One of the things that I still see is the idea that when a problem exists, throw more people at it. The mythical man month pretty much threw that to wind for software development, and I am sure there are a whole slew of books that predate it saying essenstially the same thing. Yes advancements do mean that more people can communicate more directly, but there still is a limit and I do not think it is as great as some believe. Define interfaces, define test that insure those interfaces exhibit high fidelity, and let small teams, even a single person, solve a small problem. What technological advance has done is make clock cycles very cheap, so there is less excuse to go digging around trying to change code that will make your code run a little faster.
Speaking of interfaces, we know that when data and processes are not highly encapsulated, it is nearly impossible to create a bug free large project. One thing that object oriented programs has done is to create a structure where data and processes can be hidden so they can be changed as needed without damaging the overall software application. Now, many complain because the data is not really hidden, it is just a formality. But really coding is just a formality, and a professional is mostly one who knows how to respect that formality to generate the most manageable and defect free code possible.
One thing that has been lost with the generation of rapid development systems quickly spouting out bad code is that code and the ability to tweak it is the basis of what we do.
I have looked at T-mobile, and for what I have it does not seem that much better. For one thing they say unlimited night and weekends, but it does not say it voice minutes are unlimited. I am on legacy rollover, so some months I use more, others I use less, and it tends to balance out.
Coverage is an issue. I have devices for ATT, Verizon and Sprint. Where I am, ATT and Verizon are now the same, but I do travel to places where the ATT coverage is worse. Sprint coverage for 4G/LTE is spotty at best. I have tried them twice in past, and still have a situation where I can use it if I pay a monthly fee, but pretty much I don't since coverage is basically non existence.
I know a lot of people who study 10-12 years and make, make 30-50K for years afterwords, and if they are luck they can get into 100-150K by the time they middle aged. I don't know that anyone deserves money more than anyone else, particularly doctors. After all most doctors haven't actually generated new knowledge or created an innovative solution. Yes, a few like Michael E Debakey are more than technicians, but if we are honest are just highly skilled technicians, not trained in high level skills o research, development, or engineering.
I would agree that we have a shortage in primary care physicians, so they should be paid more.
Yes, c-level executives are paid a lot, but I think they would argue, just like doctors, that the excessive pay is justified because they make sure that everyone else gets paid. The question is does the family of a person in the fast food industry deserve to poor just because they could not get accepted to medical school. Does a person who completes medical school automatically deserve to be in the top 1%?
From an objective economic perspective, most doctors make too much money because we have too many of them. As mentioned, GPs may make too little money because we have too few of them. It could also be that the system of medical school in the US has distorted the pay and expectations of the medical community. Since the 1960's, the restrictions based on race and gender have been removed, yet the number of slots in medical school and residency have not been significantly increased. White males are still overrepresented.
So the value of the yacht is a critical value in this experiment, If I only buy an $8 million dollar yacht I will be immune?
We have seen that over reliance on GPS is a problem. I have lead astray following Google maps using GPS. Although I can imagine some applications in hijacking oil tankers and the like, I would hope that such vessels would have secondary systems.
I can see this as a countermeasure against drones.
To be the most boring technology ever. It was kind of cool when it first came out, like desktop publishing, but over time it has become old. The thing I dread is for teachers to stand up with multicolored text and read. Keynote was and is still interesting, but only because of the rich animation it allows. It is easy to illustrate how things are related. Prezi is an interesting option for online presentations, in that encourages extremely concise and relation messages.
The way most people use it, all it saves is printing plastic sheets to use on an overhead.
Neuromancer is ideal science fiction. It investigates how technology has and might effect the way we live. Unlike the classic and wonderful pulp books, if does not have many of the assumption of the 40's and 50's.
The Difference Engine, although a bit racy, would lead to wonderful discussion about ideas, production, and mass production of technology. Why was the difference engine never built? What were the technological innovation that allowed the Enigma machine to be produced in quantity, the digital computer to be developed, and then mass market components to be produced. What were the technological developments that let us use incredibly wasteful higher level languages instead of flipping switches or assembly?
Virtual Light and that trilogy allows a more contemporary view of how technology effects our privacy, and how our dependency on technology means that we may know less than we think.
A more straightforward look at technology and privacy and security is Bruce Schneier Liers and Outliers, Certainly suitable for the upper level students. Unlike the other books which I would assign outside of class and then use the topic to drive discussion, this book might be used in class. Break it up into reporting groups that would then lead discussions based on what they read and researched.
Also, Dr. John Lienhard has a series of radio programs called Engines of Our Ingenuity. Which this is a broader selection that what is called for here, there are many engaging selections that would apply. There are programs on the difference engine, Lady Ada, the census computer, Turing, and others.
