Yes, but its user base is miniscule compared to Java. The real crunch will become more noticeable when the switch is made from IPV4 to IPV6 and internet address space expands dramatically so that individual devices can be manipulated. Since Java is pretty much the lingua-franca for server-side, router, and switch technologies, increasingly replacing C because of application development, design and testing costs and the products life-cycle race, limited tools like XCode, will not have a sufficiently large number of API-hooks to probably ever get much than a marginal share of this new device control technology.
What a lot of users of Javascript fail to appreciate is that ultimately it has to interact with servers on the Java side and hence businesses can manipulate how Javascript is served, particularly when it comes to interfacing at the hardware device level that IPV6 will usher in in a more substantial way, particularly since highly parallel (thread), cloud computing using Java on big iron is becoming increasingly embedded in business server-side logic.
I think XCode will work fine within the Apple-world, but it has little hope of navigating the cross-platform market, unless Apple gets their JVM act together and they simply are moving in an entirely different market direction for financial reasons. They have a developed a lucrative closed-market and are comfortable with the prospects of their near-term market share.
Sun sued Microsoft remember? Java is a powerful technology that evidently wants to be owned and profited from. Oracle does need to be careful of how it handles the Google suit however as it has the potential to fork Java, which for them would defeat the purpnose of buying Java in the first place. Remember, just before it died, Sun open-sourced much of Java, so a fork remains a very distinct possibility if Oracle does a heavy handed job of screwing rather than supporting the Java community process.
We shall see how this all plays out, particularly now that many foreign governments have moved to open-Linux based systems and software for their development needs. If Oracle, mucks it up too badly, they just might have government funded competition to contend with going forward with Java, most notable China, Brazil and some countries in the Eurozone. Analogous to the situation the US faces in being dependent on foreign oil, many countries find themselves overly dependent on US-based technology. As with everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages of doing anything in any particular way.
If its not Apple approved, don't look at the Apple store for your product as you won't find it. For those, you will need to turn to the general purpose computing market rather than the increasingly closed Apple platform.
Its not really about root privileges but rather what API's you can hook to in for applications development (expect for those coders who are so good, they do all their net apps in assembly language). Who cares what you keep in your root directory for what apps you give root privileges, most markets are focused on who can control how entire systems interface with other systems and software developed on those systems.
With cloud computing and open service oriented software technologies web-mediated applications become more and more predominant on the bigger iron and multi-sever environments, primarily because of maintenance and development costs associated with supporting multi-platform systems and where Java thread execution and remote method invocation become increasingly more important, what goes on with entertainment, the latest tech gizmos, and cool iPhone apps is of limited concern to all but end-users.
Apple is simply announcing in a subtle way that it is no longer really targeting the general, all-purpose computer market, but has decided on carving out a highly profitable niche market, as the Nieman Marcus or Sharp of the CPU-based tech world, much like Sony wanted to do but not as successfully as Apple. That is the vision of the Apple store. See a cool application you like at your store buy it and you pay for it. Since their market is for non-developers they don't care if it is closed source at the level of the OS.
Apple has pretty well given up on the business applications side of computing, except in the productivity suites for end-user area. It has no sever technologies and is rapidly diminishing as a significant software development platform for general-purpose computing. This is just a subtle way of making the announcement without making their end-user customer base nervous. Yes, this will largely drive developers of scientific-software and other technical users from the Apple platform, but they are such a small fraction of their market share and expensive to cater to, so Apple really doesn't see it will loose much.
Oracle is targeting the business and general-purpose computer markets, whereas Apple is targeting the cool tech gadget, entertainment, tunes and games markets. This will simply reinforce the realization that you really can't use a Mac for business and scientific-technical computing for in the long run, what you do is only OK if its approved for sale in the Apple store. Apple's OS is more along the lines of the Sony and Nintendo approach of developing for captured markets.
Although you are right in the short term, the onus will really be on Apple to develop its own developer tools if it wants to compete at all in the business/scientific technology space. My guess is that they don't as they are making quite a bit of money selling "cool" tech to the non-tech, users who wouldn't know how to use an OS even if it were fully open. Apple will have to decide to either maintain their own JVM or leave their JVM in legacy mode and watch developers, scientists, and engineers move to non-Apple development platforms. This is the dilemma people who use a proprietary OS face in every app they build. For those who just use apps they buy this is fine. Those whose businesses must interact with java on the server side must look beyond Apple to stay competitive.
