Nothing in the universe produces a net gain. It's all just a matter of converting evergy from one form to another.
What brilliant insight! This got modded informative?
Relative to MY current existance, the big puddle of flaming goo in the middle east I can (or used to be able to) scoop up with a bucket sure is an energy gain. Roughly 10 or 8 barrels of oil gained for every one you spend sucking it out of the ground. It's the collected energy from millions of years of solar output, all stored up for humanities handy-dandy use. It's a very very high quality energy source. Except it's limited.
Show me another process that can give the same kind of energy gain - 8 to 10 : 1, in the same volume, easily transported and stored. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't one.
If you want more depressing numbers, why don't you go look at the average daily consumption of oil in terms of energy.
One barrel of oil has 78 million Btu, 42 gallons per barrel.
From google: The United States consumed an average of about 20.0 MMBD of oil in 2003, up from 19.8 MMBD in 2002. (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html)
This gives us a yearly consumption of 7300 million barrels per year. This represents an energy conspumption figure - and this is JUST oil - 569,400,000,000,000,000 BTU's. In kWh, that's about 166,834,200,000,000 kilowatt hours. In other words, on hell of a pile of energy.
There is just no alternative energy source that can come close to meeting this demand. Period. All that energy - energy that has been stored up over huge periods of time - needs to come from someplace. There is no alternative at a reasonable energy profit I am aware of.
To meet that 20.0 MMBD figure, at 2:1, you'd need 40MMBD of oil. Let's assume biodiesel can get a 2:1 profit (It can't, that I'm aware) - Do you see the problem? How many barrels (assuming energy equivilancy) of biodiesel can you extract per acre of land at WHAT ENERGY PROFIT?..and that's just the USA!
First: Diesel is cheap because there is less demand than gasoline. Switch all the cars to diesel, and there go your savings. Poof.
Second: I am skeptical of both biodiesel and ethanol from argiculture. I do not believe either produces a net energy gain once ALL factors of production have been accounted for - this includes gas for the equipment to harvest, energy used in processing and refining, oil and energy used in the creation of fertilizers, etc etc etc ad nauseam. Biodiesel lowers the amount of waste in that you can recover energy from that which would have otherwise been thrown away. It is not an energy source. (although; I am welcome to be proven wrong)
The depressing problem is NOTHING comes even CLOSE to oil. Oil is basically free energy lying there to be scooped off/out of the ground. Or, at least, it was - the energy profit from a barrel of oil is falling. It's that energy profit - e.g. quantity energy you get from burning that is greater than the energy that it took to extract the oil.
I highly recommend spending some time on the peakoil.net site and look at WHO it is sounding the alarm bells; there are going to be rough times ahead. There does not appear to be ANYTHING even close.
We need to look at fusion and other nuclear energy sources, and we need to look seriously at other crazy ideas, like extracting energy from the vacuum itself. The question is if viable alternatives are going to arise in time.
Every car out there already has a "hydrogen bomb" under the hood. Contained in some cases by a fragile piece of rubber tubing. You do know gasoline is a "hydrocarbon", right?
It doesn't work that well, and is a PITA for forms. What is worthwhile is imaging the file - just scan the document you want, and "file" it in a directory. When you want a document, look it up the way you would normally then print it. Presto.
at the very moment their presence in other scientific and engineering disciplines has soared.
Chemical and civil engineering, from what I can tell, are enjoying larger numbers of women. I graduated EE in 2000, and my girlfriend graduated from Mechanical Engineering last May - and the numbers of women have not increased substantially up or down in either of those disiplines from what I can tell over that timeframe. (Sample size 1; standard disclaimers apply)
With regards to women and minorities, I feel that engineering and CS are perhaps the fairest degrees; when the pencil hits the paper, the answer can be determined to be right or wrong within a reasonable margin.
After compromising a system the first thing most people do is obtain a list of the stored password hashes to start your disctionary attacks. Or, after installing network sniffers or keyloggers, depending on how ballsy you might be feeling that day.
So, the length of the password can matter, or at least at one point in time, it did.
While what you propose might be nice, it's not a part of the legal test in Canada or the UK.
In the one major contract dispute that made it down this road, this -was- considered by the arbitrating party. My dealings with the civil legal system have indicated that most representatives ARE reasonable when it comes to contract disputes, perhaps moreso when one side dramatically outguns the other.
