Just right click->Properties->settings->advanced->display->DP I Setting->custom setting... at that point you can set it too anything you want. You can make that 12 point font an inch high if you so desire. At the least, you should make it 12 points high by putting a ruler up to the displayed ruler and adjusting it to match. This fixes everything but the icons and title bars, but they don't matter as much anyway.
I really don't understand why anyone would use a flat panel on the desktop. The cost per square foot saved doesn't come close yet to the cost of a square foot in an average home. And you can currently get 19" monitors capable of 2048x1536 for under $300. I have 3 such 19" monitors running at 1600x1200 each on my machine and can't see why anyone would settle for less. My 3 monitors + video cards cost less than a single 19" flat panel. And Ghost Recon at 2048x1536 is really cool:o)
By the way, I've found the trick to happiness with 19" monitors at high resolution is a horizontal dot pitch of around 0.22. Anything higher causes letters to have fuzzy edges. Its this that causes eyestrain, not the size of the text. The secret to easier reading is greater sharpness, not larger size. In fact, making the size larger greatly slows the reading because there is less text in the region of sharpest focus. Most of us read at least phrases if not sentences or paragraphs, not letters and words. If you can't see a whole phrase at once in focus, you have to revert to a more primitive word by word reading pattern.
A mining capability on the moon with the intention of supplying Earth IS a weapon. No weaponization is required. All you have to do, is steer the shipment wrong.
Those scared of random asteroid impacts really have it all wrong. As our capabilities increase, we will have to mount defenses not against random asteroids, but controlled objects placed into Earth bound solar orbits. That's exactly what any extraterrestrial mining operation with the intention of supplying Earth produces. We simply could never allow it. It would be too easy to steer a hundred tons of metal into a military facility or major city and vaporize it. A carefully organized attack could knock out all fixed military installations in the continental US with only a few seconds warning (the time it takes for an object traveling 20,000+ mph to vertically penetrate the atmosphere.
So, if someone develops such a capability, a counterability will have to be developed. The easiest, and possibly only counter due to the difference in the speed and stealth (flaring rocket taking off versus dark cold mass moving at tremendous speeds) of the material, is to knock down the shipments at the source.
Unless you're naive enough to think that the nature of mankind will change, the only useful purpose for extraterrestrial mining is to supply colonies on those extraterrestrial bodies.
The last thing we want is for this to become cheap and widely available. It will have to be expensive because we don't want anyone to get it until there it is proven that a particular case of MRSA is resistant to all existing antibiotics. And then, we only want it given on those particular cases. Thus, the costs of having found it, which could have been in the billions since its the cost of every project looking for naturally occurring drugs divided by the number of successes, and the cost of figuring out how to cultivate it, purify it, and of testing it all have to be defrayed against (hopefully) no more than a few thousands of cases.
Its the fact that the antibiotics are too widely and easily available today that has caused this crisis. Now that a possible way out has been discovered, you propose to destroy it by making it cheap and widely available. Will we ever learn our lessons?
To get right answers to the energy question, we must start understanding that
a technology's efficiency rating must subtract the true energy cost of production of all hardware involved and extraction of all resources including the energy and resources consumed by the people involved and
an assessment of the environmental impact of technology must include the environmental impact of the factories producing the energy production devices, the raw materials consumed, the wastes produced, the land covered, and the environmental energy transferred (many transform environmental energy of some type to electricity and transfer that electricity to other locations where it almost always becomes heat).
Almost every "solution" I've seen come from the friends of the environment has huge environmental impacts and many consume more energy than they produce. Let's talk about a few.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy. Another big weight on the efficiency rating is that you have to back this with other technologies for storing the energy to supply energy at night and when cloudy, these reduce the overall energy efficiency ratings of the system too, both directly and indirectly through the energy cost of production of the backup systems. On top of that, you have to plan for worse case scenarios because you'd likely supplant much of the other energy production technology. What effect would the fires a couple of years ago in Indonesia have had on regional and even worldwide solar energy production? And they lasted for how long?
Solar cells (environment) - solar cell energy consumption might be environmentally friendly, but the energy production will alter the landscape of an order of magnitude more land than oil. To get the capacities we need we will have to significantly change the reflectivity of large areas of our planet. What will that do to weather patterns?
Various underground organic energy sources - none are sustainable. We should stop just burning these up because they are also our cheapest stores for many other raw materials needed to sustain modern technology, though I'm figuring they will eventually make a bug to turn coal into oil/gas and leave behind an equivalent volume tubular matrix made from non-organic substances in the coal. This will allow for easier, more environmentally friendly extraction (it really ticks me off when they cut the tops off of the mountains). Anyway, suffice it to say that there will still be a massive need for oil even when none of it is used for energy production.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape. Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here (and most of them are coming from tax dollars because it isn't a very good business yet except in very special circumstances). Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities? Not to mention maintenance, recycling, etc. And, once again, you need an entire backup infrastructure. It can't be another infrastructure needing a backup unless you can prove that their needs will never significantly overlap. No energy is free and wind seems far from it.
