Re:What's the incentive to be secretive?
on
Open Source... Mining?
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· Score: 5, Informative
It's more than just tradition. My experience is more from the petroleum exploration arena, so I'll speak it its terms.
Almost no property owner owns the mineral rights to their land, only the 'surface' rights. The mineral rights (in most cases) were seperated years ago.
Exploration for petroleum involves statistical analysis as well as physical discovery. Physical discovery used to involve guessing, based on prior performance or just a hunch, where there might be oil or gas. These days, there's a lot more technology to be applied. One method involves placing sensitive seismic instruments in a variety of locations. Then large machines called 'thumpers' are put in place to cause deliberate seismic disturbances. The effects of these disturbances and underground interference to them are measured, mapped and analysed using the instrumentation that's scattered about.
This type of physical discovery is not cheap. It consists of:
expensive instruments
expensive machines
well-paid geologists and other crew
paying landowners for use of their land.
costom analysis software
and more
The best ways for a venture like that to make money are to (a) sell the information to mineral rights owners, or (b) use the information to drill for petroleum themselves.
In case (a), making the information available at no charge is contrary to the business plan. In (b), they would need to acquire/lease the necessary mineral rights and it wouldn't pay advertise what they were looking for where.
I have a little trouble with your "it's all speculation as to what designs might conceivably be used."
Don't we already have a good idea of the density and composition of the red planet's atmosphere? If so, I would think it fairly trivial for a [government funded] interprise to setup a atmospheric test chamber; a kind of Mars Wind Tunnel for exercizing thin wind flyers.
Did you see the "SEX[7]" note at the bottom of page 1? it says "[7] You have a dirty mind..."
If I recall correctly, both Signetics and National Semiconductor managed to sneak a few bogus datasheets into their released databooks from time to time. I first saw of this particular one a couple three years ago; I think someone posted a link to it on sci.electronics.design or a similar newsgroup.
Re:article illustrated something about family...
on
Tracking Mafiaboy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not being an apoligist here, but upper/middle class children often have their own, unique (or not so unique) handicaps.
Lower income kids might have to deal with: a flawed vision of themselves being inferior to higher income people, exposure to disillusioned/disenfranchised people who've given up on themselves and their peer's ability to succeed, parents who fit the above description or are too busy to think clearly about their children's environment and care.
Middle/upper income kids might have to deal with: a flawed vision of themselves being superior to lower income people, exposure to jaded/??? people who've long ago given up on the lower class of folk (because they've "proven" they're no good), parents who fit the above description or are too busy to think clearly about their children's environment and care.
The only scientific basis I can think of to support that idea is that the main transformer is larger and has more headroom, ie. it doesn't have to deliver as close to its capacity as the lighter one. That could translate into longer life and higher reliability in general.
More likely, in my opinion, the rule of thumb might work because the heavier power supply is just more likely to have been built better; better transformer, better chassis, larger capacitors, etc.
Yes. And in business, we aren't all that trusting, so we have laws to regulate business behavior in order to improve or, at least, enforce the trustworthiness between business players. Do we need/want the same practices applied to the Internet? I say no, but I have this awful feeling of gloom. I think that, within 10 or 15 years (maybe even less) the business interests in the net will have convinced the lawmakers that we need to boost the trustworthiness of the net... by regulating the hell out of it.
I think we, as the techical force behind the net, can and must resolve the major issues that make the businesses nervous. If they can trundle blithely forward, enjoying the net without too many major hitches, they'll continue to pay our salaries and let us run it. One or two major exploits or outages with mega/giga dollar associated losses, and the lawmakers will clamp right down. Bye bye net, as we know (and love) it.
because it didn't tell us *which* codon they were working with. There are several codons which were understood to be interepreted as STOP signals, so based on this fragment of the article,
"Surprisingly, the codon Krzycki's team identified should have signaled a stop to protein building but it did not."
it must be one of those. They previously-known-to-be-stop codons are: UAA, UGA, and UAG (did I miss any?). So which one is it? If you know, please reply to this post.
