I really have trouble believing that any sort of fusion project, especially one funded by the states, has a measly budget of 2 million a year.
Projects are done in stages. 2 million a year on a project still in essentially a design stage, before it reaches the engineer stage where actually prototypes of important physical systems are built and tested, isn't so far-fetched.
You have to take a look at hard far down the road FIRE is to put the cost in perspective. FIRE was just beginning to assess the cost of contruction of things like the magnetic field coils. If FIRE was still a priority, there are several rounds of additional funding that would have gone into the project as it met specific review criteria. These project don't get budgetted for the full project at the beginning. There are multiple phases, with reviews, that if successful mean more money when its needed to actually build things. You don't get the money to even build prototype of critical systems till there is a significant review process of the physics and engineering concerns.
Feel free to read past comment 21 on the mandrake bug 7959. Further comments from users in the same bur report indicate that this bug still exists in the official mandrake release. Perhaps this is a most subtle bug, that both fedora and mandrake believed they had found a workaround for.
And it you really want to understand whats going on, i encourage you to go searching the parted mailinglists over the last 4 months or so, for a discussion as to where the problem actually lies.
I don't think that was the question the poster asked at all. Its a very complicated process to turn the nuclear energy released in a plasma back into electricity, and requires a metric buttload of human effort.
The goal of course of any fusion reactor is to get enough energy out than it takes to produce the fields and other things...to produce net energy that can be put to use. The point at which this happens is called break-even, there is a handy dandy ratio called Q=power-out/power-in that gets used to describe the reactor power. Q=1 is break even...the reactor produces just enough energy via nuclear reactions to make up for the energy needed to be spent by humans to power the reactor. Of course what goes into defining Q is sort of dependant on who you talk to. The efficiency of turning the energy released in the nuclear reactions into electricity is a matter of debate. The process we do most efficiently is turning steam into electricity...turning fast moving energetic nuclear particles into steam is something we aren't really good at doing. Anyways...i digrest.
The point at which a plasma is self-sustaining is Q=infinity and is called ignition. Plasmas that ignite, don't need external power sources to continue their fusion processes. They go about their business all by themselves if given a supply of fuel.
Production reactor designs aim between something like Q=5 to Q=20. At first glance a higher Q value would seem to be a better thing. But actually it isn't. Q isn't just a measure of how much net power your are getting out, but its also a measure of how much control you have over the plasma itself by external means. It could very well be the case that the most economical reactors long term are ones that can be better controlled at Q=5 than higher performing Q=20 reactors.
I just took a vote of hands at pppl.gov the concensous view is the US is backing japanese site for a variety of political reasons and not just the obvious we hate france one. If only the EU were allowed to propose both the french and spanish locations. The spanish site that was on the table at one point would have been much better, i know spanish. But the EU had to pick which site they wanted to propose and well... france.
sure i do...but it doesn't stop me from using it as an entry point for karma whoring. I make a few hand-waving motions and pretend to know what I'm talking about and i get a few +1's instantly. I didn't even have to make a citation reference to real information about fusion either.
I think you for making it easy for me to do a little karma matainance.
Let me point you to the sun as an an example of what it takes to keep fusion conditions viable over long timescales without extra energy input. Thats a hell of a lot of mass to produce the gravitational energy to keep a burning plasma self-confined, not to mention the large scale bulk motion of the solar plasma that is still not completely understood that allows the sun to create its own magnetic field via a dynamo effect. Regardless of what the open scientific questions about how our sun and other stars operate, few if any competent researchers will argue that a self-sustaining magneticially confined plasma is something that can be created on earth, simply because of the scales invovled to produce a dynamo. Earth's core for example, is probably a good example of the amount of material needed to produce a dynamo..and thats not even a fusion plasma..just a magnetic dynamo..getting to the much higher pressure/temperature conditions required to produce a self-sustaining magneticlly confided plasma will require stellar mass.
I think perhaps you don't grasp the fundamentals of what a magnetically confided burning plasma reactor really means. While a reactor of this sort aims at providing net power production via nuclear fusion, you have to be aware that a significant amount of energy is used to create the magnetic fields, and other auxillory control mechanisms like nuetral particle beams and radio/microwave power used in controlling the plasma to get the very precise conditions under which net power can be achieved. You turn off any of these control systems..the plasma start under performing. Unlike fission, you aren't trying to control a run-away process by slowing it down. In terresterial magnetic confinement fusion reactors..you are doing everything you can think of to produce the very specific conditions that maximize the amount of nuclear reactions. And if the plasma conditions change or your control system fails, plasma performance quickly degrades on its own because of naturally occuring instabilities in the magnetohydrodynamics that govern bulk plasma behavior.
