Too small. Read the books, liked them, interesting ideas, but the end result is practically "sherline sized".
I'm thinking of the class of lathes big enough to do something like gunsmithing rifle barrel work.. maybe two inches thru the headstock. The size where its a little too bit to bolt to a bench and call it a bench lathe, but its a little small and light to do the cabinet route.
The gimmick mostly being the teacher doesn't want to spend all her time figuring out which encyclopedia you're plagiarizing or if the level of it rises to the height of nasty comment or academic misconduct or... Its mostly about making her job easier... make the kids scared of the encyclopedia and its easier on you. The side effect is some stockholm syndrome types in the later years, but most of the kids are never going to think again if they can at all avoid it, so it doesn't matter ?
Because wikipedia access is free, incredibly convenient, trivial UI, and usually pretty high quality.
To access a "scholarly journal" costs thousands for an annual account, or dozens for the "right" to read one article. A byzantine pain in the ass.
If http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_function does what you need it to do, and you're trying to spread information to others instead of exert superiority over them, then wiki is the logical choice.
"Twas not that brevitous. Their print sales peaked in 1990. Net mass adoption began ~'95. Wikipedia was nowhere to be had hitherto.
Before wiki we had "multimedia CDROMs". Stereotypically people buying their first cdrom drive always bought two cd apps, either in a sales bundle or separately. They always, always bought "Myst" which was a graphical adventure that could only be distributed on cd (too many pics for floppy) and they always bought an encyclopedia (usually abridged) cdrom which always had the bare minimum of cheesy multimedia features in addition to bare text articles.
Before we were all supposed to be "web page designers" around the turn of the century, we were all supposed to be "multimedia designers" around 1990. My local college had just gotten around to scrapping the multimedia curriculum and replacing it with the web designer curriculum... right around the dotcom implosion. And those upper level pathways were the only night school options they provided, although they had "real' CS degree paths on the books they were not offered at night and weekends. That was my signal to leave and switch to a school offering real classes.
For the noobs, or at least those under 30 or so, Osborne had one of the coolest transportable computers around, announced they were developing a better one, tanked their current sales wiping out the company.
They understood the EE components model where everyone understands the continuous treadmill, but didn't understand that applying that to a computer is not a good idea.
A 32 volume printed set and "up to date" are mutually exclusive.
How much can a one page summary of the life of Martin Luther King (the original, not Jr) change in a couple centuries?
Would not advise for current research in exoplanets or current stage of computational technology, but, the other 99% of the encyclopedia hasn't changed since I was a kid.
I went to wikipedia.org, and clicked "random article" 1) Some non-noteworthy late 1900's physicist, one paragraph. 2) Thomas Good (aka Thomas Goode,[1] 1609 – 9 April 1678) 3) Tony Franklin disambiguation page - None of them seem noteworthy enough to read. 4) George Turner (February 25, 1850 – January 26, 1932). - A nice list of boring facts. Most interesting thing he ever did was serve on a commission regarding "disputes regarding the use of boundary waters between the United States and Canada from 1911 to 1914." 5) "All Nite (Don't Stop)" is a song by American recording artist Janet Jackson - What kind of tripe is this? 6) Lernadzor... is a village and rural community (municipality) in the Syunik Province of Armenia. - Apparently the only noteworthy fact is they have a U mine. 7) Tracy Donald Jones (born March 31, 1961 in Hawthorne, California) - baseball player. Who cares. 8) Pa Bong is a tambon (subdistrict) of Saraphi District, in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. - The only noteworthy fact is it had a population of 3506 seven years ago. 9) Nathalie Lefebvre (born T'Sobbel on 20 January 1977), known under the name of Melody, was a Belgian singer. - note that "was" means she's fallen off the face of the earth, not that she's dead. 10) Marietta Martin (1902–1944). - She was once editor of a magazine I've never heard of.
So lets analyze my 10 random wiki pages. 8 were completely non-generally-noteworthy mostly recent biographies. I think it fair to change the name from wikipedia to wikibiography. 1 page was an obscure and pretty much irrelevant location. 1 page was a pop song.
The conclusion is that wiki, being at least 80% biographies of recent not-generally-relevant people, changes constantly and a printed out version would be fairly useless. Printed encyclopedias only had summary biographies for "noteworthy people of general interest" most of whom died more than a century ago. Most of printed encyclopedias were things that are actually searched for on wiki, like "electrodynamics" or "calculus" etc.
Note that there is no reason to go on a deletionist frenzy on wiki. It costs nothing to hold the page for Marietta Martin and if I were researching her, I'd be Pissed Off if her page were deleted. But the data stored in wiki and in an encyclopedia are inherently dramatically different, so properly laughing at the idea of printing out wiki means absolutely nothing WRT improperly laughing at the idea of printing out an encyclopedia.
