You do realize that burning gasoline in your car engine doesn't change the mass of anything, right? That the mass of gas burned + mass of intake air = mass of exhaust?
And must like a catalytic converter will "burn" exhaust further, by subjecting it to different conditions, a star will briefly burn its own exhaust in the immense energy density that briefly exists as the star falls in on itself and reaches peak pressure before rebounding. All elements heavier than iron come from these brief moments in the large supernovas.
There's no such thing as a "big oil" company any more - the big guys are all "energy" companies and care as much about natural gas. In places where electricity comes from natural gas, the energy companies may make more per mile from the Tesla than a gas-burner (maybe not this year, since natural gas is so cheap right now, but the logistics from oil drill to gas pump are complex and expensive, compared to selling natural gas to power companies).
The difference with stocks is: they represent control of the means of production (at least, stocks in company with an actual product or service in the market). There's something real underneath a stock share.
Actually, as bitcoin starts to gain acceptance it becomes less of a lottery as well. Currency speculation is just gambling, but a small amount of savings in any stable currency can be wise. It will be interesting to see whether bitcoin stabilizes soon - it's still all over the place even compared with gold, which is notoriously speculator-driven in the short term.
As much as I enjoy laughing at politicians, there's a less funny side to all of this: there's apparently no security for this website at all. We heard early on that they had skipped the security audit required of all government websites, but I've been on projects that did the security audit a bit after launch to make a date, so I won't throw stones.
However, we're seeing a wide range of security experts, spanning the credibility spectrum from the sort who give testimony to congress, to MacAfee his own bad self, warning of critical security flaws in Healthcare.gov. That sounds like they didn't just skip the final audit, but the entire security lifecycle - and it's freaking hard to "add security after the fact" to anything! This is massive identity theft waiting to happen, which isn't funny at all.
Actually most went to android, because dumb people cant afford apple.
What does "able to afford" have to do with American purchasing habits in any way? The mostly-unemployed "occupy" crowd was very Apple-dominated from what we saw: it's the hipsters version of the $400 tennis shoes that were common in the poor urban school I went to.
You know what they say about the very best, true genius inventions in the world? "I could have thought of that!" All the very best ideas are blindingly obvious in hindsight.
At the time, OS/2's Workplace Shell was an amazing object oriented desktop with independent folder color settings, folder background settings, developer inheritance so all the bells/whistles you expect from a folder would be part of a new folder which might have a split view.
Microsoft always did make products for non-geeks. From the start of/. this has made geeks fly off in a rage whenever MS dominates the market, but that's nonsense: of course the mainstream market isn't what geeks want. Now, when Ubuntu does the same thing? I'm joining in the nerdrage there, to be sure.
I think these social sites require something that looks like a real name, not a handle, mostly so the don't seem geeky. You'll probably find an "Oliver Klosov" on all of them, however.
Oh, yeah, you definitely still have control by those with too much time to kill, but at least the reader sees the whole picture. I think most people in the West, to use your example, would be shocked by the "Evil Zionist Menace" page and enlightened in ways that the page "owners" didn't intend. It would be more educational all around, IMO.
I'd say the taskbar is one great piece of UI advancement that MS can claim credit for. The start menu was just cleaning up the Win 3.1 clutter of nested icons into a standard menu tree, and nothing all that original, but the taskbar was special. I still force my new version of Windows into the Win2k/XP style of one-click-to-change-focus (the new combined button approach in Windows and Unity where it's 2+ clicks really annoys me).
Light-carrying fiber is slower than copper (5ns/m vs 4 for copper) - it sort of has to be, as the higher impedance goes hand-in-hand with the need for total internal reflection at the boundary of the clear plastic. Optical helps with band-width-per-strand, not with latency.
I think the next decade of advances will be very much about power efficiency, and very little about clock rate on high-end CPUs. That will benefit both mobile and supercomputers, as power are power-constrained (supercomputers by the heat rather than the raw power, but it works out to the same thing).
Yes, the difference now is reaching the limits of physics, and even with something better than CMOS there's not much headroom. There's only so much state you can represent with one atom, and we're not that far off.
