One thing to consider is the time it takes to change computers. First of all, there is the time to install all the apps and tools you need, you have to transfer your files, etc. Maybe its just my luck but the last computers I had all had teething problems, costing huge amounts of time.
The last one was not working reliably, so we shipped it to the dealer. He couldn't reproduce the fault (not surprisingly, it had hardware related crashes only about every week / 2 weeks). So, we got it back. It took ages to stumble on something where the fault was reproducable and the dealer could find out what part of the coputer was defective and replace it.
IMHO, using a computer for a long time, even when it starts getting slow (compared to up-to-date machines) saves time. I had a PPro 200 for maybe 4 years. Even if it costs a few seconds here and 10 seconds there, that is not much compared against the days or even weeks to get a new machine. Of course, this may look a bit different in large companies where you have someone order and test the computer, install stuff etc. For a buisiness, these times are much more important than a few hundred dollars.
Whoa, Red Bull is nasty anyway. Tastes like rotting apple cider if you ask me. At my office, we prefer the American programmer's standby, shiny red cans of Coca-Cola!
My experience is very different. Red Bull works very well for me when I need to stay awake for a long time. Coca-Cola also wakes me up, but after about 30 to 60 minutes, the oposite effect sets in and I am even more sleepy than before. Actually, if I use Cola early enough I can use it as a sleeping pill:-). OTOH, when I need to stay awake I now always use Red Bull. The other high-energy drinks might well be equally good, I have not really tested them.
In other words, they assume that the manufacturer is up to no good, and that the consumer is an idiot.
Well, it seems you overlooked some possibilities. There are many people that are no idiots but not good at deciding whether technological / chemical etc things are safe.
And then there are the people like me that could do it (with the right equipment), but don't want to because they want to do others things with the little time they have. There are 100s if not 1000s of things I use each day, many of them composed of many parts that might be harmfull. I can't test them all. I don't want to be forced to watch TV/read papers to know what is dangerous, and even if I would have the time, I would have little confidence in their findings. Government officials may be lazy, incompetent, somtimes bought or whatever, but papers or commercial TV stations have a money interest *each time* they put out a story.
Of course, he got a good deal of it wrong since he wasn't taking into account politics.
True.
However he's also got a few inconsistencies wholly within his train of thought.
IMHO wrong. Someone already said that the atom-bombarding sentence is about neon lights.
You go to length that on the hand hand he says people won't use nuclear power and
on the other he says people will use nuclear power. I think you are misunderstandings his
main point about nuclear power:
"It is as hopeless in 2000 as it was in 1950 to drive machinery directly by atomic energy."
You have to keep in mind that at that time, one of the most popular predictions
was that cars and planes would be nuclear powered by the year 2000. Clearly we know today,
they are not. AFAIK only three types of things are nuclear powered:
stationary power plants, large ships and satellites.
He did predict the first two, and did predict we would not have small machinery powered
directly by atomic energy. The only thing he didn't predict is satellites. So, I think
his hit-rate on this point (which you seem to see as his major downfall) is very high, even so he
went against the opinion of his time.
"It was known as early as 1950 that an atomic power plant would have to
be larger and much more expensive than a fuel-burning plant to be efficient."
While the fossil fuel power plants of his day may have been
"smaller" and "cheaper" than the nuclear power plants, he failed to
take into account all the extra stuff you'd need to put into that
fossil fuel power plant to clean up the pollution,
which he mentioned earlier in the paragraph.
If you take the pollution into account, that is the waste disposal and safe storage
for unbelievable amounts of time, then there is no doubt that he is right that
nuclear energy is much more expensive. Its just that the companies that build and
operate them now don't care about the costs in, say 1000 or even 100 years.
Do the managers care about 10 years? If the company has a few percent more earnings the next ten years and then goes downhill and they know/speculate they won't be in that company in 10 years time what will they do?
"Because they sprawl over large surfaces, solar engines are profitable in 2000
only where land is cheap."
Why is having a larger power plant such a bad thing for nuclear energy, but not for solar?
After all, by his own words:
"Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of
the earth's surface every day."
Aside from the fact that he's confusing power and energy, just how many of
the coal-burning steam locomotives of his day would be required to match
that power output? Do you really think they'd take up anywhere near an acre?
Like he writes, the size matters sometimes (for example, for a power station generating
electricity for New York), and sometimes doesn't matter as much (for
example, a power station in the desert to produce hydrogen).
BTW, he doesn't confuse power and energy when you read the sentence like he wrote it and not substitute "per day" instead of "every day"
"Before (the hurricane) has a chance to gather much strength and speed as
it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited
. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing
hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the
water in the whirling mass falls as rain."
Aside from the pollution issues, if you have oil that burns that hot, who needs nuclear power?
Huh??? Thermals are created by a few Celsius differences. The *temperature* of burning oil
certainly is absolutely sufficient to generate huge updrafts. Think about how hurricanes are
created themselves. You don't need 1000 degrees to generate one.
Besides, he seems to have forgotten that the gulf stream that pulls the hurricane towards
North America would also pull the flaming oil slick as well.
Yes. And? What he wants to do is change the course of the hurricane. Say it moves west
and you do a huge fire just south of it. I don't know what would happen, but I wouldn't
be surprised if it changed course to the south.
In order to get it to work, you'd pretty much have to put the oil down while the hurricane
is raging overhead. Playing with extremely flammable oil in the middle of a tropical
depression at best. Any volunteers?
