What confuses me is that the OLPC association is ADAMANT about not offering their product commercially. This makes no sense. Given:
1) Minimum production runs are required to meet the desired price point 2) Meeting minimum production quantities had been difficult 3) There is demand in the private/consumer market for the product
It seems to only make sense to offer the units to the consumer market, which would solve the minimum production run issue AND help subsidize the cost of the units shipped to their intended market. Especially since, by definition, their intended market is the demographic that can't afford them in the first place.
Extending and promote the "get one give one" program, is one way to do this. Another way is to sell them for a slight profit ($300 each instead of $200?) to schools in industrialized countries for the same purpose. Being a non-profit company does not preclude actually making money. =Smidge=
"No plans to quit" is not the same as "Determined to keep it up no matter what anyone says." It is not the same as unwilling to stop.
Find a smoker, or perhaps you are one. Ask them is they have any plans to quit. If not, would they be willing to participate in a (hypothetical) experiment that might "cure" them of the addiction? Now offer them money and free cigs during the course of the experiment. See how many would be willing to do it. =Smidge=
At Columbia, in 2003, Haney tested a cocaine vaccine on 10 people who had no plans to quit using the drug.
After a course of four vaccines injected over a 12-week period, half of the people produced sufficient levels of cocaine antibodies and reported a substantial decrease, up to a 70 per cent drop, in their dependence.
One of the concerns with a cocaine vaccine is that once inoculated against a cocaine high, determined users will seek other drugs. But Haney's subjects did not do that.
"On the outside, they were using less cocaine. They just stopped. None of them switched to another drug of abuse."
Unless the site in question is owned and operated by Adobe, then no... that's just shitty design.
As noted by someone else already, Adobe's website does not require Flash. SOME pages use it, sure, but the site does not become broken and unusable without it. All their pages are ubiquitous HTML/CSS design. =Smidge=
Well if the TSA keeps up to their perfect track record of successfully locating bomb components in people's luggage, I'm sure we are now as safe as one can possibly imagine!
The article doesn't say what the training for this job involves, but I'm sure it's at LEAST two whole weeks... =Smidge=
What "science" do you have in mind? Mars has already a bazillion craters to look at
But no FRESH ones. All the craters are millions of years old and have been weathered and contaminated. A fresh divot would expose deeper soils and rocks that have not previously been exposed to the atmosphere.
Also, there are things to learn about the mechanics of larger impacts on Earth-like planets. Since comparisons have been drawn between this and the Tunguska explosion, perhaps studying this will help prove or disprove that theory. =Smidge=
To be fair, a "1 in 24" is much better odds than "1 in 76." So yes, It is three times more likely and yes, that is a pretty big deal.
A fresh impact crater would reveal all sorts of valuable, once-in-a-lifetime data about the planet that is likely to be the first humans will tred on since Earth. Don't underestimate the science. =Smidge=
For internal combustion engines, efficiency scales with size. Bigger engines therefore tend to be more efficient than smaller engines of similar design. Then, of course, you run into the maximum theoretical efficiency of a gasoline engine which is quite low to begin with: About 30% or so if memory serves.
Your first two links are broken, but at least we have some hard numbers. Quite far from your "1000's of hours" number too, BTW:P
So 200 hours at 15GB/min works out to about 180TB of uncompressed data. At $350 per TB, that is a one-time cost of $63,000. You can reliably cut that in half using lossless compression.
I still don't see the problem, but this is mainly because the article was completely lax on any details. This is not the kind of data you need to have live all the time like a big company's customer data would need to be. It is archive data. There is little or no ongoing cost for maintaining archived drives - they just sit there. By the time you feel it necessary to verify the data and update the media, say in five years time, the cost of doing so would be significantly less than the initial setup. I fully expect the price of 1TB drives to be around $200 by the end of spring. A $500 computer and an intern paid $10/hr can plug in a hard drive and press a button to verify and copy data.
