SheepShaver. When Apple dropped support for the Classic Environment, this became our only practical link to the fabulous apps of our youth (or our parents' youth, if you're a young pup).
Ok -- I apologize for the miscommunication. I believe you about the superiority of Javascript. My only skepticism is that it can, say, manipulate the contents of spreadsheet cells the way VBA can. If there's a tutorial that says, "Here we'll show you how language X can automate repetitive tasks in Office apps, as easily as VBA can," I don't know of one.
Part of what Dennis Overbye wrote for the New York Times:
I no longer expect to see boot prints on Mars during my lifetime, nor do I expect that whoever eventually makes those boot prints will be drawing a paycheck from NASA, or even speaking English.
I understand that to a real computer scientist, VBA sucks. But I've done some interesting things with it. For example, I wrote a sudoku solver in Excel. You can watch the numbers in the spreadsheet cells change as it converges toward the solution. How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.
Yes, most programs overpromise to some extent. However, "but mom, everybody's doing it!" is hardly a defense.
I hate to see JWST go, but there's a potential silver lining to this. Here's how I hope it goes down: if the worst offenders, like JWST, get the axe, it will cause the surviving programs to become cost-conscious, lest they suffer the same fate. In the end, our science dollars will have accomplished more than if all programs had received an unconditional blank check. Not really a paradox if you think about it.
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP.
It's not entirely ridiculous. Comparing certain categories of spending against a total budget lets you know whether that category is becoming more affordable.
Over the past few decades, technology and productivity gains have made just about everything more affordable. Example: when a typical family dropped $2000 on an Apple ][e in 1983, that was perhaps 7% of their annual income, but when a typical family spends $1000 on a MacBook in 2011, it's only perhaps 1% of their annual income. Similarly, the fraction of family budgets spent on staples like milk and bread has been dropping. The net result of all this is more funds left over for luxuries that previous generations could rarely afford. That, in a nutshell, is progress.
Now scale the concept up to the national budget. Expressing it as a percent of GDP shows that defense, too, has become more affordable. (You can argue that we should have taken a bigger "peace dividend" when the cold war ended, and I might agree with you on that, but that's not the point. The point is, calculating the percent of GDP devoted to defense is not entirely ridiculous.)
So. We've seen that defense, like most other things, has become more affordable. Just about the only thing that hasn't become more affordable over the years is the non-defense portion of government. And that, my friend, is a huge problem. Here's the part of my post that will elicit derision from some readers: creeping socialism is to blame. But really... if you can think of anywhere else to place the blame for the indisputable fact that non-defense government spending, both in absolute terms and as a percent of GDP, is out of control, I'm all ears.
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future
That's an unbelievably irresponsible attitude.
Medicare's unfunded liabilites are $89 TRILLION (source: 2009 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports). In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come. If that doesn't qualify as an existential threat to the United States, I don't know what does. This number should terrorize you much more than al Qaeda ever did. It does me.
When this hits the fan, no one can say they hadn't been warned -- this coming disaster is a "known known."
The only way out is a massive reform of the program, and soon. Yes, Paul Ryan's plan qualifies. Hope you're not a partisan who automatically rejects any idea thought up by a Republican.
When Lyndon Johnson created the Medicare program, he was seduced by cost projections that were orders of magnitude too small. Love him or hate him, the man didn't have a death wish for his country's economy, so it's safe to say that he wouldn't have touched the Medicare idea with a 10 foot pole if he had known the true costs of the beast it would grow into.
"Leaving it to the future" will make the unfunded liability grow larger, faster (and obviously, to reach $89 trillion it has already undergone massive exponential growth). You don't have kids or grandkids, do you? If you do, your cavalier attitude about saddling them with unthinkable burdens is akin to child abuse.
Duh... of course average users can, and will, easily use the ActiveX bindings of non-VBA languages to create cross-platform ways to automate repetitive tasks in their M$ Office apps. That's exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for setting me straight, AC.
I don't understand the enthusiasm for nuclear in the light of the above, or the recent disasters.
I can think of only one recent nuclear disaster. It didn't dim my enthusiasm for nuclear in the least because, you see, I'm not enthusiastic about 50-year-old reactor designs like the one used at Fukushima. I'm enthusiastic about the new designs that are orders of magnitude safer. Unfortunately the general public isn't aware the new designs exist -- they think that when "Republicans continue to press for more nuclear energy," they're pressing for more Fukushimas, and the media of course does nothing to fix that perception.
M$ is trying to get away with marketing unscriptable office apps once again (Office 365 doesn't support VBA macros).
What happened the last time they did this? Office 2008 for Mac dropped support for VBA macros. Customers complained mightily, and now it's back in Office 2011 for Mac.
