The UN is not a single room of the worlds leaders debating every topic. Most people know this in theory, but don't think about it much. It's a huge bureaucracy with hundreds of "committees" such as the "UN's Committee Against Torture".
Some things coming out of this beast are more much more important and meaningful than others. This particular note is, IMHO, pretty low on the tree. It certainly isn't coming from the Security Council.
Can a Taser be used for torture? Yep. So can just about everything else in the room I'm in. Electricity, water, ceramics, keys, phone book, pens, electrical cords... I'm sure if Jack Bauer were around, he'd find some way to use the fern in the corner to extract the secret location of the nuke from the bad guys this season.
It's been mentioned a few times around these parts, British Columbia, that our primarily hydroelectric dam power generation system is a great match for unreliable power generated by wind (and solar). For the most part, hydro dams can literally be turned on and off (and many levels in between) quickly.
The same can not be said about nuclear. I'm not sure, but I think coal and other fossil fuel power plants are not efficient at dynamic adjustments either.
I called 911 a few times with my cell phone supposedly in keyboard locked mode because of 08 + "dial". It's super easy to do since it's only 2 digits and they're in line vertically (including the call button on many phones).
Not sure if that was specific to my Nokia model or not. I eventually looked it up, it's the emergency number for Mexico, I think.
Anyway, after getting a scolding from the call centre a couple times, I've vowed to always get flip phones from now on.
The brick moving internal is probably the most visible change, but I doubt that's it. I would guess that the overall power usage has shrunk, to allow the PSU to be moved internally. To reduce power usage, the chips probably aren't the same. My best guess would be a process shrink to the bigger chips, or more integration, as you suspect.
Bricks are cheap, but internal PSUs are cheaper, especially in higher volumes. It's less pieces, period. Fewer, simpler cables. One less "case". One less item to pack into a box. A slightly smaller and lighter package for shipping. Plus, I'd bet that the external bricks were outsourced, the internal PSU might be integrated into the main circuit board.
It's nickels and dimes.
Also, a $30 drop at retail, does not mean a $30 drop in hardware costs. After retailer markups, importing costs, and transportation costs, who know, you might only need a $15 change in costs -- or Sony might take a bit less profit on the hardware, and hope to make up a bit in software sales.
For smaller websites, Google is the only choice for displaying ads (that actually pay) on your website. Google is literally making nickels and dimes for itself and hundreds of thousands of small websites that get less than, say, 500,000 visitors a month. Anyone less than that has a really hard time finding meaningful advertising revenue, especially if they're not in a desirable niche.
How does Google do it, whereas other's can't manage millions of small advertising agreements? They use those crazy algorithms of theirs to do the bulk of the work.
On the buying ads side, Google also whoops MS and Yahoo. The minimum click price is... well, there is none. Whereas Yahoo and MS have $0.10 minimums. Minimums make sense for many ads, they don't for many others. Google's uber-algorithms make this possible too.
For what it's worth, I send Google a couple hundred a month for ads, and maybe a five bucks to Yahoo and MS - what's worse is that I don't see any return on the Yahoo and MS ads, and technically I should drop them altogether!
In theory, Microsoft and Yahoo can compete, but in practice, it's been years and Google is just as entrenched as ever.
This confused me also, I figured Wii is a no-brainer, even if it's not at the maximum resolution that Netflix is willing to stream. So, since I've been considering buying shares in Netflix, I decided to actually RTFA.
The author of the article on Gamasutra.com used PS3 and XBox as examples. The actual transcript of the conference call does not mention PS3 or Xbox, just this:
"In terms of enabling the viewing of online content on the television screen, we are exploring a variety of options, including Internet connected, high definition DVD players, Internet connected game consoles, and dedicated Internet set tops, with a variety of partners, trying to understand the best ways to provide inexpensive viewing of online content on the television."
I think this'll happen. Sony has placed a very large bet on the PS3 and BluRay, IMHO, they've bet the company by tying both products together. It would be in Microsoft's best interests to do as much damage to Sony as possible so that in the next round of the console wars, Microsoft will have more of an advantage.
