I like nuclear thermal as much as the next/.er, but is there really any point in thermal rockets beyond attaining orbit?
Personally, I'd rather see the money go into a space-borne power reactor and rely on VASIMR or other electric engines for the transit. As SpaceX and Musk should know, a modular system is a lot more flexible, and we know a lot more about how to design and build power reactors than nuclear thermal rockets. More to the point, you'd need a gas-core reactor to match the specific impulse of current VASIMR prototypes, and gas-core reactors are ENTIRELY theoretical.
(If you don't know, specific impulse is the rough analogue of how 'fast' a engine is in space, although it actually bears more in common with fuel economy than power).
And as far as graphics goes, WoW is a great example of OpenGL showing off the best that 2004 graphics technology can provide. I mean, you can't exactly call it visually stunning.
Not that this is the fault of OpenGL... just it's a very bad to use WoW as its torchbearer when Direct3D sports the CryEngine, for example.
X-Plane is a fantastic piece of software, but I don't know how well it defends OpenGL's honour. The flight model implemented by Austin Meyer is the best ever created for a desktop flight simulator and his overall commitment to accuracy makes it a fantastic simulator. But it's not the prettiest in the world; by modern standards the graphics engine is quite dated. Blizzard is also widely credited for their use of OpenGL in WoW, but again, WoW's graphics are pathetic by modern standards.
For whatever reason the prime examples of OpenGL are always game engines which, while portable, are primitive by modern standards. This doesn't do much for the argument that it's a competent replacement for DirectX.
If you buy an iPhone, jailbreak it and then the headphone out jack breaks.... why shouldn't that be covered by the warranty?
I'm going to use the ever-popular car analogy. Car makers used to do this... your car was only under warranty if it was repaired by certified technicians, with "Genuine" parts. Good business to be had, especially if you're building pretty unreliable vehicles. And it was a scam: replace the radio with something nicer and then if your transmission fell apart they'd claim it wasn't under warranty anymore. Of course, this doesn't happen today because there's a law: if something in your car breaks, the car maker has to honor the warranty unless the failure was caused by a modification you made.
There's no reason why a similar rule shouldn't be applied to consumer electronics. If I buy a phone and replace or modify the user software, there's no reason why the hardware should not remain covered.
Ugh. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. I don't really care whether EVs are more dangerous to blind pedestrians or not, but this is just bad statistics aimed at producing a desired result. The claim is that electric vehicles will not be more dangerous, because hybrids at low speeds are also quiet and there has been no significant change in pedestrian fatalities.
From that one sentence summary, the fundamental flaw in this study should be apparent.
Monopolies are always bad and competition is always good. Unless it's labour we're talking about. Then competition is just a bunch of scabs and monopoly is the loving embrace of the union organizer.
Sounds to me like there's a supply and demand problem for these established designers... namely there's too much supply for the available demand.
I understand their position: for someone outside of the design industry, it can be difficult to know who to go to with a project. So large, established designers get good business, just because they have enough of a reputation to appeal to the more conservative business types. But the prices they're charging are well above the market optimum, and they thrive off of imperfect knowledge in their client base. An organization like 99designs.com gives small, unknown, but potentially talented players access to the client base that has typically been reserved for the big guys. This drives the actual price of services (when amortized over all the work that doesn't get paid for) down to the actual economic optimum.
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
I guess that depends on what Google hoped to accomplish. From a pure sales perspective, the Nexus One didn't make a big dent in the market. But with Android, Google is trying something that Microsoft tried with WinMo, and failed at; one of the many reasons was stagnant, crappy and divergent hardware. I've never believed the purpose of the N1 was to sell a lot of phones... that was obvious from the selection of T-Mobile as the carrier... the purpose was to drive Android forward and keep it from falling into one of the traps WinMo fell into.
So if you compare pre--N1 Android phones to phones in the post-N1 era, the difference is startling. Nexus One may have failed in sales, but it succeeded in pushing the ecosystem forward. And I suspect that's all Google ever really wanted.
Radiation pressure. Put a bunch of satellites up with big lasers and give everything it sees a retrograde zap. Bonus points if you put out enough wattage to cause ablation.
The article is unclear, but it sounds more like China tested their ASAT weapon against a launched suborbital target, not an actual satellite as the headline suggests.
