This is not the first time we had to switch energy sources FAST.
This is, in fact, the first time we have to switch our primary fuel source at the global scale, when the current supplies are becoming increasingly scarce.
Up until the 1840's, night lamps were fueled by whale oil--but we ran in to a big problem: we were running out of whales to kill even back then.
Night lamps, heh. Do you have any idea how many things in the world around you are made affordable by cheap oil?
Today, we realize that we need to begin the transition from petroleum to other energy sources. Promising research into batteries with much higher storage density could mean far longer-ranged electric cars by 2020, and there is considerable money invested into growing oil-laden algae on a huge scale to use as a base to make motor fuels. I actually predict that by 2025 the average family car will be an all-electric vehicle with a full-charge range of 700 to 800 km (435 to 497 miles) that will be physically smaller than today's cars (remember, engine compartments will be much smaller) but just as roomy.
Yes, everybody who can afford it will switch to electric cars, but it cannot happen quickly and the transition will cost a lot, including temporary price spikes while production to meet the suddenly surging demand is ramping up. Money invested into algae guarantee nothing about it becoming a viable replacement for oil (we are talking about EROEI at least 20:1) any time soon, even with declining demand for petroleum-based fuels.
I think sewers are designed to have a gravity-only spill mode, but the routing of the sewage, and the degree of its treatment in this mode might be, erm, less than optimal.
* A side effect is that the traditional religions will probably not make ostentatious construction either.
Well, that part's been bothering me the most. The traditional religions (who decides which ones are traditional, BTW? Can I has a golden-domed Orthodox church?) are supposed to know their bounds, there's only one that is expressly prescribed to.
You don't need Sonera or the banks to do it for you. You can get your own personal X.509 certificate in a chip on a national ID card. I have mine since 2006, though I never used it.
Well, there were enough people to vote in Perussuomalaiset for at least one cycle (their support is eroding now), so the consensus is fairly wobbly. And the top party these days are the supposedly more individualistic centre-righties.
But Russia has the communist history, when most people working in a city had to live in a multi-storey apartment block, cars were scarce, and you couldn't even freely choose where to settle. This will take many decades to change.
Another difficulty is income disparity. Going from Home->Public Transit->Destination odds are very high you will encounter a desperate, aggressive, predatory person with *way* less to lose than you do.
I rode the metro for 14 years in post-Soviet Moscow. You don't need to spend a day there to see how much poverty and inequality that city has. The police are universally known for being corrupt pigs, though they can be effective against petty crime and hooliganism. The public transit is used by a lot of people from various walks of life, and I was not accosted by somebody I would like to avoid that often (tbf, I'm a 6 ft tall male and I am not prone to flashing expensive-looking stuff or travelling while piss-drunk).
Unless one of your company's major suppliers requires, in the interest of protecting its trade secrets, that all employees on your project work from secure facilities that are not part of a residence.
That's already rather unusual. OK, no teleworking in this case, but why not flex hours?
1. Much of the world's potential oilfields haven't been touched, mostly due to current environmental regulations, too harsh weather conditions, or the current limits on oil extraction technology. Geologists know that we've barely touched the potential oil and gas deposits off the North Slope of Alaska, and the continental shelves of the USA--deposits that could add hundreds of billions of barrels of crude oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to the potential US supply.
In other words, the hard-to-get oil, that will take a lot of expenditure to even ramp up the production.
And that's not including the potential to unlock two trillion barrels of oil from oil shale deposits. Right now, Russia is looking at starting to unlock the potential of oil and gas deposits in parts of Siberia that have yet to be explored--deposits that could be just as big as all of the Persian Gulf _combined_ if properly exploited.
"Not yet expored", "could be big", sounds reassuring. I'd like to see predictions from any reputable organization in the industry, that confirm a future growth of extraction. Because it'd better continue growing (for particular meanings of "better") at an exponential rate to sustain the expectations of the world's economic planners. That is, if we don't accept the possibility that they all have fallen in for a global, centuries-long Ponzi scheme, one that is ultimately defeated by laws of thermodynamics, and the bottom will fall out any decade now.
