The original article claimed the new battery could withstand 1000 recharge cycles while only losing 1% of its capacity. That's much better than traditional LiIon batteries which only get a few hundred cycles before they're essentially useless.
Various studies have revealed that most cars are driven less than 40mi per day, making a 100mi car perfectly acceptable as a commuter car. I live in L.A. and almost never drive more than 100 mi in a day. I'd buy one.
No, it was both. People want a car that they can take on vacation...nobody is willing to wait hours for a recharge.
No, it was energy density (again). Energy density is what determines the range of the car: ICE/gasoline cars get excellent ranges because of the gravimetric density of gasoline which is 13,500WH/kg, compared to ~40WH/kg for lead-acid batteries.
If you only had to recharge the electric car once per day, waiting a few hours for a recharge wouldn't be that big a burden, since it could be done overnight. This would be less of a burden than stopping every 50 miles on a long trip.
At high speeds (60mph) most of the energy is spent on wind resistance which is function of frontal area and other such variables, none of which are affected by mass.
Um, since electric vehicles are much heavier than conventional ICE cars, a greater proportion of the energy is expended on rolling resitance and acceleration of mass.
Otherwise, why would the range of an EV1 have been only ~40 miles? If aerodynamic resistance were the principal factor, then then EV1 should have had a greater range than conventional cars, since its drag coefficient was much smaller.
You are taking a figure from ICE cars and wrongly applying it to EVs.
Even if we assume 20mph where rolling resistance is the dominate factor you are making a claim that the the entire car minus batteries weighs -84lbs!
I never claimed any such thing. You (wrongly) inferred that my claim implied it.
Cars obviously do not consistently operate at any speed (they start and stop). The EVs were touted as "commuter vehicles" which obviously won't operate consistently at 60MPH then suddenly stop for the day.
Even if we assume 20mph where rolling resistance is the dominate factor you are making a claim that the the entire car minus batteries weighs -84lbs! (the car specs at 3086 lbs, + 200lbs driver, 90% of that is 2970, which subtracting the driver out again comes out to negative weight!)
The original figure did not include the weight of what the car was carrying, which is difficult to estimate and which depends on the number of people in the car, how fat the people are, the weight of their luggage, etc.
IIRC the EV1 car minus the batteries weighed only a few hundred pounds, and the car with the batteries weighed ~3100 lbs. The car was touted as a "commuter car" and therefore most of its energy was expended in acceleration of its enormous mass, and in rolling resistance. Regenerative braking only recaptures a relatively small proportion of the energy expended during acceleration.
The problem wasn't that it takes hours to recharge. The problem was energy density: electric cars used conventional lead-acid or NiCAD batteries which were terribly heavy, relative to the amount of energy they stored. This greatly reduced vehicle range, because so much energy was expended carrying the heavy batteries. Adding batteries helped little, because that increased the weight of the batteries still further.
An example of these problems was the GM EV1, which had a range of ~40 miles in an underpowered subcompact. The problem was energy density: the EV1 devoted ~90% of its energy to carrying its own batteries.
Car manufacturers (like GM) considered using Lithium-Ion batteries, but were deterred by two facts: LiIon batteries are very expensive, and they need to be replaced every few years because they lose the ability to hold a charge. Replacing expensive batteries every 2 years or so made the vehicle costs skyrocket.
A LiIon battery that can be recharged many thousands of times, and that can be recharged in a few minutes, solves all of these problems. An EV can be built with a range >100 miles and an acceptable cost. Even long distances could be tolerated if you don't mind stopping every 100 miles or so for a brief recharge.
This potentially wouldn't even require a hybrid. Straight electric seems achievable.
I've never been a Mac guy. But I recently bought a Mac Mini and I must say, I'm extremely satisfied with it. OS/X is so much better than any other desktop/workstation operating system, that I'm now surprised I consented to use anything else for so long.
I think Apple has a good chance of retaking the 10% market share they traditionally held before their implosion a few years back. Many of my geek friends are "switching" to Mac.
The difficulty is, a random string of bytes appended to the end of a signed message would call into question the authenticity of the signature. It would make the signed document appear like someone was forging the signature by cracking the digital signature scheme.
With any reasonably worded English contract, it's entirely possible that there doesn't even exist another reasonably worded English contract that would collide with the same hash and that's useful for the cracker. Unless, of course, the second contract has quasi-random bytes attached to the end of it; but again, that calls into question the authenticity of the signature.
I certainly agree with you that they're finding stronger attacks against SHA-1, and the trend will likely continue. However they're a very long way from finding useful attacks.
Schneier is taking both of those things into account. He's assuming that we're a long way from useful attacks, but useful attacks may become possible far in the future. That's why he recommends that we gradually migrate ("walk, don't run") away from SHA-1.
It's true that the capital expenditures and costs of repair are far higher for nuclear power. However, the cost of fuel and transportation for that fuel is far lower. As a result, the cost of energy from nuclear is only slightly higher than from coal, taking into account all capital, repair, and fuel costs.
However nuclear power is unfairly penalized because it's the only energy source which must pay to sequester and contain its wastes, in remote underground locations. The coal industry, on the other hand, is allowed to spew its waste into the atmosphere, including its radioactive waste, thereby changing the very composition of the atmosphere and endangering the planet.
If coal power were forced to internalize the cost of disposing its wastes properly, like nuclear power does, then coal would be far more expensive.
