Water ice has nothing to do with hypothetical life on Titan. Liquid methane would replace water as the main solvent, so no water would be required. The freezing point of water therefore becomes irrelevant- it's the freezing point of methane that becomes a lower limit.
Good luck teaching 7 year olds to "grok structures made of text", or at least structures complex enough to represent even reasonably interesting programming projects (beyond "hello world"). For kids that age, it's more important to get their head around the concepts and logic of it all than it is to baffle them with complex syntax and non-standard use of punctuation. They won't even have gotten to grip with regular English punctuation usage by that point!
To demonstrate, here is a bit of JavaScript generated by this Blockly for a few random shapes I threw together:
while (true) {
if (Maze.isWall(0)) {
while (Maze.isWall(0)) {
Maze.turn(0);
Maze.checkTimeout();
}
} else {
}
Maze.move(0)
Maze.checkTimeout(); }
(In case you're wondering, my fiancee is a primary school teacher who has used Scratch to teach programming to 7 year olds and up. She used projects like maze games and Space Invaders clones to set interesting tasks and learning activities. There's no way she would have even attempted an IT project like that with them if she'd had to do it in Visual Basic. Scratch as a tool literally brought proper computer science education to somewhere where it would never have been otherwise; in another age, those kids wouldn't have gotten their first taste of formal programming education for perhaps almost a decade.)
Nope. One of the laptops is an ancient (but perfectly serviceable) Pavilion. The other two (one Asus netbook and one full-sized consumer grade HP) are both less than 2 years old. And not a CRT in the house. That's not counting my work laptop (a Thinkpad), which I don't have a choice in using- it's the one provided by my employer. That's only got VGA too.
Obviously if you go and spend good money on a brand new, decent spec computer you should expect HDMI. But not all computers meet that description- the overwhelming majority of computers and peripherals in the world are bought as cheap as possible, and are kept in use for as long as possible.
That would be reasonably straight forward from a phone point of view. Just have the phone act as a USB hard-drive with a bootable live OS on it, in the same veign as Puppy Linux.
The fiddly bit of booting to a USB hard-drive is always at the other end- making sure your laptop/desktop actually has the ability to do so, and it isn't blocked to you, and the boot device order is correct, and so forth.
3) Wearing one of those stupid headsets every time someone makes a call.
Situation 1: The phone rings. You pick the handset up from the desk/your pocket, push the "answer call" button, and then press the device against the side of your head.
Situation 2: The phone rings. You pick the Bluetooth gadget up from the desk/your pocket, push the "answer call" button, and then press the device against the side of your head. Clip behind ear if you want.
Honestly, I don't see the big deal. I don't own or have any need for a Bluetooth headset at the moment, but I can see that as being a valid and pain-free use for one.
WiFi capable monitors aren't exactly standard. That would either limit a device to just a handful of the newest high-spec devices, or would mean carrying around extra bits of kit to enable connectivity (which would defeat the object of making it wireless). You'd also want the device to be hooked up to a power supply if we're taking this seriously- my Android phone only has a couple of days battery life, and it would be a lot shorter if it were attempting to run desktop applications all day.
Google Docs has a native application for Android. Not to mention plenty of alternatives- Google search "office suite for android" and you'll see plenty. Just because it lacks MS Office it doesn't mean it lacks an office suite.
On the latter point, Ubuntu For Android might interest you- the concept is to have an Ubuntu desktop environment running as an app within Android. That means Unity/KDE/XFCE/etc. available from your phone. If it ever sees light of day, of course. http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
I beg to differ. My employer has many thousands of monitors/projectors/etc. spread across hundreds of sites, and I've never yet seen a single one with HDMI. HDMI is common on new devices- but most devices aren't new. We're not likely to replace those thousands of displays for years yet, not until the hardware starts to fail. In my own home, my main TV has HDMI- but my LCD monitor and spare TV do not. Also, none of the Laptops in my house (three of them) have outputs other than VGA- so I can't realistically buy any display device which lacks VGA for the foreseeable future.
It's a fair point, but bear in mind that this submitter is talking about career options. It's likely that that will mean joining an existing company, rather than starting his own back-room software project. Where that's the case, odds are very high that any "open source" software will be under one of the big licenses, none of which have any anti-military (/animal testing/GM food/fossil fuel/etc.) clauses in them.