Inland hydroelectric - already more exploited than I like. So many beautiful rivers lost. So much history submerged. Very sad.
Oceanic water movement - This would include wave, current, and many other oceanic energy production methodologies. How come the environmentalists scream when a nuclear plant puts out heat but don't scream at the combined impact of all of this on the oceanic environment. No reason really. So they will. And rightly so. I can't wait for all the studies about what kinds of weather extremes are being caused by the minuscule reduction of energy transfers from one part of the ocean to another that all of these technologies cause.
????? combination maybe - just an easy way to trick yourself by distributing the impacts. The combination of all the smaller impacts is still as big or greater than the whole impact of other technologies.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer. Its environmental effects especially are far more containable than the other sources. Fission at first, preferrably with breeder technology, then fusion. Either way, it should be combined with a hydrogen and electrical distribution system. Perhaps mostly hydrogen at some point. I suspect hydrogen may prove to have a lesser loss in long distance transport than electric.
Even with fusion, we'll eventually need to find a way to radiate more of the energy into space because the heat produced by our consumption will eventually reach levels able to influence climates. Probably about the time we start moving society underground so that we can restore our environment and increase food production.
The interesting thing is that this is exactly the answer Bush has proposed. Hmmm. Maybe not so dumb after all. Its a wise man who seeks wise instead of radical counsel.
Like others have said, Blair's move is just a fig leaf thrown to the lions for political purposes. Unless he means "nuclear power" when he says "sustainable energy", it will have no real impact, not only because it won't last, but because its based on sensationalism and fear, not science.
A fair comparison would have to include a full suite or at least a representative suite of everything in common that is provided by Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux without picking things that are "mature". It would also have to properly define usability problems, installation difficulties, hardware compatibility problems (which of course the Apple solutions fail by design) and other design flaws as bugs.
Linux would fall behind the others as you get away from the absolutely core critical components. Heck, in a lot of cases, you'd be comparing beta code to production code just because there's no maintainer for critical pieces.
It would be hard to pick a more critical component with a longer history than the TCP/IP stack.
Run the test again with the main components of a modern OS including media players, browsers, complex file systems, etc. and the picture would change.
Almost all patents simply document a new way to put together existing technologies. That's what an invention is. The existence of prior art for a component is meaningless. There is almost always prior art for the components of an invention. The invention here is the whole assembly, not the pieces.
Furthermore, it seems to be oriented towards the instantiation, not the class. I see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to protect themselves from blatant copycats. But even projects like mono should be able to exist as long as the logic under the hood is not made by blatant copying. I would hope that's not the case. It wouldn't be honorable.
Besides, Microsoft is not threatened by anyone pursuing them from behind. If you're more than six months behind them, you're not on their radar. Mono will attract people who would never have given the new framework a chance and whet their appetite for more. Microsoft will always have more. In a few years the fact that less than 5% of Dot Net has anything to do with "Net" and that Microsoft has actually created a very nice Windows framework replacement (read operating system here) will become obvious to everyone when they launch a version that runs fully native instead of on top of another OS. That product will provide a tremendous acceleration of the (what will then be) huge installed base of Dot Net software.
which is impossible to judge right now. No amount of scanning code after it has been written can catch all problems. Nobody ever understands code as well as the person that wrote it. Microsoft's code base is huge beyond belief. With a full press effort, it is likely that it will be another 3 to 5 years before we truly know whether or not they've successfully changed their ways today because it will take that long to replace the code base with one mostly written by people conscious of security.
As to where I THINK they are today, it seems that they are truly security focused. The classes that every programmer have been subjected too have been more grueling than any from any other company I've ever heard of whose core business was not security software. This is despite the fact that the talent Microsoft hires is some of the best. They've taken their best talent and drilled it in that they've got to focus on security first and foremost. We will see results. They will take time.
I'd say that we will know the success of their efforts when we see the first.Net framework only OS (no legacy Win32 support) or OS installation option about four to five years from now.
Vehicle body designers are artists in an even bigger money business than Hollywood. When a customizer does their job, not only are they changing the original artist's vision, they frequently make their living off of reselling it. In fact, this isn't a onesy and twosy garage shop type thing, there are corporations that have this as their direct or indirect (suppliers of customizing equipment) business. Some businesses even specialize in making complete from scratch reproductions of originals that use ZERO ORIGINAL PARTS!!! There is NO DIFFERENCE between these practices and what Hollywood is complaining about other than the cost of the product which I believe leads to the fact that people would be a lot more loudly ticked off if they couldn't change and resale their $20,000 vehicle than if they can't change their $20 movie.
