They won't, because there are only two things shoring up their critical desktop OS monopoly in the enterprise at this point: Office and IE.
User and developer dependencies on IE's peculiarities makes not having access to Windows inconvenient. Microsoft's own web software are designed to provide users of alternative browsers with inferior experience.
Keeping those "poor schmucks" dependent on IE is worth a great deal of money to MS.
Mr. Hopey Changey is filling his cabinet with storied Washington insiders.
Why not? That's what I'd do, if I wanted to get anything done. The last president to fill most of his staff with Washington outsiders was Jimmy Carter; while he is underrated as a President, this decision cost him a lot of effectiveness. The last major initiative headed by a Washington outsider was the Clinton's health plan. Not knowing how national politics worked wasn't exactly an asset.
Ronald Reagan was, in terms of getting his policy initiatives acted upon, one of the most successful presidents in modern history. His administration was staffed largely by Nixon admiinstration veterans, former congressmen, and scions of old political families. The few outsiders in his administration were either at departments he wanted to fail (Education). The only exception was Attorney General, a position he preferred to fill with old, loyal California cronies.
This is news for nerds because the difference between the way things are expected to work and the way they are actually implemented is a nerd interest.
The fact that this something that happens regularly every four years doesn't mean it isn't news. If that were the case, then we would not see stories with titles like "The worst/best/most/least ____ of 2008" in the upcoming weeks.
The crux of the issue? It's a BS rhetorical question.
If you really need an answer, the obvious one is that over a sufficiently long period, there is no such thing as an "optimal" climate. That's obvious what his point is, and of course he's right. It only sounds profound to people who've never thought of this issue. Of course, people adjust, and indeed on evolutionary timescales ecosystems adjust. That's a truism that is far from the "crux" of the issue.
The crux of the matter is that in the short to mid term human generated environmental change is going to wipe out a vast amount of wealth - both monetary and biodiversity. That's the timescale we and everybody we know has to live in. To be accurate, we have to note that many of those activities are generating huge amount of monetary wealth at the same time. Whether the monetary wealth gained is greater than the wealth lost is a question we can leave open for the moment. The important thing is that the people who don't even realize there are any costs are going to be the patsies in this deal.
With respect the the idea that we can't have an effect on the environment, it doesn't take much effort to see that we in fact do. Take any major city, then study what the physical environment was like before that city was there versus what it is like now. By any reasonable standard of the word "change" , the physical and biological landscape has been drastically changed. True, no one human activity has the power of a singleton event like Krakatoa, that has a visible global impact in a matter of months. But that's not how humans change the environment. We do it one acre at a time, at an exponentially increasing rate.
I think we need somebody scientifically literate, with a vision. He or she also has to have a certain amount of flexibility in pursuing that vision, because as of today there is not a solution that can replace oil. He also needs to be aware of foreign policy issues; you don't want somebody to say that a particular nuclear technology is what the US should invest in if that has nuclear arms proliferation implications. It may be the right technology choice, but the security issues have to be part of that recommendation.
In the case of nuclear power, I think we need to plan to, at the very least, replace the plants that are currently in operation. Yes, there are waste disposal issues, but we have them now, and maintaining or modestly growing the nuclear generation capacity of the country is a way of amortizing those costs over future revenues without increasing the order of magnitude of the problem. In short, as an environmentalist, I believe that if corporations aren't invested in the future of nuclear power, they will at some point simply dump the waste problem on the public as plant after plant goes offline.
I also think that since we have the waste problem today, a marginal addition to that problem could be offset by the carbon emission benefits.
However, I don't think a crash program to put all our eggs in the nuclear basket is the answer. It may transform (in a bad way) the waste problem, produce a massive step increase in future waste and decommissioning costs, and should the technology turn out to be economically undesirable leave us with a vast investment in obsolete white elephants.
Rather, I think we should take steps to diversify our energy sources so that should any one energy source prove to be somewhat more environmentally, technologically or economically advantageous (or disadvantageous) than expected, the economy can adjust the mix accordingly. Look at our food supply: when there was an E. coli outbreak in tomatoes, nobody starved because tomatoes were just one of the foodstuffs used to power humans.
A key step in this is a highly efficient, long range electrical grid. This could be high voltage DC, or in some cases we may begin to experiment with superconducting segments (with liquid hydrogen not only as a coolant but also as an energy carrier).
Such a grid would make diversification of energy easier. Nuclear plants would not have to be located in population centers to serve them, making them politically easier to site. Wind, tidal, and solar energy can be harvested from distant sites. Even fossil fuel plants with carbon offsets like sequestration can play a part.
It might not be possible to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels in, say, twenty years. But it might be possible to reduce the environmental and geopolitical impact of fossil fuel use to a fraction of what they are today. Placing all our hope on a single technology such as nuclear fission is unnecessarily risky; in an environment where many technologies are able to compete, and costs such as waste disposal are not externalized onto the public, then if nuclear energy is more practical it will gain market share until the marginal problems caused by the next kWh exceed the marginal benefits. Furthermore approaching this limit will incent technological developments in new plants.
It certainly fits in with Nintendo's marketing philosophy, which is to broaden the appeal of its platforms beyond traditional gamers.
Economy of scale in tech hardware ultimately trumps everything. It doesn't matter how far "behind" you are on tech specs, if you sell enough units eventually you can challenge your competitors in any market segment by any metric they choose.
