Here's an honest, non-trolly question: what is it about solar cells that makes them decay and become unuseable in 30 years? There are no moving parts to wear out... it's just electrons being moved around. It it the interaction with air, rain, dirt and temperature variation? If so, which of these is the most significant? Or is it rather that the energy gathering itself somehow "fatigues" the semiconductor?
I'm curious, because in my fantasy future I imagine a huge array of these things beaming back energy from geosynchronous orbit, where the air/rain/dirt problems are absent. Is there any hope of a "permanent" solar cell in those conditions?
Why don't the US just outsource the whole war to some company?
You know, that gives me some ideas! The Pentagon could make a list of all countries that need a spankin' and companies can bid on contracts to do that. This is what my dweeby Ayn Rand fanboy friends from college would have loved.
We could assemble in various well-armed posses that compete for government contracts to kick ass around the world. Sort of like big A-Teams, but more evil and capitalistic.
Actually, it's been a long time since we had the A-Team. This sounds like a pretty good premise for a new TV action show: "It's USA, 2014. President Wolfowitz has just declared a new "evil power" has been elected to govern the island of Samoa. The contract to take them out and replace them with a military junta is worth $23B. Team Alpha (consisting of some colorful characters) is on the project." Hell, that could be the whole first season! They first have to convince Wolfowitz they're up to the job (their sexy munitions expert is also a master negotiator), and after all that action, the shooting may begin! Season 2: Cuba. Season 3: Canada.
I teach at a large university and my colleagues and I have spend some thought on open-source multimedia textbooks - not PDFs, which are almost completely inferior to their paper counterparts, and take no advantage of being consumed through a computer.
It was our idea that we should start with an introductory physics text, say, basic mechanics. The ultimate product would be an.iso disk image which contains not only a textbook, but recordings of key lectures, some highly compressed video and simulations of certain experiments, perhaps rendered in a GPL 3D graphics engine (where physical principles would be programmed in, and students could manipulate the setup and observe realistic changes in the results).
This would be a large and publicised project, and one that could/should attract enough NSF funding to cover its modest costs. (I've seen the NSF give money to much more frivolous ideas!) The initial text might be a "donation" from a cooperating professor, and the audio/video lecture fragments would also be solicited recorded in the classrooms of truly excellent faculty. (Nobody I talked to about this said he/she would refuse.) The various programs and simulations that need to be written would come from contracted, qualified and paid programmers and graduate students. (And perhaps volunteers.) All their code would be GPL.
Once the project gets going, a working group, organized much like an editorial board, would solicit and review new submissions and alterations. There can be arbitrarily many exercise problems, as well as detailed explanations of their solutions.
These would fully take advantage of the digital format. One weakness of paper textbooks is that by their nature, they have space for only a few fully-solved and explained sample exercises. This would not be a limitation of an electronic text. In fact, how to solve an exercise could be explained in several different ways by different instructors, maximizing the chance the student would "get it". I imagine an interface where next to each step, there is a small "how does this follow?" button. If pressed, it opens a small window describing the motivation of a certain transition.
Many of these details and elaborations could be contributed by users of the textbook. Like any major software project, there would be a moderated online forum to discuss issues related to the textbook. Ultimate decisions about how the text should be updated (the regular "distributions" of the GPL material) would be made by the editorial board. In academia many professors participate in editing journals pro bono, and we could expect something similar here. Feedback on the various aspects of the text would be solicited directly from students and instructors, and the editorial board would post "requests for updates" with specific issues that need to be addressed to make the project a better learning tool.
Well, we thought about many more details of implementation, but they are boring and you guys might have better ideas anyway. The point of the whole project would be primarily to have a supplement to introductory college-level classes, but the uses go far beyond that. The textbook would be designed to be self-learner friendly, something a motivated high-school student could easily work through. It could be duplicated cheaply and en masse (at first it would be a set of CD-ROMS, eventually transitioning to DVD-ROMS).
In places where poverty, georgaphy and cultural factors limit access to higher education (which includes parts of the USA), people will still have simple computers and can cover the $2 for a burned DVD-ROM.
