To understand how the free market solves the problem of pollution, where government regulation is a failure, see Rothbard's For a New Liberty
Unless you have an actual, working example, then this is not how the free market solves the problem, it's all theory. How does the free market deal with companies that pollute and then go out of business?
Or the libertarians' beloved property rights. Is there a square inch of land owned on earth that cannot trace ownership back to one guy with a big stick taking it from another?
Pollution is exactly that -- a tort.
So you want even more frickin' lawyers than we have now. Joy. The law does not guarantee fairness, just see O.J. Simpson on the golf course for an example of what money can buy.
You can't legally copy open-source software any more than you can copy closed-source binary images.
Yes you can. What you describe is "available source", not open source. And no, you can't define open source to mean what you want it to mean, when the term of art is well understood to mean something completely different.
There really isn't any real reason why Microsoft couldn't make all their source code available.
Available yes, open no. Though no doubt by not making it available they make it harder for someone else to duplicate bug-for-bug functionality.
Opening up their source would also instantly get rid of the problem of some governments' requirements for open-source software.
Again, you're confusing open and available. Available source is less useful, since you can't create derivative works, can't cooperate on improving things. Governments are interested in more than available source gives them, including no licensing fees.
Not because people were dying as a result of the vaccine.
Sadly, a percentage (very small, but even so) of children do react to vaccines, and become permanently disabled or die as a result. The number is very small compared to the number who die in car crashes, swimming accidents, etc., but it is non-zero. And knowing you did everything right but still voluntarily did something that ended up destroying your child's life still leaves you with a hell of a lot of guilt and soul-searching.
If there is a negligible chance of the ailment coming back, it is worth stopping the vaccinations to save those few lives.
You act like consumerism is a bad thing. Consumerism is what drives economies.
Bah. If you spent the money on charitable causes (such as medical research), you would stimulate the economy just as much, and at the end you would have more medical progress instead of broken or obsolete gadgets taking up space in your attic or basement.
Or, if you don't spend it, and invest it, someone else may use the money to invent or improve new technologies. Are we better off because we bought bonds during WWII and the gov't developed jet engines and computers? Or would we have been better off spending on consumer goods? The tech advancement from war comes because we do the former then, not the latter.
It reminds me of a Consumer Reports review of a voice-activated remote control and a letter responding to said review. The CR report said that it didn't seem as effective as the old-fashioned technique of pressing buttons on the remote. The letter writer wrote that he didn't think he was that old, but he thought the old-fashioned way of changing channels, etc. was actually getting up and turning knobs on the set...
OK, you didn't say yield, but the OP did, and then I did when helping him understand that the actual relationship of yield to process geometry is opposite of what he claimed.
"Yield" as used by CPU manufacturers is not necessarily what a layman means when he uses it. In the business, it's the ratio of good chips to total chips. But I could say "one wafer yields 50 good chips on average", and most of us would understand it. So while you are technically correct in CPU tech terms, the original poster was really concerned with what matters to Athlon pricing, which is more closely related to chips/wafer than to yield as you use it.
I'll grant you my MS in VLSI is more than 10 years old, so I haven't looked that closely at the effects of process changes on yield and die sizes. I was under the impression the changes in yield aren't that dramatic because they are countered by improvements in the technology. Otherwise yields for P4s would be incredibly bad compared to the 6502 yields of 20 years ago.
As for pricing differences of making masks, running fabs, etc., there's certainly a tradeoff of higher initial costs and amortization costs. But manufacturers are making those tradeoffs -- including using larger wafers -- because they are expected to pay off.
BTW, note that your example cited an expected rather than actual die size reduction. I'll bet the actual wasn't even close.
If you have an actual as opposed to expected die size reduction for very similar chips of different wire width, I'd be interested in seeing the actual numbers. Ditto yield numbers.
I didn't say yield, I said the chips/wafer increases. Since the cost of manufacturing a wafer of a given size is pretty constant, more chips/wafer means cheaper chips if your yield does not decrease, or if it only decreases by a small enough amount.
die size for a given design does not scale with gate size as you think it might.
I agree that is an oversimplification. (Esp. since things like pads don't change in size.) Picking the one example I could find quickly on the internet, a decrease from.18 u to.13 u (.72 as wide) was expected to decrease an Athlon from 128 sq mm to 80 sq mm (.625 as big). So you would get 1.6 times as many chips/wafer if the yield is the same, less if the yield decreases.
(See this, near the end, for the numbers provided above.)
Why is that? Generally smaller geometries result in lower yields.