That only shows the importance of agile methods. One aims for the success that is within immediate reach, and so over time increases the range of one's grasp.
Well, yeah. A lot of early attempts to make user interfaces better were based on modeling a literal desktop with things like file cabinets underneath and rolodexes and phones on top. They had limited short term success. In the long term the one that was successful was a "desktop" on which you put "windows" (stretchy ones at that) through which you viewed infinitely expandable sheets of paper. So go figure. You want computers to make things that are hard to do in the real world easy, and usually this means changing the rules.
However, one BIG application of VR that has only really begun to get developed is enhancing users' interactions with the real world. GPS units are a good example of this. You take them out into the world to see where you are. The ability to call up a Google street view on an Android phone is more than a curiosity. It tells you other things, like what street number you are at; it makes it possible to see around the corner without actually going around the corner.
I think form factor has been the limiting factor in this obvious application of VR. For example, really good heads up projection glasses would make it possible to superimpose information and models on real world objects. You could outline the parts of a copy machine and animate the process of clearing a paper jam at "C".
Well, in every business I've been in, the problems of the business come from ignoring things everybody knew to be true. They did things they knew in principle to be bad, they failed to do things that they knew in principle they had to do.
Why?
Expediency. And the driver of expediency is cash. You can make money without making cash. Every day a programmer labors to create a better product, he is creating value, and that value is worth money. The problem is that it's not cash, and you have to pay him in cash otherwise he stops creating value for you. That's why development companies exist in the first place, to get enough investment together to pay people to create value.
When you're driven by license sales, cash is a harsh master. It means you ship an inferior product this quarter than a superior product two quarters from now, in order to keep feeding the beast. It means you take talent off of bold new products to do superficial retreads of old ones, in order to keep the beast fed. And if you don't keep the beast fed, nothing else matters. Even though you know releasing a game that people would want to keep for years would earn you more money, you'll settle for something that brings cash in soon and then kills its own sales because people are playing the game for week or two then selling them used.
Doing the right thing isn't as easy as it sounds.
Take the US auto industry. Yes, there are long term, structural problems they need to tackle, both in their organization and in their product lines. But in the current environment, GM is not going to sell enough cars in the next quarter to keep the beast fed. If they don't keep the beast fed, then they won't survive, and if they don't survive they won't make any changes.
So, yes, the proposition here is that we give a pile of money to a badly run company. Or we let it fail and take all the downstream consequences, including on companies that were not necessarily badly run other than to be in the wrong business at the wrong time. What is not an option is to give them money contingent on making changes; the best we can get is a promise of change.
In some ways, the worst of all possible worlds is a compromise: give them just enough money to keep going. That means they're still a slave to short term cash and can't make any changes. No, we should either do it, with specific promises and milestones but soon; or we should not do it at all. Half measures are only fine if you're willing to do them over and over again.
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy
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Well, do you think that investigators will simply refuse to look at private data because... there is no system that that limits their ability to do so?
I think there are perfectly legitimately reasons to look at privately held data, but once somebody gets that power, either officially or simply by taking it secretly, that power has to be regulated and its use made accountable.
Consider torture. Alan Dershowitz suggested after 9/11 that there should be a "torture warrant". Now I think that torture has no legitimate use, however I think the idea of a "torture warrant" has its merits. The reason is that many, probably most people think it would be morally allowable to apply torture in a "ticking time bomb" scenario. For that reason, they will tend to look the other way when torture happens. When people are in the habit of looking the other way at torture, then the limits of the "allowable" scenarios are blurred, and extended by frequent practice.
If there were official rules defining the limits of the "ticking time bomb" scenario, those rules would reduce the actual use of torture. Where it was used, its utility could be held up to objective scrutiny.
I think the same goes for the less extreme case of searching. There is no doubt in my mind that people will poke around in private data, even if the rules say they can't. The existence of a legally proper avenue means that there will be more robust compliance measures.
After all, most slashdotters are not anti-copyright. The industry position on DRM is based on confusing DRM with copyright and (ironically) compensating musicians.
Acknowledging a sizable die hard "information wants to be free" contingent, I think the consensus position here is that artists should be able to make money with copyrighted but DRM free music, priced reasonably, and packaged for convenient purchase and use. True, that means the only the most efficient distributors make money, which is bad for some cherished institutions like the neighborhood record shop, but it should mean more music being heard.
I would venture that listening to music is a habit. Habits, once acquired, lead to purchases. In an ideal world for musicians, people would go through life in a habitual cocoon of music. The problem with most DRM schemes is that they work against the habit by making using a song in some context a conscious economic transaction. For similar reasons, I think that unlimited copyright terms work against the habit of music. There's only so many times you can listen to Louis Armstrong recordings from the 30s, but the education in jazz makes you more likely to buy recent recordings.
While the notions that DRM and extended copyright work against the habit of music are consistent with each other, they are neither necessary to each other. One can believe one without the other. This seems a reasonable test of the DRM notion, one that is entirely within the rights for McCartney to attempt.
Now, I happen to think that at this point, if the Beatles catalog was in the public domain, there'd be more people interested in McCartney's recent music. He'd make less money, but he'd get a lot more new fans. However, even if he were inclined to do such an experiment (which he is apparently not) he'd have to buy out others with a proprietary interest in the old copyrights to do it.
Well, the thing about functional programming is that it shows the power of containing complexity in self contained, independent units of code.
