My understanding is that pure carbon things sublimate into CO2 over time (including diamonds) when exposed to oxygen.
Your understanding is wrong. First of all, that is not sublimation, it's oxidation. Carbon has highest sublimation point (3915 K) of all the elements. At standard pressure, it has no melting point! (The triple point is 4600 K (4327C) at 10800 kPa). It's insanely stable against sublimation.
Furthermore, the rate at which diamonds "oxidize" is pretty darn slow. FWIW, Diamonds are thermodynamically unstable under standard conditions and are slowly transforming into graphite, even in the absense of oxygen. However, both of these processes are so slow (i.e. typically hundreds of millions of years) that for nearly all practical purposes, they can be ignored.
It turns out you can save a lot of energy by having modern multi-core processors handle the same work-load as a single core because they can clock down and use lower voltages. Two cores running at 550MHz each use 40% less energy than one core running at 1GHz. Similar power savings can be made with 4 cores running at lower speeds and lower voltages on multithreaded workloads.
Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'. Even
more important, the 'experts' often don't agree on even the basics. Witness
all the various religions and factions thereof.
Furthermore, "faith" often requires belief *DESPITE* obvious evidence to the contrary. Science does not.
Your average game will use one core to keep the port to current generation of consoles simple.
Ummm... that might have been a current or valid point 5-6 years ago with PS2 and XBOX but not today.
Speaking as a game programmer, most of the industry has been working for years on optimizing games for multiple cores. The current generation of consoles (XBOX 360 and PS3) are multicore and the next generation promises to have even more cores. Heck even handheld gaming systems (Sony NGP has 4 cores), portables, tablets (iPad2 is dual-core), and phones are going multicore.
Actually Apple is a mobile device company and views itself as such. Less than 4% of their revenue came from software sales. As a matter of fact, Apple made twice as much on media (iTunes music and videos) as it did on software sales (including apps). The app market is growing but the cash cow that powers apple with nearly 60% of it's revenue is hardware sales of mobile iOS devices: iPod / iPhone / iPad. If you count hardware sales of laptops (another portable device), then you have 75% of their revenue coming from mobile / portable devices.
MS took years to overcome bad image problems with Windows ME. Same with VISTA. People still buy windows machines but the VISTA issues definitely caused them a lot of sales in people refusing to upgrade from XP to Windows 7.
Tablets (the separate species from TabletPCs) are meant to be take-anywhere devices. That iPod or Android phone in your pocket? That's a tablet.
Yup... and iPad is competing in the "book" space not pocket space. Something you can take easily in a book bag. It ways 1.3 lbs and has a touchscreen. Last time I checked, $$300 laptops where about 5-6 lbs about 3X thicker than an iPad. Lugging an extra 5-6 lbs in a bookbag is a lot more noticeable than lugging around 19 oz.
I've largely stopped buying TV dinners since I can't recycle the plastic trays.
The plastic trays in most food products I buy have a recycle symbol on them and it's quite easy to clean and rinse the tray yourself before placing it in the recycling bin and then it it perfectly recyclable. The problem is that if you put in a dirty tray with food all over it, it causes contamination that requires that the whole recycling bin is thrown into the garbage.
From my link:
Contamination occurs when a recyclable item is made non-recyclable and can happen in several ways:
Food waste – wash containers. When a plastic tray from prepackaged meals/TV dinner is placed in the recycle cart with food still on it contamination happens. The entire recycling cart is contaminated and all items go in the trash. Rinsing/washing recyclables keeps items recyclable, plus it keeps your recycle cart tidy.
Hey, I visited that fountain last weekend while visiting the Lucas Film campus in the Presidio. I was giving a talk on Multicore Memory Management in Mortal Kombat at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Plus I posted the picture on my facebook, can I get the frontpage of Slashdot now please ?
Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20.
Ummm... you are off on the price by a factor of 20X. Angry Birds is worth the $0.99 they charge for it -- no one in their right mind would pay $20 for it.
Just like the music industry, the electronic distribution of books has the publishers running scared. Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever. They can self-publish with little to no overhead and keep the profits for themselves. $9.95 (or more, oftentimes) is an abso-friggin-lutely ridiculous price to charge for an e-book.
