Great point. Back in the day I worked on a SGI Origin mini/supercomputer (not sure if it qualifies 32 way symmetric multiprocessor still kind of impressive now a days I guess (even a 16 way Opteron isn't symmetric I don't think). Anyways at the time (~2000) there were much faster cores out there. Sure we could use this machine for free for serial load (yeah that is a waste) but we had to wait 3-4X as long as a modern core. You ended up having to ssh in to start new jobs in the middle of the night so you didn't waste an evening of runs versus getting 2-3 in during the day and firing off the fourth before you go to bed. Add to that the IT guys had to keep a relatively obscure system around, provide space and cooling for this monster etc they would have been better just buying us 10 ~1Ghz at the time I guess dual socket workstations.
I tune out when I hear a companies business model is "ad-based". Reason: there is only so much revenue available from companies that make "real" products. Of that they will only part with a certain amount of it for marketing before the marginal return goes negative. Thus every stinking crapware company is fighting for the same dollar. Ultimately someone has to make something that will make a customer willing to part with their money to make the size of the tech industry to grow otherwise you might be making high tech but you are fighting for Walmart dollars.
Well if they are small enough projects (say the typical LOB crap that 90% of devs work on for companies) they might get knocked off by someone that likes the charity AND has another reason. I agree with this general thread people contribute because they have a need for the project generally. If it is useful enough a corporate entity might start using it in their products and then have to do some modification to make it more useful. Some of those will be nice enough to give the mods back. The OP is pretty adamant this is something that will only benefit his non-profit though. Assuming that is the case you eliminate all the corporate users and the people that think it might be useful in their side projects. What you are left with is the people that really like your charity or people that want to learn the tech that you are going (or they choose) to use.
I'd say around 70% code really isn't single purpose it is single purpose by shortsightedness: people don't see anything beyond their current problem, don't desire to help others who might find it useful or don't have access to other data. Say a insurance company builds a dashboard, chances are a well designed system would have a huge amount of components that would be relevant to others in the industry. They don't share because they are competing and they won't sell because it is a distraction from their main business. Could this be the case with these small projects? Could it be you aren't thinking big enough to include enough interested parties? If a lot of them are interrelated technologically you might want to start a framework project that will have the parts that others can use (and might find interesting enough to contribute too) and then make your life easier building the rest of the solution on top of that framework.
I'm not sure about that. I haven't seen any projects that were related on GitHub. There are forks and such but I haven't seen one "site" that says here's our twenty different projects and how they fit in to the bigger solution. GitHub would be a great place for the individual project repos to live though.
I'd suggest assuming your non-profit has a website already put it there. Say in your volunteers wanted section just have a "Do you know how to program? Would you like to work on a project that will help us? Check out our GitHub projects (and a link to a sub page with technical descriptions of what is needed). The assumption that volunteers are only (or could only) be unskilled place fillers rather than meeting technical or business needs is pretty wide spead in non-profits. It would be nice to see one post their skilled needs as well rather than trying to recruit paid employees and then in most cases offering pitifully low salaries. I'll volunteer my time but I still have a quality of life I want as a skilled person. Free coding projects for say Red Cross would be a great way to keep a six figure salary and still do something interesting on my volunteer time rather than canvasing for money or picking up trash.
Also a lot can be team dynamics. A person can be a great worker but for whatever reason a few other team members decided that they don't like talking to them. So they are never included in conversations aren't seen as helpful when problems come up etc. But is it due to a real personality fault in that employee or that employee just having a different way of communicating, work style heck even extra curricular interests can come into play (people will generally go to the person that they can chat with for a half hour about the latest sports drama than the guy that is say a dungeon master (when sports are their interest and not role playing) or vis versa). That is part of the issue with remote work that needs to be considered not just individual work performance but how well will the team communicate without the queues you get from in person interaction? It can work and it can not work but you need to at least leave the option of going back to a work from the office model if the telecommute doesn't work for the employee (or you find other people's performance goes down because they aren't as available for helping out with random questions etc).
ah there is the rub. In a few places I've worked they insisted that training be something relevant for your existing position. So that ruled out things like taking an ITIL course if you weren't a manager etc. But then when you tried to take a course in something you were already supposed to know (like your particular flavor of networking gear or Solaris) they'd pretty much say: oh it hasn't change just read the manual. Or isn't there an free online "course" you can take? So the education "benefit" essentially wasn't useful.
