Good points, particularly regarding the game consoles. The fact that Microsoft runs 80-90% gross margins for Office and Windows shows that even as labor-intensive as SW development is, the pricing is effectively gouging. In the console world, as in many consumer products, the hardware is essentially given away at cost (or less) and subsidized by consumables/service.
Microsoft, if not the Post, figured this out a long time ago. Like them or not, I give them props for realizing that in the business world, you evolve or die, no matter how big you are now. It is no accident that M$ has moved aggressively into every single market that can use a processor. Cars, phones, set-top boxes, game consoles - there is some Microsoft product that is available. They don't know which one will be popular, but their bets are all covered. They are already looking beyond the PC era.
As for the appliance era, it's not clear to me how this will end up working. It could be dedicated single, or small number of function boxes running an OS. Or it could be that compute power is distributed and appliances basically differ in the type of interface they have to optimize for handling different kinds of information, as well as differing in the bandwidth they use. IBM seems to be betting it will be the latter with their recent announcement of even bigger investments in services.
Re:casimir == van der waals
on
The Casimir Effect
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm aware that the Casimir effect can appear as a repulsive force, J. Ambjørn and Stephen Wolfram wrote a detailed paper that can be found at:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/artic le s/physics/83-properties1/
Originally in Annals of Physics 147 (1983). I also came across an interesting paper in the June Physical Review Letters, by P. Bruno at the Max Planck Institute, available at:
on calculating a magnetic Casimir effect for parallel ferromagnetic plates, which shows the resultant effect as antiferromagnetic.
As classical electromagnetism derives from an underlying quantum formulation, I concede that that Van Der Waals interactions are essentially classical manifestations of an underlying quantum explanation. However the "classical" vacuum parallel plate Casimir effect is one of those quantum manifestations, like superfluidity, that would not be expected or predicted from "common sense" physics. Van Der Waals forces, calculated without recourse to quantum effects, serve to explain all manner of chemical interactions and phase transitions, and, apparently, the adhesion of geckos to walls;-) So stating a bald equivalence between these two well known forces is a little misleading.
(Note: I am not a physicist, I only play one on Slashdot;)
Yahweh, my most groveling apologies, but the formula wouldn't line up without it.
It IS annoying, isn't it? However, since you are all-powerful, you may no doubt fix it yourself for all time and space. Or if you don't, I suppose you're just a wanker.
Yes, "ENERGIZE THE DRUDE ELECTRONS!" may well be the new battlecry of our generation, just like "Free the Indianpolis 500!" was to previous ones;-)
casimir != van der waals
on
The Casimir Effect
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Confusion would be an excellent description. What in Heisenberg's name are you driving at here? The London force or dipole dispersion force varies as 1/r^6, where r is the separation radius.
The Casimir effect between two parallel uncharged plates in a vacuum at zero kelvin is given by:
pi^2 h-bar c F = ----------- A 240 r^4
A = area of the plates and r is the separation distance.
The Van der Waals interaction can be considered and computed as a semi-classical electrostatic effect. The Casimir effect, although sometimes referred to as a "long-range Van der Waals effect" is fundamentally a quantum concept as shown by the appearance of h-bar in the equation above.
As you indicate, both forces follow a power law, but the Casimir effect will appear, again, between "neutral, conducting" plates at absolute zero, i.e. in a configuration where electrostatic forces due to charge distribution are not present, and the power relationship differs by an order of magnitude.
So the two forces are fundamentally different conceptually and similar in that they both describe attractive forces between objects. However the latter similarity would also allow you to say that casimir == ferromagnetism if that is the only metric.
After heavy Tempest action, I would sometimes have nightmares of being trapped, unable to fire, at the top of a glowing Tempest level, as the red death crabs inexorably slid toward me to slay.
The lag of the knob definitely contributed to the feel of Tempest gameplay.
Correct are you, my padawan, but you speak not from understanding...
The royalty always applied to commercial applications, which a hardware implementation clearly is. From a practical standpoint, hardware is really easy to count and hard to hide when you sell it, so these companies had to license as part of doing business. So that fee is already builtin to all the hardware players out there.
However, if Ogg gains critical mass, it will get hardware support, and thus help keep Thomson honest. That's the key importance of Ogg gaining support.
Perfect for lengthy meetings, or large multistory office towers with openable windows...drop one onto that reserved VP spot next to the entrance from the 12th floor, and watch a JART hole the engine block of the 2002 Mercedes SL500 like a 0.50 cal sniper rifle! BUUUUHHAHAHAAHAAA!!!!
As mentioned my many, there is Jabber. On OS X there are Fire and Proteus, which I use extensively primarily to communicate with AIM users. I'm sure there are Windows multi-protocol clients that I am not familiar with that also have this functionality.
