Honestly, who here would have updated Win98 if the OS had actually been stable. The day MS produce a stable, secure OS is the day their OS business dies. So where's the business case to actually fix the problems?
No, its just the day that Microsoft has to actually start innovating their OS product.
As to the business case, I'd suggest MSFT employee morale. People there would often like to be on more "exciting" projects involving new development. This is not practical of course due to the massive load of bugs in the system.
The real issue is that MSFT needs to kill the Windows product and start over. Not tomorrow or anything, but like in 2015. Vista should be the last system with a Windows heritage. MSFT should work to squish all the bugs and make sure the system is easily virtualized.
In the meantime they should start work on an entirely new OS. One without all the backwards compatible cruft. One that integrates some of the things they had to cut out of Vista in its core. I think some of the core concepts in Plan 9 are ready for wider deployment. Core integration of a relational file system, with extensive support for metadata is essential, as the number of files and objects in a system jump into the millions. So is core support for distributed computing. You should be able to plug a computer into the LAN and have it close to instantly available to applications on "your" system for storage, computation and human interfaces (display, audio, keyboard etc.).
Money is not zero-sum, just because some CEO gets a lot of money doesn't mean I get less.
In my formulation, there are three basic types of games. Zero Sum, Infinite Sum and Finite Sum.
Conservation of Matter and Energy is a zero sum game. If there is a fixed sum of cash in a pile on the table, the division is a zero sum game. (The gains of each of the players is exactly offset by the loss of the "piles" cash.)
In an infinite sum game, no matter how much you take from the pile on the table there is always enough for anyone to take as much as they like.
The exchange of knowledge, information and ideas approaches an infinite sum game. Note that p2p file sharing falls into this category.
Most real world situations are Finite Sum games. Looking closer at the p2p example above... there is an opportunity cost for using p2p filesharing: You have to pay for bandwidth and you have to use some or all of that bandwidth for this one task as opposed to others. There are other costs, for example storage, which must be both increased and maintained. (You have to have enough disk space, and you can't share or download if the drives are failing/failed.)
Companies are also Finite Sum. They start with assets. You labor and create new assets. These are used in economic transactions, usually for money. (i.e. SOLD) The difference is profit.
Given any amount of profit, division of the profit may be considered as a short time horizon zero sum game.
So, that is a long winded and abstract way of saying that if a CEO makes $53 million dollars, the company has 53 million dollars less to pay other employees and to reinvest in operations.
The essential argument is that paying a CEO so much more than average employees doesn't properly value everybody's contribution to the creation of profit. It significantly overvalues this one person, the CEO, in comparison to everyone else.
Goldman's CEO, in this case, earned 0.9% of Goldman's total net income. There are 22400 employees at Goldman's. On average each of them is responsible for 0.0045% of the work done, or on average $249000 worth of work. Right now, based on pay, the CEO is 200 times more effective than the average worker at Goldman's. I might be convinced that he is superhuman and thus responsible for perhaps 20 times the average contribution... but certainly not 200 times.
If he is 20 times more effective than average, then he'd earn about 5 million. The average employee would earn an additional bonus of about $2000. That $2000 means far more to a secretary making $30K than the extra 48.4 million means to the CEO.
But what about all of the cool things we miss out on that those "tens of thousands of engineers" could make or invent if they weren't coming up with new ways to kill people?
Don't kid yourself. We basically don't have more engineering and science jobs in our economy.
Many of us here are engineers or scientists. If defense scientists and engineers suddenly stopped working defense then we'd all face more competition for jobs, meaning less pay. Also, a lot of us would end up at Best Buy or some other dead end place fighting with high school kids for jobs where our education and experience don't matter. Sure some of us, being otherwise unemployed, would go out and form successful businesses of various sorts. Some... not all, probably not even a lot.
If NASA had Apollo levels of support again and a free technical hand, well then maybe a lot of those defense scientists and engineers could make a living without the DoD. I can tell you firsthand though that the work climate at NASA isn't at all what you saw in Apollo 13. It's way closer to the consultant... where everyone is trying to cover their ass. Not every place thank goodness, but far far too many.
Of course, that is essentially the same thing anyway: big science needs big government support.
OK, I'll bite. The problem: How does Google avoid delisting "well known" sites with valid content. Talk Origins is an example of such a site.
Google should whitelist certain sites if they meet a few criteria.
First off, it should be a valid site listed on Google for a "reasonable" period of time. Second, it should come up as a valid result for a "large" number of searches on relevant terms. Please note terms in quotations which Google could set to arbitrary values in order to make the whitelist manageable.
If there are other useful tests that can easily be automated or found by DB query insert them here.
Last someone at Google should be informed that a site has met the automatic criteria for whitelisting. A human should check it out, and if it appears to be a valid site etc etc. It is whitelisted probationally. 6 month human review... then a review only if there are complaints or if there is a problem leading to technical disqualification. These human reviews should be spread around the company so that employees that sit at a desk with net access might be asked to check out a site or two. Sort of like moderating on/. but with narrow criteria, "Is this site actually about what users directed to it are searching for?" Reviewers should be given the words and phrases which lead to search results which in turn lead to the site under review.
There are a lot of sites that Google could readily whitelist, like CNN, Yahoo, Google itself, Microsoft, Apple, Wikipedia... you get the point. A site like Talk Origins should fall into this category pretty quickly.
This is a relatively safe practice because spammers would have to post sites that had a long life on Google's index, attracted users searching for it, and passed two human checks. This is manageable because a very small percentage of sites fall into this category. Many if not all of these would be more profitable as legitmate sites than link farms.
First stab at the issue with just a few seconds of thought. I'll let the people getting paid figure out the sordid details. (You know like how do you verify adult sites for inclusion in the listings at work?)
If a police office can see me with his eyes then these things can serve as an accurate record of what happened near him without further invasion of my privacy. These things may see me occasionally... but they monitor the officer all the time. Police need to be watched more than almost any regular citizen. Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos and all that.
If the original record is relatively tamper proof (Ha!) this could serve as a good recourse against police by citizens who are wrongfully accused or otherwise abused.
It will of course aid police in their investigations, but I like this two edged sword.
Oh, those 40's were great too. Lots of good gossip. Macbeth killed Duncan. William the Conqueror took Normandy. There was that business with Zoe, Michael, Theodora and Constantine in the Eastern Roman Empire. Oh, and don't get me started on the Simonious Popes.
TFA says digital cameras, and then talks about 30Hz. Display syncing is not an issue for still applications- only for video.
What this really means is that you will be able to get crystal clear standard definition screens on your camcorder.
Of course its a bit late. A lot of the cameras now coming onto the market are shooting HDV and soon AVC HD- many in progressive formats and without the frame sync issues of SD video. So... they can include the older 60Hz LCD's and use frame doubling in the framebuffer. They can also use higher resolution small LCD's.
Still this is a great technology, and being able to do this should help Samsung's institutional knowledge about LCD's in general. I hope to see some of these devices used in LCD field production monitors of varying sizes.
In most colleges and universities Wikipedia is not considered a suitable source for research, even as a jumping off point, because its information cannot be verified.
Many academic facilities make this argument, and it is without credence. Unless of course you choose to redefine "research."
When using an encyclopedia, a student or researcher is supposed to use it as a basis of understanding. Then using that basis they can begin their research. One of the most important aspects of this research is finding original sources and examining them to verify the information.
In other words- you are never supposed to really believe an encyclopedia. It is always a starting point and nothing more.
