I can understand that issue, but Pickens' project has one advantage other large-scale wind turbine farms in other parts of the USA don't have: much shorter distances to connect to the customers that need this power, namely all those customers in Texas.
Sure, it will cost around US$4 billion to connect up this wind farm to the Texas utility grid, but it's kind of hard to ignore 4,000 MW in generating capacity in one of the world's best areas for locating wind turbines. This is why every major company involved in wind turbines are putting up wind farms in western Texas.
I think if you're a home user, Windows Update works fairly well--I've never had any significant issues with that update.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft posts its updates the second Tuesday of every month, so you'll have plentiful warning of when the updates arrive. Occasionally, Microsoft posts updates "out of cycle" if the update is deemed very critical, but those are relatively rare.
The big problems recently for getting Americans onto broadband were:
1) The limits on the ADSL distance from the central switching office (circa 3,000 meters limit).
2) The limits on availability of TV cable lines for cable modems.
3) The cost of setting up landline broadband in rural areas.
Fortunately, within the 12 years, these things happened:
1) New technology allows for "mini switching offices," tremendously extending the range of ADSL from the main central switching office.
2) Most everyone in metropolitan areas can get access to cable TV, so cable modems is now an option.
3) New technologies may alleviate the issue of broadband access in rural areas, especially the new WiMAX wireless technology.
I think you forget that in Europe and much of Asia, the population density is high enough that telco's can afford the exorbitant cost of setting up broadband for everyone in metropolitan areas, since there are enough potential users to pay for the cost of installation. This isn't like the USA, where the sprawled-out nature of many cities and the old wiring infrastructure of older cities made broadband installation too expensive until within the last decade.
Bottom line: A team of engineers with a good workshop and modern materials, tools and woodwork/crafting methods could come up with a string that beats a Stradivary at any time within a few months the latest. Or emulates it's sound exactly. And it would be considerably cheaper. It's only that no one really cares. Especially not those owning a Stradivary.
Indeed. With access to modern computer analysis and access to modern composite materials such as carbon fiber, epoxy resins, fiberglass, boron composites, etc., it would only take about a year's work to create a violin that sounds EXACTLY like a Stradivarius-built instrument. We might be able to exceed what Stradivarius produced because of our modern understanding of how sound resonates across various materials.
In my opinion, here's what Windows 7 should be like:
1) Strip away all legacy code support for anything pre-WIN32 flat-memory mode API. That means no more support for anything that runs in Windows 98 and older operating systems, which means you can write the code base from the ground up for true flat-memory mode for improved stability.
2) Split Windows 7 into two lines, one for home users that gets updated frequently with improved multimedia software and one for business users with a simplified interface that gets updated less frequently (though you'll still get frequent security updates).
One thing Microsoft could do to reduce the size of the OS is to drop anything older that doesn't support WIN32 API flat memory model mode. That would not only cut code size but also improve system stability, since flat memory model mode allows for more graceful program shutdowns in case the program crashes.
The problem with line judges is that unlike Hawkeye, line judges have to see the landing point of tennis ball from pretty far away, and that tends to cause far worse judgment errors than with Hawkeye.
No system is 100% foolproof, but those with the least amount of errors will reduce problems with judgment calls by by a long way. In fact, that's why Major League Baseball might even implement a replay system to determine home run calls as early as August 2008, given the recent spate of inaccurate calls by umpires.
I think people forget how AWFUL air pollution in Los Angeles used to be. Does anyone remember the Stage II smog alerts that were common during the 1960's to early 1980's?
Today, even in the height of summer, thanks to really strict pollution control laws the air pollution is a fraction of what it used to be. And new technologies to reduce diesel engine particulate and NOx emissions could really cut the pollution even further.
I think people forget that this is not the first time people have been looking for a new fuel for industrial purposes.
Up until the 1850's, lighting lamps were fueled by whale oil, and with the rapid decline in the whale population even by then there was considerable concern about what to substitute for whale oil. The discovery of using kerosene derived from crude oil about this period changed all that, and that was the foundation of the oil industry as we know it today.
