If you had an authentic 10000 year old cave drawing you could sell, I'm sure someone would buy it for quite a tidy sum!
Apple-I is important because it's old, and it's unique. As the summary mentions, there were only 200 of them, and I'm sure a good number are destroyed by now...
Heavy pollution? Exactly why? This (according to TFA) is a catalytic cracking system that appears to work on 'organic' (ie, hydrocarbon) waste. While I am sure that there are various and sundry heavy metals, annoyingly stable but biologically reactive chemicals and perhaps even the occasional radioactive compound in the organic waste, it doesn't appear like this process grinds up laptops and burns them.
Well, I wonder what the energy cost of the conversion is: for any cracking of hydrocarbons, you need some energy input, and (in all probability) you'll end up losing some of the input mass to by-products. My questions with these kinds of "waste to energy" methods are,
What is the energy input, and the expected energy output? In other words, if you use 1 MW of power to produce 1 litre of gas, that's not a commercially viable option in the absence of subsidies at all.
What are the by-products of the reaction? One of the biggest problems with pyrolysis is that it produces dioxins and furans, which aren't the most agreeable compounds to have in your local atmosphere. That's why you'd even want to look at this type of method. But what are the byproducts of this method? Specifically, where do all the phosphorus, chlorine, sulphur and other friends in polymers (say PVC) go after cracking? And what's the composition of the output of the process?
Unfortunately, TFA doesn't have those details. In any case, converting organic (I mean plant/animal, not chemically organic) matter into fuel seems to me a massive waste of perfectly good compost.
Carriers only have any leverage because of your horrendous US mobile environment, where you buy both instrument and service from the same company. Come on down to India sometime, and I'll show you just how much control the carriers have, even though we still can't migrate numbers across carriers.
Yes, phones cost more, but the end result is cheaper call rates, and pretty much no lock-in.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but people still buy (differently branded) TVs, and have done so for the last fifty years. Remember all the jokes about VCR clocks? People still bought VCRs, because it fit their requirements.
And as far as cars go, ever try to get into a car with a different placement of steering column controls than what you're used to? I still turn on the windshield wiper instead of the turn indicator in my dad's car, because the controls are on opposite sides to mine. Yet, both cars are still good, and satisfy each of our needs, and really, figuring out a couple of new controls every now and then is hardly an uphill task that's too difficult for our puny human brains.
And I assume that you've never ridden different motorbikes - the gear placement and kick-start on different vehicles is always a nice topic for conversations, yet I can take my friend's bike and ride it with about as much comfort as my own.
I'll let you get back to your walled Apple garden now, where you don't have to get confused by all those buttons!
The societal goal of a good product is that it's a good product that's useful to many people. An incentive for someone to make a good product is cash flow. There could be other incentives.
Like Google's incentive in this case may be simply to keep the market open, so that their cash-flow in other areas isn't even more easy for others to block off. They probably don't need the headache of controlling their own platform like MS or Apple; just enough competition to ensure that they get in on emerging markets, without the traditional OS players dominating there and dictating terms to Google (like: "Pay us a few million or your ad-revenues from our platforms are history").
From what I can see, they seem to have given up on China as a too-opaque market to get much penetration into, and are concentrating on other possibilities - India, S.E. Asia and Africa are big enough to balance out (and then some!) the loss of China, for example.
Remember, they don't need to be the biggest or the only player in the market - that would probably be bad for them in a lot of ways. They just need to be big enough to survive, and to keep their employees, shareholders and customers happy.
And that's the problem with most business-thinking - the idea that you can only be a success at the expense of others' failure, and that you have to actively work against everyone else. The Harvard Business Review article seems to fall into this fallacy.
You still need to convince enough developers that it's in their best interest to run to your (fragmented) market, while everyone else is going with the official one.
This! I'm using git-svn at work purely because I want branches that can actually be merged back without sacrificing a few barnyard animals at a satanic altar.
Technically, that wasn't a hunger strike; you refer to the Dandi march, which was more of civil disobediance. The point was to make salt, which was a forbidden commodity.
