TFA is not being truthful about what the research is about. For example, the question of when to take the car keys away from an Alzheimer's patient is very critically important if you are a family member. Such research is attempting to find simple tests to determine if a neurologically impaired person is still fit to drive or not. It is not simply trying to find out if Alzheimer's patients drive worse than the general population.
You could weld a valve onto the top, but if you try to close it, the pressure will seek relief elsewhere. If you get really, really lucky, it just blows out the weld and rejects the valve.
Actually, they are planning to put a "capping valve" at the top of the BOP soon, replacing the top hat thingy they have in place now. They are giving very serious consideration to unbolting the flange at the top of the BOP, then bolting a new riser on top.
Also, they are already collecting oil through from the side of the BOP, via the lines and manifold they were using for the top kill attempt, so even if they did seal the top of the BOP, there would still be some pressure relieved via those lines. However, since BP is not talking about shutting the top of the BOP, they must not believe there is enough pressure relief through the top kill manifold to ensure that the well casing won't fail.
Here's a quote from a recent conference call by BP:
"And then – and then in terms of the capping valve, I’ve always told you that we have three options that we’re working. That remains. The – we’re starting to favor the flange-to-flange connection. It brings some advantages in terms of its ability to hold back more pressure. In fact, we believe it has the potential to actually hold the full pressure of the well. However, its challenges are around installation and the teams have been working a lot on all of the different tools and equipment that would be required to do that."
First small quantities of the accessory projector are promised "this summer". Embedded in phones about a year after, as green lasers become available in large quantities.
Frequency doubled IR is not an option either because you can't modulate the beam fast enough.
Actually, the Corning green lasers in the ShowWX are freq doubled. True green is not expected for several years at least. More on the Corning lasers here.
It should get there, in a couple years. The reason it will be so expensive to start with is two new technologies in one: Scanning MEMS mirror which projects the image, and the green lasers inside, which have not been produced before.
Microvision has been waiting for green laser supplier for a long time. Corning has built a facility and is ramping up production of green lasers now.
When green lasers are available in quantities of millions, the laser projectors will be built into blackberries, iphones, digital cameras, etc.
And exposing students to a myriad of different skills is the best way. Take a semester of basic shop, cooking, auto mechanics. Offer courses in basic home repair, teach bicycle repair.
Sounds nice, but that isn't happening,for many reasons.
The core requirements of math, science, language arts, etc., have been increasing, so each student gets fewer elective slots--and the counselors will push them to use those electives to take foreign language or something else that's on the "college prep" list.
It costs FAR more to teach a section of home repair than it costs to teach, say, drama or creative writing. Hands-on learning requires more materials, more equipment, and a lot more space.
There is a major shortage of teachers in the areas you mention; industrial technology teachers are an endangered species, with new teachers being produced at a slower pace than retirements. Unlike many of the teachers in the building, the shop teacher could walk out the door any day and make more money the next day working in one of the trades s/he teaches.
You need to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. You would be shocked to see how little the typical middle school or HS student knows about using tools and working with materials.
The trade schools teach job-specific skills, and the secondary schools teach general skills. Also, the trade schools are begging for studnts because the secondary schools are not producing graduates who have an interest in the trades. It's not that students wouldn't like to learn the trades, they just have basically zero context or experience with hands on learning. The typical HS graduate has no idea the type of opportunities that are out there for someone who can fix a furnace or install power lines, etc.
If you receive a dividend you have to pay income taxes on it. Buybacks increase your percentage ownership in the company, which increases share price (usually), and you only pay capital gains on the increase, and that only happens when you realize the gain. Buybacks are usually good for shareholders.
Microsoft had over 10B shares out a couple years ago and now has about 9B outtanding, if I remember right.
Which is `generally better' doesn't matter, only which is better for the task at hand.
Which is exactly my point. The OP is, apparently, lobbying legislaors to mandate migration to FOSS. The post I was responding to said that the argument shoudl be that FOSS is better. I argue that it is not.
Additionally, it is not possible for schools to switch en masse to FOSS because they need many proprietary apps and an OS which will run them.
