I'm not an Oracle champion. As a matter of fact I think they are worse than Microsoft in their FUD advertisements (unbreakable my ass!) and their underhanded business practices. Never mind the fact that their product certainly is not 'the best' for the majority (guestimating) of clients.
Here where I work we have an Oracle DB of like 30GB. Most of it (20GB or so) are log entries, which pretty much any RDBMS can handle. Is there a 'killer' reason why we chose Orable over MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.? Well, all of our applications (e.g. purchased, 3rd party ones) run on Oracle. There are a wealth of stable, mature monitoring, performance and tuning, backup, etc. applications already written to help us mange, backup and restore, performance tune, etc. our databases. Not only that, but we can call Oracle any time of day if something goes wrong with the database.
How much of that is directly translatable to PostgreSQL or MySQL? How many commercial-grade, large-scale applications are written to take advantage? How many billing applications, how many payroll, etc. etc. etc. Few, if any!
Are all 300,000 licenses going to developers? Certainly not; I suspect this would be per-seat type things for every employee who uses their intranet or whatever. Even DMV employees use computers (although to what degree of efficiency is debatable;)) which probably are connected to a central mainframe somewhere. They may even run desktop applications which communicate with Oracle. Is the 300,000 license a little 'far reaching'? Of course - you can't poll each and every user to say "Have you used an application which connects to an Oracle DB?". So you guess. Or in this case, you hire a 3rd party (the consulting company Logicon) to do the legwork for you. They do a survey of the enterprise and 'recommend' a solution. In this case, it appears that Logicon was/is in bed with Oracle unbeknownst to CA anyway; such is the case when you deal with mid-management who know absolutely zero about RDBMS' to begin with.
I guess if there was blame to be placed, I'd put it on the whole 'system' that we have here. 1) Software company develops database. 2) It gains market share (60%+) 3) People realize there is a lot of money in developing applications focused for said RDBMS 4) Management, not knowing a single thing about competing products, hires 'Consulting' company to tell them what they want to hear "The product you've been paying a lot of money for the past few years is the right choice. Buy more of it!" 5) Management picks said RDBMS due to consultant pointing out RDBMS marketing and large application base 6) Lather, rinse, repeat the vicious cycle.
Would a different RDBMS suit CA better? Could be. It depends on what their applications are and what they do with it. However, PostgreSQL (MySQL, FireBird, other free ones, etc.) is *still* not suited for the task. Can you easily administrate PostgreSQL for 300,000 users? Can you cluster, perform fail-safe replication, etc? Can you perform not only on-line backups (which PostgreSQL can) but 'point-in-time' snapshots? How much would it cost to migrate your financial backend to something else? This includes not only re-writing the application but re-training your users to the new interface (300,000 user training-session?).
The RDBMS is quickly becoming not simply an 'island' apart from the Enterprise - it is becoming the *heart* of the Enterprise. It is increasingly taking over analytical and business roles in which the RDBMS vendors have intimate experience with, and have the resources available to commit to bringing end-user requirements to life.
Fortunately, the small, low-end RDBMS market (PostgreSQL, MySQL) has an appropriate cost - zero! This allows smaller shops to save a significant amount of money by using less advanced, less technologically superior tools. Sure, you can probably live with reconstructing a days worth of payroll for 25 people if your MySQL-backed system goes down. For 25,000 that is simply not an option.
The "Slashdot party line" for these sorts of things, and really is unfortunate that they get modded up so often, is that "Anything you do (big commercial companies) we can do better!" Well, perhaps so. In the case of the Enterprise RDBMS market, however, this has not been the case, and probably will continue to be so. Stop trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole - it aint gonna fit without breaking something (or significant pain;)).
Check out page #44: http://www.aoltimewarner.com/investors/annua l_repo rts/pdf/2001ar.pdf
Basically the FASB 'used' to allow for amortization (e.g. 'writing-off') good-will over a period of many, many years (40 I think). Remember that goodwill basically is an asset on a purchaser's balance sheet and has the value of the excess paid over the net worth of the purchased company. That is to say if AOL paid $100B for Time Warner and all of Time Warner's assets etc. added up only accounted for $46B then the 'excess' paid would be goodwill (stuff like trademarks, that stupid Road Runner 'beep beep', other intangibles, etc.).
Naturally almost every buyout includes that sort of thing. Before the accounting change, however, this excess paid (goodwill) would be written off as an expense over a period of 40 years. However, the new accounting change by the FASB says "No more!", so now AOL/Time-Warner must write off the ENTIRE amount. Again, this is a NON-CASH write-off and says NOTHING to the value of Time Warner, AOL, etc. -- if we were going on past FASB declaration this $54 billion would have been written off over a number of years anyway -- and no one would've cared.
But, since it is the largest 'loss' by a company in US history everyone is jumping on it as some sort of a monumental failure. Granted AOL probably overpaid, but traditionally this overpay was smoothed out over the amortization period. Now they had to take it all at once, but to say that somehow the merger should have 'never taken place' or that AOL is now '1/3rd the company it was' is pretty wrong.
'Honorable' Experience with CompUSA re: discounts
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Worst Buy
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· Score: 2
Back when 8X burners had just entered the market a friend notified me of an outstanding deal in the Sunday paper for a Smart and Friendly 8x SCSI (with card) burner for something like $150 from CompUSA. We knew that they should be around $400 or so, and armed with the flyer marked $150 we hurried to our nearest CompUSA indeed saw that the sticker price was around $400 ($375 or somesuch).
CompUSA honored the flyer price and we walked out of there with 5 8x CD-Rs. Now there's integrity! We checked the paper a week later and noticed the corrected price.;)
Granted, we only purchased 5 CD-Rs and their markup probably covered their losses for those 5. I bet if we tried to buy 2,000 (like in this case) they'd be less willing to lose a TON of money.
Remember that quality products sometimes do not enjoy large market share (OS/2, Sybase ASE, Linux) while others which may have lesser quality have large market share (Oracle, MS Windows, MySQL). Because of this, someone without knowledge that Linux is 'cool' or 'Oracle is bloated' will mis-read the statistics. I would include them as an anicdote but should not be relied upon. I was reading on MySQL market share data which counted an 'install' as simply someone who has downloaded the software!! How can that be even close to the actual number of MySQL servers in production (the number which should really count and can only be found by doing legwork)? Again, another reason why 'market share' is a BadThing(TM) to cite as a reason. I love open-source (Linux and PHP especially) but remember that if I'm finding fault the *anti-s* will easily as well.
I installed XP Professional yesterday and could've swore I saw IE in the list of add/remove windows components. When I get home from work I'll check but I distinctly remember it and going "Hey, this was never there before!".
Ah right the idle workers.. If you have a MS Optical mouse with extra buttons the forward, back thumb buttons will find idle workers and take you home.:)
Microsoft's Age of Empires II does offer some form of 'intelligent' AI.
For example, the vast majority of the time the ore is spread out across the map. Quite often you'll find yourself telling 4 villagers to create a gold mine next to the gold deposit for mining purposes. You'll 'remember' that you did that oh 20 minutes ago when you run out of gold and they'll all be standing next to the mine scratching their asses.
The expansion pack 'guesses' that you want them to mine the nearest resource to the building-type you just built. So, those 4 villagers after creating the mine will go ahead and start mining gold. Giddy up!
