In a lot of fertilizers for gardern and lawn use it, but not farms. Farms are not allowed, at least in Iowa, to use industrial phosphorus. They use ammonia, manure, and limestone (antacid). There is no way farmers could get away will the amount or type of fertilizer that is allowed on lawns and gardens in suburbia. But its never suburbia's problem, they have too much voting power.
I know where you are coming from. I'm in my last year of college. Taking summer classes so I can get out in four years which isn't easy in a nuclear engineering program. But state level student loans weren't available this summer so they directed me to nonstandard student loans like those you see on TV or are offered by just about every bank you see on campus selling credit cards. They wanted 10% interest. Luckly I have credit history and have a credit card with 8% interest and a job to pay some of it off. But living on credit cards means I cut everything. And now I am arguing with my roommates to cut $60 a month cable and $50 a month internet since we can get campus wireless at the apartment. But yeah, 1 cup of noodles a day is what I am eating. I have $3500 plus a 15hr/wk job to pay for rent, tuition, books, a car payment and everything else for 4 months.
I am using KDE 4.0, yeah its rough, yeah some basic functionality isn't there. And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller.
However, despite all the failures, which I believe will come around, KDE is really moving to the next step and once the polish is applied it will outshine the rest. A desktop were apps of every shape and color can be integrated. Where the best ideas don't have to be accepted by the head developers, customization, and opening the doors to open source even further. It is a place were truly original ways to organize data and display information will come. It is were we will begin to move beyond just making a windows 3.1 gui more fancy and with more features. I think these are worthy goals. I put up with the annoyances now because I want to be part of it. I think it will be big.
But seriously, developers, start getting functionality working. You have to get people to use it. The widgets will come but you need functionality to get people to use it. No drag and drop for icons on the desktop, can't move around widgets in the bottom bar, right clicking doesn't give you widget specific options. And when they do, it is very limited, like the digitial clock being set to 12 hour time. I know these aren't sexy to work on, but nothing else matters if this isn't done.
Lastly, what I think will make the biggest appeal is making kde install easy on vista. People hate the vista interface, but have to have it for the new stuff underneath like directx 10. If you can make kde4 stable and install smooth on vista, you will have a firefox style pickup of it.
They are "huge and bulky" because that is what is efficient. A smaller power plant is less efficient especially for nuclear since its main cost is human resources. Having to have a team of engineers for a small plant cost almost as much as for a large plant. That is why you see a lot of multiple cores at single sites.
BTW, there are very small reactors that are designed for something like a small town in Alaska and also ones for ships.
And the reason there are a lot of small plants in the last 20 years or so is that the rate of electricity demand is growing slowly and large plants that won't be fully needed for several years weren't as profitable as something smaller albeit less efficient.
However, that is changing as many companies want to replace groups of smaller plants with a large ones. That and the 'why have anything else' natural gas power plants of the nineties now operate often at a lost and are run only when needed. And the reactors are only getting bigger, not because people still think in the stone age, but because that is what they are being called for. France wants all the power it can get per reactor, they just sell the excess to Germany who is having issues with a stable power grid. South Africa wants 23 gigawatts, China wants 50 gigawatts, Texas 15, UK 20, etc. And they are willing to pay for it, because over its lifespan there are very very few plants that aren't profitable at any scale and many much more profitable than originally thought, look at entrgy and exelon profits in the last few quarters.
And a large system of many small plants are have great reliability in terms of having some power, but are very poor at consistent power. Germany and Denmark are good examples of nations with many small plants and they depend heavily on other nations power systems as a back up.
Buying out all of the competition does give you more market share, but that isn't going to last. You buy up Yahoo and not everyone is going to go from yahoo to msn. There is a reason people don't use msn even though it is defaulted on most computers. They go out of their way to avoid msn. And even if they take down every major search engine, how long will it be before some new idea comes roaring out of nowhere into dominance? That said, I think Yahoo is outdated. It is built around getting everything from one source, which was popular with dial up as it took so long to search, but not anymore.
So I say to the yahoo shareholders, sell sell sell. If you don't, start redesigning or you will loss more money.
And long live the all night hackers, dorm room brain storms, and tinkers. Brings whats next. Cus, I can guarantee we will not see much innovation from Microsoft.
