The electric car is a good thing because your power plant can burn oil and coal at around 80% efficiency. Your car burns gas at, IIRC, a meager 20%-40%.
This is a common misconception but it's simply not true. The theoretical limit of efficiency is for an internal combustion engine like the one we use in our power plants is 35%. Internal combustion fossil fuel power plants operate at very near that theoretical limit but you have to factor in transmission loss, about 9%, which basically makes them equal to best-case car engine use (about 30%). The problem with today's cars is they often operate far from best-case (idling, downhill slopes, breaking, etc) bringing their efficiency down to 18-23%. This is why hybrid vehicles do so much better. They operate the engines much more intelligently and bring the efficiency up to about 30%. That means that an electric car powered by an fossil fuel power plant uses just about as much fuel as a hybrid car running on gasoline. This says nothing about pollution emissions which will be better from the power plant, but fuel use and CO2 emissions will be roughly the same.
The only way electric/fuel cell based cars are actually a benefit to the environment is if they are powered by nuclear power plants or some other non-poluting technology. Fuel cells in cars won't solve anything by themselves.
It's about time perl6 the language started taking shape. Hopefully it will live up to the hype. Parrot sounds like a great platform on which to build a language and I really like some of the things I've read about perl6 the language. It reamains to be seen how good the threading model will be though. Perl5 recently got semi-usable threading but because it was a retrofit, it has proven a little tough to use. I'm hoping perl6's will be designed to work better with things like mod_perl.
Metric is such a great example of bad engineering and, while appropriate for space exploration, has NO PLACE in the kitchen. They took a system that had been designed, tested, tweaked, and honed over millenia with tons of neet features and benefts and replaced it with one that has one feature, the units are powers of 10 away from each other. All other important features like being multiples of 2 and divisible by 3 and easy to conceptualize and communicate were thrown out. The metric system is great for the very big and very small, but when dealing with every day things in the ranges we deal with in every day life, the imperial system is far superior.
You can look at something and guess it's about a cup, or a pint, or a quart, or a gallon. How many mililiters? Well, it looks like about half way inbetween a pint and a quart so that's about 750 mililiters. It requires an extra step and 2 extra digits and it's bad science since the number has 3 significant digits and it's probably only valid to plus or minus 50%.
To see how basic these units of measurement are, look at the names and how short they are. Cup, inch, pint.
The "imperial" system of measuring volume is MUCH better for cooking.
Also, the imperial system for measuring distance is damn good for things in our every day life. I have a little mental experiment I want to see done on a large scale:
You need to fold something that's 1 foot long into thirds, how long will it be? Conceptualize that size in your mind and put your fingers about that far appart.
Now do the same for something that's half a meter? How long will it be when folded in thirds (without going to imperial units). Put your fingers that far appart.
A foot having 12 inches instead of 10 may seem silly on the surface but 12 is divisible by the the 3 most important numbers: 2, 3 and 4. Units based on mutiples of 10 are great for building 5 sided things like the pentagon but for the rest of us, being evenly divisible by 3 and 4 are important features that the metric system lacks.
As with so many other times when people throw out time tested wisdom, converting every-day measuring to the metric system was a bad idea.
Why don't we, as a society, spend the money to put a few of these things up in orbit and let everyone have access to it like they have with regular over-the-air broadcasts. It would save an aweful lot of people $40 a month.
It would probably do a hell of a lot more good for the economy than a tax cut for the wealthy.
Actually, there's no font defined on the page, it uses whatever font you told your browser to use (as web pages should!)
What's that? You never told your browser what font to use? Maybe you should just change the default to something that doesn't suck. Or maybe you should complain to whoever makes your browser that it's default sucks!
Oh wow do I agree! IPV6's addressing is not well thought out. It's impossible to remember an IPV6 address.
The design seems to work very hard to get rid of DHCP servers. While I understand wanting to make a network able to function without a DHCP server (good idea) they also need to have DHCP so you can avoid the horrible pain those mammoth V6 addresses cause.
Some suggestions just from the few hours I've spent using V6:
Every machine should get an un-routable prefix of all 0's so you can address every machine as::LocalAddress to allow for basic intra-network communication. fe80 is lame. Also, they need to get rid of the bits they insert in the MAC address to get the local address segment (02 and ff:fe.) That was just a bad idea. Why did they mix them up in the middle!?!::MAC would be much better, but also...
DHCP is good! It assigns network addresses that small, arbitrary, and are easy for humans to remember. Using it, you should be able to assign new local sections of IPv6 addresses that are easy to remember. Everything should still have that unroutable prefix of all 0's so machines would get unroutable addresses that look like::2::3::4, etc. That would make me happy. Someone! Please make this happen!
The high bits of addresses (network numbers) that are assigned by ISP's should be handed out Ipv4 addresses are handed out now, but with the lower bits all turned off until the address space is needed. That way the addresses, at least to start, could be really short. By the time we got as many network number's assigned as there are machines on the internet now we'd have network addresses that look like A9F1:B38C:: Totally reasonable. Then, as more addresses are used up, the addresses simply get longer.
