This kind of vertical integration would be a terrible thing for both Apple and AMD. AMD would suffer because it would be more difficult to sell to companies that see Apple as a competitor (would you buy vital components of your product from a competitor? Your competitor would then be able to either cut off your supply or arbitrarily raise your costs). Apple would have to assume the full capital investment burden of a chip manufacturer. A new chip fab costs about what Apple's current gross receipts are in one year (that's receipts, not profit). I don't see any upside for Apple in this, and damn little for AMD.
If I were going to look for a good fit with AMD I would say either a well heeled supplier (chip fab equipment or raw materials) or a holding company like Berkshire Hathaway. The supplier might be able to make a case for having a guaranteed volume of consumption under their own control, and they would be able to harvest more of the added value from thier products. A holding company would be able to justify the purchase as increased diversification. In either case, the negative impact on AMD's current sales would be minimal, which would allow AMD to maintain capital investments in the future.
I have to say that I was perticularly unimpressed by the quality of the AppleTV stuff (mostly music videos) being displayed at my local Apple store this past weekend. I don't know why it would look so bad, though: I routinely play WMV and MPG videos on my computer blown up three or four times (160x100 or 320x200 -> 1024x768) and it looks just fine. Only hellaciously compressed web-vids end up looking as bad as the stuff I saw at the Apple store.
Of course, I'm not displaying my videos on a 42" plasma TV, just a dinky 15" LCD, so maybe the quality is actually the same but I can't see the blockiness on the smaller display. My experience on small, high-resolution displays lead me to expect that 640x480 would result in a much better looking video than I saw at the Apple store.
Whatever the case, maybe Apple can fix this by tweaking their codecs to produce more pleasing output on large displays (or, if you only care about what things look like in the store, Apple can pick demo videos that don't showcase the resolution problems). If not, then they'll have to find a way to distribute higher resolution videos (which could be a problem due to existing agreements with the content owners and to bandwidth limitations with their customers).
I did something like this a couple of years ago (backpacking the length of Vietnam) and faced similar decisions. I came to the conclusion that whatever tech I took with me had to be light, durable and inexpensive (aside from my SLR camera, which was a non-negotiable item because I wanted to take lots of pictures). I didn't want to be too upset if my tech stuff got lost, stolen or dropped off a clif. My solution, at the time, was to get an inexpensive Palm pilot, but this wasn't really satisfactory.
These days I would recommend getting a used subnotebook computer on which you can load your OS of choice. An old Toshiba Portege can be had for only a few hundred dollars and can be loaded with OS and software to do just about anything you'll need to do. The Porteges are small and light, so it will fit easily in your backpack and won't greatly increase your load. The only real problem is that, like most clamshell designs, it's not particularly durable. A small and simple tablet computer would be a much better option, but I don't know of any that cost lest than a thousand dollars. The Portege also comes with a universal power brick which should work almost anywhere in the world, so long as you have the right plug (just get one of those adapter sets that they sell at Radio Shack).
Alternatively, you might be able use a Palm Lifedrive or one of the Windows Mobile devices, but I have no experience with either solution so I can't make recommendations.
One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply.
Whoo-hoo, that's a great idea! Now, instead of a single, central, easily regulated and maintained water supply we can have hundreds or thousands of separate water supplies, each with their own, probably increased, potential for contamination. Just think of all the new economic opportunities generated by the upsurge of water-borne illness and poisoning from contaminated water!
Yes, this entire article sounds like a load of hooey. We alreadyhaveverticalwindmills that can extract power from wind regardless of direction (which is probably why this guy hasn't gotten a patent yet). As for practical extraction of water from the air, I'd bet that you can't get more than a dozen gallons per day out of a small (less than 30 feet tall) windmill. That might be enough for a small household's drinking water, but I don't think it would cover cleaning needs (dishes, clothes and bathing).
Thank God Verizon cares so much about their customers that they have so crippled bluetooth on their phones
I know that you meant this in jest, but this is the first thing I thought of when reading the article. I just got a new RAZR V3m from Verizon and was pretty pissed to find out that I couldn't transfer files to and from the phone via my laptop's Bluetooth connections. It never even occurred to me that other people might be able to access my phone via Bluetooth (why the hell did I enter a pairing passkey if anyone can talk to my phone whenever they want?).
Now, I'm still not sure I believe that Verizon disabled the Bluetooth OBEX support for any reason other than blind greed, but this sure would have been a good justification.
I was forced to get a TI-85 in college when the calculus courses started requiring calculators as part of the ciriculum. I still have it and use it, happily to this day. The newer TIs are much better than my antiquated old thing (more memory, better connectivity, and Flash RAM for long-term storage), so I would certainly recommend the TI-89 Titanium or the Voyage 200. The feature sets and prices are pretty similar, but I would be worried that some professors or grad students might balk at allowing the Voyage 200 in an exam.
Lots of folk pooh-pooh the TI calculators as being inferior to the HP RPN models, but I have, as I said, been very happy with mine. You can write fairly sophisticated programs on them, and the newer ones even allow you to do some of the programming from a PC and transfer the program to the calculator over a USB cable. My only real gripe with the TIs (or any of the graphing calculators, for that matter) is that the displays haven't gotten much better over the past 20 years: they all, pretty much, still low resolution monochrome LCDs, many without a backlight. The processors, memory capacity and interface options have all progressed, but the displays have stagnated.
