However, if people did not go out and purchase these vehicles and new technologies then we would all still be driving around in Model T Fords.
The issue is not the purchase of new vehicles, the issue is the timing of the purchase and what is done with the old vehicle. As old vehicles wear out and are disposed of at the end of their natural life cycle they will, of course, be replaced by a new vehicle, preferably a "better" one than the old. The tide of technology can still move forward at a sustainable rate.
There are those, however, who advocate dispossing of (not reselling used, which is what happens to your old car when you buy a new hybrid; dispossing of) older, but still perfectly operational, vehicles and replacing them with new ones. In fact, many of them wish to mandate this.
I, for one, would not shed a tear if we got rid of 90% of all the cars, period, but I'm afraid I can only think of those people as ignorant twits. The ignorant part would be curable, if it weren't for the twit part.
I'm also likely willing to interpose my body as a living baricade between the crusher and the Bugatti T35, or even Ford Model T.
That said, perhaps we all should be driving the Model T. ..
I've driven a few, and it is still a perfectly viable automobile for the sort of driving most people do, most of the time, given a few modern improvements. The latest technology often goes far beyond what would be perfectly sufficient, but at least it often costs a lot more (there are, of course, cases where the newer technology costs a lot less).
Note that Henry F. once made a Model T prototype from locally grown soybean oil plastic, and powered it with locally produced corn alcohol. His vision was a local farm produced infrastructure, so maybe we should all be driving Model Ts.
John D. had another idea, however.
People are People and they like shiny new things.
Which is exactly why no special, government mandated, accelerated program to replace older cars is needed in the first place, and they can leave those few of us that prefer older, classic things the hell alone.
. ..are they simply not deemed as important as reducing air pollution from exhaust fumes?
It's always easier to get a warm, fuzzy feeling by focusing intently on one small parameter, doing something about that, and thinking you've solved the problem than it is to acknowledge the whole picture.
Ignorance, after all, is bliss.
When I pointed out to a friend that part of the cost of replacing older, less "enviromentally friendly" cars with new cars was the pollution inherent in dispossing of the old car prematurely and manufacturing the new one (not to mention the pollution inherent in earning the money to buy the new car, and the pollution inherent in. ..) he was stunned. He'd simply never thought of that issue. All he'd ever heard about were emmisions, so that's all he ever thought about.
It's almost always more 'friendly' in the long run to use existing systems until they naturally expire than it is to replace them with new systems before that time. After all, isn't that why many of us spend so much time maintaining existing code base?
Is there any research being done in these areas as well. ..
Oh sure. There are people, such as myself, who give a considerable amount of thought to the issue, and put a certain amount of work into it as well, but after doing it for a few decades you are inevitably faced with an issue:
Until the skies are all thick and brown, and the oil is all gone, nobody much is going to care. It always boils down to a dietary issue with shades of laziness on top("Yo, have we got enough money for a pizza?" Cool, have it delivered").
When that time comes there will be those of us standing around with solutions that might have been, although at that point largely irrelevant because, while they would have kept the air from becoming thick and brown, won't, in and of themselves, make the air any less thick.
There's an eternal cycle of creating your own problems, than patting yourself on the back for being clever enough to wangle your way out of them, and so far as I've ever been able to determine from observation, the purpose of man as machine seems to be to incessantly worry about the future while doing nothing practical about it, all the while regreting the past.
I don't understand it, but it seems to make people "happy."
Ok, let me rephrase that more explicitly for the moderators:
The rate of individual componant failure is a non issue. What we're interested in is the rate of system failure. Redundancy inherently increases the number of componants in a system that fail. If I add five more mirroring HDs to my box I am going to have more faied HDs, yes, but a more robust system.
The question I have posed is if one of my redudant HDs fails, why do I have to worry about the reliability of my video card, and thus the system.
I could accept that. In fact, it's what I often do, and what the main article is about, however, he seems to be discussing removing fans from an existing high end gaming system, not building a new system that requires fewer fans.
borked fan ->weird electrical loads -> broken compy
That would be a power supply issue, just as it is for hot swappable USB powered periperals and HDs. I can sit here all day repeatedly jamming a fan, thus simulating a failed bearing, and not have a single electrical componant on my computer fail.
