As an American, I can say living close to the Canadian border is really useful during the Olympics, so I don't have to struggle to get good coverage. CTV is so much better than NBC.
Cellular networks do not share the same frequency limitations as radio. In radio, a single frequency will be used to cover a range of 100 miles or so. This is a natural range, so that you can cross a city and continue to listen to the same station. However, you will eventually lose the station. Cellular networks are fundamentally different, in that you can regularly jump between towers (changing frequencies, as it happens) and still maintain the phone call. It's possible to drive vast distances and maintain a single phone call, while using many, many towers in the process.
The whole reason it's called a "cellular" network is because they are "cells" - one for each tower (give or take multiple carriers sharing a tower). These cells overlap, and operate in different parts of the frequency spectrum. The important point about understanding this "cell" nature is that there is no reason a cell in rural Kansas has to be the same size as a cell in downtown NYC. In fact, they generally aren't the same. That's related to why they previously prohibited (and how they now can technologically allow) cell phones on planes - there is a "femtocell" placed on the plane so that cell phones use their minimum power. The use of higher power levels can cause an overlap of a flying cell phone with multiple distant cells (using the same frequency) on the ground... and cause a whole chain of confusion (for a system effectively designed to be 2-dimensional).
You make it out like additional bandwidth (in the form of more parallel downloads) is not an economic problem. Additional bandwidth has a cost: More tower density (or at least more radio antenna if you can mount on existing buildings) using smaller cells, and that's absolutely an economic problem. (It's also a permitting problem, and in suburban areas likely a ditch-digging problem, both of which are likely worse than buying the equipment)
A few other notes:
You need to calculate 3X/Y, not X/Y, as 4G Cell towers will likely use Tri-sectored directional antenna. It's widely deployed in 3G environments, and is basically a requirement in any dense area (and also facilitates cellular 911 location when more accurate location isn't available)
There are also additional technologies that could be deployed that change the rules of spectrum usage. MIMO comes to mind. (The major problem of MIMO is much like other things in the cellular world, in that signal reflections (and interference in general) are somewhat of a royal pain and the resulting demand of processing power makes the basestations and phones infeasible to deploy at this time.)
Net is that smaller cell sizes and using additional technologies could absolutely reduce congestion, but the expense in doing so is enormous. It doesn't really change why the cap needs to exist at some level (they are up against wall, even if a financial loss wall rather than a physics wall), but we're nowhere near the fundamental laws of physics.
Have you ever tried to generate the view of what a proposed communications tower would look from your back yard? I have. While Google Earth was useful, It took me a lot of time modeling tree heights from pictures, GPS coordinates (of photo locations) and pacing.
I don't know if their algorithm/data takes in account height, but if it does, or if they add it (and it wouldn't be hard at this point), it would be ENORMOUSLY useful in my opinion. It gives resources to the population to get an accurate rendition that isn't limited to the two or three (very carefully chosen) views that have to be provided by the owning company in the permitting process.
Yeah, except... nobody owns space by international treaty anyway. So if a satellite malfunctions (or a space ship collides with one), legally it's like international waters.
There is no such thing as cheating, only getting creative with your sources. The real world, whatever your career will be, relies on the same behavior that is punished in school that they call "cheating."
The students agreed to a certain limits when they enrolled in the school, and committed that they would NOT cheat. That should be sufficient to impose punishment if those limits are unreasonably breached.
The behavior that is being discouraged is not sharing work. The behavior that is being punished is unreasonably breaching an agreement. The real world also has that type of limit. Most companies have some form of code of conduct. Part of that is likely to avoid breaking laws.
As a specific example from the 'real world', look at what SAP did with Oracle's code. It would be a breach of section 1 of SAP's Employee Code of Conduct. Seems that creativity will result in something between $40 million and $1.6 billion in punishment. That's not creativity, it's illegal.
The fact that the limits may be at different points (one set by a student's contract with the school, the other set by law) doesn't mean they shouldn't be enforced as written.
