I'm fine with they keyboard size, but the mirror-like screen totally ruins almost all laptops nowadays for me.
I recently spent about $1k extra to get a Mac instead of a high-end Windows laptop, just because the Mac has ever so slightly less screen glare. After a few weeks of using it I have to say that was money well spent.
I suppose I must be unusually annoyed by screen glare compared to most people, but I think that I am not the only one, and I think if Dell or Asus would release a high end laptop with a matte screen option for say $300 extra on top of the regular price, they would probably find a nice niche market.
This is always a problem: incrementalist thinking, the idea that one can achieve the revolutionary through small intermediate steps with an evolutionary process. This is very limited (and limiting) thinking, and people who think that way will never achieve anything truly revolutionary. If you think like this, you should probably get the hell out of the way of those of us who don't. We'll come back for you. Some day. Maybe.
Revolutionary v.s. evolutionary is a false dichotomy. Some of the most revolutionary developments have been incremental by nature, but each increment could also be seen as a minor revolution.
Think of the miniaturization of electronics, or Moores law. Each year businesses that make CPU:s, GPU:s and other chips make incremental progress, but most of those increments required some (relatively minor) revolution in the way that one thinks about chip-making.
Rockets went from tiny fireworks in the late 1800:s to the Saturn V in the 1960:s through incremental progress. Then the US tried and failed at switching to space shuttles. Now it's back to rockets again, and incremental work towards better rockets. Some of those increments could have a huge impact, like being able to re-light the first stage and land it for later re-use.
Maybe one day it'll be space elevators instead of rockets. Maybe. Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that a space elevator will be better or cheaper than rockets. That largely depends on how expensive it will be to build the elevator, how often it will need maintenance and how long it will ultimately last until you need to scrap it and build a new one.
In any case, as wind gets cheaper its capacity factor is rocketing up too.
I think the arrow of causation is that smoother and more predictable power output causes the price of wind power to drop.
This is why the idea of airborne wind harvesters is such an interesting concept. Those harvesters could have capacity factors in the 40-80% range and the price per unit of energy could be less than half that of conventional wind power, especially if you account for the reduced need for backup power.
It's often filtered, carbonated and flavored with various fruit flavors, which by the way usually contain small amounts of sugar - something to be aware of if you're on a strict diet. The only thing it's missing is caffeine. I'm sure they'll get around to that if there is sufficient demand for it.
I quit my Coca Cola habit about 12 years ago and haven't looked back.
Interesting, but those numbers are deaths per PWh, not per kWh. That means that a 500MW US coal burner and its associated mining kills 0,0075 people per hour, or roughly one person per week.
Imagine the outrage if your average 1000MW nuclear reactor and its associated uranium mining killed two people per week! The president and congress would race to be the first to propose an outright ban on nuclear power.
I do think that nuclear is dead, because it takes government money to build it and because you don't win elections by subsidizing something that most people are scared of. Yes, nuclear is significantly more expensive than coal and slightly more expensive than gas and it takes 10-15 years to get a new nuclear plant online, which is longer than for any other power source. No sane capitalist would let any of his money anywhere near that investment unless the government promised to provide lots of subsidies.
With that said, the storage problem for solar and wind is absolutely not solved, nor will it be cheap. The amount of installed wind and solar is still so small that existing hydro dams can handle the storage, but wind and solar are growing fast enough that hydro dams will be completely insufficient.
There are experimental ideas about using excess power to make hydrogen, or methane or other hydrocarbons, but those are highly experimental and it is doubtful whether it will ever make economic sense. There are some very promising developments in turning sunlight directly into hydrogen or hydrocarbons, which will probably make a lot more sense economically. The problem is that none of this is available off the shelf, nor will it be in the next 5-10 years, and when it finally does become available it will take several decades to ramp up production to a level needed to supply 10+ billion people with energy storage.
Energy distribution has been making slow but steady progress over the last 150 or so years. We can easily transmit power 1000-2000 km today. Some day we'll be able to transmit it 3000 km and in the distant future 4000 km and 5000 km, which will be enough that we'll barely need storage. But again we're talking about decades into the future.
