Microsoft owns the desktop, and has tons of money. They didn't ever say, "How do we make the desktop really good? How do we use our massive resources to make our customer's lives better?" That can include serious and radical rethinking---if it makes desktop experience better.
Microsoft had a 'smart phone' -- a real computer on a phone with a reasonably capable OS -- long before Apple and Android. Microsoft did see the future and drove into a ditch.
This Windows Phone OS UI was awful. Terrible, revolting. The UI was really bad---because they tried to do a Windows XP on a tiny thing with a stylus. (I had a treo 700 something which I got for free). There was even a little mini "control panel" and similar confusions. Because at that time the ideology was Windows Uber Alles and serving the Windows empire.
Jobs didn't insist on stuffing MacOS UI on the iPhone, because it wouldn't be GOOD for those uses. Even though it was quite different there were no deep strain of serious complaint about the UI.
So phones and tablets get popular. And Microsoft makes the same mistake AGAIN as with Windows Phone (pre 7) -- stuffing a totally inappropriate interface (and one which isn't even that pleasant) somewhere else. This time, unlike Windows Phone, greatly annoying their enormous number of paying customers.
There are all sorts of ideas about how to make better desktops at a deep level (at least browse academia for 20 years) which are substantially more than another skin.
Back in 1995, Microsoft had the good sense to copy something decent for the Win 95 UI, NeXTSTEP, though of course it was degraded, it was still clear and effective enough. Nobody missed Win 3.1's UI. Desktop customers are not stupid dinosaurs, maybe they actually notice better from worse.
Even today, if they re-implemented NeXTSTEP 1993 for Win 9 desktop, they'd still be ahead. Really.
is that today's 4 cylinder cars have as much useful acceleration and almost as much interior room as the V8 behemoths.
Take a look sometime how small a 4 cyclinder Japanese car from 1975 was. It had 53hp, about 1500 pounds. Today, common 4 cylinder cars are 150-230 hp, 2800 to 3600 pounds.
The point though is true, gasoline at $13 will educate many people about what they really need vs what they said they "needed". Liquid-hydrocarbon based vehicles will be rented like bulldozers are today. When gasoline is $13 for a decade or two there will be charging stations everywhere.
If everybody had electric cars in your area, a roughly equivalent amount of money which they are spending on gasoline will now be revenue to the electric utility. This may be a substantial amount of money and can be used to justify financing for long-lived capital improvements.
The fact that everybody can change to electric cars with only a doubling in power requirements is actually quite encouraging. This would happen over 50 years perhaps. The capital expenditures of transmission won't be twice existing ones in most cases, though of course for generation it might be.
Finally, a good fraction of people filling up their cars with electricity will do so at night when generation and transmission capacity currently has substantial headroom. At present exactly 0% of people fill up their car with petroleum overnight and thus the number of daytime peak-capacity electrical fillups will be less than current daytime fuel fillups.
NASA wisely cancelled the poorly performing Contstellation project and went to the new and lean private industry vendors, Space X and Orbital.
Constellation and the lunar program was expensive funding for deep red-state MSFC and conservative-friendly traditional military-aerospace contractors (Lockheed et al). Space X and Orbital are in California and Virginia, and are much smaller.
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
A very large fraction of total stationary energy consumption is heating, ventilation & cooling. With climate change and increasing wealth in hot countries, this demand will increase more.
They suck. Every reactor (not just a plant!) has to be a reprocessing plant handling hot, intensely radioactive, corrosive liquids. And if they leak into the chamber, well, nobody can go in to clean them for years/decades. Oops. There will be leaks.
I do not trust utilities with this at all, even if they are generally OK for regular fission reactors. In normal operation the fuel is solid and encased in zirconium steel.
I prefer modular smaller reactors made in an assembly line. Smaller is better because the primary major failure point (meltdown from residual heat) is less likely because of the increased surface area to volume ratio with a smaller core. If unpowered air-cooling always results in safe cold shutdown that's good.
"The argument was always that natural gas was less damaging then coal."
In combustion, yes, because gas has more hydrogen to burn than coal.
But in production, even the small % of methane which is inevitably leaked escapes to the atmosphere unburnt where it has a much more potent greenhouse effect (per molecule) than CO2, and could cause substantial climate forcing. Methane though does have a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2.
It's because digital technology is technically superior. Yes, indeed.
With physical LP cutting, if the engineers amped up the dynamic range compression too much to make it all LOUD, then the effective width of the groove would be too high, requiring larger inter-groove spacing, and cutting into the playing time excessively. A 10 minute playtime per side on a LP would be unacceptable to buyers especially if it required two physical discs for one album's worth of music.
On the flip side, a little bit of dynamic range compression is actually pleasing to people as the quietest bits become more listenable (and because of Fletcher-Munson effects, more perceptually correct spectrally), and that was needed on LP because of noise floor issues.
So, it was the LP's technological limitations which resulted in engineering choices which inadvertently improved the typical sound quality.