Maybe Apple can give us an iCalc to update the graphing calculator for the twenty-first century, or something (actually, it would be a pretty neat third-party add-on for the video iPod: a dock that slips around the iPod and gives you a full scientific calculator keypad, using the iPod for display and storage).
Having grown up in the era preceding the rise of the graphing calculator, however, I can say that there is a serious downside to learning higher math with a sophisticated calculational crutch: you may not get as good an instinct for the math as you would have if you had been forced to do the graphs by hand. I suppose that, in an age when even elementary schoolers are being given calculators, it's something of a lost cause to lament the loss of manual mathematical skills.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to MP3s. They've got too much invested in their format to abandon it now.
When, in the last decade, has Apple shown any reluctance to abandon proprietary technologies, in which they had a large investment, rather than adopt industry standards? Hm, lets see:
I doubt Apple would ever switch to PCI. They've got too much invested in Nubus to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to IDE. They've got too much invested in SCSI to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB. They've got too much invested in ADB to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB2. They've got too much invested in Firewire to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to Intel CPUs. They've got too much invested in PowerPC to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to PDF. They've got too much invested in QuickDraw to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to VGA/DVI. They've got too much invested in their proprietary video connector to abandon it now.
I doubt Apple would ever switch to a multi-button mouse. They've got too much invested in the single button mouse to abandon it now.
Apple just hasn't shown, in the last 10 years, any reluctance to abandon existing, home-grown, technologies when the market has provided an adequate alternative.
Besides, the iPod and iTunes already support MP3s, all Apple would need to do is switch the format that iTunes uses to distibute purchased music.
For example. Who would you hire to do the wiring in your house, and electrician or an electrical engineer?
Granted this is an extreme situation, but in theory, shouldn't both be able to do the task?
No, an electrical engineer is in no way qualified to wire your house. The electrician has had to memorize all the local housing ordinances and knows all the tradesman's tricks of how to run wire through walls and such. The electrical engineer know none of these things, instead the electrical engineer has had to learn esoteric formulae for resistance and current flow in different guage and composition wire, how to design efficient power supplies given various requirements and all sorts of other things that the Electrician never thinks about.
Things that are illegal for a monopoly are perfectly legit for a non-monopoly. It's a crazy law, but that's how it works. Microsoft broke no federal laws to *gain* their monopoly.
Unfortunately, you are wrong on almost all counts:
Section 1 of the Sherman Act (Restraints of Trade) applies to everyone, not just to monopolists. If Microsoft engaged in any restrains of trade, even before they were a monopoly (which doesn't have to mean 100% market share, as so many people seem to believe, it only means that the company must have the power to set prices in the market*), they would have violated Sherman 1.
Section 2 of the Serman Act (Monopolization) makes it a crime to monopolize or attempt to monopolize. Hence, you can be held in violation of Sherman 2 for doing something that is otherwise perfectly legal, so long as you were trying to maintain or obtain a monopoly. Since (1) Microsoft is obviously a monopoly and (2) they have taken steps both to attain their monopoly position and to maintain it once they had it, they are clearly in violation of Sherman 2.
The real problem, however, with the Sherman Act is that, in general, it can only be prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission, and that is under the direct control of the executive power. Ever since the Regan administration, there has been little or no desire on the part of the FTC to persue anti-trust litigation.
* Courts have generally used the rule that anyone with more that 70% market share obviously has monopoly power, and anyone with less than 20% obviously lacks it, but that between 20% and 70% requires and examination of facts and circumstances before declaring that someone has monopoly power.
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. The stupidity of all the organizations - from Greenpeace to the Chinese Government - that could have made a difference but chose not to make a difference that mattered is not the mundane stupidity we see in everyday life. This is a highly trained, highly refined breed of stupidity that only the truly gifted hand-wringer could develop.
This wasn't just plain stupidity, it was fancy stupidity. This was stupidity with raisins in it.
I got a computer ccience degree as well, but by the end of it had done lots of programming. The University of Maryland offers the following code-heavy courses for junior and senior level computer science majors:
Compiler Design
Operating System Theory and Design
Computer Networking
Computer Graphics
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Data Structures
If you can get good grades in any three of those courses and still not know how to construct a reasonably complex program, you have noone to blame but yourself.
As for how to design a 'console emulator' I would think that someone who has taken a computer architecture course and a compiler design course should have a pretty good grounding for writing a machine emulator.
The dumb and slow approach is just a loop that fetches instructions from a big array (simulating the emulated machine's memory), selects a function that implements the fetched instruction, calls the selected function and, finally, updates the machine state. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The smart and fast way implements a compiler that converts from the emulated instruction set to a local representation (possibly the local instruction set) for basic blocks (blocks of instructions that don't contain jumps) of emulated code.
In either case, a computer science degree and a little bit of native curiosity should be all that you need to get started. Heck, even without the computer science degree, a healthy dose of curiosity should be enough.
While the computer science degree isn't exclusively about programming, a lot of programming is required to complete the degree. If your CS program didn't require at least four code-heavy courses in the last two years, then you probably did get scammed.
The only way to prevent burst pipes is to purge them (drain all water from the plumbing). Even if you had a monitoring system to tell you when the pipes burst, you'd never be able to get there (or get someone else to get there) before a huge amount of damage was done.
