We can lump a bunch of currencies in like so and the fact that it is the USD that is moving is more clear. The general trend is clear, and with the Fed dropping interest rates right now that's going to put considerable downward pressure on the USD, so expect to see things get worse over the next month or so.
Bear in mind that the reason the Fed dropped interest rates so low in the first place from 2002-2005 was to shake the Yuan off the dollar (China used to have it sell at a fixed value relative to the dollar, instead of traded on the open market). A significant portion of the dollar's drop during that time period was due to this. The two were decoupled (in a fashion) in 2005. In theory the dollar should've recovered some afterwards, but Katrina, things going badly in Iraq, and now the credit crunch (which traces its roots to the Yuan being tied to the dollar) have all kept it heading down.
When an aluminum BIKE part gets nicked, or scratched, by brushing up against a rock, or having another bike lay down on top of it, there's a pretty decent chance that you're going to have to live with a nasty, ugly nick on that part for many, many years, (unless you sand it down and polish it, or whatever). Mind you; aluminum bike parts are make much beefier than aluminum airplane parts - probably different alloy as well.
When a carbon-fiber part suffers even a very minor nick or scratch, it does not take many more hours of riding before that nick develops into a fracture, and that fracture unzips into a full-on shear-crack all the way through.
I'd be interested in seeing how those CF bike parts are designed. One of the boons of CFRP and FRP (fiberglass) has been safer crack propagation mechanics. When a metal develops a crack, stress concentrates at the point of separation. The load that used to be carried by section that is now cracked is transferred to the nearest connected location, which is the corner of the crack. This causes the crack to grow. Usually the stress is small enough that it doesn't unzip, initially. The crack just grows over time, until one day the crack is large enough for the stresses to push it into the fast fracture domain, and the material just unzips. That's what brought down UAL 232.
CFRP and FRP have an advantage in crack propagation because cracks will stop when they hit a dislocation. That is, the crack will propagate until it hits an edge. If you shatter one window in your car, the cracks don't propagate into an adjacent window because the metal beams between windows are a dislocation. CFRP and FRP are full of dislocations. Every place that a fiber is embedded in the resin is a dislocation. So a crack will propagate until it hits the next fiber, then stop cold. You lose the structural strength of a few nanometers of resin since it now has a crack completely through it, but the crack's growth stops completely and the load is transferred to the ample remaining material surrounding it.
Speculating, I suspect what happened with the bike parks is that they were designed very little safety factor. That is, in order to maximize weight savings, they were designed to just barely withstand the loads they bore. When you scratched one, you damaged the fibers thus reducing the part's ability to carry a load. The dynamic load (pumping the bike side to side) placed on it now exceeded its capability to carry during its peaks, causing more fibers to fail. Eventually enough fibers failed that the entire thing broke. Cracks had nothing to do with it. The solution(s) then is pretty simple. Design with an adequate (perhaps an enhanced) safety factor, and cover or shield the material so it can better withstand nicks and scratches.
In the UK one reason for some of the cost is interconnect fees. If you send a SMS to a phone on another network then your network has to pay a fee (3p per message if I remember correctly) to the destination network.
Then that's an archaic cost structure, dating back from the analog days when voice calls were fundamentally different from data transfer. Nowadays, nearly all telecommunications is digital, so voice calls are simply data. It makes no sense to charge more for one form of digital data because it contains ASCII instead of CELP.
If money is being charged disproportionate to the cost of a service, that represents an opportunity for a competitor to grab marketshare by offering the same service at a lower cost. Left to its own devices, the market will correct itself in these situations. Unfortunately, we have collusion, monopolies, and buying of government regulations thwarting what the market wants to do.
If this situation persists, someone will figure out a way to piggyback an ASCII/Unicode stream into a CELP transmission, allowing owners of phones with the new feature to send SMS to each other via their "free" voice minutes rather than having to may $0.15/ea. Unfortunately, the current crop of phone companies will then collude to require this feature be disabled on all phones which use their network. This is why Google's efforts to open up the 700 MHz band up for auction in the U.S. are so important.