There have been quite a lot of volunteers that flew into thunderstorms and hurricanes to
do measurements. But you could also fly over it and drop things, use a manned submarine,
use a unmanned submarine, release the oil before the storm comes, fire rockets, lob grenades,
etc etc etc. I am sure this problem can be overcome. Of course we don't want to do it because
of environmental reasons. Not predicting environmental issues is IMHO the largest downfall
of his. But I certainly see no reason why his hurricane-diverting scheme should not be possible.
Sure, if the oil burns hot enough, the air directly over the oil will expand to help fill
up the low-pressure system,
That isn't how air works (cold, not warm air fills up low pressure areas over the ground).
And it isn't how he intends it. He wants air from the hurricane to move to the burning spot,
not vice versa.
but to get it to expand enough to stop that hurricane, you'll still need oil that violates a thermodynamic law or two.
If you think expanding air can fill the low pressure and thereby *reduce* the updraft, you
have got the sign of the effect wrong, not the magnitude.
"Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."
I dunno, maybe it's the whole "hindsight is 20/20" thing, but how could anybody that's seen what
a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
Actually, many if not most people didn't believe it possible. For the human mind it is easy to "understand"
that with huge rockets you can "throw" more stuff higher than a human being can. But its something different
to "understand" of believe the possibility of something not falling back to earth, like a sputnik or even
like a rocket to the moon.
"And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like
Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments,"
Now I'm wondering if this guy ever had to testify before the House UnAmerican
Activities Comittee. "Everybody has exactly the same things" sounds an awful
lot like the ol' "worker's paradise."
I think you (want to?) misunderstand again. He speaks of "can". Isn't that the american dream,
that everyone can became a billionaire and have everything? Mass production is what makes things cheap.
Therefore, there is a big standardization. There are only so many manufacturers of cars, dish washers,
planes, computer graphics cards, operating systems etc. Sure it would be nice, if everyone had a car
build for himself. I, for example would like a space int the boot that exactly fits a desktop. A farmer
wants one (and gas stations) that uses plant oil. An ecologist wants a solar powered one. Someone
wants one with the same flower texture as her favorite dress. Someone would prefer to steer with joystick.
All these would be nice, but 90% of the people have cars straight of some assembly line and Kaempffert says
we should prefer this because only this way can we produce them in such a way that most people can have a car.
Again, I agree. Maybe its different in another 50 years: Maybe you can get Photoshop 2050, draw the
"texture" for your car and the factory will spray it on. Maybe you can design your own car (in certain
limits, of course) and it will be automatically built for you, with no extra charge because no more work and materials than for a standard car are neede.
But he predicts 2000, not 2050, so again he is on. I am not saying his predictions are all hits, but
I was surprised how many came true.
"and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
Ancient Rome didn't have sawdust?
They did, but did they have the modern means to process it?
First of all, technological change will always be greater in the future
than it was in the past, unless some large scale disaster sets us back
horrendously.
I disagree. I think the rate of change should be measured by the effect
on the humans. IMHO the effect of change from, say, 1850-1900 or
1900-1950 is greater than that of today.
While it is true that there are ever more scientists and engineers and
while it is true in a sense that the rate of innovations accelarates
exponentially, the innovations you need for one product increase as well.
All the simple things have been done, only the hard things remain.
It is estimated that a math-student needs to read 3000 pages to completely
understand one of the "big" modern proofs.
I look upon technologic advancve like a expanding sphere. If you only
want to keep the rate of advance in the radius constant, you need
to increase the volume much more than linearly, since the "front"
where you need advances grows all the time.
Looking at the biggest advances in physics, like Netonian mechanics,
quantum theory and theory of relativity, they all occured long
before 1950.
About 1880 few believed in human flight and there were scientists that
had good arguments that a wing of a plane can only carry 25% of the
plane's weight and humans will never fly. 20 years later, the first
planes fly and fullfill a dream of humanity. Less than 20 years later,
it is already a important weapon. Do we have a weapon of that importance
today that was though impossible 30 years ago? Another 20 years later
(WWII), it was a matter of life and death for 10s of million of people and was maybe the largest of all industries.
Today, we can fly fast and cheap from, say europe to america. But people
could fly that route in the 1930s. The only thing that changed in the
last 50 years is how cheap and fast and reliable it is.
The two most expensive possessions of a typical inhabitant of a wealthy
country are the house and the car. These have become more safe, cheap,
a bit faster in the case of cars, but are fundamentally the same as in
1910, both in construction and effect. We don't have flying cars or
nuclear powered ones. The big change was when "normal" people could
leave their surroundings. When in 1900 a factory worker in Berlin
could ride his bike to leave the city for the weekend or could ride
a train to visit relatives in another city, that was much more of a
revolution than any changes in transporting we have had in the last 50 years.
Well, we've seen the end of religious philosophy
as the major force in the world. It seems that we're stuck with
money-grubbing and power-mongering as the predominant forces now.
Again that is a very old trend, probably 200 or 300 years old.
The trend is only continuing.
Real world peace will never happen. Not until we find someone
else to fight. Humans (and in fact, earthlings in general)
are just too violent and ambitious.
I would say egoistic instead of ambitious, but apart from that, you are right.
Fifty years from now, we won't have computers, so to speak. Hell,
they're so prevalent now that they're starting to dissappear.
True. And that will be an advance. But, again it is a small advance
compared to getting computers in the first place.
Of course, there have been big innovations in the last 50 years: The digital computer, the internet or the mobile phone. But many people use them to do things more easily that could have been done before; They use the computer as a better typewriter. The use the internet to download MP3s instead of listening to the radio. They use the mobile phone instead of looking for a phone booth.
