No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack
IMHO, Microsoft is welcome keep all to themselves "improvements" such as having to call WSAStartup(), making sockets and file handles incompatible, and making it so select() doesn't work on files.
At least each intersection will probably host several hundred million vehicles over a couple of decades of service. Statistically speaking, at least some of that traffic will be of very high importance.
That compares favorably on a value-per-dollar basis to a two-week ant farming expedition for 7 overachieving geeks.
People wouldn't watch a channel devoted to science. They wanted crap. These same people are doing the voting for people making the decisions about space flight.
That gives me an idea for a sure-fire space program that will enjoy the full support of the American public:
Create two teams each comprised of a combination of rocket scientists and washed-up hollywood celebrities. Pit them against each other in a battle to create the next manned space launch system. Each team is given a workshop, a silo full of old ICBM parts, a '71 Dodge Challenger and 3 Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The first team into orbit wins $50,000 and a chance to try for a major defense contract. The contest starts at T-minus 21 days.
Face it, most of life is boringly routine, including spaceflight. Not everything has to be about doing bold exploration in to the unknown.
If somebody's going to perform a useless boring routine, I'd prefer that the government not waste half a billion dollars of the taxpayers' money subsidizing it.
The PC's success was driven largely by business usage. In 1984, you would have bought a PC because it had one of the best keyboards that has ever been made, and it had an outstanding monochrome text display (with a crisp font and specialized long-persistence phosphor).
Basically, the PC was a standalone version of IBM's high-quality mainframe terminals. It was designed for people who needed comfortably to run business apps all day long. This is not something that you would want to do on the primitive color monitors of the day, and the Macintosh was a brand new architecture with a radically different UI and zero business software available at its introduction. The PC also had IBM's support and brand name; as they say, you'd never be fired for choosing an IBM.
When the clones came along and offered PCs to the public at low prices, people bought a computer just like the ones at work that they were already familiar with. The rest is history.
Re:What about Commercial Aircraft?
on
Liquid Hydrogen UAV
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the $60 a barrel prive for oil is driving jet fuel costs through the room. It seems like if Boeing or Airbus could get some of this type of engine technology working in large commercial aircraft, they could make a killing.
The problem is that the closest supply of gaseous hydrogen is on Jupiter. So here on earth, it's artificially manufactured from natural gas, whose price correlates very closely to the price of oil.
How so? The Buran used expendable engines, which would have been cheaper to operate than the shuttle's reusable design.
The Soviets building an airplane-shaped spacecraft was as stupid and pointless as the US doing the same, but at least they didn't waste a lot of effort and money on trying to make the booster "reusable".
Each Energia flight threw away the 4 main H2O2 engines and 4 Kerosene/O2 boosters none of which was reused. Compare this to the shuttle where the SRB motor casings and the SSME's can be used many times.
Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines. US taxpayers have been soaked for countless $Billions over 3 decades in this epic demonstration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish".
It's not true. What the OP means is: a coal plant normally releases more radioactivity into the environment than the equivalent nuclear plant. Which is true as long as nothing ever goes wrong with the nuclear plant or the handling of its wastes.
The nuclear plant still generates orders of magnitude more radioactivity than the coal plant.
Will this apply to other areas or just tech? For example, will you be able to patent a shirt design or a new motor?
Of course you will. The whole reason that patents were introduced was to entice people to reveal their trade secrets to the world so they would become available as public knowledge. That's the opposite of proprietary file formats.
Tempel-1 isn't even a NEA. The orbit doesn't even cross the orbit of the earth.
However, the orbit does occasionally pass near Jupiter. This makes its orbit chaotic and unpredictable over the very long term.
One day, its orbit may get significantly altered by one or more close encounters to planets. It might end up being ejected from the solar system, sent into the sun, put into an earth-intersecting orbit, or countless other possibilities. It's unlikely that it will stay in its current orbit indefinitely.
This impact will most likely change the ultimate fate of the comet's orbit over millions of years. (As will countless other events that affect the comet, such as changes in the solar wind due to solar flares.) The infinitesimal chance that it will eventually hit the earth due to this satellite is probably exactly balanced out by the infinitesimal chance that it was already going to hit the earth and we've just saved our planet.
Load them up, remove them and store them in a fire proof safe.
