So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?
I suspect that the break-even point varies depending on what you want to do. If you want electricity, photovoltaics get a substantial boost (plants may still turn out to be cheaper, for sufficiently large installations, if you can grow a zillion acres of generic combustables with minimal human intervention and then shovel them into a slightly converted coal plant or something; but the poor efficiency of the conversion from thermal energy to electrical energy will hobble you, and it will cripple you in small-scale installs). If you want a hydrocarbon-fuel substitute, the ability of organisms to synthesize all kinds of neat organic compounds is going to be quite a trick to replicate, even if you have unlimited electricity.
Also depends on location: given suitably robust solar cell packages(ideally with some fancy catalytic autocleaning coating), you could convert surface area on large structures into PV sites with just an occasional visit by the installers-with-climbing-gear. You wouldn't want to try crops under those conditions. A desert area, with plenty of sun but next to no water, would also be decent PV territory but bad planting ground. A large patch of arable land would have the opposite conditions(though it might also have competing food producers; but luckily, while it's illegal to use poor people for biofuel, it's legal to use food for biofuel and let poor people starve.)
I think the promotion is a side effect of legitimate questions being asked about its premise. Aren't you curious if this is possible in the foreseeable future? At least it's more "real" science-fiction than something like Transformers.
I suspect that talking about space stations is also more popular than talking about massive inequality, squalid impoverished masses, heavily robotized security apparatuses, and other non science-fiction elements.
Unfortunately, without bold advances in genetic engineering, psycho-pharmaceuticals, or social psychology, we'll be hard-pressed to find enough humans who derive greater satisfaction from putting a spacecraft into orbit than from putting a spacecraft on a reentry trajectory toward the nearest loathsome nest of foreigners.
And even a pretty fucked-up-dystopian-hellworld version of earth still has convenient gravity, atmospheric pressure and loads of raw materials. Short, possibly, of a good, enthusiastic, all-out, nuclear war (which would also...reduce...the odds of magnificent space-constructs), there isn't much you could do to earth that would make living on a space station cheaper and easier than just throwing up some habidomes with climate control and a ring of razor wire and killbots to keep the proles away.
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Maybe they could have a bidding war with Yahoo... They've been moving aggressively into HP's "Where Technologies go to Die" turf lately, and a line of Yahoo! Mail branded blackberries would be perfect as a component of Yahoo's "Just think of us as a weighted average of Google and AOL" strategy.
So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.
Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.
It's a more common problem than one might imagine: Massive success is certainly profitable; but it makes you conservative and risk-averse (you don't want some fancy skunkworks project, even your own, to cannibalize your cash cow, and your whiny customers want compatibility). It can also constrain your horizons: RIM effectively crushed all comers to the 'mobile email' market (WinMo's numbers were never pretty, even with MS pushing it, and Palm never really recovered after it became clear that PDAs would be network-connected, rather than intermittently docked, in the future); but barely even attempted, much less recognized as the looming future, cellphones-as-mostly-general-purpose-computers until 'email' had already become something that the competitor's markedly superior (as computers) phones could handle adequately by virtue of being a computer with an internet connection.
It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
Arguably, it was a two-stage kill: Microsoft's late-and-largely-unlamented PocketPC/Windows Mobile (pre 7) implemented "activesync" ages ago to compete with RIM (indeed, after a brief period of attempting to eat Palm's lunch, attempting to eat RIM's lunch became their chief purpose in life); but that didn't help all that much because WinMo devices made Blackberries look like elegant triumphs of engineering and UI design.
Once a device that consumers loved, and an increasingly bearable and very cheap OS licensed Microsoft's dusty BES-killer protocol and brought it to hardware that people didn't hate, though. Game over, man. Game over.
I don't see how this could be a surprise to anyone. No other version of Windows ships with Outlook installed.
The 'surprise' isn't that it's not preloaded; but that Microsoft wouldn't even sell you a copy. Any other current version of Windows has that little feature.
I can understand why Germans would Not want their emails passing through American control; but it looks like they'll have to clean house if they want to be able to do that just by going domestic.
I'm surprised that Keith's head didn't explode when he said "people who have access to data as part of their missions, if they misuse that trust they can cause huge damage.”
He is sort of Public Enemy #1 on that score right about now, with any lackeys who have nontrivial authority right behind him.
I assume that sysadmins score particularly badly on the 'amount of access vs. degree of trust' metric.
