There is an obvious solution this whole mess - you just need to have a different point of view. Divide the job of an ISP into two parts - making/maintaining the physical infrastructure and 2) providing the packets / service / customer support. If the city were to build the infrastructure, they could simply sell the bandwidth to the ISPs and let them provide the service. Because the market would be easy to enter, many ISPs would jump in resulting in competitive pricing. The city could then mandate that the price charged to ISPs allows them to break even on maintaining the infrastructure.
In this situation, the ISPs would still be allowed to build their own infrastructure. Most likely would not - it would already be built if it were going to happen. But the city does not prevent the ISPs from operating. It simply builds an infrastructure thereby allowing the ISPs to do business in an area where it was previously too expensive to operate. It also ensures that their citizens are not ripped off by allowing for competition.
Flash and EEPROM memories are different. Look at the specs for any microcontroller and you will notice that they specify both EEPROM and Flash separately. The reason for this is because of the way they are erased. Flash is divided into blocks, the entirety of the block is erased in a single operation. This is great for storing large blocks of data, like an executable, as it greatly decreases the time required to erase the memory. It also reduces the cost of the memory as it is requires less space to implement.
EEPROM memory is really designed for saving small amounts of data - such as the configuration settings for whatever widget the memory is part of. More expensive to implement and slower but cells can be erased individually thus making it a very convenient feature to have in a microcontroller. If you look at the specs for current microcontrollers you will notice that they tend to include only small amounts of EEPROM with much larger amounts of Flash. This is why.
Technically they could very well be made of the same components - making you correct. But the support circuitry differs thus making them two different types of memory.
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
Sure it did. When Apple released their iMac there was a rush to release peripherals to support them. Before that nobody really cared about USB despite the fact that it was present on the majority of PCs. People were fine with serial and parallel ports - there was simply insufficient reasons to switch to USB. Remember that USB 1.0 (or 1.1) was not actually that fast and came with a pile of driver issues (due to how new it was). It also added to the work that the CPU was required to do, something that is irrelevant today but quite relevant for a p200.
So Apple did jumpstart the USB market. Not that it would not have happened eventually on it's own, Apple just made it happen sooner. Their actions caused peripheral manufacturers to adopt the standard sooner then they would have liked to. Remember those early devices? Most were standard serial/parallel devices with a built in USB to serial/parallel converter. Ugly, but necessary if they wanted a piece of the iMac peripheral market.
I have also used ClamAV - but it is horrible for finding most viruses. It is probably great for scanning email but it simply is not reliable enough for detecting viruses in downloaded files. I use Windows in a VM and have found numerous occasions when ClamAV would not detect a virus (scanned by the host machine). Scanning the file with most other free Windows anti-virus products results in the virus being found. So while I would love it if ClamAV did the job, it just doesn't.
Am I alone in feeling disturbed at the trend to separate the combatants by ever increasing distances? It is separating the human cause and effect so that the soldiers are increasingly disconnected from their actions. What motivation is there to peacefully settle the argument when you can just continue to blast the opposition?
Soldiers do not make peace, never have and never will. It is the politicians that decide when the killing should start and stop. It is the generals that decide how to most effectively implement the political goals. The soldiers are simply the ones that implement the plan. They can do it via remote control of a drone or they can bash a person's head in with a club. It doesn't matter how it is done or how connected the soldiers are with their actions as it is not the soldiers that decide to go to war. Now if the politicians that decided to go to war were first required to slit the throats a typical 5 person enemy family - just maybe there would be fewer conflicts.
I wonder if you could make a high gain steerable antenna to track the dish on the cell tower while you're transmitting?
What you described could be done without physically moving the antennas. Read a paper on it a few years ago (sorry, no link) where some researchers built an antenna on a chip that consisted of hundreds of different physical antennas. By applying the signal to different antenna at different times, a directional beam can be formed, much like yagi. But unlike a yagi, the beam can be sent in any direction, one just has to alter the timing. I believe it is similar to how modern RADAR works.
