Too late now... *everything* uses HTML webpages to manage control systems. Your wifi router will have configuration, diagnostic, security and login windows accessible only through a webpage. The same is happening with corporations. Even software development houses automatically generate HTML pages to indicate the state of all projects.
For corporate applications, it's absolutely critical that something looks exactly the same on all browsers. That's the only way the training and help manuals can remain accurate.
Let's say we were to build everything from scratch. First need would be to have a scripting language to create page layouts with forms, be able to add pictures and embed video. That scripting language would need to be able to reuse the style of different webpages, allow the use of discussion forums, being able to add comments, maintain wikis.
Every application ends up going that way. New modules are written (20,000+ lines) of code are implemented, tested and integrated. Then they are extended, and extended a bit more with workarounds, refactoring, internal restructuring so that the API calls that were originally large algorithm functions on their own are now reimplemented as a series of calls to an internal state machine functions. But then there's a new desirable feature from customers, so everything moves in a new direction, something new comes along. That requires a certain amount of rejiggery in order to get everything to play nice with each other. Sometimes if the developers are particularly adventurous, there will be a complete rewrite with a "new standard", only to have everything above happen again.
With web-browsers, these included having 256 color palettes, true-color images, supporting custom TTF fonts, CSS style sheets, PHP, JavaScript, ActiveX, being able to have a virtual canvas that was larger than the display window view, embedding video, encryption with secure sockets, 3D animation with VRML, WebGL, supporting PDF, all the different image file formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, TGA, BMP), all the different video codecs (MPG, AVI, DIVX). Drop any standard and there will be screaming and wailing from developers in every part of the world. So applications and web-browsers become these massive code-monsters with tentacles of directories that just swallow up every module standard there is.
This happens to desktop and embedded applications as well, customers want to be able to send email from within an application, integrate training videos with the API, have a console window for settings and diagnostics, run scripts, do photo-realistic rendering of presentation graphs.
Bank manager: [Looking through a credit card statement the size of a yellow pages telephone book, shaking his head and calling a customer on the telephone:
"You may be a city trader, but as your local bank manager and a respected member of the community, I must insist that you come down to my office this afternoon for a serious face-to-face chat about the sensiible management of money!".
You can't blame them. Look at what a smartphone can do now. HD screen resolutions with a simple HDMI plug in cable. Better texture-mapping than an Ultra-64 or PS2 . OK, not too impressive now, but. Back 20 years, you'd have to fork out $150,000 just to get an SGI workstation that could do texture-mapping. Now that comes for less than $500 using OpenGL ES. Combine that with GPS location, MEMS accelerometers, barometers, temperature sensors, magnetic sensors, motion sensors, allows augmented reality with Oculus Rift. It then becomes absolutely imperative to Microsoft that they must get a share if not take control of the mobile market. Of course, it's rapidly expanding. GPU's and embedded OS's are moving into devices like flatscreen television/monitors, car control systems, tablets, high-end household electrical appliances. Even some keyboards have their own LCD screen.
Now if Microsoft don't try and unify the desktop and mobile phone markets, then someone else will try using API's like The Qt Company(Trolltech), Java or Android. Their first attempt was to try and turn the desktop into a giant mobile phone display. The only other way is to either have the smartphone have a windows system or to have a smartphone emulator on the desktop like the Palm Pilots used to have.
At the point it was all crammed into that tiny space, it wasn't even regular matter than we know. It would have been one giant tangle-ball of sub-sub-atomic particles like quarks and gluons. No protons, neutrons or electrons.
As the light travels from the furtherest points from the oberver (at the speed of light), the universe is expanding at a similar rate. Say the universe expands by 10% over a year. Then light has to travel an extra 1 light year for every distance covered by 10 light years. But that expansion is like compound interest. In the next year, that distance covered by 11 light years expands to 12.1 light years. More time is spent traveling across expanded space that the original space that existed when the light photons first started out.