Nothing like a world ending 'meltdown' can happen, a magnetically confided plasma has so many different ways to dissipate energy. The trick has always been and always will be to get enough nuclear reactions out of this plasmas to make it worth while to build them as an energy source, becuase running them invovles using lots of energy just to create the plasmas conditions at all.
there is a boot.iso image that is very very small. Its actually sort of a waste actually to burn such a small iso to cd...unless you have a business card cd.
Anyways burn the tiny iso to a cd...then do a net install. No fuss, no muss.
And there is certaintly room for community effort...ie YOU...to help rework some of the installer software groupings so you could have a very minimal working install using just one cd and no network. In fact i think people are sort of working on that very issue, though they wandered off the mailinglist with what they were doing.
-jef"put the 'get off your arse and help out' back in community"spaleta
if you read the pdf report...there is a list of HLW materials. I think some of them are listed with halflives of +1E6 years. The report makes a distinction (and so does the government, i think) between low level and high level at 100 years...but if you read the report you will probably see several materials that meet your personal definition of "long lived."
hmmm, well I don't think I'd claim that there isn't a problem with some long lived wastes. http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1155. pdf.
Looks like there can be some long lived(+100year halflives) radioactive byproducts, high level waste (HLW) to use the terminology.
So the bad news is... HLW exists in fusion reactors, long-lived radioactive product can be produced by that wacky little excited neutron....10% of the waste by volume, if I read the report right.
The good news is...it looks like the fusion reactors themselves might be used to burn/transmure a good chunk of those HLW elements via more neutron interactions, though the report is very vague on the technology that would need to be used to seperate the low level waste from the high level waste, to do the burn/trasmuting...and even then there could easily be long lived isotopes with small nuclear cross-sections that can not be cleaned up in this manner...well not in the 40 year lifetime of the reactor.
But, this really needs to be tested in a next step reactor design...inertial or magnetic confinement, either one...a reactor design that actually produces enough neutrons to test this trasmutation cleanup idea. Now that ITER looks to be going forward, finally...I'd imagine these sorts of long term reactor design/process issues will have a large role in the experimental ITER program.
-jef"as long as this fusion idea hangs around just long enough so I can make a career out of it"spaleta
Just imagine the nightmare of supporting five different WPs, three different SS, and six different Presentation packages that all shared formats but nothing else.The help desk and IT staff would be swamped.
There is an argument here about how varied an application set can be and still be officially supported. But maybe not all applications need to be officially supported by a help desk or IT staff to be useful...and usable. There should be some open guideline as to what can be used and there needs to be some leeway to allow unsupported applications to be used to meet a specific need. But as things progress there needs a way for the helpdesk to get feedback from users as to what applications are in most need of support. So if an application becomes popular then support for that application can be added while support for an unused application can be dropped. Helpdesks aren't particularly useful to most users who would know enough to NEED a specific peice of software to begin with...so in a lot of cases where you would want a waiver the point is moot.
And on the size of an organization as big and dispersed as the DOI...there isnt just one set of IT professionals...there are prob several different helpdesk staffs supporting small segments of the whole department. I see know reason why the entire DOI needs to used vendor specific solutions...when open standard file formats and protocals would work well with each small IT staff could service the specific application needs for the chunk of DOI staff they are there to support. What does it matter if someone in an office in california is using a different word processor than the person in a new york office...as long as they are using the official file format that both word processors handle. The IT staffs on either coast can support the applications needed locally.
From a SysAdmin standpoint, I want every desktop to have the precise same hardware, software, settings, and packages regardless of location or job function
It's nice to want things. Everyone wants to be lazy..but the example is very much a fantasy. As companies get larger and the reasons for using a computer usage inside the companies get more varied...you need to have some room to balance the sysadmins desire to be lazy and the users need for the right tool. It might make sense to have an all MS shop if everyone has the NEED for the MS tools specifically. And I'm not saying every sysadmin wannabe geek in the department should be allowed or encourage to run linux to be different. But if someone feels a work related NEED to use a specific tool...it shouldn't be an uphill battle to get that tool. I think the sysadmin should be the one who needs to make a case for not supporting a specific set of software...since I really doubt in most circumstances sysadmins really understand the work to be performed and are just looking to narrow the software support for convience and not on any really technical argument.
Let me assure you that having sysadmins or managers in general dictate what tools should be used is a great way to hamper how much work gets done by those people who have a real need for a specific tool especially when the work from employee to employee is highly specialized.
Having a sysadmin tell accounting which accounting software they should be using is just plain silly. A sysadmin typically does not know enough about accounting to really make a case for any specific application based on the the work being done with the application.
Now lets talk about how diverse a workspace the DOI is really. How specialized is the workforce? How diverse is the range of computer work that most be overseen by the whole DOI. If they want to standardize....stanardize and give people open published guidelines for their software to meet. Dictating MS(or any vendor solution) as the one true way is only going to hamper work when its most critical that it be performed well. Asking for permission to get the job done with the best toolset is the wrong way to set things up. Instead establish vendor neutral guidelines that software needs to meet and do a waiver system based on those vendor neutral guidelines. Locking yourself into one supplier of anything is really bad especially for governments.
