This is Slashdot, for crying out loud. We're nerds, we don't fall for this idiotic screed even a high school freshman could debunk.
Ooooh, big words are scary! Stator, rotor, magnetic flux. Dammit, both the editor and article submitter should hand in their geek cards.
This guy does have a real patent, though. I don't know which is worse, the ignoramus patent examiner who allowed this one through or the baboon who posted it to Slashdot. Check the USPTO link here.
I bet they had to hire people just so they had 150 people to fire.;)
A mathematician watches the Activision CEO go into a building, then ten minutes later 150 people waving pink slips walk out. So the mathematician thinks to himself, "Ah, if they hire 149 more people, the building will be empty!"
Anyway, anyone else remember Arthur C. Clarke's "3001 The Final Odyssey"? By the time you start talking about petabytes, we could think about storing not just great works of art, but also the artist who created them. Let's see, some math is in order:
Fat artist: 75kg = 75000 g. Since we're 70% water, we'll say the average molar mass is 20g, so that's 3750 moles of molecules. Multiply by Avogadro's number and we get 2.2575 x 10^27 molecules. One petabyte is 10^15 bytes, so we need another 12 orders of magnitude before we can even devote 1 byte per molecule.
Even millions of petabytes leaves us short. Yawn, wake me up when we have 4 million zettabyte drives. Of course, by then the drive manufacturers will have redefined the prefixes again...
While you do have a point about some secrets being necessary, the question becomes "who determines what is necessary?" Nearly always, government officials are overly restrictive of what gets released, even to other government agencies. How can the government make good decisions without full knowledge of the situation?
What we need is dynamic equilibrium: the overly-secretive types should be constantly fighting the tell-the-world types, with neither side getting too strong. Not the most efficient system, but at least it removes the need for a central arbiter. One could argue that this is the case in the US right now: the current administration vs. the NY Times about the NSA secret wiretaps is a good example.
Of course, once the opposing parties get in bed with each other, your equilibrium goes out the window...
I think this is another example of the "worse is better" philosophy in action. Having just reread Richard Gabriel's article, I'll post a link to it: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html. He is originally decrying the shoddiness of Unix software compared to ITS, TOPS-10, or LISP-M, but the point is valid here as well.
The whole point is that good software takes time to write, but that the last 20% of the functionality takes 80% of the time to write. Different end-users also have different ideas about what that 20% should be, compounding the problem. Why do you think that MS Office has so many useless features? They are trying to please everyone, which gets you nowhere. Far better to release something that is only 80% done and get to market first, because then nearly everyone is 80% satisfied. Otherwise you end up with a product years late, and only 20% better!
As for explicitly calling it "beta," hey, at least they're being honest with us!
"Justificationalism" or whatever you want to call it is not the be-all or end-all of science. There are a substantial number of physicists (mostly string theorists and cosmologists) who hope that within the bounds of physics, someday, it will be provable that the Universe must be the way it is to be self consistent. That is, the big bang was inevitable, gravity must be a 1/r^2 force, the masses of common particles are derivable, etc.
I don't know how I feel about this from a religious point of view, but as a scientist it would be the most important discovery ever.
Please use your real name and email address! If we want the industry types to take this survey seriously, don't give them an excuse to write off the results as "ballot box stuffing." If your email address is noone@nowhere.com, I apologize for all the spam I have given you over the years, but now is the time to tell the truth.
Microsoft has to file monthly reports with the SEC, detailing its profits and expenses. If the quarterly profit numbers change even a little bit, even if they are "lower than expected growth," the stock price can decline sharply.
If Bill Gates alone, or all the executives decided to switch to an open source model one day, I guarantee that even if the switch had yet to take place, the expense of starting such a project would have a large impact on profit, and may cause a stock price slip. Too large of a slip, and the board asks nasty questions. Don't forget, Microsoft only answers to Bill in the short term, anything longer than about three months puts the board and the stockholders in charge.
Every time someone comes in with a formula about how to make something better, some one with no actual expertise but a lot of power buys into it and from then on, you'd better follow the formula, even if your idea is unique enough to fall outside the boundary the formula takes into account.
Everyone bitches about how much pop music sucks, but it sure sells well. Why? Because someone came up with a formula for predicting chart-toppers, and now you have to be really good to even be considered if your song scores poorly on the formula scale.
