Try to give your products a generic name so people assume they have all the market, e.g. "Word", "SQL Server", "Internet Explorer" (There is only one SQL server, right?). Then try and claim your usage is nonobvious so you can trade mark it. This is just a marketing fashion, like the one of giving things stupid made-up names ("Pentium", "Accenture") and the flirtation with i-this and e-that. Ford in the UK have a (horrible) model called the Ka, though it makes me think of ancient Egypt rather than the automotive industry and hasn't helped their market share
Given the way Intel seems to be determined to make the thing trade markable by adding a qualifier (as in "Core duo"), someone is going to have to recruit a classicist to tell them what to do after "Core trio". When they get to, say, 160 cores on one chip, that will be one seriously unpronounceable brand name. Perhaps they will go for Roman numerals and we will have to try and work out whether a Core CXXXXVIII outranks a Core CDX.
Or perhaps they could just move all marketing and microprocessor development to Israel. There are plenty of prophets left after Yonah, and the names are likely to be more familiar.
No-one will ever read this post, but I couldn't help observing that the Tay Bridge disaster in Scotland in the 19th century occurred precisely because an engineer put his faith in the wind estimates of a scientist (Airey.) It was the engineer who lost his knighthood, but it was Airey who was the real villain because his carelessness drastically understated wind pressures on the bridge.
However, you are quite wrong about the theory of evolution. The amount of data that underpins it is colossal. I think it has been estimated (by Gould?) that the quantity of evidence gathered for evolutionary processes and palaeontology exceeds the evidence for the Roman Empire and the historicity of Christianity.
However, that you use the term "creation scientists" shows your obvious bias. Perhaps in future I'm going to start referring to Darwin as "Evangelist Charles 1st".
The question is, what is the best way of miximising shareholder value? Dodge was clearly wrong, because Ford was acting in the best long term interests of his shareholders, but Dodge did not underfstand this. Modern corporate law is essentially meaningless because it is so difficult to predict what actions would lead in the long term to maximise shareholder value. For instance, Shell and BP invest increasingly in non-oil technology, and this has depressed Shell's share price. But if this ever came to court, Shell would pull in a raft of economists who would argue that, if they do nothing and oil runs out, shareholder value will decline towards zero, while if Shell becomes the world leader in, say, wind or wave power, their shareholders will continue to draw dividends forever. Given the propoensity of economists to agree with one another, such a court case would benefit mainly lawyers and expert witnesses, and Shell could create a new industry harnessing the resulting hot air.
It would be possible to make at least an outline case that the Chinese boom is unsustainable and the Chinese control economy and government will ultimately be harmful to US business and the world economy, and that therefore a company like Google which depends on information availability must resist as far as possible any official attempts to curtail their access to and dissemination of information.
It is unfortunately all too often that civil laws are drafted in such a way as to maximise lawyer profits by giving the largest possible scope for variant interpretation. Sed quid custodiet ipsos custodes, as they say.
Bullying should be treated in law as what it is - an assault on the person. When the parents of bullies realise that the outcome will be time in juvenile detention for their child and payment of damages by themselves - the problem will start to go away.
Violence that begets violence never ends. Violence that results in financial and social penalties has a limited life span.
Where the USPTO is out of whack with the rest of the world is that the US enables submarine patents by working to date of invention, not date of filing. (The European patent office allows cheap early notification of a patent to get round the potential cost issue.) Date of invention is an inducement to fraud because it is easy for Big Corp to fake or modify documents, especially as the whole idea is that these documents are secret as otherwise the patent is in the public domain. An idea originally intended to help small inventors in days when transport and communications were poor s completely obsolete today, but encourages forgers, lawyers and IP practitioners to sit on potentially patentable ideas and do nothing, hoping that someone else will do the work of putting them into practice whereupon they can establish a patent.
So yes, I agree with your proposals but they don't go far enough.
Improving the reflectivity of cities and urban areas is a practical, possible measure with a sensible timescale (after all, sidewalks have to be resurfaced from time to time, roofs have to be repaired and replaced, so the net oncost is very small.)