Yeah, Does it makes sense to pay $9.95 for magical e-data when I can go to a bookstore (if any are left) or go on Amazon and buy an actual physical dead-tree paperback copy for $5.95 ???
Maybe $0.99 is too cheap but it doesn't take too many brains to realize I should be paying less for simple data than the equivalent in a bound physically produced object. E-Books at $2 or $3 would probably sell pretty darn well compared to a $6-7 paperback but $10 is ridiculous.
If google cut me a check for 1337 for infosec work, I'd want to keep it in my job portfolio for when potential clients or employers ask for a reference....just saying.
Some banks like JP Morgan Chase now let you "deposit" a check by iPhone by taking a picture of the check.
You could keep the original check in your portfolio while getting the cash as well:-)
Want to get young professionals in libraries? Make an area where people can sit in comfy chairs and get a coffee while they read or surf WiFi.
Libraries could use the extra revenue from coffee shops (heck it can be a local shop, not even a chain). Have several large desks where people can spread out work or homework and work in small groups... again, with coffee.
You'd be surprised how many more young professionals would spend hours in a library if they can get their caffeine addiction served.
The problem isn't just that the Samsung is more expensive, it's that it's a lot more expensive. Even the 7" Galaxy tab is priced well above the 9.7" iPad/iPad2, and the 10.1" version was expected to be even more expensive.
A lot of the "exciting" features like dual core CPU, faster GPU, cameras, etc from the Samsung are on the iPad2. So the $800 to $499 price difference appears to be for two machines with feature parity.
And yes, I realize that the slightly bigger screen (about 5% larger) might cost Sansung more. But people holding and using tables also perceive size differently. Noticeably (both visibly and in the heft) decreasing thickness and weight as Apple has done adds much more perceived "value" as increasing the screen by an amount too tiny for most consumers to notice.
Competing on specs was the problem with iPod and iPhone competition for quite a while. Apple is constantly adding features and a design process cycle takes about 1.5 to 2 years (they overlap -- I guarantee Apple is already working iPad 3 technical ideas). If you start today with the specs for an iPad2 competitor by the time you release it, you will be competing against the iPad3. The "Specs" competitors fell way behind.
Samsung made a different mistake. They shot for a generation ahead of the original iPad. What they didn't realize is they were way off on price by charging several hundred more than Apple's base price. Apple releases a new generation of products every year with as many new features as they can cram into the device *BUT* only if the new features do not raise the cost or decrease the battery life. In otherwords, when you compare a Gen2 Apple product with a Gen1 Apple product that sold for the same price only months ago, it is ridiculously easy to see the value proposition for the Gen2 device.
Samsung, by charging $800 for their Gen1 device that appears to be close in feature parity for Apple's $499 Gen2 device, looks way overpriced.
I wonder how many 911 and 311 calls were dropped during the Chicago Blizzard we just had. Of course, in order to get dropped you would have had to get thru first. I tried calling to report a car accident I saw and I got a busy signal and couldn't get through -- this was on AT&T and it was more than a full 24 hours after the Blizzard.
So apparently in Chicago when drivers can't see what is ahead of them, they continue forward at full speed?
It's possible in Chicago (or anywhere) to be temporarily blinded by the sun while driving with very warning -- for example, by early morning sunrise reflecting off a large shiny building (with mirrored windows) into your car. In a case like this, the sun's reflection can be onto a single small area of the road even when you are not driving in the direction of the sun (such as North/South rather than East West). Also, some of the roads curve and it's possible to get a blinding glare from the sun only at a certain spot when going around a curve. Both of these can temporarily blind you with little warning and may only be an issue at a very specific spot at a specific time of day and even that time can change based on day of the year..
The spot in the road was obviously dangerous for sun glare / reflection impeding vision that morning as the previous drivers had crashed for the same reason.
Also, it's possible the victim was actually standing in the road. If they had not moved their cars off to the side and he got out of the car, he'd be right in the way of traffic at a spot where he was just blinded by glare and had an accident. Even if they pulled off to the side, it's possible he was talking to the other driver outside the other driver's window while standing in the far right lane of traffic.
