Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
The beauty of some of the new reactor designs is that they use old radioactive waste as their fuel source. By some people's estimates we have about two centuries worth of fuel for the energy needs of the entire United States just in our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Not only would we not have to mine additional fuel, we would be significantly reducing the amount of waste that we need to store.
(45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page.
Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
Storage is cheap. The manual process of scanning each of these documents is the costly part. It is thus better to scan at the maximum resolution and quality possible so that they never have to do it again. They may even be scanning multiple passes with different methods (visible, IR, etc.). 1.2GB per page is not unreasonable, even if it uses a lossless compression scheme.
This looks like an evolution of what FingerWorks was building before being purchased by Apple. Fingerworks multitouch technology led to the iPhone, macbook multitouch trackpad, etc.
Their Frogpad product:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qg8IB64yu8
Start small. Shared hosting is probably fine unless you need the features of a dedicated Virtual Private Server. Some things that used to require dedicated VPS can now be outsourced to services like Amazon S3 and MySQL hosting.
Shared Hosting:
I like Dreamhost.com for all my PHP/MySQL related sites. They offer SSH accounts, unlimited number of domains for a shared hosting account, IMAP and preconfigured webmail, cron and a bunch of other goodies. Support is decent but not great. Using the promo code "JMK" will get you $50 off if you sign up. They are already very cost effective for what you get, with or without the promo code.
VPS:
Don't go with dedicated hardware, choose a VPS. I really like the service provided by MediaTemple.net. Their knowledgebase and support staff are top notch and their prices are reasonable. If and when you grow to need multiple servers they can set you up with your own private network. They do not charge for traffic between these machines which can save you alot of money. Do not go this route unless you are comfortable with linux administration. You will be responsible for maintaince of the machine.
General Tips:
Use a different registrar than your hosting company. This ensures that they don't give you the run around if you ever need to switch hosts. I foolishly used Network Solutions several years ago and when I went to change hosts that continually hung up on me on the phone, didn't answer my emails, and eventually let me domain name expire, at which point they said they could get it back for around $200 instead of the already inflated normal price of $25 to renew.
Use a version control system for you code and keep your own regular backup of your site. You can setup a cron job to run daily / weekly backups of important data and have them sent to another hosting provider or online storage. Check them occasionally and make sure they contain all the right data.
I used to make kiosks for museums and other public areas. Do not underestimate how much abuse these things get from the public. I would highly recommend researching kiosk enclosures and ensuring that the hardware, touch screen and pc, will fit in whatever enclosure suits your needs best.
Our kiosks were constantly moved around. Access to ethernet wasn't always an option so we often went wireless. Many times we would develop software so that it stored all content locally on the kiosk. We would create an admin program that would push any content changes to the devices. The devices were then able to run even if the network/internet went down. It also gives you a speed boost since you aren't streaming 20 video feeds across ethernet/wireless.
Try finding a local interactive media company that has kiosk experience. It will save you headaches in the long run, even if you only pay them to meet with you once or twice to hash out your ideas and ask for recommendations.
It would be nice if someone were to come out with a half qwerty keyboard that attached to your other wrist. You could put your left hand over your right wrist to type on this keyboard while having a decent view of the display. Put in a little joystick that would rest underneath your thumb and you'd have a functional mouse.
I'd like to see Legislators prorate taxes for Gay couples. If they can't enjoy the same rights as a heterosexual married couple, don't charge them as much in taxes to offset the financial burden of not being able to get married.
Good thing they will have those new highways. Now they'll have a quick way to get their kids to the hospital when the smog induced asthma attacks happen!
With almost everything else in life, there is a more clear set beginning and end. If you are addicted to food, you reach a stopping point when your plate is licked clean. The internet keeps going. I, myself, find it very hard not to keep reading interesting information. There is simply so much data out there.
Having said that, I can't understand how someone could play a stupid flash game for hours on end. Many of the people I know who do such things claim it's neither very fun or rewarding...so why do it?
I've met religious fanatics who don't spend that much time reading their religious scripture. Literally, you claim to be spending more time with whatever literature supports your views than a fundie does with a bible.
You are comparing finding actual facts and logical arguments to reading a few whacky sentences and taking them at face value. The pursuit of knowledge takes far more time then the pursuit of ignorance.
Not only would it encourage people to quit, all those who were dumb enough to keep smoking would be dead quick enough not to become such a horrible drain on our medical system. Yes, I do know that cigarettes are taxed, blah blah blah.
Maybe we could comprise any make every 1000th cigarete cause instantenous death?
They do boneheaded things like this all too often. They are seriously considering shutting down HWY40, a major highway that connects the suburbs to the city. HWY40 doesn't have exit and on ramps that are the proper length, so they want to do construction to fix all that. If they shut that highway down it will double or triple many peoples morning commute.
