So, then, why doesn't Tesla just franchise out the dealerships in Ohio?
Because the only people who are even potential franchisees are already franchisees of manufacturers of gasoline cars. And their owners have a very public anti-electric stance. Elon Musk knows damn well that if he leaves Tesla sales in their tender hands, he'll never move a single vehicle.
In theory, some Random Rich Guy would bid for the franchise, right? Doesn't work that way. Guys who are already rich in one particular industry tend to stay put in that industry, under the (usually correct) assumption that they don't understand other industries well enough to make money in them. So the pool of potential franchisees is much more severely limited than one might assume. That limitation is too hazardous to the eventual success of Tesla motors for Mr. Musk to risk it. If nothing else, he's good at learning from history.
Every day you hear about more things they are spotting in space, with bigger more powerful horoscopes they can see more exoplanets and stars etc. Considering how much our Curiosity alone has Discovered about the surface of Mars, it's not surprising Astrology is gaining a lot of credibility.
Wow. That was.... Wow. You should be ashamed that you could even construct that sentence. I mean, there's comedy, and then there's what you just perpetrated. That was a comedic field of land mines, and should be banned by international treaty.
In the case of the big bang theory, you have some properties of the universe that are predicted by the theory, such as the presence of the background radiation and the uniformity of mass distribution, among others, that are predicted to exist in a universe where a "big bang" occurs.
Except you've put the cart before the horse. The background radiation was observed, as was the distribution of mass in the universe (which may not actually be uniform, which throws a monkey wrench into the works). Entropy in a closed system always increases. Big Bang was constructed as a theory specifically to explain those observed properties of the universe. It doesn't predict them.
There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim.
There's plenty of evidence that Scientology was created exclusively for control and manipulation. I'm not even going to bother fetching relevant links. They're not hard to find, despite Scientology's persistent attempts to run them off the net.
First, it's not theft. Making a copy will never be theft. Get over it.
Second, yes, it damn well should be legal. The Internet is primarily a publishing engine. It's for publishing things. As in, making them available to the public. If you're an ignorant jackoff, you shouldn't be on the fucking Internet in the first place. Your malware infested piece of shit computer is a menace to everyone around you. No, there should be no penalty for anyone accessing files YOU PUBLISHED. Or files the government published.
"But I didn't mean to" is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Stop denigrating intelligence. Stop vilifying education. Stop demanding the government level draconian punishments against other people for your fuckups. It's not like the necessary knowledge is restricted to some exclusive priesthood or elite guild. It's freely available and easy to find. Learn it. Use it.
And stop defending people who actively avoid learning.
If you are, you're looking in the wrong place. Texas has a positive balance of payments with the federal government, one of the very few Southern states that do. It's Mississippi and Alabama that have a negative balance, among others.
The biggest impediments to getting students to study science in the U.S. probably have to do with stereotypes about "geeks" and "nerds," along with anti-intellectualism.
What is creationism and removal of natural selection from curriculums if not anti-intellectualism? Trying to force the teaching of creationism in something called a science class is the end result of rampant anti-intellectualism. It is part and parcel of how anti-intellectualism propagates itself. Beating back legislative stupidity like this is part of the solution.
Will people be talking of our "contemporary classical" composers (I can't even name one)...
Your geek card is now on probation. John Williams? Composer of the Star Wars Imperial March (and everything else in all six movies, but especially the damn March). Also composer for everything Spielberg has ever done, with the exception of The Color Purple.
Williams has won 5 Academy Awards, 4 Golden Globe Awards, 7 British Academy Film Awards and 21 Grammy Awards. With 49 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated person, after Walt Disney.
He's 82 years old, but he's still alive, and still composing. One of a tiny handful of symphonic composers who became a legend in their own time.
Classical folk music is still alive. I have three different CDs of it, featuring bagpipes, hammered dulcimers, and harpsichord. Hell, I own a recorder, a Renaissance instrument (not some sort of electronic device, as you might think). The Scottish jig "Snug in a Blanket" is so old, no one is certain of its origins. It could be as much as a thousand years old. Performances of it can be had from iTunes, or heard on Grooveshark.
