MN looks polished. You sure its a iGOOG replacement? Looks more like a reader.google.com replacement. I skimmed the website and its basically "feedonfeeds" from 199x or reader.google.com from 200x with a optional map display, written in drupal. Is there more to it that I missed in my skimming? If not, as a test you could set reader.goog as your home page, and if you catch yourself saying "a map would make this better" then do the MN thing.
Heck, I mainly check/. based on the iGoogle widget
Ditto, you'll be seeing less of me (some folks are probably saying "good")
Thing is igoogle is not exactly "high tech"... maybe for 1996 it would have been pretty impressive. I can make my own homepage on my own server without too much effort. I need the API into goog-calendar and goog-reader and I'm all good.
Heck, infinitely crude as it is, I could make four frames/framesets and embed calendar.goog in one frameset, gmail in another, reader in the third, and put something else in the fourth like plain ole goog ready to search. This would be about a 6 line HTML file problem and I haven't tried it, but how bad can it be?
A tool built almost entirely in javascript doesn't work with a JAVASCRIPT BLOCKER
My guess is he's talking about whitelisting not working with some random 3rd party app. All I use on my igoogle is/. RSS feed and the calendar, and whitelisting those worked perfectly. He's probably got some bizarre 3rd party app thats malfunctioning, therefore its all the platform's fault. Just like the people who install the "steal my cc.ru" extension on firefox and its unstable and suddenly its all FF fault and all FF installs suck.
expecting to browse the modern web with noscript enabled just isn't sane.
LOL show me some "modern web" worth shutting off noscript and I'll think about it.
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Part of the explanation was I drove for at least a decade before the DOT built the first one in my area, and now they're hellbent on putting them absolutely everywhere. The first couple times thru are confusing, even terrifying as hell, kind of like the first time you ever parked parallel parked a car, assuming you remember and/or are honest about it. Of course when parking you're going slow with no moving cars nearby and in a TC its more like a county fair demolition derby experience.
If people still have oil to drive cars when my kids are old enough to drive (frankly, not too likely) then with the DOT turning every intersection they can into a roundabout or TC I think my kids will not freak out because they'll experience them their whole lives. By then I'll be used to them too.
One thing for sure, the confusion creates longer traffic backups for at least a couple years. We're still not on a net positive gain yet only a couple years in, although slowly getting closer, and I believe the propaganda that on a 20 year average or whatever, eventually the novelty will wear off and they'll be a net gain. Much like communism, theoretically it works great but in practice the first few years result in a lot of deaths (err, well low speed crashes anyway) and anxiety for all.
One other thing for sure is the Euro's like to go on and on about how high density their cities are but their monster roundabout things turn a simple little stop sign into a civil engineering project the size of a shopping mall. High density in euroland? BS, only if you don't count their crazy traffic infrastructure.
For a good time ask two groups of people what the 1st derivative of sea level is:
1) Enviroloonies and save the earthers will step out of their Priuses (and/or SUVs) and swear Gaia earth mother goddess set the 1st derivative of sea level to be always and forever more zero until the evil political opponents raped the earth and elected Reagan. Zoning committees and housing developers will demand congress pass a law to make the 1st deriv of sea level be zero by pure fiat, or Gaia earth mother goddess will get an arrest warrant for not holding the 1st deriv constant, should she ever descend to earth from heaven in her birkenstocks and unshaven glory when she makes an apparition at the drumming circle or maybe the homeopathic clinic... these are the same people who claim they could never have predicted a hurricane could strike the coast so the inland people should all pay to bail them out, every couple years, over and over and over and over...
2) Geologists and scientists in general will point out that other than very rare short term local maxima/minima the 1st derivative of sea level has never been zero and probably never will be, and anyone planning on the sea level never going up or down is doomed to unhappiness.
The two groups can't make any sense of each other, mostly because only one group lives in a scientific reality.
landlubber. Tides vary quite a bit based on position of moon in its orbit and weather conditions and wind conditions and currents and probably other stuff.
There is no simplistic grade school single value of "high tide" level. The end effect is that rather than legendary high tides causing extremely minor flooding once a decade, it'll happen once per year, or something like that.
Tides are not simple. Landlubbers get killed all the time thinking that "back home the difference between high and low tide is always about 5 feet so I can dive off this pier" little did they know that in that area, low tide is like 30 feet lower. Its a decade or so before my time, but I think one of the Beetles died that way, jumping off a pier at low tide in a area with unusually low, low tides.
Will this set off radar detectors that drivers are using, or does it operate on different bands? Would it interfere with radar guns used by police depts (I presume the answer to this one is no or it likely wouldn't be approved)?
Finally a EE-type question I can authoritatively answer. Police radar runs mostly K band around 24 GHz and some really old X band around 10 GHz. Vehicular helping systems seem to really like infrared and visual processing but the radar based ones like to use the W band around 77 GHz.
