1. Solar panels are pretty crap by any standard. Cheap thin film panels will come out (about the same time as Duke Nukem 3D), but until then they are only useful in special applications. You can heat hot water with solar panels. I'm not sure if you can heat a whole house. Are you talking about photovoltaic panels generating power to run electric heaters, or using sunlight to heat water (which plugs into the central heating)? Because the second option is much more efficient.
2. Wind generators don't sit "on your house". The performance of a wind generator scales with the square of their blade length (since their power goes up with the flux of the wind that they sweep). A tiny little house sized generator is a waste of time and money. The wind generators that you want to use have blades that are bigger than a 737.
A cat would kill *you* if it could. Make no mistake.
On a side note, I was actually modded up for trolling cat lovers. Which means that cat lovers are apparently saner than Mac users (who will mod me down for even using the word in a not-entirely-positive fashion - despite the fact that I am a Mac user...).
Cats are just bad pets. They are barely evolved from the wildcats that they descended from. They are not meant to be pets, they are meant to inhabit human settlements and clean up the rodents. If they are lucky, they can scavenge some table scraps.
Every animal that has been domesticated (dogs, cows, sheep, even the guinea pig) has evolved from pack animals. They know how to follow a master. Cats don't.
Time boxed iterations are an essential part of agile development. Face it, if they waited for the OS to be ready , it would never be released.
They could set more specific goals, and use that to drive release schedules, but that would lead to bickering over what goals should be met, and generally suck the life out of the project.
On the other hand it's persistent, modifiable, discrete, asynchronous, and good for many-to-many broadcasts. SMS is the worst of both worlds (in many cases).
Look at where the big money gets spent. Marketing, promotion, and tacky video clips.
It's just like the pharmaceutical industry - basically all the costs are adding no value to the product, just getting the product out there. Something that would be far easier if the product was cheaper.
Surgery is just hand-eye coordination, so a specialist should be better.
But for a lot of problems, a good GP can be better than a specialist. Specialists will tend to over-diagnose and over-proscribe within their own field. If you see a psychologist, you'll get psycho-therapy. If you see a psychiatrist, you'll get happy pills. A good GP will recommend surgery, medication, lifestyle changes, or whatever else is most likely to work.
That said, a bad GP will give you a script of antibiotics, and tell you to come back if the symptoms persist.
(Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor, but I'm related to a GP).
Virtualization is looking like a real killer app. Putting your whole OS on a memory stick would be awesome. Just carry it around, and plug in where-ever you want.
Nope. They are meant to make common infrastructure that would otherwise be too difficult to finance. I don't mind them making highways that lots of people use (private highways would suck because of micro-payment issues), but I don't want them paving my driveway.
Gah. The NBN. 43 Billion is about $5000 per home. It's just too expensive.
Why didn't they stick with the original idea? Fiber connecting the cities, then rent out bandwidth to local providers, who could do the last few miles using whatever technology the customers wanted. Some people want wireless (and yes, there are issues). Some people want fiber. Some people just want a cheap connection, because they only use the internet for email and banking. It would have been a little more expensive for the people who wanted fiber, and a lot cheaper for people who wanted something different.
If you want to travel, ESL (English as a second language) teaching is great. 20 hours a week teaching (plus prep time), you see your work being used (as the students get better at English), interesting co-workers. If you know (or want to learn) a foreign language, it's a great opportunity.
The best thing is - minimal office politics. There's you, a class, and maybe a head teacher telling you what to do. Co-ordination meetings, blame games, and clueless managers are hard to find. You still have a boss (and work policies), but the soft crap is mostly between you and your students.
Income is much lower in China (where I am), but so are costs. Great news if you have savings and no debts. Other countries have higher pay.
I wouldn't advise it to anyone with a superiority complex (they make poor teachers), or anyone who hates the idea of living overseas, but otherwise, it's a blast.
Slashdot Mirror
It would have been the world's largest greenhouse. I can image ... smoke ... being a problem.
The town from TFA was about 7,000 people. They said they would just use electric cars. Or a monorail.
Monorail!
Mono ... duh!
1. Solar panels are pretty crap by any standard. Cheap thin film panels will come out (about the same time as Duke Nukem 3D), but until then they are only useful in special applications. You can heat hot water with solar panels. I'm not sure if you can heat a whole house. Are you talking about photovoltaic panels generating power to run electric heaters, or using sunlight to heat water (which plugs into the central heating)? Because the second option is much more efficient.
2. Wind generators don't sit "on your house". The performance of a wind generator scales with the square of their blade length (since their power goes up with the flux of the wind that they sweep). A tiny little house sized generator is a waste of time and money. The wind generators that you want to use have blades that are bigger than a 737.
The biggest feature in Firefox is all those unimportant passwords it remembers.
OpenID might fix that eventually.