A fast ballistic trajectory that either immediately returns to earth, or returns after a couple of orbits, would be a comparatively responsible way of testing these weapons. A well designed test would have most of the same challenges as firing on an actual satellite, without leaving a semi-permanent debris cloud.
Amusing, yes, but incorrect, since we're talking about an object orbiting the sun. You go further away from the sun by reflecting the light behind you, and get closer by reflecting the light in front of you. In fact, I can't think of any orbital maneuver where you'd want to reflect sunlight back to the sun.
No, not really. Photons carry several orders of magnitude more momentum than solar wind. The only "practical" way to capture momentum from solar wind is with a magnetic sail, since the surface area required (hundreds of square km) would be unfeasible with any physical material.
There are lots of apps in Android that come in both paid and ad-ware versions. It offers choice to users and to developers. Of course, on Android, as a developer, you can use any advertising network you want; Apple could certainly port iAd to Android, if they wished. Choice is a Good Thing(TM).
Compare that to the iPhone. If it's just content you're interested in, you could always just do a website. Except with the latest version of Safari, Apple are trying to kill off web advertising too. So if you want reliable income from iPhone users, you've got to do a content-delivery app. Users then have to buy your app through the AppStore (and Apple get their cut). If it's free and ad-supported, all of the major competitors are locked out so you're stuck with iAds... and Apple gets their cut. And if you get pissed off and want to abandon the iPhone and switch to Android? Well, have fun rewriting your app from scratch: Apple banned you from using any compatibility platforms which would make it portable.
Yes, in this particular incident we're talking about ads, and I hate annoying ads as much as the next person, but leaving it at that is short-sighted and naive. This isn't about eliminating ads and improving user-experience, no matter what Steve Jobs tells his adoring masses. This is competition Mafia-style. You can say 'this is all fine, it's Apple's platform and they can do what they like with it.' But it's also what's called 'rent-seeking' behavior and I don't know of any economist who doesn't consider it abusive and anti-competitive. Hence all the recent DOJ investigations.
Uh, no. Google is crying "Foul!" because Apple is banning developers from using Google's ad platform in their apps. Conveniently, right at the same time as they introduce their own: iAd. Yes, ads suck and it's weird defending an advertising platform, but this is Google: the company that made ads useful and unoffensive (and just that slight bit creepy).
Apple are truly becoming the kings of rent-seeking and platform lock-in. It's far worse than anything Microsoft ever did.
Oregon law obviously doesn't apply, but California law. California law is a bit unusual in that it calls all kinds of things "theft" that have different names elsewhere. For example, if you rent a car, and don't return it, and the rental car company asks you to return it, and you keep it for another eleven days, then by California law it will be assumed that this was theft. The important one in this case is that when you find someone's lost property, and take it, and then neither return it to the owner nor hand it over to the police, then California law calls this theft.
The way this is written always causes confusion among the feeble-minded.
Indeed it does. Unfortunately, perhaps you should have checked the law before making this statement.
California law has two statutes covering lost property. One statute allows injured parties to sue for compensation or return of property, and requires that found property over a certain value be handed to the police, as you say. The criminal statute only requires a reasonable effort be made to return it.
Well, that's the problem with HTML. The W3C doesn't create an acceptance test, so there's really no objective way to measure how compliant a particular browser truly is. People love to use the ACID tests, but ACID tests only a small portion of the relevant standards. And the portions tested aren't even the major, important parts; ACID tests for very obscure, esoteric parts of the standards.
On one hand, you can look at the ACID tests and say 'well, at least it's an indication of interest in conforming to the standard.' But is that true either? ACID tests have become another marketing point: 'my browser got to 100% compliance before your browser.' Aiming for 100% on the ACID tests doesn't necessarily indicate a desire to be highly compliant, it indicates a desire to score 100% on the ACID tests.
You could perhaps consider the instantaneous behavior of the tests: how compliant various browsers are upon release of the new test. There's a certain logic to that; developers which are truly interested in compliance, and not just marketing, will do well in a previously unseen test. But ACID tests aren't developed in isolation either. They're politically justified, an effort to encourage compliance, and as such they test for specific behaviors which major browsers were getting wrong (i.e., a browser could be 99.9% compliant, and ACID would target the 0.1% they get wrong).
