It's true that Windows seems to be getting slower with every release and OSX is getting faster. But one thing to keep in mind about that is that using OSX versions 10.0 and 10.1 were like watching a tree grow.
Seriously, clicking on a menu with just the Finder running, I had to wait for the lag for the thing to pop open. Try putting a folder in the dock and click and holding to see it's contents... it took positively ages. Where on OS9 on the same machine, you could drop your entire hard drive on the Apple menu and scroll around the hierarchy about as fast as you could move the mouse. Windows 2000 was way, way faster than OS10.1. There was a lot of complaining in the Mac forums about "where's the snappy?"
So now, I think maybe the OS's are crossing. By 10.3 OSX was getting pretty usable and 10.5 is really pretty snappy on most things, a few exceptions aside. Not up to OS9 speeds on basic Finder tasks, but not "WTF? painful" either. Meanwhile Windows seems to keep slowing down. But remember, OSX was starting from crap on speed, and Windows was starting from a much better place. So one getting better while the other got worse doesn't mean as much as it might if they started from equal footing.
Are you flying around with an old chair in the back of the plane that you picked up off the side of the runway? Because I've heard that is often accompanied by a "da da daaa" sound.
Also in Wired two months ago, there's a story on a guy with a company that's building out networks of battery-swapping stations and battery-powered vehicles in Isreal and Hawaii. He has contracts with major car manufacturers to make cars compatible with his system. It has every appearance of "really happening." His background is software- he was a higher-up at SAP - and he's taken a software/networking approach to implementing the electric car. For example, you tell your car where you're going, or it tries to guess, and it books battery swaps and charging stations ahead of time over the network as needed.
Darn. Looking at this, it makes me think, "Why didn't I write something like this back when I wrote this. Of course, Wall Street wasn't known for doing so much stupid crap back then to relate the news to for current relevance, but I found most of this back then. Oh well. I wish I had the time to act like a full-time journalist every time I find something interesting like this. Kudos to this guy for bringing this to the forefront.
This is obviously not aimed at the truly paranoid, though. Paranoia is a psychological disease that makes people irrationally believe that everyone's out to get them. The paranoid would probably be particularly suspicious of any product aimed at paranoid people, and they really won't trust this product at all, because they are irrationally afraid of everyone and everything. Even if a bunch of well-known security researchers with good reputations had audited the source code and said it's a great implementation, and the principles leading the project were well known people with a good reputation, the truly paranoid would still fear it, because there is no limit to the scope of a conspiracy they'll believe in.
But there's no reason to ask whether or not the truly paranoid would be willing to use Paranoid Linux, because it's not aimed at them. It's just a clever name. It's aimed at people who actually have a rational fear that someone's out to get them. (Note that, if everyone really was out to get you, and you knew that they were, it would be impossible for you to be paranoid. The following is not an actual instance of Godwin's Law because I'm not using this to counteract anybody's argument, it's just an actual good example: while Hitler's often been described as paranoid, it would actually have been impossible for him to have been paranoid. Nearly every person in the world really did have potential reasons to be out to get him.)
So this is aimed at people like political dissenters in oppressive countries. They aren't paranoid, but in many ways they act like paranoid people, because it truly is possible, or even likely, that someone really is out to get them.
The main thing I worry about is that the mere presence of Paranoid Linux installed on your machine will be grounds for prosecuting you in the places where it's most needed. Is Paranoid Linux paranoid enough to make itself appear indistinguishable from Windows? Can Paranoid Linux run in the background as a stealth rootkit on Windows that you can't even find or access without secret, user-specifiable knowledge?
So, they patented a method of figuring out what to patent. Well, I'm going to file for a patent on the method of getting patents on ideas concerning how to patent things. Or maybe even just cut to the chase, and get a patent on patenting methods of patenting ways to generate things to patent.
Wait, can we just define this as a recursive function, and patent that, therefore patenting all conceivable levels of meta-patent-analysis in one fell swoop?
Being a scientist sucks bigtime if we look at salary, job security or social standing
Yeah, tenure track research positions at major research universities, or being a PI in research at private companies, starts around what, $100,000/year? $200,000/year isn't out of line for good science faculty.
Bad job security? Who has better job security than a tenured professor? If you have tenure and then turn totally incompetent and loose all your funding, they still can't fire you, at worst they can make you teach classes. I know that seems worse than being fired to some professors, but it's not.
Social standing? You aren't on the level of a rock star or a movie star, but you have control over a budget for a lab and a sea of peons (post docs, grad students, undergrads) to do your bidding, you attend big international conferences and give papers. A lot of research scientists, if they indicate their willingness to local news sources, are frequently interviewed on relevant topics. My impression of scientists hanging around faculty clubs and conferences is not that they're a bunch of pocket-protector wearing nerds getting sand kicked in their faces. Try asking scientists what they do for a living, and they aren't exactly sheepish and trying to hide it. Being "a scientist" may not give you street cred in the hood, but is social high ground in many circles.
