The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
Unless they can convince the wider Linux community to adopt some of their technologies, Canonical is basically going to end up forking the platform. If that happens, it will be a fairly major step backwards for Linux on the desktop since developers will be on the hook to adjust to supporting not just multiple packaging systems and multiple library versions, but also multiple incompatible core system API's. Essentially Ubuntu will no longer be "Linux" in any way that matters to developers and all the support for Linux out there now will either die or just switch over to being Ubuntu specific and I don't see how that benefits anyone in the community.
Forking the platform, you mean like Apple did with BSD and Google did with Linux? I think Canonical isn't interested in having a linux distribution. Just like Apple has OS X and Google has Android, Canonical plan is to have Ubuntu as the operating system.
Mark Shuttleworth while proclaiming publicly and often that he won't support the company forever and that it needs to be profitable decides in his infinite wisdom to not only fork a major toolchain piece (upstart) but to fork the GUI as well. Rather than putting his limited resourced into the community projects.
I think he has as much chance succeeding at this as he does of the aliens giving him the technology.
Oh, be nice. He just thinks he's the next Steve Jobs. The difference is that while many products Apple released were not a success, those that were all had one thing in common -- almost all were first to market and if not, dramatically improved what was already out there.
Canonical, however, doesn't even have a market for many of it's ideas let alone being first to market in the markets it is trying to break into. So, if they can't be first to market with a new concept or idea, and they want to mirror Jobs/Apple's success, then they need to dramatically improve what is already out there. So far, they have not been able to do that, and it appears that there efforts aren't even being focussed in that direction.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility.
It is highly doubtful that he can make any money in the mobile sphere, that is pretty well decided now, too. He probably stood a better chance with the desktop, particularly after Windows 8.
The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
If the goal was to compete with android, they should have gone KDE. KDE active is a much more attractive development environment and much further along than Ubuntu's mobile offerings, which don't even use the standard Unity interface.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
Study after study shows that Unity does not work well on a tablet/touch device. It only looks like it should work, but all of the apps are mouse centric. The problem for Canonical going mobile is that most of the apps in their repositories, which is a large selling point (even if free), won't work on mobile. So from the very start, they will be competing with Apple and Android who have a huge head start and even Microsoft who while a very distant third is lightyears ahead of Canonical.
As I said earlier, they should have gone Plasma Active. If all of the resources that they dumped into Unity and now their mobile offerings had been used to further that project, they would have been to market earlier and had apps ready to deploy. Instead they chose to go their own way, which is their right, but not necessarily the wisest business decision as even Microsoft is late to the game.
I'm guessing that they're running an elaborate experiment to see just what one has to do to ruin a distro thoroughly and completely. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense.
No, they just think they are the next Apple and people will accept whatever they come out with. Unfortunately for them, Mark isn't Steve.
If you are going to need years of hovering for this to work and you are going to have to reach the asteroid while it is still years away, so you have time to launch a rocket and travel to it in time to make a difference, That means, first you are going to have to be able to detect said asteroid while many decades away, if not possibly a century or more.
Now, lets say there is an asteroid detected early enough that this might work and that it is relatively small enough where it would make a difference, say the size of a football stadium. Assuming it is mainly solid rock and iron, exactly how much fuel is going to be needed to hover long enough to make a difference. Then once that is known, how much fuel is it going to take to transport the hovering fuel there in a timely fashion. And finally, how much to get it out of earth's gravity well. Sounds like one pretty damn big rocket is going to be needed, just to transport the fuel.
Of course, if it works and it would safe earth, that would be worth it. OTOH, we still have to get past being able to detect it far enough away where there would be time to get there and do all of this hovering.
Now, on the other hand, instead of a football stadium, the asteroid is the size of a volkswagen (which would be far more feasible to divert in this manner), and it is on the right trajectory where it will hit the earth's atmosphere at a steep enough angle that it will penetrate it instead of glancing off, we will never know in time to do anything about it, because at that size, it won't be detected until it is too close to alter the trajectory.
You are hovering nearby so your gravity pulls the rock toward you. You fire your retro rockets to push yourself away from the rock, in the process pushing the rock away from you, back towards it's original destination.
