Wouldn't it be possible to turn these data centers into water purification stations by boiling it and collecting/condensing the steam? They could *add* fresh water to the system instead of using it if they were given sea water (if the conduits could be cleaned of the residue left behind).
I don't know how people can ever come to any conclusions. It's cases like this (original post and response) that make me question how anybody can reach any sort of authoritative conclusion. You think you've identified something, and something you never thought of blows it away. Maybe this seems trivial in this case, it's easy for Americans to forget about the rest of the world, or, more likely, not realize how different it is and runs on a different schedule, or realize that something (like Netflix) is global. But it seems to me like this kind of shortsightedness is much more diverse and often more inconspicuous than just forgetting about the rest of the world. Maybe that's an indication that people shouldn't hold conclusions with such authority? It points out a fatal flaw in that statement by Sherlock Holmes, something like, "If you've eliminated all other possibilities, all that remains, however improbable, must be the truth." There's no way to can enumerate all other possibilities, let alone eliminate them. "Oh, well, it didn't occur to me that an indestructible micrometeorite would have been landing at this point in time appearing very much like a bullet permeating this guy's skull! Maybe we shouldn't have executed the convict after all."
I don't know about your son, but I for one was so excited about programming that I didn't need much of a teacher. If you find the right instrument to get him excited about programming, he'll come to you with questions or figure out how to answer his own questions and lead his own learning path. Of course I'm sure he would still appreciate some ideas and guidance from time to time. Personally, I enjoy game programming. There are free game programming environments on Microsoft's web site if you're not too heavily anti-MS. The modern environments are, I suspect, much more entertaining to use for a beginner than the environment you're used to using. To get started, head to their "explore by intrest" page.
Also, I am working on a more visual (less coding) game development environment (Scrolling Game Development Kit 2), and trying to make it a bit more portable (it might work in Linux someday since I am almost done converting it from DirectX to the OpenGL-based OpenTK library). I think game development is a very rewarding way to learn programming.
Maybe it's a personal preference thing, but I'm a developer and have been switched to at least 5 completely different projects (with different bosses) in my 11.5 years at the company I work for, and still enjoying every minute of it, welcoming each new project as something interesting and different to get involved with. I'd rather work where they need me and use me to the best of my abilities than fester on some declining project. And our company has agreed on a single language and toolset as well. But I don't know that I care about that because I would be equally welcoming of switching to a new toolset when I switch projects (I know C, C#, VB.NET, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, ASP, ASP.NET etc., many of which I pick up as I switch to a new project). But there are many developers who, I think, pick up on a new project more quickly because it's written in the same language, using the same tools and practices they used in their previous project. I guess it's a trade-off between developing versatile developers or having them able to switch quickly right away.
BTW, the reason I picked up more than one language is because we didn't introduce the common language until a couple years ago, and I also do some hobby development. There's also some old code we have to continue to maintain, which is another consideration when making such a decision.
The way you worded it, it almost sounded like you thought there was no use in producing the energy requirements of the US if it were localized in one location. My reply is that, if we can produce that much energy cleanly and cheaply, it's useful regardless of whether we're trying to fulfill (some of) the energy requirements of the US or put it to other uses. Your statement is assuming that we're trying to totally replace the entire energy requirements of the country with this, and I'm pointing out that maybe that figure (the US energy consumption level) was used only as an illustration of how much energy could be produced, and not as a suggestion of how 100% of the energy would be used.
Generating the entire US's energy needs in one central location is only useful if you have a way to transmit the power to where it's needed. Really? You can't think of any use for producing the equivalent of the entire US energy needs if it weren't portable? I can think of some pretty good uses for that much energy. Many of them reduce the reliance on existing non-renewable energy sources, even if the production were localized far away from where it's being used. One use would be to generate fuel for transporting the energy elsewhere in other useful forms. Devising more means to make the energy portable (if we can agree on this clean and abundant source of energy) could yield all sorts of interesting benefits -- eliminating power grids in which one fault affects the a huge area might be one. Providing more practical portable power supplies (alternative to diesel generators) might be another.
As I understand it, there is much research going on in the area of energy storage these days (super-capacitors, etc), and this would complete the circle. If we have good ways to both store and produce energy, it becomes quite portable and useful.
