1. Not a chance solar panels in their current technology could meet 1% of our entire energy needs and.
They could. It would just be too expensive.
2. Did you know what crap and environmentally unfriendly energy is required to make a solar panel:)
Yes, that's why research is needed.
Nuclear needs to keep us going for only 30-40 years before we works something else out
Maybe nuclear is our only current option, but we should still invest massively in solar research now. Ask yourself why that isn't happening.
In principle solar panels could be produced very cheaply and they really could meet all of our energy demands. Given the enormous potential of solar power, I find it shocking that there is so little government investment. We should be pumping billions into solar research instead of spending billions on Middle Eastern adventures.
We can't rely on propaganda efforts like "BP Solar" to bring us cheap solar power. It will take a lot of money and research. If I were an "oil man" I would see solar power as a massive future threat and would lobby against any government funding of solar research. I wonder if this lobbying has really been going on, and if not, why not?
What you need is the digital equivalent of a dead man's switch. Something that only triggers once you are dead and then sends all your passwords etc to one or two family members.
You could do this with some kind of timed email. There are sites that let you send emails into the future. You just type a message and specify a date on which it will be sent. You could set it to email every month and then make sure you cancel the message every month. Once you die you wont be able to cancel the message and voila!, it will be sent.
There is probably some business potential in this. You need a service that makes the dead-man's switch concept simple.
Here is my conribution to the National Identity Register Database.
DELETE * FROM People
INSERT INTO People (FirstName, LastName, Description) VALUES ('Tony','Blair', 'Corrupt lying cryptofascist war criminal bastard.')
I think you will only see real aggression against open source when it starts to seriously hurt financially. When people/businesses start to find the idea of buying the next version of MS Office ludicrous when Open-Office is free, that's when the shit will hit the fan. Microsoft will then start to do everything it can to destroy open source competition. They can't do it by making their own products better since the freeness of open-source is hard to beat.
The only thing they can really do is go after open-source legally. The legal angle is really a weak point for open source since it is based on collective altruism and there is not much money available for legal costs. All we can hope for is that companies who have an interest in open-source, such as IBM, will step in and help.
If you had the technology to have flying cars and AI to control them, you probably wouldn't need flying cars anyway. I think some sort of combination of telepresence and video conferencing should suffice for most things.
Even with today's technology I find that most business trips are quite pointless. We could probably have done an equal, if not better job by having a video conference combined with some kind of TightVNC shared desktop. It also opens up new meeting possibilities. Because there is zero travel time, the duration of the meeting can practically be much smaller, say several 1 hour meetings over a course of a week. It really opens up new possibilities. No-one takes any notice though despite the huge travel/hotel/man-time savings both sides could make.
Darth Vader: "I see you have constructed a new lightsaber."
Luke: "That's right. And I power it with new Duracell Ultra-Life Batteries."
Darth Vader: "I see. wwwwhoooor poooooow"
Luke: "You sound a bit congested. Why don't you try new Lemon-Flavor Beecham's Flu Powder?"
Darth Vader: "I will, but later my son. Now I must text the Emperor on my new Blackberry 7100r."
etc etc
After signing up with CinemaNow, I now discover that because I am in the UK I can only watch crappy B Movies, since Hollywood downloads are only available in the US. In fact, most of the download sites seem to be US only. As long as things are this dumb, people will continue to rip their DVD's to divx.
My main problem with the Cinema is that I don't have control. Missing half the film if I need to use the toilet is a bit of a pain. Also, if I miss what someone said, I can't rewind a bit and listen again.
Most of my viewing in done on a Archos AV500 portable PMP while I am commuting to work (about 1 hour). I mostly watch TV shows, e.g. Babylon 5, Alias etc. The only problem is getting the content. There don't seem to be any good (and legal) places I can get the content I want. Does anyone know where I can pay a reasonable fee to download popular TV shows?
Yes and no. Yes because I failed to tick the anonymous box. No because MrSteve isn't my real name, so in a sense it's still anonymous. I stand by my comments though:)
All companies are effectively Fascist dictatorships.
1. Your government (boss) is unelected.
2. Your government (boss) has extraordinary control over you.
3. The state (company) is viewed as more important than the individual.
In such a situation there is only one course of action. Armed resistance (skiving) is permitted under the UN Charter.
Remember that companies try to make the most money while doing as little work for it as possible. It is only fair that the employees pursue the same policy. Your employer will screw you in the end (probably after years of loyal service), so screw them now in advance.
