If I found an employee of mine was wasting the working time of another employee of mine with his own problems, I would fire him. Doubly so if it was to do a task any 5 year old could do by himself.
I also used to like to help. However sometimes you get in a lot of trouble. You tell someone you do not have the time. Because you really don't. Not when someone is paying you for your time, and these freeloaders (which is what we are talking about) are getting in the way of your paid job. Then they constantly pester you by e-mail, phone, whatever. Then I ignore them. If they persist, I filter all their electronic communications to me.
Do not use IM unless it is for a meeting. If, for some reason, you still persist in using IM, configure it so the window doesn't popup any time someone wants to talk with you. Or does sounds. Or flashes. Or anything else that interrupts your current task. Constant task switching = lowered productivity.
Choose your friends wisely. Do not try to be friends with your co-workers, if they are the kind of people you would absolutely *never* ever choose to be friends with outside work. Keep it professional as much as possible. The less contact you have, the less friction there will be.
Do not ever, ever, tell your co-workers what is your current salary. Former co-workers fine. Friends who don't work with you fine.
If your current boss keeps changing the rules of the game without consulting you first, run. If there isn't a clear chain of command, run. If he starts demanding you to do overtime *and* adding things to the task list at the same time, run. It is a sign he couldn't negotiate a proper contract with the client, and you are walking into a death march. Check the median age of the people working there. If they are all extremely young it is very, very likely your boss burns out his employees, and he has a high employee turnover.
Oh and my final piece of advice to/.ers. Do not ever, ever, do someone else's homework.
It's PHB 101. You do not do anything you can get someone else to do for you. Because, you know, for the PHB time is money. For the drones however, time isn't money because all you have is time. Or so the PHBs think.
SSE2 was an extension of SSE to allow double precision floating point. It did not increase vector length, which remained at 128 bits. Video compression applications do not use double precision math. They use integer, or at best single precision math.
Pentium 4 did do twice the floating point operations of a Pentium III per clock.
The Pentium 4 can process a full 128-bit vector (addition or multiplication) in one clock cycle, while it takes two clock cycles to do the same in a Pentium III. So a Pentium 4 had twice the FLOPS at a similar clockspeed compared to a Pentium III.
However the Athlon (K7) can do one 64-bit floating point addition *and* multiplication in one clock. So it has the same peak performance per clock as a Pentium 4 (2x64 bit vs 1x128 bit = same peak performance). Athlon also had better FP performance than the Pentium 4 on legacy X86 applications, since the Pentium 4 could do either a single X87 addition, or a multiplication, but not both in the same clock. Athlon also had an optimization for the common FXCH X87 instruction. The Pentium 4 did have a higher clockspeed than an Athlon, but it was not twice the clockspeed (1.2 vs 1.8 GHz). So it definitively did not have twice the floating point performance. Ever.
The truth is AMD got a bad rap with the K6's poor floating point performance. Despite the K7 having better FP performance per clock than a Pentium III, and the same peak performance per clock as a Pentium 4, people like to stick to their old notions instead of measuring things properly.
The K8 kept the same floating point functional units as in the K7, except it added SSE2 instruction support. It has the same floating point peak performance as the old Athlon.
Just because a processor has SSE or SSE2 support does not necessarily mean the instructions run at 1 clock cycle latency.
AMD increased the FPU width to 128-bits in the K10 core. AMD K10 has the same peak floating point performance per clock as Intel's current Nehalem architecture. AMD's current architecture limitations are in main memory bandwidth, and integer performance, rather than vector floating point.
The Pentium 4 was a one trick pony. It worked well with specifically optimized algorithms, but had terrible performance with legacy, or branch heavy code. For many applications it actually had worse performance than the Pentium III it was supposed to replace, let alone the Athlon.
Intel still does ok in innovation. They were the first semiconductor manufacturing company to use high-k and metal gates. They are also behind most of the I/O standards you can think of: PCI, PCI-Express, USB, being some of these. They really excel at mass manufacturing while having mostly mediocre R&D or design. Even IBM, who has largely been away from the hardware market, has done much more leading edge R&D. The thing is, IBM doesn't know how to make anything in quantity for cheap.
