I assumed as much, but I would have figured that the major amounts of rendering would be done on a farm while the modeling would be done on the workstation. But I assume that we've progressed to a point that work stations are now doing a lot more work than just the basic modeling and the farm is doing even more complicated things?
That's very interesting, thank you. So GPUs play an important role in neural nets? I can see where that would be very important to people like Facebook and what not. Additionally, I would assume that they have big GPU setups in the workstations to allow for slicing and dicing of data sets from some server.
I guess being mostly in a text editor I don't see the fuss over 4K monitors, but I figured that for people with spreadsheets and presentations and handling assets like our digital media department does here, that they would be important. Good to know. Thanks for your time kind stranger.
GPU capability has been outstripping CPU capability for some time
I get that GPU speeds have been on the rise, but a GPU cannot do everything a CPU can. So upgrading a GPU isn't exactly like upgrading a CPU. Additionally, GPU can only help with software specifically written to use that kind of acceleration. Each element in a GPU by itself is slower than a CPU so the speed bump only comes when a task can be spread across as many elements as possible. That is, while 77.6 GFLOPS might be what it can do, you have to be able to spread your task out enough to get to that value. And if we are just focusing on GPUs as a rationale for changing out the PCIe slots, what professional industry actually does that? I once had a gig at a university's chemical engineering department and even then they just sent modeling compounds off to a farm, where I can understand the need to change out regularly. But what profession is doing it regularly at the workstation? I would assume that the real players that need this massive parallel processing are farming it out to specially built rigs.
I see your high DPI and 4K monitor statement there. Is that a common case? Everywhere I look in cube-ville here it's basically, you get a monitor upgrade when you get a computer upgrade. Are there industries that are actively switching to 4K and swapping out the card as opposed to just getting a new system altogether? How often does that happen? Do I need to walk into my boss' cube and demand a 4K monitor? I don't know why but I find all of this absolutely fascinating.
Really? I'm not denying that, but I am questioning it. Programming for some time now and I can't remember the last time I needed to crack open the case to change out an expansion card of all things. I know a couple of folks in the graphic arts department and likewise, most of their editing and asset management hasn't required a change of things that would typically go into a PCIe slot. So I am curious as to which fields require a constant refresh of what's in the PCIe slots?
Now if we are talking gaming, end user side, I can see that. So with a flexible enough definition we can call them professional? I'm a little out of the gaming loop so I don't want to grant a title to gaming that it doesn't have, but at the same time don't want to snub a legitimate group there. But gaming development, of which I don't do (sorry mostly deal with standard grade C++ and database programming) maybe then there's a need for it?
I'm just struggling to put a solid finger on who exactly needs a constant refresh of cards but at the same time doesn't need a refresh of CPU/RAM/etc at the same time. Is this a common thing in that industry? Not hating on your comment or anything but it now has my curiosity peaked.
Because environmental groups could have sued the federal government for not living up to it's commitments.
At best they could have shamed the government for not doing so. The commitments were non-binding. At no point was the US in any legally obligated point to make good on anything they promised. The Obama administration promised something to the tune of $1B but Trump could have sent all of $0.02 and have felt zero legal challenge on such a move. This is one of the main reasons cited by the Obama administration for using sole-executive agreement power as opposed to a CEA in agreeing to the accords.
And I tried to make that point earlier. If someone says the President has the sole power to pull out of the Paris Accords, which the President does have that power, then you have to come to terms that the accord is fluff. If you think the terms were binding, which they weren't so you can't use the argument of suing so-and-so for not meeting whatever pledge, then the President cannot act in such a unilateral fashion, as it would require undoing the law to effectively withdraw.
If you agree that the President can unilaterally pull out of the accords, you have to also give up the argument that the Accords would have costed us dearly.
It would have costed us exactly as much money as the President intended on sending, which from the outset seemed like zero dollars.
So again, why was the President acting so foolishly to rush into actively rejecting the Paris Accord? Why not first find **literally anyone else** on the planet to jump ship with us before getting on national TV and opening his mouth? It literally costed him so much, bought him so little, and has done more to damage his longer term goals then any short term gain he might get from this. The US stood to loose $0 from doing nothing, but instead he just had to get all showy and stoke his ego. Guy has issues letting his power trips interfere with his ability to actually have a long term strategy.
2 more months and it will be a YEAR and still NO REAL EVIDENCE
Now in all fairness, investigations can take years to conduct. Real evidence belongs in that court of law thing and so citing a lack of it to dismiss allegations brought by news media is a bit apples and oranges. However, on the flip side of that coin, we have to remember that what the media is putting forth are only allegations. Loose threads that may or may not piece together toward anything bigger. How and even if they do piece together is all just a mental process for each reader. It whets the appetite for criminal acts, but only a court of law or in this case an impeachment, actually bring that to the sense of "REAL" as you would have it. Perhaps in good time we will see the outcome of these events into something real or not.
I will say this though, Trump sure hasn't done any favors for himself. If I, myself, were in his shoes I would be looking for some new legal counsel and pretty much hang up the Twitter account. His current array of lawyers do not seem up to task on keeping their client up-to-date on how law functions, creating ideas for programs that are worded so as to work with law as opposed to just how the President feels it should work, recommending bills or legal text that his own party can broadly agree with, how the judicial system works, or more importantly from shooting himself in the foot using his 50 caliber Twitter account. Ultimately it might not be criminal acts that are his undoing but just poor handling of the issues that swirl around his entire administration. There's been lots of points where someone at some time could have just stopped, addressed the issues, and a whole bevvy of other things to cool the flames. Instead, we've only seen Trump ask for more gasoline, double down on his arrogance, and stoke animosity between his office and the other two branches of government, not to mention other international actors and nations.
If we're going to beat up on biased media, then I'm all for it. However, at same time we need to at least partially recognize that some part of this maelstrom is Trump's own creation. The man is a walking PR catastrophe and the media are seizing on it to kill him in a court of public opinion. I'm not sure if he feels that he just doesn't need to address these issues, feels the issues are beneath him, or just simply doesn't have a clue on how serious the situation is and how much he really needs to pull back on the daily diatribe. I mean, c'mon there's seriously a limit to how often a single person can use a public platform to cry victim before we all start getting to the point of thinking it's mostly self inflicted. At least option one and three can be partly blamed on crappy lawyers. There's no fix if number two is the full or partly the truth behind everything wrong that just keeps happening. If the man just refuses to address anything or just keeps shifting the blame to someone that's not him, there's just no course correction that's going to save this man's political appeal. He's not showing strength by his bullish disregard for the political process, he's just goading more people to question him and that's an aphrodisiac for the press. Thinking they would not seize the bountiful opportunity Trump provides daily to crucify himself would be like some billionaire of group of billionaires not taking a tax write off named after themselves.
funneling American wealth to third world countries via a non-binding agreement
If it is non-binding, which it is, then what pressure is there to funnel anything? I get the President did what he did, but what I don't understand is the why. Why openly reject an agreement that just simply not doing it would have sufficed? I feel the reason being is that the President wanted a big show of defiance, like he's outside of some corrupt group. However, it makes no sense that he jumped off a cliff with zero other people joining him in the jump. Now that he's taken his stance, which can't possibly go into effect until 2020, right about election time, he's got the weaker stance.
