Well libraries. That's a huge part of language choices these days; you really choose frameworks or libraries and live with the language as a consequence. A lot of what we do these days is glue stuff together.
This problem, however is a completely different kind of programming. It's old school stuff: building everything you need yourself to run on really slow hardware. And hardware is always slow relative to crypto problems. Ever try to implement RSA encryption from scratch? I have. There's a reason the public key stuff is only used for key exchange.
I think the usefulness of Ada on this kind of problem is related to the issue of testing being costly. When I started in this business, compiling and linking a two hundred line program took about fifteen minutes. Something like unit testing would have been utterly impractical. So a strictly typed language was for nearly everyone a good idea.
Over the last couple of years, I've been trying my hand at a number of difficult algorithmic problems. This is not the stuff that 99% of the programmers in the world do professionally, including me.
Working on these problems was like programming was in the old days. Not only was it just you and the problem with no frameworks to come between, every output becomes a milestone when it takes a program days to generate. It also means that the style of programming is different. You don't worry so much about language restrictions introducing frictional losses into the code/test/recode cycle. You do worry more about mistakes that make it past the compiler.
Ada's philosophy is that coding should be, if not exactly slower certainly more deliberate. If you are running something for which your hardware is monumentally slow, then this is a good style to work in.
Suppose you are the national association for the advancement of kinky sex. Does anybody who gets a hold of some of your documents have a right to publish them to the world at large, excepting things like discovery in a legal proceeding? Doesn't the NAAKS have a right to privacy? Wouldn't it be reasonable for the NAAKS be within its rights to suppress a document that had fallen into unauthorized hands, if that document doesn't reveal any law breaking?
Maybe the NAAKS is embarassed by things that woudln't be embarassing to other people. Maybe they have an internal study that says that 80% of their members prefer to have sex in the missionary position with their spouses, but are members to get the magazine. Is that anybody else's business?
That's pretty much what's going on here. The stuff that is being suppressed isn't exactly earth shattering: if you are about to get a sex change operation you aren't allowed to convert to Mormonism, but you can if you come to the church after the fact. That's probably a bit embarrassing to the church leaders, but maybe secrecy also protects the interests of potential converts in this matter. There's plenty of people who would criticize a transgendered person for converting to a religion that discourages sex change operations, on the ironic basis that the Church does not accept who they are.
Well, why shouldn't a church have the same right to privacy that any other organization has? If members don't like it, they can vote with their feet. And that is the difference between a church and a cult.
A church can pressure its straying members with ghostly harm; that's really between the church and the member, it's nobody else's business, especially the government's. A cult pressures its straying member with harm to his reputation, his relationships, his economic and indeed physical well being. This is all stuff that is well regulated under common law; being a church gives you no particular first amendment protection against the consequences of wrongful actions in this sphere.
Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
Probably because VBA was introduced around 1993, the same year the first Pentium (running at 60MHz) was introduced. The typical machine had a 486DX2 running a single instruction pipeline at 33MHz, and maybe 16-24MB of RAM. Oh, yes, and Windows 3.1, which is 16 bit and has all its 16 bit glory.
Still, C code can be reasonably close to assembler in efficiency, especially if you profile and use assembler only in tight loops. It shouldn't be that hard on modern systems to cross compile to C against some kind of simple virtual machine.
I'm guessing that the code probably makes a lot of direct Windows API calls without any framework or abstraction. This probably means that collectively the VBA code for MacOS and Windows is significantly larger than for Windows alone. If this is true Microsoft would have to port a lot of the Windows API to MacOS (nobody is better positioned to do this), or they have to do a rather massive refactoring. Since porting the API is undesirable for other reasons, and refactoring is desirable for others, I'm guessing they're planning on cleaning things up enough to make a Mac port viable.
At the risk of being flamebait, exactly how does learning require freedom?
Well, learning to do things that require you to think and act indepedently requires freedom.
Children learn from their parents - the most autocratic system in the world is the family structure, especially in the formative phases.
Perhaps your family was the most autocratic system in the world, but my experience of family life was quite different.
My siblings and I always thought of our parents as strict, but years later my mother contradicted us and claimed she was extremely lenient. We were both right. We grew up (figuratively of course) in an enclosure with iron walls, but the enclosure kept expanding. While the wall was always close enough that it loomed in our minds, we seldom challenged it because there was always new territory to explore within the walls. Then, one day, after the area within the walls became sufficient for a lifetime's exploration, and we'd shown ourselves responsible and competent, the walls were gone. We were allowed -- no, required -- to think and decide for ourselves what was responsible and what was not. And that was parenting at its toughest and most hard-nosed. Play with matches if you want, but do it in your own house and carry your own insurance.
Yes, freedom is a good thing to have, but it's not going to benefit people if all they learn to do is use an obscure system that doesn't do anything the way they do it out in the business world.
The reason parents erect walls is to protect their children; the reason they expand those walls is to raise competent children. What is the reason to erect walls around students in technology education? Exactly who are we protecting? Do the training wheels ever come off?
The disadvantage of authoritarian parenting is that it keeps children infants when it comes to dealing with things they don't have rules for or experience with. The advantage is that you can ensure a predictable response in a certain situation, so long as circumstances around that situation haven't changed very much. The advantages and disadvantages of authoritarian education are the same. Authoritarian education prepares its recipients to be subordinates.
A technology education built around what is currently in common use in the "business world" prepares students in developing countries to take subordinate roles in that world. It's great if you want a nation of workers that staffs call centers, and does the other menial work of the information age. It's great if you want a cadre of bureaucrats who will execute the programs devised for them by wealthy "development" agencies faithfully. In short, arbitrary technological dependency is just the thing if you are aiming for economic and political subservience. It's not so great if you want a people capable of solving their own problems creatively, or carving out their own niche in the world economy.
And it's not really that clear that the developed world is that well adapted for the conditions of the mid twenty-first century. Our economies are predicated on cheap and abundant energy and resources, and cheap disposal of wastes. We are going to be hard pressed ourselves to adapt and improve our material well being. The developing world, with its lower resource footprint, could well experience major gains in quality of life while we struggle to maintain own our own. But they won't be by adopting first world lifestyles; they don't have the accumulated capital to bootstrap a resource intensive lifestyle as wealthier societies bid up prices.
But the Rudd government is still young, and we are yet to discover the riddles and traps of their policies.
I'm all for cynicism, but if you go too far you end up going full circle, approaching naive idealism from, as it were, the other side. It appears that you think that governments should operate more effectively other human institutions.