I think the progress we'll see in the coming decades will be very minor in speed of traditional computers, significant in power consumption, and huge in areas like quantum computing, which are not incremental refinements of what we're so good at today.
Our tools are nearly as fast as they reasonably can be, but that's not to say there aren't important gains to be had from different kinds of tools.
A better platform would have multiple pages for contentions issues. For most of Wikipedia, there's no drama, and it's a good source of information. But for the remainder, often the most interesting parts, there is constant drama, page locks, revert wars, and so on. All of that should be solved by admitting that Wikipedia doesn't list "facts", it lists "consensus opinions", and where there's no consensus it needs to let each side have it's page.
Note at the top in bold text which page represents the consensus of published scientists, where that's available, and leave the rest to the readers' judgement.
Wow, "blood money"? Get over yourself. Microsoft's "acquisition and destruction of companies" is the normal way all big tech companies work. They buy startups, and try to do something useful with whatever the startup made and dominate that market. Everything in Silly Valley revolves around this practice - almost all innovation happens in startups, but bringing a product to the world market is capital intensive and often requires a large and established sales force, so small companies get bought by the big players to sell that product to everyone.
My doctor's office takes a blood and urine test and sends it to the lab himself. Then he reviews them to see whether they show any reason for further intervention, and gives me a copy. My insurance covers it. Under Obamacare, all the insurance companies will cover recommended tests with no copayments, so you won't be saving any money.
Ahh, you do it the expansive way, but since the cost doesn't come out of your personal pocket, you close your eyes and pretend the cost isn't there. No need to do things cheaply when someone else is paying, right?
Except you're fundamentally wrong about that: different health care strategies (single payer, obamacare, cash up front) change how care is rationed, but the point is to have more total care. Instead of fighting over who gets the MRI machine this week, it's far better to eliminate the rationing entirely by incentivizing the price of an MRI to fall to where no one needs to wait.
Technological progress is great for stuff like that. Don't be confused by "prices in dollars", what will matter to the nation/world as a whole is total availability of care, and the easier it is (less labor, less capital) to provide any given care the more there will be to go around for everyone.
Sure, but part of the point of technology is to reduce the skill needed to use equipment. Flu shots at the pharmacy are great progress. This blood testing the same. If we could get the capital cost for an MRI down low enough, I don't see why you couldn't get a scan at the pharmacy as well.
Windows phone 8 isn't WinCE based, is the point. It's an entirely new OS, and it's very much like the difference between WinME and WinXP: a whole different world, with none of the old problems, but some new ones.
Really, the whole Metro UI is fine for a smart phone - at least for what I use my android for, I don't know what I'd complain about. The only functional difference I can see is for folks who want to root their phones and hack on them.
Bill Gates is spending around $1B a year through his charity, much of it to eliminate malaria from the planet. Meanwhile, biotech startups and big pharma R&D groups collectively burn way more than $100 MM/year on research. Healthcare is over 1/6th of the US economy - leave a little for fun, yeah?
Wow, I can't believe I fell for the "why are we spending money on this when people are dying of cancer" troll that is older than/.'s mod system.
You should really get over that whole Windows 95 thing, you're getting to old to carry a grudge that heavy. They had NT back then if you wanted a real OS. Ahh, playing StarCraft on WinNT, those were the days (sure, it was the only real game that used DirectX back then, but that was one more real game than Linux had).
Well, WinCE is a different story - I mean, even MS called it "wince". The newer ones seems fine to me, if still lacking apps, but maybe I'm a bad sample since I mostly use my phone to make calls, and as a kindle/audible/media player.
How do you think tests always work? The doctor sends you out to get tested, you get the test results, and the doctor explains them to you. Getting them at Walmart instead of paying $400 at some "lab" in a strip mall changes nothing except price.
Wow, I like the way you chopped off what you were quoting just a few words short of the full quote that would have refuted your point. Well trolled, sir, well trolled.
Depends a lot on how finicky the positioning is, and how important sliders are. MOO1 wouldn't work at all on touch (the whole game seemed like finicky sliders), for example. But yeah, I'm sure there are many that would work just fine as is.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that burning gasoline in your car engine doesn't change the mass of anything, right? That the mass of gas burned + mass of intake air = mass of exhaust?
