You are plugging a radio device into a regulated liscenced network. You have a responsibility not to screw with the emissions of the device or misuse it. More than a responsibily--a legal obligation. But Apple also has a responsibility to try to prevent misuse of the device since it can't be expected that every user knows what they are doing and can weigh the ramifications of software installation. They need to make it reasonably safe but beyond that it's the end user that commits the crime.
It's also remotely plausible software can ruin the device and even increase the risk of fire. So making it hard to mess with also makes sense from that perspective. This is much more of a minor concern than the former, as there are already many perfectly safe battery operated computers. The reason it matters here at all is simply the numbers game. Unlike most moddable handhelds, theres millions of these things and they are very likely to be operated on airplanes and public transportation. Some prudence is required.
But beyond apples need to due dilligence above they also have the desire to make the thing have some value to the carriers and to the music sellers. Thus locking them helps the carriers. If there's a kickback for sales then it lessens the initial purchase cost to the consumers too. And it makes a market for DRMd music. (people who whine about fairlplay can't be pleased--it's a freakin fair-use speedbump folks, not a lock in. At least for the music. Video is a different story.). People may not like DRM but the mass consumer likes having a marketplace so they want to make that possible. To do that they need to enhance the sales value to attract the sellers. Personally I'm pretty happy with the line apple walks between buyers and sellers interests on audio sales. You can disagree with me on the DRM, but please see the point that apple has its reasons for needing to keep the device secure given its middleman position in the market.
Finally, my guess is that like their video DRM (as opposed to audio) they are not trying to win the cat and mouse game here but simply perpetuate it at a level where the rodent population is tolerable. hardcore folks will play update games. Everyone else will not.
So sure there may be sim card laws that say they can't prevent that. But they can prevent people from unlocking many of the other parts of the phone which may amount to the same thing, indirectly.
Since the system is free there's no harm, to you at least, in having infinite length phone calls. So do the following..call yourself (one browser to another). Play MP3s or NPR or Rush limbaugh into it. This will chaffe the system with ludicrous amounts of nonsense data. They will never be able to get a profile on you for the few real phone calls you make.
I thought some more about your question and realized my other answer was not on target.
In the developed world we have substituted materials that did not require so much energy for ones that do. To follow your line of reasoning consider the can opener in your kitchen and compare it with your grandmothers first canopener. Heres was a carbon steel blade, she might have even had the knife sharpener man who came by sharpen it from time to time. it was probably made in chicago or some place near a train depot. Yours is a plastic handled item, with a more refined steel and coated with more advanced metals. It was made in china from materials shipped from many different places, then wrapped in paper and plastic to hang in your brightly lit store. It's disposable. It's cheaper too because substituting energy for man power and materials costs have made it so. But it uses orders of magnitude more energy to make and get to you than your grandmothers.
Look at your couch. Heres was an oak frame, made to be reupholstered many times over it's life. It was filled with cotton batting and covered in cotten or flax. Yours is a particle board, metal and plastic frame. It was made mainly by robotic tools. And it is filled with oil based poly filled and covered with synthetic fibers all of which are treated. It too was made far away and shipped. it is disposable.
Moreover, your couch has more than 300% more materials in it since it's at least 40% bigger in every dimension. Indeed everything in your house is bigger. Your bed is bigger, your chairs are bigger. your doorways or bigger. IN fact house sizes are growing.
Every year we build more and more square footage of houses and apartments. That's both for people who are increasing their sq footage and for all those new people. And when we tear down and replace old houses, the new house require more energy per sq foot than the old one. We build wider roads and more exotic infrastructure under them as time moves on. Everything is the sort of analogous to how it was but so much more sophisticated and made from much more energy intensive materials.
So I think perhaps that answers your question.
As a rule of thumb, over a short period of time the gross domestic product is proportional to energy consumption. But over the long haul the pre-factor in the proportionality is also increasing as well.
The bottom line is that it's not enough to say I have the same sort of household my parents did. As the population rises we may have to actually use less energy individually just to stay even.
It's kind hard to get one's head around--the enormity of it. But to show you it's happening, A conference I attented pointed out that china has a program that is going to ramp up to 1 GW class nuke or coal plant coming on line every week. (Wired had an article not long ago called "let 1000 reactors bloom" on the chinese pebble bed reactor which while less efficient is also intrinsically melt-down proof and thus possible to mass -replicate safely)
The increase in power demand is likely to be spread around. Measured proportionally the third world will see the biggest increases but measured in a absolute sense the fractionally smaller increase in the first world will be as much wattage in total.
However as I pointed out, global energy competition means rising prices for energy both for production and for the inevitable Nuclear waste disposal, sharp increases in oil and coal prices. And sharp increases in food and water costs as biofuels emerge.
Since people are eventually price sensitive eventually something has to give, and people, especially in the first world, will cut back on energy wasting appliances and change their spectrum of energy (electric cars, electric heat). One hopes that this actually heads off the said "doubling" rate.
