I agree completely - one needs to consider quality and past performance in addition to cost when making these kinds of decisions. Contractors are not interchangeable; if they were, then one could conceivably use cost as the primary metric in making a decision. An open (i.e., transparent, not behind closed doors) bid process does not necessarily preclude taking other things into consideration. I don't know about the applicable Massachusetts laws, though.
Devil's Advocate: One key difference in this case is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, public entity, isn't quite the same as Greg Norton, private citizen, when it comes to purchases. When it's the taxpayer footing the bill, there's an imperative to have an open bid process without room for bias (positive or negative) or personal preference.
Not that it matters much. Diebold's claim is bullshit. Sour grapes.
I think that the current issues of copyright are nicely bracketed by the two: the advent of the Internet making copyrighted content easier to sell, spread, and steal; and the hard-nosed tactics of Disney to keep their stuff copyrighted indefinitely.
Ya know, Armageddon (the movie) cost about $140 million to make. For that same budget, we probably could have finished a very good survey of any Near-Earth Asteroids, create a detailed mitigation plan, and start building prototype hardware to send up. You probably could even get Jerry Bruckheimer to film an overly dramatic documentary filled with lots of sound effects in space and slow-mo hero scenes.
If you were go back to the start of the mission and tell Squyers and his team that the rovers - both of them - would still be chugging along after this long, they would have thought you a lunatic. No one, particularly the ones involved, hoped or expected the rovers to continue functioning, let alone moving and providing loads of data for over three years.
They didn't ask for a three-year mission because, at the time, they didn't think it possible; or at least, they couldn't guarantee it on any reasonable budget. The assumption about the solar panels of the rovers becoming dusted over was a pretty good one, since that had happened with previous missions. They just happened to luck out with those scrubbing dust devils. Ninety days: sure, they could do that, and even that seemingly brief period would have been outstanding. The Pathfinder lander in 1997, with its little Sojourner rover, only lasted that long and it was a wildly successful mission that captivated the public eye.
I won't deny your premise, however, that it is easy to start off with a conservative goal you are pretty sure you can make, and then see how far you can milk it. I'm not sure that they do it because they fear asking for more money upfront, though. I think they fear not achieving what they told everyone they would do. Careers and reputations are at stake in this kind of thing, and success at a modest goal seems better than failure at a more ambitious goal. It hasn't always been so, of course, Kennedy and the Apollo program is an apt counterexample.
It does seem to happen a lot with planetary spacecraft - or at least those fortunately enough to survive to the end of their original mission length - they get their missions extended. It is a lot cheaper to extend a mission that is already there than it is to send a replacement. Why do you think no one wants to see the Hubble retired? The recently lost Mars Global Surveyor was in its third two-year extension, after a five-year primary mission, when it finally kicked the bucket. Low-balling and then exceeding expectations is part of the Scottie school of engineering. It is, as you put it, a good way of working within a bureaucracy.
I have sometimes wondered about the validity of the Microsoft tax, at least as far as windows is concerned. The cost per license to an OEM as large as Dell is probably rather small (certainly compared to the retail price of Windows). By having Windows installed, Dell is able to also bundle all kinds of bloatware that they get paid to include. I'm guessing the two are close to balancing out. Anyone have any numbers?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating for the presence of either Windows or bloatware on a new machine. I'm just not convinced that it is affecting the pricetag much overall.
If the license cost and bloatware payoff are comparable to Dell, then one could figure that a Dell machine without Windows or bloatware could have a comparable unit cost to a current, Windows-based machine. Note I'm not talking about price to consumers anymore - there are non-recurring engineering costs to figure into the pricetag like configuring the hardware and software together and establishing a support system.
If you're going to criticize the cost of the mission, perhaps you should put a more informed number to it: $650 million over some 15 years.
Relax, that's only moderately expensive as interplanetary probes go. Cassini-Huygens will top out at around $3.5-4 billion over the whole mission. The wildly successful Mars Exploration Rovers, especially since their mission has been extended much longer than expected, are about $1 billion. Mariner 4, the first probe to do a flyby of Mars (a significantly less-sophisticated mission), was about $100 million in 1960s dollars. $650 million is about as much that's lost to graft, corruption, fraud, and bribes in Iraq each month.
Aside from the probes that we have lost outright, the probes that have reached their destination intact have yielded mountains of data and plenty of pretty pictures. There will be much more data coming back to earth from the flyby in the coming weeks. But keep in mind that, over the vast distances and relatively weak signal from New Horizons, the connection is fairly low-bandwidth. By the time of the Pluto flyby, you can expect that it will takes months or years to download the full dataset. So, please, have some patience.