Now in my day to day life, I am often satisfied with the information presented in an encyclopedia in its entirety. As an intelligent and thoughtful reader I can usually detect biases, and simply understanding the bias is enough for me without necessarily seeing the other side.
This is vastly different than academic study and research.
Wikipedia does in fact cite sources. The quality of those sources varies wildly, many being nothing more than biased web sites themselves. Still if you begin your research with Wikipedia, look through whatever sources it cites and do an independent search for your own primary and secondary sources... like you should with ANY encyclopedia, then you will have a solid basis for whatever purpose you may need to use the information for.
You may also want to know that if all you want is a jpg, OS X has a built in screen grabber. You can find it under the services menu in your application menu. Also Shift+Command+4 gives you a crosshair cursor you can use to select a screen region for immediate capture.
The chicks are geeks. Some of them are probably reading this now, and hoping to have a chance to check it out. Many will understand MIDAS well enough to build their own.
Basically these guys have designed a perfect solution for their environment. It might not work that well at another school, but at MIT they have it made... for a while at any rate. Like most geeks the chicks at MIT will want to see upgrades, new versions and bugfixes.
First off... some people do not want a game console. I am sure you know the type: They think games are silly and won't consider anything that might be related.
Second, there are some nice features in dedicated players:
Front panel display Backlit remote high quality upscaling of DVD content high quality scaling to formats other than the discs native format. lower physical noise levels lower signal to noise ratio more picture adjustments/calibration settings.
Basically the PS 3 will be great when your Blue Ray content matches your TV's native resolution. Unfortunately that will be very rare.
A lot of Blue Ray movies will be 1920x1080p on disc. Will your TV handle that ? If you have a TV that is 1366x768 progressive, like most people who have HDTV's, every movie you watch will be scaled, as that resolution doesn't correspond to ANY HD or SD format.
The scaler in the PS2, Xbox and Xbox 360 is pitiful. A $50 USD DVD player outperforms all of them with standard DVD. There is no reason to expect any better from the PS3.
Unless you have one of the new Grand Wega's or the other 1080p TV's most Blue Ray content will look noticeable worse than a dedicated player. Even if you do have such a TV Blue Ray content that is 720p on disc will look worse than any dedicated player.
Now- I happen to be buying both a 1080p TV and a PS3 sometime this year. (probably both together in the fall.) This is less of an issue. I do however expect to get a dedicated Blue Ray/HD-DVD combination player once they fall under $300 USD.
You could also buy a higher end A/V amplifier, many of which include high quality image scaling hardware.
The point is that you do actually get something for your money. (Provided of course that you are shopping intelligently.)
By the holiday shopping season (ugh.. pains me to type that.) we may see a couple of low end blue ray and HD-DVD players, but I don't think so. All the manufacturers are looking forward to the high margin early adopter money too much. Still, despite my opinion, don't rule it out.
Expect to see a huge raft of cheaper Blue-Ray players after the holiday season.
In fact- if the PS3 doesn't sell well enough expect to see a PS2.5 or somesuch. basically a PS3 with a DVD instead of Blue-Ray. It would play PS2 games at enhanced resolution (like you see with Halo 2 on Xbox 360) and PS3 games that fit on DVD media. It will be very aggressively priced- probably debuting competitive with a price reduced Xbox 360. (Yeah I expect MSFT to drop the price after the holidays, like say in February 2007.)
I don't know how useful this is in the game realm where things have to be realtime, but it could definitely be very useful for film and video work. I am eager to try it out.
Please reread your post. At best you are guilty of abysmal writing. This being/. I might believe that ordinarily, but I am not so sure in your case.
"The only reason I'm not more against the NSA program is that I'm convinced that if the people arguing against it are this stupid, then maybe it's not such a bad idea after all."
According to your reply to me, your original statement conflated slashtrolls, which were not mentioned by name, with "people arguing against it", 'it' being NSA wiretapping.
I believe you knew exactly what you were writing and that you were dismissing people opposed to NSA wiretapping as stupid and naive.
Your own writing then makes the same mistake you accuse me of: You read your own ideas into what the grandparent (great grandparent at this point I suppose) wrote. All they wrote was a link the that famous Franklin quote, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Namely you argue the straw man that the GP argued that we can not give up any liberty for any safety. Despite the fact that the GP only posted a link to the quote, you ranted on about what Franklin really meant.
Well, we all agree about what Franklin meant. That is why he included the word 'essential' when he said it. Since we must make an assumption regarding the GP's intent, we must assume, given no other context, that he meant exactly what Franklin meant when he said that. If the GP meant something else, then they should have said so.
By redefining the GP's meaning to suit you then arguing against that with another interpretation of the same words you have constructed a textbook straw man argument.
As to the rest of my post- I am arguing against your stated position, "The only reason I'm not more against the NSA program is..." and "...then maybe it's not such a bad idea after all." I understand you mean to be 'tongue in cheek' with the last bit, but I don't think its funny.
I am arguing that you should be very very disturbed by this and fully, vehemently opposed. I argue that we are giving up essential liberty. I made the further point that this NSA wiretapping is in violation of the First and Fourth amendment. That a very serious set of accusations, and a momentous concern regarding our liberty and safety. Not from terrorists, but rather from the US government.
It seems to me you are not prepared to see cogent arguments. I am prepared to be convinced otherwise, but you have not done a decent job to the present.
As to responding "blow by blow", most of what I wrote is essentially just information regarding my situation, and now yours regarding these wiretaps and electronic monitoring. To sum up: because you chose to communicate with me, all your electronic communications and those of whom you communicate with are now being scrutinized by the NSA. For no reason other than my having an Arabic last name. I am not sure its worth a response, you either believe me or you do not. I can't support it better in any case.
I can assure you I am being factually monitored, but I can't prove why I am being monitored. Maybe it isn't my last name- maybe I do have some terrorist tie I don't know about, perhaps in the second or third degree, or even further. I don't think so. I think its my last name.
That underlines another problem, under the current regime nobody will ever know why I am being monitored. There is no court, no judge, no testimony. It is not reasonable, and none of you should ever go through it.
You are making a type of argument known as a logical fallacy. In this case the colloquial name is a straw man.
Basically, there are plenty of people out there who have more rational arguments against many of the erosions of our rights.
By the same light, you make it sound as though all, or at least the majority of, people who "support" rights erosion, as exemplified by the NSA wiretapping, have cogent arguments. The vast majority do not. Most people are going along because someone told them it was a good idea- that is a LACK of reasoning. Many go along because of abject fear of terrorism, also irrational. As pointed out obesity is a FAR deadlier problem in America.
So, since obesity is at least an order of magnitude more likely to kill you than terrorism, would you support NSA wiretapping to find when and where fat people are planning to meet and eat ? Perhaps we should start tracking contact between citizens and known chefs.
Read my userid. A Ibrahim. Nevermind that I am so patriotic I bleed red, white and blue. Nevermind that I gladly bled some of that blood for this nation, and that I'd do it again. My last name is Ibrahim therefore I "must be" a potential terrorist.
The NSA monitors my communications all the time, because it says Ibrahim. That means they monitor all the people who communicate with me. This includes you at this moment. How do you like that ? Do you understand the problem now ? Do you still think it is rational ?
What's that you say ? You think it may be unfair in my case, but still a rational precaution ?
How about when you consider that, because you communicated with me, they will now monitor all the people YOU communicate with. So, because you talked to me, all your family and friends are getting monitored. If you make the mistake of mentioning this conversation or any of its elements, like NSA, terrorist or my name, whoever you mention it to will now be monitored and so will the people they communicate with. Monitoring is also triggered if you happen to disagree with the current administration or mention the President or his cabinet. Would you like to impose an NSA monitoring regime on your friends and family because you communicated with me? If not you have to be careful what you say to whom.
