A moderator should not care about the karma of the author. If a post is funny, mod it funny. That's what it is. And whether the poster gets karma or not that's not up to the moderator to decide.
The West is sucked in into the was which cannot be won. As result the West is approaching to the economical crisis and social unrest of an unprecedented magnitude. As a European I am SO happy that "the West" is more than the US of A... the EU countries are not or barely involved in war. And it's primarily the USA that is in deep, deep economical trouble.
The main innovation here is the touch pad itself: allowing the tracking of two (or more) positions at the same time. Most touch pads can't do that. Using two mice at the same time of course doesn't have that issue, then it's only the software that's left to worry about.
But, as usual with Microsoft, the really cool functions and innovations continue to be postponed to "the next release".
It is quite sad that a cool and very useful feature demonstrated years ago by the leading software maker (by revenue) in the world, has to be made popular by implementation in a mobile phone by a total newcomer in that market (Apple with the iPhone), followed by implementation by a hardware maker on a low-end, low-cost laptop (the EEE). And it is not that this leading software maker can not get hardware makers to change the hardware standards, thinking of the Windows key that is present on virtually any keyboard now on the market.
Euhm, you are almost totally wrong. Sorry to say it so, but it's the case.
Nuclear is great indeed for a base load: but that's it, base load. It can not easily be switched on or off like a coal or gas fired plant, which can change load in a matter of minutes.
Your idea of using some power dump is nice, but electrical vehicles are not the place. How are you ever going to switch on and off their charging for a start? When the wind falls, these chargers should be switched off. That requires some sophisticated communications, and is quite error prone. And how are you going to get to work after a windless night, or a gusty night where your charger is switched on and off but mostly off?
Power dumps could be cold storage warehouses, as discussed on Slashdot a few years ago (sorry, no link). Other power dumps, used already in e.g. France which is over-reliant on nuclear, could be pumping up water to the top of a hill during the night, and let it run down during the day when necessary.
Wind power is unstable, and we have to live with that. As nuclear is only a base load, wind may be used during the night to power the cold storage warehouses, which don't mind having no power for an hour or so. But during the day you will need back-up from conventional sources, just to maintain reliability. So far we haven't found a sufficiently reliable renewable energy source do do it otherwise.
On top of that power dumps are nice but also have limited capacity, both in absorption and release of energy on demand. They can cover fluctuations measured in time spans of minutes to hours maybe - not the longer term fluctuations such as a windless week.
In The Netherlands your electricity meter will simply run backwards at the moment you start feeding electricity to the network. It is not likely that you will actually produce more than you use yourself in the long run so you just save the cost of the electricity you produce.
Could the grid handle everyone pumping electricity back into the grid, especially with such a technology as wind, where the amount of power generated tends to be "bursty". Could this backfire a large percentage (> 25%) of homes started doing this? It already gives problems in areas like northern Germany and Denmark, where large quantities of wind power are installed. Wind force can drop from 4-6 bft (giving basically maximum output) to zero in a matter of minutes - that is barely enough time for conventional power production to step in, and may result in brown-outs or even black-outs. So yes we are talking about a serious issue here.
Solar has this issue as well, but bar a total solar eclipse even when clouds come, it will take quite a while for a spread-out set of solar cells to all become darkened, and even under clouds they produce quite some electricity.
Plus you get free poultry delivered to your backyard. And that is not true. I recall a research being done by green groups in The Netherlands, where we have large wind parks in the northern part, mostly on the seashore of course. The idea was that those huge fast moving blades must be killing scores of birds.
They found that is not the case. Birds hardly get killed by turbines - accidents happen of course, but are rare.
The researchers thought that this is because of the noise those turbines make, even upwind this is audible to the birds at sufficient distance. So they just fly around them. The mortality was as low or lower than around power lines: those also kill birds that happen to fly into them.
This result actually surprised the researchers, in a happy way of course. And the research being done by a.o. animal protection groups gives it quite some credit to me.
With all of the web 2.0 apps and things like terminal services, the laptop becomes a powerful dumb terminal. If that is really the case, who cares anymore which O/S we use? They may care about the browser, as in such a situation the web browser IS what people deal with, exclusively.
