So my 1 month old Raspberry Pi can run all the same stuff as my 2 year old quad core i7 desktop and my Atom-powered Asus netbook? Good to know! That will make my computing decisions very much easier.
Unless they have performance SLAs as well as uptime SLAs. Which they really should. Who the hell would move their system/site to a server hosting business without a performance SLA? I mean, you wanted 23 second page load times on your site, right?
Orbit is basically (in really inaccurate terms which someone will undoubtedly shoot me down on) where you're travelling sideways fast enough that, although you're falling towards the Earth, you keep missing. It's like when you throw a ball in a straight line, and it travels along and curves down towards the ground. Imagine throwing the ball so hard that the curve downward takes it over the horizon. This trick works because atmospheric drag is so little in orbit, once the object has achieved a high enough speed that it keeps "missing" the Earth, it retains that speed for a good long time.
So, in order to get up to geo-stationary orbit, you basically have to add a huge amount of speed to your satellite by burning lots of fuel. Once it's up to speed and stops burning its engines, it stays up to speed.
If you want it to come down again, you need to cause it to lose speed. In order to do that, you need to burn a rocket engine in the opposite direction to slow it down. It takes the same amount of fuel to reduce speed by 1 km/h as it does to gain speed by 1km/h. So you need to burn almost* the same amount of fuel to get back down as you do to get up there.
(* "Almost" because you only need to lose altitude to the point where atmospheric drag picks up, and then you start to lose speed "naturally")
How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?
They could go the Red Hat route for Enterprise customers ("if you want security updates, pay us a small license fee every year for eternity"). For consumers, they could rely on the "natural upgrade cycle"- that is, most people buy a new computer every few years, with a new copy of whatever the latest OS is.
Forcibly withdrawing support is a great way of undermining trust in your product. If you're a large hospital with hundreds of XP devices that really can't be upgraded without a hardware change, finding your hospital infrastructure grinding to a halt (or becoming open to massive security holes) overnight will really sting. They may still upgrade to a new MS OS, but they'll resent it.
Well one answer to that is "that'll learn you to buy Windows for system critical hardware". If you had bought Linux, and Linux-compatible microscopes (and damnit, scientific equipment is one of the few areas which does have decent Linux driver support), you would not be having this problem.
I hope you remember this experience when you do come to upgrade. If you upgrade to Windows 7, you'll have the exact same problem in 5-15 years time.
Anecdote time. My work laptop is very locked down as I'm in a highly regulated industry. Although it has a wireless receiver, it's deactivated; I need to use ethernet connections to connect to the corporate network. It can also ONLY connect to the corporate network, and unless you have a VPN set up (which I and most people don not), that means it will only connect at an office location. No home connection for me.
Despite this, I can work from home, or from the train, or from suppliers' offices, or conference suites- as long as I make sure I synced up all my documents before I left.
Can a Chromebook do that? If not, then no deal for my office.
I'm using 12.04 with dual monitors right now, and it works OK. Did they break something in the new version?
(In case it helps- if you're using the Nvidia proprietary drivers, you need to use the Nvidia settings menu, rather than the default "Displays" menu, in order to configure dual monitors. Not sure why, but there you go)
And open-source is where business wants to invest,
If only. Most big businesses (in non-technical industries) still avoid open source like they would office furniture made of hemp. Or my employer does, anyway. If it doesn't come with an MS/IBM/Oracle/Apple/etc. sticker on it, procurement won't touch it.
Batteries don't grow on trees- they cost energy (and some fairly scarce and/or toxic materials) to make.
You've got to compare the overall cost of building a car with a petrol-based engine and powering it with synthetic fuel, with building a car with great big battery cells and then transporting energy to it by wire.
I bet the batteries still win, but then this is a brand new technology. It'll be interesting to see if they can fulfil their promised efficiency improvements as the technology progresses.
The other obvious use is aviation fuel. I'm not aware of any sensible design for a practical aeroplane powered by batteries. Bio-fuel is the main competitor in that space, so the same logic applies.
This has uses as an energy storage method. Think of it as the evolution of the hydrogen fuel cell- same basic idea, but with a fuel that is less of a pain in the logistics to store and transport. As a way of powering your family sedan, it is competing with the battery not the solar panel.
Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages
...or we can cut out the inefficient middle man and use that power directly instead of converting it into hydrocarbons.
I presume you have designs for solar powered or battery powered aeroplanes then?
