In 10 years we'll laugh at these impatient people who couldn't wait a year to get the same car at a steep discount. Like Apple line people, Cabbage Patch line people, Tickle Me Elmo line people, etc.
Seriously. I don't want to call people "morons", but buying a car sight-unseen is bad. Buying one that no one has ever seen is worse. True, they are only on the hook for $1000 if this thing turns out to be a stinker, but still...
I might agree except that the local school system is flooded with Chromebooks... Linux. It might be another education fad, or it might be the start of a larger trend to home computers. It's amazing how much one can accomplish on a Chromebook - and a more familiar Linux environment is only a chroot away.
I'm willing to bet that you could grab 100 random Android phone users and 95% of them wouldn't have a clue that Android was based on Linux. Many of those people would never have heard of Linux.
Do Apple users know about their Mach kernel? Do they know about their BSD userland? Who cares if the users "know it's Linux"? It's an iPhone. It's an Android. A user being made aware of the kernel they are running is probably a sign of design failure.
Google has managed it with phones and tablets - Android is just Linux underneath, after all. Chromebooks run Linux and are quietly taking over the education world. Perhaps one of these options will morph into the desktop conqueror...
That's an unfair standard. You buy a Windows machine with Windows pre-installed on it. You buy Mac with an Apple Logo on it. When you start putting together a Windows machine from bits purchased on NewEgg or - God help you - a hackintosh, you start getting into "download drivers" territory... or "impossible to use at all" territory if you don't research the parts ahead of time.
If you plan to run Linux (or one of the BSDs, for that matter), you should probably make sure the hardware will work ahead of time. If you blindly buy a Windows machine with the intent of putting Linux on it, you should expect some amount of pain. Honestly, you might be better off just running Linux in a VM. In which case, you'll probably install some drivers from source to support the VirtualBox guest additions.:)
It seems pretty arrogant to assume you know all about the future. The main limit boils down to energy, and there are certainly energy technologies awaiting an engineering solution. I'd be surprised if we ended up with a permanent base on Mars in my lifetime, but not shocked to my core. I would be shocked if a larger colony ended up there, but in 1000 or 10,000 years? The only thing that would shock me about that is living to see it.
I've busted apart some of those Ali/Ebay/Banggood USB chargers out of sheer morbid curiosity. Those things are so cheaply constructed that it is a physical impossibility that they would successfully negotiate a USB data connection. Even the supposed "hubs" lack capacitors, or even crystals for the controllers. Many of them even save money and omit the diode meant to prevent wall-wart supply voltage from feeding back to the host computer. They are way too busy ripping you off the old-fashioned way to take on more sophisticated cyber crime.
On a side note, the 110v shock that you get in the US is bad enough. If I lived in a country with 220+ V on my wall-warts, I would never ever use one of those Chinese adapters. Terrifying. That crappy, abused little transformer is the only thing keeping the USB port from being energized - and that's assuming that the charger otherwise has decent isolation, which is a bad assumption. YouTube is full of cheap Chinese electronics breakdown porn.
Chicklet today != chicklet then. The TI chicklet was just a rubber-membrane calculator keyboard. Just awful. The hard chicklet keys on a modern laptop are not everyone's bag, but they are at least usable.
It can go the other way, too. A bastard of a man could be discovered to be a huge patron of charity. You can dream up such scenarios for almost any policy, whether it applies to the dead or the living. I think that truthfulness tends to be the better path most of the time.
That would be cool. Most of these low-temperature-differential technologies are expensive because they rely on a binary heat pump. Lots of equipment. But in areas traditionally electrified with imported oil (Alaska, Hawaii, etc) it might still make economic sense.
To be fair, most people would probably also pay attention to a "Shock Hazard" sign. Or just to be unambiguous, use an icon sign. I personally like the one that looks like the guy is being hit by a lightning arrow.
OK, while it technically is still "hydro", that is definitely not what I was referring to.
I wish them luck. We have some engineers at work who used to work at a wave power company. I grew up on the seashore and worked at a corrosion laboratory. I wish anyone luck who can make anything even remotely mechanical work in a marine environment, let alone keeping it economical to do so. I'm flat-out amazed that shipping works at all:)
Economical power from waves and tides would indeed be groundbreaking.
It works fine. Email is a fairly mature technology at this point. Even bloated software like Outlook runs fast enough on modern PCs. If you like a desktop client but still want the benefits of "email anywhere", IMAP + Gmail is hard to beat.
I'm not going to disagree with you. But don't expect people to get excited about 1930s-era high-tech. It's superior to coal, for sure - but it does have some pretty significant drawbacks. The biggest one, despite you calling it a stretch, is availability. Hydro has largely been built everywhere feasible. It is important, yes, but it's also built-out and is doomed to an increasingly small share of the energy market.
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In 10 years we'll laugh at these impatient people who couldn't wait a year to get the same car at a steep discount. Like Apple line people, Cabbage Patch line people, Tickle Me Elmo line people, etc.
If they stay on schedule.
No, worst case is you lose the $1000.
Refundable until the car goes into production.
