I never grew fond of these so-called controllers where I have to use my left thumb for steering because someone thought, hey, screw those righthanders by putting the movement control on the controller's left side.

I was perfectly happy with the old (digital) joysticks like the Competition Pro or some more robust joyboards which could be fixed to the desk using suction cups, and also offered automatic fire triggering.

Where I can see a use of the WiiMote for more lifelike gameplaying (e.g. Golf, Swordfight, Tennis), I never found these weird "let's replace the joystick by buttons or just a small thumbstick" controls really useful...

Wow, first-time troll modding.

Obviously someone was truly pissed -- or unable to read and understand. But he's forgiven, as reading *and* understanding is a rare gift these days...

No, that's not the way it works with the market.

If US companies enter the European market, they either use the 1US$=1EUR scheme if the EUR is higher, otherwise the price will of course be adjusted. Remember the 1980s when the US$ was skyrocketing to nearly EUR1,80? Even entry-level US electronics like the Commodore C64, Ensoniq synthesizers were priced insanely high.

The other way round, however, European companies like to match US$ prices, even if that means selling at a loss. Have a look what Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, or Porsche cost in the US compared to their EU prices... But also other pricing is weird: in 2003, I bought a Canon S45. Street price in the US: US$330. Street price in Germany: EUR550. Back then the exchange rate US$:EUR was about 1.20:1.

Clearly, the Europeans are doing something very wrong, and this is not only overtaxation...

Yes, my bad. "Per something" falls into the denominator...

Still you need to differentiate between the maximum power something might deliver and how much energy that finally results in.

If my fridge's compressor does 1.8kW that doesn't tell me, how much energy it consumes. And it it would turn out to be 1.8kWh, I'd better throw it away. Likewise, in the article we don't care how much power each plate might emit at once, but we're interested in how much energy is harvested unter typical operating conditions.

30kWh per hour

That would be 30kW per square-hour. What kind of metric would that be?

but I can't help thinking, whats wrong with simply saying 30kW?

If you want to refer to power, you use Watt. If you refer to energy, you use Joule. Alternatively, you may use Watt seconds (Ws) -- which not only is the same but also directly shows that energy is power over time -- or its derivative Watt hours (Wh) or 1000 Watt hours (kWh). If you were a physicist (which you aren't, otherwise your question would be most self-humiliating) then you would eventually be using electron volts (eV). And if you ever wondered what this "kcals" are which are mentioned on your food packs, yes, again energy. Hence, the article correctly talks about kWh, i.e. the amount of energy produced.

Frankly, I don't get it why this gets so much attention.

Is really noone of the /. crowd familiar with the VICE family of Commodore emulators? This had *for years* a proper PAL emulation which not only brought back the scanlines, but also allowed to define the level of blurriedness, and even emulates proper color phase handling.

Granted, it doesn't emulate ghosting (signal reflections in the cable) and afterglow effects (at least I'm not aware of).

Still, it would've been nice to see that mentioned somewhere in the summary, if not TFA.

What I'm getting at is that the robot will have to poop. If it eats, it must poop. All things that eat poop, except, of course, for attractive women, who never do that.

Oh, just because the digestive system of the average animal is so inefficient, it doesn't mean that the robot needs to adhere to such ineffectivity.

The entire amount of carbon contained in the food can be burned into CO2. No poop.

What's left is some spurious stuff and water, so eventually the robot may have to pee, yes, or sweat, assuming that the water will be also used within its cooling system.

MS-DOS was a very good OS for standalone workstations where only one user was going to be interacting with the system and only running one application. The early PC's were not really capable of much more anyway, so DOS did what it was intended to do, and did it well enough at the time.

No. It never was "good", in no case "very good". And it also did not "well enough".

In fact, DOS was a true step back compared to anything that existed at that time and it took a whopping 15 years until it arrived where others were already in the early 80s.

Finance, accounting etc. are also considered technical skills within the industry - they are not technology-related, but they are hard skills.

And I'm not objecting these. As said before, they are vital *especially* for techies who often enough make bad businessmen, either due to a lack of interest or just a wrong perspective. And even if not, they do need accounting and finance to properly rate how their company is doing and see where things are possibly going wrong.

However, this can be also been overdone -- like unfortunately it is today where hardly any long-term perspective counts but just quarterly numbers and how much the shareholder value can be risen. In more sane times it counted that the company had a long-term perspective and was profitable. There was not this mathematically nonsensical idea that a company could increase sales by n% per year. Even less there was this idea that the quarterly numbers could be boosted by just firing a bunch of people which looked good in the books (saved money), but in the end kills the company. Once you start playing that game, it's definitely not the best and brightest who stay til the end.

