Lets throw in a few "Bjorn Lomborg (a statistician with no environmental science training, let alone numerical modelling or fluid dynamics) is right and everyone else was wrong" too
A statistician with no training in numerical modelling, eh?
Seriously, tho', Lomborg's background is an advantage. If you want to be a serious academic, you need tenure. Who grants tenure? People who already have it. So, it's pretty much impossible to become an academic without adhering to the orthodoxy of the established academics.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
We don't know for sure yet whether Lomborg is such a person, but I'd be willing to place money on it.
This is perhaps both more and less significant that it first appears.
For those that don't know, from version 8.0 Oracle is in fact two seperate components, VOS (virtual operating system) and Oracle itself. VOS completely abstracts everything from the actual OS; Oracle programmers have their own APIs for file I/O, memory management, networking, threading, scheduling, you name it. To port Oracle to a new platform, VOS is ported, then Oracle itself compiled against the new VOS libraries.
Solaris was the primary platform, which meant that everyone developed on a Solaris box and then compiled against VOS on all platforms prior to release. This meant that inevitably useful new features went into Solaris first, but eventually they would have to be incorporated into VOS otherwise Oracle itself would fail to compile anywhere else.
So, this means that everyone gets a Linux box on their desktop, but they are still developing against VOS, and so while Oracle is pushing Linux as its platform of choice, all its other builds such as Solaris and AIX will remain current.
Re:But it's not getting cheaper
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
The big headache with all this is that the technology isn't making animated features cheaper. The project headcounts are still huge.
But that's the same in all IT. For example, computers meant fewer accountants on staff, but more programmers, sysadmins, tech support, etc etc. Computers in fact have barely increased productivity overall throughout the economy - they've simply shuffled jos from one department to another. No reason movie production should be any different.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
Well, it isn't bad, but this is Slashdot. When Linux competes with Windows on price, it's good. When Indian programmers compete with Americans on price, it's bad.
Certainly no-one has yet produced compelling evidence that Linux is actually cheaper. We have a bunch of studies from IBM et al saying that it is, and we have a bunch of studies from MS saying that it isn't. But I will say this: if something has no upfront cost and there is still doubt that it is cheaper, then maybe it's worth paying upfront.
Why in the world would someone want to run a bloated GUI based operating system on hardwared designed specifically to provide services (servers) to it's customers?
I think you vastly overestimate how much CPU a Windows box uses to display that "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to Login" screen.
What I really don't understand is why it would be necessary or smart to brand such a product as Windows at all.
That's easy. Sun, for example, sells workstations to its server customers on the premise that you can develop your app on small, cheap machines then when it's ready deploy it staight into your data centre without needing to change anything. Solaris is built from the ground up for this; fundamentally your code neither needs to know nor care that its threads are being scheduled on a uniprocessor U5 or a 106-way E15K. In reality of course you have to test for race conditions if you have any inter-thread dependencies, but if you don't, it's plain sailing.
That's Microsoft's game plan here. They are selling a solution not a server. They are selling the idea that your developers will be able to use their familiar Visual Studio tools on their cheap desktops (and Visual Studio these days is an incredibly productive environment) then run that code on the "Windows mainframe" in the basement. That strategy worked pretty well for every Unix vendor that sold both servers and workstations, there's no reason that it can't work for Microsoft.
Sure Microsoft could develop or buy a dedicated HPC OS, but why would they? If you can be bothered right now, it's easy enough to develop on Windows and deploy onto big Unix boxes. Microsoft wants to make it seamless, and they're doing an interestingly good job of it. Pretty soon, you'll be able to use the same tools to develop for PDAs, tablets, PCs, games consoles and mainframes. That's the vision.
Dell printer starts to run low on ink/toner. Poof! Windows comes up, ink/toner low, with a direct link to Dell's website to buy another pack. It could even be built into the driver interface so you give your credit card info, and it automatically orders when it goes low.
Problem is, a cheap printer estimates how much ink you have left by counting the number of pages you print and multiplying it by the manufacturers idea of the amount of ink on an average page. This may or may not match the way you actually print! Only a relatively good printer has the hardware onboard to actually measure how much ink you have left. And you can bet that Dell will estimate each page needs a lot of ink, and they'll make their cartridges opaque so you can't see how much you really have left!
Why the fsck is it that allegedly-educated people HAVE NO FSCKING CLUE about the fact that there are days when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine?
It is worse than you suspect, my friend. The fact is that they DO know these things, yet continue to advocate those methods anyway. Why? Because their real agenda is NOTHING to do with power generation and EVERYTHING to do with wrecking modern high-tech industrial society. It's far easier to control a man who earns his living tending crops that it is a man who earns his living pushing buttons. Why do you think that every "green" is also a Socialist? The answer is that the green agenda doesn't even exist, it is merely a cover story for an increase in State control over every aspect of your life.
