Yeah. The caveat to the caveat is that some real-world problems have known optimal solutions (i.e. there's mathematical proof that the solution is optimal), or have a best known heuristic that you would be an idiot not to use unless you've discovered a superior heuristic.
This bit by Linus is easily one of the best and most concise quotes about problem-solving that I've read. Any sot of 'manifesto' about programming or engineering in general that does not have a caveat along these lines as one of its tenets is extremely flawed.
"The fact is, reality is complicated, and not amenable to the "one large idea" model of problem solving. The only way that problems get solved in real life is with a lot of hard work on getting the details right. Not by some over-arching ideology that somehow magically makes things work."
1. Affordable radios that connect digital devices with one another (WiFi, GPRS, 3G, 4G). 2. Affordable lightweight rechargeable batteries. 3. Affordable thin lightweight screens (LCD, OLED). 4. Affordable digital photography sensors. 5. Easy to use software and web services that change the way we consume media and communicate with other people (Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, etc).
The iPhone merges all of these things into one package, but it's far from the only thing that has changed. Everything about how we consume media and tele communicate has changed dramatically. The majority of people did not own laptops in 1997. Stores were selling 56k modems as upgrades to existing 28k and 14k modems. A considerable number of people did not own cellphones. I remember helping a less tech-savvy friend buy a portable cassette player and FM radio and a big pack of AA batteries in 1997. It sold for something like a fifth of the price of an mp3-player with 32MB of storage and no FM radio.
Yeah, gas will be more important than PV and we're probably moving towards a methane economy, but the average person will barely notice it in their day to day life.
I'm talking about the sort of stuff that you could weave into a "a day in the life of" story, like like roofs everywhere being covered in PV panels because they've become so cheap that you might as well do it. If you think that PV cells are stupid, do not buy them and do tell your government to stop subsidizing them. I think they will turn out to be okay based on the one or two studies that I've read about their environmental impact.
Solar heating is also one of those important things that are already happening, but that most people won't notice. Most solar heating systems seem to use the ground as the heat collector and once you have one in your house it just sits there quietly doing its job until the heat pump fails.
I'd say one or two things will be dramatically different from now, while most other things will be very slightly different or exactly the same. I can't think of a 15-year period since 1900 when there wasn't at least one dramatic breakthrough that changed some aspect of society.
My money would be on Google cars and Google glass coming to fruition, and on photovoltaics becoming ubiquitous.
You'll probably have your genome on file 15 years from now, because the cost of doing it will be trivial, but I doubt that it will make much difference in practice unless you happen to have one of the very specific things that they'l have stumbled on personalized cures for.
According to the tweets the satellite is still attached to the second stage at this time. They will need to light up the second stage again to get it into its intended orbit.
This may also explain why Google wants driverless cars, so they can fully automate the data collection.
There's that and there's the tens of billions of dollars that they might make over time by selling self-driving technology to car makers. Another win for Google is that people who ride self-driving cars are presumably going to spend more time watching ads than people who drive do.
HSR primarily competes on journeys in the 100-500 km range (one way). The vast majority of car journeys are shorter than 50 km. That alone ought to tell you that HSR isn't going to replace car journeys in any meaningful way.
That said, I'm sure that there are a number of urban corridors in the US where the potential for longer journeys is large enough that you could justify the cost of building and HSR line. In a typical mid-sized American city you could imagine a central station in a tunnel under the central skyscraper cluster which you would reach by public transport and one peripheral station on each side of the city which you would reach by car or by taxi. An extra stop near the end of an HSR line only adds about 4-5 minutes to the travel time of the train.
A wireless replacement for HDMI cables. The alternative would be to compress the video signal and transmit it as say a 50Mb/s signal, but that would add latency and reduce image quality.
I can also imagine using it for data transmission in science and industry in situations where the radio interference and the requirement of line of sight isn't a problem. Suppose that you have a camera (or some other sensor) that monitors a delicate process in a place where you don't want to run cables for whatever reason.
The real benefit of a printer is probably the short "shipping" time. If you realize that you want a plastic part or a photo print tomorrow at the latest it's too late to order now, but if you have a printer you can get it today.
