Looks like I'll be buying my movies from France here on out. It's not like the MPAA would stop selling DVD's in France...
I wonder if this is part of the hidden agenda with the ruling. The French do not like U.S cultural imperialism as embodied by Hollywood movies. If Hollywood's movie distributors stop selling into the French market, will the French be that upset? And if France becomes a center for the distribution of non-DRM DVDs that hurts Hollywood's profits, will the French be that upset?
It sounds like a win-win proposition for defenders of the French culture.
This article describes a GMO rice that is herbicide resistant. Scientists spliced in a human enzyme that is very effective at crunching toxins to create rice that can withstand a wider variety of weed-killers. This lets farmers rotate their weedkillers to reduce the chance that the weeds evolve resistance.
The GMO rice provides two other important environmental benefits. First, the new enzyme is so efficient at detoxifying the herbicide that the resulting rice is relatively herbicide free (non-modified rice contains 20X more residual herbicide). Second, the GMO rice extracts herbicide from the soil, meaning less herbicide in run-off.
Spectroscopic analysis of waste products to determine the health of the depositor. There has been some serious R&D on home healthcare monitoring system that analyze waste products (glucose in urine, fiber or blood in the stool, etc.). One scheme is optical or fluorescent spectroscopy of the bowl contents and LEDs could be the light source.
Germicidal lighting: if they use a UV-C LED (280 nm wavelength), then this system could help kill bacteria and viruses in the bowl (And give a nice oval tan on the sitter's butt).
The ease of spreadsheet creation is the problem, not the solution. Yes, it allows non-computer-literate managers to create an analysis of a particular problem... but that analysis is often flawed, and it is nearly impossible (for any non-trivial spreadsheet) to figure out where the problem really lies
Absolutely! Perhaps spreadsheets are like Flash, a good technology except for the fact that it lets too many idiots inflict stuff on the rest of us.
But this study is deeply flawed because all it does is document some of the costs of some of bad spreadsheets. If we are to do a full accounting of spreadsheets (both benefits and costs), then we need for consider more than just numbers of "bad" spreadsheets out there.
I would contend that for a broad class of software-addressable problems, a spreadsheet provides the fastest development time and the least total number of logical errors. Without spreadsheets (or some novice-usable software development environment that creates this problem of logic errors), then we face the problem of delegation of a complex programming task. If a manager needs a piece of software and they are not allowed to use a spreadsheet, then they must explain what they want to a professional programmer. This process is also fraught with error and would also let us write one of these "Businesses lose $X billion to errors" papers.
In fact, i'd wager that that error rates in a non-spreadsheet world would be higher for four reasons.
The manager's description of the problem/solution to the programmer would include some of the same logical errors as they would have made in the spreadsheet.
the programmer, not having the business knowledge of the manager, would allow or add other domain errors in the code.
The inferiority of debugging tools in programming languages would mean a greater number of residual bugs in the code.
The manager would have far less ability to perform a "sanity" check on the programmer's code than they would if they were doing the spreadsheet themselves.
I do agree that spreadsheets and spreadsheet-creating processes could and should be better. Quality control, testing, and better review processes should be used to ensure that a simple little spreadsheet does not cause thousands or millions of dollars in errors.
Although spreadsheets can contain costly errors, so can programs written in any language. I would argue that spreadsheets are a very powerful IDE for a wide class of small problems and can more easily create software with lower rates of errors than other "language oriented" approaches to software development.
The reason spreadsheets provide superior debugging versus language-based software is that they instantly display the intermediate results of the formula every time the inputs or formulae change. Change one number in the inputs and the programmer can instantly see the intermediate and final calculations and do a visual sanity check on the results. In contrast, language-based software creates several impediments such as a manual edit-compile-run cycle, manual/isolated debugging statements, and few easy ways to visually monitor all the values of all the intermediate variables.
Don't get me wrong, spreadsheets have some severe limits. First, they can provide too much power to developers with too little experience/competence. If the developer is an idiot, they are more likely to be able to create a spreadsheet than a program, but just as likely to create (and not find) serious logical error. Programming languages, to some extent, create a barrier that blocks morons (not always). Second, spreadsheets don't scale to large/complex problems very easily. Some of this reflects the monopolist state of the spreadsheet market -- the lack of competition for Excel means that it has not substantively improved in the last decade. (e.g., why is Excel still limited to 256 columns?!?!?).
At a certain part of the article it is stated that one tenth of the energy required for electrolysis is required here. How I got it from the context, that means you get 10 times the amount of hydrogen for your power input here, then compared to standard electrolysis. If true, waste water can help alleviate getting hydrogen, for any devices we would like to run on hydrogen.
Thanks for the insightful post, AC. That is a very good factoid that I had not noticed when I read TFA. It definitely raises the potential for the invention in terms of practicality.
Ps, The reason for this is likely that the microbes are using the carbohydrates in the waste water to power themselves
Good point. The question remains: what fraction of the energy latent in the carbohydrates is being converted to hydrogen? As you insightfully indicate, the microbes consume some of the energy themselves (probably generating a mix of carbon dioxide, water, ethanol, methanol, methane, etc. and a certain amount of waste heat as they make more microrobes) The electricity juices the microbes into producing more hydrogen and perhaps converting more of the fuel in the slurry. In addition to the microbe tax and electrical power needed, we would also need some estimate of the energy required to grow, harvest, and process the biomass.