P.S. You'll understand if I post anonymously:)
So, what's the problem, *exactly*? I hear OSS zealots saying this all of the time, but all of my VB6 apps still work just fine...
Because they will slowly die, bit by bit. You may find weird errors using Vista or the next radically different OS pumped out by Microsoft. You many notice oddities under a 64 bit OS. There are lots of horrible possibilities. Also if your customers know your applications are in VB6, they may start to worry too.
I knew we weren't the only company in the same boat. I also find it unbelievable that they dumped VB6. Are we expected to spend £400,000 doing a rewrite that adds nothing, while our competitors with their java product continue to make improvements?
The tragedy is that the management is going with.NET for future work despite the fact we have been royally screwed by Microsoft. It's almost beyond belief. It's like finishing your Autobiography after 6 years only to be told that English is being discontinued in favour of Esperanto, and you'll have to start all over again.
What languages are the safest (in terms of longevity) and most practical to use for business development?
Java is still a bit proprietary, but seems a lot safer than any of Microsoft's languages.
Delphi is proprietary, but is still around after all these years, whereas VB has been killed off. Borland seems like a better choice if you are going to be locked into a proprietary language.
C++ is non-proprietary, but I don't want to be chasing memory leaks around forever.
As for all the scripting languages, Ruby, Python etc etc, I'm not sure they are a good idea for a big business development.
Any other options you would suggest?
As for open-source VB6, I doubt it. Microsoft would not allow it.
I work for a company whose main product is a VB6 app that has had hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in it over many years. When.Net came out we quickly realised there was no way to simply convert the code to VB.NET. The upgrade wizard is a joke. The only way to move to.NET is to do a rewrite, but we don't have the time or money to do that. I suspect many companies are in this position, but they don't want to make to much of a fuss as they do not want their customers to know about the problem.
Even if we had £400,000 to invest in a rewrite, would it make sense to do in in C# or VB.NET? After all, what is to stop Microsoft from screwing us again? I find myself wishing we had written it in Java from the beginning. It would have been cross-platform and would not now require a re-write.
Has anyone else out their been screwed in this way too?
P.S. You can forget Mono, that will never be able to keep up with Microsoft's gargantuan changes, so that's not really a migration option if Microsoft decides to ever dump.NET.
On smaller projects it just leaves you with zillions of things to do, some of which can be very awkward to fix. On our main product (which is large) it just died. The time estimated for conversion just kept growing and growing.
Anyway, it's a bit like being told that English is being discontinued in favour of Esperanto, but it's ok because you can just paste your Autobiography into Google Translate and it will all be ok. Yeah, right.
Actually it also reminds me how worthless all of those Microsoft Qualifications are, since they just become totally irrelevant when they dump the technology, which can be sooner than you might think. I'm so glad I have a Physics degree and not some kind of Microsoft degree.
Well they can do all sorts of things to try to force you to upgrade. For example you suddenly discover that the latest version of MSN Messenger will only work on Vista. Solution, use Skype instead.
With some microsoft products it can be virtually impossible to upgrade though. Hypothetically imagine that your company spent £400,000 of man-time developing a product in Visual Basic 6. Then microsoft dumps VB6 and tells you to upgrade to.NET instead. You discover there is no real way to do this other than to recode everything at the cost of hundreds of thousands again (don't even joke about the migration wizard). The real solution to such problems is not to bother investing time and money with microsoft's tools in the first place.
DRM will always be broken. It's a flawed concept from the outset. You can certainly have a code that's so hard to break it would take millions of years of computer time to do it. The problem is if you just encrypt a movie with such a code, it is completely useless to everyone since they can't view it. So for DRM to work, you have to encrypt the movie, then give the viewer the movie along with the secret code necessary to decrypt it (embedded in the DVD software or hardware).
So you have everything you need to remove the encryption. They just try to make it as tricky as possible to decode the film in an unauthorized way, but it's really fundamentally flawed.
I think the true potential of this is not projecting onto surfaces, but the possibility of projection directly into the eye.
I've been waiting for the VRD (Virtual Retinal Display) for 10 years. I first heard about it on Tomorrow World (UK Science Program) and it has been in development by MVIS (http://www.mvis.com/) ever since. Sadly in all this time, all they seem to have developed is a red monochrome display for car mechanics.
Apart from being a lot more private, projecting directly into the eye cuts down on the power requirements (since the projection area is so small).