Most "fire proof" safes have walls filled with a moist material. While this provides some fire resistance, the high humidity also tends to promote corrosion of metal in objects like hard drives. It's probably not the best place to archive sensitive electronics.
Or is this the sort of thing you need a Cray and hundreds of thousands of lines of Fortran to model accurately?
If you have a Linux box with KDE, it might have come with KStars, which is a very nifty program. I just pulled it up, and the three planets are really close together.
Not to discount the experts or anything, but wouldn't an event like that result in a period quite different from the very regular period of our moon (making one rock spin faster than the other)?
Early in the moon's history, it was much closer to earth, the earth's day was far shorter, and the moon's day wasn't locked to its orbital period. Over billions of years, tidal forces have gradually changed things to the current state. In fact, the moon is still slowly receding from the earth as some of the earth's rotational momentum continues to get transferred to the moon's orbital momentum via tidal interactions.
Despite all this computing power, computers still can't think like humans. They can perform calculations faster, but can't perform optimized heuristics or even form optimized heuristics like humans.
That's probably because brains use a completely different architecture than digital computers. Neurons connect in a highly parallel fashion, with trillions simultaneous of connections arranged in 3D directly between various parts of the brain. Even with the 1000000X speed advantage of computer logic, the number of permutations of neuron connections compared with the serial nature of computer buses allows the brain to outpower computers on many real-world problems.
Because they are full of narrow bottelneck data paths, computers rely heavily on locality of reference and precomputed indices to do anything efficiently. A brain, with a storage architecture approaching fully associative memory, can instantly compare any input against a lifetime of experiences with no need for predefined indices. It is somehow able to use high-level concepts as access keys as well, in contrast to the binary numbers that computers must use to address storage.
The result of all of this is that for many tasks like navigation in the real world, a cockroach brain compares favorably to the most powerful current digital computers.
Why don't you try reading the entire sentence from the article, not just the last dependant clause:
Instead, what I think happens is that markets mature, and as they mature and become commoditized, the kind of dominant player like MS just doesn't happen any more.
He's talking about the product market that a business is in, not the stock market. He's asserting that desktop OSes are becoming commodities, and therefore Microsoft's market dominance will tend to erode as new competitors come in selling goods closer to actual production costs.
The desktop OS market has been around for almost 3 decades. Web search + targeted advertising has only been around for a couple of years. It will be a while before the market for Google's products becomes mature.
But's what's more interesting is how it moves the pipe paradigm over to the object oriented world of.Net.
I'm skeptical that it's going to work very well. I still remember when DCOM was going to seamlessly combine object-oriented programming with networked messaging. It ended up pretty much being a nightmare to use, and has been largely deprecated in favor of RPC schemes that better match the characteristics of actual networks.
Maybe they'll get this to work as smoothly as the more limited stream-based shells like bash, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them a decade and a few redesigns before they get it right.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, Microsoft is welcome keep all to themselves "improvements" such as having to call WSAStartup(), making sockets and file handles incompatible, and making it so select() doesn't work on files.
That compares favorably on a value-per-dollar basis to a two-week ant farming expedition for 7 overachieving geeks.
That gives me an idea for a sure-fire space program that will enjoy the full support of the American public:
Create two teams each comprised of a combination of rocket scientists and washed-up hollywood celebrities. Pit them against each other in a battle to create the next manned space launch system. Each team is given a workshop, a silo full of old ICBM parts, a '71 Dodge Challenger and 3 Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The first team into orbit wins $50,000 and a chance to try for a major defense contract. The contest starts at T-minus 21 days.
If somebody's going to perform a useless boring routine, I'd prefer that the government not waste half a billion dollars of the taxpayers' money subsidizing it.
So?
It helped to propel GUI-enhanced PCs to total market domination. But it didn't exist in 1984.
The PC's success was driven largely by business usage. In 1984, you would have bought a PC because it had one of the best keyboards that has ever been made, and it had an outstanding monochrome text display (with a crisp font and specialized long-persistence phosphor).
Basically, the PC was a standalone version of IBM's high-quality mainframe terminals. It was designed for people who needed comfortably to run business apps all day long. This is not something that you would want to do on the primitive color monitors of the day, and the Macintosh was a brand new architecture with a radically different UI and zero business software available at its introduction. The PC also had IBM's support and brand name; as they say, you'd never be fired for choosing an IBM.
When the clones came along and offered PCs to the public at low prices, people bought a computer just like the ones at work that they were already familiar with. The rest is history.