The CPU in a cell phone does not use much power so there is little to gain. Now if you can make more efficient radio transceivers - that would be something. Or the display, that would also significantly reduce power consumption. But adopting a new, unproven technology for minimal benefits.... That's not going to happen.
plus the spark plug has nothing to do with the engine efficiency
Not exactly true, but I doubt there is much room for improvement. What this does allow for is a rethinking of how to size and position the valves. This depends on the head space requirements of a laser, but it could possibly allow for more efficient valve design allowing smaller motors to produce more power.
any DVD I watch is going to look worse than it would on a 720 screen, which is its native resolution
DVDs do not natively support the 720 HD standard. A 720 TV supports 1280x720 pixels while a DVD supports 720x480. Also, bluray does support native 720, in addition to several other formats. Multiple streams can be placed on the same disk if the publisher has the space. If not, the 1080 stream is brought down to 720 with almost no loss of quality over a native 720 stream. It is not the same as when you run a LCD monitor at it's non-native resolution.
But if you want to see what the difference just download some HD movie trailers and do the comparisons. I find that HD is better then DVD but the advantages of 1080 vs 720 are almost non-existent. The only real reason to get a 1080 television is if you want to have a clear static image, like you want with a computer screen. But there is no disadvantage to having a 1080 screen - except for price.
but does anybody have a technical explanation of why bog-standard RTSP, an RFC implemented by a bunch of vendors(including Apple), is worse than HTTP for media streaming? "More difficult to optimize" is pretty vague.
I don't know for certain, but the newer method is supposed to encapsulate the media into 10 second chunks. This would allow the media stream to change quality as it is playing. This can be handy if the user, for example, switches to full screen mode and requires a higher quality stream. I know the older RTSP standard also supported multiple different quality streams but I do not believe you could switch between them as the media is playing.
Considering that this newer method makes use of standard formats and protocols, there has to be a reason why it was developed. There is nothing here that could act as a "submarine patent" and it should be easy for just about anyone to implement.
That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous.
What you have said is very true, for the most part. But where the economics break down is when you deal with hidden costs or side effects of producing a product. Pollution is a big one. Producing widget A results in a river being killed. The fishing industry that used that river is now destroyed but the cost of the lost fishing industry is not part of the cost of widget A. This is where taxes come in. The economics relevant to manufacturers is limited to their small scope of the world. In the previous example the fishing industry is beyond their view. It is up to governments to see the whole picture and implement taxes to ensure that everyone, as a whole, operate at peak efficiency.
One of the problems with CO2 production is that there is no global entity limiting it's use. CO2 does not respect political lines drawn on a map. One country an produce the CO2 and all suffer the consequences. Therefor, there is very little use in taxing carbon if it is not a universally accepted tax. Countries implementing such a tax would simply get their manufacturing offshored to countries that do not have the tax. Until people acknowledge the problem of CO2 production and a universal tax is accepted, the problem will be left to worsen.
If I were an all-powerfull entity I would solve the problem as follows. All internationally shipped products would include a "carbon" or "pollution" index. Countries would then be able to apply whatever tax they wanted onto imported products based on the index. This would provide the incentive for foreign manufacturers to clean up their facilities. And it would be based on economic theory - not local government legislation. All easier said then done - but if you could apply an _accurate_ index then it would work.
That brings up an interesting question concerning steel folding, like what was done with japanese swords.
There are two reasons why Japanese swords are traditionally made from folded steel. Firstly, folding is used to purify the steel. With every fold sparks fly and impurities are burned from the metal. This was a very effective technique considering how old it is. But the resulting steel was still of much lower quality then what is mass produced today.
The second reason for folding the steel was to distribute carbon throughout the metal. After folding the steel 10 to 20 times to purify it, they would do it again to add carbon to the steel. Now you have to understand that only ~1/3 of the steel that comes from the original melt of iron ore is of sufficient quality to use. But some of that left over slag is of very high carbon content (and very brittle). So they would take a piece of purified steel and weld a layer of the high carbon slag onto it. Now by folding it ~20 times they distribute the carbon evenly throughout the steel resulting in a very hard steel even by today's standards. I owned a high quality kitchen knife that broke - carbon buildup in the blade. It was replaced but my point is that even with modern techniques* it is difficult to evenly distribute carbon in steel. The Japanese solved this problem long ago - it just takes an outrageous amount of work.
