Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture.
Didn't MS actually broke backwards compatibility with Vista, which is what pissed so many people off? They introduced a new driver system and expected hardware vendors to write to it. Many did, but legacy stuff isn't there.
Except that Fantasia only cost Mr. Disney 0.003 billion to produce. He paid-off that bill in the 1960s, so every digital copy today's Disney Company sells online would literally be zero cost. And pure profit.
It's not free at all. Have you looked at your bandwidth bill lately? If Disney puts a bunch of movies online, somebody has to lay out the capital costs for interconnects, software services, the climate control and all of that.
Republicans are farmers, miners and oil drillers and then small business owners at the core. There are plenty of rank and file Republicans who would just as soon let IP laws fall by the wayside because liberals are so concentrated in businesses that benefit from copyright laws.
Plugins are DLLs... NSAPI I though was for servers side DLLs, like ISAPI is sort of a clone of... in any case, here's the mozilla doc for the plug in run time model.
You really hit the nail on the head with that sentence. Once a book, song, or movie exists, it can be mass-produced at zero cost. It's the ultimate product where the "economy of scale" has no limit. It's an infinite value... For example if Disney could convince every person on earth to buy "Fantasia" from itunes.com..... No cost..
Except that, Fantasia, with its hand drawn cells, is not exactly the kind of movie that one is going to just whip up in their spare time. Many movies are hideously expensive to make.
The thing about Active X is that is just a way to put an object oriented wrapper around a DLL. So really, its just a DLL.
The problem with DLLs is that they are good for process re-use on a desktop but not the kind of thing you want to be shoving into a browser. However, if Microsoft closed off Active X entirely in browsers, they would break Flash and third party OpenGL and movie plugins... and probably would wind up getting ripped for it.
The thing to keep in mind is that Firefox and other browsers that allow for DLLs to be loaded as plugins are going to have these problems as well. It's just that, there are less firefox plugins than there are activex controls out there, so the universe of the problem is smaller.
So the volume of shuttle exhaust material is enough to fill a significant portion of the upper atmosphere of the North Pole?
Really depends on how much you spread it out. If the air up there was only 1/1000 thick as it is a sea level, then, a volume of gas which might be a cubic 100 meters at sea level would be considerably larger in the upper atmosphere... miles across maybe.
I used to be convinced by the overwhelming evidence that uncontrolled AGW would be a disaster. But you have a Javascript model! Thanks for opening my eyes
Javascript model only illustrates that the claim of AGW mitigation will be cost efficient because of energy savings isn't necessarily true.
A rule applying to a single product like light bulbs doesn't imply universality, even if the product is ubiquitous.
Fair enough, but I would ask you to show something that has lower costs - including capital costs, but is more complex. Complexity costs money. The only way it doesn't is if you shave a feature to get a feature.
I'm having a hard time seeing why you think that ecologically positive tech will not reduce in price as it matures and as its adoption rate increases
It may, but mandating that expenditure removes capital from society for other goals. What's going to happen is that you'll have say, maybe 90% of the population able to afford the premium of going green, but then the other 10% are going to be even more screwed than they are now.
This is the sort of thing which needs to be kick started because the gain is sufficiently far out that no corporations would be able to justify it to their stock holders because as you point out yourself, the cost effectiveness is not yet there.
For me, the answer is that we need more energy, not conservation. So... I'm about, dumping loads of federal money into free electron laser research (nuclear fusion), building nuclear fission power plants for now, and doing wind where honestly it can be done. Figure that fission buys us roughly 50 years to figure out how to do fusion.
Actually, that's not true at all. Lefties embraced free trade round the turn of the century in the USA in order to get southern votes and to also throw a cog into the wheels of the robber barons.
However, you are right, of all the ideas liberals had, Republicans have embraced the worst one in free trade.
Leftists promote a crackpot idea called "fair trade" instead of "free trade".
GASP! CHOKE! HOW DARE LEFTISTS ACTUALLY BE RIGHT ON AN ISSUE!!!:-)
Those leftists are actually right at least on that issue. My wife is a staunch leftist and I'm of course a right wing loony but we both have a solid common ground in supporting fair trade and buying local wherever possible. Unlike many conservatives, I'd rather support the UAW and General Motors than a foreign company...
The issue with conservatives is that you have absolutely no proof your green economy can actually work. The last two big economic ideas from the left, free trade and socialism, both have cratered spectacularly.
And as computers have increased in complexity from the models in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, so too have they increased in cost and size, right?
The capital required to make them, has, yes, most certainly. It's only because there are a lot more customers do we have the illusion of lower prices. But right now it costs billions of dollars to bring a CPU to market, and it didn't cost nearly that before. Before there were many players because the barriers to entry were not so high, but now, there are few. You even see this in software. How many operating systems were there twenty years ago? How many today? IT's the capital costs get higher and higher.
