I routinely reference my old text books as well, but I have to disagree, this would've been preferred by me.
As a student I didn't really have the cash for these books and always needed to sell them back. So assuming that the cost is significantly cheaper than buying the book it would've suited me to rent them. Then as I got an income (i.e. the job that would use them in) I not only purchased back old text books, having a lot more disposable cash, but I purchased the ones that I used and didn't have the useless doorstops sitting around. It's not like there's a law out there saying that you only get one chance to buy the book.
Let's face it, Amazon will charge more to rent the book than price/course length, but the students will benefit from this deal. It's not like they can't go buy the books if they want. The only downside may be that you can't mark up the book while studying.
Interesting comment. I have to say that this is a way more complex issue than just affinity. I wonder if there's also something in there that is associated to addiction in a way, or at least the way the brain processes addiction. A lot of addiction is based around physiology, but there are huge components that come from obsession and all the other intangible emotions. So if you get someone who buys a brand, they could fall into a culture addiction. I don't know, just throwing out thoughts.
I'm confused to where this double the price comes from.
My old plan was 3 DVDs a month (with blu ray) and streaming was $23. The equivalent new plan would be $28, which seems to me to be a 21% increase. Now did they give me anything different, nope. In fact as we always seem to have a DVD sitting around for a month, I dropped the 3 DVDs to 2 DVDs and am going back to $23/month.
When they first bought in streaming it was 1 hour for every dollar you spent on a plan, I was on the $18 plan and got 18 hours of streaming. You paid for unlimited streaming separately, I can't remember how much. Then they wrapped unlimited streaming into all packages. Now they've gone back to paying for unlimited streaming.
I'm not really sure while people are getting their entitlement knickers in a twist over this. I pay for stuff on VUDU, Amazon at the moment and use Hulu plus and playon. (I dont have cable TV, haven't had for 5 years). Once the economics breakdown, Netflix will loose my business, really that simple, but the economics, given what we watch is still pretty good for us.
"These include building new coal and gas power plants, although Berlin is sticking to its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and by 80-95 percent by 2050.
It also signed off on expanding wind energy, in a bid to boost the share of the country's power needs generated by renewable energies to 35 percent by 2020 from 17 percent at present.
Germany is already far ahead of most of the world in alternative energy and this SHOULD force them to accelerate progress in the area, which will benefit all of us. The question is whether they stick to the road map.
While interesting, the thing that bothers me about this exercise is it puts the focus on friending/unfriending the US, but as with a lot of these exercises it completely ignores the assholishness of all those countries critiquing the US. I'm British by birth, lived there 23 years, came to the US and now naturalized. As much as people want to be critical about the US history, I grew up learning how Britain has been completely prickish throughout the whole of history in general. The difference I suppose is that we were taught about this in school. The point being there is no country, the US included, out there that who has the right to critique any countries history without critiquing their own. People in glasshouse shouldn't throw stones.
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Re:Hearing negative feedback over the toolbar
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 1
I hear Apple was awarded a patent on using a white background in the toolbar. Google obviously will not pay the license (Ummm, I'm joking btw...it's obvious, but you can never tell with this crowd)
Hey I'm all for improving our technology. The issue I have with press releases like this is the simplicity of the claims. They compare the direct efficiency from consumption of the coal gas to the energy efficiency of burning the coal. This is apples to oranges. There needs to be an envelope drawn around the efficiency area. You wouldn't compare the energy captured from igniting crude oil directly with the well-to-wheels efficiency of gasoline. It makes no sense.
Interesting solution, but the article misses some pivot points.
The fuel cells are also said to capture about half of the energy in the coal gas, as opposed to the third captured by burning.
and
Because solid oxide fuel cells have traditionally operated best at temperatures above 850C (1,562F), they have had to be made from relatively expensive heat-resistant materials. When treated with barium oxide and running on coal gas, however, they can operate at temperatures as low as 750C (1,382F).
How much energy does it take to gasify coal? - Deduct that. Also deduct the energy required to keep the fuel cell at 750C. Fuel cells currently run about 40% efficient, so multiple the previous number by 0.4. It's going to be a lot less than 30%.
Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, these ones do create carbon dioxide in the course of operation. Part of that CO2 is reused, however, for gasifying the coal. The rest is in a much more pure form than that produced simply by the burning of coal in a power plant, so extensive separation and purification wouldn't be required for sequestration.
So what CO2 sequestration are they envisaging? I'm not aware of anything that is truly commercial yet, except for the paper accounting job of claiming biomass production for a CO2 removal brownie point.
Okay I'll give you that. Those positions are most likely redundant in the MS model. Although I would have thought they'd retained the VP/GM during the internal management transition. However, the Qik guys, they already knew they were leaving when they were bought by Skype, most likely due to the size of this deal they knew at point that MS was making moves to buy Skype. In fact I would even go one step further to suggest that the purchase of Qik may have been with MS's blessing or even encouragement. You don't put a $8.5 B deal together in 6 months.
I'm not a MS hater, actually I'm all MS and have a healthy dislike for Apple and a modicum of sympathy for Linux.
You just don't put a deal of this magnitude together without looking at everything and having your reasonable desires fixed in place.
MS would be remiss if it didn't build the deal the way that it wanted it. This way they keep their hands clean of some of the dirty work. It's not wrong, it is in fact good business practice. If MS should be hated for anything here, it's amount they paid, Skype is just not worth that much money, but if it gets them even half the distance to where they need to be, they have enough reserves for that luxury.
"It appears that this move isn't meddling from Redmond; rather, the private equity firm that owns a 70 percent stake in Skype wanted to cut back on the payout to company execs that would normally accompany this kind of transaction."
I'll let you into a secret, they knew, probably got paid well and Microsoft were in on it.
1) As an exec in company like this you come in with a contract that has all departure routes covered, outside being fired for cause. It's standard practice and if you didn't require it, you wouldn't be doing that job. So yes, they were made whole and that means a lot of cash, probably a chunk of equity prior to the sale.
2) Microsoft negotiated the options for the buy out and that means assessing and pruning the management at Skype, before the sale. Skype didn't just futz with the company on the eve of the sale. Removing the folks MS don't want before the sale takes the focus off of MS for clearing out who it doesn't want. It would be a negotiated point.
3) My guess is that these execs are M&A (Mergers and Acquisition) specialists. They were likely specifically bought in to engineer something like this. So they've done their job and they'll move on to the next.
You don't sell/buy something for $8.5 billion and not talk about everything. Trust me, everybody knew way before now who was staying, who was leaving and how much money they were going to make.
The question is not can you do it for free, rather can you do it for cheaper than the cloud; and that includes the intangible cost of dealing with 'personalities'. The cloud, when you need to interact with customer service is set up to be polite and understand, but never let on, that I'm a neophyte and I don't know anything. They're will just smile sweetly 'virtually' an go get my stuff to work. The frustration and waste of time that I may suffer trying to get good customer service from a bunch of whining, self-entitled IT staff is not worth the extra money I pay to outsource my service. So while you sit their with your shitty attitude about how you have to do everything for free, why don't you think more about how I don't want to deal with that, I just want my shit to work. If you want to profess that it's 'not that simple' and 'I'm so busy I don't know when I can get to it' then let me watch you talking for 30 mins about your vacation to the cute chick in the corner cube, I'll go find someone who actually has the business savy to operate in a way that helps me get my job done, or presents a cost option to doing what I want to do with a clear and simple presentation, not trying to bamboozle me with technical jargon to try and show me how utterly inferior I am to them, then present obviously over inflated costs (This aint Los Alamos, I know what an order of magnitude padding is).
In saying all this, I don't use the cloud because I don't trust it, but I wish I could so I could fire all my freakin IT staff and be productive.
And what in your experienced political opinion indicates that would be worse than Gaddafi, who openly and broadly funded anti-western terrorism?