As an owner of an EEE PC, that is exactly my main problem with it. For example the Preferences dialogue of Firefox and Thunderbird does not fit: you have to do crazy things like moving the window up so it falls of the screen, then resizing it, just to see the rest of the options. Instead of having a scroll-bar inside the window for that...
Indeed many applications are designed for bigger screens, AND miss fall-back options.
I love my EEE, but it has many rough edges beyond the very nice tabbed desktop that makes it feel very much like a first-version product. That, and the quite limited battery life. 2 1/2 hours is not enough.
Well, now that the laws are in place requiring the emission control systems to be included, it's always harder to undo a law, It may be hard to undo a law, it is much easier to redo it, and redo it correctly.
Instead of requiring "this and that pollution control measures", the law should write "the maximum pollution level in the exhaust is this and that".
Now it becomes up to the automotive industry HOW to reach this. Either using catalytic converters, filters, etc, or improving the engine itself, or both of course. If they manage to invent an engine that burns its fuel so clean you don't need these filters: great, now we have a very efficient and presumably cheap solution, as it doesn't need the extra equipment to meet the law.
Now I don't know the exact laws, but I have never heard in Europe about specific equipment requirements, only about specific emission levels. Which is how it should be.
And, then the right for your employees to check up on YOU goes into effect as well. No. It's my business, so it's my responsibility. When I'm doing something wrong, it's my responsibility. When my employee is doing something wrong, it's STILL my responsibility. You sound like a disgruntled employee who thinks he doesn't get enough money for his work; maybe you should try to run your own business for a start.
An employee has a right of a certain privacy, but as employee you should also know that when the boss has a good reason, that privacy can and will be take away. It should not be done secretly either. Oh and to answer another poster: I don't care what an employee is doing on the toilet. But if they're going there every half hour or sitting there for twenty minutes at a time, I will be asking questions. Because that is not normal use of such a facility.
One can always here half of the conversation.
Then there is still the practical problem that my staff is usually talking in Chinese... I can understand it only partly (enough to figure out what it's about) but when using Mandarin I'm lost:)
But still I get a monthly overview of phone numbers dialed (those out of Hong Kong) in the phone bills.
As an employer actually I consider it a right to know what my employees are doing. When using company resources (telephone, e-mail, Internet, whatever) then of course an employee has a right to use it for personal matters, but that should be limited to the necessary.
For example, if they have to call their bank, then it always always must be done during office hours. But calling their lover that can be done after office hours.
For e-mail: most people these days have an e-mail address already. Personal things they should send using that e-mail address. Work things are for the company provided address.
It would be scary for me to not be allowed to check on my employees, to see that they are doing what they are paid for. Scary to be never allowed to read their e-mails, when I deem necessary (hasn't happened yet but it's possible) - the most likely situation for me would occur when a customer says "I sent that to this employee", who happens to be on vacation then, upon which I'd start looking through their company mail box.
An employee should know that this is company resource, and the company also should have a right to check/limit the usage.
Having an account here doesn't necessarily make one much less anonymous, it just allows one to collect karma, and other users to recognise which posts are done by the same individual. Not who that individual really is.
It's not cheap as soon as you are going to take the digging into account. A 1000 ft trench will easily costs you as much as the $1.30/ft for the cable.
The summary is talking about 600 sq.mi., and then running fibre along all the roads. Could easily be 500-1000 mile of cable, or 2.5-5 mln ft. That means on cable alone US$3.25-6.5 million. That's not cheap. And this doesn't even take the digging part into account, so double that amount to a nice US$ 5-10 mln. Oh and I didn't take into account the cost of routers, relays, and the length of the cables needed from the road to the homes - which can easily add another 100 ft per household.
Twenty rural towns, that may be like 50,000 households. If each household requires another 100 ft to get from the road to their front door, you can add another 5 mln ft of cable. So now the bill for cable alone is $9.75-13 mln for the cables alone. Double that for the digging, and you are at US$400-500 per household just to lay the cable.
Now this network just needs the rest of the equipment - another couple million investment. And renting a fat pipe to the nearest backbone, because you have all that fibre and now you have to feed it. And you will have to do maintenance: hire some people to keep an eye on the equipment, the routers, whatever. It's not going to keep up long unmaintained.
So US$400-500 for setting up the connection, plus easily another US$100 per month for the service - and these amounts are assuming everyone joins. In practice maybe half of the people will want this, so double these amounts. Oh and now even less people will be interested...
