If there was a big market for cars that can only drive 100 miles, auto manufacturers would be reducing the size of their gas tanks to reduce weight and gain 0.25mpg.
Since they're not doing that, clearly it's not a market big enough to care about.
No one has a gasoline pipeline to their house to constantly refill a 100 mile range gas tank, but many homes can conveniently recharge an electric car.
x86 is probably going the same way as Sparc. x86 is powerful but too powerful to be used on mobile devices and doesn't scale very well on desktops when it comes to parallel processing.
Intel continues to work on reducing power consumption of x86 while retaining performance.
ARM continues to work on increasing performance while retaining low power consumption.
I'm hoping for everybody to win.
The web is hardly usable anymore. Even the simplest web sites are slow as molasses, thanks to heaps of "active" content alongside the actual information. Now you're going to bestow your own runtime on us? Now that we've finally ditched Java and Flash?
JavaScript and the DOM is a runtime that has replaced Java applets (almost completely) and Flash (mostly). There's room for improvement in performance.The problem with asm.js is that it's a Mozilla thing, even though asm.js runs quite well on Chrome. The problem with Dart is that it's a Google thing, even though it can be transpiled to JavaScript.
WebAssembly has all four of the key players involved (Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft). Maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to write code in a language that suits the task and have it run fast in any browser. I'm crossing my fingers but definitely not holding my breath
Even if the world rallied around the cause instantly and everyone didn't panic (HUGE ifs), do we have the technology to alter the course of a mile wide asteroid in 2 months?
No, but I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy, at the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.
Is the Maker Bot water-soluble filament safe to digest? I'd google it to find out, but I prefer the human contact of a question answered.
I had the same question and I don't mind googling:
It appears water-soluble filament is poly vinyl alcohol, which is reasonably safe to ingest in small amounts. From the linked abstract: " A critical evaluation of the existing information on PVA supports its safety for use as a coating agent for pharmaceutical and dietary supplement products."
This phone is basically a third of an inch thick. Given that one holds the phone while it's in use by that thin edge, this is getting a little ridiculous. Give me a thicker phone with a much bigger battery. My pockets can handle it, I assure you, and with more edge to hold on to I'm much les likely to drop the damn thing by accident, and they could even build the phone more durably to the point I might not need to buy a third-party case either.
I have a G3 and the thin, slick edge is actually more of a problem for me than battery life. A thicker, textured edge and better battery life would be great improvements and would cost very little.
How hard is it to tell them, either end your nuclear program or we will?
47 minutes after Iran announces that they have a nuclear weapon a large mushroom cloud over Tehran will announce the cancelation of said nuclear program.
Send that message.
anything past that is a waste of time.
Hopefully you are being facetious, otherwise what kind of evil bastard are you? Willing to slaughter millions of people to "send that message".
The mere presence of Iran at the bargaining table suggests that sanctions were working. Ratchet up the sanctions.
To achieve what, exactly? Play out the scenario for us.
Agreed. There are limits to harshness of sanctions. The ideas that sanctions could make the Iranian leadership give up all nuclear aspirations or make the Iranian masses rise up against the theocracy are both ridiculous. Harsher sanctions, if they are even possible, might make Iran try even harder to complete a nuclear weapon. A rapprochement between the US and Iran gives a chance, however slight, of Iran realizing that they don't need one.
There's no reason to believe that Iran would invite destruction by doing a first strike.
I tend to consider the statement by Iran's minister of defense that the destruction of Israel is a non-negotiable point as a reason. Reasonable people can argue on how good a reason, but holding to the theory that no reason exists is, in fact, delusional, when national leadership of the country has openly declared its intent to annihilate another country.
You place too much weight on rhetorical statements. While Israel neither confirms nor denies that it has nuclear weapons, it is widely believed to possess a substantial arsenal. It is highly doubtful that Iran could eliminate Israel's ability to counterattack.