A recent example of this game is Agere Systems. Spun off from Bell Labs with about 18.500 employees in 2001. In 2003 the numbers were cut down drastically for "concentrating on the core business". Just 6 months after that nonsense started, even the internal research dept was nixed. By 8/2003 there were only 5500 people left, another 4 months later 3500.

What remained (IIRC about 1500 people) was later acquired by LSI Logic.

Quite some fate for originally one of the finest research labs.

But, then, research labs have awful quarterly numbers. All these costs, costs, costs and no revenue... Cause of course the commercialization of eventual findings is done by a different company division. And look how great *they* perform. Hardly any cost, but so much revenue!

a lot of the best people in a lot of these professions act by feel,

Which is completely fine! Another word for this would be "talent". And no matter how hard and long John Dow works, how many hours per week he robots, he will *never* match someone truly talented.

And I have no idea what business studies you are talking about, unless you are equating every non-technical class to be a business studies class (whatever that may entail).

Might be a language clash here as I'm no native speaker and had to look up proper translations for "Betriebswirtschaftslehre (BWL)" (which according to dict.leo.org is "business studies") and "Volkswirtschaftslehre (VWL)" (translated as "economics").

Anyone?

You (like most Slashdotters) think that anything non-technical is mostly useless.

And what exactly let you draw this conclusion?

It's wrong, btw.

The problem with business studies is that they perceive themselves as hard science. At least that's they way they like so sell themselves. And where I fully believe in economics, I wouldn't touch business studies with a 10-foot pole.

Unfortunately, any major decision these days doesn't seem to be made upon economic or scientific decisions, but rather because of some model/promise derived from business studies. Which, in retrospective, are always able to show how their models work for past situations but usually utterly fail for anything in the future. Kinda like those Nostradamus books which get updated and re-sold every year.

And to come back to the original topic, the 60/80/100 hrs working week, it's also those business studies people who favor the idea that you're an "underperformer" if you just work the ordinary working hours and not bring in your entire spare time and a major part of your sleep time.

So when it comes to "non-tech", as you put it, I like to differentiate. There's valuable non-tech like economics (where techies and engineers usually are not quite best, hence any Steve Wozniak typically will need his Steve Jobs) and there's bogus non-tech like business studies.

And they're easy to differentiate. Only the bogus non-tech changes its model with the fashion, even if that means that 10 years later the same people who praised Model X will now advertise a Model Y being the complete difference of Model X.

Talk to any lawyer, management consultant or finance professional in one of the top tier firms.

And you see the contradiction to my posting exactly *where*?

Excuse my frank words, but what you cited here are exactly those jobs which either create one huge pile of cow manure after the other (which is left for others to clean up), or where every food and drink intake becomes a "work meeting". Mostly both.

I do have relatives working at McK and I do know how McK sucks the life out of them, with them finding each and every excuse for why that is good. For *that*, the paycheck is not even remotely big enough. Besides, consulting firms like these are responsible for any major business fuckup: We need to outsource. No, outsourcing is wrong, we need to be fully self-supplying. We need to concentrate the company to its core business and sell everything else. No, we need to amalgamate to acquire a wide, solid base.

Not to mention those financial firms who seeingly created the current world-wide mess.

Thank you, but if that is your point pro 80-100hrs of work per week, I rest my case...

at a previous job I occasionally worked 100 hours a week (thats insane though, only allowed by a crisis allowing you to give up sleep).

The key word here is occasionally. I'm fully aware that there are situations where you just have to kick in the overdrive and get something by insane working hours. BTDT, and more than once. It usually is, however, a sign of bad company management because they either have too much work for too few people or acquired a too big project. Bad planning in both cases. Only emergency situations justify such insane overload.

If you continue that overdrive you'll sooner or later burn out and/or start doing nonsense. Especially sleep deprivation is not exactly known for improving your work performance. Raised stress levels may lead to a temporary productivity boost, but that boost comes at a price.

Unless, of course, your job has a recreational effect on you, which is probably anything but the norm. I know a lot of people who really like their jobs (being one of them myself), but doing some hobbyist stuff, even if somewhat work-related, is something completely different than work. And neither is a replacement for sleep.

The idea you can only work 40 hours a week and the rest is just wasted is crap

It indeed is. Usually the quote of productive work per day is much lower, about the range of 5h.

You mentioned that it's the monotony that kills concentration. True. Zombie work kills. On the other hand, you also need a certain time to adjust to a new task and get that going smoothly. Too frequent task changes (being the norm today with telephone, email, and slashdot interrupts...) will make you feel utterly busy, but in the end being highly unproductive.