For now, however, Wal-Mart says it will stay the course
In my opinion, with the weight the phrase has accumulated in the last few years, "stay the course" should become a four letter word.
Re:Congratulations Microsoft...
on
ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 1
Ya know, I've often wondered about wireless syncing. It could be a pretty cool feature, particularly for moving an odd music file here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets added to the iPhone and iPod Touch eventually (as a firmware upgrade, and an upgrade to iTunes).
However, when you think about it, it's almost a step backwards. A USB 2.0 wired connection can do upwards of 480 Mbps, although it's often less than that. 802.11g wireless tops out at 54 Mbps, and often it's less than that. It is difficult to make a comparison of real-world usage, but it seems likely that a wireless sync would be several times slower than a good ol' cable. You don't get power from a wireless sync, either.
There still needs to be a human reviewing the work before it's truly accepted, and that human might as well be doing it in the first place, with the context still there to help them.
That is, for all intents and purposes, impractical, which was the entire point. The backlog of work was never going to get done in a reasonable timescale with dedicated humans correcting all the errors. A dedicated human, even with the context, will still make mistakes or get stumped.
Most people, when presented with a CAPTCHA, make an honest effort to try and get it right - otherwise they can't get their precious Facebook account. The number of people who understand what's going on with this reCAPTCHA thing is probably pretty small. Finally, those who know what it is about are probably inclined to not be jackasses and purposefully screw it up. I'd say that honest errors and malicious errors are an overwhelmingly small portion of reCAPTCHA responses. While flawed, this system might still be, say, 95% correct. So, for accepting a certain amount of error, you are able to get as much character recognition done as you are able to supply. As the article says:
Given that it takes about 10 seconds to decipher a reCAPTCHA and type in the answer, this represents the equivalent of almost three thousand man hours a day spent deciphering words that CMU's computers find illegible.
3000 man-hours a day at 95% accuracy versus, maybe, a few dozen man-hours a day at slightly higher accuracy. You tell me which is better.
it IS an open device, costs about the same as the iPhone, is guaranteed never to be bricked by the manufacturer, and encourages user development and contributions to its features
I think these statements are contradictory. When people tinker around with the software, they take the risk that some change they make may render the device inoperable. It is entirely possible (I would say likely) that a subsequent change in the core software from the manufacturer could cause some of these phones to get bricked (at least temporarily). It's impossible to expect the manufacturer of a device to anticipate and support all the myriad ways people are going to tinker with and alter their devices (or software).
You see, man, you're sending me all these crazy signals. I can't take it! It's frying my brain and sucking my will to live!
That's IT! I'm sick of this! I'm going to self destruct - that'll show you. But, just to be tricky, I'm not going to self destruct right here, I'm going to go over to that corner and do it remotely. Ha!
Do you think that Scaled Composites won the X-Prize on a budget of only $10 million, the prize's actual amount? The point of these prizes is not to make money, but to win, to be the one to do it. Scaled Composites didn't make money on the X-Prize, but their victory has led to being the one to build Virgin Galactic's commercial spaceflight vehicles.
The first 787 is due to be delivered to Japan's All Nippon Airways in May next year, meaning it will have at most six months of flight tests, much shorter than previous jetliner programs.
What they don't mention is that, while the testing schedule is shorter in terms of calendar days, Boeing is logging just as many, if not more, flight hours with the 787 test aircraft as they have with earlier projects. The accelerated schedule is to meet their delivery deadline, but all the requisite tests are still being done.
Boeing knows that the health of the company for the next 10-20 years rests with this aircraft. Airbus, despite its problems with the A380, isn't going to cease being a fierce competitor. If Boeing screws this project up, and gets a lot of bad PR from an aircraft failure, they'll be lucky to survive. With so much at stake, I trust them to do their jobs right.
I worked for an independent college textbook store once upon a time. The place was a ramshackle old office space - bare girders and all. We never put any money into making the place look nice, because that would force our costs up. And although people bitch about what a ripoff textbooks are, our own profit margins were never very high. When professors gave us booklists, we would do tremendous amounts of sleuthing to track down used books first, then resort to new. The students appreciated our efforts to keep their costs low, such that we were able to elbow into a once undisputed market and drove the local Barnes and Nobel out of the textbook business. Professors rewarded us, too, for our good service to them and to their students, by giving us their booklists exclusively. On the other hand, we were in a bit of a unique situation, in that we were independent both from national franchises and from the College, who had no official bookstore.
