All 3 were founded substantially (or partially) by professors from Stanford University. Is there a pattern here? Everyone affiliated with Stanford University seems to have become rich (from stock options) at the expense of the common shareholder.
Okay, genius, how about Decru or VMWare? Those acquisitions averaged half a billion dollars each; Decru was last year AFAIK and VMWare was about four years ago. Also, Mike Farmwald was a Purdue professor, not a Stanford professor.
You're just jealous, must be a Cal grad, or worse, one of those Big 10 grads who hitchhikes into Silicon Valley looking to make it big. Also your naive view that the only stakeholders who matter are the common stockholders is funny, if not annoying. Just be glad they let you buy a ticket to ride.
Well, certainly Nintendo would owe it to shareholders to consider any offers.
Huh? This isn't Delaware corporate law -- Revlon doesn't apply. Do you not remember the Livedoor bruhaha from just a year ago?
This mindset which has gained traction in America over the past decade or so that the only stakeholders in a corporation that matter are shareholders is nauseous.
I'm not a manufacturing expert, but I would think that taking a machine from prototype to production would be more than a month's work. If they're still in development, then I would expect the shipping models to be *much* later than a month late.
The prototypes weren't finished the day before the show. You have nothing to suggest that the time between the prototypes being made and the final units being made is only a month. In fact, as you point out, the fact that manufacturing lead times are so long suggests that the prototypes were made weeks if not months before the show.
Another reason that the prototypes had lousy battery life may be that they were thoroughly abused during that time; fresh batteries might have better life even in the absence of any design changes. Given that Apple worked so hard to finish the products ahead of schedule, it's not very likely that the prototypes were used for just a couple hours a day of light use like most working laptops are.
Finally different materials may have been used to make the prototypes reflecting poorly on performance. It may be that the circuit board was not laid out in final form in the prototypes. There might be patch wires running all over the place inside to parts that won't be in the final product. Maybe certain power-saving features were disabled in that prototype. To use another example of how prototypes do not demonstrate final performance, recall that microprocessor prototypes run at low speeds because they have been patched by focused ion beams.
If Apple says the battery life will be similar, let's give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
The worst one I saw was the "do you get wetter running or walking." They even redid it after viewer letters and still got it wrong. They had two people run out in the rain in identical dry overalls, then re-weighed the overalls. It never even occurred to them that people run in different ways (e.g. hunched over or not, how high the legs are raised, etc.) -- they didn't control the main variable. No wonder they got garbage results. (They thought the problem was their indoors-rigged fake rain v. outdoors real rain -- sheesh; if anything the "fake rain" would be more consistent.)
There are other episodes where they test "Rare Event" and, as one would expect from a rare event, it fails to happen on command. The cell phone gasoline-vapor ignition is one that comes to mind. Or they test "Events That Take a Long-Ass Time," like soda eating through various objects. I have personally seen years-old old aluminum cans of Pepsi, stored indoors, that leaked from internal corrosion; maybe there's a new kind of liner now that prevents it or something, or maybe it just takes a long time. It didn't happen for them though, which makes it "busted." Good thing these guys don't design airplanes or spacecraft.
Special mention should be made of the episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances", which quite frankly are the best scifi episodes i've seen in years bar none, not only for the special effects but for the incredible writing and directing.
The "Everybody lives!" hokum ending of The Empty Child?? Most of the episode was interesting, but then they painted themselves into a corner. It could only have been more deux ex machina if he'd used a sonic screwdriver to fix everything; like the Star Trek TNG episodes where they used the transporter beam to wrap everything up in two minutes. Deux ex machina is not a good thing.
To be completely fair, CD-ROM and CD-AUDIO are very different formats. The CD-AUDIO format has a very basic error recovery layer in the protocol. The CD-ROM format has another layer of much more extensive error correction on top of that. CD-AUDIO, although digital, is not close to being "bit-perfect", because its generally assumed that you'd rather hear an interpolated sample instead of hearing an audible break as the CD player goes and tries to fix a read-error.