Yes, a lot of video games suck, but at least there is no psuedo-objective "formula" for deciding a priori that a game will not sell well that publishers can use to reject games that may have otherwise been released even in small numbers. Self publishing is hard, even with the advantages of the internet. Imagine if the formula had predicted that "Yohoho Puzzle Pirates" would not sell. No publisher would have taken the risk on picking it up, even after the developers spent all that time popularizing it themselves.
While you have some good points about the method Microsoft used to ensure IE was installed on everyone's new computer, I find your essay to be extremely one-sided. I would just point out that around the time of IE 4.0/Netscape 4.0, IE actually implemented more of the CSS specification than Netscape, and had fewer rendering errors to boot. Actually, at that point one of Microsoft's selling points was standard compliance (always a tool used by the underdog). That is not to mention how SLOWLY Netscape started up compared to IE. (I know, IE is always resident in memory, unfair but convincing!) If Microsoft hadn't moved into the browser business, we'd have stagnated with bloaty, non-standard compliant Netscape instead of dangerously-integrated bug-ridden IE.
What was id thinking?? I watched the trailer expecting to see monsters, guns, and blood, and the first half is storyline! I don't want a story with my monsters, I want lots of guns!
I should start a petition...
Seriously though, it's good to see a bit of story and interaction in an id game for once.
While I agree with your main point, I must mention the fact that biomass fuels do not generate hydrocarbons. The growth of biomass removes carbon from the atmosphere, and burning biomass releases that carbon. Biomass is a zero sum fuel; it does not release sequestered carbon (unless you are fertilizing it with fossil fuel).
According to the CNN article, he faces deportation after his trial, win or lose. His family is already back in Saudi Arabia, and he expects to join them. However, no details as to why he is being deported. He did face several counts of visa fraud, but he was acquitted on those counts! Why is he still being shipped out?
What kind of legal circus has been set up, when you either spend time in jail or get kicked out of the country? Was he really here illegally, or is the government just deporting him because they know he doesn't have the resources to fight TWO legal battles back to back? Neat way to get rid of the problem, from a Dept of Homeland Security asshat point of view.
Do you honestly think that a few scattered dumps of well-sealed nuclear waste would be enough to keep developers out of the wilderness? These guys don't care. Just bury it and forget it until the foundations of their 30-years-then-tear-'em-down buildings fill up with krypton and radon. Put them under the parking lot. Hell, leave them on the neighbor's doorstep and let him take care of it. This solution neglects to take human shortsightedness and greed into account.
Yes, Courtside pizza is the best in Athens, but do they still have that "buy one get two free" deal at Avalanche pizza? Three days worth of pizza for ~$10! Of course, you had to pick it up yourself, but hey, college kids are poor.
This is great! Oh wait, it sucks. According to the Dominoes website, every place I have ever lived is outside the service area. I live in a college town, and it doesn't work. The LAST college town I lived in isn't hooked up either. WTF? Even ZIPs in large cites claim to be unavailable. College campuses in large cites near me are out of bounds! WHERE THE HELL CAN I BUY A PIZZA ON THE INTERNET?
Well, the process is actually pretty difficult. One normally uses ordinary refridgeration techniques (compress the gas and let it cool, then expand it again and it cools further) in several cycles.
Step 1: liquify nitrogen. Nitrogen can be liquified with ordinary refridgeration. It costs pennies per liter. Temperature now ~80 Kelvin.
Step 2: Use liquid nitrogen to liquify hydrogen. By pumping on the liquid nitrogen, it is possible to cool it to the point where one can get liquid hydrogen out of it. Liquid hydrogen costs $1-2 per liter. Temperature now ~20 Kelvin.
Step 3: Use pumped liquid hydrogen to liquify the helium. It costs $5-10 per liter. Temperature now 4.2 Kelvin.
Step 4: In my case, 4.2 Kelvin is still too warm. Use pumped liquid helium4 to liquify helium3 (the light isotope of helium). Cost now $1,000 per cubic centimeter. Temperature now 1.2 Kelvin. This is still too warm. Pump on the helium 3 and one can get to 0.3 Kelvin. There are various techniques to get colder, but this is as far as I personally have gone.