The less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone statement is totally meaningless because it gives no indication of the efficiency of the process. Even at "0.25V", if the process requires tens or hundreds of electrons per molecule of hydrogen, then the process may be horribly inefficient. Even the "produces four times more hydrogen than would be typically generated by fermentation alone" is meaning less without some facts such as the molar conversion efficiency -- how many moles of hydrogen per mole of acetate does the augmented process create?
Moreover, this process is not the holy grail of pure electrolysis (e.g., splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), it is an electrolyticly augmented chemical conversion of carbohydrates into carbon dioxide (green house gas), water, and hydrogen. In theory, this process could by part of a biomass-to-hydrogen fuel generation cycle, but as we have seen with ethanol production, the amount ethanol-based energy harvested is poor in comparison with the energy required to grow, reap, and process the plants (corn).
Don't get me wrong, this is a very intriguing finding, but there is far too little information in the article to determine if this process is thermodynamically better or worse than simply burning the carbohydrates in a furnace or standard combustion engine.
What frustrates and saddens me is that the analysis needed to make useful statements about this discovery are not that hard to make. Any competent chemist or chemical engineer could provide a useful back-of-the-envelop estimate of the energy inputs and outputs given an afternoon with the raw data from the experimenters. Either the scientists involved did not do this analysis (shame on them) or the journalists chose to ignore key results (shame on them) or the actual return on energy input is very poor indeed (to bad for all of us).
I hate articles that quote meaningless comparisons and leave the true question of practically total unanswered while holding out a vaporous promise that our energy problems are solved.
Testing of Linux might be easier if it contained some automated features for sending crash reports back to a central database. Gathering some basic data on the stack trace, thread states, processes, etc. might help troubleshoot the OS in the context of the wide array of systems, configurations, and usage patterns. I know that both Microsoft and Apple have benefited strongly from this feature. Some tin-foil-hat wearers might object to their box phoning home. Tin foil hatters can just disable the feature but it might mean that the types of bug they experience never get fixed.
If developers are going to fix the bugs that occur in the real world, they need data from the real-world.
In an economy ruled by corporations, yes. In a sensible economy, we wouldn't have a capitalist class of employers; people would work for themselves, trading labor as sole proprietorships, co-ops, collectives, and employee-owned companies, not as wage slaves to an owning class.
I'd like that too, but am skeptical that it can ever occur in more than a minority of companies. My experience has been that too many people just want a steady paying job. I co-founded a company but left when it became clear that the other founders did not want to invest in R&D or new product development. They preferred to stay with government contracts that provided a steady income, but little opportunity for growth (I have nothing against what they do, but they were risk averse). I've since met many others with similar experiences -- too many employees don't want to give up salary for ownership.
There are plenty of people who thing like you and I. They do work for themselves, form partnerships with like-minded people, and create employee-owned companies. Even Wal-Mart tried this -- giving stock to a broad swath of employees in the early days. Employee stock ownership worked very well when the stock price was soaring, but became a disincentive as the company matured and the price stopped rising.
The point is that I fear there will always be a great mass of people who will only be wage-slaves because they are unwilling to put forth or endure the effort/risk required to be anything more.
The annotation on the webcam picture intrigued me. What are those Kiwi's up to down under? Are they getting into tectonic engineering? Is that pink dinosaur a radiation-mutated tuatara? I can only hope that have no WMDs.
Admittedly I'm no marketting genius, but how do you illustrate the deep humour and insane yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created with a barrage of 1-second clips played with rock-music?
Tricky! IANAMG (I Am Not A Marketing Genius) either, but I can see something like this..
Voiceover (progressing from friendly to serious); "Arthur Dent is living a peaceful life until he learns that his house is to be demolished for a new highway. Then he learns that the Earth is to be demolished for a new interstellar highway. Then he discovers that his friend is an interstellar hitchhiker. Then life turns even stranger" all accompanied by visuals that transition from Arthur's peaceful home, the local demolition crew, the Vogon destructor fleet, Ford Perfect's electronic thumb, and then the total madness of 1-second scenes cut to rock music, then a near-ending pause with the words "Don't Panic" in big friendly letters on the electronic thumb/galactic encyclopedia before returning manic scenes of Arthur's travels.
Again, IANAMG.
Why PR matters to nerds
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Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The more powerful the role of PR in the media and the mind of decision makers, the weaker the role of reason when it comes to technology selection. If one company can spend millions on FUD and get that FUD published or cited by seemingly reputable journalists, then less well capitalized technologies such as OSS are at a disadvantage.
The previews of the movie don't look good for use Adams fans. They seem to emphasize special effects and the bustle of the books, but give no evidence of the deep humor and insane and yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created. Rather than create Adams' mind-boggling humor (which is harder), they seem to have created the usual array of eye-boggling visuals.
I hope the actual movie is better than the previews.
People get wealth from work. Workers are the source of all wealth.
The second sentence does not follow from the first, assuming that the first is even true. The output of any given individual worker is not really worth anything unless that worker (or someone connected to that worker) can find a market or consumer of their work product. In an idyllic era of agrarian output or simple hand-crafted products, it may have been possible for individual workers to sell their individual work. But the increasing sophistication of both products and services in the modern world mean that individual workers are valueless without some entity to coordinate, connect, and manage a grouo of workers who each contribute an individually value-less effort to a collectively-valueable output. As governments have proven horribly inept at managing workforces, it falls on the shoulders of managers in corporations to provide that valuable service. What corporations do is create an organized structure that efficiently connects workers to work and work output to markets.
