Aside from working for OSI for a while, Rosen is also better known for creating some licenses that weren't exactly free and trying to pass them off as being the real thing (failure; nobody uses them), and generally supporting companies who try to exploit the "open source" label for publicity without actually releasing any free software.
Don't be fooled. He may not be actively opposed to free software, but he's not working for it either. He's just a hanger-on that's trying to profit from it. It's unclear whether it's due to greed or simple ignorance, but his idea of an "open source" business model tends to be "people give us software for free and then we sell it" - not exactly evil, but pretty much missing the point. You know the type: "we'll give you the source, if you change anything you must give it to us, we own all your changes, you can't release it without our approval, and we get to sell it".
Perhaps you missed the article. We're talking about a new technology that works on a different principle, which happens to escape the fundamental efficiency limits of a heat-transfer cycle, and hence could potentially be developed into a far more efficient nuclear power generation method.
And the actual thermal efficiency of a steam-cycle nuclear power plant is in the 5-30% range (with most of the ancient, 1960s reactors that you find in the US and western Europe coming in at the 5% end - new reactor designs give a more respectable 30%, but when did you last hear of somebody building a new reactor?).
That's misleadingly written. What it means is that multi-mode controllers are possible (because the cabling is the same and there is a detection protocol). You can even use the multi-drive cables and hang some SATA and some SAS drives off the same cable (or plug them into the same RAID cage), if your controller supports it. It is not the case that every SAS controller is a multi-mode SAS/SATA controller, nor are they "faulty" because some people don't like what they were designed to do. To create an SAS controller that also supports SATA, you have to include a complete SATA protocol implementation, which is an added expense - it's not something you get for free, like you would if SATA was a subset of SAS.
The radiation will just bounce off the lead and cancel out in a closed environment (once again I'm not a nuclear physicist).
We can tell. That's nonsense. Lead does not reflect radiation - most notably, it absorbs alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Although in practice we use concrete, it's cheaper and more effective.
without a place for the radiation to go the system doesn't work
The radiation goes into the converter material and comes out of the system as electricity. That's the whole point.
Not really having much confidence in your guesses at this point.
They support SCSI Primary Command (SPC) Set and SCSI Block Command (SBC) Set. That makes them very much compatible with SCSI
No. It means that they copied a chunk of text out of the SCSI spec because it was as good a way as any. SCSI is a whole lot more than just the parts they copied, and they added some stuff of their own. USB mass storage devices are not compatible with SCSI in any way.
The OS sees them as "removable SCSI drives"
You're thinking of Linux, and that was purely a design decision based on the relative cruftiness of different parts of the kernel. It has nothing to do with the underlying protocol.
And SAS supports SATA devices.
No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.
Meaning that SATA, being a subset of SAS
No. SATA is not a subset of SCSI. SATA has features that SCSI does not. SCSI has features that SATA does not. They have very little in common except that the protocols look vaguely similar.
Even though SATA protocol is only -similar- to SCSI of the old, it is a part of -current- SCSI standard (SAS)
The SATA protocol is specified by SATA-IO. The SCSI protocol is specified by INCITS. They are completely different organisations, and the documents that specify them are entirely separate. The only thing they really have in common is the connectors and cabling.
Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.
That's not a problem with firewire, that's a problem with the BROKEN, RETARDED Windows firewire driver. The silly part is that Microsoft have known about it for years and haven't bothered to fix it.
In their defense they're talking about the ports, not the protocols.
If you're going to play it that way, then the obsolete ports are Centronics C50, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, SCA, and SCA-2. SCSI has had a whole lot of different cables and ports over the years, each one obsoleted by the next. The current SCSI connector is SFF8482, the same one that's used for SATA (although the Infiniband connector is also used for the same purpose).
SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
Really isn't. The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar, but there is a real SCSI over serial cable, and it's called SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI). It's the same connectors and cables as SATA, running the real SCSI protocol. The drives are the same good old SCSI drives, costing ten times and much and running ten times as fast as their SATA cousins. It has replaced Ultra-640 SCSI as the system of choice for high-end RAID cages.
USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
Vastly better performance on all counts, which matters when you're attaching fifty drives to your bus. Incidentally, the current generation is called SAS ("Serial-Attached SCSI") and uses the same connectors as SATA, running the SCSI wire protocol. Modern RAID cages will accept both SATA and SAS drives in the same bays.
Large steam turbines have thermodynamic efficiency in the 90% range.
That's the loss in the turbine itself - the number most favourable to the turbine manufacturer's marketing department. The main loss in a steam turbine system is in the required cooling/condensing apparatus that must accompany the turbine to close the cycle.
