I mentioned Toyota, but not the RAV4-EV specifically... Their Prius certainly predates Tesla Motors, and changing it to a plug-in didn't require much new technology. I also mentioned Ford, who licensed their hybrid designs from Toyota. In fact most car companies cross-license technology, or at least patents, from other car makers. Sometimes they jointly develop vehicles in partnerships with their competitors...
Hand-wave it away all you want, but there are plenty of non-US companies with perfectly good EVs. It's good that US companies aren't falling behind, but I don't see any reason for flag-waving here. Maybe if GM didn't ax the EV1 the first time around, we'd be in far better shape.
America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants
What do you mean "still"? We had a ~40 year hiatus, while other countries (eg. France) were going full-bore on nuclear power, and we were just hoping our existing plants wouldn't fall apart.
natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2.
Completely wrong! Less than coal, sure, but it emits plenty of CO2.
Also where are realistic electric cars like the Telsa being designed? America.
This is the "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy. Plenty of electric cars and hybrids are coming from Japan... Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Toyota Prius plug-in, etc. You have to completely contrive your idea of "realistic", going out of your way to make it fit only US-built vehicles.
Other EVs include: Peugeot iOn, Citroen C-ZERO, Smart Fortwo electric, Tata Vista, Vauxhall Ampera, Renault Fluence ZE, Mia electric, Azure Transit Connect Electric; Mercedes-Benz Vito E-Cell; Faam Ecomile; Faam Jolly 2000; Mia U; Smith Electric Edison, BYD Auto's F3DM, Fisker Karma, Ford C-Max Energi.
If Europe had been at all serious about CO2 reduction they would have leaned on Germany not to close down nuclear plants.
It might have been a short-sighted and politically motivated move, OR MAYBE the Germans know something about the safety of their existing nuclear power plants that the rest of us do not... Waiting until there's an accident and then shutting them down is the worst of both worlds.
Meanwhile, Germany has been incredibly aggressive in developing solar and wind power, something we can't say about the US, even after Obama's campaign promises.
No. Neither high voltage nor high current on its own will kill a person. You need both, and excesses of either one will allow the other to be reduced to minimal levels to still be lethal.
If teachers don't know where she is or what she is doing at any time during her stay that is indicative of negligence on their part, regardless of whether an RFID monitoring system is in place. So, as long as an uncovered and functional RFID tag is something she is only required to carry on school grounds
Except RFID (or NFC to be accurate) will NOT, in any way, allow schools to better track or protect her, nor will it obviate the need for any existing methods. Kids will givr their badges to friends to swipe and "prove" they were in class, while they were off campus entirely. The NFC card won't make it any harder to physically leave campus, or be forcibly removed.
This whole thing is just a "We're lazy, and you're nothing but cattle to us, so we've decided to brand you all" move.
My car battery can supply hundreds of amps, yet grabbing both terminals doesn't kill me, because it's only 12-14 volts.
A tiny amount of current at a low voltage can kill you, but ONLY if directly delivered across your heart or brain.
Generally, your skin protects you, by being pretty highly resistive (depending on humidity). But accidents happen, and if you have open wounds, get poked through the skin with a stray copper strand, or similar, a seemingly small amount of current at modest voltages can suddenly become deadly.
But if we're talking about the most common case, where a terminal is in contact with your skin, a high voltage is needed to overcome the resistance of your skin and musculature, and you also need a not-insignificant amount of current to travel all the way through your body. And even then, the path it takes from entry to exit is critical... With only one arm affected, the power is likely to flow to ground through your legs, and never cross your heart. But if your other hand is grounded, your odds of survival become far worse.
In other words, you can always put on more clothes, but there's a limit to what you can take off.
Really not true...
Here on EARTH at least, there's no locations that are too hot for a healthy person to tolerate. And for those who aren't healthy, dumping a bucket of water over their head will very significantly drop their body temperature...
Meanwhile, those in really extreme cold are going to have a difficult time surviving. The GP's plan of setting-up a 4-season tent indoors, and crawling into a -20 degree rated sleeping bag would be my plan, too, but that's not entirely tenable. Things like stepping out for a few minutes to use the restroom MIGHT KILL YOU. Not to mention the difficulties of having to MELT your supply of water, and serious risks of numerous cold-related health conditions like pneumonia.
No question about it... I'd prefer to try and survive an extended disaster in Death Valley, rather than Antarctica.