Imagine if you will, 2020 comes, no one else joins him in his stance. That's going to get plastered on pretty much every person's arsenal of political attacks on him. "The President stands alone in the world" or something like that. Tie that to how he's incited other countries to now actively work against him. His line of, "I work for Pittsburgh not Paris" directly puts France in the cross hairs, something tells me France just got a sudden rush to go down with the ship if need be on this agreement just to spite him. Add in the alienation of Germany that he seems bent on, and you have two of the biggest three countries in the EU now having axes to grind. Oh and it wasn't lost how the UK, the third largest in the EU, was awfully quiet about any kind of lifeline of support to the President. Why is that? Because it's non-binding, even if the UK wanted out, it's a non-binding agreement, it literally is no sweat off their back to just simply do nothing. They would actually have to go out of their way to get behind him at this point.
And I think that's the kicker on the International stage here. Trump is the odd man out and there is nothing to induce any other country to change their position. If the President at some point feels he needs at least one other country to get behind him, he's going to be swiftly met with, "Well what will your country do for ours?" Because, them not helping him won't hurt them and helping him might stir a pot they would rather let sit for the next five years. And that's the thing, I don't think the President is going to feel at any point in his term that he needs the International community, and that's going to make his lofty goals that he's set out that more difficult. I get the principal of the matter, but our great deal maker in command should understand the basic principal of leverage. Leverage that he just willfully tossed away all because he wanted to make some sort of point on an agreement that didn't even have teeth and was mostly symbolic in nature.
So say what you will about the accords and its merits or lack thereof. However, being odd man out isn't a good position to be in, in any situation. Anything he goes to the table with for trade agreements is going to have the specter of his actions yesterday not far behind. "Oh you are the only country on the entire planet that didn't go with the Paris Accords, well we're going to look at your terms and get back to you in three years."
If anyone is arguing the lack of power in this agreement, cannot deny how bad on the International stage this is going to look. If anyone wants to argue that this amounted to welfare to third world counties, then you cannot claim that the agreement lacked power, and thus you have to admit that the actions yesterday were hasty without at least one other country being in the band wagon. Either the President felt the agreement lacked power or it had power but he failed to get anyone else on this planet to agree with him that the terms should be changed. But it is either it does or does not have power, it cannot be both. And truth told it lacked any kind of power, which should have signaled to the President that he had plenty of time to find at least one other country to stand with him. But no, he had to make a great big show complete with band, all the media, tantaliz
Guy or gal, I don't give a shit about the actual agreement. It's political theater. Trump had to make a big shit show about "pulling out" and the other countries are making a big shit show out of how insanely bombastic his attitude is to pretty much everything. Both sides got exactly what they were expecting would happen.
But it's not a treaty. Obama knew that Trump would pull out. The full exit happens in 2020 and the bet that side A is making is that they'll be able to use the circle jerk reaction to full exit as a topic down the road. Side B, I would hope, isâ going to spend the time to actually talk about a better deal or just sweep the whole thing under a rug, Trump's a hard read with him literally being everywhere.
So if you're looking for a snip to quote in future replies, try this, all of this is just countries playing politics, each side has their bigger goal to play at, none of the actual agreement means anything beyond rainbow points and fuzzies.
Someone pointing out the technical details does not always mean they're actually interested in politics.
Or perhaps it is a lesson to other leaders of state that assumed that the US President had unilateral power to commit the US to treaties
I just want to add that this is not a treaty. Treaties require 2/3rd Senate approval. This was sought under a sole-executive agreement by the US and is why the agreement is ultimately non-binding, additionally, it is also why it is called an agreement, since agreements do not require anything from Congress except that the President give notice that the US has entered one within 20-days.
Side notes for anyone interested. There's also Congressional-Executive agreements (CEAs) which is basically the same as a sole-executive agreement but Congress also codifies the agreement into law, that's what NAFTA is just in case anyone was wondering. Also, stating that the Paris Accords is non-binding isn't 100% true. There are parts that are binding which use the power of the UNFCCC (an actual treaty we signed onto in 1992) to bind those who signed on. One of those agreements is that everyone has to wait three years before they can actually exit the agreement. Then it takes a little under a year to actually be out. If you are wondering, yes, that puts us squarely with full exit happening right about the time the 2020 US election gets into the heat of things. So while Trump has stated he'll be leaving, he can't actually file to leave until 2019.
The President has the power to negotiate treaties and contracts but they're not binding on the US until the legislature ratifies it.
That's a specific type of treaty. Known as a Congressional-Executive Agreement, which technically isn't a treaty, is when the President haggles, er negotiates, some sort of "whatever" and then goes and asks nicely for Congress to put it in the books. CEAs are typically used for trade of non-military/weapon stuff, entering in and exiting organizations (like WTO), foreign aids that should last longer than a single President term, and so on. However, according to Article 1 Section 10, States can also enter into these kinds of agreements to a degree (think car plant in a State or something like that).
There's also sole-executive agreements. These don't require anyone but the President. These are things like Status of Force Agreements (SOFA) and such, like if you get attacked, we're going to help you bomb the crap out of whoever. This particular example is via the President's Commander-in-Chief power. Sole-executive agreements can also be with intelligence sharing, setting spy networks, and so on. Now the President must inform both the House and Senate Committee that a sole-executive agreement has been "done", "agreed upon", whatever, but that's about it. Congress can eat it if they don't like it.
That finally brings us to Actual Treaties which is sometimes called an Article 2, because they use the rules as outlined in Article 2 Section 2. The President or ambassador or special convoy or whatever is the one doing all the agreeing to details and what-not. However, the Senate (not the full Congress, just the upper house) get's to peek at what is going on and suggest things into the process. The President can tell them to get lost but that hurts his chances at the second phase. Once the treaty is agreed upon, it then goes to the Senate where it takes 2/3rd (not that wimpy 3/5th BS) to make it an official treaty. Once that happens, it has the same power as the actual Constitution. (Yes, there's been more things written about a President abusing Article 2 than you can shake a stick at). Article 2 is usually reserved for the trade of weapons, nuclear agreements, things that have really serious binding agreements, things that are long term in such a way that a CEA just wouldn't work. Basically, really serious stuff. To give some scale here, since FDR only 6% of all international agreements went on to Article 2 status, and again the big reason being, treaties have the same flipping weight as the actual US Constitution. You do not want to be the Senator that approved one of these that went south fast.
Okay, well that's a quick intro in the the unholy triad of agreements/treaties/international things. There's a ton being skipped here and like anything in Government, which one is used for such-and-such agreement is pretty much a d12 roll, with Article 2 being used if it lands on it's side. Also, there's been a ton of legislation and judicial precedent that guides a lot of this that's been created in the 200+ year history the US has been doing this. So all the above are "rough" approximations of when each has and is used.
All that said, the Paris Agreement is/was (sorry haven't really checked news to see if anything has changed) a sole-executive agreement. Again, d12 dice rolled an eight here so that's what we're going with. So since the then President decided to call it this, he then sits down with his lawyers and begins to pen out how he can actually do that. Well the Paris Agreement is mostly fluff, there I said it. The language is mostly hortatory as opposed to binding. There's not actually anything in the agreement except some reporting of emissions, promises to do better, and some processes for shaming, but other than loosing face, there's not really anything of substance. However, even with all the fluff, the Senate couldn't let Obama get away with a power play. Yeah the whole thing, much like that pipelin
I really don't think the parsing speed of RSS's XML is going to be an issue here...
The problem isn't reading it. It's building the DOM that goes behind anything XML. That DOM incurs a slight overhead. Building a DOM, giving it all the abilities to move forward, backwards, n-th node, etc is what *some* people have massive issues with. Now that sounds a lot like an issue with the thing that's in charge of building the DOM and you'd be correct. Lot's of XML libraries have tons of things that they automatically do that no one needs, but really some of that can be argued for JS engines as well...