You know what all three bands have in common? You guessed it, they're ham radio allocations mostly as secondary allocations (I'd have to check to be sure). There's quite a bit of friction because you can fool around on 10 and 24 GHz as long as the cops aren't parking a radar trap right in front of you, and even then narrowband is probably OK. But if every freaking car has a radar, then W band is pretty much toast for hams. Oh well. On the other hand wide deployment of millions of W band radar systems means lots of surplus and cheap W band gear for hams to tinker with, so maybe its not the end of the world after all.
The odds of them interfering are about the same as a AM radio station interfering with a FM radio station. Maybe if you're parked right underneath the antenna, maybe, but probably not.
Looking at waveguide propagation modes and attenuation, a vehicle radar could theoretically interfere or be detected by a cop radar, but a cop radar is too low in frequency to propagate thru a piece of W size waveguide so vehicle radar cannot due to basic electrodynamics physics be interfered with by cop radar. Also modulation technology has improved somewhat from the 1960s or whatever police radar guns, so I other than fundamental overload issues I don't think they'd know what to do with each other if they were on the same band (much like placing a multimode receiver in narrowband FM mode and tuning the AM broadcast band ends up making no sense at all, or vice versa other than slope detection etc etc)
This runs right up against the core american value of its its legal its the right thing to do and vice versa. Only a commie would suggest that doing something legal but stupid might be a bad idea, or that our holy laws might have a bug. I'm thinking lane splitting is a ticket to a Darwin award, legal or not.
Yeah, it's called a "horse". The days of cheap energy are behind us, folks.
Unfortunately it takes more diesel and natgas-based fertilizer to raise the oats to feed the horse than it would take to just run the car.
Horses end up like the ethanol scam where you end up using 2 barrels of crude oil to manufacture each 1 barrel of crude equivalent. Of course lots of people make money off that scam. If horse breeders start making major political campaign donations... maybe the govt will force your next Mustang to be a mustang... That sounds like a fun slogan but donno where this leaves beetle drivers...
One interesting criminal issue is making way for emergency vehicles. Depending on the level of civilization of your local area, if an emergency vehicle is coming up behind you, you're legally supposed to get out of the way, and depending on the local ethnicity, maybe culturally you do, maybe you don't. The thing is you have to blend in with the locals or cause an accident. So in the 'burbs, if an ambulance comes up behind you, you stand on the brakes and veer right until the ambulance passes, or you'll rear end the car in front of you doing that maneuver. On the other hand, in the ghetto (at least around here, your experience may vary on location) if an ambulance comes up behind you and you stand on the breaks and veer right until it passes, you'll simply get rear ended because those folks don't respect emergency vehicles.
I suppose you can GPS tag each little road and stop sign, like "this is ghetto, do not come to a stop at this intersection after sundown and floor it if you detect someone approaching the slowed down car" or "across the street from bored suburban police station, must come to full stop for minimum 3 seconds". Then the tags will be publicized and the S will HTF by the usual suspects, etc. Its gonna be a mess!
In wisconsin there are plenty of roads where they just categorically give up on road markings. The suburban subdivision in front of my house, even the feeder road to the interstate. In fact there are portions of the interstate that are unmarked, especially concrete bridges. I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly. Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without needing chalk or paint lines.
I'm curious how this strange AI driver would handle the weird stuff like merging and lane expansion and contraction (2 lanes to 3 lanes, 3 lanes to 2 lanes). Oh how about traffic circles which confuse and scare the crap out of human drivers...
Here's a thought, the vehicle sensors detect a car in the blind spot so no sense looking anymore, right? But in the home of Harley Davidson, what if the blind spot detector can't detect little itty bitty motorcycles and the car drivers have been trained not to look anymore?
No sense keeping losses on the books for no reason. For example, a 1% growth in a stock viewed before a writeoff vs after a writeoff is a much different picture (e.g., the 1% is a lot bigger gain before the writeoff than after)
I believe you have that backwards.
If you have a $200M balance sheet and earn $1M then your numbers look like 0.5% rate of return. Lets say the execs want to boost that rate of return (why is a whole nother topic). If the assets are really only worth maybe $100M then you write off the "fake" $100M and suddenly you're earning the same $1M on a $100M balance sheet which is double the previous rate, a stellar 1% rate of return.
There are other reasons to write off. Lets say you're a small company (obviously not MS) trying to get acquired. For ego reasons or whatever your balance sheet is a little inflated. BigCorp and you want to make a deal but they aren't paying the inflated balance sheet amount. So you write off to "correct" your net worth to something BigCorp is willing to pay.