And must like a catalytic converter will "burn" exhaust further, by subjecting it to different conditions, a star will briefly burn its own exhaust in the immense energy density that briefly exists as the star falls in on itself and reaches peak pressure before rebounding. All elements heavier than iron come from these brief moments in the large supernovas.
There's no such thing as a "big oil" company any more - the big guys are all "energy" companies and care as much about natural gas. In places where electricity comes from natural gas, the energy companies may make more per mile from the Tesla than a gas-burner (maybe not this year, since natural gas is so cheap right now, but the logistics from oil drill to gas pump are complex and expensive, compared to selling natural gas to power companies).
Yeah, that C-to-JS compiler is a pain to work with, please don't make me.
The difference with stocks is: they represent control of the means of production (at least, stocks in company with an actual product or service in the market). There's something real underneath a stock share.
Actually, as bitcoin starts to gain acceptance it becomes less of a lottery as well. Currency speculation is just gambling, but a small amount of savings in any stable currency can be wise. It will be interesting to see whether bitcoin stabilizes soon - it's still all over the place even compared with gold, which is notoriously speculator-driven in the short term.
As much as I enjoy laughing at politicians, there's a less funny side to all of this: there's apparently no security for this website at all. We heard early on that they had skipped the security audit required of all government websites, but I've been on projects that did the security audit a bit after launch to make a date, so I won't throw stones.
However, we're seeing a wide range of security experts, spanning the credibility spectrum from the sort who give testimony to congress, to MacAfee his own bad self, warning of critical security flaws in Healthcare.gov. That sounds like they didn't just skip the final audit, but the entire security lifecycle - and it's freaking hard to "add security after the fact" to anything! This is massive identity theft waiting to happen, which isn't funny at all.
Actually most went to android, because dumb people cant afford apple.
What does "able to afford" have to do with American purchasing habits in any way? The mostly-unemployed "occupy" crowd was very Apple-dominated from what we saw: it's the hipsters version of the $400 tennis shoes that were common in the poor urban school I went to.
No, I really like BDOS, to complement BSOD! There's a beautiful symmetry there.
You know what they say about the very best, true genius inventions in the world? "I could have thought of that!" All the very best ideas are blindingly obvious in hindsight.
At the time, OS/2's Workplace Shell was an amazing object oriented desktop with independent folder color settings, folder background settings, developer inheritance so all the bells/whistles you expect from a folder would be part of a new folder which might have a split view.
Microsoft always did make products for non-geeks. From the start of /. this has made geeks fly off in a rage whenever MS dominates the market, but that's nonsense: of course the mainstream market isn't what geeks want. Now, when Ubuntu does the same thing? I'm joining in the nerdrage there, to be sure.
Heh, no apologetics so far for the "Blue Dickpunch of Sadness". Maybe they're off their game.
I think these social sites require something that looks like a real name, not a handle, mostly so the don't seem geeky. You'll probably find an "Oliver Klosov" on all of them, however.
Oh, yeah, you definitely still have control by those with too much time to kill, but at least the reader sees the whole picture. I think most people in the West, to use your example, would be shocked by the "Evil Zionist Menace" page and enlightened in ways that the page "owners" didn't intend. It would be more educational all around, IMO.
I'd say the taskbar is one great piece of UI advancement that MS can claim credit for. The start menu was just cleaning up the Win 3.1 clutter of nested icons into a standard menu tree, and nothing all that original, but the taskbar was special. I still force my new version of Windows into the Win2k/XP style of one-click-to-change-focus (the new combined button approach in Windows and Unity where it's 2+ clicks really annoys me).
Light-carrying fiber is slower than copper (5ns/m vs 4 for copper) - it sort of has to be, as the higher impedance goes hand-in-hand with the need for total internal reflection at the boundary of the clear plastic. Optical helps with band-width-per-strand, not with latency.
I think the next decade of advances will be very much about power efficiency, and very little about clock rate on high-end CPUs. That will benefit both mobile and supercomputers, as power are power-constrained (supercomputers by the heat rather than the raw power, but it works out to the same thing).
Yes, the difference now is reaching the limits of physics, and even with something better than CMOS there's not much headroom. There's only so much state you can represent with one atom, and we're not that far off.
