Before the Euro, countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece were constantly devaluing their currencies every Summer in order to attract tourist money. At the same time, whenever there was a financial storm blowing somewhere, investors would convert their money into Deutchmarks without even thinking. It was the prudent thing to move your money into a "safe haven" until the storm blew over. This was infuriating for German companies because they would be in the process of signing a hundred million deutchmark deal, and suddenly the exchange rate would blow up by 20%. Having a unified currency, bolts all these countries together so the Euro exchange rate rises and falls together. Those Mediterranean countries were forced to give up their manufacturing in order to join the EU.
That won't happen. Usually all government workers are on a standardized payscale. If the teachers get a payrise, then the police department, fire department will get payrises too. But the big companies will give their workers even larger pay rises and you are back to where you started. The shortage of housing will usually end up with the result of family homes being converted into apartments, making the housing situation even worse.
it's happening in London too. Banks will only pay interest on a savings account for the first £2000, and even they you have to put in more money each month than you take out in interest. The other investment option are government bonds, but they are hard to obtain and require a long investment time of several years. Or you can invest in property. There's no upper limit on the amount that can be invested. You can buy anything from a studio flat for £500,000 to a penthouse suite for a few million £££. Property developers are tripping over themselves converting brownfield sites like old warehouses and power stations into luxury condo units that Londoner's can't afford but international investors can. Property prices are increasing at 10%/year and they can sell anytime.
Hard disk drives already have CPU microcontrollers to handle the cache management algorithms. Some companies actually tried putting some arithmetic logic on their VRAM chips so that pixel operations could be done without fetching across the data bus.
That's the same with most companies. The smaller the startup, the smaller and more achievable their goals. There's less code base to support, so they can concentrate on just writing new software. But then they get have to get their first product out. They make enough sales to employ more developers. Customers now want support, so they have to implement customer support engineers, technical writers, documentation, test engineers. The test harness system needs to be maintained. The more code that is added, the more code that needs to be made interoperable without breaking any builds. Testing takes longer. It might take 30 minutes to run through all automated test to make sure no check-in has broken anything.
Development teams will split into next-generation core technology development and infrastructure support. Eventually, the need for investment in equipment, conferences and development tools, that will be so much they will need to be bought out by a big company. In exchange for money, they have to restructure their staff to be compatible with the host. That will blow out the more creative engineers who liked to learn new skills and hack stuff together. Many corporations would just buy companies out and promote their staff to "ambassadors" or "sales" and "customer relations".
And there are plans to design batteries that be charged up from the CO2 in the air. Imagine if the two can be coupled together and you will have zero emissions coal stations.
I agree. Just look at the videos. They're impressive from a VFX perspective, but having a $150 million piece of high-precision engineering turned into several tonnes of scrap metal that is likely to fall off at any moment is not a good situation for the pilot, passengers or airline.
Jet engines are designed to withstand the ingestion of a frozen turkey (at least not to explode and send blades flying through the aircraft). That's how they test them - there's a chicken cannon that is used to test that the engines can withstand bird impacts:
It would seem easier to use a Helium balloon to do the lifting bit, then use a parachute to do the falling bit, then the battery to do the landing bit.
Get the size of the balloon just right for neutral buoyancy, and the motors would only be needed for movement/stabilisation and not lift.
It might depend on the developer. I know one company who did try and abstract the differences between the different shader languages (GLSL, Cg, HLSL) into their own macro language.
In that era, the originality of a best selling game was driven by the technology to do something completely different and to make use of the latest technology at the time (VGA, SVGA/ModeX) and SoundBlaster cards/MIDI. And speed was important, so code optimization took priority.
People were doing casual games (simple platform games), but those were written on top of the Windows API.
Paper ballots can be fudged. There were some cases in the UK where certain minorities were getting their ballot paper sent by mail to particular addresses. Then the votes were cast all to the same political party. Some places, the votes for one candidate were discarded as being "spoiled", while extra votes for the preferred candidate were added.
iPhones can get USB dongles to allow data to be copied to a memory card. Android smartphones have a socket for a removable SD card (any size from 8GB to 128GB). The memory is really that cheap (and small as a fingernail). Perfect for backing up data, even if the USB cable port won't accept data service.
It's easy to provide fibre-to-the-home when everyone lives in high rise apartment blocks. You just get some string, tie a weight to the end and let it haul the bundles of fibre optic cables down the risers in the building, then hook them out into each home. With cities in Eurpoe and the UK, there are thousands of streets with paving stones that have to be dug up, fibre-optic cables laid and connected to each home.
