This talk by Dr Sadoway is pretty amazing regarding his team's design for utility-scale liquid metal batteries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiRrvxjrJ1U
It's an hour long, but it's well worth the time investment.
This is not merely a theoretical technology. A company has been created around this technology: http://www.ambri.com
(I am not connected to any of this, but I am quite excited by it.)
I was born and raised in the midwest part of the U.S. and I've been using "flabbergasted" for all my adult life (20+ years). Of course, I've always had a propensity for peculiar or anachronous verbiage.
I've lived in Kansas City for years. The Steamboat Arabia museum is a great experience. In the early days, one of the original guys would often be there and tell the whole story to groups.
Interestingly, they had a lot to learn about saving the artifacts. Since everything was submerged for so long in fresh water mud the wood artifacts would shrivel up when they dried up. For many months, they stored all the wood artifacts in one of the guy's backyard pool until they could learn how to properly transition the wood artifacts to a restored state.
My understanding is that the team at Mojang is seriously committed to their new mod-based vision; but that there are many technical hurdles they must overcome to achieve their goals.
Just looking at the patch notes for the 1.7, 1.7.1, and 1.7.2, it looks to me that they did some significant code refactoring and expanded the capabilities of the core systems.
Additionally, they seem to have added new features to really enhance the multiplayer experience.
Among the changes I see as significant (either from improving the social experience, or from technical difficulty) are:
+ Achievements are now world specific
+ Gaining achievements now announced to other players
+ Servers can now have a “server-icon.png” that is displayed in the multiplayer list
+ You can see who’s online before joining, just hover the player count number in the server list
+ Links in chat are now clickable
+ Click on somebody’s name to send a private message
+ Added Stained Glass
+ Added a bunch of new graphics options
+ Added some shader tests (click on the “Super Secret Settings” a couple of times…)
* You can now have multiple resource packs loaded at the same time
* Resource packs can now hold sound effects
* Servers can recommend resource packs
* Network code has been rewritten
* Sound manager has been rewritten
There may be interesting organizational hurdles, as subjectively the community, or at least the mod community, or the users of the most popular mods, appear to implement changes showing they believe the best way to enhance the multiplayer experience is new sets of blocks doing cool new things with new varieties of technology, whereas most of the listed "upgrades" boil down to making a nice chat system. Make the game more fun with more toys, vs lets make an app to socialize oh and there's also a game attached or something.
I think this frictional point is where most of the interesting action will happen in the near term evolution of MC and Mojang.
Actually, most of the changes revolve around "let's make it easier for modders to make mods" and "let's work on areas that we neglected". Private messaging systems are used a LOT on servers.
Well, if people don't actively use the Apple products they've bought then by definition they won't be having a good experience with them. If they're not having a good experience with Apple products then not only have the engineers and designers at Apple failed, but there will be no excitement or "buzz" that will inspire the owners of Apple products to buy new Apple products (for themselves or others) or recommend existing Apple products to others.
So, I don't think that the talking point is "bull". I think it was a grossly oversimplification of their business/design strategy.
It is "bull". The tablets are being bought and used mostly outside the US, primarily in Asia. If you compare global sales with US web usage you've got a mystery to explain because the figures don't match, which leads to theories like all Android tablets get bought and put in drawers.
If you look at web usage segmented by region it's clear that they're getting used roughly in line with installed base, which is higher for iOS tablets in the US than elsewhere:
That's a good question. I'll take a stab at answering it.
(This is supposition on my part, it is not backed by links to wikipedia or anything.)
I believe the word "arbitrary" applies because Magnetic North pulls a compass needle in a specific way, but that technically, the needle points both north and south.
It is merely due to convention that we navigate by first finding magnetic north. It would be just as easy to navigate by finding magnetic south...mathematically speaking.
Navigators had stellar nav a long time before compasses.
If you live in the N hemisphere theres a really convenient star nearly perfectly (by olden standards) north. Polaris.
If you live in the N hemisphere you could never see a "south star" if one existed, which it doesn't (although there are some close ones).
If you live on a rotating planet, there's no such thing as a permanently "East" star or permanently "West" star.
So you inherently end up navigating off the north star. And in another post I tried to explain there's some built in human-user-interface issues that you tend to hold the map upward pointing to the one feature you're sure of, and with ancient-style celestial nav thats always going to be north because of the north star aka Polaris... so once you have literate map users, map makers are inevitably going to write place names right side up with top pointing to Polaris aka the north star aka "North"
Though I've never worked for the large local telecom here in town I've had many friends and coworkers who have. I wish I had a dime for every time I've heard a story just like this (though smaller in scope). People have set up file sharing servers, game servers, whole warez team back ends...the works on hardware that was purchased & set up but never used. This is one of the primary reasons I've never wanted to work for Big Local Telco...
I worked with someone who got fired for hosting MP3s on a surplus corporate machine.
At least, that was the excuse they used when they fired him. I think the actual reason was that he was hard to get along with. However, it's difficult to fire him for that reason. Much easier to fire him over misuse of corporate equipment.
The guy told everyone about his MP3 server. Including summer interns.
Are you able to elaborate on this? I've always wondered how the warez scene functioned; residential Internet connections are obviously insufficient, hacked resources too risky, and warez groups turn their nose up at any form of legitimate resources (e.g. dedi/colo hosting)
This leaves corporate infrastructure. All it takes is a small IT team with a big budget, lots of hardware and network resources, and management who neither know nor care how their resources are being utilized.
I know that my past employers networks have been abused for long periods for game servers and MP3 hosting. Y2K period in particular resulted in lots of insane investments in IT, with very lax management in most places. Nowadays, tools and copyright take downs make it difficult to be completely inept.
Hacked resources are used as well. I worked at a place that used an old SGI Indy as a mail relay. It wasn't really managed, and somebody rooted it to use as a distribution server for warez and porn. I suspect the admins kept it running as a source for their own warez and porn needs.
I got involved when a spammer got in and sent millions of emails, flooding our puny T1 with bounces.
Has anyone worked anywhere that didn't have a bit of a server that was dedicated to piracy? I haven't. Even working for a large public healthcare provider. Slightly worse, there was even a torrent client using their fibre. The trick was to find an IT illiterate colleague or one who was leaving it best of all, both these things in one person. Their logins wouldn't e revoked for months or years.
Use their login to set up torrent clients. If you called IT support and just played dumb you always found someone who would let you install stuff (I need this program for my section on ankle casting). Keep calling back until they answer.
Once a torrent was running, stay well away from the computer until no one else is around as grumpy IT guys would hang round to try and catch you. This was long ago now, I pay for my media now, with the exception of a few shows from the UK which I can't pay for.
