what if we were to grow plants, cut them down, and stick them underground in some salt mines or something?
This is essence what happens to most of the paper that enters most American homes (newsprint, magazines, junk mail) - it gets put out in the trash, and ends up in a landfill, where it gets buried and takes decades to centuries to break down.
So, don't recycle that paper! Put it in a landfill and sequester that carbon!
The problem is a monopoly on cable right-of-way granted by government. If the government owned the lines, there would still be a monopoly, and competition would still have a problem getting in.
Ever notice that all the serious competitors for last-mile connectivity service in the US (cable, telco, electric company) are the ones who already have negotiated access to that right-of way?
The solution is not allowing anyone to have monopoly control over that right-of-way. Regulated access, sure, but no contracts with (say) Comcast saying no other cable company may provide service to this area.
And note that the market share leader Windows survived the Mac by a day (though, my friend the Mac-fan said that only proves the Mac was so much more desirable than the other two laptops - touché!:-)
Clearly, then, next year they should eliminate that factor by running the three different OSs on the same hardware. I believe the only platform they could legally use would be Macs.;-)
I had no idea it would be findable on the web - the Digital Library of India did a real nice job of scanning a paper on it into a nice, searchable OCRed PDF:
ZMOB consisted of 256 home-grown Z80 boards and 256 home-grown communication boards. The comm hardware controlled a 48-bit wide bus that was essentially a shift register running in a loop around all 256 processor/comm pairs.
If we had started the project a few years later, we would have probably used 68000 processors, or maybe 8085/8087.
ZMOB was Maryland's first big hardware project, and we learned a lot about how not to do projects of this nature, like the worst ways to maneuver money through state channels, and that when you do large scale machines, careful signal engineering matters.
ZMOB per se was a failure - we never really got all 256 machines running at once. The comm hardware was eventually broken up into smaller 16 and 32 machine loops, and the Z80s were replaced by 68000s.
Anybody else remember the great clock cycle stall of the 1980's? During that period, Moore's Law operated in a manner closer to its original statement - the big news was the drop in cost per transistor, not raw CPU speed. The general wisdom at the time was that parallelism was going to be the way to get performance.
And then, we entered the die shrink and clock speed up era, clock speeds doubled every 14 months or so for ten years, and we went smoothly from 60 MHz to 2 GHz. Much of the enthusiasm for parallel programming died away - why sweat blood making a parallel computer when you can wait a few years and get most of the same performance?
Clock speeds hit a wall again about five years ago. If the rate of increase stays small for another five years, the current cycle drought will have outlasted the 1980's slowdown. I have a great deal of sympathy for parallel enthusiasm (I hacked on a cluster of 256 Z80's in the early 80's), but I think it won't really take off until we really have no other choice, because parallelism is hard.
My wife carried the code for her master's thesis project back from California to Maryland once. It was on an 80 MB hard drive removed from a Xerox 1108 - a little bigger than a shoebox, weight like it was full of pennies. Physical replacement cost of $$$$, plus a year's worth of hacking - no way were we going to put it into checked-in luggage.
Caused some concern at airport security, though. Couldn't prove it was a computer by turning it on - no power supply. They finally shrugged and let us through.
I believe pharmacists should be allowed to choose what services to provide to the public on the basis of their belief system.
For example, if a pharmacist believes that increased evolutionary pressure on the population is a good thing, then he/she should be allowed to not dispense antibiotics to people who believe the earth is 6000 years old.
I agree that limiting money is useless. The current limits + disclosure + federal funding regime isn't working - witness all the presidential candidates refusing federal funds because they (and their opponents) can raise more money outside the public funding system.
The only way to reduce the influence of money in politics is to make it unneeded - to find ways of mobilizing voters without bales of cash for tv/radio/print ads.
Maybe by 2012 it will be possible for a candidate to run with a message like this:
Our movement communicates and organizes via the Internet - the most flexible and least expensive means of information sharing ever invented. The other guys use outdated, expensive media, which means they need lots of campaign money, which means they are indebted to the big contributors that fund them.
Every time you see a slick TV ad, or a full-page newspaper or magazine ad, regardless of the content, THINK - who funded that? Who owns the candidate?
From reading TFA, t's not 100% clear what email application he's using. Given Limbaugh's long-time Mac user status, he might be using something like Eudora, which stores email as one file per folder. Mail.app stores each message in a separate file, which works much better with Time Machine.