Of course, the idea would be to get one "hit" textbook and then reuse the software and other infrastructure to make more. Not only would this textbook require sequels, but also a demand for a calculus textbook in the same format. These are ideal fields for getting the project rolling, because introductory math, physics and chemistry textbooks don't get obsolete very quickly. How this project would be paid for re
If the military is going to control the reaction, the military is going to ban cameras.
Yeah, that was the real problem in that prison: the cameras! If it weren't for those pesky cameras, there would be no crimes, right?
Actually, Rumsfeld said something to this effect. They asked him how such a thing could happen, and his characteristically evasive answer was that the the security precautions need an update when everyone has digital cameras and phones and 21st century stuff. So that's the lesson for the Pentagon: we need to make new rules about cameras in the vicinity of sanctioned torture and rape.
You think I'm being cynical? Look at Rumsfeld's own words from yesterday:
We're functioning in a - with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.
Well, Microsoft said that the minimum requirement for Longhorn will be 2GB, and you don't have to be a geek to buy as system with twice as much ram as the stated minimum. And who will want to be stuck there without any upgrade potential? I think the 4GB limit on 32bit processors will really start playing a role in the desktop market around the time that Longhorn is released. If Intel doesn't have 64bit mass-market chips by then, they will really suffer - which is exactly why they reverse-engineered Opteron's implementation of x86/64.
Good. I'm glad somebody dug up those links. It looks like 2005 will be a pretty wild year for CPUs. This is the sort of stuff that makes engineering look glamorous. Intel vs AMD is really an interesting and fast-paced battle to follow. I'm so happy AMD's engineers are keeping this competition furious.
Some of these things were mentioned, like a plane with arbitrarily long range. But it's just a joke at this point to talk about applications, because that one golf-ball-sized chunk would need tons of shielding before anybody could walk near it. It's insanely radioactive. If you read the articles, you'll see that though the actual amount of stuff necessary for the explosion is relatively small, the shielding and the necessary excitation device can simply not be made small.
This means that our best hope of making use of this stuff is if we could get it to explode in an uncontrolled chain reaction. Great! Luckily, the science behind it is less plausible than cold fusion, so I don't expect this "ultimate dirty bomb" is going to be dropping on the heads of our dark-skinned "enemies" soon.
The $30Billion facility for producing this stuff could make it for a price as low as $1M/ounce, if the thing gets built. The real victims of this sham are the people who hand over these billions to our government. But don't worry, you'll never hear about it, because all the research (about how this is total bunk) is about to get classified. The defense contractors will get richer... though I'd be more mad about it if they were making insanely radioactive nuclear energy release devices that might actually work.
I hope this will not take much longer. Sure, people might be selling stock, but who's buying? You'd have to be crazy. Maybe Linux and the GPL will be stronger for weathering this. Whatever. I'm just so sick of this case.
Yeah, you could buy a million silencing products
on
A Silent PC Solution?
·
· Score: 1
But I found a much more satisfying solution:
1. Buy a few loud, fast case fans (I actually made new holes in my case to bolt on more fans).
2. Buy a well-shielded 25ft monitor cable, and mouse/keyboard extension wires, and stick the loud box into the closet. I actually drilled my wall, a hole big enough for a VGA plug. It's easy to patch if you move, so don't freak out.
3. If you wanna be cute, extend the power/reset button wires and install new buttons in your bedroom. Also, get a firewire DVD drive and put that on your desk. I did neither of these things yet - I find myself swapping CDs very rarely, and I never power down.
The result is absolute silence, minimal cost, more space in my bedroom, and all the heat the computer puts out no longer bugs me in my bedroom.
That stupid Powell, keeping Bush and Rummsfeld from developing the greatest Pentagon program ever: The Death Star. And the renaming of the Marines is also encountering some annoying gridlock... Gah! We want our Stormtroopers now!
I like that list. I only wish we could vote on the wisdom of each of the individual deviations. Positive wisdom would indicate that Jackson's change was a good idea given his goal of compressing the story into 9 hours worth of good film. Negative wisdom would indicate a mistake.
In a mod system like that, I would certainly assign deeply negative wisdom to the butchering of Faramir and Denethor's characters, the miraculous appearance of the elves at Helm's Deep, and Frodo showing the ring to the ring wraith at Osgiliath (when the whole point was that the location, owner and direction of movement of the ring were supposed to be secret).