Yes, but the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates. Remember the increase in the chips/wafer is the square of the inverse of the decrease. I.e., if you go from.15 nm to.1 nm, the chips/wafer increases by (.15/.1)^2 = 2.25 times as many chips.
Of the little I know about biometric fingerprint readers, there are two kinds - ones based on conductivity and ones based on ccd cameras. Both allow for 'Alive-And-Well' checks, to circumvent the problems of both lopping off someone's finger and holding them at gunpoint (pulse checkers).
The problem is thieves tend to be pretty stupid to begin with, particularly those who would be willing to cut off someone's finger to steal a little money. So this might stop the thief from actually getting money with the finger, but doesn't stop them cutting it off in the first place.
[The lunar atmosphere] is made of hydrogen and helium from the Solar Wind
So why not collect it? Seems to me the tech needed for a ramjet could be used to create a solar wind collector on the moon. Even at a millionth the atmosphere of the earth, a decent area of collectors could get enough to supply a good-sized moonbase. If it's the solar wind, it is constantly replenished, right?
Does it really take that long to swap out a set of RCA input cables?
Depending on your set-up, the connectors may be hard to access. If you have a 25"+ TV in a cabinet, for example, you may have to move the cabinet just to get the cables. Front panel jacks are a lot easier, but require more visible cables and many people are still using TVs that don't have them. Also, my 6-year-old definitely couldn't do it, whereas she could press the video/TV button on a remote and she can put in a DVD.
Except for the DVD games thing, this already exists, and it's called the Panasonic Q
It's mind-bogglingly expensive for what it does relative to a standard 'Cube. Maybe Nintendo had a contract with Panasonic that has terminated, and now allows Nintendo to build their own DVD player version.
You could also conceivably "theme" a DVD player. What it displays when no disc is playing, or how it handles long pauses, could be done with a Mario or Zelda theme -- no normal player could do that.
I think it was more a failure not to have a Zelda or Mario title available for launch...
They did have Luigi's Mansion, and the Wind Waker has at least been out for a while. Pokemon clearly was going to fade before too long, as it now has.
Why is it that it's suddenly so important to convert everybody's grandma to Linux?
So I don't have keep running Ad-Aware and Spybot for them.
Also, I work on Mac/Windows software development. I'd like to add Linux to the targets list so I can make use of it.
I like my choices
We don't want to take away choices. We just want one high-reliability, easy-to-use open source OS plus applications that works well for the masses. The same flexible Linux/X/GNU/etc stuff can all live happily on.
Why does the next one have to play DVDs? I don't know about you specifically, but myself and everyone I know already has a perfectly good stand-alone DVD player....
But devices such as TVs don't have an infinite number of inputs. Many just have two independent sources: a coaxial connection (for Cable) and an RCA connection. So in that case the single device is better.
Perhaps this new device is an enhanced GameCube, with the ability to play full DVDs (and even have games with a full DVD worth of data) and 720P support, but otherwise the same API or a superset thereof, so developers don't need to do much different at the moment.
Nintendo's real failure with the GameCube was not having a Pokemon title at or near launch. Now the Pokemon phenomenon has faded, it's not such an issue, but people would have bought the console just for a GameCube game like Pokemon Gold/Sapphire/etc.
No he doesn't, he sits on it and accrues interest.
So then a bank or other financial institution has the cash, and they "circulate" the money.
In the end, though, money is just bits of paper thant move around and inspire us to do work. The real issues of economics are how many of us are working, and how productively. Unemployed people don't produce anything of value, and thus are a drain on the economy. People who do jobs that should be unnecessary also don't produce anything of value. Soldiers don't produce anything, although they may preserve value. The key to economics is getting as much goods and services provided as possible, generally by getting as many people working as possible and working as productively as possible.
The issue of the fat cat is how those goods and services produced are distributed, the fat cat getting much more than the common man.
I don't get why the Xouvert folks didn't just pitch in on this effort. They're almost a month and a half behind their schedule.
It is an unfortunate inefficiency in the open source development process that there are often redundant projects whose variations add little or nothing to the mix. If two seemingly similar projects actually have substantial differences underneath, in terms of structure, process, or even development model, then at least there can be some benefit from the multiple projects. But too often there is the same NIH ("not invented here") syndrome seen in many other fields.
So why didn't I earn that trust when I went out and bought the CD, rather than grabbing it off Kazaa?
I'm the guy actually buying music, and 99% of the time, I'm not the guy who then goes and puts it on Kazaa. And if I was, a little thing like DRM isn't going to stop me.
You might as well trust and give good service to people who have demonstrated that they are legitimate customers.