It is difficult to explain to an angry and broke student's satisfaction (or, more obnoxiously, their parents satisfaction) that we, an independent bookstore, are just as much at the whim of the textbook industry as they are. Just like it is difficult to explain to an angry motorist that the gas station on the corner isn't reeping huge rewards from $3/gal gasoline (in the U.S.). The publishers do an impressive bit of work to ensure a high revenue stream. A 5-10% year-over-year increase in new textbook prices really helps, with absolutely no added value. The broader the market and more introductory the level, the higher the price: compare the cost of an intro calculus book to one on advanced linear algebra. What really gets me is issuing new editions of a textbook without making any substantive changes. It instantly kills the market for old editions - used textbook dealers will stop buying and selling them.
Reasons for this have been given by others. On the other hand, those willing to stick it out through, say, the next four months, probably will have something valuable. The christmas season is always a banner time for iPod sales (which today's announcement was clearly aimed at), and it may be driven up again in anticipation for MacWorld in January.
I wonder if this sort of thing could be developed for (or ported over to) the One-Laptop-Per-Child? OLPC is an open platform, so there should be possible. Data entry would be even easier with a larger screen and full-sized keyboard. The construction of the OLPC is certainly rugged, and it has power consumption almost as low as a PDA (rechargeable in the field, too). The wireless capabilities (when available) allow it to beam the data back in near-realtime to the health database. The costs are comparable, too. A stumbling block may be that OLPC isn't targeted to government officials, but rather students.
Von Braun and the other rocket scientists of the 40s were predicting the next 20-30 years in space. They were looking almost exclusively at the technological evolution - the most straightforward part, the part within their control. Von Braun was a savvy person in his own right, but he couldn't have predicted how the public's lack of enthusiasm after Apollo would stunt the technological evolution of space technology through 2000. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, no one could have predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, or how the end of the Cold War would affect space exploration. Von Braun could not, I think, have foreseen how computing technology would enable unmanned probes to accomplish so much of what human spaceflight hasn't.
People can make grandiose visions and strive towards them. I agree that this is what drives innovation. People should take risks to try and accomplish great things over the long haul. But don't expect to be able to predict what is going to happen 50 years from now - there is far too much that will influence it that hasn't even been conceived of yet - things that will aid you, thwart you, spur you and stifle you, closing off one path while opening another.
In 1957, who could have predicted the next fifty years in space? Sputnik had not yet been launched - the Space Race hadn't even begun.
On the other hand, who 40 years ago could have predicted where we are now? In 1967, the Space Race was a dead heat, the Mercury and Gemini programs in the U.S. were blazing successes, and the challenges of Apollo putting a man on the Moon (though formidable) seemed within our grasp. People were already talking of space stations, Moon colonization, and Mars exploration, certainly all within a generation. Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were starting their collaboration for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
My point is: predictions are cheap, and over a span of fifty years mean little. Things develop far too quickly for a 50-year prediction to carry much weight. Predicting the future of space means also predicting the future of technology - what will be possible in fifty years. It also means predicting the future of the geopolitical and economic landscapes. All of these different factors influence one another - predicting the future of one will mean predicting at least a portion of the others.
When Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium-210, the media publicized that it was commercially available, although in very small quantities, in little brushes used for removing dust from lenses and old film. Po-210 is an alpha-particle emitter, which imparts that +2 ionization onto whatever it impacts. Once the dust on the lense or film is positively ionized, it repels itself and whatever it's sticking to, allowing it to be removed with essentially no mechanical action (like wiping), which could cause scratching. So, all we need to do it impregnate the glass of the solar panels with an alpha-emitter, and we'll be all set.
Engadget has a helpful rumor roundup - just to keep the/. discussion lively with speculation. Aside from the next-gen touchscreen iPod, there's the Beatles' catalogue on iTMS, direct-to-iPhone (iPod) music store downloads, and increased capacity in the Nano. "Analysis" (i.e., educated speculation and wishful thinking) available from CNet, ArsTechnica, and AppleInsider (1, 2, 3).
The Dali Lama position has frequently been held by people whose selection was extremely useful politically (influential families and such). I find it all highly suspect.
That might be true of previous incarnations, but the current Dalai Lama was born in a simple farming family. They did alright for themselves as farmers, better than their neighbors, but not rich by most standards. An important thing to remember about Buddhism, however, is the deep belief that wealth and happiness are entirely disconnected from one another.
Considering the tremendous amount of fanfare that the article describes will take place in transporting this old movie prop, and its overall shape, one could be forgiven for mistaking it for an inanimate carbon rod.