Just curious, but how can some of you so callously be willing to deprive someone of the rights that so many people fought and died for? Because he was causing a scene? Big deal, its his right.
No it's not his right. By exceeding his allotted time, he's the one callously willing to deprive others of their right to speak out to the Senator. If this had been some right-wing nut-job rambling on and the campus police hadn't acted, the Slashdot story probably would've been something like "Police inaction allows protester to deprive others of their right to speak to Senator Kerry."
IMHO this is not a free speech issue at all. By continuing to speak past his allotted time, he was depriving others of their right to speak. So the free speech aspect of it cancels out entirely IMHO. The only thing at question is whether the police use of force was appropriate in dealing with the violation of the rules of the event.
Why even have static key bindings?
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most of the games I've played lately let you completely reconfigure the keybindings to your liking. I don't understand why all software apps don't incorporate this. Yeah it could be confusing if you hop onto someone else's machine, but all you have to do is keep a copy of your keybind config file on a flash drive you carry around.
If your app requires an Internet connection or can die if it can't phone home, my experience has been that the user will often go out of his way to find a pirated version which doesn't have that annoyance. When it comes time to upgrade, the user then thinks, "Hmm, that pirated version worked pretty well last time. Do I really want to pay for an upgrade when I'm just going to be downloading the pirated version again?"
Whenever I'm faced with a situation where I need to be absolutely sure that a piece of portable electronics is off, I just take the battery out. That's what these guys should've done, taken the battery out of their... iPhone...
Oh yeah. Oops. I guess it is bad UI design after all.
Most of those commercial fishing vessels around 100' LOA are ~100 tons displacement. This vessel is only 12 tons displacement (6.8 tons of which is fuel if my calculations are correct). With that much difference in mass, the commercial vessel would actually be more efficient burning 3 gal/mile, the primary limitation being range due to capacity. I suspect the point of this vessel is more platform stability and high speed capability in heavy seas without adversely affecting range.
No one is saying that that's legal. The question is whether the MPAA should have known they were obtained illegally when Anderson sold the emails to them, claiming they had been obtained legally.
Anyway, I'm sure some combination of "they weren't stolen, they were copied" and ""let's say you leave your back door unlocked and I..." is sufficient to make all of this OK.
I think you've unwittingly hit the solution to this whole thing.
The emails were copied without authorization. That's a copyright violation, with up to a $100,000 fine for each copyrighted work (email). Following the RIAA's tactic of using the presence of MP3s on a person's hard drive as evidence, the RIAA's possession of these emails is sufficient evidence for shutdown notices. Torrentspy should send notices to the RIAA members' ISPs and email services for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, requesting logs of all emails sent by/to them, and asking that these services be terminated in order to stop the violations. On top of that, I'm sure that Andersen didn't just give them a copy of these emails and they sat on some hard drive collecting dust. They were most likely distributed within the RIAA and amongst the lawyers, thus making them all guilty of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.
The beauty is if the RIAA defends itself, it undermines its own arguments in the lawsuits it's filing against MP3 sharing.
I'll assume you aren't being facetious. Because with a 5% market share of the OS market, the expectation is that Apple would sell about 5% of the computers in any given market. 17% clearly exceeds that by a large margin, which is why it's great news for Apple. The flip side of course is that it means Mac sales in other markets are proportionately worse (unless OSX is gaining market share).
Also, the numbers from IDC (also mentioned in the article) put Apple's share at 5.6%, not 17.6%:
Research firm IDC also has Apple in the third spot; data it released last month put Apple's share of U.S. sales at 5.6%, far behind leaders HP (28.4%) and Dell (23.6%) but tied with Gateway.
In other words, 1 laptop out of every 18, not out of every 5.
I puzzled over that too since the article itself says Apple is selling more than 1 in every 6 laptops. I think the 5.6% figure is referring to all computer sales, since it falls pretty close to Apple's acknowledged ~5% share of the OS market.
And then, when you buy foreign made goods, that recycled money leaves the country, leaving you with less to purchase with. It is an entropic cycle, and will eventually fail.
