This isn't the worst idea I've ever come across but I can't help feeling it's walking down the idle route. I like achievements in games I'm not really sure they fit into a news discussion site. Still there's a good chance they won't be around tomorrow anyway.
Here's a radical idea, why not do three experiments: men only, mixed and women only. Find out which group handles the isolation best. My guess is that it would be the women only group followed by the men only group.
I think the women only group would handle it best because women are generally less aggressive and better communicators. Handling that sort of isolation will require people that can talk to each other for extended periods of time.
I read articles like this (well the summary anyway) and I am always left wondering where the money to produce these games comes from. The companies are saying that to break even they need to sell a million copies but they are typically selling 150k so therefore they are making a huge loss on every game. How do they stay in business? The console manufacturers can't be bailing them out as they are making a loss on each piece of hardware so they need to make their money from games sales so who is paying? I can only assume that when a company gets a blockbuster it makes so much money that all these total failures (from a business point of view) are paid for.
They are trying to sell the one thing that is easier to rip off than anything man has ever produced before to a nation virtually built on ripping things off. Yeah that's going to work really well.
Saying the desktop won't be relevant in five years is complete and utter, crack smoking, nonsense. I would put money on most people still using computers that a very broadly similar to the current machines five years from now for the simple reason that cloud based applications aren't as good as desktop applications and they aren't going to be for a good few years yet. Sure, there are some cloud based applications that are fairly good. Email is the perfect example, for many people web based email is good enough but those applications are few and far between. We might all end up with virtualized machines and big-iron in the server room again but that is just moving the hardware.
A virtual machine hosted remotely and not tied to a single piece of hardware looks a lot like the end-game of browser based web-applications. Sure there are a few differences over how data is accessed but that's pretty minor stuff.
Is it just me that is a bit fed up with this sort of situation? The last few years seems to have seen the rise of the legal stalemate based on patent infringement where 90% of the patents are for trivial ideas anyway. I'm sure when the patent and legal system were designed this wasn't what was intended as it helps no one and just ends up costing us, the buyers, more money. I suppose it keeps all those lawyers in business though.
A lack of planning and having defined goals is not the same as working in a new and different way. If a survey of the most successful open source project was to be done I would put money on every single one having a strong plan and good leadership. Fair enough that leadership might be technical rather than the typical management type but it would be there.
This whole "we won't call it 1.0 till it does everything perfectly" thinking smacks of childishness to me. Set some goals and publish them along with version numbers so that people know what to expect when. FFmpeg is a prime example of a project that should be 5.0 not 0.5. It's a mature, feature rich and stable lump of code that is in widespread use. Give it a version number that reflect that.
Why does the Chrome Experiments link not go to the Chrome Experiments site but instead to a PC Pro article? That's just plain nuts. Sure link to the article but come on.
I agree, if we can make carbon capture work then it's a short, possibly even medium term solution to our problems but, personally, I can't see it even nearly working.
Perhaps it would be possible to capture some but the volume of gas produced by coal fired power stations must be many orders of magnitude greater than the volume of natural gas we pump out of the ground (assuming they are going to use old gas fields for storage). That doesn't even begin to address the energy required for compression and transportation or the possibility that the CO2 won't stay underground.
It's a straw clutching solution to a problem that needs real working solutions soon.
From what I've read about fusion power I mostly agree with your summary. The only part I would question is the comment on high-level nuclear waste. It's certainly true that the neutron flux will cause the containment vessel to become highly radioactive but by selecting the correct materials for it that radioactivity will be very short lived. I believe that they are talking about half lives of a few years at most. In other words the plant would only need to sit there for maybe 100 years before it could be decommissioned and recycled. We already build structures that are designed to be maintained for over 100 years so this is well within our current capabilities.
As for tritium production we can always run a couple of nuclear plants to produce it. I think the problem for fusion power will continue to be waste helium removal and a severe lack of funding.
I agree completely though that nuclear power is our only viable alternative at the moment. We have discovered that uranium is a lot more abundant than we first thought (and we haven't even looked that hard yet) but on it's own it's not enough to power the world for a billion years. If you include reprocessing and thorium breeding then yes we can get power for a very long time but both of those technologies are in their infancy. What we need is for governments to bite the bullet and run a PR campaign for nuclear power. The whole proliferation reason for not reprocessing is starting evaporate as more and more countries get nuclear weapons.
