Japan is one of the few places that could possibly be powered completely by geothermal. There isn't nearly enough wave energy to supply the planet, nor is there sufficient wave energy near Japan to supply Japan.
I think you overestimate the geothermal potential near Japanese cities and underestimate wave energy potential. Here are some advantages of wave/tidal energy:
With wave energy, you take advantage of the world's largest pre-existing energy collecting surface-- the Pacific ocean. With wind and solar, you have to build your own comparatively small energy collecting surfaces.
The infrastructure required for a wave energy collection system can diminish the energy of tsunamis and destructive typhoon waves.
The optimal location for energy-harnessing wave barriers coincides with the location of cities with demand for energy.
The infrastructure for wave energy can also be designed to collect a predictable amount of tidal energy.
Cool technology, but there is a simpler solution which doesn't require lenses, holograms, laser beam splitters, computers or CCDs. A transmission laser microscope. The example on the teravolt web page shows the sample in a water drop which acts as both the sample holder and lens. It is also possible to remove the converging lens from the laser diode so that it becomes a simple point source microscope (think pinhole camera, in reverse). The light source in a typical laser is comparable to the size of a bacteria so, while it isn't truely a point source, for 50-100x microscopy (paramecium, amoeba, blood cells, brine shrimp...) it works well. Something like this might be particularly useful in testing water and body fluid samples for parasites.
* The commoditiziation of hardware continues. Laptops and desktop workstations are truly dead. Tablet computers are passe, now replaced with e-specs eyeglasses which provide wireless content from the global satellite monopoly.
* Keyboard? How quaint! 99% of all unlicensed end-user IT devices have no input devices. The 1% which do have input devices have only a single button which says "Don't Panic", localized to the common language spoken in the devices locale.
* In the gaps and innovation phobia left by massive mergers (encouraged by central bank money printing), several Chinese or South Asian startup companies will form and grow to unseat Google and outshine the big 3 remaining cloud hardware companies (oh wait, 2 have already bit the dust? Pssst, watch your back IBM!)
* Memristors will become a household word. Finally learning computers will replace 1% of the software market in 2021. By 2031 it is expected that 30% of the world's software will be replaced with neural learning machines. The U.S. government forms the "Database Engineer Retirement Board" continuing the bureaucracy from the 19th century railroad retirement board.
* Delocalization continues. South American and African nations with relaxed immigration policies soon grow their economy. Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea and Ethiopia are well placed for providing IT services, Iceland, Canada, Norway and New Zealand become renowned for their green server farms. Other countries (Including most of "old Europe" and the U.S.) need to improve the efficiency of their government in order to provide a lifestyle which attracts technology workers. This does not happen.
* As hardware companies and associated hardware knowledge disappears, some find work in the growing field of hardware maintenance. While migration to newer platforms (neural and otherwise) continues, some companies and governments have grown dependent on technology which no longer exists. (See the FAA's Advanced Automation System for a preview)
* Patent and copyright reform will not occur in the U.S. Therefore Open Source software development will be banned there. Enforcement of Schummer's "Linux law" will be challenging but it will create a business model where companies obfuscate open source software and resells it within the U.S. This will help the E.U., China and Apple recover from their respective fiscal hangovers.
* In light of the economic, infrastructure and security disasters caused by bad software engineering, the TSA (now a top level U.S. government agency which overseas the 3 branches of government) requires a license for all software engineers. This license is also required for all software modification activity. Old style PCs with input devices (such as keyboards) are now confiscated as criminal tools.
I was 11 when I read the full edition of the Lord of the Rings after The Hobbit. It was a family copy, which meant it was not the edited crap that was mostly available in libraries throughout the 70's and 80's. My copy (now passed down to me) was published in the 50's.
It was indescribable to me what I went through reading that. The scope of that world, the "resolution" and "texture" that it took in my mind could never be replaced or compared too.
The day we lose the written word, is the day we start slipping into a Dark Age, or more likely Idiocracy realized complete.
Anyone who has read an original book, whether it be by Tolkien, Tolstoy or A.A. Milne would not for a moment confuse it with, nor prefer edited, disnified, film or T.V. versions. There are a handful of authors whose books lend themselves to film adaptations, Steinbeck, Dickens, Shakespeare and many modern authors (Crighton, Clancey, Grisham) who write with the knowledge that film rights can be far more lucrative than a publishing contract but even there, much bandwidth is lost in translation.
When writing for film, everything must be distilled down to two senses, what is heard and and what is seen. Other senses and thoughts must be expressed in these two... without sounding awkward. One sci fi author (Clark?) put it well when he said that the best mapping is not between a novel and a movie, but between a short story and a movie. So Moby Dick, 1984, Dune, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, Never Let Me Go... _seem_ as thought they could be made into excellent movies, but the film adaptations pale in comparison to the originals.