Nuclear engineer talking here. Here is the benefit: Radiation exposure to Americans has more than doubled in the past 15 years. Despite fallout amounts from aerial tests dropping and the power industry getting more and more strict about radiation leakage. The exposure is overwhelmingly coming from the medical industry. I will say that if I had to choose between radiation exposure to lower risk from the cancer i would take it. However, the same reason to stop aerial atomic tests and nuclear industry applies here: ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Possible). Proton treatments have less radiation exposure to healthy tissue. There are two issues with X-rays you deal with here. First, electromagnetic radiation causes a lot of energy to be deposited anytime density changes, that means a lot of radiation exposure to the skin, a rapidly dividing tissue and thus higher risk of causing skin cancer. And then you have uniform energy deposit through the tissue. So get enough energy to the tumor, X-rays have to deposit a lot of energy in healthy tissue. Particle radiation deposits energy differently. There is relatively little radiation deposited until the particle slows down to a certain energy ( about 800 keV for protons). Then the particle deposits 90% of its energy in a short distance. So with a particle accelerator, you can design a range of energies to give the protons to deposit the same amount of energy as X-rays to the tumor, but much much less to healthy tissue. This reduces the risk significantly of skin cancer developing later in life due to this treatment and somewhat less in other tissues. The question comes here comes down to what is reasonable. Is it reasonable to spend three times as much money to lower cancer risk.1%. When applied to a large population that might mean 1 more death a year in this nation. Is preventing one death worth causing thousands of people to pay thousands of dollars more. An engineer would say no, that money can save many more from starvation, but a human being find it hard to choose to cause a death.
Right, cus wind, light, waves, bateria just magically inject energy into our power grid. We just have to ask them nicely. Although 'renewables' don't use fuel as it is defined, they use plenty of material. Everything to get energy will require material (maybe this will be not true in some far future with force fields and what not) but to be realistic, we need material to get energy. Wind needs large amounts of metal, plastic, fiberglass. Solar needs silicon. Bateria needs giant green houses of steel and glass. And then you add in the second law of thermodynamics, the ugly reality of the universe that most people don't understand, and the material will break down. Thus waste is created. 'Renewables' need no fuel, but create plenty of waste. The wind generaters dont' last forever, and then they will need to recycled (although much of it can not be) and resmelted. Smelting metal makes a lot of nasty air chemicals. Silicon is a huge enivormental issue. And eventaully anything that a 'renewable' source relies on for construction will no longer be able to be mined. So every Earth bound energy source is finite. As built now, some of the resources needed for wind generaters aren't going to last the century. Also there is a lot of waste in wiring with renewables. A large grid of renewable resources could produce the power needed continuously, but you would need to move a large amount of power a large distance, from where the wind blows to where it doesn't. And that will take a much large power grid. And power grids are made out of large towers, wires, transformers, etc. A large grid creates more waste and demands more material.
What is good about nuclear power, is that we know the waste amounts and longevity up front. We (I am a nuclear engineer) contain ALL of the waste and although the waste from 'renewables' is much much less than fossil fuels and is desirable compared to it, it is more waste than nuclear. And the chemicals dont' have a half life. Spent fuel might take awhile to degrade, but it is safe eventually, you can't say the same for chemical processes. And to reprocess the chemicals with a chemical fuel source violates that second law again. Humans live in a chemical world, we need a nuclear source to over come the second law effectively for a long time.
Nothing is forever, but we should try to push as long as we can, and nuclear is the only one that can say what that length is. All others depend on too many factors and it can't be determined. And that is a little scary to depend on something that we don't know how long it can sustain us. Look at oil now compared to the turn of the last century. Many factors that made it attractive are ended and to figure anything out with oil now is nearly impossible.
That being said, the nuclear industry can not get defensive about renewables. They are a great advance over fossil fuels. Although it would be great to make a France like system here in the US, it isn't going to be possible in the next few decades. The issue isn't resources in money or uranium, there isn't enough man power. Not enough engineers and trained people to expand that fast. Thus even in an social-political enviroment that decided to go all nuke, we can't get there until at least 2040. Thus renewables need to be pushed as well for the time being. Anything to get off coal is good at this point.
I agree with you that the Linux development needs to be continued. They need to get the codecs in for one. I am more than able to do that myself. But if I am trying to get someone else to look at them, it is hard to say, yeah, and after you get it, let me finish installing everything. I buy one, but with better support and a more complete out of the box experience, I could sell 8 of them. Dell has a huge opportunity here, which is hiring the Linux evangelists as a sales team, but it is going to require a complete system out of the box, not out of the box and a few websites. Also, they need to continue to show that they are committed to this by offering a new computer setup, or deals, even if it is a minor thing like free shipping, every once in awhile. It also needs a link from the home page. It shows average users, that this isn't a weird alley of Dell's website, but a legitimate part of Dell that they believe and will support and are not just throwing meat to OSS dogs.