And Harold Stephen Black invented the feedback amplifier on a short ferry ride in New York.
The thing about inventions is that most inventions are made by multiple people around the same time and this happens because the ambient culture, knowledge and technology is available to them around the same time. The Kalman filter is based on a simple enough idea that it would almost certainly have been invented by someone else within years of Kalman's invention, if he hadn't made it then. The feedback amplifier is an even simpler idea.
There are people who don't play angry birds or produce triple digits numbers of tweets every day and there will always be people like them.
Just go out for a walk whenever you need to gather your thoughts and zone out for a bit. Touchscreens and walking don't mix...
This tip works great until you get to the point where you subscribe to a large enough number of podcasts that there's always a queue lined up for you in your podcast player. If you're like me you can still zone out or let your mind drift a bit during the boring parts of the podcasts. Also, obviously, if you go out for a walk without your headset you commit to not listening to podcasts or music.
Buying CFLs seems to be a hit and miss kind of thing. I buy my CFLs at IKEA, mostly because they're cheap. I don't think CFLs are ever going to get to a point where there is a premium brand that one can swear by. I think the CFL, for home use, is going to be a cheap and temporary solution that you throw in while you shop around for a more permanent solution.
I think the long term solution is probably going to be designer fixtures with embedded LEDs and WiFi that enables you to remote control them from your laptop, smartphone, table and light switches with WiFi. (WiFi chips are so cheap now that the new technologies intended to replace them are basically dead before they're even on the market.)
But seriously, random slashdot poster, what's keeping you from Tux?
Based on his question I'd guess that he's a college freshman. In that case it's probably a combination of spending time on making friends, on flirting, on going to parties, on drinking beer and perhaps on that thing that you do in the house where everyone goes during the day.
I think learning to use Linux is probably more of a second semester thing unless you're a CS major.
No, it's like a watching a juror change her way of thinking about the story as more and more evidence is revealed throughout the trial.
Until someone can show me how to make a creator out of dead empty space, you need to just accept the fact that there is a creator-creator. Until someone can show me how to make a creator-creator out of dead empty space, you need to just accept the fact that there is a creator-creator-creator. Until someone can show me how to make a creator-creator-creator out of dead empty space...
Another to thing to keep in mind is that the learning curve is not only a function of the inherent difficulty and amount of work involved in getting started but also a function of the difficulty in finding good tutorials and finding people who can answer specific questions. If everyone who's learning to program on Raspberry Pi is using the same stuff (Debian, LXDE, Python for example) and the same beginner's tutorial then you'll 1) get lots of feedback to the tutorial maintainers on the tutorial and 2) get users who can help one another because they're all up against the same problems and challenges.
When it comes to getting started with stuff, unity is good and fragmentation is bad. The standard free software way of doing things where there are N different distros with P different environments and Q different languages is perhaps nice for experienced people who have developed a taste, but it's certainly not ideal for beginners.
I think the number one thing that the Raspberry pi has going for it besides the low price is that there's only one (or two) hardware versions being made at any one time. I hope they'll be able to get the vast majority of beginners onto the same distro, environment and language / script language.
They're still working on the switching between windows feature (I'm not even kidding). The way it works now is almost bearable when you get used to it, but it still lacks text labels on the windows which makes it hard to tell different windows of the same type apart if you have more than a couple open at the same time.
Canonical's ultimate solution is called "the spread" and is a year late, so far...
The Cinnamon developers are working hard to make a UI that is useful to the user, and that can be a part of either single task or multiple task workflow. The GNOME3 developers try to cram their views down the user's throat, and impede anyone with a multiple-task workflow. moreover, the GNOME3 devs attitude is, you want something different that used to be user-configurable before, get a developer! GNOME3 and its developers can now die, they serve no purpose and the useful work has been taken up by competent people.
Are you aware that Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell, which in turn runs on top of GNOME3?
Here's a demo video that shows the new changes and features.