Reserve any address starting with 1: through F: as non-internet routable addresses (not to be confused with 0: which shouldn't be routable at all). I know the IPv6 architects hated the concept of non-internet routable addresses but there's a reason they are popular and it's not just that there aren't enough routable IP's. Any machine that doesn't have an internet routable IP is, by default, not on the internet. This can be a very good thing. Masquerading isn't evil either. I don't necessarily want every web site I go to to know exactly what machine I'm accessing it from right down to the MAC address. That's too much information to be giving out. I would like to have be able to use video conferencing on my machine but there are other ways of making that work than exposing my machine to the internet. By reserving all that address space you allow people to create complicated local networks including subnet schemes without having the addresses look horrible (have I mentioned that fe80 is lame?)
Quick and dirty subnets could be done using unroutable addresses i.e. 1::0000-FFFF could be one subnet with up to 65000 machines and 2::0000-FFFF could be a second subnet with up to 65000 machines. This would obviously be quite scalable and yet still yield addresses that are very usable. These subnet addresses wouldn't be internet routable but that's what internet routable subnets are for. If further private sub netting was needed more address space bits could be used i.e. 1:1:: is one subnet 1:2:: is another 2:f:: is a third.
To do internet routable subnets, you could do one of two things. Use the reserved local address segment (which is in the spec now and yields really ugly addresses) or get a range of addresses from your ISP and leave the local subnet address all 0's which makes the addresses nice. Companies could buy blocks of addresses in the high bits i.e. the company who has A9F1:B38C:: could buy A9F1:B38C:0001-FFFF:: if they wanted. That would allow for 65,534 subnets, all with relatively easy addresses. When address ranges get tight, they could end up with just A9F1:B38C:0000-00FF (256
As far as hardware interfaces go... there isn't any.
Exactly. This is precisely my point. There is no standard hardware interface. It's all software and it all requires several layers of drivers and support and BS.
I cant do "cat < cdimage.iso >/dev/cdrom" can I? I can do "cat < floppy.img >/dev/fd0" though.
CD-RW drives require interaction with a high level software api to do writing instead of a low level hardware interface like hard drives, floppy drives, tape drives, zip drives, cd-rom drives, super disks, usb keys, flash disks, etc. This is a limitation that can be overcome.
The first is through ATAPI/MMC by the way of the ide-scsi driver (but more recently without the extra layer, which usually falls to userspace utility cdrecord.
Managing the writing to disks is classicly something an operating system does, not userspace programs. Why is it that OS's don't support writing to CD-RW drives? (XP sort of does, but not in the kernel part of the OS, it's still managed by a userspace app.) What makes them special? If we fixed that, and made them low level read-write devices, we could use them to replace floppies. That's my suggestion.
I don't want to be bullying the world around for diminishing resources 30 years from now, and if that's what you want, I don't want to live in the same country as you. Just no place else to go.
Nor do I. We should keep our education system running well so we can compete legitimately in the world economy. We just need to focus more on it now because we won't be the only ones doing it from here on in. Other, more populous countries know how important good public education is to good economic strength so we'll have more competition out there. This is a bad time to screw up public education.
My point was also that the educational system we have has done a damn good job. We're messing it up slightly these days by investing little in educating our brightest students and instead sucking all of the money away and giving it to "special" education aka the education of our students with the least potential. I'm all for reaching the potential in every child, but let's not forget that the kids who aren't "special" are, in fact, special and worth investing money in too. If we can spend $40,000 a year educating a kid who's greatest achievment will be working at Wal-Mart we can spend one fifth as much educating the gifted kid next to him.
There are issues with our educational system but the theory that it is unfixable is rediculous.
As far as "diminishing resources", don't be so sure about that. I doubt we'll ever find a time where the resources available to us will really be diminishing.
I worry more about our growing economic dependance on "intellecutal property" revenue, i.e. software, movies and music. These things are inherently fragile as any country who wants to, can simply decide not honor our rules and everything is suddenly free for their citizens. Unlike manufacturing capability and engineering skill, these things can't be protected from such perfectly legal actions and therefore make very risky things to build an economy on. It's not hard to imagine a military "IP war" where we invade an autonomous foreign country who perfectly legally decided not to honor our IP laws. I think it's better to focus on doing a good job at making things than it is to try and make fast easy money by owning ideas.
Our education system then was still fine and capable enough to make it so that even these hick farmers unconcerned with world domination read
Why do you think we ended up as a world power? You gain economic strength from having an overeducated populous that seeks to better themselves. That's exactly the state you are describing existed as our dramatic rise in power started.
Also, reading and understanding classic literature isn't nearly as important as most people think it is. Lots of people pine for the good-old days where blah blah blah. The US sucked as a place to live before we pulled ourselves up into an industrial superpower. Electricity, and roads didn't exist. Trains crashed daily killing thousands of people every year. Pollution was horrible, healthcare was virtually non-existant. Life was hard and opportunities for advancing yourself didn't exist.
Maybe Dubya gets off on being a world power, but I'm not sure that serves most of the rest of us.
Well. If you are arround in 20-30 years you'll probably find out how nice it was to be able to economicly bully our way arround the world.
Read the book
Possibly. But more likely I'll just dismiss it as crap like I did with Farenheight 911 and skip it over. I agree with the basic concept of the problem but it sounds like he missed the real root issues and therefor it's just a meanigless rant (in both cases).
That's because they don't need them, they are very simple devices.
