MY understanding (at least in the UK) was that hospitals and universities also do a lot of research (often cutting-edge), and are often the source of innovation. These entities are largely publicly funded.
Most drugs appear first in publicly-funded research, but so does every other compound that can get past a p value of 0.05.
The main value proposition of big pharma is that they take those results, find the ones that actually work (very few of them do), study them for side effects, and characterize them. There is a LOT of work between the published research and an actual drug (there is actually significantly more risk and cost to go from a paper to a drug than to write the initial paper).
"Tests on an MIT building rooftop showed that a simple proof-of-concept desalination device could produce..."
So doesn't look like they've even hooked it up to the sea yet, so still a bit to go for a real implementation, but still sounds interesting.
I harbour a small dream that I could buy some seaside land someday on a Greek island and hook one of these desalination devices up to the sea and build myself a small oasis.
The device itself would not be "on" the sea, it would just get water from it with a pipe/pump. I don't really see any reason it wouldn't work the same way by the sea: the main problem seems to be how to remove the salt, efficiently, not how to get water into the device, which is easier. Getting enough sun might even be harder than getting sea water.
Yep, and that's what I basically meant by 'hooking it up'.
I guess you would need a pump to bring the seawater to the device, something to pump it elsewhere (for storage, or irrigation), and also some mechanism to dump the brine back in the sea when you're no longer desalinating.
And for maximum ecological efficiency that could be powered by solar panels.
I wonder how maintenance free you could build such a device, and just leave it to work away by itself for months on end.
I also remember wiggling the mouse to get installation programs to progress.
Sometimes it would be stuck at 100% for ages, as usually you're not interacting with the machine during an install, and then somebody would wiggle the mouse and suddenly 'Installation complete'
For a technology that occupies such a big presence in people's minds, and has billions of peoples' money invested in, and hundreds of companies chasing their tails trying to find practical uses for it - it's a really short list.
I don't think it does occupy a big presence in most people's minds.
For the relatively small group that are either (a) happy to be the 'early' guy in an obvious ponzi/pyramid scheme or (b) convinced that despite all the evidence, it isn't in fact a scam, I'm sure it does occupy a big presence in their minds.
For cleaning windows you can also employ a Robot to do the job. Though i think a safety cable is a really good idea, not sure how that is done for a Robot working on the ceiling.
Would have to agree, common data structures like linked lists and maps can't really be easily composed into this sort of sequential layout as required, and the main advantages only come about when you're searching through the data for something.
The other data we process a lot of is strings which are commonly variable in length and scattered around in separate mem allocations.
Still, the performance difference between the 2 examples was eye-opening so I'll definitely spend a bit of time looking at Data-Oriented Design book for some ideas.