When I was but a young lad I had a World Book set that I couldn't keep my nose out of.
I also read the World Book A-Z in roughly the same timeframe and era. As I recall they were a multi-level marketing operation, but you actually got something useful out of them, weren't they?
Remember the feeling when you're reading the "C" volume and you run across something interesting beginning with a "M" and you're thinking "I hope I remember that when I finally get there..." ?
Maybe for a barbie doll house. Have you seen a machinists handbook (speaking generically, not that specific title) Most are small enough to fit in a small corner of a toolbox... for obvious reasons. The whole firefox series (there's more than one book) takes up only a couple inches at my public library. It needs editing... lots of "ghost stories" and instructions for canning food that modern knowledge shows would just get you botulism now.
Combined that whole stack is about the size of one of those old fashioned very large metropolitan phone books. I just had a "phone book" delivered last week that must have been 4 inches thick, and dropped it right in the recycle bin unopened, as I've done for more than a decade. Why anyone pays for advertising in there, in 2012, mystifies me.
If you really want to rebuild society get a full set of us army (or other service) field and technical manuals focusing on non-military purposes. You don't need a FM for battalion level artillery ops or SINCGARS radio programming, or at least you hope not. You do need the awesome basic carpentry manual, the awesome basic welding manual, all written for the average grunt to figure out. The navy has a legendary series of basic electronics textbooks.
Simplest approximation is its a cop out, The long form is "I donno either, but I'm pompous and you're too lowly for me to admit it to you, you peasant"...
The medium answer is the company is dying and they'll never say no to a customer, because a couple months of revenues is more important than losing it all in a court case in a couple years, because the company will be bankrupt or cease operations long before the court case, and close down even sooner if they don't close that sale. Been there, lived thru it.
The other medium term answer is the company is dying, but if they can convince a greater fool to buy the brand new gourmet decorated cupcake division, then the profits of that sale will keep the beer brewing and security consulting conglomerate in business a little longer, aside from bumping up the CEO's resume as a great entrepreneur and dealmaker, etc... Been there, lived thru it.
The longest answer is there are some businesses where the accounting sheets are kinda important and you simply cannot compete without making your balance sheet look like your competitors.
Buncha computer guys sitting in cubes doing things with computers, thats similar enough that its sorta OK. But when you start trying to run a combination aluminum smelter / heavy road construction / investment bank / wedding cake decoration company that you start running into problems trying to be capital intensive.. no wait, we're trying to maximize cash flow.. err, I mean minimize salary expense... or no we need to be leaders in outsourcing, err we need to be the leading outsourcing provider... no wait.... Thats an excellent way to get run over by competitors specializing in each individual field.
Those tankless heaters are a poor ROI for people in the US.
Disagree strongly. 1) Last time I was in the market, you could not buy a tankless with a guarantee less than 15 years, and you could not buy a tank with a guarantee over 7 years. You cannot compare the capital cost of one tank vs one tankless because you need to buy two tanks to get the lifetime of one tankless. Also water damage from the inevitable leakage means you'll pay twice as much for tank water damage (on my concrete floor, thats $0, but some people destroy hundreds of dollars of Pergo everytime they have a flood...) 2) Price delta at the time of install for me 7 or so years ago was remarkably only about $300. Instantly my summertime natgas consumption dropped $20. To a crude first approximation the payback time was 15 months. 3) Natgas price only goes up. Median income only goes down, making it even more sensitive. It seems utterly inevitable that I'll end up even further ahead than I already am.
Poor ROI or not, I don't care. Its a cheap luxury item not a for-profit investment. My hot shower water never, ever, runs cold. I simply have a slightly better home life than if I had a tank. Its rather like asking for the ROI on a new ipod, or the ROI on buying a new frying pan. Its nice that I save money, but if I didn't I'd still buy it anyway because its an easily affordable luxury for me.
Whoops almost forgot the other unique thing about the USA mobile market is unlike almost everywhere else, the devices and service are tied. Its Extremely Unusual to not get a device from your provider.
Strongly advise against. Need maps, restaurant and tourist trap recommendations... If poster is not 100% fluent in English you need inet access. It just makes the trip easier and more fun.
Attention visitors.... Note that 99% of the advertising and marketing budget in the USA is oriented around "free device with minimum two year service contract" business model. Most of the civilian population does not know any other cellphone business model exists... Unless you're planning on your trip taking 2 years, you're best off with a prepay provider.
There are providers that are non-contract aka month-to-month who will helpfully automatically bill your CC every month until you find a way to stop them. I don't think you want the headache of making them "go away" after you return home. The prepay has a much lower risk, once the balance is depleted, they can't go after you if they have no idea who you are and/or no idea how to bill you.