This is not design at all
All PC Compatible floppy drives have the same hardware interface. You don't see Linux having trouble keeping up with the flurry of new floppy drive designs hitting the market do you? They defined a simple standard of communication where the hardware underneath is abstracted by a standard interface that works to this day. Nobody defines a standard like that anymore. Everything takes advantage of the flexability of digital communication to make interfaces that are unnecessarily complicated and buggy. I'd say the inteface to a CD writer wasn't designed, it just fell together while the interface to the 1.44 floppy WAS deisgned and designed well. Let's see if the CD-Writer interface is shipping in most new computers roughly 25 years after it was first introduced!
The design of floppy VS cd-rw is kinda like VGA vs DVI-D. Engineering is a creative process, like sculpture and painting. Just because it's newer, doesn't mean it was better engineered.
They're called Zip drives...
I haven't seen a Zip drive yet that's $40 and will read and write 1.44 floppies. They do have BIOS interfaces in most BIOS's which is good but that only helps if the hardware makes sense to buy, which it doesn't. Oh, and not too many $0.50 100mb zip cartridges like there would be if they were CD-RW media based.
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit around all day postulating on how to not help others or do anything else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The American school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of educating their population, they will undoubtedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speak for themselves. The system works!
the education system here is based on some industrial-conformity training system
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit arround all day postulating on how to not help others or do anthing else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The american school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of ecucating their population, they will undoubedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speek for themselves. The system works!
Actually I'm at a loss to explain why CDRW did not become the new floppy, but flash drives have
This is one of the great tragedies of modern computing. It would seem that the problem was not one of economics but of design. Burning a CD, even in packet mode, is very different from writing to a standard block device. It requires complicated device interaction to setup and manage the write operation which varies between drives. With a floppy or hard drive you can simply say "write these x bytes at location y" and it's done. The software interface to a burner is wildly more complicated.
I don't believe floppies should die. I think they are a horribly neglected storage medium who don't have an adaquate replacement and manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves for not coming up with a new standard. I think many people thought CD-RW should replace floppies but failed to recognize that without design changes, they couldn't.
I believe the future of the floppy should be to make a dual capability drive attached via usb2.0/sata to the motherboard. It should have a 2x or 4x floppy drive mechanism to read and write standard 1.44 disks plus the ability to read and write to a new, high density media. It should be able to random write and have the ability to manage the write itself so it can provide a nice low-level interface to software so you could, for example, treat it as a hard drive and read and write to it in DOS without drivers.
The next generation media I envision is essentially small CD-RW media mounted in a floppy style container, slightly thicker than a 1.44 floppy. Full size, un-encased CD's are great for high-density storage of non-unique content but they are highly vulnerable to scratching and thus aren't that good for unique information. The floppy is ok for unique content but it's magnetic and prone to being erased. CD-RW style media inside a dark, dust free, scratch free container would be quite durable and, unlike CD's in . Sure, at the size of a 3.5" floppy it would only hold about 100-200 MB but that's plenty for the unique content most people create. It's 100 times the size of a floppy and floppies are still useful. The best part is that as DVD-RW and higher density storage options show up, you could scale the size of a modern floppy disk like they did back in the old days with the magnetic ones.
The big challenge would be to get the cost down. It would have to cost less than $40 to make it popular but with CD burners down as cheap as they are, I doubt it would be too hard.
What about nuclear waste!
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I'll pre-emptively reply to this one. Smart people should not worry about nuclear waste. Unlike the waste from burning coal, wood, oil, and natural gass, nuclear waste isn't spread out in the atmosphere, it's stored in nice safe little containers and it has a neet trick: nuclear waste dissapears by itself over time. People look at how long it takes to degrade and worry about keeping it contained for that long. Wake up! How long does it take for lead to degrade? How about mercury? How long do you have to wait before it's not dangerous? Are you sure you can keep it safely contained in your lungs until that happens! Your environment is being poisoned today. People are dying today! Birth defects and neurological disorders are happening today and they are't from nuclear power, the power generation methods we have used instead.
Nuclear power can kill, but if you look at it carefully, it doesn't. Nuclear waste is not nearly as hard to deal with as somehting like mecury spewed out into the air.
Why send nukes, just send power!
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What an incredibly bad idea. Take the thing that needs the most security, engineering expertise, technical expertise, and provides the most economic benefit *ever* and send it out of our country. Next thing you know we'll have the "US Department of Shipping high-tech workers to India". Build them here! Employ us! Sell them power.
Except that the cars that have had the biggest impact are "retro" ie: The Dodge Prowler, PT Cruiser, and similar "advances"
Notice, the popular 'retro' cars have the same basic design as regular cars. The Prowler is just a standard min-suv with some cool design elements. The Beatle is just a compact car with a slightly modified shape. Most of the important structural design elements are nothing like real old cars, the are industry standard best practices of today. You don't steer them from the back seat, you don't lie down in them while driving, no gull wing doors, no rocket power, no other stupid ideas, just good solid standard cars. Likewise, while Windows, OSX, Gnome and KDE all have slightly different looks, they all look similar and none of them look stupid.
OSS would not fare well if the only thing between a particular GUI and consumer acceptance is Microsoft's Marketing Machine.
The difference between OSS software and everything that came before is that when it reaches commodity level it has $0 manufacturing costs. If you were a Crest user and the store had bins of Colgate for free, and would always have them for free, forever and ever, would you switch? It's not to hard to figure that one out. There will be plenty of forces to market Linux on the desktop. PC Manufacturers, "Lindows" type value added distributions, etc but also, this is OS's we're talking about here. Does Microsoft's advertising really have any effect on whether you run Windows or not?
