Actually I think you'll find that Kiwis, Aussies and especially the Brits enjoy the "surrender monkey" theme just as much. All of us (including Canada of course) sent troops to France on D-Day so I think we're entitled to a little fun. Perhaps Canadians are just too polite - eh?
Rather than facetious posturing, perhaps you could respond to my argument directly. Specifically, how does the removal of a legitimate option for people to pay for content help you as a content producer?
Your argument makes absolutely no sense. People who are happy to *buy* content are being blocked from doing so. Now they'll either just go without or torrent it. How does that help the content producers?
I'm increasingly sceptical of EEStor. They've just signed another "worldwide exclusive" deal with a tiny company called LightEVs for all 2 and 3 wheel vehicles. The deal they did previously with Zenn covers all small to midsized cars so they've now conceeded a big chunk of their margin to a couple of nobodies. You've got to wonder - how are these companies adding value? What's their track record? Why hasn't EEStor made deals with more established manufacturers? A single working prototype which has the performance they claim would have the majors beating the door down. I hope I'm wrong about EEStor, but it doesn't look good.
According to the BBC article it carried a 2kg payload. That's enough for a decent observation and communications platform and this is only a prototype - they're talking about a much bigger version that could stay aloft for months.
Sion Power make the Lithium Sulfur batteries and they claim an energy density that's almost twice that of Lithium Ion. If that's true the power shouldn't be too much of a problem once the UAV's reached cruising altitude. It would be good to know some more about those batteries...
Demultiplexing multiple channels from an optical fibre isn't routing. This technology could speed the mux/demux stuff up tremendously (saving a lot of cable) but you'll still have a bottleneck at the actual routers that need to read and direct individual packets.
Given that one of the oldest sales tactics in the book is to create a sense of urgency, is it possible that MS fully intend to extend the deadline but will just keep quiet about it until 1 July? At the moment, there's a lot of people who intend to buy XP Pro by June 30. It's easy money. Just a thought...
We've extensively evaluated Alfresco as an ECM solution for our university (41,000 students, 2800 staff, 500,000 web pages across ~450 domains). As a content repository and document management solution it looks great, but its web content management capabilities are very basic and currently not ready for prime time in my opinion.
For one thing there's no in-context editing, so content contributors need to be trained in an administrative interface that's often quite complex. You also can't nest templates easily so something as simple as including a common header or footer is difficult without using a dynamic language to compose pages outside the CMS.
For open source J2EE web CMSs, I think Magnolia shows great promise in terms of simplicity and usability. It conforms to the JSR170 storage repository standard like Alfresco so potentially you could build a very nice hybrid ECM solution.
OpenCMS is another mature J2EE option but the admin interface can get pretty complex.
Unfortunately Drupal, Joomla and most of the other CMSs out there just aren't an option for large multi-site, multi-contributor situations like ours.
I did some contracting for a large but surprisingly enlightened government department who had a policy I thought worked really well.
By default, all the PCs were locked down and they were all supported by IT. You could apply to have more control over your PC if you needed it (and as a developer I did), but you and your supervisor first had to sign an agreement taking responsibility for your actions.
That responsibility included not uninstalling things like antivirus and remote management tools, agreeing not to install unlicensed software, always using backed up networked drives for important files and basically fixing anything you broke. If you stuffed your machine up, your area was charged by IT for the machine to be reimaged and it would probably be locked down again. If you installed unlicensed software or through negligence did something like introducing a virus you faced disciplinary procedures.
The policy worked great. Most users weren't interested and stayed locked down. Competant users were happy to take responsibility in return for more control and those that thought they were competant but actually weren't were usually stopped by their supervisor before they got "low lockdown" privileges.
TFA quotes an analyst who thinks it'll be built on Server 2008 with a significantly pared down UI. That's actually very good news - the MinWin kernel may be nothing new to Unix users but it's a very welcome break from the bloat of Vista.
While network connectivity may be close to ubiquitous in some places, network reliability is anything but. The outage of Amazon S3 should be a wakeup call to the "cloud computing" crowd. Networks are flakey. Wireless networks very flakey.
Occasionally connected apps like Air could provide backup for data in the same way that UPS provides backup for power. I've lost count of the number of times I've gone 20+ form fields into some web app that died. Temporary local storage could fix that.
Re:If you can't store it, you can't count on it
on
Google Goes Green
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· Score: 1
Actually there are a few options out there...
Solar Thermal - The cheapest option out there at the moment. Heat up water. Keep it in an insulated tank until it's needed. Drive steam through a turbine. Works up to 16 hours a day which isn't perfect but it's better than "only when the sun's shining"
Vanadium redox (flow) batteries - Charge a Vanadium electrolyte and pump it into tanks for storage. Pump it back the other way to release the charge. Highly scalable (just add more electrolyte and bigger tanks) to many MWh of power. Still pricey but could be competitive with more research funding and economies of scale. A great candidate for Google funding IMHO.