Actual thermal efficiency for nuclear plants tends to be in the 5-30% range. The 40-year-old designs that comprise most plants in the US and western Europe are appalling; current designs manage about 30% at their optimal power level, but nobody's building new plants these days so there aren't many of them around.
Compared to the amount of energy wasted. Most of it is lost in the cooling towers that are needed to keep the cycle closed, the rest is lost in transfer from the core.
Steam Turbines are one of the most efficient engines we have. That's why we use them!
Yes. And guess what? The most efficient system we have is not very efficient at all. Also note that the main problem is not the turbine itself, but the system as a whole used to transfer energy from the nuclear core to the grid output.
Carnot, says that the best we can hope for is more like 60-70% efficiency, and Rankine, suggests that a more realistic number is somewhere between 40-50%.
Which is precisely why a system based on a new material like this, which does not involve the Carnot (or Rankine) cycle at all, would be hugely more efficient. The whole point is that heat transfer systems are not a good way to extract energy from a nuclear power plant, because of those intrinsic inefficiencies.
In the US it is nearly impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive infrastructure investments needed.
No. In the US it is completely impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive laws explicitly prohibiting it, at the request of the incumbent telcos. This is pure corruption.
Who told you that the infrastructure investments were prohibitive? Hey, it's those same telcos again. They're lying to you: it's quite doable in the urban areas, and the rest would creep out slowly over the following years. This is all sleight of hand to distract you from noticing the corruption that's really responsible for the mess.
If it was legal, you would have competition, and your network services wouldn't suck so utterly.
It's called population density. The US has a density of 80 per sq mile.
Irrelevant. Nobody wants to run network service to miles of desert in Utah. The density in the parts of the US where people actually live is more than high enough to support real service. This sort of misleading statistic is typical of the way they try to convince you that what you have isn't broken.
If this works, imagine being able to generate electricity not just from nuclear power plants themselves, but from the nuclear waste storage facility?
To heck with that, and with batteries - imagine being able to generate electricity from nuclear power plants themselves, rather than using them to heat water, shove it through an inefficient turbine, and then let most of the energy evaporate off in a cooling tower. The steam turbine system is horrendously inefficient. Cutting all of that out of the loop would make nuclear power so hilariously efficient that nobody would care about the waste storage (we wouldn't need much of it anyway). It would also be far safer: a lot of the stuff in a current nuclear plant goes into managing the water moving through the reactor, which is all expensive, fragile equipment that gets mildly contaminated. Replacing all that junk with some electrical cabling would be a major breakthrough.
The article asks "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking". The best answer they come up with is "there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new".
And that's so stunningly inevitable that the whole article is a poor joke. They've started by using misleading labels for the things under consideration - if you fix that, the idiocy of their opinion becomes obvious.
They aren't comparing "old technology" to "new technology". They are comparing "technologies that have survived for 25 years and are still around" to "new technologies". In other words, they are comparing the very best of the older technologies to a random (hence, mediocre) selection of newer technologies. It is no surprise that the better ones are, well, better.
You'd get a different result if you made a fair comparison of "things that were around 25 years ago" to "things that are around today". Nobody ever does that.
All of that said, I personally do not want a car that I can't steer when the car is turned off (when I am working on the car), and I would be quite scared to drive a car that I can't steer when the alternator, computer, or power steering unit dies at 80 mph.
And yet you seem quite happy with the idea of driving a car that you can't steer when the complex mechanical contraption shatters at 80 mph.
People have this idea in their heads that things with electricity can break while things without electricity can't. You trust the engineer to design a mechanical steering system that won't break, and you don't trust that same engineer to build an electric steering system that won't break. Funny, that.
Since the "bit of wire that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it" definition obviously doesn't apply, perhaps you should consider that it's talking about the "ignition system for an explosive device" definition.
RTFA. They explicitly specified the electrical variety, not the explosive one.
There continue to be links between cell phone use and brain tumors
There are established links between stress and brain tumours. Who wants to bet that a suitable study would find a link between cell phone use and stress?
Correlation doesn't mean causation. Most of the time, it means some third factor is responsible for the whole lot.
And frankly folks, Joe Sixpack still doesn't trust what he reads about online more than he does the idiot box.
Mostly because he can't read that well, and the internet uses too many big words. TV dominates in the US because it's the only thing that the minimally-educated majority can understand.
This is perfect for those who want to build recording studio PCs, do lots of music production work
Anybody who is building a recording studio should know how to deal with the PCs: put them in the next room, on the other side of your acoustic insulation, and just bring the cables through. You need to do that anyway, so there's no point making them quieter.
Wrong question. The correct question is: how much power per gigabyte does flash storage consume compared to a hard drive? It is not useful to have a 1Gb flash device that consumes 1/100th of the power of a 500Gb hard drive, unless you weren't going to use that space anyway.