For that matter, bearing failure is a bearing quality issue. A good bearing alone will cost more than the average cheap fan. Instead of removing fans why not add better ones?
. . . with fewer fans, has fewer components to break.
If I take 20 fans, all with already wonky bearings, and nail them to my roof truss (designed to work without any fans at all), what effect does the failure of half of them have on the failure rate of my roof?
For the life of me I can't see why a box with one fan in it is any different from a box with one working fan and one nonworking fan in it, nor why more fans don't add redundancy to the system in case a fan fails (nevermind your implication that the number of fans effects the failure rate of each individual fan).
You're going to have to enlighten me as to why you think fewer fans leads to a cooler and more reliable box.
That's on my mother's side. My father's is the basic English/French thingy. I'm pretty much just a Euromutt who can't claim to be anything, but can claim to be everything.
Except Native American. So far as I know there ain't a drop of that in me.
That would be why Joseph Brant brought a Brown Bess and Crazy Horse brought a Winchester. They had access to firearms almost from day one.
And frankly, until the mid 1700s, in the Eastern woodlands where fighting was almost never done in the open field the bow and arrow was actually a superior weapon to the firearms of the time (plate armor already being extinct), being more reliable, more accurate and with a greater rate of fire.
A Wrist Rocket would have been a completely bitchin' thing to have at the time.
No, their primary military mistake was in holding to a chivalric code that held combat to be a matter of personal honor between combatants, rather than a clash of nameless cannon fodder.
By the time they figured out how to deal with an army (and that they would have to, like it or not) they were already few in number, and we already in the millions.
Look Bud, I don't know you, and there's a chance I wouldn't even like you if I did, so if your damned computerized car crashes, crashes and kills you, well, it's no nevermind to me (not that you should think I actually trust you in control of your car. I've seen the way you people drive).
But if it crashes, crashes and kills me I'm likely to get a bit peeved.
...say the Slashdotters as they goober in front of their computer monitors for the 18th hour in a row.
Reading Cicero, Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare and Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night; and between Shakespeare and Burton you have the essential plot of every fiction show that's ever appeared on television, only with better writing. Available for free download at Project Gutenberg.
The net connected computer has been a Godsend for lovers of literature, and you can even get your exercise in at the same time if you power your rig with a bicycle driven generator.
The fact that IR is unregulated spectrum that doesn't interfere with regulated spectrum, and that if everyone wasn't out to make a buck for themselves they wouldn't bother going through all the trouble and exense of designing and manufacturing this stuff in the first place.
In this regard, while I do have my problems with some of Chesterton's ideas, I think he was right. The issue isn't so much that people are trying to make a buck for themselves, but that for some reason attention has actually shifted away from making bucks to making sure the other guy doesn't make a buck.
They're paying more attention to screwing the other guy's business than they are toward running their own.
This is a result of confusing the idea of market share with profit, a confusion that ultimately lead the dot com bomb and other economic attrocities.
Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.
Thank you, sir, and thank you again. A thousand thank yous and a thank you.
My only concern is that since the average "journalist" now seems to write at about the level of a dull third grader (or is edited to appear as one) people won't be able to tell the difference.
Actually, going counter to the joke, my first impression is that is the only sort of "news" it could write, which, given the joke, would, indeed, render its output indistinguishable for what passes for "news" these days.
I'll believe a search engine can "write" news when I can't tell a difference in quality between its output and Twain's or Mencken's.
Most of the Eastern tribes were nearly eradicated by European diseases before the arrival of the "Pilgrims."
Before departing England the Pilgrims actually offered thanks to God for the devistating plauge that had depopulated the New World, leaving it open for them.
Before departing England Squanto (yes, Squanto came from England to meet the Pilgrims, and spoke with them in perfect English) had intended to rejoin his native people, but upon his arrival found that they had been wiped out by disease, hence his hooking up with the Pilgrims in a sort of mutual survial pact in the first place.
