Night on the moon lasts for about two weeks. This means that, during the two weeks of sunlight, you'd have to generate and store enough power to last you two weeks, on top of the power that you were using normally. That's going to require a lot of batteries...
If you're paying a dividend, then you're saying to your shareholders 'I think you can do more with this money than we can'. That's not a good message for a dynamic company to be sending, but it's fine for one in a fairly static position in an established market (i.e. a company in the cash cow phase).
As to keeping investors happy, there are two reasons why a company needs to care about its stock price, and it only needs to care if one or both of these apply:
It is using stock options to pay people. This is often a good idea, because it means that they are financially invested in the company's success, but it means that a drop in the share price is equivalent to giving your employees a pay cut, which is not good if you want to retain top talent.
They want to be able to raise more capital easily by issuing more shares in the future. When a company issues more shares, this dilutes the value of the existing ones. If a company issues $100,000 of new shares, but then uses this capital to increase in value by $200,000, then the existing investors won't see issuing more
as a reason to sell, and the next time that they need capital they can issue more. If a company issues $100,000 of shares and doesn't increase in value, then everyone else's shares just became slightly less valuable, so it's not a good thing to own. As long as the share price is on an upwards trajectory, you can raise capital without lowering the value of the shares - you just slow the rate at which they gain value.
It's important not to lose sight of why the share price matters.
Because, at the time, there was no video support in Windows at all. Microsoft build Video For Windows (which later evolved into DirectShow) using some code appropriated from QuickTime. Don't confuse the QuickTime Player with QuickTime. One is a tiny front end, the other is a rich multimedia framework. It's getting slightly dated now (hence the fact that it's largely replaced with AVFoundation in OS X and iOS), but in the '90s it was the API to use for multimedia applications.
For example, differential geometry also applies to physics of surfaces (bubble mechanics, for example)
And some of this is actually much more interesting. General relativity is interesting in a sort of hand-waving, never actually going to be any use to me, kind of way. Understanding the shape of waves breaking on a shore is much more interesting - and still an open research problem.
Yes. Their monopoly on a large body of knowledge was part of the Church's power. They didn't want peasants reading the bible and disputing their interpretation, nor did they want people educated enough to question their doctrine. Several popes and cardinals wrote long essays arguing against mass literacy.
But that's the thing, what kind of demographic information are they going to get from a NAME
My tango group uses Facebook for communication (fortunately, they have a mailing list too). If you're a member of that group, that gives a good indication of which city you're in - especially if it's combined with comments about attending events. If they have your real name as well, then they can cross-reference this with the electoral roll (public domain information) and get your address. Replace Facebook group with G+ Circle and the same applies.
Even without the group membership, they know your IP address, and geolocation can easily get you within a couple of miles if you're using cable. Connect from the same residential IP for a few months, and they can then do the same cross-referencing with the electoral roll to narrow it down to a real address.
They don't have to sell this address to advertisers, they can send junk mail on their behalf. They might not even do that. If they've got your location and name, then you may see billboards appearing near you that are specifically targeted at you and a few other people nearby.
And if you don't think that Altavista sucked, then you obviously weren't on dialup. I switched to Google from Altavista because the Altavista page took about 30 seconds to load on my modem, while the Google one loaded almost instantly. Important when you're paying by the minute, and irritating even when you aren't.
The UI was why I switched to Google, and why I switched form Google. The last straw was when they broke the text entry field. On every other text field in the system, up arrow jumps to the start, down arrow jumps to the end. With the Google search field, up arrow does nothing, down arrow invokes some autocompletion crap.
I'd say the opposite. I can do the calculus related to orbital mechanics, for example, but I can also look at the path of an object in a 2-body system and work out where it's going and roughly what force is required to shift it into a different orbit. I can catch a frisbee by judging the angle, the speed, and the wind. I can also work out where it will land by calculating the airfoil effect and the integral of the various forces acting on it.
In neither case would I say that the mathematics enhanced my understanding. The mathematics is a crutch. It's useful to verify your comprehension, but when you deal with the mathematics you're dealing with an abstraction. Real understanding requires you to know how it relates to the real world. For general relativity, this isn't so hard. If you look at quantum mechanics, there are far more people who can follow the maths than really understand what's going on - Feynman said that anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is lying, and I'm pretty sure he understood the maths.
It would have been nice if the article had contained some specs on CPU / GPU &c.
I know reading is, like, hard and stuff, but TFA specifically says that it's a Broadcom BCM2835, which is an ARM11 core with an OpenGL 2 ES GPU.
Makes me wonder how they did it. My desktop computer cannot do this without a huge AGP card.
Seriously? How old is your desktop. Quake 3 was released in 1999. It ran nicely on my VooDoo 2 (although only at 800x600). It is designed for a fixed-function pipeline. Any mobile phone GPU from the last 5 years will have been capable of running it.
To be fair, the uneducated accounted for about 95% of the population in the time period that you're discussing. Literacy levels were very low, and the Catholic church was working hard to maintain this.