If we design a generator that runs at the right RPM, and connection kits that will allow it to be coupled to an car engine it would be very helpful.
Now you've just gone off the rails completely... It's one thing to draw a little power from your car/battery in an emergency to power a few critical appliances (raido, cell phone, flashlights, etc.), and quite another to try and press them into extended, heavy-duty service.
Automobiles aren't designed for stationary use to begin with. You'd have cars overheating left and right, as there's no airflow. Their wimpy little electric cooling fans would be struggling mightily, but would fail from that kind of abuse and frequent cycling in short order.
Once you talk about inserting accessories, like an upgraded alternator, you've completely failed on the economical side as well... You can walk into stores RIGHT NOW and go buy a low-end 1kW generator right around $100, or a heavy-duty 4kW model for under $250. No need to go destroy your vehicle.
In an emergency so many people would happily stay at home and avoid driving around, if they can. But they are all forced to run around looking for food, gas and water.
In the first place, people should all be evacuated from the disaster area, not being provided conveniences at the expense of first responders' lives. Secondly, if FEMA or anyone else was in a position to provide services, they'd be restoring the water, natural gas, and power lines, NOT dispatching fleets of fuel delivery trucks to keep people comfortably watching TV...
It's up to individuals to stock-up on these basic necessities to protect themselves in case of emergencies. Even minor events could cause you to lose water, power, or be unable to go buy food.
A gallon of water per person/per day isn't difficult to manage. It's what, 4x1gal for a dollar at just about any grocery store? A reusable "WaterBOB" bladder that'll hold 100 gallons is $20-30. And in a pinch, those nice big water heater tanks can be tapped for 30+ gallons.
A 25lbs bag of rice costs all of $12 right now (even less when on sale), and will give an average person all the calories they need for more than a month. Camping stores (or Walmart) sell a 5gal bucket full of a month's supply of a variety of food for under $100.
And a full gas tank is always recommended by authorities before an impending potential disaster, but I would suggest a 55 gallon barrel. That's probably more than enough to get a family through even an extended outage, and is small enough to store in any homes (apartment dwellers will need to go considerably smaller, though), and any homes that use heating oil have a huge supply of kerosene already. Plus, natural gas lines seem to have held up quite well during Sandy, at least, and in a pinch, anybody with some mechanical inclination can convert an engine to run on natural gas or propane, instead of gasoline or kerosene.
Municipalities should develop emergency plans where their residents simply text to some known number information like, "running short of water/food/gas", "Medical attention needed", "Number of young children = XX".
First they're really going to need to crack the whip on cell phone companies, and have them make damn sure their towers will stay up and running during power outages, and not lose half of them in the first few minutes.
I've read about people buying dead car batteries real cheap and bringing them back to life by desulfating them
There are a lot of failure modes for car batteries.
You can't see the reason for the failure just by looking at it before buying it.
If you buy one with other (eg. physical) damage, you've wasted your time and money.
Even if you're lucky, your desulfated battery is going to have lower capacity and shorter useful life than a new battery.
The "core charge" for a dead battery runs about 1/4th the cost of a NEW and WORKING car battery.
In short, I don't think the economics are there to make "car battery repair" very viable.
I suppose if I had a junk yard, or other source of completely free batteries (see "core charge" above) I'd keep stocked-up with specific gravity testers and replacement acid and be happy even with a very low success rate, and recycle all the failures.
You don't have a clue WTF you're talking about, and either didn't read past the first sentence, or couldn't comprehend my post, because I covered what really happens, and it isn't as ridiculously simple as you believe.
All of the above can be determined by reading tec h specs, or customer reviews... There's no reason you need to be the guinea p pig. Not to mention, reviews cover other important issues a showroom won't help with.
And now, a good tablet with keyboard can be cheaper than the cheapest laptops.
Apple has only sued over phones, and vendor-specific software changes. Samsung may be in the headlights, but Android in general is quite safe.
Let me guess: all your computers are desktop computers, whose keyboards are replaceable.
You realize tablets (with one exception) don't come with keyboards, right? To simulate the input device on a tablet, I recommend you cut a pane of glass to the size listed in the tech specs.
When I discovered that its space bar was so short that my right thumb didn't reach it,
I don't have freakishly small hands, so reading a few hundred other customer reviews on walmart,com or amazon.com gives me an extremely good idea what I'm getting.
