"First of all how can the be the richest man in the world's office? Bill Lumberg's office was nicer than that! Geez, cheap basic apartment blinds, a cheesy plant, particle board desk, etc. Maybe that's an attempt to endear him as an average joe."
It's probably not unlikely that Gates purposely has his office set up in the same style as your average worker since it would give him better insight into how his companies products are used in the real world. Remember this is the company that extols their employees to "eat their own dog food" and use their products in the real world, etc.
Yea I'll agree with you that including a little free content on a memory stick or any other memory format would be a nice little bonus and it might sell a few more. But you phrased it as thought they should start releasing their entire library on Memory Stick:
"Five years ago, Sony's music labels should have started releasing all albums as mp3 on Memory Sticks."
Which on the outset sounds cool but if you think about it the reality of it is not all that feasible. For starters how is an electronics store supposed to orchestrate this? Their average memory stick display probably takes up about 5 square feet of wall space. To make available Sony's entire library they would have to devote an entire wall in their store to nothing but memory sticks. I'm guessing your average electronics store would be less than enthusiastic about that prospect, just in the interest of helping Sony generate some "buzz". And again you still aren't thinking about cost. Most people probably buy 1 or 2 memory sticks for whatever Sony product they have, maybe 3. After that you really don't need more storage. Why would I continue to buy $50 or $100 memory sticks to get the songs when I can but the cd for 15 bucks??
Like you said; it would be a cool little bonus if they stuck some mp3's on their memory sticks, but as for it being some sort of new distribution method it would never work.
You seem to think that flash memory is somehow competitive with pressed cd storage on a cost per megabyte basis. I assure you it is not even close. Nobody in their right mind would by $55 albums week after week on memory stick, it would be much cheaper to buy ONE memory stick then buy cd's and rip them to that one memory stick.
I just didn't realize it was still going on. I remember reading about this several years ago. What was kind of disgusting was how obvious it was that all involved were well aware they were ripping off taxpayers. One "Synfuel" factory had a conveyor belt carrying the finished product away from the factory. Of course on the section of conveyor that passed by a public road they made sure to cover it so that no one could see that the finished "Synfuel" was just coal sprayed with diesel fuel.
I'm sort of on the fence about whether or not it's fair to require students to have a laptop, it would be nice if the University or the state could subsidize at least a low end model that could reduce the cost to below say $500.
That being said I can see some real benefits, at least for the administration and faculty, for every student having a laptop. The University would not have to spend nearly as much on computer labs since every student will have their very own portable, wi-fi computer that they can use instead, (maybe they could use the savings to subsidize the laptops to an extent). Professors could have students bring their laptops to class on certain days if he wanted to have them use a certain program. As an engineer I can think of a ton of classes where we could have used this. Whenever we had to use Matlab, AutoCAD, Solidworks, Working Model, Labview, etc. we could never do it in class, either we had to all troop down to a lab somewhere or the Professor would give us some instructions and we would go home and do it. Also many professors are creating fairly extensive websites for their classes, having a laptop in class you could reference all this material at any time. I've also seen students in class using their laptops to record lectures, and even video record them using a portable webcam.
The more I think about it the more it actually does make sense. Just like a graphing calculator is pretty much a requirement nowadays for engineering students. I think in the future you'll see less of the big boxy computers in computer labs and more of students just having their own personal computer that they take around with them.
Since a lot of people are speculating (incorrectly), I am happy to educate everyone.
Direct from Microsofts' Vista site:
Adding system memory (RAM) is often the best way to improve your PC's performance. More memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory is not always easy. You must learn what type of memory you need, purchase the memory, and open your computer to install the memory--which sometimes can invalidate your support agreement. Also, some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, preventing you from adding RAM even if you are willing to do so.
Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. USB flash drives can be used as External Memory Devices (EMDs) to extend system memory and improve performance without opening the box. Your computer is able to access memory from an EMD device much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive, boosting system performance. When combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvement in system responsiveness.
EMD technology is both reliable and secure. You can remove an EMD at any time without any loss of data or negative impact to the system; however, if you remove the EMD, your performance returns to the level you experienced without the device. Wear on the USB drive is not an issue when using it as an EMD. A unique algorithm optimizes wear patterns, so that a USB device can run as an EMD for many years, even when heavily used. Finally, data on the EMD is encrypted to help prevent inappropriate access to data when the device is removed.
Of course my post had nothing to do with pricing, I was merely highlighting an irony; that I've noticed several Linux advocates criticizing MS for releasing "too many" versions of Vista. Has nothing to do with cost. Way to completely ignore my point and try and prove me wrong with some issue that is completely unrelated.
