Titanium--which is actually common in the soil--is an amazingly strong metal that is also quite corrosion resistant and can withstand very temperatures. Even with the expensive production processes used up till now, titanium was favored by the aerospace industry because of its strength and heat resistance and for making propeller blades for ship screws because they withstood the corrosive effects of seawater.
With a vastly cheaper production process, it could make it possible to substantially lighten the weight of automobiles--which has the benefit of either lower petrol/diesel fuel consumption or needing a smaller battery pack (in the case of electric cars). And it means high-speed trains can be vastly lighter while still meeting safety standards for passenger train cars, which means smaller and more efficient traction motors on electric multiple unit (EMU) passenger trains.
Actually, after Service Pack 1, most of the updates are what I call cumulative updates--the additional patch files are probably going to be less than you think, especially for Internet Explorer and the.NET Framework files.
Wrong. The problem with this meteor was that when it enters the atmosphere at over 33,000 mph and is just smaller than a subcompact (A-segment) automobile, even our modern radars will have essentially NO warning before any potential impacts.
Remember, the iPhone 5 was effectively the last iPhone designed with direct input from the late Steve Jobs. As such, the design was probably finalized just after Jobs' untimely passing. Jobs' insistence on the being able to operate the phone with one hand and his fetish for physically thin devices was why until the production fabs could produce the Qualcomm MDM9615 cellphone chip in large quantities, Apple couldn't accommodate 3GPP LTE on such a physically small device.
But now that Steve Cook is firmly in charge of Apple, we're starting to see things that Jobs may not have personally approved, namely the iPad mini. It may also signal the possibility that we may end up with THREE iPhone models: a low-cost model with a less-expensive body design and more limited hardware for emerging markets (GSM, W-CDMA and/or TD-SCDMA only) using the form factor of the iPhone 4S, an upgraded iPhone 5 (the "iPhone 5S"?) that adds an NFC radio/antenna subsystem, and the increasingly rumored "iPhone Math" with a larger screen in the 4.8 to 5.0 inch (diagonal) size to directly compete against the Samsung Galaxy Note "phablet."
Interestingly, I wonder has Apple invested in developing better lithium-ion battery designs. New dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries can now store at minimum three times the charge for the same physical size battery (and have much higher safety factors), and that could lead to much longer battery life per charge on the iPhone.
I think the problem with the current iPhone comes down to this: while the software is still excellent, the hardware for the iPhone itself has fallen behind. I see two issues with the current iPhone:
1. The screen is still _too small_ by 2013 standards. The success of the Samsung Galaxy S II (and subsequently S III) shows users do want a wider (by portrait orientation) display screen.
2. The lack of NFC is going to become an issue, because in many parts of the world (especially South Korea, Japan and parts of Europe), NFC is widely used for mobile payment systems and other special "tap to communicate" features.
This is why I think the so-called "iPhone 5S" will likely become just a tad thicker to accommodate an NFC radio/antenna system. Get that, and the iPhone will take back a lot of marketshare now lost to Android.
Or better yet, faster light signal cycling? Indeed, I remember seeing on Discovery Channel a video where because of an improperly-timed light at an intersection that has a railroad crossing right next to it, a tractor-trailer truck stopped at a red light got hit by a fast-moving freight train (they were VERY lucky the trailer wasn't a tanker loaded with flammable liquids). As such, they had to change the light timing to fix this problem.
If the smallest interval for power distribution is only 15 minutes, that won't cut it in the world of renewables plus large-scale battery storage. They need to cut that down to one minute intervals for monitoring power distribution--now possible with modern communications technology.
Because H.265 will has (I believe) half the bandwidth requirements of H.264, DirecTV or Dish Network could either cram in more channels or keep the current channel allocations but at MUCH higher video quality.
I think a lot of municipalities are dropping intersection cameras because of the high maintenance cost, not to mention the fact you get a good percentage of "false positives" from the camera images depending on weather and light conditions (angle of Sun and street lights).
Much of the USA has trouble getting broadband because the population density of rural areas makes it too expensive do the "last mile" connection of broadband to the home. This isn't like South Korea or Japan, where the population density is high enough per square kilometer to justify the enormous expense of hardwired high-speed Internet connections to everyone.
I think if the IRS were to offer substantial corporate tax incentives to get the "last mile" connection--whether by DSL, cable or even long-range wireless not tied to cellphones like 802.16 WiMax--out to rural customers, they could solve the problem pretty quickly.