After PCs die, what hardware will remain that is 1. sold in U.S. stores with showrooms, and 2. not enforcing a walled garden against a machine owner's will like an iPad or game console?
You can walk into the nearest Walmart and play with a couple of the latest and cheapest Android tablets.
Besides, why the requirement? I haven't used a "showroom" for my computer purchases since my very, very first one, way back when.
GPT vs MBR is irrelevant to BIOS, [...] "it works unless actively broken."
WTF are you talking about? How does the BIOS hand-off to the boot loader (eg. GRUB) on the active partition, if the BIOS doesn't even know what a partition is?
Yes, you can stick a loader in the MBR and the BIOS will be able to load it, but there's so little space available there that you've gotta do neat tricks to get enough smarts in that little slice of disk to be able to read partitions and files, to be able to find the next stage of the boot loader.
It doesn't "work unless actively broken"... It works, most of the time, because people have been working within those limitations for decades, and a few have been able to put together some hacks that happen to work well enough that we tolerate them.
It's putting an operating system (including UI, device drivers etc) into the fucking firmware
That's pretty much what every architecture other than x86 has in their firmware/boot loader.
x86, instead, lived with putting lots of extra complexity into the boot loader and kernel. Things like GRUB would be completely unnecessary on, eg. DEC Alpha systems. INITRD could mostly be replaced/eliminated as well. And indeed, anyone who has had to deal with boot problems with their Linux system on x86 can testify that the x86 boot loader/kernel complexity isn't a very good trade-off for those who have to write the loaders, or debug and fix the problems that (only occasionally these days) come up.
Not that I'm endorsing UEFI; the job could be done much more simply.
GRUB sucks... Everybody hates it, and just tolerates it. If we're limited to one bootloader for Linux, go for the SysLinux/ExtLinux/ISOLinux/PXELinue suite,
This whole issue could have been avoided if the developers didn't use the "Hacker Solution", but instead... well, read the paper.
Though it hardly affects me, I have to highly disagree with the assertions of the paper... I'd say the "Hacker Solution" was the most proper, with the exception of using case instead of nested ifs, and pattern matching (eg. "Win*" instead of multiple full strings hard-coded). Don't underestimate the maintainability of code that is small, and with super-simple logic anyone can comprehend at a glance.
And particularly in the case of Lenovo's UEFI, the "Hacker Solution" already has a reasonable fallback for the case of an unmatched alternative OS, which the "Sophisticated" option appears to lack if the "os.name" doesn't match, but also is not NULL.
Netflix works fine on the Mac, which is a bigger threat to Microsoft's desktop dominance than Linux is.
Apple's Mac is clearly no threat to Microsoft. They've shown themselves perfectly happy to have a profitable niche, rather than lower prices and cater to the unwashed masses.
The real threat to Windows is Android... A decent Android tablet is only $80, plus a few for bluetooth keyboard and stand. Viewsonic is embedding Android systems in their monitors, now, so you can go buy a new monitor for your PC, and later decide the PC its attached to is redundant. I'm frustrated nobody has put together a polished Linux OS layer for Android, ala. Cygwin or MacPorts, so a number of Linux apps I need can't be run on Android. Microsoft knows the threat, and they've (re-)entered the tablet market to try and just slow the competition down, and divide the market, with Win8, rather than let a free and open option gain dominance and that magical economies of scale that suddenly tips the balance of power.
Netflix doesn't seem happy about Android, either. They dragged their feet as long as they could on getting out a Netflix app for Android, and while it's out there now, it sure performs like crap on my nice fast cell phone that easily runs everything else... I suppose no matter how much Netflix loves Microsoft, they can't ignore the market to the point of their own demise.
Meanwhile, HuluDesktop has been available for Linux for a good long time... If you want to stream TV shows and a few movies on your Linux DVR, Hulu Plus is obviously the way to go.
Nathan Cohen and Fractal Antenna Systems have been on a crusade to corrupt Wikipedia. They have been paying multiple editors who have been systematically making advertising edits to multiple Wikipedia articles, all coming from IPs that map to the vicinity of Fractal Antenna Systems' headquarters in MA. They remove any reference to competitors (eg. Fractus) and any references that disagree that fractal antennas are the be-all end-all. The bulk of the corruption is on the fractal antenna article, but Nathan Cohen's name has been tossed in to several other pages... Notable people from XYZ, notable graduates from university XYZ, etc,
See the talk page on Fractal Antennas for all the details:
"I'm still trying to figure out what else would be worth paying hundreds of dollars more for a bigger phone with a shorter battery life."
