For me, it makes a lot of sense to do disk backups.
I suppose it depends on how much data you've got, but if you've got less than, oh, 1TB of weekly differential data, you can just use eSATA or similar. It's "fast enough" if you're doing it from your backup system, the 2-3 backup "revision" copies (go snapshots!) of your data plus the previous week's backup (and the several before that) should be enough in addition to the "live" data on another host.
And, unlike tape, your 'verify the write' is done in a single process.
Maybe tape has an advantage I'm not seeing in our environment, or maybe I'm missing the benefit outright. In my mind, the cost - coupled with the additional maintainance of complex and "different" tape backup systems - leads me, as "the" systems administrator, to not want to fuck with it. To get a single tape large enough for a "everything" backup is currently not tenable (financially), anyway, so why bother?
Seriously? I wonder how you guys avoid gmail spam; I get a shitload of it. And no, I never signed up for anything with the account - I've largely used it for temporary "cloud" storage and very little actual email (not many people have the address).
Why? It would be immeasurably complicated to switch to metric.
Not only would you have the distance thing to contend with, you'd have volumes, yields, and the like. THe most sensitive industry to this would be farming/ranching, where a lot of knowledge is "rule of thumb": it's not written down, per se, but is the accumulation of seasons and generations of built-up knowledge. Farmers and ranchers know it takes x gallons of water per head or acre per week to keep optimal results; you know x bushels of feed per head or yield per acre are good. You know it takes x gallons of water to optimally water a quarter section to produce y bushels - which is enough to feed z cattle for so many days to reach optimal weights. Then there's fertilizer, and the fact that all equipment is designed around standard units, with many ranchers and farmers using 30+ year old equipment which Still Works. Yes, that will/does cause compatibility issues they could ill afford.
Agricultural workers aren't given enough credit for being smart. They are: they deal with as many, if not more, complex systems as your average IT person on a given day. Some of the biggest growth in IT systems right now is in embedded, special purpose tools specifically desired by ranchers and farmers - and not just the really big corporate ones, but everything down to mom+pop. You think SNMP is useful for managing servers: they've got a feed barn full of cattle which need daily shots, some with special needs and feed regimens, etc.
The holdouts from the metric conversion weren't the 'stupid Americans' who just drive to work every day. It was due to the people who use the standard units in the real world on a daily basis, in large quantities, throughout multiple domains - and for the companies which cater to those people through products.
"First adopters" have always been into the pretty curvy thing. Think: sports cars. Nobody makes boring first-release products; the early ones are "sexy", with the $20 just-the-facts-ma'am variety will come later.
Companies like Dell haven't used the 'standard' board formats for some time. Why they do this, I don't know; maybe it's to lock people into buying a new computer instead of simply replacing the failed-motherboard-on-account-of-shit-PSU with a new board. And now there's Mini-BTX as well.
Don't forget microATX can get quite small! It's only just-barely larger than mini-ITX. It's out there and has been for quite some time, just not terribly popular.
Ironically, all these board formats are ATX power supply compatible (20 or 24 pin): they can use the same PSU.
We probably won't get much smaller in the 'common workstation' arena until we move away from slot expansions and on to pinless sockets, fiber optic connectors, or something similar. It's simply not possible to cram too many more connectors onto the boards (I mean, look at some of those pictures). There are also the limits of the RAM and PSU connector form factor in addition to the card slots and breakouts. Even taking those off, you're not likely to shave more than 1/2" dimensionally: there's too much room dedicated to that backside breakout and support chips/electrical systems.
There will be no legal prosecution for this. In fact, I'd be surprised if we saw anything more about it.
Why?
Because the exploit involves numerous high-profile users: CEOs, military officials, and (most significantly) federal employees who just happen to be of a fairly high status. The White House is using iPads for daily briefings and the like. The fact that this leak is out would be a huge, huge embarrassment on account of its security implications.
Most of the US is laid out in a fairly rigid grid system. We have mile markers (and still use miles) because that's how far apart intersections are. Going to metric would be stupid, making many things complicated. Most people would have to then convert to standard units.
No, using L/km is stupid, since they're not units anyone is familiar with, and gas is pumped by the gallon. Unless we're going to change the entire infrastructure - and you thought the E85 or "over $4/gal" was costly to fuel distribution - the smallest change is the best. (We're not talking software, here - where big changes can be better than small ones due to lifetime costs.)