Actually, there is a GIGANTIC hydrocarbon resource nobody has really touched: methane clathrate, better known by the name methane hydrates. Scientists now estimate that the ocean floors hold enough methane clathrate to essentially equal all the world's oil and natural gas resources and then some! That is enough to essentially up the known reserve of hydrocarbon fuels by a factor of three or more!
The biggest problems with renewables like solar and wind power is what happens when the Sun is not up and the wind speed dies down? What we need is aggressive technological development of electic batteries using safer dry-electrode lithium-ion packs, carbon nanotube ultracapacitors, and molten-salt technologies. That way, we can store up the energy generated by renewables so they can be used around the clock.
Actually, many of the newer games CAN use more than 8 GB of RAM--and they'll need it, given the fact the latest games really "push the limit" in terms of hardware.
Actually, the "sweet" spot for Windows XP was 1 GB of RAM, not 2 GB of RAM.
You want as much RAM as possible in the system--especially if you're running anything that uses a lot of system resources. On my current desktop with 8 GB of RAM under Windows 7 Home Edition (SP1), Office 2010 runs really fast, to say the least.
I also think that H.265 could find its way to satellite TV broadcasting, because its lower bandwidth requirements for 720p/1080i resolution video means they can add in more channels per satellite.
I think one of THE biggest bottlenecks for any computer is insufficient amount of RAM in the computer.
That's why I've always suggested that if you can afford it, install the maximum RAM allowed by the motherboard. Most motherboards that support CPU's with x86-64 instructions can support 8 GB of RAM, and with 8 GB of RAM, the performance improvement can be quite high since 1) you no longer need to use the hard disk as virtual memory and 2) programs have more "breathing room" to run.
I used to run a computer with Windows XP Home (SP2) that only had 512 MB of RAM--gawd, did the hard drive grind away like mad. But once I upgraded it to the 2 GB of RAM allowed, the performance improvement was _dramatic_--the hard drive ran a lot less, and programs in memory ran very smoothly, to say the least.
I used to have a Linksys WRT54G2 router on my network. The big problem was after a few months, it would stop connecting my laptop and iPad 2 to the router, forcing a reset of the router--a major annoyance!
I switched to a Netgear N600 (WNDR3700) dual-band router and no longer get Wi-Fi connection problems.:-)
Precisely. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.net said that he knew Swartz was suffering from serious clinical depression for several years, having known Swartz for over a decade. As such, sooner or later there would have been an attempt to harm himself regardless of the legal situation.
It would have been very interesting to see how the trial fared, but we'll never find out....
Cory Doctorow on his blog said that Swartz had been suffering from pretty serious bouts of depression for some years, and the legal case against him may have been the last straw for Swartz.
Which is too bad, because it would have been very interesting to see how the case against Swartz would have held up in Federal court trial.
There's also the issue of enough devices out there to justify the "enhanced content" books. At least with the iPad, the sheer number of them out there (I own an iPad 2 myself) means at least in the iBooks format, you have enough potential buyers out there to justify the cost of creating one in the first place.
...on a large scale, don't expect Huawei and ZTE to be influential in the US market.
Right now, the "Big Four" of cellphone companies with US operations (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile USA) are mostly pushing well-known brands of cellphones from the likes of Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. As such, these five cellphone companies have nearly all of the market share (though Nokia is starting to make a comeback with their Windows Phone 8 based Lumia models), and new companies like Huawei and ZTE may find it very hard to become players in the US market.
Interestingly, e-books has actually made OLDER people interested in reading books again, for two reasons:
1) You can adjust the text font display size, very important for older readers with vision problems.
2) The weight of a modern e-ink e-book reader is way lighter than many hardback books out there. Lot easier to hold the current Kindle e-book reader reading the later "Harry Potter" novels than to hold up the original hardback version.
What you described may happen sooner than you think.
Remember, devices like the iPad, the Nexus 7/10 tablet, Amazon Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble Nook (color versions) are essentially computers with touchscreen interfaces. It won't take a big leap in publishing technology to include animated maps or other interacitive features into an e-book--in fact, it's possible to do this now with Apple's iBooks ecosystem.
I don't think so. The Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2--which run Android 4.1 ("Jelly Bean") with Samsung's own "TouchWiz" interface--are already so popular that there is no real incentive to build an Ubuntu OS cellphone.
Now, a Tizen-based cellphone is possible, but they will be aimed primarily for developing countries.
Gasoline (petrol) had a weird price spike in California because several major oil refineries were not in operation during October 2012--and that spiked the price of 87 pump octane (91 RON) gasoline to US$4.37/US gallon at the cheapest filling stations!:-O Fortunately, we're way below that peak now.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It could literally change the world.