People can still afford to make folk music. Most instruments are a few hundred dollars, and it's a one-time expense. Classical music is out of copyright and free sheet music is readily available.
Meanwhile, if you're a 22 year old adrenaline junkie, are you riding a motorcycle? Maybe. Some still do. A good many of them are riding illegally: they can't afford the insurance. Aviation? It is to laugh. The generation that should be taking up aviation can't afford it. They're the least employed generation ever. And while some of them are shiftless whining prima donnas, a good many of them know how to work. Do they have jobs? Not many. The jobs they should be getting are occupied by a Boomer who should be retiring but can't afford to. When they do retire, the job they occupied will pay half what the Boomer got.
For those that do have jobs, yeah, there's been a culture shift. The Safety Culture has made its mark, deep and indelible. Activities that carry real risk are avoided, and even activities that carry only perceived risk get short shrift. Even if you want to be counter-culture, it's so much safer to be a beat poet than it is to try to skateboard. Perhaps patrons of coffee shops who have that stupid little stage should be issued throwing knives...
Lacking any real information about said motivation, the article and summary have cynically leapt to the worst possible conclusion. Way to muck the rake, guys.
The idiom would be "rake the muck." And it's EA we're talking about. It's not cynicism when it's true. It's very hard to assume the worst about EA and be wrong. EA works hard to seek the nadir of all customer relations.
I don't care about the olympics but I wish there was a way for cord-cutters in the US to still watch Formula 1 at home.
Since when could you watch much Formula 1 coverage at home in the first place? If it's not NASCAR it's nothing, to US sports networks. Formula 1 has been studiously ignored by broadcast TV for ages, and how often does it show up on ESPN? So little that I stopped looking, I know that.
No, actually, I've been surprised by the number of real posts here against the beta, some of them with some incredibly low UID's.
It's not the low IDs that matter. If the high IDs, i.e. new accounts, are also bitching, then maybe Dice might back off. Right now, they think that Betabortion will attract new, young, hip, ad-vulnerable users. If high IDs bitch about it, maybe they can be dissuaded from their determination to follow Digg into oblivion.
Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science.
I wonder just how well a cubesat can survive out beyond Earth's Van Allen belts. And transiting them, for that matter. Especially given such choices as consumer-grade sensors and other electronics. Such chips really don't like hard radiation, and that form factor makes it rather difficult to wedge in any sort of effective radiation shielding, or sufficient redundancy to maintain sanity when you take a particle to the knee.
And I suspect there's a minimum functional size for an RTG that is larger than a CubeSat. One would think covering 3 adjacent faces of the cube with 44% efficient solar cells would do the job. It's not like there's even room for a lot of electronics to use that power.
It's a fascinating topic that still has a lot of room for development. Historically, satellite designers have thought in terms of tons and hundreds of millions of dollars. Thinking in terms of grams and individual dollars is alien to the endeavor. This year will see only the third CubeSat conference. There are a piddling 15 papers listed on cubesat.org, only 14 of which have links. That's a pretty miserable showing for 15 years of development.
Here's hoping SpaceX continues to accommodate CubeSat secondary payloads.
Fucking SlashBeta. Nobody wants to talk about tiny spacecraft.:(
Where will I go to talk about tiny spacecraft where I can read just the gems, without having to wade through all the dross in some bullshit forum format? For that matter, where can I go to read about tiny spacecraft where the people posting actually know anything? So much of WannabeSpace is jammed full of know-nothings who wouldn't recognize the rocket equation if it bit them on the ass. Sure, even on Slashdot, I'd only expect 100 or so posts, from the still credible mob of users (hundreds of thousands?), and a bunch of those would be bad jokes, but at least there'd be something.
