What can the environmental community possibly find wrong with this?
Probably will end up as something like "producing the required 10 pounds of cerium causes environmental damage equivalent to burning 10 kilobarrels of crude oil, yet only produces energy equivalent to 1 kilobarrel equivalent of burned crude oil before the catalyst disintegrates or whatever" So you'd be 9 kilobarrels ahead if you'd just burn the crude oil.
Very much like how making corn alcohol is a great way to manufacture the equivalent of one barrel of crude oil, assuming you're willing to burn the equivalent of two barrels of crude oil to make that one barrel equivalent..
This does not make any sense. A simple chemical reaction of methane burning is CH4 + 2*O2 -> CO2 + 2*H2O + 890 kJ/mol energy freed during the process.. So in order to convert CO2 and water back to methane and oxygen you need to spend the same 890 kJ/mol energy. Okay, you get the energy from the sun, but why not to use the sun to generate the energy directly without doing the CO2 conversion back and forth?
Because we're "experts" at storing, stockpiling, and using methane gas, but attempts to store sunlight for later use, perhaps by bouncing it between two parallel mirrors or something, is way beyond our (current) technology.
Also ask a petrochemical engineer about the way cool things you can make given a large supply of methane. Pretty much any organic chemistry compound (with pretty obvious exceptions, like you're going to need some metal atoms from somewhere if you want to make organometallics, amines are going to need nitrogen, etc)
That strange and exotic metal Cerium, is it at least cheaper than gold? How rare is this? Admittedly it sucks to have our oil stuck under their sand, but trading it for our Cerium stuck in their jungle is not a better solution either.
It's strange and exotic, at say, McDonalds or Pick n Save food store. On the other hand, Home Depot probably sells cans of it and its widely industrially available in bulk and used for all kinds of things.
Its extremely cheap compared to gold. Heck its pretty cheap compared to nickel, tin, and only about twice as costly as copper. Its about ten time as expensive as bulk raw aluminum per pound.
Its a relatively common semi-industrial metal used in all manner of catalysts and especially grinding processes. Cerium Oxide grinding paste sells for about $10 per pound. You can pay more retail in small cans if you'd like, or perhaps you could contract down to 50 cents per ounce if you bought a unit-train of railroad cars worth of it.
Ask your local (working, not retail) jeweler, whom probably has some quart cans of different size grits for polishing stuff.
Unlike the polishing / grinding industry, the catalyst industry would probably recycle heavily. So I'm thinking it would remain relatively cheap even if usage increased.
Yes, but experience in area Y != experience in area X. No one, no matter how good, is going to master a programming language in a week or even a month. As long as the new hire actually worked and studied in college, he'll be much better in area X than the old guy just trying to learn it. Yes, I'm well aware that once you know one programming language it's easy to pick up another. That doesn't change the fact though that it still takes time to learn it - it just takes less than if you had no programming experience at all.
Mmmm not really. A language is like penmanship. You talking block caps, or cursive, or some weird shorthand script? A programmer on the other hand is a guy whom takes a pretty vague flowchart and fills in the details. Most of the mental effort is figuring out the translation, the error conditions, and especially the business logic or the equivalent. Very little time is spent on the syntax details of how to add the interest to the bank balance, its all spent on the logical puzzles of deciding how to avoid race conditions, how to ensure you do it precisely once per account every time, etc.
Even worse the kid is used to 100 line microprojects or even worse is just good at answering short test questions. No one in the biz ever gets to "start on a blank slate" its all extend extend extend. That and bug fix. And argue with the users about doing dumb things. And work on scalability, theres plenty of really slow ways to do things.
There's a shift in one's thinking that takes place after learning 5 or 6 languages; it becomes ever more profound after you've worked in a number of languages for years.
You neglected to mention what that shift may be, and since I've done the same, I can attempt to explain that experiencing what makes languages A B C and D shine and fail in certain areas naturally gives you a certain appreciation for the unique features of other languages. Learning 6809 assembly makes it an unholy heck of a lot easier to learn 8 bit PIC despite their dramatic differences, simply because you can appreciate their differences.
Another interesting example, if you're an "IT" class of code slinger, gaining experience inherently gives you some "CS" guy insight, so even if you intentionally spend your life trying to avoid learning "big O notation" and all that, you'll still accidentally end up quite talented at figuring out optimization and scalability problems, even if you don't have the formal language to discuss how you do it with everyone else. Going back to school to get the paperwork to make HR happy after about 20 years of programming about a decade ago was very enlightening. Mostly a lot of "So thats what they call it!" Note that I'm not old, in that generational range we started programming at age 5 because all we had was ROM basic.