Of course, if people would simply stop trying to cut everyone else off, and not drive like total pricks, there wouldn't be any problem. Not to mention the fact that the white flight has caused all these upper middle class jerks to move out of the city but still work there, burning gas for hours each day just to drive back and forth to work.
In effect, open sourcing many of these systems would give the elite technical people in the community an unfair advantage over their non-technical fellow citizens.
As opposed to the massive advantage of being rich? I'm not rich, but I'm decently technical, where's my piece of the advantage pie?:-)
If, ideally, the government exists soley for it's citizens. Would it be in our best interest to be able to view the source code of non classified projects? If the government is in fact using our tax dollars to pay programmers, should we be entitled to view the outcome of their work and does it become public domain if paid for by public funds?
He developed something unique and functional. If someone else takes over the company, they will probably just not "Get it"
Besides, CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck and end up screwing over the company they work for and all of it's workers. One CEO of a rather large company, forget his name...well...he presided over the company while its stock plumetted 20%, took a massive severence package and ended up making $54,000 an hour when it was all said and done. The average yearly salary of his employees...$35,000.
imagine if your house was broken into and a large amount of valuables stolen, but the police wouldn't come out to look at it because you didn't donate enough to the last election or you weren't in a high enough tax bracket.
Well, I don't need to imagine...I see it happen alot. I could provide the police with the names, addresses, phone numbers and even pictures of people who have stolen from me and vandalised my property. They won't do anything about it. However, if I take matters into my own hands...I could (and most likely would) get fined or sent to prison.
I do not trust any police officier that I don't personally know. In fact, I trust them much less than a typical stranger. Atleast with a typical stranger I can be relatively sure they don't have the power to royally screw over my life like a cop.
Commander: Solider! Kill that mother and small child! Solider: No sir! I will not kill an innocent civilian Commander: KillBot5000! Kill that mother and small child! KillBot5000 Would you like me to toture them first?
I must say, if I had the cash I'd love to get one of these. ( http://mypce.com/ ) It's a reclining style chair with overhead LCDs mounted.
I am extermely happy with my Logitech Multimedia Keyboard and my Kesington Optical Elite mouse. The optical elite mouse is my hands down favorite out of the 50+ mice I have used. I don't know how much longer they will make it, but I bought an xtra 2 to tuck away in case this one breaks.
Multiple monitors is an absolute must. I work with 2 at work and 3 at home. The screen real estate available to you will make you much more productive. This is extremely easy to do on a mac. It doesn't work as well on my PC, but I've heard something called UltraMon gives windows added functionality for dual monitor setups.
Reduce our military budget??? Just as we are nearing completion of the Baby Killer 5000? Are you out of your mind? This thing will be able to kill 5000 babies instead of the former 4000 babies of it's predecessor! It's well worth the 50 million spent.
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Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
The beauty of some of the new reactor designs is that they use old radioactive waste as their fuel source. By some people's estimates we have about two centuries worth of fuel for the energy needs of the entire United States just in our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Not only would we not have to mine additional fuel, we would be significantly reducing the amount of waste that we need to store.
Here's a TED talk that covers the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I
By the end of life of these new reactors, solar should be cheap, efficient and plentiful.
(45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page. Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
Storage is cheap. The manual process of scanning each of these documents is the costly part. It is thus better to scan at the maximum resolution and quality possible so that they never have to do it again. They may even be scanning multiple passes with different methods (visible, IR, etc.). 1.2GB per page is not unreasonable, even if it uses a lossless compression scheme.
This looks like an evolution of what FingerWorks was building before being purchased by Apple. Fingerworks multitouch technology led to the iPhone, macbook multitouch trackpad, etc. Their Frogpad product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qg8IB64yu8
Start small. Shared hosting is probably fine unless you need the features of a dedicated Virtual Private Server. Some things that used to require dedicated VPS can now be outsourced to services like Amazon S3 and MySQL hosting. Shared Hosting: I like Dreamhost.com for all my PHP/MySQL related sites. They offer SSH accounts, unlimited number of domains for a shared hosting account, IMAP and preconfigured webmail, cron and a bunch of other goodies. Support is decent but not great. Using the promo code "JMK" will get you $50 off if you sign up. They are already very cost effective for what you get, with or without the promo code. VPS: Don't go with dedicated hardware, choose a VPS. I really like the service provided by MediaTemple.net. Their knowledgebase and support staff are top notch and their prices are reasonable. If and when you grow to need multiple servers they can set you up with your own private network. They do not charge for traffic between these machines which can save you alot of money. Do not go this route unless you are comfortable with linux administration. You will be responsible for maintaince of the machine. General Tips: Use a different registrar than your hosting company. This ensures that they don't give you the run around if you ever need to switch hosts. I foolishly used Network Solutions several years ago and when I went to change hosts that continually hung up on me on the phone, didn't answer my emails, and eventually let me domain name expire, at which point they said they could get it back for around $200 instead of the already inflated normal price of $25 to renew. Use a version control system for you code and keep your own regular backup of your site. You can setup a cron job to run daily / weekly backups of important data and have them sent to another hosting provider or online storage. Check them occasionally and make sure they contain all the right data.