Today, rapid changes in technology could make gasoilne obselete as a motor fuel within the next 20 years. The most important announcement was MIT's announcement of research into high-energy supercapacitors using carbon nanotubes back in 2006; that may just open the way for a drastic reduction in the size of the battery pack needed for a battery-electric vehicle (BEV), making it possible for a practical electric car that could carry four passengers in comfort yet go up to 400 km (248 miles) or more on a single charge, and the charge time for the battery pack would be a tiny fraction of even Li-On battery packs.
That same technology could make it possible to have electrical storage units from home size to city size that could provide power after being charged up by a solar cell array or wind turbine array. I can imagine a single house with a sun-facing solar cell array (now much cheaper thanks to nanotechnology) that provides power during daytime and charges a supercapacitor electrical storage unit for use at night.
In short, I see within 20-25 years most homes and apartment complexes with cheap solar arrays on their roofs and supercapacitor electrical storage units somewhere in the building.
Actually, if you're buying a new machine or have a machine with a dual-core CPU built in the past two years, you're better off with Windows Vista.
Mostly because Vista does properly take advantage of multi-core CPU's "out of the box," and unlike Windows XP, Vista has far more graceful recovery in case of a program crash. With Service Pack 1, Vista is no longer slow in terms of file management, too.
I expect Windows 7 to essentially be Vista but with redesigned core OS code to lower the memory "footprint" compared to Vista now--it would essentially be like a Vista "Second Edition."
I've read about homes based on the dome structural design built in Florida that managed to survive quite well in that notorious 2005 hurricane season with nary a scratch--a testament to the potential of such a building to survive this extreme of nature. Check out American Ingenuity's web site (www.aidomes.com) to see why Buckmaster Fuller's vision of a dome home is no longer such a far-fetched idea.
When properly engineered, a house based on a dome design have these advantages:
1) They're extremely structurally strong. In fact, a properly-engineered dome house would probably survive a Category 5 hurricane or even an F5 tornado.
2) They're very energy efficient, often needing substantially lower energy bills to heat and cool the structure.
While buses and delivery trucks are going to clean-burning CNG in Paris, you still have the problem of a lot of automobiles fuelled by diesel fuel, and unlike the USA, European diesel emission standards are nowhere as strict as in the USA. Given the huge amount of new cars sold in Europe with diesel engines, they need to make them much cleaner in terms of NOx and diesel particulate output to reduce the serious air pollution problems in cities.
Being able to simply grab (rent) a bike and ride the 15-20 blocks you might need to travel, doing this above ground in a physically exhilarating and liberating fashion (compared to a bus/metro/taxi)... this is all most excellent.
Ah, no thanks, especially considering the air pollution you get in a densely-populated city like Paris with all that automobile, truck and bus traffic. I'll wait until every vehicle on Paris streets are either Euro 6 emissions-compliant, run off natural gas, are hybrids/plug-in hybrids and/or all-electric.
I believe it was Isaac Asimov that once said in the future we could "build" almost any hydrocarbon fuel by using carbon dioxide gas as a base. The technology GE demonstrated shows that this far-fetched idea may not be so far-fetched within a few decades at the rate things are going.
I remember reading in (I believe) Popular Science some months ago that several scientists have figured out how to at least produce gasoline from biomass; this could eventually make it possible to use oil-laden algae to "grow" almost any hydrocarbon fuel we want from methanol all the way up to diesel fuel and heating oil.
Actually, very few movies I know of here in the USA are available on pay-per-view before it's available on DVD or Blu-ray disc, mostly because the movie studios make way more profit on video software sales per disc than from a pay-per-view sale.
With a number of companies working on advanced supercapacitor battery packs that can store a lot of electricity in less space than even Li-On batteries but recharge in a very small fraction of the time of Li-On batteries, we could see by 2011-2014 time frame vehicles about the size of a Honda Fit seating four passengers comfortably, have a top speed of around 150 km/h (93 mph), go about 400 km (248 miles) between charges and recharge in about 10-15 minutes from a commercial recharging station. Once that happens the days of a gasoline-fuelled car will officially be over for the majority of drivers.