If corporations really were mere leaches, why wouldn't workers leave and go into business for themselves? In a world in which corporations add no value, any individual worker would be able to undercut the price charged by a corporation because that worker would not have to add the leach's fees and profits into the price. The answer is three-fold. First, many workers do start small businesses that grow and inevitably recreate the corporate structure of management and workers. Second, some work is not individualizable -- building an automobile requires the coordinated effort of hundreds or thousands of people. In this case, corporations provide value in management. Third, individuals often lack capital for equipment, start-up costs, etc. -- and capital is hard (in-efficient) to raise in small quantities. Corporations provide a convenient, cost-effective way of raising and managing capital.
You can say in theory that seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom in wages, but look at what happens in practice. The vast majority of corporations take the easy route and do everything they can to cut wages and other labor costs.
I blame "The People" for this. How many people buy the lowest price whatever with no regard for the management practices of the company that made the product? There are companies that try to treat their workers well, but does that translate into more sales? Instead, 100 million people shop at Wal-Mart everyday despite the well-known wage and benefits practices of that company. For a company, a competitor to Wal-mart or a supplier to Wal-Mart, the choice is clear, the people have spoken. The People want cheap goods and will gladly go to another company to buy them. Faced with a choice between closing the factory because nobody will buy high-priced goods or cutting wages & benefits, most sane, ethical, and moral managers chose the cuts.
How many US companies offer full medical coverage now, or pensions?
Defined benefit pensions are a deathtrap for a company and that fact will only get worse as the Baby Boomers age. Look at the old steel companies in this country to see what happens when the retiree population exceeds the employee population. Companies can read the actuarial tables, take one look at the ballooning numbers of retirees and know that they cannot afford to pay for everything. Moreover, in a world where people move, change jobs, change careers, it makes more sense to create defined contribution retirement plans or leave it up to each worker to use their pay as they see fit. In some ways the lessening of retirement benefits is a lessening of the golden handcuffs that keep workers tied to an employer.
The problem with medical coverage is even more insidious -- we've separated the benefactor (the patient) from the payor (the employer/insurance company). Patients have no incentive to manage their own healthcare costs. Healthcare costs
This is only the case with a surplus labour pool, and since the current population of the earth is oh, 6.1 billion or so, most of whom have no rights, no labour standards or unions affecting them, and live in developing nations with oppressive governments, we have all the surplus labour we need to drive wages into, say, nothing.
That's a very good point that is true in theory and probably true in some of poorest parts of the world. But its not true in India and China where wages are rising. So the two most populous countries on Earth don't have enough supply to completely cancel the effects of demand. Also, the very high employee turnover rates in Indian call centers suggest that workers can and do vote with their feet.
The scary issue, for the U.S., is that some of the new Chinese factories are NOT like the sweatshops of your average third world nation. The Chinese are building modern factories with modern productivity enhancements. These modern Chinese factories won't have to worry about rising wages because they will use productivity gains to create both cheap goods and a billion new home-grown consumers.
Summary: corporations owe to the state, state owes to the people, and so corporation owe to the people.
The logic needs to go a bit further bit further -- where do the people get their riches? Without employers (mostly corporations), the people would have no money. Without consumer goods makers and retailers (mostly corporations), the money paid by a job would have no value. So the people owe their riches to the corporations and we have come full circle.
The point is that economies are mutually dependent networks with no simple linear chain of who owes whom. I'm not saying the current balance of power is right, only that people are dependent on corporations and corporations are dependent on people.
Seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom on wages. Henry Ford knew that if he could make his workforce more productive he would both create wealthier workers and create a product those workers could afford. Ford paid higher wages than other companies at the time and was rewarded with high productivity. Ford also designed systems to make those worker vary productive so that the amount of high-wage cost per car was low and the car was affordable to a great many people (including Ford's own workers).
If any company or country wants to compete on the world market its need to find a way to create more value than costs. Yes, cut-rate wages can avoid costs and some companies try to go that route, but it is a dead end. Smarter companies find a way to create greater value per unchanged unit of cost (Ford actual increased wages) and then use greater productivity, greater efficiency, and better products to create extraordinary value.
I heard Vint Cerf speak at an e-business conference (remember when those were popular?).
He talked extensively about how the layered architecture of the internet poses a serious challenge to business models. The fact that any application can communicate through any physical medium (of sufficient bandwidth) was great for interoperability, but hard on businesses that provide the physical layer.
The problem is that all of the value is in the application layer -- people want to run software, download movies, chat with friends, etc. Whether the data flows on copper, fiber, or RF is irrelevant to the end-user and the layered architecture ensures that this is irrelevant. In contrast, a lot of the cost is in that "irrelevant" physical layer -- the last mile is still very expensive (we can hope WiMax reduces this problem). This gulf between cost and value forces physical infrastructure providers into a position of being a commodity providers with severe cost competition. If the end-user doesn't care how their data is carried, then they tend to treat bandwidth as a commodity.
I think he was wearing his MCI hat at the time of this talk and was influenced by the beginnings of the dot-com crash. MCI's subsequent bankruptcy was not surprising. Understanding this issue explains why telecom companies don't want municipal wifi and insist that you only network your cellphone through their networks. The only way to make infrastructure pay is to bind the high-value software application layer to the high-cost hardware layer. But this strategy violates the entire layered model and enrages consumers.