Ironically, if you consider military software unethical (which the submitter suggested), open source becomes unethical; not only is there no legal way to stop someone using your GPL/BSD/Apache software for military (or other objectionable) purposes, armed forces in many countries actually favour open source, some are even mandated to use them as a priority. Case and point is the recent Slashdot article on the US military using Linux as a platform for some weapons system or other.
It was a stupid move for them from the get go. We've already got our own, old established failing tech retailers battling it out for the last scraps of what's left of bricks-and-mortar tech retailing (Currys/PC World, Comet, Argos, Maplins, etc.). They're all heading very quickly towards going bust; what on earth possessed Best Buy to try to muscle in on that? They weren't offering anything special; they were offering exactly the same thing as the rest of the crowded market, without the benefit of a well known brand name.
They'd have been far better off buying Comet when it went into administration recently, and pulling a re-brand. It still would have been a stupid move, but at least they could have been a major player while it lasts.
BlackBerrys used to be so popular, there was a time (just a couple of years ago) that it was unheard of for any CEO or politician worth their salt not to have one. Or several. They used to be called "crackberries" because of how popular they were. They were considered so tippity top of the line that their main competitors (such as Nokia) mad their best smartphone money with straight up BlackBerry clones.
Their current products look dated compared with the rivals that are killing them- but that's not because of inherently bad design, it's because they're designing products that look and feel like they're from a previous decade.
5 & 6 are essentially variations on my point 4. You send a crowbar up, put it in orbit (it's now a part of a satellite), then bring it down again as a weapon. You may leave a part of the satellite in orbit, but there's not really much point in doing so (extra mass, even a few pounds, means extra destruction). Lasers are a bit more of a stretch to my wording, but the principle is the same- you put something up there, it sends stuff down as a weapon (in energy form this time).
8 is something you can do with a satellite, but as China so amply demonstrated- you might as well keep the thing safely on the ground and just send it up there when you want it to detonate- i.e., an anti-satellite missile. There's no point keeping these things idling in orbit for years, risking malfunction. The same reasoning is basically what's kept nukes out of orbit- why keep the thing vulnerably in orbit, when you get no extra functionality over keeping it in a nice safe bunker?
7 I'll give you though. That's more or less the raison d'etre of the X-37B.
Not to mention Dreamcast and its VMU modules (or whatever they were called). Frankly, it's a shame we've had to wait until now (for TFA and the Wii U) for it to resurface as an idea again.
There are only a very limited number of things that a satellite can do: 1) Look up at the sky 2) Look down at the ground 3) Relay data 4) Come back down again (i.e., as a weapon, perhaps with a warhead)
Seeing as that first category is pretty innocent and will most likely be non-secret (science is for bragging rights as much as anything else), that only really leaves three varieties of sinister purpose. It's also probably pretty much a given that every space-faring government does items 2 & 3 in large quantities.
Linux won't become a major force on the desktop until it gets the full package down- which includes usability, hardware compatibility, software, and in particular games. Gaming on Linux has historically always been poor- making it better can only be a good thing for Linux. The complete "Linux just works" package is closer today than ever, and gaming is one of the major holes that still needs patching.
And if you want more Microsoft screw-ups, Windows 8 is lining itself up nicely. Unless you really think that Apple (with their single-vendor, premium price-tag approach) is going to be the only one that benefits from a Microsoft market-share slip, you're not thinking straight.
You seem to be using "soft sci-fi" as synonymous with "crap sci-fi", which isn't correct. Soft sci-fi is sci-fi that focuses on the "soft sciences", such as psychology, sociology, political sciences; a heavy focus on character an society. Hard sci-fi focuses on the "real" sciences- fiction about the implications of physics, chemistry and engineering.
What you describe as "soft sci-fi" is not sci-fi- it's space opera. That is, where science isn't really involved, but technology is just a fantastical plot element. If you're desperate to call it sci-fi, it's worth pointing out that you can have crappy, lazy hard sci-fi too- where some interesting aspect of a hard science is used as a prop for some shallow-as-a-puddle action flick.