The only advantage I can see is the initial cost advantage, but considering the durability of the panels (breaking a mirror would destroy the entire mirror - braking a solar panel would reduce the energy output only by the destroyed cells, if they're in parallel), any reasonable long-term cost estimate would have to scream in favor of the panels.
You've got me thinking too now. There's the cost of the obelisk itself, of course. The turbine/generator might be cheap if we're reusing, I don't know how much your rectifier/transformer would cost. Mirrors (lots of small mirrors, not one large one) are cheap - for a given area, mirrors will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solar cells, and can be made a good deal more robust. The motorized rail, and a mechanism for keeping the surfaces dust free, costs the same for both our solutions. I would need to do lots of plumbing to get my superheated steam from the obelisk to the turbine, you would need to do lots of wiring to get lots of small direct currents to your converter and into something that could be used by a consumer device. Hmm.
Photovoltaics are semiconductor devices, so they're not limited by the "thermodynamic bottleneck". I'd expect in the next 50 years to see photovoltaics hit 40-50% efficiency, which I doubt a "black obelisk" would *ever* hit. So I'm skeptical. Proof?
Well, no-one's built a full-size one yet, but the Spanish got good results from their little 50KW testbed (don't have a link to it to hand). Note that a coal-fired station is only about 40% efficient now anyway (slightly more with CHP, but you can do that with an obelisk too), and they're considered very viable.
Photovoltaics are the right solution if you need an easily portable/deployable method of generating a relatively small amount of power - but in that case, ease of portability makes it worthwhile to spend resources on actually making the cells.
The economics of reprocessing don't make sense. Sellafield could not exist without the British government imposing a levy on all energy sales AND bailing BNFL out on a regular basis.
The economics don't make sense because the British government has as a matter of policy busily been driving the British power industry out of business in favour of importing energy from Europe. They've stuck their head in the sand - they think that building new power stations would hurt them at the polls, so they're postponing dealing with the problem for another government to worry about sometime in the future.
The power stations we have are rapidly approaching end of life (but not rapidly enough to be before the next election) and NOTHING is being done about it. Even if the government would let them, British utilities simply don't have the cash, as their profit (i.e. reinvestment) margins have been so eroded by the regulator.
If Britain went for an serious nuclear strategy, like France, it would be more than viable.
'crack' the oil (dont ask me what that means, cos I dont know either!)
Cracking is the (usually catalytic) process by which long-chain hydrocarbons, which are difficult to burn efficiently, are broken down into short-chain hydrocarbons, which are volatile and easy to burn. Long-chain hydrocarbons have the advantage of a higher energy density but the engines that can use them are huge and complex (think, power station or large ship). Short chains are harder to handle (for example, they can explode) but they burn much more cleanly, much less free carbon in the exhaust, it's locked up in C02 (which of course has its own set of problems).
You can get a handfull of large solar panels , chuck it on the roof, stick it thru a 240w inverter and blammo
There are much better techniques for mass conversion of solar energy than photovoltaic cells. I'm not talking about enough energy to run a house but enough to make serious industry viable. My preferred technique would be the "black obelisk". It requires a large, open space, which you fill with mirrors on motorized bearings, and in the middle you build a huge black obelisk, filled with pipes. The mirrors rotate througout the day focussing the sun's energy on the obelisk, superheating water that is pumped into it, the steam coming out the other end is used to run the kind of turbine that exists in an ordinary coal or oil fired station. It's very efficient, and reuses existing technology, existing power stations in suitable climates could simply be converted in-place. In fact, a power station could use this technique by day and coal by night to ease the transition (it's all the same to the turbine), eventually it would store power generated by day for use at night.
Why should it be a sin to make money from political commentary, be it focused on Sept 11th,
Indeed - then why is Moore so sharply critical of other people, such as defense contractors - who also are making money out of hightened security?
He's not doing this out of a desire to right the wrongs of the world, but to get rich. He's really no different from Halliburton's board, but see if he'll ever admit that.
I've read all ten, and none of them mention anything about the viewer not performing independant verification of the material presented.
Accepting an award for a DOCUMENTARY and including material in said DOCUMENTARY that is not factual are incompatible. The only way Moore can accept that award is to assert that his source material is factual, and for that assertion to stand, the audience must not perform a verification. If Moore turned down the award and said "actually, it isn't really a documentary" then his position would be sound. Read the debunkings of his earlier work; his previous "documentaries" are full of made-up stuff. He even admits it quietly after the fact, when the furore has died down.
