I've wondered how people might be able to evac very fast from a damaged skyscraper - stairs suck, they're too slow, too prone to blockage, and they crowd up in proportion to building height. So, how about copying this NASA idea and using some system of escape pods and vertical free fall roller coasters?
Realtime can be divided into hard realtime, which gives deterministic guarantees on latency, and soft realtime, which gives no guarantees but can be expected to deliver low latency more often than not. Hard RT is the one that's slow, because it does things like fixed-timeslice round robin scheduling. Linux, when not built as a layer above a specialist microkernel, is soft RT.
I have a suspicion that formal collectives of the Wiki style will be discovered to be useful only for some bounded set of problems, like, and for much the same reasons as, massively parallel computing.
That is to say, there are common, routine problems for which "collective wisdom" is dumb as a sack of rocks, and only a smart individual stands a chance of making headway.
Why not? Well (1) they were hiding their numbers from the Padishah emperor and the Harkonnens (2) they needed all their money to bribe the spacing guild to hide their numbers (3) it was unthinkable to imperil spice production (4) waterbombing Arrakis would quickly kill off the spice and the worms (5) the guild navigators would see this quite clearly in advance, and turn against them (6) they'd lose the addictive spice, worms as transport, Shai-hulud, and the impenetrable defensive wall of the desert. Plus they were, when it came down to it, tribal semi-savages, and more used to persistence than immediacy.
Depends upon your definition of "cool". Games are harder, but desktop apps are infinitely easier. Any damn fool with a Visual-Basic-alike can put something pragmatically useful together in mere hours.
If I remember, IE is a system DLL or some such, and the "browser" UI is sort of tacked on? That makes me suppose it shouldn't be so hard for someone to write a mash-up which wraps IE7's rendering engine in a more modern front end.
There is going to come a point when a private (in both senses of the word) bin collecting service is going to be commercially viable. People will say "it's like BUPA, I'm paying for it twice, but this way I'll at least be treated like a paying customer".
Ten years down the line, everyone will be paying a "bin bill", which won't be awfully much, and they'll collect weekly or on demand for an extra fee, and they'll not bug you about recycling (which is, in nearly every case except aluminium, an anti-green net waste of energy).
The lefties will of course hate this, and decry it as a two-tier system.
Who cares about robots? Seriously, the point isn't to gather dry data. The point is to expand the human species into one that saturates space, rather than one that lives on one solitary planet.
It's no more than the old "go west, young man" instinct writ large, although it's noble for all that. But your claim of robot efficacy is as dust in the wind before the million-odd years of human ancestors saying "it's too crowded here, lets up sticks and go thataway".
People police their saints unkindly, because they want to guard the power of moral suasion linked to their goodness. A lying sinner is normal, but a lying saint is dangerous.
Lets make it quite clear - ever since the days of win95, when Windows stopped being a limited program and became a limiting program, Microsoft OSes are not, and have not been, your friend. The priority order for Microsoft is approximately: themselves, then OEMs, then the entertainment industry, then other software companies, then business users, and finally you, the home PC consumer, right at the bottom of the heap. In fact, if you're a techie, you're below that, because they aim at the nontechnical consumers first.
None of the above is "personal". It's just business, because that's where the money is.
None the less, it should truly suprise nobody when Windows f*cks you up the ass, or holds you down for somebody else. Your happiness is simply not their priority. Often as not, you're the product.
If you don't own your OS, right down to the source code, then your OS 0wnz you. This is truly the reason I use linux. It's the only way to know that my computer is mine.
If they're doing nothing but troll-whacking, maybe. But, the whole point of wiki is that many specialists cumulatively out-think any generalist. Which means: no generalist can be qualified to vet the contributions of all specialists.
LCDs are definitely the right tool for computer use, though, where precision of form is often more important than precision of colour (if you're serious, you're using pantones and colour profiles anyway), and where they get stared at from migraine-inducing up-close all day. CRTs flicker, whine, draw current like a kettle, put your back out to carry, and eat up acres of desk real-estate. I'm glad I never have to use one anymore.