It is very interesting to look at the Gateway's share price history - as the summary suggests. Stock symbol GTW. Click on the 10 year view to see that, at the height of the dot-com days, it was trading at $60-$80. Since the bubble has burst, it has been steadily been below $10. Today at $1.80.
Be sure there will be someone just as pliable and loyal to the Party--and probably smart enough not to get caught perjuring himself. So I wouldn't get too excited.
I wouldn't be too sure. A different party controls Congress now. The hackles of the Judiciary committees in both houses are raised; even a number of Republican members have had enough. Part of the reason many thought Gonzales wouldn't resign (or, rather, Bush wouldn't let him) is that they knew whoever followed Gonzales would have one of the toughest confirmation battles in recent memory. That is assuming, of course, the President can even find someone willing to take the job for the next 18 months.
He did serve "At the Pleasure of the President," and show his loyalty to him. But, I will contend forcefully that his loyalty has been sorely misplaced. Loyalty is a virtue; misplaced loyalty is folly. Dammit, he didn't swear an oath of office to the President; his job is to be loyal to the people and the Constitution. If the President's wishes contradict what is in the interests of the people and skirt the Constitution, there should be no ambiguity in the Attorney General's mind as to which should take precedence.
It is true, in a sense, that the FCC does not "own" the spectrum. According to law, the airwaves belong to the people. In order to use the airwaves, companies must negotiate the right to use a portion of the radio spectrum. But, rather than go door-to-door and ask every citizen if it is OK to use the airwaves, companies negotiate with the citizens' representative - the government. And, because access to the radio spectrum has value, the FCC doesn't just give the spectrum away, but rather tries to fetch the best price for it on behalf of the citizens. It is much like an oil and gas company paying the government for the rights to drill on public lands.
1) Developers, the time may not too far away when your code is measured on power efficiency.
2) Software effects will be found significant as well because widely used software affects so many systems.
This reminds me of an article here on/., about how Microsoft could become the world's greenest company with a few small changes in code to be more aggressive about using power saving modes by default. Hardware makers have been harping on about power efficiency for ages, driven largely by the mobile computing and gadgetry market. As a result, there are a lot of things that the hardware can do to save power when under-utilized or idle, even in the server market. However, those features are only useful if the software (particularly OS and firmware) takes advantage of them. The more widespread the software, the greater the impact of incremental improvements in power-efficient code. A tiny fraction times GWh of energy is still a large amount. There are whole realms of power efficiency that have yet to be tapped.
Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others. It comes from the latin roots for "use" and "fruits," in the sense that you are using the fruits of someone else's labor.
In the case of Hansen's second email, he is, I think, using it to describe how captains of industry are benefitting from the global warming nay-sayers' spin on this correction. He also uses it in the sense that successive generations have a right and claim to the enjoy the Earth, so we'd better take care of it, even as we benefit from it.
The evidence they provide for it traveling at "supersonic" speeds is the evidence of the shock wave accumulating in front of its direction of travel. It is the same shockwave that is created by a supersonic object in the atmosphere. That kind of shock wave - the sonic boom - develops because the object is traveling faster than the sound waves leaving it - the waves all get piled up in a cone extending behind the object. In the case of Mira, the same thing is happening, except that it's waves of stellar material being emitted from the star at some speed, and the star is traveling faster than the propagation of those stellar ejections.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya know, I've often wondered about wireless syncing. It could be a pretty cool feature, particularly for moving an odd music file here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets added to the iPhone and iPod Touch eventually (as a firmware upgrade, and an upgrade to iTunes).
However, when you think about it, it's almost a step backwards. A USB 2.0 wired connection can do upwards of 480 Mbps, although it's often less than that. 802.11g wireless tops out at 54 Mbps, and often it's less than that. It is difficult to make a comparison of real-world usage, but it seems likely that a wireless sync would be several times slower than a good ol' cable. You don't get power from a wireless sync, either.
... starts off with a good laugh. Thank you, /. !
Most people, when presented with a CAPTCHA, make an honest effort to try and get it right - otherwise they can't get their precious Facebook account. The number of people who understand what's going on with this reCAPTCHA thing is probably pretty small. Finally, those who know what it is about are probably inclined to not be jackasses and purposefully screw it up. I'd say that honest errors and malicious errors are an overwhelmingly small portion of reCAPTCHA responses. While flawed, this system might still be, say, 95% correct. So, for accepting a certain amount of error, you are able to get as much character recognition done as you are able to supply. As the article says: 3000 man-hours a day at 95% accuracy versus, maybe, a few dozen man-hours a day at slightly higher accuracy. You tell me which is better.
You see, man, you're sending me all these crazy signals. I can't take it! It's frying my brain and sucking my will to live!