Your statement seems to imply there is no point in going any further with advancing efficiency because of costs right now.
No, what I am saying, and what my next prediction will be, is that consumers will wind up giving up other things have a poorer lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly.
And, by the way, the question is not whether or not you put a 2009 Civic in front of engineers in the 1950s, the question is, if it were legal to build a 1950s car, but with modern tools, how much cheaper would it be than the Civic? I bet it would be a lot.
Actually, no, that's not the question at all. The question is what are you going to do when oil is permanently above 100USD a barrel and climbing, or worse, constantly volatile?
Switch to the production of synthetic fuels using energy from nuclear power plants.
I'm afraid you've just made this connection up. What examples make you feel this three-way relation is universally true as you assert?
Look at the price of different kinds of light bulbs.
All of this is to say that we shouldn't bother doing anything at all. Here's the kickers though, 1) as the GP stated, if we don't find another portable fuel source from oil especially, we're in big trouble
Well, no because, if the price of oil stays high, then we switch over to synthesis methods. We could do Fischler Tropf from coal and get the energy from nuclear power.
As for CO2 levels, if we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, it's safe to say that the damage will be worse. So, before Bush was elected we had the chance with the Kyoto accord to choose between minimal damage and damage, now we have the choice to choose between some damage and more damage. I
The Chinese and Indian economies have more to do with the elevated CO2 emissions at this point than anything Bush ever did. Right now there is a single coal mine fire in China that cranks out as much CO2 as the USA does cars. Even if Bush has signed Kyoto, it would have been just an ineffective economic suicide for the USA. The Chinese and Indians will never sign.
Meanwhile in the real world there is no such thing as "the climate change cabal," what there is are thousands of mainstream scientists who basically agree,
My question would be, regardless of the academic opinion of the scientists, when do we start trusting global temperature measurements over their opinion? The RSS measured planetary temperature has been falling sharply for the last six months. In June the anomaly was 75, and in Jan it was 322.. Meanwhile, the CO2 actually climbs still. How long do you have measurements of the temperature going down, before scientists say that it is actually going down?
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon. The changing climate is also a worry (which we wouldn't want to encourage to change faster than it already is), but it's not the only reason, and the money spent on migrating to alternative energy sources certainly wouldn't be wasted.
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost. This relationship between efficiency and cost is exponential due to increased complexity efficiency demands. I put together a simple JavaScript model of this at http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx . Basically, by jiggering the predicted cost of fuel (using gasoline as a baseline), versus, the exponent of increased energy efficiency costs, you can arrive at a number of scenarios where reducing greenhouse gasses actually doesn't pay for itself. If it pays anyone, it also pays the Chinese and the Europeans..
In any case, most models show that even a rather dramatic altering of CO2 emissions will not alter the course of climate change for a minimum of 200 years. Even if we stopped now, the glaciers are still going to melt. The CO2 is already in the air.
There are 2 population grown curves. One is when an organism's population grows to the point where it is in equilibrium with its environment, and the other is where it grows to the point that its environment is no longer able to sustain it, so its population crashes.
Malthus has been predicting this for 200 years and it hasn't happened yet. The human intellect always finds a way. Even if the earth gets even more prosperous and more populated, then eventually there will be a break even point where people will find migration to other planets attractive and so humans will move into space.
Everything else being equal, a better-looking woman has more chance of securing a more prosperous male, and therefore has a better sense of well being and end up having more kids, no?
But this sounds more like a bug than DRM. Presumably the code was attempting to check the value you'd just written, but was actually checking a fixed address due to omitting some indirection. Which is easy to do in assembler.
That sounds fair enough. And, in any case, Microsoft's product was embedded in ROM - certainly it was for TRS-80 and even the IBM PC has a ROM BASIC. So they didn't really need DRM for a while. Sometimes I still drool over the possibility of Windows in ROM, and am interested in Linux in ROM from the likes of ASUS for the same reason.
I've railed on about MBA types and the guys in suits but for the most part I've never had a manager that tried to hold me to an hourly schedule. They have to have an hourly schedule to cover all the meetings and people but they don't hold the makers to it.
Competition isn't the reason -- it's that we have far too many people on the planet at the expense of other species and our own well-being.
That's your opinion, and you are certainly entitled to it, but saying that some other species should impede on a woman's reproductive rights is rather odd, don't you think?
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Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture.
Didn't MS actually broke backwards compatibility with Vista, which is what pissed so many people off? They introduced a new driver system and expected hardware vendors to write to it. Many did, but legacy stuff isn't there.
