Turn off the proposed new lines and tell me how that's our grid today in essentially 2010. On that map, the only route between the east and west coasts is a little line, under 500kV in western Nebraska.
The ONLY ONE.
So what's the solution to our energy problems? Biofuel, captured coal, wind, fission, fusion, space, treadmills? It doesn't matter!
If we can generate limitless power in Montana, but can only get it to North Dakota (next door) by either really small lines or by routing it though Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Idaho (again!), Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, then North Dakota... how can we do anything?
It doesn't matter if we should be using wind and carbon sequestration (I question wind as the panacea it seems to be these days), we'll still need a modern grid. That mess than happened in the north east a few years ago shouldn't be possible.
It's not a choice between better lines and green energy, unless you only count stimulus money. And isn't big interstate utility projects the kind of thing the federal government should be doing?
Clean power isn't useful if we can't transmit it more than 100 miles. The areas not near some sort of clean power source will just keep using coal.
It doesn't matter than nuclear energy has possible waste disposal issues. My point is that discussing the CO2 output caused by this project is useless. The question is how much energy is wasted, not how much CO2 is created.
We just happen to be on a kind of energy that frees previously trapped CO2. We could be mostly on one that produces radioactive waste, or one that uses up silicon (solar), or ones that cool down the earth (hydrothermal, to the teeny-tiny degree it does).
If we are going to discuss the energy impact of this project, I want to discuss the energy impact, not a side effect of the most common power generation methods.
But talking about CO2 is cool, so people frame everything that way, even when it would be much more appropriate to frame it in another manner.
Iceland gets less than 0.1% of it's energy from fossil fuels, but BOINC wastes just as much energy for computers in Iceland as it does in the US. Yet for Iceland the answer to how much extra CO2 does it make is "basically none", where as the answer to how much energy it wastes is "5%" (or whatever).
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad. So was the coming overpopulation and world famine. And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
There are more important questions. Much of this energy would be used anyway, but it would be in centralized supercomputers. This way though it's cheaper for the scientists so we can get more research done, even though it's slightly less efficient.
I'm just really tired about CO2 being discussed attached to everything. "Should I buy new shoes?" "Well, the CO2 produced from rubber is... and.... but...".
It could just as easily be run on computers powered by nuclear or solar power, producing no CO2 (past initial construction).
Why does CO2 have to be the end-all-be-all of everything? Why not ask how much coal dust or mercury is now in the atmosphere thanks to the plants that power most of those computers.
I almost never use Excel. The only thing I use it consistently for is making little graphs when I want to visualize some data, because I know how to do it and have the software installed.
At least I knew how to do it. The data range selection stuff makes no sense to me anymore. I knew exactly how it worked in '03 and before. But now I get two multi-line select boxes, one of which holds one thing and one of which holds one thing for every data point. I find it very confusing, it's certainly not an improvement over the old system.
It's mentioned in the article. It says that Google rejected it because it's a mess of Bash, Expect, and C and very hard to maintain. Their implementation is mostly Python, with a little C and Bash.
I'm guessing he was referring to using Eclipse to develop Mono stuff, but I'm not sure. I've never done Mono/C# development.
I also agree with the IntelliJ comment. Basically everyone I know tends to use Eclipse. Those that don't use the IDE they were taught in school or that they used before Eclipse was common: NetBeans.
Those are series hybrids, which is how the Chevy Volt will work (when the gas engine is engaged). The Prius is a series hybrid as well (it's got a neat but relatively complicated dual electric motor pseudo-CVT system). Other cars, such as the Honda Insight (the old one, don't know about the new) was a parallel hybrid, where the electric motor provided additional torque, but couldn't run the car alone.
Yeah, it's similar. There are some differences (trains don't generally have to deal with stop-and-go traffic, etc) but the idea isn't too far off.
I remember reading in Forbes years ago that there was a car company (Ford?) who wanted to make a hybrid. They developed their own system and it performed much worse than the Prius (the first gen in the US). That, combined with the fact their system was so similar to Toyota's they were afraid of lawsuits, led them to license the Toyota Hybrid System (THS), which was later named the Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD), since the Fords of the world wouldn't want their cars being powered by a Toyota Hybrid System.
It's a bit of a mess, but at least there are some hybrid cars. As other companies do more of this stuff (like the Volt, the Fusion if it doesn't use the HSD, etc) it will get to the point no one will be able to produce a car without violating patents, so they'll just cross-license everything and things will be the same as they are now.