So far in this console generation, MS was able to come out a year earlier, partly because waiting for BluRay delayed the PS3. Then, for a long time, the XBox external HD-DVD drive was the cheapest hi-def DVD player around, although, you need to attach it to something, i.e. a PC or a 360.
Now that HD-DVD drives are relatively cheap, MS can produce an XBox360+ with HD+DVD. It might be just enough to make HD-DVD the winner, and BluRay the looser. And knock a couple billion dollars of BluRay and PS3 revenues out of Sony's pockets.
If MS is willing to spend $240 million to win the advertising gig on Facebook so that Google doesn't get that contract, then MS including an HD DVD drive to give Sony a kick in the shins is definitely in the cards.
I'll bet the average kid who has a few of these lead painted toys still gets less lead intake than any slashdotter.
I strongly suspect that a lot of my toys had lead paint, but it probably wasn't an issue 28 years ago. Never mind the lead based paint that is probably a few layers of paint below what is there now in the very room I'm sitting in now.
I can't even tell you what operating system the most recent Palm's run. There must have been half a dozen attempts to modernize the platform...
I used my Handspring Deluxe for 6 years, it was good for it's time, and the interface is still pretty good, but it just doesn't have the features I want in a PDA today. When it came time to find a replacement, I didn't even consider Palm. I didn't have confidence that I'd be able to find modern apps to run on a new Palm device.
But you know those startup bands that you've never heard of?
Well, there are a lot of barriers between that and being able to sell $100K of online music, never mind $5M. How will new bands become popular in the future? I think the "middlemen" will be with us for a long time. They'll adapt... they'll just take their cut from a wider range of revenues, i.e. live shows, rather than CD sales.
In the meantime, all the big names who "have made it" will drift away from the big labels. That's nothing new.
As far as I can figure out, all this means is that when a government puts some spectrum up for "3G" services, companies that want to deploy WiMax will be allowed to bid. It's not like equipment is magically going to support all parts of this new "3G"...
Am I reading the article correctly? Humidity caused the connections to go bad from rust? IIRC, the off the shelf ISA cards and RAM I used to get with my (now) ancient computers were gold plated.
Couldn't the ISS with it's multi billion dollar cost use contacts and cables that can't rust? Gold for contact points, aluminum for the bulk cable?
Heck, given the costs involved, it'd barely be a rounding error in the budget to use solid gold cables. One tonne of gold at $700 per ounce is about $25 million. Not that I have no idea how many critical tonnes of cabling are involved.
At first glance 20% sounds really high, but once you think about what could be mixed in with security, I'd believe 20%. No, it shouldn't be that high, but thanks to the great Internet thing, that's what we get.
SPAM affects every mail system. I've probably had to implement a dozen different ways to reduce inbound SPAM in my inbox and the inboxes of my customers over the years. On the flip side, I also have to get my emails out, including those of a modest sized opt-in mailing list through recipient SPAM filters.
It's ridiculous the volume of SPAM out there. If you've never had to think about this, it's easy to underestimate. Now, imagine my relatively simple situation and multiply it by about a million. That's what the Hotmail administrators have to deal with. It's not easy. Looking briefly at the article, it looks like a relatively harmless error, comparable, but different, to greylisting.
IMHO, stop using mail blasters that spool out emails as fast as the server can spit them out. That just doesn't work anymore. Queues and slow spooling are critical to making email recipient servers happy - otherwise it looks just like a zombie'd home computer spitting out spam.
We used to use phpBB for our quiet little forum. It got overran by spam, so it was switched to SMF, but that's a separate issue.
We installed a couple modifications to phpBB, I can't recall the specifics, I think a CAPTA (before it was standard issue) and some tweaks to the layout. This lead to huge problems when security issues required upgrades of phpBB.
In short, we didn't do the updates unless absolutely necessary. We'd have to patch in updates to the updated files... incredibly time consuming.
Yes, I realize that there's a full web browser in there... but it's just not the same. In fact, the times when I use my PDA the most are when I'm furthest from a computer and Internet access.