People are fallible, and inconsistent. In fact, given that people are fallible, it's a good thing they're inconsistent. But things are never quite what you expected them to be; over time you are forced to compromise so many times that the initial coherence of your plans starts to fall apart.
That's why the best way of managing human enterprises is to make them mortal. The Grim Reaper removes the deadwood and lets the light in for new growth. This notion is built into capitalism. Businesses fail all the time. Business that are "too big to fail" incorporate extinction into themselves, changing leadership, spinning off divisions, dropping products and initiatives all the time.
That's why crony capitalism stinks. It takes extinction off the table. Businesses, like large defense contractors, that are treated as national assets are a mix of the worst elements of government and private enterprise.
The real value of democracy is not to ensuring good government. That's humanly impossible. The real value of democracy is removing bad government. The only advantage of democracy over any other philosophy of government is that it makes extinguishing a bad regime routine and in social terms relatively cheap. People living under other kinds of systems can change regimes, but at the risk of being killed, imprisoned or exiled.
What we are seeing in the OLPC program is a questioning of some of its initial assumptions. That's inevitable. It's also unfortunate that MS used it's marketing pull to force them to confront the Windows issue,because given the mission of the organization, that's a side show. And, as confronting issues in these cases always does, it's undermined other assumptions of the project's initial vision, like creating a new desktop paradigm. It would have been better for the project to have had more of a chance to make its case before it faced political pressures.
In defense of the Sugar concept, it's sometimes easier to do more than to do less. It's easier to keep the creative juices flowing, to attract interest and support, when you are doing something revolutionary than when you are doing something incremental, even if the incremental changes have revolutionary effects.
But that's only when things are going well. When the project's assumptions are undermined, then bold design philosophies become a liability, sapping support and energy by being one more thing that people argue over.
While there is some issue of protecting state secrets, this is not really where China goes off the deep end into paranoia. It's all about "harming... national dignity, and... bad political influence." It's about fighting the "splittists".
The Chinese attitude towards this is arguably paranoid. This reminds me of the overreaction of the Chinese regime to the Olympic torch protests. In the West, protests happen all the time; they are completely normal and expected, and don't change anything unless somebody in power acts rashly. Arguably China's hypersensitive reaction to the protests did far more damage to Chinese national interests than the protests possibly could.
This is another case. The Chinese people overwhelmingly support Chinese territorial claims to Tibet and Taiwan. True, this is due to propaganda. But why bother? It's hard to see what in hard economic or geopolitical terms these claims do for China, other than complicate its relationships with its economic and strategic partners.
Imagine, for a moment, that the American Revolution was thoroughly discredited with the American people and the American government. Some would say that's already happened. What would the enduring legacy of the Revolution be? The only thing left would be American territorial sovereignty. And it's not exactly accidental that Southern politicians blocked US ratification of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide for thirty eight years. The South was the only territory of the United States ever to be occupied, albeit by other Americans.
Now think about the Chinese Communist Party, which won the Chinese Civil War largely because the Nationalists were perceived as ineffective in resisting Japanese violations of Chinese sovereignty. In truth, the Communists weren't any more effective, but they got credit for waging a guerrilla war against the Japanese.
The Chinese Communist party has turned its back on every single goal that the veterans of the Long March fought for, except one: Chinese territorial sovereignty. In reality, the Communist Party is ideologically indistinguishable from the Kuomintang they defeated in 1949. There's only one difference: foreigners have never meddled in China on their watch.
Well, the traditional method is to check into to a cheap boarding house near the wharves in a west coast port like San Francisco, Portland or Seattle. Then you drink yourself into a stupor, and when you wake up you're on you way to Shanghai.
Well, I'd guess that a robot house builder would be more complicated than the best available non-robotic option: prefabrication in a factory. So rather than having some kind of super-flexible machine that can do wiring, plumbing, framing and finish carpentry, you just set up stations with simple machines and conventional robots.
In any case, if you want to make houses by robot, you're going to have to constrain the designs and materials used around robot-friendliness. Once you've done that, you might as well use non-conventional designs that don't require complex craftsmanship or expensive materials (e.g., various adobe-like building methods).
Robotic sailing, on the other hand, is quite useful. It provides the ability to collect information over a large area and extended time at low cost and risk to human life. It may have utility in a future where energy prices make international shipping more expensive.
In any case, what I'd like to see is a robot that can replicate itself. The self reproducing 3D printer discussed here a few weeks ago is interesting, but too constrained; it can only make rather small parts, which accounts for its peculiar rod and fastener construction. A machine capable of actually creating and assembling its own mechanical pars would not only have to be capable of producing a wider variety of useful parts, it would eliminate the need for human expertise and intervention in making machines. That would break the duplication barrier for machines in the way that computers break the duplication barrier for information.
Why not? Houses that old are not uncommon in Massachusetts, and Cape Cod was one of the first areas settled. The first towns on the Cape were established around 1640; the towns in the area the poster is talking about were incorporated around 1710, years after the first settlers arrived. It makes sense to spread out along the unexploited coastline because of the convenient maritime trade connection with settlements like Plymouth and Boston.
We've been conditioned for some reason to think of "pioneers" exclusively as western settlers, but the first settlers of New England were moving to the edge of the greatest and most unknown wilderness in history. As in all pioneering eras, some individuals began to feel crowded as soon as they could see their neighbors' houses. You often see isolated examples of very old houses. My town north of Boston was sparsely populated until the railroad came through in the mid 1800s. The houses in my neighborhood were mostly built in the 1950s. But one of the houses in my neighborhood was built in 1720, at a time when the area was a remote wilderness a hard day's journey over tracks through virgin forest from the nearest settlement.
I can't possibly see the UMPC on its own ever becoming as important a product category as laptops. I can't believe that anybody would seriously predicate a business plan on them replacing laptops.
The important lesson of the original palm for mobile electronics: it's all about the form factor. So what is the UMPC form factor ideal for? And do you need true UMPC capabilities to do it?
The ultra-cheap laptop really is a ratification of the notion that form factor is everything in mobile computing. It's diametrically the opposite of UMPC: it's minimalist computing power in a human friendly package. UMPCs, so far as I can see, are predicated in putting, if not a huge amount of computing power into a small package, at least a surprising amount of power. This has built in early adopter sex appeal, but the appeal is largely confined to those users.
Therefore, by itself, I see UMPC as a dead end.
However.... I see the idea of a UMPC as being very interesting in the context of a personal network. You can think of the personal network like a LAN; your cell phone is the router; your PDA and laptop (maybe even your wristwatch) are different kinds of workstations; your UMPC is the server.
