At first I thought that doing this by 2050 sounded way too long. Then I realised, the technology to make it possible will take 20 years, but the rest of the time will be to get enough people to actually realise that banging a metal block up and down inside a closed space by exploding a volatile chemical is really a very poor idea for obtaining motive power indeed. This methodology has had its day, time to move on.
Before OS X, if a program did not hand control back go the OS via WaitNextEvent(), the Mac essentially need to be restarted. In fact, Macs became so unstable, people ended up just rebooting them every two hours just to be safe.
While OSX was a vast improvement, you exaggerate. The classic Mac OS was never that bad, and as one Apple developer once wrote, "A well-written app should run for hours if not days without being restarted". Even in 1992 that was taken to be a very tongue-in-cheek remark.
The supposed "clamour" for features such as pre-emptive multi-tasking, protected memory and so forth came from developers, not users. As a developer myself this was a huge relief to finally have, but for users, it was "meh". I found it near to impossible to explain to non-technical users the actual benefits of these things.
For the first few versions of OS X, most users used to the old Mac OS had plenty to complain about in terms of UI usability and quality of fit and finish. I think much of that has been addressed, but not all - it's just that current users have now either forgotten the smoothness of the old UI or else were never familiar with it.
Talking of high tech, whatever happened to the thing I saw about 5-6 years ago where someone had fitted a small hydrofoil blade beneath the rear of the board, which lifted the whole thing out of the water at speed and made it ultra-fast and ultra-manouverable. I know little about surfing, so maybe that wasn't playing fair, and it got seen off by the surfing equivalent of the "get off my lawn"brigade, but it seemed a great idea and once seen, sort of obvious. Not even expensive to make.
Mass bends space-time, right? So why not define it as a certain amount of curvature - say the mass needed to bend a light beam in vacuo by some measurable amount, divided by a chosen constant to give 1kg according to the theory.
Apps have to return a special exit code when the appstore verification fails
No they don't HAVE to. They can, and that helps to make for a unified UI for the user, rather than every app implementing its own UI for the purpose. However, if the app doesn't implement this, it still runs fine. The benefit for the developer is that it provides a standard method for dealing with pirated copies of their app being run. For many, that's a non-issue.
First one I ever saw was an 80MB drive which was attached to a network server and shared among ten Mac Pluses in an office. We thought that was a pretty hot system, 1986.
I've been very successful with ancestry.com after a pretty shaky start. I think if you are a newbie, it can mislead you into thinking that finding true links is a piece of cake and that anything it suggests is likely to be true by default. You have to use common sense to reject the many, many false positives it offers, and as so many people don't it means that by my estimate, 90%+ of the trees lodged there are incorrect to some extent. For example, people don't bother to check the most basic feasibility of a date, that would for example suggest that someones mother was 8 years old at the time of their birth, or that they had children aged 60 or more. Even worse is placenames - people frequently seem to assume that a village in England is the same place as another place in the USA with the same name, causing tress to suddenly jump continents for no good reason. When much of what makes Ancestry.com work is matches with research done by others, you end up having to be very skeptical about nearly everything it throws at you that comes from another person's tree and not from an official record (and even then it's still very loose with its matches).
Nevertheless it's got a lot of good data if you are prepared to be careful and painstaking and work like a detective (and are able to confirm links independently). I've now traced 5 generations reliably and many more in some branches after about 6-7 months of fairly persistent work.
I do have a problem with us subsidizing their life choices by living remote from services offered in heavily populated cities. Hell, I'd love to move out to the countryside, and have all the services offered in a city location.
What "choice"? I live in the Australian countryside. I'd love to live in Sydney, but my house is worth about $350,000 dollars, whereas the smallest apartment in Sydney is well out of our league at more than double that, and it wouldn't be big enough to house my family.
I run my own software business from home, and this is possible because I have some form of broadband connection. It's not great - just ADSL (1) and we're so far from the exchange that the speed is well down on the maximum theoretical available. We also have no choice but to use Telstra here, there is no alternative service for this region.
By living here we suffer in terms of not having lots of services available on our doorstep - if it's not agricultural, you can't get it here. So anything "unusual" requires a trip to Sydney or Brisbane which is a 7 hour drive either way, one way. Even basic stuff like home furnishing can be a challenge.
Yes, it's nice to live here, it has many upsides, but it certainly is not convenient compared to living in the city. Roll on the NBN, it will give us many of the benefits that city folk take for granted, and will allow me personally to expand my software enterprise as well as reduce our environmental impact by eliminating many car journeys that are currently forced on us.
Yes, I thought the same. Sure, this is likely to have a few more effects and so on, but really, who pays much attention to how the sound-to-light works? I remember making a very effective one with a single thyristor, a potentiometer and a small transformer. That very simplicity makes it easy to get a kid interested in electronics; something this complex will only serve to make most think it's well beyond them.
I don't really know much about how the motor works, but Volvo and others are using it for research. The company is called Protean Electric. Unfortunately their website sucks and doesn't tell you much about the technology itself. Seems they found some more investment since I last checked though.
