Yes, because VCs are so impressed by a good-looking laptop. I mean, forget the numbers on the spreadsheet, this candidate has an ugly Thinkpad.
VCs tend to be impressed by polish.
Typically, if you take an idea to a VC, unless you have some IP tied up, or there is significant work entailed to get to a first mover advantage, they are already thinking about one of their go-to teams that can take your idea and run with it. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen, and beyond that, the only thing that matters is an ability to execute, and that means they are not investing in your product, per se, they are investing in your market segment and the team.
Usually, they will prefer their team to the team that you have put together because they are familiar with their team. Their team has a track record, and they have an existing relationship with the teams they typically work with on new projects. It's one of the reasons there are so many serial entrepreneurs, and so few new entrepreneurs that make it past the friends-and-family or angel funding stage of their startup into series A financing.
If you are a new entrepreneur, or someone with a proven technical track record, who has never been on "The VP Gravy Train", unless you are already profitable (and are therefore trying to give away a very large chunk of your company and control of your board of directors, in exchange for capital to bring your venture to scale), you need every advantage going into the meeting that you can lay your grubby little hands on.
Packaging of yourself is therefore almost as important as the content of the presentation itself.
So yeah, they're "impressed by a good looking laptop", if that's part of the overall package impression that convinces them that your team is the right team, and that they won't need to replace you, the founder, with one of their go-to CEOs, or one of their VPs they've been cultivating to take a CEO position at some point in the future, and "Gee, I think it's time we gave Frank a shot at a CEO position; what do you think, other managing partners of this large venture fund?".
If you are a technical person, you will be lucky to last in the C suite much beyond (mostly) losing control of your board of directors, which is going to happen some time between closing Series A and closing Series B. Typically, your series B will be contingent on you losing control to the point that they can replace you at any point their confidence falters, and they decide "It's time to bring in adult supervision".
PS: One of the reasons there are so few women in higher up positions is that the women haven't taken their paydays from being an early employee, and acted as their own angel investor in a new company that has been successful. You kind of have to be a gambling addict to get to that point in the game, so that you are a known quantity. That said, technical companies in the Fortune 500 have done 2X as well asall of the other Fortune 500 companies, in terms of percentages, so tech is about 2X as egalitarian as any other industry in that regard.
Electronics is low margin because of commodity parts and consumer demand for interoperability. Think, microwaves and computers. You don't need a special brand of microwave to heat Packaged Dinner Product.
Low margin vs. High demand
There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.
When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.
Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.
The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.
I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.
It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.
Once the data leaves your network and makes its way onto theirs, its no longer your own traffic. Why people feel like they are entitled to abuse the system that the rest of us rely on is beyond me. This country has really gone downhill.
Probably because we don't feel that it's abuse; once we've paid for a certain diameter of pipe to the rest of the Internet, it's their job to let us send or receive whatever we want over that pipe, without editorializing.
Of course, if they really want to editorialize, and demonstrate a technical ability to do so, I'm going to hold them legally responsible any time my 13 year old son is successful in accessing porn over this pipe that they are supposedly capable of exercising content control on, since by *not* exercising control on that particular content, they are responsible for the porn.
are located in Hillsboro Or. Also located there is a major part of their design group and process science.
Almost all of the microarchitecture changes and die shrinks come out of Haifa, Israel. Not Hillsboro. The Itanium came out of Santa Clara, California. Willamette came out of Hillsboro (the Pentium 4, which was arguably a pretty big failure, with 35%-50% of the 115W power consumption lost to leakage power). There was also the well-know SMT issue, where the dispatch ordering was (effectively) random, meaning the IPC between SMT cores never really scaled very well. Prescott never really scale above about a max of 3.8GHz, when it was (in theory) designed to allow derivatives of the microarchitecture to run at speeds of up to 10GHz.
Generally, most of the machine-building companies I've worked for (Apple, Google) tend to skip the Hillsboro designs for anything but prototypes, and they wait for the every other year die shrink out of Haifa for the actual shipping product.
Living here I can say I am frustrated by how much the local big businesses get big tax breaks simply by occasionally threatening to leave now and then. Nike, Intel, and now these datacenters. The rest of us, and other employers foot the bill to cover their shirked responsibilities to their communities.
You mean the "shirked responsibilities" that would be being paid to the lowest bidder in Topeka or Wichita Kansas, rather than in Oregon, were it not for the tax breaks?