Unfortunately slashnot.org is already registered. Maybe Matthew Strebe would switch it over from being a satire site (that he hasn't updated since 2006) to being a place for refugees.
This new beta site needs to go. The current layout works just fine. The new one looks like one of those SEO spam sites used to get clicks.
I thought it was an SEO spam site the first time I saw it. I checked my browser address bar while muttering, "Shiiiit, hijacked," under my breath. I assumed those giant columns of white space on either side were jammed full of advertising banners that AdBlock had gleefully expurgated for me. In fact, I still think that.
Come to find out it was real. I actually spent half an hour trying to use it. Found it not just stupidly ugly (if you're using fixed width on the web, you're DOING IT WRONG, ASSHOLES!), but also nonfunctional. So I found the "make this shit go away" button and never went back.
Now they think they're going to force it on me? Ha. No more clicks for you, Dice.
What happens, when Google becomes a regional (or nationwide) monopoly, however?
How could they? Is all that cable in the ground going to dry up and blow away? Is the cost of electricity going to overwhelm these poor benighted cable companies? Is the American public going to stop paying for all the media these incestuous content+transport companies produce? Are you not going to be able to choose AT&T or Comcast?
Maybe not. Throughout history, when a monopolist's power is broken and a real market happens, the monopolist takes their toys and goes home, after discovering they're a terribly inefficient dinosaur completely incapable of competing against a real contender.
On the other hand, three providers is still not a market. It takes a minimum of four competitors before a sector begins to behave like an actual market, instead of an oligopoly. Widespread deployment of Google fiber would bring the number of providers all the way up to two, in some areas, and one, in plenty of others.
AT&T may have some leaner years ahead, but Ma Bell isn't going away any time this century.
It's an election year. Begging for attack ads from one of the world's largest advertising companies is a losing proposition.
"Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel."
Google practically INVENTED 'ink' as it's used today. If they ever decide to really earnestly get down in the muck with the SuperPACs, it'll be a fun time in the old town.
FYI, Unauthorized use of aftermarket emergency lights is illegal statewide in MO. You can't even use ground-effect lights or strobes of any kind while operating on a public street.
But ground-effect lights aren't emergency lights. They're accessory lights, and they're not even directly visible to other motorists.
I wonder if anybody has argued the point in court...
I got that banner today too. Suddenly all the posts about that shit-ass site revision mean something to me. I never had the problem other people had about getting shunted to the revised version involuntarily. I saw it once. It sucked ass. I told it to show me the readable version, and it has ever since.
Dice is in for a shock in the hit counter when they disable the readable version of the site.
Your statement is false and shows a lack of knowledge of nuclear reactor design and operation.
His statement isn't so much false as it is specific to certain widespread reactor designs. Very old designs. Some nuclear power plants take days to throttle up and down, the same as old coal plants. Throttle speed simply wasn't a design criteria 50 years ago.
Modern designs of both coal and nuclear power plants can throttle up and down much more quickly than the plants of yesteryear, but there are far more of the older plants than there are of the new ones. Old Westinghouse pressurized water reactors are the most common type in the US, controlled by a combination of control rods and adjusting the boric acid concentration in the coolant water. Getting the boric acid concentration right is a somewhat fiddly process that you don't change rapidly if you can avoid it, and the coolant loop simply wasn't designed for rapid thermal cycling. Old high pressure water pipes really don't like rapid temperature changes.
Modern designs are great, but they're more heard of than seen, outside of France.
they have seen much lower energy cost rises than some of their neighbours (particularly the UK).
Baloney. Average price of electricity in Germany: 0.35 USD/kwHr Average price of electricity in UK: 0.20 USD/kwHr
He said "rises", not absolute costs. Possibly German prices haven't been rising as fast as UK prices in recent years? I haven't seen statistics. Everyone should be aware by now that Germans pay a higher price for power than most of Europe. The question is, are they paying a price that everyone else will also eventually be paying, just paying it sooner? I'd be interested to see what the rates of change across Europe are.
