But outside of the (rough) triangle, population density drops off dramatically.
No, it doesn't. Pretty much everywhere near or east of the Mississippi is densely populated... Not quite as dense as New England, but very dense. Some of the largest US cities are in this area.
*California* is probably too large for a HS rail network - large parts of it a pretty close to empty.
There have been plans for a very long time for maglev (or other high-speed) trains between Los Angeles & Las Vegas, and Los Angeles and San Francisco. Large numbers of people need to go a great distance, as quickly as possible, with no need for any stops in-between (which is what kills high-speed train and jet travel).
But actually, your understanding of California is quite lacking. Yes, there are often 50 miles between cities, but even at that, those "empty" parts of California are more densely populated than significant portions of Western Europe, the Southern East Coast, etc.
Completely my mistake. I guess I had mentally incremented the digit for some reason.
You will probably get more future proofing with fiber - but as always staining on the bleeding edge will bleed you dry.
I expect the issue is a bit more technical. It's not easy to appropriately run fiber through the tight turns needed for (current methods of) home wiring.
English is 700 years old It should be replaced with Esperanto
A commonly held belief (see other replies), which does a good job illustrating the deep ignorance of so many people. They are quick to advocate Esperanto, but obviously have absolutely _no_ knowledge of world languages.
English WAS a difficult language to learn, and Esperanto WAS far easier... That state of affairs was an accurate world view for approximately 40 years... Specifically, from the creation of Esperanto (1887), until the creation of Basic English (1930).
Basic/Simplified/Simple English can be learned in just slightly less time than Esperanto. But more importantly, Basic English is infinitely more useful than Esperanto, as it allows you to understand, and be understood, by basically everyone in the world. English is the established lingua franca, and Basic English makes it attainable for everyone in the world.
Meanwhile, Esperanto allows you to understand, and be understood by perhaps 0.1% of the world. Since the introduction of Basic English, Esperanto has had NOTHING going for it, and will eventually fade away as the last generation that learned Esperanto age.
The moment a person gets up with his shiny, animated powerpoint slides, and then proceeds to READ ALOUD the bullet points he's showing to me, I immediately mark him as an idiot.
I do the same when someone links to a SWF/FLV video...
The PC is also bogged by something far more sinister than the x86 instruction set, namely, the PC BIOS.
First, x86 really isn't "bogged" down any significant amount by the instruction set or legacy compatibility.
Second, the BIOS is certainly a limitation, but these days a more and more minor one... Modern OSes don't really use it for anything but initially executing the boot-sector, after that, they fully take over. The time it takes the BIOS to execute is a waste, but again, it's only a second or two, maybe 1/10th the time of most systems' boot-up procedure. Most OEMs have figured out that they need lots of foreward compatibility in BIOSes, to the point that BIOS limitations haven't been an issue for anything I've seen in over a decade. And finally, BIOSes on x86 servers with serial-port management eliminate yet another limitation. There limitations of the BIOS, like x86, are exaggerated.
IMHO, the biggest limitation of x86 these days is the interrupt model, where a small volume of I/O can bring down an otherwise incredibly fast CPU. Even there, though, it seems the issue may be (really, accidentally) significantly mitigated by the trend towards multiple cores.
x86 has all but been ousted where engineers are freed from the concerns of backwards compatibility and high performance is not required.
I would stress that the LATTER, not the former, is the primary reason... Geode CPUs use under 1W, while clocking in at ~400MHz, and so are used in many very low-power systems, wherever performance is an issue, such as OLPC.
So there are arguments about wether contrails have a net cooling or a net warming effect.
Not really. The observed temperature was 2F degrees higher, and the quote you posted clearly said: "there is a lot of argument still going on about how much of a warming effect they produce."
getting this down to a minute doesn't really change the fact that a hacker could capture enough packets simply by hanging around and drinking a coffee using the "old" tools.
Yes, yes it does.
Many vendors, from the very first sign of WEP's weakness ~7 years ago, worked-around this by having their APs change the key every X minutes to negate the possibility of anyone gaining access. Any faster method, which potentially allows someone to sneak in before the key change, makes this common workaround moot, and WEP completely and totally unworkable.
aircraft are hugely polluting and trains are a lot better.
Except for the fact that that isn't true at all...
planes dump their output at high altitudes where the blanketing effect is far greater.
That is a GOOD thing! The closer to the ground, and the more concentrated the pollution, the more health effects for more people. By polluting higher in the atmosphere, you get less crap entering fewer people's lungs. And, of course, others have already mentioned global dimming due to contrails.