There is a strong case to be made for conformance of systems
And I'd say take that one step further had have conformance of systems...but conformance to a published open standard...so you can have competition without conformance degration.
Once you start down the MS road and start using software that does not conform to a published standard you are locked in and the cost of switch over to any else becomes extremely high..and higher after every release cycle.
Its hard to talk about conformance when the issues at hand are vendor specific since the vendor can force change on you via updates. You can get conformance and competition if you limit yourself to an open specification that all vendors can compete for. Once you let the vendor dictate to you what features are worth using and what features you are going to get...your stuck...without paying a huge penalty to get out. But if you don't pay the huge penalty in the short term you pay a gigantic penalty in the long term after several upgrade cycles, where you have lost the power to make decisions as to what you really need and who can provide the software and the systems.
Honestly, sometimes, it makes sense to standardize
It sure does...so stop using MS...becuase MS software does not conform to OPEN standards. How standard is a standard if there isn't a neutral 3rd body overseeing conformance to that standard. If we used a standard of length measurement only sold to us by MS, we'd have to upgrade our rulers every 2 years becuase the standard would surely change.
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes (by incompetence, rather than malignly) is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf. What they have generated are Red Hat GNOME and KDE desktops. In doing this they have antagonised developers and made both their own and the vanilla desktops more difficult to support.
And what happens if the developers decide to ignore the code change requests Redhat wants? All Redhat can do in this case is make the changes and submit the patches....and wait for the developers to incorporate the changes if they so desire.
The hacking of the Gnome and KDE codebases is no different than the hacking Redhat does to apply patches to the kernel tree for instance. How many kernel patches that get applied to commercial distro kernels? How long would Redhat have to wait to see a stock kernel with ALL the patches they apply to be bless by linus? Do the kernel developers get mad when Redhat patches a stock kernel on their own?
For whatever reason whether it be long standing grudges or just the fact the Redhat has a different vision and motivation than the desktop developers...Redhat decided to make some patches. If Redhat submits those patches to the developers on the main branch..Redhat has done all you can really ask of them to do. We don't expect every person who comes up with a kernel patch to talk it over with Linus before they create the patch, do we?
Sometimes the lines of communication break down and you have to do things yousekf to get what you want. Sometimes its a simple matter of manhours and the people you'd rather work on it don't have the time. Sometimes is a decision to make experimental changes that others disagree with.... many reasons as to why patches for code get made.
The underling issue here is about control, who has control of the codebase. The people complaining about the changes Redhat has made, and the politics of the situation around those changes, miss the whole point about the GPL. People don't have to play nice in OSS to innovate. What matters in the end is whether or not Redhat has created a better KDE with their changes. If they haven't..then they wasted some valuable manhours in development time...but if Redhat's changes catch on in the userbase then it doesn't matter how the changes were made now does it? If the original project want to pick up the patches they can...and it would be a shame to see any contributions that provide new features that users like stay out of the main project because of some politics...and in the end that situation only hurts the main project...and not Redhat becuase Redhat will be seen as the innovator.
And of course I'm not a lawyer.... but reading the press over the whole Mysql fiasco, click-through license seems to only be a necessity if the license is taking away a right not granted by default copyright situations. For OSI software, the licenses typically grant rights not already granted by default, and thus can only be granted via a license agreement. For instance redistribution is not a right granted under default copyright rules. So for someone to redistribute a work they MUST have a license agreement from the copyright holder to do so. Click through becomes a necessity when defending your license agreement in situations where you are asking the users of the software to agree to give up some default rights...or you are asking them for permission to use private data or some such. So I'd imagine for some very complicated OSI approved licenses you might need click through...but I cant see old standards like X11/BSD/GPL needing this kind of mechanism since these licenses only grant you more rights over defualt copyright rules. Maybe a click-through requirement is a good measure of whether or not its should be OSI approved. If it need a click-through wrapper...then its got to be taking away some rights from users, and therefore not in the spirit of OSI.
cytrix has a software package to connect to a win2k server...its basically a fancy fancy vnc server/client software set.
So the idea is you need to do productivity stuff...you fire up the virtual desktop from a central win2k server..and view it on the lab computer.
So know you only have to maintain that one central win2k server ( its 2 backups ) instead of a whole lab of windows machines.... of course the licensing issues in this are um...interesting.
Because if a company used GPL'd software, and declined to release the source, they'd have two options:
I take it you mean use and redistribute outside of the company. Nothing in the GPL says you have to offer up source code if you modify but don't redistribute....A company could easily pickup GPL code and modify it for use inside the company and never have to offer up the changes for distribution.
I take EXTREME issue with the idea that there hae been HUNDREDS of "studies"..where studies means an FDA approved double blind clinical test.