I agree the GP is wrong that the Constitution is not relevant. In fact, I think it is still highly relevant to the issue
The thing is that copyright in its current form is a social contract - you are provided a temporary monopoly in exchange for producing that thing... with the underlying principle and power being "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;". (emphasis added)
If I am prevented from EVER copying an item (and remember that DRM has NO provision to provide an end to its protection), then I ask a more fundamental question: Given the social contract and the power provided to Congress in the Constitution, should an item that is protected with DRM actually be protected by copyright? If they want to take away the return of that item to the public domain, then shouldn't they have to give up some of the protection?
The fact is, the Constitution hasn't been fundamentally broken, but DRM changes the equation, because it impacts the underlying social contract in copyright. Congress and the courts haven't caught up to that tradeoff (which isn't a surprise, as the law generally lags technology by years or decades), and may not until something released solely with DRM enters the public domain (by which point the solution may be to legalize the breaking of such decades old [and computationally irrelevant] DRM)
This (almost) all exists today, if you're willing to buy the components required. (Almost depends on who built your camera)
Kensington will sell you cell phone connectors that will allow you to charge a cell phone from a laptop or other USB power source. It also has a portable battery that can provide an additional charge for your cell phone. Or step up to a fully universal laptop battery if you want to power that netbook
Some cameras can also be charged from USB, allowing you to use the Kensington portable battery or your netbook. Google to find out if yours can be charged that way.
There are at least half a dozen systems to charge a laptop (or in your case, a netbook) from solar power, effectively making it your portable power station, using solar power as the source.
Wow, over a runtime of 204 years, the DNA copying process has an accuracy of 99.99988%, or an error rate of only 0.00012%.
While I agree that the level of change is reasonably slow, I think you've taken the conclusion a bit too far in inferring the observed rate of change matches transcription accuracy.
The reason I would be cautious about extending observed mutation rate to infer transcription accuracy is that there is likely to be significant selection bias, similar to how "old furniture" always appears to be great quality (because anything that isn't great quality is in a landfill). Any fatal mutations would never progress and therefore can't be detected by this method. Thus, the 0.00012% is a (very) loose lower bound on the transcription error rate.
To follow your computer analogy, it's like saying a program running for 204 years only produces a wrong answer 0.00012% of the time *that it produces an answer*. What you may be missing is the 50% (making up a number) of the time that it dumped stack because a bounds check failed due to an error.
OLE (1990) was an extension of Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange, introduced in 1987. CORBA was 1991. CORBA standardized (and made more flexible) the types of transactions Microsoft defined in DDE/OLE.
I seem to recall that tabbed browsing took years to make it into IE.
I have not - and will never make - the assertion that Microsoft innovates well or consistently. Microsoft frequently is not an innovator, but rather is chasing others. My point was on tabbed spreadsheets. "Microsoft has yet to innovate anything, ever." is a strong (and IMHO incorrect) statement.
On-the-fly spell checking in word processor
Trivial leveraging of improved processor speeds does not equal innovation, but nice try;-)
It is innovation. It provides benefit to the end user that reduces the amount of effort a user has to make in checking a document. It may seem trivial in hindsight (many innovations are), but it was innovative when introduced.
This is where business and technology meet, because I think you're confusing invention and innovation.
People often refer to the inventors of technology and fret that they are not sufficiently recognized for their invention. (e.g. Xerox PARC on the GUI). What matters to users, however, is not the idea or the invention, but the successful application of that idea or invention. (e.g. Apple Macintosh)
This distinction between invention and innovation is why you will see companies refer to "innovation" as a key area where they need to spend effort. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Innovation refers to an invention that is successfully applied.
In that sense, Microsoft was an "innovator" in many areas because it was often the first to successfully apply a technology.
I challenge anyone to cite an innovation from M$
XBox Live (more generally a console w/ services and playability across the Internet)
OLE
Tabbed Spreadsheet
Pivot Tables in Spreadsheets
On-the-fly spell checking in word processor
Actually, it's not even that simple. Most "high" quality furniture is still only about mid-range IMHO and subject to weaknesses in design. Ethan Allen and others who "mass produce" furniture - even "high quality" furniture will use jigs that result in shortcomings in the final structure. DerekLyons is correct. While they use a dovetail joint on corners, their half-blind dovetails tend to be rounded on the inside, and not completely square. Look at the half-blind illustration and then look at how it's done with a jig. Note in picture 5 how the insides of the pins are taken out with the use of a jig. That makes it harder for the glue to grip and makes the joint weaker in the long run.
