As far as I can tell, unless you use zinc carbonate as your ore, the only part of the process that uses carbon and releases CO2 is the reduction of zinc oxide to zinc. Since this reactor uses zinc oxide, that part seems to be unnecessary. In fact, this reactor performs exactly that reduction using heat from the Sun.
Even if you used zinc carbonate as your ore, I expect that the amount of CO2 released would be much lower than when obtaining energy by directly burning carbon. It seems that the device reclaims most of the zinc it uses.
Forget sailing. It looks like it could be a great tool for figuring out movement of allergens such as pollen through the air, for studying allergy outbreaks.
The only thing that will save more lives is raising the price of dang gas to $80 a dang gallon. Then all them dang drivers with their dang newfangled cars will get of the road, and it will be safe to walk again. Then the most common traffic related injury will be a drunk falling on his face on the dang sidewalk. Maybe some dang idiot will then develop dang airbags for sidewalks.
Exactly, it works, straight out of the box, and it does exactly what I need it to do.
The reasons I run linux instead of windows on my laptop are pretty much the same today as they were 10 years ago, although the emphasis shifted a bit.
1) Availability of software. I use number of programs that 10 years ago were simply not available for windows. Almost all of them were ported since, but there is still a huge differenece. On linux, I can install almost all of them from central repositories, while on windows, I have to go to 20 different websites, download 20 different installers, run all of them, then spend few days configuring things before I can get any work done. My last work laptop was windows (when I got it, I did not think about asking if I can put linux on it, actually I did not think the IT guys would agree to it, so I used windows. With my new laptop, I asked, and to my surprise they said sure, why not) and I could get my work done, but it took me several days just to get things set up, and even after that it was constant pain.
2) Software integration. On linux, all the software I use is designed to work together, and in a consistent way, or it can easily be made to cooperate. On windows, each program behaves in its own way (mostly because they were all ported to windows by different people, and because the people doing the porting could not count on the other software being installed, or being installed in a known location). On linux, when I save some data, I know where the file is. I know where to look for config files for any application I use. On windows, I have to constatly hunt for things. I can install a decent shell on windows, but most application will not be able to work with it, and will insist on starting windows console every time they need a shell access. Some application will use forward slashes as path separators, some backslashes, some double backslashes, with no obvious rhyme or reason. On linux, things just work, on windows, after spending hours configuring things, I get a semi functional working environment.
3) The user interface. Again, linux just works. On windows, I can install some additional software to get multiple virtual desktops and a decent command line, but it doesn't always work, it does not work with all aplications, and I need to go to some website to find the software, download it and install it, and keep track of updates. On linux, all that stuff works out of the box. Cutting and pasting on windows just simply drives me nuts, it does not seem to have any logic behind it, and if there is some, it is unnecesarily complicated. On linux, I do not get dialog boxes that open other dialog boxes that will somewhat prevent the original dialog box from being moved to a different part of the screen.
I could go on, but this whole thing is getting long, and anyway, it is rather pointless. Depending on the nature of our work, and on our work habits, we use different operating systems which is perfectly fine as long as data are kept in well defined open formats and networking and data exchange protocols are open. The problems start when someone uses propriatary file formats and when someone pushes their platform onto people who simply have no use for it.
The problem is that it does not make Russia mad. The problem is that it makes Russia, or at least some Russians, very happy. Russian leaders have been spinning it as an attack on Russia by the evil west. Russian military have been using it as an excuse to ramp up military spending. And Russian defense industry uses it to justify producing more and more nukes and conventional weapons. They know very well that we are not going to nuke them, and that any talk about nuclear balance is really just a nonsense. They do not care whether the system works or not. It simply gives them a convenient excuse for bringing forward whatever their domestic agenda is.
I don't understand, what is all this fuss about release schedules? Last year I went through I don't know how many versions of firefox, and I almost didn't notice. If it wasn't for the window popping up every once a while when starting firefox that informs me that it is checking addon compatibility, I would have no idea it was upgraded.
Actually, you are wrong. Just because someone hates teaching does not mean they cannot teach. A motivated student interested in the topic could learn much more from a real expert that hates to teach than from an excellent teacher that does not know the subject as well.