But I'm with you on this, this all sounds insanely "meh" and honestly sounds like the, "oooh! JSON is so H-O-T right now" trend is kicking off. Just like the XML version of that trend was a few years back. I'm pretty sure in a few more years we'll all move past JSON and we will all have this same discussion about JSON feeds converting over to ((insert next big thing)).
I will add this. There is a frightfully vocal group of folks who tout JSONP as the solution to by-passing all of the headache that comes with cross site XML. To which I usually say, "well there was a reason for that, but, hey it's your site, your gun, your foot, have fun." While nothing bad has happened yet and folks are (big air quotes)keeping tabs(/big air quotes), I won't be surprised for XSS exploits to rise up at some point in the not-so-distant future. It may not ever happen, but just seeing some of the handwaving that a lot of JS developers do (type safety for lamb sakes!!) all in the name of making things smaller, easier, and faster; I just can't help but think that there's something bad brewing.
But not giving these folks their fifteen minutes in the limelight, denies what I've come to see as the status quo for all things tech. New, shiny, and waiting to be exploited before it too moves into the obsolescence bin.
The problem is really how quickly it blazed through the community
You know just the other day I was reading about how some people were bemoaning the Firefox piece that pointed out Google for how big it was and how little we have in the way for emergency braking should Google start abusing that power with respect to W3C and web standards (basically, Google is in a position to stomp out the relevance of W3C, make the web work the way they feel it should, and little to nothing anyone can do to stop that, should it come to pass and thus we might want to rethink how the governance of the web standard works. However, it mostly descended into Firefox is just bitching, someone call the waanbulance, but I digress). This blazing through the distros is exactly the same. This is all a symptom of loose governance. That's not to say the model is weak or bad or anything of that nature, but when you operate a loosely governed project, having a run away task/project/person dominate all is one of those things that you get, sometimes. Not every project has this happened to it, but when it does, it really gets a specific group of folks up in arms, but then when you ask them to do something about it before the next time it happens, they shrug and say things like, "it dog eat dog out there" or something similar to that effect.
I've just gone ahead and chalked it up as, there's always going to be that group that's in perpetual bitch mode (PBM) about the way the community is heading just like those old farts that sit around and say that the current generation is messing up/moral decline. I'm glad the Devuan people did what they did, I was one of those folks when systemd was "blazing" the trail that if people want a systemd free environment, then they'll build one. I for one welcome the Devuan folks as a third option for Linux systemd-free (really you all should be using Slackware but that's just me).
I know keep getting off-topic here, but if people want to prevent these projects from "blazing" through, then the folks in PBM of the community need to get off their rear-ends and choose a different model of governance. Aside from that, learn to deal.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool the torches there buddy. I get where you are coming from but I think we're a little past that point. You've got a great argument at say 20% delta between first and second place, but we're way, way, way past that point. Chrome is at 54% with second place at 15% and that's Apple's Safari which I'm sure 90% of that 15% is iPhone. That's an almost 40% difference between the two. While no one is screaming monopoly (okay maybe a few but no one cares about them), we're in the territory where we should grow a bit concerned.
The W3C manages the standards of the web and even then Google has an insanely heavy hand in the process there and even if W3C doesn't agree to something, who cares, Google just does it anyway. So I get it, competition and all, but there's a point where we should pro-actively start looking at what checks are in place to ensure that Google doesn't make W3C, OASIS, et al completely irrelevant.
You know how people say that "gee I wish people were more proactive before monopolies formed?" Yeah, we're there, this is that point where it is time to ask questions. Not asking questions, not ensuring that Google just doesn't start stomping standards and going the non-evil form of embrace, enhance, and extinguish, ensuring the young whipper snappers that Google hires don't GNOME 3 the hell out of the Internet, that's the entire point. It's not to say, "OMG! Google is just too big, has way too much a lead over other browsers, it's just not fair *wail to heavens*". It is to say, "Hey, uh, do we have enough checks and balances to ensure that Google doesn't use their lead to just fudge bomb how the web works?" The answer is pretty much no and that's been a concern for like forever (I remember conversations about this issue back in late 1990s and W3C was way smaller then), but more so now that I lot more people happen to be on the Internet daily.
Totally understand your position, but just up and up being cynical and telling them to go f'off, !!CAPITALISM!! Is exactly the crap that just leads to an insanely high level of apathy that ultimately leads to the same folks that said !!CAPITALISM!! saying, "WTF?! Where were you all and why didn't you stop them?!?!" I for one don't want another IE and neither should anyone else. We need an organization that can literally say, "Google Chrome is not compliant with ISO(ideally W3 as opposed to ISO)-96716723(whatever) of HTML rendering standards, they are a non-standard browser." And we should actively shun non-standard browsers.
Also, just want to add that this nowhere even gets into how slow the W3C has been, how they totally missed the ball on mobile-everything, and how they are totally getting left behind in IoT. So there's an even amount of blame to lay on W3C's feet too. Also mobile OS makers and what not, there's some blame heading to them too... It's a really complex topic, but yeah screaming !!CAPITALISM!! isn't going to fix jack crap and possible just make it worse off.
Also more to the point. The idea that we're going to work our butts off to build one around Sol when there's an insanely high chance that elsewhere is a whole lot better gives Sol, IMHO, this special status that it isn't due. If say in thousands of years humans have the technology to build such a structure, and we're talking the solid kind here, it's also highly likely that we're able to travel the stars at will. That said, it's also likely that Sapiens aren't the only species of Homo out there anymore and that the variety of humanity that will exist at that point will just not give Earth a second thought other than a chapter in some history book. While it's cute to think of H. Sapiens wanting to build a better house around their crib, it's more reasonable to think that they'll look at Earth about the same way we look at the bed we slept in as children. With greener pastures a plenty elsewhere, there's just no overriding need to build such a thing unless building such a thing is massively easier than blasting off to the next nearest star.
Dyson spheres in all of their forms are basically power plants more so than they are habitats. Say we want to build a giant device to test gravity at the quantum level, okay you need a giant power source for that and a Dyson shell is a good source for that. But that basically means we're bulldozing a stellar system to basically conduct a science experiment. I highly doubt someone is going to say, oh let's use that system our ancestors from thousands of years ago lived in, it's not the most ideal spot to build it, but ya know, it just tugs on my heart strings. Nope more than likely they're going to look at how best they can build it and with the least amount of energy put into its construction.
Thinking that humanity is going to cling to this rock in thousands of years into the future is just silly. Somewhere in Africa, Europe, Middle East humanity started there, but just because that's where humanity started doesn't mean I have this sudden yearning to make it the best place ever on the face of the Earth. I sure it was a great place back in the day, but we've evolved since then and have found way better places all over the world. And there's an incredibly good chance that as humans and all of the different species we eventually evolve into will find way better places for themselves outside of our dusty old rock that served as humanity's crib. Right now, there's no planet #2, so yeah Earth is very special at the moment. But if we're conjecturing into thousands of years from now, Earth is just some place like any other place in the Universe. It doesn't deserve *status especial" in that context.
we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.
There's not enough material in the solar system as we know it currently to provide enough material to construct a 2 AU in diameter Dyson sphere. If we're willing to fly to another star to get more material for building around our star, we're more than willing to fly somewhere else with more building material at the site. Just saying.
