People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
The renewables (solar, wind) have fundamental reliability issues. They require an energy storage system, and that energy storage system is expensive.
Nuclear is expensive too, but for different reasons.
Oil and coal will likely stay the cheapest energy storage source for a long time to come. In part, because the concrete and steel to make the nuclear plants and the chemicals to make the solar cells come from heavily energy based sources that use oil and/or coal.
Realistically, investing in different conservation schemes gets way better payback than some renewable energy approaches. It doesn't take much computation to show that switching from always-on incandescent to motion-activated LED light bulbs yields a better return on investment than purchasing solar cells. As gas prices rise and climate change issues increase, North America will simply have to get better at conservation.
In the case of Iraq, it was later shown that Saddam Hussein thought he had chemical weapons. His underlings were just lying to him. Also, there was at least one incident where people were killed as they inadvertently disassembled chemical munitions for scrap metal.
As such, the weapons were there, and thought to be there on both sides. They just were not usable.
It speaks more to the general disinformation of the war on both sides that the story is as muddy as it is.
Realistically, both Iran and North Korea are unlikely to make the same mistakes as Saddam.
They have learned from Iraq, and will not repeat the same mistakes.
Iran, in particular, appears determined to find new and inventive ways to cause trouble.
It appears to be following more of a cold war philosophy, where direct engagement with the West is avoided, and instead a series of proxy governments (Lebanon, Syria) and groups (Hamas, Hezbollah) are used to influence other regional governments.
Personally, I don't see what the effort is accomplishing, other than lots of casualties in the region.
Actually, it is like having a house on a busy street with the door standing open, only you don't know it. Would you rather:
a) Your neighbour pop in, check if you are still alive, and remind you to close the door?
b) or just wander in and out like everyone else does on the street.
The problem isn't that people are breaking into your house. It's that people are breaking into your house, sleeping over, and you don't know it.
Physical property has definite levels of trespass. Walking through an open door is not trespassing in many jurisdictions. Things are way more nebulous on-line. If I can pull data from your webserver without a password, where was the closed door exactly? (People have been charged with pulling open-access data from a webserver, and it really shouldn't have been as easy as knowing which web page to call up.)
For symbolic math, Mathematica is vastly superior to Matlab. In my comprehensive exam, Matlab said if I increased the gain of a control system to 1E8, then the following error would be zero. However, for that particular control system, I knew that this result had to be wrong. For modestly large gains, the average of the absolute value of the error should have been a constant, and unaffected by the gain. At gains of 1E8, most physical systems go unstable. The issue shook my confidence on the written portion of my comprehensive exam.
SPICE and Mathematica computed the correct result. The key difference is Mathematica is a symbolic solver. It solves the formulas, without making unnecessary approximations. Spice is absolutely amazing for control system work. It analyzes stuff that most users would be unable to model with Matlab. In particular, SPICE models output to input capacitive coupling correctly, where most other models ignore the issue. Thus, SPICE will frequently predict that a system will be unstable if the gains are sufficiently large, whereas Matlab will often predict everything is good. Additionally, after knowingly blowing the results on the written, I verified the result on a physical system. I wanted to be really sure I had the correct answers for the oral portion of the comprehensive exam.
Matlab is a numeric computation package. In the case of control systems, it quietly converts Laplace transforms into discrete time z-Transforms before computing the system response. Never trust numeric results when they disagree with the theory. To this day, I still wonder if the professor that asked that particular exam question knew about this bug in Matlab, and deliberately asked the exam question from hell.
Fortunately, the search engines appear to have forgotten about USENET. I'm in the same boat, and I used my real name too.
My current strategy is to avoid saying anything on-line that could blow back to me, and I always use a pseudonym. However, with a vast history, I wonder how anonymous I really am.
I've bought a number of CAD workstations. Cost is (almost) no object when a key designer is working full-time on new CAD designs.
Somehow, I suspect the CAD operator would really prefer a really high resolution 19" or 24" touch tablet. Even then, I think someone would have been selling some high-priced devices for this sector if the techology really worked. Personally, I think the Wacom style visual tablets appeal to more to the graphics arts people than the CAD people. I always want the Wacom tablet when I'm drawing free-hand, and never for 3-D CAD models.