He's not being suficiently nuanced about mining. Boosting up to orbit, mining stuff in space and shipping it down to Earth makes no sense. But, once we as a species have multiple populated worlds, it makes far more sense to ship something to a factory in Earth orbit from the asteroid belt, than up from Earth. Just as it makes more sense to manufacture in orbit and drop the product down the well than to manufacture on the ground and boost it up. The core principle being: avoid boosting anything up to planetary orbit. It's just so ridiculously expensive that fetching the same stuff from anywhere else in the solar system will always be cheaper.
It's a matter of energy availability. You can reasonably assume that if algae and bacteria don't already break it down, there isn't enough free energy to make breaking it down possible. And if they do break it down, you can reasonably assume a nanobot could do it no faster, not without basically requiring a power cord.
With any vaguely modern games box, there simply isn't any such thing as underpowered. Power defines the scope and prettiness of the game, but good games are possible within all modern power limits.
Also, I suspect a lower-powered box may be a win in some areas - it could broaden the range of game studios having a chance, take away some of the distracting focus on polishing the SFX. If your game is never going to match the 360 on pixel prettiness, it will have to compete on something else. Like eg: being more fun.
Any company that doesn't allow, nay, embrace third party jarballs is missing 98% of the point of Java. The language is so-so, the built in libraries are nice, but not infinite - but the ability to load componentized, versioned, packaged third-party tools is priceless.
Wielding GPL3 as a way to commercially corner reluctant vendors into releasing lock-free hardware is a form of voting with your feet. They, too, are free to strand themselves in the land of the expensively and laboriously reinvented wheel.
Your best option if you have a "model" fully expressed in one language, but want a "deliverable" in another, would be to use some sort of translation process. Effectively, a compiler, although it may be a "manual" compilation process, where you go through and line-for-line write code that does in one language what's expressed in the other. Best of all, would be some automatic compiler - it's not so hard to write one, if you're targeting C++ rather than raw assembler, and if you know it only has to compile one program - especially if that one program is under your control. There's a lot of corners you can cut, like error reporting and full support for the more esoteric source language constructs. Plus you can special case constructs you'll use, but don't want to implement fully flexible support for.
You may also, if your source language is high level, want to indirect through another pre-existing high level language compiler that targets C or C++, since that would be a narrower conceptual divide to cross. Example, matlab to Haskell, and use GHC to turn it into C.
Eventually after a while, such a compiler may even become a product in itself.
"I just can't understand why all the current designs all look like boring lumps"
It's plenty obvious why. They're designed to sell to car-hating greens. They're designed by car-hating greens. Up until now, the only reason to put up with the hassle and the limitations an electric car would give you, has been ideology. Lots and lots of rabid, fist-shaking ideology. Such people don't buy sports cars. They key the paintwork on sports cars.
"they're gonna have to be more stylish like a normal sports car, and have the performance AND miles per charge equivalent to miles per gas tank fill, before they get my attention"
I think you'll find that, like with digital cameras, other advantages will make them displace petrol despite being not feature comparable. It will be a long time until you can go as far, or refuel as fast. However, people will find the performance, low maintainance, and sheer gadget fun are more important, unless they regularly make long trips. Compare digital cameras. You can still get more fine detail and resolution out of a supermarket disposable film camera let alone a proper SLR, but nobody except pros buys film nowadays. It's just too slow and fiddly, and it has become uncool.
Ironically the things you meantioned, engine performance and MPG equivalent, are where electric shines. Its weaknesses are slow recharging, limited range, battery bulk and mass, temperature sensitivity, and battery lifetime before replacement.
This one car is enough to change my attitude to electric cars as a tech. All of its stats are adequate. It's not some in-town, "there-and-back and recharge all night" souped up milk float for commuting hippies. If you're travelling > 250 miles, you probably don't mind a 3-hour lay-over.
New tech has an "inflection point", when it's nowhere near mature yet, can't match the old tech for features, still a bit of an executive toy, but you can already see it will inexorably displace the older mature tech. I figure electric cars just arrived.