While sometimes making a good product seems to have little to do with it's success, I think you'll find that there is such a thing as an informed consumer and more often than not, people concider factors other than marketing in their buying decisions.
No reason to be different just for the sake of being different.
EXACTLY! People seem to get all upset that their "alternative different" thing is becoming just like everything else. Gnome is growing up, get used to it. Gnome isn't trying to be different from Windows, it isn't trying to be the same as Windows, it's trying to do the best job it can at providing an interface. So is Windows, so is Mac OS. Reason dictates that when they all get it right, they'll look very similar.
This is like complaining that a Ford car looks just like a Chevy car. Sure, back in the day they had cool fins and stuff and before that there were all sorts of kooky car designs and I'm sure people bemoaned the loss of each of those interesting design elements. Today, cars all look the same. Why? Because the shapes we have work really well. Why are there no open air hillbilly pickup trucks anymore? Because they suck. Why are there no more giant fins? Because they suck. Why aren't there cars that steer from the back seet? Because it's a dumb idea. Why isn't there some unnecessary other crap in a simple copy dialog? Becuase there shouldn't be.
In every new industry there is a period of great change, of great innovation, immagination, discovery and creation. Then, at the end, the good designs become accepted best practices and comoditization of the industry follows. It happened in electricity, trains, cars, airplains, and telecommunication and it's happening in computers. Things are settling down. Get used to it.
Yes. Yes! YES! I would buy one, but not until the car could fly itself and I could take off from my driveway. Flying cars will require some organizational changes in the air corridors but unlike land based cars, there is no expense to allowing them to travel in different directions at different heights. Setting up rules to manage heavy congestion with vehicles that can't stop will be quite a challenge. I'm looking forward to what the solution will be.
I don't like the naming convention of firstSecondThird. first_second_third is simply more readable
That's personal preference. I personally hate moving my finger so far out of the letters to get to the underscore. Also, nothing stops you from naming things in java any old way you like.
Java's naming convention is all through the standard libraries, you can't really avoid it. You either use it or end up with code that has multiple naming conventions which is even worse for readability. The first_second_third method of naming which while it may be slightly harder to type, is better for readability and readability is very important in languages.
I believe that the only sufficient documentation for code is code.
Here, you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
Don't I? Have you never run across documentation in source code that wasn't updated properly when the code was changed or simply was wrong from the start? Reading only comments is necessarily insufficient for understanding a program. Furthermore, if the program can be written in such a way that it's just as easy to read the code as the comments, it's redundant.
Comments can be wrong and never telly you precisely what is happening so a good programmer never relies on them, you have to read the code to figure out what is going on.
And code can be obtuse and completely unreadable, forcing you to spend hours deciphering what someone tried to write in a blur of speed.
But one of the goals of a language is to make code easy to read. Much of source code's roll is about people telling other people how to get computers to do things and as such, it should work like a natural human language. Some languages are better at this than others. C, for example, is notorious for requiring pages of code for something that in English would be described as "split this line up on spaces and put the first thing in this variable, and the second thing in that one, etc.." One of the measures of the quality of a language is how easy it is to read. Some of that depends on the programmer but a lot of it depends on how the language is structured and what operators it has. Java does OK there but is not exceptional. Python, for example, is much better.
You can make an ugly mess out of any language. As a perl devotee you cannot disagree.
True. Much of perl's bad reputation is that people often port shell scripts to it when the shell language just isn't quite good enough and the resulting mess is completely unmaintainable. This isn't an issue with the language but it does make it look bad. Of course, it's also not just the programmer's faults. Perl has some ugly things in it's language too.
You can't deny that there are things inherently inside the languages that affect readability.
As computers mature and standardize less code will be written from scratch and more will be read and slightly modified. In the future, a language's readability will be even more important to productivity than it is now. As such, it is possibly the most important aspect of language design.
I agree with all your comments except that people like Java the language. I don't like Java the language. People usually dissmiss my objections to Java once I tell them I'm a perl guy but many of them are legitimate. Java is good but I have some serious gripes with it:
I don't like the naming convention of firstSecondThird. first_second_third is simply more readable.
I do like . notation and I'm happy it's spread to every other language.
I don't like try, catch. It's important to roll up errors but try, catch just turns into a mess usually. Perl's "or die()" way of doing things isn't great but I do like it better.
I don't like strongly typed languages. Dealing with an overloaded object as a basic type that automatically does what you would do normally, usually requiring less variable names and code is a win.
There's too much overhead in Java. I believe that the only sufficient documentation for code is code. Comments can be wrong and never telly you precicely what is happening so a good programmer never relies on them, you have to read the code to figure out what is going on. Having to read through lots of overhead is a waste of programmers time. Things should be represented consisely so they can be read and understood quickly. Lots of programmers have a hard time with perl because it's so dense but I'd rather read a 1 line regex than a 20 line function that does the same thing any day.
Perl and Java are kindred spirits. They both compile to bytecode and run on VM's. They are both highly portable unless you use something OS specific. They were built for different reasons and definitely have different streangs but their architecture is similar. The language of perl5 predates Java and is slightly less advanced in many ways but they got many things fundamentally right that Java got wrong. The changes in the language for perl6 have fixed all the glaring issues I've seen with the and has added lots of new improvements that make it make it an example of how to do a language right.