Another strategy for writing off is that writing off $400M is not really more of a career or market issue than writing off $300M, its seen as a one time isolated "event" as long as you don't make a habit of it. So you write off more than its actually lost, so as to make every quarter for the next ten years look better than reality. Kick it down worse than it really is, let it float back up to reality slowly making it look like you're doing amazing management things rather than merely financial trickery. Usually you can see this strategy if they refuse to sell the "worthless" asset later... That becomes an interesting strategic issue because you might be brought up on criminal charges for false accounting if you sell the "worthless" asset next month for half price rather than zero, so the strategic issue is MS cannot get out of that business or sell the remains of the asset for... awhile.
Another write off strategy (probably not in this case) is to make it a very non-traditional poison pill. Suddenly your balance sheet looks ickier, making you less of a takeover target (not an issue for MS). But nothing has really changed in business operations. So you're not gonna get financially raided, probably, if you write down your balance sheet to an icky level. Not relevant for MS, but a reasonable strategy in a non-monopoly industry thats undergoing merger-fever.
Any accountant want to explain exactly what "wrote off" means?
As an experienced investor dude, not a licensed CPA, heres how writeoffs for purchased companies work. I'm taking a step back from the "what" answers to attempt to answer "why". As in why does it happen and why is it being posted today, as opposed to last week or next year.
The traditional way to do R+D was to pay cash up front in salaries and parts, and maybe something cool and profitable fell out, or maybe not. See Bell Labs, HP in the glory days, etc.
The modern way to do R+D is to let a startup do the real R+D on their own and get it started up, then the failed ideas die and the good ideas are bought for big money. Sometimes BIG companies are bought as "new wave R+D" instead of little startups. Maybe for as much as 6 billion bucks. The advantage for the big company is they invest later when its "more obvious" if a tech is any good, and if it bombs after purchase like this story, then the big corp gets to pick when to accept and post the losses, based on coordinating with other mysterious financial activities, etc. There is a certain limit to the BS allowed and eventually you have to report losses even if you don't want to. I have not been following MS enough to tell if this loss is being posted on their schedule or someone elses.
I looked into installing one, but the cost was about one month's air conditioning bill. Of course there's something to be said for fresh outside air even if it ends up costing more. Also I'd need to do some kind of vent into the attic from the living space which can be heavily insulated in the winter... like a grill with a flap of fiberglass or something. And those big fans draw big power, so you're not trading a 20 amp AC for nothing, you're trading a 20 amp AC for a 1.5 HP fan, which really isn't all that much lower. Yes its lower, but not like 1/100th lower, more like a quarter of running the AC... So run the fan continuously for 4 hours, or the AC on maybe a quarter of the time during those 4 hours, same energy cost... There is some argument that you only get 10K hours out of a $3K compressor, so you save some money by running a cheap to replace fan instead of the AC compressor, so you come out ahead on total cost of ownership.
you seem to miss the point that there would be a lot less of it
We will have to just agree to disagree. I think if you yank a tree out of the ground, the damage to cables run thru the roots will be just as bad a cables run thru the branches. Maybe somewhat fewer trees will be completely ripped out of the ground, but if it takes 10 times longer to fix underground...
As a bonus, you don't have downed power lines that could injure or kill someone.
Ground currents are a pretty serious danger with underground lines. Dirt has a high enough resistance to get a pretty impressive voltage drop over a couple feet yet a low enough resistance to transmit the 50 or so mA it takes to kill. I would suggest wearing rubber soled tennis shoes around a underground power accident until it gets fixed. Gardening inadvisable, barefoot inadvisable..
Not sure why people think they don't exist or would be an expensive option to add.
Because some of us in the industrial controls / CNC machine / home automation sector know how much a 300 amp 220 volt relay/contactor costs. Also I know how cheap my old fashioned mechanical electric "meter fee" is. Even at zero interest rates, they would have to ten-tuple my base meter fee to pay for the costs of a 300 amp contactor, not to mention the cost of the rest of the meter. There seems to be the strange belief among people who don't know the market, that if a 5 amp 12 volt relay costs $5 at radio shack, then a 300 amp 220 volt relay must only be $5.25 or something. You will not be too far off to pay a buck an amp per contact pair for a high quality relay, so it would not be too far out of line to budget "mid three figures" just for the 300 amp relay (two hots and a probably unswitched neutral)
How much do these meters cost, anyway? The only way to pay for them is to increase rates, and I get the feeling these smart meters must be like four digit prices, which means rates are going way up. For my $200/month house I think I can eat an additional $25/mo just to pay for the meter without overly freaking out beyond feeling its a waste of my money, but when I lived in my apartment bachelor pad I never paid more than maybe $20 during the hottest month of the hottest year of my entire bachelor lifetime. So I'm thinking a $25/mo meter fee, either explicitly or by bumping rates up, is going to absolutely kill elderly, poor, students, renters, kids, etc. The only full time electric load I had in the apartment was the fridge and my alarm clock, everything else was natgas, so other than air conditioning you can see how I got $10 electric bills during the winter. Paying $25 to meter my $10 of electricity sounds like long distance telephone company accounting.