If the savings is minimal, and those modes don't effect anything once you've changed to 32 or 64 bit protected mode, then maybe it's a moot point.
It most certainly is. If you'd gone on to read the second page, you would have seen:
It's unlikely that any so-called "clean sheet" design would be able to produce more than a 10 percent improvement in performance or power consumption over the modern x86 ISA, Hester said.
That means 10% max for eliminating everything x86... not _just_ legacy (8/16bit) modes.
This is the same idiotic argument as always. They don't even try to change it up a little bit...
The architectural limitations of x86 were probably true up through the Pentium1 days. After the introduction of Intel's P6, and AMD's K6, everything changed. At that point, x86 was no longer the clumsy CISC snail it used-to be. At that point, and from then on, the fierce competition between Intel and AMD has pushed x86 ahead of every other architecture. Others like Alpha held on to the pure performance crown for a few years to come, but they did so by embracing much higher power consumption. These days, new x86 CPUs are falling in power consumption, not rising. And AMD's Geode CPUs can give you a good performing x86 CPU for embedded systems, OLPC, and anything else, in under 1W. There's really nothing else that is lower power, which still performs as well...
These days, x86 is more than competitive with everything else in sheer performance, performance-per-watt figures, and far ahead in performance per dollar. One at a time, nearly all the limitations of the x86 architecture, that were so often paraded out by competitors, have been worked around. It's most other architectures which were crippled, in that their short-sighted design was only really good in one area, and they only became popular because x86 wasn't quite there at the time. Meanwhile, x86 continued to develop, addressing those shortcomings, and the others did not. The only competitors these days are Power and SPARC, and the two highest-profile companies using them have long since come around, and started selling x86 themselves.
Backwards compatibility is only the smallest of reasons that x86 is still around. How many Linux/BSD users continue to buy x86 systems, even though they would hardly notice an underlying architecture change? How many super-computing clusters are x86-based? It's only the Windows world that needs x86 compatibility, and though that's about 90% of the market, the other 10% use x86 anyhow.
Meh. Ethernet is good, but if not for ethernet, something _better_ might be in-place today. It certainly wasn't the only networking technology of the time.
4) Mouse
Boo!!! I'd be much happier if the mouse was never invented. Everything could be done much faster. Now everything is built for the mouse, keyboard navigation is utterly neglected. Links is the only web browser with good keyboard navigation, but it is feature-lacking today.
Simple effects can make a desktop interface more user-friendly. I've always liked Afterstep's spiraling, shrinking window outline that shows you exactly where you window is being iconified to.
Windows quickly fading in and out, or zooming, could be a good feedback event when you've changed desktops, which shows new users what is happening (my windows disappeared!), and should help even skilled users more quickly get their bearings after a desktop switch.
Or more than that, just imagine that we completely do away with icons. How much easier would it be to find the app, or one specific iconified window you want, if the desktop icons are actually live updating, thumbnail sized copies of the actual window contents...
[...] nothing but a waste of RAM and cycles that could be better spent making the system more responsive.
Except that it ISN'T using any RAM or CPU cycles. These are all OpenGL effects, which means your otherwise idle GPU is doing all the work. What's more, it could potentially be more responsive this way, as modern graphic cards have tons of 3D (GL) acceleration, while the 2D unit is neglected, slow, and the writing has been on the wall for some time that it might end up being completely eliminated in the future.
It seems nobody (getting modded-up) here understands. Of course it's going to be difficult to start biofuel production, and any change of this level is going to cause short-term shortages, and higher prices.
Nobody is going to starve. It's just that we've all become so used-to subsidized corn, that we never expected having to deal with market forces. Now that we do, everything is changing. Farmers are looking for new cattle feed, companies like Coca-Cola are looking for other sugar alternatives than corn syrup, et al. The market is starting to take action on this change, and there's no reason to believe it won't work just fine.
That rain forest is being burned is a huge shame. However, biofuels certainly don't require the burning of rain forest, so they aren't really the cause. What's more, even in the current state of affairs, that kind of pollution is only a one-time issue, while that land will continue to produce biofuels for many, many years.
Claims of limited arable lands are nonsense as well. Water can and is being transported to arid regions for crops. Every farmer in the developed world fertilizes their own fields, and there is no shortage of compost available. Once again, it will require some changes, and initially higher prices, but it really is the kind of thing the free market is perfectly good at handling, if you just give it a few years to work itself out.