Most RTS games will allow you to have units 'patrol' or 'guard'. MS AOE2 also has the ability to set threat levels for units attacking - attack and follow till enemy is dead, 'defensive' meaning that if an enemy gets close the units will attack but not past a certain range and will go back to where they were before, and 'stand ground' meaning your units will NEVER move from their position and only ranged units will attack. It requires micromanagement but it adds to the game play a bit since you don't have to worry about a bunch of foot soldiers chasing after a single scout cavalry unit who leads them back to an ambush to be slaughtered.
I liken the 'never rewrite' issue to MySQL. Yeah yeah, MySQL is cool and all and we all like it for interesting tasks and whatnot, but there are several glaring, fundamental problems with the database engine (filesystem buffered writes, inability to use more than one index on a query, no clustered indexes, crappy query optimizer etc.). In the spirit of object-oriented design, they said, "Well heck, we'll just allow different table types to be complied in and then we can avoid doing the hard work". In theory, this is interesting, but in practice, it is far less than they had hoped.
InnoDB doesn't store a count of rows, so select count( * ) from table now takes far, far longer to return a result. Most RDBMs' operate this way, but to a developer who hasn't experienced that before (since MyISAM/Gemini store a count in the table) it would be confusing and not entirely intuitive why this happens. Not only that, but since text/blob/etc. information is stored on the row (instead of off-row like, again, other RDBMs') users of textual data now may find the hard row-size limit of InnoDB a problem when working with large amounts of text data (like it used to be in PostGRES).
Gemini has their own sets of problems, some of which are due to MySQL's horrendous lock-manager (if such a thing exists). When you perform a table scan on a Gemini table, it appears that it will not escalate the table scan to a full table lock but instead dutifully lock each and every row (and it appears that it does not release the lock after it 'passes' the row either, only when the entire result set is dumped). In these sorts of cases, a table lock is far more efficient since you'll save the lock manager of maintaining count( * ) locks for your table. Also, since it is difficult to manage (if at all) the transaction log, deletions or modifications of many rows can cause it to choke on the massive amount of data in order to roll-back the transaction.
Now, I don't want to make this a "I Hate MySQL" post, but I think it illustrates the "Well we can just make these little incremental changes here or there, or maybe make it modular so that we can simply 'hack in' new features whenever we think them up!" fallacy that Joel seems to love to stick by. It hasn't worked for MySQL, and for sufficiently complex applications I don't think it would work there either. There comes a time in which you must say "Well shit, we did it wrong. And all our core functions are locked in the old, broken way of thinking. If we re-do the core functionality, then we can be more competitive, have a better product, etc." Are we asking them to start over from scratch? In most cases I think that would be a bad idea. Obviously the MySQL parsing engine (which determines if SQL statements are valid) is 'good enough'; there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. However their lock manger could use a good overhaul.
Or as Brooks said in The Mythical Man-Month"Plan to throw one away, you will anyway."
Here at our college Microsoft has done a ton to get their software into more and more PCs. In the next couple of weeks Windows XP Professional which typically retails for what $199 or $299 will be on sale for under $20. It's not crippled or marked as "Academic" or anything. All you have to show is a valid student ID. Same thing with Visual Studio.NET (although we were one of the launch partners so I picked up a copy of XP Professional and.NET for free anyway).
Makes a ton of sense; there's also Photoshop, OS X, etc. all at great prices. Personally, if I can purchase the software for a wallet-friendly price I'm going to do so. It's awesome software that I don't mind shelling out $15 to help out in their efforts. $15 is greater than zero!:)
I was using a penny as a really extreme example, but I'm sure you could partner with bandwidth / server providers to help shoulder the cost. The advantage would be in numbers -- obviously a penny is pretty inexpensive but say you sell 10 million MP3s a day @ $.10 -- that's a million bucks a day. We could assume many of those will be duplicates (think of all of Brittney's fans who would download her song all at once) -- to use the Akamai network as an example again cache the songs on the Akamai servers so that the bandwidth is strictly intra-ISP and very very cheap comparitively. It's not hard to spread/decrease the cost around provided you get enough people on board.
A dollar a song isn't terribly bad but I think it would have to be based also upon the length (thinking of say a 30 track CD vs. a 5 track CD but both are 60 minutes long, obviously the 30 track CD has an average track length far less than the 5 track CD) because I'd be better off buying a many-track'ed CD outright rather than individually. Of course, perhaps that is best business-wise if you make more profit off of a CD than you would with the individual downloads? Personally I'd probably be more comfortable with songs in the range of $.25 to $.50. That would give me more of an incentive to buy many at once. Again it comes to business costs -- if you think people would buy enough at $1.00 per pop that you'd make more money vs. $.50 (you'd have to sell 4 @.50 or 2 @ $1 irrespective of bandwidth charges). It gets more difficult to price once you throw in bandwidth charges since 4 MP3 downloads will use twice as much bandwidth as 2 (same-sized MP3s).
I can't tell if ACPI-disabled versions of XP are available but due to a memory error on my motherboard Windows 2000 blue-screened on startup. The STOP code was 0x000000A5 which indicated the ACPI BIOS extensions were busted in some fashion.
In the error write-up (linked above) it states you can re-install Win2K and bypass the installation of the ACPI Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) by pressing F7 in the install process. I waited for new RAM to come in and that fixed the problem, but it leads me to believe that motherboards with the ability to turn ACPI on and off break XP in the same fashion as Win2k, namely the HAL is 'hard coded' to use ACPI extensions when you install XP with ACPI enabled (and vice versa), and a clueless user who sets ACPI to 'NO' all of a sudden has a 'broken' copy of Win2000/XP.
So Microsoft says: "Well, writing the code to dynamically change the HAL from ACPI to Standard and vice versa at runtime is far too complicated and costly. Since it [the BSOD after changing ACPI BIOS settings] is a user issue, to combat support tickets and the like it would be a great idea if you [BIOS/motherboard manufacturers] simply remove the ability to enable/disable ACPI. Really, why would you want to do that anyway? Without ACPI we can't do neat-o power management in the OS and most users wouldn't care either way."
It makes a lot of sense to me - I'm not sure how many issues this would've caused but I can see few reasons to disable ACPI in the BIOS, and doing so breaks Windows 2000/XP anyway. To me, this is a non-issue and a good business move to reduce software and support costs.
The RIAA and all the lawyers in the world will never be able to completely stop pirating. Look at how much money the feds throw at drugs and the number of addicts on the street. If enough people want something, they'll get it.
To put an interesting spin on it, what if the RIAA were to attack the source of the MP3s.. Not so much trying to force Morpheus or whomever out of business, but to taint their supply of MP3s? I know one of my chief frustrations is to search for a song and either have it incomplete, or be of poor quality (e.g. pops or other defects) or to simply have it not be the same song that I downloaded. If I could search for a song, pay a penny for it and download a 'known perfect' copy at my choice of bitrates (e.g. 128, 160, etc.) then sure as heck I'd do it.
In that vein, what if RIAA / third party went ahead and started 'poisoning' the well? Started distributing broken or otherwise junk MP3s? If they could find a way to diminish the signal ratio by spewing so much junk I'd have no other choice but to find alternate means of obtaining the mp3, be it buying the CD, obtaining it from a friend, or buying the mp3 online.
Now, before you say 'That's impossible!' consider the following little scheme: 1) Entity (be it RIAA or some 3rd party company) contacts recording studio and asks "Which song/artist would you like us to poison?" 2) Record company gives them a list, and a certain amount of money (e.g. the Entity charges on a per-song or per-artist basis). 3) Entity floods the Napster / Morpheus / etc. community with junk MP3s.