I think of the downside more as being the hours you have to work, especially at research universities. And yes, with those kinds of brains and those kinds of hours, you could make more as a lawyer, doctor, investment banker, consultant, etc. But $100,000+ isn't exactly leaving you in the poor house. I actually have salary information for one research university, that is not a top, highest-paying one, and no tenure-track faculty in the hard sciences makes less than six figures.
For god's sake, I know this is Slashdot, and it's the cliche that nobody RTFA's. But I can't believe this prolonged discussion about how testing his device in a Mercedes was improper because he probably just changed his driving habits, and how they should install these in dozens of cars with placebos in a randomized, blind, controlled study, and then finally to your brilliant deduction here that they should just hire an independent lab to run it on a bench test as a properly controlled lab experiment. BECAUSE THAT"S EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. Way to go, slashdot writers, your prolonged discussion on how they did everything wrong, and subsequently figuring what it is that they should have done, has finally arrived at the right answer for what they really should have done- the sort of testing they ACTUALLY DID PERFORM. From TFA:
The first engine test was conducted by Cornaglia Iveco, a diesel engine manufacturer in Italy (Figure 6a). The tests measured the fuel consumption rate and the power output at a constant rpm.
Constant RPM = lab work, not car driving. Read their testing methodology- a diesel engine on a lab bench hooked up to a dynamometer, measuring power vs. fuel consumption on the same motor with and without the device, performed by an independent testing lab.
On the Mercedes, they started with the car parked on a dynamometer in the lab and did lab testing, then they did six months of road testing to make sure their lab results were applicable in a real-world environment.
There are lots of highly-moderated posts above about how kooks and con-artists have been selling scam fuel-economy improvement devices for years, and how stupid the Slashdot editors are to have approved this story. Their argument boils down to saying that, because anyone has ever done anything invalid in the realm of engine efficiency, therefore any conceivable improvements in engine efficiency add-ons that anyone comes up with are invalid. This is a physics professor at a real university who published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in a respectable scientific journal, including results from an independent lab, and complete with specifications and testing methodology, because he expects other labs to duplicate and confirm his research. It's called snake-oil above, but that's the snake-oil he's selling that's being promoted by this? He's not selling anything yet, he's performing research and testing. He applied for a patent because he hopes to profit eventually. Once it's fully confirmed and proven.
I'm glad to see they did this for Mac as well as PC. Now if they could just support 64-bit processing on OSX, it would once again be fully up to par with Photoshop for Windows. Yes, I read the article I linked to, I know it's not all Adobe's fault. But it's going to be bad for Adobe, because they'll sell less CS4 upgrades for Mac because of this, and it'll be bad for Apple, because some platform-fence-sitting Photoshop pros who are considering a new computer to run CS4 are going to go PC over Mac.
Just to note- creationists equally claim that "macroevolution" is not a theory because it isn't able to "predict results of a test." That is, they divide evolution up into "micro-evolution," or evolutionary changes that take place in the short-term, ie, anything we can directly observe and test, and macroevolution, or long-term evolution. They admit that small, microevolutionary changes occur, but they claim that somehow, the microevolutionary changes that occur in a few hours to a few decades do not add up, when multiplied by hundreds of millions of years, into macroevolution- the evolution of new species, genera, families, orders, classes, phylum, or kingdoms. We can say that there's existing evidence for it in the fossil record, we can say that it's a logical imperative of microevolution, and it is "possible to disprove," but we can't really test macroevolution in any controlled manner, because the experiment will, by definition, take a few million years, and most grad students don't want to wait that long to get their PhD.
Something similar might actually be the solution. Microtek once took on "interpolated resolution" on scanners, and reformed the industry.
That is, some sleazbag small manufacturers started advertising "interpolated resolution" on their scanners. So the real brand scanners on the shelves said "600 DPI," and the crappy scanners said "1200 DPI*" with a footnote printed in 3-point font on page 13 of the manual inside the box that said "up to 1200 DPI interpolated: 300 DPI hardware resolution." I guess the other retailers got sick of seeing people buy these crappy scanners over theirs, because soon the real brands were doing this too. I pay close attention to this, being in the scanning business, and I remember rolling my eyes at all these scanners that were now advertised with meaningless marketing-gimmick numbers printed in a huge font on the side of the box for one of their primary specs.
Then one day I saw a scanner ad online and smiled; it was a Microtek scanner (and Microtek was one of the few manufacturers I'd never seen listing interpolated resolution) and their ad said: "2400 DPI Hardware Resolution: up 99,999 DPI Interpolated Resolution."
Well, WTF was the competition supposed to do about that? They just made their meaningless stupid numbers look meaningless and stupid. Soon after, I stopped seeing interpolated numbers being used.