If someone tells your that we are running out of (insert fossil fuel here), what they are most likely talking about is economically viable (insert fossil fuel here) not absolute values. This planet has a ton of trapped energy, it's just ridiculous to think of the sheer amount of energy that has been stored in this planet over it's billions of years of existence. It's a ton of flipping energy and unless something significantly changes about how human's exist, there's just no hope in us ever extracting 100% of all of that energy from the planet, ever. Put bluntly, we will never ever reach a point where humans have extracted absolutely every single bit of energy stored in this planet. Be it coal, oil, natural gas, or whatever else, there's just simply too much of it that we'll never get *all* of it. There is a limited supply of economically viable fossil fuels. We are indeed getting more creative with things like fracking (invented in 2006) that's helped us extend our reach. But at some point even that too will not be enough and we will need another innovation to extend our reach further. Some industries, just haven't had any of those *break through* innovations and it really makes you wonder about their economic viability. We're pretty good as a species at innovating so we're going to always come up with new and interesting ways to extract energy form the planet. The question is less, will we be able to extract the energy and more will there be any buyers? If this technology can be made to be cheap and reliable, then China's sitting on gold here. If it's only going to save them a buck or two,
then they'll just sit on the technology until energy prices in the other industries go up enough to make this gold. If it's never going to save them money, then this might very well be the last time we all hear about it. But again, it all comes down to less about how awesome we can innovate and more so to market pressures.
The doomsday scenarios, unless you're talking about climate change which is a different topic altogether, is basically what happens if we run into a period of time where we've not yet hit the next innovation and energy prices are flying through the roof? It's not unrealistic to think that we might be in the middle of researching the next big thing and then poof (and by poof I mean over the course of several years), we're running low on X-Y-Z fuel that we can extract at $5 a unit. We've got at least ten years of X-Y-Z fuel but we extracted it at $23 a unit and we've got at least three decades worth of X-Y-Z fuel but it was extracted at $78 a unit. That's a doomsday scenario. If we don't find a way to get that $23/unit X-Y-Z fuel somewhere close to $5/unit X-Y-Z fuel, a lot of industries that rely on X-Y-Z are going to be hurting. Heaven forbid we have to tap into that $78/unit fuel. We have technically forty years worth of fuel but all at prices that either no one will want to pay, or at prices that will drastically change industries. Sometimes governments subsidize things to help get the price as close to something that will keep demand up, but that can only go so far. The point being, there's no physical shortage, we're not absolutely out of X-Y-Z, but we are running out of X-Y-Z that the majority of people will pay for.
Absolute terms are silly to talk about. I think in the Asia-Pacific there's like enough coal to keep everyone in Japan, China, etc warm till 4000 or 5000 AD. But the majority of it is impure and would require an insane amount of processing before it actually became "fuel" grade coal. That's not also mentioning that a lot of it is difficult to get to, being trapped in complicated geological structures are aren't exactly the easiest thing to just drill through and have a stable tunnel running through it. Those are obviously things that eventually we'll have technical solutions for, but not right now. Also, if anyone wants to talk absolute terms. The sun is the way to go. It's got enough energy to power us for the next billio
It literally is a shame that 5 is as high as one can mod up a comment, because in seventeen words, you've summed up the entire point.
So I guess I'll just ask, which industry has the potential for more money? Those that depend on a NN-less or pro-NN world? I know there's not a technically correct answer to that question, but just wondering who's going to build the most clout to bribe, er lobby, our House members?
so original and appealing that OEMs won't be able to resist tagging along
We have no fucking idea what we're going to do next, but we're totally playing it off like shits about to get real. Please, buy our phones! We will literally give you an HP laptop and a Windows Phone if you just promise to let everyone you know, know that you are using a Windows phone and you, like this guy, are really enjoying the phone and think it is hip. Why are you all not buying our phones!!?
Has there EVER been a politician born that attained office that didn't thing of EVERYTHING they saw as a taxable opportunity???
You should really read the Dictator's Handbook. There is a reason why over time politicians begin to take a similar shape and it has a lot more to do with how power structures are formed than politicians just randomly looking at everything and wondering how they can tax it. ISBN: 978-1610391849 Sorry to sound like an advert but it really is a good book that talks about this very thing and why it's more common than not.
Hold up. Now I've worked COBOL. There's the COBOL that they teach you and then there's the stuff you're going to see out in the field. There is a huge difference and it'll cost any company time for any new person to get up to speed.
Each company has their own way they like to do subfiles, their own standard for indicators, their ways of dealing with file access, and so on. The language per se isn't that hard it's just everything else about dealing with COBOL in a real system that's the time muncher.
Additionally you'll run into things where this group of programs was written when file indicators used 60-69 and this group it's indicators 80-89, and that group they use actual variables, oh and this handful of groups was before the compiler got table (COBOL array) support. Oh and then that's not getting into the literal half dozen ways to interact with a display file. Nor service programs etc.
COBOL is easy to learn, but knowing the syntax of the language just doesn't prepare you for how wild west programming used to be and code from the 60s tends to be more along the lines of, "whatever solution I came up with that day to solve this one problem is what I went with." A huge lacking in coding standards and thus a lot of inconstancy not just in programs built the same year, but literally if the developer slept between coding sessions, you could have different styles in a single program from the same person. It was really an undisciplined style of getting things done.
Holy shit dude. I'm a vet C++ programmer and the last three years mobile developer for warehousing company. However about a year before my current job, I worked in an exclusive AS400 shop. RPGLE, COBOL, CL, you name, it was still using the stuff from back in the day.
The system was incredibly fragile and had insanely complicated builds with the labyrinth of binding directories, dependencies, the constant service program signature violations. Customers demanded new functionality and the system just had trouble keeping up. Old programmers would code crap like RPG still lacked arrays with abusing subfiles. They'd swear by using numeric indicators versus the new fancy types. Yeah, because IN73 being on tells me that I totally need to refresh the data on the screen. Eventually the company fired all of the RPG/COBOL programmers because they could never keep up with demand. They were short order replaced by an off the shelf solution and any new work was contacted out. I stayed on a few months more because I understood EDI and they needed someone to get that all setup on the new solution. Oh and it was Java based.
Point though, you sound exactly like those old guys. OO over complicates crap and you don't need all that fancy stuff, blah blah blah. I work and coded DDS, SQL, RPG, and COBOL with those people for five years and I knew their mentality was just setting them up for obsolescence.
The tech industry is brutal man and you've got to be a person keenly adept to rapidly adapt or you'll find yourself quickly no longer employed and lacking serious skills to find your next job. Two, besides myself, out of our group of nine found another job. Those two for jobs doing AS400 maintenance, took a pay cut for it, and RPGLE programmer with the State Government, smaller hit to the paycheck than the first guy. The rest of the group have nothing but their retirement savings to dip into. We all lost touch over the years but last I heard two or three more for jobs finally but had to eat the cost of moving elsewhere.
Seriously, the only thing that kept me above water was that I had skills in C++ and Java. And since then I've picked up containers with Linux and node.js plus Python and some big data (Hadoop and shit) just to what I assume is stay current.
That thinking of yours isn't a good kind in this industry. But I get it, when I worked with the AS400 folk, I had just turned 30 and so I was seen as the young whipper snapper etc. I had just left my last job of several years doing C++ and every gray beard (literally) there thought I was there to "think outside the box" and "shift paradigms" and really I was just there to mostly get a paycheck. Learning RPGLE and COBOL was fun but man those old guys they scoffed at any suggestion to get off a green screen or to make their monolith more modular. They would literally say, "stupid hipster just trying to make everything harder than it needs to be." And let me tell you, I didn't dress like a hipster.
Anyway, I know, way more memory lane than anyone asked for, but seriously, those guys' thinking ultimately led to their firing. I've worked in a few development teams but not a lot so can't say with a lot of experience, but my gut tells me that had they been just a wee more open to change and newer technologies, they might still be working at that place.
Slashdot Mirror
Programmers for games, 3D animators
I assumed as much, but I would have figured that the major amounts of rendering would be done on a farm while the modeling would be done on the workstation. But I assume that we've progressed to a point that work stations are now doing a lot more work than just the basic modeling and the farm is doing even more complicated things?