At first I felt similarly about not having mechanical brakes as a "failsafe", but if you think about brakes as a mechanism that removes energy from the wheel, as long as you have somewhere to put it and can do it sufficiently rapidly, there's no reason they can't be as effective, with the bonus that you keep the energy for later use (and if that storage is full, just convert to heat and vent to the air, as all cars do now). Current brakes have a finite limit to how rapidly they can convert energy, as I have discovered on numerous occasions!
With you on manual transmissions, vastly prefer it in conventional cars, but looking forward to the day that no transmission at all is ever needed. The existence of a complex transmission of any sort is an indication of just how unsuitable IC engines are for cars.
Yes, except that the company I mentioned developed a combined motor/brake unit with a 100kW output power weighing 22kg. That is in the same ballpark as a conventional disc brake and drive shaft. Sadly, last time I checked they'd gone into receivership, but nevertheless the technology exists for average-car applications. Performance cars might use a slightly different arrangement for ideal unsprung weight, but let's walk before we can run.
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
Why does it need this? It should be possible to put the drive motors in the wheel hubs and do away with all transmission, clutches, drive shafts and what-have-you. Motors are efficient over a much wider speed range than IC. A British company already achieved a practical motor/brake combination that is 100kW at the wheel with no greater unsprung weight than a typical current car.
This was discusssed on the Guardian comments the other day, and this solution was put forward which, if implemented, would sweep it all away at a stroke. I don't claim this came from me, but I can't find the attribution.
Solution: Invent a device that causes any concealed explosive to detonate instantly, and have this within a sealed containment room. Ordinary passengers pass right through, but real security risks are immediately removed from the situation. Extra bonus: muffled bangs would be shortly followed by an announcement that a seat upgrade is now available...
It's still Carbon because of the need to support Windows. A Cocoa version would be nice, but would then require a totally different codebase on Windows.
Those guys did well to even think of the idea in 1975. At around the same time the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" portrayed the future of photography as instant, but still using film. Even those whose job is new ideas have a hard time making the leap to a whole different technology to solve an apparently solved problem in a completely new way.
Slashdot Mirror
At first I thought that doing this by 2050 sounded way too long. Then I realised, the technology to make it possible will take 20 years, but the rest of the time will be to get enough people to actually realise that banging a metal block up and down inside a closed space by exploding a volatile chemical is really a very poor idea for obtaining motive power indeed. This methodology has had its day, time to move on.
Before OS X, if a program did not hand control back go the OS via WaitNextEvent(), the Mac essentially need to be restarted. In fact, Macs became so unstable, people ended up just rebooting them every two hours just to be safe.
While OSX was a vast improvement, you exaggerate. The classic Mac OS was never that bad, and as one Apple developer once wrote, "A well-written app should run for hours if not days without being restarted". Even in 1992 that was taken to be a very tongue-in-cheek remark.
The supposed "clamour" for features such as pre-emptive multi-tasking, protected memory and so forth came from developers, not users. As a developer myself this was a huge relief to finally have, but for users, it was "meh". I found it near to impossible to explain to non-technical users the actual benefits of these things.
For the first few versions of OS X, most users used to the old Mac OS had plenty to complain about in terms of UI usability and quality of fit and finish. I think much of that has been addressed, but not all - it's just that current users have now either forgotten the smoothness of the old UI or else were never familiar with it.
Zune, Zune, Zune.... errrrmmm... oh, that thing!
This is the thing I mean: youtube vid . Did it come to anything?
Talking of high tech, whatever happened to the thing I saw about 5-6 years ago where someone had fitted a small hydrofoil blade beneath the rear of the board, which lifted the whole thing out of the water at speed and made it ultra-fast and ultra-manouverable. I know little about surfing, so maybe that wasn't playing fair, and it got seen off by the surfing equivalent of the "get off my lawn"brigade, but it seemed a great idea and once seen, sort of obvious. Not even expensive to make.
The point is we don't actually need the mass. It just needs to be calculated according to theory and the definition based on it.
Of course, turning that into a reference standard might be a challenge...
Alternatively, a convenient nearby very large mass is available. Look up in the sky.
Mass bends space-time, right? So why not define it as a certain amount of curvature - say the mass needed to bend a light beam in vacuo by some measurable amount, divided by a chosen constant to give 1kg according to the theory.
Not everybody agrees with you
Anyone with any actual knowledge of Greek and Latin does, however. Ignorance is not a virtue - stop defending it.
why do people keep modding my Jobs/Vader comparisons down?
Because they're tedious and unfunny?
Apps have to return a special exit code when the appstore verification fails
No they don't HAVE to. They can, and that helps to make for a unified UI for the user, rather than every app implementing its own UI for the purpose. However, if the app doesn't implement this, it still runs fine. The benefit for the developer is that it provides a standard method for dealing with pirated copies of their app being run. For many, that's a non-issue.
First one I ever saw was an 80MB drive which was attached to a network server and shared among ten Mac Pluses in an office. We thought that was a pretty hot system, 1986.