Object oriented programming, on the other hand, is less so. Sure, details are encapsulated, but classes are really only understandable in the context of patterns. The idea that you can write a program by a kind of straightforward mapping of concepts in the problem domain to classes is extremely naive. Of course you do do that, but that's the easy stuff. Sure, it's more natural to do this in OO programming than any other paradigm, but since shallow modeling is easy to being with, it doesn't represent a huge productivity gain for the paradigm. The hard stuff in OO is what has to come out of your imagination.
That's the link between programming and computer science. Skillful programming involves difficult, non-obvious transformations of requirements into novel abstractions; abstractions that are in a sense arbitrary, but still well defined and clear in the context of the design. Functional programming is a very pure form of this. If you can grasp that, then real object oriented programming isn't going to be so hard. On the other hand, you can get a very thorough primer in all the object oriented programming principles and still not be any good at it.
My first reaction to the article title was: make the course fun -- that is fun for people who ought to be in the field. My first attempts at difficult programming problems were done in a largely functional programming style. It was fun, because the rules of the game were simple, and although they restricted how you could do things, they didn't restrict what you can do. I wonder whether people who don't enjoy such a challenge really ought to be programmers.
These days, when I do almost all my work in object orientation, I still largely follow mental habits acquired in the functional style. One of those habits is to have a function (or in the case of OO a method) do one simple, irreducible thing. Following that habit on object oriented designs naturally leads to clean refactoring of classes. Most of the OO code I've seen has suffered from an attempt to prematurely twist the code into some preconceived pattern like MVC, whereas trying to make each method as self-contained and simple as possible leads to the same end in a more organic way.
Well, there are a lot of cognitive shortcuts people use to reason about situations like this that are applicable most of the time, but have significant exceptions.
The sticking point with free software is that people think it's too good to be true. After all, software is hard to make, why would somebody do it without being compensated? But free software developers are compensated. They are compensated in payment by their employers for solving problems. They are compensated also in terms of status in the developer community but only when they share. And here's the point they miss: status is worth money. Proverbially, you can't eat prestige; but you can dine out on it.
Look at a project like the Linux kernel. Early on contributors nothing but status, but for a few people like Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, the magnitude of the status payoff is huge. Those kind of people can walk into any big software developer and say, "I want a job with a six figure salary and by the way I'll be spending most of my time just working on things that interest me." And they'll probably get a job. There are people who have done comparable work in closed source projects, and while they got more pay in the front end, they never get that kind of status.
It's kind of like the difference between being a rock star vs. being a guitar teacher. If you are diligent and conscientious, you can make a living as a musician by teaching. But a rock star makes a lot more money than a hard working music teacher -- after he makes it. Beforehand, it's expected he'll starve until he gets his first hit. Software is more moderate. Unknown contributors don't have to starve, because they're creating things for which people will pay good money to have exist. On the downside, being the equivalent of Elvis in the software world involves a lot less wealth.
The problem with the "no such thing as a free lunch" theory is that the assertion is much to strong. Free lunches exist under special conditions. For years free radio and television flourished. You could say recipients "paid" for the programming by watching the advertising, but using that loose standard of "payment" people who use free software "pay" the creators by enhancing their status.
Enough buoyancy is a matter of having sufficient volume of lifting gas per unit weight of payload. That's why zeppelins had to be big -- in order to have enough lifting gas to go over mountain ranges.
The proposed airship is huge. Of course, cross section adds drag, but length reduces drag.
It's all a matter of getting all the equations to work out, which apparently they do: you can get high enough to use the ion thrusters, at which point the atmosphere is very thin indeed. You then balance the thrust against the drag and if your velocity keeps going up, you're into space.
Or rather it's initially a matter of balancing the equations. There's the very practical problem of whether a sufficiently light system would be robust enough to survive. Safety's why zeppelins went out of favor; it wasn't that they were prone to fire, it was that they were in effect motorized soap bubbles.
Yes, but the idea is that you get to orbital velocity by applying a small amount of acceleration for a long, long time: on the order of two weeks instead of a several minutes.
Ion thrusters are weak, but efficient. I believe the term is something like "specific impulse": units of impulse (delta V) per unit mass of propellant. Ion thrusters have something like 10x the specific impulse, so you need 1/10 the fuel mass to get the same change in velocity.
Speaking of which, there is an airship to orbit concept that was discussed here a few years ago.
You have two airships, a ground ship and an orbital ship. You put your payload on the ground ship where it ferried to a high altitude rendezvous with the orbital airship. The orbital airship raises the payload farther, to the highest point it can on buoyancy. That point is far below orbit, but the atmosphere there would be thin enough to permit the use of ion thrusters. Ion engines take the airship to orbit: a two week process. To return payloads from orbit the process is reversed.
Personally, I don't think this would ever prove to be practical, but it is possible to imagine it working.
The outfit behind this concept (JP Aerospace seems to be a volunteer organization of high altitude balloon enthusiasts. They've done a number of spectacular balloon missions, in one case sending a balloon to over 19 miles, or 1/3 of the way to the official "space" line. They don't seem to have done anything in the last year though.
Well, 60 grand for a superintendent is just below the 25th percentile in all districts across all US districts, the median being $74,733. Even taking into account the low cost of living, you aren't exactly lavishing money on a position that minimally requires a Masters and normally a PhD preferred.