For reference, here is a good page for more info on codons, their product amino acids and more.
If there is adequate public, scientific and political desire to get it done, it will be done. At this time, I would say there is little public and political desire for it, Mr. Lampson being a notable exception. There would, however, be money to be made by doing it. Unfortunately, that money is to be made by only the usual suspects: Boeing, Martin-Marietta (or whoever they are now) and the other common space contractors.
Perhaps the "develop the moon" stuff is in response to China's recent announcement of intent to do just that. I think that, by itself, will (maybe has already) increase the political desire for this kind of thing. Personally, I desire it; both in the scientific sense and in the political/national pride sense. Now... is it practical? Nah. Is it going to be done in my lifetime? Hmmm, somehow I doubt it.
Yeah, but I wonder what/who convinced Sony? They looked to me like they were on the same road to pig-headed, "we know what you need better than you do" attitude that the rest of the entertainment & music establishments exhibit.
Is it possible that/. and similar, thru negative feedback, had a positive effect on the Sony way?
I am admittedly geeky, that's why I hang out here; but it seemed pretty obvious to me from the beginning that alienating an entire consumer sub-culture would be bad for business. Especially when members of that sub-culture are more likely to be able to afford a pricy toy like Aibo.
All in all, I'm glad they've opened it up some. Now, if I can just convince my wife to let me buy an expensive toy dog...
I think so. In fact, I'll be surprised if we do not see this going to court. If any of the affected PC's belong to a fortune 500 or larger company, I can nearly guarantee it. What I think should happen is that a class action suit be filed on behalf of all of the common people who were affected.
Heck, I'm sure if I the same exploits to upload even 1 teeny-tiny file to a PC, let's say, at a local bank. Guaran-damn-tee I'd be in lockup the next day.
The company behind this needs to be more than bitchslapped. They're going down.
As stated, 'twas gonna happen sooner or later. My thinking is that the notification of OS 9 being shelved is of only passing interest, as it is passe' itself.
OTOH, being an embedded systems developer, I know the havoc that can be caused by a vendor pulling a platform from under your feet. Are there actually any (commercial) developers who will be adversely affected by this? Does anyone really care that it's on its way out?
My own opinion is that OS X has so many advantages that it's a hands-down winner 'twixt the two.
"... take down the site with a good slashdotting."
Actually, his site is holding up pretty well. When I first checked at about 8:30 CST, his site visit counter was at 2375. As of this post at about 11:45 CST, it's 7385. Loads a little slow, but otherwise doing well for having been slashdotted.
I can only hope the legal worms at LSU find a bad aftertaste from the negative publicity garnered by trying to chew this guy up in court. Over 5000 visits to his site in a little over 3 hours... maybe we should drop a few negative emails to marc@tpbp.com (the shys^H^H^H^Hlawyer representing LSU). Let him know what we think about frivilous lawsuits.
Yes, I thought it was common knowledge also. But I've noticed that there seems to be very little decrease in the use of GIF files in web sites. It seems like a majority of sites still use GIF's for their small images... tiled backgrounds, arrow pointers, etc. Besides not compressing the image as efficiently, GIF's also come with potential baggage, which is even more reason to choose JPEG over GIF. What's really goofy is, when I pointed my browser to that URL on tweaktown, a banner ad for Kingston memory appear... as a GIF!
The article may have been apropos on tweaktown, given that site's intended target audience. I *don't* think the article was apropos for/.
Freaky. A few days ago (Sat, April 13, I think), I search google for QuantaBot. Google said I misspelled Quantiblot and gave me results for that instead (did not say how many results were returned for the original search term). I headed straight to their "Quality form" to bitch that I had NOT misspelled anything and resented them giving me results on something else instead. Today, I tried the same search and was told
"Your original search: QuantaBot was misspelled and returned 0 results. The corrected search: Quantiblot was done instead and the results appear below."