Assume you're dealing with crooks and dishonest wheeler dealers. In the telco biz, often you are.
Also be careful with the power cords in the US. If you try hard enough you can probably curl your fingers underneath a charger and touch energized AC wall outlet contacts. Also our power plugs are not as heavy as the giant hockey puck UK ones (possibly AC power connectors are the only thing you'll find lighter weight in the states) but that doesn't mean you can swing them around in the air like a flail spiked ball and chain without hurting yourself. And for a good laugh ask to see your hosts "hot water heater tank" I am told we're the only country in the world that doesn't use tankless, its a trip, they're these giant closet sized steel tubes.
Essentially that's the point of the article, are they a search engine, an ad delivery service, a music retailer, or a venture capital firm? Their internal operations would very theoretically be more efficient if they could decide what kind of business to focus on.
Yes, because being off by 2 seconds every billion years is something to worry about. I am sick of having to adjust my watch for the inaccuracy of atomic clocks.
a OC-192 fiber line transmits 10 gigs/sec, roughly.
If you stuck one of those "2 secs/gigayear" clocks on each end, instead of regenerating the clock off the line, I think the circuit would lose line sync and drop every:
365*24*60*60/10/2 / 6/60/60/24 = every 18.2 days. Bummer.
Lets check. 10 gigabits/sec at 18.2 days is 18.2*24*60*60*10*1e9 is 1.57e16 bits. 2 secs/gigayear is an error rate of 1e9*365*24*60*60/2 is 1.57e16 bits per clock framing failure. Seems likely.
That is why now a days you get your clock off the line instead of internal clocking at each site. In ye olden T-1 era, a clock that good at each CO would mean you'd probably never experience a clock slip between COs in the lifetime of the equipment... Even in ye olden days we internal timed quite a bit (and some of our DEXCS only could do internal, so we had to)
If the accuracy is defined as fractions of a second over billion years - how do they know its going to last a billion years
Run the reciprocal and test your frequency. You know that saying about how in europe they think hundreds of miles (err KM) is far away and hundreds of years is recent, but in the US they think hundreds of miles is a daily commute and hundreds of years is ancient? Well billions of seconds is a long time, but billions of cycles per second is actually medium to low frequency in the RF world now a days, depending I guess on industry (that would still be considered kind of fast in the PLC/VFD field, but truly ancient great-grandfatherly stuff in the radar world)
So you've got three atomic clocks (now a days a ebay special Rb clock is about $100 surplus) and use that to drive three sets of ham radio microwave experimenters gear at 10 GHz (which is not cutting edge anymore). Hmm. 10 billion hz. suddenly fractional parts per billion becomes fractional hz which a piano tuner has no real problem detecting.
This isn't exactly how it works, but as a thought experiment you hook up your 10gig ethernet and drive it with this clock and hack the driver for variable length packets... If you think you have better than 0.1 ppb clock, then you should be able to transmit a billion bit packet and not fall out of frame sync (which at 10 gigs only takes a tenth of a second). This is not exactly the modulation method used by real 10gigE and not exactly how you test it, but it within the realm of the general idea.
Good luck doing modern ham radio stuff like bouncing microwave signals off the moon using the more exotic low SNR digital modes without at least PPB level frequency accuracy. Freq stability is a factor at 10 GHz until at least 10e-9 for that kind of work... luckily 10e-11 is cheap and off the (ebay) shelf for $200 or so GPSDO or old Rb oscillators.
I could be wrong but isn't the definition of one second based on some atomic phenomenon? (All the sloshing water and wind makes the revolution of the planet a non-starter...)
How can a new method be more accurate than the method we use to define time?
jitter phenomena. Aka phase noise. You'd like to think something like a Rb clock watches exactly one atom and counts that single atom, but its a lot more analog than that.
Man you has one clock knows what time it is, as you say. Man who has two clocks has no freaking idea what time it is. Man who has at least three clocks and lets ntpd or equivalent do its thing for a couple days/weeks has excellent idea what time it is and how accurate each clock is relative to "the group".
So for high frequencies in the millimeter wave range you are stuck using small waveguides?
Yeah small wavelength means small waveguides, unless you do something weird like multimode, or don't use waveguide, or do strange things.
I would guess that 140 PSI air would not detune a waveguide frequency "too much" although it would have some effect, but the main result is it would take about 10 times the voltage to arc over.
I wonder how they deal with that limitation when megawatt class gyrotrons at say 170 Ghz are used in particle accelerator applications.
I am unable to get a straight answer on this. Pulsed operation means you're all done before the arc fully ionizes? They seem to be vaporware since there's nothing online.
No microwave RF "devices in general" are very efficient. Megawatts in of DC current with kilowatts out of RF? OK. Multiple megawatts in an A megawatt out with multiple megawatts of heat, well thats going to vaporize anything "170 GHZ sized" rather quickly.