Actually, people like me have been using the strategic helium reserve for years. I'm a physics grad student who uses liquid helium for cryogenics experiments, and about half of our helium comes from the reserve, with the other half coming from coal mines and oil wells. I'm too young to remember it, but the old guys in the physics department remember when helium was $10-20 per liter (liquid), whereas now it's about $5-7 thanks to the Feds selling it cheap.
Since when is going back to monolithic applications a good thing? I thought the whole point of having a/usr/lib directory was to share common functionality. Or will everyone have to install all the libraries for everything they might ever need, since the app can't do it? I predict library version hell!
Where do you install kde, or gnome? X is going to have to change drastically to accommodate this, and I think we all know how quickly the Xfree86 guys move on something if it wasn't their idea. This is a nice idea for technophobes, but I don't think it is really practical for big applications, or an application using a shared library.
ultimately at least one must be incorrect, or at a minimum incomplete
Strictly, that is not true either. It is possible to have two theories which accurately describe reality in different ways, and have them both be correct. The important thing is that the predictions of each theory must be the same in all cases. Sometimes it is possible to prove that the theories are equivalent, as with the wave and matrix formulations of quantum mechanics, which makes the theories homologues.
Kapla kapla kapla! I thought LEGO rocked until I went to a children's museum and got my hands on some KAPLA blocks. They are very simple: 1/4 X 1 X 4 inches, perfectly balanced pine blocks. If you are complaining about how LEGO are too specialized these days, go the other way and free yourself from the need for specialized blocks at all!
I may sound like a fanatic, but I really do love these things! Check them out here.
Yes, I do indeed mean solid hydogen. Unlike helium, which will never solidify at normal pressures no matter the temperature, hydrogen can be frozen into a solid. This hydrogen is not metallic, however. The predicted (but as yet unobserved) metallic state of hydrogen exists only at very high pressures. Hydrogen used in nuclear weapons is at atmospheric pressure (before the bomb goes off, anyway).
By the way, the center of Jupiter is probably heavy elements (metals) and hydrocarbons surrounded by a layer of metallic hydrogen. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that Jupiter emits more heat than the sun gives it, probably due to radioactive decay of those heavy elements.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit detector overload!
This is Slashdot, for crying out loud. We're nerds, we don't fall for this idiotic screed even a high school freshman could debunk.
Ooooh, big words are scary! Stator, rotor, magnetic flux. Dammit, both the editor and article submitter should hand in their geek cards.
This guy does have a real patent, though. I don't know which is worse, the ignoramus patent examiner who allowed this one through or the baboon who posted it to Slashdot. Check the USPTO link here.I bet they had to hire people just so they had 150 people to fire. ;)
A mathematician watches the Activision CEO go into a building, then ten minutes later 150 people waving pink slips walk out. So the mathematician thinks to himself, "Ah, if they hire 149 more people, the building will be empty!"
Sorry for replying to my own comment, but it seems that the wikipedia article for yottabyte beat me to the punch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte
I know some people need a lot of storage, but c'mon:
4 -million-petabyte-array/
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/emc-rolls-out-
Four million petabytes?
Anyway, anyone else remember Arthur C. Clarke's "3001 The Final Odyssey"? By the time you start talking about petabytes, we could think about storing not just great works of art, but also the artist who created them. Let's see, some math is in order:
Fat artist: 75kg = 75000 g. Since we're 70% water, we'll say the average molar mass is 20g, so that's 3750 moles of molecules. Multiply by Avogadro's number and we get 2.2575 x 10^27 molecules. One petabyte is 10^15 bytes, so we need another 12 orders of magnitude before we can even devote 1 byte per molecule.
Even millions of petabytes leaves us short. Yawn, wake me up when we have 4 million zettabyte drives. Of course, by then the drive manufacturers will have redefined the prefixes again...
Yeah, did any other EE geeks see the headline and think "Silicon Nitride episodes? WTF?"
I mean, I could watch GaAs episodes all day, but SiN would be too much.
While you do have a point about some secrets being necessary, the question becomes "who determines what is necessary?" Nearly always, government officials are overly restrictive of what gets released, even to other government agencies. How can the government make good decisions without full knowledge of the situation?
What we need is dynamic equilibrium: the overly-secretive types should be constantly fighting the tell-the-world types, with neither side getting too strong. Not the most efficient system, but at least it removes the need for a central arbiter. One could argue that this is the case in the US right now: the current administration vs. the NY Times about the NSA secret wiretaps is a good example.