Just look at the universities in the UK and USA. If a controversial speaker is invited to a debate, they will either shout down that person until they leave, or they themselves will walk out of the debating hall.
Special glasses would be useful when going outside away from man-made structrues in the outback. For motorcyclists the display could be built into the visor.
They'll find a reason to justify it. They wanted to push RFID tags onto everyone, so the idea was to have the refrigerator and freezer internet ready. Then they could tell you how much time each food item had before it expired it's sell by date. An internet-ready toaster could bake messages onto your bread.
Maybe doorknobs would use fingerprint recognition so that doors could only be opened or closed by chosen people at chosen times.
I'd imagine that would be a line from Star Trek, "My God, they're still using logic circuits made from transistors and they think they have an advanced civilization!"
Most of industry gets by with simple logic processing using just integers or fixed point calculations. Start processing audio or video and you need a DSP chip. For heavy duty stuff like industrial computer vision, a multi-core DSP chip is available. For user interaction, a single touchscreen is enough. It's really only desktops and workstations that have the multiple window displays. Above that are the supercomputing systems with hundreds of thousands of CPU cores.
Is that any different from the biological world? Most of the critters manage to get by without a centralized brain (viruses, bacteria, fungii), let alone vision or sound. Some critters like jellyfish just hardwire their motor control systems straight to their eye spots and move just enough to keep in the shade. Blobfish float just above the ocean floor (just high enough to avoid any scavengers) and just eat whatever falls directly in front of them. At the other end of the scale, you have dolphins with built in sonar augmenting their vision, and the "lateral line" in reptiles, fish and sharks which allows the perception of vortex motion and turbulence in water.
Failsafe mechanism: Our drone has a failsafe mechanism in that:
1. If there is a loss of lift, the system is guaranteed to automatically fall to the ground under the force of gravity. No special maintenance or procedures are required to ensure that this mechanism is activated.
2. If the drone should encounter an large obstacle while traveling horizontally, it will automatically come to a stop and come under the rule of #1.
Water is the "unviversal solvent". It dissolves and mixes with just about anything; salts, acids, alkalines, ions. Some things don't mix like oils and fats, but that makes them useful as well. It also has a strong heat carrying capacity making it useful as a cooling fluid and it isn't combustible which is another advantage. Chemically, it's formed from hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are found in stars. (also Nitrogen and Carbon through the CNO sequence of atomic transmutation).
You could easily use post production effects to replace the surface of the balls with the white lettering of the numbers. hey could simply be unmarked balls, then when one gets selected, the number is added. They already use that technology to make adverts multi-lingual by replacing any posters or text in the scene.
The US government does that with suitcases. You now get to buy suitcases that have a three digit combination lock, as well as a special DHS lock that bypasses that combination lock.
There were several Manhattan projects for the internet. The first was the design of the original network stacks (OSI, DECnet, and many others all replaced by TCP/IP). The second was the http protocol, and the third was the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) that is the basis for encryption for Internet commerce. Unfortunately, that and any other encryption scheme always ended up getting a bit nobbled in places. Probably thousands others if you read the RFC's.
At the bottom of the TCP/IP stack, there's the network chip. That has to receive a packet header and data, push it into the packet ring buffer, send an interrupt to the CPU, and wait for the next packet. It's up to the TCP/IP stack what to next; drop the packet, forward a datagram, or reconstruct packet data into a consistent stream of data.
The only reason nukes aren't used now, is that cruise missiles and other guided munitions reduce the size of warhead required to destroy a particular target. Taking out power stations, power lines, bridges, refineries, airfields and telephone exchanges is all they need to do in order to send a country back to the stone age.