I'm afraid that the US can't really take credit for any brilliance in military strategy here. It was mostly an accident and the later intentional germ warfare conducted against native tribes was informed by previous unintentional example.
For the most part you out strategied us every step of the way (except, perhaps, for being too nice) and we simply used a very crude, but very effective, method to deal with those of you that remained after the various plagues.
We swept over you like a flood.
The story isn't entirely unique I'm afraid. The Tartars did the same thing to my Causcasian ancestors, so thouroughly that the very word used to describe an endentured state is my people's name.
Leaving the mystery of how South Carolina chert got to Asia to be picked up and carried back to South Carolina. Damn, this really could turn our entire conception of history on its head. There must have been a Great Chert Road 60,000 years ago. The cultural implications are also staggering, since one must, necessarily, posit some religious reason for "carrying coals to Newcastle" and back again (since there's plenty of the stuff in both China and America).
And, of course, still leaving the mystery of how it got placed in its resting place 50,000 years ago (which is what the evidence actually suggests, a fact that a distressingly small number of posters seem to grasp). Your suggestion solves nothing since it doesn't even address the actual mystery (of course, judging from your earlier post on carbon dating you already knew that, didn't you?:))
Slashdot Mirror
However, if people did not go out and purchase these vehicles and new technologies then we would all still be driving around in Model T Fords.
.
The issue is not the purchase of new vehicles, the issue is the timing of the purchase and what is done with the old vehicle. As old vehicles wear out and are disposed of at the end of their natural life cycle they will, of course, be replaced by a new vehicle, preferably a "better" one than the old. The tide of technology can still move forward at a sustainable rate.
There are those, however, who advocate dispossing of (not reselling used, which is what happens to your old car when you buy a new hybrid; dispossing of) older, but still perfectly operational, vehicles and replacing them with new ones. In fact, many of them wish to mandate this.
I, for one, would not shed a tear if we got rid of 90% of all the cars, period, but I'm afraid I can only think of those people as ignorant twits. The ignorant part would be curable, if it weren't for the twit part.
I'm also likely willing to interpose my body as a living baricade between the crusher and the Bugatti T35, or even Ford Model T.
That said, perhaps we all should be driving the Model T. .
I've driven a few, and it is still a perfectly viable automobile for the sort of driving most people do, most of the time, given a few modern improvements. The latest technology often goes far beyond what would be perfectly sufficient, but at least it often costs a lot more (there are, of course, cases where the newer technology costs a lot less).
Note that Henry F. once made a Model T prototype from locally grown soybean oil plastic, and powered it with locally produced corn alcohol. His vision was a local farm produced infrastructure, so maybe we should all be driving Model Ts.
John D. had another idea, however.
People are People and they like shiny new things.
Which is exactly why no special, government mandated, accelerated program to replace older cars is needed in the first place, and they can leave those few of us that prefer older, classic things the hell alone.
KFG
. . .are they simply not deemed as important as reducing air pollution from exhaust fumes?
.) he was stunned. He'd simply never thought of that issue. All he'd ever heard about were emmisions, so that's all he ever thought about.
.
It's always easier to get a warm, fuzzy feeling by focusing intently on one small parameter, doing something about that, and thinking you've solved the problem than it is to acknowledge the whole picture.
Ignorance, after all, is bliss.
When I pointed out to a friend that part of the cost of replacing older, less "enviromentally friendly" cars with new cars was the pollution inherent in dispossing of the old car prematurely and manufacturing the new one (not to mention the pollution inherent in earning the money to buy the new car, and the pollution inherent in. .
It's almost always more 'friendly' in the long run to use existing systems until they naturally expire than it is to replace them with new systems before that time. After all, isn't that why many of us spend so much time maintaining existing code base?
Is there any research being done in these areas as well. .
Oh sure. There are people, such as myself, who give a considerable amount of thought to the issue, and put a certain amount of work into it as well, but after doing it for a few decades you are inevitably faced with an issue:
Until the skies are all thick and brown, and the oil is all gone, nobody much is going to care. It always boils down to a dietary issue with shades of laziness on top("Yo, have we got enough money for a pizza?" Cool, have it delivered").