The nice ting about nuclear power is that we can build it now. You can call GE and order a plant on Monday, assuming you have the $5 billion (or $10 billion after the usual cost overrun) that they want for one of those and in 10-15 years you, your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids will have a clean and safe power plant. Throw in a few hundred millions for a decent sea wall if you decide put it next to the ocean.
If you are concerned about what future generations will do with your nuclear waste storage sites, you should probably be more concerned about what they will do (or rather what they will fail to do) with your hydro dams. I wouldn't trust a government that fails to repair bridges before they collaps to maintain a hydro dam upstream from where I live.
Well, you typically haven't truly decided to not go to college until you get your first kid...
Any 18-year who wants a career in X would be wise to accept a job offer in that field. They can go to college when they're 19 or 20, or 21. It's great to have some professional experience when you start your studies.
Nuclear power has been a disaster and widespread adoption of clean, renewable energy can't come soon enough.
Bullshit.
There have been multiple individual coal mining accidents that have killed more people than the entire nuclear industry has ever killed. Millions of people are estimated to die prematurely every year from pollution-caused heart and lung disease, and coal is one of the main culprits.
Every decision ever made to invest in nuclear instead of coal has been a life saving decision. The same could be said of investment in wind an solar in places where they can partially replace coal, but wind and solar will need to be paired with energy storage or long-range low-loss power distribution. Until we have either a cheap scalable energy storage technology or superconducting power distribution wind and solar will never replace coal.
And don't get me started on hydroelectrical dams. Dam breaches have killed more people than we could ever hope to kill with flawed nuclear reactor designs if we tried on purpose.
Since Israel has taken an unusual "don't confirm - don't deny" stance we can only assume that the nukes are meant to be revealed, and used if necessary, as a last resort in a scenario where Israel has lost the conventional fight against enemy forces and is about to be conquered and occupied.
If Israel primarily intended to use the weapons as a deterrent they would have revealed that they have them and how may they have, since the deterrent effect is proportional to the amount of firepower that you have. An unconfirmed arsenal with an unknown number of warheads is of course still a tremendous deterrent, so maybe the Israeli leadership thought that it would be overkill to disclose numbers.
Why does the US allow it? The US needs all the allies it can get in the Middle east in order to project influence and power over that region, so it will gladly accept almost anything that its allies do as long as it doesn't go completely against US interests. For example, Turkey is currently bombing the only viable opposition to IS in Iraq, the Kurds. The US needs Turkey in NATO at almost any price (imagine what a disaster it would be for US interests if Turkey aligned itself with Russia and/or with Iran), so Turkey is going to get away with that, even if it means that IS will gain ground in Iraq.
Actually, if the latency of the "pencil" and screen is as low as advertised this would be the first time since the invention of the paper notebook that someone has come up with a viable new way to take notes.
This could be pretty cool. I can think of some interesting applications...
Obvious: graphics editing, fun drawing apps for kids, note-taking apps.
Less obvious: a math learning app that has a computer algebra system and a math knowledge database that talk to a canvas. A student would write expressions on the canvas, get hints about where they made a mistake, or instructions about problem solving strategies. The system might say things like "this integral that you just wrote looks like such and such an integral, here is a variable substitution that often works for such integrals."
What other parts of the body does the virus reside in?
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it splices its genome into the genome of the infected human's cells, forcing the cells to produce copies of the virus as part of their normal operation. When the cells divide and produce new human cells the virus producing code gets copied to the new cell and when that new cell undergoes cell division the code gets copied again, and so on and so forth.
I guess you could say that there is an evolution-made conspiracy of evil viruses that makes it hard to cure HIV.
The PC industry's race to the bottom seem to have come to an end in 2014. There are all sorts of nice and expensive PC:s on sale now. The average screen resolution probably declined in 2010-2013, but it has gone way up in 2014 and 2015. Just to name one metric.
It does make sense that the PC industry will see a slight recovery (or at least an end of its decline) since the laptops that people bought in 2007, before the smartphone and tablet revolution, will have lost their movable parts to wear and tear by now. It is also increasingly meaningless to talk about laptops and tablets as separate markets now that there are large tablets that run Windows.