But why WOULD the U.S. send a nuclear strike back, against cities full of innocent people.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki each had plenty of innocent people, why do you think the US would be too scrupulous to respond in kind to an Iranian first strike? After 9/11, many ordinarily rational people were ready to support the nuclear annihilation of millions in response to the murder of thousands.
Personally I am not concerned; I don't think that Iran will commit a first strike. (They will get nuclear weapons, eventually.) I reject the idea that the Iranian leaders are not rational enough to be deterred by the threat of a nuclear response.
well, it is a chamber.. its being filled with gas, what else would you call it???
The phrase "the gas chamber" has the connotation "hydrogen cyanide poisoning", so with respect to nitrogen asphyxiation it is misleading in spite of being accurate.
BTW, I never see any reports on the relatively short lifespan of PV cell panels. They lose their effectiveness largely after 5 years of exposure.
According to this one, most manufacturers warrant that their panels will still produce at least 80% of their rated power after 25 years. Your statement about largely losing effectiveness in 5 years is misinformed at best.
Can we safely assume, the treaty favors businessmen of first-world countries who will use public resources to mine the minerals but keep the profits to themselves?
I'm sure we can trust the government to prevent such abuses.
I didn't post the link earlier, but the International Seabed Authority already exists to regulate mining of the seabed, including in international waters. I expect lunar and asteroid mining to fall under a similar authority. (Assuming either ever becomes practical.)
I thought at one point in time, it was agreed on that no single nation "owned" the moon. Therefore, what happens if someone goes up there for a commercial project and sells material gathered there? Is it "first come, first to profit"?
Article II: "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Article I says, in part, "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law". I would look to maritime law regarding resources in international waters as a basis for how lunar resources might be handled.
Article VI says, in part, "States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty." Since this is a US company they will need authorization from and supervision by the federal government.
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Without Mozilla the Microsoft/Google/Apple triumvirate will control all browser standards. I think Mozilla brings a different perspective that would be missed. It would be nice if Firefox OS gained enough traction to make a similar difference in mobile but the chance of that happening seems slim.
But I've certainly had cases where I needed to copy and paste a few lines of code maybe even 100 times and then tweak each instance to put in the data values or validations I want.
This leads to bugs where a tweak gets missed in one of the copies (copy, paste, do tweak 1, interruption!, forget tweak 2). It also causes maintenance problems when the person coding a bug fix doesn't know there are a bunch of other places that need to be fixed.
But as we move to smaller processes that require less electricity to function, perhaps heat dissipation will become a none issue.
The reduction of power consumption (and hence heat production, and the need to dissipate the heat) along with feature size is called Dennard scaling. As feature size has fallen it has not been possible to keep lowering the voltage and current proportionally.
But give it a few years, maybe 5, and something in a similar form factor will be much more affordable and will still be able to perform the role of a traditional desktop.
My phone has 3GB of RAM, a quad-core 2GHz CPU, and 96GB of storage, which would have been a pretty sweet desktop once upon a time.
Node is fast supposedly because it uses low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous calls, instead of threading. So if that is such a fast paradigm, why don't we build a low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous Java or Python or C# engine? Eg: Node.java, Node.cs, and Node.py?
There is no reason not to build a single-threaded, asynchronous web server in the language of your choice. I'd be surprised if there aren't a bunch of them out there by now.
Node has the advantage of using the same language for both client and server side code. Since JavaScript is the de facto standard for in-browser code, any other language pretty much requires a translation step.
Node also has a robust community and a lot of framework and library packages.
Slashdot Mirror
If there was a big market for cars that can only drive 100 miles, auto manufacturers would be reducing the size of their gas tanks to reduce weight and gain 0.25mpg.
Since they're not doing that, clearly it's not a market big enough to care about.
No one has a gasoline pipeline to their house to constantly refill a 100 mile range gas tank, but many homes can conveniently recharge an electric car.
x86 is probably going the same way as Sparc. x86 is powerful but too powerful to be used on mobile devices and doesn't scale very well on desktops when it comes to parallel processing.
Intel continues to work on reducing power consumption of x86 while retaining performance.
