Harrison says that the current PS3 game lineup is using less than half of the machines power, adding that 'nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capacity.'
But Harrison could be correct depending on how he defines 'capacity.' In the world of computer science, one must be careful with the absolute of "never ever" but he hasn't defined capacity sufficiently. Now if he means there will never be a PS3 game capable of using it to the full capacity then he's probably right.
Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express."
I haven't used Mac OS X or Vista on a regular basis but, to be fair, if one operating system does something right, should we really criticize another operating system for coding that feature into their own product?
For instance, when I found out that Mac OS's had the Unix shell I was happy & enthusiastic at the same time. Not because I use Mac but because I like that shell over so many others & I hope to see every operating system standardize their shell. I would also like to see the same done with security schemes.
Now, whether widgets came first or gadgets came first--I don't care. What I care about is that my job (and I'm sure a lot of people reading this are the same way) forces me to use Windows & sooner or later they'll get Vista. Should I really be bitching and making fun of Vista being an OS X clone? Or should I sit back and enjoy the fact that something is changing and--since they're mimicking an already successful operating system--it must be for the better.
I guess this is some form of operating system snobbery I'm not accustomed to.
The license for the software is $399, and the 'standard' Pioneer P3DX robot that's made for home use is $40,000.
You're telling me that this is made for home use? What is it supposed to do at my house? I used them for my robotics class in college and I wasn't too impressed.
Oh, and, by the way, the simulation software we used to test our software was a little project called player/stage. I didn't delve into the licensing prices on it but I think it comes to about $0. And don't give me that "Yeah but you have to train in it so it costs you more" crap.
[A]s I look at the trends that are now starting to converge, I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives,' Gates writes in the January issue of Scientific American.
Congratulations, Bill, did you just finish reading I, Robot? Or maybe you caught a trailer for the terrible movie by the same name? Or perhaps you picked up any sci-fi novel from 1955-present? Oh, no, I think I've got it. You're trying to enter a field you haven't done any research in by using your mountains of cash again? Sounds familiar, I wish you the best of luck. I just hope your robots aren't running Windows Vista or CE.
I titled this article "The Sierras of Titan" as a pun for Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s early sci-fi novel 'The Sirens of Titan." The book means a lot to me so I heavily recommend it but before you mod me offtopic, let me explain why Vonnegut picked Titan, of all the mass in the galaxy.
There have been experiments on the abundant chemicals on Titan done by astronautical & nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin who has been quite influential in the proliferation of humans to other pieces of mass ASAP.
While you may be able to argue that these experiments were too early or had inherent flaws within them, they were done to try to prove that a "chemical revolution" could occur on Titan similar to what we theorize happened on earth early on. I haven't heard many people address the fact that it could have taken billion of years to progress on earth but I am quite interested to see if there is a way to engineer bacteria to break methane down into oxygen or some other gas that we could potentially exploit to make oxygen.
As you may have seen in other media, Titan is often used because of these experiments. It's a bit of a romantic dream but these mountains are just a little more to add to the possibility.
Oh, I also forgot to include a link to the Cassini-Huygens mission which has images, videos, wallpapers and all that jazz of Titan and its mountains.
I don't really see how... one small mouse, even if there was 1 million of them, wouldn't really have made much difference to birds; it'd only be preditors that made a big difference
Well, I think the overall logic is that this ancient mouse and its affiliates would most likely have prospered in New Zealand and eventually evolved into something that fed on birds. In a lot of places, mammals have been more successful than birds. Now, there are a few like places Antarctica where birds are probably more successful than mammals but New Zealand and its surrounding islands (like the Dodo on Mauritius) were pretty special in this respect. So special, that (as I learned in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel") when humans arrived, many of the bird species had no fear of humans--only curiosity. They didn't have the thousands of years of living side by side with humans like elephants & zebras did in Africa to slowly train them to stay away at all costs. So its evident they never lived with predators but why were mice fossils found and not other mammals?
So now we need to explain that the mouse and other mammals were either restricted by food sources or eliminated. It also has to explain why there aren't more mammals. What is it about New Zealand? Did a volcano periodically remove all life from the island so that only birds could repopulate it at some point? Perhaps the only mammals that survived a food shortage were mice which were subsequently overhunted by the birds? These are the new questions that now must be answered.
So we're still left with this question of why these 1 million mice didn't evolve or why their bird eating relatives didn't thrive on the island. I heavily endorse and suggest Guns, Germs & Steel if you haven't had the time to read it. It asks questions about subjects like these that for a long time people just used the creation theories to explain. Now we're finally starting to look for answers as to why the way things are the way they are and why some populations of humans are better off or have more 'cargo' than others.
So far Dean has elected not to name and shame this business owner.
Maybe it's the Texan lawyer by the same name whose practice has been so far 100% litigation? The letter sure sounds like the author has found something in his books of law that give him just enough edge to use his firm in forcing this guy to settle out of court.
Who ever is doing this, I'll bet there's some stupid law they can leverage that says that Top Level Domains (TLDs) should only be used for what they stand for. Afterall, the.com TLD is short for 'commercial' or 'commerce.' I know it claims to be 'open' but a blog isn't anything commercial so maybe these are just beginning petty threats that will lead to a domain squatting lawsuit? Either way, if the guy's so concerned, why hasn't he registered deanhunt.biz? If you think I'm out of my mind, you've never encountered a lawyer before.
When I search for Dean Hunt, the blog beats any references to that lawyer's firm by a long shot but the links referring to the lawyer follow the blog immediately after it's #1 slot.
Anyone else find it hilarious that all these news articles are going to Google bomb the blog into a no-way-beatable #1 position for at least a few months? And what's this guy supposed to do? Check Google daily to ensure that he hasn't offended this ranking implication that the online store claims should be in place superseding Google's pagerank?
I'd wager most modern music is made just like that, and involves a lot of people who would meet this definition of "unskilled" musician.
I disagree. I play a number of instruments and have fiddled with drums and keyboard. You'll note that when he's playing drums, he never has to prepare for the next hit. He's never thinking about what comes next. Same on the piano. He's just hunched over with two fingers outstretched. And that's what makes this 'unskilled' versus skilled. If you watch a skilled piano player, their hands are constantly fluidly in motion.
Now, your critique about modern music is unfounded. Yes, I hate N'Sync also and I'm sure that their studio does a lot for them. But it sure the hell isn't micro-sampling like this guy is doing. At some point, it stops being sound editing and it becomes sampling. This man is a skilled sampler but horrible at drums (he never uses anything but one symbol--I mean, there's three or four others, try the ride!--and a little bit of hi-hat).