2. Many of the world's oilfields aren't using the gas or special fluid injection--methods originally developed to extract out highly-viscous California crude oil--to extend the life of oilfields. As such, possibly a third of the oil from older oilfields have yet to be extracted out.
Listen to yourself: you are saying "we can save ourselves by scraping vigorously at the bottom of the barrel".
3. There has been tremendous advances in using oil-laden algae to produce motor fuels in the last ten years. Research is continuing, and over the next decade motor fuels from oil-laden algae could become finally economically competitive with motor fuels from crude oil.
It did not reach a break-even point yet, and when it's done, we need to ramp up production, which requires a lot of energy and transportation. We may find ourselves needing to build all this shiny futuristic infrastructure at a time when the very resources needed to build it are becoming increasingly scarce and costly. The exponential curve meeting a fixed limit is a weird thing: it happens faster than any linear extrapolation from the past would led you to believe.
Remember, doomsayers have been screaming "Peak Oil!" for over 100 years!
For about half as long, in fact. Before that, there were basically physicists and some economists (such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mille), who saw an exponential growth curve and the finite Earth, and knew that something has to give. They did not know it's got to be oil that will run out first.
Most predictions were off by decades. But due to the exponentially growing nature of the modern economy, when the shit hits the fan, the rate of drastic changes will be paced in years.
But as new oilfields and better extraction technology has come online, the supply of petroleum and natural has gone through the roof.
The supply of petroleum has been a plateau since 2005, despite prices going through the roof for most of the time. Note also how the oil prices bounced back after the recession onset, while the overall economy is still in the slump.
Remember, it's only because of severe Siberian winters that Russia has not explored for more oil and natural gas in eastern Siberia--a place that might hold more oil and natural gas than all of the Persian Gulf _combined_. Here in the USA, we have potentially two trillion barrels of oil locked in oil shale, and once the technology to heat up the shale and pump out the oil "in situ" matures, the USA will in effect become energy independent because we'll no longer need to import oil from anywhere.
So how much is the energy return on energy invested from all those sources, compared to what we've come to rely on with, say, Persian Gulf oil? I can agree with you that it might be sufficient for the USA... for some decades, more if the current rate of consumption is fixed by some feat of divine intervention, and after the colossal infrastructure needed to replace the conventional oil supply is financed and built (requiring a lot of energy in the process). But that necessarily means the economy as we know it will be crashing all the while.
Possibly within 20 years, oil-laden algae could be grown on a large enough scale to produce gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet-fuel quality kerosene--essentially these fuels will come from a renewable resource.
Possibly. It's a bit worrying, though, to wager our well-being on a technological advance that may hit any number of efficiency walls before reaching replacement parity with good old oil.
In short, technology is about to out-run the doomsayers again....
... up until it can't anymore, because of the thermodynamics.
And it's not all doomsday scenarios. If all goes smooth, in more well-to-do parts of the world there will be some discomfort, downsizing, some financial parasites compelled to take more down-to-earth, inherently useful occupations like agriculture, far less military dick-waving, etc. The post-growth world may even turn out a better place after all.
GGP didn't say "I want PS3 games", he said "I want PS3 level graphics at the least".
He did mention hooking up to a large screen, so I assume he meant console-like gameplay as well.
So control schemes and UIs aren't relevant, if you can conceive of any phone game that has enough stuff going on to make PS3-level graphics sensible (e.g. Galaxy on Fire).
I can't conceive of a game that would make me strain to resolve so much detail on the phone screen. For phone games I did play, moderately busy OpenGL ES scenes on a 800x480 screen worked fairly well. The GPU is there to help, too.
Personally I want my phone to be successfully streaming media from the 'net, playing it through my bluetooth headset,
Unless HD video is involved, all this should not take a large share of scheduling slots on a reasonably good smartphone CPU. It worked on Nokia N800 with plenty of cycles to spare.
waiting for inbound calls
This is what the modem unit is supposed to busy itself with.
Given the web page rendering can max out a single core all by itself, how were you planning to avoid stuttering audio, interrupted audio feeds or missed calls?
By boosting the audio service process' priority, the way it's done in all modern operating systems? Note that it does not take much processing time to feed the audio sink with buffers, it just has to be done on time.