You also don't need nearly as much physical space to store the data. 180 hard drives will fit in a crate vs. a million feet of celluloid film which would take up a whole room. =Smidge=
More like they never know when they'll have to whip out a "director's cut" or "digitally remastered" version to prop up sluggish sales. Oh wait! You can't digitally remaster something that's already digital, can you? Hmm...
As I said, it was a stab in the dark. It's also uncompressed, and halving that (at least) without loss would be a simple task. It still blows half the article's arguments clean away: When you're paying under 30 cents per gigabyte media costs becomes much less of a problem.
If you have any actual information on how much data is stored, please share with the class. I think you are greatly exaggerating the amount of filming that's being done, considering most movies rarely spend more than a year in actual filming. Consider the costs involved and I'm sure studios go to great lengths to not junk 99% of their time and effort. I actually think only 25% is a bit generous for something involving live actors. =Smidge=
I'm going to take a huge stab in the dark here regarding how much data they're storing...
Hi-Def 1080p is 1,920x1,080 resolution, 29.97 FPS, 32-bits per pixel. That's about 14GB per minute uncompressed, say 15GB/min with audio to make the math easier.
If a 100 min movie represents, say, a quarter of what was actually filmed and needs to be archived. 400min * 15GB/min = 6000GB or about 6TB of data *uncompressed*
1TB hard drives are available now for about $350 or so and I'm sure you can get bulk discounts.
Any arguments about outdated data formats is more or less bullshit, because you have the same issues with projectors and other analog media equipment. NASA's case is a tad special since they didn't use widely and ubiquitous consumer-grade hardware. Nowadays you can't walk down the street without seeing a place where you can buy a SATA hard drive or something containing one.
Store the hard drives in the same cold storage vaults you keep your analog media. Problem solved IMHO. These dumbasses are probably burning everything to CD-Rs or something. =Smidge=
The article I clicked on - the only link in the summary as I write this - leads to a page that has both a huge photo on top showing the two side by side (titanium vs steel) but also a video where they grind various items. The difference is very noticeable.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Yes, you did say "power source" in your original comment. Too bad the OP was specifically talking about reactors, not nuclear power sources in general.
While neat, that's not exactly a nuclear reactor. Power source yes, rector no.
This is from 2001, and based on the size seems to be the same or very similar device: Japanese design, 6.5m high (21ft) and 2m in dia. (6ft). Doesn't mention Toshiba though.
I think that, even if the device is the size mentioned, it does not include everything needed for a fucntional system? Does it include the genrator system? What about waste heat disposal? 200KW is not a lot of power, of course, so it's possible everything is included. A diesel generator of the same capacity takes up about a third of that space, not counting fuel tank... =Smidge=
Pitch and roll are handled by internal gravity-sensing accelerometers. The bar is used only for yaw control because twisting the unit about the vertical axis has no effect on the perceived gravity for the accelerometers - that requires expensive gyroscopic-procession sensor units.
I'm doubtful the Wiimote uses any information from the bar other than yaw. Calculating distance to the screen is perhaps possible but it would have to account for things like not being pointed directly AT the bar (perspective skew) as well as requiring some form of calibration. =Smidge=
Just about any CMOS webcam can be easily modified to see only IR light. It involves removing the IR filter (usually a small glass plate with special coating inside the lens assembly) and adding a filter to block visible light (usually a fully exposed piece of film negative).
I'm pretty sure the "damage potential" is related to the job, and independent of the means to getting that job.
County judges are elected. Last I checked, a county judge couldn't do a fraction of the damage an appointed supreme court judge could. Fire department chiefs are elected, Michael Brown was appointed head of FEMA just before Hurricane Katrina, etc. =Smidge=
More importantly: if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know? Can we separate natural laws from the universe that they are derived from/created in?
Well, if they change fast enough, it could become apparent that the equations and constants we've been using for 200 years now are no longer accurate (with respect to the results they used to produce). That would be a pretty big flag I'd think. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
What confuses me is that the OLPC association is ADAMANT about not offering their product commercially. This makes no sense. Given:
1) Minimum production runs are required to meet the desired price point
2) Meeting minimum production quantities had been difficult
3) There is demand in the private/consumer market for the product
It seems to only make sense to offer the units to the consumer market, which would solve the minimum production run issue AND help subsidize the cost of the units shipped to their intended market. Especially since, by definition, their intended market is the demographic that can't afford them in the first place.