Applied to employment contraccts, it does boil down to what "specific knowledge" means. To the best of my knowledge, this cannot be used to restrict me from working from a competing employer. It does restrict me from using, for example, a trade secret acquired in the course of my employment.
My point is if specific consideration is made for the noncompete arrangement, it has much more clout than a general rider on a employment contract.
Termination of the contract is governed by the terms of the contract itself and by the law governing termination in situations were it makes no sense for the contract to remain on foot, i.e. termination for frustration, breach of a fundamental term, or repudiation. but as I said in my above post, the law does not force a strict one-to-one mapping between obligations. To do so would impose unnecessary rigidity and inflexibility on the forms of legal relationships that can be created through contracts.
You're missing my point. No, it doesn't have to be point for point, but the scope of the contract and the consideration therein has to be reasonable. Let's say the contract says you won't accept a job in your field for 10 years instead of 2. With no additional consideration for that clause, I could not see a judge upholding the contract. Yes, this is one term within the contract - but it's a prett y substantial one, wouldn't you think? If I do specific low level work, such a clause could very likely prohibit me from working. Any person would see this as a serious restriction. When viewed upon the "at will" nature of most employment contracts, it borders on unreasonable.
This is assuming the restriction on employment is in itself legal, and that itself is a point of contention in many juristictions.
The consideration for a contract of employment consists only of the benefits that accrue to the employee generally, not of specific benefits for each obligation the employee is required to fulfil.
*translating*..and, after termination of employment, the former employee must have recieved some consideration for the restrictions placed upon them after the end of the contract. They would have to have recieved some reasonable compensation for the period of non compete to reflect the expense of the restriction.
In Canada, this, as was explained to me - would represent the difference between your income and the income you would get in a comparable competing job, or the income lost while you were looking for a job in a non-competing position - provided you could be hired for a competing position, and the NDA you signed was restricting you.
If you were paid an excessive wage during the terms of your contract, then it could be argued you were compensated for in that manner, but otherwise, these terms don't hold up under contract law.
If the terms of the contract are illegal, and as was explained to me, in a lot of cases they could be interpreted to be illegal - then the contract in part or in whole could be declared null and void.
That doesn't mean that such clauses are not legally enforceable in Canada, or in the UK. There's a solid foundation of case law supporting the validity of non-competition clauses in both countries. Put very simply, the restrictions must be for a reasonably limited time, and must restrict using the specific knowledge gained from the former employer, but typically not restrict a person from using their general expertise in the area of research/development.
These contracts are legal, I believe, if and only if there is consideration for the signee. This would mean you would have to recieve compensation, or something, in exchange for you not working. So if Seagate was willing to pay him a fair amount - likely his standard wages, or the difference between what he made there and a non-competing firm - then a judge in Canada would find this reasonable.
As a rider on a standard employment contract, based on what I know about contract law, any judge would interpret there to be no consideration for the signee making the contract void. Canadian judges tend to be sane and reasonable, for the most part.
I'm not a lawyer, of course, and this is a layman's interpretation from a text.
I do hardware design / low level and embedded programming. There's been pretty steady demand for the past few years; I saw the end coming when I graduated from EE for software engineering. Guys who couldn't tell me what a stack was were doing "IT".. sure, opens the field up - but dilutes the market. I did communications / network programming when I graduated, then got myself into low level embedded design as fast as I could. The lower level the better. Nobody ever wanted to do driver level or lower work.. so I figured I'd try.
Something those coming up should look at. It's a lot more frustrating than software design - try writing code when the only reliable debugger you have is printf, and even then not really, because you're writing it on beta development software for a nonstandard OS on unfinished prototype hardware.:)
It's very rewarding when you see your product being produced, and it's got blinkenlights you designed, and such.:)
To anyone finding work - the sad reality that I have accepted is that the odds of being able to settle in one area prior to retirement are very slim. I honestly don't know how I'd have kids - work is steady, but everything seems so unpredictable.
What's next, vaccinating against rebellious independant thoughts? No, I don't like this. Not one bit..
Not a lot of math :yeesh:
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I worked one of these for use with a 3D visualization system some time ago. The problem is that it is very difficult to do precision selection of the data - not precision movement of the mouse.
