I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around. If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.
What I like is that I can install multiple legal copies on different devices including family members.
Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.
The last time a hyper loop thread came up I learned some things about it from links someone posted about the problems associated with establishing and maintaining a vacuum vessel need for this application. The explosive energy in such a system is indeed daunting. Even the most trivial bit of sabotage, let alone run-of-the-mill failures can set it off.
Since then I haven't seen any convincing answers to those issues. You just don't need to be very advanced in physics to understand them. Does anyone here have any explanations or links to explanations about how this problem can be addressed?
I'll admit to being something of a Musk fanboi but I am not willing to throw all sense to the wind because of it. I don't want a flamewar I just would like to know because if there is an answer it is well outside my intuition.
I would recommend them contacting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. They curate this stuff all day long and they would have a better appreciation of what value it has than nearly anybody. And they are funded.
A couple of years ago I let my neighbor use my recycle bin because his was overflowing. As it turns out he was a retired JPL engineer and what he was throwing out is tons of manuals from JPL back in the 70s. I much regret not contacting the CHM at the time but I was busy and just not thinking about it. They might not have taken them (they do have a big documents facility) but at least I would have known that I hadn't let something valuable slide to the recycle plant.
Presumably the air mass has inertia such that keeping it moving does not take the same amount of energy that getting it started. An aquarium in a torus does this to simulate ocean currents. The energy would be parasitic drag which could be managed.
Much of the remarks about the engineering infeasibility of the concept center around the problems associated with maintaining a vacuum in a vessel a thousand KM long. I see no convincing answers except not to do that in the first place.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier and more energy efficient to simply circulate the in-system air at the speed you want the pods to go rather than pumping it all out and having to deal with all the related failure conditions?
I am looking forward to the date where it becomes an issue (for others not for me) that sex workers are plying their trade out of their cars. Pick up a customer, program the car for a trip around the park or whatever, tint the windows, and conduct business in the reclined passenger seat.
No dangerous alleys. Or crappy rent-by-the-hour hotels. No walk-ins by the spouse. Minimum time wasted. Do it right and cops will have a hard time busting you other than with a decoy.
That is amazing. I don't have a security clearance so I wouldn't have known that.
It isn't clear to me what the concern is. Jetbrains tools are complex enough to hide something in but they are just honking big Java programs pretty easy to sandbox if you must.
Is the Linux kernel also banned? I understand there is a lot of Russian code there, specifically the networking part.
If they outlaw Jetbrains then only outlaws will have Jetbrains.
And I will be in trouble because Netbeans and Eclipse just doesn't cut it for me anymore.
Could there be a Kremlin back-door or trojan in Kaspersky anti-virus? I don't think so but unfortunately it is too easy to imagine. And it might even be something Putin is not aware of.
I don't think that's going to work. The White House and most if not all Senators and Congressmen have web pages for many years and have never given up the right to control what goes on them.
Free speech does not mean that the government has to publish whatever you want to say. When the president gives a speech he does not have to give up the microphone to you.
Further, if this actually got to court they could point out that the plaintiffs have multiple other avenues to having their voiced heard. There is no constitutional reason it has to be on the president's twitter feed.
It is possible to work around each other answer. For example a sex worker, lawyer, or mega-church do not need capital or a business plan to go into business. Nor do they need a product as such. Even if you manufacture something if you have a customer that is willing to pre-pay an order you don't need capital or a business plan. The job of Marketing is to generate customers and if it does not then it gets de-funded.
At the end of the day to have a business you need a customer who is willing to pay for whatever you are selling, regardless of what it is you are selling if anything. (Mega-churches are a business model that produce nothing tangible but boy do they make money.)
Management teams that do not understand this can still succeed in spite of themselves, but if things start going south it is because they have not internalized this basic lesson.
I do not generally write replies to my own posts but this exception is to say thanks to everyone who responded to my OP.
In many of these cases, the customer is the VC and the business is selling something to them. Repeat business is hard to generate though, and it's a pretty crowded marketplace.