In reading a comment by a computational biologist, who evidently develops on an Apple platform, he thought the Apple announcement represents trouble. He should have more carefully investigated Linux to begin with since science can not utilize a close-platform because of its primary need of allowing other scientists to see precisely how results were achieved, which requires a sufficiently open platform. Fortunately, for him, Java on Linux is getting so good that he will hardly miss OS X, at least for his application development needs.
Apple is rapidly becoming a dead platform for applications development anyway, unless you are developing for the captive end-user markets they serve, which is fine as they are quite large and popular for those primarily directed toward entertainment, end-user experiences rather than general purpose computing or web-development, where increasingly switches and routers are being configured using java rather than C as they are much easier to develop and maintain for interfacing multiple platform environments.
You an run the core product, but only a few of the modules that really provide the power to the OO platform, like highly integrated database-document interaction. But the vast majority of Apple users generally don't have those kinds of technical skills anyway.
Open office is a basically a business application designed to serve as an open alternative to the basic Microsoft suite of business products. Apple sees its future in the trendy gadget, cool phones and vido-games markets, not in general technical/business computing. As a percentage of their sales, developers are just a tiny fraction of their user-base, so why go through the extra expense of catering to them, when you can develop a closed-shop end-user general consumer market instead?
I develop Java on Windows quite well thank you. Yes there was a dust up, when MIcrosoft tied to grab a hold of the language through proprietary VM, but they lost that suit and Windows remains a great platform for Java development and likely to stay that way, otherwise many customers like me will simply migrate to Ubuntu or another system capable of running Java, which would further erode Windows market share, particularly in the business applications market.
Thats why Apple wants to kill Java. They don't believe in end-users having that kind of choice. For them software and computer gadgets are all about closed and captive, rather than open markets. Just check out the dearth of really useful, but incredibly expensive stuff in the iPhone apps market that only do things that are Apple-approved. For many end users thats fine as they just want a cool app or gadget that works. They have no real technical understanding beyond pressing "buttons". They do other things with their lives.
Apple has become the trendy tech for the non-technical. Apple sees their market there rather than in general purpose computer manufacturing. Its a good move for Jobs. In his lifetime, things are likely to pretty much stay that way. For people who expand the boundaries of what you can do with computing technology Apple is becoming a closed, shrinking market, except for those developing games and trendy gizmo, entertainment software. For them in the long run Apple is increasingly becoming a dead market for significant technical innovation. For folks who are primarily interested in web-centric technical computing, Apple is really longer "cool" and really has no future, which is not the same thing as saying they won't have a sizable market or profits for some time to come. Look at Sony and Nintendo, they are still making money, but no one would claim they serve as development platforms for innovate software other than games and video entertainment.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
Yet another effort by insurers to figure out what claims they can deny? For them, $100,000 a pop would be a good investment, if they can use the data to deny a single claim.
the real question is whether I have the intelligence to sufficiently understand it. I've been trying to better my understanding of linear algebra for a number of years new, but it doesn't come easily. It is at least comforting that I can begin to read research papers such as this and understand some of it.
Those who have more substantial knowledge and who make an effort to build ladders to help scale the wall of understanding, like Gilbert Strang, Arnold, Shilov, Gantmacher, and others, are really due serious appreciation.
Sadly, too true. In my experience given the kind of covariance matrices that result from measures taken on fish, condition numbers of such matrices almost enter into a world of intractability, but not quite, so the choice of methods becomes quite important. The difficult is learning enough of the underlying mathematics to understand precisely how to choose among various potential methods and in being able to generate enough data to make it possible to obtain sufficiently stable covariance matrices to begin with given the reality of the consequences of potentially high condition numbers for matrices of interest.
Can't agree with you more. I've struggled to better understand linear algebra for quite some time and found Strang's clarity on the subject of tremendous help. The way he takes you from elementary ideas to the important concepts associate with SVD is truly worth paying close attention to. It makes a lot of seemingly disjunct ideas come together in a meaningful way.