Being a senior developer does not excuse you from learning all the hot new techs.
All of them? Are you really being serious?
Most of them are just the same old rehashed junk warmed back up to room temperature... for awhile.
Look, the new kid knows the rules is just write random buzzwords on the resume and if you get an interview, start cramming. The old guy was too dumb to know he is supposed to do the same thing, more or less, tell the boss yeah yeah OK boss its gonna take 10 hours just like Scotty on TOS, and then do a bunch of on the job googling and whip something up in 5 hours, making everyone happy.
Note there is a huge difference in a "senior developer" whom has had 20 years of experience and one thats had the same first year, twenty times. I worked for a supervisor once like that, 10 entry level supvr jobs about 2 yrs each, he was just an old guy with only 2 years experience not an old guy with 20 years management experience.
for the senior to ask for more than the new hire. After all, it'd take all of two weeks for the seasoned pro to get up to speed on this new-fangled gibberish!
Ah but he refused to and that is the problem. Should have just told the boss yeah no problemo.
An old timer knows he can just google a few things, skim some pages and be productive.
Know how long it took to transition from Perl to Ruby? About 5 minutes of "apt-get install" and a bit of firefox.
Such a civilisation would not even think of dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, or anything else we need to cobble theory to observation.
Not necessarily. You're assuming theories can only be imagined and tested based on past observation. Trust me, the theoretical physics community has no lack of wild imagination.
Worst case the hard science fiction writers will write something profoundly imaginative, an engineer will run the math and go "holy cow you really could orbit a TV transmitter around the world, how bout that" and finally the scientists would gin up some theories.
On the other hand, being atheist ends up being as un-scientific as being religious. Since you can neither prove or disprove the existence of God, being agnostic is the only real option for a true man of science (whatever that is)...
You've got to be kidding. I think every atheist type as a kid honestly had an anxiety prone evening where they wondered "well, if I formally declare... then I will be hit by lightning or run over by a bus, because the christian god hates atheists (or so I had been told)". Repeat the experiment a zillion times and you end up with the inevitable scientific conclusion that atheism must be correct, after all I used the scientific method to declare a hypothesis and tested it untold zillions of times and just couldn't provably falsify it.
The other part is there's way more than one religion, and all of them disagree, all of them have unprovable element, so we know almost all are false thru their own conflicting definitions. The odds of one of them being correct are very low indeed.
The really devout ones would probably take this as evidence of intelligent design anyway.
The ones I know who are scientists who are also religious mostly accept that god isn't micro-managing the day-to-day stuff.
Most of the ones I know see it as a racial heritage. Heck most of the regular people I know see it the same way. For one of them, on a single issue by issue basis, she completely disagrees with everything from Rome. I mean everything, when I write everything. Yet she almost violently defends her identify as an Irish-Catholic, because its a racial heritage issue. Telling her she's not really a catholic is very much like saying her dad is not really her biological dad, if you know what I mean. Or trying to convince her she was actually adopted. Its just not gonna happen. For her its a family tradition on Sunday morning, nothing more than a meaningless tradition, she has good memories of it, and is thus extremely devout at both attending mass and loudly declaring her allegiance.
As one of our fellow apartment-dwellers likes to point out, our scientific view of the universe is directly influenced by:
1. Our own biological bias (meaning the way we, as humans, perceive things) 2. The fundamental elements that make up life in this galaxy 3. The math we use
Were any of these three things different, our scientific view of reality could be completely changed.
Unlikely beyond the level of mere triviality. The bio basis seems to make no sense, kind of a long delayed hangover of the vital humor approach to organic chemistry, "life force theory". The fundamental elements seems to make no sense, in that the fundamental elements seem to reliably and predictably follow our scientific view of reality (that's kind of the whole point of chemistry). The math we use seems irrelevant, binary, hex, octal, decimal, it all comes out equivalent and the "dependency tree" of mathematical knowledge seems to have remarkably little room for variation compared to practically all other sciences, so it's an especially poor example.
At the most trivial level, sure, if we had 12 fingers we would probably use a base-12 numbering system, but that has very little effect on the fundamental limit theory of calculus, or pretty much all of geometry, or the concept of a standard deviation.