And that's (cynicism hat on) what's wrong with it. You're only creating jobs for hard hat workers. To get any leverage behind a solution, you need something that costs an enormous amount and creates lots of white middle class jobs, preferably in government.
Protestantism started as a revolt of people who wanted access to knowledge when the Church was being obscurantist. They wanted, for instance, not to have to use an old Latin translation of the Bible but to be able to do their own translations direct from Greek and Hebrew. As a result, Protestantism became the religion of advanced thinkers. Protestant scientists discovered the age of the Earth, the structure of the Universe, and modern biology while the Catholic church was still insisting as late as the 1950s (I think) that Adam and Eve were historical. The Universities in Cambridge (UK) and Cambridge(Mass) are the front-runners of that tradition.
And now? It's so-called "protestants" who are trying to go back to religious fundamentalism and wilful obscurantism, and the Catholic Church that is rethinking its intellectual foundations.
The really funny thing is that in recent years the Roman Catholic Church suddenly seems to have realised that they should be proud of Galileo. How long before a movement starts to canonise Geordano Bruno?
Karl Popper is dead, and we know that in many sciences falsifiability is not the only option. There is prediction. If a hypothesis results in a prediction that can be tested, and it is correct, then this is evidence for the hypothesis. The new version of the dark matter theory seems actually to be resulting in predictions, and the concept that the universe may be quantised in some way at a very large scale (1000 light years) could have considerably explanatory power. Theories that claim that there is no such thing as dark matter and it will can be replaced by adjustments to the theory of gravitation will run into trouble if the proposed quantisation can be demonstrated.
If the Universe does turn out to be made of 1000LY wide bricks, I sure as Hell don't want to meet the bricklayer.
Perhaps worth pointing out that the cooling problem looks entirely due to having too small a hole for the fan inlet. The hub of the fan obstructs a lot of the hole. The rule is either to ensure the hole is the same diameter as the impeller, or have a duct to the hole which is the same size as the impeller where it meets the fan, and the same cross-sectional area as the working impeller blades at the outlet. The total area of the inlet to the case should be roughly the same as the area of the fan outlet. (i.e. you do not want to need any pressure differential across the inlet.)
Unfortunately small fast fans are noisy. Perhaps the answer would be to cheat: remove the base, create a false base with ducting around the circumference, and allow the air to flow in at the bottom and out at the back.
No, I'm no expert. I just rely on information from the numerous Africans I've met over the last few years since I first visited Africa in 1980.
As an example, consider the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin, and the ongoing expulsion of white farmers by Mugabe. The expulsion of the Ugandan Asians resulted in a loss of educated people to the Ugandan economy from which, given its subsequent disastrous history, it has not yet recovered. Recent studies in the UK show that those same Asians have been one of the most economically successful waves of UK immigration ever (one of the few things I am proud of about the UK is that the government ignored that ghastly monster Enoch Powell and let them in.) The expulsion of white farmers in Zimbabwe, far from bringing agrarian reform, is impoverishing the countryside.
Meanwhile, educated Kenyans and Nigerians head for foreign countries as soon as they can. (There are Africans teaching in British schools, and many working in the National Health Service. They are as good at their jobs as anybody else, but they should not be here when their own continent needs them so badly.) The loss of educated people is damaging to African economies and we in the West just stand by and do nothing.
We let Rwandans have a civil war in which, particularly, educated people are targeted; we have an Aids pandemic which disproportionately affects the more economically active in cultures where relatively wealth brings mobility and access to prostitutes; we continue to let Somalia disrupt economic activity in its region. But we can spend billions and thousands of lives failing to guarantee oil supplies.
The John Deere platform is only available to military users. It has a really nice, small, advanced Diesel engine so should be very cheap to run. It looks dirt simple to work on. Far from being restricted, they should be giving them away with a grant to anyone working on autonomous vehicles, and to me. Because I want one. No, make that two. In fact, give them away free to anyone who has ever worked in vehicle research, because you will then see the state of the art in autonomy advance by leaps and bounds. Why? Because there is currently no suitable cheap, widely available platform. The Darpa challenge was won by a modified VW van, with a huge array of platforms behind it. Standardising around a simple, low cost, low power vehicle which is already tough would put future teams on a level playing field, ensuring that it was the superior systems that won the day, and that no-one could profit from their ability to buy mechanical muscle.
