Bell Labs took unknown PhDs and made them do wonders (like UNIX, C, the transistor, etc as you said). Microsoft Research takes brilliant researchers like Jim Blinn or Gordon Bell and turns them into unproductive employees.
Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft Research is not to generate Microsoft R&D at all, but just a clever ploy to syphon off everyone elses R&D talent.
The exceptions to the rule, which get R&D right, seem to be Google and Apple. Look how well they have performed lately.
Japan's problem was not R&D expense. Their problem was investing in huge infrastructure projects such as Shinkansen, bridges over the sea, tunnels (longer than the Euro Tunnel), which have never paid themselves and probably never will. Which leads some to call Shinkansen the Pork-Barrel Express. Their country is under a mountain of debt.
Japan's R&D investments have led them to blue-violet LEDs, Aibo, Toyota Prius, and other products.
You cannot have an install program remove a dll that is loaded by the OS without causing a possible kernel panic/BSOD, so either unload other adobe products (you'd be surprised what is running in the background) or reboot.
Yeah, that is one thing the NT kernel sucks at. The UNIX way of doing it by allowing the delete but only freeing the inode later is so much less frustrating.
Those who hate UNIX are condemned to reinvent it.
Re:I know, I know...
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Re:Linux And The BSDs
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Neither FreeBSD, nor OpenBSD scale as well on large SMP systems as Linux. Period. OpenBSD may have more security features and FreeBSD may have its own strong point, but scalability sure as heck isn't one of them.
It is important to test this theory all the way through if billion, nay, trillion dollar policies are going to be made based on it.
The Kyoto agreements are based on this theory being sound and that we can actually influence global warming by changing man-made emissions. If that turns out to be false, then who will pay back the money lost?
Resources are finite and problems are innumerable. If you are devoting resources to a non-existant problem, or a something which you cannot hope to influence, you are removing resources from something else, something which actually solves a real world life threatening issue.
I agree. Citeseer was invaluable to me when I was doing my final thesis. Contrary to scholar.google.com, which returns mostly links to pay to view sites, it returns those and many more links. The UI is also superior as you said.
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning..
on
Happy Birthday, Amiga
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The original Macintosh did not have preemptive multitasking. It also came with a monochrome screen. Its 3 1/2" floppies were single-sided 400KB while the Amigas were double-sided 880KB.
As for the 16-bit color, I find that somewhat hard to believe without a daughterboard and new graphics chips. If the claim is correct, the Mindset had a 512 color (9-bit) palette. No amount of video memory would give you 65536 (16-bit) colors. Unless it had another palette mode which seems unlikely.
I have heard of personal computers with better graphics and sound than the Amiga, but they are all posterior to the 1985 A1000 launch. Examples include the 1987 Acorn Archimedes which had a 32-bit CPU and better graphics or the 1989 Fujitsu FM Towns on which you could have 8-bit colors from a 15-bit palette. Both were superb machines at the time they came out.
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning..
on
Happy Birthday, Amiga
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hardly seems like it. The original Amiga had a 4096 color palette, this has 512. Amigas also had 32 colors in 320x200 mode, and this one has 16. The max interlaced screen resolution was also 640x400.
Both had 4 channel sound. But the Amiga had *stereo* sound by default.
This is funny, but in Windows it also locks up, using Adobe's own plugin. I disable "Display PDF in browser" in the Adobe Reader preferences because of that.
It is moronic. If you have negative growth eventually the human race would become extinct. That is like the absolute stupidest movement I have ever heard.
As for the Malthusian argument, history proves Malthus was *wrong*. In the EU farmers are fined if they produce over their quota. Excess food is destroyed.
There is nothing more distasteful than someone who has no self-respect.
Layoffs also increase the productivity of those remaining, at least in the short term, out of raw fear. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of being terminated.