Navigation, POI (business search), and live traffic information is worth vastly more than $100 by itself.
Listening to your entire music collection and/or live streaming like Pandora and PRI/NPR/BBC World.
Watching youtube videos, or entire DVDs if you are so inclined (works out well on long flights).
Reading and replying to your personal and work email wherever and whenever you feel like it.
Having both your personal appointments and reminders, and your work appointments pulled from Exchange automatically.
Using a good RSS reader, allowing you to read the articles from a number of website you frequent (including/.) all in a slick interface, at a moment's notice, without needing to turn on/off a computer.
Replying to idiots on/. at work...
Having all your ebooks wherever you are, and a great screen to read them on.
Having a great SSH client wherver you are, so you can login to your Linux boxes and do... absoloutely anything and everything...
Scientific calculator with you at all times.
All the games you can stand... From strategy games to word games, to emulators allowing you to play any game for older consoles (Genesis, N64, etc).
What if the parts of your brain that process visual/audio data are damaged and don't work anymore?
That isn't the case for this man. He is apparently acquiring information from after his accident (unless this experiment is biased and the conclusions are all crap, but that's a different discussion).
you would be trapped in a dark abyss entirely inside your head, unable to see or hear any stimulus
Purgatory? Solitary confinement? Depending on your philosophy, a few years of that may be preferable to death. And if there is any HOPE of a cure, a few years of complete isolation may not be horrendous. If you've had a decently long life, you may have lots to think about...
The LKML thread isn't long, and it's entirely on-topic, unlike most.
RTS (the accused) engineer and lawyer have asserted they are not violating the GPL, but things they've said to justify that don't hold up to scrutiny, and at least imply license violation. They may well be correct, but they're completely failing to explain their position and answer questions.
Google doesn't need them. They're doing fine running on commodity servers for their web stuff,
Where do you think the processors in those "commodity servers" come from? Intel only keep their chips at reasonable prices because they have AMD to keep them honest.
Plus, Google has so many damn servers, and a completely custom, in-house workflow, that they'll spend millions and millions for a percent efficiency improvement here and there... Being able to steer a chip-maker towards more cores, higher IPC, better SIMD, or whatever, could be quite profitable for them, and as an added bonus, the outside world wants to buy their chips, too, so they arent risking losing too much money to get what they want.
and trying to produce their own mobile chips would anger their hardware partners for Android.
Being just another ARM designer and fab doesn't seem like it would anger anyone, all that much. Samsung might not exactly be ecstatic about it...
IBM isn't too likely (they have enough good hardware people already),
IBM and AMD are about the closest partners there are in the chip world. They shared technologies and fabs for many years, giving both larger volume. IBM has good hardware people, but they're focused on things like POWER, not on x64, yet IBM is happy to use Opteron chips in their supercomputers. Plus, with the increasing trend of CPU+GPU combos in supercomputers, AMD is a one-stop shop to get the best of both.
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I mentioned Toyota, but not the RAV4-EV specifically... Their Prius certainly predates Tesla Motors, and changing it to a plug-in didn't require much new technology. I also mentioned Ford, who licensed their hybrid designs from Toyota. In fact most car companies cross-license technology, or at least patents, from other car makers. Sometimes they jointly develop vehicles in partnerships with their competitors...
Hand-wave it away all you want, but there are plenty of non-US companies with perfectly good EVs. It's good that US companies aren't falling behind, but I don't see any reason for flag-waving here. Maybe if GM didn't ax the EV1 the first time around, we'd be in far better shape.
Pure nonsense.
What do you mean "still"? We had a ~40 year hiatus, while other countries (eg. France) were going full-bore on nuclear power, and we were just hoping our existing plants wouldn't fall apart.
Completely wrong! Less than coal, sure, but it emits plenty of CO2.
This is the "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy. Plenty of electric cars and hybrids are coming from Japan... Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Toyota Prius plug-in, etc. You have to completely contrive your idea of "realistic", going out of your way to make it fit only US-built vehicles.
Other EVs include: Peugeot iOn, Citroen C-ZERO, Smart Fortwo electric, Tata Vista, Vauxhall Ampera, Renault Fluence ZE, Mia electric, Azure Transit Connect Electric; Mercedes-Benz Vito E-Cell; Faam Ecomile; Faam Jolly 2000; Mia U; Smith Electric Edison, BYD Auto's F3DM, Fisker Karma, Ford C-Max Energi.
