We're talking about people who think you need the fastest computer available to play ripped CD audio out of your computer, because slower computers create "jitter" in the audio output, degrading the signal quality.
That's right, your lowly mid-range computer, capable of pushing gigabits of data per second across it's internal bus, isn't capable of reliably feeding your audio buffer with a of megabit of audio data per second. 'Cause, you know, your computer is busy doing so much other stuff, like updating the clock, and checking for updates.
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
No, the German scientists did most of the heavy lifting. The Soviet rocket program was pretty much non-existent post WWII. The politicization of the science and engineering fields, as well as the Pogroms and purges that got rid of a lot of their leading scientists set them back decades.
I use a pay-as-you-go plan for my dumb phone, and it's roughly $5 an hour amortized out (T-Mobile only charges for minutes you use, unlike pretty much all other plans that have daily fees, use fees, monthly fees, etc...)
I also have an Archos pocket tablet, basically an iPod touch running Android. I'm in areas with Wifi about 90% of the time, and I don't use it to access the internet that often. I use Listen to grab podcasts - that's probably most of my internet usage. I use the camera more than I use the network on the thing. In a pinch, if I *really* need to look something up with no Wifi available, I have my Kindle in my laptop bag - unlimited free 3G access anywhere. Yeah the interface is rough, but it's free, and available for the once or twice a month I need it.
I just don't dig the pocket form factor for using the internet. I'll sometimes use the Archos to read RSS feeds, but if I want to check out an article in-depth I'll read it on my desktop. I like the iPad/Galaxy Touch form factor for using the internet, but the data-only plans for those are *ridiculous* Maybe a Wifi version some day.
Keep the machines themselves pretty open - let them dink around with settings, install junk, play around with stuff, etc... But have a steady-state client locked down and active in the pre-boot environment, so every time they log out and/or reboot the machine everything gets wiped and you start fresh. Keeps down on the viruses, too.
I'm willing to spend a few dollars a month for the convenience of a cell phone for as little as I use it. I'm not willing to spend $80 a month on something I use, maybe, half an hour a week.
Tell that to Bernie Ebbers, Ivan Boesky, Tony Rezko, Lou Pearlman, Michael Miliken... I could check the references in my business law book and pull out a couple of hundred more.
Even all the Enron execs had their convictions vacated.
Skilling is in jail. Fastow is almost done with his term. Causey just finished his term. Lay's sentence was vacated after his death. Not sure where you are getting your information.
Learning what materials work and don't work, how to fix things (a biggy), how to build things, the boring mechanics of just supplying the thing for years and keeping the crew sane - that's important.
I agree entirely - which is why we've already done that stuff. Skylab was up for six years. Mir was inhabited for a decade. The next step should have been either building a permanent space station, or sending robots to the moon to start building a lunar base. Instead we got an even larger, much more expensive temporary space station.
At least they are planning on re-using bits to build OPSEK.
The ISS is super cool - the idea of a permanent human presence in near-space is awesome. However, it's kind of a colossal waste of money, in terms of hard science done per dollar spent. I don't think there's a single experiment done up there that couldn't be done autonomously. I don't think we're learning much more about living in space that hasn't already been explored in Skylab or Mir.
If the point of the ISS is to inspire people, then the mission should have been more inspiring, instead of parking people in orbit for a while, which has already been done. How about sending components to the moon to build an orbital spaceyard? Launching deep-space missions from the moon would be much more efficient, if we can manage to get the machinery up there.
Leo Laporte makes fun of this happening, and it's happened before. He'll play a few seconds of some song while talking about something on TWiT, and joke on how that will get the show yanked from YouTube. It falls pretty clearly into the realm of fair use, I think YouTube has been knocked around so much by copyright lawsuits they just do whatever the big conglomerates say.
It's been proven by mid-level bureaucrats that spending money on expensive vanity projects generates wealth and jobs!
Heck, at the end of my block the city used federal stimulus money to build a dog park. It created a fourth of a dozen part-time jobs (running the toll-booth thing) paid for by money the city doesn't have. A win all around!
80MPG Hybrids: Entirely feasable using 1990s regulations on safety. This is why a 1990's Metro XFE gets 50MPG, and a modern Fiat 500 gets 40MPG.
Large Cap NiMH: Wouldn't have made much of a difference, as they were *freaking expensive* to build in quantity (building small NiMH cells was, and still is, relatively expensive, yields on the large cells was abysmal.) It's moot now, LiPolys are taking over, anyways, which is a far superior technology.
Except it's a FPS game, not a courtroom simulation game.
This is like saying that Rock Band ignores the hard work of the roadies, and after each game the player should be forced to take the stage apart and pack it up before the next round.