Nuclear power is simply the only cost-effective energy source that's sufficient, sustainable, and not catastrophic to the environment. Solar is 10x as expensive, wind power is transitory and insufficient, and hydroelectric is insufficient and causes ecological disasters when the rivers are dammed.
Too bad you're too much of a fucking arrogant prick to actually consider the viewpoint you're downplaying.
There might not be that much of a viewpoint for him to consider. I've yet to meet someone opposed to nuclear power who knew even the very basics of the science surrounding it. Most of them confused a meltdown with a nuclear explosion, or recited the preposterous "China Syndrome" myth where a meltdown can supposedly melt through the core of the Earth (!!) and come out in China.
I mean, who really needs to worry about birth defects anyway? Or waste byproducts being dumped into rivers? Or deformed animals? Or cancer? Or the possibility of a meltdown?
You may have some misconceptions about nuclear power. Nuclear power does not cause birth defects; does not result in waste being dumped into rivers (almost alone in this regard); does not deform animals; has not caused higher cancer rates; and has never caused a meltdown in any country that employs even rudimentary safety procedures, even in countries (like France) that get the vast majority of their power from Nuclear sources.
There are a number of dependencies which are not indicated on the chart, and a few dependencies which are on the chart but don't exist or are very weak.
For example, Python borrows tremendously from Lisp and its creator ackonwledges that. Python has dynamic lists in the grammar of the language, functions as first class objects, and LAMBDA expressions which are clearly derived from Lisp. Some people have maintained that Python is an attempt to bridge algol-derived languages (like C) with Lisp. Still, the chart indicates no dependency.
Java is shown as borrowing from SmallTalk and this is true but only to a very limited extent.
PHP/FI is seen as a derivative of Perl but the early syntax was borrowed from both C and Perl.
The influence of simula on everything is not indicated.
I read the license from Microsoft.com and it appears to be clearly open. It allows any developer to create programs (even open-source ones) that read and write in the format; and any patent claims are waived insofar as an attribution notice is included.
The only change has been a clarification that "end users will not violate this license...merely by reading files...constituted by Microsoft specifications." This does not overrule the prior (open) license in any way, or state that only end-users could read the files; it just frees end-users of the necessity of offering attribution.
In short, the format appears to be absolutely open, and this recent minor amendment does not alter the fact.
When Wilcox (the author of the parent linked article) read this minor amendment, he remarked "that's a far cry from open standard or really open format." It appears possible that he simply misunderstood the amendment to mean that only end-users were able to read files.
On the other hand, Kriss' comment is disturbing: "it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats." Even if the current document format is open and remains open, that doesn't prevent Microsoft from replacing it with other formats ("future revisions") which aren't open. OS programs could continue to read and write in the open format, while Office will extend it with closed elements (in future versions) to write things OS programs cannot read. It doesn't seem that an open format guarantees that a vendor will stick with only that format. Unfortunately it appears the format is still "open" by the common definition of that term, even if a vendor does not promise to use only the open format in the future.
Suspicious is fine, but there is plenty of evidence to support that fact. Just look at the story of GM pulling their EV1 from the market, despite great demand, or the similar story behind every other major manufacturer's story.
Not only did the EV1 devote almost 90% of its total body weight to batteries, but it costed as much as a $30,000 car for a two-seater subcompact. For these reasons, and other reasons, the EV1 was a total commecial flop.
Despite heavy advertising, GM never managed to lease more than 800 of them, only a fraction of the manufactured inventory. Bear in mind that designing a car and ramping up for production usually costs ~$1.5 billion.
Thus, it's clearly false that GM cancelled the EV1 because of conspiracy, despite "great demand" (your words).
First of all, LiIon is about as light as batteries get... They are quite light... Lighter in fact than the engine and transmission in conventional cars.
No, LiIon batteries are lighter than Lead Acid ones but are nowhere near as light as engines and transmissions, and have nowhere near the fuel density of gasoline.
...It would be INCREDIBLY difficult to get up to 200MPH with electric motors having to hault 10 tons... I'm willing to guarantee it's doesn't weigh more than 2 tons.
Actually, the article mentions that the car weighs ~5300lbs and is therefore more than twice the weight of a typical midsize sedan, and is also more than 2 tons.
That's a ridiculous assumption to make. It's most likely got so many wheels because it needs serious traction for such acceleration.
The article mentioned that its acceleration was very slightly more than a Porsche 911 which does not require 8 wheels, or even 6.
Just look at the story of GM pulling their EV1 from the market, despite great demand, or the similar story behind every other major manufacturer's story.
The EV1 failed not because of a GM conspiracy, but because it costed $30,000 for a subcompact with an average 48-mile range (max 100 miles under ideal circumstances) and the necessity of replacing the batteries, at great expense, every few years.
I should also mention that the EV1 weighed 2970 pounds, approximately 2590 of which was battery weight (87% of the weight of the car). I dare say, that your bringing up the EV1 has just validated my original point completely.
Actually, according the to the UK article, the car weighs 2,400kg, or 2.6455 tons.
That is more than twice a typical passenger car and is more in line with a large truck.
I am guessing that the eight wheels are there to provide the extra horsepower needed to have this thing go 0-60 in about 4 seconds.
0-60 in 4 seconds is approximately the same acceleration as a Porsche 911 Turbo, which does not require 8 wheels to accomplish the task. Professional racing cars do not require 8 wheels either.
Unfortunately, the difficulties are much greater than that. Li-ion batteries are incredibly heavy, and therefore difficult to transport in a car. The vast majority of the electricity expended is wasted in just carrying the extra weight of the batteries.