For the rest you you out there who think hemeopathic medicine is for real(let's not get into whether or not its safe)..please check this article out
Why don't the homeopathic remedy manufacturers go thuugh a series of FDA clinical studies to be come FDA certified drugs? If this stuff actually works...why are the remedy manufactures using a loop hole in FDA statues and marketing this stuff as herbal suppliments and not as effictive drugs. I'll tell you why...these remedies would not be found to be proven effective for most of the things word of mouth advertising claims. Oh yeah I'm sure hidden in many of the remedies being pushed at the super crunky health food store down the road from me will contain something that helps prevent or cure one or two specific illnesses. But we can't be sure until they actually conduct FDA trials and get FDA certification. And quite frankly taking this stuff can be DANGEROUS...especially if you are on ANY type of real drugs. homeopathic remedies don't have to do any sort of drug interaction testing. Is this stuff safe for a healthy person to take...probably...there is a long track record of other ignorant people taking this stuff without dying. But is it safe if you are also taking ANY modern scientificly researched medications? No way. Don't mix medications with out talking to the docters who gave you the idea to take the medications..even herbals can interfere with how modern FDA approved prescription or over the counter drugs work
This is WHY we have the FDA...if something is an effective drug for a certain illness...the FDA is there to test and certify that. If you are taking any medicine (no matter how ancient it is) sold by a company and placed on retail shelves...you should DEMAND that that they get FDA approval certifying that what they are selling you really works for what you think it does. There is a reason the homeopathic remedies in the store don't actually make specific claims to help any specific illness.
I can understand desperate people taking experimental drugs for live threatening illnesses. But to sell this stuff over the counter without making any specific claims on the label...and letting word of mouth spin a tale of fanasticly wonderful benifits is a slap in the face to the benifits this past century as seen thanks to the explosion of the understanding of how medicines work and the great strides modern medical science have taken to improve the quality of life for those who hae access to it.
Please go back to living in your flat world, with the sun circling overhead, and take your ancient medicines with you.
Or are you just another bitter Netscape zealot looking for an excuse to berate MS because they wrote an (at the time[1]) better browser?
I'm not berating MS on how good or bad IE is. That was the parent poster. I was just giving input as to why no one has opera installed. There is a large segment of the population that would probably use opera if it were the browser pre installed, or even crappy old netscape 4.x. Most people aren't download happy...if they were everybody's desktop MS computers would have all the MS updates installed on within mere days of security update announcements. And if it isn't a NEEDED update corporates dont tend install extra crap on centrally managed win2k desktops either. If it ain't horribly broken...don't fix it...seems to be the moto of corporate pc support departments everywhere. If some company vp or ceo isn't crying over not having opera on the system...opera doesn't get put on the system...becuase IE is adquately preinstalled. And I'd imagine if opera were preinstalled...pc support personal would take the same pains to aviod installing IE on the coperate network. Having pc support departments ONLY officially supporting the preinstalled browser on an internal corporate desktop is going save hassle, time and money...no matter which browser it is. People are sheep, pc support people are sheep...the take what's given and use it as long as it meets a certain level of usability. The important factor is not the wealth of IE's features...its IE's preinstalled presence.
" I still can't figure out why people are using IE, seriously."
1)Bundled....people are sheep. 2)Bundled.....a lot of people dont have the band or the patience to do a lot of downloading (AOL users on dialup) 3)Bundled...on a corporate win2k desktop where the user just logins in and cant really install much in the way of software...see 1) s/pc support personal/people
No a lot of choices out there in terms of recording contracts...atleast not until very recently thanks to the internet with more access for direct to consumer sales.
And he didnt breach contract..he found a loophole and used...in a rather clever way.
Look around...the big labels pay artists a measly share of each CD sold...and up until recently that was the best game in town...becuase the barrier to entry into music publishing was pretty high...the internet has changed that. It's now significantly easier to go out and find indie labels via the web and order directly..it would get even better if small labels would endorse song by song digital sales...pressing cd's is cheap...but just giving out digital downloads to consumers is cheaper....
It looks like this thread is better talked about on either one of the 2 newer slashdot article that showed up today...both of which have elements which bolster my point of view (if you can sell songs in india for 25 cents per song you can do it in america...and it looks like cd sales drops are a factor of unfair price controls by the music industry as much of internet downloads cutting into sales)
Slashdot Mirror
I really have trouble believing that any sort of fusion project, especially one funded by the states, has a measly budget of 2 million a year.
Projects are done in stages. 2 million a year on a project still in essentially a design stage, before it reaches the engineer stage where actually prototypes of important physical systems are built and tested, isn't so far-fetched.