Really good furniture only needs glue to secure it for long periods of time (if at all). Screws are typically used to hold on the top, in order to allow the wood to expand/contract with different moisture levels and avoid cracking. I have a desk & filing cabinet I built by hand and the glue is a formality. I could sit on them before they were glued and they didn't budge.
My water company is the town government, so the bill is sparse in the amount of detail it provides. My sewer charges are based on the number of gallons of water used. The sewer capital charge when building a home is based on the legal number of bedrooms (rooms with closets) in the home (I know this because I have a "study" that I didn't turn into a bedroom:) )... not sure what the capital charges on the water side of things is based on.
It is actually different from other utilities - the electric company doesn't cap how much electricity you use...
Citation needed. I say that because I believe they DO limit how much electricity you use. Here's the proof: I'm on a residential rate, E01, to be exact. I can't exceed 5kW load under that rate, nor can I exceed 7600kWh per month consecutively while remaining on that rate.
I wouldn't think anything special about Apple being missing given that IBM/Lenovo (depending on how the suit would hit based on time of filing), Sony, Cisco/Linksys are missing. A host of others would be potential targets, too.
- It isn't standards compliant. When standards disintegrate the consumer pays.
So the only innovation that should be allowed is innovation qualified through IEEE or another standards body? This way, we immediately have a race to the bottom on price? How would any company ever make money?
- It promotes vendor lock in.
So what? If you bought an SLR, you understood the consequences of the connection between the camera body and the lens - or you should have. Where is the limit? Would you propose that GM, Honda, and Toyota all be forced to use the same air filters and fuel filters? What about speedometers and engines? At what point do we accept competition is about solutions and not about making every component in a solution interchangeable?
People buy things that are "locked-in" because they work. If this weren't true, then almost no corporation would have purchased an IP phone system. While there are base standards (SIP), just about every vendor has proprietary extensions that ensure you can actually perform many valuable functions a modern phone system should be able to perform. Note that this does mean the single-source vendor can charge higher prices for additional equipment (i.e. phones), but any company that installs them presumably is saving money vs. their original phone system. So while it's "locked-in", it's still a savings to the purchaser. Decisions are a series of trade-offs, and others will not make the same trade-offs that you make.
When a market leader pulls this crap, others do too and pretty soon all the MP3 players you can buy have this "feature".
...and if that happens, I suspect you'll find it turns into a standard. Lots of things start out proprietary and migrate to standards in order to assist both the manufacturers and consumers. What are now WiFi, HTML, SIP, and many other protocols followed this path. It only makes sense to standardize if the demand and volumes justify standardization.
That's nice. They get what they want. What about those that do care about the headphones? What about those who can't use ear buds due to hearing or ear problems?
Then they have product requirements that will lead them to investigate and purchase a different music player. Apple produces a product for a specific segment of the market, they are not required to serve other segments (e.g. those that do care about the headphones)
It's different because anyone who is willing to do that exploration and failure would be considered an early adopter, and not part of the mass market. You cannot successfully sell cheap consumer electronics to only the early adopters.
This is a prisoner's dilemma for manufacturers of hardware that might be "made for X". If any manufacturer performs the qualification, the non-"made for X" product will likely be more expensive. (Yes, I meant "non-", and this is counter-intuitive to some people)
This is all about unit volumes. While it's interesting to target a high-technology crowd with a product, it is *not* the mass-market. The mass-market will flock to the pre-qualified item (even at what would initially be a slightly higher price), and drive unit volumes on the qualified part to the point where manufacturing efficiencies would actually make the qualified item cheaper in the long run.
"Pursuit of life, liberty and happiness" is irrelevant. You're quoting the Declaration of Independence, which is not binding law.