However, if these kinds of plants were available, we wouldn't feel so bad about producing huge quantities of hydrogen and other forms of storable energy that would otherwise require non-renewable energy sources to produce. Specifically, we could probably overhaul the way automobiles are fueled. Then we could make significant advances against the way other energy is produced even if the old means are not entirely eliminated. It may be enough to provide us with thousands of years of reliable energy instead of the relatively short time we have to work out alternative energy sources before we're sunk right now.
If this is truly as clean and abundant energy source as it appears to be, transportation of the energy seems not as much of a concern. We're already transporting fossil fuels long distances to produce much of our current energy. Why not at least switch to transporting some energy that's not based on fossil fuels -- like hydrogen or some other form of chemical energy. Just looking at the trade offs, there appear to be huge advantages over our current options.
I think ray tracing would simplify things over the current model geometry from the developer perspective because you have more primitives to work with so you don't need to always be dealing with so many vertices and converting everything into triangles and whatnot. You can deal with objects at a higher level. I for one have done some work defining some simple POV-Ray scenes, but could never really get into modeling in a way that I could use in games (I think only recently has a free tool become available that would support that -- Blender -- while POV-Ray has been free a long time). Certainly there will still be complexities, but the bar is lowered for new developers trying to get started in 3D game development. Maybe that's a bad thing for the pros trying to make their mark in the industry, but for those of us who are struggling with finding adequate modeling tools and working with geometry, it'd be nice to deal with the higher level primitives that a ray-tracer could provide rather than always having to break it down into polygons (and align the textures on the edges of so many polygons? Is that an issue?)
I think the problem with the current system, however, is that you have to be a professional 3D game developer with years of study and experience to understand how it all works, whereas if you could define scenes in the same terms that ray tracers accept scene definitions, I think the complexity might be taken down a notch for developers making quality 3D game development a little more accessible and easy to deal with, even if it doesn't provide technical advantages.
I have a similar problem, which is only aggravated by the fact that GMail doesn't let you delete attachments! How ridiculous is that... you can't even delete an attachment without deleting a whole message! I think a couple features would go a long ways toward reducing space requirements. I think the problem is more about bloat than inadequate space. Increasing the available space focuses only on half the problem. We need better tools to manage the content we have. 1) I'd like to be able to delete attachments without deleting a message; 2) I'd like to be able to auto-reject/return messages with attachments larger than X MB (where I can set X); 3) I'd like it if messages were compressed so that my quoted text in replies didn't take up the same amount of space as the original. I suspect this isn't happening.
The recent hypothesis about black hole behavior seems like another good example of such "poetic perfection" and infinity giving way to more finite and realistic notions, if it turns out to work better. And it has some similarities to this idea, in the sense that time may not be hitting an absolute boundary here as previously supposed.
All else being equal, if it's a choice between burning oil recycled from plastic or burning oil pumped up from a well, I'd rather see oil from recycled plastic being burned (both in order to reduce new fossil fuel consumption, and reduce landfill use). I don't think it's realistic to expect oil usage to be reduced to 0, thus making the idea of recycling plastic into oil stupid. You make it sound like recycling plastic into oil is going to increase oil burning. I would be surprised if the process were cheap enough to promote extra oil usage.
Actually I'm thinking it looks similar to the new theory of black holes. There is no game but just a bunch of cool-looking pieces getting ever closer to being a game, which, observed externally, appear to take an infinite amount of time before the game will come together, but which, viewed from the internal frame of reference, seem to be going along swimmingly.
This might have more to do with the price difference between a stand-alone Blu-Ray player and a PS3 being smaller (favoring PS3 in many if not all cases!) compared to the price difference between a stand-alone HD DVD player and an XBox 360 with HD DVD, rather than any indication that people are only buying Blu-Ray because of the PS3. It's conceivable that people who start out with the notion of just wanting to play Blu-Ray movies and not PS3 games are going for the PS3 because it's cheaper than a Blu-Ray player. It's conceivable that Blu-Ray might even be turning people to gaming (eventually) considering the currently meager selection of PS3 games (though the PS2 games are still pretty worthwhile for someone who didn't previously have a game system and is looking for some other use for a PS3).
Also, am I the only one wondering about the comment relating to the "end of 2007"? That's typo, right? They meant 2006, right? Or are we travelling through time and using the past tense to refer to the future now... where's that "Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations" when you need it.
Sorry for this off-topic post, but I don't know of any other way to contact martyb. I'm curious what your name is because martyb happens to be my login name at work (my last name and first initial). Is Marty your last name or first name?