Isn't a more likely scenario to be you are hovering nearby so the gravity of the larger asteroid pulls your rocket towards the asteroid. You fire your rockets to push yourself away from the asteroid while the asteroid continues on its merry way.
Otherwise, when the various lunar lander crafts launched from the moon, the moon would have been pushed further away and that didn't seem to happen, at least not that could be measured.
The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.'
That's because we don't actually read what Darwin wrote about man. To paraphrase him, he said, humans were inferior in most ways to the predatory animals in their environment. Humans, weren't the fastest, we weren't the strongest, we didn't have the longest fangs or claws. In every way, we were inferior in some major aspect to the other predators. He goes on to say, however, that what made humans survive and dominate is their innate ability to cooperate. Above all the other animal species, the ability for humans to cooperate with each other outweighs the deficits in our other competitive traits.
For Darwin, what made humans the fittest at survival was our ability to cooperate with each other. It was others who took the survival of the fittest and twist it into what we talk about today with it. Cooperation is not unique among humans, it just reaches its highest expression.
>Sometimes I think that mankind deserves to become extinct.
You are cordially invited to lead the way.
I think this is an interesting discovery, myself.
Technically, it isn't a discovery at all. They have been grafting body parts on tadpoles for a long time. The process is well documented. This may be the first time with an eye, but then again, until it is reproduced in another lab, it is just a report. Even if reproduced, it still wouldn't be a discovery, any more than building Hoover Dam was a discovery because nobody else had done it before.
Not sure why you were modded down for a troll. All one has to do is look at the MTBF for SSDs versus magnetic media to see that SSDs are less reliable. That is probably why, SSDs are mainly used where speed or low power are the driving factors and not long term reliability.
Magnetic media can compete with SSDs if you have a large enough cache. However, power consumption for magnetic media will always be worse than an SSD.
Again, not sure why you were modded down, because technically, you are correct in what you say, even if not politically so.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.
The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.
The fact that "any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store mission critical data on SSDs kind of proves his point in that they are not as reliable as magnetic media. They are definitely faster, definitely lower power, but definitely a shorter MTBF.
It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.
We actually ran those back in the day. 1GB SCSI disks with 1GB memory on top of them. Expensive as fuck, but boy would they scream.
Back in the day they were expensive, but today, they aren't or wouldn't be and they would probably still outperform SSDs which are slower on writes than volatile memory. That said, SSDs would do much better on power consumption, although, with a big enough cache, you could actually spin down your drives and only occasionally bring them up for writes, or run them at a lower speed than even 5400rpm.
SSDs have their place, but I'm not sure high volume, high availability storage that is constantly updating is the place for them. Wear leveling has improved tremendously, but it still only postpones the inevitable.
There would be no gently pulling involved as the same distructive force that would be applied if such an astral body hit the earth would be applied hitting the net.
No, it wouldn't. Take a hammer. drop a feather. While the feather is falling, hit it with the hammer. Oh my, that feather was destroyed by the sheer might of the hammer. Now, take the feather and put it on the ground (preferably on a rock). Hit it with the hammer.
See the difference now? The "desreuctive force" of the astral body can't exceed the destructive force of a light net gently settling on the surface. Though if it doesn't work and it hits the earth anyway, yes, the net will be destroyed.
But there is not light net gently settling on the surface, unless you are going to try and catch the asteroid from the back side, which of course won't do you any good. As long as you are approaching the asteroid from the front or some angle off center from the front, you have to deal with the inertia of the asteroid against your net.
I guess it would be possible to land on the asteroid and somehow deploy your net running around the surface and at some point on the back side launch rockets in the opposit direction, but at that point, the rockets and cords attached to the net have to be able to deal with the inertia of the moving asteroid.
Put it this way, prior to launching the shuttle, it was bolted to the pad, to allow it to build up thrust. If your methodolgy worked, everytime they launched the shuttle, the earth would have been nudged out of it's normal orbit. It simply doesn't work that way because there is too much mass involved (earth) versus the thrust of the rocket (shuttle). Catching an asteroid hurtling toward the earth in space would not be any different, other than whatever you are catching it with has to be able to withstand the mass and inertia or at a minimum get drug along for the ride.