What has happened in most of these cases either in IT or in other technical fields is the lower level technicans got sent away for course because it was required for them to be able to service equipment without voiding warantees. So college guy gets a 6k Apple repair course no problem, me as the server/network admin am supposed to just read the manual. Oh and my "education benefit" got appropriated to top up the college guys training budget to pay for his course. Nice. Current job the lowest end of guys in my department get about a month of off site training at a cost of about 20k a year. The really senior people get one conference a year which are always somewhere nice (ski resorts, Vegas etc). The people in the middle? Read the freaking manual.
How about use those situations where you have no choice to get used to it? Suffering though crappy hardware just because it is there doesn't seem like a good solution.
The thing is the building volume generally doesn't grow with the cube of it's height. Generally people want windows in every room/work area (even cube dwellers generally have one wall that has windows in their area) which limits you to a rectangular base with on side relatively narrow (essentially two room widths wide by however long you want at the base). But yeah a mix is going to be best it just doesn't make sense to me to be planning on paving the desert with panels or wind farms before you have saturated the available roofs (and for new buildings at least consider wall treatments as well).
Solar does someone scale with building size. There are materials now that can be applied to windows for solar generation too. Of course in a forest of skyscrapers you get a bunch of shade but at the moment there are only ~15 cities in the world with more than 100 of these buildings and even there the vast majority of the city is still probably 20 stories or less (which with a road in between would probably mean a lot of the building across the street is out of shade).
Peoples mentality might change but there still is about 50% of the worlds population living in rural areas and even those in urban areas a lot of them aren't living in dense cores so you'll always have sprawling buildings. Factories are another issue: most people don't want multistory factories. Regardless the sprawl needed for solar is much less because you can overlap generation with buildings and the W/m^2 is much higher.
Another idea I have (living in cold climate) would be enclosed parking garages (not necessarily multistory I mean just inclosing the suburban parking lot) with a relatively light weight roof (probably need something like a shed to have enough rigidity) and cover the sucker with solar. Cars get sheltered from snow rain etc so less crap weather for owners to walk through. The parking lot would likely last longer because it wouldn't be exposed to the elements and need to be plowed all the time. The solar could be provided to the cars as charging stations: free/cheap charging for customers would both be a perk to shop and an incentive for people to get solar/hybrid cars.
On that end basic computer hardware is probably more relevant. Having a clue how cache (just at a high level) works, hardware interrupts, rough orders of magnitude differences between network, HDD, RAM register access etc. It then doesn't just apply to building your own software but having a rough idea how your phone, computer, console, computer controlled factory equipment etc works. It is the equivalent of learning mechanics and optics in the yearly 20th century. Software is nice but ultimately it is instructions and still having no clue how the instructions work because you don't get hardware makes things bad (bad coders, and people with no "physical" intuition as to how systems work).
Well to be fair a lot likely the majority of people don't work for software companies as coders. So it is less of a problem for the Google, MS, Apples of the world to be very selective because either the scale of the systems or the number of users makes the use of rockstars nice. The journeymen can find more than enough work making reports, dashboards, websites etc for companies in all the other industries.
The challenge I find in company work on the other hand is you compete with every other Joe in the office. Joe over here has a degree in psycology but did some progrmaming in R, okay lets have him make something too. It ends up watering down the quality of the jobs so that you end up being + programming when you have time. You end up with either bad programmers making stuff you have to use, or a large part of the job being something that you don't want to be doing. At least that has been my experience both inside of the "IT shed" and as a technical resource at a program/department level. In the IT shed you become a programmer, oh except can you keep the SQL running? Write ad hoc queries, install the client software, create the user accounts etc. In the department level you end up being "the fix it guy" plus build the tools you use. At least that has been my experience.
Anyways, the work is there it is just that even the journeymen want the rockstar jobs but there are only ~300k or so positions for devs in all the rockstar companies vs probably 50M devs.
