Unfortunately if you multiply the amount of circuitry you are trying to deliver in one fully working device, you cut your yield exponentially. This is a SERIOUS problem if your yields aren't high enough to make the exponential nature a small effect.
Say on one wafer you have 30 defects bad enough to wreck whatever chip they are on. Now normally you make 100 chips on that wafer. So (first approximations here, I won't actually do the statistics) 70 chips make it, your yield is 70 percent.
But now you double the size of your chips, so that same wafer now only produces 50. But you still have those same 30 bad defects. Whoops, your yield is now 40 percent. Quadruple the size of your die... Whoops, now you will be lucky to get a handfull of that entire wafer (you're trying to get 25 chips when there are 30 randomly distributed defects... I leave the answer as an excercise for the reader:)
On the other hand if you do the same rough approximation with only 10 super bad defects per wafer, then you go from a 90 percent yield to an 80 percent yield when doubling the die size. No where near as bad an effect on the economics.
So, the only reason they are now considering it is that they expect to have defect rates reduced enough to make it reasonably ecomonical.
-NH
My apologies for avoiding the statistics and actual mathematics, and my examples above use randomly chosen yields. I have an optoelectronics background that is a few years old, back when production yields at some places for III-V QWH Lasers with simple integration with a few other devices had utterly pathetic yields... Like 10 percent!!
> income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money
If we're going to come up with outrageous analogies, sales taxes punish people for existing, and punish the poor more heavily than those who aren't poor.
"punishing people for making money"... jeezus....
But...
Ummm...
--- brain of a long time liberal ( hell, often left wing Canadian - but appreciates capitalism and competition ) with a background in Physics ( and thus pride in logic and thought ) makes strange creaking and groaning noises for a few minutes ---
JEEZE. It's been a long time since I came across something which, upon attempting to crush it against my world of logic, results in strong challenges to my current view of the world.
I'm going to have to go away for a long while and think about this
Maybe I'm just tired, I only had 4 hours sleep last night...
I know damn well that the regressive nature is wrong, but I can't figure out at the moment what the advantages/purposes are of tax rates applying to earnings way way beyond the point where one covers the the benefits I obtain from govt (plus extra for social justice and the like) way out to infinity...
I haven't gotten to the point of even considering 'no income taxes', I think that's dumb, it's just so much more efficient to collect income taxes, and more importantly one has so much more control over the social justice of who is paying what.
BUT - I am wondering that if, once a person reaches an upper income limit, all further earnings should be tax free...?
Of course, what happens to the tax revenue when those with more income earn more...(removing income from others, moving income from a taxable area to a non-taxable one)?
God in heaven, my mind is wandering towards 'flat taxes', well not absolute flat taxes, but staggered flat taxes... but there are still boundary like issues... perhaps they can be dealt with using a sharp but still graded transition from no taxes to the flat 'amount' based upon income (and I'm talking *flat* tax - no tax rate - just a fixed dollar amount)...
I must be missing something big here. Perhaps I'm confusing the effects/implications/differences between Corporate and Private taxes...
Anyways, I know one thing FOR SURE. In terms of 'alleviating' the 'taxes punish you for making money' thing, I'd deal with it completely within the framework of the private/corporate income tax area. I'd still get rid of sales taxes. They are a blunt blunt completely flat instrument, unless you start re-imbursing based upon income, whereupon you might as well do it through income taxes. (I was about to say they are archaic holdovers from when our society was much more idiotic than it is now, but hey, that's true about almost everything in our society.)
If you poor buggers can't use income taxes, and are left with only sales taxes, and the rest of us do THE RIGHT THING and eliminate sales taxes, then I think you're going to have no choice but to implement consumer side sales taxes, whether your residents are buying from out of state or not. Here in Canada anytime we buy anything from the US, it get's 7% GST tacked on coming over the border. But how you're going to nail e-transactions that have no physical deliverable... perhaps you're going to have to stick to only taxing physical deliverables?
As I followed hyperlink to hyperlink from Mr Bezo's letter, I ended up at an article by Christopher Locke, where I found this gem of a quote:
"The 'killer app' well may turn out to be a cyberspatial locus where people meet to collaboratively develop and digest their own content relating to how they make their respective livings."
