For many years, I watched almost no television. Few shows were worth my time, and almost none were worth arranging my life around a broadcast schedule.
Then I bought a cheap tuner card on sale, on impulse. I built a MythTV system out of parts left over from upgrades. When I felt like relaxing with a TV show, I had a library of previously recorded shows to choose from. With more control over my viewing, I found that I spent more time watching TV. I could skip ads, but often didn't. Most advertising has a much greater budget per second than any entertainment show, resulting in at least some ads which I enjoy watching. The key fact that Disney shareholders need to understand is that I watch an order of magnitude more advertising after MythTV than before MythTV.
The FCC, prompted by Disney and others, threatened to impose a Broadcast Flag over digital TV broadcasts. I hadn't been interested in digital TV or High Definition before then, but I wanted to keep the control over my TV viewing that I had gained, so I bought a digital tuner card. Built before any Broadcast Flag laws could effect, it would be grandfathered in and not impose the restrictions that would make viewing unpleasant. I put an antenna in my attic, and discovered Over-the-Air digital TV. Wow! DVD quality for the SD material, and even better for HD. Even downscaled to my old TV, HD looked good.
I bought a large screen 1080i TV. I bought a second tuner card. I bought larger hard drives, and recorded more shows. I even watched the Olympics, which had been too boring to watch before. Before MythTV, I watched -0- hours of Olympic coverage. After, I watched hours. Yes, I skipped most of it, but the point is that I watched hours more than before. The ability to skip over the boring 'human interest' crap (shouldn't sports TV be produced by people who LIKE sports? Don't the viewers who select sports coverage want to see the competition?), the ability to skip over events I'm not interested in resulted in my watching many, many more ads than ever before. And there were surprises: I expected bobsled and luge to be exciting, but they were boring. Skip. Cross-country skiing, which I expected to be boring, turned out to be exciting.
I repeat for the attention of Disney shareholders: my ability to control how, what, and when to view resulted in my watching MORE ads.
Cox offered a free trial of their digital service. It sucked. They offered again, and the salesman promised that they'd improved it. I tried it again, and coughed up enough money to try their HD service. The salesman lied. It still sucked. I canceled ALL cable services. There are two problems, which have much in common. The first is that Motorola builds boxes for the cable companies, not for the end users. I'm willing to pay a premium for a good user interface and high quality. Cable companies want to spend as little as possible. The result is lowest common denominator crap that's underpowered and lacks the features *I* want. The other problem is that the program suppliers. like Disney, impose conditions on the cable companies that make my viewing experience less pleasant. You can't force me to watch.
Cox lost my business, in part because Disney overcharges for ESPN. I can watch ABC free OTA, although I can't think of any shows on ABC other than sporting events that I have watched.
Disney, let's review basic economics. You want my money, either directly or through selling my viewing time to advertisers. You only get my money or time when you offer something I want on terms that I find acceptable. I can live without Disney. Disney can't survive without viewers. Your control over distribution has created a false sense of power, but the real power is with the viewer. Making viewing less pleasant will cost you sales. I WILL watch advertising when I control which ads to view. Take that control away from me, and I won't watch ANY advertising. Drop the damned stick and focus on the carrot.
You have the cart before the horse. Many obsolete designs used pushrods. Many obsolete designs used overhead cams. They are obsolete for a variety of reasons.
Where efficiency is critical and weight is not, large slow engines rule. Consider ships and locomotives. Granted, those are Diesel rather than Otto cycle, but it shows how important the relationship is between RPM and friction. Consider two pumps, one with a displacement half the size of the other. The smaller one must run at twice the RPM to match the volume. But the friction of the air moving in and out of the pump does not increase linearly with velocity, it increases much faster than that. Higher velocity means much higher drag. All industrial engines run at low RPM because that's where you get the lowest fuel consumption for a given power output.
Consider a car at idle. The throttle is nearly closed, and the power generated by burning the fuel is exactly matched by the power lost pumping the air through the engine. Luckily, increasing the air friction reduces the RPM. which reduces the power by reducing the amount of fuel used. At full throttle, if the engine doesn't come apart, the power produced also equals the power used in pumping the air. The fact that gasoline engines have been controlled by throttles for most of their history shows just how important air (and exhaust) frictional losses are. One of the keys to the direct injection technology in the article is that it enables doing away with the throttle (and its frictional losses) and controlling power through metering the fuel.
Most cars only need a few horsepower to overcome rolling resistance. All of the rest is used to overcome the friction of the air passing over the car. It takes power to move air over a car. It takes power to move air through an engine. And it takes way, way more power at higher speeds. High RPM engines make more power, but they also waste more power.
High RPM engines waste more power than low RPM engines. Most racing rules limit displacement, so the loss of efficiency is much less important than higher overall power. Many countries charge lower taxes for smaller displacements, so smaller but less efficient engines are cheaper to run. But if you are optimizing for the most power from a given quantity of fuel, than slower is better.
For automobiles, weight does matter. For a given displacement, pushrods are lighter. But a smaller, higher-revving engine may be lighter for a given power. It will use more fuel to get that power. But a lighter car will need less power to accelerate. On the other hand, engine weight is only part of the total weight, and aerodynamic losses don't depend on weight at all. So there's no clear winner if your only concern is fuel consumption.
Compare the current pushrod Corvette with any similar class car, and see which gets better highway mileage. At legal speeds, it loafs along in top gear.
Most of the world taxes vehicles by displacement. That favors small engines. You get more power out of a small engine by increasing the RPM. Not more power per unit of fuel, more power per displacement, at the COST of higher pumping losses.
The benefit of OHC is higher RPM, allowing a small displacement engine to pump the same volume of air as a larger, slower engine. Smaller displacement may mean lower weight for some components, but OHC adds weight for others. When taxes are based on displacement, OHC is a clear win.