I only wish there were more additional advanced lecture series to follow up on where his two lecture series leave off.
Yes, but for mere mortals the intermediate steps are often critical to keep from getting lost on the way, at least given my level of abilities. I for one still admit to having difficulty following proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra and I've have the advantage of several hundred years of alternate proofs. Although the steps are clear enough, understanding the leaps between them can still be difficult.
Sadly, weak math skills can keep one wandering for a long time. Conceptualizing the route from starting point to destination is not often easy to establish, when one is not entirely sure what the destination is supposed to look like when you get there.
To the extent I understand the paper, it is that certain error bounds can be described that given various inequality relations specify that the correct answer can be shown to be within an ever-more confined region of solution space upon iteration given the assumption that the initial matrix is SSD. Not being sufficiently familiar with the behavior of Chebechev polynomials to be sure, but it would seem that the classifiers that define various "inappropriate" edges in various representations graphs must be met must be correct within a sufficient approximation for the classification (sparsification) to lead to a correct result. I have no clear understanding of how this can be known, not having examined the Tang Spielman result. Perhaps others can provide a more informative outline of the major steps and assumptions involved in each.
Then you would be better off visiting mathoverflow or stackoverflow. Thats where the real wizards get the job done. Slashdot is directed more to the computer-social scene, which is important in some respects, but not the place to expect answers to technical questions, unless its about the popularity of computer games and such.
Better in the sense that the results that can be produced for a given sized grid can be obtained more quickly. Hence, it is possible to dramatically increase the density of sampled points (finer mesh grid) that would yield more localize accuracy and hence potentially more accurate results. Generally speaking the more better data can be included, the more likely the result will make an accurate prediction given the boundary conditions of the model.
Obama saved the American automotive industry, whether he ultimately gets any credit for it or not. Howevver, this really isn't so much about political philosophies, as it is whether there is a willingness of Detroit and America to recognnize that in order to stay competitive, investments in education and infrastructure necessary to invovate and keep up with the competition are critical. It seems likely this will be their last chance, as another bailout is not in the cards.
Although the final sentence of the article in French attempts to suggest that the future will fall to Detroit by default, becuase "the more things change the more they stay the same". The article really presents no real evidence to substantiate this assumption. In reality this race will be won by those who innovate and take better strategic risks that prove good bets. Life is a gamble.
Tesla Motors is small and the start up costs are indeed steep, as the article points out. However, the article displays a smugness that Detroit really can't afford right now, the notion that because of high costs, Tesla Motors is doomed to fail. Telsa motors has partnered with Toyota and few can credibly argue that Toyota doesn't know something about the automotive industry or electric vehicles.
For Toyota, the fit is a good one, because from their perspective the costs of investment in a manufacturing plant in California makes sense. They already have enough capacity at their plants serving the eastern US given current market condition. Likewise, it makes no sense to build another plant for internal combustion engines, when the mass production of electric vehicles is close at hand (nearly all Japense manufacturers are moving entirely electric cars for their domestic market, with Toyota, Honda, and Nissan poised to commence sale of fully electric vehicles globally in the next production cycle. Further, given the appreciation of the yen relative to the dollar, complements of US taxpayers, especially republicans, who like to load up on debt with little return on investment, their appreciating currency can best be spent in the US, where the same number of yen will buy more. Toyota may ultimately be looking for a sizeable stake in Tesla, to gain the premier name brand in electric vehicles.
Yes, costs of living are higher in California, but as with anything else in life, you get wh at you pay for. California has, in addition to its geographic position, a highly educated workforce that results from its long term investments in higher education. Assumming Meg Whitman doesn't succeed in her efforts to defund the university system, this advantage will remain for the foreseeable future. Likewise, it also has a very strong and emerging solar and wind technology industries, that are steadily ramping up in terms of megawatts on line each year. Although it does have high taxes, this gives it tax benefits associated with investments in infrastructure and human resource and health care that most states lack. These are things that are attractive to high tech workers, who want to raise happy and healthy families.
Likewise, the preferred republican approach to encourage off-shoring of American jobs is also counter-productive as it fundamentally undermines the buying power of Americans, which is why there are so few jobs being created now. Who, besides bankers, CEO's and Wall Street tycoons have that much money to spend anymore these days? Wealth concentration in the US is at a historic high, so it is unlikely that most Americans will have any buying power or jobs soon, which ironically will aid Tesla, since the market for smaller, lighter cars will be relatively larger.
