Science is about exploring the frontier of knowledge. On the frontier, no one knows what to expect, so almost anything can be surprising.
In contrast, engineers (and inventors) are all about turning knowledge into usable products. There's less surprise there because the basic science is already worked out.
I totally agree. The California High Speed Rail Project from LA to San Francisco is *currently being built* and is estimated to cost $96 billion, not $6 billion. If we could cancel that and switch to hyperloop for only $6 billion, that would be a huge cost savings, and it would be significantly faster.
Forget Mars, this thing is economical here.
I have the Samsung ATIV Book 7 (formerly called the Series 7). It's pretty similar in size and weight to a 13" MBP, and it's incredibly upgradeable for an Ultrabook. Here's a nice link:
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Series-7-Ultra.htm
You can easily upgrade the RAM and SSD. You should be able to upgrade the battery, though I've never done that myself. Also, the European version of the computer can be had with a discrete graphics card if that's your thing.
By the way, the screen, speakers, and touchpad on the ATIV Book 7 are all fantastic. It's a high-quality laptop.
Moreover, the Sony Vaio Pro has a higher-resolution screen than the MBA, which puts the Vaio at a disadvantage (because it drains the battery a little faster). So with highly-optimized Windows drivers, the battery life looks the same or even better for Windows.
The comparison to ARM is just stupid. Obviously battery life is better on ARM, at the cost of much lower performance. That's true for Windows and OS X both.
Since when is a legal brief by one of the litigating parties an unbiased source of "facts"? Everything in this post and in the link is stated as fact, yet all of it comes from a single legal brief filed by Google.
I thought/.'s standards for journalism were a little higher.
My thoughts were with the original poster, there is a huge (actually Huge, wait I mean HUGE) problem with plagiarism/fake results/fraud/etc. in China. There have been cases of scientists who were otherwise well-regarded getting away with this for years, before the fraud was revealed. Have Dr. Pan's results been consistently replicated by others in the past, whatever his "status" in the profession?
It seems like this "theft" is being blown way out of proportion, for several reasons:
1. The device in question is a cell phone.
2. The finder seems to have made several attempts to contact the apparent owner to return the device, and was told it wasn't theirs.
3. When the owner of the device did surface, the phone was immediately returned.
Regardless of what happened between #2 and #3 above, would the police normally waste any time on an incident like this?
Let me try to pre-emptively respond to some objections. Regarding #1, the only reason this particular cell phone was "valuable" was because of who it belonged to (Apple). If it had turned out to have been a fake, it would have been virtually worthless. So is this really a huge felony? Here's another example: Suppose the device in question had been a t-shirt (value $10), lost by some celebrity (say Brittney Spears). Of course, the t-shirt can be sold for outrageous sums of money on eBay or wherever, if it can be determined that the shirt is genuine. Is it a felony to sell the shirt? Is it really that big a deal? If the shirt was promptly returned to Brittney as soon as she came forward to claim it, would the police be giving this any attention at all?
I second Maelstrom, I always loved this game. It's Asteroids on steroids--modern graphics and sound effects, extra bonus targets, multiplayer capabilities, etc. Runs great on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.
The original poster is right--AMD was originally naming the Athlons after muscle cars: Mustang and Thunderbird, obviously, but there was also a "Spitfire" and a "Corvette"--see, for example this article on Cnet. They made a deliberate switch to horses. My impression was that they did this because of copyright/trademark infringement issues. If that's the case, how are "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" going to fare any better--won't they just have to change the name again?
As for the argument that different products can have the same name, I think the hurdle is higher than most people think. For example, in the mid-90's Chevrolet was sued over the "Beretta" moniker by Beretta USA (a handgun manufacturer), and the lawsuit was successful enough that Chevy abandoned the name. Beretta USA argued that Chevy was using the power and speed associated with its Beretta trademark to boost the sales of its cars.
A few papers have been written on the subject in the academic economics community (I'm an economist by profession). Statistically, these are the best and most rigorous analyses I've seen. I think there's also a tendency to be more unbiased because 1) the authors are academics, and don't answer to a particular lobbyist group, 2) they are typically focusing on the statistical methods employed, and gun control is partially an application to illustrate the method, and 3) publication in a refereed academic journal signals that it has undergone some anonymous peer review, and faces a much higher chance of being rejected if it is strongly partisan.
Doing a search on Econlit, I find the following published in top journals:
1) Duggan, Mark. "More Guns, More Crime" Journal of Political Economy 109 (5), October 2001, pp. 1086-1114. Somebody cited a working version of this paper below. I've read this article and it is well done.
2) a symposium on this subject at The American Economic Association Annual Meeting in 1998, consisting of 4 short papers. They were published in
American Economic Review 88 (2), May 1998, pp. 458-479. These articles did not undergo anonymous peer review, although they did undergo editorial review and represent about 8 different authors (writing in pairs of 2) which were solicited by the conference organizer. Presumably they have some diversity of opinion on the subject.
Some academic institutions have acces to JSTOR, which has the American Economic Review symposium articles available for download.
