Is this practical, or even easily plausible, in windows? No.
With cygwin, it is.
Does everyone know regular expressions? No. Am I saying that no one should use these tools? No. I'm just commenting on the poster that said grep couldn't do what these tools do - they were wrong.
Actually, the reason why I started using tools such as glimpse and swish-e is because there are some things that I just couldn't do with grep. At least not without far too much work involved. For example, using grep to search pdf files is painful. Simple egrep doesn't work, and pre-processing the file with pdftotext takes quite a bit of time per file. (A half-second per file adds up when you have 120 pdf files to search.) OpenOffice.org files are just as bad. (I had to write my own parser for that.)
Locate isn't bad, but for some applications you really need to have a content-based search that can't be accomodated by variations on grep. The grep family is great when you are dealing with text based files, but tends to run into problems with content like pdf and OpenOffice.org files.
So for a practical example, I have about 120 collected pdf files of academic articles under filenames with the primary author and year. (I could put the title in there, but filenames between 16-25 characters seem to be reasonable.)
If I'm doing reading on a particular topic, I might want, for example, all of the articles related to Barry Wellman's work on social networks on the internet. The obvious way to get that is to list all of the articles that cite Wellman. This is probably not information that I want to put in the filename.
So, to try a naive example (which according to others here should work.)
% time grep -il wellman *.pdf grep -il wellman *.pdf 0.65s user 1.27s system 99% cpu 1.939 total
So in this case, grep spends about two seconds returning no results.
Now I could write a shell script that runs pdftotext on every file in my library, then grep the output. But pdftotext is expensive for one file much less a directory of 120 files:
% time pdftotext postgresql_tutorial.pdf - >/dev/null pdftotext postgresql_tutorial.pdf - >/dev/null 1.84s user 0.16s system 99% cpu 2.019 total
Thankfully, I have a document indexing application that does the work for me. A while back I set up swish-e to index almost everything in my home directory. So...
% time swish-e -f ~/.swish-e/Web_index -w wellman | grep library 1000/home/kirk/www/library/garton_1997.html "STUDYING ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS, by Laura Garton, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Barry Wellman" 103238 927/home/kirk/www/library/koku_2003.doc "koku_2003.doc" 306176 375/home/kirk/www/library/Cassell_2005.pdf "Cassell_2005.pdf" 615126 323/home/kirk/www/library/Qualifying_Exams/onlinecomm.pdf "onlinecomm.pdf" 63894 255/home/kirk/www/library/Koehly_1998.pdf "Koehly_1998.pdf" 1410176 255/home/kirk/www/library/Qualifying_Exams/methods.pd f "methods.pdf" 72688 255/home/kirk/www/library/cho_2003.pdf "cho_2003.pdf" 118267 161/home/kirk/www/library/SearchDBDT/INDEX_K.IX "INDEX_K.IX" 294912 161/home/kirk/www/library/ICLS_doctoral_consortium_pr oposal.pdf "ICLS_doctoral_consortium_proposal.pdf" 44923 161/home/kirk/www/library/barab_ilf_2002.pdf "barab_ilf_2002.pdf" 280560 161/home/kirk/www/library/barab_dvc.pdf "barab_dvc.pdf" 683011 swish-e -f ~/.swish-e/Web_index -w wellman 0.05s user 0.03s system 95% cpu 0.090 total grep library 0.00s user 0.01s system 9% cpu 0.087 total
The full-text index gives me 11 hits, in 1/20th of the time as a naive grep, sorted by score. (It missed one, primarily because xpdf respects copy protection while Copernic seems to be able to index through copy protection.)
Sometimes fulltext searching is useful, and egrep just does not work.
Seriously, I'm really holding off on the jump to the 5.X series. It looks like the best migration route from 4.X to 5.X is backup-reformat-reinstall-restore. My system currently does just about everything I need (I've given up on wine as not worth the effort) and I just know that I'll miss some configuration file that took me about 6 hours to tweak into working.
That said, I (and many others) consider Subversion to be the logical successor to CVS, and it seems to me that any effort spent on revision control would be better spent contributing to Subversion (or Arch maybe) instead of writing yet another version of something that's essentially obsolete.
