In a large company, it is not critical that each part of the company be individually profitable. What is important is that the various parts be set up correctly from a strategic point of view such that the profit of the company as a whole is maximized over a time period that satisfies investors.
So let's ask what is strategic about Xbox?
The main thing is that if they hope to make Xbox 2 profitable, they had to suffer the learning curve and risk to capital of introducing Xbox 1. It would be great to go straight to version 2 and skip all the growing pains of version 1 in any product, but product development just doesn't work that way.
Second part of the plan: MS is desperate to have a box in your house that they control, which affords them an opportunity for another monopoly in a different room of 2+ billion people's homes. This is kind of a longshot, but big companies can roll big dice.
Third part of the plan: by the time Xbox 3 rolls out, the marketing people should have figured out a way to get people to pay for PVR, video on demand, high definition, 7.1 surround, webtv, satellite, broadband, VOIP, wireless, EVERYTHING IN ONE BOX and you only pay MSFT $30/month. This is what they want, a giant revenue stream from a cheap box they control and that everyone wants.
Final part of the plan: with a monopoly on the delivery platform, they can dictate terms to movie studios, cable companies, TV networks, game developers, even telcos on a pay-to-play basis. This is when they make their realprofit. With even partial control of these revenue streams, MSFT can make back 100x their losses on Xbox 1.
Microsoft is not stupid, they are not throwing away their money on a bad investment just to annoy Sony, and they are not the least bit concerned that they spent a $1 billion and didn't make it back immediately.
In fact, this is so tempting a strategy that we must wonder why they have not already done so. There are some practical factors...
1. There is a stunning variety of hardware devices out there with no mac os drivers for them. One solution would be a driver compatibiliy kernel plug-in that would let windows or linux drivers work, but this would take some time and effort to get right. Apple should have started on this years ago.
2. MS invested several hundred million in Apple a couple of years ago, at a dark time in the company's history. I have to wonder if there are some strings to that investment, or similar conditions tied to MS's continued support of Office on macs. If MS pulls the plug on Office for MacOS X, most corporations will stop buying macs. End of story.
3. Jobs is biding his time because he has some very specific marketing information as to why this would not be a financial success for Apple and is waiting for conditions to change before doing another "bet the company" initiative.
4. Jobs is just touchy-feely and can't get over his preference to sell actual hardware at $2000 a pop over $100 boxes of Mac OSx86 to 20 times as many people.
5. Microsoft would use every last employee, dollar, and lawyer to destroy Apple if this were to pass.
What would be cool is if xv 3.20 could be released soon.
In case you're too young to remember, xv is the program everyone used for looking at whatever they downloaded from alt.binaries.pictures.* around 1990 +/-. Without xv and the newsgroups to fuel it, the bandwidth demands of the developing internet would have been much smaller and there would have been less of a need for the fiber-optic build out later in the 90's.
It's a tiny program, but it was the leading edge for the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in internet infrastructure.
In another, oh, two years, cell phones will have streaming movie recording capabilities anyway so you won't need a camcorder to record movies. when the night vision goggle guy comes up just tell him you were checking your voice mail for the last 45 minutes.
If the theaters are smart they'll be able to kill two birds with one stone here--the annoying people who chat on cell phones during movies plus people who record movies on their cell phones.
Here are some handy and hopefully not dreadfully obvious tips for saving money on fuel. clip and save
* Switch to a more economical car
if you have multiple cars in your household, you don't have to buy a new one, just make sure the person who drives the most gets the highest-mpg car.
or, if you have a recent model SUV, you may be able to trade it in and get a nice economical sedan, AND have money leftover.
when choosing a car, get the smallest engine available, combine it with a manual transmission (preferably a 5 or six speed, whichever has the highest final drive ratio), manual air conditioning, and no extra-weight accessories like a motorized sunroof, 14-way power seats, or trailer towing package for example.
It may make sense to choose a diesel or hybrid vehicle, but you need to compute the payback period, since these vehicles usually cost more to purchase, both in list price and in the lack of discounts because of limited availability. Consider a $3000 up front cost that saves $300 a year in fuel. If you aren't going to keep the car 10+ years then don't bother.
choose a car with a tachometer for sure, and even better find one with a dashboard display of mpg so you can adjust your driving habits in real time.
if you choose a normal gasoline engine car, check the owner's manual before you buy to make sure it doesn't require premium.
