If you are going to carry a spare battery for your phone in your pocket then you have to buy such a battery. That adds to the cost of the phone you are carrying right now. You also have to have a means to charge that battery. A lot of people would use a cradle that can charge the battery sans phone. In any case they already paid the ~$49 OEM price or less for a cheapy chinese knockoff with exagerated specs.
Now with the Iphone, you have a battery with twice the capacity of the competing smart-phone batteries. Actually if you consider what the phone is actually powering--a fast processor, wifi, and big screen--the battery is likely even larger than twice the capacity. So it's not a cheap battery.
When it dies some day replacing it would be, the equivalent of replacing two of the half-capacity interchangable batteries on your smart phone.
For that $79 seems like a very fair price. In the mean time you have not been hauling around another battery in your pocket and having to fret about keeping it charged.
I find myself extremely skeptical. fuel tanks are usualy fairly far underground. buried tanks are going to be fairly near isothermal and the ambient temperature is not going to change the temp very much on it's short trip to the tank.
If anyone is getting ripped by this, it's the independent fuel stations. There a fuel truck that has been driving for days or dipped out of above-ground storage might indeed be warmer. So the station is buying hot fuel. But the consumer is probably buying fuel much closer to the underground temperature. It would not be hard to fix this since measuring the temperature of the fuel truck would be easy and infrequent.
Finally, were talking a couple of percent difference in energy per gallon here. Don't people suppose that their cars efficiency might also vary by a several percent with ambient temperature?
Finally, the station sells gas by the gallon not by the BTU. you are still getting a gallon. If anything you are getting more than a gallon since it's coming out of a cold tank and then expanding in your hot car tank. So actually you owe them more not less.
I agree that diversity helps resistance. But as phones become computers I think we'll also see all the hand-rolled specialty phone OS disappear and standard OS's, fewer in number, replace them. This almost has to happen for develpers to develop apps. At first this may be web-apps of course so there underlying OS is less important. But long term there's pressure to downselect. Cringely thinks everything will be using Flash as a front end, even toasters. At some point the number of OS's will be small enough that we've lost the advantage of diversity. Or so I speculate.
One might speculate that it's a good thing for linux (and mac) that China runs on Windows. It's an incubator for this kind of activity. It probably does not help that a lot of the windows is pirated and/or never kept patched. Since linux is even harder to keep patched automatically it would not be a better situation (Flame me if you wish but please don't say something moronic as "its' as simple as "apt-get update-all". And even if you believe that linux is more resistant to holes than windows that's not an issue: Remember most of these bots come in as trojans not remote execution exploits, and they don't even need to run as root--so linux is not going to be more secure against trojans people welcome into their user spaces.
Now just imagine in the future when phones become general purpose computers, not subject to reprogramming by the phone service provider. That's going to be billions of rooted computers. Yikes.
No we don't have the infrastructure to use diesel. That would require replacing all of our fleet. that's not an instantaneous result. However that's admittedly not a great argument either since no matter what we go with we phase it in. it's just easier to phase in ethanol or so it is believed.
plug-in hybrid has a math problem. you can't pulse charge a hybrid, so no way to refuel these on the go without battery swapping. Even if you were to invent pulse charge batteries--and those are coming along--do the math and you see you need gigawatt delivery devices to refuel a 400 mile range 40 horse power car in the time it now takes to pour in fuel. Likewise is every home had one of these puppies charging overnight the existing power lines could not handle the load. (would need distributed energy generation. solar power won't work well because usually cars are not at home when the suns out). Finally once you move up from commuter cars to more powerful vehicles (SUV and Minvan) the energy efficiency goes in the crapper. (yes it is better than what you get with current engines, but not neccessarily better than you could get with a internal cumbustion engine that has variable cyllinders.
Why Ethanol? Simple 1) we have the infrastructure to use it immediately. 2) It's not corrosive or particularly toxic. 3) unlike algae it's grown by agricultiure so Archer Daniels Midland can get their cut of the pie.
the latter is probably the most defining reason.
But I think ethanol may be the wrong ticket. Obviously corn ethanol is a bad idea. But even cellulosic ethanol may be a bad idea.
two reasons: 1) Now matter how you produce it, evenif a miracle in effciency happened, at the end of the process any ethanol produced is going to be dissolved in water. Drying it out is going to eat the efficiency.