Extending and promote the "get one give one" program, is one way to do this. Another way is to sell them for a slight profit ($300 each instead of $200?) to schools in industrialized countries for the same purpose. Being a non-profit company does not preclude actually making money.
=Smidge=
Yes.
"No plans to quit" is not the same as "Determined to keep it up no matter what anyone says." It is not the same as unwilling to stop.
Find a smoker, or perhaps you are one. Ask them is they have any plans to quit. If not, would they be willing to participate in a (hypothetical) experiment that might "cure" them of the addiction? Now offer them money and free cigs during the course of the experiment. See how many would be willing to do it.
=Smidge=
Emphasis mine.
=Smidge=
Unless the site in question is owned and operated by Adobe, then no... that's just shitty design.
As noted by someone else already, Adobe's website does not require Flash. SOME pages use it, sure, but the site does not become broken and unusable without it. All their pages are ubiquitous HTML/CSS design.
=Smidge=
Well if the TSA keeps up to their perfect track record of successfully locating bomb components in people's luggage, I'm sure we are now as safe as one can possibly imagine!
The article doesn't say what the training for this job involves, but I'm sure it's at LEAST two whole weeks...
=Smidge=
Well, Canada is #3 for Uranium but #2 for oil... lesser of two evils, go with Uranium!
=Smidge=
What "science" do you have in mind? Mars has already a bazillion craters to look at
But no FRESH ones. All the craters are millions of years old and have been weathered and contaminated. A fresh divot would expose deeper soils and rocks that have not previously been exposed to the atmosphere.
Also, there are things to learn about the mechanics of larger impacts on Earth-like planets. Since comparisons have been drawn between this and the Tunguska explosion, perhaps studying this will help prove or disprove that theory.
=Smidge=
To be fair, a "1 in 24" is much better odds than "1 in 76." So yes, It is three times more likely and yes, that is a pretty big deal.
A fresh impact crater would reveal all sorts of valuable, once-in-a-lifetime data about the planet that is likely to be the first humans will tred on since Earth. Don't underestimate the science.
=Smidge=
For internal combustion engines, efficiency scales with size. Bigger engines therefore tend to be more efficient than smaller engines of similar design. Then, of course, you run into the maximum theoretical efficiency of a gasoline engine which is quite low to begin with: About 30% or so if memory serves.
=Smidge=
Your first two links are broken, but at least we have some hard numbers. Quite far from your "1000's of hours" number too, BTW :P
So 200 hours at 15GB/min works out to about 180TB of uncompressed data. At $350 per TB, that is a one-time cost of $63,000. You can reliably cut that in half using lossless compression.
I still don't see the problem, but this is mainly because the article was completely lax on any details. This is not the kind of data you need to have live all the time like a big company's customer data would need to be. It is archive data. There is little or no ongoing cost for maintaining archived drives - they just sit there. By the time you feel it necessary to verify the data and update the media, say in five years time, the cost of doing so would be significantly less than the initial setup. I fully expect the price of 1TB drives to be around $200 by the end of spring. A $500 computer and an intern paid $10/hr can plug in a hard drive and press a button to verify and copy data.
You also don't need nearly as much physical space to store the data. 180 hard drives will fit in a crate vs. a million feet of celluloid film which would take up a whole room.
=Smidge=
More like they never know when they'll have to whip out a "director's cut" or "digitally remastered" version to prop up sluggish sales. Oh wait! You can't digitally remaster something that's already digital, can you? Hmm...
As I said, it was a stab in the dark. It's also uncompressed, and halving that (at least) without loss would be a simple task. It still blows half the article's arguments clean away: When you're paying under 30 cents per gigabyte media costs becomes much less of a problem.