Why fuck around with 'thickclients' at all? Give the user an XP Embedded thinclient and have them connect to a terminal server (Citrix Presentation, etc.) for their apps and make things massively easier to maintain.
Doom is, granted, a 2D game in all respects - but there are examples of games which lend themselves to good adaptations. Max Payne and Tomb Raider, for instance. They could've ripped everything directly from Max Payne and it'd have been a great film, provided they'd put half a damn into finding an actor who fits the role. Tomb Raider could've been a "female Indiana Jones" if the acting wasn't similarly horrible (with weak-as-piss writing).
Really, butchering movies like these has no excuse in today's film industry where a "good action movie" can be made for a scant wad of cash (compared to in previous years).
I think game movies are bad for several (or more) reasons:
1) The directors/studios don't take the 'game' medium seriously, and don't bother to 'read' the source. They just buy franchise rights, throw a big name actor at it (who doesn't seem to take the role seriously) and hire a couple writers to make the script (regardless of the source material). Classic example(s): Max Payne and Tomb Raider. The source medium for Max Payne was incredible; for all intents and purposes, they could've taken the original dialog from the cutscenes and the in-game dialog, thrown in with action scenes - performed by an actor who understands the character of Max Payne. Tomb Raider suffers much the same problem: bad acting, and an apparent lack of give-a-damn about the quality thereof. Most TV shows have better acting than your typical 'game adaptation' movie, making the viewer interest in them somewhat lackluster, regardless of everything else in the film. 2) Wrong application of the game medium. Eg: the Street Fighter, Mario, etc. movies should never have been movies in the first place. Even as Saturday morning cartoons they've got limited demographic appeal, and casting a game like these into a movie is bound to fail due to the (intentionally) shallow depth of the game characters.
Not to be flaimbait, but there's been no significant improvement to XP in, what, 5 years? There are notable vulnerabilities which are still not fixed. And nothing new from Redmond (or anyone else) seems to support XP in anything but a cursory manner, if that.
So yeah, it is probably time to upgrade from XP. It's a dead operating system; this limits your ability to manage things in an open-ended fashion, increasing the likelihood of a worm-like kludge being introduced to your network design to support old shit.
I don't know abotu that. From what I understand about the current trend (no, I didn't RTFA), most screens are being made for 'multitouch'. This means it's a capacitive screen, more often than not: this makes it ill-suited for pen-based input, on the fact that it needs a finger for operation. This is unlike a resistive touchscreen, which you can use a pen for, and can have varying degrees of sensitivity. The "old" tech used these resistive screens, allowing for pen use: you had to use pressure to operate them/trigger a 'touch'.
All the iCrap and most newer phones have capacitive screens. They're difficult for someone used to a resistive screen to use (IMO) and, again, useless for precise/pen input.
Well, that's kinda what they want to do, from the looks of it (and judging by their social/political behavior over the past several years). "Hey fellow Mohammedans, we're with you now!" First it was denying US air basing into Iraq; most recently it was the vocal support of the flotilla into Israel (of which many of their citizens were participants).
It probably has something to do with a "religiously conservative" party having taken the seats of power there in 2002. Just maybe.
Yet, Turkey is/was a charter nation in the creation of the United Nations; they've also been a member in NATO since the Cold War.
Somehow, something has changed. It's interesting that this so closely coincides with the "blockade" incident with Israel, on account of many of the participants having been Turkish citizens.
I wonder if either of these events have anything to do with the recent (2002) elections in Turkey, where the AKP party (a 'religiously conservative' party with strong Islamic 'influence') won the seats of government in overwhelming numbers. It would certainly explain socio-political events since that time, if indeed they're moving closer towards the Islamic "center" (as Iran claims having done themselves).
Politics - and the societal attitude towards the environment - are very much a part of a culture. A culture is all what makes them a people group, the good and the bad.
Once you say something like violent persecution and child labor aren't part of a culture, you might as well say that war or economics aren't part of a culture, either.
What, per chance, were the defining characteristics of the Roman culture (slavery, opulence, violence, trade, citizenry, the Republic/Empire)? How about the Khan-era Mongol culture? A culture is not a myopic fixture of a people; the people - good and bad - are the culture.
