If you were setting out to write a serious new web application and cross platform was a real requirement why not just use Java? If your requirements are smaller there are plenty of other languages that offer cross platform deployment that are up to date on all platforms.
It's great to see this project continuing to develop but it's going to be like Blackdown Java - a niche product at best. The only saving grace is that, unlike with Java, you can't actually run the MS VM on Linux (AFAIK).
I hope that I am not the only one that is worried by this sort of thing. It seems that we are constantly restricting the freedoms of our children to the point where we are quite possibly damaging them mentally.
Being young means taking silly risks occasionally. Yes, a few will take a risk that is too big and kill or seriously injure themselves and that is very sad but if that means that millions of others can experience life than I think it's a price worth paying.
It will be interesting to see what happens to society as these children grow up and begin to run the show. Will they realize the importance of freedom and cause another 60s style freedom revolution or will they continue the trend to ever more draconian control.
On a personal note though now that I am passed the driving stupidly fast phase of my life I would acutally quite like a GPS based speed limiter on my car so that I never get a speeding fine.
I hear what you are saying but comparisons across different laptops are hard without knowing the size of the battery. The laptop I'm currently on runs about 2.5 hours on battery with the larger battery option it gets about 3.5 hours. What that doesn't say though is it takes a laptop that already nearly pulls your arm off when carrying it to something that virtually needs a trolley to move around.
... you just need a very very big battery. Rather than quoting run time on battery we should probably start reporting the average power draw of the system idle and under full load.
We have some preliminary evidence that dark matter exists from studying the collisions of galaxies (IIRC). I believe we have managed to gravitaionally lense round dark matter which to my mind is fairly good proof.
I RTFA after posting but, as you point out, it's not clear exactly how they capture the CO2. I'm guessing it's the old classic lime to lime stone reaction. That could be done easily in one square meter to capture that much CO2 over a year but the waste would weigh far more than twenty tonnes. Further more it wouldn't address where the lime comes from and the fact that whoever was running the scrubber would need to empty it of lime stone on a regular basis.
The only way I could see this really working is if they find some way to react the CO2 to form some kind of polymer, I wish them luck with that though.
Removing the CO2 is hard but the hardest problem is what to do with it once you have removed it. I haven't RTFA yet but I'm guessing it's going to be the old pump it under the ground solution. That's great but if you want to store a lot of CO2 that way you need to compress it and that is going to use a lot of energy.
Personally I think a better idea would be to make charcoal and bury that. Genetically engineer a very fast growing tree, turn it into charcoal after a few years and spread it on fields or just dump it in old mines.
When I think about Saudi Arabia though one of the first things that comes to mind is that it's very hot. Building a super computer in a hot country must be quite a challenge from a cooling point of view.
I was wondering was if anyone has considered building a supercomputer in an underground cavern. They are, after all, naturally pretty cool. You would still need cooling to keep it that way but you would be sheilded from the worst of the sun.
While it's certainly an interesting experiment there is no way I would run my companies servers in a tent, especially a leaky tent.
Anyone who has built a few machines knows that hardware can prove to be a lot tougher than many people think it is. We once had a server running for over two years that had been dropped down a flight of steel stairs a few hours before delivery (we got the server free because it was really badly dented and no one thought it would actually run).
There is a difference between the above scenario though and the one where a whole rack of servers is sitting in a tent. One decent tear in the tent could easily flood the tent. Tough as they are I can't see any server running with water pouring into it and this scenario would result in the whole tent going down in one go. If you have to have a hot spare for this situation it's probably just easier to put it in a real building or a shipping container.
I'm not sure pirates would be much of a problem. My guess is they would probably anchor some where off the USA and European coast, just in international water. I can't see that many pirates operating in those waters.
I've heard they will be using the barges to anchor the space elevator too.
While I'm sure Google are looking into this I can't see it happening anytime soon. It's hard enough to run a massive data centre on land let alone run one that is bobbing up and down on the ocean all the time. I can't believe for one minute that this is the cheapest thing that would work.
In reality I imagine this is just an idea that was mooted and a couple of guys have looked into the feasibility to it. If you're as big as Google you can afford to look into hair brained ideas. If one sticks you make another fortune.