It might have been a short-sighted and politically motivated move, OR MAYBE the Germans know something about the safety of their existing nuclear power plants that the rest of us do not... Waiting until there's an accident and then shutting them down is the worst of both worlds.
Meanwhile, Germany has been incredibly aggressive in developing solar and wind power, something we can't say about the US, even after Obama's campaign promises.
No. Neither high voltage nor high current on its own will kill a person. You need both, and excesses of either one will allow the other to be reduced to minimal levels to still be lethal.
Except RFID (or NFC to be accurate) will NOT, in any way, allow schools to better track or protect her, nor will it obviate the need for any existing methods. Kids will givr their badges to friends to swipe and "prove" they were in class, while they were off campus entirely. The NFC card won't make it any harder to physically leave campus, or be forcibly removed.
This whole thing is just a "We're lazy, and you're nothing but cattle to us, so we've decided to brand you all" move.
Awesome! Up next, students being force-fed BLTs for lunch every Friday!
No, it's not that simple.
My car battery can supply hundreds of amps, yet grabbing both terminals doesn't kill me, because it's only 12-14 volts.
A tiny amount of current at a low voltage can kill you, but ONLY if directly delivered across your heart or brain.
Generally, your skin protects you, by being pretty highly resistive (depending on humidity). But accidents happen, and if you have open wounds, get poked through the skin with a stray copper strand, or similar, a seemingly small amount of current at modest voltages can suddenly become deadly.
But if we're talking about the most common case, where a terminal is in contact with your skin, a high voltage is needed to overcome the resistance of your skin and musculature, and you also need a not-insignificant amount of current to travel all the way through your body. And even then, the path it takes from entry to exit is critical... With only one arm affected, the power is likely to flow to ground through your legs, and never cross your heart. But if your other hand is grounded, your odds of survival become far worse.
Really not true...
Here on EARTH at least, there's no locations that are too hot for a healthy person to tolerate. And for those who aren't healthy, dumping a bucket of water over their head will very significantly drop their body temperature...
Meanwhile, those in really extreme cold are going to have a difficult time surviving. The GP's plan of setting-up a 4-season tent indoors, and crawling into a -20 degree rated sleeping bag would be my plan, too, but that's not entirely tenable. Things like stepping out for a few minutes to use the restroom MIGHT KILL YOU. Not to mention the difficulties of having to MELT your supply of water, and serious risks of numerous cold-related health conditions like pneumonia.
No question about it... I'd prefer to try and survive an extended disaster in Death Valley, rather than Antarctica.
Now you've just gone off the rails completely... It's one thing to draw a little power from your car/battery in an emergency to power a few critical appliances (raido, cell phone, flashlights, etc.), and quite another to try and press them into extended, heavy-duty service.
Automobiles aren't designed for stationary use to begin with. You'd have cars overheating left and right, as there's no airflow. Their wimpy little electric cooling fans would be struggling mightily, but would fail from that kind of abuse and frequent cycling in short order.
Once you talk about inserting accessories, like an upgraded alternator, you've completely failed on the economical side as well... You can walk into stores RIGHT NOW and go buy a low-end 1kW generator right around $100, or a heavy-duty 4kW model for under $250. No need to go destroy your vehicle.
In the first place, people should all be evacuated from the disaster area, not being provided conveniences at the expense of first responders' lives.
Secondly, if FEMA or anyone else was in a position to provide services, they'd be restoring the water, natural gas, and power lines, NOT dispatching fleets of fuel delivery trucks to keep people comfortably watching TV...
It's up to individuals to stock-up on these basic necessities to protect themselves in case of emergencies. Even minor events could cause you to lose water, power, or be unable to go buy food.
A gallon of water per person/per day isn't difficult to manage. It's what, 4x1gal for a dollar at just about any grocery store? A reusable "WaterBOB" bladder that'll hold 100 gallons is $20-30. And in a pinch, those nice big water heater tanks can be tapped for 30+ gallons.
A 25lbs bag of rice costs all of $12 right now (even less when on sale), and will give an average person all the calories they need for more than a month. Camping stores (or Walmart) sell a 5gal bucket full of a month's supply of a variety of food for under $100.