Totally overlooked by all the stereotypes in the article are clear synergies between electric cars and electric power production that Detroit needs to take seriously before their fate is sealed. The oil companies do, which is why they are waging w
The manufacturing can take place elsewhere, just as the movies can be made elsewhere. The critical issues is where the profits wind up, not the manufacturing. Typically, the profits wind up in the hands of the first investors in, who tend to be the ones who where their when things got off the ground. Hollywood still must have some pull as does Silicon Valley. Schwartznegger the governor is from California. You really think that some of his friends aren't from Hollywood either?
Tesla Motors was smart to partner with Toyota, who may ultimate be investing in them to ultimately buy them out. If Detroit thinks it can stay smug about Toyota, they will again be doing more than whistling as they walk past graveyards, they will become one.
California is already ramping up more and more solar and wind. Only the first wave is beginning to come on line. Lots of sunshine in California, with no need to send money to the Saudi's, Venezuelans, and Mexicans, nor pay for occupying armies to keep the oil spigots flowing, or taxes to mitigate environmental damage associated with petroleum.
Electric cars will only speed this up dramatically, especially if some of the initial production is in California, as it will be an increased incentive for locals to buy local made products. California is on the right track, its just that huge oil-company money is holding it back, but not for long.
partner with Toyota and no one can say Toyota doesn't know how to compete with Detroit. Detroit needs to control its smugness or it will again find itself begging for a bailout, which will be a hard act to pull off the next time their execs underestimate the competition.
Texas is rapidly becoming one of the poorest states in the nation. There is less and less buying power in Texas. Manufacturers would do better to focus on markets where they can make money. The marketing types at most major corporations have already begun to figure this out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but its user base is miniscule compared to Java. The real crunch will become more noticeable when the switch is made from IPV4 to IPV6 and internet address space expands dramatically so that individual devices
can be manipulated. Since Java is pretty much the lingua-franca for server-side, router, and switch technologies, increasingly replacing C because of application development, design and testing costs and the products life-cycle race, limited tools like XCode, will not have a sufficiently large number of API-hooks to probably ever get much than a marginal share of this new device control technology.
What a lot of users of Javascript fail to appreciate is that ultimately it has to interact with servers on the Java side and hence businesses can manipulate how Javascript is served, particularly when it comes to interfacing at the hardware device level that IPV6 will usher in in a more substantial way, particularly since highly parallel (thread), cloud computing using Java on big iron is becoming increasingly embedded in business server-side logic.
I think XCode will work fine within the Apple-world, but it has little hope of navigating the cross-platform market, unless Apple gets their JVM act together and they simply are moving in an entirely different market direction for financial reasons. They have a developed a lucrative closed-market and are comfortable with the prospects of their near-term market share.
Sun sued Microsoft remember? Java is a powerful technology that evidently wants to be owned and profited from. Oracle does need to be careful of how it handles the Google suit however as it has the potential to fork Java, which for them would defeat the purpnose of buying Java in the first place. Remember, just before it died, Sun open-sourced much of Java, so a fork remains a very distinct possibility if Oracle does a heavy handed job of screwing rather than supporting the Java community process.
We shall see how this all plays out, particularly now that many foreign governments have moved to open-Linux based systems and software for their development needs. If Oracle, mucks it up too badly, they just might have government funded competition to contend with going forward with Java, most notable China, Brazil and some countries in the Eurozone. Analogous to the situation the US faces in being dependent on foreign oil, many countries find themselves overly dependent on US-based technology. As with everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages of doing anything in any particular way.
If its not Apple approved, don't look at the Apple store for your product as you won't find it. For those, you will need to turn to the general purpose computing market rather than the increasingly closed Apple platform.
Its not really about root privileges but rather what API's you can hook to in for applications development (expect for those coders who are so good, they do all their net apps in assembly language). Who cares what you keep in your root directory for what apps you give root privileges, most markets are focused on who can control how entire systems interface with other systems and software developed on those systems.