The problem up till recently was that lightness equated with unsafe cars, because light weight equated with little protection for passengers when the lighter car was involved in a crash.
However, with the development of high-strength steel, aluminum body parts, and increasingly the use of composites, you can lighten the weight of a car without compromising passenger safety. The latest Mazda2 available in Japan and Europe and the upcoming 7th-generation Ford Fiesta takes advantage of extensive use of high-strength steel structural components to make a car that is reasonably light but still get good safety ratings from IIHS and EuroNCAP crash testing.
With recent developments in metal refining, we could see another material that could really lighten the weight of a car: titanium alloys. Soon, titanium alloys will be far less costly to produce, and given the very high strength of titanium alloys we could lighten a car far more than even using aluminum alloy structural parts. A four-door 2008 Honda Civic sedan that now weights 2,945 pounds could with extensive use of titanium alloys could weight under 2,400 pounds, and that lower weight means much better fuel economy, especially since we can now use a smaller engine for even more fuel economy gains.
By the way, once maglev technology matures, I could actually see not only the transit corridors I mentioned originally, but these corridors could benefit from maglev trains around the world:
1) Tokyo-Osaka (already on its way to actual construction) 2) Detroit-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City 3) Jacksonville, FL-Orlando, FL-Miami, FL 4) Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo 5) Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne 6) Singapore-Kuala Lumpur
The problem with Transrapid is that the technology is still way too expensive to build on a per mile/kilometer basis. Fortunately, a new technology developed within the last 15 years using permanent magnets--developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories originally for a rail-launch system to launch payloads into orbit--could drastically cut the cost of construction.
It's not as big a boondoggle as you think. It could pave the way for essentially obseleting air travel between city centers for trips under 600 miles in distance due to the 300+ mph cruising speed of maglev trains.
For example, Chicago could become a MAJOR hub for maglev trains, with these lines going from Chicago in a spoke-like fashion:
1) To Milwaukee, WI-Madison, WI-Eau Claire, WI-Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN 2) To Rockford, IL-Davenport, IA-Des Moines, IA-Council Bluffs, IA-Omaha, NE 3) To Champaign, IL-Saint Louis, MO-Columbia, MO-Kansas City, MO-Wichita, KS 4) To Indianapolis, IN-Cincinnati, OH-Louisville, KY 5) To South Bend, IN-Toledo, OH-Cleveland, OH-Erie, PA-Buffalo, NY 6) To Grand Rapids, MI-Lansing, MI-Detroit, MI
Given that maglev trains aren't limited by the width constraints of standard gauge rail, you can create trains that could seat 500 passengers per train or more travelling every 18 to 20 minutes on the same route. You would actually encourage people to not fly or drive between these two cities due to the very fast transit times.
I think what really hurt AMD was Intel's release of the Conroe-core Core 2 Duo CPU. The Conroe core--if I remember correctly--was based heavily on the excellent Pentium III Mobile CPU, hence the reason why the Core 2 Duo CPU ran so much cooler than the competitive AMD Athlon64 x2 CPU.
But yet, we overcame those limitations and today's x86-compatible CPU's easily support many gigabytes of RAM in true flat memory mode, with the only limitation being the motherboard itself. Indeed, Windows 2000, XP and Vista, the current MacOS X version, and even the latest distributions of Linux all take advantage of the flat memory mode that has been available since the advent of the 80386 CPU in 1986 (now in 64-bit flat memory mode).
The issue here is that most web developers will develop their web pages to work with IE 7.0 or Firefox because that's most of the user share for web browsers to start with. With the coming of IE 8.0 late this year with its full standards-compliance mode and the fact there are lots of third-party extensions for Firefox, I don't see Safari being important on the Windows side like it is on the Mac (after all, Safari is the default web browser for Mac users).
I'm sure Google will make Google Earth compatible with Firefox 3.0, given that Firefox 3.0 is going to be a hugely popular product. I'm not surprised the Google Earth doesn't work with Firefox 3.0 yet given that the new browser has yet to complete its beta test program.
