You are comparing a well-known propulsion mechanism (ion drives) to something we aren't even sure is generating propulsion in the first place, and which according to current theory really has no business doing so even if it is. Let's assume there really is an effect here. Maybe the shape of the cavity is still highly sub-optimal. Maybe, once theory explains what is going on, we can create engines based on the effect that are much more efficient.
Also, we should look at possible future missions. Drop the solar panels; put a nuclear device there and just keep accelerating until halfway to the next star. Is such a mission even possible with ion drives?
I disagree. Change that does not change functionality, but improves user friendliness, performance, resource usage, or just sheer elegance and awesomeness, is still a welcome improvement.
Also, I find the efficiency argument boring. In the end we all die. Life is not about being 'most efficient' before that moment comes.
The disadvantages of putting solar panels on roads are huge: not only is the angle wrong and are the panels covered by dirt, dust, snow, etc. but roads are subject to considerable wear and tear that requires a massive construction to have any kind of longevity. If it then turns out that the panels are only good enough to light up a few streetlights (i.e. do not even recover the energy used in their production), I think it is absolutely fair to criticize this project.
Moreover, both the angle problem, and the 'wear and tear' problem, are going to remain, while all kinds of much more useful surfaces (roofs) go unused. So what's the point of trying to shoehorn solar panels into roads?
As for the ad hominems - I really think the good people here on slashdot, including you, need to learn to discuss without ending every comment with something like "...or are you a moron". It's just not very polite or constructive, and it is entirely possible to make a point without also attacking everybody around you and/or questioning their motives or mental capacity. Most of us are adults, so why not act like it?
Is it considered "download", "PC", "retail",...? How would the researchers even know, considering that Valve is not (to the best of my knowledge) publishing data on its sales?
That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
Thanks! The thing I normally see in these situations is a popup (at the bottom left of the screen) saying "looking up www.whatever". That stays on the screen for 10-20 seconds, then disappears, and immediately comes back up again. I'm not sure if the lookup is failing completely or just very slow. It certainly happens multiple times within 60s.
Not good enough for the spaceship, though. Adding a substantial amount of mass to gain a couple of millinewtons of trust isn't too helpful.
Those millinewtons can be applied over a very long time though, allowing significant speeds to be achieved. Moreover, missions to far-away objects would no longer have their lifetimes limited by running out of fuel.
A bunch of the software in the world of ham radio is pretty bad--for whatever reason it seems like everybody is stuck on developing software for Windows 95/98 with Visual Basic or FoxPro, and they typically shoot for "it gets the job done" and not much else.
That's because electrical engineers are typically shit at writing code. I've been looking at code written by EE's for a long time, and it is almost always bad - full of software delay loops (because there is only one speed of CPU out there), structured like a landfill, breaking every form of good practice known to mankind, etc.
You also shouldn't let software engineers get close to a soldering iron, but that's ok - the two groups can work together to get great things done...
The difference between being an idiot, and being a visionary, is mostly a matter of being right at the end of the day. Turns out Stallman is proven more correct with every passing year, as more boxes get closed, more systems get locked down, and more control gets exerted over every aspect of our lives.
His vision led him to create gcc. Without gcc, do you think we would have had clang or free copies of Visual Studio? Without free compilers, do you think any of the open source world would have existed? And without the open source world, how do you suppose the software landscape would have looked by now?
It's not scary that post gets +3, interesting. It's only scary that you don't know your history, yet feel qualified to comment on it.
I don't think that's the standard use case for testing, nor should it be. What the hell are you doing with that many tabs open.
Speak for yourself. I normally open a bunch of websites I read, and then just middle-click to open the articles I find interesting in separate tabs. You can quite easily end up with dozens of articles. I wouldn't consider that to be unusual at all.
Firefox opens new tabs instantly, not only after two seconds. If I hold down ctrl-T it pretty much keeps up with the key repeat rate. Switching between tabs is pretty much instantaneous as well. And when you restart your browser, Firefox will only reload any given tab when you click on it, and not try to load all of them at once. In other words, isn't the problem more that the OP is using the wrong browser? Or, alternatively, is running that browser on hardware that is just too low on memory (something that has a very significant impact on browsers, given the incredible amounts of memory they use)?
BTW, I do agree with his doubts about the effectiveness of the cache. And I also wish it would cache IP addresses more effectively; when travelling, I'm extremely frequently greeted by endless (and very long lasting) DNS lookups for the same domain, over and over.
I understood one of the reasons why Crytek is failing is because it did what Turkish businesses often do: it appointed family members throughout the business, without ever asking if they have something useful to add to the business itself. Turns out you can only carry so much ballast before the ship goes under...
