Ideally, the invisible hand of the market would price the hybrid vehicles higher than their non-hybrid counterparts, to such a degree that the hybrid's price discounts the future value of the gasoline saved over the vehicle's lifetime. If the market didn't do this, an arbitrage opportunity would exist... and arbitrageurs would act upon it, which would have the effect of raising the price of the hybrids anyway.
So, essentially the invisible hand is stupid and greedy, and there's no incentive for anybody to make a more fuel efficient car? Because anywhere you make an efficiency someone will be expected to pay more for the efficiency and cancel it out?
It's in the summary, and google is the only entity who is described as seeking a patent related to this. The patent to use the wave energy was google, which is what I was talking about.
Cause those photos he used are not photographs. Those are snapshots.
Photography is a technology, not a threshold. Just because you don't think it has artistic merit, doesn't mean it's not a photograph. But, I'm glad to see that the person who is in charge of defining photography for the rest of us is posting on Slashdot. I take literally thousands of photos each year, maybe I should screen them through you to make sure they're actually photographs and not snapshots?
In the new photos people are there simply by accident. Utterly meaningless and completely unmotivated. Those photos don't contrast - they clash.
That's the whole point... it's about juxtaposition of the two dissimilar elements. The first picture has families casually walking down the steps paired against uniformed people surrounded by rubble. It's about as different in tone and setting as you can get.
If anything, I think he's done a great job of actually lining up the scenes as well as he did and showing the disconnect between the old and the new. Seeing the connection between same place across different periods in time is the whole point. If anything, if he'd gone for too sterile of a shot, or for too much artistic merit in the new picture he'd be detracting from the actual pictures of the war. The modern pictures are there specifically to clash (or contrast since you don't seem to know what the word means) with the older pictures.
Ships aren't cheap, and marine environments are rather hostile (salt, water), and data centers can already be reasonably mobile by putting it in a shipping container and moving that shipping container somewhere... so what need is this filling?
From the first link...
Using cargo ships allows for flexibility and the ability to expand based on the availability of ships and port space, rather than real estate. IDS plans to develop the below-deck areas as data center space and use the water temperature to support its cooling system, which it cites as a key factor in its claims that it can build its ship-based data centers for less than similar land-based facilities.
So, in theory, because they think it will cost less to operate. Of course, it actually remains to be seen if it truly is cheaper, but that's what they're counting on.
Seriously? How is a server-farm in a ship innovative enough for a patent? Goodness.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
You see so many patents that are like "a patent for doing something commonplace... with a computer". Now I'm looking at "building a data center... on a ship" and going WTF??
However, following the link to the Slashdot article, they're envisioning capturing the wave energy to run some of the power needs. So, that might be a somewhat novel idea that merits a patent.
The problem there is when it becomes "surveillance", In my own country, you must have a warrant for that.
I fear this might be one of those "gray" areas -- the police need a warrant, but a private company flying a drone may not.
Because they simply say it's not surveillance, and that they're doing research. I worry it might be like those companies that data mine -- it would be illegal for the government to do it, but if a private company does it and then the government agency just buys the data... all of a sudden it's perfectly legal.
I'm just not sure that Google technically needs warrants in this case. Might be a situation where technology gets out in front of law and there's no real rules.
I do, however, agree that this is getting into an area where I'm not so sure they should be allowed to do this.
That's funny. You obviously don't understand how the airline industry works.
Sadly, I know all too well how it works. My work caused me to be immersed in it for several years, so I pretty much got to peek behind the curtains and get a lot of insight from insiders.
You'll start with hotel amenities. You'll end with shoving them in like cattle and charging to ship their baggage.
Yeah. I know. But, I can dream of a civilized form of travel without dealing with airports and cattle class.
Just because air-travel is currently the most aggravating form of travel I can imagine doesn't mean that I can't dream of a new golden age of air travel which has some dignity and tablecloths in it.
would you trade the 5 hour flight for a 2 day trip and at more money?
Maybe not the 5 hour trip -- but, what about a 4-day airship journey that ends where it began? I've definitely pondered taking a multi-day train journey and then flying back home. How is this any different?