The potential uses for direct eye projection are huge. From flip up projectors on mobiles to augmented reality and full immersion Virtual Reality displays.
I'd like to know why Google logs my searches and ties them to my IP Address. Even if they never hand my searches over to anyone else, I find it a gross violation of my privacy. Does anyone know a good search engine that does not store so much private information?
get shit on for killing 5 "civilians"
Yes, people get so funny about that don't they. I wonder why? Dropping a 500lb bomb on a house is not as bad as what Hitler did, so it must be ok, right?
It takes a hell of a lot of ignorance to claim that the US doesn't care about civilian dead, and is only worried about their own soldiers, and there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a premise.
Your right of course. Take air power for example. Air power is far safer to the civilian population than sending in soldiers. Only last week I read in the New York Times that some suspected terrorists were hiding in a house in Poughkepsi, NY. Air-strikes were called in and 20 people were killed, including the two suspects. God knows what the civilian death toll would have been if soldiers had burst into the house. But of course that story in untrue. The US would never call in air-power for fear of killing US citizens. Yet it is called in all the time in Iraq.
Does anyone know how many civilians were killed in the air and artillery bombardment on Tal Afar (Iraq)? Dropping 500lb bombs on a town is not something you do to reduce civilian casualties.
So the US cares about civilian dead does it? Remember Gen. Tommy Franks infamous line "We don't do body counts." He didn't mean soldiers by the way.
Anyway, I don't want to solely concentrate on the US. Most governments care little for civilian dead. What they care about is if it gets reported in the news.
Military automation is a worrying trend. Eventually it could reach the stage where there are very few soldiers actually involved in combat. That would make it much easier for governments to prosecute wars. Consider Iraq. All the concern has been over how many US troops have died and how politically damaging it is. There is little concern for all the Iraqis killed in air strikes.
If you can automate the military, you remove most of the political repercussions of war. No US Soldiers dead, just lots of automated robots killing people in another country, who no-one cares about. It would also make it much easier for governments to turn the military against their own people.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Not a chance solar panels in their current technology could meet 1% of our entire energy needs and. They could. It would just be too expensive. 2. Did you know what crap and environmentally unfriendly energy is required to make a solar panel :)
Yes, that's why research is needed.
Nuclear needs to keep us going for only 30-40 years before we works something else out
Maybe nuclear is our only current option, but we should still invest massively in solar research now. Ask yourself why that isn't happening.
In principle solar panels could be produced very cheaply and they really could meet all of our energy demands. Given the enormous potential of solar power, I find it shocking that there is so little government investment. We should be pumping billions into solar research instead of spending billions on Middle Eastern adventures. We can't rely on propaganda efforts like "BP Solar" to bring us cheap solar power. It will take a lot of money and research. If I were an "oil man" I would see solar power as a massive future threat and would lobby against any government funding of solar research. I wonder if this lobbying has really been going on, and if not, why not?
What you need is the digital equivalent of a dead man's switch. Something that only triggers once you are dead and then sends all your passwords etc to one or two family members. You could do this with some kind of timed email. There are sites that let you send emails into the future. You just type a message and specify a date on which it will be sent. You could set it to email every month and then make sure you cancel the message every month. Once you die you wont be able to cancel the message and voila!, it will be sent. There is probably some business potential in this. You need a service that makes the dead-man's switch concept simple.
Here is my conribution to the National Identity Register Database.
DELETE * FROM People
INSERT INTO People (FirstName, LastName, Description) VALUES ('Tony','Blair', 'Corrupt lying cryptofascist war criminal bastard.')
I think you will only see real aggression against open source when it starts to seriously hurt financially. When people/businesses start to find the idea of buying the next version of MS Office ludicrous when Open-Office is free, that's when the shit will hit the fan. Microsoft will then start to do everything it can to destroy open source competition. They can't do it by making their own products better since the freeness of open-source is hard to beat.
The only thing they can really do is go after open-source legally. The legal angle is really a weak point for open source since it is based on collective altruism and there is not much money available for legal costs. All we can hope for is that companies who have an interest in open-source, such as IBM, will step in and help.
If you had the technology to have flying cars and AI to control them, you probably wouldn't need flying cars anyway. I think some sort of combination of telepresence and video conferencing should suffice for most things.
Even with today's technology I find that most business trips are quite pointless. We could probably have done an equal, if not better job by having a video conference combined with some kind of TightVNC shared desktop. It also opens up new meeting possibilities. Because there is zero travel time, the duration of the meeting can practically be much smaller, say several 1 hour meetings over a course of a week. It really opens up new possibilities. No-one takes any notice though despite the huge travel/hotel/man-time savings both sides could make.