Right now it's not that impressive, because the storage density is lagging behind. This may change.
But the parts in question are from designs in the 1960s, how far behind/ahead of that mark is China with regards to being able to create a nuclear fuse of similar function?
Well, they had them in the 1970s. That's either 30 years ahead or 10 years behind, depending on how you look at it.
Also, we're talking about electrical fuses here. An electrical fuse is a bit of wire or something similar that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it. You'll find the details in your physics textbook. They do not become magic fuses just because somebody intends to use them in an obsolete weapon.
When I hear someone saying they can feel or be adversely affected by radio waves I want to yell 'quack' but I suppose that's not the right term for it. Just plain batty?
My bet is on "paid by a telecom". They hate the idea of there being more than one supplier for any given house.
More importantly, what if ISO and Microsoft reach different definitions for the same OpenXML functions?
The very fact that you are asking this question is a strong indicator that ISO's actions here are completely irrelevant - they serve only as marketing for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from working for OSI for a while, Rosen is also better known for creating some licenses that weren't exactly free and trying to pass them off as being the real thing (failure; nobody uses them), and generally supporting companies who try to exploit the "open source" label for publicity without actually releasing any free software.
Don't be fooled. He may not be actively opposed to free software, but he's not working for it either. He's just a hanger-on that's trying to profit from it. It's unclear whether it's due to greed or simple ignorance, but his idea of an "open source" business model tends to be "people give us software for free and then we sell it" - not exactly evil, but pretty much missing the point. You know the type: "we'll give you the source, if you change anything you must give it to us, we own all your changes, you can't release it without our approval, and we get to sell it".
Perhaps you missed the article. We're talking about a new technology that works on a different principle, which happens to escape the fundamental efficiency limits of a heat-transfer cycle, and hence could potentially be developed into a far more efficient nuclear power generation method.
And the actual thermal efficiency of a steam-cycle nuclear power plant is in the 5-30% range (with most of the ancient, 1960s reactors that you find in the US and western Europe coming in at the 5% end - new reactor designs give a more respectable 30%, but when did you last hear of somebody building a new reactor?).
That's misleadingly written. What it means is that multi-mode controllers are possible (because the cabling is the same and there is a detection protocol). You can even use the multi-drive cables and hang some SATA and some SAS drives off the same cable (or plug them into the same RAID cage), if your controller supports it. It is not the case that every SAS controller is a multi-mode SAS/SATA controller, nor are they "faulty" because some people don't like what they were designed to do. To create an SAS controller that also supports SATA, you have to include a complete SATA protocol implementation, which is an added expense - it's not something you get for free, like you would if SATA was a subset of SAS.
We can tell. That's nonsense. Lead does not reflect radiation - most notably, it absorbs alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Although in practice we use concrete, it's cheaper and more effective.
The radiation goes into the converter material and comes out of the system as electricity. That's the whole point.
Not really having much confidence in your guesses at this point.
No. It means that they copied a chunk of text out of the SCSI spec because it was as good a way as any. SCSI is a whole lot more than just the parts they copied, and they added some stuff of their own. USB mass storage devices are not compatible with SCSI in any way.
You're thinking of Linux, and that was purely a design decision based on the relative cruftiness of different parts of the kernel. It has nothing to do with the underlying protocol.
No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.
No. SATA is not a subset of SCSI. SATA has features that SCSI does not. SCSI has features that SATA does not. They have very little in common except that the protocols look vaguely similar.
The SATA protocol is specified by SATA-IO. The SCSI protocol is specified by INCITS. They are completely different organisations, and the documents that specify them are entirely separate. The only thing they really have in common is the connectors and cabling.
Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.
That's not a problem with firewire, that's a problem with the BROKEN, RETARDED Windows firewire driver. The silly part is that Microsoft have known about it for years and haven't bothered to fix it.
If you're going to play it that way, then the obsolete ports are Centronics C50, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, SCA, and SCA-2. SCSI has had a whole lot of different cables and ports over the years, each one obsoleted by the next. The current SCSI connector is SFF8482, the same one that's used for SATA (although the Infiniband connector is also used for the same purpose).
Really isn't. The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar, but there is a real SCSI over serial cable, and it's called SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI). It's the same connectors and cables as SATA, running the real SCSI protocol. The drives are the same good old SCSI drives, costing ten times and much and running ten times as fast as their SATA cousins. It has replaced Ultra-640 SCSI as the system of choice for high-end RAID cages.
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
That one's true though.
Vastly better performance on all counts, which matters when you're attaching fifty drives to your bus. Incidentally, the current generation is called SAS ("Serial-Attached SCSI") and uses the same connectors as SATA, running the SCSI wire protocol. Modern RAID cages will accept both SATA and SAS drives in the same bays.