They have done that to death already, I doubt it is producing positive results by now. If you whip a horse, it will work harder, but if you continue whipping it again and again, it will just collapse on the floor.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
Wrong. You can control the economy. The problem is, a centrally planned economy will never be as efficient as a market based system because the central planner will always have incomplete knowledge of the whole system. The closest the planner is to the scene, the more efficiently he can manage it. Also, the more the misadjustment between the central planners and the actual people on the field, the more brute force (hence manpower and ergo money) it will take to enforce the policy.
If the US healthcare industry is so good, how come they have terrible infant mortality and life expectancy rates, probably on par with highly evolved nations like Mexico?
To be honest though, I think the major problem we have at the moment is nobody has come up with a real solution to the Nuclear waste issue
Oh there are plenty of solutions. One is to simply keep the stuff in casks, as we do right now. That is the easiest solution in technical and political terms. Recycling would reduce the waste by 90% and give more energy. Recycling primarily is not used in the USA at the moment because uranium is so cheap, it is easier to mine more than recycling the fuel. But the French manage to do it IIRC and their nuclear electricity is cheap.
Then there are several possible ways to bury the rest using current technology, if for whatever reason you got tired from the casks. Dump it into a subduction zone, inject it into solid rock, inject it into a borehole, etc. The reason this is not done is because the casks work and there seems to be some sort of paranoia about nuclear waste.
Beyond that there is promising research into transmutation of nuclear waste. But since the technology is not in use right at the moment, it can be ignored for now.
Is it kooky to whine that environmentalists are hypocritical by opposing both greenhouse gas emissions and Nuclear energy, when actually the environmentalists who do oppose both are usually into conservation
Conservation is no solution by itself. See what negawatts did to California. No new power plants were built, so electricity had to come off state. So there were brownouts and the price of electricity rocketed. Did people save energy more? Not really. This was wonderfully played around by off state energy companies, like Enron. I cannot heat myself, or run this computer with conservation. I need energy from somewhere. Even if it is food. Energy consumption per capita will increase, it is an historical trend. As China and India beef up their economies it will only make this more painfully obvious. We need power, it must come from someplace. For the safety and prosperity of the human race it must be cheap. Renewables will not be enough to satisfy the demand.
To me, green "kooks" lose the argument the moment they start talking about population control. That may work on a totalitarian state like China, but not in a democracy. To me, anyone who thinks willfully killing their own people provides a solution to any problem is simply out of their mind.
My point was, to make ammonia for fertilizer you need:
a) nitrogen (which is extracted from air)
b) hydrogen (heat and water or electricity and water plus some gear would work).
c) heat.
d) pressure.
So even if we had no fossil fuels, it would still be possible to make chemical fertilizer. Today, we use natural gas to generate the hydrogen, because it is cheaper. Many technologies are available which could make other ways of producing hydrogen cheap enough.
Yes, you could use natural fertilizer. As for the bat guano from South America (Chilean saltpetre aka potassium nitrate?), while it works, there is not enough potassium nitrate to go around for everyone. It isn't used right now because it is so expensive and the chemical fertilizers do the same job, only better.
The pro-nuker "kooks" just point out that countries like France generate 76% of their electricity with nuclear power, without using coal like the USA does.
There is more energy in the uranium and thorium spewed out from the black belched smoke in a coal power plant than in the coal which it burned. We are literally pissing gold away.
Nuclear fission power alone could fullfill all our present energy requirements. Of course, this is not what would happen in the real world. For example, France uses hydro power for most of the other 24% of the electricity they require. Wind power is also economical in the right places. I have little doubt we will eventually turn to biodiesel for transportation, even if for no other reason, it is energy dense and works on current internal combustion engines. But trying to devise an economy without fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum) using existing technology without putting nuclear power into the mix is *not* going to work.
Fallacy. They are talking about ammonia based fertilizer production under the Haber-Bosch process. This only requires atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is usually produced from natural gas, but could be produced in a number of other ways including high-temperature electrolysis using nuclear power. Oil is too expensive to use for fertilizer production when natural gas or coal do the job cheaper.
IIRC most of the energy cost is distillation, then irrigation, next comes fertilizer production.
