The problem is not solved considering biofuels are neither cheap, nor can you manufacture enough of them even if you covered the entire world in corn/soy. Switchgrass ethanol is too expensive, the manufacturing processes have lousy efficiency. Algae biodiesel theoretically could do it, provided anyone could actually do it in a large scale on the cheap. You can use biofuels for military and aerospace requirements, but it is too expensive for people's cars.
Even palm oil biodiesel and sugar cane ethanol are not good enough.
There is enough spare electric capacity in off-peak times to power several dozen million vehicles in the US alone.
Funny how it used to be "global warming". Then Al Gore went to present a global warming speech at one of the coldest recorded days in history, there is like a decade showing there has been a temperature decline, rather than increase, and it is suddenly "climate change". No shit there is climate change. If there wasn't, the weathermen would be out of a job. We could just use last year's prediction to this year or some such. AGW (anthropogenic global warming) seems to be a fraud of a science, since it is based on tampered data, as shown per the leak, even if there was no other foul play done, which there is. What is the use of a model which can't predict anything?
The data that the CRU refused to release when other people tried to reproduce their results? The data that was leaked in the hack, and was massaged by the CRU deleting inconvenient data points, increasing or lowering data points for decades where they felt it was necessary and so on? You call this data unequivocal?
Or the tree ring data later used that was based on that if a tree grew more that year, it surely must have been because of a higher temperature. Or the ice cores which are supposed to measure CO2 rather than temperature?
Kind of more complex than that. Check out the initial date of release of JavaScript and ECMAScript. Netscape developed JavaScript initially and as browsers started implementing it in many incompatible fashions, standard ECMAScript was devised.
Cycles aren't "wasted". Power is saved. But yeah, if you are a service provider, you probably want to offload as much work (and expense) to the clients as possible.
I've always hope Games Workshop was kicking themselves hard over their stupidity for losing blizzard to make their own even more successful franchise when games such as Warhammer Online are a total flop.
I guess you never played the Warhammer 40K : Dawn of War series of games. Relic makes a mean RTS game. They have released several games and expansions while Blizzard has released nothing new in their Starcraft franchise. Starcraft II development is starting to look like Duke Nukem Forever. They have the World of Warcraft cow to milk, but if they don't get their asses into gear, they will get the same destiny as the people who did Everquest.
The next problem is the "make" mindset, which is built on timestamps. "make" doesn't check what changed; it checks was was "touched". If "make" decided what had changed based on hashes, rather than timestamps, many
unnecessary recompiles would be avoided. Something could run "autoconf", produce exactly the same result as last time, and not trigger vast numbers of recompiles. .
Check out ccache. Basically you symlink 'gcc' to it. Before running GCC on a source file, it actually computes the hash of the source file and sees if it was compiled already. If it was it just fetches it from the cache. Why this facility isn't included as standard on every system is a mystery to me.
The German President is mostly a figurehead. Sort of like the Queen of England. Supposedly serves to preserve tradition, unity, and all that rot. The person with de facto executive power is the Chancellor (think of him as the Prime Minister).
PS: The aerospace industry doe use agile like methods on occasion. They usually call it a skunkworks project, from Lockheed Skunk Works, the guys who brought you the U-2 and SR-71. Read Kelly Johnson's 14 Rules of Management and see if some of it sounds familiar...
The waterfall process is used in engineering for solving well known problems using well known technology. NASA does leading edge tech, so it is hardly surprising it doesn't work properly. When something is produced, components are rough fitting, and the whole is a mess. Spiral development processes are used in aerospace engineering as well. Spiral usually isn't used in those fields because it is perceived as expensive and wasteful, since you know beforehand you will produce prototypes which will be discarded. The thing is, it is cheaper to make errors in small scale prototypes than to introduce those errors in a larger project. Spiral reduces uncertainty in the early stages of a project, so it is essential in complex projects such as software engineering in general.
In my experience when lay people say "IT" they usually mean tech-support and cannot conceive of any other job. Which is why I do not like being called an IT person, since programming is nothing like it.
Grains come from plants, which are living beings as well. They grow geometrically like we do. Space also grows, since the Universe is expanding. Energy... we do not even use a fraction of the Sun's output...
The part about innovation is spot-on: the Chinese simply don't have that culture of "fixin' things" like we do. The usual attitude is to wait around for the government to do something. I've had my product copied so many times when it would have just been easier (and more educational) for the company to make its own damn product. Who knows, they might have made a better one instead of an inferior copy. But they'll never know because they just can't see past the end of their noses.
Right. Culture. That must be why Taiwan and Singapore don't have a high tech industry despite having a Chinese based culture. Oh wait, they do. It has got nothing to do with culture. It is just that you are concerned with different things if you do not have enough to eat, plumbing in your house, or can get killed by standing out too much. Once they reach a certain technological level, they will start getting concerned with those things.
Why do you think people have been rushing to buy gold for the last years? Gold is the savings shelter when a country is printing loads of paper money. Inflation usually results.