So I propose Sony use a similar method, since they're faced with a similar problem to Microtek. First, they need some standardized test that's a pretty good, fair, test, with a catchy name, that everyone can use. Then they need to say on their products: "4 hr battery life according to the AccuVolt3 Test: Up to 3 months by other testing." Soon, consumers will suspect that "other testing" may not be all that accurate, and want to see "AccuVolt3" numbers, especially if they buy products that said that and experience the accuracy of the claims first hand.
Now if someone will just go after horsepower claims on home appliances. Horsepower is a measure of power and watts are a measure of power, and all the vacuum cleaners and air compressors in the store produce more power than they take out of the wall. I guess our energy worries are over, we can just use the amazing 200% efficiency motors from these products to generate endless power.
Also, watch out for the possible comming of interpolation stats in digital cameras. Many manufactueres have been quoting meaningless "digital zoom" number for years, but Bell+Howell has upped the ante by ONLY quoting "interpolated resolution" for the camera. They won't even tell you how many pixels the sensor records.
Well, if it didn't add DRM, it sounds useful to me. There are currently too many unnecessary steps involved in backing up a DVD. I've got two optical drives- it would be nice to have software that let me put a DVD in one drive, a blank in the other, and click the "copy" button and get an identical copy fast, without messing around with DeCSS ripping to my hard drive and then burning back to disc manually.
Although there already is a program that does this or OSX, without any DRM crap, called Fast DVD Copy. Not only does it not add DRM, it DeCSS's and then can also de-macrovision, remove navigational restrictions, and extract tracks and recompress video to compress double layer DVD's onto single layer media. But the developer wants $100 for it, and ironically, the program itself is highly protected, calling home to its servers to check registration.
Yeah, that was my thought. Roadrunner at Los Alamos sits at the top of the 500 list with Rmax 1,026,000. I don't know enough about benchmarks to distinguish between "Rmax" and "sustained petascale," but it is achieving over a petaflop. Maybe someone here can tell us more about linpack vs. whatever they're using for this new one. I notice the article linked in the story mentions Roadrunner at the end, but without saying how it compares in speed. It doesn't seem to say by what specific measure this new computer's speed surpasses a petaflop.
I launched Safari and did fairly heavy browsing for about half an hour- my history shows 66 pages from 22 sites, but now I've got all the tabs closed again except for this one, and Safari's still using 300.8 MB of RAM and 1.25 GB of VRAM. So does Safari suck too, or does IE8 not relatively suck all that much?
It's hovering around 10% usage of one of my two 2 ghz CPU cores, though, so it's not using much processing power.
Management is largely about optimizing resources, but of the tradeoffs management must consider, only some of them can be quantified numerically at all. The decisions managers have to make are often that of weighing something easily quantifiable and incredibly precise against something hopelessly vague and unquantifiable, which a computer will have no chance whatsoever of grappling with until we have strong AI. There's a pervasive trend in management to put undue weight on the quantifiable aspects of business, when it's a common fallacy to beleive something should be weighted more highly simply because it's quantifiable.
Here's just one tiny example of the kind of decision management has to weigh: setting service-level goals for a call center. Most call centers measure and target a service level, defined as answering [x]% of their incoming calls in [y] seconds or less. There's a tremendous amount of exceedingly tricky mathematical modeling that can be done to determine how to staff best to meet service level efficiently, and super-advanced computer programs could play a huge roll in improving this. And good computer modeling can create a beautiful and accurate graph of exactly how much it costs the company to run different service levels. But the key management problem here is setting the target service level, and while you can quantify, model, and analyze the costs of providing that service level intricately, and smart management can optimize that out the wazoo and bring ever lower costs to providing the same service level, it's almost impossible to gather the tiniest shred of evidence regarding the benefits of different service levels.
Sure, we all know what the benefits are- how many people get sick of waiting and call another company? How many do so subconsciously? How many only do so after years? How many of your customers tried another company once, and made the connection that that company provides poor customer service because the wait on the phone was so much longer, or switched because it was so much shorter, or the opposite- competitor's customers who did or did not switch to you because of the same? How much money did you save in returns or less complaint calls because you had built up goodwill by always answering the phone fast and not keeping your customers waiting? How about trying to quantify the mental health benefit to your own sales force from having happier, less irate customers, because they weren't kept on hold interminably before you answered? You have no hope of quantifying the benefits, but you must set some service level, based upon your intricate analysis of costs and NO IDEA what the benefits are.
And almost every aspect of business if FULL of decisions like this.
I used to manage a call center, and we answered 97% of calls in 18 seconds or less- that's three rings. There was no computer answering system, and no queue except the ringing. When we went to call-center industry conventions, people literally wouldn't believe that any major call center ran service levels that high, and if they believed it, they'd tell us we were insane, that that service level represents an unconscionable waste of resources. For comparison, many companies had targets more like 60% of calls in 10 minutes or less, with a computer holding queue. Some government departments (I'm not kidding) had goals of 50% of calls answered period- that is, answered before the caller bailed out of the holding queue by giving up, with no time factor.