That's only true for Yellow Book Mode 1. Mode 2, like Playstation discs, doesn't use Layered ECC.
Intel had to license its chips to TWO outside sources, AMD and Harris. Harris supplied alternative chips up through the 286. Even then, like AMD, they would sell faster chips than Intel (up to 20 MHz 286 chips), because Intel was holding back the clocks of its older generation to not cannibalize sales while the second sources were not.
They have never completed a single project that has "run into the hundreds of thousands of lines of code." According to the article the most complex project they've done is the air traffic program CDIS, which has 197 kloc. The smallest is 10 kloc, and there's also one that's 27 kloc and 39 kloc. It's great that they're delivering bug-free executables, and we can all learn from them yadda yadda, but these are tiny projects. CDIS is midsize. The Mastercard program at 100 kloc is barely midsize.
Patent examiners have totally insufficient background in technical areas to evaluate them. They're not stupid people, not by any means, but we're talking about bachelors and masters degrees in the sciences with no research experience evaluating cutting-edge technology done by research phds. The fundamental problem is that the examiner is not up to date with what constitutes prior knowledge in a field. If you get a masters degree in computer science that's all very well, but it hardly brings you up to speed on the latest research, which is what is being patented.
The vast, vast majority of software patents I've seen don't need a Ph.D. to understand -- any difficulty in understanding comes only from the legalese they are written in. Moreover, very few software patent inventors actually have Ph.D.s. Most patents are not on some arcane variation of a data compression algorithm, but some basic user interface feature written by a couple of engineers at Adobe or IBM who got their bachelor's at a state university. (Remember the "Progress Bar" patent?) I should point out, also, that many entrepreneurs like "the boys" at Google, Yahoo!'s founders, and of course Bill Gates dropped out of their programs.
I'm going to assume that you have a Ph.D., and it is your belief that no mere mortal without those letters after his or her name can understand the "cutting-edge" research you are doing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you think that the reason that "obvious" patents are getting issued is that that the patent examiners are too uneducated to know if something is obvious. In fact that's not right as a legal matter. The obviousness standard almost requires the suggestion to be found in the literature; patent examiners (and judges) are not permitted anymore to simply say that an idea looks obvious and reject the patent.
Biotech patents, on the other hand, are often written by patent agents and lawyers with Ph.D.s, reflecting the higher level of knowledge required in practice. And while software patents can usually be had for under $10k, a biotech patent usually runs $50k. The only time Ph.D.s get involved in a software patent dispute is usually at trial, when some security-camera company claims that their patent covers computer network firewalls and the law firm has to hire a professor to tell the judge and the jury that the plaintiff is full of shit.
Not a Harvard Law grad I see
on
High-Tech RepoMan
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· Score: 3, Informative
Repo men, whatever you think about their profession, risk their lives daily in order to prevent auto theft, which in a way is what failing to pay car payments is.
You need to brush up on your secured credit law bucko. A car loan comes with a security interest in the car. The car belongs to the customer. In no way is failing to pay the loan back "theft," it is default on a loan or, at most, fraud if the person entered into the contract with scienter. It is no more theft than failing to pay one's credit card bill.
The holder of a security interest (the car lender, here) has the right to "self help" in the event of default to satisfy the debt. (He also has the right to proceeds if the owner sells the car to someone else.) This is a difference from "unsecured credit," the best example being a credit card. No matter how much money someone owes on a credit card, the repo man can't come to his house and take some stuff to settle the debt.
In other words, I would bet you five hundred dollars you could not find a single court case where someone was convicted of "theft" for failing to make his car payments. I'm glad you're a fan of the repo man, honorable work, blah blah blah, but like most slashdot posters you don't know much about the law.
Your loaded question implies there's a serious problem with the current system in the U.S, and that's just not the case. Fresh water is cheap and plentiful in the majority of the U.S. and that's not about to change any time soon.
Einstein, you might have noticed that the article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. There is a huge water problem throughout pretty much the entire state of California. The San Joaquin and its tributaries have been totally tapped out by Northern California, the excess of which is sent down a concrete-lined artificial river hundreds of miles long to Los Angeles and the rest of southern California.
