There's a Second Cup just a bit West of there on Adelaide, and if you go East there's a Tim Hortons and some no name coffee shop on the North Side across from First Canadian, and two Timothy's (one in down at the PATH level, and one on the 1st floor) in First Canadian. I usually partake of Timothy's in First Canadian, though my real favourite is definitely Second Cup.
That does not mean they are technologically superior, rather it is the reason for their technological inferiority.
Nice blanket statement. So by my analogy, all Zaire needs to do is to make the cell phone equipped bread (I'm sure it's practical to those for whom cell phone equipped bread is very important), and they will then be "technologically superior", and all other countries will be "technologically inferior". In the case of the US (a country for which I am not a citizen), the country has implementations of wireless technologies throughout the land that shame GSM, but because there isn't a widespread adoption of the mantra GSM, somehow they are technologically inferior. Keep on convincing yourself of that if it makes you feel good. The funniest thing of all is that I never have claimed that the US is superior, but rather than the classic European chest puffer of claiming the US is inferior is ridiculous.
There are points to, for example, being able to send SMS:es with your phone
SMS of the sort that we've been able to do in North America for years? Of, right, that is some mysterious magical GSM technology.
That is a ridiculous generalization. I'm sorry, I won't sink to your level. You hate Europeans, I don't hate Americans.
I hate Europeans? How ridiculous. I recently completed a tour of Italy, and apart from being derisively called a "Americano" on several occasions (once because I had the gall to complain that my room safe wasn't working), it was the most amazing, stunning place and I will be returning. My ancestry is European as well. However, every single discussion on Slashdot that involves cell phone technology in the slightest way always elicits one or more "the US is a technology laggard!" (nice clean blanket statements of the sort that you like. They can be the hub of processor and software technology, and can make a cruise missile that can target a pimple on a Slashdotters face, but damnit if they don't got GSM they're behind the times!) statement by some GSM pimping cheerleader European (the person who makes such a statement is virtually always European, yet not all Europeans make that statement). I'm not an American, but it gets incredibly tiring after a while, and can clearly be recognized as defensive self-consoling rhetoric. I remember the European internet backbone conversation of a while back when the board was full of "WE ARE THE BEST! THE US SUXXORS! WE LEAD IN TECHNOLOGY!" postings, ignoring the fact that the US was already jam packed with higher capacity backbones and had been for years.
It could be in the office towers above the Eaton's Center. Alternately one of the retailers could be using wireless between cash registers and their hub (remember that Home Depot, I believe, was doing that for a while).
I'm actually surprized by how few there are on there: I would have expected First Canadian Place (Bay and Adelaide), and Scotiabank's tower across the street, to be circled by them, but instead there's nary a hint of wireless around them.
Mind you we Canadians have bought into the Northern perception as well. A recent National Post article was hyperbolizing about rising water levels, and how Toronto would soon be "Venice North". Imagine their suprize when an alert reader notified them that Toronto is actually further South than Venice. Indeed, Toronto is further South than the significant majority of Europe, etc.
but I'm certain that most people would agree that a country which has implemented a new technology, all other things being equal, is more technologically advanced than one who hasn't
Your ability to miss the point is astounding. Do you really believe that there are engineers in the US going "Geesh, we just can't figure out this GSM...darn those super smart Europeans!". Of course that's absurd (and it ignores the fact that every North American carrier uses a comparable system and has for years. Of course many confuse GSM's wide deployment with some sort of technical superiority. Clearly the similar logic says that Windows is the technically superior operating system). The technology is there, but there is little economic will (incentive) to pursue it. To use another analogy that you will thoroughly fail to grasp: If Zaire started selling $120 loafs of bread by integrating cell phone technology in each loaf, would they then be a technologically superior country? I mean, does your country have cell phone equipped loafs of bread?
I thought we had agreed that the US does in fact not have this technology (you write in your original post that "If they want, they can have", emphasis mine).
We were talking about wide deployment to the average joe. I find your prior statement ("Yeah, yeah, your dick^H^H^H^Htech is really big^H^H^Himpressive." - thanks, btw) especially humorous because many Europeans measure their relevance, apparently, by how small their cell phone is. Again, if a country has an excellent telephone infrastructure (such as North America), and the populace largely considers cell phones utilitarian, then there is less of a will to pay for the technology of tiny cell phones, for instance, but it doesn't mean that it's not there for the taking if someone wanted it.
There whas a Question asked by a website recently that asked name me the company that build there technologie entirely in the USA so that whe can promote them above the others
I think you should learn a little about worldwide trade, and how companies work in the real world: You see, there are silly things like manufacturing costs that they can reduce (especially when the US $ is overly strong) by outsourcing less demanding jobs to other countries. Even for engineering, a forward thinking organization sets up shops throughout the globe to get the best of each prospective country without having to deal with immigration, etc. I find it absolutely laughable that you would try to find a single big company that is completely contained within one country: THEY DON'T EXIST. Is Nokia Finnish? Nope, Nokia has engineering all over the globe. Is Honda "Japanese"? Nope, Honda has engineering and manufacturing all over the world. Is Sony Japanese? Nope, they have engineering all over the world. Is LG Japanese? Nope, they have engineering and manufacture all over the world. Could you please point out an example of a great company that makes you puff up your chest with pro-yourcountry, anti-American pride?
