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Comment Re:1 B$ for open source software ? (Score 1) 107

CyanogenMod is missing the boat by being blinded by the *potential* for more cash. The ture reality is that Google's offer is the best they will get, and they fucked it up. Google will offer them much less when it becomes obvious that CyanogenMod made a mis-calculation.

I was waiting for someone to say this. We're clearly in a tech bubble. Making a business out of CyanogenMod would mean trying to out-google google, while at the same time relying on many of google's own services! They are fools for not taking the money and running.

Comment Re:Good video on this (Score 1) 174

Technical details on the turbine include; 200 lbs, 250 hp, 40,000h service life between overhauls (13+ years @ 8h / day.) The turbine has air bearings to eliminate wear, which implies a gas generator/power section arrangement to drive the generator, I believe.

A gas turbine is composed of two sections- a compressor and a power turbine. Probably they are using some compressor bleed air for the bearings (which is expensive, effeciency-wise). It still doesn't make sense to me though. Diesels in that size are much more efficient, more tolerant of abuse, more tolerant of contaminated fuels, and a lot cheaper to maintain. The only reason to use a gas turbine is when weight REALLY matters. We're talking about a garbage truck here. 100-200 more pounds for a diesel engine isn't going to be noticed. It may even balance out since a tank of diesel can likely be made lighter than a tank of compressed LNG.

Comment Re:Electricity from Oil? (Score 1) 167

That's messed up... Only 40 years of oil supply left, compared to 160 years natural gas and 400 years of coal.

No electricity should be generated via oil right now, and definitely not in 2050.

The amount of electricity generated using oil in the US is less than 1% and has been that way for decades. Oil is too expensive to burn compared to any other way of making electricity. The 1% used in the USA is generally in emergency cases where there is a heat wave / cold snap and demand outstrips the normal supply.

Comment Re:It's fast enough for office use (Score 1) 554

I am working for a company with 6000+ desktops. I do not understand why our client engineering is rolling out faster hardware every year. 95% of all office workers need MS office, a browser and email. Most of the home users just need a browser these days. Those core i7 are just idling around heating office space.

I have now started rolling out 200 dollar desktop hardware (zotac). Which could really become a problem for microsoft. The windows licence price tag looks really expensive with these hardware prices.

Office problems are solved, we do not need faster hardware. And microsoft is manly making money from, *drumbeat*, office workers.

Best -S

I surely hope you are not also one of those awful IT people that keep purchasing spinning disks for user computers. If you do the math for what an employee is worth, and think about how many minutes they are waiting for their computers to boot/shutdown/open a program, having high-end hardware is often a no-brainer. $2000 in hardware cost is dwarfed pretty quickly by a $100k salary employee twiddling their thumbs for 5 minutes every day waiting on their computer.

Comment Re:Lotus 1-2-3 (Score 3, Interesting) 156

Ok, that I know of Lotus was never on Apple... wasn't that Visicalc?

Anyways... when I was a kid, my father brought home a Commodore Vic20 and said "Son! This is the future!" and told me to figure out how to plug it into the TV. I'll not lie... to me it was a video game machine for years. The command line reminded me of exploring some cave... the directories different tunnels, etc... I was a kid.

But as the computers got better and I eventually found myself on an Apple IIe and a Compaq PC it got more interesting. And what finally made me realize what computers could do was when my dad brought home copies of Lotus and Visicalc. I would sit for hours making spreadsheets with formulas in pale monochrome ASCII. You could change something in one cell and watch all the other cells change in response. Prior to that I had no idea what programming even was... or how variables and functions worked. Those first spreadsheets are what made it all real to me. I thought it was amazing. I put my famillies finances on it. I budgeted my allowance. I made rudimentary war games. Really, Lotus (because I always liked the PC better) is what finally made me realize computers were important, and it was something I wanted to do.

Thanks Lotus!

I heard that when accountants first saw demos of Visicalc, many of them literally broke down in tears when they realized how much of the "boring" parts of their job were going to be eliminated.

Comment Re:Boost mobile (Score 5, Insightful) 209

I have to suspect you have never experienced Verizon's coverage area and reliability.

Like every carrier, it varies depending on where you are. I used to swear by their coverage and reliability but then I found many places where it just fell flat. The best coverage carrier is the carrier who has coverage where you are or need to be, not the carrier who claims to have covered x% of a map.

Comment Re:How does it handle Pinterest? (Score 1) 182

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...

I don't think that tray price has much basis in reality. The "$107" N2840 looks, at least on the face, to be not vastly different from the "$86" 1037U. If Biostar can sell a motherboard + 1037U + heatsink + fan for $79.99, it doesn't take much of a stretch to think maybe these prices are just "list" prices with no basis in reality. Biostar is just selling a bare motherboard so there can't be any Microsoft kickbacks or ad revenue.

Comment Re:Expense (Score 1) 444

Tesla is selling $100k cars, while other battery factories make batteries for $100 phones and $500 laptops. Maybe it is too expensive for them to set up a fully renewable process.