People are touting cellulose ethanol, which is a good option, but it's going to have precisely the same drawbacks, just less pronounced... Food prices rising because cellulose is currently used in hog and cattle feed. Expansion of farming to meet the demands. Rising prices of crops, as existing farmland is stretched to produce enough fuel. Increase in use of petroleum fertilizers, as cheap cellulose is no longer available for compost. etc.
Things like algae for production of biofuels have plenty of potential, but it isn't just going to spring-up overnight. You really need to create a guaranteed demand for the product, before anyone is going to be willing to invest in such technologies. Indeed, the more expensive corn ethanol gets, the higher the potential profit in developing algae solutions.
Just saying "to hell with it, developing biofuels is too challenging" is just going to prolong our problems. Giving up on a good option, because it produces complications like higher corn prices in the (very) near-term is horribly myopic. We'll be reaping the benefits of widespread production of biofuels for at least the next century, and probably longer. Those in the poorer parts of the world, affected by the food prices, will also.
That's complete nonsense. I run unmodified Linux and BSD binaries all the time. Just about every library maintains backwards compatibility for a great many years, and when it changes, they rename it so there's no conflict having both installed (gtk1/gtk2, freetype/freetype2, etc.).
I for one wrote a Windows app years ago in straight C windows SDK, and the executable works unmodified on Win9X, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, AND WINE fer Chrissake.
If you write something simple enough, you don't have to worry about backwards compatibility. If you'd written it for Linux, I have little doubt it would continue to work today as well.
Do you thing having a cash incentive to lie is likely to make more people tell the truth about whether they are eligible or not?
It's positively idiotic to believe that the safety of the US' blood supply is based on the honor system. There would be numerous deaths, daily, if that were really the case.
my opinions seem to match those of Apple who does have such experience
No, it's purely coincidence. Apple either does or doesn't sell indy music, so 50% of people's opinions will match, while the other 50% will not. That says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL about how your opinions on the subject (other than the conclusion) do or don't match with Apple's. Claiming otherwise comes off brash and over-confident in your own analysis.
Both Apple and indie lables have come out of this process in a better position than I could have imagined,
That only demonstrates a tremendous lack of imagination on your part.
Good. Then fork from the start, and everyone's happy...
Having one project, among other things, means everyone is working on the same thing, in the same direction, etc. With different projects, you get to see two different paths taken, different ideas, different problems solved, and one may run-up against underlying limitations that the other does not have.
Ability to fork a project can't prevent these problems.
Thrift stores have 'junk' that people were going to throw out, anyway. I've never had any need to throw out a pint of blood, or nearly any canned-food.
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No, it doesn't. Pretty much everywhere near or east of the Mississippi is densely populated... Not quite as dense as New England, but very dense. Some of the largest US cities are in this area.
There have been plans for a very long time for maglev (or other high-speed) trains between Los Angeles & Las Vegas, and Los Angeles and San Francisco. Large numbers of people need to go a great distance, as quickly as possible, with no need for any stops in-between (which is what kills high-speed train and jet travel).
But actually, your understanding of California is quite lacking. Yes, there are often 50 miles between cities, but even at that, those "empty" parts of California are more densely populated than significant portions of Western Europe, the Southern East Coast, etc.
Completely my mistake. I guess I had mentally incremented the digit for some reason.
I expect the issue is a bit more technical. It's not easy to appropriately run fiber through the tight turns needed for (current methods of) home wiring.
A commonly held belief (see other replies), which does a good job illustrating the deep ignorance of so many people. They are quick to advocate Esperanto, but obviously have absolutely _no_ knowledge of world languages.
English WAS a difficult language to learn, and Esperanto WAS far easier... That state of affairs was an accurate world view for approximately 40 years... Specifically, from the creation of Esperanto (1887), until the creation of Basic English (1930).
Basic/Simplified/Simple English can be learned in just slightly less time than Esperanto. But more importantly, Basic English is infinitely more useful than Esperanto, as it allows you to understand, and be understood, by basically everyone in the world. English is the established lingua franca, and Basic English makes it attainable for everyone in the world.
Meanwhile, Esperanto allows you to understand, and be understood by perhaps 0.1% of the world. Since the introduction of Basic English, Esperanto has had NOTHING going for it, and will eventually fade away as the last generation that learned Esperanto age.
I do the same when someone links to a SWF/FLV video...
(Not trolling)
First, x86 really isn't "bogged" down any significant amount by the instruction set or legacy compatibility.