That sounds pretty cool, it would be a bit like "reading" the matrix. I guess you would get over the distraction of text you're not looking at turning into garbage and start to tune it out.
Does anyone know of a video of this software in action, I'd love to see what it looks like.
That was literally my first thought when I saw this, but I checked out other videos by that YouTube user and it looks totally legit. If this is a joke, they went a long way.
I agree that at least DCTF served a purpose. This one is exactly where the RIAA/MPAA is. Kid copies some software, ends up making prison tattoos and being chased (so he can be beaten/killed) because he wasn't good at making the tattoo.
It's clear cause and effect here: own a computer, be annoyed by an 80s reject rapper, get shanked in prison.
What they need is another DCTF, just not corny. If they ran PSAs saying it's important to buy software, otherwise people won't be able to make The Sims 4, Crysis 5, or Barbie Horse Adventures 7: The Mysterious Case of the Calico Clydesdale, they could probably get a whole new generation of kids to think twice about copying.
Instead they made themselves a joke again.
Even if they had to do this campaign, did they really have to tie it into DCTF? That can't possibly lend them credibility. I bet if I showed this new video to the average 12 year old, they'd think it was some kind of internet sketch comedy thing.
I disagree. It doesn't make much sense for MS to release Halo 4 or Sony to release Little Big Planet 2 right away, but what about their backed catalog? It wouldn't hurt Nintendo (or anyone else) to release older games (everything from old arcacde through the last generation) on this kind of a service. It's just one more way to take people's money.
Heck. Maybe after playing Zelda or Halo 1 or something, I'd go out and buy the new version of the console, thus increasing revnue.
Makes sense to me, as long as you keep this away from new games.
Agreed. It's amazing how bad Flash is on the Mac. There is a reason Apple is trying to kill it (beyond lack of control).
HD video looks very nice. My Mac can play Apple's QuickTime h.264 clips, even those larger than the screen. It's not really a problem. It's a dual core 2.4GHz MBP.
Yet it drops frames on YouTube's 720p videos, and can do the same some times on other large (high pixel count) web videos (such as the HD 540p clips on GameSpot). There is no excuse for a 540p video not playing back smoothly and need ~85%+ of each core.
Download the same video in any format, no problem at all.
Flash video is just horrible. That's not even mentioning all the problems caused by every people on the 'net inventing their own Flash video player (some don't buffer content, some won't let you skip to arbitrary points, etc).
The video element is fantastic. I hope it catches on fast.
I'm pretty sure it's common to feed animal products (beef, chicken, pigs, etc) to other herbivores/omnivores (beef, chicken, pigs, etc). It can be a common ingredient in commercial feed. It's hypothesized to be one of the reasons for the increased incidence of salmonella, mad cow, e. coli, etc.
After a little Googling, the articles I can find are a few years old, and discuss pending legislation. That practice may have been outlawed by now. I'm pretty sure it was still in practice last year when the second season of This American Life was filmed. Here are some links: Seattle PI, Union of Concerned Scientists, some lobbying group, possibly for Islamic issues.
That program sounds fantastic to me. And this opinion is not influenced at all by the beef industry.
I might say that maybe we should just start by making it illegal to feed animals (especially old/diseased animals) to herbivore livestock. Or maybe make antibiotic feed illegal. Maybe just require labeling of if you use antibiotics or GE meat.
But I wouldn't say any of that. I love the Texas beef industry.
Besides occasionally helping to solve an "unsolvable" problem, there is distinct difference between people who like figuring things out and coding, and people who just code.
People with the "hacker ethic" often have experience with a wide range of languages or disciplines, since they are interesting in knowing many things. This gives this a wide array of knowledge to draw on. The Mythbusters, in their RSA speech, said that they don't know a lot about any subject, but they don't know a lot about a lot of subjects, helping them succeed where others run into stumbling blocks. Same thing for hackers.
Of course businesses, at least at some point, like the hacker ethic. Many businesses, at least initially, would rather have the hacked up system that works and they can make money off of than the "correct" answer of "it's too complicated" or "it can't be done". Sure this code can become a headache later (a very big one), but that's really because people didn't invest enough in paying off the technical debt in the code. If they had improved it over time it wouldn't be a large headache later.