You don't control a net. You spread a mesh in front of an object, and it snags in it. You have a single tether, and it doesn't matter how it spins. When you start gently pulling, it will waste a good bit of energy stabilizing the whole thing. It's inherently stable - the only issue is if our materials science is enough to support getting to that stable point.
What exactly would such a mesh be made out of that could withstand the impact from how ever many metric tonnes of material traveling at however many thousands of meters per second? There would be no gently pulling involved as the same distructive force that would be applied if such an astral body hit the earth would be applied hitting the net.
I think you may need to consider feasibility when coming up with your plans. It's a lot easier to just fly somewhere and hover than to land, or to make and deploy a gigantic asteroid net.
That may be true, but while hovering, you are going to have to exert enough gravitational pull to offset the inertia that is already in place. While it is true that all bodies exert gravitional forces upon each other, in practice, there has to be enough force to actually do something. When we landed men on the moon, the gravitational forces between earth and the moon were altered, but not enough to change their positions in space relative to each other. Likewise, a rocket, unless it contains extreme mass, is unlikely to change the trajectory of an asteroid or comet because of the combination of the gravitational forces and the inertia. And, if said rocket does contain enough mass to effect this change, then how in the hell are we going to get it there in the first place?
I agree, he's great for explaining stupid shit to proles, but as far as a professional scientist goes he has very little credibility in my book.
It's scientists like him that are personable and able to "explain stupid shit to proles" that help keep people interested in science and help make sure the scientists in your "credibility book" get enough funding from the proles to do their work.
There are two side to every coin. Yes, he may keep people interested, but by so over simplifying what is the real problem he gives the false sense that this could really work. So, by being personable and getting the funing from the proles, he is actually taking funding away from potential solutions that have a much higher probability of being successful.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.
The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.
Being responsible for many terabytes of corporate data, I can tell you that SSDs have a much higher failure rate for us than does magnetic media. The tradeoff for that, however, is much lower power consumption and higher throughput. However, hybrid devices seem to couple the worst of both devices instead of the best. It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.
Our backup regime with SSDs is much more rigid than with old fashioned dasd. And, that includes not storing misison critical data on single drives or in single locations. Murphy will always win, but with SSDs, the MTBF is more in his favor than magnetic storage, at least in our companies experience.
People forget that when the 10" iPad came out, the main competition was from the 10" netbook. How would a 7" iPad had faired against that? There were tablets of various sizes prior to the iPad, but they weren't as popular as the netbooks were. People were already using the 10" form factor in their netbooks. Apple improved upon it by going beyond 1024x600 and ditching the keyboard. At the time a 7" iPad would probably had been viewed as an oversized iPod Touch.
It may turn out that the 7" form factor is what the market settles on, but the question is whether or not there would have been a market to settle on if there wasn't the 10" iPad, first?
16KB storage: Apple is really screwing with the customer now.
The worst part is that instead of using sockets like in the Apple II, for the iPad they soldered down the memory DIPs and omitted any kind of expansion bus slots, so you can't upgrade.
Since sockets are thicker than the DIPs themselves and one of the goals was for thin, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the memory isn't upgradable. As for bus slots, well there is that Apple port that has all sorts of potential, if Apple would allow it to be used. The pinouts are there, it is the OS that restricts what can and cannot be plugged into it.
anyone whose IT department reports to the CFO is already screwed. it happens. they dictate you do more with less staff, and BAM a decade later, salaries have slipped 20% and IT guys are worried about losing their jobs. innovation? not from Microsoft.
That is just not true. They may say, here is the funding available, but the CFO rarely micromanages the IT department and leaves it up to the CIO to determine how to allocate those limited resources. OTOH, if the CFO is making those decisions, then the CFO is actually part of the IT management and it is in that role, not as accounting/finance those decisions are being made, so either way, it is an IT management deceision, not an accounting office decision.
The summary implies it is accountants that keep IT from upgrading, but last time I checked, accounts don't control IT's budget, IT does. There is only so much money available, if IT decides to use it for development or new hardware instead of upgrading Office or Windows, why blame the accountants? Why blame anybody?