Point being, at least the Mac clients can import contact lists from AIM, so you can wean people onto a non-AOL platform, which makes it easier to divert them to another service if AOL once again screws with AIM.
The problem may also be self-correcting, since AOL's MRQ subscriber growth was down to less than 500k new subscribers, which is probably close to their quarterly churn. So I don't think the rest of the world will be sucked into the AOL vortex. The Bubble popped, and the waves have left AOWhale beached on the shoreline. I mean, the *magazine guys* at AOLTW are taking off AOL heads now...how the mighty have fallen.....
This is sort of splitting hairs, isn't it? If Apple applied pressure to IDG, they were ultimately responsible. I agree that the twinkie-like crumbling of IDG is also lame, but if Apple even suggested that this would be a good idea, they are ultimately culpable.
I was just thinking of a system that maintains files as chopped up pieces which are redundantly stored in the network, so that to obtain a full actual copy, you would need to collect and assemble all said pieces. (AKA usenet binaries.) However, you never distribute a complete copy of the item yourself. Are you still guilty of infringement?
Excellent response. A one-man operation can live hand to mouth like this, but you are going to have to be prepared for substantially more bullshit than you are probably equipped to handle.
$1000/installation is probably about right for what a small business owner might pay. You seriously think a one man show can turn over 40 sales a year? It's ridiculous. You aren't going to convert all the mechanics in your neighborhood, either, that would be 100% market share, which is pretty unlikely. And you don't just hand them a copy of "Office" in the box and walk away with your $1k. Every single one of them will need/want custom mods.
Small business owners are inherently conservative, which is how they stay in business. For anybody interested in starting a tech-related business I highly recommend a book by Arnold Kling called "Under the Radar". It's written by a netrepreneur who started out trying to sell a single product to small businesses (his real estate website), and managed to score during the Bubble. His book is actually based on interviews with other entrepeneurs and would-be entrepreneurs, and was very informative, he's candid about his own mistakes and completely avoids any ego trips or self-congratulation.
It's obviously not impossible to start a business, but it's a completely different skill set from being an elite code jockey. Advising somebody to start a small business is essentially advising them to get out of programming. I don't think that is what the thread starter was asking at all.
It seems to me to be a pretty small sample size of the "universe" of OSS projects. I make his detailed sample to be 0.3% of all of the projects listed on Sourceforge.
It's also a well-known fact that "mature" products by their nature show a drop in participation, indeed, there is typically 1 or perhaps 2 "maintainers" who handle such projects. Most hackers like to be involved in earlier stage projects for many reasons, perceived ability to impact the project, novelty, etc.
Palm devices (and Handspring, btw) are manufactured by a company called Flextronics, one of the big 4 in outsourced manufacturing. Palm devices are manufactured in Flex Malaysia and in Guadalajara, Mexico. Flextronics sources material and handles end of line manufacturing quality. The only exception to this for Palm was the VIIx was made in a Flex facility in Fremont, I don't know if this applies to the 705.
In any case, where many people rail about the quality of Company X's products, these days it is highly likely that Company X didn't have anything to do with making the product other than designing it. And in this age of "badge engineering" of electronics, that's not even necessarily true, as someone mentioned with the IBM WorkPad.
The objective of outsourcing the manufacturing function is ultimately managing the companies stock price, not pleasing the customer. By offloading headcount and very expensive capital facilities like factories, companies try to make their return on invested capital look better.
However, someone other than Company X now actually controls the customer's "out of box" experience. If they do this poorly, they eventually will have to eat the cost of returns and perhaps lose Company X's manufacturing business, but the loss of future sales caused by the customer's poor experience falls on Company X. And the contract manufacturer is large and has many other companies to live on, while Company X probably has a relatively small set of products, which now may have acquired a reputation for poor quality. Company X's sales drop and their stock (symbol: PALM) drops below $2...
Ultimately the consumer is the loser, since as I mentioned, it is possible that a product area has ALL of the branded companies using contract manufacturing, possibly even the SAME manufacturer.
I believe that using contract manufacturing for consumer systems ultimately is a loser for the companies involved since it is very difficult to avoid large batches of poor quality goods from reaching customers. So if, for example Sony, apart from being innovative with its designs, still does its own manufacturing, I think it will win share down the road, while companies that hit lower price points with inferior product will be eliminated, unless they can figure out how to create "disposable" products and do the heavy marketing needed to establish such a concept.
Yes, Slashdot's redundancy clearly is increasing, soon you will be able to generate a day's Slashdot in advance by interpolative prediction. Already possible for all Katz submissions!
Yes. seems like kind of blatant hit-mongering, as Salon is so fond of. Wonder what the readership numbers have been looking like lately, maybe they needed a bit of a boost;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Good points, particularly regarding the game consoles. The fact that Microsoft runs 80-90% gross margins for Office and Windows shows that even as labor-intensive as SW development is, the pricing is effectively gouging. In the console world, as in many consumer products, the hardware is essentially given away at cost (or less) and subsidized by consumables/service.