As for the other stuff, sure, you can set up cameras and remote sensors (for temperature, window and door closure, etc.) but you really need someone to be actively watching the place to ward off burglers and other delinquents. Again, by the time you know something's up, it's probably already too late.
There is damn little information in the linked article about how the information was collected, but if it was collected at point of sale then I'd bet that the data is being badly misrepresented: If the maing usage demographic for iPods and Macs is in the age range 15-25 you would expect that the maint purchasers of iPods and Macs would be in the age range 45-55 (or older), since young people would likely have their parents buy the devices for them (either directly for the under-18 cohort, or as part of their college expenses for the over-18 cohort).
Again, there isn't enough information in the article to tell much of anything, so I'm just guessing here. Usage numbers (as opposed to marketshare numbers) are, however, notoriously hard to collect and interpret, so when I hear a market research organization talk about numbers of users (rather than marketshare or sales numbers) I get very skeptical.
look what they did with the XBox, Web Servers, and Browser. Microsoft always tends to start slow with a crappy product and take heavy losses.
Your examples don't support your thesis:
XBox: Microsoft is pouring tons of money into the XBox just to sustain a distant second place status to Sony's Playstation franchise (look at the marketshare numbers here and you can see that PS2 maintains a commanding lead over both the original XBox and the new XBox 360). That's starting slow and staying slow.
IIS: According to Netcraft IIS is a distant second in the web-server market. I don't know what kind of money MS is wasting on that fight, but it doesn't seem to be doing them much good.
IE: Internet Explorer didn't start slow: it established an immediate foothold upon release and then rapidly ate up marketshare from IE over the course of about two years, almost all based on it's inclusion in the basic Windows operating system distribution.
So we have two products that started slow and stayed slow, and one that started fast and swept the field. Where is the example that started slow and swept the field? I'm not saying that such an example doesn't exist, only that you haven't provided it. I will say that, if such an example exists, it isn't from recent history (last 10 years or so), so the Microsft that was able to carry off the start-slow takeover is not the same Microsoft that we are dealing with today.
There is no reason to expect Zune to fare differently than either the XBox or IIS, unless Microsoft gives one away with every copy of Windows bundled with a new computer. Even then, there is no way to ensure that the free Zunes will actually be used: unlike IE, the Zune is of no use by itself (at least IE could display anybody's HTML webpage, not just MS-HTML(TM) webpages served by MS-IIS, though they have tried) and there is no way to force people to buy the Zune music even if they have a free Zune.
Worse, unless the Zune can rapidly take marketshare from both Apple and Microsoft's former allies in the PlaysForSure and Rhapsody coalitions, it won't get any of the network effects that it needs: music publishers will drift away from the music store and third-party add-on makers won't invest in Zune accessories.
Re:Does anyone in the US care about Ultraman?
on
40 Years of Ultraman
·
· Score: 1
I rushed home from elementary school in the mid-seventies in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. to watch Ultraman on TV. My older cousin, David, had turned me on to it and it seemed to be pretty well know by my classmates as well (we played Ultraman at recess). I also watched it on a B&W TV, so I thought Ultraman was silver as well (I never got to see the show in color, it went off the air before my family bought a color TV in 1979). In the late seventies most of the Japanime was gone from American TV (at least in the D.C. area) except for brief stints of G-Force and Starblazers. We didn't see a resurgance of Japanime on U.S. TV until the late eightier with Voltron and Robotech, and nothing even remotely like Ultraman or Johnny Socko until the arrival of the Power Rangers in the early nineties.
Along with Speed Racer, Marine Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Johnny Socko's Flying Robot, Ultraman formed the basis of an enduring fascination (or, possibly, obsession) with Japanese popular culture. During the long dry period of the mid-eighties, I had to get by with whatever pirated dubbed or subbed videos my friends and I found through local anime clubs (there were clubs at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University and we had older friends and siblings who could hook us up). It wasn't until the mid-nineties that I was really able to feed my anime fix on anything like a reagular basis.
Anyway, for any of the really die-hard Ultraman fans (of the old TV show) out there: Hayata had the spoon first!
If you want to be a computer sceintist, or be a programmer who knows his ass from a hole in the ground, Computer Science is 'still worth it.' If, on the other hand, you are one of those jackasses I went to school with in the min-ninties who's only interest in the degree is how it affects the number of 'figures' in their salary, then you are much better off getting a degree in law or business.
Computer Science was 'worth it' in the seventies and eighties when you could only make a solid middle-class living with a BSCS and it's still 'worth it' today. You don't go into a science because you want to make lots of money, you do it because you are a scientist and have better things to do with your life than the other 90%. It always amazed me that greedhead morons were going into CS in the ninties: it was still a damn difficult ciriculum and you still didn't get the kind of long-term compensation that lawyers or MBAs got (although the entry level pay may have been slightly better).
There is lots of interesting (and, probably, profitable) stuff still to do with computers, and the job market is only going to get tighter from here out. As the living standard in China and India improve, the domestic demand for technical labor will improve as well. We have already shown that the west, with only about 1 billion people, can absorb the technical labor production of the entire world. China and India will match the western demand for technical labor when their standard of living is only a quarter that of the west. At that point, there will be no way to meet world-wide technical labor demands and the ensuing rush to snap up techs will make the.com boom look like the great depression. (either that, or the inability to meet global labor demand for tech workers will cause a collapse of the economies in China and India, which can't be very good for anyone).