At a certain point, it might be an alternative to the cruise ship where you're not "going" somewhere. You're on-board, and going past places. But, there's a bar and a bedroom and a nice chair to read your book. You're seeing new things at a leisurely pace.
Why didn't you go first class when you flew?
I'm not saying this is going to replace all forms of air travel for all purposes. Especially if the travel is specifically to get you to a certain place at a certain time.
But, I can absolutely see taking a multi-day trip on an airship where it's more about the experience than where I actually go.
So, the whole thing depends on forcing everybody to install spyware on their machine which will monitor their activity and report on it?
From a security stand point,it's obviously going to be doing much of the same stuff as malware; and from getting people to actually install this, I just can't see this working at all, who is going to voluntarily install this crap?
What happen when someone refuses to install this, or, the operating system they run does support it? Will they outlaw Linux? This is why you can't force a solution to this kind of thing.
I don't think they have a hope in hell of making this actually work. People aren't going to voluntarily install it, and they're not going to be able to jam it into every operating system without fundamentally destroying privacy and security. This sounds like the Sony rootkit, but on a national scale.
I can see it now -- any form of general computing device not running OS designed, built, and vetted by the copyright holders will be outlawed. Good luck with that.
To quote Archer "You combine all the comforts of a cruise ship with a slightly faster method of travel.", its a dumb idea.
What, exactly, makes it a dumb idea?
I've been on 5hr flights -- they're no fun. I can only imagine some of the really long flights must be friggin' brutal. Give it hotel amenities, a bar, a dance floor -- whatever -- and send people on a more leisurely trip without jamming them in like cattle and shoving them through airports. I can see it being a popular mode of travel.
Heck, just the romantic notion of it is kind of cool. I'd *love* to go on an airship voyage. It would be just plain old cool.
For leisure travel, it would be absolutely awesome way to see the world. I can see people paying to travel on one, if nothing else, for the novelty of it.
Cool!! Airships! Does this mean we all get brass goggles and leather aprons and other Steampunk essentials?
We need way more retro-future stuff like this! That's freakin' awesome.
Next, zombies in London.:-P
Re:It was gimmicky to begin with
on
Why Wave Failed
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· Score: 1
The really problem with Wave was definitely marketing. If I asked a random, "normal" person if they used Google Wave, their answer would be "Huh? What's that?" No one knew about it.
I think it went beyond that.
Last year one of my co-workers had an invite to Google Wave. So, being a nice guy, he gave our group a presentation on it to tell us about it.
Almost everybody at the table was left going "OK, it's got wavelets, but what would I actually *do* with it?". Nobody ever really did explain to me what it would be useful for. In the end, we stopped looking at it since it was a new, revolutionary technology which didn't do anything we needed.
Yeah, if you are a douche bag. It's 1 space. WTF is the reason for 2? Your eyes so poor you cant see the delineation?
Because some of us are old and spent many years in a monospace font, and liked it.
Seriously, I've been doing two spaces after a full-stop for so long that I'd never be able to stop doing it (I've been typing since the early/mid 80's). It just becomes part of how you do things. The reality is, it may or may not render in such a way as anybody will notice it -- that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it.
If you were taught to use the two spaces, you're likely to always use that.
This diverging discussion is the perfect example of why it is clear the ideal code indentation is a TAB. Set your editor to display whatever indentation width you like, don't expect to inflict that choice on everyone else. Plus it eliminates the possibility of sloppy partial indentations, and it's fewer keystrokes to boot. Win, win, win.
I'll grant you that on one condition... if your fancy text-formatter is going to write in a consistent number of chars so that if it's rendered by another editor it still works, then fine. Otherwise, no.
A former co-worker and I got into this argument. His emacs would use a single "tab" char to display between 1 and 40 tabs because it "knew" what it meant to do, but any other editor might render it like shit since it didn't have the right number of actual chars and relied on a specific mode.
It caused huge problems with those of using different editors which didn't interpret the tabs the same way. Eventually, I locked him out of CVS until he fixed his emacs to adhere to our coding standard -- our manager agreed with me.:-P
If you mean it to be 8 levels of indent, you need 8 placeholder items. Not one which is interpreted by your *^&%* editor (and only your editor). Otherwise, you end up with vast diffs specific to whitespace, and not what was changed. The resulting document must be properly rendered in any text editor, and it must do it consistently.