The people who build data centers don't care where they are located physically; they care about taxes, land costs, and power costs. If power were more reliable in Kabul Afghanistan, and the local government a bit more stable, they'd be located there, instead.
Reminds me of the data center shit that happened up in Quincy Washington, Sure, they created a few jobs, but it also made the land and homes so expensive that the locals couldn't afford to buy and live there any longer...
Because everyone wants to live next door to a data center because of all the jobs there, or why? Why would it be more expensive to live near a data center, than not, if there were no economic benefit to doing so?
There's also the reality that those tax incentives could be spent on things like education that would bring more jobs to the area on a per dollar basis. That's the real issue with subsidizing datacenters that employ basically nobody locally.
So you can give the tax breaks, and have the data center built locally, and employ construction workers, ongoing site maintenance workers, etc., which you don't count as employees because they are contractors, yet they have jobs.
Or you can *not* give the tax break, and have a vacant lot, as the data center is built in Kansas or wherever instead.
I'm jelly, I always wanted to try this. High end FPGA?
There are commercial emulation chips available, used for testing everything up to the flat panel. You could build your own FPGA if you wanted to, I suppose.
Well, then, very clearly, we need to start giving government contracts to your brother in law's company which manufactures deep oceanic temperature sensors. You know, "just to be sure"...
Think "anomalously long backscatter times"/"anamalous diffusion of backscatter" for energetic cosmic rays. You can refine the specificity for the location utilizing synthetic aperture techniques, but you end up with very thin stripes for each pass over the scanned region. I *did* say "long term observation"...
Note that the Fukushima detectors are a pretty long ways away from the reactor itself, as well as the containment vessel, compared to straight tomographic techniques used to examine cargo containers, say in Oakland.
NB: These days, it's pretty obsolete as a technique, and we use neutrino tomography instead, but there are enough "dark spots" that it's not possible to cover everywhere with the technique. Interestingly, Vernor Vinge "outed" the neutrino tomography technique in his novel "The Peace War", although his details are a bit hand-wavy and wrong.
Generally we don't have to worry about being shot down when we fly a constellation of high altitude aircraft over North Korea without their permissions in order to create a synthetic aperture large enough to be meaningful, so it's OK for filling in the dark spots there. You wouldn't want to run the same flights over Russia, even at 90,000 feet these days.
PS: In case you missed it, there was a story the other day bemoaning the lack of noble gas detectors to detect by-products of fission plant operation, but they also wanted some better generalized climatological models (read: give us lots of money for supercomputer hardware to play with) in order to determine the origin, should noble gasses be detected with their new detectors.
#1 Can't give MMR below 12 months in age. Period. Exception: infants traveling internationally warrant the risk.
Most day cares don't take infants, and when they do, they usually don't take anyone else. The day cares I went to didn't want you until you were potty trained.
This article is specifically about Silicon Valley Day Care.
Which I think is probably code to "The day care next door to Marisa Mayer's office", but even if it's not, in the companies I've worked in in SV, they were a substitute for a babysitter to get mothers and fathers back to work as quickly as possible following a birth, without paying them enough to be able to afford a nanny. They took kids from a few weeks old up to age 4.
Totally ignoring the fact that for all middleware-based vertical market software (which is, in effect, "all of it", mostly written in dialects of VB to glue a bunch of Microsoft and third party DLLs together) it's an added "rewrite everything from scratch" overhead, it ignores buying cycle.
But I have stuff like that running on my Windows 7 amd64 system on a regular basis. WTF are you on about?
You can have stuff *like that*, but it's not going to be the same stuff, it's going to be *new stuff* written in VB.Net or C#.Net.
This would be fine, if anyone had liked some of the intermediate Windows releases, and gone forward on those platforms, instead of running more XP systems because they freaking *HATED* "ME", "Vista", which is why they never achieved sufficient market share to displace XP. This should have been obvious when everyone avoided "200" and instead went for XP when it came out.
Instead, the vertical market code is still living on the old VB platform on XP.
While VB6.0 apps *can* run on Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows 8 platforms, most *don't*.
First of all, the Server 2008 platform is irrelevant for vertical market apps, since they run client side, not server-side.