This assumes conservation of currency, which is not the case. The money supply is constantly increasing, to reflect the increase in wealth (stuff of value) within the U.S. as well as inflation. As long as the increase in wealth within the U.S. exceeds the amount of money being sent abroad (coupled with inflation devaluing money sent abroad), the cycle can continue indefinitely. Obviously it's not an ideal way to be operating, but it is sustainable under certain circumstances.
Yeah, I had that happen at a small business I consulted for. Their flat LAN died. I eventually tracked the problem down to a cheap unmanaged switch which had a network cable plugged into it for people to plug their laptops into. Whoever used it last thought leaving the unplugged cable laying on the desk looked untidy, so they "helpfully" plugged it into an empty socket on the same switch.
Nobody gives a rat's ass about "the SI unit." These are computers.
Yeah. Making nomenclature consistent across industries is damned inconvenient! Why bother?
Look, I hate marketing dishonesty as much as the next guy, but borrowing the SI prefixes honestly does nothing but add confusion.
I can just see the same argument being played out a thousand years ago...
"... and that is why you should measure your lumber in units of 10."
"But 10 is such an awful number to do carpentry with. What if I need to cut a timber into three equal lengths?"
"Then just set your standard measure so a typical timber is 30 units long instead of 10 units long."
"But what if I want to take a 1/3rd cut and also cut that into thirds?"
"Oh I give up. Making nomenclature consistent across industries is so damned inconvenient! Why bother? Just stick with your yards, feet, and inches. See if I care."
Consistency and convenience often end up on opposite sides of the table.
Hard drives are easy, because one can safely assume that the marketing 'tards went with whatever number was bigger.
Not quite. They're still labeled in bytes, not bits. Though I suppose we shouldn't be giving the marketroids any more stupid ideas...
A couple years ago I closed a business checking account for a corporation I was treasurer for at the time. I asked for the funds in a cashier's check. The teller screwed up and forgot to deduct the fee for the cashier's check from the balance, even though I had told him to do exactly that. The computers weren't as forgetful, and automatically assessed the fee. As a result, the bank showed the account as closed, but with a -$3 balance. The computers interpreted that as overdrawn and automatically assessed a additional $30 insufficient funds fee. So for months they were bugging me with letters demanding $33 to correct their error.
1955 Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
1985 Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
1955 Doc: Unbelievable.
Korean products went through the same thing in the 1990s. Anyone remember how crappy Hyundais were when first introduced in the U.S.? Last year they topped the J.D. Power initial quality survey for non-premium brands, coming in third behind Porsche and Lexus (though apparently they weren't able to hold it in 2007). And of course Samsung and LG are now household names in the consumer electronics market. I would suspect the Brits from the 19th century experienced the same thing with American produts.
All that remains to be seen is if China follows the same path as Japan and Korea, or if it's going to be like "made in Taiwan" which has never quite become a cachet of quality, remaining more a mark of cheapness.
but I believe some of the spacecraft used for the moon shots used the low-pressure environment.
Correct. Apollo used a 100% oxygen atmosphere at a lower pressure (I think 3 psi, which approximates the partial pressure of oxygen in normal air at sea-level). When they tested Apollo 1 on the ground, they decided to use 100% oxygen. But because the test was at sea-level, it was 100% oxygen at sea-level pressure. 100% oxygen at 3 psi creates a fire which burns just like regular air at sea-level. 100% oxygen at sea-level pressure creates an inferno.
And you should have thought about where they financial interest lies. Why bother with geothermal energy, which needs development and has a much higher start up cost than an oil well, when oil has been obscenely profitable for them?
But your whole argument is that geothermal has better long-term market potential than oil. If that's the case, it'd be advantageous for the oil companies to be on the forefront developing it, rather than hanging on to old technology which will be made obsolete by it.
Beyond that, oil companies may have no interest in developing a resource that would devalue their existing oil wells, and their leases on the oil fields beneath them. Geo-thermal power would be the monopoly of no country, no region.
