My favorite temperature for serving beer (that I'll tolerate drinking) is roughly the ambient temperature of a typical cellar in Ireland in the Spring and Autumn.
Renewables will finally take over when the price/performance numbers are better.
They're getting more economical over time. In particular, solar seems to have been obeying something like Moore's Law in some ways.
If that doesn't stop, then at some point renewables will be more economical than even plentiful legacy energy sources, and at some point the gap will be large enough to cover the retooling costs over a pretty short time frame.
The availability of other usable carbon sources would merely delay this, not stop it.
...if something like an upgraded/improved Google Glass takes off in time.
It's hard to beat the subjective screen size of a thing that draws on your eye.
If it's got eye tracking and is combined either with peering with other devices that have tolerable input mechanisms (phone? keyboard?) or with something Kinect-like, then sure, physical tablets may become less common.
Three devices? What's the state of original PlayStation games? There's a (small) subset of those that don't run properly on the PS2. Will they run on the PS4?
(I have a ton of PSX and PS2 games. Today, I keep both an original PlayStation and a PS2 hooked up in our guest room, next to the SNES, Genesis, and GameCube. I do not have a PS3 or any PS3 games, so the question of how original PlayStation games play on the PS3 isn't of interest to me.)
maybe the sysadmins liked them but as a developer i hated solaris boxen. the libraries were always years old, nothing modern would compile, the cli tools were slightly incompatible with linux scripts,...
Myself, I hate when developers depend on the newest versions of libraries and stuff.
I run Debian on my servers. If your app can't run on top of the older versions of the libraries, then... I just don't need to run your app, at least not for a few years yet. I'll take "stable" over "modern", please.
That when Mankind actually launches ships to other star systems, the computers on board will be running a descendent of the x86 ISA, even if it's running 1024-bit words on superconducting molecular circuitry.
It's kinda worse than that, if you look at the history deeply enough and squint your eyes a little.
The 8086 takes much of its design from the 8085 -- in a sense, it's a souped-up 16-bit version of the 8085.
The 8085 was a souped-up version of the 8080 (which Zilog also cloned as the Z80, and which the CP/M80 ecosystem revolved around).
The 8080 was a descendant of the 8008. The 8008 was the 8-bit descendant of the 4-bit 4004.
The 4004, released by Intel in 1971, was the very first commercially available microprocessor.
So we're not really running a descendant of the 32-bit 386, or even of the 16-bit 8086. We're really running a descendant of the 4004, the very first mass-market CPU, from 1971.
IIRC, early versions of Windows NT could run emulated x86 software at decent speed on the DEC Alpha, but that machine was too pricey for the mass market.
I can confirm this.
I had a DEC Multia, Alpha version. Nifty little desktop machine, odd in that it had PCMCIA card slots. I used mine to help debug some Linux PCMCIA drivers, helping them become 64-bit clean (which was a big deal back around then). But I also had a copy of Windows NT 4.0 for Alpha, and I ran it sometimes.
It ran many 16-bit x86 Windows apps (like Office... 6.0 I think?) just fine.
(Hm. Still have the OS media. There a good cross-platform Alpha emulator out there somewhere?)
Does the tool let people specify various epigenetic factors, such as methylation? This is a thing that's pretty important, but that a lot of people don't understand well (and some refuse to believe there's anything to understand there).
If so, wow.
If not, this is going to have some severe limits in utility. Useful, certainly, but completely incapable of producing working DNA for, say, a human being or a giraffe.
We'll have to see if it can be disabled. I have a Kinect, and various dashboard updates have made it so annoying that I haven't turned it on in months.
When the dashboard paid no attention to it and you had to fire up a Kinect-specific title for it to do anything other than serve as a mic, it was mostly fine. But since the dashboard got support for it, it's constantly triggering on words and motions that nobody intended it to notice.
If the XB720 (or whatever) doesn't require a 24x7 internet connection and does support used/rented games on physical media, this will be the next thing on my list -- if Kinect is automatically "always on", I won't be getting one, period.
Sony and Microsoft have it in their power to "force" me onto "Wii U". (Well. And Ouya. But I'm not expecting AAA titles there, and I will want to play "BioShock 4" on a console, given a choice.)
I've got a Nook Color tablet, in part because its boot loader is not locked. I can pop in a microSD card with an arbitrary OS (that supports the hardware) on it, and no DRM or cryptography or "secure boot" stuff is there to prevent it from just loading up.
Today, I use this with a stack of microSD cards with different versions of CyanogenMod installed, to be able to rapidly test code on completely different versions of Android.