Oh, and they only made the first Far Cry; later versions came from Ubisoft.
You'll notice how they are all phrased in past tense, as a record of history, and apply to specific situations. They are cathegorically not commandments for future generations to follow for all eternity, as guidelines for how the human race should behave to its fellow men.
This is completely different from how the quran phrases it; in the quran such statements are commandments for muslims to follow today, everywhere in the world.
We're 16 years into C# and 14 years into.NET, and they've gone from "will not sue" licensing to full blown opensource and multiplatform, with alternate GPL'd implementations if you don't like Microsoft's. How long do we need to wait before you'll move beyond blind religious zeal?
You are actually ready to trust the company that gave us Windows 10, then? And that might next year very well decide that _all_ Windows applications need to go through the Windows Store?
Windows 10 has shown us there is no limit to the level of idiocy they are willing to commit to. And if you believe your future is in good hands with them, I can only wish you good luck.
You are an idiot if you blindly load all of Microsoft's updates. Put your name here so smarter IT departments won't hire a moron like you that would render systems useless for work
I'm always wondering if people like you actually talk like that in real life too, and if you do, how often you get smacked in the face. Really, is it so difficult to at least be polite?
Your PC is an IoT device, yet when Microsoft makes auto-updates mandatory you are all screaming bloody murder. I cathegorically DO NOT WANT manufacturers to be able to see what I'm doing, or change functionality after I bought the device (because I have no guarantees whatsoever they will not remove half of the features I wanted and needed, as Sony did with the PS3 'other OS' option), or even outright disable the device (like what happened with that Samsung phone).
I can only hope that devices that are not, in fact, connected to the internet will remain available for sale. "Your fridge was unable to download security updates and has therefore been disabled" is not a message I _ever_ want to see in my life.
The first thing I thought about the "Oracle is going to start shaking down developers" article from yesterday was that it was a boon to C#.
-scott
If you flee from Oracle into the warm embrace of Microsoft, expecting everything will be fine, you deserve everything you are going to get. We'll read about it on slashdot in a few years: "Microsoft demands licensing fees from.NET developers", and some of us will be thinking "phew, I dodged another bullet there".
But hey, if decades of experience with a company means nothing to you, by all means lock yourself into Microsoft's walled garden.
I agree with you! However, C/C++ isn't 'sexy' and isn't a buzzword thrown around to attract more students. Learning C/C++ is hard as a first language, though it makes for better programmers.
There is no language called "C/C++"! There is a language called C, and there is another called C++. They share some syntax (but not all), and one is occasionally (and incorrectly) considered to be a subset of the other. Not only is it not a subset, it isn't even a true that "a large majority of C programs also compile as C++ programs". They are very different languages, and using them proficiently requires a completely different mindset from the programmer.
First of all, you might have noticed that both me and the OP were talking about _the article on slashdot_, not the scientific paper. And second, you seem mightily sure about the contents of the paper, despite not having read it.
What _is_ the reason for the article being on slashdot, do you suppose? How is this "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? The only thing I can imagine is that it fits in with the new slashdot policy of having far too many eco-articles, and the slant of those is most definitely that "we are all bad".
The intention of articles such as this is clearly to make people feel bad about... well, their existence, really. Just by our sheer presence we are destroying the world, and here is further evidence, it says. If you are a citizen of a Western country your footprint is several earths. Never mind the way you _actually_ live; it's all about where you were born that determines if you are destroying the planet.
Slashdot is rapidly becoming an eco-site instead of a tech site, with plenty of articles intended to instill a sense of guilt. This one may not directly state it is our fault, but the intention is nonetheless there: "see how bad you are? See what the consequences are?" They don't have to spell it out by calling you a bad person. Anyone who reads this understands perfectly fine.
Now, I'm all in favor of not destroying the world. Unfortunately the number one problem is never available for discussion: there are too many people. The world would be far better of with fewer of us, and it can be argued that instead of policies that promote endless population growth (which are necessary to sustain our current economic models), we are in dire need of policies that promote population shrinkage (to be achieved through birth control, nothing more dramatic than that). To the best of my knowledge, the only country that has experimented with this is China, and even China is now stepping back from its one child policy. Everywhere else, you get called a nazi for even considering that it might be good to just talk about it.
Oh, and to the guy who is about to comment "why don't you kill yourself": try for something original instead...
