86% collection efficiency? Holy cow, that's amazing. Now, if we can just electrolyze water cheaply enough for fuel cells to solve the time-of-use problem, we could free up megatons of metals that currently make up the power grid for other uses.
Transmission lines lose less than 10% of the power.
Yeah, but we waste a lot of power heating up transformer cores. Keep in mind also, that if we can ditch the grid, that we'll free up millions of tons of copper, steel, and aluminum for other purposes. Even if we keep a grid, distributing the generation means that the individual links in the grid can be made for much lower capacity.
Not sure when you left, but I left in '05. By that time, IS&T was farming out much of the development work, although most of the operators were still Apple employees.
In Imperial Earth, he mentions a device called a "minisec", which has enough storage to retain anything someone cares to store in their whole lifetime. I wonder what it would mean to have something like an iPad with couple petabytes of capacity?
I thought that was the definition of a huge multi-national corporation.
If you imagine that governments protect you from corporations, then I'd like to invite you a friendly game of poker before some nice gentleman from Nigeria renders you penniless.
Every time the federal government creates a new agency, it's an opportunity for other agencies to get rid of their dead wood by transferring them. Happened with the department of education, the department of energy, and the department of homeland security.
I'd say that that any group of people that shares resources constitutes some form of government.
I was referring to the commonly-understood definition, which is a group of kleptocrats who obtain a disproportionate ability to use force against other people with few if any repercussions.
Libertarians are often ignorant of the fact that they effectively lobby against civilization.
Wow.. Does pulling that kind of lie out of your ass make the undergrads swoon? Governments kill people by the millions. Want to tell me how "civilized" that is?
The US government, at NASA's urging, convinced Zaire to reneg on a deal to provide a launch site for the OTRAG rocket. I remember hearing about it the time, and being astounded that NASA would be trying to prevent competition.
NASA is one example of where government can pool together resources to achieve national objectives the private sector would not do.
Consider the history of flight: the government wasted money on Langley, and he had all the right connections and credentials. He failed. Who got us off the ground? The Wrights, Glenn Curtis, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and thousands of others who risked their own life, money, and work. Why did Lindbergh fly the Atlantic? There was a prize for it, posted by a consortium of private parties.
The government spent a shitload of tax money on beating the Russians to the moon, so we'll never know what the private sector would have done to develop a near-earth launch capability, or maybe to go to the moon for something like the x-prize.
Not really. The Xserve is great for Apple shops that need servers, but they've put very little effort into convincing anyone to switch to it. They even left the storage business, despite the great success of the XServe RAID.
John, are you seriously saying that the personal music player market wasn't already a crowded market when Apple released the iPod?
I wouldn't describe it as crowded, since it was so small. Look at the level of sales before and after the iPod came out.
As for the phones, I'd say that they went for badly-served segment of the market. Smart phones before the iPhone sucked, big time. The introduction of the iPhone has driven a great expansion of the smart phone market.
Safari they did because they had to. IE on the Mac was crap, and MS had no reason to care.
Apple's not very big on jumping into crowded markets. I'd love to see them take a good shot at unseating Windows in the server business, but they look at how much it would cost to try to push their way in, versus what they can make if they put the same resources into something like the iPad. So far, Apple's growing like crazy without doing much about the business market.
Slashdot Mirror
..and you'll be fine.
-jcr
86% collection efficiency? Holy cow, that's amazing. Now, if we can just electrolyze water cheaply enough for fuel cells to solve the time-of-use problem, we could free up megatons of metals that currently make up the power grid for other uses.
-jcr
I found it here.
I do not find Friel convincing.
-jcr
>You obviously don't have to pay a gas bill.
Most of what you pay on your gas bill is the transport and billing costs. Pumps, meters, and pipelines don't build or maintain themselves.
-jcr
Transmission lines lose less than 10% of the power.
Yeah, but we waste a lot of power heating up transformer cores. Keep in mind also, that if we can ditch the grid, that we'll free up millions of tons of copper, steel, and aluminum for other purposes. Even if we keep a grid, distributing the generation means that the individual links in the grid can be made for much lower capacity.