From what I've seen, perl6 the language is superior to Java the language. It remains to be seen how perl6 the platform will compare.
It's time to build a G2 (gnutella 2) like network for phone conversations with nice hard encryption on top of it. It should rely on a public/private key pair where the public key is your unique ID and your "phone number" is mapped to it via a DNS scheme like reverse DNS's.
A third party can have a huge pull over the parties, if they *use* the leveradge they have. In 2000 Nader's party could have thrown the election decisively one way or another. They could have used that power to negotiate with the parties forcing consessions on important issues. They didn't and instead squandered all those votes. What we need is an aggressive third party that will force the Democrats and Republicans to stop screwing the general puplic to benefit large corporations.
There are huge lobbying organizations throwing support behind candidates (coal, hollywood, microsoft, steel, teamsters, big finance, etc) but that support has strings attached and the organizations get legislation in return for their support. It's time for a third party to do the same thing, to work winthin the current system to force the parties to do what is fair and benefits *the people* not what benefits specific existing corporations and groups. If the parties don't go allong, throw your support behind the challenger. If the parties start figuring out that their guy doesn't stay in office unless they do what we want, they'll start to listen.
Allowing a companies to own empolyee's ideas not directly related to their jobs is bad economic and legal policy.
It's bad economic policy because as a salaried employee, you probably don't have the power or inceintive to make your idea succeed. Most companies don't give empoyees time to work on their ideas and make them into products and even if they did, the reward rarely justifies the effort. The idea is unlikely to grow inside the company and having the comany own it removes the incentive for the employee to develop it on their own. This destroys ideas and innovation and causes them to be stillborn. Allowing companies to own employee ideas doesn't benefit the company, it just hurts the employee and the economy as a whole.
It's bad legal policy because freedom is important and people should not have their thoughts stolen from them.
There should be laws that say companies *can not* own any ideas that aren't directly related to the work an employee does at a company. I think there are in many states (does anyone know which.) It seems that wouldn't have helped this person so maybe the laws should also include a clause about if a company doesn't use an invention they got from an employee before they separate from the company, they lose it.
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This is a common misconception but it's simply not true. The theoretical limit of efficiency is for an internal combustion engine like the one we use in our power plants is 35%. Internal combustion fossil fuel power plants operate at very near that theoretical limit but you have to factor in transmission loss, about 9%, which basically makes them equal to best-case car engine use (about 30%). The problem with today's cars is they often operate far from best-case (idling, downhill slopes, breaking, etc) bringing their efficiency down to 18-23%. This is why hybrid vehicles do so much better. They operate the engines much more intelligently and bring the efficiency up to about 30%. That means that an electric car powered by an fossil fuel power plant uses just about as much fuel as a hybrid car running on gasoline. This says nothing about pollution emissions which will be better from the power plant, but fuel use and CO2 emissions will be roughly the same.
The only way electric/fuel cell based cars are actually a benefit to the environment is if they are powered by nuclear power plants or some other non-poluting technology. Fuel cells in cars won't solve anything by themselves.
Good stats on fuel efficiency
Second law of thermodynamics wrt. internal combustion
It's about time perl6 the language started taking shape. Hopefully it will live up to the hype. Parrot sounds like a great platform on which to build a language and I really like some of the things I've read about perl6 the language. It reamains to be seen how good the threading model will be though. Perl5 recently got semi-usable threading but because it was a retrofit, it has proven a little tough to use. I'm hoping perl6's will be designed to work better with things like mod_perl.
You can look at something and guess it's about a cup, or a pint, or a quart, or a gallon. How many mililiters? Well, it looks like about half way inbetween a pint and a quart so that's about 750 mililiters. It requires an extra step and 2 extra digits and it's bad science since the number has 3 significant digits and it's probably only valid to plus or minus 50%.
To see how basic these units of measurement are, look at the names and how short they are. Cup, inch, pint.
The "imperial" system of measuring volume is MUCH better for cooking.
Also, the imperial system for measuring distance is damn good for things in our every day life. I have a little mental experiment I want to see done on a large scale: A foot having 12 inches instead of 10 may seem silly on the surface but 12 is divisible by the the 3 most important numbers: 2, 3 and 4. Units based on mutiples of 10 are great for building 5 sided things like the pentagon but for the rest of us, being evenly divisible by 3 and 4 are important features that the metric system lacks.
As with so many other times when people throw out time tested wisdom, converting every-day measuring to the metric system was a bad idea.
Why don't we, as a society, spend the money to put a few of these things up in orbit and let everyone have access to it like they have with regular over-the-air broadcasts. It would save an aweful lot of people $40 a month.
It would probably do a hell of a lot more good for the economy than a tax cut for the wealthy.
sans serif fonts
Actually, there's no font defined on the page, it uses whatever font you told your browser to use (as web pages should!)
What's that? You never told your browser what font to use? Maybe you should just change the default to something that doesn't suck. Or maybe you should complain to whoever makes your browser that it's default sucks!
The design seems to work very hard to get rid of DHCP servers. While I understand wanting to make a network able to function without a DHCP server (good idea) they also need to have DHCP so you can avoid the horrible pain those mammoth V6 addresses cause.
Some suggestions just from the few hours I've spent using V6:
When address ranges get tight, they could end up with just A9F1:B38C:0000-00FF (256
As far as hardware interfaces go... there isn't any.
