I must be dense, but I'm not seeing how this is going to help in making TVs and projectors. The diode-pumped green lasers we already have are not that expensive (about $100, I think), so they would not add much to the cost.
The real problem seems like it would be brightness: you need a really bright laser to scan over that large 54" area and still remain bright to the eye. But the green lasers we have are already plenty bright. I think it's easier to get a bright "fake" green laser diode than a bright red one.
There are two reasons why the IBM PC was cloned: because Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS and you could buy the OS from Microsoft. If someone would reverse engineer the Mac BIOS you could legally make the hardware. You'd still have to violate Apple's license agreement to install the OS, though.
Just a random thought, why haven't we been bashing Intel on this? Sure, it was Microsoft which intentionally mislabeled things, but who pushed them? I would think Intel should be at least somewhat culpable on this, since, from the emails, they obviously knew what they were trying to get MS to do... Maybe inciting a crime, or an accomplice?
Am I correct in saying that the theory of evolution asserts (among other things) that new species are caused by random mutations in existing species? If so, it seems like the major point of contention is the random part. I doubt anyone would disagree that mutations of species produce new ones (that's kind of the definition). It seems like the only debate would be are the mutations random, or directed?
Is the claim of randomness falsifiable? From what I've seen, everyone just assumes that the mutations are random. Has anyone investigated to see if they are? (Honest question; I don't know the answer)
The problem with Windows is not that window drawing is done on by the client. The problem is that no event can be processed without the wndproc for that window looking at it first. So if the application isn't processing events, the window can't move.
X does it a bit differently in that you only receive events you request. Most X apps probably aren't interested in processing the move event, but if it does process it, I'll bet you'll get a similar effect with X.
I read the article, and it sounded rather like kdrive. Fast, simple, no cruft. Nobody uses kdrive, though, and I didn't see any compelling reason from the article why wayland is going to change things. Hopefully someone can enlighten me.
AMD is a company with debt/equity ratio of 2.0 and an average profit margin of -9.8% for the past 10 years. I'd say a company that has lost 10% for 10 years has a dismal future ahead of it. So for your B option, assets + fundamentals, we have about $5/sh - $1.1/sh/year. (-10% of revenue/sh = -$1.1) EPS this year were about -$8; I'd say if ever a company could have a negative valuation, AMD would be in the running.
Reminds me of a comment by Terry Pratchet in his Discworld book about opera. The owner was observing that he put opera in, but never got money out. The new owner looked at it differently: the opera house was a machine that you put money in and got opera out. AMD seems like the same thing: you put money in and get competition with Intel out. You certainly don't get money out!
Re:"what Leander thinks are the takeaways..."
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 1
> It takes even more to assume that you can explain the success of a man like Steve Jobs...
> and even more to assume that you can draw transferrable lessons that will enable others
> to replicate that success.
Well, either Jobs is successful because he's lucky, or he's successful because he consistently does things to produce a good result. If the latter, you can observe what he's doing and look for patterns. You can even run some experiments (theoretically) to figure out if what you think is responsible for his success really is. In fact, Jim Collins something like this with Built to Last and Good to Great. He looked at lots of successful companies and found commonalities. And he looked at lots of almost successful companies and found the lack of those commonalities. Great books; I highly recommend them. (You can read a short summary of Good to Great at my web site: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~prewett/writings/BookReviews/GoodToGreat.html)
It might also be worthwhile to ask what "success" means. Jobs is successful in the now, but if he doesn't build up a successor with his same characteristics, Apple will fail as soon as he leaves. Does success mean building a wonderful company that disappears when you die? Does success mean building a company that lasts forever? Does success mean building just enough of a company to get bought out and make a fortune? Does success mean people like you? That you have a great family? Jobs is only successful by some of those metrics...
I actually installed digiKam last night to take a look at it, but it looks like you have to import your stuff into their album management. I'd rather keep my files organized by the filesystem, not organized by some program that I may or may not be using five years from now. Is it possible to open up a raw file and just edit it? Can I at least say "here's the root directory of the pictures, let me look at them but don't put any special databases anyway, just treat them like files"?