Titanium--which is actually common in the soil--is an amazingly strong metal that is also quite corrosion resistant and can withstand very temperatures. Even with the expensive production processes used up till now, titanium was favored by the aerospace industry because of its strength and heat resistance and for making propeller blades for ship screws because they withstood the corrosive effects of seawater.
With a vastly cheaper production process, it could make it possible to substantially lighten the weight of automobiles--which has the benefit of either lower petrol/diesel fuel consumption or needing a smaller battery pack (in the case of electric cars). And it means high-speed trains can be vastly lighter while still meeting safety standards for passenger train cars, which means smaller and more efficient traction motors on electric multiple unit (EMU) passenger trains.
Actually, after Service Pack 1, most of the updates are what I call cumulative updates--the additional patch files are probably going to be less than you think, especially for Internet Explorer and the .NET Framework files.
Wrong. The problem with this meteor was that when it enters the atmosphere at over 33,000 mph and is just smaller than a subcompact (A-segment) automobile, even our modern radars will have essentially NO warning before any potential impacts.
Remember, the iPhone 5 was effectively the last iPhone designed with direct input from the late Steve Jobs. As such, the design was probably finalized just after Jobs' untimely passing. Jobs' insistence on the being able to operate the phone with one hand and his fetish for physically thin devices was why until the production fabs could produce the Qualcomm MDM9615 cellphone chip in large quantities, Apple couldn't accommodate 3GPP LTE on such a physically small device.
But now that Steve Cook is firmly in charge of Apple, we're starting to see things that Jobs may not have personally approved, namely the iPad mini. It may also signal the possibility that we may end up with THREE iPhone models: a low-cost model with a less-expensive body design and more limited hardware for emerging markets (GSM, W-CDMA and/or TD-SCDMA only) using the form factor of the iPhone 4S, an upgraded iPhone 5 (the "iPhone 5S"?) that adds an NFC radio/antenna subsystem, and the increasingly rumored "iPhone Math" with a larger screen in the 4.8 to 5.0 inch (diagonal) size to directly compete against the Samsung Galaxy Note "phablet."
Interestingly, I wonder has Apple invested in developing better lithium-ion battery designs. New dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries can now store at minimum three times the charge for the same physical size battery (and have much higher safety factors), and that could lead to much longer battery life per charge on the iPhone.
I think the problem with the current iPhone comes down to this: while the software is still excellent, the hardware for the iPhone itself has fallen behind. I see two issues with the current iPhone:
1. The screen is still _too small_ by 2013 standards. The success of the Samsung Galaxy S II (and subsequently S III) shows users do want a wider (by portrait orientation) display screen.
2. The lack of NFC is going to become an issue, because in many parts of the world (especially South Korea, Japan and parts of Europe), NFC is widely used for mobile payment systems and other special "tap to communicate" features.
This is why I think the so-called "iPhone 5S" will likely become just a tad thicker to accommodate an NFC radio/antenna system. Get that, and the iPhone will take back a lot of marketshare now lost to Android.
Or better yet, faster light signal cycling? Indeed, I remember seeing on Discovery Channel a video where because of an improperly-timed light at an intersection that has a railroad crossing right next to it, a tractor-trailer truck stopped at a red light got hit by a fast-moving freight train (they were VERY lucky the trailer wasn't a tanker loaded with flammable liquids). As such, they had to change the light timing to fix this problem.
If the smallest interval for power distribution is only 15 minutes, that won't cut it in the world of renewables plus large-scale battery storage. They need to cut that down to one minute intervals for monitoring power distribution--now possible with modern communications technology.
Because H.265 will has (I believe) half the bandwidth requirements of H.264, DirecTV or Dish Network could either cram in more channels or keep the current channel allocations but at MUCH higher video quality.
I think a lot of municipalities are dropping intersection cameras because of the high maintenance cost, not to mention the fact you get a good percentage of "false positives" from the camera images depending on weather and light conditions (angle of Sun and street lights).
Much of the USA has trouble getting broadband because the population density of rural areas makes it too expensive do the "last mile" connection of broadband to the home. This isn't like South Korea or Japan, where the population density is high enough per square kilometer to justify the enormous expense of hardwired high-speed Internet connections to everyone.
I think if the IRS were to offer substantial corporate tax incentives to get the "last mile" connection--whether by DSL, cable or even long-range wireless not tied to cellphones like 802.16 WiMax--out to rural customers, they could solve the problem pretty quickly.