... because then someone in the states in question would have to admit that They Made A Mistake in approving the machines in the first place, despite the loud public warnings of every computer scientist not employed by an e-voting machine company.
And that would mean that Someone Should Be Fired for negligence and general stupidity. Given that the people most likely to be fired got their jobs via political patronage, that would reflect badly on their patrons.
Therefore, nobody will be punished - except the taxpayers, as always.
... especially for files. These days, for small projects, compile and link can take much less than one second, especially if all the files are in the system cache. Having all the files in your project with the same timestamp can confuse tools like make, which will then rebuild stuff unnecessarily.
If we're going to 64-bit timestamps, could we consider giving up, say, one or two bytes for fractional seconds?
... is buy last year's model and make it last for five years. The newest machine in my house right now is a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac mini, which I'm debating moving to Leopard.
I love the idea of Time Machine and Time Capsule, but I won't be running them any time soon.
... unless someone hacked on it a lot after I released it into the wild. Mine was the grid-of-quadrants navigated by warp drive, impulse drive within a quadrant, move around and shoot at stuff version.
The only thing I added to it was Tholians, who would grab you as you entered a quadrant and start laying web segments around you. Your phasers would bounce off the web and hit you, so you could escape them only by hitting them with photon torpedoes.
... which is common on portables that get the crap beaten out of them, being able to easily attach another machine and copy your data off is real important. This is especially important on portables that are tough, but painful to open for servicing.
My ancient and revered iBook (500 MHz G3) is still in service, running 10.4. I've never lost data on it, not even when its hard drive committed slow-motion suicide after repeated falls, primarily because I was able to image its hard drive even when it was unbootable.
Replacing that hard drive was a nightmare. Three hours on my dining room table, N different shapes and sizes of miniscule screws... my eyes water at the thought of it.
I "ported" a BASIC Star Trek game to PL/I in 1975, by hosing the code into a text editor and making all the BASIC line numbers into PL/I labels, among other software engineering atrocities.
I put an ad for this game into Creative Computing, eventually selling about 50 copies by shipping decks of punched cards through the US mail.
I even got a legitimate, for-pay account on Clemson's 370 mainframe to handle the card punching. And discovered that the command I was told to use for punching didn't charge my account, so my profit margin was huge.
On a PDP8, at Clemson. I was in high school at the time, and wrote most of the code on a TSS8 machine over a phone line. Controls were the main switch register. I am still amazed that it displayed actual moving, orbiting blobs the first time I ran it on the box with the 1024x1024 oscilloscope.
Later on as an undergrad, I cleaned it up and moved the controls over to two boxes with four push buttons each (turn left, turn right, thrust, shoot).
... and look how much good that did Xerox. Turning real innovation into competitive advantage, or new products, is hard.
Anecdote from Fumbling the Future (book on Xerox PARC in the 1970's and 80's):
Xerox held a big coming-out party for the Xerox Star office system - personal workstations with mice and WIMP interfaces, networked file storage, laser printers. They set up a big demo Office Of The Future, and invited all of Xerox's top brass to see it. Because this was 1980, they were all male, and they brought along their wives, who had all been secretaries at one time or another.
The executives walked around, looked at stuff, and nodded their heads thoughtfully, but did not get excited. Their wives sat down, rolled the mice, clicked the buttons, typed stuff, created documents, printed them, and basically got excited as all hell. The users knew that this was the future - the business decision-makers didn't have a clue.
... beware of unintended consequences. Taxing fuel to maintain roads makes the assumption that there's only one source of fuel for transportation.
In the US, this has led to stupidities like people being arrested and fined for home-cooking biodiesel fuel - they hadn't paid the fuel taxes, and there was no system set up for them to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Consumer Price Index Calculator $360 in 1979 = $1069 today.
Their 2008 numbers are based on linear extension of the 2006 - 2007 data, so this might be off.
Doesn't it?
what if we were to grow plants, cut them down, and stick them underground in some salt mines or something?
This is essence what happens to most of the paper that enters most American homes (newsprint, magazines, junk mail) - it gets put out in the trash, and ends up in a landfill, where it gets buried and takes decades to centuries to break down.
So, don't recycle that paper! Put it in a landfill and sequester that carbon!