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I can understand that issue, but Pickens' project has one advantage other large-scale wind turbine farms in other parts of the USA don't have: much shorter distances to connect to the customers that need this power, namely all those customers in Texas.
Sure, it will cost around US$4 billion to connect up this wind farm to the Texas utility grid, but it's kind of hard to ignore 4,000 MW in generating capacity in one of the world's best areas for locating wind turbines. This is why every major company involved in wind turbines are putting up wind farms in western Texas.
I think if you're a home user, Windows Update works fairly well--I've never had any significant issues with that update.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft posts its updates the second Tuesday of every month, so you'll have plentiful warning of when the updates arrive. Occasionally, Microsoft posts updates "out of cycle" if the update is deemed very critical, but those are relatively rare.
The big problems recently for getting Americans onto broadband were:
1) The limits on the ADSL distance from the central switching office (circa 3,000 meters limit).
2) The limits on availability of TV cable lines for cable modems.
3) The cost of setting up landline broadband in rural areas.
Fortunately, within the 12 years, these things happened:
1) New technology allows for "mini switching offices," tremendously extending the range of ADSL from the main central switching office.
2) Most everyone in metropolitan areas can get access to cable TV, so cable modems is now an option.
3) New technologies may alleviate the issue of broadband access in rural areas, especially the new WiMAX wireless technology.
I think you forget that in Europe and much of Asia, the population density is high enough that telco's can afford the exorbitant cost of setting up broadband for everyone in metropolitan areas, since there are enough potential users to pay for the cost of installation. This isn't like the USA, where the sprawled-out nature of many cities and the old wiring infrastructure of older cities made broadband installation too expensive until within the last decade.
Bottom line:
A team of engineers with a good workshop and modern materials, tools and woodwork/crafting methods could come up with a string that beats a Stradivary at any time within a few months the latest. Or emulates it's sound exactly. And it would be considerably cheaper. It's only that no one really cares. Especially not those owning a Stradivary.
Indeed. With access to modern computer analysis and access to modern composite materials such as carbon fiber, epoxy resins, fiberglass, boron composites, etc., it would only take about a year's work to create a violin that sounds EXACTLY like a Stradivarius-built instrument. We might be able to exceed what Stradivarius produced because of our modern understanding of how sound resonates across various materials.
In my opinion, here's what Windows 7 should be like:
1) Strip away all legacy code support for anything pre-WIN32 flat-memory mode API. That means no more support for anything that runs in Windows 98 and older operating systems, which means you can write the code base from the ground up for true flat-memory mode for improved stability.
2) Split Windows 7 into two lines, one for home users that gets updated frequently with improved multimedia software and one for business users with a simplified interface that gets updated less frequently (though you'll still get frequent security updates).
One thing Microsoft could do to reduce the size of the OS is to drop anything older that doesn't support WIN32 API flat memory model mode. That would not only cut code size but also improve system stability, since flat memory model mode allows for more graceful program shutdowns in case the program crashes.
The problem with line judges is that unlike Hawkeye, line judges have to see the landing point of tennis ball from pretty far away, and that tends to cause far worse judgment errors than with Hawkeye.
No system is 100% foolproof, but those with the least amount of errors will reduce problems with judgment calls by by a long way. In fact, that's why Major League Baseball might even implement a replay system to determine home run calls as early as August 2008, given the recent spate of inaccurate calls by umpires.
I think people forget how AWFUL air pollution in Los Angeles used to be. Does anyone remember the Stage II smog alerts that were common during the 1960's to early 1980's?
Today, even in the height of summer, thanks to really strict pollution control laws the air pollution is a fraction of what it used to be. And new technologies to reduce diesel engine particulate and NOx emissions could really cut the pollution even further.
I think people forget that this is not the first time people have been looking for a new fuel for industrial purposes.
Up until the 1850's, lighting lamps were fueled by whale oil, and with the rapid decline in the whale population even by then there was considerable concern about what to substitute for whale oil. The discovery of using kerosene derived from crude oil about this period changed all that, and that was the foundation of the oil industry as we know it today.