We strongly disagreed that we were significantly overspending on service level, but there wasn't anything to even say to argue about it- the value of a good customer service experience is just ridiculously difficult to quantify. But even at that company, I routinely saw people making the kind of mistake we felt companies who kept their customers on hold forever were making- they tend to move in bias of the information they can quantify. Some manager goes to a meeting of higher-ups and says "I found out how we can save $6 million a yea
Every so often this happens with really big things where it seems unbelievable. For example, in 1998, VW paid over $1 billion for Rolls Royce/Bentley, only to find out later that the people selling the company didn't own the Rolls Royce brand, which was then sold separately to BMW. VW had paid a fortune for outmoded manufacturing facilities that produced about 2,000 absurdly expensive cars a year, some outmoded technology, and the lesser known Bentley brand.
Some birds are impressively smart, we know a family that had an African Grey Parrot that had a vocabulary of hundreds of words and used them appropriately. It used to perfectly imitate the voice of the mother in the family and call the dogs and make them do tricks in front of its cage.
Also, I don't buy this "few known species that recognize themselves in mirrors" thing one bit- if that's considered to be a widely known scientific fact, scientists aren't trying very hard, because we used to have a cat that would always go sit in front of the mirror and watch herself in the mirror as she groomed her face, and was clearly using the mirror.
But while I've got some respect for animal intelligence, I've also got an alternative explanation for their results in this case that doesn't involve bird self-awareness.
Most of what most birds do is pure ingrained response based upon evolution- birds don't "learn" how to build nests from watching their parents, it's just evolutionary behavior hard-wired through their genes into their brains.
Well, birds have a huge evolutionary history of mating based upon appearances. And you know what else they have a huge history of? Finding still, clear water to bathe themselves in. Which is often reflective. So I propose that a bird with some sort of things stuck to them marring their plumage would reduce their chances of reproducing, and I contend that birds saw their reflection regularly, in still water when they were about to groom themselves. Removing stuff they see in the water that doesn't correspond with an image of the plumage of their species (which could be hard-wired and involve no conception of self) could be a behavior that evolved, not a demonstration of a brain capable of recognizing their reflection as being themself and recognizing things that are out of place about them.
If you don't do the things you want to do in life because you're afraid some jerk might come along and mess something up, then your attitude toward life sucks.
Then you reply with one example of where you encountered a jerk in life. I don't think this is really relevant; surely the grandparent's point was not built upon the axiom "there are no jerks in the world." He's not saying avoiding-doing-what-you-want for-fear-of-jerks is stupid because there are no such thing as jerks, but because you should try not to let the existence of jerks wield a huge influence over your life, if you can avoid it.
What lesson would you propose we take from your car accident? I suppose things might have gone differently had you insisted upon a police report, but just like she lied the next day, she could have lied by the time a cop got there. [Incidentally, what about the person your car ended up hitting, don't you have their contact info, and can't they serve as a witness?] Anyone could be a jerk and lie about a car accident, but would you propose arranging your life so you never have to drive again to avoid this possibility?
I'm not one for a "turning the other cheek" attitude to putting up with jerks; I think we need to do everything we can not to let jerks get way with treating people like crap, and I applaud you for standing up for what's right in court. But at the same time, when lacking prior knowledge of who's a jerk and who's not, we should give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trust, especially if it will have a big influence on how we lead our lives. That is, I'm not saying "trust everyone and leave your wallet sitting out in a public park all afternoon," because seriously, there's a high risk of somebody taking it and there's low benefit to leaving it there. But if you're not living your life the way you want to as a precaution against anything bad ever happening, you're just exchanging the possibility of a bad thing happening for the certainty of the bad thing that is your failure to live your life.
Does anyone here know what a 2.5" hard disk actually weighs, so we can calculate the angular momentum? For example if we spin it at 20,000 RPM and a bearing seizes, will shattered fragments of disk penetrate the walls of the drive, the case of the computer, and the side of my head?
You don't have to be so clever as to resort to all that crazy computer-hacker cloak-and-dagger "Google searching" stuff... after all, those are probably just other "illegal" photos taken by other "terrorists" who managed to get away with it, and are sharing their carefully gathered espionage data to help their fellows plan.
Instead, you could just use the photo gallery and 360-degree virtual tour of the lobby provided by the Hyatt website. Funny, while they have lots of amenities, they don't mention "Thorough photography provided for the convenience of all your terrorist plots" anywhere in their literature.
If a picture of a lobby of a hotel is a terrorist risk, the Department of Homeland Security should be aggressively shutting down all these hotel's websites.
Saying "it deosn't mttaer" is relative. It may not matter to getting your meaning across, but it does affect whether or not you're attacked by a ravenous cabal of grammar Nazis on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that Windows seems to be getting slower with every release and OSX is getting faster. But one thing to keep in mind about that is that using OSX versions 10.0 and 10.1 were like watching a tree grow.
