Why didn't you use perl instead of PHP? It seems to have all the advantages mentioned above and I would think it would be better suited to the task.
I know perl is out of vouge these days but I think it's highly under-rated. Does it have such a bad name that people actually avoiding it for projects that it would be good for?
Companies can break out that stick and you bet I'd comply in a heartbeat rather than lose my paycheck.
Of course, we can keep one-upping this: Since this is a democracy (at least where I live. err.. well.. republic but that's close) we can outlaw certain behavior on 'machines dedicated to the sole use of one employee' like installing any software or accessing any private documents without informing the employee ahead of time each time such an access takes place. Wouldn't that be a giant mess.
It's best to keep things friendly and for both sides to respect the other.
I'm a little special in that I work from my home office so if I have trouble with a machine I can't just call an admin to come over and fix it. I'm responsible for keeping my machines working, not them, so I need admin privs. Of course, the company I work for now openly installs keysroke logging software when they want to and set's the machines up so they periotically install software and spontaneously reboot losing whatever work you've done. They also hand out laptops but set them up so explorer regularly locks up for minutes at a time when they aren't connected to the corperate network (worse than useless people set
I simply prefer have the machine I spend most of my time in front of to be *my* machine. So far, this hasn't been an issue at any of the companies I've worked for, large or small. If my company were unwilling to allow the machine they give me to be mine, I would most likely simply use a machine that was mine. I can't imagine a company realistically forbidding that unless there's a national security issue involved or something of the sort.
It's their computer, they can decide how you use it.
If it's their computer, they can use it. I'll do work on a machine that only I have access to. If they are unwilling to provide one, I have plenty of my own I can use.
See, two can play at that "it's all simply really" game. It's not simple. I expect privacy on whatever machine I use. I expect nobody is recording the passwords I type in to access my machine at home with a keystroke logger. I expect that nobody is screen scraping my bank account numbers when I check that my paycheck actually got deposited on Friday. I expect privacy on my computer, period, and no amount of "technically, they own it" makes it any less wrong for them to do these things or insist on being able to do these things. If it's dedicated to my sole use, you have no business poking around in there without my permission.
Granted, anyone who locks company admin's out of their machine should not expect any help when something goes wrong. The people for whom that is not a problem are a relatively small population in the total work force who uses computers and thus the typical company's policy is appropriate for most of it's employees but if you have programmers working for you, do yourself a favor and let them have free reign of their machines. You'll get happier, more productive employees. Programming is a job that requires a lot of creativity and nothing squashes creativity faster than forced conformity.
Actually, the copper bars are because of the low voltage not the DC. At 12V the current has to be 10 times as high as at 120V. Have you seen 150 amp AC wires? Look in the breaker box in your house, behind the front pannel at the wires that come in from the power company. Odds are they are 100-200 amp and very big. To efficiently transmit the hight currents you need need big wires. Also, 12V AC is higher voltage than 12V DC. The 12V is RMS, not peak. Peek is arround 160V so the insulation needs to be thicker.
AC won back in the day because you could make effiicent, cheap, transformers and run motors and lights with it (the primary uses of electricity at the time.) Now we have highly efficient DC-DC voltage converters and huge rooms full of computers that are entirely DC. A DC power standard would be good. 48V is usually concidered the right way to go, its enough to zap you but has a hard time killing you and eficient enough to run most computers.
I'd like to see power supplies that would work off of both 48V DC and 120V AC. It would be great for Telco based ISP's where the power is already all 48V DC and has to be converted up to 120 AC just to be converted back to DC in the computers power supply.
RAID 5 is only really appropriate if you are building a large array. The money you will spend on the controller will make the cost/megabyte higher than RAID 1 unless you are looking for a very big array (more than you can get with a mirrored pair.) I have a RAID 5 array I built about 2 years ago with 4 160GB drives on a 3ware 6000 series RAID controller. It has worked great and I'm planning on using RAID 5 again for my next array. I've only had one drive failure so far but it recovered from it beautifully.