I wonder what will happen with the laptop/tablet industry once people have bought sufficiently powerful hardware without moving parts that break after 5-10 years. We could be looking at 15-30 year update cycles for the average consumer.
There is not really much of a market for suborbital spaceflight, it's just a few unmanned science experiments each year. I don't think that anyone is ever going to pay $100k to fly on a suborbital joyride either. Perhaps if they can get it down to 20k per ride.
You could decide to build modules to a standard that people in your state or country use. Use google to find the most appropriate standard for your geographical location and get in contact with people who modules to that standard for guidance on how to get started and what the pitfalls are.
There are meetups where people bring modules and assemble them into temporary model railroads. These meetups often allow visitors and the model railroaders tend to be happy to talk about their hobby with interested visitors. Maybe there's a meetup near you that you could visit?
This is interesting, but I don't think that hipsters are the culprits.
Let's look back at some history. I would argue that from the time that Hitler came into power in Germany to the failure of the Soviet economy in the 1980's, there was a strong and steady demand for technologies that did awesome stuff with matter (and with information to some extent). The demand for better weapons created a steady stream of spin-offs into the civilian sector. For example, we got satellites because Hitler wanted supersonic revenge weapons and Eisenhower and Khrushchev wanted ICBM:s to point at one another. These spin-offs stopped coming when the Soviet economy failed, because then the US no longer had a technologically advanced enemy.
There have been some mildly impressive weapons programs since the cold war, the F-35 and the Russian PAK-FA come to mind. The F-22 was a formidable plane when it went into service, but the mechanical design was mostly done by the time the Soviet Union dissolved.
Now, this is basically a good thing, of course. The only drawback is that the spin-off effects into the civilian sector have stopped coming and it has taken a long time for the private sector to pick up the slack.
I think this is the reason why the time between 1990 and 2015 has been relatively boring in terms of doing mechanical things, except for a few companies like SpaceX and Tesla that have begun to appear recently. I think there is more to come in the next few decades, and not just From Elon Musk.
It's a rock made of water ice, with ice mountains as high as the Alps and an ice canyon that is possibly as deep as Mount Everest is high.
I don't know, but I don't think anyone was expecting that. And those are just observations made in the first detailed picture of one small region of Pluto. There will be new discoveries before the end of the week and more to come after that.
The redistribution of wealth in the US and Europe from the middle class to the super rich has perhaps made this sort of jet viable again, but with a passenger capacity of something like 20.
I remember reading about supersonic air travel as a kid 25 years ago when it was thought that the middle class would one day afford to (occasionally) fly supersonic and the planes would have to have 250 seats.
That would cost a lot of money over time. Imagine having to procure equipment that works with nonstandard voltage and has nonstandard plugs.
The smart thing would be to cover the socket with a metal cover that has "not for public use" etched into it and add that as a rule to your list of rules that passengers implicitly agree to by entering your premises. If someone uses that socket to charge their phone, your security guards can fine them the standard fee for breaking the rules. Then there is no need to involve the police or the justice system, unless the passenger accuses you of lying.
It may also help to have a designated power socket with controlled phase and voltage at each seat that the passengers can use.
Apple has thousands of developers, artists and other experts that get paid to work on OSX.
When do you think a Linux desktop company will be come close to matching that?
Granted, most of the work that they do at Apple is thrown away before it reaches the consumer, but that is often the nature of product development, when you don't know which features the users will need or want. The same would be true for a Linux desktop OS company.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fine with they keyboard size, but the mirror-like screen totally ruins almost all laptops nowadays for me.
I recently spent about $1k extra to get a Mac instead of a high-end Windows laptop, just because the Mac has ever so slightly less screen glare. After a few weeks of using it I have to say that was money well spent.
I suppose I must be unusually annoyed by screen glare compared to most people, but I think that I am not the only one, and I think if Dell or Asus would release a high end laptop with a matte screen option for say $300 extra on top of the regular price, they would probably find a nice niche market.
I'm not an American, so I'm not really that interested, but I would watch a debate between the top campaign donors for each candidate...
"..or what intermediate steps have to be taken.."
