The most obvious model is freemium, ie giving away content to 90+% of your visitors in order to attract the rest who find some premium content you hold back enticing enough to pay for. The Wallstreet Journal has been quite successful at it. The problem with that model is obviously how does your podunk enquirer build enough quality content to put behind the paywall? Put another way, in the internet age what makes your local paper special enough to survive?
An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.
Did you play WoW at release? Seriously buggy, painful town experience, and frequent server crashes for the first 6 months at least. I don't really blame them as it was their first MMO and the most successful one ever, but it wasn't exactly some perfectly polished piece at release. The same was also true for Diablo 2, I was a beta tester on that and I know of 20 bugs I reported during beta that made it to launch, quite a few that weren't fixed until the third patch. Blizzard might have been better than many PC publishers, but that's a fairly low bar.
Personally I think this is partly getting the new platform ready and partly not wanting to release an AAA title during one of the weakest holiday seasons in decades. If you spend the better part of a decade developing a game, why release it at the worst possible time? My biggest fear personally is that this will push SC2 to fall 2010 which will mean no Diablo 3 until 2011.
40% is still substantial, and DeBeers probably has enough capital laying around to build their percentage back up by buying and hoarding now when prices are low and then unloading to crash the market thus driving smaller operators out of operations. They've done it in the past, and could likely do it again. Regardless my wife and I have agreed that in the unlikely event we buy another diamond (accent stones are the most likely) it will be a Polar Ice diamond from a Canadian mine not associated with the cartel.
Because even if they have the same outside dimensions the crystalline lattice of each piece will NOT be the same. Gem cutting is more an art than a science.
It's actually not any cheaper to make an F,FL-IS 1 carat jewel (~2 carat seed stone) then it is to mine it, especially since a lot of the value is in the labor to cut it perfectly.
Diamonds are not that rare, DeBeers just has a near monopoly on them. Industrial users won't pay the major markup that suckers will so they sell the non-gem quality ones at a reasonable price.
The 'native' max ISO on crop body Nikons is currently 1600 and you can do a digital push to 3200 at the cost of significant noise. The noise floor on the D40 is actually better than most of the crop bodies that followed it at its native ISO range but newer sensors have a higher native ISO so they will be less noisy where there is overlap (ie pushing the D40 is more noisy than not pushing the weaker sensor on newer models).
Man, I get heckled on a lot of AV forums when I suggest I want Nikon to fix the video issue with their bodies before I upgrade and you want them to put a projector in the body, I don't think their core audience for dSLR's will like that. I want to get more MP (my old D40 only does 6MP but at very good ISO sensitivity), the GPS tagging feature, and usable video. No I don't consider 5 minutes of motion jpeg to be usable video, if Nikon were to come out with unlimited (ok limited to 2GB) 1080p24 H.264 video like Canon has and I'd pre-order.
Ha! I keep hearing that printing is dying yet my experience is that all this technology has just increased the volume of printing people do. Today we have 65 page per minute printers so people think nothing of firing off 20 copies of a powerpoint slide deck to hand out at the meeting (where they will of course have the same slides up on the projector). For 500 people at our corporate office we print ~750,000 pages per month, which while admittedly is very high, is not so far off from the typical office I have supported.
Yes, x64 has a much higher IPC than a non-superscaler design like most ARM cpu's (the A8 and A9 are the only superscalar ARM cpu's). ARM also get lower MIPS/watt despite what people claim, the A9 MP gets only 2,000 Drystone MIPS while consuming.64W whereas Atom 330 get 7,800 DMIPS from 2W (3,125 MIPS/W vs 3,900). If you need to fit into a sub Watt power envelope then Intel currently doesn't have a solution for you but for anything from a palmtop on up you are better off with the Intel solution because it gets better performance per Watt, scales to much higher performance, and is compatible with the 99.99+% of software that's available for the dominant ISA.
The opcode decoder stage in a modern x64 processor is about 5% of the active (non-cache) transistors, it's not a significant contributor to power use. The biggest problem is that modern x54 designs are very complex and so they don't scale down as far as a stripped down ARM core can.