That is an interesting role for the UMPC. If the UMPC is about computing power in a portable package, and laptop is about convenient user interfaces for extended tasks, and the PDA is about convenient user interfaces for quick tasks, and the cell phone is about access to global communications networks, it seems likely that our future selves will want the best of each of these capabilities, rather than one package that compromises on everything.
If that's the future, the number 1 priority would be owning the cell phone bit; after that perhaps owning the UMPC bit. Everything else amounts to peripherals and accessories.
This is what happened to PDAs over the last three years. The price for what people needed dropped to the point where you couldn't make a very attractive business out of replacing their broken old PDAs, nor could you tempt them with glitzy new features they didn't really care about. It made more marketing sense to make the PDA feature set a phone option, given that phones are sold in a way that keeps their real price artificially inflated.
What's going to happen when you can get a perfectly usable, semi-disposable laptop in the $100 range, equipped with wireless access to ubiquitous network services?
There's bound to be massive fortunes made, but mostly over the corpse of the traditional laptop market. I wish I knew the magic formula, but the only thing you can be sure of is that a lot of companies are going to lose.
The fact is that it's quicker to develop high quality software on the MS platform.
For a given value of "software" and "high quality".
I'd characterize the situation as this: the high level of integration of MS development tools and the MS product stack means that it's easy to rapidly prototype applications that approximate a certain set of stereotypical forms. That's a good thing, especially if the forms have widespread usefulness, e.g. a web based storefront, or variations on things like blogs or content management systems.
There's no such thing as "easy" "high quality". In a competitive environment, as soon as something become "easy", the goalposts for "high quality" move.
Once you set yourself the goal of outperforming your competitors, you are as stuck as ever, if not more so. For example, I develop applications that have complex data management requirements. I'm not anti-SQL Server, I recognize its particular strengths, but all those strengths revolve around connecting to other MS products and development tools. I have to support both Oracle and SQL Server, and for the kinds of things I do, SQL Server consistently introduces complications. Every database platform has strengths and weaknesses, and SQL Server's weaknesses happen to be in the areas that my work needs strengths.
It's not that SQL Server doesn't work in my problem domain; nor is it that it offers no advantages whatsoever; but if I could drop SQL Server support and replace it with Postgres, my job would be easier and my customers would benefit as a result, even though the same net number of platforms are supported.
What happens, though, is that I have customers that make platform standardization decisions after being convinced of things like "it's quicker to develop high quality software on the MS platform," as if "high quality software" always required exactly the same kinds of features, no matter what the nature of the application. In truth, they don't even reduce their overall administrative burden by making these kinds of platform standardization decisions.
This kind of thinking is a false promise. If you want high quality software with low maintenance costs, you can't get that by locking yourself into a single vendor. It's neither sufficient, nor necessary. What you really need is patience, and realistic expectations. Often customers shoot themselves in their own foot by demanding that vendors meet arbitrary requirements that have no business value to them, only to some vendor that has its hooks into them. The customer ends up paying more for less quality and less support.
What customers ought to worry about is documented and standardized interfaces, not platforms. An Oracle based product with well defined mechanisms for getting data in and out does more for a SQL Server shop's access to the data than a SQL Server product with no documented interfaces.
There's too much "cargo cult" thinking about how to develop applications. The truth is that most of the things that get magically spit out of development environments are not that hard to do for a competent developer to do.
A company that claims its products are better than the competition isn't engaging in FUD. FUD is when they predict doom and disaster for the customer foolish enough to buy from other vendors.
In any case, a "properly set up and mainained" MS server is, in practical terms, perfectly acceptable for many uses.
As far as the MS environment being "better", it depends on your assumptions. If you are developing for the MS platform exclusively, with developers with MS-only experience, and targeting an MS only product stack (IIS, SQL Server, sharepoint, MS office integration), then it isn't unreasonable to consider MS Visual Studio as your environment. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider Visual Studio if I were targeting J2EE, or the LAMP stack.
If you want to be an engineer, you have to understand about trade-offs. One of the consequence of trade-offs is no product, indeed no company can do everything you'd wish. You shouldn't identify yourself with, or against a product or vendor when it comes to your technical judgment.
When I first got my cell phone, I sometimes took calls while I was driving, particularly on the highway. Then I stopped doing it.
It's true you can't really multitask conversation and driving, but you can multiplex them. Neither takes constant high levels of attention, but when they both need attention at the same time, you have to prioritize driving if you want to stay alive. Passengers appreciate any efforts you make to avoid accidents more than people on the other end of the phone.
I once was driving down the highway and took a call from one of our customers' employees. I encountered a situation with a car coming on to the highway on my right and a truck on my left. "Hold on for a second," I said, and once I was past the exit I apologized and explained that I had had a tricky driving situation. The apology was not accepted. The person was angry that I was not giving her my full attention. Damned right. She was angry in a "I'm going to tell your boss and get you fired" kind of way, but that kind of self-centered immaturity is all too common. I finally said, "If you can't accept that I can't consistently give you my full attention while I'm driving, then we'll have to talk after I've arrived at my destination," and then I hung up on her. The corollary of "the customer is always right" is that you should be selective about who you get into a business relationship with.
After that, I stopped having cell conversations while I drive. If people allowed for the fact that driving safety is a higher priority than what they have to say, maybe you could have cell conversations safely. But they don't. They're self-centered, and if its not their life you are endangering, a lot of them will demand, and receive your full attention.
Yes, obviously they do. The technologies in Vista are key to their leveraging their desktop monopoly into other areas like entertainment.
However -- this is NOT the way they want to do it. Especially now.
Microsoft is a big picture, global strategy kind of outfit, and right now several of the underpinnings of their grand strategy appear cracked.
IE, while still the dominant browser, has lost significant market share for the last four years running. MS is a perennial nobody in online services, something the Yahoo acquisition was supposed to fix. They'll be back, but with every month their ability to execute a dramatic turnaround using their browser and desktop monopoly drops. While arguably the office monopoly is more important than the desktop monopoly, the desktop monopoly is the fulcrum and DRM is the lever by which they hope to become the dominant player in digital entertainment. That's why they aren't hot and bothered about Blu-ray; they don't envision a future where people access information by any old third party hardware.
Why was Vista such a dog, after they'd delivered two successive solid releases in the Windows franchise (2000 and XP)? Because they had too many agendas; too many strategic partners to keep happy. Vista is not architecturally worse than its predecessors, in some ways it is better. It's just unfinished; MS had too many strategic imperatives to satisfy, imperatives that were useless or meaningless to customers.