Today, rapid changes in technology could make gasoilne obselete as a motor fuel within the next 20 years. The most important announcement was MIT's announcement of research into high-energy supercapacitors using carbon nanotubes back in 2006; that may just open the way for a drastic reduction in the size of the battery pack needed for a battery-electric vehicle (BEV), making it possible for a practical electric car that could carry four passengers in comfort yet go up to 400 km (248 miles) or more on a single charge, and the charge time for the battery pack would be a tiny fraction of even Li-On battery packs.
That same technology could make it possible to have electrical storage units from home size to city size that could provide power after being charged up by a solar cell array or wind turbine array. I can imagine a single house with a sun-facing solar cell array (now much cheaper thanks to nanotechnology) that provides power during daytime and charges a supercapacitor electrical storage unit for use at night.
In short, I see within 20-25 years most homes and apartment complexes with cheap solar arrays on their roofs and supercapacitor electrical storage units somewhere in the building.
Actually, if you're buying a new machine or have a machine with a dual-core CPU built in the past two years, you're better off with Windows Vista.
Mostly because Vista does properly take advantage of multi-core CPU's "out of the box," and unlike Windows XP, Vista has far more graceful recovery in case of a program crash. With Service Pack 1, Vista is no longer slow in terms of file management, too.
I expect Windows 7 to essentially be Vista but with redesigned core OS code to lower the memory "footprint" compared to Vista now--it would essentially be like a Vista "Second Edition."
Didn't I just say properly engineered??
I've read about homes based on the dome structural design built in Florida that managed to survive quite well in that notorious 2005 hurricane season with nary a scratch--a testament to the potential of such a building to survive this extreme of nature. Check out American Ingenuity's web site (www.aidomes.com) to see why Buckmaster Fuller's vision of a dome home is no longer such a far-fetched idea.
When properly engineered, a house based on a dome design have these advantages:
1) They're extremely structurally strong. In fact, a properly-engineered dome house would probably survive a Category 5 hurricane or even an F5 tornado.
2) They're very energy efficient, often needing substantially lower energy bills to heat and cool the structure.
While buses and delivery trucks are going to clean-burning CNG in Paris, you still have the problem of a lot of automobiles fuelled by diesel fuel, and unlike the USA, European diesel emission standards are nowhere as strict as in the USA. Given the huge amount of new cars sold in Europe with diesel engines, they need to make them much cleaner in terms of NOx and diesel particulate output to reduce the serious air pollution problems in cities.
Being able to simply grab (rent) a bike and ride the 15-20 blocks you might need to travel, doing this above ground in a physically exhilarating and liberating fashion (compared to a bus/metro/taxi)... this is all most excellent.
Ah, no thanks, especially considering the air pollution you get in a densely-populated city like Paris with all that automobile, truck and bus traffic. I'll wait until every vehicle on Paris streets are either Euro 6 emissions-compliant, run off natural gas, are hybrids/plug-in hybrids and/or all-electric.
I believe it was Isaac Asimov that once said in the future we could "build" almost any hydrocarbon fuel by using carbon dioxide gas as a base. The technology GE demonstrated shows that this far-fetched idea may not be so far-fetched within a few decades at the rate things are going.
I remember reading in (I believe) Popular Science some months ago that several scientists have figured out how to at least produce gasoline from biomass; this could eventually make it possible to use oil-laden algae to "grow" almost any hydrocarbon fuel we want from methanol all the way up to diesel fuel and heating oil.
Actually, very few movies I know of here in the USA are available on pay-per-view before it's available on DVD or Blu-ray disc, mostly because the movie studios make way more profit on video software sales per disc than from a pay-per-view sale.
With a number of companies working on advanced supercapacitor battery packs that can store a lot of electricity in less space than even Li-On batteries but recharge in a very small fraction of the time of Li-On batteries, we could see by 2011-2014 time frame vehicles about the size of a Honda Fit seating four passengers comfortably, have a top speed of around 150 km/h (93 mph), go about 400 km (248 miles) between charges and recharge in about 10-15 minutes from a commercial recharging station. Once that happens the days of a gasoline-fuelled car will officially be over for the majority of drivers.