If you are willing to fork out about $1100 for storage you can create a really nice array. I'd recommend a 3Ware 4 port 9000 series controller like the 9500S4LP (around $330) or a RaidCore card reviewed recently over at tomshardware. Add in 4 $180 250GB SATA drives and you have a nice 750 GB array for around $1100. The Promise FastTrack SX6000 is quite economical and supports more drives if you don't mind it's bad performance and crappy Linux support. 8 port cards are also pretty economical but it's hard to put that many drives in most cases. You have to design a system carefully in order to create arrays much bigger than 4 drives.
Once you have your array, it's a good to use Linux or something with a reliable journaling filesystem on top of it. Once you have a RAID array your filesystem becomes a much more important point of failure. Using a reliable one will do a lot towards reducing your likelihood of data loss.
I also use a separate drive with a separate filesystem for backup. I have a script that manages it for me (ignoring certain directories) which runs every night. A RAID array is pretty reliable and a big step up from single drives so it's a good half way point but I wasn't comfortable with it so I went further. How far you go us up to you.
Apparently you don't know much about open source software.
Mozilla, it source code and and it's logos are copyrighted to the Mozilla organization. They retain the copyright and retain all their rights under that copyright. Are they not donating to the Firfox project? By your definition, no open source, copylefted software would be concidered open source.
There is lots of GPL'd software where the art work is not GPL'd. Many logo's are copyrighted to the company and their use is restricted. RedHat's red hat, the Suse Iguana and every other distro's mascot are copyrighted to the company and are not licenced under an open source licence. Even the Debian logo isn't open source. You can see it's licence here. That's just the way it works. Artwork doesn't need to be open sourced to be included with open source software.
The author of Qute took the time to make a theme for Firefox 0.9 and gave it away for free. That is donating his time and talent. The licencing terms don't change that fact. It's also my understanding that he was willing to change his terms but was never asked. Very rude on the part of the Mozilla folks.
Just because it isn't GPL'd doesn't mean it wasn't a help to Firefox. 0.8 was by far the most popular of the Firefox releases and it owes a lot of that success to the excelent Qute theme.
You may not agree with their decision to use Qute in the first place, that doesn't change the fact that they were rude to someone who was supporting their efforts by donating his time and tallent.
I agree. The new theme is HORRIBLE. I even tried the updated qute theme which should make it look more like 0.8 but the icons are huge now, not compact and efficient like they were in 0.8. I don't know about you guys but I don't want half my screen full of highly detailed icons. Qute for 0.8 was great. I went back.
If you liked the theme from 0.8 (qute) better you can download it for 0.9. The author completely revamped qute for 0.9 and it's better than ever.
I don't know about the rest of you but this new theme doesn't look as nice to me. The icon's aren't as detailed or polished and it feels a little clunky compared to the old one.
Also, shame on the Mozilla folks for not letting the Qute author know all his hard work to support their project wouldn't be included.
I still use Windows on my primary desktop but I'm getting less and less attached to it. I do most of my work over an SSH session as well. I have a bunch of machines that run Windows, most of them came with it pre-installed. I stay away from most of the proprietary Windows stuff (Domains/AD, NTFS, etc) and know very little about them.
I recently got an LCD monitor and was forced to upgrade to XP to make it look half decent (2000's font rendoring is horrible on LCD monitors.) Wow was that painful. I don't trust Windows's upgrade tools (seem to leave things slightly broken with no way to back out) so I did a new install. It was the first time I had installed XP and it took a lot of time. Once it was done I was left with a shell of a machine that looked horrible (what kind of heavy drugs were the MS UI guys on) and had no working applications. I had to trick XP into using my old settings from my ntuser.dat file and I've had to reinstall or dig through and import registry settings for tons of programs. I've sunk tons of time into the upgrade and things still are a litte off. I install RedHat and Fedora a lot and I've just gotten used to having a working machine at the end of the install. Dealing with Windows again was annoying and frustrating.
Most of the machines I do work on are Linux boxes running various versions of RedHat. I put Fedora Core 2 on two of them after it came out and I have to say I'm impressed at the progress they have made on desktop usability. I used to think X was always going to be a little slow but Fedora is just as snappy as Windows. XP is seeming more and more like a clunky in comparison.