Microsoft, if not the Post, figured this out a long time ago. Like them or not, I give them props for realizing that in the business world, you evolve or die, no matter how big you are now. It is no accident that M$ has moved aggressively into every single market that can use a processor. Cars, phones, set-top boxes, game consoles - there is some Microsoft product that is available. They don't know which one will be popular, but their bets are all covered. They are already looking beyond the PC era.
As for the appliance era, it's not clear to me how this will end up working. It could be dedicated single, or small number of function boxes running an OS. Or it could be that compute power is distributed and appliances basically differ in the type of interface they have to optimize for handling different kinds of information, as well as differing in the bandwidth they use. IBM seems to be betting it will be the latter with their recent announcement of even bigger investments in services.
I'm aware that the Casimir effect can appear as a repulsive force, J. Ambjørn and Stephen Wolfram wrote a detailed paper that can be found at:
c le s/physics/83-properties1/
6 .p df
;-) So stating a bald equivalence between these two well known forces is a little misleading.
;)
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/arti
Originally in Annals of Physics 147 (1983). I also came across an interesting paper in the June Physical Review Letters, by P. Bruno at the Max Planck Institute, available at:
http://www.mpi-halle.mpg.de/~bruno/publis/2002_
on calculating a magnetic Casimir effect for parallel ferromagnetic plates, which shows the resultant effect as antiferromagnetic.
As classical electromagnetism derives from an underlying quantum formulation, I concede that that Van Der Waals interactions are essentially classical manifestations of an underlying quantum explanation. However the "classical" vacuum parallel plate Casimir effect is one of those quantum manifestations, like superfluidity, that would not be expected or predicted from "common sense" physics. Van Der Waals forces, calculated without recourse to quantum effects, serve to explain all manner of chemical interactions and phase transitions, and, apparently, the adhesion of geckos to walls
(Note: I am not a physicist, I only play one on Slashdot
Yahweh, my most groveling apologies, but the formula wouldn't line up without it. It IS annoying, isn't it? However, since you are all-powerful, you may no doubt fix it yourself for all time and space. Or if you don't, I suppose you're just a wanker.
1. DeLorean 2. Cocaine 3. Feds 4. Indictment!!!
Yes, "ENERGIZE THE DRUDE ELECTRONS!" may well be the new battlecry of our generation, just like "Free the Indianpolis 500!" was to previous ones ;-)
Confusion would be an excellent description. What in Heisenberg's name are you driving at here? The London force or dipole dispersion force varies as 1/r^6, where r is the separation radius.
The Casimir effect between two parallel uncharged plates in a vacuum at zero kelvin is given by:
pi^2 h-bar c
F = ----------- A
240 r^4
A = area of the plates and r is the separation distance.
The Van der Waals interaction can be considered and computed as a semi-classical electrostatic effect. The Casimir effect, although sometimes referred to as a "long-range Van der Waals effect" is fundamentally a quantum concept as shown by the appearance of h-bar in the equation above.
As you indicate, both forces follow a power law, but the Casimir effect will appear, again, between "neutral, conducting" plates at absolute zero, i.e. in a configuration where electrostatic forces due to charge distribution are not present, and the power relationship differs by an order of magnitude.
So the two forces are fundamentally different conceptually and similar in that they both describe attractive forces between objects. However the latter similarity would also allow you to say that casimir == ferromagnetism if that is the only metric.
After heavy Tempest action, I would sometimes have nightmares of being trapped, unable to fire, at the top of a glowing Tempest level, as the red death crabs inexorably slid toward me to slay. The lag of the knob definitely contributed to the feel of Tempest gameplay.
/. is environmentally friendly...it's GIGO recycling!
Correct are you, my padawan, but you speak not from understanding...
The royalty always applied to commercial applications, which a hardware implementation clearly is. From a practical standpoint, hardware is really easy to count and hard to hide when you sell it, so these companies had to license as part of doing business. So that fee is already builtin to all the hardware players out there.
However, if Ogg gains critical mass, it will get hardware support, and thus help keep Thomson honest. That's the key importance of Ogg gaining support.
And I have only this reply...JARTS!
http://www.jarts.com/
Perfect for lengthy meetings, or large multistory office towers with openable windows...drop one onto that reserved VP spot next to the entrance from the 12th floor, and watch a JART hole the engine block of the 2002 Mercedes SL500 like a 0.50 cal sniper rifle! BUUUUHHAHAHAAHAAA!!!!
As mentioned my many, there is Jabber. On OS X there are Fire and Proteus, which I use extensively primarily to communicate with AIM users. I'm sure there are Windows multi-protocol clients that I am not familiar with that also have this functionality.