An incoming call should suspend all media playback and put the active application to the background, naturally. If your phone software does not do it, you got bigger problems than a lack of cores.
Sure, it _can_ be done - but it can be done better and quicker with multiple hardware threads.
I'd put it as "it can be done with more slack, and the warts will still show up at times". Certain popular devices seem to follow this design philosophy, indeed.
I see. I guess this piece of the puzzle can only be solved with baked-in Skype support, not in an installable app. Unless they have offered the "remain as an obtrusive overlay on top of the screen" behavior in public APIs, that the stock phone UI uses when switched away from.
This is not how you properly bash camera quality in a Nokia phone. Learn from this fellow: the iPhone photos are clearly better, because the little piggies are more vividly pink! And the white background is pink too! The dull picture from the Nokia just does not deliver it the way the user wants to see his porcelain piggies!
I believe the decision to drop MeeGo was malicious.
Ah, no Nokia story can be left without comments by MeeGo Persecution Complex sufferers.
The Nokia N9 is feature complete,
The Nokia N9 is not MeeGo, and while very good, it falls short of being a well-finished product. Wait, I need to check the latest update, maybe they have fixed those calendar blunders after all...
and is better than any of their Symbian phones.
I agree here, but it's not a high bar to measure phones with nowadays.
If Nokia wants to make Windows phones, fine. But dropping MeeGo and then claiming they don't have a plan B is much better justified by malice than stupidity.
And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
Don't they use a dedicated chip to process the images? A driver for it can probably be integrated, given some time; Elop seemed to indicate it may eventually happen. Mind you, the technology has been 5 years in development as it is.
"Though Windows Phone 7.5 introduced new multitasking capabilities, allowing applications to do things like play music in the background and run periodic scheduled tasks, it only supports certain scenarios. VoIP is not one of those supported scenarios."
In contrast, perhaps, with the author of this article, I know a thing or two about how VoIP protocols typically work. Receiving a "riser" message signaling an incoming call is not entirely dissimilar to receiving a chat message. If an application can subscribe to the latter, it could use the same mechanism to be notified about incoming calls. After being activated, the application can proceed to establish the VoIP session. Hence my doubts about multitasking being the problem.
Web browsing. Until I got my first smartphone recently, I assumed that modern phone web browsers were slow just due to network latency. Then I teathered my laptop to my phone and it definitely felt a slower than normally browsing over a cable modem, but not by all that much. Certainly nowhere near how slow I expect a smartphone web browser to be (which, to be fair, is fast enough to be usable unlike, say, the web browser on the N810 which was painfully slow since the device just wasn't powerful enough for a web browser). Of course, multiple cores wouldn't help here: both were running Firefox which is single-threaded.
Right, if the browser engine can do heavy lifting in a separate thread/process, another core could be helpful. But it's easier said than done, as illustrated by Firefox: the whole thing about flowing and rendering a webpage, running attached scripts, while being able to handle scripted I/O events etc. does not sound like an awfully parallelizable lot of things to do.
For what it's worth, IE on Windows Phone 7.5 works smoothly enough, as does WebKit on the N9. Maybe I never gave them a properly gross webpage. Most sites I use with my phone provide "iPhone-optimized" versions which work like a charm. Ignoring gobs of gratuitous flash probably helps as well.
It really is unfortunate that Microsoft kludged the system like that - VoIP is a no-brainer for multitasking...:(
Lync works on Windows Phone. I don't think it has VoIP, but for background lurking IM should be served the same way. What makes you think it's a system limitation?
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the first time we had to switch energy sources FAST.
This is, in fact, the first time we have to switch our primary fuel source at the global scale, when the current supplies are becoming increasingly scarce.
Up until the 1840's, night lamps were fueled by whale oil--but we ran in to a big problem: we were running out of whales to kill even back then.
Night lamps, heh. Do you have any idea how many things in the world around you are made affordable by cheap oil?