But you don't know if I didn't just hack the servers ;)
A cat would kill *you* if it could. Make no mistake.
On a side note, I was actually modded up for trolling cat lovers. Which means that cat lovers are apparently saner than Mac users (who will mod me down for even using the word in a not-entirely-positive fashion - despite the fact that I am a Mac user ...).
Go figure.
I'm sure it could easily run Quake. And there's nothing more mature than Quake. (Except perhaps nethack).
Cats are just bad pets. They are barely evolved from the wildcats that they descended from. They are not meant to be pets, they are meant to inhabit human settlements and clean up the rodents. If they are lucky, they can scavenge some table scraps.
Every animal that has been domesticated (dogs, cows, sheep, even the guinea pig) has evolved from pack animals. They know how to follow a master. Cats don't.
Time boxed iterations are an essential part of agile development. Face it, if they waited for the OS to be ready , it would never be released.
They could set more specific goals, and use that to drive release schedules, but that would lead to bickering over what goals should be met, and generally suck the life out of the project.
Yes, but what if they recover a hash of the password? It better be well salted ...
In reality, it wouldn't cost 45 bucks. A big botnet would do the heavy lifting, and crack millions of passwords at the same time. Ouch.
Plus, modern chips might recompile code. A modern CPU might take x86 instructions, and modify them to run on their more modern instruction sets.
Text is slower, and not as rich.
On the other hand it's persistent, modifiable, discrete, asynchronous, and good for many-to-many broadcasts. SMS is the worst of both worlds (in many cases).
I'll agree. People like Knuth, Larry, and Guido were more important for their documentation and marketing efforts than their actual code.
Look at where the big money gets spent. Marketing, promotion, and tacky video clips.
It's just like the pharmaceutical industry - basically all the costs are adding no value to the product, just getting the product out there. Something that would be far easier if the product was cheaper.
OSX preview is pretty powerful.
A google search shows PDF Annot (GPL), but I'm not sure if it's any good.
Statistically, the best heart surgeon is the one with them most computer game experience. See http://www.springerlink.com/content/a63nx82mbq2g37b4/
Surgery is just hand-eye coordination, so a specialist should be better.
But for a lot of problems, a good GP can be better than a specialist. Specialists will tend to over-diagnose and over-proscribe within their own field. If you see a psychologist, you'll get psycho-therapy. If you see a psychiatrist, you'll get happy pills. A good GP will recommend surgery, medication, lifestyle changes, or whatever else is most likely to work.
That said, a bad GP will give you a script of antibiotics, and tell you to come back if the symptoms persist.
(Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor, but I'm related to a GP).
Virtualization is looking like a real killer app. Putting your whole OS on a memory stick would be awesome. Just carry it around, and plug in where-ever you want.
OS footprint would matter then.
Nope. They are meant to make common infrastructure that would otherwise be too difficult to finance. I don't mind them making highways that lots of people use (private highways would suck because of micro-payment issues), but I don't want them paving my driveway.
Chest pounding vibrations. That's all I'll say.
"We" is the market. There are too many highly paid CEOs and bankers, due to the rewards caused by the financial bubbles.
Those bubbles are now deflating, so the overpaid CEOs and financiers are mostly parasites with a dead host.
There's still room for finance and management, it just has to take up a far smaller proportion of GDP. That will happen naturally.
Gah. The NBN. 43 Billion is about $5000 per home. It's just too expensive.
Why didn't they stick with the original idea? Fiber connecting the cities, then rent out bandwidth to local providers, who could do the last few miles using whatever technology the customers wanted. Some people want wireless (and yes, there are issues). Some people want fiber. Some people just want a cheap connection, because they only use the internet for email and banking. It would have been a little more expensive for the people who wanted fiber, and a lot cheaper for people who wanted something different.
Instead of paying scientists more, could we just pay CEOs and bankers less?
If you want to travel, ESL (English as a second language) teaching is great. 20 hours a week teaching (plus prep time), you see your work being used (as the students get better at English), interesting co-workers. If you know (or want to learn) a foreign language, it's a great opportunity.
The best thing is - minimal office politics. There's you, a class, and maybe a head teacher telling you what to do. Co-ordination meetings, blame games, and clueless managers are hard to find. You still have a boss (and work policies), but the soft crap is mostly between you and your students.
Income is much lower in China (where I am), but so are costs. Great news if you have savings and no debts. Other countries have higher pay.
I wouldn't advise it to anyone with a superiority complex (they make poor teachers), or anyone who hates the idea of living overseas, but otherwise, it's a blast.
The "Serious and Organised Crime Agency", as opposed to the RIAA (or whatever it's called in the UK).
It's slashdot. Maybe 20% of readers know what an implicit algorithm is these days.
Still, I got modded "insightful" for pasting some figures about the number of flops that Roadrunner nodes can handle ... go figure.