Actually, there is a GIGANTIC hydrocarbon resource nobody has really touched: methane clathrate, better known by the name methane hydrates. Scientists now estimate that the ocean floors hold enough methane clathrate to essentially equal all the world's oil and natural gas resources and then some! That is enough to essentially up the known reserve of hydrocarbon fuels by a factor of three or more!
Too bad I can't mod you way, way up.
The biggest problems with renewables like solar and wind power is what happens when the Sun is not up and the wind speed dies down? What we need is aggressive technological development of electic batteries using safer dry-electrode lithium-ion packs, carbon nanotube ultracapacitors, and molten-salt technologies. That way, we can store up the energy generated by renewables so they can be used around the clock.
Actually, many of the newer games CAN use more than 8 GB of RAM--and they'll need it, given the fact the latest games really "push the limit" in terms of hardware.
Actually, the "sweet" spot for Windows XP was 1 GB of RAM, not 2 GB of RAM.
You want as much RAM as possible in the system--especially if you're running anything that uses a lot of system resources. On my current desktop with 8 GB of RAM under Windows 7 Home Edition (SP1), Office 2010 runs really fast, to say the least.
I also think that H.265 could find its way to satellite TV broadcasting, because its lower bandwidth requirements for 720p/1080i resolution video means they can add in more channels per satellite.
I think one of THE biggest bottlenecks for any computer is insufficient amount of RAM in the computer.
That's why I've always suggested that if you can afford it, install the maximum RAM allowed by the motherboard. Most motherboards that support CPU's with x86-64 instructions can support 8 GB of RAM, and with 8 GB of RAM, the performance improvement can be quite high since 1) you no longer need to use the hard disk as virtual memory and 2) programs have more "breathing room" to run.
I used to run a computer with Windows XP Home (SP2) that only had 512 MB of RAM--gawd, did the hard drive grind away like mad. But once I upgraded it to the 2 GB of RAM allowed, the performance improvement was _dramatic_--the hard drive ran a lot less, and programs in memory ran very smoothly, to say the least.
I used to have a Linksys WRT54G2 router on my network. The big problem was after a few months, it would stop connecting my laptop and iPad 2 to the router, forcing a reset of the router--a major annoyance!
I switched to a Netgear N600 (WNDR3700) dual-band router and no longer get Wi-Fi connection problems. :-)
Precisely. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.net said that he knew Swartz was suffering from serious clinical depression for several years, having known Swartz for over a decade. As such, sooner or later there would have been an attempt to harm himself regardless of the legal situation.
It would have been very interesting to see how the trial fared, but we'll never find out....
Cory Doctorow on his blog said that Swartz had been suffering from pretty serious bouts of depression for some years, and the legal case against him may have been the last straw for Swartz.
Which is too bad, because it would have been very interesting to see how the case against Swartz would have held up in Federal court trial.
There's also the issue of enough devices out there to justify the "enhanced content" books. At least with the iPad, the sheer number of them out there (I own an iPad 2 myself) means at least in the iBooks format, you have enough potential buyers out there to justify the cost of creating one in the first place.
...on a large scale, don't expect Huawei and ZTE to be influential in the US market.
Right now, the "Big Four" of cellphone companies with US operations (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile USA) are mostly pushing well-known brands of cellphones from the likes of Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. As such, these five cellphone companies have nearly all of the market share (though Nokia is starting to make a comeback with their Windows Phone 8 based Lumia models), and new companies like Huawei and ZTE may find it very hard to become players in the US market.
Interestingly, e-books has actually made OLDER people interested in reading books again, for two reasons:
1) You can adjust the text font display size, very important for older readers with vision problems.
2) The weight of a modern e-ink e-book reader is way lighter than many hardback books out there. Lot easier to hold the current Kindle e-book reader reading the later "Harry Potter" novels than to hold up the original hardback version.
What you described may happen sooner than you think.
Remember, devices like the iPad, the Nexus 7/10 tablet, Amazon Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble Nook (color versions) are essentially computers with touchscreen interfaces. It won't take a big leap in publishing technology to include animated maps or other interacitive features into an e-book--in fact, it's possible to do this now with Apple's iBooks ecosystem.
I don't think so. The Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2--which run Android 4.1 ("Jelly Bean") with Samsung's own "TouchWiz" interface--are already so popular that there is no real incentive to build an Ubuntu OS cellphone.
Now, a Tizen-based cellphone is possible, but they will be aimed primarily for developing countries.
Gasoline (petrol) had a weird price spike in California because several major oil refineries were not in operation during October 2012--and that spiked the price of 87 pump octane (91 RON) gasoline to US$4.37/US gallon at the cheapest filling stations! :-O Fortunately, we're way below that peak now. :-)