It's right there in the story writeup and the article too, but let's recap since nobody reads the articles anyway:
For mainstream markets and applications that don't require discrete AGP graphics, Shuttle has whipped up a smaller, quieter "Zen" XPC ST62K system. By stripping the cube of its AGP slot and using a passively-cooled external power supply...
And this for 20% off the length (not height, not width) of the case. Whoop-ti-doo -- I haven't had an external power supply on my computer since I threw away my C-64. I'm sorry, but this hardly qualifies as innovation...
...and besides, I'm perfectly happy with my Creative SLiX as is. (The thing could be a little quieter though.)
Only in theory. In commercial service, both Shinkansen and TGV operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h. The fastest scheduled service in the world is the Nozomi Shinkansen in Japan between Hiroshima and Kokura, which manages an average speed of 261.8 km/h.
Alas, the maglev's official home page (I think; at least they sell tickets) is all Chinese and out of date to boot. In the meantime, the best place to go is Wangjianshuo's blog, in particular the well-illustrated Maglev in depth story.
Things that suck about the maglev:
It only runs every half hour, which kind of defeats the point of having a superfast train.
Tickets cost 75 RMB (~$9) a pop, this in a country where 800 RMB a month is considered a decent wage.
It doesn't go into the city, you have to transfer to a subway and ride another 6 stops just to get on the Puxi side of the river.
Not that any of this will stop me from going for a ride next time I'm in Shanghai!
So we're talking about the smallest "independent" country in the world
Sorry, not [cia.gov] even [cia.gov] close. [cia.gov]
Actually quite close, the Vatican just barely nudges under with 911 people vs. Niue's 1100. (San Marino and Monaco are an order of magnitude larger.) But the article predicts that the population may now fall to only 500, which would be -- populationwise -- the smallest independent country in the world.
Malaysia (.fm ) did sold many domain names to foreigners, for obvious reasons.
Nitpicking your nitpick,.fm is the Federated States of Micronesia. Malaysia is.my , which might also be fun, if it weren't restricted to third-level domains (foo.com.my) and even that only for Malaysian-registered entities.
China has an excellent military, including an air force and the navy, which it can use quite effectively. Remember the time when Taiwan was having its first elections, back in 1996? China performed quite a show of force back then, holding exercises in which an occupying force took and held a beachhead and a few islands, giving a good proof of concept for a Taiwan invasion.
Bullpucky. Those few islands were a lot smaller and closer to the mainland than to Taiwan, there were no hostile forces shooting back, and the excellent Chinese military still fucked up so badly that some of the invasion force starved to death because they couldn't get supplies to them! Most military analysts concluded that China was nowhere near being able to take on Taiwan.
Just one tangential comment from the submitter of the article:
I almost didn't submit the story, because Tufte's essay is only available in hardcopy for 7 bucks a pop. WTF? The only reason I excuse him is that he's a freelancer now, so his thoughts aren't sponsored by tax money, but in this day and age it's pretty odd not to freely publish your content if you want to have an impact... especially when said content is all of 28 pages long, and you've already written 7 books on the subject!
And now we've got hordes of slashdotters posting uninformed comments, because it's not really even possible to RTFA beyond what the NYT reveals of it. Sigh.
As the submitter of the article in question, all I can say is... MOD PARENT UP! You're the only one who has gotten the point so far (better than the NYT did, at that).
...and before the ObTrolls start yelling about Third World governments putting money into newfangled computers instead of feeding their own people, don't worry, Brazil's working on that too. (In case you don't read Portuguese, here's an article about the 'Hunger Zero' program in English.
Anything than can be automated should be automated.
If your job is so repetitive, monotonous and predictable that it can be done by a robot, then it's better for you and everybody that it is done by robot. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everybody on the planet had to work in manual agriculture just to get food on the table; the people freed from serfdom have created the world as we know it. A machine is much better at brute force work, let humans use their brains instead!
Your naivete has an endearing quality to it, like the idea of any utopia. However, history has shown that when people are given resources beyond their contribution, like you suggest, they tend to breed endlessly.
Quite the contrary. The correlation in fact goes in exactly the opposite direction, as shown here.
Basically, more wealth means better healthcare, less infant mortality, better family planning and more career options for women -- so they choose to have less kids. Most "rich" countries actually have negative net growth rates now.
Gotta love Slashdot's incendiary headlines. "DEATH" of the PDA, indeed.
Well, in this particular case the Economist's own headline was "PDA, RIP". If anything, Slashdot added a ? at the end, meaning it's a debatable opinion, instead of just stating it as a fact.