No offense? Maan, that's just such a stupid comment. I suppose you also think Germans would engineer it better, but they're less friendly, but still better than the French who are neither friendly nor good engineers. And the Americans are unfriendly, boorish, profoundly stupid and mediocre engineers, though they have big budgets. I could go on (Japanese, Russians, Indians, etc.) but I hope I've said enough to make you see how stupid your comment sounds.
There were a few good adventure games early on, but as a genre, there is just far too much crap being released. This is because unless a story behind an adventure game is awesome, the game will make players yawn with boredom.
And it takes a really immersive story to make a normal human care enough to "procure A, bring it to be in order to accomplish C" over and over.
CRPG games also have some "fetch-bitch" tasks for the characters, but the designers have an easier time. If the back story is a bit stale, a heated fight with a few orcs will liven it up. That's a luxury adventure game authors don't have. If their stories are a bit stale, their game fails.
I think this is enough to explain why adventure games must inevitably suck, on average. When it's done on a large scale and by the numbers, it always fails. It reminds me of romance novels: Seriously, how likely is a romance novel to be a good book? Vanishingly. And how many are you able to read before you declare the genre "dead" as far as you care? Even if romance novelists were good writers, there is a certain wall that the genre hits. Everything will read like something else. That's what's happening to adventure games. It gets progressively harder to write original ones, to the point where it starts requiring storywriting genius. And that genius is busy on other genres with more vitality (and money).
So did I just describe the death of adventure games? Not really. I mean, they'll live on in exactly the same way that romance novels with bumpy covers live on.
If NIMA can discern wreckage (or lack thereof) on a small space craft on Mars based on those photos...
Then why don't they show us the photos? I mean, we (and this includes professional astronomers) have not seen any satellite photogrgaps of the Martian surface with enough detail to make a determination like "the lander is upright on its three legs," like NIMA said. So either they're full of sh*t, or they and maybe NASA as well are classifying photographs from the Martian surface. Why, so the terrorists can't use them for evil? If you're a US taxpayer who financed everything that NIMA and NASA does, you should be mad!
Novell might be thinking: "Hey, if the millions of legal fees actually produce some settlements for SCO, we can ride their gravy train with no investment at all; If a judge rules that someone owes SCO money, we will be owed that very same money. That would be money for nuthin, who can turn that down?"
So, I hope Novell has their heart in the right place. But really, this depends on the judges. To sue over header files is so damn crazy, the real winners are obviously the people who ran off with $9 million in legal fees. What did the lawyers tell SCO that made them think this is a good investment when the case is so absurdly flimsy? That must have been a home-run sales pitch!
What Mozilla doesn't have is a way to intergrate your responses into the message tree in your inbox. Sure, you can display stuff threaded, but it doesn't look like a conversation because it leaves out your input. I take it the proposed Outlook implementation would be different.
Tyson certainly could beat the hell out of boxers who wanted to beat the hell out of him, but if someone was just simply avoiding him, could it last for two minutes? that's the real question.
Funny picture! It wouldn't look much like boxing then, would it? It would be a lot of ducking and running. Really, a great recipe for a spectator sport.
Suppose (per impossible) that this sport made it big, with large amounts of prize money. Well, then it would essentially turn into straight boxing.
I read the rules, and though you begin with chess, it goes only four minutes, and then it's a round of boxing. Even Mike Tyson could learn to not lose a chess game in four minutes (by stalling or whatever). And then, seriously, who can go a whole round against a top-rated heavyweight boxer? Only another top-rated heavyweight boxer. (In his prime, Tyson would regularly KO the second-best boxer in the world in the first round. What chess players would have a chance?)
When you think of it, any intellectual activity/boxing hybrid will most likely be decided in the boxing segment. There might be some profound lesson in that observation...
would you rather have the wristwatch that is hand crafted to perfection, works better, and will last forever, or would you rather buy the watch that came off of the assembly line, always loses time, and will break on you in a year or two?
In Critical Thinking class, this is called a false dilemma. Discuss.