Could be the usual output of combiners "marketing". I know a guy with a "60 watt" 1296 MHz amp using hybrid amplifier modules. No such thing exists (at that time) as a 60 watt hybrid module in that frequency range. He did have two off the shelf 30 watt modules with a reasonably efficient combiner network, all packaged up in the same box...
WR8 and WR10 are standard waveguide sizes not transistors. I guess you'd say its sort of the microwave RF equivalent of singlemode optical fiber.
Like down around 10 GHz you use standard size WR90, etc.
The waveguide wouldn't arc over if you increase the dimensions... however that increases the wavelength the waveguide operates at such that it would no longer be 100 GHz waveguide it would be 50 GHz waveguide or whatever.
Waveguide is singlemode, obviously (?) over a bit less than a 2:1 wavelength range.
You can theoretically run multimode, after all waveguide is high pass (hold a piece up in the air and look thru it...), but thats... considered kinda crazy. Crazy enough to work, maybe, if you spent enough money modeling it. Have to think about that. I bet someone is making a fat stack of cash off this crazy thing.
So if humans are not eating the cows how will their numbers decrease? Are we just going to kill them all? Planned extinction of species that product too much CO2?
Presumably the mad scientist won't get rid of northern european ability to drink cow milk (other branches have varying levels of lactose intolerance). So we could keep the female cows around for milk and cheese. What to do with the male ones? Oh I know, grind them up and feed them to the living cows. Oh wait, thats how we ended up with mad cow disease. Whoops.
One thing I don't get is growing cows on land suited for cows and not much else is perfectly Ok. Factory farming of cows, not so Ok. So we'll hit the mosquito with a Hbomb and eliminate all dairy farming. Dumb!!
Let's say we all turn into hobbit-sized vegetarians and reduce our footprint. It doesn't fricking matter. Unless we do something about our fertility, our population will still keep growing and we will still eat the rainforests, it will just take a little longer for us to do it. And that's the thing: there really is only one variable that actually matters in the long run. With the right-sized population, we can all be 12-foot-tall gorillas that only eat the prime part of the cow and discard the rest.
The other thing you missed is that once we're overpopulated hobbit sized vegetarians, its possible we won't be big and strong enough to take step 3, whatever it turns out to be.
Same argument with global warming... OK so we delayed the inevitable by X years. After X years the inevitable arrives, and we can't deal with it because we're a depopulated paleolithic 3rd world culture instead of an industrial culture. Why do something that dumb?
His insights in nutritional science are likely to be as correct and relevant as/.s insights into modern interpretive dance. This was a LOL article.
Old world thinkers have just barely moved beyond the "vital force" principle in organic chem... still hung up on the differences between humans and animals being some mysterious vital force. Sorry, there's just not that much difference.
His theory seems to be he can create a bovine protein allergy. He might succeed at creating a bioengineered lupus-like autoimmune disease.
He might manage to make us allergic to hemoglobin (what could go wrong), or maybe unable to digest some essential amino acid that is in meat and also some plants... kwashiorkor here we come!
Another fun one would be cross species contamination into carnivorous species... Bye bye lions and tigers and housecats and wolves and dogs and...
You know what would be fun? Catholic mass is into the transubstantiation thing where the wafer turns into the body of christ. Unable to digest meat means unable to digest the host. Therefore catholics can't take the pill. The meat allergy pill, I mean, not the birth control pill. Although the jokes are already firing up about "eating meat". Except on Fridays during lent when you're not supposed to eat meat. Except for fish, which is a plant. This will be fun to watch.
Seriously though, it might be an interesting bioweapon. Imagine something that spreads like AIDS so religious types can blame the victim for their sex life, but it gives them fatal kwashiorkor.
Another fun one would be to build the industrial facilities to generate and package enormous quantities of some obscure non-essential amino acid, then release a plague that converts human digestive systems into having that formerly non-essential amino acid now be an essential amino acid. Then sell the food supplements to keep them alive... at a high profit of course. This is a subcategory of the old game of give new 3rd world mothers enough baby formula to supply the baby until they stop making milk, then say ha ha and charge whatever you can get out of them lest they watch their babies starve. Ha ha, its a great day to be an American isn't it....
Slashdot needs a copy of the wiki alertbox: "This article appears to be written like an advertisement".
"Light is generated instantly when power is applied." So how are they doing the thermionic emission of electrons... cold cathode which I thought had serious amps/meter limits, or ?
Slashdot Mirror
Too small. Read the books, liked them, interesting ideas, but the end result is practically "sherline sized".
I'm thinking of the class of lathes big enough to do something like gunsmithing rifle barrel work.. maybe two inches thru the headstock. The size where its a little too bit to bolt to a bench and call it a bench lathe, but its a little small and light to do the cabinet route.
gimmick to fulfill an educational goal.