The Shell study is interesting but it smells like research that was done after the conclusions had already been set. The scramble scenario is a worst case where we almost deliberately walk into problems, the blueprints scenario trumpets carbon capture as the almighty saviour.
In the UK we have a number of coal and nuclear plants that are due to close in the near future that are critical to our energy supply. The coal plants have to close due to agreements on emissions and the nuclear plants due to them reaching the end of their life. In the scramble scenario they would just be left to close, in real life I suspect they will be forced to run on for longer because no government wants to be the one running the show where there are rolling blackouts. I think when push comes to shove and people are given the choice between no heating and lighting and nuclear power opposition to nuclear will vanish faster than your can blink. I wouldn't be at all surprised if with a decent push a nuclear plant could also be built and operational in less than ten years.
The real problem of course is that the bulk of our energy usage isn't in the form of electricity at the moment. Moving to all electric space heating and transport is going to be very very hard.
Couldn't agree more. Eclipse was better than Netbeans for a while but in the last 18 months Eclipse has stood still and Netbeans has shot forward. Netbeans probably doesn't have as many features as Eclipse, and certainly not as many plugins, but what it does it does well which no one could say about Eclipse. I just wish I could now migrate our main product to Netbeans so that I can take advantage of the Visual JSF tools.
I've never owned a console but lately I've been considering getting a PS3. The only thing stopping me is the price which when compared to the 360 is just plain silly. It's not that I can't afford the PS3 at the current price I just can't justify paying more than double the price of the 360 for something that is only a little better. The price of the PS3 really pushes it into the luxury / enthusiast bracket for me. I want something I can just kick back on occasionally not something where I feel guilty for not using it because I've spent a fortune on it.
It's true enough that requirements often change during development but if requirements are changing drastically and / or frequently during development someone has screwed up.
Like a lot of young developers I used to think that the "best" way to deliver a software project was just to jump straight in and start coding. As I've gained more experience and worked on progressively larger projects I now see that software development is a lot more like civil engineering.
If you went up to the engineering team that was responsible for the Viaduc de Millau bridge and said I want it in purple half way through the project he would say fine give me X euros to re-paint it. If you instead said I want it to span the straights of Gibraltar you've screwed up with the requirements.
I'm guessing that sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. I've seen it go wrong a lot more than I've seen it go right hence my opinion that they are probably not worth it. I'd take a team of moderate, well adjusted, programmers over a maverick and a bunch of brow-beaten devs any day.
There is a flip side to this though. One place I worked had a habit of trying to make sure any code they wrote was always as flexible and general as possible so that future requirements could be satisfied easily. The problem was that everything took twice as long to develop and was unnecessarily complex. I noticed that the developers were generally fairly poor at predicting what the new requirements would be or when they would be wanted. I'm not advocating that every piece of code should be written as the shortest path from A to B but I think the best solution is somewhere between general and rigid. Your in class example isn't great because you knew up front that there would be new requirements in the near future therefore hinting to you that a flexible base is a good thing. In the real world you rarely get such hints.
You sir are most certainly not alone in having spent hours going through reams of anothers overly complex code. I have had that unenviable job for the last three years now and, while not religious, it has driven me to pray that there is a special type of hell waiting for dip stick that wrote this software.
I started on the software coal fact many years ago and have slowly worked my way up to the point where I now employ programmers and right from day one I've found the Josh type developer to be nothing but a pain in the neck and generally not worth it. They might be great developers but in my team (at least) that alone is not good enough. I need people that can communicate and get on with others as well. I need people that I can take to customers occasionally. In my experience Josh types are also loose cannons that can't be trusted to do what they are asked to do, they go off mission because they think they know better. Unfortunately they rarely do see the whole picture and end up causing problems further down the road.
My view of this type of programmer is probably rather skewed because one of them actually managed to bankrupt a company I was working for by promising far more than he could actually deliver. Management just kept lapping up the promises despite warnings right up to the end when they noticed how much they had spent and what they actually had got in return.