I vote, but only in races that I know something about. The logic is simple: If I don't know enough about the race to choose which side I would want to win if I had done the research, then I'm as likely to hurt my own interests as I am to help them, so I might as well do nothing. It's sort of a hipocratic principle for politics: first, do no harm.
I simply can't stand the idea that I may, inadvertantly vote for someone or something I detest (or against someone or something I admire) out of ignorance, but I can live with the idea that I stood by and let events take their course. I also don't encourage others to vote unless they have a pretty good idea what they are voting for or against and why, under the same theory.
Now, I'm not particularly apathetic and am reasonably well versed on national matters and candidates for state-wide office, but I'm completely in the dark about most ballot measures (unless the measure has gotten a spectacular amount of press coverage, which most don't), school board candidates and judges, so I tend not to vote in those categories. I'll vote for state legislature, governor, congress, senate and the president, but everything else is below the radar.
In my experience it is not small scale components that get reused, but entire systems. In general the small components are not large or complex enough to make 'software archeology' an advantage over rewriting from scratch or redesigning the application to use a new (supported) component. Even with large systems, at some point the cost of maintaining the old code just gets too large and the system is redesigned and reimplemented, either wholesale or piecemeal. The only systems I have encountered which have effectively resisted reimplementation for long periods of time are:
very complex, so that reimplimentation would be prohibitively expensive
safety critical, so that even minor failures in the replacement system would be disasterous, and
require effectively zero on-going maintenance.
If a system fails any of these three criteria, the pressure to reimplement will be irresistable.
Vernor Vinge is an adequate science fiction writer, but his ideas about software engineering are purely fanciful. The very concept that you could replace actual programming with a purely investigative procedure has clearly never actually done any programming. Even if this were possible, it wouldn't be profitable: for any reasonably complex program, the amount of effort needed to understand the program well enough to repurpose it is, at least, equal to the amount of effort required to write a completely new implementation. Very few software systems, and almost no individual components, meet all three cirteria to resist re-implementation.
Device interfaces change. Communication formats change. Platforms change. Programming languages change. Worst of all, requirements change. Any one of these changes is enough to cause a complete rewrite of a component, even if that component has completely open source code. If a proram's source code is unavailable, or is written in an obscure language, the cost of re-implementation in the face of changing requirements can be a tiny fraction of dealing with the existing program.
I just clicked through the link in the article and I can see why you might be having trouble attracting tallent: you make it much too difficult to find out what the job entails. I had to click through three links to get to any real meat about the job. Along the way all I saw where boring, ugly pages (each one doling out a tiny bit more of the information I was looking for than the previous page), with no particularly exciting elements (no description of the neat stuff I would do, no mention of compenstation or benefits, no steak and no sizzle).
I just completed a three month long job search, so I can say with some authority that this is one of the most uninteresting job posts I have ever seen. I wouldn't bother applying to this position, especially when I have a half dozen other job posts to apply to from bigger name companies willing to tell me, up front, the job title, duties and compensation. I mean, what's the point of not putting all this information in the second link (if not in the first)?
I don't really think that there is any malice involved, just stupidity. Whoever constructed this job posting didn't put any thought into it, didn't consider what would entice prospective empolyees. I also don't think that the job market is so great that you shouldn't be able to find a few good candidates, if only you put some effort into pitching the company and the position (of course, the economy is nowhere near as bad as it was three years ago, so maybe it looks really good to some people who don't remember the first Bush recession).
<old-man-voice>kids these days... don't know how good they've got it... barefoot in the snow, up-hill, both ways!.. and we liked it!... bah! GET OFF MY LAWN!</old-man-voice>
programming language writers love the process of creating something so much that they don't care about the consequences. Example: Pascal. It was a wonderful language. It worked well. It was easy to use also with low level stuff. Wirth developed Modula, then Oberon. These were so radical changes that Pascal was killed.
Nonesense, on two counts:
Pascal was not a wonderful language, especially with low level stuff: Pascal's support for pointers was rudimentary, as was its support of bit operations. Pascal had no standard method of breaking a program into several files. Pascal was a pedagogical language shoe-horned into the task of general purpose programming by a handfull of commercial interests via a random assortment of proprietary extensions.
Pascal was not killed off by Oberon and Modula. Wirth's two follow-on languages had negligible impact on the general programming community and were virtually moribund from the day they were released. What killed Pascal was the standardization of C and the introduction of C++. Prior to 1989, C and Pascal had been fighting a running battle for dominance in the application programming world, with both languages hampered by a lack of standardization. When C was standardized in 1989 it took the upper hand due to its support of separate compilation (via #include, static and extern), marginally better performance of compiled code (Pascal compilers generated notoriously inefficient code) and its impressive standard library (also part of the ANSI standard).
You might also argue that the fact that Microsoft didn't ever embrace Pascal (opting for BASIC and C instead) played some part in Pascal's demise. I'm not sure I buy this theory, however, since even environments which had enthusiastically embraced Pascal (the Apple Macintosh, for instance, where most of the OS APIs were designed to be called from Pascal) changed course as soon as standard C and C++ compilers were available.
The simple fact of the matter is that Pascal, even with a host of proprietary extensions, was not all that great a general purpose language. It was verbose and restrictive and it didn't give you much in return for those flaws. C just felt more expressive, partly because it used a more generalized expression syntax (where assignment operators could be freely mixed with arithmetic operators) and partly because it didn't require you to write too much excess verbiage (in other words, it was cryptic). Then, when you compiled your C code it just flew in comparisson to your Pascal code.