Home PCs of the ROM basic era weren't powerful enough to run fancy DEC software. Even if DEC fortran had been free, nobody would have used it at home because they couldn't afford tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars for a computer to run it on.
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas. Slowly. And always with claiming its Gods will and its always been that way. But by no means the same codebase. Things like no married priests and stealing all the pagan holidays for themselves (christmas, etc) are much more recent than 2000 years. Think "GNU hurd" speed not "Linux" speed. Cathedral vs bazzar, literally.
Now if you want programming analogies, try codebase forks like the protestant revolution and holy wars like vi vs emacs.
It seems these companies are exhibiting what many old companies tend toward: they prefer the easy lucrativity of relatively low-volume, high-margin as opposed to a more active, high volume low-margin operation. L'aissez faire economics is beckoning to these old stalwarts: evolve or fade-away!
Look at the car industry, bigger and more expensive land barges until a flood of econoboxes crushes them. Then they ask for government bailouts. Repeat every two or three decades.
I could see intel and microsoft demanding government bailouts. Look how many drones, inside and outside their companies, whom would be unemployed without them? We could very well all end up buying "armdroid" and apple "i-" products while paying taxes to keep "wintel" employees employed.
Take your typical netbook, remove the expensive ATOM hardware and replace it with a nice ARM SOC
The L-users don't care about the chipset. Remove the keyboard instead.
Although I think the problem is, most people have this expectation that if it looks like a laptop, its going to work like a laptop and run WoW or Word or Photoshop or whatever other windows-based software they want. Tablets are viewed differently because people dont see them as a "computer" in the way they view a netbook.
See above, remove the keyboard. Thats the difference. You can't convince a L-user that openoffice is the same as word, even if objectively it does the same tasks. Nothing but endless whining about retraining, despite the fact that every release of word needs both retraining and a stack of money. But remove the keyboard and the impact on the UI is enough to kick them into thinking some appstore thing is just the way its done now.
Same with WOW. I don't think you can play WOW without a keyboard, can you? (I never had that addiction). But I can and do play The Lacuna Expanse on my ipod touch.
I'm not interested in photo editing, but don't most "power users" of photoshop use keyboard shortcuts?
The first rule of technology is that "If you don't canabalize your own business, someone else will do it for you". This is the classic tech product/company dilemna and we have lots of examples of dominant #1's who ignored this rule and are gone. Digital? Wang? Visicorp? Borland?
How about IBM's mainframe dominance in the very early microcomputer era?
The pity of it, was looking at something like DECs PDP-8 offerings, DECs multi kilodollar software kicked butt over microsoft ROM basic in a typical home PC. Microcomputers beat DEC on hardware, DEC utterly smashed microcomputers in software depth and quality, but DEC wanted like $3000 for a fortran compiler.
I think one factor of the "wintel" vs "armdroid" not discussed is the typical cost of software is, once again, imploding. The fact that the hardware and underlying OS is nice, but, much like DEC PDP-8 vs the apple II, most people will switch because the software is cheaper (not because its better) Despite not personally finding angry birds to be very entertaining, I do understand that its a bit cheaper than civ 5. Doesn't matter how much they're different, because they both do the same thing, that being wasting time, so the cheaper one will win.
I'm curious, does anyone have links to any resources which might explain the Department of Energy's involvement?... Is there some *particular* need for which steel is currently used, but steel is considered not as good a material as they actually need?
If its tensile strength is unimaginably higher than anything else ever manufactured etc etc as the article claims, it would make an awesome uranium centrifuge rotor. The DoE really likes those and their overall efficiency scales as something ridiculous like the fifth power of the rotor tensile strength per unit volume or something like that. Think about it... its one of those rare apps where the cost pretty much doesn't matter because of the dollar value of the product.
Twenty years ago, we though NASA's aerogel was going to be everywhere today. It promised the light-transmission and strength of regular glass, while being literally light as a feather and the best thermal insulator known to man. It seemed like eventually you could build entire houses out of this stuff.
First of all its a general class of materials, its a gel (think jello) with the bulk substrate removed (think dehydrated jello). So its like talking about making stuff out of "metal" as opposed to "SAE 316L certified steel".
The second thing is its been around in some form or another for about 80 years now, not 20.
