Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.
Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.
In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.
There are fewer netbooks in existence than there are tablets sold. That you happen to have a netbook doesn't mean anything for the 99.99999999999 of the population that doesn't.
A netbook is half the price of a Transformer and probably faster too. So if you're thinking of buying one you could just buy the netbook and save a few hundred bucks.
Microsoft will have office for Windows 8 Metro. That alone will surely encourage many consumers that shy from tablets due to productivity concerns, a market Android Tablets does not cover.
I'm sure people will just be lining up to run a word processor on a tablet with no keyboard.
So that's why Android tablets lost 8% marketshare last fiscal quarter?
I suspect it's as much because only Apple fanboys still think they really 'must have' a tablet while the rest of the world doesn't see much use for them. I played with a Transformer at a trade show a few months ago and it was kind of cool but I couldn't see myself doing anything with it that I don't really do with my netbook.
I read an interesting survey a few weeks back showing some huge percentage of iPad buyers bought it on hype and barely use the thing a few months later; I forget what site it was on.
I regularly browse through e-books on Amazon, though I wish they'd let you read more than 10% (or is it 20%?) of the book.
no ability to lend your friends books
Amazon, at least, supports limited lending so long as the publisher allows it.
having your books remotely deleted on publisher whim...
As far as I'm aware, Amazon only ever deleted books that the publisher did not have the rights to sell. It kind of sucks, but there's no good solution to that problem.
The publishers instead tell retailers what they can sell the books for.
So perhaps you can explain why the book store I walked past yesterday had a sign in the window saying '30% off all hardbacks'? Or, indeed, why I almost never see a book on Amazon for sale at the 'retail price' without a discount?
This publisher-set pricing is exclusive to e-books, not to paper books.
They were involved in price fixing, which essentially is only illegal because there is government regulation. Without regulation this would happen much more often and on larger scale.
Let's try that again.
Publishers only exist because of copyright. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly.
Now explain how publishers would price-fix if copyright did not exist.
When a monopoly exists, it's usually for one of two reasons:
1. Bigger is cheaper. No smaller company can compete because the big company is more efficient and can sell their product for less than any competitor. This is good, because it means customers are paying less. 2. Government is preventing competition. This is bad, because it means customers are paying more than they should have to.
How does a big corporation become a monopoly that can charge excessively high prices without a government to keep competition out of the market?
Yeah, they should definitely let terrorists get into the reactor and blow it up rather than risk shooting a lefty retard who's out for a publicity stunt.
Management don't care, why should you? It really can't be all that much of a problem.
The manager who didn't document anything finished ahead of schedule and below budget. He got a big bonus and moved on to another job at a different company based on his reputation for delivering early and cheap.
The manager who comes in to organise an upgrade to that software ends up taking much longer than expected and going well over budget because nothing was documented in the initial spaghetti code. He gets fired for being incompetent.
Uh, no it hasn't. It may not be readily accessible, but there are (literally) tons of Saturn V information still available.
The scientist have died, the documents have rotten and been lost.
That'll be a surprise to the people who've put many gigabytes of Apollo-era documents on ntrs.nasa.gov.
What they have lost is much of the software; the Apollo Guidance Computer software only exists because some of the programmers had old listings that were OCR-ed, and the Saturn guidance computer software seems to be long gone.. there are a couple of computers left that may still have the code in their core memory, but so far no-one has been brave enough to try reading it out since that's a destructive operation and if you screw up you won't get a second chance.
Fortunately if someone was to try to rebuild a Saturn V they'd use completely new electronics and software anyway. Heck, it would probably have to run Windows...
this thing runs at 1.4ghz. Losing a few hundred cycles to garbage collection shouldn't hurt anything.
'A few hundred cycles'?
Java routinely locks up the system for several seconds garbage collecting on a multi-core, multi-gigahertz x86 CPU. When we write performance-sensitive software in Java we typically spend far more time making the garbage collection not screw it up than we spend dealing with memory management in C++; there are very few reasons to call new or delete directly in modern C++ code.
Most things about Java are better than C++, but memory management isn't one of them.
Privatize the profits socialize the losses. Isn't capitalism great.
The Fed was created by the 'progressives'. Central banks are one of the ten recommended measures for creating a communist state in the Communist Manifesto.
So don't blame capitalists for the inevitable failure of another stupid left-wing policy.