The relevant context is Amendment 4 of the Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
I wouldn't. They explicitly choose algorithms that save memory and reduce communications requirements, even if that wastes CPU time. That is rational based on overall system power usage. It is also one of the design characteristics of IBM's BlueGene system, and I would expect that to hold for this system as well.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Actually, many of them have a good basis in logic, but are used beyond their original purpose.
For example.... I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
Part of the reason there are individual companies that separated items like brokerages and commercial banking is historical structure created in the Great Depression, known as the Glass Steagall Act
Other responders to your post have pointed out various specific details, e.g. reason for commercial paper, but let me cover a more general point of view on why so many different products exist: Risk.
The issue, however, is that risk doesn't come in only one form. There are different types of risk:
- Default Risk (if a company goes bankrupt, you don't get back your principal)
- Inflation
- Interest rate risk (if interest rates change, then the value of underlying loans change)
- Tax Rate Risk (different tax rates due to different income or time)
- Counterparty Risk (risk of entering into a contract, but the other party failing to fulfill the contract)
- Secured nature of the debt (recovery in case of default)
- Opportunity cost (cost of not doing an alternative with the money)
- etc.
Looking at various products we can see how they are different. An IRA vs. a Roth IRA actually transfers the Tax Rate Risk onto the government (you pay a known tax rate, and the unknown benefit or penalty due to the future difference is absorbed by the government)
A TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Security) vs. a normal Bond issued by the government transfers inflation risk onto the government (presumably the normal bond is accounting for perceived inflation in the offering price, but the TIPS accounts for real inflation, thus allowing one to eliminate the risk of the perception of future inflation being incorrect.
We can see today that today's 4 week Treasury Bill Auction resulted in zero yield (give money to the government for 4 weeks, no interest). This presumably would mean the return one could get in a non-FDIC insured bank account (over the current $250K limit) is entirely bankruptcy risk premium.
Also there are organizations that do market clearing of bonds and stocks that absorb counterparty risk. Part of the problem with credit default swaps was that the holders of those products actually bear the counterparty risk, as they are not regulated like other products. (When combined with a lack of market data on quantity and concentration of the risks around default of bonds, this led to one of the underlying issues in the problems we have right now)
Lastly, there are also "positive" values that are priced into different financial products, such as recovery in case of default. That's why secured loans of [statistically] appreciating assets (e.g. home mortgage) are lower rates than loans on depreciating assets (e.g. automobile) and those are lower than unsecured personal loans. Same reason bonds will maintain value longer than preferred stock.
As a specific example of what is good (and bad), look for a moment at interest rate swaps. They actually serve a valuable purpose, in allowing an investor (or the loaning company) to convert a variable-rate instrument into a fixed-rate one (or vice versa). This is valuable to companies to be able to "lock-in" lower interest rates when rates fall, for example. What is risky is when someone speculates on interest rate swaps without having an underlying asset. This results in significant leverage that can be wiped out very quickly if interest rates (i
You *can* integrate memory and CPU on the same silicon die, but the overhead to do it in terms of additional error rates and processing tasks makes it economically inefficient to do so. (It is more economically efficient to build a larger cluster). It's possible (I'd even hedge likely) that we will see 3D packaging technology try to get around some of the latency. (More in my post a few years ago). However, the overall difference in speed between memory and processor is unlikely to change in the near future, so we need to continue to architect around that limitation at a system level, rather than a chip level.
The other thing I'd point out is that your analogy to "balanced" general purpose computing systems can (and should) fail for supercomputers... there is no rational reason to continue scaling in a linear fashion.
Then again, this is seriously old news. Trying to optimize a supercomputer to get anywhere close to 100% CPU utilization is known to be a problem. Others have already pointed out IBM's Blue Gene, and there's a reason it's a good example.
From Marc Snir, et al. at IBM, September, 2001 in a file called BlueGenePublic.pdf, which discussed the design philosophy for the Blue Gene supercomputer:
"Standard microprocessors are optimized for running as fast as possible one instruction stream...