The third thing is all the manufacturing processes (as far as I know) involve replacing the substrate with supercritical solvent and venting out the solvent. Which, given typical supercritical vapor pressures, usually means the manufacturing plant occasionally blows up. An easy thing to remember is supercritical CO2 needs equipment built to a hundred bar. The actual number is closer to 70, but whatever, "a hundred" is easier to remember...
Standard slashdot car analogy, your car tires run about 2 bar, and mechanics at tire shops regularly get killed when they're inflated and they blow apart, tire cages or not. So to make an aerogel the size of a car tire, you need to inflate / deflate a tank running about 50 or so times the pressure. Your average greasemonkey would probably not retire with a pension from an aerogel factory.
I believe the sweeds blew a factory completely up in the 80s. Pressure vessel failures are such a PITA.
Also the process is inherently batch. Every modern industry relies on constant process, from steel to ipod assembly lines. Not gonna have widespread aerogel until someone figures out a continuous flow process.
Depends on your industry, but often, tensile strength per unit area. In the us that would be thousands of pounds pulling apart a chunk of steel of one square inch cross section. This is kind of important in the wire rope and chain industries, on the other hand piston makers or knife makers might have an alternative opinion. Anyway tensile KPSI values 20 and under is junk tier like Walmart China products, 50 is the good stuff, and over 200 is strange Swedish alloys made by gnomes in a secretive process that costs about as much per pound as sterling silver and only.mil can afford it.
For marketing / PR purposes, yes it means nothing. Just like calling machined parts "billet" means absolutely nothing. A billet used to be a slight step up from an ingot that you'd smoosh in a forge press before machining. Now all it means is its overpriced and probably shiny.
Slashdot Mirror
What can the environmental community possibly find wrong with this?
Probably will end up as something like "producing the required 10 pounds of cerium causes environmental damage equivalent to burning 10 kilobarrels of crude oil, yet only produces energy equivalent to 1 kilobarrel equivalent of burned crude oil before the catalyst disintegrates or whatever" So you'd be 9 kilobarrels ahead if you'd just burn the crude oil.
Very much like how making corn alcohol is a great way to manufacture the equivalent of one barrel of crude oil, assuming you're willing to burn the equivalent of two barrels of crude oil to make that one barrel equivalent..
This does not make any sense. A simple chemical reaction of methane burning is
CH4 + 2*O2 -> CO2 + 2*H2O + 890 kJ/mol energy freed during the process.. So in order to convert CO2 and water back to methane and oxygen you need to spend the same 890 kJ/mol energy. Okay, you get the energy from the sun, but why not to use the sun to generate the energy directly without doing the CO2 conversion back and forth?
Because we're "experts" at storing, stockpiling, and using methane gas, but attempts to store sunlight for later use, perhaps by bouncing it between two parallel mirrors or something, is way beyond our (current) technology.
Also ask a petrochemical engineer about the way cool things you can make given a large supply of methane. Pretty much any organic chemistry compound (with pretty obvious exceptions, like you're going to need some metal atoms from somewhere if you want to make organometallics, amines are going to need nitrogen, etc)
That strange and exotic metal Cerium, is it at least cheaper than gold? How rare is this? Admittedly it sucks to have our oil stuck under their sand, but trading it for our Cerium stuck in their jungle is not a better solution either.
It's strange and exotic, at say, McDonalds or Pick n Save food store. On the other hand, Home Depot probably sells cans of it and its widely industrially available in bulk and used for all kinds of things.
Its extremely cheap compared to gold. Heck its pretty cheap compared to nickel, tin, and only about twice as costly as copper. Its about ten time as expensive as bulk raw aluminum per pound.
Its a relatively common semi-industrial metal used in all manner of catalysts and especially grinding processes. Cerium Oxide grinding paste sells for about $10 per pound. You can pay more retail in small cans if you'd like, or perhaps you could contract down to 50 cents per ounce if you bought a unit-train of railroad cars worth of it.
Ask your local (working, not retail) jeweler, whom probably has some quart cans of different size grits for polishing stuff.
Unlike the polishing / grinding industry, the catalyst industry would probably recycle heavily. So I'm thinking it would remain relatively cheap even if usage increased.
If the waters are as muddy as they appear in the picture, how would sharks not get their gills clogged? And what is the salinity of the water?
Don't worry about that, worry about this:
Two bull sharks were spotted swimming past a McDonald’s
That "food" will make anyone sick.