Now I think it's immediately explained why no commercial business will ever put down fibre in those areas.
14.4k dial-up, wow... how about mobile broadband? Hey even GPRS is faster than this!
And when setting up a community network, I'm also quite sure there are reasonably fast and much cheaper wireless solutions. Not necessarily WiFi (but with strategially placed directional antennas that should do quite well too), but maybe even packet radio like solutions?
Why laying cables in this wireless age in the first place? Cables are expensive to roll out and very hard to upgrade, especially when you are talking about low-density rural areas.
Or what about wireless connections for the backbone, and only wire the last bits to the homes, assuming clusters of homes that you want to connect?
Ironic that the more expensive model will run slower than the cheaper model, will feature more restrictive licensing and the user will not be able to tweak it as much as the cheaper version... And what is actually even more worrisome is that the vast majority of the buyers may just say "who cares, as long as it runs Windows!".
Re:Oh sure, he's hot shit NOW
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Sounds like the beginning of a half-scale arms race.
Venture capital could be largely a US phenomenon, I have no idea really how that works.
But then a site like Google got going without any VC funding. And so many more companies that are huge now: started in someone's garage or dorm room. Only to attract capital after they prove their idea, and needed the money to grow further. I believe Slashdot itself is also an example. Europe also has garages and dorm rooms.
One obstacle may be the language. Dutch web site startpagina.nl, now a major collection of links to all kinds of subjects, started off in someone's home as help for family or friends, just like Google. But the Dutch speaking market of course is relatively small, which will limit their growth. Still nothing stops one to go multi-lingual.
Again a DMCA notice... this is not the first time it happens to a user. Also non-USA citizens are subject to this crazy law, when they post material on a US based server. Or not even necessarily that it seems, do legal reverse-engineering or encryption related work in your own country, visit the USA, get arrested, it's possible, no? But leave that discussion for later.
What actually surprises me is that there are no similar portals in e.g. the EU. All major portals and sharing sites are US based - Yahoo!, MSN, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, you name it, they are all in the USA, I can't think of anyone based fully in Europe. And as such they are subject to the US's draconian copyright laws.
This again makes me wonder why none is being set up outside of the US jurisdiction. How about a facebook.de, or a youtube.nl, fully hosted in that country, and incorporated there as well. What is holding the Internet back? It is not that Europe doesn't have the IT infrastructure, on the contrary. It may be better than what's available in the USA. Same accounts for the people. I may assume there as much business sense on both sides of the pond.
Yet all these video-sharing and other creative enterprises on the Internet seem to sprout and flourish mostly in the USA. The world is really a wonderful place.
In my opinion the only thing Vista was properly designed to do is strip money from customers. Considering the lackluster sales of Vista, even that is a matter of debate.
[...] a typical Linux distro, which is small, [...] Most distro's I wouldn't exactly call small. When it doesn't fit on a single CD (700 MB) it is not small anymore. Most distro's come as multi-CD or these days maybe even multi-DVD releases.
Now of course that includes a lot of other software, to make it all usable, but still... I wouldn't call it small. Nor with any lack of bloat (three web browsers, five window managers, two windowing systems, three kernels, two desktop environments, a dozen text editors, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
OK getting off-topic here.
A moderator should not care about the karma of the author. If a post is funny, mod it funny. That's what it is. And whether the poster gets karma or not that's not up to the moderator to decide.
The main innovation here is the touch pad itself: allowing the tracking of two (or more) positions at the same time. Most touch pads can't do that. Using two mice at the same time of course doesn't have that issue, then it's only the software that's left to worry about.
Google cache of TFA: http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:Y2FtyYRKu2YJ:torrentfreak.com/baywords-pirate-bay-blog-080416/+baywords&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2, and the page in question http://www.baywords.com/.
It is quite sad that a cool and very useful feature demonstrated years ago by the leading software maker (by revenue) in the world, has to be made popular by implementation in a mobile phone by a total newcomer in that market (Apple with the iPhone), followed by implementation by a hardware maker on a low-end, low-cost laptop (the EEE). And it is not that this leading software maker can not get hardware makers to change the hardware standards, thinking of the Windows key that is present on virtually any keyboard now on the market.