In this case, they probably achieved the 200 mile range by using 10 times the normal number of batteries. But the car probably weighs 10 tons. I bet that's why it's huge, and has eight wheels (including four in the front).
Just recharging that many Li-ion batteries would probably take more electricity than a city block uses in a month. To say nothing of the 180,000 gbp price tag, or the replacement costs (every 3-4 years!) for the batteries, or upgrading all the streets in the U.S. to handle the weight. Also, even if you only drive a short distance, you are still expending all the electricity of carrying batteries that are sufficient for a greater range.
The idea of using batteries to power cars was totally mistaken from the outset, and has been completely discredited by now. Batteries simply don't have the energy density required. They can't be used to power cars until there's a revolutionary advancement in battery technology, but none has been forthcoming after more than a century of research.
Of course, we should all be suspicious of those pepole who say: "I have a revolutionary idea that will transform the automobile industry -- but General Motors is trying to suppress me!!" Venture capital would chase you to the ends of the earth, if you had a real revolutionary idea. The difficulty is: some people overrate the importance of their ideas, and attribute their failure to a conspiracy to ignore them.
That is the absolute least likely thing to happen. Holocaust articles, Judaism, US election/political figures, and articles about the Middle East are subject to the most scrutiny of any article type on Wikipedia. Massive vandalism of the type you indicate to fool little Johnny would be instantaneously reverted, and the user vigorously blocked without warning. Little Johnny would never have a chance to glance it.
Nothing on wikipedia is ever "instantaneously" reverted. All reversions require someone familiar with Wikipedia to read the article, notice the difficulty, and revert it back to the original. This takes at least some noticeable time. Indeed, the Holocaust article you mentioned routinely has neo-Nazi material added to it that often remains uncorrected for 30 minutes or more. Even a neo-Nazi rant published as recently as last month ran for 7 minutes. (See history of the article).
7 minutes is sufficient time for a great many web hits. There were probably hundreds of page views of the incorrect material before someone corrected it.
Thus, your analysis that uncorrected revisions being viewed are "the absolute least likely thing to happen" is clearly false. Instead, it's absolutely inevitable that incorrect revisions will be viewed. In fact, since there are far more innocent non-editing viewers in the world than responsible Wikipedia editors, it seems likely that the average neo-Nazi rant will be viewed by several innocent viewers before being corrected.
I've been around long enough in the computer industry to have seen hundreds of studies like this produced over decades. Every one claims some remarkable productivity increase through some environmental change: raise the temperature, lower the temperature, paint the walls green, have everyone program in a big "war room," have everyone program in separate offices, have people program in pairs, waft chamomile scents through the air, conduct team building exercises, etc etc. Each time, the study claims huge productivity increases (>200%). None of the studies are ever replicated by anyone else. When their recommendations are put into practice, productivity always remains the same.
The lesson is this. There is no trendy, simple way of doubling productivity. There is no magic bullet. And, isolated studies can be quite mistaken.
More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it... They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.
I'm relatively sure Sun has thought of this already.
They're intending this to be used for commercial workloads, like Oracle. Oracle already has all kinds of fine-grained locking mechanisms and scales relatively linearly up to hundreds of CPUs, and has for years. A great many other applications in user space can already exploit many CPUs. This is a software engineering problem that was solved when SMP machines started coming out in '91. This problem is totally independent of Sun's Niagra chip.
Tell a lie enough times it becomes true. Most Palestinians actually voluntarily left, at the urging of their Arab neighbors, to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies, and then move back after the Jews are defeated. It is estimated only about 1/3 of the Arabs actually were forced out.
The palestinians maintain that they were forced out, and the israelis mantain that the palestinians voluntarily abandoned their homes. I wasn't there, but the palestinian case is much more believable. This argument put forth by the pro-israel lobby -- "they just GAVE their houses to us spontaneously, who knows why" -- is very difficult to believe and would never withstand the evidentiary tests required to constitute a legal transfer of property.
But even if palestinians voluntarily left, still, the fact is irrelevant. Voluntarily leaving one's home doesn't imply that ownership of the home is thereby transferred to zionists. The homes remain the property of owners until they sell them or transfer the titles.
Plus, you mention the occupation, and conveniently ignore that prior to this, West Bank was occupied by Jordan, and Gaza was occupied by Egypt. Why, then, weren't these occupations fought against?
Egypt has not established settlements by evicting the former residents of Gaza.
Let's look at the PA. I bet you're not aware that it is illegal under penalty of death for any Palestinian to sell land to any Jew. Period. Note - not Israeli, but JEW. Why doesn't any human rights champion condemn this? It seems only Israel is the violator of human rights in the region.
I'm certainly not justifying the barbarism and violence of much of the arab world. Nevertheless this doesn't justify Israel's activities.
It wasn't Israel turning itself [apartheid], it was the actions BOTH of Israel and its Arab neighbors that led to the situation today.
Israel was an apartheid state from the beginning. The entire point of zionism was to eject the indigenous population of palestine and create a state of jewish people. Zionism was not about moving to Israel and living among the people who were already there. The initial decision to create a "jewish state" to the exclusion of others was a tremendous mistake, and the ejection of the native population necessitated by it has led to decades of conflict.