Now this would take an enormous amount of bandwidth, so said Entity would have to have some sort of agreement worked out with ISPs and a mass-content provider, say Akamai. Akamai has tens of thousands of servers located in hundreds (if not more) of ISPs throughout the nation. I think on peak usage they're pushing out 100 GB/sec. in the US (if not more). Simply say "Ok Akamai, can we buy 10GB on each of your servers and push all these MP3s out?". Then you write a gnutella client for each box which offers all the MP3s up for distribution.
I can't remember how the gnutella protocol works but I think it broadcasts search requests to the nodes who store a cache of what they have and what their neighbors offer and then can pass the request off. Have your client log all the requests (so you can tell the record companies which songs were requested more) and of course offer up your files when requested. If you do this with 10,000 boxes full of identical content chances are you're going to drown out any signal out there.
If you're really tricky, you can even have the client 'fake' files so you don't actually need to have the file on the box; you could send a pre-existing obfuscated file.
Of course, all of this is moot if you still don't have a very easy, cheap method of offering MP3s online for the mass public. You could pitch it like this "Yeah, so you won't make much money off of offering a penny for each MP3. But you're a fool if you think simply shutting Morpheus off will result in even 10% of the Morpheus users buying the actual CD or using a painful, userUNfriendly pay-per-MP3 system. However, what if we have a method to net you 20 or 30% of users who wouldn't pay you anyway?" So the pitch would be "We can't get you all of them, but our method would give you more than you're getting now!". Frankly the people who post on SlashDot (from the very negative response to the Subscription model) are not a good cross-section of the vast majority of internet users out there:).
So in your obfuscated file you have it play maybe 20 seconds of the file and then say "Sorry, this is a copywrited file. Pirating files costs artists money. If you want to buy this MP3 for a penny, please visit http://www.somestore.com. 80% of every penny earned will go directly to the artist."
It gives them a reason to buy it - not only do you have SomeStore.com very easily accepting payment of the penny, but you ACTUALLY PAY THE ARTISTS A MAJORITY OF THE MONIES EARNED! So it can quell the naysayers who say "Well the artist wouldn't receive anything anyway!" (rant: but who are you hurting more, the billion dollar-industry or the Artist who NEEDS even the small cut they receive from each CD sold?).
Some drawbacks could be of course that someone writes a 'detector' to find and ignore the invalid MP3s, or they block the IP addresses of the servers, etc. but that is easily fixed. Most non-power users (e.g. the great and huddled masses of the internet) don't want to update their Morpheus client every time a new version is released. Heck, even programs which offer hassle-free updating (e.g. antivirus, windowsupdate.com) very rarely are by the majority of internet users. Also, you'd work out the server IP settings with the ISP so that they would rotate to a random IP in their pool - since most of the servers are located in most ISPs you couldn't ban the single IP but perhaps a subnet. But since the IPs are in the ISP, you have now banned a large chunk of users. If they are in every ISP, you will have to ban every ISP (see the problem in banning IPs?). You could also use the EVIL RAW SOCKETS (sorry had to poke fun at XP haters;)) in XP to fake the IP address and have it ban the hapless 'regular' user in the ISP.
So, to boil it down to a few bullet points: *Poison the well *Have very easy-to-use, hassle-free, cheap, reliable, etc. method for users to buy MP3s and they WILL.
LOL. Nothing says DotCom excess like companies named: "Guess who has a huge wang? Our: ".:D
You'd think the DotComs would've come up with clever names like that rather than "MarchFIRST", "Rivals.com", and "WebVan". It would've put a nice punctuation mark on the DotCom era!:D
So that whenever they refer to me in the press articles I'd always be lauded for my intellectual acheivements!:D
(e.g. When the two ran into legal trouble at home and in the United States, Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, set up a meeting with Nikki Hemming, CEO of Australian's Sharman Networks venture firm.)
Rail Guns are more fun! :D
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Homemade Gauss Gun
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· Score: 4, Informative
Back in high-school for Honors/Advanced Physics I took it upon myself to build a rail-gun, you know - something that could be cool (everyone in high-school thought Quake/Doom was the shiz) and somewhat useful (provided you needed to drive a projectile at 2 to 3 km/sec). The other students were building oh I don't know weird tinker-toys like reverse-osmosis water filtration and a electrolysis something-or-other (a guy the semester before built a tesla-coil using IBC root-beer bottles as capacitors - turned out he had wayyy more capacitance than needed and not enough current) but I wanted to make something that blew stuff up.
So I went to work assembling materials for the gun.. I didn't worry about the math behind why rail guns worked, all I knew is that it did plenty of damage in Quake.:) So a couple hundred dollars later and I have some copper rails fixed to a base (some wood;)), a whole lot of 2ga. wire (friend's dad worked for the electric company), and some.9F of capacitors hooked up to provide the juice.
Two things I learned:
1) You need a fuckton of capacitance to really achieve massive current (talking hundreds of thousands of Amps needed)
2) You also need an electronic switch instead of a mechanical switch so you don't lose said Amps to welding the switch to itself.
.9F of capacitance (after working out the numbers) proved to be far too few amps to do anything but make a whole lot of sparks. Actually I managed to vaporize some of the smaller projectiles with only a small scrap of what was left pitifully dribbled out of the end of the gun. In any rate, after researching further, I found some 5 and 10F capacitors which would've done the job nicely could I have afforded the several thousand dollars it required to buy one.
So I guess the moral of the story is if you don't have $10M in defense contracts you're not going to get a good rail-gun built since it requires MASSIVE amperage to create a plasma to launch your armature out of the weapon. And Capacitors are not tiny objects, so the likelihood of a 'Eraser'-style railgun are slim to none unless someone magically comes up with a much more compact and higher-capacity capacitor (which can still discharge at 1/1000th or better of a second).
The problem with a coil gun is that you need massive voltage plus some sizeable amps, which is generally very hard to come by. Your local mains circuit won't provide enough voltage. Although you could push it through a transformer you would need a very large and bulky one, and then you still probably would wind up with not enough amps to do the job. Most capacitors work at low enough voltages that a commodity (e.g. plugs into your regular wall socket) transformer could easily provide it, but achieving enough capacitance is both cost and size prohibitive (ignoring the rail mass loss due to vaporization).
Stupid Quake.:)
Re:Texan Gun Owner?
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iWarez
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ouch, what a way to burn 3 karma points.;) Still, I think it needed to be said. It's exactly the same as saying "What if he was black, you never know what he might have been carrying." and of course the ACLU PC nazis would've been all over that. And I'd agree with them. He'd be stereotyping blacks as people who always are violent lawbreakers.
Since when are Texans liable to shoot you at the drop of a hat? Read the statistics; you're more likely to get hit by a drunk driver (or any driver for that matter) than shot by a law-abiding concealed-carry permit holder who lawfully carries a concealed weapon (both in total numbers and percentage of drivers/CCW holders). Just because you're afraid of weapons doesn't mean they're inherently bad and make whomever touches them evil -- I'd rather my sister or my mother carry a pistol for self-defense than pepper spray or for heaven's sake a whistle!
Stereotypes are stereotypes and perpetuating them, just like modding down that post, is just as stupid and close-minded as the original statement.
"I thought there's no point in getting any more involved in this imbroglio," Webb said. "Besides, this is Texas. You never know what he might have been carrying."
What a maroon. Way to stereotype both Texans and gunowners. Sure, like some kid is going to shoot you for ratting him out. Grow up, turn off the TV once in a while, maybe even read a book, and shut the hell up.
For those who don't wish to register to NY Times: Toyland Is Tough, Even for Robots
By BARNABY J. FEDER
MARK TILDEN recalls being a lonely child, repeatedly uprooted by his family's moves around Canada. He took comfort in his gift for constructing toys, especially mobile toys.
