Well, they want to see your raw abilities, not your development environments abilities.
After migrating from C++ in emacs to Java in Netbeans only recently (and maybe a bit grudgingly), I have been spending some time looking over the shoulders of IDE whizzes and found something to admire. One guy I watched basically writes software backwards, starting with a small kernel and "refactoring" it up to a program by referring to classes, methods, and parameters that don't exist, and having the IDE create the skeletons with a few hotkeys. (Not to mention more obvious things like auto-complete and creating imports). I was surprised how fundamentally the tools affect the workflow of somebody who first learned to program using them.
Hopefully by "finely tuned to support life," they didn't actually mean just us and similar to us (such as all life on this planet). A change in a basic physical constant or two could easily lead to very un-interesting universes, such as all matter being in a single black hole, or all matter in stars, or all matter evenly and homogeneously dispersed throughout space, or no nuclear reactions happening anywhere (thus no energy for anything interesting to happen).
Have you used it? The thing with most AI applications, including Siri, is having the idea for it is very simple. Even the technology isn't the hardest part. What's much, much harder is developing content, to give the system enough depth to be useful. It's not a matter of clever programming, so much as maturing it by having lots of users over time and making continual improvements. Maybe others have done that, but you can't tell from a bulleted feature list on a web page.
The response you linked is a good one. It sounds like solar isn't really cheaper than nuclear yet, particularly if you imagine trying to handle base load with solar. Still, the simplicity and low impact of solar are unbeatable, and I am impressed by how much solar has come down in price in the last 20 years, so the trend is encouraging.
I will, but this double dare will include you moving right underneath a wind turbine, or moving into a houseboat in a large dam used for hydro-electric power.
I wouldn't mind living under a roof with solar panels on it though. Solar is still quite a bit more expensive than coal, but is now cheaper than nuclear, according to some.
I think the worst thing about this is that he was published in Science. Obviously the researcher's career ends here, but this is a big black mark on the journal as well.
The main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for reductions in the per-student subsidy state taxpayers sent colleges. In 2006, the last year for which Wellman had data, state taxpayers sent $7,078 per student to the big public research universities. That's $1,270 less (after accounting for inflation) than they sent in 2002.
Did you even read your own reference? Contributions have gone up, though not as much as "tuition".
That's not clear from the link, since the figures were not inflation-adjusted. But in any case, those numbers are 10 years old. How about some more recent information:
In the 2009 fiscal year, state support for higher education nationally fell from $80.7 billion to $77.9 billion, and this year it's expected to fall an additional $2.7 billion, to $75.2 billion, according to the annual Grapevine survey out of Illinois State University's Center for the Study of Education Policy. The impact of those reductions has not been fully felt yet, because nearly $40 billion was provided to states by the federal government through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, part of last year's $787 billion stimulus package. With those federal funds soon running out and state and local tax revenues still in decline, many public university presidents are looking anxiously toward the 2011 fiscal year, worried that the they'll have to take even more draconian measures.
The iPad also has four times the RAM of the $25 Pi in question. It also has something like 16 GB of internal flash. The Pi has NONE. There is a reason the iPad costs as much as 20 Pis.
Also, the iPad shows what can be done with tight hardware/software integration. Who will get that job done for the Pi? Stop and think about OLPC and their efforts to do something similar. Even hardware acceleration for Flash is VERY iffy on Linux. Getting VDPAU to work requires a narrow selection of players and codecs.
Pi is the cutting edge, and is probably doing what they do better than anybody else, and I might pick one up to play with... but you just can't make a general purpose desktop PC for $25 yet, so raising hopes of this bringing desktop computing as we know it to the 3rd world are premature.
Used notebooks actually hold their value fairly well. Anything that will work for websurfing (including youtube) is a couple hundred bucks, not $25. For $25 you will get a "for parts, not working" laptop that has already been scavenged for parts once or twice.
I wish they had tested the integrated graphics on both Intel and AMD, if only to prove "nope, you still can't do that!" But I had hoped AMD's Radeon graphics were getting close?
This will be sold as a cost-cutting measure, since a few guys operating a UAV can see a wider area than 10 guys on the ground. Or the cost could be compared to a police helicopter.
I wonder if this will be applicable for laser optics? Those guys normally pay a huge amount for anti-reflective components. Also optics inside camera lenses. Complex lenses like common zoom lenses have lots of elements, and having light bouncing around all over inside the lens doesn't help image quality any.
The Sony XBR-HX929 series produces deeper black levels than any current LCD or plasma TV, giving excellent overall picture quality. It evinces accurate shadow detail and color... One of the best-performing LED-based LCDs we've ever tested, the expensive local-dimming Sony XBR-HX929 competes well with the top plasmas.
If everyone had listened to the economists talking about the future mortgage crisis, the crisis would have been averted.
Maybe, maybe not. Many lenders knew very well that their loans would go bad - they called them "liar's loans" even at the time! And many bankers knew the derivatives they created from those bad loans (which they sold back and forth to reach a leverage of about 30x) were not worthy of the AAA rating the ratings agencies gave them.
But here's the thing - a race to the bottom is not averted by knowing it's happening! If you don't think the other guy will stop even if you do, then your best option is to get while the getting is good, before the sh*t hits the fan.
Plus, the outcome wasn't disastrous for those at the top - at worst, they lost their jobs, and walked away keeping the millions they had "earned." They need never work again.
So, even perfect knowledge would not guarantee a good outcome.
But since you mentioned uninstallation, I think it is a real problem. Installation / uninstallation should be managed by the operating system, so "uninstall" is an OS call that removes an application forcibly, whether it likes it or not. Like kill -9, except from disk instead of RAM. If people insist on having shared libraries (though I think they are overrated), then the OS should do the reference counting on them.