Everyone wants to get fibre-to-the-home, but there just isn't the investment. Hyper-Optik have a map of registered interest:
As usual it's London headquartered companies who make the supreme decision as to which area should get improved communications.
Read the Evening Standard, and you'll see business people in London who don't see "why there should be investment in fibre-optic technology in small villages around the UK, when the capital city is where all the startup ventures are located".
It's the only way they can fund the cost of internet surveillance. Companies like Phorm would do deep packet inspection of internet traffic for keywords, web addresses in combination with a tracking cooking UID. They would sell advertising slots to advertisers and websites. When a website requested an banner advert, Phorm would check the IP address and keywords, then provide a suitable advert if possible.
That sounds like the perfect theme for a comedy sci-fi movie: FCC gulags spread across the country. Inmates detained for reasons ranging from failing to maintain starter motors, keeping old washing machines and electric drills, refusing to hand over old multi-sync CRT monitors.
The primary care fields are usually in the inner-cities where there is a large proportion of street-gang violence, drug addiction, and mental health issues. That tends to scare away most doctors due to safety issues. So they have to import international doctors to work in these areas.
In the Piper Alpha disaster, crewmen waited in the common areas for the rescuers to arrive, even though those areas were directly threatened by burning oil and gas:
I've seen documentaries on those evacuation tests. In one case, the nerdy geeky guy tried to go up into the overhead locker to get his laptop. He got totally bulldozed by the amateur sumo-wrestler who just wanted to get to the sushi bar in time for the next flight.
That is the curse of crowd-sourcing with traffic data. When you know the local roads around motorway intersections, it's easy to find the nearest off-ramp and sneak off home and avoid the tailbacks. But when you have a smartphone, Google rats you out, and directs everyone to follow you. Even if it does involves going through residential access roads meant for low traffic (these are the type of roads that are so narrow that cars have to park halfway on the pavements in order to just allow a single lane of traffic to get through.
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Before the Euro, countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece were constantly devaluing their currencies every Summer in order to attract tourist money. At the same time, whenever there was a financial storm blowing somewhere, investors would convert their money into Deutchmarks without even thinking. It was the prudent thing to move your money into a "safe haven" until the storm blew over. This was infuriating for German companies because they would be in the process of signing a hundred million deutchmark deal, and suddenly the exchange rate would blow up by 20%. Having a unified currency, bolts all these countries together so the Euro exchange rate rises and falls together. Those Mediterranean countries were forced to give up their manufacturing in order to join the EU.
That won't happen. Usually all government workers are on a standardized payscale. If the teachers get a payrise, then the police department, fire department will get payrises too. But the big companies will give their workers even larger pay rises and you are back to where you started. The shortage of housing will usually end up with the result of family homes being converted into apartments, making the housing situation even worse.
it's happening in London too. Banks will only pay interest on a savings account for the first £2000, and even they you have to put in more money each month than you take out in interest. The other investment option are government bonds, but they are hard to obtain and require a long investment time of several years. Or you can invest in property. There's no upper limit on the amount that can be invested. You can buy anything from a studio flat for £500,000 to a penthouse suite for a few million £££. Property developers are tripping over themselves converting brownfield sites like old warehouses and power stations into luxury condo units that Londoner's can't afford but international investors can. Property prices are increasing at 10%/year and they can sell anytime.
Hard disk drives already have CPU microcontrollers to handle the cache management algorithms. Some companies actually tried putting some arithmetic logic on their VRAM chips so that pixel operations could be done without fetching across the data bus.
How long before they stick a couple of embedded CPU's or GPU's along with those SSD's?
That's the same with most companies. The smaller the startup, the smaller and more achievable their goals. There's less code base to support, so they can concentrate on just writing new software. But then they get have to get their first product out. They make enough sales to employ more developers. Customers now want support, so they have to implement customer support engineers, technical writers, documentation, test engineers. The test harness system needs to be maintained. The more code that is added, the more code that needs to be made interoperable without breaking any builds. Testing takes longer. It might take 30 minutes to run through all automated test to make sure no check-in has broken anything.
Development teams will split into next-generation core technology development and infrastructure support. Eventually, the need for investment in equipment, conferences and development tools, that will be so much they will need to be bought out by a big company. In exchange for money, they have to restructure their staff to be compatible with the host. That will blow out the more creative engineers who liked to learn new skills and hack stuff together. Many corporations would just buy companies out and promote their staff to "ambassadors" or "sales" and "customer relations".