Today, we realize that we need to begin the transition from petroleum to other energy sources. Promising research into batteries with much higher storage density could mean far longer-ranged electric cars by 2020, and there is considerable money invested into growing oil-laden algae on a huge scale to use as a base to make motor fuels. I actually predict that by 2025 the average family car will be an all-electric vehicle with a full-charge range of 700 to 800 km (435 to 497 miles) that will be physically smaller than today's cars (remember, engine compartments will be much smaller) but just as roomy.
Yes, everybody who can afford it will switch to electric cars, but it cannot happen quickly and the transition will cost a lot, including temporary price spikes while production to meet the suddenly surging demand is ramping up. Money invested into algae guarantee nothing about it becoming a viable replacement for oil (we are talking about EROEI at least 20:1) any time soon, even with declining demand for petroleum-based fuels.
Only as "unusual" as, say, the video game industry.
Ah, the slaves. *Whip crack* Get to work, you slackers, the sun is still up in the sky!
I think sewers are designed to have a gravity-only spill mode, but the routing of the sewage, and the degree of its treatment in this mode might be, erm, less than optimal.
Too bad they stuck computers in all of the gasoline cars, non of them work after an emp pulse ether.
Well, there is also a good chance that gasoline, not solar outbursts, will be the worst problem in 2020.
requires the moderation of level heads before being rushed into legislation.
So not the Congress, then.
* A side effect is that the traditional religions will probably not make ostentatious construction either.
Well, that part's been bothering me the most. The traditional religions (who decides which ones are traditional, BTW? Can I has a golden-domed Orthodox church?) are supposed to know their bounds, there's only one that is expressly prescribed to.
You don't need Sonera or the banks to do it for you. You can get your own personal X.509 certificate in a chip on a national ID card. I have mine since 2006, though I never used it.
Well, there were enough people to vote in Perussuomalaiset for at least one cycle (their support is eroding now), so the consensus is fairly wobbly. And the top party these days are the supposedly more individualistic centre-righties.
But Russia has the communist history, when most people working in a city had to live in a multi-storey apartment block, cars were scarce, and you couldn't even freely choose where to settle. This will take many decades to change.
Another difficulty is income disparity. Going from Home->Public Transit->Destination odds are very high you will encounter a desperate, aggressive, predatory person with *way* less to lose than you do.
I rode the metro for 14 years in post-Soviet Moscow. You don't need to spend a day there to see how much poverty and inequality that city has. The police are universally known for being corrupt pigs, though they can be effective against petty crime and hooliganism. The public transit is used by a lot of people from various walks of life, and I was not accosted by somebody I would like to avoid that often (tbf, I'm a 6 ft tall male and I am not prone to flashing expensive-looking stuff or travelling while piss-drunk).
Unless one of your company's major suppliers requires, in the interest of protecting its trade secrets, that all employees on your project work from secure facilities that are not part of a residence.
That's already rather unusual. OK, no teleworking in this case, but why not flex hours?
If you run the risk of being fired for not showing up on a day when weather is unsuitable for cycling, you still have to own, fuel, and insure a car.
Add to the list:
Improve labor relationships by allowing more flexible work hours and teleworking.
There are jobs where you must arrive at work at such-and-such time, but most office workers are not that.
Right or wrong, you are not going to convince anyone of your position by suggesting that they can live like they are in the third world.
No. Instead, they will be forced to live like that, by the inevitable oil crunch.
1. Much of the world's potential oilfields haven't been touched, mostly due to current environmental regulations, too harsh weather conditions, or the current limits on oil extraction technology. Geologists know that we've barely touched the potential oil and gas deposits off the North Slope of Alaska, and the continental shelves of the USA--deposits that could add hundreds of billions of barrels of crude oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to the potential US supply.
In other words, the hard-to-get oil, that will take a lot of expenditure to even ramp up the production.
And that's not including the potential to unlock two trillion barrels of oil from oil shale deposits. Right now, Russia is looking at starting to unlock the potential of oil and gas deposits in parts of Siberia that have yet to be explored--deposits that could be just as big as all of the Persian Gulf _combined_ if properly exploited.
