Sounds like they're using the CD seed program. I've noticed that most CD player's random appear to be seeded by information on the CD, so they'll always play all songs in the same order, "random" be damned. Why they can't use the clock to seed it, I don't know. (If it's because they want the CD to continue playing the songs in the same order until it's finished, then save that extra information in $0.01 of flash ram and clear it on CD ejection.)
It's funny you should say that. I just opened my 3.5 year old box, and what did I see? Capacitors (caps) that are leaking. Nice brown topped caps. Not what you want to see in your PC. There were about 4 of the 8 or so near the CPU in this shape.
Now while I'll be replacing the motherboard very soon at the least, companies generally replace the entire machine. I can replace the motherboard/CPU today with a $110 AMD X2 3800+ CPU and motherboard combo that will still utilize all my current hardware, and it will be 2-5 times faster. If I wait 2-6 months, I can replace it with an even better configuration, while still utilizing my current RAM, although at that point, I will at least have to buy a new video card and possibly some RAM.
I'm sure you're correct about the sodas. I quit drinking them for the most part 5 years ago, and noticed I felt better within days. I now go months without a single soda, certain situations sometimes leave a soda as the only palatable alternative.
The one thing that got me about Supersize Me was the fact that he drank the large/supersize cokes. Don't drink the soda, and your sugar consumption will drop by 90% or so, unless there's ridiculous amounts of sugar in the hamburgers.
I had the same conundrum - jump into the DDR2 fray with an AM2 or stay with DDR and 939, or go Core 2 with 2GB DDR2. Core 2, at the time, with the best prices out there was a minimum $500 investment, AM2 was $300, and the 939 a mere $160. AM2 had no performance benefit, Core 2 would have had about 30-60%, but at a huge cost that I couldn't justify at the time. Not to mention that Core 2 would have required another video card then too, as there were no built-in graphics unless you went higher.
I still don't own a PCIe graphics card, it's next on the list, for about $60 for a 7600 GS most likely. I'm waiting another month or two for ATI and nVidia's new cards to hit the market in number and pressure the pricess of "lesser" cards down. (they're all still better than my current 9800 pro). While the ATI X1900XT looks appealing, it's hot and a min $250, and since I don't really play games or do cad work, it's overkill.
Media encoding is now about realtime, with the OC'd 3800. That's pretty reasonable to me, compared to the original 10m per 2m of video, and that was just encoding into MPEG2. H.264 must be a real pig since the encoding algorithm has to do more. Quads will definitely help with that.
For serious video encoding, an AMD 4X4 system could be nice - 2 AM2 CPUs which will be socket compatible with the future AM3 quad CPUs in mid 2007. That's why I held off on spending too much cash this round.
I couldn't wait - bought a AMD 3800+ X2 and motherboard for a whole $160. (Frys) works allright, and allowed me to not buy anything else to get a working PC. However, I'm looking forward 6 months and going wow - I can buy today's $500 setup probably for $100 in 6 months, if the current price drops are any indication, and I'd still be 2 cycles behind. The CPUs are definitely rolling out faster this year.
The only way to have a secure computer is to have it separately firewalled from the net for worms, and to run with a lowest user priviledged account, using non-MS software.
Modern games are another ball of wax, and I've actually gotten to the point of creating a separate OS installed partition for any new games.
If you're anything like us, you'll continually complain about your national health service, but I'd still rather become ill here, than over there in the USA.
Except during the last 2 weeks of the year. (Canada closed down hospitals because they ran out of money a couple of years ago for 2 weeks. Even seriously ill people had to leave.)
Also, with stringent population controls you create new problems: a generation down the line, you'd have a pensions crisis like the one we have in NW Europe (tax base gets too small to support all the old people).
That's why pension plans should be front-loaded. The entire concept of "pay-as-you-go" funding that depends upon ever increasing population is a doomed farce that should be outlawed. In the US, Social Security is such a farce. Matter of fact, anything that depends upon unlimited growth falls into this same category.
If you have doubts, look at the stock market, where there is wild speculation about stocks, which all eventually never reach their "estimated potential", because growth is finite. I'm still waiting for Google's upcoming crash. Their P/E is about 60 w/ a 120+B market cap. They're already everywhere, so where are they going to grow?
we might pay $5 for a polo shirt instead of $15 to $28
Try again - $40 - $95, depending upon make and brand, and I've seen it for $2 overseas, although it might not be the same quality. And that would be where I go, certainly not the cheapest market.