When that time comes there will be those of us standing around with solutions that might have been, although at that point largely irrelevant because, while they would have kept the air from becoming thick and brown, won't, in and of themselves, make the air any less thick.
There's an eternal cycle of creating your own problems, than patting yourself on the back for being clever enough to wangle your way out of them, and so far as I've ever been able to determine from observation, the purpose of man as machine seems to be to incessantly worry about the future while doing nothing practical about it, all the while regreting the past.
I don't understand it, but it seems to make people "happy."
KFG
Ok, let me rephrase that more explicitly for the moderators:
The rate of individual componant failure is a non issue. What we're interested in is the rate of system failure. Redundancy inherently increases the number of componants in a system that fail. If I add five more mirroring HDs to my box I am going to have more faied HDs, yes, but a more robust system.
The question I have posed is if one of my redudant HDs fails, why do I have to worry about the reliability of my video card, and thus the system.
KFG
I could accept that. In fact, it's what I often do, and what the main article is about, however, he seems to be discussing removing fans from an existing high end gaming system, not building a new system that requires fewer fans.
KFG
borked fan ->weird electrical loads -> broken compy
That would be a power supply issue, just as it is for hot swappable USB powered periperals and HDs. I can sit here all day repeatedly jamming a fan, thus simulating a failed bearing, and not have a single electrical componant on my computer fail.
For that matter, bearing failure is a bearing quality issue. A good bearing alone will cost more than the average cheap fan. Instead of removing fans why not add better ones?
KFG
If your CPU fan breaks, it doesn't help having 9 case fans for redundancy.
Neither does removing the CPU fan in the first place to decrease your fan failure rate.
KFG
. . . with fewer fans, has fewer components to break.
If I take 20 fans, all with already wonky bearings, and nail them to my roof truss (designed to work without any fans at all), what effect does the failure of half of them have on the failure rate of my roof?
KFG
For the life of me I can't see why a box with one fan in it is any different from a box with one working fan and one nonworking fan in it, nor why more fans don't add redundancy to the system in case a fan fails (nevermind your implication that the number of fans effects the failure rate of each individual fan).
You're going to have to enlighten me as to why you think fewer fans leads to a cooler and more reliable box.
KFG
Belarus mostly, with a bit of Poland and Romania.
That's on my mother's side. My father's is the basic English/French thingy. I'm pretty much just a Euromutt who can't claim to be anything, but can claim to be everything.
Except Native American. So far as I know there ain't a drop of that in me.
KFG
What people's name would that be?
Slav(e)
KFG
Why God Why?
Did I hear you say that there must be a catch?
Would you walk away from a fool and his money?
KFG
. . .and looks like a million bucks while doing it.
All of my portable music players, no matter who they're made by, look exactly like the outside of my pocket.
So hey, they all look like a million bucks (cue ZZ Top).
KFG
Yeah, but you know me, that line would have made the joke a little too obvious for my taste.
:)
Of course, you could say the joke's on me, since you're the one that got the mod points for it.
Doesn't look like the serious issue I actually raised is going to get much notice either.
C'est la vie.
KFG
Never bring a bow & arrows to a gun fight!
That would be why Joseph Brant brought a Brown Bess and Crazy Horse brought a Winchester. They had access to firearms almost from day one.
And frankly, until the mid 1700s, in the Eastern woodlands where fighting was almost never done in the open field the bow and arrow was actually a superior weapon to the firearms of the time (plate armor already being extinct), being more reliable, more accurate and with a greater rate of fire.
A Wrist Rocket would have been a completely bitchin' thing to have at the time.
No, their primary military mistake was in holding to a chivalric code that held combat to be a matter of personal honor between combatants, rather than a clash of nameless cannon fodder.
By the time they figured out how to deal with an army (and that they would have to, like it or not) they were already few in number, and we already in the millions.