Second, you can't use Office 2000 as an installed application on the new platforms, you have to use Office 2011 and 2013, and the DLL components that make up the components you'd use in the vertical market app are sufficiently different from one another that you'd have to pic running one or the other anyway. Which would be fine, except Office 2013 requires Windows 7 or above to install. So basically, if I want new Office, I have to tke new Windows, and vice versa.
This means that you have to do a re-buy, or you have to have two versions of your vertical market application.
To add insult to injury, it's practically impossible to force the newer versions of Office to use the older file formats at the DLL level, without reselecting the settings every time you save a document. So if your vertical market app has to communicate data between an older and a newer workstation instance, even if you invest in rewriting you vertical market app from scratch to move off VB 6.0, it's most non-interoperable without a bunch of "Can you re-save that document in the old office format so I can use it? Thanks.".
At a minimum, if I'm a small business with 20 employees, and I want to add 3 more, I am pretty much screwed, unless I've done one of two things:
(1) Pre-bought a bunch of XP systems and stuck them in a closet in case I wanted to hire someone, or someone's computer dies
(2) Paid to move everyone forward onto at *least* Windows 7 and Office 2003, and paid to have my middleware rewritten.
Even so, there are a lot of third party DLL components that simple *are not available* as 64 bit versions. So I m either SOL, or paying to duplicate their functionality, as well, in order to get my dentists office / collections agency / non-profit call center / POS systems / whatever vertical market app, back online.
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So like I've said: they've missed the boat for about 70% of their market, which simply can not afford to redo everything all at once.
They *REALLY* needed to deprecate the OS and the applications components - Office - and the applications platform - VB 6.0 - *separately* so that SMBs could do overlapping buy-forward, which is more in line with the fact that they are constrained in their instantaneous purchasing power by being in a cash flow business model, but relatively unconstrained in their over time purchasing power, for the same reason.
Frankly, they *could* have maintained component binary binary compatibility, while deploying a new office.
The actual order should have been:
(1) New windows with VB 6.0 and Office binary backward compatibility (2) Deprecate XP and force people OS-forward with (relatively) little pain
(3) New Office with component binary backward compatib
Back before DVD drm was generally broken with DeCSS, I had my own mechanism for breaking DVDs It was cumbersome but it worked.
Me too. I electrically emulated a LVDS flat panel and reconstructed the high resolution image from the LVDS.
Works great for BluRay encryption, and for projectionist monitor screens in movie theaters, too, since the flat panels themselves are *after* the content decryption.
We've been using muon detectors for over 40 years to detect nuclear-related activities in various countries, including reactor installation, stockpiling, bomb-building, and so on. One of the reasons for the ability to move MX missiles around underground was so that long term muon detector observation by the Soviets could not pinpoint the location of the missiles.
Personally I think that Microsoft has been doing quite well lately, but no matter what they do, people seem to find something wrong with it.
Microsoft has gotten themselves in trouble.
One of the big things they did wrong was kill binary compatibility for software running on XP at the same time they killed XP.
This effectively forces a re-buy of all your hardware, because any new hardware you buy can no longer run the old software.
Totally ignoring the fact that for all middleware-based vertical market software (which is, in effect, "all of it", mostly written in dialects of VB to glue a bunch of Microsoft and third party DLLs together) it's an added "rewrite everything from scratch" overhead, it ignores buying cycle.
Typical accounting for computer hardware is an accelerated depreciation schedule, which is a 3 year schedule. This effectively means that every year, you intend to replace 1/3 of your computer systems (without an accelerated depreciation, as allowed by the IRS, this turns into a 5 year schedule, which means 1/5th or 20% get replaced).
The changes in binary compatibility at the same time the OS changed means that you have to do a full re-buy to handle adding people, or simple because old systems need replaced.
While this is great for Microsoft (they get a 3X - or 5X - bump in the number of licenses the y get to sell for everything), and it's great for computer vendors (same bump, in order to sell hardware capable of running the new OS), and it's great for vertical market consulting developers ("hey, we get to do the same job we did ~10 years ago over again for more $$$, and it's an emergency, so we can charge usurious rates!")... it's a pretty big hit.
Larger businesses can pretty much stomach this hit, because they have reserve.
Small and medium businesses, however, are cash flow-based, and have to have money on hand. Which is why they were still using XP in the first place: they needed to be able to do incremental replacement a a survival requirement, since they pretty much can only afford to replace a machine every month or so, rather than fully re-buying, or even replacing the 1/3 or 1/5 of their machines all at the same time.