This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed.
Not all government work is non-productive. Most government agencies have some hand in assisting citizens and businesses in their productive endeavors, either by providing regulatory and legal infrastructure (the Dept. of Agriculture and the FDA inspect for food safety, the NIST provides consistant weights and measures for use in all sorts of commercial transactions, the judiciary provides the means of enforcing contracts, etc.) or by producing actual goods and services (the Library of Congress publishes books on tape and in braile for the deaf and the blind, the Army Corps of Engineers builds all sorts of public works and many agencies perform a fair amount of basic research that, eventually, winds up in the public sector via technology transfer).
I know that the Libertarian party-line, so popular on slashdot and with technologists in general, is that government is nothing but a leech on the ass of an otherwise productive capitalist society and should be restricted to funding a militia, but the facts simply don't bear this out. Any large organization will have an alarming amount of bureaucratic waste, and most governments may have a little more than most private sector entities, but governemnts can, and in some cases do, do more than generate paper and hot air.
Nothing beats a fearmongering president like fearmongering dissent. Welcome to the real new America. Everyone has lost all perspective... Chicken Little rules the day.
Let's just put this alleged fearmongering dissent in perspective, shall we? this president has just been granted the fundamental power of tyrany: the ability to imprison people indefinitely without charge or judicial review. This is a power that has been denied to the King of England for over three centuries, specifically to restrict the monarchy's tyranical tendancies. The very same clause was written into the articles of the U.S. constitution (not into an ammendment, but into the articles themselves):
(from Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2)The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
The very next paragraph, by the way, forbids bills of attainder (a law designed to make a criminal of a specific individual) and ex post facto laws (a law that applies to action before it's passage), which would seem to have some bearing on this bill and on the detainess bill just passed by the Senate.
Some people may try to claim that this isn't really a violation of the constitution because it only applies to non-citizens, but we should note two things: first, the constitution never says that habeas corpus (or any other right, for that matter) only applies to U.S. citizens, and second, that this same administration has made noises about stripping U.S. citizenship from people it considers terrorists. So there is reason to worry that this law could be applied to anyone that the administration takes a disliking to.
To summarize the situation: This is not people simply sitting around wringing their hands because the president wants these powers, or might use them if they were granted. The president already exercised these powers, before he had any legal right to do so, and he has now been granted these same powers. They president has acted like a tyrant and is now in full possession of the powers of tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of vertical integration would be a terrible thing for both Apple and AMD. AMD would suffer because it would be more difficult to sell to companies that see Apple as a competitor (would you buy vital components of your product from a competitor? Your competitor would then be able to either cut off your supply or arbitrarily raise your costs). Apple would have to assume the full capital investment burden of a chip manufacturer. A new chip fab costs about what Apple's current gross receipts are in one year (that's receipts, not profit). I don't see any upside for Apple in this, and damn little for AMD.
If I were going to look for a good fit with AMD I would say either a well heeled supplier (chip fab equipment or raw materials) or a holding company like Berkshire Hathaway. The supplier might be able to make a case for having a guaranteed volume of consumption under their own control, and they would be able to harvest more of the added value from thier products. A holding company would be able to justify the purchase as increased diversification. In either case, the negative impact on AMD's current sales would be minimal, which would allow AMD to maintain capital investments in the future.
I have to say that I was perticularly unimpressed by the quality of the AppleTV stuff (mostly music videos) being displayed at my local Apple store this past weekend. I don't know why it would look so bad, though: I routinely play WMV and MPG videos on my computer blown up three or four times (160x100 or 320x200 -> 1024x768) and it looks just fine. Only hellaciously compressed web-vids end up looking as bad as the stuff I saw at the Apple store.
Of course, I'm not displaying my videos on a 42" plasma TV, just a dinky 15" LCD, so maybe the quality is actually the same but I can't see the blockiness on the smaller display. My experience on small, high-resolution displays lead me to expect that 640x480 would result in a much better looking video than I saw at the Apple store.
Whatever the case, maybe Apple can fix this by tweaking their codecs to produce more pleasing output on large displays (or, if you only care about what things look like in the store, Apple can pick demo videos that don't showcase the resolution problems). If not, then they'll have to find a way to distribute higher resolution videos (which could be a problem due to existing agreements with the content owners and to bandwidth limitations with their customers).
I did something like this a couple of years ago (backpacking the length of Vietnam) and faced similar decisions. I came to the conclusion that whatever tech I took with me had to be light, durable and inexpensive (aside from my SLR camera, which was a non-negotiable item because I wanted to take lots of pictures). I didn't want to be too upset if my tech stuff got lost, stolen or dropped off a clif. My solution, at the time, was to get an inexpensive Palm pilot, but this wasn't really satisfactory.
These days I would recommend getting a used subnotebook computer on which you can load your OS of choice. An old Toshiba Portege can be had for only a few hundred dollars and can be loaded with OS and software to do just about anything you'll need to do. The Porteges are small and light, so it will fit easily in your backpack and won't greatly increase your load. The only real problem is that, like most clamshell designs, it's not particularly durable. A small and simple tablet computer would be a much better option, but I don't know of any that cost lest than a thousand dollars. The Portege also comes with a universal power brick which should work almost anywhere in the world, so long as you have the right plug (just get one of those adapter sets that they sell at Radio Shack).