So the final Japanese blade would typically be made from a core of purified steel with the high carbon steel welded around the outside - like a jacket. Hardness and the ability to hold an edge comes from the high carbon steel. Flexibility and durability comes from the purified steel. There was more to it then just this, for example try googling "differential hardening", but it serves as a brief overview.
modern techniques* - One of the coolest new ways to make steel is via "powdered steel". Basically, when you melt all the alloys to make steel they do not always mix together well resulting in poor steel. Just try to imagine oil and water. Anyway, powdered steel solves this problem by grinding up all the elements of the alloy and manually mixing them together in powdered form. They are then pressed into a mould at high temperature - almost at the melting point. Everything fuses together and one is left with a perfect steel. It costs more to manufacture but it results in the highest quality steel you can get. Very popular with knives and chisels.
Well with (MacOSX | GNUStep | OpenStep) you would typically work with a "NSMutableArray" object. This is a standard array type object that you can modify. Your class can then provide a reference to this array in the form of a "NSArray" object - an object that can not be modified.
Inheritance works as follows: base object (NSObject) -> static array (NSArray) -> dynamic array (NSMutableArray).
So you can always typecast your dynamic array as a static one when sending to possible callers. This technique can be used in any OO based language. It doesn't guarantee that callers play nice with your array but it does prevent it from happening by accident.
There is a lot of cool software for doing math, some of which enables you to do stuff wildly out of scope of pencil and paper... it should be taught rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
The goal of secondary schools is to ensure that students learn math. There is a limited amount of time to accomplish this task so schools need to focus on what is important. Learning cool new software is pointless because tomorrow it will be a thing of the past. Doing stuff outside the scope of pencil and paper - waste of time at this grade level. Learning to use tools such as calculators is also pointless because it takes away from time that should be used to learn the math. Students can learn to use such tools _after_ they know the math - typically alongside applying the math.
One of the biggest problems I see with current high school graduates is their lack of understanding of math and their reliance on calculators. Too many people do not know their times tables and can not do simple calculations in their head. In the real world, odds are you will not have a calculator handy when presented with a problem. And even if you do, it's just faster to be able to do it in your head. So get rid of the calculators and go back to actually learning math. Save the calculators for physics class - that's where you are going to need them.
With more cores, this will also add a benefit because apps that don't multithread will use one core's CPU time, while other cores are not affected. Say a MP3 player is using one core to play music. The user fires up another task, and instead of taking CPU time away from the MP3 player (possibly causing skipping), it will use another core that is not as utilized.
Not really an issue anymore. One just has to adjust the scheduler to ensure your mp3s do not skip, there is no real advantage to having two cores in this respect. And even if skipping were to occur, it would likely be a result of contention for other resources and not the CPU.
The real advantage of multiple cores is that it allows CPU designers to produce more MIPS while using less power. This is because doubling the clock rate of a CPU more then doubles the power requirements of that same CPU. So CPU designers are going the multi-core route to increase power. This happens at the cost of requiring the software to me multithreaded - something which used to be difficult but is becoming less of an issue.
If you could get your task done faster and the screen back to sleep you could significantly increase useful life.
The only way a faster CPU would help in this regard is if the current user interface was defective. I say defective because any UI that can not respond to the user, regardless of the reason, is defective. So long as the user is not waiting on the UI, adding CPU power will not reduce the amount of time the display is turned on.
It is not about faith / understanding in science - science is not even the term that should be used. It is about understanding the scientific method - a very different thing. Understanding the scientific method is very possible for most people. From there one just needs to see that the scientific method is properly applied in order to accept the results (once peer reviewed.)
I'm not a biologist, but I am curious if these open ocean deserts are man made or just nature.
They will most likely be naturally occurring "deserts". I know that some sea cucumbers are protandric - they can change gender if required. I guess when traversing the sea floor it can take a long time to come across another sea cucumber. So when this happens, and they are both of the same gender, one changes gender allowing them to procreate. This quality would not have evolved without large desert like expanses in the ocean.
Current human activities do not appear to be effecting the deserts so much as they are effecting the ocean's oases - the coral reefs. Higher temperatures, increased CO2 levels, and fishing are all destroying these ecological hotspots.
Apple was very close to using ZFS in 10.6, but couldn't come to licensing terms with Sun, so they scrapped it.
Licensing might have played a part, but ZFS is simply a poor file system for a consumer operating system. A consumer operating system must have first class support for removable media, something ZFS lacks. The vast majority of customers run a computer with a single drive and would gain very little from the overhead imposed by ZFS. Simply put, it is not worth it for most people.
Now there are lots of areas where ZFS would have been excellent but considering that Apple just killed their line of servers, the benefits of ZFS to Apple would have been minimal. If Apple really wanted ZFS they would have gotten it.