An electric three-wheeler was never going to appeal to the mainstream, so it was a pointless exercise. If you're going to build electric cars you have to appeal to the rich hippy market.
OTOH, the current generation of consoles are old. None of them approach, let alone define, the state of the art. Do you really think they're still being sold below cost?
The current generation of consoles are old and nowhere near the capability of a modern PC. How long do you think people will keep buying them before console manufacturers have to invest billions of dollars in developing the next generation?
What is going away is the console that can only play a game, which is being replaced by devices that have apps as well as games. This is already happening in the current generation of consoles.
I've had one of those for thirty years. We call it 'a computer'.
Sure, they're good in theory, but after you've been using some extension for years the Gnome developers decide that they want Change and then your extension breaks and the developer hasn't updated it in a long time because it's done and there's really no way to improve it, and now it's dead unless someone else learns whatever arcane Gnome-isms are required to fix it.
Users simply can't rely on anything outside the main code development tree, and with Gnome you can't even rely on that.
Windows got ahead because it was designed primarily as a platform for running high level applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, by single users on microcomputers rather than being designed as a multi-user, general purpose platform for programmers and other users who could invest a little more time in learning their way around the operating system.
Windows got ahead because a Sun Workstation cost 10x as much. Windows 3.x was a joke compared to what people were doing on Unix workstations at the time, but few people could afford to buy a Sun for their home.
Windows 95 was the first version that was better than SunOS from a user perspective (obviously it was a pile of crap internally).
What the heck do you people do to make Firefox use all that RAM? Firefox here has been running for a couple of weeks with dozens of tabs open and is using 260MB.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to airplane travel, would several hundred rocket launches a year really contribute that much more pollution?
Gaseous-core nuclear rockets are pretty polluting. LOX/LH2 not so much.
Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.
Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.
In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.
There are fewer netbooks in existence than there are tablets sold. That you happen to have a netbook doesn't mean anything for the 99.99999999999 of the population that doesn't.
A netbook is half the price of a Transformer and probably faster too. So if you're thinking of buying one you could just buy the netbook and save a few hundred bucks.
Microsoft will have office for Windows 8 Metro. That alone will surely encourage many consumers that shy from tablets due to productivity concerns, a market Android Tablets does not cover.
I'm sure people will just be lining up to run a word processor on a tablet with no keyboard.
So that's why Android tablets lost 8% marketshare last fiscal quarter?
I suspect it's as much because only Apple fanboys still think they really 'must have' a tablet while the rest of the world doesn't see much use for them. I played with a Transformer at a trade show a few months ago and it was kind of cool but I couldn't see myself doing anything with it that I don't really do with my netbook.
I read an interesting survey a few weeks back showing some huge percentage of iPad buyers bought it on hype and barely use the thing a few months later; I forget what site it was on.
No ability to find books by browsing
I regularly browse through e-books on Amazon, though I wish they'd let you read more than 10% (or is it 20%?) of the book.
no ability to lend your friends books
Amazon, at least, supports limited lending so long as the publisher allows it.
having your books remotely deleted on publisher whim...
As far as I'm aware, Amazon only ever deleted books that the publisher did not have the rights to sell. It kind of sucks, but there's no good solution to that problem.
The publishers instead tell retailers what they can sell the books for.
So perhaps you can explain why the book store I walked past yesterday had a sign in the window saying '30% off all hardbacks'? Or, indeed, why I almost never see a book on Amazon for sale at the 'retail price' without a discount?
This publisher-set pricing is exclusive to e-books, not to paper books.
They were involved in price fixing, which essentially is only illegal because there is government regulation. Without regulation this would happen much more often and on larger scale.
Let's try that again.
Publishers only exist because of copyright. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly.
Now explain how publishers would price-fix if copyright did not exist.
When a monopoly exists, it's usually for one of two reasons:
1. Bigger is cheaper. No smaller company can compete because the big company is more efficient and can sell their product for less than any competitor. This is good, because it means customers are paying less.
2. Government is preventing competition. This is bad, because it means customers are paying more than they should have to.
How does a big corporation become a monopoly that can charge excessively high prices without a government to keep competition out of the market?
This is another example of why free-market is bullshit. Leave these big players uncontrolled and they will screw everybody over.
You think publishing, which relies entirely on a GOVERNMENT-GRANTED MONOPOLY to operate, is somehow an indictment of the free market?