The United Kingdom produced a lot of "IP" in the XIXth century. From works in literature to scientific research and applied research. Steam engine? Steam turbine? Railroad? However as the century passed increasingly the USA started ascending in power due to a greater industrial production capacity driving a virtuous cycle. The people who manned the factories had the money to buy the new products and more money was available for R&D. Once the British Empire lost its colonies, access to cheap raw materials and labor, not to mention sank its money in multiple expensive wars it increasingly faded until it was surpassed by the USA. Still it took WWII to finish it off as a credible power. The ending of an empire is seldom a pretty sight. China is still technologically backwards in a lot of ways, but the gap will continue to decrease.
Well, Eclipse/Visual Studio just do not give you that much of an advantage in writing C/C++ programs. Which you need to do if you want to write kernel drivers, some system applications, fast client apps. If you want to program server side apps which have more scalability than raw performance requirements, you are probably better off using Java and Eclipse, or.NET and Visual Studio yes. Refactoring support for C/C++ is quite lackluster compared to its Java/C# brethren. Perhaps you would do even better using PHP, Python or Ruby, especially for web apps or scripts.
Ah HyperCard. Never used it because Macs were too expensive and mostly monochromatic at the time. But I used something which was probably similar: INOVAtronics CanDo!
The problem with such solutions is that they are usually inflexible in terms of the applications you can make and often produce lower performing applications (i.e. use more memory and processor time). I still remember corporate suits droning off in business magazines in the 90s how Rapid Application Development tools would soon make programmers obsolete leading to a wondrous wave of cheap microserfs. RAD tools only had staying power in things like GUI design tools. This "Revolution 4.0" just seems like a hyped up "web 2.0" version of the same thing.
You try to sell Solaris machines under a name that doesn't involve Sun Microsystems and let's see how long you do in the market.
Or IBM OS/360. Or Palm WebOS. Or...
Fujitsu. They even design their own SPARC CPUs which are better performing than Sun's. In fact, Sun has done such a craptastic job designing UltraSPARC V and Rock, that they have to sell high-end servers using Fujitsu's processors to be able to compete. Amdahl Corporation manufactures IBM S/360 hardware.
Apple has already shut down manufacturers which made better MacOS compatible hardware than they did. Power Computing and UMAX used to make better MacOS hardware than Apple did. Power Computing, for example, had faster hardware than Apple itself. One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned as CEO was to shut down the clone market by pulling the plug on licensing. I guess one of the things he learned from running NeXT was that there was little money to be made in a niche software OS business. NeXT's move to a pure software based business model around OpenStep was its own undoing.
It is not of some limited historical interest. Foreign mercenaries have been considered an issue not just in Renaissance Italy, but are considered a leading cause of the downfall of Carthage, and the Roman Empire. If you want more recent examples, you can find some here. PMCs are just the latest facade of the same thing.
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The problem is not solved considering biofuels are neither cheap, nor can you manufacture enough of them even if you covered the entire world in corn/soy. Switchgrass ethanol is too expensive, the manufacturing processes have lousy efficiency. Algae biodiesel theoretically could do it, provided anyone could actually do it in a large scale on the cheap. You can use biofuels for military and aerospace requirements, but it is too expensive for people's cars.
Even palm oil biodiesel and sugar cane ethanol are not good enough.
There is enough spare electric capacity in off-peak times to power several dozen million vehicles in the US alone.
Funny how it used to be "global warming". Then Al Gore went to present a global warming speech at one of the coldest recorded days in history, there is like a decade showing there has been a temperature decline, rather than increase, and it is suddenly "climate change". No shit there is climate change. If there wasn't, the weathermen would be out of a job. We could just use last year's prediction to this year or some such. AGW (anthropogenic global warming) seems to be a fraud of a science, since it is based on tampered data, as shown per the leak, even if there was no other foul play done, which there is. What is the use of a model which can't predict anything?
Or the tree ring data later used that was based on that if a tree grew more that year, it surely must have been because of a higher temperature. Or the ice cores which are supposed to measure CO2 rather than temperature?
Kind of more complex than that. Check out the initial date of release of JavaScript and ECMAScript. Netscape developed JavaScript initially and as browsers started implementing it in many incompatible fashions, standard ECMAScript was devised.
Cycles aren't "wasted". Power is saved. But yeah, if you are a service provider, you probably want to offload as much work (and expense) to the clients as possible.
I've always hope Games Workshop was kicking themselves hard over their stupidity for losing blizzard to make their own even more successful franchise when games such as Warhammer Online are a total flop.
I guess you never played the Warhammer 40K : Dawn of War series of games. Relic makes a mean RTS game. They have released several games and expansions while Blizzard has released nothing new in their Starcraft franchise. Starcraft II development is starting to look like Duke Nukem Forever. They have the World of Warcraft cow to milk, but if they don't get their asses into gear, they will get the same destiny as the people who did Everquest.
The next problem is the "make" mindset, which is built on timestamps. "make" doesn't check what changed; it checks was was "touched". If "make" decided what had changed based on hashes, rather than timestamps, many unnecessary recompiles would be avoided. Something could run "autoconf", produce exactly the same result as last time, and not trigger vast numbers of recompiles. .