PK Dick is definitely soft sci-fi. His books were more concerned with psychology, society and questions about real vs unreal, shifting realities. They were only tenuously related to anything to do with hard science- but were fantastic.
And to be pedantic- Blade Runner and Total Recall are not PK Dick books. They are films very loosely based on them (but only very loosely indeed). The originals were the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and the short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". The film Minority Report is even less to do with the story of the same name.
... and the reason why its important is people who like one genre invariably can't stand the other genre and even make comments about how they can't imagine why someone would like the opposite genre.
Invariably my left butt cheek. I like both. My favourite two sci-fi authors are Arthur C. Clarke (who brought hard sci-fi to the big screen with 2001 arguably for the first time) and Philip K. Dick (one of the true great writers of the soft sci-fi subgenre).
There probably aren't many sci-fi fans who could say that they didn't like at least one of: Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who. And they're all soft as over-ripe banana compared to literary hard sci-fi.
Several of my favourite sci-fi films of recent years were only distributed on a limited release around my neck of the woods. For both Moon and A Scanner Darkly, none of my local cinemas were showing it and I had to travel an hour and a half by train (and book a day off work) to see them. It's no surprise that neither of them had record-breaking results at the box office.
Sci-fi does not need to involve space travel. Source Code was an excellent bit of light sci-fi- the fact that it's "fi" was focused on "sci" of dimension-hopping, time-travelling brain-in-a-jar escapades rather than rocket ships doesn't make it not sci-fi. You'll be telling me that William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer isn't real sci-fi next...
Speaking of which, that's what Google TV is aiming for too. Not to mention all the Samsung "smart TVs", and no-doubt other proprietary takes on the concept.
Although none of them have exactly stormed the market yet, I'm of the opinion that we're still waiting for a break-through model, the same as happened with the iPhone and smartphones. Might be Apple TV, might be Google TV, might be something else- but when it happens, subscriber satellite/cable providers will start to feel the effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Water ice has nothing to do with hypothetical life on Titan. Liquid methane would replace water as the main solvent, so no water would be required. The freezing point of water therefore becomes irrelevant- it's the freezing point of methane that becomes a lower limit.
Good luck teaching 7 year olds to "grok structures made of text", or at least structures complex enough to represent even reasonably interesting programming projects (beyond "hello world"). For kids that age, it's more important to get their head around the concepts and logic of it all than it is to baffle them with complex syntax and non-standard use of punctuation. They won't even have gotten to grip with regular English punctuation usage by that point!
To demonstrate, here is a bit of JavaScript generated by this Blockly for a few random shapes I threw together:
while (true) {
if (Maze.isWall(0)) {
while (Maze.isWall(0)) {
Maze.turn(0);
Maze.checkTimeout();
}
} else {
}
Maze.move(0)
Maze.checkTimeout();
}
(In case you're wondering, my fiancee is a primary school teacher who has used Scratch to teach programming to 7 year olds and up. She used projects like maze games and Space Invaders clones to set interesting tasks and learning activities. There's no way she would have even attempted an IT project like that with them if she'd had to do it in Visual Basic. Scratch as a tool literally brought proper computer science education to somewhere where it would never have been otherwise; in another age, those kids wouldn't have gotten their first taste of formal programming education for perhaps almost a decade.)
Nope. One of the laptops is an ancient (but perfectly serviceable) Pavilion. The other two (one Asus netbook and one full-sized consumer grade HP) are both less than 2 years old. And not a CRT in the house. That's not counting my work laptop (a Thinkpad), which I don't have a choice in using- it's the one provided by my employer. That's only got VGA too.
Obviously if you go and spend good money on a brand new, decent spec computer you should expect HDMI. But not all computers meet that description- the overwhelming majority of computers and peripherals in the world are bought as cheap as possible, and are kept in use for as long as possible.
That would be reasonably straight forward from a phone point of view. Just have the phone act as a USB hard-drive with a bootable live OS on it, in the same veign as Puppy Linux.
The fiddly bit of booting to a USB hard-drive is always at the other end- making sure your laptop/desktop actually has the ability to do so, and it isn't blocked to you, and the boot device order is correct, and so forth.
3) Wearing one of those stupid headsets every time someone makes a call.