Sadly, you can't glue things together to make a vertical market app with all the software living on the back end (as it does with Office365), which makes that a completely unsuitable alternative.
So:
(1) Microsoft missed the boat on Office365 because that's not actually how 50% of the people use their products: they don't use them stand-alone, or at least, they *also* use them as components in vertical market systems, if they use them standalone too.
(2) Microsoft missed the boat on bringing people forward onto the new OS, due to inability to use a new OS system as a fungible replacement for a Windows XP system; they really needed this to keep working as they EOL'ed XP.
(3) They assumed their primary market was education/corporate, rather than SMB (Small and Medium Businesses); most estimates put the Microsoft market at 72%+ SMB, since bigger businesses have options, which are generally corporate mandates. These include Lotus's suite, Google Docs, and other options, up to and including in-house supported OpenOffice, among others.
So you're really quite wrong about them doing well.
They've been trying to reinvent themselves on a lot of fronts (tablet OS company, Phone OS company, SAS company, Cloud provider company, etc., but they lack a really coherent vision for their existing base market which they could then leverage to enter and successfully compete in their new frontiers (either via "whole product" offerings, or via "Halo effect" offerings).
So, I think Microsoft must turn their ship, or they're in for some really rough times ahead.
It's one thing to shoot yourself in the foot once, perhaps even twice; it's another thing entirely to reload and continue firing.
You are likely an idiot if you do not get yourself and your kid vaccinated, if you can tolerate the vaccine.
If your kid is immunocompromised, they will either (A) not vaccinate or (B) be very careful about vaccination.
If they go route 'B', then they will do single dose vaccines, rather than combinations (i.e. separate measles vaccine, rather than MMR), and they will do an antibody titer (a relatively expensive test) to verify a primary, rather than secondary, immune response to the disease. A secondary response is generally a response to the IgE response, and is likely to make your child *more* sick than if they had not been immunized. Then, if necessary, they will immunize until they get a primary response. Your child will not be one of the ones with unknown vaccine effectiveness.
You definitely want an immunity to measles. There's up to an 8% chance of untreatable encephalitis from measles (the protein coat makes most broad spectrum antivirals ineffective as a stop-gap), after which your child will at a minimum be brain damaged, if they do not end up brain dead or actually dead.
So get vaccinated. Get your kid vaccinated.
Just don't do it for Measles or Diphtheria out of some misguided sense of social responsibility.
In almost all the outbreaks that have occurred in the USA, the source was someone who traveled to or from a region where the population there was generally not vaccinated and that had the inevitable high rates of infection and transmission.
Thank God we don't have people flooding into the U.S. who are undocumented to have been vaccinated, and who do not participate in local vaccination programs for fear of deportation; thank God those people do not make up 8.1% of the population, since herd immunity for the most virulent strain of measles requires 94% of people be vaccinated!
Slashdot really needs a sarcasm tag...
However, all of those outbreaks extinguished immediately. The reason they extinguished was due to herd immunity.
In New Jersey, anyway, the reason the Pertussis outbreak at the magnet school (which was caused by an infected teacher who had travelled abroad, and brought the disease back for "Show And Tell"), the reason in burnt out was they sent everyone home for 1.5X the contagious period. In other words, it was voluntary quarantine, not herd immunity.
Which does beg the question of why were are not giving immunity testing by titer to teachers and other school personnel likely to be primary vectors, and vaccinating them repeatedly until they test immune. It's much more likely for a teacher to take a trip to a disease hot zone like the Philippines or Thailand than it is for a student, after all.
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To be fair, 90% OSes in the world are Windows. What do you think would happen if 90% OSes were Linux (besides my complete satisfaction)?
Then the year of the Linux desktop would be 3 years away instead of 5 years away.
Yes, because VCs are so impressed by a good-looking laptop. I mean, forget the numbers on the spreadsheet, this candidate has an ugly Thinkpad.
VCs tend to be impressed by polish.
Typically, if you take an idea to a VC, unless you have some IP tied up, or there is significant work entailed to get to a first mover advantage, they are already thinking about one of their go-to teams that can take your idea and run with it. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen, and beyond that, the only thing that matters is an ability to execute, and that means they are not investing in your product, per se, they are investing in your market segment and the team.