The introduction of the radio with the possibility to hear music whenever you want, to hear events life, to do propaganda etc has had an enormous effect on people.
What will be nice to see is how governments and corporations will respond to this
For really totalitarian governments this is easy to predict:
There will be a severe punishment for using these tools or encryption. Think about the third reich. Anyone caught listening to enemy radio stations was *severely* punished, up to the death penalty. Also, letters were censored. If you had somethiong written in obviuous code (encrypted), there would have been severe punishments as well.
So, all you can transfer per letter is a few bits. For example, if my father had ever written a letter to my aunt where the date were underlined, this would have been very bad news.
The argument is fairly simple: You only need to hide things when you are doing illegal stuff. People doing illegal stuff should be punished.
I would guess that it is much easier for the government to find out whether you are participating in encrypted/PeekAFoo/Gnutella Internet usage than whether you are passively listening to the "wrong" radio station. Therefore, I guess these things are not very effective in a totalitarian state.
Off course, the government will let things through it likes. For example, my father could read all the science magazines from the allied powers, so that he could build even better killing machines for the Gröfaz (Hitler). They came in via spain.
A BSOD can always mean that data from other apps is lost, so it has a high severity. But I do agree with the original post that the same effect - for example a program crash - can have different severities according to the conditions under which it happens. For example, once in a program of mine, you could start operations via a toolbar before you had loaded a document or created one. It lead to a crash, but it could never have lead to data loss, so it definately had a lower severity than, say a crash that happens while saving. Therefore I disagree with people like cavemanf16 (post #47) who have put all crashes into one category:
1-Critical -- A bug that causes the whole application to crash and/or become unuseable.
I do remember VC 5 had a number of problems with STL in particular, and we still have problems with the compiler in VC 6, even with the latest SP (random errors regarding DEBUG_NEW in MFC apps that disappear when you try compile again, as well as internal compiler errors)
You always read how much code review there is, and that it is an advantage of open source. Maybe that is true about Linux kernel programming, but my experience is very different. I am a member of three projects: PLIB, Steve Bakers portable game and 3D library, PrettyPoly the 3D-Editor on top of PLIB and I do a bit for flightgear, THE open source flight simulator. All of these are IMHO quite sexy projects. But on all of them, we have so few people contributing that there is very little code review. While I program for 20 years now, 10 of them professionaly, I still like to improve my coding. Therefore, I would welcome peer review giving me tips on my coding style.
I work at a very small company and am the only C++ programmer, so I get little to no feedback on my style there.
But the problem is simply that in all of the projects there is so much to do and so few people / so few hours to do it in, that unfortunately noone takes the time to look at code that others have commited. You only look when you build a new feature on top of someone elses code. Of course, if you don't know something or are unsure how you should implement a new feature, you can always ask and normally you will get an answer and there are many experienced and high quality C++ coders in the projects.
C++ is, like Perl, such a mess because the problem set is such a mess.
Not if your are programming applications.
C++ is such a mess since it is compatible to C and adds stuff. Also, it carried over all the bad things of C. C was created for low level programming (operating system, drivers etc). Therefore it allowas many things that an application programmer never needs and that hurt, since they are dangerous. IMHO it was one of the bad directions the IT industry took to use C(++) as a standard in almost all software development areas. There are many languages (for ex. Delphi or Eiffel) that have at least as much power for application programming, let you program faster and with less bugs.
That means it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot--and given C++'s power, shots to the foot often take off everything below your waist.
Very true. BTW, to the people that say "only WIMPs want safe languages": I prefer to solve a difficult problem with good tools than to be proud to use unnessacarily (sp?) difficult tools and solve an easy problem.
Re:It's good to see Soviet history on the big scre
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Enemy At The Gates
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· Score: 2
Well, recently declassified documents from British intelligence regarding the debriefing of the German nuclear scientists demonstrates that they weren't as far ahead scientifically as previously thought.
Yes, they were FAR behind. IMHO it is clear that Heisenberg, the boss of the German nuclear program of the time didn't want to succeed.
Some of the people on the American bomb had worked with him for years. The boss of the theoretical section was Hans Bethe, a German. They were very afraid he might succeed. Actually,
the German program didn't even get a self sustaining reactor.
When Heisenberg as a POW heard of the American bomb, in a few days he correctly calculated the critical mass. If he wanted the bomb, he would have done that years ago.
There is a famous talk between Heisenberg and Bohr during the first half of the war. Many believe that Heisenberg wanted to tell his friend that the Germans wouldn't build an atom bomb. Unfortunately Bohr got completely into panic when he heard that word. Heisenberg drew a reactor. Bohr understood that the Germans would drop it onto London, which is ridicules.
My father always said: For a scientist in war, its unbelievable easy to do "sabotage": Just don't tell anyone the good ideas you have. He worked on the V2 rocket. While there were a few things in the war that he was proud of, his passive sabotage wasn't really one of them, since it was so easy and safe.
I think the worst part of GIMP, at least for a newbie is the documentation. When for example, I want to get help for the Text tool, I get
toolbox help page
Index
(/toolbox/toolbox.html)
Sorry but the help file for toolbox is not yet done.
/Karin & Olof
Any user of GIMP - even non-programmers - can participate in this effort. And for programmers it is nice if they sometimes do the necessary things and not only the things that are fun. Else Linus is right and we won't be able to compete on the "polish" front. I don't mind whether a program has a nice box or a nice picture while installing. But when in one of "my" projects I want to do some file conversions, and I can't get GIMP to do this straight away, why should I use it? I don't know whether the task really is difficult with GIMP. I found another program (ImageMagick) where I looked into the documentation for a few minutes, and then I had it working.