2) Cellulose and Ligno-cellulose is desinged by trees to be indigestible and energetically inaccessible. If it were easy to digest the bacteria and termites would have eaten the whole forest a long time ago. Trees would not be huge cellulose containers. That should be a clue.
Now it is true that man made enzymes can in some instances beat natural ones by an order of magnitude of more. But this is one place where nature has had a lot of different creatures all working on the same problem independently for quite some time.
One the other hand it's almost commerically viable now. So we only need maybe a factor of ten improvement to open up wide spread production. However then other scaling issues will raise their heads. Farmland will be used. in many case it will be existing farm waste, but in others, say poplar trees, it will be for non-edible products. And if we try to open up new farmlands to compensate then were back to having a water budget problem.
Algae making diesel would seem to bypass a lot of these problem. It can be grown off croplands, in many cases using sea water or brackish water. And it's easy to separate the oils from the water. the product has a higher energy value than Ethanol per volume and per weight. And it does not produce as much toxic waste in the production process (ethanol uses acid treatment and produces loads of crap to dispose of).
1) OSX runs fine without enabling root. indeed enabling root is discouraged. One has full access to root via sudo -s, so actually creating the root user is only a hazard and has no high value in OSX. Even if sudo gets borked you can still get in to root via booting in single user mode.
So I wonder why they enabled root? perhaps when connecting from another computer to run a command via ssh it's a lot fewer steps to type. (don't have to enter the password twice). So I but the idea this is left over from development.
2) However this does bring up some good questions. just how do they manage this phone? Does the local computer need to know the password to get into modify things. Does it mount as a hard disk with write privs to the attached comuter?
While I sympathize with the human that is scooter and feel bad he was going to prison for a sort of derivative crime I still think he needs to go to prison. The crime while derivative is a crime none the less and he was found guilty so no arguments there. Interfering with a prosecutors investigation is serious business. Now he has to be punished even if there was no underlying crime that was the subject of the investigations. He chose to lie. That much we know because the jury said so. So tough luck for his bad choices. It's perhaps a shame but absolutely necessary.
is $250K fine a punishment? I sincerely doubt it. Money can easily be made up to him given all the fortunes involved. So I don't think it will hurt him.
Thus this is a travesty because it says high government officials are beyond reach of the law. Their subordinates can take the blame and be set free. A minor ding on their resume, assuming they get caught at all.
First I agree. There's more to the phone than a bag-o-parts. In addition to all the engineering and custom software they are leveraging the enormous implicit value of the already developed OS. The latter is free to them but would cost a competitor plenty. (how much do other phones pay to use windows?). Also factor in the giant risk costs. What if there's a defect that requires a recall. What if it's craters like a newton. Not every project succeeds and you have to amortize the losses over the ones that succeed. And of course one has to keep the lights on in the store. One has to pay the interest on the borrowed capital to make the device (even if you borrowed it from yourself--it's still lost earnings). Lastly if this is like other Apple and NExt Product then they usually are selling initially at a loss to keep the price reasonable while using expensive advanced tech, and expecting the component prices to fall swiftly enough to make all the profit on the tail end.
In any case assume once the risks amortize then the price settles to a profit margin of 10% like other apple products. Now that would be about 60 dollars a unit.
Now if they actually achieve their stated goal of ten million in a year, then that's 0.6 billion dollars profit. apple's net profit last year was 1.9 billion. so thats about a 30% increase in the company in one years time.
holy shit. That would drop their price to earnings ratio down to to the 20's, which is way too low for any innovative company, let alone apple. So we should expect to see a huge jump in apple stock price when they report their quarterly earnings.
connections to most free online drives tend to be slow, usually the best is about 100Kb/sec and usually a quarter of that..mac goes at megabytes per second.
