Specifically, my dad had a very cool looking light green '67 Ford Galaxie 500 with a 390 cubic inch V8. When I needed info for a report, my mom used it to drive me down to the public library, probably getting about 9 mpg. So we consumed about 20 kWh worth of fully leaded fuel to do a few simple queries. That's probably enough energy to run one of Google's server nodes for more than a week, but at least we did it in style.
There was no need to cross the oceans to the new world either. Absolutely nothing over there that we don't already have right here.
What a stupid analogy. As soon as they got there, explorers found that the new world was chock full of high value stuff that could be easily snatched from their owners and transported back to Europe at reasonable cost.
The moon, OTOH, is nothing more than an airless rock made up almost entirely of low-value elements. And it costs $billions just to send a carload of people there for a 1-week vacation.
Because in 40 years we haven't matched the accomplishment.
Largely because there's no need to. There is little if anything the moon of any economic value, and certainly nothing worth the cost of getting there. There's no more cold war pissing contest adversaries, so that motivation is gone.
We got what we needed from the original mission: enough scientific data to verify the leading theory about how the moon was formed. If we ever need to get more moon rocks, advances in robotics and automation now make it possible to achieve everything Apollo did and more with unmanned sample return probes, at a small fraction of the cost.
Mars will be pretty much the same story, just with all the costs increased by orders of magnitude.
And the highways weren't socialist. The Interstate Freeway System was designed as a Department of Defense project.
That's the biggest load of bull ever foisted on dimwitted "fiscal conservatives". Of course they said it's "for the military". We have to support the troops!
Bunk. You know full well that the entire reason they built those freeways was because the American public wanted to drive fast in big cars.
If all they wanted was to was move military convoys, they could have paved a right-of-way no wider than a single railroad track, at orders of magnitude less cost.
BTW, the US Department of Defense is one of the biggest socialist programs on this planet.
The best argument I've ever heard against subsidies for Green technology was from a VC in Silicon Valley and the interview was in Scientific American a few months ago - and I can't find the damn article.
One thing that made this nation great in its heyday was this: We didn't have a bunch of hand wringers from libertarian think tanks getting in the way of progress. If we had, this country would never have achieved anything that couldn't safely return a profit within the next two quarters.
When there was a major goal to accomplish, government and industry got together and put together the taxpayer funded handouts it took to do the job. Whether it was gifting free land to railroads, building canals in Central America, providing major subsidies for air mail, creating massive socialist highway building programs to help auto makers, or hundreds of other things., they stepped up to the plate and said: Git 'er Done.
I have quite a bit of experience with LISP. I also did quite a bit of work with it during AI bubble of the 1980s. That's where my disdain for the language started. (More recently I've also done work in Scheme. It's an improvement over old-school LISP, but not by much.)
During the AI craze, I quickly realized that the emperor had no clothes. In spite of all these professors hacking away with their elegant parentheses, I could see that their goals were never going to be possible because at the end of the day they were still trying to cram a brain's worth of pattern matching through a single 16-bit accumulator. There is nothing about LISP that fixes that fact, although all the self-referential bells and whistles of the language seemed to fool a lot of people into thinking otherwise. I dropped that field of study as fast as I could.
As it turns out, I was exactly right, and the AI hoopla went precisely nowhere for 30 years. (My opinion on AI is open to change lately, but only because of the sheer brute force computational horsepower available today that's millions of times faster than the 1980s. If and when real AI progress is made, whether it gets coded in LISP - or more likely some GPU assembly language - won't be very relevant.)
Um, LISP has almost no syntax idiosyncrasies - that's the point.
That's not the point. The lack of character-level syntax just moves the quirks up to the next level. LISP has lots of syntax, it's just embedded in the abstract shape of the CONS node graphs. The biggest thing that achieves is making it almost impossible to use your brain's sophisticated visual processing hardware to help understand the code you're looking at. Everything has to be cerebral and oh-so-clever. Well, most people's minds just don't work that way. That's a big reason that LISP-derived languages make a poor choice for an application scripting language.