I would like to know exactly when it became a right for people that live in the middle of nowhere to have fast broadband. Purely letting the market decide is not the correct solution because we would end up with a situation in which probably only 30% of the country would ever get fibre. Going out of our way to make sure every isolated house gets fibre is not the correct solution either.
Personally I think we should aim for about 80% of houses with fibre to the home (yes, I would be in the 80%). If that means we need to subsiize it a bit so be it. I think we have to wake up a little and realize that these people chose to live far from populated centres. That luxury comes at a cost, that cost being higher utility charges.
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
While in recent years we have made some big steps in the right direction to get self driving cars the actual self driving car is, IMHO, a very long way off. The self driving vehicles that enter the DARPA grand challenge (which are probably about the best we currently have) only have to drive arond on empty desert and roads and lets not forget most don't make it to the finish line.
Factor in other drivers, weird junctions, heavy weather and a million other things we can't even think of and you will see that self driving cars are a long long way off. What we probably could do is have a limited number of roads where the car could take over. Something along the lines of magnetic "rails" embeded in the road that the car follows. That could take the effort out of motorway driving.
I didn't know that, makes sense though. I heard once that a world class 100m runner was generating about 250W when in a race. I'm not surprised a rower would require a little more as they are using more muscles.
I don't think you understand the complexity of the game if you're making statements like that.
That's an interesting thing becasue it's starting to look like we aren't solving these sorts of problems in the simplest way possible. A human going flat out is running on 200W maximum. That super computer is probably using 200W per-processor (when you take into account all the addition equipment needed for memory, switching, cooling etc) and not even playing as well as the human. What that says to me is that we probably aren't approaching the problem correctly.
I suspect that we will need to develop a completely different type of hardware in order for machines to be able to perform well at this type of task. Humans are poor at what computers are good at and vice versa and the two take completely different approaches to processing - perhaps that's a hint to look elsewhere.
When I started replying I was going to have the usual rant about this being a stupidly tiny "invention" or probably not even an invention at all as it's so simple. I was going to compare it to the invention of the steam engine or the television or some other complex device but it occured to me that I couldn't think of a single complex device that was a single invention.
I think every single complex device that we use is built up of several (perhaps hundreds or even thousands) of tiny increments each one of which was an invention. I'm sure some of those increments people looked at and said "that's obvious" and some required a little more imagination.
While I wouldn't try to defend this patent as being right, I firmly believe this shouldn't have been allowed, I think we are in danger of over correcting the current stupidity of the patent system unless we are careful in how we draw up new guidelines.
I could easily believe that the wireless strength meter is "lying" by not reporting S2N ration but the battery meter is a different kettle of fish.
I, too, have seen how mobile phone batteries are full according to the meter then drop rapidly but I have always assumed this is because of the chemistry used. It's been a while since I studied chemistry but IIRC the way the "fullness" of a battery is measured is by it's potential. One of the really great things about Li based batteriees is that they have almost constant voltage across their whole discharge cycle (there is a sudden voltage drop just before they go flat) which is in stark contrast to say NiCd or Lead Acid. The problem with this behaviour is that it can make it difficult to tell how much charge is remaining in a Li based battery. My guess would be that mobile phones don't have very accurate volt meters in them and they partially guess at the remaining charge based on useage.
I would like to question the reason to build a human carrying shuttle at all right now. While it's certainly very cool to be able to shoot people into space and have the walk around on the Moon is it really the most cost effective way to do the research? Huge amounts of money are spent researching ways to keep our poorly space adapted feeble bodies alive in space which could otherwise be spent making some really great breakthroughs in the robotics and perhaps AI fields.
I'm not questioning whether we should do space research (which I would like to see more of even though I think it's an expensive luxury) but I am saying that we should be maximum bang for our buck both in space and down here in the real world.
While I personally think it would be great if we saw the current wasteful duplication of effort come to an end (flame away) I can't see it happening any time soon. There are too many stuborn people in both camps to go for something like this.
How exacltly are you proposing we harness the power of gravity? I suppose hydroelectic / pumped water sort of uses gravity but I can't think of any other way. Lifing something up will always take more energy than you get from it falling and I can't see many large things falling out the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were setting out to write a serious new web application and cross platform was a real requirement why not just use Java? If your requirements are smaller there are plenty of other languages that offer cross platform deployment that are up to date on all platforms.