MacOS prior to X was a non-preemptive, non-protected memory, emulated 68K stack and file system POS that Bill Gates would have been too embarased to release.
Agreed. And Apple's attempts to fix those problems (Copland) was stillborn.
Further if you think Linux sucks because [chose your reason] there is most likely already an OS project running to address your issue.
I don't think Linux sucks, but can envision it becoming bloated or ill-suited to some future computing environment. Each OS project to fix some perceived gap in Linux will add to the complexity and bloat of the OS. More stuff is added to the OS than is taken out.
In short MacOS needed a restart worse then windows 3.1, Linux does not.
This statement misses my point. The article concerns a potential trend toward bloat. Linux may not suck now, but will probably suck in the future as the space of applications, users, and hardware changes above and below the kernel. All I am saying is that no architecture is forever and that it is hard to incrementally evolve one architecture to another.
I suspect that all long-lasting, end-user OSes tend toward bloatware. Macintosh went through this with OS 7 through 9. Windows appears to be doing this as it progresses to Longhorn. It's just the natural evolution of software to accumulate cruft on the basis of yet another nifty feature that must be added into the bowels of the OS until the development effort becomes so constipated that the next version never appears or is so complication/unstable that people abandon it.
The trick, for Linux, will be to do what Apple did in moving to OS X -- create a new, "from-scratch" (yes, I know Apple borrowed a lot from others), OS with some form of compatibility-creating layer or old-kernal box. Incrementalism only takes an OS so far before revolution is needed to build a new, better system from the ground up.
Looking at the die layout, its easy to imagine that AMD (and Intel) will be produces a good many dual-core chips with one defective core (maybe 10-25% of production). I'd bet that somebody finds a market for those partially-functional chips. I also wonder what will happen when people discover that one core can be overclocked more than another core. For applications/loads that only use a single core, the system could disable the slow core and run the fast core at full speed.
We switched mail servers at our web host and that changed the IP addy of our mail. Two weeks later I looked at the mailboxes on the old server and find that they were still getting about a 10-20 spams per day.
As an aside, whitelisting our valid email accounts and filtering mail "received from" our own IP addy knocks out about 20-30% of our spam. It appears spammers try to sneek one past by spoofing the header to look like it came from inside. If so, spammers use DNS to get IP addys and then use the IP. I doubt they even think about TTL.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment
You make a good point -- perhaps you and I don't disagree as much as it might seem. Some author-control of layout is not a bad thing. A consistent site page design certainly aids navigation, comprehension, and usage. What I would like is more control of type size (new versions of HTML suffer from this too) because some designers choose excessively small or excessive large type. I'd also like more control of color because too many designers make bad decisions (e.g.,. yellow text on white backgroud, non-standard colors for HREFs, etc.).
most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
This is the heart of the problem with Flash today. The technology itself is not evil, but too many of its developers are just bad and they ruin it for the better developers that do do a good job with Flash. Perhaps if Flash had a certification program or some scheme for regulating who used it, it would be better. In architecture, you have to have license to practice and perhaps Flash needs that too.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
This is where you and I part company. I absolutely don't want a TV-like experience -- this is my biggest reason for Flash-hatred. I prefer interaction, manipulation, and navigation. I want a self-paced, not a author-paced experience. I want to be able to randomly access the parts of the site I'm interested in. I want to spend as much or a little time dwelling on any given part of the site as I choose. I want to be able to navigate back and forth over the content. I want to be able to copy-paste snippets of text (I use the web for research). Too many Flash site take that control away from me and I don't like it.
If the fraction of bad Flash dropped, I would gladly become a fanboy. But until Flash developers realize that some people don't want a passive, linear, author-controlled experience, there will be too much bad Flash and too much knee-jerk hatred of what could be an awesome technology for interactive sites.
Thanks for writing an insightful counterargument.
National insecurity & militarization of the ne
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U.S. Military's Hackers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This looks like a scary, but inevitable, development. The internet is becoming too important to this country's economy. Perhaps the private sector can keep the Internet safe, but they need more vigilance and more tools to handle fast-evolving threats. The minute the government feels that the net has become a national security vulnerability, they will take steps to become the defender of that infrastructure.
Perhaps the day will come when the government deploys.mil computers to DDoS offending servers of phisher, spammers, etc.
Because Micheal Dell likes to reduce complexity
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Dell Still Intel Only
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· Score: 4, Insightful
At a conference, Michael Dell spoke about this issue, indirectly. He argued that if Dell can satisfy most of the demand with a smaller number of parts, it will do that. I've heard other Dell managers speak and the magic number is usually 3 -- 3 graphics cards, 3 HD sizes, 3 speed levels, etc. Although Dell's factories are amazing in their ability to pump out customized PCs, each added part variant adds costs to the entire system.
Dell would rather lose a few percent of sales that drive the costs of the entire factory higher.
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
I hope you are right. In my mind, Flash represents the triumph of the content creator over the user of the internet. HTML, in its original incarnation as a markup language, gave power to the browser - the user of the browser controlled how tagged text was rendered, the user controlled the pacing of pages, etc. Lightweight HTML pages loaded quickly and let the user actively move in a self-paced fashion. WIth HTML, the user could actively control what they saw, how they saw it, and when they saw it.