The hunger strike was a different tactic, which he used more often to highlight differences between his own people (Hindu-Muslim unity and so on). And yes, that was reasonably successful too.
Strange. If I write a trivial hello world in Java and in C/C++, total execution time for the C/C++ one is less a hundredth of the Java one, with its lumbering great JVM dependency to initialize. Even shell script or Perl beats Java dramatically.
Be fair - Hello World is hardly a good test of performance... Shell script is obviously highly optimized for string processing, and Java is more generic. The question is, how much of a speedup do you get between JVM initialization and good optimization in C++? What's the tradeoff?
For example, if the JVM overhead is 10 seconds across the board, and your Hello World takes a second to run, that's a massive slowdown. But if your program is a complex image processor that takes 10 hours to run, the JVM overhead shouldn't be noticeable. Again, the JVM may have a lot of optimized methods within the standard library for certain things (say search) which are faster than what you hand-code in C.
Of course, you can probably write a faster method in C, but you have to know what you're doing. If you don't, or if the JVM method is already optimal, you won't gain much, and may actually end up losing a lot. But again, see my above post - in general, a really optimal method written in C/C++ should normally either equal or beat the equivalent JVM method hands down.
If it's that close, either your algorithm isn't that heavy, or you're doing it wrong. My (anecdotal, of course) experience is that there's a significant difference if you do things right. Any void pointers or heavy casts in the C++ version? Try templating it instead...
Also, with c++, you can do things like SSE which are not possible with Java, and depending on your algorithm, can give you a hell of a boost.
And just how much gold/silver can you have to back all the currency in circulation? How do you increase the gold supply to meet the demands of a larger population? Remember, most of the easily accessible gold has already been mined - what we have is a diminishing supply, which by your plan would necessarily be shared among a growing population.
Also, there are situations where you can have over-supply of the commodity being used to back your currency. Suppose you're backed by gold, and an alchemist the philosopher's stone. Just any way by which the supply can increase like crazy. Suddenly, your entire currency is rendered worthless. All those gold dollars under your mattress that you spent your life accumulating are now equal to something that a guy in a dark room dressed in a weird robe can conjure up in a few seconds. Where's your self-backed currency now?
Some amount of inflation is necessary for an economy to grow. And grow, it has to, when you're trying to take care of everyone, and not just the plantation owner. Gold only works if you have a static economy.
Besides, Gold standard introduced to the US (I assume that with the mention of 1776, you're talking about the US): 1873. At various points in time, currency was backed by gold, silver, others and nothing, the "nothing" periods primarily being wars (war of 1812, Civil War, etc).
With gold, you also have the exact opposite problem - deflation, when the gold supply grows at a rate slower than the economy.
But don't let basic economics distract you from talking points and sound-bites, inconvenient as they are!
So apparently, every idea that anyone ever comes up with should be absolutely unique and have no predecessors in your view?
To take just one thing, I don't know if you remember web search before Google - there's a reason that "to Google" is a verb these days... Of course they've taken existing ideas and improved on them - that really is the basis of innovation. You can keep going back further and further to prove that nothing in that little list of yours is really "new" (Android -> Apple -> Palm -> Newton ->... -> PADD from Star Trek ->... -> A pocket notebook ->... -> a bunch of palm leaves or papyrus and so on).
As to the rest, I think we can summarize it thus: "Google is dying - Netcraft confirms it"
You do realise that the guys writing kdelibs aren't the same ones who'll be working on Quanta, right? Quanta should be the domain of the kdevelop/kdewebdev guys, not the kdelibs/kdebase guys.
We don't know from that article, but I suspect that this may be what they end up doing anyway. Otherwise, 50 people to develop a complete OS? Fat chance!
Slashdot Mirror
Nicely abstracted UIs make it easier to design for awesome user experience. In the end, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't matter.
...$12 pounds 50 shillings...
How much is that in Peso Dirams?
If you had an authentic 10000 year old cave drawing you could sell, I'm sure someone would buy it for quite a tidy sum!
Apple-I is important because it's old, and it's unique. As the summary mentions, there were only 200 of them, and I'm sure a good number are destroyed by now...