The second "problem" with ebooks is that they are inexpensive to publish. As we've seen with the internet, when it becomes very inexpensive to broadcast, SPAM dominates, advertising dominates, signal to noise ratio trends towards zero.
Your reference to editing brings to mind the third and what I see as the biggest risk in letting paper books disappear. If I have a paper book and I hand it to you and you pass it along to someone else anywhere in the English speaking world, at any time in history, we all have this book as a common experience. It isn't region-coded, it doesn't edit parts of itself to suit the biases of the reader, nor does it shape itself to the laws, customs, religion and political correctness whims of the reader's locale and time. While many in this century would be more comfortable reading Huck fin after passing it through sed 's/*igger/p.o.c./g', what would happen in a world where Huck Finn had shaped itself according to political correctness forces of its time when its portrayal of a friendship between a white boy and a black slave was "inappropriate?"
In the past century many forms of entertainment have moved from common to individualistic. If you have only a few radio channels or 3 TV channels, chances are good that your neighbor saw the same long-haired British band on Ed. Sullivan as you did. We lost the common experience, but we should value the choices we have in going from 3 channels to 300, or even more choices in selecting entertainment content on the Internet. Such choices _should_ allow us to become more well-rounded, to see things from more points of view. But studies have demonstrated that people tend to use these choices to select information which reinforces their own biases. Adolf Hitler was able to read such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin and value them as as great works, without allowing them to shape his opinions of non-aryan people.
Ebooks and the internet can present a feedback loop. If I always search websites which "prove" that Elvis is living with space aliens in Roswell, N.M., my searches of news and other topics can also be influenced by that bias. Paper books provide a "reader neutral" reality check. But if a book vendor wants to sell an Elvis biography, adding a chapter on Elvis's retirement in Roswell will make it sell to Elvis conspiracy theorists. There is no disincentive to allowing ebooks to morph into what we or our society expects of them.
Walmart is only a tiny part of the blame. Much of the blame should be assigned to government policies in most of the western world which:
Keep property prices high, wages low and oil cheap so serfs are forced to commute long distances
Create an inefficient self-serving ineffective multilayer government to discourage people and businesses from living in cities, further contributing to sprawl.
Use underwater mortgages (aka "ownership society") so that labor can't quickly follow jobs from one exburb to the next and eventually out of state and overseas.
Keep oil cheap so factory farms and remote cheap labor markets have advantage over anything grown or manufactured locally.
Narrow the entertainment market so that two cartels (RIAA/MPAA) can discourage any local arts from thriving.
One other not so smart thing about the picture is that the houses are rectangular. If you want buildings to be able to resist some earthquake, hydrodynamic and aerodynamic forces, there are much better shapes. And with 3D building fabricators now able to print a building out of concrete or gypsum, there is no reason why buildings need to be rectangular. Imagine buildings shaped like an aerodynamic wing with the broadside facing the sea or prevailing wind.
"poor Apple fanboys with their black and white OS that barely even multitasked..."
Tsk tsk, now don't hurt their poor little feelings. Remember Apple eventually did acquire some BSD unix code from NeXT at a going-out-of-business sale and eventually produced "their own" (ahem) preemptive multitasking OSX in 2001 which was only 16 years after Commodore's Amiga, 22 years after OS9 on the Radio Shack computer. Heck, even Microsoft produced a preemptive multitasking OS only 10 years after Amiga.
Now don't anyone make apple fanboys feel worse by telling them that Nokia (good grief, Nokia?) had multitasking in their Symbian phones more than half a decade ago. Funny, you'd think of all that borrowed NeXT Objective C code that remains inside iOS, they must've worked pretty hard to make it not mutitask.
P.S.For those of you still on Mac OS9, no that is called "cooperative multitasking", a very primitive version of multitasking which goes back to the Cretacious period.
No Linus, those aren't threads. They're not very pretty either and they're certainly not threads.
The people working on projects such as Opengazer headtracking, use cheap commodity webcams to ehable communication and control (e.g. wheelchair) for people with spinal chord injuries and other conditions which prevent other input methods from being practical. The technology used inside Kinect would be ideal for this but if Microsoft insists on utilizing taxpayer funded law enforcement agencies so that they can profit from this device's gaming functionality, I guess the rest of us should just sit back and let them do that, right?
After all, a device intended for gaming should be used only for that purpose and not for inappropriate and unprofitable activities such as enabling a disabled person to communicate and interact with their world.
If he doesn't want to use the other hand or if he would like to explore other artistic entry methods, he should try Opengazer
Jack Welch's #1 or #2 mantra has been deprecated
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Jack Welch was absolutely right, if you want to be G.E. or Microsoft, you must be #1 or #2 in your market (and ruthlessly crush any competition.) But we aren't G.E. and we aren't Microsoft and with the Fed's policy encouraging M&As, we will soon be left with a few dozen mega-corporations who are averse to invention or innovation because it doesn't guarantee #1 or #2 and doesn't guarantee a profit to shareholders in the next 90 days.
