What? Flamebait? Seriously! It seems like it would be potentially interesting, and I went to the site and looked hoping to find something normal-web-browser-based, but it wasn't there. You couldn't run this thing on an iPhone, either. =( Very limited.
That's probably true, but sometimes optimizing for programmers' convenience is more important than reducing every ounce of bloat to the bare minimum. RAM is cheap enough and reusable; programmers' time isn't either.
If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue.
Oh, it will help the local economy of Pittsburgh plenty, but the loss to the rest of the economy will more than offset that. Expensive steel hurts the construction industry, and anyone who uses things which have been constructed. Like, say, buildings. Or web sites that are hosted on computers which are located in data centers inside buildings. Or people who pay taxes to fund the latest municipal light rail project (and hey, those things get federal money, so that's... let me check... just about everyone in the country).
To the people who enjoyed cheaper steel (useful for all sorts of construction projects, like skyscrapers and bridges, and cars, and...) and to the Chinese steelworkers who will be unemployed (and the people who had come to rely on their employment), and to people in and about Pittsburgh who were not otherwise affected detrimentally by the current state of affairs but will be negatively affected by increased industrial emissions in the area, this is a bad thing.
I'm part of the at-large public who consumes steel (mostly indirectly via Infrastructure) and I for one am not particularly happy about its skyrocketing prices these days.
Actually, my company occasionally works with active, battery-powered RFID tag technology. They chirp location beacons by themselves. I understand most of the applications are currently more "warehouse" than "hospital", though.
Right. Because "quickly locating a very expensive portable medical device which may have been left in the wrong room in a 10,000-room hospital" is a problem that didn't exist before those evil overlords invented it. Heck, even the "gee it would be nice to track my supply chain better" problems are fundamentally real. And these things work.
You talk of privacy issues and such? Oh, you betcha! They're real. But you can't pretend it's not a useful technology. That is the real insult to intelligence in this thread.
No one in the server farm business is going to try and break into the solar-power business. It's not their area of expertise. It's an entirely different sort of business altogether.
If there were a ton of solar power stations littering the outback, or if someone enterprising were ready to put some up in the hopes of attracting power-hungry industries with cheap electricity, that'd be another thing. But I would imagine it's still a rather risky proposition, as far as things go.
Besides, the bandwidth and latency to Australia from the rest of the world... not the greatest.
On a related IR story: A co-worker of mine who lives a little ways north in San Francisco with three roommates. One of them obtained a rabbit (for goodness only knows what reason). Rabbits, if you were not aware, are very good at chewing wires, and at some point the rabbit managed to chew through the cables to the infrared bar on their Wii.
His immediate solution was to burn two candles on either side of the TV. It apparently worked just fine.
My biggest beef with flash drives thus far is with the flimsy construction. I have owned three flash drives. The first was a 64 byte drive back in the day when that was sizeable. Umm, when was that exactly? 1955?:)
Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. Why? The process is totally inefficient.
kpppppffffffffft. Like running solar power through the electric grid into batteries isn't triply inefficient itself? Guess again.
It uses recyclable materials. Yeah? Metals like steel and copper are pretty recyclable. Doesn't mean they're cheap. In fact, they've more-than-doubled in price over the past several years.
Presumably we would only extract the interesting things, like useful metals or He3, and leave behind the useless chunks of plain old boring bulk rock there. We have plenty here.
Aside from mystic voodoo, the gravitational force should therefore remain more or less intact.
And if we ever reach the point where we can theoretically actually move enough of the Moon here to the Earth to make a difference on the raw gravitational front, then I think we'll be able to handle most of the ill effects of any removal.
I am not an oil company or automobile manufacturer. I probably have a little stock some of them through some ETF or mutual fund, but whatever.
My big concern is that they're going to spend my tax dollars on this thing, and it's going to end up being a spectacular failure (minus the interesting spectacle). I don't like tax money going to useless government projects. I have big enough projects to apply it to myself.
There are no billionaire economists - but they know it all, don't they?
Most of the big billionare money (the new money, not the stuff you inherit, at least) is in organizing people to actually get stuff done, making big deals with other companies (and, for that matter, convincing people to put you in charge and pay you money if you're not there already). Anyone can learn how business works. It's another thing to actually pull it off. That's people-skills.
I'm sure there's nerds who could tell you all about, oh, say, the physics of football, the biological processes that occur, the strategy, the statistics. That doesn't mean they could survive a tackle.
Extreme Programming is a subset of the "agile" software methodologies which features test-first programming, pair programming, customer conversations / "stories" rather than specifications, to "do the simplest thing possible that could work" (and fix it up later... assisted by comprehensive test suites), and a 40-hour work week.
I'm actually trying out this flaxseed/peanut-butter hot cereal. Tons of omega-whatevers and fiber, or something like that, decent (less bland than oatmeal) and darned easy to make. Amazing things, grains.
It all depends on the uniform. Someone dressed like a cop or Secret Service agent will get more credibility than, say, the attendant at the local Hot Dog On A Stick.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Flamebait? Seriously! It seems like it would be potentially interesting, and I went to the site and looked hoping to find something normal-web-browser-based, but it wasn't there. You couldn't run this thing on an iPhone, either. =( Very limited.
therefore this application is absolutely useless to me.