Well if that isn't a description of SlashDot, I don't know what is!
The company where I work (up here in Canada) tried this once, but then there were tax implications that sort of soured them on it.
Even if they/the-employee had to pay taxes on it (as it could be considered 'income') I don't see how it would change the economics *that* much. Probably just the a) book-keeping nightmare involved and b) the psychological effect of having an extra up-front cost, it being a 'tax' giving it a bigger psychological punch.
> So, my question is: Have they perfected some way of creating bubbles of the exact same size every single > time, and if so, how? Bubbles don't seem (to me) to be something you can regulate by size easily.
And isn't HFl the acid that doesn't feel like it's "burning" you, but instead it gets absorbed into your skin, and hours/a-half-day later as your bones begin getting their calcium burned out of them you experience severe amounts of pain?
Not only that, but when you have your GPS enabled cellphone, they'll be able to track where you are, figure out what shops you are close to, and....
Oooh, the possibilities. Right now I'm thinking about 'Intelligent Agents' for both the advertising company, and the individual merchants. I can see the negotiation now:
Your chart is accurate, up to around August 1999 that is..
My $40 CDN per month ADSL goes at 900,000. Available to 40% or *MORE* of the Canadian population. (Their problem if they choose not to take advantage of it). Less widely available but spreading rapidly are cable modems with speeds up to 2,400,000 (presuming cable-co's split loops and upgraded head-ends as fast as they gain customers).
New advances in ADSL threaten to make speeds up to 40,000,000 possible for the home user in the medium term future. Right now OC-48 backbones are the norm ( 2 Gbits/s ).
Seems like Moore's law doesn't even come close to predicting the advances in bandwidth. A web-page that loads in 8 seconds for me could contain a half Megabyte of data.
Jeeze, for something with so much storage made by a company with such resources in this day and age (what year is it?), to be so limited... it's pathetic...
I want to be able to plug this into my USB port and use it as a massive transfer device between computers.
I want to plug my digital camera into it and dump all the pics to/fro.
I want an ethernet port on it.
I want to be able to plug in an 8 inch wide 'hand scanner' (like those cheap hand drawn scanners of old, but 8" wide instead of 4.)
I want to be able to plug my PDA/Palm into it.
I want to be able to plug in my mini plug and digitize audio on the fly. Don't forget a pair of spring loaded speaker wire connectors.
Add an FM receiver
I want a microphone jack. Ah heck, give me a tiny cheap microphone as well.
I want to plug in my video cable and digitize that on the fly. And then there's playback.
There should be an 'leet' model that is a digital camera / video camera / Palm all wrapped in one.
By the time you've got all that together, USB 2 will be out, so there'll be no more bandwidth problems... oh wait a minute, I already have an ethernet port (100base-T of course):)
I think it's idiotic that we spend all this money collecting taxes in a hundred different ways. All the time and energy spent collecting sales taxes could be better spent on something else.
Instead of clamoring for net purchaes to be taxed *as well*, we/businesses should be using this as the right time to ask why we're collecting sales taxes at all when we have perfectly good income and corporate tax systems. Don't give me any bunk about 'fairness', I can't imagine any *supposed* functional distribution of tax against people that can't be transferred rather transparently within the income tax rules.
So what is the historical history of sales taxes? Did they preceed income taxes? (which didn't come into existence until how late this century?) Were they originally introduced on selected items for good reasons, and then over 100 years simply spread to all items by Governments who at the time had no other revenue stream?
Ooohhhh yeah.... I guess so. But the 'reflection' in it's upper right quadrant makes me think it's a spherical 3d shape, and so a 'flat C' gets translated into a red ocean around a blue continent. It doesn't make sense to have a 'flatish' C 'on' a spherical object.
I think they should have gone with another graphics arts firm to come up with a logo. Even after all this, their logo doesn't "speak" to me.