The gimmick mostly being the teacher doesn't want to spend all her time figuring out which encyclopedia you're plagiarizing or if the level of it rises to the height of nasty comment or academic misconduct or ... Its mostly about making her job easier... make the kids scared of the encyclopedia and its easier on you. The side effect is some stockholm syndrome types in the later years, but most of the kids are never going to think again if they can at all avoid it, so it doesn't matter ?
Because wikipedia access is free, incredibly convenient, trivial UI, and usually pretty high quality.
To access a "scholarly journal" costs thousands for an annual account, or dozens for the "right" to read one article. A byzantine pain in the ass.
If
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_function
does what you need it to do, and you're trying to spread information to others instead of exert superiority over them, then wiki is the logical choice.
"Twas not that brevitous. Their print sales peaked in 1990. Net mass adoption began ~'95. Wikipedia was nowhere to be had hitherto.
Before wiki we had "multimedia CDROMs". Stereotypically people buying their first cdrom drive always bought two cd apps, either in a sales bundle or separately. They always, always bought "Myst" which was a graphical adventure that could only be distributed on cd (too many pics for floppy) and they always bought an encyclopedia (usually abridged) cdrom which always had the bare minimum of cheesy multimedia features in addition to bare text articles.
Before we were all supposed to be "web page designers" around the turn of the century, we were all supposed to be "multimedia designers" around 1990. My local college had just gotten around to scrapping the multimedia curriculum and replacing it with the web designer curriculum... right around the dotcom implosion. And those upper level pathways were the only night school options they provided, although they had "real' CS degree paths on the books they were not offered at night and weekends. That was my signal to leave and switch to a school offering real classes.
Osborne.
For the noobs, or at least those under 30 or so, Osborne had one of the coolest transportable computers around, announced they were developing a better one, tanked their current sales wiping out the company.
They understood the EE components model where everyone understands the continuous treadmill, but didn't understand that applying that to a computer is not a good idea.
A better URL would have been
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Encyclopedias+and+dictionaries%22
Search Results
Results: 1 through 50 of 2,409 (0.006 secs)
You searched for: subject:"Encyclopedias and dictionaries"
I have not researched it in detail, but it seems that Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition is available in full.
A 32 volume printed set and "up to date" are mutually exclusive.
How much can a one page summary of the life of Martin Luther King (the original, not Jr) change in a couple centuries?
Would not advise for current research in exoplanets or current stage of computational technology, but, the other 99% of the encyclopedia hasn't changed since I was a kid.
I went to wikipedia.org, and clicked "random article" ... is a village and rural community (municipality) in the Syunik Province of Armenia. - Apparently the only noteworthy fact is they have a U mine.
1) Some non-noteworthy late 1900's physicist, one paragraph.
2) Thomas Good (aka Thomas Goode,[1] 1609 – 9 April 1678)
3) Tony Franklin disambiguation page - None of them seem noteworthy enough to read.
4) George Turner (February 25, 1850 – January 26, 1932). - A nice list of boring facts. Most interesting thing he ever did was serve on a commission regarding "disputes regarding the use of boundary waters between the United States and Canada from 1911 to 1914."
5) "All Nite (Don't Stop)" is a song by American recording artist Janet Jackson - What kind of tripe is this?
6) Lernadzor
7) Tracy Donald Jones (born March 31, 1961 in Hawthorne, California) - baseball player. Who cares.
8) Pa Bong is a tambon (subdistrict) of Saraphi District, in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. - The only noteworthy fact is it had a population of 3506 seven years ago.
9) Nathalie Lefebvre (born T'Sobbel on 20 January 1977), known under the name of Melody, was a Belgian singer. - note that "was" means she's fallen off the face of the earth, not that she's dead.
10) Marietta Martin (1902–1944). - She was once editor of a magazine I've never heard of.
So lets analyze my 10 random wiki pages. 8 were completely non-generally-noteworthy mostly recent biographies. I think it fair to change the name from wikipedia to wikibiography. 1 page was an obscure and pretty much irrelevant location. 1 page was a pop song.
The conclusion is that wiki, being at least 80% biographies of recent not-generally-relevant people, changes constantly and a printed out version would be fairly useless. Printed encyclopedias only had summary biographies for "noteworthy people of general interest" most of whom died more than a century ago. Most of printed encyclopedias were things that are actually searched for on wiki, like "electrodynamics" or "calculus" etc.
Note that there is no reason to go on a deletionist frenzy on wiki. It costs nothing to hold the page for Marietta Martin and if I were researching her, I'd be Pissed Off if her page were deleted. But the data stored in wiki and in an encyclopedia are inherently dramatically different, so properly laughing at the idea of printing out wiki means absolutely nothing WRT improperly laughing at the idea of printing out an encyclopedia.