Seriously, who needs first class continuations and hygienic macros in an application script? IMO, the only thing that Lisp and its offspring are good for is implementing other languages. If the data and algorithms in your problem don't map directly onto a tree made of singly linked lists visited with recursion, Lisp's idiosyncrasies just get in the way of what you're trying to do.
And all the powerful features that let you redefine language constructs make it like talking to a stoned hippie: "What do these one-off custom control structures actually do?" "Whatever you want them to do, man..."
I once tried to use guile in the Gimp to do a few simple filters. Between the abysmal documentation and the clumsy syntax, I gave up in disgust after a couple of hours, and installed the Python Image Library instead. My sanity was saved.
My "Why?" question is: Why do people think they need an IDE for Python at all?
I could see people using an IDE for a brittle, boilerplate-filled language like C++, but I don't see how it helps developing in a stripped down language like Python. I've never felt the need for anything beyond gvim with a few tweaked macro settings for Python development. I really don't see the need to overcomplicate things with some kind of "Studio" just to write some code in a scripting language.
In my opinion, the state of space exploration today is to its potential as alchemy was to modern chemistry.
That's a good analogy. Alchemists were obsessed with turning lead into gold. Space nutters are obsessed with having humans colonize space.
As it turns out, both goals are technically possible, but neither is worth the effort with any foreseeable human technology. Chemists figured that out long ago and applied their knowledge to other, more useful, problems. NASA should likewise dump human space flight.
If and when transmutation of elements becomes cheap and easy, we can revisit creating gold for profit. Likewise, AFTER we have developed a feasible interstellar propulsion system, THEN we can start hiring astronauts.
Meanwhile, if you're worried about human extinction due to bad things happening on earth, you could get very effective insurance against that by building and staffing a dozen or so Dr. Strangelove style underground bunkers. This probably could be achieved within a few short years at well under $100 billion cost. However, it's not sexy enough for the space nutters, so they'll keep pushing for a Mars colony that would probably not be truly self sufficient for centuries.
The costs and resources for segregated lanes should be assigned to motorized traffic. Cars and trucks are what make roadways so dangerous that people can't walk or ride bikes on them without putting their lives in peril.
Without cars and trucks, you wouldn't need separate bike lanes.
and the trillion of new debt spent on "stimulus" was actually very effective
Herbert Hoover tried the Tea Party approach to an economic meltdown, and the result was 25% unemployment, breadlines and tent cities. Did you see those things during this meltdown? This time around, shaking money out of the mattresses of cowering capitalists worked.
and that the key to economic growth actually is to hugely increase deficit spending and to raise the rate at which we tax the economy
Well, that's how things panned out during WWII. Maybe we should nationalize most industries as well to fully relive those boom times.
Not quite AMD started with an intel design. When Intel couldnt make enough 386 chips they got AMD to do help them (and a bunch others). That meant 'here are the plans to make it'.
Wrong. If 8086 chips were going to be put in the PC, IBM required that Intel have a second source manufacturer for the parts. So Intel contracted with AMD to also crank out the chips.
Intel tried to cancel this arrangement when the 80386 was introduced, and a long legal battle followed. In the mean time, AMD started a clean room design of a 386 clone. AMD has had their own distinct designs since then, and I'm sure that there's just about nothing from pre-386 chip internals that is in any way relevant to current CPU designs.
Somewhere along the line, the two companies also did a patent cross-licensing agreement, which allows them to freely copy each other's concepts.
How were they overpriced? They sold at the same exact price any other brick and mortar book store sold new books at - the price stamped on the back by the publisher.
Just about any amount stamped on a product by a manufacturer is by definition overpriced. Those numbers exist mainly so that retailers can show how much of a "discount" they're offering.
If you're a captive in a place like an airport gift shop, then you're usually stuck paying the full stamped overpriced amount. However, if a retailer tries charging those prices to non-captive customers, then they'll likely eventually find themselves in the same boat as Borders.