I don't like supporting an abusive monopoly as well but really I just need to get my job done. I doubt it will be too long before I switch my primary desktop to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if XP was the last Windows I run on my primary desktop.
I agree. While my post was toung-in-cheek, I do believe the nice name is helping spread x.org faster. I, for one, am happy to say goodbye to the XFree86 name forever. It really is hard to type. I'm much happier having to hand edit my xorg.conf file than my XF86Config file and I doubt I'm alone.
They really should rename GIMP. I doubt it will ever get widely used or respected with that name.
All the distro's just like the new name. XFree86 was just too hard to keyboard and sounded funny. xorg.conf is much easier to type than XF86Config. X.org just sounds better, that's why everyone's switching, not because of serious licencing or oranizational issues. (grin)
That depends on the method used to transmit the power. They can get the transmission loss down very low using 1 megavolt DC transmission lines for long haul transmission.
Also, in a nuclear model it's not so much important to worry about the efficiency of a system as the capacity of it. You are essentially making power out of nothing so efficiency isn't as important. If we can eliminate using a coal power plant by building two nuclear plants in Alaska, I say it's worth it.
Governments are hesitant to use them. Only 1 ever has and nobody's used them since. I'm not as worried about that as terrorist organizations. They've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Power is never generated on a large scale where it is needed, we transmit it over power lines. Granted, there are losses in doing this and those losses would be higher if the power was transmitted over such vast distances but that's OK. Just generate more.
The power loss in the current system is estimated at 9%. From what I understand, more than half of that is in local transmission. Even if you tripple the loss from long distance transmission you are only adding about 10% overhead to the system. It seems to me that this system would be many times cheaper than the one it is replacing so it would be well worth it.
I agree that Nuclear power is a good answer that has been overlooked for too long. It never reached it's potential due mostly to PR problems that caused people's deep fear of the technology. Now that we've been living with Nuclear for a long time and it has proven itself much safer than people feared, it might be a good time to take another look at it.
Environmentalists, real environmentalists, should love nuclear power. The problem is most people who call themselves environmentalists aren't. They care more about themselves, their health, their safety and controlling what goes on around them then they do about preserving nature and the environment. They would be more appropriately called "my environment-ists". This guy is right, radiation from nuclear waste poses basically no threat to nature, it's only really a threat to us. Leaving it around on the surface of the earth is a really bad idea, we should dispose of it deep underground, but it illustrates an important point. Nuclear waste is a danger to us, not nature, and it's a danger that we know how to deal with. To continue poisoning the environment the way we are so that we don't have to worry about radioactive waste is irresponsible and selfish.
Secure transport to a disposal site is very important and, in my opinion, the biggest issue with the current system of nuclear power generation. We should be expanding our nuclear power production capabilities but not in the way we built them before. Put them together in large clusters near the disposal site so that you can control access to all aspects of the operation of the pants and disposal of the waste. That way, you don't have to truck radioactive material through every city and town in the country.
I think the US government should build two huge clusters of nuclear power plants. The first cluster should be near enough to Yucca Mountain to facilitate secure transport of the waste without traveling near populated areas. The second one should be in Alaska with it's own waste disposal site if possible. The only way on and off of both should be an air strip. The clusters would be huge sites with restricted airspace and lots of security around dozens of small, well protected reactors. They should be designed so a failure of one would not prevent the operation and maintenance of the others. They should be housed in separate buildings separated by relatively large distances to make it hard for a terrorist attack or nuclear strike to do damage to more than one. Each cluster should be capable of powering the entire US by itself (for security reasons) and each should be able to expand to twice it's initial size to accommodate the inevitable rise in power consumption.
This may seem wildly expensive but if done correctly it could dramatically help the economy of the US. First, we could we cut the huge flow of money out of the country from purchasing oil and also reduce the demand for oil further reducing prices. But also, secondly, if we overbuilt production capability we could sell power to other countries creating a flow of money into the country instead of out. Clusters could be run much more economically than current facilities by sharing resources for engineering, inspection, security, maintenance.