* Choose a sensible route to work
of course, for some people there is only one obvious way to get to work and back, but for others there may be some alternatives. drive the alternatives for a week each, make a note of driving time, exact distance, number of stoplights, fuel used, and whether there are convenient shops and malls along the way at which you can do your errands w/o having to go off course.
Generally, the shortest route that consists mainly of highway driving will be your best bet, then if necessary take an alternate route home on "errand day" that passes by your dry cleaners, grocery store, etc.
* Combine multiple trips
i'm about 5 miles from civilization (10 miles round trip) so if I can do three errands at once instead of one at a time, I can save 20 miles of driving. this is about 1 gallon in my car so about $2.00 at current gas prices. if I can combine errands like this once a week at least that's $104 per year.
* Drive gently
get up to a maintainable cruising speed and keep it steady. For automatic transmissions, accelerate in a manner that allows the transmission to shift fairly early. For manual transmissions, shift early all the time, even if you have to press the gas pedal pretty far down to keep accelerating. pushing down the pedal 100% at 1500 rpm is more efficient than pushing it down half way at 3000 rpm. (neglecting the effect of non-linear throttles).
anticipate stop lights, traffic, and intersections then slow down in advance. when you lift your foot off the gas and coast, you are probably getting 100+ mpg for a short time. this is preferable to keeping your foot on the gas (e.g. 20 mpg) all the way up to the stoplight and then hitting the brakes, coming to a stop and getting 0 mpg. if you time it right you won't even have to spend the energy re-accelerating from a stop.
* Simple things that together add up to one or 2 mpg
turn off the a/c. climate control systems often leave the compressor running even if it is quite cold outside, so find the a/c button and turn it off. the climate control system will still function for heating and ventilation and when it actually does get hot you can turn the a/c back on just when you need it. some cars have an economy mode so use that in preference to the normal a/c. check the owner's manual as sometimes it isn't obvious how to engage the economy mode.
if you aren't worried about crime, lower your windows when parked on a warm day so you might not need the a/c when you get back in the car.
if you are a pack rat, clean out your car. the excess weig
One other factor has changed slightly over the last 20 years that affects vehicle choice. It is now the law of the land (in the US at least) that for safety reasons children must be safely belted into the car in their own seat, or in a child safety seat that takes up a full seating position.
When I was a child there was no such requirement, and excess children typically sat wedged between other people on bench seats or just scrambled into the cargo area of the station wagon. With the new legal requirements, a car may only carry as many people as it was officially designed to carry, so people must purchase larger vehicles with a third row of seats to maintain their ability to ferry the same number of children about. And keep in mind it is common for people to cart around the children of relatives or neighbors in addition to their own, so even if you only have two kids you may find it expedient to plan for carrying 5 from time to time.
Anyway, this limits a lot of people's choice to larger minivans and SUVs, at some cost in fuel efficiency. And to get back to your point, this is partly why average people are now willing to buy large "truck" sized vehicles that were simply not on the radar when the tax laws affecting them were created 20 years ago.
This didn't really seem like much co-operation between buildings. they were just independently listening to price-of-electricity broadcasts (over XML whoop-dee-freakin-doo) and acting solely on that information.
But take a moment of brainstorming and you can imagine some areas where buildings could actually co-operate:
adjacent buildings could compare temperatures and notice that one is always a little hot (because of a lot of people and equipment) and one is always a little cold (maybe it's in shadow most of the day and lightly occupied). The buildings could do an ROI on establishing a heat pump between the two buildings and tell someone about it if it's positive.
buildings with solar power could offer to sell to nearby buildings. since distribution over short distances is more efficient, this would save the innefficency of selling it back to edison who then resells it some random place at some markup.
water source heat pumps could negotiate sharing agreements over who gets to raise/lower a shared pond by how many (fractions) of a degree.
buildings could monitor nearby microclimates on behalf of each other to make better predictions on weather and thus anticipate temperature/light changes by, for example, storing up some heat at evening rates if there is a cold front coming in or pre-chilling if buildings to the east are reporting a big jump when the sun comes up.
crime wave/riot situation: if other buildings security or fire alarms are going off in the area, turn on exterior lights, run a systems check on the fire safety system, and send a page to building security people.
co-ordinate holiday schedules. often there are a few buildings that leave systems running on holidays that happen M-F. If one building seems to be deviating from the pack, it can suggest to building management that maybe they can shutdown a/c on monday.
marketing. if some conference rooms are in use after 6pm, the neighborhood Pizza Hub would sure like to know about it so they can send over some food and soda.