With the woman's mother claiming she texted at home 4 minutes before the accident, it's possible this is just a tragedy of striking someone standing in the road at an area where viewing conditions were dangerously impeded without warning. The woman may bear little actual fault in the death.
you can get 2 TB HDD for that price or 146 GB 15K HDDs as well.
Ummm... yeah, try putting a 3.5" drive in a mini-notebook. What this $200 gets us is PC's notebooks that will be able to compete with MacBook Airs or Notebooks that can have both an SSD (for fast / instant boot capability and longer battery life) and a HD (for user storage) without being any larger. Making a notebook smaller, faster and have longer battery life is something A LOT of people will pay a mere $200 for.
If they don't want these people hanging out, why go to the trouble of luring them in?
You can read and waste cafe space for hours on an eReader without a Wifi Connection. Of course you can do the same thing with a book as well. WiFi is not part of the "lure" and turning it off will do nothing to keep readers out of your cafe.
Of course they can get your ZIPCODE. They CAN ASK to see your Driver's License or other official identification when making a credit card transaction and that has your address, your ZIP, you height, your weight, the color of your eyes, your birthday, an other personal information such as whether you are an organ donor (in some states).
What's this talk about technology? The iPad is a fashion accessory. Android tablets are not fashionable.
I wish I could mod you up. Seriously, non-geeks buy an iPad and think the device is not only sexy, but that they look cool checking their e-mail on an iPad at Starbucks. Only the pocket-protector geeks get excited that the ugly crap they are shoveling out as cheap Android tablets have an open source OS. Heck, even most of the hip geeks still would prefer a usable iPad to your typical Android Tablet with fewer features running an old OS.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that pure carbon things sublimate into CO2 over time (including diamonds) when exposed to oxygen.
Your understanding is wrong. First of all, that is not sublimation, it's oxidation. Carbon has highest sublimation point (3915 K) of all the elements. At standard pressure, it has no melting point! (The triple point is 4600 K (4327C) at 10800 kPa). It's insanely stable against sublimation.
Furthermore, the rate at which diamonds "oxidize" is pretty darn slow. FWIW, Diamonds are thermodynamically unstable under standard conditions and are slowly transforming into graphite, even in the absense of oxygen. However, both of these processes are so slow (i.e. typically hundreds of millions of years) that for nearly all practical purposes, they can be ignored.
The hobbit is being filmed in 3d? Ugh...
3d is a gimmic and it is helping to further ruin cinamatography. There are very few exceptions.
1939: The Wizard of OZ is being filmed in Color? Ugh...
Color is a gimmic and it is helping to further ruin cinamatography. There are very few exceptions.
It turns out you can save a lot of energy by having modern multi-core processors handle the same work-load as a single core because they can clock down and use lower voltages. Two cores running at 550MHz each use 40% less energy than one core running at 1GHz. Similar power savings can be made with 4 cores running at lower speeds and lower voltages on multithreaded workloads.
Faith is an idea with no evidence to back it up no matter how adept the 'experts'. Even more important, the 'experts' often don't agree on even the basics. Witness all the various religions and factions thereof.
Furthermore, "faith" often requires belief *DESPITE* obvious evidence to the contrary. Science does not.
Your average game will use one core to keep the port to current generation of consoles simple.
Ummm... that might have been a current or valid point 5-6 years ago with PS2 and XBOX but not today.
Speaking as a game programmer, most of the industry has been working for years on optimizing games for multiple cores. The current generation of consoles (XBOX 360 and PS3) are multicore and the next generation promises to have even more cores. Heck even handheld gaming systems (Sony NGP has 4 cores), portables, tablets (iPad2 is dual-core), and phones are going multicore.
Apple is a software company
Actually Apple is a mobile device company and views itself as such. Less than 4% of their revenue came from software sales. As a matter of fact, Apple made twice as much on media (iTunes music and videos) as it did on software sales (including apps). The app market is growing but the cash cow that powers apple with nearly 60% of it's revenue is hardware sales of mobile iOS devices: iPod / iPhone / iPad. If you count hardware sales of laptops (another portable device), then you have 75% of their revenue coming from mobile / portable devices.
Nobody buys a polished turd twice.