Also, I can't imagine manipulating big 3-D CAD designs without a big GPU and a big monitor. Additionally, if the design needs FEA (finite elements analysis), then the surface probably doesn't have enough horsepower and a sufficiently large and high resolution screen.
I think you have nailed one of the two major issues:
a) Reform the system so H1B's are portable between employers, and
b) Keep the high-tech workers in the US.
From an outsider's perspective, one of the real advantages of the US is that people from all over the world will come and work in the US. The same can't be said for China and/or India. The issue with kicking skilled foreign workers out of the US is that they start foreign businesses outside the US to compete against workers in the US. The result is poor growth in the US economy (and the foreign companies get rich.)
It is much better to be a world center for commerce like Silicon Valley, New York, or London, than it is to be in a forgettable high-tech free, manufacturing-free place in the world. I'm from one of those places, and the US has huge advantages over those places. Don't get rid of the elements of the US economy that made the US great.
Roger's has officially rolled over and plays ball with the troll's. They have a system where they will automatically forward a legal letter or something.
I remember in Microwave engineering when the professor got up and explained that we can create phase velocities faster than light. Except, when you actually looked at what was really happening in the system, nothing was actually moving at faster than light. It only appears to move faster than light. Wikipedia mentions this effect with both phase and group velocities.
Reviewing the author's paper, I strongly suspect the author has gotten lost in his own math. It starts with a Newtonian premise, introduces Maxwell's equations in Newtonian form, and then adds relativity. If relativity is involved, Maxwell's equations in derivative form need to be applied from the beginning, otherwise interesting problems occur like omitting the mass change of the electrons.
Whatever is happening in this system, it isn't what the author of the paper describes.
The civil engineers do design for resiliency against severe failures and/or attacks. The world trade center was designed to be hit by a B-25 bomber. The terrorists used a 767, and simulations say that the building should have survived. The engineers did not design against a 767 filled with a full fuel load, in the 1960's, when a 767 did not exist yet.
To be fair, the software people in the SCADA software industry have the same safety issues. SCADA systems are designed to fail gracefully in the event of many disruptions. Many of the SCADA software "hacks" are people connecting a "designed to be isolated and secure" network to the internet, against all manufacturers recommendations.
For SCADA, the problems are:
a) Microsoft promised a hardened secure operating system with Windows NT, and this somehow turned into a "needs to be connected to the Internet so the systems stays updated" with Windows XP. Thus, the "designed to be isolated" networks were no longer isolated.
b) Every supplier of the software and hardware involved has a "not to be used in safety-critical, nuclear, or life-support machinery..." line in the software license. Thus, they are absolved of legal liability.
c) How do you design a software system to resist malicious and/or inadvertent attack? It is actually an unsolved engineering problem. Hit with a big enough plane, the world trade center fell down. Hit with a big enough Tsunami, Fukishima melted down. With sufficient network traffic, I can take out almost any network link to an embedded microcontroller. In engineering, there is always a "big enough fool" with "big enough sledge hammer", to gum up any proposed design.
Everyone is pirating. Today's copyright laws can't be followed, even by people actively trying to follow them. Someone put a nice essay together to detail how incredibly absurd we are right now. If you walk around in public, singing along to your iPod, you are violating copyright. Current copyright law is so nebulous, that average person will violate it somehow, every day. The only good news is that no one cares about most peoples infractions.
After trying very hard to like Unity for several versions, I tried Linux Mint. MATE is a pleasure to use. Everything is where I instinctively look to find it.
You can try prying MATE out of my cold dead hands.
Modern supply chain systems make extensive use of EDI and ERP systems. When you are Apple, and you really want to make sure you have sufficient capacity to supply your product, you tool up two suppliers to supply the full volume of your sales. As such, the EDI system says that in 6 months you will ship 32 million units x 2 suppliers = 65 million units.