Heavy pollution? Exactly why? This (according to TFA) is a catalytic cracking system that appears to work on 'organic' (ie, hydrocarbon) waste. While I am sure that there are various and sundry heavy metals, annoyingly stable but biologically reactive chemicals and perhaps even the occasional radioactive compound in the organic waste, it doesn't appear like this process grinds up laptops and burns them.
Well, I wonder what the energy cost of the conversion is: for any cracking of hydrocarbons, you need some energy input, and (in all probability) you'll end up losing some of the input mass to by-products. My questions with these kinds of "waste to energy" methods are,
Unfortunately, TFA doesn't have those details. In any case, converting organic (I mean plant/animal, not chemically organic) matter into fuel seems to me a massive waste of perfectly good compost.
Carriers only have any leverage because of your horrendous US mobile environment, where you buy both instrument and service from the same company. Come on down to India sometime, and I'll show you just how much control the carriers have, even though we still can't migrate numbers across carriers.
Yes, phones cost more, but the end result is cheaper call rates, and pretty much no lock-in.
Oh my goodness! Buttons! How will we ever manage!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but people still buy (differently branded) TVs, and have done so for the last fifty years. Remember all the jokes about VCR clocks? People still bought VCRs, because it fit their requirements.
And as far as cars go, ever try to get into a car with a different placement of steering column controls than what you're used to? I still turn on the windshield wiper instead of the turn indicator in my dad's car, because the controls are on opposite sides to mine. Yet, both cars are still good, and satisfy each of our needs, and really, figuring out a couple of new controls every now and then is hardly an uphill task that's too difficult for our puny human brains.
And I assume that you've never ridden different motorbikes - the gear placement and kick-start on different vehicles is always a nice topic for conversations, yet I can take my friend's bike and ride it with about as much comfort as my own.
I'll let you get back to your walled Apple garden now, where you don't have to get confused by all those buttons!
Congratulations on your decision. There's a Blackberry with your name on it somewhere. Enjoy it!
A very one-dimensional view of the world...
The societal goal of a good product is that it's a good product that's useful to many people. An incentive for someone to make a good product is cash flow. There could be other incentives.
Like Google's incentive in this case may be simply to keep the market open, so that their cash-flow in other areas isn't even more easy for others to block off. They probably don't need the headache of controlling their own platform like MS or Apple; just enough competition to ensure that they get in on emerging markets, without the traditional OS players dominating there and dictating terms to Google (like: "Pay us a few million or your ad-revenues from our platforms are history").
From what I can see, they seem to have given up on China as a too-opaque market to get much penetration into, and are concentrating on other possibilities - India, S.E. Asia and Africa are big enough to balance out (and then some!) the loss of China, for example.
Remember, they don't need to be the biggest or the only player in the market - that would probably be bad for them in a lot of ways. They just need to be big enough to survive, and to keep their employees, shareholders and customers happy.
And that's the problem with most business-thinking - the idea that you can only be a success at the expense of others' failure, and that you have to actively work against everyone else. The Harvard Business Review article seems to fall into this fallacy.
You still need to convince enough developers that it's in their best interest to run to your (fragmented) market, while everyone else is going with the official one.
Memory address space, not IP, you dolt!
Well... I recently tried something like this:
Trunk:
/Foo
/Foo/Bar
Branch A:
/Foo /Bar /Baz
Branch C: No layout changes, but several commits in /Foo/Bar
Merging in SVN gives me tree conflicts. Merging in git pretty much just works. This was with SVN 1.6 or so, but the repository was upgraded from 1.4
Sure, SVN's gotten better in the last few releases, but really, Git's robustness is still a distant dream...
Branching, directories, merging...
Some things are just broken in CVS...
This! I'm using git-svn at work purely because I want branches that can actually be merged back without sacrificing a few barnyard animals at a satanic altar.
And have all the existing, open bugs of a 10 year old version of Windows along with all the bugs of a beta version of your browser?
Why not just upgrade when things are fixed?
