Posts by Schultz
700 posts • joined Monday 22nd October 2007 16:07 GMT
The need to launder their money...
seems to become a quite pressing issue.
I like that "Cook told the Washington Post that he planned to propose a "dramatic simplification" of tax laws" -- probable he'd like to pay only 10%, or 5 for the right to 'repatriate' the money (and please ignore how many rules we dodged/exploited/bent to get that money into untaxed accounts to start with).
At least nobody peed in there.
The rest of this planet's water has been disgustingly recycled through the bladders of lifeforms you don't even want to imagine.
Hard to launder 100 beelions
They should have laundered the money in smaller batches before it accumulated into such a ginormous (and hard-to-overlook) mountain.
Now they'll have to hire the complete population of the Cayman islands and pay them fair and untaxed bonuses.
Chaos breads creativity
The article raises some good point, but I think the tone is too negative. The many UIs and apps in Android are irritating and it may be hard to find the right configuration for a phone. But with time the best solutions survive and the user experience improves. In this sense the comparison to the early Windows ecosystem is a good one. That also started out quite ugly but it improved continually, mostly based on third party innovations.
But they'll fix it...
by not offering Office for Android or iPads.
Bright future
Eventually, there will be freedom of expression, but no freedom of (obtaining) information. A good recipe for honest, informed discussions and a good basis for democracy. NOT.
So they made a mistake with the purchase of Autonomy, but ...
everybody makes a mistake every now and them. Cut those managers some slack. They are only humans.
Very well-payed humans :).
So XPM look like noise...
but is not really noise (unpredictable randomness). It's instead a predictable phase modulation that can be mathematically described. Nice to see entropy reduced.
Posted in On the hunt for a new ampere
Nice concept...
but I can't wait to see the little surprises when they try to compare those amp-meters devices in different labs. It's some decades now that they try to redefine the kg based on a well-define number of atoms and what sounded like a simple concept some decade ago became horribly complex and still doesn't work. Let's hope this one is different.
They should have...
created a course for those teachers:
- How to deal with a computer virus
and, of course, the follow up:
- How to secure a personal computer in the 21st century
Transmigration?
sounds like you got it mixed up, it's Transformation, as in Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Collapsar travel...
is more of a metaphysical thing, you enter in bodily form and you separate into a beautiful smear of photons --liberated from the blob of matter below.
The Reg has commentards to stir the pot
So the new regurgitation is more entertaining here.
Growing market...
but for how long? The market might be quite a bit smaller than that for smart phones. And as compared to phones, the owners might expect a longer time-to-replacement, damping the future demand. I would expect the tablet category saturating quite fast, unless there are unexpected new markets opening up or they become cheap commodity devices (probably not from Apple or Microsoft).
Mass profiling
is great tool (ask your policeman or politician). We should just lock away the .1% most suspicious citizens every year to protect the children | curb terrorism | make this world a better place.
Honest
If they don't have a vision with a $1011 price tag then they are doing the right thing in handing back the money. It's probably better value than going through a lot of visionary CEOs, each spending the dosh on the latest vision / management fad / acquisition / ...
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 720
In any commercial relationship, ... profits must ... be placed above customers' interests
I disagree, in most commercial relationships both sides find a common interest. If that common interest would not exist, then there would no deal!
Only a company in a monopoly position or with a strong lock-in can afford to annoy their customers and MS did that extensively. They built their monopoly and then started to tax the world for access to office documents. I still run windows to retain access to a lot of legacy data -- and I don't ever want to have a similar lock-in for my phone. Google, on the other hand, liberated a lot of information and offers you daily choice whether you want to pay the Google tax (move over to Bing if you want).
Could anybody explain...
what is special about the 'high amplitude microphone'? I was under the impression that decent microphones were around for a while and the availability of a high-powered processor capable of handling multiple microphone sources should allow trivial enhancements even in the small form factor of a phone. So what is special about this microphone to give Nokia a valuable patent?
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 720
Sounds nice...
but not nice enough to make up for it being a microsoft phone. After two decades of MS shenanigans and a clear drive to put monopoly profits above the customer's interests, they need to offer something exceptional for me to take notice. I wonder if I am the only one?
I like it!
Ir's about time that soap opera started a new season!
20% already own a tablet...
I wonder how big the remaining market might be. Some parsimonious persons will be happy to stick to a smart phone and a lap-top and others will wait until they get the free tablet as a remote control for their TV or car. Anybody wants to bet that the tablet market will go the way of the netbook market in the next 5 years?