The thing about computers is that when you pay for the newest, highest performing technologies you open yourself up to getting burned. Sometimes it takes time to spot all the problems and release a perfect product. This applies to all manufacturers. There is a reason why some people always wait for v2.0.
It's funny that some of those cheap laptops are so reliable. The hardware has gone through extensive testing because it has been on the market for the past year. Performance typically sucks, as does the build quality - but they run surprisingly well. Manufacturers charge more for performance and build quality. And on all their products, regardless of the targeted market segment, they attempt to maximize* reliability. It's just harder to do this with newer technologies.
*sometimes the cheapest computers will have to compromise reliability for price but most brand name computers will try to avoid doing so because it tarnishes their brand.
EFI can replace the BIOS, but the operating system must support it. The Intel based Macs are famous for being some of the first machines that shipped with EFI in place of a BIOS. If you want to dual boot, Boot Camp actually fakes* a BIOS on top of EFI to allow other operating systems (like Windows XP) to install.
* Note: I do not know exactly how this is done, others might want to offer some insight.
I don't know of many people who have made use of the fiber connectors for sound, but they are there, nevertheless.
Well the sound quality of the regular 1/8" jack is garbage - way too much noise when it's in the side of a computer. Anyone who is connecting their laptop to a TV should definitely replace the standard 1/8" to RCA cable with a TOSLINK cable. They're cheap, sound better, and support surround sound.
FYI, the ports you speak of are officially called Mini-TOSLINK cables / ports. Generally, an adapter just sits in front of a regular TOSLINK cable. I picked up a cable a couple of weeks ago (from a grocery store of all places) and it came with two such adapters.
Heck one thing I can think of is dismantling large ships in boneyards. This would be good for any sort of metal recycling in fact.
Hight pressure water jets would be much cheaper for cutting metal. This technology is here and in use today. In addition, the dangers inherit in employees of a recycling yard operating a laser of such power should be obvious.
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I fail to see why we need commercial ISPs at all.
There is an obvious solution this whole mess - you just need to have a different point of view. Divide the job of an ISP into two parts - making/maintaining the physical infrastructure and 2) providing the packets / service / customer support. If the city were to build the infrastructure, they could simply sell the bandwidth to the ISPs and let them provide the service. Because the market would be easy to enter, many ISPs would jump in resulting in competitive pricing. The city could then mandate that the price charged to ISPs allows them to break even on maintaining the infrastructure.
In this situation, the ISPs would still be allowed to build their own infrastructure. Most likely would not - it would already be built if it were going to happen. But the city does not prevent the ISPs from operating. It simply builds an infrastructure thereby allowing the ISPs to do business in an area where it was previously too expensive to operate. It also ensures that their citizens are not ripped off by allowing for competition.
Flash and EEPROM memories are different. Look at the specs for any microcontroller and you will notice that they specify both EEPROM and Flash separately. The reason for this is because of the way they are erased. Flash is divided into blocks, the entirety of the block is erased in a single operation. This is great for storing large blocks of data, like an executable, as it greatly decreases the time required to erase the memory. It also reduces the cost of the memory as it is requires less space to implement.
EEPROM memory is really designed for saving small amounts of data - such as the configuration settings for whatever widget the memory is part of. More expensive to implement and slower but cells can be erased individually thus making it a very convenient feature to have in a microcontroller. If you look at the specs for current microcontrollers you will notice that they tend to include only small amounts of EEPROM with much larger amounts of Flash. This is why.
Technically they could very well be made of the same components - making you correct. But the support circuitry differs thus making them two different types of memory.
USB uptake on PCs was a function of Intel bundling USB for free on all of it's motherboards. The fact that Apple Corp left it's legacy users in the lurch really had nothing to do with it.
Sure it did. When Apple released their iMac there was a rush to release peripherals to support them. Before that nobody really cared about USB despite the fact that it was present on the majority of PCs. People were fine with serial and parallel ports - there was simply insufficient reasons to switch to USB. Remember that USB 1.0 (or 1.1) was not actually that fast and came with a pile of driver issues (due to how new it was). It also added to the work that the CPU was required to do, something that is irrelevant today but quite relevant for a p200.