Seriously though, it could take a while to travel 62000 miles, even at a pretty good pace. Let's say it can manage 100 miles an hour. That leaves 620 hours to get there, or over 25 days. If you've only got one cable, there's no way for a car coming down to pass another coming up, so it's one shot every 50 days which severely limits cargo capacity.
The solution? Make the elevator cars disposable. Then you can just keep loading them up and sending them on their way so long as the weight limit on the cable isn't exceeded. When they get to the top, fire a small rocket that sends it into the atmosphere to burn up or just let them pile up until you have enough to make a space station with.
It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.
The obvious exception would be a nuclear explosion, but there is already a network of satellites in place to detect those.
For spacecraft that venture further afield this could certainly be of value though.
Seriously, let the caller choose what he/she wants to listen to. Something obvious like:
Press 1 for classical. Press 2 for jazz. Press 3 for easy listening. Press 4 for popular tunes. Press 5 for hard rock. Press 6 for the weird guy who likes dixieland. Press 7 for country. Press 8 for western.
This will be a little harder to set up, but if you care enough to BOTHER THE 100000 PEOPLE WHO READ SLASHDOT then surely you'd be willing to put some extra time into this.
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
So you are saying that in the metric system it is logical to scale paper sizes in base 2. Thanks, I've learned a lot today!
The tempest in a teacup is over whether an OS could be written from scratch by a single person. Making a shared project out of it fails to prove that a single person can do it. Worse yet, Ken Brown's sense of logic will lead him to cry that it's proof that a single person cannot do it.
It's probably a fun project, but it isn't really going to prove anything new that reasonable people don't already know. And it will fail to convince unreasonable people of anything.
The problem with judging this on pricing is that MS execs may or may not see the "game" in terms of units sold or pricing.
In real life, what happens is that the 10 year old kids are the only ones locked into the Xbox they got last christmas. The gamers in their 20's and 30's can and do buy both an Xbox and a PS2 and maybe a Gamecube while they're at it. The price war has made the cost of an extra console about the same as 2 high-quality game titles. People just shop for games and if the game is cool enough they'll buy the console for it regardless of their "installed base."
Sony could actually sell far fewer consoles than MS but still make far more money on licensing.
Clearly, MS isn't playing to win in the short term, they simply want to have another box in another room in your house and they'll worry about the revenue stream later, maybe PPV movies or PPV games or $10/month for a PVR subscription. They just want their foot in the door.
I would recommend a professional driving school like bondurant or skip barber. not cheap, but compared to a car wreck or DUI it's not a bad investment. this will teach him the basic intuition needed to control a car in a variety of traction and speed circumstances. A real car with no reset button to fix his mistakes.
Lots of people run blogs/forums types of websites on the cheap. You don't need VC money to run that sort of thing.
Honestly, I think you'd be in danger of blowing any VC funding on more day-trading "experience" and this time it would all be documented in your blog. Not a good thing, from a legal defense perspective.
1. do not drink, smoke pot, or hang out with other people who do such things. take it easy on caffeine too. bright but directionless people can get very non-linear when their brains are exposed to chemicals. don't do it, you'll be extraordinarilty sorry. I was.
2. find an area of study that has some microcosm-like aspects to it, so that if you get obsessed with it, you still might learn enough to be a useful and productive member of society. For example, if you really get into law or business you'll still be able to deal with "normal" people at some point. If you study astronomy or music for 4 or 6 years you'll only be able to talk to other people who are into those topics and they will probably find you somewhat boring.
3. get a girlfriend. she will dump you. get another one. she will dump you. get another one. you sound like someone who is going to need something to hold his life together, and picking a field in college isn't going to be enough. work on intimacy, trust, love, and how to deal with heartbreak. eventually you may reach a stable relationship and it won't seem to important to be super "intense" and "focused". you might have some kids, buy a house in the suburbs and commute to work in a Honda. It's okay, lots of people do it, and you can still be unique in a way that matters, even if you're normal in ways that don't.
4. accept different levels of expertise from yourself and others in different areas. some people don't know anything about anything but they are still fun to talk to. some people are total geniuses about everything and are still fun to talk to.