Except that Fantasia only cost Mr. Disney 0.003 billion to produce. He paid-off that bill in the 1960s, so every digital copy today's Disney Company sells online would literally be zero cost. And pure profit.
It's not free at all. Have you looked at your bandwidth bill lately? If Disney puts a bunch of movies online, somebody has to lay out the capital costs for interconnects, software services, the climate control and all of that.
Republicans are farmers, miners and oil drillers and then small business owners at the core. There are plenty of rank and file Republicans who would just as soon let IP laws fall by the wayside because liberals are so concentrated in businesses that benefit from copyright laws.
Plugins are DLLs... NSAPI I though was for servers side DLLs, like ISAPI is sort of a clone of... in any case, here's the mozilla doc for the plug in run time model.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference/Plug-in_Basics#Understanding_the_Runtime_Model
Note that a plug in is a DLL that uses the same thread as the browser... just like Active X.
You really hit the nail on the head with that sentence. Once a book, song, or movie exists, it can be mass-produced at zero cost. It's the ultimate product where the "economy of scale" has no limit. It's an infinite value... For example if Disney could convince every person on earth to buy "Fantasia" from itunes.com ..... No cost..
Except that, Fantasia, with its hand drawn cells, is not exactly the kind of movie that one is going to just whip up in their spare time. Many movies are hideously expensive to make.
The thing about Active X is that is just a way to put an object oriented wrapper around a DLL. So really, its just a DLL.
The problem with DLLs is that they are good for process re-use on a desktop but not the kind of thing you want to be shoving into a browser. However, if Microsoft closed off Active X entirely in browsers, they would break Flash and third party OpenGL and movie plugins... and probably would wind up getting ripped for it.
The thing to keep in mind is that Firefox and other browsers that allow for DLLs to be loaded as plugins are going to have these problems as well. It's just that, there are less firefox plugins than there are activex controls out there, so the universe of the problem is smaller.
So the volume of shuttle exhaust material is enough to fill a significant portion of the upper atmosphere of the North Pole?
Really depends on how much you spread it out. If the air up there was only 1/1000 thick as it is a sea level, then, a volume of gas which might be a cubic 100 meters at sea level would be considerably larger in the upper atmosphere... miles across maybe.
I used to be convinced by the overwhelming evidence that uncontrolled AGW would be a disaster. But you have a Javascript model! Thanks for opening my eyes
Javascript model only illustrates that the claim of AGW mitigation will be cost efficient because of energy savings isn't necessarily true.
A rule applying to a single product like light bulbs doesn't imply universality, even if the product is ubiquitous.
Fair enough, but I would ask you to show something that has lower costs - including capital costs, but is more complex. Complexity costs money. The only way it doesn't is if you shave a feature to get a feature.
I'm having a hard time seeing why you think that ecologically positive tech will not reduce in price as it matures and as its adoption rate increases
It may, but mandating that expenditure removes capital from society for other goals. What's going to happen is that you'll have say, maybe 90% of the population able to afford the premium of going green, but then the other 10% are going to be even more screwed than they are now.
This is the sort of thing which needs to be kick started because the gain is sufficiently far out that no corporations would be able to justify it to their stock holders because as you point out yourself, the cost effectiveness is not yet there.
For me, the answer is that we need more energy, not conservation. So... I'm about, dumping loads of federal money into free electron laser research (nuclear fusion), building nuclear fission power plants for now, and doing wind where honestly it can be done. Figure that fission buys us roughly 50 years to figure out how to do fusion.
Free trade isn't exactly an idea from the lef
Actually, that's not true at all. Lefties embraced free trade round the turn of the century in the USA in order to get southern votes and to also throw a cog into the wheels of the robber barons.
However, you are right, of all the ideas liberals had, Republicans have embraced the worst one in free trade.
Leftists promote a crackpot idea called "fair trade" instead of "free trade".
GASP! CHOKE! HOW DARE LEFTISTS ACTUALLY BE RIGHT ON AN ISSUE!!! :-)
Those leftists are actually right at least on that issue. My wife is a staunch leftist and I'm of course a right wing loony but we both have a solid common ground in supporting fair trade and buying local wherever possible. Unlike many conservatives, I'd rather support the UAW and General Motors than a foreign company...
The issue with conservatives is that you have absolutely no proof your green economy can actually work. The last two big economic ideas from the left, free trade and socialism, both have cratered spectacularly.
And as computers have increased in complexity from the models in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, so too have they increased in cost and size, right?
The capital required to make them, has, yes, most certainly. It's only because there are a lot more customers do we have the illusion of lower prices. But right now it costs billions of dollars to bring a CPU to market, and it didn't cost nearly that before. Before there were many players because the barriers to entry were not so high, but now, there are few. You even see this in software. How many operating systems were there twenty years ago? How many today? IT's the capital costs get higher and higher.