As for the deluded GP, American lifestyles might seem wasteful to him, but if you're working, why live in a government shack where lead often paints the walls (for the GP, that would be flying bullets - yes, we have neighborhoods with that problem here too, they're just not as numerous). That means spending more cash to live elsewhere, and also usually a car that is reliable enough to get you to and from work, because work will almost never be where you are living, because of cost or the before mentioned lead problem. So, now you've gone to probably a minimum of $1500/month, because you have to pay for rent, car, gas, and insurance because without insurance, you're in trouble if you get pulled over, and that could cost you your job (depending upon the job). So, as you can see, incidentals start piling up rapidly, and the cost gets high, compared to other countries. Note that I didn't even touch upon the social services provided here or anything else, just things that apply to your immediate "health" only.
What I'm saying is that a top programmer from a rich country, according to these clueless twits, can be replaced by 10 poor programmers from a poor country. (I can't make it any clearer than that)
The rest of my post is (not so) subtle innuendo and unsupported assertions, and I intend to leave them that way.
You are correct, no matter whatever country "this country" refers to. Lots of people are under the delusion that they can learn Java, C#, (insert favorite language) in 21 days and be a senior developer or architect.
I've even seen a couple of instances where just such a person was put in place as an architect. The resulting messes are still being dealt with by small hordes of developers, where just a small group of no more than 5 should be able to do all that's necessary. The management that put them in place, and the "architects" are no more. I'm willing to bet that this is more common than anyone suspects, and probably why a large segment of management has little or no respect for IT. They see these morons "succeeding" because they do produce code that does meet most of the requirements. However, what they don't see is the ensuing misery in trying to do anything with the code. Think spaghetti code maintenance and revision 2 of such a codebase - for real life - see Vista.
Let me emphasize my meaning regarding this point: It really comes down to the quality of the people you hire. If management wants bottom dollar per person, but hires 10 people for the price of one, they're always going to get lower quality code than hiring just 1 good programmer at the higher salary.
It doesn't matter if you're American, Indian, Phillipino, Columbian, or Peruvian - that particular statement holds true. The clueless management I'm talking about wants 10 programmers rather than 1, because 10 must be better, and gee, look, I hired 10 for the price of that 1 programmer you had working for you. Then they say "Aren't I good?"
Now to place that in the larger picture of my post, a good Indian programmer will cost you about 2/3s of a good American programmer. We're talking equal skills here. That's because 2/3s of the wage in India is equivalent to 3 times the wage in the US already, although that's dropping lately. That's the economics of things discussed, and it will take a while for it to equalize. One of the things that will add to Indian labor costs are health insurance, wage insurance, and a social security type of network. Those will come, or a revolution will occur. You can't have 1-10% of your population living in relative luxury, and step on the remaining 90+% in total poverty forever. As that rich percentage grows, so does the interface with the poor, and the poor become more restless.
I don't want to delve any more off-topic than that here, and I realize that my assertion certainly isn't fully supported. I certainly hope that the stabilizing process in India speeds up, because the sooner it does, the sooner we'll compete on ability rather than false economy.
Yes, it's increasingly obvious that racists, who thought that certain people (white people, or those from the west) were intrinsicly better than the others.
You can be the "pot", or the "kettle", take your pick.
This has nothing to do about racism, it's about basic economics. It's hard to compete with people that make less per month than your garbage pick up bill. There are costs to living in the "west" that require a base level of income that is higher than the highest salary for some of the people we're "competing" with. You see, as far as some management is concerned, there's no competition other than cost. By that measure, it's a foregone conclusion who the "winner" will be.
As for code quality from those "competitors", I've had the displeasure to see 5 different off-shorer's efforts, and they're all total and complete crap. I've also had the displeasure to see several "local" outsourcers and internal efforts, and they're no better.
It really comes down to the quality of the people you hire. If management wants bottom dollar per person, but hires 10 people for the price of one, they're always going to get lower quality code than hiring just 1 good programmer at the higher salary. Until management realizes they are throwing money away with this approach, they will not change. I'm not holding my breath as to when this will happen.
Sure I do. I can have a solid system up and running with all software installed in about 45m. Note: I do NOT do windows updates. Ever. I have slipstreamed installation disks with SP1 and SP2, so I don't have that particular issue either, depending upon which one I want installed.