Look up the word "fujitsu" in a japanese-english dictionary (there are a few online) and see what it means! You may never buy another fujitsu brand drive again...
Hate to burst your bubble, but "Fujitsu" (written in kanji) is short for "Fuji Tsushin", which means "Fuji Communications". Which isn't too surprising, since they got started building telegraph equipment.
Chinese Christians -- and there are quite a few in Singapore and Taiwan, esp. in the higher classes of society -- usually have "English" Christian names in addition to their Chinese names.
Apparently you know very little about Mandarin, or it's input. For Japanese input, there is a big speed penalty.
Err, no, there isn't. The approach used is different (predictive phonetic input for Japanese vs character stroke input for Chinese), but that's because the underlying languages are also radically different, despite the superficial similarity of the writing system.
Most Japanese these days bemoan (a little exaggeratedly) that they've forgotten to write by hand, since it's so much faster and easier to write by computer. And besides, we all know how poor the Japanese are at designing electronics and coding games, right?
Wired has a strange definition of "cheaper"; I do believe every country on that list (except Vietnam) is, by most measures, better off than India. Some GDP per capita figures from the CIA World Factbook 2002:
and desperately impoverished little poor Singapore: $24,700
If companies are relocating out of India to these, this is actually proving quite the opposite -- it's not enough to just look at the salary per employee, you also have to consider infrastructure, efficiency and quality. And even those American dinosaurs may be able to compete!
Cheers,
-j. (who outsourced himself to Singapore and got a pay raise in the process)
People, these are concept designs, not prototypes!
The design is only a concept at this point, although Motorola is preparing for user testing, and plans to bring a product based on the design to market within two years.
In other words, these are only pretty pictures and hot air, and a "product based on the design" (which means absolutely nothing and/or anything using Bluetooth) may or may not appear in two years. Sure, it's a spiffy design, but with current technology eg. the sunglasses are completely impossible. (The current state of the art is MicroOptical, whose displays require bulky transformer boxes attached by a cord, and Bluetooth bandwidth is nowhere near that needed to push even a VGA signal wirelessly.)
was'nt 56k dial up access about 50quid a minute or somthing? I dont want to even think what the cost of this will be..:(
Didn't think to read the article either, now did you?
Connexion in turn will share a percentage of the revenue it gets from passengers, who could expect to pay $25 to $35 for Internet connection for each international flight and less for trips of shorter distance.
Not cheap, but just might be worth it for a 12-hour stretch of terminal (har!) boredom... at least if there's AC power for the laptop as well. And the target audience is not./, it's people in suits who can call this a business expense.
Aren't the Yakuza deeply mixed up in the Pachinko business?
Gambling for money is illegal in Japan, which means that the prizes you win in pachinko parlors aren't cash, but teddy bears, cans of abalone, etc. This bit of the business is perfectly legal.
Now, the yakuza's role is to run shady little shops next door, which exchange your teddy bears and abalone cans for cash, and sell the prizes back to the pachinko shop. This is not legal, but the police are bribed enough to not care, and it makes pachinko a lot more popular; some people play well enough to earn a living.
So Sammy, being at the other end of the chain (designing the machines), has virtually no contact with the yakuza. Their business would collapse if the police started cracking down, but they aren't about to as it's a rather innocuous racket as far as these things go.
So in other countries, banks don't charge anything for issuing debit cards, maintain the databases, routing the funds, etc.? I find this a bit hard to believe.
Depends on your bank and country, but at mine, Handelsbanken in Finland, I pay nothing for my:
accounts themselves
debit card
ATM withdrawals in Finland (any ATM) and Sweden (Handelsbanken ATMs)
online banking
electronic money transfers (within Finland, soon to be all the EU as well)
service at physical bank branches (I know my teller by first name)
And no, this doesn't require assets of 15 kazillion, I'm just an ordinary customer.
I do pay a small yearly fee (less than 50) for my credit card, and a small commission on withdrawals outside Finland/Sweden. The bank makes its share through interest in my checking account (not that Finns ever use checks...), for managing my mutual funds and interest from loans (not that I have any at the moment).
And yes, this kicks ass. Handelsbanken has been signing up a lot of people since the thousand-pound gorilla of Nordic banking, Nordea, started jacking up its fees.
Remember how long it took to reinstate the STS program after the Challenger Incident?
Yes.
What are the chances NASA will send up STS 108 on schedule?
Zero. I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttles never fly again.
Will they use the soyuz emergency capsule to return earthside?