It looks to me like they have something pretty close to the ultimate version of the Windows 95-like UI. If this had been around with this amount of polish a year ago I probably would have switched to Mint. Now that I've gotten used to Unity I don't know if I'll switch. Great work anyway!
Yeah, they'll probably have to ship Windows for free on the low-end 7" tablets.
I wonder if Microsoft has failed to realize that in terms of profit the OS is essentially a front-end for the app store and plans to make money on both the OS and on app sales, analogous to a mall owner charging entrance.
Don't start bolting your chairs to the floor just yet. It's probably just an early tantalizer that they release while they work out the kinks. I would be surprised if you couldn't get a 7" Windows 8 tablet in Q4 2013. The real question is whether they'll be able to release a tablet that can compete with the iPad in the $500-$600 range.
If you can't afford a tool or a solution for your startup because of lack of investment you have to turn to a cheaper, inferior but workable, tool or solution and deal with the pain involved. Doing a startup without major investment upfront is, as you've pointed out, an unsolvable equation, yet every now and then there are people who manage to smash through and start a new business from virtually zero.
I'm not convinced that you would actually love to do a startup in EE.
Apple is already working on technology that would turn off all civilian cameras in an area. Governments everywhere are going to implement this as soon as they see a chance to do it without pissing off the majority of the population. It looks like a relatively trivial change if you legislate that manufacturers have to ship the feature inside everything they make that has a camera. Of course you and I may be able to disable it by googling how to, but what are the odds that you or I or another geek is there to film the next police meltdown?
Yeah that's certainly a justified question. Lot's of research needs to b done, like with any other technology that we might want to deploy on a planetary scale.
There are already some studies on the effects of commercial wind farms on the micro climate around the farms which seem to indicate some warming at the ground level. There are several studies that attempt to quantify the amount of birds killed (per unit of energy delivered). There are anecdotal horror tales about people being poisoned in the mining cities in China where some of the rarer the raw materials for the generators are mined. More research is certainly needed before we can quantify how clean wind power is so that we can compare it to the alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The caveat to the caveat is that some real-world problems have known optimal solutions (i.e. there's mathematical proof that the solution is optimal), or have a best known heuristic that you would be an idiot not to use unless you've discovered a superior heuristic.
This bit by Linus is easily one of the best and most concise quotes about problem-solving that I've read. Any sot of 'manifesto' about programming or engineering in general that does not have a caveat along these lines as one of its tenets is extremely flawed.
"The fact is, reality is complicated, and not amenable to the "one large idea" model of problem solving. The only way that problems get solved in real life is with a lot of hard work on getting the details right. Not by some over-arching ideology that somehow magically makes things work."
My list would be:
1. Affordable radios that connect digital devices with one another (WiFi, GPRS, 3G, 4G).
2. Affordable lightweight rechargeable batteries.
3. Affordable thin lightweight screens (LCD, OLED).
4. Affordable digital photography sensors.
5. Easy to use software and web services that change the way we consume media and communicate with other people (Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, etc).
The iPhone merges all of these things into one package, but it's far from the only thing that has changed. Everything about how we consume media and tele communicate has changed dramatically. The majority of people did not own laptops in 1997. Stores were selling 56k modems as upgrades to existing 28k and 14k modems. A considerable number of people did not own cellphones. I remember helping a less tech-savvy friend buy a portable cassette player and FM radio and a big pack of AA batteries in 1997. It sold for something like a fifth of the price of an mp3-player with 32MB of storage and no FM radio.
Yeah, gas will be more important than PV and we're probably moving towards a methane economy, but the average person will barely notice it in their day to day life.
I'm talking about the sort of stuff that you could weave into a "a day in the life of" story, like like roofs everywhere being covered in PV panels because they've become so cheap that you might as well do it. If you think that PV cells are stupid, do not buy them and do tell your government to stop subsidizing them. I think they will turn out to be okay based on the one or two studies that I've read about their environmental impact.
Solar heating is also one of those important things that are already happening, but that most people won't notice. Most solar heating systems seem to use the ground as the heat collector and once you have one in your house it just sits there quietly doing its job until the heat pump fails.