RTSP server to stream its video / sound files or capture camera / micro output
OK that is a real idea and a real good idea. I'm surprised no one has ever proposed something like that for camera apps. So after you record the cops beating a minority, the cops want to wipe your phone's memory. Um, OK guys wipe away, see what I care, its already uploaded read-only status uploaded to youtube in real time, or being broadcast by the local tv station as you talk to me, so delete away if it makes you feel better....
Yeah I assumed it was obvious that it plays videos pretty well is a given for the audience. Probably everyone here (?) has used VLC on a desktop at one time or another. If it doesn't work "right" on mplayer then simply try vlc or vice versa.
OK that is a real answer and a real good idea. Given some headphones it would basically be a flash memory version of my old automobile DVD player, admittedly with a much smaller screen, but it would store more movies per cubic inch or per pound or whatever.
Of course I could just transcode and avoid the whole VLC / hardware compatibility list whatever.
As a side note it is pretty funny that when Linux has a "hardware compatibility" list that means no one can or should use it and we should all laugh until that list is completely empty, but when a commercial mass market product has a "hardware compatibility" list, then suddenly everyone should be excited about it and its a great idea and its the year of the android tablet on the linux desktop or whatever.
OK that is a real answer, and is also a real good idea. I've not had great success watching mythtv recordings using my phone, maybe VLC would decode better. I could skim thru a show, for example, decide if its worth watching on the tv or if not I could just delete it. Or I suppose I could do the mythtv "watch live TV" thing on my phone and go watch the weather channel or whatever in the morning.
The traditional firewalls from Checkpoint or Juniper aren’t designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from a hypervisor running, say, ten virtualized servers.
LOL very funny. If it were true, which it is not, but for the sake of argument were it true, then you'd just use the magic of VLANs to put a tenth on each of ten VLANs, and have 10 firewalls run in parallel.
Traffic is parallelizable. This is not the famous "nine chicks give birth to a baby in one month by cooperation" situation. This is more like you got 9 inches of old fashioned printed paperwork, and 9 interns who can only handle one inch of paperwork each, hmm I wonder how that works.
What do I do with this? I could set it up. But beyond the hack value "hey I'm running VLC"...
So the target market is a subset of android users who know how to put files on a memory card but don't know how to transcode, who want to watch movies on a tiny little screen with a tinny mono speaker where the battery probably doesn't live long enough to watch a movie so its tv shows only... I'm kinda getting painted into a corner for what to do with this.
I'm not (only) trying to make a rhetorical question but it is a fair question in general, what to do with this. 1) No access to a desktop to transcode on 2) Access to short/TV length files in odd formats that don't play natively 3) Not terribly concerned that it only works on certain / my hardware 4) Very concerned about video but not care about the awful audio 5) Tiny screen is OK (I thought the most important feature of couch potatoe viewing was the larger the screen the better, 60+ inches etc) Man if I could do the above, then I would... um... what? I donno. Understand that I'm a pretty creative dude in general but in this specific instance and at this specific moment, I'm completely stumped.
How long before somebody, or a Nation, starts turning off the grid in countries going ahead with such technology..?
The real fun isn't onesie twosie but being able to destroy an infrastructure by making the billing and monitoring system completely unusable, which frankly wouldn't be that hard. So warmonger in chief earns another nobel peace prize by starting a war with syria, who respond by having sleeper agents basically completely disable the smart meter network. Now what do you do? Replace them all with mechanical meters? Going to take months. Just send last months bill out this month? Its quite a puzzle. In position as the worlds major bully, everyone else wants to do the op to us themselves and get syria to take the fall for it. Or is that just the story syria will release to get out of punishment?
Even more fun is not binary on/off but corrupting the data slowly. So revenue slowly rises an extra 2%/yr and the stock goes crazy up, then the perps set up to short the stock, and roll back their hack suddenly, you can seesaw this into some profits. After all, everyone knows a computer never lies? Kind of the superman movie plot except you round up or round down the kilowatt hours instead of the paycheck stub pennies.
I suppose you can roll bribes into this somehow. Would my local electric company mind if I hacked their system to charge everyone 1% more money? And once they get used to the increased revenue, how much will they pay me to keep me quiet and keep me doing it? Thats the big picture. Sure the little picture is as a practical joke I can zero out a coworkers bill or make their bill a million dollars, but the big picture way to do it is hold an entire city hostage.
What if the "big hack" was swapping the meter readings and thus bills for ghetto-town and rich-white-town as a weird political statement?
Slashdot Mirror
MN looks polished. You sure its a iGOOG replacement? Looks more like a reader.google.com replacement.
I skimmed the website and its basically "feedonfeeds" from 199x or reader.google.com from 200x with a optional map display, written in drupal.