If done correctly, this setup could be much safer than our current system of power generation. People who work at the sites should spend several months working at a time, not commute on and off the base every day to reduce the flow of people in and out and allow for much stricter security as people arrive and leave. The only way in and out should be by plane. There should be an airforce base at each of the two sites to help defend it like they do with other sensitive locations. You could even keep one reactor offline at every time to provide a reference model if anything goes wrong.
An alternative that I've heard about that seems horribly irresponsible is selling and building inexpensive small nuclear reactors all over the world. I heard about a company that
You are sacrificing features now for upgradability. True, often it's worth the tradeoff but don't kid yourself into thinking it's not a tradeoff. Sometimes it's important to have things work well as a package. I can buy a new box later when I want more features. Just give me one box that does it all.
I have 2 ReplayTV's now and they are nice but I'm really starting to get annoyed by the lack of a DVD player inside them. All these devices are trying to be little components in a vastly complicated mess of an entertainment system. Stop that! Be everything. I want to be able to run my whole system with one remote again (and no, a massively complicated universal remote doesn't count.)
Also, it should be networked with little inexpensive "player" modules that people can hook up to their various TV's.
Netscape as a platform was scary to Microsoft but Mozilla as a platform is much scarier. Longhorn's new XAML is a way to lock-in enable the internet, a way to bait companies into making web sites and web pages tied to Windows. Currently Microsoft is in a unusually weak position because most important things that are done with a computer can be done on non-Windows OS's. XAML would lock a whole new generation of people into using Windows.
If Mozilla comes up with an alternative to XAML that works well across all platforms it has the potential to not just thwart Microsoft's new lock-in plans but also drastically increase the ability of cross platform web-based applications and further reduce the differentiation Windows enjoys. Mozilla + Gnome sounds like something we should all be paying attention to.
Actually, I did mean unless you are MS. MS's software is concidered the default. They can claim that their software can't do everything other peoples does but is still better because it's ubiquitous which is an advantage by itself. MS's software can be worse but still perceived as the better option simply because it's MS's.
Linux fanboys can be annoying but I find MS fanboys much more annoying and there are a lot more of them, especially in IT management.
MS's software is often good (I use it constantly) but Linux's software is also good and has much more promise than the MS lock-in enabled stuff.
In order to do everything that Microsoft can do and more, first you need to be able to do everything Microsoft can do. It's hard to say "Mine can't do everything that one can but it's still better" (unless you are MS.)
Now of course, you will never be a perfect clone of MS stuff but to say it's unimportant to copy their feature set is to ignore a serious issue.
Why does the open source community hate patents so much? I think that if the open source community came up with something new, they would hopefully patent it just like Microsoft are doing. If they didn't patent it, then they're fools because someone else will.
The thing that differentiates free and open source software from closed source is the lack of holding pieces of it hostage for money. It's what makes it open.
Having patents on an something atomatically makes open source software unable to implement it. Even if someone invents a way to get there and allows other people to use it, they are prevented from doing so by the patent.
Since copyright prevents someone from copying your invention in the software world, patenting software is only useful for preventing other people from coming up with another way to solve the same problem you did. This was not the original reason for patents. You were supposed to be able to "build the better mouse trap" and patent it, not patent "building mouse traps".
Many open source licences (apache, samba) specifically say the software can't be used if any money is charged for licencing patents held on any technology inside. This prevents someone from creating a patent and sueing every company using the software for money to keep using apache/samba. They can ask that companies stop using the software, but they cannot ask for money to keep using it since if the company pais the money they are then in violation of the software's licence and must stop using it. It keeps unscrupulous companies from trying to gain effective ownership of other people's work.
The debate over patents is an old one. The benefits of having the freedom of to use knowledge and innovate vs the benefits of the profit incentive from being able to own patents. Open source software operates with the freedom of knowledge and innovation at it's core. Holding pieces of knowledge and pieces of software hostage for money can't work with open source.
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Why didn't you use perl instead of PHP? It seems to have all the advantages mentioned above and I would think it would be better suited to the task.
I know perl is out of vouge these days but I think it's highly under-rated. Does it have such a bad name that people actually avoiding it for projects that it would be good for?