Usually, they will prefer their team to the team that you have put together because they are familiar with their team. Their team has a track record, and they have an existing relationship with the teams they typically work with on new projects. It's one of the reasons there are so many serial entrepreneurs, and so few new entrepreneurs that make it past the friends-and-family or angel funding stage of their startup into series A financing.
If you are a new entrepreneur, or someone with a proven technical track record, who has never been on "The VP Gravy Train", unless you are already profitable (and are therefore trying to give away a very large chunk of your company and control of your board of directors, in exchange for capital to bring your venture to scale), you need every advantage going into the meeting that you can lay your grubby little hands on.
Packaging of yourself is therefore almost as important as the content of the presentation itself.
So yeah, they're "impressed by a good looking laptop", if that's part of the overall package impression that convinces them that your team is the right team, and that they won't need to replace you, the founder, with one of their go-to CEOs, or one of their VPs they've been cultivating to take a CEO position at some point in the future, and "Gee, I think it's time we gave Frank a shot at a CEO position; what do you think, other managing partners of this large venture fund?".
If you are a technical person, you will be lucky to last in the C suite much beyond (mostly) losing control of your board of directors, which is going to happen some time between closing Series A and closing Series B. Typically, your series B will be contingent on you losing control to the point that they can replace you at any point their confidence falters, and they decide "It's time to bring in adult supervision".
PS: One of the reasons there are so few women in higher up positions is that the women haven't taken their paydays from being an early employee, and acted as their own angel investor in a new company that has been successful. You kind of have to be a gambling addict to get to that point in the game, so that you are a known quantity. That said, technical companies in the Fortune 500 have done 2X as well asall of the other Fortune 500 companies, in terms of percentages, so tech is about 2X as egalitarian as any other industry in that regard.
Electronics is low margin because of commodity parts and consumer demand for interoperability. Think, microwaves and computers. You don't need a special brand of microwave to heat Packaged Dinner Product.
Low margin vs. High demand
There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.
When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.
Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.
The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.
I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.
It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.
or just watched "keeping up with the kardashians"...
The differential diagnosis: If you are also bleeding from your ears, it was the Kardashians.
Once the data leaves your network and makes its way onto theirs, its no longer your own traffic. Why people feel like they are entitled to abuse the system that the rest of us rely on is beyond me. This country has really gone downhill.
Probably because we don't feel that it's abuse; once we've paid for a certain diameter of pipe to the rest of the Internet, it's their job to let us send or receive whatever we want over that pipe, without editorializing.
Of course, if they really want to editorialize, and demonstrate a technical ability to do so, I'm going to hold them legally responsible any time my 13 year old son is successful in accessing porn over this pipe that they are supposedly capable of exercising content control on, since by *not* exercising control on that particular content, they are responsible for the porn.
How did the American Indians detect the Europeans?
I suggest we *not* do that...
Also how did the Poles detect the Mongols?
Let's *not* do that, either...
are located in Hillsboro Or. Also located there is a major part of their design group and process science.
Almost all of the microarchitecture changes and die shrinks come out of Haifa, Israel. Not Hillsboro. The Itanium came out of Santa Clara, California. Willamette came out of Hillsboro (the Pentium 4, which was arguably a pretty big failure, with 35%-50% of the 115W power consumption lost to leakage power). There was also the well-know SMT issue, where the dispatch ordering was (effectively) random, meaning the IPC between SMT cores never really scaled very well. Prescott never really scale above about a max of 3.8GHz, when it was (in theory) designed to allow derivatives of the microarchitecture to run at speeds of up to 10GHz.
Generally, most of the machine-building companies I've worked for (Apple, Google) tend to skip the Hillsboro designs for anything but prototypes, and they wait for the every other year die shrink out of Haifa for the actual shipping product.
Living here I can say I am frustrated by how much the local big businesses get big tax breaks simply by occasionally threatening to leave now and then. Nike, Intel, and now these datacenters. The rest of us, and other employers foot the bill to cover their shirked responsibilities to their communities.
You mean the "shirked responsibilities" that would be being paid to the lowest bidder in Topeka or Wichita Kansas, rather than in Oregon, were it not for the tax breaks?