Why is it that a vehicle manufacturer can see this as flattering but Hollywood can't?
eating mushrooms that had been grown in night soil in China and then illegally imported. Over 200 faculty and students at Mississippi State University were hospitalized with severe food poisoning after consuming mushrooms at a salad bar. The government covered it up as less than 50 to try to minimize it, but the hospital records in the area tell a different story.
Night soil isn't used in this country because it isn't safe to use it. Any process that could cleanse human waste of all viral DNA would also cleanse it of all but the simplest nutrients and make it less valuable as night soil. Its not that it hasn't been tried. The problem has been and is still being extensively researched in this country.
The basic problem is that far, far more diseases can be passed from human to human than from any other animal to human. It is interesting that many of the societies with practices like these are also the breeding grounds for most of the new disease strains we are attacked by. Perhaps its not all because their citizens are treated like dispensable cattle. Or perhaps it is and like cattle, they're fed the products of their own waste.
True. But adding code because it might be needed can't win statistically past a certain point that is actually not very far from not adding any code that you're doubtful of. Statistically, you'll create more errors in the code added than you'll solve.
I code routines for how they are being used in my project. If someone uses them for some case different from design, that's their issue. Everyone has the responsibility of making sure that every system routine they use was designed to handle their case. The reduction in code size allowed by not handling every case allows for this to actually be possible to achieve, even on the million line projects I work on. My methods are old, but by not jumping on the bandwagons of modern coding fashion, I've been able to lead several projects to packing multi-million line functionality into million line products with very very low bug counts. In my experience, rewrites of products usually contain much lower bug counts than the past generation "mature" products. That is opposite industry experience, and I attribute much of it to reduction in code complexity through design all levels of the product to solve end user's needs instead of designing the lowest levels to solve higher level developer's needs in a too general fashion.
Actually, we had an incredible testing process. It was a two year project and in the last 6 months we did 42 baselines for testing. Every change in every baseline was reviewed at the code level by myself and a customer representative (who was seated with our team for the entire project). Out tests involved automated code scanning using lint and a supplementary tool that we wrote to scan for mistakes we had made in the past, low level looping of almost 100% of our code through 10,000 iterations on at least two different machines to make sure we had no intermittent problems, and adhoc testing by engineers, managers (I figured they should be useful for something), and the customer 2 to 3 shifts a day throughout (amongst other things). I personally reached the point where all I had to know was who wrote the code and I could usually look at it and find several bugs immediately. In many cases, I would then add logic to our scanner to catch that persons common mistakes. Besides writing the operating system and most of the drivers, every single line of code in the 27 applications delivered to run on the system went past my eyes.
My definition of a bug includes any design flaw. In fact, in my experience, about 80% of bugs are design bugs. The statement "it works as designed" is pretty much banned as an excuse on the projects I work on. I believe it is the programmer's responsibility to communicate with the customer throughout to find the optimal design. When an optimal design is not possible, options should be made available to allow for flexibility, or a conscious decision should be made by the customer as to which direction to take (usually after tons of painful explanation). Don't take that to mean that I believe the customer always knows best. The programmer always knows way more about the problem than the customer. But the programmer should be able to communicate those minute details that the customer didn't realize were in their process and educate the customer to the point of allowing them to make informed decisions.
I suppose they've hit my pet peeve. I've seen many simple problems turned into hideous monstrosities with many bugs by people trying to handle bugs that can't ever happen and imaginary special cases because they were never taught how to abstract a function. Perhaps it can't be taught. In 20+ years of programming, its been a very rare time when I've picked up code and not been able to cut out large chunks without replacing them.
I enforced a policy of eliminating all Lint info messages on a 1.5 million line, from scratch project. And, I do mean from scratch. we wrote our own operating system, ANSI c Library, and drivers and ran it on hardware that we designed and produced. In the first 2 years of deployment, only five bugs were reported. Lint was only part of the reason, but it was a total part.
and agree. That doesn't mean that children under 18 can't play a violent video game, just that its the parent's decision and not the government's, the video game maker's, or the store's. That's the way everything should be for children. We've made a really bad mistake by letting government and Hollywood get involved in the raising of kids. Its not that parents are perfect, its just that the government and Hollywood are far from perfect. Better to have a wide variance of bad/good than a government/Hollywood enforced nonvariance of all bad.
the Star Trek replicators will probably be reality. This kind of "build things up from raw materials by placing them using an electronically stored 3D matrix" type of technology should ultimately evolve to being able to build molecules piecemeal and deposit them into a structure. The technology will probably come together after evolving from two directions... the nanostructure people are already trying to build molecules with atomic placement techniques today... and these more macro structure technologies are trying to get more and more detailed in what they can do. Eventually the two will meet and 20-30 years after they meet it will be fast/cheap enough to start its use as a common manufacturing process for smaller, more complex objects. It will likely quickly evolve to larger and less complex things from that point because it will bootstrap itself from an economic point of view. Note that from a molecular point of view, there would be no reason not to build foods as well as things.