At least in Canada it is more likely to be skilled trades than programming. About a third of us have university degrees. More have some university, than you have the dumb and generally lazy, or smart but can't be bothered. All leads to a lot of people with some programming experience but not a lot of people that can fix your sink.
Just because a particular field is popular and pays well doesn't mean we should encourage EVERYONE to do it. Just like the invention of the car (didn't, though did more than it should have IMHO) mean that everyone should work directly or indirectly on cars. You only need so much transportation before you get the people and things to where they need to be and then need to do something else, similarly computers aren't going to do away with the need for physical goods and people that can fix them.
How long could you exploit deserts before you'd have environmentalists (probably rightly) complaining that we are destroying habitat for particular animals/plants? I think solar is much better currently capture ~30% of the solar energy vs a portion of the 0.25% of solar energy that ends up as wind. It scales with communities (as you build more buildings you have more roofs to put solar on) vs available space shrinking as the suburbs move farther and farther out and finally it is the minimum distance to at least some of the load on the power grid (ie sitting on top of a house). We'd still need more power than that probably which would require other power sources but solar should definitely be in the mix. Just for power density reasons I don't see how wind beats solar other than in areas with very little sun but lots of wind. Wind is the peaker plants of the green energy mix.
Actually natural gas is the cheapest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source and probably will remain so with all the new sources available due to fracking. It is ~30% more expensive to generate from either oil or coal. But generally your right. It will be a long time before generating something from incoming energy (the sun) will be cheaper than getting something that was stored from the same energy source but combined over millions of years essentially with a straw and a pump similar to how the quickest way to get rich is to rob a bank. Doesn't make it a good idea but...
Oh and since only 0.25% of sun energy becomes wind solar is better, if you can get say 30% efficiency out of 97.5% you'll do a lot better than 100% (which would never happen either) of 0.25%. You'd need a lot less land, can overlap on roofs for example (I don't want something that by definition catches wind fixed to my roof in a storm) which means your production can scale by number of dwellings vs actually being subtracted from as more land is used for housing.
Exactly and the bottom 6B people will want to live just like we do now or better roughly 2-3X more power usage globally. This is assuming the entire surface is used for a wind farm which realistically will never happen.
Hurricanes tend to come from the ocean, likely well away from convenient places to put wind farms. You can have some off shore but how far do you go before you can't just build supports but have to make an oil rig sized thing for a couple turbines?
Well supposedly (according to one of the posts in the comments on the original article) only 0.25% of that energy (250TW) gets turned into wind. So you'd be taking About 7% of the total. But relistically a lot of the wind will be effectively unusable: in the middle of the desert surrounded by people that can't afford things that need power, in the middle of the ocean etc. Think hot summer day with say 20% less breeze (you presumably live in a populated area right near where they are going to want to plop these wind farms down). It sucks already, lack of wind could make it suck more (though a gas fired plant produces heat from energy that was normally sequestered so contributes to net heating the "am I hot" factor might be in its favor).
Wii came out after XBox 360 it was essentially a cheap next gen console with a novel interface. Kinect kicks Wii's but (why have a controller when you can use your body?). This time around they came out first with a relatively low powered machine. I suspect hardcore gamers are waiting to see how much better the graphics will be on the "real" consoles that are pending. The rumor mill and existence of kinect kind of did away with the expectation that Wii U would be novel and the casual gamer market by now have all moved over to smart phones and tablets.
Okay so malware might be more appropriate. See for example: http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/security/vunix.html though (albeit a bit old). Vulnerabilities exist in UNIX and a large set of things can be expected to be on a lot of other systems (eg. Apache, Perl, bash etc), so find an open interface to something and a corresponding vulnerability and away you go. Malware doesn't have to rely on peer to peer replication: they effect a server and the visitors "do it to themselves" afterwards.
Also: the dude that coined the term for virus did his research on UNIX so viruses are clearly possible on UNIX if rare.
Good points on a lot of it. I can get the UAC for network connection though. If you download a office suite say and it tries to connect to the internet you might be suspicious. I think it is a good idea for users to know what applications use the network especially since a lot/most people have metered internet connections so you are paying for that traffic.