Of course, once the opposing parties get in bed with each other, your equilibrium goes out the window...
I think this is another example of the "worse is better" philosophy in action. Having just reread Richard Gabriel's article, I'll post a link to it: http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html. He is originally decrying the shoddiness of Unix software compared to ITS, TOPS-10, or LISP-M, but the point is valid here as well.
The whole point is that good software takes time to write, but that the last 20% of the functionality takes 80% of the time to write. Different end-users also have different ideas about what that 20% should be, compounding the problem. Why do you think that MS Office has so many useless features? They are trying to please everyone, which gets you nowhere. Far better to release something that is only 80% done and get to market first, because then nearly everyone is 80% satisfied. Otherwise you end up with a product years late, and only 20% better!
As for explicitly calling it "beta," hey, at least they're being honest with us!
"Justificationalism" or whatever you want to call it is not the be-all or end-all of science. There are a substantial number of physicists (mostly string theorists and cosmologists) who hope that within the bounds of physics, someday, it will be provable that the Universe must be the way it is to be self consistent. That is, the big bang was inevitable, gravity must be a 1/r^2 force, the masses of common particles are derivable, etc.
I don't know how I feel about this from a religious point of view, but as a scientist it would be the most important discovery ever.
Please use your real name and email address! If we want the industry types to take this survey seriously, don't give them an excuse to write off the results as "ballot box stuffing." If your email address is noone@nowhere.com, I apologize for all the spam I have given you over the years, but now is the time to tell the truth.
Microsoft has to file monthly reports with the SEC, detailing its profits and expenses. If the quarterly profit numbers change even a little bit, even if they are "lower than expected growth," the stock price can decline sharply.
If Bill Gates alone, or all the executives decided to switch to an open source model one day, I guarantee that even if the switch had yet to take place, the expense of starting such a project would have a large impact on profit, and may cause a stock price slip. Too large of a slip, and the board asks nasty questions. Don't forget, Microsoft only answers to Bill in the short term, anything longer than about three months puts the board and the stockholders in charge.
Stockholders like 80% profit margins.
Every time someone comes in with a formula about how to make something better, some one with no actual expertise but a lot of power buys into it and from then on, you'd better follow the formula, even if your idea is unique enough to fall outside the boundary the formula takes into account.
Everyone bitches about how much pop music sucks, but it sure sells well. Why? Because someone came up with a formula for predicting chart-toppers, and now you have to be really good to even be considered if your song scores poorly on the formula scale.
Yes, a lot of video games suck, but at least there is no psuedo-objective "formula" for deciding a priori that a game will not sell well that publishers can use to reject games that may have otherwise been released even in small numbers. Self publishing is hard, even with the advantages of the internet. Imagine if the formula had predicted that "Yohoho Puzzle Pirates" would not sell. No publisher would have taken the risk on picking it up, even after the developers spent all that time popularizing it themselves.
It has happened before, it will happen again.
While you have some good points about the method Microsoft used to ensure IE was installed on everyone's new computer, I find your essay to be extremely one-sided. I would just point out that around the time of IE 4.0/Netscape 4.0, IE actually implemented more of the CSS specification than Netscape, and had fewer rendering errors to boot. Actually, at that point one of Microsoft's selling points was standard compliance (always a tool used by the underdog). That is not to mention how SLOWLY Netscape started up compared to IE. (I know, IE is always resident in memory, unfair but convincing!) If Microsoft hadn't moved into the browser business, we'd have stagnated with bloaty, non-standard compliant Netscape instead of dangerously-integrated bug-ridden IE.
Thanks for the detailed analysis. It really NOx my SOx off.
What was id thinking?? I watched the trailer expecting to see monsters, guns, and blood, and the first half is storyline! I don't want a story with my monsters, I want lots of guns!
I should start a petition...
Seriously though, it's good to see a bit of story and interaction in an id game for once.
While I agree with your main point, I must mention the fact that biomass fuels do not generate hydrocarbons. The growth of biomass removes carbon from the atmosphere, and burning biomass releases that carbon. Biomass is a zero sum fuel; it does not release sequestered carbon (unless you are fertilizing it with fossil fuel).