This is a very good observation and if I could vote in this thread I would vote Insightful+. Thinking back to the text so long ago that I read that posed this question that might not have been considered a valid point. Since then, however, it has been a practice of quite a few start ups to specifically generate enough hype of a "business-like" entity" such that that their stock can be obtained by the first VC to sell to the bigger fool a short time later. In that sense the product being sold is hype-able stock and the nominal customers of the company, if any, can be viewed as the commodity to be sold.
Certainly a lot of money has been made that way but often the companies either fail or are absorbed by a larger company to live or die on the merits there
In order to have a business which ONE item of the following do you need?
a: A business plan
b: Innovative new technology or service
c: Capital
d: Customer
e: Market Presence
I learned the correct answer over 30 years ago and to this day I see endless startups and investors still get it wrong. People who should know better. So it doesn't surprise me much that $1.5B goes up in smoke.
This looks a lot like what happens in mid-eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, where you can get fined $50K US for using a VPN. It isn't a security issue so much as they do not want people not paying the local voice carriers the $6 US/minute or whatever for voice communications. The owners of the carrier are typically relatives or close business associates of the ruling government.
China of course want to monitor online political activity so they want to make sure that nobody can post online content anonymously. I suspect even with them that is the second reason.
Well if they form their tax polices after the fantasies of someone who never got over their teenage fantasies of how the world should work then why not their space exploration policy?
Does anyone know what happened with that gal who was with him in Belize and suddenly just burned all the "research" he paid her to do and then just took off? I've always been curious about that thread of the story but haven't seen anything.
The devices I currently have at my house connected to the Internet include the DVR, security system, lawn sprinkler control, vacuum robot. I haven't installed a Nest thermostat yet.
I took a pass on an connected refrigerator because yes it is possible to go too crazy with this stuff. But each of the other devices has turned out to be convenient at one time or another and well worth having for the modest cost involved.
The security thing is really not that hard for anyone with minimal understanding of the issues involved.
The bottom line is you will have useful IoT and you will have useless IoT. You will have good vendors and you will have crap vendors. Like any other market.
Fun facts: some of the earliest IoT devices were many years ago and not called that. There was a Christmas tree you could poll or set via an early SNMP demonstration (can't remember what year that was) and I think also a coffee pot. The only thing "new" about IoT is we can make the devices small enough and cheap enough to make small applications commercially viable.
I learned my lesson long ago with Intel back in the i960 days or maybe before that. With them it is all about the CPU chips. No matter what they say. The one exception are their Network Interface chips
Here is the pattern: They use their unlimited money+market position+PR machine to fund some kind of tech, pump up a bunch of customers, trade groups, get projects started with generous relationships ("partnerships"), make lots of press.
A year or two down the road it gets de-funded, spun-out, quietly quashed. The numbers weren't what they wanted so the inevitable corporate-level decision is to return to our "core competency" and that of course is selling CPU chips.
Anyone who was sucked into designing something with their switch chip product line knows what I am talking about. Remember SSI? If you didn't you dodged a bullet. Infiniband? Network Processors? FPGAs? Then Over 2+ decades (starting with the i186) every 3-4 years they would venture into the embedded controller market just to pull back out of it again. Not Intel Core? Not committed.
However their current product lineup for embedded is actually pretty damn good. Not only are their designs better thought out but market and ecosystem conditions are fortuitous for them. Most of all, it is now all about selling Intel i3/i5/i7-family CPUs. That alone will keep that line it alive.
I am wondering why they have to ship the power to a neighboring state instead of letting me run my AC and pool for free until the crisis is over. My utility bill routinely breaks over $600/month (both gas and electric) from PG&E in the summer.
Oh, wait. I'm in Northern California. That means they can use my water all they want but something like sharing their excess energy must be illegal. Rather than do that they would prefer to break California in two so they don't have to pay taxes to redwood trees or something. What was I thinking.