Heyyyy! Is that a 'G' in the Gnome logo? I never noticed that before..:)
> someone seems to have an awful lot of spare time on their hands to perform such a study,
A waste of time? GOD no! If you're the Guinness people, you've just bought yourself MAJOR amounts of free advertising for almost nothing.
I love Guinness, and when my Brother came to visit once he of course had to try it, having heard so much about it from me. He took one sip, made a queer face, and set it down. I didn't take offence, I love liver and onions personally and can understand wierd differences in taste, and besides, suddenly there was twice as much Guinness at the table for me!:)
> I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of our production machines at work.
Pardon me!!?!
You're running Win2000 Beta in a PRODUCTION environment? What kind of fools let you do this?
Or does the term 'production environment' mean something completely different in your line of work? (In mine it means gambling with or flat out losing huge amounts of money each hour the system is down.)
Bzzzt. Not if you're using a half decent PGP program. The one I have (straight from Network Associates - they bought out the guy who invented PGP, he works for them now - PGP Freeware - personal use free ) encrypts my keys using triple DES, whose passphrase is whatever long long easy to remember string I come up with(*).
I go a step further of course, storing them on floppy, so if my home system gets penetrated even these triple DES encrypted files aren't there to work on. Of course remembering to insert the floppy each time I go to use a key is a pain...
(*) - I thought it was cool, analyzing the passphrase as I typed it in telling me how secure it thought it was, via a slider bar. Each time I completed a simple word and started a new word, it moved forward a bit more, and whenever I used a non-standard character ( punctuation, hyphenation, numbers, etc ) it would leap forward even more. )
Not striving to make oneself stronger, more centered, and more stoic when necessary.... is a wasteful treatement of a life, imho.
Heartily agreed.
Be honest - you have seen more simplistic ones, I'm sure.
Yeah, but I'm always unimpressed with them too:) It always disappoints me to see humans still stuck on the simplest approximation in this day and age. I'm not asking for people to construct entire tomes, but something a little more robust than black and white.
Appologies for the tone of my reply. I was reacting to what I perceived as the tone and attitude of your reply. And I guess you were probably reacting to the fact that someone was marginalizing who you were based upon what you were wearing... Understandable. Perhaps in 100 years when there's no fear of affecting still impressionable segments of society negatively...
There was another discussion in the past two days where a URL to your pics was given, and the comments made were less than pleasant to see. What we really need are good role models *in* the locker room and other places during the impressionable years... I've been thinking lately that schools are the main places where each generation is taught what to think of each other, by the group 1-2 years ahead of them!! Like a waterfall of disgusting attitudes.. (Thinking back to when I was in HS.) Well, I'd better stop here, I have a tendency to go on and on.
It's late, I'm still internally three hours ahead of everyone else in CA. Meep.
Ack... my sympathies. Late is noticing it's 3-5am, on a workday! ( I need to get control.. doing that too often just hurts, no good at all.)
TTFN
BTW: I highly recommend this - Mind Control - nicest stuff I've heard in ages. Notice I don't get any 'commission'. I just love the stuff.
That's the most simplistic banal view of the human mind, soul, and experience I've ever seen.
Very few humans in this planet have been able to 'wish themselves' a new backbone, or anything else for that matter, and most who have it (or anything else in this world) did't get it _purely_ due to their own 'efforts'. I *doubt* you're responsible for your own backbone.
That's not to say that no-one is in control of their own lives, that it's not worth it to overcome what is, but to say that everyone is in *complete* control of their world or destiny is to ignore the fact that you live in a world created by those around you, and limited by what has been burned into your own soul during the first 20 years of your life.
Congrats on having the inner strength and confidence that you do have. My sympathies for your lack of depth elsewhere.
I've seen red pots and green pots and yellow pots. In fact I'm in the pot painting business myself. I've painted a couple crappy black pots, but also quite a few nice colorful ones.
I have never in my life seen a Kettle that wasn't black. Not just black, but the Kettle PR department spends all it's time and money convincing my Mom that their pretty 'dark brown' kettles are the best.
The Kettles have always been black. This kettle is black. I expect the next kettle I see to be black.
If I get the gist of this, does this mean I have to call my birdhouse a hammer-saw-nail-board-Birdhouse? Or my toolbox a Hammer-Screwdriver-Toolbox?