It's been about four years since I first saw news of Boeing using phased array technology to put this stuff on commercial airliners for about $4 million a pop. Now it looks like the same thing has been shrunk to the size of a CD player and made available for less than one thousandth the cost. Can we expect this to shrink to a size and cost that will make it reasonable for my tablet in four more years?
Also, one of the neat things about phased array approaches is that they are very frequency agile. Since the 802.11 world has now got FCC approval to pursue phased array designs to boost range to four miles,perhaps we can end up with a single system that would use 802.11 when available and satellite otherwise.
Since the gravity from an object like the moon is actually pulling objects towards where it was however many seconds ago that light takes to travel between the two objects... and on orbital scales, there are very significant numbers involved here... maybe leading to one of the reasons that orbital calculations don't tend to hold up well over years of time???
antivirus software in the last 20 years of my work. To date, I've probably lost about 3 man months due to antivirus programs interfering with proper and efficient computer operation. I've lost two days to virus attacks. The only viruses that the programs have ever detected on any of my machines were in emails that I would never have opened and even that has only occured a half dozen or so times. When was the last time you read an article about the threat of viruses that was written by someone without a vested interest in your fear?
I have a fairly old TIVO and have never noticed any noise from it. On the other hand, all of my VCRs are very noisy, especially when rewinding which is something the PVR eliminates.
Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, I witnessed a tremendous downturn in knowledge and creativity amongst the engineers being hired by the major corporation I worked for at the time. The schools were the same, the grades were the same, but the depth and breadth of the basic knowledge had greatly decreased. Strangely, they thought it had gone up. They had been taught "skills" that were supposedly newer, but were in fact idealistic theology that had nothing to do with practical engineering and didn't work. The workload shifted more and more to the older engineers who eventually said "uncle" and left. Now the company is adrift at see and will likely have no clue why they can't engineer anything truly new when/if they finally wake up and realize it.
To put it simply, engineering the world over is a victim of the dumbing down of education and greatly reduced (overall) fundamental R&D spending in the '90s. We concentrated on the Net and let everything else drop. Now we're stuck in an economic downturn fundamentally caused by the lack of truly new innovation in recent years and aren't even smart enough anymore to know that is the problem.
I think the question that this should put into the queue is, when the American plains burned off most every year, was the resulting total carbon emissions higher or lower than today? On the one hand, we burn lots of fossil fuels, on the other, we've stopped nature from periodically burning a million square miles....
This is eerily like the ozone equation here in St. Louis. We've got lots of Oak forests to our west which boost our ozone levels. There are indications that the forests are a primary contributor to our ozone problem. I suppose much of the rest of the country already solved the problem by replacing their Oak forests with faster growing trees that by chance, don't produce so much ozone.
I think it was a particular type of Oak. Can't remember the specifics, but a researcher from Washington University here in St. Louis has been on TV about it a couple of times. I'll try to Google it...
Its sort of off subject and certainly inflammatory for those who debate with their emotions,, but I'll go there:o)
Nuclear winter is mostly a fiction raised by the superpowers to try to scare each other's populations out of allowing their governments to do the "unthinkable". It was part of the psychological aspect of the cold war. In truth, nuclear war was not unthinkable, but doing it in a way that would cause a nuclear winter, was. Except for in the earliest stages when we hadn't thought things out enough, most of the real plans of each side factored in what the effect of different strategies would be on their own survival. Thus, they all leaned towards heavy usage of air bursts for maximum devastation and minimum fallout. We even went so far as to develop bombs optimized this way while carefully manipulating the popular scientific community into becoming a propaganda machine spewing fiction. Those who were the most scared during the cold war were those who knew the most closely held truth. It WAS thinkable.
More on subject,,, sure, if we exploded a few thousand warheads as slightly below ground bursts (far enough to lift more matter, but shallow enough to still allow the bulk into the air instead of trapping it), we could have an effect that would last 100s of years. But the overall ecosystem would recover from even that scenario which isn't likely to occur because it doesn't leave anyone in power. Heck, even humanity would likely survive. Its a big planet.
And if you believe in evolution, you could conclude that the shakeups in both the gene pool and the various predator vs. prey matrices might cause a temporary dip in the ecosystem but in the longer term would likely increase the diversity and strength of the ecosystem. Put another way, evolution would go into hyperdrive. That's just one of the checks and balances in this very ACTIVE ecosystem we live in.