Office used to be called a productivity suite. Since Office 2003, have the end user productivity gains associated with new versions offset the cost to upgrade and retrain? Probably not. Maybe, IT, like the accountants are looking at ROI and finding that there is much more bang for the buck elsewhere in the system than in Office.
This kind of thing shows how worthless gun control is. The REALITY is just about anyone with desire can get the equipment and training to make an AR-15 lower, this just makes it easier. Now the idea behind gun control is to take the guns away from law abiding citizens so those guns can't get into the hands of criminials. However, criminals could always make their own guns and it is just getting easier. Therefore gun control will do nothing to prevent criminials from getting guns, or criminials making illegal guns for other criminials.
Gun control is about disarming citizens and nothing else. It has nothing to do with crime/criminals and never has.
Actually, before this, you really did need to be a skilled machinist to make an AR-15 lower. This doesn't just make it easier. This makes it possible for the other 98% of the population who aren't machinists or don't have the metal working tools at their disposal.
This also has nothing to do with gun control or disarming citizens, so let that tired argument go. This IS an example of how technology is amoral and can be used for good purposes or bad. TNT made it easier to build tunnels and roads AND it made explosive munitions. Splitting the atom allowed for nuclear power AND nuclear bombs. 3D printing allows for all sorts of small run manufacturing to occur at reduced costs AND it allows people to make fully automatic weapons.
Since in the US, firearms are protected, but 3D printers are not. I sure would hate to see a knee jerk reaction to ban the 3D printers because they can and will be misused.
Slashdot Mirror
The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
The article talks about the challenges about designing a robot for the home that is fun, useful and safe. Fun is doable. Safe is doable. But useful? Really? I'm sure that such a device could be put to use, but does that make it useful. In college, we built bookshelves using cinder blocks and lumber, but I would not hold out that cinder blocks were "useful" in the home (outside of the actual construction of the home), just because we found a way to use them.
Obviously, we have numerous things in our homes that we enjoy and want, but are they truly useful, in the real sense of the word? Put differently, what makes something useful? If I hang an ugly picture over a hole in the wall, that ugly picture serves a purpose and in that specific instance is useful, but does that mean all ugly pictures are useful?
When designing a robot for the home to be useful, what characteristics would it actually have? In other words, how would one measure whether something is useful or not objectively? Think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Instead of what is "quality," what characteristics make something "useful"?
Unless they can convince the wider Linux community to adopt some of their technologies, Canonical is basically going to end up forking the platform. If that happens, it will be a fairly major step backwards for Linux on the desktop since developers will be on the hook to adjust to supporting not just multiple packaging systems and multiple library versions, but also multiple incompatible core system API's. Essentially Ubuntu will no longer be "Linux" in any way that matters to developers and all the support for Linux out there now will either die or just switch over to being Ubuntu specific and I don't see how that benefits anyone in the community.
Forking the platform, you mean like Apple did with BSD and Google did with Linux? I think Canonical isn't interested in having a linux distribution. Just like Apple has OS X and Google has Android, Canonical plan is to have Ubuntu as the operating system.
Mark Shuttleworth while proclaiming publicly and often that he won't support the company forever and that it needs to be profitable decides in his infinite wisdom to not only fork a major toolchain piece (upstart) but to fork the GUI as well. Rather than putting his limited resourced into the community projects.
I think he has as much chance succeeding at this as he does of the aliens giving him the technology.
Oh, be nice. He just thinks he's the next Steve Jobs. The difference is that while many products Apple released were not a success, those that were all had one thing in common -- almost all were first to market and if not, dramatically improved what was already out there.
Canonical, however, doesn't even have a market for many of it's ideas let alone being first to market in the markets it is trying to break into. So, if they can't be first to market with a new concept or idea, and they want to mirror Jobs/Apple's success, then they need to dramatically improve what is already out there. So far, they have not been able to do that, and it appears that there efforts aren't even being focussed in that direction.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility.
It is highly doubtful that he can make any money in the mobile sphere, that is pretty well decided now, too. He probably stood a better chance with the desktop, particularly after Windows 8.