As other posters have aluded to, eventually you will get extreme muscle fatigue and want to hit something. At least, that's what I found. There was also a version that didn't rely on anything besides calculating arcs on the mouse and standard input.
The ultimate 3D input device has already been invented, it's the SpaceBall - not the cheap one, the $$$ work of art that you could get as an option with SGI boxen before they changed their logo.;)
No linux vendor has what's required, and that's the combination of hardware, software, and baseline apps and API's that Apple has. Moving to a mac solves all of the problems for the end user that moving to linux would, and it does so in a much more concrete, concise package. I get the heebie jeebies recommending people move to linux on the desktop because I know the inevitable 8pm support phone call would be coming.
Linux is great for fileserving and other tasks, but right now, the package is far from ready. This isn't a problem - I'm not sure that linux is ever going to be a desktop environment. Linux works great for my fileserver, FTP server, and web server. It works great for email, just like OpenBSD works great for my firewall. I'm not sure it will ever make a "good" desktop OS. Could somone build up a good desktop OS? Sure! I just don't see it happening. Apple, I think, has filled this niche.
I ran Linux as my primary OS until I got a mac, and let me tell you, things have awhile to go. I've said this many times, but Apple did what Redhat should have had the vision to do: Take linux, take some hardware, make the two work flawlessly, get some APIs and development tools in a nice supported package, and roll it out. That's what's needed for Unix on the desktop, and let me tell you, unix for the desktop is available right now. On OSX.
Linux certainly has the capability, and you can easily make linux work for you if you're technically inclined: For most people, better alternatives are out there right now.
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands. While this one will at least be very predictable, it will only be able to generate power when the tides are right, and that has no relation to peak power usage times. Sometimes the timing will be right, but the rest is wasted.
This is something that needs to be underscored; what is even worse is the magnitude to which green energy sources fall short. It's a myth; it's outright LIES at worst. Hydrogen is not an energy source, as many people - even professionals who should know better. Oil is effectively free energy, millions of years of solar power stored up and scooped off the ground - and it is going to take a HUGE investment in nuclear infrastructure to catch up.
Solar is an excellent possibility; however, research into efficient solar cells is lagging, and the energy efficiency of those cells is questionable. It doesn't do much good if you're producing cells using oil, and the cells take more energy to make than they will return over their lifetime.
That's also the problem with oil in the first place - there is more oil than will every be extracted from the earth. The problem is that the amount of energy to extract the oil is increasing, and once oil becomes an energy storage mechanism, and not an energy source, we are in big big trouble.
The unfortunately alarmist sites Die Off and the link in my signature are excellent sources for data backing up these claims - many of those studies are in fact funded for by congress.
"Green" energy sources are an interesting experiment but they WILL NOT solve the upcoming crisis from a shortening oil supply. The solution is to apply taxes to petroleum now and get that money into base research into solar cells, nuclear power, space based solar colletion, and other possibilities that offer energy densities that are a reasonable replacement for what we have now.
If you have energy, you have everything. Without energy, you have nothing.
This is a simple situation; they write the cheques, they make the rules. If you don't like it that much, then look for employment elsewhere. Very straightforward arrangement.
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts. A standard reference text that could be improved, peer reviewed, and built upon year after year would be a tremendous boon to mankind. I think of all the useless projects and questions I worked out over the years, imagine if that work went towards improving a collective body of information. Perhaps, something like another collaborative effort we know.
Yes, this won't work for everything. But things like calculus, fourier transforms, electromagnetics, classical signal processing, statics, dynamics, statistics - this is cookie cutter stuff. Should apply right through the grade schools, too. I suppose I should be thankful those things are even allowed to be taught anymore, because you can do naughty things with them.:-)
I won't tell you how mad it made me lugging close to 100lbs of books around for 5 years when if things were sane, they could be accessed either online, or via pdf files.
If anyone wants to be a patron saint - opening those materials up would potentially help a lot of people. Books are very expensive. Moreso outside of the western world.
The journal of the Sigma Xi society, my dad is a lifetime member and I've throughly enjoyed reading these. They give you a great sampling of any number of cutting edge topics - and get this - they actually have math and an acceptable level of science! It's not as heavy writing as you would get in a purely scientific journal, but it is much more in depth for the most part than you'd see in something like Scientific American. Pretty color graphics, great book reviews.