What bullshit is this? There is no market. First, the firmware is copyrighted. HP has a legal monopoly on distribution of it. (As Oracle is setting about proving in court.) Second, no one else has access to the necessary information to write their own firmware. HP is necessarily the only possible author.
Where the fuck do people get the idea that "if you paid money, you participated in a market"? Monopolies are not markets. Monopolies are the very antithesis of markets. A necessary condition of having a market is having competition, and that certainly doesn't apply to firmware updates.
...would mean more vendors would support their hardware for longer.
Longer? You mean shorter. Support before the change lasts indefinitely long. The firmware updates were available to download by anyone who wants them, including updates to hardware that is more than a decade old. Now, that firmware is not available without a fee, and possibly not available at all. That's shorter, not longer.
1.) Over time, paid firmware update will decrease the price of the new server and/or its initial support contract.
Wrong. Wrong in so many ways, but wrong especially because of this mythical "market" that does not exist. Monopoly providers do not EVER do that. They don't have to, and they can and do increase prices instead. Firmware updates for HP products are an HP monopoly. Paying for them only gives HP more money. It puts zero downward pressure on any other aspect of their pricing. The only possible source of downward pricing is people making purchasing decisions based on this policy and refusing to buy HP hardware at all. Thankfully, HP is not the monopoly hardware provider they evidently think they are.
If HP (and others) jkeep the price for these updates fair...
When in the history of the world has a monopoly provider ever done that, absent heavily enforced law to the contrary?
In fact I welcome it, hoping it will gain attention from smaller vendors in the consumer space as well.
I'm sure it will gain all sorts of attention, as everybody watches HP sales decline and HP customer satisfaction plummet. It's a good lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
So, then, why doesn't Tesla just franchise out the dealerships in Ohio?
Because the only people who are even potential franchisees are already franchisees of manufacturers of gasoline cars. And their owners have a very public anti-electric stance. Elon Musk knows damn well that if he leaves Tesla sales in their tender hands, he'll never move a single vehicle.
In theory, some Random Rich Guy would bid for the franchise, right? Doesn't work that way. Guys who are already rich in one particular industry tend to stay put in that industry, under the (usually correct) assumption that they don't understand other industries well enough to make money in them. So the pool of potential franchisees is much more severely limited than one might assume. That limitation is too hazardous to the eventual success of Tesla motors for Mr. Musk to risk it. If nothing else, he's good at learning from history.
Every day you hear about more things they are spotting in space, with bigger more powerful horoscopes they can see more exoplanets and stars etc. Considering how much our Curiosity alone has Discovered about the surface of Mars, it's not surprising Astrology is gaining a lot of credibility.
Wow. That was.... Wow. You should be ashamed that you could even construct that sentence. I mean, there's comedy, and then there's what you just perpetrated. That was a comedic field of land mines, and should be banned by international treaty.
In the case of the big bang theory, you have some properties of the universe that are predicted by the theory, such as the presence of the background radiation and the uniformity of mass distribution, among others, that are predicted to exist in a universe where a "big bang" occurs.
Except you've put the cart before the horse. The background radiation was observed, as was the distribution of mass in the universe (which may not actually be uniform, which throws a monkey wrench into the works). Entropy in a closed system always increases. Big Bang was constructed as a theory specifically to explain those observed properties of the universe. It doesn't predict them.
There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim.
There's plenty of evidence that Scientology was created exclusively for control and manipulation. I'm not even going to bother fetching relevant links. They're not hard to find, despite Scientology's persistent attempts to run them off the net.
First, it's not theft. Making a copy will never be theft. Get over it.
Second, yes, it damn well should be legal. The Internet is primarily a publishing engine. It's for publishing things. As in, making them available to the public. If you're an ignorant jackoff, you shouldn't be on the fucking Internet in the first place. Your malware infested piece of shit computer is a menace to everyone around you. No, there should be no penalty for anyone accessing files YOU PUBLISHED. Or files the government published.