So while he may 'have a sense' of beat, tempo and melody, sit yourself down at fruity loops and mess around. You'll be pleasantly surprised that after a few hours, you have something that sound cool to you. After a few days, something that might sound cool to others. A few months and who knows?
The man is skilled. Skilled at sampling and editing. He's not, however, a skilled musician. He doesn't record 'tracks,' he records 'samples.' There's a difference and your statement of "a lot of people" and "most modern music" is quite hastily made.
Well, there's nothing wrong on the surface. It's just that the consumer doesn't 'know' that it's Sony's marketing blitz. Sony is probably doing it out of pure motive of trying to gather interest and make the news (mission accomplished--see article). But there are some people that don't like being lied to regardless of the conditions.
As consumers we feel we have a right to know where our advertisements are coming from. When we don't know who's advertising what, we get annoyed. Some of us even associate it with evil like SPAM marketers.
Essentially what it comes down to is Sony trying to present third party opinions of their products but not only are these opinions biased and untrue--they may be monetarily compensated for saying these things. They essentially lose 'street cred' among gamers. They aren't doing anything illegal, they're just using tricky marketing tactics that make the news. Some people hate it, some people might gobble it right up. Either way, I just spent two minutes talking about it to you.
I'm just going to throw something out there about your attitude towards computer science. I thought console emulators were cool also but I never took the time to dive into how they worked. I did take the time to dive into some OSS projects (like Weka) and find out how they work.
While this wasn't what pulled me into computing, it may be your addiction. Here's what I would suggest doing--take a well developed open source emulator (you know, like an NES emulator) and pick apart the source tree. You might find that the code is obviously doing some low level translation of the ROM which essentially changes its executable language to be IA32 or some such thing. It may be that you don't understand the architecture of the NES itself and therefor you can't really develop this yourself. So there's some insider information you lack but it will still be a good learning experience and may prompt you to figure out how to A) dump ROMs and B) reverse engineer a console architecture. Even if these are fruitless searches, how far you're willing to go will be a good indicator of whether or not CS is for you. Yeah, I hate to say this but I know people with CS degrees that simply don't have the debugging mentality to be programmers. A simple test is to think back to the times you saw something neat. Did you ever have a strong internal urge to find out how it worked or to try and modify it to augment its task?
But as I read slashdot, and other tech sites / articles, and realize for some of the software being written nowadays, I would have absolutely NO IDEA how to even begin writing it.
Fear not your own ignorance. Only fear your acceptance of it. I am confident that if I wanted to build an emulator I could. I personally find other things more interesting but you just have to buckle down and really pick it apart and look for answers. As I said above, these emulators might have proprietary reverse engineering so these backwards black boxes might not be the best place to start as you may be met with frustration. On top of that, the newer consoles are now fighting a war & implementing encryption scheme which just makes the emulator all that more complicated. Why don't you pick a project like Firefox? Get the source, find out what the common developing environment is and step through the code when you visit a page. That's where it all starts.
Most importantly, you don't need to do everything from the ground up. It helps to know everything that's going on below the abstractions you sit upon but you don't need to think about that every time you write code. Learn to use libraries & frameworks. To quote Salvador Dali: "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." I couldn't start writing an emulater either. But if I looked at the source trees and structures of the more popular ones out there, I'm damn sure I could figure it out. That confidence I have in myself is infallible and that's important to me. Sorry to sound like Dr. Phil but you asked for my opinion.
There are different tricks to different applications. Some are more simple than others. In my opinion, the less tricks you need to get started in a language, the better. Because we're not all world class magicians (although every language has some players that could rock your world in said language). This is why Java, while not as efficient as C, is probably taught to you first. There are very few tricks one needs to know in Java. But you know what? Java is still quite useful. Those responsible for implementing it did a decent job and now the web service programmer needs to know very little about them because configuring them has been abstracted and made easier by many UI & IDE tools out there. But web services are a very practical and widely accepted concept out there today. In fact, pay the bills by writing some very inane web se
China for instance today has huge sulfur dioxide emissions, roughly comparable to the US 25 years ago before we got good about it.
Yeah, you know, you kind of skipped something important in this whole 'fairness of polluting' issue. You know, our (I'm American) economy raged when we didn't care about dumping shit in the environment. And it's still pretty evident that green products cost more (not always but usually). In fact, carbon neutrality would almost certainly raise the price of your product and a carbon tax would stagnate the economy at least a little.
So, when we chastise other nations for doing what we did 25 years ago, we may be hobbling them somewhat in the international market if we force them not to do that. I mean, look at the great infrastructure and products that we've produced while destroying the environment. You have to admit that it's given us an upper hand.
And this doesn't just apply to chemicals and gases, remember our 'save the rain forest' campaigns? Well, who was campaigning us to stop logging in North America (pictures on the right side)? We've literally deforested much of the United States and benefited from it quite a bit. Who's to say we're not completely hobbling the economies in 3rd world countries that are attempting to tap their nation's natural resources of wood?
I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative... or, hell, maybe even compensate them for lost wealth? I don't know, I'm not an economist and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of negative replies for defending China or people cutting down rain forest for land. Oh well.
If Sony doesn't get their act together and bring HD-DVD down to a reasonable price (in all respects), then they're going to run massive risk to standards like China's EVD. Now only will they lose the licensing in the Chinese market but EVD has no copyright protection scheme--which means it's buy and burn. I think that in China, a different strategy on HD-DVD is in order although with the way Sony runs its business, I wonder if China is even a viable market at all to Sony.
Follow Muhammad Yunus' example. His micro-credit system will probably do 20x more in the long run to raise the quality of life in the countries that follow his model than the OLPC could ever even dream of being part of.
So you want me to develop a micro-credit model for poor nations? Because I'm a computer scientist. When will you get it through your head that these are computer scientists trying to do something within their reach for these people? Seriously, we're not wasting an economist's time nor could your average economist even do that. I hate to break it to you, but what your hero Yunus did, I cannot. I apologize for my sever shortcomings.
I'm confused here, do you want me to become super rich and donate to these micro-economic programs? Are you telling me to just magically become an economic genius? I'm sure this guy is a great speaker too, are you expecting me to become that? This guy invented a great banking system, am I just supposed to copy him? Seriously, your comment leaves me quite confused.
Thanks for the suggestion. Keep trying to deter people who are only trying to do what they are best at to help other people. Spread the FUD, keep it up, bro.
I once considered myself a bass player. At bars we would play songs & work 50% originals with 50% covers. We were pretty much illegally performing songs (Don't Let Me Down by The Beatls, Karma Police by Radiohead, Yellow by Coldplay, The Door by The Turin Brakes, etc.). Now, why do we do this? It pleases the crows and shows them that we like their music and that if they listen to ours hopefully they see the influence and elements. Yes, every band borrows these things--you can't deny it.