Seriously, clicking on a menu with just the Finder running, I had to wait for the lag for the thing to pop open. Try putting a folder in the dock and click and holding to see it's contents... it took positively ages. Where on OS9 on the same machine, you could drop your entire hard drive on the Apple menu and scroll around the hierarchy about as fast as you could move the mouse. Windows 2000 was way, way faster than OS10.1. There was a lot of complaining in the Mac forums about "where's the snappy?"
So now, I think maybe the OS's are crossing. By 10.3 OSX was getting pretty usable and 10.5 is really pretty snappy on most things, a few exceptions aside. Not up to OS9 speeds on basic Finder tasks, but not "WTF? painful" either. Meanwhile Windows seems to keep slowing down. But remember, OSX was starting from crap on speed, and Windows was starting from a much better place. So one getting better while the other got worse doesn't mean as much as it might if they started from equal footing.
"I clearly underestimated the man."
I think you mean misunderestimated.
Are you flying around with an old chair in the back of the plane that you picked up off the side of the runway? Because I've heard that is often accompanied by a "da da daaa" sound.
Also in Wired two months ago, there's a story on a guy with a company that's building out networks of battery-swapping stations and battery-powered vehicles in Isreal and Hawaii. He has contracts with major car manufacturers to make cars compatible with his system. It has every appearance of "really happening." His background is software- he was a higher-up at SAP - and he's taken a software/networking approach to implementing the electric car. For example, you tell your car where you're going, or it tries to guess, and it books battery swaps and charging stations ahead of time over the network as needed.
Darn. Looking at this, it makes me think, "Why didn't I write something like this back when I wrote this. Of course, Wall Street wasn't known for doing so much stupid crap back then to relate the news to for current relevance, but I found most of this back then. Oh well. I wish I had the time to act like a full-time journalist every time I find something interesting like this. Kudos to this guy for bringing this to the forefront.
This is obviously not aimed at the truly paranoid, though. Paranoia is a psychological disease that makes people irrationally believe that everyone's out to get them. The paranoid would probably be particularly suspicious of any product aimed at paranoid people, and they really won't trust this product at all, because they are irrationally afraid of everyone and everything. Even if a bunch of well-known security researchers with good reputations had audited the source code and said it's a great implementation, and the principles leading the project were well known people with a good reputation, the truly paranoid would still fear it, because there is no limit to the scope of a conspiracy they'll believe in.
But there's no reason to ask whether or not the truly paranoid would be willing to use Paranoid Linux, because it's not aimed at them. It's just a clever name. It's aimed at people who actually have a rational fear that someone's out to get them. (Note that, if everyone really was out to get you, and you knew that they were, it would be impossible for you to be paranoid. The following is not an actual instance of Godwin's Law because I'm not using this to counteract anybody's argument, it's just an actual good example: while Hitler's often been described as paranoid, it would actually have been impossible for him to have been paranoid. Nearly every person in the world really did have potential reasons to be out to get him.)
So this is aimed at people like political dissenters in oppressive countries. They aren't paranoid, but in many ways they act like paranoid people, because it truly is possible, or even likely, that someone really is out to get them.
The main thing I worry about is that the mere presence of Paranoid Linux installed on your machine will be grounds for prosecuting you in the places where it's most needed. Is Paranoid Linux paranoid enough to make itself appear indistinguishable from Windows? Can Paranoid Linux run in the background as a stealth rootkit on Windows that you can't even find or access without secret, user-specifiable knowledge?
So, they patented a method of figuring out what to patent. Well, I'm going to file for a patent on the method of getting patents on ideas concerning how to patent things. Or maybe even just cut to the chase, and get a patent on patenting methods of patenting ways to generate things to patent.
Wait, can we just define this as a recursive function, and patent that, therefore patenting all conceivable levels of meta-patent-analysis in one fell swoop?
Being a scientist sucks bigtime if we look at salary, job security or social standing
Yeah, tenure track research positions at major research universities, or being a PI in research at private companies, starts around what, $100,000/year? $200,000/year isn't out of line for good science faculty.
Bad job security? Who has better job security than a tenured professor? If you have tenure and then turn totally incompetent and loose all your funding, they still can't fire you, at worst they can make you teach classes. I know that seems worse than being fired to some professors, but it's not.
Social standing? You aren't on the level of a rock star or a movie star, but you have control over a budget for a lab and a sea of peons (post docs, grad students, undergrads) to do your bidding, you attend big international conferences and give papers. A lot of research scientists, if they indicate their willingness to local news sources, are frequently interviewed on relevant topics. My impression of scientists hanging around faculty clubs and conferences is not that they're a bunch of pocket-protector wearing nerds getting sand kicked in their faces. Try asking scientists what they do for a living, and they aren't exactly sheepish and trying to hide it. Being "a scientist" may not give you street cred in the hood, but is social high ground in many circles.