With cloud computing and open service oriented software technologies web-mediated applications become more and more predominant on the bigger iron and multi-sever environments, primarily because of maintenance and development costs associated with supporting multi-platform systems and where Java thread execution and remote method invocation become increasingly more important, what goes on with entertainment, the latest tech gizmos, and cool iPhone apps is of limited concern to all but end-users.
Apple is simply announcing in a subtle way that it is no longer really targeting the general, all-purpose computer market, but has decided on carving out a highly profitable niche market, as the Nieman Marcus or Sharp of the CPU-based tech world, much like Sony wanted to do but not as successfully as Apple. That is the vision of the Apple store. See a cool application you like at your store buy it and you pay for it. Since their market is for non-developers they don't care if it is closed source at the level of the OS.
Apple has pretty well given up on the business applications side of computing, except in the productivity suites for end-user area. It has no sever technologies and is rapidly diminishing as a significant software development platform for general-purpose computing. This is just a subtle way of making the announcement without making their end-user customer base nervous. Yes, this will largely drive developers of scientific-software and other technical users from the Apple platform, but they are such a small fraction of their market share and expensive to cater to, so Apple really doesn't see it will loose much.
Oracle is targeting the business and general-purpose computer markets, whereas Apple is targeting the cool tech gadget, entertainment, tunes and games markets. This will simply reinforce the realization that you really can't use a Mac for business and scientific-technical computing for in the long run, what you do is only OK if its approved for sale in the Apple store. Apple's OS is more along the lines of the Sony and Nintendo approach of developing for captured markets.
Although you are right in the short term, the onus will really be on Apple to develop its own developer tools if it wants to compete at all in the business/scientific technology space. My guess is that they don't as they are making quite a bit of money selling "cool" tech to the non-tech, users who wouldn't know how to use an OS even if it were fully open. Apple will have to decide to either maintain their own JVM or leave their JVM in legacy mode and watch developers, scientists, and engineers move to non-Apple development platforms. This is the dilemma people who use a proprietary OS face in every app they build. For those who just use apps they buy this is fine. Those whose businesses must interact with java on the server side must look beyond Apple to stay competitive.
In reading a comment by a computational biologist, who evidently develops on an Apple platform, he thought the Apple announcement represents trouble. He should have more carefully investigated Linux to begin with since science can not utilize a close-platform because of its primary need of allowing other scientists to see precisely how results were achieved, which requires a sufficiently open platform. Fortunately, for him, Java on Linux is getting so good that he will hardly miss OS X, at least for his application development needs.
Apple is rapidly becoming a dead platform for applications development anyway, unless you are developing for the captive end-user markets they serve, which is fine as they are quite large and popular for those primarily directed toward entertainment, end-user experiences rather than general purpose computing or web-development, where increasingly switches and routers are being configured using java rather than C as they are much easier to develop and maintain for interfacing multiple platform environments.
You an run the core product, but only a few of the modules that really provide the power to the OO platform, like highly integrated database-document interaction. But the vast majority of Apple users generally don't have those kinds of technical skills anyway.
Open office is a basically a business application designed to serve as an open alternative to the basic Microsoft suite of business products. Apple sees its future in the trendy gadget, cool phones and vido-games markets, not in general technical/business computing. As a percentage of their sales, developers are just a tiny fraction of their user-base, so why go through the extra expense of catering to them, when you can develop a closed-shop end-user general consumer market instead?
I develop Java on Windows quite well thank you. Yes there was a dust up, when MIcrosoft tied to grab a hold of the language through proprietary VM, but they lost that suit and Windows remains a great platform for Java development and likely to stay that way, otherwise many customers like me will simply migrate to Ubuntu or another system capable of running Java, which would further erode Windows market share, particularly in the business applications market.
Thats why Apple wants to kill Java. They don't believe in end-users having that kind of choice. For them software and computer gadgets are all about closed and captive, rather than open markets. Just check out the dearth of really useful, but incredibly expensive stuff in the iPhone apps market that only do things that are Apple-approved. For many end users thats fine as they just want a cool app or gadget that works. They have no real technical understanding beyond pressing "buttons". They do other things with their lives.