Reread the last sentence. Now you have to worry about the consequences of what you talk about and who you talk with. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the abridgment of free speech.
That is un-American in the extreme. When Reagan talked about the "Evil Empire" one of the first thoughts that came to mind is how repressed the people in the Soviet Union were because their speech was monitored. Well now my speech is being monitored by my government for political reasons. Now, thanks to this exchange of ideas SO ARE YOURS.
Our nation is becoming the enemy we fought so bitterly for so long.
I firmly believe that one of the reasons people sheepishly go along with this tripe is that they do not understand its extent... most importantly they do not understand that THEY can be easily included for even the most trivial acts. They think they have nothing to hide. Of course they do. It doesn't matter if its a dirty phone conversation with your significant other, or a copy of DeCSS - everybody is hiding something. Not necessarily because its wrong or illegal, just because its PRIVATE.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." - The Constitution of the United States of America, 1st Amendment.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - The Constitution of the United States of America, 4th Amendment.
I liked it better when my government followed these laws.
Ugh... I tried reposting listing anonymously for a higher rating, but I forgot that posting as AC removes karma and logged in bonus... so here I go being TREBLY redundant.
For the record, if I had mod points I would have modded GP up as "Informative"
Last login: Thu Apr 20 18:20:18 on ttyp1 Welcome to Darwin! [athena:~] aibrahim% ls -l/System/Library/Filesystems/ total 8 drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 Apr 4 11:14 AppleShare drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Apr 2 2005 URLMount lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 49 Nov 4 02:45 afpfs.fs ->/System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpfs.kext drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Feb 24 22:08 cd9660.fs drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 26 2005 cddafs.fs drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Nov 4 02:45 ftp.fs drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Nov 4 02:45 hfs.fs drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 26 2005 msdos.fs drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 2005 nfs.fs drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Sep 4 2005 ntfs.fs drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 26 2005 smbfs.fs drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Apr 29 21:33 udf.fs drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 20 2005 ufs.fs drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 26 2005 webdav.fs
Fnkmaster's point is better thought out than you give him credit for, though he expresses it pitifully. So pitifully, that I- the lord of piteous writing- have seen fit to "clarify."
His point in bringing up his MBA is not some sort of appeal to false authority, but rather to point out that someone as unqualified as the poster has a measure of understanding of the matter. He is trying to set a minimum standard. Pointing out that the poster has an MBA is an excellent way to assure us he has no real expertise in the matter.
He further goes on to state that Wal-Mart is highly likely to employ people better qualified than himself. He bases this argument on the notion that it is normal to build a competent marketing and PR department- something an MBA should be qualified to comment on. Hiring real experts to cover your ass is something I think they take a full semester course on.
Now once such experts were hired, no doubt they would engage in as many activities in support of Wal-Mart as possible. Some fancible people call it "justifying your position." I like to say that they don't want anyone to realize they're just cruising the net wasting the day, waiting to get their very high pay.
Lastly, like most people, such experts would understand that, "getting caught is bad." Meaning that they probably did their best to not commit edits while logged in as "Wal Mart Employee #HJ56879878" or whatever.
Now as you asserted he has no evidence for any of the above, but it is not as unreasonable as you suggest. This is/. so we can't place any undue burdens- like evidence gathering- on posters. Otherwise who'd post ? It merits further consideration. The mere fact that another MBA came up with the scheme so quickly means that a similar parallel thought process is like to have occurred amongst Wal-Marts MBA collection, lending credence to the whole thing.
Powers of 10 ? Sure, but we are dealing with real materials. Real water has a density of 915kg/m^3 in solid form (aka ice) at 0C.
As I said in the original post, we don't have to deice the entire wing, just the leading edges and a foot or two back. For a 747 the total is ~160m^2. So yeah- it is a huge overestimate in our workload.
I did forget heat of fusion, so call it a car battery.
Its reasonable to consider raising the temp only 1 degree for two reasons. Heat of fusion is >> heat to change temp. More seriously, if there were reason to believe they had to change the temp that much they'd deice more often, that's why I came up with the ludicrous notion of deicing 1000 times a flight. That once every 18s on a 5 hour flight.
I used surface areas according to where I looked up the info, but even if I used planforms it would be fine. This is/. not Boeing. Plane wings are pretty thin. Once you do the math right there are fudge factors aplenty elsewhere. Its close enough.
Despite my 'hideously' wrong math my point remains cogent- this is feasible.
Lastly 'innacurate' is supposed to be inaccurate. Get it ? Humor, in this case self effacing. I thought the silly concept of a floral bonnet (Firefly reference to boot) just might have clued you in. I use OS X and Safari. Safari underlines incorrectly spelled words- its pretty hard to make a mistake like that.
Well, thanks and you were right up to a point. Of course the point is rather moot, as I said before they have already flight tested the system. (Read Petrenko's page for what little there is.)
Let's forget converting units and start again.
541.2m^2*0.000003=0.0016236m^3
The density of "solid water" at 0C is 915kg/m^3. Reference
That means we have 1.485kg of solid water to turn to ice. That's 1.485kcal or 6.217kJ.
As someone else pointed out I forgot heat of fusion. That works out to ~497kJ. So, our total energy for a de-icing cycle is 503.3kJ.
If we actually feel the need to de-ice the plane 1000 times in a NYC to LA flight of about five hours... well that's once every 18 seconds. I picked it to be pie in the sky high. I don't think planes of any sort run that many de-icing cycles. In any case 503MJ isn't unreasonable for a 747 at all. A 747 uses 2.5TJ in a 5 hour flight. Yeah- terajoules. What's a few megajoules one way or another ?
We could just burn fuel from the aircraft to charge a capacitor, since aviation fuels range from 33-37MJ/liter. We could consider a system that combines that with batteries too. A truck battery holds ~5MJ, so you could use those for a few de-icing cycles. D-Cell's was wrong but still, even a Cessna can do the job of deicing a 747 wing.
Energy and power are not what will keep this off new planes. Cost of refits may keep it off old planes.
I picked a 747 on purpose. It has a huge wing area. Remember that a plane really only needs to deice the leading edges during flight. The wing area of the 747 dwarfs the area of the leading edges of the wing. The total leading edge area, going back about two feet for a 747-400 is about 160 m^2.
For comparison The total wing area (both wings planform top and bottom) for a Cessna 140 is ~32m^2. Thats less than an sixteenth of the area we were calculating.
32m^2*0.000003m*915kg/m^3=0.087kg of ice, that requires 367J+29.1kJ to overcome heat of fusion... 29.47 kJ.
That can easily be handled by a car battery, and in a pinch we can use a few D-Cells. Oh, and we are again deicing the whole wing, not just the leading edges.
The real point was and remains that this is entirely feasible. The GP was wrong regarding its central point, which was that the concept was entirely infeasible due to energy restrictions.
I can see that being an ass generates a pile of interest. It unfortunately doesn't engender any actual reasoning, just more "thinking." You people are intellectually lazy.
Maybe I should try leading by example instead.
The key is that the GP says power, but he is really talking about energy budgets. This thing needs power over a very short time. Not a huge pile of energy.
How much energy... How about a calculation... oh dear is that sort of thing even possible on/. ? I'll try anyways. One caveat, whenever I trot out numbers: I *insist* you double check before believing them.