ARM continues to work on increasing performance while retaining low power consumption.
I'm hoping for everybody to win.
You are more likely to get struck by lightning than shot by a gun.
NOAA gives an average of 33 lightning deaths and 297 injuries per year in the US for the years 2004-2013.
GunPolicy.org gives a minimum of 11,068 gun homicides and 64,389 non-fatal gun injuries in any one year over the same time span.
Statistically, a random person in the US is much more likely to be killed or injured by gunfire than struck by lightning.
The web is hardly usable anymore. Even the simplest web sites are slow as molasses, thanks to heaps of "active" content alongside the actual information. Now you're going to bestow your own runtime on us? Now that we've finally ditched Java and Flash?
JavaScript and the DOM is a runtime that has replaced Java applets (almost completely) and Flash (mostly). There's room for improvement in performance.The problem with asm.js is that it's a Mozilla thing, even though asm.js runs quite well on Chrome. The problem with Dart is that it's a Google thing, even though it can be transpiled to JavaScript.
WebAssembly has all four of the key players involved (Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft). Maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to write code in a language that suits the task and have it run fast in any browser. I'm crossing my fingers but definitely not holding my breath
Even if the world rallied around the cause instantly and everyone didn't panic (HUGE ifs), do we have the technology to alter the course of a mile wide asteroid in 2 months?
No, but I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy, at the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.
I C what you did there.
440 Hz is A, not C, AC.
What decent Android phone has a user-replacable battery and expandable memory?
LG G3 and G4.
Posting to undo incorrect mod.
Is the Maker Bot water-soluble filament safe to digest? I'd google it to find out, but I prefer the human contact of a question answered.
I had the same question and I don't mind googling: It appears water-soluble filament is poly vinyl alcohol, which is reasonably safe to ingest in small amounts. From the linked abstract: " A critical evaluation of the existing information on PVA supports its safety for use as a coating agent for pharmaceutical and dietary supplement products."
For the use case you have set forth, an Android stick would be a better deal.
If you crack one open though, how easy would it be to wire up additional hardware? The CHIP has 8 GPIOs, SPI, TWI, and UART on headers.
What about using one to create a portable device? The CHIP has a battery power and charging circuit already on board.
OS's that aren't as full featured.
The CHIP runs Debian.
At least one manufacturer is still making phones with replaceable batteries and a Micro SD slot. I wish they would make a water-resistant version.
This phone is basically a third of an inch thick. Given that one holds the phone while it's in use by that thin edge, this is getting a little ridiculous. Give me a thicker phone with a much bigger battery. My pockets can handle it, I assure you, and with more edge to hold on to I'm much les likely to drop the damn thing by accident, and they could even build the phone more durably to the point I might not need to buy a third-party case either.
I have a G3 and the thin, slick edge is actually more of a problem for me than battery life. A thicker, textured edge and better battery life would be great improvements and would cost very little.
How hard is it to tell them, either end your nuclear program or we will?
47 minutes after Iran announces that they have a nuclear weapon a large mushroom cloud over Tehran will announce the cancelation of said nuclear program.
Send that message.
anything past that is a waste of time.
Hopefully you are being facetious, otherwise what kind of evil bastard are you? Willing to slaughter millions of people to "send that message".
To achieve what, exactly? Play out the scenario for us.
Agreed. There are limits to harshness of sanctions. The ideas that sanctions could make the Iranian leadership give up all nuclear aspirations or make the Iranian masses rise up against the theocracy are both ridiculous. Harsher sanctions, if they are even possible, might make Iran try even harder to complete a nuclear weapon. A rapprochement between the US and Iran gives a chance, however slight, of Iran realizing that they don't need one.
There's no reason to believe that Iran would invite destruction by doing a first strike.
I tend to consider the statement by Iran's minister of defense that the destruction of Israel is a non-negotiable point as a reason. Reasonable people can argue on how good a reason, but holding to the theory that no reason exists is, in fact, delusional, when national leadership of the country has openly declared its intent to annihilate another country.
