You need to also compare delivery times, though. How far out are each of them? Airbus only has a 25% margin, and I think they have at least a 1-year head start.
If Bob writes a program, releases it under the GPL, and incorporates contributed code into the project, that's another can of worms. I would think if he wanted to "go private" with the code base at that point he would need to get the permission of everyone who contributed any code, much like Mozilla did. If he couldn't get their permission he would have to rewrite those chunks of code.
No. One person owns the copyright to the overall body of code. Your contributions are just that... gifts. The alternative is to only contribute to projects where the EFF owns the copyright, so a "rogue owner" can't take advantage of your work.
Nature of the beast. The real check and balance is that if a project has a significant portion of outside contributors it doesn't make a very good canidate for "sale," as the maintenance of the package is outside the realm of hte primary contributor...
That is basically what you have to do; accelerometers for precision, corrected by GPS for drift. The programming isn't that bad as long as you can synch the time stamp between a accelerometer datalogger and GPS.
A lot of people don't seem to understand why the white balance has value to a professional photographer. When you shoot RAW, you can completely correct for ambient lighting after the fact by adjusting the white balance, and without any loss of quality.
Even just for "pro-sumer" cameras, this feature is great when working with ambient light.
Good link. Problem is that the data doesn't really get beter with the extra radar sites. You should be able to use one radar site as a source, and others in the region for supplemental reflections. Should be able to cancel out some of the ground reflections...
If there is money to be made, private industry doesn't need to worry about government competition.
I can think of plenty of ways to offer better data to the consumer than what NOAA provides. Aggregating public and private information and providing that to subscribers is a great idea!
Personally, it's nice to check out the NOAA radar maps before I head out on a bike ride. However, because of the location of the regional radar (San Jose), I can't get a great idea of what obstacles I might face in riding from San Francisco to Marin. Overlaying the radar data from multiple sources might provide me with more useful information.
NOAA doesn't always provide the best information in terms of point-forecasts, and there is a market ($$) for someone to do a better job. The problem is that people like the Weather Channel and Weather Underground were the original obnoxious advertisers! Their weather forecasts were not worth the "cost" of the advertisements. On the other hand, some of of the "personal weather stations" were pretty useful.
This is bad legislation. If you want to "cripple" NOAA, cut their budget to make it easier for private competition to do a better job. I don't support it, but if you want to stick with Republican values, that is the only way to go.
is the iGo power adapters. To really meet your needs you would have to reverse-engineer something, though.
What makes the iGo solution work is the "tips" which apparently provide feedback to the DC-DC voltage regulators as to what the desired voltage for that tip is.
What makes it suck is that you can only have two "tips", and it has so many cords that it is almost worse than the original two wall warts you had to carry around.
My solution would be to reverse-engineer an iGo system, have a common high voltage DC bus and modular DC-DC regulators that can stack, with integrated ports for additional cords and "tips". It isn't perfect; you still have way more cords than a sane person would want, and if your device requires multiple voltages (I think the mac mini is in this category) you will need to do something fancier...
A lot of people get really caught up in the US-centric view of the world. Until very recently, iPods were not readily available in many markets in Europe. They are now. Sales went up 40% in Europe.
There are new markets left to tap, and new generations of the product that will offer compelling reasons to upgrade. The availability of iPods in the retail channel is amazing. People know what an iPod is.
If 10% of the people that bought an iPod buy a Mac in the future, that is a huge impact on apple! The "cult of the ipod" makes me think they will do better than 10% with the conversions...
But, only a fool expects 100% growth to be able to continue for several consecutive years! It is better to have a company that has steady growth over a decade rather than a "one-hit wonder." Apple is showing that their big hit is being converted to a long-term revenue stream.
I have an iPod Photo. I bought it just for the drive capacity; I thought the photo thing was a really dumb gimmic. We have 3,000 photos on ours now... and actually show them to people! It blows my mind that anybody would want to sit and look at them, but... they do!!!