Aviation fuel is a big problem for renewables- that's one of the main drivers for bio-fuel research. It's also one of the main areas they've name dropped in TFA. If you think of this as a battery/energy storage component to renewable power (wind/solar/tidal/etc.) as opposed to a source of energy in its own right then the concept makes more sense.
Not necessarily as much sense as the alternatives (batteries, hydrogen, bio-fuel), but still worth researching.
All of them are running dozens of programmes, most of which developed out of house (most of which off-the-shelf). Not necessarily the same dozen on each machine, obviously, but they're all heavily used- we're in a very technology-heavy industry.
If every single one of the development teams for every single one of the dozens of different programmes in use have the same attitude ("Who cares if it's hogging RAM and churning CPU cycles, they're both cheap these days!"). then every single one of them runs more poorly than it might, forcing us to either upgrade the hardware unnecessarily at great expense, or accept a god awful user experience. That's not a good situation just because each developing company wants to cut corners and shave a few quid off the costs.
If you RTFA (and please do on this occasion- it has pretty pictures and everything) you'll see they do show the ones that didn't come true too.
Ultimately it's not about "correct predictions" though- it's about seeing what the people of 100 years ago thought the world would be like in the future. The fact that many of their wildest dreams have actually more or less come true is pretty fascinating.
Has our current network reached a fundamental limit? Presumably NASA currently has X-number of antennae, either on Earth or on orbiting satellites, relaying data to a number of existing supercomputer sites. Is there a reason why the problem can't be solved by building a couple more antennae and a new Earth-based supercomputer/data centre?
That's true, although I suspect they were thinking of using "lunar matter" other than the atmosphere for convection purposes- i.e., using the lunar surface as a giant heat sink, perhaps using lunar water as part of the cooling system. Basically relying on the Moon as a big radiator- let it absorb your heat, and hope it radiates it off into space elsewhere on its vast surface.
Raises an interesting question of "Lunar Warming". What happens if theoretical human industry pumps more heat into the lunar rocks than are being radiated out? Not exactly a problem in anything like the foreseeable future, but I smell a good sci-fi novel in that concept somewhere.
I liked the name Moblin (still do). Thought it was a shame when Maemo merged with it and killed the name. Tizen is OK sounding as names go, but I don't really understand what it's supposed to mean (other than sounding like a popular British soft-drink). Mer I understand ("MeeGo Restructured"), but I don't like the sound of.
The 1GB laptop is a company laptop that I have no control over. Our company has something like 15,000 laptops and desktops out there in frontline use. Buying 30,000 2GB RAM modules at the best internet price I can find (£12.98) would cost £390,000. Then there's the labour costs of fitting new RAM modules to 15,000 machines at over 700 different locations. Programming time might not be free, but then nor is half a million pounds.
So yeah "just buy more RAM derp derp" is not generally a helpful response. Like I said, bastards the lot of them.
That seems surprisingly low to me. Over the entire lifetime of Saddam Hussein's reign (25 years or so), 1 million died. During the course of the US invasion (8 years), up to 650,000 died (Lancet).
That's a hell of a comparison. 2/3 of the people killed in 1/3 of the time, in a war where the invader was genuinely trying to win hearts and minds. Tricky to take the moral high-ground with those figures.
Processors and memory are cheap, a developer's time isn't.
And that attitude in application developers is the reason my 1 GB RAM, dual core laptop runs like sludge.
We've bought a few externally supplied programmes at my company recently, all promising to be within our minimum requirements for hardware. But try to run even a handful of them at once and the whole thing crawls to a halt. The developers on each of them were undoubtedly saying "processors and RAM is cheap, we don't need to optimise!". Bastards the lot of them.
If this were BSD, Alan Cox would have had his hard work stolen from him against his will, and he wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Nvidia could have taken his code and released it in their binary blobs, and he'd never see any benefit from it again.
So why is that a reason for him to go BSD instead of GPL?
Foxconn's workers throwing themselves off high ledges is a problem for Foxconn, not for Apple. As long as the finished phones turn up at the Apple stores, they're happy.
And there are plenty of other contract manufacturers out there in the world.
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So my 1 month old Raspberry Pi can run all the same stuff as my 2 year old quad core i7 desktop and my Atom-powered Asus netbook? Good to know! That will make my computing decisions very much easier.
Unless they have performance SLAs as well as uptime SLAs. Which they really should. Who the hell would move their system/site to a server hosting business without a performance SLA? I mean, you wanted 23 second page load times on your site, right?
