The fact that DDG just isn't ready for prime time.
I love the idea, so much so that I made it my primary engine for the bar in Safari on my various machines (including PCs). But very simply, it didn't get the results I wanted. Too much spam. Lots of hits on pages that were Wiki scrapes, for instance.
I gave up and switched back to Google. Open to future tries, but it needs to improve a whole lot, IMHO.
"Like Jobs, he saved his beloved baby Tesla Motors from the brink of oblivion"
Really? It seems to me that the company is on as shaky ground today, just as much as in the past. Its continued survival appears to depend on cash infusions.
Nothing wrong with that, but it does not seem to me that the company is fully booted, and this statement is just a little too rah-rah.
> "Apple just added things to FeeBSD just like Amazon just added things to Android".
I may be reading this incorrectly, but...
OSX traces its lineage to a licensed copy of Mach 2.x from the 1980s. That code base used portions of BSD Unix, especially the user-level utilities and such.
At that time FreeBSD didn't exist. FreeBSD started as a totally separate fork of BSD. That project worked both on the kernel and those user-level utilities.
By the time of OSX, the two code bases had diverged significantly. Apple's efforts were to bring *some* of the upper levels of that code base back in-line with the then-current FreeBSD.
But make no mistake, the OS as a whole looks utterly different. Simply examine the Darwin sources.
I consider this to be very different in its very nature from the implications in the quote above - assuming I'm getting the context correct. Nor do I believe that this is in any way similar to the Amazon situation. Basically I think the comparison is pants.
> Mid 90s NeXTSTEP is still better than the slightly dumbed down OS X of today
Bah. I came from that world (commercial OpenStep and WebObjects developer) and I don't miss it at all.
Don't get me wrong, some of the parts of the UI I really liked. And networked home folders were a minor miracle at that point in time (and still, to some degree).
But as a "get things done" machine? No contest, OSX all the way.
> You mean if Apple had bought BeOS instead of NeXT? I've always wondered what would have happened
Confining myself just to the OS side of this question...
The BeOS circa 1997 was, charitably, incomplete. IIRC that was during the era when printing was unsupported and they were having to switch their entire networking stack? In any event, I find it *extremely* difficult to believe it was at the state of OpenStep of the same era.
But that's a comparison at the user level... we're talking about what-if's here. So my question is this, is there anything *inherent* to the BeOS that suggests the end result, 15 years later, might be better than having started with OpenStep.
I mean, we've replaced just about everything from OpenStep except the most basic levels like the kernel. It has the same basic model, albeit greatly enhanced over the years. By comparison the graphics engine and UI are completely different.
So if we strip everything off the two systems except those low layers, is there anything inherent to BeOS that suggested the endpoint might be more interesting?
"the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coand effect"
Ummm, no.
It propelled itself by forcing air from the central jet engine out through various shutters, using the airflow to effect the flow of the surrounding air. Nothing rotated (sheesh, didn't the author bother to read what he googled?!)
It didn't work. NACA wind-tunnel experiments showed they had increasing nose-down trim as speeds increased through the subsonic, and it became uncontrollable at any reasonable speed. It was then re-purposed as a helicopter-like aircraft, but was ineffective due to a variety of aerodynamic factors.
"If you ditch the need for helmets, more people would start cycling"
I simply don't believe this.
I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet. And I suspect anyone that reports such is just looking for a socially acceptable reason for their lack of exercise.
"You realize that is just a temporary problem"
So we'll just let people get hit by cars until the cars stop being dumb?
Great plan. I've been waiting 100 years for that to happen. Maybe Google will finally solve it.
"Our ancestors tried electric cars in the 19th century and they sucked. They still suck. The only thing that will stop them sucking is a massive improvement in battery technology"
EVs in the 19th century used nickel-iron or lead-acid batteries, with about 15-25 Wh/kg of storage.
EVs today use some variant of lithium-ion battery, with about 100-130 Wh/kg of storage.
That "massive improvement" already happened.
In the next five years I strongly suspect we'll see experimental automotive li-s batteries, at ~300. I'm not such a believer in li-air.
Note that electric motors are far more efficient than gasoline. As a result, you only need about 1/5th to 1/10th as much energy onboard to get the same range. That means that a battery with 600 Wh/kg has the same range per kg as a gasoline drive train.