Thanks!
That's very interesting, thank you. So GPUs play an important role in neural nets? I can see where that would be very important to people like Facebook and what not. Additionally, I would assume that they have big GPU setups in the workstations to allow for slicing and dicing of data sets from some server.
I guess being mostly in a text editor I don't see the fuss over 4K monitors, but I figured that for people with spreadsheets and presentations and handling assets like our digital media department does here, that they would be important. Good to know. Thanks for your time kind stranger.
GPU capability has been outstripping CPU capability for some time
I get that GPU speeds have been on the rise, but a GPU cannot do everything a CPU can. So upgrading a GPU isn't exactly like upgrading a CPU. Additionally, GPU can only help with software specifically written to use that kind of acceleration. Each element in a GPU by itself is slower than a CPU so the speed bump only comes when a task can be spread across as many elements as possible. That is, while 77.6 GFLOPS might be what it can do, you have to be able to spread your task out enough to get to that value. And if we are just focusing on GPUs as a rationale for changing out the PCIe slots, what professional industry actually does that? I once had a gig at a university's chemical engineering department and even then they just sent modeling compounds off to a farm, where I can understand the need to change out regularly. But what profession is doing it regularly at the workstation? I would assume that the real players that need this massive parallel processing are farming it out to specially built rigs.
I see your high DPI and 4K monitor statement there. Is that a common case? Everywhere I look in cube-ville here it's basically, you get a monitor upgrade when you get a computer upgrade. Are there industries that are actively switching to 4K and swapping out the card as opposed to just getting a new system altogether? How often does that happen? Do I need to walk into my boss' cube and demand a 4K monitor? I don't know why but I find all of this absolutely fascinating.
Really? I'm not denying that, but I am questioning it. Programming for some time now and I can't remember the last time I needed to crack open the case to change out an expansion card of all things. I know a couple of folks in the graphic arts department and likewise, most of their editing and asset management hasn't required a change of things that would typically go into a PCIe slot. So I am curious as to which fields require a constant refresh of what's in the PCIe slots?
Now if we are talking gaming, end user side, I can see that. So with a flexible enough definition we can call them professional? I'm a little out of the gaming loop so I don't want to grant a title to gaming that it doesn't have, but at the same time don't want to snub a legitimate group there. But gaming development, of which I don't do (sorry mostly deal with standard grade C++ and database programming) maybe then there's a need for it?
I'm just struggling to put a solid finger on who exactly needs a constant refresh of cards but at the same time doesn't need a refresh of CPU/RAM/etc at the same time. Is this a common thing in that industry? Not hating on your comment or anything but it now has my curiosity peaked.
Because environmental groups could have sued the federal government for not living up to it's commitments.
At best they could have shamed the government for not doing so. The commitments were non-binding. At no point was the US in any legally obligated point to make good on anything they promised. The Obama administration promised something to the tune of $1B but Trump could have sent all of $0.02 and have felt zero legal challenge on such a move. This is one of the main reasons cited by the Obama administration for using sole-executive agreement power as opposed to a CEA in agreeing to the accords.
And I tried to make that point earlier. If someone says the President has the sole power to pull out of the Paris Accords, which the President does have that power, then you have to come to terms that the accord is fluff. If you think the terms were binding, which they weren't so you can't use the argument of suing so-and-so for not meeting whatever pledge, then the President cannot act in such a unilateral fashion, as it would require undoing the law to effectively withdraw.
If you agree that the President can unilaterally pull out of the accords, you have to also give up the argument that the Accords would have costed us dearly.
It would have costed us exactly as much money as the President intended on sending, which from the outset seemed like zero dollars.
So again, why was the President acting so foolishly to rush into actively rejecting the Paris Accord? Why not first find **literally anyone else** on the planet to jump ship with us before getting on national TV and opening his mouth? It literally costed him so much, bought him so little, and has done more to damage his longer term goals then any short term gain he might get from this. The US stood to loose $0 from doing nothing, but instead he just had to get all showy and stoke his ego. Guy has issues letting his power trips interfere with his ability to actually have a long term strategy.
2 more months and it will be a YEAR and still NO REAL EVIDENCE
Now in all fairness, investigations can take years to conduct. Real evidence belongs in that court of law thing and so citing a lack of it to dismiss allegations brought by news media is a bit apples and oranges. However, on the flip side of that coin, we have to remember that what the media is putting forth are only allegations. Loose threads that may or may not piece together toward anything bigger. How and even if they do piece together is all just a mental process for each reader. It whets the appetite for criminal acts, but only a court of law or in this case an impeachment, actually bring that to the sense of "REAL" as you would have it. Perhaps in good time we will see the outcome of these events into something real or not.
I will say this though, Trump sure hasn't done any favors for himself. If I, myself, were in his shoes I would be looking for some new legal counsel and pretty much hang up the Twitter account. His current array of lawyers do not seem up to task on keeping their client up-to-date on how law functions, creating ideas for programs that are worded so as to work with law as opposed to just how the President feels it should work, recommending bills or legal text that his own party can broadly agree with, how the judicial system works, or more importantly from shooting himself in the foot using his 50 caliber Twitter account. Ultimately it might not be criminal acts that are his undoing but just poor handling of the issues that swirl around his entire administration. There's been lots of points where someone at some time could have just stopped, addressed the issues, and a whole bevvy of other things to cool the flames. Instead, we've only seen Trump ask for more gasoline, double down on his arrogance, and stoke animosity between his office and the other two branches of government, not to mention other international actors and nations.
If we're going to beat up on biased media, then I'm all for it. However, at same time we need to at least partially recognize that some part of this maelstrom is Trump's own creation. The man is a walking PR catastrophe and the media are seizing on it to kill him in a court of public opinion. I'm not sure if he feels that he just doesn't need to address these issues, feels the issues are beneath him, or just simply doesn't have a clue on how serious the situation is and how much he really needs to pull back on the daily diatribe. I mean, c'mon there's seriously a limit to how often a single person can use a public platform to cry victim before we all start getting to the point of thinking it's mostly self inflicted. At least option one and three can be partly blamed on crappy lawyers. There's no fix if number two is the full or partly the truth behind everything wrong that just keeps happening. If the man just refuses to address anything or just keeps shifting the blame to someone that's not him, there's just no course correction that's going to save this man's political appeal. He's not showing strength by his bullish disregard for the political process, he's just goading more people to question him and that's an aphrodisiac for the press. Thinking they would not seize the bountiful opportunity Trump provides daily to crucify himself would be like some billionaire of group of billionaires not taking a tax write off named after themselves.
funneling American wealth to third world countries via a non-binding agreement
If it is non-binding, which it is, then what pressure is there to funnel anything? I get the President did what he did, but what I don't understand is the why. Why openly reject an agreement that just simply not doing it would have sufficed? I feel the reason being is that the President wanted a big show of defiance, like he's outside of some corrupt group. However, it makes no sense that he jumped off a cliff with zero other people joining him in the jump. Now that he's taken his stance, which can't possibly go into effect until 2020, right about election time, he's got the weaker stance.
Imagine if you will, 2020 comes, no one else joins him in his stance. That's going to get plastered on pretty much every person's arsenal of political attacks on him. "The President stands alone in the world" or something like that. Tie that to how he's incited other countries to now actively work against him. His line of, "I work for Pittsburgh not Paris" directly puts France in the cross hairs, something tells me France just got a sudden rush to go down with the ship if need be on this agreement just to spite him. Add in the alienation of Germany that he seems bent on, and you have two of the biggest three countries in the EU now having axes to grind. Oh and it wasn't lost how the UK, the third largest in the EU, was awfully quiet about any kind of lifeline of support to the President. Why is that? Because it's non-binding, even if the UK wanted out, it's a non-binding agreement, it literally is no sweat off their back to just simply do nothing. They would actually have to go out of their way to get behind him at this point.