There's only so much one can do with unscriptable office apps. M$'s new "ribbon interface" is hardly a breakthrough. Things only get interesting when users have access to automation and an easy-to-use programming language like VBA.
Apple is not the only company with the financial means to employ that strategy; therefore, the strategy is not to blame for the difficulty of duplicating its products.
Instead of using expensive PV cells, the solar telescope uses commercially available triple-junction solar cells
In fact, triple-junction cells are far more expensive than garden-variety PV cells. The cost savings come from the fact that sunlight is concentrated onto a much smaller area of cells. And this is hardly the first company that has applied that idea; for example, see Energy Innovations, Inc.
Roger Angel has designed a new type of solar concentrator that uses half the area of solar (PV) cells used by other optical devices and delivers a light output/concentration that is over 1000 times more concentrated before it even hits the cells.
If the light is concentrated over 1000 times, wouldn't the the device require less than 1/1000 the area of solar cells, relative to a solar panel that lacked a concentrator?
Adam Werbach wrote, Unlike 2008, when it seemed like we were starting our innovation engine from a cold start, we now have a robust field of clean energy technologies that are slowly coming online, from thinfilm solar to fuel cells to cellulosic ethanol.
When it comes to fuel cells, at least, this is darn misleading. Fuel cells were invented in the 1830s. There have been a few refinements over the decades, but state-of-the-art fuel cells in 2011 differ very little from those in 2008.
Why should a casual listener who downloads a dozen songs per month pay the same amount as a music-obsessed person who's amassing a multi-gigabyte collection?
inhabibat.com wrote, The researchers, Associate Professor Lei Zhai and Postdoctoral Associate Jianhua Zou, believe that this material could soon become the best energy storage material for capacitors and batteries.
More fluff technology journalism. Energy storage materials for capacitors are quite different from energy storage materials for batteries (no chemical reaction takes place when capacitors are charged or discharged). These "multi-walled carbon nanotubes" can't be used for both applications; I suspect they could be useful in a capacitor, but not in a battery.
the positrons are not escaping into space... TFA has it right
No, TFA says "When antimatter striking [the spacecraft named] Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays... The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft."
So, either TFA doesn't have it right, or the positrons are traveling all the way up to the altitude of the spacecraft. (I agree with you that that seems unlikely, given the mean free path in the atmosphere.)
If the attacker turns out to be a tea party paranoid type, then I honestly believe people like Beck hold indirect responsibility for the attack.
You obviously haven't spent much time getting to know Beck.
He regularly criticizes those on the left who call for violence, and passionately urges his audience to never stoop to that level.
He requires his associates to sign the exact same Pledge of Nonviolence that Martin Luther King Jr. employed in his organization. What's more, if you go to the link I provided, then click the "VIEW RECENT SIGNATURES" link, you'll see that to date, 93,847 members of Beck's audience have signed that same Pledge of Nonviolence.
Here is some text written by Beck, that I have just copied from his web site: "pray for the leaders of our country. Pray for their safety."
By "leaders of our country," Beck means people like Rep. Giffords. But here you are, holding someone "indirectly responsible for the attack" on Giffords, who in fact implores people to pray for her safety. You're a real, uninformed, piece of work. When you've promoted nonviolence 1% as much as Glenn Beck has -- which you never will in your lifetime, "chebucto" -- come back here and take some more cheap shots at him.
During ABC News' coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, Peter Jennings was addressing the camera while a screen behind him carried a live image of the World Trade Center towers. Millions of people saw the first tower collapse while Jennings obliviously continued to talk. It as a good twenty seconds before a staff member got Jennings' attention and told him to look at the screen; at which point the collapse of the first tower was pretty much complete.
Am I alone in thinking we should not have apps for highly specialized tasks that a user will only need once every few years (like renewing a gun license)? Soon users will rebel against the cluttering of their phones with hundreds of ridiculous apps. ("Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?")
How about -- gasp -- creating a web site where people can renew their gun licenses? All iPhone users already have an app for that: [mobile] Safari
Another very promising anti-cancer drug, that's probably being overlooked because it can be manufactured very cheaply, is bromopyruvic acid. The preliminary research was done by Dr. Young Ko at Johns Hopkins.
MSNBC wrote, The FCC needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.
This simply isn't true. The FCC could, say, contract with Windstream Communications to upgrade its network such that DSL is available to all households in its service area. After negotiations result in a price both parties agree to, Windstream does the work. No additional regulatory authority needed.
I recently saw a comparison chart of various ISPs; for the benefit of consumers who consider this a selling point, the chart showed which ISPs were and were not filtering BitTorrent traffic. (Sorry I am unable to find that chart again right now, wish I could.)