When I was but a young lad I had a World Book set that I couldn't keep my nose out of.
I also read the World Book A-Z in roughly the same timeframe and era. As I recall they were a multi-level marketing operation, but you actually got something useful out of them, weren't they?
Remember the feeling when you're reading the "C" volume and you run across something interesting beginning with a "M" and you're thinking "I hope I remember that when I finally get there..." ?
Maybe for a barbie doll house. Have you seen a machinists handbook (speaking generically, not that specific title) Most are small enough to fit in a small corner of a toolbox... for obvious reasons. The whole firefox series (there's more than one book) takes up only a couple inches at my public library. It needs editing... lots of "ghost stories" and instructions for canning food that modern knowledge shows would just get you botulism now.
Combined that whole stack is about the size of one of those old fashioned very large metropolitan phone books. I just had a "phone book" delivered last week that must have been 4 inches thick, and dropped it right in the recycle bin unopened, as I've done for more than a decade. Why anyone pays for advertising in there, in 2012, mystifies me.
If you really want to rebuild society get a full set of us army (or other service) field and technical manuals focusing on non-military purposes. You don't need a FM for battalion level artillery ops or SINCGARS radio programming, or at least you hope not. You do need the awesome basic carpentry manual, the awesome basic welding manual, all written for the average grunt to figure out. The navy has a legendary series of basic electronics textbooks.
What's wrong with that answer, really?
Simplest approximation is its a cop out, The long form is "I donno either, but I'm pompous and you're too lowly for me to admit it to you, you peasant"...
The medium answer is the company is dying and they'll never say no to a customer, because a couple months of revenues is more important than losing it all in a court case in a couple years, because the company will be bankrupt or cease operations long before the court case, and close down even sooner if they don't close that sale. Been there, lived thru it.
The other medium term answer is the company is dying, but if they can convince a greater fool to buy the brand new gourmet decorated cupcake division, then the profits of that sale will keep the beer brewing and security consulting conglomerate in business a little longer, aside from bumping up the CEO's resume as a great entrepreneur and dealmaker, etc... Been there, lived thru it.
The longest answer is there are some businesses where the accounting sheets are kinda important and you simply cannot compete without making your balance sheet look like your competitors.
Buncha computer guys sitting in cubes doing things with computers, thats similar enough that its sorta OK. .. no wait, we're trying to maximize cash flow .. err, I mean minimize salary expense... or no we need to be leaders in outsourcing, err we need to be the leading outsourcing provider... no wait.... Thats an excellent way to get run over by competitors specializing in each individual field.
But when you start trying to run a combination aluminum smelter / heavy road construction / investment bank / wedding cake decoration company that you start running into problems trying to be capital intensive
Those tankless heaters are a poor ROI for people in the US.
Disagree strongly.
1) Last time I was in the market, you could not buy a tankless with a guarantee less than 15 years, and you could not buy a tank with a guarantee over 7 years. You cannot compare the capital cost of one tank vs one tankless because you need to buy two tanks to get the lifetime of one tankless. Also water damage from the inevitable leakage means you'll pay twice as much for tank water damage (on my concrete floor, thats $0, but some people destroy hundreds of dollars of Pergo everytime they have a flood...)
2) Price delta at the time of install for me 7 or so years ago was remarkably only about $300. Instantly my summertime natgas consumption dropped $20. To a crude first approximation the payback time was 15 months.
3) Natgas price only goes up. Median income only goes down, making it even more sensitive. It seems utterly inevitable that I'll end up even further ahead than I already am.
Poor ROI or not, I don't care. Its a cheap luxury item not a for-profit investment. My hot shower water never, ever, runs cold. I simply have a slightly better home life than if I had a tank. Its rather like asking for the ROI on a new ipod, or the ROI on buying a new frying pan. Its nice that I save money, but if I didn't I'd still buy it anyway because its an easily affordable luxury for me.
Whoops almost forgot the other unique thing about the USA mobile market is unlike almost everywhere else, the devices and service are tied. Its Extremely Unusual to not get a device from your provider.
Strongly advise against. Need maps, restaurant and tourist trap recommendations... If poster is not 100% fluent in English you need inet access.
It just makes the trip easier and more fun.
Attention visitors.... Note that 99% of the advertising and marketing budget in the USA is oriented around "free device with minimum two year service contract" business model. Most of the civilian population does not know any other cellphone business model exists... Unless you're planning on your trip taking 2 years, you're best off with a prepay provider.
There are providers that are non-contract aka month-to-month who will helpfully automatically bill your CC every month until you find a way to stop them. I don't think you want the headache of making them "go away" after you return home. The prepay has a much lower risk, once the balance is depleted, they can't go after you if they have no idea who you are and/or no idea how to bill you.