I think of the downside more as being the hours you have to work, especially at research universities. And yes, with those kinds of brains and those kinds of hours, you could make more as a lawyer, doctor, investment banker, consultant, etc. But $100,000+ isn't exactly leaving you in the poor house. I actually have salary information for one research university, that is not a top, highest-paying one, and no tenure-track faculty in the hard sciences makes less than six figures.
Someone mod parent up. Other people should know why I was ROFL after reading the grandparent.
For god's sake, I know this is Slashdot, and it's the cliche that nobody RTFA's. But I can't believe this prolonged discussion about how testing his device in a Mercedes was improper because he probably just changed his driving habits, and how they should install these in dozens of cars with placebos in a randomized, blind, controlled study, and then finally to your brilliant deduction here that they should just hire an independent lab to run it on a bench test as a properly controlled lab experiment. BECAUSE THAT"S EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. Way to go, slashdot writers, your prolonged discussion on how they did everything wrong, and subsequently figuring what it is that they should have done, has finally arrived at the right answer for what they really should have done- the sort of testing they ACTUALLY DID PERFORM. From TFA:
The first engine test was conducted by Cornaglia Iveco, a diesel engine manufacturer in Italy (Figure 6a). The tests measured the fuel consumption rate and the power output at a constant rpm.
Constant RPM = lab work, not car driving. Read their testing methodology- a diesel engine on a lab bench hooked up to a dynamometer, measuring power vs. fuel consumption on the same motor with and without the device, performed by an independent testing lab.
On the Mercedes, they started with the car parked on a dynamometer in the lab and did lab testing, then they did six months of road testing to make sure their lab results were applicable in a real-world environment.
There are lots of highly-moderated posts above about how kooks and con-artists have been selling scam fuel-economy improvement devices for years, and how stupid the Slashdot editors are to have approved this story. Their argument boils down to saying that, because anyone has ever done anything invalid in the realm of engine efficiency, therefore any conceivable improvements in engine efficiency add-ons that anyone comes up with are invalid. This is a physics professor at a real university who published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in a respectable scientific journal, including results from an independent lab, and complete with specifications and testing methodology, because he expects other labs to duplicate and confirm his research. It's called snake-oil above, but that's the snake-oil he's selling that's being promoted by this? He's not selling anything yet, he's performing research and testing. He applied for a patent because he hopes to profit eventually. Once it's fully confirmed and proven.
I'm glad to see they did this for Mac as well as PC. Now if they could just support 64-bit processing on OSX, it would once again be fully up to par with Photoshop for Windows. Yes, I read the article I linked to, I know it's not all Adobe's fault. But it's going to be bad for Adobe, because they'll sell less CS4 upgrades for Mac because of this, and it'll be bad for Apple, because some platform-fence-sitting Photoshop pros who are considering a new computer to run CS4 are going to go PC over Mac.
Just to note- creationists equally claim that "macroevolution" is not a theory because it isn't able to "predict results of a test." That is, they divide evolution up into "micro-evolution," or evolutionary changes that take place in the short-term, ie, anything we can directly observe and test, and macroevolution, or long-term evolution. They admit that small, microevolutionary changes occur, but they claim that somehow, the microevolutionary changes that occur in a few hours to a few decades do not add up, when multiplied by hundreds of millions of years, into macroevolution- the evolution of new species, genera, families, orders, classes, phylum, or kingdoms. We can say that there's existing evidence for it in the fossil record, we can say that it's a logical imperative of microevolution, and it is "possible to disprove," but we can't really test macroevolution in any controlled manner, because the experiment will, by definition, take a few million years, and most grad students don't want to wait that long to get their PhD.
Something similar might actually be the solution. Microtek once took on "interpolated resolution" on scanners, and reformed the industry.
That is, some sleazbag small manufacturers started advertising "interpolated resolution" on their scanners. So the real brand scanners on the shelves said "600 DPI," and the crappy scanners said "1200 DPI*" with a footnote printed in 3-point font on page 13 of the manual inside the box that said "up to 1200 DPI interpolated: 300 DPI hardware resolution." I guess the other retailers got sick of seeing people buy these crappy scanners over theirs, because soon the real brands were doing this too. I pay close attention to this, being in the scanning business, and I remember rolling my eyes at all these scanners that were now advertised with meaningless marketing-gimmick numbers printed in a huge font on the side of the box for one of their primary specs.
Then one day I saw a scanner ad online and smiled; it was a Microtek scanner (and Microtek was one of the few manufacturers I'd never seen listing interpolated resolution) and their ad said: "2400 DPI Hardware Resolution: up 99,999 DPI Interpolated Resolution."
Well, WTF was the competition supposed to do about that? They just made their meaningless stupid numbers look meaningless and stupid. Soon after, I stopped seeing interpolated numbers being used.
So I propose Sony use a similar method, since they're faced with a similar problem to Microtek. First, they need some standardized test that's a pretty good, fair, test, with a catchy name, that everyone can use. Then they need to say on their products: "4 hr battery life according to the AccuVolt3 Test: Up to 3 months by other testing." Soon, consumers will suspect that "other testing" may not be all that accurate, and want to see "AccuVolt3" numbers, especially if they buy products that said that and experience the accuracy of the claims first hand.