So to answer your question: No. There's no comprehensive compliance/acceptance test for any of W3C's standards, so don't expect one either. The only evidence of compliance is anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Microsoft's test results are completely unsurprising and generally meaningless for anybody familiar with normal development practices, and W3C standards, but it's a nice indication that they're aiming for at least some level of standards-compliance in IE9.
Yes, and this has absolutely nothing to do with you running pre-release, debug mode software, or that you're comparing low-def YouTube videos to high-def Vimeo.
I replicated your experiment, except with Chrome 5 (the release version) in Ubuntu: Vimeo and YouTube in flash (standalone plugin), at the same time. With the CNN ROV stream from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on my other monitor. So that's three video streams, and according to top npviewer.bin (the flash plugin) is taking around 70% CPU time. With just the CNN live stream it's around 8%.
Actually, it is. Since the Valdez accident, ExxonMobil completely overhauled their procedures and practices and now run the best and safest operations in the world. Ironically, ExxonMobile are consummate professionals and BP are a bunch of cowboys in comparison.
There's lots of "traditional" desalination techniques, and it's widely used in regions like the Persian Gulf where supplies of fresh water are limited. You've got everything from evaporative desalination to reverse osmosis which can run on waste heat from power plants or other industrial processes, to reverse-osmosis. And you can easily build a small reverse-osmosis based desalination plant powered by solar. All that takes is some clear skies and a water pump, no need for a complex field installation.
What good is a wave-powered desalination plant that costs $500,000 to construct, when it produces the same amount of fresh-water as a small $50k solar-powered reverse-osmosis device? I have no clue whether those numbers are representative, which is why I ask the question in the original post.
An interesting idea... but just because something is clean and self-sustaining, doesn't make it a wise investment. At what rate does this produce fresh water, and how much does it cost to build? It sounds clever, but would it actually be more efficient than a traditional desalination powered by solar, or even nuclear power?
I hope it works well, but too many of these ideas simply cost too much for too little.
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I like nuclear thermal as much as the next /.er, but is there really any point in thermal rockets beyond attaining orbit?
Personally, I'd rather see the money go into a space-borne power reactor and rely on VASIMR or other electric engines for the transit. As SpaceX and Musk should know, a modular system is a lot more flexible, and we know a lot more about how to design and build power reactors than nuclear thermal rockets. More to the point, you'd need a gas-core reactor to match the specific impulse of current VASIMR prototypes, and gas-core reactors are ENTIRELY theoretical.
(If you don't know, specific impulse is the rough analogue of how 'fast' a engine is in space, although it actually bears more in common with fuel economy than power).
Valve refuses to touch the PS3 (rightly so, it's an awful piece of hardware to program). EA did the port of the Orange Box.
And as far as graphics goes, WoW is a great example of OpenGL showing off the best that 2004 graphics technology can provide. I mean, you can't exactly call it visually stunning.
Not that this is the fault of OpenGL... just it's a very bad to use WoW as its torchbearer when Direct3D sports the CryEngine, for example.
X-Plane is a fantastic piece of software, but I don't know how well it defends OpenGL's honour. The flight model implemented by Austin Meyer is the best ever created for a desktop flight simulator and his overall commitment to accuracy makes it a fantastic simulator. But it's not the prettiest in the world; by modern standards the graphics engine is quite dated. Blizzard is also widely credited for their use of OpenGL in WoW, but again, WoW's graphics are pathetic by modern standards.
For whatever reason the prime examples of OpenGL are always game engines which, while portable, are primitive by modern standards. This doesn't do much for the argument that it's a competent replacement for DirectX.
Sure, but you can expect Chevy, Ford or any other auto vendor to fix factory defects in the paintwork, for example. Or if the radio breaks.
Making modifications may partially void your warranty. But only if they can prove your modifications caused the problem. That's the law.
If you buy an iPhone, jailbreak it and then the headphone out jack breaks.... why shouldn't that be covered by the warranty?
I'm going to use the ever-popular car analogy. Car makers used to do this... your car was only under warranty if it was repaired by certified technicians, with "Genuine" parts. Good business to be had, especially if you're building pretty unreliable vehicles. And it was a scam: replace the radio with something nicer and then if your transmission fell apart they'd claim it wasn't under warranty anymore. Of course, this doesn't happen today because there's a law: if something in your car breaks, the car maker has to honor the warranty unless the failure was caused by a modification you made.