The fact is Dell marked the transition of PC OEMs from a corporation which actually manufactured motherboards and other components, into someone which simply rebadges boxes made somewhere in China by a Taiwanese company. Digital went bankrupt and was bought by Compaq. Compaq was absorbed into HP. IBM sold its PC business to a Chinese company. Gateway went bankrupt and was bought by a Taiwanese company. HP traveled through rough waters and tethered on the brink of collapse. All because of Intel's "special relationship" with Dell. Dell was the darling of Wall Street and was constantly beating "market expectations" every quarter. Other OEMs knew they were getting shafted, but chose to ignore it because they would not dare to ire the Intel CPU monopoly. By making the manufacturers dependent on rebates to survive, rebates which you only got by being an Intel exclusive vendor, they forced OEMs into being little more than dumb sweat shop for manufacturing PCs.
The result was AMD never got enough money so they could increase their manufacturing space, and break Intel's monopoly. It has got to the point where AMD decided to go fabless because they can no longer afford the large capital investments required to be in the manufacturing business. The last company which tried doing this, Cyrix, went bankrupt not long afterwards because by losing vertical integration, they lost their margins to compete against Intel as well.
Athlon XP had SSE. Earlier Athlons had AMD's version of vector processing named 3DNow! which was released before Intel even had SSE.
Athlon was faster than Pentium 4 at legacy X87 floating point support (which most programs actually used then). AMD couldn't use SSE at the time because it was patented by Intel and they were involved in one of their usual patent disputes. AMD and Intel signed a new patent cross licensing deal in 2001, years after Athlon was originally released.
IMO AAC is about the same quality as Vorbis. Matroska is indeed much superior to the MPEG-4 container. H.264 is still the best video codec standard (haven't seen any WebM videos yet).
It was good that Google did this. Theora is better than H.263, but was much inferior to H.264. I suspect as WebM implementations gets more work we will see a codec with similar quality to H.264.
IMO there are good free sound codecs across the spectrum: vorbis for compressed music, flac for uncompressed music, speex for sound, etc. It's video that has been the issue.
No, the real issue is that to increase clock rate you have to increase the voltage. Power draw (and dissipation) increases to the square of voltage. Eventually you start to need using water cooling, or more exotic refrigeration techniques to cool the processor. This increases costs significantly, increases the size footprint, and reduces the amount of possible market applications. As CPU power consumption increased, clients also got increasingly more interested in performance per watt, rather than raw peak performance numbers. In today's world where people increasingly are replacing their desktops with mobile laptops, this is even more important.
The fact is the fastest (in clockspeed) processor available today is probably the 4.14 GHz Power 7 CPU from IBM. Not anything from Intel, or AMD. However this is a server processor with an expensive cooling system which is too expensive for the average Joe to own.
C is full of baggage. The worst of it is the standard C library. From functions which do no bounds checking (vulnerable to security exploits), to a standard string library which was made for single byte ASCII encodings. In today's global world Unicode support is essential.
There are other things which are not in the basic C language but should: parallel programming support, sockets, a type system which more accurately reflects modern CPU architectures (where are the vector types, POPCNT, or FMA?).
C++ on the other hand has an overly verbose syntax, mixes data declarations with code (which makes compilation slow and code reviews cumbersome), has brain damaged standard I/O (C++ streams are horrible). C++ does not actually fix any of the actual issues in C, but adds tons of cruft in an attempt to improve the expressiveness of the C language while mostly failing. Oh and get this ISO C committee. I do not need to be able to declare my variables anywhere. Variable length arrays, now that was actually an improvement.
To me this seems a rather disingenuous way of analyzing the market. I have heard similar claims to these many times in the past and the PC game platform kept chugging along just fine as consoles imploded. Remember Atari, 3DO and Sega?
Many of today's games are "console ports" because there is little difference between doing a Xbox360 title and a DirectX PC title. To reach a wider audience the developers often target older hardware specifications, which means there is little visual difference between console and PC titles.
As for the playability of Flash games, it is usually not that dissimilar from that of other causal gaming platforms including consoles. What is different is the distribution method, and less often the business model.
I also find it interesting that people chide Blizzard for hogging the PC gamer market with World of Warcraft, when Nintendo has much more of a chokehold on software in their games platforms, yet I see much less complaints. What I do notice is that I more often see small publishers succeeding with PC titles (which they might port to a console later) than titles done for the console first, although things like the Xbox Live Marketplace were a step in the right direction.