Visual settings: agreed and should be per login based (not sure if they are or not). Apple has a better solution here for preferences: show the preferences and make the user click on the lock to unlock the particular setting for changes. users don't accidentally change things, settings that you need to know even if you aren't an administrator can be shown etc. Heck I have work PCs I can't double click on the time on the desktop to see the calendar because I don't have sufficient privileges to change the time. It is assumed that you want to change the time when you can have other reasons for wanting to see the calendar (or the second hand on the clock for example). Generally unless things are changing don't prompt the user.
This is a general challenge with free societies (democracies etc). A small vocal minority can control the framing of issues and you can end up with a choice between
1) Guns and freedom. 2) No guns and no freedom.
Or whatever combo of polarizing issues. This makes me want to go back to ancient Greece (Thebes?) where democracy didn't mean voting it meant participation. Leaders were drawn by lot you had to serve if chosen or forfeited your citizenship (which is a fair balance between rights and obligations to your country IMHO vs vote if you feel like it, and for whoever has the most "trustworthy" face we currently have). Not sure if it would be better or worse but would be worth a shot. The alternative that we've seemed to settle for is:
1) Those that want power can run 2) To get power you need lots of money so generally you are rich and have rich friends 3) You almost always have to be a part of a major party and toe the party line rather than have independent thought on each of the issues you face 4) Generally you have to be from a "respected" profession (doctor, lawyer, business owner)
These leads to a disproportionate representation of the monied, socially talented, and professional classes in government. Shy people: don't count, poor people, don't count, people with moderate opinions that aren't easily worded as "contrasting" sound bites to distinguish you from your competitor don't get elected etc.
With a large enough body of randomly chosen representatives you get a true cross section of the population, "parties" are represented proportionately, people don't owe favors to the people that got them into power, they aren't coming in necessarily with a "better idea" of how the money should be allocated (usually my business/industry or my special interest friends) and even if they do the chances of having say all the pro-choice guys coming in with the same favors owed to the same groups is much lower, people actually have to discuss issues and think rather than cling to the accepted opinion (even worse in Canada where I'm from where you have a party whip to make sure you vote the right way and can be expelled from your party for voting otherwise).
Well something like 80% of BSOD issues were driver based (talk from a while back in XP days) but that didn't stop MS from getting the blame. A company can encourage other vendors to make good stuff but they can't force customers to apply the blame correctly when 3rd parties fail. It is fair game for MS to say "we've been hacked and yeah our Macs got hacked too" if it is true. It is also in their best interest to make sure that their competitors get included in the sound bits about the problem (and the source of the problem too of course) so that they don't get stuck with all the blame.
Or a less evil way of thinking about it is that MS didn't want to say "yeah we have the problem too" without pointing out that it isn't just them having the problem but it is Apple products too. Keep in mind every time a company discloses things they lose control over how it will be presented. If their statement doesn't include that it is Apple hardware/software too (or at least implies that it might have been) what might end up as the head line is "MS hacked" with no mention of Apple at all leaving MS looking like crap and a lot of people that don't give to turds about OS X saying "man when will MS learn". It could be evil (might even likely be evil) trying to deflect the blame but it can be the opposite too making sure you don't get tainted with all the blame for something that is a common problem.
I got into a bit of a flame war back and forth with a guy when the Java vulnerability first appeared. He said it would only affect PCs since viruses don't work on Mac or Linux. I called bs he responded with "they use different filesystems, learn something before spewing off at the mouth." To which I replied: 1) this is a browser based attack and 2) do you think a hacker can't figure out/home/bob rather than \Users\bob? My God the things people come up with. All three platforms now have a request for elevation kind of mechanism that is supposed to protect you. The problem is for 90% of users a UNC prompt or its mac/linux equivalent pops up and they click ok. To most users the fingers go in the ears as soon as you try to explain the risks and what is happening and they just ask "So what do I need to click to continue?" This is more a mental problem then a technological one and I don't see any likely solution. Sandboxing like Win 8 Modern can help where you at least in theory make no app able to see each other directly or even the whole of the filesystem but there are just too many use cases where being able to browse all the filesystem, one app needs to get something from anothers space etc that are needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Great point. Back in the day I worked on a SGI Origin mini/supercomputer (not sure if it qualifies 32 way symmetric multiprocessor still kind of impressive now a days I guess (even a 16 way Opteron isn't symmetric I don't think). Anyways at the time (~2000) there were much faster cores out there. Sure we could use this machine for free for serial load (yeah that is a waste) but we had to wait 3-4X as long as a modern core. You ended up having to ssh in to start new jobs in the middle of the night so you didn't waste an evening of runs versus getting 2-3 in during the day and firing off the fourth before you go to bed. Add to that the IT guys had to keep a relatively obscure system around, provide space and cooling for this monster etc they would have been better just buying us 10 ~1Ghz at the time I guess dual socket workstations.