There's no reason why a similar rule shouldn't be applied to consumer electronics. If I buy a phone and replace or modify the user software, there's no reason why the hardware should not remain covered.
Ugh. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. I don't really care whether EVs are more dangerous to blind pedestrians or not, but this is just bad statistics aimed at producing a desired result. The claim is that electric vehicles will not be more dangerous, because hybrids at low speeds are also quiet and there has been no significant change in pedestrian fatalities.
From that one sentence summary, the fundamental flaw in this study should be apparent.
Monopolies are always bad and competition is always good. Unless it's labour we're talking about. Then competition is just a bunch of scabs and monopoly is the loving embrace of the union organizer.
Sounds to me like there's a supply and demand problem for these established designers... namely there's too much supply for the available demand.
I understand their position: for someone outside of the design industry, it can be difficult to know who to go to with a project. So large, established designers get good business, just because they have enough of a reputation to appeal to the more conservative business types. But the prices they're charging are well above the market optimum, and they thrive off of imperfect knowledge in their client base. An organization like 99designs.com gives small, unknown, but potentially talented players access to the client base that has typically been reserved for the big guys. This drives the actual price of services (when amortized over all the work that doesn't get paid for) down to the actual economic optimum.
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
I guess that depends on what Google hoped to accomplish. From a pure sales perspective, the Nexus One didn't make a big dent in the market. But with Android, Google is trying something that Microsoft tried with WinMo, and failed at; one of the many reasons was stagnant, crappy and divergent hardware. I've never believed the purpose of the N1 was to sell a lot of phones... that was obvious from the selection of T-Mobile as the carrier... the purpose was to drive Android forward and keep it from falling into one of the traps WinMo fell into.
So if you compare pre--N1 Android phones to phones in the post-N1 era, the difference is startling. Nexus One may have failed in sales, but it succeeded in pushing the ecosystem forward. And I suspect that's all Google ever really wanted.
Radiation pressure. Put a bunch of satellites up with big lasers and give everything it sees a retrograde zap. Bonus points if you put out enough wattage to cause ablation.
The article is unclear, but it sounds more like China tested their ASAT weapon against a launched suborbital target, not an actual satellite as the headline suggests.
A fast ballistic trajectory that either immediately returns to earth, or returns after a couple of orbits, would be a comparatively responsible way of testing these weapons. A well designed test would have most of the same challenges as firing on an actual satellite, without leaving a semi-permanent debris cloud.
Amusing, yes, but incorrect, since we're talking about an object orbiting the sun. You go further away from the sun by reflecting the light behind you, and get closer by reflecting the light in front of you. In fact, I can't think of any orbital maneuver where you'd want to reflect sunlight back to the sun.
No, not really. Photons carry several orders of magnitude more momentum than solar wind. The only "practical" way to capture momentum from solar wind is with a magnetic sail, since the surface area required (hundreds of square km) would be unfeasible with any physical material.
I see you're an Alfa Romeo fan too!
Yes. Especially since it was France that gave Israel nuclear technology, not America.
There are lots of apps in Android that come in both paid and ad-ware versions. It offers choice to users and to developers. Of course, on Android, as a developer, you can use any advertising network you want; Apple could certainly port iAd to Android, if they wished. Choice is a Good Thing(TM).
Compare that to the iPhone. If it's just content you're interested in, you could always just do a website. Except with the latest version of Safari, Apple are trying to kill off web advertising too. So if you want reliable income from iPhone users, you've got to do a content-delivery app. Users then have to buy your app through the AppStore (and Apple get their cut). If it's free and ad-supported, all of the major competitors are locked out so you're stuck with iAds... and Apple gets their cut. And if you get pissed off and want to abandon the iPhone and switch to Android? Well, have fun rewriting your app from scratch: Apple banned you from using any compatibility platforms which would make it portable.
Yes, in this particular incident we're talking about ads, and I hate annoying ads as much as the next person, but leaving it at that is short-sighted and naive. This isn't about eliminating ads and improving user-experience, no matter what Steve Jobs tells his adoring masses. This is competition Mafia-style. You can say 'this is all fine, it's Apple's platform and they can do what they like with it.' But it's also what's called 'rent-seeking' behavior and I don't know of any economist who doesn't consider it abusive and anti-competitive. Hence all the recent DOJ investigations.