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Just right click->Properties->settings->advanced->display->DP I Setting->custom setting... at that point you can set it too anything you want. You can make that 12 point font an inch high if you so desire. At the least, you should make it 12 points high by putting a ruler up to the displayed ruler and adjusting it to match. This fixes everything but the icons and title bars, but they don't matter as much anyway.
I really don't understand why anyone would use a flat panel on the desktop. The cost per square foot saved doesn't come close yet to the cost of a square foot in an average home. And you can currently get 19" monitors capable of 2048x1536 for under $300. I have 3 such 19" monitors running at 1600x1200 each on my machine and can't see why anyone would settle for less. My 3 monitors + video cards cost less than a single 19" flat panel. And Ghost Recon at 2048x1536 is really cool :o)
By the way, I've found the trick to happiness with 19" monitors at high resolution is a horizontal dot pitch of around 0.22. Anything higher causes letters to have fuzzy edges. Its this that causes eyestrain, not the size of the text. The secret to easier reading is greater sharpness, not larger size. In fact, making the size larger greatly slows the reading because there is less text in the region of sharpest focus. Most of us read at least phrases if not sentences or paragraphs, not letters and words. If you can't see a whole phrase at once in focus, you have to revert to a more primitive word by word reading pattern.
A mining capability on the moon with the intention of supplying Earth IS a weapon. No weaponization is required. All you have to do, is steer the shipment wrong.
Those scared of random asteroid impacts really have it all wrong. As our capabilities increase, we will have to mount defenses not against random asteroids, but controlled objects placed into Earth bound solar orbits. That's exactly what any extraterrestrial mining operation with the intention of supplying Earth produces. We simply could never allow it. It would be too easy to steer a hundred tons of metal into a military facility or major city and vaporize it. A carefully organized attack could knock out all fixed military installations in the continental US with only a few seconds warning (the time it takes for an object traveling 20,000+ mph to vertically penetrate the atmosphere.
So, if someone develops such a capability, a counterability will have to be developed. The easiest, and possibly only counter due to the difference in the speed and stealth (flaring rocket taking off versus dark cold mass moving at tremendous speeds) of the material, is to knock down the shipments at the source.
Unless you're naive enough to think that the nature of mankind will change, the only useful purpose for extraterrestrial mining is to supply colonies on those extraterrestrial bodies.
The last thing we want is for this to become cheap and widely available. It will have to be expensive because we don't want anyone to get it until there it is proven that a particular case of MRSA is resistant to all existing antibiotics. And then, we only want it given on those particular cases. Thus, the costs of having found it, which could have been in the billions since its the cost of every project looking for naturally occurring drugs divided by the number of successes, and the cost of figuring out how to cultivate it, purify it, and of testing it all have to be defrayed against (hopefully) no more than a few thousands of cases.
Its the fact that the antibiotics are too widely and easily available today that has caused this crisis. Now that a possible way out has been discovered, you propose to destroy it by making it cheap and widely available. Will we ever learn our lessons?
To get right answers to the energy question, we must start understanding that
a technology's efficiency rating must subtract the true energy cost of production of all hardware involved and extraction of all resources including the energy and resources consumed by the people involved and
an assessment of the environmental impact of technology must include the environmental impact of the factories producing the energy production devices, the raw materials consumed, the wastes produced, the land covered, and the environmental energy transferred (many transform environmental energy of some type to electricity and transfer that electricity to other locations where it almost always becomes heat).
Almost every "solution" I've seen come from the friends of the environment has huge environmental impacts and many consume more energy than they produce. Let's talk about a few.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy. Another big weight on the efficiency rating is that you have to back this with other technologies for storing the energy to supply energy at night and when cloudy, these reduce the overall energy efficiency ratings of the system too, both directly and indirectly through the energy cost of production of the backup systems. On top of that, you have to plan for worse case scenarios because you'd likely supplant much of the other energy production technology. What effect would the fires a couple of years ago in Indonesia have had on regional and even worldwide solar energy production? And they lasted for how long?
Solar cells (environment) - solar cell energy consumption might be environmentally friendly, but the energy production will alter the landscape of an order of magnitude more land than oil. To get the capacities we need we will have to significantly change the reflectivity of large areas of our planet. What will that do to weather patterns?
Various underground organic energy sources - none are sustainable. We should stop just burning these up because they are also our cheapest stores for many other raw materials needed to sustain modern technology, though I'm figuring they will eventually make a bug to turn coal into oil/gas and leave behind an equivalent volume tubular matrix made from non-organic substances in the coal. This will allow for easier, more environmentally friendly extraction (it really ticks me off when they cut the tops off of the mountains). Anyway, suffice it to say that there will still be a massive need for oil even when none of it is used for energy production.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape. Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here (and most of them are coming from tax dollars because it isn't a very good business yet except in very special circumstances). Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities? Not to mention maintenance, recycling, etc. And, once again, you need an entire backup infrastructure. It can't be another infrastructure needing a backup unless you can prove that their needs will never significantly overlap. No energy is free and wind seems far from it.