Second, the BIOS is certainly a limitation, but these days a more and more minor one... Modern OSes don't really use it for anything but initially executing the boot-sector, after that, they fully take over. The time it takes the BIOS to execute is a waste, but again, it's only a second or two, maybe 1/10th the time of most systems' boot-up procedure. Most OEMs have figured out that they need lots of foreward compatibility in BIOSes, to the point that BIOS limitations haven't been an issue for anything I've seen in over a decade. And finally, BIOSes on x86 servers with serial-port management eliminate yet another limitation. There limitations of the BIOS, like x86, are exaggerated.
IMHO, the biggest limitation of x86 these days is the interrupt model, where a small volume of I/O can bring down an otherwise incredibly fast CPU. Even there, though, it seems the issue may be (really, accidentally) significantly mitigated by the trend towards multiple cores.
I would stress that the LATTER, not the former, is the primary reason... Geode CPUs use under 1W, while clocking in at ~400MHz, and so are used in many very low-power systems, wherever performance is an issue, such as OLPC.
Not really. The observed temperature was 2F degrees higher, and the quote you posted clearly said: "there is a lot of argument still going on about how much of a warming effect they produce."
1) No it doesn't.
2) There's no thing as Cat-6.
Yes, yes it does.
Many vendors, from the very first sign of WEP's weakness ~7 years ago, worked-around this by having their APs change the key every X minutes to negate the possibility of anyone gaining access. Any faster method, which potentially allows someone to sneak in before the key change, makes this common workaround moot, and WEP completely and totally unworkable.
Except for the fact that that isn't true at all...
That is a GOOD thing! The closer to the ground, and the more concentrated the pollution, the more health effects for more people. By polluting higher in the atmosphere, you get less crap entering fewer people's lungs. And, of course, others have already mentioned global dimming due to contrails.
And you're wrong:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/contrail.html
"the days had become warmer and the nights cooler, with the overall range greater by about two degrees Fahrenheit."
It most certainly is. If you'd gone on to read the second page, you would have seen:
That means 10% max for eliminating everything x86... not _just_ legacy (8/16bit) modes.
This is the same idiotic argument as always. They don't even try to change it up a little bit...
The architectural limitations of x86 were probably true up through the Pentium1 days. After the introduction of Intel's P6, and AMD's K6, everything changed. At that point, x86 was no longer the clumsy CISC snail it used-to be. At that point, and from then on, the fierce competition between Intel and AMD has pushed x86 ahead of every other architecture. Others like Alpha held on to the pure performance crown for a few years to come, but they did so by embracing much higher power consumption. These days, new x86 CPUs are falling in power consumption, not rising. And AMD's Geode CPUs can give you a good performing x86 CPU for embedded systems, OLPC, and anything else, in under 1W. There's really nothing else that is lower power, which still performs as well...
These days, x86 is more than competitive with everything else in sheer performance, performance-per-watt figures, and far ahead in performance per dollar. One at a time, nearly all the limitations of the x86 architecture, that were so often paraded out by competitors, have been worked around. It's most other architectures which were crippled, in that their short-sighted design was only really good in one area, and they only became popular because x86 wasn't quite there at the time. Meanwhile, x86 continued to develop, addressing those shortcomings, and the others did not. The only competitors these days are Power and SPARC, and the two highest-profile companies using them have long since come around, and started selling x86 themselves.
Backwards compatibility is only the smallest of reasons that x86 is still around. How many Linux/BSD users continue to buy x86 systems, even though they would hardly notice an underlying architecture change? How many super-computing clusters are x86-based? It's only the Windows world that needs x86 compatibility, and though that's about 90% of the market, the other 10% use x86 anyhow.
There isn't enough wind for wind turbines to supply all the electricity...
There isn't enough oil to supply all the power plants...
There isn't enough water for hydro-electric to provide all the electricity.
There isn't enough natural gas to supply fuel for automobiles.
That's complete nonsense. Biodiesel is far less toxic than petroleum, and carbon-neutral. It's basically vegetable oil.
Meh. Ethernet is good, but if not for ethernet, something _better_ might be in-place today. It certainly wasn't the only networking technology of the time.
Boo!!! I'd be much happier if the mouse was never invented. Everything could be done much faster. Now everything is built for the mouse, keyboard navigation is utterly neglected. Links is the only web browser with good keyboard navigation, but it is feature-lacking today.
Simple effects can make a desktop interface more user-friendly. I've always liked Afterstep's spiraling, shrinking window outline that shows you exactly where you window is being iconified to.