Someone enlighten me. I was under the impression that these images were coming directly from Satellite images. Maybe I was misled by the fact that the button on the map that says what mode it is in says "Satellite". Am I to believe that there are people physically getting these images on paper, putting them in a scanner and scanning each square of Google's whole database of images from earth's surface!? Of course if there were actual people involved, you'd think they would have noticed this, but even an automated process seems ridiculous to me... why would these images ever be in physical form?
Most trends tend to end, and while humanity itself might be considered a "trend", so is the idea that every species on earth eventually ends. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that humanity might be the one that survives, with it's ability to impose massive changes and push ahead the boundaries of what life is doing in the universe so quickly. It could go either way, as I see it. I hope that the trend ends with some species surviving rather than all species ending.
I noticed in the picture a bright/large star in the lower half of the picture right along the right edge that appears to have an interesting organization of equally spaced light spots around it. Is this just an artifact of some lense? I can't imagine that this would go unnoticed if it were real... unless this is all part of an elaborate April Fools prank.
Well, at least maybe for once I'll be able to install Windows on a machine without having to download a million drivers (something I've never had to do with Linux). Here's hoping.
Strange, I've had the opposite experience. I spend much more effort looking for drivers to make Linux work (particularly video drivers), which I never had to worry about when using Windows. Has Linux improved so significantly since I last tried it (a couple years ago was maybe the last time I tried to configure a new Linux installation)? Is it now easier to find Linux drivers than Windows drivers?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't DirectDraw the 2D graphics component of DirectX 7.0 and earlier. In DirectX 8 it was replaced with Direct3D which (as the name would suggest) would be more suited to 3D development that DirectDraw was. And as I understand it, Direct3D is so encompassing that Microsoft dropped DirectDraw and now expects Direct3D to handle all 2D and 3D graphics. So why on earth did the article choose to use the term Direct Draw (with a space no less)?
This article lost most of its credibility when I saw that his graph for enumerating badness came from the "department of vague pseudo-scientific statistics". Humorous though it may be, I don't think people should be making up charts to illustrate their "data" when there aren't real numbers to back it up. It's worse than providing 6 significant digits in a measurement for which you only measured two, in my opinion. It makes me doubt that any research or real data went into any of the rest of this article, and suspect that it's just one guy's opinion.
Oh wait, I think I get it now. The translation (as the summary states) was from an earlier decision in the case -- from the court of appeals. But now the supreme court has overturned the appeals court's decision, agreeing with the initial decision before the appeal... right?
Did I RTFA a little too quickly? I got to the end of the translated findings and saw that the court found in favor of Bruvik, the one responsible for posting the links. Was this overturning the original decision to the contrary or what?
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Wouldn't it be possible to turn these data centers into water purification stations by boiling it and collecting/condensing the steam? They could *add* fresh water to the system instead of using it if they were given sea water (if the conduits could be cleaned of the residue left behind).
I don't know how people can ever come to any conclusions. It's cases like this (original post and response) that make me question how anybody can reach any sort of authoritative conclusion. You think you've identified something, and something you never thought of blows it away. Maybe this seems trivial in this case, it's easy for Americans to forget about the rest of the world, or, more likely, not realize how different it is and runs on a different schedule, or realize that something (like Netflix) is global. But it seems to me like this kind of shortsightedness is much more diverse and often more inconspicuous than just forgetting about the rest of the world. Maybe that's an indication that people shouldn't hold conclusions with such authority? It points out a fatal flaw in that statement by Sherlock Holmes, something like, "If you've eliminated all other possibilities, all that remains, however improbable, must be the truth." There's no way to can enumerate all other possibilities, let alone eliminate them. "Oh, well, it didn't occur to me that an indestructible micrometeorite would have been landing at this point in time appearing very much like a bullet permeating this guy's skull! Maybe we shouldn't have executed the convict after all."
I don't know about your son, but I for one was so excited about programming that I didn't need much of a teacher. If you find the right instrument to get him excited about programming, he'll come to you with questions or figure out how to answer his own questions and lead his own learning path. Of course I'm sure he would still appreciate some ideas and guidance from time to time. Personally, I enjoy game programming. There are free game programming environments on Microsoft's web site if you're not too heavily anti-MS. The modern environments are, I suspect, much more entertaining to use for a beginner than the environment you're used to using. To get started, head to their "explore by intrest" page.
Also, I am working on a more visual (less coding) game development environment (Scrolling Game Development Kit 2), and trying to make it a bit more portable (it might work in Linux someday since I am almost done converting it from DirectX to the OpenGL-based OpenTK library). I think game development is a very rewarding way to learn programming.