Often well known console titles are the equivalent of Hollywood blockbuster movies done using a similar business model. i.e. the developer gets a huge cash advance from the publisher to produce a game (a process which takes several years and dozens of people). Then the game goes for sale and the "profits" evaporate as marketing and distribution fees. Developing studios are perennially either on the verge of going bankrupt (most common event) or awash with cash (which is promptly spent on hookers and booze). The publishers get so risk adverse you start seeing Hollywood like malaise such as brainless sequelitis. EA was well known for this at a time (EA Sports series natch) and got on the verge of bankruptcy themselves because of it.
I do not remember a single developer who got rich, or well known, developing for consoles first and foremost. Unless they work as employees (not founders) of one of the console manufacturers themselves.
I live in mainland Europe (Eurozone) and every time I tried to buy a Nexus One the Google website brushed me off. After many months the HTC Desire was finally launched. To get one of those I need to order from the UK (not in the Eurozone) and pay a lot more than a US customer would.
Google is wrong. You just need to make it slightly cheaper, or more feature full, and actually available. I wanted to buy a Nexus One and ended up buying an iPhone because I couldn't get it anywhere. Sure, having the carrier do customer support is nice, since you can handle manufacturing issues more easily. Google could use some support centers physically closer to the consumer, or expediently handle returns. However I do not need to go to a store to try it out. I have actually tried a friend's HTC Desire for a while. The Desire only was available months after I bought my iPhone 3GS.
Coal is cheaper than nuclear when you have coal deposits nearby. Coal fuel is very low density compared to uranium fuel, so if you are very far away from the extraction point transport costs start to dominate. You also need your coal power plant to be located near a railroad, a canal, or the ocean, so you can more cheaply transport the large amounts of coal required. Uranium fuel is so compact you could carry it in a regular truck every couple of years.
The US, China, India, Australia, for example, have rather large coal reserves. While France, Japan, South Korea do not. Hence the emphasis on coal vs nuclear in these countries.
Gas is not cheaper than nuclear, or coal, anywhere in the long term. Gas was used in the 90s because it was mostly being wasted at the time (e.g. flared gas in oil wells to prevent pipeline explosions) and hence readily available. However the density is terrible, and the pipelines are expensive compared to oil pipelines. Gas power plants were used to replace the oil burning peaking power plants of the 1970s nearly everywhere to reduce dependency on foreign petroleum imports. Gas power plants have basically two advantages: since they can spool up quickly you can use them as peaking power plants to cover up consumption peaks and stabilize the grid (useful if you have a lot of intermittent generation capacity), the initial starting capital and construction time are low compared to a larger coal or nuclear power plant.
Nothing in that news report indicates to me that EDF is pricing their product below their costs. What it did say was that EDF is considered to be applying undue transit fees, from power plant to consumer, for new competing electricity generators in France (EDF owns the grid and the existing nuclear generators).
To me EDF is a national treasure of France. The day they privatize it fully France's industry will start to collapse. The private energy generation enterprises are only interested in short term profits, so they prefer to build gas power plants and windmills, since they are cheap to erect and have lower initial capital costs, regardless of the final energy price to the consumer (or regardless of the source of the imported gas). This will likely be followed by disinvestment in the power grid and brownouts similar to other highly deregulated markets like California.
The Mother of All Demos was cool but it did not have a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer). It had a mouse and a pointer. From what I remember from the demo they were used to edit text (well, more like hypertext to be accurate). Apple's interface is more similar to Xerox's. You could even say it was less advanced, since the Xerox systems had an object-oriented programming language (Smalltalk). Apple only got that with MacOS X and Objective-C. Oh so many decades afterwards. I blame it on the hardware.
The reactor becomes lightly radioactive. We are talking about neutron radiation, so not that more radioactive than the mine where the fuel originally came from to begin with. Even a fusion reactor using D-T fusion would irradiate the construction materials with neutrons during its life time. The lighter, non-reusable fissionables in the spent fuel, are mostly low lived radioactive products which decay quickly.
The reasons reprocessing is not more advanced are two-fold: 1) is that uranium is so plentiful and cheap, it is just more economic to dump the once through fuel by the wayside, 2) if you can separate plutonium, you can more easily make a nuclear weapon. The fact is the major powers are not interested in reprocessing, although there are many possible avenues to doing it, in addition to the currently used processes. I suspect some of the more recent nuclear powers will eventually do it. India is a good candidate since they have low uranium deposits. Japan is another good candidate since they have next to no deposits. Japan also has low coal deposits unlike India.