Windows quickly fading in and out, or zooming, could be a good feedback event when you've changed desktops, which shows new users what is happening (my windows disappeared!), and should help even skilled users more quickly get their bearings after a desktop switch.
Or more than that, just imagine that we completely do away with icons. How much easier would it be to find the app, or one specific iconified window you want, if the desktop icons are actually live updating, thumbnail sized copies of the actual window contents...
Except that it ISN'T using any RAM or CPU cycles. These are all OpenGL effects, which means your otherwise idle GPU is doing all the work. What's more, it could potentially be more responsive this way, as modern graphic cards have tons of 3D (GL) acceleration, while the 2D unit is neglected, slow, and the writing has been on the wall for some time that it might end up being completely eliminated in the future.
It seems nobody (getting modded-up) here understands. Of course it's going to be difficult to start biofuel production, and any change of this level is going to cause short-term shortages, and higher prices.
Nobody is going to starve. It's just that we've all become so used-to subsidized corn, that we never expected having to deal with market forces. Now that we do, everything is changing. Farmers are looking for new cattle feed, companies like Coca-Cola are looking for other sugar alternatives than corn syrup, et al. The market is starting to take action on this change, and there's no reason to believe it won't work just fine.
That rain forest is being burned is a huge shame. However, biofuels certainly don't require the burning of rain forest, so they aren't really the cause. What's more, even in the current state of affairs, that kind of pollution is only a one-time issue, while that land will continue to produce biofuels for many, many years.
Claims of limited arable lands are nonsense as well. Water can and is being transported to arid regions for crops. Every farmer in the developed world fertilizes their own fields, and there is no shortage of compost available. Once again, it will require some changes, and initially higher prices, but it really is the kind of thing the free market is perfectly good at handling, if you just give it a few years to work itself out.
People are touting cellulose ethanol, which is a good option, but it's going to have precisely the same drawbacks, just less pronounced... Food prices rising because cellulose is currently used in hog and cattle feed. Expansion of farming to meet the demands. Rising prices of crops, as existing farmland is stretched to produce enough fuel. Increase in use of petroleum fertilizers, as cheap cellulose is no longer available for compost. etc.
Things like algae for production of biofuels have plenty of potential, but it isn't just going to spring-up overnight. You really need to create a guaranteed demand for the product, before anyone is going to be willing to invest in such technologies. Indeed, the more expensive corn ethanol gets, the higher the potential profit in developing algae solutions.
Just saying "to hell with it, developing biofuels is too challenging" is just going to prolong our problems. Giving up on a good option, because it produces complications like higher corn prices in the (very) near-term is horribly myopic. We'll be reaping the benefits of widespread production of biofuels for at least the next century, and probably longer. Those in the poorer parts of the world, affected by the food prices, will also.
That's complete nonsense. I run unmodified Linux and BSD binaries all the time. Just about every library maintains backwards compatibility for a great many years, and when it changes, they rename it so there's no conflict having both installed (gtk1/gtk2, freetype/freetype2, etc.).
If you write something simple enough, you don't have to worry about backwards compatibility. If you'd written it for Linux, I have little doubt it would continue to work today as well.
It's positively idiotic to believe that the safety of the US' blood supply is based on the honor system. There would be numerous deaths, daily, if that were really the case.
No, it's purely coincidence. Apple either does or doesn't sell indy music, so 50% of people's opinions will match, while the other 50% will not. That says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL about how your opinions on the subject (other than the conclusion) do or don't match with Apple's. Claiming otherwise comes off brash and over-confident in your own analysis.
That only demonstrates a tremendous lack of imagination on your part.
In other words, they want my garbage...
But nobody is so inclined, so it's trash.
Those are the lucky exceptions, not the rules. I know from bitter experience. Microsoft breaks some backwards compatibility with every minor revision.
And? You've heard of X11, which is where all this stuff is going when it's mature.
Good. Then fork from the start, and everyone's happy...
Having one project, among other things, means everyone is working on the same thing, in the same direction, etc. With different projects, you get to see two different paths taken, different ideas, different problems solved, and one may run-up against underlying limitations that the other does not have.
Ability to fork a project can't prevent these problems.
Umm... NOT from canned-food drives?
Thrift stores have 'junk' that people were going to throw out, anyway. I've never had any need to throw out a pint of blood, or nearly any canned-food.
Having a kitchen-sink approach in order to please everyone usually makes for crappy software. And putting all your eggs in one basket is very bad.
Error 500 - Internal server error
Server committed seppuku rather than face a slashdotting.