It doesn't make any sense that Sir Paul should say this. Look at the line up of The Beatles' first album:
1. "I Saw Her Standing There" - 2:55
2. "Misery" - 1:50
3. "Anna (Go to Him)" (Arthur Alexander) - 2:57
4. "Chains" (Gerry Goffin/Carole King) - 2:26
5. "Boys" (Luther Dixon/Wes Farrell) - 2:27
6. "Ask Me Why" - 2:27
7. "Please Please Me" - 2:03
[edit] Side Two
1. "Love Me Do" - 2:22
2. "P.S. I Love You" - 2:05
3. "Baby It's You" (Mack David/Barney Williams/Burt Bacharach) - 2:38
4. "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" - 1:59
5. "A Taste of Honey" (Bobby Scott/Ric Marlow) - 2:05
6. "There's a Place" - 1:52
7. "Twist and Shout" (Phil Medley/Bert Russell) - 2:33
Ok, so nearly half the songs are covers of other musicians. Now I would like to ask Paul how it is that a starting band (exactly like him) gets enough money to pay the licensing costs to half their songs which are covers. Was it easy for you, Paul? Would it be that easy for bands today? Shouldn't you be honored that musicians are influenced by you and worship you?
When you look at the irony of Paul's statements considering that first album, it really makes me wonder how much money he'll need before he's a happy man. Does he realize the implications this has on the music in his country and possibly the world?
I hate to attack Paul McCartney because I love his music, Beatles & post-Beatles. But I think 50 years is enough. Let's say you write a song at age 20-25 like the Beatles. Well, you'd have the rights for that until you're 70. Ok, so you yourself should have ample time perform and record that song or to license it and profit from it. Paul knows a lot about this last part after suing the other Beatles for many of the McLennon songs & subsequently selling them to Michael Jackson.
If I were a musician, I would be honored that so many people are waiting after those 50 years to use my music. The reason I feel this way and Paul doesn't is that he's going down in history as the one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time no matter how long the copyright is held on that song. I'm not.
But why, in God's name would he want them extended to 95 years? Well, he made quite a bit of music after the Beatles & has been touring with that on and off. Some of it good & some of it quite bad. Either way, if he wants to cash out one last time before he kicks it, the rights to those songs will fetch much more if the buyers have them for 65 more years as opposed to 20 more years.
So that's what it's coming down to, not this 'fair play' bullshit. Paul's not hoping to be playing his music fairly after he dies... he's just concerned about the money for these artists. And it's not money they're going to enjoy, it's money they're going to get and maybe try to pass on to their kids or something. Or buy another 1936 Rolls Royce Shadow with.
Who knows why they claim to need this money. Especially U2, that actually shocks me. Bono used to be all about people and to hell with money. I guess that isn't true anymore though he might try to show that he wants to keep making money to help people in a country less fortunate. At least he's got that going for him.
I saw an interview with Paul once where he basically said, "Yeah, I sold Michael Jackson the rights to these songs... and it's too bad, you know, because I just want to play the music for my fans and have fun but I can't since I sold the rights." I guess sometimes I just have to treat them as artists with good music & just severely lacking in other departments. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and what he's done. I honestly think he's implementing publicity stunts just to work an angle of sympathy for a former Beatle. Unfortunately it's most likely going to work perfectly for him.
If you're honestly worried about the strap breaking on your Wiimote, check out this quick how-to on flickr. Just use some heavy duty fly fishing line to reinforce it.
Sociologists ??? You want them to hire Tom Cruise?
If it will stop him from making movies, yes.
Plus than 99% of my rants on things I hate can be rolled into one as I curse Tomsoft Microcruise and all his horrible religiomonopoliness. I want my open source alcoholism back, damnit!
A lot of large IT companies looked outside of computer science. I mean, yeah, engineers should be the core of your work force but diversity is always a big plus. It didn't surprise me to see this quote:
The MSR staff, however, is not just computer scientists, it includes psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and medical doctors who are tasked with pushing the envelope on state of the art technology as much or more than transferring their technology into new and existing Microsoft products.
Large companies shouldn't hire these professions just to "push the envelope." Instead, I would hope that all companies diversified as their employee numbers grow. I work in a large IT company and have witnessed the above professions working effectively--especially in the R&D department.
Psychologists
One of the areas of studies the gets some of the most criticism from me. But you know what? When it comes to performing experiments on how people think and react to stimuli, psychologists are pretty damn good at it since all their data has been collected empirically from subjects. And who uses the code and devices we make in the end? Humans. And who better to tell you what the effects will be after a human has used your product for hours on end? You know, I've often wondered how many psychologists Blizzard employs because I can play that game for long periods of time with little or no fatigue on my eyes/brain.
Sociologists
As software becomes more and more decentralized and internet based, communities form around it. Communities identify themselves by it. For instance, I am part of the Slashdot community by merely posting on it. Think about how many sociologists that MySpace must employ to predict/track or protect people from social deviance. How do you handle that? How do you address that? Not really an engineer's department.
Anthropologists
Now that's a word I hear thrown around a lot and abused to mean many things. But most importantly, it's the study of diverse kinds of people. If you're an international company, you need anthropologists to view your projects and make sure that you aren't inadvertently calling your product or displaying something that may limit your market or create bad press. Engineers focus on one type of person when they make their product and so you need people to make sure that it is still marketable to the world.
Medical Doctors
Most likely hired for the sheer fact that baby boomers are getting old. Huge market for healthcare. If you can make anything related to it and sell it, you're in the money for the coming years. I may be a horrible monster for saying this but things like Alzheimer's Disease are multi-billion dollar industries based on treatments. Gene therapy and computational techniques in gene sequencing just make the field all that more lucrative.
On top of that, you need to think of the disabled using your product and be conscious of their disabilities. Also, what medical problems might be associated with your product or how can you make it easier on the end user. You don't want a million lawsuits if I'm losing my eye sight or getting arthritis by playing WoW, do you?
I'm actually shocked that list wasn't longer and more astonishing. No music theory majors to look at musical products like Guitar Hero's success? No athletic trainers to combat my country's obesity or offer and IT solution for it? No history majors to... to... ok well maybe they really are useless (I'm kidding).
Come on people, this is the R&D of the largest software company in the world. I'm shocked that I'm not more shocked on what they're up to.
In the 80s, kids of my generation cut their teeth on Super Mario Bros..