Alternatively, you might be able use a Palm Lifedrive or one of the Windows Mobile devices, but I have no experience with either solution so I can't make recommendations.
Whoo-hoo, that's a great idea! Now, instead of a single, central, easily regulated and maintained water supply we can have hundreds or thousands of separate water supplies, each with their own, probably increased, potential for contamination. Just think of all the new economic opportunities generated by the upsurge of water-borne illness and poisoning from contaminated water!
Yes, this entire article sounds like a load of hooey. We already have vertical windmills that can extract power from wind regardless of direction (which is probably why this guy hasn't gotten a patent yet). As for practical extraction of water from the air, I'd bet that you can't get more than a dozen gallons per day out of a small (less than 30 feet tall) windmill. That might be enough for a small household's drinking water, but I don't think it would cover cleaning needs (dishes, clothes and bathing).
I know that you meant this in jest, but this is the first thing I thought of when reading the article. I just got a new RAZR V3m from Verizon and was pretty pissed to find out that I couldn't transfer files to and from the phone via my laptop's Bluetooth connections. It never even occurred to me that other people might be able to access my phone via Bluetooth (why the hell did I enter a pairing passkey if anyone can talk to my phone whenever they want?).
Now, I'm still not sure I believe that Verizon disabled the Bluetooth OBEX support for any reason other than blind greed, but this sure would have been a good justification.
I was forced to get a TI-85 in college when the calculus courses started requiring calculators as part of the ciriculum. I still have it and use it, happily to this day. The newer TIs are much better than my antiquated old thing (more memory, better connectivity, and Flash RAM for long-term storage), so I would certainly recommend the TI-89 Titanium or the Voyage 200. The feature sets and prices are pretty similar, but I would be worried that some professors or grad students might balk at allowing the Voyage 200 in an exam.
Lots of folk pooh-pooh the TI calculators as being inferior to the HP RPN models, but I have, as I said, been very happy with mine. You can write fairly sophisticated programs on them, and the newer ones even allow you to do some of the programming from a PC and transfer the program to the calculator over a USB cable. My only real gripe with the TIs (or any of the graphing calculators, for that matter) is that the displays haven't gotten much better over the past 20 years: they all, pretty much, still low resolution monochrome LCDs, many without a backlight. The processors, memory capacity and interface options have all progressed, but the displays have stagnated.
Maybe Apple can give us an iCalc to update the graphing calculator for the twenty-first century, or something (actually, it would be a pretty neat third-party add-on for the video iPod: a dock that slips around the iPod and gives you a full scientific calculator keypad, using the iPod for display and storage).
Having grown up in the era preceding the rise of the graphing calculator, however, I can say that there is a serious downside to learning higher math with a sophisticated calculational crutch: you may not get as good an instinct for the math as you would have if you had been forced to do the graphs by hand. I suppose that, in an age when even elementary schoolers are being given calculators, it's something of a lost cause to lament the loss of manual mathematical skills.
When, in the last decade, has Apple shown any reluctance to abandon proprietary technologies, in which they had a large investment, rather than adopt industry standards? Hm, lets see:
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to PCI. They've got too much invested in Nubus to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to IDE. They've got too much invested in SCSI to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB. They've got too much invested in ADB to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to USB2. They've got too much invested in Firewire to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to Intel CPUs. They've got too much invested in PowerPC to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to PDF. They've got too much invested in QuickDraw to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to VGA/DVI. They've got too much invested in their proprietary video connector to abandon it now.
- I doubt Apple would ever switch to a multi-button mouse. They've got too much invested in the single button mouse to abandon it now.
Apple just hasn't shown, in the last 10 years, any reluctance to abandon existing, home-grown, technologies when the market has provided an adequate alternative.Besides, the iPod and iTunes already support MP3s, all Apple would need to do is switch the format that iTunes uses to distibute purchased music.
No, an electrical engineer is in no way qualified to wire your house. The electrician has had to memorize all the local housing ordinances and knows all the tradesman's tricks of how to run wire through walls and such. The electrical engineer know none of these things, instead the electrical engineer has had to learn esoteric formulae for resistance and current flow in different guage and composition wire, how to design efficient power supplies given various requirements and all sorts of other things that the Electrician never thinks about.
Unfortunately, you are wrong on almost all counts:
The real problem, however, with the Sherman Act is that, in general, it can only be prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission, and that is under the direct control of the executive power. Ever since the Regan administration, there has been little or no desire on the part of the FTC to persue anti-trust litigation.
* Courts have generally used the rule that anyone with more that 70% market share obviously has monopoly power, and anyone with less than 20% obviously lacks it, but that between 20% and 70% requires and examination of facts and circumstances before declaring that someone has monopoly power.
This wasn't just plain stupidity, it was fancy stupidity. This was stupidity with raisins in it.
[with apologies to Dorothy Parker]
I got a computer ccience degree as well, but by the end of it had done lots of programming. The University of Maryland offers the following code-heavy courses for junior and senior level computer science majors:
If you can get good grades in any three of those courses and still not know how to construct a reasonably complex program, you have noone to blame but yourself.
As for how to design a 'console emulator' I would think that someone who has taken a computer architecture course and a compiler design course should have a pretty good grounding for writing a machine emulator.