The people I've run into who don't have at least a little of the hacker ethic aren't good programmers. They may be able to program, but they don't move outside their little world of what they know how to do and what they use. The only improve when forced to (by being given a new assignment, etc) and they only do what is necessary to finish that assignment. Any knowledge they gained that they didn't need, they gained because they didn't realize they didn't need it.
But if they were the kind of person who wanted to learn that kind of thing, they'd have the hacker ethic.
It's a good thing. It keeps programmers sharp and interested. It helps them have more of the necessary skills when a new challenge arrives... or at least be able to pick up that skill faster/easier.
Why do you need a new car? You should be able to find a perfectly reliable, reasonably safe used car for just a few grand. It may not be pretty, but it will do fine. Drive it until it dies, saving your car payment during that time. By the time it dies, you should have enough to buy something better (especially with trade in value). Trade up to another used car that's better, and continue.
The problem, from my readings of the story and associated stuff, seems to be that ScummVM was ported to the Wii (or at least to the official Nintendo APIs), but didn't release the changes. That's probably a GPL violation.
The really big issue from the initial complaint was not that ScummVM was being used (they seem rather happy about that), but that it was used without credit or attribution. That's a clear GPL violation.
Not saying they are correct, just that I hate being forced to listen to someone's obnoxious music every time their phone rings.
Besides, even if it does count as a performance... doesn't selling a license to a song as a ringtone imply the right to use the ring tone without paying each time?
In the past few years we've seen Expose, Spotlight, Time Machine, Aero Glass, and Growl, QuickSilver, and other innovations.
None of those have been in linux.
From my point of view, Linux has been getting better, but I wouldn't call it innovative. I don't remember hearing about any relatively innovative things on the Linux desktop.
The best I can think of is Ubuntu shipping the new notification mechanism, but that sounds a bit like Growl for OS X to me. I give them points for shipping it so everyone has it and it's not an incremental add-on.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at it.
Turn off the proposed new lines and tell me how that's our grid today in essentially 2010. On that map, the only route between the east and west coasts is a little line, under 500kV in western Nebraska.
The ONLY ONE.
So what's the solution to our energy problems? Biofuel, captured coal, wind, fission, fusion, space, treadmills? It doesn't matter!
If we can generate limitless power in Montana, but can only get it to North Dakota (next door) by either really small lines or by routing it though Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Idaho (again!), Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, then North Dakota... how can we do anything?
It doesn't matter if we should be using wind and carbon sequestration (I question wind as the panacea it seems to be these days), we'll still need a modern grid. That mess than happened in the north east a few years ago shouldn't be possible.
It's not a choice between better lines and green energy, unless you only count stimulus money. And isn't big interstate utility projects the kind of thing the federal government should be doing?
Clean power isn't useful if we can't transmit it more than 100 miles. The areas not near some sort of clean power source will just keep using coal.
It doesn't matter than nuclear energy has possible waste disposal issues. My point is that discussing the CO2 output caused by this project is useless. The question is how much energy is wasted, not how much CO2 is created.
We just happen to be on a kind of energy that frees previously trapped CO2. We could be mostly on one that produces radioactive waste, or one that uses up silicon (solar), or ones that cool down the earth (hydrothermal, to the teeny-tiny degree it does).
If we are going to discuss the energy impact of this project, I want to discuss the energy impact, not a side effect of the most common power generation methods.
But talking about CO2 is cool, so people frame everything that way, even when it would be much more appropriate to frame it in another manner.
Iceland gets less than 0.1% of it's energy from fossil fuels, but BOINC wastes just as much energy for computers in Iceland as it does in the US. Yet for Iceland the answer to how much extra CO2 does it make is "basically none", where as the answer to how much energy it wastes is "5%" (or whatever).
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad. So was the coming overpopulation and world famine. And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
There are more important questions. Much of this energy would be used anyway, but it would be in centralized supercomputers. This way though it's cheaper for the scientists so we can get more research done, even though it's slightly less efficient.
I'm just really tired about CO2 being discussed attached to everything. "Should I buy new shoes?" "Well, the CO2 produced from rubber is... and.... but...".
Nothing. BOINC requires no CO2 to operate.
It could just as easily be run on computers powered by nuclear or solar power, producing no CO2 (past initial construction).