Since when are we obligated to prepend the name of anything used in the construction of something to the name of what we are constructing? Isn't that almost as silly as that licence (Berkley?) which required the never-ending prepending of statements which threatened to become rediculously infinite?
(or perhaps I don't have the gist of what is being talked about...)
> PROBLEMS: > > Had difficulty telneting into meteorite computer. > Power cycled computer several times before we > were able to connect to it.
That's an NT box. And this from the 28ths logs.
> SUMMARY: Tried to do more testing in the moraine > but the science computer was failing preventing > these tests. Nomad was driven back to camp. Extra > spectra were taken in camp by placing rocks in > front of Nomad and manually moving the arm.
If I'm not mistaken, that's likely another NT box, unless it's the VME 68060... I'm not clear on which system controls the robot arm.
What strikes me is how slow this thing is going. It's a _big_ machine, and it's not going on solar power, and it's got three fast computers, just what's holding it up? Is it all the time spent doing the analysis of all the rocks it finds?
I had started to reply to this, listing some webpages which I could see stuff with Javascript turned off (once I had used the Javascript to navagate in with*).
But then I noticed the contest with it's 'first 200 successful internet pilots' win, and the pointer to the VRML, and I began to wonder if this wasn't all a bit gimicky... and THEN when I tried to skip the VRML, they crashed my NN4.7 browser and I lost my partially composed post.
So you're getting diddly. I'm not paying them much more mind until I see it in a mainstream article, preferrably NewScientist or something similar.
(*) I don't know whether turning off Javascript in NN4.7 is similar enough to what IE 3 will do for you, but there were still a few URLs stuck in my OS copy and paste. Try these.
This seems to be a chronic failing of Governments. Utterly failing to detect and respond to gross understaffing or changing circumstances in anything approaching a resonable timeframe.
I understand that in the quest for efficiency and financial security they want to squeeze out every penny in 'fat', but why are they so inept at detecting life affecting and even life threatening shifts in the requirements and responding? (Let alone anything less dramagic.)
Here in Ontario Canada the death of a young man hasn't even really gotten much of a response from the Provincial government in terms of upping emergency room resources (at any given time a huge fraction of the emergency rooms are 'closed' due to overfilling).
These aren't situations that 'pop up'. This has been building for a half a year!
The important question is, what needs to be done, institutionally and bureaucratically, to allow our governments to respond to things like these?
Do they need to create special 'response' departments whose sole responsibility is to analyze reported shortages of any type of 'services' and 'resources' and independently and publicly report what needs to be done and how quickly to avoid such idioticly drawn out situations that screw up entire human lives?
I agree with the court's decision. I don't have a way out of this situation, but I do agree that encrypted data shouldn't be returned (until it's been decrypted), and yet he shouldn't be punished an extra amount for not revealing the key, unless that is that they have other evidence proving that something important is in there, akin to a bank robber refusing to identify where he hid the loot, or on the other hand a bank robber identifying where the loot is and so getting a smaller sentence. (Sorry, the bank robber *might* not be the best analogy.)
I think I have a better analogy... If there was a safe in your home when they raided you, and it was *impossible* for them to open it, what would be the current procedures? They certainly wouldn't be under any obligation to return it to you.
> Granted, my percentage figures can't be accurate
No no, it's your MATH that can't be accurate.
2000/month * $4000 * 20% = $1,600,000/month
* 10% = $160,000 / month = $1,920,000 / year
So that puts you only $200,000 per year in the hole. Not bad for a patent factory.
One other important thing: Often these days if you took the software off of the hardware, you might save 2.1 million per year in software development costs, and reduce the price of the product by 10%, but guess what happens if the lack of that software means you lose 2% of your shipped volume because people consider not getting that software a deciding factor in choosing you or your competition?
Well, it means you lose 2% of your gross profit, which is 2% of $1,600,000 / month = $32,000 / month = $384,000 / year.
So you go from losing $200,000 per year to losing $400,000 per year. That's not exactly an improvement. And it gets MUCH worse if you actually lose more than 2% of sales.