It may be that such systems could be made reasonably secure in the hands of a trustworthy authority. But let's face it; do you trust China with these devices? I can certainly imagine a few "accidental" strikes on Taiwan, or even a supposedly rogue general making threatening remarks about using them in that way. While the U.S. would be hard-pressed to stop the Chinese from implementing this if they had the tech, if the U.S. develops one it will make it easier for other countries to implement it in future.
One thing that might encourage energy efficiency is if power companies can establish liens on houses. It might be in their best interest to finance installation of energy-efficient appliances and things like SunSlates. (Note: I have no connection with the company, I was just checking it out recently and remembered that name.) Put a lien so it is financed by a short or long-term loan on the house that is paid as part of the utilities bill. If the device is efficient enough, it may be that the overall power bill is still lower than normal, in which case even a fairly expensive installation is in the homeowner's best interest. I don't know if power companies can legally do this already, however, in which case presumably they have chosen not to due to it not being economically feasible.
For example, a $15K solar power system with an average lifespan of 20 years breaks even on a 5 percent, 20 year loan if it saves an average of $100/month.
Unless I'm mistaken, Mac now seems to be the system for development, more than ever, and that spells progress in the right direction for developers everywhere.
I'm currently considering get a Mac for exactly that reason. With the Unix-like base, X Window support, XCode, and CHUD, they have a very nice development platform available for every Mac, and some of it is even open source.
Give me a break, a rogue government is much more likely to buy a briefcase sized nuke than construct trillion dollar space laser.
That's not the issue. 10 men didn't build 757s, but they did crash them into the WTC. You don't need to build the item if you can seize temporary control. That's the fear of building something like this; what happens if it gets into the wrong hands, or what if the failsafes aren't? (Aren't fail-safe, that is.)
In contrast, something like SunSlates on tens of millions of homes would also cost about a trillion, but has little or no abuse potential. But it wouldn't be quite the engine of change, either, as it couldn't provide power for industrial applications.
Slashdot Mirror
To understand how the free market solves the problem of pollution, where government regulation is a failure, see Rothbard's For a New Liberty
Unless you have an actual, working example, then this is not how the free market solves the problem, it's all theory. How does the free market deal with companies that pollute and then go out of business?
Or the libertarians' beloved property rights. Is there a square inch of land owned on earth that cannot trace ownership back to one guy with a big stick taking it from another?
Pollution is exactly that -- a tort.
So you want even more frickin' lawyers than we have now. Joy. The law does not guarantee fairness, just see O.J. Simpson on the golf course for an example of what money can buy.
You can't legally copy open-source software any more than you can copy closed-source binary images.
Yes you can. What you describe is "available source", not open source. And no, you can't define open source to mean what you want it to mean, when the term of art is well understood to mean something completely different.
There really isn't any real reason why Microsoft couldn't make all their source code available.
Available yes, open no. Though no doubt by not making it available they make it harder for someone else to duplicate bug-for-bug functionality.
Opening up their source would also instantly get rid of the problem of some governments' requirements for open-source software.
Again, you're confusing open and available. Available source is less useful, since you can't create derivative works, can't cooperate on improving things. Governments are interested in more than available source gives them, including no licensing fees.
Not because people were dying as a result of the vaccine.
Sadly, a percentage (very small, but even so) of children do react to vaccines, and become permanently disabled or die as a result. The number is very small compared to the number who die in car crashes, swimming accidents, etc., but it is non-zero. And knowing you did everything right but still voluntarily did something that ended up destroying your child's life still leaves you with a hell of a lot of guilt and soul-searching.
If there is a negligible chance of the ailment coming back, it is worth stopping the vaccinations to save those few lives.
"I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Cpl. Hicks, "Aliens"
You act like consumerism is a bad thing. Consumerism is what drives economies.
Bah. If you spent the money on charitable causes (such as medical research), you would stimulate the economy just as much, and at the end you would have more medical progress instead of broken or obsolete gadgets taking up space in your attic or basement.
Or, if you don't spend it, and invest it, someone else may use the money to invent or improve new technologies. Are we better off because we bought bonds during WWII and the gov't developed jet engines and computers? Or would we have been better off spending on consumer goods? The tech advancement from war comes because we do the former then, not the latter.
My family enjoyed one of the Discovery Channel shows Daltrey did (replicating parts of Powell's trip down the Grand Canyon.)
But then you still have to get up!