I'd say one or two things will be dramatically different from now, while most other things will be very slightly different or exactly the same. I can't think of a 15-year period since 1900 when there wasn't at least one dramatic breakthrough that changed some aspect of society.
My money would be on Google cars and Google glass coming to fruition, and on photovoltaics becoming ubiquitous.
You'll probably have your genome on file 15 years from now, because the cost of doing it will be trivial, but I doubt that it will make much difference in practice unless you happen to have one of the very specific things that they'l have stumbled on personalized cures for.
According to the tweets the satellite is still attached to the second stage at this time. They will need to light up the second stage again to get it into its intended orbit.
Did your hawk eyes miss the SpaceX story [or was stories?] yesterday?
I'm watching the video stream now because I found the SpaceX live blog because I found out about the launch on Slashdot yesterday.
This may also explain why Google wants driverless cars, so they can fully automate the data collection.
There's that and there's the tens of billions of dollars that they might make over time by selling self-driving technology to car makers. Another win for Google is that people who ride self-driving cars are presumably going to spend more time watching ads than people who drive do.
HSR primarily competes on journeys in the 100-500 km range (one way). The vast majority of car journeys are shorter than 50 km. That alone ought to tell you that HSR isn't going to replace car journeys in any meaningful way.
That said, I'm sure that there are a number of urban corridors in the US where the potential for longer journeys is large enough that you could justify the cost of building and HSR line. In a typical mid-sized American city you could imagine a central station in a tunnel under the central skyscraper cluster which you would reach by public transport and one peripheral station on each side of the city which you would reach by car or by taxi. An extra stop near the end of an HSR line only adds about 4-5 minutes to the travel time of the train.
A wireless replacement for HDMI cables. The alternative would be to compress the video signal and transmit it as say a 50Mb/s signal, but that would add latency and reduce image quality.
I can also imagine using it for data transmission in science and industry in situations where the radio interference and the requirement of line of sight isn't a problem. Suppose that you have a camera (or some other sensor) that monitors a delicate process in a place where you don't want to run cables for whatever reason.
The real benefit of a printer is probably the short "shipping" time. If you realize that you want a plastic part or a photo print tomorrow at the latest it's too late to order now, but if you have a printer you can get it today.
And Harold Stephen Black invented the feedback amplifier on a short ferry ride in New York.
The thing about inventions is that most inventions are made by multiple people around the same time and this happens because the ambient culture, knowledge and technology is available to them around the same time. The Kalman filter is based on a simple enough idea that it would almost certainly have been invented by someone else within years of Kalman's invention, if he hadn't made it then. The feedback amplifier is an even simpler idea.
There are people who don't play angry birds or produce triple digits numbers of tweets every day and there will always be people like them.
Just go out for a walk whenever you need to gather your thoughts and zone out for a bit. Touchscreens and walking don't mix...
This tip works great until you get to the point where you subscribe to a large enough number of podcasts that there's always a queue lined up for you in your podcast player. If you're like me you can still zone out or let your mind drift a bit during the boring parts of the podcasts. Also, obviously, if you go out for a walk without your headset you commit to not listening to podcasts or music.
Buying CFLs seems to be a hit and miss kind of thing. I buy my CFLs at IKEA, mostly because they're cheap. I don't think CFLs are ever going to get to a point where there is a premium brand that one can swear by. I think the CFL, for home use, is going to be a cheap and temporary solution that you throw in while you shop around for a more permanent solution.
I think the long term solution is probably going to be designer fixtures with embedded LEDs and WiFi that enables you to remote control them from your laptop, smartphone, table and light switches with WiFi. (WiFi chips are so cheap now that the new technologies intended to replace them are basically dead before they're even on the market.)
But seriously, random slashdot poster, what's keeping you from Tux?
Based on his question I'd guess that he's a college freshman. In that case it's probably a combination of spending time on making friends, on flirting, on going to parties, on drinking beer and perhaps on that thing that you do in the house where everyone goes during the day.
I think learning to use Linux is probably more of a second semester thing unless you're a CS major.
No, it's like a watching a juror change her way of thinking about the story as more and more evidence is revealed throughout the trial.