Situation 1: The phone rings. You pick the handset up from the desk/your pocket, push the "answer call" button, and then press the device against the side of your head.
Situation 2: The phone rings. You pick the Bluetooth gadget up from the desk/your pocket, push the "answer call" button, and then press the device against the side of your head. Clip behind ear if you want.
Honestly, I don't see the big deal. I don't own or have any need for a Bluetooth headset at the moment, but I can see that as being a valid and pain-free use for one.
WiFi capable monitors aren't exactly standard. That would either limit a device to just a handful of the newest high-spec devices, or would mean carrying around extra bits of kit to enable connectivity (which would defeat the object of making it wireless). You'd also want the device to be hooked up to a power supply if we're taking this seriously- my Android phone only has a couple of days battery life, and it would be a lot shorter if it were attempting to run desktop applications all day.
Google Docs has a native application for Android. Not to mention plenty of alternatives- Google search "office suite for android" and you'll see plenty. Just because it lacks MS Office it doesn't mean it lacks an office suite.
On the latter point, Ubuntu For Android might interest you- the concept is to have an Ubuntu desktop environment running as an app within Android. That means Unity/KDE/XFCE/etc. available from your phone. If it ever sees light of day, of course.
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
I beg to differ. My employer has many thousands of monitors/projectors/etc. spread across hundreds of sites, and I've never yet seen a single one with HDMI. HDMI is common on new devices- but most devices aren't new. We're not likely to replace those thousands of displays for years yet, not until the hardware starts to fail. In my own home, my main TV has HDMI- but my LCD monitor and spare TV do not. Also, none of the Laptops in my house (three of them) have outputs other than VGA- so I can't realistically buy any display device which lacks VGA for the foreseeable future.
It's a fair point, but bear in mind that this submitter is talking about career options. It's likely that that will mean joining an existing company, rather than starting his own back-room software project. Where that's the case, odds are very high that any "open source" software will be under one of the big licenses, none of which have any anti-military (/animal testing/GM food/fossil fuel/etc.) clauses in them.
Doesn't Debian run fine on PPC systems? And isn't Yellow Dog Linux still a thing?
Basically- what on earth is the point of this MorphOS?
Curiously, there are some parts of Mars that are the spitting image of the Atacama Desert. You'd feel right at home!
Ironically, if you consider military software unethical (which the submitter suggested), open source becomes unethical; not only is there no legal way to stop someone using your GPL/BSD/Apache software for military (or other objectionable) purposes, armed forces in many countries actually favour open source, some are even mandated to use them as a priority. Case and point is the recent Slashdot article on the US military using Linux as a platform for some weapons system or other.
It was a stupid move for them from the get go. We've already got our own, old established failing tech retailers battling it out for the last scraps of what's left of bricks-and-mortar tech retailing (Currys/PC World, Comet, Argos, Maplins, etc.). They're all heading very quickly towards going bust; what on earth possessed Best Buy to try to muscle in on that? They weren't offering anything special; they were offering exactly the same thing as the rest of the crowded market, without the benefit of a well known brand name.
They'd have been far better off buying Comet when it went into administration recently, and pulling a re-brand. It still would have been a stupid move, but at least they could have been a major player while it lasts.
BlackBerrys used to be so popular, there was a time (just a couple of years ago) that it was unheard of for any CEO or politician worth their salt not to have one. Or several. They used to be called "crackberries" because of how popular they were. They were considered so tippity top of the line that their main competitors (such as Nokia) mad their best smartphone money with straight up BlackBerry clones.
Their current products look dated compared with the rivals that are killing them- but that's not because of inherently bad design, it's because they're designing products that look and feel like they're from a previous decade.
5 & 6 are essentially variations on my point 4. You send a crowbar up, put it in orbit (it's now a part of a satellite), then bring it down again as a weapon. You may leave a part of the satellite in orbit, but there's not really much point in doing so (extra mass, even a few pounds, means extra destruction). Lasers are a bit more of a stretch to my wording, but the principle is the same- you put something up there, it sends stuff down as a weapon (in energy form this time).
8 is something you can do with a satellite, but as China so amply demonstrated- you might as well keep the thing safely on the ground and just send it up there when you want it to detonate- i.e., an anti-satellite missile. There's no point keeping these things idling in orbit for years, risking malfunction. The same reasoning is basically what's kept nukes out of orbit- why keep the thing vulnerably in orbit, when you get no extra functionality over keeping it in a nice safe bunker?