The problem with your conspiracy theory is that it involves a developing technology which the oil companies are perfectly suited to take advantage of (that was rude of you to selectively edit this out when you quoted me). They are the foremost experts at evaluating underground geology, drilling, getting liquid up from the bottom of a well, and sending liquid back down into a well. If they decided to invest in developing geothermal technology now, there is no way anyone else could catch up to them, and they would insure that they control the gateway to an (effectively) infinite energy source. They'd have to be crazy not to do it and risk someone else taking the lead from them. Unless there are other factors hindering the idea.
Another thing to keep in mind is that with an effectively infinite energy source (with non-infinite power output), lower cost does not automatically mean lower profit. The laptop I'm typing on probably has more processing power than all the computers in the world back in 1975 combined, but does that mean my laptop is the only computer that was sold last year? No, Intel and AMD are selling more processors than they ever have. Lower energy cost just means people would come up with more ways to use energy, not continue to use the same amount of it.
It would probably bankrupt all existing car manufacturers, since electric-car competitors can be nimbler if small, and would need very little from currently patented automotive tech.
Hardly. Transportation energy sources have several requirements to which gasoline is well suited. Cost, high energy density (both volumetric and weight), ease and speed of distribution (refueling or recharging), and safety are some that come to mind. A cheap energy source like geothermal would take care of the cost requirement, but energy density (range) and distribution (time to recharge) would still remain a huge hurdle to electric vehicles. Also, most existing car manufacturers are at the forefront of electric vehicle development, and if they aren't they'd just buy up any electric car competitors to insure they stay competitive.
the technology is not fully there yet - that's what the MIT panel said would take $1 billion and 10-15 years to develop.
Right, which is why this is, as I asserted, a political problem; not one of oil companies conspiring to hold back technology.
"A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration."
Yea, so that's about six times more expensive. But wouldn't the savings be much more in the long run? And more "environmentally friendly"?
Oil wells in the U.S. are incredibly non-productive. People always think of oil wells as the geysers they see in movies and cartoons (or Kuwait during the first Gulf War). The reality in the U.S. is that two-thirds of them produce fewer than 5 barrels of oil a day. In fact, only about 1.5% of them produce more than 100 barrels per day. The average for the nation is 13.7 barrels per day per oil well.
At a crude oil price of $75/bbl, a 13.7 bbl/day well is yielding $1027.50 of product per day, or $375,284 per year. At a cost of $1.44 million, it takes the well 3.84 years to pay for itself. At a cost of $7-$8 million, it would take 19-21 years to pay for itself. That's assuming you could extract as much energy-dollars from a hot rock well as from an oil well (can't find any numbers on this, but it can't be much higher or the oil companies would be all over this since they're already in the best position to take over any market involving drilling).
The hot rock well does have the advantage of being guaranteed productive for those 20 years, but you're talking "long term" as in way past the term of any elected official. It's hard to get them to pay for needed maintenance on roads and bridges, much less make an investment which won't pay for itself for 20+ years.
Way back when I was in jr. high around 1980, my friends and I were going ga-ga over the latest issue of Byte magazine at the library. It had a chart listing various computers (processors) and their FLOPS. The 6502 (Apple II) and 8088 (IBM PC) were listed at less than 1000 FLOPS (they didn't do floating point so it had to be emulated in software). We were drooling over the Cray Supercomputer which was listed at 1 million FLOPS, or 1 MFLOPS.
A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo rates around 500 MFLOPS. An nVidia 8600GT which you can pick up for about $130 rates around 114 GFLOPS (114,000 MFLOPS). The upcoming 9800GTX is supposed to rate at over 1 TFLOPS.
Slashdot Mirror
CFRP and FRP have an advantage in crack propagation because cracks will stop when they hit a dislocation. That is, the crack will propagate until it hits an edge. If you shatter one window in your car, the cracks don't propagate into an adjacent window because the metal beams between windows are a dislocation. CFRP and FRP are full of dislocations. Every place that a fiber is embedded in the resin is a dislocation. So a crack will propagate until it hits the next fiber, then stop cold. You lose the structural strength of a few nanometers of resin since it now has a crack completely through it, but the crack's growth stops completely and the load is transferred to the ample remaining material surrounding it.