I think what we're seeing is a world of technology that is too complex and dynamic to be orchestrated by the strategic plans of any single company. But MS is a big picture, grand strategy kind of company. There's lots of valuable pieces in that company too.
The irony is we may look back in ten years time and conclude that MS shareholders would have been better if the anti-trust case had resulted in a court-ordered breakup. Since MS dodged the break-up bullet in 2001, its stock price has lagged the NASDAQ as a whole.
The 3.5" diskettes were made of the same stuff as the 5.25 inch diskettes, and were just as "floppy". They simply had a rigid protective shell protected the floppy bits.
I have indeed not only seen, but have worked with 8" floppies. On systems that had 8" hard disks They had Shugart interfaces, 8" platters, and boasted a 5 MB capacity, and a nifty transparent Plexiglas case.
I'm not sure it was desoldered. Note that the ribbon cables don't appear to be scorched at all.
I'd infer from the sand on the platters that the drive hit hard enough to cause the screws holding the cover in place to shear off. If that is the case, what is astounding is that the platters are true enough to be cleaned, spun up and read from. It's not out of the question that an impact capable of ripping the cover off might cause a mechanical failure of the solder joint.
It wouldn't take much energy to weaken the solder joints mechanically. If you heat the solder up faster than the leads can heat, then rapidly cool it, you could end up with a cold joint, especially if you are using a not-perfectly-eutectic mixture like 60/40 lead/tin. Whether its possible to do that without damaging the adjacent ribbon cables is hard to say. The conditions producing this result are unique.
The problem is that the analogy is fundamentally broken. One way or the other, it only addresses the superficial consequences of making copies.
Imagine you did have a 'magic duplicator'. It's not true that use of this would be harmless.
It wouldn't harm the owner of the car. It would harm the people who make a living assembling the car from its design, who make a living advertising, promoting and selling the car. They'd have to find other jobs.
It would also remove the current structure which pays the designers of the car. And so, in absence of an alternative method of paying, it harms them too. Granted when we talk about music, most people in this position don't make any money out of the system. And even if the system could be reformed so that they all can eke out aliving, it is so fabulously expensive with respect to the amount it pays them it's very nearly indefensible.
The morality of copying depends on whether you think that the market will provide alternatives for creators in the absence of selling copies.
Actually, I think you got the Bush/Vietnam thing wrong.
He was bashed for not changing. It wasn't that he was a draft dodger who is now a hawk, he was a hawk all along. And even that wasn't enough. He acted as if he was entitled to special treatment and he still hasn't confronted that attitude.
Nobody seriously goes after Bush for being clean and sober after a youth of drug and alcohol abuse. It comes up in this context: he hasn't changed enough. He still operates by lying and denial, he still gets by by manipulating the news rather than changing the facts.
So it's not a double standard when people criticize Bush for his youthful foibles, because they are really criticizing him for being the same. If Jesus helped him quite snorting coke and drinking, that's good, but it seems to me that he's also co-opting Jesus into playing the role his dad and cronies used to play. Dad's money and influence kept Bush from experiencing the consequences of his irresponsible behavior, and now it's Jesus who makes him, in his own eyes, infallible in ways that his fellow mortals are not. The theological platitudes about the imperfectability of Man ring hollow in the mouths of those who believe in Bush as a divinely appointed leader. They don't read their Old Testament very carefully, either.
Oh, I'm all for change, forgiveness, leniency towards to folly of youth and all that. It's not principled tolerance, however, to grant those things to yourself and your friends, but deny them to others. That's just hypocrisy.
As people age, they become more conservative. That's a fact of life. People who have made the transition like to assert that with age comes wisdom. Speaking as somebody who has watched his peers aging from being on his left to being on his right, I can't endorse this as proof that conservatives are more wise than liberals. I don't see any evidence of my cohorts breaking out in heretofore unsuspected wisdom. Their mature conservatism is as intellectually rotten as their youthful radicalism.
They've really remained the same as ever, it's just their circumstances that have changed. When you don't have power and money, the obvious position is that the system is broken. When you don't have much to tax, then taxation seems like no big deal. When you have more than your share of power and money, then the system appears to be working. When you have lots of things to be taxed, taxation looks a lot different.
This is not to say that taxation isn't sometimes a bad thing; or that the system doesn't work some of the time. It's not to say that the well trod path from young turk to old guard isn't taken by many who in their age are wiser than in their youth. But most of the people on this path haven't really changed in any fundamental way.
The dead giveaway is hypocrisy, aggressive and self-righteous hypocrisy. It's that absolute certainty that the world owes you and your friends a break for your youthful foibles, and you owe the world nothing in return, not restitution, not even extending the same considerations to others you demand for yourself.
People like that have not really changed. Their political views have always been narrow and narcissistic, reflecting nothing more than their belief in their personal entitlement.
Alternatively, you can think of it as being stored in the most highly efficient storage medium yet devised by man.
Unburned fossil fuels.
As long as we have significant fossil fuel generation capacity, nobody's lights are going dark when the wind slackens. And we aren't likely to hit the point where wind power generates more power than coal, natural gas and oil any time soon. In the long run we'll need to have other ways of storing and reusing energy that don't rely on fossil fuels, but if we did this sort of thing everywhere we could, the world could conserve its limited supplies of petroleum and coal and reduce its emissions of CO2 and other pollutants.
Also, you might consider why famine is rare in developed countries. That is because our food supply is, in effect. A network with many suppliers. If beef suppliers are having mad cow problems and can't supply the market with enough beef, money flows to poultry and pork producers instead. Any individual food supplier is subject to short term shortage, the network as a whole has diverse sources of food it can draw upon.
A geographically large superconducting grid would smooth over local variations in wind, solar, tidal and other intermittent power sources.
The "use it or lose it" nature of some renewable power sources means that it's may be financially efficient to store any excess production, even if that storage medium is not very efficient itself. If your windmills are going full (err...) tilt in the dead of the night when power is cheap, why not use them to pump water upstream across a dam? Then you can sell that energy in the middle of the day when market prices are higher. Or you could sell an energy contract to an energy intensive factory that can run in the off-hours.
Suppose if your photovoltaic farm is generating power in the middle of the winter, why not put it into a reversible chemical reactor that converts it back into electricity during the summer to run people's air conditioning?
A superconducting grid itself could be a short term storage mechanism; you could pump liquid hydrogen in when demand is low, and extract it when demand is higher.
I see no real short term or long term barriers to the utility of renewable energy as a way of reducing pollution and reliance on politically unstable regimes overseas. The midterm -- well that could get economically tricky. But then, declining oil production will be even more tricky.