This is always a problem: incrementalist thinking, the idea that one can achieve the revolutionary through small intermediate steps with an evolutionary process. This is very limited (and limiting) thinking, and people who think that way will never achieve anything truly revolutionary. If you think like this, you should probably get the hell out of the way of those of us who don't. We'll come back for you. Some day. Maybe.
Revolutionary v.s. evolutionary is a false dichotomy. Some of the most revolutionary developments have been incremental by nature, but each increment could also be seen as a minor revolution.
Think of the miniaturization of electronics, or Moores law. Each year businesses that make CPU:s, GPU:s and other chips make incremental progress, but most of those increments required some (relatively minor) revolution in the way that one thinks about chip-making.
Rockets went from tiny fireworks in the late 1800:s to the Saturn V in the 1960:s through incremental progress. Then the US tried and failed at switching to space shuttles. Now it's back to rockets again, and incremental work towards better rockets. Some of those increments could have a huge impact, like being able to re-light the first stage and land it for later re-use.
Maybe one day it'll be space elevators instead of rockets. Maybe. Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that a space elevator will be better or cheaper than rockets. That largely depends on how expensive it will be to build the elevator, how often it will need maintenance and how long it will ultimately last until you need to scrap it and build a new one.
In any case, as wind gets cheaper its capacity factor is rocketing up too.
I think the arrow of causation is that smoother and more predictable power output causes the price of wind power to drop.
This is why the idea of airborne wind harvesters is such an interesting concept. Those harvesters could have capacity factors in the 40-80% range and the price per unit of energy could be less than half that of conventional wind power, especially if you account for the reduced need for backup power.
It's often filtered, carbonated and flavored with various fruit flavors, which by the way usually contain small amounts of sugar - something to be aware of if you're on a strict diet. The only thing it's missing is caffeine. I'm sure they'll get around to that if there is sufficient demand for it.
I quit my Coca Cola habit about 12 years ago and haven't looked back.
Interesting, but those numbers are deaths per PWh, not per kWh. That means that a 500MW US coal burner and its associated mining kills 0,0075 people per hour, or roughly one person per week.
Imagine the outrage if your average 1000MW nuclear reactor and its associated uranium mining killed two people per week! The president and congress would race to be the first to propose an outright ban on nuclear power.
I do think that nuclear is dead, because it takes government money to build it and because you don't win elections by subsidizing something that most people are scared of. Yes, nuclear is significantly more expensive than coal and slightly more expensive than gas and it takes 10-15 years to get a new nuclear plant online, which is longer than for any other power source. No sane capitalist would let any of his money anywhere near that investment unless the government promised to provide lots of subsidies.
With that said, the storage problem for solar and wind is absolutely not solved, nor will it be cheap. The amount of installed wind and solar is still so small that existing hydro dams can handle the storage, but wind and solar are growing fast enough that hydro dams will be completely insufficient.
There are experimental ideas about using excess power to make hydrogen, or methane or other hydrocarbons, but those are highly experimental and it is doubtful whether it will ever make economic sense. There are some very promising developments in turning sunlight directly into hydrogen or hydrocarbons, which will probably make a lot more sense economically. The problem is that none of this is available off the shelf, nor will it be in the next 5-10 years, and when it finally does become available it will take several decades to ramp up production to a level needed to supply 10+ billion people with energy storage.
Energy distribution has been making slow but steady progress over the last 150 or so years. We can easily transmit power 1000-2000 km today. Some day we'll be able to transmit it 3000 km and in the distant future 4000 km and 5000 km, which will be enough that we'll barely need storage. But again we're talking about decades into the future.
The nice ting about nuclear power is that we can build it now. You can call GE and order a plant on Monday, assuming you have the $5 billion (or $10 billion after the usual cost overrun) that they want for one of those and in 10-15 years you, your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids will have a clean and safe power plant. Throw in a few hundred millions for a decent sea wall if you decide put it next to the ocean.
If you are concerned about what future generations will do with your nuclear waste storage sites, you should probably be more concerned about what they will do (or rather what they will fail to do) with your hydro dams. I wouldn't trust a government that fails to repair bridges before they collaps to maintain a hydro dam upstream from where I live.
Well, you typically haven't truly decided to not go to college until you get your first kid...