I don't dispute that there's a big pile of assumptions there. The thing is there is geometric rate of increased consumption in power and we are not building new capacity at a parallel rate. As consumption curve starts to hit the production cruve the cost of power which has varied little for decades is going to go through the roof. 25 cents per KW-hour will seem like a pipedream in 2040.
Since this may seem implausible consider this. The world is on track to double its energy consumption by 2040. To reach that point in a linear fashion--not geometric one--would mean bringing on line three gigawatt class power plants every day from now until then. Right now the figure is about 10 GW plants per year because we are in early long tails of that geometric growth curve.
About now your jaw should be dropping as you ponder the implications.
Thus what has to happen, other than permanent blackouts in most of the world and carbon poisoning of the planet, is that the growth rate must be stifled. And that is going to happen when the price of electricity hits ~$10/KW-hour and all then people will economize and buy energy saving appliances.
I did not make up those numbers. read the 2030 report from the department of energy.
So I was being generous assuming 25 cents per KW-hour grid rates.
Of and by the way, note that the plant for solars cells will produce 200MW/year. That's a drop in the GW/day bucket.
Assuming 6 hours a day generation, that's 4380 kW-hrs a year, or at $0.10 kW/hr that's $438 worth of electricity. 438/8000 = 5.4% tax free return on investment. If you live in the US with a decent income, you would have to earn over $700 to have $438 for your power bill after taxes. Huh? That makes no sense. first include the time value of 8000$ at 8% interest rates. That's $640 dollars per year what you have to borrow or not make from investment.
Now this hocus pocus about the after tax situation is wrong too. If you want to include that then you have to include it on the 8000 dollars as well so Since the 8000 cost is after taxes, there's no point in calling the return on investment after taxes. Or if you want to then it costs 12300 of pre-tax income to buy the 8000 panels.
The ROI is negative since 437 electricity minus 640 interest is a 200 loss every year.
Lets see. Assume the competing cost is at present 10 to 25 cents per KW-hour. We'll use the upper end because future power prices will rise whereas the Solar panel is a fixed cost.
So let's see the solar panels are 100000 cents per KiloWatt. if the last 4000 then that's breakeven. We'll assume that the power is available 10 hours per day. That's not realistic for individual use but perhaps with batteries, and selling back to the grid this could be done. So 4000 hours is 400 days. Or about 1 year. Not too bad.
Now that ignores the efficiency of either pushing back to the grid or battery storage. Let's assume 50% loss. Then this is 2 years to payback on the cells. But now we also have to payback on the batteries. Let's assume the batteries needed const aout the same as the solar cells. That would double this payback to 4 years.
Finally this is assuming capital is free. Assume one borrows at 8 % interest. Then this another 5 months to payback.
So the whole operation needs to run undegraded for 4 to 4.5 years I estimate for break even.
That figure could be cut in half if one could sell back to the grid rather than batteries. ( Fine--as long as there is a grid and every one does not do that!. )
If the cells were down to 50% effiency after 4 years then this extends out to ~7 years to payback. If one cannot get that watt for the full ten hours then this gets even longer.
It sounds to me, roughly speaking that at 1 dollar per what things are in the ballpark for breakeven.
Apple is not providing a generic PC phone, it's providing it's usual seamless enduser enviroment. If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail. Upgrade software would be spotty, itunes store might have some problem, etc...
So what, you might say, Let me have the downgraded experience if that's what I want. Well That's just the point. Apple does not sell downgraded, sort works, experiences. That is their brand image. 1) It just works. 2) every machine has 100% of it's high end features working. (e.g. when you buy an apple computer you get Firewire whether you want it or not--every one has it and developers can count on it).
So it's not up to You. It's up to apple.
Now I'm sure there are boatload of other reasons. Some of them might be to do with revenue sharing. But I think its also to promote the vendor's attention to the details apple likes. By giving exclusive contracts they can pick people who will make Edge work well and make visual voicemail work well. Maybe they can also pick people who wont create nightmare pricing plans. FOr example look at the discpline apple enforced with the Ringtones. while people complain about ringtone costing anything, apple simplified the whole pricing plan. 1) it's cheaper (verizon) 2) you can customize it (all of them) 3) and they don't expire (sprint).
Apple keeps control for it's reason of perpetuating it's brand image and making a profit when they only have small portion of the market and are taking expensive R&D risks.
Hi porpnorber, I't probably just me an you takling here but if you are seriously interested I'll answer your query. I've had a life time to dwell on and process the incident so I realze you are just speaking from a gut reaction. First let me acknowledge that having a gun pointed at you is among the most clarifying things that can happen to a person. It brings a great deal of soberness.
My belief and hope is that the cop was smart enough to not pull the trigger wantonly. So if I behaved in a very subdued manner I would be safe. It is scarey to be so abjectly under the will of another. But cops are--one hopes--not lookeing for any excuse to kill. If one assumes that then it's rational that they should seek to act with extreme force when they act. Not to hurt but to control absolutely after the intervention decision is made.
I'm fine with that.
I might have had a gun for all he knew. I don't want cops getting shot because they are not supposed to hurt my feelings.