There is basically no more water available in California, yet water use continues to grow. San Francisco is seriously considering building a desalination plant for its water system, which supplies the peninsula and much of the south and east bay including parts of San Jose. SoCal is already way beyond sustainable water usage.
The only way to mitigate water usage growth is through conservation.
Everyone forgets to mention Hubble's 'associate', Humason.
His work was what Hubble's Law is actually founded out, he and Hubble worked together, and he was the one that 'observed' the red shift.
He's been dead for thirty years. Do you think he's still bitter?
For example, Dayton, one of the largest distributors, charges $400.16 per Xbox 360 unit, $399 for a bulk order of 10-20, and minimal discounts (if any) for larger orders
Sure, but that mainly affects small shops. Larger companies like Best-Buy and Wal-Mart indeed net a few dollars on each unit. Sega's suggestion on the Saturn that since they were taking a loss per unit the retailers should too went over like a lead balloon.
Those numbers are clearly pulled out of some M-L analyst's ass. Don't you think it's funny how the ethernet costs exactly $5? Which is the same price as the USB? Those prices didn't come off any chipmaker's price list, or even attempt to make a guess at what Microsoft's discounts will be. Plus, the M-L numbers leave off things like the power adapter, etc. which the linked story specifically analyzes. And what about the cost of assembly? These parts don't just come in a mylar sack for the user to solder together.
The story's analysis seemed pretty good. There are companies out there who make their living estimating the cost of products. M-L isn't one of them.
Some of those old Looney Tunes episodes are extremely racist. The censoring's not just to protect kids: it's to remove offensive material.
Boy, howdie, you said it. Huckleberry Finn, the Revised Expurgated Edition is so much better than the original. And Harriet Bowdler did such a fantastic job of cleaning up Shakespeare. I also limit my movie-viewing to trans-continental airline flights, because they boil down the movie to the good parts and I don't have to watch the "director's vision" filth.
I'm sorry I don't have more time to reminisce with you, but early tomorrow I'm heading off to Alabama and Mississippi to help clean out the government archives. There's a lot of junk from the 1950s and 1960s that makes them look bad, and it's all water under the bridge now, so hey. We're trying to project a more modern image now.
This would imply he'd been especially useful in the first place.
Hey now. ESR maintained ncurses for a while. You know not everyone can contribute as usefully at the guy who posts screenshots of new Family Guy episodes on Wikipedia.
The reason Coverity (Dawson Engler and his former students) say that Linux has fewer bugs than FreeBSD is that about five years when they were writing their bug detection tool they used Linux as the testbed. Don't you remember the deluge of bug reports they reported?
No offense, but you are way off. I honestly wonder why you would spout off without reading the copyright statute (it's there, no parsing of court cases necessary) or even secondary sources like the Wikipedia. Fair use has nothing to do with the exception the parent mentioned.
Probably? This is probably just MS stealing again.
A proud graduate of the RIAA School of Law, eh? You know not every tort is "stealing," and given that Microsoft is actually going to comply with the contract, there isn't even a tort here. Move along...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, genius, how about Decru or VMWare? Those acquisitions averaged half a billion dollars each; Decru was last year AFAIK and VMWare was about four years ago. Also, Mike Farmwald was a Purdue professor, not a Stanford professor.
You're just jealous, must be a Cal grad, or worse, one of those Big 10 grads who hitchhikes into Silicon Valley looking to make it big. Also your naive view that the only stakeholders who matter are the common stockholders is funny, if not annoying. Just be glad they let you buy a ticket to ride.
You've got to make smarter friends, muchacho.
Huh? This isn't Delaware corporate law -- Revlon doesn't apply. Do you not remember the Livedoor bruhaha from just a year ago?
This mindset which has gained traction in America over the past decade or so that the only stakeholders in a corporation that matter are shareholders is nauseous.
