Why strip mine the Rockies when you can get tar sands from Alberta or the Orinoco? It is not like US leaders actually value domestic self-reliance anymore.
If you look at a large enough timescale this is true. But in a short timescale lack of oil could have disastrous consequences. Just look at the economy of Cuba after the fall of the USSR as an example.
Regarding petroleum consumption in farming fertilizer is not, contrary to what a lot of people think, usually made using petroleum. What you actually require is hydrogen to make ammonia. The hydrogen is currently cheapest to synthesize using natural gas. You could also generate hydrogen using coal via the water-gas-shift reaction, or using electrolysis to split hydrogen from water. Both are more expensive than natural gas reforming, but they do work. Then there are the large amounts of currently underutilized manure from cattle or wastewater treatment plants. I doubt lack of fertilizer would be a big problem.
Mechanical processing is more problematic. Most farms are far away from the electric grid so electric tools cannot be used. If the cost of food went up substantially many people might resort to home growing of food. There you have plentiful electricity nearby. However farming takes many months, or years. The question is if everyone would survive until then.
I doubt bulk intercontinental transportation costs will change much. Ships burned coal not so long ago, and you can always use nuclear like the military does. The issue is with regional and intercontinental transportation. For high value cargo, or military aircraft, synthetic hydrocarbons can be used. For low value cargo you are either going back to electric rail, or switching to electric vehicles.
Last time I wrote a large document over 200 pages in MS Word I had difficulty even getting it to print properly. I also had a lot of fun with MS Word crashes and corrupted files (good thing I had backups). That was when I switched to LaTeX for long technical documents. You can write chapters in separate file and just include them together in another document. Another bonus is, since the document is a plain text file, version control systems work with the documents.
Western countries did the same during the Industrial era. The waterways in London got so infected and rat infested that someone actually proposed using turpentine to clean then. Today the rivers are cleaner than they were before industrialization. Having enough wealth so you can spend money on water treatment facilities certainly helps. Same thing applies to most air pollution. Try reading about XIXth century London with its black skies due to all the coal burning. The Chinese will eventually have installed enough filters, moved the plants away from population sources, or built enough alternative energy sources to coal that the problem will be reduced.
Microsoft seemingly stopped bothering with application backwards compatibility when Windows Vista was released. It got worse with Windows 7. Windows 7 Professional reached the ridicule of coming with an optionally installable VM running Windows XP (Windows XP Mode) so the user can run his old applications. You can run MS-DOS applications in a more compatible fashion in DOSBox than Windows. I would not be surprised if in a couple of years WINE had better backwards compatibility than the latest Windows version.
Virtualization speed has got good enough I do not dual boot anymore. Unfortunately 3D support inside the virtual machine sucks. I cannot even run glxgears inside VirtualBox without getting warnings. If 3D was good, I would boot into Linux, running Windows inside a VM. Because 3D sucks I boot into Windows, run Linux inside a VM. The interesting thing is I use Windows as a game console. I do all my work inside the Linux VM...
1 GHz is too fast for some games which used hardcoded timers (I even had problems with some games playing too fast in my Pentium 100). An emulator can dynamically change the clockspeed to fit the game being emulated.
I also remember running MS-DOS in the Pentium 100. Not fun. From manually configuring CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, to figuring out the correct soundcard settings, it was hell. DOSBox is much easier. My Amiga was easier to configure than a PC, and I prefer to use the UAE emulator. For much the same reasons. Many games are hardcoded and require you to either downgrade your hardware via bootstrap ROM settings after a reboot, or just plain won't work at at all. You could own a copy of every Amiga model that every existed, but that is not a practical solution. An emulator takes no physical space, and if it is fast enough, it doesn't matter.
If the engines in an airplane stop nothing major will happen for some time. The airplane will glide. Civilian airliners rely on wing lift to stay airborne, not the engines. If the engines on a train stop, on a high-speed line, you only have a limited amount of time until the next train comes and hits you, so you have to adjust the schedules for all trains on that line. Fast. The fact is the problem is not that different... and 3D also gives you more possibilities to plot a collision free course. 3D makes collision avoidance simpler not harder.
The system does not need to land a plane safely no matter what, it only needs to be as safe as a human pilot would be. A human pilot cannot land a plane for all possible failure modes either.
Trains have rarely been hijacked because you cannot maneuver a train to go someplace where there are no rails...
Actually it is much easier to do automatic control for airplanes than cars. The degree of difficulty is comparable to trains. Which today are mostly automated in any reasonably advanced system. The train pilot is there mostly to hit the 'stop train' button in case he thinks something is going wrong.
The checklists can be done by a machine. The flying could be 100% done by a machine. No co-pilot or pilot are necessary. It will not be universally done however because people appreciate having a man in the loop. Where there is room for it to happen is in cheap flights where people might compromise... like Ryanair.