The US has pitifully old, not to mention inefficient, enrichment technology. This is the result of decades of non-investment. Recycling and reprocessing is just another face of the problem.
The water cooling towers are required for any high performance thermal power plant. Which is like 3/4 of US electricity generation (coal, gas, and nuclear). It's basic thermodynamics baby. The colder the heat sink the better. Even a solar thermal power plant is more efficient if you use cooling towers.
Nuclear power is cheap and clean. It is cheap enough that France exports large amounts of electricity to Italy, Germany, and the UK. The importing countries closed or scaled down their nuclear power investments to placate local enviro-weenies but are OK importing it, even if the reactors are right next to the border. France has some of the cheapest electricity costs in Europe. So I do not get where you are coming from.
Check the DOE energy reports. In the US nuclear power generates more electricity than wind, solar, hydro and other renewables combined. If CO2 is considered a pollutant there is no clean coal.
Atlantic, Pacific ocean, Mississippi river. I know the Japanese have some nuclear reactors cooled using salt water. Then you add a huge power grid and hey presto! Done.
Sure, if you want to carry a bunch of gaseous chlorine around to be able to fire the laser. It is a logistical nightmare. The solid state lasers only require electricity. Which you can get from a naval nuclear power reactor.
Many things have been called asymmetric warfare. One example was Germany's strategy in WWII of using highly coordinated submarine wolfpacks against allied Navy. Or the Japanese's use of submarine carriers and midget submarines to counter the US Navy. Neither of those worked very well since either successful counter measures were developed in due course, or the technology was too immature. However asymmetric warfare has worked on occasion. One example was the use of British Longbowmen in the Hundred Years War. Another example is the use of attrition tactics by Fabius in the First Punic War, or the Russian Empire in the Napoleonic Wars.
The Soviet Navy during the Cold War had a higher emphasis in their submarine fleet than a blue water navy. They also invested more on long range surface-to-sea missiles and high speed torpedoes as a way of denying US sea power. This is because they did not have the resources to develop a large blue water navy with carrier groups and associated paraphernalia. In addition their areas of control were different. The Soviet Union was more of a continental power while the US was a sea power.
In China's case they have done heavy investments in all areas of military power. However I think their most significant advances are in the areas of air and (increasingly) sea power. Their technology base in these areas has increased significantly. Even if they do not seem to have quite digested it all yet. I compare them to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. While in the past China's main strength was in the land forces, their armor and other land based technology has degraded immensely. My suspicion is that the Chinese Army lost power after the Sino-Vietnamese war and lack of investment. I think even South Korea has a better land based army by now. In fact I do not get why the South Koreans are investing so much in their military.
Asymmetric warfare is when two opposing forces with highly dissimilar military power, tactics, or strategy fight. What you are referring to is more precisely called unconventional warfare. It is used by those without substantial conventional forces, who must find other means of fighting back because they lack the military organization or funding to do otherwise. I agree with you that using aircraft and missiles to attack carriers is not asymmetric at a first glance, but without knowing the precise tactics or strategy being employed (e.g. is this a strategy of sea denial?) I cannot give a final opinion.
Current state of the art solid state lasers for defense purposes (still in testing phase) have 100 kW power. The military is doing R&D to push the power to 1 MW.
32 MW is still a long time away. This particular laser is 32 kW which is 1/1000th the power.
Higher power lasers have two issues to be worked on. One is how to store enough power to do such a pulse. Presently this is done with a generator trickle charging a capacitor bank for doing a pulsed blast. These systems are very heavy (which is one reason why the Navy is further away in this research: a ship can carry a heavier load than a truck or even a jumbo plane). The other main problem is how to dissipate the heat. Lasers at this power category presently are very inefficient at converting the input power to laser light. You can easily waste 2/3 or more of the input power as heat. This means you need beefy cooling requirements, which again increases weight and decreases reliability. One advantage the Navy has is that they can use the ocean to cool the laser.
Slashdot Mirror
If I found an employee of mine was wasting the working time of another employee of mine with his own problems, I would fire him. Doubly so if it was to do a task any 5 year old could do by himself.