The prototypes weren't finished the day before the show. You have nothing to suggest that the time between the prototypes being made and the final units being made is only a month. In fact, as you point out, the fact that manufacturing lead times are so long suggests that the prototypes were made weeks if not months before the show.
Another reason that the prototypes had lousy battery life may be that they were thoroughly abused during that time; fresh batteries might have better life even in the absence of any design changes. Given that Apple worked so hard to finish the products ahead of schedule, it's not very likely that the prototypes were used for just a couple hours a day of light use like most working laptops are.
Finally different materials may have been used to make the prototypes reflecting poorly on performance. It may be that the circuit board was not laid out in final form in the prototypes. There might be patch wires running all over the place inside to parts that won't be in the final product. Maybe certain power-saving features were disabled in that prototype. To use another example of how prototypes do not demonstrate final performance, recall that microprocessor prototypes run at low speeds because they have been patched by focused ion beams.
If Apple says the battery life will be similar, let's give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
There are other episodes where they test "Rare Event" and, as one would expect from a rare event, it fails to happen on command. The cell phone gasoline-vapor ignition is one that comes to mind. Or they test "Events That Take a Long-Ass Time," like soda eating through various objects. I have personally seen years-old old aluminum cans of Pepsi, stored indoors, that leaked from internal corrosion; maybe there's a new kind of liner now that prevents it or something, or maybe it just takes a long time. It didn't happen for them though, which makes it "busted." Good thing these guys don't design airplanes or spacecraft.
The "Everybody lives!" hokum ending of The Empty Child?? Most of the episode was interesting, but then they painted themselves into a corner. It could only have been more deux ex machina if he'd used a sonic screwdriver to fix everything; like the Star Trek TNG episodes where they used the transporter beam to wrap everything up in two minutes. Deux ex machina is not a good thing.
Not with data on them they don't. Have you read a spec sheet? I think I saw a quote for 10 years last time I looked.
That's only true for Yellow Book Mode 1. Mode 2, like Playstation discs, doesn't use Layered ECC.
Intel had to license its chips to TWO outside sources, AMD and Harris. Harris supplied alternative chips up through the 286. Even then, like AMD, they would sell faster chips than Intel (up to 20 MHz 286 chips), because Intel was holding back the clocks of its older generation to not cannibalize sales while the second sources were not.
They have never completed a single project that has "run into the hundreds of thousands of lines of code." According to the article the most complex project they've done is the air traffic program CDIS, which has 197 kloc. The smallest is 10 kloc, and there's also one that's 27 kloc and 39 kloc. It's great that they're delivering bug-free executables, and we can all learn from them yadda yadda, but these are tiny projects. CDIS is midsize. The Mastercard program at 100 kloc is barely midsize.
If you think the runtime of sorting algorithms is esoteric, I can't imagine what you think everyday knowledge for a programmer is.
The vast, vast majority of software patents I've seen don't need a Ph.D. to understand -- any difficulty in understanding comes only from the legalese they are written in. Moreover, very few software patent inventors actually have Ph.D.s. Most patents are not on some arcane variation of a data compression algorithm, but some basic user interface feature written by a couple of engineers at Adobe or IBM who got their bachelor's at a state university. (Remember the "Progress Bar" patent?) I should point out, also, that many entrepreneurs like "the boys" at Google, Yahoo!'s founders, and of course Bill Gates dropped out of their programs.
I'm going to assume that you have a Ph.D., and it is your belief that no mere mortal without those letters after his or her name can understand the "cutting-edge" research you are doing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you think that the reason that "obvious" patents are getting issued is that that the patent examiners are too uneducated to know if something is obvious. In fact that's not right as a legal matter. The obviousness standard almost requires the suggestion to be found in the literature; patent examiners (and judges) are not permitted anymore to simply say that an idea looks obvious and reject the patent.
Biotech patents, on the other hand, are often written by patent agents and lawyers with Ph.D.s, reflecting the higher level of knowledge required in practice. And while software patents can usually be had for under $10k, a biotech patent usually runs $50k. The only time Ph.D.s get involved in a software patent dispute is usually at trial, when some security-camera company claims that their patent covers computer network firewalls and the law firm has to hire a professor to tell the judge and the jury that the plaintiff is full of shit.