To receive this award there are only two possibilities: either the committee were ignorant of Moore's content, or they disregarded their own rules to make a political point.
Would they report on Poppy Bush's business ties with the Bin Laden's?
Bush's ties with the Bin Ladens are with the Bin Ladens who've publicly disowned Osama Bin Laden and refuse to have anything to do with him. Or do you think that entire families should be held responsible any time one family member commits a crime? Better hope all your second cousins never get any speeding tickets...
What gives you the impression that he expects you to not independently verify his content?
That he presents his work as documentary. That is a word with a specific meaning. Take the getting a free gun at the bank scene. In fact, the bank would give you a voucher that could be used at a gun store, once all the regular checks were done. The scene was completely staged - that makes it fiction, not documentary. Moore's films take place in an America that doesn't, and never, existed - it's no more real than a sci-fi or fantasy movie.
I would like to make that determination myself rather then seeing Buena Vista kiss presidential ass and decide that it is not gonna distribute it
Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that freedom of speech implies that private organizations are obligated to provide a soapbox. Therefore, despite what Moore claims, their decision is not censorship.
A genuine question for Moore fans: doesn't it bother you even slightly that Moore expects you not to independently verify what he presents as fact? You're supposed to be geeks, people who're capable of thinking "out of the box". And doesn't it bother you that Michael Moore is personally getting very, very rich out of September 11th?
but he has had a hand in producing some of the worst crap to ever be spattered on the silver screen.
OK, but you must understand that Woo doesn't, and never intended to, make traditional Hollywood films. His films, and what his fans expect, are all about motifs:
Doves
Reflections (in water, sunglasses, windows, etc)
Double-gunning
Brief but frequent use of slow-motion in action scenes
Characters who assume one another's identities
Etc
If you don't like that, you will of course think Woo films suck, but then, you're missing the point of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets throw in a few "Bjorn Lomborg (a statistician with no environmental science training, let alone numerical modelling or fluid dynamics) is right and everyone else was wrong" too
A statistician with no training in numerical modelling, eh?
Seriously, tho', Lomborg's background is an advantage. If you want to be a serious academic, you need tenure. Who grants tenure? People who already have it. So, it's pretty much impossible to become an academic without adhering to the orthodoxy of the established academics.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
We don't know for sure yet whether Lomborg is such a person, but I'd be willing to place money on it.
This is perhaps both more and less significant that it first appears.
For those that don't know, from version 8.0 Oracle is in fact two seperate components, VOS (virtual operating system) and Oracle itself. VOS completely abstracts everything from the actual OS; Oracle programmers have their own APIs for file I/O, memory management, networking, threading, scheduling, you name it. To port Oracle to a new platform, VOS is ported, then Oracle itself compiled against the new VOS libraries.
Solaris was the primary platform, which meant that everyone developed on a Solaris box and then compiled against VOS on all platforms prior to release. This meant that inevitably useful new features went into Solaris first, but eventually they would have to be incorporated into VOS otherwise Oracle itself would fail to compile anywhere else.
So, this means that everyone gets a Linux box on their desktop, but they are still developing against VOS, and so while Oracle is pushing Linux as its platform of choice, all its other builds such as Solaris and AIX will remain current.
The big headache with all this is that the technology isn't making animated features cheaper. The project headcounts are still huge.
But that's the same in all IT. For example, computers meant fewer accountants on staff, but more programmers, sysadmins, tech support, etc etc. Computers in fact have barely increased productivity overall throughout the economy - they've simply shuffled jos from one department to another. No reason movie production should be any different.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
Well, it isn't bad, but this is Slashdot. When Linux competes with Windows on price, it's good. When Indian programmers compete with Americans on price, it's bad.
Certainly no-one has yet produced compelling evidence that Linux is actually cheaper. We have a bunch of studies from IBM et al saying that it is, and we have a bunch of studies from MS saying that it isn't. But I will say this: if something has no upfront cost and there is still doubt that it is cheaper, then maybe it's worth paying upfront.
I bet his Karma sucks too
Dude, if you are compelling someone to do something, then their karma is clean and yours sucks. That's how it works.
Why in the world would someone want to run a bloated GUI based operating system on hardwared designed specifically to provide services (servers) to it's customers?
I think you vastly overestimate how much CPU a Windows box uses to display that "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to Login" screen.
What I really don't understand is why it would be necessary or smart to brand such a product as Windows at all.