I think the core problem is that CVS has become something of a legacy tool like sed, awk, grep and sh. Many of these tools may be "obsolete" but that does not mean that we don't need secure and trustworthy versions of those tools.
For the forseeable future, there will probably be projects using cvs for the next several years. OpenBSD users use cvsup for patching and updating both the base system and ports tree. I like Subversion and use it for my own stuff, but I don't think it is quite ready yet.
Well, the big problem is that there are hundreds of legacy projects and update mechanisms that currently depend on cvs. (For example, FreeBSD's cvsup.) This means that there is still a need for a secure re-write of cvs.
I have read the full article, and have read many of the comments as well. But I think that you are missing a key issue. In one of the comments you made, you suggested that users will be willing to give up the single program that they can't get under a free operating system, if the programs that do run under the free operating system are superior. Even if we accept this as true, this only works if the single application in question is one that the user cannot live without. In recent months, I have been forced to go back from using FreeBSD to Windows XP primarily because the speech recognition software that I need to produce 2000 words per day does not currently exist under a free operating system. The big question on my mind is that why should the fact that I am locked into a specific application that runs on Windows, lock me into using a proprietary office suite, statistics package, programming language, or typesetting program?
I have run into a few examples of major deal breakers. For many of my colleagues EndNote is one of the major deal-breakers. And adoption of open office is hindered by multiple perceived deficiencies. But I think that one of the major problems with the argument that most people choose their operating system based on applications, is that that is not how things work. People choose their operating systems based on culture, and then go about trying to discover what applications are available to meet their needs.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is really the only deal killer that keeps me from converting over to FreeBSD. About three years ago my bad typing habits caught up with me, and I have found the dictation is really the only thing that keeps me able to put out a couple thousand words a day. However, there are quite a few annoyances that comes with using speech dictation. Expect to plop down at least $50 for good headset. Also, my choice and editors is limited to notepad and Dragon pad. Editing is a pain in the ass, and correcting what it gets wrong takes quite a bit of time.
To be honest, I would not use it unless I had to. I have been typing since I was 8 years old, and that is still the most natural way for me to write.
Can one tell me why I should learn python and not any other programming language anyway?
Well, some of the things I like about python: 1: tightly structured code. 2: less punctuation. 3: more readable syntax. 4: full OOP from the ground up (in contrast to perl where the OOP is bolted on with references). 5: short production cycle.
Many of these things can be found in other languages as well. So it largely comes down a matter of preference.
From the little I have seen, python seems to be a command line language. Is it anywhere similar to Visual Basic, which I have come to see and experience through a GUI?
...anything I'm talking about. Right. I'm talking about manipulation at the particle level. When you read what I say and then talk nanotechnology, you're like a chaste priest who is trying to explain their views on sex to a sensible human being. We're not even talking about the same things. You're talking about some sillyassed ideas from a book that say that abstaining is a good deal, and I'm talking about getting my partner to have multiple orgasms more than once a day. No wonder we're not communicating.
No, the reason we are not communicating is that I'm talking physics, and you are talking science fiction.
Actually, you are not even talking science fiction, you are talking pure fantasy.
Again, bzzt. Not talking about fission. Not talking about fusion....Now we need to make some free protons, neutrons, and then figure out how to stick 'em back together in a new configuration.
Getting free protons and neutrons to stick together is nuclear fusion. It is well understood enough to be taught in both basic high school and college physics. The processes by which we get protons and neutrons to stick together is actually well understood, and does not provide the magical energy source you desire.
Is your (true) assertion about what works for fission and fusion so because unstable radioactive elements are the only ones with powerful atomic bonds? No. That's not the case. Right? Right. Instead, it is so because they are simply easy prey for our current level of technology. That's the only reason. They come apart easily because they are already coming apart. The frigging things want to come apart. It's almost cheating, in a way. It's so easy, even nature has done it by accident. But all elements carry these same, ultra-powerful bonds. And it may well be the case that taken one at a time, radioactive elements may not be the ones we want to be playing with. For several reasons, one of which, obviously, is safety.