The
target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust
port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the
reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should
destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction.
SSDs are better in enough other respects that I'll bet they take over before they're the rock-bottom $/MB choice. CRT TV's and monitors exited the market, or at least were on a very sharp downturn, even when they were still somewhat cheaper than the same-sized LCD.
There you go, sex sells anything and everything. We are such irrational beings that simply being aroused and being shown lumps of coal at the same time changes how we feel about coal. It's embarrassing for our species, but there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
After migrating from C++ in emacs to Java in Netbeans only recently (and maybe a bit grudgingly), I have been spending some time looking over the shoulders of IDE whizzes and found something to admire. One guy I watched basically writes software backwards, starting with a small kernel and "refactoring" it up to a program by referring to classes, methods, and parameters that don't exist, and having the IDE create the skeletons with a few hotkeys. (Not to mention more obvious things like auto-complete and creating imports). I was surprised how fundamentally the tools affect the workflow of somebody who first learned to program using them.
If it were a cheap paradise welcome to all, it would be immediately spoiled by everybody moving there. See California.
Hopefully by "finely tuned to support life," they didn't actually mean just us and similar to us (such as all life on this planet). A change in a basic physical constant or two could easily lead to very un-interesting universes, such as all matter being in a single black hole, or all matter in stars, or all matter evenly and homogeneously dispersed throughout space, or no nuclear reactions happening anywhere (thus no energy for anything interesting to happen).
Have you used it? The thing with most AI applications, including Siri, is having the idea for it is very simple. Even the technology isn't the hardest part. What's much, much harder is developing content, to give the system enough depth to be useful. It's not a matter of clever programming, so much as maturing it by having lots of users over time and making continual improvements. Maybe others have done that, but you can't tell from a bulleted feature list on a web page.
The response you linked is a good one. It sounds like solar isn't really cheaper than nuclear yet, particularly if you imagine trying to handle base load with solar. Still, the simplicity and low impact of solar are unbeatable, and I am impressed by how much solar has come down in price in the last 20 years, so the trend is encouraging.
I wouldn't mind living under a roof with solar panels on it though. Solar is still quite a bit more expensive than coal, but is now cheaper than nuclear, according to some.
I think the worst thing about this is that he was published in Science. Obviously the researcher's career ends here, but this is a big black mark on the journal as well.
Note, that was 2002-2006.
That's not clear from the link, since the figures were not inflation-adjusted. But in any case, those numbers are 10 years old. How about some more recent information:
Also, the iPad shows what can be done with tight hardware/software integration. Who will get that job done for the Pi? Stop and think about OLPC and their efforts to do something similar. Even hardware acceleration for Flash is VERY iffy on Linux. Getting VDPAU to work requires a narrow selection of players and codecs.
Pi is the cutting edge, and is probably doing what they do better than anybody else, and I might pick one up to play with... but you just can't make a general purpose desktop PC for $25 yet, so raising hopes of this bringing desktop computing as we know it to the 3rd world are premature.
Used notebooks actually hold their value fairly well. Anything that will work for websurfing (including youtube) is a couple hundred bucks, not $25. For $25 you will get a "for parts, not working" laptop that has already been scavenged for parts once or twice.
What would you propose to do with it? Firefox and OpenOffice won't run. The Ubuntu LiveCD won't even run on 512MB (I found out by trial and error).
I wish they had tested the integrated graphics on both Intel and AMD, if only to prove "nope, you still can't do that!" But I had hoped AMD's Radeon graphics were getting close?
I don't suppose it would be viable as a desktop. I can't imagine it has either the CPU or video performance to play youtube videos for example.
This will be sold as a cost-cutting measure, since a few guys operating a UAV can see a wider area than 10 guys on the ground. Or the cost could be compared to a police helicopter.
I wonder if this will be applicable for laser optics? Those guys normally pay a huge amount for anti-reflective components. Also optics inside camera lenses. Complex lenses like common zoom lenses have lots of elements, and having light bouncing around all over inside the lens doesn't help image quality any.
(cite)
Granted, that's an expensive set, but cheaper LCDs are so much better than they used to be.
Maybe, maybe not. Many lenders knew very well that their loans would go bad - they called them "liar's loans" even at the time! And many bankers knew the derivatives they created from those bad loans (which they sold back and forth to reach a leverage of about 30x) were not worthy of the AAA rating the ratings agencies gave them.
But here's the thing - a race to the bottom is not averted by knowing it's happening! If you don't think the other guy will stop even if you do, then your best option is to get while the getting is good, before the sh*t hits the fan.
Plus, the outcome wasn't disastrous for those at the top - at worst, they lost their jobs, and walked away keeping the millions they had "earned." They need never work again.
So, even perfect knowledge would not guarantee a good outcome.
Maybe WinMo 7 is good? Usually Microsoft gets it right shortly after people stop caring.
But since you mentioned uninstallation, I think it is a real problem. Installation / uninstallation should be managed by the operating system, so "uninstall" is an OS call that removes an application forcibly, whether it likes it or not. Like kill -9, except from disk instead of RAM. If people insist on having shared libraries (though I think they are overrated), then the OS should do the reference counting on them.
The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction.
SSDs are better in enough other respects that I'll bet they take over before they're the rock-bottom $/MB choice. CRT TV's and monitors exited the market, or at least were on a very sharp downturn, even when they were still somewhat cheaper than the same-sized LCD.
Libraries are great for families, even ones that aren't broke. Kids go through scads of books, I wouldn't want to keep them all.
There you go, sex sells anything and everything. We are such irrational beings that simply being aroused and being shown lumps of coal at the same time changes how we feel about coal. It's embarrassing for our species, but there it is.
Neither the summary nor the article made any mention of being environmentally friendly.