Certainly, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the facts are wrong. It's definitely written with an eye to entertain and as such plays up the violence, because, well this is America, we like violence - especially violence of the wild west variety, which was a definitely a parallel the author of the article was trying to draw.
To digress from my point (if I really had one) I thought this quote from the article was very interesting: "But the US solution was to give large US companies business here... If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence." The idea that large US corporations, who made their fortunes working within a more or less reliable national infrastructure, could actually do a decent job building infrastructure where what little that is there already is unreliable - seems to me to be a really bad idea. What's really interesting is the causality implied by Lackey (the author of that quote), i.e. that had the US not tagged massive corporations for outsourcing their rebuilding effort, Iraq would not be in the state that it's in now.
This seems to be to be very insightful. Given the management structure of these large corporations - rapidly deploying anything as complex as telecommunications infrastructure doesn't seem to me to be something they can actually do. The reality in situations like Iraq is that if you want the citizens to be happy, you must give them the basic necessities: food, water, and shelter (and, since the late 19th century, electricity). Given the instability in Iraq, the way to provide these things is not through the massive beauracracy of American corporations, but rather with small, self-sufficient modules - mobile power stations, mobile communications stations. I kind of envision it as the guerilla warfare method of providing basic services. After all - it's been shown time and time again that the guerillas can give the massive beauracracies a run for their money *cough*vietnam*cough*iraq*cough*afghanistan*cough. To sum it up in a sentence: agility and flexibility is the necessary quality in organizations responsible for providing basic services in Iraq, and it's not a quality of *any* big corporation I've ever seen.
I agree - I feel the same way about a number of proposals to place cell repeaters in the tunnels of the NYC subway - a crowded train is bad enough, but a crowded train full of people trying to talk on their cell phones? I'd think the protruding elbows of people with phones at their ear would be annoying in itself, and probably equally annoying in coach on an airplane.
It certainly is - strangley enough, I just finished reading an article in this month's scientific american that describes the research mentioned in TFA done by John Pendry regarding an area of study called "plasmonics". Odd that TFA didn't mention the field, as it has applications that are far more realistic in the shorter term than cloaking devices, such as circuits that can convert electromagnetic energy at a given frequency and wavelength to an electron density wave that is the same frequency of the light (thus information can be transmitted from the light and through the material with no loss) but at a much smaller wavelength, meaning the material can transmit the same volume of information through a conduit that it is much smaller than half the wavelength of the light wave, which is currently the limiting factor in optical transmission of data (i.e. fiber).
At any rate, the SciAm article is much more interesting than TFA, and has a lot more information, I highly recommend it.
Not all phone services provided by cable companies are VoIP - some(Patriot Media, Time Warner) use digital phone systems that use the existing cable wiring and have a PBX and a bridge to POTS that are not unlike office digital phone systems made by companies like Avaya. Basically the phone system uses a completely different channel from that used by the cable modem or cable box to transmit its signals.
I couldn't agree more - especially the monthly usage limits a lot of ISPs hide deep in their TOSs. It seems like it's especially a problem now that legal usage of extreme amounts of bandwidth is becoming more widestream (think downloading movies/tv shows from itunes - those files run about 500MB/hour). Perhaps we should start forcing ISPs to more openly report how exactly they think the word "unlimited" is defined.
Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested: Well, yes and no - semantically, I was considering royalties and patent licensing fees as separate entities. AAC decoder licensing fees run as low as $0.12 per unit, whereas MP3 licensing fees appear to be independent of volume of devices sold and cost ~$0.75 per unit. Additionally, the sale of mp3 files costs the seller 2-3% of their gross revenue from the sales in royalties - the sale of AAC files does not require royalty payments. So yes, while AAC is not free per se, it is in fact cheaper than mp3 for both hardware manufacturers and content distributors.
they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market. How does mandating an open format help apple lockup the hardware market? It's a more or less trivial process for DAP manufactures to add AAC decoding capability, and substantially cheaper than including WMA decoders, I would imagine. Not that a record company would necessarily mandate format, I'm just saying that any mandate of a AAC format would only benefit Apple in the very short term, as other manufacturers catch up.
Because the next one you buy very likely will, for the same reason that many, many players currently support WMA. DAP manufacturers have been trying to get Apple to license fairplay to them for quite some time, simply so they can produce a player that is compatible with the worlds most popular online music store. Once (if?) Apple begins selling it's entire catalog drm free, these companies won't need Apple's permission to produce an iTMS compatible DAP.
AAC isn't everywhere yet, I'll agree. However, if Apple actually moves it's entire catalog to unprotected AAC files, it seems to me quite reasonable that the vast majority of players released from that point forward will support AAC, considering Apple's dominance in the online music sales market. If one sells music player hardware, wouldn't you want it to support the most popular format (for sale) on the market? Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.