Classical music producers aren't interested in LOUD, and as a consequence well-engineered and mastered contemporary recordings can have very high sound quality with modern digital.
Why are you sure the problems are "lack of aptitude"? Systemic failures also can result from business units not cooperating sufficiently with IT.
"(Again, on paper, there were no failures for a very long time)"
How about taking the old paper results, and asking some long-timers both in, and out of IT, if they agree or disagree with the characterization on paper, and ask them to explain why.
The quoted article relates the Beal conjecture to 'abc' (which is the deepest and most remarkable of them), which might have been proven by Shin Mochizuki. Nobody really knows yet because he appeared to invent a large new branch of mathematics along the way.
Why is this particularly or uniquely bad vs the lifetime environmental impact of steel and mining of metallurgical and power coal and oil? Are we going to count the much lower amount of engine oil used? How about the pollution from the trucks delivering gasoline? And the refineries? And the tanker ships?
Are we going to count the hills removed in West Virginia?
Mainstream automobile industry is considered a long-term dead-money play.
Tesla stock was very heavily shorted by hedge funds. They are hurting now. And yes they'd say anything, and pay anybody to say anything to keep their money from going down the drain.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology. They thought that Tesla was a short-term dead-money play.
Remember the mostly slanted NYT article? Why, when everything else has been very positive? Because NYC's the financial capital. Who might be susceptible to pressure or lucre? People in the financial industry or in New York close to the financial industry.
"You can still inherit from there classes, but you'll have to copy all the objects to new objects of your subclasses to be able to use them, doubling the memory required. "
You might try a shared_ptr instead so you may have less need to copy the objects instead of a pointer to them.
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I think they used their own money and share it.
Microsoft owns the desktop, and has tons of money. They didn't ever say, "How do we make the desktop really good? How do we use our massive resources to make our customer's lives better?" That can include serious and radical rethinking---if it makes desktop experience better.
Microsoft had a 'smart phone' -- a real computer on a phone with a reasonably capable OS -- long before Apple and Android. Microsoft did see the future and drove into a ditch.
This Windows Phone OS UI was awful. Terrible, revolting. The UI was really bad---because they tried to do a Windows XP on a tiny thing with a stylus. (I had a treo 700 something which I got for free). There was even a little mini "control panel" and similar confusions. Because at that time the ideology was Windows Uber Alles and serving the Windows empire.
Jobs didn't insist on stuffing MacOS UI on the iPhone, because it wouldn't be GOOD for those uses. Even though it was quite different there were no deep strain of serious complaint about the UI.
So phones and tablets get popular. And Microsoft makes the same mistake AGAIN as with Windows Phone (pre 7) -- stuffing a totally inappropriate interface (and one which isn't even that pleasant) somewhere else. This time, unlike Windows Phone, greatly annoying their enormous number of paying customers.
There are all sorts of ideas about how to make better desktops at a deep level (at least browse academia for 20 years) which are substantially more than another skin.
Back in 1995, Microsoft had the good sense to copy something decent for the Win 95 UI, NeXTSTEP, though of course it was degraded, it was still clear and effective enough. Nobody missed Win 3.1's UI. Desktop customers are not stupid dinosaurs, maybe they actually notice better from worse.
Even today, if they re-implemented NeXTSTEP 1993 for Win 9 desktop, they'd still be ahead. Really.
is that today's 4 cylinder cars have as much useful acceleration and almost as much interior room as the V8 behemoths.
Take a look sometime how small a 4 cyclinder Japanese car from 1975 was. It had 53hp, about 1500 pounds. Today, common 4 cylinder cars are 150-230 hp, 2800 to 3600 pounds.
The point though is true, gasoline at $13 will educate many people about what they really need vs what they said they "needed". Liquid-hydrocarbon based vehicles will be rented like bulldozers are today. When gasoline is $13 for a decade or two there will be charging stations everywhere.
If everybody had electric cars in your area, a roughly equivalent amount of money which they are spending on gasoline will now be revenue to the electric utility. This may be a substantial amount of money and can be used to justify financing for long-lived capital improvements.
The fact that everybody can change to electric cars with only a doubling in power requirements is actually quite encouraging. This would happen over 50 years perhaps. The capital expenditures of transmission won't be twice existing ones in most cases, though of course for generation it might be.
Finally, a good fraction of people filling up their cars with electricity will do so at night when generation and transmission capacity currently has substantial headroom. At present exactly 0% of people fill up their car with petroleum overnight and thus the number of daytime peak-capacity electrical fillups will be less than current daytime fuel fillups.
Go ahead and emphasize, and while you're at it, explain the strategic importance of the Moon.
NASA wisely cancelled the poorly performing Contstellation project and went to the new and lean private industry vendors, Space X and Orbital.
Constellation and the lunar program was expensive funding for deep red-state MSFC and conservative-friendly traditional military-aerospace contractors (Lockheed et al). Space X and Orbital are in California and Virginia, and are much smaller.