Well give me a break, those plastic cartridges were rock hard but oh so tasty. Plus I herd from someone that if you bit them they would work... but if that didn't work, just take them out and bite them again. Rinse, wash, repeat like a squirrel with nuts.
They went through high school with Mario Kart...
Listen, my parents didn't have a lot of money so I'd appreciate it if you just let it go that my first car failed the safety inspection.
... and bonded with college friends playing Super Smash Bros.
Now there we differ. On the contrary, I bonded in college with my friends, the super smashed brothers. Leinenkugel's for the win! It was all very similar though--a punch here, a puch there, a flaming Luigi & a princess was an instant party.
By 1999, though, the N64 had long since proven that Nintendo's dominance in American videogaming was over.
Yeah, it sure is going to hurt to have this removed.
... to read to such news and read such idiotic comments sickens me.
If you're calling my comments 'idiotic,' I would appreciate it if you told me why I'm idiotic. I pointed out Pareto's Law & speculated that it isn't a bad thing if there isn't corruption & there is the ability for the poor to work themselves out of their situation. Currently, the world is rife with corruption and, as you pointed out, there are massive regions of the world where people can't even find work for money. You'll also notice that corruption reigns in a lot of these regions. At the risk of being redundant, the poor get poorer. This is when Pareto's Law is a very bad thing. If the poor had the option to work and earn a steady living then Pareto's Law would be a very good thing because everyone would be motivated to produce more and be in the 20% while being able to provide for their families. Which is why I still stand by my statement of Pareto's Law not being inherently bad.
Yes, you are right. Tell that to the 80% without any money.
They aren't without money, they have 20% of the wealth. If this 20% of wealth were enough to feed/cloth/shelter them then this would actually be a desirable situation because everyone would be living and working toward being productive for the economy. I guess I should state the disclaimer that I believe in capitalism fused with democracy.
And they keep asking themselves why Chavez keeps winning...
No, I don't keep asking myself why Chavez keeps winning. It's painfully obvious to me. They think that the way our system works in the United States is bad for them and I agree with them. Chavez offers them an alternative and, at the end of the day, everyone is lying to the people of Venezuela a little bit one way or another. Socialism is right for some countries but wrong for others. The United States has seemingly unlimited resources which makes capitalism very very good. Venezuela has resource issues & corruption which are both very very bad for capitalism. If the people feel that socialism will help them in the short run to get up and running, I hope they experiment with it. But I am a firm believer that once there is money & resources present to make an economy take off, I certainly hope they switch back to capitalism because that's where you really start to see your people strive to achieve great things. The great thing about socialism is that everybody eats. The bad thing about it is that everybody eats the same food--so why should I work harder at my job? What's motivating me to work my ass off in the fields while some computer scientist programs in an air conditioned office, in the end we both get the same thing.
I'm not sure why you called me idiotic. Nowhere did I say that the current situation in the world is perfect or good--in fact I pretty much said it was a bad situation considering that you have to be wealthy to get more wealth. I'm not sure what I said to put a thorn in your side. If my comment sickens you, fine, tell me why but calling me an idiot doesn't really help me that much.
An Italian by the name of Vilfredo Pareto once made the statement that 20% of the population will always own 80% of the wealth (also known as the 80/20 rule of thumb). From a site on him:
In the Cours, his main economic contributions was his exposition of "Pareto's Law" of income distribution. He argued that in all countries and times, the distribution of income and wealth follows a regular logarithmic pattern that can be captured by the formula:
log N = log A + m log x
where where N is the number of income earners who receive incomes higher than x, and A and m are constants. Over the years, Pareto's Law has proved remarkably resilient in empirical studies.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's only a bad thing when you need money in order to make money which is often the case. This translates to the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. If you make sure that those with money don't influence the market so they make more money than Pareto law is actually good for the economy in my opinion
If a system is that important, and only has a single task, such as communicating with a spacecraft, why would it be accessible from outside sources?
Well, with the case of McKinnon, I don't think he ever actually 'hacked' into something by way of computer. I think that he was more so a social engineer than a hacker but they call him a hacker because it has a rogue/negative sound to it. Anyway, I don't know what the facts are in the Romanian's case, only reported it to Slashdot.
Keep in mind that these guys did 150 computers, the NASA problems were only NASA's reports of their 'hacking.' It could be that he was part of a team that was trying everything to get at government computers (pretexting/social engineering, hacking, you name it) and that this guy was the only one who actually physically went to a facility and illegally accessed data. I think if you're smart enough to hack into a NASA system, you should be smart enough to cover your tracks--so maybe this guy just waltzed in and presented real ID but just lied about who he was or representing?
So before you call NASA stupid for leaving those computers connected to the internet, I would wait until you find out what they're actually accusing this guy of--it could be another case as with Gary McKinnon where the person wasn't some steller computer genius, he was just really good at gaining trust from people and lying his way into facilities.
The company I work for had a policy that no e-mail was to be kept longer than 30 days unless it was absolutely necessary. If it was an internal e-mail, it was kind of expected that you would delete it as there would be no long term use for it. Now, like a few company policies, this one was broken even by myself a few times. Somebody would write a procedure out in e-mail and send it to the group or you could be in a hurry and you just drop an e-mail on installation instructions into the same directory as the deployment file. Under almost no circumstances were you allowed to record internal instant messaging conversations either.
It was claimed that we did this to keep the Exchange server free & not clog our hard drives with e-mail. But I really think that our lawyers speculated that since we're such a large company with subcontracters and other companies working with us that it would be best not to have these information linger. It's hard to ensure that a company with many tens of thousands of employees has everyone of them doing things that aren't illegal. It's just a problem of sheer numbers. Plus the incidences of the famous Microsoft memos about their competition. Memos about eliminating your only competition in a free market are frowned upon by the market but not exactly taboo inside the company.
Now, Friday morning, we got an e-mail saying that that has changed. That now we're supposed to keep e-mails but it didn't really say for how long. Plus it was Friday morning and an e-mail about a change in company policy was pretty high on my list of things to ignore. I'd imagine that our corporate policy is going to change to something vague and undefinable about under what circumstances you're supposed to archive it. And if a case comes up and my company is called on this Federal law that requires them to keep e-mails, it will now be the employee's fault since this e-mail was very applicable to a future case but they failed to archive it. What does that encourage me to do? Keep all my e-mails regardless of any policy.
I think the more volatile a communication is and the larger the company, the more they encourage you to destroy it. It's just a game of numbers. If you have 10,000 employees and 1 in every 100,000 e-mails is by chance something bad for the company, then each employee need only send 10 e-mails for you to have problems.
Or the Romans tried many times before creating Bath's and Aqueducts.