They have lots of ZX81 ads, but I didn't see my favorite one. The headline was:
Expandable by a factor of 16
It had 1kB RAM, and you could add a 16kB module (later on even 64 kB modules). Of course, if you start with little, it is easy to expand it by a huge factor. Are our current computers expandable by a factor of 16;-)?
notice how, back then, Microsoft was the hero and Bill Gates represented the ultimate success story of school drop-outs? We had Microsoft Basic, Microsoft Word (which was a really nice, simple text editor with an innovative format called RTF, back then), MS-DOS floppy formatting, etc.
I remember that differently. Maybe I didn't notice Bill Gates at the beginning of his career.
But I remember DOS selling well while there was, for example the Amiga about. The Amiga had multitasking, long filenames (Microsoft implemented that in 1995), DLLs, a micro kernel, colour etc. The only thing Microsoft had was better marketing. For example, they said professionals wouldn't need colour, colour computers are for games and therefore are not meant to be used in the office. Really clever marketing: You don't say the obvious differences don't exist, you just sell inferior technology as more advanced. Today no one says, you can't use Windo$ in the office, it has colours.
You obviously haven't thought about this. These people are the puzzle solvers not the puzzle readers or puzzle thinkers. So, when they for example read the text they have to decipher, this is simple ineffective and simply shows that most puzzle solvers don't know how to effectively solve puzzles. This is the reason we have such a drastic shortage of puzzle solvers and will lead to a national catastrophy shortly. If the self-appointed puzzle solvers would just see the light of day. Lets say, getting a flash of understanding takes 10 minutes (that's very long for a flash, is it not?). And lets say they solve three important puzzles a year, then thats 30 minutes of work per year.
basically showing that throughout time, the younger generation has always seen the older generation as a useless anachronism until they reach their mid twenties or even thirties? Why do people keep presenting this as "news" or "something wrong with the word" when it's probably been like this since humans advanced enough to have a culture?
There have always been different opinions between generations, for example an uncle of mine described pop music as "nigger music", or they have other values about sex etc.
But one thing has never been like today:
The young generation has an ability that the older doesn't have. For example, I know a mother of two who is about 40 or 45, her son is about 13. She took on a new post as expert on English (she was born in the UK). She has to use a computer now to write etc. She is an inteligent woman, reading lots, but uninterested in technology. She wasn't quite sure about kilo/mega/giga and didn't know what a computer bug is! So, her boy can teach her usefull (actually, necessary) stuff. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that the old generation doesn't know about computers and the young one does. As I said, I think there was never a time when there was this situation about an ability that is more and more important, both in the commercial and in the private sector.
Obviuously, the effect is even more important when the kid does programming. But even gaming teaches you a lot about computers, for example what mice are, that you have to "shut down", it reduces the "fright" etc.
I know this is slightly off topic (whack! slapping my wrist).
I just bought Mirco$ofts (whack! slapping my wrist again)Flight Simulator. On the CD it says (translated from german):
It is illegal to make unlawfull copies of this disc.
So, even Micro$oft has to admit implicitly that there are lawfull ways to copy their CDs.
I don't think they're trying to say that time spent debugging isn't considered "work"
He compares the time for "developing" with that for "testing, fixing bugs...". Later on he whines about the low quality. Well, if I don't see testing as part of development, then the quality will go down, not up.
- obviously it is, as fixing problems to make a stable product is an extremely vital activity (as we all know)
Yes - WE all know that, but he doesn't seem to. That's what angers me about articles like that.
What I think they're trying to say is that a lot of our debugging time is spent dealing with stuff that shouldn't be a problem in the first place
If we test less at the beginning, then we will get more unnecessary bugs. Again, to us this is a trivial statement. But to me, it seems he has taken on his own advice:
Programmers should code - so they should spend less time testing and debugging.
Writers should write - so they should spend less time researching.
Re:Developers will hit the wall sooner or later
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
So game developers will be able to go to a website and access a library of pre-built stuff, including textures, and just include it in their game.
These sites/companies exist. The best known ones are viewpoint, zygote and 3Dcafe.
Have you seen pictures, of, for example Gorleben (sorry, I didn't find some on the web). The salt dome is huge. Also, the 5 kg for 21 plants in Germany is the reason to buy 4653t capacity from COGEMA and 887t from BNFL? See:
http://hs.riverdale.k12.or.us/~matiash/paises.htm.
Both governments and many companies have looked for a solution to this problem for at least 20 years now and you think there is a trivial solution?
I have an idea: Go to the American government, take the waste, chuck the few kgs into an old mine shaft, take 25 billion $ for it, and the government (or whoever is paying) has saved over 25 billion $.
In Homecomputers? Much longer. 10 years ago I wrote my masters thesis in TeX on my private Amiga with 32 bit sw and hw (and printed it on mainframes; There is even TeX for Crays:-)). The Amiga had 32 bit sw since the beginning, that must be about 15 years ago now.
The birthday "paradox" is beside the point here. The question is not how probable it is to have two identical fingerprints in a certain number of people. A better question is how probable is it to find a match to a given print under n people. And, as other have said already, the authors main question is even: How probably is it to find a "match" to a given print when the print is smudged etc.
How do you distinguish votes between the candidates?
Thats another advantage over the current system: You dont. Therefore f*ck ups like in palm beach county are not possible. You just have one hole you can punch to say "I voted".
"I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end."
Well, he thought farther than anyone else, but building on his ideas I just thought farther and just found the perfect system!