Depends on the instruction(s) inflicted. Based on the limited information available, it could be....an instruction that the compiler used for Mac OS/X simply never generates. (A sub-optimal instruction, for example, would be skipped by any decent optimizing compiler as the same thing could be done in superior ways.) That makes no sense. Apple can't know what compiler third party used to compile some piece of software. For that matter someone might have handcoded it. Your theory that it could be some mode not used in mac-os makes more sense since the OS might possibly prevent certain modes from being accessed by any non-apple software.
los alamos has a press release response to this. The laptop did not contain sensitive info. Indeed it would be highly unusual for a laptop with sensitive info to leave the Los Alamos site on travel. Moreover, what Los Alaoms considers "sensitive" info is a much higher standard than you would think. For example, if an employee has someones resume on their computer and that resume, despite being a public document, perhaps taken off Monster.com or Nature.jobs, has a birthdate in it, then it's treated as sensitive information. Think about that next time you hear "sensitive" info being lost at Los alamos.
First I agree, music quality has nothing to do with it. That accounts for a negligible market size. The real reason is gifts. How many CDs did you used to buy and how many did you used to give as gifts. I'd wager about 10% of the CDs you bought was the number you gave as gifts at christmas or other times. Possibly more. Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift. The original media is a much better gift than a burned CD or a pile of itunes gift certificates. It's not like the days of audi tapes where a Mix CD took time and effort and could only be made one at a time. THere the mix tapes were more valuable than the original media. With Cds its the reverse. I have no problems owning a copy but I prefer to give the original as a gift. It's the tangible media that is satsifying to the recpient.
I'd say that could easily account for 15% of the market.
It's strange that you are correct. The puppet is more real than the CGI yoda. Even stranger is that the motion cameras on a prop should somehow be better than CGI? Makes not sense to me why. But empirically it was better, at least in my recollection.
Woderful. now if they could think of a better name. What's wrong with moonlight? well other that not sounding right to me it's going to be hard to search for it on the web.
Of course my favortite suggestion has the same problem: MONOchrome.
Suggestions: "monochrome" instead of silverlight. (ie. whitelight versus single frequency). Of course those opposed to it might call it silverblight.
Is "punishing for previous sins" unfair? No not at all, that's how the world works. Be an asshole, it's not illegal, your free to be an asshole, but that does not mean it does not come without a social penalty. and the next time you need someone else's approval, that someone has a chance to punish you. It's a good thing. It's not unfair.
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If you are going to carry a spare battery for your phone in your pocket then you have to buy such a battery. That adds to the cost of the phone you are carrying right now. You also have to have a means to charge that battery. A lot of people would use a cradle that can charge the battery sans phone. In any case they already paid the ~$49 OEM price or less for a cheapy chinese knockoff with exagerated specs.
Now with the Iphone, you have a battery with twice the capacity of the competing smart-phone batteries. Actually if you consider what the phone is actually powering--a fast processor, wifi, and big screen--the battery is likely even larger than twice the capacity. So it's not a cheap battery.
When it dies some day replacing it would be, the equivalent of replacing two of the half-capacity interchangable batteries on your smart phone.
For that $79 seems like a very fair price. In the mean time you have not been hauling around another battery in your pocket and having to fret about keeping it charged.
people are whiners.
I find myself extremely skeptical. fuel tanks are usualy fairly far underground. buried tanks are going to be fairly near isothermal and the ambient temperature is not going to change the temp very much on it's short trip to the tank.
If anyone is getting ripped by this, it's the independent fuel stations. There a fuel truck that has been driving for days or dipped out of above-ground storage might indeed be warmer. So the station is buying hot fuel. But the consumer is probably buying fuel much closer to the underground temperature. It would not be hard to fix this since measuring the temperature of the fuel truck would be easy and infrequent.
Finally, were talking a couple of percent difference in energy per gallon here. Don't people suppose that their cars efficiency might also vary by a several percent with ambient temperature?
Finally, the station sells gas by the gallon not by the BTU. you are still getting a gallon. If anything you are getting more than a gallon since it's coming out of a cold tank and then expanding in your hot car tank. So actually you owe them more not less.
I agree that diversity helps resistance. But as phones become computers I think we'll also see all the hand-rolled specialty phone OS disappear and standard OS's, fewer in number, replace them. This almost has to happen for develpers to develop apps. At first this may be web-apps of course so there underlying OS is less important. But long term there's pressure to downselect. Cringely thinks everything will be using Flash as a front end, even toasters. At some point the number of OS's will be small enough that we've lost the advantage of diversity. Or so I speculate.