Now if someone will just go after horsepower claims on home appliances. Horsepower is a measure of power and watts are a measure of power, and all the vacuum cleaners and air compressors in the store produce more power than they take out of the wall. I guess our energy worries are over, we can just use the amazing 200% efficiency motors from these products to generate endless power.
Also, watch out for the possible comming of interpolation stats in digital cameras. Many manufactueres have been quoting meaningless "digital zoom" number for years, but Bell+Howell has upped the ante by ONLY quoting "interpolated resolution" for the camera. They won't even tell you how many pixels the sensor records.
Well, if it didn't add DRM, it sounds useful to me. There are currently too many unnecessary steps involved in backing up a DVD. I've got two optical drives- it would be nice to have software that let me put a DVD in one drive, a blank in the other, and click the "copy" button and get an identical copy fast, without messing around with DeCSS ripping to my hard drive and then burning back to disc manually.
Although there already is a program that does this or OSX, without any DRM crap, called Fast DVD Copy. Not only does it not add DRM, it DeCSS's and then can also de-macrovision, remove navigational restrictions, and extract tracks and recompress video to compress double layer DVD's onto single layer media. But the developer wants $100 for it, and ironically, the program itself is highly protected, calling home to its servers to check registration.
Yeah, that was my thought. Roadrunner at Los Alamos sits at the top of the 500 list with Rmax 1,026,000. I don't know enough about benchmarks to distinguish between "Rmax" and "sustained petascale," but it is achieving over a petaflop. Maybe someone here can tell us more about linpack vs. whatever they're using for this new one. I notice the article linked in the story mentions Roadrunner at the end, but without saying how it compares in speed. It doesn't seem to say by what specific measure this new computer's speed surpasses a petaflop.
I launched Safari and did fairly heavy browsing for about half an hour- my history shows 66 pages from 22 sites, but now I've got all the tabs closed again except for this one, and Safari's still using 300.8 MB of RAM and 1.25 GB of VRAM. So does Safari suck too, or does IE8 not relatively suck all that much?
It's hovering around 10% usage of one of my two 2 ghz CPU cores, though, so it's not using much processing power.
Management is largely about optimizing resources, but of the tradeoffs management must consider, only some of them can be quantified numerically at all. The decisions managers have to make are often that of weighing something easily quantifiable and incredibly precise against something hopelessly vague and unquantifiable, which a computer will have no chance whatsoever of grappling with until we have strong AI. There's a pervasive trend in management to put undue weight on the quantifiable aspects of business, when it's a common fallacy to beleive something should be weighted more highly simply because it's quantifiable.
Here's just one tiny example of the kind of decision management has to weigh: setting service-level goals for a call center. Most call centers measure and target a service level, defined as answering [x]% of their incoming calls in [y] seconds or less. There's a tremendous amount of exceedingly tricky mathematical modeling that can be done to determine how to staff best to meet service level efficiently, and super-advanced computer programs could play a huge roll in improving this. And good computer modeling can create a beautiful and accurate graph of exactly how much it costs the company to run different service levels. But the key management problem here is setting the target service level, and while you can quantify, model, and analyze the costs of providing that service level intricately, and smart management can optimize that out the wazoo and bring ever lower costs to providing the same service level, it's almost impossible to gather the tiniest shred of evidence regarding the benefits of different service levels.
Sure, we all know what the benefits are- how many people get sick of waiting and call another company? How many do so subconsciously? How many only do so after years? How many of your customers tried another company once, and made the connection that that company provides poor customer service because the wait on the phone was so much longer, or switched because it was so much shorter, or the opposite- competitor's customers who did or did not switch to you because of the same? How much money did you save in returns or less complaint calls because you had built up goodwill by always answering the phone fast and not keeping your customers waiting? How about trying to quantify the mental health benefit to your own sales force from having happier, less irate customers, because they weren't kept on hold interminably before you answered? You have no hope of quantifying the benefits, but you must set some service level, based upon your intricate analysis of costs and NO IDEA what the benefits are.
And almost every aspect of business if FULL of decisions like this.
I used to manage a call center, and we answered 97% of calls in 18 seconds or less- that's three rings. There was no computer answering system, and no queue except the ringing. When we went to call-center industry conventions, people literally wouldn't believe that any major call center ran service levels that high, and if they believed it, they'd tell us we were insane, that that service level represents an unconscionable waste of resources. For comparison, many companies had targets more like 60% of calls in 10 minutes or less, with a computer holding queue. Some government departments (I'm not kidding) had goals of 50% of calls answered period- that is, answered before the caller bailed out of the holding queue by giving up, with no time factor.