I used to make kiosks for museums and other public areas. Do not underestimate how much abuse these things get from the public. I would highly recommend researching kiosk enclosures and ensuring that the hardware, touch screen and pc, will fit in whatever enclosure suits your needs best. Our kiosks were constantly moved around. Access to ethernet wasn't always an option so we often went wireless. Many times we would develop software so that it stored all content locally on the kiosk. We would create an admin program that would push any content changes to the devices. The devices were then able to run even if the network/internet went down. It also gives you a speed boost since you aren't streaming 20 video feeds across ethernet/wireless. Try finding a local interactive media company that has kiosk experience. It will save you headaches in the long run, even if you only pay them to meet with you once or twice to hash out your ideas and ask for recommendations.
It would be nice if someone were to come out with a half qwerty keyboard that attached to your other wrist. You could put your left hand over your right wrist to type on this keyboard while having a decent view of the display. Put in a little joystick that would rest underneath your thumb and you'd have a functional mouse.
You mean like intelligent design being taught in classrooms? *ducks*
Hey, lets just call them Gateways Away from Mundane Existance. That's too long...maybe we could turn it into an acronym or something.
I'd like to see Legislators prorate taxes for Gay couples. If they can't enjoy the same rights as a heterosexual married couple, don't charge them as much in taxes to offset the financial burden of not being able to get married.
Good thing they will have those new highways. Now they'll have a quick way to get their kids to the hospital when the smog induced asthma attacks happen!
Having said that, I can't understand how someone could play a stupid flash game for hours on end. Many of the people I know who do such things claim it's neither very fun or rewarding...so why do it?
You are comparing finding actual facts and logical arguments to reading a few whacky sentences and taking them at face value. The pursuit of knowledge takes far more time then the pursuit of ignorance.
Still, I agree...the posted should get a life. :-)
Not only would it encourage people to quit, all those who were dumb enough to keep smoking would be dead quick enough not to become such a horrible drain on our medical system. Yes, I do know that cigarettes are taxed, blah blah blah.
Maybe we could comprise any make every 1000th cigarete cause instantenous death?
Of course, if people would simply stop trying to cut everyone else off, and not drive like total pricks, there wouldn't be any problem. Not to mention the fact that the white flight has caused all these upper middle class jerks to move out of the city but still work there, burning gas for hours each day just to drive back and forth to work.
Oh Apple, why won't you bring back the Newton. :-(
As opposed to the massive advantage of being rich? I'm not rich, but I'm decently technical, where's my piece of the advantage pie?:-)
If, ideally, the government exists soley for it's citizens. Would it be in our best interest to be able to view the source code of non classified projects? If the government is in fact using our tax dollars to pay programmers, should we be entitled to view the outcome of their work and does it become public domain if paid for by public funds?
Hey, looks like a written attack on Penny Arcade. They should counter sue on the grounds that they are not idiots :-)
Besides, CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck and end up screwing over the company they work for and all of it's workers. One CEO of a rather large company, forget his name...well...he presided over the company while its stock plumetted 20%, took a massive severence package and ended up making $54,000 an hour when it was all said and done. The average yearly salary of his employees...$35,000.
If you're not a slave, why should you care about slavery? Dangerous logic my friend.
Because you maybe want to keep your job?
Well, I don't need to imagine...I see it happen alot. I could provide the police with the names, addresses, phone numbers and even pictures of people who have stolen from me and vandalised my property. They won't do anything about it. However, if I take matters into my own hands...I could (and most likely would) get fined or sent to prison.
I do not trust any police officier that I don't personally know. In fact, I trust them much less than a typical stranger. Atleast with a typical stranger I can be relatively sure they don't have the power to royally screw over my life like a cop.
Solider: No sir! I will not kill an innocent civilian
Commander: KillBot5000! Kill that mother and small child!
KillBot5000 Would you like me to toture them first?
I certainly can't wait!
I must say, if I had the cash I'd love to get one of these. ( http://mypce.com/ ) It's a reclining style chair with overhead LCDs mounted.
I am extermely happy with my Logitech Multimedia Keyboard and my Kesington Optical Elite mouse. The optical elite mouse is my hands down favorite out of the 50+ mice I have used. I don't know how much longer they will make it, but I bought an xtra 2 to tuck away in case this one breaks.
Multiple monitors is an absolute must. I work with 2 at work and 3 at home. The screen real estate available to you will make you much more productive. This is extremely easy to do on a mac. It doesn't work as well on my PC, but I've heard something called UltraMon gives windows added functionality for dual monitor setups.
Reduce our military budget??? Just as we are nearing completion of the Baby Killer 5000? Are you out of your mind? This thing will be able to kill 5000 babies instead of the former 4000 babies of it's predecessor! It's well worth the 50 million spent.