That anybody who actually did a CS degree in London would go around saying "I say, what what". Unless they had CS degrees in the 1920s, which I doubt.
Why would a CS degree teach games programming? That is application, not science. Games programming involves the skills of real time programming and, I imagine, a good healthy dose of OO (some early graphics subsystems had the objects built in.)
Some "Universities" around London are anything but -basically they teach designing web pages- but to take University College, (disclaimer: family connections) the CS degree includes, after the intro year:
Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists
Concurrent Programming
Logic and Database Theory
Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction
Compilers
Databases, Networks and Graphics
Mathematics and Statistics
Computational Complexity
Operating Systems
Technology Management and Professional Issues
Practical Software Engineering
I've highlighted the stuff that is obviously relevant to games but I hope you get the point. Perhaps the possibilities of working in some of UCL's preferred research areas is actually more fun than games, and seen as more useful to society. Somebody working on, I don't know, controllers and sensor systems for operating theatre robots might feel that his life was more fulfilling than it would be if he was making avatars simulate sex in GTA5.
The extremely simple gun-type design using U235 and used by the US on Japan could be made really quite reliable rather easily and would fit into an SUV or minivan with little trouble. (This information is in the public domain.) I have always assumed that the US bombed Japan twice, once with a simple and reliable design and once with a Pu bomb, first to prove that the compact and light Pu bomb would work, and second so they would have a "battle tested" bomb that would fit into a V2 or a V1 just as soon as they acquired the technology.
If you had a ship full of vehicles being imported from, say, China or India, and one of them contained a simple U235 nuke, how would you know?
Laptop!=cpu+chipset. There is that big screen thingy with its drivers and backlight,RAM and the Flash - which still needs power to write and read. Then there is the analog audio drive, the wireless modules, and probably a load of other stuff. A laptop consists of two main parts that dissipate heat partly through ducted air and partly through convection from the surface. Cutting the CPU power may reduce the fan load quite a lot, but the fan is there mainly to remove heat from a very small, very hot area. A lot of heat gets dissipated from the entire case.
Changing the north and south bridges might increase the battery life by perhaps 20%, depending on the attached peripherals, but it will not double or triple it. In fact, even this may be wrong; you do not know how efficient the chipset is already, and it may not be possible to reduce the power significantly.
The great thing about being a non-elected lord is that you don't have to do and think vile things to get elected. Perhaps it's a sad fact, but true. Years ago, there was a police attack on a number of really quite harmless hippies in Wiltshire. Unfortunately a member of the Lords was passing by on his motorcycle, observed the whole thing and reported it to the Lords. The outcome was not pleasant for the police. I am quite sure that a local elected politician would not have rocked the boat in this way.
You wouldn't be modifying your car, you would be adding something that is possibly illegal. It would be the possession of the rocket launcher that is the problem, not the bolting of it to the car.
Copyright is different. A photocopier, a camera, a computer and in fact a brain,hand and piece of paper are all that are needed to violate copyright. These are all long established to be legal pieces of equipment. The same applies to contract law. If it was illegal to possess a piece of equipment that facilitated allowing you to break a contract, we would have to get rid of our brains as well as our computers.
You can get through your entire life without ever needing access to a rocket launcher or a gun, (My grandfather, a Methodist, was in a reserved occupation during WW1 and lived to 90 without ever so much as holding a shotgun), but it is now extremely difficult to get through life in a modern society without ever using a photocopier, camera, or a computer. Since a computer can be used to violate copyright or break a contract out of the box, it is hard to see how modifying it to change slightly the ways in which you could potentially do so would be illegal.
David was born in Tottenham on 19th July, 1972, one of five children raised by a single mother. At eleven years of age, David won a scholarship as a chorister to attend a state choral school at The Kings School in Peterborough. He came back to London in 1990 to study law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Law School. Admitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 1994, David became the first Black Briton to study a Masters in Law at the Harvard Law School in 1997.
David Lammy is black but that is actually coincidental. He comes from a difficult background, raised by a single mother, and became a successful lawyer. On entering Parliament, he has risen very rapidly to a ministerial job. So: both extemely bright, politically active and fast rising progessive charismatic black lawyers with difficult family backgrounds who went to Harvard Law School. Good enough for you? If anybody is likely to be the first black British Prime Minister, DL must be in with a chance.