But OHC has drawbacks, too. Higher RPM also means more frictional losses pumping that air, and to a lesser extent, higher frictional losses in other areas. OHC also requires more parts, increasing cost and weight and reducing reliability. For the same displacement, the heads and drive train will weigh more for an OHC engine than for a pushrod engine. This is especially true for the V layout, where both banks can share a camshaft in a pushrod engine, but you need two (or four) cams and a heavier, more complex cam drive train.
Pumping losses kill efficiency at high RPMs. For racing or for a sports car, efficiency is secondary to power/weight ratio. Turbo- or supercharging improves power/weight even more, but again lowers efficiency due to friction, lowers reliability due to increased complexity, and increases price. That's OK when maximum power is the concern. When getting the most power out of a given volume of fuel has priority, large slow engines rule.
Both pushrod and OHC engines can be designed for whatever compression ratio and combustion properties you want. Neither has an advantage there.
High revving engines are ALWAYS the result of rules or taxes based on displacement. Eliminate taxes based on displacement and substitute taxes on fuel, and you'll see a shift towards pushrod designs.
DC, Ford, and GM already sell engines using direct injection.
US automakers do have management problems, but technology is not one of them. Quality levels are actually better than most European and some Japanese competitors, but are sadly sabotaged by incompetent dealerships. The UAW remains a huge problem; the leadership would like to take the steps needed to save good jobs for the long run, but the membership will toss out anyone who tries. Health care costs are out of control. And so on...
It could be worse. Ford looks good compared to FIAT.
Yes, and I also described the market for prerecorded casette tapes.
At one time, 78 RPM phonograph records owned the market, then LPs, then 8-track tapes, then casettes. But digital storage of music has overwhelming advantages over analog storage, so the switch was on. The companies who succeeded with analog music were able to transition to digital storage - the CD - while keeping the same distribution and business model. Companies who adapted to shifts in analog storage technology also adapted to the shift to digital storage.
But the Internet allows digital distribution, and that shows signs of causing radical changes in the music business. The transitions between storage technologies certainly seemed significant to the record companies and retailers, but they pale in comparison to the changes due to new distribution technology. Digital distribution, of course, depends on digital storage. It is the combination of the two changes that shows signs of overturning the traditional business model.
Microsoft succeeded because they were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of commodity hardware. By selling to all OEMs, they created a market for quasi-commodity software. A commodity is a product which is available from multiple suppliers and each supplier's product may be freely substituted for that from the other suppliers. In the DOS days, a computer/OS bundle looked to the end user like a commodity; the cost of the software was a fraction of the overall price, and one bundle could be replaced by a bundle from another supplier. The fact that the OS was sole-source was hidden by the fact that was available to, and from, all OEMs.
But the cost of the hardware has dropped so far that the cost of the software can no longer be hidden. Also, Microsoft no longer offers a neutral platform for competing application vendors; they have taken over most of the application market themselves. Just as proprietary hardware has been largely displaced by commodity hardware, there is an opportunity for commodity software to displace proprietary software.
The Internet has enabled a new method of software development, one which favors software as a commodity. It is a method that Microsoft cannot take advantage of, because it conflicts with their business model. Microsoft ruled when distribution of software was difficult, and distribution in source form was impractical. Now, distribution in source form costs so little that many don't even bother to measure it. The Internet has changed software development, and it has changed software distribution. Software is becoming a commodity. For those areas most closely related to the Internet, it already is: email clients and servers, web browsers and servers, file servers, routing, etc. The rest may take a decade or so, but software will become a commodity.
Microsoft is huge, and won't disappear overnight, if ever. But if you think that a 90% market share is permanent, you are ignoring history.
There will not be another Microsoft. Microsoft will be displaced by something completely unlike Microsoft. DEC owned the minicomputer market, and they were not displaced by a better VAX, a better VMS. The entire propietary minicomputer market itself, not just DEC, was displaced by commodity personal computers and commodity servers. The entire proprietary desktop market will be displaced, too. The only question is when, not if.
It is a huge, huge mistake to think that Linux should be like Windows. People who want Windows use Windows. People who run Windows applications run Windows. They'll drop Windows when they realize that they no longer need it, when they no longer run closed proprietary software. They won't switch to Linux when Adobe ports Photoshop, they'll switch when they stop using Photoshop. For some. that's already happened. For others, it may not happen for years.
Closed applications belong on closed platforms. Open applications belong on open platforms. Mixing open and closed provides the benefits of neither and the drawbacks of both.
"...never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market."
Linux will never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple market by doing the same things the same way as Microsoft and Apple.
Look at markets where Linux has succeeded, such as servers and embedded systems. Linux succeeds *because* it doesn't follow the Microsoft license model, the Microsoft development model, the Microsoft business model, and so on. You can't win if you play by Microsoft rules.
Linux can be, and is, an OS for users. It isn't an OS for third party closed source binary distribution. Don't read that as non-commercial; commercial software was distributed in source form before Microsoft and will be again. Distribution in binary form makes sense for games and art, but not for general purpose computing. The value of doing things in software rather than in hardware is that software is malleable. But you need the source to realize the full value; binary distribution removes value.
So yes, Linux will not make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market, if that means the closed binary sales market. If Microsoft played in the NFL, they'd be the Super Bowl winning Colts. But the Colts will never win the World Cup, which is worth more. Don't complain about Linux not hiring a bigger front line when the game Linux is playing is soccer, and doing rather well at it.
What's wrong with paying another company to carry only your products?
If you have a dominant position in the market, it may violate antitrust law.
Selling at a low price is fine, always. But if you have a dominant position in the market, there are things that you aren't allowed to do:
You can't sell below cost, called dumping. The tactic is to bankrupt the competition and raise prices after they're gone.
You can't bundle products together so as to create a monopoly in a new area by tying to products from an existing monopoly.