My opinion would change in a flash if they abused that seeding of authority. That's infact why I'm an outspoken activist on the matter of authority abuse. I prefer a government that earns its trust.
Hrmmmm.... looking at the "device" from the images on the link makes me think the police overreacted. I had exactly the opposite reaction. I think the response was totally appropriate. Look at it. Not only is it extremely provocative from the average persons TV-level awareness of bomb gadgetry, but personally with a EE background I'd be even more alarmed by it's context.
It's a tough call on when cops should draw their guns. If this was in the frozen food section at Safeway and the person seemed to be acting like a shopper then drawing guns would be an overreaction. In a crowded airport is a different venue and one rife with bomb-related contexts and plentiful warnings that stupid remarks will be taken at face value. The purpose of drawing guns is not to shoot but to immediately control a situation that could be deadly. Shut it down and sort it out in a safe place.
I've had guns drawn on me when I was drunk hiding in the bushes near the scene of what looked suspiciously top the cops like breaking into a car. (it wasn't but it was reasonably confused). I did not blame them for flushing me out that way, cause sometimes it owuld not have been a drunk collge student but someone with intent to escape. Cops just never know what the situation brings when they show up.
You do realize that the standard price for TV shows on iTunes is $2 per episode, don't you?
I'm not seeing where this "net loss" comes into play - assuming someone were to buy all three episodes on iTunes, they would actually spend an extra dollar. NBC wanted to reprice things. 2.99 for new and 99 for old, instead of 1.99 for all. PLus they wanted to force bundle pricing at the wholesale level so Apple was screwed if they unbundled things. And if they kept the buble together it was 4.99 and added complexity for the sale (3 downloads and 3 consumer shopping items). NBC was trying to say they were not going to charge 4.99 for a new release. In fact they were effectively doing that for anyone who did not really want the old shows. NBC might even claim they were selling things cheaper for those folks that actually wanted the three shows.
The point is, metal fatigue would not have been in any finite element code (if they had had them back them) as it was not well characterized.
As for the other anecdotes. Each one seems pretty obvious when you think about it. But it's not so obvious at the time. Two junction boxes or one. Well planes need to be light and you want to make them easy and fast to service. Having two junction boxes might mean that the serivicing is not a efficient as one, and that might be a bigger risk than having one.
The thing that always boggled my mind about the plane engineers was that the planes (at a nut and bolt and wire) level are vastly more complex that any one human can hold in their mind. So it's all about engineering methodology. The process of collecting, analyzing then disseminating the crash lessons learned was institutionalized and then reduced to rule-of-thumb best practices. e.g. hydraulic control tubing routed on the underside of a wing requires the wing be armored against turbo fan explosion. that's heavy. Therefore always route on the top of the wing any critical flight control tubing.
While obvious once you say it, every junior designer has to learn these. And that requires an institution to retain the knowledge and then to train them.
My dad worked for boeing and used to tell me stories of how airplane safety came to be. Basically an giant engnineering system to learn from every crash. One of the first stories he told me was about how they learned about metal fatigue when the early aluminum planes started dropping wings. At the time everyone though alumiunm would be a great airlpane construction material just like they think carbon fiber is now. No one anticipated what a disaster it turned out to be. Of course that was then. And now Aluminum is a great material, once they got the material science figured out.
Likewise the biggest single boon to aircraft safety was World War 2. There they had many plane designs (any given plane might have many different configurations) and they learned all sorts of fun things. Like for example that you had to not route all the electrical system through a single junction box (A washer got loose and shorted out a plane during turbulence that then crashed in SF bay). Or how you need to run both the main and backup fuel pumps up to full pressure during takeoff because if the mains fail then there is not enough time to spin up the backups to speed before the engines lose power. Or how you have to make the fuel pumps big enough to dump the tanks fast for an emergency landing. All of those discovered by "accident".
Some may recall the crash in NY where the composite tail ripped off when the pilot whipped the rudder too and fro in a non-standard maneuver.
THe good news is that the military uses composites and so they have had enough accidents to work things out for the commerical jets.
Also notice that the service only free till "mid 2008". And It also has commercials. The videos dont come out till a week after airing and expire 7 days after you download them. Finally what can we expect for the "real" price in 2008. Well some details have emerged on the price NBC wanted apple to charge. You may recall the price they wanted apple to charge was said to be $4.99 but NBC denied this vehemently. Well it turns out what they wanted was to force apple to purchase bundles of shows. SO to get a popular show like Heros apple would have to buy one episode of heros and 2 episodes of some re-run. The equivalent price of those 3 shows was 4.99. But apple could only charge 2.99 for the Hero's. This would have left apple with a net loss for all the re-runs it could not off load to other customers for 99 cents.
Yes that's my argument. The main argument against it is that there simply are not enough companies trying enough different strategies to have fully explored the competition landscape. Could be flawed. But I think it's on target. (and don't call it a circular argument unless you have a better explanation of how despite the fickle nature of experimental prgoress moores law has sustained it self well over 9 orders of magnitude.)