According to Apple's 2006 Annual report(PDF Warning) Apple spent approximately $300 million on marketing last fiscal year(p. 96) and had approximately $20 billion in net sales, from which the gross margin of these sales totalled only about $5 billion(p.113-114). So, a little subtraction: $20 billion - $5 billion = $15 billion. This is the total manufacturing costs of Apple's products, which is approximately 50 times what they spent on marketing. Furthermore, Apple spent approximately $700 billion on R&D, meaning the ratio of R&D to marketing costs is higher than that of most of the big pharmaceutical companies. With this data and your metric for defining a company's primary purpose, I'd conclude that Bristol Meyer Squib is more of a marketing firm than Apple.
Since hits support Roland, I'd suggest slashdotters tag his stuff "boycottroland" Now if only slashcode would support the ability to filter out articles by their tags - seems to me to be an obvious feature to add, especially given how long the new tagging system has been kicking around.
I couldn't agree more. One of the fundamental precepts in designing an operating system is that the speed of interactive tasks directly effects the perceived speed of a system. To paraphrase an old professor of mine, if you perform a task that you intuitively believe should happen instantaneously and it doesn't complete within half a second or so(like, for example, opening a menu), you will perceive the system to be slower; the impact from a task that you intuitively believe should take a minute (like encoding an audio file, or loading a large application *cough*Office*cough*), a difference of several seconds is less noticable.
I'm far from an MS fanboy, but I'd argue that optimizing the response time of an interactive processes over that of more resource-intensive processes is a good design choice on the part of Microsoft.
Given some hypothetical instance of a licensing dispute, I would certainly agree with you assuming that there exists an issue with the license that could be called a "gaping hole". If, OTOH, said licensing dispute hinges on the interpretation of an ambiguity in the license, wouldn't a judge have no other option but to consult any/all commentary by the license's author in order to resolve the ambiguity?
IANAL, but it seems to me that if a decision *must* be made, and cannot be unambiguosly deduced from the language of the license, that it is perfectly valid for a judge to consult clarifications of the intent of the license's author in order to resolve the conflict.
This article(PDF Warning) seems to show that the energy efficiency of trains is not in fact substantially better than that of planes or cars - however, one can make the leap (given their data) that the average train (assuming it's more than 50% full) is far better than the average car (assuming only the driver is in the car). At any rate, it's an interesting read and provides some good data. An interesting note is that high speed trains like those mentioned in the article, are comparable in power consumption to planes.
I like the apple hardware minus the single mouse button Can't we drop this particular gripe? Yes, apples desktop mice and laptop trackpads have only one physical button - however, due to clever design, a right click on a Mighty Mouse or an apple trackpad is just as easy as any 2+ button mouse designed for windows. And yeah, you can use any usb mouse on a mac just as easily.
Slashdot Mirror
MSN is attractive enough, but I'm kinda worried about disease :-P
Certainly, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the facts are wrong. It's definitely written with an eye to entertain and as such plays up the violence, because, well this is America, we like violence - especially violence of the wild west variety, which was a definitely a parallel the author of the article was trying to draw.
... If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence." The idea that large US corporations, who made their fortunes working within a more or less reliable national infrastructure, could actually do a decent job building infrastructure where what little that is there already is unreliable - seems to me to be a really bad idea. What's really interesting is the causality implied by Lackey (the author of that quote), i.e. that had the US not tagged massive corporations for outsourcing their rebuilding effort, Iraq would not be in the state that it's in now.
. To sum it up in a sentence: agility and flexibility is the necessary quality in organizations responsible for providing basic services in Iraq, and it's not a quality of *any* big corporation I've ever seen.
To digress from my point (if I really had one) I thought this quote from the article was very interesting: "But the US solution was to give large US companies business here
This seems to be to be very insightful. Given the management structure of these large corporations - rapidly deploying anything as complex as telecommunications infrastructure doesn't seem to me to be something they can actually do. The reality in situations like Iraq is that if you want the citizens to be happy, you must give them the basic necessities: food, water, and shelter (and, since the late 19th century, electricity). Given the instability in Iraq, the way to provide these things is not through the massive beauracracy of American corporations, but rather with small, self-sufficient modules - mobile power stations, mobile communications stations. I kind of envision it as the guerilla warfare method of providing basic services. After all - it's been shown time and time again that the guerillas can give the massive beauracracies a run for their money *cough*vietnam*cough*iraq*cough*afghanistan*cough
Heh, you're a little over a week late...or do they sell "Belated April Fools Day" cards at the drug store?
Maybe, but it's still a great reference....I can't wait until they release more Futurama.
I agree - I feel the same way about a number of proposals to place cell repeaters in the tunnels of the NYC subway - a crowded train is bad enough, but a crowded train full of people trying to talk on their cell phones? I'd think the protruding elbows of people with phones at their ear would be annoying in itself, and probably equally annoying in coach on an airplane.