Uh, no. Google is crying "Foul!" because Apple is banning developers from using Google's ad platform in their apps. Conveniently, right at the same time as they introduce their own: iAd. Yes, ads suck and it's weird defending an advertising platform, but this is Google: the company that made ads useful and unoffensive (and just that slight bit creepy).
Apple are truly becoming the kings of rent-seeking and platform lock-in. It's far worse than anything Microsoft ever did.
Oregon law obviously doesn't apply, but California law. California law is a bit unusual in that it calls all kinds of things "theft" that have different names elsewhere. For example, if you rent a car, and don't return it, and the rental car company asks you to return it, and you keep it for another eleven days, then by California law it will be assumed that this was theft. The important one in this case is that when you find someone's lost property, and take it, and then neither return it to the owner nor hand it over to the police, then California law calls this theft.
The way this is written always causes confusion among the feeble-minded.
Indeed it does. Unfortunately, perhaps you should have checked the law before making this statement.
California law has two statutes covering lost property. One statute allows injured parties to sue for compensation or return of property, and requires that found property over a certain value be handed to the police, as you say. The criminal statute only requires a reasonable effort be made to return it.
Well, that's the problem with HTML. The W3C doesn't create an acceptance test, so there's really no objective way to measure how compliant a particular browser truly is. People love to use the ACID tests, but ACID tests only a small portion of the relevant standards. And the portions tested aren't even the major, important parts; ACID tests for very obscure, esoteric parts of the standards.
On one hand, you can look at the ACID tests and say 'well, at least it's an indication of interest in conforming to the standard.' But is that true either? ACID tests have become another marketing point: 'my browser got to 100% compliance before your browser.' Aiming for 100% on the ACID tests doesn't necessarily indicate a desire to be highly compliant, it indicates a desire to score 100% on the ACID tests.
You could perhaps consider the instantaneous behavior of the tests: how compliant various browsers are upon release of the new test. There's a certain logic to that; developers which are truly interested in compliance, and not just marketing, will do well in a previously unseen test. But ACID tests aren't developed in isolation either. They're politically justified, an effort to encourage compliance, and as such they test for specific behaviors which major browsers were getting wrong (i.e., a browser could be 99.9% compliant, and ACID would target the 0.1% they get wrong).
So to answer your question: No. There's no comprehensive compliance/acceptance test for any of W3C's standards, so don't expect one either. The only evidence of compliance is anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Microsoft's test results are completely unsurprising and generally meaningless for anybody familiar with normal development practices, and W3C standards, but it's a nice indication that they're aiming for at least some level of standards-compliance in IE9.
No specification? Here you go: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
I like your argument that nobody can make an alternative player, so long as you ignore the alternative FOSS player.
Yes, and this has absolutely nothing to do with you running pre-release, debug mode software, or that you're comparing low-def YouTube videos to high-def Vimeo.
I replicated your experiment, except with Chrome 5 (the release version) in Ubuntu: Vimeo and YouTube in flash (standalone plugin), at the same time. With the CNN ROV stream from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on my other monitor. So that's three video streams, and according to top npviewer.bin (the flash plugin) is taking around 70% CPU time. With just the CNN live stream it's around 8%.
So yeah, PEBKAC.
Actually, it is. Since the Valdez accident, ExxonMobil completely overhauled their procedures and practices and now run the best and safest operations in the world. Ironically, ExxonMobile are consummate professionals and BP are a bunch of cowboys in comparison.
There's lots of "traditional" desalination techniques, and it's widely used in regions like the Persian Gulf where supplies of fresh water are limited. You've got everything from evaporative desalination to reverse osmosis which can run on waste heat from power plants or other industrial processes, to reverse-osmosis. And you can easily build a small reverse-osmosis based desalination plant powered by solar. All that takes is some clear skies and a water pump, no need for a complex field installation.
What good is a wave-powered desalination plant that costs $500,000 to construct, when it produces the same amount of fresh-water as a small $50k solar-powered reverse-osmosis device? I have no clue whether those numbers are representative, which is why I ask the question in the original post.
In summary, you're a fucking idiot.
An interesting idea... but just because something is clean and self-sustaining, doesn't make it a wise investment. At what rate does this produce fresh water, and how much does it cost to build? It sounds clever, but would it actually be more efficient than a traditional desalination powered by solar, or even nuclear power?
I hope it works well, but too many of these ideas simply cost too much for too little.