Maybe it's a personal preference thing, but I'm a developer and have been switched to at least 5 completely different projects (with different bosses) in my 11.5 years at the company I work for, and still enjoying every minute of it, welcoming each new project as something interesting and different to get involved with. I'd rather work where they need me and use me to the best of my abilities than fester on some declining project. And our company has agreed on a single language and toolset as well. But I don't know that I care about that because I would be equally welcoming of switching to a new toolset when I switch projects (I know C, C#, VB.NET, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, ASP, ASP.NET etc., many of which I pick up as I switch to a new project). But there are many developers who, I think, pick up on a new project more quickly because it's written in the same language, using the same tools and practices they used in their previous project. I guess it's a trade-off between developing versatile developers or having them able to switch quickly right away.
BTW, the reason I picked up more than one language is because we didn't introduce the common language until a couple years ago, and I also do some hobby development. There's also some old code we have to continue to maintain, which is another consideration when making such a decision.
The way you worded it, it almost sounded like you thought there was no use in producing the energy requirements of the US if it were localized in one location. My reply is that, if we can produce that much energy cleanly and cheaply, it's useful regardless of whether we're trying to fulfill (some of) the energy requirements of the US or put it to other uses. Your statement is assuming that we're trying to totally replace the entire energy requirements of the country with this, and I'm pointing out that maybe that figure (the US energy consumption level) was used only as an illustration of how much energy could be produced, and not as a suggestion of how 100% of the energy would be used.
As I understand it, there is much research going on in the area of energy storage these days (super-capacitors, etc), and this would complete the circle. If we have good ways to both store and produce energy, it becomes quite portable and useful.
However, if these kinds of plants were available, we wouldn't feel so bad about producing huge quantities of hydrogen and other forms of storable energy that would otherwise require non-renewable energy sources to produce. Specifically, we could probably overhaul the way automobiles are fueled. Then we could make significant advances against the way other energy is produced even if the old means are not entirely eliminated. It may be enough to provide us with thousands of years of reliable energy instead of the relatively short time we have to work out alternative energy sources before we're sunk right now.
If this is truly as clean and abundant energy source as it appears to be, transportation of the energy seems not as much of a concern. We're already transporting fossil fuels long distances to produce much of our current energy. Why not at least switch to transporting some energy that's not based on fossil fuels -- like hydrogen or some other form of chemical energy. Just looking at the trade offs, there appear to be huge advantages over our current options.
I think ray tracing would simplify things over the current model geometry from the developer perspective because you have more primitives to work with so you don't need to always be dealing with so many vertices and converting everything into triangles and whatnot. You can deal with objects at a higher level. I for one have done some work defining some simple POV-Ray scenes, but could never really get into modeling in a way that I could use in games (I think only recently has a free tool become available that would support that -- Blender -- while POV-Ray has been free a long time). Certainly there will still be complexities, but the bar is lowered for new developers trying to get started in 3D game development. Maybe that's a bad thing for the pros trying to make their mark in the industry, but for those of us who are struggling with finding adequate modeling tools and working with geometry, it'd be nice to deal with the higher level primitives that a ray-tracer could provide rather than always having to break it down into polygons (and align the textures on the edges of so many polygons? Is that an issue?)
I think the problem with the current system, however, is that you have to be a professional 3D game developer with years of study and experience to understand how it all works, whereas if you could define scenes in the same terms that ray tracers accept scene definitions, I think the complexity might be taken down a notch for developers making quality 3D game development a little more accessible and easy to deal with, even if it doesn't provide technical advantages.
I have a similar problem, which is only aggravated by the fact that GMail doesn't let you delete attachments! How ridiculous is that... you can't even delete an attachment without deleting a whole message! I think a couple features would go a long ways toward reducing space requirements. I think the problem is more about bloat than inadequate space. Increasing the available space focuses only on half the problem. We need better tools to manage the content we have. 1) I'd like to be able to delete attachments without deleting a message; 2) I'd like to be able to auto-reject/return messages with attachments larger than X MB (where I can set X); 3) I'd like it if messages were compressed so that my quoted text in replies didn't take up the same amount of space as the original. I suspect this isn't happening.
The recent hypothesis about black hole behavior seems like another good example of such "poetic perfection" and infinity giving way to more finite and realistic notions, if it turns out to work better. And it has some similarities to this idea, in the sense that time may not be hitting an absolute boundary here as previously supposed.