Building a concept car is relatively easy. Making a limited production run of expensive one-offs is also pretty easy. Mass producing a car affordable for the general market at a profit is *insanely* difficult. Basically, your quality has to be near-perfect, because one recall to fix a defective CV joint or door latch will blow your profit margin out of the water. So will rising commodity prices. So will rising labor prices. So will changing regulations. So will dozens of factors you probably haven't even thought about.
If it's easy enough to be done quickly by a programmer, there probably already is an application for it. If it's a non-trivial app, the expense in time and effort of an average user becoming savvy enough to create the app they want is probably much larger than the cost in just paying someone else to do it.
A combination of simple scripting languages, command line batch scripting, and application macros probably takes care of the vast majority of what users could possibly want to do that isn't already being done.
I knew a mechanical engineer who worked at a university. His team had to create a bunch of large brackets for a bunch of photomultiplier tubes for use in a particle detector. One guy fired up Autocad and started writing a bunch of macros to figure out the optimal way to line up the brackets on the large sheets of metal. After waiting a half an hour, the guy I knew fired up Excel, made a few formulas, and figured it out in ten minutes.
I know several people who have dealt with Groupon, and Groupon was careful about setting reasonable limits with each of them. I guess YMMV depending on your sales rep.
Itanium is far from crappy, it's a much better architecture than x86 for transaction processing. People use old software because it works. If you were a medium sized company that spent $10 million on a custom ERP, why would you spend another $10 million every few years to do it all over again? Then you get to train everyone and work through the kinks and bugs again... Most companies just want to use what works.
It's not even that complicated. Some OEM radios can be "flashed" with update CD-ROMs. This became prevalent about the time that MP3 and satellite radio head units became popular, the car companies knew there were going to be problems and hedged their bets allowing CD updates. They aren't available to the consumer, though, you still need to take it in to the dealership to get the update.
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I read it in an article in Stereophile. From their "computer audio expert" guy. It's also a popular belief in the forums.
We're talking about people who think you need the fastest computer available to play ripped CD audio out of your computer, because slower computers create "jitter" in the audio output, degrading the signal quality.
That's right, your lowly mid-range computer, capable of pushing gigabits of data per second across it's internal bus, isn't capable of reliably feeding your audio buffer with a of megabit of audio data per second. 'Cause, you know, your computer is busy doing so much other stuff, like updating the clock, and checking for updates.
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
No, the German scientists did most of the heavy lifting. The Soviet rocket program was pretty much non-existent post WWII. The politicization of the science and engineering fields, as well as the Pogroms and purges that got rid of a lot of their leading scientists set them back decades.
I use a pay-as-you-go plan for my dumb phone, and it's roughly $5 an hour amortized out (T-Mobile only charges for minutes you use, unlike pretty much all other plans that have daily fees, use fees, monthly fees, etc...)
I also have an Archos pocket tablet, basically an iPod touch running Android. I'm in areas with Wifi about 90% of the time, and I don't use it to access the internet that often. I use Listen to grab podcasts - that's probably most of my internet usage. I use the camera more than I use the network on the thing. In a pinch, if I *really* need to look something up with no Wifi available, I have my Kindle in my laptop bag - unlimited free 3G access anywhere. Yeah the interface is rough, but it's free, and available for the once or twice a month I need it.
I just don't dig the pocket form factor for using the internet. I'll sometimes use the Archos to read RSS feeds, but if I want to check out an article in-depth I'll read it on my desktop. I like the iPad/Galaxy Touch form factor for using the internet, but the data-only plans for those are *ridiculous* Maybe a Wifi version some day.
Keep the machines themselves pretty open - let them dink around with settings, install junk, play around with stuff, etc... But have a steady-state client locked down and active in the pre-boot environment, so every time they log out and/or reboot the machine everything gets wiped and you start fresh. Keeps down on the viruses, too.
I'm willing to spend a few dollars a month for the convenience of a cell phone for as little as I use it. I'm not willing to spend $80 a month on something I use, maybe, half an hour a week.
That is about the only exception.
Tell that to Bernie Ebbers, Ivan Boesky, Tony Rezko, Lou Pearlman, Michael Miliken... I could check the references in my business law book and pull out a couple of hundred more.
Even all the Enron execs had their convictions vacated.
Skilling is in jail. Fastow is almost done with his term. Causey just finished his term. Lay's sentence was vacated after his death. Not sure where you are getting your information.
It's impossible to send a corporation to jail for illegal acts that would get a person sent to jail.
Then why is Bernie Madeoff in jail? His company was an LLC.
Dear leader can write a function that can sort a list of any size in three iterations.
