How is this different from/better than Stack Exchange's blackbox[0] which doesn't require a third-party service (just plain-ole gpg) and is written in bash?
P.S.: I think the image looks aesthetically pleasing, but why is it there? It's a scaled-down 1,600x680px image that costs me 140KB and doesn't add anything to the article; what's worse is that it's not even a nice banner image, it's just smack dab in the middle of the article.
It has been technically feasible to get humans to Mars for decades already. It has only recently become economically feasible. And we likely have a few more years to go before it becomes politically feasible.
The sticking point has never been the tech. It has always been the people. And in my opinion, Mars One does not have the right people to produce a successful mission.
Not quite that cheap, but I found land at $89/acre in west Texas in about 2 minutes of searching. The price likely drops rapidly if you want 1,000 acres or more.
> Medium is swimming in crap. Like reprints or links to other pages. Why? That’s for social media. Don’t repost things. Where’s the originality in that.
Reposting (or the principle behind sharing someone else's work you find interesting) is something that's been around since the web's inception, and is actually a great thing: Hacker News itself is a link aggregator which is essentially a centralized reposting system, ordered by interest (up/downvotes). Hyperlinking is all about sharing awesome content, and there are thousands of things I never would have known about if somebody didn't reblog it, retweet it, share it on fb, or crosspost it from a different subreddit.
Originality is cool, but I'll never know about your original work if a friend of a friend of a friend didn't share it all the way down that chain until it got to me.
I know Vuka (the article's author) in real life. I'll send him a FB message and see if he would be willing to answer some of the burning questions asked here.
> A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls.
(EDIT: To nitpick, I think the MS POSIX subsystem actually implemented the POSIXy standards as native code, as opposed to the translation layer that's mentioned here).
> Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years ... [and] will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point another technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already "maxed out" Moore's Law? Aren't hardware manufactures already running into problems at the quantum level because of how small and packed transistors are already? That would be why we've "maxed" CPU speed at around ~3-4GHz.
The confusion here is that people refer to several distinct exponential growths as Moore's Law, and some of them have already faltered.
The CPU frequency growth has halted primarily due to the fact that going any higher means we can no longer cool the chips. Power usage (and, consequently, the heat you need to dispose of) is proportional to the square of the frequency (higher-frequency gates also usually require higher voltage to get the switching times down, which means it's really the cube).
Another aspect is the size of the transistor. Some features are already getting down to the point where it's more useful to talk about them in terms of monolayers--i.e., the exact number of atoms. Some elements of a 14nm transistor are already two or three monolayers in size, and the distance between two transistors is already about 100 monolayers, which puts a hard cap on the maximum possible minimization, since you can't make transistors smaller than a single atom. In terms of the smallest transistors that can be feasibly made, the general consensus is that there is at most around 3 shrinks remaining.
There's another dimension, too: whether or not it's cost-effective to keep doing these shrinks. The 14nm node itself has given Intel lots of trouble, and the 10nm node doesn't look like it's much better. Intel has already been forced to give up its Tick-Tock cycle, and the semiconductor industry as a whole may explicitly give up maintaining Moore's Law as a collective research goal shortly.
In short, then, Moore's Law either ended a decade ago, is just now ending, or will end in a decade, depending on what you want it to mean.
No. That's not quite true. Yes we are very close to maxing out Moore's Law but so far we've still kept up. If I remember correctly there's a completely different reason for CPU speed not being higher than that (maybe the physical limit to transistors themselves?). We are still increasing the number of transistors per chip and not exactly scaling horizontally - after all we are fitting 4 CPU cores onto a chip that previously only fit a single one.