Uber is a good example. The existing options for transport were:
public bus service - fixed route, infrequent times (1 hour or 2 hours + delay due to traffic), may require walking some distance company shuttle service - fixed route, frequent times, may require walking some distance taxi service - point-to-point route, requires 60/30 minutes notice, expensive - The waiting time depends on city licensing and demand. Somewhere like London, you can simply hail a taxi, and it will stop. In the Bay Area, you would have to wait 30 minutes.
private car - point to point route, no minute notice, requires maintenance of car, fast travel time, no time notice walking/cycling - slow travel time, practically impossible if only route is via freeway/motorway, no time notice
Uber offers point-to-point route service without having to wait 30 minutes. The city could fix this problem by licensing more taxi cab drivers, but that was block by the incumbents.
Another example was internet telephone calls vs. traditional voice calls on the mobile networks. With these networks regular voice communication piggybacks over a data service, which allowed the phone company to bill by distance as a value-added feature. Using the internet feature of a smartphone allows the user to bypass this billing system and communicate directly regardless of distance. The phone companies then try and charge for Skype minutes.
Electric currents are known to travel underground. There's also the piezoelectric effect where crystals put under strain can generate electric currents and thus magnetic fields. Combine that with rock being heated under pressure then snapping due to the earthquake, then it's not to hard to imagine that magnetic field lines would be reconnecting in the way that solar flares do.
If you disabled the TCP/IP stack, it would be rather hard to connect to through the network. But what about that remote shutdown feature that Sandy Bridge processors have.
The cooling water pipes goes all around the back door of the rack. Water goes in one pipe and out the other. Then the heat is carried off using an air to water exchanger. What worries me is whether they are recycling the water or just wasting the mains water supply.
Some schools had "tuck shops" run by the prefects (selling crisp and sweets like "refreshers" or "soft mints", or "bun queues" which sold donuts and warmed up sausage rolls. There was always a newsagents nearby outside which sold just about every sweet and snack available.
In the college I went to, there was a vending machine selling crisps, bicuits, soft drinks at the end of every corridor and in every public seating area.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late now ... *everything* uses HTML webpages to manage control systems. Your wifi router will have configuration, diagnostic, security and login windows accessible only through a webpage. The same is happening with corporations. Even software development houses automatically generate HTML pages to indicate the state of all projects.
For corporate applications, it's absolutely critical that something looks exactly the same on all browsers. That's the only way the training and help manuals can remain accurate.
Let's say we were to build everything from scratch. First need would be to have a scripting language to create page layouts with forms, be able to add pictures and embed video. That scripting language would need to be able to reuse the style of different webpages, allow the use of discussion forums, being able to add comments, maintain wikis.
Every application ends up going that way. New modules are written (20,000+ lines) of code are implemented, tested and integrated. Then they are extended, and extended a bit more with workarounds, refactoring, internal restructuring so that the API calls that were originally large algorithm functions on their own are now reimplemented as a series of calls to an internal state machine functions. But then there's a new desirable feature from customers, so everything moves in a new direction, something new comes along. That requires a certain amount of rejiggery in order to get everything to play nice with each other. Sometimes if the developers are particularly adventurous, there will be a complete rewrite with a "new standard", only to have everything above happen again.
With web-browsers, these included having 256 color palettes, true-color images, supporting custom TTF fonts, CSS style sheets, PHP, JavaScript, ActiveX, being able to have a virtual canvas that was larger than the display window view, embedding video, encryption with secure sockets, 3D animation with VRML, WebGL, supporting PDF, all the different image file formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, TGA, BMP), all the different video codecs (MPG, AVI, DIVX). Drop any standard and there will be screaming and wailing from developers in every part of the world. So applications and web-browsers become these massive code-monsters with tentacles of directories that just swallow up every module standard there is.
This happens to desktop and embedded applications as well, customers want to be able to send email from within an application, integrate training videos with the API, have a console window for settings and diagnostics, run scripts, do photo-realistic rendering of presentation graphs.
Bank manager: [Looking through a credit card statement the size of a yellow pages telephone book, shaking his head and calling a customer on the telephone:
"You may be a city trader, but as your local bank manager and a respected member of the community, I must insist that you come down to my office this afternoon for a serious face-to-face chat about the sensiible management of money!".