Barring really elegant, or unbearably onerous, system design, (which the NSA apparently didn't bother with, since one comparatively junior sysadmin at a contracting company, not even in house, apparently had massive access to the juicy details) sysadmins tend to have enormous power over your systems, access (because somebody has to run backups) to your files and email, etc, etc.
True, true, I was thinking about NT-derivatives and succumbed to tunnel vision.
It'll be interesting to see if MS keeps CE around, since there will always be something on 'low end hardware' no matter how high the low end gets to be, or whether they'll eventually ditch CE in favor of some compact-but-NT-kernel-based embedded flavor for consistency's sake.
Oh, I don't doubt that they are, in fact, expanding their Chromebook and Android production, if only because industry sales trends don't show any alternative on their part. My point was just that any strategy that successfully scares Microsoft is one of the most valuable supply-chain innovations you can realistically implement in your production of Wintel hardware: Microsoft and Intel are really the only companies with fat left to cut on the list of suppliers and assemblers for your average x86 box.
Not that it's a surprise, the CIA being what it is; but that little trick was crazy unethical on their part. Strictly speaking, though, it didn't seem to have much effect on attitudes about vaccines specifically, just the luckless bastards who have the pleasure of administering them and occasionally getting killed for their trouble.
South Africa is really a sad case: Unlike a lot of postcolonial states, they got damn lucky with Mandela (elsewhere, the number of people who were good freedom-fighters and really, really, shitty autocrats is just alarming); but the ANC basically hasn't had a good idea since then. Mbeki was a stark-raving AIDs denialist (as was his favorite Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and some of his 'outside experts', notably Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick); and, though the overt craziness surrounding AIDs is supposed to be over at present, the quality of governance is still... painfully unimpressive.
There's a reason why Mandela's health problems have been the object of so much strategic-mourning among ANC figures: basically, their remaining credibility is now bouncing in and out of the hospital on the edge of death...
Given that (in terms of vendor margins, and thus price elasticity under hardball negotiations) MS licenses are probably the most flexible component that goes into a Wintel box (with Intel CPUs being the other one), any negotiation strategy that works at scaring MS a bit is probably worth a great deal of money indeed.
HDDs, RAM, passives, OEM assembly sweatshops, plastic mouldings and metal stampings, are already cut to the bone, so being able to tell scary lies to Microsoft is probably worth as much to a PC OEM as amazing expertise in JIT supply chains or other elegant re-engineerings of the actual manufacturing and distribution process.
Isn't it slightly breathtaking how Microsoft has put more than a decade into CLR/CIL and all the.NET framework stuff, theoretically putting themselves in a surprisingly good position for multi-architecture support (given a software ecosystem dominated by proprietary applications from loads of independent vendors and substantial demand for legacy support: Linux and BSD do multi-architecture better; but only for situations where 'just ship the source, stupid' is considered viable, and Apple's 'if it were legal, we'd personally execute anybody who produces software compatible with OS versions older than the one we currently ship' approach allows them to bludgeon the ecosystem into compliance; but isn't a matter of technical sophistication), and then utterly fucked up their foray into ARM?
Why not? Do you feel that Africans are, on average, more rational than Europeans and Americans?
More rational? No. More fearful of illness and/or death by malaria? Just a bit...
Medicine-related nonsense tends to flourish in the presence of at least one of two conditions: (1) the risk presented by a given disease is very low (the common cold is annoying but nearly harmless, so Airborne(tm) "Invented by a schoolteacher!" doesn't have to worry about any unpleasant testimonials involving dead customers, as long as it doesn't kill them itself...) (2) Conventional medicine has few answers, or very bad news, for you. (If the doctor says that there isn't much we can do, the odds that you'll go find somebody willing to tell you something more palatable just jumped rather markedly...)
American and European vaccine 'controversy' flourishes in the presence of both of these elements: the vaccines people worry about are for diseases that relatively few people have even seen/experienced in person (because vaccination mostly eradicated them) and which are seen as very low risk, while the fears and quackery bubble around autism, a condition for which present medical expertise's ability to help is rather severely lacking.
When it comes to diseases that actually scare them, Americans and Europeans have relatively high compliance rates, even with treatments that are well known to be quite unpleasant and dangerous (chemo, major surgery, antiretrovirals, etc, etc.).
There have been instances of vaccine-related 'controversy' bullshit in Africa(Good work, part of Nigera, it's not like polio is a problem or anything...); but none related to autism, to my knowledge.
In general, though, there's nothing like a population for which some ghastly disease is still a firsthand reality to keep vaccine concerns (even ones founded on actual side effects of the vaccine) at bay. For something with the morbidity and mortality rates of malaria, even a vaccine with atypically nasty risks would probably be damn popular.