Heck, I had trouble making a (GSM) phone-call in the mall this weekend!
Languages have always come and gone... actually, I guess they've mostly gone as communication over wider geographies has become possible.
Anyway, I propose that we make giant stone cut modern day equivalents of the Rosetta Stone so that future archaeologists will have something to kickstart translation efforts when they pull fragments of text off of buried DVDs or whatever we leave behind.
Were these pre-existing licenses made known to Sprint et. al. when they bid on this spectrum? Wouldn't winning this bid entitle you to the spectrum -- making the FCC as the vendor responsible for actual delivery of the required space?
Or are these just little pockets of exceptions that everyone hoped would just "work out" in the end?
It's not clear from the summary, but I assume that this algae can still be used for biodiesel. Harvesting both might make the economics work out that much sooner.
That said, I don't know anything about algae for energy. I just know that I hate seeing the stuff when I'm on a lake (that isn't supposed to have algae).
When I first saw the iPod Touch on the news the first thought I had was "finally I can update my PDA!".
All it needs is to be open enough that people can develop programs for it. It doesn't need to be too complex, look at a lot of the cool apps for the Palm Pilot... and synchronize a datebook, notes, and contacts.
Sadly, I'm still stuck with my old black and white (hah, black and green) Handspring Visor Deluxe since it just works and it refuses to die.
Muni-WiFi that covers an entire city, not just the "downtown core", was destined to fail. You're lucky to get a WiFi signal a block away from the access point... for a smallish city, you're talking about thousands of access points to install and maintain.
It's not as simple as plugging in a router at home and shoving in a CAT5 cable from your ADSL or Cable 'modem'. A muni-wifi network needs to find power and handle the data back-haul (though a portion of the data can be bounced over the same wifi network).
Anyway, a WiMax access point can cover 100 times as much space, so yeah, assuming a municipality can get the frequency, it makes a lot more sense.
The anti-email spam guys figured out a distributed way to publish blacklists for IPs AND domains years ago.
Use DNS.
I assume that spamhaus.org et. al are using a customized DNS server, but whatever it is, it works reasonably well. For those who've never had to flag spam using a DNSBL, the gist is that the spam scrubber get's the IP address of a website via a "normal" dns lookup, then runs the IP or host name against the DNS blacklist by looking up a coded host name, something like: blacklist.spamhaus.org.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. (i don't have the format memorized, so the syntax is probably wrong). Depending on how that that special DNS lookup resolves, it's either spam or probable spam, or not listed.
This has the benefit of being anonymous (more or less) and distributed and mostly time-tested.
Crazy stuff. I could have sworn that MS had some resources allocated to doing huge beta tests.
For that matter, they probably assign people to create scripts to randomly create calculations and test the results. However, after reading a bit of the Usenet thread, automated scripts might not have caught the problem, it seems that it is at the rendering layer - using VB to get the cell value apparently gets the correct value.
Weird. And highly embarrassing.
I can't wait for the advertisements from OpenOffice (and it's new allies in IBM and Google) to play this up! Apple will have a field day too -- "Hi, I'm a Mac. Sure I'm good at video and music and all that fun stuff, but I can also do math. I know that 65,535 doesn't equal 100,000." -- OK, maybe that wouldn't be TV worthy, but I'll make a good web ad for Slashdot et. al.
I don't have a Mac. So, as an un-cool outsider, I find this topic a bit confusing.
Do Apple users actually keep up to date with OS X revisions? Is "Leopard" more like a service pack or a whole new OS or somewhere in-between? And what's the downside to not upgrading? Applications aren't tied to new OS X versions, are they?
In the Windows world, I would expect very few (non-geek) people to upgrade existing machines to Windows Vista.
My thought was that the long term plan is to integrate the GPU anyway (for one product line at least). While the GPU is RIGHT THERE, they will find a way to use of much of it as they can when it's not busy with 3D work... which for the average office environment is 95% of the time.
Gamers can still buy addon graphics cards, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
The UN is not a single room of the worlds leaders debating every topic. Most people know this in theory, but don't think about it much. It's a huge bureaucracy with hundreds of "committees" such as the "UN's Committee Against Torture".