The reason why fission only works for a handful of heavy elements is because it only takes a small quantity of additional mass (in the form of a neutron) to make those atoms unstable enough to undergo fission. The reason why fusion only works for a handful of elements at the other end of the periodic table is because above a critical atomic, it takes more energy to shove two nucleii together than the energy you get out. For everything heavier than iron, you don't get as much energy out of the reaction as you put into the reaction.
The problem isn't with the technology. The problem is with the physics. You might as well be talking about perpetual motion.
I'm not talking about "purifying" metal, I'm talking about making metal from electrons, protons, neutrons.
You do know that the energies required to produce iron is so large that it happens only in late-stage stars? And you do know that producing elements heavier than iron through fusion is an endothermic process that only happens in supernovae?
But, release a just few bonds, and you have quite a bit less energy.
Could you please explain the physics of how this is done.
You can get lots more energy out than you have to put in. We already know that. It is an esablished fact, with numerous demonstrations available. So the trick is, how do we do it?
There is not much of a trick to it. The problem is that you need a few things for it to work: 1: a good source of alpha particles or neutrons, both dangerous to hang out around. 2: unstable isotopes.
Dude, basic physics. Every bit of material has huge amounts of energy locked away in it. We call it "atomic energy." There is No shortage of energy at the atomic level, and we already know that. Just ask the 1940's residents of Hiroshima. Well, the ones you can find.
Um, perhaps you should go back and take a basic physics course.
1. Nanotechnology has nothing to do with what happens inside the nucleus. Nanotechnology is all about manipulating ions, particles that either have extra electrons, or are lacking electrons. We are not talking about machines that can pull atoms apart.
2. Fission is only a viable energy source if you have a large quantity of already unstable radioactive material. The number of elements that can be used to get energy via fission is very few (Uranium and Plutonium the most prominent.) And as for fusion, we are nowhere near being able to chuck a handful of garbage into a reactor and get energy by fission.
Except for the unfortunate fact that quite a bit of fabrication requires a lot more energy than you can get from photovoltaics.
2 - Have the machine make a garbage disposal/atomizer. Solved.
The problem is not that elements are rare. The problem is that you have to spend a fairly large quantity of energy to get those elements into a form that is useful. Iron for example is dirt cheap. Steel will cost you a shitload of energy, and and some carbon to soak up all that oxygen.
Gee, go out to a movie and there is just so much more to shovel up:
The energy cost issue is a mirage. Buy the replicator. Make solar cells. Bingo, NO energy cost issue.
Purifying metal into any usable form in sufficient qantities requires quite a bit more energy than is available from photovaltaics. And this is not even approaching the problem that fabrication is an endothermic process on its own.
If we're talking about an atomic level fabricator, then other than starting the thing up, there is plenty of energy available at the atomic level. Don't believe me? Look here [hmm-364.org] (link to atomic bomb photo).
Talk about mixing apples and oranges here. Radioactive elements are expensive to get for good reasons, and expensive to store. A lump of radioactive material large enough to provide usable energy is not something you want sitting on your desktop, at least not if your desktop can also hold a fairly heavy containment system. This is also a bit of a non-sequetor because nanotechnology is not concerned with splitting atoms, but with shuffling charged particles from place to place.
Nothing in life is free. You still have to deal with the laws of thermodynamics even with nanotechnology.
Then again, this all sounds way too good to be true.
Probably because it is too good to be true. They're just so many flawed assumptions behind the idea of the desktop replicator that puts it on the same level as warp drive, a literary device that is good for those moments when you need the hero to create an object on the fly, but really bad when talking about future economics.
Such a device would make physical goods value-less. The only things of value any longer would be services and artistic creations.
Whoa! Hold on here just a minute! There are a large number of costs involved in producing a physical good. While your machine might be able to eliminate the labor costs, you still have to deal with the costs of raw materials, the costs of time, the costs of design, and the cost of energy.