Compressed air - Use surplus energy to compress air into an underground aquifer. Release it through a regular gas turbine when needed significantly boosting the turbine's efficiency. Not truly renewable as you're still burning gas but you still get the benefit of otherwise wasted wind power. The advantage of pumping water into an aquifer is that the constant hydrostatic pressure removes the need for variable regulation at the plant saving significant cost. Won't work everywhere though and the drilling cost would be significant.
Pumped hydro - Well established and incredibly scalable (to GWh of power storage!) but not cheap to build.
Supergrid - Spread your wind farms across a wide enough grid and the wind will be guaranteed to be blowing somewhere giving you guaranteed supply. Uses HVDC lines to minimize power loss over the large transmission distances involved.
Has there been any actual real life case of pharmaceutical intentionally sitting on a cure due to profit motives? There was a lot of resistance when a simple cure was found for stomach ulcers. Barry Marshall eventually won a Nobel Prize for proving that Helicobacter pylori bacteria was the cause of most stomach ulcers but it took him years to do it.
There's some good background on it in this interview. It gives a pretty good insight into what happens when you challenge the conventional wisdom. The medical community were extremely sceptical and resistant to his ideas. There was no great conspiracy to discredit him, it was more that people weren't paying much notice. It was only several years later when an independent researcher confirmed his findings that people finally realized he was right.
I think this is a far more common problem in science than actual conspiracies to cover things up. When a large number of people subscribe to a certain view those ideas have a kind of momentum that isn't easily changed. The thing I like about Marshall's story is that it shows that the scientific method can (eventually) work to win over sceptics. That's just not always going to happen unfortunately.
These guys have developed a microbial synfuel that could possibly be used as the blend fuel.
In the lab, their fuel has a higher energy density than Jet-A and a lower freezing point: -57C as opposed to -40C.
The technology's being backed by Virgin Biofuels and Boeing but they readily admit that they're targetting the product as a blend stock. They can't produce enough for it to be used as a pure fuel and I'm guessing the price would be up there too.
See, different definition, perfectly acceptable.
Not really. Even though this is about cellular and wi-fi networks "meshing" together, the term "mesh network" specifically refers to a network where all nodes are also routers.
A true mesh network phone would be awesome. It'd go peer-peer if the person you were calling was nearby - being rerouted by other phones in between. No fixed wifi or cellular network needed.
Sorry to be pedantic but I'm suspicious of manufacturers changing definitions. Someone should've stomped on them back when they started claiming 1MB was a million bytes...
Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home Probably not, but even a small solar panel would be very useful for circulating fresh air through the cabin when the vehicle is parked in the sun. Here (Perth, Aus) in summer it's regularly over 35C and a car cabin in the sun gets so hot (>70C) you can't touch the steering wheel. Circulating fresh air while parked would lower that huge blast of AC power required when you take off again.
In winter you could do the opposite and pump a very small amount of heat into the cabin. It's not so much about keeping the cabin a constant temperature as preventing the extremes that eat power when you first start up.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think you'll find that Kiwis, Aussies and especially the Brits enjoy the "surrender monkey" theme just as much. All of us (including Canada of course) sent troops to France on D-Day so I think we're entitled to a little fun. Perhaps Canadians are just too polite - eh?
Charging lanes that you enter via an e-tollbooth?
Traffic Cop: Mr Heisenberg, do you have any idea how fast you were driving?
Heisenberg: No, but I know exactly where I am
I think a sharpened wooden stake is called for at this point.
Can you please explain how Google made Youtube work? It's a useful service but it's done nothing but bleed red ink from day 1.
Rather than facetious posturing, perhaps you could respond to my argument directly. Specifically, how does the removal of a legitimate option for people to pay for content help you as a content producer?
Your argument makes absolutely no sense. People who are happy to *buy* content are being blocked from doing so. Now they'll either just go without or torrent it. How does that help the content producers?
I'm increasingly sceptical of EEStor. They've just signed another "worldwide exclusive" deal with a tiny company called LightEVs for all 2 and 3 wheel vehicles. The deal they did previously with Zenn covers all small to midsized cars so they've now conceeded a big chunk of their margin to a couple of nobodies. You've got to wonder - how are these companies adding value? What's their track record? Why hasn't EEStor made deals with more established manufacturers? A single working prototype which has the performance they claim would have the majors beating the door down. I hope I'm wrong about EEStor, but it doesn't look good.
Why waste money on employee benefits when you can reinvest in taking photos every 15m out here?
According to the BBC article it carried a 2kg payload. That's enough for a decent observation and communications platform and this is only a prototype - they're talking about a much bigger version that could stay aloft for months.