One might speculate that it's a good thing for linux (and mac) that China runs on Windows. It's an incubator for this kind of activity. It probably does not help that a lot of the windows is pirated and/or never kept patched. Since linux is even harder to keep patched automatically it would not be a better situation (Flame me if you wish but please don't say something moronic as "its' as simple as "apt-get update-all". And even if you believe that linux is more resistant to holes than windows that's not an issue: Remember most of these bots come in as trojans not remote execution exploits, and they don't even need to run as root--so linux is not going to be more secure against trojans people welcome into their user spaces.
Now just imagine in the future when phones become general purpose computers, not subject to reprogramming by the phone service provider. That's going to be billions of rooted computers. Yikes.
sniff bicycle seats. Honest. Brain growth
please explain how a virtual sex toy works and how I sell one?
just work the math. I've done it. try it yourself. it's no problem to charge one electic car. try 10,000.
No we don't have the infrastructure to use diesel. That would require replacing all of our fleet. that's not an instantaneous result. However that's admittedly not a great argument either since no matter what we go with we phase it in. it's just easier to phase in ethanol or so it is believed.
plug-in hybrid has a math problem.
you can't pulse charge a hybrid, so no way to refuel these on the go without battery swapping. Even if you were to invent pulse charge batteries--and those are coming along--do the math and you see you need gigawatt delivery devices to refuel a 400 mile range 40 horse power car in the time it now takes to pour in fuel. Likewise is every home had one of these puppies charging overnight the existing power lines could not handle the load. (would need distributed energy generation. solar power won't work well because usually cars are not at home when the suns out). Finally once you move up from commuter cars to more powerful vehicles (SUV and Minvan) the energy efficiency goes in the crapper. (yes it is better than what you get with current engines, but not neccessarily better than you could get with a internal cumbustion engine that has variable cyllinders.
Why Ethanol? Simple
1) we have the infrastructure to use it immediately.
2) It's not corrosive or particularly toxic.
3) unlike algae it's grown by agricultiure so Archer Daniels Midland can get their cut of the pie.
the latter is probably the most defining reason.
But I think ethanol may be the wrong ticket. Obviously corn ethanol is a bad idea. But even cellulosic ethanol may be a bad idea.
two reasons:
1) Now matter how you produce it, evenif a miracle in effciency happened, at the end of the process any ethanol produced is going to be dissolved in water. Drying it out is going to eat the efficiency.
2) Cellulose and Ligno-cellulose is desinged by trees to be indigestible and energetically inaccessible. If it were easy to digest the bacteria and termites would have eaten the whole forest a long time ago. Trees would not be huge cellulose containers. That should be a clue.
Now it is true that man made enzymes can in some instances beat natural ones by an order of magnitude of more. But this is one place where nature has had a lot of different creatures all working on the same problem independently for quite some time.
One the other hand it's almost commerically viable now. So we only need maybe a factor of ten improvement to open up wide spread production. However then other scaling issues will raise their heads. Farmland will be used. in many case it will be existing farm waste, but in others, say poplar trees, it will be for non-edible products. And if we try to open up new farmlands to compensate then were back to having a water budget problem.
Algae making diesel would seem to bypass a lot of these problem. It can be grown off croplands, in many cases using sea water or brackish water. And it's easy to separate the oils from the water. the product has a higher energy value than Ethanol per volume and per weight. And it does not produce as much toxic waste in the production process (ethanol uses acid treatment and produces loads of crap to dispose of).
1) OSX runs fine without enabling root. indeed enabling root is discouraged. One has full access to root via sudo -s, so actually creating the root user is only a hazard and has no high value in OSX. Even if sudo gets borked you can still get in to root via booting in single user mode.
So I wonder why they enabled root? perhaps when connecting from another computer to run a command via ssh it's a lot fewer steps to type. (don't have to enter the password twice). So I but the idea this is left over from development.
2) However this does bring up some good questions. just how do they manage this phone? Does the local computer need to know the password to get into modify things. Does it mount as a hard disk with write privs to the attached comuter?