There's a lot of stuff out there that I can grind up and mold. It will last a day. It will last two days. It will last the week and it might even last the season. But when you come to a place of sand and you see these pyramids that have weathered the elements and retained a decent shape for possibly thousands of years, you might say, "What have you got there?"
I'm not keen on Roman/Egyptian history but I think that the Egyptian society and race are a bit older than the Romans. Wikipedia tells me that the Egyptian empire ran some 7,000 years while the Roman Empire technically only lasted only from 44 BC to AD 476. Ok so in 500 years, how many experiments with possible mixtures could you test. You can test for hardness & solubility on the fly but not duration. If you mix limestone with gypsum, you come up with something like drywall that won't last long at all in the elements. but might initially have a very hard composure.
Go look at some of the adobe structures that have lasted for hundreds upon hundreds of years in the Southwest of the United States. They were using the most abundant resource that was known to last the longest. R&D for the Romans was probably pretty high quality but I was just speculating that nothing then could match 7,000 years of research for something that would bring your leader's through the ages.
It was just speculation on my part but I highly doubt the Romans were the sole originators of the formula for the aqueducts. It really is too bad Alexandria was burned. If I could undo one thing in history, I would be tempted to pick that one.
I've poured a lot of concrete with my dad over the years. So I will share with you some of the useless knowledge I acquired before college. He has only a high school degree so it's not like he was a scholar on this material.
My dad always used to tell me that when Alexandria was burned, all the publications holding the Roman recipe for concrete went with it. That, he claimed, was why all concrete poured was inferior to the Roman Aqueducts. And why it wasn't until 1948 that the right combination of limestone & other minerals was discovered to be able to resist water and hold that high a level of precision. Cement/concrete are by nature porous surfaces and so often sap water which causes structural problems. The fact that the some of the aqueducts still hold their accuracy within inches of their architectural specifications after 2000 years is nothing to overlook.
If Egyptians (for thousands of years prior to the Romans) had experimented with or refined this process and if an Aristotelean (such as Demetrius of Phaleron) had moved this information to Alexandria, that would explain how the structures like the aqueducts were constructed with such high quality mixtures.
I have one tiny problem with the summary as the article states:
The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.
While summary uses the word cast:
The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.
I would like to point out that this is known as forming concrete and not casting concrete. The difference is like the difference between pouring concrete for a foundation of a house and laying brick. Laying brick is casting while pouring concrete (like the article alludes to) is called 'forming.'
This might sound like a small matter but laying brick & forming concrete walls are two entirely different professions.
In all honesty, if you were to ask me to construct a pyramid today--knowing what I know, I would build the core of the pyramid out of laid brick. And then I would, starting from the bottom, form up the angled sides and fill in those areas. If you're wondering why I would take this route, try it with paper. Cut out blocks of paper from a notebook without making marks and try to make a perfect angled edge between them. Pretty difficult. Now try it in three dimensions with 2000 year old tools.
It makes sense that they would have both technologies (like the article states), one quarried for huge bricks and the other formed up ash, salt & lime. It would also explain a lot of technologies the Romans had.
Ok, I'll reveal my ignorance here. I'm a computer scientist, not an accountant. But I have had the balance sheet crap shoved down my throat by corporate.
The R&D and production costs of the consoles is spread out over a fairly large time frame.
I'm not talking R&D, I'm talking the cost of each component, as reported on Slashdot, seems to be $300 over the price tag.
It isn't like they calculate up the costs of building a PS3 and don't count it until they sell it.
"OK, we sold 200k PS3's this quarter, so write down $12 million in the 4th quarter revenue box and $16 million in the expenses box"
Ok, so what is it like then? You tell me that I don't know how it works but then you don't reveal to me how it works. Here's my problem: components A, B, C,... & Z all together cost $$$$$. So you buy up a lot of them and they go on your balance sheet as an investment worth $$$$$. Now you sell each console at $$$ and you add the $$$ to your balance sheet as liquid cash. What's your balance now? Well, it's $$ less than what you started with. What I mean by shareholder report card is that you can't doctor this. Yes, they're supposed to think of the future and yes this will probably pay off but that much initial loss still makes people antsy and can't make Wallstreet happy either.
So tell me, how do you work your balance sheets when you're moving inventory at (what is reported to be) $300 less per unit than the raw materials cost. How do you do this and not be accused of 'cooking the books?' I mean, Sony can claim it's a great investment but the balance sheets can't hold assumptions. They have to tell the truth or the SEC will get you. At least that's how my limited knowledge has me thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
But Harrison could be correct depending on how he defines 'capacity.' In the world of computer science, one must be careful with the absolute of "never ever" but he hasn't defined capacity sufficiently. Now if he means there will never be a PS3 game capable of using it to the full capacity then he's probably right.
For instance, when I found out that Mac OS's had the Unix shell I was happy & enthusiastic at the same time. Not because I use Mac but because I like that shell over so many others & I hope to see every operating system standardize their shell. I would also like to see the same done with security schemes.
Now, whether widgets came first or gadgets came first--I don't care. What I care about is that my job (and I'm sure a lot of people reading this are the same way) forces me to use Windows & sooner or later they'll get Vista. Should I really be bitching and making fun of Vista being an OS X clone? Or should I sit back and enjoy the fact that something is changing and--since they're mimicking an already successful operating system--it must be for the better.
I guess this is some form of operating system snobbery I'm not accustomed to.
Oh, and, by the way, the simulation software we used to test our software was a little project called player/stage. I didn't delve into the licensing prices on it but I think it comes to about $0. And don't give me that "Yeah but you have to train in it so it costs you more" crap.
Congratulations, Bill, did you just finish reading I, Robot? Or maybe you caught a trailer for the terrible movie by the same name? Or perhaps you picked up any sci-fi novel from 1955-present? Oh, no, I think I've got it. You're trying to enter a field you haven't done any research in by using your mountains of cash again? Sounds familiar, I wish you the best of luck. I just hope your robots aren't running Windows Vista or CE.
I titled this article "The Sierras of Titan" as a pun for Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s early sci-fi novel 'The Sirens of Titan." The book means a lot to me so I heavily recommend it but before you mod me offtopic, let me explain why Vonnegut picked Titan, of all the mass in the galaxy.
There have been experiments on the abundant chemicals on Titan done by astronautical & nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin who has been quite influential in the proliferation of humans to other pieces of mass ASAP.
While you may be able to argue that these experiments were too early or had inherent flaws within them, they were done to try to prove that a "chemical revolution" could occur on Titan similar to what we theorize happened on earth early on. I haven't heard many people address the fact that it could have taken billion of years to progress on earth but I am quite interested to see if there is a way to engineer bacteria to break methane down into oxygen or some other gas that we could potentially exploit to make oxygen.
