Putting Wine on Linux netbooks is not a good idea. 1. It gives a false impression of Linux as an inferior no cost alternative to run your Windows apps. 2. It provides compatibility with many forms of Windows malware. 3. It reduces the pressure on the user to find open source alternatives.
Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much
But it works 3-5 times as often, regardless of weather, and can be built almost anywhere. The only required condition is geological and hydrological stability of the area. Oftentimes existing sites can be used to build extra capacity. Wind farms have an actual mean power output of about 20-30% their peak power output, and of course they are intermittent.
I once saw an article saying that with a lot of intermittent sources the probability of all of them being out at the same time asymptotically approaches zero, but that would be true only if the works/doesn't work state of the sources was uncorrelated. Unfortunately it is to a very large extent (e.g. there are significant periods of time when 100% of the area of US is not insolated at all, and for smaller countries the situation is even worse).
operating costs thrice as much
See above. Moreover this cost could be brought down a lot (probably 2- or 3-fold) by creating a few standardised designs, or better yet a single modular design of nuclear plants, that would be used nationwide for all new deployments.
and fuel costs infinitely more.
That doesn't mean they are high. Actually they are less than 1% of operating costs.
nuclear remains the energy of the future...
Nuclear power still generates more energy than wind power in the US.
There some people that say otherwise, but it's a myth; they talk in terms of peak power output, which wind farms cannot realistically achieve for any sustained periods of time. On the other hand, nuclear plants are entirely capable of consistently running at 100% of their rated capacity, sometimes even more (power uprates).
Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms. On the other hand, there are several countries which get more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear plants, and at least 3 (France, Belgium and Slovakia) that get more than half.
nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation
Safety: No civilian killed in nuclear power operations since 1986. Waste: The idiots from environmental groups keep saying it's a big problem, and at the same time keep attacking all the reasonable solutions that could be implemented to solve it (underground burial, reprocessing, breeder reactors, etc). Proliferation: Nuclear fuel in conventional reactors is only slightly enriched and not suitable for making nuclear weapons. There are breeder reactor designs that make extracting plutonium from them highly impractical.
Google probably is the definition of a content kleptomaniac. They store all your information on their servers forever and their terms and agreements state that pretty much any content you e-mail, use their hosting service for, or put in any of their other tools becomes theirs. However, them being a search engine is pretty much their only service that they aren't kleptomaniacs about.
I think that's FUD.
11. Content licence from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this licence shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.
Firstly, your content is not "theirs". They don't get a copyright assignment, only a licence from you. Secondly, the licence is 'for the sole purpose' of providing the services and promoting them. If you sent a PDF copy of a book you wrote over Gmail, they would not be allowed to print and publish it.
They should go with a metered plan with a reasonable rate, so the customer pays only for services actually used, rather than an unlimited plan they can't provide thereby cheating the customer out of their money.
The only good solution to the problem of network billing is per-byte (or per-kilobyte) billing with a reasonable rate, and maybe a small monthly 'connectivity fee'. Any other solution is unfair to customers, and sets up a wrong reward structure for the company. With unlimited plans, the company is rewarded for having less available bandwidth, because the revenue per customer stays the same while costs are roughly proportional to available bandwidth. With metered plans, the amount of money that can be made is proportional to available bandwidth, so it is in the interest of the company to invest in infrastructure.
Unfortunately this is also the solution that doesn't have any loopholes to not provide the service that was paid for, which is what US telecoms want.
I don't really know why people want unlimited plans. A metered plan with a reasonable rate can be much cheaper, and does not bring the risk of being disconnected, because the more bandwidth you use the more incentive the company has to keep you aboard.
1. There are only 4000 people on this island. 2. The island has an area 114 km2. 3. Thus it gives us a population density of 35 people per km2. 4. Even if people were distributed evenly across earth's land area, it could support slightly more than 5 billion people in this matter. Of course a lot of earth's area is not habitable, and people are not distributed evenly.
Other problems: "However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas." "The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, "Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.""
If the energy density is 2 watts per square meter, they need 228MW. I highly doubt this figure, because the entire Pomeranian voivodeship in Poland (over 2 million people) uses 600MW during winter evening peak hours.
Before somebody says "OMFG pocket Chernobyl WTF!": 1. This does not work like nuclear plants (fission), it is really a mini-RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator). 2. Since this is intended for very small low power devices that need to run continuously, the amount of radioactive material will likely be comparable to that in glow in the dark toys and stickers, or watches with phosphorescent hands.