Assume you're dealing with crooks and dishonest wheeler dealers. In the telco biz, often you are.
Also be careful with the power cords in the US. If you try hard enough you can probably curl your fingers underneath a charger and touch energized AC wall outlet contacts. Also our power plugs are not as heavy as the giant hockey puck UK ones (possibly AC power connectors are the only thing you'll find lighter weight in the states) but that doesn't mean you can swing them around in the air like a flail spiked ball and chain without hurting yourself. And for a good laugh ask to see your hosts "hot water heater tank" I am told we're the only country in the world that doesn't use tankless, its a trip, they're these giant closet sized steel tubes.
Essentially that's the point of the article, are they a search engine, an ad delivery service, a music retailer, or a venture capital firm? Their internal operations would very theoretically be more efficient if they could decide what kind of business to focus on.
Yes, because being off by 2 seconds every billion years is something to worry about. I am sick of having to adjust my watch for the inaccuracy of atomic clocks.
a OC-192 fiber line transmits 10 gigs/sec, roughly.
If you stuck one of those "2 secs/gigayear" clocks on each end, instead of regenerating the clock off the line, I think the circuit would lose line sync and drop every:
365*24*60*60 /10 /2 / 6/60/60/24 = every 18.2 days. Bummer.
Lets check. 10 gigabits/sec at 18.2 days is 18.2*24*60*60*10*1e9 is 1.57e16 bits. 2 secs/gigayear is an error rate of 1e9*365*24*60*60/2 is 1.57e16 bits per clock framing failure. Seems likely.
That is why now a days you get your clock off the line instead of internal clocking at each site. In ye olden T-1 era, a clock that good at each CO would mean you'd probably never experience a clock slip between COs in the lifetime of the equipment... Even in ye olden days we internal timed quite a bit (and some of our DEXCS only could do internal, so we had to)
If the accuracy is defined as fractions of a second over billion years - how do they know its going to last a billion years
Run the reciprocal and test your frequency. You know that saying about how in europe they think hundreds of miles (err KM) is far away and hundreds of years is recent, but in the US they think hundreds of miles is a daily commute and hundreds of years is ancient? Well billions of seconds is a long time, but billions of cycles per second is actually medium to low frequency in the RF world now a days, depending I guess on industry (that would still be considered kind of fast in the PLC/VFD field, but truly ancient great-grandfatherly stuff in the radar world)
So you've got three atomic clocks (now a days a ebay special Rb clock is about $100 surplus) and use that to drive three sets of ham radio microwave experimenters gear at 10 GHz (which is not cutting edge anymore). Hmm. 10 billion hz. suddenly fractional parts per billion becomes fractional hz which a piano tuner has no real problem detecting.
This isn't exactly how it works, but as a thought experiment you hook up your 10gig ethernet and drive it with this clock and hack the driver for variable length packets... If you think you have better than 0.1 ppb clock, then you should be able to transmit a billion bit packet and not fall out of frame sync (which at 10 gigs only takes a tenth of a second). This is not exactly the modulation method used by real 10gigE and not exactly how you test it, but it within the realm of the general idea.
Good luck doing modern ham radio stuff like bouncing microwave signals off the moon using the more exotic low SNR digital modes without at least PPB level frequency accuracy. Freq stability is a factor at 10 GHz until at least 10e-9 for that kind of work... luckily 10e-11 is cheap and off the (ebay) shelf for $200 or so GPSDO or old Rb oscillators.
I could be wrong but isn't the definition of one second based on some atomic phenomenon? (All the sloshing water and wind makes the revolution of the planet a non-starter...)
How can a new method be more accurate than the method we use to define time?
jitter phenomena. Aka phase noise. You'd like to think something like a Rb clock watches exactly one atom and counts that single atom, but its a lot more analog than that.
Man you has one clock knows what time it is, as you say. Man who has two clocks has no freaking idea what time it is. Man who has at least three clocks and lets ntpd or equivalent do its thing for a couple days/weeks has excellent idea what time it is and how accurate each clock is relative to "the group".
So for high frequencies in the millimeter wave range you are stuck using small waveguides?
Yeah small wavelength means small waveguides, unless you do something weird like multimode, or don't use waveguide, or do strange things.
I would guess that 140 PSI air would not detune a waveguide frequency "too much" although it would have some effect, but the main result is it would take about 10 times the voltage to arc over.
I wonder how they deal with that limitation when megawatt class gyrotrons at say 170 Ghz are used in particle accelerator applications.
I am unable to get a straight answer on this. Pulsed operation means you're all done before the arc fully ionizes? They seem to be vaporware since there's nothing online.