The people who build data centers don't care where they are located physically; they care about taxes, land costs, and power costs. If power were more reliable in Kabul Afghanistan, and the local government a bit more stable, they'd be located there, instead.
Reminds me of the data center shit that happened up in Quincy Washington, Sure, they created a few jobs, but it also made the land and homes so expensive that the locals couldn't afford to buy and live there any longer...
Because everyone wants to live next door to a data center because of all the jobs there, or why? Why would it be more expensive to live near a data center, than not, if there were no economic benefit to doing so?
Not really. Most of the materials are imported and configuring them is very quick. Your "lots of jobs" = not local.
If only there were some way to make Oregon economically desirable to businesses...
There's also the reality that those tax incentives could be spent on things like education that would bring more jobs to the area on a per dollar basis. That's the real issue with subsidizing datacenters that employ basically nobody locally.
So you can give the tax breaks, and have the data center built locally, and employ construction workers, ongoing site maintenance workers, etc., which you don't count as employees because they are contractors, yet they have jobs.
Or you can *not* give the tax break, and have a vacant lot, as the data center is built in Kansas or wherever instead.
Pick one.
Instead we must think of population control. this planet can't susta more than 2.7-3 billion Homo sapiens any way.
Sure it can.
It *does*, therefore it can. Proof by example.
I know, right? I mean, look at all the young people that moved to SoCal during the glory years of the dotcom boom.http://i.imgur.com/Hwpiv6W.jpg
Where are the big arrows coming into California from Mexico, China, and Russia, among other countries? That map seems incomplete.
Exactly. That was my take-away as well.
(1) Get a huge government contract
(2) Ignore robots.txt
(3) Profit!
I'm jelly, I always wanted to try this. High end FPGA?
There are commercial emulation chips available, used for testing everything up to the flat panel. You could build your own FPGA if you wanted to, I suppose.
Well, then, very clearly, we need to start giving government contracts to your brother in law's company which manufactures deep oceanic temperature sensors. You know, "just to be sure"...
Think "anomalously long backscatter times"/"anamalous diffusion of backscatter" for energetic cosmic rays. You can refine the specificity for the location utilizing synthetic aperture techniques, but you end up with very thin stripes for each pass over the scanned region. I *did* say "long term observation"...
Note that the Fukushima detectors are a pretty long ways away from the reactor itself, as well as the containment vessel, compared to straight tomographic techniques used to examine cargo containers, say in Oakland.
NB: These days, it's pretty obsolete as a technique, and we use neutrino tomography instead, but there are enough "dark spots" that it's not possible to cover everywhere with the technique. Interestingly, Vernor Vinge "outed" the neutrino tomography technique in his novel "The Peace War", although his details are a bit hand-wavy and wrong.
Generally we don't have to worry about being shot down when we fly a constellation of high altitude aircraft over North Korea without their permissions in order to create a synthetic aperture large enough to be meaningful, so it's OK for filling in the dark spots there. You wouldn't want to run the same flights over Russia, even at 90,000 feet these days.
PS: In case you missed it, there was a story the other day bemoaning the lack of noble gas detectors to detect by-products of fission plant operation, but they also wanted some better generalized climatological models (read: give us lots of money for supercomputer hardware to play with) in order to determine the origin, should noble gasses be detected with their new detectors.
#1 Can't give MMR below 12 months in age. Period. Exception: infants traveling internationally warrant the risk.
Most day cares don't take infants, and when they do, they usually don't take anyone else. The day cares I went to didn't want you until you were potty trained.
This article is specifically about Silicon Valley Day Care.
Which I think is probably code to "The day care next door to Marisa Mayer's office", but even if it's not, in the companies I've worked in in SV, they were a substitute for a babysitter to get mothers and fathers back to work as quickly as possible following a birth, without paying them enough to be able to afford a nanny. They took kids from a few weeks old up to age 4.
Totally ignoring the fact that for all middleware-based vertical market software (which is, in effect, "all of it", mostly written in dialects of VB to glue a bunch of Microsoft and third party DLLs together) it's an added "rewrite everything from scratch" overhead, it ignores buying cycle.
But I have stuff like that running on my Windows 7 amd64 system on a regular basis. WTF are you on about?
You can have stuff *like that*, but it's not going to be the same stuff, it's going to be *new stuff* written in VB.Net or C#.Net.