But, yes. The Tab is the unit of measure, and your editor can render a tab as however many chars make you happy.
I really wish Slashdot headlines would stop using "Hacker" in the sense of "computer-oriented criminal."
You know, I'm pretty sure we've lost that battle -- both within and outside of the geek community.
In my 25+ years of computers, it has primarily referred to people who muck about with systems, with a strong connotation of people who are getting into things they shouldn't just because they can (but not always).
It's only a specific generation who tried to get everybody else to use a different word after we'd already been using hacker so that they could be hackers without the bad connotation.
People were 'hacking' into systems and 'phreaking' long before someone decided that "those people" should be called 'crackers' and the hobbyists etc should be 'hackers'. It's just simply too late to change the wide-spread meaning of the word. And, the people who used it first get to keep it, not a bunch of kids who came along 15 years later.
For me, it has long become a word that entirely depends on the context -- yes, it's a stunning hack to hang a VW from the Golden Gate bridge, I can hack at code, but people still hack into networks.
TFS literally refers to "hiding malicious code in the hardware", and it was the summary I referred to.
I see what you're saying, but my understanding of something at the chip-level is that while it still may be 'code', it's immutable because it's printed on/embedded in the chip (whatever the correct term is) and implements the logic, but it can't be changed.
Firmware is static, but can be modified. It's not clear to me that what is being described is firmware, but true, fixed, unchanging hardware. It just has an embedded bit of behavior that under some circumstances will trigger something potentially malicious.
I mean, the instruction set in a CPU is 'code', but it can't be changed since it's part of the circuitry.
This isn't about adding new code to an existing bit of hardware, I think it's about building in the functionality at the lowest level in the actual chip itself. An embedded logic bomb or something, but not something which can be updated once the chip is manufactured.
Seriously?/. editors can't tell the difference between Hardware and Firmware??
Can you??
TFA is talking about someone embedding extra functionality at the chip-level which can later be accessed to achieve some desired result. It is not talking about injecting an update into the firmware of a running system. He's literally talking about hiding something at the circuit board level so by the time the chips are manufactured, they already have the embedded functionality.
So, before you start complaining about the editors being unable to tell the difference between the two things... RTFA so you know what is being talked about. There is no mention of firmware, and he's not talking about firmware.
50%-100% markups aren't just coming from economies of scale...
It's not just economies of scale, but it is all determined by economic factors.
I remember about a decade ago, people thinking it was absurd that Amazon had a market cap greater than B&N. B&N had stores, and other assets, as well as a place in people's retail habits. Fast forward, and Amazon has become something between a Fed Ex and a Wal Mart. They're huge, they sell a lot more books than anybody else so they can afford to sell each one cheaper, and they don't need to pay for the overhead of running a chain of retail stores.
B&N doesn't have to beat Amazon's prices, but if it's always going to cost me at least 50% more, I can't justify using B&N unless I NEED the book that day.
And, ultimately, that is why B&N is putting themselves up for sale. You can only try to sell the same thing at a higher price than your main competition for so long before eventually it becomes apparent that fewer people are buying from you, and you're making less on each sale.
They can't sell on equal footing with Amazon, because they don't sell like Amazon. It really is a combination of economies of scale, and the relative way their operations are structured.
Now, in 5-10 years when there's almost no bookstores left because they can't compete with Amazon, it will be a sad day. But, the mom and pop bookstore has even less chance of competing with Amazon.
MSRP is just what the manufacturer says someone might like to charge.
Book stores actually buy their inventory up front, if my days in a book store aren't too hazy from the passage of time. So, a store with an inventory has a fairly big cost invested in the actual books. Someone like Amazon can buy them as they need them and exploit supply chain savings.
So if Amazon can make a profit (and they do make a good profit) charging half of MSRP, then B&N charging full MSRP means they are ripping you off.
No, it means that B&N isn't moving as many units as Amazon, and in order to cover their costs, they need to charge more. If you sell 10x as many books, you can make way less on each book and still make a killing.
Amazon doesn't operate 'brick and mortar' stores. It's a difference in business models, and Amazon is making up thinner margins by selling vastly more books -- and doing it online. B&N has to maintain stores and physical inventories.
