Go Language

Go is the worst name for a programming language.

Try googling "Go".

Try googling "Go Language".

Also, while I do agree that a garbage collecting language is a great idea. Even if you dedicate an entire processor to nothing but garbage collection it can still be overwhelmed. By doing thousands of concurrent go routines all allocating 1 byte in a loop and then discarding over and over again breaks that idea. One processor cannot keep up with that. You would need roughly an equivalent number of processors doing garbage collection as you do doing processing. That is also assuming a perfectly efficient garbage collector.

They would probably say to this "don't do that" and sure its a worst case scenario, however it shows that you can be sacrificing lots of performance to these garbage collecting processors. Thats possibly 50% or more regardless of the total number of processors in the system.

Ok, so all gripes aside... I think its pretty nice and I'm glad somebody is continuing research into new languages to solve parallelism problems. I installed it and currently am playing with it a bit, I'll know more soon.

When will we run out of energy?

Why worry about energy consumption?

Humans currently (2010) consume about 510,000,000,000,000,000 BTU per year.

Earth receives 3,649,800,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs per year from the sun.

World-wide energy consumption doubles every 35 years. At this rate, it will take a little less than 490 years in order to exceed our external energy input.

Ok, thats great, but what about things that aren't computers which require some sun too. Sunlight is vital for humans to produce vitamin D. Its also vital for growing the things we eat. If we eat up too much sunlight for computers, we will certainly die.

Majority of the world is ocean, and majority of the ocean doesn't have very much life. This is because life springs up and eats up all available resources, then dies, floats to the bottom of the sea floor and stays there as there is little to swish it around the nutrients to be eaten by other organisms. As such, most of the life exists around the coasts and up-swells in the ocean currents bringing the nutrition from the sea floor to the surface where phytoplankton can thrive and the pyramid of life grows from that. So I think its reasonable to say we can capture a decent percentage of the suns rays and convert that into energy without hurting things too much. Lets say 10% at best although the more realistic number may be much higher. At about 10%, we will exceed this energy source in about 310 to 350 years.

In other words, we won't run out of energy for a loooong time. I read lots of periodicals which say "were increasing our energy consumption and we should be concerned, blah blah blah". Sure, thats all true if solar energy won't get drastically more efficient with more research and time, which is ridiculous. So give me a personal holo-deck please, and damn the energy costs.

References:

http://timeforchange.org/prediction-of-energy-consumption

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy

Wikipedia Company Idea

Make a company which connects companies and individuals with other individuals or companies who will write wikipedia articles for cash.

This sounds bad, but isn't too different from what happens now. If a company wants something changed they have to convince other (hopefully unassociated) people to write about the thing or change the thing they want changed. This happens all the time. I've seen it personally at some companies that I've worked at. The difference is that this company would formalize the transfer for a modest intermediary fee.

I'm not sure if this idea is morally correct or even would follow Wikipedia's COI rules, however it would probably make a lot of cash. The company itself would be morally in the grey area in my opinion as it simply connects unscrupulous people with other unscrupulous people. It doesn't inherently do anything bad, but it does allow bad things. Like how Napster can be used for good purposes, but everybody pretty much just stole music.

Google Wave

looks like it is a chat room with threads. Currently not many people to thread chat with. I'm looking forward to really giving it a try when there are more people who have it. I think the biggest problem with google-wave is that its not open source. There would be much wider adoption if it wasn't centralized and google controlled. IE, more like e-mail.