I understand that a system with only 500 students probably doesn't need a superintendent, since it probably has only a high school and one or two elementary schools. In that case you want really, really good principals. Of course your state pays half the going rate for experienced principals. Also, even accounting for a lower cost of living, OK ranks 41st in the nation in teacher pay. It's probably not coincidence that OK ranks 41st in the nation in 4th grade reading proficiency and 39th in 4th grade math, and that these shameful results continue through the eighth grade.
These results are pretty much in line with OK's total per pupil expenditure, including both line and administration expenses, which is smack in the bottom quintile. This means you aren't, overall, getting a worse deal per dollar spent. You're spending little and achieving little.
All of which suggests to me that bureaucracy in OK is not the cause of your education problems. It is the result.
The statistics suggest to me that OK enough about education. You get lousy education because you're too cheap to pay for quality. Then you throw your hands up in the air as if getting the same results most other states get is an unattainable goal. Having "bloated administration" is not like being born under an unfavorable astrological sign. All that takes to fix it is the will to improve education in the state.
Getting pissed off isn't the same as getting involved. Getting pissed off and feeling cheap contempt is the basis of most of popular entertainment.
Well, it depends in part on your state. Assuming there is no perfect form of education, I know that in my state kids are getting much more challenging and rigorous training in math history and civics than kids did in the 1960s, when I went to school. This is at least progress.
However, the reason to bring more broadband to school is not for technology training. More than modest bandwidth is unnecessary for technology training. The reason to bring more bandwidth into school is to create a large and efficient "market" for educational materials, and to allow educational institutions to pool resources together. A small high school that didn't have enough students to justify a calculus, or say a robotics course could offer that via high quality teleconferencing.
If we taught them more about proper usage of computers, such as basic maintenance (defrag, virus scan, etc.), emails (And the dangers of random attachments), etc. we'd probably save billions on tech support costs just a few short years down the line.
On the other hand, if we taught them to be less passive when it comes to acquiring and using knowledge to solve problems, we wouldn't have to teach them about system janitorial tasks that are apt to be obsolete in a few years.
For example, if you teach them to question the information they receive, to think about it critically, then you protect them not only against email scams, you protect them against future forms of scamming. Such critical thinking skills might have undesirable political consequences, I suppose.
Likewise if you teach students to take initiative in solving problems, they will be able to handle whatever the equivalent of "defragging a hard drive" is in 2050.
The way I see it, too much of school reform is focused on "things kids should know". While by in large this is a good thing, students ought to have some experience of setting the fact finding agenda themselves. I don't think everybody should get out of high school with a working knowledge of electronics, but it should be possible that any student might acquire such a knowledge in the process of pursing other educational goals.
I'm talking about the scenario TFA proposes: that directions in technology cause supercomputing advancement to stall. In that case expressed as a ratio any advancement at all would be infinite. However, I don't expect improvements in supercomputing will go to all the way down to zero.
Now, why couldn't the rate of improvement double over some timescale from what it is now? I think it is because investors don't care a rat's ass about the rate of technological advance; they care about having something to sell that somebody else doesn't. What you're saying amounts to this: the people working in the field pretty much agree on what's needed to make a supercomputer go faster, so the focus of supercomputing development is on commodity concepts.
However, if you believe that supercomputer could go, say four times as fast as they do now in ten years and sixteens times as fast as they do now in twenty years, then it certainly is physically possible for them to become eight times as fast in ten years. The difference between four and sixteen in the initial scenario comes from ten additional years of investment, in both money and thought. There is not some kind of intrinsic limitation on the rate that technology gets better (hmm.. sounds like a premise for a sci-fi story).
Provided that it is physically possible to reach some higher level of performance in the future, it is not the rate of improvement that is the limitation. The limitation is the rate of investment. And increasing the rate of improvement is non-linear in investment; investments are subject to diminishing returns. Even so, investment is not subject to a strict upper limit. The right person with the right ideas could attract additional investment, which would increase the rate of technological improvement.
I'm not expecting it to happen. But I don't think you can rule out the idea that more investment will go into supercomputers. If supercomputing improvement stalls, it could go either way: some investors will abandon the field as a commodity field, others will look at it as a chance to get ahead by doing something different and proprietary.
It may be true that "That market simply isn't large enough to support an R&D which will consistently outperform commodity hardware at a price people are willing to pay," that's not quite tantamount to saying "there is no possible rational justification for a larger supercomputer budget." There are considerable inflection points and external factors to consider.
The market doesn't allocate funds the way a central planner does. A central planner says, "there isn't room in this budget to add to supercomputer R&D." The way the market works is that commodity hardware vendors beat each other down until everybody is earning roughly similar normal profits. Then somebody comes a long with a set of ideas that could double the rate at which supercomputer power is increasing. If that person is credible, he is a standout investment, not just despite the fact that there is so much money being poured into commodity hardware, but because of that.
There may also be reasons for public investment in R&D. Naturally the public has no reason to invest in commodity hardware research, but it may have reason to look at exotic computing research. Suppose that you expected to have a certain maximum practical supercomputer capability in twenty years' time. Suppose you figure that once you have that capability you could predict a hurricane's track with several times the precision you could today. It'd be quite reasonable to put a fair amount of public research funds into supercomputing in order to have the that ability in five to ten years' time.
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They won't, because there are only two things shoring up their critical desktop OS monopoly in the enterprise at this point: Office and IE.