That's easy. Sun, for example, sells workstations to its server customers on the premise that you can develop your app on small, cheap machines then when it's ready deploy it staight into your data centre without needing to change anything. Solaris is built from the ground up for this; fundamentally your code neither needs to know nor care that its threads are being scheduled on a uniprocessor U5 or a 106-way E15K. In reality of course you have to test for race conditions if you have any inter-thread dependencies, but if you don't, it's plain sailing.
That's Microsoft's game plan here. They are selling a solution not a server. They are selling the idea that your developers will be able to use their familiar Visual Studio tools on their cheap desktops (and Visual Studio these days is an incredibly productive environment) then run that code on the "Windows mainframe" in the basement. That strategy worked pretty well for every Unix vendor that sold both servers and workstations, there's no reason that it can't work for Microsoft.
Sure Microsoft could develop or buy a dedicated HPC OS, but why would they? If you can be bothered right now, it's easy enough to develop on Windows and deploy onto big Unix boxes. Microsoft wants to make it seamless, and they're doing an interestingly good job of it. Pretty soon, you'll be able to use the same tools to develop for PDAs, tablets, PCs, games consoles and mainframes. That's the vision.
Dell printer starts to run low on ink/toner. Poof! Windows comes up, ink/toner low, with a direct link to Dell's website to buy another pack. It could even be built into the driver interface so you give your credit card info, and it automatically orders when it goes low.
Problem is, a cheap printer estimates how much ink you have left by counting the number of pages you print and multiplying it by the manufacturers idea of the amount of ink on an average page. This may or may not match the way you actually print! Only a relatively good printer has the hardware onboard to actually measure how much ink you have left. And you can bet that Dell will estimate each page needs a lot of ink, and they'll make their cartridges opaque so you can't see how much you really have left!
Why the fsck is it that allegedly-educated people HAVE NO FSCKING CLUE about the fact that there are days when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine?
It is worse than you suspect, my friend. The fact is that they DO know these things, yet continue to advocate those methods anyway. Why? Because their real agenda is NOTHING to do with power generation and EVERYTHING to do with wrecking modern high-tech industrial society. It's far easier to control a man who earns his living tending crops that it is a man who earns his living pushing buttons. Why do you think that every "green" is also a Socialist? The answer is that the green agenda doesn't even exist, it is merely a cover story for an increase in State control over every aspect of your life.
The only advantage I can see is the initial cost advantage, but considering the durability of the panels (breaking a mirror would destroy the entire mirror - braking a solar panel would reduce the energy output only by the destroyed cells, if they're in parallel), any reasonable long-term cost estimate would have to scream in favor of the panels.
You've got me thinking too now. There's the cost of the obelisk itself, of course. The turbine/generator might be cheap if we're reusing, I don't know how much your rectifier/transformer would cost. Mirrors (lots of small mirrors, not one large one) are cheap - for a given area, mirrors will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solar cells, and can be made a good deal more robust. The motorized rail, and a mechanism for keeping the surfaces dust free, costs the same for both our solutions. I would need to do lots of plumbing to get my superheated steam from the obelisk to the turbine, you would need to do lots of wiring to get lots of small direct currents to your converter and into something that could be used by a consumer device. Hmm.
Photovoltaics are semiconductor devices, so they're not limited by the "thermodynamic bottleneck". I'd expect in the next 50 years to see photovoltaics hit 40-50% efficiency, which I doubt a "black obelisk" would *ever* hit. So I'm skeptical. Proof?
Well, no-one's built a full-size one yet, but the Spanish got good results from their little 50KW testbed (don't have a link to it to hand). Note that a coal-fired station is only about 40% efficient now anyway (slightly more with CHP, but you can do that with an obelisk too), and they're considered very viable.
Photovoltaics are the right solution if you need an easily portable/deployable method of generating a relatively small amount of power - but in that case, ease of portability makes it worthwhile to spend resources on actually making the cells.
Plus obelisks are cool...
The economics of reprocessing don't make sense. Sellafield could not exist without the British government imposing a levy on all energy sales AND bailing BNFL out on a regular basis.
The economics don't make sense because the British government has as a matter of policy busily been driving the British power industry out of business in favour of importing energy from Europe. They've stuck their head in the sand - they think that building new power stations would hurt them at the polls, so they're postponing dealing with the problem for another government to worry about sometime in the future.
The power stations we have are rapidly approaching end of life (but not rapidly enough to be before the next election) and NOTHING is being done about it. Even if the government would let them, British utilities simply don't have the cash, as their profit (i.e. reinvestment) margins have been so eroded by the regulator.
If Britain went for an serious nuclear strategy, like France, it would be more than viable.
'crack' the oil (dont ask me what that means, cos I dont know either!)
