Here in the UK, the National Health Service ditched an enterprise-wide agreement for MS Office ; a back-of-envelope calculation suggests it must have been worth around $100M a year - imagine what could be developed for LibreOffice for only a fraction of this.
Hell yes... if it wasn't for the wife and child, I would do the same.
These days if I won the lottery, I'd probably buy a local bankrupt factory (there are plenty, from the demise of the local textile industries), and set up a lab in it. And rent any space I wasn't using to anyone else who wanted a lab.
What would I research? Whatever the hell I wanted to.
They get suckered into things like "Software Assurance", where you are assured of paying every year for your software... even if it doesn't change. Hell, the user doesn't want it to anyway - they'd have to learn a new magic ritual to get things to work.
You'll have to endure the whining because all their cargo-cult learning of how to use the previous software will be invalid.
I swear, most people just view it all as some magical ritual that you have to learn by rote, rather than something to understand and use.. even if you show them a more efficient way of doing things, they'll just keep doing it the same way.
You'd be taking a song that was put through lossy compression, and putting it through lossy compression again (unless you store it as WAV or FLAC) ; some quality loss is inevitable, and the original quality might not be up to your standards either.
He hopes Oracle hurts them so they fight. It's like the principle of adding an adjuvant to a vaccine - you irritate the immune system enough to notice the antigens you introduced. Then it constructs a viable defence and makes sure they never come back.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are working on a fusion reactor concept that doesn't involve a steam kettle ; the energy output is split between a braking coil (for the high-energy pulses of alpha particles) and an onion-skin gamma photovoltaic collector.
It seems remarkably elegant, but it's really only in the research stage - if they can crack unity with their fusion process, it will seem a lot more viable.
I believe part of his point was that when you can make billions selling insulin (US market $1.4B anually in 2001, sales growing 10% a year, projected $7.5B in 2020), what incentive do you have to research pancreatic replacement?
Part of that is of course, that automated assembly (or cheap labour) puts the labour cost of construction so low, then the object is imported into a country where the labour to repair it costs a lot more, which is in contrast to the previous era, where the appliance was made in the country that consumed it (and consequently cost a lot more).
Vorbis produces a superior sounding encode at lower bitrates than MP3.
Manufacturers that support it in their players also tend to be more attentive to the needs of their more technical users. iOS doesn't have native Vorbis support ; Android does. Samsung supports it in their YP range. iRiver support it (and their players tend to have excellent audio quality too). So it's something of an interesting litmus test of the general tech-savvy of a given manufacturer.
And being a patent-free codec, you can use it in your open-source OS without even those niggling little abstract worries about paying license fees for the use of MP3 codecs (which technically, you should be doing).
Or you could take the other position - it's a "religion" tailored to provoke thinking about the nature of religion with a bias towards discarding it, which could be beneficial for everyone (if you take the view that religion is on the whole, harmful to the human condition).
Re:SORRY FACT IS MORE WINPHO USERS THAN LINUX USER
on
Linux Kernel 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It isn't. If you're counting operating systems on mobile platforms, Android beats all the other smartphone platforms.
"This man is so vain, so rich, he would spend on writing his name. The first thing this tells us, is that he has too much. The second thing this tells us, is that he works very little for it - only a man who does no work, would value his resources so little. The third thing this tells us is that he is a weak, wasteful fool. Why should we not rise up, and take what he has, when we can make so much better of it?"
But you consume water in the process - the effect is evaporative cooling. Water will become increasingly scarce in decades to come, and it's probably already a silly idea in places like Vegas, which are essentially man-made oases in the middle of a desert and only function due to immense amounts of energy spent importing water.
Increasing albedo is entirely passive.
If your location has sufficient rainfall AND you incorporate water retention systems into your roof garden, it might not place any additional burden on water supplies, but it would still be a great deal more expensive than a simple coat of white paint.
The idea has other merits, such as the increased presence of "nature" which is proven to have health benefits, the ability to grow food, which would also have health benefits, etc, but it has a much higher capital cost.