What makes you think assassinating Saddam would have brought about regime change? All that would have happened would be that his second in command succeeded him. I'm guessing his second in command had the same philosophy as Saddam. Ruler change, yes; regime change, no.
I like your point about the scientific method being a tester of theories (kind of clears up some things for me, despite having studied physics).
Clearly evolution is a viable theory. But I don't think that saying God did it is saying that "anything can happen and we can't predict it." I see religion as a theory as well. They both are theories answering slightly different questions. Evolution asks "how did we get here?" and theorizes that the answer is "random chance" and supports this by observing random mutations. Christianity asks "why are we here?" and theorizes "we are here to love God and be loved by Him" and supports this by observing God's work in the world--creation, the history of Israel, Jesus dying for our sins. As far as I understand it, (Indian) Buddhism asks the question "why is there pain?" and theorizes that it comes from desire. (I don't know what supporting observations Buddhists use)
Religion/philosophy even has experiments, albeit usually unsupervised. Communism can be viewed as an experiment by the human race to test Marx's theory of human nature. Since the result diverged from his predicted result in the same way in all communist countries, one could conclude that his theories of human nature and human society are not well-supported. With Christianity, the prediction is that God will change people's character to match His. This is testable: find people who are Christians, watch them over ten or twenty years and see if it's true.
Sorry, a little off-topic. From all the posts here I get the feeling people that people don't respect religion. But religion is not just some bunk people make up (unlike most Creationist "science"). The major religions answer very real questions with legitimate answers.
Wouldn't the same thing hold for evolution? As far as I understand it, evolution asserts that we evolved through random mutations in absence of any divine intervention. (The last part being implicit to the usual meaning of "random") Nobody can scientifically prove that there was divine intervention, and nobody can prove that there wasn't, because science requires that the divine does not intervene (or at least intervenes exactly the same way each time).
> There's got to be huge advantages to building in a lunar environment,
> with raw materials available right there, and the chance to create living space
> just by drilling and sealing instead of fabricating from scratch.
You can create living space by drilling/sealing on Earth. Aside from water table issues (fixable with good sealing), I wouldn't be surprised if you run into some of the same problems on the moon that prevent people from doing that on Earth: rock is pretty hard, and it's just cheaper to build on the surface.
The stereotypical Slashdotter lives in his mother's basement and doesn't shower very often.
There are a number of complaints about ID/faith/science in earlier comments, and it occurred to me to ask, is there any data to back up this oft-repeated assertion? I keep seeing posts using the words "wife" and "girlfriend", so I'm finding it harder to have faith in this assertion...:)
If you want Linux (and are going to wipe the drive anyway) and the Windows computer is cheaper, just buy that. Look at it as the seller is giving you a free copy of Windows. If you want to be Principled about it, reject the eula and see if you can get a refund. However, Windows *is* one of the two main OSes in common use, and it might be handy to have a license lying around. I've been using Linux exclusively for about 5 or 6 years now, but I have some XP licenses I've acquired which have come in handy. For instance, if some lame-o company comes out with an cool phone/computer but whose sync software only runs on Windows or OS X and whose music browsing requires some database that only gets generated with said software, well, installing Windows is a lot cheaper than buying a Mac. It's also inevitable that you will want to give an older computer to someone or some charitable organization. They aren't going to want Linux. If you keep your license, then you can give them something useful that they will be happy to have.
I have to wonder, if Sun is pursuing Defense contracts, does Sun know where it's business is headed? Usually companies do the Defense contracts when they are small, need money, and don't really have a product yet. Since Sun made $740 million last year, you'd think they could afford to spend $40 million on this (probably over several years), and then they'd get to keep all the knowledge to themselves (including their R&D direction). So I can only assume that either Sun thinks this has too small a chance of success to invest in, or they can't think of any ideas for the future and are using government money to explore lots of ideas and hope that one of them keeps the company afloat.
Maybe it's just because I'm not in the server space, but it's unclear to me why exactly I would buy a Sun machine. I used to know--they were fast and had a nice version of Unix--but now Solaris is free and I'm not even sure if Sun makes their own chips any more.
