If you're sitting on more money than you'd ever need, and you have a very bad name for the way you deal with governments, customers, employees and competitors then throwing around some of that money can buy a lot of good karma for Bill Gates and MS. For Bill Gates $50 million is probably about the same as $1 to you. Would you pay $1 to have a university building or AIDS program named after you?
A reasearch team has found some T-Rex fossils found in a hole show traces of plant oils and other materials. The research team leader, Dr K.F.C. Saunders, reports that initial spectral analysis suggests that the dinosaurs rolled about in breadcrumbs and a mix of twenty as yet unidentified herbs and spices before jumping into boiling oil.
I teach electronics to a bunch of kids and use autonomous robotics as a vehicle for this.
Kids really enjoy problem solving for things that move. This creates a great learning environment.
Even plain old bump-and-turn robots have some very interesting control problems, like getting trapped. THis really helps people extend their problem solving skills.
I also work in real-world robotics (big multi-ton mothers).Sure we use simulations for developing control ideas, but those are pretty limited. You can test out various theories, but simulation only takes you so far. You need the real thing to get the dynamcs correct. For some real fun you want to see a huge robot go out of control.
Some of the most interesting research in robotics is being done at the hobbiest level. Lejos http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ has some very interesting abstractions and models for defining and controlling behaviour. Then there's also http://www.seattlerobotics.org/
It is thought by most that transistors were the first semiconductor amplifiers (ie. device that can give gain). That is not true. Iron pyrites negative tunnel diodes were built in the 1920s http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/iposc.htm. Esaki got the Nobel Prize for discovering tunnelling in 1973, almost 50 years later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode
Zune is unlikely to be effective at squeezing ipod prices. It is more likely to drive ipod features, if Zune has a very compelling feature.
ipod is very heavily branded and Apple have worked very hard to build this as a coolness icon. You can't play the 99c vs $1 game against that. Unless Zune was at least 10-20% cheaper than ipod, price won't matter.
ASICs cost a lot to make and take a very long time. Much of this is due to the long turnaround times to do any verification and the costs associated with revisions.
FPGA revisions are a lot cheaper (almost free) and thus it is very much faster to verify designs and release a product. Tha significantly improves time to market.
Buggy non-FPGA hardware is typically released because of the long design/test loop in hardware resulting in people releasing hardware when it is "good enough". Speeding that up by using FPGAs can actually help good design and improve first-release quality. On top of that, it also gives the flexibility to change things later.
That's a bit like saying that software is crap because we can update it and to get good software we should ban software patching.
Actually, FPGA patches are sometimes done to fix bugs, but more often they're done to change functionality. eg. a new firmware download uses different DSP algorithms or whatever and thus needs different FPGA algorithms to work properly. THus both get updated.
This is no different from nay other situations. You need to give up all these rights to get on a plane. Try walk into a bank carrying a shotgun. Shout "This is a stick up" and then claim freedom of speach.
The difference with myspace etc is that these are clearly soap-boxing sites where people are encouraged and expected to express opinions.
Sure bacteria live inside sea vents and even in nuclear reactor cores. Many of these don't even need oxygen (so using oxygen as an indicator of life is ill informed). Tube worms and other animals found near the vents don't live inside the vents, they live around them where the water is a lot cooler (way less than 100C).
Althouth there are a few interesting tools I'd still like to see, how many more desktops apps are really needed? Most people's needs and desires are more than covered by a word processor, email client and web browser. Open Office and MS Office are already overloaded with features that almost nobody will ever use.
There will always be a need for custom software for corporates, but that is typically client/server with the client side just being a web front-end. The browser covers that.
The real scope for target-side (as opposed to server-side) applications is in embedded/mobile marketplace. Embedded devices outnumber desktops and are increasing in number, size and complexity. Due to performance, cost and comnnectivity limitations these won't get soaked up by server-side apps for a long time still.
The HP48 keyboard layout was pretty good. Though the 48Gii,49G+ and 50 are a lot faster, the keyboard has been stuffed up. Now there's the small Enter/= key instead of the "proud to be RPN"-sized Enter key that was on the 48 and previous RPN devices.
RPN is pure geekiness isn't it? Wrong! Amazingly, the most popular RPN calculators are the HP11/12 which are for beancounters!
I learnt to program on an HP29C overalmost 30 years ago. 98 instructions (well keystrokes) of programming and only a few registers forced you to be pretty frugal, although at the time we thought that was pretty plush compared with the HP25 whiuch had half the memory.
As I type this, I have an HP48SX and HP28S on the desk in front of me. Great devices. My kids both use HP48s for their routine calculations & programming too.
The mistakes were the giveaway. Surely these are "creative works"?
Re:"Sold" probably includes them all
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It all depends on how the numbers are reported.
Many companies run their service centres as a seperate business unit because that's simpler. I don't know if Apple do this, but they might. If they do, then replacement units get sold to the service centres who then charge a service fee back to the ipod business unit. This is a far neater way to handle stock levels etc.
Regardless, I do agree that they have no need to pump up sales numbers. They're doing fine with no embellishment.
"Sold" probably includes them all
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Generally the management of these numbers is designed to make sales numbers look good. There is nothing stopping warantee replacement units being reflected as a zero-dollar sale, so long as you don't mess with the actual revenue numbers.