Slashdot Mirror
MAME OS X. Dave Dribin can no longer work on this, now that he works for Apple. The forum for discussing MAME OS X is: http://forums.bannister.org/
SheepShaver. When Apple dropped support for the Classic Environment, this became our only practical link to the fabulous apps of our youth (or our parents' youth, if you're a young pup).
Ok -- I apologize for the miscommunication. I believe you about the superiority of Javascript. My only skepticism is that it can, say, manipulate the contents of spreadsheet cells the way VBA can. If there's a tutorial that says, "Here we'll show you how language X can automate repetitive tasks in Office apps, as easily as VBA can," I don't know of one.
Just as I thought... you have no real answers and you're totally blowing smoke.
Part of what Dennis Overbye wrote for the New York Times:
I no longer expect to see boot prints on Mars during my lifetime, nor do I expect that whoever eventually makes those boot prints will be drawing a paycheck from NASA, or even speaking English.
I understand that to a real computer scientist, VBA sucks. But I've done some interesting things with it. For example, I wrote a sudoku solver in Excel. You can watch the numbers in the spreadsheet cells change as it converges toward the solution. How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.
Maybe my use of the sarcasm tag in the post to which you replied should have been explicit.
Yes, most programs overpromise to some extent. However, "but mom, everybody's doing it!" is hardly a defense.
I hate to see JWST go, but there's a potential silver lining to this. Here's how I hope it goes down: if the worst offenders, like JWST, get the axe, it will cause the surviving programs to become cost-conscious, lest they suffer the same fate. In the end, our science dollars will have accomplished more than if all programs had received an unconditional blank check. Not really a paradox if you think about it.
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP.
It's not entirely ridiculous. Comparing certain categories of spending against a total budget lets you know whether that category is becoming more affordable.
Over the past few decades, technology and productivity gains have made just about everything more affordable. Example: when a typical family dropped $2000 on an Apple ][e in 1983, that was perhaps 7% of their annual income, but when a typical family spends $1000 on a MacBook in 2011, it's only perhaps 1% of their annual income. Similarly, the fraction of family budgets spent on staples like milk and bread has been dropping. The net result of all this is more funds left over for luxuries that previous generations could rarely afford. That, in a nutshell, is progress.
Now scale the concept up to the national budget. Expressing it as a percent of GDP shows that defense, too, has become more affordable. (You can argue that we should have taken a bigger "peace dividend" when the cold war ended, and I might agree with you on that, but that's not the point. The point is, calculating the percent of GDP devoted to defense is not entirely ridiculous.)
So. We've seen that defense, like most other things, has become more affordable. Just about the only thing that hasn't become more affordable over the years is the non-defense portion of government. And that, my friend, is a huge problem. Here's the part of my post that will elicit derision from some readers: creeping socialism is to blame. But really... if you can think of anywhere else to place the blame for the indisputable fact that non-defense government spending, both in absolute terms and as a percent of GDP, is out of control, I'm all ears.
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future
That's an unbelievably irresponsible attitude.
Medicare's unfunded liabilites are $89 TRILLION (source: 2009 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports). In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come. If that doesn't qualify as an existential threat to the United States, I don't know what does. This number should terrorize you much more than al Qaeda ever did. It does me.
When this hits the fan, no one can say they hadn't been warned -- this coming disaster is a "known known."
The only way out is a massive reform of the program, and soon. Yes, Paul Ryan's plan qualifies. Hope you're not a partisan who automatically rejects any idea thought up by a Republican.
When Lyndon Johnson created the Medicare program, he was seduced by cost projections that were orders of magnitude too small. Love him or hate him, the man didn't have a death wish for his country's economy, so it's safe to say that he wouldn't have touched the Medicare idea with a 10 foot pole if he had known the true costs of the beast it would grow into.
"Leaving it to the future" will make the unfunded liability grow larger, faster (and obviously, to reach $89 trillion it has already undergone massive exponential growth). You don't have kids or grandkids, do you? If you do, your cavalier attitude about saddling them with unthinkable burdens is akin to child abuse.
Duh... of course average users can, and will, easily use the ActiveX bindings of non-VBA languages to create cross-platform ways to automate repetitive tasks in their M$ Office apps. That's exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for setting me straight, AC.
I don't understand the enthusiasm for nuclear in the light of the above, or the recent disasters.
I can think of only one recent nuclear disaster. It didn't dim my enthusiasm for nuclear in the least because, you see, I'm not enthusiastic about 50-year-old reactor designs like the one used at Fukushima. I'm enthusiastic about the new designs that are orders of magnitude safer. Unfortunately the general public isn't aware the new designs exist -- they think that when "Republicans continue to press for more nuclear energy," they're pressing for more Fukushimas, and the media of course does nothing to fix that perception.