Astrology is not merely "sort of a flawed mental shortcut for understanding the world." Astrology is trying to optimize your life by trying to extract extra information out of the Universe. It is not spirituality in the sense of Christianity, Islam, which is the worship of a being who by his nature deserves worship. Nor is it spirituality in the Buddhist sense of realizing that pain is caused by desire, so to eliminate pain you must eliminate desire. Astrology is more akin to folk religion, where you attempt to bribe the gods (with worship, money, etc.) to give you what you want.
Astrology is using amplified noise a guide to life. Since the information they want, namely information about the future, is non-existant, attempts to extract it from patterns of stars and planets must fail. Astrology is sort of like drawing a constellation from random dots. It sure looks meaningful after you draw the lines, but you've not decreased the randomness at all.
I'm failing to see why considering spiritual beliefs in choosing a girlfriend is a problem. You're already discriminating based on gender, attractiveness, personality, interests, maturity, etc. I don't hear many people suggesting that "she's totally selfish and immature, but that's no reason to rule her out." If you think her spiritual beliefs are idiotic, maybe there are better women to be spending your time with.
A surprisingly long-term oriented company. Usually they don't think past what Wall Street will think of the next couple quarters...
With the shipping charges and time delay, Doritos would probably be a high-society import. When I was in China in 1996, when we had fancy banquets, the table always had a couple bottles of Sprite and Coke. (1L bottles, which was a little annoying. Since there were 8 people per table, you could never drink enough to not be thirsty, and I was afraid it would be insulting to ask for more)
So is there any chance of getting an ssh implementation that doesn't require jailbreaking on my iPhone before June? If I can download the SDK, the SSH.app source code, compile it, and then upload it via the SDK, that'd be perfect.
This is the first thing I've heard which actually makes sense. I can't see why you would buy Yahoo for search, because nobody uses them for searching. If they had brilliant engineers doing brilliant search algorithms, you'd think that people would be using Yahoo's brilliant search algorithms. So either Microsoft is stupid (possible) or they want Yahoo for something else than a Google killer. Yahoo is a pretty nice information portal, though, and they do seem to have a well-used e-commerce piece.
But looking at YHOO from an investor's point of view, it looks wildly over-priced. P/E > 60 for 7% growth, 10% profit margin, 7% return on equity. By comparison, Microsoft's own stock has a P/E of 16, 30% growth, 22% profit margin, 48% return on equity. Which would you want to own? I'll take MSFT any day (even as a die-hard Linux user). It seems like Microsoft would have a much better investment if they spent their $40 billion on their own stock.
Some investment book I was reading (Peter Lynch, maybe) referred to companies investing in areas outside their traditional areas as diworsification because when companies did it, it usually hurt the business. And in either Built to Last or Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great businesses stick to their main thing they do well (their "hedgehog concept"). I wonder if Microsoft has lost its vision. Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS (their main strength) for mobile phones rather than making phones (not their strength).
I think GEGL was supposed to be in 2.2, too... I'm not terribly optimistic about seeing it any time soon. I'm hoping the Enlightenment 17 folks didn't have any influence on GEGL, or it may never happen.
Even if you only need 8 bit channels for web images, using 16 bit channels to do the processing before saving would help significantly. If you need to do color correction or color-curve editing you will frequently end up with gaps in the histogram, which corresponds to coarse color transitions in the image. For instance, if you have an under-exposed 8-bit image which only uses colors 0 - 128. It will look much better if you expand the color curve to use 0 - 255, but you will never more than the 128 values you started with. If you then try to change the color balance or use other effects you'll notice the banding more. If you had used a 16-bit image you would have the full 255 colors when you saved it back to an 8-bit image.
8-bit processing is not really an option. (Unless maybe your camera technique gives you pretty near perfect images all the time.)
> And if we're talking about a 512 bit hash then it's possible that a new planet full of lotteries will spontaneously emerge from the quantum vacuum. And you'll win all those too.
If this happens, be sure to keep the money from the quantum vacuum lotteries in a separate account, or it will annihilate with your real money.