Inland hydroelectric - already more exploited than I like. So many beautiful rivers lost. So much history submerged. Very sad.
Oceanic water movement - This would include wave, current, and many other oceanic energy production methodologies. How come the environmentalists scream when a nuclear plant puts out heat but don't scream at the combined impact of all of this on the oceanic environment. No reason really. So they will. And rightly so. I can't wait for all the studies about what kinds of weather extremes are being caused by the minuscule reduction of energy transfers from one part of the ocean to another that all of these technologies cause.
????? combination maybe - just an easy way to trick yourself by distributing the impacts. The combination of all the smaller impacts is still as big or greater than the whole impact of other technologies.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer. Its environmental effects especially are far more containable than the other sources. Fission at first, preferrably with breeder technology, then fusion. Either way, it should be combined with a hydrogen and electrical distribution system. Perhaps mostly hydrogen at some point. I suspect hydrogen may prove to have a lesser loss in long distance transport than electric.
Even with fusion, we'll eventually need to find a way to radiate more of the energy into space because the heat produced by our consumption will eventually reach levels able to influence climates. Probably about the time we start moving society underground so that we can restore our environment and increase food production.
The interesting thing is that this is exactly the answer Bush has proposed. Hmmm. Maybe not so dumb after all. Its a wise man who seeks wise instead of radical counsel.
Like others have said, Blair's move is just a fig leaf thrown to the lions for political purposes. Unless he means "nuclear power" when he says "sustainable energy", it will have no real impact, not only because it won't last, but because its based on sensationalism and fear, not science.
A fair comparison would have to include a full suite or at least a representative suite of everything in common that is provided by Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux without picking things that are "mature". It would also have to properly define usability problems, installation difficulties, hardware compatibility problems (which of course the Apple solutions fail by design) and other design flaws as bugs.
Linux would fall behind the others as you get away from the absolutely core critical components. Heck, in a lot of cases, you'd be comparing beta code to production code just because there's no maintainer for critical pieces.
It would be hard to pick a more critical component with a longer history than the TCP/IP stack.
Run the test again with the main components of a modern OS including media players, browsers, complex file systems, etc. and the picture would change.
Almost all patents simply document a new way to put together existing technologies. That's what an invention is. The existence of prior art for a component is meaningless. There is almost always prior art for the components of an invention. The invention here is the whole assembly, not the pieces.
Furthermore, it seems to be oriented towards the instantiation, not the class. I see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to protect themselves from blatant copycats. But even projects like mono should be able to exist as long as the logic under the hood is not made by blatant copying. I would hope that's not the case. It wouldn't be honorable.
Besides, Microsoft is not threatened by anyone pursuing them from behind. If you're more than six months behind them, you're not on their radar. Mono will attract people who would never have given the new framework a chance and whet their appetite for more. Microsoft will always have more. In a few years the fact that less than 5% of Dot Net has anything to do with "Net" and that Microsoft has actually created a very nice Windows framework replacement (read operating system here) will become obvious to everyone when they launch a version that runs fully native instead of on top of another OS. That product will provide a tremendous acceleration of the (what will then be) huge installed base of Dot Net software.
which is impossible to judge right now. No amount of scanning code after it has been written can catch all problems. Nobody ever understands code as well as the person that wrote it. Microsoft's code base is huge beyond belief. With a full press effort, it is likely that it will be another 3 to 5 years before we truly know whether or not they've successfully changed their ways today because it will take that long to replace the code base with one mostly written by people conscious of security.
As to where I THINK they are today, it seems that they are truly security focused. The classes that every programmer have been subjected too have been more grueling than any from any other company I've ever heard of whose core business was not security software. This is despite the fact that the talent Microsoft hires is some of the best. They've taken their best talent and drilled it in that they've got to focus on security first and foremost. We will see results. They will take time.
I'd say that we will know the success of their efforts when we see the first .Net framework only OS (no legacy Win32 support) or OS installation option about four to five years from now.
Vehicle body designers are artists in an even bigger money business than Hollywood. When a customizer does their job, not only are they changing the original artist's vision, they frequently make their living off of reselling it. In fact, this isn't a onesy and twosy garage shop type thing, there are corporations that have this as their direct or indirect (suppliers of customizing equipment) business. Some businesses even specialize in making complete from scratch reproductions of originals that use ZERO ORIGINAL PARTS!!! There is NO DIFFERENCE between these practices and what Hollywood is complaining about other than the cost of the product which I believe leads to the fact that people would be a lot more loudly ticked off if they couldn't change and resale their $20,000 vehicle than if they can't change their $20 movie.