It certainly is - strangley enough, I just finished reading an article in this month's scientific american that describes the research mentioned in TFA done by John Pendry regarding an area of study called "plasmonics". Odd that TFA didn't mention the field, as it has applications that are far more realistic in the shorter term than cloaking devices, such as circuits that can convert electromagnetic energy at a given frequency and wavelength to an electron density wave that is the same frequency of the light (thus information can be transmitted from the light and through the material with no loss) but at a much smaller wavelength, meaning the material can transmit the same volume of information through a conduit that it is much smaller than half the wavelength of the light wave, which is currently the limiting factor in optical transmission of data (i.e. fiber).
At any rate, the SciAm article is much more interesting than TFA, and has a lot more information, I highly recommend it.
Not all phone services provided by cable companies are VoIP - some(Patriot Media, Time Warner) use digital phone systems that use the existing cable wiring and have a PBX and a bridge to POTS that are not unlike office digital phone systems made by companies like Avaya. Basically the phone system uses a completely different channel from that used by the cable modem or cable box to transmit its signals.
I couldn't agree more - especially the monthly usage limits a lot of ISPs hide deep in their TOSs. It seems like it's especially a problem now that legal usage of extreme amounts of bandwidth is becoming more widestream (think downloading movies/tv shows from itunes - those files run about 500MB/hour). Perhaps we should start forcing ISPs to more openly report how exactly they think the word "unlimited" is defined.
Silly parser....55/115 < 50%
Umm...he obviously meant red M&Ms 55/115 50%
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested: Well, yes and no - semantically, I was considering royalties and patent licensing fees as separate entities. AAC decoder licensing fees run as low as $0.12 per unit, whereas MP3 licensing fees appear to be independent of volume of devices sold and cost ~$0.75 per unit. Additionally, the sale of mp3 files costs the seller 2-3% of their gross revenue from the sales in royalties - the sale of AAC files does not require royalty payments. So yes, while AAC is not free per se, it is in fact cheaper than mp3 for both hardware manufacturers and content distributors.
Seems to me to be more like a laptop carrying a Sony lithium ion battery.
The battery runs down, then....BOOM!
Because the next one you buy very likely will, for the same reason that many, many players currently support WMA. DAP manufacturers have been trying to get Apple to license fairplay to them for quite some time, simply so they can produce a player that is compatible with the worlds most popular online music store. Once (if?) Apple begins selling it's entire catalog drm free, these companies won't need Apple's permission to produce an iTMS compatible DAP.
AAC isn't everywhere yet, I'll agree. However, if Apple actually moves it's entire catalog to unprotected AAC files, it seems to me quite reasonable that the vast majority of players released from that point forward will support AAC, considering Apple's dominance in the online music sales market. If one sells music player hardware, wouldn't you want it to support the most popular format (for sale) on the market? Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.
s/$700 billion on R&D/$700 million on R&D/
According to Apple's 2006 Annual report(PDF Warning) Apple spent approximately $300 million on marketing last fiscal year(p. 96) and had approximately $20 billion in net sales, from which the gross margin of these sales totalled only about $5 billion(p.113-114). So, a little subtraction: $20 billion - $5 billion = $15 billion. This is the total manufacturing costs of Apple's products, which is approximately 50 times what they spent on marketing. Furthermore, Apple spent approximately $700 billion on R&D, meaning the ratio of R&D to marketing costs is higher than that of most of the big pharmaceutical companies. With this data and your metric for defining a company's primary purpose, I'd conclude that Bristol Meyer Squib is more of a marketing firm than Apple.
I couldn't agree more. One of the fundamental precepts in designing an operating system is that the speed of interactive tasks directly effects the perceived speed of a system. To paraphrase an old professor of mine, if you perform a task that you intuitively believe should happen instantaneously and it doesn't complete within half a second or so(like, for example, opening a menu), you will perceive the system to be slower; the impact from a task that you intuitively believe should take a minute (like encoding an audio file, or loading a large application *cough*Office*cough*), a difference of several seconds is less noticable.
I'm far from an MS fanboy, but I'd argue that optimizing the response time of an interactive processes over that of more resource-intensive processes is a good design choice on the part of Microsoft.
Given some hypothetical instance of a licensing dispute, I would certainly agree with you assuming that there exists an issue with the license that could be called a "gaping hole". If, OTOH, said licensing dispute hinges on the interpretation of an ambiguity in the license, wouldn't a judge have no other option but to consult any/all commentary by the license's author in order to resolve the ambiguity?
IANAL, but it seems to me that if a decision *must* be made, and cannot be unambiguosly deduced from the language of the license, that it is perfectly valid for a judge to consult clarifications of the intent of the license's author in order to resolve the conflict.
This article(PDF Warning) seems to show that the energy efficiency of trains is not in fact substantially better than that of planes or cars - however, one can make the leap (given their data) that the average train (assuming it's more than 50% full) is far better than the average car (assuming only the driver is in the car). At any rate, it's an interesting read and provides some good data. An interesting note is that high speed trains like those mentioned in the article, are comparable in power consumption to planes.
My advice: ditch the MS software for controlling the mouse and use usb overdrive instead; it'll let you configure every button on any mouse.