Some things coming out of this beast are more much more important and meaningful than others. This particular note is, IMHO, pretty low on the tree. It certainly isn't coming from the Security Council.
Can a Taser be used for torture? Yep. So can just about everything else in the room I'm in. Electricity, water, ceramics, keys, phone book, pens, electrical cords... I'm sure if Jack Bauer were around, he'd find some way to use the fern in the corner to extract the secret location of the nuke from the bad guys this season.
It's been mentioned a few times around these parts, British Columbia, that our primarily hydroelectric dam power generation system is a great match for unreliable power generated by wind (and solar). For the most part, hydro dams can literally be turned on and off (and many levels in between) quickly.
The same can not be said about nuclear. I'm not sure, but I think coal and other fossil fuel power plants are not efficient at dynamic adjustments either.
I called 911 a few times with my cell phone supposedly in keyboard locked mode because of 08 + "dial". It's super easy to do since it's only 2 digits and they're in line vertically (including the call button on many phones).
Not sure if that was specific to my Nokia model or not. I eventually looked it up, it's the emergency number for Mexico, I think.
Anyway, after getting a scolding from the call centre a couple times, I've vowed to always get flip phones from now on.
The brick moving internal is probably the most visible change, but I doubt that's it. I would guess that the overall power usage has shrunk, to allow the PSU to be moved internally. To reduce power usage, the chips probably aren't the same. My best guess would be a process shrink to the bigger chips, or more integration, as you suspect.
Bricks are cheap, but internal PSUs are cheaper, especially in higher volumes. It's less pieces, period. Fewer, simpler cables. One less "case". One less item to pack into a box. A slightly smaller and lighter package for shipping. Plus, I'd bet that the external bricks were outsourced, the internal PSU might be integrated into the main circuit board.
It's nickels and dimes.
Also, a $30 drop at retail, does not mean a $30 drop in hardware costs. After retailer markups, importing costs, and transportation costs, who know, you might only need a $15 change in costs -- or Sony might take a bit less profit on the hardware, and hope to make up a bit in software sales.
For smaller websites, Google is the only choice for displaying ads (that actually pay) on your website. Google is literally making nickels and dimes for itself and hundreds of thousands of small websites that get less than, say, 500,000 visitors a month. Anyone less than that has a really hard time finding meaningful advertising revenue, especially if they're not in a desirable niche.
How does Google do it, whereas other's can't manage millions of small advertising agreements? They use those crazy algorithms of theirs to do the bulk of the work.
On the buying ads side, Google also whoops MS and Yahoo. The minimum click price is... well, there is none. Whereas Yahoo and MS have $0.10 minimums. Minimums make sense for many ads, they don't for many others. Google's uber-algorithms make this possible too.
For what it's worth, I send Google a couple hundred a month for ads, and maybe a five bucks to Yahoo and MS - what's worse is that I don't see any return on the Yahoo and MS ads, and technically I should drop them altogether!
In theory, Microsoft and Yahoo can compete, but in practice, it's been years and Google is just as entrenched as ever.
This confused me also, I figured Wii is a no-brainer, even if it's not at the maximum resolution that Netflix is willing to stream. So, since I've been considering buying shares in Netflix, I decided to actually RTFA.
The author of the article on Gamasutra.com used PS3 and XBox as examples. The actual transcript of the conference call does not mention PS3 or Xbox, just this:
"In terms of enabling the viewing of online content on the television screen, we are exploring a variety of options, including Internet connected, high definition DVD players, Internet connected game consoles, and dedicated Internet set tops, with a variety of partners, trying to understand the best ways to provide inexpensive viewing of online content on the television."
http://seekingalpha.com/article/50856-netflix-q3-2007-earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo
So... the millions of Wii's out there will probably have their chance at this too, IMHO.
I think this'll happen. Sony has placed a very large bet on the PS3 and BluRay, IMHO, they've bet the company by tying both products together. It would be in Microsoft's best interests to do as much damage to Sony as possible so that in the next round of the console wars, Microsoft will have more of an advantage.