I don't understand why Israel doesn't just dismantle the settlements and get back into its 1967 borders. Over time (perhaps decades) the hatred will fade. But instead, Israel engages in stupidly provocative tactics like building settlements and exropriating more land. And for what purpose? A few more square miles of land? What amazes me about both Israel and the U.S. is that their moves on the world stage are so terribly idiotic. Israel has managed to re-ignite anti-semitism worldwide, to an extent not seen since the 1930's, and the U.S. continues to tinker in the politics of the middle east, with the same disastrous long-term consequences as always. What baffles me is that both countries (the U.S. and Israel) see these maneuvers as being in their self-interest. Bizarre. I was starting to think that they were intentionally injuring themselves. How terribly tragic that Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and Arabs must suffer because of idiots like Sharon and Bush.
This morning I had the pleasure of installing RedHat 9 onto a Dell Dimension 4600 provided by the gov't. First, it couldn't deal with the video card plugged into the AGP port that provided an S-Video out; the graphical installer wouldn't even run. So I removed the card. Then it couldn't deal with the integrated i865 graphics (!!!!). To use i865 graphics you must download and install a patch and provide it with parameters. Then it couldn't deal with the wireless nic. And so on....
After the installation, postgres wouldn't work until i typed "su -c 'createdb username' postgres", which was entirely different from what the docs said, because the doc's instructions were wrong and didn't work.
Bear in mind: This is the most common linux distro, installed on probably the most common PC in the world (Dell Dimension), with very common graphics hardware (i865). Still the installer failed badly. I got it to work with some tinkering but it's the kind of thing the typical user won't want to do.
But of course the construction of such a missle would be greatly aided by a space program. You could just as well say the dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have thumbs. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.
The article was discussing whether manned space flight was economical and worthwhile. The construction of such a missile would obviosuly be aided more by (say) a missile defense program than by sending people to mars.
"The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."
The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a missile capable of shooting down an incoming asteroid. Building such a missle would be much easier than building a light-speed artificial-gravity terraforming spacecraft capable of carrying some portion of dinosaur civilization 6 billion lightyears to some other planet.
In short, space travel is not the most realistic way of avoiding the fate of the dinosaurs.
(5) The number of supported devices on proprietary computers was a small fraction of the number that Windows currently supports.
Windows/PCs have 100,000s of different devices, all from 3rd party manufacturers. Each device must have it's own device driver running in kernel space, and defects in the device drivers can crash the system. Many of the drivers are rapidly changing and not well-tested. This is the biggest cause of Windows OS crashes.
Boxes from "vertically integrated" computer makers (DEC, Sun, etc) had a very small number of supported devices that were built by the same company that made the OS. Device drivers were few, stable, and very well-tested.
There are more market segments than the one you describe. Perhaps the gaming industry is suffering because it appeals only to the young male demographic.
For example, I used to play games but don't any more, because now I find games incredibly boring. I don't find any of the criteria you listed (GUNS, GIRLS, GRAPHICS) to be important. I don't want more GUNS, because I played Doom in High School and (by now) I'm completely sick of the FPS genre, and I never EVER want to play another FPS. Furthermore, I don't want to look at GIRLS cuz I'm a gay guy, and although I realize my demographic is atypical, there are alot of heterosexual females that don't need to look at scantily clad girls either. And GRAPHICS aren't enough to motivate me to play a game for more than like 10 minutes. Great graphics are actually a minor part of whether or not I end up enjoying a game.
SO, the three criteria you listed are really only important to heterosexual young males who aren't yet COMPLETELY FUCKING SICK of shoot-em-ups and FPS's. That demographic makes up what percentage of the population? 5-10%? The gaming industry is mistaken to think that these criteria apply to everybody and that we'll never tire of FPS's. These mistaken notions might be part of the problem faced by the gaming industry now.
The article briefly mentioned the dark history of psychosurgery. A few interesting details were omitted however.
The most popular kind of psychosurgery ever done was the prefontal lobotomy. This technique had something of a heyday in the 1940s.
The gentleman who invented the lobotomy (Freeman) lacked any surgical training. He would perform the procedure on an outpatient basis; he drove around the countryside in his "loboto-mobile" (quite seriously) and performed thousands of the operations himself.
His method of lobotomizing involved jamming an icepick through the eye socket with a hammer, until the icepick was deeply recessed within the brain. Then he would wiggle the icepick around vigorously. (I'm not making this up). The entire procedure took less than 5 minutes. A hospital visit was unnecessary.
Freeman went around the country demonstrating the procedure in mental hospitals etc. The technique fell out of favor in the 1950s, when it was learned that lobotomies had no therapeutic value whatsoever, and often had severe and permanent side-effects.
I'll throw in an answer here, even though I'm not the person you were asking. I'll share what it's like to use X on my 600mhz p3 box w/ 512MB.
1. Launching a typical application (mozilla or openoffice) takes about 1-2 minutes, even when the application is entirely cached in RAM. On Windows, this takes <0.5 seconds on far older hardware (k6/2-350mhz).
2. Resizing a window looks like complete shit, because the resizing drags behind my mouse movements by several seconds. On windows, this is completely instantaneous on far older hardware, even if I jerk the mouse back and forth as fast as I can.
3. Moving windows takes visible time.
4. Opening new windows takes several seconds. Again, completely instantaneous on windows years ago.
Bear in mind that this is not something specific to my box. This has been the case on every box running XFree that I've ever encountered. The problem has not gone away with more modern hardware; On ~2GHz boxes, it's just gotten somewhat better.
To me this is the huge reason not to use linux on the desktop. I just can't stand waiting every time the screen needs to redraw, or every time I launch an app.