Paint the roof white first, and use the money you save on A/C to buy planters and water butts to start and then expand your roof garden.
Worst case ; instead of being absorbed on the ground (under the atmosphere), the radiation is absorbed in the air (also under the atmosphere).
So the worst thing that could possibly happen is the same amount of energy stays within the atmosphere.
In reality, you can see the Great Wall of China from space. There are satellite photos of buildings all around the world readily available from the likes of Google Earth. This demonstrates that light bounces off man made structures and exits into space, or the satellites would not be able to see the buildings. Since the light carries energy, the energy has left the atmosphere, and isn't contributing to global warming. If more light leaves, less energy stays as heat. White things reflect more light than dark things.
Ergo, this would decrease global warming as well as producing a saving on your energy bill.
White gravel might also be mostly quartz, with a high reflectivity. I wonder if the kind of gravel makes a significant difference, and whether the high surface area of gravel is an improvement over the lower surface area of a roof, because what energy it does absorb it can radiate and convect more effectively?
It gets people working, which earns them money, which they will spend, which improves the economy.
It saves people money, which they will spend, which improves the economy.
They should empower the utility companies to offer this as a service to their customers for the equivalent of 3 months worth of savings on their bills. The man from the electric company turns up, paints your roof white, and three months later your bill goes down. The electric company makes a tidy profit, the customer doesn't have to lay out additional capital for the paint and labour, and power consumption goes down.
But corporations don't give a flying monkey fart about freedom, unless it's their freedom to sell you things and exploit your labour. I guess the answer is "Yes. You are doing a good job!"
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK, the National Health Service ditched an enterprise-wide agreement for MS Office ; a back-of-envelope calculation suggests it must have been worth around $100M a year - imagine what could be developed for LibreOffice for only a fraction of this.
Because the market will bear a higher price. But it wouldn't if faster processors were available for less money.
What, you thought the price you paid had something to do with the cost of manufacture?
There's a TED talk of a guy who tried to make a toaster..
Hell yes... if it wasn't for the wife and child, I would do the same.
These days if I won the lottery, I'd probably buy a local bankrupt factory (there are plenty, from the demise of the local textile industries), and set up a lab in it. And rent any space I wasn't using to anyone else who wanted a lab.
What would I research? Whatever the hell I wanted to.
I'm astounded none of the siblings get the sarcasm here...
None of these men made fortunes from patent rights on a single notable invention.
Most notably, Jonas Salk said, when asked who owned his vaccine - "The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
They get suckered into things like "Software Assurance", where you are assured of paying every year for your software... even if it doesn't change. Hell, the user doesn't want it to anyway - they'd have to learn a new magic ritual to get things to work.
You'll have to endure the whining because all their cargo-cult learning of how to use the previous software will be invalid.
I swear, most people just view it all as some magical ritual that you have to learn by rote, rather than something to understand and use.. even if you show them a more efficient way of doing things, they'll just keep doing it the same way.
You'd be taking a song that was put through lossy compression, and putting it through lossy compression again (unless you store it as WAV or FLAC) ; some quality loss is inevitable, and the original quality might not be up to your standards either.
Look at the little asterisk by his name - he is a subscriber. Subscribers get to see stories early.
<waves hand>
This is not the troll you're looking for.
He hopes Oracle hurts them so they fight. It's like the principle of adding an adjuvant to a vaccine - you irritate the immune system enough to notice the antigens you introduced. Then it constructs a viable defence and makes sure they never come back.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are working on a fusion reactor concept that doesn't involve a steam kettle ; the energy output is split between a braking coil (for the high-energy pulses of alpha particles) and an onion-skin gamma photovoltaic collector.
It seems remarkably elegant, but it's really only in the research stage - if they can crack unity with their fusion process, it will seem a lot more viable.
Sounds like an excellent classification of his movies : "Exploding shit"
I believe part of his point was that when you can make billions selling insulin (US market $1.4B anually in 2001, sales growing 10% a year, projected $7.5B in 2020), what incentive do you have to research pancreatic replacement?