So they tax Android slabs...
but still don't manage to competitively price their own offerings. There is some fail hidden in there.
Teleport matter?
But it sounds like they teleported the spin state of an atom, not the atom itself.
Does it matter? I guess it depends on what you mean by 'matter'.
But this kills the other half of the brilliant business model...
which consists of overcharging those few customers who were to lazy to cancel / rollover their contract after two years.
Don't need a new phone? We'll just keep charging you for the old one. (And no, we can't allow you to switch to the grandly advertised cheap new contracts because those are for _new_ customers.)
Posted in Ten Windows tablets
Is it just me,
or do those tablets increasingly resemble full-fledged notebooks?
Welcome to the new form-factor, (almost the) same as the old form factor. Maybe it's got something to do with Windows being the dominant workplace OS.
Kick their certificate out...
and I will switch to Firefox. Whatever that is worth.
Now here is a good reason...
...to keep that gargantumongous stash of cash in the bank! We wouldn't want a few bad years to lead to personnel attrition, now would we?
A finite calculable resource [like] gold/precious metals -- NOT
No they are not alike. I can hit you over the head with my heavy block of gold, I can stand on it to look over your head, I can attract mates with the glimmering qualities of it -- but all you can do is confuse people with those bits and bytes.
verbal diarrhoea
It's called "Logorrhea".
Carry on
scale it up
Surely the energy transmission and efforts to keep good vacuum should scale well with size. I'd like to see GW energy storage facilities with massive flywheels.
Feel the hum in the ground? Yea, that's last night's electricity in the Brandenburg storage facility.
The judge should...
postpone the next court date to a point faaaaaaaar in the future to give everybody involved some time to innovate, evolve their business, develop new products, burn their platforms, etc. This might be a general solution to this type of patent litigation, just make sure none of the managers will ever get (or loose) a bonus due to performed (missed) litigation during his tenure.
I got one of those machines at home...
but it can't predict the social stuff, only what day it'll be somewhere in the future.
Where can I collect my reward?
Re: Degree of difficulty to decode
"harder to read serif fonts resulted in better memory consolidation than sans serif fonts. It concluded that if the brain was having to 'work harder' to decode the text, then it was better able to comprehend and remember the content."
Is it really the 'difficulty to decode', or just that you read more slowly and therefore give your brain that extra time to comprehend? I found that the speed of presentation in a lecture is crucial. There need to be some breaks to allow everybody to digest the information. This can be done independent of the tools (Powerpoint or other) -- but an old-fashioned blackboard lecture has the delays built-in via the writing speed.
He just discovered the 3 minute attention span.
And now to something completely different.
Re: Clever
But by the time the device is declared as fit for medical diagnostics, it'll be 30 k$ and it'll be a large "machine that goes ping".
"At the low end, WP8 is a good choice."
I am sure Nokia loves that statement. Didn't they just burn a platform to get out of the low end?
So there is not enough DNA to recreate a dinosaur from its bones...
but maybe there is enough genetic information in living organisms to extrapolate. Go find that DNA preserving sponge creature that forgot to throw out the ancient DNA of something the ancient ancestor ate :).
... loss on a sold cheap phone
With a large cash flow from their patent pool and another from MS, selling phones at a loss might be a sustainable business model.
Business 2.0, now I can see you.
Whow, ...
... I must have found my nemesis. But with millions of Schultzes standing behind me, I cannot fail to crush you, tiny, tiny man!
That move shoud fail
I use an android phone with an opera browser, accessing my work email, and I'd be really happy to have access to Nokia maps when traveling abroad (but I didn't stumble across that service yet).
So it seems to me that Android is quite open, and does not create any artificial lock-in. Remember the time when you needed internet explorer to download certain updates from MS, or when MS messenger suddenly appeared on your desktop?
Android phones are particularly open as compared to the competition - in particular if you jailbreak that provider-locked crapware and revert to stock android.
Re: A teeny problem folk- we don't actually know c
Your "true vacuum" does not allow any measurement, because your measurement relies on propagating some particle, e.g., a photon, through the vacuum -- but then the vacuum is no longer a true vacuum (there is a probability for particle pair creation).
This does not really matter, because we understand the pair creation process and can account for it in our physics models (I think this is part of quantum chromodynamics, but don't nail me down on this). So we do know c quite well.