One of the keys is pictures of kids. People take thousands of pictures of their kids... and other people love looking at all of them. It's cool to see changes over time.
Sadly, I'm even thinking of getting the AV kit now, and the camera connector! It makes no sense, but... it's useful.
It's also nice to have the color screen and some of the other little perks...
If you are going to buy stock in something you are emotionally attached to, and money is important to you, at least think of the following things:
Can the company's benevolence lead to some source of income?
Does what they are doing make some kind of big-picture opportunity?
If this company is intent on competing with Microsoft,
can they be successful with a small market share?
can they gain whatever market share required with a minimum of cash?
do they need to rely on Microsoft for success in any way, including compatibility
Is there anything "cool" about what the company is trying to pull off... can it get beyond logic and actually make money?
Am I just in it for a quick press "bounce"?
Will the SlashdotEffect create enough interest to actually drive the price up? (It is possible... just look at Corel in the late 90's!) There's nothing wrong with throwing money after a good idea... just try and grasp the big picture and see if things make sense. (Checking current fundementals doesn't hurt either, but that will lead to conservative selections.)
Well, the audit trail for a $1 transaction can easily cost $0.20. ($0.12 is a best-case number that the credit card companies used to use.) Small component costs can kill your margin quite quickly!
Much of what is required by the act is "good." However, the end-run for many businesses will be to force them to offshore (audit) work in an effort to drive down that extra overhead by 50-60% and make themselves remain competitive.
It's a boon to my business... as long as we aren't publicly traded! It adds work and helps us provide lower cost solutions than our listed competitors.
In US airports for international flights, your passport is checked by the ticket agent at the airline check-in counter. People have to have the passports ready. It would be easy enough to pull it off... if you could read any encrypted data.
From my experience on an island in Thailand without government electricity, a UPS is hopeless. The range of voltage is only marginally suitable for driving incandescent lightbulbs. If you need to use local power (no solar option), you have limited options.
An AVR helps, but is usually only good in the +/-15% range. A laptop is the ideal solution, with an input range of 240-100V, but that will go in time as well with enough surges. An old battery will usually still give you a couple minutes of run-time, which will at least get you through the sags.
If you have to work with a desktop, the only solution I found that actually kept the surges away was to make a small M-G set-- couple a two motors on a common shaft with a flywheel, and connect a UPS to the output of that. All the little hits will be taken by the flywheel (as will the overvoltages), and the UPS will deal with actual outages. If you want to increase the life of the UPS batteries, put an Automatic Voltage Regulator in front of the UPS.
As for UPS systems, an off-line UPS won't do you much good. You will need a good double-conversion system to condition incoming power.
I don't think APC makes one of their "Delta Conversion" systems in that small of a size, but that could give you the best of both worlds; very good voltage regulation with buck/boost capability, and the best efficiency.
This potentially wouldn't even require a hybrid. Straight electric seems achievable.
Cost would still be an issue with the new cells; using the batteries as an APU would be much more cost effective. (If cost goes down, maybe there would be a chance for an all-electric.) It seems like the real key is to get the auto manufacturers to have a viable electric drivetrain, which could take advantage of technology advances in fuel cells or batteries.
Problem is that as an employer I expect prospective hires to give at least a minimum notice (something over two weeks), but I also have a criteria for maximum notice, depending on a variety of factors including experience level, size of company they are coming from, and other secret things. When they go beyond the maximum, I start to be concerned that there is something they aren't telling me...
My recommendation is to not to do it between high school and university.
Premise is that you are American, and are "average" when it comes to social adaptation.
University is a great place to continue your maturity, learn to live away from home and parents, make good decisions and bad, and learn something academically as well. When you finish school, find a job and work for a while.