The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
If the goal was to compete with android, they should have gone KDE. KDE active is a much more attractive development environment and much further along than Ubuntu's mobile offerings, which don't even use the standard Unity interface.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
Study after study shows that Unity does not work well on a tablet/touch device. It only looks like it should work, but all of the apps are mouse centric. The problem for Canonical going mobile is that most of the apps in their repositories, which is a large selling point (even if free), won't work on mobile. So from the very start, they will be competing with Apple and Android who have a huge head start and even Microsoft who while a very distant third is lightyears ahead of Canonical.
As I said earlier, they should have gone Plasma Active. If all of the resources that they dumped into Unity and now their mobile offerings had been used to further that project, they would have been to market earlier and had apps ready to deploy. Instead they chose to go their own way, which is their right, but not necessarily the wisest business decision as even Microsoft is late to the game.
I'm guessing that they're running an elaborate experiment to see just what one has to do to ruin a distro thoroughly and completely. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense.
No, they just think they are the next Apple and people will accept whatever they come out with. Unfortunately for them, Mark isn't Steve.
If you are going to need years of hovering for this to work and you are going to have to reach the asteroid while it is still years away, so you have time to launch a rocket and travel to it in time to make a difference, That means, first you are going to have to be able to detect said asteroid while many decades away, if not possibly a century or more.
Now, lets say there is an asteroid detected early enough that this might work and that it is relatively small enough where it would make a difference, say the size of a football stadium. Assuming it is mainly solid rock and iron, exactly how much fuel is going to be needed to hover long enough to make a difference. Then once that is known, how much fuel is it going to take to transport the hovering fuel there in a timely fashion. And finally, how much to get it out of earth's gravity well. Sounds like one pretty damn big rocket is going to be needed, just to transport the fuel.
Of course, if it works and it would safe earth, that would be worth it. OTOH, we still have to get past being able to detect it far enough away where there would be time to get there and do all of this hovering.
Now, on the other hand, instead of a football stadium, the asteroid is the size of a volkswagen (which would be far more feasible to divert in this manner), and it is on the right trajectory where it will hit the earth's atmosphere at a steep enough angle that it will penetrate it instead of glancing off, we will never know in time to do anything about it, because at that size, it won't be detected until it is too close to alter the trajectory.
You are hovering nearby so your gravity pulls the rock toward you. You fire your retro rockets to push yourself away from the rock, in the process pushing the rock away from you, back towards it's original destination.
Isn't a more likely scenario to be you are hovering nearby so the gravity of the larger asteroid pulls your rocket towards the asteroid. You fire your rockets to push yourself away from the asteroid while the asteroid continues on its merry way.
Otherwise, when the various lunar lander crafts launched from the moon, the moon would have been pushed further away and that didn't seem to happen, at least not that could be measured.
The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.'
That's because we don't actually read what Darwin wrote about man. To paraphrase him, he said, humans were inferior in most ways to the predatory animals in their environment. Humans, weren't the fastest, we weren't the strongest, we didn't have the longest fangs or claws. In every way, we were inferior in some major aspect to the other predators. He goes on to say, however, that what made humans survive and dominate is their innate ability to cooperate. Above all the other animal species, the ability for humans to cooperate with each other outweighs the deficits in our other competitive traits.
For Darwin, what made humans the fittest at survival was our ability to cooperate with each other. It was others who took the survival of the fittest and twist it into what we talk about today with it. Cooperation is not unique among humans, it just reaches its highest expression.
>Sometimes I think that mankind deserves to become extinct.
You are cordially invited to lead the way.
I think this is an interesting discovery, myself.
Technically, it isn't a discovery at all. They have been grafting body parts on tadpoles for a long time. The process is well documented. This may be the first time with an eye, but then again, until it is reproduced in another lab, it is just a report. Even if reproduced, it still wouldn't be a discovery, any more than building Hoover Dam was a discovery because nobody else had done it before.
Where the hell is the human medical technology?
I don't know about you, but I'd just assume pass on grafting eyeballs onto my bum TYVM.
Hopefully, they grafted eyelids, too, otherwise, the view while taking a dump would be enought to jab a pencil in that third eye.
Not sure why you were modded down for a troll. All one has to do is look at the MTBF for SSDs versus magnetic media to see that SSDs are less reliable. That is probably why, SSDs are mainly used where speed or low power are the driving factors and not long term reliability.