Moreover, as this Court has explained, although a dismissal in contexts like this one may appear "harsh" for the individual plaintiffs, the "greater public good," and "ultimately the less harsh remedy," is the protection of military and intelligence secrets the release of which could harm the public's safety.
My favorite part is that AT&T's lawyers feel that the terms "harsh," "greater public good," and "ultimately the less harsh remedy" all need to be put in quotes, as though they are abstract concepts that need an "ad hoc" definition. I think I'll just turn my cynicism engine on full blast and crawl into a corner somewhere.
I suspect that the intelligence built into the drive has the capability of detecting flash sectors that have gone bad, much like an ordinary hard drive can detect bad magnetic sectors. So, I think that over time one will see that the flash's capacity decreases, but is mostly still available during the life of the drive.
Actually, they did have something similar - a little animated assistant named Max. It looked like a Macintosh Plus with Mickey Mouse feet. Instead of snide facial expressions (a la Clippy), it would be stupid expressions on the animated Mac's screen, with the disk slot for a mouth. If you didn't ask it a question for a while, it would start doing attention-getting things like transforming itself (Rubik's cube style) or rocking back and forth on its feet. The best was that when you finally told the little shit to go away, it would have a waving hand flash on its screen.
I swear that in the animation of the waving hand Icould see it giving me the finger.
If it is true that Diebold is looking to dump this business unit (which hasn't been confirmed or denied - Diebold has only said that an announcement would come sometime), what then happens to all the machines (100,000+, i think)? Surely they, or whoever purchases the business unit, is still on the hook for support, updates, and whatever flak comes when the things don't work right. Those machines aren't going to simply vanish or instantly become secure and reliable. Some improvements can be made by completely changing the firmware, but a great deal of the criticism behind the voting machines was their lack of physical security and lack of a physical paper trail. Those are problems that can't be fixed without drastically altering the hardware itself. What company out there would want to buy this business unit and take that challenge on?
We are still in contact with the Voyager probes, and they have, at this point, traveled further out of the solar system than the Pioneer probes. Has the same anomaly been spotted in their trajectories too? That would be of great importance in weeding out possible phenomena.
Nah, I wasn't advocating that gyms actually go out and do this. My point was more that there are much more focused ways to go about capturing human energy. Probably a much larger savings would be realized, not from the electricity capture, but from reduced cooling needs. If 50 * 75 W can be turned into useful electricity rather than just waste heat,(*) that's a reduction in the necessary air conditioning. X watts of cooling power typically requires several times X in electrical power. It's still not enough to justify the costs of implementing this technology, but it is probably worth more than the raw electricity.
* Yes, I know, it all ends up as heat eventually, but at least it would do some useful work beforehand.
The article describes the system as siphoning off excess power from the generators already built into the equipment to run the exercise computers. It is like the dynamo on a bicycle - a parasitic power sink. They are only capturing a small fraction of the available power. The majority of the power the human inputs into the gym equipment still goes into waste heat production, same as the unmodified equipment.
A much better way to capture human power would be to scrap the power sink (the friction mechanism, for instance) and replace it with a real electrical generator, not just some dynamo rated for a couple of watts. With the proper power electronics, you can adjust the mechanical resistance that the human feels by adjusting the electrical power drawn from the generator. This would be similar to how regenerative braking works in hybrid cars. The braking action can be soft or hard, depending on the pedal input, and works by modulating the power drawn out of the generator and into the battery bank. Like a hybrid car, the mechanical resistance (i.e., traditional brakes) becomes almost superfluous.
This system would allow you to capture far more of the human power and convert it to electricity. With a well-chosen generator and well-designed power electronics, the conversion efficiency can be over 75%. For a human producting 100 W on a stationary bike (a decent workout), that would be 75 W of electricity.
This idea does, however, require a more substantial redesign or retrofit of the existing equipment, designed into the equipment and the gym from the beginning. As a result, I think it is unlikely to come about anytime soon. It would be a fun home project, however. Anyone know if Make Magazine has done something with this?
At least it is (presumably) charge-by-USB, so you won't need multiple power adaptors.
A slight correction: the iPhone is charge-by-Dock-connector. This means that you can charge it not only over USB (using a Dock cable), but also using any number of existing third-party products developed for charging the iPod.
With this technology, an "inkless pen" isn't out of the question. The paper is "printed" by shining light of a specific wavelength on it (in this case, in the UV range). It isn't so farfetched to imagine a pen that shines the same wavelength of light onto the page, allowing notes to be written freehand.