After a few years of working (paying off student loans, saving up a little cash, deciding what you like and don't), then you are allowed to take off as much as a couple years. Don't set a timeline. Go to some place that interests you (and where you can live cheap and work a little), move around a bit, and challenge yourself. When you run out of money, figure out what to do next...
This is what I did. I know that going back to school after spending a couple years on a tropical island wouldn't work for me. (Honestly, learning to write again was hard...) Also, I personally needed the extra time to "grow" as a person that college allowed me. I have noticed that the vast majority of Americans have this same need. Most Europeans tend to be considerably more mature at 18 than their US counterparts.
I spent most of two years scuba diving on an island in Thailand, with trips off to Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Ireland. When I was done, I was ready to go back to engineering. After a few more years of engineering, I'm ready to head back again for a while. It was fun, and I am happy I did it. I am also happy that I waited until I was over 25 to do it, where I had some financial backup and a better sense of how things really work. It was also easier for me to find "good" work being a little older.
The flip side to this is that your new employer might not take kindly to pushing back the start date too much. I'm only marginally willing to let a new hire wait 4 weeks before starting; if they want that long, there is a good chance they might be fishing.
When people come off as fishing, you worry that they won't stay at your job long, are just looking for a raise, or might be difficult to work with.
It isn't fair, since on the other side of the fence I would want 2 months notice before someone quits (there is no chance in hell you can replace a non-commodity person in less than 2 months!). Two months in my business is enough time to wind down for one person, transition projects, and hopefully get a replacement on board.
While it isn't likely to go up another 4x this year, it is a safe bet that it will beat the S&P and most of the mutual funds out there. A 20% gain for the year is reasonable, and 30-40% is possible.
If nothing else, Apple is at least keeping pace with oil.
The "Flimsy Slums" you speak of are often a response to local climate. A lightweight structure is better in a hot climate since it doesn't trap the heat; it just provides shelter.
Most of the places that I have been to with such "slums" work much better than a concrete structure ever would!
Slashdot Mirror
You need to also compare delivery times, though. How far out are each of them? Airbus only has a 25% margin, and I think they have at least a 1-year head start.
Of course, the real test is profitability though.
No. One person owns the copyright to the overall body of code. Your contributions are just that... gifts. The alternative is to only contribute to projects where the EFF owns the copyright, so a "rogue owner" can't take advantage of your work.
Nature of the beast. The real check and balance is that if a project has a significant portion of outside contributors it doesn't make a very good canidate for "sale," as the maintenance of the package is outside the realm of hte primary contributor...
That is basically what you have to do; accelerometers for precision, corrected by GPS for drift. The programming isn't that bad as long as you can synch the time stamp between a accelerometer datalogger and GPS.
No, I bill myself out at roughly $15/hour. ...and therin lies your problem.
A lot of people don't seem to understand why the white balance has value to a professional photographer. When you shoot RAW, you can completely correct for ambient lighting after the fact by adjusting the white balance, and without any loss of quality.
Even just for "pro-sumer" cameras, this feature is great when working with ambient light.
More importantly, the OC links have a hell of a lot more redundancy than a consumer connection...
Good link. Problem is that the data doesn't really get beter with the extra radar sites. You should be able to use one radar site as a source, and others in the region for supplemental reflections. Should be able to cancel out some of the ground reflections...
If there is money to be made, private industry doesn't need to worry about government competition.
I can think of plenty of ways to offer better data to the consumer than what NOAA provides. Aggregating public and private information and providing that to subscribers is a great idea!
Personally, it's nice to check out the NOAA radar maps before I head out on a bike ride. However, because of the location of the regional radar (San Jose), I can't get a great idea of what obstacles I might face in riding from San Francisco to Marin. Overlaying the radar data from multiple sources might provide me with more useful information.
NOAA doesn't always provide the best information in terms of point-forecasts, and there is a market ($$) for someone to do a better job. The problem is that people like the Weather Channel and Weather Underground were the original obnoxious advertisers! Their weather forecasts were not worth the "cost" of the advertisements. On the other hand, some of of the "personal weather stations" were pretty useful.