5. find some uninteresting way to make money. be a landlord. day trade stocks. be a tax advisor. you'll need money in the future and it's nice to be able to just make money without having the process tied up in your ego drive for knowledge.
Actually now that I think about it, I think people did tell me these things, I was just not listening...
It's entirely possible that Ken Brown is just creating an artificial controvery in order to get AdTI into the headlines and drum up more business for himself.
What I would like to see developed is a "partial" hybrid vehicle, one that extracts power from engine braking, but instead of storing a large quantity of energy for low-speed propulsion, it just stores a moderate amount for powering accessory and parasitic loads like water pumps, air conditioning, power steering, fans, etc, which can all run off of small electric motors instead of being driven off the main engine pully full time. This also allows the engine to be slightly smaller and accessories can be packaged in more convenient places throughout the car rather than being forced into a plane at the front of the engine.
The potential mpg gain for this kind of hybrid is not as dramatic as in a full hybrid like a Toyota Prius, but the cost is a lot more practical as you don't need a large, heavy battery bank or a 40+ hp electric motor. You don't need to modify the powertrain of a standard vehicle at all, plus you get benefit of being able to run all the accessories when the engine is stopped.
My guess is that this would add well under a thousand dollars to the price of a car, as opposed to the $2000-3000 premium that you pay for current hybrids and I would expect a 10 to 15% improvement in mpg, which isn't dramatic, but it isn't anything to sneeze at either.
It isn't that hard to see how this will play out. Like any scarce resource, it will gradually become more expensive (subject to fluctuations) and as it does so, people will migrate from their 12mpg GMC Suburbans living 45 miles from the office into toyota priuses and telecommuting most days.
The key is that there is a lot of oil in the ground at different costs to extract. As the price of fuel rises, it becomes worthwhile for oil companies to work harder to extract small amounts from remaining wells that were not viable at lower prices. Maybe it will taper off with gasoline at $50 a gallon or more but it will happen gradually so that humanity can slowly adapt to using less fuel.
As the auto and truck fleet ages it will be replaced by higher efficiency vehicles. Oil powered electic plants will be replaced by solar or (gasp) nuclear. People will become accustomed to video conferencing and telephone calls and not so interested in air travel. It will happen, it will happen gradually, and people will be bitching about it the whole time. Just ignore them.
In a couple hundred years, when oil is essentially gone, people will probably be celebrating a new "age", like the "cold fusion age" and looking back at how quaint it was when people burned oily goop to make explosions in a chunk of cast iron.
plenty of small-form-factor digital cameras avail
on
Camera Phone Tips
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are quite a number of small (fits in pocket) cameras available. I like the casio exilim, but olympus, konica minolta, sony, and canon all have 3MP+ cameras with 3x optical zoom and flash that are about the size of a 1/2" stack of business cards.
These are great cameras to carry with you 24/7 and while they don't take digital SLR level photos they are a lot better than a camera phone and have a lot more smarts about exposure levels and autofocus.
Buy a couple of memory cards and you can take pictures constantly for a week and not pay to upload them over a cell phone carrier's network. You'll get some truly awesome photos that aren't stuck at 640x480 on a fixed-focus no-zoom, filled-with-dirt-lens seconday add-on marketing-said-to piece of junk.
What would funny is if they had gone the other direction and put a cheap cell phone into a Nikon digital rebel. "Excuse me, my camera is ringing..."
The article made it sound like the optimizations he was doing at the erlang level were somehow "better" than optimizations done in a language like C++ because he could just try out new techniques w/o worrying about correctness. His array bounds and types would be checked and all would be good.
BS.
First of all, erlang won't catch logical or algorithm errors, which are quite common when you're optimizing.
Second, you can optimize just fine in C++ the same way just as easily, IF YOU ARE A C++ programmer. You just try out some new techniques the same way you always do. So array bounds aren't checked. You get used to it and you just stop making that kind of mistake or else you get good at debugging it. Hey at least you have static type checking.