Flash takes to much of that control away -- the content creator forces their vision of layout, type size, and pacing on the hapless, passive viewer. I have seen so many flash sites that turn a broadband connection into a 110 baud experience of slowly appearing words (get a clue, I don't want to see letters swirling on a page, fading in and out, etc.). Flash prevents browsing. You cannot glance at a flash site, you cannot control what you see or when you see it. You are forced to wait for it to download and wait for it to play. Although I admit that a few, too few, flash sites add substantive value with interactivity, it is far to little to compensate for the incredibly frustrating body of flash on the web today.
We can only hope that Abode screws this one up so that the browser of the internet can enjoy more control and escape user-interface micromanagement by flash content creators.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like I'll be buying my movies from France here on out. It's not like the MPAA would stop selling DVD's in France...
I wonder if this is part of the hidden agenda with the ruling. The French do not like U.S cultural imperialism as embodied by Hollywood movies. If Hollywood's movie distributors stop selling into the French market, will the French be that upset? And if France becomes a center for the distribution of non-DRM DVDs that hurts Hollywood's profits, will the French be that upset?
It sounds like a win-win proposition for defenders of the French culture.
This article describes a GMO rice that is herbicide resistant. Scientists spliced in a human enzyme that is very effective at crunching toxins to create rice that can withstand a wider variety of weed-killers. This lets farmers rotate their weedkillers to reduce the chance that the weeds evolve resistance.
The GMO rice provides two other important environmental benefits. First, the new enzyme is so efficient at detoxifying the herbicide that the resulting rice is relatively herbicide free (non-modified rice contains 20X more residual herbicide). Second, the GMO rice extracts herbicide from the soil, meaning less herbicide in run-off.
Absolutely! Perhaps spreadsheets are like Flash, a good technology except for the fact that it lets too many idiots inflict stuff on the rest of us.
But this study is deeply flawed because all it does is document some of the costs of some of bad spreadsheets. If we are to do a full accounting of spreadsheets (both benefits and costs), then we need for consider more than just numbers of "bad" spreadsheets out there.
I would contend that for a broad class of software-addressable problems, a spreadsheet provides the fastest development time and the least total number of logical errors. Without spreadsheets (or some novice-usable software development environment that creates this problem of logic errors), then we face the problem of delegation of a complex programming task. If a manager needs a piece of software and they are not allowed to use a spreadsheet, then they must explain what they want to a professional programmer. This process is also fraught with error and would also let us write one of these "Businesses lose $X billion to errors" papers.
In fact, i'd wager that that error rates in a non-spreadsheet world would be higher for four reasons.
I do agree that spreadsheets and spreadsheet-creating processes could and should be better. Quality control, testing, and better review processes should be used to ensure that a simple little spreadsheet does not cause thousands or millions of dollars in errors.
Although spreadsheets can contain costly errors, so can programs written in any language. I would argue that spreadsheets are a very powerful IDE for a wide class of small problems and can more easily create software with lower rates of errors than other "language oriented" approaches to software development.
The reason spreadsheets provide superior debugging versus language-based software is that they instantly display the intermediate results of the formula every time the inputs or formulae change. Change one number in the inputs and the programmer can instantly see the intermediate and final calculations and do a visual sanity check on the results. In contrast, language-based software creates several impediments such as a manual edit-compile-run cycle, manual/isolated debugging statements, and few easy ways to visually monitor all the values of all the intermediate variables.
Don't get me wrong, spreadsheets have some severe limits. First, they can provide too much power to developers with too little experience/competence. If the developer is an idiot, they are more likely to be able to create a spreadsheet than a program, but just as likely to create (and not find) serious logical error. Programming languages, to some extent, create a barrier that blocks morons (not always). Second, spreadsheets don't scale to large/complex problems very easily. Some of this reflects the monopolist state of the spreadsheet market -- the lack of competition for Excel means that it has not substantively improved in the last decade. (e.g., why is Excel still limited to 256 columns?!?!?).
At a certain part of the article it is stated that one tenth of the energy required for electrolysis is required here. How I got it from the context, that means you get 10 times the amount of hydrogen for your power input here, then compared to standard electrolysis. If true, waste water can help alleviate getting hydrogen, for any devices we would like to run on hydrogen.
Thanks for the insightful post, AC. That is a very good factoid that I had not noticed when I read TFA. It definitely raises the potential for the invention in terms of practicality.
Ps, The reason for this is likely that the microbes are using the carbohydrates in the waste water to power themselves
Good point. The question remains: what fraction of the energy latent in the carbohydrates is being converted to hydrogen? As you insightfully indicate, the microbes consume some of the energy themselves (probably generating a mix of carbon dioxide, water, ethanol, methanol, methane, etc. and a certain amount of waste heat as they make more microrobes) The electricity juices the microbes into producing more hydrogen and perhaps converting more of the fuel in the slurry. In addition to the microbe tax and electrical power needed, we would also need some estimate of the energy required to grow, harvest, and process the biomass.
The less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone statement is totally meaningless because it gives no indication of the efficiency of the process. Even at "0.25V", if the process requires tens or hundreds of electrons per molecule of hydrogen, then the process may be horribly inefficient. Even the "produces four times more hydrogen than would be typically generated by fermentation alone" is meaning less without some facts such as the molar conversion efficiency -- how many moles of hydrogen per mole of acetate does the augmented process create?