Wow. Could it be that someone at an internet-based company actually uses customer feedback!?
Yeah, Google == cheap. But I won't be suprised in the slightest if, in light of recent... uh, manipulations of Google's "AdWords Select," the price of words goes up. Right now it's laughably cheap to 'buy' slightly less used keywords that still receive 'impressions' (hope nobody actually clicks-thru on mine).
Google has been fairly good about applying lessons learned from user feedback and habits to their operations. Do I smell changes to "AdWords Select" in the wind?
...I thought you were going to make a portably device and wanted advice on how to maximize the utilization of Flash memory, balancing the economics of parts cost vs. storage capacity, minimizing write cycles, compressing code to save space.
Then I realized you're talking about using that bloated, bandwidth hogging, gotta get the plug-in, standards ignoring web-based thing called Flash(tm).
Unless others here can convince you otherwise, please don't. It's starting to look like some day all you'll need to surf the web is that damndable Flash plug-in. Just think about all those poor saps at the IETF and before who, with their misguided thinking, labored so long to create *public standards* for delivering online content.
Maybe a little more info is necessary:
- Is this application to be Internet or intranet based? If Intranet, I guess you might assume better resources (bandwidth, storage) than with an app for the general public.
- do you really need the animation features? My experience (on the receiving end) with Flash indicates it may be esp. good for animation. Somehow I don't see the need in your application.
- Is the content mainly static? I think there are many better choices if the content needs frequent updates.
Darn, I meant to stick this link in my post above. It's got some stuff that might interest you, including some't on fuel cells.
Re:Screw rebooting, there're other advantages
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 1
Right. It's a matter of scale. Mostly a matter of friction between moving parts, contributing to wear and eventual failure. I don't expect the LCD's to 'wear out' their pixels anytime soon. I would expect the backlight power supply to die, however. Partly because of, as you mentioned, magnetics. Many novices don't realize it, but transformers *are* moving parts, they just don't move much. With each expand and collapse cycle of the mag field(s), motion occurs in the windings (and core), that's why you can often hear xformers buzzing and 50/60 Hz.
Offense to moving electrons? Nah, that's called electronics.
There is a very real and techical difference between BigOilCo/Hydrogen and BigMusicCo/MP3.
MP3 is not only technically feasible, its proven itself a superior medium. Using MP3, I can put several analog audo CD's on a single data CD, or better yet, all of my audio CD's on hard disk. BigMusicCo ain't going there because (a) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 has vast advantages, (b) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 is *wildly* popular (in spite of BigMusicCo) and (c) they're ignoring the multitude of distribution and promotion channels that the features of MP3'd music offer... all because they're so goddam greedy that they want to harness the power of computers to do something they've never been succeeded at doing to date: control piracy.
Now, I'm not saying that BigOilCo isn't greedy. I *am* saying that using hydrogen to power cars and the like is not a technical practicality at this time. It's not a simple as carrying around a tank full of compressed hydrogen instead of a tank of gasoline; ever heard of the Hindenburg? Yeah, fuel cells have been around for a while and are getting better, but they're still bulky and expensive. The techno-economic changes necessary for us to be able to take advantage of huge stocks of H are the kind that come slowly, though it helps to keep the social/political pressure on.
It is nice to know that, should we become ready to use it, there's lots of Hydrogen to be had.
'dihydrogen' - meaning 2 H's 'monoxide' - meaning 1 O
Could it be H20? Not terribly dangerous after all. And already being pumped out (and pumped back in) in huge volumes in the course of pumping plain ol' crude. Nah, it ain't funny or even correct.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more than just tradition. My experience is more from the petroleum exploration arena, so I'll speak it its terms.
Almost no property owner owns the mineral rights to their land, only the 'surface' rights. The mineral rights (in most cases) were seperated years ago.