Is there more to it that I missed in my skimming?
If not, as a test you could set reader.goog as your home page, and if you catch yourself saying "a map would make this better" then do the MN thing.
Heck, I mainly check /. based on the iGoogle widget
Ditto, you'll be seeing less of me (some folks are probably saying "good")
Thing is igoogle is not exactly "high tech"... maybe for 1996 it would have been pretty impressive. I can make my own homepage on my own server without too much effort. I need the API into goog-calendar and goog-reader and I'm all good.
Heck, infinitely crude as it is, I could make four frames/framesets and embed calendar.goog in one frameset, gmail in another, reader in the third, and put something else in the fourth like plain ole goog ready to search. This would be about a 6 line HTML file problem and I haven't tried it, but how bad can it be?
A tool built almost entirely in javascript doesn't work with a JAVASCRIPT BLOCKER
My guess is he's talking about whitelisting not working with some random 3rd party app. All I use on my igoogle is /. RSS feed and the calendar, and whitelisting those worked perfectly. He's probably got some bizarre 3rd party app thats malfunctioning, therefore its all the platform's fault. Just like the people who install the "steal my cc.ru" extension on firefox and its unstable and suddenly its all FF fault and all FF installs suck.
expecting to browse the modern web with noscript enabled just isn't sane.
LOL show me some "modern web" worth shutting off noscript and I'll think about it.
I think they should demand a refund of their subscription fee.
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Part of the explanation was I drove for at least a decade before the DOT built the first one in my area, and now they're hellbent on putting them absolutely everywhere. The first couple times thru are confusing, even terrifying as hell, kind of like the first time you ever parked parallel parked a car, assuming you remember and/or are honest about it. Of course when parking you're going slow with no moving cars nearby and in a TC its more like a county fair demolition derby experience.
If people still have oil to drive cars when my kids are old enough to drive (frankly, not too likely) then with the DOT turning every intersection they can into a roundabout or TC I think my kids will not freak out because they'll experience them their whole lives. By then I'll be used to them too.
One thing for sure, the confusion creates longer traffic backups for at least a couple years. We're still not on a net positive gain yet only a couple years in, although slowly getting closer, and I believe the propaganda that on a 20 year average or whatever, eventually the novelty will wear off and they'll be a net gain. Much like communism, theoretically it works great but in practice the first few years result in a lot of deaths (err, well low speed crashes anyway) and anxiety for all.
One other thing for sure is the Euro's like to go on and on about how high density their cities are but their monster roundabout things turn a simple little stop sign into a civil engineering project the size of a shopping mall. High density in euroland? BS, only if you don't count their crazy traffic infrastructure.
For a good time ask two groups of people what the 1st derivative of sea level is:
1) Enviroloonies and save the earthers will step out of their Priuses (and/or SUVs) and swear Gaia earth mother goddess set the 1st derivative of sea level to be always and forever more zero until the evil political opponents raped the earth and elected Reagan. Zoning committees and housing developers will demand congress pass a law to make the 1st deriv of sea level be zero by pure fiat, or Gaia earth mother goddess will get an arrest warrant for not holding the 1st deriv constant, should she ever descend to earth from heaven in her birkenstocks and unshaven glory when she makes an apparition at the drumming circle or maybe the homeopathic clinic... these are the same people who claim they could never have predicted a hurricane could strike the coast so the inland people should all pay to bail them out, every couple years, over and over and over and over...
2) Geologists and scientists in general will point out that other than very rare short term local maxima/minima the 1st derivative of sea level has never been zero and probably never will be, and anyone planning on the sea level never going up or down is doomed to unhappiness.
The two groups can't make any sense of each other, mostly because only one group lives in a scientific reality.
landlubber. Tides vary quite a bit based on position of moon in its orbit and weather conditions and wind conditions and currents and probably other stuff.
There is no simplistic grade school single value of "high tide" level. The end effect is that rather than legendary high tides causing extremely minor flooding once a decade, it'll happen once per year, or something like that.
Tides are not simple. Landlubbers get killed all the time thinking that "back home the difference between high and low tide is always about 5 feet so I can dive off this pier" little did they know that in that area, low tide is like 30 feet lower. Its a decade or so before my time, but I think one of the Beetles died that way, jumping off a pier at low tide in a area with unusually low, low tides.
32cm is like, over 12 inches. That's gonna be noticeable.
Somewhere in there is a "Your Mom" joke, straining against the seams to get out.
Or worse, a goatse joke
Will this set off radar detectors that drivers are using, or does it operate on different bands? Would it interfere with radar guns used by police depts (I presume the answer to this one is no or it likely wouldn't be approved)?
Finally a EE-type question I can authoritatively answer. Police radar runs mostly K band around 24 GHz and some really old X band around 10 GHz. Vehicular helping systems seem to really like infrared and visual processing but the radar based ones like to use the W band around 77 GHz.
