granted and take on the onus of defending ourselves from it, but that does not justify shifting the moral burden from the criminal to the victim.
Martin
PA-RISC, MIPS and SPARC had nothing going for them - no competitive advantage, certainly not over AMD64. they were each tied to old-fashioned name-brand-Unix machines, which are now thankfully extinct.
PA-RISC, MIPS, and SPARC were killed off by the mere threat of Itanium about 5 years before AMD64 first shipped. MIPS scrapped Beast and Capitan back in 1998. AMD64 was barely a glint in its designers' eyes at that point.
We'll never know if they would have been competitive. However, the one company that didn't shitcan their 64 bit RISC development, IBM, now holds a dominant position in high performance computing. Someone clearly thinks they have a competitive advantage or they wouldn't be selling supercomputers.
Martin
There's about two decades of prior work in this field. I've always found the non-photorealistic rendering papers at Siggraph to be particularly interesting and creative. Chinese and Japanese painting are a rich area of study since they are well suited for physical simulation and offer a significant challenge.
The paper that started things off was "Hairy Brushes" by Steve Strassmann at Siggraph '86. I haven't seen this paper in a long time and I can't find it online.
One oft cited work, perhaps the first to look specifically at Japanese painting in computer graphics, is Guo and Kunii, "Modeling the diffuse paintings of 'sumie'", 1991. I can't find a copy of this either.
A more recent paper is "Two Methods for Creating Chinese Painting" by Chan, Akleman and Chen. Available online here. In addition, this paper has a good summary of previous research in the field.
One of my favorites is Barbara Meier, "Painterly Rendering for Animation", from Siggraph '96. It's devoted more to European painting styles but it is a great paper. Found here.
Martin
Have you ever READ an SEC filing for AMD?
Yes, and unlike you, I understood them.
First, you're missing three zeros. AMD's net earnings are in millions, not thousands.
Second, AMD's flash business is deadweight, it's been losing money for several quarters, and they're looking to get rid of it. On the other hand, their CPU business is actually profitable. Exactly the opposite of what you say.
Third, your original claim was that Intel includes the cost of the fab in their selling prices whereas AMD does not. If that were the case AMD would be losing billions of dollars a year. And if Intel were in a competitive, cost driven market, they would not be earning 30% gross margins.
Fourth, even if AMD were losing money, that would hardly disprove the existence of artifically inflated CPU prices. The chip business has massive economies of scale which makes chip production much cheaper the larger your market share. (Incidentally, this is why AMD has sometimes sells CPUs at a loss, not because they're too dumb to amortize their fabs.) AMD's claim is that Intel has denied AMD market share through illegal anticompetitive practices, keeping AMD's costs artificially high, allowing Intel to earn it's 30% operating margins.
Keep your day job, whatever it is, because you'd never make it as a financial analyst.
Martin
Look, this has nothing to do with "pricing the cost of the fab in the chip"... of course every chip manufacturer does that or they'd be out of business. Other than R&D and a little bit of ultrapure sand, most of the cost of your Pentium or Athlon is amortizing the fab.
What Intel is pricing into their chips, which AMD is not, is a crapload of operating margin, some 30%. By contrast, AMD is earning about 3% and Dell, the most fiscally secure company in the PC supply chain after Intel, about 9%. (Trailing twelve months, from finance.yahoo.com.)
From the responses to this article it seems that most of you haven't read AMD's actual complaint. It's very interesting, it's written for humans not lawyers, and anyone who cares about the computer industry would do well to read it.
Martin
What makes you think hydrogen has any advantages over kerosene (jet fuel) for commercial aircraft? Hydrogen has a lower energy density, it's far more expensive, and it's much harder to store. The only (debatable) advantage is environmental and that hardly outweighs the crushing disadvantages.
The press release is mighty short on details, but I assume this UAV uses electric motors. Presumably liquid hydrogen and a fuel cell is lighter than batteries. It's a great solution if your goal is to fly very slowly for a long, long time. Not so good if you want to move half a million pounds at 600mph.
Martin
The most incredible wirewrap project I ever saw was CMU's original Warp computer, a 10 CPU array computer, all wirewrapped and running at 10 MHz. Each cell had 255 chips and drew 136 watts peak. The whole array delivered 100 MFLOPS peak and about 30 MFLOPS on real problems. Apparently the price/performance was quite good by the standards of the day (1986).