The dumb and slow approach is just a loop that fetches instructions from a big array (simulating the emulated machine's memory), selects a function that implements the fetched instruction, calls the selected function and, finally, updates the machine state. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The smart and fast way implements a compiler that converts from the emulated instruction set to a local representation (possibly the local instruction set) for basic blocks (blocks of instructions that don't contain jumps) of emulated code.
In either case, a computer science degree and a little bit of native curiosity should be all that you need to get started. Heck, even without the computer science degree, a healthy dose of curiosity should be enough.
While the computer science degree isn't exclusively about programming, a lot of programming is required to complete the degree. If your CS program didn't require at least four code-heavy courses in the last two years, then you probably did get scammed.
The only way to prevent burst pipes is to purge them (drain all water from the plumbing). Even if you had a monitoring system to tell you when the pipes burst, you'd never be able to get there (or get someone else to get there) before a huge amount of damage was done.
As for the other stuff, sure, you can set up cameras and remote sensors (for temperature, window and door closure, etc.) but you really need someone to be actively watching the place to ward off burglers and other delinquents. Again, by the time you know something's up, it's probably already too late.
Again, there isn't enough information in the article to tell much of anything, so I'm just guessing here. Usage numbers (as opposed to marketshare numbers) are, however, notoriously hard to collect and interpret, so when I hear a market research organization talk about numbers of users (rather than marketshare or sales numbers) I get very skeptical.
Your examples don't support your thesis:
So we have two products that started slow and stayed slow, and one that started fast and swept the field. Where is the example that started slow and swept the field? I'm not saying that such an example doesn't exist, only that you haven't provided it. I will say that, if such an example exists, it isn't from recent history (last 10 years or so), so the Microsft that was able to carry off the start-slow takeover is not the same Microsoft that we are dealing with today.
There is no reason to expect Zune to fare differently than either the XBox or IIS, unless Microsoft gives one away with every copy of Windows bundled with a new computer. Even then, there is no way to ensure that the free Zunes will actually be used: unlike IE, the Zune is of no use by itself (at least IE could display anybody's HTML webpage, not just MS-HTML(TM) webpages served by MS-IIS, though they have tried) and there is no way to force people to buy the Zune music even if they have a free Zune.
Worse, unless the Zune can rapidly take marketshare from both Apple and Microsoft's former allies in the PlaysForSure and Rhapsody coalitions, it won't get any of the network effects that it needs: music publishers will drift away from the music store and third-party add-on makers won't invest in Zune accessories.
I rushed home from elementary school in the mid-seventies in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. to watch Ultraman on TV. My older cousin, David, had turned me on to it and it seemed to be pretty well know by my classmates as well (we played Ultraman at recess). I also watched it on a B&W TV, so I thought Ultraman was silver as well (I never got to see the show in color, it went off the air before my family bought a color TV in 1979). In the late seventies most of the Japanime was gone from American TV (at least in the D.C. area) except for brief stints of G-Force and Starblazers. We didn't see a resurgance of Japanime on U.S. TV until the late eightier with Voltron and Robotech, and nothing even remotely like Ultraman or Johnny Socko until the arrival of the Power Rangers in the early nineties.
Along with Speed Racer, Marine Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Johnny Socko's Flying Robot, Ultraman formed the basis of an enduring fascination (or, possibly, obsession) with Japanese popular culture. During the long dry period of the mid-eighties, I had to get by with whatever pirated dubbed or subbed videos my friends and I found through local anime clubs (there were clubs at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University and we had older friends and siblings who could hook us up). It wasn't until the mid-nineties that I was really able to feed my anime fix on anything like a reagular basis.
Anyway, for any of the really die-hard Ultraman fans (of the old TV show) out there: Hayata had the spoon first!
Computer Science was 'worth it' in the seventies and eighties when you could only make a solid middle-class living with a BSCS and it's still 'worth it' today. You don't go into a science because you want to make lots of money, you do it because you are a scientist and have better things to do with your life than the other 90%. It always amazed me that greedhead morons were going into CS in the ninties: it was still a damn difficult ciriculum and you still didn't get the kind of long-term compensation that lawyers or MBAs got (although the entry level pay may have been slightly better).
There is lots of interesting (and, probably, profitable) stuff still to do with computers, and the job market is only going to get tighter from here out. As the living standard in China and India improve, the domestic demand for technical labor will improve as well. We have already shown that the west, with only about 1 billion people, can absorb the technical labor production of the entire world. China and India will match the western demand for technical labor when their standard of living is only a quarter that of the west. At that point, there will be no way to meet world-wide technical labor demands and the ensuing rush to snap up techs will make the .com boom look like the great depression. (either that, or the inability to meet global labor demand for tech workers will cause a collapse of the economies in China and India, which can't be very good for anyone).
I simply can't stand the idea that I may, inadvertantly vote for someone or something I detest (or against someone or something I admire) out of ignorance, but I can live with the idea that I stood by and let events take their course. I also don't encourage others to vote unless they have a pretty good idea what they are voting for or against and why, under the same theory.
Now, I'm not particularly apathetic and am reasonably well versed on national matters and candidates for state-wide office, but I'm completely in the dark about most ballot measures (unless the measure has gotten a spectacular amount of press coverage, which most don't), school board candidates and judges, so I tend not to vote in those categories. I'll vote for state legislature, governor, congress, senate and the president, but everything else is below the radar.