I also used to like to help. However sometimes you get in a lot of trouble. You tell someone you do not have the time. Because you really don't. Not when someone is paying you for your time, and these freeloaders (which is what we are talking about) are getting in the way of your paid job. Then they constantly pester you by e-mail, phone, whatever. Then I ignore them. If they persist, I filter all their electronic communications to me.
Do not use IM unless it is for a meeting. If, for some reason, you still persist in using IM, configure it so the window doesn't popup any time someone wants to talk with you. Or does sounds. Or flashes. Or anything else that interrupts your current task. Constant task switching = lowered productivity.
Choose your friends wisely. Do not try to be friends with your co-workers, if they are the kind of people you would absolutely *never* ever choose to be friends with outside work. Keep it professional as much as possible. The less contact you have, the less friction there will be.
Do not ever, ever, tell your co-workers what is your current salary. Former co-workers fine. Friends who don't work with you fine.
If your current boss keeps changing the rules of the game without consulting you first, run. If there isn't a clear chain of command, run. If he starts demanding you to do overtime *and* adding things to the task list at the same time, run. It is a sign he couldn't negotiate a proper contract with the client, and you are walking into a death march. Check the median age of the people working there. If they are all extremely young it is very, very likely your boss burns out his employees, and he has a high employee turnover.
Oh and my final piece of advice to /.ers. Do not ever, ever, do someone else's homework.
It's PHB 101. You do not do anything you can get someone else to do for you. Because, you know, for the PHB time is money. For the drones however, time isn't money because all you have is time. Or so the PHBs think.
SSE2 was an extension of SSE to allow double precision floating point. It did not increase vector length, which remained at 128 bits. Video compression applications do not use double precision math. They use integer, or at best single precision math.
Pentium 4 did do twice the floating point operations of a Pentium III per clock.
The Pentium 4 can process a full 128-bit vector (addition or multiplication) in one clock cycle, while it takes two clock cycles to do the same in a Pentium III. So a Pentium 4 had twice the FLOPS at a similar clockspeed compared to a Pentium III.
However the Athlon (K7) can do one 64-bit floating point addition *and* multiplication in one clock. So it has the same peak performance per clock as a Pentium 4 (2x64 bit vs 1x128 bit = same peak performance). Athlon also had better FP performance than the Pentium 4 on legacy X86 applications, since the Pentium 4 could do either a single X87 addition, or a multiplication, but not both in the same clock. Athlon also had an optimization for the common FXCH X87 instruction. The Pentium 4 did have a higher clockspeed than an Athlon, but it was not twice the clockspeed (1.2 vs 1.8 GHz). So it definitively did not have twice the floating point performance. Ever.
The truth is AMD got a bad rap with the K6's poor floating point performance. Despite the K7 having better FP performance per clock than a Pentium III, and the same peak performance per clock as a Pentium 4, people like to stick to their old notions instead of measuring things properly.
The K8 kept the same floating point functional units as in the K7, except it added SSE2 instruction support. It has the same floating point peak performance as the old Athlon.
Just because a processor has SSE or SSE2 support does not necessarily mean the instructions run at 1 clock cycle latency.
AMD increased the FPU width to 128-bits in the K10 core. AMD K10 has the same peak floating point performance per clock as Intel's current Nehalem architecture. AMD's current architecture limitations are in main memory bandwidth, and integer performance, rather than vector floating point.
The Pentium 4 was a one trick pony. It worked well with specifically optimized algorithms, but had terrible performance with legacy, or branch heavy code. For many applications it actually had worse performance than the Pentium III it was supposed to replace, let alone the Athlon.
Intel still does ok in innovation. They were the first semiconductor manufacturing company to use high-k and metal gates. They are also behind most of the I/O standards you can think of: PCI, PCI-Express, USB, being some of these. They really excel at mass manufacturing while having mostly mediocre R&D or design. Even IBM, who has largely been away from the hardware market, has done much more leading edge R&D. The thing is, IBM doesn't know how to make anything in quantity for cheap.
For the desktops, I just buy the parts and assemble them myself. I either get a better PC for slightly less, or a much cheaper PC.