Unlikely. Remember, the Soyuz is not just an emergency capsule, it's a full-blown launcher system. Most supply and crew change missions to the ISS are flown with Soyuzes, so technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
However, Russia's financially strapped space program has been hard pressed to produce even the current number of spacecraft (the "escape capsule" Soyuz is swapped for a new one every 6 months), so whether they alone can keep going is doubtful.
Before y'all start foaming at the mouth about terrorism and Osama bin Laden's dastardly plots (now just how is al-Qaeda going to hit something moving at twice the speed of sound at an altitude of 200,000 ft, and if they've planted nasty things on board why not blow them up during ascent?), consider this bit from Spaceflight Now:
During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge.
But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."
Make of that what you will. Odds are we are looking at an all-too-natural catastrophic failure though; shuttles are insanely complex beasts, and rapidly aging ones at that.
But the damage has been done: the astronauts are dead, and the U.S. space program -- which never recovered from Challenger's loss -- may soon be dead as well.
Of course every industry player is very interested in multimedia messaging to succeed. The manufacturers like to sell new, snazzy and expensive phones, carriers charge an arm and a leg and have a huge interest in mms taking off and network equipment providers can sell nice upgrades to the wireless infrastructure.
Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.
Picture messages have been a huge hit in Japan, J-Phone alone has picked up over 5 million subscribers for its Sha-Mail service in the last year and doubled its data ARPU in the process (translation: the service is actually used and the operator is making a killing in per-byte fees).
The business model is clearly viable. It remains to be seen if GSM operators kill the golden goose by overcharging for messages, but rates seem to be becoming more reasonable and things are looking pretty good.
Slashdot Mirror
Landing itself isn't too hard, but unlike Beagle 2, Opportunity appears to have landed in one piece. Congrats!
Cheers,
-j.
For mainstream markets and applications that don't require discrete AGP graphics, Shuttle has whipped up a smaller, quieter "Zen" XPC ST62K system. By stripping the cube of its AGP slot and using a passively-cooled external power supply...
And this for 20% off the length (not height, not width) of the case. Whoop-ti-doo -- I haven't had an external power supply on my computer since I threw away my C-64. I'm sorry, but this hardly qualifies as innovation...
Cheers,
-j.
Only in theory. In commercial service, both Shinkansen and TGV operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h. The fastest scheduled service in the world is the Nozomi Shinkansen in Japan between Hiroshima and Kokura, which manages an average speed of 261.8 km/h.
Cheers,
-j.
Alas, the maglev's official home page (I think; at least they sell tickets) is all Chinese and out of date to boot. In the meantime, the best place to go is Wangjianshuo's blog, in particular the well-illustrated Maglev in depth story.
Things that suck about the maglev:
- It only runs every half hour, which kind of defeats the point of having a superfast train.
- Tickets cost 75 RMB (~$9) a pop, this in a country where 800 RMB a month is considered a decent wage.
- It doesn't go into the city, you have to transfer to a subway and ride another 6 stops just to get on the Puxi side of the river.
Not that any of this will stop me from going for a ride next time I'm in Shanghai!Cheers,
-j.
Sorry, not [cia.gov] even [cia.gov] close. [cia.gov]
Actually quite close, the Vatican just barely nudges under with 911 people vs. Niue's 1100. (San Marino and Monaco are an order of magnitude larger.) But the article predicts that the population may now fall to only 500, which would be -- populationwise -- the smallest independent country in the world.
Cheers,
-j.
Nitpicking your nitpick, .fm is the Federated States of Micronesia. Malaysia is .my , which might also be fun, if it weren't restricted to third-level domains (foo.com.my) and even that only for Malaysian-registered entities.
Cheers,
-j.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/
And in English too!
Bullpucky. Those few islands were a lot smaller and closer to the mainland than to Taiwan, there were no hostile forces shooting back, and the excellent Chinese military still fucked up so badly that some of the invasion force starved to death because they couldn't get supplies to them! Most military analysts concluded that China was nowhere near being able to take on Taiwan.
An interesting analysis: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=589046
Cheers,
-j.
I almost didn't submit the story, because Tufte's essay is only available in hardcopy for 7 bucks a pop. WTF? The only reason I excuse him is that he's a freelancer now, so his thoughts aren't sponsored by tax money, but in this day and age it's pretty odd not to freely publish your content if you want to have an impact... especially when said content is all of 28 pages long, and you've already written 7 books on the subject!