This would be fine, if anyone had liked some of the intermediate Windows releases, and gone forward on those platforms, instead of running more XP systems because they freaking *HATED* "ME", "Vista", which is why they never achieved sufficient market share to displace XP. This should have been obvious when everyone avoided "200" and instead went for XP when it came out.
Instead, the vertical market code is still living on the old VB platform on XP.
While VB6.0 apps *can* run on Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows 8 platforms, most *don't*.
First of all, the Server 2008 platform is irrelevant for vertical market apps, since they run client side, not server-side.
Second, you can't use Office 2000 as an installed application on the new platforms, you have to use Office 2011 and 2013, and the DLL components that make up the components you'd use in the vertical market app are sufficiently different from one another that you'd have to pic running one or the other anyway. Which would be fine, except Office 2013 requires Windows 7 or above to install. So basically, if I want new Office, I have to tke new Windows, and vice versa.
This means that you have to do a re-buy, or you have to have two versions of your vertical market application.
To add insult to injury, it's practically impossible to force the newer versions of Office to use the older file formats at the DLL level, without reselecting the settings every time you save a document. So if your vertical market app has to communicate data between an older and a newer workstation instance, even if you invest in rewriting you vertical market app from scratch to move off VB 6.0, it's most non-interoperable without a bunch of "Can you re-save that document in the old office format so I can use it? Thanks.".
At a minimum, if I'm a small business with 20 employees, and I want to add 3 more, I am pretty much screwed, unless I've done one of two things:
(1) Pre-bought a bunch of XP systems and stuck them in a closet in case I wanted to hire someone, or someone's computer dies
(2) Paid to move everyone forward onto at *least* Windows 7 and Office 2003, and paid to have my middleware rewritten.
Even so, there are a lot of third party DLL components that simple *are not available* as 64 bit versions. So I m either SOL, or paying to duplicate their functionality, as well, in order to get my dentists office / collections agency / non-profit call center / POS systems / whatever vertical market app, back online.
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So like I've said: they've missed the boat for about 70% of their market, which simply can not afford to redo everything all at once.
They *REALLY* needed to deprecate the OS and the applications components - Office - and the applications platform - VB 6.0 - *separately* so that SMBs could do overlapping buy-forward, which is more in line with the fact that they are constrained in their instantaneous purchasing power by being in a cash flow business model, but relatively unconstrained in their over time purchasing power, for the same reason.
Frankly, they *could* have maintained component binary binary compatibility, while deploying a new office.
The actual order should have been:
(1) New windows with VB 6.0 and Office binary backward compatibility
(2) Deprecate XP and force people OS-forward with (relatively) little pain
(3) New Office with component binary backward compatib
Back before DVD drm was generally broken with DeCSS, I had my own mechanism for breaking DVDs It was cumbersome but it worked.
Me too. I electrically emulated a LVDS flat panel and reconstructed the high resolution image from the LVDS.
Works great for BluRay encryption, and for projectionist monitor screens in movie theaters, too, since the flat panels themselves are *after* the content decryption.
We've been using muon detectors for over 40 years to detect nuclear-related activities in various countries, including reactor installation, stockpiling, bomb-building, and so on. One of the reasons for the ability to move MX missiles around underground was so that long term muon detector observation by the Soviets could not pinpoint the location of the missiles.
Personally I think that Microsoft has been doing quite well lately, but no matter what they do, people seem to find something wrong with it.
Microsoft has gotten themselves in trouble.
One of the big things they did wrong was kill binary compatibility for software running on XP at the same time they killed XP.
This effectively forces a re-buy of all your hardware, because any new hardware you buy can no longer run the old software.
Totally ignoring the fact that for all middleware-based vertical market software (which is, in effect, "all of it", mostly written in dialects of VB to glue a bunch of Microsoft and third party DLLs together) it's an added "rewrite everything from scratch" overhead, it ignores buying cycle.
Typical accounting for computer hardware is an accelerated depreciation schedule, which is a 3 year schedule. This effectively means that every year, you intend to replace 1/3 of your computer systems (without an accelerated depreciation, as allowed by the IRS, this turns into a 5 year schedule, which means 1/5th or 20% get replaced).
The changes in binary compatibility at the same time the OS changed means that you have to do a full re-buy to handle adding people, or simple because old systems need replaced.