I tune out when I hear a companies business model is "ad-based". Reason: there is only so much revenue available from companies that make "real" products. Of that they will only part with a certain amount of it for marketing before the marginal return goes negative. Thus every stinking crapware company is fighting for the same dollar. Ultimately someone has to make something that will make a customer willing to part with their money to make the size of the tech industry to grow otherwise you might be making high tech but you are fighting for Walmart dollars.
Well if they are small enough projects (say the typical LOB crap that 90% of devs work on for companies) they might get knocked off by someone that likes the charity AND has another reason. I agree with this general thread people contribute because they have a need for the project generally. If it is useful enough a corporate entity might start using it in their products and then have to do some modification to make it more useful. Some of those will be nice enough to give the mods back. The OP is pretty adamant this is something that will only benefit his non-profit though. Assuming that is the case you eliminate all the corporate users and the people that think it might be useful in their side projects. What you are left with is the people that really like your charity or people that want to learn the tech that you are going (or they choose) to use.
I'd say around 70% code really isn't single purpose it is single purpose by shortsightedness: people don't see anything beyond their current problem, don't desire to help others who might find it useful or don't have access to other data. Say a insurance company builds a dashboard, chances are a well designed system would have a huge amount of components that would be relevant to others in the industry. They don't share because they are competing and they won't sell because it is a distraction from their main business. Could this be the case with these small projects? Could it be you aren't thinking big enough to include enough interested parties? If a lot of them are interrelated technologically you might want to start a framework project that will have the parts that others can use (and might find interesting enough to contribute too) and then make your life easier building the rest of the solution on top of that framework.
I'm not sure about that. I haven't seen any projects that were related on GitHub. There are forks and such but I haven't seen one "site" that says here's our twenty different projects and how they fit in to the bigger solution. GitHub would be a great place for the individual project repos to live though.
I'd suggest assuming your non-profit has a website already put it there. Say in your volunteers wanted section just have a "Do you know how to program? Would you like to work on a project that will help us? Check out our GitHub projects (and a link to a sub page with technical descriptions of what is needed). The assumption that volunteers are only (or could only) be unskilled place fillers rather than meeting technical or business needs is pretty wide spead in non-profits. It would be nice to see one post their skilled needs as well rather than trying to recruit paid employees and then in most cases offering pitifully low salaries. I'll volunteer my time but I still have a quality of life I want as a skilled person. Free coding projects for say Red Cross would be a great way to keep a six figure salary and still do something interesting on my volunteer time rather than canvasing for money or picking up trash.
Also a lot can be team dynamics. A person can be a great worker but for whatever reason a few other team members decided that they don't like talking to them. So they are never included in conversations aren't seen as helpful when problems come up etc. But is it due to a real personality fault in that employee or that employee just having a different way of communicating, work style heck even extra curricular interests can come into play (people will generally go to the person that they can chat with for a half hour about the latest sports drama than the guy that is say a dungeon master (when sports are their interest and not role playing) or vis versa). That is part of the issue with remote work that needs to be considered not just individual work performance but how well will the team communicate without the queues you get from in person interaction? It can work and it can not work but you need to at least leave the option of going back to a work from the office model if the telecommute doesn't work for the employee (or you find other people's performance goes down because they aren't as available for helping out with random questions etc).
ah there is the rub. In a few places I've worked they insisted that training be something relevant for your existing position. So that ruled out things like taking an ITIL course if you weren't a manager etc. But then when you tried to take a course in something you were already supposed to know (like your particular flavor of networking gear or Solaris) they'd pretty much say: oh it hasn't change just read the manual. Or isn't there an free online "course" you can take? So the education "benefit" essentially wasn't useful.