Really the last three years is irrelevant. MS is one of the granddaddies of the mobile computing/phone industry. Their first phone is 10 years old.
The original 'mistake' with the phone the same one they made with IE, trying to use it to tie end users to MS. This is the same thing we are seeing know with MS Office 365 and Azure. Ultimately it does not matter if any phone platform fails, as long as MS Windows and Office still generates revenue and profits.
Xbox is something that could develop because it was decoupled from MS Office. I think it is mostly a publicity vehicle for MS, something to make them seem cool to the young people. Like beer sponsorship in sports. Kids aren't supposed to drink, so there is no immediate profit, but it is important that your beer is what they order the first time they are in a bar. Whether Xbone makes a profit or loss is insignificant in the grand scheme of MS.
If a MS phone is eventually a layer in the market, it will probably be because of MS Surface, which of course was originally an actual playable surface. Of course, it is unclear whether MS is going to put MS Office in jeopardy by actually pushing MS Surface and MS Metro on the general population. I see corporate just moving to MS Windows 7 now. I can see many moving away from MS if they don't give up like they did with Vista. And if they do that, then the phone is dead.
Give me box that I can hook up to my cable box and record everything for several days on as many channels as I want. Well, at least 10 or so. In this world of $50 terabyte drives this should be possible. I have no issue with what the broadcast channels fighting dish on this. The real criminals are the cable channels that fight to keep the content, that maybe only 100 people watch, back in the 50's and away from time shifting and commercial skipping.
And of course other try to over simplify the situation by claiming that processed food is required for us to be healthy.
It is not. You know what food contains half the iodine you need in a day. A potato. Each one real baked potato a day, maybe a glass of milk if you so desire, include some sea salt, which does contain natural iodine along with other trace minerals. In fact mined salt also contains trace minerals, but they are removed, and then the iodine in added back in, albeit in higher quantities.
This is not to say the fortified salt is not incredibly beneficial. In a world where fresh food is in short supply, a world that existed up to the end of WWII, such things were essential public health issues. Of course we now live in a country, the US, where fresh food is pretty much universally available, and it is only our choice to eat highly processed food that makes such supplements important. For instance potatoes, one of natures perfect food, has a bad reputation so we only eat french fried. We all try to pretend to be rich, so we eat a lot of meat, which has no fiber or vitamins or minerals.
As far as jam is concerned, the purpose was to provide year round access to vitamins. Fruit is not going to keep, but jam will. The purpose of pectin is to allow you to make jelly, which is based on juice, not fruit. So again we are dealing with a less nutritious product. Jam is, by definition, added pectin free. Just like sea salt has not added iodine. Or an Apple has no added sugar. This is important because it is often the concentration that causes problems. For instance the arsenic in yucca can be dealt with by letting it soak overnight.
Finally salt is used as a preservative. It is a natural product that allows things, like jerky, to be labeled preservative free. It is what allows us to have cold cuts. Many processed food contains large amounts of salt for this reason. Sugar is also a preservative, which is why it is added to jams and jellies. I know this is not what you said, but it what people are actually talking about.
So really this is just a bunch of copy from the processed food industry, which makes a pretty penny by telling us that we cannot possible survive on fresh vegetables and fruit.
Before we all start cat fighting, remember that 12 years ago Sun gave us a office application that competed well with MS. I have used it for all that time, and have been able to what I most of what I need to much better and reliably then with MS Office. I supplement it with Apple stuff and lately with Google Docs, which is not as good.
Yes a few years ago some who did not like OO.org structure created an alternative which some prefer, and there is an issue with Oracle buying OO.org, but now Apache has it.
So before we start modded up the MS shills who want to promote the OO.org versus Libreoffice battle, remember that OSS is about choice, and MS is about the destruction of choice.
Thanks to all the people who have put work into OO.org. It is very appreciated. I have downloaded the new version and will look at it as I need it.
It is interesting in the fact that someone actually built something and put it into a form that others can replicate it. This exercise,no matter how silly the actual product, is always of value.
The thing with such devices is what is the return on investment. Is there anything of value on a typical phone that would justify the average 10 hours to break in, other to just say you did it? Well yes if you want to check on the text message of a lover who you think has other partners maybe, but it seems that under such intimate contact there may be other ways than to steal the phone and set a robot on it. In other cases, as mentioned, after several tries people often have the phone set to wipe. I mean that is just cheating lover 101.
So I knew people 20 years ago who wanted to be a pilot in the air force. These were extremely intelligent, bright, fit people, good eyesight, knew multiple languages, were willing to do whatever it took/ Couldn't get a plane, they were not the right type.