The fact is Dell marked the transition of PC OEMs from a corporation which actually manufactured motherboards and other components, into someone which simply rebadges boxes made somewhere in China by a Taiwanese company. Digital went bankrupt and was bought by Compaq. Compaq was absorbed into HP. IBM sold its PC business to a Chinese company. Gateway went bankrupt and was bought by a Taiwanese company. HP traveled through rough waters and tethered on the brink of collapse. All because of Intel's "special relationship" with Dell. Dell was the darling of Wall Street and was constantly beating "market expectations" every quarter. Other OEMs knew they were getting shafted, but chose to ignore it because they would not dare to ire the Intel CPU monopoly. By making the manufacturers dependent on rebates to survive, rebates which you only got by being an Intel exclusive vendor, they forced OEMs into being little more than dumb sweat shop for manufacturing PCs.
The result was AMD never got enough money so they could increase their manufacturing space, and break Intel's monopoly. It has got to the point where AMD decided to go fabless because they can no longer afford the large capital investments required to be in the manufacturing business. The last company which tried doing this, Cyrix, went bankrupt not long afterwards because by losing vertical integration, they lost their margins to compete against Intel as well.
Athlon XP had SSE. Earlier Athlons had AMD's version of vector processing named 3DNow! which was released before Intel even had SSE.
Athlon was faster than Pentium 4 at legacy X87 floating point support (which most programs actually used then). AMD couldn't use SSE at the time because it was patented by Intel and they were involved in one of their usual patent disputes. AMD and Intel signed a new patent cross licensing deal in 2001, years after Athlon was originally released.
IMO AAC is about the same quality as Vorbis. Matroska is indeed much superior to the MPEG-4 container. H.264 is still the best video codec standard (haven't seen any WebM videos yet).
It was good that Google did this. Theora is better than H.263, but was much inferior to H.264. I suspect as WebM implementations gets more work we will see a codec with similar quality to H.264.
IMO there are good free sound codecs across the spectrum: vorbis for compressed music, flac for uncompressed music, speex for sound, etc. It's video that has been the issue.
No, the real issue is that to increase clock rate you have to increase the voltage. Power draw (and dissipation) increases to the square of voltage. Eventually you start to need using water cooling, or more exotic refrigeration techniques to cool the processor. This increases costs significantly, increases the size footprint, and reduces the amount of possible market applications. As CPU power consumption increased, clients also got increasingly more interested in performance per watt, rather than raw peak performance numbers. In today's world where people increasingly are replacing their desktops with mobile laptops, this is even more important.
The fact is the fastest (in clockspeed) processor available today is probably the 4.14 GHz Power 7 CPU from IBM. Not anything from Intel, or AMD. However this is a server processor with an expensive cooling system which is too expensive for the average Joe to own.
C is full of baggage. The worst of it is the standard C library. From functions which do no bounds checking (vulnerable to security exploits), to a standard string library which was made for single byte ASCII encodings. In today's global world Unicode support is essential.
There are other things which are not in the basic C language but should: parallel programming support, sockets, a type system which more accurately reflects modern CPU architectures (where are the vector types, POPCNT, or FMA?).
C++ on the other hand has an overly verbose syntax, mixes data declarations with code (which makes compilation slow and code reviews cumbersome), has brain damaged standard I/O (C++ streams are horrible). C++ does not actually fix any of the actual issues in C, but adds tons of cruft in an attempt to improve the expressiveness of the C language while mostly failing. Oh and get this ISO C committee. I do not need to be able to declare my variables anywhere. Variable length arrays, now that was actually an improvement.
To me this seems a rather disingenuous way of analyzing the market. I have heard similar claims to these many times in the past and the PC game platform kept chugging along just fine as consoles imploded. Remember Atari, 3DO and Sega?
Many of today's games are "console ports" because there is little difference between doing a Xbox360 title and a DirectX PC title. To reach a wider audience the developers often target older hardware specifications, which means there is little visual difference between console and PC titles.
As for the playability of Flash games, it is usually not that dissimilar from that of other causal gaming platforms including consoles. What is different is the distribution method, and less often the business model.
I also find it interesting that people chide Blizzard for hogging the PC gamer market with World of Warcraft, when Nintendo has much more of a chokehold on software in their games platforms, yet I see much less complaints. What I do notice is that I more often see small publishers succeeding with PC titles (which they might port to a console later) than titles done for the console first, although things like the Xbox Live Marketplace were a step in the right direction.