"Not yet expored", "could be big", sounds reassuring. I'd like to see predictions from any reputable organization in the industry, that confirm a future growth of extraction. Because it'd better continue growing (for particular meanings of "better") at an exponential rate to sustain the expectations of the world's economic planners. That is, if we don't accept the possibility that they all have fallen in for a global, centuries-long Ponzi scheme, one that is ultimately defeated by laws of thermodynamics, and the bottom will fall out any decade now.
2. Many of the world's oilfields aren't using the gas or special fluid injection--methods originally developed to extract out highly-viscous California crude oil--to extend the life of oilfields. As such, possibly a third of the oil from older oilfields have yet to be extracted out.
Listen to yourself: you are saying "we can save ourselves by scraping vigorously at the bottom of the barrel".
3. There has been tremendous advances in using oil-laden algae to produce motor fuels in the last ten years. Research is continuing, and over the next decade motor fuels from oil-laden algae could become finally economically competitive with motor fuels from crude oil.
It did not reach a break-even point yet, and when it's done, we need to ramp up production, which requires a lot of energy and transportation. We may find ourselves needing to build all this shiny futuristic infrastructure at a time when the very resources needed to build it are becoming increasingly scarce and costly. The exponential curve meeting a fixed limit is a weird thing: it happens faster than any linear extrapolation from the past would led you to believe.
Odd, it's only 3.4 and the comments are fairly docile compared to what GNOME stories got only a few weeks ago.
Remember, doomsayers have been screaming "Peak Oil!" for over 100 years!
For about half as long, in fact. Before that, there were basically physicists and some economists (such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mille), who saw an exponential growth curve and the finite Earth, and knew that something has to give. They did not know it's got to be oil that will run out first.
Most predictions were off by decades. But due to the exponentially growing nature of the modern economy, when the shit hits the fan, the rate of drastic changes will be paced in years.
But as new oilfields and better extraction technology has come online, the supply of petroleum and natural has gone through the roof.
The supply of petroleum has been a plateau since 2005, despite prices going through the roof for most of the time. Note also how the oil prices bounced back after the recession onset, while the overall economy is still in the slump.
Remember, it's only because of severe Siberian winters that Russia has not explored for more oil and natural gas in eastern Siberia--a place that might hold more oil and natural gas than all of the Persian Gulf _combined_. Here in the USA, we have potentially two trillion barrels of oil locked in oil shale, and once the technology to heat up the shale and pump out the oil "in situ" matures, the USA will in effect become energy independent because we'll no longer need to import oil from anywhere.
So how much is the energy return on energy invested from all those sources, compared to what we've come to rely on with, say, Persian Gulf oil? I can agree with you that it might be sufficient for the USA... for some decades, more if the current rate of consumption is fixed by some feat of divine intervention, and after the colossal infrastructure needed to replace the conventional oil supply is financed and built (requiring a lot of energy in the process). But that necessarily means the economy as we know it will be crashing all the while.
Possibly within 20 years, oil-laden algae could be grown on a large enough scale to produce gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet-fuel quality kerosene--essentially these fuels will come from a renewable resource.
Possibly. It's a bit worrying, though, to wager our well-being on a technological advance that may hit any number of efficiency walls before reaching replacement parity with good old oil.
In short, technology is about to out-run the doomsayers again....
... up until it can't anymore, because of the thermodynamics.
And it's not all doomsday scenarios. If all goes smooth, in more well-to-do parts of the world there will be some discomfort, downsizing, some financial parasites compelled to take more down-to-earth, inherently useful occupations like agriculture, far less military dick-waving, etc. The post-growth world may even turn out a better place after all.
GGP didn't say "I want PS3 games", he said "I want PS3 level graphics at the least".
He did mention hooking up to a large screen, so I assume he meant console-like gameplay as well.
So control schemes and UIs aren't relevant, if you can conceive of any phone game that has enough stuff going on to make PS3-level graphics sensible (e.g. Galaxy on Fire).
I can't conceive of a game that would make me strain to resolve so much detail on the phone screen. For phone games I did play, moderately busy OpenGL ES scenes on a 800x480 screen worked fairly well. The GPU is there to help, too.