Magnetic media can compete with SSDs if you have a large enough cache. However, power consumption for magnetic media will always be worse than an SSD.
Again, not sure why you were modded down, because technically, you are correct in what you say, even if not politically so.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.
The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.
The fact that "any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store mission critical data on SSDs kind of proves his point in that they are not as reliable as magnetic media. They are definitely faster, definitely lower power, but definitely a shorter MTBF.
It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.
We actually ran those back in the day. 1GB SCSI disks with 1GB memory on top of them. Expensive as fuck, but boy would they scream.
Back in the day they were expensive, but today, they aren't or wouldn't be and they would probably still outperform SSDs which are slower on writes than volatile memory. That said, SSDs would do much better on power consumption, although, with a big enough cache, you could actually spin down your drives and only occasionally bring them up for writes, or run them at a lower speed than even 5400rpm.
SSDs have their place, but I'm not sure high volume, high availability storage that is constantly updating is the place for them. Wear leveling has improved tremendously, but it still only postpones the inevitable.
That new port though, the lightning one seems to be physically restricted in that it can't supply the bandwidth for uncompressed 1080p video.
Maybe that is so everybody will upgrade when lightning 2 is released?!
There would be no gently pulling involved as the same distructive force that would be applied if such an astral body hit the earth would be applied hitting the net.
No, it wouldn't. Take a hammer. drop a feather. While the feather is falling, hit it with the hammer. Oh my, that feather was destroyed by the sheer might of the hammer. Now, take the feather and put it on the ground (preferably on a rock). Hit it with the hammer.
See the difference now? The "desreuctive force" of the astral body can't exceed the destructive force of a light net gently settling on the surface. Though if it doesn't work and it hits the earth anyway, yes, the net will be destroyed.
But there is not light net gently settling on the surface, unless you are going to try and catch the asteroid from the back side, which of course won't do you any good. As long as you are approaching the asteroid from the front or some angle off center from the front, you have to deal with the inertia of the asteroid against your net.
I guess it would be possible to land on the asteroid and somehow deploy your net running around the surface and at some point on the back side launch rockets in the opposit direction, but at that point, the rockets and cords attached to the net have to be able to deal with the inertia of the moving asteroid.
Put it this way, prior to launching the shuttle, it was bolted to the pad, to allow it to build up thrust. If your methodolgy worked, everytime they launched the shuttle, the earth would have been nudged out of it's normal orbit. It simply doesn't work that way because there is too much mass involved (earth) versus the thrust of the rocket (shuttle). Catching an asteroid hurtling toward the earth in space would not be any different, other than whatever you are catching it with has to be able to withstand the mass and inertia or at a minimum get drug along for the ride.
You don't control a net. You spread a mesh in front of an object, and it snags in it. You have a single tether, and it doesn't matter how it spins. When you start gently pulling, it will waste a good bit of energy stabilizing the whole thing. It's inherently stable - the only issue is if our materials science is enough to support getting to that stable point.
What exactly would such a mesh be made out of that could withstand the impact from how ever many metric tonnes of material traveling at however many thousands of meters per second? There would be no gently pulling involved as the same distructive force that would be applied if such an astral body hit the earth would be applied hitting the net.
I think you may need to consider feasibility when coming up with your plans. It's a lot easier to just fly somewhere and hover than to land, or to make and deploy a gigantic asteroid net.
That may be true, but while hovering, you are going to have to exert enough gravitational pull to offset the inertia that is already in place. While it is true that all bodies exert gravitional forces upon each other, in practice, there has to be enough force to actually do something. When we landed men on the moon, the gravitational forces between earth and the moon were altered, but not enough to change their positions in space relative to each other. Likewise, a rocket, unless it contains extreme mass, is unlikely to change the trajectory of an asteroid or comet because of the combination of the gravitational forces and the inertia. And, if said rocket does contain enough mass to effect this change, then how in the hell are we going to get it there in the first place?
I agree, he's great for explaining stupid shit to proles, but as far as a professional scientist goes he has very little credibility in my book.
It's scientists like him that are personable and able to "explain stupid shit to proles" that help keep people interested in science and help make sure the scientists in your "credibility book" get enough funding from the proles to do their work.