KFG
Look Bud, I don't know you, and there's a chance I wouldn't even like you if I did, so if your damned computerized car crashes, crashes and kills you, well, it's no nevermind to me (not that you should think I actually trust you in control of your car. I've seen the way you people drive).
But if it crashes, crashes and kills me I'm likely to get a bit peeved.
KFG
How about we just ship the nuclear waste to the moon, ala Space:1999?
Which would have an additional advantagous side effect on terrestrial maritime navigation, getting rid of all those nasty tides and shit.
KFG
Reading Cicero, Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare and Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night; and between Shakespeare and Burton you have the essential plot of every fiction show that's ever appeared on television, only with better writing. Available for free download at Project Gutenberg.
The net connected computer has been a Godsend for lovers of literature, and you can even get your exercise in at the same time if you power your rig with a bicycle driven generator.
KFG
Tivo vs. Time-Warner DVR review
KFG
What am I missing here?
The fact that IR is unregulated spectrum that doesn't interfere with regulated spectrum, and that if everyone wasn't out to make a buck for themselves they wouldn't bother going through all the trouble and exense of designing and manufacturing this stuff in the first place.
In this regard, while I do have my problems with some of Chesterton's ideas, I think he was right. The issue isn't so much that people are trying to make a buck for themselves, but that for some reason attention has actually shifted away from making bucks to making sure the other guy doesn't make a buck.
They're paying more attention to screwing the other guy's business than they are toward running their own.
This is a result of confusing the idea of market share with profit, a confusion that ultimately lead the dot com bomb and other economic attrocities.
KFG
Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.
Thank you, sir, and thank you again. A thousand thank yous and a thank you.
My only concern is that since the average "journalist" now seems to write at about the level of a dull third grader (or is edited to appear as one) people won't be able to tell the difference.
KFG
But Google runs on fire, allowing you to see naked bottoms in the dark.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
KFG
Actually, going counter to the joke, my first impression is that is the only sort of "news" it could write, which, given the joke, would, indeed, render its output indistinguishable for what passes for "news" these days.
I'll believe a search engine can "write" news when I can't tell a difference in quality between its output and Twain's or Mencken's.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
KFG
Most of the Eastern tribes were nearly eradicated by European diseases before the arrival of the "Pilgrims."
Before departing England the Pilgrims actually offered thanks to God for the devistating plauge that had depopulated the New World, leaving it open for them.
Before departing England Squanto (yes, Squanto came from England to meet the Pilgrims, and spoke with them in perfect English) had intended to rejoin his native people, but upon his arrival found that they had been wiped out by disease, hence his hooking up with the Pilgrims in a sort of mutual survial pact in the first place.
I'm afraid that the US can't really take credit for any brilliance in military strategy here. It was mostly an accident and the later intentional germ warfare conducted against native tribes was informed by previous unintentional example.
For the most part you out strategied us every step of the way (except, perhaps, for being too nice) and we simply used a very crude, but very effective, method to deal with those of you that remained after the various plagues.
We swept over you like a flood.
The story isn't entirely unique I'm afraid. The Tartars did the same thing to my Causcasian ancestors, so thouroughly that the very word used to describe an endentured state is my people's name.
KFG
Leaving the mystery of how South Carolina chert got to Asia to be picked up and carried back to South Carolina. Damn, this really could turn our entire conception of history on its head. There must have been a Great Chert Road 60,000 years ago. The cultural implications are also staggering, since one must, necessarily, posit some religious reason for "carrying coals to Newcastle" and back again (since there's plenty of the stuff in both China and America).
:))
And, of course, still leaving the mystery of how it got placed in its resting place 50,000 years ago (which is what the evidence actually suggests, a fact that a distressingly small number of posters seem to grasp). Your suggestion solves nothing since it doesn't even address the actual mystery (of course, judging from your earlier post on carbon dating you already knew that, didn't you?
But here's the real flaw in your hypothesis:
Dude, chert ain't nice lookin'.
KFG
That's one of the reasons I always insist on calling it Wodensday, although people will look at you funny.
KFG