I am happy to root for the underdog, and in fact I use both Windows and Linux. However when I see a glaring irony (on either side), I will make light of it. If you truly believe in Linux and opensource you should be able to handle a little good natured ribbing without getting bitter and defensive.
Yea! FU#@ING MS!! Releasing 6 different versions of Vista??!! What the hell are they trying to pull!! Screw them, I'm switching to Linux!! Now I just have to decide if I want to use Gentoo or Ubuntu or SUSE or Mandriva or Debian or KNOPPIX or Fedora or or...umm, hmmmm.....
Silver has superior electrical conductivity to copper. The delta is not as big as it was from aluminum to copper but it is certainly there. I wonder what the roadblocks are preventing its use in interconnects.
"Greenwood, who earned $27,000 a year and had worked in the office for six years"
That's a crying shame he lost that high-paying job, maybe he can move up in the world and get a job at McDonalds. Seriously though, 6 years and he's making $27,000 and still has to deal with crap about playing solitaire once in awhile? Bloomburg needs to lighten up a little.
What does logarithmic have to do with anything? An order of magnitude of a value "X" would be the same whether the data is plotted linearly or logarithmicly. I think you need to review some basic math textbooks.
You may not want to fly anymore. Airplanes are typically designed with a factor of safety of less than 1.5. An FOS of 10 is usually overkill, do I really need to design a bridge so that it will hold ten times the highest load it will ever carry in it's lifetime? In a word, no.
The engineers had taken into account the soft soil and the levees were designed to go through this and into more stable soil. However they were not set as deep as the design called for. This is not a design issue, it's an issue with the contractor and inspectors. It is possible that there were also design issues that compounded the problem but I have not heard of any major ones. Incidently you say "clay-like soil consistency" like it's a bad thing. Stable clay soils are exactly the type of earth you want to construct earthen levees, damns, subgrade, etc. out of since it compacts so well and won't move once it is compacted. This as opposed to the material the levees were built in that had a lot of biological material in it and was very unstable.
We studied the Challenger disaster in an undergraduate engineering class regarding ethics and I'm consistently surprised by virtually all the articles I've read on it that seem to gloss over what a horrifically ridiculous management failure this was. Can you imagine being on the engineering team at Morton Thiokol, knowing the Challenger would likely fail the next morning and being unable to convince mangement of it? Two of the engineers refused to watch the launch because they fully believed it would explode on the launchpad. If it wasn't so tragic it would be something for a Dilbert cartoon.
Oh please, only Slashdot could praise someone making billions off stocks for foregoing a salary as if they are so selfless. The last I heard Bill Gates, along with other Microsoft execs, was taking home a salary of around $865,000, (this was a few years ago it may be different today). A salary of $865,000 for a top executive at one of the worlds largest companies is puny, it might as well be zero. Executives at much, much smaller companies take home 10 or 100 times as much. Compared to the value of Microsoft stock he owns his salary might as well be zero. Yet he is routinely lambasted as one of the most evil people in the business. In fact Gates is the one who has pledged the majority of his fortune to charity, a $29 billion endowment to the B&M Gates foundation so far. That's putting your money where your mouth is. Foregoing a salary when you're already making billions? yes if only we were all in a position to be so altruistic.....
Yea I was thinking there would be a high amount of energy during impact. It's way too late on a Friday night for me to try working out any equations though. I don't know what the impact speeds would be or the resultant energy generated. Would it be enough to vaporize ice at way, way, WAY below zero? I dont really know, but if they didn't attempt to preserve it then probably no. Still though it's interesting to think about. Too many people think of water as some impermanent substance. At the temperatures it exists at in deep space it has the hardness of granite, it will exist for millenia with no change. It would be a shame to evaporate it in few minutes during some science experiment.
"Dr. Brownlee said some of the tracks in the aerogel might have been left by ice particles that later evaporated. If such cavities are found, he said, they may contain residue of the ice and its constituents."
I wonder why they wouldnt have had the sample canister land in the frozen desert of Antarctica or some other area where ice samples would remain solid? Obviously they would stay cold enough during the return trip from the comet to preserve them, all it would entail is enough heat shielding to maintain the cold temperature during descent.
Look at this gem:
"Keri had been concerned to see debris falling from the earth. "I thought it was space junk but Drew said it was ice."
Am I reading this right, did she believe that crap falling off the fake earth was ice?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless of course you plan on buying an HDTV sometime in the next few years. Which is probably a not insignificant percentage of the population.