The problem is that the closest supply of gaseous hydrogen is on Jupiter. So here on earth, it's artificially manufactured from natural gas, whose price correlates very closely to the price of oil.
...and yet operating them never got any cheaper. The whole concept was nothing but a money pit.
The Soviets building an airplane-shaped spacecraft was as stupid and pointless as the US doing the same, but at least they didn't waste a lot of effort and money on trying to make the booster "reusable".
Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines. US taxpayers have been soaked for countless $Billions over 3 decades in this epic demonstration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish".
It's not true. What the OP means is: a coal plant normally releases more radioactivity into the environment than the equivalent nuclear plant. Which is true as long as nothing ever goes wrong with the nuclear plant or the handling of its wastes.
The nuclear plant still generates orders of magnitude more radioactivity than the coal plant.
Of course you will. The whole reason that patents were introduced was to entice people to reveal their trade secrets to the world so they would become available as public knowledge. That's the opposite of proprietary file formats.
However, the orbit does occasionally pass near Jupiter. This makes its orbit chaotic and unpredictable over the very long term.
One day, its orbit may get significantly altered by one or more close encounters to planets. It might end up being ejected from the solar system, sent into the sun, put into an earth-intersecting orbit, or countless other possibilities. It's unlikely that it will stay in its current orbit indefinitely.
This impact will most likely change the ultimate fate of the comet's orbit over millions of years. (As will countless other events that affect the comet, such as changes in the solar wind due to solar flares.) The infinitesimal chance that it will eventually hit the earth due to this satellite is probably exactly balanced out by the infinitesimal chance that it was already going to hit the earth and we've just saved our planet.
Most "fire proof" safes have walls filled with a moist material. While this provides some fire resistance, the high humidity also tends to promote corrosion of metal in objects like hard drives. It's probably not the best place to archive sensitive electronics.
If you have a Linux box with KDE, it might have come with KStars, which is a very nifty program. I just pulled it up, and the three planets are really close together.
Early in the moon's history, it was much closer to earth, the earth's day was far shorter, and the moon's day wasn't locked to its orbital period. Over billions of years, tidal forces have gradually changed things to the current state. In fact, the moon is still slowly receding from the earth as some of the earth's rotational momentum continues to get transferred to the moon's orbital momentum via tidal interactions.
What's wrong with that? It gives people information to help them figure out if they're being phished.
In comparison to Opera's new behavior, IE *is* flawed. I don't see why Microsoft thinks it shouldn't innovate this feature from Opera into IE.
That's right; the PC would be lack the requisite Lucite case.
That's probably because brains use a completely different architecture than digital computers. Neurons connect in a highly parallel fashion, with trillions simultaneous of connections arranged in 3D directly between various parts of the brain. Even with the 1000000X speed advantage of computer logic, the number of permutations of neuron connections compared with the serial nature of computer buses allows the brain to outpower computers on many real-world problems.
Because they are full of narrow bottelneck data paths, computers rely heavily on locality of reference and precomputed indices to do anything efficiently. A brain, with a storage architecture approaching fully associative memory, can instantly compare any input against a lifetime of experiences with no need for predefined indices. It is somehow able to use high-level concepts as access keys as well, in contrast to the binary numbers that computers must use to address storage.
The result of all of this is that for many tasks like navigation in the real world, a cockroach brain compares favorably to the most powerful current digital computers.
The desktop OS market has been around for almost 3 decades. Web search + targeted advertising has only been around for a couple of years. It will be a while before the market for Google's products becomes mature.
Umm, Google's not in a mature market.
I'm skeptical that it's going to work very well. I still remember when DCOM was going to seamlessly combine object-oriented programming with networked messaging. It ended up pretty much being a nightmare to use, and has been largely deprecated in favor of RPC schemes that better match the characteristics of actual networks.
Maybe they'll get this to work as smoothly as the more limited stream-based shells like bash, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them a decade and a few redesigns before they get it right.
That's rather stupid. Who knows what kind of trojans and/or keyboard loggers might be installed on those random machines?
My suggestions:
"{1e8ba19e-48eb-4a68-bec4-d81c010069e4} (tm) Web Browser" and
"{33899fb5-719b-4e75-a0ef-e7f91b196030} (tm) Mail Client"
The odds that these name have been previously trademarked are rather slim.