That's IT! I'm sick of this! I'm going to self destruct - that'll show you. But, just to be tricky, I'm not going to self destruct right here, I'm going to go over to that corner and do it remotely. Ha!
Do you think that Scaled Composites won the X-Prize on a budget of only $10 million, the prize's actual amount? The point of these prizes is not to make money, but to win, to be the one to do it. Scaled Composites didn't make money on the X-Prize, but their victory has led to being the one to build Virgin Galactic's commercial spaceflight vehicles.
What they don't mention is that, while the testing schedule is shorter in terms of calendar days, Boeing is logging just as many, if not more, flight hours with the 787 test aircraft as they have with earlier projects. The accelerated schedule is to meet their delivery deadline, but all the requisite tests are still being done.
Boeing knows that the health of the company for the next 10-20 years rests with this aircraft. Airbus, despite its problems with the A380, isn't going to cease being a fierce competitor. If Boeing screws this project up, and gets a lot of bad PR from an aircraft failure, they'll be lucky to survive. With so much at stake, I trust them to do their jobs right.
I worked for an independent college textbook store once upon a time. The place was a ramshackle old office space - bare girders and all. We never put any money into making the place look nice, because that would force our costs up. And although people bitch about what a ripoff textbooks are, our own profit margins were never very high. When professors gave us booklists, we would do tremendous amounts of sleuthing to track down used books first, then resort to new. The students appreciated our efforts to keep their costs low, such that we were able to elbow into a once undisputed market and drove the local Barnes and Nobel out of the textbook business. Professors rewarded us, too, for our good service to them and to their students, by giving us their booklists exclusively. On the other hand, we were in a bit of a unique situation, in that we were independent both from national franchises and from the College, who had no official bookstore.
It is difficult to explain to an angry and broke student's satisfaction (or, more obnoxiously, their parents satisfaction) that we, an independent bookstore, are just as much at the whim of the textbook industry as they are. Just like it is difficult to explain to an angry motorist that the gas station on the corner isn't reeping huge rewards from $3/gal gasoline (in the U.S.). The publishers do an impressive bit of work to ensure a high revenue stream. A 5-10% year-over-year increase in new textbook prices really helps, with absolutely no added value. The broader the market and more introductory the level, the higher the price: compare the cost of an intro calculus book to one on advanced linear algebra. What really gets me is issuing new editions of a textbook without making any substantive changes. It instantly kills the market for old editions - used textbook dealers will stop buying and selling them.
Yes, I hear that becoming a senator commands a higher salary.
Reasons for this have been given by others. On the other hand, those willing to stick it out through, say, the next four months, probably will have something valuable. The christmas season is always a banner time for iPod sales (which today's announcement was clearly aimed at), and it may be driven up again in anticipation for MacWorld in January.
I wonder if this sort of thing could be developed for (or ported over to) the One-Laptop-Per-Child? OLPC is an open platform, so there should be possible. Data entry would be even easier with a larger screen and full-sized keyboard. The construction of the OLPC is certainly rugged, and it has power consumption almost as low as a PDA (rechargeable in the field, too). The wireless capabilities (when available) allow it to beam the data back in near-realtime to the health database. The costs are comparable, too. A stumbling block may be that OLPC isn't targeted to government officials, but rather students.
Von Braun and the other rocket scientists of the 40s were predicting the next 20-30 years in space. They were looking almost exclusively at the technological evolution - the most straightforward part, the part within their control. Von Braun was a savvy person in his own right, but he couldn't have predicted how the public's lack of enthusiasm after Apollo would stunt the technological evolution of space technology through 2000. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, no one could have predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, or how the end of the Cold War would affect space exploration. Von Braun could not, I think, have foreseen how computing technology would enable unmanned probes to accomplish so much of what human spaceflight hasn't.
People can make grandiose visions and strive towards them. I agree that this is what drives innovation. People should take risks to try and accomplish great things over the long haul. But don't expect to be able to predict what is going to happen 50 years from now - there is far too much that will influence it that hasn't even been conceived of yet - things that will aid you, thwart you, spur you and stifle you, closing off one path while opening another.
In 1957, who could have predicted the next fifty years in space? Sputnik had not yet been launched - the Space Race hadn't even begun.