Moreover, this process is not the holy grail of pure electrolysis (e.g., splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), it is an electrolyticly augmented chemical conversion of carbohydrates into carbon dioxide (green house gas), water, and hydrogen. In theory, this process could by part of a biomass-to-hydrogen fuel generation cycle, but as we have seen with ethanol production, the amount ethanol-based energy harvested is poor in comparison with the energy required to grow, reap, and process the plants (corn).
Don't get me wrong, this is a very intriguing finding, but there is far too little information in the article to determine if this process is thermodynamically better or worse than simply burning the carbohydrates in a furnace or standard combustion engine.
What frustrates and saddens me is that the analysis needed to make useful statements about this discovery are not that hard to make. Any competent chemist or chemical engineer could provide a useful back-of-the-envelop estimate of the energy inputs and outputs given an afternoon with the raw data from the experimenters. Either the scientists involved did not do this analysis (shame on them) or the journalists chose to ignore key results (shame on them) or the actual return on energy input is very poor indeed (to bad for all of us).
I hate articles that quote meaningless comparisons and leave the true question of practically total unanswered while holding out a vaporous promise that our energy problems are solved.
Testing of Linux might be easier if it contained some automated features for sending crash reports back to a central database. Gathering some basic data on the stack trace, thread states, processes, etc. might help troubleshoot the OS in the context of the wide array of systems, configurations, and usage patterns. I know that both Microsoft and Apple have benefited strongly from this feature. Some tin-foil-hat wearers might object to their box phoning home. Tin foil hatters can just disable the feature but it might mean that the types of bug they experience never get fixed.
If developers are going to fix the bugs that occur in the real world, they need data from the real-world.
In an economy ruled by corporations, yes. In a sensible economy, we wouldn't have a capitalist class of employers; people would work for themselves, trading labor as sole proprietorships, co-ops, collectives, and employee-owned companies, not as wage slaves to an owning class.
I'd like that too, but am skeptical that it can ever occur in more than a minority of companies. My experience has been that too many people just want a steady paying job. I co-founded a company but left when it became clear that the other founders did not want to invest in R&D or new product development. They preferred to stay with government contracts that provided a steady income, but little opportunity for growth (I have nothing against what they do, but they were risk averse). I've since met many others with similar experiences -- too many employees don't want to give up salary for ownership.
There are plenty of people who thing like you and I. They do work for themselves, form partnerships with like-minded people, and create employee-owned companies. Even Wal-Mart tried this -- giving stock to a broad swath of employees in the early days. Employee stock ownership worked very well when the stock price was soaring, but became a disincentive as the company matured and the price stopped rising.
The point is that I fear there will always be a great mass of people who will only be wage-slaves because they are unwilling to put forth or endure the effort/risk required to be anything more.
The annotation on the webcam picture intrigued me. What are those Kiwi's up to down under? Are they getting into tectonic engineering? Is that pink dinosaur a radiation-mutated tuatara? I can only hope that have no WMDs.
Admittedly I'm no marketting genius, but how do you illustrate the deep humour and insane yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created with a barrage of 1-second clips played with rock-music?
Tricky! IANAMG (I Am Not A Marketing Genius) either, but I can see something like this..
Voiceover (progressing from friendly to serious); "Arthur Dent is living a peaceful life until he learns that his house is to be demolished for a new highway. Then he learns that the Earth is to be demolished for a new interstellar highway. Then he discovers that his friend is an interstellar hitchhiker. Then life turns even stranger" all accompanied by visuals that transition from Arthur's peaceful home, the local demolition crew, the Vogon destructor fleet, Ford Perfect's electronic thumb, and then the total madness of 1-second scenes cut to rock music, then a near-ending pause with the words "Don't Panic" in big friendly letters on the electronic thumb/galactic encyclopedia before returning manic scenes of Arthur's travels.
Again, IANAMG.
The more powerful the role of PR in the media and the mind of decision makers, the weaker the role of reason when it comes to technology selection. If one company can spend millions on FUD and get that FUD published or cited by seemingly reputable journalists, then less well capitalized technologies such as OSS are at a disadvantage.
The previews of the movie don't look good for use Adams fans. They seem to emphasize special effects and the bustle of the books, but give no evidence of the deep humor and insane and yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created. Rather than create Adams' mind-boggling humor (which is harder), they seem to have created the usual array of eye-boggling visuals.
I hope the actual movie is better than the previews.
People get wealth from work. Workers are the source of all wealth.
The second sentence does not follow from the first, assuming that the first is even true. The output of any given individual worker is not really worth anything unless that worker (or someone connected to that worker) can find a market or consumer of their work product. In an idyllic era of agrarian output or simple hand-crafted products, it may have been possible for individual workers to sell their individual work. But the increasing sophistication of both products and services in the modern world mean that individual workers are valueless without some entity to coordinate, connect, and manage a grouo of workers who each contribute an individually value-less effort to a collectively-valueable output. As governments have proven horribly inept at managing workforces, it falls on the shoulders of managers in corporations to provide that valuable service. What corporations do is create an organized structure that efficiently connects workers to work and work output to markets.
If corporations really were mere leaches, why wouldn't workers leave and go into business for themselves? In a world in which corporations add no value, any individual worker would be able to undercut the price charged by a corporation because that worker would not have to add the leach's fees and profits into the price. The answer is three-fold. First, many workers do start small businesses that grow and inevitably recreate the corporate structure of management and workers. Second, some work is not individualizable -- building an automobile requires the coordinated effort of hundreds or thousands of people. In this case, corporations provide value in management. Third, individuals often lack capital for equipment, start-up costs, etc. -- and capital is hard (in-efficient) to raise in small quantities. Corporations provide a convenient, cost-effective way of raising and managing capital.