BTW, there are about a bazillion e-books on Amazon for $0.99 if you don't want to pay $19.99 for one from a big publisher.
Sniping people should NOT be the first response.
Yeah, they should definitely let terrorists get into the reactor and blow it up rather than risk shooting a lefty retard who's out for a publicity stunt.
in a world where nuclear power plants don't have half-assed security. Call me crazy.
And if the guards had shot the Greenpeas, people would be complaining about how awful that was.
They're going to encourage people to use their services by dramatically reducing the service quality they offer.
Management don't care, why should you? It really can't be all that much of a problem.
The manager who didn't document anything finished ahead of schedule and below budget. He got a big bonus and moved on to another job at a different company based on his reputation for delivering early and cheap.
The manager who comes in to organise an upgrade to that software ends up taking much longer than expected and going well over budget because nothing was documented in the initial spaghetti code. He gets fired for being incompetent.
NASA has lost ALL of it's Saturn V knowledge.
Uh, no it hasn't. It may not be readily accessible, but there are (literally) tons of Saturn V information still available.
The scientist have died, the documents have rotten and been lost.
That'll be a surprise to the people who've put many gigabytes of Apollo-era documents on ntrs.nasa.gov.
What they have lost is much of the software; the Apollo Guidance Computer software only exists because some of the programmers had old listings that were OCR-ed, and the Saturn guidance computer software seems to be long gone.. there are a couple of computers left that may still have the code in their core memory, but so far no-one has been brave enough to try reading it out since that's a destructive operation and if you screw up you won't get a second chance.
Fortunately if someone was to try to rebuild a Saturn V they'd use completely new electronics and software anyway. Heck, it would probably have to run Windows...
this thing runs at 1.4ghz. Losing a few hundred cycles to garbage collection shouldn't hurt anything.
'A few hundred cycles'?
Java routinely locks up the system for several seconds garbage collecting on a multi-core, multi-gigahertz x86 CPU. When we write performance-sensitive software in Java we typically spend far more time making the garbage collection not screw it up than we spend dealing with memory management in C++; there are very few reasons to call new or delete directly in modern C++ code.
Most things about Java are better than C++, but memory management isn't one of them.
Privatize the profits socialize the losses. Isn't capitalism great.
The Fed was created by the 'progressives'. Central banks are one of the ten recommended measures for creating a communist state in the Communist Manifesto.
So don't blame capitalists for the inevitable failure of another stupid left-wing policy.
An electric three-wheeler was never going to appeal to the mainstream, so it was a pointless exercise. If you're going to build electric cars you have to appeal to the rich hippy market.
OTOH, the current generation of consoles are old. None of them approach, let alone define, the state of the art. Do you really think they're still being sold below cost?
The current generation of consoles are old and nowhere near the capability of a modern PC. How long do you think people will keep buying them before console manufacturers have to invest billions of dollars in developing the next generation?
When the hell did a computer become a 'converged device'?
I prefer the phrase 'non-crippled device' myself.
What is going away is the console that can only play a game, which is being replaced by devices that have apps as well as games. This is already happening in the current generation of consoles.
I've had one of those for thirty years. We call it 'a computer'.
My game consoles spend more time streaming Netflix then playing games these days.
Well, there goes the 'sell below cost and recoup the money on game licensing fees' business model.
Sure, they're good in theory, but after you've been using some extension for years the Gnome developers decide that they want Change and then your extension breaks and the developer hasn't updated it in a long time because it's done and there's really no way to improve it, and now it's dead unless someone else learns whatever arcane Gnome-isms are required to fix it.
Users simply can't rely on anything outside the main code development tree, and with Gnome you can't even rely on that.
Windows got ahead because it was designed primarily as a platform for running high level applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, by single users on microcomputers rather than being designed as a multi-user, general purpose platform for programmers and other users who could invest a little more time in learning their way around the operating system.
Windows got ahead because a Sun Workstation cost 10x as much. Windows 3.x was a joke compared to what people were doing on Unix workstations at the time, but few people could afford to buy a Sun for their home.
Windows 95 was the first version that was better than SunOS from a user perspective (obviously it was a pile of crap internally).
I want 64 bit firefox. I wouldn't care about memory leaks if it could use the memory I payed for.
Weird. I've been running 64 bit Firefox for years.
What the heck do you people do to make Firefox use all that RAM? Firefox here has been running for a couple of weeks with dozens of tabs open and is using 260MB.