Speculating, I suspect what happened with the bike parks is that they were designed very little safety factor. That is, in order to maximize weight savings, they were designed to just barely withstand the loads they bore. When you scratched one, you damaged the fibers thus reducing the part's ability to carry a load. The dynamic load (pumping the bike side to side) placed on it now exceeded its capability to carry during its peaks, causing more fibers to fail. Eventually enough fibers failed that the entire thing broke. Cracks had nothing to do with it. The solution(s) then is pretty simple. Design with an adequate (perhaps an enhanced) safety factor, and cover or shield the material so it can better withstand nicks and scratches.
If money is being charged disproportionate to the cost of a service, that represents an opportunity for a competitor to grab marketshare by offering the same service at a lower cost. Left to its own devices, the market will correct itself in these situations. Unfortunately, we have collusion, monopolies, and buying of government regulations thwarting what the market wants to do.
If this situation persists, someone will figure out a way to piggyback an ASCII/Unicode stream into a CELP transmission, allowing owners of phones with the new feature to send SMS to each other via their "free" voice minutes rather than having to may $0.15/ea. Unfortunately, the current crop of phone companies will then collude to require this feature be disabled on all phones which use their network. This is why Google's efforts to open up the 700 MHz band up for auction in the U.S. are so important.
IMHO this is not a free speech issue at all. By continuing to speak past his allotted time, he was depriving others of their right to speak. So the free speech aspect of it cancels out entirely IMHO. The only thing at question is whether the police use of force was appropriate in dealing with the violation of the rules of the event.
Most of the games I've played lately let you completely reconfigure the keybindings to your liking. I don't understand why all software apps don't incorporate this. Yeah it could be confusing if you hop onto someone else's machine, but all you have to do is keep a copy of your keybind config file on a flash drive you carry around.
If your app requires an Internet connection or can die if it can't phone home, my experience has been that the user will often go out of his way to find a pirated version which doesn't have that annoyance. When it comes time to upgrade, the user then thinks, "Hmm, that pirated version worked pretty well last time. Do I really want to pay for an upgrade when I'm just going to be downloading the pirated version again?"
i.e. A few cheap employees from nearby stores decide to use those spots as their daily parking spots.
Oh yeah. Oops. I guess it is bad UI design after all.
Most of those commercial fishing vessels around 100' LOA are ~100 tons displacement. This vessel is only 12 tons displacement (6.8 tons of which is fuel if my calculations are correct). With that much difference in mass, the commercial vessel would actually be more efficient burning 3 gal/mile, the primary limitation being range due to capacity. I suspect the point of this vessel is more platform stability and high speed capability in heavy seas without adversely affecting range.
The emails were copied without authorization. That's a copyright violation, with up to a $100,000 fine for each copyrighted work (email). Following the RIAA's tactic of using the presence of MP3s on a person's hard drive as evidence, the RIAA's possession of these emails is sufficient evidence for shutdown notices. Torrentspy should send notices to the RIAA members' ISPs and email services for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, requesting logs of all emails sent by/to them, and asking that these services be terminated in order to stop the violations. On top of that, I'm sure that Andersen didn't just give them a copy of these emails and they sat on some hard drive collecting dust. They were most likely distributed within the RIAA and amongst the lawyers, thus making them all guilty of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.
The beauty is if the RIAA defends itself, it undermines its own arguments in the lawsuits it's filing against MP3 sharing.
I'll assume you aren't being facetious. Because with a 5% market share of the OS market, the expectation is that Apple would sell about 5% of the computers in any given market. 17% clearly exceeds that by a large margin, which is why it's great news for Apple. The flip side of course is that it means Mac sales in other markets are proportionately worse (unless OSX is gaining market share).
Apple, selling a laptop running an OS compatible with just ~5% of computers out there has a staggering 17% of the entire laptop market.