Lets pretend we are de-icing the entire surface area of a 747-400D, 541.2m^2. This is a huge overestimate of our work loads, because we really only have to defrost the leading edges and a foot or two back.
The C|Net article linked says he only needs to melt a micron or two for it to work, so we'll aim for three microns, or 3*10^-6 meters.
Ladies and gentlemen the total volume of water we are talking about over that vast area with the assumptions I have made is 1.6 mm^3. That is only about.146 grams of water.
That means we must expend.146 calories people. That's.611 joules.
You think a plane of any sort can spare lets say 611 joules, enough energy to de-ice the wings of a 747 a thousand times a flight ?
If you really think they don't have the energy budget, maybe we can just stick a D-Cell battery on board. Of course that's overkill because a D-Cell stores 10000 joules.
What about efficiency ? According to Petrenko's site at Dartmouth the system is wastes almost zero heat energy because of the short time over which it operates. Basically there is no time for it to go anywhere else.
You think we can somehow draw such a tiny amount of energy on even the flimsiest Cessna ? If not, I'm not getting into the damn thing.
In any case, it turns out Goodrich Aerospace has had good results flight testing the system on propeller driven aircraft, and is preparing to flight test it on jets. No details I got that from Petrenko's page at Dartmouth too.
Are you all starting to understand how cool this technology is ?
Well- I think you are both missing each others points.
Mac users typically multitask rather differently than Windows users. I am not talking about technical or power users, just "normal" users.
My experience is that most home Windows users barely multitask at all. 3-4 browser windows (not even tabbed since they are typically using IE.), a word processor and whatever they use for email. If they do something else, like photo management they tend to shut down their other applications. A few more advanced users will run iTunes or Winamp most of the time.
Office users use a bit more, usually either Excel or Powerpoint and a more specialized application, but those special apps are migrating to the web. Also they tend to have heavier email clients- like say Notes.
Add to this the stuff users don't know they are using, like AV software that scans every document before opening.
Windows users routinely quit programs, thus freeing and reallocating memory.
Mac users multitask differently. In fact, I'd argue they multitask in the same way a user accustomed to Linux does typically.
Typically you'll see 3-4 browser windows, each containing multiple tabs, their word processor (usually Word), Adobe Reader or Preview, Quicktime Player, some email program, a calendar application, iPhoto or iTunes and a few trivial apps of interest to the user. Oh, and 3-6 "widgets" which can be considered as browser instances.
They keep them open until something crashes or an Apple update "forces" a reboot.
When they decide to do something more serious, say running iMovie or Garageband, they don't shut down their other applications.
Remember I am not talking about "power" users or professionals. To contrast, I have a different set up running concurrently at this moment:
Shake, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Modo, Lightwave Layout & Hub, Soundtrack Pro, Safari (5 windows ~5 tabs each window), Firefox (1 window, 2 tabs), SubethaEdit (6 docs), Word (2 docs), Excel (no docs), iCal, iPhoto, iTunes (not playing), Mail, iChat AV, Quicktime, Photoshop, Toast, VNC, 3 Terminal windows, Cyberduck (FTP app), Compressor and Qmaster (distributed frame rendering for Shake and Compressor)
Presently I am rendering a flipbook in Shake, wasting time on/. and playing video in Motion. The rest of the stuff is idle for the moment. (Rendering a flipbook takes a good chunk of CPU.)
Typically if I were working on the same tasks on a Windows machine right now I'd be running Avid Xpress Pro, Photoshop and if desperately needed Combustion. I might have Thunderbird or AIM running, if I were expecting to hear from a client.
The upside of a Windows machine is that I wouldn't dare run a browser unless the project demanded it, and thus wouldn't be wasting life posting on/.
Humor aside, its a different pattern of multitasking. People keep a lot of apps open on OS X, to view different output or to change source materials for my Final Cut project.
I would point out that this is an OS issue, not a hardware issue- well not entirely. My Dual G5 has more RAM than Win XP 32bit supports and that helps. 64 bit helps shake, but makes no difference to anything else on my proc list.
If the apps were available for a 64-bit Linux you could achieve this readily. Windows XP 64 doesn't do a good job, and the apps aren't present anyway- but at least it won't crack like Win XP 32 bit will.
A lot of the points the parent makes are not worthy of any response as they seem more rooted in bigotry than reason.
1) After you teach the Indian company how to write good software for your industry, a relative of the owner of the Indian company will go into business in competition with you.
This is true in pretty much any business relationship. Whomever you teach how to do a thing for your profit will try to figure out ways of doing that same thing for their profit.
3) All products require innovation. Indian programmers are not usually innovative; it's not a quality of the Hindu culture.
This is one of those bigotry motivated points.
I know enough Indian people to say this is false. You don't have to believe me though- take a look at the list of Nobel laureates. Just wanted to refute one in case anybody was wondering. 4) No matter what the project plans say, programming requires decision-making that affects the long term health of your product and your company. How often does programming require far-reaching decision-making? Possibly as often as once per hour.
The general point here is completely valid, and people will have to learn how to evaluate companies for their work performance. Switching industries- who would you rather hire to do special effects for your eature film: Zenera (my company) or Industrial Light and Magic ?
Well, ILM has earned their reputation through lots of successful high profile projects. You can look at a ton of their work. You'd be smart to go with ILM unless your project is small and you can afford a risk, then you can risk a small unknown studio like Zenera.
My pricing reflects that- I am much cheaper per man hour than ILM. That's my company giving prospective customers a valid business reason to choose us. It decreases risks in case of failure and costs in case of success.
The same is true in any sort of outsourcing- I talked about reputation, but a management team must examine who they are outsourcing to, and their prior work product, in order for the move to be effective.
5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you.
If the parent means to refer to the lack of materialistic motive in their culture, I fail to see the validity of the point.
In general, Indian culture values education. That is valuable- especially in a knowledge industry like programming.
Mostly however I think this "point" is, again, motivated by bigotry.
6) There's a big overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. On the other hand, programmers in the U.S. may spend a lot of time playing video games rather than learning social skills; there is a big barrier between someone with low social skills and the normal world, also.
This sounds like a point, but ends up being a non-issue. Indians, or any other foreign contractors will have to expend their own internal efforts on these issues. Native contractors are likely to use that as leisure time. Both are "wastes" from a productivity standpoint.
(I know there is a point here about leisure time being restorative and allowing people to work more effectively when they are on task- but there are some studies that indicate that what is really needed is time away from the "primary" task, a secondary task is often just as effective as a pure leisure time. Let the shrinks sort it out.)
7) You may not notice the low quality of your product until it is too late. That's why you outsourced, isn't it?: You wanted to avoid giving attention to a critical area.
Anyone who outsources their critical business processes is a fool.
There are valid reasons for outsourcing, most of which boil down to focusing on where your expertise is, and letting other experts do what they are good at for you.
Using Apple as an example, they outsource almost all of their manufacturing and assembly. They focus on design and engineering. (Software and hardware)
Slashdot Mirror
The Black Saturn's.
We're really small. Our music sucks you in, and we're growing.
Honestly, who here would have updated Win98 if the OS had actually been stable. The day MS produce a stable, secure OS is the day their OS business dies. So where's the business case to actually fix the problems?
No, its just the day that Microsoft has to actually start innovating their OS product.
As to the business case, I'd suggest MSFT employee morale. People there would often like to be on more "exciting" projects involving new development. This is not practical of course due to the massive load of bugs in the system.