Glow in the dark toys and stickers, as well as watches with phosphorescent hands, contain radioactive isotopes (mainly thorium). The amount of radioactive material in those batteries is likely on par with the aforementioned items. Remember that the intended use for those is to power extremely tiny devices that need to operate constantly, not to replace AA batteries, so the required amount of power is very small.
What a great way to gently remind them to have a positive attitude towards open source!
So you say we should e.g. congratulate Nvidia for supplying an obfuscated 2D-only piece of shit driver to "encourage" them to open the 3D driver as well? No, positive motivation does not work with corporations. Nothing gets done until lts of people complain. Providing half-assed open source support is actually more harmful that not providing any support at all, because it takes away the manpower needed to implement proper support. If 90% of users are satisfied with the limited functionality, it usually means you have 10x less developers working on proper support.
1 ml of air (or any other gas) at ambient conditions contains about 2.69e18 (in other words almost 3 quintillion) molecules. A hundred billions is 1e14, or 26900 times less.
Also take note that antimatter was produced in the form of positrons. A positron is more than 50000 times lighter than a molecule of nitrogen. So the reported experiment produced 1/1382498600 of the mass of a milliliter of air. And a milliliter of air weighs about 1.3 mg.
(Of course air also contains other gases than nitrogen but I'm simplifying.)
sudo reduces the possibility of disabling your system by mistyping a root command, and promotes the good practice of only doing the absolute minimum of tasks as root.
Another minor advantage is that the name of the user with sudo privileges is not known, so you have to guess both the name and the password.
"Plug and play" is mostly a marketing buzzword. Even XP and Vista don't have too much of it because you have to install drivers for several types of hardware, like GSM modems and printer.
The OSS approach works much better on the "plug-and-play" front but not as well on the hardware coverage front.
As computer hardware gets faster, more machines will be described in software before they are implemented in hardware, yet, as I see it, these inventions are worthy of protection via the patent system.
We must cease seeing ICs as hardware, they're actually a combination of hardware and software. Fabrication technology and the physical layout of a given chip might deserve patent protection; IC logic doesn't, because it is software.
One of the problems facing both software and electrical engineers is the fact that ultimately all software and nearly all logic circuits can be expressed as either software or hardware.
For me the case is clear. You could only patent process technology and physical layout techniques, while the logic would be unpatentable. I think it's fair game. Moreover you can still keep designs confidential, like companies do with software source code.
I'd rather buy downloadable games for PSP since I can install them on multiple PSPs and PS3s than buy multiple UMDs to play multiplayer but I must be a crazy one.
There is a PSP feature called Game Sharing that allows multiplayer between up to (IIRC) 4 people using a single UMD.
Copyright should be tied to publication date, not the author's death date. This avoid both the issue of somebody dying prematurely and the issue of not being able to determine whether a work is copyrighted (because the dates of death of its authors are not known).
And if you add to this the fact that other branches of Judeo-Christian idiocy, i.e. the Muslim-medieval kind, are even more rabidly insane, the majority of human societies on Earth are, to use a topic-relevant term: fucked up beyond description, with no relief in sight.
Sexual taboos might seem an idiocy to you, but there was a time when they were necessary and beneficial. They were intended to prevent the birth of unwanted children. Societies with a strict sexual culture were more efficient than those without them, because the survival rate of children was much higher.
Now, when we have effective and widely available contraceptives, the practical value of sexual taboos is now much diminished. It's a pity that many people do not recognize *why* they exist.
Second post says the temperature is 446*C. However, since this temperature needs to be achieved in a very small fraction of the chip's volume when writing, I guess that writing all bits at once would translate to a heat-up of a few degrees when averaged over the whole die. This can be further reduced if the material surrounding the memory cells has a higher specific heat capacity than the crystals.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting Wine on Linux netbooks is not a good idea.
1. It gives a false impression of Linux as an inferior no cost alternative to run your Windows apps.
2. It provides compatibility with many forms of Windows malware.
3. It reduces the pressure on the user to find open source alternatives.
I had the impression that Slashdot was named after the notation for the filesystem root on Unix systems, not after an URL.
Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much
But it works 3-5 times as often, regardless of weather, and can be built almost anywhere. The only required condition is geological and hydrological stability of the area. Oftentimes existing sites can be used to build extra capacity. Wind farms have an actual mean power output of about 20-30% their peak power output, and of course they are intermittent.