Apple has become the trendy tech for the non-technical. Apple sees their market there rather than in general purpose computer manufacturing. Its a good move for Jobs. In his lifetime, things are likely to pretty much stay that way. For people who expand the boundaries of what you can do with computing technology Apple is becoming a closed, shrinking market, except for those developing games and trendy gizmo, entertainment software. For them in the long run Apple is increasingly becoming a dead market for significant technical innovation. For folks who are primarily interested in web-centric technical computing, Apple is really longer "cool" and really has no future, which is not the same thing as saying they won't have a sizable market or profits for some time to come. Look at Sony and Nintendo, they are still making money, but no one would claim they serve as development platforms for innovate software other than games and video entertainment.
This is not a big deal really.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
Yet another effort by insurers to figure out what claims they can deny? For them, $100,000 a pop would be a good investment, if they can use the data to deny a single claim.
Beware of what you wish for in hurricane science.
the real question is whether I have the intelligence to sufficiently understand it. I've been trying to better my understanding of linear algebra for a number of years new, but it doesn't come easily. It is at least comforting that I can begin to read research papers such as this and understand some of it.
Those who have more substantial knowledge and who make an effort to build ladders to help scale the wall of understanding, like Gilbert Strang, Arnold, Shilov, Gantmacher, and others, are really due serious appreciation.
Sadly, too true. In my experience given the kind of covariance matrices that result from measures taken on fish, condition numbers of such matrices almost enter into a world of intractability, but not quite, so the choice of methods becomes quite important. The difficult is learning enough of the underlying mathematics to understand precisely how to choose among various potential methods and in being able to generate enough data to make it possible to obtain sufficiently stable covariance matrices to begin with given the reality of the consequences of potentially high condition numbers for matrices of interest.
Can't agree with you more. I've struggled to better understand linear algebra for quite some time and found Strang's clarity on the subject of tremendous help. The way he takes you from elementary ideas to the important concepts associate with SVD is truly worth paying close attention to. It makes a lot of seemingly disjunct ideas come together in a meaningful way.
I only wish there were more additional advanced lecture series to follow up on where his two lecture series leave off.
Yes, but for mere mortals the intermediate steps are often critical to keep from getting lost on the way, at least given my level of abilities. I for one still admit to having difficulty following proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra and I've have the advantage of several hundred years of alternate proofs. Although the steps are clear enough, understanding the leaps between them can still be difficult.
Sadly, weak math skills can keep one wandering for a long time. Conceptualizing the route from starting point to destination is not often easy to establish, when one is not entirely sure what the destination is supposed to look like when you get there.
To the extent I understand the paper, it is that certain error bounds can be described that given various inequality relations specify that the correct answer can be shown to be within an ever-more confined region of solution space upon iteration given the assumption that the initial matrix is SSD. Not being sufficiently familiar with the behavior of Chebechev polynomials to be sure, but it would seem that the classifiers that define various "inappropriate" edges in various representations graphs must be met must be correct within a sufficient approximation for the classification (sparsification) to lead to a correct result. I have no clear understanding of how this can be known, not having examined the Tang Spielman result. Perhaps others can provide a more informative outline of the major steps and assumptions involved in each.
Then you would be better off visiting mathoverflow or stackoverflow. Thats where the real wizards get the job done. Slashdot is directed more to the computer-social scene, which is important in some respects, but not the place to expect answers to technical questions, unless its about the popularity of computer games and such.
Better in the sense that the results that can be produced for a given sized grid can be obtained more quickly. Hence, it is possible to dramatically increase the density of sampled points (finer mesh grid) that would yield more localize accuracy and hence potentially more accurate results. Generally speaking the more better data can be included, the more likely the result will make an accurate prediction given the boundary conditions of the model.
Obama saved the American automotive industry, whether he ultimately gets any
credit for it or not. Howevver, this really isn't so much about political
philosophies, as it is whether there is a willingness of Detroit and America to
recognnize that in order to stay competitive, investments in education and
infrastructure necessary to invovate and keep up with the competition are
critical. It seems likely this will be their last chance, as another bailout is
not in the cards.
Although the final sentence of the article in French attempts to suggest that
the future will fall to Detroit by default, becuase "the more things change the
more they stay the same". The article really presents no real evidence to
substantiate this assumption. In reality this race will be won by those who
innovate and take better strategic risks that prove good bets. Life is a gamble.