While I sympathize with the human that is scooter and feel bad he was going to prison for a sort of derivative crime I still think he needs to go to prison. The crime while derivative is a crime none the less and he was found guilty so no arguments there. Interfering with a prosecutors investigation is serious business. Now he has to be punished even if there was no underlying crime that was the subject of the investigations. He chose to lie. That much we know because the jury said so. So tough luck for his bad choices. It's perhaps a shame but absolutely necessary.
is $250K fine a punishment? I sincerely doubt it. Money can easily be made up to him given all the fortunes involved. So I don't think it will hurt him.
Thus this is a travesty because it says high government officials are beyond reach of the law. Their subordinates can take the blame and be set free. A minor ding on their resume, assuming they get caught at all.
First I agree. There's more to the phone than a bag-o-parts. In addition to all the engineering and custom software they are leveraging the enormous implicit value of the already developed OS. The latter is free to them but would cost a competitor plenty. (how much do other phones pay to use windows?). Also factor in the giant risk costs. What if there's a defect that requires a recall. What if it's craters like a newton. Not every project succeeds and you have to amortize the losses over the ones that succeed. And of course one has to keep the lights on in the store. One has to pay the interest on the borrowed capital to make the device (even if you borrowed it from yourself--it's still lost earnings). Lastly if this is like other Apple and NExt Product then they usually are selling initially at a loss to keep the price reasonable while using expensive advanced tech, and expecting the component prices to fall swiftly enough to make all the profit on the tail end. In any case assume once the risks amortize then the price settles to a profit margin of 10% like other apple products. Now that would be about 60 dollars a unit. Now if they actually achieve their stated goal of ten million in a year, then that's 0.6 billion dollars profit. apple's net profit last year was 1.9 billion. so thats about a 30% increase in the company in one years time. holy shit. That would drop their price to earnings ratio down to to the 20's, which is way too low for any innovative company, let alone apple. So we should expect to see a huge jump in apple stock price when they report their quarterly earnings.
they won't run vista 64 bit.
Why do I suddenly feel like singing the Madonna hit, "like a virgin, touched for the very first time"?
connections to most free online drives tend to be slow, usually the best is about 100Kb/sec and usually a quarter of that. .mac goes at megabytes per second.
where's the Gdrive?
Above link is dead. release cached here
los alamos has a press release response to this. The laptop did not contain sensitive info. Indeed it would be highly unusual for a laptop with sensitive info to leave the Los Alamos site on travel. Moreover, what Los Alaoms considers "sensitive" info is a much higher standard than you would think. For example, if an employee has someones resume on their computer and that resume, despite being a public document, perhaps taken off Monster.com or Nature.jobs, has a birthdate in it, then it's treated as sensitive information. Think about that next time you hear "sensitive" info being lost at Los alamos.
First I agree, music quality has nothing to do with it. That accounts for a negligible market size. The real reason is gifts. How many CDs did you used to buy and how many did you used to give as gifts. I'd wager about 10% of the CDs you bought was the number you gave as gifts at christmas or other times. Possibly more. Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift. The original media is a much better gift than a burned CD or a pile of itunes gift certificates. It's not like the days of audi tapes where a Mix CD took time and effort and could only be made one at a time. THere the mix tapes were more valuable than the original media. With Cds its the reverse. I have no problems owning a copy but I prefer to give the original as a gift. It's the tangible media that is satsifying to the recpient. I'd say that could easily account for 15% of the market.
Number one on my list is an avatar that can autonomously handle the presence system.
It's strange that you are correct. The puppet is more real than the CGI yoda. Even stranger is that the motion cameras on a prop should somehow be better than CGI? Makes not sense to me why. But empirically it was better, at least in my recollection.
Woderful. now if they could think of a better name. What's wrong with moonlight? well other that not sounding right to me it's going to be hard to search for it on the web.
Of course my favortite suggestion has the same problem: MONOchrome.
Suggestions:
"monochrome" instead of silverlight. (ie. whitelight versus single frequency). Of course those opposed to it might call it silverblight.
Other possibilities:
flash-light
silver-lux
silver-tux
silvix
sliver
Is "punishing for previous sins" unfair? No not at all, that's how the world works. Be an asshole, it's not illegal, your free to be an asshole, but that does not mean it does not come without a social penalty. and the next time you need someone else's approval, that someone has a chance to punish you. It's a good thing. It's not unfair.