There are two side to every coin. Yes, he may keep people interested, but by so over simplifying what is the real problem he gives the false sense that this could really work. So, by being personable and getting the funing from the proles, he is actually taking funding away from potential solutions that have a much higher probability of being successful.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.
The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.
Being responsible for many terabytes of corporate data, I can tell you that SSDs have a much higher failure rate for us than does magnetic media. The tradeoff for that, however, is much lower power consumption and higher throughput. However, hybrid devices seem to couple the worst of both devices instead of the best. It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.
Our backup regime with SSDs is much more rigid than with old fashioned dasd. And, that includes not storing misison critical data on single drives or in single locations. Murphy will always win, but with SSDs, the MTBF is more in his favor than magnetic storage, at least in our companies experience.
People forget that when the 10" iPad came out, the main competition was from the 10" netbook. How would a 7" iPad had faired against that? There were tablets of various sizes prior to the iPad, but they weren't as popular as the netbooks were. People were already using the 10" form factor in their netbooks. Apple improved upon it by going beyond 1024x600 and ditching the keyboard. At the time a 7" iPad would probably had been viewed as an oversized iPod Touch.
It may turn out that the 7" form factor is what the market settles on, but the question is whether or not there would have been a market to settle on if there wasn't the 10" iPad, first?
ps. I am no Apple fanboy, just a realist.
16KB storage: Apple is really screwing with the customer now.
The worst part is that instead of using sockets like in the Apple II, for the iPad they soldered down the memory DIPs and omitted any kind of expansion bus slots, so you can't upgrade.
Since sockets are thicker than the DIPs themselves and one of the goals was for thin, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the memory isn't upgradable. As for bus slots, well there is that Apple port that has all sorts of potential, if Apple would allow it to be used. The pinouts are there, it is the OS that restricts what can and cannot be plugged into it.
anyone whose IT department reports to the CFO is already screwed. it happens. they dictate you do more with less staff, and BAM a decade later, salaries have slipped 20% and IT guys are worried about losing their jobs. innovation? not from Microsoft.
That is just not true. They may say, here is the funding available, but the CFO rarely micromanages the IT department and leaves it up to the CIO to determine how to allocate those limited resources. OTOH, if the CFO is making those decisions, then the CFO is actually part of the IT management and it is in that role, not as accounting/finance those decisions are being made, so either way, it is an IT management deceision, not an accounting office decision.
The summary implies it is accountants that keep IT from upgrading, but last time I checked, accounts don't control IT's budget, IT does. There is only so much money available, if IT decides to use it for development or new hardware instead of upgrading Office or Windows, why blame the accountants? Why blame anybody?
Office used to be called a productivity suite. Since Office 2003, have the end user productivity gains associated with new versions offset the cost to upgrade and retrain? Probably not. Maybe, IT, like the accountants are looking at ROI and finding that there is much more bang for the buck elsewhere in the system than in Office.
Just a thought.
This kind of thing shows how worthless gun control is. The REALITY is just about anyone with desire can get the equipment and training to make an AR-15 lower, this just makes it easier. Now the idea behind gun control is to take the guns away from law abiding citizens so those guns can't get into the hands of criminials. However, criminals could always make their own guns and it is just getting easier. Therefore gun control will do nothing to prevent criminials from getting guns, or criminials making illegal guns for other criminials.
Gun control is about disarming citizens and nothing else. It has nothing to do with crime/criminals and never has.
Actually, before this, you really did need to be a skilled machinist to make an AR-15 lower. This doesn't just make it easier. This makes it possible for the other 98% of the population who aren't machinists or don't have the metal working tools at their disposal.
This also has nothing to do with gun control or disarming citizens, so let that tired argument go. This IS an example of how technology is amoral and can be used for good purposes or bad. TNT made it easier to build tunnels and roads AND it made explosive munitions. Splitting the atom allowed for nuclear power AND nuclear bombs. 3D printing allows for all sorts of small run manufacturing to occur at reduced costs AND it allows people to make fully automatic weapons.
Since in the US, firearms are protected, but 3D printers are not. I sure would hate to see a knee jerk reaction to ban the 3D printers because they can and will be misused.