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Well libraries. That's a huge part of language choices these days; you really choose frameworks or libraries and live with the language as a consequence. A lot of what we do these days is glue stuff together.
This problem, however is a completely different kind of programming. It's old school stuff: building everything you need yourself to run on really slow hardware. And hardware is always slow relative to crypto problems. Ever try to implement RSA encryption from scratch? I have. There's a reason the public key stuff is only used for key exchange.
I think the usefulness of Ada on this kind of problem is related to the issue of testing being costly. When I started in this business, compiling and linking a two hundred line program took about fifteen minutes. Something like unit testing would have been utterly impractical. So a strictly typed language was for nearly everyone a good idea.
Over the last couple of years, I've been trying my hand at a number of difficult algorithmic problems. This is not the stuff that 99% of the programmers in the world do professionally, including me.
Working on these problems was like programming was in the old days. Not only was it just you and the problem with no frameworks to come between, every output becomes a milestone when it takes a program days to generate. It also means that the style of programming is different. You don't worry so much about language restrictions introducing frictional losses into the code/test/recode cycle. You do worry more about mistakes that make it past the compiler.
Ada's philosophy is that coding should be, if not exactly slower certainly more deliberate. If you are running something for which your hardware is monumentally slow, then this is a good style to work in.
Perhaps you should read what you just wrote.
I dunno.
Suppose you are the national association for the advancement of kinky sex. Does anybody who gets a hold of some of your documents have a right to publish them to the world at large, excepting things like discovery in a legal proceeding? Doesn't the NAAKS have a right to privacy? Wouldn't it be reasonable for the NAAKS be within its rights to suppress a document that had fallen into unauthorized hands, if that document doesn't reveal any law breaking?
Maybe the NAAKS is embarassed by things that woudln't be embarassing to other people. Maybe they have an internal study that says that 80% of their members prefer to have sex in the missionary position with their spouses, but are members to get the magazine. Is that anybody else's business?
That's pretty much what's going on here. The stuff that is being suppressed isn't exactly earth shattering: if you are about to get a sex change operation you aren't allowed to convert to Mormonism, but you can if you come to the church after the fact. That's probably a bit embarrassing to the church leaders, but maybe secrecy also protects the interests of potential converts in this matter. There's plenty of people who would criticize a transgendered person for converting to a religion that discourages sex change operations, on the ironic basis that the Church does not accept who they are.
Well, why shouldn't a church have the same right to privacy that any other organization has? If members don't like it, they can vote with their feet. And that is the difference between a church and a cult.
A church can pressure its straying members with ghostly harm; that's really between the church and the member, it's nobody else's business, especially the government's. A cult pressures its straying member with harm to his reputation, his relationships, his economic and indeed physical well being. This is all stuff that is well regulated under common law; being a church gives you no particular first amendment protection against the consequences of wrongful actions in this sphere.
Probably because VBA was introduced around 1993, the same year the first Pentium (running at 60MHz) was introduced. The typical machine had a 486DX2 running a single instruction pipeline at 33MHz, and maybe 16-24MB of RAM. Oh, yes, and Windows 3.1, which is 16 bit and has all its 16 bit glory.
Still, C code can be reasonably close to assembler in efficiency, especially if you profile and use assembler only in tight loops. It shouldn't be that hard on modern systems to cross compile to C against some kind of simple virtual machine.
I'm guessing that the code probably makes a lot of direct Windows API calls without any framework or abstraction. This probably means that collectively the VBA code for MacOS and Windows is significantly larger than for Windows alone. If this is true Microsoft would have to port a lot of the Windows API to MacOS (nobody is better positioned to do this), or they have to do a rather massive refactoring. Since porting the API is undesirable for other reasons, and refactoring is desirable for others, I'm guessing they're planning on cleaning things up enough to make a Mac port viable.
Well, learning to do things that require you to think and act indepedently requires freedom.
Perhaps your family was the most autocratic system in the world, but my experience of family life was quite different.
My siblings and I always thought of our parents as strict, but years later my mother contradicted us and claimed she was extremely lenient. We were both right. We grew up (figuratively of course) in an enclosure with iron walls, but the enclosure kept expanding. While the wall was always close enough that it loomed in our minds, we seldom challenged it because there was always new territory to explore within the walls. Then, one day, after the area within the walls became sufficient for a lifetime's exploration, and we'd shown ourselves responsible and competent, the walls were gone. We were allowed -- no, required -- to think and decide for ourselves what was responsible and what was not. And that was parenting at its toughest and most hard-nosed. Play with matches if you want, but do it in your own house and carry your own insurance.
The reason parents erect walls is to protect their children; the reason they expand those walls is to raise competent children. What is the reason to erect walls around students in technology education? Exactly who are we protecting? Do the training wheels ever come off?
The disadvantage of authoritarian parenting is that it keeps children infants when it comes to dealing with things they don't have rules for or experience with. The advantage is that you can ensure a predictable response in a certain situation, so long as circumstances around that situation haven't changed very much. The advantages and disadvantages of authoritarian education are the same. Authoritarian education prepares its recipients to be subordinates.
A technology education built around what is currently in common use in the "business world" prepares students in developing countries to take subordinate roles in that world. It's great if you want a nation of workers that staffs call centers, and does the other menial work of the information age. It's great if you want a cadre of bureaucrats who will execute the programs devised for them by wealthy "development" agencies faithfully. In short, arbitrary technological dependency is just the thing if you are aiming for economic and political subservience. It's not so great if you want a people capable of solving their own problems creatively, or carving out their own niche in the world economy.
And it's not really that clear that the developed world is that well adapted for the conditions of the mid twenty-first century. Our economies are predicated on cheap and abundant energy and resources, and cheap disposal of wastes. We are going to be hard pressed ourselves to adapt and improve our material well being. The developing world, with its lower resource footprint, could well experience major gains in quality of life while we struggle to maintain own our own. But they won't be by adopting first world lifestyles; they don't have the accumulated capital to bootstrap a resource intensive lifestyle as wealthier societies bid up prices.
I'm all for cynicism, but if you go too far you end up going full circle, approaching naive idealism from, as it were, the other side. It appears that you think that governments should operate more effectively other human institutions.
People are fallible, and inconsistent. In fact, given that people are fallible, it's a good thing they're inconsistent. But things are never quite what you expected them to be; over time you are forced to compromise so many times that the initial coherence of your plans starts to fall apart.