Yes, but experience in area Y != experience in area X. No one, no matter how good, is going to master a programming language in a week or even a month. As long as the new hire actually worked and studied in college, he'll be much better in area X than the old guy just trying to learn it. Yes, I'm well aware that once you know one programming language it's easy to pick up another. That doesn't change the fact though that it still takes time to learn it - it just takes less than if you had no programming experience at all.
Mmmm not really. A language is like penmanship. You talking block caps, or cursive, or some weird shorthand script? A programmer on the other hand is a guy whom takes a pretty vague flowchart and fills in the details. Most of the mental effort is figuring out the translation, the error conditions, and especially the business logic or the equivalent. Very little time is spent on the syntax details of how to add the interest to the bank balance, its all spent on the logical puzzles of deciding how to avoid race conditions, how to ensure you do it precisely once per account every time, etc.
Even worse the kid is used to 100 line microprojects or even worse is just good at answering short test questions. No one in the biz ever gets to "start on a blank slate" its all extend extend extend. That and bug fix. And argue with the users about doing dumb things. And work on scalability, theres plenty of really slow ways to do things.
If you get a job in the field, you'll understand.
There's a shift in one's thinking that takes place after learning 5 or 6 languages; it becomes ever more profound after you've worked in a number of languages for years.
You neglected to mention what that shift may be, and since I've done the same, I can attempt to explain that experiencing what makes languages A B C and D shine and fail in certain areas naturally gives you a certain appreciation for the unique features of other languages. Learning 6809 assembly makes it an unholy heck of a lot easier to learn 8 bit PIC despite their dramatic differences, simply because you can appreciate their differences.
Another interesting example, if you're an "IT" class of code slinger, gaining experience inherently gives you some "CS" guy insight, so even if you intentionally spend your life trying to avoid learning "big O notation" and all that, you'll still accidentally end up quite talented at figuring out optimization and scalability problems, even if you don't have the formal language to discuss how you do it with everyone else. Going back to school to get the paperwork to make HR happy after about 20 years of programming about a decade ago was very enlightening. Mostly a lot of "So thats what they call it!" Note that I'm not old, in that generational range we started programming at age 5 because all we had was ROM basic.
All of them? Are you really being serious?
Most of them are just the same old rehashed junk warmed back up to room temperature ... for awhile.
Look, the new kid knows the rules is just write random buzzwords on the resume and if you get an interview, start cramming. The old guy was too dumb to know he is supposed to do the same thing, more or less, tell the boss yeah yeah OK boss its gonna take 10 hours just like Scotty on TOS, and then do a bunch of on the job googling and whip something up in 5 hours, making everyone happy.
Note there is a huge difference in a "senior developer" whom has had 20 years of experience and one thats had the same first year, twenty times. I worked for a supervisor once like that, 10 entry level supvr jobs about 2 yrs each, he was just an old guy with only 2 years experience not an old guy with 20 years management experience.
for the senior to ask for more than the new hire. After all, it'd take all of two weeks for the seasoned pro to get up to speed on this new-fangled gibberish!
Ah but he refused to and that is the problem. Should have just told the boss yeah no problemo.
An old timer knows he can just google a few things, skim some pages and be productive.
Know how long it took to transition from Perl to Ruby? About 5 minutes of "apt-get install" and a bit of firefox.
"We call that lazy and smart."
Well, you're right about one of those. (Hint: You can't write iPhone apps using Fortran.)
Oh trust me you can write "fortran" in any language.
You need to examine F2C. You'll need a bit of work on the UI but the fundamental logic translates pretty well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2c
Such a civilisation would not even think of dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, or anything else we need to cobble theory to observation.
Not necessarily. You're assuming theories can only be imagined and tested based on past observation. Trust me, the theoretical physics community has no lack of wild imagination.
Worst case the hard science fiction writers will write something profoundly imaginative, an engineer will run the math and go "holy cow you really could orbit a TV transmitter around the world, how bout that" and finally the scientists would gin up some theories.
On the other hand, being atheist ends up being as un-scientific as being religious. Since you can neither prove or disprove the existence of God, being agnostic is the only real option for a true man of science (whatever that is)...