You know what all three bands have in common? You guessed it, they're ham radio allocations mostly as secondary allocations (I'd have to check to be sure). There's quite a bit of friction because you can fool around on 10 and 24 GHz as long as the cops aren't parking a radar trap right in front of you, and even then narrowband is probably OK. But if every freaking car has a radar, then W band is pretty much toast for hams. Oh well. On the other hand wide deployment of millions of W band radar systems means lots of surplus and cheap W band gear for hams to tinker with, so maybe its not the end of the world after all.
The odds of them interfering are about the same as a AM radio station interfering with a FM radio station. Maybe if you're parked right underneath the antenna, maybe, but probably not.
Looking at waveguide propagation modes and attenuation, a vehicle radar could theoretically interfere or be detected by a cop radar, but a cop radar is too low in frequency to propagate thru a piece of W size waveguide so vehicle radar cannot due to basic electrodynamics physics be interfered with by cop radar. Also modulation technology has improved somewhat from the 1960s or whatever police radar guns, so I other than fundamental overload issues I don't think they'd know what to do with each other if they were on the same band (much like placing a multimode receiver in narrowband FM mode and tuning the AM broadcast band ends up making no sense at all, or vice versa other than slope detection etc etc)
It hurts when I do stupid shit!
So don't do stupid shit?
This runs right up against the core american value of its its legal its the right thing to do and vice versa. Only a commie would suggest that doing something legal but stupid might be a bad idea, or that our holy laws might have a bug. I'm thinking lane splitting is a ticket to a Darwin award, legal or not.
Yeah, it's called a "horse". The days of cheap energy are behind us, folks.
Unfortunately it takes more diesel and natgas-based fertilizer to raise the oats to feed the horse than it would take to just run the car.
Horses end up like the ethanol scam where you end up using 2 barrels of crude oil to manufacture each 1 barrel of crude equivalent. Of course lots of people make money off that scam. If horse breeders start making major political campaign donations... maybe the govt will force your next Mustang to be a mustang... That sounds like a fun slogan but donno where this leaves beetle drivers...
One interesting criminal issue is making way for emergency vehicles. Depending on the level of civilization of your local area, if an emergency vehicle is coming up behind you, you're legally supposed to get out of the way, and depending on the local ethnicity, maybe culturally you do, maybe you don't. The thing is you have to blend in with the locals or cause an accident. So in the 'burbs, if an ambulance comes up behind you, you stand on the brakes and veer right until the ambulance passes, or you'll rear end the car in front of you doing that maneuver. On the other hand, in the ghetto (at least around here, your experience may vary on location) if an ambulance comes up behind you and you stand on the breaks and veer right until it passes, you'll simply get rear ended because those folks don't respect emergency vehicles.
I suppose you can GPS tag each little road and stop sign, like "this is ghetto, do not come to a stop at this intersection after sundown and floor it if you detect someone approaching the slowed down car" or "across the street from bored suburban police station, must come to full stop for minimum 3 seconds". Then the tags will be publicized and the S will HTF by the usual suspects, etc. Its gonna be a mess!
snowplows are very hard on the paint
In wisconsin there are plenty of roads where they just categorically give up on road markings. The suburban subdivision in front of my house, even the feeder road to the interstate. In fact there are portions of the interstate that are unmarked, especially concrete bridges. I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly. Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without needing chalk or paint lines.
I'm curious how this strange AI driver would handle the weird stuff like merging and lane expansion and contraction (2 lanes to 3 lanes, 3 lanes to 2 lanes). Oh how about traffic circles which confuse and scare the crap out of human drivers...
Here's a thought, the vehicle sensors detect a car in the blind spot so no sense looking anymore, right? But in the home of Harley Davidson, what if the blind spot detector can't detect little itty bitty motorcycles and the car drivers have been trained not to look anymore?
No sense keeping losses on the books for no reason. For example, a 1% growth in a stock viewed before a writeoff vs after a writeoff is a much different picture (e.g., the 1% is a lot bigger gain before the writeoff than after)
I believe you have that backwards.
If you have a $200M balance sheet and earn $1M then your numbers look like 0.5% rate of return. Lets say the execs want to boost that rate of return (why is a whole nother topic). If the assets are really only worth maybe $100M then you write off the "fake" $100M and suddenly you're earning the same $1M on a $100M balance sheet which is double the previous rate, a stellar 1% rate of return.
There are other reasons to write off. Lets say you're a small company (obviously not MS) trying to get acquired. For ego reasons or whatever your balance sheet is a little inflated. BigCorp and you want to make a deal but they aren't paying the inflated balance sheet amount. So you write off to "correct" your net worth to something BigCorp is willing to pay.