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I must be dense, but I'm not seeing how this is going to help in making TVs and projectors. The diode-pumped green lasers we already have are not that expensive (about $100, I think), so they would not add much to the cost. The real problem seems like it would be brightness: you need a really bright laser to scan over that large 54" area and still remain bright to the eye. But the green lasers we have are already plenty bright. I think it's easier to get a bright "fake" green laser diode than a bright red one.
There are two reasons why the IBM PC was cloned: because Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS and you could buy the OS from Microsoft. If someone would reverse engineer the Mac BIOS you could legally make the hardware. You'd still have to violate Apple's license agreement to install the OS, though.
Just a random thought, why haven't we been bashing Intel on this? Sure, it was Microsoft which intentionally mislabeled things, but who pushed them? I would think Intel should be at least somewhat culpable on this, since, from the emails, they obviously knew what they were trying to get MS to do... Maybe inciting a crime, or an accomplice?
Am I correct in saying that the theory of evolution asserts (among other things) that new species are caused by random mutations in existing species? If so, it seems like the major point of contention is the random part. I doubt anyone would disagree that mutations of species produce new ones (that's kind of the definition). It seems like the only debate would be are the mutations random, or directed?
Is the claim of randomness falsifiable? From what I've seen, everyone just assumes that the mutations are random. Has anyone investigated to see if they are? (Honest question; I don't know the answer)
The problem with Windows is not that window drawing is done on by the client. The problem is that no event can be processed without the wndproc for that window looking at it first. So if the application isn't processing events, the window can't move. X does it a bit differently in that you only receive events you request. Most X apps probably aren't interested in processing the move event, but if it does process it, I'll bet you'll get a similar effect with X.
I read the article, and it sounded rather like kdrive. Fast, simple, no cruft. Nobody uses kdrive, though, and I didn't see any compelling reason from the article why wayland is going to change things. Hopefully someone can enlighten me.
AMD is a company with debt/equity ratio of 2.0 and an average profit margin of -9.8% for the past 10 years. I'd say a company that has lost 10% for 10 years has a dismal future ahead of it. So for your B option, assets + fundamentals, we have about $5/sh - $1.1/sh/year. (-10% of revenue/sh = -$1.1) EPS this year were about -$8; I'd say if ever a company could have a negative valuation, AMD would be in the running.
Reminds me of a comment by Terry Pratchet in his Discworld book about opera. The owner was observing that he put opera in, but never got money out. The new owner looked at it differently: the opera house was a machine that you put money in and got opera out. AMD seems like the same thing: you put money in and get competition with Intel out. You certainly don't get money out!
> It takes even more to assume that you can explain the success of a man like Steve Jobs...
> and even more to assume that you can draw transferrable lessons that will enable others
> to replicate that success.
Well, either Jobs is successful because he's lucky, or he's successful because he consistently does things to produce a good result. If the latter, you can observe what he's doing and look for patterns. You can even run some experiments (theoretically) to figure out if what you think is responsible for his success really is. In fact, Jim Collins something like this with Built to Last and Good to Great. He looked at lots of successful companies and found commonalities. And he looked at lots of almost successful companies and found the lack of those commonalities. Great books; I highly recommend them. (You can read a short summary of Good to Great at my web site: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~prewett/writings/BookReviews/GoodToGreat.html)
It might also be worthwhile to ask what "success" means. Jobs is successful in the now, but if he doesn't build up a successor with his same characteristics, Apple will fail as soon as he leaves. Does success mean building a wonderful company that disappears when you die? Does success mean building a company that lasts forever? Does success mean building just enough of a company to get bought out and make a fortune? Does success mean people like you? That you have a great family? Jobs is only successful by some of those metrics...
I actually installed digiKam last night to take a look at it, but it looks like you have to import your stuff into their album management. I'd rather keep my files organized by the filesystem, not organized by some program that I may or may not be using five years from now. Is it possible to open up a raw file and just edit it? Can I at least say "here's the root directory of the pictures, let me look at them but don't put any special databases anyway, just treat them like files"?