Part of that is of course, that automated assembly (or cheap labour) puts the labour cost of construction so low, then the object is imported into a country where the labour to repair it costs a lot more, which is in contrast to the previous era, where the appliance was made in the country that consumed it (and consequently cost a lot more).
And even sillier, it's not necessary - Android plays Vorbis just fine...
Vorbis produces a superior sounding encode at lower bitrates than MP3.
Manufacturers that support it in their players also tend to be more attentive to the needs of their more technical users. iOS doesn't have native Vorbis support ; Android does. Samsung supports it in their YP range. iRiver support it (and their players tend to have excellent audio quality too). So it's something of an interesting litmus test of the general tech-savvy of a given manufacturer.
And being a patent-free codec, you can use it in your open-source OS without even those niggling little abstract worries about paying license fees for the use of MP3 codecs (which technically, you should be doing).
Yes, and "MP3" just _slips_ off the tongue.
Or you could take the other position - it's a "religion" tailored to provoke thinking about the nature of religion with a bias towards discarding it, which could be beneficial for everyone (if you take the view that religion is on the whole, harmful to the human condition).
It isn't. If you're counting operating systems on mobile platforms, Android beats all the other smartphone platforms.
Operating system share, Q4 2010
* Android : 33%
* Symbian : 31%
* iOS : 16%
* Blackberry : 14%
* Windows Mobile : 3%
* Other : 3%
The Android kernel is a fork of Linux.
I would.
"This man is so vain, so rich, he would spend on writing his name. The first thing this tells us, is that he has too much. The second thing this tells us, is that he works very little for it - only a man who does no work, would value his resources so little. The third thing this tells us is that he is a weak, wasteful fool. Why should we not rise up, and take what he has, when we can make so much better of it?"
But you consume water in the process - the effect is evaporative cooling. Water will become increasingly scarce in decades to come, and it's probably already a silly idea in places like Vegas, which are essentially man-made oases in the middle of a desert and only function due to immense amounts of energy spent importing water.
Increasing albedo is entirely passive.
If your location has sufficient rainfall AND you incorporate water retention systems into your roof garden, it might not place any additional burden on water supplies, but it would still be a great deal more expensive than a simple coat of white paint.
The idea has other merits, such as the increased presence of "nature" which is proven to have health benefits, the ability to grow food, which would also have health benefits, etc, but it has a much higher capital cost.
Paint the roof white first, and use the money you save on A/C to buy planters and water butts to start and then expand your roof garden.
Worst case ; instead of being absorbed on the ground (under the atmosphere), the radiation is absorbed in the air (also under the atmosphere).
So the worst thing that could possibly happen is the same amount of energy stays within the atmosphere.
In reality, you can see the Great Wall of China from space. There are satellite photos of buildings all around the world readily available from the likes of Google Earth. This demonstrates that light bounces off man made structures and exits into space, or the satellites would not be able to see the buildings. Since the light carries energy, the energy has left the atmosphere, and isn't contributing to global warming. If more light leaves, less energy stays as heat. White things reflect more light than dark things.
Ergo, this would decrease global warming as well as producing a saving on your energy bill.
White gravel might also be mostly quartz, with a high reflectivity. I wonder if the kind of gravel makes a significant difference, and whether the high surface area of gravel is an improvement over the lower surface area of a roof, because what energy it does absorb it can radiate and convect more effectively?
It's a double whammy -
It gets people working, which earns them money, which they will spend, which improves the economy.
It saves people money, which they will spend, which improves the economy.
They should empower the utility companies to offer this as a service to their customers for the equivalent of 3 months worth of savings on their bills. The man from the electric company turns up, paints your roof white, and three months later your bill goes down. The electric company makes a tidy profit, the customer doesn't have to lay out additional capital for the paint and labour, and power consumption goes down.
But corporations don't give a flying monkey fart about freedom, unless it's their freedom to sell you things and exploit your labour. I guess the answer is "Yes. You are doing a good job!"