The Conservative Party is NOT like the Republicans, and the Labour Party is NOT like the Democrats. Or vice versa. There are overlaps, of course, but the political underpinnings are different.
Just as in the US, party affiliation is more about where you grew up and your aspirations than any core beliefs. There are many far-right Labour MPs (like John Reid) and there are many quite left wing Conservatives - very left wing by US standards. The new Mayor of London - not Lord Mayor of the City, please note - is a pro-European Conservative whose social views are so liberal that he could never get elected in the US. Margaret Thatcher had a soft spot for nasty dictators just so long as they did what she wanted, but she would have seen straight through the neocons because at heart she was a Little Englander. The nearest UK equivalent to Barack Obama - David Lammy - is Labour but would fit in well to any of the mainstream parties.
Unfortunately for us, the most influential British political party is the Rupert Murdoch Party, one man one vote and he has the vote. Illiberal legislation is drafted with an eye to getting Murdoch approval. The House of Lords doesn't give a shit about Murdoch (or Rothermere, or the Barclay Brothers, the other right wing media owners). Therefore, they can carry on doing their proper job. But mainstream politicians have bought into the belief that you must have right wing media approval to survive. It seems increasingly sociologists and psephologists don't believe this, but politicians are too busy to listen to them.
This is not correct. UK magistrates' courts may be largely populated by Johnny rich-but-dims who believe the police are there to protect them and keep the lower orders under control, but real judges know better than that. They also know about an influential young woman named Shami Chakrabarti. If you really think the police are trying to stitch you up, apply to Liberty.
The real point about the obsessive, anal-retentive, security obsessed, tabloid influenced, illiberal and incompetent New Labour government is that it makes loud noises because it is rapidly losing influence, not because it is establishing a Stalinist state.
We can run them for years longer than the intended mission, we can even photograph them landing from a satellite, but can we build a toilet that runs reliably in low Earth orbit? We can not. Which must go to show that poop disposal is not rocket science, it is obviously much harder.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to commercialise a technology in volume? Obviously not.
If you actually read up on solar cells instead of sounding off like an idiot, you would know that the cost per watt is dropping quite fast, durability has doubled in the last 5 years, that Sharp are making cells which are nearly twice as efficient as much of the competition and they are being sold as roof panels, that the recently opened German factory can sell everything it makes for many months ahead.
Nobody has ever pretended that a 1 sq M panel would power anything large. There is only so much sunlight, and nobody has ever pretended the second law of thermodynamics would be broken. No-one has ever pretended that 1 sq M panels would cost $1 apiece; you could not make a structure to withstand wind loading that cheaply. There is a huge difference between actual forecasts of an eventual $1 per peak watt, and $1 per sq M. $1 per watt works out at about $140 per sq M for a 14% efficient panel.
To the people who modded this insightful: if you can't tell an obvious troll from engineering reality, plase hand in your geek cards now and go play with Facebook.
Even assuming the correct definition of order of magnitude (5th root of 100, not 10) you are not correct. Diesel-electric drives can achieve nearly 30% thermal efficiency at constant speed. Electric drive may start with a turbine system running as high as 45% thermal efficiency, but then losses in conversion, distribution and re-conversion can reduce that below 30%, even with regenerative braking. There are many benefits to electric drive - including the ability to run in tunnels and dense urban areas, easier monitoring and control, and reduced maintenance costs - but unless you live in France, Finland or Japan, with a high reliance on nuclear power, the emissions will not be reduced as much as you think.
Much as I like trains in principle, it has to be said that trucks are not that bad especially where they can run at constant speed and be Diesel fueled. Problems come when they have to mix with other traffic, and that was the strategic error- not providing dedicated truck lanes and separating them from other traffic. One factor driving up SUV/light truck use, in Europe as well as the US is surely fear of heavy trucks.
However, in many countries exactly the same mistake was made with rail - the traffic pattern meant that passenger trains had to be built to the same shunting capability as freight trains, making passenger trains unnecessarily heavy and lacking in efficiency.
Now we know why everything with carbon fiber in it has to be transparent. It's so you can check those nanotubes are staying right in there. It's not about showing off, it's a safety feature!
Even though I think HP Printing System for Linux is really rather good.