You need to brush up on your secured credit law bucko. A car loan comes with a security interest in the car. The car belongs to the customer. In no way is failing to pay the loan back "theft," it is default on a loan or, at most, fraud if the person entered into the contract with scienter. It is no more theft than failing to pay one's credit card bill.
The holder of a security interest (the car lender, here) has the right to "self help" in the event of default to satisfy the debt. (He also has the right to proceeds if the owner sells the car to someone else.) This is a difference from "unsecured credit," the best example being a credit card. No matter how much money someone owes on a credit card, the repo man can't come to his house and take some stuff to settle the debt.
In other words, I would bet you five hundred dollars you could not find a single court case where someone was convicted of "theft" for failing to make his car payments. I'm glad you're a fan of the repo man, honorable work, blah blah blah, but like most slashdot posters you don't know much about the law.
Einstein, you might have noticed that the article appeared in the Los Angeles Times. There is a huge water problem throughout pretty much the entire state of California. The San Joaquin and its tributaries have been totally tapped out by Northern California, the excess of which is sent down a concrete-lined artificial river hundreds of miles long to Los Angeles and the rest of southern California.
There is basically no more water available in California, yet water use continues to grow. San Francisco is seriously considering building a desalination plant for its water system, which supplies the peninsula and much of the south and east bay including parts of San Jose. SoCal is already way beyond sustainable water usage.
The only way to mitigate water usage growth is through conservation.
He's been dead for thirty years. Do you think he's still bitter?
Sure, but that mainly affects small shops. Larger companies like Best-Buy and Wal-Mart indeed net a few dollars on each unit. Sega's suggestion on the Saturn that since they were taking a loss per unit the retailers should too went over like a lead balloon.
Those numbers are clearly pulled out of some M-L analyst's ass. Don't you think it's funny how the ethernet costs exactly $5? Which is the same price as the USB? Those prices didn't come off any chipmaker's price list, or even attempt to make a guess at what Microsoft's discounts will be. Plus, the M-L numbers leave off things like the power adapter, etc. which the linked story specifically analyzes. And what about the cost of assembly? These parts don't just come in a mylar sack for the user to solder together.
The story's analysis seemed pretty good. There are companies out there who make their living estimating the cost of products. M-L isn't one of them.
If you're going to count the FPU and SIMD registers on the PowerPC, you need to do the same for Intel.
You got that wrong, buddy, except for customer service drone "these calls may be monitored for quality assurance."
Ah, yes. The earth heats up, we all die out, and then it cools down again.
Boy, howdie, you said it. Huckleberry Finn, the Revised Expurgated Edition is so much better than the original. And Harriet Bowdler did such a fantastic job of cleaning up Shakespeare. I also limit my movie-viewing to trans-continental airline flights, because they boil down the movie to the good parts and I don't have to watch the "director's vision" filth.
I'm sorry I don't have more time to reminisce with you, but early tomorrow I'm heading off to Alabama and Mississippi to help clean out the government archives. There's a lot of junk from the 1950s and 1960s that makes them look bad, and it's all water under the bridge now, so hey. We're trying to project a more modern image now.
Hey now. ESR maintained ncurses for a while. You know not everyone can contribute as usefully at the guy who posts screenshots of new Family Guy episodes on Wikipedia.
The reason Coverity (Dawson Engler and his former students) say that Linux has fewer bugs than FreeBSD is that about five years when they were writing their bug detection tool they used Linux as the testbed. Don't you remember the deluge of bug reports they reported?
No offense, but you are way off. I honestly wonder why you would spout off without reading the copyright statute (it's there, no parsing of court cases necessary) or even secondary sources like the Wikipedia. Fair use has nothing to do with the exception the parent mentioned.
A proud graduate of the RIAA School of Law, eh? You know not every tort is "stealing," and given that Microsoft is actually going to comply with the contract, there isn't even a tort here. Move along...