While you're demonstrating ignorance, there is a lot of very promising work going into applications of neural networks to control systems and the broader field of AI in general. The problem with neural networks is that you need large numbers of processors to do some of the more complicated nets in anything approaching real time. Your brain has several billion little processors massively interconnected.
Up until very recently with the advent of large scale FPGAs, this has not been practical.
Pardon me while I yawn. These things have been just around the corner for a LONG TIME. It seems they get "demonstrated" when there's a pressing need for more money, and then they go away for an undefined period of time.
I've never been all that excited about the space program; I missed those years by a decade. I worked for a PhD that was part of the Apollo program; he left NASA when he realized that he would never get to fly in space. He was right, so long as it was being run by governments - only the elite of the elite would ever have that honour, and even then, only while there was political interest.
Looking at pictures taken from the edge of space make my spine tingle - especially when they're taken by what amounts to a shoestring budget done by private enterprise. Pictures are one thing; tomorrow if all goes to plan, private enterprise will have put a man up there at the edge of space. Maybe not in orbit; I'm sure that will come in time.
I can't imagine what it must feel like to look up and see black, then look down and see the glowing blue curvature of the earth.
If you're reading this Mike, and everyone at Scaled Composites, you did a damn good job and we'll be waiting for your safe landing!
Microsoft development tools can cost some big money, and it costs money to stay on top of things. Countries that invest once in open source tools can use those open tools to develop their own in house software - for example, Le KMissile Destructo Fumer 5000. All of this can run on open platforms, some the KMissile system can have more resources put into the APPLICATION and USE of the tools, instead of getting new hammers and nails all the time.
Open source gives free tools to everybody. World class, kick ass tools. Do you know how much something as good as FFTW would cost to buy? More than my car! This lets you focus on using those tools to create value in the market - sucks to be in the tool making business, but overall it represents a boon. This is why so many people in the industry have problems; the value is not IN the IT, but what the IT enables you to DO.
How much extra spent on power supplies? High efficiency, high-current (500W+, where PC supplies are headed) are not cheap to produce.
It would be far better if government worked to reduce the amount of petroleum being consumed through initiatives to encourage telecommuting, locating companies in locations that don't require commuting in the first place, and research into fuel cells and hybrid vehicles.
I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen. 1) Your computer gets wet 2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.
I did a lot of experimenting with watercooling for about two years, short answer is it isn't going to leak unless you do something stupid or are very unlucky. If you have a GFCI on the outlet, you don't actually have too much to worry about. Just use proper clamps, or even zip ties will work ok.
So basically, I'd say this one is not worth worrying about. There have been very few meltdowns for all of the water cooling kits sold, and it HAS come a long way. Resevoirs aren't really needed with some of the new and adapted pumps that are out there. Fish tank 120V submersibles are obsoleted for 12V pumps. Good purpose built radiators are out there. Add silicone tubes and good hose clamps, and you shouldn't see a leak. Think of all the high pressure systems in your average car - rarely do those fail if maintained in far worse conditions.
I used to laugh at people who had PDAs. Then my little black book along with YEARS of contact info fell in a mudpuddle. After transcribing soggy half-legible pages, let me introduce you to the biggest reason to have a PDA:
You can back the damn thing up. $300 is NOTHING compared to the value of the information in my PDA.
PDA's are only useful if you always have them with you, too. What PDA's need, like notebooks, is the transparent bluetooth connection TO the cell phone for data. Those cell phone screens hurt my eyes. In Canada, the prices for wireless data over CDPD or GPRS is priced way to high to be used for anything, so maybe it's not as big of a deal here.
One things PDAs have done is they have been a BOON for the homebrew embedded industry. With about $20 in extra parts I built a really nice datalogger and digital gauge set for my car - and I got the palm for $60 on Ebay. (shameless plug) They're even cheaper now. (8mb of storage, a nice LCD, and buttons!).. millions of pdas have been sold worldwide, too. Happy happy!
Maybe the mass market appeal of PDA's will drop, but they will always be there. I miss my HP100LX "real" palmtop/PDA though. Used it until the keys broke. All the ones that followed were much too big and clunky.