Yeah, no kidding. It's not bad enough that we've got the (relatively rare) office printers with preconfigured mail servers and half a dozen+ variants of BSD which all come with sendmail as part of the base install - nevermind all the zombie machines out there - now we're going to have every cheap deskjet out there with an email address (and likely, the ability to be exploited via an internal mail server of some sort).
When we talk about such items as $75 Nikes that "would cost $300 if they were made in a factory full of USA union labor, paid $45K plus per year", we neglect the possibility that SMALL companies making unique shoes could compete nicely - providing a truly USA made shoe at more like an $85-100 price point - while still earning respectable salaries for the people working there. Sure, they won't employ nearly as many people as a big factory, or even sell as much product -- but the point is, MANY smaller companies can co-exist, all offering alternatives for footwear.
Do you have any idea how much time and effort goes into making a good pair of footwear? I spoke with a local cobbler, and he said the starting price point for custom shoes is $1500. Not $150, $1,500. Granted, he mainly does work boots, but material cost alone is going to put a small shop above $150 a pair: unlike the big boys, they don't have the time/money/resources to make fab molds for their soles or pre-cut the materials with machines.
About 8 years ago, I bought a pair of (real) suede leather Airwalks from Payless Shoes right after Airwalk was bought/joined with their parent company. They cost me $19. They're by far the best shoes (not boots) I've ever owned, and they're just now getting ready for retirement. You can't even get shoes like that anymore from Payless, and their costs have gone up...
But I agree: quality is where it's at. I buy a pair of shoes now every several years (last pair: Danner 8" Strikers about 4 years ago). I'm thinking of getting custom or just well-made ($150+) footwear next, and having them resoled when I need to: these boots are still fit to fight, and they've seen a lot of wear; they're just bald on the bottom and can't be resoled.
Nationalistic bickering aside, this is very good news. As living standards rise around the globe, labor will get more expensive, sure, and our iPods might cost 20% more or something, and in return, human beings on the other side of the planet have food on their table and work to do. It's good for the world that labor in china is getting more expensive in every way except the most short-term "I want my shit cheap right now" way.
That's a bit shortsighted.
Gadgets are not something like food; their novelty/luxury items. If (when) the cost goes up across the board, people will spend less of their hard-earned money on the things they don't need - ie, gadgets. (Perceived) quality will need to go up a similar proportion as the increase in cost for the product to remain competitive (remember the 'high quality' Erickson, etc. cell phones from a decade ago? - they were supplanted by other products offering a better price value).
In return for the decreased demand, there will be less manufacturing done; this will further increase the manufacturing cost per unit, likely leading to a loss of jobs in the foreign plants (unless they're able to cut costs). Increasing costs to your customers NEVER results in more business unless it is paired with a (perceived) equitable increase in the product.
As for respecting China's culture... sure, I'll get right on that. My first cultural taboo to learn to respect is child labor. After I've gotten over that, I'll work on violent persecution of belief systems I don't agree with (Christianity, Islam, etc.). Then I'll work on agreeing with overt state-controlled censorship, and finally, the wanton destruction of the ecosystem and disregard for dumping toxic waste. In fact, I might start on the toxic waste thing: it's easy, because all I'll have to do is pour some waste oil into the municipal sewer. I figure that by this time next year, I'll have matured enough as a person to start accepting China's particular brand of threats and imperialist encroachment - just in time for their wholesale invasion of Taiwan or Tibet, maybe.
I, for one, would pay a (steep) premium for Made in the USA gadgets. Though - and I'm hesitant to add - I'm somewhat tired of the "record profits" companies like Apple are making through their 150% markup and foreign manufacture.
Companies - not just tech companies - as well as their investors need to face the reality that they can't have quarter after quarter record profits and maintain economic vitality. Something will sink eventually - and fast. They need to step back to the reality of past generations (and most other domestic industries which don't outsource everything): marginal (single digit) profits with scrupulous budgeting and spending.
I don't see why a company couldn't manufacture something in the US, sell it here, and still make a profit. Some of the highest quality tools - not necessarily the most expensive - do this: Lee Precision Inc; CMMC (machine + tool) all make both some of the best parts and tools in their field of expertise, and manufacture them completely in the USA (as opposed to some of their direct market competitors, which cost more and have the parts made in China - in the case of Lee). Toyota builds vehicles here due to the superiority of our labor and process, as does Mitsubishi and many others (including many chip fabs, Intel's included).