I tried to get an HP A3 inkjet going the other day, using an old P4 box as the print server. I do not consider 100% CPU utilisation while trying to print a PDF to be acceptable, nor do I consider that having to reboot to clear a stuck job is a good idea. And this from a driver of nearly 100MBytes.
There are several other recent HP gripes that are causing me nowadays no longer to recommend HP printers. I guess it will take many years to recover from Fiorina.
Go and look at a container ship, then tell me how you propose to inspect it. Have you any idea how many inspectors would be needed, or how long it would take?
Actually, ants are the least of your worries. It's been pointed out by security specialists that container ships are an ideal way for terrorists to bring in the parts of nuclear weapons. While they're pretending to make things safe at airports, there's a 20-lane superhighway wide open into almost all developed countries, consisting of uninspectable shipping containers and artic trailers. Bomb parts can have their radiation reduced to background levels easily enough, put them in a container full of auto parts and nothing will detect them.
It's one world, for good or bad, and we have to live with it. Blaming foreigners is unlikely to be productive. These things are a cost that we bear because we no longer live in isolated tribal groups or city states, with an average GNP per head of about 600 1980 dollars, or whatever the last estimate was.
Realistically, even a 15kt bomb being exploded by terrorists in the middle of NY or Boston would do less harm to civilisation than natural causes do from time to time, and these ants are equally unlikely to do severe long term damage.
First as tragedy, then as farce. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a disgusting anti-Jewish complete fabrication, but it still gets reprinted by right wing nuts from time to time. This Mormon handbook appears to be genuine, and the Mormons are trying to suppress its publication.
There's a lesson there, but I suspect you can't recite it on the Internet without invoking Godwin's Law.
The last time I was called a "boffin" was by a Reme sergeant in 1982. I remember it well. The sergeant's precise words were "You, Sir, are quite sensible for a boffin" and I asked if I put it on my cv would he sign it?
Onto the serious bit. This proposal is basically a reinvention of the Transputer, lots of little blobs with cpu, memory, and fast communication links. Is this because:
[ ]It's now possible to write software to run on massively parallel machines effectively
[ ]The idea just keeps getting reinvented and abandoned because it's difficult to keep all the connectors working
[ ]Embedded processors today are as powerful as small supercomputers were twenty years ago, whereas desktop and server CPUs haven't scaled up as much in relative terms
[ ]Someone just wants to boast about how many simultaneous processes they can run
[ ]Someone just had a big cancelled order for embedded CPUs and they were cheap
Most of these ideas get killed by insurance costs rather than engineering impracticality. To suggest that an unproven form of transport that is capable of falling out of the sky onto people and resulting in lawsuits is going to be affordable to insure in the United States suggests a happy ignorance of the American legal system and the history of the American medical system. Think of the sound of 1000 Ralph Naders trying to get famous off the back of killing a fledgling industry.
I think the idea is impractical for many other, technical reasons, but litigiousness and insurance are the deadly killers.
I'm not arguing about the validity or otherwise of the row limit, just making an observation because you haven't mentioned SQL as such. You say "I can do a lot of this through straight table queries", but it is quite possible that you can do the whole thing really quite elegantly with a little structured SQL and your ODBC link. The tool for the job is Access in the Microsoft world and OOo Base in the OOo world, but they both act as a translation layer between database and spreadsheet. I have been involved in database translation and linking now on and off for 20 years, and the simple fact is that Access does a better job than farting around with Excel. Once you output your spreadsheet you can do whatever you like with it. You also only need one copy of Access.
Even better than either is Filemaker. The latest version is truly the Swiss Army Knife of database conversion, extraction and analysis. Again you can treat it as pure middleware and pump the result out as Excel if that's what you want. The nice thing about Filemaker is that you can make your middle tier very robust and lock it down so you know no-one has messed with your data between the database and the presentation layer.
Personally, and this is just my prejudice and the way I work, I would never consider any solution that had a spreadsheet involved of more than a few thousand rows. It is just too fragile, too hard to audit and manage.
The fact is that at some point you run out of steam. In the past I have had to extract data from log files with over 1 million rows. I wouldn't use Excel. What is the cutoff point at which a spreadsheet becomes silly? There surely is one.