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Nothing in the universe produces a net gain. It's all just a matter of converting evergy from one form to another.
..and that's just the USA!
What brilliant insight! This got modded informative?
Relative to MY current existance, the big puddle of flaming goo in the middle east I can (or used to be able to) scoop up with a bucket sure is an energy gain. Roughly 10 or 8 barrels of oil gained for every one you spend sucking it out of the ground. It's the collected energy from millions of years of solar output, all stored up for humanities handy-dandy use. It's a very very high quality energy source. Except it's limited.
Show me another process that can give the same kind of energy gain - 8 to 10 : 1, in the same volume, easily transported and stored. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't one.
If you want more depressing numbers, why don't you go look at the average daily consumption of oil in terms of energy.
One barrel of oil has 78 million Btu, 42 gallons per barrel.
From google: The United States consumed an average of about 20.0 MMBD of oil in 2003, up from 19.8 MMBD in 2002. (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html)
This gives us a yearly consumption of 7300 million barrels per year. This represents an energy conspumption figure - and this is JUST oil - 569,400,000,000,000,000 BTU's. In kWh, that's about 166,834,200,000,000 kilowatt hours. In other words, on hell of a pile of energy.
There is just no alternative energy source that can come close to meeting this demand. Period. All that energy - energy that has been stored up over huge periods of time - needs to come from someplace. There is no alternative at a reasonable energy profit I am aware of.
To meet that 20.0 MMBD figure, at 2:1, you'd need 40MMBD of oil. Let's assume biodiesel can get a 2:1 profit (It can't, that I'm aware) - Do you see the problem? How many barrels (assuming energy equivilancy) of biodiesel can you extract per acre of land at WHAT ENERGY PROFIT?
First: Diesel is cheap because there is less demand than gasoline. Switch all the cars to diesel, and there go your savings. Poof.
Second: I am skeptical of both biodiesel and ethanol from argiculture. I do not believe either produces a net energy gain once ALL factors of production have been accounted for - this includes gas for the equipment to harvest, energy used in processing and refining, oil and energy used in the creation of fertilizers, etc etc etc ad nauseam. Biodiesel lowers the amount of waste in that you can recover energy from that which would have otherwise been thrown away. It is not an energy source. (although; I am welcome to be proven wrong)
The depressing problem is NOTHING comes even CLOSE to oil. Oil is basically free energy lying there to be scooped off/out of the ground. Or, at least, it was - the energy profit from a barrel of oil is falling. It's that energy profit - e.g. quantity energy you get from burning that is greater than the energy that it took to extract the oil.
I highly recommend spending some time on the peakoil.net site and look at WHO it is sounding the alarm bells; there are going to be rough times ahead. There does not appear to be ANYTHING even close.
We need to look at fusion and other nuclear energy sources, and we need to look seriously at other crazy ideas, like extracting energy from the vacuum itself. The question is if viable alternatives are going to arise in time.
Every car out there already has a "hydrogen bomb" under the hood. Contained in some cases by a fragile piece of rubber tubing. You do know gasoline is a "hydrocarbon", right?
It doesn't work that well, and is a PITA for forms. What is worthwhile is imaging the file - just scan the document you want, and "file" it in a directory. When you want a document, look it up the way you would normally then print it. Presto.
Nursing degrees?
at the very moment their presence in other scientific and engineering disciplines has soared.
Chemical and civil engineering, from what I can tell, are enjoying larger numbers of women. I graduated EE in 2000, and my girlfriend graduated from Mechanical Engineering last May - and the numbers of women have not increased substantially up or down in either of those disiplines from what I can tell over that timeframe. (Sample size 1; standard disclaimers apply)
With regards to women and minorities, I feel that engineering and CS are perhaps the fairest degrees; when the pencil hits the paper, the answer can be determined to be right or wrong within a reasonable margin.
After compromising a system the first thing most people do is obtain a list of the stored password hashes to start your disctionary attacks. Or, after installing network sniffers or keyloggers, depending on how ballsy you might be feeling that day.
So, the length of the password can matter, or at least at one point in time, it did.
Coffee today is 20 times more potent than the coffee you drank in college...
While what you propose might be nice, it's not a part of the legal test in Canada or the UK.