Any 18-year who wants a career in X would be wise to accept a job offer in that field. They can go to college when they're 19 or 20, or 21. It's great to have some professional experience when you start your studies.
Nuclear power has been a disaster and widespread adoption of clean, renewable energy can't come soon enough.
Bullshit.
There have been multiple individual coal mining accidents that have killed more people than the entire nuclear industry has ever killed. Millions of people are estimated to die prematurely every year from pollution-caused heart and lung disease, and coal is one of the main culprits.
Every decision ever made to invest in nuclear instead of coal has been a life saving decision. The same could be said of investment in wind an solar in places where they can partially replace coal, but wind and solar will need to be paired with energy storage or long-range low-loss power distribution. Until we have either a cheap scalable energy storage technology or superconducting power distribution wind and solar will never replace coal.
And don't get me started on hydroelectrical dams. Dam breaches have killed more people than we could ever hope to kill with flawed nuclear reactor designs if we tried on purpose.
Since Israel has taken an unusual "don't confirm - don't deny" stance we can only assume that the nukes are meant to be revealed, and used if necessary, as a last resort in a scenario where Israel has lost the conventional fight against enemy forces and is about to be conquered and occupied.
If Israel primarily intended to use the weapons as a deterrent they would have revealed that they have them and how may they have, since the deterrent effect is proportional to the amount of firepower that you have. An unconfirmed arsenal with an unknown number of warheads is of course still a tremendous deterrent, so maybe the Israeli leadership thought that it would be overkill to disclose numbers.
Why does the US allow it? The US needs all the allies it can get in the Middle east in order to project influence and power over that region, so it will gladly accept almost anything that its allies do as long as it doesn't go completely against US interests. For example, Turkey is currently bombing the only viable opposition to IS in Iraq, the Kurds. The US needs Turkey in NATO at almost any price (imagine what a disaster it would be for US interests if Turkey aligned itself with Russia and/or with Iran), so Turkey is going to get away with that, even if it means that IS will gain ground in Iraq.
Actually, if the latency of the "pencil" and screen is as low as advertised this would be the first time since the invention of the paper notebook that someone has come up with a viable new way to take notes.
This could be pretty cool. I can think of some interesting applications...
Obvious: graphics editing, fun drawing apps for kids, note-taking apps.
Less obvious: a math learning app that has a computer algebra system and a math knowledge database that talk to a canvas. A student would write expressions on the canvas, get hints about where they made a mistake, or instructions about problem solving strategies. The system might say things like "this integral that you just wrote looks like such and such an integral, here is a variable substitution that often works for such integrals."
What other parts of the body does the virus reside in?
Being forced to take a drug forever to keep the virus at-bay with no cure, profitably for the pharmaceutical company, sounds like good fodder for conspriacy theorists.
HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it splices its genome into the genome of the infected human's cells, forcing the cells to produce copies of the virus as part of their normal operation. When the cells divide and produce new human cells the virus producing code gets copied to the new cell and when that new cell undergoes cell division the code gets copied again, and so on and so forth.
I guess you could say that there is an evolution-made conspiracy of evil viruses that makes it hard to cure HIV.
The PC industry's race to the bottom seem to have come to an end in 2014. There are all sorts of nice and expensive PC:s on sale now. The average screen resolution probably declined in 2010-2013, but it has gone way up in 2014 and 2015. Just to name one metric.
It does make sense that the PC industry will see a slight recovery (or at least an end of its decline) since the laptops that people bought in 2007, before the smartphone and tablet revolution, will have lost their movable parts to wear and tear by now. It is also increasingly meaningless to talk about laptops and tablets as separate markets now that there are large tablets that run Windows.
I wonder what will happen with the laptop/tablet industry once people have bought sufficiently powerful hardware without moving parts that break after 5-10 years. We could be looking at 15-30 year update cycles for the average consumer.
There is not really much of a market for suborbital spaceflight, it's just a few unmanned science experiments each year. I don't think that anyone is ever going to pay $100k to fly on a suborbital joyride either. Perhaps if they can get it down to 20k per ride.
You could decide to build modules to a standard that people in your state or country use. Use google to find the most appropriate standard for your geographical location and get in contact with people who modules to that standard for guidance on how to get started and what the pitfalls are.