Biodiesel from vegetable oil is IIRC more efficient to produce than ethanol because there is no distillation step. Some guys recently also have managed to come up with a process with turns corn sugars into biodiesel at low temperatures. Some other guys are working on a process to produce ethanol from cellulosic matter like corn stalks using a different yeast strain to do the fermentation step.
Heck, I have heard reports that it takes *more* energy to locate, extract, transport, refine one barrel of petroleum than you get out of it from some oil fields. Guess why they still do it? Because gasoline and diesel are more valuable than the coal used in the refineries or the waste used in the oil tankers.
It is the same reason we use electric washing machine engines instead of using an internal combustion engine powered washing machine (which could reuse the excess heat to heat the water).
Convenience. People want convenience and 24h availability. That costs extra.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft Research is not to generate Microsoft R&D at all, but just a clever ploy to syphon off everyone elses R&D talent.
The exceptions to the rule, which get R&D right, seem to be Google and Apple. Look how well they have performed lately.
Japan's R&D investments have led them to blue-violet LEDs, Aibo, Toyota Prius, and other products.
Yeah, that is one thing the NT kernel sucks at. The UNIX way of doing it by allowing the delete but only freeing the inode later is so much less frustrating.
Those who hate UNIX are condemned to reinvent it.
Linux runs this. :-)
Neither FreeBSD, nor OpenBSD scale as well on large SMP systems as Linux. Period. OpenBSD may have more security features and FreeBSD may have its own strong point, but scalability sure as heck isn't one of them.
The Kyoto agreements are based on this theory being sound and that we can actually influence global warming by changing man-made emissions. If that turns out to be false, then who will pay back the money lost?
Resources are finite and problems are innumerable. If you are devoting resources to a non-existant problem, or a something which you cannot hope to influence, you are removing resources from something else, something which actually solves a real world life threatening issue.
I agree. Citeseer was invaluable to me when I was doing my final thesis. Contrary to scholar.google.com, which returns mostly links to pay to view sites, it returns those and many more links. The UI is also superior as you said.
As for the 16-bit color, I find that somewhat hard to believe without a daughterboard and new graphics chips. If the claim is correct, the Mindset had a 512 color (9-bit) palette. No amount of video memory would give you 65536 (16-bit) colors. Unless it had another palette mode which seems unlikely.
I have heard of personal computers with better graphics and sound than the Amiga, but they are all posterior to the 1985 A1000 launch. Examples include the 1987 Acorn Archimedes which had a 32-bit CPU and better graphics or the 1989 Fujitsu FM Towns on which you could have 8-bit colors from a 15-bit palette. Both were superb machines at the time they came out.
Hardly seems like it. The original Amiga had a 4096 color palette, this has 512. Amigas also had 32 colors in 320x200 mode, and this one has 16. The max interlaced screen resolution was also 640x400.
Both had 4 channel sound. But the Amiga had *stereo* sound by default.
So no, it was most definitively not superior.
This is funny, but in Windows it also locks up, using Adobe's own plugin. I disable "Display PDF in browser" in the Adobe Reader preferences because of that.
As for the Malthusian argument, history proves Malthus was *wrong*. In the EU farmers are fined if they produce over their quota. Excess food is destroyed.
There is nothing more distasteful than someone who has no self-respect.
You cannot even beat Cuba. Lamers.
Here is Canada:
So, you were telling me how great your healthcare system was?
I will take Christianity vs VHEMT any day. Suicide is for the weak of mind.
They have done that to death already, I doubt it is producing positive results by now. If you whip a horse, it will work harder, but if you continue whipping it again and again, it will just collapse on the floor.
Wrong. You can control the economy. The problem is, a centrally planned economy will never be as efficient as a market based system because the central planner will always have incomplete knowledge of the whole system. The closest the planner is to the scene, the more efficiently he can manage it. Also, the more the misadjustment between the central planners and the actual people on the field, the more brute force (hence manpower and ergo money) it will take to enforce the policy.