"But I didn't mean to" is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Stop denigrating intelligence. Stop vilifying education. Stop demanding the government level draconian punishments against other people for your fuckups. It's not like the necessary knowledge is restricted to some exclusive priesthood or elite guild. It's freely available and easy to find. Learn it. Use it.
And stop defending people who actively avoid learning.
Udu + She-tortoise = MANY MANY tortoises. YOU cannot say how many, only Udu can.
You're good at this. You should publish a newsletter.
Yeah, Texas, we're looking at YOU!
If you are, you're looking in the wrong place. Texas has a positive balance of payments with the federal government, one of the very few Southern states that do. It's Mississippi and Alabama that have a negative balance, among others.
The biggest impediments to getting students to study science in the U.S. probably have to do with stereotypes about "geeks" and "nerds," along with anti-intellectualism.
What is creationism and removal of natural selection from curriculums if not anti-intellectualism? Trying to force the teaching of creationism in something called a science class is the end result of rampant anti-intellectualism. It is part and parcel of how anti-intellectualism propagates itself. Beating back legislative stupidity like this is part of the solution.
Will people be talking of our "contemporary classical" composers (I can't even name one)...
Your geek card is now on probation. John Williams? Composer of the Star Wars Imperial March (and everything else in all six movies, but especially the damn March). Also composer for everything Spielberg has ever done, with the exception of The Color Purple.
Williams has won 5 Academy Awards, 4 Golden Globe Awards, 7 British Academy Film Awards and 21 Grammy Awards. With 49 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated person, after Walt Disney.
He's 82 years old, but he's still alive, and still composing. One of a tiny handful of symphonic composers who became a legend in their own time.
Classical folk music is still alive. I have three different CDs of it, featuring bagpipes, hammered dulcimers, and harpsichord. Hell, I own a recorder, a Renaissance instrument (not some sort of electronic device, as you might think). The Scottish jig "Snug in a Blanket" is so old, no one is certain of its origins. It could be as much as a thousand years old. Performances of it can be had from iTunes, or heard on Grooveshark.
People can still afford to make folk music. Most instruments are a few hundred dollars, and it's a one-time expense. Classical music is out of copyright and free sheet music is readily available.
Meanwhile, if you're a 22 year old adrenaline junkie, are you riding a motorcycle? Maybe. Some still do. A good many of them are riding illegally: they can't afford the insurance. Aviation? It is to laugh. The generation that should be taking up aviation can't afford it. They're the least employed generation ever. And while some of them are shiftless whining prima donnas, a good many of them know how to work. Do they have jobs? Not many. The jobs they should be getting are occupied by a Boomer who should be retiring but can't afford to. When they do retire, the job they occupied will pay half what the Boomer got.
For those that do have jobs, yeah, there's been a culture shift. The Safety Culture has made its mark, deep and indelible. Activities that carry real risk are avoided, and even activities that carry only perceived risk get short shrift. Even if you want to be counter-culture, it's so much safer to be a beat poet than it is to try to skateboard. Perhaps patrons of coffee shops who have that stupid little stage should be issued throwing knives...
Lacking any real information about said motivation, the article and summary have cynically leapt to the worst possible conclusion. Way to muck the rake, guys.
The idiom would be "rake the muck." And it's EA we're talking about. It's not cynicism when it's true. It's very hard to assume the worst about EA and be wrong. EA works hard to seek the nadir of all customer relations.
I don't care about the olympics but I wish there was a way for cord-cutters in the US to still watch Formula 1 at home.
Since when could you watch much Formula 1 coverage at home in the first place? If it's not NASCAR it's nothing, to US sports networks. Formula 1 has been studiously ignored by broadcast TV for ages, and how often does it show up on ESPN? So little that I stopped looking, I know that.
No, actually, I've been surprised by the number of real posts here against the beta, some of them with some incredibly low UID's.