So Apple did jumpstart the USB market. Not that it would not have happened eventually on it's own, Apple just made it happen sooner. Their actions caused peripheral manufacturers to adopt the standard sooner then they would have liked to. Remember those early devices? Most were standard serial/parallel devices with a built in USB to serial/parallel converter. Ugly, but necessary if they wanted a piece of the iMac peripheral market.
I have also used ClamAV - but it is horrible for finding most viruses. It is probably great for scanning email but it simply is not reliable enough for detecting viruses in downloaded files. I use Windows in a VM and have found numerous occasions when ClamAV would not detect a virus (scanned by the host machine). Scanning the file with most other free Windows anti-virus products results in the virus being found. So while I would love it if ClamAV did the job, it just doesn't.
Am I alone in feeling disturbed at the trend to separate the combatants by ever increasing distances? It is separating the human cause and effect so that the soldiers are increasingly disconnected from their actions. What motivation is there to peacefully settle the argument when you can just continue to blast the opposition?
Soldiers do not make peace, never have and never will. It is the politicians that decide when the killing should start and stop. It is the generals that decide how to most effectively implement the political goals. The soldiers are simply the ones that implement the plan. They can do it via remote control of a drone or they can bash a person's head in with a club. It doesn't matter how it is done or how connected the soldiers are with their actions as it is not the soldiers that decide to go to war. Now if the politicians that decided to go to war were first required to slit the throats a typical 5 person enemy family - just maybe there would be fewer conflicts.
I wonder if you could make a high gain steerable antenna to track the dish on the cell tower while you're transmitting?
What you described could be done without physically moving the antennas. Read a paper on it a few years ago (sorry, no link) where some researchers built an antenna on a chip that consisted of hundreds of different physical antennas. By applying the signal to different antenna at different times, a directional beam can be formed, much like yagi. But unlike a yagi, the beam can be sent in any direction, one just has to alter the timing. I believe it is similar to how modern RADAR works.
The CPU in a cell phone does not use much power so there is little to gain. Now if you can make more efficient radio transceivers - that would be something. Or the display, that would also significantly reduce power consumption. But adopting a new, unproven technology for minimal benefits.... That's not going to happen.
Older vehicles used belts to turn the rad fan but most vehicles now use an electric motor.
plus the spark plug has nothing to do with the engine efficiency
Not exactly true, but I doubt there is much room for improvement. What this does allow for is a rethinking of how to size and position the valves. This depends on the head space requirements of a laser, but it could possibly allow for more efficient valve design allowing smaller motors to produce more power.
any DVD I watch is going to look worse than it would on a 720 screen, which is its native resolution
DVDs do not natively support the 720 HD standard. A 720 TV supports 1280x720 pixels while a DVD supports 720x480. Also, bluray does support native 720, in addition to several other formats. Multiple streams can be placed on the same disk if the publisher has the space. If not, the 1080 stream is brought down to 720 with almost no loss of quality over a native 720 stream. It is not the same as when you run a LCD monitor at it's non-native resolution.
But if you want to see what the difference just download some HD movie trailers and do the comparisons. I find that HD is better then DVD but the advantages of 1080 vs 720 are almost non-existent. The only real reason to get a 1080 television is if you want to have a clear static image, like you want with a computer screen. But there is no disadvantage to having a 1080 screen - except for price.
but does anybody have a technical explanation of why bog-standard RTSP, an RFC implemented by a bunch of vendors(including Apple), is worse than HTTP for media streaming? "More difficult to optimize" is pretty vague.
I don't know for certain, but the newer method is supposed to encapsulate the media into 10 second chunks. This would allow the media stream to change quality as it is playing. This can be handy if the user, for example, switches to full screen mode and requires a higher quality stream. I know the older RTSP standard also supported multiple different quality streams but I do not believe you could switch between them as the media is playing.
Considering that this newer method makes use of standard formats and protocols, there has to be a reason why it was developed. There is nothing here that could act as a "submarine patent" and it should be easy for just about anyone to implement.
That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous.
What you have said is very true, for the most part. But where the economics break down is when you deal with hidden costs or side effects of producing a product. Pollution is a big one. Producing widget A results in a river being killed. The fishing industry that used that river is now destroyed but the cost of the lost fishing industry is not part of the cost of widget A. This is where taxes come in. The economics relevant to manufacturers is limited to their small scope of the world. In the previous example the fishing industry is beyond their view. It is up to governments to see the whole picture and implement taxes to ensure that everyone, as a whole, operate at peak efficiency.