The "all it would take" bit is huge. Slashdotters frequently have no idea just how big some of the things that they regard as trivial in fact turn out to be. A corporate basically wants to see long term stability from its outsourced support, along with years of experience and huge economies of scale. So you build that and wait three years for the corporate replacement cycle to click in - but when it does, you have been bankrupt for nearly 3 years. It is simply not possible to scale such a business because it is very expensive per seat to provide high quality support in niche markets.
My consultancy is currently working with several support companies who are starting to change their offered product mix. You would simply not believe how slow it is as the culture has to change, the training has to take place, the systems have to evolve. In my view, Apple is right to stay out. Eventually the wheel will turn and the fashion will revert to in house support. Then they will be in with a chance.
The amperage on a Taser is too low by a few orders of magnitude to cause death by electrocution. It will cause central nervous system disruption, which is very uncomfortable, and causes some unusual side effects
Unfortunately this is not true.
Years ago I was responsible for designing a safety interlock system on a piece of high voltage test equipment, and I worked with an officer of the UK H&S executive to achieve compliance.
H&SE have evidence of people being killed by shocks of as little as 2.5mA, and have reason to believe that there is no lower limit. The actual cause is heart fibrillation which can be set off by a very small current in the wrong place.
The standard set for equipment like electric fences for cattle is based on this research, but it is statistical - that is to say, the overall likelihood of deaths from this cause is very small bot non-zero. People fit and active enough to walk across fields are unlikely to die as a result of contacting an electric fence, but people with heart conditions need to be very careful.
In the case of the taser, the electric shock is deliberately caused and the victim has no opportunity to avoid it. This is a different situation . The law needs to reflect the scientific evidence that electric shocks can cause death because otherwise a police officer may be tempted to use on in a non-threatening situation. It must be possible to prosecute police who behave recklessly, and legislating that certain technology is not dangerous removes this protection from the citizen. Unless you are one of those judges who believe that all policemen are totally honest and always have the best interests of society at heart, in which case I have a job for you in China.
This new trend of governments and companies trying to legislate independent experts out of existence is very worrying. In the UK, coroners are identifying the cause of death of soldiers as being due to failures by the MOD - so the MOD wants the law changed to prevent them from doing so. Here we have a company trying to use the law in exactly the same way. The Tesco company (think Wal-Mart only worse) based in the UK is now trying to use criminal libel laws (in Thailand) and ordinary libel laws (in the UK) to prevent investigative journalists reporting on what it gets up to. Macdonalds famously spent a fortune (in the McLibel case) trying to destroy a pair of activists who exposed their practices - they had what is known as a Pyrrhic victory - hundreds of millions of pounds of legal expenses and adverse publicity in exchange for £40000 damages - but still they pursued the case.
Meanwhile we find out that drug companies have been using the full weight of statistical analysis and selective reporting to represent ineffective drugs as being effective. The result is that independent organisations like the NIH and, in the UK, the NICE, have to spend to counter the propaganda.
Perhaps we need to take a leaf out of the book of the Byzantine empire - which was around a lot longer than the British Empire was or the US Empire is likely to last - and restrict the maximum size of any corporation to the point at which it cannot dictate to elected governments. But who is the "we" who any longer have the power to do it?
The efficiency in instructions per joule of the cpu alone may increase somewhat with underclocking, but the efficiency of the system as a whole may not.
This is because the cpu is not the only energy dissipator in the system and the others exceed it. To take a very simple example: I have a build which takes 30 minutes. During that time, the hard drive is on all the time, so is everything on the motherboard. To be very conservative, assume that at maximum speed the cpu uses 50% of system power.
Now I underclock the processor to, say, 60% of normal speed, and am able to reduce the voltage, and hence the power consumption, by 50%. The system power consumption is now only 75% of what it was. But my build takes around 50% longer. So I use 75% of the power for 150% of the time. The energy consumed in the build is 12% higher with the underclocked cpu.
The concept of getting the most processor speed when needed and powering down unused subsystems whenever possible is the one to give the best power saving. As a further example, replacing an old 4200rpm disk on a laptop with a 7200 rpm disk (where possible) may actually improve battery life because the disc is active for much shorter periods (with twice as much data per track, and 12/7 the speed, it can read the same amount of data in roughly 1/3 the time of the slower drive, which outweighs its 50% higher active power.)
It doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Erlang is designed from the ground up for pattern matching rather than computation, because it was designed for use in messaging systems - telecoms, SNMP, now XMPP. Its integer arithmetic is arbitrary precision, which prevents overflow in integer operations at the expense of performance. Its floating point is limited. My early work on a 3-way system used hand coded assembler to drive the interprocess messaging using hardware FIFOs, for Pete's sake, and that was as high performance as you could get - given the huge limitations of trying to write useful functions in assembler.
That in a nutshell is why I suggested that investment in Erlang would be a good idea. It's better to start with the right approach and optimise it, than go off into computer science blue sky and try to design a perfect language for paralleling GPUs - which practically nobody will ever really use.
The only problem is you need a roll of pressure adhesive backed notes because, amazingly, a glue dispenser is just incredibly hard to miniaturise and make reliable.
Look at Dymo labelling machines. They are almost there, just so close. They spit out a label in just over a second. Imagine a yellow version with a weak glue that does exactly what you suggest.
I do wonder if Dymo have already thought of this and it is impeded in some way by patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a CS degree teach games programming? That is application, not science. Games programming involves the skills of real time programming and, I imagine, a good healthy dose of OO (some early graphics subsystems had the objects built in.)
Some "Universities" around London are anything but -basically they teach designing web pages- but to take University College, (disclaimer: family connections) the CS degree includes, after the intro year:
- Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists
- Concurrent Programming
- Logic and Database Theory
- Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction
- Compilers
- Databases, Networks and Graphics
- Mathematics and Statistics
-
Computational Complexity
- Operating Systems
- Technology Management and Professional Issues
- Practical Software Engineering
I've highlighted the stuff that is obviously relevant to games but I hope you get the point. Perhaps the possibilities of working in some of UCL's preferred research areas is actually more fun than games, and seen as more useful to society. Somebody working on, I don't know, controllers and sensor systems for operating theatre robots might feel that his life was more fulfilling than it would be if he was making avatars simulate sex in GTA5.If you had a ship full of vehicles being imported from, say, China or India, and one of them contained a simple U235 nuke, how would you know?
Changing the north and south bridges might increase the battery life by perhaps 20%, depending on the attached peripherals, but it will not double or triple it. In fact, even this may be wrong; you do not know how efficient the chipset is already, and it may not be possible to reduce the power significantly.
The great thing about being a non-elected lord is that you don't have to do and think vile things to get elected. Perhaps it's a sad fact, but true. Years ago, there was a police attack on a number of really quite harmless hippies in Wiltshire. Unfortunately a member of the Lords was passing by on his motorcycle, observed the whole thing and reported it to the Lords. The outcome was not pleasant for the police. I am quite sure that a local elected politician would not have rocked the boat in this way.
Copyright is different. A photocopier, a camera, a computer and in fact a brain,hand and piece of paper are all that are needed to violate copyright. These are all long established to be legal pieces of equipment. The same applies to contract law. If it was illegal to possess a piece of equipment that facilitated allowing you to break a contract, we would have to get rid of our brains as well as our computers.
You can get through your entire life without ever needing access to a rocket launcher or a gun, (My grandfather, a Methodist, was in a reserved occupation during WW1 and lived to 90 without ever so much as holding a shotgun), but it is now extremely difficult to get through life in a modern society without ever using a photocopier, camera, or a computer. Since a computer can be used to violate copyright or break a contract out of the box, it is hard to see how modifying it to change slightly the ways in which you could potentially do so would be illegal.
David Lammy is black but that is actually coincidental. He comes from a difficult background, raised by a single mother, and became a successful lawyer. On entering Parliament, he has risen very rapidly to a ministerial job. So: both extemely bright, politically active and fast rising progessive charismatic black lawyers with difficult family backgrounds who went to Harvard Law School. Good enough for you? If anybody is likely to be the first black British Prime Minister, DL must be in with a chance.
Just as in the US, party affiliation is more about where you grew up and your aspirations than any core beliefs. There are many far-right Labour MPs (like John Reid) and there are many quite left wing Conservatives - very left wing by US standards. The new Mayor of London - not Lord Mayor of the City, please note - is a pro-European Conservative whose social views are so liberal that he could never get elected in the US. Margaret Thatcher had a soft spot for nasty dictators just so long as they did what she wanted, but she would have seen straight through the neocons because at heart she was a Little Englander. The nearest UK equivalent to Barack Obama - David Lammy - is Labour but would fit in well to any of the mainstream parties.