In 1996, Digital Equipment Corporation had a Alpha processor fabricated in a bad process uncorrected until 1999 that otherwise had the potential to play Doom3 in SOFTWARE RENDERING. Despite the corrected process reaching the same processor, this is the first company ever to reach 1GHz and was done in 1999, but it could've been done in 1996. The $10k workstation, made in America, and still had more potential than AMD and Intel but they were sold-out by Compaq and Hewlet-Packard.
Meanwhile Intel released the Pentium Pro architecture and its successors, which had a price/performance ratio competitive with Alpha, but could run the software people already had. With this, the Alpha was duly relegated to the dustbin of history.
It's hard to see how the software patent situation could possibly get any worse than it is.
Many more people have been bankrupted and/or put out of work than people like you have been helped by software patents. I'm sorry, but if you were to lose your government entitlement, it would be a small price to pay to restore sanity to the software industry.
The software industry was a thriving field long before the courts legislated software patents into existence from the bench. They're just not necessary.
What if you're someone who creates new things, then has them forcefully confiscated by a troll wielding a bunch of invalid patents that you can't afford to contest? That's a bigger injustice than anything you have presented.
Just like they say about criminal cases, it would be better to have 100 valid patents rejected than for the patent office to approve a single invalid patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Wehen I was a kid, we were more green.
Specifically, my dad had a very cool looking light green '67 Ford Galaxie 500 with a 390 cubic inch V8. When I needed info for a report, my mom used it to drive me down to the public library, probably getting about 9 mpg. So we consumed about 20 kWh worth of fully leaded fuel to do a few simple queries. That's probably enough energy to run one of Google's server nodes for more than a week, but at least we did it in style.
This is simply a tax on innovation.
No, it's a token fee that gets you a big, fat government entitlement, which you can then use as a club to stifle innovation.
(750 000 / 24) / 365.25 = 85.5578371 years
Whats the problem?
The problem is that HDD manufacturers don't tell you that all their MTBF ratings are actually specified in "dog hours".
There was no need to cross the oceans to the new world either. Absolutely nothing over there that we don't already have right here.
What a stupid analogy. As soon as they got there, explorers found that the new world was chock full of high value stuff that could be easily snatched from their owners and transported back to Europe at reasonable cost.
The moon, OTOH, is nothing more than an airless rock made up almost entirely of low-value elements. And it costs $billions just to send a carload of people there for a 1-week vacation.
I see you stopped reading my post at the first sentence.
Because in 40 years we haven't matched the accomplishment.
Largely because there's no need to. There is little if anything the moon of any economic value, and certainly nothing worth the cost of getting there. There's no more cold war pissing contest adversaries, so that motivation is gone.
We got what we needed from the original mission: enough scientific data to verify the leading theory about how the moon was formed. If we ever need to get more moon rocks, advances in robotics and automation now make it possible to achieve everything Apollo did and more with unmanned sample return probes, at a small fraction of the cost.
Mars will be pretty much the same story, just with all the costs increased by orders of magnitude.
And the highways weren't socialist. The Interstate Freeway System was designed as a Department of Defense project.
That's the biggest load of bull ever foisted on dimwitted "fiscal conservatives". Of course they said it's "for the military". We have to support the troops!
Bunk. You know full well that the entire reason they built those freeways was because the American public wanted to drive fast in big cars.
If all they wanted was to was move military convoys, they could have paved a right-of-way no wider than a single railroad track, at orders of magnitude less cost.
BTW, the US Department of Defense is one of the biggest socialist programs on this planet.
If Nixon tried to enter a Republican primary today, he'd be run out of town on a rail by teabaggers screaming that he's a left wing socialist radical.
The best argument I've ever heard against subsidies for Green technology was from a VC in Silicon Valley and the interview was in Scientific American a few months ago - and I can't find the damn article.
One thing that made this nation great in its heyday was this: We didn't have a bunch of hand wringers from libertarian think tanks getting in the way of progress. If we had, this country would never have achieved anything that couldn't safely return a profit within the next two quarters.