So where does that leave the rest of us? There are enormous gaps in the market the big guys won't bother touching because no one will make billions on desktops which require only one support person for 10,000+ desktops. No one will make billions on desktops which can run on last year's computers or on other handheld devices. No one will make billions on desktops which have accessibility designed into standard widgets or desktops which can beused as teaching tools by allowing users to see and modify what's under the hood. No one will make billions on desktops which can be customized to meet many diverse needs which haven't yet been dreamed of.
In case you haven't heard, Jack Welch's winner takes all mantra has been deprecated In this new world, it's O.K. to be a niche player. In fact unless you are G.E. or Microsoft, it's crucial to be a niche player and in that world, the OpenSource Desktops (including various flavors of GNU/Linux) shine.
By the late 1980s Byte had become too focused on PC hardware instead of the more general concepts of computing. (My favorite example was when they gave the Amiga 1000 a negative review because it didn't have an AUTOEXEC.BAT). Likewise, Compute! became so hyperfocused on specific Commodore and Atari hardware, they would publish three or four nearly identical listings (C64,Vic,Atari400, Atari 800) instead of one program with the hardware specific stuff in separate subroutines. Even their checksum listings eventually got to the point where the reader was nothing but a human barcode reader who wasn't meant to understand what he was typing into his computer.
IMHO "Creative Computing" was a far better magazine than either. It remained a true computer science magazine until the very end, focusing on algorithms rather than the hardware platform-du-jour. For that reason, some Creative Computing articles are timeless. The only thing similar today would be ACM journals, but Creative Computing hit a sweet spot in the understandability vs depth curve that ACM journals rarely reach.
Things that are interesting that are not known:
- how to reliably and cheaply protect people from malaria (100's of millions of people would be very interested in this) ?
- how to generate energy in a way that doesn't involve lots of people dying due to flooding, crop failure, radiation sickness or sudden my head is on fire syndrome?...
- how will feed modern populations (say 5 billion people, because if a billion die who will care - clue they won't be on CNN and wouldn't be in a gang called "the aryans" in prison) with the resources available in 50 years time, in particular with known energy generation and recovery systems and feasible sources of fertilization?
- how would you land a human on Mars (clue, no current system can deliver a payload of the weight of a human with minimal life support without fatal deceleration)
The biggest problems which face humanity can't be solved in such a way to show a profit in the next 90 days. The same SEC rules which encourage microsecond trading and trillion dollar derivative losses discourage any kind of long-term planning in the corporate world. Corporate R&D died with this long term planning and companies heavy on R&D (e.g. Sun, Cray, SGI, DEC) cannot thrive in this ADD economy. It doesn't matter if the end result is both highly profitable in a monetary as well as humanitarian sense, you have to answer to the microsecond whims of day traders. Ditto for education, Reagan brought on the "University bubble" where a college education must turn a profit in 4 years. People left the sciences in droves and flocked to the hot trend of the day:EE in the 80s, Comp sci in the 90s, Law in the 00s, ??? in 10s...profit! Of course that's what its all about but our time scale is *$&ed up.
NTSC compatible portables were inexpensive, small (e.g. pocket TVs...) and lasted hours on a few AA batteries.
Battery powered portables provided everyone with a cheap way of seeing localized weather information (compare NOAA 162.xxx MHz non-localized audio with local TVs radar/satellite map including commentary and I'll take the latter any day.)
Anyone could implement an NTSC compatible, TV, Tuner card, PVR, camcorder... without paying anyone royalties.
After the transition:
Most people get a better picture, some people get no picture.
Portables are the size and shape of a laptop + USB dongle and consume batteries at a similar rate.
No pure OpenSource ATSC compatible devices are possible.
Roughly 1/4th the cost of the moon missions was spent on the ATSC conversions but getting America to the moon didn't take as long as giving it digital TV.
A few Chinese and Korean TV manufacturers did well for a short time.
Thompsons of China (codec owner) receives millions of dollars in license fees and will continue to do so for every compatible device sold.
Yeah, that was a worthwhile boondoggle. After all, every red-blooded American[Tm] has the right to see when their newscaster needs more makeup and a shave.
I once tried to match up the stone circle surrounding a 5000 year old burial tomb against how stars would appear on the winter solstice at that time. (there is a well-known solstice alignment with the associated passage tomb.) Nothing lined up until I noticed that my Amiga astronomy program turned off precession by default so that it's 7Mhz processor wouldn't have a conniption. Lo and behold, the stars of Orion's belt rose over this stone, Sirius over that one, the ecliptic aligned with those two...