Can't believe this isn't being tagged MuchAdoAboutNothing. I guess people just don't read the classics anymore. ;)
Yeah, I had that happen at a small business I consulted for. Their flat LAN died. I eventually tracked the problem down to a cheap unmanaged switch which had a network cable plugged into it for people to plug their laptops into. Whoever used it last thought leaving the unplugged cable laying on the desk looked untidy, so they "helpfully" plugged it into an empty socket on the same switch.
"... and that is why you should measure your lumber in units of 10."
"But 10 is such an awful number to do carpentry with. What if I need to cut a timber into three equal lengths?"
"Then just set your standard measure so a typical timber is 30 units long instead of 10 units long."
"But what if I want to take a 1/3rd cut and also cut that into thirds?"
"Oh I give up. Making nomenclature consistent across industries is so damned inconvenient! Why bother? Just stick with your yards, feet, and inches. See if I care."
Consistency and convenience often end up on opposite sides of the table.
Not quite. They're still labeled in bytes, not bits. Though I suppose we shouldn't be giving the marketroids any more stupid ideas...A couple years ago I closed a business checking account for a corporation I was treasurer for at the time. I asked for the funds in a cashier's check. The teller screwed up and forgot to deduct the fee for the cashier's check from the balance, even though I had told him to do exactly that. The computers weren't as forgetful, and automatically assessed the fee. As a result, the bank showed the account as closed, but with a -$3 balance. The computers interpreted that as overdrawn and automatically assessed a additional $30 insufficient funds fee. So for months they were bugging me with letters demanding $33 to correct their error.
1985 Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
1955 Doc: Unbelievable.
Korean products went through the same thing in the 1990s. Anyone remember how crappy Hyundais were when first introduced in the U.S.? Last year they topped the J.D. Power initial quality survey for non-premium brands, coming in third behind Porsche and Lexus (though apparently they weren't able to hold it in 2007). And of course Samsung and LG are now household names in the consumer electronics market. I would suspect the Brits from the 19th century experienced the same thing with American produts.
All that remains to be seen is if China follows the same path as Japan and Korea, or if it's going to be like "made in Taiwan" which has never quite become a cachet of quality, remaining more a mark of cheapness.
Another thing to keep in mind is that with an effectively infinite energy source (with non-infinite power output), lower cost does not automatically mean lower profit. The laptop I'm typing on probably has more processing power than all the computers in the world back in 1975 combined, but does that mean my laptop is the only computer that was sold last year? No, Intel and AMD are selling more processors than they ever have. Lower energy cost just means people would come up with more ways to use energy, not continue to use the same amount of it.
Hardly. Transportation energy sources have several requirements to which gasoline is well suited. Cost, high energy density (both volumetric and weight), ease and speed of distribution (refueling or recharging), and safety are some that come to mind. A cheap energy source like geothermal would take care of the cost requirement, but energy density (range) and distribution (time to recharge) would still remain a huge hurdle to electric vehicles. Also, most existing car manufacturers are at the forefront of electric vehicle development, and if they aren't they'd just buy up any electric car competitors to insure they stay competitive. Right, which is why this is, as I asserted, a political problem; not one of oil companies conspiring to hold back technology.At a crude oil price of $75/bbl, a 13.7 bbl/day well is yielding $1027.50 of product per day, or $375,284 per year. At a cost of $1.44 million, it takes the well 3.84 years to pay for itself. At a cost of $7-$8 million, it would take 19-21 years to pay for itself. That's assuming you could extract as much energy-dollars from a hot rock well as from an oil well (can't find any numbers on this, but it can't be much higher or the oil companies would be all over this since they're already in the best position to take over any market involving drilling).
The hot rock well does have the advantage of being guaranteed productive for those 20 years, but you're talking "long term" as in way past the term of any elected official. It's hard to get them to pay for needed maintenance on roads and bridges, much less make an investment which won't pay for itself for 20+ years.
A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo rates around 500 MFLOPS. An nVidia 8600GT which you can pick up for about $130 rates around 114 GFLOPS (114,000 MFLOPS). The upcoming 9800GTX is supposed to rate at over 1 TFLOPS.