If a system fails any of these three criteria, the pressure to reimplement will be irresistable.
Vernor Vinge is an adequate science fiction writer, but his ideas about software engineering are purely fanciful. The very concept that you could replace actual programming with a purely investigative procedure has clearly never actually done any programming. Even if this were possible, it wouldn't be profitable: for any reasonably complex program, the amount of effort needed to understand the program well enough to repurpose it is, at least, equal to the amount of effort required to write a completely new implementation. Very few software systems, and almost no individual components, meet all three cirteria to resist re-implementation.
Device interfaces change. Communication formats change. Platforms change. Programming languages change. Worst of all, requirements change. Any one of these changes is enough to cause a complete rewrite of a component, even if that component has completely open source code. If a proram's source code is unavailable, or is written in an obscure language, the cost of re-implementation in the face of changing requirements can be a tiny fraction of dealing with the existing program.
I just clicked through the link in the article and I can see why you might be having trouble attracting tallent: you make it much too difficult to find out what the job entails. I had to click through three links to get to any real meat about the job. Along the way all I saw where boring, ugly pages (each one doling out a tiny bit more of the information I was looking for than the previous page), with no particularly exciting elements (no description of the neat stuff I would do, no mention of compenstation or benefits, no steak and no sizzle).
I just completed a three month long job search, so I can say with some authority that this is one of the most uninteresting job posts I have ever seen. I wouldn't bother applying to this position, especially when I have a half dozen other job posts to apply to from bigger name companies willing to tell me, up front, the job title, duties and compensation. I mean, what's the point of not putting all this information in the second link (if not in the first)?
I don't really think that there is any malice involved, just stupidity. Whoever constructed this job posting didn't put any thought into it, didn't consider what would entice prospective empolyees. I also don't think that the job market is so great that you shouldn't be able to find a few good candidates, if only you put some effort into pitching the company and the position (of course, the economy is nowhere near as bad as it was three years ago, so maybe it looks really good to some people who don't remember the first Bush recession).
<old-man-voice> kids these days ... don't know how good they've got it ... barefoot in the snow, up-hill, both ways! .. and we liked it! ... bah! GET OFF MY LAWN! </old-man-voice>
Nonesense, on two counts:
You might also argue that the fact that Microsoft didn't ever embrace Pascal (opting for BASIC and C instead) played some part in Pascal's demise. I'm not sure I buy this theory, however, since even environments which had enthusiastically embraced Pascal (the Apple Macintosh, for instance, where most of the OS APIs were designed to be called from Pascal) changed course as soon as standard C and C++ compilers were available.
The simple fact of the matter is that Pascal, even with a host of proprietary extensions, was not all that great a general purpose language. It was verbose and restrictive and it didn't give you much in return for those flaws. C just felt more expressive, partly because it used a more generalized expression syntax (where assignment operators could be freely mixed with arithmetic operators) and partly because it didn't require you to write too much excess verbiage (in other words, it was cryptic). Then, when you compiled your C code it just flew in comparisson to your Pascal code.
Not all government work is non-productive. Most government agencies have some hand in assisting citizens and businesses in their productive endeavors, either by providing regulatory and legal infrastructure (the Dept. of Agriculture and the FDA inspect for food safety, the NIST provides consistant weights and measures for use in all sorts of commercial transactions, the judiciary provides the means of enforcing contracts, etc.) or by producing actual goods and services (the Library of Congress publishes books on tape and in braile for the deaf and the blind, the Army Corps of Engineers builds all sorts of public works and many agencies perform a fair amount of basic research that, eventually, winds up in the public sector via technology transfer).
I know that the Libertarian party-line, so popular on slashdot and with technologists in general, is that government is nothing but a leech on the ass of an otherwise productive capitalist society and should be restricted to funding a militia, but the facts simply don't bear this out. Any large organization will have an alarming amount of bureaucratic waste, and most governments may have a little more than most private sector entities, but governemnts can, and in some cases do, do more than generate paper and hot air.
Let's just put this alleged fearmongering dissent in perspective, shall we? this president has just been granted the fundamental power of tyrany: the ability to imprison people indefinitely without charge or judicial review. This is a power that has been denied to the King of England for over three centuries, specifically to restrict the monarchy's tyranical tendancies. The very same clause was written into the articles of the U.S. constitution (not into an ammendment, but into the articles themselves):
The very next paragraph, by the way, forbids bills of attainder (a law designed to make a criminal of a specific individual) and ex post facto laws (a law that applies to action before it's passage), which would seem to have some bearing on this bill and on the detainess bill just passed by the Senate.
Some people may try to claim that this isn't really a violation of the constitution because it only applies to non-citizens, but we should note two things: first, the constitution never says that habeas corpus (or any other right, for that matter) only applies to U.S. citizens, and second, that this same administration has made noises about stripping U.S. citizenship from people it considers terrorists. So there is reason to worry that this law could be applied to anyone that the administration takes a disliking to.
To summarize the situation: This is not people simply sitting around wringing their hands because the president wants these powers, or might use them if they were granted. The president already exercised these powers, before he had any legal right to do so, and he has now been granted these same powers. They president has acted like a tyrant and is now in full possession of the powers of tyranny.
That's not your pulse, it's your gorge.
They day is not over yet, we have plenty of time for a repost or two.