"where the sun's path touches the earth" is almost exactly the phrase used in an old native American story about a boy who rigged a noose at the point "where the sun's path touches the earth" in order to punish it for burning his coat. The noose choked the sun and nearly put it out until (a mouse?) gnawed through the rope and allowed the sun to be restored. Does this sound familiar? The story is from a north American tribe which is currently confined to an area which hasn't seen a total solar eclipse in several hundred years. I'd love to discuss with David exactly which eclipse matches this mystery. The last time I investigated this I assumed it was a southern Canadian eclipse from the 1700s but it might not have been.
Yes the engineers and customers are in Silicon Valley, that's fine. But we have this thing called the Internet which means it is no longer necessary to put data centers anywhere near the customers or engineers. And if it's not necessary, it makes absolutely no sense for servers to compete for space in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world when there are billions of acres of wasteland that would work just as well for a server farm. I've used a thin client desktop with the servers hosted over 3000 miles away and the latency was better than it was when the server was hosted only 8 miles away. Only video games and the kind of hyperactive trading that led to this month's stock crashes have latency requirements which would be significantly impacted by having your server in central valley or the Midwest or Iceland or Offshore and you will save an enormous amount of real estate and energy costs. I'm convinced that high-level corporate decisions are still based on inertia and nineteenth century factory-whistle mentality.
Good comment but this't really solve the problem. Our business leaders tried desperately to emulate the "work-to-death" aspect of Japanese corpoculture, but have carefully avoided emulating their more sensible CEO wage scales and the sense of responsibility that has lead to suicides of Japanese leaders who felt responsible for shattered lives, environmental disasters or deaths.
As a previous post mentioned, there aren't enough BP officials to plug this hole. But if we were to force anyone to repay the economic and environmental reparations, who would that be? Certainly the leaders and stockholders of BP, but also its customers who believe it is their god-given right to drive whatever gas hog they intend to and if that causes blood to be spilled in the middle east or props up despots in Venezuela and Nigeria or lays waste to thousands of miles of coastline and the primary source of U.S. seafood, punt the blame to Obama or another late-arriving scapegoat.
As for the parent question, the simple reason why no one knows how deep water oil behaves or how to clean it up is that there isn't any 90 day time horizon GAP profit in basic science. Sometime around the Reagan years with the SEC reforms (sic) that helped bring on the banking crisis, we've lost sight of the idea that anything can be useful for something beyond what will show a GAP profit within the next 90 days. Until we fix that basic flaw in our system, everyone will be able to point to the U.S. as an example of where capitalism fails. But calling this sham and bribe system we have in place capitalism is akin to calling slavery 'capitalism.'
And there lies the problem, U.S. universities are turning themselves into trade schools in order to satisfy the short-term profit motives required to support the education bubble. Combine this with the narrowly focused (and innovation killing) "teach to the exam" methodology of European schools and eventually a computer science degree will be a certification program narrowly focused on commercial products which were popular four years ago.
.Net
VB6
Java
Windows XP
??? Version 1.0001 (tsk tsk, you have 1.0000, 4 more years for you, pay up!)
The fact that U.K. schools are reimporting this stupidity will maintain the unnovation balance of power. Yes it's challenging to write a "commercial technology" neutral exam, but we should be striving for that so that graduates with training in version (n-1) won't be completely lost. Meanwhile I look forward to the day when I'm up against graduates with a PhD in cloud computing or whatever the technology buzzword du jour is.
Betamax, Laserdisc, Afghanistan
All these have/had porn.
Betamax: Too little, too late.
Afghanistan: A particular revealing scene where you can almost see that there is a human beneath the burka?
Laserdisc: Are you talking about frame #119058 of WF Roger Rabbit or #90467 of the Rescuers? (made ya look;-)
We have a two party system. There is no third option.
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
As for the moon; it's so close and so big that an unbiased observer might call our system a double planet. You won't find anything like this in the solar system and even though we're towards the small end of the planets, we have one of the biggest moons. There are some good things in Obama's plan, but the fact that his plan avoids the stepping stone God dropped in fron of us just because we've stepped there before is absolutely insane. Don't be surprised if India or China or Samsung gets man on Mars first by not avoiding the obvious. Yes we can explore space without using the moon but, did the polynesian's discover Hawaii without exploring neighboring Polynesian islands? Did the Europeans venture to the New World without exploring the Mediterranean?
This device was designed to play musical notes of the ancient equal tempered scale. That scale has been illegal since 2066 when the copyright was awarded to the Orbcorp oligopoly. Any intellectual property using this scale was confiscated, uploaded to the Orb and safely locked away forever-- along with everything else.
Don't you just hate it when you're not even finished with your great American dystopian Sci-Fi novel and it suddenly morphs into a friggin' documentary?