This is bad legislation. If you want to "cripple" NOAA, cut their budget to make it easier for private competition to do a better job. I don't support it, but if you want to stick with Republican values, that is the only way to go.
is the iGo power adapters. To really meet your needs you would have to reverse-engineer something, though.
What makes the iGo solution work is the "tips" which apparently provide feedback to the DC-DC voltage regulators as to what the desired voltage for that tip is.
What makes it suck is that you can only have two "tips", and it has so many cords that it is almost worse than the original two wall warts you had to carry around.
My solution would be to reverse-engineer an iGo system, have a common high voltage DC bus and modular DC-DC regulators that can stack, with integrated ports for additional cords and "tips". It isn't perfect; you still have way more cords than a sane person would want, and if your device requires multiple voltages (I think the mac mini is in this category) you will need to do something fancier...
Looks more like an artifact from the reflection/shadow in the water. Water turbidity could account for the color difference
A lot of people get really caught up in the US-centric view of the world. Until very recently, iPods were not readily available in many markets in Europe. They are now. Sales went up 40% in Europe.
There are new markets left to tap, and new generations of the product that will offer compelling reasons to upgrade. The availability of iPods in the retail channel is amazing. People know what an iPod is.
If 10% of the people that bought an iPod buy a Mac in the future, that is a huge impact on apple! The "cult of the ipod" makes me think they will do better than 10% with the conversions...
But, only a fool expects 100% growth to be able to continue for several consecutive years! It is better to have a company that has steady growth over a decade rather than a "one-hit wonder." Apple is showing that their big hit is being converted to a long-term revenue stream.
I have an iPod Photo. I bought it just for the drive capacity; I thought the photo thing was a really dumb gimmic. We have 3,000 photos on ours now... and actually show them to people! It blows my mind that anybody would want to sit and look at them, but... they do!!!
One of the keys is pictures of kids. People take thousands of pictures of their kids... and other people love looking at all of them. It's cool to see changes over time.
Sadly, I'm even thinking of getting the AV kit now, and the camera connector! It makes no sense, but... it's useful.
It's also nice to have the color screen and some of the other little perks...
Don't people understand that it is dangerous to ride a bicycle while listening to music!?
I know it's sarcasm, but Steve Jobs is the highest paid CEO in the US in terms of total annual compensation. He weighs in at about $78m...
Can the company's benevolence lead to some source of income?
Does what they are doing make some kind of big-picture opportunity?
If this company is intent on competing with Microsoft,
Is there anything "cool" about what the company is trying to pull off... can it get beyond logic and actually make money?
Am I just in it for a quick press "bounce"?
Will the SlashdotEffect create enough interest to actually drive the price up? (It is possible... just look at Corel in the late 90's!)
There's nothing wrong with throwing money after a good idea... just try and grasp the big picture and see if things make sense. (Checking current fundementals doesn't hurt either, but that will lead to conservative selections.)
How much does compliance cost?
Well, the audit trail for a $1 transaction can easily cost $0.20. ($0.12 is a best-case number that the credit card companies used to use.) Small component costs can kill your margin quite quickly!
Much of what is required by the act is "good." However, the end-run for many businesses will be to force them to offshore (audit) work in an effort to drive down that extra overhead by 50-60% and make themselves remain competitive.
It's a boon to my business... as long as we aren't publicly traded! It adds work and helps us provide lower cost solutions than our listed competitors.
But boy do they cause a welt when stored in your pocket! Long time since anybody has mentioned these guys... indestructable they are!
In US airports for international flights, your passport is checked by the ticket agent at the airline check-in counter. People have to have the passports ready. It would be easy enough to pull it off... if you could read any encrypted data.
From my experience on an island in Thailand without government electricity, a UPS is hopeless. The range of voltage is only marginally suitable for driving incandescent lightbulbs. If you need to use local power (no solar option), you have limited options.