Have you checked out the boiling point of hydrogen recently? I think you'll find that it's much lower than methanol but they seem to think they can store that. Of course we could always maybe make the refueling process not spill vast amounts of vapour into the air, just because it's a liquid fuel doesn't mean we have to pump it like we currently do petrol.
I agree though there is a risk from the vapour should a fuel tank burst, perhaps we should therefore look into ethanol buring fuel cells. A much harder problem due to the greater size of ethanol but still possible.
Even at 240V the charge time will be measured in hours though unless people plan on using cable so thick they need a fork lift truck to move it. If we want fast charging we need to step up the voltage to a few thousand volts (I like the sound of 7200V as, I believe, that is the local distribution voltage in the EU). Trouble with high voltages though is the complexity to switching then regularly.
Personally, I don't understand why we aren't making a push to use methanol fuel cells. Methanol is much easier to transport and store than hydrogen, has a decent power density, the fuel cells pretty much work already and refueling is about as fast as with petrol. Of course there is the downside that it releases CO2 but that is only a problem if we use methane from fossil sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Production
Please excuse me widening the discussion but... I play quite a few RTS games and I've noticed that over the last few years the various different playable races in those games have tended to become very similar in ability.
It used to be the case that in an RTS there were generally one or two races that were slightly better than the others but now they are very well balanced. The problem is that they have balanced the races by making them all the same and thus removing one of the most interesting aspects of the genre.
In AOE II for example you could pit a strong ranged race against a strong close combat race and have a damn good game with each side trying to lure the other into traps that play to their strength. By AOE III every race was damn near the same.
Ah well, maybe one day someone will have the courage / time to properly balance a game again. Oh and, get off my lawn you kids.
I'm sure your explanation of how these cards works is correct but I can't help wondering why they don't / can't use private key encryption? Apple are the only people that need to read what is on the card so if each card carried some unique information (e.g. a GUID, a time stamp, value, distributor sold to) encrypted with a key they kept secret it would be damn near impossible to counterfeit. The end user would simply send the encrypted information back to Apple when they wanted to use the card and it would be marked off the list of available card.
While an interesting comparison which draws conclusions I broadly agree with I feel that this is mostly unfair. They author states at the start that he has developed two solutions to the problems he commonly faces one based on Joomla the other on Word Press. Since Joomla is much harder to work with it must be bringing something to the party that Word Press isn't. Having said that I do feel that a lot of open source projects are far more complicated than they need to be because they are produced by developers for developers. Developers seem to have an unwritten language which is impenetrable to non-developers and describes how systems work. This is great for developers because it means we can sit down to just about any tool and know how to use it, to non-developers though it's an indication it's time to walk away.
... I've slipped into a parallel universe again. Courts making sensible decisions! Next you'll tell me a funny joke about chickens crossing the road or maybe even find a/. meme that hasn't been done to death.
I wouldn't worry too much there is ample scope for this common sense to be screwed up by other courts and rulings.
SOFC's currently run at about 900 to 1000 deg C which is pretty hostile to the equipment (I was working on lowering the temperature to around 700 deg C). When building a SOFC most of the cost is in building a system that can handle these temperatures not the materials they are made from - although they aren't cheap.
In other words it doesn't cost twice as much to build a system twice as large (within reason). When you build a system you want to get as much bang for your buck as you can so you build it big. The ceramic tubes that form the heart of the system are pretty much as easy to make 1m long as they are 1cm long but the 1m long tubes give 100* the output hence another driver to increase size.
As for power cycling the problem here is not how long it takes to heat or cool the system it's the thermal stresses in the materials. Being heated from 20 deg C to 1000 deg C and back will cause the ceramics to fail in a few cycles even if the heating and cooling is done slowly. Slower is better but it's no solution. Try leaving a china plate in the oven for a couple of weeks an you will see the glaze crack and that is probably only cycling up to 200 deg C max.
As an aside... The furnace we made used to make many of the ceramics we tested used ceramic heating elements (tungsten carbide) which were rated at just 5 power cycles. The lowest temperature we could take the oven to was 950 deg C. Putting something into that oven for the first time is not something you forget quickly.