Even if there's a 10% warantee number, that still makes for 90M-or-so real sales. That is not too suprising considering how iconic the ipod is and how much Apple have invested in creating that image.
I wonder what Apple's advertising budget is for ipod? It probably gets to be somewhere around a buck per unit.
You'd think by now that any sane people would have walked a long time ago. They'd be pissed of with being screwed and would buy from alternate vendors or take up some other activity. But no, they bitch a bit, then pay up to keep playing and line themselves up for another round of MS cornholing.
Clearly MS does understand the market and how far you can push it.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly it works.
A reasearch team has found some T-Rex fossils found in a hole show traces of plant oils and other materials. The research team leader, Dr K.F.C. Saunders, reports that initial spectral analysis suggests that the dinosaurs rolled about in breadcrumbs and a mix of twenty as yet unidentified herbs and spices before jumping into boiling oil.
Kids really enjoy problem solving for things that move. This creates a great learning environment.
Even plain old bump-and-turn robots have some very interesting control problems, like getting trapped. THis really helps people extend their problem solving skills.
I also work in real-world robotics (big multi-ton mothers).Sure we use simulations for developing control ideas, but those are pretty limited. You can test out various theories, but simulation only takes you so far. You need the real thing to get the dynamcs correct. For some real fun you want to see a huge robot go out of control.
Some of the most interesting research in robotics is being done at the hobbiest level. Lejos http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ has some very interesting abstractions and models for defining and controlling behaviour. Then there's also http://www.seattlerobotics.org/
It is thought by most that transistors were the first semiconductor amplifiers (ie. device that can give gain). That is not true. Iron pyrites negative tunnel diodes were built in the 1920s http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/iposc.htm. Esaki got the Nobel Prize for discovering tunnelling in 1973, almost 50 years later http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode
ipod is very heavily branded and Apple have worked very hard to build this as a coolness icon. You can't play the 99c vs $1 game against that. Unless Zune was at least 10-20% cheaper than ipod, price won't matter.
They really want this to be perceived as tight to sign up content providers.
Always there to give freedom!
FPGA revisions are a lot cheaper (almost free) and thus it is very much faster to verify designs and release a product. Tha significantly improves time to market.
Buggy non-FPGA hardware is typically released because of the long design/test loop in hardware resulting in people releasing hardware when it is "good enough". Speeding that up by using FPGAs can actually help good design and improve first-release quality. On top of that, it also gives the flexibility to change things later.
Actually, FPGA patches are sometimes done to fix bugs, but more often they're done to change functionality. eg. a new firmware download uses different DSP algorithms or whatever and thus needs different FPGA algorithms to work properly. THus both get updated.
Don't sign up for a contract you might want to break out of.
If you do sign up, then don't bitch about your own stupidity.
The difference with myspace etc is that these are clearly soap-boxing sites where people are encouraged and expected to express opinions.
Sure bacteria live inside sea vents and even in nuclear reactor cores. Many of these don't even need oxygen (so using oxygen as an indicator of life is ill informed). Tube worms and other animals found near the vents don't live inside the vents, they live around them where the water is a lot cooler (way less than 100C).
There will always be a need for custom software for corporates, but that is typically client/server with the client side just being a web front-end. The browser covers that.
The real scope for target-side (as opposed to server-side) applications is in embedded/mobile marketplace. Embedded devices outnumber desktops and are increasing in number, size and complexity. Due to performance, cost and comnnectivity limitations these won't get soaked up by server-side apps for a long time still.
The HP48 keyboard layout was pretty good. Though the 48Gii,49G+ and 50 are a lot faster, the keyboard has been stuffed up. Now there's the small Enter/= key instead of the "proud to be RPN"-sized Enter key that was on the 48 and previous RPN devices.
I learnt to program on an HP29C overalmost 30 years ago. 98 instructions (well keystrokes) of programming and only a few registers forced you to be pretty frugal, although at the time we thought that was pretty plush compared with the HP25 whiuch had half the memory.
As I type this, I have an HP48SX and HP28S on the desk in front of me. Great devices. My kids both use HP48s for their routine calculations & programming too.
The mistakes were the giveaway. Surely these are "creative works"?
Many companies run their service centres as a seperate business unit because that's simpler. I don't know if Apple do this, but they might. If they do, then replacement units get sold to the service centres who then charge a service fee back to the ipod business unit. This is a far neater way to handle stock levels etc.
Regardless, I do agree that they have no need to pump up sales numbers. They're doing fine with no embellishment.
Will MS make the magic number?
Even if there's a 10% warantee number, that still makes for 90M-or-so real sales. That is not too suprising considering how iconic the ipod is and how much Apple have invested in creating that image.
I wonder what Apple's advertising budget is for ipod? It probably gets to be somewhere around a buck per unit.
Clearly MS does understand the market and how far you can push it.
Save an industry landmark: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/09/shockley_f ruit_closed/
If the chair is thrown through a window won't space suck you out?
Thanks to MS trying to lock governments into MS Word.
Considering the context, they probably mean small surveilance helicopters. The small surveilance choppers could likely be taken down with a shotgun.
No, it's a back door.