Cracking is the (usually catalytic) process by which long-chain hydrocarbons, which are difficult to burn efficiently, are broken down into short-chain hydrocarbons, which are volatile and easy to burn. Long-chain hydrocarbons have the advantage of a higher energy density but the engines that can use them are huge and complex (think, power station or large ship). Short chains are harder to handle (for example, they can explode) but they burn much more cleanly, much less free carbon in the exhaust, it's locked up in C02 (which of course has its own set of problems).
You can get a handfull of large solar panels , chuck it on the roof, stick it thru a 240w inverter and blammo
There are much better techniques for mass conversion of solar energy than photovoltaic cells. I'm not talking about enough energy to run a house but enough to make serious industry viable. My preferred technique would be the "black obelisk". It requires a large, open space, which you fill with mirrors on motorized bearings, and in the middle you build a huge black obelisk, filled with pipes. The mirrors rotate througout the day focussing the sun's energy on the obelisk, superheating water that is pumped into it, the steam coming out the other end is used to run the kind of turbine that exists in an ordinary coal or oil fired station. It's very efficient, and reuses existing technology, existing power stations in suitable climates could simply be converted in-place. In fact, a power station could use this technique by day and coal by night to ease the transition (it's all the same to the turbine), eventually it would store power generated by day for use at night.
Enlighten me as to what items he presented as facts that had not basis in reality.
Read the links in the root of this thread.
Why should it be a sin to make money from political commentary, be it focused on Sept 11th,
Indeed - then why is Moore so sharply critical of other people, such as defense contractors - who also are making money out of hightened security?
He's not doing this out of a desire to right the wrongs of the world, but to get rich. He's really no different from Halliburton's board, but see if he'll ever admit that.
I've read all ten, and none of them mention anything about the viewer not performing independant verification of the material presented.
Accepting an award for a DOCUMENTARY and including material in said DOCUMENTARY that is not factual are incompatible. The only way Moore can accept that award is to assert that his source material is factual, and for that assertion to stand, the audience must not perform a verification. If Moore turned down the award and said "actually, it isn't really a documentary" then his position would be sound. Read the debunkings of his earlier work; his previous "documentaries" are full of made-up stuff. He even admits it quietly after the fact, when the furore has died down.
To receive this award there are only two possibilities: either the committee were ignorant of Moore's content, or they disregarded their own rules to make a political point.
Besides, if you think that there is _any_ documentary that doesn't have a bias you're naiive.
I've got no problem with bias - but Moore is way beyond bias and into making stuff up that supports his prejudices but no basis in reality.
Would they report on Poppy Bush's business ties with the Bin Laden's?
Bush's ties with the Bin Ladens are with the Bin Ladens who've publicly disowned Osama Bin Laden and refuse to have anything to do with him. Or do you think that entire families should be held responsible any time one family member commits a crime? Better hope all your second cousins never get any speeding tickets...
Ummm... why can't you verify the information in his movie? Nothing's stopping you.
Oh, indeed you can, as my link shows. But, in that case, why's he picking up a prize for a documentary?
Well, he's doing work, selling a product, and making money - its called capitalism
Then why's it OK for him and not OK for say Halliburton?
, torture, rape and slaughter of Iraqi citizens
Let me get this straight: you hope that abuse of Iraqi prisoners CONTINUES, just so that you can score a few cheap political points back in the US?
Any website which needs to mock the physical appearance of someone to make a point shouldn't really be trusted.
And it's OK to mock Bush for his occasional verbal gaffes and silly facial expressions?
What gives you the impression that he expects you to not independently verify his content?
That he presents his work as documentary. That is a word with a specific meaning. Take the getting a free gun at the bank scene. In fact, the bank would give you a voucher that could be used at a gun store, once all the regular checks were done. The scene was completely staged - that makes it fiction, not documentary. Moore's films take place in an America that doesn't, and never, existed - it's no more real than a sci-fi or fantasy movie.
I would like to make that determination myself rather then seeing Buena Vista kiss presidential ass and decide that it is not gonna distribute it
Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that freedom of speech implies that private organizations are obligated to provide a soapbox. Therefore, despite what Moore claims, their decision is not censorship.
Do you mean a documentary or a "documentary"?
A genuine question for Moore fans: doesn't it bother you even slightly that Moore expects you not to independently verify what he presents as fact? You're supposed to be geeks, people who're capable of thinking "out of the box". And doesn't it bother you that Michael Moore is personally getting very, very rich out of September 11th?
OK, but you must understand that Woo doesn't, and never intended to, make traditional Hollywood films. His films, and what his fans expect, are all about motifs:
If you don't like that, you will of course think Woo films suck, but then, you're missing the point of them.