And a full gas tank is always recommended by authorities before an impending potential disaster, but I would suggest a 55 gallon barrel. That's probably more than enough to get a family through even an extended outage, and is small enough to store in any homes (apartment dwellers will need to go considerably smaller, though), and any homes that use heating oil have a huge supply of kerosene already. Plus, natural gas lines seem to have held up quite well during Sandy, at least, and in a pinch, anybody with some mechanical inclination can convert an engine to run on natural gas or propane, instead of gasoline or kerosene.
First they're really going to need to crack the whip on cell phone companies, and have them make damn sure their towers will stay up and running during power outages, and not lose half of them in the first few minutes.
There are a lot of failure modes for car batteries.
You can't see the reason for the failure just by looking at it before buying it.
If you buy one with other (eg. physical) damage, you've wasted your time and money.
Even if you're lucky, your desulfated battery is going to have lower capacity and shorter useful life than a new battery.
The "core charge" for a dead battery runs about 1/4th the cost of a NEW and WORKING car battery.
In short, I don't think the economics are there to make "car battery repair" very viable.
I suppose if I had a junk yard, or other source of completely free batteries (see "core charge" above) I'd keep stocked-up with specific gravity testers and replacement acid and be happy even with a very low success rate, and recycle all the failures.
OpenSSH will refuse to use any key where the permissions are set too permissively, so others may be able to read it...
Technology can't solve stupid user mistakes, but it can keep getting better at preventing common mistakes.
You don't have a clue WTF you're talking about, and either didn't read past the first sentence, or couldn't comprehend my post, because I covered what really happens, and it isn't as ridiculously simple as you believe.
All of the above can be determined by reading tec h specs, or customer reviews... There's no reason you need to be the guinea p pig. Not to mention, reviews cover other important issues a showroom won't help with.
And now, a good tablet with keyboard can be cheaper than the cheapest laptops.
Apple has only sued over phones, and vendor-specific software changes. Samsung may be in the headlights, but Android in general is quite safe.
You realize tablets (with one exception) don't come with keyboards, right? To simulate the input device on a tablet, I recommend you cut a pane of glass to the size listed in the tech specs.
I don't have freakishly small hands, so reading a few hundred other customer reviews on walmart,com or amazon.com gives me an extremely good idea what I'm getting.
You can walk into the nearest Walmart and play with a couple of the latest and cheapest Android tablets.
Besides, why the requirement? I haven't used a "showroom" for my computer purchases since my very, very first one, way back when.
WTF are you talking about? How does the BIOS hand-off to the boot loader (eg. GRUB) on the active partition, if the BIOS doesn't even know what a partition is?
Yes, you can stick a loader in the MBR and the BIOS will be able to load it, but there's so little space available there that you've gotta do neat tricks to get enough smarts in that little slice of disk to be able to read partitions and files, to be able to find the next stage of the boot loader.
It doesn't "work unless actively broken"... It works, most of the time, because people have been working within those limitations for decades, and a few have been able to put together some hacks that happen to work well enough that we tolerate them.
That's pretty much what every architecture other than x86 has in their firmware/boot loader.
x86, instead, lived with putting lots of extra complexity into the boot loader and kernel. Things like GRUB would be completely unnecessary on, eg. DEC Alpha systems. INITRD could mostly be replaced/eliminated as well. And indeed, anyone who has had to deal with boot problems with their Linux system on x86 can testify that the x86 boot loader/kernel complexity isn't a very good trade-off for those who have to write the loaders, or debug and fix the problems that (only occasionally these days) come up.
Not that I'm endorsing UEFI; the job could be done much more simply.
GRUB sucks... Everybody hates it, and just tolerates it. If we're limited to one bootloader for Linux, go for the SysLinux/ExtLinux/ISOLinux/PXELinue suite,
Though it hardly affects me, I have to highly disagree with the assertions of the paper... I'd say the "Hacker Solution" was the most proper, with the exception of using case instead of nested ifs, and pattern matching (eg. "Win*" instead of multiple full strings hard-coded). Don't underestimate the maintainability of code that is small, and with super-simple logic anyone can comprehend at a glance.
And particularly in the case of Lenovo's UEFI, the "Hacker Solution" already has a reasonable fallback for the case of an unmatched alternative OS, which the "Sophisticated" option appears to lack if the "os.name" doesn't match, but also is not NULL.
Apple's Mac is clearly no threat to Microsoft. They've shown themselves perfectly happy to have a profitable niche, rather than lower prices and cater to the unwashed masses.