In fact you might be able to do a better job of optimization because you'll be able to see, right in front of you, low level opportunities for optimization and high level ones also. C++ programmers aren't automatically stupid and blinded by some 1:1 source line to assembly line ratio requirement.
i agree, spam seems overwhelming, but it's really easy to filter a big chunk of it out and just click the delete key on the few that make it into your inbox.
what I hate about email is that 2/3 of it is real stuff from customers, friends, co-workers, managers, spouses, on-line acquantainces, family, REAL PEOPLE who expect a thoughtful, complete reply to their message. Even for a simple yes/no reply this can take 20-50 times longer to deal with than just deleting a spam message. The actual cost of labor to deal with email is far higher when the message has actual content, and that's what IT managers should really be worried about.
how did they do this? fiber optic? satellite? quantum singlarity? who paid for this? government grants? private sponsorship? ice weasels? who benefits from this? physics professors? lonely college students? pay per view movie download web sites? can this technology be brought to individuals and businesses? yes? no? maybe? what crappy reporting on such an interesting topic.
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In a large company, it is not critical that each part of the company be individually profitable. What is important is that the various parts be set up correctly from a strategic point of view such that the profit of the company as a whole is maximized over a time period that satisfies investors.
So let's ask what is strategic about Xbox?
The main thing is that if they hope to make Xbox 2 profitable, they had to suffer the learning curve and risk to capital of introducing Xbox 1. It would be great to go straight to version 2 and skip all the growing pains of version 1 in any product, but product development just doesn't work that way.
Second part of the plan: MS is desperate to have a box in your house that they control, which affords them an opportunity for another monopoly in a different room of 2+ billion people's homes. This is kind of a longshot, but big companies can roll big dice.
Third part of the plan: by the time Xbox 3 rolls out, the marketing people should have figured out a way to get people to pay for PVR, video on demand, high definition, 7.1 surround, webtv, satellite, broadband, VOIP, wireless, EVERYTHING IN ONE BOX and you only pay MSFT $30/month. This is what they want, a giant revenue stream from a cheap box they control and that everyone wants.
Final part of the plan: with a monopoly on the delivery platform, they can dictate terms to movie studios, cable companies, TV networks, game developers, even telcos on a pay-to-play basis. This is when they make their realprofit. With even partial control of these revenue streams, MSFT can make back 100x their losses on Xbox 1.
Microsoft is not stupid, they are not throwing away their money on a bad investment just to annoy Sony, and they are not the least bit concerned that they spent a $1 billion and didn't make it back immediately.
In fact, this is so tempting a strategy that we must wonder why they have not already done so. There are some practical factors...
1. There is a stunning variety of hardware devices out there with no mac os drivers for them. One solution would be a driver compatibiliy kernel plug-in that would let windows or linux drivers work, but this would take some time and effort to get right. Apple should have started on this years ago.
2. MS invested several hundred million in Apple a couple of years ago, at a dark time in the company's history. I have to wonder if there are some strings to that investment, or similar conditions tied to MS's continued support of Office on macs. If MS pulls the plug on Office for MacOS X, most corporations will stop buying macs. End of story.
3. Jobs is biding his time because he has some very specific marketing information as to why this would not be a financial success for Apple and is waiting for conditions to change before doing another "bet the company" initiative.
4. Jobs is just touchy-feely and can't get over his preference to sell actual hardware at $2000 a pop over $100 boxes of Mac OSx86 to 20 times as many people.
5. Microsoft would use every last employee, dollar, and lawyer to destroy Apple if this were to pass.
Discuss.
What would be cool is if xv 3.20 could be released soon.
In case you're too young to remember, xv is the program everyone used for looking at whatever they downloaded from alt.binaries.pictures.* around 1990 +/-. Without xv and the newsgroups to fuel it, the bandwidth demands of the developing internet would have been much smaller and there would have been less of a need for the fiber-optic build out later in the 90's.
It's a tiny program, but it was the leading edge for the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in internet infrastructure.
In another, oh, two years, cell phones will have streaming movie recording capabilities anyway so you won't need a camcorder to record movies. when the night vision goggle guy comes up just tell him you were checking your voice mail for the last 45 minutes.
If the theaters are smart they'll be able to kill two birds with one stone here--the annoying people who chat on cell phones during movies plus people who record movies on their cell phones.
Here are some handy and hopefully not dreadfully obvious tips for saving money on fuel.
clip and save
* Switch to a more economical car
if you have multiple cars in your household, you don't have to buy a new one, just make sure the person who drives the most gets the highest-mpg car.
or, if you have a recent model SUV, you may be able to trade it in and get a nice economical sedan, AND have money leftover.
when choosing a car, get the smallest engine available, combine it with a manual transmission (preferably a 5 or six speed, whichever has the highest final drive ratio), manual air conditioning, and no extra-weight accessories like a motorized sunroof, 14-way power seats, or trailer towing package for example.