Driver installations, depending upon the board, are the worst, as that's usually 4 or 5 reboots, depending on how many items you're installing, and motherboard drivers are generally picky enough that you don't want to install 3 drivers at once without rebooting, at least not without a trial run or two. (My old machine was 2 reboots to finished system after the OS install - 4 drivers could be installed in a single go, with 1 more reboot required for graphics drivers.)
As for music and movies - note that they're on separate external drive, which goes untouched. I have two drives with copies, as this content almost never changes, and since they're nearly full, won't get added to either.
That's true, once I get a windows machine configured, I don't upgrade anything. Including the OS. I use FF and Thunderbird. I reduce my MS exploit exposure as much as possible by removing all unnecessary services as well, which is almost all of them other than file sharing, although I'm looking into a replacement for that as well.
I buy another machine after a year or 2, or 4 as in this case, and configure it. Once it's stable, I have a slew of stuff I install, and I'm done. (The new machine is only 2 weeks old) However, in my case, I create a software load CD/DVD with all the things I load on it, so if I ever have to reinstall due to a disk crash or some kind of corruption, it's a quick reinstall. Then I ghost the drive, so I can very quickly go back to this precise configuration.
For the game machine, I then take the ghosted drive and recreate the machine config on a secondary primary partition, which is basically a throw-away once the game or games are done. With data on a second HD, this means that I have a stable productivity environment, and a copy if I'm gaming that will usually allow me to switch quickly over into my productivity suite without rebooting, as all data is on a separate disk/partition that's visible to both.
It's a little more work to setup, but you wind up with a rock stable work environment, and a worry-free game environment. (You do need to back up your data, of course, but that's a separate issue)
If you're really anal, you can use swappable drives for the stable vs gaming disks. Then there's no chance of corruption by even a rampantly evil virus.
Other than cases where laptops are seized in raids (it's hard to argue you didn't type something in your own personal copy of Outlook) or the feds haul every hard drive out of a building, why does email have any value in courts at all?
who said that you typed it in your personal copy? That's fakable as well, or have you never used someone else's machine briefly to send an embarassing email to a group? Basically, unless the raiding party can prove that said machine was in your control at all times, they really have no conclusive proof that you did anything.
Yeah, except that process stinks. I don't understand what the issue is with just reinstalling windows. It's a quick 20 or so minute process on the new system, especially if you slipstream whatever service pack you're interested in. Heck, it's about 3-5m of input, and then walk away for a while, then another 2m of input. (Why they can't collect all the data in 1 fell swoop, who knows. FC5 and Debian are both nicer installs in that regard)
Besides, installing fresh allows you to do some quick testing without fear, like bleeding edge drivers, or experimenting with non manufacturer supplied drivers. Of course, I do have a "stable" machine as my main machine while this one undergoes spastic configurations. I'll be doing my 5th install in 3 weeks shortly, with the configuration largely ironed out this time. (I had issues with a couple of the onboard "features". The built-in NIC actually locks up the system when flooding it @ 100Mbps, replacing it with an add-in card solved that problem. The onboard firewire is either bad or requires a different driver - I'm giving it one more driver attempt before punting and buying a DFI or Abit board. (yes, ECS sucks, but I was holding off on getting a PCIe vid card. With the 7600 GS selling for under $70 though, that position has become stupid in light of time wasted with the ECS board)
It appears to be for the means of manufacturing a specific design of capacitors. That should be exactly what patents are for. The same thing would occur for room temperature super conductors, should they ever be discovered. Once known, they'll be obvious, but to initially produce them will be hard.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that's what the 5 minute at recharging stations are for. Probably running 440 or 480 directly off the power lines? At home I'm sure it will take longer. I also recall seeing something mentioned or implied about a "battery swap" at those stations, so perhaps the charging time is considerably longer, and the swap only takes 5m?
I also checked their patent, which seems like a reasonable decent use of a patent for a change provided it actually works. Think of the Tesla using this instead of 6381 exploding Sony batteries;).
But more importantly, does this remind anyone else of the batacitors from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld? If you could only charge them with lightning strikes - free power!;)
I'm sorry, but you must be somewhat mistaken. Eiffel sounds like a johnny come lately - yes, I know it's been around for a while. However Java, and C++ before it, had this concept called interfaces, and I'm sure something somewhere had the concept of Design by Contract long before then.
Also, if you've done anything regarding integration like, say, EDI, then you've been designing by contract since the 60s.