You have to take a look at hard far down the road FIRE is to put the cost in perspective. FIRE was just beginning to assess the cost of contruction of things like the magnetic field coils. If FIRE was still a priority, there are several rounds of additional funding that would have gone into the project as it met specific review criteria. These project don't get budgetted for the full project at the beginning. There are multiple phases, with reviews, that if successful mean more money when its needed to actually build things. You don't get the money to even build prototype of critical systems till there is a significant review process of the physics and engineering concerns.
-jef
http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-sp ec
c /c lipboards.txt
http://freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spe
Sure, i could make them nice html links, but considering the topic of discussion, making people cut and paste them to use seem most appropriate.
Feel free to read past comment 21 on the mandrake bug 7959.
Further comments from users in the same bur report indicate that this bug still exists in the official mandrake release. Perhaps this is a most subtle bug, that both fedora and mandrake believed
they had found a workaround for.
And it you really want to understand whats going on, i encourage you to go searching the parted mailinglists over the last 4 months or so, for a discussion as to where the problem actually lies.
-jef
http://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/geoelectricity.html
I don't think that was the question the poster asked at all. Its a very complicated process to turn the nuclear energy released in a plasma back into electricity, and requires a metric buttload of human effort.
The goal of course of any fusion reactor is to get enough energy out than it takes to produce the fields and other things...to produce net energy that can be put to use. The point at which this happens is called break-even, there is a handy dandy ratio called Q=power-out/power-in that gets used to describe the reactor power. Q=1 is break even...the reactor produces just enough energy via nuclear reactions to make up for the energy needed to be spent by humans to power the reactor. Of course what goes into defining Q is sort of dependant on who you talk to. The efficiency of turning the energy released in the nuclear reactions into electricity is a matter of debate. The process we do most efficiently is turning steam into electricity...turning fast moving energetic nuclear particles into steam is something we aren't really good at doing. Anyways...i digrest.
The point at which a plasma is self-sustaining is Q=infinity and is called ignition. Plasmas that ignite, don't need external power sources to continue their fusion processes. They go about their business all by themselves if given a supply of fuel.
Production reactor designs aim between something like Q=5 to Q=20. At first glance a higher Q value would seem to be a better thing. But actually it isn't. Q isn't just a measure of how much net power your are getting out, but its also a measure of how much control you have over the plasma itself by external means. It could very well be the case that the most economical reactors long term are ones that can be better controlled at Q=5 than higher performing Q=20 reactors.
-jef
I just took a vote of hands at pppl.gov the concensous view is the US is backing japanese site for a variety of political reasons and not just the obvious we hate france one. If only the EU were allowed to propose both the french and spanish locations. The spanish site that was on the table at one point would have been much better, i know spanish. But the EU had to pick which site they wanted to propose and well... france.
-jef
sure i do...but it doesn't stop me from using it as an entry point for karma whoring. I make a few hand-waving motions and pretend to know what I'm talking about and i get a few +1's instantly. I didn't even have to make a citation reference to real information about fusion either.
I think you for making it easy for me to do a little karma matainance.
-jef
Let me point you to the sun as an an example of what it takes to keep fusion conditions viable over long timescales without extra energy input. Thats a hell of a lot of mass to produce the gravitational energy to keep a burning plasma self-confined, not to mention the large scale bulk motion of the solar plasma that is still not completely understood that allows the sun to create its own magnetic field via a dynamo effect. Regardless of what the open scientific questions about how our sun and other stars operate, few if any competent researchers will argue that a self-sustaining magneticially confined plasma is something that can be created on earth, simply because of the scales invovled to produce a dynamo. Earth's core for example, is probably a good example of the amount of material needed to produce a dynamo..and thats not even a fusion plasma..just a magnetic dynamo..getting to the much higher pressure/temperature conditions required to produce a self-sustaining magneticlly confided plasma will require stellar mass.
-jef
I think perhaps you don't grasp the fundamentals of what a magnetically confided burning plasma reactor really means. While a reactor of this sort aims at providing net power production via nuclear fusion, you have to be aware that a significant amount of energy is used to create the magnetic fields, and other auxillory control mechanisms like nuetral particle beams and radio/microwave power used in controlling the plasma to get the very precise conditions under which net power can be achieved. You turn off any of these control systems..the plasma start under performing. Unlike fission, you aren't trying to control a run-away process by slowing it down. In terresterial magnetic confinement fusion reactors..you are doing everything you can think of to produce the very specific conditions that maximize the amount of nuclear reactions. And if the plasma conditions change or your control system fails, plasma performance quickly degrades on its own because of naturally occuring instabilities in the magnetohydrodynamics that govern bulk plasma behavior.
Nothing like a world ending 'meltdown' can happen, a magnetically confided plasma has so many different ways to dissipate energy. The trick has always been and always will be to get enough nuclear reactions out of this plasmas to make it worth while to build them as an energy source, becuase running them invovles using lots of energy just to create the plasmas conditions at all.
I mean, when is the last time you heard of a successful business person taking advice from a skid row bum?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465/
there is a boot.iso image that is very very small.