I've been very successful with ancestry.com after a pretty shaky start. I think if you are a newbie, it can mislead you into thinking that finding true links is a piece of cake and that anything it suggests is likely to be true by default. You have to use common sense to reject the many, many false positives it offers, and as so many people don't it means that by my estimate, 90%+ of the trees lodged there are incorrect to some extent. For example, people don't bother to check the most basic feasibility of a date, that would for example suggest that someones mother was 8 years old at the time of their birth, or that they had children aged 60 or more. Even worse is placenames - people frequently seem to assume that a village in England is the same place as another place in the USA with the same name, causing tress to suddenly jump continents for no good reason. When much of what makes Ancestry.com work is matches with research done by others, you end up having to be very skeptical about nearly everything it throws at you that comes from another person's tree and not from an official record (and even then it's still very loose with its matches).
Nevertheless it's got a lot of good data if you are prepared to be careful and painstaking and work like a detective (and are able to confirm links independently). I've now traced 5 generations reliably and many more in some branches after about 6-7 months of fairly persistent work.
I do have a problem with us subsidizing their life choices by living remote from services offered in heavily populated cities. Hell, I'd love to move out to the countryside, and have all the services offered in a city location.
What "choice"? I live in the Australian countryside. I'd love to live in Sydney, but my house is worth about $350,000 dollars, whereas the smallest apartment in Sydney is well out of our league at more than double that, and it wouldn't be big enough to house my family.
I run my own software business from home, and this is possible because I have some form of broadband connection. It's not great - just ADSL (1) and we're so far from the exchange that the speed is well down on the maximum theoretical available. We also have no choice but to use Telstra here, there is no alternative service for this region.
By living here we suffer in terms of not having lots of services available on our doorstep - if it's not agricultural, you can't get it here. So anything "unusual" requires a trip to Sydney or Brisbane which is a 7 hour drive either way, one way. Even basic stuff like home furnishing can be a challenge.
Yes, it's nice to live here, it has many upsides, but it certainly is not convenient compared to living in the city. Roll on the NBN, it will give us many of the benefits that city folk take for granted, and will allow me personally to expand my software enterprise as well as reduce our environmental impact by eliminating many car journeys that are currently forced on us.
...NATO helps you! /oblig
Yes, I thought the same. Sure, this is likely to have a few more effects and so on, but really, who pays much attention to how the sound-to-light works? I remember making a very effective one with a single thyristor, a potentiometer and a small transformer. That very simplicity makes it easy to get a kid interested in electronics; something this complex will only serve to make most think it's well beyond them.
How about the churches, for example? They controlled a lot of the information flow
Very true, though in fact you should probably call it the MISinformation flow...
I don't really know much about how the motor works, but Volvo and others are using it for research. The company is called Protean Electric. Unfortunately their website sucks and doesn't tell you much about the technology itself. Seems they found some more investment since I last checked though.
At first I felt similarly about not having mechanical brakes as a "failsafe", but if you think about brakes as a mechanism that removes energy from the wheel, as long as you have somewhere to put it and can do it sufficiently rapidly, there's no reason they can't be as effective, with the bonus that you keep the energy for later use (and if that storage is full, just convert to heat and vent to the air, as all cars do now). Current brakes have a finite limit to how rapidly they can convert energy, as I have discovered on numerous occasions!
With you on manual transmissions, vastly prefer it in conventional cars, but looking forward to the day that no transmission at all is ever needed. The existence of a complex transmission of any sort is an indication of just how unsuitable IC engines are for cars.
Yes, except that the company I mentioned developed a combined motor/brake unit with a 100kW output power weighing 22kg. That is in the same ballpark as a conventional disc brake and drive shaft. Sadly, last time I checked they'd gone into receivership, but nevertheless the technology exists for average-car applications. Performance cars might use a slightly different arrangement for ideal unsprung weight, but let's walk before we can run.
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
Why does it need this? It should be possible to put the drive motors in the wheel hubs and do away with all transmission, clutches, drive shafts and what-have-you. Motors are efficient over a much wider speed range than IC. A British company already achieved a practical motor/brake combination that is 100kW at the wheel with no greater unsprung weight than a typical current car.
This was discusssed on the Guardian comments the other day, and this solution was put forward which, if implemented, would sweep it all away at a stroke. I don't claim this came from me, but I can't find the attribution.
Solution: Invent a device that causes any concealed explosive to detonate instantly, and have this within a sealed containment room. Ordinary passengers pass right through, but real security risks are immediately removed from the situation. Extra bonus: muffled bangs would be shortly followed by an announcement that a seat upgrade is now available...
. And they'll never fly away since there is no pilot to need a break
By the same token there's no reason to have many qualms about shooting it down...
It's still Carbon because of the need to support Windows. A Cocoa version would be nice, but would then require a totally different codebase on Windows.
Those guys did well to even think of the idea in 1975. At around the same time the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" portrayed the future of photography as instant, but still using film. Even those whose job is new ideas have a hard time making the leap to a whole different technology to solve an apparently solved problem in a completely new way.
a) where are we going to go?
b) how are we going to get there?
c) when would we ever agree on a and b let alone actually do it?
Nah. We're just a bunch of ignorant monkeys who ought to know better. But don't. Something else will evolve out of the mess we leave.
except dumb womens usually aren't any good in bed
This is SOOOO not true. Much experience either way? Thought not.