But price I think is not a big thing. Yeah, keep costs down and be competitive, but Linux can beat Windows even if the costs are the same as long as Dell uses everything Linux has and are not scared of Ballmer's ramblings about patents. Take the $50 you save and put it towards developing or as a lawsuit war chest so you can put in everything that will make Ubuntu run as well as it can.
Always put up with it? To a point, but soon that hurdle of switching to something else seems worth it when time and time again MS does something to make computing more difficult for the end user. And that hurdle is getting smaller all the time. And I am not talking theoretical nonsense. I work for a library at a large university and it is become unbelievably hard to maintain a large fleet of public computers. Genuine Advantage has broken our update scripts causes massive manual updates to be needed, and they continue to change this, with no guarantee that the next patch Tuesday will or will not require a different process. On top of that, to build an image using MS's own sysprep, has about a 80% failure rate! It can take up to two months to fulling update an image that we know will always boot up correctly on all the computers we use (and we only have three different models).
Then there is vista. Right now, hardware requirements aside, it is not ready for mass use. It isn't stable enough for 4 guys to keep 150 public machines running. We would probably need about 15 people. And if SP1 fixes these issues, there is still the hardware side. Maybe we have been spoiled with the fact that 5 year old computers could use the newest software, but that is the way it is set up now. We use computers that are 5 years old, and older for specialized systems, and we can't go back to the university and say, "oh, well MS needs more hardware, so we need to double the computer funding." So as Vista stands now, it would be about 3-4 years before the entire group of computers will run it well enough that busy college students can use it. MS has stated quite clearly that XP will not be supported that long. So soon we may not have any choice but to leave windows.
And it may not be that long. I have already been handed a project to evaluate the ability for linux to be used on public computers. The requirements are IE7 and Office 2007 working as well as "All media in books in the library are readable." The last requirement isn't going to be hard. But even if the only way to do that is to set them up with VMware that runs a downloaded workstation of windows, it will probably be much easier to send out a new workstation file than do the updates required from MS. And when linux is running for free on all the public desktops, albeit in the background, how long it is going to be before wine can get IE7 and O2007 working along side the free variants and the university says "Why are we paying a Windows site license?"
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In a lot of fertilizers for gardern and lawn use it, but not farms. Farms are not allowed, at least in Iowa, to use industrial phosphorus. They use ammonia, manure, and limestone (antacid). There is no way farmers could get away will the amount or type of fertilizer that is allowed on lawns and gardens in suburbia. But its never suburbia's problem, they have too much voting power.
I know where you are coming from. I'm in my last year of college. Taking summer classes so I can get out in four years which isn't easy in a nuclear engineering program. But state level student loans weren't available this summer so they directed me to nonstandard student loans like those you see on TV or are offered by just about every bank you see on campus selling credit cards. They wanted 10% interest. Luckly I have credit history and have a credit card with 8% interest and a job to pay some of it off. But living on credit cards means I cut everything. And now I am arguing with my roommates to cut $60 a month cable and $50 a month internet since we can get campus wireless at the apartment. But yeah, 1 cup of noodles a day is what I am eating. I have $3500 plus a 15hr/wk job to pay for rent, tuition, books, a car payment and everything else for 4 months.
I am using KDE 4.0, yeah its rough, yeah some basic functionality isn't there. And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller.
However, despite all the failures, which I believe will come around, KDE is really moving to the next step and once the polish is applied it will outshine the rest. A desktop were apps of every shape and color can be integrated. Where the best ideas don't have to be accepted by the head developers, customization, and opening the doors to open source even further. It is a place were truly original ways to organize data and display information will come. It is were we will begin to move beyond just making a windows 3.1 gui more fancy and with more features. I think these are worthy goals. I put up with the annoyances now because I want to be part of it. I think it will be big.
But seriously, developers, start getting functionality working. You have to get people to use it. The widgets will come but you need functionality to get people to use it. No drag and drop for icons on the desktop, can't move around widgets in the bottom bar, right clicking doesn't give you widget specific options. And when they do, it is very limited, like the digitial clock being set to 12 hour time. I know these aren't sexy to work on, but nothing else matters if this isn't done.
Lastly, what I think will make the biggest appeal is making kde install easy on vista. People hate the vista interface, but have to have it for the new stuff underneath like directx 10. If you can make kde4 stable and install smooth on vista, you will have a firefox style pickup of it.