Its actually sort of a waste actually to burn such a small iso to cd...unless you have a business card cd.
Anyways burn the tiny iso to a cd...then do a net install. No fuss, no muss.
And there is certaintly room for community effort...ie YOU...to help rework some of the installer software groupings so you could have a very minimal working install using just one cd and no network. In fact i think people are sort of working on that very issue, though they wandered off the mailinglist with what they were doing.
-jef"put the 'get off your arse and help out' back in community"spaleta
if you read the pdf report...there is a list of HLW materials. I think some of them are listed with halflives of +1E6 years. The report makes a distinction (and so does the government, i think) between low level and high level at 100 years...but if you read the report you will probably see several materials that meet your personal definition of "long lived."
-jef
hmmm, well I don't think I'd claim that there isn't a problem with some long lived wastes.. pdf.
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1155
Looks like there can be some long lived(+100year halflives) radioactive byproducts, high level waste (HLW) to use the terminology.
So the bad news is... HLW exists in fusion reactors, long-lived radioactive product can be produced by that wacky little excited neutron....10% of the waste by volume, if I read the report right.
The good news is...it looks like the fusion reactors themselves might be used to burn/transmure a good chunk of those HLW elements via more neutron interactions, though the report is very vague on the technology that would need to be used to seperate the low level waste from the high level waste, to do the burn/trasmuting...and even then there could easily be long lived isotopes with small nuclear cross-sections that can not be cleaned up in this manner...well not in the 40 year lifetime of the reactor.
But, this really needs to be tested in a next step reactor design...inertial or magnetic confinement, either one...a reactor design that actually produces enough neutrons to test this trasmutation cleanup idea. Now that ITER looks to be going forward, finally...I'd imagine these sorts of long term reactor design/process issues will have a large role in the experimental ITER program.
-jef"as long as this fusion idea hangs around just long enough so I can make a career out of it"spaleta
Just imagine the nightmare of supporting five different WPs, three different SS, and six different Presentation packages that all shared formats but nothing else.The help desk and IT staff would be swamped.
There is an argument here about how varied an application set can be and still be officially supported. But maybe not all applications need to be officially supported by a help desk or IT staff to be useful...and usable. There should be some open guideline as to what can be used and there needs to be some leeway to allow unsupported applications to be used to meet a specific need. But as things progress there needs a way for the helpdesk to get feedback from users as to what applications are in most need of support. So if an application becomes popular then support for that application can be added while support for an unused application can be dropped. Helpdesks aren't particularly useful to most users who would know enough to NEED a specific peice of software to begin with...so in a lot of cases where you would want a waiver the point is moot.
And on the size of an organization as big and dispersed as the DOI...there isnt just one set of IT professionals...there are prob several different helpdesk staffs supporting small segments of the whole department. I see know reason why the entire DOI needs to used vendor specific solutions...when open standard file formats and protocals would work well with each small IT staff could service the specific application needs for the chunk of DOI staff they are there to support. What does it matter if someone in an office in california is using a different word processor than the person in a new york office...as long as they are using the official file format that both word processors handle. The IT staffs on either coast can support the applications needed locally.
-jef
From a SysAdmin standpoint, I want every desktop to have the precise same hardware, software, settings, and packages regardless of location or job function
It's nice to want things. Everyone wants to be lazy..but the example is very much a fantasy. As companies get larger and the reasons for using a computer usage inside the companies get more varied...you need to have some room to balance the sysadmins desire to be lazy and the users need for the right tool. It might make sense to have an all MS shop if everyone has the NEED for the MS tools specifically. And I'm not saying every sysadmin wannabe geek in the department should be allowed or encourage to run linux to be different. But if someone feels a work related NEED to use a specific tool...it shouldn't be an uphill battle to get that tool. I think the sysadmin should be the one who needs to make a case for not supporting a specific set of software...since I really doubt in most circumstances sysadmins really understand the work to be performed and are just looking to narrow the software support for convience and not on any really technical argument.
Let me assure you that having sysadmins or managers in general dictate what tools should be used is a great way to hamper how much work gets done by those people who have a real need for a specific tool especially when the work from employee to employee is highly specialized.
Having a sysadmin tell accounting which accounting software they should be using is just plain silly. A sysadmin typically does not know enough about accounting to really make a case for any specific application based on the the work being done with the application.
Now lets talk about how diverse a workspace the DOI is really. How specialized is the workforce? How diverse is the range of computer work that most be overseen by the whole DOI. If they want to standardize....stanardize and give people open published guidelines for their software to meet. Dictating MS(or any vendor solution) as the one true way is only going to hamper work when its most critical that it be performed well. Asking for permission to get the job done with the best toolset is the wrong way to set things up. Instead establish vendor neutral guidelines that software needs to meet and do a waiver system based on those vendor neutral guidelines. Locking yourself into one supplier of anything is really bad especially for governments.
