There are two ways to look at cost. The first one, which I think is the one you refer to, is the $$$ cost to produce a solar panel. When you compare this to how much you end up being able to sell the electricity produced by this panel you end up loosing money. The second would be to total the amount of energy needed to produce a solar panel and compare that to the amount of energy it can produce. I doubt that this number would be negative. What is needed is to take into account the impact on the environment that a particular energy source has and charge the producer for the clean up. i.e. scrubers for coal plants, etc... If you do this, you'll quickly notice how comparatively cheap solar panel are. What is not okay is to keep ignoring the fact that we are mismanaging our planet. There are better ways to produce electricity and more importantly there are very good ways to use less of it, we just need to take the issue out of the hands of short sighted (4 year plans...) politicians... Just my $0.02 worth of a rant...
Re:Why bother?... and wait...and wait...and wait..
on
XPlay: iPod with Windows
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· Score: 0, Troll
And you can keep waiting while you attempt to load your latest album on your mp3 player before catching your plane or bus... Oh wait... your winbox just crashed too... well, maybe saving a few bucks was not really worth it in the end...
I just love my ipod. Never failed, always fast and reliable... always!:-))
I think that he gets it half right.
Firstable, it is true that Porshe buyers will keep bying them... and Apple hardware will kept being bought by the current Apple customers who will unliky step down to an IntelAMD based PC.
What he gets wrong is when he assumes that releasing an Intel version of OSX would fly. This is wrong, I think, for the follwoing reasons:
1) While the Aqua stuff can probably be recompiled to the Intel platform esaily, the Carbon apps (most of the current apps unfortunately) will not be.
2) You will never get MS to release an OSX Intel version of Office unless they are forced to do so, which looks more and more unlikely (as does a Linux version)
3) Porting OSX to Intel might be "easy" but supporting the zillions of INtel based hardware is nearly impossible. Even MS does not seem to be able to do this and relies on third party vendors to supply drivers. I doubt that these companies would rush to release OS Intel drivers.
4) Apple IS already a thread not only for MS but also for Intel and the Wintel duopoly. My simple example is that I have just dumped my crapy DeLL laptop for a G4 powerbook, replaced my Sun Ultra 10 with a dual 800Mhz G4, and purchase a new iMac from home. All this at a price that is competitive with what I could have gotten from any Wintel vendors. I know of several people in the process of making the same move. Apple is right to keep its hardware and OSX tied. This makes for a much better platform and user experience...
NOT TRUE Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
As an Italian in Germany, you must first be able to get a work permit to be able to work in Germany. There is NO truelly free labor motion in Europe.
Commerce is the same thing... I bought an Alpine car CD player in France and live in Germany. Guess what? I cannot get it repaired under warranty here and need to ship it back to France. As long as this is the kind of things happening in Europe, the economy will lag that of the US. It will take years for the "old Europe" mentalities to die...
Does he miss the point about what adds are?
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
Aren't people just missing the point of what adds are all about? I for one do not understand Dvorak's argument. It pre-supposes that a private company (let it be Mc Donald's or Marlboro) can pay another company (the TV stations) to FORCE people to watch their adds.
This is completely different then what happens in the printed media. After all, no-body forces anyone to actually read the adds in order to read the articles in the New York Time. And there is NO contract between me and the TV station that says that I can only watch their programming IF AND ONLY IF I watch the commercials. The reason why we have not had to sign such a contract is because
the concept that the adds MUST be forced onto people in order to be effective is rediculous. People who are forced to watch an add are not more likely to buy a product than if they had ignored/zapped past it.
Does dvorak really read every single printed add in Forbes magazine since those are what provided the bulk of the money for him to write his column in that magazine?
As an aside, the obnoxious add on the article's page led me to install adzapper on my machine... Maybe the ardvertisers should think about that before going over the top. Of course, one alternative is to start building browsers that cannot avoid downloading adds.... How many years do you think it will be before people think about that (been done actually, I know...).
It sometimes seems that common sense, and basic civil liberties, are conveniently ignored by people like Dvorak.