You can't punish customers for buying from a competitor. Reward them for buying from you, yes. Punish them for buying from the other guy, no.
If you don't have a dominant position in the market, you can do those things. Sell below cost, buy market share, and the competition will have its chance when you run out of money. Sell unpopular products by bundling them with popular products, and watch your popular products become less popular. Require exclusive contracts, and watch customers switch to vendors willing to satisfy customer needs. You can do these things because market forces will correct attempts to manipulate the market. Under normal conditions, the market will reward efforts to compete and punish efforts to inhibit competition.
But a company can have a commanding position in a market, such that they aren't hurt much by tactics which reduce, inhibit, or eliminate competition. That's where antitrust laws come in. If you can get away with actions that stifle competition, then you are a monopoly in the legal sense, if not the pedantic sense beloved by shills. That's how the court determine if you are a monopoly. If you can raise prices without losing sales, you may be a monopoly. If you can afford to sell below cost until the competitors are out of business, then you may be a monopoly. If you can force unfavorable contract terms on your customers without losing them, you may be a monopoly.
Rewarding Dell for buying from Intel is one thing, and rewarding Dell for helping drive AMD out of business is another. The distinction between gaining sales for Intel and punishing sales by AMD can be subtle, and that's what the courts will wrestle with.
"I can't go buy an electric car even if I want one."
There's a simple reason for that, and it doesn't involve conspiracies. The global auto manufacturing capacity exceeds demand by a sizable margin, creating cut-throat competition. That's why there have been so many mergers and plant closings. There are local exceptions, such as China, but China isn't willing to absorb production from the rest of the world. Manufacturers will build anything that they can sell at a profit.
Someone would make the car you want if they could. Maybe not GM or Ford, but someone. There is a market for a practical electric car, and it would be built and sold. If it could. But what you want is an illusion; real electric cars aren't very practical, and the market for what CAN be built is vanishingly small.
A tiny number of people driving battery-powered cars would have almost no impact on oil consumption. Reducing consumption in the kinds of vehicles that people actually buy would have an impact.
The technical problem of air pollution from automobiles is solved. Your lack of awareness notwithstanding, emissions controls have improved a tremendous amount since the '70s. The exhaust from today's ultra-low emission vehicles may be cleaner than ambient air in the most polluted cities. I don't think you understand how low emissions levels can be, and are where required. Such southern California, where I live, and which has driven emissions technologies to the point where new cars are no longer stand out as the main problem. Further reductions in SoCal atmospheric hydrocarbon levels have required limiting emissions from paint, charcoal lighter fluid, and lawn mowers. Pollution from engines on ships, locomotives, and off-road equipment remain to be addressed. Yes, cars depend on foreign oil, produce greenhouse gases, and pose a major land use problem. But emissions (hydrocarbons and NOx) are controlled quite well.
The political problem of pollution from automobiles remains. Even in SoCal, cars which pollute can stay on the road once the owner has spent a certain amount attempting to repair the problem. One car may pollute as much as a 100 new cars. Cutting emissions of the already clean cars won't help. Getting the dirty cars of the road will. Eastern states are finally imposing tighter limits, as is Europe. But most of the US requires no more than the Fedral standard, and most of the world has no limits on pollution at all.
Yes, oil company profits are outrageous. Big oil outright owns the Bush administration and much of Congress. ADM and the farm lobby wrote the national ethanol policy. I don't like it, and have done my part to vote the rascals out. But I don't need a complicated conspiracy to explain what simple economics does, which is that real electric cars cost too much and deliver too little. I don't like watching my neighbors buy pickup trucks and SUVs, but they do. Higher gas prices may change that, and I'd support higher gas taxes to push that direction harder. But my neighbors do drive trucks and SUVs, and I recognize that reducing oil consumption of what *most* people drive will have a bigger impact than any fringe market electric car.
No, it's a sign that physics trumps politics. Battery-powered electric cars don't make sense for nearly all uses of automobiles. The limited range is acceptable for fork lifts and golf carts, but not for family transportation. Practical cars need to be able to be refueled in minutes.
Hybrids make sense now. They reduce the use of fossil fuels, which battery-powered cars do not; the electricity to charge the batteries comes mostly from fossil fuels. Hybrids also provide a great development platform for future fuel-cell technology.
We've largely solved the autombile pollution problem, and it was done through incremental improvements. Solving the fossil fuel problem will also happen as a series of incremental improvements. A scientific breakthrough in electricity storage would be nice, but breakthroughs are not predictable, and it's foolish to depend on them when you can reach the same goal through steady improvement of known engineering.
The EV1 was GM's response to a piece of political grandstanding. I'd rather have real reductions in the use of fossil fuels than the diversion of resources towards satisfying some politican's need for grand gestures. Sure, GM blundered, but even if GM had been perfect, the goal of the program was still pure folly.
Yes, there are practical limits to the retail demand for unbundled systems. But an investigation into possible anti-competitive practices at the retail level provides a lever to uncover anti-competitive practices at the OEM level. Solve the problem at the OEM level and the retail level will take care of itself.
Microsoft has too much power over OEMs, and has used it to stifle competition. No OEM wants to be the first to challenge Microsoft, because they will be the first to feel the Wrath of Redmond. But an investigation into bundling at the retail level gives HP cover to provide evidence of how bundling is abused at the OEM level.
Investigating retail practices is just a tactic. The strategic goal is to open up the market at the OEM level. HP doesn't need to ship Linux systems to Best Buy, they need Microsoft to think that they could. Maybe they could get a better price. Maybe they'd be allowed to install a boot loader. Maybe they'd be allowed to install a Linux-based troubleshooting tool and recovery manager.
During the US antitrust trial, HP testified that one support call could wipe out any profit from a desktop system. They developed software that would run during the initial boot which addressed the most common questions and issues customers faced. Run one time, and then revert to the standard Windows startup. Microsoft said no. If you want to sell Windows, then the system must boot into Windows. Every time, no exceptions. The benefit to HP doesn't matter, the benefit to the customer doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is Microsoft's desire that users never, ever see anything other than Windows.