No microwave RF "devices in general" are very efficient. Megawatts in of DC current with kilowatts out of RF? OK. Multiple megawatts in an A megawatt out with multiple megawatts of heat, well thats going to vaporize anything "170 GHZ sized" rather quickly.
Could be the usual output of combiners "marketing". I know a guy with a "60 watt" 1296 MHz amp using hybrid amplifier modules. No such thing exists (at that time) as a 60 watt hybrid module in that frequency range. He did have two off the shelf 30 watt modules with a reasonably efficient combiner network, all packaged up in the same box...
WR8 and WR10 are standard waveguide sizes not transistors. I guess you'd say its sort of the microwave RF equivalent of singlemode optical fiber.
Like down around 10 GHz you use standard size WR90, etc.
The waveguide wouldn't arc over if you increase the dimensions... however that increases the wavelength the waveguide operates at such that it would no longer be 100 GHz waveguide it would be 50 GHz waveguide or whatever.
Waveguide is singlemode, obviously (?) over a bit less than a 2:1 wavelength range.
You can theoretically run multimode, after all waveguide is high pass (hold a piece up in the air and look thru it...), but thats... considered kinda crazy. Crazy enough to work, maybe, if you spent enough money modeling it. Have to think about that. I bet someone is making a fat stack of cash off this crazy thing.
So if humans are not eating the cows how will their numbers decrease? Are we just going to kill them all? Planned extinction of species that product too much CO2?
Presumably the mad scientist won't get rid of northern european ability to drink cow milk (other branches have varying levels of lactose intolerance). So we could keep the female cows around for milk and cheese. What to do with the male ones? Oh I know, grind them up and feed them to the living cows. Oh wait, thats how we ended up with mad cow disease. Whoops.
One thing I don't get is growing cows on land suited for cows and not much else is perfectly Ok. Factory farming of cows, not so Ok. So we'll hit the mosquito with a Hbomb and eliminate all dairy farming. Dumb!!
Let's say we all turn into hobbit-sized vegetarians and reduce our footprint. It doesn't fricking matter. Unless we do something about our fertility, our population will still keep growing and we will still eat the rainforests, it will just take a little longer for us to do it. And that's the thing: there really is only one variable that actually matters in the long run. With the right-sized population, we can all be 12-foot-tall gorillas that only eat the prime part of the cow and discard the rest.
The other thing you missed is that once we're overpopulated hobbit sized vegetarians, its possible we won't be big and strong enough to take step 3, whatever it turns out to be.
Same argument with global warming... OK so we delayed the inevitable by X years. After X years the inevitable arrives, and we can't deal with it because we're a depopulated paleolithic 3rd world culture instead of an industrial culture. Why do something that dumb?
You may find that you are actually adapted to the diet of what ever place your great-grandparents came from.
Try giving cow milk to a non-northern european. Not a nice thing to do to them.
professor of philosophy and bioethics
His insights in nutritional science are likely to be as correct and relevant as /.s insights into modern interpretive dance. This was a LOL article.
Old world thinkers have just barely moved beyond the "vital force" principle in organic chem... still hung up on the differences between humans and animals being some mysterious vital force. Sorry, there's just not that much difference.
His theory seems to be he can create a bovine protein allergy. He might succeed at creating a bioengineered lupus-like autoimmune disease.
He might manage to make us allergic to hemoglobin (what could go wrong), or maybe unable to digest some essential amino acid that is in meat and also some plants... kwashiorkor here we come!
Another fun one would be cross species contamination into carnivorous species... Bye bye lions and tigers and housecats and wolves and dogs and...
You know what would be fun? Catholic mass is into the transubstantiation thing where the wafer turns into the body of christ. Unable to digest meat means unable to digest the host. Therefore catholics can't take the pill. The meat allergy pill, I mean, not the birth control pill. Although the jokes are already firing up about "eating meat". Except on Fridays during lent when you're not supposed to eat meat. Except for fish, which is a plant. This will be fun to watch.
Seriously though, it might be an interesting bioweapon. Imagine something that spreads like AIDS so religious types can blame the victim for their sex life, but it gives them fatal kwashiorkor.
Another fun one would be to build the industrial facilities to generate and package enormous quantities of some obscure non-essential amino acid, then release a plague that converts human digestive systems into having that formerly non-essential amino acid now be an essential amino acid. Then sell the food supplements to keep them alive... at a high profit of course. This is a subcategory of the old game of give new 3rd world mothers enough baby formula to supply the baby until they stop making milk, then say ha ha and charge whatever you can get out of them lest they watch their babies starve. Ha ha, its a great day to be an American isn't it....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_stimulated_luminescence
Slashdot needs a copy of the wiki alertbox: "This article appears to be written like an advertisement".
"Light is generated instantly when power is applied." So how are they doing the thermionic emission of electrons... cold cathode which I thought had serious amps/meter limits, or ?