Why does CO2 have to be the end-all-be-all of everything? Why not ask how much coal dust or mercury is now in the atmosphere thanks to the plants that power most of those computers.
I almost never use Excel. The only thing I use it consistently for is making little graphs when I want to visualize some data, because I know how to do it and have the software installed.
At least I knew how to do it. The data range selection stuff makes no sense to me anymore. I knew exactly how it worked in '03 and before. But now I get two multi-line select boxes, one of which holds one thing and one of which holds one thing for every data point. I find it very confusing, it's certainly not an improvement over the old system.
It's mentioned in the article. It says that Google rejected it because it's a mess of Bash, Expect, and C and very hard to maintain. Their implementation is mostly Python, with a little C and Bash.
I'm guessing he was referring to using Eclipse to develop Mono stuff, but I'm not sure. I've never done Mono/C# development.
I also agree with the IntelliJ comment. Basically everyone I know tends to use Eclipse. Those that don't use the IDE they were taught in school or that they used before Eclipse was common: NetBeans.
Those are series hybrids, which is how the Chevy Volt will work (when the gas engine is engaged). The Prius is a series hybrid as well (it's got a neat but relatively complicated dual electric motor pseudo-CVT system). Other cars, such as the Honda Insight (the old one, don't know about the new) was a parallel hybrid, where the electric motor provided additional torque, but couldn't run the car alone.
Yeah, it's similar. There are some differences (trains don't generally have to deal with stop-and-go traffic, etc) but the idea isn't too far off.
I remember reading in Forbes years ago that there was a car company (Ford?) who wanted to make a hybrid. They developed their own system and it performed much worse than the Prius (the first gen in the US). That, combined with the fact their system was so similar to Toyota's they were afraid of lawsuits, led them to license the Toyota Hybrid System (THS), which was later named the Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD), since the Fords of the world wouldn't want their cars being powered by a Toyota Hybrid System.
It's a bit of a mess, but at least there are some hybrid cars. As other companies do more of this stuff (like the Volt, the Fusion if it doesn't use the HSD, etc) it will get to the point no one will be able to produce a car without violating patents, so they'll just cross-license everything and things will be the same as they are now.
That sounds pretty cool, it would be a bit like "reading" the matrix. I guess you would get over the distraction of text you're not looking at turning into garbage and start to tune it out.
Does anyone know of a video of this software in action, I'd love to see what it looks like.
That was literally my first thought when I saw this, but I checked out other videos by that YouTube user and it looks totally legit. If this is a joke, they went a long way.
Watch the preview video. It's there now.
I agree that at least DCTF served a purpose. This one is exactly where the RIAA/MPAA is. Kid copies some software, ends up making prison tattoos and being chased (so he can be beaten/killed) because he wasn't good at making the tattoo.
It's clear cause and effect here: own a computer, be annoyed by an 80s reject rapper, get shanked in prison.
What they need is another DCTF, just not corny. If they ran PSAs saying it's important to buy software, otherwise people won't be able to make The Sims 4, Crysis 5, or Barbie Horse Adventures 7: The Mysterious Case of the Calico Clydesdale, they could probably get a whole new generation of kids to think twice about copying.
Instead they made themselves a joke again.
Even if they had to do this campaign, did they really have to tie it into DCTF? That can't possibly lend them credibility. I bet if I showed this new video to the average 12 year old, they'd think it was some kind of internet sketch comedy thing.
All the fun of meth with none of the side effects! Great!
no... wait...
It's the other way around.
I disagree. It doesn't make much sense for MS to release Halo 4 or Sony to release Little Big Planet 2 right away, but what about their backed catalog? It wouldn't hurt Nintendo (or anyone else) to release older games (everything from old arcacde through the last generation) on this kind of a service. It's just one more way to take people's money.
Heck. Maybe after playing Zelda or Halo 1 or something, I'd go out and buy the new version of the console, thus increasing revnue.
Makes sense to me, as long as you keep this away from new games.
Agreed. It's amazing how bad Flash is on the Mac. There is a reason Apple is trying to kill it (beyond lack of control).
HD video looks very nice. My Mac can play Apple's QuickTime h.264 clips, even those larger than the screen. It's not really a problem. It's a dual core 2.4GHz MBP.
Yet it drops frames on YouTube's 720p videos, and can do the same some times on other large (high pixel count) web videos (such as the HD 540p clips on GameSpot). There is no excuse for a 540p video not playing back smoothly and need ~85%+ of each core.