As Natapoff has said, by far the most important thing is that voters have as much power as possible. For example, more power to the individual voter means more people actually vote. Ths US already has the electoral college, which as Natapoff has shown, gives great power, so that explains the extremely high turn out for votes in the US.
As Natapoff said, power for the individual voter can simply be defined by your chance to change the outcome. Lets say the Reps win when the number of voters is even, the Democrats win when it is odd. Then you are GUARANTIED to influence the vote!!! This is maximum power!!
There are several other advantages as well:
Natapoff says the vote should be exciting. Just like sport. Well, how could it get more exciting when no one can reasonably guess on the outcome?
Also Natapoff wants to help the underdogs. You cant help more than make their chance 50%. So again this system is perfect, it cant be better!
Slashdot Mirror
The last one was not working reliably, so we shipped it to the dealer. He couldn't reproduce the fault (not surprisingly, it had hardware related crashes only about every week / 2 weeks). So, we got it back. It took ages to stumble on something where the fault was reproducable and the dealer could find out what part of the coputer was defective and replace it.
IMHO, using a computer for a long time, even when it starts getting slow (compared to up-to-date machines) saves time. I had a PPro 200 for maybe 4 years. Even if it costs a few seconds here and 10 seconds there, that is not much compared against the days or even weeks to get a new machine. Of course, this may look a bit different in large companies where you have someone order and test the computer, install stuff etc.
For a buisiness, these times are much more important than a few hundred dollars.
Whoa, Red Bull is nasty anyway. Tastes like rotting apple cider if you ask me. At my office, we prefer the American programmer's standby, shiny red cans of Coca-Cola!
:-). OTOH, when I need to stay awake I now always use Red Bull. The other high-energy drinks might well be equally good, I have not really tested them.
My experience is very different. Red Bull works very well for me when I need to stay awake for a long time. Coca-Cola also wakes me up, but after about 30 to 60 minutes, the oposite effect sets in and I am even more sleepy than before. Actually, if I use Cola early enough I can use it as a sleeping pill
Well, it seems you overlooked some possibilities. There are many people that are no idiots but not good at deciding whether technological / chemical etc things are safe.
And then there are the people like me that could do it (with the right equipment), but don't want to because they want to do others things with the little time they have. There are 100s if not 1000s of things I use each day, many of them composed of many parts that might be harmfull. I can't test them all. I don't want to be forced to watch TV/read papers to know what is dangerous, and even if I would have the time, I would have little confidence in their findings. Government officials may be lazy, incompetent, somtimes bought or whatever, but papers or commercial TV stations have a money interest *each time* they put out a story.
Of course, he got a good deal of it wrong since he wasn't taking into account politics.
True.
However he's also got a few inconsistencies wholly within his train of thought.
IMHO wrong. Someone already said that the atom-bombarding sentence is about neon lights.
You go to length that on the hand hand he says people won't use nuclear power and on the other he says people will use nuclear power. I think you are misunderstandings his main point about nuclear power:
"It is as hopeless in 2000 as it was in 1950 to drive machinery directly by atomic energy."
You have to keep in mind that at that time, one of the most popular predictions was that cars and planes would be nuclear powered by the year 2000. Clearly we know today, they are not. AFAIK only three types of things are nuclear powered: stationary power plants, large ships and satellites. He did predict the first two, and did predict we would not have small machinery powered directly by atomic energy. The only thing he didn't predict is satellites. So, I think his hit-rate on this point (which you seem to see as his major downfall) is very high, even so he went against the opinion of his time.
"It was known as early as 1950 that an atomic power plant would have to be larger and much more expensive than a fuel-burning plant to be efficient."
While the fossil fuel power plants of his day may have been "smaller" and "cheaper" than the nuclear power plants, he failed to take into account all the extra stuff you'd need to put into that fossil fuel power plant to clean up the pollution, which he mentioned earlier in the paragraph.
If you take the pollution into account, that is the waste disposal and safe storage for unbelievable amounts of time, then there is no doubt that he is right that nuclear energy is much more expensive. Its just that the companies that build and operate them now don't care about the costs in, say 1000 or even 100 years.
Do the managers care about 10 years? If the company has a few percent more earnings the next ten years and then goes downhill and they know/speculate they won't be in that company in 10 years time what will they do?
"Because they sprawl over large surfaces, solar engines are profitable in 2000 only where land is cheap."
Why is having a larger power plant such a bad thing for nuclear energy, but not for solar?
After all, by his own words:
"Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth's surface every day."
Aside from the fact that he's confusing power and energy, just how many of the coal-burning steam locomotives of his day would be required to match that power output? Do you really think they'd take up anywhere near an acre?
Like he writes, the size matters sometimes (for example, for a power station generating electricity for New York), and sometimes doesn't matter as much (for example, a power station in the desert to produce hydrogen). BTW, he doesn't confuse power and energy when you read the sentence like he wrote it and not substitute "per day" instead of "every day"
"Before (the hurricane) has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited . There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain."
Aside from the pollution issues, if you have oil that burns that hot, who needs nuclear power?
Huh??? Thermals are created by a few Celsius differences. The *temperature* of burning oil certainly is absolutely sufficient to generate huge updrafts. Think about how hurricanes are created themselves. You don't need 1000 degrees to generate one.
Besides, he seems to have forgotten that the gulf stream that pulls the hurricane towards North America would also pull the flaming oil slick as well.
Yes. And? What he wants to do is change the course of the hurricane. Say it moves west and you do a huge fire just south of it. I don't know what would happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it changed course to the south.