Companies outsourcing manufacturing are only hurting themselves, long term.
Only 6? And why those 6? The ones they pick seem like a subset I might have picked in the early 2000s. I'd be surprised if there are more than, oh, 5 working Newtons out there, and Palm is pretty damn dead, still. Palm, if anything, should only make the list because of a lack of backward compatibility/application support elsewhere.
How about:
* Apple (wanton consumerism and bling?) * Ubuntu (obviously they picked wisely on this one; there are quite a few people who cling to their Ubuntu as bad as the Apple people do their iProducts) * *BSD (closely pairs with Apple cult, but has other values as well; we're not sure what those are, but they hold them quite dear.) * Silverlight (no sane moral would embrace this cult; it's the coolaid cult that shoots you in the back of the head if you try to leave. But it's getting wide adoption and nobody's leaving it...) * Windows 7 (MCIEs who have had their careers and image revitalized by Windows 7 and 2k8SP2 and users who are glad to have a cheap computer that's prettier like a Mac. These types also use Bing.) * IBM hardware types (where the adage, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" still seems to apply, despite the evidence of inferiority in many ways) * Cloudites (Those idiots who want to move everything to the cloud. "The cloud is the future!" Often use Google products for everything; don't backup their data.)
I classify cult/cult members as a group which, if their "architecture of choice" were to get destroyed/changed drastically, they'd have an ideological/existential reckoning. These are, of course, my observations of fairly rigid groups. Oh yeah, and TFA is OVER A YEAR OLD. WTF, Slashdot editors.
A car can travel faster than the wind. It's called an engine.:P This, however, is not a "car".
The object in TFA doesn't quite meet the qualifications. Why? It's not a car (and barely a vehicle), and you sure as hell won't get that onto a roadway without immediately getting arrested for stupidity. It's not even an engineering prototype; it's a design concept. (A cool one, but still a concept. A LOT more would need to be done to make it even remotely practical for land travel.)
And no, you wouldn't likely be able to shield the thing, or make it 'road safe'. The machine works at all because it's so light and small: it's got no profile and negligible weight to fight the wind's force against the propellers. If you add more weight and/or profile, your propellers need to be (exponentially) larger. The ratio of propeller to vehicle is already well beyond what would be acceptable for road use (and no, they'd not be able to get the same/necessary torque out of multiple, smaller blades).
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
A synergy engine isn't possible, you are correct. However, that's not what this is: look at the scale/size of the rotors in relation to the vehicle itself. This means the blade surface is getting pushed against by the wind, transfering energy down the drive shaft to the wheels: this is more energy than is being imparted against it's forward surface(s) in the form of wind resistance, thus it goes forward.
Hell, sailors have been (I think the term is) drafting into the wind for centuries. It's not a particularly novel concept, though this method of harnessing said wind is. I've heard that it's possible to sail faster than the wind speed if quartered out with the proper tide, or some such thing, but I've no idea if it's possible for sure...
I imagine they'd be better off with a sail, actually. But maybe there's some reason they didn't try a sail (TFA doesn't mention sails).
What are you talking about? The/. headline calls this a "car" and TFA calls it a "vehicle". Being generous, that's misleading. It's neither: it's a frame with a propeller at best; it isn't designed for turning or transit. In fact, you'd probably get arrested for even trying to bring something like this onto a public road.
Best case, this is an engineering example. It's not even a prototype. Necessary scale (particularly for passengers and/or a load) and land (as opposed to sea) friction make such a "vehicle" as close to impossible as impractical can.
Don't get me wrong - it's an awesome demonstration but arguably nothing that's going to go anywhere anytime soon.
Now, derringers... that's something else. If we could figure out how to haul cargo over long distances with minimal wind resistance (slipstreamed airframes with internal cargo space) using sealed helium compartments (so it's a one-time investment), that'd be something. Even if they only do a very slight mileage, they'd be a huge win in many regards. But I doubt we'll be going back to derringers for some time.
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For me, it makes a lot of sense to do disk backups.