Unfortunately for us, the most influential British political party is the Rupert Murdoch Party, one man one vote and he has the vote. Illiberal legislation is drafted with an eye to getting Murdoch approval. The House of Lords doesn't give a shit about Murdoch (or Rothermere, or the Barclay Brothers, the other right wing media owners). Therefore, they can carry on doing their proper job. But mainstream politicians have bought into the belief that you must have right wing media approval to survive. It seems increasingly sociologists and psephologists don't believe this, but politicians are too busy to listen to them.
The real point about the obsessive, anal-retentive, security obsessed, tabloid influenced, illiberal and incompetent New Labour government is that it makes loud noises because it is rapidly losing influence, not because it is establishing a Stalinist state.
We can run them for years longer than the intended mission, we can even photograph them landing from a satellite, but can we build a toilet that runs reliably in low Earth orbit? We can not. Which must go to show that poop disposal is not rocket science, it is obviously much harder.
If you actually read up on solar cells instead of sounding off like an idiot, you would know that the cost per watt is dropping quite fast, durability has doubled in the last 5 years, that Sharp are making cells which are nearly twice as efficient as much of the competition and they are being sold as roof panels, that the recently opened German factory can sell everything it makes for many months ahead.
Nobody has ever pretended that a 1 sq M panel would power anything large. There is only so much sunlight, and nobody has ever pretended the second law of thermodynamics would be broken. No-one has ever pretended that 1 sq M panels would cost $1 apiece; you could not make a structure to withstand wind loading that cheaply. There is a huge difference between actual forecasts of an eventual $1 per peak watt, and $1 per sq M. $1 per watt works out at about $140 per sq M for a 14% efficient panel.
To the people who modded this insightful: if you can't tell an obvious troll from engineering reality, plase hand in your geek cards now and go play with Facebook.
Much as I like trains in principle, it has to be said that trucks are not that bad especially where they can run at constant speed and be Diesel fueled. Problems come when they have to mix with other traffic, and that was the strategic error- not providing dedicated truck lanes and separating them from other traffic. One factor driving up SUV/light truck use, in Europe as well as the US is surely fear of heavy trucks.
However, in many countries exactly the same mistake was made with rail - the traffic pattern meant that passenger trains had to be built to the same shunting capability as freight trains, making passenger trains unnecessarily heavy and lacking in efficiency.
Now we know why everything with carbon fiber in it has to be transparent. It's so you can check those nanotubes are staying right in there. It's not about showing off, it's a safety feature!
I tried to get an HP A3 inkjet going the other day, using an old P4 box as the print server.
I do not consider 100% CPU utilisation while trying to print a PDF to be acceptable, nor do I consider that having to reboot to clear a stuck job is a good idea. And this from a driver of nearly 100MBytes.
There are several other recent HP gripes that are causing me nowadays no longer to recommend HP printers. I guess it will take many years to recover from Fiorina.
Surely, given that only about 60% of the population is capable of writing a grammatical letter, this is hardly a surprising statistic?
Go and look at a container ship, then tell me how you propose to inspect it. Have you any idea how many inspectors would be needed, or how long it would take?
Actually, ants are the least of your worries. It's been pointed out by security specialists that container ships are an ideal way for terrorists to bring in the parts of nuclear weapons. While they're pretending to make things safe at airports, there's a 20-lane superhighway wide open into almost all developed countries, consisting of uninspectable shipping containers and artic trailers. Bomb parts can have their radiation reduced to background levels easily enough, put them in a container full of auto parts and nothing will detect them.
It's one world, for good or bad, and we have to live with it. Blaming foreigners is unlikely to be productive. These things are a cost that we bear because we no longer live in isolated tribal groups or city states, with an average GNP per head of about 600 1980 dollars, or whatever the last estimate was.
Realistically, even a 15kt bomb being exploded by terrorists in the middle of NY or Boston would do less harm to civilisation than natural causes do from time to time, and these ants are equally unlikely to do severe long term damage.
There's a lesson there, but I suspect you can't recite it on the Internet without invoking Godwin's Law.