"First of all how can the be the richest man in the world's office? Bill Lumberg's office was nicer than that! Geez, cheap basic apartment blinds, a cheesy plant, particle board desk, etc. Maybe that's an attempt to endear him as an average joe."
It's probably not unlikely that Gates purposely has his office set up in the same style as your average worker since it would give him better insight into how his companies products are used in the real world. Remember this is the company that extols their employees to "eat their own dog food" and use their products in the real world, etc.
Yea I'll agree with you that including a little free content on a memory stick or any other memory format would be a nice little bonus and it might sell a few more. But you phrased it as thought they should start releasing their entire library on Memory Stick:
"Five years ago, Sony's music labels should have started releasing all albums as mp3 on Memory Sticks."
Which on the outset sounds cool but if you think about it the reality of it is not all that feasible. For starters how is an electronics store supposed to orchestrate this? Their average memory stick display probably takes up about 5 square feet of wall space. To make available Sony's entire library they would have to devote an entire wall in their store to nothing but memory sticks. I'm guessing your average electronics store would be less than enthusiastic about that prospect, just in the interest of helping Sony generate some "buzz". And again you still aren't thinking about cost. Most people probably buy 1 or 2 memory sticks for whatever Sony product they have, maybe 3. After that you really don't need more storage. Why would I continue to buy $50 or $100 memory sticks to get the songs when I can but the cd for 15 bucks??
Like you said; it would be a cool little bonus if they stuck some mp3's on their memory sticks, but as for it being some sort of new distribution method it would never work.
You seem to think that flash memory is somehow competitive with pressed cd storage on a cost per megabyte basis. I assure you it is not even close. Nobody in their right mind would by $55 albums week after week on memory stick, it would be much cheaper to buy ONE memory stick then buy cd's and rip them to that one memory stick.
I just didn't realize it was still going on. I remember reading about this several years ago. What was kind of disgusting was how obvious it was that all involved were well aware they were ripping off taxpayers. One "Synfuel" factory had a conveyor belt carrying the finished product away from the factory. Of course on the section of conveyor that passed by a public road they made sure to cover it so that no one could see that the finished "Synfuel" was just coal sprayed with diesel fuel.
I'm sort of on the fence about whether or not it's fair to require students to have a laptop, it would be nice if the University or the state could subsidize at least a low end model that could reduce the cost to below say $500.
That being said I can see some real benefits, at least for the administration and faculty, for every student having a laptop. The University would not have to spend nearly as much on computer labs since every student will have their very own portable, wi-fi computer that they can use instead, (maybe they could use the savings to subsidize the laptops to an extent). Professors could have students bring their laptops to class on certain days if he wanted to have them use a certain program. As an engineer I can think of a ton of classes where we could have used this. Whenever we had to use Matlab, AutoCAD, Solidworks, Working Model, Labview, etc. we could never do it in class, either we had to all troop down to a lab somewhere or the Professor would give us some instructions and we would go home and do it. Also many professors are creating fairly extensive websites for their classes, having a laptop in class you could reference all this material at any time. I've also seen students in class using their laptops to record lectures, and even video record them using a portable webcam.
The more I think about it the more it actually does make sense. Just like a graphing calculator is pretty much a requirement nowadays for engineering students. I think in the future you'll see less of the big boxy computers in computer labs and more of students just having their own personal computer that they take around with them.
Since a lot of people are speculating (incorrectly), I am happy to educate everyone.
Direct from Microsofts' Vista site:
Adding system memory (RAM) is often the best way to improve your PC's performance. More memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory is not always easy. You must learn what type of memory you need, purchase the memory, and open your computer to install the memory--which sometimes can invalidate your support agreement. Also, some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, preventing you from adding RAM even if you are willing to do so.
Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. USB flash drives can be used as External Memory Devices (EMDs) to extend system memory and improve performance without opening the box. Your computer is able to access memory from an EMD device much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive, boosting system performance. When combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvement in system responsiveness.
EMD technology is both reliable and secure. You can remove an EMD at any time without any loss of data or negative impact to the system; however, if you remove the EMD, your performance returns to the level you experienced without the device. Wear on the USB drive is not an issue when using it as an EMD. A unique algorithm optimizes wear patterns, so that a USB device can run as an EMD for many years, even when heavily used. Finally, data on the EMD is encrypted to help prevent inappropriate access to data when the device is removed.