Darth Vader: "I see you have constructed a new lightsaber." Luke: "That's right. And I power it with new Duracell Ultra-Life Batteries." Darth Vader: "I see. wwwwhoooor poooooow" Luke: "You sound a bit congested. Why don't you try new Lemon-Flavor Beecham's Flu Powder?" Darth Vader: "I will, but later my son. Now I must text the Emperor on my new Blackberry 7100r." etc etc
After signing up with CinemaNow, I now discover that because I am in the UK I can only watch crappy B Movies, since Hollywood downloads are only available in the US. In fact, most of the download sites seem to be US only. As long as things are this dumb, people will continue to rip their DVD's to divx.
Granted I have become a super villan because of this. but that also has it's perks. Such as? A giant laser to destroy Washington DC?
My main problem with the Cinema is that I don't have control. Missing half the film if I need to use the toilet is a bit of a pain. Also, if I miss what someone said, I can't rewind a bit and listen again. Most of my viewing in done on a Archos AV500 portable PMP while I am commuting to work (about 1 hour). I mostly watch TV shows, e.g. Babylon 5, Alias etc. The only problem is getting the content. There don't seem to be any good (and legal) places I can get the content I want. Does anyone know where I can pay a reasonable fee to download popular TV shows?
Yes and no. :)
Yes because I failed to tick the anonymous box. No because MrSteve isn't my real name, so in a sense it's still anonymous. I stand by my comments though
All companies are effectively Fascist dictatorships. 1. Your government (boss) is unelected. 2. Your government (boss) has extraordinary control over you. 3. The state (company) is viewed as more important than the individual. In such a situation there is only one course of action. Armed resistance (skiving) is permitted under the UN Charter. Remember that companies try to make the most money while doing as little work for it as possible. It is only fair that the employees pursue the same policy. Your employer will screw you in the end (probably after years of loyal service), so screw them now in advance. P.S. You'll understand if I post anonymously :)
So, what's the problem, *exactly*? I hear OSS zealots saying this all of the time, but all of my VB6 apps still work just fine... Because they will slowly die, bit by bit. You may find weird errors using Vista or the next radically different OS pumped out by Microsoft. You many notice oddities under a 64 bit OS. There are lots of horrible possibilities. Also if your customers know your applications are in VB6, they may start to worry too.
I have about 2 feet worth of now obsolete VB5 and VB6 books. The best was definately "Hardcore Visual Basic" by Bruce McKinney!
I knew we weren't the only company in the same boat. I also find it unbelievable that they dumped VB6. Are we expected to spend £400,000 doing a rewrite that adds nothing, while our competitors with their java product continue to make improvements?
.NET for future work despite the fact we have been royally screwed by Microsoft. It's almost beyond belief. It's like finishing your Autobiography after 6 years only to be told that English is being discontinued in favour of Esperanto, and you'll have to start all over again.
The tragedy is that the management is going with
What languages are the safest (in terms of longevity) and most practical to use for business development?
Java is still a bit proprietary, but seems a lot safer than any of Microsoft's languages.
Delphi is proprietary, but is still around after all these years, whereas VB has been killed off. Borland seems like a better choice if you are going to be locked into a proprietary language.
C++ is non-proprietary, but I don't want to be chasing memory leaks around forever.
As for all the scripting languages, Ruby, Python etc etc, I'm not sure they are a good idea for a big business development.
Any other options you would suggest?
As for open-source VB6, I doubt it. Microsoft would not allow it.
I work for a company whose main product is a VB6 app that has had hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in it over many years. When .Net came out we quickly realised there was no way to simply convert the code to VB.NET. The upgrade wizard is a joke. The only way to move to .NET is to do a rewrite, but we don't have the time or money to do that. I suspect many companies are in this position, but they don't want to make to much of a fuss as they do not want their customers to know about the problem.
Even if we had £400,000 to invest in a rewrite, would it make sense to do in in C# or VB.NET? After all, what is to stop Microsoft from screwing us again? I find myself wishing we had written it in Java from the beginning. It would have been cross-platform and would not now require a re-write.
Has anyone else out their been screwed in this way too?
P.S. You can forget Mono, that will never be able to keep up with Microsoft's gargantuan changes, so that's not really a migration option if Microsoft decides to ever dump .NET.