Landings and takeoffs can be 100% automatic, flight navigation can be 100% automatic using GPS.
The original Pentium 4 (Willamette) was quite bad, the second iteration of the architecture (Northwood) was better. The Pentium 4 core had many issues. The pipeline was very long so if you mispredicted a branch, or had a cache miss, the processor would stall for a long time. This meant the IPC (instructions per cycle) executed by a Pentium 4 core were lower than that of the Pentium III, or the Pentium M.
The Pentium 4 also used something called a trace cache used to hold intermediate translations of x86 CISC code to RISC like micro-ops. The RISC like code was then executed by the CPU core. The trace cache was stored in the space traditionally used by the L1 cache in a processor. The trace cache was used to avoid translating the same CISC code again and again. Yet these RISC like instructions were less dense than x86 CISC code so the L1 cache in a Pentium 4 could hold a lot less instructions per kB. Which meant it was necessary to fetch instructions from the slower L2 cache more often than in previous architectures. The AMD Athlon in comparison only stored some additional pre-decode bits in the L1 cache.
The Pentium 4 family processors would perform nicely for well behaved, highly tuned, code but little else. Plus the high clockspeed made the chips extremely hot. The worst processor of the family in that regard was probably Prescott.
Digital "rentals" are stupid. People should be able to buy the episode once and watch it forever.
You will also likely at least have a couple of news channels you will want to see on cable for which the Apple "rental" service is useless. For these channels some form of web streaming is warranted. IMO you are better off with some form of web video streaming device. At least you can watch Youtube, Crunchyroll, and (if you are in the US) Hulu.
The Chinese are building a large high speed rail network. It is not as expensive as it used to be, since the process of laying tracks is highly automated today. Oh and if stations are too close, the train will never get to maximum speed before needing to hit the brakes to stop for the next station. The trick is to have separate high speed and low speed rail networks with common stations at high speed rail stops.
Why does it "need to be done"? The most successful computer architecture next to X86 is S/360 which was designed in 1964. S/360 is still used in mainframes today.The third most successful architecture, ARM, has 16 registers just like X86-64.
The other alternatives to EUV (like e-beam) have low productivity. It takes a long time to etch a chip with those techniques. Intel has bet on EUV for a long time now. Since EUV failed to be on time, they had to use techniques such as immersion lithography and double patterning which they had previously derided as overly expensive.
They do this already. This technique works best on highly redundant and homogeneously distributed components such as cache memory blocks. However if by some stroke of bad luck the error is in the control unit you are toast.
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Why strip mine the Rockies when you can get tar sands from Alberta or the Orinoco? It is not like US leaders actually value domestic self-reliance anymore.
If you look at a large enough timescale this is true. But in a short timescale lack of oil could have disastrous consequences. Just look at the economy of Cuba after the fall of the USSR as an example.
Mechanical processing is more problematic. Most farms are far away from the electric grid so electric tools cannot be used. If the cost of food went up substantially many people might resort to home growing of food. There you have plentiful electricity nearby. However farming takes many months, or years. The question is if everyone would survive until then.
I doubt bulk intercontinental transportation costs will change much. Ships burned coal not so long ago, and you can always use nuclear like the military does. The issue is with regional and intercontinental transportation. For high value cargo, or military aircraft, synthetic hydrocarbons can be used. For low value cargo you are either going back to electric rail, or switching to electric vehicles.
You can also Select All, Copy, and Paste Special 'Unformatted Unicode Text' in Word.
Last time I wrote a large document over 200 pages in MS Word I had difficulty even getting it to print properly. I also had a lot of fun with MS Word crashes and corrupted files (good thing I had backups). That was when I switched to LaTeX for long technical documents. You can write chapters in separate file and just include them together in another document. Another bonus is, since the document is a plain text file, version control systems work with the documents.
That's the Optimus keyboard FWIW.
We have hardware memory protection for a reason. There is no such thing as a flawless program, or a perfect programmer.
Must be an Apple user. Only people who would think waiting in a queue is a mark of excellence.
Western countries did the same during the Industrial era. The waterways in London got so infected and rat infested that someone actually proposed using turpentine to clean then. Today the rivers are cleaner than they were before industrialization. Having enough wealth so you can spend money on water treatment facilities certainly helps. Same thing applies to most air pollution. Try reading about XIXth century London with its black skies due to all the coal burning. The Chinese will eventually have installed enough filters, moved the plants away from population sources, or built enough alternative energy sources to coal that the problem will be reduced.
Is it preemptive multitasking, or not? If it is not preemptive multitasking, it is not real multitasking.
Microsoft seemingly stopped bothering with application backwards compatibility when Windows Vista was released. It got worse with Windows 7. Windows 7 Professional reached the ridicule of coming with an optionally installable VM running Windows XP (Windows XP Mode) so the user can run his old applications. You can run MS-DOS applications in a more compatible fashion in DOSBox than Windows. I would not be surprised if in a couple of years WINE had better backwards compatibility than the latest Windows version.