If the US healthcare industry is so good, how come they have terrible infant mortality and life expectancy rates, probably on par with highly evolved nations like Mexico?
a) they use shade
b) they wear clothes fit for the desert
b) they drink water
Oh there are plenty of solutions. One is to simply keep the stuff in casks, as we do right now. That is the easiest solution in technical and political terms. Recycling would reduce the waste by 90% and give more energy. Recycling primarily is not used in the USA at the moment because uranium is so cheap, it is easier to mine more than recycling the fuel. But the French manage to do it IIRC and their nuclear electricity is cheap.
Then there are several possible ways to bury the rest using current technology, if for whatever reason you got tired from the casks. Dump it into a subduction zone, inject it into solid rock, inject it into a borehole, etc. The reason this is not done is because the casks work and there seems to be some sort of paranoia about nuclear waste.
Beyond that there is promising research into transmutation of nuclear waste. But since the technology is not in use right at the moment, it can be ignored for now.
Is it kooky to whine that environmentalists are hypocritical by opposing both greenhouse gas emissions and Nuclear energy, when actually the environmentalists who do oppose both are usually into conservation
Conservation is no solution by itself. See what negawatts did to California. No new power plants were built, so electricity had to come off state. So there were brownouts and the price of electricity rocketed. Did people save energy more? Not really. This was wonderfully played around by off state energy companies, like Enron. I cannot heat myself, or run this computer with conservation. I need energy from somewhere. Even if it is food. Energy consumption per capita will increase, it is an historical trend. As China and India beef up their economies it will only make this more painfully obvious. We need power, it must come from someplace. For the safety and prosperity of the human race it must be cheap. Renewables will not be enough to satisfy the demand.
To me, green "kooks" lose the argument the moment they start talking about population control. That may work on a totalitarian state like China, but not in a democracy. To me, anyone who thinks willfully killing their own people provides a solution to any problem is simply out of their mind.
a) nitrogen (which is extracted from air)
b) hydrogen (heat and water or electricity and water plus some gear would work).
c) heat.
d) pressure.
So even if we had no fossil fuels, it would still be possible to make chemical fertilizer. Today, we use natural gas to generate the hydrogen, because it is cheaper. Many technologies are available which could make other ways of producing hydrogen cheap enough.
Yes, you could use natural fertilizer. As for the bat guano from South America (Chilean saltpetre aka potassium nitrate?), while it works, there is not enough potassium nitrate to go around for everyone. It isn't used right now because it is so expensive and the chemical fertilizers do the same job, only better.
There is more energy in the uranium and thorium spewed out from the black belched smoke in a coal power plant than in the coal which it burned. We are literally pissing gold away.
Nuclear power is the safest way of generating electricity per GWhr we have.
Nuclear fission power alone could fullfill all our present energy requirements. Of course, this is not what would happen in the real world. For example, France uses hydro power for most of the other 24% of the electricity they require. Wind power is also economical in the right places. I have little doubt we will eventually turn to biodiesel for transportation, even if for no other reason, it is energy dense and works on current internal combustion engines. But trying to devise an economy without fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum) using existing technology without putting nuclear power into the mix is *not* going to work.
Fallacy. They are talking about ammonia based fertilizer production under the Haber-Bosch process. This only requires atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is usually produced from natural gas, but could be produced in a number of other ways including high-temperature electrolysis using nuclear power. Oil is too expensive to use for fertilizer production when natural gas or coal do the job cheaper.
Dunno, but the USSR got sugar from Cuba, and perhaps other places.
Biodiesel from vegetable oil is IIRC more efficient to produce than ethanol because there is no distillation step. Some guys recently also have managed to come up with a process with turns corn sugars into biodiesel at low temperatures. Some other guys are working on a process to produce ethanol from cellulosic matter like corn stalks using a different yeast strain to do the fermentation step.
It is the same reason we use electric washing machine engines instead of using an internal combustion engine powered washing machine (which could reuse the excess heat to heat the water).
Convenience. People want convenience and 24h availability. That costs extra.
Oh, regarding the first-strike doctrine, it is nothing the USA have not done, and are not doing now IIRC.