- Factories are closing or laying of large numbers of people since demand for anything non-vital has collapsed. - Building sites are closing since there is no cash to pay workers. - Farmers are unable to buy seeds and fertilizer for the new planting season. Planting food is not an optional luxury for India. - Every single bank or ATM that is open has a 4-6 hour long queue. - 2/3rd of all ATMs are closed. - Banks have stopped opening new bank accounts. - A quarter of all Indians is illiterate, and presumably unable to deal with electronic payment. - A significantly greater number has no form of ID, and therefore cannot open a bank account anyway. - Tourists are spending 80% less than before (since they don't have money either). - Tourism is dropping sharply....all of this according to local newspapers, discussions with locals, and/or personal observation.
I visited India for three weeks starting on november 10th. I was carrying 32000 rupees (worth roughly 450 euro), which turned out to be so much old paper. During any single transaction you can only exchange 4000 rupees worth of old notes, and any holiday where you spend 8 of your 21 days standing in lines at banks for 4-6 hours isn't really all that much fun. In the end we exchanged much of our money on the black market (at a 30% loss, but without the queue), paid with credit card where we could, and only paid for essentials if the only choice was cash.
The whole thing is an unmitigated disaster, and rather than a success story about how India is modernizing rapidly, this should have been a story about how India destroyed its own economy, and possibly caused a famine in the process.
That's because management is universally insane, and will only ever count costs that are actually being measured by their own bosses. Lost productivity is not being measured and therefore not being counted. It's not about productivity, it's about optimizing the pointless metric du joure....simple example. My company has seen fit to equip me with a laptop that has a 5400rpm harddisk and a corporate security solution that cannot be disabled, and that insists on laboriously scanning every header file I want to use in a compilation - every. single. time. The boss is happy because he saved the cost of one decent laptop. My productivity is destroyed because I spend well over three hours to compile what should be a ten minute job on a properly configured machine. Does my lost productivity count? Nope...
After years of research capturing large objects in the oceans, and despite all the protests by nay-sayers, finally Japan is ready to take their technology into space and in the process help all of humanity...
Not the network perse, but ISPs should certainly take some responsibility for what happens on their networks. Some typical DDOS patterns are easy enough to detect, and should result in blocking that traffic. If ISPs did this as a matter of course it would be much harder to set up an effective DDOS attack.
Slashdot Mirror
You are comparing a well-known propulsion mechanism (ion drives) to something we aren't even sure is generating propulsion in the first place, and which according to current theory really has no business doing so even if it is. Let's assume there really is an effect here. Maybe the shape of the cavity is still highly sub-optimal. Maybe, once theory explains what is going on, we can create engines based on the effect that are much more efficient.
Also, we should look at possible future missions. Drop the solar panels; put a nuclear device there and just keep accelerating until halfway to the next star. Is such a mission even possible with ion drives?
I disagree. Change that does not change functionality, but improves user friendliness, performance, resource usage, or just sheer elegance and awesomeness, is still a welcome improvement.
Also, I find the efficiency argument boring. In the end we all die. Life is not about being 'most efficient' before that moment comes.
The disadvantages of putting solar panels on roads are huge: not only is the angle wrong and are the panels covered by dirt, dust, snow, etc. but roads are subject to considerable wear and tear that requires a massive construction to have any kind of longevity. If it then turns out that the panels are only good enough to light up a few streetlights (i.e. do not even recover the energy used in their production), I think it is absolutely fair to criticize this project.
Moreover, both the angle problem, and the 'wear and tear' problem, are going to remain, while all kinds of much more useful surfaces (roofs) go unused. So what's the point of trying to shoehorn solar panels into roads?
As for the ad hominems - I really think the good people here on slashdot, including you, need to learn to discuss without ending every comment with something like "...or are you a moron". It's just not very polite or constructive, and it is entirely possible to make a point without also attacking everybody around you and/or questioning their motives or mental capacity. Most of us are adults, so why not act like it?
Is it considered "download", "PC", "retail", ...? How would the researchers even know, considering that Valve is not (to the best of my knowledge) publishing data on its sales?
That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
Thanks! The thing I normally see in these situations is a popup (at the bottom left of the screen) saying "looking up www.whatever". That stays on the screen for 10-20 seconds, then disappears, and immediately comes back up again. I'm not sure if the lookup is failing completely or just very slow. It certainly happens multiple times within 60s.
Not good enough for the spaceship, though. Adding a substantial amount of mass to gain a couple of millinewtons of trust isn't too helpful.
Those millinewtons can be applied over a very long time though, allowing significant speeds to be achieved. Moreover, missions to far-away objects would no longer have their lifetimes limited by running out of fuel.