As you may have seen in other media, Titan is often used because of these experiments. It's a bit of a romantic dream but these mountains are just a little more to add to the possibility.
Oh, I also forgot to include a link to the Cassini-Huygens mission which has images, videos, wallpapers and all that jazz of Titan and its mountains.
So now we need to explain that the mouse and other mammals were either restricted by food sources or eliminated. It also has to explain why there aren't more mammals. What is it about New Zealand? Did a volcano periodically remove all life from the island so that only birds could repopulate it at some point? Perhaps the only mammals that survived a food shortage were mice which were subsequently overhunted by the birds? These are the new questions that now must be answered.
So we're still left with this question of why these 1 million mice didn't evolve or why their bird eating relatives didn't thrive on the island. I heavily endorse and suggest Guns, Germs & Steel if you haven't had the time to read it. It asks questions about subjects like these that for a long time people just used the creation theories to explain. Now we're finally starting to look for answers as to why the way things are the way they are and why some populations of humans are better off or have more 'cargo' than others.
Who ever is doing this, I'll bet there's some stupid law they can leverage that says that Top Level Domains (TLDs) should only be used for what they stand for. Afterall, the
When I search for Dean Hunt, the blog beats any references to that lawyer's firm by a long shot but the links referring to the lawyer follow the blog immediately after it's #1 slot.
Anyone else find it hilarious that all these news articles are going to Google bomb the blog into a no-way-beatable #1 position for at least a few months? And what's this guy supposed to do? Check Google daily to ensure that he hasn't offended this ranking implication that the online store claims should be in place superseding Google's pagerank?
Now, your critique about modern music is unfounded. Yes, I hate N'Sync also and I'm sure that their studio does a lot for them. But it sure the hell isn't micro-sampling like this guy is doing. At some point, it stops being sound editing and it becomes sampling. This man is a skilled sampler but horrible at drums (he never uses anything but one symbol--I mean, there's three or four others, try the ride!--and a little bit of hi-hat).
So while he may 'have a sense' of beat, tempo and melody, sit yourself down at fruity loops and mess around. You'll be pleasantly surprised that after a few hours, you have something that sound cool to you. After a few days, something that might sound cool to others. A few months and who knows?
The man is skilled. Skilled at sampling and editing. He's not, however, a skilled musician. He doesn't record 'tracks,' he records 'samples.' There's a difference and your statement of "a lot of people" and "most modern music" is quite hastily made.
As consumers we feel we have a right to know where our advertisements are coming from. When we don't know who's advertising what, we get annoyed. Some of us even associate it with evil like SPAM marketers.
Essentially what it comes down to is Sony trying to present third party opinions of their products but not only are these opinions biased and untrue--they may be monetarily compensated for saying these things. They essentially lose 'street cred' among gamers. They aren't doing anything illegal, they're just using tricky marketing tactics that make the news. Some people hate it, some people might gobble it right up. Either way, I just spent two minutes talking about it to you.
While this wasn't what pulled me into computing, it may be your addiction. Here's what I would suggest doing--take a well developed open source emulator (you know, like an NES emulator) and pick apart the source tree. You might find that the code is obviously doing some low level translation of the ROM which essentially changes its executable language to be IA32 or some such thing. It may be that you don't understand the architecture of the NES itself and therefor you can't really develop this yourself. So there's some insider information you lack but it will still be a good learning experience and may prompt you to figure out how to A) dump ROMs and B) reverse engineer a console architecture. Even if these are fruitless searches, how far you're willing to go will be a good indicator of whether or not CS is for you. Yeah, I hate to say this but I know people with CS degrees that simply don't have the debugging mentality to be programmers. A simple test is to think back to the times you saw something neat. Did you ever have a strong internal urge to find out how it worked or to try and modify it to augment its task?
Fear not your own ignorance. Only fear your acceptance of it. I am confident that if I wanted to build an emulator I could. I personally find other things more interesting but you just have to buckle down and really pick it apart and look for answers. As I said above, these emulators might have proprietary reverse engineering so these backwards black boxes might not be the best place to start as you may be met with frustration. On top of that, the newer consoles are now fighting a war & implementing encryption scheme which just makes the emulator all that more complicated. Why don't you pick a project like Firefox? Get the source, find out what the common developing environment is and step through the code when you visit a page. That's where it all starts.
Most importantly, you don't need to do everything from the ground up. It helps to know everything that's going on below the abstractions you sit upon but you don't need to think about that every time you write code. Learn to use libraries & frameworks. To quote Salvador Dali: "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." I couldn't start writing an emulater either. But if I looked at the source trees and structures of the more popular ones out there, I'm damn sure I could figure it out. That confidence I have in myself is infallible and that's important to me. Sorry to sound like Dr. Phil but you asked for my opinion.
There are different tricks to different applications. Some are more simple than others. In my opinion, the less tricks you need to get started in a language, the better. Because we're not all world class magicians (although every language has some players that could rock your world in said language). This is why Java, while not as efficient as C, is probably taught to you first. There are very few tricks one needs to know in Java. But you know what? Java is still quite useful. Those responsible for implementing it did a decent job and now the web service programmer needs to know very little about them because configuring them has been abstracted and made easier by many UI & IDE tools out there. But web services are a very practical and widely accepted concept out there today. In fact, pay the bills by writing some very inane web se
So, when we chastise other nations for doing what we did 25 years ago, we may be hobbling them somewhat in the international market if we force them not to do that. I mean, look at the great infrastructure and products that we've produced while destroying the environment. You have to admit that it's given us an upper hand.
And this doesn't just apply to chemicals and gases, remember our 'save the rain forest' campaigns? Well, who was campaigning us to stop logging in North America (pictures on the right side)? We've literally deforested much of the United States and benefited from it quite a bit. Who's to say we're not completely hobbling the economies in 3rd world countries that are attempting to tap their nation's natural resources of wood?
I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative
If Sony doesn't get their act together and bring HD-DVD down to a reasonable price (in all respects), then they're going to run massive risk to standards like China's EVD. Now only will they lose the licensing in the Chinese market but EVD has no copyright protection scheme--which means it's buy and burn. I think that in China, a different strategy on HD-DVD is in order although with the way Sony runs its business, I wonder if China is even a viable market at all to Sony.
So you want me to develop a micro-credit model for poor nations? Because I'm a computer scientist. When will you get it through your head that these are computer scientists trying to do something within their reach for these people? Seriously, we're not wasting an economist's time nor could your average economist even do that. I hate to break it to you, but what your hero Yunus did, I cannot. I apologize for my sever shortcomings.