Nuclear is great indeed for a base load: but that's it, base load. It can not easily be switched on or off like a coal or gas fired plant, which can change load in a matter of minutes.
Your idea of using some power dump is nice, but electrical vehicles are not the place. How are you ever going to switch on and off their charging for a start? When the wind falls, these chargers should be switched off. That requires some sophisticated communications, and is quite error prone. And how are you going to get to work after a windless night, or a gusty night where your charger is switched on and off but mostly off?
Power dumps could be cold storage warehouses, as discussed on Slashdot a few years ago (sorry, no link). Other power dumps, used already in e.g. France which is over-reliant on nuclear, could be pumping up water to the top of a hill during the night, and let it run down during the day when necessary.
Wind power is unstable, and we have to live with that. As nuclear is only a base load, wind may be used during the night to power the cold storage warehouses, which don't mind having no power for an hour or so. But during the day you will need back-up from conventional sources, just to maintain reliability. So far we haven't found a sufficiently reliable renewable energy source do do it otherwise.
On top of that power dumps are nice but also have limited capacity, both in absorption and release of energy on demand. They can cover fluctuations measured in time spans of minutes to hours maybe - not the longer term fluctuations such as a windless week.
In The Netherlands your electricity meter will simply run backwards at the moment you start feeding electricity to the network. It is not likely that you will actually produce more than you use yourself in the long run so you just save the cost of the electricity you produce.
Solar has this issue as well, but bar a total solar eclipse even when clouds come, it will take quite a while for a spread-out set of solar cells to all become darkened, and even under clouds they produce quite some electricity.
They found that is not the case. Birds hardly get killed by turbines - accidents happen of course, but are rare.
The researchers thought that this is because of the noise those turbines make, even upwind this is audible to the birds at sufficient distance. So they just fly around them. The mortality was as low or lower than around power lines: those also kill birds that happen to fly into them.
This result actually surprised the researchers, in a happy way of course. And the research being done by a.o. animal protection groups gives it quite some credit to me.
As an owner of an EEE PC, that is exactly my main problem with it. For example the Preferences dialogue of Firefox and Thunderbird does not fit: you have to do crazy things like moving the window up so it falls of the screen, then resizing it, just to see the rest of the options. Instead of having a scroll-bar inside the window for that...
Indeed many applications are designed for bigger screens, AND miss fall-back options.
I love my EEE, but it has many rough edges beyond the very nice tabbed desktop that makes it feel very much like a first-version product. That, and the quite limited battery life. 2 1/2 hours is not enough.
Instead of requiring "this and that pollution control measures", the law should write "the maximum pollution level in the exhaust is this and that".
Now it becomes up to the automotive industry HOW to reach this. Either using catalytic converters, filters, etc, or improving the engine itself, or both of course. If they manage to invent an engine that burns its fuel so clean you don't need these filters: great, now we have a very efficient and presumably cheap solution, as it doesn't need the extra equipment to meet the law.
Now I don't know the exact laws, but I have never heard in Europe about specific equipment requirements, only about specific emission levels. Which is how it should be.
Your mileage may vary... it's truly appropriate an expression here.
An employee has a right of a certain privacy, but as employee you should also know that when the boss has a good reason, that privacy can and will be take away. It should not be done secretly either. Oh and to answer another poster: I don't care what an employee is doing on the toilet. But if they're going there every half hour or sitting there for twenty minutes at a time, I will be asking questions. Because that is not normal use of such a facility.
One can always here half of the conversation. :)
Then there is still the practical problem that my staff is usually talking in Chinese... I can understand it only partly (enough to figure out what it's about) but when using Mandarin I'm lost
But still I get a monthly overview of phone numbers dialed (those out of Hong Kong) in the phone bills.
As an employer actually I consider it a right to know what my employees are doing. When using company resources (telephone, e-mail, Internet, whatever) then of course an employee has a right to use it for personal matters, but that should be limited to the necessary.
For example, if they have to call their bank, then it always always must be done during office hours. But calling their lover that can be done after office hours.
For e-mail: most people these days have an e-mail address already. Personal things they should send using that e-mail address. Work things are for the company provided address.