I believe that the casual users who try linux as a desktop, will dump it for precisely this reason. All gui manipulations are instantaneous on Mac or Win, and have been for many years; whereas XFree is so damn sluggish that it's extremely irritating.
This defect greatly outweighs the benefits of network transparency! If I need to do some administration work from remote I can use a shell. (I do almost all administrative work using the shell anyway). People want a gui for desktop apps, and with desktop apps what they really want is responsiveness.
Let's see, you want to replace a thriving part of the economy and unemploy hundreds of thousands of upper middle class developers
No part of my suggestion requires that we unemploy "hundreds of thousands of upper middle class developers." No part of my suggestion requires that we "replace" any part of the economy. Did you gather these from my post somewhere, or are you "inferring" it?
with a government program (with the usual endemic mismanagement, pork-barrel politics, and just plain ineffectiveness)
If the government program were so much less efficient than private industry, then more programmers would have to be employed to achieve the same result. However, that's not even what I'm suggesting; I'm not suggesting that any portion of the private economy be replaced. In case you didn't read my post terribly carefully, I'm not suggesting we nationalize the software industry! I'm suggesting a small program funded by a collaboration of public entities, to offer free software in competition with the few monopolistic software enterprises. Since less than 10% of the price of Windows or Office goes to actaual development on that software, I'd be willing to bet that government programs would be even more efficient than private industry in this limited case.
Furthermore, government agencies which only distribute grants (like the NIH) have been shown to be reasonably efficient, relative to private industry.
funded through additional taxation (which would inevitably creep upward over time).
It's not inevitable that the funds devoted to a given project will increase over time. Federal funds to defense and aerospace (for example) dropped precipitously during the 1990s. Your comment is an unwarranted assumption.
I think even Stallman would have trouble keeping a straight face while listening to this one.
Thanks for your considered and intelligent response. It appears you have serious problems with reading comprehension, since most of the things you attributed to my post had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
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Various studies have revealed that most cars are driven less than 40mi per day, making a 100mi car perfectly acceptable as a commuter car. I live in L.A. and almost never drive more than 100 mi in a day. I'd buy one.
If you only had to recharge the electric car once per day, waiting a few hours for a recharge wouldn't be that big a burden, since it could be done overnight. This would be less of a burden than stopping every 50 miles on a long trip.
Um, since electric vehicles are much heavier than conventional ICE cars, a greater proportion of the energy is expended on rolling resitance and acceleration of mass.Otherwise, why would the range of an EV1 have been only ~40 miles? If aerodynamic resistance were the principal factor, then then EV1 should have had a greater range than conventional cars, since its drag coefficient was much smaller.
You are taking a figure from ICE cars and wrongly applying it to EVs.
I never claimed any such thing. You (wrongly) inferred that my claim implied it.Cars obviously do not consistently operate at any speed (they start and stop). The EVs were touted as "commuter vehicles" which obviously won't operate consistently at 60MPH then suddenly stop for the day.
The original figure did not include the weight of what the car was carrying, which is difficult to estimate and which depends on the number of people in the car, how fat the people are, the weight of their luggage, etc.IIRC the EV1 car minus the batteries weighed only a few hundred pounds, and the car with the batteries weighed ~3100 lbs. The car was touted as a "commuter car" and therefore most of its energy was expended in acceleration of its enormous mass, and in rolling resistance. Regenerative braking only recaptures a relatively small proportion of the energy expended during acceleration.
The problem wasn't that it takes hours to recharge. The problem was energy density: electric cars used conventional lead-acid or NiCAD batteries which were terribly heavy, relative to the amount of energy they stored. This greatly reduced vehicle range, because so much energy was expended carrying the heavy batteries. Adding batteries helped little, because that increased the weight of the batteries still further.
An example of these problems was the GM EV1, which had a range of ~40 miles in an underpowered subcompact. The problem was energy density: the EV1 devoted ~90% of its energy to carrying its own batteries.
Car manufacturers (like GM) considered using Lithium-Ion batteries, but were deterred by two facts: LiIon batteries are very expensive, and they need to be replaced every few years because they lose the ability to hold a charge. Replacing expensive batteries every 2 years or so made the vehicle costs skyrocket.
A LiIon battery that can be recharged many thousands of times, and that can be recharged in a few minutes, solves all of these problems. An EV can be built with a range >100 miles and an acceptable cost. Even long distances could be tolerated if you don't mind stopping every 100 miles or so for a brief recharge.
This potentially wouldn't even require a hybrid. Straight electric seems achievable.
I've never been a Mac guy. But I recently bought a Mac Mini and I must say, I'm extremely satisfied with it. OS/X is so much better than any other desktop/workstation operating system, that I'm now surprised I consented to use anything else for so long.
I think Apple has a good chance of retaking the 10% market share they traditionally held before their implosion a few years back. Many of my geek friends are "switching" to Mac.
The difficulty is, a random string of bytes appended to the end of a signed message would call into question the authenticity of the signature. It would make the signed document appear like someone was forging the signature by cracking the digital signature scheme.
With any reasonably worded English contract, it's entirely possible that there doesn't even exist another reasonably worded English contract that would collide with the same hash and that's useful for the cracker. Unless, of course, the second contract has quasi-random bytes attached to the end of it; but again, that calls into question the authenticity of the signature.
I certainly agree with you that they're finding stronger attacks against SHA-1, and the trend will likely continue. However they're a very long way from finding useful attacks.