It may make sense to choose a diesel or hybrid vehicle, but you need to compute the payback period, since these vehicles usually cost more to purchase, both in list price and in the lack of discounts because of limited availability. Consider a $3000 up front cost that saves $300 a year in fuel. If you aren't going to keep the car 10+ years then don't bother.
choose a car with a tachometer for sure, and even better find one with a dashboard display of mpg so you can adjust your driving habits in real time.
if you choose a normal gasoline engine car, check the owner's manual before you buy to make sure it doesn't require premium.
* Choose a sensible route to work
of course, for some people there is only one obvious way to get to work and back, but for others there may be some alternatives. drive the alternatives for a week each, make a note of driving time, exact distance, number of stoplights, fuel used, and whether there are convenient shops and malls along the way at which you can do your errands w/o having to go off course.
Generally, the shortest route that consists mainly of highway driving will be your best bet, then if necessary take an alternate route home on "errand day" that passes by your dry cleaners, grocery store, etc.
* Combine multiple trips
i'm about 5 miles from civilization (10 miles round trip) so if I can do three errands at once instead of one at a time, I can save 20 miles of driving. this is about 1 gallon in my car so about $2.00 at current gas prices.
if I can combine errands like this once a week at least that's $104 per year.
* Drive gently
get up to a maintainable cruising speed and keep it steady.
For automatic transmissions, accelerate in a manner that allows the transmission to shift fairly early.
For manual transmissions, shift early all the time, even if you have to press the gas pedal pretty far down to keep accelerating. pushing down the pedal 100% at 1500 rpm is more efficient than pushing it down half way at 3000 rpm. (neglecting the effect of non-linear throttles).
anticipate stop lights, traffic, and intersections then slow down in advance. when you lift your foot off the gas and coast, you are probably getting 100+ mpg for a short time. this is preferable to keeping your foot on the gas (e.g. 20 mpg) all the way up to the stoplight and then hitting the brakes, coming to a stop and getting
0 mpg. if you time it right you won't even have to spend the energy re-accelerating from a stop.
* Simple things that together add up to one or 2 mpg
turn off the a/c. climate control systems often leave the compressor running even if it is quite cold outside, so find the a/c button and turn it off. the climate control system will still function for heating and ventilation and when it actually does get hot you can turn the a/c back on just when you need it. some cars have an economy mode so use that in preference to the normal a/c. check the owner's manual as sometimes it isn't obvious how to engage the economy mode.
if you aren't worried about crime, lower your windows when parked on a warm day so you might not need the a/c when you get back in the car.
if you are a pack rat, clean out your car. the excess weig
One other factor has changed slightly over the last 20 years that affects vehicle choice. It is now the law of the land (in the US at least) that for safety reasons children must be safely belted into the car in their own seat, or in a child safety seat that takes up a full seating position.
When I was a child there was no such requirement, and excess children typically sat wedged between other people on bench seats or just scrambled into the cargo area of the station wagon. With the new legal requirements, a car may only carry as many people as it was officially designed to carry, so people must purchase larger vehicles with a third row of seats to maintain their ability to ferry the same number of children about. And keep in mind it is common for people to cart around the children of relatives or neighbors in addition to their own, so even if you only have two kids you may find it expedient to plan for carrying 5 from time to time.
Anyway, this limits a lot of people's choice to larger minivans and SUVs, at some cost in fuel efficiency. And to get back to your point, this is partly why average people are now willing to buy large "truck" sized vehicles that were simply not on the radar when the tax laws affecting them were created 20 years ago.
But take a moment of brainstorming and you can imagine some areas where buildings could actually co-operate:
Seriously though, it could take a while to travel 62000 miles, even at a pretty good pace. Let's say it can manage 100 miles an hour. That leaves 620 hours to get there, or over 25 days. If you've only got one cable, there's no way for a car coming down to pass another coming up, so it's one shot every 50 days which severely limits cargo capacity.
The solution? Make the elevator cars disposable. Then you can just keep loading them up and sending them on their way so long as the weight limit on the cable isn't exceeded. When they get to the top, fire a small rocket that sends it into the atmosphere to burn up or just let them pile up until you have enough to make a space station with.
It's not like this software has to be on board the spacecraft. It's well under a second to do a round trip communication with a satellite, so there isn't much value to having the camera steered on board vs. from a ground computer unless you are photographing things that are over in 1/2 a second. Most anything large enough to see from orbit is going to unfolding slowly over days, not seconds.