Just let a bunch of seemly oppressed citizens fight for their right for self-governance and check your paranoia at the door. If this all goes ass-over-tit for the West what exactly is going to change for us? It's about time that we all focus a little more on our internal political bullshit and quit worrying about what others may possibly do to us if the absolute worst outcome occurs. Trust me, the crap that internal politics is driving in Western Countys is way more damaging than anything that may happen in Libya after Gaddafi finally gets removed. If you really want to get your paranoia juiced up, ask yourself, what can our political overlords gain by distracting us away from their own internal actions with conflicts in North Africa/Middle East. What policy's are they now going to push for based on what's going on in the world? Magicians use distraction to perform their tricks; as in the zombie apocalypse, worry about what's in your own basement before you worry about what's in your neighbors yard. - I have tin foil hats for sale as well, btw.
But what we're seeing here is the evolution of a device. I agree, there's so much more to computers, I'm a power user at work, but a lot of folks are just using the computer as an web based device. My HDX 16T laptop now sits in the living room streaming netflix and playing DVDs. Completely under utilized, but it's that or being shoved on a shelf in the garage while I pay for a cheaper computer to do the same thing. I lament at what a waste this is for the HDX. This is the next step in netbooks. A simplified GUI for simplified use. I think we'll see, computing-wise, smart phone sized systems, greater than netbook webuse systems like the tablets and then devices more akin to what we're currently used to a as computer. Each is going down it's only evolutionary pathway.
I still have the model from my kids first few months of time sleeping and time of pooping as a function of feeding where I achieved an ~80% success rate in predicting when he would wake us up and when we would have to change the diaper.
Because it's not that simple, sadly.
To have a cost comparison, you have to have an agreed basis. The idea would be a full life cycle analysis with no financial subsidies that confidently predicted material costs over 50-60 years. That would be great if we knew the operations and maintenance cost of all of these items (good rule of thumb is 80% of the cost is after the capital outlay). Also how do you compare moving electrons from place a to b via transmission lines to a pipe carrying LNG. What are the assumptions, what's going to happen to the price of copper? The list goes on. How does the exploration of new oil reserves affect the true cost of oil, especially given the hyperblown futures market. So I go back again to the point, for a comparative analysis, what's the baseline assumptions that the majority (note: I'm not even saying everyone) agree on?
Until we get that, you will find issues (read bias) with everyone's numbers depending on which side of the fence they sit.
This theory bothers me as well, but more for the simpler perspective of how the hell did the chuck of rock knocked off earth become so round in space? Shouldn't it be more like a big jaggiedy piece? It's not like it would weather down to a nice nice round object up there.
Slashdot Mirror
As a student I didn't really have the cash for these books and always needed to sell them back. So assuming that the cost is significantly cheaper than buying the book it would've suited me to rent them. Then as I got an income (i.e. the job that would use them in) I not only purchased back old text books, having a lot more disposable cash, but I purchased the ones that I used and didn't have the useless doorstops sitting around. It's not like there's a law out there saying that you only get one chance to buy the book.
Let's face it, Amazon will charge more to rent the book than price/course length, but the students will benefit from this deal. It's not like they can't go buy the books if they want. The only downside may be that you can't mark up the book while studying.
Interesting comment. I have to say that this is a way more complex issue than just affinity. I wonder if there's also something in there that is associated to addiction in a way, or at least the way the brain processes addiction. A lot of addiction is based around physiology, but there are huge components that come from obsession and all the other intangible emotions. So if you get someone who buys a brand, they could fall into a culture addiction. I don't know, just throwing out thoughts.
I'm confused to where this double the price comes from. My old plan was 3 DVDs a month (with blu ray) and streaming was $23. The equivalent new plan would be $28, which seems to me to be a 21% increase. Now did they give me anything different, nope. In fact as we always seem to have a DVD sitting around for a month, I dropped the 3 DVDs to 2 DVDs and am going back to $23/month. When they first bought in streaming it was 1 hour for every dollar you spent on a plan, I was on the $18 plan and got 18 hours of streaming. You paid for unlimited streaming separately, I can't remember how much. Then they wrapped unlimited streaming into all packages. Now they've gone back to paying for unlimited streaming. I'm not really sure while people are getting their entitlement knickers in a twist over this. I pay for stuff on VUDU, Amazon at the moment and use Hulu plus and playon. (I dont have cable TV, haven't had for 5 years). Once the economics breakdown, Netflix will loose my business, really that simple, but the economics, given what we watch is still pretty good for us.