Virtualization speed has got good enough I do not dual boot anymore. Unfortunately 3D support inside the virtual machine sucks. I cannot even run glxgears inside VirtualBox without getting warnings. If 3D was good, I would boot into Linux, running Windows inside a VM. Because 3D sucks I boot into Windows, run Linux inside a VM. The interesting thing is I use Windows as a game console. I do all my work inside the Linux VM...
I also remember running MS-DOS in the Pentium 100. Not fun. From manually configuring CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, to figuring out the correct soundcard settings, it was hell. DOSBox is much easier. My Amiga was easier to configure than a PC, and I prefer to use the UAE emulator. For much the same reasons. Many games are hardcoded and require you to either downgrade your hardware via bootstrap ROM settings after a reboot, or just plain won't work at at all. You could own a copy of every Amiga model that every existed, but that is not a practical solution. An emulator takes no physical space, and if it is fast enough, it doesn't matter.
If the engines in an airplane stop nothing major will happen for some time. The airplane will glide. Civilian airliners rely on wing lift to stay airborne, not the engines. If the engines on a train stop, on a high-speed line, you only have a limited amount of time until the next train comes and hits you, so you have to adjust the schedules for all trains on that line. Fast. The fact is the problem is not that different... and 3D also gives you more possibilities to plot a collision free course. 3D makes collision avoidance simpler not harder.
The system does not need to land a plane safely no matter what, it only needs to be as safe as a human pilot would be. A human pilot cannot land a plane for all possible failure modes either.
Trains have rarely been hijacked because you cannot maneuver a train to go someplace where there are no rails...
Actually it is much easier to do automatic control for airplanes than cars. The degree of difficulty is comparable to trains. Which today are mostly automated in any reasonably advanced system. The train pilot is there mostly to hit the 'stop train' button in case he thinks something is going wrong.
The checklists can be done by a machine. The flying could be 100% done by a machine. No co-pilot or pilot are necessary. It will not be universally done however because people appreciate having a man in the loop. Where there is room for it to happen is in cheap flights where people might compromise... like Ryanair.
Landings and takeoffs can be 100% automatic, flight navigation can be 100% automatic using GPS.
The original Pentium 4 (Willamette) was quite bad, the second iteration of the architecture (Northwood) was better. The Pentium 4 core had many issues. The pipeline was very long so if you mispredicted a branch, or had a cache miss, the processor would stall for a long time. This meant the IPC (instructions per cycle) executed by a Pentium 4 core were lower than that of the Pentium III, or the Pentium M.
The Pentium 4 also used something called a trace cache used to hold intermediate translations of x86 CISC code to RISC like micro-ops. The RISC like code was then executed by the CPU core. The trace cache was stored in the space traditionally used by the L1 cache in a processor. The trace cache was used to avoid translating the same CISC code again and again. Yet these RISC like instructions were less dense than x86 CISC code so the L1 cache in a Pentium 4 could hold a lot less instructions per kB. Which meant it was necessary to fetch instructions from the slower L2 cache more often than in previous architectures. The AMD Athlon in comparison only stored some additional pre-decode bits in the L1 cache.
The Pentium 4 family processors would perform nicely for well behaved, highly tuned, code but little else. Plus the high clockspeed made the chips extremely hot. The worst processor of the family in that regard was probably Prescott.
How about not requiring me to restart windows after an update?
You will also likely at least have a couple of news channels you will want to see on cable for which the Apple "rental" service is useless. For these channels some form of web streaming is warranted. IMO you are better off with some form of web video streaming device. At least you can watch Youtube, Crunchyroll, and (if you are in the US) Hulu.
The Chinese are building a large high speed rail network. It is not as expensive as it used to be, since the process of laying tracks is highly automated today. Oh and if stations are too close, the train will never get to maximum speed before needing to hit the brakes to stop for the next station. The trick is to have separate high speed and low speed rail networks with common stations at high speed rail stops.
Things are made of molecules. Which are made of atoms. Which are made of quarks. So is the atomic scale really the smallest we can go?
Why does it "need to be done"? The most successful computer architecture next to X86 is S/360 which was designed in 1964. S/360 is still used in mainframes today.The third most successful architecture, ARM, has 16 registers just like X86-64.
The other alternatives to EUV (like e-beam) have low productivity. It takes a long time to etch a chip with those techniques. Intel has bet on EUV for a long time now. Since EUV failed to be on time, they had to use techniques such as immersion lithography and double patterning which they had previously derided as overly expensive.
They do this already. This technique works best on highly redundant and homogeneously distributed components such as cache memory blocks. However if by some stroke of bad luck the error is in the control unit you are toast.