This isn't a Windows versus Linux issue. It's Microsoft versus everyone but Microsoft, including OEMs, including users. Windows users could benefit quite a bit from the ability to boot into a minimal system that could test hardware, backup and restore the Windows partition, and many other things that we geeks do on our own. The end user can install a boot manager, but the OEM can't.
Let me try again. Microsoft does things to stifle competition, things that harm OEMs, things that harm end users. Microsoft does things which harm WINDOWS users. Evidence uncovered during an investigation of retail sales may lead to changes in OEM sales, changes that would apply to all of those Windows systems stacked at Best Buy. Maybe it would lead to Linux systems at Best Buy, maybe not. But more open competition would benefit everyone who buys a PC, regardless of OS, regardless of market share.
I don't want a better deal for Linux users, I want a better deal for all PC users.
NOT (Mid-Atlantic) Coast, as there isn't any coast in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Naming a region of land using the name of the adjoining body of water is quite common. More clues: Canal Street isn't actually IN the canal, the Channel Ports actually only touch the English Channel. It also works the other way: the South China Sea isn't in southern China. Not to mention that the Mediterranean Sea is not actually in the middle of the Earth, where liquid water would be rather unlikely.
Amdahl sold hardware that run the same instruction set as the IBM 360 series. IBM refused to offer the OS as a separate product, bundling it with the IBM mainframe hardware. In other words, they were forcing hardware sales on customers who wanted only the software.
Given the dominance of IBM in the mainframe market, the DOJ stepped in, as bundling for the purpose of damaging competitors is illegal when done by a monopoly. IBM settled, and unbundled the software.
Bundling products together is legal when none of the products show monopoly market power. If customers don't like the bundle, they can take their business elsewhere. Customers buying an undesired bundle is a key indication that monopoly market power exists and is being abused.
The key to understanding how Microsoft violates antitrust law is that end-users are not Microsoft's customers, OEMs like HP are. It makes no sense for HP to refuse to offer PCs without Windows when there are customers who want them that way. That refusal indicates that HP is under pressure from Microsoft to do something that hurts HP in the market, but helps Microsoft. Microsoft is using its Windows monopoly to suppress competition in the market to OEMs. HP can't afford to lose the ability to sell Windows, and it can't afford to pay higher rates for Windows.
The OEM Windows monopoly gets passed on to the end user. The French are using consumer protection law to give HP and other OEMs a way out. HP can settle by offering PCs unbundled from Windows. If (when?) Microsoft penalizes HP for unbundling, then that becomes evidence that Microsoft is violating antitrust law. HP can either take the fall for Microsoft, or it can turn state's evidence and help convict Microsoft. What it can't do is sit on the sidelines and plead that it's an innocent bystander.
They may be. I've read that Microsoft will provide free streaming audio equipment to non-profit radio stations, with said equipment providing only Microsoft formats.
I'd love to know what strings are attached, if any. If any? Every deal with Microsoft has strings attached!
All but one of the 8080 instructions map directly into an equivalent 8086 instruction, althought the binary representation differs. This allowed Intel to sell a translation program that would convert your 8080 CP/M program into an 8086 DOS program. So ISA does have a connection back as far as the 8080.
I don't remember the relationship of the 8080 to the 8008.
Yes, there are systems for that. People who work in theater, music, or broadcast production often use intercom systems which can be used with high-isolation headphones. Musicians often use in-ear monitors with per-user mixers. Some are wireless, others aren't. Check with your local sound reinforcement, lighting, or video shop. If you don't know any, try a music store.
I bought my Ultimate Ear in-ear monitors from Guitar Center, and love them.
Opera did not invent mouse gestures. Mouse 'strokes' have been part of the UI for Mentor Graphics EDA applications since the early 90's, and weren't invented there, either. The first appearance at Mentor was in IC Station, in response to competing tools from either GE Calma or Computervision.
No, I will NOT admit that Opera was first. They weren't.
The Illinois court agreed that did not have jusrisdiction.
The federal court accepted jurisdiction at Spamhaus' request.
Then Spamhaus changed their minds and decided to ignore the federal court.
This is no different than some AOL user signing up to an opt-in mail list, changing his mind, and pressing the 'Mark as SPAM' button to get off the list.
That AOL user has a right to control his email, but he used the wrong procedure to do it. Spamhaus has the right to argue jurisdiction, but they used the wrong procedure. Both the court and the mail list operator are reaching for the clue gun. So far, Slashdot readers appear to understand the legal process about as well as AOL users understand how email works.
Spamhaus asked that the case be transferred from state to federal court. In other words, *Spahaus* claimed that the federal court had jusrisdiction, the court agreed, and the case was transferred.
That's what people are missing. Spamhaus *asked* the federal court to take jurisdiction, and then decided to ignore the court.
Vouchers are even more contentious than evolution.
A voucher is a way to spend my taxes to teach the religion of your choice. I will fight that as long as I breath.
Tax credits may be a better solution: spend your money, not mine. The loss of your taxes towards public education is troubling, but avoids the issue of government funding of religion. Credits may a form of indirect government subsidy, but we already have that with tax exemptions for churches.
The focus on vouchers rather than credits is precisely due to the desire of some to funnel public funds into their personal religious organizations. This is a huge mistake, as this is a two-way street. Religious meddling in government will always result in government meddling in religion. Separation of church and state benefits both.
Slashdot Mirror
For many years, I watched almost no television. Few shows were worth my time, and almost none were worth arranging my life around a broadcast schedule.