Just in terms of energy costs, it is quite possible that it is cheaper to create a toaster using traditional metallurgy than to try to assemble a toaster atom by atom. The big problem with assembling metal objects atom by atom is how you deal with oxygen. When you are working with ingots, sheets, and wires, the fact that contact with oxygen is limited to the surface area helps quite a bit. The smaller the particles that you try to push around, the worse the oxygen problem becomes. Once oxidized, separating oxygen away from what you want to work with is a hugely expensive process in terms of energy. The reason why living organisms prefer to work with carbon is because carbon is one of the few elements for which the energy trade-offs are reasonable for both oxidation and reduction.
The second problem is time. It is not necessarily the case that a fabricator will be able to produce a widget atom by atom in a time frame that is competitive with an assembly line. This also adds value to products.
I think that there is also a basic misunderstanding of economics expressed here on this topic. Economics is not just about our current fuzzy version of capitalism. Economics applies to just about any situation in which you have local surpluses and local scarcities. Even with a desktop fabricator, there are still surpluses and scarcities that do not spell an end to economics.
Yes they do cross over, but it is my understanding that the seal parvo and dog parvo are different species and the dog type doesn't infect seals.
That could be true. I thought that eliminating dogs had a lot to do with economics however. Internal combustion engines may have efficiency problems in that kind of cold, but a gallon of gas will still get you a lot further than the equivalent weight of dog food. The use of dogs for transportation has been a quaint and expensive anachronism for a while.
I read an anecdote that McMurdo station has enough pre-packaged butter pats to last for the next 20 years in cold storage due to a shipping error. It is more expensive to get rid of the butter than to let it sit in the freezer. Since living off the local seal and penguin populations is considered to be problematic, dog food is an expensive luxury.
And, a quick google search reveals that canine distemper and parvovirus appears to have transferred to other species, including sea otters.
Additionally with the severe cold the parvo would be very difficult to migrate since anything at 40 below dies really quick.
Many viruses are not affected by extreme cold, and it is my understanding that parvo is a very hard virus to destroy. In fact, quite a bit of bacteria can survive freezing as well. The photos and descriptions I've read from McMurdo suggest that seals and humans are frequently on the same beach. This makes transmission of a highly contageous virus such as parvo extremely likely.
On the other hand, if cross over from species is that simple, why allow humans?
Humans are indespensible to the kinds of reseach that go on at McMurdo. Dogs stopped being indespensible with the Byrd expeditions.
I really need to disagree with the previous two posters on this. The early adopter's guide recommends backup-install-restore rather than cvsup from source.
They banned dogs over a decade ago because people were afraid that they would spread parvo to the seals (something scientifically impossible since it is an entirely different species)
Viruses cross over between species all the time: Rabies,Influenza, Hantavirus, and Ebola all have large non-human reservoirs.
It's essentially built like a normal computer motherboard, but who in their right mind is using a low power embedded solution like this for a desktop?
I went with a VIA EPIA for my desktop/server. After a few years of having a damn vacum cleaner next to my desk, it was an excellent choice. (Actually, with plenty of ram and xfce, it's quite a bit snappier than many of the WinXP boxes I use.)
Granted, the original post got some of the facts wrong, but the knee-jerk reactions here are bothering me.
Having had more than my share of experiences within the health system lately, I'd gladly accept the risk of being bleeped by a yahoo on the street to reduce the very real risk of misdiagnosis in an emergency room. If I need to go into the emergency room, I want the team to know in less than a minute the make, model, and date of manufacture of any prosthetics I have implanted, cross-indexed with any reports of trouble with those specific prosthetics.
Seriously folks, there are occasions when being able to instantly identify an object by waving a wand within 6 inchs is a good thing.
Whoo, another singularity skeptic. At least the killer for me is that Vinge makes sweeping claims about how changes in technology will have radical and unpredictable effects on society, but fails to hit any of the relevant works about the intimate symbiotic relationship between technology, culture and economics.
So Ray's point is that as computational power increases, machines will start acting in more and more "intelligent" ways. Of course, computational power alone doesn't produce intelligence but it will if combined with studying brain structure and mimicking it (or parts of it for starters) in machines. And I don't necessarily mean silicone machines.
