You've obviously never worked at a Fortune 500 company. The simplest things take weeks, if not months, to requisition. Then add submitting a labor request to have it installed. Add in a helicopter trip to get the tech and the equipment to the rig and you've got massive delays. Seems like they need expedited procedures for life-critical safety systems. (Sorry that was obvious wasn't it).
Your logic forgets one significant source of cost in hardware and software development. Non-recurring engineering (NRE) is a significant contributor to the cost of hardware and the primary contributor to the cost of software.
For example, a IC that costs $5 probably has NRE costs upwards of a couple million dollars. Due to the cost of setting up chip fabrication and paying the engineers to do all the chip layout and design. The chip itself will cost pennies to fabricate, but the company producing the chip needs to recoup all the NRE costs spent to get to that first chip so they charge $5.
The same is true for non-free software. It may cost pennies to produce a CD or sub-pennies to download the binaries, but the company must recoup the NRE costs if they are to remain in business. That is why software costs money.
For free software, the makers of the software are looking to recoup their NRE in other ways. The hobbyist is usually looking for recognition, resume' enhancement, or just enjoyment. But, the hobbyist isn't looking to buy groceries with their good looks; the most likely have a day job that pays the bills. I posit that hobbyist do not produce the high quality free software that we've come to know and love, they just don't have the time or organization (they contribute but they are not the primary producers). The professional organization producing free software (IBM, RedHat, etc) are looking for other revenue streams from the free-customers to pay the NRE on the free software, through support fees or licensing related products.
All in all, to my point. Software is not free either. Somebody has to spend labor time producing it and those somebodies expect to get paid somehow.
I concur with this sentiment. If having real live revenue makes wikipedia better then let them have revenue. There is nothing inherently evil about making money.
They could easily do something non-intrusive, such as AdWords that correspond to the topic(s) being viewed. There is ample screen real estate on the left hand side for a discrete ad bar.
But they would need to be careful not to allow ads to creep into what could be considered content, or have advertisers directly choose which page they want to advertise on.
The FBI probably would not need physical access to the phone. They could just use the over-the-radio firmware upgrade feature many phone have to send the target phone some new firmware with the bug software integrated into it.
Yes, the software has bugs, it is supposed to have bugs.
The submitter started with an incorrect statement. He stated that the foreign surveillance program was illegal. It is not. The only people that still claim it is illegal are those that cling to the mistaken notion that the wiretaps were for domestic calls, they were not. So, I guess the slashdot editors continue either in blind ignorance or willful ignorance of the facts of the situation.
So, it seems very justified that the President would block a useless investigation of a legal program especially since it seems that nobody in DC can keep their mouth shut about anti-terror programs.
As a MS MVP told me a couple of weeks ago, '.NET is the worlds largest COM wrapper'. So, no, you can't just rip out the old APIs because the new stuff is built on top of it.
Chances are you won't make it back to your friends to have that discussion. The vehicle probably has some type of quick response targetting system that determines the point of origin of the projectile and then fills that point of origin will anti-personnel projectiles from some other weapon mounted on the vehicle.
I've got a new '05 Honda Odyssey with GPS Nav, XM Radio, DVD system, etc. I have to stop and reboot about once a month because of some weirdness in the dashboard systems. Something like the radio not putting out sound, or the nav screen not drawing streets. Simple reboot fixes the weirdness each and every time.
Look closely at the white house. It is not a real image of the roof. The roof has been digitally painted over to hide detail (anti-aircraft missiles perhaps). The old executive office building and another building to the east have the same obscuration (that's a new word).
Looks like different areas are of differing vintage. The area around my home is at least 3 years old, but if I go south 10 miles the maps appear to be much more recent.
They didn't come close to solving the most vexing issue: heat. As I recall the act of squeezing a mini-itx board into a mac-mini case involved hacking off the heat sink and placing the hard drive right on top of the CPU. That configuration will last about an hour.
Intel needs to move beyond the plastic box and see if they can actually get one of their processors to live in a small space with minimal fans. Remember, the mac mini puts out about 22db of sound when running at full blast. My Intel laptop sounds like a vacuum cleaner (sucks like one too).
So, show me a running, reliable Intel PC in that form factor and I'll be impressed. My 8 year old daughter could have made that plastic box.
I doubt that the plane can land with anything close to a full tank. So, a fully loaded test flight would have been a 60 hour test flight. Doing this on a single seater without the excitement of breaking any records would probably be very dangerous.
That's kinda the nature of breaking a world record, you cannot do a test because the test would break the record.
Slashdot Mirror
You beat me to it. My immediate thought was with the eternal war with Eastasia.
Somebody left their sarcasm detector at home today.
You've obviously never worked at a Fortune 500 company. The simplest things take weeks, if not months, to requisition. Then add submitting a labor request to have it installed. Add in a helicopter trip to get the tech and the equipment to the rig and you've got massive delays. Seems like they need expedited procedures for life-critical safety systems. (Sorry that was obvious wasn't it).
Thankfully, the brain growth does not seem to be a zero-sum game. Meaning, that one does not gain in one area at the expense of another.