"I was born a compulsive builder," Mr. Tilden said. "I made my first robot out of sticks and rubber bands when I was 3."
Mr. Tilden, now 41 and a resident of Los Alamos, N.M., figures he has made thousands more since then. His designs have included machines to explore other planets, mine-clearing devices, toilet bowl cleaners and, more recently, a line of toys called B.I.O.-Bugs. The footlong creatures, which vaguely resemble roaches despite having just four legs, were a hit at the 2001 Toy Fair in New York and were brought to market last fall by Hasbro (news/quote).
Mr. Tilden's specialty has been designing robots with little or no brainpower. Instead, they are built around networks of simple sensors, switches and mechanical systems that respond to analog signals like lightwaves, heat or sounds without any need to convert them into a digital code of ones and zeros for analysis by a microprocessor.
Colleagues marvel at the dexterity and speed with which Mr. Tilden builds devices, noting that such finesse seems unexpected in a man so large and rotund that he jokingly describes himself as "big enough to create my own ozone layer." Then there is his ingenuity. Many a Tilden robot consists largely of components harvested from cameras, videocassette recorders and other devices retrieved from junk bins.
"Tilden is unique in his ability to intuit and hack analog circuits," said Rodney Brooks, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "You just cannot find anyone else with his virtuoso skills in that area."
But if Mr. Tilden has become widely known, even admired, among robotics experts, his views have not won him a large following. Nor has his recent plunge into the toy business played out as he hoped. Simpler is not always better for toy makers looking for unique products, he learned, and unexpected events, like domestic terrorism, can change perceptions of even a toy.
Mr. Tilden has been arguing with little success for well over a decade that progress in robotics would be much more rapid if researchers concentrated on designing relatively dumb robots rather than devices stuffed with increasingly powerful programmable electronic brains. The trick, in Mr. Tilden's view, is to equip simple-minded but physically robust robots with mechanical variations on animal nervous systems.
Nervous networks do not organize and process information digitally as computers do. Nonetheless, he points out, every second of life on earth is filled with millions of types of dim-witted creatures using nervous systems to respond instantly to environmental challenges that stump the powerful digital brains of today's computer-driven robots.
"All life is analog," Mr. Tilden said.
Many other robotics experts are also interested in nervous networks. And many are just as convinced as Mr. Tilden of the value of designing robots from simple building blocks. But most believe that without digital brainpower -- lots of it -- machines will have little potential to learn from experience and be far too limited in their ability to interact usefully with humans or other machines.
The robotic design wars that have preoccupied Mr. Tilden since the late 1980's have largely been waged in university laboratories, obscure journals and government-financed research projects. Mr. Tilden's main livelihood since 1993, for instance, has come from research at the federal government's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In recent years, though, the toy industry has emerged as a new playground for the robotics theorists. In this sector, as in the others, the advocates of programmable robotics clearly have the lead and the upper hand. Products like the Sony (news/quote) Aibo (which cost $2,500 when it was introduced in 1999), Furby and Lego Mindstorms have been huge hits. Robotics and virtual pets accounted for only $160 million of the $2.3 billion toy industry's revenues in 2000, but Poochi and Tekno, both robotic toys, were individual best sellers.
The novelty of Mr. Tilden's approach and some of his inventions caught the eye of executives at WowWee just over a year ago, shortly before the company was acquired by Hasbro, the second-largest toy company after Mattel. Mr. Tilden said he was thrilled by the invitation to become a consultant.
"You build something for NASA and you only build two of them," Mr. Tilden said. "You build for the military and they might want 50. But here it could be millions."
Mr. Tilden's fondest dreams were battered a bit by his first year in the toy business, though. B.I.O.-Bugs, priced at $39.95, reached toy stores last September. There were four bugs in the line, each with slightly different behavioral tendencies. The red Predator was the most aggressive, the blue Stomper the noisiest, the green Destroyer slightly more suited to moving in rough terrain and the yellow Acceleraider the speediest. The battery-driven bugs operate on their own or under remote control.
Mr. Tilden had originally hoped for a broader line including some bugs intended to appeal to girls rather than the 4- to 9- year-old boys Hasbro had in mind. Mr. Tilden also wanted to make B.I.O.-Bugs easy to dissect and alter, a starkly different attitude from that of Sony, which has threatened to sue customers who publish information about how to alter its Aibo dogs or the software that runs them.
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else," Mr. Tilden said. "They are my colleagues of the future."
Hasbro had a more commercial and conservative perspective than Mr. Tilden's, of course. Before mass production began last year in Hong Kong, he said, Hasbro told him that a chunk of the "neural network" engineering needed to be converted into digital functions executed by a microprocessor so that B.I.O.-Bugs would be harder for competitors to reverse-engineer and duplicate.
"It ended up with about 80 percent of what I wanted," Mr. Tilden said.
Hasbro ended up feeling similarly unfulfilled. B.I.O.-Bugs sold well -- they were, for example, the best-selling robotic toy at F.A.O. Schwarz during the Christmas season, said Steven Benoff, the toy retailer's chief buyer for electronics, action figures, video games and vehicles. But overall sales added up to "a double or a triple" rather than a home run, according to Loren T. Taylor, the Hasbro executive who oversees WowWee. In the toy industry, only a smash hit guarantees a line's survival beyond its first year.
Mr. Tilden and some independent experts are convinced that B.I.O.-Bugs would have done much better had Hasbro not been forced to abandon a portion of its advertising campaign in October. The television ads, which were geared primarily toward children and fans of science fiction shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation," began attracting angry letters from viewers who said the landscape that the bugs were crawling over looked like the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Then came the anthrax attacks. "We had the worst name you could come up with for selling toys during an anthrax scare," Mr. Tilden said.
Whatever the reasons, Hasbro decided that expanding the line this year was too risky. B.I.O.-Bugs shipped last year will remain on the shelves in this country, and B.I.O.-Bugs will be introduced in overseas markets that did not get them last year. But Mr. Tilden was told late last year to put aside plans for new B.I.O.-Bugs and focus instead on enhancing dragons, hovercraft and several other toys that WowWee introduced last week at the Toy Fair.
"They would have been like Ferraris compared to Model T's," Mr. Tilden said, sighing over the B.I.O.-Bug enhancements he was told to shelve.
If the B.I.O.-Bug experience has done less than Mr. Tilden had hoped to highlight the commercial value of his robotics concepts, it certainly has not shaken his faith in them. He still believes that large numbers of such simple devices are more likely to be able to execute many tasks without human supervision than the brainy robots most researchers have been trying to build. As evidence, he often points to the tiny, slow-moving devices he has built to clean the floors and windows in his condominium apartment.
Meanwhile, he is still having fun working for Hasbro and is constantly on the prowl for chances to demonstrate his concepts, both inside the toy business and beyond. On the whole, he said, the experience with B.I.O.-Bugs has been good. That has not always been the case with his inventions, he said.
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
But life -- robotic as well as human -- goes on. Some of the same technology is embedded in a fantasy snake that Mr. Tilden recently designed for Hasbro.
Not really 'leech computing' but just 'leeches' or the infinitive form 'to leech'. I remember 'back in the day' of having friends who would upload GBs (literally several times the size of consumer hard drives at that point) to BBS's with their 14.4s.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an Oracle champion. As a matter of fact I think they are worse than Microsoft in their FUD advertisements (unbreakable my ass!) and their underhanded business practices. Never mind the fact that their product certainly is not 'the best' for the majority (guestimating) of clients.