Of course, the reverse could be true. Perhaps your customers are more sensitive to that 10% price difference than they are to the existence of your software.
This marketing lesson was brought to you by the allmighty dollar sign and the number 5,000,000,000.
Slashdot Mirror
> SMP on a single chip is an obvious advance.
Unfortunately if you multiply the amount of circuitry you are trying to deliver in one fully working device, you cut your yield exponentially. This is a SERIOUS problem if your yields aren't high enough to make the exponential nature a small effect.
Say on one wafer you have 30 defects bad enough to wreck whatever chip they are on. Now normally you make 100 chips on that wafer. So (first approximations here, I won't actually do the statistics) 70 chips make it, your yield is 70 percent.
But now you double the size of your chips, so that same wafer now only produces 50. But you still have those same 30 bad defects. Whoops, your yield is now 40 percent. Quadruple the size of your die... Whoops, now you will be lucky to get a handfull of that entire wafer (you're trying to get 25 chips when there are 30 randomly distributed defects... I leave the answer as an excercise for the reader :)
On the other hand if you do the same rough approximation with only 10 super bad defects per wafer, then you go from a 90 percent yield to an 80 percent yield when doubling the die size. No where near as bad an effect on the economics.
So, the only reason they are now considering it is that they expect to have defect rates reduced enough to make it reasonably ecomonical.
-NH
My apologies for avoiding the statistics and actual mathematics, and my examples above use randomly chosen yields. I have an optoelectronics background that is a few years old, back when production yields at some places for III-V QWH Lasers with simple integration with a few other devices had utterly pathetic yields... Like 10 percent!!
> income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money
If we're going to come up with outrageous analogies, sales taxes punish people for existing, and punish the poor more heavily than those who aren't poor.
"punishing people for making money"... jeezus....
But...
Ummm...
--- brain of a long time liberal ( hell, often left wing Canadian - but appreciates capitalism and competition ) with a background in Physics ( and thus pride in logic and thought ) makes strange creaking and groaning noises for a few minutes ---
JEEZE. It's been a long time since I came across something which, upon attempting to crush it against my world of logic, results in strong challenges to my current view of the world.
I'm going to have to go away for a long while and think about this
Maybe I'm just tired, I only had 4 hours sleep last night...
I know damn well that the regressive nature is wrong, but I can't figure out at the moment what the advantages/purposes are of tax rates applying to earnings way way beyond the point where one covers the the benefits I obtain from govt (plus extra for social justice and the like) way out to infinity...
I haven't gotten to the point of even considering 'no income taxes', I think that's dumb, it's just so much more efficient to collect income taxes, and more importantly one has so much more control over the social justice of who is paying what.
BUT - I am wondering that if, once a person reaches an upper income limit, all further earnings should be tax free...?
Of course, what happens to the tax revenue when those with more income earn more...(removing income from others, moving income from a taxable area to a non-taxable one)?
God in heaven, my mind is wandering towards 'flat taxes', well not absolute flat taxes, but staggered flat taxes... but there are still boundary like issues... perhaps they can be dealt with using a sharp but still graded transition from no taxes to the flat 'amount' based upon income (and I'm talking *flat* tax - no tax rate - just a fixed dollar amount)...
I must be missing something big here. Perhaps I'm confusing the effects/implications/differences between Corporate and Private taxes...
Anyways, I know one thing FOR SURE. In terms of 'alleviating' the 'taxes punish you for making money' thing, I'd deal with it completely within the framework of the private/corporate income tax area. I'd still get rid of sales taxes. They are a blunt blunt completely flat instrument, unless you start re-imbursing based upon income, whereupon you might as well do it through income taxes. (I was about to say they are archaic holdovers from when our society was much more idiotic than it is now, but hey, that's true about almost everything in our society.)
If you poor buggers can't use income taxes, and are left with only sales taxes, and the rest of us do THE RIGHT THING and eliminate sales taxes, then I think you're going to have no choice but to implement consumer side sales taxes, whether your residents are buying from out of state or not. Here in Canada anytime we buy anything from the US, it get's 7% GST tacked on coming over the border. But how you're going to nail e-transactions that have no physical deliverable... perhaps you're going to have to stick to only taxing physical deliverables?