I have read articles like this for many years (I recall that the outer planets were detected before they were known this way) and have always wondered something that maybe someone here can explain.
I understand at a high level the theory behind detecting unseen objects by their fanatic effect on known bodies but just how can you make measurements that precise? How many digits of precision do you need to do the calculation? Intuitively the angles involved must be far smaller than typical mechanical tools could measure so how do they do it?
OK I tried it and I was not exactly whelmed. Forty years ago I was playing with predictive pattern matching models in an attempt to create a Go player. Although the basic idea worked it took too much expensive computer storage (CDC 7600) to actually play a game on a 9x9 board in real time. (The processor was actually fast enough.)
This exercise is pretty much the same but this software has the benefit of lots of cheap processor cycles and storage space. (I'll spare you the numeric equivalent calculations from the 7600 to modern hardware.) And instead of winning combinations it just guesses stuff with a wide range of possible positive feedback responses.
We will see if Alphabet's infinite money supply can make something out of this. Personally I just don't see much but I have been wrong on the "vision" thing before.
It needs to create "art" based on personal emotional experience AND induce such emotional experience in human audience.
Otherwise... it's just a drawing, photo, sculpture, video... but not art.
Just like those "paintings" by monkeys and elephants are not art but paint slapped on canvas.
Some of the paintings to which you refer are clearly relatable to human experience. The animals doing the painting are always well socialized with humans and the animal artists clearly have emotions similar to that of humans.
Which would you rate as art? The 5-year-old kid studiously filling in a paint-by-the-numbers coloring book, or Koko the gorilla rendering a freestyle image that is clearly and object and a setting she has seen such as a bird or her pet cat?
If you understand anything at all about art the answer is clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around. If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.
What I like is that I can install multiple legal copies on different devices including family members.
Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.
The last time a hyper loop thread came up I learned some things about it from links someone posted about the problems associated with establishing and maintaining a vacuum vessel need for this application. The explosive energy in such a system is indeed daunting. Even the most trivial bit of sabotage, let alone run-of-the-mill failures can set it off.
Since then I haven't seen any convincing answers to those issues. You just don't need to be very advanced in physics to understand them. Does anyone here have any explanations or links to explanations about how this problem can be addressed?
I'll admit to being something of a Musk fanboi but I am not willing to throw all sense to the wind because of it. I don't want a flamewar I just would like to know because if there is an answer it is well outside my intuition.
If there is any city in the world that best understands clean sewers it would be London.
I would recommend them contacting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. They curate this stuff all day long and they would have a better appreciation of what value it has than nearly anybody. And they are funded.
A couple of years ago I let my neighbor use my recycle bin because his was overflowing. As it turns out he was a retired JPL engineer and what he was throwing out is tons of manuals from JPL back in the 70s. I much regret not contacting the CHM at the time but I was busy and just not thinking about it. They might not have taken them (they do have a big documents facility) but at least I would have known that I hadn't let something valuable slide to the recycle plant.
Presumably the air mass has inertia such that keeping it moving does not take the same amount of energy that getting it started. An aquarium in a torus does this to simulate ocean currents. The energy would be parasitic drag which could be managed.
Much of the remarks about the engineering infeasibility of the concept center around the problems associated with maintaining a vacuum in a vessel a thousand KM long. I see no convincing answers except not to do that in the first place.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier and more energy efficient to simply circulate the in-system air at the speed you want the pods to go rather than pumping it all out and having to deal with all the related failure conditions?
I am looking forward to the date where it becomes an issue (for others not for me) that sex workers are plying their trade out of their cars. Pick up a customer, program the car for a trip around the park or whatever, tint the windows, and conduct business in the reclined passenger seat.
No dangerous alleys. Or crappy rent-by-the-hour hotels. No walk-ins by the spouse. Minimum time wasted. Do it right and cops will have a hard time busting you other than with a decoy.
Sooner or later Level 3+ cars will enable this.