The problem up till recently was that lightness equated with unsafe cars, because light weight equated with little protection for passengers when the lighter car was involved in a crash.
However, with the development of high-strength steel, aluminum body parts, and increasingly the use of composites, you can lighten the weight of a car without compromising passenger safety. The latest Mazda2 available in Japan and Europe and the upcoming 7th-generation Ford Fiesta takes advantage of extensive use of high-strength steel structural components to make a car that is reasonably light but still get good safety ratings from IIHS and EuroNCAP crash testing.
With recent developments in metal refining, we could see another material that could really lighten the weight of a car: titanium alloys. Soon, titanium alloys will be far less costly to produce, and given the very high strength of titanium alloys we could lighten a car far more than even using aluminum alloy structural parts. A four-door 2008 Honda Civic sedan that now weights 2,945 pounds could with extensive use of titanium alloys could weight under 2,400 pounds, and that lower weight means much better fuel economy, especially since we can now use a smaller engine for even more fuel economy gains.
By the way, once maglev technology matures, I could actually see not only the transit corridors I mentioned originally, but these corridors could benefit from maglev trains around the world:
1) Tokyo-Osaka (already on its way to actual construction)
2) Detroit-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City
3) Jacksonville, FL-Orlando, FL-Miami, FL
4) Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo
5) Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne
6) Singapore-Kuala Lumpur
The problem with Transrapid is that the technology is still way too expensive to build on a per mile/kilometer basis. Fortunately, a new technology developed within the last 15 years using permanent magnets--developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories originally for a rail-launch system to launch payloads into orbit--could drastically cut the cost of construction.
It's not as big a boondoggle as you think. It could pave the way for essentially obseleting air travel between city centers for trips under 600 miles in distance due to the 300+ mph cruising speed of maglev trains.
For example, Chicago could become a MAJOR hub for maglev trains, with these lines going from Chicago in a spoke-like fashion:
1) To Milwaukee, WI-Madison, WI-Eau Claire, WI-Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN
2) To Rockford, IL-Davenport, IA-Des Moines, IA-Council Bluffs, IA-Omaha, NE
3) To Champaign, IL-Saint Louis, MO-Columbia, MO-Kansas City, MO-Wichita, KS
4) To Indianapolis, IN-Cincinnati, OH-Louisville, KY
5) To South Bend, IN-Toledo, OH-Cleveland, OH-Erie, PA-Buffalo, NY
6) To Grand Rapids, MI-Lansing, MI-Detroit, MI
Given that maglev trains aren't limited by the width constraints of standard gauge rail, you can create trains that could seat 500 passengers per train or more travelling every 18 to 20 minutes on the same route. You would actually encourage people to not fly or drive between these two cities due to the very fast transit times.
I think what really hurt AMD was Intel's release of the Conroe-core Core 2 Duo CPU. The Conroe core--if I remember correctly--was based heavily on the excellent Pentium III Mobile CPU, hence the reason why the Core 2 Duo CPU ran so much cooler than the competitive AMD Athlon64 x2 CPU.
But yet, we overcame those limitations and today's x86-compatible CPU's easily support many gigabytes of RAM in true flat memory mode, with the only limitation being the motherboard itself. Indeed, Windows 2000, XP and Vista, the current MacOS X version, and even the latest distributions of Linux all take advantage of the flat memory mode that has been available since the advent of the 80386 CPU in 1986 (now in 64-bit flat memory mode).
The issue here is that most web developers will develop their web pages to work with IE 7.0 or Firefox because that's most of the user share for web browsers to start with. With the coming of IE 8.0 late this year with its full standards-compliance mode and the fact there are lots of third-party extensions for Firefox, I don't see Safari being important on the Windows side like it is on the Mac (after all, Safari is the default web browser for Mac users).
I'm sure Google will make Google Earth compatible with Firefox 3.0, given that Firefox 3.0 is going to be a hugely popular product. I'm not surprised the Google Earth doesn't work with Firefox 3.0 yet given that the new browser has yet to complete its beta test program.