This post is more than interesting, it is insightful. Why is Africa such a mess? Because, basically, it has few middle class educated people. Why is India progressing so rapidly? Because it has a large and growing middle class fueled by the high status of education. Why does China want Taiwan so badly? Because China is (relatively speaking) a backward oligarchy and it would benefit from quickly acquiring a large educated middle class and its vast intellectual productive resources.
So why is the American (and British) system currently so geared to benefiting oligarchs and making things using cheap labor? Why are our education systems increasingly failing? Is it because our leaders are becoming like the backwards oligarchs of the South, interested solely in lining their own pockets to the detriment of our long term prospects?
What makes this especially interesting is the rise in prominence of people like McKain in the US and now Cameron in the UK, who are emphasising traditional middle class values against the corporatism of the respective governments. Time for an educated middle class backlash, perhaps.
The Russian mob is far from funny. Doctorow lives in London, and central London currently has a large number of Russians who are unable to explain where their money comes from. Personally, I would rather have old style KGB agents than the current crop of oligarchs (though I don't give a toss who owns Chelsea, having been born within screaming distance of White Hart Lane.)
I can assure you that two magents that fit into a 5.25 inch hard drive would not collide from a foot apart horizontally. The attraction law for magnets is very roughly inverse cube (NOT inverse square, because there are two poles not one). In fact (and I tested it) the magnets from an old WD SCSI drive would come together from between one and two inches apart, and believe me that is quite a lot for magnets with very close poles. However, it is perfectly true that if these ceramic magnets are allowed to come together they can shatter.
In fact, the magnets are the most useful things in junk hard drives - they can be used for all sorts of little jobs - but as hard drives get ever lighter and more efficient the magnets get ever less useful. Old SCSI drives are the best. A standard IBM 9Gbyte drive contains two magnets with a holding capacity which would cost over $50 from the hardware shop.
IBM does not do much with SMEs. But some SMEs will become large enterprises, and when they do they will want big tin and support and they will want to keep on using what they've got.
The logic is exemplary. Microsoft has a lot of SME installations of MSSQL, and they hope that some will become big installations and by then they will have figured out how to do big iron. So IBM says to the SME "come to us instead and no matter how fast you grow your investment in software will never be obsolete. Hey, worried about viruses and licensing and stuff? Want to start off from day one with Linux on the server and the desktop? We can do that for you."
The reasoning is sufficient to have caused me to download DB2 for Linux to install on Ubuntu tomorrow morning, if only to evaluate just how difficult a port will be for us.
Have you ever seen a Japanese advanced toilet? Washes, direction dependent on gender, blow dries, by now probably dispenses talcum powder. The worst of it is, I find myself thinking seriously about installing a couple just to blow the minds of visitors. If only plumbers in our area had yet reached the 20th Century.
Michael Faraday and electricity
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Story one:
Prime Minister: What use is it, Mr. Faraday?
Faraday: I know not, but I wager one day your government will tax it.
Story two:
Prime Minister: Waht use is it, Mr Faraday?
Faraday: What use is a new born baby?
Probably both urban legends (BTW I'm a former RI member, I'm allowed to say this) but they make a point.
Infrastructure not old business model
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Amazon is (just) a department store that runs over the Web. All its tricks are just derivatives of the way that traditional department stores operated - hosting stores within stores, customer accounts, POS advertising. It arose at a time when the infrastructure did not really exist to support it. Google is an enabling technology. It is funded through advertising, but it is something fundamentally new. I'm in the process of completing a personal engineering project. When I look at the stuff I have had to learn and the technology I have had to acquire, it's probable that without Google and the Internet it would have taken several times longer and not worked so well. As for my day job, it would be nearly impossible.
Google shares are possibly over-hyped, but they reflect a very interesting perception: that the Internet is now good for something, but that we don't know where it is going. We had the mass transit revolution (railways), the personal transit revolution (bicycles, then cars), the communications revolution (telephony.) Now we have the information revolution, and anyone who looks like they are reading meaningful signposts is likely to be highly valued.