When there was a major goal to accomplish, government and industry got together and put together the taxpayer funded handouts it took to do the job. Whether it was gifting free land to railroads, building canals in Central America, providing major subsidies for air mail, creating massive socialist highway building programs to help auto makers, or hundreds of other things., they stepped up to the plate and said: Git 'er Done.
Of course it'll work.
Corporate welfare is how this country was built, and it's the engine behind today's fastest growing economies. Why change a winning formula?
I have quite a bit of experience with LISP. I also did quite a bit of work with it during AI bubble of the 1980s. That's where my disdain for the language started. (More recently I've also done work in Scheme. It's an improvement over old-school LISP, but not by much.)
During the AI craze, I quickly realized that the emperor had no clothes. In spite of all these professors hacking away with their elegant parentheses, I could see that their goals were never going to be possible because at the end of the day they were still trying to cram a brain's worth of pattern matching through a single 16-bit accumulator. There is nothing about LISP that fixes that fact, although all the self-referential bells and whistles of the language seemed to fool a lot of people into thinking otherwise. I dropped that field of study as fast as I could.
As it turns out, I was exactly right, and the AI hoopla went precisely nowhere for 30 years. (My opinion on AI is open to change lately, but only because of the sheer brute force computational horsepower available today that's millions of times faster than the 1980s. If and when real AI progress is made, whether it gets coded in LISP - or more likely some GPU assembly language - won't be very relevant.)
Um, LISP has almost no syntax idiosyncrasies - that's the point.
That's not the point. The lack of character-level syntax just moves the quirks up to the next level. LISP has lots of syntax, it's just embedded in the abstract shape of the CONS node graphs. The biggest thing that achieves is making it almost impossible to use your brain's sophisticated visual processing hardware to help understand the code you're looking at. Everything has to be cerebral and oh-so-clever. Well, most people's minds just don't work that way. That's a big reason that LISP-derived languages make a poor choice for an application scripting language.
Seriously, who needs first class continuations and hygienic macros in an application script? IMO, the only thing that Lisp and its offspring are good for is implementing other languages. If the data and algorithms in your problem don't map directly onto a tree made of singly linked lists visited with recursion, Lisp's idiosyncrasies just get in the way of what you're trying to do.
And all the powerful features that let you redefine language constructs make it like talking to a stoned hippie:
"What do these one-off custom control structures actually do?"
"Whatever you want them to do, man..."
I once tried to use guile in the Gimp to do a few simple filters. Between the abysmal documentation and the clumsy syntax, I gave up in disgust after a couple of hours, and installed the Python Image Library instead. My sanity was saved.
My "Why?" question is: Why do people think they need an IDE for Python at all?
I could see people using an IDE for a brittle, boilerplate-filled language like C++, but I don't see how it helps developing in a stripped down language like Python. I've never felt the need for anything beyond gvim with a few tweaked macro settings for Python development. I really don't see the need to overcomplicate things with some kind of "Studio" just to write some code in a scripting language.
Hmm... that sounds like a a good value to me.
When I choose HP, I'm getting more printer driver for my dollar.
In my opinion, the state of space exploration today is to its potential as alchemy was to modern chemistry.
That's a good analogy. Alchemists were obsessed with turning lead into gold. Space nutters are obsessed with having humans colonize space.
As it turns out, both goals are technically possible, but neither is worth the effort with any foreseeable human technology. Chemists figured that out long ago and applied their knowledge to other, more useful, problems. NASA should likewise dump human space flight.
If and when transmutation of elements becomes cheap and easy, we can revisit creating gold for profit. Likewise, AFTER we have developed a feasible interstellar propulsion system, THEN we can start hiring astronauts.
Meanwhile, if you're worried about human extinction due to bad things happening on earth, you could get very effective insurance against that by building and staffing a dozen or so Dr. Strangelove style underground bunkers. This probably could be achieved within a few short years at well under $100 billion cost. However, it's not sexy enough for the space nutters, so they'll keep pushing for a Mars colony that would probably not be truly self sufficient for centuries.