Onto the serious bit. This proposal is basically a reinvention of the Transputer, lots of little blobs with cpu, memory, and fast communication links. Is this because:
I think the idea is impractical for many other, technical reasons, but litigiousness and insurance are the deadly killers.
Even better than either is Filemaker. The latest version is truly the Swiss Army Knife of database conversion, extraction and analysis. Again you can treat it as pure middleware and pump the result out as Excel if that's what you want. The nice thing about Filemaker is that you can make your middle tier very robust and lock it down so you know no-one has messed with your data between the database and the presentation layer.
Personally, and this is just my prejudice and the way I work, I would never consider any solution that had a spreadsheet involved of more than a few thousand rows. It is just too fragile, too hard to audit and manage.
The fact is that at some point you run out of steam. In the past I have had to extract data from log files with over 1 million rows. I wouldn't use Excel. What is the cutoff point at which a spreadsheet becomes silly? There surely is one.
My consultancy is currently working with several support companies who are starting to change their offered product mix. You would simply not believe how slow it is as the culture has to change, the training has to take place, the systems have to evolve. In my view, Apple is right to stay out. Eventually the wheel will turn and the fashion will revert to in house support. Then they will be in with a chance.
Years ago I was responsible for designing a safety interlock system on a piece of high voltage test equipment, and I worked with an officer of the UK H&S executive to achieve compliance.
H&SE have evidence of people being killed by shocks of as little as 2.5mA, and have reason to believe that there is no lower limit. The actual cause is heart fibrillation which can be set off by a very small current in the wrong place.
The standard set for equipment like electric fences for cattle is based on this research, but it is statistical - that is to say, the overall likelihood of deaths from this cause is very small bot non-zero. People fit and active enough to walk across fields are unlikely to die as a result of contacting an electric fence, but people with heart conditions need to be very careful.
In the case of the taser, the electric shock is deliberately caused and the victim has no opportunity to avoid it. This is a different situation . The law needs to reflect the scientific evidence that electric shocks can cause death because otherwise a police officer may be tempted to use on in a non-threatening situation. It must be possible to prosecute police who behave recklessly, and legislating that certain technology is not dangerous removes this protection from the citizen. Unless you are one of those judges who believe that all policemen are totally honest and always have the best interests of society at heart, in which case I have a job for you in China.
Meanwhile we find out that drug companies have been using the full weight of statistical analysis and selective reporting to represent ineffective drugs as being effective. The result is that independent organisations like the NIH and, in the UK, the NICE, have to spend to counter the propaganda.
Perhaps we need to take a leaf out of the book of the Byzantine empire - which was around a lot longer than the British Empire was or the US Empire is likely to last - and restrict the maximum size of any corporation to the point at which it cannot dictate to elected governments. But who is the "we" who any longer have the power to do it?
This is because the cpu is not the only energy dissipator in the system and the others exceed it. To take a very simple example: I have a build which takes 30 minutes. During that time, the hard drive is on all the time, so is everything on the motherboard. To be very conservative, assume that at maximum speed the cpu uses 50% of system power.
Now I underclock the processor to, say, 60% of normal speed, and am able to reduce the voltage, and hence the power consumption, by 50%. The system power consumption is now only 75% of what it was. But my build takes around 50% longer. So I use 75% of the power for 150% of the time. The energy consumed in the build is 12% higher with the underclocked cpu.
The concept of getting the most processor speed when needed and powering down unused subsystems whenever possible is the one to give the best power saving. As a further example, replacing an old 4200rpm disk on a laptop with a 7200 rpm disk (where possible) may actually improve battery life because the disc is active for much shorter periods (with twice as much data per track, and 12/7 the speed, it can read the same amount of data in roughly 1/3 the time of the slower drive, which outweighs its 50% higher active power.)
That in a nutshell is why I suggested that investment in Erlang would be a good idea. It's better to start with the right approach and optimise it, than go off into computer science blue sky and try to design a perfect language for paralleling GPUs - which practically nobody will ever really use.
Look at Dymo labelling machines. They are almost there, just so close. They spit out a label in just over a second. Imagine a yellow version with a weak glue that does exactly what you suggest.
I do wonder if Dymo have already thought of this and it is impeded in some way by patents.