We strongly disagreed that we were significantly overspending on service level, but there wasn't anything to even say to argue about it- the value of a good customer service experience is just ridiculously difficult to quantify. But even at that company, I routinely saw people making the kind of mistake we felt companies who kept their customers on hold forever were making- they tend to move in bias of the information they can quantify. Some manager goes to a meeting of higher-ups and says "I found out how we can save $6 million a yea
Every so often this happens with really big things where it seems unbelievable. For example, in 1998, VW paid over $1 billion for Rolls Royce/Bentley, only to find out later that the people selling the company didn't own the Rolls Royce brand, which was then sold separately to BMW. VW had paid a fortune for outmoded manufacturing facilities that produced about 2,000 absurdly expensive cars a year, some outmoded technology, and the lesser known Bentley brand.
Some birds are impressively smart, we know a family that had an African Grey Parrot that had a vocabulary of hundreds of words and used them appropriately. It used to perfectly imitate the voice of the mother in the family and call the dogs and make them do tricks in front of its cage.
Also, I don't buy this "few known species that recognize themselves in mirrors" thing one bit- if that's considered to be a widely known scientific fact, scientists aren't trying very hard, because we used to have a cat that would always go sit in front of the mirror and watch herself in the mirror as she groomed her face, and was clearly using the mirror.
But while I've got some respect for animal intelligence, I've also got an alternative explanation for their results in this case that doesn't involve bird self-awareness.
Most of what most birds do is pure ingrained response based upon evolution- birds don't "learn" how to build nests from watching their parents, it's just evolutionary behavior hard-wired through their genes into their brains.
Well, birds have a huge evolutionary history of mating based upon appearances. And you know what else they have a huge history of? Finding still, clear water to bathe themselves in. Which is often reflective. So I propose that a bird with some sort of things stuck to them marring their plumage would reduce their chances of reproducing, and I contend that birds saw their reflection regularly, in still water when they were about to groom themselves. Removing stuff they see in the water that doesn't correspond with an image of the plumage of their species (which could be hard-wired and involve no conception of self) could be a behavior that evolved, not a demonstration of a brain capable of recognizing their reflection as being themself and recognizing things that are out of place about them.
The grandparent's point was essentially:
If you don't do the things you want to do in life because you're afraid some jerk might come along and mess something up, then your attitude toward life sucks.
Then you reply with one example of where you encountered a jerk in life. I don't think this is really relevant; surely the grandparent's point was not built upon the axiom "there are no jerks in the world." He's not saying avoiding-doing-what-you-want for-fear-of-jerks is stupid because there are no such thing as jerks, but because you should try not to let the existence of jerks wield a huge influence over your life, if you can avoid it.
What lesson would you propose we take from your car accident? I suppose things might have gone differently had you insisted upon a police report, but just like she lied the next day, she could have lied by the time a cop got there. [Incidentally, what about the person your car ended up hitting, don't you have their contact info, and can't they serve as a witness?] Anyone could be a jerk and lie about a car accident, but would you propose arranging your life so you never have to drive again to avoid this possibility?
I'm not one for a "turning the other cheek" attitude to putting up with jerks; I think we need to do everything we can not to let jerks get way with treating people like crap, and I applaud you for standing up for what's right in court. But at the same time, when lacking prior knowledge of who's a jerk and who's not, we should give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trust, especially if it will have a big influence on how we lead our lives. That is, I'm not saying "trust everyone and leave your wallet sitting out in a public park all afternoon," because seriously, there's a high risk of somebody taking it and there's low benefit to leaving it there. But if you're not living your life the way you want to as a precaution against anything bad ever happening, you're just exchanging the possibility of a bad thing happening for the certainty of the bad thing that is your failure to live your life.
Does anyone here know what a 2.5" hard disk actually weighs, so we can calculate the angular momentum? For example if we spin it at 20,000 RPM and a bearing seizes, will shattered fragments of disk penetrate the walls of the drive, the case of the computer, and the side of my head?
You don't have to be so clever as to resort to all that crazy computer-hacker cloak-and-dagger "Google searching" stuff... after all, those are probably just other "illegal" photos taken by other "terrorists" who managed to get away with it, and are sharing their carefully gathered espionage data to help their fellows plan.
Instead, you could just use the photo gallery and 360-degree virtual tour of the lobby provided by the Hyatt website. Funny, while they have lots of amenities, they don't mention "Thorough photography provided for the convenience of all your terrorist plots" anywhere in their literature.
If a picture of a lobby of a hotel is a terrorist risk, the Department of Homeland Security should be aggressively shutting down all these hotel's websites.
Funny how things change, eh?
I think Nvidia would have preferred a different previous naysayer for you to link to.
I heard the title of their talk at SIGGRAPH was:
"Practical Real Time HD Raytracing With Nvidia Hardware: Suck It, John Carmack."
The thing is, who cares? We can piss-off these anti-violence people all we want, and what are they going to do about it?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Saying "it deosn't mttaer" is relative. It may not matter to getting your meaning across, but it does affect whether or not you're attacked by a ravenous cabal of grammar Nazis on slashdot.