That's why the best way of managing human enterprises is to make them mortal. The Grim Reaper removes the deadwood and lets the light in for new growth. This notion is built into capitalism. Businesses fail all the time. Business that are "too big to fail" incorporate extinction into themselves, changing leadership, spinning off divisions, dropping products and initiatives all the time.
That's why crony capitalism stinks. It takes extinction off the table. Businesses, like large defense contractors, that are treated as national assets are a mix of the worst elements of government and private enterprise.
The real value of democracy is not to ensuring good government. That's humanly impossible. The real value of democracy is removing bad government. The only advantage of democracy over any other philosophy of government is that it makes extinguishing a bad regime routine and in social terms relatively cheap. People living under other kinds of systems can change regimes, but at the risk of being killed, imprisoned or exiled.
What we are seeing in the OLPC program is a questioning of some of its initial assumptions. That's inevitable. It's also unfortunate that MS used it's marketing pull to force them to confront the Windows issue,because given the mission of the organization, that's a side show. And, as confronting issues in these cases always does, it's undermined other assumptions of the project's initial vision, like creating a new desktop paradigm. It would have been better for the project to have had more of a chance to make its case before it faced political pressures.
In defense of the Sugar concept, it's sometimes easier to do more than to do less. It's easier to keep the creative juices flowing, to attract interest and support, when you are doing something revolutionary than when you are doing something incremental, even if the incremental changes have revolutionary effects.
But that's only when things are going well. When the project's assumptions are undermined, then bold design philosophies become a liability, sapping support and energy by being one more thing that people argue over.
You are 100% spot on.
... national dignity, and ... bad political influence." It's about fighting the "splittists".
While there is some issue of protecting state secrets, this is not really where China goes off the deep end into paranoia. It's all about "harming
The Chinese attitude towards this is arguably paranoid. This reminds me of the overreaction of the Chinese regime to the Olympic torch protests. In the West, protests happen all the time; they are completely normal and expected, and don't change anything unless somebody in power acts rashly. Arguably China's hypersensitive reaction to the protests did far more damage to Chinese national interests than the protests possibly could.
This is another case. The Chinese people overwhelmingly support Chinese territorial claims to Tibet and Taiwan. True, this is due to propaganda. But why bother? It's hard to see what in hard economic or geopolitical terms these claims do for China, other than complicate its relationships with its economic and strategic partners.
Imagine, for a moment, that the American Revolution was thoroughly discredited with the American people and the American government. Some would say that's already happened. What would the enduring legacy of the Revolution be? The only thing left would be American territorial sovereignty. And it's not exactly accidental that Southern politicians blocked US ratification of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide for thirty eight years. The South was the only territory of the United States ever to be occupied, albeit by other Americans.
Now think about the Chinese Communist Party, which won the Chinese Civil War largely because the Nationalists were perceived as ineffective in resisting Japanese violations of Chinese sovereignty. In truth, the Communists weren't any more effective, but they got credit for waging a guerrilla war against the Japanese.
The Chinese Communist party has turned its back on every single goal that the veterans of the Long March fought for, except one: Chinese territorial sovereignty. In reality, the Communist Party is ideologically indistinguishable from the Kuomintang they defeated in 1949. There's only one difference: foreigners have never meddled in China on their watch.
Well, the traditional method is to check into to a cheap boarding house near the wharves in a west coast port like San Francisco, Portland or Seattle. Then you drink yourself into a stupor, and when you wake up you're on you way to Shanghai.
Well, I'd guess that a robot house builder would be more complicated than the best available non-robotic option: prefabrication in a factory. So rather than having some kind of super-flexible machine that can do wiring, plumbing, framing and finish carpentry, you just set up stations with simple machines and conventional robots.
In any case, if you want to make houses by robot, you're going to have to constrain the designs and materials used around robot-friendliness. Once you've done that, you might as well use non-conventional designs that don't require complex craftsmanship or expensive materials (e.g., various adobe-like building methods).
Robotic sailing, on the other hand, is quite useful. It provides the ability to collect information over a large area and extended time at low cost and risk to human life. It may have utility in a future where energy prices make international shipping more expensive.
In any case, what I'd like to see is a robot that can replicate itself. The self reproducing 3D printer discussed here a few weeks ago is interesting, but too constrained; it can only make rather small parts, which accounts for its peculiar rod and fastener construction. A machine capable of actually creating and assembling its own mechanical pars would not only have to be capable of producing a wider variety of useful parts, it would eliminate the need for human expertise and intervention in making machines. That would break the duplication barrier for machines in the way that computers break the duplication barrier for information.
Why not? Houses that old are not uncommon in Massachusetts, and Cape Cod was one of the first areas settled. The first towns on the Cape were established around 1640; the towns in the area the poster is talking about were incorporated around 1710, years after the first settlers arrived. It makes sense to spread out along the unexploited coastline because of the convenient maritime trade connection with settlements like Plymouth and Boston.
We've been conditioned for some reason to think of "pioneers" exclusively as western settlers, but the first settlers of New England were moving to the edge of the greatest and most unknown wilderness in history. As in all pioneering eras, some individuals began to feel crowded as soon as they could see their neighbors' houses. You often see isolated examples of very old houses. My town north of Boston was sparsely populated until the railroad came through in the mid 1800s. The houses in my neighborhood were mostly built in the 1950s. But one of the houses in my neighborhood was built in 1720, at a time when the area was a remote wilderness a hard day's journey over tracks through virgin forest from the nearest settlement.
I can't possibly see the UMPC on its own ever becoming as important a product category as laptops. I can't believe that anybody would seriously predicate a business plan on them replacing laptops.
The important lesson of the original palm for mobile electronics: it's all about the form factor. So what is the UMPC form factor ideal for? And do you need true UMPC capabilities to do it?
The ultra-cheap laptop really is a ratification of the notion that form factor is everything in mobile computing. It's diametrically the opposite of UMPC: it's minimalist computing power in a human friendly package. UMPCs, so far as I can see, are predicated in putting, if not a huge amount of computing power into a small package, at least a surprising amount of power. This has built in early adopter sex appeal, but the appeal is largely confined to those users.
Therefore, by itself, I see UMPC as a dead end.
However.... I see the idea of a UMPC as being very interesting in the context of a personal network. You can think of the personal network like a LAN; your cell phone is the router; your PDA and laptop (maybe even your wristwatch) are different kinds of workstations; your UMPC is the server.
That is an interesting role for the UMPC. If the UMPC is about computing power in a portable package, and laptop is about convenient user interfaces for extended tasks, and the PDA is about convenient user interfaces for quick tasks, and the cell phone is about access to global communications networks, it seems likely that our future selves will want the best of each of these capabilities, rather than one package that compromises on everything.