I just don't think this is as big a deal as the story makes out, and Eiffel certainly isn't the centerpiece.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like they're using the CD seed program. I've noticed that most CD player's random appear to be seeded by information on the CD, so they'll always play all songs in the same order, "random" be damned. Why they can't use the clock to seed it, I don't know. (If it's because they want the CD to continue playing the songs in the same order until it's finished, then save that extra information in $0.01 of flash ram and clear it on CD ejection.)
suffers a melt-down @ 8:35am EST on Monday morning.
RUN
ClearQuest is less than "good", or even "acceptable" even. It's a bolted on POS that reminds me of CA products.
If you don't know what PHB is, you don't have a geek card....
It's funny you should say that. I just opened my 3.5 year old box, and what did I see? Capacitors (caps) that are leaking. Nice brown topped caps. Not what you want to see in your PC. There were about 4 of the 8 or so near the CPU in this shape.
Now while I'll be replacing the motherboard very soon at the least, companies generally replace the entire machine. I can replace the motherboard/CPU today with a $110 AMD X2 3800+ CPU and motherboard combo that will still utilize all my current hardware, and it will be 2-5 times faster. If I wait 2-6 months, I can replace it with an even better configuration, while still utilizing my current RAM, although at that point, I will at least have to buy a new video card and possibly some RAM.
I'm sure you're correct about the sodas. I quit drinking them for the most part 5 years ago, and noticed I felt better within days. I now go months without a single soda, certain situations sometimes leave a soda as the only palatable alternative.
The one thing that got me about Supersize Me was the fact that he drank the large/supersize cokes. Don't drink the soda, and your sugar consumption will drop by 90% or so, unless there's ridiculous amounts of sugar in the hamburgers.
You could always replace that RAM.... ;)
I had the same conundrum - jump into the DDR2 fray with an AM2 or stay with DDR and 939, or go Core 2 with 2GB DDR2. Core 2, at the time, with the best prices out there was a minimum $500 investment, AM2 was $300, and the 939 a mere $160. AM2 had no performance benefit, Core 2 would have had about 30-60%, but at a huge cost that I couldn't justify at the time. Not to mention that Core 2 would have required another video card then too, as there were no built-in graphics unless you went higher.
I still don't own a PCIe graphics card, it's next on the list, for about $60 for a 7600 GS most likely. I'm waiting another month or two for ATI and nVidia's new cards to hit the market in number and pressure the pricess of "lesser" cards down. (they're all still better than my current 9800 pro). While the ATI X1900XT looks appealing, it's hot and a min $250, and since I don't really play games or do cad work, it's overkill.
Media encoding is now about realtime, with the OC'd 3800. That's pretty reasonable to me, compared to the original 10m per 2m of video, and that was just encoding into MPEG2. H.264 must be a real pig since the encoding algorithm has to do more. Quads will definitely help with that.
For serious video encoding, an AMD 4X4 system could be nice - 2 AM2 CPUs which will be socket compatible with the future AM3 quad CPUs in mid 2007. That's why I held off on spending too much cash this round.
I couldn't wait - bought a AMD 3800+ X2 and motherboard for a whole $160. (Frys) works allright, and allowed me to not buy anything else to get a working PC. However, I'm looking forward 6 months and going wow - I can buy today's $500 setup probably for $100 in 6 months, if the current price drops are any indication, and I'd still be 2 cycles behind. The CPUs are definitely rolling out faster this year.
You've got to be kidding - a secure OS?
The only way to have a secure computer is to have it separately firewalled from the net for worms, and to run with a lowest user priviledged account, using non-MS software.
Modern games are another ball of wax, and I've actually gotten to the point of creating a separate OS installed partition for any new games.
Except during the last 2 weeks of the year. (Canada closed down hospitals because they ran out of money a couple of years ago for 2 weeks. Even seriously ill people had to leave.)
That's why pension plans should be front-loaded. The entire concept of "pay-as-you-go" funding that depends upon ever increasing population is a doomed farce that should be outlawed. In the US, Social Security is such a farce. Matter of fact, anything that depends upon unlimited growth falls into this same category.
If you have doubts, look at the stock market, where there is wild speculation about stocks, which all eventually never reach their "estimated potential", because growth is finite. I'm still waiting for Google's upcoming crash. Their P/E is about 60 w/ a 120+B market cap. They're already everywhere, so where are they going to grow?
Try again - $40 - $95, depending upon make and brand, and I've seen it for $2 overseas, although it might not be the same quality. And that would be where I go, certainly not the cheapest market.