According to the CNN article, he faces deportation after his trial, win or lose. His family is already back in Saudi Arabia, and he expects to join them. However, no details as to why he is being deported. He did face several counts of visa fraud, but he was acquitted on those counts! Why is he still being shipped out?
What kind of legal circus has been set up, when you either spend time in jail or get kicked out of the country? Was he really here illegally, or is the government just deporting him because they know he doesn't have the resources to fight TWO legal battles back to back? Neat way to get rid of the problem, from a Dept of Homeland Security asshat point of view.
Do you honestly think that a few scattered dumps of well-sealed nuclear waste would be enough to keep developers out of the wilderness? These guys don't care. Just bury it and forget it until the foundations of their 30-years-then-tear-'em-down buildings fill up with krypton and radon. Put them under the parking lot. Hell, leave them on the neighbor's doorstep and let him take care of it. This solution neglects to take human shortsightedness and greed into account.
Yes, Courtside pizza is the best in Athens, but do they still have that "buy one get two free" deal at Avalanche pizza? Three days worth of pizza for ~$10! Of course, you had to pick it up yourself, but hey, college kids are poor.
This is great! Oh wait, it sucks. According to the Dominoes website, every place I have ever lived is outside the service area. I live in a college town, and it doesn't work. The LAST college town I lived in isn't hooked up either. WTF? Even ZIPs in large cites claim to be unavailable. College campuses in large cites near me are out of bounds! WHERE THE HELL CAN I BUY A PIZZA ON THE INTERNET?
Well, the process is actually pretty difficult. One normally uses ordinary refridgeration techniques (compress the gas and let it cool, then expand it again and it cools further) in several cycles.
Step 1: liquify nitrogen. Nitrogen can be liquified with ordinary refridgeration. It costs pennies per liter. Temperature now ~80 Kelvin.
Step 2: Use liquid nitrogen to liquify hydrogen. By pumping on the liquid nitrogen, it is possible to cool it to the point where one can get liquid hydrogen out of it. Liquid hydrogen costs $1-2 per liter. Temperature now ~20 Kelvin.
Step 3: Use pumped liquid hydrogen to liquify the helium. It costs $5-10 per liter. Temperature now 4.2 Kelvin.
Step 4: In my case, 4.2 Kelvin is still too warm. Use pumped liquid helium4 to liquify helium3 (the light isotope of helium). Cost now $1,000 per cubic centimeter. Temperature now 1.2 Kelvin. This is still too warm. Pump on the helium 3 and one can get to 0.3 Kelvin. There are various techniques to get colder, but this is as far as I personally have gone.
Actually, people like me have been using the strategic helium reserve for years. I'm a physics grad student who uses liquid helium for cryogenics experiments, and about half of our helium comes from the reserve, with the other half coming from coal mines and oil wells. I'm too young to remember it, but the old guys in the physics department remember when helium was $10-20 per liter (liquid), whereas now it's about $5-7 thanks to the Feds selling it cheap.
Since when is going back to monolithic applications a good thing? I thought the whole point of having a /usr/lib directory was to share common functionality. Or will everyone have to install all the libraries for everything they might ever need, since the app can't do it? I predict library version hell!
Where do you install kde, or gnome? X is going to have to change drastically to accommodate this, and I think we all know how quickly the Xfree86 guys move on something if it wasn't their idea. This is a nice idea for technophobes, but I don't think it is really practical for big applications, or an application using a shared library.
Strictly, that is not true either. It is possible to have two theories which accurately describe reality in different ways, and have them both be correct. The important thing is that the predictions of each theory must be the same in all cases. Sometimes it is possible to prove that the theories are equivalent, as with the wave and matrix formulations of quantum mechanics, which makes the theories homologues.
Kapla kapla kapla! I thought LEGO rocked until I went to a children's museum and got my hands on some KAPLA blocks. They are very simple: 1/4 X 1 X 4 inches, perfectly balanced pine blocks. If you are complaining about how LEGO are too specialized these days, go the other way and free yourself from the need for specialized blocks at all!
I may sound like a fanatic, but I really do love these things! Check them out here.By the way, the center of Jupiter is probably heavy elements (metals) and hydrocarbons surrounded by a layer of metallic hydrogen. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that Jupiter emits more heat than the sun gives it, probably due to radioactive decay of those heavy elements.