They are behind in computer...
This one is just too funny, so I'll leave it alone.
And lastly last time I checked the Euro is higher then the USD and so does a lot of other recognized money...
I don't want to explain how monetary conversion works, however I will say that it doesn't work like "$1.00 of my dollars is worth $1.00 of your dollars!". If it makes you feel pride that you get 7 hogs heads to the rhuppie, then kudos to you.
Eg: They have pagers...Yet the americans think they're neat.
Who thinks pagers are neat? Pagers were neat about 15 years ago, but they've long been obsolete. Do you really believe that Americans are all sitting around going "Gosh darnit, look at that darn pager thing! That's some new fangled technology!". Of course, there ARE still some people with pagers because the technology is very cost effective (pagers are receptive only, making the infrastructure far less expensive).
the rest of the world is on the open and scalable gsm network
North American is generally on TDMA (GSM is one implementation of TDMA) or CDMA, not some "odd closed system". GSM, basically, won the standards game, but that certainly doesn't mean that therefore it's a superior technology (unless you're also confessing that Windows Me is therefore a great operating system). GPRS is impressive, as is CDMA 2000, but GSM is not this amazing technology that many Europeans try to sell it as.
This is true, and fairly obvious, but then you go on and conclude that this must mean they are equally advanced now, which is absurd.
Perhaps I should dumb it down a bit for you. If Japan took MRI technology (the technology that we have here in North America) and put it in latrines so that for a mere $275,000 you could look at your bone structure while using the facilities, would that make them "more technologically advanced"? Would that be reason for all of the Japanese to follow the trend that Europeans have blazed a path of glory with (good old Europe and its non-stop gloating about GSM) and come on here to extoll how they're "technologicially advanced"? Of course it wouldn't: It's implementing a technology in a particular way.
I GUARANTEE you that the large US wireless carriers have technologies that would make GSM look like a pathetic form of morse code (in fact, CDMA2000 does just that), but the difference between implementing the technology and having the technology is vastly different, and it's fools (such as yourself) that fail to scale that chasm.
I entirely agree! GSM is not some amazing technology: It hardly offers any benefits over CDMA (and is a variation of the same TDMA used by providers here for many years), and the belief on here that it's some great new technology is baffling. I was not using GSM as the example, but instead was thinking about advanced communications systems like CDMA 2000 3G, or GPRS (which, while related to GSM, is not GSM).
This is not a suprising fact. The US is not ahead in technology.
You know I really cannot stand when people say nonsense like this. The US is, overall, the richest reasonably large country in the world (note: I am not even an American! I'm a Canadian, and our purchasing power isn't nearly as strong as the mighty American $), so clearly one cannot simply say "Uh, they're behind in technology!" (which is an especially hilarious comment when a large portion of the world's high technology industry is centered in the US): If they want, they can have the best of every technology worldwide: The best, most cutting edge wireless technologies, with handsets that'll clean your teeth while you talk, and compute the next million prime numbers while they slumber. If there is a technology anywhere in the planet, apart from maybe Osama's garagecave, if the US and US citizens found it palatable and worthwhile, they'd have it.
A more reasonable comment would be "the adoption of certain technologies has not been as brisk in the US as it is in some other countries". For instance, the cell phone networks in North America tend to already have a tough time being profitable, so they don't jump on new, non-standardized technologies at the toss of a coin like they appear to do in Japan (where they bleed money on them at unbelievably staggering rates). US citizens, generally, like paying $100 or less (actually, most like the phones to be free) for handsets, because again it really doesn't matter to most of us: I don't want a colour screen on my phone, I just want something that I can talk to people on.
For the sake of his child, I hope his adversarial ways don't prevent him from meeting his parental obligations.
I highly doubt that Bruce has any financial difficulties, either now or in the forseeable future. On top of that, Bruce can basically print money by doing an endless series of lectures, corporate "technology updates", etc. Bruce has more of an ability to stand up for his beliefs than most of us.
I can tell you first hand that M$ dictates the relationship...Also, they provide you with significant amounts of marketing funding
Isn't that just a tad bit of a dichotomy? They "dictate" by paying you?
Microsoft offers cobranding dollars for partners selling products with Windows on it, just as Intel does, and just about any large integrated component maker. All of them have specific rules and regulations on how to include their brand, and that's quite reasonable given that they're paying you to include it! There is nothing whatsoever insidious about that, and any computer company is completely free to buy as many ads themselves that they want, but the moment they expect Microsoft, or anyone else, to cobrand with them, of course they should expect such conditions.
Secondly, his job was probably questionable at best, more PR than anything else, so his firing may very well have been inevitable. In other words, he had nothing to lose. In fact, he may have been fired, in actuality, because he was a waste of resources.