Anyone know if I'll ever (or soon) be able to boot up Ubuntu on this device the same way? (If so, I'm in, but I'm not buying new hardware just for this OS.)
Yeup, the first two I used were HyperCard on the Macintosh in 1987 or so, and "Interface Builder" on prerelease NeXT machines in 1989.
"Interface Builder" is why NeXT systems were so popular with Wall Street for a long time. It was amazing. And the IDE for iPhone development is a direct descendant of that first version I used, and to this day has a lot in common with it.
(Yes, I really was programming a NeXT in 1989. I was at Carnegie Mellon at the time, where the Mach kernel was developed, so we had lots of prerelease access to them. My first NeXT Cube was running version 0.8 of the OS.)
Very often rules about efficiency like this one are incorrect.
In particular, they're very often incorrect today, with modern compilers, even if they were true in the very early days.
Many years ago, a co-worker offered to teach us PDP-11 assembly language strictly in order to understand the design of C better. If you've got time, it's a worthwhile exercise. A lot of the design of C makes more sense if you understand how bloody simple a compiler for the PDP-11 could be.
"C combines the power and speed of assembly language with the portability and ease-of-use of assembly language."
You must not have known what you were doing or something.
You seem to be saying this as if it were bad or something.
I insist on playing games on a system I can use without knowing what I'm doing. I'll consider any such option, and won't seriously consider any other options.
This is why almost all of my gaming is on consoles (or console-like portables) these days (and the rest is all pretty old titles that'll run on just about anything, under emulation).
(I program and run servers for my day job. I'm not screwing with that sort of thing for my entertainment, not if I have any choice.)
Or those people who often buy unpasteurized milk on the black market. Because they claim it tastes better and has nutrition. Does the difference in taste and a minor improvement in nutrition outweigh the serious illnesses you can get from it?
There's actually a good compromise on that one, that I wish more milk producers would take up. Alton Brown has discussed it.
There's more than one way to do pasteurization. You can do it very briefly at a very high temperature, or much longer at a still-high-enough-but-not-as-high temperature. The very high/fast method is cheaper for industrial dairies to use because it cycles milk through in seconds rather than in something like a half hour, but it breaks down a ton of the safe but more complex compounds in the milk -- you're cooking the milk! The slower method still kills everything, but leaves considerably more of the complex organic chemicals intact, so it tastes more like milk when it's done.
I'd love to find a local organic dairy farm that uses the slower method. I would in fact pay more for that product.
At this moment, the best niche for Windows RT seems to me like it might be: cheap, low-power, portable devices with very good Microsoft-provided remote desktop client support.
Throw your "real" apps on a VM that you manage centrally, use an RT device to RDP into them, and you might end up with long-lasting, cheap, supportable devices in client hands, but applications running on powerful, centralized, managed systems.
Won't be suitable everywhere, of course, but I see niches in which this could work.
I've had two ideas so far that might help address this.
First: correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're using an open source Twitter client, would you be able to obtain your own API key and use that? So, in theory, open source clients should have no trouble with the "no more than 100,000 users per API key" issue. Could even set up infrastructure for automatically distributing and using sets of API keys, no?
Second: if it gets too bad, switch from using "the twitter API" to "SMS". Just use SMS forwarding, point it at something like your Google Voice account, and forget there is an official "API".
(Or are they talking about killing the SMS gateway function too?)
The system calls and lots of the design are clearly cloned. Anyone who used both CP/M and MS-DOS back in the day and who dabbled in assembly language programming on both would be able to spot it.
If the software industry had been as rife with patents (both functional and design) and other litigation tools back then as it is today, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten away with this particular way of copying.
(Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.)
With the app, you can't even copy a damned url link.
But you can mail or tweet it, which is the main reason I'd want to copy it myself, so I never even noticed that "copy" wasn't one of the sharing options.
This change sucks for me, but I'll adapt. I prefer the behavior or the app I have right now over that of the web site (mobile or desktop). Sure, Google may add their own app shortly, but want to make bets over whether or not they'll force all sorts of Google+ social/sharing crap on users?
All I want is a simple list of channels my account is subscribed to that lets me access the videos uploaded to those channels, plus the ability to interact with my own videos and lists.
Ah well. The last time I looked, there were open APIs for YouTube. If Google messes this up, I'll either write my own app or switch to Vimeo. Slightly annoying, sure, but ultimately not a huge deal.
(Now, if they get rid of the AppleTV YouTube channel as well, that could suck.)
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite temperature for serving beer (that I'll tolerate drinking) is roughly the ambient temperature of a typical cellar in Ireland in the Spring and Autumn.