At the 3 month mark, both suppliers are fully tooled up. As such, you cut the 3 month advance planning order to 16 million units x 2 suppliers = 32 million units. This should be close to actual sales. This is done, because the automated ERP systems will actually build 65 million phones, unless someone tells them to stop.
Crazy numbers like this happen all the time in some industries. 6 month = 2 million units/month. 3 month = 1 million/month. 1 month = 1.5 million/month. 2 week = 0.5 million/week. 1 day = 0.2 million/day. The numbers can be all over the place. Sometimes, the suppliers have no idea how many parts will be shipping the next day.
To acheive any kind of security with Windows NT 3.5/4.0, you really need to control the physical layer thoroughly. Any device on the network is a potential source for untrusted code. Once you had untrusted code running on the computer, the network was compromised.
With Windows XP and Windows 7, it's pretty much impossible to lock down the computers. The security certifications that Microsoft had for Windows NT 4.0 no longer exist.
The only current desktop operating system technology that is equivalent to the security I was deploying with Windows NT 4.0 is SE Linux.
The crucial detail is whether the physical layer of the network can be trusted. If the physical layer is trusted, then NTLM works fine. Historically, lots of corporate networks controlled every computer on the office network, and air-gapped the internet.
Many modern networks, including wireless networks, have a non-trust worthy physical layer. In this case, only end-to-end encryption protects the network. Yes, the newer versions NTLM protect against the most obvious password scanning attacks. However, with a non-trust worthy physical layer, it is possible to simply scan all the network traffic and get the file contents from the network directly. Also, some (almost all?) ODBC and database servers send passwords in the clear. This makes it straightforward to do simple network traffic analysis attacks, and directly gather valuable information from the company network.
The bottom line is that only protocols like SSH work against a non-trustworthy physical layer.
Encapsulation - the ability to hide functions inside classes is a far bigger feature of C++ than any of the above.
Additionally, C++ has the advantage that you can write one piece of code that can compile either in C++ or in C, which can be a huge advantage when doing communications code with embedded systems.
I think it needs to be remembered that education != success.
Business schools have spent some time on this. The best entrepreneurs are incapable of sitting through business classes. Education rewards good students, not successful people. If the goal of a society is to be highly conformist, then the current education system does well. However, America's competitive edge in the world is based on new non-conforming ideas.
I can't imagine anything less useful for high-performing students than group work in math class. It does nothing more than create a pool of free tutors to help the teacher.
According to communities dominate brands by Tomi Ahohen, the poor N9 and the outdated Symbian are expected to outsell the great savior, the Lumia Windows Phone 8 at Nokia this quarter. Not too shabby.
PSTricks is more for diagrams. GnuPlot runs circles around Excel for high-powered graphing. It has lots of neat tricks including advanced graphs with complex error bars, colour coding, shading, etc. I know Excel pretty well, and I don't think it is possible to do a number of the examples at the gnuplot demo page in Excel.
The challenges facing my thesis were more basic. Excel has a few key issues with log graphing and numbers in scientific notation. Excel (and PowerPoint) have issues with Greek numbers. Also, in GnuPlot it is possible to place two graphs on the same page, one above the other, such that the X-Axis line up accurately. With Excel and PowerPoint, the results are "less than professional quality" at best. It's definitely not replicatable if a large volume of graphs is being done.
I also found a bug in Excel where it would render the bar graphs with the texture pattern inside the bar also appearing outside the border line for the bar. That truly sucked.
Another, "Not in my big moment!" bug is that PowerPoint will not consistently render the same fonts in the same presentation if you move between computers and/or PowerPoint versions. It's a really nasty bug, and creeps up in the wierdest places.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
The renewables (solar, wind) have fundamental reliability issues. They require an energy storage system, and that energy storage system is expensive.
Nuclear is expensive too, but for different reasons.
Oil and coal will likely stay the cheapest energy storage source for a long time to come. In part, because the concrete and steel to make the nuclear plants and the chemicals to make the solar cells come from heavily energy based sources that use oil and/or coal.
Realistically, investing in different conservation schemes gets way better payback than some renewable energy approaches. It doesn't take much computation to show that switching from always-on incandescent to motion-activated LED light bulbs yields a better return on investment than purchasing solar cells. As gas prices rise and climate change issues increase, North America will simply have to get better at conservation.