They are "huge and bulky" because that is what is efficient. A smaller power plant is less efficient especially for nuclear since its main cost is human resources. Having to have a team of engineers for a small plant cost almost as much as for a large plant. That is why you see a lot of multiple cores at single sites.
BTW, there are very small reactors that are designed for something like a small town in Alaska and also ones for ships.
And the reason there are a lot of small plants in the last 20 years or so is that the rate of electricity demand is growing slowly and large plants that won't be fully needed for several years weren't as profitable as something smaller albeit less efficient.
However, that is changing as many companies want to replace groups of smaller plants with a large ones. That and the 'why have anything else' natural gas power plants of the nineties now operate often at a lost and are run only when needed. And the reactors are only getting bigger, not because people still think in the stone age, but because that is what they are being called for. France wants all the power it can get per reactor, they just sell the excess to Germany who is having issues with a stable power grid. South Africa wants 23 gigawatts, China wants 50 gigawatts, Texas 15, UK 20, etc. And they are willing to pay for it, because over its lifespan there are very very few plants that aren't profitable at any scale and many much more profitable than originally thought, look at entrgy and exelon profits in the last few quarters.
And a large system of many small plants are have great reliability in terms of having some power, but are very poor at consistent power. Germany and Denmark are good examples of nations with many small plants and they depend heavily on other nations power systems as a back up.
Buying out all of the competition does give you more market share, but that isn't going to last. You buy up Yahoo and not everyone is going to go from yahoo to msn. There is a reason people don't use msn even though it is defaulted on most computers. They go out of their way to avoid msn. And even if they take down every major search engine, how long will it be before some new idea comes roaring out of nowhere into dominance? That said, I think Yahoo is outdated. It is built around getting everything from one source, which was popular with dial up as it took so long to search, but not anymore. So I say to the yahoo shareholders, sell sell sell. If you don't, start redesigning or you will loss more money. And long live the all night hackers, dorm room brain storms, and tinkers. Brings whats next. Cus, I can guarantee we will not see much innovation from Microsoft.
Nuclear engineer talking here. Here is the benefit: .1%. When applied to a large population that might mean 1 more death a year in this nation. Is preventing one death worth causing thousands of people to pay thousands of dollars more. An engineer would say no, that money can save many more from starvation, but a human being find it hard to choose to cause a death.
Radiation exposure to Americans has more than doubled in the past 15 years. Despite fallout amounts from aerial tests dropping and the power industry getting more and more strict about radiation leakage. The exposure is overwhelmingly coming from the medical industry. I will say that if I had to choose between radiation exposure to lower risk from the cancer i would take it. However, the same reason to stop aerial atomic tests and nuclear industry applies here: ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Possible). Proton treatments have less radiation exposure to healthy tissue.
There are two issues with X-rays you deal with here. First, electromagnetic radiation causes a lot of energy to be deposited anytime density changes, that means a lot of radiation exposure to the skin, a rapidly dividing tissue and thus higher risk of causing skin cancer. And then you have uniform energy deposit through the tissue. So get enough energy to the tumor, X-rays have to deposit a lot of energy in healthy tissue.
Particle radiation deposits energy differently. There is relatively little radiation deposited until the particle slows down to a certain energy ( about 800 keV for protons). Then the particle deposits 90% of its energy in a short distance. So with a particle accelerator, you can design a range of energies to give the protons to deposit the same amount of energy as X-rays to the tumor, but much much less to healthy tissue. This reduces the risk significantly of skin cancer developing later in life due to this treatment and somewhat less in other tissues.
The question comes here comes down to what is reasonable. Is it reasonable to spend three times as much money to lower cancer risk
Right, cus wind, light, waves, bateria just magically inject energy into our power grid. We just have to ask them nicely. Although 'renewables' don't use fuel as it is defined, they use plenty of material. Everything to get energy will require material (maybe this will be not true in some far future with force fields and what not) but to be realistic, we need material to get energy. Wind needs large amounts of metal, plastic, fiberglass. Solar needs silicon. Bateria needs giant green houses of steel and glass. And then you add in the second law of thermodynamics, the ugly reality of the universe that most people don't understand, and the material will break down. Thus waste is created. 'Renewables' need no fuel, but create plenty of waste. The wind generaters dont' last forever, and then they will need to recycled (although much of it can not be) and resmelted. Smelting metal makes a lot of nasty air chemicals. Silicon is a huge enivormental issue. And eventaully anything that a 'renewable' source relies on for construction will no longer be able to be mined. So every Earth bound energy source is finite. As built now, some of the resources needed for wind generaters aren't going to last the century. Also there is a lot of waste in wiring with renewables. A large grid of renewable resources could produce the power needed continuously, but you would need to move a large amount of power a large distance, from where the wind blows to where it doesn't. And that will take a much large power grid. And power grids are made out of large towers, wires, transformers, etc. A large grid creates more waste and demands more material.
