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Comment Re:The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 180

Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

Comment The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 180

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Comment Re:Well what would you do (Score -1) 114

Not sure what you're referring to. Let's try it this way.

Imagine you are a manager or a CO and you have an employee who keep spending an enormous amount of time working on the exact thing you hired him for. He gets frustrated when he finds stuff he CAN'T explain, wants to research further, and you just brush him off because you really hired him to NOT find anything.

Comment Re:Great (Score 1) 28

This is just a wrapper. They will use it to lock down an actual life saving solution, so unless you pay the literal blood money, you can't access the cure - or even worse, poison yourself or your patient in the process.

No this is much worse than a non-solution to a non-problem, it's a distinct obstacle to sharing, distributing or using an actual solution to a real problem.

Comment Re:AP spin (Score 4, Informative) 27

In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

Submission + - China Flies World's First Megawatt-Class Hydrogen Turboprop Engine (fuelcellsworks.com)

walterbyrd writes: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-tonne unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world’s first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine.

Comment Re:Please sir (Score 3, Insightful) 193

Which regime? The current Iranian one, the one running is Israel or the one running the US right now? They are all kinda crap quite honestly. At this point Israel's and Iran's leaders are probably competing for body count. Iran it is is its own people and Israel its the Palestinians, which they treat as scum.

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