In order to get it to work, you'd pretty much have to put the oil down while the hurricane is raging overhead. Playing with extremely flammable oil in the middle of a tropical depression at best. Any volunteers?
There have been quite a lot of volunteers that flew into thunderstorms and hurricanes to do measurements. But you could also fly over it and drop things, use a manned submarine, use a unmanned submarine, release the oil before the storm comes, fire rockets, lob grenades, etc etc etc. I am sure this problem can be overcome. Of course we don't want to do it because of environmental reasons. Not predicting environmental issues is IMHO the largest downfall of his. But I certainly see no reason why his hurricane-diverting scheme should not be possible.
Sure, if the oil burns hot enough, the air directly over the oil will expand to help fill up the low-pressure system,
That isn't how air works (cold, not warm air fills up low pressure areas over the ground). And it isn't how he intends it. He wants air from the hurricane to move to the burning spot, not vice versa.
but to get it to expand enough to stop that hurricane, you'll still need oil that violates a thermodynamic law or two.
If you think expanding air can fill the low pressure and thereby *reduce* the updraft, you have got the sign of the effect wrong, not the magnitude.
"Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."
I dunno, maybe it's the whole "hindsight is 20/20" thing, but how could anybody that's seen what a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
Actually, many if not most people didn't believe it possible. For the human mind it is easy to "understand" that with huge rockets you can "throw" more stuff higher than a human being can. But its something different to "understand" of believe the possibility of something not falling back to earth, like a sputnik or even like a rocket to the moon.
"And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments,"
Now I'm wondering if this guy ever had to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Comittee. "Everybody has exactly the same things" sounds an awful lot like the ol' "worker's paradise."
I think you (want to?) misunderstand again. He speaks of "can". Isn't that the american dream, that everyone can became a billionaire and have everything? Mass production is what makes things cheap. Therefore, there is a big standardization. There are only so many manufacturers of cars, dish washers, planes, computer graphics cards, operating systems etc. Sure it would be nice, if everyone had a car build for himself. I, for example would like a space int the boot that exactly fits a desktop. A farmer wants one (and gas stations) that uses plant oil. An ecologist wants a solar powered one. Someone wants one with the same flower texture as her favorite dress. Someone would prefer to steer with joystick. All these would be nice, but 90% of the people have cars straight of some assembly line and Kaempffert says we should prefer this because only this way can we produce them in such a way that most people can have a car. Again, I agree. Maybe its different in another 50 years: Maybe you can get Photoshop 2050, draw the "texture" for your car and the factory will spray it on. Maybe you can design your own car (in certain limits, of course) and it will be automatically built for you, with no extra charge because no more work and materials than for a standard car are neede. But he predicts 2000, not 2050, so again he is on. I am not saying his predictions are all hits, but I was surprised how many came true.
"and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
Ancient Rome didn't have sawdust?
They did, but did they have the modern means to process it?
I disagree. I think the rate of change should be measured by the effect on the humans. IMHO the effect of change from, say, 1850-1900 or 1900-1950 is greater than that of today.
While it is true that there are ever more scientists and engineers and while it is true in a sense that the rate of innovations accelarates exponentially, the innovations you need for one product increase as well. All the simple things have been done, only the hard things remain. It is estimated that a math-student needs to read 3000 pages to completely understand one of the "big" modern proofs. I look upon technologic advancve like a expanding sphere. If you only want to keep the rate of advance in the radius constant, you need to increase the volume much more than linearly, since the "front" where you need advances grows all the time. Looking at the biggest advances in physics, like Netonian mechanics, quantum theory and theory of relativity, they all occured long before 1950.
About 1880 few believed in human flight and there were scientists that had good arguments that a wing of a plane can only carry 25% of the plane's weight and humans will never fly. 20 years later, the first planes fly and fullfill a dream of humanity. Less than 20 years later, it is already a important weapon. Do we have a weapon of that importance today that was though impossible 30 years ago? Another 20 years later (WWII), it was a matter of life and death for 10s of million of people and was maybe the largest of all industries.
Today, we can fly fast and cheap from, say europe to america. But people could fly that route in the 1930s. The only thing that changed in the last 50 years is how cheap and fast and reliable it is.
The two most expensive possessions of a typical inhabitant of a wealthy country are the house and the car. These have become more safe, cheap, a bit faster in the case of cars, but are fundamentally the same as in 1910, both in construction and effect. We don't have flying cars or nuclear powered ones. The big change was when "normal" people could leave their surroundings. When in 1900 a factory worker in Berlin could ride his bike to leave the city for the weekend or could ride a train to visit relatives in another city, that was much more of a revolution than any changes in transporting we have had in the last 50 years.
Well, we've seen the end of religious philosophy as the major force in the world. It seems that we're stuck with money-grubbing and power-mongering as the predominant forces now.
Again that is a very old trend, probably 200 or 300 years old. The trend is only continuing.
Real world peace will never happen. Not until we find someone else to fight. Humans (and in fact, earthlings in general) are just too violent and ambitious.
I would say egoistic instead of ambitious, but apart from that, you are right.
Fifty years from now, we won't have computers, so to speak. Hell, they're so prevalent now that they're starting to dissappear.
True. And that will be an advance. But, again it is a small advance compared to getting computers in the first place.
Of course, there have been big innovations in the last 50 years: The digital computer, the internet or the mobile phone. But many people use them to do things more easily that could have been done before; They use the computer as a better typewriter. The use the internet to download MP3s instead of listening to the radio. They use the mobile phone instead of looking for a phone booth. The introduction of the radio with the possibility to hear music whenever you want, to hear events life, to do propaganda etc has had an enormous effect on people.