As I followed hyperlink to hyperlink from Mr Bezo's letter, I ended up at an article by Christopher Locke, where I found this gem of a quote:
Well if that isn't a description of SlashDot, I don't know what is!
The company where I work (up here in Canada) tried this once, but then there were tax implications that sort of soured them on it.
Even if they/the-employee had to pay taxes on it (as it could be considered 'income') I don't see how it would change the economics *that* much. Probably just the a) book-keeping nightmare involved and b) the psychological effect of having an extra up-front cost, it being a 'tax' giving it a bigger psychological punch.
> it cost me fifteen times what it would have cost via USPS
Here in Canada, it's ILLEGAL for a private company to offer delivery of small mail like items for below $7-8. Guaranteed monopoly.
Many years back this kept coming up as an example of something that should be changed. I haven't heard anything of it lately though.
> So, my question is: Have they perfected some way of creating bubbles of the exact same size every single
> time, and if so, how? Bubbles don't seem (to me) to be something you can regulate by size easily.
Think Inkjet and Bubblejet printers!
And isn't HFl the acid that doesn't feel like it's "burning" you, but instead it gets absorbed into your skin, and hours/a-half-day later as your bones begin getting their calcium burned out of them you experience severe amounts of pain?
Not only that, but when you have your GPS enabled cellphone, they'll be able to track where you are, figure out what shops you are close to, and....
Oooh, the possibilities. Right now I'm thinking about 'Intelligent Agents' for both the advertising company, and the individual merchants. I can see the negotiation now:
ADSYSTEM534 : HELO SEARS284
...
.. etc
SEARS284 : ACK ADSYSTEM534
ADSYSTEM534 : CUSTOMER 32ft x 270 degrees, 2mph
SEARS284 : ACK - LEATHERandFOOTWARE Quotient
ADSYSTEM534 : INCOME 65000, MARRIED, LEATHERandFOOTWEAR 83.6, last purchases: 8mo self, 6mo spouse, 2 and 3 mo children
SEARS284 : ACK BARGAIN
ADSYSTEM534 : 2.3 cents initial, comission 5 cents per 60 seconds linger
SEARS284 : ACK NEGATIVE, comission 3 cents per 60 seconds linger
ADSYSTEM534 : ACK STANDBY
ADSYSTEM534 : HELO EDDIEBAUER86
EDDIEBAUER86: ACK ADSYSETM534
Well, as long as they can't tell what direction my head is turned...
Your chart is accurate, up to around August 1999 that is..
My $40 CDN per month ADSL goes at 900,000. Available to 40% or *MORE* of the Canadian population. (Their problem if they choose not to take advantage of it). Less widely available but spreading rapidly are cable modems with speeds up to 2,400,000 (presuming cable-co's split loops and upgraded head-ends as fast as they gain customers).
New advances in ADSL threaten to make speeds up to 40,000,000 possible for the home user in the medium term future. Right now OC-48 backbones are the norm ( 2 Gbits/s ).
Seems like Moore's law doesn't even come close to predicting the advances in bandwidth. A web-page that loads in 8 seconds for me could contain a half Megabyte of data.
Jeeze, for something with so much storage made by a company with such resources in this day and age (what year is it?), to be so limited... it's pathetic...
Gimme gimme gimme :)
I think it's idiotic that we spend all this money collecting taxes in a hundred different ways. All the time and energy spent collecting sales taxes could be better spent on something else.
Instead of clamoring for net purchaes to be taxed *as well*, we/businesses should be using this as the right time to ask why we're collecting sales taxes at all when we have perfectly good income and corporate tax systems. Don't give me any bunk about 'fairness', I can't imagine any *supposed* functional distribution of tax against people that can't be transferred rather transparently within the income tax rules.
So what is the historical history of sales taxes? Did they preceed income taxes? (which didn't come into existence until how late this century?) Were they originally introduced on selected items for good reasons, and then over 100 years simply spread to all items by Governments who at the time had no other revenue stream?