MS took years to overcome bad image problems with Windows ME. Same with VISTA. People still buy windows machines but the VISTA issues definitely caused them a lot of sales in people refusing to upgrade from XP to Windows 7.
There are large animals that can fly. In the time of the dinosaurs, there were Pterosaurs with 33ft wingspans
Tablets (the separate species from TabletPCs) are meant to be take-anywhere devices. That iPod or Android phone in your pocket? That's a tablet.
Yup... and iPad is competing in the "book" space not pocket space. Something you can take easily in a book bag. It ways 1.3 lbs and has a touchscreen. Last time I checked, $$300 laptops where about 5-6 lbs about 3X thicker than an iPad. Lugging an extra 5-6 lbs in a bookbag is a lot more noticeable than lugging around 19 oz.
The plastic trays in most food products I buy have a recycle symbol on them and it's quite easy to clean and rinse the tray yourself before placing it in the recycling bin and then it it perfectly recyclable. The problem is that if you put in a dirty tray with food all over it, it causes contamination that requires that the whole recycling bin is thrown into the garbage.
From my link: Contamination occurs when a recyclable item is made non-recyclable and can happen in several ways: Food waste – wash containers. When a plastic tray from prepackaged meals/TV dinner is placed in the recycle cart with food still on it contamination happens. The entire recycling cart is contaminated and all items go in the trash. Rinsing/washing recyclables keeps items recyclable, plus it keeps your recycle cart tidy.
Hey, I visited that fountain last weekend while visiting the Lucas Film campus in the Presidio. I was giving a talk on Multicore Memory Management in Mortal Kombat at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Plus I posted the picture on my facebook, can I get the frontpage of Slashdot now please ?
Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20.
Ummm... you are off on the price by a factor of 20X. Angry Birds is worth the $0.99 they charge for it -- no one in their right mind would pay $20 for it.
Jesus christ, it's just an IDE. You can still develop Mac apps with vim and gcc.
Without XCode? Getting a working toolchain on OS X without first installing XCode (which includes gcc and binutils) is non-trivial.
Are you sure Apple XCode uses GCC? They claim to be using the Apple LLVM Compiler 2.0: Apple LLVM is fast. It compiles code twice as quickly as GCC, yet produces applications that also run faster.
Just like the music industry, the electronic distribution of books has the publishers running scared. Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever. They can self-publish with little to no overhead and keep the profits for themselves. $9.95 (or more, oftentimes) is an abso-friggin-lutely ridiculous price to charge for an e-book.
Yeah, Does it makes sense to pay $9.95 for magical e-data when I can go to a bookstore (if any are left) or go on Amazon and buy an actual physical dead-tree paperback copy for $5.95 ???
Maybe $0.99 is too cheap but it doesn't take too many brains to realize I should be paying less for simple data than the equivalent in a bound physically produced object. E-Books at $2 or $3 would probably sell pretty darn well compared to a $6-7 paperback but $10 is ridiculous.
If google cut me a check for 1337 for infosec work, I'd want to keep it in my job portfolio for when potential clients or employers ask for a reference. ...just saying.
Some banks like JP Morgan Chase now let you "deposit" a check by iPhone by taking a picture of the check.
:-)
You could keep the original check in your portfolio while getting the cash as well
Want to get young professionals in libraries? Make an area where people can sit in comfy chairs and get a coffee while they read or surf WiFi.
Libraries could use the extra revenue from coffee shops (heck it can be a local shop, not even a chain). Have several large desks where people can spread out work or homework and work in small groups... again, with coffee.
You'd be surprised how many more young professionals would spend hours in a library if they can get their caffeine addiction served.
The problem isn't just that the Samsung is more expensive, it's that it's a lot more expensive. Even the 7" Galaxy tab is priced well above the 9.7" iPad/iPad2, and the 10.1" version was expected to be even more expensive.
A lot of the "exciting" features like dual core CPU, faster GPU, cameras, etc from the Samsung are on the iPad2. So the $800 to $499 price difference appears to be for two machines with feature parity.
And yes, I realize that the slightly bigger screen (about 5% larger) might cost Sansung more. But people holding and using tables also perceive size differently. Noticeably (both visibly and in the heft) decreasing thickness and weight as Apple has done adds much more perceived "value" as increasing the screen by an amount too tiny for most consumers to notice.