Bingo. I find it ridiculous that people are so quick to question corporate PR at other times, but they all truly believe that HP hired Bruce on to "challenge them". No they didn't, and it's the height of naivety for anyone to actually parrot that line. They hired him to get karma points from the open source community, hoping that Jimmy the Linux evangelist who works at some random company would put HP first and foremost ("that place that hired Perens") when considering a new server box, etc. I would wager that they found that the open source community is much more fickle and "disloyal", and quite honestly much more penny pinching, and that the desired outcome did not come to fruition.
I don't know how much Bruce was getting paid (though I suspect that the number is quite large, especially considering it in today's technology environment)
I was specifically replying to your earlier post, not to the article in question. For a heat engine, there IS a maximum efficiency, namely the Carnot Efficiency.
I never mentioned heat engines. You did. However, even taking the Carnot efficiency into consideration, "waste" heat can equally be turned into energy with a little ingenuity, and some long proven techniques (steam). If all energy degrades to heat, then some people might a little surprized to find that nuclear power plants turn atomic energy into heat, which turns water into steam, which powers generators, which creates electricity (i.e. energy->heat->energy).
Assuming that this car is powered by the 12 batteries, and assuming that the batteries are in turn charged by the car while in motion, it is obvious that something is fishy. A very large amount of power is required to put the car in motion and keep it at any real speed; the car will experience the effects of drag from the air and friction from the wheels and the bearings. These forces cause a net deceleration, so power must always be applied to the motors if one wishes to maintain a constant speed.
We're agreed that the claims involving this magical car sound incredibly dubious, and I'm certainly not vouching for the authenticity of their astounding new power source. Nor am I stating that you can get out more than you put in (Sidenote: Of course it depends upon the viewpoint of how you measure what you "put in". I'm sure there are those who would claim that simple uranium enriched pellets contain very little energy, however they might be a little surprized by the truth: Every atom contains a tremendous amount of energy, and a teaspoon of gasoline contains tremendous atomic energy, but not via the basic oxidization method that we use to utilize it).
What it boils down to is that a car which recovers power by skimming it off of its own momentum will travel a shorter distance than a similar car with no recovery device. If the car mentioned in the article can travel farther than an equivalent car with no recovery device, it is breaking thermodynamics.
And here's where we disagree : A hybrid car does exactly that - When the momentum is no longer needed or wanted, it uses the momentum to generate power, rather than discharging it as waste heat via brake pads. Said generated power is then used to propel the car at a later time. Indeed, the complex workings of a hybrid car (that a gas engine turns a generator which then powers electric motors) not only adds extra weight to the car, but it introduces potentially even more friction and heat loss, yet magically the cars get fuel economy 30% or greater than a regular car. I appreciate what you are saying that there is no perpetual motion machine (and that such a energy reclamation device would consume more than it reclaimed if the car actually would like to currently make use of the energy), and I am not claiming that there is, however my problem is with the fact that many confuse the conservation of energy as being some sort of status quo that there cannot be a conservation of said energy, because any amount less than the status quo must represent a contravention of the laws of thermodynamics. This is proposterous. A compact flourescent lightbulb doesn't contravene the laws of thermodynamics. A spaceship floating silently and effortlessly in outer space doesn't either.
My point (which was not specific to this car) was that, in essence, in outer space a car can go forever on only a short burst of energy (well, technically it will slowly slow down due to space debris, etc, but you get the point). Does this defy the laws of thermodynamics? No, of course it doesn't: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and it is the least energy state for them to maintain said motion (i.e. it actually takes energy to slow down). If one can reduce the friction here on planet Earth, be it via an anti-gravity shield (maybe the Tiller foundation will invent that for us), or regenerative aerodynamics, then theoretically a car could travel from New York to LA on a 9V battery because all it needs is the initial burst of energy. Am I saying this is reasonable right now? Nope, not even close, and it certainly wouldn't involve a butt ugly Delorian. However, I do have a problem with the application of thermodynamics to defeatable frictions (as outer space has demonstrated) as some trump card supposedly proving any increase in efficiency impossible.
Not only did they create the, err, amazing technology in this car, but they also claim on their website
Electricity that powers the 1,800 Square foot electric vehicle building is from another invention, currently being tested, that uses no outside power source. It needs no fuel, wind, solar or hydroelectric to operate. It is a totally new type of self contained and self generating alternative energy invention and is completely different from what is used in the electric car.
What are these guys waiting for? They could be making billions supplying the needs of California, money which should be leverage in fighting "big oil/government/car companies/aliens (the mean ones, not the nice green ones)/etc" to get their astounding new invention out the door. So not only did they create one amazing new breakthrough that should be out real soon now, but they also claim to have a completely different solution to all of the energies needs. Boy, these guys just don't stop! Geniuses!
This is just too over the top. To see people on here crying for people to give them the benefit of the doubt just blows me away. Does anyone recall the internet scam where the guy claimed to have a super form of compression (another classic fraudsters realm) that could compress high resolution, full screen video over a 14.4 connection? In the end it ended up being that he gutted his demonstration PC and actually put a VCR in it, and by these demonstrations he got millions in investments. It was eventually his wife who ratted him out when the house started to crumble. I would love to give a link but I can't find it right now.