Then you can do it without their paycheque.
Companies can break out that stick and you bet I'd comply in a heartbeat rather than lose my paycheck.
Of course, we can keep one-upping this: Since this is a democracy (at least where I live. err.. well.. republic but that's close) we can outlaw certain behavior on 'machines dedicated to the sole use of one employee' like installing any software or accessing any private documents without informing the employee ahead of time each time such an access takes place. Wouldn't that be a giant mess.
It's best to keep things friendly and for both sides to respect the other.
I'm a little special in that I work from my home office so if I have trouble with a machine I can't just call an admin to come over and fix it. I'm responsible for keeping my machines working, not them, so I need admin privs. Of course, the company I work for now openly installs keysroke logging software when they want to and set's the machines up so they periotically install software and spontaneously reboot losing whatever work you've done. They also hand out laptops but set them up so explorer regularly locks up for minutes at a time when they aren't connected to the corperate network (worse than useless people set
I simply prefer have the machine I spend most of my time in front of to be *my* machine. So far, this hasn't been an issue at any of the companies I've worked for, large or small. If my company were unwilling to allow the machine they give me to be mine, I would most likely simply use a machine that was mine. I can't imagine a company realistically forbidding that unless there's a national security issue involved or something of the sort.
It's their computer, they can decide how you use it.
If it's their computer, they can use it. I'll do work on a machine that only I have access to. If they are unwilling to provide one, I have plenty of my own I can use.
See, two can play at that "it's all simply really" game. It's not simple. I expect privacy on whatever machine I use. I expect nobody is recording the passwords I type in to access my machine at home with a keystroke logger. I expect that nobody is screen scraping my bank account numbers when I check that my paycheck actually got deposited on Friday. I expect privacy on my computer, period, and no amount of "technically, they own it" makes it any less wrong for them to do these things or insist on being able to do these things. If it's dedicated to my sole use, you have no business poking around in there without my permission.
Granted, anyone who locks company admin's out of their machine should not expect any help when something goes wrong. The people for whom that is not a problem are a relatively small population in the total work force who uses computers and thus the typical company's policy is appropriate for most of it's employees but if you have programmers working for you, do yourself a favor and let them have free reign of their machines. You'll get happier, more productive employees. Programming is a job that requires a lot of creativity and nothing squashes creativity faster than forced conformity.
Actually, the copper bars are because of the low voltage not the DC. At 12V the current has to be 10 times as high as at 120V. Have you seen 150 amp AC wires? Look in the breaker box in your house, behind the front pannel at the wires that come in from the power company. Odds are they are 100-200 amp and very big. To efficiently transmit the hight currents you need need big wires. Also, 12V AC is higher voltage than 12V DC. The 12V is RMS, not peak. Peek is arround 160V so the insulation needs to be thicker.
AC won back in the day because you could make effiicent, cheap, transformers and run motors and lights with it (the primary uses of electricity at the time.) Now we have highly efficient DC-DC voltage converters and huge rooms full of computers that are entirely DC. A DC power standard would be good. 48V is usually concidered the right way to go, its enough to zap you but has a hard time killing you and eficient enough to run most computers.
I'd like to see power supplies that would work off of both 48V DC and 120V AC. It would be great for Telco based ISP's where the power is already all 48V DC and has to be converted up to 120 AC just to be converted back to DC in the computers power supply.
RAID 5 is only really appropriate if you are building a large array. The money you will spend on the controller will make the cost/megabyte higher than RAID 1 unless you are looking for a very big array (more than you can get with a mirrored pair.) I have a RAID 5 array I built about 2 years ago with 4 160GB drives on a 3ware 6000 series RAID controller. It has worked great and I'm planning on using RAID 5 again for my next array. I've only had one drive failure so far but it recovered from it beautifully.
If you are willing to fork out about $1100 for storage you can create a really nice array. I'd recommend a 3Ware 4 port 9000 series controller like the 9500S4LP (around $330) or a RaidCore card reviewed recently over at tomshardware. Add in 4 $180 250GB SATA drives and you have a nice 750 GB array for around $1100. The Promise FastTrack SX6000 is quite economical and supports more drives if you don't mind it's bad performance and crappy Linux support. 8 port cards are also pretty economical but it's hard to put that many drives in most cases. You have to design a system carefully in order to create arrays much bigger than 4 drives.