For me, publishing an observation that differs from an accepted theory is not a negative result. A negative result would be: I tried to solve this and this, I spent two years banging my head against the wall, tried this method and that method, and I just simply completely failed to come up with anything useful at all.
But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.
Problem with that is that it will discourage people from tackling difficult problems. Say that a problem I am interested in has not been solved in over 50 years, most of the partial results that could be easily obtained has olready been done, and I think I have an idea that may give me some new insight and potentially lead to a solution. It would be great if I could solve it. On the other hand, the problem is obviously very hard, leading experts in the field has been trying to crack it for a long time, without a complete result. I may spend next 5 years trying only to discover that I simply cannot make it work. In the meantime, someone else will be solving one easy problem after another, putting out paper after paper.
If you can prove that the scheduling algorithm is less effective, that's not a negative result. If you cannot prove it, it may just mean that the algorithm in fact isn't less effective, you were just doing something wrong. Someone else could make it work with a fresh approach. It is true that the information about what you tried and how could be useful to somebody, but except in some very special circumstances, I don't think it would be enough for a separate paper. How would you even peer review something like that?
Exactly. In fact, actually proving that a particular method cannot work in certain situation is not a negative result. A negative result, at least in mathematics, would be "I tried this and I tried that and I think it should work but I wasn't able to make it work". There isn't really even an established format for publishing something like that. It may be suitable for a conference talk, in the case the topic is very interesting and the falure is generally unexpected and the difficulties surparising, or it may be attached as a note to an article which has number of positive results, something like "we also believe that a similar method could be used to extend this result to the case when..., but so far we were not able to prove it". I have never seen an article where somebody would basically write "I tried this and it didn't work".
But I also suspect this does not apply to something like a word processor document, where you likely use Word or something similar?
Actually, I use Vim editor to enter LaTeX or ConTeXt code for all my documents. I find Word clunky and hard to use, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are even worse.
A good references and media manager that would work with a variety of mark up languages would be a nice thing to have, though. I personally would prefer something keyboard driven over dragging things with mouse, but so far I have not find either.
And all such edits would be handled much easier via a WYSWIG editor.
YMMV, but I find that editing structured documents is much faster using plain text, than a WYSIWYG editor. That is if the mark up language is not idiotically verbose, like XML.
Don't waste time doing what a computer can do better than you.
Exactly! Why should I waste time formatting the document, when the computer will easily do it for me. I just type what I want to say, and let the computer place it on the screen.
If that is really a problem, why don't you make an editor shortcut that will automatically expand frameCounter++ to frameCounter = frameCounter + 1? Who still types out every little piece of repetitive code these days?
If I waited till the class is over and _then_ started to write down the notes based on what I recall, I probably can recall 15% to 20% of the total thing.
Sure, but then you would actually recall that stuff, not only when taking the notes, but also on the exam, next semester in the subsequent class, in the future on the job, etc. With your current system, if you cannot recall more than 15 - 20% right after the lecture, how much will you recall later on?
...physical books don't crash or get data corruption...
I simply cannot agree with that, in light of one particular incident that happened when I was in fourth grade. On the way from school, with bunch of friends, we happened to pass a nice sledding hill. Since we had no sleds with us, we improvised and used our school bags as sleds. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that in addition to my textbooks, I also had a large bottle of white glue in the bag, for some sort of school project. I don't know if what happened to the books could be described as crashing, but it certainly was a major data corruption. Of course, I am not even trying to imagine what would happen these days if I had an ebook reader or an ipad in that backpack.
Actually, at least in the case of college textbook, this is really largely irrelevant. It is the professor who selects the textbook, and, hopefully, she knows her subject well enough to be able to distinguish good books from crap.
C'est possible. People will be people, and their random personality quirks will be, well, random. I personally never experienced that, but as they say, YMMV.