Exploration for petroleum involves statistical analysis as well as physical discovery. Physical discovery used to involve guessing, based on prior performance or just a hunch, where there might be oil or gas. These days, there's a lot more technology to be applied. One method involves placing sensitive seismic instruments in a variety of locations. Then large machines called 'thumpers' are put in place to cause deliberate seismic disturbances. The effects of these disturbances and underground interference to them are measured, mapped and analysed using the instrumentation that's scattered about.
This type of physical discovery is not cheap. It consists of:
expensive instruments
expensive machines
well-paid geologists and other crew
paying landowners for use of their land.
costom analysis software
and more
The best ways for a venture like that to make money are to (a) sell the information to mineral rights owners, or (b) use the information to drill for petroleum themselves.
In case (a), making the information available at no charge is contrary to the business plan. In (b), they would need to acquire/lease the necessary mineral rights and it wouldn't pay advertise what they were looking for where.
I have a little trouble with your "it's all speculation as to what designs might conceivably be used."
Don't we already have a good idea of the density and composition of the red planet's atmosphere? If so, I would think it fairly trivial for a [government funded] interprise to setup a atmospheric test chamber; a kind of Mars Wind Tunnel for exercizing thin wind flyers.
Did you see the "SEX[7]" note at the bottom of page 1? it says "[7] You have a dirty mind..."
If I recall correctly, both Signetics and National Semiconductor managed to sneak a few bogus datasheets into their released databooks from time to time. I first saw of this particular one a couple three years ago; I think someone posted a link to it on sci.electronics.design or a similar newsgroup.
I'm not being an apoligist here, but upper/middle class children often have their own, unique (or not so unique) handicaps.
Lower income kids might have to deal with: a flawed vision of themselves being inferior to higher income people, exposure to disillusioned/disenfranchised people who've given up on themselves and their peer's ability to succeed, parents who fit the above description or are too busy to think clearly about their children's environment and care.
Middle/upper income kids might have to deal with: a flawed vision of themselves being superior to lower income people, exposure to jaded/??? people who've long ago given up on the lower class of folk (because they've "proven" they're no good), parents who fit the above description or are too busy to think clearly about their children's environment and care.
The only scientific basis I can think of to support that idea is that the main transformer is larger and has more headroom, ie. it doesn't have to deliver as close to its capacity as the lighter one. That could translate into longer life and higher reliability in general.
More likely, in my opinion, the rule of thumb might work because the heavier power supply is just more likely to have been built better; better transformer, better chassis, larger capacitors, etc.
ummm... wouldn't that be Red Peace?
Yes. And in business, we aren't all that trusting, so we have laws to regulate business behavior in order to improve or, at least, enforce the trustworthiness between business players. Do we need/want the same practices applied to the Internet? I say no, but I have this awful feeling of gloom. I think that, within 10 or 15 years (maybe even less) the business interests in the net will have convinced the lawmakers that we need to boost the trustworthiness of the net... by regulating the hell out of it.
I think we, as the techical force behind the net, can and must resolve the major issues that make the businesses nervous. If they can trundle blithely forward, enjoying the net without too many major hitches, they'll continue to pay our salaries and let us run it. One or two major exploits or outages with mega/giga dollar associated losses, and the lawmakers will clamp right down. Bye bye net, as we know (and love) it.
because it didn't tell us *which* codon they were working with. There are several codons which were understood to be interepreted as STOP signals, so based on this fragment of the article,
"Surprisingly, the codon Krzycki's team identified should have signaled a stop to protein building but it did not."
it must be one of those. They previously-known-to-be-stop codons are: UAA, UGA, and UAG (did I miss any?). So which one is it? If you know, please reply to this post.
For reference, here is a good page for more info on codons, their product amino acids and more.
If there is adequate public, scientific and political desire to get it done, it will be done. At this time, I would say there is little public and political desire for it, Mr. Lampson being a notable exception. There would, however, be money to be made by doing it. Unfortunately, that money is to be made by only the usual suspects: Boeing, Martin-Marietta (or whoever they are now) and the other common space contractors.