The really difficult problem is when dealing with diseases that are almost nonexistent (and thus not scary)
Isn't the 'shield' device running a GPL2 linux kernel (about which they have no legal choice on openness), some apache licensed Android components (dalvik, bionic, etc.) and a big Nvidia GPU driver blob?
It's nice of them to not be assholes about the bootloader just for spite (though I have to imagine that voiding the warranty of any device with an unlocked bootloader might not fly in jurisdictions where 'consumer protection' isn't a joke...); but what exactly are they 'opening'? Linux is GPL, Android is apache (and so could include proprietary modifications; but deviations from 'mainstream' Android aren't exactly a good thing), and the real meat of the device is a huge binary GPU driver, which Nvidia has no intention of opening.
I have the suspicion that Seagate is planning quite specifically; but just don't care all that much.
The majority of orders will, presumably, be from OEMs looking to stuff HDD slots on the cheap, while still complying with the Win8 hardware certification requirements(most notably, resume in under 2 seconds) and possibly Intel's "ultrabook" requirements, which have their own I/O demands.
I suspect that Seagate's calculations of 'How cheaply can we build a drive that will satisfy the letter of the requirements that our customers need to meet?" were made with care, and aren't crap at all. They're just something of a lie if you expect that level of performance to be maintained under more stressful loads.
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Given that Seagate makes HDDs and has little or no Flash fabrication capacity, they were obviously going to include an HDD in the plan (and, given the price, so will a lot of buyers). They don't have an obvious bias (other than a general desire for 'less, because that keeps costs low') in terms of how much NAND cache is needed to see meaningful improvements.
I'd be inclined to distrust flimflam to the effect that 'Sure, hard drives are just as good as SSDs!'; but have no particular reason to doubt that 8GB, rather than 4, or 12, or 16, or 5, or 32, is the approximate amount of flash needed, if that is what they report.
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So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?
I suspect that the break-even point varies depending on what you want to do. If you want electricity, photovoltaics get a substantial boost (plants may still turn out to be cheaper, for sufficiently large installations, if you can grow a zillion acres of generic combustables with minimal human intervention and then shovel them into a slightly converted coal plant or something; but the poor efficiency of the conversion from thermal energy to electrical energy will hobble you, and it will cripple you in small-scale installs). If you want a hydrocarbon-fuel substitute, the ability of organisms to synthesize all kinds of neat organic compounds is going to be quite a trick to replicate, even if you have unlimited electricity.
Also depends on location: given suitably robust solar cell packages(ideally with some fancy catalytic autocleaning coating), you could convert surface area on large structures into PV sites with just an occasional visit by the installers-with-climbing-gear. You wouldn't want to try crops under those conditions. A desert area, with plenty of sun but next to no water, would also be decent PV territory but bad planting ground. A large patch of arable land would have the opposite conditions(though it might also have competing food producers; but luckily, while it's illegal to use poor people for biofuel, it's legal to use food for biofuel and let poor people starve.)
I think the promotion is a side effect of legitimate questions being asked about its premise. Aren't you curious if this is possible in the foreseeable future? At least it's more "real" science-fiction than something like Transformers.
I suspect that talking about space stations is also more popular than talking about massive inequality, squalid impoverished masses, heavily robotized security apparatuses, and other non science-fiction elements.
Unfortunately, without bold advances in genetic engineering, psycho-pharmaceuticals, or social psychology, we'll be hard-pressed to find enough humans who derive greater satisfaction from putting a spacecraft into orbit than from putting a spacecraft on a reentry trajectory toward the nearest loathsome nest of foreigners.
when the earth has everything?
And even a pretty fucked-up-dystopian-hellworld version of earth still has convenient gravity, atmospheric pressure and loads of raw materials. Short, possibly, of a good, enthusiastic, all-out, nuclear war (which would also...reduce...the odds of magnificent space-constructs), there isn't much you could do to earth that would make living on a space station cheaper and easier than just throwing up some habidomes with climate control and a ring of razor wire and killbots to keep the proles away.
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Maybe they could have a bidding war with Yahoo... They've been moving aggressively into HP's "Where Technologies go to Die" turf lately, and a line of Yahoo! Mail branded blackberries would be perfect as a component of Yahoo's "Just think of us as a weighted average of Google and AOL" strategy.
So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.
Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.