No, we don't know enough about this or any other trait to understand under what condition there might be benefits. For example, color blindness seems to present advantages in hunting, or an advantage in seeing that color-camouflaged predator. As an individual I would want the treatment if it were safe and affordable but what is good for an individual isn't necessarily good for society. For society the safest "rule" would be to allow this kind of genetic tweaking of "mostly harmless" traits only with consent of the individual and only in individuals who will not subsequently have children and pass the designer gene on to the next generation without their consent. Even terrible diseases such as Tay Sachs and Sickle Cell Anemia appear to have some beneficial effects (offering slight immunity to TB and Malaria in carriers).
We have carefully considered (not) your proposal and have decided to unconditionally release (or not) Schroedinger's cat. Therefore you may (or may not) find this free-range cat at a position which we will disclose (or not) at a later occasion, only under the condition that we cannot disclose the momentum of said cat.
Architects, sociologists, city planners.. indeed all of us could learn something about the kind of innovation that goes on in slums as the result of necessity. Our cushy world is based so much around luxury, not necessity, that it's nearly impossible to strip away what we really need. Some MIT students studied the carbon footprint of homeless and found that een the homeless of the U.S. have nearly twice the carbon footprint of the global mean. If people with homes in ROW can get by, even be relatively happy with half the carbon footprint of our homeless, maybe they know something we should learn.
Whether we reach peak-oil, peek debt, peak atmospheric carbon or our population reaches a point where food and water becomes too scarce, eventually most of us will have to learn to live with what we need rather than what we want. We won't learn that if we (Like Beijing), take working old neighborhoods, Hutongs and silk market and replace them with hi rises and supermalls. We wont learn it if we do like the U.S. and declare such neighborhoods "Blighted" and seize them by eminent domain and hand them over to private developers who understand greed more than they understand the architecture and sociology of necessity.
Apple is trying to stop Nokia from selling phones in the U.S. which seems a little heavy-handed. But I think its struggles against Microsoft taught Apple that either you're a ruthless monopoly and patent troll or you're the kid who gets beat up by one. We might as well admit that U.S. trade law is designed to create domestic monopolies with third-world labor pools. Apple is smart enough to live within that system. It's unfortunate because I don't want to give up my reliable and relatively open Nokia for a locked down iAnything.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan is one of the few places that could possibly be powered completely by geothermal. There isn't nearly enough wave energy to supply the planet, nor is there sufficient wave energy near Japan to supply Japan.
I think you overestimate the geothermal potential near Japanese cities and underestimate wave energy potential. Here are some advantages of wave/tidal energy:
Cool technology, but there is a simpler solution which doesn't require lenses, holograms, laser beam splitters, computers or CCDs. A transmission laser microscope. The example on the teravolt web page shows the sample in a water drop which acts as both the sample holder and lens. It is also possible to remove the converging lens from the laser diode so that it becomes a simple point source microscope (think pinhole camera, in reverse). The light source in a typical laser is comparable to the size of a bacteria so, while it isn't truely a point source, for 50-100x microscopy (paramecium, amoeba, blood cells, brine shrimp...) it works well. Something like this might be particularly useful in testing water and body fluid samples for parasites.
I was 11 when I read the full edition of the Lord of the Rings after The Hobbit. It was a family copy, which meant it was not the edited crap that was mostly available in libraries throughout the 70's and 80's. My copy (now passed down to me) was published in the 50's.
It was indescribable to me what I went through reading that. The scope of that world, the "resolution" and "texture" that it took in my mind could never be replaced or compared too.
The day we lose the written word, is the day we start slipping into a Dark Age, or more likely Idiocracy realized complete.
Anyone who has read an original book, whether it be by Tolkien, Tolstoy or A.A. Milne would not for a moment confuse it with, nor prefer edited, disnified, film or T.V. versions. There are a handful of authors whose books lend themselves to film adaptations, Steinbeck, Dickens, Shakespeare and many modern authors (Crighton, Clancey, Grisham) who write with the knowledge that film rights can be far more lucrative than a publishing contract but even there, much bandwidth is lost in translation.
When writing for film, everything must be distilled down to two senses, what is heard and and what is seen. Other senses and thoughts must be expressed in these two... without sounding awkward. One sci fi author (Clark?) put it well when he said that the best mapping is not between a novel and a movie, but between a short story and a movie. So Moby Dick, 1984, Dune, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, Never Let Me Go... _seem_ as thought they could be made into excellent movies, but the film adaptations pale in comparison to the originals.
The second "problem" with ebooks is that they are inexpensive to publish. As we've seen with the internet, when it becomes very inexpensive to broadcast, SPAM dominates, advertising dominates, signal to noise ratio trends towards zero.