So far in this console generation, MS was able to come out a year earlier, partly because waiting for BluRay delayed the PS3. Then, for a long time, the XBox external HD-DVD drive was the cheapest hi-def DVD player around, although, you need to attach it to something, i.e. a PC or a 360.
Now that HD-DVD drives are relatively cheap, MS can produce an XBox360+ with HD+DVD. It might be just enough to make HD-DVD the winner, and BluRay the looser. And knock a couple billion dollars of BluRay and PS3 revenues out of Sony's pockets.
If MS is willing to spend $240 million to win the advertising gig on Facebook so that Google doesn't get that contract, then MS including an HD DVD drive to give Sony a kick in the shins is definitely in the cards.
That's my CAD 0.02, anyway.
I'll bet the average kid who has a few of these lead painted toys still gets less lead intake than any slashdotter.
I strongly suspect that a lot of my toys had lead paint, but it probably wasn't an issue 28 years ago. Never mind the lead based paint that is probably a few layers of paint below what is there now in the very room I'm sitting in now.
Lead has been around forever...
I can't even tell you what operating system the most recent Palm's run. There must have been half a dozen attempts to modernize the platform...
I used my Handspring Deluxe for 6 years, it was good for it's time, and the interface is still pretty good, but it just doesn't have the features I want in a PDA today. When it came time to find a replacement, I didn't even consider Palm. I didn't have confidence that I'd be able to find modern apps to run on a new Palm device.
But you know those startup bands that you've never heard of?
Well, there are a lot of barriers between that and being able to sell $100K of online music, never mind $5M. How will new bands become popular in the future? I think the "middlemen" will be with us for a long time. They'll adapt... they'll just take their cut from a wider range of revenues, i.e. live shows, rather than CD sales.
In the meantime, all the big names who "have made it" will drift away from the big labels. That's nothing new.
As far as I can figure out, all this means is that when a government puts some spectrum up for "3G" services, companies that want to deploy WiMax will be allowed to bid. It's not like equipment is magically going to support all parts of this new "3G"...
Am I reading the article correctly? Humidity caused the connections to go bad from rust? IIRC, the off the shelf ISA cards and RAM I used to get with my (now) ancient computers were gold plated.
Couldn't the ISS with it's multi billion dollar cost use contacts and cables that can't rust? Gold for contact points, aluminum for the bulk cable?
Heck, given the costs involved, it'd barely be a rounding error in the budget to use solid gold cables. One tonne of gold at $700 per ounce is about $25 million. Not that I have no idea how many critical tonnes of cabling are involved.
At first glance 20% sounds really high, but once you think about what could be mixed in with security, I'd believe 20%. No, it shouldn't be that high, but thanks to the great Internet thing, that's what we get.
SPAM affects every mail system. I've probably had to implement a dozen different ways to reduce inbound SPAM in my inbox and the inboxes of my customers over the years. On the flip side, I also have to get my emails out, including those of a modest sized opt-in mailing list through recipient SPAM filters.
It's ridiculous the volume of SPAM out there. If you've never had to think about this, it's easy to underestimate. Now, imagine my relatively simple situation and multiply it by about a million. That's what the Hotmail administrators have to deal with. It's not easy. Looking briefly at the article, it looks like a relatively harmless error, comparable, but different, to greylisting.
IMHO, stop using mail blasters that spool out emails as fast as the server can spit them out. That just doesn't work anymore. Queues and slow spooling are critical to making email recipient servers happy - otherwise it looks just like a zombie'd home computer spitting out spam.
We used to use phpBB for our quiet little forum. It got overran by spam, so it was switched to SMF, but that's a separate issue.
We installed a couple modifications to phpBB, I can't recall the specifics, I think a CAPTA (before it was standard issue) and some tweaks to the layout. This lead to huge problems when security issues required upgrades of phpBB.
In short, we didn't do the updates unless absolutely necessary. We'd have to patch in updates to the updated files... incredibly time consuming.
The same thing happened with phpNuke...