Then I bought a cheap tuner card on sale, on impulse. I built a MythTV system out of parts left over from upgrades. When I felt like relaxing with a TV show, I had a library of previously recorded shows to choose from. With more control over my viewing, I found that I spent more time watching TV. I could skip ads, but often didn't. Most advertising has a much greater budget per second than any entertainment show, resulting in at least some ads which I enjoy watching. The key fact that Disney shareholders need to understand is that I watch an order of magnitude more advertising after MythTV than before MythTV.
The FCC, prompted by Disney and others, threatened to impose a Broadcast Flag over digital TV broadcasts. I hadn't been interested in digital TV or High Definition before then, but I wanted to keep the control over my TV viewing that I had gained, so I bought a digital tuner card. Built before any Broadcast Flag laws could effect, it would be grandfathered in and not impose the restrictions that would make viewing unpleasant. I put an antenna in my attic, and discovered Over-the-Air digital TV. Wow! DVD quality for the SD material, and even better for HD. Even downscaled to my old TV, HD looked good.
I bought a large screen 1080i TV. I bought a second tuner card. I bought larger hard drives, and recorded more shows. I even watched the Olympics, which had been too boring to watch before. Before MythTV, I watched -0- hours of Olympic coverage. After, I watched hours. Yes, I skipped most of it, but the point is that I watched hours more than before. The ability to skip over the boring 'human interest' crap (shouldn't sports TV be produced by people who LIKE sports? Don't the viewers who select sports coverage want to see the competition?), the ability to skip over events I'm not interested in resulted in my watching many, many more ads than ever before. And there were surprises: I expected bobsled and luge to be exciting, but they were boring. Skip. Cross-country skiing, which I expected to be boring, turned out to be exciting.
I repeat for the attention of Disney shareholders: my ability to control how, what, and when to view resulted in my watching MORE ads.
Cox offered a free trial of their digital service. It sucked. They offered again, and the salesman promised that they'd improved it. I tried it again, and coughed up enough money to try their HD service. The salesman lied. It still sucked. I canceled ALL cable services. There are two problems, which have much in common. The first is that Motorola builds boxes for the cable companies, not for the end users. I'm willing to pay a premium for a good user interface and high quality. Cable companies want to spend as little as possible. The result is lowest common denominator crap that's underpowered and lacks the features *I* want. The other problem is that the program suppliers. like Disney, impose conditions on the cable companies that make my viewing experience less pleasant. You can't force me to watch.
Cox lost my business, in part because Disney overcharges for ESPN. I can watch ABC free OTA, although I can't think of any shows on ABC other than sporting events that I have watched.
Disney, let's review basic economics. You want my money, either directly or through selling my viewing time to advertisers. You only get my money or time when you offer something I want on terms that I find acceptable. I can live without Disney. Disney can't survive without viewers. Your control over distribution has created a false sense of power, but the real power is with the viewer. Making viewing less pleasant will cost you sales. I WILL watch advertising when I control which ads to view. Take that control away from me, and I won't watch ANY advertising. Drop the damned stick and focus on the carrot.
Are there any good tools for testing DVD and CD discs in Linux?
You have the cart before the horse. Many obsolete designs used pushrods. Many obsolete designs used overhead cams. They are obsolete for a variety of reasons.
Where efficiency is critical and weight is not, large slow engines rule. Consider ships and locomotives. Granted, those are Diesel rather than Otto cycle, but it shows how important the relationship is between RPM and friction. Consider two pumps, one with a displacement half the size of the other. The smaller one must run at twice the RPM to match the volume. But the friction of the air moving in and out of the pump does not increase linearly with velocity, it increases much faster than that. Higher velocity means much higher drag. All industrial engines run at low RPM because that's where you get the lowest fuel consumption for a given power output.
Consider a car at idle. The throttle is nearly closed, and the power generated by burning the fuel is exactly matched by the power lost pumping the air through the engine. Luckily, increasing the air friction reduces the RPM. which reduces the power by reducing the amount of fuel used. At full throttle, if the engine doesn't come apart, the power produced also equals the power used in pumping the air. The fact that gasoline engines have been controlled by throttles for most of their history shows just how important air (and exhaust) frictional losses are. One of the keys to the direct injection technology in the article is that it enables doing away with the throttle (and its frictional losses) and controlling power through metering the fuel.
Most cars only need a few horsepower to overcome rolling resistance. All of the rest is used to overcome the friction of the air passing over the car. It takes power to move air over a car. It takes power to move air through an engine. And it takes way, way more power at higher speeds. High RPM engines make more power, but they also waste more power.
High RPM engines waste more power than low RPM engines. Most racing rules limit displacement, so the loss of efficiency is much less important than higher overall power. Many countries charge lower taxes for smaller displacements, so smaller but less efficient engines are cheaper to run. But if you are optimizing for the most power from a given quantity of fuel, than slower is better.
For automobiles, weight does matter. For a given displacement, pushrods are lighter. But a smaller, higher-revving engine may be lighter for a given power. It will use more fuel to get that power. But a lighter car will need less power to accelerate. On the other hand, engine weight is only part of the total weight, and aerodynamic losses don't depend on weight at all. So there's no clear winner if your only concern is fuel consumption.
Compare the current pushrod Corvette with any similar class car, and see which gets better highway mileage. At legal speeds, it loafs along in top gear.
Most of the world taxes vehicles by displacement. That favors small engines. You get more power out of a small engine by increasing the RPM. Not more power per unit of fuel, more power per displacement, at the COST of higher pumping losses.
The benefit of OHC is higher RPM, allowing a small displacement engine to pump the same volume of air as a larger, slower engine. Smaller displacement may mean lower weight for some components, but OHC adds weight for others. When taxes are based on displacement, OHC is a clear win.
But OHC has drawbacks, too. Higher RPM also means more frictional losses pumping that air, and to a lesser extent, higher frictional losses in other areas. OHC also requires more parts, increasing cost and weight and reducing reliability. For the same displacement, the heads and drive train will weigh more for an OHC engine than for a pushrod engine. This is especially true for the V layout, where both banks can share a camshaft in a pushrod engine, but you need two (or four) cams and a heavier, more complex cam drive train.