A bunch of the software in the world of ham radio is pretty bad--for whatever reason it seems like everybody is stuck on developing software for Windows 95/98 with Visual Basic or FoxPro, and they typically shoot for "it gets the job done" and not much else.
That's because electrical engineers are typically shit at writing code. I've been looking at code written by EE's for a long time, and it is almost always bad - full of software delay loops (because there is only one speed of CPU out there), structured like a landfill, breaking every form of good practice known to mankind, etc.
You also shouldn't let software engineers get close to a soldering iron, but that's ok - the two groups can work together to get great things done...
The difference between being an idiot, and being a visionary, is mostly a matter of being right at the end of the day. Turns out Stallman is proven more correct with every passing year, as more boxes get closed, more systems get locked down, and more control gets exerted over every aspect of our lives.
His vision led him to create gcc. Without gcc, do you think we would have had clang or free copies of Visual Studio? Without free compilers, do you think any of the open source world would have existed? And without the open source world, how do you suppose the software landscape would have looked by now?
It's not scary that post gets +3, interesting. It's only scary that you don't know your history, yet feel qualified to comment on it.
I don't think that's the standard use case for testing, nor should it be. What the hell are you doing with that many tabs open.
Speak for yourself. I normally open a bunch of websites I read, and then just middle-click to open the articles I find interesting in separate tabs. You can quite easily end up with dozens of articles. I wouldn't consider that to be unusual at all.
Firefox opens new tabs instantly, not only after two seconds. If I hold down ctrl-T it pretty much keeps up with the key repeat rate. Switching between tabs is pretty much instantaneous as well. And when you restart your browser, Firefox will only reload any given tab when you click on it, and not try to load all of them at once. In other words, isn't the problem more that the OP is using the wrong browser? Or, alternatively, is running that browser on hardware that is just too low on memory (something that has a very significant impact on browsers, given the incredible amounts of memory they use)?
BTW, I do agree with his doubts about the effectiveness of the cache. And I also wish it would cache IP addresses more effectively; when travelling, I'm extremely frequently greeted by endless (and very long lasting) DNS lookups for the same domain, over and over.
I understood one of the reasons why Crytek is failing is because it did what Turkish businesses often do: it appointed family members throughout the business, without ever asking if they have something useful to add to the business itself. Turns out you can only carry so much ballast before the ship goes under...
Oh, and they only made the first Far Cry; later versions came from Ubisoft.
You'll notice how they are all phrased in past tense, as a record of history, and apply to specific situations. They are cathegorically not commandments for future generations to follow for all eternity, as guidelines for how the human race should behave to its fellow men.
This is completely different from how the quran phrases it; in the quran such statements are commandments for muslims to follow today, everywhere in the world.
We're 16 years into C# and 14 years into .NET, and they've gone from "will not sue" licensing to full blown opensource and multiplatform, with alternate GPL'd implementations if you don't like Microsoft's. How long do we need to wait before you'll move beyond blind religious zeal?
You are actually ready to trust the company that gave us Windows 10, then? And that might next year very well decide that _all_ Windows applications need to go through the Windows Store?
Windows 10 has shown us there is no limit to the level of idiocy they are willing to commit to. And if you believe your future is in good hands with them, I can only wish you good luck.
It starts compiling Linux kernels and debating the relative merits of vi and emacs.
You are an idiot if you blindly load all of Microsoft's updates. Put your name here so smarter IT departments won't hire a moron like you that would render systems useless for work
I'm always wondering if people like you actually talk like that in real life too, and if you do, how often you get smacked in the face. Really, is it so difficult to at least be polite?
Your PC is an IoT device, yet when Microsoft makes auto-updates mandatory you are all screaming bloody murder. I cathegorically DO NOT WANT manufacturers to be able to see what I'm doing, or change functionality after I bought the device (because I have no guarantees whatsoever they will not remove half of the features I wanted and needed, as Sony did with the PS3 'other OS' option), or even outright disable the device (like what happened with that Samsung phone).
I can only hope that devices that are not, in fact, connected to the internet will remain available for sale. "Your fridge was unable to download security updates and has therefore been disabled" is not a message I _ever_ want to see in my life.
The first thing I thought about the "Oracle is going to start shaking down developers" article from yesterday was that it was a boon to C#.
-scott
If you flee from Oracle into the warm embrace of Microsoft, expecting everything will be fine, you deserve everything you are going to get. We'll read about it on slashdot in a few years: "Microsoft demands licensing fees from .NET developers", and some of us will be thinking "phew, I dodged another bullet there".
But hey, if decades of experience with a company means nothing to you, by all means lock yourself into Microsoft's walled garden.