The real issue is that MSFT needs to kill the Windows product and start over. Not tomorrow or anything, but like in 2015. Vista should be the last system with a Windows heritage. MSFT should work to squish all the bugs and make sure the system is easily virtualized.
In the meantime they should start work on an entirely new OS. One without all the backwards compatible cruft. One that integrates some of the things they had to cut out of Vista in its core. I think some of the core concepts in Plan 9 are ready for wider deployment. Core integration of a relational file system, with extensive support for metadata is essential, as the number of files and objects in a system jump into the millions. So is core support for distributed computing. You should be able to plug a computer into the LAN and have it close to instantly available to applications on "your" system for storage, computation and human interfaces (display, audio, keyboard etc.).
Money is not zero-sum, just because some CEO gets a lot of money doesn't mean I get less.
In my formulation, there are three basic types of games. Zero Sum, Infinite Sum and Finite Sum.
Conservation of Matter and Energy is a zero sum game.
If there is a fixed sum of cash in a pile on the table, the division is a zero sum game. (The gains of each of the players is exactly offset by the loss of the "piles" cash.)
In an infinite sum game, no matter how much you take from the pile on the table there is always enough for anyone to take as much as they like.
The exchange of knowledge, information and ideas approaches an infinite sum game. Note that p2p file sharing falls into this category.
Most real world situations are Finite Sum games. Looking closer at the p2p example above... there is an opportunity cost for using p2p filesharing: You have to pay for bandwidth and you have to use some or all of that bandwidth for this one task as opposed to others. There are other costs, for example storage, which must be both increased and maintained. (You have to have enough disk space, and you can't share or download if the drives are failing/failed.)
Companies are also Finite Sum. They start with assets. You labor and create new assets. These are used in economic transactions, usually for money. (i.e. SOLD) The difference is profit.
Given any amount of profit, division of the profit may be considered as a short time horizon zero sum game.
So, that is a long winded and abstract way of saying that if a CEO makes $53 million dollars, the company has 53 million dollars less to pay other employees and to reinvest in operations.
The essential argument is that paying a CEO so much more than average employees doesn't properly value everybody's contribution to the creation of profit. It significantly overvalues this one person, the CEO, in comparison to everyone else.
Goldman's CEO, in this case, earned 0.9% of Goldman's total net income. There are 22400 employees at Goldman's. On average each of them is responsible for 0.0045% of the work done, or on average $249000 worth of work. Right now, based on pay, the CEO is 200 times more effective than the average worker at Goldman's. I might be convinced that he is superhuman and thus responsible for perhaps 20 times the average contribution... but certainly not 200 times.
If he is 20 times more effective than average, then he'd earn about 5 million. The average employee would earn an additional bonus of about $2000. That $2000 means far more to a secretary making $30K than the extra 48.4 million means to the CEO.
THAT is Income Inequality.
But what about all of the cool things we miss out on that those "tens of thousands of engineers" could make or invent if they weren't coming up with new ways to kill people?
Don't kid yourself. We basically don't have more engineering and science jobs in our economy.
Many of us here are engineers or scientists. If defense scientists and engineers suddenly stopped working defense then we'd all face more competition for jobs, meaning less pay. Also, a lot of us would end up at Best Buy or some other dead end place fighting with high school kids for jobs where our education and experience don't matter. Sure some of us, being otherwise unemployed, would go out and form successful businesses of various sorts. Some... not all, probably not even a lot.
If NASA had Apollo levels of support again and a free technical hand, well then maybe a lot of those defense scientists and engineers could make a living without the DoD. I can tell you firsthand though that the work climate at NASA isn't at all what you saw in Apollo 13. It's way closer to the consultant... where everyone is trying to cover their ass. Not every place thank goodness, but far far too many.
Of course, that is essentially the same thing anyway: big science needs big government support.
> I have two words for you: As long as you PowerPoint, you're all set.
>> That's a lot more than two words. Perhaps you should have used the preview button?
Never attended a presentation ? Thats actually a Powerpoint users notion of two words.
OK, I'll bite. The problem: How does Google avoid delisting "well known" sites with valid content. Talk Origins is an example of such a site.
/. but with narrow criteria, "Is this site actually about what users directed to it are searching for?" Reviewers should be given the words and phrases which lead to search results which in turn lead to the site under review.
Google should whitelist certain sites if they meet a few criteria.
First off, it should be a valid site listed on Google for a "reasonable" period of time. Second, it should come up as a valid result for a "large" number of searches on relevant terms. Please note terms in quotations which Google could set to arbitrary values in order to make the whitelist manageable.
If there are other useful tests that can easily be automated or found by DB query insert them here.
Last someone at Google should be informed that a site has met the automatic criteria for whitelisting. A human should check it out, and if it appears to be a valid site etc etc. It is whitelisted probationally. 6 month human review... then a review only if there are complaints or if there is a problem leading to technical disqualification. These human reviews should be spread around the company so that employees that sit at a desk with net access might be asked to check out a site or two. Sort of like moderating on
There are a lot of sites that Google could readily whitelist, like CNN, Yahoo, Google itself, Microsoft, Apple, Wikipedia... you get the point. A site like Talk Origins should fall into this category pretty quickly.
This is a relatively safe practice because spammers would have to post sites that had a long life on Google's index, attracted users searching for it, and passed two human checks. This is manageable because a very small percentage of sites fall into this category. Many if not all of these would be more profitable as legitmate sites than link farms.
First stab at the issue with just a few seconds of thought. I'll let the people getting paid figure out the sordid details. (You know like how do you verify adult sites for inclusion in the listings at work?)
than with fixed installations of cameras.
If a police office can see me with his eyes then these things can serve as an accurate record of what happened near him without further invasion of my privacy. These things may see me occasionally... but they monitor the officer all the time. Police need to be watched more than almost any regular citizen. Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos and all that.
If the original record is relatively tamper proof (Ha!) this could serve as a good recourse against police by citizens who are wrongfully accused or otherwise abused.
It will of course aid police in their investigations, but I like this two edged sword.
To answer the joking question...
XML = 1040
Oh, those 40's were great too. Lots of good gossip. Macbeth killed Duncan. William the Conqueror took Normandy. There was that business with Zoe, Michael, Theodora and Constantine in the Eastern Roman Empire. Oh, and don't get me started on the Simonious Popes.
TFA says digital cameras, and then talks about 30Hz. Display syncing is not an issue for still applications- only for video.
What this really means is that you will be able to get crystal clear standard definition screens on your camcorder.
Of course its a bit late. A lot of the cameras now coming onto the market are shooting HDV and soon AVC HD- many in progressive formats and without the frame sync issues of SD video. So... they can include the older 60Hz LCD's and use frame doubling in the framebuffer. They can also use higher resolution small LCD's.
Still this is a great technology, and being able to do this should help Samsung's institutional knowledge about LCD's in general. I hope to see some of these devices used in LCD field production monitors of varying sizes.
SD ain't dead yet.
Many academic facilities make this argument, and it is without credence. Unless of course you choose to redefine "research."
When using an encyclopedia, a student or researcher is supposed to use it as a basis of understanding. Then using that basis they can begin their research. One of the most important aspects of this research is finding original sources and examining them to verify the information.
In other words- you are never supposed to really believe an encyclopedia. It is always a starting point and nothing more.
Now in my day to day life, I am often satisfied with the information presented in an encyclopedia in its entirety. As an intelligent and thoughtful reader I can usually detect biases, and simply understanding the bias is enough for me without necessarily seeing the other side.
This is vastly different than academic study and research.