I think depending on Moore's law as proof that a certain type of artificial intelligence is inevetable, or immenent, is making a pretty stupid mistake between quality and quantity. In spite of throwing massive transistors and storage at the problem, the P4 is is not all that different from a Babbage Difference Engine. I also disagree with you in regards to the claim that the complexity of microprocessors have has not eclipsed insects. We passed the insect stage of complexity long ago. The problem that as much insect intelligence exists in muscles, and joints exists in the exoskeleton as in the neurons. Chip-based artificial intelligence is taking the long way around, using a Turing device to simulate networks of thermostats, rather than just building the thermostats.
Because nanotech and fusion power combined will make production of anything dirtcheap.
I'm highly skeptical. I think that nanotechnology will be highly influential in some fields. But I suspect that for a large number of objects, especially those that involve slabs of highly reactive iron, aluminum, magnesium and titanium, nanotechnology may never be competitive with macrotechnology.
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Is this practical, or even easily plausible, in windows? No.
With cygwin, it is.
Does everyone know regular expressions? No. Am I saying that no one should use these tools? No. I'm just commenting on the poster that said grep couldn't do what these tools do - they were wrong.
Actually, the reason why I started using tools such as glimpse and swish-e is because there are some things that I just couldn't do with grep. At least not without far too much work involved. For example, using grep to search pdf files is painful. Simple egrep doesn't work, and pre-processing the file with pdftotext takes quite a bit of time per file. (A half-second per file adds up when you have 120 pdf files to search.) OpenOffice.org files are just as bad. (I had to write my own parser for that.)
So for a practical example, I have about 120 collected pdf files of academic articles under filenames with the primary author and year. (I could put the title in there, but filenames between 16-25 characters seem to be reasonable.)
If I'm doing reading on a particular topic, I might want, for example, all of the articles related to Barry Wellman's work on social networks on the internet. The obvious way to get that is to list all of the articles that cite Wellman. This is probably not information that I want to put in the filename.
So, to try a naive example (which according to others here should work.)So in this case, grep spends about two seconds returning no results.
Now I could write a shell script that runs pdftotext on every file in my library, then grep the output. But pdftotext is expensive for one file much less a directory of 120 files:Thankfully, I have a document indexing application that does the work for me. A while back I set up swish-e to index almost everything in my home directory. So...The full-text index gives me 11 hits, in 1/20th of the time as a naive grep, sorted by score. (It missed one, primarily because xpdf respects copy protection while Copernic seems to be able to index through copy protection.)
Sometimes fulltext searching is useful, and egrep just does not work.
Seriously, I'm really holding off on the jump to the 5.X series. It looks like the best migration route from 4.X to 5.X is backup-reformat-reinstall-restore. My system currently does just about everything I need (I've given up on wine as not worth the effort) and I just know that I'll miss some configuration file that took me about 6 hours to tweak into working.
That said, I (and many others) consider Subversion to be the logical successor to CVS, and it seems to me that any effort spent on revision control would be better spent contributing to Subversion (or Arch maybe) instead of writing yet another version of something that's essentially obsolete.
I think the core problem is that CVS has become something of a legacy tool like sed, awk, grep and sh. Many of these tools may be "obsolete" but that does not mean that we don't need secure and trustworthy versions of those tools.
For the forseeable future, there will probably be projects using cvs for the next several years. OpenBSD users use cvsup for patching and updating both the base system and ports tree. I like Subversion and use it for my own stuff, but I don't think it is quite ready yet.
It's not just devolopers who who would be affected by the changes. Both OpenBSD and FreeBSD use cvsup to distribute updates to users.
Well, the big problem is that there are hundreds of legacy projects and update mechanisms that currently depend on cvs. (For example, FreeBSD's cvsup.) This means that there is still a need for a secure re-write of cvs.
I have read the full article, and have read many of the comments as well. But I think that you are missing a key issue. In one of the comments you made, you suggested that users will be willing to give up the single program that they can't get under a free operating system, if the programs that do run under the free operating system are superior. Even if we accept this as true, this only works if the single application in question is one that the user cannot live without. In recent months, I have been forced to go back from using FreeBSD to Windows XP primarily because the speech recognition software that I need to produce 2000 words per day does not currently exist under a free operating system. The big question on my mind is that why should the fact that I am locked into a specific application that runs on Windows, lock me into using a proprietary office suite, statistics package, programming language, or typesetting program?