For really totalitarian governments this is easy to predict:
There will be a severe punishment for using these tools or encryption. Think about the third reich. Anyone caught listening to enemy radio stations was *severely* punished, up to the death penalty. Also, letters were censored. If you had somethiong written in obviuous code (encrypted), there would have been severe punishments as well. So, all you can transfer per letter is a few bits. For example, if my father had ever written a letter to my aunt where the date were underlined, this would have been very bad news. The argument is fairly simple: You only need to hide things when you are doing illegal stuff. People doing illegal stuff should be punished.
I would guess that it is much easier for the government to find out whether you are participating in encrypted/PeekAFoo/Gnutella Internet usage than whether you are passively listening to the "wrong" radio station. Therefore, I guess these things are not very effective in a totalitarian state.
Off course, the government will let things through it likes. For example, my father could read all the science magazines from the allied powers, so that he could build even better killing machines for the Gröfaz (Hitler). They came in via spain.
What Severity is BSOD?
A BSOD can always mean that data from other apps is lost, so it has a high severity. But I do agree with the original post that the same effect - for example a program crash - can have different severities according to the conditions under which it happens. For example, once in a program of mine, you could start operations via a toolbar before you had loaded a document or created one. It lead to a crash, but it could never have lead to data loss, so it definately had a lower severity than, say a crash that happens while saving. Therefore I disagree with people like cavemanf16 (post #47) who have put all crashes into one category:
1-Critical -- A bug that causes the whole application to crash and/or become unuseable.
I do remember VC 5 had a number of problems with STL in particular, and we still have problems with the compiler in VC 6, even with the latest SP (random errors regarding DEBUG_NEW in MFC apps that disappear when you try compile again, as well as internal compiler errors)
Do you have precompiled headers on?
But the problem is simply that in all of the projects there is so much to do and so few people / so few hours to do it in, that unfortunately noone takes the time to look at code that others have commited. You only look when you build a new feature on top of someone elses code. Of course, if you don't know something or are unsure how you should implement a new feature, you can always ask and normally you will get an answer and there are many experienced and high quality C++ coders in the projects.
C++ is, like Perl, such a mess because the problem set is such a mess.
Not if your are programming applications. C++ is such a mess since it is compatible to C and adds stuff. Also, it carried over all the bad things of C. C was created for low level programming (operating system, drivers etc). Therefore it allowas many things that an application programmer never needs and that hurt, since they are dangerous. IMHO it was one of the bad directions the IT industry took to use C(++) as a standard in almost all software development areas. There are many languages (for ex. Delphi or Eiffel) that have at least as much power for application programming, let you program faster and with less bugs.
That means it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot--and given C++'s power, shots to the foot often take off everything below your waist.
Very true. BTW, to the people that say "only WIMPs want safe languages": I prefer to solve a difficult problem with good tools than to be proud to use unnessacarily (sp?) difficult tools and solve an easy problem.
Well, recently declassified documents from British intelligence regarding the debriefing of the German nuclear scientists demonstrates that they weren't as far ahead scientifically as previously thought.
Yes, they were FAR behind. IMHO it is clear that Heisenberg, the boss of the German nuclear program of the time didn't want to succeed.
Some of the people on the American bomb had worked with him for years. The boss of the theoretical section was Hans Bethe, a German. They were very afraid he might succeed. Actually, the German program didn't even get a self sustaining reactor.
When Heisenberg as a POW heard of the American bomb, in a few days he correctly calculated the critical mass. If he wanted the bomb, he would have done that years ago.
There is a famous talk between Heisenberg and Bohr during the first half of the war. Many believe that Heisenberg wanted to tell his friend that the Germans wouldn't build an atom bomb. Unfortunately Bohr got completely into panic when he heard that word. Heisenberg drew a reactor. Bohr understood that the Germans would drop it onto London, which is ridicules.
My father always said: For a scientist in war, its unbelievable easy to do "sabotage": Just don't tell anyone the good ideas you have. He worked on the V2 rocket. While there were a few things in the war that he was proud of, his passive sabotage wasn't really one of them, since it was so easy and safe.
Good point. I certainly understand the hippies who said "Make love, not war". Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have had much effect.
I think the worst part of GIMP, at least for a newbie is the documentation. When for example, I want to get help for the Text tool, I get
/Karin & Olof
toolbox help page
Index
(/toolbox/toolbox.html)
Sorry but the help file for toolbox is not yet done.
Any user of GIMP - even non-programmers - can participate in this effort. And for programmers it is nice if they sometimes do the necessary things and not only the things that are fun. Else Linus is right and we won't be able to compete on the "polish" front. I don't mind whether a program has a nice box or a nice picture while installing. But when in one of "my" projects I want to do some file conversions, and I can't get GIMP to do this straight away, why should I use it? I don't know whether the task really is difficult with GIMP. I found another program (ImageMagick) where I looked into the documentation for a few minutes, and then I had it working.
They have lots of ZX81 ads, but I didn't see my favorite one. The headline was:
;-)?
Expandable by a factor of 16
It had 1kB RAM, and you could add a 16kB module (later on even 64 kB modules). Of course, if you start with little, it is easy to expand it by a huge factor. Are our current computers expandable by a factor of 16
notice how, back then, Microsoft was the hero and Bill Gates represented the ultimate success story of school drop-outs? We had Microsoft Basic, Microsoft Word (which was a really nice, simple text editor with an innovative format called RTF, back then), MS-DOS floppy formatting, etc.