It will be interesting if these early generation electrics have non-obvious social knock-on effects. I can imagine for example, an industry of short break stopovers where you can relax, drink coffee, work via wi-fi for an hour or two, and meanwhile recharge the car. Sort of like gas stations, but much more restful.
My point being, when people talk about "seeing past today", they don't generally mean "we'll design, detail, prototype, and COST a solution that actually will work and do the job better", nor do they mean "we'll proceed with promising but blue sky research". Both of those are "today", for all they're new. What they generally mean is "lets all adopt the impractical" - as if force of rhetoric could make it work. Or, indeed, as if they KNOW it will fail, and they don't care; they'd rather have everyone suffer and "do the right thing" before it's ready.
The point libertarians make is that property and self ownership constitute the least possible coercion of any system. Economic and interpersonal activitiy would be limited by consent, but never by imposition.
Add more freedom, you allow imposition. Take more freedom, and that is an imposition. Libertarian anarchy sits precisely where the curve crosses the zero.
I seriously doubt a handful of bloggers, by themselves, mass the raw democratic clout to decide even a close vote. But then, that's not the point. Democratic politics aren't really about elections - elections are just the safety valve. The reality of politics is that the people the ultimate power not just every so often, but continually. (This is true even in a tyrannny. When a misruled people realise their strength, you get a "color revolution".) If the public en masse decide that politicians must, or must not do something, there usually is no choice but to follow along.
Therefore, politics is about "image", because if the public are stirred into anger, they WILL turn the government upside down, even without an election. A few voices calling out "injustice!" can wield power far beyond their weight.
Facts are facts, mister. If it can't yet be done, you're out of luck - screaming and bouncing like an angry chimp won't change that. The point at which you can change the world, practically, is "today". To do that, you have to show a present-day solution. Not try and arm-twist the world into throwing away what actually works for alternatives that are fictional, theoretical or inadequate.
"Seeing past today" is like seeing through walls. You'd run into what you couldn't see, and smash your nose flat.
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I've wondered how people might be able to evac very fast from a damaged skyscraper - stairs suck, they're too slow, too prone to blockage, and they crowd up in proportion to building height. So, how about copying this NASA idea and using some system of escape pods and vertical free fall roller coasters?
Realtime can be divided into hard realtime, which gives deterministic guarantees on latency, and soft realtime, which gives no guarantees but can be expected to deliver low latency more often than not. Hard RT is the one that's slow, because it does things like fixed-timeslice round robin scheduling. Linux, when not built as a layer above a specialist microkernel, is soft RT.
I have a suspicion that formal collectives of the Wiki style will be discovered to be useful only for some bounded set of problems, like, and for much the same reasons as, massively parallel computing.
That is to say, there are common, routine problems for which "collective wisdom" is dumb as a sack of rocks, and only a smart individual stands a chance of making headway.
Why not? Well (1) they were hiding their numbers from the Padishah emperor and the Harkonnens (2) they needed all their money to bribe the spacing guild to hide their numbers (3) it was unthinkable to imperil spice production (4) waterbombing Arrakis would quickly kill off the spice and the worms (5) the guild navigators would see this quite clearly in advance, and turn against them (6) they'd lose the addictive spice, worms as transport, Shai-hulud, and the impenetrable defensive wall of the desert. Plus they were, when it came down to it, tribal semi-savages, and more used to persistence than immediacy.
Depends upon your definition of "cool". Games are harder, but desktop apps are infinitely easier. Any damn fool with a Visual-Basic-alike can put something pragmatically useful together in mere hours.
If I remember, IE is a system DLL or some such, and the "browser" UI is sort of tacked on? That makes me suppose it shouldn't be so hard for someone to write a mash-up which wraps IE7's rendering engine in a more modern front end.
There is going to come a point when a private (in both senses of the word) bin collecting service is going to be commercially viable. People will say "it's like BUPA, I'm paying for it twice, but this way I'll at least be treated like a paying customer".
Ten years down the line, everyone will be paying a "bin bill", which won't be awfully much, and they'll collect weekly or on demand for an extra fee, and they'll not bug you about recycling (which is, in nearly every case except aluminium, an anti-green net waste of energy).
