So to save a little typing to format a 1-inch formula, you'd rather make your readers decipher things like:
VOLUME IS EQUAL TO THE INTEGRAL OF PI MULTIPLIED BY RADIUS SQUARED DIVIDED BY HEIGHT SQUARED MULTIPLIED BY X SQUARED MULTIPLIED BY DX ON X FROM 0 TO HEIGHT
(Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING)
Those words are free-form natural language, which computers currently can't understand. So they would be useless. Computer programs at present do not contain free-form prose.
What COBOL does is nothing more than a mechanical replacement of the formal symbols you'd find in a math paper with capitalized English words. While a few people may feel that's somehow letting people program with a natural language, it's simply not true. It doesn't change the situation one bit as far as the computers are concerned because it's logically equivalent to conventional math symbols, but just with harder to read lexical tokens.
but start maintaining large software and clarity is paramount.
Mathematicians have spent many centuries refining how best to expresses mathematical operations with clarity -- And they sure as hell didn't pick spelled out English verbs in all caps.
That's not clarity; instead, it looks like that obfuscated legalese from an EULA text box.
LOL. Try actually computing how much land area is required to cover 1% of US electrical baseload given 20% solar panel efficiency and 600W - 1000W incident solar radiation per square meter on a perfectly sunny day in May (e.g. most optimal time of the year.)
You should quickly come to the realization that solar is a complete boondoggle, even at 100% panel efficiency.
Annualized average US power = 440GW. Your 1% of US power is 4.4GW. At 20% of 800W/m^2, that's 6800 acres, or about 10 square miles.
You seem to have a problem with that?
IIRC, about 1/6 of the 90,000,000 acres of corn grown in the US goes to silly schemes to make ethanol, which is 2000 times as much land as your example. That seems like a prime candidate to replace with far more efficient solar panels, especially if the areas with the most dire depletion of aquifers are reallocated first.
Then you're calculating $/W wrong, because this cost should obviously be included. Of course $/W is meaningless if the $ part is only whatever fraction of the cost you feel like putting in a news article.
You seem confused. I"m calculating $/W correctly because I did include all the costs, not just land. I explained how efficiency affects that. I didn't put anything into a news article.
I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.
I'd bet it's because the physical structure that holds the cells, along with site preparation, probably costs much more per square meter than the land itself. So a more efficient cell would directly lead to a reduction in $/W by minimizing this overhead.
There's a standard template to apply to any debate about the history of computing:
The first computer with $GIVEN_FEATURE was actually invented by $GENIUS_LONER who worked for $SOME_INSTITUTION in $CENTRAL_EUROPEAN_COUNTRY a full $N_GREATER_THAN_10 years before $GIVEN_DATE. Sadly, his invention was ignored because of $INSTITUTION_POLITICS, the inventor's $PERSONAL_FAILINGS, and meddling by the $OPPRESSIVE_REGIME. Only a single example of the system was built, and it languished in $DISUSED_BASEMENT, until was unfortunately destroyed during $WARTIME_EVENT.
if Jim disappears at 2PM and is holding the important file with him its a real fucking pain in the ass
Maybe that's why Linus wrote his own revision control system that has as little to do as possible with people 'holding files".
Anyway, with probably close to one billion "customers", whether a particular release happens by midnight tonight isn't really relevant to this organization. What matters is productivity averaged over time.
I've also noticed that another feature of most of those restaurant chain birthday songs is that unlike the real song, they're written to require a vocal range of only about one eighth of an octave. I presume that's done to match the voice talent typically available in the random collection of waitstaff who "sing" them.
You know how they always say "80% of the users only use 20% of the features". Well, those features look like they belong solidly in that 20% that they should have focused on. I'm pretty sure that even 1980s vintage copies of WordPerfect running on DOS supported those features.
Cryptography, as understood by speakers of the English language, means encoding information with algorithms to make them difficult or impossible to decode without the secret key.
It's not a silver bullet because of the biggest risk of fission power technology: nuclear proliferation.
If the nuclear energy is the one solution to the worlds energy needs, then ALL countries, including Iran, Syria, and every single state in Africa will need its very own nuclear power industry. And every one of those countries realizes that a nuclear weapon would be the trump card that prevents them from being invaded by hostile neighbors, and it would make even GWB think twice about an attack.
With orders of magnitude more nuclear facilities sprinkled around the world than we already have, and huge amounts of fuel reprocessing added on to supply all of that, it would be easier than ever to hide weapons programs or feign plausible deniability. And of course, with more and more unstable countries cranking out nukes, that just increases the odds of getting these weapons into the hands of The Terrorists.
Every single country that has acquired nuclear weapons since the 1960s has hidden their work under the guise of nuclear power generation or "research" (and you wouldn't have much excuse for "research" if not for power).