You've got to be kidding. I think every atheist type as a kid honestly had an anxiety prone evening where they wondered "well, if I formally declare ... then I will be hit by lightning or run over by a bus, because the christian god hates atheists (or so I had been told)". Repeat the experiment a zillion times and you end up with the inevitable scientific conclusion that atheism must be correct, after all I used the scientific method to declare a hypothesis and tested it untold zillions of times and just couldn't provably falsify it.
The other part is there's way more than one religion, and all of them disagree, all of them have unprovable element, so we know almost all are false thru their own conflicting definitions. The odds of one of them being correct are very low indeed.
The ones I know who are scientists who are also religious mostly accept that god isn't micro-managing the day-to-day stuff.
Most of the ones I know see it as a racial heritage. Heck most of the regular people I know see it the same way. For one of them, on a single issue by issue basis, she completely disagrees with everything from Rome. I mean everything, when I write everything. Yet she almost violently defends her identify as an Irish-Catholic, because its a racial heritage issue. Telling her she's not really a catholic is very much like saying her dad is not really her biological dad, if you know what I mean. Or trying to convince her she was actually adopted. Its just not gonna happen. For her its a family tradition on Sunday morning, nothing more than a meaningless tradition, she has good memories of it, and is thus extremely devout at both attending mass and loudly declaring her allegiance.
Just look at any government. Intelligent design surely would not allow for such insanity.
Better: Look at any very large religious / church bureaucracy, ID surely would not allow for such insanity.
As one of our fellow apartment-dwellers likes to point out, our scientific view of the universe is directly influenced by:
1. Our own biological bias (meaning the way we, as humans, perceive things)
2. The fundamental elements that make up life in this galaxy
3. The math we use
Were any of these three things different, our scientific view of reality could be completely changed.
Unlikely beyond the level of mere triviality. The bio basis seems to make no sense, kind of a long delayed hangover of the vital humor approach to organic chemistry, "life force theory". The fundamental elements seems to make no sense, in that the fundamental elements seem to reliably and predictably follow our scientific view of reality (that's kind of the whole point of chemistry). The math we use seems irrelevant, binary, hex, octal, decimal, it all comes out equivalent and the "dependency tree" of mathematical knowledge seems to have remarkably little room for variation compared to practically all other sciences, so it's an especially poor example.
At the most trivial level, sure, if we had 12 fingers we would probably use a base-12 numbering system, but that has very little effect on the fundamental limit theory of calculus, or pretty much all of geometry, or the concept of a standard deviation.
Home PCs of the ROM basic era weren't powerful enough to run fancy DEC software. Even if DEC fortran had been free, nobody would have used it at home because they couldn't afford tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars for a computer to run it on.
Blatantly false. Got 4K of ram and a disk drive?
This is a dupe from the mid 90s when nmap was released.
Yeah, why should anyone admire a man who donated enormous amounts of money to charity?
Because of the shady way he got it? Monopolistic business practices to sell a remarkably shoddy set of products?
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas. Slowly. And always with claiming its Gods will and its always been that way. But by no means the same codebase. Things like no married priests and stealing all the pagan holidays for themselves (christmas, etc) are much more recent than 2000 years. Think "GNU hurd" speed not "Linux" speed. Cathedral vs bazzar, literally.
Now if you want programming analogies, try codebase forks like the protestant revolution and holy wars like vi vs emacs.
It seems these companies are exhibiting what many old companies tend toward: they prefer the easy lucrativity of relatively low-volume, high-margin as opposed to a more active, high volume low-margin operation. L'aissez faire economics is beckoning to these old stalwarts: evolve or fade-away!
Look at the car industry, bigger and more expensive land barges until a flood of econoboxes crushes them. Then they ask for government bailouts. Repeat every two or three decades.
I could see intel and microsoft demanding government bailouts. Look how many drones, inside and outside their companies, whom would be unemployed without them? We could very well all end up buying "armdroid" and apple "i-" products while paying taxes to keep "wintel" employees employed.
Take your typical netbook, remove the expensive ATOM hardware and replace it with a nice ARM SOC
The L-users don't care about the chipset. Remove the keyboard instead.
Although I think the problem is, most people have this expectation that if it looks like a laptop, its going to work like a laptop and run WoW or Word or Photoshop or whatever other windows-based software they want. Tablets are viewed differently because people dont see them as a "computer" in the way they view a netbook.
See above, remove the keyboard. Thats the difference. You can't convince a L-user that openoffice is the same as word, even if objectively it does the same tasks. Nothing but endless whining about retraining, despite the fact that every release of word needs both retraining and a stack of money. But remove the keyboard and the impact on the UI is enough to kick them into thinking some appstore thing is just the way its done now.