A collision between asteroids? Who wants to bet a woman was driving one of them?
According to this recent article, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pregnant-brain-as-racecar , they (at least the pregnant or postpartum) have a lot more on their minds than us simple menfolk.
Actually I know of two things more dangerous:
1) A programmer with a screwdriver
2) A salesman with an install disc
I hope not.
Your logic forgets one significant source of cost in hardware and software development. Non-recurring engineering (NRE) is a significant contributor to the cost of hardware and the primary contributor to the cost of software.
For example, a IC that costs $5 probably has NRE costs upwards of a couple million dollars. Due to the cost of setting up chip fabrication and paying the engineers to do all the chip layout and design. The chip itself will cost pennies to fabricate, but the company producing the chip needs to recoup all the NRE costs spent to get to that first chip so they charge $5.
The same is true for non-free software. It may cost pennies to produce a CD or sub-pennies to download the binaries, but the company must recoup the NRE costs if they are to remain in business. That is why software costs money.
For free software, the makers of the software are looking to recoup their NRE in other ways. The hobbyist is usually looking for recognition, resume' enhancement, or just enjoyment. But, the hobbyist isn't looking to buy groceries with their good looks; the most likely have a day job that pays the bills. I posit that hobbyist do not produce the high quality free software that we've come to know and love, they just don't have the time or organization (they contribute but they are not the primary producers). The professional organization producing free software (IBM, RedHat, etc) are looking for other revenue streams from the free-customers to pay the NRE on the free software, through support fees or licensing related products.
All in all, to my point. Software is not free either. Somebody has to spend labor time producing it and those somebodies expect to get paid somehow.
I guess that they all outrank private data.
You forgot to include the towel. Never go anywhere without a towel.
I concur with this sentiment. If having real live revenue makes wikipedia better then let them have revenue. There is nothing inherently evil about making money.
They could easily do something non-intrusive, such as AdWords that correspond to the topic(s) being viewed. There is ample screen real estate on the left hand side for a discrete ad bar.
But they would need to be careful not to allow ads to creep into what could be considered content, or have advertisers directly choose which page they want to advertise on.
The FBI probably would not need physical access to the phone. They could just use the over-the-radio firmware upgrade feature many phone have to send the target phone some new firmware with the bug software integrated into it.
Yes, the software has bugs, it is supposed to have bugs.
The submitter started with an incorrect statement. He stated that the foreign surveillance program was illegal. It is not. The only people that still claim it is illegal are those that cling to the mistaken notion that the wiretaps were for domestic calls, they were not. So, I guess the slashdot editors continue either in blind ignorance or willful ignorance of the facts of the situation.
So, it seems very justified that the President would block a useless investigation of a legal program especially since it seems that nobody in DC can keep their mouth shut about anti-terror programs.
Jack
As a MS MVP told me a couple of weeks ago, '.NET is the worlds largest COM wrapper'. So, no, you can't just rip out the old APIs because the new stuff is built on top of it.
Chances are you won't make it back to your friends to have that discussion. The vehicle probably has some type of quick response targetting system that determines the point of origin of the projectile and then fills that point of origin will anti-personnel projectiles from some other weapon mounted on the vehicle.
After looking at the article, I wonder why the soldiers aren't riding the UGV? There's two seats, surely the guy in charge would ride?
I've got a new '05 Honda Odyssey with GPS Nav, XM Radio, DVD system, etc. I have to stop and reboot about once a month because of some weirdness in the dashboard systems. Something like the radio not putting out sound, or the nav screen not drawing streets. Simple reboot fixes the weirdness each and every time.
According to current theoretical physics isn't everything made out of string?
You know, String Theory?
Look closely at the white house. It is not a real image of the roof. The roof has been digitally painted over to hide detail (anti-aircraft missiles perhaps). The old executive office building and another building to the east have the same obscuration (that's a new word).
Jack
Looks like different areas are of differing vintage. The area around my home is at least 3 years old, but if I go south 10 miles the maps appear to be much more recent.
They didn't come close to solving the most vexing issue: heat. As I recall the act of squeezing a mini-itx board into a mac-mini case involved hacking off the heat sink and placing the hard drive right on top of the CPU. That configuration will last about an hour.
Intel needs to move beyond the plastic box and see if they can actually get one of their processors to live in a small space with minimal fans. Remember, the mac mini puts out about 22db of sound when running at full blast. My Intel laptop sounds like a vacuum cleaner (sucks like one too).
So, show me a running, reliable Intel PC in that form factor and I'll be impressed. My 8 year old daughter could have made that plastic box.
Jack
I doubt that the plane can land with anything close to a full tank. So, a fully loaded test flight would have been a 60 hour test flight. Doing this on a single seater without the excitement of breaking any records would probably be very dangerous.
That's kinda the nature of breaking a world record, you cannot do a test because the test would break the record.
Jack
I would disagree about the intimidation part. Maybe not armed thugs, but thugs that are smart enough to gain unauthorized access to the system.
I find it interesting that Intel has code named these chips using the same name as one of the world's largest pork processors, Smithfield Foods.
I expect that these chips will be large power hungry pigs.