I'm confused here, do you want me to become super rich and donate to these micro-economic programs? Are you telling me to just magically become an economic genius? I'm sure this guy is a great speaker too, are you expecting me to become that? This guy invented a great banking system, am I just supposed to copy him? Seriously, your comment leaves me quite confused.
Thanks for the suggestion. Keep trying to deter people who are only trying to do what they are best at to help other people. Spread the FUD, keep it up, bro.
I once considered myself a bass player. At bars we would play songs & work 50% originals with 50% covers. We were pretty much illegally performing songs (Don't Let Me Down by The Beatls, Karma Police by Radiohead, Yellow by Coldplay, The Door by The Turin Brakes, etc.). Now, why do we do this? It pleases the crows and shows them that we like their music and that if they listen to ours hopefully they see the influence and elements. Yes, every band borrows these things--you can't deny it.
It doesn't make any sense that Sir Paul should say this. Look at the line up of The Beatles' first album:
- 1. "I Saw Her Standing There" - 2:55
- 2. "Misery" - 1:50
- 3. "Anna (Go to Him)" (Arthur Alexander) - 2:57
- 4. "Chains" (Gerry Goffin/Carole King) - 2:26
- 5. "Boys" (Luther Dixon/Wes Farrell) - 2:27
- 6. "Ask Me Why" - 2:27
- 7. "Please Please Me" - 2:03
- [edit] Side Two
- 1. "Love Me Do" - 2:22
- 2. "P.S. I Love You" - 2:05
- 3. "Baby It's You" (Mack David/Barney Williams/Burt Bacharach) - 2:38
- 4. "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" - 1:59
- 5. "A Taste of Honey" (Bobby Scott/Ric Marlow) - 2:05
- 6. "There's a Place" - 1:52
- 7. "Twist and Shout" (Phil Medley/Bert Russell) - 2:33
Ok, so nearly half the songs are covers of other musicians. Now I would like to ask Paul how it is that a starting band (exactly like him) gets enough money to pay the licensing costs to half their songs which are covers. Was it easy for you, Paul? Would it be that easy for bands today? Shouldn't you be honored that musicians are influenced by you and worship you?When you look at the irony of Paul's statements considering that first album, it really makes me wonder how much money he'll need before he's a happy man. Does he realize the implications this has on the music in his country and possibly the world?
If I were a musician, I would be honored that so many people are waiting after those 50 years to use my music. The reason I feel this way and Paul doesn't is that he's going down in history as the one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time no matter how long the copyright is held on that song. I'm not.
But why, in God's name would he want them extended to 95 years? Well, he made quite a bit of music after the Beatles & has been touring with that on and off. Some of it good & some of it quite bad. Either way, if he wants to cash out one last time before he kicks it, the rights to those songs will fetch much more if the buyers have them for 65 more years as opposed to 20 more years.
So that's what it's coming down to, not this 'fair play' bullshit. Paul's not hoping to be playing his music fairly after he dies
Who knows why they claim to need this money. Especially U2, that actually shocks me. Bono used to be all about people and to hell with money. I guess that isn't true anymore though he might try to show that he wants to keep making money to help people in a country less fortunate. At least he's got that going for him.
I saw an interview with Paul once where he basically said, "Yeah, I sold Michael Jackson the rights to these songs
If you're honestly worried about the strap breaking on your Wiimote, check out this quick how-to on flickr. Just use some heavy duty fly fishing line to reinforce it.
Plus than 99% of my rants on things I hate can be rolled into one as I curse Tomsoft Microcruise and all his horrible religiomonopoliness. I want my open source alcoholism back, damnit!
Large companies shouldn't hire these professions just to "push the envelope." Instead, I would hope that all companies diversified as their employee numbers grow. I work in a large IT company and have witnessed the above professions working effectively--especially in the R&D department.
- Psychologists
- Sociologists
- Anthropologists
- Medical Doctors
I'm actually shocked that list wasn't longer and more astonishing. No music theory majors to look at musical products like Guitar Hero's success? No athletic trainers to combat my country's obesity or offer and IT solution for it? No history majors toOne of the areas of studies the gets some of the most criticism from me. But you know what? When it comes to performing experiments on how people think and react to stimuli, psychologists are pretty damn good at it since all their data has been collected empirically from subjects. And who uses the code and devices we make in the end? Humans. And who better to tell you what the effects will be after a human has used your product for hours on end? You know, I've often wondered how many psychologists Blizzard employs because I can play that game for long periods of time with little or no fatigue on my eyes/brain.
As software becomes more and more decentralized and internet based, communities form around it. Communities identify themselves by it. For instance, I am part of the Slashdot community by merely posting on it. Think about how many sociologists that MySpace must employ to predict/track or protect people from social deviance. How do you handle that? How do you address that? Not really an engineer's department.
Now that's a word I hear thrown around a lot and abused to mean many things. But most importantly, it's the study of diverse kinds of people. If you're an international company, you need anthropologists to view your projects and make sure that you aren't inadvertently calling your product or displaying something that may limit your market or create bad press. Engineers focus on one type of person when they make their product and so you need people to make sure that it is still marketable to the world.
Most likely hired for the sheer fact that baby boomers are getting old. Huge market for healthcare. If you can make anything related to it and sell it, you're in the money for the coming years. I may be a horrible monster for saying this but things like Alzheimer's Disease are multi-billion dollar industries based on treatments. Gene therapy and computational techniques in gene sequencing just make the field all that more lucrative.
On top of that, you need to think of the disabled using your product and be conscious of their disabilities. Also, what medical problems might be associated with your product or how can you make it easier on the end user. You don't want a million lawsuits if I'm losing my eye sight or getting arthritis by playing WoW, do you?
Come on people, this is the R&D of the largest software company in the world. I'm shocked that I'm not more shocked on what they're up to.
Listen, my parents didn't have a lot of money so I'd appreciate it if you just let it go that my first car failed the safety inspection.
Now there we differ. On the contrary, I bonded in college with my friends, the super smashed brothers. Leinenkugel's for the win! It was all very similar though--a punch here, a puch there, a flaming Luigi & a princess was an instant party.
Yeah, it sure is going to hurt to have this removed.
They aren't without money, they have 20% of the wealth. If this 20% of wealth were enough to feed/cloth/shelter them then this would actually be a desirable situation because everyone would be living and working toward being productive for the economy. I guess I should state the disclaimer that I believe in capitalism fused with democracy.