The obvious exception would be a nuclear explosion, but there is already a network of satellites in place to detect those.
For spacecraft that venture further afield this could certainly be of value though.
Seriously, let the caller choose what he/she wants to listen to. Something obvious like:
Press 1 for classical. Press 2 for jazz. Press 3 for easy listening. Press 4 for popular tunes. Press 5 for hard rock. Press 6 for the weird guy who likes dixieland. Press 7 for country. Press 8 for western.
This will be a little harder to set up, but if you care enough to BOTHER THE 100000 PEOPLE WHO READ SLASHDOT then surely you'd be willing to put some extra time into this.
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
So you are saying that in the metric system it is logical to scale paper sizes in base 2. Thanks, I've learned a lot today!
The tempest in a teacup is over whether an OS could be written from scratch by a single person. Making a shared project out of it fails to prove that a single person can do it. Worse yet, Ken Brown's sense of logic will lead him to cry that it's proof that a single person cannot do it.
It's probably a fun project, but it isn't really going to prove anything new that reasonable people don't already know. And it will fail to convince unreasonable people of anything.
The problem with judging this on pricing is that MS execs may or may not see the "game" in terms of units sold or pricing.
In real life, what happens is that the 10 year old kids are the only ones locked into the Xbox they got last christmas. The gamers in their 20's and 30's can and do buy both an Xbox and a PS2 and maybe a Gamecube while they're at it. The price war has made the cost of an extra console about the same as 2 high-quality game titles. People just shop for games and if the game is cool enough they'll buy the console for it regardless of their "installed base."
Sony could actually sell far fewer consoles than MS but still make far more money on licensing.
Clearly, MS isn't playing to win in the short term, they simply want to have another box in another room in your house and they'll worry about the revenue stream later, maybe PPV movies or PPV games or $10/month for a PVR subscription. They just want their foot in the door.
I would recommend a professional driving school like bondurant or skip barber. not cheap, but compared to a car wreck or DUI it's not a bad investment. this will teach him the basic intuition needed to control a car in a variety of traction and speed circumstances. A real car with no reset button to fix his mistakes.
Lots of people run blogs/forums types of websites on the cheap. You don't need VC money to run that sort of thing.
Honestly, I think you'd be in danger of blowing any VC funding on more day-trading "experience" and this time it would all be documented in your blog. Not a good thing, from a legal defense perspective.
1. do not drink, smoke pot, or hang out with other people who do such things. take it easy on caffeine too. bright but directionless people can get very non-linear when their brains are exposed to chemicals. don't do it, you'll be extraordinarilty sorry. I was.
2. find an area of study that has some microcosm-like aspects to it, so that if you get obsessed with it, you still might learn enough to be a useful and productive member of society. For example, if you really get into law or business you'll still be able to deal with "normal" people at some point. If you study astronomy or music for 4 or 6 years you'll only be able to talk to other people who are into those topics and they will probably find you somewhat boring.
3. get a girlfriend. she will dump you. get another one. she will dump you. get another one. you sound like someone who is going to need something to hold his life together, and picking a field in college isn't going to be enough. work on intimacy, trust, love, and how to deal with heartbreak. eventually you may reach a stable relationship and it won't seem to important to be super "intense" and "focused". you might have some kids, buy a house in the suburbs and commute to work in a Honda. It's okay, lots of people do it, and you can still be unique in a way that matters, even if you're normal in ways that don't.
4. accept different levels of expertise from yourself and others in different areas. some people don't know anything about anything but they are still fun to talk to. some people are total geniuses about everything and are still fun to talk to.
5. find some uninteresting way to make money. be a landlord. day trade stocks. be a tax advisor. you'll need money in the future and it's nice to be able to just make money without having the process tied up in your ego drive for knowledge.
Actually now that I think about it, I think people did tell me these things, I was just not listening...
It's entirely possible that Ken Brown is just creating an artificial controvery in order to get AdTI into the headlines and drum up more business for himself.
What I would like to see developed is a "partial" hybrid vehicle, one that extracts power from engine braking, but instead of storing a large quantity of energy for low-speed propulsion, it just stores a moderate amount for powering accessory and parasitic loads like water pumps, air conditioning, power steering, fans, etc, which can all run off of small electric motors instead of being driven off the main engine pully full time. This also allows the engine to be slightly smaller and accessories can be packaged in more convenient places throughout the car rather than being forced into a plane at the front of the engine.