Pumping losses kill efficiency at high RPMs. For racing or for a sports car, efficiency is secondary to power/weight ratio. Turbo- or supercharging improves power/weight even more, but again lowers efficiency due to friction, lowers reliability due to increased complexity, and increases price. That's OK when maximum power is the concern. When getting the most power out of a given volume of fuel has priority, large slow engines rule.
Both pushrod and OHC engines can be designed for whatever compression ratio and combustion properties you want. Neither has an advantage there.
High revving engines are ALWAYS the result of rules or taxes based on displacement. Eliminate taxes based on displacement and substitute taxes on fuel, and you'll see a shift towards pushrod designs.
DC, Ford, and GM already sell engines using direct injection.
US automakers do have management problems, but technology is not one of them. Quality levels are actually better than most European and some Japanese competitors, but are sadly sabotaged by incompetent dealerships. The UAW remains a huge problem; the leadership would like to take the steps needed to save good jobs for the long run, but the membership will toss out anyone who tries. Health care costs are out of control. And so on...
It could be worse. Ford looks good compared to FIAT.
Yes, and I also described the market for prerecorded casette tapes.
At one time, 78 RPM phonograph records owned the market, then LPs, then 8-track tapes, then casettes. But digital storage of music has overwhelming advantages over analog storage, so the switch was on. The companies who succeeded with analog music were able to transition to digital storage - the CD - while keeping the same distribution and business model. Companies who adapted to shifts in analog storage technology also adapted to the shift to digital storage.
But the Internet allows digital distribution, and that shows signs of causing radical changes in the music business. The transitions between storage technologies certainly seemed significant to the record companies and retailers, but they pale in comparison to the changes due to new distribution technology. Digital distribution, of course, depends on digital storage. It is the combination of the two changes that shows signs of overturning the traditional business model.
Microsoft succeeded because they were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of commodity hardware. By selling to all OEMs, they created a market for quasi-commodity software. A commodity is a product which is available from multiple suppliers and each supplier's product may be freely substituted for that from the other suppliers. In the DOS days, a computer/OS bundle looked to the end user like a commodity; the cost of the software was a fraction of the overall price, and one bundle could be replaced by a bundle from another supplier. The fact that the OS was sole-source was hidden by the fact that was available to, and from, all OEMs.
But the cost of the hardware has dropped so far that the cost of the software can no longer be hidden. Also, Microsoft no longer offers a neutral platform for competing application vendors; they have taken over most of the application market themselves. Just as proprietary hardware has been largely displaced by commodity hardware, there is an opportunity for commodity software to displace proprietary software.
The Internet has enabled a new method of software development, one which favors software as a commodity. It is a method that Microsoft cannot take advantage of, because it conflicts with their business model. Microsoft ruled when distribution of software was difficult, and distribution in source form was impractical. Now, distribution in source form costs so little that many don't even bother to measure it. The Internet has changed software development, and it has changed software distribution. Software is becoming a commodity. For those areas most closely related to the Internet, it already is: email clients and servers, web browsers and servers, file servers, routing, etc. The rest may take a decade or so, but software will become a commodity.
Microsoft is huge, and won't disappear overnight, if ever. But if you think that a 90% market share is permanent, you are ignoring history.
There will not be another Microsoft. Microsoft will be displaced by something completely unlike Microsoft. DEC owned the minicomputer market, and they were not displaced by a better VAX, a better VMS. The entire propietary minicomputer market itself, not just DEC, was displaced by commodity personal computers and commodity servers. The entire proprietary desktop market will be displaced, too. The only question is when, not if.
It is a huge, huge mistake to think that Linux should be like Windows. People who want Windows use Windows. People who run Windows applications run Windows. They'll drop Windows when they realize that they no longer need it, when they no longer run closed proprietary software. They won't switch to Linux when Adobe ports Photoshop, they'll switch when they stop using Photoshop. For some. that's already happened. For others, it may not happen for years.
Closed applications belong on closed platforms. Open applications belong on open platforms. Mixing open and closed provides the benefits of neither and the drawbacks of both.
"...never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market."
Linux will never make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple market by doing the same things the same way as Microsoft and Apple.
Look at markets where Linux has succeeded, such as servers and embedded systems. Linux succeeds *because* it doesn't follow the Microsoft license model, the Microsoft development model, the Microsoft business model, and so on. You can't win if you play by Microsoft rules.
Linux can be, and is, an OS for users. It isn't an OS for third party closed source binary distribution. Don't read that as non-commercial; commercial software was distributed in source form before Microsoft and will be again. Distribution in binary form makes sense for games and art, but not for general purpose computing. The value of doing things in software rather than in hardware is that software is malleable. But you need the source to realize the full value; binary distribution removes value.
So yes, Linux will not make a significant dent in the Microsoft+Apple consumer desktop market, if that means the closed binary sales market. If Microsoft played in the NFL, they'd be the Super Bowl winning Colts. But the Colts will never win the World Cup, which is worth more. Don't complain about Linux not hiring a bigger front line when the game Linux is playing is soccer, and doing rather well at it.
What's wrong with paying another company to carry only your products?
If you have a dominant position in the market, it may violate antitrust law.
Selling at a low price is fine, always. But if you have a dominant position in the market, there are things that you aren't allowed to do:
You can't sell below cost, called dumping. The tactic is to bankrupt the competition and raise prices after they're gone.
You can't bundle products together so as to create a monopoly in a new area by tying to products from an existing monopoly.
You can't punish customers for buying from a competitor. Reward them for buying from you, yes. Punish them for buying from the other guy, no.