Digital made the best binary translator ever made (FX!32), it didn't help the adoption of NT/Alpha despite the fact that Alpha was about twice as fast as the fastest PPro available at the time. Now you think that people are going to run an alternative processor that's several times slower just to get somewhat better battery life? You have got to be joking.
The space shuttle fleet met the design spec (1% failure) almost perfectly, Challenger was not a technological failure but a bureaucratic one. The design spec and the engineers said not to launch Challenger but the boneheads who wanted to look good decided to force the issue and launch over the objection of the people who are paid to analyze such things.
What about leaving it attached as a large life boat with remote control of the telemetry system for orbit adjustments? Would the shuttle take much power if it wasn't supporting life support systems but just keeping itself in the right temperature range for systems to function?
No, those modules probably cost significantly more than a single shuttle launch (even as stupid expensive as that is). In fact a quick search shows Japan sunk more than $700M into the CAM unit with about another $100M from NASA for experiment modules to be placed within it. Even without any other involvement we are up to $800M in sunk costs, the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
Ok, how about the ~2.5M barrels a day Iraq produced before the invasion, that comes out to ~38B gallons a year, or more than $3/gallon just in military expenses. If that oil was gasoline and was free it would hardly be a bargain.
P.S. Try more like 20M barrels a day consumption for the US, how can you link to that site and get the numbers so far off?
Tax breaks don't work because they can't bring the $/gallon of this or any currently researched technology down to $25 which is the production cost floor of dino fuel.
Yes, petroleum derived gasoline SHOULD be the loser for a whole host of reasons (environmental impact, peak oil, national security, alternative uses (plastics and medicine)).
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The most obvious model is freemium, ie giving away content to 90+% of your visitors in order to attract the rest who find some premium content you hold back enticing enough to pay for. The Wallstreet Journal has been quite successful at it. The problem with that model is obviously how does your podunk enquirer build enough quality content to put behind the paywall? Put another way, in the internet age what makes your local paper special enough to survive?
An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.
Did you play WoW at release? Seriously buggy, painful town experience, and frequent server crashes for the first 6 months at least. I don't really blame them as it was their first MMO and the most successful one ever, but it wasn't exactly some perfectly polished piece at release. The same was also true for Diablo 2, I was a beta tester on that and I know of 20 bugs I reported during beta that made it to launch, quite a few that weren't fixed until the third patch. Blizzard might have been better than many PC publishers, but that's a fairly low bar.
Personally I think this is partly getting the new platform ready and partly not wanting to release an AAA title during one of the weakest holiday seasons in decades. If you spend the better part of a decade developing a game, why release it at the worst possible time? My biggest fear personally is that this will push SC2 to fall 2010 which will mean no Diablo 3 until 2011.
40% is still substantial, and DeBeers probably has enough capital laying around to build their percentage back up by buying and hoarding now when prices are low and then unloading to crash the market thus driving smaller operators out of operations. They've done it in the past, and could likely do it again. Regardless my wife and I have agreed that in the unlikely event we buy another diamond (accent stones are the most likely) it will be a Polar Ice diamond from a Canadian mine not associated with the cartel.
Because even if they have the same outside dimensions the crystalline lattice of each piece will NOT be the same. Gem cutting is more an art than a science.
It's actually not any cheaper to make an F,FL-IS 1 carat jewel (~2 carat seed stone) then it is to mine it, especially since a lot of the value is in the labor to cut it perfectly.
Diamonds are not that rare, DeBeers just has a near monopoly on them. Industrial users won't pay the major markup that suckers will so they sell the non-gem quality ones at a reasonable price.
The 'native' max ISO on crop body Nikons is currently 1600 and you can do a digital push to 3200 at the cost of significant noise. The noise floor on the D40 is actually better than most of the crop bodies that followed it at its native ISO range but newer sensors have a higher native ISO so they will be less noisy where there is overlap (ie pushing the D40 is more noisy than not pushing the weaker sensor on newer models).