Standard nodes suffer from 'von Neumann' bottleneck: computation speed increases much faster than memory access speed"
"Let's think from scratch.... in order to build general purpose systems that overcome constraints of conventional architectures. Let's accept that significant improvements in cost/performance can be achieved by building an 'unbalanced' system" (emphasis added)
"CPU is a vanishingly small fraction of total system, in silicon area, or power
It is rational to build systems with a surfeit of compute power, so as to reduce memory requirements and reduce the need to move data around It is cost effective to have a low CPU utilization"
Slashdot Mirror
As an American, I can say living close to the Canadian border is really useful during the Olympics, so I don't have to struggle to get good coverage. CTV is so much better than NBC.
The whole reason it's called a "cellular" network is because they are "cells" - one for each tower (give or take multiple carriers sharing a tower). These cells overlap, and operate in different parts of the frequency spectrum. The important point about understanding this "cell" nature is that there is no reason a cell in rural Kansas has to be the same size as a cell in downtown NYC. In fact, they generally aren't the same. That's related to why they previously prohibited (and how they now can technologically allow) cell phones on planes - there is a "femtocell" placed on the plane so that cell phones use their minimum power. The use of higher power levels can cause an overlap of a flying cell phone with multiple distant cells (using the same frequency) on the ground... and cause a whole chain of confusion (for a system effectively designed to be 2-dimensional).
You make it out like additional bandwidth (in the form of more parallel downloads) is not an economic problem. Additional bandwidth has a cost: More tower density (or at least more radio antenna if you can mount on existing buildings) using smaller cells, and that's absolutely an economic problem. (It's also a permitting problem, and in suburban areas likely a ditch-digging problem, both of which are likely worse than buying the equipment)
A few other notes:
You need to calculate 3X/Y, not X/Y, as 4G Cell towers will likely use Tri-sectored directional antenna. It's widely deployed in 3G environments, and is basically a requirement in any dense area (and also facilitates cellular 911 location when more accurate location isn't available)
There are also additional technologies that could be deployed that change the rules of spectrum usage. MIMO comes to mind. (The major problem of MIMO is much like other things in the cellular world, in that signal reflections (and interference in general) are somewhat of a royal pain and the resulting demand of processing power makes the basestations and phones infeasible to deploy at this time.)
Net is that smaller cell sizes and using additional technologies could absolutely reduce congestion, but the expense in doing so is enormous. It doesn't really change why the cap needs to exist at some level (they are up against wall, even if a financial loss wall rather than a physics wall), but we're nowhere near the fundamental laws of physics.
I don't know if their algorithm/data takes in account height, but if it does, or if they add it (and it wouldn't be hard at this point), it would be ENORMOUSLY useful in my opinion. It gives resources to the population to get an accurate rendition that isn't limited to the two or three (very carefully chosen) views that have to be provided by the owning company in the permitting process.
Yeah, except... nobody owns space by international treaty anyway. So if a satellite malfunctions (or a space ship collides with one), legally it's like international waters.
Articles VI and VII of The Treaty disagree.
Which - for reference - is different from the law of the sea.
There is no such thing as cheating, only getting creative with your sources. The real world, whatever your career will be, relies on the same behavior that is punished in school that they call "cheating."
The students agreed to a certain limits when they enrolled in the school, and committed that they would NOT cheat. That should be sufficient to impose punishment if those limits are unreasonably breached.
The behavior that is being discouraged is not sharing work. The behavior that is being punished is unreasonably breaching an agreement. The real world also has that type of limit. Most companies have some form of code of conduct. Part of that is likely to avoid breaking laws.
As a specific example from the 'real world', look at what SAP did with Oracle's code. It would be a breach of section 1 of SAP's Employee Code of Conduct. Seems that creativity will result in something between $40 million and $1.6 billion in punishment. That's not creativity, it's illegal.
The fact that the limits may be at different points (one set by a student's contract with the school, the other set by law) doesn't mean they shouldn't be enforced as written.
These rules happen to be one of the main reasons I still have cable. The Stanley Cup playoffs are nationally televised, thus blacked out online.