Today I see kids that have great spatial ability, score way above what they need on the test, and have good process skills. These kids want to be in the military, they are not looking to make $100K a year. They want the government to take care of them for 10-20 years, then they want a pension, and if they are air force they expect to get a job flying planes, which they would,if they had the chance. But because the Army and Marines are seen as the low hanging fruit for these kids, and the incentives evidently don't encourage placement in the the most qualified kids in the most appropriate service, they end up in the Army or Marines.
Most of the these shortages are manufactured to meet some goal of some paper pusher somewhere. Like the shortage of software people or the shortage of teachers. We know what the current goals of the military are, the current issues that they are pushing back heavily against legitimate constitutional civilian oversight. And of course there are, evidently, only between 700-800 female pilots in the USAF.
Creating within a structure can be liberating. That is why students are given the five paragraph essay, with initially very strict guidelines on the type of content and number of sentences.Of course as creative individuals we are supposed to move beyond these structures. The problem is that moving beyond these structures involves violating peoples expectations, which means that commercial success can be jeopardized. Or getting back to school, we are trained to stay within a structure so that we get good grades.
So the challenge is meet commercial expectations while expanding it slightly so not to be too repetitive. I would argue that the six flops of this summer were a victim of over dependence on the structure and the Hollywood star system which lead to bad writing and production. By blaming the structure we blame the car and not the driver. If Dispicable Me 2 can be the #1 film, them repeatedly giving people the same drivel is not the problem. It just has to be fancied up drivel that is well managed and well executed, just like anything else.
Spatial ability is testable. I took such a test to get into high school.It is explicitly listed on tests such as the ASVAB.
Creativity is another thing. There are many types of creativity, and the good news that increasingly school do see the need to encourage creative learning. Of course, given that school are increasingly only concerned with test, it is difficult to find time to engage in unstructured play, which is where we learn creativity. Creativity might be a the ability to put a bunch of stuff together into an interesting or useful form, or it might be the ability to create an image on a blank sheet of paper. To be honest, now that I think about it, the issue is not that we don't try to teach creativity, but we are too product oriented. We are focused on the idea that there is a right and wrong answer, a right and wrong, way, and not that we need to develop a creative process.
I know many artists and they do pretty well without many rewards. I am not saying that an artist should not make a living, but just like anything else it is a choice. One works to maximize money, like this guy or they guy who set up mortgages the guarantees families lose their life saving, or one works to try to make the world a better place, hoping to make some money along the way. And i do not mean high faluting things. If your music makes a few people feel better, able to deal with life,then that is the reward. Sometimes you end up with a product that is highly profitable, and sometimes that product is not art.
The reality is that the free market has set a value for recorded music. It may not be enough to support all the inefficiencies it once did, but the value is set. I heard a radio interview with this guy where he somehow felt entitled to a certain amount of money. That is not how it works. In my lifetime I have found my skills to be worth different values at different time, and if I were still doing the same thing I was doing 30 years ago I would be broke.
Everything has really changed over the past 20 years or so. I recall one duo, 25 years ago, who did shows for free and sold t-shirts to fund an album. The album then paid expenses. Now they perform and don't realy put out albums. They sell t-shirts. I was at a show a while back and was told just go to iTunes.
I wish more big recording people would get off Spotify. This might encourage spotify to do more local stuff, where local performers could get some exposure. People would then go out and see the shows, and we have a better music scene like when I was young, where you just went out to hear some cool music, not to be part of a crowd.
Not really a bug, but rather an implementation. Unfortunately Safari, like IE, allows websites to change the display of a browser window(for instance, no longer display the URL) and to display modal windows that effectively hijack the browser. While there are a few legitimate reasons to allow this, for the most part they are used to keep people on a page against their will.
A lot of this comes from the effort of MS to turn the web browser into an application front end, and many of the legitimate uses are related to using the browser as a dumb terminal. But the risk is significant. On Windows i have IE, only used for sites I know I have to. I try not to go anywhere questionable on a PC. I have had to reformat my computers twice because of problems. On the Mac I have Safari and Firefox. I also have Chrome but it can't be as locked as much so I only use for Google Drive.
It is too bad that we need multiple browsers, but that is life. I really did not realize how hard it was to get a safe browser until Camino was EOL and I had to switch to, and secure, Firefox.
Yes, I did realize the error after I posted. I used population instead of housing units. The article clearly stated that the plants supplied power to 1.4 million homes, and there are about 14 million housing units in California. So really these plants provide power to 10% of the houses, significant but still not critical, meaning that it enough to mean that there will no longer be excess capacity and rates may go up, but not enough to mean that there will necessarily be rolling blackouts, especially if there is a realization that conservation is a major part of the solution.