Download the same video in any format, no problem at all.
Flash video is just horrible. That's not even mentioning all the problems caused by every people on the 'net inventing their own Flash video player (some don't buffer content, some won't let you skip to arbitrary points, etc).
The video element is fantastic. I hope it catches on fast.
I'm pretty sure it's common to feed animal products (beef, chicken, pigs, etc) to other herbivores/omnivores (beef, chicken, pigs, etc). It can be a common ingredient in commercial feed. It's hypothesized to be one of the reasons for the increased incidence of salmonella, mad cow, e. coli, etc.
After a little Googling, the articles I can find are a few years old, and discuss pending legislation. That practice may have been outlawed by now. I'm pretty sure it was still in practice last year when the second season of This American Life was filmed. Here are some links: Seattle PI, Union of Concerned Scientists, some lobbying group, possibly for Islamic issues.
That program sounds fantastic to me. And this opinion is not influenced at all by the beef industry.
I might say that maybe we should just start by making it illegal to feed animals (especially old/diseased animals) to herbivore livestock. Or maybe make antibiotic feed illegal. Maybe just require labeling of if you use antibiotics or GE meat.
But I wouldn't say any of that. I love the Texas beef industry.
*please don't sue me*
It got posted to Slashdot.
Q.E.D.
It's actively helpful.
Besides occasionally helping to solve an "unsolvable" problem, there is distinct difference between people who like figuring things out and coding, and people who just code.
People with the "hacker ethic" often have experience with a wide range of languages or disciplines, since they are interesting in knowing many things. This gives this a wide array of knowledge to draw on. The Mythbusters, in their RSA speech, said that they don't know a lot about any subject, but they don't know a lot about a lot of subjects, helping them succeed where others run into stumbling blocks. Same thing for hackers.
Of course businesses, at least at some point, like the hacker ethic. Many businesses, at least initially, would rather have the hacked up system that works and they can make money off of than the "correct" answer of "it's too complicated" or "it can't be done". Sure this code can become a headache later (a very big one), but that's really because people didn't invest enough in paying off the technical debt in the code. If they had improved it over time it wouldn't be a large headache later.
The people I've run into who don't have at least a little of the hacker ethic aren't good programmers. They may be able to program, but they don't move outside their little world of what they know how to do and what they use. The only improve when forced to (by being given a new assignment, etc) and they only do what is necessary to finish that assignment. Any knowledge they gained that they didn't need, they gained because they didn't realize they didn't need it.
But if they were the kind of person who wanted to learn that kind of thing, they'd have the hacker ethic.
It's a good thing. It keeps programmers sharp and interested. It helps them have more of the necessary skills when a new challenge arrives... or at least be able to pick up that skill faster/easier.
Why do you need a new car? You should be able to find a perfectly reliable, reasonably safe used car for just a few grand. It may not be pretty, but it will do fine. Drive it until it dies, saving your car payment during that time. By the time it dies, you should have enough to buy something better (especially with trade in value). Trade up to another used car that's better, and continue.
But now what will the poor grey-beards do for a living?
Wont' someone please think of the grey-beards?
The problem, from my readings of the story and associated stuff, seems to be that ScummVM was ported to the Wii (or at least to the official Nintendo APIs), but didn't release the changes. That's probably a GPL violation.
The really big issue from the initial complaint was not that ScummVM was being used (they seem rather happy about that), but that it was used without credit or attribution. That's a clear GPL violation.
Don't forget no taxes and a yearly check from the Permanent Fund.
Yet one more reason to avoid ringtones.
Not saying they are correct, just that I hate being forced to listen to someone's obnoxious music every time their phone rings.
Besides, even if it does count as a performance... doesn't selling a license to a song as a ringtone imply the right to use the ring tone without paying each time?
In the past few years we've seen Expose, Spotlight, Time Machine, Aero Glass, and Growl, QuickSilver, and other innovations.
None of those have been in linux.
From my point of view, Linux has been getting better, but I wouldn't call it innovative. I don't remember hearing about any relatively innovative things on the Linux desktop.
The best I can think of is Ubuntu shipping the new notification mechanism, but that sounds a bit like Growl for OS X to me. I give them points for shipping it so everyone has it and it's not an incremental add-on.
Not only the tape interface, the keyboard will be out in the spring!