Another strategy for writing off is that writing off $400M is not really more of a career or market issue than writing off $300M, its seen as a one time isolated "event" as long as you don't make a habit of it. So you write off more than its actually lost, so as to make every quarter for the next ten years look better than reality. Kick it down worse than it really is, let it float back up to reality slowly making it look like you're doing amazing management things rather than merely financial trickery. Usually you can see this strategy if they refuse to sell the "worthless" asset later... That becomes an interesting strategic issue because you might be brought up on criminal charges for false accounting if you sell the "worthless" asset next month for half price rather than zero, so the strategic issue is MS cannot get out of that business or sell the remains of the asset for ... awhile.
Another write off strategy (probably not in this case) is to make it a very non-traditional poison pill. Suddenly your balance sheet looks ickier, making you less of a takeover target (not an issue for MS). But nothing has really changed in business operations. So you're not gonna get financially raided, probably, if you write down your balance sheet to an icky level. Not relevant for MS, but a reasonable strategy in a non-monopoly industry thats undergoing merger-fever.
Any accountant want to explain exactly what "wrote off" means?
As an experienced investor dude, not a licensed CPA, heres how writeoffs for purchased companies work. I'm taking a step back from the "what" answers to attempt to answer "why". As in why does it happen and why is it being posted today, as opposed to last week or next year.
The traditional way to do R+D was to pay cash up front in salaries and parts, and maybe something cool and profitable fell out, or maybe not. See Bell Labs, HP in the glory days, etc.
The modern way to do R+D is to let a startup do the real R+D on their own and get it started up, then the failed ideas die and the good ideas are bought for big money. Sometimes BIG companies are bought as "new wave R+D" instead of little startups. Maybe for as much as 6 billion bucks. The advantage for the big company is they invest later when its "more obvious" if a tech is any good, and if it bombs after purchase like this story, then the big corp gets to pick when to accept and post the losses, based on coordinating with other mysterious financial activities, etc. There is a certain limit to the BS allowed and eventually you have to report losses even if you don't want to. I have not been following MS enough to tell if this loss is being posted on their schedule or someone elses.
I looked into installing one, but the cost was about one month's air conditioning bill. Of course there's something to be said for fresh outside air even if it ends up costing more. Also I'd need to do some kind of vent into the attic from the living space which can be heavily insulated in the winter... like a grill with a flap of fiberglass or something. And those big fans draw big power, so you're not trading a 20 amp AC for nothing, you're trading a 20 amp AC for a 1.5 HP fan, which really isn't all that much lower. Yes its lower, but not like 1/100th lower, more like a quarter of running the AC... So run the fan continuously for 4 hours, or the AC on maybe a quarter of the time during those 4 hours, same energy cost... There is some argument that you only get 10K hours out of a $3K compressor, so you save some money by running a cheap to replace fan instead of the AC compressor, so you come out ahead on total cost of ownership.
you seem to miss the point that there would be a lot less of it
We will have to just agree to disagree. I think if you yank a tree out of the ground, the damage to cables run thru the roots will be just as bad a cables run thru the branches. Maybe somewhat fewer trees will be completely ripped out of the ground, but if it takes 10 times longer to fix underground...
As a bonus, you don't have downed power lines that could injure or kill someone.
Ground currents are a pretty serious danger with underground lines. Dirt has a high enough resistance to get a pretty impressive voltage drop over a couple feet yet a low enough resistance to transmit the 50 or so mA it takes to kill. I would suggest wearing rubber soled tennis shoes around a underground power accident until it gets fixed. Gardening inadvisable, barefoot inadvisable..
Not sure why people think they don't exist or would be an expensive option to add.
Because some of us in the industrial controls / CNC machine / home automation sector know how much a 300 amp 220 volt relay/contactor costs. Also I know how cheap my old fashioned mechanical electric "meter fee" is. Even at zero interest rates, they would have to ten-tuple my base meter fee to pay for the costs of a 300 amp contactor, not to mention the cost of the rest of the meter. There seems to be the strange belief among people who don't know the market, that if a 5 amp 12 volt relay costs $5 at radio shack, then a 300 amp 220 volt relay must only be $5.25 or something. You will not be too far off to pay a buck an amp per contact pair for a high quality relay, so it would not be too far out of line to budget "mid three figures" just for the 300 amp relay (two hots and a probably unswitched neutral)
How much do these meters cost, anyway? The only way to pay for them is to increase rates, and I get the feeling these smart meters must be like four digit prices, which means rates are going way up. For my $200/month house I think I can eat an additional $25/mo just to pay for the meter without overly freaking out beyond feeling its a waste of my money, but when I lived in my apartment bachelor pad I never paid more than maybe $20 during the hottest month of the hottest year of my entire bachelor lifetime. So I'm thinking a $25/mo meter fee, either explicitly or by bumping rates up, is going to absolutely kill elderly, poor, students, renters, kids, etc. The only full time electric load I had in the apartment was the fridge and my alarm clock, everything else was natgas, so other than air conditioning you can see how I got $10 electric bills during the winter. Paying $25 to meter my $10 of electricity sounds like long distance telephone company accounting.