A rational person would have stopped when they said that economics closed nuclear power. This is the reality. In the US there has been 40 years to prove that nuclear energy is a competitive product. You can blame the government, but it is pretty much bad management of a technology that could work. You can say if the government would only subsidize the product, it would work, but why is government subsidizing a mature technology? In the US it does not seem to be a viable solution.
Yes coal is a major source of electricity, about 40%, and it is going to get harder with new regulation. But again, like nuclear, the reason we building more coal plants it dogma. People believe it is the best solution. It is certainly a profitable solution. There are tens of thousands of people who are willing to dig coal for a middle class income in working conditions that keep the overall costs low. So we have the job argument, the argument that we can't live without electricity, and the argument that technology will make it cleaner. But that technology is funded by the taxpayer, and maybe we want to do something new that will help us long term, not just keep established corporations in power.
In any case, the short term future is natural gas, and the long term future is wind, solar, and conservation. This is where the technology is. Building more efficient electronics. Building better turbines and solar cells. Building superconducting batteries, storing energy in elevated mass, flywheels, etc so that we are not generating for peak capacity 24 hours a day, and then throwing away a quarter of it. It is not something that your C level executive understands, it is not something your coal miner wants to go to school to learn, it is not something that is going to transfer millions of dollars of tax payers money directly into the pockets of investors, but it is something that will build the intellectual and long term economic wealth of the country.
And I mentions conservation. These plants supplied one millions homes in a state of 38 million. That is 2% reduction in capacity. The big thing we need to realize is that energy is neither free nor infinate. We can go and buy a 60" TV that us going to use almost 400KWh in a year, or one that uses under 200. We can browse on our 120 watt computer, or on our 5W tablet. We can turn on the lights in the middle of the day, or not. How much would we need to do to save 2% of the electricity? Who much would be need to do to save 10%?
A cubesat is a kilogram or so. Adding a cold gas thruster with a solar panel could give it limited attitude control and not break the mass budget. I don't know how you build interplanetary telemetry and control in a kilogram so that an ion thruster can get to mars and transmit data. the solar panels necessary for a jupiter mission are massive and much more limited than a nuclear option. A big benefit of the ion engine is a reduction in the fuel that has to be lifted. And the fuel must be easy to ionize, which seems to currently argon, not water. Of course any test bed to see how things actually work is space is great. We can theorize all we want but won't know until we try
It is really going to be a compromise between the expense of a car and the ease of other transportation. And it is not going mean people are necessarily going to own fewer cars, just that they will not use them to commute.
For instance there has been times when a bus has been easier for than driving. So I take the bus. There are places where parking is simply not available,or very expensive, so people drive cars for part of the commute, then take a bus or train or whatever for the rest. So really this has little to do with ownership of a car, but opportunity costs of using the car versus other means of transportation. Obviously if someone does not have a car, then they must use other means. What public transportation is about in cities like LA is making the opportunity costs of using alternate transportation low enough so people will use it.
There are two ways to do this. First is by spending less on highways and diverting money to encourage public transportation. This was a trend that happening in some cities, and to some degree still is. However, car owners, especially suburban and rural car owners, think they have an entitlement to a fast commute, so money has been diverted away from efficient public transportation to getting a vocal minority into the city quickly.
Second is by asking people to voluntarily be responsible. Stuff like carpooling can help, but large firms have had these set up, with incentives, for years. It really hasn't helped that much. People still buy gas they can't afford and put them into cars they can't afford and complain that the government isn't doing enough to subsidize their life style. I have seen change. I have seen people use sharing services, and it is true that younger people are much more likely to do this. Younger people, if they have a well paying job, are also more likely to live in a situation where they don't need a car, i.e. bars and the like are very close.They can take the bus home, change, walk around, pick up a willing partner, walk home and play.
Unfortunately, if what we are talking about is a legitimate company, both states are not going to be in the running. Both states have set themselves on a path of politics that makes them look like third world countries, focusing on personal needs and wants of the politicians rather than building business in the states. It is no surprise that in Texas, for instance, tech companies have been failing. No one who has a choice wants to move where personal liberties are constantly under attack.
If this is not a legitimate company, i.e. innovates and produces products that must be marketed, then they will probably get some corrupt tax deal by bribing the appropriate officials. Few livable wage paying jobs will be created, the taxpayer will be screwed once again, and several high ranking conservative officials will get new vacation homes.
Exactly. Chromebooks are not anything like a PC. It is a dumb terminal connected to remote resources controlled by a third party. There are advantages and disadvantages to that arrangement. One advantage is that hardware and management costs tend to be less expensive, which if costs of the remote system can be managed then the end user benefits.