Check out ccache. Basically you symlink 'gcc' to it. Before running GCC on a source file, it actually computes the hash of the source file and sees if it was compiled already. If it was it just fetches it from the cache. Why this facility isn't included as standard on every system is a mystery to me.
Guess what Wine uses to have hardware acceleration in their DirectX emulation: OpenGL...
The German President is mostly a figurehead. Sort of like the Queen of England. Supposedly serves to preserve tradition, unity, and all that rot. The person with de facto executive power is the Chancellor (think of him as the Prime Minister).
PS: The aerospace industry doe use agile like methods on occasion. They usually call it a skunkworks project, from Lockheed Skunk Works, the guys who brought you the U-2 and SR-71. Read Kelly Johnson's 14 Rules of Management and see if some of it sounds familiar...
The waterfall process is used in engineering for solving well known problems using well known technology. NASA does leading edge tech, so it is hardly surprising it doesn't work properly. When something is produced, components are rough fitting, and the whole is a mess. Spiral development processes are used in aerospace engineering as well. Spiral usually isn't used in those fields because it is perceived as expensive and wasteful, since you know beforehand you will produce prototypes which will be discarded. The thing is, it is cheaper to make errors in small scale prototypes than to introduce those errors in a larger project. Spiral reduces uncertainty in the early stages of a project, so it is essential in complex projects such as software engineering in general.
Why not? The ISS has plants growing inside it.
In my experience when lay people say "IT" they usually mean tech-support and cannot conceive of any other job. Which is why I do not like being called an IT person, since programming is nothing like it.
Grains come from plants, which are living beings as well. They grow geometrically like we do. Space also grows, since the Universe is expanding. Energy... we do not even use a fraction of the Sun's output...
Great. We should never have left the trees then.
Right. Culture. That must be why Taiwan and Singapore don't have a high tech industry despite having a Chinese based culture. Oh wait, they do. It has got nothing to do with culture. It is just that you are concerned with different things if you do not have enough to eat, plumbing in your house, or can get killed by standing out too much. Once they reach a certain technological level, they will start getting concerned with those things.
Why do you think people have been rushing to buy gold for the last years? Gold is the savings shelter when a country is printing loads of paper money. Inflation usually results.
The United Kingdom produced a lot of "IP" in the XIXth century. From works in literature to scientific research and applied research. Steam engine? Steam turbine? Railroad? However as the century passed increasingly the USA started ascending in power due to a greater industrial production capacity driving a virtuous cycle. The people who manned the factories had the money to buy the new products and more money was available for R&D. Once the British Empire lost its colonies, access to cheap raw materials and labor, not to mention sank its money in multiple expensive wars it increasingly faded until it was surpassed by the USA. Still it took WWII to finish it off as a credible power. The ending of an empire is seldom a pretty sight. China is still technologically backwards in a lot of ways, but the gap will continue to decrease.
Well, Eclipse/Visual Studio just do not give you that much of an advantage in writing C/C++ programs. Which you need to do if you want to write kernel drivers, some system applications, fast client apps. If you want to program server side apps which have more scalability than raw performance requirements, you are probably better off using Java and Eclipse, or .NET and Visual Studio yes. Refactoring support for C/C++ is quite lackluster compared to its Java/C# brethren. Perhaps you would do even better using PHP, Python or Ruby, especially for web apps or scripts.
The problem with such solutions is that they are usually inflexible in terms of the applications you can make and often produce lower performing applications (i.e. use more memory and processor time). I still remember corporate suits droning off in business magazines in the 90s how Rapid Application Development tools would soon make programmers obsolete leading to a wondrous wave of cheap microserfs. RAD tools only had staying power in things like GUI design tools. This "Revolution 4.0" just seems like a hyped up "web 2.0" version of the same thing.
You try to sell Solaris machines under a name that doesn't involve Sun Microsystems and let's see how long you do in the market. Or IBM OS/360. Or Palm WebOS. Or...
Fujitsu. They even design their own SPARC CPUs which are better performing than Sun's. In fact, Sun has done such a craptastic job designing UltraSPARC V and Rock, that they have to sell high-end servers using Fujitsu's processors to be able to compete. Amdahl Corporation manufactures IBM S/360 hardware.
Apple has already shut down manufacturers which made better MacOS compatible hardware than they did. Power Computing and UMAX used to make better MacOS hardware than Apple did. Power Computing, for example, had faster hardware than Apple itself. One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned as CEO was to shut down the clone market by pulling the plug on licensing. I guess one of the things he learned from running NeXT was that there was little money to be made in a niche software OS business. NeXT's move to a pure software based business model around OpenStep was its own undoing.
It is not of some limited historical interest. Foreign mercenaries have been considered an issue not just in Renaissance Italy, but are considered a leading cause of the downfall of Carthage, and the Roman Empire. If you want more recent examples, you can find some here. PMCs are just the latest facade of the same thing.
Sun Tzu's Art of War talks about spies and double spies. This is all older than dirt.
Not if they start using cartel policies. Or leveraging one monopoly to get another. This is how Microsoft lost the Netscape case in the first place.