Until someone can show me how to make a creator out of dead empty space, you need to just accept the fact that there is a creator-creator. Until someone can show me how to make a creator-creator out of dead empty space, you need to just accept the fact that there is a creator-creator-creator. Until someone can show me how to make a creator-creator-creator out of dead empty space...
Another to thing to keep in mind is that the learning curve is not only a function of the inherent difficulty and amount of work involved in getting started but also a function of the difficulty in finding good tutorials and finding people who can answer specific questions. If everyone who's learning to program on Raspberry Pi is using the same stuff (Debian, LXDE, Python for example) and the same beginner's tutorial then you'll 1) get lots of feedback to the tutorial maintainers on the tutorial and 2) get users who can help one another because they're all up against the same problems and challenges.
When it comes to getting started with stuff, unity is good and fragmentation is bad. The standard free software way of doing things where there are N different distros with P different environments and Q different languages is perhaps nice for experienced people who have developed a taste, but it's certainly not ideal for beginners.
I think the number one thing that the Raspberry pi has going for it besides the low price is that there's only one (or two) hardware versions being made at any one time. I hope they'll be able to get the vast majority of beginners onto the same distro, environment and language / script language.
They're still working on the switching between windows feature (I'm not even kidding). The way it works now is almost bearable when you get used to it, but it still lacks text labels on the windows which makes it hard to tell different windows of the same type apart if you have more than a couple open at the same time.
Canonical's ultimate solution is called "the spread" and is a year late, so far...
The Cinnamon developers are working hard to make a UI that is useful to the user, and that can be a part of either single task or multiple task workflow. The GNOME3 developers try to cram their views down the user's throat, and impede anyone with a multiple-task workflow. moreover, the GNOME3 devs attitude is, you want something different that used to be user-configurable before, get a developer! GNOME3 and its developers can now die, they serve no purpose and the useful work has been taken up by competent people.
Are you aware that Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell, which in turn runs on top of GNOME3?
Here's a demo video that shows the new changes and features.
It looks to me like they have something pretty close to the ultimate version of the Windows 95-like UI. If this had been around with this amount of polish a year ago I probably would have switched to Mint. Now that I've gotten used to Unity I don't know if I'll switch. Great work anyway!
Yeah, they'll probably have to ship Windows for free on the low-end 7" tablets.
I wonder if Microsoft has failed to realize that in terms of profit the OS is essentially a front-end for the app store and plans to make money on both the OS and on app sales, analogous to a mall owner charging entrance.
Don't start bolting your chairs to the floor just yet. It's probably just an early tantalizer that they release while they work out the kinks. I would be surprised if you couldn't get a 7" Windows 8 tablet in Q4 2013. The real question is whether they'll be able to release a tablet that can compete with the iPad in the $500-$600 range.
If you can't afford a tool or a solution for your startup because of lack of investment you have to turn to a cheaper, inferior but workable, tool or solution and deal with the pain involved. Doing a startup without major investment upfront is, as you've pointed out, an unsolvable equation, yet every now and then there are people who manage to smash through and start a new business from virtually zero.
I'm not convinced that you would actually love to do a startup in EE.
Okay, but for how long?
Apple is already working on technology that would turn off all civilian cameras in an area. Governments everywhere are going to implement this as soon as they see a chance to do it without pissing off the majority of the population. It looks like a relatively trivial change if you legislate that manufacturers have to ship the feature inside everything they make that has a camera. Of course you and I may be able to disable it by googling how to, but what are the odds that you or I or another geek is there to film the next police meltdown?
Yeah that's certainly a justified question. Lot's of research needs to b done, like with any other technology that we might want to deploy on a planetary scale.
There are already some studies on the effects of commercial wind farms on the micro climate around the farms which seem to indicate some warming at the ground level. There are several studies that attempt to quantify the amount of birds killed (per unit of energy delivered). There are anecdotal horror tales about people being poisoned in the mining cities in China where some of the rarer the raw materials for the generators are mined. More research is certainly needed before we can quantify how clean wind power is so that we can compare it to the alternatives.