It's not the low IDs that matter. If the high IDs, i.e. new accounts, are also bitching, then maybe Dice might back off. Right now, they think that Betabortion will attract new, young, hip, ad-vulnerable users. If high IDs bitch about it, maybe they can be dissuaded from their determination to follow Digg into oblivion.
Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science.
I wonder just how well a cubesat can survive out beyond Earth's Van Allen belts. And transiting them, for that matter. Especially given such choices as consumer-grade sensors and other electronics. Such chips really don't like hard radiation, and that form factor makes it rather difficult to wedge in any sort of effective radiation shielding, or sufficient redundancy to maintain sanity when you take a particle to the knee.
And I suspect there's a minimum functional size for an RTG that is larger than a CubeSat. One would think covering 3 adjacent faces of the cube with 44% efficient solar cells would do the job. It's not like there's even room for a lot of electronics to use that power.
It's a fascinating topic that still has a lot of room for development. Historically, satellite designers have thought in terms of tons and hundreds of millions of dollars. Thinking in terms of grams and individual dollars is alien to the endeavor. This year will see only the third CubeSat conference. There are a piddling 15 papers listed on cubesat.org, only 14 of which have links. That's a pretty miserable showing for 15 years of development.
Here's hoping SpaceX continues to accommodate CubeSat secondary payloads.
Fucking SlashBeta. Nobody wants to talk about tiny spacecraft. :(
Where will I go to talk about tiny spacecraft where I can read just the gems, without having to wade through all the dross in some bullshit forum format? For that matter, where can I go to read about tiny spacecraft where the people posting actually know anything? So much of WannabeSpace is jammed full of know-nothings who wouldn't recognize the rocket equation if it bit them on the ass. Sure, even on Slashdot, I'd only expect 100 or so posts, from the still credible mob of users (hundreds of thousands?), and a bunch of those would be bad jokes, but at least there'd be something.
Fucking beta...
We apparently need to create a NewDot
Unfortunately slashnot.org is already registered. Maybe Matthew Strebe would switch it over from being a satire site (that he hasn't updated since 2006) to being a place for refugees.
This new beta site needs to go. The current layout works just fine. The new one looks like one of those SEO spam sites used to get clicks.
I thought it was an SEO spam site the first time I saw it. I checked my browser address bar while muttering, "Shiiiit, hijacked," under my breath. I assumed those giant columns of white space on either side were jammed full of advertising banners that AdBlock had gleefully expurgated for me. In fact, I still think that.
Come to find out it was real. I actually spent half an hour trying to use it. Found it not just stupidly ugly (if you're using fixed width on the web, you're DOING IT WRONG, ASSHOLES!), but also nonfunctional. So I found the "make this shit go away" button and never went back.
Now they think they're going to force it on me? Ha. No more clicks for you, Dice.
What happens, when Google becomes a regional (or nationwide) monopoly, however?
How could they? Is all that cable in the ground going to dry up and blow away? Is the cost of electricity going to overwhelm these poor benighted cable companies? Is the American public going to stop paying for all the media these incestuous content+transport companies produce? Are you not going to be able to choose AT&T or Comcast?
Maybe not. Throughout history, when a monopolist's power is broken and a real market happens, the monopolist takes their toys and goes home, after discovering they're a terribly inefficient dinosaur completely incapable of competing against a real contender.
On the other hand, three providers is still not a market. It takes a minimum of four competitors before a sector begins to behave like an actual market, instead of an oligopoly. Widespread deployment of Google fiber would bring the number of providers all the way up to two, in some areas, and one, in plenty of others.
AT&T may have some leaner years ahead, but Ma Bell isn't going away any time this century.
It's an election year. Begging for attack ads from one of the world's largest advertising companies is a losing proposition.
"Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel."
Google practically INVENTED 'ink' as it's used today. If they ever decide to really earnestly get down in the muck with the SuperPACs, it'll be a fun time in the old town.
Yes, they're forcing logged in users over to Beta. Not all of us at once, but in waves.
If you find an alternative site, I'm all ears.