In the one major contract dispute that made it down this road, this -was- considered by the arbitrating party. My dealings with the civil legal system have indicated that most representatives ARE reasonable when it comes to contract disputes, perhaps moreso when one side dramatically outguns the other.
Applied to employment contraccts, it does boil down to what "specific knowledge" means. To the best of my knowledge, this cannot be used to restrict me from working from a competing employer. It does restrict me from using, for example, a trade secret acquired in the course of my employment.
My point is if specific consideration is made for the noncompete arrangement, it has much more clout than a general rider on a employment contract.
Termination of the contract is governed by the terms of the contract itself and by the law governing termination in situations were it makes no sense for the contract to remain on foot, i.e. termination for frustration, breach of a fundamental term, or repudiation. but as I said in my above post, the law does not force a strict one-to-one mapping between obligations. To do so would impose unnecessary rigidity and inflexibility on the forms of legal relationships that can be created through contracts.
You're missing my point. No, it doesn't have to be point for point, but the scope of the contract and the consideration therein has to be reasonable. Let's say the contract says you won't accept a job in your field for 10 years instead of 2. With no additional consideration for that clause, I could not see a judge upholding the contract. Yes, this is one term within the contract - but it's a prett y substantial one, wouldn't you think? If I do specific low level work, such a clause could very likely prohibit me from working. Any person would see this as a serious restriction. When viewed upon the "at will" nature of most employment contracts, it borders on unreasonable.
This is assuming the restriction on employment is in itself legal, and that itself is a point of contention in many juristictions.
The consideration for a contract of employment consists only of the benefits that accrue to the employee generally, not of specific benefits for each obligation the employee is required to fulfil.
*translating*
In Canada, this, as was explained to me - would represent the difference between your income and the income you would get in a comparable competing job, or the income lost while you were looking for a job in a non-competing position - provided you could be hired for a competing position, and the NDA you signed was restricting you.
If you were paid an excessive wage during the terms of your contract, then it could be argued you were compensated for in that manner, but otherwise, these terms don't hold up under contract law.
If the terms of the contract are illegal, and as was explained to me, in a lot of cases they could be interpreted to be illegal - then the contract in part or in whole could be declared null and void.
That doesn't mean that such clauses are not legally enforceable in Canada, or in the UK. There's a solid foundation of case law supporting the validity of non-competition clauses in both countries. Put very simply, the restrictions must be for a reasonably limited time, and must restrict using the specific knowledge gained from the former employer, but typically not restrict a person from using their general expertise in the area of research/development.
These contracts are legal, I believe, if and only if there is consideration for the signee. This would mean you would have to recieve compensation, or something, in exchange for you not working. So if Seagate was willing to pay him a fair amount - likely his standard wages, or the difference between what he made there and a non-competing firm - then a judge in Canada would find this reasonable.
As a rider on a standard employment contract, based on what I know about contract law, any judge would interpret there to be no consideration for the signee making the contract void. Canadian judges tend to be sane and reasonable, for the most part.
I'm not a lawyer, of course, and this is a layman's interpretation from a text.
I do hardware design / low level and embedded programming. There's been pretty steady demand for the past few years; I saw the end coming when I graduated from EE for software engineering. Guys who couldn't tell me what a stack was were doing "IT".. sure, opens the field up - but dilutes the market. I did communications / network programming when I graduated, then got myself into low level embedded design as fast as I could. The lower level the better. Nobody ever wanted to do driver level or lower work .. so I figured I'd try.
:)
:)
Something those coming up should look at. It's a lot more frustrating than software design - try writing code when the only reliable debugger you have is printf, and even then not really, because you're writing it on beta development software for a nonstandard OS on unfinished prototype hardware.
It's very rewarding when you see your product being produced, and it's got blinkenlights you designed, and such.
To anyone finding work - the sad reality that I have accepted is that the odds of being able to settle in one area prior to retirement are very slim. I honestly don't know how I'd have kids - work is steady, but everything seems so unpredictable.
What's next, vaccinating against rebellious independant thoughts? No, I don't like this. Not one bit..
I worked one of these for use with a 3D visualization system some time ago. The problem is that it is very difficult to do precision selection of the data - not precision movement of the mouse.
;)
As other posters have aluded to, eventually you will get extreme muscle fatigue and want to hit something. At least, that's what I found. There was also a version that didn't rely on anything besides calculating arcs on the mouse and standard input.