The lefties will of course hate this, and decry it as a two-tier system.
Who cares about robots? Seriously, the point isn't to gather dry data. The point is to expand the human species into one that saturates space, rather than one that lives on one solitary planet.
It's no more than the old "go west, young man" instinct writ large, although it's noble for all that. But your claim of robot efficacy is as dust in the wind before the million-odd years of human ancestors saying "it's too crowded here, lets up sticks and go thataway".
It's a matter of holding-to-account.
People police their saints unkindly, because they want to guard the power of moral suasion linked to their goodness. A lying sinner is normal, but a lying saint is dangerous.
Lets make it quite clear - ever since the days of win95, when Windows stopped being a limited program and became a limiting program, Microsoft OSes are not, and have not been, your friend. The priority order for Microsoft is approximately: themselves, then OEMs, then the entertainment industry, then other software companies, then business users, and finally you, the home PC consumer, right at the bottom of the heap. In fact, if you're a techie, you're below that, because they aim at the nontechnical consumers first.
None of the above is "personal". It's just business, because that's where the money is.
None the less, it should truly suprise nobody when Windows f*cks you up the ass, or holds you down for somebody else. Your happiness is simply not their priority. Often as not, you're the product.
If you don't own your OS, right down to the source code, then your OS 0wnz you. This is truly the reason I use linux. It's the only way to know that my computer is mine.
If they're doing nothing but troll-whacking, maybe. But, the whole point of wiki is that many specialists cumulatively out-think any generalist. Which means: no generalist can be qualified to vet the contributions of all specialists.
LCDs are definitely the right tool for computer use, though, where precision of form is often more important than precision of colour (if you're serious, you're using pantones and colour profiles anyway), and where they get stared at from migraine-inducing up-close all day. CRTs flicker, whine, draw current like a kettle, put your back out to carry, and eat up acres of desk real-estate. I'm glad I never have to use one anymore.
He's not being suficiently nuanced about mining. Boosting up to orbit, mining stuff in space and shipping it down to Earth makes no sense. But, once we as a species have multiple populated worlds, it makes far more sense to ship something to a factory in Earth orbit from the asteroid belt, than up from Earth. Just as it makes more sense to manufacture in orbit and drop the product down the well than to manufacture on the ground and boost it up. The core principle being: avoid boosting anything up to planetary orbit. It's just so ridiculously expensive that fetching the same stuff from anywhere else in the solar system will always be cheaper.
It's a matter of energy availability. You can reasonably assume that if algae and bacteria don't already break it down, there isn't enough free energy to make breaking it down possible. And if they do break it down, you can reasonably assume a nanobot could do it no faster, not without basically requiring a power cord.
With any vaguely modern games box, there simply isn't any such thing as underpowered. Power defines the scope and prettiness of the game, but good games are possible within all modern power limits.
Also, I suspect a lower-powered box may be a win in some areas - it could broaden the range of game studios having a chance, take away some of the distracting focus on polishing the SFX. If your game is never going to match the 360 on pixel prettiness, it will have to compete on something else. Like eg: being more fun.
Any company that doesn't allow, nay, embrace third party jarballs is missing 98% of the point of Java. The language is so-so, the built in libraries are nice, but not infinite - but the ability to load componentized, versioned, packaged third-party tools is priceless.
OpenGL / DirectX is to GPU as Posix is to CPU.
Wielding GPL3 as a way to commercially corner reluctant vendors into releasing lock-free hardware is a form of voting with your feet. They, too, are free to strand themselves in the land of the expensively and laboriously reinvented wheel.
Your best option if you have a "model" fully expressed in one language, but want a "deliverable" in another, would be to use some sort of translation process. Effectively, a compiler, although it may be a "manual" compilation process, where you go through and line-for-line write code that does in one language what's expressed in the other. Best of all, would be some automatic compiler - it's not so hard to write one, if you're targeting C++ rather than raw assembler, and if you know it only has to compile one program - especially if that one program is under your control. There's a lot of corners you can cut, like error reporting and full support for the more esoteric source language constructs. Plus you can special case constructs you'll use, but don't want to implement fully flexible support for.