M$ is trying to get away with marketing unscriptable office apps once again (Office 365 doesn't support VBA macros).
What happened the last time they did this? Office 2008 for Mac dropped support for VBA macros. Customers complained mightily, and now it's back in Office 2011 for Mac.
There's only so much one can do with unscriptable office apps. M$'s new "ribbon interface" is hardly a breakthrough. Things only get interesting when users have access to automation and an easy-to-use programming language like VBA.
Apple is not the only company with the financial means to employ that strategy; therefore, the strategy is not to blame for the difficulty of duplicating its products.
Instead of using expensive PV cells, the solar telescope uses commercially available triple-junction solar cells
In fact, triple-junction cells are far more expensive than garden-variety PV cells. The cost savings come from the fact that sunlight is concentrated onto a much smaller area of cells. And this is hardly the first company that has applied that idea; for example, see Energy Innovations, Inc.
Roger Angel has designed a new type of solar concentrator that uses half the area of solar (PV) cells used by other optical devices and delivers a light output/concentration that is over 1000 times more concentrated before it even hits the cells.
If the light is concentrated over 1000 times, wouldn't the the device require less than 1/1000 the area of solar cells, relative to a solar panel that lacked a concentrator?
Hey Rei, you seem really knowledgeable about this stuff.
What's your take on EESTOR... should we give up all hope that they'll ever deliver a product?
Has anyone actually fabricated a "nano-capacitor," or are you speaking theoretically?
Adam Werbach wrote, Unlike 2008, when it seemed like we were starting our innovation engine from a cold start, we now have a robust field of clean energy technologies that are slowly coming online, from thinfilm solar to fuel cells to cellulosic ethanol.
When it comes to fuel cells, at least, this is darn misleading. Fuel cells were invented in the 1830s. There have been a few refinements over the decades, but state-of-the-art fuel cells in 2011 differ very little from those in 2008.
Why should a casual listener who downloads a dozen songs per month pay the same amount as a music-obsessed person who's amassing a multi-gigabyte collection?
inhabibat.com wrote, The researchers, Associate Professor Lei Zhai and Postdoctoral Associate Jianhua Zou, believe that this material could soon become the best energy storage material for capacitors and batteries.
More fluff technology journalism. Energy storage materials for capacitors are quite different from energy storage materials for batteries (no chemical reaction takes place when capacitors are charged or discharged). These "multi-walled carbon nanotubes" can't be used for both applications; I suspect they could be useful in a capacitor, but not in a battery.
the positrons are not escaping into space... TFA has it right
No, TFA says "When antimatter striking [the spacecraft named] Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays... The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft."
So, either TFA doesn't have it right, or the positrons are traveling all the way up to the altitude of the spacecraft. (I agree with you that that seems unlikely, given the mean free path in the atmosphere.)
If the attacker turns out to be a tea party paranoid type, then I honestly believe people like Beck hold indirect responsibility for the attack.
You obviously haven't spent much time getting to know Beck.
By "leaders of our country," Beck means people like Rep. Giffords. But here you are, holding someone "indirectly responsible for the attack" on Giffords, who in fact implores people to pray for her safety. You're a real, uninformed, piece of work. When you've promoted nonviolence 1% as much as Glenn Beck has -- which you never will in your lifetime, "chebucto" -- come back here and take some more cheap shots at him.
During ABC News' coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, Peter Jennings was addressing the camera while a screen behind him carried a live image of the World Trade Center towers. Millions of people saw the first tower collapse while Jennings obliviously continued to talk. It as a good twenty seconds before a staff member got Jennings' attention and told him to look at the screen; at which point the collapse of the first tower was pretty much complete.
Am I alone in thinking we should not have apps for highly specialized tasks that a user will only need once every few years (like renewing a gun license)? Soon users will rebel against the cluttering of their phones with hundreds of ridiculous apps. ("Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?")
How about -- gasp -- creating a web site where people can renew their gun licenses? All iPhone users already have an app for that: [mobile] Safari
Another very promising anti-cancer drug, that's probably being overlooked because it can be manufactured very cheaply, is bromopyruvic acid. The preliminary research was done by Dr. Young Ko at Johns Hopkins.
MSNBC wrote, The FCC needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.
This simply isn't true. The FCC could, say, contract with Windstream Communications to upgrade its network such that DSL is available to all households in its service area. After negotiations result in a price both parties agree to, Windstream does the work. No additional regulatory authority needed.
I recently saw a comparison chart of various ISPs; for the benefit of consumers who consider this a selling point, the chart showed which ISPs were and were not filtering BitTorrent traffic. (Sorry I am unable to find that chart again right now, wish I could.)