Your reference to editing brings to mind the third and what I see as the biggest risk in letting paper books disappear. If I have a paper book and I hand it to you and you pass it along to someone else anywhere in the English speaking world, at any time in history, we all have this book as a common experience. It isn't region-coded, it doesn't edit parts of itself to suit the biases of the reader, nor does it shape itself to the laws, customs, religion and political correctness whims of the reader's locale and time. While many in this century would be more comfortable reading Huck fin after passing it through sed 's/*igger/p.o.c./g', what would happen in a world where Huck Finn had shaped itself according to political correctness forces of its time when its portrayal of a friendship between a white boy and a black slave was "inappropriate?"
In the past century many forms of entertainment have moved from common to individualistic. If you have only a few radio channels or 3 TV channels, chances are good that your neighbor saw the same long-haired British band on Ed. Sullivan as you did. We lost the common experience, but we should value the choices we have in going from 3 channels to 300, or even more choices in selecting entertainment content on the Internet. Such choices _should_ allow us to become more well-rounded, to see things from more points of view. But studies have demonstrated that people tend to use these choices to select information which reinforces their own biases. Adolf Hitler was able to read such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin and value them as as great works, without allowing them to shape his opinions of non-aryan people.
Ebooks and the internet can present a feedback loop. If I always search websites which "prove" that Elvis is living with space aliens in Roswell, N.M., my searches of news and other topics can also be influenced by that bias. Paper books provide a "reader neutral" reality check. But if a book vendor wants to sell an Elvis biography, adding a chapter on Elvis's retirement in Roswell will make it sell to Elvis conspiracy theorists. There is no disincentive to allowing ebooks to morph into what we or our society expects of them.
One other not so smart thing about the picture is that the houses are rectangular. If you want buildings to be able to resist some earthquake, hydrodynamic and aerodynamic forces, there are much better shapes. And with 3D building fabricators now able to print a building out of concrete or gypsum, there is no reason why buildings need to be rectangular. Imagine buildings shaped like an aerodynamic wing with the broadside facing the sea or prevailing wind.
"poor Apple fanboys with their black and white OS that barely even multitasked..."
Tsk tsk, now don't hurt their poor little feelings. Remember Apple eventually did acquire some BSD unix code from NeXT at a going-out-of-business sale and eventually produced "their own" (ahem) preemptive multitasking OSX in 2001 which was only 16 years after Commodore's Amiga, 22 years after OS9 on the Radio Shack computer. Heck, even Microsoft produced a preemptive multitasking OS only 10 years after Amiga.
Now don't anyone make apple fanboys feel worse by telling them that Nokia (good grief, Nokia?) had multitasking in their Symbian phones more than half a decade ago. Funny, you'd think of all that borrowed NeXT Objective C code that remains inside iOS, they must've worked pretty hard to make it not mutitask.
P.S.For those of you still on Mac OS9, no that is called "cooperative multitasking", a very primitive version of multitasking which goes back to the Cretacious period.
No Linus, those aren't threads. They're not very pretty either and they're certainly not threads.
The people working on projects such as Opengazer headtracking, use cheap commodity webcams to ehable communication and control (e.g. wheelchair) for people with spinal chord injuries and other conditions which prevent other input methods from being practical. The technology used inside Kinect would be ideal for this but if Microsoft insists on utilizing taxpayer funded law enforcement agencies so that they can profit from this device's gaming functionality, I guess the rest of us should just sit back and let them do that, right?
After all, a device intended for gaming should be used only for that purpose and not for inappropriate and unprofitable activities such as enabling a disabled person to communicate and interact with their world.
If he doesn't want to use the other hand or if he would like to explore other artistic entry methods, he should try Opengazer
Jack Welch was absolutely right, if you want to be G.E. or Microsoft, you must be #1 or #2 in your market (and ruthlessly crush any competition.) But we aren't G.E. and we aren't Microsoft and with the Fed's policy encouraging M&As, we will soon be left with a few dozen mega-corporations who are averse to invention or innovation because it doesn't guarantee #1 or #2 and doesn't guarantee a profit to shareholders in the next 90 days.
So where does that leave the rest of us? There are enormous gaps in the market the big guys won't bother touching because no one will make billions on desktops which require only one support person for 10,000+ desktops. No one will make billions on desktops which can run on last year's computers or on other handheld devices. No one will make billions on desktops which have accessibility designed into standard widgets or desktops which can beused as teaching tools by allowing users to see and modify what's under the hood. No one will make billions on desktops which can be customized to meet many diverse needs which haven't yet been dreamed of.
In case you haven't heard, Jack Welch's winner takes all mantra has been deprecated In this new world, it's O.K. to be a niche player. In fact unless you are G.E. or Microsoft, it's crucial to be a niche player and in that world, the OpenSource Desktops (including various flavors of GNU/Linux) shine.