Nash Equilibrium in a nutshell is something every efficient industry will always reach. It's game theory if you a familiar with that.
Youre counter examples are actually arguments in favor of what I said.
The price of food production DID fall exponentially over many years. Then as I predicted when margins approach development costs, it became a commodity without any quick doubling time. The cost of oil production did fall exponentially over many years then it became a commodity.
Moreover you are comparing resource extraction with technology development. No matter how hard you try there simply is only so much energy in a barrel of oil. once you get within a factor of 4 or less there's not much doubling left to get. Likewise once transportation costs exceed the production costs of brocolli, the problem is not in the same realm.
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this. What makes you say that? What about competition? If you knew "the other guys" were striving to exactly meet Moore's law, wouldn't you try to beat it? No it's called a Nash Equilibrium. A point in competition space where no player can imporve his strategy given the other players moves. I can't say what the costs that drive it are. But it's so fixed it apparently has reached equilibrium.
I exaggerate slightly for the sake of being funny. But not much. Python is trying to optimize itself by adding more and more features or libraries for more very special cases that allow speed for that case. I think that has limited potential. And worse I fear adding features which need be supported in future versions may slowly foreclose the right direction which is to 1) permit implicit and explicit typing so that it can become a compiled language 2) create ways to do multi-processing. So yes python can get faster but not much I expect.
offtopic: personally I'm eyeballing Groovy right now because it is a script language that mirrors a compiled typed language that already has some degree of thread safety and behind the scenes memory management (GC) at a low level: java. But I'm still using python (and perl!)
IN ten years, according to moore's law python will be 32 times faster than it is now. Right now it's about 1000x slower than tuned C and 100x slower than unoptimized C-code. So in ten years python will still be slower than C running on todays computers. (mean while C will also be 32 times faster).
That is not a rag on python. well no a big one. indeed for lots of things don't need to be faster (word processors) so being 32x faster would enable python to take over development of lots of areas we now use C for.
No the point here is that if python can't even see a future where it's faster than today's other languages before it's obsolete it needs to go on a vision quest. Other than taking over distasteful roles that C refuses to do anymore, what's the point in life?
I think, like the thinking-in-python dude's rant said--python needs to ask it self what high level languages could be really good at that low level laguages will perpetually suck at. And that is multi-processing. thread safety is possible in any language but if you actually are thinking about while you are programming then you have a problem. Too hard. If you modified C to be thread safe intrinsically it would dramatically slow down. But if you modified an already slow language for this then it's not going to make a big difference in speed. Thus proportionally high level language poise to gain the most advantage by multi-processing.
And moores law is going to vector in to multi-processing in the future as a way to sustain itself.
Python should reinvent itself to be the multi-processing language.
Otherwise things like Fortress, which everyone scoffs at these days, is going to go to charles atlas school and be kicking sand in all your faces. (fortress is written from the ground up to assume multi-processing by default: e.g. for-loops always can execute in any order and the local variables are thread safe.)
You are right, but that's also because the fabs get more expensive on each generation, I think each feature size shrink requires a fab that costs 50% more than the previous fab. See my post below about the corollary for more discussion. But right now your point does not hold simply because the size of the market is increasing and revenues are also increasing. Therefore 1) cost-per-cpu cycle and the cost per unit of computation is falling despite the increasing cost of fabs 2) the growing cost of the fabs as a fraction of growing revenue is not increasing (I believe) yet.
If you accept the statement I just made about moore's law being sustained because of economics then here's a corollary which makes an observable prediction. Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.
Therefore, if we every do reach a point where we simply are running out of available physics and computer science (multiprocessing) then the first sign of this will be an increasing fraction of research dollars spent to sustain moores law.
Plot the industry's margin, smooth the curve, and you will be able to extrapolate to the point where the research dollars cross the profit line. somewhere shortly before that is when moore's law will end.
The only way that would not be true is if the nature of innovation changes from frequent small leaps to massive leaps spaced far apart.
Moore's law is not about physics it's about economics. Basically the entire industry has built an economic engine that requires that growth pattern to sustain it self.
To put it another way, growth needs to be geometric not addative. that is things need to grow at x% per year, which leads to a doubling time. If the grew linearly at x += D then as x grew the proportional rate (1/x dx/dt) of x growing shrinks with time--or the doubling period gets longer and longer. Eventually it takes a lifetime before your computer is 2x more capable. Then it takes 2 lifetimes.
Why would you ever upgrade at that point? except due to wear and tear. Things become commodities and sales are based on price and other values-added. So long to intel's industry domination model.
Moore's law is also a limit too. Namely that very same growth engine will not invest twice as many research dollars to get a slightly faster doubling time. The fact that it has held steady tells you that this is so. Empirically this growth rate is the sweat spot between creating innovation at the lowest cost, and reaping a profit on it.
Indeed the only surprising thing we've seen in the consumer market that seemed (superficially) to violate this was apples' replacement of the ipod mini with the ipod nano shortly after it's introduction. They could easily have milked it for longer. But here the driver was the competition that they needed to stay ahead of.
While python org has documentation, python documentation lacks three critical aspects.