Wikipedia does in fact cite sources. The quality of those sources varies wildly, many being nothing more than biased web sites themselves. Still if you begin your research with Wikipedia, look through whatever sources it cites and do an independent search for your own primary and secondary sources... like you should with ANY encyclopedia, then you will have a solid basis for whatever purpose you may need to use the information for.
You may also want to know that if all you want is a jpg, OS X has a built in screen grabber. You can find it under the services menu in your application menu. Also Shift+Command+4 gives you a crosshair cursor you can use to select a screen region for immediate capture.
Dude... they go to MIT. Have you been there ?
The chicks are geeks. Some of them are probably reading this now, and hoping to have a chance to check it out. Many will understand MIDAS well enough to build their own.
Basically these guys have designed a perfect solution for their environment. It might not work that well at another school, but at MIT they have it made... for a while at any rate. Like most geeks the chicks at MIT will want to see upgrades, new versions and bugfixes.
As a bonus, add right-click (or whatever the hell you Mac people do).
Uh... right click ? Cause you know we have mice with more than one button and such. Default on newer desktop Macs.
In the event of a single button mouse, control-click emulates a right click.
Of course, someone pointed out at length that OS X is designed so that you don't need more than one mouse button- but some apps require it.
First off... some people do not want a game console. I am sure you know the type: They think games are silly and won't consider anything that might be related.
Second, there are some nice features in dedicated players:
Front panel display
Backlit remote
high quality upscaling of DVD content
high quality scaling to formats other than the discs native format.
lower physical noise levels
lower signal to noise ratio
more picture adjustments/calibration settings.
Basically the PS 3 will be great when your Blue Ray content matches your TV's native resolution. Unfortunately that will be very rare.
A lot of Blue Ray movies will be 1920x1080p on disc. Will your TV handle that ? If you have a TV that is 1366x768 progressive, like most people who have HDTV's, every movie you watch will be scaled, as that resolution doesn't correspond to ANY HD or SD format.
The scaler in the PS2, Xbox and Xbox 360 is pitiful. A $50 USD DVD player outperforms all of them with standard DVD. There is no reason to expect any better from the PS3.
Unless you have one of the new Grand Wega's or the other 1080p TV's most Blue Ray content will look noticeable worse than a dedicated player. Even if you do have such a TV Blue Ray content that is 720p on disc will look worse than any dedicated player.
Now- I happen to be buying both a 1080p TV and a PS3 sometime this year. (probably both together in the fall.) This is less of an issue. I do however expect to get a dedicated Blue Ray/HD-DVD combination player once they fall under $300 USD.
You could also buy a higher end A/V amplifier, many of which include high quality image scaling hardware.
The point is that you do actually get something for your money. (Provided of course that you are shopping intelligently.)
By the holiday shopping season (ugh.. pains me to type that.) we may see a couple of low end blue ray and HD-DVD players, but I don't think so. All the manufacturers are looking forward to the high margin early adopter money too much. Still, despite my opinion, don't rule it out.
Expect to see a huge raft of cheaper Blue-Ray players after the holiday season.
In fact- if the PS3 doesn't sell well enough expect to see a PS2.5 or somesuch. basically a PS3 with a DVD instead of Blue-Ray. It would play PS2 games at enhanced resolution (like you see with Halo 2 on Xbox 360) and PS3 games that fit on DVD media. It will be very aggressively priced- probably debuting competitive with a price reduced Xbox 360. (Yeah I expect MSFT to drop the price after the holidays, like say in February 2007.)
Luxology and Allegorithmic have this really cool concept. They are taking images and using them as the seeds to generate procedural texture shaders.
I can't explain it well enough, so take a look.
I don't know how useful this is in the game realm where things have to be realtime, but it could definitely be very useful for film and video work. I am eager to try it out.
Please reread your post. At best you are guilty of abysmal writing. This being /. I might believe that ordinarily, but I am not so sure in your case.
"The only reason I'm not more against the NSA program is that I'm convinced that if the people arguing against it are this stupid, then maybe it's not such a bad idea after all."
According to your reply to me, your original statement conflated slashtrolls, which were not mentioned by name, with "people arguing against it", 'it' being NSA wiretapping.
I believe you knew exactly what you were writing and that you were dismissing people opposed to NSA wiretapping as stupid and naive.
Your own writing then makes the same mistake you accuse me of: You read your own ideas into what the grandparent (great grandparent at this point I suppose) wrote. All they wrote was a link the that famous Franklin quote, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Namely you argue the straw man that the GP argued that we can not give up any liberty for any safety. Despite the fact that the GP only posted a link to the quote, you ranted on about what Franklin really meant.
Well, we all agree about what Franklin meant. That is why he included the word 'essential' when he said it. Since we must make an assumption regarding the GP's intent, we must assume, given no other context, that he meant exactly what Franklin meant when he said that. If the GP meant something else, then they should have said so.
By redefining the GP's meaning to suit you then arguing against that with another interpretation of the same words you have constructed a textbook straw man argument.
As to the rest of my post- I am arguing against your stated position, "The only reason I'm not more against the NSA program is..." and "...then maybe it's not such a bad idea after all." I understand you mean to be 'tongue in cheek' with the last bit, but I don't think its funny.
I am arguing that you should be very very disturbed by this and fully, vehemently opposed. I argue that we are giving up essential liberty. I made the further point that this NSA wiretapping is in violation of the First and Fourth amendment. That a very serious set of accusations, and a momentous concern regarding our liberty and safety. Not from terrorists, but rather from the US government.
It seems to me you are not prepared to see cogent arguments. I am prepared to be convinced otherwise, but you have not done a decent job to the present.
As to responding "blow by blow", most of what I wrote is essentially just information regarding my situation, and now yours regarding these wiretaps and electronic monitoring. To sum up: because you chose to communicate with me, all your electronic communications and those of whom you communicate with are now being scrutinized by the NSA. For no reason other than my having an Arabic last name. I am not sure its worth a response, you either believe me or you do not. I can't support it better in any case.
I can assure you I am being factually monitored, but I can't prove why I am being monitored. Maybe it isn't my last name- maybe I do have some terrorist tie I don't know about, perhaps in the second or third degree, or even further. I don't think so. I think its my last name.
That underlines another problem, under the current regime nobody will ever know why I am being monitored. There is no court, no judge, no testimony. It is not reasonable, and none of you should ever go through it.
You are making a type of argument known as a logical fallacy. In this case the colloquial name is a straw man.
Basically, there are plenty of people out there who have more rational arguments against many of the erosions of our rights.
By the same light, you make it sound as though all, or at least the majority of, people who "support" rights erosion, as exemplified by the NSA wiretapping, have cogent arguments. The vast majority do not. Most people are going along because someone told them it was a good idea- that is a LACK of reasoning. Many go along because of abject fear of terrorism, also irrational. As pointed out obesity is a FAR deadlier problem in America.
So, since obesity is at least an order of magnitude more likely to kill you than terrorism, would you support NSA wiretapping to find when and where fat people are planning to meet and eat ? Perhaps we should start tracking contact between citizens and known chefs.
Read my userid. A Ibrahim. Nevermind that I am so patriotic I bleed red, white and blue. Nevermind that I gladly bled some of that blood for this nation, and that I'd do it again. My last name is Ibrahim therefore I "must be" a potential terrorist.
The NSA monitors my communications all the time, because it says Ibrahim. That means they monitor all the people who communicate with me. This includes you at this moment. How do you like that ? Do you understand the problem now ? Do you still think it is rational ?
What's that you say ? You think it may be unfair in my case, but still a rational precaution ?