Yes, I realize that there's a full web browser in there... but it's just not the same. In fact, the times when I use my PDA the most are when I'm furthest from a computer and Internet access.
Heck, I had trouble making a (GSM) phone-call in the mall this weekend!
Some things are better run locally.
Languages have always come and gone... actually, I guess they've mostly gone as communication over wider geographies has become possible.
Anyway, I propose that we make giant stone cut modern day equivalents of the Rosetta Stone so that future archaeologists will have something to kickstart translation efforts when they pull fragments of text off of buried DVDs or whatever we leave behind.
Were these pre-existing licenses made known to Sprint et. al. when they bid on this spectrum? Wouldn't winning this bid entitle you to the spectrum -- making the FCC as the vendor responsible for actual delivery of the required space?
Or are these just little pockets of exceptions that everyone hoped would just "work out" in the end?
It's not clear from the summary, but I assume that this algae can still be used for biodiesel. Harvesting both might make the economics work out that much sooner.
That said, I don't know anything about algae for energy. I just know that I hate seeing the stuff when I'm on a lake (that isn't supposed to have algae).
When I first saw the iPod Touch on the news the first thought I had was "finally I can update my PDA!".
All it needs is to be open enough that people can develop programs for it. It doesn't need to be too complex, look at a lot of the cool apps for the Palm Pilot... and synchronize a datebook, notes, and contacts.
Sadly, I'm still stuck with my old black and white (hah, black and green) Handspring Visor Deluxe since it just works and it refuses to die.
Muni-WiFi that covers an entire city, not just the "downtown core", was destined to fail. You're lucky to get a WiFi signal a block away from the access point... for a smallish city, you're talking about thousands of access points to install and maintain.
It's not as simple as plugging in a router at home and shoving in a CAT5 cable from your ADSL or Cable 'modem'. A muni-wifi network needs to find power and handle the data back-haul (though a portion of the data can be bounced over the same wifi network).
Anyway, a WiMax access point can cover 100 times as much space, so yeah, assuming a municipality can get the frequency, it makes a lot more sense.
The anti-email spam guys figured out a distributed way to publish blacklists for IPs AND domains years ago.
Use DNS.
I assume that spamhaus.org et. al are using a customized DNS server, but whatever it is, it works reasonably well. For those who've never had to flag spam using a DNSBL, the gist is that the spam scrubber get's the IP address of a website via a "normal" dns lookup, then runs the IP or host name against the DNS blacklist by looking up a coded host name, something like: blacklist.spamhaus.org.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. (i don't have the format memorized, so the syntax is probably wrong). Depending on how that that special DNS lookup resolves, it's either spam or probable spam, or not listed.
This has the benefit of being anonymous (more or less) and distributed and mostly time-tested.
Crazy stuff. I could have sworn that MS had some resources allocated to doing huge beta tests.
For that matter, they probably assign people to create scripts to randomly create calculations and test the results. However, after reading a bit of the Usenet thread, automated scripts might not have caught the problem, it seems that it is at the rendering layer - using VB to get the cell value apparently gets the correct value.
Weird. And highly embarrassing.
I can't wait for the advertisements from OpenOffice (and it's new allies in IBM and Google) to play this up! Apple will have a field day too -- "Hi, I'm a Mac. Sure I'm good at video and music and all that fun stuff, but I can also do math. I know that 65,535 doesn't equal 100,000." -- OK, maybe that wouldn't be TV worthy, but I'll make a good web ad for Slashdot et. al.
I don't have a Mac. So, as an un-cool outsider, I find this topic a bit confusing.
Do Apple users actually keep up to date with OS X revisions? Is "Leopard" more like a service pack or a whole new OS or somewhere in-between? And what's the downside to not upgrading? Applications aren't tied to new OS X versions, are they?
In the Windows world, I would expect very few (non-geek) people to upgrade existing machines to Windows Vista.
My thought was that the long term plan is to integrate the GPU anyway (for one product line at least). While the GPU is RIGHT THERE, they will find a way to use of much of it as they can when it's not busy with 3D work... which for the average office environment is 95% of the time.
Gamers can still buy addon graphics cards, of course.