"These include building new coal and gas power plants, although Berlin is sticking to its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and by 80-95 percent by 2050.
It also signed off on expanding wind energy, in a bid to boost the share of the country's power needs generated by renewable energies to 35 percent by 2020 from 17 percent at present.
Germany is already far ahead of most of the world in alternative energy and this SHOULD force them to accelerate progress in the area, which will benefit all of us. The question is whether they stick to the road map.
While interesting, the thing that bothers me about this exercise is it puts the focus on friending/unfriending the US, but as with a lot of these exercises it completely ignores the assholishness of all those countries critiquing the US. I'm British by birth, lived there 23 years, came to the US and now naturalized. As much as people want to be critical about the US history, I grew up learning how Britain has been completely prickish throughout the whole of history in general. The difference I suppose is that we were taught about this in school. The point being there is no country, the US included, out there that who has the right to critique any countries history without critiquing their own. People in glasshouse shouldn't throw stones.
Next story please
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I hear Apple was awarded a patent on using a white background in the toolbar. Google obviously will not pay the license (Ummm, I'm joking btw...it's obvious, but you can never tell with this crowd)
Use Picasa, it's not made by a wannabe evil, world dominating organisation.
You sure about that?
"This word comes from English dialect geek, geck: fool, freak; from Low German geck, from Middle Low German."
Oops meant "without considering the entire wells-to-wheels"
Hey I'm all for improving our technology. The issue I have with press releases like this is the simplicity of the claims. They compare the direct efficiency from consumption of the coal gas to the energy efficiency of burning the coal. This is apples to oranges. There needs to be an envelope drawn around the efficiency area. You wouldn't compare the energy captured from igniting crude oil directly with the well-to-wheels efficiency of gasoline. It makes no sense.
Hasn't Google voice been doing this for a while? Otherwise how do they manage to do their voice to text?
The fuel cells are also said to capture about half of the energy in the coal gas, as opposed to the third captured by burning.
and
Because solid oxide fuel cells have traditionally operated best at temperatures above 850C (1,562F), they have had to be made from relatively expensive heat-resistant materials. When treated with barium oxide and running on coal gas, however, they can operate at temperatures as low as 750C (1,382F).
How much energy does it take to gasify coal? - Deduct that. Also deduct the energy required to keep the fuel cell at 750C. Fuel cells currently run about 40% efficient, so multiple the previous number by 0.4. It's going to be a lot less than 30%.
Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, these ones do create carbon dioxide in the course of operation. Part of that CO2 is reused, however, for gasifying the coal. The rest is in a much more pure form than that produced simply by the burning of coal in a power plant, so extensive separation and purification wouldn't be required for sequestration.
So what CO2 sequestration are they envisaging? I'm not aware of anything that is truly commercial yet, except for the paper accounting job of claiming biomass production for a CO2 removal brownie point.
How much energy
Okay I'll give you that. Those positions are most likely redundant in the MS model. Although I would have thought they'd retained the VP/GM during the internal management transition. However, the Qik guys, they already knew they were leaving when they were bought by Skype, most likely due to the size of this deal they knew at point that MS was making moves to buy Skype. In fact I would even go one step further to suggest that the purchase of Qik may have been with MS's blessing or even encouragement. You don't put a $8.5 B deal together in 6 months.
I'm not a MS hater, actually I'm all MS and have a healthy dislike for Apple and a modicum of sympathy for Linux. You just don't put a deal of this magnitude together without looking at everything and having your reasonable desires fixed in place. MS would be remiss if it didn't build the deal the way that it wanted it. This way they keep their hands clean of some of the dirty work. It's not wrong, it is in fact good business practice. If MS should be hated for anything here, it's amount they paid, Skype is just not worth that much money, but if it gets them even half the distance to where they need to be, they have enough reserves for that luxury.