What has happened in most of these cases either in IT or in other technical fields is the lower level technicans got sent away for course because it was required for them to be able to service equipment without voiding warantees. So college guy gets a 6k Apple repair course no problem, me as the server/network admin am supposed to just read the manual. Oh and my "education benefit" got appropriated to top up the college guys training budget to pay for his course. Nice. Current job the lowest end of guys in my department get about a month of off site training at a cost of about 20k a year. The really senior people get one conference a year which are always somewhere nice (ski resorts, Vegas etc). The people in the middle? Read the freaking manual.
How about use those situations where you have no choice to get used to it? Suffering though crappy hardware just because it is there doesn't seem like a good solution.
The thing is the building volume generally doesn't grow with the cube of it's height. Generally people want windows in every room/work area (even cube dwellers generally have one wall that has windows in their area) which limits you to a rectangular base with on side relatively narrow (essentially two room widths wide by however long you want at the base). But yeah a mix is going to be best it just doesn't make sense to me to be planning on paving the desert with panels or wind farms before you have saturated the available roofs (and for new buildings at least consider wall treatments as well).
Solar does someone scale with building size. There are materials now that can be applied to windows for solar generation too. Of course in a forest of skyscrapers you get a bunch of shade but at the moment there are only ~15 cities in the world with more than 100 of these buildings and even there the vast majority of the city is still probably 20 stories or less (which with a road in between would probably mean a lot of the building across the street is out of shade).
Peoples mentality might change but there still is about 50% of the worlds population living in rural areas and even those in urban areas a lot of them aren't living in dense cores so you'll always have sprawling buildings. Factories are another issue: most people don't want multistory factories. Regardless the sprawl needed for solar is much less because you can overlap generation with buildings and the W/m^2 is much higher.
Another idea I have (living in cold climate) would be enclosed parking garages (not necessarily multistory I mean just inclosing the suburban parking lot) with a relatively light weight roof (probably need something like a shed to have enough rigidity) and cover the sucker with solar. Cars get sheltered from snow rain etc so less crap weather for owners to walk through. The parking lot would likely last longer because it wouldn't be exposed to the elements and need to be plowed all the time. The solar could be provided to the cars as charging stations: free/cheap charging for customers would both be a perk to shop and an incentive for people to get solar/hybrid cars.
On that end basic computer hardware is probably more relevant. Having a clue how cache (just at a high level) works, hardware interrupts, rough orders of magnitude differences between network, HDD, RAM register access etc. It then doesn't just apply to building your own software but having a rough idea how your phone, computer, console, computer controlled factory equipment etc works. It is the equivalent of learning mechanics and optics in the yearly 20th century. Software is nice but ultimately it is instructions and still having no clue how the instructions work because you don't get hardware makes things bad (bad coders, and people with no "physical" intuition as to how systems work).
Well to be fair a lot likely the majority of people don't work for software companies as coders. So it is less of a problem for the Google, MS, Apples of the world to be very selective because either the scale of the systems or the number of users makes the use of rockstars nice. The journeymen can find more than enough work making reports, dashboards, websites etc for companies in all the other industries.
The challenge I find in company work on the other hand is you compete with every other Joe in the office. Joe over here has a degree in psycology but did some progrmaming in R, okay lets have him make something too. It ends up watering down the quality of the jobs so that you end up being + programming when you have time. You end up with either bad programmers making stuff you have to use, or a large part of the job being something that you don't want to be doing. At least that has been my experience both inside of the "IT shed" and as a technical resource at a program/department level. In the IT shed you become a programmer, oh except can you keep the SQL running? Write ad hoc queries, install the client software, create the user accounts etc. In the department level you end up being "the fix it guy" plus build the tools you use. At least that has been my experience.
Anyways, the work is there it is just that even the journeymen want the rockstar jobs but there are only ~300k or so positions for devs in all the rockstar companies vs probably 50M devs.