If you have any actual information on how much data is stored, please share with the class. I think you are greatly exaggerating the amount of filming that's being done, considering most movies rarely spend more than a year in actual filming. Consider the costs involved and I'm sure studios go to great lengths to not junk 99% of their time and effort. I actually think only 25% is a bit generous for something involving live actors.
=Smidge=
I'm going to take a huge stab in the dark here regarding how much data they're storing...
Hi-Def 1080p is 1,920x1,080 resolution, 29.97 FPS, 32-bits per pixel. That's about 14GB per minute uncompressed, say 15GB/min with audio to make the math easier.
If a 100 min movie represents, say, a quarter of what was actually filmed and needs to be archived. 400min * 15GB/min = 6000GB or about 6TB of data *uncompressed*
1TB hard drives are available now for about $350 or so and I'm sure you can get bulk discounts.
Any arguments about outdated data formats is more or less bullshit, because you have the same issues with projectors and other analog media equipment. NASA's case is a tad special since they didn't use widely and ubiquitous consumer-grade hardware. Nowadays you can't walk down the street without seeing a place where you can buy a SATA hard drive or something containing one.
Store the hard drives in the same cold storage vaults you keep your analog media. Problem solved IMHO. These dumbasses are probably burning everything to CD-Rs or something.
=Smidge=
The article I clicked on - the only link in the summary as I write this - leads to a page that has both a huge photo on top showing the two side by side (titanium vs steel) but also a video where they grind various items. The difference is very noticeable.
=Smidge=
No way.
Clearly, it's turtles all the way down.
=Smidge=
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley
=Smidge=
...or a shark launcher?
=Smidge=
Yes, you did say "power source" in your original comment. Too bad the OP was specifically talking about reactors, not nuclear power sources in general.
=Smidge=
While neat, that's not exactly a nuclear reactor. Power source yes, rector no.
This is from 2001, and based on the size seems to be the same or very similar device: Japanese design, 6.5m high (21ft) and 2m in dia. (6ft). Doesn't mention Toshiba though.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s352244.htm
I think that, even if the device is the size mentioned, it does not include everything needed for a fucntional system? Does it include the genrator system? What about waste heat disposal? 200KW is not a lot of power, of course, so it's possible everything is included. A diesel generator of the same capacity takes up about a third of that space, not counting fuel tank...
=Smidge=
Placing a laser trip bomb near a doorway or elevator exit and setting it off from across the room as someone runs in is also a fav.
=Smidge=
Pitch and roll are handled by internal gravity-sensing accelerometers. The bar is used only for yaw control because twisting the unit about the vertical axis has no effect on the perceived gravity for the accelerometers - that requires expensive gyroscopic-procession sensor units.
I'm doubtful the Wiimote uses any information from the bar other than yaw. Calculating distance to the screen is perhaps possible but it would have to account for things like not being pointed directly AT the bar (perspective skew) as well as requiring some form of calibration.
=Smidge=
Just about any CMOS webcam can be easily modified to see only IR light. It involves removing the IR filter (usually a small glass plate with special coating inside the lens assembly) and adding a filter to block visible light (usually a fully exposed piece of film negative).
=Smidge=
A better list (old, thouigh, and no graph)
http://www.cockeyed.com/science/gallon/liquid.html
Lists black ink as $2,701.52 per gallon, compared to human blood ($1,514.79/Gallon) and insulin ($9,411.76/Gallon).
=Smidge=
I'm pretty sure the "damage potential" is related to the job, and independent of the means to getting that job.
County judges are elected. Last I checked, a county judge couldn't do a fraction of the damage an appointed supreme court judge could. Fire department chiefs are elected, Michael Brown was appointed head of FEMA just before Hurricane Katrina, etc.
=Smidge=
More importantly: if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know? Can we separate natural laws from the universe that they are derived from/created in?
Well, if they change fast enough, it could become apparent that the equations and constants we've been using for 200 years now are no longer accurate (with respect to the results they used to produce). That would be a pretty big flag I'd think.
=Smidge=
It's not enabled by default ... until the next Automatic Update rolls around.
=Smidge=