But even assuming that a chromebook and a PC are comparable, gaining 25% of a small market near zero profit market after two years is nothing to brag about. For one thing I see no numbers. is this 25% of 10 million computers? 25% of 1 million computer? When I look to buy computers I don't see many for less than $300, and can't imagine anyone really was to sell them, because what kind of commission is that?
Here is sucess story. After two years, Apple captured 5-8% of the world wide PC market with the iPad. Not the sub $300 market. No the sub $500 market. Not the sub $1000 market. The whole market.By no selling an tarted up advertising platform, but by selling a tool. A tool, that personally, I can say is effective because I use for work and it makes my work more efficient.
The articles are clearly astroturfing trying to make a failure of a product look like a success. And yes, compared to MS Windows 8 it probably is a success. But compared to hardware people want, it is not.
The first era of the PC ended with Byte. This was when people actually put computers together, actually understood what the computer was doing, and wasn't obsessed with memory and clock speed unless it actually improved performance. Then, over the past 20 years it simply became what MS Windows machine to buy and how expensive MS Office is. So PC World ending might signal a world in which we are trying to innovative things with computers again, albeit in a much more restrictive environment.
way back when one of the routines I depended on, and wrote myself, was something that stored all memory allocations, checked before deallocating, and checked on the end of a routine. It basically patched malloc() and dealloc(), or whatever. It would throw an error if I made a mistake. Still, even with such help, that can be easily turning off for production, memory allocation is tough and it one of those things that separates a skilled developer from a script kiddie, so to speak.
But in the real world, in most cases, cycles and memory is much cheaper than skilled developers. Hand coding memory is like hand coding widgets. Like on any project, sometimes optimization is necessary. I would think that mobile apps would be just like any other app. Run a profiler, see what is making the code get stuck, and fix it. When I was doing C, there were times when I had to drop to assembly because the C was too slow. It would been hugely irresponsible to do it all in assembly, but sometimes yes.
It is a waste of money for developers to go on bug hunts. If a customer reports a bug and a QA person confirms it,then time should be allocated to fix it, and not only fix it but hopefully to fix the process that allowed it to happen. The benefits of bug bounties, I think, is to encourage sophisticated users to give a detailed analysis of the prob,em therefore saving QA and developer time. In OSS of course the end user can fix the bug, but so can any volunteer, so not sure where the cost savings would be there.
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One of the things that I still see is the idea that when a problem exists, throw more people at it. The mythical man month pretty much threw that to wind for software development, and I am sure there are a whole slew of books that predate it saying essenstially the same thing. Yes advancements do mean that more people can communicate more directly, but there still is a limit and I do not think it is as great as some believe. Define interfaces, define test that insure those interfaces exhibit high fidelity, and let small teams, even a single person, solve a small problem. What technological advance has done is make clock cycles very cheap, so there is less excuse to go digging around trying to change code that will make your code run a little faster. Speaking of interfaces, we know that when data and processes are not highly encapsulated, it is nearly impossible to create a bug free large project. One thing that object oriented programs has done is to create a structure where data and processes can be hidden so they can be changed as needed without damaging the overall software application. Now, many complain because the data is not really hidden, it is just a formality. But really coding is just a formality, and a professional is mostly one who knows how to respect that formality to generate the most manageable and defect free code possible. One thing that has been lost with the generation of rapid development systems quickly spouting out bad code is that code and the ability to tweak it is the basis of what we do.
I have looked at T-mobile, and for what I have it does not seem that much better. For one thing they say unlimited night and weekends, but it does not say it voice minutes are unlimited. I am on legacy rollover, so some months I use more, others I use less, and it tends to balance out. Coverage is an issue. I have devices for ATT, Verizon and Sprint. Where I am, ATT and Verizon are now the same, but I do travel to places where the ATT coverage is worse. Sprint coverage for 4G/LTE is spotty at best. I have tried them twice in past, and still have a situation where I can use it if I pay a monthly fee, but pretty much I don't since coverage is basically non existence.
I would agree that we have a shortage in primary care physicians, so they should be paid more.
Yes, c-level executives are paid a lot, but I think they would argue, just like doctors, that the excessive pay is justified because they make sure that everyone else gets paid. The question is does the family of a person in the fast food industry deserve to poor just because they could not get accepted to medical school. Does a person who completes medical school automatically deserve to be in the top 1%?
From an objective economic perspective, most doctors make too much money because we have too many of them. As mentioned, GPs may make too little money because we have too few of them. It could also be that the system of medical school in the US has distorted the pay and expectations of the medical community. Since the 1960's, the restrictions based on race and gender have been removed, yet the number of slots in medical school and residency have not been significantly increased. White males are still overrepresented.
We have seen that over reliance on GPS is a problem. I have lead astray following Google maps using GPS. Although I can imagine some applications in hijacking oil tankers and the like, I would hope that such vessels would have secondary systems.