Not really. Any sufficiently complex system begins to exhibit emergent behaviours which are fundamentally different to its normal behaviour. When you focus on the detail, you see something very different to when you look at an entire system. What we perceive as touch, pressure, and so on is just an emergent behaviour of electrostatic repulsion. There's no reason to suppose that this is limited in either direction - that the properties that we detect at the micro scale are not emergent behaviours of smaller and simpler systems, or that the properties that we perceive at the macro scale do not give rise to emergent properties at an even larger scale.
Pringles claimed that they were stacking cakes. They lost a court case in the UK over this a couple of years back - for strange historical reasons, you pay VAT on crisps, but not on cakes. Pringles had been avoiding paying VAT by claiming that, because they were made from baked dough, they were cakes and not crisps.
I'd look at the SmartQ series of tablets too. They look a lot like the iPad, but have been around for a lot longer (and are a lot cheaper, although the specs are pretty anaemic).
If all that they'd changed was the size, you might have a point, but they also changed the aspect ratio, and the orientation of default UI, and replaced the standard home screen with one that looked like iOS.
Depends on what you mean by success. For some definitions, it would be Microsoft. Apple sold quite a lot of Macs, but they had nowhere near the market presence of the Apple II or the IBM PC. DR's GEM was pretty successful, but came slightly later. Windows 3.1 was the first GUI that everyone had seen and used. When it came out, there were a few people on my street with computers, but they had Acorn, Amiga, or Atari machines. It wasn't until 3.1 had been out for a while that I started meeting people who had IBM-compatible PCs as home machines - the few who'd used them before then had borrowed them from work. My first computer was an 8086 that shipped with GEM and that I replaced with Windows 3.0, but that was an exception - I only got it because my father's company had no further use for it and sold it off cheaply.
I'm pretty sure Palm made a lot of money with a flat device that had icons in rows. Take a look at the images on the right hand side of this page. Palm was using that look right back in 1996, and was making a lot of money until smartphones started to replace PDAs. The iPhone is an incremental change from the Palm (multitouch, no graffiti-entry space) and the iPad is an incremental change from that.
Slashdot Mirror
Night on the moon lasts for about two weeks. This means that, during the two weeks of sunlight, you'd have to generate and store enough power to last you two weeks, on top of the power that you were using normally. That's going to require a lot of batteries...
I'd prefer the moon without nuclear contamination
This makes about as much sense as standing next to the mouth of a volcano and complaining that your neighbour's barbecue is making you too hot.
If you're paying a dividend, then you're saying to your shareholders 'I think you can do more with this money than we can'. That's not a good message for a dynamic company to be sending, but it's fine for one in a fairly static position in an established market (i.e. a company in the cash cow phase).
As to keeping investors happy, there are two reasons why a company needs to care about its stock price, and it only needs to care if one or both of these apply:
It is using stock options to pay people. This is often a good idea, because it means that they are financially invested in the company's success, but it means that a drop in the share price is equivalent to giving your employees a pay cut, which is not good if you want to retain top talent.
They want to be able to raise more capital easily by issuing more shares in the future. When a company issues more shares, this dilutes the value of the existing ones. If a company issues $100,000 of new shares, but then uses this capital to increase in value by $200,000, then the existing investors won't see issuing more as a reason to sell, and the next time that they need capital they can issue more. If a company issues $100,000 of shares and doesn't increase in value, then everyone else's shares just became slightly less valuable, so it's not a good thing to own. As long as the share price is on an upwards trajectory, you can raise capital without lowering the value of the shares - you just slow the rate at which they gain value.
It's important not to lose sight of why the share price matters.
Politicians in the USA learned long ago not to underestimate the influence of a load of women with time on their hands...
Because, at the time, there was no video support in Windows at all. Microsoft build Video For Windows (which later evolved into DirectShow) using some code appropriated from QuickTime. Don't confuse the QuickTime Player with QuickTime. One is a tiny front end, the other is a rich multimedia framework. It's getting slightly dated now (hence the fact that it's largely replaced with AVFoundation in OS X and iOS), but in the '90s it was the API to use for multimedia applications.
I don't think things that harm Facebook can be considered evil. The evil bit is making their own locked-in information-harvesting service.
For example, differential geometry also applies to physics of surfaces (bubble mechanics, for example)
And some of this is actually much more interesting. General relativity is interesting in a sort of hand-waving, never actually going to be any use to me, kind of way. Understanding the shape of waves breaking on a shore is much more interesting - and still an open research problem.
I took 3 years of calculus at Caltech, and differential equations were in year 3.
I really hope that you're trolling here. Or you were there doing a cookery course and took Calculus For Chefs.
Yes. Their monopoly on a large body of knowledge was part of the Church's power. They didn't want peasants reading the bible and disputing their interpretation, nor did they want people educated enough to question their doctrine. Several popes and cardinals wrote long essays arguing against mass literacy.
But that's the thing, what kind of demographic information are they going to get from a NAME
My tango group uses Facebook for communication (fortunately, they have a mailing list too). If you're a member of that group, that gives a good indication of which city you're in - especially if it's combined with comments about attending events. If they have your real name as well, then they can cross-reference this with the electoral roll (public domain information) and get your address. Replace Facebook group with G+ Circle and the same applies.