There is absolutely nothing that prohibits someone in Europe to get a cheap zone 1 DVD player in the US that can output NTSC on PAL40 and then use that player in Europe to view zone 1 DVDs. This is actually a cheap alternative.
If you have a relatively modern TV which can display NTSC, then any zone 1 player would work. You would only need a cheap power converter which cost about 10$ in Radio Shack.
I heard that Warner wanter to outlaw the sale of such power convertors so you might have to hurry and go buy one (Just kidding!:-) ).
Also, this new zone protection looks to me like it is similar to the old Disney protection which tricked multi-zone players by not asking them if they were zone 1, but say zone 2 after which the dvd software would in essense declare "too bad we wanted a zone 1". How is this new scheme any different? Multi-zone DVDs are, I think, a bad idea because you can write software that detect if a player can view more than one zone, but a player which can be set to any single zone at a time can probably not be sniffed by the dvd software anyway, right?
I just wanted to comment that it is not clear at all that the UN is funding this at all. The UN is just were the international agreement is signed and registered.
Organizarion such as ESA (The European Space Agency) are also listed by the UN, and a UN treaty between the member countries does exists at the UN. The UN itself does not contribute to ESA.
You can find more information about this sort of things, which happen often in astronomy were costs are high and international cooperations are mandatory, by looking up the internet registration of the.int domain name.
I too was surprised a while ago to find out that I needed a copy of a UN agreement in order to register a.int domain, and that places like www.esa.int HAD such a treaty. I had forgotten, as many seem to, that the UN is THE place where international agreements can be ironed out officially.
Forcing people to buy your products with every computer that is sold is certainly not akin to the act of voting, at least not in my book:-)
Bill Gates and Murdock have been getting rich because they have been using the fact that people are tired of governement regulation, and that most goverments in the Western worlds are therefore having a hands-off policy towards new technologies and the "new economy".
As for what your goverment is for: it is not to protect YOU against life, and protect each individual against the errors in judment he might have made. This IS up to you. But it should be the goverment (i.e. ALL OF US, not just a few) which sets guideline of behaviour, so that NO-ONE is cooerce into living in a way which he does not want to. Democracy might well be the dictature of the majority. But the making of this abstract majority changes from issue to issue.
The BIG failure of modern goverments is to be blind to the fact that they are letting a few individual affect the lives of too many people at once!
Well, I for one am becoming more and more negative about the impact that technology has on our lifes. This is because it is becoming quite obvious that technology is not been shared and distributed equaly. By this, I do not mean the old story about how the poorer nations are being kept in the dark ages. What I mean, rather, is that technology is bringing new problems with it.
For example, a few years ago, people were amazed that the world was split in two by the cold war. That people could not really communicate. 10 years later, it is private interest's abuse of technology that decides to cut the world in 7 DVD zones.
Most people would (as I did) not think much of it at first, but WHOM DO WE COMPLAIN TO when things like these get implemented? What power do we have to bring such a cartel to an end? No buying a DVD from them? Then from whom?:-)
We do not elect the Bill Gates and Murdocks of the world.These guys are where they are because they wheel and deal with one another and are not kept in check. There absolutely no check in balance mechanism to keep a few of these people from enacting a tremendous amount of control on people.
Another (quick) example of the sort of things that I find scary is to see Murdock (SKY Digital) want to add a Tivo-like appliance into every SkyDigital topset box, but with the added feature that an advertiser can disable your fast forward button! I resent the fact that renting a digital receiver can enslave me several minutes at a time just so that some other guy might get a bit richer.
And if you think that this is ok because it is afterall commercials that pay the bill, then just wait and watch big companies as they slowly creep in more and more into your personal life: have you notice how more movies in DVD zone 1 no longer come with any other language than English? Big companies do not care about the few millions people who happen to not be speaking English in North America... the market is too small. And, unlike these "tired old goverments", they certainly do not have to protect the rights of minorities...
Goverments might be tired, but at least they (well, some..) are 1) responsible 2) elected 3) democratic. It took centuries to get some of the world into a state where most of us are prosperous and living peacefully. Runaway capitalism and the control of many by a few rich folks is not a step forward. In my opinion, it is a step backward. The actors have changed, the weapons have changed, but it is the sma eold story: most people have very little freedom, and telling them how great their lifes are and how free they have become does not change the reality that they are not in control of their lifes.