In a recent Today Show interview [youtube video], Billg dilated glowingly about Vista's new parental control centre; but we should remember that it's merely a tool, not a solution. Parental controls are not a substitute for adult supervision. The internet is adult space, and so it should remain. Nothing sends my blood pressure into aneurysm territory faster than talk of legislation that would make the internet safe for children. The internet has been created by adults for adults, and children venturing online simply have got to be supervised, either by a parent or by a mature and responsible older sibling. Filtering is not a panacea.
The italics are mine. That's probably the most well-put statement about parenting, children, and the internet I have ever come across. I don't think I could have summarized my thoughts on this any better. And since I can't, I won't expound on it any further.
The next release of OS X will have resolution independence. It's been just beneath the surface for a few releases now. Resolution independence allows text, icons, and everything else to be scaled to look "right" on high-resolution, small scale screens, or on normal resolution, ultra-large screens.
FTFA: The spinning ring would also drag space-time around with it, making the central black hole spin as well.
Perhaps I'm too Newtonian in my thinking here but, in order to conserve the angular momentum (presumably zero) of the particles that went into the collision, wouldn't the central black hole have to spin in the opposite direction of the ring? In that case, since we've got two objects dragging space-time in opposite directions, what happens to space-time in the space between?
Or, since we are talking about colliding protons, are we conserving spin instead of classical angular momentum? What happens then? If the protons are aligned, is the net spin of the black hole 1 (assuming that the exclusion principle has been overcome by gravity)? If they are anti-aligned, is the resulting spin zero?
Or do we throw things completely out the window because we're talking about higher spatial dimensions?
Argh! The Fermions are attacking my brain!
[These aren't really serious questions that I expect serious answers to. I know just enough physics to have those weird questions jump into my head, but not enough to intelligently explore the possibilities.]
That's all well and good, but that requires carrying around a TDD keyboard in addition to the cellphone. Those things aren't small. It also requires that the receiving party also have a TDD, unless the cellphones know to display the TDD text on their tiny screens.
Keep in mind that the station was designed for a crew complement of seven. Right now it has three. Keeping the station running is requiring most of the attention of those three. This is not a surprise. What has been a surprise has been how long the construction has taken, which has (in part) prevented the other four crew members, who would be doing the bulk of the science work, from going up. Other hangups that have held things up: redirected funding, the grounding of the shuttle fleet, and the not-yet-complete crew escape vehicle.
Well, the obvious solution is to have a device that's orientation-aware, possibly using an accelerometer, that could flip the button mapping and screen orientation depending on whether it is held one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely - one needs to consider quality and past performance in addition to cost when making these kinds of decisions. Contractors are not interchangeable; if they were, then one could conceivably use cost as the primary metric in making a decision. An open (i.e., transparent, not behind closed doors) bid process does not necessarily preclude taking other things into consideration. I don't know about the applicable Massachusetts laws, though.
Devil's Advocate: One key difference in this case is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, public entity, isn't quite the same as Greg Norton, private citizen, when it comes to purchases. When it's the taxpayer footing the bill, there's an imperative to have an open bid process without room for bias (positive or negative) or personal preference.
Not that it matters much. Diebold's claim is bullshit. Sour grapes.
I think that the current issues of copyright are nicely bracketed by the two: the advent of the Internet making copyrighted content easier to sell, spread, and steal; and the hard-nosed tactics of Disney to keep their stuff copyrighted indefinitely.
But of course it has practical applications: it applies to string theory!
Ya know, Armageddon (the movie) cost about $140 million to make. For that same budget, we probably could have finished a very good survey of any Near-Earth Asteroids, create a detailed mitigation plan, and start building prototype hardware to send up. You probably could even get Jerry Bruckheimer to film an overly dramatic documentary filled with lots of sound effects in space and slow-mo hero scenes.
If you were go back to the start of the mission and tell Squyers and his team that the rovers - both of them - would still be chugging along after this long, they would have thought you a lunatic. No one, particularly the ones involved, hoped or expected the rovers to continue functioning, let alone moving and providing loads of data for over three years.
They didn't ask for a three-year mission because, at the time, they didn't think it possible; or at least, they couldn't guarantee it on any reasonable budget. The assumption about the solar panels of the rovers becoming dusted over was a pretty good one, since that had happened with previous missions. They just happened to luck out with those scrubbing dust devils. Ninety days: sure, they could do that, and even that seemingly brief period would have been outstanding. The Pathfinder lander in 1997, with its little Sojourner rover, only lasted that long and it was a wildly successful mission that captivated the public eye.