;)) which probably are connected to a central mainframe somewhere. They may even run desktop applications which communicate with Oracle. Is the 300,000 license a little 'far reaching'? Of course - you can't poll each and every user to say "Have you used an application which connects to an Oracle DB?". So you guess. Or in this case, you hire a 3rd party (the consulting company Logicon) to do the legwork for you. They do a survey of the enterprise and 'recommend' a solution. In this case, it appears that Logicon was/is in bed with Oracle unbeknownst to CA anyway; such is the case when you deal with mid-management who know absolutely zero about RDBMS' to begin with.
;)).
Here where I work we have an Oracle DB of like 30GB. Most of it (20GB or so) are log entries, which pretty much any RDBMS can handle. Is there a 'killer' reason why we chose Orable over MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.? Well, all of our applications (e.g. purchased, 3rd party ones) run on Oracle. There are a wealth of stable, mature monitoring, performance and tuning, backup, etc. applications already written to help us mange, backup and restore, performance tune, etc. our databases. Not only that, but we can call Oracle any time of day if something goes wrong with the database.
How much of that is directly translatable to PostgreSQL or MySQL? How many commercial-grade, large-scale applications are written to take advantage? How many billing applications, how many payroll, etc. etc. etc. Few, if any!
Are all 300,000 licenses going to developers? Certainly not; I suspect this would be per-seat type things for every employee who uses their intranet or whatever. Even DMV employees use computers (although to what degree of efficiency is debatable
I guess if there was blame to be placed, I'd put it on the whole 'system' that we have here.
1) Software company develops database.
2) It gains market share (60%+)
3) People realize there is a lot of money in developing applications focused for said RDBMS
4) Management, not knowing a single thing about competing products, hires 'Consulting' company to tell them what they want to hear "The product you've been paying a lot of money for the past few years is the right choice. Buy more of it!"
5) Management picks said RDBMS due to consultant pointing out RDBMS marketing and large application base
6) Lather, rinse, repeat the vicious cycle.
Would a different RDBMS suit CA better? Could be. It depends on what their applications are and what they do with it. However, PostgreSQL (MySQL, FireBird, other free ones, etc.) is *still* not suited for the task. Can you easily administrate PostgreSQL for 300,000 users? Can you cluster, perform fail-safe replication, etc? Can you perform not only on-line backups (which PostgreSQL can) but 'point-in-time' snapshots? How much would it cost to migrate your financial backend to something else? This includes not only re-writing the application but re-training your users to the new interface (300,000 user training-session?).
The RDBMS is quickly becoming not simply an 'island' apart from the Enterprise - it is becoming the *heart* of the Enterprise. It is increasingly taking over analytical and business roles in which the RDBMS vendors have intimate experience with, and have the resources available to commit to bringing end-user requirements to life.
Fortunately, the small, low-end RDBMS market (PostgreSQL, MySQL) has an appropriate cost - zero! This allows smaller shops to save a significant amount of money by using less advanced, less technologically superior tools. Sure, you can probably live with reconstructing a days worth of payroll for 25 people if your MySQL-backed system goes down. For 25,000 that is simply not an option.
The "Slashdot party line" for these sorts of things, and really is unfortunate that they get modded up so often, is that "Anything you do (big commercial companies) we can do better!" Well, perhaps so. In the case of the Enterprise RDBMS market, however, this has not been the case, and probably will continue to be so. Stop trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole - it aint gonna fit without breaking something (or significant pain
Sorry I mis-stated the past amortization periods. It was in fact 20 years and not 40. Sorry!
Sheesh, take an accounting class or something!
a l_repo rts/pdf/2001ar.pdf
Check out page #44:
http://www.aoltimewarner.com/investors/annu
Basically the FASB 'used' to allow for amortization (e.g. 'writing-off') good-will over a period of many, many years (40 I think). Remember that goodwill basically is an asset on a purchaser's balance sheet and has the value of the excess paid over the net worth of the purchased company. That is to say if AOL paid $100B for Time Warner and all of Time Warner's assets etc. added up only accounted for $46B then the 'excess' paid would be goodwill (stuff like trademarks, that stupid Road Runner 'beep beep', other intangibles, etc.).
Naturally almost every buyout includes that sort of thing. Before the accounting change, however, this excess paid (goodwill) would be written off as an expense over a period of 40 years. However, the new accounting change by the FASB says "No more!", so now AOL/Time-Warner must write off the ENTIRE amount. Again, this is a NON-CASH write-off and says NOTHING to the value of Time Warner, AOL, etc. -- if we were going on past FASB declaration this $54 billion would have been written off over a number of years anyway -- and no one would've cared.
But, since it is the largest 'loss' by a company in US history everyone is jumping on it as some sort of a monumental failure. Granted AOL probably overpaid, but traditionally this overpay was smoothed out over the amortization period. Now they had to take it all at once, but to say that somehow the merger should have 'never taken place' or that AOL is now '1/3rd the company it was' is pretty wrong.
Back when 8X burners had just entered the market a friend notified me of an outstanding deal in the Sunday paper for a Smart and Friendly 8x SCSI (with card) burner for something like $150 from CompUSA. We knew that they should be around $400 or so, and armed with the flyer marked $150 we hurried to our nearest CompUSA indeed saw that the sticker price was around $400 ($375 or somesuch).
;)
CompUSA honored the flyer price and we walked out of there with 5 8x CD-Rs. Now there's integrity! We checked the paper a week later and noticed the corrected price.
Granted, we only purchased 5 CD-Rs and their markup probably covered their losses for those 5. I bet if we tried to buy 2,000 (like in this case) they'd be less willing to lose a TON of money.
Remember that quality products sometimes do not enjoy large market share (OS/2, Sybase ASE, Linux) while others which may have lesser quality have large market share (Oracle, MS Windows, MySQL). Because of this, someone without knowledge that Linux is 'cool' or 'Oracle is bloated' will mis-read the statistics. I would include them as an anicdote but should not be relied upon. I was reading on MySQL market share data which counted an 'install' as simply someone who has downloaded the software!! How can that be even close to the actual number of MySQL servers in production (the number which should really count and can only be found by doing legwork)? Again, another reason why 'market share' is a BadThing(TM) to cite as a reason. I love open-source (Linux and PHP especially) but remember that if I'm finding fault the *anti-s* will easily as well.
I installed XP Professional yesterday and could've swore I saw IE in the list of add/remove windows components. When I get home from work I'll check but I distinctly remember it and going "Hey, this was never there before!".
Anyone else with XP Prof care to comment?
Ah right the idle workers.. If you have a MS Optical mouse with extra buttons the forward, back thumb buttons will find idle workers and take you home. :)
Microsoft's Age of Empires II does offer some form of 'intelligent' AI.
For example, the vast majority of the time the ore is spread out across the map. Quite often you'll find yourself telling 4 villagers to create a gold mine next to the gold deposit for mining purposes. You'll 'remember' that you did that oh 20 minutes ago when you run out of gold and they'll all be standing next to the mine scratching their asses.
The expansion pack 'guesses' that you want them to mine the nearest resource to the building-type you just built. So, those 4 villagers after creating the mine will go ahead and start mining gold. Giddy up!
Most RTS games will allow you to have units 'patrol' or 'guard'. MS AOE2 also has the ability to set threat levels for units attacking - attack and follow till enemy is dead, 'defensive' meaning that if an enemy gets close the units will attack but not past a certain range and will go back to where they were before, and 'stand ground' meaning your units will NEVER move from their position and only ranged units will attack. It requires micromanagement but it adds to the game play a bit since you don't have to worry about a bunch of foot soldiers chasing after a single scout cavalry unit who leads them back to an ambush to be slaughtered.