NGST, the Next Generation Space Telescope, is due to be launched in 2008. It is an 8m deployable telescope placed at L2 (In the shadow of the Earth with respect to the Sun). This telescope will cost at the very leat around 1Billion dollars. It will likely only have three instruments on board and will only provide Infrared coverage. Ground telescopes are significantly cheaper. It is actually good to have so may large telescope. There are a lot of people trying to observe many scientifically interesting things which can only be observed with a lrge telescope (because they are too faint). More large telescopes is not a bad thing, it is a good thing.
Solaris and HP. Linux is only slowly creeping in, but only as cheap "astronomer workstations". The thing is that Suns and HP's have a pretty good record at running well for along time (I am not trying to start a flame war!:-) ) and that it will take time for people to trust Linux in critical places such as telescope control. Additionally, Linux does not AFAIK offer a real time OS which is as robust as some other commercial products around.
The VLT can track pretty fast but not quite fast enough, AFAIK, to track a low Earth orbit satelite. The Moon was observed with it, I hear, but the problem here is that the Moon is really really bright for such a large telescope and that there are some heating considerations to keep in mind when trying to look at objects like the Moon with very large telescope. There are some 3m class telescope in Hawaii which can track fast enough to look at satelites. I believe that these are used to look for Earth-orbit crossing asteroids.
This is indeed a problem for telescope such as OWL which would require many nodes to be adjusted in real time. The hope is that Intel et co. continue down the path of Moore's law. Another problem which LARGE telescope is that they are usually designed to provide a large field of view which are meant to be observed with very large format arrays of detectors. There are some 16k x 8k, or even larger arrays observing around the world, and the data they generate is actually large enough to be difficuly to store AND to analyse since each image is several hundreds of megabytes and that hundreds of these can be acquired on any given night...
With interferometry, using the four VLT plus the upcmoing sideostats telescope, astronomers will be able to reach a much much higher resolution than HST. HST's resolution is about 75mas (i.e. 0.075" which is much smaller than the atmospherically imposed limit of 0.3"(for a VERY good site like VLT's or Kecks') to 1.0". However, resolution of 0.075" HAVE been obtained from the ground using what is called Adaptive Optics: there are ways to compensate for the blurring effect of the atmosphere using deformable mirror which undo the effect of the atmosphere moving on top of the telescope (This is where laser are sometimes used).
An 8m telescope provides a much larger light collection area than a 2.4m telescope such as HST. This make the VLT (and Keck) a very good place to look for veru faint objects which would be very hard to image with HST (i.e. a prohibitively high number of orbits would be necessary). There is also the fact that VLT is not one but four telescope (i.e. 4x8m class) and that there is a vcery broad range of instruments available (high resolution spectrograph, very sensitive IR camera etc..)
Why is using a built-in feature of Outlook suddently a "Virus"? A while back, GM made implemented some rather silly designs on their trucks and their saddle bag gas tanks. Under "normal operation", this was not a problem... but when a truck was hit by a car the probability for a fire and an explosion was higher. GM was accused of poor design, of not caring for the lifex of people, some accused them to be more worried about money than people's well being and of being criminal in that respect. Now, MS has been implemented some rather sily things in their OS too, without (it seems) paying a second thought to the consequences of some of the "features" that they are offering to their customers... How come MS is not finding itself under the lightsport here? Aren't they responsible? Can't they be accounted responsible for their action like any other company in the "traditional sector"? Even more interesting to me is the question of why the US military would suddently be surprised that they have made themselves succesptible to major downtime by choosing the wrong OS a few years back. So far, not a SINGLE news report I have seen clearly stated that only Windows users (and SOME Mac users running Windows software) are really at risk. When the GM truck problem was discovered, not ALL owners of trucks and cars were told to stop filling up their gas tank, just the GM owners. There is nothing wrong with email attachements, as long as you use a software package whose design is not controlled by a few gimmicky features. This, I think, where the Linux/Unix crowd could do a lot more to educate the public, and the news media....