The potential mpg gain for this kind of hybrid is not as dramatic as in a full hybrid like a Toyota Prius, but the cost is a lot more practical as you don't need a large, heavy battery bank or a 40+ hp electric motor. You don't need to modify the powertrain of a standard vehicle at all, plus you get benefit of being able to run all the accessories when the engine is stopped.
My guess is that this would add well under a thousand dollars to the price of a car, as opposed to the $2000-3000 premium that you pay for current hybrids and I would expect a 10 to 15% improvement in mpg, which isn't dramatic, but it isn't anything to sneeze at either.
Get a compiler! Write some code! It will be fun!
It isn't that hard to see how this will play out. Like any scarce resource, it will gradually become more expensive (subject to fluctuations) and as it does so, people will migrate from their 12mpg GMC Suburbans living 45 miles from the office into toyota priuses and telecommuting most days.
The key is that there is a lot of oil in the ground at different costs to extract. As the price of fuel rises, it becomes worthwhile for oil companies to work harder to extract small amounts from remaining wells that were not viable at lower prices. Maybe it will taper off with gasoline at $50 a gallon or more but it will happen gradually so that humanity can slowly adapt to using less fuel.
As the auto and truck fleet ages it will be replaced by higher efficiency vehicles. Oil powered electic plants will be replaced by solar or (gasp) nuclear. People will become accustomed to video conferencing and telephone calls and not so interested in air travel. It will happen, it will happen gradually, and people will be bitching about it the whole time. Just ignore them.
In a couple hundred years, when oil is essentially gone, people will probably be celebrating a new "age", like the "cold fusion age" and looking back at how quaint it was when people burned oily goop to make explosions in a chunk of cast iron.
There are quite a number of small (fits in pocket) cameras available. I like the casio exilim, but olympus, konica minolta, sony, and canon all have 3MP+ cameras with 3x optical zoom and flash that are about the size of a 1/2" stack of business cards.
These are great cameras to carry with you 24/7 and while they don't take digital SLR level photos they are a lot better than a camera phone and have a lot more smarts about exposure levels and autofocus.
Buy a couple of memory cards and you can take pictures constantly for a week and not pay to upload them over a cell phone carrier's network. You'll get some truly awesome photos that aren't stuck at 640x480 on a fixed-focus no-zoom, filled-with-dirt-lens seconday add-on marketing-said-to piece of junk.
What would funny is if they had gone the other direction and put a cheap cell phone into a Nikon digital rebel. "Excuse me, my camera is ringing..."
The article made it sound like the optimizations he was doing at the erlang level were somehow "better" than optimizations done in a language like C++ because he could just try out new techniques w/o worrying about correctness. His array bounds and types would be checked and all would be good.
BS.
First of all, erlang won't catch logical or algorithm errors, which are quite common when you're optimizing.
Second, you can optimize just fine in C++ the same way just as easily, IF YOU ARE A C++ programmer. You just try out some new techniques the same way you always do. So array bounds aren't checked. You get used to it and you just stop making that kind of mistake or else you get good at debugging it. Hey at least you have static type checking.
In fact you might be able to do a better job of optimization because you'll be able to see, right in front of you, low level opportunities for optimization and high level ones also. C++ programmers aren't automatically stupid and blinded by some 1:1 source line to assembly line ratio requirement.
I clicked on the link to see the new Darth Vader costume and I was surprised to see that it looks a lot like George Lucas.
i agree, spam seems overwhelming, but it's really easy to filter a big chunk of it out and just click the delete key on the few that make it into your inbox.
what I hate about email is that 2/3 of it is real stuff from customers, friends, co-workers, managers, spouses, on-line acquantainces, family, REAL PEOPLE who expect a thoughtful, complete reply to their message. Even for a simple yes/no reply this can take 20-50 times longer to deal with than just deleting a spam message. The actual cost of labor to deal with email is far higher when the message has actual content, and that's what IT managers should really be worried about.
how did they do this? fiber optic? satellite? quantum singlarity?
who paid for this? government grants? private sponsorship? ice weasels?
who benefits from this? physics professors? lonely college students? pay per view movie download web sites?
can this technology be brought to individuals and businesses? yes? no? maybe?
what crappy reporting on such an interesting topic.