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This isn't the worst idea I've ever come across but I can't help feeling it's walking down the idle route. I like achievements in games I'm not really sure they fit into a news discussion site. Still there's a good chance they won't be around tomorrow anyway.
Here's a radical idea, why not do three experiments: men only, mixed and women only. Find out which group handles the isolation best. My guess is that it would be the women only group followed by the men only group.
I think the women only group would handle it best because women are generally less aggressive and better communicators. Handling that sort of isolation will require people that can talk to each other for extended periods of time.
I read articles like this (well the summary anyway) and I am always left wondering where the money to produce these games comes from. The companies are saying that to break even they need to sell a million copies but they are typically selling 150k so therefore they are making a huge loss on every game. How do they stay in business? The console manufacturers can't be bailing them out as they are making a loss on each piece of hardware so they need to make their money from games sales so who is paying? I can only assume that when a company gets a blockbuster it makes so much money that all these total failures (from a business point of view) are paid for.
They are trying to sell the one thing that is easier to rip off than anything man has ever produced before to a nation virtually built on ripping things off. Yeah that's going to work really well.
Saying the desktop won't be relevant in five years is complete and utter, crack smoking, nonsense. I would put money on most people still using computers that a very broadly similar to the current machines five years from now for the simple reason that cloud based applications aren't as good as desktop applications and they aren't going to be for a good few years yet. Sure, there are some cloud based applications that are fairly good. Email is the perfect example, for many people web based email is good enough but those applications are few and far between. We might all end up with virtualized machines and big-iron in the server room again but that is just moving the hardware.
A virtual machine hosted remotely and not tied to a single piece of hardware looks a lot like the end-game of browser based web-applications. Sure there are a few differences over how data is accessed but that's pretty minor stuff.
Is it just me that is a bit fed up with this sort of situation? The last few years seems to have seen the rise of the legal stalemate based on patent infringement where 90% of the patents are for trivial ideas anyway. I'm sure when the patent and legal system were designed this wasn't what was intended as it helps no one and just ends up costing us, the buyers, more money. I suppose it keeps all those lawyers in business though.
A lack of planning and having defined goals is not the same as working in a new and different way. If a survey of the most successful open source project was to be done I would put money on every single one having a strong plan and good leadership. Fair enough that leadership might be technical rather than the typical management type but it would be there.
This whole "we won't call it 1.0 till it does everything perfectly" thinking smacks of childishness to me. Set some goals and publish them along with version numbers so that people know what to expect when. FFmpeg is a prime example of a project that should be 5.0 not 0.5. It's a mature, feature rich and stable lump of code that is in widespread use. Give it a version number that reflect that.
Why does the Chrome Experiments link not go to the Chrome Experiments site but instead to a PC Pro article? That's just plain nuts. Sure link to the article but come on.
I agree, if we can make carbon capture work then it's a short, possibly even medium term solution to our problems but, personally, I can't see it even nearly working.
Perhaps it would be possible to capture some but the volume of gas produced by coal fired power stations must be many orders of magnitude greater than the volume of natural gas we pump out of the ground (assuming they are going to use old gas fields for storage). That doesn't even begin to address the energy required for compression and transportation or the possibility that the CO2 won't stay underground.
It's a straw clutching solution to a problem that needs real working solutions soon.
From what I've read about fusion power I mostly agree with your summary. The only part I would question is the comment on high-level nuclear waste. It's certainly true that the neutron flux will cause the containment vessel to become highly radioactive but by selecting the correct materials for it that radioactivity will be very short lived. I believe that they are talking about half lives of a few years at most. In other words the plant would only need to sit there for maybe 100 years before it could be decommissioned and recycled. We already build structures that are designed to be maintained for over 100 years so this is well within our current capabilities.
As for tritium production we can always run a couple of nuclear plants to produce it. I think the problem for fusion power will continue to be waste helium removal and a severe lack of funding.
I agree completely though that nuclear power is our only viable alternative at the moment. We have discovered that uranium is a lot more abundant than we first thought (and we haven't even looked that hard yet) but on it's own it's not enough to power the world for a billion years. If you include reprocessing and thorium breeding then yes we can get power for a very long time but both of those technologies are in their infancy. What we need is for governments to bite the bullet and run a PR campaign for nuclear power. The whole proliferation reason for not reprocessing is starting evaporate as more and more countries get nuclear weapons.