BTW: I have an algorithm that can compress any file down to one byte, however big business is stopping me from releasing it!
It would almost have relevance if it weren't for the fact that we're talking about an electric motor, not an internal combustion. However, even if we were talking about an internal combustion engine, with zero friction a eyedroplet of gas could propel a car into eternal motion. "BUT....no friction isn't possible!" you say. That's right, it isn't, but at the same time no one is saying that the friction that current cars achieve is the limits that we can achieve (we're already proving that with regenerative braking and propulsion aerodynamics).
Again, let me state that most of those who diligently bring up the laws of thermodynamics do so because they just happened to have just taken a class that discussed, therefore everything earns the "but that is illegal as per the laws of thermodynamics!" comment, however grossly inappropriate. Hell, I'd buy myself a Transmeta processor, but it can't be real: Clearly to consume less energy than the Intel, it must be disobeying the laws of thermodynamics!
While I find this story to be astoundingly dubious (to the point that I'd hope that if any $ are involved that the FBI keeps a close eye), I find many of the "laws of thermodynamics" references on here to be absurdly incorrect: The laws of thermodynamics state that energy degrades to heat, not that there is some specific arbitrary maximum efficiency.
I might have missed it on there, but there appears to be no clear way to sign up: If, at that very instant, I was prepared to pay $36 or whatever for a year, then you would have lost that sale (for the record I did take a peek at what sorts of payments you would accept, but couldn't see any method whatsoever).
On the flip side, the biggest reason, by a long way, why I am very wary of using a ASP type service for email is longevity: If I'm going to send out email addresses, or put them on business cards, or use it for mailing lists, etc, I have to know that it will be there for a long, long time: I've played the email shuffle between too many different companies for far too long. As a prospective user of Gravital, I naturally wonder "Is this is just a hobby that'll soon become boring?" etc. Take a look at Joel's article to get a better picture of what I mean by the cost of change.
Is this really necessary? Personally I'd think a much better approach would be to simply set up test accounts (not with.gov, but I mean on AOL, local ISPs, etc) and reference the email on a couple of webpages, and perhaps in a usenet posting. They will, without any doubt, very quickly get every spam that everyone else gets, without getting hundreds of thousands of duplicates of each and every spam. This idea of forwarding all spams, either a request or some people who have mentioned that they do this by default, is just a grotesque waste of internet resources, doubling or tripling the damage a spam does.
Having said that, spam is grotesquely out of control: My hotmail inbox now gets about 90 spams a day, and while Hotmail's spam filter catches most of them, I still have a noise floor as a dozen or so make it into my inbox every day (and conversely I have to go through the Junk Mail folder every week or so as real emails get stuck in there, particularly when associates or friends use subject lines like "BTW").
I highly, highly, highly doubt that Microsoft programmers are unaware of this non-standard C library call (indeed, if you search in the MSDN library it will filter show you results prefaced by _, __, etc, by default). It's pretty damn silly to say that Microsoft is "hiding" this when they're hiding it in brutally plain sight.
How do you think people become social morons? By speaking loudly? You notice people's disgust at your using a cell phone yet seem unable to explain it. You're right that a lot of people can't stand each other. Perhaps, cell phones are part of the reason why.
Oh, I entirely understand the reason why people are disgusted at even entirely polite use of a cellphone. One type is the stereotyping type that like to cast every human being into nice compartments (these people are often astounding racist for the same reasons. I do see the irony in the fact that I'm compartmentalizing people right here, though I have more than one explanation for a particular action): All cellphone users to them, regardless of how politely it's used, are dirty ignorant pigs. To these people the world is a nice contrast between black and white. Another type of person is the "who moved my cheese?" type of person that simply resists change, and one way of resisting change is to shun it when it's embraced by others. See the other message by the AC calling me an asshole because I dare to call ahead and communicate a meeting: THEY wouldn't do this, therefore everyone who does that is some sort of moron. That's a pretty common one. Another "disgusted at cellphones" are people who might have just had a bad experience, so they have short term cell phone rage. They're fairly common.
hat we need is a clear etiquette for the use of cell phones but so far, I haven't seen any such thing. As cell phones become more common, I hope one gets stirred up. Until then, I know I'm not going to buy a cell phone.
You can't control yourself? Why does the common consensus on cell phone use affect your usage whatsoever? I use my cell phone as a very valuable communication tool, and I use it politefully and respectfully: I use only vibrate for notifications (Sidenote: I've noticed that women often can't because they put their phone in their purse [which also party explains the deafening ring tones]. It would be beneficial if phones were sold with bluetooth remote vibrator bracelets, pendants, anklets, whatever, so that people who don't put their phone on their person can use this]), I speak very quietly, and just like the way I treat a normal phone I never put a real life person secondary to a phone just because it's ringing (that's what voicemail is for. For the same reason I don't use call waiting).
Slashdot Mirror
There's a Second Cup just a bit West of there on Adelaide, and if you go East there's a Tim Hortons and some no name coffee shop on the North Side across from First Canadian, and two Timothy's (one in down at the PATH level, and one on the 1st floor) in First Canadian. I usually partake of Timothy's in First Canadian, though my real favourite is definitely Second Cup.