It's great to see this project continuing to develop but it's going to be like Blackdown Java - a niche product at best. The only saving grace is that, unlike with Java, you can't actually run the MS VM on Linux (AFAIK).
I hope that I am not the only one that is worried by this sort of thing. It seems that we are constantly restricting the freedoms of our children to the point where we are quite possibly damaging them mentally.
Being young means taking silly risks occasionally. Yes, a few will take a risk that is too big and kill or seriously injure themselves and that is very sad but if that means that millions of others can experience life than I think it's a price worth paying.
It will be interesting to see what happens to society as these children grow up and begin to run the show. Will they realize the importance of freedom and cause another 60s style freedom revolution or will they continue the trend to ever more draconian control.
On a personal note though now that I am passed the driving stupidly fast phase of my life I would acutally quite like a GPS based speed limiter on my car so that I never get a speeding fine.
I hear what you are saying but comparisons across different laptops are hard without knowing the size of the battery. The laptop I'm currently on runs about 2.5 hours on battery with the larger battery option it gets about 3.5 hours. What that doesn't say though is it takes a laptop that already nearly pulls your arm off when carrying it to something that virtually needs a trolley to move around.
... you just need a very very big battery. Rather than quoting run time on battery we should probably start reporting the average power draw of the system idle and under full load.
We have some preliminary evidence that dark matter exists from studying the collisions of galaxies (IIRC). I believe we have managed to gravitaionally lense round dark matter which to my mind is fairly good proof.
I RTFA after posting but, as you point out, it's not clear exactly how they capture the CO2. I'm guessing it's the old classic lime to lime stone reaction. That could be done easily in one square meter to capture that much CO2 over a year but the waste would weigh far more than twenty tonnes. Further more it wouldn't address where the lime comes from and the fact that whoever was running the scrubber would need to empty it of lime stone on a regular basis.
The only way I could see this really working is if they find some way to react the CO2 to form some kind of polymer, I wish them luck with that though.
Removing the CO2 is hard but the hardest problem is what to do with it once you have removed it. I haven't RTFA yet but I'm guessing it's going to be the old pump it under the ground solution. That's great but if you want to store a lot of CO2 that way you need to compress it and that is going to use a lot of energy.
Personally I think a better idea would be to make charcoal and bury that. Genetically engineer a very fast growing tree, turn it into charcoal after a few years and spread it on fields or just dump it in old mines.
When I think about Saudi Arabia though one of the first things that comes to mind is that it's very hot. Building a super computer in a hot country must be quite a challenge from a cooling point of view.
I was wondering was if anyone has considered building a supercomputer in an underground cavern. They are, after all, naturally pretty cool. You would still need cooling to keep it that way but you would be sheilded from the worst of the sun.
While it's certainly an interesting experiment there is no way I would run my companies servers in a tent, especially a leaky tent.
Anyone who has built a few machines knows that hardware can prove to be a lot tougher than many people think it is. We once had a server running for over two years that had been dropped down a flight of steel stairs a few hours before delivery (we got the server free because it was really badly dented and no one thought it would actually run).
There is a difference between the above scenario though and the one where a whole rack of servers is sitting in a tent. One decent tear in the tent could easily flood the tent. Tough as they are I can't see any server running with water pouring into it and this scenario would result in the whole tent going down in one go. If you have to have a hot spare for this situation it's probably just easier to put it in a real building or a shipping container.
I'm not sure pirates would be much of a problem. My guess is they would probably anchor some where off the USA and European coast, just in international water. I can't see that many pirates operating in those waters.
I've heard they will be using the barges to anchor the space elevator too.
While I'm sure Google are looking into this I can't see it happening anytime soon. It's hard enough to run a massive data centre on land let alone run one that is bobbing up and down on the ocean all the time. I can't believe for one minute that this is the cheapest thing that would work.
In reality I imagine this is just an idea that was mooted and a couple of guys have looked into the feasibility to it. If you're as big as Google you can afford to look into hair brained ideas. If one sticks you make another fortune.
I would like to know exactly when it became a right for people that live in the middle of nowhere to have fast broadband. Purely letting the market decide is not the correct solution because we would end up with a situation in which probably only 30% of the country would ever get fibre. Going out of our way to make sure every isolated house gets fibre is not the correct solution either.