1) searching and finding only relevant results. When I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, say how to parse an input string to numerical variables, and try to search python.org I get all kinds of crap at the top of my search. Discussions, posts, Peps, and deprecated crap. There ought to be a way to search for things relevant to the current python commands.
2) documetnation that teaches. Too often when I find the documentation of a method it's just a terse self-referential explanation and a list of args. No understanding is returned. If you want to see doucmentation that explains how to use a function look at Perl's man pages. There commands are explained.
3) local documentation. Again I point to perl's man pages as the right balance between compactness, richness, and completeness.
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You are plugging a radio device into a regulated liscenced network. You have a responsibility not to screw with the emissions of the device or misuse it. More than a responsibily--a legal obligation. But Apple also has a responsibility to try to prevent misuse of the device since it can't be expected that every user knows what they are doing and can weigh the ramifications of software installation. They need to make it reasonably safe but beyond that it's the end user that commits the crime.
It's also remotely plausible software can ruin the device and even increase the risk of fire. So making it hard to mess with also makes sense from that perspective. This is much more of a minor concern than the former, as there are already many perfectly safe battery operated computers. The reason it matters here at all is simply the numbers game. Unlike most moddable handhelds, theres millions of these things and they are very likely to be operated on airplanes and public transportation. Some prudence is required.
But beyond apples need to due dilligence above they also have the desire to make the thing have some value to the carriers and to the music sellers. Thus locking them helps the carriers. If there's a kickback for sales then it lessens the initial purchase cost to the consumers too. And it makes a market for DRMd music. (people who whine about fairlplay can't be pleased--it's a freakin fair-use speedbump folks, not a lock in. At least for the music. Video is a different story.). People may not like DRM but the mass consumer likes having a marketplace so they want to make that possible. To do that they need to enhance the sales value to attract the sellers. Personally I'm pretty happy with the line apple walks between buyers and sellers interests on audio sales. You can disagree with me on the DRM, but please see the point that apple has its reasons for needing to keep the device secure given its middleman position in the market.
Finally, my guess is that like their video DRM (as opposed to audio) they are not trying to win the cat and mouse game here but simply perpetuate it at a level where the rodent population is tolerable. hardcore folks will play update games. Everyone else will not.
So sure there may be sim card laws that say they can't prevent that. But they can prevent people from unlocking many of the other parts of the phone which may amount to the same thing, indirectly.
Since the system is free there's no harm, to you at least, in having infinite length phone calls. So do the following..call yourself (one browser to another). Play MP3s or NPR or Rush limbaugh into it. This will chaffe the system with ludicrous amounts of nonsense data. They will never be able to get a profile on you for the few real phone calls you make.
I thought some more about your question and realized my other answer was not on target.
In the developed world we have substituted materials that did not require so much energy for ones that do. To follow your line of reasoning consider the can opener in your kitchen and compare it with your grandmothers first canopener. Heres was a carbon steel blade, she might have even had the knife sharpener man who came by sharpen it from time to time. it was probably made in chicago or some place near a train depot. Yours is a plastic handled item, with a more refined steel and coated with more advanced metals. It was made in china from materials shipped from many different places, then wrapped in paper and plastic to hang in your brightly lit store. It's disposable. It's cheaper too because substituting energy for man power and materials costs have made it so. But it uses orders of magnitude more energy to make and get to you than your grandmothers.
Look at your couch. Heres was an oak frame, made to be reupholstered many times over it's life. It was filled with cotton batting and covered in cotten or flax. Yours is a particle board, metal and plastic frame. It was made mainly by robotic tools. And it is filled with oil based poly filled and covered with synthetic fibers all of which are treated. It too was made far away and shipped. it is disposable.
Moreover, your couch has more than 300% more materials in it since it's at least 40% bigger in every dimension. Indeed everything in your house is bigger. Your bed is bigger, your chairs are bigger. your doorways or bigger. IN fact house sizes are growing.
Every year we build more and more square footage of houses and apartments. That's both for people who are increasing their sq footage and for all those new people. And when we tear down and replace old houses, the new house require more energy per sq foot than the old one. We build wider roads and more exotic infrastructure under them as time moves on. Everything is the sort of analogous to how it was but so much more sophisticated and made from much more energy intensive materials.
So I think perhaps that answers your question.
As a rule of thumb, over a short period of time the gross domestic product is proportional to energy consumption. But over the long haul the pre-factor in the proportionality is also increasing as well.
The bottom line is that it's not enough to say I have the same sort of household my parents did. As the population rises we may have to actually use less energy individually just to stay even.
It's kind hard to get one's head around--the enormity of it. But to show you it's happening, A conference I attented pointed out that china has a program that is going to ramp up to 1 GW class nuke or coal plant coming on line every week. (Wired had an article not long ago called "let 1000 reactors bloom" on the chinese pebble bed reactor which while less efficient is also intrinsically melt-down proof and thus possible to mass -replicate safely)
The increase in power demand is likely to be spread around. Measured proportionally the third world will see the biggest increases but measured in a absolute sense the fractionally smaller increase in the first world will be as much wattage in total.