That does not mean they are technologically superior, rather it is the reason for their technological inferiority.
Nice blanket statement. So by my analogy, all Zaire needs to do is to make the cell phone equipped bread (I'm sure it's practical to those for whom cell phone equipped bread is very important), and they will then be "technologically superior", and all other countries will be "technologically inferior". In the case of the US (a country for which I am not a citizen), the country has implementations of wireless technologies throughout the land that shame GSM, but because there isn't a widespread adoption of the mantra GSM, somehow they are technologically inferior. Keep on convincing yourself of that if it makes you feel good. The funniest thing of all is that I never have claimed that the US is superior, but rather than the classic European chest puffer of claiming the US is inferior is ridiculous.
There are points to, for example, being able to send SMS:es with your phone
SMS of the sort that we've been able to do in North America for years? Of, right, that is some mysterious magical GSM technology.
That is a ridiculous generalization. I'm sorry, I won't sink to your level. You hate Europeans, I don't hate Americans.
I hate Europeans? How ridiculous. I recently completed a tour of Italy, and apart from being derisively called a "Americano" on several occasions (once because I had the gall to complain that my room safe wasn't working), it was the most amazing, stunning place and I will be returning. My ancestry is European as well. However, every single discussion on Slashdot that involves cell phone technology in the slightest way always elicits one or more "the US is a technology laggard!" (nice clean blanket statements of the sort that you like. They can be the hub of processor and software technology, and can make a cruise missile that can target a pimple on a Slashdotters face, but damnit if they don't got GSM they're behind the times!) statement by some GSM pimping cheerleader European (the person who makes such a statement is virtually always European, yet not all Europeans make that statement). I'm not an American, but it gets incredibly tiring after a while, and can clearly be recognized as defensive self-consoling rhetoric. I remember the European internet backbone conversation of a while back when the board was full of "WE ARE THE BEST! THE US SUXXORS! WE LEAD IN TECHNOLOGY!" postings, ignoring the fact that the US was already jam packed with higher capacity backbones and had been for years.
It could be in the office towers above the Eaton's Center. Alternately one of the retailers could be using wireless between cash registers and their hub (remember that Home Depot, I believe, was doing that for a while).
I'm actually surprized by how few there are on there: I would have expected First Canadian Place (Bay and Adelaide), and Scotiabank's tower across the street, to be circled by them, but instead there's nary a hint of wireless around them.
Mind you we Canadians have bought into the Northern perception as well. A recent National Post article was hyperbolizing about rising water levels, and how Toronto would soon be "Venice North". Imagine their suprize when an alert reader notified them that Toronto is actually further South than Venice. Indeed, Toronto is further South than the significant majority of Europe, etc.
but I'm certain that most people would agree that a country which has implemented a new technology, all other things being equal, is more technologically advanced than one who hasn't
Your ability to miss the point is astounding. Do you really believe that there are engineers in the US going "Geesh, we just can't figure out this GSM...darn those super smart Europeans!". Of course that's absurd (and it ignores the fact that every North American carrier uses a comparable system and has for years. Of course many confuse GSM's wide deployment with some sort of technical superiority. Clearly the similar logic says that Windows is the technically superior operating system). The technology is there, but there is little economic will (incentive) to pursue it. To use another analogy that you will thoroughly fail to grasp: If Zaire started selling $120 loafs of bread by integrating cell phone technology in each loaf, would they then be a technologically superior country? I mean, does your country have cell phone equipped loafs of bread?
I thought we had agreed that the US does in fact not have this technology (you write in your original post that "If they want, they can have", emphasis mine).
We were talking about wide deployment to the average joe. I find your prior statement ("Yeah, yeah, your dick^H^H^H^Htech is really big^H^H^Himpressive." - thanks, btw) especially humorous because many Europeans measure their relevance, apparently, by how small their cell phone is. Again, if a country has an excellent telephone infrastructure (such as North America), and the populace largely considers cell phones utilitarian, then there is less of a will to pay for the technology of tiny cell phones, for instance, but it doesn't mean that it's not there for the taking if someone wanted it.
There whas a Question asked by a website recently that asked name me the company that build there technologie entirely in the USA so that whe can promote them above the others
...
...
I think you should learn a little about worldwide trade, and how companies work in the real world: You see, there are silly things like manufacturing costs that they can reduce (especially when the US $ is overly strong) by outsourcing less demanding jobs to other countries. Even for engineering, a forward thinking organization sets up shops throughout the globe to get the best of each prospective country without having to deal with immigration, etc. I find it absolutely laughable that you would try to find a single big company that is completely contained within one country: THEY DON'T EXIST. Is Nokia Finnish? Nope, Nokia has engineering all over the globe. Is Honda "Japanese"? Nope, Honda has engineering and manufacturing all over the world. Is Sony Japanese? Nope, they have engineering all over the world. Is LG Japanese? Nope, they have engineering and manufacture all over the world. Could you please point out an example of a great company that makes you puff up your chest with pro-yourcountry, anti-American pride?