Morpheus is totally fucked.
I liken the 'never rewrite' issue to MySQL. Yeah yeah, MySQL is cool and all and we all like it for interesting tasks and whatnot, but there are several glaring, fundamental problems with the database engine (filesystem buffered writes, inability to use more than one index on a query, no clustered indexes, crappy query optimizer etc.). In the spirit of object-oriented design, they said, "Well heck, we'll just allow different table types to be complied in and then we can avoid doing the hard work". In theory, this is interesting, but in practice, it is far less than they had hoped.
InnoDB doesn't store a count of rows, so select count( * ) from table now takes far, far longer to return a result. Most RDBMs' operate this way, but to a developer who hasn't experienced that before (since MyISAM/Gemini store a count in the table) it would be confusing and not entirely intuitive why this happens. Not only that, but since text/blob/etc. information is stored on the row (instead of off-row like, again, other RDBMs') users of textual data now may find the hard row-size limit of InnoDB a problem when working with large amounts of text data (like it used to be in PostGRES).
Gemini has their own sets of problems, some of which are due to MySQL's horrendous lock-manager (if such a thing exists). When you perform a table scan on a Gemini table, it appears that it will not escalate the table scan to a full table lock but instead dutifully lock each and every row (and it appears that it does not release the lock after it 'passes' the row either, only when the entire result set is dumped). In these sorts of cases, a table lock is far more efficient since you'll save the lock manager of maintaining count( * ) locks for your table. Also, since it is difficult to manage (if at all) the transaction log, deletions or modifications of many rows can cause it to choke on the massive amount of data in order to roll-back the transaction.
Now, I don't want to make this a "I Hate MySQL" post, but I think it illustrates the "Well we can just make these little incremental changes here or there, or maybe make it modular so that we can simply 'hack in' new features whenever we think them up!" fallacy that Joel seems to love to stick by. It hasn't worked for MySQL, and for sufficiently complex applications I don't think it would work there either. There comes a time in which you must say "Well shit, we did it wrong. And all our core functions are locked in the old, broken way of thinking. If we re-do the core functionality, then we can be more competitive, have a better product, etc." Are we asking them to start over from scratch? In most cases I think that would be a bad idea. Obviously the MySQL parsing engine (which determines if SQL statements are valid) is 'good enough'; there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. However their lock manger could use a good overhaul.
Or as Brooks said in The Mythical Man-Month "Plan to throw one away, you will anyway."
Here at our college Microsoft has done a ton to get their software into more and more PCs. In the next couple of weeks Windows XP Professional which typically retails for what $199 or $299 will be on sale for under $20. It's not crippled or marked as "Academic" or anything. All you have to show is a valid student ID. Same thing with Visual Studio .NET (although we were one of the launch partners so I picked up a copy of XP Professional and .NET for free anyway).
:)
Makes a ton of sense; there's also Photoshop, OS X, etc. all at great prices. Personally, if I can purchase the software for a wallet-friendly price I'm going to do so. It's awesome software that I don't mind shelling out $15 to help out in their efforts. $15 is greater than zero!
I was using a penny as a really extreme example, but I'm sure you could partner with bandwidth / server providers to help shoulder the cost. The advantage would be in numbers -- obviously a penny is pretty inexpensive but say you sell 10 million MP3s a day @ $.10 -- that's a million bucks a day. We could assume many of those will be duplicates (think of all of Brittney's fans who would download her song all at once) -- to use the Akamai network as an example again cache the songs on the Akamai servers so that the bandwidth is strictly intra-ISP and very very cheap comparitively. It's not hard to spread/decrease the cost around provided you get enough people on board.
.50 or 2 @ $1 irrespective of bandwidth charges). It gets more difficult to price once you throw in bandwidth charges since 4 MP3 downloads will use twice as much bandwidth as 2 (same-sized MP3s).
A dollar a song isn't terribly bad but I think it would have to be based also upon the length (thinking of say a 30 track CD vs. a 5 track CD but both are 60 minutes long, obviously the 30 track CD has an average track length far less than the 5 track CD) because I'd be better off buying a many-track'ed CD outright rather than individually. Of course, perhaps that is best business-wise if you make more profit off of a CD than you would with the individual downloads? Personally I'd probably be more comfortable with songs in the range of $.25 to $.50. That would give me more of an incentive to buy many at once. Again it comes to business costs -- if you think people would buy enough at $1.00 per pop that you'd make more money vs. $.50 (you'd have to sell 4 @
I can't tell if ACPI-disabled versions of XP are available but due to a memory error on my motherboard Windows 2000 blue-screened on startup. The STOP code was 0x000000A5 which indicated the ACPI BIOS extensions were busted in some fashion.
In the error write-up (linked above) it states you can re-install Win2K and bypass the installation of the ACPI Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) by pressing F7 in the install process. I waited for new RAM to come in and that fixed the problem, but it leads me to believe that motherboards with the ability to turn ACPI on and off break XP in the same fashion as Win2k, namely the HAL is 'hard coded' to use ACPI extensions when you install XP with ACPI enabled (and vice versa), and a clueless user who sets ACPI to 'NO' all of a sudden has a 'broken' copy of Win2000/XP.
So Microsoft says: "Well, writing the code to dynamically change the HAL from ACPI to Standard and vice versa at runtime is far too complicated and costly. Since it [the BSOD after changing ACPI BIOS settings] is a user issue, to combat support tickets and the like it would be a great idea if you [BIOS/motherboard manufacturers] simply remove the ability to enable/disable ACPI. Really, why would you want to do that anyway? Without ACPI we can't do neat-o power management in the OS and most users wouldn't care either way."
It makes a lot of sense to me - I'm not sure how many issues this would've caused but I can see few reasons to disable ACPI in the BIOS, and doing so breaks Windows 2000/XP anyway. To me, this is a non-issue and a good business move to reduce software and support costs.
To people who say "Video games/TV/media/etc. are to blame": :D
Can I sue the Mr.Rogers Show for turning you into a sissy?
The RIAA and all the lawyers in the world will never be able to completely stop pirating. Look at how much money the feds throw at drugs and the number of addicts on the street. If enough people want something, they'll get it.
:).
;)) in XP to fake the IP address and have it ban the hapless 'regular' user in the ISP.
To put an interesting spin on it, what if the RIAA were to attack the source of the MP3s.. Not so much trying to force Morpheus or whomever out of business, but to taint their supply of MP3s? I know one of my chief frustrations is to search for a song and either have it incomplete, or be of poor quality (e.g. pops or other defects) or to simply have it not be the same song that I downloaded. If I could search for a song, pay a penny for it and download a 'known perfect' copy at my choice of bitrates (e.g. 128, 160, etc.) then sure as heck I'd do it.
In that vein, what if RIAA / third party went ahead and started 'poisoning' the well? Started distributing broken or otherwise junk MP3s? If they could find a way to diminish the signal ratio by spewing so much junk I'd have no other choice but to find alternate means of obtaining the mp3, be it buying the CD, obtaining it from a friend, or buying the mp3 online.
Now, before you say 'That's impossible!' consider the following little scheme:
1) Entity (be it RIAA or some 3rd party company) contacts recording studio and asks "Which song/artist would you like us to poison?"
2) Record company gives them a list, and a certain amount of money (e.g. the Entity charges on a per-song or per-artist basis).
3) Entity floods the Napster / Morpheus / etc. community with junk MP3s.