Always though that Dredd would have made a great TV series if they picked the best stories from the 2000AD comic magazine.
And there are plans to design batteries that be charged up from the CO2 in the air. Imagine if the two can be coupled together and you will have zero emissions coal stations.
I agree. Just look at the videos. They're impressive from a VFX perspective, but having a $150 million piece of high-precision engineering turned into several tonnes of scrap metal that is likely to fall off at any moment is not a good situation for the pilot, passengers or airline.
Jet engines are designed to withstand the ingestion of a frozen turkey (at least not to explode and send blades flying through the aircraft). That's how they test them - there's a chicken cannon that is used to test that the engines can withstand bird impacts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It would seem easier to use a Helium balloon to do the lifting bit, then use a parachute to do the falling bit, then the battery to do the landing bit.
Get the size of the balloon just right for neutral buoyancy, and the motors would only be needed for movement/stabilisation and not lift.
You would probably have to look in the Asteroid belts for a herd of those.
It might depend on the developer. I know one company who did try and abstract the differences between the different shader languages (GLSL, Cg, HLSL) into their own macro language.
BBC plays adverts for their own programming. The most annoying thing for me was that their news studio color scheme was always red.
In that era, the originality of a best selling game was driven by the technology to do something completely different and to make use of the latest technology at the time (VGA, SVGA/ModeX) and SoundBlaster cards/MIDI. And speed was important, so code optimization took priority.
People were doing casual games (simple platform games), but those were written on top of the Windows API.
Paper ballots can be fudged. There were some cases in the UK where certain minorities were getting their ballot paper sent by mail to particular addresses. Then the votes were cast all to the same political party. Some places, the votes for one candidate were discarded as being "spoiled", while extra votes for the preferred candidate were added.
iPhones can get USB dongles to allow data to be copied to a memory card. Android smartphones have a socket for a removable SD card (any size from 8GB to 128GB). The memory is really that cheap (and small as a fingernail). Perfect for backing up data, even if the USB cable port won't accept data service.
It's easy to provide fibre-to-the-home when everyone lives in high rise apartment blocks. You just get some string, tie a weight to the end and let it haul the bundles of fibre optic cables down the risers in the building, then hook them out into each home. With cities in Eurpoe and the UK, there are thousands of streets with paving stones that have to be dug up, fibre-optic cables laid and connected to each home.
Everyone wants to get fibre-to-the-home, but there just isn't the investment. Hyper-Optik have a map of registered interest:
https://hyperoptic.com/map/
As usual it's London headquartered companies who make the supreme decision as to which area should get improved communications.
Read the Evening Standard, and you'll see business people in London who don't see "why there should be investment in fibre-optic technology in small villages around the UK, when the capital city is where all the startup ventures are located".
It's the only way they can fund the cost of internet surveillance. Companies like Phorm would do deep packet inspection of internet traffic for keywords, web addresses in combination with a tracking cooking UID. They would sell advertising slots to advertisers and websites. When a website requested an banner advert, Phorm would check the IP address and keywords, then provide a suitable advert if possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was only discovered when a businessman couldn't understand why his web pages were different on different computers.
That sounds like the perfect theme for a comedy sci-fi movie: FCC gulags spread across the country. Inmates detained for reasons ranging from failing to maintain starter motors, keeping old washing machines and electric drills, refusing to hand over old multi-sync CRT monitors.
The primary care fields are usually in the inner-cities where there is a large proportion of street-gang violence, drug addiction, and mental health issues. That tends to scare away most doctors due to safety issues. So they have to import international doctors to work in these areas.
In the Piper Alpha disaster, crewmen waited in the common areas for the rescuers to arrive, even though those areas were directly threatened by burning oil and gas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Only those had the motivation to find their own way out or had a fear of staying, made it out alive.
I've seen documentaries on those evacuation tests. In one case, the nerdy geeky guy tried to go up into the overhead locker to get his laptop. He got totally bulldozed by the amateur sumo-wrestler who just wanted to get to the sushi bar in time for the next flight.
That is the curse of crowd-sourcing with traffic data. When you know the local roads around motorway intersections, it's easy to find the nearest off-ramp and sneak off home and avoid the tailbacks. But when you have a smartphone, Google rats you out, and directs everyone to follow you. Even if it does involves going through residential access roads meant for low traffic (these are the type of roads that are so narrow that cars have to park halfway on the pavements in order to just allow a single lane of traffic to get through.
That was GCHQ with their implementation:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ics54/...