/dev/cdrom" can I? /dev/fd0" though.
Exactly. This is precisely my point. There is no standard hardware interface. It's all software and it all requires several layers of drivers and support and BS.
I cant do "cat < cdimage.iso >
I can do "cat < floppy.img >
CD-RW drives require interaction with a high level software api to do writing instead of a low level hardware interface like hard drives, floppy drives, tape drives, zip drives, cd-rom drives, super disks, usb keys, flash disks, etc. This is a limitation that can be overcome.
The first is through ATAPI/MMC by the way of the ide-scsi driver (but more recently without the extra layer, which usually falls to userspace utility cdrecord.
Managing the writing to disks is classicly something an operating system does, not userspace programs. Why is it that OS's don't support writing to CD-RW drives? (XP sort of does, but not in the kernel part of the OS, it's still managed by a userspace app.) What makes them special? If we fixed that, and made them low level read-write devices, we could use them to replace floppies. That's my suggestion.
I don't want to be bullying the world around for diminishing resources 30 years from now, and if that's what you want, I don't want to live in the same country as you. Just no place else to go.
Nor do I. We should keep our education system running well so we can compete legitimately in the world economy. We just need to focus more on it now because we won't be the only ones doing it from here on in. Other, more populous countries know how important good public education is to good economic strength so we'll have more competition out there. This is a bad time to screw up public education.
My point was also that the educational system we have has done a damn good job. We're messing it up slightly these days by investing little in educating our brightest students and instead sucking all of the money away and giving it to "special" education aka the education of our students with the least potential. I'm all for reaching the potential in every child, but let's not forget that the kids who aren't "special" are, in fact, special and worth investing money in too. If we can spend $40,000 a year educating a kid who's greatest achievment will be working at Wal-Mart we can spend one fifth as much educating the gifted kid next to him.
There are issues with our educational system but the theory that it is unfixable is rediculous.
As far as "diminishing resources", don't be so sure about that. I doubt we'll ever find a time where the resources available to us will really be diminishing.
I worry more about our growing economic dependance on "intellecutal property" revenue, i.e. software, movies and music. These things are inherently fragile as any country who wants to, can simply decide not honor our rules and everything is suddenly free for their citizens. Unlike manufacturing capability and engineering skill, these things can't be protected from such perfectly legal actions and therefore make very risky things to build an economy on. It's not hard to imagine a military "IP war" where we invade an autonomous foreign country who perfectly legally decided not to honor our IP laws. I think it's better to focus on doing a good job at making things than it is to try and make fast easy money by owning ideas.
Our education system then was still fine and capable enough to make it so that even these hick farmers unconcerned with world domination read
Why do you think we ended up as a world power? You gain economic strength from having an overeducated populous that seeks to better themselves. That's exactly the state you are describing existed as our dramatic rise in power started.
Also, reading and understanding classic literature isn't nearly as important as most people think it is. Lots of people pine for the good-old days where blah blah blah. The US sucked as a place to live before we pulled ourselves up into an industrial superpower. Electricity, and roads didn't exist. Trains crashed daily killing thousands of people every year. Pollution was horrible, healthcare was virtually non-existant. Life was hard and opportunities for advancing yourself didn't exist.
Maybe Dubya gets off on being a world power, but I'm not sure that serves most of the rest of us.
Well. If you are arround in 20-30 years you'll probably find out how nice it was to be able to economicly bully our way arround the world.
Read the book
Possibly. But more likely I'll just dismiss it as crap like I did with Farenheight 911 and skip it over. I agree with the basic concept of the problem but it sounds like he missed the real root issues and therefor it's just a meanigless rant (in both cases).
Floppy drives have next to zero internal smarts
That's because they don't need them, they are very simple devices.
This is not design at all
All PC Compatible floppy drives have the same hardware interface. You don't see Linux having trouble keeping up with the flurry of new floppy drive designs hitting the market do you? They defined a simple standard of communication where the hardware underneath is abstracted by a standard interface that works to this day. Nobody defines a standard like that anymore. Everything takes advantage of the flexability of digital communication to make interfaces that are unnecessarily complicated and buggy. I'd say the inteface to a CD writer wasn't designed, it just fell together while the interface to the 1.44 floppy WAS deisgned and designed well. Let's see if the CD-Writer interface is shipping in most new computers roughly 25 years after it was first introduced!
The design of floppy VS cd-rw is kinda like VGA vs DVI-D. Engineering is a creative process, like sculpture and painting. Just because it's newer, doesn't mean it was better engineered.
They're called Zip drives...
I haven't seen a Zip drive yet that's $40 and will read and write 1.44 floppies. They do have BIOS interfaces in most BIOS's which is good but that only helps if the hardware makes sense to buy, which it doesn't. Oh, and not too many $0.50 100mb zip cartridges like there would be if they were CD-RW media based.
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit around all day postulating on how to not help others or do anything else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The American school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of educating their population, they will undoubtedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speak for themselves. The system works!
the education system here is based on some industrial-conformity training system
Of course a public education is designed to make you a productive member of society! What else would it be for? To generate a bunch of arrogant pratts that sit arround all day postulating on how to not help others or do anthing else useful? No! That's the job of law school! Public education's goal is not make the most of every student but to make them productive members of a society. In the lower grades, this almost always coincides with making the most of every child which is why education in the lower grades seems the most productive. High school, on the other hand, has a hard time since by then, most people should really start specializing but there are still lots of generic things to learn (english, history, economics) so they keep teaching those and put off the specializing until later.