Once you have your array, it's a good to use Linux or something with a reliable journaling filesystem on top of it. Once you have a RAID array your filesystem becomes a much more important point of failure. Using a reliable one will do a lot towards reducing your likelihood of data loss.
I also use a separate drive with a separate filesystem for backup. I have a script that manages it for me (ignoring certain directories) which runs every night. A RAID array is pretty reliable and a big step up from single drives so it's a good half way point but I wasn't comfortable with it so I went further. How far you go us up to you.
HD-DVD format uses a 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology
That's Blue-Ray, the competing standard. HD-DVD is based on the same wavelength as DVD and has 15 GB single layer and 30 GB double layer disks.
For more Blue-Ray info check out this web page.
Apparently you don't know much about open source software.
Mozilla, it source code and and it's logos are copyrighted to the Mozilla organization. They retain the copyright and retain all their rights under that copyright. Are they not donating to the Firfox project? By your definition, no open source, copylefted software would be concidered open source.
There is lots of GPL'd software where the art work is not GPL'd. Many logo's are copyrighted to the company and their use is restricted. RedHat's red hat, the Suse Iguana and every other distro's mascot are copyrighted to the company and are not licenced under an open source licence. Even the Debian logo isn't open source. You can see it's licence here. That's just the way it works. Artwork doesn't need to be open sourced to be included with open source software.
The author of Qute took the time to make a theme for Firefox 0.9 and gave it away for free. That is donating his time and talent. The licencing terms don't change that fact. It's also my understanding that he was willing to change his terms but was never asked. Very rude on the part of the Mozilla folks.
Ooh. Much better. It still looks weird with no lines between the different toolbars but I might be able to live with it.
Just because it isn't GPL'd doesn't mean it wasn't a help to Firefox. 0.8 was by far the most popular of the Firefox releases and it owes a lot of that success to the excelent Qute theme.
You may not agree with their decision to use Qute in the first place, that doesn't change the fact that they were rude to someone who was supporting their efforts by donating his time and tallent.
I agree. The new theme is HORRIBLE. I even tried the updated qute theme which should make it look more like 0.8 but the icons are huge now, not compact and efficient like they were in 0.8. I don't know about you guys but I don't want half my screen full of highly detailed icons. Qute for 0.8 was great. I went back.
Do they get real people to test this stuff?
If you liked the theme from 0.8 (qute) better you can download it for 0.9. The author completely revamped qute for 0.9 and it's better than ever.
I don't know about the rest of you but this new theme doesn't look as nice to me. The icon's aren't as detailed or polished and it feels a little clunky compared to the old one.
Also, shame on the Mozilla folks for not letting the Qute author know all his hard work to support their project wouldn't be included.
I still use Windows on my primary desktop but I'm getting less and less attached to it. I do most of my work over an SSH session as well. I have a bunch of machines that run Windows, most of them came with it pre-installed. I stay away from most of the proprietary Windows stuff (Domains/AD, NTFS, etc) and know very little about them.
I recently got an LCD monitor and was forced to upgrade to XP to make it look half decent (2000's font rendoring is horrible on LCD monitors.) Wow was that painful. I don't trust Windows's upgrade tools (seem to leave things slightly broken with no way to back out) so I did a new install. It was the first time I had installed XP and it took a lot of time. Once it was done I was left with a shell of a machine that looked horrible (what kind of heavy drugs were the MS UI guys on) and had no working applications. I had to trick XP into using my old settings from my ntuser.dat file and I've had to reinstall or dig through and import registry settings for tons of programs. I've sunk tons of time into the upgrade and things still are a litte off. I install RedHat and Fedora a lot and I've just gotten used to having a working machine at the end of the install. Dealing with Windows again was annoying and frustrating.
Most of the machines I do work on are Linux boxes running various versions of RedHat. I put Fedora Core 2 on two of them after it came out and I have to say I'm impressed at the progress they have made on desktop usability. I used to think X was always going to be a little slow but Fedora is just as snappy as Windows. XP is seeming more and more like a clunky in comparison.