I suppose it depends on how much data you've got, but if you've got less than, oh, 1TB of weekly differential data, you can just use eSATA or similar. It's "fast enough" if you're doing it from your backup system, the 2-3 backup "revision" copies (go snapshots!) of your data plus the previous week's backup (and the several before that) should be enough in addition to the "live" data on another host.
And, unlike tape, your 'verify the write' is done in a single process.
Maybe tape has an advantage I'm not seeing in our environment, or maybe I'm missing the benefit outright. In my mind, the cost - coupled with the additional maintainance of complex and "different" tape backup systems - leads me, as "the" systems administrator, to not want to fuck with it. To get a single tape large enough for a "everything" backup is currently not tenable (financially), anyway, so why bother?
Desktop? ...
Oh, you mean the thing covered by sticky notes?
My display is for work. If I'm looking at my desktop, chances are I'm not utilizing much of my screen for work.
See how that works?
Seriously? I wonder how you guys avoid gmail spam; I get a shitload of it. And no, I never signed up for anything with the account - I've largely used it for temporary "cloud" storage and very little actual email (not many people have the address).
Why? It would be immeasurably complicated to switch to metric.
Not only would you have the distance thing to contend with, you'd have volumes, yields, and the like. THe most sensitive industry to this would be farming/ranching, where a lot of knowledge is "rule of thumb": it's not written down, per se, but is the accumulation of seasons and generations of built-up knowledge. Farmers and ranchers know it takes x gallons of water per head or acre per week to keep optimal results; you know x bushels of feed per head or yield per acre are good. You know it takes x gallons of water to optimally water a quarter section to produce y bushels - which is enough to feed z cattle for so many days to reach optimal weights. Then there's fertilizer, and the fact that all equipment is designed around standard units, with many ranchers and farmers using 30+ year old equipment which Still Works. Yes, that will/does cause compatibility issues they could ill afford.
Agricultural workers aren't given enough credit for being smart. They are: they deal with as many, if not more, complex systems as your average IT person on a given day. Some of the biggest growth in IT systems right now is in embedded, special purpose tools specifically desired by ranchers and farmers - and not just the really big corporate ones, but everything down to mom+pop. You think SNMP is useful for managing servers: they've got a feed barn full of cattle which need daily shots, some with special needs and feed regimens, etc.
The holdouts from the metric conversion weren't the 'stupid Americans' who just drive to work every day. It was due to the people who use the standard units in the real world on a daily basis, in large quantities, throughout multiple domains - and for the companies which cater to those people through products.
"First adopters" have always been into the pretty curvy thing. Think: sports cars. Nobody makes boring first-release products; the early ones are "sexy", with the $20 just-the-facts-ma'am variety will come later.
Companies like Dell haven't used the 'standard' board formats for some time. Why they do this, I don't know; maybe it's to lock people into buying a new computer instead of simply replacing the failed-motherboard-on-account-of-shit-PSU with a new board. And now there's Mini-BTX as well.
Don't forget microATX can get quite small! It's only just-barely larger than mini-ITX. It's out there and has been for quite some time, just not terribly popular.
Ironically, all these board formats are ATX power supply compatible (20 or 24 pin): they can use the same PSU.
We probably won't get much smaller in the 'common workstation' arena until we move away from slot expansions and on to pinless sockets, fiber optic connectors, or something similar. It's simply not possible to cram too many more connectors onto the boards (I mean, look at some of those pictures). There are also the limits of the RAM and PSU connector form factor in addition to the card slots and breakouts. Even taking those off, you're not likely to shave more than 1/2" dimensionally: there's too much room dedicated to that backside breakout and support chips/electrical systems.
There will be no legal prosecution for this. In fact, I'd be surprised if we saw anything more about it.
Why?
Because the exploit involves numerous high-profile users: CEOs, military officials, and (most significantly) federal employees who just happen to be of a fairly high status. The White House is using iPads for daily briefings and the like. The fact that this leak is out would be a huge, huge embarrassment on account of its security implications.
The story isn't going anywhere.
Most of the US is laid out in a fairly rigid grid system. We have mile markers (and still use miles) because that's how far apart intersections are. Going to metric would be stupid, making many things complicated. Most people would have to then convert to standard units.