If you don't have a dominant position in the market, you can do those things. Sell below cost, buy market share, and the competition will have its chance when you run out of money. Sell unpopular products by bundling them with popular products, and watch your popular products become less popular. Require exclusive contracts, and watch customers switch to vendors willing to satisfy customer needs. You can do these things because market forces will correct attempts to manipulate the market. Under normal conditions, the market will reward efforts to compete and punish efforts to inhibit competition.
But a company can have a commanding position in a market, such that they aren't hurt much by tactics which reduce, inhibit, or eliminate competition. That's where antitrust laws come in. If you can get away with actions that stifle competition, then you are a monopoly in the legal sense, if not the pedantic sense beloved by shills. That's how the court determine if you are a monopoly. If you can raise prices without losing sales, you may be a monopoly. If you can afford to sell below cost until the competitors are out of business, then you may be a monopoly. If you can force unfavorable contract terms on your customers without losing them, you may be a monopoly.
Rewarding Dell for buying from Intel is one thing, and rewarding Dell for helping drive AMD out of business is another. The distinction between gaining sales for Intel and punishing sales by AMD can be subtle, and that's what the courts will wrestle with.
"I can't go buy an electric car even if I want one."
There's a simple reason for that, and it doesn't involve conspiracies. The global auto manufacturing capacity exceeds demand by a sizable margin, creating cut-throat competition. That's why there have been so many mergers and plant closings. There are local exceptions, such as China, but China isn't willing to absorb production from the rest of the world. Manufacturers will build anything that they can sell at a profit.
Someone would make the car you want if they could. Maybe not GM or Ford, but someone. There is a market for a practical electric car, and it would be built and sold. If it could. But what you want is an illusion; real electric cars aren't very practical, and the market for what CAN be built is vanishingly small.
A tiny number of people driving battery-powered cars would have almost no impact on oil consumption. Reducing consumption in the kinds of vehicles that people actually buy would have an impact.
The technical problem of air pollution from automobiles is solved. Your lack of awareness notwithstanding, emissions controls have improved a tremendous amount since the '70s. The exhaust from today's ultra-low emission vehicles may be cleaner than ambient air in the most polluted cities. I don't think you understand how low emissions levels can be, and are where required. Such southern California, where I live, and which has driven emissions technologies to the point where new cars are no longer stand out as the main problem. Further reductions in SoCal atmospheric hydrocarbon levels have required limiting emissions from paint, charcoal lighter fluid, and lawn mowers. Pollution from engines on ships, locomotives, and off-road equipment remain to be addressed. Yes, cars depend on foreign oil, produce greenhouse gases, and pose a major land use problem. But emissions (hydrocarbons and NOx) are controlled quite well.
The political problem of pollution from automobiles remains. Even in SoCal, cars which pollute can stay on the road once the owner has spent a certain amount attempting to repair the problem. One car may pollute as much as a 100 new cars. Cutting emissions of the already clean cars won't help. Getting the dirty cars of the road will. Eastern states are finally imposing tighter limits, as is Europe. But most of the US requires no more than the Fedral standard, and most of the world has no limits on pollution at all.
Yes, oil company profits are outrageous. Big oil outright owns the Bush administration and much of Congress. ADM and the farm lobby wrote the national ethanol policy. I don't like it, and have done my part to vote the rascals out. But I don't need a complicated conspiracy to explain what simple economics does, which is that real electric cars cost too much and deliver too little. I don't like watching my neighbors buy pickup trucks and SUVs, but they do. Higher gas prices may change that, and I'd support higher gas taxes to push that direction harder. But my neighbors do drive trucks and SUVs, and I recognize that reducing oil consumption of what *most* people drive will have a bigger impact than any fringe market electric car.
No, it's a sign that physics trumps politics. Battery-powered electric cars don't make sense for nearly all uses of automobiles. The limited range is acceptable for fork lifts and golf carts, but not for family transportation. Practical cars need to be able to be refueled in minutes.
Hybrids make sense now. They reduce the use of fossil fuels, which battery-powered cars do not; the electricity to charge the batteries comes mostly from fossil fuels. Hybrids also provide a great development platform for future fuel-cell technology.
We've largely solved the autombile pollution problem, and it was done through incremental improvements. Solving the fossil fuel problem will also happen as a series of incremental improvements. A scientific breakthrough in electricity storage would be nice, but breakthroughs are not predictable, and it's foolish to depend on them when you can reach the same goal through steady improvement of known engineering.
The EV1 was GM's response to a piece of political grandstanding. I'd rather have real reductions in the use of fossil fuels than the diversion of resources towards satisfying some politican's need for grand gestures. Sure, GM blundered, but even if GM had been perfect, the goal of the program was still pure folly.
Boy, did you miss the point.
Yes, there are practical limits to the retail demand for unbundled systems. But an investigation into possible anti-competitive practices at the retail level provides a lever to uncover anti-competitive practices at the OEM level. Solve the problem at the OEM level and the retail level will take care of itself.
Microsoft has too much power over OEMs, and has used it to stifle competition. No OEM wants to be the first to challenge Microsoft, because they will be the first to feel the Wrath of Redmond. But an investigation into bundling at the retail level gives HP cover to provide evidence of how bundling is abused at the OEM level.
Investigating retail practices is just a tactic. The strategic goal is to open up the market at the OEM level. HP doesn't need to ship Linux systems to Best Buy, they need Microsoft to think that they could. Maybe they could get a better price. Maybe they'd be allowed to install a boot loader. Maybe they'd be allowed to install a Linux-based troubleshooting tool and recovery manager.
During the US antitrust trial, HP testified that one support call could wipe out any profit from a desktop system. They developed software that would run during the initial boot which addressed the most common questions and issues customers faced. Run one time, and then revert to the standard Windows startup. Microsoft said no. If you want to sell Windows, then the system must boot into Windows. Every time, no exceptions. The benefit to HP doesn't matter, the benefit to the customer doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is Microsoft's desire that users never, ever see anything other than Windows.