An AVR helps, but is usually only good in the +/-15% range. A laptop is the ideal solution, with an input range of 240-100V, but that will go in time as well with enough surges. An old battery will usually still give you a couple minutes of run-time, which will at least get you through the sags.
If you have to work with a desktop, the only solution I found that actually kept the surges away was to make a small M-G set-- couple a two motors on a common shaft with a flywheel, and connect a UPS to the output of that. All the little hits will be taken by the flywheel (as will the overvoltages), and the UPS will deal with actual outages. If you want to increase the life of the UPS batteries, put an Automatic Voltage Regulator in front of the UPS.
As for UPS systems, an off-line UPS won't do you much good. You will need a good double-conversion system to condition incoming power.
I don't think APC makes one of their "Delta Conversion" systems in that small of a size, but that could give you the best of both worlds; very good voltage regulation with buck/boost capability, and the best efficiency.
Good luck... it's an uphill battle.
This potentially wouldn't even require a hybrid. Straight electric seems achievable.
Cost would still be an issue with the new cells; using the batteries as an APU would be much more cost effective. (If cost goes down, maybe there would be a chance for an all-electric.) It seems like the real key is to get the auto manufacturers to have a viable electric drivetrain, which could take advantage of technology advances in fuel cells or batteries.
Problem is that as an employer I expect prospective hires to give at least a minimum notice (something over two weeks), but I also have a criteria for maximum notice, depending on a variety of factors including experience level, size of company they are coming from, and other secret things. When they go beyond the maximum, I start to be concerned that there is something they aren't telling me...
My recommendation is to not to do it between high school and university.
Premise is that you are American, and are "average" when it comes to social adaptation.
University is a great place to continue your maturity, learn to live away from home and parents, make good decisions and bad, and learn something academically as well. When you finish school, find a job and work for a while.
After a few years of working (paying off student loans, saving up a little cash, deciding what you like and don't), then you are allowed to take off as much as a couple years. Don't set a timeline. Go to some place that interests you (and where you can live cheap and work a little), move around a bit, and challenge yourself. When you run out of money, figure out what to do next...
This is what I did. I know that going back to school after spending a couple years on a tropical island wouldn't work for me. (Honestly, learning to write again was hard...) Also, I personally needed the extra time to "grow" as a person that college allowed me. I have noticed that the vast majority of Americans have this same need. Most Europeans tend to be considerably more mature at 18 than their US counterparts.
I spent most of two years scuba diving on an island in Thailand, with trips off to Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Ireland. When I was done, I was ready to go back to engineering. After a few more years of engineering, I'm ready to head back again for a while. It was fun, and I am happy I did it. I am also happy that I waited until I was over 25 to do it, where I had some financial backup and a better sense of how things really work. It was also easier for me to find "good" work being a little older.
The flip side to this is that your new employer might not take kindly to pushing back the start date too much. I'm only marginally willing to let a new hire wait 4 weeks before starting; if they want that long, there is a good chance they might be fishing.
When people come off as fishing, you worry that they won't stay at your job long, are just looking for a raise, or might be difficult to work with.
It isn't fair, since on the other side of the fence I would want 2 months notice before someone quits (there is no chance in hell you can replace a non-commodity person in less than 2 months!). Two months in my business is enough time to wind down for one person, transition projects, and hopefully get a replacement on board.
But... I ain't no programmer...
While it isn't likely to go up another 4x this year, it is a safe bet that it will beat the S&P and most of the mutual funds out there. A 20% gain for the year is reasonable, and 30-40% is possible.
If nothing else, Apple is at least keeping pace with oil.
The "Flimsy Slums" you speak of are often a response to local climate. A lightweight structure is better in a hot climate since it doesn't trap the heat; it just provides shelter.
Most of the places that I have been to with such "slums" work much better than a concrete structure ever would!