Just because the school system is non-optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't do a good job. The power of any nation can be directly linked to the quality of it's educational system. Despite the amazing technology that exists today some nations still can't pull themselves out of horrible economic conditions and that's largely due to an uneducated population. The american school system, despite it's faults, has kept us as a dominant world power for nearly a century. As other, much more populous countries catch on to the power of ecucating their population, they will undoubedly follow suit and we will lose our position as the dominant world power but for now, the results speek for themselves. The system works!
SuperDisk's were proprietary technology that they wanted money to license. It would be important for this to be an industry standard like CD-RW.
Also, I thought SuperDisk's were magnito-optical not optical. The media was expensive. CD-RW based media would be cheap.
Actually I'm at a loss to explain why CDRW did not become the new floppy, but flash drives have
This is one of the great tragedies of modern computing. It would seem that the problem was not one of economics but of design. Burning a CD, even in packet mode, is very different from writing to a standard block device. It requires complicated device interaction to setup and manage the write operation which varies between drives. With a floppy or hard drive you can simply say "write these x bytes at location y" and it's done. The software interface to a burner is wildly more complicated.
I don't believe floppies should die. I think they are a horribly neglected storage medium who don't have an adaquate replacement and manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves for not coming up with a new standard. I think many people thought CD-RW should replace floppies but failed to recognize that without design changes, they couldn't.
I believe the future of the floppy should be to make a dual capability drive attached via usb2.0/sata to the motherboard. It should have a 2x or 4x floppy drive mechanism to read and write standard 1.44 disks plus the ability to read and write to a new, high density media. It should be able to random write and have the ability to manage the write itself so it can provide a nice low-level interface to software so you could, for example, treat it as a hard drive and read and write to it in DOS without drivers.
The next generation media I envision is essentially small CD-RW media mounted in a floppy style container, slightly thicker than a 1.44 floppy. Full size, un-encased CD's are great for high-density storage of non-unique content but they are highly vulnerable to scratching and thus aren't that good for unique information. The floppy is ok for unique content but it's magnetic and prone to being erased. CD-RW style media inside a dark, dust free, scratch free container would be quite durable and, unlike CD's in . Sure, at the size of a 3.5" floppy it would only hold about 100-200 MB but that's plenty for the unique content most people create. It's 100 times the size of a floppy and floppies are still useful. The best part is that as DVD-RW and higher density storage options show up, you could scale the size of a modern floppy disk like they did back in the old days with the magnetic ones.
The big challenge would be to get the cost down. It would have to cost less than $40 to make it popular but with CD burners down as cheap as they are, I doubt it would be too hard.
I'll pre-emptively reply to this one. Smart people should not worry about nuclear waste. Unlike the waste from burning coal, wood, oil, and natural gass, nuclear waste isn't spread out in the atmosphere, it's stored in nice safe little containers and it has a neet trick: nuclear waste dissapears by itself over time. People look at how long it takes to degrade and worry about keeping it contained for that long. Wake up! How long does it take for lead to degrade? How about mercury? How long do you have to wait before it's not dangerous? Are you sure you can keep it safely contained in your lungs until that happens! Your environment is being poisoned today. People are dying today! Birth defects and neurological disorders are happening today and they are't from nuclear power, the power generation methods we have used instead.
Nuclear power can kill, but if you look at it carefully, it doesn't. Nuclear waste is not nearly as hard to deal with as somehting like mecury spewed out into the air.
What an incredibly bad idea. Take the thing that needs the most security, engineering expertise, technical expertise, and provides the most economic benefit *ever* and send it out of our country. Next thing you know we'll have the "US Department of Shipping high-tech workers to India". Build them here! Employ us! Sell them power.
Except that the cars that have had the biggest impact are "retro" ie: The Dodge Prowler, PT Cruiser, and similar "advances"
Notice, the popular 'retro' cars have the same basic design as regular cars. The Prowler is just a standard min-suv with some cool design elements. The Beatle is just a compact car with a slightly modified shape. Most of the important structural design elements are nothing like real old cars, the are industry standard best practices of today. You don't steer them from the back seat, you don't lie down in them while driving, no gull wing doors, no rocket power, no other stupid ideas, just good solid standard cars. Likewise, while Windows, OSX, Gnome and KDE all have slightly different looks, they all look similar and none of them look stupid.
OSS would not fare well if the only thing between a particular GUI and consumer acceptance is Microsoft's Marketing Machine.
The difference between OSS software and everything that came before is that when it reaches commodity level it has $0 manufacturing costs. If you were a Crest user and the store had bins of Colgate for free, and would always have them for free, forever and ever, would you switch? It's not to hard to figure that one out. There will be plenty of forces to market Linux on the desktop. PC Manufacturers, "Lindows" type value added distributions, etc but also, this is OS's we're talking about here. Does Microsoft's advertising really have any effect on whether you run Windows or not?
While sometimes making a good product seems to have little to do with it's success, I think you'll find that there is such a thing as an informed consumer and more often than not, people concider factors other than marketing in their buying decisions.
No reason to be different just for the sake of being different.