The Shell study is interesting but it smells like research that was done after the conclusions had already been set. The scramble scenario is a worst case where we almost deliberately walk into problems, the blueprints scenario trumpets carbon capture as the almighty saviour.
In the UK we have a number of coal and nuclear plants that are due to close in the near future that are critical to our energy supply. The coal plants have to close due to agreements on emissions and the nuclear plants due to them reaching the end of their life. In the scramble scenario they would just be left to close, in real life I suspect they will be forced to run on for longer because no government wants to be the one running the show where there are rolling blackouts. I think when push comes to shove and people are given the choice between no heating and lighting and nuclear power opposition to nuclear will vanish faster than your can blink. I wouldn't be at all surprised if with a decent push a nuclear plant could also be built and operational in less than ten years.
The real problem of course is that the bulk of our energy usage isn't in the form of electricity at the moment. Moving to all electric space heating and transport is going to be very very hard.
Couldn't agree more. Eclipse was better than Netbeans for a while but in the last 18 months Eclipse has stood still and Netbeans has shot forward. Netbeans probably doesn't have as many features as Eclipse, and certainly not as many plugins, but what it does it does well which no one could say about Eclipse. I just wish I could now migrate our main product to Netbeans so that I can take advantage of the Visual JSF tools.
I've never owned a console but lately I've been considering getting a PS3. The only thing stopping me is the price which when compared to the 360 is just plain silly. It's not that I can't afford the PS3 at the current price I just can't justify paying more than double the price of the 360 for something that is only a little better. The price of the PS3 really pushes it into the luxury / enthusiast bracket for me. I want something I can just kick back on occasionally not something where I feel guilty for not using it because I've spent a fortune on it.
Just my 1c worth.
It's true enough that requirements often change during development but if requirements are changing drastically and / or frequently during development someone has screwed up.
Like a lot of young developers I used to think that the "best" way to deliver a software project was just to jump straight in and start coding. As I've gained more experience and worked on progressively larger projects I now see that software development is a lot more like civil engineering.
If you went up to the engineering team that was responsible for the Viaduc de Millau bridge and said I want it in purple half way through the project he would say fine give me X euros to re-paint it. If you instead said I want it to span the straights of Gibraltar you've screwed up with the requirements.
I'm guessing that sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. I've seen it go wrong a lot more than I've seen it go right hence my opinion that they are probably not worth it. I'd take a team of moderate, well adjusted, programmers over a maverick and a bunch of brow-beaten devs any day.
There is a flip side to this though. One place I worked had a habit of trying to make sure any code they wrote was always as flexible and general as possible so that future requirements could be satisfied easily. The problem was that everything took twice as long to develop and was unnecessarily complex. I noticed that the developers were generally fairly poor at predicting what the new requirements would be or when they would be wanted. I'm not advocating that every piece of code should be written as the shortest path from A to B but I think the best solution is somewhere between general and rigid. Your in class example isn't great because you knew up front that there would be new requirements in the near future therefore hinting to you that a flexible base is a good thing. In the real world you rarely get such hints.
You sir are most certainly not alone in having spent hours going through reams of anothers overly complex code. I have had that unenviable job for the last three years now and, while not religious, it has driven me to pray that there is a special type of hell waiting for dip stick that wrote this software.
I started on the software coal fact many years ago and have slowly worked my way up to the point where I now employ programmers and right from day one I've found the Josh type developer to be nothing but a pain in the neck and generally not worth it. They might be great developers but in my team (at least) that alone is not good enough. I need people that can communicate and get on with others as well. I need people that I can take to customers occasionally. In my experience Josh types are also loose cannons that can't be trusted to do what they are asked to do, they go off mission because they think they know better. Unfortunately they rarely do see the whole picture and end up causing problems further down the road.
My view of this type of programmer is probably rather skewed because one of them actually managed to bankrupt a company I was working for by promising far more than he could actually deliver. Management just kept lapping up the promises despite warnings right up to the end when they noticed how much they had spent and what they actually had got in return.