City trader: "Yes, what would like to know?"
You can't blame them. Look at what a smartphone can do now. HD screen resolutions with a simple HDMI plug in cable. Better texture-mapping than an Ultra-64 or PS2 . OK, not too impressive now, but. Back 20 years, you'd have to fork out $150,000 just to get an SGI workstation that could do texture-mapping. Now that comes for less than $500 using OpenGL ES. Combine that with GPS location, MEMS accelerometers, barometers, temperature sensors, magnetic sensors, motion sensors, allows augmented reality with Oculus Rift. It then becomes absolutely imperative to Microsoft that they must get a share if not take control of the mobile market. Of course, it's rapidly expanding. GPU's and embedded OS's are moving into devices like flatscreen television/monitors, car control systems, tablets, high-end household electrical appliances. Even some keyboards have their own LCD screen.
Now if Microsoft don't try and unify the desktop and mobile phone markets, then someone else will try using API's like The Qt Company(Trolltech), Java or Android. Their first attempt was to try and turn the desktop into a giant mobile phone display. The only other way is to either have the smartphone have a windows system or to have a smartphone emulator on the desktop like the Palm Pilots used to have.
That has to be added to nethack as an artifact "The Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone" along with a new character class - the Tech Guru.
At the point it was all crammed into that tiny space, it wasn't even regular matter than we know. It would have been one giant tangle-ball of sub-sub-atomic particles like quarks and gluons. No protons, neutrons or electrons.
As the light travels from the furtherest points from the oberver (at the speed of light), the universe is expanding at a similar rate. Say the universe expands by 10% over a year. Then light has to travel an extra 1 light year for every distance covered by 10 light years. But that expansion is like compound interest. In the next year, that distance covered by 11 light years expands to 12.1 light years. More time is spent traveling across expanded space that the original space that existed when the light photons first started out.
Because you don't have the whole world knowing what you are reading when you have a technical book on the shelf.
Just look at the universities in the UK and USA. If a controversial speaker is invited to a debate, they will either shout down that person until they leave, or they themselves will walk out of the debating hall.
Special glasses would be useful when going outside away from man-made structrues in the outback. For motorcyclists the display could be built into the visor.
They'll find a reason to justify it. They wanted to push RFID tags onto everyone, so the idea was to have the refrigerator and freezer internet ready. Then they could tell you how much time each food item had before it expired it's sell by date. An internet-ready toaster could bake messages onto your bread.
Maybe doorknobs would use fingerprint recognition so that doors could only be opened or closed by chosen people at chosen times.
I'd imagine that would be a line from Star Trek, "My God, they're still using logic circuits made from transistors and they think they have an advanced civilization!"
Most of industry gets by with simple logic processing using just integers or fixed point calculations. Start processing audio or video and you need a DSP chip. For heavy duty stuff like industrial computer vision, a multi-core DSP chip is available. For user interaction, a single touchscreen is enough. It's really only desktops and workstations that have the multiple window displays. Above that are the supercomputing systems with hundreds of thousands of CPU cores.
Is that any different from the biological world? Most of the critters manage to get by without a centralized brain (viruses, bacteria, fungii), let alone vision or sound. Some critters like jellyfish just hardwire their motor control systems straight to their eye spots and move just enough to keep in the shade. Blobfish float just above the ocean floor (just high enough to avoid any scavengers) and just eat whatever falls directly in front of them. At the other end of the scale, you have dolphins with built in sonar augmenting their vision, and the "lateral line" in reptiles, fish and sharks which allows the perception of vortex motion and turbulence in water.
Failsafe mechanism: Our drone has a failsafe mechanism in that:
1. If there is a loss of lift, the system is guaranteed to automatically fall to the ground under the force of gravity. No special maintenance or procedures are required to ensure that this mechanism is activated.
2. If the drone should encounter an large obstacle while traveling horizontally, it will automatically come to a stop and come under the rule of #1.