It reminds me of a Consumer Reports review of a voice-activated remote control and a letter responding to said review. The CR report said that it didn't seem as effective as the old-fashioned technique of pressing buttons on the remote. The letter writer wrote that he didn't think he was that old, but he thought the old-fashioned way of changing channels, etc. was actually getting up and turning knobs on the set...
OK, you didn't say yield, but the OP did, and then I did when helping him understand that the actual relationship of yield to process geometry is opposite of what he claimed.
"Yield" as used by CPU manufacturers is not necessarily what a layman means when he uses it. In the business, it's the ratio of good chips to total chips. But I could say "one wafer yields 50 good chips on average", and most of us would understand it. So while you are technically correct in CPU tech terms, the original poster was really concerned with what matters to Athlon pricing, which is more closely related to chips/wafer than to yield as you use it.
I'll grant you my MS in VLSI is more than 10 years old, so I haven't looked that closely at the effects of process changes on yield and die sizes. I was under the impression the changes in yield aren't that dramatic because they are countered by improvements in the technology. Otherwise yields for P4s would be incredibly bad compared to the 6502 yields of 20 years ago.
As for pricing differences of making masks, running fabs, etc., there's certainly a tradeoff of higher initial costs and amortization costs. But manufacturers are making those tradeoffs -- including using larger wafers -- because they are expected to pay off.
BTW, note that your example cited an expected rather than actual die size reduction. I'll bet the actual wasn't even close.
If you have an actual as opposed to expected die size reduction for very similar chips of different wire width, I'd be interested in seeing the actual numbers. Ditto yield numbers.
I didn't say yield, I said the chips/wafer increases. Since the cost of manufacturing a wafer of a given size is pretty constant, more chips/wafer means cheaper chips if your yield does not decrease, or if it only decreases by a small enough amount.
.18 u to .13 u (.72 as wide) was expected to decrease an Athlon from 128 sq mm to 80 sq mm (.625 as big). So you would get 1.6 times as many chips/wafer if the yield is the same, less if the yield decreases.
die size for a given design does not scale with gate size as you think it might.
I agree that is an oversimplification. (Esp. since things like pads don't change in size.) Picking the one example I could find quickly on the internet, a decrease from
(See this, near the end, for the numbers provided above.)
Why is that? Generally smaller geometries result in lower yields.
.15 nm to .1 nm, the chips/wafer increases by (.15/.1)^2 = 2.25 times as many chips.
Yes, but the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates. Remember the increase in the chips/wafer is the square of the inverse of the decrease. I.e., if you go from
Of the little I know about biometric fingerprint readers, there are two kinds - ones based on conductivity and ones based on ccd cameras. Both allow for 'Alive-And-Well' checks, to circumvent the problems of both lopping off someone's finger and holding them at gunpoint (pulse checkers).
The problem is thieves tend to be pretty stupid to begin with, particularly those who would be willing to cut off someone's finger to steal a little money. So this might stop the thief from actually getting money with the finger, but doesn't stop them cutting it off in the first place.
[The lunar atmosphere] is made of hydrogen and helium from the Solar Wind
So why not collect it? Seems to me the tech needed for a ramjet could be used to create a solar wind collector on the moon. Even at a millionth the atmosphere of the earth, a decent area of collectors could get enough to supply a good-sized moonbase. If it's the solar wind, it is constantly replenished, right?
Does it really take that long to swap out a set of RCA input cables?
Depending on your set-up, the connectors may be hard to access. If you have a 25"+ TV in a cabinet, for example, you may have to move the cabinet just to get the cables. Front panel jacks are a lot easier, but require more visible cables and many people are still using TVs that don't have them. Also, my 6-year-old definitely couldn't do it, whereas she could press the video/TV button on a remote and she can put in a DVD.
Except for the DVD games thing, this already exists, and it's called the Panasonic Q
It's mind-bogglingly expensive for what it does relative to a standard 'Cube. Maybe Nintendo had a contract with Panasonic that has terminated, and now allows Nintendo to build their own DVD player version.
You could also conceivably "theme" a DVD player. What it displays when no disc is playing, or how it handles long pauses, could be done with a Mario or Zelda theme -- no normal player could do that.
I think it was more a failure not to have a Zelda or Mario title available for launch...
They did have Luigi's Mansion, and the Wind Waker has at least been out for a while. Pokemon clearly was going to fade before too long, as it now has.
Why is it that it's suddenly so important to convert everybody's grandma to Linux?
So I don't have keep running Ad-Aware and Spybot for them.
Also, I work on Mac/Windows software development. I'd like to add Linux to the targets list so I can make use of it.