Schneier is taking both of those things into account. He's assuming that we're a long way from useful attacks, but useful attacks may become possible far in the future. That's why he recommends that we gradually migrate ("walk, don't run") away from SHA-1.
It's true that the capital expenditures and costs of repair are far higher for nuclear power. However, the cost of fuel and transportation for that fuel is far lower. As a result, the cost of energy from nuclear is only slightly higher than from coal, taking into account all capital, repair, and fuel costs.
However nuclear power is unfairly penalized because it's the only energy source which must pay to sequester and contain its wastes, in remote underground locations. The coal industry, on the other hand, is allowed to spew its waste into the atmosphere, including its radioactive waste, thereby changing the very composition of the atmosphere and endangering the planet.
If coal power were forced to internalize the cost of disposing its wastes properly, like nuclear power does, then coal would be far more expensive.
Nuclear power is simply the only cost-effective energy source that's sufficient, sustainable, and not catastrophic to the environment. Solar is 10x as expensive, wind power is transitory and insufficient, and hydroelectric is insufficient and causes ecological disasters when the rivers are dammed.
There are a number of dependencies which are not indicated on the chart, and a few dependencies which are on the chart but don't exist or are very weak.
For example, Python borrows tremendously from Lisp and its creator ackonwledges that. Python has dynamic lists in the grammar of the language, functions as first class objects, and LAMBDA expressions which are clearly derived from Lisp. Some people have maintained that Python is an attempt to bridge algol-derived languages (like C) with Lisp. Still, the chart indicates no dependency.
Java is shown as borrowing from SmallTalk and this is true but only to a very limited extent.
PHP/FI is seen as a derivative of Perl but the early syntax was borrowed from both C and Perl.
The influence of simula on everything is not indicated.
I read the license from Microsoft.com and it appears to be clearly open. It allows any developer to create programs (even open-source ones) that read and write in the format; and any patent claims are waived insofar as an attribution notice is included.
The only change has been a clarification that "end users will not violate this license...merely by reading files...constituted by Microsoft specifications." This does not overrule the prior (open) license in any way, or state that only end-users could read the files; it just frees end-users of the necessity of offering attribution.
In short, the format appears to be absolutely open, and this recent minor amendment does not alter the fact.
When Wilcox (the author of the parent linked article) read this minor amendment, he remarked "that's a far cry from open standard or really open format." It appears possible that he simply misunderstood the amendment to mean that only end-users were able to read files.
On the other hand, Kriss' comment is disturbing: "it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats." Even if the current document format is open and remains open, that doesn't prevent Microsoft from replacing it with other formats ("future revisions") which aren't open. OS programs could continue to read and write in the open format, while Office will extend it with closed elements (in future versions) to write things OS programs cannot read. It doesn't seem that an open format guarantees that a vendor will stick with only that format. Unfortunately it appears the format is still "open" by the common definition of that term, even if a vendor does not promise to use only the open format in the future.
Despite heavy advertising, GM never managed to lease more than 800 of them, only a fraction of the manufactured inventory. Bear in mind that designing a car and ramping up for production usually costs ~$1.5 billion.
Thus, it's clearly false that GM cancelled the EV1 because of conspiracy, despite "great demand" (your words).
I should also mention that the EV1 weighed 2970 pounds, approximately 2590 of which was battery weight (87% of the weight of the car). I dare say, that your bringing up the EV1 has just validated my original point completely.
That is more than twice a typical passenger car and is more in line with a large truck.
0-60 in 4 seconds is approximately the same acceleration as a Porsche 911 Turbo, which does not require 8 wheels to accomplish the task. Professional racing cars do not require 8 wheels either.
Unfortunately, the difficulties are much greater than that. Li-ion batteries are incredibly heavy, and therefore difficult to transport in a car. The vast majority of the electricity expended is wasted in just carrying the extra weight of the batteries.
In this case, they probably achieved the 200 mile range by using 10 times the normal number of batteries. But the car probably weighs 10 tons. I bet that's why it's huge, and has eight wheels (including four in the front).
Just recharging that many Li-ion batteries would probably take more electricity than a city block uses in a month. To say nothing of the 180,000 gbp price tag, or the replacement costs (every 3-4 years!) for the batteries, or upgrading all the streets in the U.S. to handle the weight. Also, even if you only drive a short distance, you are still expending all the electricity of carrying batteries that are sufficient for a greater range.
The idea of using batteries to power cars was totally mistaken from the outset, and has been completely discredited by now. Batteries simply don't have the energy density required. They can't be used to power cars until there's a revolutionary advancement in battery technology, but none has been forthcoming after more than a century of research.
Of course, we should all be suspicious of those pepole who say: "I have a revolutionary idea that will transform the automobile industry -- but General Motors is trying to suppress me!!" Venture capital would chase you to the ends of the earth, if you had a real revolutionary idea. The difficulty is: some people overrate the importance of their ideas, and attribute their failure to a conspiracy to ignore them.
Nothing on wikipedia is ever "instantaneously" reverted. All reversions require someone familiar with Wikipedia to read the article, notice the difficulty, and revert it back to the original. This takes at least some noticeable time. Indeed, the Holocaust article you mentioned routinely has neo-Nazi material added to it that often remains uncorrected for 30 minutes or more. Even a neo-Nazi rant published as recently as last month ran for 7 minutes. (See history of the article).
7 minutes is sufficient time for a great many web hits. There were probably hundreds of page views of the incorrect material before someone corrected it.