I thought it was funny.. the first time I saw it.
Looks like there are still lots of people who haven't seen it though, as it has so far managed to get 7 positive moderations (versus 8 negative...)
That's a 'C'?!?!
Ooohhhh yeah.... I guess so. But the 'reflection' in it's upper right quadrant makes me think it's a spherical 3d shape, and so a 'flat C' gets translated into a red ocean around a blue continent. It doesn't make sense to have a 'flatish' C 'on' a spherical object.
I think they should have gone with another graphics arts firm to come up with a logo. Even after all this, their logo doesn't "speak" to me.
Heyyyy! Is that a 'G' in the Gnome logo? I never noticed that before.. :)
> someone seems to have an awful lot of spare time on their hands to perform such a study,
A waste of time? GOD no! If you're the Guinness people, you've just bought yourself MAJOR amounts of free advertising for almost nothing.
I love Guinness, and when my Brother came to visit once he of course had to try it, having heard so much about it from me. He took one sip, made a queer face, and set it down. I didn't take offence, I love liver and onions personally and can understand wierd differences in taste, and besides, suddenly there was twice as much Guinness at the table for me! :)
> I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of our production machines at work.
Pardon me!!?!
You're running Win2000 Beta in a PRODUCTION environment? What kind of fools let you do this?
Or does the term 'production environment' mean something completely different in your line of work? (In mine it means gambling with or flat out losing huge amounts of money each hour the system is down.)
Bzzzt. Not if you're using a half decent PGP program. The one I have (straight from Network Associates - they bought out the guy who invented PGP, he works for them now - PGP Freeware - personal use free ) encrypts my keys using triple DES, whose passphrase is whatever long long easy to remember string I come up with(*).
I go a step further of course, storing them on floppy, so if my home system gets penetrated even these triple DES encrypted files aren't there to work on. Of course remembering to insert the floppy each time I go to use a key is a pain...
(*) - I thought it was cool, analyzing the passphrase as I typed it in telling me how secure it thought it was, via a slider bar. Each time I completed a simple word and started a new word, it moved forward a bit more, and whenever I used a non-standard character ( punctuation, hyphenation, numbers, etc ) it would leap forward even more. )
Heartily agreed.
Be honest - you have seen more simplistic ones, I'm sure.
Yeah, but I'm always unimpressed with them too :) It always disappoints me to see humans still stuck on the simplest approximation in this day and age. I'm not asking for people to construct entire tomes, but something a little more robust than black and white.
Appologies for the tone of my reply. I was reacting to what I perceived as the tone and attitude of your reply. And I guess you were probably reacting to the fact that someone was marginalizing who you were based upon what you were wearing... Understandable. Perhaps in 100 years when there's no fear of affecting still impressionable segments of society negatively...
There was another discussion in the past two days where a URL to your pics was given, and the comments made were less than pleasant to see. What we really need are good role models *in* the locker room and other places during the impressionable years... I've been thinking lately that schools are the main places where each generation is taught what to think of each other, by the group 1-2 years ahead of them!! Like a waterfall of disgusting attitudes.. (Thinking back to when I was in HS.) Well, I'd better stop here, I have a tendency to go on and on.
It's late, I'm still internally three hours ahead of everyone else in CA. Meep.
Ack... my sympathies. Late is noticing it's 3-5am, on a workday! ( I need to get control.. doing that too often just hurts, no good at all.)
TTFN
BTW: I highly recommend this - Mind Control - nicest stuff I've heard in ages. Notice I don't get any 'commission'. I just love the stuff.
Very few humans in this planet have been able to 'wish themselves' a new backbone, or anything else for that matter, and most who have it (or anything else in this world) did't get it _purely_ due to their own 'efforts'. I *doubt* you're responsible for your own backbone.
That's not to say that no-one is in control of their own lives, that it's not worth it to overcome what is, but to say that everyone is in *complete* control of their world or destiny is to ignore the fact that you live in a world created by those around you, and limited by what has been burned into your own soul during the first 20 years of your life.
Congrats on having the inner strength and confidence that you do have. My sympathies for your lack of depth elsewhere.