Okay, maybe Creative Computing wasn't quite as pure as I remembered it (or I had a few particularly good issues), but the Creative Computing archives contain some interesting bits of nostalgia, including:
My five year old knows Basic
Stereo Graphics with hidden line removal.
What does it take to be successful or how to tell the winners from losers? (With articles about successful companies such as DEC,Coleco,Visicorp,Osborn,TI,Atari,Commodore...)
Naked call writing (i.e. I wonder what young kid read this and went on to write the software which created the derivatives panics of 2007?)
Product preview: Microsoft Windows; 23 Manufacturers to support new operating software system -- "Finally, microcomputer users will be able to take their software and plug it into any system, without worrying about compatibility." -- William H. Gates, Chairman of the board of Microsoft
By the late 1980s Byte had become too focused on PC hardware instead of the more general concepts of computing. (My favorite example was when they gave the Amiga 1000 a negative review because it didn't have an AUTOEXEC.BAT). Likewise, Compute! became so hyperfocused on specific Commodore and Atari hardware, they would publish three or four nearly identical listings (C64,Vic,Atari400, Atari 800) instead of one program with the hardware specific stuff in separate subroutines. Even their checksum listings eventually got to the point where the reader was nothing but a human barcode reader who wasn't meant to understand what he was typing into his computer.
IMHO "Creative Computing" was a far better magazine than either. It remained a true computer science magazine until the very end, focusing on algorithms rather than the hardware platform-du-jour. For that reason, some Creative Computing articles are timeless. The only thing similar today would be ACM journals, but Creative Computing hit a sweet spot in the understandability vs depth curve that ACM journals rarely reach.
The biggest problems which face humanity can't be solved in such a way to show a profit in the next 90 days. The same SEC rules which encourage microsecond trading and trillion dollar derivative losses discourage any kind of long-term planning in the corporate world. Corporate R&D died with this long term planning and companies heavy on R&D (e.g. Sun, Cray, SGI, DEC) cannot thrive in this ADD economy. It doesn't matter if the end result is both highly profitable in a monetary as well as humanitarian sense, you have to answer to the microsecond whims of day traders. Ditto for education, Reagan brought on the "University bubble" where a college education must turn a profit in 4 years. People left the sciences in droves and flocked to the hot trend of the day:EE in the 80s, Comp sci in the 90s, Law in the 00s, ??? in 10s...profit! Of course that's what its all about but our time scale is *$&ed up.
DTV to USB tuner (~$20) for my computer
Before the transition:
After the transition:
Yeah, that was a worthwhile boondoggle. After all, every red-blooded American[Tm] has the right to see when their newscaster needs more makeup and a shave.
I once tried to match up the stone circle surrounding a 5000 year old burial tomb against how stars would appear on the winter solstice at that time. (there is a well-known solstice alignment with the associated passage tomb.) Nothing lined up until I noticed that my Amiga astronomy program turned off precession by default so that it's 7Mhz processor wouldn't have a conniption. Lo and behold, the stars of Orion's belt rose over this stone, Sirius over that one, the ecliptic aligned with those two...
"where the sun's path touches the earth" is almost exactly the phrase used in an old native American story about a boy who rigged a noose at the point "where the sun's path touches the earth" in order to punish it for burning his coat. The noose choked the sun and nearly put it out until (a mouse?) gnawed through the rope and allowed the sun to be restored. Does this sound familiar? The story is from a north American tribe which is currently confined to an area which hasn't seen a total solar eclipse in several hundred years. I'd love to discuss with David exactly which eclipse matches this mystery. The last time I investigated this I assumed it was a southern Canadian eclipse from the 1700s but it might not have been.
Yes the engineers and customers are in Silicon Valley, that's fine. But we have this thing called the Internet which means it is no longer necessary to put data centers anywhere near the customers or engineers. And if it's not necessary, it makes absolutely no sense for servers to compete for space in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world when there are billions of acres of wasteland that would work just as well for a server farm. I've used a thin client desktop with the servers hosted over 3000 miles away and the latency was better than it was when the server was hosted only 8 miles away. Only video games and the kind of hyperactive trading that led to this month's stock crashes have latency requirements which would be significantly impacted by having your server in central valley or the Midwest or Iceland or Offshore and you will save an enormous amount of real estate and energy costs. I'm convinced that high-level corporate decisions are still based on inertia and nineteenth century factory-whistle mentality.
Good comment but this't really solve the problem. Our business leaders tried desperately to emulate the "work-to-death" aspect of Japanese corpoculture, but have carefully avoided emulating their more sensible CEO wage scales and the sense of responsibility that has lead to suicides of Japanese leaders who felt responsible for shattered lives, environmental disasters or deaths.