Personally I want my phone to be successfully streaming media from the 'net, playing it through my bluetooth headset,
Unless HD video is involved, all this should not take a large share of scheduling slots on a reasonably good smartphone CPU. It worked on Nokia N800 with plenty of cycles to spare.
waiting for inbound calls
This is what the modem unit is supposed to busy itself with.
Given the web page rendering can max out a single core all by itself, how were you planning to avoid stuttering audio, interrupted audio feeds or missed calls?
By boosting the audio service process' priority, the way it's done in all modern operating systems? Note that it does not take much processing time to feed the audio sink with buffers, it just has to be done on time.
An incoming call should suspend all media playback and put the active application to the background, naturally. If your phone software does not do it, you got bigger problems than a lack of cores.
Sure, it _can_ be done - but it can be done better and quicker with multiple hardware threads.
I'd put it as "it can be done with more slack, and the warts will still show up at times". Certain popular devices seem to follow this design philosophy, indeed.
I see. I guess this piece of the puzzle can only be solved with baked-in Skype support, not in an installable app. Unless they have offered the "remain as an obtrusive overlay on top of the screen" behavior in public APIs, that the stock phone UI uses when switched away from.
This is not how you properly bash camera quality in a Nokia phone. Learn from this fellow: the iPhone photos are clearly better, because the little piggies are more vividly pink! And the white background is pink too! The dull picture from the Nokia just does not deliver it the way the user wants to see his porcelain piggies!
I believe the decision to drop MeeGo was malicious.
Ah, no Nokia story can be left without comments by MeeGo Persecution Complex sufferers.
The Nokia N9 is feature complete,
The Nokia N9 is not MeeGo, and while very good, it falls short of being a well-finished product. Wait, I need to check the latest update, maybe they have fixed those calendar blunders after all...
and is better than any of their Symbian phones.
I agree here, but it's not a high bar to measure phones with nowadays.
If Nokia wants to make Windows phones, fine. But dropping MeeGo and then claiming they don't have a plan B is much better justified by malice than stupidity.
MeeGo was a lousy plan B to begin with.
And it could not be done in WP7, as the processing power is simply missing there.
Don't they use a dedicated chip to process the images? A driver for it can probably be integrated, given some time; Elop seemed to indicate it may eventually happen. Mind you, the technology has been 5 years in development as it is.
The article he linked to.
"Though Windows Phone 7.5 introduced new multitasking capabilities, allowing applications to do things like play music in the background and run periodic scheduled tasks, it only supports certain scenarios. VoIP is not one of those supported scenarios."
In contrast, perhaps, with the author of this article, I know a thing or two about how VoIP protocols typically work. Receiving a "riser" message signaling an incoming call is not entirely dissimilar to receiving a chat message. If an application can subscribe to the latter, it could use the same mechanism to be notified about incoming calls. After being activated, the application can proceed to establish the VoIP session. Hence my doubts about multitasking being the problem.
Web browsing. Until I got my first smartphone recently, I assumed that modern phone web browsers were slow just due to network latency. Then I teathered my laptop to my phone and it definitely felt a slower than normally browsing over a cable modem, but not by all that much. Certainly nowhere near how slow I expect a smartphone web browser to be (which, to be fair, is fast enough to be usable unlike, say, the web browser on the N810 which was painfully slow since the device just wasn't powerful enough for a web browser). Of course, multiple cores wouldn't help here: both were running Firefox which is single-threaded.
Right, if the browser engine can do heavy lifting in a separate thread/process, another core could be helpful. But it's easier said than done, as illustrated by Firefox: the whole thing about flowing and rendering a webpage, running attached scripts, while being able to handle scripted I/O events etc. does not sound like an awfully parallelizable lot of things to do.
For what it's worth, IE on Windows Phone 7.5 works smoothly enough, as does WebKit on the N9. Maybe I never gave them a properly gross webpage. Most sites I use with my phone provide "iPhone-optimized" versions which work like a charm. Ignoring gobs of gratuitous flash probably helps as well.
It really is unfortunate that Microsoft kludged the system like that - VoIP is a no-brainer for multitasking... :(
Lync works on Windows Phone. I don't think it has VoIP, but for background lurking IM should be served the same way. What makes you think it's a system limitation?