Even without the group membership, they know your IP address, and geolocation can easily get you within a couple of miles if you're using cable. Connect from the same residential IP for a few months, and they can then do the same cross-referencing with the electoral roll to narrow it down to a real address.
They don't have to sell this address to advertisers, they can send junk mail on their behalf. They might not even do that. If they've got your location and name, then you may see billboards appearing near you that are specifically targeted at you and a few other people nearby.
Newfag? Seriously? This is not 4chan...
And if you don't think that Altavista sucked, then you obviously weren't on dialup. I switched to Google from Altavista because the Altavista page took about 30 seconds to load on my modem, while the Google one loaded almost instantly. Important when you're paying by the minute, and irritating even when you aren't.
The UI was why I switched to Google, and why I switched form Google. The last straw was when they broke the text entry field. On every other text field in the system, up arrow jumps to the start, down arrow jumps to the end. With the Google search field, up arrow does nothing, down arrow invokes some autocompletion crap.
I'd say the opposite. I can do the calculus related to orbital mechanics, for example, but I can also look at the path of an object in a 2-body system and work out where it's going and roughly what force is required to shift it into a different orbit. I can catch a frisbee by judging the angle, the speed, and the wind. I can also work out where it will land by calculating the airfoil effect and the integral of the various forces acting on it.
In neither case would I say that the mathematics enhanced my understanding. The mathematics is a crutch. It's useful to verify your comprehension, but when you deal with the mathematics you're dealing with an abstraction. Real understanding requires you to know how it relates to the real world. For general relativity, this isn't so hard. If you look at quantum mechanics, there are far more people who can follow the maths than really understand what's going on - Feynman said that anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is lying, and I'm pretty sure he understood the maths.
It would have been nice if the article had contained some specs on CPU / GPU &c.
I know reading is, like, hard and stuff, but TFA specifically says that it's a Broadcom BCM2835, which is an ARM11 core with an OpenGL 2 ES GPU.
Makes me wonder how they did it. My desktop computer cannot do this without a huge AGP card.
Seriously? How old is your desktop. Quake 3 was released in 1999. It ran nicely on my VooDoo 2 (although only at 800x600). It is designed for a fixed-function pipeline. Any mobile phone GPU from the last 5 years will have been capable of running it.
I'd heard of the project, but not of the name. A simple mention of Braben somewhere in the summary would have helped...
To be fair, the uneducated accounted for about 95% of the population in the time period that you're discussing. Literacy levels were very low, and the Catholic church was working hard to maintain this.
Not really. Any sufficiently complex system begins to exhibit emergent behaviours which are fundamentally different to its normal behaviour. When you focus on the detail, you see something very different to when you look at an entire system. What we perceive as touch, pressure, and so on is just an emergent behaviour of electrostatic repulsion. There's no reason to suppose that this is limited in either direction - that the properties that we detect at the micro scale are not emergent behaviours of smaller and simpler systems, or that the properties that we perceive at the macro scale do not give rise to emergent properties at an even larger scale.
Pringles claimed that they were stacking cakes. They lost a court case in the UK over this a couple of years back - for strange historical reasons, you pay VAT on crisps, but not on cakes. Pringles had been avoiding paying VAT by claiming that, because they were made from baked dough, they were cakes and not crisps.
That's just wishful thinking. We're all really hoping that C++ won't still be around in 2098...
If it hadn't been for NeXT, Microsoft would have had no one to copy for most of the '90s...
I'd look at the SmartQ series of tablets too. They look a lot like the iPad, but have been around for a lot longer (and are a lot cheaper, although the specs are pretty anaemic).
If all that they'd changed was the size, you might have a point, but they also changed the aspect ratio, and the orientation of default UI, and replaced the standard home screen with one that looked like iOS.
It just goes to show something that we've known for a long time, but people on Slashdot like to deny. Apple users really are creative professionals...
Depends on what you mean by success. For some definitions, it would be Microsoft. Apple sold quite a lot of Macs, but they had nowhere near the market presence of the Apple II or the IBM PC. DR's GEM was pretty successful, but came slightly later. Windows 3.1 was the first GUI that everyone had seen and used. When it came out, there were a few people on my street with computers, but they had Acorn, Amiga, or Atari machines. It wasn't until 3.1 had been out for a while that I started meeting people who had IBM-compatible PCs as home machines - the few who'd used them before then had borrowed them from work. My first computer was an 8086 that shipped with GEM and that I replaced with Windows 3.0, but that was an exception - I only got it because my father's company had no further use for it and sold it off cheaply.
I'm pretty sure Palm made a lot of money with a flat device that had icons in rows. Take a look at the images on the right hand side of this page. Palm was using that look right back in 1996, and was making a lot of money until smartphones started to replace PDAs. The iPhone is an incremental change from the Palm (multitouch, no graffiti-entry space) and the iPad is an incremental change from that.