No, I don't keep asking myself why Chavez keeps winning. It's painfully obvious to me. They think that the way our system works in the United States is bad for them and I agree with them. Chavez offers them an alternative and, at the end of the day, everyone is lying to the people of Venezuela a little bit one way or another. Socialism is right for some countries but wrong for others. The United States has seemingly unlimited resources which makes capitalism very very good. Venezuela has resource issues & corruption which are both very very bad for capitalism. If the people feel that socialism will help them in the short run to get up and running, I hope they experiment with it. But I am a firm believer that once there is money & resources present to make an economy take off, I certainly hope they switch back to capitalism because that's where you really start to see your people strive to achieve great things. The great thing about socialism is that everybody eats. The bad thing about it is that everybody eats the same food--so why should I work harder at my job? What's motivating me to work my ass off in the fields while some computer scientist programs in an air conditioned office, in the end we both get the same thing.
I'm not sure why you called me idiotic. Nowhere did I say that the current situation in the world is perfect or good--in fact I pretty much said it was a bad situation considering that you have to be wealthy to get more wealth. I'm not sure what I said to put a thorn in your side. If my comment sickens you, fine, tell me why but calling me an idiot doesn't really help me that much.
Keep in mind that these guys did 150 computers, the NASA problems were only NASA's reports of their 'hacking.' It could be that he was part of a team that was trying everything to get at government computers (pretexting/social engineering, hacking, you name it) and that this guy was the only one who actually physically went to a facility and illegally accessed data. I think if you're smart enough to hack into a NASA system, you should be smart enough to cover your tracks--so maybe this guy just waltzed in and presented real ID but just lied about who he was or representing?
So before you call NASA stupid for leaving those computers connected to the internet, I would wait until you find out what they're actually accusing this guy of--it could be another case as with Gary McKinnon where the person wasn't some steller computer genius, he was just really good at gaining trust from people and lying his way into facilities.
The company I work for had a policy that no e-mail was to be kept longer than 30 days unless it was absolutely necessary. If it was an internal e-mail, it was kind of expected that you would delete it as there would be no long term use for it. Now, like a few company policies, this one was broken even by myself a few times. Somebody would write a procedure out in e-mail and send it to the group or you could be in a hurry and you just drop an e-mail on installation instructions into the same directory as the deployment file. Under almost no circumstances were you allowed to record internal instant messaging conversations either.
It was claimed that we did this to keep the Exchange server free & not clog our hard drives with e-mail. But I really think that our lawyers speculated that since we're such a large company with subcontracters and other companies working with us that it would be best not to have these information linger. It's hard to ensure that a company with many tens of thousands of employees has everyone of them doing things that aren't illegal. It's just a problem of sheer numbers. Plus the incidences of the famous Microsoft memos about their competition. Memos about eliminating your only competition in a free market are frowned upon by the market but not exactly taboo inside the company.
Now, Friday morning, we got an e-mail saying that that has changed. That now we're supposed to keep e-mails but it didn't really say for how long. Plus it was Friday morning and an e-mail about a change in company policy was pretty high on my list of things to ignore. I'd imagine that our corporate policy is going to change to something vague and undefinable about under what circumstances you're supposed to archive it. And if a case comes up and my company is called on this Federal law that requires them to keep e-mails, it will now be the employee's fault since this e-mail was very applicable to a future case but they failed to archive it. What does that encourage me to do? Keep all my e-mails regardless of any policy.
I think the more volatile a communication is and the larger the company, the more they encourage you to destroy it. It's just a game of numbers. If you have 10,000 employees and 1 in every 100,000 e-mails is by chance something bad for the company, then each employee need only send 10 e-mails for you to have problems.
I'm not keen on Roman/Egyptian history but I think that the Egyptian society and race are a bit older than the Romans. Wikipedia tells me that the Egyptian empire ran some 7,000 years while the Roman Empire technically only lasted only from 44 BC to AD 476. Ok so in 500 years, how many experiments with possible mixtures could you test. You can test for hardness & solubility on the fly but not duration. If you mix limestone with gypsum, you come up with something like drywall that won't last long at all in the elements. but might initially have a very hard composure.
Go look at some of the adobe structures that have lasted for hundreds upon hundreds of years in the Southwest of the United States. They were using the most abundant resource that was known to last the longest. R&D for the Romans was probably pretty high quality but I was just speculating that nothing then could match 7,000 years of research for something that would bring your leader's through the ages.
It was just speculation on my part but I highly doubt the Romans were the sole originators of the formula for the aqueducts. It really is too bad Alexandria was burned. If I could undo one thing in history, I would be tempted to pick that one.
My dad always used to tell me that when Alexandria was burned, all the publications holding the Roman recipe for concrete went with it. That, he claimed, was why all concrete poured was inferior to the Roman Aqueducts. And why it wasn't until 1948 that the right combination of limestone & other minerals was discovered to be able to resist water and hold that high a level of precision. Cement/concrete are by nature porous surfaces and so often sap water which causes structural problems. The fact that the some of the aqueducts still hold their accuracy within inches of their architectural specifications after 2000 years is nothing to overlook.
If Egyptians (for thousands of years prior to the Romans) had experimented with or refined this process and if an Aristotelean (such as Demetrius of Phaleron) had moved this information to Alexandria, that would explain how the structures like the aqueducts were constructed with such high quality mixtures.
I have one tiny problem with the summary as the article states: While summary uses the word cast: I would like to point out that this is known as forming concrete and not casting concrete. The difference is like the difference between pouring concrete for a foundation of a house and laying brick. Laying brick is casting while pouring concrete (like the article alludes to) is called 'forming.'
This might sound like a small matter but laying brick & forming concrete walls are two entirely different professions.
In all honesty, if you were to ask me to construct a pyramid today--knowing what I know, I would build the core of the pyramid out of laid brick. And then I would, starting from the bottom, form up the angled sides and fill in those areas. If you're wondering why I would take this route, try it with paper. Cut out blocks of paper from a notebook without making marks and try to make a perfect angled edge between them. Pretty difficult. Now try it in three dimensions with 2000 year old tools.
It makes sense that they would have both technologies (like the article states), one quarried for huge bricks and the other formed up ash, salt & lime. It would also explain a lot of technologies the Romans had.
I'm not talking R&D, I'm talking the cost of each component, as reported on Slashdot, seems to be $300 over the price tag.
Ok, so what is it like then? You tell me that I don't know how it works but then you don't reveal to me how it works. Here's my problem: components A, B, C,
So tell me, how do you work your balance sheets when you're moving inventory at (what is reported to be) $300 less per unit than the raw materials cost. How do you do this and not be accused of 'cooking the books?' I mean, Sony can claim it's a great investment but the balance sheets can't hold assumptions. They have to tell the truth or the SEC will get you. At least that's how my limited knowledge has me thinking.