Tesla Motors is small and the start up costs are indeed steep, as the article points out.
However, the article displays a smugness that Detroit really can't afford right now,
the notion that because of high costs, Tesla Motors is doomed to fail. Telsa motors
has partnered with Toyota and few can credibly argue that Toyota doesn't know something
about the automotive industry or electric vehicles.
For Toyota, the fit is a good one, because from their perspective the costs of
investment in a manufacturing plant in California makes sense. They already have
enough capacity at their plants serving the eastern US given current market
condition. Likewise, it makes no sense to build another plant for internal
combustion engines, when the mass production of electric vehicles is close at
hand (nearly all Japense manufacturers are moving entirely electric cars for
their domestic market, with Toyota, Honda, and Nissan poised to commence sale of
fully electric vehicles globally in the next production cycle. Further, given
the appreciation of the yen relative to the dollar, complements of US taxpayers,
especially republicans, who like to load up on debt with little return on
investment, their appreciating currency can best be spent in the US, where the
same number of yen will buy more. Toyota may ultimately be looking for a
sizeable stake in Tesla, to gain the premier name brand in electric vehicles.
Yes, costs of living are higher in California, but as with anything else in
life, you get wh at you pay for. California has, in addition to its geographic
position, a highly educated workforce that results from its long term
investments in higher education. Assumming Meg Whitman doesn't succeed in her
efforts to defund the university system, this advantage will remain for the
foreseeable future. Likewise, it also has a very strong and emerging solar and
wind technology industries, that are steadily ramping up in terms of megawatts
on line each year. Although it does have high taxes, this gives it tax benefits
associated with investments in infrastructure and human resource and health care
that most states lack. These are things that are attractive to high tech
workers, who want to raise happy and healthy families.
Likewise, the preferred republican approach to encourage off-shoring of American
jobs is also counter-productive as it fundamentally undermines the buying power
of Americans, which is why there are so few jobs being created now. Who, besides
bankers, CEO's and Wall Street tycoons have that much money to spend anymore
these days? Wealth concentration in the US is at a historic high, so it is
unlikely that most Americans will have any buying power or jobs soon, which
ironically will aid Tesla, since the market for smaller, lighter cars will be
relatively larger.
Totally overlooked by all the stereotypes in the article are clear synergies
between electric cars and electric power production that Detroit needs to take
seriously before their fate is sealed. The oil companies do, which is why they
are waging w
Sorry these days, there is such a dearth of reason coming from conservatives that its too easy to miss the sarcasm.
I did laugh in a sense though, didn't I?
The manufacturing can take place elsewhere, just as the movies can be made elsewhere. The critical issues is where the profits wind up, not the manufacturing. Typically, the profits wind up in the hands of the first investors in, who tend to be the ones who where their when things got off the ground. Hollywood still must have some pull as does Silicon Valley. Schwartznegger the governor is from California. You really think that some of his friends aren't from Hollywood either?
Tesla Motors was smart to partner with Toyota, who may ultimate be investing in them to ultimately buy them out. If Detroit thinks it can stay smug about Toyota, they will again be doing more than whistling as they walk past graveyards, they will become one.
California is already ramping up more and more solar and wind. Only the first wave is beginning to come on line. Lots of sunshine in California, with no need to send money to the Saudi's, Venezuelans, and Mexicans, nor pay for occupying armies to keep the oil spigots flowing, or taxes to mitigate environmental damage associated with petroleum.
Electric cars will only speed this up dramatically, especially if some of the initial production is in California, as it will be an increased incentive for locals to buy local made products. California is on the right track, its just that huge oil-company money is holding it back, but not for long.
Composites rather than steel will be the future of cars, just as it now is in aeronautics.
It doesn't seem to have bothered the Koreans or Japanese much.
partner with Toyota and no one can say Toyota doesn't know how to compete with Detroit. Detroit needs to control its smugness or it will again find itself begging for a bailout, which will be a hard act to pull off the next time their execs underestimate the competition.
Texas is rapidly becoming one of the poorest states in the nation. There is less and less buying power in Texas. Manufacturers would do better to focus on markets where they can make money. The marketing types at most major corporations have already begun to figure this out.