User and developer dependencies on IE's peculiarities makes not having access to Windows inconvenient. Microsoft's own web software are designed to provide users of alternative browsers with inferior experience.
Keeping those "poor schmucks" dependent on IE is worth a great deal of money to MS.
Mr. Hopey Changey is filling his cabinet with storied Washington insiders.
Why not? That's what I'd do, if I wanted to get anything done. The last president to fill most of his staff with Washington outsiders was Jimmy Carter; while he is underrated as a President, this decision cost him a lot of effectiveness. The last major initiative headed by a Washington outsider was the Clinton's health plan. Not knowing how national politics worked wasn't exactly an asset.
Ronald Reagan was, in terms of getting his policy initiatives acted upon, one of the most successful presidents in modern history. His administration was staffed largely by Nixon admiinstration veterans, former congressmen, and scions of old political families. The few outsiders in his administration were either at departments he wanted to fail (Education). The only exception was Attorney General, a position he preferred to fill with old, loyal California cronies.
This is news for nerds because the difference between the way things are expected to work and the way they are actually implemented is a nerd interest.
The fact that this something that happens regularly every four years doesn't mean it isn't news. If that were the case, then we would not see stories with titles like "The worst/best/most/least ____ of 2008" in the upcoming weeks.
The crux of the issue? It's a BS rhetorical question.
If you really need an answer, the obvious one is that over a sufficiently long period, there is no such thing as an "optimal" climate. That's obvious what his point is, and of course he's right. It only sounds profound to people who've never thought of this issue. Of course, people adjust, and indeed on evolutionary timescales ecosystems adjust. That's a truism that is far from the "crux" of the issue.
The crux of the matter is that in the short to mid term human generated environmental change is going to wipe out a vast amount of wealth - both monetary and biodiversity. That's the timescale we and everybody we know has to live in. To be accurate, we have to note that many of those activities are generating huge amount of monetary wealth at the same time. Whether the monetary wealth gained is greater than the wealth lost is a question we can leave open for the moment. The important thing is that the people who don't even realize there are any costs are going to be the patsies in this deal.
With respect the the idea that we can't have an effect on the environment, it doesn't take much effort to see that we in fact do. Take any major city, then study what the physical environment was like before that city was there versus what it is like now. By any reasonable standard of the word "change" , the physical and biological landscape has been drastically changed. True, no one human activity has the power of a singleton event like Krakatoa, that has a visible global impact in a matter of months. But that's not how humans change the environment. We do it one acre at a time, at an exponentially increasing rate.
I think we need somebody scientifically literate, with a vision. He or she also has to have a certain amount of flexibility in pursuing that vision, because as of today there is not a solution that can replace oil. He also needs to be aware of foreign policy issues; you don't want somebody to say that a particular nuclear technology is what the US should invest in if that has nuclear arms proliferation implications. It may be the right technology choice, but the security issues have to be part of that recommendation.
In the case of nuclear power, I think we need to plan to, at the very least, replace the plants that are currently in operation. Yes, there are waste disposal issues, but we have them now, and maintaining or modestly growing the nuclear generation capacity of the country is a way of amortizing those costs over future revenues without increasing the order of magnitude of the problem. In short, as an environmentalist, I believe that if corporations aren't invested in the future of nuclear power, they will at some point simply dump the waste problem on the public as plant after plant goes offline.
I also think that since we have the waste problem today, a marginal addition to that problem could be offset by the carbon emission benefits.
However, I don't think a crash program to put all our eggs in the nuclear basket is the answer. It may transform (in a bad way) the waste problem, produce a massive step increase in future waste and decommissioning costs, and should the technology turn out to be economically undesirable leave us with a vast investment in obsolete white elephants.
Rather, I think we should take steps to diversify our energy sources so that should any one energy source prove to be somewhat more environmentally, technologically or economically advantageous (or disadvantageous) than expected, the economy can adjust the mix accordingly. Look at our food supply: when there was an E. coli outbreak in tomatoes, nobody starved because tomatoes were just one of the foodstuffs used to power humans.
A key step in this is a highly efficient, long range electrical grid. This could be high voltage DC, or in some cases we may begin to experiment with superconducting segments (with liquid hydrogen not only as a coolant but also as an energy carrier).
Such a grid would make diversification of energy easier. Nuclear plants would not have to be located in population centers to serve them, making them politically easier to site. Wind, tidal, and solar energy can be harvested from distant sites. Even fossil fuel plants with carbon offsets like sequestration can play a part.
It might not be possible to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels in, say, twenty years. But it might be possible to reduce the environmental and geopolitical impact of fossil fuel use to a fraction of what they are today. Placing all our hope on a single technology such as nuclear fission is unnecessarily risky; in an environment where many technologies are able to compete, and costs such as waste disposal are not externalized onto the public, then if nuclear energy is more practical it will gain market share until the marginal problems caused by the next kWh exceed the marginal benefits. Furthermore approaching this limit will incent technological developments in new plants.
It certainly fits in with Nintendo's marketing philosophy, which is to broaden the appeal of its platforms beyond traditional gamers.
Economy of scale in tech hardware ultimately trumps everything. It doesn't matter how far "behind" you are on tech specs, if you sell enough units eventually you can challenge your competitors in any market segment by any metric they choose.
That only shows the importance of agile methods. One aims for the success that is within immediate reach, and so over time increases the range of one's grasp.