It's unfortunate for B&N, and it basically means that Amazon has managed to displace all of the big players by going on-line and selling literally everything. My wife is a regular Amazon shopper, because for price and convenience, she just orders the books and they appear -- usually within a day or so. I can't argue with the economics of buying from Amazon, but I can see the position B&N is in.
Seriously, B&N isn't "ripping you off". The reality of it is, in the last decade or so, Amazon's new business model has completely undercut the business model of a traditional bookseller, and made it too expensive to keep it going. But, the reasons have more to do with economics rather than trying to give you the shaft by charging the MSRP.
I'm afraid you're making some sweeping statements about some aspects of business which you may not fully understand. Specifically, how much B&N needs to charge in comparison to Amazon to cover their costs.
It's not much different from the airline industry -- they've been squeezed to such a thin margin that even if they're charging us all too much damned money, they're still barely making pennies on the dollar, largely for historical reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
So, essentially the invisible hand is stupid and greedy, and there's no incentive for anybody to make a more fuel efficient car? Because anywhere you make an efficiency someone will be expected to pay more for the efficiency and cancel it out?
Wow, that's utterly depressing.
Yeah, we know.
It's in the summary, and google is the only entity who is described as seeking a patent related to this. The patent to use the wave energy was google, which is what I was talking about.
Thanks for playing.
Photography is a technology, not a threshold. Just because you don't think it has artistic merit, doesn't mean it's not a photograph. But, I'm glad to see that the person who is in charge of defining photography for the rest of us is posting on Slashdot. I take literally thousands of photos each year, maybe I should screen them through you to make sure they're actually photographs and not snapshots?
That's the whole point ... it's about juxtaposition of the two dissimilar elements. The first picture has families casually walking down the steps paired against uniformed people surrounded by rubble. It's about as different in tone and setting as you can get.
If anything, I think he's done a great job of actually lining up the scenes as well as he did and showing the disconnect between the old and the new. Seeing the connection between same place across different periods in time is the whole point. If anything, if he'd gone for too sterile of a shot, or for too much artistic merit in the new picture he'd be detracting from the actual pictures of the war. The modern pictures are there specifically to clash (or contrast since you don't seem to know what the word means) with the older pictures.
I applaud him for his work.
From the first link ...
So, in theory, because they think it will cost less to operate. Of course, it actually remains to be seen if it truly is cheaper, but that's what they're counting on.
Oh, I just thought you were glad to see me. ;-)
One typically tries not to use the word "hurl" in a nautical context. Maybe hurtling might be a better choice in this context? :-P
I was thinking the exact same thing.
You see so many patents that are like "a patent for doing something commonplace ... with a computer". Now I'm looking at "building a data center ... on a ship" and going WTF??
However, following the link to the Slashdot article, they're envisioning capturing the wave energy to run some of the power needs. So, that might be a somewhat novel idea that merits a patent.
Oh, come on. He's talking about a geek date. They're actually IMing across the table and not making eye contact. He needs the wifi.
I mean, haven't you ever seen two teens sitting next to one another, but apparently only texting and not talking? It boggles the mind.
I fear this might be one of those "gray" areas -- the police need a warrant, but a private company flying a drone may not.
Because they simply say it's not surveillance, and that they're doing research. I worry it might be like those companies that data mine -- it would be illegal for the government to do it, but if a private company does it and then the government agency just buys the data ... all of a sudden it's perfectly legal.
I'm just not sure that Google technically needs warrants in this case. Might be a situation where technology gets out in front of law and there's no real rules.
I do, however, agree that this is getting into an area where I'm not so sure they should be allowed to do this.
Sadly, I know all too well how it works. My work caused me to be immersed in it for several years, so I pretty much got to peek behind the curtains and get a lot of insight from insiders.
Yeah. I know. But, I can dream of a civilized form of travel without dealing with airports and cattle class.
Just because air-travel is currently the most aggravating form of travel I can imagine doesn't mean that I can't dream of a new golden age of air travel which has some dignity and tablecloths in it.
Maybe not the 5 hour trip -- but, what about a 4-day airship journey that ends where it began? I've definitely pondered taking a multi-day train journey and then flying back home. How is this any different?