At least in Canada it is more likely to be skilled trades than programming. About a third of us have university degrees. More have some university, than you have the dumb and generally lazy, or smart but can't be bothered. All leads to a lot of people with some programming experience but not a lot of people that can fix your sink.
Just because a particular field is popular and pays well doesn't mean we should encourage EVERYONE to do it. Just like the invention of the car (didn't, though did more than it should have IMHO) mean that everyone should work directly or indirectly on cars. You only need so much transportation before you get the people and things to where they need to be and then need to do something else, similarly computers aren't going to do away with the need for physical goods and people that can fix them.
How long could you exploit deserts before you'd have environmentalists (probably rightly) complaining that we are destroying habitat for particular animals/plants? I think solar is much better currently capture ~30% of the solar energy vs a portion of the 0.25% of solar energy that ends up as wind. It scales with communities (as you build more buildings you have more roofs to put solar on) vs available space shrinking as the suburbs move farther and farther out and finally it is the minimum distance to at least some of the load on the power grid (ie sitting on top of a house). We'd still need more power than that probably which would require other power sources but solar should definitely be in the mix. Just for power density reasons I don't see how wind beats solar other than in areas with very little sun but lots of wind. Wind is the peaker plants of the green energy mix.
Actually natural gas is the cheapest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source and probably will remain so with all the new sources available due to fracking. It is ~30% more expensive to generate from either oil or coal. But generally your right. It will be a long time before generating something from incoming energy (the sun) will be cheaper than getting something that was stored from the same energy source but combined over millions of years essentially with a straw and a pump similar to how the quickest way to get rich is to rob a bank. Doesn't make it a good idea but ...
Oh and since only 0.25% of sun energy becomes wind solar is better, if you can get say 30% efficiency out of 97.5% you'll do a lot better than 100% (which would never happen either) of 0.25%. You'd need a lot less land, can overlap on roofs for example (I don't want something that by definition catches wind fixed to my roof in a storm) which means your production can scale by number of dwellings vs actually being subtracted from as more land is used for housing.
Exactly and the bottom 6B people will want to live just like we do now or better roughly 2-3X more power usage globally. This is assuming the entire surface is used for a wind farm which realistically will never happen.
Hurricanes tend to come from the ocean, likely well away from convenient places to put wind farms. You can have some off shore but how far do you go before you can't just build supports but have to make an oil rig sized thing for a couple turbines?
Well supposedly (according to one of the posts in the comments on the original article) only 0.25% of that energy (250TW) gets turned into wind. So you'd be taking About 7% of the total. But relistically a lot of the wind will be effectively unusable: in the middle of the desert surrounded by people that can't afford things that need power, in the middle of the ocean etc. Think hot summer day with say 20% less breeze (you presumably live in a populated area right near where they are going to want to plop these wind farms down). It sucks already, lack of wind could make it suck more (though a gas fired plant produces heat from energy that was normally sequestered so contributes to net heating the "am I hot" factor might be in its favor).
Wii came out after XBox 360 it was essentially a cheap next gen console with a novel interface. Kinect kicks Wii's but (why have a controller when you can use your body?). This time around they came out first with a relatively low powered machine. I suspect hardcore gamers are waiting to see how much better the graphics will be on the "real" consoles that are pending. The rumor mill and existence of kinect kind of did away with the expectation that Wii U would be novel and the casual gamer market by now have all moved over to smart phones and tablets.
Okay so malware might be more appropriate. See for example: http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/security/vunix.html though (albeit a bit old). Vulnerabilities exist in UNIX and a large set of things can be expected to be on a lot of other systems (eg. Apache, Perl, bash etc), so find an open interface to something and a corresponding vulnerability and away you go. Malware doesn't have to rely on peer to peer replication: they effect a server and the visitors "do it to themselves" afterwards.
Also: the dude that coined the term for virus did his research on UNIX so viruses are clearly possible on UNIX if rare.
Good points on a lot of it. I can get the UAC for network connection though. If you download a office suite say and it tries to connect to the internet you might be suspicious. I think it is a good idea for users to know what applications use the network especially since a lot/most people have metered internet connections so you are paying for that traffic.