And I think that's the kicker on the International stage here. Trump is the odd man out and there is nothing to induce any other country to change their position. If the President at some point feels he needs at least one other country to get behind him, he's going to be swiftly met with, "Well what will your country do for ours?" Because, them not helping him won't hurt them and helping him might stir a pot they would rather let sit for the next five years. And that's the thing, I don't think the President is going to feel at any point in his term that he needs the International community, and that's going to make his lofty goals that he's set out that more difficult. I get the principal of the matter, but our great deal maker in command should understand the basic principal of leverage. Leverage that he just willfully tossed away all because he wanted to make some sort of point on an agreement that didn't even have teeth and was mostly symbolic in nature.
So say what you will about the accords and its merits or lack thereof. However, being odd man out isn't a good position to be in, in any situation. Anything he goes to the table with for trade agreements is going to have the specter of his actions yesterday not far behind. "Oh you are the only country on the entire planet that didn't go with the Paris Accords, well we're going to look at your terms and get back to you in three years."
If anyone is arguing the lack of power in this agreement, cannot deny how bad on the International stage this is going to look. If anyone wants to argue that this amounted to welfare to third world counties, then you cannot claim that the agreement lacked power, and thus you have to admit that the actions yesterday were hasty without at least one other country being in the band wagon. Either the President felt the agreement lacked power or it had power but he failed to get anyone else on this planet to agree with him that the terms should be changed. But it is either it does or does not have power, it cannot be both. And truth told it lacked any kind of power, which should have signaled to the President that he had plenty of time to find at least one other country to stand with him. But no, he had to make a great big show complete with band, all the media, tantaliz
Guy or gal, I don't give a shit about the actual agreement. It's political theater. Trump had to make a big shit show about "pulling out" and the other countries are making a big shit show out of how insanely bombastic his attitude is to pretty much everything. Both sides got exactly what they were expecting would happen.
But it's not a treaty. Obama knew that Trump would pull out. The full exit happens in 2020 and the bet that side A is making is that they'll be able to use the circle jerk reaction to full exit as a topic down the road. Side B, I would hope, isâ going to spend the time to actually talk about a better deal or just sweep the whole thing under a rug, Trump's a hard read with him literally being everywhere.
So if you're looking for a snip to quote in future replies, try this, all of this is just countries playing politics, each side has their bigger goal to play at, none of the actual agreement means anything beyond rainbow points and fuzzies.
Someone pointing out the technical details does not always mean they're actually interested in politics.
Or perhaps it is a lesson to other leaders of state that assumed that the US President had unilateral power to commit the US to treaties
I just want to add that this is not a treaty. Treaties require 2/3rd Senate approval. This was sought under a sole-executive agreement by the US and is why the agreement is ultimately non-binding, additionally, it is also why it is called an agreement, since agreements do not require anything from Congress except that the President give notice that the US has entered one within 20-days.
Side notes for anyone interested. There's also Congressional-Executive agreements (CEAs) which is basically the same as a sole-executive agreement but Congress also codifies the agreement into law, that's what NAFTA is just in case anyone was wondering. Also, stating that the Paris Accords is non-binding isn't 100% true. There are parts that are binding which use the power of the UNFCCC (an actual treaty we signed onto in 1992) to bind those who signed on. One of those agreements is that everyone has to wait three years before they can actually exit the agreement. Then it takes a little under a year to actually be out. If you are wondering, yes, that puts us squarely with full exit happening right about the time the 2020 US election gets into the heat of things. So while Trump has stated he'll be leaving, he can't actually file to leave until 2019.
The President has the power to negotiate treaties and contracts but they're not binding on the US until the legislature ratifies it.
That's a specific type of treaty. Known as a Congressional-Executive Agreement, which technically isn't a treaty, is when the President haggles, er negotiates, some sort of "whatever" and then goes and asks nicely for Congress to put it in the books. CEAs are typically used for trade of non-military/weapon stuff, entering in and exiting organizations (like WTO), foreign aids that should last longer than a single President term, and so on. However, according to Article 1 Section 10, States can also enter into these kinds of agreements to a degree (think car plant in a State or something like that).
There's also sole-executive agreements. These don't require anyone but the President. These are things like Status of Force Agreements (SOFA) and such, like if you get attacked, we're going to help you bomb the crap out of whoever. This particular example is via the President's Commander-in-Chief power. Sole-executive agreements can also be with intelligence sharing, setting spy networks, and so on. Now the President must inform both the House and Senate Committee that a sole-executive agreement has been "done", "agreed upon", whatever, but that's about it. Congress can eat it if they don't like it.
That finally brings us to Actual Treaties which is sometimes called an Article 2, because they use the rules as outlined in Article 2 Section 2. The President or ambassador or special convoy or whatever is the one doing all the agreeing to details and what-not. However, the Senate (not the full Congress, just the upper house) get's to peek at what is going on and suggest things into the process. The President can tell them to get lost but that hurts his chances at the second phase. Once the treaty is agreed upon, it then goes to the Senate where it takes 2/3rd (not that wimpy 3/5th BS) to make it an official treaty. Once that happens, it has the same power as the actual Constitution. (Yes, there's been more things written about a President abusing Article 2 than you can shake a stick at). Article 2 is usually reserved for the trade of weapons, nuclear agreements, things that have really serious binding agreements, things that are long term in such a way that a CEA just wouldn't work. Basically, really serious stuff. To give some scale here, since FDR only 6% of all international agreements went on to Article 2 status, and again the big reason being, treaties have the same flipping weight as the actual US Constitution. You do not want to be the Senator that approved one of these that went south fast.
Okay, well that's a quick intro in the the unholy triad of agreements/treaties/international things. There's a ton being skipped here and like anything in Government, which one is used for such-and-such agreement is pretty much a d12 roll, with Article 2 being used if it lands on it's side. Also, there's been a ton of legislation and judicial precedent that guides a lot of this that's been created in the 200+ year history the US has been doing this. So all the above are "rough" approximations of when each has and is used.
All that said, the Paris Agreement is/was (sorry haven't really checked news to see if anything has changed) a sole-executive agreement. Again, d12 dice rolled an eight here so that's what we're going with. So since the then President decided to call it this, he then sits down with his lawyers and begins to pen out how he can actually do that. Well the Paris Agreement is mostly fluff, there I said it. The language is mostly hortatory as opposed to binding. There's not actually anything in the agreement except some reporting of emissions, promises to do better, and some processes for shaming, but other than loosing face, there's not really anything of substance. However, even with all the fluff, the Senate couldn't let Obama get away with a power play. Yeah the whole thing, much like that pipelin
He should update that to now include USB-C
Maybe by the end of the year we'll be reading about bored developers who claim email is unusable crap because it's not a JSON feed.
You take that back right this second, least someone actually read that and get an idea about better email!
I really don't think the parsing speed of RSS's XML is going to be an issue here...
The problem isn't reading it. It's building the DOM that goes behind anything XML. That DOM incurs a slight overhead. Building a DOM, giving it all the abilities to move forward, backwards, n-th node, etc is what *some* people have massive issues with. Now that sounds a lot like an issue with the thing that's in charge of building the DOM and you'd be correct. Lot's of XML libraries have tons of things that they automatically do that no one needs, but really some of that can be argued for JS engines as well...