You can say in theory that seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom in wages, but look at what happens in practice. The vast majority of corporations take the easy route and do everything they can to cut wages and other labor costs.
I blame "The People" for this. How many people buy the lowest price whatever with no regard for the management practices of the company that made the product? There are companies that try to treat their workers well, but does that translate into more sales? Instead, 100 million people shop at Wal-Mart everyday despite the well-known wage and benefits practices of that company. For a company, a competitor to Wal-mart or a supplier to Wal-Mart, the choice is clear, the people have spoken. The People want cheap goods and will gladly go to another company to buy them. Faced with a choice between closing the factory because nobody will buy high-priced goods or cutting wages & benefits, most sane, ethical, and moral managers chose the cuts.
How many US companies offer full medical coverage now, or pensions?
Defined benefit pensions are a deathtrap for a company and that fact will only get worse as the Baby Boomers age. Look at the old steel companies in this country to see what happens when the retiree population exceeds the employee population. Companies can read the actuarial tables, take one look at the ballooning numbers of retirees and know that they cannot afford to pay for everything. Moreover, in a world where people move, change jobs, change careers, it makes more sense to create defined contribution retirement plans or leave it up to each worker to use their pay as they see fit. In some ways the lessening of retirement benefits is a lessening of the golden handcuffs that keep workers tied to an employer.
The problem with medical coverage is even more insidious -- we've separated the benefactor (the patient) from the payor (the employer/insurance company). Patients have no incentive to manage their own healthcare costs. Healthcare costs
This is only the case with a surplus labour pool, and since the current population of the earth is oh, 6.1 billion or so, most of whom have no rights, no labour standards or unions affecting them, and live in developing nations with oppressive governments, we have all the surplus labour we need to drive wages into, say, nothing.
That's a very good point that is true in theory and probably true in some of poorest parts of the world. But its not true in India and China where wages are rising. So the two most populous countries on Earth don't have enough supply to completely cancel the effects of demand. Also, the very high employee turnover rates in Indian call centers suggest that workers can and do vote with their feet.
The scary issue, for the U.S., is that some of the new Chinese factories are NOT like the sweatshops of your average third world nation. The Chinese are building modern factories with modern productivity enhancements. These modern Chinese factories won't have to worry about rising wages because they will use productivity gains to create both cheap goods and a billion new home-grown consumers.
Summary: corporations owe to the state, state owes to the people, and so corporation owe to the people.
The logic needs to go a bit further bit further -- where do the people get their riches? Without employers (mostly corporations), the people would have no money. Without consumer goods makers and retailers (mostly corporations), the money paid by a job would have no value. So the people owe their riches to the corporations and we have come full circle.
The point is that economies are mutually dependent networks with no simple linear chain of who owes whom. I'm not saying the current balance of power is right, only that people are dependent on corporations and corporations are dependent on people.
Seeking profit does not necessitate a race to the bottom on wages. Henry Ford knew that if he could make his workforce more productive he would both create wealthier workers and create a product those workers could afford. Ford paid higher wages than other companies at the time and was rewarded with high productivity. Ford also designed systems to make those worker vary productive so that the amount of high-wage cost per car was low and the car was affordable to a great many people (including Ford's own workers).
If any company or country wants to compete on the world market its need to find a way to create more value than costs. Yes, cut-rate wages can avoid costs and some companies try to go that route, but it is a dead end. Smarter companies find a way to create greater value per unchanged unit of cost (Ford actual increased wages) and then use greater productivity, greater efficiency, and better products to create extraordinary value.
I heard Vint Cerf speak at an e-business conference (remember when those were popular?).
He talked extensively about how the layered architecture of the internet poses a serious challenge to business models. The fact that any application can communicate through any physical medium (of sufficient bandwidth) was great for interoperability, but hard on businesses that provide the physical layer.
The problem is that all of the value is in the application layer -- people want to run software, download movies, chat with friends, etc. Whether the data flows on copper, fiber, or RF is irrelevant to the end-user and the layered architecture ensures that this is irrelevant. In contrast, a lot of the cost is in that "irrelevant" physical layer -- the last mile is still very expensive (we can hope WiMax reduces this problem). This gulf between cost and value forces physical infrastructure providers into a position of being a commodity providers with severe cost competition. If the end-user doesn't care how their data is carried, then they tend to treat bandwidth as a commodity.
I think he was wearing his MCI hat at the time of this talk and was influenced by the beginnings of the dot-com crash. MCI's subsequent bankruptcy was not surprising. Understanding this issue explains why telecom companies don't want municipal wifi and insist that you only network your cellphone through their networks. The only way to make infrastructure pay is to bind the high-value software application layer to the high-cost hardware layer. But this strategy violates the entire layered model and enrages consumers.
MacOS prior to X was a non-preemptive, non-protected memory, emulated 68K stack and file system POS that Bill Gates would have been too embarased to release.
Agreed. And Apple's attempts to fix those problems (Copland) was stillborn.
Further if you think Linux sucks because [chose your reason] there is most likely already an OS project running to address your issue.