I have run into a few examples of major deal breakers. For many of my colleagues EndNote is one of the major deal-breakers. And adoption of open office is hindered by multiple perceived deficiencies. But I think that one of the major problems with the argument that most people choose their operating system based on applications, is that that is not how things work. People choose their operating systems based on culture, and then go about trying to discover what applications are available to meet their needs.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is really the only deal killer that keeps me from converting over to FreeBSD. About three years ago my bad typing habits caught up with me, and I have found the dictation is really the only thing that keeps me able to put out a couple thousand words a day. However, there are quite a few annoyances that comes with using speech dictation. Expect to plop down at least $50 for good headset. Also, my choice and editors is limited to notepad and Dragon pad. Editing is a pain in the ass, and correcting what it gets wrong takes quite a bit of time.
To be honest, I would not use it unless I had to. I have been typing since I was 8 years old, and that is still the most natural way for me to write.
Short short version: use software that incorporates sha1 over md5. configure software to use sha1 over md5 when you have a choice.
On the other hand, it seems that sha1 has become a default for most applications anyway.
Can one tell me why I should learn python and not any other programming language anyway?
Well, some of the things I like about python:
1: tightly structured code.
2: less punctuation.
3: more readable syntax.
4: full OOP from the ground up (in contrast to perl where the OOP is bolted on with references).
5: short production cycle.
Many of these things can be found in other languages as well. So it largely comes down a matter of preference.
From the little I have seen, python seems to be a command line language. Is it anywhere similar to Visual Basic, which I have come to see and experience through a GUI?
Check out tkinter and wxPython.
...anything I'm talking about. Right. I'm talking about manipulation at the particle level. When you read what I say and then talk nanotechnology, you're like a chaste priest who is trying to explain their views on sex to a sensible human being. We're not even talking about the same things. You're talking about some sillyassed ideas from a book that say that abstaining is a good deal, and I'm talking about getting my partner to have multiple orgasms more than once a day. No wonder we're not communicating.
No, the reason we are not communicating is that I'm talking physics, and you are talking science fiction.
Actually, you are not even talking science fiction, you are talking pure fantasy.
Again, bzzt. Not talking about fission. Not talking about fusion....Now we need to make some free protons, neutrons, and then figure out how to stick 'em back together in a new configuration.
Getting free protons and neutrons to stick together is nuclear fusion. It is well understood enough to be taught in both basic high school and college physics. The processes by which we get protons and neutrons to stick together is actually well understood, and does not provide the magical energy source you desire.
Is your (true) assertion about what works for fission and fusion so because unstable radioactive elements are the only ones with powerful atomic bonds? No. That's not the case. Right? Right. Instead, it is so because they are simply easy prey for our current level of technology. That's the only reason. They come apart easily because they are already coming apart. The frigging things want to come apart. It's almost cheating, in a way. It's so easy, even nature has done it by accident. But all elements carry these same, ultra-powerful bonds. And it may well be the case that taken one at a time, radioactive elements may not be the ones we want to be playing with. For several reasons, one of which, obviously, is safety.
The reason why fission only works for a handful of heavy elements is because it only takes a small quantity of additional mass (in the form of a neutron) to make those atoms unstable enough to undergo fission. The reason why fusion only works for a handful of elements at the other end of the periodic table is because above a critical atomic, it takes more energy to shove two nucleii together than the energy you get out. For everything heavier than iron, you don't get as much energy out of the reaction as you put into the reaction.
The problem isn't with the technology. The problem is with the physics. You might as well be talking about perpetual motion.
I'm not talking about "purifying" metal, I'm talking about making metal from electrons, protons, neutrons.
You do know that the energies required to produce iron is so large that it happens only in late-stage stars? And you do know that producing elements heavier than iron through fusion is an endothermic process that only happens in supernovae?
But, release a just few bonds, and you have quite a bit less energy.
Could you please explain the physics of how this is done.
You can get lots more energy out than you have to put in. We already know that. It is an esablished fact, with numerous demonstrations available. So the trick is, how do we do it?