But I'm with you on this, this all sounds insanely "meh" and honestly sounds like the, "oooh! JSON is so H-O-T right now" trend is kicking off. Just like the XML version of that trend was a few years back. I'm pretty sure in a few more years we'll all move past JSON and we will all have this same discussion about JSON feeds converting over to ((insert next big thing)).
I will add this. There is a frightfully vocal group of folks who tout JSONP as the solution to by-passing all of the headache that comes with cross site XML. To which I usually say, "well there was a reason for that, but, hey it's your site, your gun, your foot, have fun." While nothing bad has happened yet and folks are (big air quotes)keeping tabs(/big air quotes), I won't be surprised for XSS exploits to rise up at some point in the not-so-distant future. It may not ever happen, but just seeing some of the handwaving that a lot of JS developers do (type safety for lamb sakes!!) all in the name of making things smaller, easier, and faster; I just can't help but think that there's something bad brewing.
But not giving these folks their fifteen minutes in the limelight, denies what I've come to see as the status quo for all things tech. New, shiny, and waiting to be exploited before it too moves into the obsolescence bin.
The problem is really how quickly it blazed through the community
You know just the other day I was reading about how some people were bemoaning the Firefox piece that pointed out Google for how big it was and how little we have in the way for emergency braking should Google start abusing that power with respect to W3C and web standards (basically, Google is in a position to stomp out the relevance of W3C, make the web work the way they feel it should, and little to nothing anyone can do to stop that, should it come to pass and thus we might want to rethink how the governance of the web standard works. However, it mostly descended into Firefox is just bitching, someone call the waanbulance, but I digress). This blazing through the distros is exactly the same. This is all a symptom of loose governance. That's not to say the model is weak or bad or anything of that nature, but when you operate a loosely governed project, having a run away task/project/person dominate all is one of those things that you get, sometimes. Not every project has this happened to it, but when it does, it really gets a specific group of folks up in arms, but then when you ask them to do something about it before the next time it happens, they shrug and say things like, "it dog eat dog out there" or something similar to that effect.
I've just gone ahead and chalked it up as, there's always going to be that group that's in perpetual bitch mode (PBM) about the way the community is heading just like those old farts that sit around and say that the current generation is messing up/moral decline. I'm glad the Devuan people did what they did, I was one of those folks when systemd was "blazing" the trail that if people want a systemd free environment, then they'll build one. I for one welcome the Devuan folks as a third option for Linux systemd-free (really you all should be using Slackware but that's just me).
I know keep getting off-topic here, but if people want to prevent these projects from "blazing" through, then the folks in PBM of the community need to get off their rear-ends and choose a different model of governance. Aside from that, learn to deal.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool the torches there buddy. I get where you are coming from but I think we're a little past that point. You've got a great argument at say 20% delta between first and second place, but we're way, way, way past that point. Chrome is at 54% with second place at 15% and that's Apple's Safari which I'm sure 90% of that 15% is iPhone. That's an almost 40% difference between the two. While no one is screaming monopoly (okay maybe a few but no one cares about them), we're in the territory where we should grow a bit concerned.
The W3C manages the standards of the web and even then Google has an insanely heavy hand in the process there and even if W3C doesn't agree to something, who cares, Google just does it anyway. So I get it, competition and all, but there's a point where we should pro-actively start looking at what checks are in place to ensure that Google doesn't make W3C, OASIS, et al completely irrelevant.
You know how people say that "gee I wish people were more proactive before monopolies formed?" Yeah, we're there, this is that point where it is time to ask questions. Not asking questions, not ensuring that Google just doesn't start stomping standards and going the non-evil form of embrace, enhance, and extinguish, ensuring the young whipper snappers that Google hires don't GNOME 3 the hell out of the Internet, that's the entire point. It's not to say, "OMG! Google is just too big, has way too much a lead over other browsers, it's just not fair *wail to heavens*". It is to say, "Hey, uh, do we have enough checks and balances to ensure that Google doesn't use their lead to just fudge bomb how the web works?" The answer is pretty much no and that's been a concern for like forever (I remember conversations about this issue back in late 1990s and W3C was way smaller then), but more so now that I lot more people happen to be on the Internet daily.
Totally understand your position, but just up and up being cynical and telling them to go f'off, !!CAPITALISM!! Is exactly the crap that just leads to an insanely high level of apathy that ultimately leads to the same folks that said !!CAPITALISM!! saying, "WTF?! Where were you all and why didn't you stop them?!?!" I for one don't want another IE and neither should anyone else. We need an organization that can literally say, "Google Chrome is not compliant with ISO(ideally W3 as opposed to ISO)-96716723(whatever) of HTML rendering standards, they are a non-standard browser." And we should actively shun non-standard browsers.
Also, just want to add that this nowhere even gets into how slow the W3C has been, how they totally missed the ball on mobile-everything, and how they are totally getting left behind in IoT. So there's an even amount of blame to lay on W3C's feet too. Also mobile OS makers and what not, there's some blame heading to them too... It's a really complex topic, but yeah screaming !!CAPITALISM!! isn't going to fix jack crap and possible just make it worse off.
Also more to the point. The idea that we're going to work our butts off to build one around Sol when there's an insanely high chance that elsewhere is a whole lot better gives Sol, IMHO, this special status that it isn't due. If say in thousands of years humans have the technology to build such a structure, and we're talking the solid kind here, it's also highly likely that we're able to travel the stars at will. That said, it's also likely that Sapiens aren't the only species of Homo out there anymore and that the variety of humanity that will exist at that point will just not give Earth a second thought other than a chapter in some history book. While it's cute to think of H. Sapiens wanting to build a better house around their crib, it's more reasonable to think that they'll look at Earth about the same way we look at the bed we slept in as children. With greener pastures a plenty elsewhere, there's just no overriding need to build such a thing unless building such a thing is massively easier than blasting off to the next nearest star.
Dyson spheres in all of their forms are basically power plants more so than they are habitats. Say we want to build a giant device to test gravity at the quantum level, okay you need a giant power source for that and a Dyson shell is a good source for that. But that basically means we're bulldozing a stellar system to basically conduct a science experiment. I highly doubt someone is going to say, oh let's use that system our ancestors from thousands of years ago lived in, it's not the most ideal spot to build it, but ya know, it just tugs on my heart strings. Nope more than likely they're going to look at how best they can build it and with the least amount of energy put into its construction.
Thinking that humanity is going to cling to this rock in thousands of years into the future is just silly. Somewhere in Africa, Europe, Middle East humanity started there, but just because that's where humanity started doesn't mean I have this sudden yearning to make it the best place ever on the face of the Earth. I sure it was a great place back in the day, but we've evolved since then and have found way better places all over the world. And there's an incredibly good chance that as humans and all of the different species we eventually evolve into will find way better places for themselves outside of our dusty old rock that served as humanity's crib. Right now, there's no planet #2, so yeah Earth is very special at the moment. But if we're conjecturing into thousands of years from now, Earth is just some place like any other place in the Universe. It doesn't deserve *status especial" in that context.
Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?
Please stop.
We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.
I think economic rationality will still be a thing then, but then again that's me.
we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.
There's not enough material in the solar system as we know it currently to provide enough material to construct a 2 AU in diameter Dyson sphere. If we're willing to fly to another star to get more material for building around our star, we're more than willing to fly somewhere else with more building material at the site. Just saying.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED.
Well not that shocked.
Okay I'll bite.