No, using L/km is stupid, since they're not units anyone is familiar with, and gas is pumped by the gallon. Unless we're going to change the entire infrastructure - and you thought the E85 or "over $4/gal" was costly to fuel distribution - the smallest change is the best. (We're not talking software, here - where big changes can be better than small ones due to lifetime costs.)
Why fuck around with 'thickclients' at all? Give the user an XP Embedded thinclient and have them connect to a terminal server (Citrix Presentation, etc.) for their apps and make things massively easier to maintain.
Doom is, granted, a 2D game in all respects - but there are examples of games which lend themselves to good adaptations. Max Payne and Tomb Raider, for instance. They could've ripped everything directly from Max Payne and it'd have been a great film, provided they'd put half a damn into finding an actor who fits the role. Tomb Raider could've been a "female Indiana Jones" if the acting wasn't similarly horrible (with weak-as-piss writing).
Really, butchering movies like these has no excuse in today's film industry where a "good action movie" can be made for a scant wad of cash (compared to in previous years).
I think game movies are bad for several (or more) reasons:
1) The directors/studios don't take the 'game' medium seriously, and don't bother to 'read' the source. They just buy franchise rights, throw a big name actor at it (who doesn't seem to take the role seriously) and hire a couple writers to make the script (regardless of the source material). Classic example(s): Max Payne and Tomb Raider. The source medium for Max Payne was incredible; for all intents and purposes, they could've taken the original dialog from the cutscenes and the in-game dialog, thrown in with action scenes - performed by an actor who understands the character of Max Payne. Tomb Raider suffers much the same problem: bad acting, and an apparent lack of give-a-damn about the quality thereof. Most TV shows have better acting than your typical 'game adaptation' movie, making the viewer interest in them somewhat lackluster, regardless of everything else in the film.
2) Wrong application of the game medium. Eg: the Street Fighter, Mario, etc. movies should never have been movies in the first place. Even as Saturday morning cartoons they've got limited demographic appeal, and casting a game like these into a movie is bound to fail due to the (intentionally) shallow depth of the game characters.
XP is supported?
Not to be flaimbait, but there's been no significant improvement to XP in, what, 5 years? There are notable vulnerabilities which are still not fixed. And nothing new from Redmond (or anyone else) seems to support XP in anything but a cursory manner, if that.
So yeah, it is probably time to upgrade from XP. It's a dead operating system; this limits your ability to manage things in an open-ended fashion, increasing the likelihood of a worm-like kludge being introduced to your network design to support old shit.
I don't know abotu that. From what I understand about the current trend (no, I didn't RTFA), most screens are being made for 'multitouch'. This means it's a capacitive screen, more often than not: this makes it ill-suited for pen-based input, on the fact that it needs a finger for operation. This is unlike a resistive touchscreen, which you can use a pen for, and can have varying degrees of sensitivity. The "old" tech used these resistive screens, allowing for pen use: you had to use pressure to operate them/trigger a 'touch'.
All the iCrap and most newer phones have capacitive screens. They're difficult for someone used to a resistive screen to use (IMO) and, again, useless for precise/pen input.
Well, that's kinda what they want to do, from the looks of it (and judging by their social/political behavior over the past several years). "Hey fellow Mohammedans, we're with you now!" First it was denying US air basing into Iraq; most recently it was the vocal support of the flotilla into Israel (of which many of their citizens were participants).
It probably has something to do with a "religiously conservative" party having taken the seats of power there in 2002. Just maybe.
Yet, Turkey is/was a charter nation in the creation of the United Nations; they've also been a member in NATO since the Cold War.
Somehow, something has changed. It's interesting that this so closely coincides with the "blockade" incident with Israel, on account of many of the participants having been Turkish citizens.
I wonder if either of these events have anything to do with the recent (2002) elections in Turkey, where the AKP party (a 'religiously conservative' party with strong Islamic 'influence') won the seats of government in overwhelming numbers. It would certainly explain socio-political events since that time, if indeed they're moving closer towards the Islamic "center" (as Iran claims having done themselves).
Politics - and the societal attitude towards the environment - are very much a part of a culture. A culture is all what makes them a people group, the good and the bad.
Once you say something like violent persecution and child labor aren't part of a culture, you might as well say that war or economics aren't part of a culture, either.