Technically, that wasn't a hunger strike; you refer to the Dandi march, which was more of civil disobediance. The point was to make salt, which was a forbidden commodity.
The hunger strike was a different tactic, which he used more often to highlight differences between his own people (Hindu-Muslim unity and so on). And yes, that was reasonably successful too.
But with Unladen Swallow, Python just might...
And for any really serious performance considerations, jump to a real language that you can actually optimize in (C, C++, etc).
Strange. If I write a trivial hello world in Java and in C/C++, total execution time for the C/C++ one is less a hundredth of the Java one, with its lumbering great JVM dependency to initialize. Even shell script or Perl beats Java dramatically.
Be fair - Hello World is hardly a good test of performance... Shell script is obviously highly optimized for string processing, and Java is more generic. The question is, how much of a speedup do you get between JVM initialization and good optimization in C++? What's the tradeoff?
For example, if the JVM overhead is 10 seconds across the board, and your Hello World takes a second to run, that's a massive slowdown. But if your program is a complex image processor that takes 10 hours to run, the JVM overhead shouldn't be noticeable. Again, the JVM may have a lot of optimized methods within the standard library for certain things (say search) which are faster than what you hand-code in C.
Of course, you can probably write a faster method in C, but you have to know what you're doing. If you don't, or if the JVM method is already optimal, you won't gain much, and may actually end up losing a lot. But again, see my above post - in general, a really optimal method written in C/C++ should normally either equal or beat the equivalent JVM method hands down.
If it's that close, either your algorithm isn't that heavy, or you're doing it wrong. My (anecdotal, of course) experience is that there's a significant difference if you do things right. Any void pointers or heavy casts in the C++ version? Try templating it instead...
Also, with c++, you can do things like SSE which are not possible with Java, and depending on your algorithm, can give you a hell of a boost.
Ha! Something as pedestrian as not having an Internet connection doesn't stop them evul hackrz!
And just how much gold/silver can you have to back all the currency in circulation? How do you increase the gold supply to meet the demands of a larger population? Remember, most of the easily accessible gold has already been mined - what we have is a diminishing supply, which by your plan would necessarily be shared among a growing population.
Also, there are situations where you can have over-supply of the commodity being used to back your currency. Suppose you're backed by gold, and an alchemist the philosopher's stone. Just any way by which the supply can increase like crazy. Suddenly, your entire currency is rendered worthless. All those gold dollars under your mattress that you spent your life accumulating are now equal to something that a guy in a dark room dressed in a weird robe can conjure up in a few seconds. Where's your self-backed currency now?
Oh great! Cue the semitone wars!
Some amount of inflation is necessary for an economy to grow. And grow, it has to, when you're trying to take care of everyone, and not just the plantation owner. Gold only works if you have a static economy.
Besides, Gold standard introduced to the US (I assume that with the mention of 1776, you're talking about the US): 1873. At various points in time, currency was backed by gold, silver, others and nothing, the "nothing" periods primarily being wars (war of 1812, Civil War, etc).
With gold, you also have the exact opposite problem - deflation, when the gold supply grows at a rate slower than the economy.
But don't let basic economics distract you from talking points and sound-bites, inconvenient as they are!
So apparently, every idea that anyone ever comes up with should be absolutely unique and have no predecessors in your view?
To take just one thing, I don't know if you remember web search before Google - there's a reason that "to Google" is a verb these days... Of course they've taken existing ideas and improved on them - that really is the basis of innovation. You can keep going back further and further to prove that nothing in that little list of yours is really "new" (Android -> Apple -> Palm -> Newton -> ... -> PADD from Star Trek -> ... -> A pocket notebook -> ... -> a bunch of palm leaves or papyrus and so on).
As to the rest, I think we can summarize it thus: "Google is dying - Netcraft confirms it"
You do realise that the guys writing kdelibs aren't the same ones who'll be working on Quanta, right? Quanta should be the domain of the kdevelop/kdewebdev guys, not the kdelibs/kdebase guys.
We don't know from that article, but I suspect that this may be what they end up doing anyway. Otherwise, 50 people to develop a complete OS? Fat chance!