The ultimate 3D input device has already been invented, it's the SpaceBall - not the cheap one, the $$$ work of art that you could get as an option with SGI boxen before they changed their logo.
No linux vendor has what's required, and that's the combination of hardware, software, and baseline apps and API's that Apple has. Moving to a mac solves all of the problems for the end user that moving to linux would, and it does so in a much more concrete, concise package. I get the heebie jeebies recommending people move to linux on the desktop because I know the inevitable 8pm support phone call would be coming.
Linux is great for fileserving and other tasks, but right now, the package is far from ready. This isn't a problem - I'm not sure that linux is ever going to be a desktop environment. Linux works great for my fileserver, FTP server, and web server. It works great for email, just like OpenBSD works great for my firewall. I'm not sure it will ever make a "good" desktop OS. Could somone build up a good desktop OS? Sure! I just don't see it happening. Apple, I think, has filled this niche.
I ran Linux as my primary OS until I got a mac, and let me tell you, things have awhile to go. I've said this many times, but Apple did what Redhat should have had the vision to do: Take linux, take some hardware, make the two work flawlessly, get some APIs and development tools in a nice supported package, and roll it out. That's what's needed for Unix on the desktop, and let me tell you, unix for the desktop is available right now. On OSX.
Linux certainly has the capability, and you can easily make linux work for you if you're technically inclined: For most people, better alternatives are out there right now.
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands. While this one will at least be very predictable, it will only be able to generate power when the tides are right, and that has no relation to peak power usage times. Sometimes the timing will be right, but the rest is wasted.
This is something that needs to be underscored; what is even worse is the magnitude to which green energy sources fall short. It's a myth; it's outright LIES at worst. Hydrogen is not an energy source, as many people - even professionals who should know better. Oil is effectively free energy, millions of years of solar power stored up and scooped off the ground - and it is going to take a HUGE investment in nuclear infrastructure to catch up.
Solar is an excellent possibility; however, research into efficient solar cells is lagging, and the energy efficiency of those cells is questionable. It doesn't do much good if you're producing cells using oil, and the cells take more energy to make than they will return over their lifetime.
That's also the problem with oil in the first place - there is more oil than will every be extracted from the earth. The problem is that the amount of energy to extract the oil is increasing, and once oil becomes an energy storage mechanism, and not an energy source, we are in big big trouble.
The unfortunately alarmist sites Die Off and the link in my signature are excellent sources for data backing up these claims - many of those studies are in fact funded for by congress.
"Green" energy sources are an interesting experiment but they WILL NOT solve the upcoming crisis from a shortening oil supply. The solution is to apply taxes to petroleum now and get that money into base research into solar cells, nuclear power, space based solar colletion, and other possibilities that offer energy densities that are a reasonable replacement for what we have now.
If you have energy, you have everything. Without energy, you have nothing.
This is a simple situation; they write the cheques, they make the rules. If you don't like it that much, then look for employment elsewhere. Very straightforward arrangement.
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts. A standard reference text that could be improved, peer reviewed, and built upon year after year would be a tremendous boon to mankind. I think of all the useless projects and questions I worked out over the years, imagine if that work went towards improving a collective body of information. Perhaps, something like another collaborative effort we know.
:-)
Yes, this won't work for everything. But things like calculus, fourier transforms, electromagnetics, classical signal processing, statics, dynamics, statistics - this is cookie cutter stuff. Should apply right through the grade schools, too. I suppose I should be thankful those things are even allowed to be taught anymore, because you can do naughty things with them.
I won't tell you how mad it made me lugging close to 100lbs of books around for 5 years when if things were sane, they could be accessed either online, or via pdf files.
If anyone wants to be a patron saint - opening those materials up would potentially help a lot of people. Books are very expensive. Moreso outside of the western world.
The journal of the Sigma Xi society, my dad is a lifetime member and I've throughly enjoyed reading these. They give you a great sampling of any number of cutting edge topics - and get this - they actually have math and an acceptable level of science! It's not as heavy writing as you would get in a purely scientific journal, but it is much more in depth for the most part than you'd see in something like Scientific American. Pretty color graphics, great book reviews.
Anyway; a real gem not many people are aware of.