This isn't a Windows versus Linux issue. It's Microsoft versus everyone but Microsoft, including OEMs, including users. Windows users could benefit quite a bit from the ability to boot into a minimal system that could test hardware, backup and restore the Windows partition, and many other things that we geeks do on our own. The end user can install a boot manager, but the OEM can't.
Let me try again. Microsoft does things to stifle competition, things that harm OEMs, things that harm end users. Microsoft does things which harm WINDOWS users. Evidence uncovered during an investigation of retail sales may lead to changes in OEM sales, changes that would apply to all of those Windows systems stacked at Best Buy. Maybe it would lead to Linux systems at Best Buy, maybe not. But more open competition would benefit everyone who buys a PC, regardless of OS, regardless of market share.
I don't want a better deal for Linux users, I want a better deal for all PC users.
Since some seem to have trouble parsing this:
Mid-(Atlantic Coast)
NOT (Mid-Atlantic) Coast, as there isn't any coast in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Naming a region of land using the name of the adjoining body of water is quite common. More clues: Canal Street isn't actually IN the canal, the Channel Ports actually only touch the English Channel. It also works the other way: the South China Sea isn't in southern China. Not to mention that the Mediterranean Sea is not actually in the middle of the Earth, where liquid water would be rather unlikely.
Given the dominance of IBM in the mainframe market, the DOJ stepped in, as bundling for the purpose of damaging competitors is illegal when done by a monopoly. IBM settled, and unbundled the software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl
Bundling products together is legal when none of the products show monopoly market power. If customers don't like the bundle, they can take their business elsewhere. Customers buying an undesired bundle is a key indication that monopoly market power exists and is being abused.
The key to understanding how Microsoft violates antitrust law is that end-users are not Microsoft's customers, OEMs like HP are. It makes no sense for HP to refuse to offer PCs without Windows when there are customers who want them that way. That refusal indicates that HP is under pressure from Microsoft to do something that hurts HP in the market, but helps Microsoft. Microsoft is using its Windows monopoly to suppress competition in the market to OEMs. HP can't afford to lose the ability to sell Windows, and it can't afford to pay higher rates for Windows.
The OEM Windows monopoly gets passed on to the end user. The French are using consumer protection law to give HP and other OEMs a way out. HP can settle by offering PCs unbundled from Windows. If (when?) Microsoft penalizes HP for unbundling, then that becomes evidence that Microsoft is violating antitrust law. HP can either take the fall for Microsoft, or it can turn state's evidence and help convict Microsoft. What it can't do is sit on the sidelines and plead that it's an innocent bystander.
"...directly paid by Microsoft..."
They may be. I've read that Microsoft will provide free streaming audio equipment to non-profit radio stations, with said equipment providing only Microsoft formats.
I'd love to know what strings are attached, if any. If any? Every deal with Microsoft has strings attached!
All but one of the 8080 instructions map directly into an equivalent 8086 instruction, althought the binary representation differs. This allowed Intel to sell a translation program that would convert your 8080 CP/M program into an 8086 DOS program. So ISA does have a connection back as far as the 8080.
I don't remember the relationship of the 8080 to the 8008.
Yes, there are systems for that. People who work in theater, music, or broadcast production often use intercom systems which can be used with high-isolation headphones. Musicians often use in-ear monitors with per-user mixers. Some are wireless, others aren't. Check with your local sound reinforcement, lighting, or video shop. If you don't know any, try a music store.
I bought my Ultimate Ear in-ear monitors from Guitar Center, and love them.
Opera did not invent mouse gestures. Mouse 'strokes' have been part of the UI for Mentor Graphics EDA applications since the early 90's, and weren't invented there, either. The first appearance at Mentor was in IC Station, in response to competing tools from either GE Calma or Computervision.
No, I will NOT admit that Opera was first. They weren't.
So you agree that Spamhaus screwed up by *asking* the federal court to take the case?
The Illinois court agreed that did not have jusrisdiction.
The federal court accepted jurisdiction at Spamhaus' request.
Then Spamhaus changed their minds and decided to ignore the federal court.
This is no different than some AOL user signing up to an opt-in mail list, changing his mind, and pressing the 'Mark as SPAM' button to get off the list.
That AOL user has a right to control his email, but he used the wrong procedure to do it. Spamhaus has the right to argue jurisdiction, but they used the wrong procedure. Both the court and the mail list operator are reaching for the clue gun. So far, Slashdot readers appear to understand the legal process about as well as AOL users understand how email works.
The judge did what Spamhaus asked him to do. No power grab involved.
Be careful what you ask for.
You have misread it.
Spamhaus asked that the case be transferred from state to federal court. In other words, *Spahaus* claimed that the federal court had jusrisdiction, the court agreed, and the case was transferred.
That's what people are missing. Spamhaus *asked* the federal court to take jurisdiction, and then decided to ignore the court.
Vouchers are even more contentious than evolution.
A voucher is a way to spend my taxes to teach the religion of your choice. I will fight that as long as I breath.
Tax credits may be a better solution: spend your money, not mine. The loss of your taxes towards public education is troubling, but avoids the issue of government funding of religion. Credits may a form of indirect government subsidy, but we already have that with tax exemptions for churches.
The focus on vouchers rather than credits is precisely due to the desire of some to funnel public funds into their personal religious organizations. This is a huge mistake, as this is a two-way street. Religious meddling in government will always result in government meddling in religion. Separation of church and state benefits both.
It gets warmer.
Superseeding is what you can do to a BitTorrent swarm using Azureus.
Superseded is the appropriate word regarding California law and employment contracts.
Yeah, you missed where Apple mentions Parallels on the "Get a Mac site."
http://www.apple.com/getamac/windows.html
You might want check *before* claiming the article is wrong.