Now this would take an enormous amount of bandwidth, so said Entity would have to have some sort of agreement worked out with ISPs and a mass-content provider, say Akamai. Akamai has tens of thousands of servers located in hundreds (if not more) of ISPs throughout the nation. I think on peak usage they're pushing out 100 GB/sec. in the US (if not more). Simply say "Ok Akamai, can we buy 10GB on each of your servers and push all these MP3s out?". Then you write a gnutella client for each box which offers all the MP3s up for distribution.
I can't remember how the gnutella protocol works but I think it broadcasts search requests to the nodes who store a cache of what they have and what their neighbors offer and then can pass the request off. Have your client log all the requests (so you can tell the record companies which songs were requested more) and of course offer up your files when requested. If you do this with 10,000 boxes full of identical content chances are you're going to drown out any signal out there.
If you're really tricky, you can even have the client 'fake' files so you don't actually need to have the file on the box; you could send a pre-existing obfuscated file.
Of course, all of this is moot if you still don't have a very easy, cheap method of offering MP3s online for the mass public. You could pitch it like this "Yeah, so you won't make much money off of offering a penny for each MP3. But you're a fool if you think simply shutting Morpheus off will result in even 10% of the Morpheus users buying the actual CD or using a painful, userUNfriendly pay-per-MP3 system. However, what if we have a method to net you 20 or 30% of users who wouldn't pay you anyway?" So the pitch would be "We can't get you all of them, but our method would give you more than you're getting now!". Frankly the people who post on SlashDot (from the very negative response to the Subscription model) are not a good cross-section of the vast majority of internet users out there
So in your obfuscated file you have it play maybe 20 seconds of the file and then say "Sorry, this is a copywrited file. Pirating files costs artists money. If you want to buy this MP3 for a penny, please visit http://www.somestore.com. 80% of every penny earned will go directly to the artist."
It gives them a reason to buy it - not only do you have SomeStore.com very easily accepting payment of the penny, but you ACTUALLY PAY THE ARTISTS A MAJORITY OF THE MONIES EARNED! So it can quell the naysayers who say "Well the artist wouldn't receive anything anyway!" (rant: but who are you hurting more, the billion dollar-industry or the Artist who NEEDS even the small cut they receive from each CD sold?).
Some drawbacks could be of course that someone writes a 'detector' to find and ignore the invalid MP3s, or they block the IP addresses of the servers, etc. but that is easily fixed. Most non-power users (e.g. the great and huddled masses of the internet) don't want to update their Morpheus client every time a new version is released. Heck, even programs which offer hassle-free updating (e.g. antivirus, windowsupdate.com) very rarely are by the majority of internet users. Also, you'd work out the server IP settings with the ISP so that they would rotate to a random IP in their pool - since most of the servers are located in most ISPs you couldn't ban the single IP but perhaps a subnet. But since the IPs are in the ISP, you have now banned a large chunk of users. If they are in every ISP, you will have to ban every ISP (see the problem in banning IPs?). You could also use the EVIL RAW SOCKETS (sorry had to poke fun at XP haters
So, to boil it down to a few bullet points:
*Poison the well
*Have very easy-to-use, hassle-free, cheap, reliable, etc. method for users to buy MP3s and they WILL.
LOL. Nothing says DotCom excess like companies named: "Guess who has a huge wang? Our: ". :D
:D
You'd think the DotComs would've come up with clever names like that rather than "MarchFIRST", "Rivals.com", and "WebVan". It would've put a nice punctuation mark on the DotCom era!
So that whenever they refer to me in the press articles I'd always be lauded for my intellectual acheivements! :D
(e.g. When the two ran into legal trouble at home and in the United States, Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, set up a meeting with Nikki Hemming, CEO of Australian's Sharman Networks venture firm.)
Back in high-school for Honors/Advanced Physics I took it upon myself to build a rail-gun, you know - something that could be cool (everyone in high-school thought Quake/Doom was the shiz) and somewhat useful (provided you needed to drive a projectile at 2 to 3 km/sec). The other students were building oh I don't know weird tinker-toys like reverse-osmosis water filtration and a electrolysis something-or-other (a guy the semester before built a tesla-coil using IBC root-beer bottles as capacitors - turned out he had wayyy more capacitance than needed and not enough current) but I wanted to make something that blew stuff up.
:) So a couple hundred dollars later and I have some copper rails fixed to a base (some wood ;)), a whole lot of 2ga. wire (friend's dad worked for the electric company), and some .9F of capacitors hooked up to provide the juice.
.9F of capacitance (after working out the numbers) proved to be far too few amps to do anything but make a whole lot of sparks. Actually I managed to vaporize some of the smaller projectiles with only a small scrap of what was left pitifully dribbled out of the end of the gun. In any rate, after researching further, I found some 5 and 10F capacitors which would've done the job nicely could I have afforded the several thousand dollars it required to buy one.
:)
So I went to work assembling materials for the gun.. I didn't worry about the math behind why rail guns worked, all I knew is that it did plenty of damage in Quake.
Two things I learned:
1) You need a fuckton of capacitance to really achieve massive current (talking hundreds of thousands of Amps needed)
2) You also need an electronic switch instead of a mechanical switch so you don't lose said Amps to welding the switch to itself.
So I guess the moral of the story is if you don't have $10M in defense contracts you're not going to get a good rail-gun built since it requires MASSIVE amperage to create a plasma to launch your armature out of the weapon. And Capacitors are not tiny objects, so the likelihood of a 'Eraser'-style railgun are slim to none unless someone magically comes up with a much more compact and higher-capacity capacitor (which can still discharge at 1/1000th or better of a second).
The problem with a coil gun is that you need massive voltage plus some sizeable amps, which is generally very hard to come by. Your local mains circuit won't provide enough voltage. Although you could push it through a transformer you would need a very large and bulky one, and then you still probably would wind up with not enough amps to do the job. Most capacitors work at low enough voltages that a commodity (e.g. plugs into your regular wall socket) transformer could easily provide it, but achieving enough capacitance is both cost and size prohibitive (ignoring the rail mass loss due to vaporization).
Stupid Quake.
Ouch, what a way to burn 3 karma points. ;) Still, I think it needed to be said. It's exactly the same as saying "What if he was black, you never know what he might have been carrying." and of course the ACLU PC nazis would've been all over that. And I'd agree with them. He'd be stereotyping blacks as people who always are violent lawbreakers.
Since when are Texans liable to shoot you at the drop of a hat? Read the statistics; you're more likely to get hit by a drunk driver (or any driver for that matter) than shot by a law-abiding concealed-carry permit holder who lawfully carries a concealed weapon (both in total numbers and percentage of drivers/CCW holders). Just because you're afraid of weapons doesn't mean they're inherently bad and make whomever touches them evil -- I'd rather my sister or my mother carry a pistol for self-defense than pepper spray or for heaven's sake a whistle!
Stereotypes are stereotypes and perpetuating them, just like modding down that post, is just as stupid and close-minded as the original statement.
"I thought there's no point in getting any more involved in this imbroglio," Webb said. "Besides, this is Texas. You never know what he might have been carrying."
What a maroon. Way to stereotype both Texans and gunowners. Sure, like some kid is going to shoot you for ratting him out. Grow up, turn off the TV once in a while, maybe even read a book, and shut the hell up.
No problem; glad I could help!
For those who don't wish to register to NY Times:
Toyland Is Tough, Even for Robots
By BARNABY J. FEDER
MARK TILDEN recalls being a lonely child, repeatedly uprooted by his family's moves around Canada. He took comfort in his gift for constructing toys, especially mobile toys.