As a previous post mentioned, there aren't enough BP officials to plug this hole. But if we were to force anyone to repay the economic and environmental reparations, who would that be? Certainly the leaders and stockholders of BP, but also its customers who believe it is their god-given right to drive whatever gas hog they intend to and if that causes blood to be spilled in the middle east or props up despots in Venezuela and Nigeria or lays waste to thousands of miles of coastline and the primary source of U.S. seafood, punt the blame to Obama or another late-arriving scapegoat.
As for the parent question, the simple reason why no one knows how deep water oil behaves or how to clean it up is that there isn't any 90 day time horizon GAP profit in basic science. Sometime around the Reagan years with the SEC reforms (sic) that helped bring on the banking crisis, we've lost sight of the idea that anything can be useful for something beyond what will show a GAP profit within the next 90 days. Until we fix that basic flaw in our system, everyone will be able to point to the U.S. as an example of where capitalism fails. But calling this sham and bribe system we have in place capitalism is akin to calling slavery 'capitalism.'
The fact that U.K. schools are reimporting this stupidity will maintain the unnovation balance of power. Yes it's challenging to write a "commercial technology" neutral exam, but we should be striving for that so that graduates with training in version (n-1) won't be completely lost. Meanwhile I look forward to the day when I'm up against graduates with a PhD in cloud computing or whatever the technology buzzword du jour is.
Betamax: Too little, too late. ;-)
Afghanistan: A particular revealing scene where you can almost see that there is a human beneath the burka?
Laserdisc: Are you talking about frame #119058 of WF Roger Rabbit or #90467 of the Rescuers? (made ya look
No Pr0n:Betamax, Laserdisc, Afghanistan, iPad,
Pr0n: VHS, DVD, Las Vegas, Google Android
Thank's for the tip Mr. Jobs!
We have a two party system. There is no third option.
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
As for the moon; it's so close and so big that an unbiased observer might call our system a double planet. You won't find anything like this in the solar system and even though we're towards the small end of the planets, we have one of the biggest moons. There are some good things in Obama's plan, but the fact that his plan avoids the stepping stone God dropped in fron of us just because we've stepped there before is absolutely insane. Don't be surprised if India or China or Samsung gets man on Mars first by not avoiding the obvious. Yes we can explore space without using the moon but, did the polynesian's discover Hawaii without exploring neighboring Polynesian islands? Did the Europeans venture to the New World without exploring the Mediterranean?
Don't you just hate it when you're not even finished with your great American dystopian Sci-Fi novel and it suddenly morphs into a friggin' documentary?
No, colour blindness is a broken trait
No, we don't know enough about this or any other trait to understand under what condition there might be benefits. For example, color blindness seems to present advantages in hunting, or an advantage in seeing that color-camouflaged predator. As an individual I would want the treatment if it were safe and affordable but what is good for an individual isn't necessarily good for society. For society the safest "rule" would be to allow this kind of genetic tweaking of "mostly harmless" traits only with consent of the individual and only in individuals who will not subsequently have children and pass the designer gene on to the next generation without their consent. Even terrible diseases such as Tay Sachs and Sickle Cell Anemia appear to have some beneficial effects (offering slight immunity to TB and Malaria in carriers).
Dear PETA:
We have carefully considered (not) your proposal and have decided to unconditionally release (or not) Schroedinger's cat. Therefore you may (or may not) find this free-range cat at a position which we will disclose (or not) at a later occasion, only under the condition that we cannot disclose the momentum of said cat.
Love,
E. Schroedinger
Architects, sociologists, city planners.. indeed all of us could learn something about the kind of innovation that goes on in slums as the result of necessity. Our cushy world is based so much around luxury, not necessity, that it's nearly impossible to strip away what we really need. Some MIT students studied the carbon footprint of homeless and found that een the homeless of the U.S. have nearly twice the carbon footprint of the global mean. If people with homes in ROW can get by, even be relatively happy with half the carbon footprint of our homeless, maybe they know something we should learn.
Whether we reach peak-oil, peek debt, peak atmospheric carbon or our population reaches a point where food and water becomes too scarce, eventually most of us will have to learn to live with what we need rather than what we want. We won't learn that if we (Like Beijing), take working old neighborhoods, Hutongs and silk market and replace them with hi rises and supermalls. We wont learn it if we do like the U.S. and declare such neighborhoods "Blighted" and seize them by eminent domain and hand them over to private developers who understand greed more than they understand the architecture and sociology of necessity.
Apple is trying to stop Nokia from selling phones in the U.S. which seems a little heavy-handed. But I think its struggles against Microsoft taught Apple that either you're a ruthless monopoly and patent troll or you're the kid who gets beat up by one. We might as well admit that U.S. trade law is designed to create domestic monopolies with third-world labor pools. Apple is smart enough to live within that system. It's unfortunate because I don't want to give up my reliable and relatively open Nokia for a locked down iAnything.