One of the problems with CO2 production is that there is no global entity limiting it's use. CO2 does not respect political lines drawn on a map. One country an produce the CO2 and all suffer the consequences. Therefor, there is very little use in taxing carbon if it is not a universally accepted tax. Countries implementing such a tax would simply get their manufacturing offshored to countries that do not have the tax. Until people acknowledge the problem of CO2 production and a universal tax is accepted, the problem will be left to worsen.
If I were an all-powerfull entity I would solve the problem as follows. All internationally shipped products would include a "carbon" or "pollution" index. Countries would then be able to apply whatever tax they wanted onto imported products based on the index. This would provide the incentive for foreign manufacturers to clean up their facilities. And it would be based on economic theory - not local government legislation. All easier said then done - but if you could apply an _accurate_ index then it would work.
That brings up an interesting question concerning steel folding, like what was done with japanese swords.
There are two reasons why Japanese swords are traditionally made from folded steel. Firstly, folding is used to purify the steel. With every fold sparks fly and impurities are burned from the metal. This was a very effective technique considering how old it is. But the resulting steel was still of much lower quality then what is mass produced today.
The second reason for folding the steel was to distribute carbon throughout the metal. After folding the steel 10 to 20 times to purify it, they would do it again to add carbon to the steel. Now you have to understand that only ~1/3 of the steel that comes from the original melt of iron ore is of sufficient quality to use. But some of that left over slag is of very high carbon content (and very brittle). So they would take a piece of purified steel and weld a layer of the high carbon slag onto it. Now by folding it ~20 times they distribute the carbon evenly throughout the steel resulting in a very hard steel even by today's standards. I owned a high quality kitchen knife that broke - carbon buildup in the blade. It was replaced but my point is that even with modern techniques* it is difficult to evenly distribute carbon in steel. The Japanese solved this problem long ago - it just takes an outrageous amount of work.
So the final Japanese blade would typically be made from a core of purified steel with the high carbon steel welded around the outside - like a jacket. Hardness and the ability to hold an edge comes from the high carbon steel. Flexibility and durability comes from the purified steel. There was more to it then just this, for example try googling "differential hardening", but it serves as a brief overview.
modern techniques* - One of the coolest new ways to make steel is via "powdered steel". Basically, when you melt all the alloys to make steel they do not always mix together well resulting in poor steel. Just try to imagine oil and water. Anyway, powdered steel solves this problem by grinding up all the elements of the alloy and manually mixing them together in powdered form. They are then pressed into a mould at high temperature - almost at the melting point. Everything fuses together and one is left with a perfect steel. It costs more to manufacture but it results in the highest quality steel you can get. Very popular with knives and chisels.
Well with (MacOSX | GNUStep | OpenStep) you would typically work with a "NSMutableArray" object. This is a standard array type object that you can modify. Your class can then provide a reference to this array in the form of a "NSArray" object - an object that can not be modified.
Inheritance works as follows: base object (NSObject) -> static array (NSArray) -> dynamic array (NSMutableArray).
So you can always typecast your dynamic array as a static one when sending to possible callers. This technique can be used in any OO based language. It doesn't guarantee that callers play nice with your array but it does prevent it from happening by accident.
There is a lot of cool software for doing math, some of which enables you to do stuff wildly out of scope of pencil and paper... it should be taught rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
The goal of secondary schools is to ensure that students learn math. There is a limited amount of time to accomplish this task so schools need to focus on what is important. Learning cool new software is pointless because tomorrow it will be a thing of the past. Doing stuff outside the scope of pencil and paper - waste of time at this grade level. Learning to use tools such as calculators is also pointless because it takes away from time that should be used to learn the math. Students can learn to use such tools _after_ they know the math - typically alongside applying the math.
One of the biggest problems I see with current high school graduates is their lack of understanding of math and their reliance on calculators. Too many people do not know their times tables and can not do simple calculations in their head. In the real world, odds are you will not have a calculator handy when presented with a problem. And even if you do, it's just faster to be able to do it in your head. So get rid of the calculators and go back to actually learning math. Save the calculators for physics class - that's where you are going to need them.
With more cores, this will also add a benefit because apps that don't multithread will use one core's CPU time, while other cores are not affected. Say a MP3 player is using one core to play music. The user fires up another task, and instead of taking CPU time away from the MP3 player (possibly causing skipping), it will use another core that is not as utilized.