I won't deny your premise, however, that it is easy to start off with a conservative goal you are pretty sure you can make, and then see how far you can milk it. I'm not sure that they do it because they fear asking for more money upfront, though. I think they fear not achieving what they told everyone they would do. Careers and reputations are at stake in this kind of thing, and success at a modest goal seems better than failure at a more ambitious goal. It hasn't always been so, of course, Kennedy and the Apollo program is an apt counterexample.
It does seem to happen a lot with planetary spacecraft - or at least those fortunately enough to survive to the end of their original mission length - they get their missions extended. It is a lot cheaper to extend a mission that is already there than it is to send a replacement. Why do you think no one wants to see the Hubble retired? The recently lost Mars Global Surveyor was in its third two-year extension, after a five-year primary mission, when it finally kicked the bucket. Low-balling and then exceeding expectations is part of the Scottie school of engineering. It is, as you put it, a good way of working within a bureaucracy.
I have sometimes wondered about the validity of the Microsoft tax, at least as far as windows is concerned. The cost per license to an OEM as large as Dell is probably rather small (certainly compared to the retail price of Windows). By having Windows installed, Dell is able to also bundle all kinds of bloatware that they get paid to include. I'm guessing the two are close to balancing out. Anyone have any numbers?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating for the presence of either Windows or bloatware on a new machine. I'm just not convinced that it is affecting the pricetag much overall.
If the license cost and bloatware payoff are comparable to Dell, then one could figure that a Dell machine without Windows or bloatware could have a comparable unit cost to a current, Windows-based machine. Note I'm not talking about price to consumers anymore - there are non-recurring engineering costs to figure into the pricetag like configuring the hardware and software together and establishing a support system.
If you're going to criticize the cost of the mission, perhaps you should put a more informed number to it: $650 million over some 15 years.
Relax, that's only moderately expensive as interplanetary probes go. Cassini-Huygens will top out at around $3.5-4 billion over the whole mission. The wildly successful Mars Exploration Rovers, especially since their mission has been extended much longer than expected, are about $1 billion. Mariner 4, the first probe to do a flyby of Mars (a significantly less-sophisticated mission), was about $100 million in 1960s dollars. $650 million is about as much that's lost to graft, corruption, fraud, and bribes in Iraq each month.
Aside from the probes that we have lost outright, the probes that have reached their destination intact have yielded mountains of data and plenty of pretty pictures. There will be much more data coming back to earth from the flyby in the coming weeks. But keep in mind that, over the vast distances and relatively weak signal from New Horizons, the connection is fairly low-bandwidth. By the time of the Pluto flyby, you can expect that it will takes months or years to download the full dataset. So, please, have some patience.
My favorite part is that AT&T's lawyers feel that the terms "harsh," "greater public good," and "ultimately the less harsh remedy" all need to be put in quotes, as though they are abstract concepts that need an "ad hoc" definition. I think I'll just turn my cynicism engine on full blast and crawl into a corner somewhere.
It makes me feel like I'm getting a patronizing lecture on law and freedom from Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. Or getting hand-parentheses from the finger quotes lady.
Related story from last month: Apple May Be Re-entering the Sub-Notebook Market.
Makes good sense, sub-notebooks have a premium on low power consumption / long battery life (more so than ordinary laptops).
I suspect that the intelligence built into the drive has the capability of detecting flash sectors that have gone bad, much like an ordinary hard drive can detect bad magnetic sectors. So, I think that over time one will see that the flash's capacity decreases, but is mostly still available during the life of the drive.
Actually, they did have something similar - a little animated assistant named Max. It looked like a Macintosh Plus with Mickey Mouse feet. Instead of snide facial expressions (a la Clippy), it would be stupid expressions on the animated Mac's screen, with the disk slot for a mouth. If you didn't ask it a question for a while, it would start doing attention-getting things like transforming itself (Rubik's cube style) or rocking back and forth on its feet. The best was that when you finally told the little shit to go away, it would have a waving hand flash on its screen.
I swear that in the animation of the waving hand Icould see it giving me the finger.
If it is true that Diebold is looking to dump this business unit (which hasn't been confirmed or denied - Diebold has only said that an announcement would come sometime), what then happens to all the machines (100,000+, i think)? Surely they, or whoever purchases the business unit, is still on the hook for support, updates, and whatever flak comes when the things don't work right. Those machines aren't going to simply vanish or instantly become secure and reliable. Some improvements can be made by completely changing the firmware, but a great deal of the criticism behind the voting machines was their lack of physical security and lack of a physical paper trail. Those are problems that can't be fixed without drastically altering the hardware itself. What company out there would want to buy this business unit and take that challenge on?