I can see this as a countermeasure against drones.
The way most people use it, all it saves is printing plastic sheets to use on an overhead.
The Difference Engine, although a bit racy, would lead to wonderful discussion about ideas, production, and mass production of technology. Why was the difference engine never built? What were the technological innovation that allowed the Enigma machine to be produced in quantity, the digital computer to be developed, and then mass market components to be produced. What were the technological developments that let us use incredibly wasteful higher level languages instead of flipping switches or assembly?
Virtual Light and that trilogy allows a more contemporary view of how technology effects our privacy, and how our dependency on technology means that we may know less than we think.
A more straightforward look at technology and privacy and security is Bruce Schneier Liers and Outliers, Certainly suitable for the upper level students. Unlike the other books which I would assign outside of class and then use the topic to drive discussion, this book might be used in class. Break it up into reporting groups that would then lead discussions based on what they read and researched.
Also, Dr. John Lienhard has a series of radio programs called Engines of Our Ingenuity. Which this is a broader selection that what is called for here, there are many engaging selections that would apply. There are programs on the difference engine, Lady Ada, the census computer, Turing, and others.
The original 'mistake' with the phone the same one they made with IE, trying to use it to tie end users to MS. This is the same thing we are seeing know with MS Office 365 and Azure. Ultimately it does not matter if any phone platform fails, as long as MS Windows and Office still generates revenue and profits.
Xbox is something that could develop because it was decoupled from MS Office. I think it is mostly a publicity vehicle for MS, something to make them seem cool to the young people. Like beer sponsorship in sports. Kids aren't supposed to drink, so there is no immediate profit, but it is important that your beer is what they order the first time they are in a bar. Whether Xbone makes a profit or loss is insignificant in the grand scheme of MS.
If a MS phone is eventually a layer in the market, it will probably be because of MS Surface, which of course was originally an actual playable surface. Of course, it is unclear whether MS is going to put MS Office in jeopardy by actually pushing MS Surface and MS Metro on the general population. I see corporate just moving to MS Windows 7 now. I can see many moving away from MS if they don't give up like they did with Vista. And if they do that, then the phone is dead.
Give me box that I can hook up to my cable box and record everything for several days on as many channels as I want. Well, at least 10 or so. In this world of $50 terabyte drives this should be possible. I have no issue with what the broadcast channels fighting dish on this. The real criminals are the cable channels that fight to keep the content, that maybe only 100 people watch, back in the 50's and away from time shifting and commercial skipping.
It is not. You know what food contains half the iodine you need in a day. A potato. Each one real baked potato a day, maybe a glass of milk if you so desire, include some sea salt, which does contain natural iodine along with other trace minerals. In fact mined salt also contains trace minerals, but they are removed, and then the iodine in added back in, albeit in higher quantities.
This is not to say the fortified salt is not incredibly beneficial. In a world where fresh food is in short supply, a world that existed up to the end of WWII, such things were essential public health issues. Of course we now live in a country, the US, where fresh food is pretty much universally available, and it is only our choice to eat highly processed food that makes such supplements important. For instance potatoes, one of natures perfect food, has a bad reputation so we only eat french fried. We all try to pretend to be rich, so we eat a lot of meat, which has no fiber or vitamins or minerals.
As far as jam is concerned, the purpose was to provide year round access to vitamins. Fruit is not going to keep, but jam will. The purpose of pectin is to allow you to make jelly, which is based on juice, not fruit. So again we are dealing with a less nutritious product. Jam is, by definition, added pectin free. Just like sea salt has not added iodine. Or an Apple has no added sugar. This is important because it is often the concentration that causes problems. For instance the arsenic in yucca can be dealt with by letting it soak overnight.
Finally salt is used as a preservative. It is a natural product that allows things, like jerky, to be labeled preservative free. It is what allows us to have cold cuts. Many processed food contains large amounts of salt for this reason. Sugar is also a preservative, which is why it is added to jams and jellies. I know this is not what you said, but it what people are actually talking about.
So really this is just a bunch of copy from the processed food industry, which makes a pretty penny by telling us that we cannot possible survive on fresh vegetables and fruit.
Yes a few years ago some who did not like OO.org structure created an alternative which some prefer, and there is an issue with Oracle buying OO.org, but now Apache has it.
So before we start modded up the MS shills who want to promote the OO.org versus Libreoffice battle, remember that OSS is about choice, and MS is about the destruction of choice.
Thanks to all the people who have put work into OO.org. It is very appreciated. I have downloaded the new version and will look at it as I need it.