EXACTLY! People seem to get all upset that their "alternative different" thing is becoming just like everything else. Gnome is growing up, get used to it. Gnome isn't trying to be different from Windows, it isn't trying to be the same as Windows, it's trying to do the best job it can at providing an interface. So is Windows, so is Mac OS. Reason dictates that when they all get it right, they'll look very similar.
This is like complaining that a Ford car looks just like a Chevy car. Sure, back in the day they had cool fins and stuff and before that there were all sorts of kooky car designs and I'm sure people bemoaned the loss of each of those interesting design elements. Today, cars all look the same. Why? Because the shapes we have work really well. Why are there no open air hillbilly pickup trucks anymore? Because they suck. Why are there no more giant fins? Because they suck. Why aren't there cars that steer from the back seet? Because it's a dumb idea. Why isn't there some unnecessary other crap in a simple copy dialog? Becuase there shouldn't be.
In every new industry there is a period of great change, of great innovation, immagination, discovery and creation. Then, at the end, the good designs become accepted best practices and comoditization of the industry follows. It happened in electricity, trains, cars, airplains, and telecommunication and it's happening in computers. Things are settling down. Get used to it.
Yes. Yes! YES! I would buy one, but not until the car could fly itself and I could take off from my driveway. Flying cars will require some organizational changes in the air corridors but unlike land based cars, there is no expense to allowing them to travel in different directions at different heights. Setting up rules to manage heavy congestion with vehicles that can't stop will be quite a challenge. I'm looking forward to what the solution will be.
Don't I? Have you never run across documentation in source code that wasn't updated properly when the code was changed or simply was wrong from the start? Reading only comments is necessarily insufficient for understanding a program. Furthermore, if the program can be written in such a way that it's just as easy to read the code as the comments, it's redundant.
But one of the goals of a language is to make code easy to read. Much of source code's roll is about people telling other people how to get computers to do things and as such, it should work like a natural human language. Some languages are better at this than others. C, for example, is notorious for requiring pages of code for something that in English would be described as "split this line up on spaces and put the first thing in this variable, and the second thing in that one, etc.." One of the measures of the quality of a language is how easy it is to read. Some of that depends on the programmer but a lot of it depends on how the language is structured and what operators it has. Java does OK there but is not exceptional. Python, for example, is much better.
You can make an ugly mess out of any language. As a perl devotee you cannot disagree.
True. Much of perl's bad reputation is that people often port shell scripts to it when the shell language just isn't quite good enough and the resulting mess is completely unmaintainable. This isn't an issue with the language but it does make it look bad. Of course, it's also not just the programmer's faults. Perl has some ugly things in it's language too.
You can't deny that there are things inherently inside the languages that affect readability.
As computers mature and standardize less code will be written from scratch and more will be read and slightly modified. In the future, a language's readability will be even more important to productivity than it is now. As such, it is possibly the most important aspect of language design.
This sounds more like a bad joke about girlfriends than a business.
Perl and Java are kindred spirits. They both compile to bytecode and run on VM's. They are both highly portable unless you use something OS specific. They were built for different reasons and definitely have different streangs but their architecture is similar. The language of perl5 predates Java and is slightly less advanced in many ways but they got many things fundamentally right that Java got wrong. The changes in the language for perl6 have fixed all the glaring issues I've seen with the and has added lots of new improvements that make it make it an example of how to do a language right.
From what I've seen, perl6 the language is superior to Java the language. It remains to be seen how perl6 the platform will compare.
It's time to build a G2 (gnutella 2) like network for phone conversations with nice hard encryption on top of it. It should rely on a public/private key pair where the public key is your unique ID and your "phone number" is mapped to it via a DNS scheme like reverse DNS's.
A third party can have a huge pull over the parties, if they *use* the leveradge they have. In 2000 Nader's party could have thrown the election decisively one way or another. They could have used that power to negotiate with the parties forcing consessions on important issues. They didn't and instead squandered all those votes. What we need is an aggressive third party that will force the Democrats and Republicans to stop screwing the general puplic to benefit large corporations.
There are huge lobbying organizations throwing support behind candidates (coal, hollywood, microsoft, steel, teamsters, big finance, etc) but that support has strings attached and the organizations get legislation in return for their support. It's time for a third party to do the same thing, to work winthin the current system to force the parties to do what is fair and benefits *the people* not what benefits specific existing corporations and groups. If the parties don't go allong, throw your support behind the challenger. If the parties start figuring out that their guy doesn't stay in office unless they do what we want, they'll start to listen.
Allowing a companies to own empolyee's ideas not directly related to their jobs is bad economic and legal policy.
It's bad economic policy because as a salaried employee, you probably don't have the power or inceintive to make your idea succeed. Most companies don't give empoyees time to work on their ideas and make them into products and even if they did, the reward rarely justifies the effort. The idea is unlikely to grow inside the company and having the comany own it removes the incentive for the employee to develop it on their own. This destroys ideas and innovation and causes them to be stillborn. Allowing companies to own employee ideas doesn't benefit the company, it just hurts the employee and the economy as a whole.
It's bad legal policy because freedom is important and people should not have their thoughts stolen from them.
There should be laws that say companies *can not* own any ideas that aren't directly related to the work an employee does at a company. I think there are in many states (does anyone know which.) It seems that wouldn't have helped this person so maybe the laws should also include a clause about if a company doesn't use an invention they got from an employee before they separate from the company, they lose it.