Traditionally, people wrote free software that they themselves found useful. A developer would decide he or she does not like any existing html editors, so they would write a new one. They would release it as free software, since they were not interested in marketing it, and getting feedback and code contributions from users was more valuable for them than getting money for the product. That's how what you call OSS community works. If a developer is telling you "you don't need a wysiwyg editor", what they are really saying is "I don't need a wysiwyg editor, I believe you don't either, but if you think otherwise, go and write one." They are not being arrogant, they are trying to be helpful. You are the arrogant one, for thinking everybody has to write the software you find useful, and give it to you for free.
To be fair, the Knuth's original compiler could produce pretty amazing things. It had neither all the cool microtypography features pdftex has, nor the font selection possibilities of luatex or xetex, but it was quite capable. Lamport just simply did not care about the way his documents looked. I actually remember when all the guys in our physics department started switching over to LaTeX and constantly talked about it, most of our reaction was like: "that's a pretty neat macro package, but boy does it look ugly!"
Anyway, this whole discussion brought back some fond memories of the mid 90's great and endless "HTML standards vs. artistic design" usenet debates.
First, that may be true about technical documentation, a science article and so on. In a work of literature, you want the design to go with the text. It is part of it, and although you can separate it, you will be missing something that number of people consider very important. While I agree that a reader should be, if it is technologically possible, to voluntarily deprive himself or herself of this dimension of the work, if they prefer to do so for some reason, the problem is that with the current ebook readers, it is extremely hard to include this aspect of a book for those who want it.
Even if we accepted what you are saying as true, and decided that the presentation should be completely separated from the content, and entirely up to the reader, the sad facts is that most (all, as far as I can tell) portable ebook readers are currently incapable to display a typical ebook in such a way that it looks good, regardless whether the actual design is a part of the book or part of the reader.
No, it cant. But good software at least has decent defaults that were set by someone that knows his/her stuff.
Which, according to most typographers I talked about it to, is not the case with LaTeX. I mean I am sure Lamport knew his stuff, that just his stuff was physics, not typography and design. Besides, defaults for physics journal articles will not necessarily be the same as defaults for a book of literature.
The problem with using LaTeX for ebook formats is that the main strengths of LaTeX are in its line breaking algorithm, kerning and generally building paragraphs. Once you start reflowing paragraphs, all that goes away.
I think it actually sort of show what the problem is. Most ebook readers that IO had seen had fairly small screen with somewhat poor resolution, with font support anywhere between difficult to horrible. Designing and programming something that reflows easily upon zoom, can be easily navigated, and looks good, must be hard.
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As far as I can tell, unless you use zinc carbonate as your ore, the only part of the process that uses carbon and releases CO2 is the reduction of zinc oxide to zinc. Since this reactor uses zinc oxide, that part seems to be unnecessary. In fact, this reactor performs exactly that reduction using heat from the Sun.
Even if you used zinc carbonate as your ore, I expect that the amount of CO2 released would be much lower than when obtaining energy by directly burning carbon. It seems that the device reclaims most of the zinc it uses.
Forget sailing. It looks like it could be a great tool for figuring out movement of allergens such as pollen through the air, for studying allergy outbreaks.
The only thing that will save more lives is raising the price of dang gas to $80 a dang gallon. Then all them dang drivers with their dang newfangled cars will get of the road, and it will be safe to walk again. Then the most common traffic related injury will be a drunk falling on his face on the dang sidewalk. Maybe some dang idiot will then develop dang airbags for sidewalks.
Exactly, it works, straight out of the box, and it does exactly what I need it to do.
The reasons I run linux instead of windows on my laptop are pretty much the same today as they were 10 years ago, although the emphasis shifted a bit.
1) Availability of software. I use number of programs that 10 years ago were simply not available for windows. Almost all of them were ported since, but there is still a huge differenece. On linux, I can install almost all of them from central repositories, while on windows, I have to go to 20 different websites, download 20 different installers, run all of them, then spend few days configuring things before I can get any work done. My last work laptop was windows (when I got it, I did not think about asking if I can put linux on it, actually I did not think the IT guys would agree to it, so I used windows. With my new laptop, I asked, and to my surprise they said sure, why not) and I could get my work done, but it took me several days just to get things set up, and even after that it was constant pain.