Not really an issue anymore. One just has to adjust the scheduler to ensure your mp3s do not skip, there is no real advantage to having two cores in this respect. And even if skipping were to occur, it would likely be a result of contention for other resources and not the CPU.
The real advantage of multiple cores is that it allows CPU designers to produce more MIPS while using less power. This is because doubling the clock rate of a CPU more then doubles the power requirements of that same CPU. So CPU designers are going the multi-core route to increase power. This happens at the cost of requiring the software to me multithreaded - something which used to be difficult but is becoming less of an issue.
If you could get your task done faster and the screen back to sleep you could significantly increase useful life.
The only way a faster CPU would help in this regard is if the current user interface was defective. I say defective because any UI that can not respond to the user, regardless of the reason, is defective. So long as the user is not waiting on the UI, adding CPU power will not reduce the amount of time the display is turned on.
Not in any modern design, which I assume applies to these theoretical CPUs that have yet to reach the market.
It is not about faith / understanding in science - science is not even the term that should be used. It is about understanding the scientific method - a very different thing. Understanding the scientific method is very possible for most people. From there one just needs to see that the scientific method is properly applied in order to accept the results (once peer reviewed.)
I'm not a biologist, but I am curious if these open ocean deserts are man made or just nature.
They will most likely be naturally occurring "deserts". I know that some sea cucumbers are protandric - they can change gender if required. I guess when traversing the sea floor it can take a long time to come across another sea cucumber. So when this happens, and they are both of the same gender, one changes gender allowing them to procreate. This quality would not have evolved without large desert like expanses in the ocean.
Current human activities do not appear to be effecting the deserts so much as they are effecting the ocean's oases - the coral reefs. Higher temperatures, increased CO2 levels, and fishing are all destroying these ecological hotspots.
Apple was very close to using ZFS in 10.6, but couldn't come to licensing terms with Sun, so they scrapped it.
Licensing might have played a part, but ZFS is simply a poor file system for a consumer operating system. A consumer operating system must have first class support for removable media, something ZFS lacks. The vast majority of customers run a computer with a single drive and would gain very little from the overhead imposed by ZFS. Simply put, it is not worth it for most people.
Now there are lots of areas where ZFS would have been excellent but considering that Apple just killed their line of servers, the benefits of ZFS to Apple would have been minimal. If Apple really wanted ZFS they would have gotten it.
The thing about computers is that when you pay for the newest, highest performing technologies you open yourself up to getting burned. Sometimes it takes time to spot all the problems and release a perfect product. This applies to all manufacturers. There is a reason why some people always wait for v2.0.
It's funny that some of those cheap laptops are so reliable. The hardware has gone through extensive testing because it has been on the market for the past year. Performance typically sucks, as does the build quality - but they run surprisingly well. Manufacturers charge more for performance and build quality. And on all their products, regardless of the targeted market segment, they attempt to maximize* reliability. It's just harder to do this with newer technologies.
*sometimes the cheapest computers will have to compromise reliability for price but most brand name computers will try to avoid doing so because it tarnishes their brand.
EFI can replace the BIOS, but the operating system must support it. The Intel based Macs are famous for being some of the first machines that shipped with EFI in place of a BIOS. If you want to dual boot, Boot Camp actually fakes* a BIOS on top of EFI to allow other operating systems (like Windows XP) to install.
* Note: I do not know exactly how this is done, others might want to offer some insight.
I don't know of many people who have made use of the fiber connectors for sound, but they are there, nevertheless.
Well the sound quality of the regular 1/8" jack is garbage - way too much noise when it's in the side of a computer. Anyone who is connecting their laptop to a TV should definitely replace the standard 1/8" to RCA cable with a TOSLINK cable. They're cheap, sound better, and support surround sound.
FYI, the ports you speak of are officially called Mini-TOSLINK cables / ports. Generally, an adapter just sits in front of a regular TOSLINK cable. I picked up a cable a couple of weeks ago (from a grocery store of all places) and it came with two such adapters.
Heck one thing I can think of is dismantling large ships in boneyards. This would be good for any sort of metal recycling in fact.
Hight pressure water jets would be much cheaper for cutting metal. This technology is here and in use today. In addition, the dangers inherit in employees of a recycling yard operating a laser of such power should be obvious.