Of course my post had nothing to do with pricing, I was merely highlighting an irony; that I've noticed several Linux advocates criticizing MS for releasing "too many" versions of Vista. Has nothing to do with cost. Way to completely ignore my point and try and prove me wrong with some issue that is completely unrelated.
I am happy to root for the underdog, and in fact I use both Windows and Linux. However when I see a glaring irony (on either side), I will make light of it. If you truly believe in Linux and opensource you should be able to handle a little good natured ribbing without getting bitter and defensive.
Yea! FU#@ING MS!! Releasing 6 different versions of Vista??!! What the hell are they trying to pull!! Screw them, I'm switching to Linux!! Now I just have to decide if I want to use Gentoo or Ubuntu or SUSE or Mandriva or Debian or KNOPPIX or Fedora or or...umm, hmmmm.....
Silver has superior electrical conductivity to copper. The delta is not as big as it was from aluminum to copper but it is certainly there. I wonder what the roadblocks are preventing its use in interconnects.
"Greenwood, who earned $27,000 a year and had worked in the office for six years" That's a crying shame he lost that high-paying job, maybe he can move up in the world and get a job at McDonalds. Seriously though, 6 years and he's making $27,000 and still has to deal with crap about playing solitaire once in awhile? Bloomburg needs to lighten up a little.
What does logarithmic have to do with anything? An order of magnitude of a value "X" would be the same whether the data is plotted linearly or logarithmicly. I think you need to review some basic math textbooks.
You may not want to fly anymore. Airplanes are typically designed with a factor of safety of less than 1.5. An FOS of 10 is usually overkill, do I really need to design a bridge so that it will hold ten times the highest load it will ever carry in it's lifetime? In a word, no.
The engineers had taken into account the soft soil and the levees were designed to go through this and into more stable soil. However they were not set as deep as the design called for. This is not a design issue, it's an issue with the contractor and inspectors. It is possible that there were also design issues that compounded the problem but I have not heard of any major ones. Incidently you say "clay-like soil consistency" like it's a bad thing. Stable clay soils are exactly the type of earth you want to construct earthen levees, damns, subgrade, etc. out of since it compacts so well and won't move once it is compacted. This as opposed to the material the levees were built in that had a lot of biological material in it and was very unstable.
We studied the Challenger disaster in an undergraduate engineering class regarding ethics and I'm consistently surprised by virtually all the articles I've read on it that seem to gloss over what a horrifically ridiculous management failure this was. Can you imagine being on the engineering team at Morton Thiokol, knowing the Challenger would likely fail the next morning and being unable to convince mangement of it? Two of the engineers refused to watch the launch because they fully believed it would explode on the launchpad. If it wasn't so tragic it would be something for a Dilbert cartoon.
Oh please, only Slashdot could praise someone making billions off stocks for foregoing a salary as if they are so selfless. The last I heard Bill Gates, along with other Microsoft execs, was taking home a salary of around $865,000, (this was a few years ago it may be different today). A salary of $865,000 for a top executive at one of the worlds largest companies is puny, it might as well be zero. Executives at much, much smaller companies take home 10 or 100 times as much. Compared to the value of Microsoft stock he owns his salary might as well be zero. Yet he is routinely lambasted as one of the most evil people in the business. In fact Gates is the one who has pledged the majority of his fortune to charity, a $29 billion endowment to the B&M Gates foundation so far. That's putting your money where your mouth is. Foregoing a salary when you're already making billions? yes if only we were all in a position to be so altruistic.....
Yea I was thinking there would be a high amount of energy during impact. It's way too late on a Friday night for me to try working out any equations though. I don't know what the impact speeds would be or the resultant energy generated. Would it be enough to vaporize ice at way, way, WAY below zero? I dont really know, but if they didn't attempt to preserve it then probably no. Still though it's interesting to think about. Too many people think of water as some impermanent substance. At the temperatures it exists at in deep space it has the hardness of granite, it will exist for millenia with no change. It would be a shame to evaporate it in few minutes during some science experiment.
"Dr. Brownlee said some of the tracks in the aerogel might have been left by ice particles that later evaporated. If such cavities are found, he said, they may contain residue of the ice and its constituents." I wonder why they wouldnt have had the sample canister land in the frozen desert of Antarctica or some other area where ice samples would remain solid? Obviously they would stay cold enough during the return trip from the comet to preserve them, all it would entail is enough heat shielding to maintain the cold temperature during descent.
Look at this gem: "Keri had been concerned to see debris falling from the earth. "I thought it was space junk but Drew said it was ice." Am I reading this right, did she believe that crap falling off the fake earth was ice?