Goodbye old-people photos, hello old-people masks?
That's probably true, but sometimes optimizing for programmers' convenience is more important than reducing every ounce of bloat to the bare minimum. RAM is cheap enough and reusable; programmers' time isn't either.
If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue.
Almost.
But not quite.
Don't anthropomorphise Mother Nature. She hates it when you do that.
Haven't seen a bank do it? Try Wachovia. A pretty big bank, as such things go, too.
Oh, it will help the local economy of Pittsburgh plenty, but the loss to the rest of the economy will more than offset that. Expensive steel hurts the construction industry, and anyone who uses things which have been constructed. Like, say, buildings. Or web sites that are hosted on computers which are located in data centers inside buildings. Or people who pay taxes to fund the latest municipal light rail project (and hey, those things get federal money, so that's... let me check... just about everyone in the country).
To the people who enjoyed cheaper steel (useful for all sorts of construction projects, like skyscrapers and bridges, and cars, and...) and to the Chinese steelworkers who will be unemployed (and the people who had come to rely on their employment), and to people in and about Pittsburgh who were not otherwise affected detrimentally by the current state of affairs but will be negatively affected by increased industrial emissions in the area, this is a bad thing.
I'm part of the at-large public who consumes steel (mostly indirectly via Infrastructure) and I for one am not particularly happy about its skyrocketing prices these days.
Actually, my company occasionally works with active, battery-powered RFID tag technology. They chirp location beacons by themselves. I understand most of the applications are currently more "warehouse" than "hospital", though.
Right. Because "quickly locating a very expensive portable medical device which may have been left in the wrong room in a 10,000-room hospital" is a problem that didn't exist before those evil overlords invented it. Heck, even the "gee it would be nice to track my supply chain better" problems are fundamentally real. And these things work.
You talk of privacy issues and such? Oh, you betcha! They're real. But you can't pretend it's not a useful technology. That is the real insult to intelligence in this thread.
No one in the server farm business is going to try and break into the solar-power business. It's not their area of expertise. It's an entirely different sort of business altogether. If there were a ton of solar power stations littering the outback, or if someone enterprising were ready to put some up in the hopes of attracting power-hungry industries with cheap electricity, that'd be another thing. But I would imagine it's still a rather risky proposition, as far as things go.
Besides, the bandwidth and latency to Australia from the rest of the world... not the greatest.
On a related IR story: A co-worker of mine who lives a little ways north in San Francisco with three roommates. One of them obtained a rabbit (for goodness only knows what reason). Rabbits, if you were not aware, are very good at chewing wires, and at some point the rabbit managed to chew through the cables to the infrared bar on their Wii.
His immediate solution was to burn two candles on either side of the TV. It apparently worked just fine.
kpppppffffffffft. Like running solar power through the electric grid into batteries isn't triply inefficient itself? Guess again.
It uses recyclable materials. Yeah? Metals like steel and copper are pretty recyclable. Doesn't mean they're cheap. In fact, they've more-than-doubled in price over the past several years.To add insult to injury, this is coming out of the non-leathal weapons division.
A pony? We have thermonuclear weapons, for crying out loud.
What we are after these days, gentlemen, is unicorns.
Isn't that the Airbus strategy? (As opposed to Boeing, who prefers the pilots-are-awesome angle on the market.)
Who the hell "expresses dissent" with an airplane?
Who expresses it with a boat, for that matter?
Presumably we would only extract the interesting things, like useful metals or He3, and leave behind the useless chunks of plain old boring bulk rock there. We have plenty here. Aside from mystic voodoo, the gravitational force should therefore remain more or less intact.
And if we ever reach the point where we can theoretically actually move enough of the Moon here to the Earth to make a difference on the raw gravitational front, then I think we'll be able to handle most of the ill effects of any removal.
My big concern is that they're going to spend my tax dollars on this thing, and it's going to end up being a spectacular failure (minus the interesting spectacle). I don't like tax money going to useless government projects. I have big enough projects to apply it to myself.
There are no billionaire economists - but they know it all, don't they?
Most of the big billionare money (the new money, not the stuff you inherit, at least) is in organizing people to actually get stuff done, making big deals with other companies (and, for that matter, convincing people to put you in charge and pay you money if you're not there already). Anyone can learn how business works. It's another thing to actually pull it off. That's people-skills.
I'm sure there's nerds who could tell you all about, oh, say, the physics of football, the biological processes that occur, the strategy, the statistics. That doesn't mean they could survive a tackle.
Extreme Programming is a subset of the "agile" software methodologies which features test-first programming, pair programming, customer conversations / "stories" rather than specifications, to "do the simplest thing possible that could work" (and fix it up later... assisted by comprehensive test suites), and a 40-hour work week.
And somehow I doubt NASA is doing all that.
I'm actually trying out this flaxseed/peanut-butter hot cereal. Tons of omega-whatevers and fiber, or something like that, decent (less bland than oatmeal) and darned easy to make. Amazing things, grains.
It all depends on the uniform. Someone dressed like a cop or Secret Service agent will get more credibility than, say, the attendant at the local Hot Dog On A Stick.