You may also, if your source language is high level, want to indirect through another pre-existing high level language compiler that targets C or C++, since that would be a narrower conceptual divide to cross. Example, matlab to Haskell, and use GHC to turn it into C.
Eventually after a while, such a compiler may even become a product in itself.
"I just can't understand why all the current designs all look like boring lumps"
It's plenty obvious why. They're designed to sell to car-hating greens. They're designed by car-hating greens. Up until now, the only reason to put up with the hassle and the limitations an electric car would give you, has been ideology. Lots and lots of rabid, fist-shaking ideology. Such people don't buy sports cars. They key the paintwork on sports cars.
"they're gonna have to be more stylish like a normal sports car, and have the performance AND miles per charge equivalent to miles per gas tank fill, before they get my attention"
I think you'll find that, like with digital cameras, other advantages will make them displace petrol despite being not feature comparable. It will be a long time until you can go as far, or refuel as fast. However, people will find the performance, low maintainance, and sheer gadget fun are more important, unless they regularly make long trips. Compare digital cameras. You can still get more fine detail and resolution out of a supermarket disposable film camera let alone a proper SLR, but nobody except pros buys film nowadays. It's just too slow and fiddly, and it has become uncool.
Ironically the things you meantioned, engine performance and MPG equivalent, are where electric shines. Its weaknesses are slow recharging, limited range, battery bulk and mass, temperature sensitivity, and battery lifetime before replacement.
This one car is enough to change my attitude to electric cars as a tech. All of its stats are adequate. It's not some in-town, "there-and-back and recharge all night" souped up milk float for commuting hippies. If you're travelling > 250 miles, you probably don't mind a 3-hour lay-over.
New tech has an "inflection point", when it's nowhere near mature yet, can't match the old tech for features, still a bit of an executive toy, but you can already see it will inexorably displace the older mature tech. I figure electric cars just arrived.
It will be interesting if these early generation electrics have non-obvious social knock-on effects. I can imagine for example, an industry of short break stopovers where you can relax, drink coffee, work via wi-fi for an hour or two, and meanwhile recharge the car. Sort of like gas stations, but much more restful.
My point being, when people talk about "seeing past today", they don't generally mean "we'll design, detail, prototype, and COST a solution that actually will work and do the job better", nor do they mean "we'll proceed with promising but blue sky research". Both of those are "today", for all they're new. What they generally mean is "lets all adopt the impractical" - as if force of rhetoric could make it work. Or, indeed, as if they KNOW it will fail, and they don't care; they'd rather have everyone suffer and "do the right thing" before it's ready.
The point libertarians make is that property and self ownership constitute the least possible coercion of any system. Economic and interpersonal activitiy would be limited by consent, but never by imposition.
Add more freedom, you allow imposition. Take more freedom, and that is an imposition. Libertarian anarchy sits precisely where the curve crosses the zero.
I seriously doubt a handful of bloggers, by themselves, mass the raw democratic clout to decide even a close vote. But then, that's not the point. Democratic politics aren't really about elections - elections are just the safety valve. The reality of politics is that the people the ultimate power not just every so often, but continually. (This is true even in a tyrannny. When a misruled people realise their strength, you get a "color revolution".) If the public en masse decide that politicians must, or must not do something, there usually is no choice but to follow along.
Therefore, politics is about "image", because if the public are stirred into anger, they WILL turn the government upside down, even without an election. A few voices calling out "injustice!" can wield power far beyond their weight.
On this rock is all civil rights built!
Facts are facts, mister. If it can't yet be done, you're out of luck - screaming and bouncing like an angry chimp won't change that. The point at which you can change the world, practically, is "today". To do that, you have to show a present-day solution. Not try and arm-twist the world into throwing away what actually works for alternatives that are fictional, theoretical or inadequate.
"Seeing past today" is like seeing through walls. You'd run into what you couldn't see, and smash your nose flat.