On the other hand, who 40 years ago could have predicted where we are now? In 1967, the Space Race was a dead heat, the Mercury and Gemini programs in the U.S. were blazing successes, and the challenges of Apollo putting a man on the Moon (though formidable) seemed within our grasp. People were already talking of space stations, Moon colonization, and Mars exploration, certainly all within a generation. Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were starting their collaboration for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
My point is: predictions are cheap, and over a span of fifty years mean little. Things develop far too quickly for a 50-year prediction to carry much weight. Predicting the future of space means also predicting the future of technology - what will be possible in fifty years. It also means predicting the future of the geopolitical and economic landscapes. All of these different factors influence one another - predicting the future of one will mean predicting at least a portion of the others.
When Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium-210, the media publicized that it was commercially available, although in very small quantities, in little brushes used for removing dust from lenses and old film. Po-210 is an alpha-particle emitter, which imparts that +2 ionization onto whatever it impacts. Once the dust on the lense or film is positively ionized, it repels itself and whatever it's sticking to, allowing it to be removed with essentially no mechanical action (like wiping), which could cause scratching. So, all we need to do it impregnate the glass of the solar panels with an alpha-emitter, and we'll be all set.
Engadget has a helpful rumor roundup - just to keep the /. discussion lively with speculation. Aside from the next-gen touchscreen iPod, there's the Beatles' catalogue on iTMS, direct-to-iPhone (iPod) music store downloads, and increased capacity in the Nano. "Analysis" (i.e., educated speculation and wishful thinking) available from CNet, ArsTechnica, and AppleInsider (1, 2, 3).
ps - the "Dalai" in Dalai Lama is spelled with two "a"'s. Otherwise, someone might get confused and think that the wild, mustachioed, surrealist painter of the early 20th century had converted to Buddhism.
Considering the tremendous amount of fanfare that the article describes will take place in transporting this old movie prop, and its overall shape, one could be forgiven for mistaking it for an inanimate carbon rod.
It is very interesting to look at the Gateway's share price history - as the summary suggests. Stock symbol GTW. Click on the 10 year view to see that, at the height of the dot-com days, it was trading at $60-$80. Since the bubble has burst, it has been steadily been below $10. Today at $1.80.
He did serve "At the Pleasure of the President," and show his loyalty to him. But, I will contend forcefully that his loyalty has been sorely misplaced. Loyalty is a virtue; misplaced loyalty is folly. Dammit, he didn't swear an oath of office to the President; his job is to be loyal to the people and the Constitution. If the President's wishes contradict what is in the interests of the people and skirt the Constitution, there should be no ambiguity in the Attorney General's mind as to which should take precedence.
It is true, in a sense, that the FCC does not "own" the spectrum. According to law, the airwaves belong to the people. In order to use the airwaves, companies must negotiate the right to use a portion of the radio spectrum. But, rather than go door-to-door and ask every citizen if it is OK to use the airwaves, companies negotiate with the citizens' representative - the government. And, because access to the radio spectrum has value, the FCC doesn't just give the spectrum away, but rather tries to fetch the best price for it on behalf of the citizens. It is much like an oil and gas company paying the government for the rights to drill on public lands.
Two sentences I would highlight from the StorageMojo article:
/., about how Microsoft could become the world's greenest company with a few small changes in code to be more aggressive about using power saving modes by default. Hardware makers have been harping on about power efficiency for ages, driven largely by the mobile computing and gadgetry market. As a result, there are a lot of things that the hardware can do to save power when under-utilized or idle, even in the server market. However, those features are only useful if the software (particularly OS and firmware) takes advantage of them. The more widespread the software, the greater the impact of incremental improvements in power-efficient code. A tiny fraction times GWh of energy is still a large amount. There are whole realms of power efficiency that have yet to be tapped.
1) Developers, the time may not too far away when your code is measured on power efficiency.
2) Software effects will be found significant as well because widely used software affects so many systems.
This reminds me of an article here on
Ok, I admit, I had to look this one up:
Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others. It comes from the latin roots for "use" and "fruits," in the sense that you are using the fruits of someone else's labor.
Wikipedia
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
a legal Dictionary
In the case of Hansen's second email, he is, I think, using it to describe how captains of industry are benefitting from the global warming nay-sayers' spin on this correction. He also uses it in the sense that successive generations have a right and claim to the enjoy the Earth, so we'd better take care of it, even as we benefit from it.
The evidence they provide for it traveling at "supersonic" speeds is the evidence of the shock wave accumulating in front of its direction of travel. It is the same shockwave that is created by a supersonic object in the atmosphere. That kind of shock wave - the sonic boom - develops because the object is traveling faster than the sound waves leaving it - the waves all get piled up in a cone extending behind the object. In the case of Mira, the same thing is happening, except that it's waves of stellar material being emitted from the star at some speed, and the star is traveling faster than the propagation of those stellar ejections.