2) Software integration. On linux, all the software I use is designed to work together, and in a consistent way, or it can easily be made to cooperate. On windows, each program behaves in its own way (mostly because they were all ported to windows by different people, and because the people doing the porting could not count on the other software being installed, or being installed in a known location). On linux, when I save some data, I know where the file is. I know where to look for config files for any application I use. On windows, I have to constatly hunt for things. I can install a decent shell on windows, but most application will not be able to work with it, and will insist on starting windows console every time they need a shell access. Some application will use forward slashes as path separators, some backslashes, some double backslashes, with no obvious rhyme or reason. On linux, things just work, on windows, after spending hours configuring things, I get a semi functional working environment.
3) The user interface. Again, linux just works. On windows, I can install some additional software to get multiple virtual desktops and a decent command line, but it doesn't always work, it does not work with all aplications, and I need to go to some website to find the software, download it and install it, and keep track of updates. On linux, all that stuff works out of the box. Cutting and pasting on windows just simply drives me nuts, it does not seem to have any logic behind it, and if there is some, it is unnecesarily complicated. On linux, I do not get dialog boxes that open other dialog boxes that will somewhat prevent the original dialog box from being moved to a different part of the screen.
I could go on, but this whole thing is getting long, and anyway, it is rather pointless. Depending on the nature of our work, and on our work habits, we use different operating systems which is perfectly fine as long as data are kept in well defined open formats and networking and data exchange protocols are open. The problems start when someone uses propriatary file formats and when someone pushes their platform onto people who simply have no use for it.
The problem is that it does not make Russia mad. The problem is that it makes Russia, or at least some Russians, very happy. Russian leaders have been spinning it as an attack on Russia by the evil west. Russian military have been using it as an excuse to ramp up military spending. And Russian defense industry uses it to justify producing more and more nukes and conventional weapons. They know very well that we are not going to nuke them, and that any talk about nuclear balance is really just a nonsense. They do not care whether the system works or not. It simply gives them a convenient excuse for bringing forward whatever their domestic agenda is.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hack-the-web/
I don't understand, what is all this fuss about release schedules? Last year I went through I don't know how many versions of firefox, and I almost didn't notice. If it wasn't for the window popping up every once a while when starting firefox that informs me that it is checking addon compatibility, I would have no idea it was upgraded.
Actually, you are wrong. Just because someone hates teaching does not mean they cannot teach. A motivated student interested in the topic could learn much more from a real expert that hates to teach than from an excellent teacher that does not know the subject as well.
For me, publishing an observation that differs from an accepted theory is not a negative result. A negative result would be: I tried to solve this and this, I spent two years banging my head against the wall, tried this method and that method, and I just simply completely failed to come up with anything useful at all.
But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.
Problem with that is that it will discourage people from tackling difficult problems. Say that a problem I am interested in has not been solved in over 50 years, most of the partial results that could be easily obtained has olready been done, and I think I have an idea that may give me some new insight and potentially lead to a solution. It would be great if I could solve it. On the other hand, the problem is obviously very hard, leading experts in the field has been trying to crack it for a long time, without a complete result. I may spend next 5 years trying only to discover that I simply cannot make it work. In the meantime, someone else will be solving one easy problem after another, putting out paper after paper.
If you can prove that the scheduling algorithm is less effective, that's not a negative result. If you cannot prove it, it may just mean that the algorithm in fact isn't less effective, you were just doing something wrong. Someone else could make it work with a fresh approach. It is true that the information about what you tried and how could be useful to somebody, but except in some very special circumstances, I don't think it would be enough for a separate paper. How would you even peer review something like that?
Exactly. In fact, actually proving that a particular method cannot work in certain situation is not a negative result. A negative result, at least in mathematics, would be "I tried this and I tried that and I think it should work but I wasn't able to make it work". There isn't really even an established format for publishing something like that. It may be suitable for a conference talk, in the case the topic is very interesting and the falure is generally unexpected and the difficulties surparising, or it may be attached as a note to an article which has number of positive results, something like "we also believe that a similar method could be used to extend this result to the case when ..., but so far we were not able to prove it". I have never seen an article where somebody would basically write "I tried this and it didn't work".