The problem is a monopoly on cable right-of-way granted by government. If the government owned the lines, there would still be a monopoly, and competition would still have a problem getting in.
Ever notice that all the serious competitors for last-mile connectivity service in the US (cable, telco, electric company) are the ones who already have negotiated access to that right-of way?
The solution is not allowing anyone to have monopoly control over that right-of-way. Regulated access, sure, but no contracts with (say) Comcast saying no other cable company may provide service to this area.
And note that the market share leader Windows survived the Mac by a day (though, my friend the Mac-fan said that only proves the Mac was so much more desirable than the other two laptops - touché! :-)
;-)
Clearly, then, next year they should eliminate that factor by running the three different OSs on the same hardware. I believe the only platform they could legally use would be Macs.
I had no idea it would be findable on the web - the Digital Library of India did a real nice job of scanning a paper on it into a nice, searchable OCRed PDF:
http://dli.iiit.ac.in/ijcai/IJCAI-81-VOL-2/PDF/071.pdf
ZMOB consisted of 256 home-grown Z80 boards and 256 home-grown communication boards. The comm hardware controlled a 48-bit wide bus that was essentially a shift register running in a loop around all 256 processor/comm pairs.
If we had started the project a few years later, we would have probably used 68000 processors, or maybe 8085/8087.
ZMOB was Maryland's first big hardware project, and we learned a lot about how not to do projects of this nature, like the worst ways to maneuver money through state channels, and that when you do large scale machines, careful signal engineering matters.
ZMOB per se was a failure - we never really got all 256 machines running at once. The comm hardware was eventually broken up into smaller 16 and 32 machine loops, and the Z80s were replaced by 68000s.
Anybody else remember the great clock cycle stall of the 1980's? During that period, Moore's Law operated in a manner closer to its original statement - the big news was the drop in cost per transistor, not raw CPU speed. The general wisdom at the time was that parallelism was going to be the way to get performance.
And then, we entered the die shrink and clock speed up era, clock speeds doubled every 14 months or so for ten years, and we went smoothly from 60 MHz to 2 GHz. Much of the enthusiasm for parallel programming died away - why sweat blood making a parallel computer when you can wait a few years and get most of the same performance?
Clock speeds hit a wall again about five years ago. If the rate of increase stays small for another five years, the current cycle drought will have outlasted the 1980's slowdown. I have a great deal of sympathy for parallel enthusiasm (I hacked on a cluster of 256 Z80's in the early 80's), but I think it won't really take off until we really have no other choice, because parallelism is hard.
My wife carried the code for her master's thesis project back from California to Maryland once. It was on an 80 MB hard drive removed from a Xerox 1108 - a little bigger than a shoebox, weight like it was full of pennies. Physical replacement cost of $$$$, plus a year's worth of hacking - no way were we going to put it into checked-in luggage.
Caused some concern at airport security, though. Couldn't prove it was a computer by turning it on - no power supply. They finally shrugged and let us through.
I believe pharmacists should be allowed to choose what services to provide to the public on the basis of their belief system.
For example, if a pharmacist believes that increased evolutionary pressure on the population is a good thing, then he/she should be allowed to not dispense antibiotics to people who believe the earth is 6000 years old.
I agree that limiting money is useless. The current limits + disclosure + federal funding regime isn't working - witness all the presidential candidates refusing federal funds because they (and their opponents) can raise more money outside the public funding system.
The only way to reduce the influence of money in politics is to make it unneeded - to find ways of mobilizing voters without bales of cash for tv/radio/print ads.
Maybe by 2012 it will be possible for a candidate to run with a message like this:
Our movement communicates and organizes via the Internet - the most flexible and least expensive means of information sharing ever invented. The other guys use outdated, expensive media, which means they need lots of campaign money, which means they are indebted to the big contributors that fund them.
Every time you see a slick TV ad, or a full-page newspaper or magazine ad, regardless of the content, THINK - who funded that? Who owns the candidate?
From reading TFA, t's not 100% clear what email application he's using. Given Limbaugh's long-time Mac user status, he might be using something like Eudora, which stores email as one file per folder. Mail.app stores each message in a separate file, which works much better with Time Machine.
... if anyone had a highly-rated comment actually addressing the problem.
Other than one guy who said "Time Machine works for me", I see nothing technical as of the posting of this comment.
Come on, Apple fanbois with current kit! I'd chime in, but my most recent machine is a G4 Mac Mini running 10.4.
