Answer (1 of 13): Uranium oxide is slightly soluble in water. So rain falls on the ground, dissolves a minute amount of uranium, runs down rivers carrying the uranium into the sea. There, the sun evaporates water concentrating the uranium. This process has been running for 4 bill … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 6): The answers by Mr. McLellan and Mr. Wilder are certainly factors contributing to the decline of neon. I only want to bring up an additional factor that I’ve observed in my 50 years of experience in the industry. That is; by the 1960’s neon became associated with … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 7): Looking at the satellite image of the wider area, I notice that the entire harbour is empty - there is not one single ship visible, apart from small yachts in the marinas. Now I do not believe that they managed to take that image at a moment when there were no sh … | Continue reading
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Answer (1 of 4): Electric vehicles do not catch fire . It is the battery that explodes or catches fire .In petro driven vehicles too, it is the fuel that catches fire .The only difference is that petrol does not have auto-combustion properties while batteries used , despite many … | Continue reading
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Winston Churchill: “Never let a good crisis go to waste." | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 90): As I hit 40, I also hit a career ceiling. I enjoy what I do and it has gotten me far but no-one really cares about good code as long as it does the job.I cannot grow in my current role unless I take on more leadership; something I am not interested in doing. So … | Continue reading
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1 person wants answers to this question. Be the first to answer. | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 4): They are practically the same problem. Lossless compression is the (hard AI) problem of predicting symbols in arbitrary data sequences, plus the (easy) problem of assigning short codes to likely symbols and longer codes to unlikely symbols. Lossy compression is t … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 1311): I crashed the New York Times once.Seriously.See, I worked for a company that sold cars online, and we had the contract to do that on the New York Times' website, and one day we get a very angry call from them because their website is crashing and they've trace … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 33): People who own their own house get mixed in with billionaire foreign investors, and this skews the debate.A long time ago, on a little isolated island in the middle of the Theoretic Ocean, lived a tribe of peaceful people.They practiced slavery, but of a particu … | Continue reading
Answer: Ivan Sutherland — the inventor-originator of interactive computer graphics — had the idea of a clipping window to see a part of the very large Sketchpad world. This wound up being a program structure roughly like a camera which had an aperture that could be of any size re … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 6): I would direct you to read “When Computing Was Human” by David GrierAfter the Newton’s publication of “Principal Mathamatica”, the computation orbits of comets became possible.The problem is with 6 know planets, this a n-body problem for which no analytical solut … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 19): Best bet is if you have the Encyclopedia Britannica from the mid twentieth century when tech was still analog. As comprehensive as you can get. Also, any basic science and engineering books.However, even with the best books, if humanity got knocked back to the t … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 5): The largest size ever claimed for a snowflake is 15 inches square and 8 inches thick. Reference to the snowflake appeared in a letter published in an 1887 edition of the scientific journal, Nature. The letter quoted from another letter published in the New York W … | Continue reading
Doc Searls's answer: Depends on how you measure fame.Perhaps the best-known call letters are for a station that never existed: WKRP in Cincinnati.The familiar call letters that have been around the longest are those of Pittsburgh’s KDKA.The station that did the most to make count … | Continue reading
Answer: Back then, I was working in Fortran (and Z80, x86, PDP-11 assembler), maybe some C in the late 80s - mostly it was whether you had any background in what would now be called Software Engineering - that is, had you worked in an environment requiring coding to a coding stan … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 7): They sort of did, in the days before PCI. Early on, the PC slot and the PC’s native bus were kind of the same thing. As well, the salient question back at you: connect to what?The Processor Bus EraUntil fairly recently, every processor hooked into the world outsi … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 10): More like a weird coding…habit? I don’t even know how to describe it. It boggles my mind to this day.When I was 18 years old at my first internship I worked with a senior developer on a number of projects. It was a small firm, so we did everything from firmware … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 52): Probably a lot different then what most people would expect. Conventional wisdom conjures up images of two nuclear powers who, after a period of conventional and tactical nuclear warfare, suddenly unleash their strategic arsenals in some firey death spasm at the … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 54): When I was in graduate school, 50 years ago, my textbook declared that the cerebellum is solely a motor control and timing region. [1] That made it an uninteresting brain region for psychologists like me.Everyone knew that the cerebral cortex and hippocampus wer … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 16): To put simply not.In order to understand better, you’ll need to have better prospective of enterprise applications, and their inner essence, and how they work.Before going into additional details let’s consider principles of enterprise applications. I always lik … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 38): Story starts from the fall of berlin wall.James baker( former united states secretary of states) and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a deal before the fall of berlin wall.USA asked soviet to dismantle Germany wall and let the east and west Germany to unite and in retur … | Continue reading