-jef
There is a strong case to be made for conformance of systems
And I'd say take that one step further had have conformance of systems...but conformance to a published open standard...so you can have competition without conformance degration.
Once you start down the MS road and start using software that does not conform to a published standard you are locked in and the cost of switch over to any else becomes extremely high..and higher after every release cycle.
Its hard to talk about conformance when the issues at hand are vendor specific since the vendor can force change on you via updates. You can get conformance and competition if you limit yourself to an open specification that all vendors can compete for. Once you let the vendor dictate to you what features are worth using and what features you are going to get...your stuck...without paying a huge penalty to get out. But if you don't pay the huge penalty in the short term you pay a gigantic penalty in the long term after several upgrade cycles, where you have lost the power to make decisions as to what you really need and who can provide the software and the systems.
Honestly, sometimes, it makes sense to standardize
It sure does...so stop using MS...becuase MS software does not conform to OPEN standards. How standard is a standard if there isn't a neutral 3rd body overseeing conformance to that standard.
If we used a standard of length measurement only sold to us by MS, we'd have to upgrade our rulers every 2 years becuase the standard would surely change.
-jef
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes (by incompetence, rather than malignly) is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf. What they have generated are Red Hat GNOME and KDE desktops. In doing this they have antagonised developers and made both their own and the vanilla desktops more difficult to support.
And what happens if the developers decide to ignore the code change requests Redhat wants? All Redhat can do in this case is make the changes and submit the patches....and wait for the developers to incorporate the changes if they so desire.
The hacking of the Gnome and KDE codebases is no different than the hacking Redhat does to apply patches to the kernel tree for instance. How many kernel patches that get applied to commercial distro kernels? How long would Redhat have to wait to see a stock kernel with ALL the patches they apply to be bless by linus? Do the kernel developers get mad when Redhat patches a stock kernel on their own?
For whatever reason whether it be long standing grudges or just the fact the Redhat has a different vision and motivation than the desktop developers...Redhat decided to make some patches. If Redhat submits those patches to the developers on the main branch..Redhat has done all you can really ask of them to do. We don't expect every person who comes up with a kernel patch to talk it over with Linus before they create the patch, do we?
Sometimes the lines of communication break down and you have to do things yousekf to get what you want. Sometimes its a simple matter of manhours and the people you'd rather work on it don't have the time. Sometimes is a decision to make experimental changes that others disagree with....
many reasons as to why patches for code get made.
The underling issue here is about control, who has control of the codebase. The people complaining about the changes Redhat has made, and the politics of the situation around those changes, miss the whole point about the GPL. People don't have to play nice in OSS to innovate. What matters in the end is whether or not Redhat has created a better KDE with their changes. If they haven't..then they wasted some valuable manhours in development time...but if Redhat's changes catch on in the userbase then it doesn't matter how the changes were made now does it? If the original project want to pick up the patches they can...and it would be a shame to see any contributions that provide new features that users like stay out of the main project because of some politics...and in the end that situation only hurts the main project...and not Redhat becuase Redhat will be seen as the innovator.
-jef
And of course I'm not a lawyer....
but reading the press over the whole Mysql fiasco, click-through license seems to only be a necessity if the license is taking away a right not granted by default copyright situations. For OSI software, the licenses typically grant rights not already granted by default, and thus can only be granted via a license agreement. For instance redistribution is not a right granted under default copyright rules. So for someone to redistribute a work they MUST have a license agreement from the copyright holder to do so.
Click through becomes a necessity when defending your license agreement in situations where you are asking the users of the software to agree to give up some default rights...or you are asking them for permission to use private data or some such.
So I'd imagine for some very complicated OSI approved licenses you might need click through...but I cant see old standards like X11/BSD/GPL needing this kind of mechanism since these licenses only grant you more rights over defualt copyright rules. Maybe a click-through requirement is a good measure of whether or not its should be OSI approved. If it need a click-through wrapper...then its got to be taking away some rights from users, and therefore not in the spirit of OSI.
-jef
cytrix has a software package to connect to a win2k server...its basically a fancy fancy vnc server/client software set.
So the idea is you need to do productivity stuff...you fire up the virtual desktop from a central win2k server..and view it on the lab computer.
So know you only have to maintain that one central win2k server ( its 2 backups ) instead of a whole lab of windows machines.... of course the licensing issues in this are um...interesting.
-jef
Because if a company used GPL'd software, and declined to release the source, they'd have two options:
I take it you mean use and redistribute outside of the company. Nothing in the GPL says you have to offer up source code if you modify but don't redistribute....A company could easily pickup GPL code and modify it for use inside the company and never have to offer up the changes for distribution.
I take EXTREME issue with the idea that there hae been HUNDREDS of "studies"..where studies means an FDA approved double blind clinical test.