I am a bit surprised by the question... Isn't Linux, and Beowulf created by people all over the world. Europe and the US in partocular, but how coul dthe US stop the export of a product which is not a 100% American technology? Is Beowulf 100% American, does anyone know? I thought it was not...
Slashdot Mirror
There are two ways to look at cost. The first one, which I think is the one you refer to, is the $$$ cost to produce a solar panel. When you compare this to how much you end up being able to sell the electricity produced by this panel you end up loosing money.
The second would be to total the amount of energy needed to produce a solar panel and compare that to the amount of energy it can produce. I doubt that this number would be negative.
What is needed is to take into account the impact on the environment that a particular energy source has and charge the producer for the clean up. i.e. scrubers for coal plants, etc... If you do this, you'll quickly notice how comparatively cheap solar panel are.
What is not okay is to keep ignoring the fact that we are mismanaging our planet. There are better ways to produce electricity and more importantly there are very good ways to use less of it, we just need to take the issue out of the hands of short sighted (4 year plans...) politicians...
Just my $0.02 worth of a rant...
And you can keep waiting while you attempt to load your latest album on your mp3 player before catching your plane or bus... Oh wait... your winbox just crashed too... well, maybe saving a few bucks was not really worth it in the end...
:-))
I just love my ipod. Never failed, always fast and reliable... always!
I think that he gets it half right.
Firstable, it is true that Porshe buyers will keep bying them... and Apple hardware will kept being bought by the current Apple customers who will unliky step down to an IntelAMD based PC.
What he gets wrong is when he assumes that releasing an Intel version of OSX would fly. This is wrong, I think, for the follwoing reasons:
1) While the Aqua stuff can probably be recompiled to the Intel platform esaily, the Carbon apps (most of the current apps unfortunately) will not be.
2) You will never get MS to release an OSX Intel version of Office unless they are forced to do so, which looks more and more unlikely (as does a Linux version)
3) Porting OSX to Intel might be "easy" but supporting the zillions of INtel based hardware is nearly impossible. Even MS does not seem to be able to do this and relies on third party vendors to supply drivers. I doubt that these companies would rush to release OS Intel drivers.
4) Apple IS already a thread not only for MS but also for Intel and the Wintel duopoly. My simple example is that I have just dumped my crapy DeLL laptop for a G4 powerbook, replaced my Sun Ultra 10 with a dual 800Mhz G4, and purchase a new iMac from home. All this at a price that is competitive with what I could have gotten from any Wintel vendors. I know of several people in the process of making the same move. Apple is right to keep its hardware and OSX tied. This makes for a much better platform and user experience...
As an Italian in Germany, you must first be able to get a work permit to be able to work in Germany. There is NO truelly free labor motion in Europe.
Commerce is the same thing... I bought an Alpine car CD player in France and live in Germany. Guess what? I cannot get it repaired under warranty here and need to ship it back to France. As long as this is the kind of things happening in Europe, the economy will lag that of the US. It will take years for the "old Europe" mentalities to die...
Aren't people just missing the point of what adds are all about? I for one do not understand Dvorak's argument. It pre-supposes that a private company (let it be Mc Donald's or Marlboro) can pay another company (the TV stations) to FORCE people to watch their adds.
This is completely different then what happens in the printed media. After all, no-body forces anyone to actually read the adds in order to read the articles in the New York Time. And there is NO contract between me and the TV station that says that I can only watch their programming IF AND ONLY IF I watch the commercials. The reason why we have not had to sign such a contract is because
the concept that the adds MUST be forced onto people in order to be effective is rediculous. People who are forced to watch an add are not more likely to buy a product than if they had ignored/zapped past it.
Does dvorak really read every single printed add in Forbes magazine since those are what provided the bulk of the money for him to write his column in that magazine?
As an aside, the obnoxious add on the article's page led me to install adzapper on my machine... Maybe the ardvertisers should think about that before going over the top. Of course, one alternative is to start building browsers that cannot avoid downloading adds.... How many years do you think it will be before people think about that (been done actually, I know...).
It sometimes seems that common sense, and basic civil liberties, are conveniently ignored by people like Dvorak.