Same with WOW. I don't think you can play WOW without a keyboard, can you? (I never had that addiction). But I can and do play The Lacuna Expanse on my ipod touch.
I'm not interested in photo editing, but don't most "power users" of photoshop use keyboard shortcuts?
The first rule of technology is that "If you don't canabalize your own business, someone else will do it for you". This is the classic tech product/company dilemna and we have lots of examples of dominant #1's who ignored this rule and are gone. Digital? Wang? Visicorp? Borland?
How about IBM's mainframe dominance in the very early microcomputer era?
The pity of it, was looking at something like DECs PDP-8 offerings, DECs multi kilodollar software kicked butt over microsoft ROM basic in a typical home PC. Microcomputers beat DEC on hardware, DEC utterly smashed microcomputers in software depth and quality, but DEC wanted like $3000 for a fortran compiler.
I think one factor of the "wintel" vs "armdroid" not discussed is the typical cost of software is, once again, imploding. The fact that the hardware and underlying OS is nice, but, much like DEC PDP-8 vs the apple II, most people will switch because the software is cheaper (not because its better) Despite not personally finding angry birds to be very entertaining, I do understand that its a bit cheaper than civ 5. Doesn't matter how much they're different, because they both do the same thing, that being wasting time, so the cheaper one will win.
Which is too bad, because I like the fancy stuff.
It is true it is probably the first game or even movie in decades that has used natural PHYSICS while showing you the end result.
You know what would be interesting, an airplane flight simulator. Theres a new and creative idea!
I'm curious, does anyone have links to any resources which might explain the Department of Energy's involvement? ... Is there some *particular* need for which steel is currently used, but steel is considered not as good a material as they actually need?
If its tensile strength is unimaginably higher than anything else ever manufactured etc etc as the article claims, it would make an awesome uranium centrifuge rotor. The DoE really likes those and their overall efficiency scales as something ridiculous like the fifth power of the rotor tensile strength per unit volume or something like that. Think about it... its one of those rare apps where the cost pretty much doesn't matter because of the dollar value of the product.
Twenty years ago, we though NASA's aerogel was going to be everywhere today. It promised the light-transmission and strength of regular glass, while being literally light as a feather and the best thermal insulator known to man. It seemed like eventually you could build entire houses out of this stuff.
First of all its a general class of materials, its a gel (think jello) with the bulk substrate removed (think dehydrated jello). So its like talking about making stuff out of "metal" as opposed to "SAE 316L certified steel".
The second thing is its been around in some form or another for about 80 years now, not 20.
The third thing is all the manufacturing processes (as far as I know) involve replacing the substrate with supercritical solvent and venting out the solvent. Which, given typical supercritical vapor pressures, usually means the manufacturing plant occasionally blows up. An easy thing to remember is supercritical CO2 needs equipment built to a hundred bar. The actual number is closer to 70, but whatever, "a hundred" is easier to remember...
Standard slashdot car analogy, your car tires run about 2 bar, and mechanics at tire shops regularly get killed when they're inflated and they blow apart, tire cages or not. So to make an aerogel the size of a car tire, you need to inflate / deflate a tank running about 50 or so times the pressure. Your average greasemonkey would probably not retire with a pension from an aerogel factory.
I believe the sweeds blew a factory completely up in the 80s. Pressure vessel failures are such a PITA.
Also the process is inherently batch. Every modern industry relies on constant process, from steel to ipod assembly lines. Not gonna have widespread aerogel until someone figures out a continuous flow process.
What does stronger than steel actually mean?
Depends on your industry, but often, tensile strength per unit area. In the us that would be thousands of pounds pulling apart a chunk of steel of one square inch cross section. This is kind of important in the wire rope and chain industries, on the other hand piston makers or knife makers might have an alternative opinion. Anyway tensile KPSI values 20 and under is junk tier like Walmart China products, 50 is the good stuff, and over 200 is strange Swedish alloys made by gnomes in a secretive process that costs about as much per pound as sterling silver and only .mil can afford it.
For marketing / PR purposes, yes it means nothing. Just like calling machined parts "billet" means absolutely nothing. A billet used to be a slight step up from an ingot that you'd smoosh in a forge press before machining. Now all it means is its overpriced and probably shiny.