7 I'll give you though. That's more or less the raison d'etre of the X-37B.
I remember a lot of "iPhone Killer" hype in the news at the time of the Pre's launch. It did not last long.
Not to mention Dreamcast and its VMU modules (or whatever they were called). Frankly, it's a shame we've had to wait until now (for TFA and the Wii U) for it to resurface as an idea again.
There are only a very limited number of things that a satellite can do:
1) Look up at the sky
2) Look down at the ground
3) Relay data
4) Come back down again (i.e., as a weapon, perhaps with a warhead)
Seeing as that first category is pretty innocent and will most likely be non-secret (science is for bragging rights as much as anything else), that only really leaves three varieties of sinister purpose. It's also probably pretty much a given that every space-faring government does items 2 & 3 in large quantities.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Linux won't become a major force on the desktop until it gets the full package down- which includes usability, hardware compatibility, software, and in particular games. Gaming on Linux has historically always been poor- making it better can only be a good thing for Linux. The complete "Linux just works" package is closer today than ever, and gaming is one of the major holes that still needs patching.
And if you want more Microsoft screw-ups, Windows 8 is lining itself up nicely. Unless you really think that Apple (with their single-vendor, premium price-tag approach) is going to be the only one that benefits from a Microsoft market-share slip, you're not thinking straight.
You seem to be using "soft sci-fi" as synonymous with "crap sci-fi", which isn't correct. Soft sci-fi is sci-fi that focuses on the "soft sciences", such as psychology, sociology, political sciences; a heavy focus on character an society. Hard sci-fi focuses on the "real" sciences- fiction about the implications of physics, chemistry and engineering.
What you describe as "soft sci-fi" is not sci-fi- it's space opera. That is, where science isn't really involved, but technology is just a fantastical plot element. If you're desperate to call it sci-fi, it's worth pointing out that you can have crappy, lazy hard sci-fi too- where some interesting aspect of a hard science is used as a prop for some shallow-as-a-puddle action flick.
PK Dick is definitely soft sci-fi. His books were more concerned with psychology, society and questions about real vs unreal, shifting realities. They were only tenuously related to anything to do with hard science- but were fantastic.
And to be pedantic- Blade Runner and Total Recall are not PK Dick books. They are films very loosely based on them (but only very loosely indeed). The originals were the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and the short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". The film Minority Report is even less to do with the story of the same name.
Fun fact- in countries like the UK where "DD/MM/YY" is the normal format, we say "4th of June", not "June 4th".
... and the reason why its important is people who like one genre invariably can't stand the other genre and even make comments about how they can't imagine why someone would like the opposite genre.
Invariably my left butt cheek. I like both. My favourite two sci-fi authors are Arthur C. Clarke (who brought hard sci-fi to the big screen with 2001 arguably for the first time) and Philip K. Dick (one of the true great writers of the soft sci-fi subgenre).
There probably aren't many sci-fi fans who could say that they didn't like at least one of: Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who. And they're all soft as over-ripe banana compared to literary hard sci-fi.
Several of my favourite sci-fi films of recent years were only distributed on a limited release around my neck of the woods. For both Moon and A Scanner Darkly, none of my local cinemas were showing it and I had to travel an hour and a half by train (and book a day off work) to see them. It's no surprise that neither of them had record-breaking results at the box office.
Sci-fi does not need to involve space travel. Source Code was an excellent bit of light sci-fi- the fact that it's "fi" was focused on "sci" of dimension-hopping, time-travelling brain-in-a-jar escapades rather than rocket ships doesn't make it not sci-fi. You'll be telling me that William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer isn't real sci-fi next...
Speaking of which, that's what Google TV is aiming for too. Not to mention all the Samsung "smart TVs", and no-doubt other proprietary takes on the concept.
Although none of them have exactly stormed the market yet, I'm of the opinion that we're still waiting for a break-through model, the same as happened with the iPhone and smartphones. Might be Apple TV, might be Google TV, might be something else- but when it happens, subscriber satellite/cable providers will start to feel the effects.