Thus, your analysis that uncorrected revisions being viewed are "the absolute least likely thing to happen" is clearly false. Instead, it's absolutely inevitable that incorrect revisions will be viewed. In fact, since there are far more innocent non-editing viewers in the world than responsible Wikipedia editors, it seems likely that the average neo-Nazi rant will be viewed by several innocent viewers before being corrected.
I've been around long enough in the computer industry to have seen hundreds of studies like this produced over decades. Every one claims some remarkable productivity increase through some environmental change: raise the temperature, lower the temperature, paint the walls green, have everyone program in a big "war room," have everyone program in separate offices, have people program in pairs, waft chamomile scents through the air, conduct team building exercises, etc etc. Each time, the study claims huge productivity increases (>200%). None of the studies are ever replicated by anyone else. When their recommendations are put into practice, productivity always remains the same.
The lesson is this. There is no trendy, simple way of doubling productivity. There is no magic bullet. And, isolated studies can be quite mistaken.
More multi-processors. Yeah, so? You need concurrency mechanisms to exploit it... They won't scale up. Even if Sun has "parallelized" Solaris, it's in user space where most of the processing is done and where most of the problems will occur.
I'm relatively sure Sun has thought of this already.
They're intending this to be used for commercial workloads, like Oracle. Oracle already has all kinds of fine-grained locking mechanisms and scales relatively linearly up to hundreds of CPUs, and has for years. A great many other applications in user space can already exploit many CPUs. This is a software engineering problem that was solved when SMP machines started coming out in '91. This problem is totally independent of Sun's Niagra chip.
Tell a lie enough times it becomes true. Most Palestinians actually voluntarily left, at the urging of their Arab neighbors, to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies, and then move back after the Jews are defeated. It is estimated only about 1/3 of the Arabs actually were forced out.
The palestinians maintain that they were forced out, and the israelis mantain that the palestinians voluntarily abandoned their homes. I wasn't there, but the palestinian case is much more believable. This argument put forth by the pro-israel lobby -- "they just GAVE their houses to us spontaneously, who knows why" -- is very difficult to believe and would never withstand the evidentiary tests required to constitute a legal transfer of property.
But even if palestinians voluntarily left, still, the fact is irrelevant. Voluntarily leaving one's home doesn't imply that ownership of the home is thereby transferred to zionists. The homes remain the property of owners until they sell them or transfer the titles.
Plus, you mention the occupation, and conveniently ignore that prior to this, West Bank was occupied by Jordan, and Gaza was occupied by Egypt. Why, then, weren't these occupations fought against?
Egypt has not established settlements by evicting the former residents of Gaza.
Let's look at the PA. I bet you're not aware that it is illegal under penalty of death for any Palestinian to sell land to any Jew. Period. Note - not Israeli, but JEW. Why doesn't any human rights champion condemn this? It seems only Israel is the violator of human rights in the region.
I'm certainly not justifying the barbarism and violence of much of the arab world. Nevertheless this doesn't justify Israel's activities.
It wasn't Israel turning itself [apartheid], it was the actions BOTH of Israel and its Arab neighbors that led to the situation today.
Israel was an apartheid state from the beginning. The entire point of zionism was to eject the indigenous population of palestine and create a state of jewish people. Zionism was not about moving to Israel and living among the people who were already there. The initial decision to create a "jewish state" to the exclusion of others was a tremendous mistake, and the ejection of the native population necessitated by it has led to decades of conflict.
I don't understand why Israel doesn't just dismantle the settlements and get back into its 1967 borders. Over time (perhaps decades) the hatred will fade. But instead, Israel engages in stupidly provocative tactics like building settlements and exropriating more land. And for what purpose? A few more square miles of land? What amazes me about both Israel and the U.S. is that their moves on the world stage are so terribly idiotic. Israel has managed to re-ignite anti-semitism worldwide, to an extent not seen since the 1930's, and the U.S. continues to tinker in the politics of the middle east, with the same disastrous long-term consequences as always. What baffles me is that both countries (the U.S. and Israel) see these maneuvers as being in their self-interest. Bizarre. I was starting to think that they were intentionally injuring themselves. How terribly tragic that Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and Arabs must suffer because of idiots like Sharon and Bush.
This morning I had the pleasure of installing RedHat 9 onto a Dell Dimension 4600 provided by the gov't. First, it couldn't deal with the video card plugged into the AGP port that provided an S-Video out; the graphical installer wouldn't even run. So I removed the card. Then it couldn't deal with the integrated i865 graphics (!!!!). To use i865 graphics you must download and install a patch and provide it with parameters. Then it couldn't deal with the wireless nic. And so on....
After the installation, postgres wouldn't work until i typed "su -c 'createdb username' postgres", which was entirely different from what the docs said, because the doc's instructions were wrong and didn't work.
Bear in mind: This is the most common linux distro, installed on probably the most common PC in the world (Dell Dimension), with very common graphics hardware (i865). Still the installer failed badly. I got it to work with some tinkering but it's the kind of thing the typical user won't want to do.
But of course the construction of such a missle would be greatly aided by a space program. You could just as well say the dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have thumbs. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.
The article was discussing whether manned space flight was economical and worthwhile. The construction of such a missile would obviosuly be aided more by (say) a missile defense program than by sending people to mars.
"Thanks for playing. Have a nice day."
idiot...
"The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."
The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a missile capable of shooting down an incoming asteroid. Building such a missle would be much easier than building a light-speed artificial-gravity terraforming spacecraft capable of carrying some portion of dinosaur civilization 6 billion lightyears to some other planet.