One thing you really need to make sure, is that the teachers know that OSS is better.
The problem with that is that OSS overall is not better for the average teacher or student. Some apps are better, some tools are better, but it is not true generally that OSS is better.
The OP isn't clear, but from teh use of the words "switching to OSS" it seems that the topic is about legislating a full or close to full migration to OSS. That's a Very Bad Idea.
Besides being political folly, and educationally inappropriate in many instances, it is currently not possible for a school district to "switch to" OSS. It is certainly possible for specific labs or certain departments to infuse OSS into their technology plan, but at this time it is just not possible to do without proprietary apps or OS.
I'm sure the majority of them aren't very complex apps, and the learning material could be easily put together (perhaps with bounties for completing modules, it'd be a nice alternative source of income for teachers).
This is just not true. You have to remember that even a small district teaches everything from auto shop to Cisco Networking to Graphic Arts to CNC Machining, CAD, Animation, and on and on and on. There is no way that a district could do without Microsoft Windows. It is impossible at this time. You could replace a lot of school computers with Macs, but not all. You could probaby not replace more than 10% with Linux.
Yes there are a lot of machines sitting in libraries that are used for little more than typing and webcrawling, but they are the exception, not the rule. Computer teaching labs are loaded with apps for many different academic disciplines and those labs are often booked through the day.
Until Linux can run every app that Windows can run, it will not replace Windows in any insitution of any complexity. Munich has proven that.
Here's the company site. No mention of battery life issues.
The first Microvision protoype is roughly the size of an ipod. Most of that space is battery. The company claims about 1.5 hours use, but claims future iterations will be up to 40% more efficient.
A fully functioning prototype of a normal sized cell phone with an embedded laser projector is being shown to wireless carriers this week at the wireless show in Las Vegas: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080331/20080331005572.html?.v=1
They generally suck as sales people treat them like they are durable and they are in fact not in any way. they break easily
Those are just smaller versions of old technology. The new ones being developed use lasers or LEDs as the light source. The laser projector being demonstrated by Microvision is amazing. Infinite focus, small enough to fit into a normal sized cell phone. It uses a tiny scanning mirror to display the image rather than a lens. Should be very durable.
Actually, the Evil Bit refers to an April Fool's joke a few years ago.
I think non-net-neutrality can be divided into 2 camps: 1. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for quality of service reasons (such as prioritising realtime protocols so they remain useful) - I believe this is good. 2. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for financial/political/contractural reasons (trying to downgrade the competition or extorting money out of a content provider) - this is certainly very bad.
Here again, somebody has to decide which packets are worthy of immediate delivery and which ones are not. It is very difficult to distinguish between your first and second cases. I might be in desperate need of a piece of software for my business that is accessible via bittorrent, but have to wait for it because of gamers, who are using the network for recreation.
Under your "bad" scenario I would at least have the option of paying for less latency. Under the "good" scenario I am subject to the whims of the admins.
It seems to me that a neutral network is the least bad option.
I was mostly joking, but not completely. You can do whatever you want on your own network. But I don't want to be the person to decide what packets are good and which are bad (maybe the 'evil bit' was a good idea, after all) and I dont' want an admin telling me that my use of the network is garbage, or that some idiot vegging out in front of a game for 6 hours is not filling the network with garbage.
Perhaps Slashdot editors could do what every professional editor on the planet does, and define what an acronym means the first time it's referenced in every article.
That would be nice, but you always have the option to, you know, RTFA.
Slashdot covers many esoteric subjects, so it's not likely that you will know every acronym or the name of every obscure language, technology, or application. Many times I have had to go into the threads to get more info about what the article was about, and many times I have learned interesting and very useful information that way.
Well, I think we're sort of arguing two different things here, although we're mostly in agreement. The thing that concerns you that doesnt' concern me too much is the sports vs. hard news thing.
Although I couldn't care less about the sports, I know that lots of people read the paper only for the sports (young males especially). That will not change with online news sources. The difference is that now you know exactly how many people read each article .