Look, tech outsourcing on a mass scale is a relatively new phenomenon. Of course the first generation of outsourced coders will make their share of mistakes. But who's going to get better faster? The people who are getting the coding jobs (asia) or the people who are losing them (europe + n.america)? Sure, since they have more experience, US coders are on average better. But as this article tells you, coding is dying in the USA. We won't have the benefit of more experience for much longer.
Why should intellectual work be harder to outsource than textile work?
So the drift is this: The USA is OK because we still have the best project managers; this only hurts the code monkeys.
The problem with that reasoning is that the good project managers once were code monkeys. It was while doing the grunt work that they developed the insight which led them to be good project managers. You know, inside understanding of modern technology and practices...
How much longer can we be a land of managers-only? And how good will our managers be if they never did the work in the trenches, because that stuff was outsourced? It seems to me that we can't avoid outsourcing management jobs if we are outsourcing the lower-level jobs.
India has tested 5 nuclear bombs already. China has been testing bombs for decades. And as far as who's politically capable of a first (nuclear) strike, the list goes:
1. USA (fucking scary, but read the doc's!)
2. (far behind) Israel
3. (even bigger gap) India
4. (tie) Pakistan, France, China, N. Korea
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious, because in my fantasy future I imagine a huge array of these things beaming back energy from geosynchronous orbit, where the air/rain/dirt problems are absent. Is there any hope of a "permanent" solar cell in those conditions?
You know, that gives me some ideas! The Pentagon could make a list of all countries that need a spankin' and companies can bid on contracts to do that. This is what my dweeby Ayn Rand fanboy friends from college would have loved.
We could assemble in various well-armed posses that compete for government contracts to kick ass around the world. Sort of like big A-Teams, but more evil and capitalistic.
Actually, it's been a long time since we had the A-Team. This sounds like a pretty good premise for a new TV action show: "It's USA, 2014. President Wolfowitz has just declared a new "evil power" has been elected to govern the island of Samoa. The contract to take them out and replace them with a military junta is worth $23B. Team Alpha (consisting of some colorful characters) is on the project." Hell, that could be the whole first season! They first have to convince Wolfowitz they're up to the job (their sexy munitions expert is also a master negotiator), and after all that action, the shooting may begin! Season 2: Cuba. Season 3: Canada.
It was our idea that we should start with an introductory physics text, say, basic mechanics. The ultimate product would be an .iso disk image which contains not only a textbook, but recordings of key lectures, some highly compressed video and simulations of certain experiments, perhaps rendered in a GPL 3D graphics engine (where physical principles would be programmed in, and students could manipulate the setup and observe realistic changes in the results).
This would be a large and publicised project, and one that could/should attract enough NSF funding to cover its modest costs. (I've seen the NSF give money to much more frivolous ideas!) The initial text might be a "donation" from a cooperating professor, and the audio/video lecture fragments would also be solicited recorded in the classrooms of truly excellent faculty. (Nobody I talked to about this said he/she would refuse.) The various programs and simulations that need to be written would come from contracted, qualified and paid programmers and graduate students. (And perhaps volunteers.) All their code would be GPL.
Once the project gets going, a working group, organized much like an editorial board, would solicit and review new submissions and alterations. There can be arbitrarily many exercise problems, as well as detailed explanations of their solutions.
These would fully take advantage of the digital format. One weakness of paper textbooks is that by their nature, they have space for only a few fully-solved and explained sample exercises. This would not be a limitation of an electronic text. In fact, how to solve an exercise could be explained in several different ways by different instructors, maximizing the chance the student would "get it". I imagine an interface where next to each step, there is a small "how does this follow?" button. If pressed, it opens a small window describing the motivation of a certain transition.
Many of these details and elaborations could be contributed by users of the textbook. Like any major software project, there would be a moderated online forum to discuss issues related to the textbook. Ultimate decisions about how the text should be updated (the regular "distributions" of the GPL material) would be made by the editorial board. In academia many professors participate in editing journals pro bono, and we could expect something similar here. Feedback on the various aspects of the text would be solicited directly from students and instructors, and the editorial board would post "requests for updates" with specific issues that need to be addressed to make the project a better learning tool.