There is absolutely nothing that prohibits someone in Europe to get a cheap zone 1 DVD player in the US that can output NTSC on PAL40 and then use that player in Europe to view zone 1 DVDs. This is actually a cheap alternative. If you have a relatively modern TV which can display NTSC, then any zone 1 player would work. You would only need a cheap power converter which cost about 10$ in Radio Shack. I heard that Warner wanter to outlaw the sale of such power convertors so you might have to hurry and go buy one (Just kidding! :-) ).
Also, this new zone protection looks to me like it is similar to the old Disney protection which tricked multi-zone players by not asking them if they were zone 1, but say zone 2 after which the dvd software would in essense declare "too bad we wanted a zone 1". How is this new scheme any different? Multi-zone DVDs are, I think, a bad idea because you can write software that detect if a player can view more than one zone, but a player which can be set to any single zone at a time can probably not be sniffed by the dvd software anyway, right?
Oh come one! Try to be fair. Golf would be very important to you too if you were a Supreme Court judge!
Organizarion such as ESA (The European Space Agency) are also listed by the UN, and a UN treaty between the member countries does exists at the UN. The UN itself does not contribute to ESA. You can find more information about this sort of things, which happen often in astronomy were costs are high and international cooperations are mandatory, by looking up the internet registration of the .int domain name.
I too was surprised a while ago to find out that I needed a copy of a UN agreement in order to register a .int domain, and that places like www.esa.int HAD such a treaty. I had forgotten, as many seem to, that the UN is THE place where international agreements can be ironed out officially.
As for what your goverment is for: it is not to protect YOU against life, and protect each individual against the errors in judment he might have made. This IS up to you. But it should be the goverment (i.e. ALL OF US, not just a few) which sets guideline of behaviour, so that NO-ONE is cooerce into living in a way which he does not want to. Democracy might well be the dictature of the majority. But the making of this abstract majority changes from issue to issue.
The BIG failure of modern goverments is to be blind to the fact that they are letting a few individual affect the lives of too many people at once!
Well, I for one am becoming more and more negative about the impact that technology has on our lifes. This is because it is becoming quite obvious that technology is not been shared and distributed equaly. By this, I do not mean the old story about how the poorer nations are being kept in the dark ages. What I mean, rather, is that technology is bringing new problems with it. For example, a few years ago, people were amazed that the world was split in two by the cold war. That people could not really communicate. 10 years later, it is private interest's abuse of technology that decides to cut the world in 7 DVD zones. Most people would (as I did) not think much of it at first, but WHOM DO WE COMPLAIN TO when things like these get implemented? What power do we have to bring such a cartel to an end? No buying a DVD from them? Then from whom? :-)
We do not elect the Bill Gates and Murdocks of the world.These guys are where they are because they wheel and deal with one another and are not kept in check. There absolutely no check in balance mechanism to keep a few of these people from enacting a tremendous amount of control on people.
Another (quick) example of the sort of things that I find scary is to see Murdock (SKY Digital) want to add a Tivo-like appliance into every SkyDigital topset box, but with the added feature that an advertiser can disable your fast forward button! I resent the fact that renting a digital receiver can enslave me several minutes at a time just so that some other guy might get a bit richer.
And if you think that this is ok because it is afterall commercials that pay the bill, then just wait and watch big companies as they slowly creep in more and more into your personal life: have you notice how more movies in DVD zone 1 no longer come with any other language than English? Big companies do not care about the few millions people who happen to not be speaking English in North America... the market is too small. And, unlike these "tired old goverments", they certainly do not have to protect the rights of minorities ...
Goverments might be tired, but at least they (well, some..) are 1) responsible 2) elected 3) democratic. It took centuries to get some of the world into a state where most of us are prosperous and living peacefully. Runaway capitalism and the control of many by a few rich folks is not a step forward. In my opinion, it is a step backward. The actors have changed, the weapons have changed, but it is the sma eold story: most people have very little freedom, and telling them how great their lifes are and how free they have become does not change the reality that they are not in control of their lifes.