> Anyone that runs the numbers honestly on the needed infrastructure realizes > that the whole e-mobility vision is a ridiculous joke
It wasn't a joke when cars had not much more range in the 1930s. The Model T got about 15 to 20 mpg and had a 10 gallon tank. That's the same range as the Tesla S. And this is precisely why there are "gasoline alleys", leftover remnants of that era when every city had a string of stations around every major artery so people could top up again on their trips.
(Another interesting point is that electric vehicles are more practical in regions south of the snow belt, unless you have plug-in stations at the destination that can keep the batteries warm. A practical EV for Alaska is a harder technology than making EVs for Los Angeles!)
This is not as true as it used to be. Modern construction techniques have dramatically impacted the effect of cold weather - *power* is still effected, but total capacity is on the order of 7% for 0 to 25 Celsius (it used to be 35%, and it's ~50% for lead acid).
"when did I become the product just because a service is provided to me free of charge via an advertising model"
Follow the money. "Products" are things that are sold, "customers" are the people/entities that buy them. So for instance...
You buy an iPhone by giving money to Apple. That means you are the customer and the iPhone is the product.
You use Google, who sells your information to 3rd parties. That means the ad companies are the customers and you are the product.
Got it?
"Does this mean that I'm also a Slashdot product"
Follow the money. The answer is "perhaps", if/. sells that information. I don't know if they do or not.
"Am I a product of the landowner who puts up a billboard next to the freeway I drive down"
Follow the money. No. The landowner does not sell information about you to anyone. They sell their land to the ad company. The land is the product.
Given the way your questions are worded, it seems you have confused this to have something to do with advertising. It has only to do with where the money comes from and goes to. Follow the money.
"seemingly without much greater purpose than speeding the removal of their rival Google from iOS"
I think it's much more likely that they're doing so because of Google's ever-increasing prices for Maps data, combined with Google's refusal hand out turn-by-turn directions to Apple and other customers.
Let's not forget, Apple is not the only high profile customer to dump Maps in the last couple of months. Google seems to be turning many of their features into Android-only ones.
So after all the US companies rejected the idea as unworkable science fiction, and then the Japanese did, and then the Chinese did, Korea is the next sucker up to bat.
"director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change"
Only if we close the plants down. If the economy comes back soon and these things are still operational, they'll turn them back on.
We should strike while the iron is hot and get these things closed. It's very easy to make a gas plant, we can have ample capacity in time for a resurgence in industry.
"and it's one of the most impressive scientific endeavours we've undertaken [llnl.gov]."
Only if one defines "impressive" as "large", which you continue to argue throughout.
I would argue that the determination of the electron mass ratio, Alain Aspect's demonstration of Bell's Inequalities, and Sabine's study of sunspots are all far more relevant, elegant, impressive and useful.
"We NEED big science"
Why? After the 1980s, big science has been relatively useless, at least outside astronomy which isn't that big. Fermi spent a decade improving the measure of the top quark mass, which costs a couple hundred million and told us exactly nothing.
"An advertisement for a GA airplane (Beech Bonanza I think) said, "economical as a Volkswagon" [snip] "you spend on fuel is significantly less to go from point A to B compared to a car"
A Beech Bonanza gets about 19.3 miles to the gallon.
"But perhaps the biggest problem the team aim to tackle are the regulatory and safety issues"
Uhhh, no, the biggest problem is the gas milage.
It is trivially easy to demonstrate that the fuel used to move from A to B is much lower in a wheeled vehicle than a flying one, and in every apples-to-apples comparison the difference is often about an order of magnitude.
People will want to name their favourite counterexample now, but invariably these are highly tuned designs of limited or no practical use. When one compares this to similar wheeled vehicles, like solar cars, the same difference shows up again.
We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than "whatever I want", and that means we need to say no to flying cars.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that DDG just isn't ready for prime time.
I love the idea, so much so that I made it my primary engine for the bar in Safari on my various machines (including PCs). But very simply, it didn't get the results I wanted. Too much spam. Lots of hits on pages that were Wiki scrapes, for instance.
I gave up and switched back to Google. Open to future tries, but it needs to improve a whole lot, IMHO.
So it's perfectly OK for active duty SF personal to advice and appear in blatant self-promotional crap like "Act Of Valor".
But not OK at all if they do it with a private firm.
Yeah, makes sense.
"Like Jobs, he saved his beloved baby Tesla Motors from the brink of oblivion"
Really? It seems to me that the company is on as shaky ground today, just as much as in the past. Its continued survival appears to depend on cash infusions.