Well, we thought about many more details of implementation, but they are boring and you guys might have better ideas anyway. The point of the whole project would be primarily to have a supplement to introductory college-level classes, but the uses go far beyond that. The textbook would be designed to be self-learner friendly, something a motivated high-school student could easily work through. It could be duplicated cheaply and en masse (at first it would be a set of CD-ROMS, eventually transitioning to DVD-ROMS). In places where poverty, georgaphy and cultural factors limit access to higher education (which includes parts of the USA), people will still have simple computers and can cover the $2 for a burned DVD-ROM.
Of course, the idea would be to get one "hit" textbook and then reuse the software and other infrastructure to make more. Not only would this textbook require sequels, but also a demand for a calculus textbook in the same format. These are ideal fields for getting the project rolling, because introductory math, physics and chemistry textbooks don't get obsolete very quickly. How this project would be paid for re
Yeah, that was the real problem in that prison: the cameras! If it weren't for those pesky cameras, there would be no crimes, right?
Actually, Rumsfeld said something to this effect. They asked him how such a thing could happen, and his characteristically evasive answer was that the the security precautions need an update when everyone has digital cameras and phones and 21st century stuff. So that's the lesson for the Pentagon: we need to make new rules about cameras in the vicinity of sanctioned torture and rape.
You think I'm being cynical? Look at Rumsfeld's own words from yesterday:
(source)Well, Microsoft said that the minimum requirement for Longhorn will be 2GB, and you don't have to be a geek to buy as system with twice as much ram as the stated minimum. And who will want to be stuck there without any upgrade potential? I think the 4GB limit on 32bit processors will really start playing a role in the desktop market around the time that Longhorn is released. If Intel doesn't have 64bit mass-market chips by then, they will really suffer - which is exactly why they reverse-engineered Opteron's implementation of x86/64.
Good. I'm glad somebody dug up those links. It looks like 2005 will be a pretty wild year for CPUs. This is the sort of stuff that makes engineering look glamorous. Intel vs AMD is really an interesting and fast-paced battle to follow. I'm so happy AMD's engineers are keeping this competition furious.
This means that our best hope of making use of this stuff is if we could get it to explode in an uncontrolled chain reaction. Great! Luckily, the science behind it is less plausible than cold fusion, so I don't expect this "ultimate dirty bomb" is going to be dropping on the heads of our dark-skinned "enemies" soon.
The $30Billion facility for producing this stuff could make it for a price as low as $1M/ounce, if the thing gets built. The real victims of this sham are the people who hand over these billions to our government. But don't worry, you'll never hear about it, because all the research (about how this is total bunk) is about to get classified. The defense contractors will get richer... though I'd be more mad about it if they were making insanely radioactive nuclear energy release devices that might actually work.
I hope this will not take much longer. Sure, people might be selling stock, but who's buying? You'd have to be crazy. Maybe Linux and the GPL will be stronger for weathering this. Whatever. I'm just so sick of this case.
But I found a much more satisfying solution: 1. Buy a few loud, fast case fans (I actually made new holes in my case to bolt on more fans). 2. Buy a well-shielded 25ft monitor cable, and mouse/keyboard extension wires, and stick the loud box into the closet. I actually drilled my wall, a hole big enough for a VGA plug. It's easy to patch if you move, so don't freak out. 3. If you wanna be cute, extend the power/reset button wires and install new buttons in your bedroom. Also, get a firewire DVD drive and put that on your desk. I did neither of these things yet - I find myself swapping CDs very rarely, and I never power down. The result is absolute silence, minimal cost, more space in my bedroom, and all the heat the computer puts out no longer bugs me in my bedroom.
That stupid Powell, keeping Bush and Rummsfeld from developing the greatest Pentagon program ever: The Death Star. And the renaming of the Marines is also encountering some annoying gridlock... Gah! We want our Stormtroopers now!
Instead of Mozilla Jr., why not just call it "Barney"?
In a mod system like that, I would certainly assign deeply negative wisdom to the butchering of Faramir and Denethor's characters, the miraculous appearance of the elves at Helm's Deep, and Frodo showing the ring to the ring wraith at Osgiliath (when the whole point was that the location, owner and direction of movement of the ring were supposed to be secret).
Microsoft will be porting DirectX to the PPC for the next Xbox. Then the race will be on to run that code on a G5 mac. Interesting times ahead!
No offense? Maan, that's just such a stupid comment. I suppose you also think Germans would engineer it better, but they're less friendly, but still better than the French who are neither friendly nor good engineers. And the Americans are unfriendly, boorish, profoundly stupid and mediocre engineers, though they have big budgets. I could go on (Japanese, Russians, Indians, etc.) but I hope I've said enough to make you see how stupid your comment sounds.
And it takes a really immersive story to make a normal human care enough to "procure A, bring it to be in order to accomplish C" over and over.
CRPG games also have some "fetch-bitch" tasks for the characters, but the designers have an easier time. If the back story is a bit stale, a heated fight with a few orcs will liven it up. That's a luxury adventure game authors don't have. If their stories are a bit stale, their game fails.
I think this is enough to explain why adventure games must inevitably suck, on average. When it's done on a large scale and by the numbers, it always fails. It reminds me of romance novels: Seriously, how likely is a romance novel to be a good book? Vanishingly. And how many are you able to read before you declare the genre "dead" as far as you care? Even if romance novelists were good writers, there is a certain wall that the genre hits. Everything will read like something else. That's what's happening to adventure games. It gets progressively harder to write original ones, to the point where it starts requiring storywriting genius. And that genius is busy on other genres with more vitality (and money).
So did I just describe the death of adventure games? Not really. I mean, they'll live on in exactly the same way that romance novels with bumpy covers live on.
Then why don't they show us the photos? I mean, we (and this includes professional astronomers) have not seen any satellite photogrgaps of the Martian surface with enough detail to make a determination like "the lander is upright on its three legs," like NIMA said. So either they're full of sh*t, or they and maybe NASA as well are classifying photographs from the Martian surface. Why, so the terrorists can't use them for evil? If you're a US taxpayer who financed everything that NIMA and NASA does, you should be mad!
So, I hope Novell has their heart in the right place. But really, this depends on the judges. To sue over header files is so damn crazy, the real winners are obviously the people who ran off with $9 million in legal fees. What did the lawyers tell SCO that made them think this is a good investment when the case is so absurdly flimsy? That must have been a home-run sales pitch!
What Mozilla doesn't have is a way to intergrate your responses into the message tree in your inbox. Sure, you can display stuff threaded, but it doesn't look like a conversation because it leaves out your input. I take it the proposed Outlook implementation would be different.
Now if only those people would learn how to make a good movie!
Funny picture! It wouldn't look much like boxing then, would it? It would be a lot of ducking and running. Really, a great recipe for a spectator sport.
I read the rules, and though you begin with chess, it goes only four minutes, and then it's a round of boxing. Even Mike Tyson could learn to not lose a chess game in four minutes (by stalling or whatever). And then, seriously, who can go a whole round against a top-rated heavyweight boxer? Only another top-rated heavyweight boxer. (In his prime, Tyson would regularly KO the second-best boxer in the world in the first round. What chess players would have a chance?)
When you think of it, any intellectual activity/boxing hybrid will most likely be decided in the boxing segment. There might be some profound lesson in that observation...
In Critical Thinking class, this is called a false dilemma. Discuss.
Look, tech outsourcing on a mass scale is a relatively new phenomenon. Of course the first generation of outsourced coders will make their share of mistakes. But who's going to get better faster? The people who are getting the coding jobs (asia) or the people who are losing them (europe + n.america)? Sure, since they have more experience, US coders are on average better. But as this article tells you, coding is dying in the USA. We won't have the benefit of more experience for much longer.
Why should intellectual work be harder to outsource than textile work?
The problem with that reasoning is that the good project managers once were code monkeys. It was while doing the grunt work that they developed the insight which led them to be good project managers. You know, inside understanding of modern technology and practices...
How much longer can we be a land of managers-only? And how good will our managers be if they never did the work in the trenches, because that stuff was outsourced? It seems to me that we can't avoid outsourcing management jobs if we are outsourcing the lower-level jobs.
1. USA (fucking scary, but read the doc's!)
2. (far behind) Israel
3. (even bigger gap) India
4. (tie) Pakistan, France, China, N. Korea