Most people will have to go to a university library to get these references.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is about exploring the frontier of knowledge. On the frontier, no one knows what to expect, so almost anything can be surprising. In contrast, engineers (and inventors) are all about turning knowledge into usable products. There's less surprise there because the basic science is already worked out.
I totally agree. The California High Speed Rail Project from LA to San Francisco is *currently being built* and is estimated to cost $96 billion, not $6 billion. If we could cancel that and switch to hyperloop for only $6 billion, that would be a huge cost savings, and it would be significantly faster. Forget Mars, this thing is economical here.
This seems like a huge omission. It's hard to think of a more influential computer game.
Apple Newton???
I have the Samsung ATIV Book 7 (formerly called the Series 7). It's pretty similar in size and weight to a 13" MBP, and it's incredibly upgradeable for an Ultrabook. Here's a nice link: http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Series-7-Ultra.htm You can easily upgrade the RAM and SSD. You should be able to upgrade the battery, though I've never done that myself. Also, the European version of the computer can be had with a discrete graphics card if that's your thing. By the way, the screen, speakers, and touchpad on the ATIV Book 7 are all fantastic. It's a high-quality laptop.
Moreover, the Sony Vaio Pro has a higher-resolution screen than the MBA, which puts the Vaio at a disadvantage (because it drains the battery a little faster). So with highly-optimized Windows drivers, the battery life looks the same or even better for Windows.
The comparison to ARM is just stupid. Obviously battery life is better on ARM, at the cost of much lower performance. That's true for Windows and OS X both.
Since when is a legal brief by one of the litigating parties an unbiased source of "facts"? Everything in this post and in the link is stated as fact, yet all of it comes from a single legal brief filed by Google. I thought /.'s standards for journalism were a little higher.
My thoughts were with the original poster, there is a huge (actually Huge, wait I mean HUGE) problem with plagiarism/fake results/fraud/etc. in China. There have been cases of scientists who were otherwise well-regarded getting away with this for years, before the fraud was revealed. Have Dr. Pan's results been consistently replicated by others in the past, whatever his "status" in the profession?
CNet has a nice summary of the main issues: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20003539-37.html
It seems like this "theft" is being blown way out of proportion, for several reasons:
1. The device in question is a cell phone.
2. The finder seems to have made several attempts to contact the apparent owner to return the device, and was told it wasn't theirs.
3. When the owner of the device did surface, the phone was immediately returned.
Regardless of what happened between #2 and #3 above, would the police normally waste any time on an incident like this?
Let me try to pre-emptively respond to some objections. Regarding #1, the only reason this particular cell phone was "valuable" was because of who it belonged to (Apple). If it had turned out to have been a fake, it would have been virtually worthless. So is this really a huge felony? Here's another example: Suppose the device in question had been a t-shirt (value $10), lost by some celebrity (say Brittney Spears). Of course, the t-shirt can be sold for outrageous sums of money on eBay or wherever, if it can be determined that the shirt is genuine. Is it a felony to sell the shirt? Is it really that big a deal? If the shirt was promptly returned to Brittney as soon as she came forward to claim it, would the police be giving this any attention at all?
I say no.
I second Maelstrom, I always loved this game. It's Asteroids on steroids--modern graphics and sound effects, extra bonus targets, multiplayer capabilities, etc. Runs great on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.
The original poster is right--AMD was originally naming the Athlons after muscle cars: Mustang and Thunderbird, obviously, but there was also a "Spitfire" and a "Corvette"--see, for example this article on Cnet. They made a deliberate switch to horses. My impression was that they did this because of copyright/trademark infringement issues. If that's the case, how are "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" going to fare any better--won't they just have to change the name again?
As for the argument that different products can have the same name, I think the hurdle is higher than most people think. For example, in the mid-90's Chevrolet was sued over the "Beretta" moniker by Beretta USA (a handgun manufacturer), and the lawsuit was successful enough that Chevy abandoned the name. Beretta USA argued that Chevy was using the power and speed associated with its Beretta trademark to boost the sales of its cars.
A few papers have been written on the subject in the academic economics community (I'm an economist by profession). Statistically, these are the best and most rigorous analyses I've seen. I think there's also a tendency to be more unbiased because 1) the authors are academics, and don't answer to a particular lobbyist group, 2) they are typically focusing on the statistical methods employed, and gun control is partially an application to illustrate the method, and 3) publication in a refereed academic journal signals that it has undergone some anonymous peer review, and faces a much higher chance of being rejected if it is strongly partisan.
Doing a search on Econlit, I find the following published in top journals:
1) Duggan, Mark. "More Guns, More Crime" Journal of Political Economy 109 (5), October 2001, pp. 1086-1114. Somebody cited a working version of this paper below. I've read this article and it is well done.
2) a symposium on this subject at The American Economic Association Annual Meeting in 1998, consisting of 4 short papers. They were published in American Economic Review 88 (2), May 1998, pp. 458-479. These articles did not undergo anonymous peer review, although they did undergo editorial review and represent about 8 different authors (writing in pairs of 2) which were solicited by the conference organizer. Presumably they have some diversity of opinion on the subject.
Some academic institutions have acces to JSTOR, which has the American Economic Review symposium articles available for download. Most people will have to go to a university library to get these references.