American Scientist
..so maybe plain 'ol meat isn't so bad.
While you're demonstrating ignorance, there is a lot of very promising work going into applications of neural networks to control systems and the broader field of AI in general. The problem with neural networks is that you need large numbers of processors to do some of the more complicated nets in anything approaching real time. Your brain has several billion little processors massively interconnected.
Up until very recently with the advent of large scale FPGAs, this has not been practical.
Pardon me while I yawn. These things have been just around the corner for a LONG TIME. It seems they get "demonstrated" when there's a pressing need for more money, and then they go away for an undefined period of time.
Call me when I can buy one for my powerbook.
I've never been all that excited about the space program; I missed those years by a decade. I worked for a PhD that was part of the Apollo program; he left NASA when he realized that he would never get to fly in space. He was right, so long as it was being run by governments - only the elite of the elite would ever have that honour, and even then, only while there was political interest.
Looking at pictures taken from the edge of space make my spine tingle - especially when they're taken by what amounts to a shoestring budget done by private enterprise. Pictures are one thing; tomorrow if all goes to plan, private enterprise will have put a man up there at the edge of space. Maybe not in orbit; I'm sure that will come in time.
I can't imagine what it must feel like to look up and see black, then look down and see the glowing blue curvature of the earth.
If you're reading this Mike, and everyone at Scaled Composites, you did a damn good job and we'll be waiting for your safe landing!
Microsoft development tools can cost some big money, and it costs money to stay on top of things. Countries that invest once in open source tools can use those open tools to develop their own in house software - for example, Le KMissile Destructo Fumer 5000. All of this can run on open platforms, some the KMissile system can have more resources put into the APPLICATION and USE of the tools, instead of getting new hammers and nails all the time.
Open source gives free tools to everybody. World class, kick ass tools. Do you know how much something as good as FFTW would cost to buy? More than my car! This lets you focus on using those tools to create value in the market - sucks to be in the tool making business, but overall it represents a boon. This is why so many people in the industry have problems; the value is not IN the IT, but what the IT enables you to DO.
How much extra spent on power supplies? High efficiency, high-current (500W+, where PC supplies are headed) are not cheap to produce.
It would be far better if government worked to reduce the amount of petroleum being consumed through initiatives to encourage telecommuting, locating companies in locations that don't require commuting in the first place, and research into fuel cells and hybrid vehicles.
I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen.
1) Your computer gets wet
2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.
I did a lot of experimenting with watercooling for about two years, short answer is it isn't going to leak unless you do something stupid or are very unlucky. If you have a GFCI on the outlet, you don't actually have too much to worry about. Just use proper clamps, or even zip ties will work ok.
So basically, I'd say this one is not worth worrying about. There have been very few meltdowns for all of the water cooling kits sold, and it HAS come a long way. Resevoirs aren't really needed with some of the new and adapted pumps that are out there. Fish tank 120V submersibles are obsoleted for 12V pumps. Good purpose built radiators are out there. Add silicone tubes and good hose clamps, and you shouldn't see a leak. Think of all the high pressure systems in your average car - rarely do those fail if maintained in far worse conditions.
I used to laugh at people who had PDAs. Then my little black book along with YEARS of contact info fell in a mudpuddle. After transcribing soggy half-legible pages, let me introduce you to the biggest reason to have a PDA:
.. millions of pdas have been sold worldwide, too. Happy happy!
You can back the damn thing up. $300 is NOTHING compared to the value of the information in my PDA.
PDA's are only useful if you always have them with you, too. What PDA's need, like notebooks, is the transparent bluetooth connection TO the cell phone for data. Those cell phone screens hurt my eyes. In Canada, the prices for wireless data over CDPD or GPRS is priced way to high to be used for anything, so maybe it's not as big of a deal here.
One things PDAs have done is they have been a BOON for the homebrew embedded industry. With about $20 in extra parts I built a really nice datalogger and digital gauge set for my car - and I got the palm for $60 on Ebay. (shameless plug) They're even cheaper now. (8mb of storage, a nice LCD, and buttons!)
Maybe the mass market appeal of PDA's will drop, but they will always be there. I miss my HP100LX "real" palmtop/PDA though. Used it until the keys broke. All the ones that followed were much too big and clunky.