I have never in my life seen a Kettle that wasn't black. Not just black, but the Kettle PR department spends all it's time and money convincing my Mom that their pretty 'dark brown' kettles are the best.
The Kettles have always been black. This kettle is black. I expect the next kettle I see to be black.
Kettles are black, and I'm calling them on it.
Since when are we obligated to prepend the name of anything used in the construction of something to the name of what we are constructing? Isn't that almost as silly as that licence (Berkley?) which required the never-ending prepending of statements which threatened to become rediculously infinite?
(or perhaps I don't have the gist of what is being talked about...)
> PROBLEMS:
>
> Had difficulty telneting into meteorite computer.
> Power cycled computer several times before we
> were able to connect to it.
That's an NT box. And this from the 28ths logs.
> SUMMARY: Tried to do more testing in the moraine
> but the science computer was failing preventing
> these tests. Nomad was driven back to camp. Extra
> spectra were taken in camp by placing rocks in
> front of Nomad and manually moving the arm.
If I'm not mistaken, that's likely another NT box, unless it's the VME 68060... I'm not clear on which system controls the robot arm.
What strikes me is how slow this thing is going. It's a _big_ machine, and it's not going on solar power, and it's got three fast computers, just what's holding it up? Is it all the time spent doing the analysis of all the rocks it finds?
But then I noticed the contest with it's 'first 200 successful internet pilots' win, and the pointer to the VRML, and I began to wonder if this wasn't all a bit gimicky... and THEN when I tried to skip the VRML, they crashed my NN4.7 browser and I lost my partially composed post.
So you're getting diddly. I'm not paying them much more mind until I see it in a mainstream article, preferrably NewScientist or something similar.
(*) I don't know whether turning off Javascript in NN4.7 is similar enough to what IE 3 will do for you, but there were still a few URLs stuck in my OS copy and paste. Try these.
http://www.return-home.com/English/ mission.html
http://www.return-home.com/Englis h/mission_2.html
http://www.return-home.com/Englis h/mission_3.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/inf o.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/i nfo_2.html
http://www.return-home.com/English/s terne.html
I understand that in the quest for efficiency and financial security they want to squeeze out every penny in 'fat', but why are they so inept at detecting life affecting and even life threatening shifts in the requirements and responding? (Let alone anything less dramagic.)
Here in Ontario Canada the death of a young man hasn't even really gotten much of a response from the Provincial government in terms of upping emergency room resources (at any given time a huge fraction of the emergency rooms are 'closed' due to overfilling).
These aren't situations that 'pop up'. This has been building for a half a year!
The important question is, what needs to be done, institutionally and bureaucratically, to allow our governments to respond to things like these?
Do they need to create special 'response' departments whose sole responsibility is to analyze reported shortages of any type of 'services' and 'resources' and independently and publicly report what needs to be done and how quickly to avoid such idioticly drawn out situations that screw up entire human lives?
I think I have a better analogy... If there was a safe in your home when they raided you, and it was *impossible* for them to open it, what would be the current procedures? They certainly wouldn't be under any obligation to return it to you.
No no, it's your MATH that can't be accurate.
2000/month * $4000 * 20% = $1,600,000/month
* 10% = $160,000 / month = $1,920,000 / year
So that puts you only $200,000 per year in the hole. Not bad for a patent factory.
One other important thing: Often these days if you took the software off of the hardware, you might save 2.1 million per year in software development costs, and reduce the price of the product by 10%, but guess what happens if the lack of that software means you lose 2% of your shipped volume because people consider not getting that software a deciding factor in choosing you or your competition?
Well, it means you lose 2% of your gross profit, which is 2% of $1,600,000 / month = $32,000 / month = $384,000 / year.
So you go from losing $200,000 per year to losing $400,000 per year. That's not exactly an improvement. And it gets MUCH worse if you actually lose more than 2% of sales.
Of course, the reverse could be true. Perhaps your customers are more sensitive to that 10% price difference than they are to the existence of your software.
This marketing lesson was brought to you by the allmighty dollar sign and the number 5,000,000,000.