In short, space travel is not the most realistic way of avoiding the fate of the dinosaurs.
One that you left out:
(5) The number of supported devices on proprietary computers was a small fraction of the number that Windows currently supports.
Windows/PCs have 100,000s of different devices, all from 3rd party manufacturers. Each device must have it's own device driver running in kernel space, and defects in the device drivers can crash the system. Many of the drivers are rapidly changing and not well-tested. This is the biggest cause of Windows OS crashes.
Boxes from "vertically integrated" computer makers (DEC, Sun, etc) had a very small number of supported devices that were built by the same company that made the OS. Device drivers were few, stable, and very well-tested.
There are more market segments than the one you describe. Perhaps the gaming industry is suffering because it appeals only to the young male demographic.
For example, I used to play games but don't any more, because now I find games incredibly boring. I don't find any of the criteria you listed (GUNS, GIRLS, GRAPHICS) to be important. I don't want more GUNS, because I played Doom in High School and (by now) I'm completely sick of the FPS genre, and I never EVER want to play another FPS. Furthermore, I don't want to look at GIRLS cuz I'm a gay guy, and although I realize my demographic is atypical, there are alot of heterosexual females that don't need to look at scantily clad girls either. And GRAPHICS aren't enough to motivate me to play a game for more than like 10 minutes. Great graphics are actually a minor part of whether or not I end up enjoying a game.
SO, the three criteria you listed are really only important to heterosexual young males who aren't yet COMPLETELY FUCKING SICK of shoot-em-ups and FPS's. That demographic makes up what percentage of the population? 5-10%? The gaming industry is mistaken to think that these criteria apply to everybody and that we'll never tire of FPS's. These mistaken notions might be part of the problem faced by the gaming industry now.
The article briefly mentioned the dark history of psychosurgery. A few interesting details were omitted however.
The most popular kind of psychosurgery ever done was the prefontal lobotomy. This technique had something of a heyday in the 1940s.
The gentleman who invented the lobotomy (Freeman) lacked any surgical training. He would perform the procedure on an outpatient basis; he drove around the countryside in his "loboto-mobile" (quite seriously) and performed thousands of the operations himself.
His method of lobotomizing involved jamming an icepick through the eye socket with a hammer, until the icepick was deeply recessed within the brain. Then he would wiggle the icepick around vigorously. (I'm not making this up). The entire procedure took less than 5 minutes. A hospital visit was unnecessary.
Freeman went around the country demonstrating the procedure in mental hospitals etc. The technique fell out of favor in the 1950s, when it was learned that lobotomies had no therapeutic value whatsoever, and often had severe and permanent side-effects.
I'll throw in an answer here, even though I'm not the person you were asking. I'll share what it's like to use X on my 600mhz p3 box w/ 512MB.
1. Launching a typical application (mozilla or openoffice) takes about 1-2 minutes, even when the application is entirely cached in RAM. On Windows, this takes <0.5 seconds on far older hardware (k6/2-350mhz).
2. Resizing a window looks like complete shit, because the resizing drags behind my mouse movements by several seconds. On windows, this is completely instantaneous on far older hardware, even if I jerk the mouse back and forth as fast as I can.
3. Moving windows takes visible time.
4. Opening new windows takes several seconds. Again, completely instantaneous on windows years ago.
Bear in mind that this is not something specific to my box. This has been the case on every box running XFree that I've ever encountered. The problem has not gone away with more modern hardware; On ~2GHz boxes, it's just gotten somewhat better.
To me this is the huge reason not to use linux on the desktop. I just can't stand waiting every time the screen needs to redraw, or every time I launch an app.
I believe that the casual users who try linux as a desktop, will dump it for precisely this reason. All gui manipulations are instantaneous on Mac or Win, and have been for many years; whereas XFree is so damn sluggish that it's extremely irritating.
This defect greatly outweighs the benefits of network transparency! If I need to do some administration work from remote I can use a shell. (I do almost all administrative work using the shell anyway). People want a gui for desktop apps, and with desktop apps what they really want is responsiveness.
No part of my suggestion requires that we unemploy "hundreds of thousands of upper middle class developers." No part of my suggestion requires that we "replace" any part of the economy. Did you gather these from my post somewhere, or are you "inferring" it?
with a government program (with the usual endemic mismanagement, pork-barrel politics, and just plain ineffectiveness)
If the government program were so much less efficient than private industry, then more programmers would have to be employed to achieve the same result. However, that's not even what I'm suggesting; I'm not suggesting that any portion of the private economy be replaced. In case you didn't read my post terribly carefully, I'm not suggesting we nationalize the software industry! I'm suggesting a small program funded by a collaboration of public entities, to offer free software in competition with the few monopolistic software enterprises. Since less than 10% of the price of Windows or Office goes to actaual development on that software, I'd be willing to bet that government programs would be even more efficient than private industry in this limited case.
Furthermore, government agencies which only distribute grants (like the NIH) have been shown to be reasonably efficient, relative to private industry.
funded through additional taxation (which would inevitably creep upward over time).
It's not inevitable that the funds devoted to a given project will increase over time. Federal funds to defense and aerospace (for example) dropped precipitously during the 1990s. Your comment is an unwarranted assumption.
I think even Stallman would have trouble keeping a straight face while listening to this one.
Thanks for your considered and intelligent response. It appears you have serious problems with reading comprehension, since most of the things you attributed to my post had nothing whatsoever to do with it.