That is amazing. I don't have a security clearance so I wouldn't have known that.
It isn't clear to me what the concern is. Jetbrains tools are complex enough to hide something in but they are just honking big Java programs pretty easy to sandbox if you must.
Is the Linux kernel also banned? I understand there is a lot of Russian code there, specifically the networking part.
If they outlaw Jetbrains then only outlaws will have Jetbrains.
And I will be in trouble because Netbeans and Eclipse just doesn't cut it for me anymore.
Could there be a Kremlin back-door or trojan in Kaspersky anti-virus? I don't think so but unfortunately it is too easy to imagine. And it might even be something Putin is not aware of.
I don't think that's going to work. The White House and most if not all Senators and Congressmen have web pages for many years and have never given up the right to control what goes on them.
Free speech does not mean that the government has to publish whatever you want to say. When the president gives a speech he does not have to give up the microphone to you.
Further, if this actually got to court they could point out that the plaintiffs have multiple other avenues to having their voiced heard. There is no constitutional reason it has to be on the president's twitter feed.
Big Meh
The correct answer is D: customer.
It is possible to work around each other answer. For example a sex worker, lawyer, or mega-church do not need capital or a business plan to go into business. Nor do they need a product as such. Even if you manufacture something if you have a customer that is willing to pre-pay an order you don't need capital or a business plan. The job of Marketing is to generate customers and if it does not then it gets de-funded.
At the end of the day to have a business you need a customer who is willing to pay for whatever you are selling, regardless of what it is you are selling if anything. (Mega-churches are a business model that produce nothing tangible but boy do they make money.)
Management teams that do not understand this can still succeed in spite of themselves, but if things start going south it is because they have not internalized this basic lesson.
I do not generally write replies to my own posts but this exception is to say thanks to everyone who responded to my OP.
In many of these cases, the customer is the VC and the business is selling something to them. Repeat business is hard to generate though, and it's a pretty crowded marketplace.
This is a very good observation and if I could vote in this thread I would vote Insightful+. Thinking back to the text so long ago that I read that posed this question that might not have been considered a valid point. Since then, however, it has been a practice of quite a few start ups to specifically generate enough hype of a "business-like" entity" such that that their stock can be obtained by the first VC to sell to the bigger fool a short time later. In that sense the product being sold is hype-able stock and the nominal customers of the company, if any, can be viewed as the commodity to be sold.
Certainly a lot of money has been made that way but often the companies either fail or are absorbed by a larger company to live or die on the merits there
In order to have a business which ONE item of the following do you need?
I learned the correct answer over 30 years ago and to this day I see endless startups and investors still get it wrong. People who should know better. So it doesn't surprise me much that $1.5B goes up in smoke.
This looks a lot like what happens in mid-eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, where you can get fined $50K US for using a VPN. It isn't a security issue so much as they do not want people not paying the local voice carriers the $6 US/minute or whatever for voice communications. The owners of the carrier are typically relatives or close business associates of the ruling government.
China of course want to monitor online political activity so they want to make sure that nobody can post online content anonymously. I suspect even with them that is the second reason.
Well if they form their tax polices after the fantasies of someone who never got over their teenage fantasies of how the world should work then why not their space exploration policy?
Does anyone know what happened with that gal who was with him in Belize and suddenly just burned all the "research" he paid her to do and then just took off? I've always been curious about that thread of the story but haven't seen anything.
Why not mandate this for all vehicles?
Are we trying to preserve the right for a privileged demographic to crash into things?
People don't need connected ....
The devices I currently have at my house connected to the Internet include the DVR, security system, lawn sprinkler control, vacuum robot. I haven't installed a Nest thermostat yet.
I took a pass on an connected refrigerator because yes it is possible to go too crazy with this stuff. But each of the other devices has turned out to be convenient at one time or another and well worth having for the modest cost involved.
The security thing is really not that hard for anyone with minimal understanding of the issues involved.