In the case of Iraq, it was later shown that Saddam Hussein thought he had chemical weapons. His underlings were just lying to him. Also, there was at least one incident where people were killed as they inadvertently disassembled chemical munitions for scrap metal. As such, the weapons were there, and thought to be there on both sides. They just were not usable. It speaks more to the general disinformation of the war on both sides that the story is as muddy as it is.
Realistically, both Iran and North Korea are unlikely to make the same mistakes as Saddam. They have learned from Iraq, and will not repeat the same mistakes. Iran, in particular, appears determined to find new and inventive ways to cause trouble. It appears to be following more of a cold war philosophy, where direct engagement with the West is avoided, and instead a series of proxy governments (Lebanon, Syria) and groups (Hamas, Hezbollah) are used to influence other regional governments. Personally, I don't see what the effort is accomplishing, other than lots of casualties in the region.
Actually, it is like having a house on a busy street with the door standing open, only you don't know it. Would you rather:
a) Your neighbour pop in, check if you are still alive, and remind you to close the door?
b) or just wander in and out like everyone else does on the street.
The problem isn't that people are breaking into your house. It's that people are breaking into your house, sleeping over, and you don't know it.
Physical property has definite levels of trespass. Walking through an open door is not trespassing in many jurisdictions. Things are way more nebulous on-line. If I can pull data from your webserver without a password, where was the closed door exactly? (People have been charged with pulling open-access data from a webserver, and it really shouldn't have been as easy as knowing which web page to call up.)
Many power supplies are designed to autoswitch between 110V and 220V for just this reason. Cheap power supplies aren't.
I knew one customer that said: "We didn't know that it was a 220V machine when we connected it to 600V!" That bang was audible.
For symbolic math, Mathematica is vastly superior to Matlab. In my comprehensive exam, Matlab said if I increased the gain of a control system to 1E8, then the following error would be zero. However, for that particular control system, I knew that this result had to be wrong. For modestly large gains, the average of the absolute value of the error should have been a constant, and unaffected by the gain. At gains of 1E8, most physical systems go unstable. The issue shook my confidence on the written portion of my comprehensive exam.
SPICE and Mathematica computed the correct result. The key difference is Mathematica is a symbolic solver. It solves the formulas, without making unnecessary approximations. Spice is absolutely amazing for control system work. It analyzes stuff that most users would be unable to model with Matlab. In particular, SPICE models output to input capacitive coupling correctly, where most other models ignore the issue. Thus, SPICE will frequently predict that a system will be unstable if the gains are sufficiently large, whereas Matlab will often predict everything is good. Additionally, after knowingly blowing the results on the written, I verified the result on a physical system. I wanted to be really sure I had the correct answers for the oral portion of the comprehensive exam.
Matlab is a numeric computation package. In the case of control systems, it quietly converts Laplace transforms into discrete time z-Transforms before computing the system response. Never trust numeric results when they disagree with the theory. To this day, I still wonder if the professor that asked that particular exam question knew about this bug in Matlab, and deliberately asked the exam question from hell.
Once, there was a legislature that attempted to make pi=3, because it would make life so much simpler.
Fortunately, the search engines appear to have forgotten about USENET. I'm in the same boat, and I used my real name too.
My current strategy is to avoid saying anything on-line that could blow back to me, and I always use a pseudonym. However, with a vast history, I wonder how anonymous I really am.
I've bought a number of CAD workstations. Cost is (almost) no object when a key designer is working full-time on new CAD designs.
Somehow, I suspect the CAD operator would really prefer a really high resolution 19" or 24" touch tablet. Even then, I think someone would have been selling some high-priced devices for this sector if the techology really worked. Personally, I think the Wacom style visual tablets appeal to more to the graphics arts people than the CAD people. I always want the Wacom tablet when I'm drawing free-hand, and never for 3-D CAD models.
Also, I can't imagine manipulating big 3-D CAD designs without a big GPU and a big monitor. Additionally, if the design needs FEA (finite elements analysis), then the surface probably doesn't have enough horsepower and a sufficiently large and high resolution screen.