Competing on specs was the problem with iPod and iPhone competition for quite a while. Apple is constantly adding features and a design process cycle takes about 1.5 to 2 years (they overlap -- I guarantee Apple is already working iPad 3 technical ideas). If you start today with the specs for an iPad2 competitor by the time you release it, you will be competing against the iPad3. The "Specs" competitors fell way behind.
Samsung made a different mistake. They shot for a generation ahead of the original iPad. What they didn't realize is they were way off on price by charging several hundred more than Apple's base price. Apple releases a new generation of products every year with as many new features as they can cram into the device *BUT* only if the new features do not raise the cost or decrease the battery life. In otherwords, when you compare a Gen2 Apple product with a Gen1 Apple product that sold for the same price only months ago, it is ridiculously easy to see the value proposition for the Gen2 device.
Samsung, by charging $800 for their Gen1 device that appears to be close in feature parity for Apple's $499 Gen2 device, looks way overpriced.
“Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant.”
Feldenkrais was talking about physical movement but Apple applies it to their UI, products, and marketing.
I wonder how many 911 and 311 calls were dropped during the Chicago Blizzard we just had. Of course, in order to get dropped you would have had to get thru first. I tried calling to report a car accident I saw and I got a busy signal and couldn't get through -- this was on AT&T and it was more than a full 24 hours after the Blizzard.
So apparently in Chicago when drivers can't see what is ahead of them, they continue forward at full speed?
It's possible in Chicago (or anywhere) to be temporarily blinded by the sun while driving with very warning -- for example, by early morning sunrise reflecting off a large shiny building (with mirrored windows) into your car. In a case like this, the sun's reflection can be onto a single small area of the road even when you are not driving in the direction of the sun (such as North/South rather than East West). Also, some of the roads curve and it's possible to get a blinding glare from the sun only at a certain spot when going around a curve. Both of these can temporarily blind you with little warning and may only be an issue at a very specific spot at a specific time of day and even that time can change based on day of the year..
The spot in the road was obviously dangerous for sun glare / reflection impeding vision that morning as the previous drivers had crashed for the same reason.
Also, it's possible the victim was actually standing in the road. If they had not moved their cars off to the side and he got out of the car, he'd be right in the way of traffic at a spot where he was just blinded by glare and had an accident. Even if they pulled off to the side, it's possible he was talking to the other driver outside the other driver's window while standing in the far right lane of traffic.
With the woman's mother claiming she texted at home 4 minutes before the accident, it's possible this is just a tragedy of striking someone standing in the road at an area where viewing conditions were dangerously impeded without warning. The woman may bear little actual fault in the death.
$200 for 80gb?
you can get 2 TB HDD for that price or 146 GB 15K HDDs as well.
Ummm... yeah, try putting a 3.5" drive in a mini-notebook. What this $200 gets us is PC's notebooks that will be able to compete with MacBook Airs or Notebooks that can have both an SSD (for fast / instant boot capability and longer battery life) and a HD (for user storage) without being any larger. Making a notebook smaller, faster and have longer battery life is something A LOT of people will pay a mere $200 for.
If they don't want these people hanging out, why go to the trouble of luring them in?
You can read and waste cafe space for hours on an eReader without a Wifi Connection. Of course you can do the same thing with a book as well. WiFi is not part of the "lure" and turning it off will do nothing to keep readers out of your cafe.
Exactly.
Of course they can get your ZIPCODE. They CAN ASK to see your Driver's License or other official identification when making a credit card transaction and that has your address, your ZIP, you height, your weight, the color of your eyes, your birthday, an other personal information such as whether you are an organ donor (in some states).
What's this talk about technology? The iPad is a fashion accessory. Android tablets are not fashionable.
I wish I could mod you up. Seriously, non-geeks buy an iPad and think the device is not only sexy, but that they look cool checking their e-mail on an iPad at Starbucks. Only the pocket-protector geeks get excited that the ugly crap they are shoveling out as cheap Android tablets have an open source OS. Heck, even most of the hip geeks still would prefer a usable iPad to your typical Android Tablet with fewer features running an old OS.