It's a more common problem than one might imagine: Massive success is certainly profitable; but it makes you conservative and risk-averse (you don't want some fancy skunkworks project, even your own, to cannibalize your cash cow, and your whiny customers want compatibility). It can also constrain your horizons: RIM effectively crushed all comers to the 'mobile email' market (WinMo's numbers were never pretty, even with MS pushing it, and Palm never really recovered after it became clear that PDAs would be network-connected, rather than intermittently docked, in the future); but barely even attempted, much less recognized as the looming future, cellphones-as-mostly-general-purpose-computers until 'email' had already become something that the competitor's markedly superior (as computers) phones could handle adequately by virtue of being a computer with an internet connection.
It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
Arguably, it was a two-stage kill: Microsoft's late-and-largely-unlamented PocketPC/Windows Mobile (pre 7) implemented "activesync" ages ago to compete with RIM (indeed, after a brief period of attempting to eat Palm's lunch, attempting to eat RIM's lunch became their chief purpose in life); but that didn't help all that much because WinMo devices made Blackberries look like elegant triumphs of engineering and UI design.
Once a device that consumers loved, and an increasingly bearable and very cheap OS licensed Microsoft's dusty BES-killer protocol and brought it to hardware that people didn't hate, though. Game over, man. Game over.
I don't see how this could be a surprise to anyone. No other version of Windows ships with Outlook installed.
The 'surprise' isn't that it's not preloaded; but that Microsoft wouldn't even sell you a copy. Any other current version of Windows has that little feature.
Germany is one of the hotspots for Boundless Informant. It appears that the US spies on Germany as much as it does on China.
It makes somewhat less sense given that the US spies on Germany with considerable assistance from the German BND...
I can understand why Germans would Not want their emails passing through American control; but it looks like they'll have to clean house if they want to be able to do that just by going domestic.
Please do call them 'Quislings' for me.
I'm surprised that Keith's head didn't explode when he said "people who have access to data as part of their missions, if they misuse that trust they can cause huge damage.”
He is sort of Public Enemy #1 on that score right about now, with any lackeys who have nontrivial authority right behind him.
Astounding decision. Piss off a bunch of SysAdmins.
Does the BOFH have a security clearance?
I assume that sysadmins score particularly badly on the 'amount of access vs. degree of trust' metric.
Barring really elegant, or unbearably onerous, system design, (which the NSA apparently didn't bother with, since one comparatively junior sysadmin at a contracting company, not even in house, apparently had massive access to the juicy details) sysadmins tend to have enormous power over your systems, access (because somebody has to run backups) to your files and email, etc, etc.
True, true, I was thinking about NT-derivatives and succumbed to tunnel vision.
It'll be interesting to see if MS keeps CE around, since there will always be something on 'low end hardware' no matter how high the low end gets to be, or whether they'll eventually ditch CE in favor of some compact-but-NT-kernel-based embedded flavor for consistency's sake.
Oh, I don't doubt that they are, in fact, expanding their Chromebook and Android production, if only because industry sales trends don't show any alternative on their part. My point was just that any strategy that successfully scares Microsoft is one of the most valuable supply-chain innovations you can realistically implement in your production of Wintel hardware: Microsoft and Intel are really the only companies with fat left to cut on the list of suppliers and assemblers for your average x86 box.
Not that it's a surprise, the CIA being what it is; but that little trick was crazy unethical on their part. Strictly speaking, though, it didn't seem to have much effect on attitudes about vaccines specifically, just the luckless bastards who have the pleasure of administering them and occasionally getting killed for their trouble.
South Africa is really a sad case: Unlike a lot of postcolonial states, they got damn lucky with Mandela (elsewhere, the number of people who were good freedom-fighters and really, really, shitty autocrats is just alarming); but the ANC basically hasn't had a good idea since then. Mbeki was a stark-raving AIDs denialist (as was his favorite Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and some of his 'outside experts', notably Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick); and, though the overt craziness surrounding AIDs is supposed to be over at present, the quality of governance is still... painfully unimpressive.
There's a reason why Mandela's health problems have been the object of so much strategic-mourning among ANC figures: basically, their remaining credibility is now bouncing in and out of the hospital on the edge of death...
Given that (in terms of vendor margins, and thus price elasticity under hardball negotiations) MS licenses are probably the most flexible component that goes into a Wintel box (with Intel CPUs being the other one), any negotiation strategy that works at scaring MS a bit is probably worth a great deal of money indeed.
HDDs, RAM, passives, OEM assembly sweatshops, plastic mouldings and metal stampings, are already cut to the bone, so being able to tell scary lies to Microsoft is probably worth as much to a PC OEM as amazing expertise in JIT supply chains or other elegant re-engineerings of the actual manufacturing and distribution process.