It would be scary for me to not be allowed to check on my employees, to see that they are doing what they are paid for. Scary to be never allowed to read their e-mails, when I deem necessary (hasn't happened yet but it's possible) - the most likely situation for me would occur when a customer says "I sent that to this employee", who happens to be on vacation then, upon which I'd start looking through their company mail box.
An employee should know that this is company resource, and the company also should have a right to check/limit the usage.
Having an account here doesn't necessarily make one much less anonymous, it just allows one to collect karma, and other users to recognise which posts are done by the same individual. Not who that individual really is.
It's not cheap as soon as you are going to take the digging into account. A 1000 ft trench will easily costs you as much as the $1.30/ft for the cable.
The summary is talking about 600 sq.mi., and then running fibre along all the roads. Could easily be 500-1000 mile of cable, or 2.5-5 mln ft. That means on cable alone US$3.25-6.5 million. That's not cheap. And this doesn't even take the digging part into account, so double that amount to a nice US$ 5-10 mln. Oh and I didn't take into account the cost of routers, relays, and the length of the cables needed from the road to the homes - which can easily add another 100 ft per household.
Twenty rural towns, that may be like 50,000 households. If each household requires another 100 ft to get from the road to their front door, you can add another 5 mln ft of cable. So now the bill for cable alone is $9.75-13 mln for the cables alone. Double that for the digging, and you are at US$400-500 per household just to lay the cable.
Now this network just needs the rest of the equipment - another couple million investment. And renting a fat pipe to the nearest backbone, because you have all that fibre and now you have to feed it. And you will have to do maintenance: hire some people to keep an eye on the equipment, the routers, whatever. It's not going to keep up long unmaintained.
So US$400-500 for setting up the connection, plus easily another US$100 per month for the service - and these amounts are assuming everyone joins. In practice maybe half of the people will want this, so double these amounts. Oh and now even less people will be interested...
Now I think it's immediately explained why no commercial business will ever put down fibre in those areas.
14.4k dial-up, wow... how about mobile broadband? Hey even GPRS is faster than this!
And when setting up a community network, I'm also quite sure there are reasonably fast and much cheaper wireless solutions. Not necessarily WiFi (but with strategially placed directional antennas that should do quite well too), but maybe even packet radio like solutions?
Why laying cables in this wireless age in the first place? Cables are expensive to roll out and very hard to upgrade, especially when you are talking about low-density rural areas.
Or what about wireless connections for the backbone, and only wire the last bits to the homes, assuming clusters of homes that you want to connect?
Sounds like the beginning of a half-scale arms race.
Venture capital could be largely a US phenomenon, I have no idea really how that works.
But then a site like Google got going without any VC funding. And so many more companies that are huge now: started in someone's garage or dorm room. Only to attract capital after they prove their idea, and needed the money to grow further. I believe Slashdot itself is also an example. Europe also has garages and dorm rooms.
One obstacle may be the language. Dutch web site startpagina.nl, now a major collection of links to all kinds of subjects, started off in someone's home as help for family or friends, just like Google. But the Dutch speaking market of course is relatively small, which will limit their growth. Still nothing stops one to go multi-lingual.
Again a DMCA notice... this is not the first time it happens to a user. Also non-USA citizens are subject to this crazy law, when they post material on a US based server. Or not even necessarily that it seems, do legal reverse-engineering or encryption related work in your own country, visit the USA, get arrested, it's possible, no? But leave that discussion for later.
What actually surprises me is that there are no similar portals in e.g. the EU. All major portals and sharing sites are US based - Yahoo!, MSN, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, you name it, they are all in the USA, I can't think of anyone based fully in Europe. And as such they are subject to the US's draconian copyright laws.
This again makes me wonder why none is being set up outside of the US jurisdiction. How about a facebook.de, or a youtube.nl, fully hosted in that country, and incorporated there as well. What is holding the Internet back? It is not that Europe doesn't have the IT infrastructure, on the contrary. It may be better than what's available in the USA. Same accounts for the people. I may assume there as much business sense on both sides of the pond.
Yet all these video-sharing and other creative enterprises on the Internet seem to sprout and flourish mostly in the USA. The world is really a wonderful place.
Now of course that includes a lot of other software, to make it all usable, but still... I wouldn't call it small. Nor with any lack of bloat (three web browsers, five window managers, two windowing systems, three kernels, two desktop environments, a dozen text editors, etc).