The thing is that copyright in its current form is a social contract - you are provided a temporary monopoly in exchange for producing that thing... with the underlying principle and power being "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;". (emphasis added)
If I am prevented from EVER copying an item (and remember that DRM has NO provision to provide an end to its protection), then I ask a more fundamental question: Given the social contract and the power provided to Congress in the Constitution, should an item that is protected with DRM actually be protected by copyright? If they want to take away the return of that item to the public domain, then shouldn't they have to give up some of the protection?
The fact is, the Constitution hasn't been fundamentally broken, but DRM changes the equation, because it impacts the underlying social contract in copyright. Congress and the courts haven't caught up to that tradeoff (which isn't a surprise, as the law generally lags technology by years or decades), and may not until something released solely with DRM enters the public domain (by which point the solution may be to legalize the breaking of such decades old [and computationally irrelevant] DRM)
2000 is entirely plausible. Sonera installed the first set of mobile enabled vending machines selling Coca-Cola at Helsinki-Vantaa airport in 1997. Read the Background section at the bottom of this 2002 article
Kensington will sell you cell phone connectors that will allow you to charge a cell phone from a laptop or other USB power source. It also has a portable battery that can provide an additional charge for your cell phone. Or step up to a fully universal laptop battery if you want to power that netbook
Some cameras can also be charged from USB, allowing you to use the Kensington portable battery or your netbook. Google to find out if yours can be charged that way.
There are at least half a dozen systems to charge a laptop (or in your case, a netbook) from solar power, effectively making it your portable power station, using solar power as the source.
Wow, over a runtime of 204 years, the DNA copying process has an accuracy of 99.99988%, or an error rate of only 0.00012%.
While I agree that the level of change is reasonably slow, I think you've taken the conclusion a bit too far in inferring the observed rate of change matches transcription accuracy.
The reason I would be cautious about extending observed mutation rate to infer transcription accuracy is that there is likely to be significant selection bias, similar to how "old furniture" always appears to be great quality (because anything that isn't great quality is in a landfill). Any fatal mutations would never progress and therefore can't be detected by this method. Thus, the 0.00012% is a (very) loose lower bound on the transcription error rate.
To follow your computer analogy, it's like saying a program running for 204 years only produces a wrong answer 0.00012% of the time *that it produces an answer*. What you may be missing is the 50% (making up a number) of the time that it dumped stack because a bounds check failed due to an error.
Purdue University http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLr_XrooLs
OLE
What did they invent?
OLE (1990) was an extension of Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange, introduced in 1987. CORBA was 1991. CORBA standardized (and made more flexible) the types of transactions Microsoft defined in DDE/OLE.
I seem to recall that tabbed browsing took years to make it into IE.
I have not - and will never make - the assertion that Microsoft innovates well or consistently. Microsoft frequently is not an innovator, but rather is chasing others. My point was on tabbed spreadsheets. "Microsoft has yet to innovate anything, ever." is a strong (and IMHO incorrect) statement.
On-the-fly spell checking in word processor
Trivial leveraging of improved processor speeds does not equal innovation, but nice try ;-)
It is innovation. It provides benefit to the end user that reduces the amount of effort a user has to make in checking a document. It may seem trivial in hindsight (many innovations are), but it was innovative when introduced.
People often refer to the inventors of technology and fret that they are not sufficiently recognized for their invention. (e.g. Xerox PARC on the GUI). What matters to users, however, is not the idea or the invention, but the successful application of that idea or invention. (e.g. Apple Macintosh)
This distinction between invention and innovation is why you will see companies refer to "innovation" as a key area where they need to spend effort. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Innovation refers to an invention that is successfully applied.
In that sense, Microsoft was an "innovator" in many areas because it was often the first to successfully apply a technology.
XBox Live (more generally a console w/ services and playability across the Internet)
OLE
Tabbed Spreadsheet
Pivot Tables in Spreadsheets
On-the-fly spell checking in word processor
All first successful applications by Microsoft.