I live at 248 above mean sea level in an area with moderate temperatures and 40 inches a year rainfall. Global warming worries me not a bit.
However, if I lived in London, New York, or Bangladesh, I would be rather more concerned for the long term. It's true that clean drinking water and medicines will benefit many people, but the effects of flooding on migration, population disruption and interruption to trade will start off wars. In fact, perhaps I should be worried. I will probably need a few RPGs and machine guns to stop those displaced Londoners coming and stealing my house.
Not for nothing in German is City Hall called the Rathaus (yes, I know, I know, it's a feeble joke.). But all too often the rats are on the outside trying to get in.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the way Intel seems to be determined to make the thing trade markable by adding a qualifier (as in "Core duo"), someone is going to have to recruit a classicist to tell them what to do after "Core trio". When they get to, say, 160 cores on one chip, that will be one seriously unpronounceable brand name. Perhaps they will go for Roman numerals and we will have to try and work out whether a Core CXXXXVIII outranks a Core CDX.
Or perhaps they could just move all marketing and microprocessor development to Israel. There are plenty of prophets left after Yonah, and the names are likely to be more familiar.
However, you are quite wrong about the theory of evolution. The amount of data that underpins it is colossal. I think it has been estimated (by Gould?) that the quantity of evidence gathered for evolutionary processes and palaeontology exceeds the evidence for the Roman Empire and the historicity of Christianity.
However, that you use the term "creation scientists" shows your obvious bias. Perhaps in future I'm going to start referring to Darwin as "Evangelist Charles 1st".
It would be possible to make at least an outline case that the Chinese boom is unsustainable and the Chinese control economy and government will ultimately be harmful to US business and the world economy, and that therefore a company like Google which depends on information availability must resist as far as possible any official attempts to curtail their access to and dissemination of information.
It is unfortunately all too often that civil laws are drafted in such a way as to maximise lawyer profits by giving the largest possible scope for variant interpretation. Sed quid custodiet ipsos custodes, as they say.
Violence that begets violence never ends. Violence that results in financial and social penalties has a limited life span.
How big is the SUV version going to be? There won't be enough room in Switzerland for it.
So yes, I agree with your proposals but they don't go far enough.
And that's (cynicism hat on) what's wrong with it. You're only creating jobs for hard hat workers. To get any leverage behind a solution, you need something that costs an enormous amount and creates lots of white middle class jobs, preferably in government.
And now? It's so-called "protestants" who are trying to go back to religious fundamentalism and wilful obscurantism, and the Catholic Church that is rethinking its intellectual foundations.
The really funny thing is that in recent years the Roman Catholic Church suddenly seems to have realised that they should be proud of Galileo. How long before a movement starts to canonise Geordano Bruno?
If the Universe does turn out to be made of 1000LY wide bricks, I sure as Hell don't want to meet the bricklayer.
Unfortunately small fast fans are noisy. Perhaps the answer would be to cheat: remove the base, create a false base with ducting around the circumference, and allow the air to flow in at the bottom and out at the back.
As an example, consider the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin, and the ongoing expulsion of white farmers by Mugabe. The expulsion of the Ugandan Asians resulted in a loss of educated people to the Ugandan economy from which, given its subsequent disastrous history, it has not yet recovered. Recent studies in the UK show that those same Asians have been one of the most economically successful waves of UK immigration ever (one of the few things I am proud of about the UK is that the government ignored that ghastly monster Enoch Powell and let them in.) The expulsion of white farmers in Zimbabwe, far from bringing agrarian reform, is impoverishing the countryside.
Meanwhile, educated Kenyans and Nigerians head for foreign countries as soon as they can. (There are Africans teaching in British schools, and many working in the National Health Service. They are as good at their jobs as anybody else, but they should not be here when their own continent needs them so badly.) The loss of educated people is damaging to African economies and we in the West just stand by and do nothing.
We let Rwandans have a civil war in which, particularly, educated people are targeted; we have an Aids pandemic which disproportionately affects the more economically active in cultures where relatively wealth brings mobility and access to prostitutes; we continue to let Somalia disrupt economic activity in its region. But we can spend billions and thousands of lives failing to guarantee oil supplies.