Well, yeah. A lot of early attempts to make user interfaces better were based on modeling a literal desktop with things like file cabinets underneath and rolodexes and phones on top. They had limited short term success. In the long term the one that was successful was a "desktop" on which you put "windows" (stretchy ones at that) through which you viewed infinitely expandable sheets of paper. So go figure. You want computers to make things that are hard to do in the real world easy, and usually this means changing the rules.
However, one BIG application of VR that has only really begun to get developed is enhancing users' interactions with the real world. GPS units are a good example of this. You take them out into the world to see where you are. The ability to call up a Google street view on an Android phone is more than a curiosity. It tells you other things, like what street number you are at; it makes it possible to see around the corner without actually going around the corner.
I think form factor has been the limiting factor in this obvious application of VR. For example, really good heads up projection glasses would make it possible to superimpose information and models on real world objects. You could outline the parts of a copy machine and animate the process of clearing a paper jam at "C".
Well, in every business I've been in, the problems of the business come from ignoring things everybody knew to be true. They did things they knew in principle to be bad, they failed to do things that they knew in principle they had to do.
Why?
Expediency. And the driver of expediency is cash. You can make money without making cash. Every day a programmer labors to create a better product, he is creating value, and that value is worth money. The problem is that it's not cash, and you have to pay him in cash otherwise he stops creating value for you. That's why development companies exist in the first place, to get enough investment together to pay people to create value.
When you're driven by license sales, cash is a harsh master. It means you ship an inferior product this quarter than a superior product two quarters from now, in order to keep feeding the beast. It means you take talent off of bold new products to do superficial retreads of old ones, in order to keep the beast fed. And if you don't keep the beast fed, nothing else matters. Even though you know releasing a game that people would want to keep for years would earn you more money, you'll settle for something that brings cash in soon and then kills its own sales because people are playing the game for week or two then selling them used.
Doing the right thing isn't as easy as it sounds.
Take the US auto industry. Yes, there are long term, structural problems they need to tackle, both in their organization and in their product lines. But in the current environment, GM is not going to sell enough cars in the next quarter to keep the beast fed. If they don't keep the beast fed, then they won't survive, and if they don't survive they won't make any changes.
So, yes, the proposition here is that we give a pile of money to a badly run company. Or we let it fail and take all the downstream consequences, including on companies that were not necessarily badly run other than to be in the wrong business at the wrong time. What is not an option is to give them money contingent on making changes; the best we can get is a promise of change.
In some ways, the worst of all possible worlds is a compromise: give them just enough money to keep going. That means they're still a slave to short term cash and can't make any changes. No, we should either do it, with specific promises and milestones but soon; or we should not do it at all. Half measures are only fine if you're willing to do them over and over again.
Well, do you think that investigators will simply refuse to look at private data because ... there is no system that that limits their ability to do so?
I think there are perfectly legitimately reasons to look at privately held data, but once somebody gets that power, either officially or simply by taking it secretly, that power has to be regulated and its use made accountable.
Consider torture. Alan Dershowitz suggested after 9/11 that there should be a "torture warrant". Now I think that torture has no legitimate use, however I think the idea of a "torture warrant" has its merits. The reason is that many, probably most people think it would be morally allowable to apply torture in a "ticking time bomb" scenario. For that reason, they will tend to look the other way when torture happens. When people are in the habit of looking the other way at torture, then the limits of the "allowable" scenarios are blurred, and extended by frequent practice.
If there were official rules defining the limits of the "ticking time bomb" scenario, those rules would reduce the actual use of torture. Where it was used, its utility could be held up to objective scrutiny.
I think the same goes for the less extreme case of searching. There is no doubt in my mind that people will poke around in private data, even if the rules say they can't. The existence of a legally proper avenue means that there will be more robust compliance measures.
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's not rigorous enough.
I'm not sure scientific research is all that safe from commercial concerns.
After all, most slashdotters are not anti-copyright. The industry position on DRM is based on confusing DRM with copyright and (ironically) compensating musicians.
Acknowledging a sizable die hard "information wants to be free" contingent, I think the consensus position here is that artists should be able to make money with copyrighted but DRM free music, priced reasonably, and packaged for convenient purchase and use. True, that means the only the most efficient distributors make money, which is bad for some cherished institutions like the neighborhood record shop, but it should mean more music being heard.
I would venture that listening to music is a habit. Habits, once acquired, lead to purchases. In an ideal world for musicians, people would go through life in a habitual cocoon of music. The problem with most DRM schemes is that they work against the habit by making using a song in some context a conscious economic transaction. For similar reasons, I think that unlimited copyright terms work against the habit of music. There's only so many times you can listen to Louis Armstrong recordings from the 30s, but the education in jazz makes you more likely to buy recent recordings.
While the notions that DRM and extended copyright work against the habit of music are consistent with each other, they are neither necessary to each other. One can believe one without the other. This seems a reasonable test of the DRM notion, one that is entirely within the rights for McCartney to attempt.
Now, I happen to think that at this point, if the Beatles catalog was in the public domain, there'd be more people interested in McCartney's recent music. He'd make less money, but he'd get a lot more new fans. However, even if he were inclined to do such an experiment (which he is apparently not) he'd have to buy out others with a proprietary interest in the old copyrights to do it.
Well, the thing about functional programming is that it shows the power of containing complexity in self contained, independent units of code.