If that's the future, the number 1 priority would be owning the cell phone bit; after that perhaps owning the UMPC bit. Everything else amounts to peripherals and accessories.
Well, they ought to be.
This is what happened to PDAs over the last three years. The price for what people needed dropped to the point where you couldn't make a very attractive business out of replacing their broken old PDAs, nor could you tempt them with glitzy new features they didn't really care about. It made more marketing sense to make the PDA feature set a phone option, given that phones are sold in a way that keeps their real price artificially inflated.
What's going to happen when you can get a perfectly usable, semi-disposable laptop in the $100 range, equipped with wireless access to ubiquitous network services?
There's bound to be massive fortunes made, but mostly over the corpse of the traditional laptop market. I wish I knew the magic formula, but the only thing you can be sure of is that a lot of companies are going to lose.
I don't see any specifics on the Vista on Bootcamp thing. Maybe the difference was the video hardware on the Mac being a bit snappier.
For a given value of "software" and "high quality".
I'd characterize the situation as this: the high level of integration of MS development tools and the MS product stack means that it's easy to rapidly prototype applications that approximate a certain set of stereotypical forms. That's a good thing, especially if the forms have widespread usefulness, e.g. a web based storefront, or variations on things like blogs or content management systems.
There's no such thing as "easy" "high quality". In a competitive environment, as soon as something become "easy", the goalposts for "high quality" move.
Once you set yourself the goal of outperforming your competitors, you are as stuck as ever, if not more so. For example, I develop applications that have complex data management requirements. I'm not anti-SQL Server, I recognize its particular strengths, but all those strengths revolve around connecting to other MS products and development tools. I have to support both Oracle and SQL Server, and for the kinds of things I do, SQL Server consistently introduces complications. Every database platform has strengths and weaknesses, and SQL Server's weaknesses happen to be in the areas that my work needs strengths.
It's not that SQL Server doesn't work in my problem domain; nor is it that it offers no advantages whatsoever; but if I could drop SQL Server support and replace it with Postgres, my job would be easier and my customers would benefit as a result, even though the same net number of platforms are supported.
What happens, though, is that I have customers that make platform standardization decisions after being convinced of things like "it's quicker to develop high quality software on the MS platform," as if "high quality software" always required exactly the same kinds of features, no matter what the nature of the application. In truth, they don't even reduce their overall administrative burden by making these kinds of platform standardization decisions.
This kind of thinking is a false promise. If you want high quality software with low maintenance costs, you can't get that by locking yourself into a single vendor. It's neither sufficient, nor necessary. What you really need is patience, and realistic expectations. Often customers shoot themselves in their own foot by demanding that vendors meet arbitrary requirements that have no business value to them, only to some vendor that has its hooks into them. The customer ends up paying more for less quality and less support.
What customers ought to worry about is documented and standardized interfaces, not platforms. An Oracle based product with well defined mechanisms for getting data in and out does more for a SQL Server shop's access to the data than a SQL Server product with no documented interfaces.
There's too much "cargo cult" thinking about how to develop applications. The truth is that most of the things that get magically spit out of development environments are not that hard to do for a competent developer to do.
A company that claims its products are better than the competition isn't engaging in FUD. FUD is when they predict doom and disaster for the customer foolish enough to buy from other vendors.
In any case, a "properly set up and mainained" MS server is, in practical terms, perfectly acceptable for many uses.
As far as the MS environment being "better", it depends on your assumptions. If you are developing for the MS platform exclusively, with developers with MS-only experience, and targeting an MS only product stack (IIS, SQL Server, sharepoint, MS office integration), then it isn't unreasonable to consider MS Visual Studio as your environment. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider Visual Studio if I were targeting J2EE, or the LAMP stack.
If you want to be an engineer, you have to understand about trade-offs. One of the consequence of trade-offs is no product, indeed no company can do everything you'd wish. You shouldn't identify yourself with, or against a product or vendor when it comes to your technical judgment.
When I first got my cell phone, I sometimes took calls while I was driving, particularly on the highway. Then I stopped doing it.
It's true you can't really multitask conversation and driving, but you can multiplex them. Neither takes constant high levels of attention, but when they both need attention at the same time, you have to prioritize driving if you want to stay alive. Passengers appreciate any efforts you make to avoid accidents more than people on the other end of the phone.
I once was driving down the highway and took a call from one of our customers' employees. I encountered a situation with a car coming on to the highway on my right and a truck on my left. "Hold on for a second," I said, and once I was past the exit I apologized and explained that I had had a tricky driving situation. The apology was not accepted. The person was angry that I was not giving her my full attention. Damned right. She was angry in a "I'm going to tell your boss and get you fired" kind of way, but that kind of self-centered immaturity is all too common. I finally said, "If you can't accept that I can't consistently give you my full attention while I'm driving, then we'll have to talk after I've arrived at my destination," and then I hung up on her. The corollary of "the customer is always right" is that you should be selective about who you get into a business relationship with.
After that, I stopped having cell conversations while I drive. If people allowed for the fact that driving safety is a higher priority than what they have to say, maybe you could have cell conversations safely. But they don't. They're self-centered, and if its not their life you are endangering, a lot of them will demand, and receive your full attention.
Yes, obviously they do. The technologies in Vista are key to their leveraging their desktop monopoly into other areas like entertainment.
However -- this is NOT the way they want to do it. Especially now.
Microsoft is a big picture, global strategy kind of outfit, and right now several of the underpinnings of their grand strategy appear cracked.
IE, while still the dominant browser, has lost significant market share for the last four years running. MS is a perennial nobody in online services, something the Yahoo acquisition was supposed to fix. They'll be back, but with every month their ability to execute a dramatic turnaround using their browser and desktop monopoly drops. While arguably the office monopoly is more important than the desktop monopoly, the desktop monopoly is the fulcrum and DRM is the lever by which they hope to become the dominant player in digital entertainment. That's why they aren't hot and bothered about Blu-ray; they don't envision a future where people access information by any old third party hardware.
Why was Vista such a dog, after they'd delivered two successive solid releases in the Windows franchise (2000 and XP)? Because they had too many agendas; too many strategic partners to keep happy. Vista is not architecturally worse than its predecessors, in some ways it is better. It's just unfinished; MS had too many strategic imperatives to satisfy, imperatives that were useless or meaningless to customers.
I think what we're seeing is a world of technology that is too complex and dynamic to be orchestrated by the strategic plans of any single company. But MS is a big picture, grand strategy kind of company. There's lots of valuable pieces in that company too.