I don't think Linux sucks, but can envision it becoming bloated or ill-suited to some future computing environment. Each OS project to fix some perceived gap in Linux will add to the complexity and bloat of the OS. More stuff is added to the OS than is taken out.
In short MacOS needed a restart worse then windows 3.1, Linux does not.
This statement misses my point. The article concerns a potential trend toward bloat. Linux may not suck now, but will probably suck in the future as the space of applications, users, and hardware changes above and below the kernel. All I am saying is that no architecture is forever and that it is hard to incrementally evolve one architecture to another.
I suspect that all long-lasting, end-user OSes tend toward bloatware. Macintosh went through this with OS 7 through 9. Windows appears to be doing this as it progresses to Longhorn. It's just the natural evolution of software to accumulate cruft on the basis of yet another nifty feature that must be added into the bowels of the OS until the development effort becomes so constipated that the next version never appears or is so complication/unstable that people abandon it.
The trick, for Linux, will be to do what Apple did in moving to OS X -- create a new, "from-scratch" (yes, I know Apple borrowed a lot from others), OS with some form of compatibility-creating layer or old-kernal box. Incrementalism only takes an OS so far before revolution is needed to build a new, better system from the ground up.
Looking at the die layout, its easy to imagine that AMD (and Intel) will be produces a good many dual-core chips with one defective core (maybe 10-25% of production). I'd bet that somebody finds a market for those partially-functional chips. I also wonder what will happen when people discover that one core can be overclocked more than another core. For applications/loads that only use a single core, the system could disable the slow core and run the fast core at full speed.
We switched mail servers at our web host and that changed the IP addy of our mail. Two weeks later I looked at the mailboxes on the old server and find that they were still getting about a 10-20 spams per day.
As an aside, whitelisting our valid email accounts and filtering mail "received from" our own IP addy knocks out about 20-30% of our spam. It appears spammers try to sneek one past by spoofing the header to look like it came from inside. If so, spammers use DNS to get IP addys and then use the IP. I doubt they even think about TTL.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment
You make a good point -- perhaps you and I don't disagree as much as it might seem. Some author-control of layout is not a bad thing. A consistent site page design certainly aids navigation, comprehension, and usage. What I would like is more control of type size (new versions of HTML suffer from this too) because some designers choose excessively small or excessive large type. I'd also like more control of color because too many designers make bad decisions (e.g.,. yellow text on white backgroud, non-standard colors for HREFs, etc.).
most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
This is the heart of the problem with Flash today. The technology itself is not evil, but too many of its developers are just bad and they ruin it for the better developers that do do a good job with Flash. Perhaps if Flash had a certification program or some scheme for regulating who used it, it would be better. In architecture, you have to have license to practice and perhaps Flash needs that too.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
This is where you and I part company. I absolutely don't want a TV-like experience -- this is my biggest reason for Flash-hatred. I prefer interaction, manipulation, and navigation. I want a self-paced, not a author-paced experience. I want to be able to randomly access the parts of the site I'm interested in. I want to spend as much or a little time dwelling on any given part of the site as I choose. I want to be able to navigate back and forth over the content. I want to be able to copy-paste snippets of text (I use the web for research). Too many Flash site take that control away from me and I don't like it.
If the fraction of bad Flash dropped, I would gladly become a fanboy. But until Flash developers realize that some people don't want a passive, linear, author-controlled experience, there will be too much bad Flash and too much knee-jerk hatred of what could be an awesome technology for interactive sites.
Thanks for writing an insightful counterargument.
This looks like a scary, but inevitable, development. The internet is becoming too important to this country's economy. Perhaps the private sector can keep the Internet safe, but they need more vigilance and more tools to handle fast-evolving threats. The minute the government feels that the net has become a national security vulnerability, they will take steps to become the defender of that infrastructure.
.mil computers to DDoS offending servers of phisher, spammers, etc.
Perhaps the day will come when the government deploys
At a conference, Michael Dell spoke about this issue, indirectly. He argued that if Dell can satisfy most of the demand with a smaller number of parts, it will do that. I've heard other Dell managers speak and the magic number is usually 3 -- 3 graphics cards, 3 HD sizes, 3 speed levels, etc. Although Dell's factories are amazing in their ability to pump out customized PCs, each added part variant adds costs to the entire system.
Dell would rather lose a few percent of sales that drive the costs of the entire factory higher.
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
I hope you are right. In my mind, Flash represents the triumph of the content creator over the user of the internet. HTML, in its original incarnation as a markup language, gave power to the browser - the user of the browser controlled how tagged text was rendered, the user controlled the pacing of pages, etc. Lightweight HTML pages loaded quickly and let the user actively move in a self-paced fashion. WIth HTML, the user could actively control what they saw, how they saw it, and when they saw it.
Flash takes to much of that control away -- the content creator forces their vision of layout, type size, and pacing on the hapless, passive viewer. I have seen so many flash sites that turn a broadband connection into a 110 baud experience of slowly appearing words (get a clue, I don't want to see letters swirling on a page, fading in and out, etc.). Flash prevents browsing. You cannot glance at a flash site, you cannot control what you see or when you see it. You are forced to wait for it to download and wait for it to play. Although I admit that a few, too few, flash sites add substantive value with interactivity, it is far to little to compensate for the incredibly frustrating body of flash on the web today.
We can only hope that Abode screws this one up so that the browser of the internet can enjoy more control and escape user-interface micromanagement by flash content creators.