However as I pointed out, global energy competition means rising prices for energy both for production and for the inevitable Nuclear waste disposal, sharp increases in oil and coal prices. And sharp increases in food and water costs as biofuels emerge.
Since people are eventually price sensitive eventually something has to give, and people, especially in the first world, will cut back on energy wasting appliances and change their spectrum of energy (electric cars, electric heat). One hopes that this actually heads off the said "doubling" rate.
I don't dispute that there's a big pile of assumptions there. The thing is there is geometric rate of increased consumption in power and we are not building new capacity at a parallel rate. As consumption curve starts to hit the production cruve the cost of power which has varied little for decades is going to go through the roof. 25 cents per KW-hour will seem like a pipedream in 2040.
/year. That's a drop in the GW/day bucket.
Since this may seem implausible consider this. The world is on track to double its energy consumption by 2040. To reach that point in a linear fashion--not geometric one--would mean bringing on line three gigawatt class power plants every day from now until then. Right now the figure is about 10 GW plants per year because we are in early long tails of that geometric growth curve.
About now your jaw should be dropping as you ponder the implications.
Thus what has to happen, other than permanent blackouts in most of the world and carbon poisoning of the planet, is that the growth rate must be stifled. And that is going to happen when the price of electricity hits ~$10/KW-hour and all then people will economize and buy energy saving appliances.
I did not make up those numbers. read the 2030 report from the department of energy.
So I was being generous assuming 25 cents per KW-hour grid rates.
Of and by the way, note that the plant for solars cells will produce 200MW
Now this hocus pocus about the after tax situation is wrong too. If you want to include that then you have to include it on the 8000 dollars as well so Since the 8000 cost is after taxes, there's no point in calling the return on investment after taxes. Or if you want to then it costs 12300 of pre-tax income to buy the 8000 panels.
The ROI is negative since 437 electricity minus 640 interest is a 200 loss every year.
Lets see. Assume the competing cost is at present 10 to 25 cents per KW-hour. We'll use the upper end because future power prices will rise whereas the Solar panel is a fixed cost.
So let's see the solar panels are 100000 cents per KiloWatt. if the last 4000 then that's breakeven. We'll assume that the power is available 10 hours per day. That's not realistic for individual use but perhaps with batteries, and selling back to the grid this could be done. So 4000 hours is 400 days. Or about 1 year. Not too bad.
Now that ignores the efficiency of either pushing back to the grid or battery storage. Let's assume 50% loss. Then this is 2 years to payback on the cells. But now we also have to payback on the batteries. Let's assume the batteries needed const aout the same as the solar cells. That would double this payback to 4 years.
Finally this is assuming capital is free. Assume one borrows at 8 % interest. Then this another 5 months to payback.
So the whole operation needs to run undegraded for 4 to 4.5 years I estimate for break even.
That figure could be cut in half if one could sell back to the grid rather than batteries. ( Fine--as long as there is a grid and every one does not do that!. )
If the cells were down to 50% effiency after 4 years then this extends out to ~7 years to payback. If one cannot get that watt for the full ten hours then this gets even longer.
It sounds to me, roughly speaking that at 1 dollar per what things are in the ballpark for breakeven.
Apple is not providing a generic PC phone, it's providing it's usual seamless enduser enviroment. If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail. Upgrade software would be spotty, itunes store might have some problem, etc...
So what, you might say, Let me have the downgraded experience if that's what I want. Well That's just the point. Apple does not sell downgraded, sort works, experiences. That is their brand image. 1) It just works. 2) every machine has 100% of it's high end features working. (e.g. when you buy an apple computer you get Firewire whether you want it or not--every one has it and developers can count on it).
So it's not up to You. It's up to apple.
Now I'm sure there are boatload of other reasons. Some of them might be to do with revenue sharing. But I think its also to promote the vendor's attention to the details apple likes. By giving exclusive contracts they can pick people who will make Edge work well and make visual voicemail work well. Maybe they can also pick people who wont create nightmare pricing plans. FOr example look at the discpline apple enforced with the Ringtones. while people complain about ringtone costing anything, apple simplified the whole pricing plan. 1) it's cheaper (verizon) 2) you can customize it (all of them) 3) and they don't expire (sprint).
Apple keeps control for it's reason of perpetuating it's brand image and making a profit when they only have small portion of the market and are taking expensive R&D risks.
Hi porpnorber,
I't probably just me an you takling here but if you are seriously interested I'll answer your query.
I've had a life time to dwell on and process the incident so I realze you are just speaking from a gut reaction. First let me acknowledge that having a gun pointed at you is among the most clarifying things that can happen to a person. It brings a great deal of soberness.
My belief and hope is that the cop was smart enough to not pull the trigger wantonly. So if I behaved in a very subdued manner I would be safe. It is scarey to be so abjectly under the will of another. But cops are--one hopes--not lookeing for any excuse to kill. If one assumes that then it's rational that they should seek to act with extreme force when they act. Not to hurt but to control absolutely after the intervention decision is made.