For the rest you you out there who think hemeopathic medicine is for real(let's not get into whether or not its safe)..please check this article
out
Why don't the homeopathic remedy manufacturers go thuugh a series of FDA clinical studies to be come FDA certified drugs? If this stuff actually works...why are the remedy manufactures using a loop hole in FDA statues and marketing this stuff as herbal suppliments and not as effictive drugs. I'll tell you why...these remedies would not be found to be proven effective for most of the things word of mouth advertising claims. Oh yeah I'm sure hidden in many of the remedies being pushed at the super crunky health food store down the road from me will contain something that helps prevent or cure one or two specific illnesses. But we can't be sure until they actually conduct FDA trials and get FDA certification. And quite frankly taking this stuff can be DANGEROUS...especially if you are on ANY type of real drugs. homeopathic remedies don't have to do any sort of drug interaction testing. Is this stuff safe for a healthy person to take...probably...there is a long track record of other ignorant people taking this stuff without dying. But is it safe if you are also taking ANY modern scientificly researched medications? No way. Don't mix medications with out talking to the docters who gave you the idea to take the medications..even herbals can interfere with how modern FDA approved prescription or over the counter drugs work
This is WHY we have the FDA...if something is an effective drug for a certain illness...the FDA is there to test and certify that. If you are taking any medicine (no matter how ancient it is) sold by a company and placed on retail shelves...you should DEMAND that that they get FDA approval certifying that what they are selling you really works for what you think it does. There is a reason the homeopathic remedies in the store don't actually make specific claims to help any specific illness.
I can understand desperate people taking experimental drugs for live threatening illnesses. But to sell this stuff over the counter without making any specific claims on the label...and letting word of mouth spin a tale of fanasticly wonderful benifits is a slap in the face to the benifits this past century as seen thanks to the explosion of the understanding of how medicines work and the great strides modern medical science have taken to improve the quality of life for those who hae access to it.
Please go back to living in your flat world, with the sun circling overhead, and take your ancient medicines with you.
-jef
Or are you just another bitter Netscape zealot looking for an excuse to berate MS because they wrote an (at the time[1]) better browser?
I'm not berating MS on how good or bad IE is. That was the parent poster. I was just giving input as to why no one has opera installed. There is a large segment of the population that would probably use opera if it were the browser pre installed, or even crappy old netscape 4.x. Most people aren't download happy...if they were everybody's desktop MS computers would have all the MS updates installed on within mere days of security update announcements. And if it isn't a NEEDED update corporates dont tend install extra crap on centrally managed win2k desktops either. If it ain't horribly broken...don't fix it...seems to be the moto of corporate pc support departments everywhere. If some company vp or ceo isn't crying over not having opera on the system...opera doesn't get put on the system...becuase IE is adquately preinstalled. And I'd imagine if opera were preinstalled...pc support personal would take the same pains to aviod installing IE on the coperate network. Having pc support departments ONLY officially supporting the preinstalled browser on an internal corporate desktop is going save hassle, time and money...no matter which browser it is. People are sheep, pc support people are sheep...the take what's given and use it as long as it meets a certain level of usability. The important factor is not the wealth of IE's features...its IE's preinstalled presence.
-jef
"There was no incentive to switch"
...becuase its bundled...
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
sheepish
1 : resembling a sheep in meekness, stupidity, or timidity
stupidity
1 : the quality or state of being stupid
stupid
4 a : lacking interest or point
incentive
: something that incites or has a tendency to incite to determination or action
synonym see MOTIVE
motive
1 : something (as a need or desire) that causes a person to act
You say
"There was no incentive to switch"
I say
Bundled...people are sheep
lets call the whole thing off.
-jef
" I still can't figure out why people are using IE, seriously."
1)Bundled....people are sheep.
2)Bundled.....a lot of people dont have the band or the patience to do a lot of downloading (AOL users on dialup)
3)Bundled...on a corporate win2k desktop where the user just logins in and cant really install much in the way of software...see 1) s/pc support personal/people
-jef
No a lot of choices out there in terms of recording contracts...atleast not until very recently thanks to the internet with more access for direct to consumer sales.
And he didnt breach contract..he found a loophole and used...in a rather clever way.
Look around...the big labels pay artists a measly share of each CD sold...and up until recently that was the best game in town...becuase the barrier to entry into music publishing was pretty high...the internet has changed that. It's now significantly easier to go out and find indie labels via the web and order directly..it would get even better if small labels would endorse song by song digital sales...pressing cd's is cheap...but just giving out digital downloads to consumers is cheaper....
It looks like this thread is better talked about on either one of the 2 newer slashdot article that showed up today...both of which have elements which bolster my point of view (if you can sell songs in india for 25 cents per song you can do it in america...and it looks like cd sales drops are a factor of unfair price controls by the music industry as much of internet downloads cutting into sales)
-jef