Nothing wrong with that, but it does not seem to me that the company is fully booted, and this statement is just a little too rah-rah.
> "Apple just added things to FeeBSD just like Amazon just added things to Android".
I may be reading this incorrectly, but...
OSX traces its lineage to a licensed copy of Mach 2.x from the 1980s. That code base used portions of BSD Unix, especially the user-level utilities and such.
At that time FreeBSD didn't exist. FreeBSD started as a totally separate fork of BSD. That project worked both on the kernel and those user-level utilities.
By the time of OSX, the two code bases had diverged significantly. Apple's efforts were to bring *some* of the upper levels of that code base back in-line with the then-current FreeBSD.
But make no mistake, the OS as a whole looks utterly different. Simply examine the Darwin sources.
I consider this to be very different in its very nature from the implications in the quote above - assuming I'm getting the context correct. Nor do I believe that this is in any way similar to the Amazon situation. Basically I think the comparison is pants.
> Mid 90s NeXTSTEP is still better than the slightly dumbed down OS X of today
Bah. I came from that world (commercial OpenStep and WebObjects developer) and I don't miss it at all.
Don't get me wrong, some of the parts of the UI I really liked. And networked home folders were a minor miracle at that point in time (and still, to some degree).
But as a "get things done" machine? No contest, OSX all the way.
> You mean if Apple had bought BeOS instead of NeXT? I've always wondered what would have happened
Confining myself just to the OS side of this question...
The BeOS circa 1997 was, charitably, incomplete. IIRC that was during the era when printing was unsupported and they were having to switch their entire networking stack? In any event, I find it *extremely* difficult to believe it was at the state of OpenStep of the same era.
But that's a comparison at the user level... we're talking about what-if's here. So my question is this, is there anything *inherent* to the BeOS that suggests the end result, 15 years later, might be better than having started with OpenStep.
I mean, we've replaced just about everything from OpenStep except the most basic levels like the kernel. It has the same basic model, albeit greatly enhanced over the years. By comparison the graphics engine and UI are completely different.
So if we strip everything off the two systems except those low layers, is there anything inherent to BeOS that suggested the endpoint might be more interesting?
> bureaucrazy
Is that a game about a bomb in a dresser factory?
Computers cost practically nothing these days. Put the servers and routers in the basement behind metal. If attacked, replace PC's.
I guarantee the missile costs *many* times more than the PC's it took out.
Yeah, that was one of his worst moves. And it's not like he hasn't given us lots of examples to choose from.
"Probably taken from German Reich designs"
All known designs were either outright fakes from the post-war period (the vast majority), or paper sketches that wouldn't have been able to fly.
Moreover the history of this aircraft is very well preserved, and is clearly an original concept.
"'t forget that thousands of US bomber pilots"
A few tens. Judging anything at night is notoriously difficult.
"the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coand effect"
Ummm, no.
It propelled itself by forcing air from the central jet engine out through various shutters, using the airflow to effect the flow of the surrounding air. Nothing rotated (sheesh, didn't the author bother to read what he googled?!)
It didn't work. NACA wind-tunnel experiments showed they had increasing nose-down trim as speeds increased through the subsonic, and it became uncontrollable at any reasonable speed. It was then re-purposed as a helicopter-like aircraft, but was ineffective due to a variety of aerodynamic factors.
Just read the Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
"If you ditch the need for helmets, more people would start cycling"
I simply don't believe this.
I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet. And I suspect anyone that reports such is just looking for a socially acceptable reason for their lack of exercise.
"You realize that is just a temporary problem"
So we'll just let people get hit by cars until the cars stop being dumb?
Great plan. I've been waiting 100 years for that to happen. Maybe Google will finally solve it.
"Our ancestors tried electric cars in the 19th century and they sucked. They still suck. The only thing that will stop them sucking is a massive improvement in battery technology"
EVs in the 19th century used nickel-iron or lead-acid batteries, with about 15-25 Wh/kg of storage.
EVs today use some variant of lithium-ion battery, with about 100-130 Wh/kg of storage.
That "massive improvement" already happened.
In the next five years I strongly suspect we'll see experimental automotive li-s batteries, at ~300. I'm not such a believer in li-air.
Note that electric motors are far more efficient than gasoline. As a result, you only need about 1/5th to 1/10th as much energy onboard to get the same range. That means that a battery with 600 Wh/kg has the same range per kg as a gasoline drive train.