We are still in contact with the Voyager probes, and they have, at this point, traveled further out of the solar system than the Pioneer probes. Has the same anomaly been spotted in their trajectories too? That would be of great importance in weeding out possible phenomena.
Nah, I wasn't advocating that gyms actually go out and do this. My point was more that there are much more focused ways to go about capturing human energy. Probably a much larger savings would be realized, not from the electricity capture, but from reduced cooling needs. If 50 * 75 W can be turned into useful electricity rather than just waste heat,(*) that's a reduction in the necessary air conditioning. X watts of cooling power typically requires several times X in electrical power. It's still not enough to justify the costs of implementing this technology, but it is probably worth more than the raw electricity.
* Yes, I know, it all ends up as heat eventually, but at least it would do some useful work beforehand.
The article describes the system as siphoning off excess power from the generators already built into the equipment to run the exercise computers. It is like the dynamo on a bicycle - a parasitic power sink. They are only capturing a small fraction of the available power. The majority of the power the human inputs into the gym equipment still goes into waste heat production, same as the unmodified equipment.
A much better way to capture human power would be to scrap the power sink (the friction mechanism, for instance) and replace it with a real electrical generator, not just some dynamo rated for a couple of watts. With the proper power electronics, you can adjust the mechanical resistance that the human feels by adjusting the electrical power drawn from the generator. This would be similar to how regenerative braking works in hybrid cars. The braking action can be soft or hard, depending on the pedal input, and works by modulating the power drawn out of the generator and into the battery bank. Like a hybrid car, the mechanical resistance (i.e., traditional brakes) becomes almost superfluous.
This system would allow you to capture far more of the human power and convert it to electricity. With a well-chosen generator and well-designed power electronics, the conversion efficiency can be over 75%. For a human producting 100 W on a stationary bike (a decent workout), that would be 75 W of electricity.
This idea does, however, require a more substantial redesign or retrofit of the existing equipment, designed into the equipment and the gym from the beginning. As a result, I think it is unlikely to come about anytime soon. It would be a fun home project, however. Anyone know if Make Magazine has done something with this?
Businesses from banks to soccer clubs have been the target of these groups
That's "football clubs" to the rest of us.
With this technology, an "inkless pen" isn't out of the question. The paper is "printed" by shining light of a specific wavelength on it (in this case, in the UV range). It isn't so farfetched to imagine a pen that shines the same wavelength of light onto the page, allowing notes to be written freehand.
The italics are mine. That's probably the most well-put statement about parenting, children, and the internet I have ever come across. I don't think I could have summarized my thoughts on this any better. And since I can't, I won't expound on it any further.
The next release of OS X will have resolution independence. It's been just beneath the surface for a few releases now. Resolution independence allows text, icons, and everything else to be scaled to look "right" on high-resolution, small scale screens, or on normal resolution, ultra-large screens.
Some links about this.
FTFA: The spinning ring would also drag space-time around with it, making the central black hole spin as well.
Perhaps I'm too Newtonian in my thinking here but, in order to conserve the angular momentum (presumably zero) of the particles that went into the collision, wouldn't the central black hole have to spin in the opposite direction of the ring? In that case, since we've got two objects dragging space-time in opposite directions, what happens to space-time in the space between?
Or, since we are talking about colliding protons, are we conserving spin instead of classical angular momentum? What happens then? If the protons are aligned, is the net spin of the black hole 1 (assuming that the exclusion principle has been overcome by gravity)? If they are anti-aligned, is the resulting spin zero?
Or do we throw things completely out the window because we're talking about higher spatial dimensions?
Argh! The Fermions are attacking my brain!
[These aren't really serious questions that I expect serious answers to. I know just enough physics to have those weird questions jump into my head, but not enough to intelligently explore the possibilities.]
That's all well and good, but that requires carrying around a TDD keyboard in addition to the cellphone. Those things aren't small. It also requires that the receiving party also have a TDD, unless the cellphones know to display the TDD text on their tiny screens.
Keep in mind that the station was designed for a crew complement of seven. Right now it has three. Keeping the station running is requiring most of the attention of those three. This is not a surprise. What has been a surprise has been how long the construction has taken, which has (in part) prevented the other four crew members, who would be doing the bulk of the science work, from going up. Other hangups that have held things up: redirected funding, the grounding of the shuttle fleet, and the not-yet-complete crew escape vehicle.
Well, the obvious solution is to have a device that's orientation-aware, possibly using an accelerometer, that could flip the button mapping and screen orientation depending on whether it is held one way or the other.
Wait a minute...
[rushes to go file patent application]
-1, Obvious