On smaller projects it just leaves you with zillions of things to do, some of which can be very awkward to fix. On our main product (which is large) it just died. The time estimated for conversion just kept growing and growing. Anyway, it's a bit like being told that English is being discontinued in favour of Esperanto, but it's ok because you can just paste your Autobiography into Google Translate and it will all be ok. Yeah, right. Actually it also reminds me how worthless all of those Microsoft Qualifications are, since they just become totally irrelevant when they dump the technology, which can be sooner than you might think. I'm so glad I have a Physics degree and not some kind of Microsoft degree.
Well they can do all sorts of things to try to force you to upgrade. For example you suddenly discover that the latest version of MSN Messenger will only work on Vista. Solution, use Skype instead. With some microsoft products it can be virtually impossible to upgrade though. Hypothetically imagine that your company spent £400,000 of man-time developing a product in Visual Basic 6. Then microsoft dumps VB6 and tells you to upgrade to .NET instead. You discover there is no real way to do this other than to recode everything at the cost of hundreds of thousands again (don't even joke about the migration wizard). The real solution to such problems is not to bother investing time and money with microsoft's tools in the first place.
DRM will always be broken. It's a flawed concept from the outset. You can certainly have a code that's so hard to break it would take millions of years of computer time to do it. The problem is if you just encrypt a movie with such a code, it is completely useless to everyone since they can't view it. So for DRM to work, you have to encrypt the movie, then give the viewer the movie along with the secret code necessary to decrypt it (embedded in the DVD software or hardware). So you have everything you need to remove the encryption. They just try to make it as tricky as possible to decode the film in an unauthorized way, but it's really fundamentally flawed.
I think the true potential of this is not projecting onto surfaces, but the possibility of projection directly into the eye.
d _d/innovations/inn_02.html
I've been waiting for the VRD (Virtual Retinal Display) for 10 years. I first heard about it on Tomorrow World (UK Science Program) and it has been in development by MVIS (http://www.mvis.com/) ever since. Sadly in all this time, all they seem to have developed is a red monochrome display for car mechanics.
Apart from being a lot more private, projecting directly into the eye cuts down on the power requirements (since the projection area is so small).
The potential uses for direct eye projection are huge. From flip up projectors on mobiles to augmented reality and full immersion Virtual Reality displays.
A number of manufacturers are already moving into the consumer head mounted display market. e.g. check out the Scopo by Mitsubishi. http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/company/r_an
Whoever can make a low cost full colour HMD is going to make a killing.
Very useful on the train to work if you happen to be sitting opposite a big fat guy in a white T-Shirt.
I'd like to know why Google logs my searches and ties them to my IP Address. Even if they never hand my searches over to anyone else, I find it a gross violation of my privacy. Does anyone know a good search engine that does not store so much private information?
get shit on for killing 5 "civilians" Yes, people get so funny about that don't they. I wonder why? Dropping a 500lb bomb on a house is not as bad as what Hitler did, so it must be ok, right?
It takes a hell of a lot of ignorance to claim that the US doesn't care about civilian dead, and is only worried about their own soldiers, and there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a premise. Your right of course. Take air power for example. Air power is far safer to the civilian population than sending in soldiers. Only last week I read in the New York Times that some suspected terrorists were hiding in a house in Poughkepsi, NY. Air-strikes were called in and 20 people were killed, including the two suspects. God knows what the civilian death toll would have been if soldiers had burst into the house. But of course that story in untrue. The US would never call in air-power for fear of killing US citizens. Yet it is called in all the time in Iraq. Does anyone know how many civilians were killed in the air and artillery bombardment on Tal Afar (Iraq)? Dropping 500lb bombs on a town is not something you do to reduce civilian casualties. So the US cares about civilian dead does it? Remember Gen. Tommy Franks infamous line "We don't do body counts." He didn't mean soldiers by the way. Anyway, I don't want to solely concentrate on the US. Most governments care little for civilian dead. What they care about is if it gets reported in the news.
Military automation is a worrying trend. Eventually it could reach the stage where there are very few soldiers actually involved in combat. That would make it much easier for governments to prosecute wars. Consider Iraq. All the concern has been over how many US troops have died and how politically damaging it is. There is little concern for all the Iraqis killed in air strikes. If you can automate the military, you remove most of the political repercussions of war. No US Soldiers dead, just lots of automated robots killing people in another country, who no-one cares about. It would also make it much easier for governments to turn the military against their own people.