I think the progress we'll see in the coming decades will be very minor in speed of traditional computers, significant in power consumption, and huge in areas like quantum computing, which are not incremental refinements of what we're so good at today.
Our tools are nearly as fast as they reasonably can be, but that's not to say there aren't important gains to be had from different kinds of tools.
A better platform would have multiple pages for contentions issues. For most of Wikipedia, there's no drama, and it's a good source of information. But for the remainder, often the most interesting parts, there is constant drama, page locks, revert wars, and so on. All of that should be solved by admitting that Wikipedia doesn't list "facts", it lists "consensus opinions", and where there's no consensus it needs to let each side have it's page.
Note at the top in bold text which page represents the consensus of published scientists, where that's available, and leave the rest to the readers' judgement.
Wow, "blood money"? Get over yourself. Microsoft's "acquisition and destruction of companies" is the normal way all big tech companies work. They buy startups, and try to do something useful with whatever the startup made and dominate that market. Everything in Silly Valley revolves around this practice - almost all innovation happens in startups, but bringing a product to the world market is capital intensive and often requires a large and established sales force, so small companies get bought by the big players to sell that product to everyone.
My doctor's office takes a blood and urine test and sends it to the lab himself. Then he reviews them to see whether they show any reason for further intervention, and gives me a copy. My insurance covers it. Under Obamacare, all the insurance companies will cover recommended tests with no copayments, so you won't be saving any money.
Ahh, you do it the expansive way, but since the cost doesn't come out of your personal pocket, you close your eyes and pretend the cost isn't there. No need to do things cheaply when someone else is paying, right?
Except you're fundamentally wrong about that: different health care strategies (single payer, obamacare, cash up front) change how care is rationed, but the point is to have more total care. Instead of fighting over who gets the MRI machine this week, it's far better to eliminate the rationing entirely by incentivizing the price of an MRI to fall to where no one needs to wait.
Technological progress is great for stuff like that. Don't be confused by "prices in dollars", what will matter to the nation/world as a whole is total availability of care, and the easier it is (less labor, less capital) to provide any given care the more there will be to go around for everyone.
Sure, but part of the point of technology is to reduce the skill needed to use equipment. Flu shots at the pharmacy are great progress. This blood testing the same. If we could get the capital cost for an MRI down low enough, I don't see why you couldn't get a scan at the pharmacy as well.
Windows phone 8 isn't WinCE based, is the point. It's an entirely new OS, and it's very much like the difference between WinME and WinXP: a whole different world, with none of the old problems, but some new ones.
Really, the whole Metro UI is fine for a smart phone - at least for what I use my android for, I don't know what I'd complain about. The only functional difference I can see is for folks who want to root their phones and hack on them.
Bill Gates is spending around $1B a year through his charity, much of it to eliminate malaria from the planet. Meanwhile, biotech startups and big pharma R&D groups collectively burn way more than $100 MM/year on research. Healthcare is over 1/6th of the US economy - leave a little for fun, yeah?
Wow, I can't believe I fell for the "why are we spending money on this when people are dying of cancer" troll that is older than /.'s mod system.
You should really get over that whole Windows 95 thing, you're getting to old to carry a grudge that heavy. They had NT back then if you wanted a real OS. Ahh, playing StarCraft on WinNT, those were the days (sure, it was the only real game that used DirectX back then, but that was one more real game than Linux had).
Well, WinCE is a different story - I mean, even MS called it "wince". The newer ones seems fine to me, if still lacking apps, but maybe I'm a bad sample since I mostly use my phone to make calls, and as a kindle/audible/media player.
How do you think tests always work? The doctor sends you out to get tested, you get the test results, and the doctor explains them to you. Getting them at Walmart instead of paying $400 at some "lab" in a strip mall changes nothing except price.
Wow, I like the way you chopped off what you were quoting just a few words short of the full quote that would have refuted your point. Well trolled, sir, well trolled.
Depends a lot on how finicky the positioning is, and how important sliders are. MOO1 wouldn't work at all on touch (the whole game seemed like finicky sliders), for example. But yeah, I'm sure there are many that would work just fine as is.