I don't like supporting an abusive monopoly as well but really I just need to get my job done. I doubt it will be too long before I switch my primary desktop to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if XP was the last Windows I run on my primary desktop.
I agree. While my post was toung-in-cheek, I do believe the nice name is helping spread x.org faster. I, for one, am happy to say goodbye to the XFree86 name forever. It really is hard to type. I'm much happier having to hand edit my xorg.conf file than my XF86Config file and I doubt I'm alone.
They really should rename GIMP. I doubt it will ever get widely used or respected with that name.
All the distro's just like the new name. XFree86 was just too hard to keyboard and sounded funny. xorg.conf is much easier to type than XF86Config. X.org just sounds better, that's why everyone's switching, not because of serious licencing or oranizational issues. (grin)
Slashdot stopped suckling at the teat of Microsoft long enough to say "What! How did that news story get through?"
That depends on the method used to transmit the power. They can get the transmission loss down very low using 1 megavolt DC transmission lines for long haul transmission.
Also, in a nuclear model it's not so much important to worry about the efficiency of a system as the capacity of it. You are essentially making power out of nothing so efficiency isn't as important. If we can eliminate using a coal power plant by building two nuclear plants in Alaska, I say it's worth it.
Governments are hesitant to use them. Only 1 ever has and nobody's used them since. I'm not as worried about that as terrorist organizations. They've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Power is never generated on a large scale where it is needed, we transmit it over power lines. Granted, there are losses in doing this and those losses would be higher if the power was transmitted over such vast distances but that's OK. Just generate more.
The power loss in the current system is estimated at 9%. From what I understand, more than half of that is in local transmission. Even if you tripple the loss from long distance transmission you are only adding about 10% overhead to the system. It seems to me that this system would be many times cheaper than the one it is replacing so it would be well worth it.
I agree that Nuclear power is a good answer that has been overlooked for too long. It never reached it's potential due mostly to PR problems that caused people's deep fear of the technology. Now that we've been living with Nuclear for a long time and it has proven itself much safer than people feared, it might be a good time to take another look at it.
Environmentalists, real environmentalists, should love nuclear power. The problem is most people who call themselves environmentalists aren't. They care more about themselves, their health, their safety and controlling what goes on around them then they do about preserving nature and the environment. They would be more appropriately called "my environment-ists". This guy is right, radiation from nuclear waste poses basically no threat to nature, it's only really a threat to us. Leaving it around on the surface of the earth is a really bad idea, we should dispose of it deep underground, but it illustrates an important point. Nuclear waste is a danger to us, not nature, and it's a danger that we know how to deal with. To continue poisoning the environment the way we are so that we don't have to worry about radioactive waste is irresponsible and selfish.
Secure transport to a disposal site is very important and, in my opinion, the biggest issue with the current system of nuclear power generation. We should be expanding our nuclear power production capabilities but not in the way we built them before. Put them together in large clusters near the disposal site so that you can control access to all aspects of the operation of the pants and disposal of the waste. That way, you don't have to truck radioactive material through every city and town in the country.
I think the US government should build two huge clusters of nuclear power plants. The first cluster should be near enough to Yucca Mountain to facilitate secure transport of the waste without traveling near populated areas. The second one should be in Alaska with it's own waste disposal site if possible. The only way on and off of both should be an air strip. The clusters would be huge sites with restricted airspace and lots of security around dozens of small, well protected reactors. They should be designed so a failure of one would not prevent the operation and maintenance of the others. They should be housed in separate buildings separated by relatively large distances to make it hard for a terrorist attack or nuclear strike to do damage to more than one. Each cluster should be capable of powering the entire US by itself (for security reasons) and each should be able to expand to twice it's initial size to accommodate the inevitable rise in power consumption.
This may seem wildly expensive but if done correctly it could dramatically help the economy of the US. First, we could we cut the huge flow of money out of the country from purchasing oil and also reduce the demand for oil further reducing prices. But also, secondly, if we overbuilt production capability we could sell power to other countries creating a flow of money into the country instead of out. Clusters could be run much more economically than current facilities by sharing resources for engineering, inspection, security, maintenance.