What is good about nuclear power, is that we know the waste amounts and longevity up front. We (I am a nuclear engineer) contain ALL of the waste and although the waste from 'renewables' is much much less than fossil fuels and is desirable compared to it, it is more waste than nuclear. And the chemicals dont' have a half life. Spent fuel might take awhile to degrade, but it is safe eventually, you can't say the same for chemical processes. And to reprocess the chemicals with a chemical fuel source violates that second law again. Humans live in a chemical world, we need a nuclear source to over come the second law effectively for a long time.
Nothing is forever, but we should try to push as long as we can, and nuclear is the only one that can say what that length is. All others depend on too many factors and it can't be determined. And that is a little scary to depend on something that we don't know how long it can sustain us. Look at oil now compared to the turn of the last century. Many factors that made it attractive are ended and to figure anything out with oil now is nearly impossible.
That being said, the nuclear industry can not get defensive about renewables. They are a great advance over fossil fuels. Although it would be great to make a France like system here in the US, it isn't going to be possible in the next few decades. The issue isn't resources in money or uranium, there isn't enough man power. Not enough engineers and trained people to expand that fast. Thus even in an social-political enviroment that decided to go all nuke, we can't get there until at least 2040. Thus renewables need to be pushed as well for the time being. Anything to get off coal is good at this point.
I agree with you that the Linux development needs to be continued. They need to get the codecs in for one. I am more than able to do that myself. But if I am trying to get someone else to look at them, it is hard to say, yeah, and after you get it, let me finish installing everything. I buy one, but with better support and a more complete out of the box experience, I could sell 8 of them. Dell has a huge opportunity here, which is hiring the Linux evangelists as a sales team, but it is going to require a complete system out of the box, not out of the box and a few websites. Also, they need to continue to show that they are committed to this by offering a new computer setup, or deals, even if it is a minor thing like free shipping, every once in awhile. It also needs a link from the home page. It shows average users, that this isn't a weird alley of Dell's website, but a legitimate part of Dell that they believe and will support and are not just throwing meat to OSS dogs. But price I think is not a big thing. Yeah, keep costs down and be competitive, but Linux can beat Windows even if the costs are the same as long as Dell uses everything Linux has and are not scared of Ballmer's ramblings about patents. Take the $50 you save and put it towards developing or as a lawsuit war chest so you can put in everything that will make Ubuntu run as well as it can.
Always put up with it? To a point, but soon that hurdle of switching to something else seems worth it when time and time again MS does something to make computing more difficult for the end user. And that hurdle is getting smaller all the time. And I am not talking theoretical nonsense. I work for a library at a large university and it is become unbelievably hard to maintain a large fleet of public computers. Genuine Advantage has broken our update scripts causes massive manual updates to be needed, and they continue to change this, with no guarantee that the next patch Tuesday will or will not require a different process. On top of that, to build an image using MS's own sysprep, has about a 80% failure rate! It can take up to two months to fulling update an image that we know will always boot up correctly on all the computers we use (and we only have three different models). Then there is vista. Right now, hardware requirements aside, it is not ready for mass use. It isn't stable enough for 4 guys to keep 150 public machines running. We would probably need about 15 people. And if SP1 fixes these issues, there is still the hardware side. Maybe we have been spoiled with the fact that 5 year old computers could use the newest software, but that is the way it is set up now. We use computers that are 5 years old, and older for specialized systems, and we can't go back to the university and say, "oh, well MS needs more hardware, so we need to double the computer funding." So as Vista stands now, it would be about 3-4 years before the entire group of computers will run it well enough that busy college students can use it. MS has stated quite clearly that XP will not be supported that long. So soon we may not have any choice but to leave windows. And it may not be that long. I have already been handed a project to evaluate the ability for linux to be used on public computers. The requirements are IE7 and Office 2007 working as well as "All media in books in the library are readable." The last requirement isn't going to be hard. But even if the only way to do that is to set them up with VMware that runs a downloaded workstation of windows, it will probably be much easier to send out a new workstation file than do the updates required from MS. And when linux is running for free on all the public desktops, albeit in the background, how long it is going to be before wine can get IE7 and O2007 working along side the free variants and the university says "Why are we paying a Windows site license?"