But I also suspect this does not apply to something like a word processor document, where you likely use Word or something similar?
Actually, I use Vim editor to enter LaTeX or ConTeXt code for all my documents. I find Word clunky and hard to use, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are even worse.
A good references and media manager that would work with a variety of mark up languages would be a nice thing to have, though. I personally would prefer something keyboard driven over dragging things with mouse, but so far I have not find either.
And all such edits would be handled much easier via a WYSWIG editor.
YMMV, but I find that editing structured documents is much faster using plain text, than a WYSIWYG editor. That is if the mark up language is not idiotically verbose, like XML.
Don't waste time doing what a computer can do better than you.
Exactly! Why should I waste time formatting the document, when the computer will easily do it for me. I just type what I want to say, and let the computer place it on the screen.
This is probably the stupidest rant I have read in a long time.
If that is really a problem, why don't you make an editor shortcut that will automatically expand frameCounter++ to frameCounter = frameCounter + 1? Who still types out every little piece of repetitive code these days?
If I waited till the class is over and _then_ started to write down the notes based on what I recall, I probably can recall 15% to 20% of the total thing.
Sure, but then you would actually recall that stuff, not only when taking the notes, but also on the exam, next semester in the subsequent class, in the future on the job, etc. With your current system, if you cannot recall more than 15 - 20% right after the lecture, how much will you recall later on?
...physical books don't crash or get data corruption...
I simply cannot agree with that, in light of one particular incident that happened when I was in fourth grade. On the way from school, with bunch of friends, we happened to pass a nice sledding hill. Since we had no sleds with us, we improvised and used our school bags as sleds. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that in addition to my textbooks, I also had a large bottle of white glue in the bag, for some sort of school project. I don't know if what happened to the books could be described as crashing, but it certainly was a major data corruption. Of course, I am not even trying to imagine what would happen these days if I had an ebook reader or an ipad in that backpack.
Actually, at least in the case of college textbook, this is really largely irrelevant. It is the professor who selects the textbook, and, hopefully, she knows her subject well enough to be able to distinguish good books from crap.
C'est possible. People will be people, and their random personality quirks will be, well, random. I personally never experienced that, but as they say, YMMV.
Traditionally, people wrote free software that they themselves found useful. A developer would decide he or she does not like any existing html editors, so they would write a new one. They would release it as free software, since they were not interested in marketing it, and getting feedback and code contributions from users was more valuable for them than getting money for the product. That's how what you call OSS community works. If a developer is telling you "you don't need a wysiwyg editor", what they are really saying is "I don't need a wysiwyg editor, I believe you don't either, but if you think otherwise, go and write one." They are not being arrogant, they are trying to be helpful. You are the arrogant one, for thinking everybody has to write the software you find useful, and give it to you for free.
To be fair, the Knuth's original compiler could produce pretty amazing things. It had neither all the cool microtypography features pdftex has, nor the font selection possibilities of luatex or xetex, but it was quite capable. Lamport just simply did not care about the way his documents looked. I actually remember when all the guys in our physics department started switching over to LaTeX and constantly talked about it, most of our reaction was like: "that's a pretty neat macro package, but boy does it look ugly!"
Anyway, this whole discussion brought back some fond memories of the mid 90's great and endless "HTML standards vs. artistic design" usenet debates.
There are two things wrong with that:
No, it cant. But good software at least has decent defaults that were set by someone that knows his/her stuff.
Which, according to most typographers I talked about it to, is not the case with LaTeX. I mean I am sure Lamport knew his stuff, that just his stuff was physics, not typography and design. Besides, defaults for physics journal articles will not necessarily be the same as defaults for a book of literature.
The problem with using LaTeX for ebook formats is that the main strengths of LaTeX are in its line breaking algorithm, kerning and generally building paragraphs. Once you start reflowing paragraphs, all that goes away.
I think it actually sort of show what the problem is. Most ebook readers that IO had seen had fairly small screen with somewhat poor resolution, with font support anywhere between difficult to horrible. Designing and programming something that reflows easily upon zoom, can be easily navigated, and looks good, must be hard.