They are behind in computer
This one is just too funny, so I'll leave it alone.
And lastly last time I checked the Euro is higher then the USD and so does a lot of other recognized money
I don't want to explain how monetary conversion works, however I will say that it doesn't work like "$1.00 of my dollars is worth $1.00 of your dollars!". If it makes you feel pride that you get 7 hogs heads to the rhuppie, then kudos to you.
Eg: They have pagers...Yet the americans think they're neat.
Who thinks pagers are neat? Pagers were neat about 15 years ago, but they've long been obsolete. Do you really believe that Americans are all sitting around going "Gosh darnit, look at that darn pager thing! That's some new fangled technology!". Of course, there ARE still some people with pagers because the technology is very cost effective (pagers are receptive only, making the infrastructure far less expensive).
the rest of the world is on the open and scalable gsm network
North American is generally on TDMA (GSM is one implementation of TDMA) or CDMA, not some "odd closed system". GSM, basically, won the standards game, but that certainly doesn't mean that therefore it's a superior technology (unless you're also confessing that Windows Me is therefore a great operating system). GPRS is impressive, as is CDMA 2000, but GSM is not this amazing technology that many Europeans try to sell it as.
This is true, and fairly obvious, but then you go on and conclude that this must mean they are equally advanced now, which is absurd.
Perhaps I should dumb it down a bit for you. If Japan took MRI technology (the technology that we have here in North America) and put it in latrines so that for a mere $275,000 you could look at your bone structure while using the facilities, would that make them "more technologically advanced"? Would that be reason for all of the Japanese to follow the trend that Europeans have blazed a path of glory with (good old Europe and its non-stop gloating about GSM) and come on here to extoll how they're "technologicially advanced"? Of course it wouldn't: It's implementing a technology in a particular way.
I GUARANTEE you that the large US wireless carriers have technologies that would make GSM look like a pathetic form of morse code (in fact, CDMA2000 does just that), but the difference between implementing the technology and having the technology is vastly different, and it's fools (such as yourself) that fail to scale that chasm.
I entirely agree! GSM is not some amazing technology: It hardly offers any benefits over CDMA (and is a variation of the same TDMA used by providers here for many years), and the belief on here that it's some great new technology is baffling. I was not using GSM as the example, but instead was thinking about advanced communications systems like CDMA 2000 3G, or GPRS (which, while related to GSM, is not GSM).
This is not a suprising fact. The US is not ahead in technology.
You know I really cannot stand when people say nonsense like this. The US is, overall, the richest reasonably large country in the world (note: I am not even an American! I'm a Canadian, and our purchasing power isn't nearly as strong as the mighty American $), so clearly one cannot simply say "Uh, they're behind in technology!" (which is an especially hilarious comment when a large portion of the world's high technology industry is centered in the US): If they want, they can have the best of every technology worldwide: The best, most cutting edge wireless technologies, with handsets that'll clean your teeth while you talk, and compute the next million prime numbers while they slumber. If there is a technology anywhere in the planet, apart from maybe Osama's garagecave, if the US and US citizens found it palatable and worthwhile, they'd have it.
A more reasonable comment would be "the adoption of certain technologies has not been as brisk in the US as it is in some other countries". For instance, the cell phone networks in North America tend to already have a tough time being profitable, so they don't jump on new, non-standardized technologies at the toss of a coin like they appear to do in Japan (where they bleed money on them at unbelievably staggering rates). US citizens, generally, like paying $100 or less (actually, most like the phones to be free) for handsets, because again it really doesn't matter to most of us: I don't want a colour screen on my phone, I just want something that I can talk to people on.
For the sake of his child, I hope his adversarial ways don't prevent him from meeting his parental obligations.
I highly doubt that Bruce has any financial difficulties, either now or in the forseeable future. On top of that, Bruce can basically print money by doing an endless series of lectures, corporate "technology updates", etc. Bruce has more of an ability to stand up for his beliefs than most of us.
I can tell you first hand that M$ dictates the relationship...Also, they provide you with significant amounts of marketing funding
Isn't that just a tad bit of a dichotomy? They "dictate" by paying you?
Microsoft offers cobranding dollars for partners selling products with Windows on it, just as Intel does, and just about any large integrated component maker. All of them have specific rules and regulations on how to include their brand, and that's quite reasonable given that they're paying you to include it! There is nothing whatsoever insidious about that, and any computer company is completely free to buy as many ads themselves that they want, but the moment they expect Microsoft, or anyone else, to cobrand with them, of course they should expect such conditions.
Well, I guess "being fired" gets news
It does when getting hired was news.
Secondly, his job was probably questionable at best, more PR than anything else, so his firing may very well have been inevitable. In other words, he had nothing to lose. In fact, he may have been fired, in actuality, because he was a waste of resources.
Bingo. I find it ridiculous that people are so quick to question corporate PR at other times, but they all truly believe that HP hired Bruce on to "challenge them". No they didn't, and it's the height of naivety for anyone to actually parrot that line. They hired him to get karma points from the open source community, hoping that Jimmy the Linux evangelist who works at some random company would put HP first and foremost ("that place that hired Perens") when considering a new server box, etc. I would wager that they found that the open source community is much more fickle and "disloyal", and quite honestly much more penny pinching, and that the desired outcome did not come to fruition.