As for the deluded GP, American lifestyles might seem wasteful to him, but if you're working, why live in a government shack where lead often paints the walls (for the GP, that would be flying bullets - yes, we have neighborhoods with that problem here too, they're just not as numerous). That means spending more cash to live elsewhere, and also usually a car that is reliable enough to get you to and from work, because work will almost never be where you are living, because of cost or the before mentioned lead problem. So, now you've gone to probably a minimum of $1500/month, because you have to pay for rent, car, gas, and insurance because without insurance, you're in trouble if you get pulled over, and that could cost you your job (depending upon the job). So, as you can see, incidentals start piling up rapidly, and the cost gets high, compared to other countries. Note that I didn't even touch upon the social services provided here or anything else, just things that apply to your immediate "health" only.
What I'm saying is that a top programmer from a rich country, according to these clueless twits, can be replaced by 10 poor programmers from a poor country. (I can't make it any clearer than that)
The rest of my post is (not so) subtle innuendo and unsupported assertions, and I intend to leave them that way.
You are correct, no matter whatever country "this country" refers to. Lots of people are under the delusion that they can learn Java, C#, (insert favorite language) in 21 days and be a senior developer or architect.
I've even seen a couple of instances where just such a person was put in place as an architect. The resulting messes are still being dealt with by small hordes of developers, where just a small group of no more than 5 should be able to do all that's necessary. The management that put them in place, and the "architects" are no more. I'm willing to bet that this is more common than anyone suspects, and probably why a large segment of management has little or no respect for IT. They see these morons "succeeding" because they do produce code that does meet most of the requirements. However, what they don't see is the ensuing misery in trying to do anything with the code. Think spaghetti code maintenance and revision 2 of such a codebase - for real life - see Vista.
Evidently, my comment was too subtle.
Let me emphasize my meaning regarding this point:
It really comes down to the quality of the people you hire. If management wants bottom dollar per person, but hires 10 people for the price of one, they're always going to get lower quality code than hiring just 1 good programmer at the higher salary.
It doesn't matter if you're American, Indian, Phillipino, Columbian, or Peruvian - that particular statement holds true. The clueless management I'm talking about wants 10 programmers rather than 1, because 10 must be better, and gee, look, I hired 10 for the price of that 1 programmer you had working for you. Then they say "Aren't I good?"
Now to place that in the larger picture of my post, a good Indian programmer will cost you about 2/3s of a good American programmer. We're talking equal skills here. That's because 2/3s of the wage in India is equivalent to 3 times the wage in the US already, although that's dropping lately. That's the economics of things discussed, and it will take a while for it to equalize. One of the things that will add to Indian labor costs are health insurance, wage insurance, and a social security type of network. Those will come, or a revolution will occur. You can't have 1-10% of your population living in relative luxury, and step on the remaining 90+% in total poverty forever. As that rich percentage grows, so does the interface with the poor, and the poor become more restless.
I don't want to delve any more off-topic than that here, and I realize that my assertion certainly isn't fully supported. I certainly hope that the stabilizing process in India speeds up, because the sooner it does, the sooner we'll compete on ability rather than false economy.
You can be the "pot", or the "kettle", take your pick.
This has nothing to do about racism, it's about basic economics. It's hard to compete with people that make less per month than your garbage pick up bill. There are costs to living in the "west" that require a base level of income that is higher than the highest salary for some of the people we're "competing" with. You see, as far as some management is concerned, there's no competition other than cost. By that measure, it's a foregone conclusion who the "winner" will be.
As for code quality from those "competitors", I've had the displeasure to see 5 different off-shorer's efforts, and they're all total and complete crap. I've also had the displeasure to see several "local" outsourcers and internal efforts, and they're no better.
It really comes down to the quality of the people you hire. If management wants bottom dollar per person, but hires 10 people for the price of one, they're always going to get lower quality code than hiring just 1 good programmer at the higher salary. Until management realizes they are throwing money away with this approach, they will not change. I'm not holding my breath as to when this will happen.
Sure I do. I can have a solid system up and running with all software installed in about 45m. Note: I do NOT do windows updates. Ever. I have slipstreamed installation disks with SP1 and SP2, so I don't have that particular issue either, depending upon which one I want installed.