Gee, I wonder why that is...
Isn't this basic high school science class stuff? Yes, condensation raises temperatures, just like evaporation lowers temperatures.
That's the whole reason human beings can sweat to cool off.
A lot of people presumably know about that. Are those people surprised that this works "in both directions"?
Renewables will finally take over when the price/performance numbers are better.
They're getting more economical over time. In particular, solar seems to have been obeying something like Moore's Law in some ways.
If that doesn't stop, then at some point renewables will be more economical than even plentiful legacy energy sources, and at some point the gap will be large enough to cover the retooling costs over a pretty short time frame.
The availability of other usable carbon sources would merely delay this, not stop it.
...if something like an upgraded/improved Google Glass takes off in time.
It's hard to beat the subjective screen size of a thing that draws on your eye.
If it's got eye tracking and is combined either with peering with other devices that have tolerable input mechanisms (phone? keyboard?) or with something Kinect-like, then sure, physical tablets may become less common.
I doubt that's what they mean, though.
Three devices? What's the state of original PlayStation games? There's a (small) subset of those that don't run properly on the PS2. Will they run on the PS4?
(I have a ton of PSX and PS2 games. Today, I keep both an original PlayStation and a PS2 hooked up in our guest room, next to the SNES, Genesis, and GameCube. I do not have a PS3 or any PS3 games, so the question of how original PlayStation games play on the PS3 isn't of interest to me.)
Myself, I hate when developers depend on the newest versions of libraries and stuff.
I run Debian on my servers. If your app can't run on top of the older versions of the libraries, then... I just don't need to run your app, at least not for a few years yet. I'll take "stable" over "modern", please.
It's kinda worse than that, if you look at the history deeply enough and squint your eyes a little.
The 8086 takes much of its design from the 8085 -- in a sense, it's a souped-up 16-bit version of the 8085.
The 8085 was a souped-up version of the 8080 (which Zilog also cloned as the Z80, and which the CP/M80 ecosystem revolved around).
The 8080 was a descendant of the 8008. The 8008 was the 8-bit descendant of the 4-bit 4004.
The 4004, released by Intel in 1971, was the very first commercially available microprocessor.
So we're not really running a descendant of the 32-bit 386, or even of the 16-bit 8086. We're really running a descendant of the 4004, the very first mass-market CPU, from 1971.
I can confirm this.
I had a DEC Multia, Alpha version. Nifty little desktop machine, odd in that it had PCMCIA card slots. I used mine to help debug some Linux PCMCIA drivers, helping them become 64-bit clean (which was a big deal back around then). But I also had a copy of Windows NT 4.0 for Alpha, and I ran it sometimes.
It ran many 16-bit x86 Windows apps (like Office... 6.0 I think?) just fine.
(Hm. Still have the OS media. There a good cross-platform Alpha emulator out there somewhere?)
Does the tool let people specify various epigenetic factors, such as methylation? This is a thing that's pretty important, but that a lot of people don't understand well (and some refuse to believe there's anything to understand there).
If so, wow.
If not, this is going to have some severe limits in utility. Useful, certainly, but completely incapable of producing working DNA for, say, a human being or a giraffe.
Do not forget that many people in this industry take it for granted that there must be DRM, or nothing can work.
Hm. I don't have that controller problem, perhaps because I've got both the XBox IR remote and the "smart glass" app.
I did actually try what you're talking about, but it was unresponsive enough that I really do prefer the IR remote.
YMMV, obviously!
We'll have to see if it can be disabled. I have a Kinect, and various dashboard updates have made it so annoying that I haven't turned it on in months.
When the dashboard paid no attention to it and you had to fire up a Kinect-specific title for it to do anything other than serve as a mic, it was mostly fine. But since the dashboard got support for it, it's constantly triggering on words and motions that nobody intended it to notice.
If the XB720 (or whatever) doesn't require a 24x7 internet connection and does support used/rented games on physical media, this will be the next thing on my list -- if Kinect is automatically "always on", I won't be getting one, period.
Sony and Microsoft have it in their power to "force" me onto "Wii U". (Well. And Ouya. But I'm not expecting AAA titles there, and I will want to play "BioShock 4" on a console, given a choice.)
Never mind -- the minimum specs are so far beyond what the Nook Color offers that device driver support and the like would be a moot question.
How many tablets meet the minimum specs and don't have locked bootloaders in firmware?
I've got a Nook Color tablet, in part because its boot loader is not locked. I can pop in a microSD card with an arbitrary OS (that supports the hardware) on it, and no DRM or cryptography or "secure boot" stuff is there to prevent it from just loading up.