Michael Wolfe's answer: Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I'll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast:The line is about 400 miles long; we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 9): To answer this, I need to attach a diagram here.This is what the US army experienced over the decades. The direction of fire is directly affected by the level of technology their opponents had as well as the terrain they operated in.Most modern tank design center … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 289): Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I'll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast:The line is about 400 miles long; we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be there … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 4): I think I have to answer somewhere between the previous answers.Nuclear binding energy isn’t enough to answer the question. One must also ask about the binding energy of the decay products.Many heavy nuclei undergo alpha decay, as the alpha particle is extremely … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 2): They did not license the technology. Xerox had invested in Apple and owned 20%. As one condition of the investment, Steve Jobs got a tour of Xerox Parc.As another part of the investment, Xerox asked Apple to buy business and liability insurance from Xerox's i … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 15): When we were finishing up the first edition of Introduction to Algorithms, we met with folks from our publisher, MIT Press, to discuss the cover. We had a few themes in mind to consider. One idea was to have a race car, evoking the notion of speed. There was a c … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 9): First, small teams can achieve a lot, but most people are average. Second, almost no startup can reliably get better-than-average people for non-founder positions. Let's say that you have three elite engineers and two business founders, each with 20% of the compa … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 20): Hi, I’m Max Howell, so maybe I shouldn’t answer this.Hi, I’m Max Howell, I’ve spent the last two years not answering this, and many questions like it. Maybe I shouldn’t answer this.So, what's the logic? Clearly I wrote something worthy of Google, right?Well, no … | Continue reading
Answer: A lot.I was the tech lead at Apple for making Mac OS X pass UNIX certification, and it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The Open Group, for use of the UNIX™ trademark in advertising.The lawsuit was filed because the owner of Mac OS X Server kept putti … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 28): Mobile is a future, but so is the cloud, and machine learning, and, and, and, ... There are many technologies in play that are exploding our existing definition of 'a computer'. Mobile already IS the future in that people carry them with them in record numbers … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 7): Ruby-on-Rails with a JavaScript UIThe site linked above is running Ruby-on-Rails hosted on Heroku.And the GUI for the site is built using the Qooxdoo JavaScript framework.But of course, I didn’t write any JavaScript at all. Instead, I used the Opal compiler to co … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 29): There's a huge amount of path dependency in how Windows, OS X and Linux came to exist as they are.In Bill Gates’s initial strategy, devised in the 1970s, Unix was to be the core of the Microsoft platform. Microsoft’s version of Unix, called Xenix, was first rele … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 4): No, RISC-V is 1980s done correctly, 30 years later.It still concentrates on fixing those problems that we had in 1980s (making instruction set that is easy to pipeline with a simple pipeline), but we mostly don’t have anymore, because we have managed to find othe … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 4): The Syrian Civil War. I'm not certain on the exact date but 2013/2014 seems to be a safe estimate, unless the trebuchet or others like it (seen below) is still in use. Syrian rebels used it to lob explosives at the Syrian Army as an improvised mortar. Here's an a … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 3): I would say yes.It is much easier to crank out ten poorly researched generic articles than a thoughtful one. It takes so much more work and time to fact-check misinformation or disprove a lie than it takes to share a link or make something up.Plus, automated tool … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 38): Buckle in.The most sophisticated software in history was written by a team of people whose names we do not know.It’s a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010.Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 439): Boredom is not a natural way to live, or experience life. It’s born because we have become so dependent on the outside world for entertainment. We become passive and expect to be entertained by others. It can be the television, concerts, socializing, etc. There … | Continue reading
Answer: Here is the answer I wrote to What common phrases are derived from obsolete technologies? which explains it. Ann error log is one kind of logfile.A log started life as a lump of wood such as you might throw on a fire. And it still is - sometimes.When sailors wanted to kno … | Continue reading
Winnie Wu's answer: Ok I give in because I got an A2A -- I don't really consider this catastrophic, but it's a funny story and I had people messaging me from all around the company telling me what a great laugh they had encountering this bug (including the team that had to fix it … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 28): I did about 4 years in federal prison in west Virginia at US penitentiary hazleton. I'll tell you what it felt like. 4 years of torture. I was incorrectly classified as a "flight risk" and placed in a high security prison. Mind you my charge was "exceeding a … | Continue reading
Answer (1 of 1726): (Pic courtesy : my gallery)I am a student. I am currently in 11th standard and I am going to tell you my personal experience on how do topper students study. I have completed my 13 years of schooling ( Nursery - X) from an ICSE affiliated school in sambalpur, … | Continue reading