... because then someone in the states in question would have to admit that They Made A Mistake in approving the machines in the first place, despite the loud public warnings of every computer scientist not employed by an e-voting machine company.
And that would mean that Someone Should Be Fired for negligence and general stupidity. Given that the people most likely to be fired got their jobs via political patronage, that would reflect badly on their patrons.
Therefore, nobody will be punished - except the taxpayers, as always.
Feh.
... especially for files. These days, for small projects, compile and link can take much less than one second, especially if all the files are in the system cache. Having all the files in your project with the same timestamp can confuse tools like make, which will then rebuild stuff unnecessarily.
If we're going to 64-bit timestamps, could we consider giving up, say, one or two bytes for fractional seconds?
... is buy last year's model and make it last for five years. The newest machine in my house right now is a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac mini, which I'm debating moving to Leopard.
I love the idea of Time Machine and Time Capsule, but I won't be running them any time soon.
... unless someone hacked on it a lot after I released it into the wild. Mine was the grid-of-quadrants navigated by warp drive, impulse drive within a quadrant, move around and shoot at stuff version.
The only thing I added to it was Tholians, who would grab you as you entered a quadrant and start laying web segments around you. Your phasers would bounce off the web and hit you, so you could escape them only by hitting them with photon torpedoes.
... which is common on portables that get the crap beaten out of them, being able to easily attach another machine and copy your data off is real important. This is especially important on portables that are tough, but painful to open for servicing.
My ancient and revered iBook (500 MHz G3) is still in service, running 10.4. I've never lost data on it, not even when its hard drive committed slow-motion suicide after repeated falls, primarily because I was able to image its hard drive even when it was unbootable.
Replacing that hard drive was a nightmare. Three hours on my dining room table, N different shapes and sizes of miniscule screws... my eyes water at the thought of it.
I "ported" a BASIC Star Trek game to PL/I in 1975, by hosing the code into a text editor and making all the BASIC line numbers into PL/I labels, among other software engineering atrocities.
I put an ad for this game into Creative Computing, eventually selling about 50 copies by shipping decks of punched cards through the US mail.
I even got a legitimate, for-pay account on Clemson's 370 mainframe to handle the card punching. And discovered that the command I was told to use for punching didn't charge my account, so my profit margin was huge.
On a PDP8, at Clemson. I was in high school at the time, and wrote most of the code on a TSS8 machine over a phone line. Controls were the main switch register. I am still amazed that it displayed actual moving, orbiting blobs the first time I ran it on the box with the 1024x1024 oscilloscope.
Later on as an undergrad, I cleaned it up and moved the controls over to two boxes with four push buttons each (turn left, turn right, thrust, shoot).
From the tech specs page:
13.3-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen TFT LED backlit display with support for millions of colors
so I suppose it could be a 7-bit panel...
Just a USB2. FireWire target mode has saved my butt so many times, I would really hate to give it up, especially on a portable machine.
Although, you probably don't need it as much if you have that $1000 solid state disk...
Functional programming is about 30 years old (going back to the mid 1970s).
Functional programming dates from about 1958.
Which makes it 50 years old in 2008.
Phil and Kaja Foglio's stuff:
Girl Genius
Buck Godot
They have RSS feeds, though I've never used them.
... and look how much good that did Xerox. Turning real innovation into competitive advantage, or new products, is hard.
Anecdote from Fumbling the Future (book on Xerox PARC in the 1970's and 80's):
Xerox held a big coming-out party for the Xerox Star office system - personal workstations with mice and WIMP interfaces, networked file storage, laser printers. They set up a big demo Office Of The Future, and invited all of Xerox's top brass to see it. Because this was 1980, they were all male, and they brought along their wives, who had all been secretaries at one time or another.
The executives walked around, looked at stuff, and nodded their heads thoughtfully, but did not get excited. Their wives sat down, rolled the mice, clicked the buttons, typed stuff, created documents, printed them, and basically got excited as all hell. The users knew that this was the future - the business decision-makers didn't have a clue.
... beware of unintended consequences. Taxing fuel to maintain roads makes the assumption that there's only one source of fuel for transportation.
In the US, this has led to stupidities like people being arrested and fined for home-cooking biodiesel fuel - they hadn't paid the fuel taxes, and there was no system set up for them to do so.