Learning what materials work and don't work, how to fix things (a biggy), how to build things, the boring mechanics of just supplying the thing for years and keeping the crew sane - that's important.
I agree entirely - which is why we've already done that stuff. Skylab was up for six years. Mir was inhabited for a decade. The next step should have been either building a permanent space station, or sending robots to the moon to start building a lunar base. Instead we got an even larger, much more expensive temporary space station.
At least they are planning on re-using bits to build OPSEK.
The ISS is super cool - the idea of a permanent human presence in near-space is awesome. However, it's kind of a colossal waste of money, in terms of hard science done per dollar spent. I don't think there's a single experiment done up there that couldn't be done autonomously. I don't think we're learning much more about living in space that hasn't already been explored in Skylab or Mir.
If the point of the ISS is to inspire people, then the mission should have been more inspiring, instead of parking people in orbit for a while, which has already been done. How about sending components to the moon to build an orbital spaceyard? Launching deep-space missions from the moon would be much more efficient, if we can manage to get the machinery up there.
Leo Laporte makes fun of this happening, and it's happened before. He'll play a few seconds of some song while talking about something on TWiT, and joke on how that will get the show yanked from YouTube. It falls pretty clearly into the realm of fair use, I think YouTube has been knocked around so much by copyright lawsuits they just do whatever the big conglomerates say.
It's been proven by mid-level bureaucrats that spending money on expensive vanity projects generates wealth and jobs!
Heck, at the end of my block the city used federal stimulus money to build a dog park. It created a fourth of a dozen part-time jobs (running the toll-booth thing) paid for by money the city doesn't have. A win all around!
Buying stolen credit card numbers makes you a hacker, the same way duct-taping a coffee can onto your muffler makes you a car mechanic.
It's possible to support two products at once. Adobe still sells Director, along with Flash. Heck, they also sell Dreamweaver for HTML5 development.
Now Microsoft just needs an HTML5/XAML development environment that isn't a slow, bloated piece of junk like Expression.
Metro IE lacking Silverlight support is kinda moot, as it can natively run XAML-based apps.
Streetcar conspiracy: Horsecrap - people liked cars, that's why streetcars died.
80MPG Hybrids: Entirely feasable using 1990s regulations on safety. This is why a 1990's Metro XFE gets 50MPG, and a modern Fiat 500 gets 40MPG.
Large Cap NiMH: Wouldn't have made much of a difference, as they were *freaking expensive* to build in quantity (building small NiMH cells was, and still is, relatively expensive, yields on the large cells was abysmal.) It's moot now, LiPolys are taking over, anyways, which is a far superior technology.
Except it's a FPS game, not a courtroom simulation game.
This is like saying that Rock Band ignores the hard work of the roadies, and after each game the player should be forced to take the stage apart and pack it up before the next round.
Building a concept car is relatively easy. Making a limited production run of expensive one-offs is also pretty easy. Mass producing a car affordable for the general market at a profit is *insanely* difficult. Basically, your quality has to be near-perfect, because one recall to fix a defective CV joint or door latch will blow your profit margin out of the water. So will rising commodity prices. So will rising labor prices. So will changing regulations. So will dozens of factors you probably haven't even thought about.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo //off-topic, but relevant
If it's easy enough to be done quickly by a programmer, there probably already is an application for it. If it's a non-trivial app, the expense in time and effort of an average user becoming savvy enough to create the app they want is probably much larger than the cost in just paying someone else to do it.
A combination of simple scripting languages, command line batch scripting, and application macros probably takes care of the vast majority of what users could possibly want to do that isn't already being done.
I knew a mechanical engineer who worked at a university. His team had to create a bunch of large brackets for a bunch of photomultiplier tubes for use in a particle detector. One guy fired up Autocad and started writing a bunch of macros to figure out the optimal way to line up the brackets on the large sheets of metal. After waiting a half an hour, the guy I knew fired up Excel, made a few formulas, and figured it out in ten minutes.
I know several people who have dealt with Groupon, and Groupon was careful about setting reasonable limits with each of them. I guess YMMV depending on your sales rep.
Itanium is far from crappy, it's a much better architecture than x86 for transaction processing. People use old software because it works. If you were a medium sized company that spent $10 million on a custom ERP, why would you spend another $10 million every few years to do it all over again? Then you get to train everyone and work through the kinks and bugs again... Most companies just want to use what works.
It's not even that complicated. Some OEM radios can be "flashed" with update CD-ROMs. This became prevalent about the time that MP3 and satellite radio head units became popular, the car companies knew there were going to be problems and hedged their bets allowing CD updates. They aren't available to the consumer, though, you still need to take it in to the dealership to get the update.