At a certain point, it might be an alternative to the cruise ship where you're not "going" somewhere. You're on-board, and going past places. But, there's a bar and a bedroom and a nice chair to read your book. You're seeing new things at a leisurely pace.
I'm not saying this is going to replace all forms of air travel for all purposes. Especially if the travel is specifically to get you to a certain place at a certain time.
But, I can absolutely see taking a multi-day trip on an airship where it's more about the experience than where I actually go.
*laugh* Not at all. I'm just not part of marketing, so I restrict myself to technical domains. :-P
So, the whole thing depends on forcing everybody to install spyware on their machine which will monitor their activity and report on it?
From a security stand point,it's obviously going to be doing much of the same stuff as malware; and from getting people to actually install this, I just can't see this working at all, who is going to voluntarily install this crap?
What happen when someone refuses to install this, or, the operating system they run does support it? Will they outlaw Linux? This is why you can't force a solution to this kind of thing.
I don't think they have a hope in hell of making this actually work. People aren't going to voluntarily install it, and they're not going to be able to jam it into every operating system without fundamentally destroying privacy and security. This sounds like the Sony rootkit, but on a national scale.
I can see it now -- any form of general computing device not running OS designed, built, and vetted by the copyright holders will be outlawed. Good luck with that.
Ummm .. except that an "airplane" is specifically talking about something using a fixed wing for lift.
This is a lighter-than-air vessel that can be steered -- by definition, an airship.
An airship and an airplane are fundamentally different in terms of how they fly.
What, exactly, makes it a dumb idea?
I've been on 5hr flights -- they're no fun. I can only imagine some of the really long flights must be friggin' brutal. Give it hotel amenities, a bar, a dance floor -- whatever -- and send people on a more leisurely trip without jamming them in like cattle and shoving them through airports. I can see it being a popular mode of travel.
Heck, just the romantic notion of it is kind of cool. I'd *love* to go on an airship voyage. It would be just plain old cool.
For leisure travel, it would be absolutely awesome way to see the world. I can see people paying to travel on one, if nothing else, for the novelty of it.
Cool!! Airships! Does this mean we all get brass goggles and leather aprons and other Steampunk essentials?
We need way more retro-future stuff like this! That's freakin' awesome.
Next, zombies in London. :-P
I think it went beyond that.
Last year one of my co-workers had an invite to Google Wave. So, being a nice guy, he gave our group a presentation on it to tell us about it.
Almost everybody at the table was left going "OK, it's got wavelets, but what would I actually *do* with it?". Nobody ever really did explain to me what it would be useful for. In the end, we stopped looking at it since it was a new, revolutionary technology which didn't do anything we needed.
OK, who is letting the lolcat post on Slashdot again? :-P
Because some of us are old and spent many years in a monospace font, and liked it.
Seriously, I've been doing two spaces after a full-stop for so long that I'd never be able to stop doing it (I've been typing since the early/mid 80's). It just becomes part of how you do things. The reality is, it may or may not render in such a way as anybody will notice it -- that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it.
If you were taught to use the two spaces, you're likely to always use that.
I'll grant you that on one condition ... if your fancy text-formatter is going to write in a consistent number of chars so that if it's rendered by another editor it still works, then fine. Otherwise, no.
A former co-worker and I got into this argument. His emacs would use a single "tab" char to display between 1 and 40 tabs because it "knew" what it meant to do, but any other editor might render it like shit since it didn't have the right number of actual chars and relied on a specific mode.
It caused huge problems with those of using different editors which didn't interpret the tabs the same way. Eventually, I locked him out of CVS until he fixed his emacs to adhere to our coding standard -- our manager agreed with me. :-P
If you mean it to be 8 levels of indent, you need 8 placeholder items. Not one which is interpreted by your *^&%* editor (and only your editor). Otherwise, you end up with vast diffs specific to whitespace, and not what was changed. The resulting document must be properly rendered in any text editor, and it must do it consistently.
But, yes. The Tab is the unit of measure, and your editor can render a tab as however many chars make you happy.
You know, I'm pretty sure we've lost that battle -- both within and outside of the geek community.
In my 25+ years of computers, it has primarily referred to people who muck about with systems, with a strong connotation of people who are getting into things they shouldn't just because they can (but not always).