-jcr
Not sure when you left, but I left in '05. By that time, IS&T was farming out much of the development work, although most of the operators were still Apple employees.
-jcr
Apple outsources their internal IT work, and the Indian vendors tend to be the low bidders. Product development is a different story.
-jcr
maybe, just maybe, we should bet on the safe side?
How safe it is it to throw China and India under the bus? They've got a lot of people, and they're both nuclear powers.
-jcr
A gamer allegedly slipped a threatening note under his door.
An alleged gamer allegedly slipped an allegedly threatening note under his door. Personally, I would need more than a politician's word on it.
-jcr
the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door.
Jesus christ, what a pussy. How in the hell did he ever make it through grade school?
-jcr
In Imperial Earth, he mentions a device called a "minisec", which has enough storage to retain anything someone cares to store in their whole lifetime. I wonder what it would mean to have something like an iPad with couple petabytes of capacity?
-jcr
I thought that was the definition of a huge multi-national corporation.
If you imagine that governments protect you from corporations, then I'd like to invite you a friendly game of poker before some nice gentleman from Nigeria renders you penniless.
-jcr
Every time the federal government creates a new agency, it's an opportunity for other agencies to get rid of their dead wood by transferring them. Happened with the department of education, the department of energy, and the department of homeland security.
-jcr
I'd say that that any group of people that shares resources constitutes some form of government.
I was referring to the commonly-understood definition, which is a group of kleptocrats who obtain a disproportionate ability to use force against other people with few if any repercussions.
-jcr
Libertarians are often ignorant of the fact that they effectively lobby against civilization.
Wow.. Does pulling that kind of lie out of your ass make the undergrads swoon? Governments kill people by the millions. Want to tell me how "civilized" that is?
-jcr
The US government, at NASA's urging, convinced Zaire to reneg on a deal to provide a launch site for the OTRAG rocket. I remember hearing about it the time, and being astounded that NASA would be trying to prevent competition.
-jcr
The difference is getting to orbit is a lot more complicated than atmospheric flight.
Yeah, and?
Getting off the ground was impossible for all of recorded history until someone did it. It wasn't the government that made it happen.
-jcr
NASA is one example of where government can pool together resources to achieve national objectives the private sector would not do.
Consider the history of flight: the government wasted money on Langley, and he had all the right connections and credentials. He failed. Who got us off the ground? The Wrights, Glenn Curtis, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and thousands of others who risked their own life, money, and work. Why did Lindbergh fly the Atlantic? There was a prize for it, posted by a consortium of private parties.
The government spent a shitload of tax money on beating the Russians to the moon, so we'll never know what the private sector would have done to develop a near-earth launch capability, or maybe to go to the moon for something like the x-prize.
California still has the advantage of the fact that the semiconductor industry started here. This state wasn't always so hostile to new ventures.
-jcr
You do know that NASA has a record for decades of doing all they could to prevent the development of any private competitors, right?
-jcr
Startups don't worry about taxes, they worry about the stuff you need to get off the ground.
Evidently, you've never started a business. Taxes and bookkeeping suck up more start-up capital than you can imagine.
-jcr
So, what you're telling us is that your office routinely violates the fourth amendment.
-jcr
Not really. The Xserve is great for Apple shops that need servers, but they've put very little effort into convincing anyone to switch to it. They even left the storage business, despite the great success of the XServe RAID.
-jcr
John, are you seriously saying that the personal music player market wasn't already a crowded market when Apple released the iPod?
I wouldn't describe it as crowded, since it was so small. Look at the level of sales before and after the iPod came out.
As for the phones, I'd say that they went for badly-served segment of the market. Smart phones before the iPhone sucked, big time. The introduction of the iPhone has driven a great expansion of the smart phone market.
Safari they did because they had to. IE on the Mac was crap, and MS had no reason to care.
-jcr
Apple's not very big on jumping into crowded markets. I'd love to see them take a good shot at unseating Windows in the server business, but they look at how much it would cost to try to push their way in, versus what they can make if they put the same resources into something like the iPad. So far, Apple's growing like crazy without doing much about the business market.
-jcr