Object oriented programming, on the other hand, is less so. Sure, details are encapsulated, but classes are really only understandable in the context of patterns. The idea that you can write a program by a kind of straightforward mapping of concepts in the problem domain to classes is extremely naive. Of course you do do that, but that's the easy stuff. Sure, it's more natural to do this in OO programming than any other paradigm, but since shallow modeling is easy to being with, it doesn't represent a huge productivity gain for the paradigm. The hard stuff in OO is what has to come out of your imagination.
That's the link between programming and computer science. Skillful programming involves difficult, non-obvious transformations of requirements into novel abstractions; abstractions that are in a sense arbitrary, but still well defined and clear in the context of the design. Functional programming is a very pure form of this. If you can grasp that, then real object oriented programming isn't going to be so hard. On the other hand, you can get a very thorough primer in all the object oriented programming principles and still not be any good at it.
My first reaction to the article title was: make the course fun -- that is fun for people who ought to be in the field. My first attempts at difficult programming problems were done in a largely functional programming style. It was fun, because the rules of the game were simple, and although they restricted how you could do things, they didn't restrict what you can do. I wonder whether people who don't enjoy such a challenge really ought to be programmers.
These days, when I do almost all my work in object orientation, I still largely follow mental habits acquired in the functional style. One of those habits is to have a function (or in the case of OO a method) do one simple, irreducible thing. Following that habit on object oriented designs naturally leads to clean refactoring of classes. Most of the OO code I've seen has suffered from an attempt to prematurely twist the code into some preconceived pattern like MVC, whereas trying to make each method as self-contained and simple as possible leads to the same end in a more organic way.
Your post wasn't what I thought it was going to be from the title.
I was going to suggest: hand the school a CD full of free software, along with an invoice for a hundred dollars a seat.
Well, there are a lot of cognitive shortcuts people use to reason about situations like this that are applicable most of the time, but have significant exceptions.
The sticking point with free software is that people think it's too good to be true. After all, software is hard to make, why would somebody do it without being compensated? But free software developers are compensated. They are compensated in payment by their employers for solving problems. They are compensated also in terms of status in the developer community but only when they share. And here's the point they miss: status is worth money. Proverbially, you can't eat prestige; but you can dine out on it.
Look at a project like the Linux kernel. Early on contributors nothing but status, but for a few people like Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, the magnitude of the status payoff is huge. Those kind of people can walk into any big software developer and say, "I want a job with a six figure salary and by the way I'll be spending most of my time just working on things that interest me." And they'll probably get a job. There are people who have done comparable work in closed source projects, and while they got more pay in the front end, they never get that kind of status.
It's kind of like the difference between being a rock star vs. being a guitar teacher. If you are diligent and conscientious, you can make a living as a musician by teaching. But a rock star makes a lot more money than a hard working music teacher -- after he makes it. Beforehand, it's expected he'll starve until he gets his first hit. Software is more moderate. Unknown contributors don't have to starve, because they're creating things for which people will pay good money to have exist. On the downside, being the equivalent of Elvis in the software world involves a lot less wealth.
The problem with the "no such thing as a free lunch" theory is that the assertion is much to strong. Free lunches exist under special conditions. For years free radio and television flourished. You could say recipients "paid" for the programming by watching the advertising, but using that loose standard of "payment" people who use free software "pay" the creators by enhancing their status.
Enough buoyancy is a matter of having sufficient volume of lifting gas per unit weight of payload. That's why zeppelins had to be big -- in order to have enough lifting gas to go over mountain ranges.
The proposed airship is huge. Of course, cross section adds drag, but length reduces drag.
It's all a matter of getting all the equations to work out, which apparently they do: you can get high enough to use the ion thrusters, at which point the atmosphere is very thin indeed. You then balance the thrust against the drag and if your velocity keeps going up, you're into space.
Or rather it's initially a matter of balancing the equations. There's the very practical problem of whether a sufficiently light system would be robust enough to survive. Safety's why zeppelins went out of favor; it wasn't that they were prone to fire, it was that they were in effect motorized soap bubbles.
Yes, but the idea is that you get to orbital velocity by applying a small amount of acceleration for a long, long time: on the order of two weeks instead of a several minutes.
Ion thrusters are weak, but efficient. I believe the term is something like "specific impulse": units of impulse (delta V) per unit mass of propellant. Ion thrusters have something like 10x the specific impulse, so you need 1/10 the fuel mass to get the same change in velocity.
Speaking of which, there is an airship to orbit concept that was discussed here a few years ago.
You have two airships, a ground ship and an orbital ship. You put your payload on the ground ship where it ferried to a high altitude rendezvous with the orbital airship. The orbital airship raises the payload farther, to the highest point it can on buoyancy. That point is far below orbit, but the atmosphere there would be thin enough to permit the use of ion thrusters. Ion engines take the airship to orbit: a two week process. To return payloads from orbit the process is reversed.
Personally, I don't think this would ever prove to be practical, but it is possible to imagine it working.
The outfit behind this concept (JP Aerospace seems to be a volunteer organization of high altitude balloon enthusiasts. They've done a number of spectacular balloon missions, in one case sending a balloon to over 19 miles, or 1/3 of the way to the official "space" line. They don't seem to have done anything in the last year though.
Of course it can be secured "a la ActiveX". Just like my super powers make me faster than a speeding monument.
Well, 60 grand for a superintendent is just below the 25th percentile in all districts across all US districts, the median being $74,733. Even taking into account the low cost of living, you aren't exactly lavishing money on a position that minimally requires a Masters and normally a PhD preferred.