The costs and resources for segregated lanes should be assigned to motorized traffic. Cars and trucks are what make roadways so dangerous that people can't walk or ride bikes on them without putting their lives in peril.
Without cars and trucks, you wouldn't need separate bike lanes.
Whose code is this I think I know
'Tis filled with buffer overflows
His pointer is not stopping here
As the megs of garbage data grow
My CPU must think it queer
To scan for null bytes not found here
Between the stack and blocks of code
Canary values, segfault near
It gives the PC bell a quake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound's the sweep
Of swapping pages disk head shake
The stack is swelling very fast
But allocated buffer's past
And megs to fill before a crash
And megs to fill before a crash
Tea Party is wrong
That's obvious to most non-ideologues.
and the trillion of new debt spent on "stimulus" was actually very effective
Herbert Hoover tried the Tea Party approach to an economic meltdown, and the result was 25% unemployment, breadlines and tent cities. Did you see those things during this meltdown? This time around, shaking money out of the mattresses of cowering capitalists worked.
and that the key to economic growth actually is to hugely increase deficit spending and to raise the rate at which we tax the economy
Well, that's how things panned out during WWII. Maybe we should nationalize most industries as well to fully relive those boom times.
Not quite AMD started with an intel design. When Intel couldnt make enough 386 chips they got AMD to do help them (and a bunch others). That meant 'here are the plans to make it'.
Wrong. If 8086 chips were going to be put in the PC, IBM required that Intel have a second source manufacturer for the parts. So Intel contracted with AMD to also crank out the chips.
Intel tried to cancel this arrangement when the 80386 was introduced, and a long legal battle followed. In the mean time, AMD started a clean room design of a 386 clone. AMD has had their own distinct designs since then, and I'm sure that there's just about nothing from pre-386 chip internals that is in any way relevant to current CPU designs.
Somewhere along the line, the two companies also did a patent cross-licensing agreement, which allows them to freely copy each other's concepts.
There is also the question of where this money would have ended up if the government hadn't decided to spend it.
Probably most of it would have been invested in millions of square yards of ugly stucco siding on mcmansions.
How were they overpriced? They sold at the same exact price any other brick and mortar book store sold new books at - the price stamped on the back by the publisher.
Just about any amount stamped on a product by a manufacturer is by definition overpriced. Those numbers exist mainly so that retailers can show how much of a "discount" they're offering.
If you're a captive in a place like an airport gift shop, then you're usually stuck paying the full stamped overpriced amount. However, if a retailer tries charging those prices to non-captive customers, then they'll likely eventually find themselves in the same boat as Borders.
In 1996, Digital Equipment Corporation had a Alpha processor fabricated in a bad process uncorrected until 1999 that otherwise had the potential to play Doom3 in SOFTWARE RENDERING. Despite the corrected process reaching the same processor, this is the first company ever to reach 1GHz and was done in 1999, but it could've been done in 1996. The $10k workstation, made in America, and still had more potential than AMD and Intel but they were sold-out by Compaq and Hewlet-Packard.
Meanwhile Intel released the Pentium Pro architecture and its successors, which had a price/performance ratio competitive with Alpha, but could run the software people already had. With this, the Alpha was duly relegated to the dustbin of history.
98%? There wasn't really anything in his discussion that would be out of place in an honors high school science class.
It's hard to see how the software patent situation could possibly get any worse than it is.
Many more people have been bankrupted and/or put out of work than people like you have been helped by software patents. I'm sorry, but if you were to lose your government entitlement, it would be a small price to pay to restore sanity to the software industry.
The software industry was a thriving field long before the courts legislated software patents into existence from the bench. They're just not necessary.
What if you're someone who creates new things, then has them forcefully confiscated by a troll wielding a bunch of invalid patents that you can't afford to contest? That's a bigger injustice than anything you have presented.
Just like they say about criminal cases, it would be better to have 100 valid patents rejected than for the patent office to approve a single invalid patent.