Sion Power make the Lithium Sulfur batteries and they claim an energy density that's almost twice that of Lithium Ion. If that's true the power shouldn't be too much of a problem once the UAV's reached cruising altitude. It would be good to know some more about those batteries...
Demultiplexing multiple channels from an optical fibre isn't routing. This technology could speed the mux/demux stuff up tremendously (saving a lot of cable) but you'll still have a bottleneck at the actual routers that need to read and direct individual packets.
Dig up George Burns?
For evaluations, I'd highly recommend downloading the Alfresco virtual appliance from JumpBox. Saves having to install it yourself.
Given that one of the oldest sales tactics in the book is to create a sense of urgency, is it possible that MS fully intend to extend the deadline but will just keep quiet about it until 1 July? At the moment, there's a lot of people who intend to buy XP Pro by June 30. It's easy money. Just a thought...
We've extensively evaluated Alfresco as an ECM solution for our university (41,000 students, 2800 staff, 500,000 web pages across ~450 domains). As a content repository and document management solution it looks great, but its web content management capabilities are very basic and currently not ready for prime time in my opinion.
For one thing there's no in-context editing, so content contributors need to be trained in an administrative interface that's often quite complex. You also can't nest templates easily so something as simple as including a common header or footer is difficult without using a dynamic language to compose pages outside the CMS.
For open source J2EE web CMSs, I think Magnolia shows great promise in terms of simplicity and usability. It conforms to the JSR170 storage repository standard like Alfresco so potentially you could build a very nice hybrid ECM solution.
OpenCMS is another mature J2EE option but the admin interface can get pretty complex.
Unfortunately Drupal, Joomla and most of the other CMSs out there just aren't an option for large multi-site, multi-contributor situations like ours.
I did some contracting for a large but surprisingly enlightened government department who had a policy I thought worked really well.
By default, all the PCs were locked down and they were all supported by IT. You could apply to have more control over your PC if you needed it (and as a developer I did), but you and your supervisor first had to sign an agreement taking responsibility for your actions.
That responsibility included not uninstalling things like antivirus and remote management tools, agreeing not to install unlicensed software, always using backed up networked drives for important files and basically fixing anything you broke. If you stuffed your machine up, your area was charged by IT for the machine to be reimaged and it would probably be locked down again. If you installed unlicensed software or through negligence did something like introducing a virus you faced disciplinary procedures.
The policy worked great. Most users weren't interested and stayed locked down. Competant users were happy to take responsibility in return for more control and those that thought they were competant but actually weren't were usually stopped by their supervisor before they got "low lockdown" privileges.
TFA quotes an analyst who thinks it'll be built on Server 2008 with a significantly pared down UI. That's actually very good news - the MinWin kernel may be nothing new to Unix users but it's a very welcome break from the bloat of Vista.
While network connectivity may be close to ubiquitous in some places, network reliability is anything but. The outage of Amazon S3 should be a wakeup call to the "cloud computing" crowd. Networks are flakey. Wireless networks very flakey.
Occasionally connected apps like Air could provide backup for data in the same way that UPS provides backup for power. I've lost count of the number of times I've gone 20+ form fields into some web app that died. Temporary local storage could fix that.
There's some good background on it in this interview. It gives a pretty good insight into what happens when you challenge the conventional wisdom. The medical community were extremely sceptical and resistant to his ideas. There was no great conspiracy to discredit him, it was more that people weren't paying much notice. It was only several years later when an independent researcher confirmed his findings that people finally realized he was right.
I think this is a far more common problem in science than actual conspiracies to cover things up. When a large number of people subscribe to a certain view those ideas have a kind of momentum that isn't easily changed. The thing I like about Marshall's story is that it shows that the scientific method can (eventually) work to win over sceptics. That's just not always going to happen unfortunately.
These guys have developed a microbial synfuel that could possibly be used as the blend fuel.
In the lab, their fuel has a higher energy density than Jet-A and a lower freezing point: -57C as opposed to -40C.
The technology's being backed by Virgin Biofuels and Boeing but they readily admit that they're targetting the product as a blend stock. They can't produce enough for it to be used as a pure fuel and I'm guessing the price would be up there too.
Not really. Even though this is about cellular and wi-fi networks "meshing" together, the term "mesh network" specifically refers to a network where all nodes are also routers.
A true mesh network phone would be awesome. It'd go peer-peer if the person you were calling was nearby - being rerouted by other phones in between. No fixed wifi or cellular network needed.
Sorry to be pedantic but I'm suspicious of manufacturers changing definitions. Someone should've stomped on them back when they started claiming 1MB was a million bytes...
In winter you could do the opposite and pump a very small amount of heat into the cabin. It's not so much about keeping the cabin a constant temperature as preventing the extremes that eat power when you first start up.