If done correctly, this setup could be much safer than our current system of power generation. People who work at the sites should spend several months working at a time, not commute on and off the base every day to reduce the flow of people in and out and allow for much stricter security as people arrive and leave. The only way in and out should be by plane. There should be an airforce base at each of the two sites to help defend it like they do with other sensitive locations. You could even keep one reactor offline at every time to provide a reference model if anything goes wrong.
An alternative that I've heard about that seems horribly irresponsible is selling and building inexpensive small nuclear reactors all over the world. I heard about a company that
You are sacrificing features now for upgradability. True, often it's worth the tradeoff but don't kid yourself into thinking it's not a tradeoff. Sometimes it's important to have things work well as a package. I can buy a new box later when I want more features. Just give me one box that does it all.
I have 2 ReplayTV's now and they are nice but I'm really starting to get annoyed by the lack of a DVD player inside them. All these devices are trying to be little components in a vastly complicated mess of an entertainment system. Stop that! Be everything. I want to be able to run my whole system with one remote again (and no, a massively complicated universal remote doesn't count.)
Also, it should be networked with little inexpensive "player" modules that people can hook up to their various TV's.
Netscape as a platform was scary to Microsoft but Mozilla as a platform is much scarier. Longhorn's new XAML is a way to lock-in enable the internet, a way to bait companies into making web sites and web pages tied to Windows. Currently Microsoft is in a unusually weak position because most important things that are done with a computer can be done on non-Windows OS's. XAML would lock a whole new generation of people into using Windows.
If Mozilla comes up with an alternative to XAML that works well across all platforms it has the potential to not just thwart Microsoft's new lock-in plans but also drastically increase the ability of cross platform web-based applications and further reduce the differentiation Windows enjoys. Mozilla + Gnome sounds like something we should all be paying attention to.
Actually, I did mean unless you are MS. MS's software is concidered the default. They can claim that their software can't do everything other peoples does but is still better because it's ubiquitous which is an advantage by itself. MS's software can be worse but still perceived as the better option simply because it's MS's.
Linux fanboys can be annoying but I find MS fanboys much more annoying and there are a lot more of them, especially in IT management.
MS's software is often good (I use it constantly) but Linux's software is also good and has much more promise than the MS lock-in enabled stuff.
In order to do everything that Microsoft can do and more, first you need to be able to do everything Microsoft can do. It's hard to say "Mine can't do everything that one can but it's still better" (unless you are MS.)
Now of course, you will never be a perfect clone of MS stuff but to say it's unimportant to copy their feature set is to ignore a serious issue.
Why does the open source community hate patents so much? I think that if the open source community came up with something new, they would hopefully patent it just like Microsoft are doing. If they didn't patent it, then they're fools because someone else will.
The thing that differentiates free and open source software from closed source is the lack of holding pieces of it hostage for money. It's what makes it open.
Having patents on an something atomatically makes open source software unable to implement it. Even if someone invents a way to get there and allows other people to use it, they are prevented from doing so by the patent.
Since copyright prevents someone from copying your invention in the software world, patenting software is only useful for preventing other people from coming up with another way to solve the same problem you did. This was not the original reason for patents.
You were supposed to be able to "build the better mouse trap" and patent it, not patent "building mouse traps".
Many open source licences (apache, samba) specifically say the software can't be used if any money is charged for licencing patents held on any technology inside. This prevents someone from creating a patent and sueing every company using the software for money to keep using apache/samba. They can ask that companies stop using the software, but they cannot ask for money to keep using it since if the company pais the money they are then in violation of the software's licence and must stop using it. It keeps unscrupulous companies from trying to gain effective ownership of other people's work.
The debate over patents is an old one. The benefits of having the freedom of to use knowledge and innovate vs the benefits of the profit incentive from being able to own patents. Open source software operates with the freedom of knowledge and innovation at it's core. Holding pieces of knowledge and pieces of software hostage for money can't work with open source.
I hope this answers your qutesion.