Man, I get heckled on a lot of AV forums when I suggest I want Nikon to fix the video issue with their bodies before I upgrade and you want them to put a projector in the body, I don't think their core audience for dSLR's will like that. I want to get more MP (my old D40 only does 6MP but at very good ISO sensitivity), the GPS tagging feature, and usable video. No I don't consider 5 minutes of motion jpeg to be usable video, if Nikon were to come out with unlimited (ok limited to 2GB) 1080p24 H.264 video like Canon has and I'd pre-order.
Ha! I keep hearing that printing is dying yet my experience is that all this technology has just increased the volume of printing people do. Today we have 65 page per minute printers so people think nothing of firing off 20 copies of a powerpoint slide deck to hand out at the meeting (where they will of course have the same slides up on the projector). For 500 people at our corporate office we print ~750,000 pages per month, which while admittedly is very high, is not so far off from the typical office I have supported.
Even in the Linux world there is a huge subset of apps that are only compiled or tested on x86/x64.
The pen is mightier than the sword and the man who controls the crowds controls the nation.
Yes, x64 has a much higher IPC than a non-superscaler design like most ARM cpu's (the A8 and A9 are the only superscalar ARM cpu's). ARM also get lower MIPS/watt despite what people claim, the A9 MP gets only 2,000 Drystone MIPS while consuming .64W whereas Atom 330 get 7,800 DMIPS from 2W (3,125 MIPS/W vs 3,900). If you need to fit into a sub Watt power envelope then Intel currently doesn't have a solution for you but for anything from a palmtop on up you are better off with the Intel solution because it gets better performance per Watt, scales to much higher performance, and is compatible with the 99.99+% of software that's available for the dominant ISA.
The opcode decoder stage in a modern x64 processor is about 5% of the active (non-cache) transistors, it's not a significant contributor to power use. The biggest problem is that modern x54 designs are very complex and so they don't scale down as far as a stripped down ARM core can.
Digital made the best binary translator ever made (FX!32), it didn't help the adoption of NT/Alpha despite the fact that Alpha was about twice as fast as the fastest PPro available at the time. Now you think that people are going to run an alternative processor that's several times slower just to get somewhat better battery life? You have got to be joking.
More like AT&T (see the language C), though IBM would own a heck of a lot in the backoffice processing space.
This is my favorite test taking shirt for that exact reason =)
There's a difference between the program cost divided by missions and the incremental cost per mission.
The space shuttle fleet met the design spec (1% failure) almost perfectly, Challenger was not a technological failure but a bureaucratic one. The design spec and the engineers said not to launch Challenger but the boneheads who wanted to look good decided to force the issue and launch over the objection of the people who are paid to analyze such things.
What about leaving it attached as a large life boat with remote control of the telemetry system for orbit adjustments? Would the shuttle take much power if it wasn't supporting life support systems but just keeping itself in the right temperature range for systems to function?
No, those modules probably cost significantly more than a single shuttle launch (even as stupid expensive as that is). In fact a quick search shows Japan sunk more than $700M into the CAM unit with about another $100M from NASA for experiment modules to be placed within it. Even without any other involvement we are up to $800M in sunk costs, the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
2,500,000 (barrels/day)*365(days/year)*42(barrels/gallon)=38,325,000,000 or ~38B gallons/year.
$120,000,000,000($/year)/38,325,000,000(gallons/year)=$3.13/gallon.
Can you point out where my unit conversions are wrong please?
Ok, how about the ~2.5M barrels a day Iraq produced before the invasion, that comes out to ~38B gallons a year, or more than $3/gallon just in military expenses. If that oil was gasoline and was free it would hardly be a bargain.
P.S.
Try more like 20M barrels a day consumption for the US, how can you link to that site and get the numbers so far off?
Tax breaks don't work because they can't bring the $/gallon of this or any currently researched technology down to $25 which is the production cost floor of dino fuel.
Yes, petroleum derived gasoline SHOULD be the loser for a whole host of reasons (environmental impact, peak oil, national security, alternative uses (plastics and medicine)).