All else being equal, if it's a choice between burning oil recycled from plastic or burning oil pumped up from a well, I'd rather see oil from recycled plastic being burned (both in order to reduce new fossil fuel consumption, and reduce landfill use). I don't think it's realistic to expect oil usage to be reduced to 0, thus making the idea of recycling plastic into oil stupid. You make it sound like recycling plastic into oil is going to increase oil burning. I would be surprised if the process were cheap enough to promote extra oil usage.
Actually I'm thinking it looks similar to the new theory of black holes. There is no game but just a bunch of cool-looking pieces getting ever closer to being a game, which, observed externally, appear to take an infinite amount of time before the game will come together, but which, viewed from the internal frame of reference, seem to be going along swimmingly.
With all the publicity this guy has had, I suspect (hope even?) that some media outlet will sponsor his taxes just so they can get the story.
This might have more to do with the price difference between a stand-alone Blu-Ray player and a PS3 being smaller (favoring PS3 in many if not all cases!) compared to the price difference between a stand-alone HD DVD player and an XBox 360 with HD DVD, rather than any indication that people are only buying Blu-Ray because of the PS3. It's conceivable that people who start out with the notion of just wanting to play Blu-Ray movies and not PS3 games are going for the PS3 because it's cheaper than a Blu-Ray player. It's conceivable that Blu-Ray might even be turning people to gaming (eventually) considering the currently meager selection of PS3 games (though the PS2 games are still pretty worthwhile for someone who didn't previously have a game system and is looking for some other use for a PS3).
Also, am I the only one wondering about the comment relating to the "end of 2007"? That's typo, right? They meant 2006, right? Or are we travelling through time and using the past tense to refer to the future now... where's that "Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations" when you need it.
Sorry for this off-topic post, but I don't know of any other way to contact martyb. I'm curious what your name is because martyb happens to be my login name at work (my last name and first initial). Is Marty your last name or first name?
Someone enlighten me. I was under the impression that these images were coming directly from Satellite images. Maybe I was misled by the fact that the button on the map that says what mode it is in says "Satellite". Am I to believe that there are people physically getting these images on paper, putting them in a scanner and scanning each square of Google's whole database of images from earth's surface!? Of course if there were actual people involved, you'd think they would have noticed this, but even an automated process seems ridiculous to me... why would these images ever be in physical form?
Most trends tend to end, and while humanity itself might be considered a "trend", so is the idea that every species on earth eventually ends. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that humanity might be the one that survives, with it's ability to impose massive changes and push ahead the boundaries of what life is doing in the universe so quickly. It could go either way, as I see it. I hope that the trend ends with some species surviving rather than all species ending.
I noticed in the picture a bright/large star in the lower half of the picture right along the right edge that appears to have an interesting organization of equally spaced light spots around it. Is this just an artifact of some lense? I can't imagine that this would go unnoticed if it were real ... unless this is all part of an elaborate April Fools prank.
Strange, I've had the opposite experience. I spend much more effort looking for drivers to make Linux work (particularly video drivers), which I never had to worry about when using Windows. Has Linux improved so significantly since I last tried it (a couple years ago was maybe the last time I tried to configure a new Linux installation)? Is it now easier to find Linux drivers than Windows drivers?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't DirectDraw the 2D graphics component of DirectX 7.0 and earlier. In DirectX 8 it was replaced with Direct3D which (as the name would suggest) would be more suited to 3D development that DirectDraw was. And as I understand it, Direct3D is so encompassing that Microsoft dropped DirectDraw and now expects Direct3D to handle all 2D and 3D graphics. So why on earth did the article choose to use the term Direct Draw (with a space no less)?
This article lost most of its credibility when I saw that his graph for enumerating badness came from the "department of vague pseudo-scientific statistics". Humorous though it may be, I don't think people should be making up charts to illustrate their "data" when there aren't real numbers to back it up. It's worse than providing 6 significant digits in a measurement for which you only measured two, in my opinion. It makes me doubt that any research or real data went into any of the rest of this article, and suspect that it's just one guy's opinion.
Oh wait, I think I get it now. The translation (as the summary states) was from an earlier decision in the case -- from the court of appeals. But now the supreme court has overturned the appeals court's decision, agreeing with the initial decision before the appeal... right?
Did I RTFA a little too quickly? I got to the end of the translated findings and saw that the court found in favor of Bruvik, the one responsible for posting the links. Was this overturning the original decision to the contrary or what?