qwerta

> Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop

There would still be plenty of food to go around. Problem was that British did not allowed people to eat corn.

Perhaps good idea for startup, medical turism..

It is sort of selection bias. Large buildings (and boats) are more effective, so it makes sense to build them if you have enough money.

And comparing gas rig platform with 'fancy' luxurious boat just does not make sense.

Nice. Perhaps have a look at uclibc and busybox... :-)

We were investigating CPUs for embedded use. I am not sure right now if it was RISC or MIPS. The performance was fraction of ARM or x86. But the consulting company would build SOC exactly to our spec. There were zero licensing fees.

So for embedded use if performance is not important, I would seriously consider it.

I make 'parallel' stuff for living and I sort of agree. Often optimizing your code is better choice than going parallel. Compact code can fit into single CPU cache which brings huge performance boost.

On other side parallel programming does not have to be hard. Fork-Join framework in Java and parallel collections in Java 8, are trivial to use and scale vertically pretty well.

And finally I think there is not actual demand for parallel programming. 99% computers have 4 cpus or less. GPUs are useless for most tasks. I have prototype of my program which scaled well to 20 cores, but nobody is interested.

I dont want to brag. But there is also DBM inspired Java port. And in-memory mode outperforms java heap collections such as j.u.HashMap.

There is simple way to speed this up. All Google Search links point to redirection service: www.google.gr/url?example.com. It is trivial to write script which makes those links direct.

> knockoff smartphone available online through various Internet retailers including Amazon.com

Does not mention where phone comes from, how many phones they tested, there is no independent confirmation...

Anyway my Lenovo comes with application firewall. We are yet to see something like that from other makers :-)

Source?

Yet another reason to buy phone directly from china. No operator locks, no region locks, no crapware, no boot-loader locks, no root locks....

Turn it into app which would update wifi passwords as well.

Or someone already did that :-) http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/global-wifi-hotspot-...

Apples,oranges and orangutans.

Doing transactions and data format evolution in REST is hard, in SOAP it is simple.

Perhaps there is marked for more distributed approach.

From documentation that library called 'emoji' is limited by some underlying library is not clear. This guy asked to update readme with that. And I really do not feel entitlement or rude tone from there. Perhaps I have different sensitivity level.

Anyway some people spend years working for free, receive death threads, are harassed by governments, have to move to different continent.... All because working on OS. And this is suppose to be THE reason why people burn out?

I really dont understand what is wrong with this issue. Poster did his homework: he found problem, debugged script, listed missing characters so its easy to test and pointed reason why. I would love to have such reports all the time.

As maintainer of OS project I find this issue justified and constructive. It points to usability problem and how to fix it (documentation). And poster did his homework by debugging script first. He enumerates missing chars (easy to unit tests!) and clearly spells reason (underlying library).

I would love to have such reports all the time!!!

> Note – Before we get started, I need to be clear that the example we’re building only works in Firefox.

No, you are not. But it boils down to what you advertise.

Perhaps declare in readme that project is unmantained and disable Issues on such project (no emails). Also declare how much hours/month you are willing to put into maintenance. And finally use separate email for OS activity, public email generates a lot of spam (viagra etc)

I actually build my living around one such abandoned project. Original idea was great, but it needed some TLC to make it usable.

You can, but you most likely get some modular drone...

I am sorry but Javascript is not much better than XSLT. Horrible legacy technology full of bugs nobody was bothered to fix.

How about making comparative test where one subject has suboptimal conditions?

- no objective given, or change objective in middle of test

- no IDE allowed, only notepad and outdated compiler

- place next to garbage bin or turbofan engine

- randomly generate some 'legacy code'. Result must contain 90% of this code...

- no internet connectivity allowed

- no external libraries allowed...

- code must be deployed within 1 week, it must past code-review before deployment, reviewer is on holiday....

- ask subject some trivial question every 10 minutes. Or thrown in 5 hours meetings randomly.

I am sure the productivity will vary... :-)

I would be more worried about insurance companies. They will get way more data and ways to sneak out of paying damages.

In my experience talented people have many options and US is not the best choice.

> 2x4 foot size is about $300

2 micron thick coating probably costs $0.1 for the same size.

Solar panels are very expensive and can not be used on windows.

There was scifi novel describing something like that in 70ties.

Anyway, I seriously doubt this is possible. Escape velocity from center of star is tiny fraction of speed of light. We might have better luck with neutron start or black hole going at near speed of light.

My Lenovo phone comes with integrated firewall out of factory... Just saying.

I think they have contract obligation to take some energy, so they just resell it.

Anyway the biggest problem of German grid are not really peak hours, but transporting energy from north where turbines are to industrial south.

Article is bit misleading. They do not 'store' energy in the same way as battery, they never pump electricity back to grid. They just adjust their consumption to use cheap energy.

> By varying the rate at which the metal is produced, the plant will be able to adjust the power consumption of the 290-megawatt smelter up and down by about 25 percent. Trimet can soak power from the grid when energy is cheap. It can then resell the power when demand is at its peak. The company can temporarily reduce its power consumption by slowing the electrolysis, cutting the energy drain.