In practice, I really like virtualization because it allows me to boot up Linux and run MS Exchange and Office, and most other (non 3d) Windows software using VMWare.
But in theory, it bothers me. The basic idea (as I see it) is to provide an isolated environment for applications to run. But that's what the OS was/is supposed to do in the first place, and typesafe languages (like Java) also do much of the same thing once again! (E.g. I see no inherent reason for virtual to physical address translation when running Java applications). The biggest commercial application I see for virtualization is server consolidation. Why not just run all those server processes within the same OS? Yes there are good reasons, but is virtualization really the most efficient solution to those problems?
Maybe virtualization is the best compromise given the legacy that computing currently has, but I wonder if some clever researchers have expressed a vision of how all the same ends could be accomplished much more simply and consistently. Or do all these layers upon layers of abstraction really provide necessary degrees of freedom?
Kinda makes you wonder why we bothered with the whole Cold War thing, doesn't it? We should have just sued them for copyright infringement and got a lien on the whole country. In Soviet Russia all their bases are belong to us, or whatever. Why conquer when you can simply write a check?
Then again I guess China beat us to the punch, only we're on the wrong end of it. Perhaps can assign our judgement against Russia over to China and they'll sign over the deed on America back to us? "China currently holds over $1 trillion in dollar denominated assets". Coincidence? I think not.
And why does parent post think this excludes learning with a computer?
Exactly. What tool do you use the most for reading, writing, and arithmetic? For me it's a computer, hands down. (For leisure reading books still prevail, but then I can afford to buy and shelf them... otherwise a library of e-books would certainly beat nothing at all!).
So you have seen the hardware? Did you get to try the screen in daylight? Could you compare it to transflective color LCDs used in e.g. GPS receivers? I would love a better reflective display technology, similar to paper.
Oh, and you don't have to be unionised to act. Or are you scared of losing your job? There's always another job.
There is not always another job for a nuclear weapons physicist. The US has only 1 nuclear weapons community. I think the root of all this consternation is the resumption of post Cold-War shrinking of the NW complex (after a resurgence under Bush - debatably irrational), making it an employer's market. Research scientists are specialists, so there's a big risk of investing years in a PhD to enter a field that won't last as long as your career.
I don't know if D gives the features of Perl with the speed of C, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Not if it doesn't guarantee type safety. Undefined behavior is the devil. It's time to migrate away from C/C++ for complex applications, especially anything touching the network (or any other untrusted user).
And that is why total government health care is such a BAD idea... It would instantly make every item on this list insignificant (and they are significant) compared to what the government would be able to force you to do or not do because it would "keep costs down".
Since all of Europe has socialized health care, there should be ample instances of things being outlawed to reduce health care costs, right? Yet it seems to me America is at the forefront of restrictions on smoking and trans fats.
And since the Europeans aren't individually responsible for their own health care costs, the overall cost of health care should be much higher there, and people life shorter, right? Except just the opposite is true; they live longer and their overall health care cost is about half of ours per capita. Why?
It's not enough to say "socialized medicine will never work because we all know communism never works"... I look at the statistics and it seems to me that it is working. I'm sure it's not optimal but costs in our system are simply out of control. And for all the resentment of taxes people have, for my family of 6 my health insurance premiums are more than my federal+state income taxes, and I supposedly receive a comparatively generous health care plan through my job.
Considering how many of the people in the states of New York and Washinton have their health care paid for by the state, typically the elderly and infirm who are receiving expensive treatments for the effects of trans-fats and smoking, these bans seem to be a justified cost-saving measure to me.
That's a horrible argument because it can be used to ban absolutely anything. Every thing you do has an effect on other people. Freedom is nothing more or less than the willingness to tolerate some level of imposition by other people in return for them doing the same for you.
You should look behind my home theater system (which includes not just the 5-speaker stereo and DVD, but a HTPC, game consoles... you get the picture). I was just yesterday thinking how cool it would be if I could somehow eliminate that rat's nest of wires.