I don't know how much Bruce was getting paid (though I suspect that the number is quite large, especially considering it in today's technology environment)
I was specifically replying to your earlier post, not to the article in question. For a heat engine, there IS a maximum efficiency, namely the Carnot Efficiency.
I never mentioned heat engines. You did. However, even taking the Carnot efficiency into consideration, "waste" heat can equally be turned into energy with a little ingenuity, and some long proven techniques (steam). If all energy degrades to heat, then some people might a little surprized to find that nuclear power plants turn atomic energy into heat, which turns water into steam, which powers generators, which creates electricity (i.e. energy->heat->energy).
Assuming that this car is powered by the 12 batteries, and assuming that the batteries are in turn charged by the car while in motion, it is obvious that something is fishy. A very large amount of power is required to put the car in motion and keep it at any real speed; the car will experience the effects of drag from the air and friction from the wheels and the bearings. These forces cause a net deceleration, so power must always be applied to the motors if one wishes to maintain a constant speed.
We're agreed that the claims involving this magical car sound incredibly dubious, and I'm certainly not vouching for the authenticity of their astounding new power source. Nor am I stating that you can get out more than you put in (Sidenote: Of course it depends upon the viewpoint of how you measure what you "put in". I'm sure there are those who would claim that simple uranium enriched pellets contain very little energy, however they might be a little surprized by the truth: Every atom contains a tremendous amount of energy, and a teaspoon of gasoline contains tremendous atomic energy, but not via the basic oxidization method that we use to utilize it).
What it boils down to is that a car which recovers power by skimming it off of its own momentum will travel a shorter distance than a similar car with no recovery device. If the car mentioned in the article can travel farther than an equivalent car with no recovery device, it is breaking thermodynamics.
And here's where we disagree : A hybrid car does exactly that - When the momentum is no longer needed or wanted, it uses the momentum to generate power, rather than discharging it as waste heat via brake pads. Said generated power is then used to propel the car at a later time. Indeed, the complex workings of a hybrid car (that a gas engine turns a generator which then powers electric motors) not only adds extra weight to the car, but it introduces potentially even more friction and heat loss, yet magically the cars get fuel economy 30% or greater than a regular car. I appreciate what you are saying that there is no perpetual motion machine (and that such a energy reclamation device would consume more than it reclaimed if the car actually would like to currently make use of the energy), and I am not claiming that there is, however my problem is with the fact that many confuse the conservation of energy as being some sort of status quo that there cannot be a conservation of said energy, because any amount less than the status quo must represent a contravention of the laws of thermodynamics. This is proposterous. A compact flourescent lightbulb doesn't contravene the laws of thermodynamics. A spaceship floating silently and effortlessly in outer space doesn't either.
My point (which was not specific to this car) was that, in essence, in outer space a car can go forever on only a short burst of energy (well, technically it will slowly slow down due to space debris, etc, but you get the point). Does this defy the laws of thermodynamics? No, of course it doesn't: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and it is the least energy state for them to maintain said motion (i.e. it actually takes energy to slow down). If one can reduce the friction here on planet Earth, be it via an anti-gravity shield (maybe the Tiller foundation will invent that for us), or regenerative aerodynamics, then theoretically a car could travel from New York to LA on a 9V battery because all it needs is the initial burst of energy. Am I saying this is reasonable right now? Nope, not even close, and it certainly wouldn't involve a butt ugly Delorian. However, I do have a problem with the application of thermodynamics to defeatable frictions (as outer space has demonstrated) as some trump card supposedly proving any increase in efficiency impossible.
Yeah, I guess you missed the way to sign up =) It's right there on the main page, right under the account information
Ah. Just tried in IE and sure enough there it is. It is quite a minority, but the link doesn't appear (nor does the "Take a Tour") in Opera 6.02.
What are these guys waiting for? They could be making billions supplying the needs of California, money which should be leverage in fighting "big oil/government/car companies/aliens (the mean ones, not the nice green ones)/etc" to get their astounding new invention out the door. So not only did they create one amazing new breakthrough that should be out real soon now, but they also claim to have a completely different solution to all of the energies needs. Boy, these guys just don't stop! Geniuses!
This is just too over the top. To see people on here crying for people to give them the benefit of the doubt just blows me away. Does anyone recall the internet scam where the guy claimed to have a super form of compression (another classic fraudsters realm) that could compress high resolution, full screen video over a 14.4 connection? In the end it ended up being that he gutted his demonstration PC and actually put a VCR in it, and by these demonstrations he got millions in investments. It was eventually his wife who ratted him out when the house started to crumble. I would love to give a link but I can't find it right now.
BTW: I have an algorithm that can compress any file down to one byte, however big business is stopping me from releasing it!