Have you checked out the boiling point of hydrogen recently? I think you'll find that it's much lower than methanol but they seem to think they can store that. Of course we could always maybe make the refueling process not spill vast amounts of vapour into the air, just because it's a liquid fuel doesn't mean we have to pump it like we currently do petrol. I agree though there is a risk from the vapour should a fuel tank burst, perhaps we should therefore look into ethanol buring fuel cells. A much harder problem due to the greater size of ethanol but still possible.
Even at 240V the charge time will be measured in hours though unless people plan on using cable so thick they need a fork lift truck to move it. If we want fast charging we need to step up the voltage to a few thousand volts (I like the sound of 7200V as, I believe, that is the local distribution voltage in the EU). Trouble with high voltages though is the complexity to switching then regularly.
Personally, I don't understand why we aren't making a push to use methanol fuel cells. Methanol is much easier to transport and store than hydrogen, has a decent power density, the fuel cells pretty much work already and refueling is about as fast as with petrol. Of course there is the downside that it releases CO2 but that is only a problem if we use methane from fossil sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Production
Please excuse me widening the discussion but... I play quite a few RTS games and I've noticed that over the last few years the various different playable races in those games have tended to become very similar in ability.
It used to be the case that in an RTS there were generally one or two races that were slightly better than the others but now they are very well balanced. The problem is that they have balanced the races by making them all the same and thus removing one of the most interesting aspects of the genre.
In AOE II for example you could pit a strong ranged race against a strong close combat race and have a damn good game with each side trying to lure the other into traps that play to their strength. By AOE III every race was damn near the same.
Ah well, maybe one day someone will have the courage / time to properly balance a game again. Oh and, get off my lawn you kids.
I'm sure your explanation of how these cards works is correct but I can't help wondering why they don't / can't use private key encryption? Apple are the only people that need to read what is on the card so if each card carried some unique information (e.g. a GUID, a time stamp, value, distributor sold to) encrypted with a key they kept secret it would be damn near impossible to counterfeit. The end user would simply send the encrypted information back to Apple when they wanted to use the card and it would be marked off the list of available card.
While an interesting comparison which draws conclusions I broadly agree with I feel that this is mostly unfair. They author states at the start that he has developed two solutions to the problems he commonly faces one based on Joomla the other on Word Press. Since Joomla is much harder to work with it must be bringing something to the party that Word Press isn't. Having said that I do feel that a lot of open source projects are far more complicated than they need to be because they are produced by developers for developers. Developers seem to have an unwritten language which is impenetrable to non-developers and describes how systems work. This is great for developers because it means we can sit down to just about any tool and know how to use it, to non-developers though it's an indication it's time to walk away.
... I've slipped into a parallel universe again. Courts making sensible decisions! Next you'll tell me a funny joke about chickens crossing the road or maybe even find a /. meme that hasn't been done to death.
I wouldn't worry too much there is ample scope for this common sense to be screwed up by other courts and rulings.
SOFC's currently run at about 900 to 1000 deg C which is pretty hostile to the equipment (I was working on lowering the temperature to around 700 deg C). When building a SOFC most of the cost is in building a system that can handle these temperatures not the materials they are made from - although they aren't cheap.
In other words it doesn't cost twice as much to build a system twice as large (within reason). When you build a system you want to get as much bang for your buck as you can so you build it big. The ceramic tubes that form the heart of the system are pretty much as easy to make 1m long as they are 1cm long but the 1m long tubes give 100* the output hence another driver to increase size.
As for power cycling the problem here is not how long it takes to heat or cool the system it's the thermal stresses in the materials. Being heated from 20 deg C to 1000 deg C and back will cause the ceramics to fail in a few cycles even if the heating and cooling is done slowly. Slower is better but it's no solution. Try leaving a china plate in the oven for a couple of weeks an you will see the glaze crack and that is probably only cycling up to 200 deg C max.
As an aside... The furnace we made used to make many of the ceramics we tested used ceramic heating elements (tungsten carbide) which were rated at just 5 power cycles. The lowest temperature we could take the oven to was 950 deg C. Putting something into that oven for the first time is not something you forget quickly.