I remember that differently. Maybe I didn't notice Bill Gates at the beginning of his career.
But I remember DOS selling well while there was, for example the Amiga about. The Amiga had multitasking, long filenames (Microsoft implemented that in 1995), DLLs, a micro kernel, colour etc. The only thing Microsoft had was better marketing. For example, they said professionals wouldn't need colour, colour computers are for games and therefore are not meant to be used in the office. Really clever marketing: You don't say the obvious differences don't exist, you just sell inferior technology as more advanced. Today no one says, you can't use Windo$ in the office, it has colours.
You obviously haven't thought about this. These people are the puzzle solvers not the puzzle readers or puzzle thinkers. So, when they for example read the text they have to decipher, this is simple ineffective and simply shows that most puzzle solvers don't know how to effectively solve puzzles. This is the reason we have such a drastic shortage of puzzle solvers and will lead to a national catastrophy shortly. If the self-appointed puzzle solvers would just see the light of day. Lets say, getting a flash of understanding takes 10 minutes (that's very long for a flash, is it not?). And lets say they solve three important puzzles a year, then thats 30 minutes of work per year.
basically showing that throughout time, the younger generation has always seen the older generation as a useless anachronism until they reach their mid twenties or even thirties? Why do people keep presenting this as "news" or "something wrong with the word" when it's probably been like this since humans advanced enough to have a culture?
There have always been different opinions between generations, for example an uncle of mine described pop music as "nigger music", or they have other values about sex etc.
But one thing has never been like today:
The young generation has an ability that the older doesn't have. For example, I know a mother of two who is about 40 or 45, her son is about 13. She took on a new post as expert on English (she was born in the UK). She has to use a computer now to write etc. She is an inteligent woman, reading lots, but uninterested in technology. She wasn't quite sure about kilo/mega/giga and didn't know what a computer bug is! So, her boy can teach her usefull (actually, necessary) stuff. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that the old generation doesn't know about computers and the young one does. As I said, I think there was never a time when there was this situation about an ability that is more and more important, both in the commercial and in the private sector. Obviuously, the effect is even more important when the kid does programming. But even gaming teaches you a lot about computers, for example what mice are, that you have to "shut down", it reduces the "fright" etc.
I know this is slightly off topic (whack! slapping my wrist).
I just bought Mirco$ofts (whack! slapping my wrist again)Flight Simulator. On the CD it says (translated from german):
It is illegal to make unlawfull copies of this disc.
So, even Micro$oft has to admit implicitly that there are lawfull ways to copy their CDs.
I don't think they're trying to say that time spent debugging isn't considered "work"
He compares the time for "developing" with that for "testing, fixing bugs...". Later on he whines about the low quality. Well, if I don't see testing as part of development, then the quality will go down, not up.
- obviously it is, as fixing problems to make a stable product is an extremely vital activity (as we all know)
Yes - WE all know that, but he doesn't seem to. That's what angers me about articles like that.
What I think they're trying to say is that a lot of our debugging time is spent dealing with stuff that shouldn't be a problem in the first place
If we test less at the beginning, then we will get more unnecessary bugs. Again, to us this is a trivial statement. But to me, it seems he has taken on his own advice:
Programmers should code - so they should spend less time testing and debugging.
Writers should write - so they should spend less time researching.
So game developers will be able to go to a website and access a library of pre-built stuff, including textures, and just include it in their game.
These sites/companies exist. The best known ones are viewpoint, zygote and 3Dcafe.
Or bury it in a mountain, all 5KG per plant per year, no problem.
m l
.
Whats Yucca going to cost? 54 billion (!) dollar? See: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/radwastegermany.ht
Have you seen pictures, of, for example Gorleben (sorry, I didn't find some on the web). The salt dome is huge.
Also, the 5 kg for 21 plants in Germany is the reason to buy 4653t capacity from COGEMA and 887t from BNFL? See: http://hs.riverdale.k12.or.us/~matiash/paises.htm
Both governments and many companies have looked for a solution to this problem for at least 20 years now and you think there is a trivial solution?
I have an idea: Go to the American government, take the waste, chuck the few kgs into an old mine shaft, take 25 billion $ for it, and the government (or whoever is paying) has saved over 25 billion $.
Screw 32 bits, that is SOOO 5 years ago.
:-)). The Amiga had 32 bit sw since the beginning, that must be about 15 years ago now.
In Homecomputers? Much longer. 10 years ago I wrote my masters thesis in TeX on my private Amiga with 32 bit sw and hw (and printed it on mainframes; There is even TeX for Crays
The birthday "paradox" is beside the point here. The question is not how probable it is to have two identical fingerprints in a certain number of people. A better question is how probable is it to find a match to a given print under n people. And, as other have said already, the authors main question is even: How probably is it to find a "match" to a given print when the print is smudged etc.
How do you distinguish votes between the candidates?
Thats another advantage over the current system: You dont. Therefore f*ck ups like in palm beach county are not possible. You just have one hole you can punch to say "I voted".
"I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end."
Well, he thought farther than anyone else, but building on his ideas I just thought farther and just found the perfect system!
As Natapoff has said, by far the most important thing is that voters have as much power as possible. For example, more power to the individual voter means more people actually vote. Ths US already has the electoral college, which as Natapoff has shown, gives great power, so that explains the extremely high turn out for votes in the US.
As Natapoff said, power for the individual voter can simply be defined by your chance to change the outcome. Lets say the Reps win when the number of voters is even, the Democrats win when it is odd. Then you are GUARANTIED to influence the vote!!! This is maximum power!!
There are several other advantages as well: