They are about as green as can be (they grow in the ground for goodness sake!), and are far greener than hydrogen.
I'm not so sure about that. Wide-spread use of biofuels would require dedicating huge areas of land to agriculture to produce them. Between the loss of natural habitat and the pollution caused by modern farming methods (which use lots of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides), that doesn't strike me as any kind of an environmental "win".
Now if you could come up with a way to create biofuels without heavy land usage or fossil-fuel inputs, then you'd have something.
Hydrogen is an energy TRANSFER MECHANISM, not a source.
You're right as far as you go, but in order to get to an oil-free transportation infrastructure we need energy transfer mechanisms. There are multiple problems to solve here (energy production, energy storage, energy transfer), and this is one of them. So I don't see how focusing on it is a bad thing -- if/when one of the key problems is solved, it will add that much more momentum behind solving the others.
To believe that we are the only intelligent species living on this planet is supreme stupidity.
Obligatory Douglas Adams quote follows:
It's an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, Man had always assumed that he was the most intelligent species occupying the planet, instead of the *third* most intelligent. The second most intelligent were of course dolphins. Dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of earth and had on many occasions tried to alert mankind but their warnings were mistakenly interpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits.
Do these parrots have personal names and speak them IN THE WILD?
I'd certainly like to know the answer to that question... we have flocks of wild parrots living around here (Southern California) and they are very noisy: it's hard to miss them when they fly by, it sounds like several dozen 300 baud modems all transmitting at once. Which makes me wonder if the modem-like audio might not actually contain a fair amount of encoded data in it...
How do you propose flushing the heat of the dies sandwhiched in the middle?
Best solution: invent room-temperature superconductor, make the chip out of that, profit.
Second-best solution: Handle it the same way office buildings do, by "installing air-conditioning ducts". i.e. little hollow tubes full of moving air (or some sort of coolant) that run through the cube at intervals carrying the excess heat away.
Third-best solution: Run the chip slowly enough that only a little bit of heat is generated: little enough that the heat is able to dissipate naturally, faster than it builds up. Rely on massive parallelism for speed.
It just amazes me that a small, never-before-heard-of-company offers a solution to a problem that Intel, IBM, and AMD have been trying to solve for over a decade, each of which have 10 times the budget, expertise, and personel.
I'm in no way qualified to comment on the actual technology here, but I will submit that this situation isn't as unlikely as it might seem. For many problems, the potential solution-space is so large (and the cost of trying out various approaches is so significant) that even a large R&D lab with a big budget and years of effort can end up missing what in retrospect is a very clever and useful solution. It's easy to get bogged down trying "just one more tweak" of your first (or second or third) approach that you never look around and notice the other approach hiding in plain sight. Even worse, a given organization can easily build up a culture that says "this is the way we do things, because this is the way we know things work", which can discourage even bright new employees from looking at alternative methods. (i.e. Why "start from scratch" with approach B when your company has invested millions in developing approach A?)
A new startup, on the other hand, doesn't have all that baggage that might limit their point of view. Or even more likely, some bright person may have had The Big Idea, and decided to found a startup to exploit it and get rich, rather than donating his idea to some pre-existing corporation.
That said, there is plenty of room for bullshit vaporware in the world too:^)
Never crashes doesn't exist. Mainboards burning out...
I should have been more specific: make it "never crashes due to software bugs".
Besides that, a server that 'runs fine' except that the network card drivers or scsi/ata drivers are not loaded is still completely off-line.
Sure, but the critical drivers are only a subset of the total drivers in use. So the benefit still exists for any driver that isn't central to the computer's tasks at hand.
My point is that, if a driver is found flaky, that may be the only option besides dropping the hardware, but a _lot_ (most) of the drivers in Linux are rock solid, and slowing them down by putting the whole system under a microkernel is the same thing as giving every car a speed limiter at 50MPH in case its driver may cause an accident while speeding.
But there are those of us, like myself, who are perfectly content at 50MPH anyway, so we wouldn't miss the extra speed. But we would like the extra peace of mind that comes from a more robust design. I guess ideally Linux could come with a configuration option that lets the user specify whether to run drivers in user space or kernel space, then the people who need more efficiency can have it, and the people who want more robustness can have that.
As I remarked to my wife the other day while we were watching "Sci-Fi Channel", can we ever invent a robot that Hollywood doesn't depict as trying to kill us?
Probably not, but we can at least make it challenging for them: I for one would pay good money to see "Day of the Scoobas"...
Is Linux that unstable for you that you would trade in 6-14% of its speed for something that (when Tanenbaum finally actually makes it), in my prediction, will crash just as often (or more)?
Obviously I wouldn't sacrifice speed for something that was less reliable. But if I had the choice of sacrificing 6-14% and getting in return an OS that never crashes, even in the presence of some buggy drivers, then sure, I would do it. Keep in mind that I'm on dual 2GHz CPUs, and so most of the time any slowdown is caused by I/O anyway... so the only thing I would be sacrificing is CPU cycles that were otherwise being wasted by the idle_thread.
If a driver is flakey, it should be fixed or moved to userspace. Putting everything below a microkernel isn't going to give you anything better than that.
As I understand it, "moving (potentially) flaky drivers to userspace" is what microkernels are all about. And having a system where driver crashes are similar in consequence to userland segfaults sounds very good to me.
People buy the middle of the road because that gives you a better value: more speed per dollar. If the OS steals 6-14% of that, it reduces that value.
Sure... but having a computer that crashes reduces the value much more quickly. How many paid hours of a technician/debugging time do you think it takes to cancel out the economic benefit of a 14% faster OS? Better yet, how many minutes or hours of your online store's web site being down does it take to lose your company more money than the cost of the entire server? Not many.
Speed matters. Always.
True, but unless the system is only being used to play games, reliability matters much more. A slow computer is a known factor that can be accounted for. A crashed computer is an unplanned emergency.
if most people would rather have speed, why are those flashy GUI animations on by default
Because the software developers are running on the latest and fastest machines (so that they can compile as quickly as possible) and therefore don't notice any slowdown when the eye-candy is enabled. They and marketing think it looks cool, and they don't experience any downside, so they make it the default.
and why do most people keep them on?
For the same reasons many people leave their web browser defaulting to the factory-preset page: they don't know it's possible to change the setting, they don't know how to change the setting, or they don't realize that they would get better performance if they changed the setting.
I had enormous fun building a 7-bed one room house inhabited by 8 men & a huge bigscreen TV. It's amazing & hilarious how often they get in fights when their lives are so completely horrible.
Too bad you didn't have a copy of the Sims handy at the time... you could have found out the same things without going to all that expense!
Ever notice that when most parents say "Act your age" they really mean, at heart, stop acting more mature than I'm comfortable with, i.e. act younger than your age. (The dumbass parents, of course, think they're telling their kids to act older than their age. That's because most parents are dumbasses
While I agree with most of your post, I think you are wrong here: usually when parents say "act your age", they mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions". They really are asking the child to behave more like an adult (e.g. do homework without being hounded about it, etc).
IMHO I think games replacing dolls will take away creativity and imagination from the children. This is a step in making kids behave like robots and always do what major corporations want them to do
Here is an article containing lots of similar pessimistic quotations by various people, proclaiming that the downfall of youth had arrived in the form of (Novels/Movies/Telephones/Rock&Roll/Waltzing/Comic Books). I think children are a little more resilient and creative than people give them credit for.
Hilarious. A victim of Apple's old marketing campaigns complaining about the victims of Apple's new marketing campaigns.
I'll let you in on a secret, AC: the "real Mac user" pose is also just that: a pose. If you really believed any of that "rebel misfit" crap you regurgitated from Apple's advertisements, you wouldn't be criticizing other people for doing things the way they want to.
Why would you buy a Mac if you're running Windows on it anyway? Doesn't that defeat the whole point?
Depends on what you thought "the point" was. If I was buying a Mac, I think "the point" would be to have a machine that runs all that nice MacOS/X software and OS for daily use, but also runs the Windows apps that I sometimes want/need to use. It's a much nicer solution than buying two computers and a KVM... especially once the Parallels VM stuff has been polished up.
It might seem shocking to you, but yes, it is the discretion of the property owner to determine who is a trespasser and who is permitted
I understand that they have the right to ask you to leave at any time and for any reason. What I don't understand is how they have the right to invite you in to their property, and then have you arrested because they changed their mind and you are now instantly "a trespasser". Common sense would suggest that they would need to ask you to leave, and that you would have to refuse, before you could be held criminally liable in that scenario.
If Best Buy would prefer patrons not look like their staff then perhaps they should invest in better uniforms? Blue shirt and khakis... I've worn that.
Nah, they should invest in worse uniforms... something no "civilian" would ever be caught wearing by choice. Then it's guaranteed that the only people wearing them will be the employees who are forced to wear them. (See the "Hot Dog on a Stick" franchise for a clear example of this strategy)
Why exactly are mildly confused customers a matter for the police anyway?
For the same reason that unattended luggage is a matter for the police, I suppose... the feeling is that if something unusual is going on, it's better to be safe and report it, just in case it is something sinister.
There's no duty to warn a trespasser, even in New York State. Criminal trespass is illegal.
If I follow you correctly, you're saying that anybody who goes into a Best Buy is a criminal the instant Best Buy decides they don't like that person. The only difference between a law-abiding citizen and a "criminal trespasser" is Best Buy's opinion of that person.
Do I have that right? Because that seems very strange.
Unfortunately, the venture was fraught with problems from the start. Automakers wouldn't honor warranties on cars that had been dropped several stories, and many customers had difficulties obtaining refunds when they entered the wrong code and got a different model of car than they wanted.
Those problems were nothing compared to what happened on busy days, when customer #2 punched in his selection while customer #1 was still starting the car at the bottom of the chute.
colour changing paint??? number plate changer?? "Pursue the red VW with the jet engine sticking out the back!" "Cant see it, just a yellow one here"
It's a good point -- what this guy needs to do next is modify his design so that the engine is stored inside the car, and extend out only just before use, in response to pressing a little red button on the dashboard... very 007 (not that 007 would be caught dead in a VW bug)
The Mighty Mouse is advertised as being able to work as a two-button mouse. With a two-button mouse, I can click the right mouse button while my finger is resting on the left mouse button, and the computer receives a right-click event. With the Mighty Mouse, that doesn't work: the computer receives a left-click event, even though I "clicked" the right side of the mouse.
I call that a hardware bug. "Caveat emptor" is all well and good to say, but pretending the bug is actually a feature is only deluding yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure about that. Wide-spread use of biofuels would require dedicating huge areas of land to agriculture to produce them. Between the loss of natural habitat and the pollution caused by modern farming methods (which use lots of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides), that doesn't strike me as any kind of an environmental "win".
Now if you could come up with a way to create biofuels without heavy land usage or fossil-fuel inputs, then you'd have something.
You're right as far as you go, but in order to get to an oil-free transportation infrastructure we need energy transfer mechanisms. There are multiple problems to solve here (energy production, energy storage, energy transfer), and this is one of them. So I don't see how focusing on it is a bad thing -- if/when one of the key problems is solved, it will add that much more momentum behind solving the others.
Obligatory Douglas Adams quote follows:
It's an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, Man had always assumed that he was the most intelligent species occupying the planet, instead of the *third* most intelligent. The second most intelligent were of course dolphins. Dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of earth and had on many occasions tried to alert mankind but their warnings were mistakenly interpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits.
Those aren't names, they are packet headers.
I'd certainly like to know the answer to that question... we have flocks of wild parrots living around here (Southern California) and they are very noisy: it's hard to miss them when they fly by, it sounds like several dozen 300 baud modems all transmitting at once. Which makes me wonder if the modem-like audio might not actually contain a fair amount of encoded data in it...
Best solution: invent room-temperature superconductor, make the chip out of that, profit.
Second-best solution: Handle it the same way office buildings do, by "installing air-conditioning ducts". i.e. little hollow tubes full of moving air (or some sort of coolant) that run through the cube at intervals carrying the excess heat away.
Third-best solution: Run the chip slowly enough that only a little bit of heat is generated: little enough that the heat is able to dissipate naturally, faster than it builds up. Rely on massive parallelism for speed.
I'm in no way qualified to comment on the actual technology here, but I will submit that this situation isn't as unlikely as it might seem. For many problems, the potential solution-space is so large (and the cost of trying out various approaches is so significant) that even a large R&D lab with a big budget and years of effort can end up missing what in retrospect is a very clever and useful solution. It's easy to get bogged down trying "just one more tweak" of your first (or second or third) approach that you never look around and notice the other approach hiding in plain sight. Even worse, a given organization can easily build up a culture that says "this is the way we do things, because this is the way we know things work", which can discourage even bright new employees from looking at alternative methods. (i.e. Why "start from scratch" with approach B when your company has invested millions in developing approach A?)
A new startup, on the other hand, doesn't have all that baggage that might limit their point of view. Or even more likely, some bright person may have had The Big Idea, and decided to found a startup to exploit it and get rich, rather than donating his idea to some pre-existing corporation.
That said, there is plenty of room for bullshit vaporware in the world too
I should have been more specific: make it "never crashes due to software bugs".
Besides that, a server that 'runs fine' except that the network card drivers or scsi/ata drivers are not loaded is still completely off-line.
Sure, but the critical drivers are only a subset of the total drivers in use. So the benefit still exists for any driver that isn't central to the computer's tasks at hand.
My point is that, if a driver is found flaky, that may be the only option besides dropping the hardware, but a _lot_ (most) of the drivers in Linux are rock solid, and slowing them down by putting the whole system under a microkernel is the same thing as giving every car a speed limiter at 50MPH in case its driver may cause an accident while speeding.
But there are those of us, like myself, who are perfectly content at 50MPH anyway, so we wouldn't miss the extra speed. But we would like the extra peace of mind that comes from a more robust design. I guess ideally Linux could come with a configuration option that lets the user specify whether to run drivers in user space or kernel space, then the people who need more efficiency can have it, and the people who want more robustness can have that.
Probably not, but we can at least make it challenging for them: I for one would pay good money to see "Day of the Scoobas"...
Obviously I wouldn't sacrifice speed for something that was less reliable. But if I had the choice of sacrificing 6-14% and getting in return an OS that never crashes, even in the presence of some buggy drivers, then sure, I would do it. Keep in mind that I'm on dual 2GHz CPUs, and so most of the time any slowdown is caused by I/O anyway... so the only thing I would be sacrificing is CPU cycles that were otherwise being wasted by the idle_thread.
If a driver is flakey, it should be fixed or moved to userspace. Putting everything below a microkernel isn't going to give you anything better than that.
As I understand it, "moving (potentially) flaky drivers to userspace" is what microkernels are all about. And having a system where driver crashes are similar in consequence to userland segfaults sounds very good to me.
Sure... but having a computer that crashes reduces the value much more quickly. How many paid hours of a technician/debugging time do you think it takes to cancel out the economic benefit of a 14% faster OS? Better yet, how many minutes or hours of your online store's web site being down does it take to lose your company more money than the cost of the entire server? Not many.
Speed matters. Always.
True, but unless the system is only being used to play games, reliability matters much more. A slow computer is a known factor that can be accounted for. A crashed computer is an unplanned emergency.
Because the software developers are running on the latest and fastest machines (so that they can compile as quickly as possible) and therefore don't notice any slowdown when the eye-candy is enabled. They and marketing think it looks cool, and they don't experience any downside, so they make it the default.
and why do most people keep them on?
For the same reasons many people leave their web browser defaulting to the factory-preset page: they don't know it's possible to change the setting, they don't know how to change the setting, or they don't realize that they would get better performance if they changed the setting.
Can I win the contest using my parachute-based landing system?
Too bad you didn't have a copy of the Sims handy at the time... you could have found out the same things without going to all that expense!
While I agree with most of your post, I think you are wrong here: usually when parents say "act your age", they mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions". They really are asking the child to behave more like an adult (e.g. do homework without being hounded about it, etc).
Here is an article containing lots of similar pessimistic quotations by various people, proclaiming that the downfall of youth had arrived in the form of (Novels/Movies/Telephones/Rock&Roll/Waltzing/Comi
I'll let you in on a secret, AC: the "real Mac user" pose is also just that: a pose. If you really believed any of that "rebel misfit" crap you regurgitated from Apple's advertisements, you wouldn't be criticizing other people for doing things the way they want to.
Then again, I've probably just been trolled.
Depends on what you thought "the point" was. If I was buying a Mac, I think "the point" would be to have a machine that runs all that nice MacOS/X software and OS for daily use, but also runs the Windows apps that I sometimes want/need to use. It's a much nicer solution than buying two computers and a KVM... especially once the Parallels VM stuff has been polished up.
I understand that they have the right to ask you to leave at any time and for any reason. What I don't understand is how they have the right to invite you in to their property, and then have you arrested because they changed their mind and you are now instantly "a trespasser". Common sense would suggest that they would need to ask you to leave, and that you would have to refuse, before you could be held criminally liable in that scenario.
Nah, they should invest in worse uniforms... something no "civilian" would ever be caught wearing by choice. Then it's guaranteed that the only people wearing them will be the employees who are forced to wear them. (See the "Hot Dog on a Stick" franchise for a clear example of this strategy)
Why exactly are mildly confused customers a matter for the police anyway?
For the same reason that unattended luggage is a matter for the police, I suppose... the feeling is that if something unusual is going on, it's better to be safe and report it, just in case it is something sinister.
If I follow you correctly, you're saying that anybody who goes into a Best Buy is a criminal the instant Best Buy decides they don't like that person. The only difference between a law-abiding citizen and a "criminal trespasser" is Best Buy's opinion of that person.
Do I have that right? Because that seems very strange.
Those problems were nothing compared to what happened on busy days, when customer #2 punched in his selection while customer #1 was still starting the car at the bottom of the chute.
It's a good point -- what this guy needs to do next is modify his design so that the engine is stored inside the car, and extend out only just before use, in response to pressing a little red button on the dashboard... very 007 (not that 007 would be caught dead in a VW bug)
The Mighty Mouse is advertised as being able to work as a two-button mouse. With a two-button mouse, I can click the right mouse button while my finger is resting on the left mouse button, and the computer receives a right-click event. With the Mighty Mouse, that doesn't work: the computer receives a left-click event, even though I "clicked" the right side of the mouse.
I call that a hardware bug. "Caveat emptor" is all well and good to say, but pretending the bug is actually a feature is only deluding yourself.
Hm, now that gives me an idea... what if Microsoft comes out with its own "boot camp" implementation that allows users to install MacOS/X on their PC?
Would that count as "biting back"?