I wish I could wave a magic wand which would make people pay attention less to sports and more to things that make a difference in our world, but that ain't gonna happen. You can lament the vapidity of our culture, but a business cannot ignore it. If people want pictures of football games, and you already have a photographer there taking photos, then post 'em.
I think the same thing will work with hard news, though. This is where you and I differ. I say that online news should be different than the printed news. In addition to re-printing the exact text of what appears in the paper version, it must be immediate, with rich content, including video or audio, many photos, unedited transcripts, additional text, historical context and links to related items, etc. And I know this is not likely to happen, but it should include reader comments. Most of value of slashdot comes from the readers comments, not from the posted articles. At slashdot I can count on someone in the audience having more expertise than the author of the article. Big news outfits are afraid of the readers because of all the trolling and inanity, but they are losing many of their potentioal page views to the people who are not afraid to deal with it. THe big guys write the article and then some blog links to it, which drives traffic to the article, which is nice, but then all the subsequent commenting traffic goes to the blog.
Obviously, blogs would continue to get a lot of the coment traffic even if the news sites did enable comments, but the fact that new sites don't enable comments is just another example of 'horseless carriage' thinking. The old media decide what is important enough for us to read, which was historically necessary because of space limitations in the paper or time limitations on the air. Then, if any reader input is printed it is only after being vetted by the same people who decided what was important to print in the first place.
On the internet that paradigm is quaint and obsolete. Your management must begin to grasp that now or they will be out of business sooner than they realize. If they think that their business is printing paper news, then they are doomed. If they think their business is to provide the best possible news, sports and information that the technology allows, then they have a chance.
The surest way for a business to fail at a new technology is to try to conform the new technology to their old way of doing business. I'm glad to hear your bosses are attending seminars that asssume the printed newspaper is dead. The sooner they get over their mourning period, the sooner they can begin to deal with the new reality. I wish them luck, but I am not optimistic they will grok the new paradigm. Instead, at every turn, when someone says "we should enable comments", or "we should give the photographers video cameras", everyone will think of reasons NOT to do it, rather than think about HOW to do it successfully. I would bet my house on that.
Thanks for your insider's viewpoint. I think you made my case for me, though, here:
The online features that draw the biggest readership numbers are web-exclusive photo galleries of our local college football team.
This is exactly the point of my post--the newspaper cannot print dozens of high resolution color photos of the game in the dead tree version of the paper, but for next-to-zero costs, they can post them all on the website and that's what's drawing reader attention.
Newspapers and tv stations who have websites must begin to think of their websites differetnly than they think of their other business. Newpapers must become more like tv stations, for one. They are going to have to have constantly updated news stories and richer content if they are going to compete online.
The reason is simple, they will not server their customers. They continue to publish crappy articles usually against any decent enterprise and as such lose their readers daily.
It's not so much that the articles are crappy (although they often are), it's that the newspapers publishers do not grok the internets. It's the "horseless carriage" mentality, but now it's "online newspaper". Ask yourself why would a newspaper post one single picture of an event on it's website? The answer: because it's expensive to print pictures on paper.
The television station websites also suffer the same mentality-- let's put up a website that will have exactly the same content that we broadcast on television.
Anyone who spends any amount of time on Slashdot already knows this, but the internet is different than a t.v. or a newspaper. Therefore, it should have a different type of content. On the internet there are no constraints on how long an article or new clip can be, no limit on the number of photos, no reason you can't post raw video or audio along with the typical edited clips so that people who are interested in a subject can see more indepth coverage.
And why don't tv networks have continuous or near-continuous live feeds on their websites from some of the events they cover. I bet >99% of all the video that is fed to the stations or networks is never broadcast. Why not make it available on the web? Most of it will be pointless and boring, but I might tune in occasionally to see long videos of, say, US soldiers working in Iraq or watch raw footage of someone driving around a hurricane damage zone, etc.
Another idea-- post video of all archival broadcasts and footage on the website so people can watch old news if they want.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is not being truthful about what the research is about. For example, the question of when to take the car keys away from an Alzheimer's patient is very critically important if you are a family member. Such research is attempting to find simple tests to determine if a neurologically impaired person is still fit to drive or not. It is not simply trying to find out if Alzheimer's patients drive worse than the general population.