Today, I use this with a stack of microSD cards with different versions of CyanogenMod installed, to be able to rapidly test code on completely different versions of Android.
Anyone know if I'll ever (or soon) be able to boot up Ubuntu on this device the same way? (If so, I'm in, but I'm not buying new hardware just for this OS.)
Yeup, the first two I used were HyperCard on the Macintosh in 1987 or so, and "Interface Builder" on prerelease NeXT machines in 1989.
"Interface Builder" is why NeXT systems were so popular with Wall Street for a long time. It was amazing. And the IDE for iPhone development is a direct descendant of that first version I used, and to this day has a lot in common with it.
(Yes, I really was programming a NeXT in 1989. I was at Carnegie Mellon at the time, where the Mach kernel was developed, so we had lots of prerelease access to them. My first NeXT Cube was running version 0.8 of the OS.)
Are you kidding? You just presented direct evidence that they're less crazy than other religions.
In particular, they're very often incorrect today, with modern compilers, even if they were true in the very early days.
Many years ago, a co-worker offered to teach us PDP-11 assembly language strictly in order to understand the design of C better. If you've got time, it's a worthwhile exercise. A lot of the design of C makes more sense if you understand how bloody simple a compiler for the PDP-11 could be.
"C combines the power and speed of assembly language with the portability and ease-of-use of assembly language."
You seem to be saying this as if it were bad or something.
I insist on playing games on a system I can use without knowing what I'm doing. I'll consider any such option, and won't seriously consider any other options.
This is why almost all of my gaming is on consoles (or console-like portables) these days (and the rest is all pretty old titles that'll run on just about anything, under emulation).
(I program and run servers for my day job. I'm not screwing with that sort of thing for my entertainment, not if I have any choice.)
Won't things that use the CLR run without recompilation?
There's actually a good compromise on that one, that I wish more milk producers would take up. Alton Brown has discussed it.
There's more than one way to do pasteurization. You can do it very briefly at a very high temperature, or much longer at a still-high-enough-but-not-as-high temperature. The very high/fast method is cheaper for industrial dairies to use because it cycles milk through in seconds rather than in something like a half hour, but it breaks down a ton of the safe but more complex compounds in the milk -- you're cooking the milk! The slower method still kills everything, but leaves considerably more of the complex organic chemicals intact, so it tastes more like milk when it's done.
I'd love to find a local organic dairy farm that uses the slower method. I would in fact pay more for that product.
At this moment, the best niche for Windows RT seems to me like it might be: cheap, low-power, portable devices with very good Microsoft-provided remote desktop client support.
Throw your "real" apps on a VM that you manage centrally, use an RT device to RDP into them, and you might end up with long-lasting, cheap, supportable devices in client hands, but applications running on powerful, centralized, managed systems.
Won't be suitable everywhere, of course, but I see niches in which this could work.
You'll want to read "White Light" by Rudy Rucker. It's an exploration of infinities the way "Flatland" is an exploration of dimensions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Light_(novel)
I've had two ideas so far that might help address this.
First: correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're using an open source Twitter client, would you be able to obtain your own API key and use that? So, in theory, open source clients should have no trouble with the "no more than 100,000 users per API key" issue. Could even set up infrastructure for automatically distributing and using sets of API keys, no?
Second: if it gets too bad, switch from using "the twitter API" to "SMS". Just use SMS forwarding, point it at something like your Google Voice account, and forget there is an official "API".
(Or are they talking about killing the SMS gateway function too?)
The system calls and lots of the design are clearly cloned. Anyone who used both CP/M and MS-DOS back in the day and who dabbled in assembly language programming on both would be able to spot it.
If the software industry had been as rife with patents (both functional and design) and other litigation tools back then as it is today, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten away with this particular way of copying.
(Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But you can mail or tweet it, which is the main reason I'd want to copy it myself, so I never even noticed that "copy" wasn't one of the sharing options.
This change sucks for me, but I'll adapt. I prefer the behavior or the app I have right now over that of the web site (mobile or desktop). Sure, Google may add their own app shortly, but want to make bets over whether or not they'll force all sorts of Google+ social/sharing crap on users?
All I want is a simple list of channels my account is subscribed to that lets me access the videos uploaded to those channels, plus the ability to interact with my own videos and lists.
Ah well. The last time I looked, there were open APIs for YouTube. If Google messes this up, I'll either write my own app or switch to Vimeo. Slightly annoying, sure, but ultimately not a huge deal.
(Now, if they get rid of the AppleTV YouTube channel as well, that could suck.)