"I was born a compulsive builder," Mr. Tilden said. "I made my first robot out of sticks and rubber bands when I was 3."
Mr. Tilden, now 41 and a resident of Los Alamos, N.M., figures he has made thousands more since then. His designs have included machines to explore other planets, mine-clearing devices, toilet bowl cleaners and, more recently, a line of toys called B.I.O.-Bugs. The footlong creatures, which vaguely resemble roaches despite having just four legs, were a hit at the 2001 Toy Fair in New York and were brought to market last fall by Hasbro (news/quote).
Mr. Tilden's specialty has been designing robots with little or no brainpower. Instead, they are built around networks of simple sensors, switches and mechanical systems that respond to analog signals like lightwaves, heat or sounds without any need to convert them into a digital code of ones and zeros for analysis by a microprocessor.
Colleagues marvel at the dexterity and speed with which Mr. Tilden builds devices, noting that such finesse seems unexpected in a man so large and rotund that he jokingly describes himself as "big enough to create my own ozone layer." Then there is his ingenuity. Many a Tilden robot consists largely of components harvested from cameras, videocassette recorders and other devices retrieved from junk bins.
"Tilden is unique in his ability to intuit and hack analog circuits," said Rodney Brooks, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "You just cannot find anyone else with his virtuoso skills in that area."
But if Mr. Tilden has become widely known, even admired, among robotics experts, his views have not won him a large following. Nor has his recent plunge into the toy business played out as he hoped. Simpler is not always better for toy makers looking for unique products, he learned, and unexpected events, like domestic terrorism, can change perceptions of even a toy.
Mr. Tilden has been arguing with little success for well over a decade that progress in robotics would be much more rapid if researchers concentrated on designing relatively dumb robots rather than devices stuffed with increasingly powerful programmable electronic brains. The trick, in Mr. Tilden's view, is to equip simple-minded but physically robust robots with mechanical variations on animal nervous systems.
Nervous networks do not organize and process information digitally as computers do. Nonetheless, he points out, every second of life on earth is filled with millions of types of dim-witted creatures using nervous systems to respond instantly to environmental challenges that stump the powerful digital brains of today's computer-driven robots.
"All life is analog," Mr. Tilden said.
Many other robotics experts are also interested in nervous networks. And many are just as convinced as Mr. Tilden of the value of designing robots from simple building blocks. But most believe that without digital brainpower -- lots of it -- machines will have little potential to learn from experience and be far too limited in their ability to interact usefully with humans or other machines.
The robotic design wars that have preoccupied Mr. Tilden since the late 1980's have largely been waged in university laboratories, obscure journals and government-financed research projects. Mr. Tilden's main livelihood since 1993, for instance, has come from research at the federal government's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In recent years, though, the toy industry has emerged as a new playground for the robotics theorists. In this sector, as in the others, the advocates of programmable robotics clearly have the lead and the upper hand. Products like the Sony (news/quote) Aibo (which cost $2,500 when it was introduced in 1999), Furby and Lego Mindstorms have been huge hits. Robotics and virtual pets accounted for only $160 million of the $2.3 billion toy industry's revenues in 2000, but Poochi and Tekno, both robotic toys, were individual best sellers.
The novelty of Mr. Tilden's approach and some of his inventions caught the eye of executives at WowWee just over a year ago, shortly before the company was acquired by Hasbro, the second-largest toy company after Mattel. Mr. Tilden said he was thrilled by the invitation to become a consultant.
"You build something for NASA and you only build two of them," Mr. Tilden said. "You build for the military and they might want 50. But here it could be millions."
Mr. Tilden's fondest dreams were battered a bit by his first year in the toy business, though. B.I.O.-Bugs, priced at $39.95, reached toy stores last September. There were four bugs in the line, each with slightly different behavioral tendencies. The red Predator was the most aggressive, the blue Stomper the noisiest, the green Destroyer slightly more suited to moving in rough terrain and the yellow Acceleraider the speediest. The battery-driven bugs operate on their own or under remote control.
Mr. Tilden had originally hoped for a broader line including some bugs intended to appeal to girls rather than the 4- to 9- year-old boys Hasbro had in mind. Mr. Tilden also wanted to make B.I.O.-Bugs easy to dissect and alter, a starkly different attitude from that of Sony, which has threatened to sue customers who publish information about how to alter its Aibo dogs or the software that runs them.
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else," Mr. Tilden said. "They are my colleagues of the future."
Hasbro had a more commercial and conservative perspective than Mr. Tilden's, of course. Before mass production began last year in Hong Kong, he said, Hasbro told him that a chunk of the "neural network" engineering needed to be converted into digital functions executed by a microprocessor so that B.I.O.-Bugs would be harder for competitors to reverse-engineer and duplicate.
"It ended up with about 80 percent of what I wanted," Mr. Tilden said.
Hasbro ended up feeling similarly unfulfilled. B.I.O.-Bugs sold well -- they were, for example, the best-selling robotic toy at F.A.O. Schwarz during the Christmas season, said Steven Benoff, the toy retailer's chief buyer for electronics, action figures, video games and vehicles. But overall sales added up to "a double or a triple" rather than a home run, according to Loren T. Taylor, the Hasbro executive who oversees WowWee. In the toy industry, only a smash hit guarantees a line's survival beyond its first year.
Mr. Tilden and some independent experts are convinced that B.I.O.-Bugs would have done much better had Hasbro not been forced to abandon a portion of its advertising campaign in October. The television ads, which were geared primarily toward children and fans of science fiction shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation," began attracting angry letters from viewers who said the landscape that the bugs were crawling over looked like the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Then came the anthrax attacks. "We had the worst name you could come up with for selling toys during an anthrax scare," Mr. Tilden said.
Whatever the reasons, Hasbro decided that expanding the line this year was too risky. B.I.O.-Bugs shipped last year will remain on the shelves in this country, and B.I.O.-Bugs will be introduced in overseas markets that did not get them last year. But Mr. Tilden was told late last year to put aside plans for new B.I.O.-Bugs and focus instead on enhancing dragons, hovercraft and several other toys that WowWee introduced last week at the Toy Fair.
"They would have been like Ferraris compared to Model T's," Mr. Tilden said, sighing over the B.I.O.-Bug enhancements he was told to shelve.
If the B.I.O.-Bug experience has done less than Mr. Tilden had hoped to highlight the commercial value of his robotics concepts, it certainly has not shaken his faith in them. He still believes that large numbers of such simple devices are more likely to be able to execute many tasks without human supervision than the brainy robots most researchers have been trying to build. As evidence, he often points to the tiny, slow-moving devices he has built to clean the floors and windows in his condominium apartment.
Meanwhile, he is still having fun working for Hasbro and is constantly on the prowl for chances to demonstrate his concepts, both inside the toy business and beyond. On the whole, he said, the experience with B.I.O.-Bugs has been good. That has not always been the case with his inventions, he said.
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
But life -- robotic as well as human -- goes on. Some of the same technology is embedded in a fantasy snake that Mr. Tilden recently designed for Hasbro.
Nothing can keep the MLB out of your life. By the way, here's an autographed baseball bat.
I can see it now:
:amidst the beeping and explosions: No, I'm logging into my Linux box!
PHB: Johnson! Are you playing space-invaders again?
Johnson:
PHB: Oh.. Can I get one for my system, too? That looks fun!
Not really 'leech computing' but just 'leeches' or the infinitive form 'to leech'. I remember 'back in the day' of having friends who would upload GBs (literally several times the size of consumer hard drives at that point) to BBS's with their 14.4s.
:D
And then I would leech them all.