You could weld a valve onto the top, but if you try to close it, the pressure will seek relief elsewhere. If you get really, really lucky, it just blows out the weld and rejects the valve.
Actually, they are planning to put a "capping valve" at the top of the BOP soon, replacing the top hat thingy they have in place now. They are giving very serious consideration to unbolting the flange at the top of the BOP, then bolting a new riser on top.
Also, they are already collecting oil through from the side of the BOP, via the lines and manifold they were using for the top kill attempt, so even if they did seal the top of the BOP, there would still be some pressure relieved via those lines. However, since BP is not talking about shutting the top of the BOP, they must not believe there is enough pressure relief through the top kill manifold to ensure that the well casing won't fail.
Here's a quote from a recent conference call by BP:
Full transcript of the call is here.
When?
First small quantities of the accessory projector are promised "this summer". Embedded in phones about a year after, as green lasers become available in large quantities.
Frequency doubled IR is not an option either because you can't modulate the beam fast enough.
Actually, the Corning green lasers in the ShowWX are freq doubled. True green is not expected for several years at least. More on the Corning lasers here.
Its why I have been looking at the LED based ones, but they are just not bright enough for my purposes.
LED-based on the left, laser projection on the right: http://www.picoprojector-info.com/files/picoprojector/images/DSC_0016.preview.jpg
Dang, $200 would have been awesome.
It should get there, in a couple years. The reason it will be so expensive to start with is two new technologies in one: Scanning MEMS mirror which projects the image, and the green lasers inside, which have not been produced before.
Microvision has been waiting for green laser supplier for a long time. Corning has built a facility and is ramping up production of green lasers now.
When green lasers are available in quantities of millions, the laser projectors will be built into blackberries, iphones, digital cameras, etc.
Yes it can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFmWAwttqZ8
And exposing students to a myriad of different skills is the best way. Take a semester of basic shop, cooking, auto mechanics. Offer courses in basic home repair, teach bicycle repair.
Sounds nice, but that isn't happening,for many reasons.
The core requirements of math, science, language arts, etc., have been increasing, so each student gets fewer elective slots--and the counselors will push them to use those electives to take foreign language or something else that's on the "college prep" list.
It costs FAR more to teach a section of home repair than it costs to teach, say, drama or creative writing. Hands-on learning requires more materials, more equipment, and a lot more space.
There is a major shortage of teachers in the areas you mention; industrial technology teachers are an endangered species, with new teachers being produced at a slower pace than retirements. Unlike many of the teachers in the building, the shop teacher could walk out the door any day and make more money the next day working in one of the trades s/he teaches.
You need to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. You would be shocked to see how little the typical middle school or HS student knows about using tools and working with materials.
The trade schools teach job-specific skills, and the secondary schools teach general skills. Also, the trade schools are begging for studnts because the secondary schools are not producing graduates who have an interest in the trades. It's not that students wouldn't like to learn the trades, they just have basically zero context or experience with hands on learning. The typical HS graduate has no idea the type of opportunities that are out there for someone who can fix a furnace or install power lines, etc.
If you receive a dividend you have to pay income taxes on it. Buybacks increase your percentage ownership in the company, which increases share price (usually), and you only pay capital gains on the increase, and that only happens when you realize the gain. Buybacks are usually good for shareholders.
Microsoft had over 10B shares out a couple years ago and now has about 9B outtanding, if I remember right.
Which is `generally better' doesn't matter, only which is better for the task at hand.
Which is exactly my point. The OP is, apparently, lobbying legislaors to mandate migration to FOSS. The post I was responding to said that the argument shoudl be that FOSS is better. I argue that it is not.
Additionally, it is not possible for schools to switch en masse to FOSS because they need many proprietary apps and an OS which will run them.
One thing you really need to make sure, is that the teachers know that OSS is better.
The problem with that is that OSS overall is not better for the average teacher or student. Some apps are better, some tools are better, but it is not true generally that OSS is better.
The OP isn't clear, but from teh use of the words "switching to OSS" it seems that the topic is about legislating a full or close to full migration to OSS. That's a Very Bad Idea.