What, per chance, were the defining characteristics of the Roman culture (slavery, opulence, violence, trade, citizenry, the Republic/Empire)? How about the Khan-era Mongol culture? A culture is not a myopic fixture of a people; the people - good and bad - are the culture.
Yeah, no kidding. It's not bad enough that we've got the (relatively rare) office printers with preconfigured mail servers and half a dozen+ variants of BSD which all come with sendmail as part of the base install - nevermind all the zombie machines out there - now we're going to have every cheap deskjet out there with an email address (and likely, the ability to be exploited via an internal mail server of some sort).
When we talk about such items as $75 Nikes that "would cost $300 if they were made in a factory full of USA union labor, paid $45K plus per year", we neglect the possibility that SMALL companies making unique shoes could compete nicely - providing a truly USA made shoe at more like an $85-100 price point - while still earning respectable salaries for the people working there. Sure, they won't employ nearly as many people as a big factory, or even sell as much product -- but the point is, MANY smaller companies can co-exist, all offering alternatives for footwear.
Do you have any idea how much time and effort goes into making a good pair of footwear? I spoke with a local cobbler, and he said the starting price point for custom shoes is $1500. Not $150, $1,500. Granted, he mainly does work boots, but material cost alone is going to put a small shop above $150 a pair: unlike the big boys, they don't have the time/money/resources to make fab molds for their soles or pre-cut the materials with machines.
About 8 years ago, I bought a pair of (real) suede leather Airwalks from Payless Shoes right after Airwalk was bought/joined with their parent company. They cost me $19. They're by far the best shoes (not boots) I've ever owned, and they're just now getting ready for retirement. You can't even get shoes like that anymore from Payless, and their costs have gone up...
But I agree: quality is where it's at. I buy a pair of shoes now every several years (last pair: Danner 8" Strikers about 4 years ago). I'm thinking of getting custom or just well-made ($150+) footwear next, and having them resoled when I need to: these boots are still fit to fight, and they've seen a lot of wear; they're just bald on the bottom and can't be resoled.
Nationalistic bickering aside, this is very good news. As living standards rise around the globe, labor will get more expensive, sure, and our iPods might cost 20% more or something, and in return, human beings on the other side of the planet have food on their table and work to do. It's good for the world that labor in china is getting more expensive in every way except the most short-term "I want my shit cheap right now" way.
That's a bit shortsighted.
Gadgets are not something like food; their novelty/luxury items. If (when) the cost goes up across the board, people will spend less of their hard-earned money on the things they don't need - ie, gadgets. (Perceived) quality will need to go up a similar proportion as the increase in cost for the product to remain competitive (remember the 'high quality' Erickson, etc. cell phones from a decade ago? - they were supplanted by other products offering a better price value).
In return for the decreased demand, there will be less manufacturing done; this will further increase the manufacturing cost per unit, likely leading to a loss of jobs in the foreign plants (unless they're able to cut costs). Increasing costs to your customers NEVER results in more business unless it is paired with a (perceived) equitable increase in the product.
As for respecting China's culture... sure, I'll get right on that. My first cultural taboo to learn to respect is child labor. After I've gotten over that, I'll work on violent persecution of belief systems I don't agree with (Christianity, Islam, etc.). Then I'll work on agreeing with overt state-controlled censorship, and finally, the wanton destruction of the ecosystem and disregard for dumping toxic waste. In fact, I might start on the toxic waste thing: it's easy, because all I'll have to do is pour some waste oil into the municipal sewer. I figure that by this time next year, I'll have matured enough as a person to start accepting China's particular brand of threats and imperialist encroachment - just in time for their wholesale invasion of Taiwan or Tibet, maybe.
I, for one, would pay a (steep) premium for Made in the USA gadgets. Though - and I'm hesitant to add - I'm somewhat tired of the "record profits" companies like Apple are making through their 150% markup and foreign manufacture.
Companies - not just tech companies - as well as their investors need to face the reality that they can't have quarter after quarter record profits and maintain economic vitality. Something will sink eventually - and fast. They need to step back to the reality of past generations (and most other domestic industries which don't outsource everything): marginal (single digit) profits with scrupulous budgeting and spending.