Seriously. I don't want to call people "morons", but buying a car sight-unseen is bad. Buying one that no one has ever seen is worse. True, they are only on the hook for $1000 if this thing turns out to be a stinker, but still...
I might agree except that the local school system is flooded with Chromebooks... Linux. It might be another education fad, or it might be the start of a larger trend to home computers. It's amazing how much one can accomplish on a Chromebook - and a more familiar Linux environment is only a chroot away.
I'm willing to bet that you could grab 100 random Android phone users and 95% of them wouldn't have a clue that Android was based on Linux. Many of those people would never have heard of Linux.
Do Apple users know about their Mach kernel? Do they know about their BSD userland? Who cares if the users "know it's Linux"? It's an iPhone. It's an Android. A user being made aware of the kernel they are running is probably a sign of design failure.
Google has managed it with phones and tablets - Android is just Linux underneath, after all. Chromebooks run Linux and are quietly taking over the education world. Perhaps one of these options will morph into the desktop conqueror...
That's an unfair standard. You buy a Windows machine with Windows pre-installed on it. You buy Mac with an Apple Logo on it. When you start putting together a Windows machine from bits purchased on NewEgg or - God help you - a hackintosh, you start getting into "download drivers" territory... or "impossible to use at all" territory if you don't research the parts ahead of time.
If you plan to run Linux (or one of the BSDs, for that matter), you should probably make sure the hardware will work ahead of time. If you blindly buy a Windows machine with the intent of putting Linux on it, you should expect some amount of pain. Honestly, you might be better off just running Linux in a VM. In which case, you'll probably install some drivers from source to support the VirtualBox guest additions. :)
It seems pretty arrogant to assume you know all about the future. The main limit boils down to energy, and there are certainly energy technologies awaiting an engineering solution. I'd be surprised if we ended up with a permanent base on Mars in my lifetime, but not shocked to my core. I would be shocked if a larger colony ended up there, but in 1000 or 10,000 years? The only thing that would shock me about that is living to see it.
Are you the same, angry AC that posts every time someone talks about inhabiting other planets or are there actually more than one of you?
I know this is flamebait, but it's like a broken record.
I agree - but such a connection would be necessary to compromise a system. (I think.)
I've busted apart some of those Ali/Ebay/Banggood USB chargers out of sheer morbid curiosity. Those things are so cheaply constructed that it is a physical impossibility that they would successfully negotiate a USB data connection. Even the supposed "hubs" lack capacitors, or even crystals for the controllers. Many of them even save money and omit the diode meant to prevent wall-wart supply voltage from feeding back to the host computer. They are way too busy ripping you off the old-fashioned way to take on more sophisticated cyber crime.
On a side note, the 110v shock that you get in the US is bad enough. If I lived in a country with 220+ V on my wall-warts, I would never ever use one of those Chinese adapters. Terrifying. That crappy, abused little transformer is the only thing keeping the USB port from being energized - and that's assuming that the charger otherwise has decent isolation, which is a bad assumption. YouTube is full of cheap Chinese electronics breakdown porn.
Chicklet today != chicklet then. The TI chicklet was just a rubber-membrane calculator keyboard. Just awful. The hard chicklet keys on a modern laptop are not everyone's bag, but they are at least usable.
It can go the other way, too. A bastard of a man could be discovered to be a huge patron of charity. You can dream up such scenarios for almost any policy, whether it applies to the dead or the living. I think that truthfulness tends to be the better path most of the time.
That would be cool. Most of these low-temperature-differential technologies are expensive because they rely on a binary heat pump. Lots of equipment. But in areas traditionally electrified with imported oil (Alaska, Hawaii, etc) it might still make economic sense.
To be fair, most people would probably also pay attention to a "Shock Hazard" sign. Or just to be unambiguous, use an icon sign. I personally like the one that looks like the guy is being hit by a lightning arrow.
Incredible, huh? Even in the US they are shutting down - though that's because of natural gas. But hey, baby steps.
OK, while it technically is still "hydro", that is definitely not what I was referring to.
I wish them luck. We have some engineers at work who used to work at a wave power company. I grew up on the seashore and worked at a corrosion laboratory. I wish anyone luck who can make anything even remotely mechanical work in a marine environment, let alone keeping it economical to do so. I'm flat-out amazed that shipping works at all :)
Economical power from waves and tides would indeed be groundbreaking.
It works fine. Email is a fairly mature technology at this point. Even bloated software like Outlook runs fast enough on modern PCs. If you like a desktop client but still want the benefits of "email anywhere", IMAP + Gmail is hard to beat.
I'm less impressed that they called you back and more impressed that they managed to retain an employee for two consecutive days.
It's smokescream - he smokes cream.
I'm not going to disagree with you. But don't expect people to get excited about 1930s-era high-tech. It's superior to coal, for sure - but it does have some pretty significant drawbacks. The biggest one, despite you calling it a stretch, is availability. Hydro has largely been built everywhere feasible. It is important, yes, but it's also built-out and is doomed to an increasingly small share of the energy market.
It does make an interesting battery, though.
Ha! Perhaps I should have phrased it, "If you paid me to worry about alien invasion..."
Little good it does you if part of the process is "now wait a few million years..."