Or maybe they lease their facility. A lot of companies do, including mine. There's about a 0% chance of us installing renewable powerinfrastructure like that which would be difficult to take with us when we move out.

Comment Re:Cultural Differences (Score 3, Informative) 110

What many in the U.S. don't realize is that what we call bribery is SOP in some countries. Not that it makes it right, or legal, but it may be the only way for a company to do business there. I've witnessed this first hand in a couple places, with local government officials who would just not process paperwork unless you "tip" them.

That's a "Facilitating payment" and is actually OK for US companies to pay. A facilitating payment is payment to make someone do something faster or more efficiently, but the person was obligated to do that thing anyway. Good examples are customs clearance, port expediting payments, etc. The official is obligated to release items from customs if all the paperwork is correct. He isn't obligated to do that in a timely fashion, however. The payment just makes his inevitable action happen faster.

When you pay for an action which may not have happened without payment (like a favorable decision) that is when it becomes bribery.

Comment Re:Value of nationalized assets? (Score 1) 540

I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.

It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.

There is more to life than worrying about "lost productivity". Capitalism is not the best system of government if you care about happiness, equality, and well-being of the people. It is superior in many ways, but in those areas, Capitalism falls pretty flat.

Comment Re:$10,000 per camera (Score 3, Informative) 170

If you, the reader, has any experience with office politics or politics you know the popular underhanded technique of supporting something while undermining it.

Overhead, corruption, and incompetence are too often used as an excuse; many times it IS simply an underhanded attack by the "supporters." When NYPD spends $60,000 while saying it's going to cost more for only 60 cameras there are people involved who WANT it to be as expensive as possible of a deterrent. A high profile test group like NYPD will get cited all over the nation. Given how badly it is needed and demanded by the public, the costs are going to have to be high to deter widespread common use. Despite how actually cheap it would be - I bet their flash lights cost more... I had a cheap pen camera from china that was in that price range; it didn't last long or store much video but that was 6 years ago.

This is also where greedy capitalism comes in because that is all about how much the market is willing to pay--- and they've got to make sure this is a niche market so it doesn't have to compete with the extremely cheap mainstream market.

Sure, the way public budgets are managed is they take all projected costs (on the high side) then divide them out in ways that makes things like this seem like it's $10,000 a camera -- and one can sometimes spot the traitors because they'll focus on such false estimates.

Now it could be this is a totally honest move by NYPD and their high costs are because they are preparing for a full scale deployment with this just being a testing group. I'm just too cynical to take things at face value... wonder if any reporters exist who can hang around enough to pick up on such things anymore.

Hint- Industrial type equipment designed for daily rough use is expensive. I have a Motorola Pro5150 radio on my desk here which apparently costs about $400 (finding an actual price on this thing isn't easy) depending on which model it is. For a radio. But it is built like a tank, designed very well, and looks a lot like what police departments use. A wearable camera built like this radio costing $1000 each might be expensive, but it wouldn't be absurdly expensive.

Comment Re:a shame but... (Score 1) 246

The pyramids being made by slave labour is something of a myth. There's not much evidence available for early pyramids, but there's plenty of evidence that later pyramids were made by skilled craftsmen and not slaves.

My business is steam turbines. Complicated machinery with very tight tolerances, requiring great skill to put together. We use 1 or 2 experienced turbine experts per shift and have a cadre of millwrights (gorillas) to do the dirty/boring/mindless/unskilled labor. There is no need for everyone on a job to be an expert.

Comment Re:The biggest risk to the pyramids is Islam (Score 1) 246

Actually, Christianity is the biggest/fastest growing religion in China. And as I've said before and I'll say it again. The last thing the Islamists (ISIS) want to piss off is the Chinese. The really really don't want to go there!

China has no love for followers of Jesus. The only way ISIS will piss off China is if they order weapons from China and don't leave positive feedback on Alibaba.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 165

I'm form Argentina and it saddens me that this post comments will fall among these categories:

  • Peple saying "don't cry for me XXX".
  • Argentines explaining that Argentina is the worst country, worse than the worst.
  • Uninformed right-wing people talking about Cuba, communism.

Even the summary is wrong! That 35% is not a tax, just a pre-payment of the income tax that you can recover.

All hope is lost.

We are all indoctrinated in certain things, and those beliefs hang onto people like a religion. The notion that "my" country is the best country in the world, and all other countries are inferior in every way, is a hard one to shake. I saw it clearly on my trip to North Korea- although some people there are just playing along, a lot of people there really believe that their nation is the best on earth. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror at the people who chant "USA USA USA". People have to keep inventing reasons to keep believing their indoctrinations. Any evidence supporting their pre-existing beliefs is held up as fact, and any evidence which doesn't agree with their preconceptions is tossed aside as propaganda, fiction, lies, etc. I have seen this with people all over the world. It sucks to be on the losing end of this kind of attitude however.

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