How about when you consider that, because you communicated with me, they will now monitor all the people YOU communicate with. So, because you talked to me, all your family and friends are getting monitored. If you make the mistake of mentioning this conversation or any of its elements, like NSA, terrorist or my name, whoever you mention it to will now be monitored and so will the people they communicate with. Monitoring is also triggered if you happen to disagree with the current administration or mention the President or his cabinet. Would you like to impose an NSA monitoring regime on your friends and family because you communicated with me? If not you have to be careful what you say to whom.
Reread the last sentence. Now you have to worry about the consequences of what you talk about and who you talk with. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the abridgment of free speech.
That is un-American in the extreme. When Reagan talked about the "Evil Empire" one of the first thoughts that came to mind is how repressed the people in the Soviet Union were because their speech was monitored. Well now my speech is being monitored by my government for political reasons. Now, thanks to this exchange of ideas SO ARE YOURS.
Our nation is becoming the enemy we fought so bitterly for so long.
I firmly believe that one of the reasons people sheepishly go along with this tripe is that they do not understand its extent... most importantly they do not understand that THEY can be easily included for even the most trivial acts. They think they have nothing to hide. Of course they do. It doesn't matter if its a dirty phone conversation with your significant other, or a copy of DeCSS - everybody is hiding something. Not necessarily because its wrong or illegal, just because its PRIVATE.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." - The Constitution of the United States of America, 1st Amendment.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - The Constitution of the United States of America, 4th Amendment.
I liked it better when my government followed these laws.
Ugh... I tried reposting listing anonymously for a higher rating, but I forgot that posting as AC removes karma and logged in bonus... so here I go being TREBLY redundant.
/System/Library/Filesystems/ /System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpfs.kext
For the record, if I had mod points I would have modded GP up as "Informative"
Last login: Thu Apr 20 18:20:18 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
[athena:~] aibrahim% ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 Apr 4 11:14 AppleShare
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Apr 2 2005 URLMount
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 49 Nov 4 02:45 afpfs.fs ->
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Feb 24 22:08 cd9660.fs
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 26 2005 cddafs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Nov 4 02:45 ftp.fs
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Nov 4 02:45 hfs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 26 2005 msdos.fs
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 20 2005 nfs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Sep 4 2005 ntfs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Mar 26 2005 smbfs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204 Apr 29 21:33 udf.fs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 20 2005 ufs.fs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Mar 26 2005 webdav.fs
Fnkmaster's point is better thought out than you give him credit for, though he expresses it pitifully. So pitifully, that I- the lord of piteous writing- have seen fit to "clarify."
/. so we can't place any undue burdens- like evidence gathering- on posters. Otherwise who'd post ? It merits further consideration. The mere fact that another MBA came up with the scheme so quickly means that a similar parallel thought process is like to have occurred amongst Wal-Marts MBA collection, lending credence to the whole thing.
His point in bringing up his MBA is not some sort of appeal to false authority, but rather to point out that someone as unqualified as the poster has a measure of understanding of the matter. He is trying to set a minimum standard. Pointing out that the poster has an MBA is an excellent way to assure us he has no real expertise in the matter.
He further goes on to state that Wal-Mart is highly likely to employ people better qualified than himself. He bases this argument on the notion that it is normal to build a competent marketing and PR department- something an MBA should be qualified to comment on. Hiring real experts to cover your ass is something I think they take a full semester course on.
Now once such experts were hired, no doubt they would engage in as many activities in support of Wal-Mart as possible. Some fancible people call it "justifying your position." I like to say that they don't want anyone to realize they're just cruising the net wasting the day, waiting to get their very high pay.
Lastly, like most people, such experts would understand that, "getting caught is bad." Meaning that they probably did their best to not commit edits while logged in as "Wal Mart Employee #HJ56879878" or whatever.
Now as you asserted he has no evidence for any of the above, but it is not as unreasonable as you suggest. This is
I answered most of your issues in another post.
/. not Boeing. Plane wings are pretty thin. Once you do the math right there are fudge factors aplenty elsewhere. Its close enough.
The highlights-
Powers of 10 ? Sure, but we are dealing with real materials. Real water has a density of 915kg/m^3 in solid form (aka ice) at 0C.
As I said in the original post, we don't have to deice the entire wing, just the leading edges and a foot or two back. For a 747 the total is ~160m^2. So yeah- it is a huge overestimate in our workload.
I did forget heat of fusion, so call it a car battery.
Its reasonable to consider raising the temp only 1 degree for two reasons. Heat of fusion is >> heat to change temp. More seriously, if there were reason to believe they had to change the temp that much they'd deice more often, that's why I came up with the ludicrous notion of deicing 1000 times a flight. That once every 18s on a 5 hour flight.
I used surface areas according to where I looked up the info, but even if I used planforms it would be fine. This is
Despite my 'hideously' wrong math my point remains cogent- this is feasible.
Lastly 'innacurate' is supposed to be inaccurate. Get it ? Humor, in this case self effacing. I thought the silly concept of a floral bonnet (Firefly reference to boot) just might have clued you in. I use OS X and Safari. Safari underlines incorrectly spelled words- its pretty hard to make a mistake like that.
Now if only I had mathcheck in the browser.
Well, thanks and you were right up to a point. Of course the point is rather moot, as I said before they have already flight tested the system. (Read Petrenko's page for what little there is.)
Let's forget converting units and start again.
541.2m^2*0.000003=0.0016236m^3
The density of "solid water" at 0C is 915kg/m^3. Reference
That means we have 1.485kg of solid water to turn to ice. That's 1.485kcal or 6.217kJ.
As someone else pointed out I forgot heat of fusion. That works out to ~497kJ. So, our total energy for a de-icing cycle is 503.3kJ.
If we actually feel the need to de-ice the plane 1000 times in a NYC to LA flight of about five hours... well that's once every 18 seconds. I picked it to be pie in the sky high. I don't think planes of any sort run that many de-icing cycles. In any case 503MJ isn't unreasonable for a 747 at all. A 747 uses 2.5TJ in a 5 hour flight. Yeah- terajoules. What's a few megajoules one way or another ?
We could just burn fuel from the aircraft to charge a capacitor, since aviation fuels range from 33-37MJ/liter. We could consider a system that combines that with batteries too. A truck battery holds ~5MJ, so you could use those for a few de-icing cycles. D-Cell's was wrong but still, even a Cessna can do the job of deicing a 747 wing.
Energy and power are not what will keep this off new planes. Cost of refits may keep it off old planes.
I picked a 747 on purpose. It has a huge wing area. Remember that a plane really only needs to deice the leading edges during flight. The wing area of the 747 dwarfs the area of the leading edges of the wing. The total leading edge area, going back about two feet for a 747-400 is about 160 m^2.
For comparison The total wing area (both wings planform top and bottom) for a Cessna 140 is ~32m^2. Thats less than an sixteenth of the area we were calculating.
32m^2*0.000003m*915kg/m^3=0.087kg of ice, that requires 367J+29.1kJ to overcome heat of fusion... 29.47 kJ.
That can easily be handled by a car battery, and in a pinch we can use a few D-Cells. Oh, and we are again deicing the whole wing, not just the leading edges.
The real point was and remains that this is entirely feasible. The GP was wrong regarding its central point, which was that the concept was entirely infeasible due to energy restrictions.
I can see that being an ass generates a pile of interest. It unfortunately doesn't engender any actual reasoning, just more "thinking." You people are intellectually lazy.