> Anyone that runs the numbers honestly on the needed infrastructure realizes
> that the whole e-mobility vision is a ridiculous joke
It wasn't a joke when cars had not much more range in the 1930s. The Model T got about 15 to 20 mpg and had a 10 gallon tank. That's the same range as the Tesla S. And this is precisely why there are "gasoline alleys", leftover remnants of that era when every city had a string of stations around every major artery so people could top up again on their trips.
> The one I think has the most potential is the liquid battery
I suspect you live south of the Mason/Dixon line?
(Another interesting point is that electric vehicles are more practical in regions south of the snow belt, unless you have plug-in stations at the destination that can keep the batteries warm. A practical EV for Alaska is a harder technology than making EVs for Los Angeles!)
This is not as true as it used to be. Modern construction techniques have dramatically impacted the effect of cold weather - *power* is still effected, but total capacity is on the order of 7% for 0 to 25 Celsius (it used to be 35%, and it's ~50% for lead acid).
"when did I become the product just because a service is provided to me free of charge via an advertising model"
Follow the money. "Products" are things that are sold, "customers" are the people/entities that buy them. So for instance...
You buy an iPhone by giving money to Apple. That means you are the customer and the iPhone is the product.
You use Google, who sells your information to 3rd parties. That means the ad companies are the customers and you are the product.
Got it?
"Does this mean that I'm also a Slashdot product"
Follow the money. The answer is "perhaps", if /. sells that information. I don't know if they do or not.
"Am I a product of the landowner who puts up a billboard next to the freeway I drive down"
Follow the money. No. The landowner does not sell information about you to anyone. They sell their land to the ad company. The land is the product.
Given the way your questions are worded, it seems you have confused this to have something to do with advertising. It has only to do with where the money comes from and goes to. Follow the money.
"trust Apple more than Google, considering that they have the ability to remotely wipe all your iDevices"
You mean like this?
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173390
Your statement proposes a comparison between the two companies, when they appear to be equals in this regard. Try again.
"seemingly without much greater purpose than speeding the removal of their rival Google from iOS"
I think it's much more likely that they're doing so because of Google's ever-increasing prices for Maps data, combined with Google's refusal hand out turn-by-turn directions to Apple and other customers.
Let's not forget, Apple is not the only high profile customer to dump Maps in the last couple of months. Google seems to be turning many of their features into Android-only ones.
"fragmentation" is when you have to tell SOME of your users "you can't do that thing that others are doing"
Indeed, and nothing on this list does that. The fact that I can't do flyover navigation on the 3GS has no effect on my solar prospecting tool.
So after all the US companies rejected the idea as unworkable science fiction, and then the Japanese did, and then the Chinese did, Korea is the next sucker up to bat.
Good luck with that.
"director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change"
Only if we close the plants down. If the economy comes back soon and these things are still operational, they'll turn them back on.
We should strike while the iron is hot and get these things closed. It's very easy to make a gas plant, we can have ample capacity in time for a resurgence in industry.
"and it's one of the most impressive scientific endeavours we've undertaken [llnl.gov]."
Only if one defines "impressive" as "large", which you continue to argue throughout.
I would argue that the determination of the electron mass ratio, Alain Aspect's demonstration of Bell's Inequalities, and Sabine's study of sunspots are all far more relevant, elegant, impressive and useful.
"We NEED big science"
Why? After the 1980s, big science has been relatively useless, at least outside astronomy which isn't that big. Fermi spent a decade improving the measure of the top quark mass, which costs a couple hundred million and told us exactly nothing.
Sorry, big science is dead.
"An advertisement for a GA airplane (Beech Bonanza I think) said, "economical as a Volkswagon"
[snip]
"you spend on fuel is significantly less to go from point A to B compared to a car"
A Beech Bonanza gets about 19.3 miles to the gallon.
My Civic averages 54.1.
"But perhaps the biggest problem the team aim to tackle are the regulatory and safety issues"
Uhhh, no, the biggest problem is the gas milage.
It is trivially easy to demonstrate that the fuel used to move from A to B is much lower in a wheeled vehicle than a flying one, and in every apples-to-apples comparison the difference is often about an order of magnitude.
People will want to name their favourite counterexample now, but invariably these are highly tuned designs of limited or no practical use. When one compares this to similar wheeled vehicles, like solar cars, the same difference shows up again.
We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than "whatever I want", and that means we need to say no to flying cars.