It isn't that fragile. No amount of climate change is going to erase the rotary engine, mathematics, electricity, etc.... away and leave us back in the dark ages.
Why do (certain) people place absurdly high requirements on what would justify action on global warming? Ok, the earth will not be annihilated and neither will civilization. What does that have to do with it? The highest reasonable requirement for action is that fixing it ends up costing less than not fixing it. In other words, cutting pollution and CO2 emissions won't put us back in the dark ages either, so why all the kicking and screaming?
If food from clones is indistinguishable, FDA doesn't have the authority to require labels, Sundlof said
And I'd appreciate somebody more legally knowledgeable commenting on whether the FDA cannot require labeling for indistinguishable items. I think it's bull, and should be changed if that is currently the law. If a much or most of the public wants to know, then they should be able (through the FDA) to require it, whether for safety issues, purely personal ethical/moral issues, or whatever. The only reason not to do so is to deny people the freedom to choose.
Even with "online" services, it remains to be seen what the bandwidth requirements will be. Nobody is trying to push you into downloading an entire office suite every time you want to do an assignment. Certainly there would be caching of.jar files (or the equivalent), and hopefully you could decline reloading the latest version if you didn't have good bandwidth right then. At this point you might say "gee, that sounds just like every Linux distro with a network-based package manager" which is IMHO not far from the truth. I don't think it will be just like gmail where you download the whole interface every time, and I don't think it will be like today's distros where network-based package management is just an add-on and overly manual. It will be somewhere in the middle.
I would not call it an 'illusion'. For one reason or another, enthusiasts of on-line services assume their detractors to be technologically inept bozos. That is short sighted. The matter is that I can (and I am forced) to take steps to ensure the security of my data. And I alone am to blame if I fail to do so.
That is true for an individual, and I run my own mail service at home too. But my perception of total control is weaker now because I've done it long enough to know that stuff *does* happen, even to me (gasp!)
Anyways, now imagine you are a CTO. You can't do everything yourself, so your choice is between the bozos who work for you at your company, or the bozos who work for you at another company because you have a contract. What's the difference? Admittedly there are pros and cons either way, but if you outsource you get specialists.
Thanks for the information. The image blows my mind. Like the others, I don't find it "realistic" looking at all, which makes it all the more amazing that it is.
I agree, the golden era of space exploration only lasted for the first decade, which was in the 1960's. It's very easy for me to imagine why people were so excited when every year brought fantastic new achievements, but then aerospace more or less leveled off. Me, I'm just old enough to remember the first Shuttle mission, and I can't say much has happened for manned space exploration during my lifetime. If anything I think it has diminished a bit. IMHO, unmanned is where it's at.
I don't see your point... "the technology for ubiquitous personal flight is completely ready... it's just way too complicated for most people to use unless they get extensive training." The fact that you still have to worry about all those things simply means the technology isn't ready. Vertical takeoff and landing is probably a practical necessity as well.
I'm pretty sure this is annual production. Most crops yield estimates assume one growing season per year.
I can hear the corn lobby already: "corn yeilds more biodiesel per harvest than pond scum!!" (Nevermind that with corn you get one crop per year, and with pond scum it's once a week.)
Potable fresh water is indeed in short supply. But we do have an excess of poo-filled "fresh" water, so much that we have special treatment facilities to knock it down a few notches before dumping it out into the ocean. Algae probably loves poo, not to mention fertilizer and most of the other junk we put into water. Maybe we could use our waste water for growing scum.
The problem is, taking into account inflation, in constant dollars, oil costs less today than it did 30 years ago. Yes, even at $4/gallon.
Bull. 30 years ago gas was $2/gal in inflation-adjusted dollars, not over $4. Even during the darkest days of the gas crisis in the early 80s, the annual average reached "only" $3/gal in today's dollars, a situation that was equaled last year.