The thing with such devices is what is the return on investment. Is there anything of value on a typical phone that would justify the average 10 hours to break in, other to just say you did it? Well yes if you want to check on the text message of a lover who you think has other partners maybe, but it seems that under such intimate contact there may be other ways than to steal the phone and set a robot on it. In other cases, as mentioned, after several tries people often have the phone set to wipe. I mean that is just cheating lover 101.
Today I see kids that have great spatial ability, score way above what they need on the test, and have good process skills. These kids want to be in the military, they are not looking to make $100K a year. They want the government to take care of them for 10-20 years, then they want a pension, and if they are air force they expect to get a job flying planes, which they would,if they had the chance. But because the Army and Marines are seen as the low hanging fruit for these kids, and the incentives evidently don't encourage placement in the the most qualified kids in the most appropriate service, they end up in the Army or Marines.
Most of the these shortages are manufactured to meet some goal of some paper pusher somewhere. Like the shortage of software people or the shortage of teachers. We know what the current goals of the military are, the current issues that they are pushing back heavily against legitimate constitutional civilian oversight. And of course there are, evidently, only between 700-800 female pilots in the USAF.
So the challenge is meet commercial expectations while expanding it slightly so not to be too repetitive. I would argue that the six flops of this summer were a victim of over dependence on the structure and the Hollywood star system which lead to bad writing and production. By blaming the structure we blame the car and not the driver. If Dispicable Me 2 can be the #1 film, them repeatedly giving people the same drivel is not the problem. It just has to be fancied up drivel that is well managed and well executed, just like anything else.
Creativity is another thing. There are many types of creativity, and the good news that increasingly school do see the need to encourage creative learning. Of course, given that school are increasingly only concerned with test, it is difficult to find time to engage in unstructured play, which is where we learn creativity. Creativity might be a the ability to put a bunch of stuff together into an interesting or useful form, or it might be the ability to create an image on a blank sheet of paper. To be honest, now that I think about it, the issue is not that we don't try to teach creativity, but we are too product oriented. We are focused on the idea that there is a right and wrong answer, a right and wrong, way, and not that we need to develop a creative process.
The reality is that the free market has set a value for recorded music. It may not be enough to support all the inefficiencies it once did, but the value is set. I heard a radio interview with this guy where he somehow felt entitled to a certain amount of money. That is not how it works. In my lifetime I have found my skills to be worth different values at different time, and if I were still doing the same thing I was doing 30 years ago I would be broke.
Everything has really changed over the past 20 years or so. I recall one duo, 25 years ago, who did shows for free and sold t-shirts to fund an album. The album then paid expenses. Now they perform and don't realy put out albums. They sell t-shirts. I was at a show a while back and was told just go to iTunes.
I wish more big recording people would get off Spotify. This might encourage spotify to do more local stuff, where local performers could get some exposure. People would then go out and see the shows, and we have a better music scene like when I was young, where you just went out to hear some cool music, not to be part of a crowd.
A lot of this comes from the effort of MS to turn the web browser into an application front end, and many of the legitimate uses are related to using the browser as a dumb terminal. But the risk is significant. On Windows i have IE, only used for sites I know I have to. I try not to go anywhere questionable on a PC. I have had to reformat my computers twice because of problems. On the Mac I have Safari and Firefox. I also have Chrome but it can't be as locked as much so I only use for Google Drive.
It is too bad that we need multiple browsers, but that is life. I really did not realize how hard it was to get a safe browser until Camino was EOL and I had to switch to, and secure, Firefox.
Yes, I did realize the error after I posted. I used population instead of housing units. The article clearly stated that the plants supplied power to 1.4 million homes, and there are about 14 million housing units in California. So really these plants provide power to 10% of the houses, significant but still not critical, meaning that it enough to mean that there will no longer be excess capacity and rates may go up, but not enough to mean that there will necessarily be rolling blackouts, especially if there is a realization that conservation is a major part of the solution.
Yes coal is a major source of electricity, about 40%, and it is going to get harder with new regulation. But again, like nuclear, the reason we building more coal plants it dogma. People believe it is the best solution. It is certainly a profitable solution. There are tens of thousands of people who are willing to dig coal for a middle class income in working conditions that keep the overall costs low. So we have the job argument, the argument that we can't live without electricity, and the argument that technology will make it cleaner. But that technology is funded by the taxpayer, and maybe we want to do something new that will help us long term, not just keep established corporations in power.
In any case, the short term future is natural gas, and the long term future is wind, solar, and conservation. This is where the technology is. Building more efficient electronics. Building better turbines and solar cells. Building superconducting batteries, storing energy in elevated mass, flywheels, etc so that we are not generating for peak capacity 24 hours a day, and then throwing away a quarter of it. It is not something that your C level executive understands, it is not something your coal miner wants to go to school to learn, it is not something that is going to transfer millions of dollars of tax payers money directly into the pockets of investors, but it is something that will build the intellectual and long term economic wealth of the country.