I don't see why a company couldn't manufacture something in the US, sell it here, and still make a profit. Some of the highest quality tools - not necessarily the most expensive - do this: Lee Precision Inc; CMMC (machine + tool) all make both some of the best parts and tools in their field of expertise, and manufacture them completely in the USA (as opposed to some of their direct market competitors, which cost more and have the parts made in China - in the case of Lee). Toyota builds vehicles here due to the superiority of our labor and process, as does Mitsubishi and many others (including many chip fabs, Intel's included).
Companies outsourcing manufacturing are only hurting themselves, long term.
Only 6? And why those 6? The ones they pick seem like a subset I might have picked in the early 2000s. I'd be surprised if there are more than, oh, 5 working Newtons out there, and Palm is pretty damn dead, still. Palm, if anything, should only make the list because of a lack of backward compatibility/application support elsewhere.
How about:
* Apple (wanton consumerism and bling?)
* Ubuntu (obviously they picked wisely on this one; there are quite a few people who cling to their Ubuntu as bad as the Apple people do their iProducts)
* *BSD (closely pairs with Apple cult, but has other values as well; we're not sure what those are, but they hold them quite dear.)
* Silverlight (no sane moral would embrace this cult; it's the coolaid cult that shoots you in the back of the head if you try to leave. But it's getting wide adoption and nobody's leaving it...)
* Windows 7 (MCIEs who have had their careers and image revitalized by Windows 7 and 2k8SP2 and users who are glad to have a cheap computer that's prettier like a Mac. These types also use Bing.)
* IBM hardware types (where the adage, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" still seems to apply, despite the evidence of inferiority in many ways)
* Cloudites (Those idiots who want to move everything to the cloud. "The cloud is the future!" Often use Google products for everything; don't backup their data.)
I classify cult/cult members as a group which, if their "architecture of choice" were to get destroyed/changed drastically, they'd have an ideological/existential reckoning. These are, of course, my observations of fairly rigid groups.
Oh yeah, and TFA is OVER A YEAR OLD. WTF, Slashdot editors.
A car can travel faster than the wind. It's called an engine. :P This, however, is not a "car".
The object in TFA doesn't quite meet the qualifications. Why? It's not a car (and barely a vehicle), and you sure as hell won't get that onto a roadway without immediately getting arrested for stupidity. It's not even an engineering prototype; it's a design concept. (A cool one, but still a concept. A LOT more would need to be done to make it even remotely practical for land travel.)
And no, you wouldn't likely be able to shield the thing, or make it 'road safe'. The machine works at all because it's so light and small: it's got no profile and negligible weight to fight the wind's force against the propellers. If you add more weight and/or profile, your propellers need to be (exponentially) larger. The ratio of propeller to vehicle is already well beyond what would be acceptable for road use (and no, they'd not be able to get the same/necessary torque out of multiple, smaller blades).
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
A synergy engine isn't possible, you are correct. However, that's not what this is: look at the scale/size of the rotors in relation to the vehicle itself. This means the blade surface is getting pushed against by the wind, transfering energy down the drive shaft to the wheels: this is more energy than is being imparted against it's forward surface(s) in the form of wind resistance, thus it goes forward.
Hell, sailors have been (I think the term is) drafting into the wind for centuries. It's not a particularly novel concept, though this method of harnessing said wind is. I've heard that it's possible to sail faster than the wind speed if quartered out with the proper tide, or some such thing, but I've no idea if it's possible for sure...
I imagine they'd be better off with a sail, actually. But maybe there's some reason they didn't try a sail (TFA doesn't mention sails).
What are you talking about? The /. headline calls this a "car" and TFA calls it a "vehicle". Being generous, that's misleading. It's neither: it's a frame with a propeller at best; it isn't designed for turning or transit. In fact, you'd probably get arrested for even trying to bring something like this onto a public road.
Best case, this is an engineering example. It's not even a prototype. Necessary scale (particularly for passengers and/or a load) and land (as opposed to sea) friction make such a "vehicle" as close to impossible as impractical can.
Don't get me wrong - it's an awesome demonstration but arguably nothing that's going to go anywhere anytime soon.
Now, derringers... that's something else. If we could figure out how to haul cargo over long distances with minimal wind resistance (slipstreamed airframes with internal cargo space) using sealed helium compartments (so it's a one-time investment), that'd be something. Even if they only do a very slight mileage, they'd be a huge win in many regards. But I doubt we'll be going back to derringers for some time.