The irony is we may look back in ten years time and conclude that MS shareholders would have been better if the anti-trust case had resulted in a court-ordered breakup. Since MS dodged the break-up bullet in 2001, its stock price has lagged the NASDAQ as a whole.
The 3.5" diskettes were made of the same stuff as the 5.25 inch diskettes, and were just as "floppy". They simply had a rigid protective shell protected the floppy bits.
I have indeed not only seen, but have worked with 8" floppies. On systems that had 8" hard disks They had Shugart interfaces, 8" platters, and boasted a 5 MB capacity, and a nifty transparent Plexiglas case.
I'm not sure it was desoldered. Note that the ribbon cables don't appear to be scorched at all.
I'd infer from the sand on the platters that the drive hit hard enough to cause the screws holding the cover in place to shear off. If that is the case, what is astounding is that the platters are true enough to be cleaned, spun up and read from. It's not out of the question that an impact capable of ripping the cover off might cause a mechanical failure of the solder joint.
It wouldn't take much energy to weaken the solder joints mechanically. If you heat the solder up faster than the leads can heat, then rapidly cool it, you could end up with a cold joint, especially if you are using a not-perfectly-eutectic mixture like 60/40 lead/tin. Whether its possible to do that without damaging the adjacent ribbon cables is hard to say. The conditions producing this result are unique.
The problem is that the analogy is fundamentally broken. One way or the other, it only addresses the superficial consequences of making copies.
Imagine you did have a 'magic duplicator'. It's not true that use of this would be harmless.
It wouldn't harm the owner of the car. It would harm the people who make a living assembling the car from its design, who make a living advertising, promoting and selling the car. They'd have to find other jobs.
It would also remove the current structure which pays the designers of the car. And so, in absence of an alternative method of paying, it harms them too. Granted when we talk about music, most people in this position don't make any money out of the system. And even if the system could be reformed so that they all can eke out aliving, it is so fabulously expensive with respect to the amount it pays them it's very nearly indefensible.
The morality of copying depends on whether you think that the market will provide alternatives for creators in the absence of selling copies.
I dunno. It worked for Microsoft.
Actually, I think you got the Bush/Vietnam thing wrong.
He was bashed for not changing. It wasn't that he was a draft dodger who is now a hawk, he was a hawk all along. And even that wasn't enough. He acted as if he was entitled to special treatment and he still hasn't confronted that attitude.
Nobody seriously goes after Bush for being clean and sober after a youth of drug and alcohol abuse. It comes up in this context: he hasn't changed enough. He still operates by lying and denial, he still gets by by manipulating the news rather than changing the facts.
So it's not a double standard when people criticize Bush for his youthful foibles, because they are really criticizing him for being the same. If Jesus helped him quite snorting coke and drinking, that's good, but it seems to me that he's also co-opting Jesus into playing the role his dad and cronies used to play. Dad's money and influence kept Bush from experiencing the consequences of his irresponsible behavior, and now it's Jesus who makes him, in his own eyes, infallible in ways that his fellow mortals are not. The theological platitudes about the imperfectability of Man ring hollow in the mouths of those who believe in Bush as a divinely appointed leader. They don't read their Old Testament very carefully, either.
Oh, I'm all for change, forgiveness, leniency towards to folly of youth and all that. It's not principled tolerance, however, to grant those things to yourself and your friends, but deny them to others. That's just hypocrisy.
As people age, they become more conservative. That's a fact of life. People who have made the transition like to assert that with age comes wisdom. Speaking as somebody who has watched his peers aging from being on his left to being on his right, I can't endorse this as proof that conservatives are more wise than liberals. I don't see any evidence of my cohorts breaking out in heretofore unsuspected wisdom. Their mature conservatism is as intellectually rotten as their youthful radicalism.
They've really remained the same as ever, it's just their circumstances that have changed. When you don't have power and money, the obvious position is that the system is broken. When you don't have much to tax, then taxation seems like no big deal. When you have more than your share of power and money, then the system appears to be working. When you have lots of things to be taxed, taxation looks a lot different.
This is not to say that taxation isn't sometimes a bad thing; or that the system doesn't work some of the time. It's not to say that the well trod path from young turk to old guard isn't taken by many who in their age are wiser than in their youth. But most of the people on this path haven't really changed in any fundamental way.
The dead giveaway is hypocrisy, aggressive and self-righteous hypocrisy. It's that absolute certainty that the world owes you and your friends a break for your youthful foibles, and you owe the world nothing in return, not restitution, not even extending the same considerations to others you demand for yourself.
People like that have not really changed. Their political views have always been narrow and narcissistic, reflecting nothing more than their belief in their personal entitlement.
Alternatively, you can think of it as being stored in the most highly efficient storage medium yet devised by man.
Unburned fossil fuels.
As long as we have significant fossil fuel generation capacity, nobody's lights are going dark when the wind slackens. And we aren't likely to hit the point where wind power generates more power than coal, natural gas and oil any time soon. In the long run we'll need to have other ways of storing and reusing energy that don't rely on fossil fuels, but if we did this sort of thing everywhere we could, the world could conserve its limited supplies of petroleum and coal and reduce its emissions of CO2 and other pollutants.
Also, you might consider why famine is rare in developed countries. That is because our food supply is, in effect. A network with many suppliers. If beef suppliers are having mad cow problems and can't supply the market with enough beef, money flows to poultry and pork producers instead. Any individual food supplier is subject to short term shortage, the network as a whole has diverse sources of food it can draw upon.
A geographically large superconducting grid would smooth over local variations in wind, solar, tidal and other intermittent power sources.
The "use it or lose it" nature of some renewable power sources means that it's may be financially efficient to store any excess production, even if that storage medium is not very efficient itself. If your windmills are going full (err...) tilt in the dead of the night when power is cheap, why not use them to pump water upstream across a dam? Then you can sell that energy in the middle of the day when market prices are higher. Or you could sell an energy contract to an energy intensive factory that can run in the off-hours.
Suppose if your photovoltaic farm is generating power in the middle of the winter, why not put it into a reversible chemical reactor that converts it back into electricity during the summer to run people's air conditioning?
A superconducting grid itself could be a short term storage mechanism; you could pump liquid hydrogen in when demand is low, and extract it when demand is higher.
I see no real short term or long term barriers to the utility of renewable energy as a way of reducing pollution and reliance on politically unstable regimes overseas. The midterm -- well that could get economically tricky. But then, declining oil production will be even more tricky.