You place too much weight on rhetorical statements. While Israel neither confirms nor denies that it has nuclear weapons, it is widely believed to possess a substantial arsenal. It is highly doubtful that Iran could eliminate Israel's ability to counterattack.
But why WOULD the U.S. send a nuclear strike back, against cities full of innocent people.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki each had plenty of innocent people, why do you think the US would be too scrupulous to respond in kind to an Iranian first strike? After 9/11, many ordinarily rational people were ready to support the nuclear annihilation of millions in response to the murder of thousands.
Personally I am not concerned; I don't think that Iran will commit a first strike. (They will get nuclear weapons, eventually.) I reject the idea that the Iranian leaders are not rational enough to be deterred by the threat of a nuclear response.
well, it is a chamber.. its being filled with gas, what else would you call it???
The phrase "the gas chamber" has the connotation "hydrogen cyanide poisoning", so with respect to nitrogen asphyxiation it is misleading in spite of being accurate.
BTW, I never see any reports on the relatively short lifespan of PV cell panels. They lose their effectiveness largely after 5 years of exposure.
According to this one, most manufacturers warrant that their panels will still produce at least 80% of their rated power after 25 years. Your statement about largely losing effectiveness in 5 years is misinformed at best.
Can we safely assume, the treaty favors businessmen of first-world countries who will use public resources to mine the minerals but keep the profits to themselves?
I'm sure we can trust the government to prevent such abuses.
I didn't post the link earlier, but the International Seabed Authority already exists to regulate mining of the seabed, including in international waters. I expect lunar and asteroid mining to fall under a similar authority. (Assuming either ever becomes practical.)
I thought at one point in time, it was agreed on that no single nation "owned" the moon. Therefore, what happens if someone goes up there for a commercial project and sells material gathered there? Is it "first come, first to profit"?
The Outer Space Treaty
Article II: "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Article I says, in part, "Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law". I would look to maritime law regarding resources in international waters as a basis for how lunar resources might be handled.
Article VI says, in part, "States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty." Since this is a US company they will need authorization from and supervision by the federal government.
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone? What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Without Mozilla the Microsoft/Google/Apple triumvirate will control all browser standards. I think Mozilla brings a different perspective that would be missed. It would be nice if Firefox OS gained enough traction to make a similar difference in mobile but the chance of that happening seems slim.
But I've certainly had cases where I needed to copy and paste a few lines of code maybe even 100 times and then tweak each instance to put in the data values or validations I want.
This leads to bugs where a tweak gets missed in one of the copies (copy, paste, do tweak 1, interruption!, forget tweak 2). It also causes maintenance problems when the person coding a bug fix doesn't know there are a bunch of other places that need to be fixed.
But as we move to smaller processes that require less electricity to function, perhaps heat dissipation will become a none issue.
The reduction of power consumption (and hence heat production, and the need to dissipate the heat) along with feature size is called Dennard scaling. As feature size has fallen it has not been possible to keep lowering the voltage and current proportionally.
But give it a few years, maybe 5, and something in a similar form factor will be much more affordable and will still be able to perform the role of a traditional desktop.
My phone has 3GB of RAM, a quad-core 2GHz CPU, and 96GB of storage, which would have been a pretty sweet desktop once upon a time.
Node is fast supposedly because it uses low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous calls, instead of threading. So if that is such a fast paradigm, why don't we build a low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous Java or Python or C# engine? Eg: Node.java, Node.cs, and Node.py?
There is no reason not to build a single-threaded, asynchronous web server in the language of your choice. I'd be surprised if there aren't a bunch of them out there by now.
Node has the advantage of using the same language for both client and server side code. Since JavaScript is the de facto standard for in-browser code, any other language pretty much requires a translation step.
Node also has a robust community and a lot of framework and library packages.
Java is actually mostly back-end these days, while JavaScript is decidedly browser-only, so the whole comparison is nonsense.
Have you not heard of Node.js? It is server-side JavaScript, built around Google's V8 execution engine.