Perhaps the "develop the moon" stuff is in response to China's recent announcement of intent to do just that. I think that, by itself, will (maybe has already) increase the political desire for this kind of thing. Personally, I desire it; both in the scientific sense and in the political/national pride sense. Now... is it practical? Nah. Is it going to be done in my lifetime? Hmmm, somehow I doubt it.
Right. And lest you get too excited, it ain't gonna be free. No pricing was discussed, but in the article here it says:
"Once the service is opened up to consumers, BT plans to offer access through subscription or pay-as-you-go."
I sincerely doubt that it will revolutionise the average UK person's roaming connectivity.
I couldn't find anything on the links provided above. Google found me this:
BBC
I'm not sure what they've done. But surely they're using Gnu tools for the public SDK because (a) they exist already and (b) GPL distribution.
Now the real question, is this their internal SDK or have they ported something for us?
BTW, the cygwin stuff provides connectivity between gcc and the Windows API.
um, that would be more of a *pack* than a cluster.
Here goes...
Imagine an AiboWolf pack of these.
Nah. Just doesn't have the same ring to it
Yeah, but I wonder what/who convinced Sony? They looked to me like they were on the same road to pig-headed, "we know what you need better than you do" attitude that the rest of the entertainment & music establishments exhibit.
/. and similar, thru negative feedback, had a positive effect on the Sony way?
Is it possible that
I am admittedly geeky, that's why I hang out here; but it seemed pretty obvious to me from the beginning that alienating an entire consumer sub-culture would be bad for business. Especially when members of that sub-culture are more likely to be able to afford a pricy toy like Aibo.
All in all, I'm glad they've opened it up some. Now, if I can just convince my wife to let me buy an expensive toy dog...
I think so. In fact, I'll be surprised if we do not see this going to court. If any of the affected PC's belong to a fortune 500 or larger company, I can nearly guarantee it. What I think should happen is that a class action suit be filed on behalf of all of the common people who were affected.
Heck, I'm sure if I the same exploits to upload even 1 teeny-tiny file to a PC, let's say, at a local bank. Guaran-damn-tee I'd be in lockup the next day.
The company behind this needs to be more than bitchslapped. They're going down.
As stated, 'twas gonna happen sooner or later. My thinking is that the notification of OS 9 being shelved is of only passing interest, as it is passe' itself.
OTOH, being an embedded systems developer, I know the havoc that can be caused by a vendor pulling a platform from under your feet. Are there actually any (commercial) developers who will be adversely affected by this? Does anyone really care that it's on its way out?
My own opinion is that OS X has so many advantages that it's a hands-down winner 'twixt the two.
Shine on, OS X!
"... take down the site with a good slashdotting."
Actually, his site is holding up pretty well. When I first checked at about 8:30 CST, his site visit counter was at 2375. As of this post at about 11:45 CST, it's 7385. Loads a little slow, but otherwise doing well for having been slashdotted.
I can only hope the legal worms at LSU find a bad aftertaste from the negative publicity garnered by trying to chew this guy up in court. Over 5000 visits to his site in a little over 3 hours... maybe we should drop a few negative emails to marc@tpbp.com (the shys^H^H^H^Hlawyer representing LSU). Let him know what we think about frivilous lawsuits.
Yes, I thought it was common knowledge also. But I've noticed that there seems to be very little decrease in the use of GIF files in web sites. It seems like a majority of sites still use GIF's for their small images... tiled backgrounds, arrow pointers, etc. Besides not compressing the image as efficiently, GIF's also come with potential baggage, which is even more reason to choose JPEG over GIF. What's really goofy is, when I pointed my browser to that URL on tweaktown, a banner ad for Kingston memory appear... as a GIF!
/.