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But in theory, it bothers me. The basic idea (as I see it) is to provide an isolated environment for applications to run. But that's what the OS was/is supposed to do in the first place, and typesafe languages (like Java) also do much of the same thing once again! (E.g. I see no inherent reason for virtual to physical address translation when running Java applications). The biggest commercial application I see for virtualization is server consolidation. Why not just run all those server processes within the same OS? Yes there are good reasons, but is virtualization really the most efficient solution to those problems?
Maybe virtualization is the best compromise given the legacy that computing currently has, but I wonder if some clever researchers have expressed a vision of how all the same ends could be accomplished much more simply and consistently. Or do all these layers upon layers of abstraction really provide necessary degrees of freedom?
Spielberg, Lucas, I honestly can't keep 'em straight anyways.
Then again I guess China beat us to the punch, only we're on the wrong end of it. Perhaps can assign our judgement against Russia over to China and they'll sign over the deed on America back to us? "China currently holds over $1 trillion in dollar denominated assets". Coincidence? I think not.
So you have seen the hardware? Did you get to try the screen in daylight? Could you compare it to transflective color LCDs used in e.g. GPS receivers? I would love a better reflective display technology, similar to paper.
That sort of employment is awfully dangerous.
And since the Europeans aren't individually responsible for their own health care costs, the overall cost of health care should be much higher there, and people life shorter, right? Except just the opposite is true; they live longer and their overall health care cost is about half of ours per capita. Why?
It's not enough to say "socialized medicine will never work because we all know communism never works"... I look at the statistics and it seems to me that it is working. I'm sure it's not optimal but costs in our system are simply out of control. And for all the resentment of taxes people have, for my family of 6 my health insurance premiums are more than my federal+state income taxes, and I supposedly receive a comparatively generous health care plan through my job.
You should look behind my home theater system (which includes not just the 5-speaker stereo and DVD, but a HTPC, game consoles... you get the picture). I was just yesterday thinking how cool it would be if I could somehow eliminate that rat's nest of wires.
* "Never" in the computer industry means 10 years. After that all bets are off.
Even with "online" services, it remains to be seen what the bandwidth requirements will be. Nobody is trying to push you into downloading an entire office suite every time you want to do an assignment. Certainly there would be caching of .jar files (or the equivalent), and hopefully you could decline reloading the latest version if you didn't have good bandwidth right then. At this point you might say "gee, that sounds just like every Linux distro with a network-based package manager" which is IMHO not far from the truth. I don't think it will be just like gmail where you download the whole interface every time, and I don't think it will be like today's distros where network-based package management is just an add-on and overly manual. It will be somewhere in the middle.
Anyways, now imagine you are a CTO. You can't do everything yourself, so your choice is between the bozos who work for you at your company, or the bozos who work for you at another company because you have a contract. What's the difference? Admittedly there are pros and cons either way, but if you outsource you get specialists.
Thanks for the information. The image blows my mind. Like the others, I don't find it "realistic" looking at all, which makes it all the more amazing that it is.
I agree, the golden era of space exploration only lasted for the first decade, which was in the 1960's. It's very easy for me to imagine why people were so excited when every year brought fantastic new achievements, but then aerospace more or less leveled off. Me, I'm just old enough to remember the first Shuttle mission, and I can't say much has happened for manned space exploration during my lifetime. If anything I think it has diminished a bit. IMHO, unmanned is where it's at.
I don't see your point... "the technology for ubiquitous personal flight is completely ready... it's just way too complicated for most people to use unless they get extensive training." The fact that you still have to worry about all those things simply means the technology isn't ready. Vertical takeoff and landing is probably a practical necessity as well.
I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?
Potable fresh water is indeed in short supply. But we do have an excess of poo-filled "fresh" water, so much that we have special treatment facilities to knock it down a few notches before dumping it out into the ocean. Algae probably loves poo, not to mention fertilizer and most of the other junk we put into water. Maybe we could use our waste water for growing scum.
Geez, I just got it a few months ago. I guess everybody wants a wide (i.e. short) screen now.