And I mentions conservation. These plants supplied one millions homes in a state of 38 million. That is 2% reduction in capacity. The big thing we need to realize is that energy is neither free nor infinate. We can go and buy a 60" TV that us going to use almost 400KWh in a year, or one that uses under 200. We can browse on our 120 watt computer, or on our 5W tablet. We can turn on the lights in the middle of the day, or not. How much would we need to do to save 2% of the electricity? Who much would be need to do to save 10%?
A cubesat is a kilogram or so. Adding a cold gas thruster with a solar panel could give it limited attitude control and not break the mass budget. I don't know how you build interplanetary telemetry and control in a kilogram so that an ion thruster can get to mars and transmit data. the solar panels necessary for a jupiter mission are massive and much more limited than a nuclear option. A big benefit of the ion engine is a reduction in the fuel that has to be lifted. And the fuel must be easy to ionize, which seems to currently argon, not water. Of course any test bed to see how things actually work is space is great. We can theorize all we want but won't know until we try
For instance there has been times when a bus has been easier for than driving. So I take the bus. There are places where parking is simply not available,or very expensive, so people drive cars for part of the commute, then take a bus or train or whatever for the rest. So really this has little to do with ownership of a car, but opportunity costs of using the car versus other means of transportation. Obviously if someone does not have a car, then they must use other means. What public transportation is about in cities like LA is making the opportunity costs of using alternate transportation low enough so people will use it.
There are two ways to do this. First is by spending less on highways and diverting money to encourage public transportation. This was a trend that happening in some cities, and to some degree still is. However, car owners, especially suburban and rural car owners, think they have an entitlement to a fast commute, so money has been diverted away from efficient public transportation to getting a vocal minority into the city quickly.
Second is by asking people to voluntarily be responsible. Stuff like carpooling can help, but large firms have had these set up, with incentives, for years. It really hasn't helped that much. People still buy gas they can't afford and put them into cars they can't afford and complain that the government isn't doing enough to subsidize their life style. I have seen change. I have seen people use sharing services, and it is true that younger people are much more likely to do this. Younger people, if they have a well paying job, are also more likely to live in a situation where they don't need a car, i.e. bars and the like are very close.They can take the bus home, change, walk around, pick up a willing partner, walk home and play.
If this is not a legitimate company, i.e. innovates and produces products that must be marketed, then they will probably get some corrupt tax deal by bribing the appropriate officials. Few livable wage paying jobs will be created, the taxpayer will be screwed once again, and several high ranking conservative officials will get new vacation homes.
But even assuming that a chromebook and a PC are comparable, gaining 25% of a small market near zero profit market after two years is nothing to brag about. For one thing I see no numbers. is this 25% of 10 million computers? 25% of 1 million computer? When I look to buy computers I don't see many for less than $300, and can't imagine anyone really was to sell them, because what kind of commission is that?
Here is sucess story. After two years, Apple captured 5-8% of the world wide PC market with the iPad. Not the sub $300 market. No the sub $500 market. Not the sub $1000 market. The whole market.By no selling an tarted up advertising platform, but by selling a tool. A tool, that personally, I can say is effective because I use for work and it makes my work more efficient.
The articles are clearly astroturfing trying to make a failure of a product look like a success. And yes, compared to MS Windows 8 it probably is a success. But compared to hardware people want, it is not.
The first era of the PC ended with Byte. This was when people actually put computers together, actually understood what the computer was doing, and wasn't obsessed with memory and clock speed unless it actually improved performance. Then, over the past 20 years it simply became what MS Windows machine to buy and how expensive MS Office is. So PC World ending might signal a world in which we are trying to innovative things with computers again, albeit in a much more restrictive environment.
But in the real world, in most cases, cycles and memory is much cheaper than skilled developers. Hand coding memory is like hand coding widgets. Like on any project, sometimes optimization is necessary. I would think that mobile apps would be just like any other app. Run a profiler, see what is making the code get stuck, and fix it. When I was doing C, there were times when I had to drop to assembly because the C was too slow. It would been hugely irresponsible to do it all in assembly, but sometimes yes.
It is a waste of money for developers to go on bug hunts. If a customer reports a bug and a QA person confirms it,then time should be allocated to fix it, and not only fix it but hopefully to fix the process that allowed it to happen. The benefits of bug bounties, I think, is to encourage sophisticated users to give a detailed analysis of the prob,em therefore saving QA and developer time. In OSS of course the end user can fix the bug, but so can any volunteer, so not sure where the cost savings would be there.