What makes you think assassinating Saddam would have brought about regime change? All that would have happened would be that his second in command succeeded him. I'm guessing his second in command had the same philosophy as Saddam. Ruler change, yes; regime change, no.
I like your point about the scientific method being a tester of theories (kind of clears up some things for me, despite having studied physics).
Clearly evolution is a viable theory. But I don't think that saying God did it is saying that "anything can happen and we can't predict it." I see religion as a theory as well. They both are theories answering slightly different questions. Evolution asks "how did we get here?" and theorizes that the answer is "random chance" and supports this by observing random mutations. Christianity asks "why are we here?" and theorizes "we are here to love God and be loved by Him" and supports this by observing God's work in the world--creation, the history of Israel, Jesus dying for our sins. As far as I understand it, (Indian) Buddhism asks the question "why is there pain?" and theorizes that it comes from desire. (I don't know what supporting observations Buddhists use)
Religion/philosophy even has experiments, albeit usually unsupervised. Communism can be viewed as an experiment by the human race to test Marx's theory of human nature. Since the result diverged from his predicted result in the same way in all communist countries, one could conclude that his theories of human nature and human society are not well-supported. With Christianity, the prediction is that God will change people's character to match His. This is testable: find people who are Christians, watch them over ten or twenty years and see if it's true.
Sorry, a little off-topic. From all the posts here I get the feeling people that people don't respect religion. But religion is not just some bunk people make up (unlike most Creationist "science"). The major religions answer very real questions with legitimate answers.
Wouldn't the same thing hold for evolution? As far as I understand it, evolution asserts that we evolved through random mutations in absence of any divine intervention. (The last part being implicit to the usual meaning of "random") Nobody can scientifically prove that there was divine intervention, and nobody can prove that there wasn't, because science requires that the divine does not intervene (or at least intervenes exactly the same way each time).
> There's got to be huge advantages to building in a lunar environment,
> with raw materials available right there, and the chance to create living space
> just by drilling and sealing instead of fabricating from scratch.
You can create living space by drilling/sealing on Earth. Aside from water table issues (fixable with good sealing), I wouldn't be surprised if you run into some of the same problems on the moon that prevent people from doing that on Earth: rock is pretty hard, and it's just cheaper to build on the surface.
The stereotypical Slashdotter lives in his mother's basement and doesn't shower very often.
:)
There are a number of complaints about ID/faith/science in earlier comments, and it occurred to me to ask, is there any data to back up this oft-repeated assertion? I keep seeing posts using the words "wife" and "girlfriend", so I'm finding it harder to have faith in this assertion...
If you want Linux (and are going to wipe the drive anyway) and the Windows computer is cheaper, just buy that. Look at it as the seller is giving you a free copy of Windows. If you want to be Principled about it, reject the eula and see if you can get a refund. However, Windows *is* one of the two main OSes in common use, and it might be handy to have a license lying around. I've been using Linux exclusively for about 5 or 6 years now, but I have some XP licenses I've acquired which have come in handy. For instance, if some lame-o company comes out with an cool phone/computer but whose sync software only runs on Windows or OS X and whose music browsing requires some database that only gets generated with said software, well, installing Windows is a lot cheaper than buying a Mac. It's also inevitable that you will want to give an older computer to someone or some charitable organization. They aren't going to want Linux. If you keep your license, then you can give them something useful that they will be happy to have.
I have to wonder, if Sun is pursuing Defense contracts, does Sun know where it's business is headed? Usually companies do the Defense contracts when they are small, need money, and don't really have a product yet. Since Sun made $740 million last year, you'd think they could afford to spend $40 million on this (probably over several years), and then they'd get to keep all the knowledge to themselves (including their R&D direction). So I can only assume that either Sun thinks this has too small a chance of success to invest in, or they can't think of any ideas for the future and are using government money to explore lots of ideas and hope that one of them keeps the company afloat.
Maybe it's just because I'm not in the server space, but it's unclear to me why exactly I would buy a Sun machine. I used to know--they were fast and had a nice version of Unix--but now Solaris is free and I'm not even sure if Sun makes their own chips any more.