@Scott Pedigo
(1) There are conservation laws for energy (color), spin (=angular momentum), etc., but you can find similar conservation laws in classical physics. The mathematical description can become tricky in the quantum world. (2) You cannot flip a switch to magically switch a property, you can only measure it. There is, however, a probabilistic relationship between the nature of the measurement and the measurement result, so you can affect the result by changing the measurement. (3) The measurement can affect the measurement result but, as a law of physics, no faster-than-light information can be transferred to an entangled particle (so far this has never been disproved -- despite large effort).
So yes, you have been given the wrong idea about entanglement. And everybody here is a complete sucker for reading all of this even though the progress towards information teleportation is zero.
"technology becoming much smarter with a greater focus on location and context"
That is exactly what most people would like to avoid with their 'work' computer. We need a tool to do well-defined work and -- no thanks -- I do not want fries with that even if there is a McD promotion around the corner.
Re: I find this stuff fascinating but I'm a total idiot who knows absolutely nothing...
#1 no, the have entangled properties, but the properties are created in the entangled common source. There is no communication ('information transfer') between the particles.
#2 no, think about the two particles as a single two-particle state of matter. The matter wave is as large as the distance of the two particles -- and once you measure a property of the wave at one point, you also know about some properties of the wave at another point.
#3 yes, the world is composed of entangle particles. But for an object of macroscopic size , the complex entangled (quantum mechanical) properties average out to classical properties, hence we cannot predict them. So even though the answer is a yes, you might pretend that the answer is no and you wont miss anything.
#4 this point is related to #3: we cannot predict observations on the level of the universe, so you can hypothesize all you want about local or non-local properties and nobody can prove you wrong.
Hope this helps.
Spooky action != Information
Stop this nonsense forthwith --or Einstein and friends will come to spook (haunt) you.
This article mixes up information transfer with spooky action. This is a major fail: established physics agrees that information transfer is not possible at speeds faster than light, but you are allowed to invent lots of information-less spooky experiments.
Spooky action works like the following: Two travelers put a red and a blue chip in a bag and -- without looking -- take out one chip each and take it to a faraway location. If they both look at their chip at the same time, they suddenly know the color of the chip in the other travelers pocket -- spooky and definitely faster than light! But there is no information transfer from one traveler to the other. There might be predefined action (e.g., the red-chip traveler should return to home base), but the relevant information must have been agreed upon before the travelers set out, so that's information transfer from the joint departure point and not from on traveler to the other.
If you now replace 'traveler' with 'photon' and use spin/polarization/energy instead of color, then you have the blueprint for most spooky action experiments.
Assembly-line degrees
There is a change in the University system that is not mentioned in the article or the comments so far: The great inflation in University degrees. Can you realistically expect that some 50% of pupils with a degree will find the same type of interesting jobs that some elite 5% did some 50 years ago (statistics purely invented, but I am sure there is a place where they might match).
Also, it used to be that University graduates would be expected to be thinking on the job, not just applying learned knowledge. Especially in the hard sciences, your acquired knowledge from the University days will age very fast. So, points 1 and 2 in the job satisfaction survey kind of miss the point ("1) The extent to which the skills learned at university are used. 2) How closely a graduate's other skills match those required in the job).
Sorry, the study missed the point and someone should not graduate.
Simplistic and wrong
The analysis in the article seems too simplistic to me. The credit markets froze due to a lot of casino banking going on worldwide (do read up on AIG, which was somewhat instrumental in getting that going) -- and going bad quickly. When money gets scarce, this hits all types of borrowers, affecting those all-too-ordinary credits which were the business of HBOS. They obviously weren't careful enough to prepare for such a crisis (shame on them), but they surely would have been considered good managers if the worldwide banking casino had survived another decade.
About the 'Robin Hood tax', I would be very interested to hear your reasoning why that's "so wrong-headed in itself". If you do business, you pay tax. This does suppress business (you'll have to factor in VAT if you want to make profit selling something). It also keeps people from wasting their time trying to get some marginal benefit from trading stuff around.
The banking system looks like it might need some kind of tax to focus minds. There are too many bankers dealing with bankers, dealing with other members of the financial industry -- all of them hunting some marginal benefits (and creating a big systemic risk by introducing extra complexity into the markets). Tax their business transactions and you'll see a lot of wasteful activities end.
Re: They're everywhere
Now which BOFH suggested this elegant solution? Gotta remember this for the next meeting with the scared members of society.