I'm fine with that.
I might have had a gun for all he knew. I don't want cops getting shot because they are not supposed to hurt my feelings.
My opinion would change in a flash if they abused that seeding of authority. That's infact why I'm an outspoken activist on the matter of authority abuse. I prefer a government that earns its trust.
I suppose you want, nay, DEMAND, ogg vorbis before you will buy?
Hrmmmm.... looking at the "device" from the images on the link makes me think the police overreacted. I had exactly the opposite reaction. I think the response was totally appropriate. Look at it. Not only is it extremely provocative from the average persons TV-level awareness of bomb gadgetry, but personally with a EE background I'd be even more alarmed by it's context.
It's a tough call on when cops should draw their guns. If this was in the frozen food section at Safeway and the person seemed to be acting like a shopper then drawing guns would be an overreaction. In a crowded airport is a different venue and one rife with bomb-related contexts and plentiful warnings that stupid remarks will be taken at face value. The purpose of drawing guns is not to shoot but to immediately control a situation that could be deadly. Shut it down and sort it out in a safe place.
I've had guns drawn on me when I was drunk hiding in the bushes near the scene of what looked suspiciously top the cops like breaking into a car. (it wasn't but it was reasonably confused). I did not blame them for flushing me out that way, cause sometimes it owuld not have been a drunk collge student but someone with intent to escape. Cops just never know what the situation brings when they show up.
I'm not seeing where this "net loss" comes into play - assuming someone were to buy all three episodes on iTunes, they would actually spend an extra dollar. NBC wanted to reprice things. 2.99 for new and 99 for old, instead of 1.99 for all. PLus they wanted to force bundle pricing at the wholesale level so Apple was screwed if they unbundled things. And if they kept the buble together it was 4.99 and added complexity for the sale (3 downloads and 3 consumer shopping items). NBC was trying to say they were not going to charge 4.99 for a new release. In fact they were effectively doing that for anyone who did not really want the old shows. NBC might even claim they were selling things cheaper for those folks that actually wanted the three shows.
The point is, metal fatigue would not have been in any finite element code (if they had had them back them) as it was not well characterized.
As for the other anecdotes. Each one seems pretty obvious when you think about it. But it's not so obvious at the time. Two junction boxes or one. Well planes need to be light and you want to make them easy and fast to service. Having two junction boxes might mean that the serivicing is not a efficient as one, and that might be a bigger risk than having one.
The thing that always boggled my mind about the plane engineers was that the planes (at a nut and bolt and wire) level are vastly more complex that any one human can hold in their mind. So it's all about engineering methodology. The process of collecting, analyzing then disseminating the crash lessons learned was institutionalized and then reduced to rule-of-thumb best practices. e.g. hydraulic control tubing routed on the underside of a wing requires the wing be armored against turbo fan explosion. that's heavy. Therefore always route on the top of the wing any critical flight control tubing.
While obvious once you say it, every junior designer has to learn these. And that requires an institution to retain the knowledge and then to train them.
My dad worked for boeing and used to tell me stories of how airplane safety came to be. Basically an giant engnineering system to learn from every crash. One of the first stories he told me was about how they learned about metal fatigue when the early aluminum planes started dropping wings. At the time everyone though alumiunm would be a great airlpane construction material just like they think carbon fiber is now. No one anticipated what a disaster it turned out to be. Of course that was then. And now Aluminum is a great material, once they got the material science figured out.
Likewise the biggest single boon to aircraft safety was World War 2. There they had many plane designs (any given plane might have many different configurations) and they learned all sorts of fun things. Like for example that you had to not route all the electrical system through a single junction box (A washer got loose and shorted out a plane during turbulence that then crashed in SF bay). Or how you need to run both the main and backup fuel pumps up to full pressure during takeoff because if the mains fail then there is not enough time to spin up the backups to speed before the engines lose power. Or how you have to make the fuel pumps big enough to dump the tanks fast for an emergency landing. All of those discovered by "accident".
Some may recall the crash in NY where the composite tail ripped off when the pilot whipped the rudder too and fro in a non-standard maneuver.
THe good news is that the military uses composites and so they have had enough accidents to work things out for the commerical jets.
Also notice that the service only free till "mid 2008". And It also has commercials. The videos dont come out till a week after airing and expire 7 days after you download them. Finally what can we expect for the "real" price in 2008. Well some details have emerged on the price NBC wanted apple to charge. You may recall the price they wanted apple to charge was said to be $4.99 but NBC denied this vehemently. Well it turns out what they wanted was to force apple to purchase bundles of shows. SO to get a popular show like Heros apple would have to buy one episode of heros and 2 episodes of some re-run. The equivalent price of those 3 shows was 4.99. But apple could only charge 2.99 for the Hero's. This would have left apple with a net loss for all the re-runs it could not off load to other customers for 99 cents.
Yes that's my argument. The main argument against it is that there simply are not enough companies trying enough different strategies to have fully explored the competition landscape. Could be flawed. But I think it's on target. (and don't call it a circular argument unless you have a better explanation of how despite the fickle nature of experimental prgoress moores law has sustained it self well over 9 orders of magnitude.)