Consequently House Republicans hate the change.
Doing exactly the same thing again does not get +5 more.
| Nothing wrong with LFTRs either,
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
A very large fraction of total stationary energy consumption is heating, ventilation & cooling. With climate change and increasing wealth in hot countries, this demand will increase more.
no Moore's law for HVAC.
It works with aircraft. Commercial aircraft and associated operational procedures are much safer than 40 years ago.
They suck. Every reactor (not just a plant!) has to be a reprocessing plant handling hot, intensely radioactive, corrosive liquids. And if they leak into the chamber, well, nobody can go in to clean them for years/decades. Oops. There will be leaks.
I do not trust utilities with this at all, even if they are generally OK for regular fission reactors. In normal operation the fuel is solid and encased in zirconium steel.
I prefer modular smaller reactors made in an assembly line. Smaller is better because the primary major failure point (meltdown from residual heat) is less likely because of the increased surface area to volume ratio with a smaller core. If unpowered air-cooling always results in safe cold shutdown that's good.
"The argument was always that natural gas was less damaging then coal."
In combustion, yes, because gas has more hydrogen to burn than coal.
But in production, even the small % of methane which is inevitably leaked escapes to the atmosphere unburnt where it has a much more potent greenhouse effect (per molecule) than CO2, and could cause substantial climate forcing. Methane though does have a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2.
Lower Manhattan will have enough money to protect it behind large floodwalls.
Staten Island and everybody poorer than Staten Island, like say Florida and Bangladesh, are hosed.
Sandstorms + windstorms are pretty bad for wind generation because they destroy your expensive capital.
Gobi desert is in the middle of nowhere and the populated areas somewhat close by (India/Pakistan) are separated by the Himalaya mountains.
And besides, "solutionism" is a whole lot better than "nihilism" or "nimbyism".
It's because digital technology is technically superior. Yes, indeed.
With physical LP cutting, if the engineers amped up the dynamic range compression too much to make it all LOUD, then the effective width of the groove would be too high, requiring larger inter-groove spacing, and cutting into the playing time excessively. A 10 minute playtime per side on a LP would be unacceptable to buyers especially if it required two physical discs for one album's worth of music.
On the flip side, a little bit of dynamic range compression is actually pleasing to people as the quietest bits become more listenable (and because of Fletcher-Munson effects, more perceptually correct spectrally), and that was needed on LP because of noise floor issues.
So, it was the LP's technological limitations which resulted in engineering choices which inadvertently improved the typical sound quality.
Classical music producers aren't interested in LOUD, and as a consequence well-engineered and mastered contemporary recordings can have very high sound quality with modern digital.
Why are you sure the problems are "lack of aptitude"? Systemic failures also can result from business units not cooperating sufficiently with IT.
"(Again, on paper, there were no failures for a very long time)"
How about taking the old paper results, and asking some long-timers both in, and out of IT, if they agree or disagree with the characterization on paper, and ask them to explain why.
The quoted article relates the Beal conjecture to 'abc' (which is the deepest and most remarkable of them), which might have been proven by Shin Mochizuki. Nobody really knows yet because he appeared to invent a large new branch of mathematics along the way.
This could be a way to pay Shin bunch of money.
"Same goes for electric cars. Always the promise, always the hype, never the delivery. Maybe it'll be different this time. But I wouldn't bet on it."
Pretty much everybody who has driven one says that this time the Model S is different.
There are power plants with almost no atmospheric emissions.
Going after money no matter what does tend to lead to and be compatible with certain ideologies more than others.
Why is this particularly or uniquely bad vs the lifetime environmental impact of steel and mining of metallurgical and power coal and oil? Are we going to count the much lower amount of engine oil used? How about the pollution from the trucks delivering gasoline? And the refineries? And the tanker ships?
Are we going to count the hills removed in West Virginia?
Mainstream automobile industry is considered a long-term dead-money play.
Tesla stock was very heavily shorted by hedge funds. They are hurting now. And yes they'd say anything, and pay anybody to say anything to keep their money from going down the drain.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology. They thought that Tesla was a short-term dead-money play.
Remember the mostly slanted NYT article? Why, when everything else has been very positive? Because NYC's the financial capital. Who might be susceptible to pressure or lucre? People in the financial industry or in New York close to the financial industry.
"You can still inherit from there classes, but you'll have to copy all the objects to new objects of your subclasses to be able to use them, doubling the memory required. "
You might try a shared_ptr instead so you may have less need to copy the objects instead of a pointer to them.
Or Lisp.
>US and friends won't be able to "bring democracy" to Iran as they brought it to Iraq or Libya.
Note, the US and friends did, in fact, end tyranny which was precluding democracy in Iraq and Libya. And so far, no oil stolen.
A technical treaty violation is imposing excess tariffs on the the wrong kind of shoes.