I think you have nailed one of the two major issues:
a) Reform the system so H1B's are portable between employers, and
b) Keep the high-tech workers in the US.
From an outsider's perspective, one of the real advantages of the US is that people from all over the world will come and work in the US. The same can't be said for China and/or India. The issue with kicking skilled foreign workers out of the US is that they start foreign businesses outside the US to compete against workers in the US. The result is poor growth in the US economy (and the foreign companies get rich.)
It is much better to be a world center for commerce like Silicon Valley, New York, or London, than it is to be in a forgettable high-tech free, manufacturing-free place in the world. I'm from one of those places, and the US has huge advantages over those places. Don't get rid of the elements of the US economy that made the US great.
Roger's has officially rolled over and plays ball with the troll's. They have a system where they will automatically forward a legal letter or something.
I remember in Microwave engineering when the professor got up and explained that we can create phase velocities faster than light. Except, when you actually looked at what was really happening in the system, nothing was actually moving at faster than light. It only appears to move faster than light. Wikipedia mentions this effect with both phase and group velocities.
Reviewing the author's paper, I strongly suspect the author has gotten lost in his own math. It starts with a Newtonian premise, introduces Maxwell's equations in Newtonian form, and then adds relativity. If relativity is involved, Maxwell's equations in derivative form need to be applied from the beginning, otherwise interesting problems occur like omitting the mass change of the electrons.
Whatever is happening in this system, it isn't what the author of the paper describes.
Better question: Wouldn't Microsoft Windows have exactly the same hybernation-resume problem?
The civil engineers do design for resiliency against severe failures and/or attacks. The world trade center was designed to be hit by a B-25 bomber. The terrorists used a 767, and simulations say that the building should have survived. The engineers did not design against a 767 filled with a full fuel load, in the 1960's, when a 767 did not exist yet.
To be fair, the software people in the SCADA software industry have the same safety issues. SCADA systems are designed to fail gracefully in the event of many disruptions. Many of the SCADA software "hacks" are people connecting a "designed to be isolated and secure" network to the internet, against all manufacturers recommendations.
For SCADA, the problems are: ..." line in the software license. Thus, they are absolved of legal liability.
a) Microsoft promised a hardened secure operating system with Windows NT, and this somehow turned into a "needs to be connected to the Internet so the systems stays updated" with Windows XP. Thus, the "designed to be isolated" networks were no longer isolated.
b) Every supplier of the software and hardware involved has a "not to be used in safety-critical, nuclear, or life-support machinery
c) How do you design a software system to resist malicious and/or inadvertent attack? It is actually an unsolved engineering problem. Hit with a big enough plane, the world trade center fell down. Hit with a big enough Tsunami, Fukishima melted down. With sufficient network traffic, I can take out almost any network link to an embedded microcontroller. In engineering, there is always a "big enough fool" with "big enough sledge hammer", to gum up any proposed design.
Everyone is pirating. Today's copyright laws can't be followed, even by people actively trying to follow them. Someone put a nice essay together to detail how incredibly absurd we are right now. If you walk around in public, singing along to your iPod, you are violating copyright. Current copyright law is so nebulous, that average person will violate it somehow, every day. The only good news is that no one cares about most peoples infractions.
The real problem with copyright law, and increasingly all IP law, is that it is impossible to avoid bankrupting lawsuits by following an obvious set of rules. This is evidenced by the fact the biggest copyright lawsuit in Canada was filed against the music labels. The university library copyright collection agency imploded. The copyright collection agencies have lost many lawsuits at the supreme court.
If the music industry can't follow copyright law, why should anyone else?
After trying very hard to like Unity for several versions, I tried Linux Mint. MATE is a pleasure to use. Everything is where I instinctively look to find it.
You can try prying MATE out of my cold dead hands.
Modern supply chain systems make extensive use of EDI and ERP systems. When you are Apple, and you really want to make sure you have sufficient capacity to supply your product, you tool up two suppliers to supply the full volume of your sales. As such, the EDI system says that in 6 months you will ship 32 million units x 2 suppliers = 65 million units.