There is not much of a trick to it. The problem is that you need a few things for it to work:
1: a good source of alpha particles or neutrons, both dangerous to hang out around.
2: unstable isotopes.
Dude, basic physics. Every bit of material has huge amounts of energy locked away in it. We call it "atomic energy." There is No shortage of energy at the atomic level, and we already know that. Just ask the 1940's residents of Hiroshima. Well, the ones you can find.
Um, perhaps you should go back and take a basic physics course.
1. Nanotechnology has nothing to do with what happens inside the nucleus. Nanotechnology is all about manipulating ions, particles that either have extra electrons, or are lacking electrons. We are not talking about machines that can pull atoms apart.
2. Fission is only a viable energy source if you have a large quantity of already unstable radioactive material. The number of elements that can be used to get energy via fission is very few (Uranium and Plutonium the most prominent.) And as for fusion, we are nowhere near being able to chuck a handful of garbage into a reactor and get energy by fission.
1 - Have the machine make solar cells. Solved.
Except for the unfortunate fact that quite a bit of fabrication requires a lot more energy than you can get from photovoltaics.
2 - Have the machine make a garbage disposal/atomizer. Solved.
The problem is not that elements are rare. The problem is that you have to spend a fairly large quantity of energy to get those elements into a form that is useful. Iron for example is dirt cheap. Steel will cost you a shitload of energy, and and some carbon to soak up all that oxygen.
Gee, go out to a movie and there is just so much more to shovel up:
The energy cost issue is a mirage. Buy the replicator. Make solar cells. Bingo, NO energy cost issue.
Purifying metal into any usable form in sufficient qantities requires quite a bit more energy than is available from photovaltaics. And this is not even approaching the problem that fabrication is an endothermic process on its own.
If we're talking about an atomic level fabricator, then other than starting the thing up, there is plenty of energy available at the atomic level. Don't believe me? Look here [hmm-364.org] (link to atomic bomb photo).
Talk about mixing apples and oranges here. Radioactive elements are expensive to get for good reasons, and expensive to store. A lump of radioactive material large enough to provide usable energy is not something you want sitting on your desktop, at least not if your desktop can also hold a fairly heavy containment system. This is also a bit of a non-sequetor because nanotechnology is not concerned with splitting atoms, but with shuffling charged particles from place to place.
Nothing in life is free. You still have to deal with the laws of thermodynamics even with nanotechnology.
Then again, this all sounds way too good to be true.
Probably because it is too good to be true. They're just so many flawed assumptions behind the idea of the desktop replicator that puts it on the same level as warp drive, a literary device that is good for those moments when you need the hero to create an object on the fly, but really bad when talking about future economics.
Such a device would make physical goods value-less. The only things of value any longer would be services and artistic creations.
Whoa! Hold on here just a minute! There are a large number of costs involved in producing a physical good. While your machine might be able to eliminate the labor costs, you still have to deal with the costs of raw materials, the costs of time, the costs of design, and the cost of energy.
Just in terms of energy costs, it is quite possible that it is cheaper to create a toaster using traditional metallurgy than to try to assemble a toaster atom by atom. The big problem with assembling metal objects atom by atom is how you deal with oxygen. When you are working with ingots, sheets, and wires, the fact that contact with oxygen is limited to the surface area helps quite a bit. The smaller the particles that you try to push around, the worse the oxygen problem becomes. Once oxidized, separating oxygen away from what you want to work with is a hugely expensive process in terms of energy. The reason why living organisms prefer to work with carbon is because carbon is one of the few elements for which the energy trade-offs are reasonable for both oxidation and reduction.
The second problem is time. It is not necessarily the case that a fabricator will be able to produce a widget atom by atom in a time frame that is competitive with an assembly line. This also adds value to products.
I think that there is also a basic misunderstanding of economics expressed here on this topic. Economics is not just about our current fuzzy version of capitalism. Economics applies to just about any situation in which you have local surpluses and local scarcities. Even with a desktop fabricator, there are still surpluses and scarcities that do not spell an end to economics.
Seriously folks, in battleground states like Florida and Ohio, the results might depend on:
* provisional ballots cast due to challenges on election day.