Water is the "unviversal solvent". It dissolves and mixes with just about anything; salts, acids, alkalines, ions. Some things don't mix like oils and fats, but that makes them useful as well. It also has a strong heat carrying capacity making it useful as a cooling fluid and it isn't combustible which is another advantage.
Chemically, it's formed from hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are found in stars. (also Nitrogen and Carbon through the CNO sequence of atomic transmutation).
Mash means Smash (potatoes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You could easily use post production effects to replace the surface of the balls with the white lettering of the numbers. hey could simply be unmarked balls, then when one gets selected, the number is added. They already use that technology to make adverts multi-lingual by replacing any posters or text in the scene.
The US government does that with suitcases. You now get to buy suitcases that have a three digit combination lock, as well as a special DHS lock that bypasses that combination lock.
There were several Manhattan projects for the internet. The first was the design of the original network stacks (OSI, DECnet, and many others all replaced by TCP/IP). The second was the http protocol, and the third was the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) that is the basis for encryption for Internet commerce. Unfortunately, that and any other encryption scheme always ended up getting a bit nobbled in places. Probably thousands others if you read the RFC's.
At the bottom of the TCP/IP stack, there's the network chip. That has to receive a packet header and data, push it into the packet ring buffer, send an interrupt to the CPU, and wait for the next packet. It's up to the TCP/IP stack what to next; drop the packet, forward a datagram, or reconstruct packet data into a consistent stream of data.
The only reason nukes aren't used now, is that cruise missiles and other guided munitions reduce the size of warhead required to destroy a particular target. Taking out power stations, power lines, bridges, refineries, airfields and telephone exchanges is all they need to do in order to send a country back to the stone age.
Uber is a good example. The existing options for transport were:
public bus service - fixed route, infrequent times (1 hour or 2 hours + delay due to traffic), may require walking some distance
company shuttle service - fixed route, frequent times, may require walking some distance
taxi service - point-to-point route, requires 60/30 minutes notice, expensive - The waiting time depends on city licensing and demand. Somewhere like London, you can simply hail a taxi, and it will stop. In the Bay Area, you would have to wait 30 minutes.
private car - point to point route, no minute notice, requires maintenance of car, fast travel time, no time notice
walking/cycling - slow travel time, practically impossible if only route is via freeway/motorway, no time notice
Uber offers point-to-point route service without having to wait 30 minutes. The city could fix this problem by licensing more taxi cab drivers, but that was block by the incumbents.
Another example was internet telephone calls vs. traditional voice calls on the mobile networks. With these networks regular voice communication piggybacks over a data service, which allowed the phone company to bill by distance as a value-added feature. Using the internet feature of a smartphone allows the user to bypass this billing system and communicate directly regardless of distance. The phone companies then try and charge for Skype minutes.
Electric currents are known to travel underground. There's also the piezoelectric effect where crystals put under strain can generate electric currents and thus magnetic fields. Combine that with rock being heated under pressure then snapping due to the earthquake, then it's not to hard to imagine that magnetic field lines would be reconnecting in the way that solar flares do.
If you disabled the TCP/IP stack, it would be rather hard to connect to through the network. But what about that remote shutdown feature that Sandy Bridge processors have.
http://www.techspot.com/news/4...
Pictures are more helpful to explain. The piping to the water cooling:
https://images.duckduckgo.com/...
The cooling water pipes goes all around the back door of the rack. Water goes in one pipe and out the other. Then the heat is carried off using an air to water exchanger. What worries me is whether they are recycling the water or just wasting the mains water supply.
Some schools had "tuck shops" run by the prefects (selling crisp and sweets like "refreshers" or "soft mints", or "bun queues" which sold donuts and warmed up sausage rolls. There was always a newsagents nearby outside which sold just about every sweet and snack available.
In the college I went to, there was a vending machine selling crisps, bicuits, soft drinks at the end of every corridor and in every public seating area.