I once saw an article saying that with a lot of intermittent sources the probability of all of them being out at the same time asymptotically approaches zero, but that would be true only if the works/doesn't work state of the sources was uncorrelated. Unfortunately it is to a very large extent (e.g. there are significant periods of time when 100% of the area of US is not insolated at all, and for smaller countries the situation is even worse).
operating costs thrice as much
See above. Moreover this cost could be brought down a lot (probably 2- or 3-fold) by creating a few standardised designs, or better yet a single modular design of nuclear plants, that would be used nationwide for all new deployments.
and fuel costs infinitely more.
That doesn't mean they are high. Actually they are less than 1% of operating costs.
nuclear remains the energy of the future...
Nuclear power still generates more energy than wind power in the US.
There some people that say otherwise, but it's a myth; they talk in terms of peak power output, which wind farms cannot realistically achieve for any sustained periods of time. On the other hand, nuclear plants are entirely capable of consistently running at 100% of their rated capacity, sometimes even more (power uprates).
Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms. On the other hand, there are several countries which get more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear plants, and at least 3 (France, Belgium and Slovakia) that get more than half.
nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation
Safety: No civilian killed in nuclear power operations since 1986.
Waste: The idiots from environmental groups keep saying it's a big problem, and at the same time keep attacking all the reasonable solutions that could be implemented to solve it (underground burial, reprocessing, breeder reactors, etc).
Proliferation: Nuclear fuel in conventional reactors is only slightly enriched and not suitable for making nuclear weapons. There are breeder reactor designs that make extracting plutonium from them highly impractical.
Google probably is the definition of a content kleptomaniac. They store all your information on their servers forever and their terms and agreements state that pretty much any content you e-mail, use their hosting service for, or put in any of their other tools becomes theirs. However, them being a search engine is pretty much their only service that they aren't kleptomaniacs about.
I think that's FUD.
11. Content licence from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this licence shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.
Firstly, your content is not "theirs". They don't get a copyright assignment, only a licence from you. Secondly, the licence is 'for the sole purpose' of providing the services and promoting them. If you sent a PDF copy of a book you wrote over Gmail, they would not be allowed to print and publish it.
Duh. I have two examples to offer:
http://www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com/
http://totallysynthetic.com/blog/
Those specialist blogs could not be written by a journalist.
They should go with a metered plan with a reasonable rate, so the customer pays only for services actually used, rather than an unlimited plan they can't provide thereby cheating the customer out of their money.
The only good solution to the problem of network billing is per-byte (or per-kilobyte) billing with a reasonable rate, and maybe a small monthly 'connectivity fee'. Any other solution is unfair to customers, and sets up a wrong reward structure for the company. With unlimited plans, the company is rewarded for having less available bandwidth, because the revenue per customer stays the same while costs are roughly proportional to available bandwidth. With metered plans, the amount of money that can be made is proportional to available bandwidth, so it is in the interest of the company to invest in infrastructure.
Unfortunately this is also the solution that doesn't have any loopholes to not provide the service that was paid for, which is what US telecoms want.
I don't really know why people want unlimited plans. A metered plan with a reasonable rate can be much cheaper, and does not bring the risk of being disconnected, because the more bandwidth you use the more incentive the company has to keep you aboard.
How am I supposed to download your favorite browser if I can't even connect to a website?
- cover CD from a computer magazine
- wget
- FTP
- 'install web browser' shortcut
What about Windows Media Player? Should Microsoft kill that as well?
Yes
1. There are only 4000 people on this island.
2. The island has an area 114 km2.
3. Thus it gives us a population density of 35 people per km2.
4. Even if people were distributed evenly across earth's land area, it could support slightly more than 5 billion people in this matter. Of course a lot of earth's area is not habitable, and people are not distributed evenly.
Other problems:
"However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas."
"The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, "Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.""
If the energy density is 2 watts per square meter, they need 228MW. I highly doubt this figure, because the entire Pomeranian voivodeship in Poland (over 2 million people) uses 600MW during winter evening peak hours.
Apparently I was wrong, the stuff used in watch hands is usually tritium or promethium, and toys and stickers don't contain radioisotopes
Before somebody says "OMFG pocket Chernobyl WTF!":
1. This does not work like nuclear plants (fission), it is really a mini-RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator).