/. ? I'll try anyways. One caveat, whenever I trot out numbers: I *insist* you double check before believing them.
.146 grams of water.
.146 calories people. That's .611 joules.
Maybe I should try leading by example instead.
The key is that the GP says power, but he is really talking about energy budgets. This thing needs power over a very short time. Not a huge pile of energy.
How much energy... How about a calculation... oh dear is that sort of thing even possible on
Lets pretend we are de-icing the entire surface area of a 747-400D, 541.2m^2. This is a huge overestimate of our work loads, because we really only have to defrost the leading edges and a foot or two back.
The C|Net article linked says he only needs to melt a micron or two for it to work, so we'll aim for three microns, or 3*10^-6 meters.
Ladies and gentlemen the total volume of water we are talking about over that vast area with the assumptions I have made is 1.6 mm^3. That is only about
That means we must expend
You think a plane of any sort can spare lets say 611 joules, enough energy to de-ice the wings of a 747 a thousand times a flight ?
If you really think they don't have the energy budget, maybe we can just stick a D-Cell battery on board. Of course that's overkill because a D-Cell stores 10000 joules.
What about efficiency ? According to Petrenko's site at Dartmouth the system is wastes almost zero heat energy because of the short time over which it operates. Basically there is no time for it to go anywhere else.
You think we can somehow draw such a tiny amount of energy on even the flimsiest Cessna ? If not, I'm not getting into the damn thing.
In any case, it turns out Goodrich Aerospace has had good results flight testing the system on propeller driven aircraft, and is preparing to flight test it on jets. No details I got that from Petrenko's page at Dartmouth too.
Are you all starting to understand how cool this technology is ?
Maybe instead of "thinking" about the issue you should have checked out the company site where they have a video of ice being removed from an airfoil in a wind tunnel.
That seemed like a fairly conclusive demonstration of the practicality of this process for that purpose.
Now where is that damn pretty floral bonnet of mine...
Well- I think you are both missing each others points.
/. and playing video in Motion. The rest of the stuff is idle for the moment. (Rendering a flipbook takes a good chunk of CPU.)
/.
Mac users typically multitask rather differently than Windows users. I am not talking about technical or power users, just "normal" users.
My experience is that most home Windows users barely multitask at all. 3-4 browser windows (not even tabbed since they are typically using IE.), a word processor and whatever they use for email. If they do something else, like photo management they tend to shut down their other applications. A few more advanced users will run iTunes or Winamp most of the time.
Office users use a bit more, usually either Excel or Powerpoint and a more specialized application, but those special apps are migrating to the web. Also they tend to have heavier email clients- like say Notes.
Add to this the stuff users don't know they are using, like AV software that scans every document before opening.
Windows users routinely quit programs, thus freeing and reallocating memory.
Mac users multitask differently. In fact, I'd argue they multitask in the same way a user accustomed to Linux does typically.
Typically you'll see 3-4 browser windows, each containing multiple tabs, their word processor (usually Word), Adobe Reader or Preview, Quicktime Player, some email program, a calendar application, iPhoto or iTunes and a few trivial apps of interest to the user. Oh, and 3-6 "widgets" which can be considered as browser instances.
They keep them open until something crashes or an Apple update "forces" a reboot.
When they decide to do something more serious, say running iMovie or Garageband, they don't shut down their other applications.
Remember I am not talking about "power" users or professionals. To contrast, I have a different set up running concurrently at this moment:
Shake, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Modo, Lightwave Layout & Hub, Soundtrack Pro, Safari (5 windows ~5 tabs each window), Firefox (1 window, 2 tabs), SubethaEdit (6 docs), Word (2 docs), Excel (no docs), iCal, iPhoto, iTunes (not playing), Mail, iChat AV, Quicktime, Photoshop, Toast, VNC, 3 Terminal windows, Cyberduck (FTP app), Compressor and Qmaster (distributed frame rendering for Shake and Compressor)
Presently I am rendering a flipbook in Shake, wasting time on
Typically if I were working on the same tasks on a Windows machine right now I'd be running Avid Xpress Pro, Photoshop and if desperately needed Combustion. I might have Thunderbird or AIM running, if I were expecting to hear from a client.
The upside of a Windows machine is that I wouldn't dare run a browser unless the project demanded it, and thus wouldn't be wasting life posting on
Humor aside, its a different pattern of multitasking. People keep a lot of apps open on OS X, to view different output or to change source materials for my Final Cut project.
I would point out that this is an OS issue, not a hardware issue- well not entirely. My Dual G5 has more RAM than Win XP 32bit supports and that helps. 64 bit helps shake, but makes no difference to anything else on my proc list.
If the apps were available for a 64-bit Linux you could achieve this readily. Windows XP 64 doesn't do a good job, and the apps aren't present anyway- but at least it won't crack like Win XP 32 bit will.
A lot of the points the parent makes are not worthy of any response as they seem more rooted in bigotry than reason.
1) After you teach the Indian company how to write good software for your industry, a relative of the owner of the Indian company will go into business in competition with you.
This is true in pretty much any business relationship. Whomever you teach how to do a thing for your profit will try to figure out ways of doing that same thing for their profit.
3) All products require innovation. Indian programmers are not usually innovative; it's not a quality of the Hindu culture.
This is one of those bigotry motivated points.
I know enough Indian people to say this is false. You don't have to believe me though- take a look at the list of Nobel laureates. Just wanted to refute one in case anybody was wondering.
4) No matter what the project plans say, programming requires decision-making that affects the long term health of your product and your company. How often does programming require far-reaching decision-making? Possibly as often as once per hour.
The general point here is completely valid, and people will have to learn how to evaluate companies for their work performance. Switching industries- who would you rather hire to do special effects for your eature film: Zenera (my company) or Industrial Light and Magic ?
Well, ILM has earned their reputation through lots of successful high profile projects. You can look at a ton of their work. You'd be smart to go with ILM unless your project is small and you can afford a risk, then you can risk a small unknown studio like Zenera.
My pricing reflects that- I am much cheaper per man hour than ILM. That's my company giving prospective customers a valid business reason to choose us. It decreases risks in case of failure and costs in case of success.
The same is true in any sort of outsourcing- I talked about reputation, but a management team must examine who they are outsourcing to, and their prior work product, in order for the move to be effective.
5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you.
If the parent means to refer to the lack of materialistic motive in their culture, I fail to see the validity of the point.
In general, Indian culture values education. That is valuable- especially in a knowledge industry like programming.
Mostly however I think this "point" is, again, motivated by bigotry.
6) There's a big overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. On the other hand, programmers in the U.S. may spend a lot of time playing video games rather than learning social skills; there is a big barrier between someone with low social skills and the normal world, also.
This sounds like a point, but ends up being a non-issue. Indians, or any other foreign contractors will have to expend their own internal efforts on these issues. Native contractors are likely to use that as leisure time. Both are "wastes" from a productivity standpoint.
(I know there is a point here about leisure time being restorative and allowing people to work more effectively when they are on task- but there are some studies that indicate that what is really needed is time away from the "primary" task, a secondary task is often just as effective as a pure leisure time. Let the shrinks sort it out.)
7) You may not notice the low quality of your product until it is too late. That's why you outsourced, isn't it?: You wanted to avoid giving attention to a critical area.
Anyone who outsources their critical business processes is a fool.
There are valid reasons for outsourcing, most of which boil down to focusing on where your expertise is, and letting other experts do what they are good at for you.
Using Apple as an example, they outsource almost all of their manufacturing and assembly. They focus on design and engineering. (Software and hardware)