There are meetups where people bring modules and assemble them into temporary model railroads. These meetups often allow visitors and the model railroaders tend to be happy to talk about their hobby with interested visitors. Maybe there's a meetup near you that you could visit?
In 2000, you just ran IE 5 or Netscape with no big need to care about shit..
Stuff changes.
I don't know, here is how I remember the web browsing experience of 2000:
CLICK!
Click... Click... Clickety click... Click. Clickclickclick. What? Aw, crap.
HUUMMMM BLIP BLEP BLEP BLIP BLEP BLIP BLIP BLEP WEEEPIIIOOOOOIOIHH IIIIHIIIIIHIHIHIIIFRIRIIII EEEWRZMEEWRZMZMM WHOOOOOSHSHSHHHSHSSHSHSHHSHSHS WMRMRMRMRMRMRMMEEEEEIIIIWHOOOOOOOSSSOSHSHSHSH
Hey, good thing I'm using a download manager.
This is interesting, but I don't think that hipsters are the culprits.
Let's look back at some history. I would argue that from the time that Hitler came into power in Germany to the failure of the Soviet economy in the 1980's, there was a strong and steady demand for technologies that did awesome stuff with matter (and with information to some extent). The demand for better weapons created a steady stream of spin-offs into the civilian sector. For example, we got satellites because Hitler wanted supersonic revenge weapons and Eisenhower and Khrushchev wanted ICBM:s to point at one another. These spin-offs stopped coming when the Soviet economy failed, because then the US no longer had a technologically advanced enemy.
There have been some mildly impressive weapons programs since the cold war, the F-35 and the Russian PAK-FA come to mind. The F-22 was a formidable plane when it went into service, but the mechanical design was mostly done by the time the Soviet Union dissolved.
Now, this is basically a good thing, of course. The only drawback is that the spin-off effects into the civilian sector have stopped coming and it has taken a long time for the private sector to pick up the slack.
I think this is the reason why the time between 1990 and 2015 has been relatively boring in terms of doing mechanical things, except for a few companies like SpaceX and Tesla that have begun to appear recently. I think there is more to come in the next few decades, and not just From Elon Musk.
Actually, I just realized the deep canyon is on Charon and not on Pluto.
It's a rock made of water ice, with ice mountains as high as the Alps and an ice canyon that is possibly as deep as Mount Everest is high.
I don't know, but I don't think anyone was expecting that. And those are just observations made in the first detailed picture of one small region of Pluto. There will be new discoveries before the end of the week and more to come after that.
The redistribution of wealth in the US and Europe from the middle class to the super rich has perhaps made this sort of jet viable again, but with a passenger capacity of something like 20.
I remember reading about supersonic air travel as a kid 25 years ago when it was thought that the middle class would one day afford to (occasionally) fly supersonic and the planes would have to have 250 seats.
That would cost a lot of money over time. Imagine having to procure equipment that works with nonstandard voltage and has nonstandard plugs.
The smart thing would be to cover the socket with a metal cover that has "not for public use" etched into it and add that as a rule to your list of rules that passengers implicitly agree to by entering your premises. If someone uses that socket to charge their phone, your security guards can fine them the standard fee for breaking the rules. Then there is no need to involve the police or the justice system, unless the passenger accuses you of lying.
It may also help to have a designated power socket with controlled phase and voltage at each seat that the passengers can use.
Pictures tend to work better. Find Pluto and Charon in these:
http://i.imgur.com/5Vzof1w.png
http://kokogiak.com/solarsyste...
Apple has thousands of developers, artists and other experts that get paid to work on OSX.
When do you think a Linux desktop company will be come close to matching that?
Granted, most of the work that they do at Apple is thrown away before it reaches the consumer, but that is often the nature of product development, when you don't know which features the users will need or want. The same would be true for a Linux desktop OS company.
Don't worry. If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about, until the government decides to ban whatever it is you're doing.
How do you expect to sell a spam can that has never been used to transport spam before? Someone has to be first.
They'll obviously fly these capsules with test dummies or other test equipment first, but again, someone has to be the first actual human to fly.