RTSP server to stream its video / sound files or capture camera / micro output
OK that is a real idea and a real good idea. I'm surprised no one has ever proposed something like that for camera apps. So after you record the cops beating a minority, the cops want to wipe your phone's memory. Um, OK guys wipe away, see what I care, its already uploaded read-only status uploaded to youtube in real time, or being broadcast by the local tv station as you talk to me, so delete away if it makes you feel better....
Yeah I assumed it was obvious that it plays videos pretty well is a given for the audience. Probably everyone here (?) has used VLC on a desktop at one time or another. If it doesn't work "right" on mplayer then simply try vlc or vice versa.
or a travel device ... I usually use earphones
OK that is a real answer and a real good idea. Given some headphones it would basically be a flash memory version of my old automobile DVD player, admittedly with a much smaller screen, but it would store more movies per cubic inch or per pound or whatever.
Of course I could just transcode and avoid the whole VLC / hardware compatibility list whatever.
As a side note it is pretty funny that when Linux has a "hardware compatibility" list that means no one can or should use it and we should all laugh until that list is completely empty, but when a commercial mass market product has a "hardware compatibility" list, then suddenly everyone should be excited about it and its a great idea and its the year of the android tablet on the linux desktop or whatever.
SMB streaming
OK that is a real answer, and is also a real good idea. I've not had great success watching mythtv recordings using my phone, maybe VLC would decode better. I could skim thru a show, for example, decide if its worth watching on the tv or if not I could just delete it. Or I suppose I could do the mythtv "watch live TV" thing on my phone and go watch the weather channel or whatever in the morning.
The traditional firewalls from Checkpoint or Juniper aren’t designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from a hypervisor running, say, ten virtualized servers.
LOL very funny. If it were true, which it is not, but for the sake of argument were it true, then you'd just use the magic of VLANs to put a tenth on each of ten VLANs, and have 10 firewalls run in parallel.
Traffic is parallelizable. This is not the famous "nine chicks give birth to a baby in one month by cooperation" situation. This is more like you got 9 inches of old fashioned printed paperwork, and 9 interns who can only handle one inch of paperwork each, hmm I wonder how that works.
What do I do with this? I could set it up. But beyond the hack value "hey I'm running VLC"...
So the target market is a subset of android users who know how to put files on a memory card but don't know how to transcode, who want to watch movies on a tiny little screen with a tinny mono speaker where the battery probably doesn't live long enough to watch a movie so its tv shows only ... I'm kinda getting painted into a corner for what to do with this.
I'm not (only) trying to make a rhetorical question but it is a fair question in general, what to do with this.
1) No access to a desktop to transcode on
2) Access to short/TV length files in odd formats that don't play natively
3) Not terribly concerned that it only works on certain / my hardware
4) Very concerned about video but not care about the awful audio
5) Tiny screen is OK (I thought the most important feature of couch potatoe viewing was the larger the screen the better, 60+ inches etc)
Man if I could do the above, then I would... um... what? I donno. Understand that I'm a pretty creative dude in general but in this specific instance and at this specific moment, I'm completely stumped.
How long before somebody, or a Nation, starts turning off the grid in countries going ahead with such technology..?
The real fun isn't onesie twosie but being able to destroy an infrastructure by making the billing and monitoring system completely unusable, which frankly wouldn't be that hard. So warmonger in chief earns another nobel peace prize by starting a war with syria, who respond by having sleeper agents basically completely disable the smart meter network. Now what do you do? Replace them all with mechanical meters? Going to take months. Just send last months bill out this month? Its quite a puzzle. In position as the worlds major bully, everyone else wants to do the op to us themselves and get syria to take the fall for it. Or is that just the story syria will release to get out of punishment?
Even more fun is not binary on/off but corrupting the data slowly. So revenue slowly rises an extra 2%/yr and the stock goes crazy up, then the perps set up to short the stock, and roll back their hack suddenly, you can seesaw this into some profits. After all, everyone knows a computer never lies? Kind of the superman movie plot except you round up or round down the kilowatt hours instead of the paycheck stub pennies.
I suppose you can roll bribes into this somehow. Would my local electric company mind if I hacked their system to charge everyone 1% more money? And once they get used to the increased revenue, how much will they pay me to keep me quiet and keep me doing it? Thats the big picture. Sure the little picture is as a practical joke I can zero out a coworkers bill or make their bill a million dollars, but the big picture way to do it is hold an entire city hostage.
What if the "big hack" was swapping the meter readings and thus bills for ghetto-town and rich-white-town as a weird political statement?