NGST, the Next Generation Space Telescope, is due to be launched in 2008. It is an 8m deployable telescope placed at L2 (In the shadow of the Earth with respect to the Sun). This telescope will cost at the very leat around 1Billion dollars. It will likely only have three instruments on board and will only provide Infrared coverage. Ground telescopes are significantly cheaper. It is actually good to have so may large telescope. There are a lot of people trying to observe many scientifically interesting things which can only be observed with a lrge telescope (because they are too faint). More large telescopes is not a bad thing, it is a good thing.
Solaris and HP. Linux is only slowly creeping in, but only as cheap "astronomer workstations". The thing is that Suns and HP's have a pretty good record at running well for along time (I am not trying to start a flame war! :-) ) and that it will take time for people to trust Linux in critical places such as telescope control. Additionally, Linux does not AFAIK offer a real time OS which is as robust as some other commercial products around.
You can find all this information at http://www.eso.org/observing/instrumentation.html
The VLT can track pretty fast but not quite fast enough, AFAIK, to track a low Earth orbit satelite. The Moon was observed with it, I hear, but the problem here is that the Moon is really really bright for such a large telescope and that there are some heating considerations to keep in mind when trying to look at objects like the Moon with very large telescope. There are some 3m class telescope in Hawaii which can track fast enough to look at satelites. I believe that these are used to look for Earth-orbit crossing asteroids.
This is indeed a problem for telescope such as OWL which would require many nodes to be adjusted in real time. The hope is that Intel et co. continue down the path of Moore's law. Another problem which LARGE telescope is that they are usually designed to provide a large field of view which are meant to be observed with very large format arrays of detectors. There are some 16k x 8k, or even larger arrays observing around the world, and the data they generate is actually large enough to be difficuly to store AND to analyse since each image is several hundreds of megabytes and that hundreds of these can be acquired on any given night...
With interferometry, using the four VLT plus the upcmoing sideostats telescope, astronomers will be able to reach a much much higher resolution than HST. HST's resolution is about 75mas (i.e. 0.075" which is much smaller than the atmospherically imposed limit of 0.3"(for a VERY good site like VLT's or Kecks') to 1.0". However, resolution of 0.075" HAVE been obtained from the ground using what is called Adaptive Optics: there are ways to compensate for the blurring effect of the atmosphere using deformable mirror which undo the effect of the atmosphere moving on top of the telescope (This is where laser are sometimes used).
An 8m telescope provides a much larger light collection area than a 2.4m telescope such as HST. This make the VLT (and Keck) a very good place to look for veru faint objects which would be very hard to image with HST (i.e. a prohibitively high number of orbits would be necessary). There is also the fact that VLT is not one but four telescope (i.e. 4x8m class) and that there is a vcery broad range of instruments available (high resolution spectrograph, very sensitive IR camera etc..)
Why is using a built-in feature of Outlook suddently a "Virus"? A while back, GM made implemented some rather silly designs on their trucks and their saddle bag gas tanks. Under "normal operation", this was not a problem... but when a truck was hit by a car the probability for a fire and an explosion was higher. GM was accused of poor design, of not caring for the lifex of people, some accused them to be more worried about money than people's well being and of being criminal in that respect. Now, MS has been implemented some rather sily things in their OS too, without (it seems) paying a second thought to the consequences of some of the "features" that they are offering to their customers... How come MS is not finding itself under the lightsport here? Aren't they responsible? Can't they be accounted responsible for their action like any other company in the "traditional sector"? Even more interesting to me is the question of why the US military would suddently be surprised that they have made themselves succesptible to major downtime by choosing the wrong OS a few years back. So far, not a SINGLE news report I have seen clearly stated that only Windows users (and SOME Mac users running Windows software) are really at risk. When the GM truck problem was discovered, not ALL owners of trucks and cars were told to stop filling up their gas tank, just the GM owners. There is nothing wrong with email attachements, as long as you use a software package whose design is not controlled by a few gimmicky features. This, I think, where the Linux/Unix crowd could do a lot more to educate the public, and the news media....
I am a bit surprised by the question... Isn't Linux, and Beowulf created by people all over the world. Europe and the US in partocular, but how coul dthe US stop the export of a product which is not a 100% American technology? Is Beowulf 100% American, does anyone know? I thought it was not...