Often well known console titles are the equivalent of Hollywood blockbuster movies done using a similar business model. i.e. the developer gets a huge cash advance from the publisher to produce a game (a process which takes several years and dozens of people). Then the game goes for sale and the "profits" evaporate as marketing and distribution fees. Developing studios are perennially either on the verge of going bankrupt (most common event) or awash with cash (which is promptly spent on hookers and booze). The publishers get so risk adverse you start seeing Hollywood like malaise such as brainless sequelitis. EA was well known for this at a time (EA Sports series natch) and got on the verge of bankruptcy themselves because of it.
I do not remember a single developer who got rich, or well known, developing for consoles first and foremost. Unless they work as employees (not founders) of one of the console manufacturers themselves.
They still would be useful for doing backups. Flash is too expensive for write-once data.
I live in mainland Europe (Eurozone) and every time I tried to buy a Nexus One the Google website brushed me off. After many months the HTC Desire was finally launched. To get one of those I need to order from the UK (not in the Eurozone) and pay a lot more than a US customer would.
Google is wrong. You just need to make it slightly cheaper, or more feature full, and actually available. I wanted to buy a Nexus One and ended up buying an iPhone because I couldn't get it anywhere. Sure, having the carrier do customer support is nice, since you can handle manufacturing issues more easily. Google could use some support centers physically closer to the consumer, or expediently handle returns. However I do not need to go to a store to try it out. I have actually tried a friend's HTC Desire for a while. The Desire only was available months after I bought my iPhone 3GS.
Coal is cheaper than nuclear when you have coal deposits nearby. Coal fuel is very low density compared to uranium fuel, so if you are very far away from the extraction point transport costs start to dominate. You also need your coal power plant to be located near a railroad, a canal, or the ocean, so you can more cheaply transport the large amounts of coal required. Uranium fuel is so compact you could carry it in a regular truck every couple of years.
The US, China, India, Australia, for example, have rather large coal reserves. While France, Japan, South Korea do not. Hence the emphasis on coal vs nuclear in these countries.
Gas is not cheaper than nuclear, or coal, anywhere in the long term. Gas was used in the 90s because it was mostly being wasted at the time (e.g. flared gas in oil wells to prevent pipeline explosions) and hence readily available. However the density is terrible, and the pipelines are expensive compared to oil pipelines. Gas power plants were used to replace the oil burning peaking power plants of the 1970s nearly everywhere to reduce dependency on foreign petroleum imports. Gas power plants have basically two advantages: since they can spool up quickly you can use them as peaking power plants to cover up consumption peaks and stabilize the grid (useful if you have a lot of intermittent generation capacity), the initial starting capital and construction time are low compared to a larger coal or nuclear power plant.
Nothing in that news report indicates to me that EDF is pricing their product below their costs. What it did say was that EDF is considered to be applying undue transit fees, from power plant to consumer, for new competing electricity generators in France (EDF owns the grid and the existing nuclear generators).
To me EDF is a national treasure of France. The day they privatize it fully France's industry will start to collapse. The private energy generation enterprises are only interested in short term profits, so they prefer to build gas power plants and windmills, since they are cheap to erect and have lower initial capital costs, regardless of the final energy price to the consumer (or regardless of the source of the imported gas). This will likely be followed by disinvestment in the power grid and brownouts similar to other highly deregulated markets like California.
The Mother of All Demos was cool but it did not have a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer). It had a mouse and a pointer. From what I remember from the demo they were used to edit text (well, more like hypertext to be accurate). Apple's interface is more similar to Xerox's. You could even say it was less advanced, since the Xerox systems had an object-oriented programming language (Smalltalk). Apple only got that with MacOS X and Objective-C. Oh so many decades afterwards. I blame it on the hardware.
Java and .NET have sandboxes.
The reactor becomes lightly radioactive. We are talking about neutron radiation, so not that more radioactive than the mine where the fuel originally came from to begin with. Even a fusion reactor using D-T fusion would irradiate the construction materials with neutrons during its life time. The lighter, non-reusable fissionables in the spent fuel, are mostly low lived radioactive products which decay quickly.