Africa is a disgrace, and it is our disgrace.
Because I checked out their site before posting that, since I was interested in acquiring one, and it says exactly what I posted. It's here by the way
The John Deere platform is only available to military users. It has a really nice, small, advanced Diesel engine so should be very cheap to run. It looks dirt simple to work on. Far from being restricted, they should be giving them away with a grant to anyone working on autonomous vehicles, and to me. Because I want one. No, make that two. In fact, give them away free to anyone who has ever worked in vehicle research, because you will then see the state of the art in autonomy advance by leaps and bounds. Why? Because there is currently no suitable cheap, widely available platform. The Darpa challenge was won by a modified VW van, with a huge array of platforms behind it. Standardising around a simple, low cost, low power vehicle which is already tough would put future teams on a level playing field, ensuring that it was the superior systems that won the day, and that no-one could profit from their ability to buy mechanical muscle.
So why is the American (and British) system currently so geared to benefiting oligarchs and making things using cheap labor? Why are our education systems increasingly failing? Is it because our leaders are becoming like the backwards oligarchs of the South, interested solely in lining their own pockets to the detriment of our long term prospects?
What makes this especially interesting is the rise in prominence of people like McKain in the US and now Cameron in the UK, who are emphasising traditional middle class values against the corporatism of the respective governments. Time for an educated middle class backlash, perhaps.
The Russian mob is far from funny. Doctorow lives in London, and central London currently has a large number of Russians who are unable to explain where their money comes from. Personally, I would rather have old style KGB agents than the current crop of oligarchs (though I don't give a toss who owns Chelsea, having been born within screaming distance of White Hart Lane.)
In fact, the magnets are the most useful things in junk hard drives - they can be used for all sorts of little jobs - but as hard drives get ever lighter and more efficient the magnets get ever less useful. Old SCSI drives are the best. A standard IBM 9Gbyte drive contains two magnets with a holding capacity which would cost over $50 from the hardware shop.
The logic is exemplary. Microsoft has a lot of SME installations of MSSQL, and they hope that some will become big installations and by then they will have figured out how to do big iron. So IBM says to the SME "come to us instead and no matter how fast you grow your investment in software will never be obsolete. Hey, worried about viruses and licensing and stuff? Want to start off from day one with Linux on the server and the desktop? We can do that for you."
The reasoning is sufficient to have caused me to download DB2 for Linux to install on Ubuntu tomorrow morning, if only to evaluate just how difficult a port will be for us.
Have you ever seen a Japanese advanced toilet? Washes, direction dependent on gender, blow dries, by now probably dispenses talcum powder. The worst of it is, I find myself thinking seriously about installing a couple just to blow the minds of visitors. If only plumbers in our area had yet reached the 20th Century.
Prime Minister: What use is it, Mr. Faraday?
Faraday: I know not, but I wager one day your government will tax it.
Story two:
Prime Minister: Waht use is it, Mr Faraday?
Faraday: What use is a new born baby?
Probably both urban legends (BTW I'm a former RI member, I'm allowed to say this) but they make a point.
Google shares are possibly over-hyped, but they reflect a very interesting perception: that the Internet is now good for something, but that we don't know where it is going. We had the mass transit revolution (railways), the personal transit revolution (bicycles, then cars), the communications revolution (telephony.) Now we have the information revolution, and anyone who looks like they are reading meaningful signposts is likely to be highly valued.
However, if I lived in London, New York, or Bangladesh, I would be rather more concerned for the long term. It's true that clean drinking water and medicines will benefit many people, but the effects of flooding on migration, population disruption and interruption to trade will start off wars. In fact, perhaps I should be worried. I will probably need a few RPGs and machine guns to stop those displaced Londoners coming and stealing my house.
Not for nothing in German is City Hall called the Rathaus (yes, I know, I know, it's a feeble joke.). But all too often the rats are on the outside trying to get in.
This is going to be one for http://europa.eu.int/comm/commission_barroso/kroes /index_en.html the European Competition commissioner. Following in the footsteps of Super Mario, it looks like this one could run and run.