It would almost have relevance if it weren't for the fact that we're talking about an electric motor, not an internal combustion. However, even if we were talking about an internal combustion engine, with zero friction a eyedroplet of gas could propel a car into eternal motion. "BUT....no friction isn't possible!" you say. That's right, it isn't, but at the same time no one is saying that the friction that current cars achieve is the limits that we can achieve (we're already proving that with regenerative braking and propulsion aerodynamics).
Again, let me state that most of those who diligently bring up the laws of thermodynamics do so because they just happened to have just taken a class that discussed, therefore everything earns the "but that is illegal as per the laws of thermodynamics!" comment, however grossly inappropriate. Hell, I'd buy myself a Transmeta processor, but it can't be real: Clearly to consume less energy than the Intel, it must be disobeying the laws of thermodynamics!
While I find this story to be astoundingly dubious (to the point that I'd hope that if any $ are involved that the FBI keeps a close eye), I find many of the "laws of thermodynamics" references on here to be absurdly incorrect: The laws of thermodynamics state that energy degrades to heat, not that there is some specific arbitrary maximum efficiency.
Where can I invest in this amazing new technology!
I might have missed it on there, but there appears to be no clear way to sign up: If, at that very instant, I was prepared to pay $36 or whatever for a year, then you would have lost that sale (for the record I did take a peek at what sorts of payments you would accept, but couldn't see any method whatsoever).
On the flip side, the biggest reason, by a long way, why I am very wary of using a ASP type service for email is longevity: If I'm going to send out email addresses, or put them on business cards, or use it for mailing lists, etc, I have to know that it will be there for a long, long time: I've played the email shuffle between too many different companies for far too long. As a prospective user of Gravital, I naturally wonder "Is this is just a hobby that'll soon become boring?" etc. Take a look at Joel's article to get a better picture of what I mean by the cost of change.
Oh come on: Surely one must respect people who can come up with genius subject lines as
"Re: Your account"
"Re: Martha, here is that information you requested" (OH GOSH! They mismailed it to me! AWESOME!)
"Remember me?"
"Earn the respect and accolades of your peers with a University Degree!"
"Women say: SIZE DOES MATTER!"
"Enlarge your penis"
(clearly the penis enlargement industry must be pretty profitable right now as probably 35%+ of spam relates to increasing the size of one's member).
Is this really necessary? Personally I'd think a much better approach would be to simply set up test accounts (not with .gov, but I mean on AOL, local ISPs, etc) and reference the email on a couple of webpages, and perhaps in a usenet posting. They will, without any doubt, very quickly get every spam that everyone else gets, without getting hundreds of thousands of duplicates of each and every spam. This idea of forwarding all spams, either a request or some people who have mentioned that they do this by default, is just a grotesque waste of internet resources, doubling or tripling the damage a spam does.
Having said that, spam is grotesquely out of control: My hotmail inbox now gets about 90 spams a day, and while Hotmail's spam filter catches most of them, I still have a noise floor as a dozen or so make it into my inbox every day (and conversely I have to go through the Junk Mail folder every week or so as real emails get stuck in there, particularly when associates or friends use subject lines like "BTW").
I highly, highly, highly doubt that Microsoft programmers are unaware of this non-standard C library call (indeed, if you search in the MSDN library it will filter show you results prefaced by _, __, etc, by default). It's pretty damn silly to say that Microsoft is "hiding" this when they're hiding it in brutally plain sight.
How do you think people become social morons? By speaking loudly? You notice people's disgust at your using a cell phone yet seem unable to explain it. You're right that a lot of people can't stand each other. Perhaps, cell phones are part of the reason why.
Oh, I entirely understand the reason why people are disgusted at even entirely polite use of a cellphone. One type is the stereotyping type that like to cast every human being into nice compartments (these people are often astounding racist for the same reasons. I do see the irony in the fact that I'm compartmentalizing people right here, though I have more than one explanation for a particular action): All cellphone users to them, regardless of how politely it's used, are dirty ignorant pigs. To these people the world is a nice contrast between black and white. Another type of person is the "who moved my cheese?" type of person that simply resists change, and one way of resisting change is to shun it when it's embraced by others. See the other message by the AC calling me an asshole because I dare to call ahead and communicate a meeting: THEY wouldn't do this, therefore everyone who does that is some sort of moron. That's a pretty common one. Another "disgusted at cellphones" are people who might have just had a bad experience, so they have short term cell phone rage. They're fairly common.
hat we need is a clear etiquette for the use of cell phones but so far, I haven't seen any such thing. As cell phones become more common, I hope one gets stirred up. Until then, I know I'm not going to buy a cell phone.
You can't control yourself? Why does the common consensus on cell phone use affect your usage whatsoever? I use my cell phone as a very valuable communication tool, and I use it politefully and respectfully: I use only vibrate for notifications (Sidenote: I've noticed that women often can't because they put their phone in their purse [which also party explains the deafening ring tones]. It would be beneficial if phones were sold with bluetooth remote vibrator bracelets, pendants, anklets, whatever, so that people who don't put their phone on their person can use this]), I speak very quietly, and just like the way I treat a normal phone I never put a real life person secondary to a phone just because it's ringing (that's what voicemail is for. For the same reason I don't use call waiting).