Visual settings: agreed and should be per login based (not sure if they are or not). Apple has a better solution here for preferences: show the preferences and make the user click on the lock to unlock the particular setting for changes. users don't accidentally change things, settings that you need to know even if you aren't an administrator can be shown etc. Heck I have work PCs I can't double click on the time on the desktop to see the calendar because I don't have sufficient privileges to change the time. It is assumed that you want to change the time when you can have other reasons for wanting to see the calendar (or the second hand on the clock for example). Generally unless things are changing don't prompt the user.
This is a general challenge with free societies (democracies etc). A small vocal minority can control the framing of issues and you can end up with a choice between
1) Guns and freedom.
2) No guns and no freedom.
Or whatever combo of polarizing issues. This makes me want to go back to ancient Greece (Thebes?) where democracy didn't mean voting it meant participation. Leaders were drawn by lot you had to serve if chosen or forfeited your citizenship (which is a fair balance between rights and obligations to your country IMHO vs vote if you feel like it, and for whoever has the most "trustworthy" face we currently have). Not sure if it would be better or worse but would be worth a shot. The alternative that we've seemed to settle for is:
1) Those that want power can run
2) To get power you need lots of money so generally you are rich and have rich friends
3) You almost always have to be a part of a major party and toe the party line rather than have independent thought on each of the issues you face
4) Generally you have to be from a "respected" profession (doctor, lawyer, business owner)
These leads to a disproportionate representation of the monied, socially talented, and professional classes in government. Shy people: don't count, poor people, don't count, people with moderate opinions that aren't easily worded as "contrasting" sound bites to distinguish you from your competitor don't get elected etc.
With a large enough body of randomly chosen representatives you get a true cross section of the population, "parties" are represented proportionately, people don't owe favors to the people that got them into power, they aren't coming in necessarily with a "better idea" of how the money should be allocated (usually my business/industry or my special interest friends) and even if they do the chances of having say all the pro-choice guys coming in with the same favors owed to the same groups is much lower, people actually have to discuss issues and think rather than cling to the accepted opinion (even worse in Canada where I'm from where you have a party whip to make sure you vote the right way and can be expelled from your party for voting otherwise).
Well something like 80% of BSOD issues were driver based (talk from a while back in XP days) but that didn't stop MS from getting the blame. A company can encourage other vendors to make good stuff but they can't force customers to apply the blame correctly when 3rd parties fail. It is fair game for MS to say "we've been hacked and yeah our Macs got hacked too" if it is true. It is also in their best interest to make sure that their competitors get included in the sound bits about the problem (and the source of the problem too of course) so that they don't get stuck with all the blame.
Or a less evil way of thinking about it is that MS didn't want to say "yeah we have the problem too" without pointing out that it isn't just them having the problem but it is Apple products too. Keep in mind every time a company discloses things they lose control over how it will be presented. If their statement doesn't include that it is Apple hardware/software too (or at least implies that it might have been) what might end up as the head line is "MS hacked" with no mention of Apple at all leaving MS looking like crap and a lot of people that don't give to turds about OS X saying "man when will MS learn". It could be evil (might even likely be evil) trying to deflect the blame but it can be the opposite too making sure you don't get tainted with all the blame for something that is a common problem.
I got into a bit of a flame war back and forth with a guy when the Java vulnerability first appeared. He said it would only affect PCs since viruses don't work on Mac or Linux. I called bs he responded with "they use different filesystems, learn something before spewing off at the mouth." To which I replied: 1) this is a browser based attack and 2) do you think a hacker can't figure out /home/bob rather than \Users\bob? My God the things people come up with. All three platforms now have a request for elevation kind of mechanism that is supposed to protect you. The problem is for 90% of users a UNC prompt or its mac/linux equivalent pops up and they click ok. To most users the fingers go in the ears as soon as you try to explain the risks and what is happening and they just ask "So what do I need to click to continue?" This is more a mental problem then a technological one and I don't see any likely solution. Sandboxing like Win 8 Modern can help where you at least in theory make no app able to see each other directly or even the whole of the filesystem but there are just too many use cases where being able to browse all the filesystem, one app needs to get something from anothers space etc that are needed.