Actually, it's not even that simple. Most "high" quality furniture is still only about mid-range IMHO and subject to weaknesses in design. Ethan Allen and others who "mass produce" furniture - even "high quality" furniture will use jigs that result in shortcomings in the final structure. DerekLyons is correct. While they use a dovetail joint on corners, their half-blind dovetails tend to be rounded on the inside, and not completely square. Look at the half-blind illustration and then look at how it's done with a jig. Note in picture 5 how the insides of the pins are taken out with the use of a jig. That makes it harder for the glue to grip and makes the joint weaker in the long run.
Really good furniture only needs glue to secure it for long periods of time (if at all). Screws are typically used to hold on the top, in order to allow the wood to expand/contract with different moisture levels and avoid cracking. I have a desk & filing cabinet I built by hand and the glue is a formality. I could sit on them before they were glued and they didn't budge.
My water company is the town government, so the bill is sparse in the amount of detail it provides. My sewer charges are based on the number of gallons of water used. The sewer capital charge when building a home is based on the legal number of bedrooms (rooms with closets) in the home (I know this because I have a "study" that I didn't turn into a bedroom :) )... not sure what the capital charges on the water side of things is based on.
Citation needed. I say that because I believe they DO limit how much electricity you use. Here's the proof: I'm on a residential rate, E01, to be exact. I can't exceed 5kW load under that rate, nor can I exceed 7600kWh per month consecutively while remaining on that rate.
I wouldn't think anything special about Apple being missing given that IBM/Lenovo (depending on how the suit would hit based on time of filing), Sony, Cisco/Linksys are missing. A host of others would be potential targets, too.
It's not like water cooling is new.
- It isn't standards compliant. When standards disintegrate the consumer pays.
So the only innovation that should be allowed is innovation qualified through IEEE or another standards body? This way, we immediately have a race to the bottom on price? How would any company ever make money?
- It promotes vendor lock in.
So what? If you bought an SLR, you understood the consequences of the connection between the camera body and the lens - or you should have. Where is the limit? Would you propose that GM, Honda, and Toyota all be forced to use the same air filters and fuel filters? What about speedometers and engines? At what point do we accept competition is about solutions and not about making every component in a solution interchangeable?
People buy things that are "locked-in" because they work. If this weren't true, then almost no corporation would have purchased an IP phone system. While there are base standards (SIP), just about every vendor has proprietary extensions that ensure you can actually perform many valuable functions a modern phone system should be able to perform. Note that this does mean the single-source vendor can charge higher prices for additional equipment (i.e. phones), but any company that installs them presumably is saving money vs. their original phone system. So while it's "locked-in", it's still a savings to the purchaser. Decisions are a series of trade-offs, and others will not make the same trade-offs that you make.
When a market leader pulls this crap, others do too and pretty soon all the MP3 players you can buy have this "feature".
That's nice. They get what they want. What about those that do care about the headphones? What about those who can't use ear buds due to hearing or ear problems?
Then they have product requirements that will lead them to investigate and purchase a different music player. Apple produces a product for a specific segment of the market, they are not required to serve other segments (e.g. those that do care about the headphones)
So how is waiting any different except ...
It's different because anyone who is willing to do that exploration and failure would be considered an early adopter, and not part of the mass market. You cannot successfully sell cheap consumer electronics to only the early adopters.
This is a prisoner's dilemma for manufacturers of hardware that might be "made for X". If any manufacturer performs the qualification, the non-"made for X" product will likely be more expensive. (Yes, I meant "non-", and this is counter-intuitive to some people)
This is all about unit volumes. While it's interesting to target a high-technology crowd with a product, it is *not* the mass-market. The mass-market will flock to the pre-qualified item (even at what would initially be a slightly higher price), and drive unit volumes on the qualified part to the point where manufacturing efficiencies would actually make the qualified item cheaper in the long run.
"Pursuit of life, liberty and happiness" is irrelevant. You're quoting the Declaration of Independence, which is not binding law.
The relevant context is Amendment 4 of the Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."
Consider that IBM's original BlueGene was 1M processor cores in 96 racks (and designed in 1997) and 1.6M cores seems in the range of what I'd expect.