Point being, at least the Mac clients can import contact lists from AIM, so you can wean people onto a non-AOL platform, which makes it easier to divert them to another service if AOL once again screws with AIM.
The problem may also be self-correcting, since AOL's MRQ subscriber growth was down to less than 500k new subscribers, which is probably close to their quarterly churn. So I don't think the rest of the world will be sucked into the AOL vortex. The Bubble popped, and the waves have left AOWhale beached on the shoreline. I mean, the *magazine guys* at AOLTW are taking off AOL heads now...how the mighty have fallen.....
This is sort of splitting hairs, isn't it? If Apple applied pressure to IDG, they were ultimately responsible. I agree that the twinkie-like crumbling of IDG is also lame, but if Apple even suggested that this would be a good idea, they are ultimately culpable.
I was just thinking of a system that maintains files as chopped up pieces which are redundantly stored in the network, so that to obtain a full actual copy, you would need to collect and assemble all said pieces. (AKA usenet binaries.) However, you never distribute a complete copy of the item yourself. Are you still guilty of infringement?
Excellent response. A one-man operation can live hand to mouth like this, but you are going to have to be prepared for substantially more bullshit than you are probably equipped to handle.
$1000/installation is probably about right for what a small business owner might pay. You seriously think a one man show can turn over 40 sales a year? It's ridiculous. You aren't going to convert all the mechanics in your neighborhood, either, that would be 100% market share, which is pretty unlikely. And you don't just hand them a copy of "Office" in the box and walk away with your $1k. Every single one of them will need/want custom mods.
Small business owners are inherently conservative, which is how they stay in business. For anybody interested in starting a tech-related business I highly recommend a book by Arnold Kling called "Under the Radar". It's written by a netrepreneur who started out trying to sell a single product to small businesses (his real estate website), and managed to score during the Bubble. His book is actually based on interviews with other entrepeneurs and would-be entrepreneurs, and was very informative, he's candid about his own mistakes and completely avoids any ego trips or self-congratulation.
It's obviously not impossible to start a business, but it's a completely different skill set from being an elite code jockey. Advising somebody to start a small business is essentially advising them to get out of programming. I don't think that is what the thread starter was asking at all.
It seems to me to be a pretty small sample size of the "universe" of OSS projects. I make his detailed sample to be 0.3% of all of the projects listed on Sourceforge.
It's also a well-known fact that "mature" products by their nature show a drop in participation, indeed, there is typically 1 or perhaps 2 "maintainers" who handle such projects. Most hackers like to be involved in earlier stage projects for many reasons, perceived ability to impact the project, novelty, etc.
Palm devices (and Handspring, btw) are manufactured by a company called Flextronics, one of the big 4 in outsourced manufacturing. Palm devices are manufactured in Flex Malaysia and in Guadalajara, Mexico. Flextronics sources material and handles end of line manufacturing quality. The only exception to this for Palm was the VIIx was made in a Flex facility in Fremont, I don't know if this applies to the 705.
In any case, where many people rail about the quality of Company X's products, these days it is highly likely that Company X didn't have anything to do with making the product other than designing it. And in this age of "badge engineering" of electronics, that's not even necessarily true, as someone mentioned with the IBM WorkPad. The objective of outsourcing the manufacturing function is ultimately managing the companies stock price, not pleasing the customer. By offloading headcount and very expensive capital facilities like factories, companies try to make their return on invested capital look better.
However, someone other than Company X now actually controls the customer's "out of box" experience. If they do this poorly, they eventually will have to eat the cost of returns and perhaps lose Company X's manufacturing business, but the loss of future sales caused by the customer's poor experience falls on Company X. And the contract manufacturer is large and has many other companies to live on, while Company X probably has a relatively small set of products, which now may have acquired a reputation for poor quality. Company X's sales drop and their stock (symbol: PALM) drops below $2...
Ultimately the consumer is the loser, since as I mentioned, it is possible that a product area has ALL of the branded companies using contract manufacturing, possibly even the SAME manufacturer.
I believe that using contract manufacturing for consumer systems ultimately is a loser for the companies involved since it is very difficult to avoid large batches of poor quality goods from reaching customers. So if, for example Sony, apart from being innovative with its designs, still does its own manufacturing, I think it will win share down the road, while companies that hit lower price points with inferior product will be eliminated, unless they can figure out how to create "disposable" products and do the heavy marketing needed to establish such a concept.
Yes, Slashdot's redundancy clearly is increasing, soon you will be able to generate a day's Slashdot in advance by interpolative prediction. Already possible for all Katz submissions!
Yes. seems like kind of blatant hit-mongering, as Salon is so fond of. Wonder what the readership numbers have been looking like lately, maybe they needed a bit of a boost ;-)
The Firefox still has this technology beat ;-)