I understand that a system with only 500 students probably doesn't need a superintendent, since it probably has only a high school and one or two elementary schools. In that case you want really, really good principals. Of course your state pays half the going rate for experienced principals. Also, even accounting for a lower cost of living, OK ranks 41st in the nation in teacher pay. It's probably not coincidence that OK ranks 41st in the nation in 4th grade reading proficiency and 39th in 4th grade math, and that these shameful results continue through the eighth grade.
These results are pretty much in line with OK's total per pupil expenditure, including both line and administration expenses, which is smack in the bottom quintile. This means you aren't, overall, getting a worse deal per dollar spent. You're spending little and achieving little.
All of which suggests to me that bureaucracy in OK is not the cause of your education problems. It is the result.
The statistics suggest to me that OK enough about education. You get lousy education because you're too cheap to pay for quality. Then you throw your hands up in the air as if getting the same results most other states get is an unattainable goal. Having "bloated administration" is not like being born under an unfavorable astrological sign. All that takes to fix it is the will to improve education in the state.
Getting pissed off isn't the same as getting involved. Getting pissed off and feeling cheap contempt is the basis of most of popular entertainment.
Well, it depends in part on your state. Assuming there is no perfect form of education, I know that in my state kids are getting much more challenging and rigorous training in math history and civics than kids did in the 1960s, when I went to school. This is at least progress.
However, the reason to bring more broadband to school is not for technology training. More than modest bandwidth is unnecessary for technology training. The reason to bring more bandwidth into school is to create a large and efficient "market" for educational materials, and to allow educational institutions to pool resources together. A small high school that didn't have enough students to justify a calculus, or say a robotics course could offer that via high quality teleconferencing.
If we taught them more about proper usage of computers, such as basic maintenance (defrag, virus scan, etc.), emails (And the dangers of random attachments), etc. we'd probably save billions on tech support costs just a few short years down the line.
On the other hand, if we taught them to be less passive when it comes to acquiring and using knowledge to solve problems, we wouldn't have to teach them about system janitorial tasks that are apt to be obsolete in a few years.
For example, if you teach them to question the information they receive, to think about it critically, then you protect them not only against email scams, you protect them against future forms of scamming. Such critical thinking skills might have undesirable political consequences, I suppose.
Likewise if you teach students to take initiative in solving problems, they will be able to handle whatever the equivalent of "defragging a hard drive" is in 2050.
The way I see it, too much of school reform is focused on "things kids should know". While by in large this is a good thing, students ought to have some experience of setting the fact finding agenda themselves. I don't think everybody should get out of high school with a working knowledge of electronics, but it should be possible that any student might acquire such a knowledge in the process of pursing other educational goals.
I'm talking about the scenario TFA proposes: that directions in technology cause supercomputing advancement to stall. In that case expressed as a ratio any advancement at all would be infinite. However, I don't expect improvements in supercomputing will go to all the way down to zero.
Now, why couldn't the rate of improvement double over some timescale from what it is now? I think it is because investors don't care a rat's ass about the rate of technological advance; they care about having something to sell that somebody else doesn't. What you're saying amounts to this: the people working in the field pretty much agree on what's needed to make a supercomputer go faster, so the focus of supercomputing development is on commodity concepts.
However, if you believe that supercomputer could go, say four times as fast as they do now in ten years and sixteens times as fast as they do now in twenty years, then it certainly is physically possible for them to become eight times as fast in ten years. The difference between four and sixteen in the initial scenario comes from ten additional years of investment, in both money and thought. There is not some kind of intrinsic limitation on the rate that technology gets better (hmm.. sounds like a premise for a sci-fi story).
Provided that it is physically possible to reach some higher level of performance in the future, it is not the rate of improvement that is the limitation. The limitation is the rate of investment. And increasing the rate of improvement is non-linear in investment; investments are subject to diminishing returns. Even so, investment is not subject to a strict upper limit. The right person with the right ideas could attract additional investment, which would increase the rate of technological improvement.
I'm not expecting it to happen. But I don't think you can rule out the idea that more investment will go into supercomputers. If supercomputing improvement stalls, it could go either way: some investors will abandon the field as a commodity field, others will look at it as a chance to get ahead by doing something different and proprietary.
It may be true that "That market simply isn't large enough to support an R&D which will consistently outperform commodity hardware at a price people are willing to pay," that's not quite tantamount to saying "there is no possible rational justification for a larger supercomputer budget." There are considerable inflection points and external factors to consider.
The market doesn't allocate funds the way a central planner does. A central planner says, "there isn't room in this budget to add to supercomputer R&D." The way the market works is that commodity hardware vendors beat each other down until everybody is earning roughly similar normal profits. Then somebody comes a long with a set of ideas that could double the rate at which supercomputer power is increasing. If that person is credible, he is a standout investment, not just despite the fact that there is so much money being poured into commodity hardware, but because of that.
There may also be reasons for public investment in R&D. Naturally the public has no reason to invest in commodity hardware research, but it may have reason to look at exotic computing research. Suppose that you expected to have a certain maximum practical supercomputer capability in twenty years' time. Suppose you figure that once you have that capability you could predict a hurricane's track with several times the precision you could today. It'd be quite reasonable to put a fair amount of public research funds into supercomputing in order to have the that ability in five to ten years' time.