_ 1987_1/annaratone_m_1987_1.pdf
The boards themselves were an incredibly dense thicket of wire wrap. You could barely see the board for the layers and layers of wiring. I looked for a photo on the web but couldn't find one. Here's a paper describing the project:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/annaratone_m
Martin
AMD has no incentive to reduce prices below the point where they sell every chip they can build.
All evidence suggests that AMD is constrained by supply, not demand. In that context, the high price is a reflection of AMD's competitiveness, not a hindrance to their competitiveness.
The real downside to those high prices is that they indicate that AMD continues to be significantly constrained by manufacturing.
Martin
No, your math is wrong. It would store about 76 minutes of uncompressed high def video.
186MB/sec * 60 seconds/minute * 76 minutes = 848MB.
Martin
Holy jumping to conclusions, Batman. Apart from all the posts about how much porn and torrents you could fit in 850 gigs, and proclaiming the death of tape backup, has anyone considered that this seems to be a read only technology?
I briefly skimmed the patent and I didn't see anything to suggest that these discs are rewritable. All the usage examples in the patent are bulk distribution related. I didn't see any mention of how the data could be changed on disk. My (admittedly poor) intuition for how this works and how rewritable media work makes it seem farfetched that this could ever be made rewritable.
Can anyone with good knowledge of the patent or optics or materials science comment on whether this technique could be adapted to rewritable discs?
Martin
You are arguing for basic science and technology research. You do not seem to be arguing for investing in space exploration for survival purposes at this time. If so, we are in complete agreement.
However, if indeed science and/or technology save the human race from extinction, it will be long before our sun dies out, and through far more prosaic means than colonizing other solar systems. There are more imminent threats.
As for why explore space, my own rationale would be simple curiousity.
Martin
Ah, so you would like to not only colonize space, but use space as a means to continue growing as a species. That means at some point soon, we need to start shipping 6 million people a month into self sufficient space colonies.
Once again, terrestrial solutions are cheaper and easier. Condoms, anyone?
Martin
None of your hyper-disasters would be addressed by anything we can do today, on or off the Earth. We are, for the forseeable future, utterly powerless to avert any disaster that would affect our entire solar system. So remind me again what this has to do with investing in space exploration today?
Just to clarify my own motives, I think exploring space is extremely important, I just think human survival is a stupid pretext for an otherwise worthy goal.
Martin
I want to elaborate on this. I am quite convinced that the survival argument for space travel is fundamentally an excuse used by people whose real reasons are less rational. How else could such a patently nonsensical argument have gained such passionate support among a community of otherwise intelligent and rational people?
The counterargument is as follows: what could anybody or anything possibly do to our planet to make it as hostile an environment as, say, Mars?
Even nuclear war or an asteroid strike would be unlikely to eliminate the oxygen from the atmosphere or change the mean surface temperature by more than, say, 20 or 30 degrees Celsius. Still quite hospitable in the grand scheme of things.
Rather than shipping a self sufficient colony of humans to Mars, at extraordinary difficulty, expense, and risk, why not just build the same colony in a physically and environmentally isolated place on Earth, like some mine shaft somewhere? Heck, build two for redundancy. The engineering and political risk to such a project would be vastly reduced by avoiding the need to shlep everything between gravity wells. Space travel is extraordinary difficult, and as a result, space engineering projects have a remarkably poor success rate. The survival of the species hardly seems like an area where we should choose to take on vast and unnecessary risks.
If our goal were truly to protect the survival of the species, we would start with that premise and consider the technical merits of all the possible solutions. Yet we seem to be entering this debate with a preconception that space colonization is the answer. I believe that the answer is preordained simply because survival of the species never was a goal, and never will be; it is simply a rationalization for our desire to explore a new frontier!
I think nothing illustrates this better than the political absurdity of actually implementing a realistic human survival plan here on Earth. Can you imagine getting Congress to spend a few billion dollars for a self sufficient colony on Earth? It would be laughed out of committee. Even at the height of the Cold War, we were telling schoolchildren to hide under their desks instead of seriously trying to protect our future. And just writing these words, I am starting to sound like a survivalist crackpot!
Why is it so much easier for us to justify an enormously difficult, expensive, and failure prone attempt at survivalism in space when we do it so much better, faster, and cheaper here on Earth?
Martin