The bottom line is you will have useful IoT and you will have useless IoT. You will have good vendors and you will have crap vendors. Like any other market.
Fun facts: some of the earliest IoT devices were many years ago and not called that. There was a Christmas tree you could poll or set via an early SNMP demonstration (can't remember what year that was) and I think also a coffee pot. The only thing "new" about IoT is we can make the devices small enough and cheap enough to make small applications commercially viable.
I learned my lesson long ago with Intel back in the i960 days or maybe before that. With them it is all about the CPU chips. No matter what they say. The one exception are their Network Interface chips
Here is the pattern: They use their unlimited money+market position+PR machine to fund some kind of tech, pump up a bunch of customers, trade groups, get projects started with generous relationships ("partnerships"), make lots of press.
A year or two down the road it gets de-funded, spun-out, quietly quashed. The numbers weren't what they wanted so the inevitable corporate-level decision is to return to our "core competency" and that of course is selling CPU chips.
Anyone who was sucked into designing something with their switch chip product line knows what I am talking about. Remember SSI? If you didn't you dodged a bullet. Infiniband? Network Processors? FPGAs? Then Over 2+ decades (starting with the i186) every 3-4 years they would venture into the embedded controller market just to pull back out of it again. Not Intel Core? Not committed.
However their current product lineup for embedded is actually pretty damn good. Not only are their designs better thought out but market and ecosystem conditions are fortuitous for them. Most of all, it is now all about selling Intel i3/i5/i7-family CPUs. That alone will keep that line it alive.
Went through this thread several times. I fail to see the crisis that has people pounding on their keyboards red faced and bulging bloodshot eyes.
I guess this never would have happened if we hadn't allowed systemd into the ecosystem.
I am wondering why they have to ship the power to a neighboring state instead of letting me run my AC and pool for free until the crisis is over. My utility bill routinely breaks over $600/month (both gas and electric) from PG&E in the summer.
Oh, wait. I'm in Northern California. That means they can use my water all they want but something like sharing their excess energy must be illegal. Rather than do that they would prefer to break California in two so they don't have to pay taxes to redwood trees or something. What was I thinking.
I have read articles like this for many years (I recall that the outer planets were detected before they were known this way) and have always wondered something that maybe someone here can explain.
I understand at a high level the theory behind detecting unseen objects by their fanatic effect on known bodies but just how can you make measurements that precise? How many digits of precision do you need to do the calculation? Intuitively the angles involved must be far smaller than typical mechanical tools could measure so how do they do it?
OK I tried it and I was not exactly whelmed. Forty years ago I was playing with predictive pattern matching models in an attempt to create a Go player. Although the basic idea worked it took too much expensive computer storage (CDC 7600) to actually play a game on a 9x9 board in real time. (The processor was actually fast enough.)
This exercise is pretty much the same but this software has the benefit of lots of cheap processor cycles and storage space. (I'll spare you the numeric equivalent calculations from the 7600 to modern hardware.) And instead of winning combinations it just guesses stuff with a wide range of possible positive feedback responses.
We will see if Alphabet's infinite money supply can make something out of this. Personally I just don't see much but I have been wrong on the "vision" thing before.
It needs to create "art" based on personal emotional experience AND induce such emotional experience in human audience.
Otherwise... it's just a drawing, photo, sculpture, video... but not art. Just like those "paintings" by monkeys and elephants are not art but paint slapped on canvas.
Some of the paintings to which you refer are clearly relatable to human experience. The animals doing the painting are always well socialized with humans and the animal artists clearly have emotions similar to that of humans.
Which would you rate as art? The 5-year-old kid studiously filling in a paint-by-the-numbers coloring book, or Koko the gorilla rendering a freestyle image that is clearly and object and a setting she has seen such as a bird or her pet cat?
If you understand anything at all about art the answer is clear.
Easier way - just give a kindergarten class a load of paint.
Or Koko the gorilla.
I have also seen youtube videos of elephants painting, although the amount of creativity is disputed since their handler is always nearby.