Astrology is not merely "sort of a flawed mental shortcut for understanding the world." Astrology is trying to optimize your life by trying to extract extra information out of the Universe. It is not spirituality in the sense of Christianity, Islam, which is the worship of a being who by his nature deserves worship. Nor is it spirituality in the Buddhist sense of realizing that pain is caused by desire, so to eliminate pain you must eliminate desire. Astrology is more akin to folk religion, where you attempt to bribe the gods (with worship, money, etc.) to give you what you want.
Astrology is using amplified noise a guide to life. Since the information they want, namely information about the future, is non-existant, attempts to extract it from patterns of stars and planets must fail. Astrology is sort of like drawing a constellation from random dots. It sure looks meaningful after you draw the lines, but you've not decreased the randomness at all.
I'm failing to see why considering spiritual beliefs in choosing a girlfriend is a problem. You're already discriminating based on gender, attractiveness, personality, interests, maturity, etc. I don't hear many people suggesting that "she's totally selfish and immature, but that's no reason to rule her out." If you think her spiritual beliefs are idiotic, maybe there are better women to be spending your time with.
A surprisingly long-term oriented company. Usually they don't think past what Wall Street will think of the next couple quarters... With the shipping charges and time delay, Doritos would probably be a high-society import. When I was in China in 1996, when we had fancy banquets, the table always had a couple bottles of Sprite and Coke. (1L bottles, which was a little annoying. Since there were 8 people per table, you could never drink enough to not be thirsty, and I was afraid it would be insulting to ask for more)
So is there any chance of getting an ssh implementation that doesn't require jailbreaking on my iPhone before June? If I can download the SDK, the SSH.app source code, compile it, and then upload it via the SDK, that'd be perfect.
This is the first thing I've heard which actually makes sense. I can't see why you would buy Yahoo for search, because nobody uses them for searching. If they had brilliant engineers doing brilliant search algorithms, you'd think that people would be using Yahoo's brilliant search algorithms. So either Microsoft is stupid (possible) or they want Yahoo for something else than a Google killer. Yahoo is a pretty nice information portal, though, and they do seem to have a well-used e-commerce piece.
But looking at YHOO from an investor's point of view, it looks wildly over-priced. P/E > 60 for 7% growth, 10% profit margin, 7% return on equity. By comparison, Microsoft's own stock has a P/E of 16, 30% growth, 22% profit margin, 48% return on equity. Which would you want to own? I'll take MSFT any day (even as a die-hard Linux user). It seems like Microsoft would have a much better investment if they spent their $40 billion on their own stock.
Some investment book I was reading (Peter Lynch, maybe) referred to companies investing in areas outside their traditional areas as diworsification because when companies did it, it usually hurt the business. And in either Built to Last or Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great businesses stick to their main thing they do well (their "hedgehog concept"). I wonder if Microsoft has lost its vision. Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS (their main strength) for mobile phones rather than making phones (not their strength).
I think GEGL was supposed to be in 2.2, too... I'm not terribly optimistic about seeing it any time soon. I'm hoping the Enlightenment 17 folks didn't have any influence on GEGL, or it may never happen.
Even if you only need 8 bit channels for web images, using 16 bit channels to do the processing before saving would help significantly. If you need to do color correction or color-curve editing you will frequently end up with gaps in the histogram, which corresponds to coarse color transitions in the image. For instance, if you have an under-exposed 8-bit image which only uses colors 0 - 128. It will look much better if you expand the color curve to use 0 - 255, but you will never more than the 128 values you started with. If you then try to change the color balance or use other effects you'll notice the banding more. If you had used a 16-bit image you would have the full 255 colors when you saved it back to an 8-bit image.
8-bit processing is not really an option. (Unless maybe your camera technique gives you pretty near perfect images all the time.)
> And if we're talking about a 512 bit hash then it's possible that a new planet full of lotteries will spontaneously emerge from the quantum vacuum. And you'll win all those too.
If this happens, be sure to keep the money from the quantum vacuum lotteries in a separate account, or it will annihilate with your real money.