Personally I think we should aim for about 80% of houses with fibre to the home (yes, I would be in the 80%). If that means we need to subsiize it a bit so be it. I think we have to wake up a little and realize that these people chose to live far from populated centres. That luxury comes at a cost, that cost being higher utility charges.
Defeated by a simple 2 inch lift in one shoe.
Or simpler than that just chop one foot off.
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
While in recent years we have made some big steps in the right direction to get self driving cars the actual self driving car is, IMHO, a very long way off. The self driving vehicles that enter the DARPA grand challenge (which are probably about the best we currently have) only have to drive arond on empty desert and roads and lets not forget most don't make it to the finish line.
Factor in other drivers, weird junctions, heavy weather and a million other things we can't even think of and you will see that self driving cars are a long long way off. What we probably could do is have a limited number of roads where the car could take over. Something along the lines of magnetic "rails" embeded in the road that the car follows. That could take the effort out of motorway driving.
I wonder if this was faked like the fireworks?
I didn't know that, makes sense though. I heard once that a world class 100m runner was generating about 250W when in a race. I'm not surprised a rower would require a little more as they are using more muscles.
I don't think you understand the complexity of the game if you're making statements like that.
That's an interesting thing becasue it's starting to look like we aren't solving these sorts of problems in the simplest way possible. A human going flat out is running on 200W maximum. That super computer is probably using 200W per-processor (when you take into account all the addition equipment needed for memory, switching, cooling etc) and not even playing as well as the human. What that says to me is that we probably aren't approaching the problem correctly.
I suspect that we will need to develop a completely different type of hardware in order for machines to be able to perform well at this type of task. Humans are poor at what computers are good at and vice versa and the two take completely different approaches to processing - perhaps that's a hint to look elsewhere.
When I started replying I was going to have the usual rant about this being a stupidly tiny "invention" or probably not even an invention at all as it's so simple. I was going to compare it to the invention of the steam engine or the television or some other complex device but it occured to me that I couldn't think of a single complex device that was a single invention.
I think every single complex device that we use is built up of several (perhaps hundreds or even thousands) of tiny increments each one of which was an invention. I'm sure some of those increments people looked at and said "that's obvious" and some required a little more imagination.
While I wouldn't try to defend this patent as being right, I firmly believe this shouldn't have been allowed, I think we are in danger of over correcting the current stupidity of the patent system unless we are careful in how we draw up new guidelines.
I could easily believe that the wireless strength meter is "lying" by not reporting S2N ration but the battery meter is a different kettle of fish.
I, too, have seen how mobile phone batteries are full according to the meter then drop rapidly but I have always assumed this is because of the chemistry used. It's been a while since I studied chemistry but IIRC the way the "fullness" of a battery is measured is by it's potential. One of the really great things about Li based batteriees is that they have almost constant voltage across their whole discharge cycle (there is a sudden voltage drop just before they go flat) which is in stark contrast to say NiCd or Lead Acid. The problem with this behaviour is that it can make it difficult to tell how much charge is remaining in a Li based battery. My guess would be that mobile phones don't have very accurate volt meters in them and they partially guess at the remaining charge based on useage.
Polo mints. I wonder what they did with the holes?
I would like to question the reason to build a human carrying shuttle at all right now. While it's certainly very cool to be able to shoot people into space and have the walk around on the Moon is it really the most cost effective way to do the research? Huge amounts of money are spent researching ways to keep our poorly space adapted feeble bodies alive in space which could otherwise be spent making some really great breakthroughs in the robotics and perhaps AI fields.
I'm not questioning whether we should do space research (which I would like to see more of even though I think it's an expensive luxury) but I am saying that we should be maximum bang for our buck both in space and down here in the real world.
Wow, now I know where the guy I used to code with came from. He had problems with numbers too.
While I personally think it would be great if we saw the current wasteful duplication of effort come to an end (flame away) I can't see it happening any time soon. There are too many stuborn people in both camps to go for something like this.
How exacltly are you proposing we harness the power of gravity? I suppose hydroelectic / pumped water sort of uses gravity but I can't think of any other way. Lifing something up will always take more energy than you get from it falling and I can't see many large things falling out the sky.