Why is it that a vehicle manufacturer can see this as flattering but Hollywood can't?
eating mushrooms that had been grown in night soil in China and then illegally imported. Over 200 faculty and students at Mississippi State University were hospitalized with severe food poisoning after consuming mushrooms at a salad bar. The government covered it up as less than 50 to try to minimize it, but the hospital records in the area tell a different story.
Night soil isn't used in this country because it isn't safe to use it. Any process that could cleanse human waste of all viral DNA would also cleanse it of all but the simplest nutrients and make it less valuable as night soil. Its not that it hasn't been tried. The problem has been and is still being extensively researched in this country.
The basic problem is that far, far more diseases can be passed from human to human than from any other animal to human. It is interesting that many of the societies with practices like these are also the breeding grounds for most of the new disease strains we are attacked by. Perhaps its not all because their citizens are treated like dispensable cattle. Or perhaps it is and like cattle, they're fed the products of their own waste.
True. But adding code because it might be needed can't win statistically past a certain point that is actually not very far from not adding any code that you're doubtful of. Statistically, you'll create more errors in the code added than you'll solve.
I code routines for how they are being used in my project. If someone uses them for some case different from design, that's their issue. Everyone has the responsibility of making sure that every system routine they use was designed to handle their case. The reduction in code size allowed by not handling every case allows for this to actually be possible to achieve, even on the million line projects I work on. My methods are old, but by not jumping on the bandwagons of modern coding fashion, I've been able to lead several projects to packing multi-million line functionality into million line products with very very low bug counts. In my experience, rewrites of products usually contain much lower bug counts than the past generation "mature" products. That is opposite industry experience, and I attribute much of it to reduction in code complexity through design all levels of the product to solve end user's needs instead of designing the lowest levels to solve higher level developer's needs in a too general fashion.
Actually, we had an incredible testing process. It was a two year project and in the last 6 months we did 42 baselines for testing. Every change in every baseline was reviewed at the code level by myself and a customer representative (who was seated with our team for the entire project). Out tests involved automated code scanning using lint and a supplementary tool that we wrote to scan for mistakes we had made in the past, low level looping of almost 100% of our code through 10,000 iterations on at least two different machines to make sure we had no intermittent problems, and adhoc testing by engineers, managers (I figured they should be useful for something), and the customer 2 to 3 shifts a day throughout (amongst other things). I personally reached the point where all I had to know was who wrote the code and I could usually look at it and find several bugs immediately. In many cases, I would then add logic to our scanner to catch that persons common mistakes. Besides writing the operating system and most of the drivers, every single line of code in the 27 applications delivered to run on the system went past my eyes.
My definition of a bug includes any design flaw. In fact, in my experience, about 80% of bugs are design bugs. The statement "it works as designed" is pretty much banned as an excuse on the projects I work on. I believe it is the programmer's responsibility to communicate with the customer throughout to find the optimal design. When an optimal design is not possible, options should be made available to allow for flexibility, or a conscious decision should be made by the customer as to which direction to take (usually after tons of painful explanation). Don't take that to mean that I believe the customer always knows best. The programmer always knows way more about the problem than the customer. But the programmer should be able to communicate those minute details that the customer didn't realize were in their process and educate the customer to the point of allowing them to make informed decisions.
I suppose they've hit my pet peeve. I've seen many simple problems turned into hideous monstrosities with many bugs by people trying to handle bugs that can't ever happen and imaginary special cases because they were never taught how to abstract a function. Perhaps it can't be taught. In 20+ years of programming, its been a very rare time when I've picked up code and not been able to cut out large chunks without replacing them.
I enforced a policy of eliminating all Lint info messages on a 1.5 million line, from scratch project. And, I do mean from scratch. we wrote our own operating system, ANSI c Library, and drivers and ran it on hardware that we designed and produced. In the first 2 years of deployment, only five bugs were reported. Lint was only part of the reason, but it was a total part.
and agree. That doesn't mean that children under 18 can't play a violent video game, just that its the parent's decision and not the government's, the video game maker's, or the store's. That's the way everything should be for children. We've made a really bad mistake by letting government and Hollywood get involved in the raising of kids. Its not that parents are perfect, its just that the government and Hollywood are far from perfect. Better to have a wide variance of bad/good than a government/Hollywood enforced nonvariance of all bad.
the Star Trek replicators will probably be reality. This kind of "build things up from raw materials by placing them using an electronically stored 3D matrix" type of technology should ultimately evolve to being able to build molecules piecemeal and deposit them into a structure. The technology will probably come together after evolving from two directions... the nanostructure people are already trying to build molecules with atomic placement techniques today... and these more macro structure technologies are trying to get more and more detailed in what they can do. Eventually the two will meet and 20-30 years after they meet it will be fast/cheap enough to start its use as a common manufacturing process for smaller, more complex objects. It will likely quickly evolve to larger and less complex things from that point because it will bootstrap itself from an economic point of view. Note that from a molecular point of view, there would be no reason not to build foods as well as things.