And no handwaving about how some new and untested reactor technology is going to make that impossible, or somehow today's dysfunctional international regulators can be fixed. All of that is just rehashing the No True Scotsmen line.
No, the ads are usually in the correctly dated flyers. The problem is that either: (a) the computer system that correlates the promotions and the actual prices is just plain hosed, or (b) as you suggest, they're not using a computer at all -- in which case the whole premise of the article is invalidated.
Humans fuck up all the time. We're really good at it. Just look at your typo-ridden post if you need a reminder.
Looks like I struck a nerve. You must be one of the incompetent developers who programs these systems. "Oh! but the margins are so low! Don't blame *us* for fraudulently shafting the customers! There isn't enough money to do it right!"
However, making grammatically correct posts on blogs isn't my career. OTOH, the people who can't seem to program their pricing systems are failing at their life's work.
Supermarkets can't seem to get the most basic data processing concepts right. If they correctly applied ACID principals to their databases, it would be impossible for an advertised special to not ring up at the discounted price, or for an item picked up from the store shelves to not scan at all. But for us, this seems to happen more often than not, and it's been going on for decades.
I always thought that was a stupid analogy anyway. There are also no unsoiled underpants in foxholes. But very few people think that means we should all go around shitting our pants on a regular basis.
Living by what your brain spews out under severe overstress doesn't make much sense. It's like using results from your computer that it calculated while you were zapping the motherboard with a Tesla coil.
The alternative to the patent system isn't everything becomes public domain. It's no one tells anyone else what they've discovered.
Yeah, if Amazon hadn't revealed their revolutionary one-click ordering brainstorm to the world on their patent application, then we'd still all be sitting here wondering:
"How the hell did that Amazon order happen so easily? God, I wish I could figure that out! There must be some trick to it."
Slashdot Mirror
So to save a little typing to format a 1-inch formula, you'd rather make your readers decipher things like:
VOLUME IS EQUAL TO THE INTEGRAL OF PI MULTIPLIED BY RADIUS SQUARED DIVIDED BY HEIGHT SQUARED MULTIPLIED BY X SQUARED MULTIPLIED BY DX ON X FROM 0 TO HEIGHT
(Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING)
Those words are free-form natural language, which computers currently can't understand. So they would be useless. Computer programs at present do not contain free-form prose.
What COBOL does is nothing more than a mechanical replacement of the formal symbols you'd find in a math paper with capitalized English words. While a few people may feel that's somehow letting people program with a natural language, it's simply not true. It doesn't change the situation one bit as far as the computers are concerned because it's logically equivalent to conventional math symbols, but just with harder to read lexical tokens.
but start maintaining large software and clarity is paramount.
Mathematicians have spent many centuries refining how best to expresses mathematical operations with clarity -- And they sure as hell didn't pick spelled out English verbs in all caps.
That's not clarity; instead, it looks like that obfuscated legalese from an EULA text box.
LOL. Try actually computing how much land area is required to cover 1% of US electrical baseload given 20% solar panel efficiency and 600W - 1000W incident solar radiation per square meter on a perfectly sunny day in May (e.g. most optimal time of the year.)
You should quickly come to the realization that solar is a complete boondoggle, even at 100% panel efficiency.
Annualized average US power = 440GW. Your 1% of US power is 4.4GW. At 20% of 800W/m^2, that's 6800 acres, or about 10 square miles.
You seem to have a problem with that?
IIRC, about 1/6 of the 90,000,000 acres of corn grown in the US goes to silly schemes to make ethanol, which is 2000 times as much land as your example. That seems like a prime candidate to replace with far more efficient solar panels, especially if the areas with the most dire depletion of aquifers are reallocated first.
Then you're calculating $/W wrong, because this cost should obviously be included. Of course $/W is meaningless if the $ part is only whatever fraction of the cost you feel like putting in a news article.
You seem confused. I"m calculating $/W correctly because I did include all the costs, not just land. I explained how efficiency affects that. I didn't put anything into a news article.
I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.
I'd bet it's because the physical structure that holds the cells, along with site preparation, probably costs much more per square meter than the land itself. So a more efficient cell would directly lead to a reduction in $/W by minimizing this overhead.
There's a standard template to apply to any debate about the history of computing:
The first computer with $GIVEN_FEATURE was actually invented by $GENIUS_LONER who worked for $SOME_INSTITUTION in $CENTRAL_EUROPEAN_COUNTRY a full $N_GREATER_THAN_10 years before $GIVEN_DATE. Sadly, his invention was ignored because of $INSTITUTION_POLITICS, the inventor's $PERSONAL_FAILINGS, and meddling by the $OPPRESSIVE_REGIME. Only a single example of the system was built, and it languished in $DISUSED_BASEMENT, until was unfortunately destroyed during $WARTIME_EVENT.