Besides being political folly, and educationally inappropriate in many instances, it is currently not possible for a school district to "switch to" OSS. It is certainly possible for specific labs or certain departments to infuse OSS into their technology plan, but at this time it is just not possible to do without proprietary apps or OS.
I'm sure the majority of them aren't very complex apps, and the learning material could be easily put together (perhaps with bounties for completing modules, it'd be a nice alternative source of income for teachers).
This is just not true. You have to remember that even a small district teaches everything from auto shop to Cisco Networking to Graphic Arts to CNC Machining, CAD, Animation, and on and on and on. There is no way that a district could do without Microsoft Windows. It is impossible at this time. You could replace a lot of school computers with Macs, but not all. You could probaby not replace more than 10% with Linux.
Yes there are a lot of machines sitting in libraries that are used for little more than typing and webcrawling, but they are the exception, not the rule. Computer teaching labs are loaded with apps for many different academic disciplines and those labs are often booked through the day.
Until Linux can run every app that Windows can run, it will not replace Windows in any insitution of any complexity. Munich has proven that.
Here's the company site. No mention of battery life issues.
The first Microvision protoype is roughly the size of an ipod. Most of that space is battery. The company claims about 1.5 hours use, but claims future iterations will be up to 40% more efficient.
Already been done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww4L_O6Lqig
That's someone playing around with a laser pocket projector at a club in Vegas during CES.
A fully functioning prototype of a normal sized cell phone with an embedded laser projector is being shown to wireless carriers this week at the wireless show in Las Vegas: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080331/20080331005572.html?.v=1
you also forgot to mention they have existed for several years now. you can buy one now at http://salestores.com/mitsub44.html
They generally suck as sales people treat them like they are durable and they are in fact not in any way. they break easily
Those are just smaller versions of old technology. The new ones being developed use lasers or LEDs as the light source. The laser projector being demonstrated by Microvision is amazing. Infinite focus, small enough to fit into a normal sized cell phone. It uses a tiny scanning mirror to display the image rather than a lens. Should be very durable.
Actually, the Evil Bit refers to an April Fool's joke a few years ago.
I think non-net-neutrality can be divided into 2 camps:
1. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for quality of service reasons (such as prioritising realtime protocols so they remain useful) - I believe this is good.
2. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for financial/political/contractural reasons (trying to downgrade the competition or extorting money out of a content provider) - this is certainly very bad.
Here again, somebody has to decide which packets are worthy of immediate delivery and which ones are not. It is very difficult to distinguish between your first and second cases. I might be in desperate need of a piece of software for my business that is accessible via bittorrent, but have to wait for it because of gamers, who are using the network for recreation.
Under your "bad" scenario I would at least have the option of paying for less latency. Under the "good" scenario I am subject to the whims of the admins.
It seems to me that a neutral network is the least bad option.
I was mostly joking, but not completely. You can do whatever you want on your own network. But I don't want to be the person to decide what packets are good and which are bad (maybe the 'evil bit' was a good idea, after all) and I dont' want an admin telling me that my use of the network is garbage, or that some idiot vegging out in front of a game for 6 hours is not filling the network with garbage.
We do aggressive traffic shaping to let VoIP and games work nicely when the links are saturated with other traffic (mostly P2P garbage).
Why do you hate network neutrality?
Who made you in charge of deciding that a P2P connection is garbage and a gaming connection is not?
Love this quote from that page: "Please don't be hasty to abuse this site with harsh words and then go off to a favourite porn site."
Perhaps Slashdot editors could do what every professional editor on the planet does, and define what an acronym means the first time it's referenced in every article.
That would be nice, but you always have the option to, you know, RTFA.
Slashdot covers many esoteric subjects, so it's not likely that you will know every acronym or the name of every obscure language, technology, or application. Many times I have had to go into the threads to get more info about what the article was about, and many times I have learned interesting and very useful information that way.
Just sayin'.
Well, I think we're sort of arguing two different things here, although we're mostly in agreement. The thing that concerns you that doesnt' concern me too much is the sports vs. hard news thing.