Isn't it slightly breathtaking how Microsoft has put more than a decade into CLR/CIL and all the .NET framework stuff, theoretically putting themselves in a surprisingly good position for multi-architecture support (given a software ecosystem dominated by proprietary applications from loads of independent vendors and substantial demand for legacy support: Linux and BSD do multi-architecture better; but only for situations where 'just ship the source, stupid' is considered viable, and Apple's 'if it were legal, we'd personally execute anybody who produces software compatible with OS versions older than the one we currently ship' approach allows them to bludgeon the ecosystem into compliance; but isn't a matter of technical sophistication), and then utterly fucked up their foray into ARM?
Why not? Do you feel that Africans are, on average, more rational than Europeans and Americans?
More rational? No. More fearful of illness and/or death by malaria? Just a bit...
Medicine-related nonsense tends to flourish in the presence of at least one of two conditions: (1) the risk presented by a given disease is very low (the common cold is annoying but nearly harmless, so Airborne(tm) "Invented by a schoolteacher!" doesn't have to worry about any unpleasant testimonials involving dead customers, as long as it doesn't kill them itself...) (2) Conventional medicine has few answers, or very bad news, for you. (If the doctor says that there isn't much we can do, the odds that you'll go find somebody willing to tell you something more palatable just jumped rather markedly...)
American and European vaccine 'controversy' flourishes in the presence of both of these elements: the vaccines people worry about are for diseases that relatively few people have even seen/experienced in person (because vaccination mostly eradicated them) and which are seen as very low risk, while the fears and quackery bubble around autism, a condition for which present medical expertise's ability to help is rather severely lacking.
When it comes to diseases that actually scare them, Americans and Europeans have relatively high compliance rates, even with treatments that are well known to be quite unpleasant and dangerous (chemo, major surgery, antiretrovirals, etc, etc.).
There have been instances of vaccine-related 'controversy' bullshit in Africa(Good work, part of Nigera, it's not like polio is a problem or anything...); but none related to autism, to my knowledge.
In general, though, there's nothing like a population for which some ghastly disease is still a firsthand reality to keep vaccine concerns (even ones founded on actual side effects of the vaccine) at bay. For something with the morbidity and mortality rates of malaria, even a vaccine with atypically nasty risks would probably be damn popular.
The really difficult problem is when dealing with diseases that are almost nonexistent (and thus not scary)
Isn't the 'shield' device running a GPL2 linux kernel (about which they have no legal choice on openness), some apache licensed Android components (dalvik, bionic, etc.) and a big Nvidia GPU driver blob?
It's nice of them to not be assholes about the bootloader just for spite (though I have to imagine that voiding the warranty of any device with an unlocked bootloader might not fly in jurisdictions where 'consumer protection' isn't a joke...); but what exactly are they 'opening'? Linux is GPL, Android is apache (and so could include proprietary modifications; but deviations from 'mainstream' Android aren't exactly a good thing), and the real meat of the device is a huge binary GPU driver, which Nvidia has no intention of opening.
At retail, an 8GB DIMM with no exceptional features is ~$60. An 8GB SDHC card with no exceptional features is ~$8.
Obviously, both prices will be lower if you are buying a zillion reels of chips; but that's a pretty significant disparity in $/GB...
I have the suspicion that Seagate is planning quite specifically; but just don't care all that much.
The majority of orders will, presumably, be from OEMs looking to stuff HDD slots on the cheap, while still complying with the Win8 hardware certification requirements(most notably, resume in under 2 seconds) and possibly Intel's "ultrabook" requirements, which have their own I/O demands.
I suspect that Seagate's calculations of 'How cheaply can we build a drive that will satisfy the letter of the requirements that our customers need to meet?" were made with care, and aren't crap at all. They're just something of a lie if you expect that level of performance to be maintained under more stressful loads.
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Given that Seagate makes HDDs and has little or no Flash fabrication capacity, they were obviously going to include an HDD in the plan (and, given the price, so will a lot of buyers). They don't have an obvious bias (other than a general desire for 'less, because that keeps costs low') in terms of how much NAND cache is needed to see meaningful improvements.
I'd be inclined to distrust flimflam to the effect that 'Sure, hard drives are just as good as SSDs!'; but have no particular reason to doubt that 8GB, rather than 4, or 12, or 16, or 5, or 32, is the approximate amount of flash needed, if that is what they report.