And now we've got hordes of slashdotters posting uninformed comments, because it's not really even possible to RTFA beyond what the NYT reveals of it. Sigh.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
Quite the contrary. The correlation in fact goes in exactly the opposite direction, as shown here.
Basically, more wealth means better healthcare, less infant mortality, better family planning and more career options for women -- so they choose to have less kids. Most "rich" countries actually have negative net growth rates now.
Cheers,
-jani
Well, in this particular case the Economist's own headline was "PDA, RIP". If anything, Slashdot added a ? at the end, meaning it's a debatable opinion, instead of just stating it as a fact.
Cheers,
-j.
Cheers,
-j.
Chinese Christians -- and there are quite a few in Singapore and Taiwan, esp. in the higher classes of society -- usually have "English" Christian names in addition to their Chinese names.
Err, no, there isn't. The approach used is different (predictive phonetic input for Japanese vs character stroke input for Chinese), but that's because the underlying languages are also radically different, despite the superficial similarity of the writing system.
Most Japanese these days bemoan (a little exaggeratedly) that they've forgotten to write by hand, since it's so much faster and easier to write by computer. And besides, we all know how poor the Japanese are at designing electronics and coding games, right?
Cheers,
-j.
- India: $2540
- Czech Republic: $15,300
- and desperately impoverished little poor Singapore: $24,700
If companies are relocating out of India to these, this is actually proving quite the opposite -- it's not enough to just look at the salary per employee, you also have to consider infrastructure, efficiency and quality. And even those American dinosaurs may be able to compete!Cheers,
-j. (who outsourced himself to Singapore and got a pay raise in the process)
Cheers,
-j.
Didn't think to read the article either, now did you?
Not cheap, but just might be worth it for a 12-hour stretch of terminal (har!) boredom... at least if there's AC power for the laptop as well. And the target audience is notCheers,
-j.
Gambling for money is illegal in Japan, which means that the prizes you win in pachinko parlors aren't cash, but teddy bears, cans of abalone, etc. This bit of the business is perfectly legal.
Now, the yakuza's role is to run shady little shops next door, which exchange your teddy bears and abalone cans for cash, and sell the prizes back to the pachinko shop. This is not legal, but the police are bribed enough to not care, and it makes pachinko a lot more popular; some people play well enough to earn a living.
So Sammy, being at the other end of the chain (designing the machines), has virtually no contact with the yakuza. Their business would collapse if the police started cracking down, but they aren't about to as it's a rather innocuous racket as far as these things go.
Cheers,
-j.
Depends on your bank and country, but at mine, Handelsbanken in Finland, I pay nothing for my:
- accounts themselves
- debit card
- ATM withdrawals in Finland (any ATM) and Sweden (Handelsbanken ATMs)
- online banking
- electronic money transfers (within Finland, soon to be all the EU as well)
- service at physical bank branches (I know my teller by first name)
And no, this doesn't require assets of 15 kazillion, I'm just an ordinary customer. I do pay a small yearly fee (less than 50) for my credit card, and a small commission on withdrawals outside Finland/Sweden. The bank makes its share through interest in my checking account (not that Finns ever use checks...), for managing my mutual funds and interest from loans (not that I have any at the moment).And yes, this kicks ass. Handelsbanken has been signing up a lot of people since the thousand-pound gorilla of Nordic banking, Nordea, started jacking up its fees.
Cheers,
-j.
Yes.
What are the chances NASA will send up STS 108 on schedule?
Zero. I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttles never fly again.
Will they use the soyuz emergency capsule to return earthside?
Unlikely. Remember, the Soyuz is not just an emergency capsule, it's a full-blown launcher system. Most supply and crew change missions to the ISS are flown with Soyuzes, so technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
However, Russia's financially strapped space program has been hard pressed to produce even the current number of spacecraft (the "escape capsule" Soyuz is swapped for a new one every 6 months), so whether they alone can keep going is doubtful.
-j.
But the damage has been done: the astronauts are dead, and the U.S. space program -- which never recovered from Challenger's loss -- may soon be dead as well.
-j.
Now if the consumers play nice, or if this is another wap fiasko in the making only time will tell.
Picture messages have been a huge hit in Japan, J-Phone alone has picked up over 5 million subscribers for its Sha-Mail service in the last year and doubled its data ARPU in the process (translation: the service is actually used and the operator is making a killing in per-byte fees).
The business model is clearly viable. It remains to be seen if GSM operators kill the golden goose by overcharging for messages, but rates seem to be becoming more reasonable and things are looking pretty good.
Cheers,
-j.