If someone tells your that we are running out of (insert fossil fuel here), what they are most likely talking about is economically viable (insert fossil fuel here) not absolute values. This planet has a ton of trapped energy, it's just ridiculous to think of the sheer amount of energy that has been stored in this planet over it's billions of years of existence. It's a ton of flipping energy and unless something significantly changes about how human's exist, there's just no hope in us ever extracting 100% of all of that energy from the planet, ever. Put bluntly, we will never ever reach a point where humans have extracted absolutely every single bit of energy stored in this planet. Be it coal, oil, natural gas, or whatever else, there's just simply too much of it that we'll never get *all* of it. There is a limited supply of economically viable fossil fuels. We are indeed getting more creative with things like fracking (invented in 2006) that's helped us extend our reach. But at some point even that too will not be enough and we will need another innovation to extend our reach further. Some industries, just haven't had any of those *break through* innovations and it really makes you wonder about their economic viability. We're pretty good as a species at innovating so we're going to always come up with new and interesting ways to extract energy form the planet. The question is less, will we be able to extract the energy and more will there be any buyers? If this technology can be made to be cheap and reliable, then China's sitting on gold here. If it's only going to save them a buck or two,
then they'll just sit on the technology until energy prices in the other industries go up enough to make this gold. If it's never going to save them money, then this might very well be the last time we all hear about it. But again, it all comes down to less about how awesome we can innovate and more so to market pressures.
The doomsday scenarios, unless you're talking about climate change which is a different topic altogether, is basically what happens if we run into a period of time where we've not yet hit the next innovation and energy prices are flying through the roof? It's not unrealistic to think that we might be in the middle of researching the next big thing and then poof (and by poof I mean over the course of several years), we're running low on X-Y-Z fuel that we can extract at $5 a unit. We've got at least ten years of X-Y-Z fuel but we extracted it at $23 a unit and we've got at least three decades worth of X-Y-Z fuel but it was extracted at $78 a unit. That's a doomsday scenario. If we don't find a way to get that $23/unit X-Y-Z fuel somewhere close to $5/unit X-Y-Z fuel, a lot of industries that rely on X-Y-Z are going to be hurting. Heaven forbid we have to tap into that $78/unit fuel. We have technically forty years worth of fuel but all at prices that either no one will want to pay, or at prices that will drastically change industries. Sometimes governments subsidize things to help get the price as close to something that will keep demand up, but that can only go so far. The point being, there's no physical shortage, we're not absolutely out of X-Y-Z, but we are running out of X-Y-Z that the majority of people will pay for.
Absolute terms are silly to talk about. I think in the Asia-Pacific there's like enough coal to keep everyone in Japan, China, etc warm till 4000 or 5000 AD. But the majority of it is impure and would require an insane amount of processing before it actually became "fuel" grade coal. That's not also mentioning that a lot of it is difficult to get to, being trapped in complicated geological structures are aren't exactly the easiest thing to just drill through and have a stable tunnel running through it. Those are obviously things that eventually we'll have technical solutions for, but not right now. Also, if anyone wants to talk absolute terms. The sun is the way to go. It's got enough energy to power us for the next billio
It literally is a shame that 5 is as high as one can mod up a comment, because in seventeen words, you've summed up the entire point.
So I guess I'll just ask, which industry has the potential for more money? Those that depend on a NN-less or pro-NN world? I know there's not a technically correct answer to that question, but just wondering who's going to build the most clout to bribe, er lobby, our House members?
so original and appealing that OEMs won't be able to resist tagging along
We have no fucking idea what we're going to do next, but we're totally playing it off like shits about to get real. Please, buy our phones! We will literally give you an HP laptop and a Windows Phone if you just promise to let everyone you know, know that you are using a Windows phone and you, like this guy, are really enjoying the phone and think it is hip. Why are you all not buying our phones!!?
Has there EVER been a politician born that attained office that didn't thing of EVERYTHING they saw as a taxable opportunity???
You should really read the Dictator's Handbook. There is a reason why over time politicians begin to take a similar shape and it has a lot more to do with how power structures are formed than politicians just randomly looking at everything and wondering how they can tax it. ISBN: 978-1610391849 Sorry to sound like an advert but it really is a good book that talks about this very thing and why it's more common than not.
Hold up. Now I've worked COBOL. There's the COBOL that they teach you and then there's the stuff you're going to see out in the field. There is a huge difference and it'll cost any company time for any new person to get up to speed.
Each company has their own way they like to do subfiles, their own standard for indicators, their ways of dealing with file access, and so on. The language per se isn't that hard it's just everything else about dealing with COBOL in a real system that's the time muncher.
Additionally you'll run into things where this group of programs was written when file indicators used 60-69 and this group it's indicators 80-89, and that group they use actual variables, oh and this handful of groups was before the compiler got table (COBOL array) support. Oh and then that's not getting into the literal half dozen ways to interact with a display file. Nor service programs etc.
COBOL is easy to learn, but knowing the syntax of the language just doesn't prepare you for how wild west programming used to be and code from the 60s tends to be more along the lines of, "whatever solution I came up with that day to solve this one problem is what I went with." A huge lacking in coding standards and thus a lot of inconstancy not just in programs built the same year, but literally if the developer slept between coding sessions, you could have different styles in a single program from the same person. It was really an undisciplined style of getting things done.
Holy shit dude. I'm a vet C++ programmer and the last three years mobile developer for warehousing company. However about a year before my current job, I worked in an exclusive AS400 shop. RPGLE, COBOL, CL, you name, it was still using the stuff from back in the day.
The system was incredibly fragile and had insanely complicated builds with the labyrinth of binding directories, dependencies, the constant service program signature violations. Customers demanded new functionality and the system just had trouble keeping up. Old programmers would code crap like RPG still lacked arrays with abusing subfiles. They'd swear by using numeric indicators versus the new fancy types. Yeah, because IN73 being on tells me that I totally need to refresh the data on the screen. Eventually the company fired all of the RPG/COBOL programmers because they could never keep up with demand. They were short order replaced by an off the shelf solution and any new work was contacted out. I stayed on a few months more because I understood EDI and they needed someone to get that all setup on the new solution. Oh and it was Java based.
Point though, you sound exactly like those old guys. OO over complicates crap and you don't need all that fancy stuff, blah blah blah. I work and coded DDS, SQL, RPG, and COBOL with those people for five years and I knew their mentality was just setting them up for obsolescence.
The tech industry is brutal man and you've got to be a person keenly adept to rapidly adapt or you'll find yourself quickly no longer employed and lacking serious skills to find your next job. Two, besides myself, out of our group of nine found another job. Those two for jobs doing AS400 maintenance, took a pay cut for it, and RPGLE programmer with the State Government, smaller hit to the paycheck than the first guy. The rest of the group have nothing but their retirement savings to dip into. We all lost touch over the years but last I heard two or three more for jobs finally but had to eat the cost of moving elsewhere.
Seriously, the only thing that kept me above water was that I had skills in C++ and Java. And since then I've picked up containers with Linux and node.js plus Python and some big data (Hadoop and shit) just to what I assume is stay current.
That thinking of yours isn't a good kind in this industry. But I get it, when I worked with the AS400 folk, I had just turned 30 and so I was seen as the young whipper snapper etc. I had just left my last job of several years doing C++ and every gray beard (literally) there thought I was there to "think outside the box" and "shift paradigms" and really I was just there to mostly get a paycheck. Learning RPGLE and COBOL was fun but man those old guys they scoffed at any suggestion to get off a green screen or to make their monolith more modular. They would literally say, "stupid hipster just trying to make everything harder than it needs to be." And let me tell you, I didn't dress like a hipster.
Anyway, I know, way more memory lane than anyone asked for, but seriously, those guys' thinking ultimately led to their firing. I've worked in a few development teams but not a lot so can't say with a lot of experience, but my gut tells me that had they been just a wee more open to change and newer technologies, they might still be working at that place.