The article may have been apropos on tweaktown, given that site's intended target audience. I *don't* think the article was apropos for
Freaky. A few days ago (Sat, April 13, I think), I search google for QuantaBot. Google said I misspelled Quantiblot and gave me results for that instead (did not say how many results were returned for the original search term). I headed straight to their "Quality form" to bitch that I had NOT misspelled anything and resented them giving me results on something else instead. Today, I tried the same search and was told
"Your original search: QuantaBot was misspelled and returned 0 results.
The corrected search: Quantiblot was done instead and the results appear below."
Wow. Could it be that someone at an internet-based company actually uses customer feedback!?
Yeah, Google == cheap. But I won't be suprised in the slightest if, in light of recent... uh, manipulations of Google's "AdWords Select," the price of words goes up. Right now it's laughably cheap to 'buy' slightly less used keywords that still receive 'impressions' (hope nobody actually clicks-thru on mine).
Google has been fairly good about applying lessons learned from user feedback and habits to their operations. Do I smell changes to "AdWords Select" in the wind?
...I thought you were going to make a portably device and wanted advice on how to maximize the utilization of Flash memory, balancing the economics of parts cost vs. storage capacity, minimizing write cycles, compressing code to save space.
.
Then I realized you're talking about using that bloated, bandwidth hogging, gotta get the plug-in, standards ignoring web-based thing called Flash(tm).
Unless others here can convince you otherwise, please don't. It's starting to look like some day all you'll need to surf the web is that damndable Flash plug-in. Just think about all those poor saps at the IETF and before who, with their misguided thinking, labored so long to create *public standards* for delivering online content
Maybe a little more info is necessary:
- Is this application to be Internet or intranet based? If Intranet, I guess you might assume better resources (bandwidth, storage) than with an app for the general public.
- do you really need the animation features? My experience (on the receiving end) with Flash indicates it may be esp. good for animation. Somehow I don't see the need in your application.
- Is the content mainly static? I think there are many better choices if the content needs frequent updates.
Darn, I meant to stick this link in my post above. It's got some stuff that might interest you, including some't on fuel cells.
Right. It's a matter of scale. Mostly a matter of friction between moving parts, contributing to wear and eventual failure. I don't expect the LCD's to 'wear out' their pixels anytime soon. I would expect the backlight power supply to die, however. Partly because of, as you mentioned, magnetics. Many novices don't realize it, but transformers *are* moving parts, they just don't move much. With each expand and collapse cycle of the mag field(s), motion occurs in the windings (and core), that's why you can often hear xformers buzzing and 50/60 Hz.
Offense to moving electrons? Nah, that's called electronics.
There is a very real and techical difference between BigOilCo/Hydrogen and BigMusicCo/MP3.
MP3 is not only technically feasible, its proven itself a superior medium. Using MP3, I can put several analog audo CD's on a single data CD, or better yet, all of my audio CD's on hard disk. BigMusicCo ain't going there because (a) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 has vast advantages, (b) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 is *wildly* popular (in spite of BigMusicCo) and (c) they're ignoring the multitude of distribution and promotion channels that the features of MP3'd music offer... all because they're so goddam greedy that they want to harness the power of computers to do something they've never been succeeded at doing to date: control piracy.
Now, I'm not saying that BigOilCo isn't greedy. I *am* saying that using hydrogen to power cars and the like is not a technical practicality at this time. It's not a simple as carrying around a tank full of compressed hydrogen instead of a tank of gasoline; ever heard of the Hindenburg? Yeah, fuel cells have been around for a while and are getting better, but they're still bulky and expensive. The techno-economic changes necessary for us to be able to take advantage of huge stocks of H are the kind that come slowly, though it helps to keep the social/political pressure on.
It is nice to know that, should we become ready to use it, there's lots of Hydrogen to be had.
Let's see...
'dihydrogen' - meaning 2 H's
'monoxide' - meaning 1 O
Could it be H20? Not terribly dangerous after all. And already being pumped out (and pumped back in) in huge volumes in the course of pumping plain ol' crude. Nah, it ain't funny or even correct.