I'll let you into a secret, they knew, probably got paid well and Microsoft were in on it.
1) As an exec in company like this you come in with a contract that has all departure routes covered, outside being fired for cause. It's standard practice and if you didn't require it, you wouldn't be doing that job. So yes, they were made whole and that means a lot of cash, probably a chunk of equity prior to the sale.
2) Microsoft negotiated the options for the buy out and that means assessing and pruning the management at Skype, before the sale. Skype didn't just futz with the company on the eve of the sale. Removing the folks MS don't want before the sale takes the focus off of MS for clearing out who it doesn't want. It would be a negotiated point.
3) My guess is that these execs are M&A (Mergers and Acquisition) specialists. They were likely specifically bought in to engineer something like this. So they've done their job and they'll move on to the next.
You don't sell/buy something for $8.5 billion and not talk about everything. Trust me, everybody knew way before now who was staying, who was leaving and how much money they were going to make.
In saying all this, I don't use the cloud because I don't trust it, but I wish I could so I could fire all my freakin IT staff and be productive.
And what in your experienced political opinion indicates that would be worse than Gaddafi, who openly and broadly funded anti-western terrorism? Just let a bunch of seemly oppressed citizens fight for their right for self-governance and check your paranoia at the door. If this all goes ass-over-tit for the West what exactly is going to change for us? It's about time that we all focus a little more on our internal political bullshit and quit worrying about what others may possibly do to us if the absolute worst outcome occurs. Trust me, the crap that internal politics is driving in Western Countys is way more damaging than anything that may happen in Libya after Gaddafi finally gets removed. If you really want to get your paranoia juiced up, ask yourself, what can our political overlords gain by distracting us away from their own internal actions with conflicts in North Africa/Middle East. What policy's are they now going to push for based on what's going on in the world? Magicians use distraction to perform their tricks; as in the zombie apocalypse, worry about what's in your own basement before you worry about what's in your neighbors yard. - I have tin foil hats for sale as well, btw.
But what we're seeing here is the evolution of a device. I agree, there's so much more to computers, I'm a power user at work, but a lot of folks are just using the computer as an web based device. My HDX 16T laptop now sits in the living room streaming netflix and playing DVDs. Completely under utilized, but it's that or being shoved on a shelf in the garage while I pay for a cheaper computer to do the same thing. I lament at what a waste this is for the HDX. This is the next step in netbooks. A simplified GUI for simplified use. I think we'll see, computing-wise, smart phone sized systems, greater than netbook webuse systems like the tablets and then devices more akin to what we're currently used to a as computer. Each is going down it's only evolutionary pathway.
Guess I'm Mr. Unpopular on here
I still have the model from my kids first few months of time sleeping and time of pooping as a function of feeding where I achieved an ~80% success rate in predicting when he would wake us up and when we would have to change the diaper.
Just in time for Hollywood to remake them all...
Because it's not that simple, sadly. To have a cost comparison, you have to have an agreed basis. The idea would be a full life cycle analysis with no financial subsidies that confidently predicted material costs over 50-60 years. That would be great if we knew the operations and maintenance cost of all of these items (good rule of thumb is 80% of the cost is after the capital outlay). Also how do you compare moving electrons from place a to b via transmission lines to a pipe carrying LNG. What are the assumptions, what's going to happen to the price of copper? The list goes on. How does the exploration of new oil reserves affect the true cost of oil, especially given the hyperblown futures market. So I go back again to the point, for a comparative analysis, what's the baseline assumptions that the majority (note: I'm not even saying everyone) agree on? Until we get that, you will find issues (read bias) with everyone's numbers depending on which side of the fence they sit.
This theory bothers me as well, but more for the simpler perspective of how the hell did the chuck of rock knocked off earth become so round in space? Shouldn't it be more like a big jaggiedy piece? It's not like it would weather down to a nice nice round object up there.