That's not how orbital mechanics work.
Orbit is basically (in really inaccurate terms which someone will undoubtedly shoot me down on) where you're travelling sideways fast enough that, although you're falling towards the Earth, you keep missing. It's like when you throw a ball in a straight line, and it travels along and curves down towards the ground. Imagine throwing the ball so hard that the curve downward takes it over the horizon. This trick works because atmospheric drag is so little in orbit, once the object has achieved a high enough speed that it keeps "missing" the Earth, it retains that speed for a good long time.
So, in order to get up to geo-stationary orbit, you basically have to add a huge amount of speed to your satellite by burning lots of fuel. Once it's up to speed and stops burning its engines, it stays up to speed.
If you want it to come down again, you need to cause it to lose speed. In order to do that, you need to burn a rocket engine in the opposite direction to slow it down. It takes the same amount of fuel to reduce speed by 1 km/h as it does to gain speed by 1km/h. So you need to burn almost* the same amount of fuel to get back down as you do to get up there.
(* "Almost" because you only need to lose altitude to the point where atmospheric drag picks up, and then you start to lose speed "naturally")
How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?
They could go the Red Hat route for Enterprise customers ("if you want security updates, pay us a small license fee every year for eternity"). For consumers, they could rely on the "natural upgrade cycle"- that is, most people buy a new computer every few years, with a new copy of whatever the latest OS is.
Forcibly withdrawing support is a great way of undermining trust in your product. If you're a large hospital with hundreds of XP devices that really can't be upgraded without a hardware change, finding your hospital infrastructure grinding to a halt (or becoming open to massive security holes) overnight will really sting. They may still upgrade to a new MS OS, but they'll resent it.
Well one answer to that is "that'll learn you to buy Windows for system critical hardware". If you had bought Linux, and Linux-compatible microscopes (and damnit, scientific equipment is one of the few areas which does have decent Linux driver support), you would not be having this problem.
I hope you remember this experience when you do come to upgrade. If you upgrade to Windows 7, you'll have the exact same problem in 5-15 years time.
. Everyone else either uses their phone or uses webmail, IM instead or OMG Facebook.
Just sayin'
My phone's email system is a traditional IMAP client. So I'm store 'n' forwarding all the time.
Also, I use Thunderbird at home as I have two regularly used email addresses, and it makes it easier to check both simultaneously.
(and I didn't have my smartphone)
That's a pretty big "if". Do many working professionals spend much time without a mobile phone about their person in this day and age?
Anecdote time. My work laptop is very locked down as I'm in a highly regulated industry. Although it has a wireless receiver, it's deactivated; I need to use ethernet connections to connect to the corporate network. It can also ONLY connect to the corporate network, and unless you have a VPN set up (which I and most people don not), that means it will only connect at an office location. No home connection for me.
Despite this, I can work from home, or from the train, or from suppliers' offices, or conference suites- as long as I make sure I synced up all my documents before I left.
Can a Chromebook do that? If not, then no deal for my office.
If they promised "Linux support", but failed to supply Linux drivers, I would consider that mis-selling. I'd say you were owed a full refund there.
I'm using 12.04 with dual monitors right now, and it works OK. Did they break something in the new version?
(In case it helps- if you're using the Nvidia proprietary drivers, you need to use the Nvidia settings menu, rather than the default "Displays" menu, in order to configure dual monitors. Not sure why, but there you go)
And open-source is where business wants to invest,
If only. Most big businesses (in non-technical industries) still avoid open source like they would office furniture made of hemp. Or my employer does, anyway. If it doesn't come with an MS/IBM/Oracle/Apple/etc. sticker on it, procurement won't touch it.
I like your optimism, though.
Batteries don't grow on trees- they cost energy (and some fairly scarce and/or toxic materials) to make.
You've got to compare the overall cost of building a car with a petrol-based engine and powering it with synthetic fuel, with building a car with great big battery cells and then transporting energy to it by wire.
I bet the batteries still win, but then this is a brand new technology. It'll be interesting to see if they can fulfil their promised efficiency improvements as the technology progresses.
The other obvious use is aviation fuel. I'm not aware of any sensible design for a practical aeroplane powered by batteries. Bio-fuel is the main competitor in that space, so the same logic applies.
Are they claiming anything of the sort?
This has uses as an energy storage method. Think of it as the evolution of the hydrogen fuel cell- same basic idea, but with a fuel that is less of a pain in the logistics to store and transport. As a way of powering your family sedan, it is competing with the battery not the solar panel.
Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages
...or we can cut out the inefficient middle man and use that power directly instead of converting it into hydrocarbons.
I presume you have designs for solar powered or battery powered aeroplanes then?
Aviation fuel is a big problem for renewables- that's one of the main drivers for bio-fuel research. It's also one of the main areas they've name dropped in TFA. If you think of this as a battery/energy storage component to renewable power (wind/solar/tidal/etc.) as opposed to a source of energy in its own right then the concept makes more sense.
Not necessarily as much sense as the alternatives (batteries, hydrogen, bio-fuel), but still worth researching.
All of them are running dozens of programmes, most of which developed out of house (most of which off-the-shelf). Not necessarily the same dozen on each machine, obviously, but they're all heavily used- we're in a very technology-heavy industry.
If every single one of the development teams for every single one of the dozens of different programmes in use have the same attitude ("Who cares if it's hogging RAM and churning CPU cycles, they're both cheap these days!"). then every single one of them runs more poorly than it might, forcing us to either upgrade the hardware unnecessarily at great expense, or accept a god awful user experience. That's not a good situation just because each developing company wants to cut corners and shave a few quid off the costs.
If you RTFA (and please do on this occasion- it has pretty pictures and everything) you'll see they do show the ones that didn't come true too.
Ultimately it's not about "correct predictions" though- it's about seeing what the people of 100 years ago thought the world would be like in the future. The fact that many of their wildest dreams have actually more or less come true is pretty fascinating.
Who will we find in maths classes now?
Has our current network reached a fundamental limit? Presumably NASA currently has X-number of antennae, either on Earth or on orbiting satellites, relaying data to a number of existing supercomputer sites. Is there a reason why the problem can't be solved by building a couple more antennae and a new Earth-based supercomputer/data centre?
That's true, although I suspect they were thinking of using "lunar matter" other than the atmosphere for convection purposes- i.e., using the lunar surface as a giant heat sink, perhaps using lunar water as part of the cooling system. Basically relying on the Moon as a big radiator- let it absorb your heat, and hope it radiates it off into space elsewhere on its vast surface.
Raises an interesting question of "Lunar Warming". What happens if theoretical human industry pumps more heat into the lunar rocks than are being radiated out? Not exactly a problem in anything like the foreseeable future, but I smell a good sci-fi novel in that concept somewhere.
I liked the name Moblin (still do). Thought it was a shame when Maemo merged with it and killed the name. Tizen is OK sounding as names go, but I don't really understand what it's supposed to mean (other than sounding like a popular British soft-drink). Mer I understand ("MeeGo Restructured"), but I don't like the sound of.
The 1GB laptop is a company laptop that I have no control over. Our company has something like 15,000 laptops and desktops out there in frontline use. Buying 30,000 2GB RAM modules at the best internet price I can find (£12.98) would cost £390,000. Then there's the labour costs of fitting new RAM modules to 15,000 machines at over 700 different locations. Programming time might not be free, but then nor is half a million pounds.
So yeah "just buy more RAM derp derp" is not generally a helpful response. Like I said, bastards the lot of them.
That seems surprisingly low to me. Over the entire lifetime of Saddam Hussein's reign (25 years or so), 1 million died. During the course of the US invasion (8 years), up to 650,000 died (Lancet).
That's a hell of a comparison. 2/3 of the people killed in 1/3 of the time, in a war where the invader was genuinely trying to win hearts and minds. Tricky to take the moral high-ground with those figures.
Processors and memory are cheap, a developer's time isn't.
And that attitude in application developers is the reason my 1 GB RAM, dual core laptop runs like sludge.
We've bought a few externally supplied programmes at my company recently, all promising to be within our minimum requirements for hardware. But try to run even a handful of them at once and the whole thing crawls to a halt. The developers on each of them were undoubtedly saying "processors and RAM is cheap, we don't need to optimise!". Bastards the lot of them.
If this were BSD, Alan Cox would have had his hard work stolen from him against his will, and he wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Nvidia could have taken his code and released it in their binary blobs, and he'd never see any benefit from it again.
So why is that a reason for him to go BSD instead of GPL?
Foxconn's workers throwing themselves off high ledges is a problem for Foxconn, not for Apple. As long as the finished phones turn up at the Apple stores, they're happy.
And there are plenty of other contract manufacturers out there in the world.