2. Since this is intended for very small low power devices that need to run continuously, the amount of radioactive material will likely be comparable to that in glow in the dark toys and stickers, or watches with phosphorescent hands.
Glow in the dark toys and stickers, as well as watches with phosphorescent hands, contain radioactive isotopes (mainly thorium). The amount of radioactive material in those batteries is likely on par with the aforementioned items. Remember that the intended use for those is to power extremely tiny devices that need to operate constantly, not to replace AA batteries, so the required amount of power is very small.
What a great way to gently remind them to have a positive attitude towards open source!
So you say we should e.g. congratulate Nvidia for supplying an obfuscated 2D-only piece of shit driver to "encourage" them to open the 3D driver as well? No, positive motivation does not work with corporations. Nothing gets done until lts of people complain. Providing half-assed open source support is actually more harmful that not providing any support at all, because it takes away the manpower needed to implement proper support. If 90% of users are satisfied with the limited functionality, it usually means you have 10x less developers working on proper support.
1 ml of air (or any other gas) at ambient conditions contains about 2.69e18 (in other words almost 3 quintillion) molecules. A hundred billions is 1e14, or 26900 times less.
Also take note that antimatter was produced in the form of positrons. A positron is more than 50000 times lighter than a molecule of nitrogen. So the reported experiment produced 1/1382498600 of the mass of a milliliter of air. And a milliliter of air weighs about 1.3 mg.
(Of course air also contains other gases than nitrogen but I'm simplifying.)
Same goes for folders and files with DOS device names like 'con', 'com2' or 'lpt1'.
sudo reduces the possibility of disabling your system by mistyping a root command, and promotes the good practice of only doing the absolute minimum of tasks as root.
Another minor advantage is that the name of the user with sudo privileges is not known, so you have to guess both the name and the password.
Further, people can't take an e-book illegally downloaded and turn it into a real paper book
Now maybe not, but I think this will change a lot in the future.
http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
"Plug and play" is mostly a marketing buzzword. Even XP and Vista don't have too much of it because you have to install drivers for several types of hardware, like GSM modems and printer.
The OSS approach works much better on the "plug-and-play" front but not as well on the hardware coverage front.
According to the article it was actually built by the same druids
Sorry but druids had nothing to do with Stonehenge, they first appeared in England thousands of years after Stonehenge has erected.
Druids: 200 BCE or earlier - 200 century CE
Stonehenge: 3000-2100 BCE
As computer hardware gets faster, more machines will be described in software before they are implemented in hardware, yet, as I see it, these inventions are worthy of protection via the patent system.
We must cease seeing ICs as hardware, they're actually a combination of hardware and software. Fabrication technology and the physical layout of a given chip might deserve patent protection; IC logic doesn't, because it is software.
One of the problems facing both software and electrical engineers is the fact that ultimately all software and nearly all logic circuits can be expressed as either software or hardware.
For me the case is clear. You could only patent process technology and physical layout techniques, while the logic would be unpatentable. I think it's fair game. Moreover you can still keep designs confidential, like companies do with software source code.
I'd rather buy downloadable games for PSP since I can install them on multiple PSPs and PS3s than buy multiple UMDs to play multiplayer but I must be a crazy one.
There is a PSP feature called Game Sharing that allows multiplayer between up to (IIRC) 4 people using a single UMD.
Copyright should be tied to publication date, not the author's death date. This avoid both the issue of somebody dying prematurely and the issue of not being able to determine whether a work is copyrighted (because the dates of death of its authors are not known).
And if you add to this the fact that other branches of Judeo-Christian idiocy, i.e. the Muslim-medieval kind, are even more rabidly insane, the majority of human societies on Earth are, to use a topic-relevant term: fucked up beyond description, with no relief in sight.
Sexual taboos might seem an idiocy to you, but there was a time when they were necessary and beneficial. They were intended to prevent the birth of unwanted children. Societies with a strict sexual culture were more efficient than those without them, because the survival rate of children was much higher.
Now, when we have effective and widely available contraceptives, the practical value of sexual taboos is now much diminished. It's a pity that many people do not recognize *why* they exist.
Second post says the temperature is 446*C. However, since this temperature needs to be achieved in a very small fraction of the chip's volume when writing, I guess that writing all bits at once would translate to a heat-up of a few degrees when averaged over the whole die. This can be further reduced if the material surrounding the memory cells has a higher specific heat capacity than the crystals.