The reasons reprocessing is not more advanced are two-fold: 1) is that uranium is so plentiful and cheap, it is just more economic to dump the once through fuel by the wayside, 2) if you can separate plutonium, you can more easily make a nuclear weapon. The fact is the major powers are not interested in reprocessing, although there are many possible avenues to doing it, in addition to the currently used processes. I suspect some of the more recent nuclear powers will eventually do it. India is a good candidate since they have low uranium deposits. Japan is another good candidate since they have next to no deposits. Japan also has low coal deposits unlike India.
The US has pitifully old, not to mention inefficient, enrichment technology. This is the result of decades of non-investment. Recycling and reprocessing is just another face of the problem.
The water cooling towers are required for any high performance thermal power plant. Which is like 3/4 of US electricity generation (coal, gas, and nuclear). It's basic thermodynamics baby. The colder the heat sink the better. Even a solar thermal power plant is more efficient if you use cooling towers.
Nuclear power is cheap and clean. It is cheap enough that France exports large amounts of electricity to Italy, Germany, and the UK. The importing countries closed or scaled down their nuclear power investments to placate local enviro-weenies but are OK importing it, even if the reactors are right next to the border. France has some of the cheapest electricity costs in Europe. So I do not get where you are coming from.
Check the DOE energy reports. In the US nuclear power generates more electricity than wind, solar, hydro and other renewables combined. If CO2 is considered a pollutant there is no clean coal.
Atlantic, Pacific ocean, Mississippi river. I know the Japanese have some nuclear reactors cooled using salt water. Then you add a huge power grid and hey presto! Done.
Think of it like the Wave Motion Gun in Star Blazers. You can fire it but you are dead in the water. :-)
Sure, if you want to carry a bunch of gaseous chlorine around to be able to fire the laser. It is a logistical nightmare. The solid state lasers only require electricity. Which you can get from a naval nuclear power reactor.
Many things have been called asymmetric warfare. One example was Germany's strategy in WWII of using highly coordinated submarine wolfpacks against allied Navy. Or the Japanese's use of submarine carriers and midget submarines to counter the US Navy. Neither of those worked very well since either successful counter measures were developed in due course, or the technology was too immature. However asymmetric warfare has worked on occasion. One example was the use of British Longbowmen in the Hundred Years War. Another example is the use of attrition tactics by Fabius in the First Punic War, or the Russian Empire in the Napoleonic Wars.
The Soviet Navy during the Cold War had a higher emphasis in their submarine fleet than a blue water navy. They also invested more on long range surface-to-sea missiles and high speed torpedoes as a way of denying US sea power. This is because they did not have the resources to develop a large blue water navy with carrier groups and associated paraphernalia. In addition their areas of control were different. The Soviet Union was more of a continental power while the US was a sea power.
In China's case they have done heavy investments in all areas of military power. However I think their most significant advances are in the areas of air and (increasingly) sea power. Their technology base in these areas has increased significantly. Even if they do not seem to have quite digested it all yet. I compare them to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. While in the past China's main strength was in the land forces, their armor and other land based technology has degraded immensely. My suspicion is that the Chinese Army lost power after the Sino-Vietnamese war and lack of investment. I think even South Korea has a better land based army by now. In fact I do not get why the South Koreans are investing so much in their military.
Asymmetric warfare is when two opposing forces with highly dissimilar military power, tactics, or strategy fight. What you are referring to is more precisely called unconventional warfare. It is used by those without substantial conventional forces, who must find other means of fighting back because they lack the military organization or funding to do otherwise. I agree with you that using aircraft and missiles to attack carriers is not asymmetric at a first glance, but without knowing the precise tactics or strategy being employed (e.g. is this a strategy of sea denial?) I cannot give a final opinion.
Current state of the art solid state lasers for defense purposes (still in testing phase) have 100 kW power. The military is doing R&D to push the power to 1 MW.
32 MW is still a long time away. This particular laser is 32 kW which is 1/1000th the power.
Higher power lasers have two issues to be worked on. One is how to store enough power to do such a pulse. Presently this is done with a generator trickle charging a capacitor bank for doing a pulsed blast. These systems are very heavy (which is one reason why the Navy is further away in this research: a ship can carry a heavier load than a truck or even a jumbo plane). The other main problem is how to dissipate the heat. Lasers at this power category presently are very inefficient at converting the input power to laser light. You can easily waste 2/3 or more of the input power as heat. This means you need beefy cooling requirements, which again increases weight and decreases reliability. One advantage the Navy has is that they can use the ocean to cool the laser.