Although I couldn't care less about the sports, I know that lots of people read the paper only for the sports (young males especially). That will not change with online news sources. The difference is that now you know exactly how many people read each article .
I wish I could wave a magic wand which would make people pay attention less to sports and more to things that make a difference in our world, but that ain't gonna happen. You can lament the vapidity of our culture, but a business cannot ignore it. If people want pictures of football games, and you already have a photographer there taking photos, then post 'em.
I think the same thing will work with hard news, though. This is where you and I differ. I say that online news should be different than the printed news. In addition to re-printing the exact text of what appears in the paper version, it must be immediate, with rich content, including video or audio, many photos, unedited transcripts, additional text, historical context and links to related items, etc. And I know this is not likely to happen, but it should include reader comments. Most of value of slashdot comes from the readers comments, not from the posted articles. At slashdot I can count on someone in the audience having more expertise than the author of the article. Big news outfits are afraid of the readers because of all the trolling and inanity, but they are losing many of their potentioal page views to the people who are not afraid to deal with it. THe big guys write the article and then some blog links to it, which drives traffic to the article, which is nice, but then all the subsequent commenting traffic goes to the blog.
Obviously, blogs would continue to get a lot of the coment traffic even if the news sites did enable comments, but the fact that new sites don't enable comments is just another example of 'horseless carriage' thinking. The old media decide what is important enough for us to read, which was historically necessary because of space limitations in the paper or time limitations on the air. Then, if any reader input is printed it is only after being vetted by the same people who decided what was important to print in the first place.
On the internet that paradigm is quaint and obsolete. Your management must begin to grasp that now or they will be out of business sooner than they realize. If they think that their business is printing paper news, then they are doomed. If they think their business is to provide the best possible news, sports and information that the technology allows, then they have a chance.
The surest way for a business to fail at a new technology is to try to conform the new technology to their old way of doing business. I'm glad to hear your bosses are attending seminars that asssume the printed newspaper is dead. The sooner they get over their mourning period, the sooner they can begin to deal with the new reality. I wish them luck, but I am not optimistic they will grok the new paradigm. Instead, at every turn, when someone says "we should enable comments", or "we should give the photographers video cameras", everyone will think of reasons NOT to do it, rather than think about HOW to do it successfully. I would bet my house on that.
Thanks for your insider's viewpoint. I think you made my case for me, though, here:
The online features that draw the biggest readership numbers are web-exclusive photo galleries of our local college football team.
This is exactly the point of my post--the newspaper cannot print dozens of high resolution color photos of the game in the dead tree version of the paper, but for next-to-zero costs, they can post them all on the website and that's what's drawing reader attention.
Newspapers and tv stations who have websites must begin to think of their websites differetnly than they think of their other business. Newpapers must become more like tv stations, for one. They are going to have to have constantly updated news stories and richer content if they are going to compete online.
The reason is simple, they will not server their customers. They continue to publish crappy articles usually against any decent enterprise and as such lose their readers daily.
It's not so much that the articles are crappy (although they often are), it's that the newspapers publishers do not grok the internets. It's the "horseless carriage" mentality, but now it's "online newspaper". Ask yourself why would a newspaper post one single picture of an event on it's website? The answer: because it's expensive to print pictures on paper.
The television station websites also suffer the same mentality-- let's put up a website that will have exactly the same content that we broadcast on television.
Anyone who spends any amount of time on Slashdot already knows this, but the internet is different than a t.v. or a newspaper. Therefore, it should have a different type of content. On the internet there are no constraints on how long an article or new clip can be, no limit on the number of photos, no reason you can't post raw video or audio along with the typical edited clips so that people who are interested in a subject can see more indepth coverage.
And why don't tv networks have continuous or near-continuous live feeds on their websites from some of the events they cover. I bet >99% of all the video that is fed to the stations or networks is never broadcast. Why not make it available on the web? Most of it will be pointless and boring, but I might tune in occasionally to see long videos of, say, US soldiers working in Iraq or watch raw footage of someone driving around a hurricane damage zone, etc.
Another idea-- post video of all archival broadcasts and footage on the website so people can watch old news if they want.