Nash Equilibrium in a nutshell is something every efficient industry will always reach. It's game theory if you a familiar with that.
Youre counter examples are actually arguments in favor of what I said.
The price of food production DID fall exponentially over many years. Then as I predicted when margins approach development costs, it became a commodity without any quick doubling time. The cost of oil production did fall exponentially over many years then it became a commodity.
Moreover you are comparing resource extraction with technology development. No matter how hard you try there simply is only so much energy in a barrel of oil. once you get within a factor of 4 or less there's not much doubling left to get. Likewise once transportation costs exceed the production costs of brocolli, the problem is not in the same realm.
I exaggerate slightly for the sake of being funny. But not much. Python is trying to optimize itself by adding more and more features or libraries for more very special cases that allow speed for that case. I think that has limited potential. And worse I fear adding features which need be supported in future versions may slowly foreclose the right direction which is to 1) permit implicit and explicit typing so that it can become a compiled language 2) create ways to do multi-processing.
So yes python can get faster but not much I expect.
offtopic:
personally I'm eyeballing Groovy right now because it is a script language that mirrors a compiled typed language that already has some degree of thread safety and behind the scenes memory management (GC) at a low level: java. But I'm still using python (and perl!)
IN ten years, according to moore's law python will be 32 times faster than it is now. Right now it's about 1000x slower than tuned C and 100x slower than unoptimized C-code. So in ten years python will still be slower than C running on todays computers. (mean while C will also be 32 times faster).
That is not a rag on python. well no a big one. indeed for lots of things don't need to be faster (word processors) so being 32x faster would enable python to take over development of lots of areas we now use C for.
No the point here is that if python can't even see a future where it's faster than today's other languages before it's obsolete it needs to go on a vision quest. Other than taking over distasteful roles that C refuses to do anymore, what's the point in life?
I think, like the thinking-in-python dude's rant said--python needs to ask it self what high level languages could be really good at that low level laguages will perpetually suck at. And that is multi-processing. thread safety is possible in any language but if you actually are thinking about while you are programming then you have a problem. Too hard. If you modified C to be thread safe intrinsically it would dramatically slow down. But if you modified an already slow language for this then it's not going to make a big difference in speed. Thus proportionally high level language poise to gain the most advantage by multi-processing.
And moores law is going to vector in to multi-processing in the future as a way to sustain itself.
Python should reinvent itself to be the multi-processing language.
Otherwise things like Fortress, which everyone scoffs at these days, is going to go to charles atlas school and be kicking sand in all your faces. (fortress is written from the ground up to assume multi-processing by default: e.g. for-loops always can execute in any order and the local variables are thread safe.)
If you accept the statement I just made about moore's law being sustained because of economics then here's a corollary which makes an observable prediction.
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.
Therefore, if we every do reach a point where we simply are running out of available physics and computer science (multiprocessing) then the first sign of this will be an increasing fraction of research dollars spent to sustain moores law.
Plot the industry's margin, smooth the curve, and you will be able to extrapolate to the point where the research dollars cross the profit line. somewhere shortly before that is when moore's law will end.
The only way that would not be true is if the nature of innovation changes from frequent small leaps to massive leaps spaced far apart.
Moore's law is not about physics it's about economics. Basically the entire industry has built an economic engine that requires that growth pattern to sustain it self.
To put it another way, growth needs to be geometric not addative. that is things need to grow at x% per year, which leads to a doubling time. If the grew linearly at x += D then as x grew the proportional rate (1/x dx/dt) of x growing shrinks with time--or the doubling period gets longer and longer. Eventually it takes a lifetime before your computer is 2x more capable. Then it takes 2 lifetimes.
Why would you ever upgrade at that point? except due to wear and tear. Things become commodities and sales are based on price and other values-added. So long to intel's industry domination model.
Moore's law is also a limit too. Namely that very same growth engine will not invest twice as many research dollars to get a slightly faster doubling time. The fact that it has held steady tells you that this is so. Empirically this growth rate is the sweat spot between creating innovation at the lowest cost, and reaping a profit on it.
Indeed the only surprising thing we've seen in the consumer market that seemed (superficially) to violate this was apples' replacement of the ipod mini with the ipod nano shortly after it's introduction. They could easily have milked it for longer. But here the driver was the competition that they needed to stay ahead of.
Darwin is open source. And you are a troll.
While python org has documentation, python documentation lacks three critical aspects.
1) searching and finding only relevant results. When I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, say how to parse an input string to numerical variables, and try to search python.org I get all kinds of crap at the top of my search. Discussions, posts, Peps, and deprecated crap. There ought to be a way to search for things relevant to the current python commands.
2) documetnation that teaches. Too often when I find the documentation of a method it's just a terse self-referential explanation and a list of args. No understanding is returned. If you want to see doucmentation that explains how to use a function look at Perl's man pages. There commands are explained.
3) local documentation. Again I point to perl's man pages as the right balance between compactness, richness, and completeness.