That's the loss in the turbine itself - the number most favourable to the turbine manufacturer's marketing department. The main loss in a steam turbine system is in the required cooling/condensing apparatus that must accompany the turbine to close the cycle.
Actual thermal efficiency for nuclear plants tends to be in the 5-30% range. The 40-year-old designs that comprise most plants in the US and western Europe are appalling; current designs manage about 30% at their optimal power level, but nobody's building new plants these days so there aren't many of them around.
Compared to the amount of energy wasted. Most of it is lost in the cooling towers that are needed to keep the cycle closed, the rest is lost in transfer from the core.
Yes. And guess what? The most efficient system we have is not very efficient at all. Also note that the main problem is not the turbine itself, but the system as a whole used to transfer energy from the nuclear core to the grid output.
Which is precisely why a system based on a new material like this, which does not involve the Carnot (or Rankine) cycle at all, would be hugely more efficient. The whole point is that heat transfer systems are not a good way to extract energy from a nuclear power plant, because of those intrinsic inefficiencies.
No. In the US it is completely impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive laws explicitly prohibiting it, at the request of the incumbent telcos. This is pure corruption.
Who told you that the infrastructure investments were prohibitive? Hey, it's those same telcos again. They're lying to you: it's quite doable in the urban areas, and the rest would creep out slowly over the following years. This is all sleight of hand to distract you from noticing the corruption that's really responsible for the mess.
If it was legal, you would have competition, and your network services wouldn't suck so utterly.
Irrelevant. Nobody wants to run network service to miles of desert in Utah. The density in the parts of the US where people actually live is more than high enough to support real service. This sort of misleading statistic is typical of the way they try to convince you that what you have isn't broken.
To heck with that, and with batteries - imagine being able to generate electricity from nuclear power plants themselves, rather than using them to heat water, shove it through an inefficient turbine, and then let most of the energy evaporate off in a cooling tower. The steam turbine system is horrendously inefficient. Cutting all of that out of the loop would make nuclear power so hilariously efficient that nobody would care about the waste storage (we wouldn't need much of it anyway). It would also be far safer: a lot of the stuff in a current nuclear plant goes into managing the water moving through the reactor, which is all expensive, fragile equipment that gets mildly contaminated. Replacing all that junk with some electrical cabling would be a major breakthrough.
Serious answer: the number of zeros in the bill for the monthly support contract.
And that's so stunningly inevitable that the whole article is a poor joke. They've started by using misleading labels for the things under consideration - if you fix that, the idiocy of their opinion becomes obvious.
They aren't comparing "old technology" to "new technology". They are comparing "technologies that have survived for 25 years and are still around" to "new technologies". In other words, they are comparing the very best of the older technologies to a random (hence, mediocre) selection of newer technologies. It is no surprise that the better ones are, well, better.
You'd get a different result if you made a fair comparison of "things that were around 25 years ago" to "things that are around today". Nobody ever does that.
You must be new.
And yet you seem quite happy with the idea of driving a car that you can't steer when the complex mechanical contraption shatters at 80 mph.
People have this idea in their heads that things with electricity can break while things without electricity can't. You trust the engineer to design a mechanical steering system that won't break, and you don't trust that same engineer to build an electric steering system that won't break. Funny, that.
RTFA. They explicitly specified the electrical variety, not the explosive one.
There are established links between stress and brain tumours. Who wants to bet that a suitable study would find a link between cell phone use and stress?
Correlation doesn't mean causation. Most of the time, it means some third factor is responsible for the whole lot.
Mostly because he can't read that well, and the internet uses too many big words. TV dominates in the US because it's the only thing that the minimally-educated majority can understand.
Anybody who is building a recording studio should know how to deal with the PCs: put them in the next room, on the other side of your acoustic insulation, and just bring the cables through. You need to do that anyway, so there's no point making them quieter.
Wrong question. The correct question is: how much power per gigabyte does flash storage consume compared to a hard drive? It is not useful to have a 1Gb flash device that consumes 1/100th of the power of a 500Gb hard drive, unless you weren't going to use that space anyway.
Right now it's not that impressive, because the storage density is lagging behind. This may change.
Well, they had them in the 1970s. That's either 30 years ahead or 10 years behind, depending on how you look at it.
Also, we're talking about electrical fuses here. An electrical fuse is a bit of wire or something similar that gets hot and melts when you put too much current through it. You'll find the details in your physics textbook. They do not become magic fuses just because somebody intends to use them in an obsolete weapon.
Why are we even talking about this?
My bet is on "paid by a telecom". They hate the idea of there being more than one supplier for any given house.
The very fact that you are asking this question is a strong indicator that ISO's actions here are completely irrelevant - they serve only as marketing for Microsoft.