I like my choices
We don't want to take away choices. We just want one high-reliability, easy-to-use open source OS plus applications that works well for the masses. The same flexible Linux/X/GNU/etc stuff can all live happily on.
Why does the next one have to play DVDs? I don't know about you specifically, but myself and everyone I know already has a perfectly good stand-alone DVD player....
But devices such as TVs don't have an infinite number of inputs. Many just have two independent sources: a coaxial connection (for Cable) and an RCA connection. So in that case the single device is better.
Perhaps this new device is an enhanced GameCube, with the ability to play full DVDs (and even have games with a full DVD worth of data) and 720P support, but otherwise the same API or a superset thereof, so developers don't need to do much different at the moment.
Nintendo's real failure with the GameCube was not having a Pokemon title at or near launch. Now the Pokemon phenomenon has faded, it's not such an issue, but people would have bought the console just for a GameCube game like Pokemon Gold/Sapphire/etc.
I don't know .. maybe because they're DEAD, and died six years before the film was shot ?
Hello?! They'd be perfect for Nazgul then!
No he doesn't, he sits on it and accrues interest.
So then a bank or other financial institution has the cash, and they "circulate" the money.
In the end, though, money is just bits of paper thant move around and inspire us to do work. The real issues of economics are how many of us are working, and how productively. Unemployed people don't produce anything of value, and thus are a drain on the economy. People who do jobs that should be unnecessary also don't produce anything of value. Soldiers don't produce anything, although they may preserve value. The key to economics is getting as much goods and services provided as possible, generally by getting as many people working as possible and working as productively as possible.
The issue of the fat cat is how those goods and services produced are distributed, the fat cat getting much more than the common man.
I don't get why the Xouvert folks didn't just pitch in on this effort. They're almost a month and a half behind their schedule.
It is an unfortunate inefficiency in the open source development process that there are often redundant projects whose variations add little or nothing to the mix. If two seemingly similar projects actually have substantial differences underneath, in terms of structure, process, or even development model, then at least there can be some benefit from the multiple projects. But too often there is the same NIH ("not invented here") syndrome seen in many other fields.
The cheese man!!! The CHEESE!!!
Wensleydale?
I dunno lad, it's like no cheese I've ever tasted...
What is the ratio of legit consumers vs "music pirates"?
What I'm saying is that ratio is very high for people who have just bought a CD.
Trust has to be earned.
So why didn't I earn that trust when I went out and bought the CD, rather than grabbing it off Kazaa?
I'm the guy actually buying music, and 99% of the time, I'm not the guy who then goes and puts it on Kazaa. And if I was, a little thing like DRM isn't going to stop me.
You might as well trust and give good service to people who have demonstrated that they are legitimate customers.
It may be that such systems could be made reasonably secure in the hands of a trustworthy authority. But let's face it; do you trust China with these devices? I can certainly imagine a few "accidental" strikes on Taiwan, or even a supposedly rogue general making threatening remarks about using them in that way. While the U.S. would be hard-pressed to stop the Chinese from implementing this if they had the tech, if the U.S. develops one it will make it easier for other countries to implement it in future.
One thing that might encourage energy efficiency is if power companies can establish liens on houses. It might be in their best interest to finance installation of energy-efficient appliances and things like SunSlates. (Note: I have no connection with the company, I was just checking it out recently and remembered that name.) Put a lien so it is financed by a short or long-term loan on the house that is paid as part of the utilities bill. If the device is efficient enough, it may be that the overall power bill is still lower than normal, in which case even a fairly expensive installation is in the homeowner's best interest. I don't know if power companies can legally do this already, however, in which case presumably they have chosen not to due to it not being economically feasible.
For example, a $15K solar power system with an average lifespan of 20 years breaks even on a 5 percent, 20 year loan if it saves an average of $100/month.
Unless I'm mistaken, Mac now seems to be the system for development, more than ever, and that spells progress in the right direction for developers everywhere.
I'm currently considering get a Mac for exactly that reason. With the Unix-like base, X Window support, XCode, and CHUD, they have a very nice development platform available for every Mac, and some of it is even open source.
Give me a break, a rogue government is much more likely to buy a briefcase sized nuke than construct trillion dollar space laser.
That's not the issue. 10 men didn't build 757s, but they did crash them into the WTC. You don't need to build the item if you can seize temporary control. That's the fear of building something like this; what happens if it gets into the wrong hands, or what if the failsafes aren't? (Aren't fail-safe, that is.)
In contrast, something like SunSlates on tens of millions of homes would also cost about a trillion, but has little or no abuse potential. But it wouldn't be quite the engine of change, either, as it couldn't provide power for industrial applications.