It's been about four years since I first saw news of Boeing using phased array technology to put this stuff on commercial airliners for about $4 million a pop. Now it looks like the same thing has been shrunk to the size of a CD player and made available for less than one thousandth the cost. Can we expect this to shrink to a size and cost that will make it reasonable for my tablet in four more years?
Also, one of the neat things about phased array approaches is that they are very frequency agile. Since the 802.11 world has now got FCC approval to pursue phased array designs to boost range to four miles,perhaps we can end up with a single system that would use 802.11 when available and satellite otherwise.
Since the gravity from an object like the moon is actually pulling objects towards where it was however many seconds ago that light takes to travel between the two objects... and on orbital scales, there are very significant numbers involved here... maybe leading to one of the reasons that orbital calculations don't tend to hold up well over years of time???
antivirus software in the last 20 years of my work. To date, I've probably lost about 3 man months due to antivirus programs interfering with proper and efficient computer operation. I've lost two days to virus attacks. The only viruses that the programs have ever detected on any of my machines were in emails that I would never have opened and even that has only occured a half dozen or so times. When was the last time you read an article about the threat of viruses that was written by someone without a vested interest in your fear?
I have a fairly old TIVO and have never noticed any noise from it. On the other hand, all of my VCRs are very noisy, especially when rewinding which is something the PVR eliminates.
the Lord sometimes uses even the most evil people/organizations for good :o)
Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, I witnessed a tremendous downturn in knowledge and creativity amongst the engineers being hired by the major corporation I worked for at the time. The schools were the same, the grades were the same, but the depth and breadth of the basic knowledge had greatly decreased. Strangely, they thought it had gone up. They had been taught "skills" that were supposedly newer, but were in fact idealistic theology that had nothing to do with practical engineering and didn't work. The workload shifted more and more to the older engineers who eventually said "uncle" and left. Now the company is adrift at see and will likely have no clue why they can't engineer anything truly new when/if they finally wake up and realize it.
To put it simply, engineering the world over is a victim of the dumbing down of education and greatly reduced (overall) fundamental R&D spending in the '90s. We concentrated on the Net and let everything else drop. Now we're stuck in an economic downturn fundamentally caused by the lack of truly new innovation in recent years and aren't even smart enough anymore to know that is the problem.
Oh, what a brave new world.
I think the question that this should put into the queue is, when the American plains burned off most every year, was the resulting total carbon emissions higher or lower than today? On the one hand, we burn lots of fossil fuels, on the other, we've stopped nature from periodically burning a million square miles....
This is eerily like the ozone equation here in St. Louis. We've got lots of Oak forests to our west which boost our ozone levels. There are indications that the forests are a primary contributor to our ozone problem. I suppose much of the rest of the country already solved the problem by replacing their Oak forests with faster growing trees that by chance, don't produce so much ozone.
I think it was a particular type of Oak. Can't remember the specifics, but a researcher from Washington University here in St. Louis has been on TV about it a couple of times. I'll try to Google it...
Its sort of off subject and certainly inflammatory for those who debate with their emotions,, but I'll go there :o)
Nuclear winter is mostly a fiction raised by the superpowers to try to scare each other's populations out of allowing their governments to do the "unthinkable". It was part of the psychological aspect of the cold war. In truth, nuclear war was not unthinkable, but doing it in a way that would cause a nuclear winter, was. Except for in the earliest stages when we hadn't thought things out enough, most of the real plans of each side factored in what the effect of different strategies would be on their own survival. Thus, they all leaned towards heavy usage of air bursts for maximum devastation and minimum fallout. We even went so far as to develop bombs optimized this way while carefully manipulating the popular scientific community into becoming a propaganda machine spewing fiction. Those who were the most scared during the cold war were those who knew the most closely held truth. It WAS thinkable.
More on subject,,, sure, if we exploded a few thousand warheads as slightly below ground bursts (far enough to lift more matter, but shallow enough to still allow the bulk into the air instead of trapping it), we could have an effect that would last 100s of years. But the overall ecosystem would recover from even that scenario which isn't likely to occur because it doesn't leave anyone in power. Heck, even humanity would likely survive. Its a big planet.
And if you believe in evolution, you could conclude that the shakeups in both the gene pool and the various predator vs. prey matrices might cause a temporary dip in the ecosystem but in the longer term would likely increase the diversity and strength of the ecosystem. Put another way, evolution would go into hyperdrive. That's just one of the checks and balances in this very ACTIVE ecosystem we live in.