* absentee ballots trickling in over the rest of the month.
Yes they do cross over, but it is my understanding that the seal parvo and dog parvo are different species and the dog type doesn't infect seals.
That could be true. I thought that eliminating dogs had a lot to do with economics however. Internal combustion engines may have efficiency problems in that kind of cold, but a gallon of gas will still get you a lot further than the equivalent weight of dog food. The use of dogs for transportation has been a quaint and expensive anachronism for a while.
I read an anecdote that McMurdo station has enough pre-packaged butter pats to last for the next 20 years in cold storage due to a shipping error. It is more expensive to get rid of the butter than to let it sit in the freezer. Since living off the local seal and penguin populations is considered to be problematic, dog food is an expensive luxury.
And, a quick google search reveals that canine distemper and parvovirus appears to have transferred to other species, including sea otters.
Additionally with the severe cold the parvo would be very difficult to migrate since anything at 40 below dies really quick.
Many viruses are not affected by extreme cold, and it is my understanding that parvo is a very hard virus to destroy. In fact, quite a bit of bacteria can survive freezing as well. The photos and descriptions I've read from McMurdo suggest that seals and humans are frequently on the same beach. This makes transmission of a highly contageous virus such as parvo extremely likely.
On the other hand, if cross over from species is that simple, why allow humans?
Humans are indespensible to the kinds of reseach that go on at McMurdo. Dogs stopped being indespensible with the Byrd expeditions.
I really need to disagree with the previous two posters on this. The early adopter's guide recommends backup-install-restore rather than cvsup from source.
They banned dogs over a decade ago because people were afraid that they would spread parvo to the seals (something scientifically impossible since it is an entirely different species)
Viruses cross over between species all the time: Rabies,Influenza, Hantavirus, and Ebola all have large non-human reservoirs.
It's essentially built like a normal computer motherboard, but who in their right mind is using a low power embedded solution like this for a desktop?
I went with a VIA EPIA for my desktop/server. After a few years of having a damn vacum cleaner next to my desk, it was an excellent choice. (Actually, with plenty of ram and xfce, it's quite a bit snappier than many of the WinXP boxes I use.)
Granted, the original post got some of the facts wrong, but the knee-jerk reactions here are bothering me.
Having had more than my share of experiences within the health system lately, I'd gladly accept the risk of being bleeped by a yahoo on the street to reduce the very real risk of misdiagnosis in an emergency room. If I need to go into the emergency room, I want the team to know in less than a minute the make, model, and date of manufacture of any prosthetics I have implanted, cross-indexed with any reports of trouble with those specific prosthetics.
Seriously folks, there are occasions when being able to instantly identify an object by waving a wand within 6 inchs is a good thing.
Whoo, another singularity skeptic. At least the killer for me is that Vinge makes sweeping claims about how changes in technology will have radical and unpredictable effects on society, but fails to hit any of the relevant works about the intimate symbiotic relationship between technology, culture and economics.
So Ray's point is that as computational power increases, machines will start acting in more and more "intelligent" ways. Of course, computational power alone doesn't produce intelligence but it will if combined with studying brain structure and mimicking it (or parts of it for starters) in machines. And I don't necessarily mean silicone machines.
I think depending on Moore's law as proof that a certain type of artificial intelligence is inevetable, or immenent, is making a pretty stupid mistake between quality and quantity. In spite of throwing massive transistors and storage at the problem, the P4 is is not all that different from a Babbage Difference Engine. I also disagree with you in regards to the claim that the complexity of microprocessors have has not eclipsed insects. We passed the insect stage of complexity long ago. The problem that as much insect intelligence exists in muscles, and joints exists in the exoskeleton as in the neurons. Chip-based artificial intelligence is taking the long way around, using a Turing device to simulate networks of thermostats, rather than just building the thermostats.
Because nanotech and fusion power combined will make production of anything dirtcheap.
I'm highly skeptical. I think that nanotechnology will be highly influential in some fields. But I suspect that for a large number of objects, especially those that involve slabs of highly reactive iron, aluminum, magnesium and titanium, nanotechnology may never be competitive with macrotechnology.