While this is great for Microsoft (they get a 3X - or 5X - bump in the number of licenses the y get to sell for everything), and it's great for computer vendors (same bump, in order to sell hardware capable of running the new OS), and it's great for vertical market consulting developers ("hey, we get to do the same job we did ~10 years ago over again for more $$$, and it's an emergency, so we can charge usurious rates!") ... it's a pretty big hit.
Larger businesses can pretty much stomach this hit, because they have reserve.
Small and medium businesses, however, are cash flow-based, and have to have money on hand. Which is why they were still using XP in the first place: they needed to be able to do incremental replacement a a survival requirement, since they pretty much can only afford to replace a machine every month or so, rather than fully re-buying, or even replacing the 1/3 or 1/5 of their machines all at the same time.
Sadly, you can't glue things together to make a vertical market app with all the software living on the back end (as it does with Office365), which makes that a completely unsuitable alternative.
So:
(1) Microsoft missed the boat on Office365 because that's not actually how 50% of the people use their products: they don't use them stand-alone, or at least, they *also* use them as components in vertical market systems, if they use them standalone too.
(2) Microsoft missed the boat on bringing people forward onto the new OS, due to inability to use a new OS system as a fungible replacement for a Windows XP system; they really needed this to keep working as they EOL'ed XP.
(3) They assumed their primary market was education/corporate, rather than SMB (Small and Medium Businesses); most estimates put the Microsoft market at 72%+ SMB, since bigger businesses have options, which are generally corporate mandates. These include Lotus's suite, Google Docs, and other options, up to and including in-house supported OpenOffice, among others.
So you're really quite wrong about them doing well.
They've been trying to reinvent themselves on a lot of fronts (tablet OS company, Phone OS company, SAS company, Cloud provider company, etc., but they lack a really coherent vision for their existing base market which they could then leverage to enter and successfully compete in their new frontiers (either via "whole product" offerings, or via "Halo effect" offerings).
So, I think Microsoft must turn their ship, or they're in for some really rough times ahead.
It's one thing to shoot yourself in the foot once, perhaps even twice; it's another thing entirely to reload and continue firing.
Well, that's one way... to try to make Google+ relevant to a larger community where it's not currently relevant.
Vaccination works.
You are likely an idiot if you do not get yourself and your kid vaccinated, if you can tolerate the vaccine.
If your kid is immunocompromised, they will either (A) not vaccinate or (B) be very careful about vaccination.
If they go route 'B', then they will do single dose vaccines, rather than combinations (i.e. separate measles vaccine, rather than MMR), and they will do an antibody titer (a relatively expensive test) to verify a primary, rather than secondary, immune response to the disease. A secondary response is generally a response to the IgE response, and is likely to make your child *more* sick than if they had not been immunized. Then, if necessary, they will immunize until they get a primary response. Your child will not be one of the ones with unknown vaccine effectiveness.
You definitely want an immunity to measles. There's up to an 8% chance of untreatable encephalitis from measles (the protein coat makes most broad spectrum antivirals ineffective as a stop-gap), after which your child will at a minimum be brain damaged, if they do not end up brain dead or actually dead.
So get vaccinated. Get your kid vaccinated.
Just don't do it for Measles or Diphtheria out of some misguided sense of social responsibility.
In almost all the outbreaks that have occurred in the USA, the source was someone who traveled to or from a region where the population there was generally not vaccinated and that had the inevitable high rates of infection and transmission.
Thank God we don't have people flooding into the U.S. who are undocumented to have been vaccinated, and who do not participate in local vaccination programs for fear of deportation; thank God those people do not make up 8.1% of the population, since herd immunity for the most virulent strain of measles requires 94% of people be vaccinated!
Slashdot really needs a sarcasm tag...
However, all of those outbreaks extinguished immediately. The reason they extinguished was due to herd immunity.
In New Jersey, anyway, the reason the Pertussis outbreak at the magnet school (which was caused by an infected teacher who had travelled abroad, and brought the disease back for "Show And Tell"), the reason in burnt out was they sent everyone home for 1.5X the contagious period. In other words, it was voluntary quarantine, not herd immunity.
Which does beg the question of why were are not giving immunity testing by titer to teachers and other school personnel likely to be primary vectors, and vaccinating them repeatedly until they test immune. It's much more likely for a teacher to take a trip to a disease hot zone like the Philippines or Thailand than it is for a student, after all.