I agree with you! However, C/C++ isn't 'sexy' and isn't a buzzword thrown around to attract more students. Learning C/C++ is hard as a first language, though it makes for better programmers.
There is no language called "C/C++"! There is a language called C, and there is another called C++. They share some syntax (but not all), and one is occasionally (and incorrectly) considered to be a subset of the other. Not only is it not a subset, it isn't even a true that "a large majority of C programs also compile as C++ programs". They are very different languages, and using them proficiently requires a completely different mindset from the programmer.
This lady explains how C++ should be taught, and it is not as a superset of C: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
First of all, you might have noticed that both me and the OP were talking about _the article on slashdot_, not the scientific paper. And second, you seem mightily sure about the contents of the paper, despite not having read it.
What _is_ the reason for the article being on slashdot, do you suppose? How is this "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? The only thing I can imagine is that it fits in with the new slashdot policy of having far too many eco-articles, and the slant of those is most definitely that "we are all bad".
The intention of articles such as this is clearly to make people feel bad about... well, their existence, really. Just by our sheer presence we are destroying the world, and here is further evidence, it says. If you are a citizen of a Western country your footprint is several earths. Never mind the way you _actually_ live; it's all about where you were born that determines if you are destroying the planet.
Slashdot is rapidly becoming an eco-site instead of a tech site, with plenty of articles intended to instill a sense of guilt. This one may not directly state it is our fault, but the intention is nonetheless there: "see how bad you are? See what the consequences are?" They don't have to spell it out by calling you a bad person. Anyone who reads this understands perfectly fine.
Now, I'm all in favor of not destroying the world. Unfortunately the number one problem is never available for discussion: there are too many people. The world would be far better of with fewer of us, and it can be argued that instead of policies that promote endless population growth (which are necessary to sustain our current economic models), we are in dire need of policies that promote population shrinkage (to be achieved through birth control, nothing more dramatic than that). To the best of my knowledge, the only country that has experimented with this is China, and even China is now stepping back from its one child policy. Everywhere else, you get called a nazi for even considering that it might be good to just talk about it.
Oh, and to the guy who is about to comment "why don't you kill yourself": try for something original instead...
It's a total disaster:
- Factories are closing or laying of large numbers of people since demand for anything non-vital has collapsed. ...all of this according to local newspapers, discussions with locals, and/or personal observation.
- Building sites are closing since there is no cash to pay workers.
- Farmers are unable to buy seeds and fertilizer for the new planting season. Planting food is not an optional luxury for India.
- Every single bank or ATM that is open has a 4-6 hour long queue.
- 2/3rd of all ATMs are closed.
- Banks have stopped opening new bank accounts.
- A quarter of all Indians is illiterate, and presumably unable to deal with electronic payment.
- A significantly greater number has no form of ID, and therefore cannot open a bank account anyway.
- Tourists are spending 80% less than before (since they don't have money either).
- Tourism is dropping sharply.
I visited India for three weeks starting on november 10th. I was carrying 32000 rupees (worth roughly 450 euro), which turned out to be so much old paper. During any single transaction you can only exchange 4000 rupees worth of old notes, and any holiday where you spend 8 of your 21 days standing in lines at banks for 4-6 hours isn't really all that much fun. In the end we exchanged much of our money on the black market (at a 30% loss, but without the queue), paid with credit card where we could, and only paid for essentials if the only choice was cash.
The whole thing is an unmitigated disaster, and rather than a success story about how India is modernizing rapidly, this should have been a story about how India destroyed its own economy, and possibly caused a famine in the process.
That's because management is universally insane, and will only ever count costs that are actually being measured by their own bosses. Lost productivity is not being measured and therefore not being counted. It's not about productivity, it's about optimizing the pointless metric du joure. ...simple example. My company has seen fit to equip me with a laptop that has a 5400rpm harddisk and a corporate security solution that cannot be disabled, and that insists on laboriously scanning every header file I want to use in a compilation - every. single. time. The boss is happy because he saved the cost of one decent laptop. My productivity is destroyed because I spend well over three hours to compile what should be a ten minute job on a properly configured machine. Does my lost productivity count? Nope...
After years of research capturing large objects in the oceans, and despite all the protests by nay-sayers, finally Japan is ready to take their technology into space and in the process help all of humanity...
Not the network perse, but ISPs should certainly take some responsibility for what happens on their networks. Some typical DDOS patterns are easy enough to detect, and should result in blocking that traffic. If ISPs did this as a matter of course it would be much harder to set up an effective DDOS attack.