Or if you set up an alternative site, since older versions of SlashCode are open source.
Cops in Texas have been spreading the rumor that flashing headlights at another motorist is a gang challenge and could get you shot.
I shit you not.
FYI, Unauthorized use of aftermarket emergency lights is illegal statewide in MO. You can't even use ground-effect lights or strobes of any kind while operating on a public street.
But ground-effect lights aren't emergency lights. They're accessory lights, and they're not even directly visible to other motorists.
I wonder if anybody has argued the point in court...
I got that banner today too. Suddenly all the posts about that shit-ass site revision mean something to me. I never had the problem other people had about getting shunted to the revised version involuntarily. I saw it once. It sucked ass. I told it to show me the readable version, and it has ever since.
Dice is in for a shock in the hit counter when they disable the readable version of the site.
Your statement is false and shows a lack of knowledge of nuclear reactor design and operation.
His statement isn't so much false as it is specific to certain widespread reactor designs. Very old designs. Some nuclear power plants take days to throttle up and down, the same as old coal plants. Throttle speed simply wasn't a design criteria 50 years ago.
Modern designs of both coal and nuclear power plants can throttle up and down much more quickly than the plants of yesteryear, but there are far more of the older plants than there are of the new ones. Old Westinghouse pressurized water reactors are the most common type in the US, controlled by a combination of control rods and adjusting the boric acid concentration in the coolant water. Getting the boric acid concentration right is a somewhat fiddly process that you don't change rapidly if you can avoid it, and the coolant loop simply wasn't designed for rapid thermal cycling. Old high pressure water pipes really don't like rapid temperature changes.
Modern designs are great, but they're more heard of than seen, outside of France.
they have seen much lower energy cost rises than some of their neighbours (particularly the UK).
Baloney.
Average price of electricity in Germany: 0.35 USD/kwHr
Average price of electricity in UK: 0.20 USD/kwHr
He said "rises", not absolute costs. Possibly German prices haven't been rising as fast as UK prices in recent years? I haven't seen statistics. Everyone should be aware by now that Germans pay a higher price for power than most of Europe. The question is, are they paying a price that everyone else will also eventually be paying, just paying it sooner? I'd be interested to see what the rates of change across Europe are.
2.) A functional post-warranty firmware market...
What bullshit is this? There is no market. First, the firmware is copyrighted. HP has a legal monopoly on distribution of it. (As Oracle is setting about proving in court.) Second, no one else has access to the necessary information to write their own firmware. HP is necessarily the only possible author.
Where the fuck do people get the idea that "if you paid money, you participated in a market"? Monopolies are not markets. Monopolies are the very antithesis of markets. A necessary condition of having a market is having competition, and that certainly doesn't apply to firmware updates.
...would mean more vendors would support their hardware for longer.
Longer? You mean shorter. Support before the change lasts indefinitely long. The firmware updates were available to download by anyone who wants them, including updates to hardware that is more than a decade old. Now, that firmware is not available without a fee, and possibly not available at all. That's shorter, not longer.
1.) Over time, paid firmware update will decrease the price of the new server and/or its initial support contract.
Wrong. Wrong in so many ways, but wrong especially because of this mythical "market" that does not exist. Monopoly providers do not EVER do that. They don't have to, and they can and do increase prices instead. Firmware updates for HP products are an HP monopoly. Paying for them only gives HP more money. It puts zero downward pressure on any other aspect of their pricing. The only possible source of downward pricing is people making purchasing decisions based on this policy and refusing to buy HP hardware at all. Thankfully, HP is not the monopoly hardware provider they evidently think they are.
If HP (and others) jkeep the price for these updates fair...
When in the history of the world has a monopoly provider ever done that, absent heavily enforced law to the contrary?
In fact I welcome it, hoping it will gain attention from smaller vendors in the consumer space as well.
I'm sure it will gain all sorts of attention, as everybody watches HP sales decline and HP customer satisfaction plummet. It's a good lesson.