Your statement seems to imply there is no point in going any further with advancing efficiency because of costs right now.
No, what I am saying, and what my next prediction will be, is that consumers will wind up giving up other things have a poorer lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly.
And, by the way, the question is not whether or not you put a 2009 Civic in front of engineers in the 1950s, the question is, if it were legal to build a 1950s car, but with modern tools, how much cheaper would it be than the Civic? I bet it would be a lot.
Actually, no, that's not the question at all. The question is what are you going to do when oil is permanently above 100USD a barrel and climbing, or worse, constantly volatile?
Switch to the production of synthetic fuels using energy from nuclear power plants.
I'm afraid you've just made this connection up. What examples make you feel this three-way relation is universally true as you assert?
Look at the price of different kinds of light bulbs.
All of this is to say that we shouldn't bother doing anything at all. Here's the kickers though, 1) as the GP stated, if we don't find another portable fuel source from oil especially, we're in big trouble
Well, no because, if the price of oil stays high, then we switch over to synthesis methods. We could do Fischler Tropf from coal and get the energy from nuclear power.
As for CO2 levels, if we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, it's safe to say that the damage will be worse. So, before Bush was elected we had the chance with the Kyoto accord to choose between minimal damage and damage, now we have the choice to choose between some damage and more damage. I
The Chinese and Indian economies have more to do with the elevated CO2 emissions at this point than anything Bush ever did. Right now there is a single coal mine fire in China that cranks out as much CO2 as the USA does cars. Even if Bush has signed Kyoto, it would have been just an ineffective economic suicide for the USA. The Chinese and Indians will never sign.
Meanwhile in the real world there is no such thing as "the climate change cabal," what there is are thousands of mainstream scientists who basically agree,
My question would be, regardless of the academic opinion of the scientists, when do we start trusting global temperature measurements over their opinion? The RSS measured planetary temperature has been falling sharply for the last six months. In June the anomaly was 75, and in Jan it was 322.. Meanwhile, the CO2 actually climbs still. How long do you have measurements of the temperature going down, before scientists say that it is actually going down?
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon. The changing climate is also a worry (which we wouldn't want to encourage to change faster than it already is), but it's not the only reason, and the money spent on migrating to alternative energy sources certainly wouldn't be wasted.
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost. This relationship between efficiency and cost is exponential due to increased complexity efficiency demands. I put together a simple JavaScript model of this at http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx . Basically, by jiggering the predicted cost of fuel (using gasoline as a baseline), versus, the exponent of increased energy efficiency costs, you can arrive at a number of scenarios where reducing greenhouse gasses actually doesn't pay for itself. If it pays anyone, it also pays the Chinese and the Europeans..
In any case, most models show that even a rather dramatic altering of CO2 emissions will not alter the course of climate change for a minimum of 200 years. Even if we stopped now, the glaciers are still going to melt. The CO2 is already in the air.
There are 2 population grown curves. One is when an organism's population grows to the point where it is in equilibrium with its environment, and the other is where it grows to the point that its environment is no longer able to sustain it, so its population crashes.
Malthus has been predicting this for 200 years and it hasn't happened yet. The human intellect always finds a way. Even if the earth gets even more prosperous and more populated, then eventually there will be a break even point where people will find migration to other planets attractive and so humans will move into space.
Everything else being equal, a better-looking woman has more chance of securing a more prosperous male, and therefore has a better sense of well being and end up having more kids, no?
It really depends on how much she puts out.
But this sounds more like a bug than DRM. Presumably the code was attempting to check the value you'd just written, but was actually checking a fixed address due to omitting some indirection. Which is easy to do in assembler.
That sounds fair enough. And, in any case, Microsoft's product was embedded in ROM - certainly it was for TRS-80 and even the IBM PC has a ROM BASIC. So they didn't really need DRM for a while. Sometimes I still drool over the possibility of Windows in ROM, and am interested in Linux in ROM from the likes of ASUS for the same reason.
I've railed on about MBA types and the guys in suits but for the most part I've never had a manager that tried to hold me to an hourly schedule. They have to have an hourly schedule to cover all the meetings and people but they don't hold the makers to it.
Competition isn't the reason -- it's that we have far too many people on the planet at the expense of other species and our own well-being.
That's your opinion, and you are certainly entitled to it, but saying that some other species should impede on a woman's reproductive rights is rather odd, don't you think?
Because it's getting crowdy on this little planet.
2/3 of the surface area is unused.
What makes you think evolution does not account for that?
Because cultural evolution is a taboo topic.