The real threat to Windows is Android... A decent Android tablet is only $80, plus a few for bluetooth keyboard and stand. Viewsonic is embedding Android systems in their monitors, now, so you can go buy a new monitor for your PC, and later decide the PC its attached to is redundant. I'm frustrated nobody has put together a polished Linux OS layer for Android, ala. Cygwin or MacPorts, so a number of Linux apps I need can't be run on Android. Microsoft knows the threat, and they've (re-)entered the tablet market to try and just slow the competition down, and divide the market, with Win8, rather than let a free and open option gain dominance and that magical economies of scale that suddenly tips the balance of power.
Netflix doesn't seem happy about Android, either. They dragged their feet as long as they could on getting out a Netflix app for Android, and while it's out there now, it sure performs like crap on my nice fast cell phone that easily runs everything else... I suppose no matter how much Netflix loves Microsoft, they can't ignore the market to the point of their own demise.
Meanwhile, HuluDesktop has been available for Linux for a good long time... If you want to stream TV shows and a few movies on your Linux DVR, Hulu Plus is obviously the way to go.
Nathan Cohen and Fractal Antenna Systems have been on a crusade to corrupt Wikipedia. They have been paying multiple editors who have been systematically making advertising edits to multiple Wikipedia articles, all coming from IPs that map to the vicinity of Fractal Antenna Systems' headquarters in MA. They remove any reference to competitors (eg. Fractus) and any references that disagree that fractal antennas are the be-all end-all. The bulk of the corruption is on the fractal antenna article, but Nathan Cohen's name has been tossed in to several other pages... Notable people from XYZ, notable graduates from university XYZ, etc,
See the talk page on Fractal Antennas for all the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fractal_antenna#Obvious_bias_in_article
"I'm still trying to figure out what else would be worth paying hundreds of dollars more for a bigger phone with a shorter battery life."
Navigation, POI (business search), and live traffic information is worth vastly more than $100 by itself.
Listening to your entire music collection and/or live streaming like Pandora and PRI/NPR/BBC World.
Watching youtube videos, or entire DVDs if you are so inclined (works out well on long flights).
Reading and replying to your personal and work email wherever and whenever you feel like it.
Having both your personal appointments and reminders, and your work appointments pulled from Exchange automatically.
Using a good RSS reader, allowing you to read the articles from a number of website you frequent (including /.) all in a slick interface, at a moment's notice, without needing to turn on/off a computer.
Replying to idiots on /. at work...
Having all your ebooks wherever you are, and a great screen to read them on.
Having a great SSH client wherver you are, so you can login to your Linux boxes and do... absoloutely anything and everything...
Scientific calculator with you at all times.
All the games you can stand... From strategy games to word games, to emulators allowing you to play any game for older consoles (Genesis, N64, etc).
That isn't the case for this man. He is apparently acquiring information from after his accident (unless this experiment is biased and the conclusions are all crap, but that's a different discussion).
Purgatory? Solitary confinement? Depending on your philosophy, a few years of that may be preferable to death. And if there is any HOPE of a cure, a few years of complete isolation may not be horrendous. If you've had a decently long life, you may have lots to think about...
The LKML thread isn't long, and it's entirely on-topic, unlike most.
RTS (the accused) engineer and lawyer have asserted they are not violating the GPL, but things they've said to justify that don't hold up to scrutiny, and at least imply license violation. They may well be correct, but they're completely failing to explain their position and answer questions.
Where do you think the processors in those "commodity servers" come from? Intel only keep their chips at reasonable prices because they have AMD to keep them honest.
Plus, Google has so many damn servers, and a completely custom, in-house workflow, that they'll spend millions and millions for a percent efficiency improvement here and there... Being able to steer a chip-maker towards more cores, higher IPC, better SIMD, or whatever, could be quite profitable for them, and as an added bonus, the outside world wants to buy their chips, too, so they arent risking losing too much money to get what they want.
Being just another ARM designer and fab doesn't seem like it would anger anyone, all that much. Samsung might not exactly be ecstatic about it...
IBM and AMD are about the closest partners there are in the chip world. They shared technologies and fabs for many years, giving both larger volume. IBM has good hardware people, but they're focused on things like POWER, not on x64, yet IBM is happy to use Opteron chips in their supercomputers. Plus, with the increasing trend of CPU+GPU combos in supercomputers, AMD is a one-stop shop to get the best of both.