It's only a specific generation who tried to get everybody else to use a different word after we'd already been using hacker so that they could be hackers without the bad connotation.
People were 'hacking' into systems and 'phreaking' long before someone decided that "those people" should be called 'crackers' and the hobbyists etc should be 'hackers'. It's just simply too late to change the wide-spread meaning of the word. And, the people who used it first get to keep it, not a bunch of kids who came along 15 years later.
For me, it has long become a word that entirely depends on the context -- yes, it's a stunning hack to hang a VW from the Golden Gate bridge, I can hack at code, but people still hack into networks.
You may just have to deal with it.
I see what you're saying, but my understanding of something at the chip-level is that while it still may be 'code', it's immutable because it's printed on/embedded in the chip (whatever the correct term is) and implements the logic, but it can't be changed.
Firmware is static, but can be modified. It's not clear to me that what is being described is firmware, but true, fixed, unchanging hardware. It just has an embedded bit of behavior that under some circumstances will trigger something potentially malicious.
I mean, the instruction set in a CPU is 'code', but it can't be changed since it's part of the circuitry.
This isn't about adding new code to an existing bit of hardware, I think it's about building in the functionality at the lowest level in the actual chip itself. An embedded logic bomb or something, but not something which can be updated once the chip is manufactured.
Can you??
TFA is talking about someone embedding extra functionality at the chip-level which can later be accessed to achieve some desired result. It is not talking about injecting an update into the firmware of a running system. He's literally talking about hiding something at the circuit board level so by the time the chips are manufactured, they already have the embedded functionality.
So, before you start complaining about the editors being unable to tell the difference between the two things ... RTFA so you know what is being talked about. There is no mention of firmware, and he's not talking about firmware.
The article is literally talking about hardware.
It's not just economies of scale, but it is all determined by economic factors.
I remember about a decade ago, people thinking it was absurd that Amazon had a market cap greater than B&N. B&N had stores, and other assets, as well as a place in people's retail habits. Fast forward, and Amazon has become something between a Fed Ex and a Wal Mart. They're huge, they sell a lot more books than anybody else so they can afford to sell each one cheaper, and they don't need to pay for the overhead of running a chain of retail stores.
And, ultimately, that is why B&N is putting themselves up for sale. You can only try to sell the same thing at a higher price than your main competition for so long before eventually it becomes apparent that fewer people are buying from you, and you're making less on each sale.
They can't sell on equal footing with Amazon, because they don't sell like Amazon. It really is a combination of economies of scale, and the relative way their operations are structured.
Now, in 5-10 years when there's almost no bookstores left because they can't compete with Amazon, it will be a sad day. But, the mom and pop bookstore has even less chance of competing with Amazon.
Book stores actually buy their inventory up front, if my days in a book store aren't too hazy from the passage of time. So, a store with an inventory has a fairly big cost invested in the actual books. Someone like Amazon can buy them as they need them and exploit supply chain savings.
No, it means that B&N isn't moving as many units as Amazon, and in order to cover their costs, they need to charge more. If you sell 10x as many books, you can make way less on each book and still make a killing.
Amazon doesn't operate 'brick and mortar' stores. It's a difference in business models, and Amazon is making up thinner margins by selling vastly more books -- and doing it online. B&N has to maintain stores and physical inventories.
It's unfortunate for B&N, and it basically means that Amazon has managed to displace all of the big players by going on-line and selling literally everything. My wife is a regular Amazon shopper, because for price and convenience, she just orders the books and they appear -- usually within a day or so. I can't argue with the economics of buying from Amazon, but I can see the position B&N is in.
Seriously, B&N isn't "ripping you off". The reality of it is, in the last decade or so, Amazon's new business model has completely undercut the business model of a traditional bookseller, and made it too expensive to keep it going. But, the reasons have more to do with economics rather than trying to give you the shaft by charging the MSRP.
I'm afraid you're making some sweeping statements about some aspects of business which you may not fully understand. Specifically, how much B&N needs to charge in comparison to Amazon to cover their costs.
It's not much different from the airline industry -- they've been squeezed to such a thin margin that even if they're charging us all too much damned money, they're still barely making pennies on the dollar, largely for historical reasons.