At the 3 month mark, both suppliers are fully tooled up. As such, you cut the 3 month advance planning order to 16 million units x 2 suppliers = 32 million units. This should be close to actual sales. This is done, because the automated ERP systems will actually build 65 million phones, unless someone tells them to stop.
Crazy numbers like this happen all the time in some industries. 6 month = 2 million units/month. 3 month = 1 million/month. 1 month = 1.5 million/month. 2 week = 0.5 million/week. 1 day = 0.2 million/day. The numbers can be all over the place. Sometimes, the suppliers have no idea how many parts will be shipping the next day.
Mod Parent Up! After reading all the other comments, this is the only one that strikes me as a solution that might work.
To acheive any kind of security with Windows NT 3.5/4.0, you really need to control the physical layer thoroughly. Any device on the network is a potential source for untrusted code. Once you had untrusted code running on the computer, the network was compromised.
With Windows XP and Windows 7, it's pretty much impossible to lock down the computers. The security certifications that Microsoft had for Windows NT 4.0 no longer exist.
The only current desktop operating system technology that is equivalent to the security I was deploying with Windows NT 4.0 is SE Linux.
The crucial detail is whether the physical layer of the network can be trusted. If the physical layer is trusted, then NTLM works fine. Historically, lots of corporate networks controlled every computer on the office network, and air-gapped the internet.
Many modern networks, including wireless networks, have a non-trust worthy physical layer. In this case, only end-to-end encryption protects the network. Yes, the newer versions NTLM protect against the most obvious password scanning attacks. However, with a non-trust worthy physical layer, it is possible to simply scan all the network traffic and get the file contents from the network directly. Also, some (almost all?) ODBC and database servers send passwords in the clear. This makes it straightforward to do simple network traffic analysis attacks, and directly gather valuable information from the company network.
The bottom line is that only protocols like SSH work against a non-trustworthy physical layer.
Encapsulation - the ability to hide functions inside classes is a far bigger feature of C++ than any of the above.
Additionally, C++ has the advantage that you can write one piece of code that can compile either in C++ or in C, which can be a huge advantage when doing communications code with embedded systems.
I think it needs to be remembered that education != success.
Business schools have spent some time on this. The best entrepreneurs are incapable of sitting through business classes. Education rewards good students, not successful people. If the goal of a society is to be highly conformist, then the current education system does well. However, America's competitive edge in the world is based on new non-conforming ideas.
I can't imagine anything less useful for high-performing students than group work in math class. It does nothing more than create a pool of free tutors to help the teacher.
According to communities dominate brands by Tomi Ahohen, the poor N9 and the outdated Symbian are expected to outsell the great savior, the Lumia Windows Phone 8 at Nokia this quarter. Not too shabby.
I would keep the N9 on my resume.
PSTricks is more for diagrams. GnuPlot runs circles around Excel for high-powered graphing. It has lots of neat tricks including advanced graphs with complex error bars, colour coding, shading, etc. I know Excel pretty well, and I don't think it is possible to do a number of the examples at the gnuplot demo page in Excel.
The challenges facing my thesis were more basic. Excel has a few key issues with log graphing and numbers in scientific notation. Excel (and PowerPoint) have issues with Greek numbers. Also, in GnuPlot it is possible to place two graphs on the same page, one above the other, such that the X-Axis line up accurately. With Excel and PowerPoint, the results are "less than professional quality" at best. It's definitely not replicatable if a large volume of graphs is being done.
I also found a bug in Excel where it would render the bar graphs with the texture pattern inside the bar also appearing outside the border line for the bar. That truly sucked.
Another, "Not in my big moment!" bug is that PowerPoint will not consistently render the same fonts in the same presentation if you move between computers and/or PowerPoint versions. It's a really nasty bug, and creeps up in the wierdest places.
The 3 envelopes joke clearly explains what is happening.
More seriously, the easiest person for Whitman to blame this fiasco on, is someone else, ideally from outside HP. Viola - the previous Autonomy CEO ...