I hear that if you tightly wrap your phone with tin foil, then it will disable these alerts.
And the look will coordinate nicely with your hat.
if Jim disappears at 2PM and is holding the important file with him its a real fucking pain in the ass
Maybe that's why Linus wrote his own revision control system that has as little to do as possible with people 'holding files".
Anyway, with probably close to one billion "customers", whether a particular release happens by midnight tonight isn't really relevant to this organization. What matters is productivity averaged over time.
I'm fairly serious. Those songs have little more range than one whole note.
I've also noticed that another feature of most of those restaurant chain birthday songs is that unlike the real song, they're written to require a vocal range of only about one eighth of an octave. I presume that's done to match the voice talent typically available in the random collection of waitstaff who "sing" them.
font options, text alignment, bulleted lists
You know how they always say "80% of the users only use 20% of the features". Well, those features look like they belong solidly in that 20% that they should have focused on. I'm pretty sure that even 1980s vintage copies of WordPerfect running on DOS supported those features.
Please by specific.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't figure out WTF you're trying to get at.
Cryptography, as understood by speakers of the English language, means encoding information with algorithms to make them difficult or impossible to decode without the secret key.
What, pray tell, is this "idiom" of yours?
Crypto == obfuscation.
A good crypto algorithm is about 30 orders of magnitude harder to crack than decompiling a binary executable.
Can you even begin to comprehend the difference?
It reminds me more of the science demo where they set up a room full of mousetraps, each with a ping pong ball on it.
There is no way to make tampering with the process impossible.
Like most geeks, you seem to think that some air-tight technical solution exists that will fix this political problem.
It's not a silver bullet because of the biggest risk of fission power technology: nuclear proliferation.
If the nuclear energy is the one solution to the worlds energy needs, then ALL countries, including Iran, Syria, and every single state in Africa will need its very own nuclear power industry. And every one of those countries realizes that a nuclear weapon would be the trump card that prevents them from being invaded by hostile neighbors, and it would make even GWB think twice about an attack.
With orders of magnitude more nuclear facilities sprinkled around the world than we already have, and huge amounts of fuel reprocessing added on to supply all of that, it would be easier than ever to hide weapons programs or feign plausible deniability. And of course, with more and more unstable countries cranking out nukes, that just increases the odds of getting these weapons into the hands of The Terrorists.
Every single country that has acquired nuclear weapons since the 1960s has hidden their work under the guise of nuclear power generation or "research" (and you wouldn't have much excuse for "research" if not for power).
And no handwaving about how some new and untested reactor technology is going to make that impossible, or somehow today's dysfunctional international regulators can be fixed. All of that is just rehashing the No True Scotsmen line.
So, it's not "High-Tech Hotbed", but just a fucked up mess. And a fraudulent one at that.
Thanks for clearing that up.
So you're saying it's done by word of mouth.
So much for "Supermarkets: Hight-Tech Hotbed".
Unless the advertiser prints the ad too early.
No, the ads are usually in the correctly dated flyers. The problem is that either: (a) the computer system that correlates the promotions and the actual prices is just plain hosed, or (b) as you suggest, they're not using a computer at all -- in which case the whole premise of the article is invalidated.
Humans fuck up all the time. We're really good at it. Just look at your typo-ridden post if you need a reminder.
Looks like I struck a nerve. You must be one of the incompetent developers who programs these systems. "Oh! but the margins are so low! Don't blame *us* for fraudulently shafting the customers! There isn't enough money to do it right!"
Gee, it looks like I did make a careless mistake.
However, making grammatically correct posts on blogs isn't my career. OTOH, the people who can't seem to program their pricing systems are failing at their life's work.
Supermarkets can't seem to get the most basic data processing concepts right. If they correctly applied ACID principals to their databases, it would be impossible for an advertised special to not ring up at the discounted price, or for an item picked up from the store shelves to not scan at all. But for us, this seems to happen more often than not, and it's been going on for decades.
Lame.
I always thought that was a stupid analogy anyway. There are also no unsoiled underpants in foxholes. But very few people think that means we should all go around shitting our pants on a regular basis.
Living by what your brain spews out under severe overstress doesn't make much sense. It's like using results from your computer that it calculated while you were zapping the motherboard with a Tesla coil.
The alternative to the patent system isn't everything becomes public domain. It's no one tells anyone else what they've discovered.
Yeah, if Amazon hadn't revealed their revolutionary one-click ordering brainstorm to the world on their patent application, then we'd still all be sitting here wondering:
"How the hell did that Amazon order happen so easily? God, I wish I could figure that out! There must be some trick to it."