Driver installations, depending upon the board, are the worst, as that's usually 4 or 5 reboots, depending on how many items you're installing, and motherboard drivers are generally picky enough that you don't want to install 3 drivers at once without rebooting, at least not without a trial run or two. (My old machine was 2 reboots to finished system after the OS install - 4 drivers could be installed in a single go, with 1 more reboot required for graphics drivers.)
As for music and movies - note that they're on separate external drive, which goes untouched. I have two drives with copies, as this content almost never changes, and since they're nearly full, won't get added to either.
That's true, once I get a windows machine configured, I don't upgrade anything. Including the OS. I use FF and Thunderbird. I reduce my MS exploit exposure as much as possible by removing all unnecessary services as well, which is almost all of them other than file sharing, although I'm looking into a replacement for that as well.
I buy another machine after a year or 2, or 4 as in this case, and configure it. Once it's stable, I have a slew of stuff I install, and I'm done. (The new machine is only 2 weeks old) However, in my case, I create a software load CD/DVD with all the things I load on it, so if I ever have to reinstall due to a disk crash or some kind of corruption, it's a quick reinstall. Then I ghost the drive, so I can very quickly go back to this precise configuration.
For the game machine, I then take the ghosted drive and recreate the machine config on a secondary primary partition, which is basically a throw-away once the game or games are done. With data on a second HD, this means that I have a stable productivity environment, and a copy if I'm gaming that will usually allow me to switch quickly over into my productivity suite without rebooting, as all data is on a separate disk/partition that's visible to both.
It's a little more work to setup, but you wind up with a rock stable work environment, and a worry-free game environment. (You do need to back up your data, of course, but that's a separate issue)
If you're really anal, you can use swappable drives for the stable vs gaming disks. Then there's no chance of corruption by even a rampantly evil virus.
Other than cases where laptops are seized in raids (it's hard to argue you didn't type something in your own personal copy of Outlook) or the feds haul every hard drive out of a building, why does email have any value in courts at all?
who said that you typed it in your personal copy? That's fakable as well, or have you never used someone else's machine briefly to send an embarassing email to a group? Basically, unless the raiding party can prove that said machine was in your control at all times, they really have no conclusive proof that you did anything.
Yeah, except that process stinks. I don't understand what the issue is with just reinstalling windows. It's a quick 20 or so minute process on the new system, especially if you slipstream whatever service pack you're interested in. Heck, it's about 3-5m of input, and then walk away for a while, then another 2m of input. (Why they can't collect all the data in 1 fell swoop, who knows. FC5 and Debian are both nicer installs in that regard)
Besides, installing fresh allows you to do some quick testing without fear, like bleeding edge drivers, or experimenting with non manufacturer supplied drivers. Of course, I do have a "stable" machine as my main machine while this one undergoes spastic configurations. I'll be doing my 5th install in 3 weeks shortly, with the configuration largely ironed out this time. (I had issues with a couple of the onboard "features". The built-in NIC actually locks up the system when flooding it @ 100Mbps, replacing it with an add-in card solved that problem. The onboard firewire is either bad or requires a different driver - I'm giving it one more driver attempt before punting and buying a DFI or Abit board. (yes, ECS sucks, but I was holding off on getting a PCIe vid card. With the 7600 GS selling for under $70 though, that position has become stupid in light of time wasted with the ECS board)
It appears to be for the means of manufacturing a specific design of capacitors. That should be exactly what patents are for. The same thing would occur for room temperature super conductors, should they ever be discovered. Once known, they'll be obvious, but to initially produce them will be hard.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that's what the 5 minute at recharging stations are for. Probably running 440 or 480 directly off the power lines? At home I'm sure it will take longer. I also recall seeing something mentioned or implied about a "battery swap" at those stations, so perhaps the charging time is considerably longer, and the swap only takes 5m?
;).
;)
I also checked their patent, which seems like a reasonable decent use of a patent for a change provided it actually works. Think of the Tesla using this instead of 6381 exploding Sony batteries
But more importantly, does this remind anyone else of the batacitors from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld? If you could only charge them with lightning strikes - free power!
I'm sorry, but you must be somewhat mistaken. Eiffel sounds like a johnny come lately - yes, I know it's been around for a while. However Java, and C++ before it, had this concept called interfaces, and I'm sure something somewhere had the concept of Design by Contract long before then.
Also, if you've done anything regarding integration like, say, EDI, then you've been designing by contract since the 60s.
I just don't think this is as big a deal as the story makes out, and Eiffel certainly isn't the centerpiece.