I wouldn't. They explicitly choose algorithms that save memory and reduce communications requirements, even if that wastes CPU time. That is rational based on overall system power usage. It is also one of the design characteristics of IBM's BlueGene system, and I would expect that to hold for this system as well.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Actually, many of them have a good basis in logic, but are used beyond their original purpose.
For example.... I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
Part of the reason there are individual companies that separated items like brokerages and commercial banking is historical structure created in the Great Depression, known as the Glass Steagall Act
Other responders to your post have pointed out various specific details, e.g. reason for commercial paper, but let me cover a more general point of view on why so many different products exist: Risk.
The issue, however, is that risk doesn't come in only one form. There are different types of risk:
- Default Risk (if a company goes bankrupt, you don't get back your principal)
- Inflation
- Interest rate risk (if interest rates change, then the value of underlying loans change)
- Tax Rate Risk (different tax rates due to different income or time)
- Counterparty Risk (risk of entering into a contract, but the other party failing to fulfill the contract)
- Secured nature of the debt (recovery in case of default)
- Opportunity cost (cost of not doing an alternative with the money)
- etc.
Looking at various products we can see how they are different. An IRA vs. a Roth IRA actually transfers the Tax Rate Risk onto the government (you pay a known tax rate, and the unknown benefit or penalty due to the future difference is absorbed by the government)
A TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Security) vs. a normal Bond issued by the government transfers inflation risk onto the government (presumably the normal bond is accounting for perceived inflation in the offering price, but the TIPS accounts for real inflation, thus allowing one to eliminate the risk of the perception of future inflation being incorrect.
We can see today that today's 4 week Treasury Bill Auction resulted in zero yield (give money to the government for 4 weeks, no interest). This presumably would mean the return one could get in a non-FDIC insured bank account (over the current $250K limit) is entirely bankruptcy risk premium.
Also there are organizations that do market clearing of bonds and stocks that absorb counterparty risk. Part of the problem with credit default swaps was that the holders of those products actually bear the counterparty risk, as they are not regulated like other products. (When combined with a lack of market data on quantity and concentration of the risks around default of bonds, this led to one of the underlying issues in the problems we have right now)
Lastly, there are also "positive" values that are priced into different financial products, such as recovery in case of default. That's why secured loans of [statistically] appreciating assets (e.g. home mortgage) are lower rates than loans on depreciating assets (e.g. automobile) and those are lower than unsecured personal loans. Same reason bonds will maintain value longer than preferred stock.
As a specific example of what is good (and bad), look for a moment at interest rate swaps. They actually serve a valuable purpose, in allowing an investor (or the loaning company) to convert a variable-rate instrument into a fixed-rate one (or vice versa). This is valuable to companies to be able to "lock-in" lower interest rates when rates fall, for example. What is risky is when someone speculates on interest rate swaps without having an underlying asset. This results in significant leverage that can be wiped out very quickly if interest rates (i
The other thing I'd point out is that your analogy to "balanced" general purpose computing systems can (and should) fail for supercomputers... there is no rational reason to continue scaling in a linear fashion.
Then again, this is seriously old news. Trying to optimize a supercomputer to get anywhere close to 100% CPU utilization is known to be a problem. Others have already pointed out IBM's Blue Gene, and there's a reason it's a good example.
From Marc Snir, et al. at IBM, September, 2001 in a file called BlueGenePublic.pdf, which discussed the design philosophy for the Blue Gene supercomputer:
"Standard microprocessors are optimized for running as fast as possible one instruction stream...
Standard nodes suffer from 'von Neumann' bottleneck: computation speed increases much faster than memory access speed"
"Let's think from scratch.... in order to build general purpose systems that overcome constraints of conventional architectures.
Let's accept that significant improvements in cost/performance can be achieved by building an 'unbalanced' system" (emphasis added)
"CPU is a vanishingly small fraction of total system, in silicon area, or power
It is rational to build systems with a surfeit of compute power, so as to reduce memory requirements and reduce the need to move data around
It is cost effective to have a low CPU utilization"