There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)
If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.
There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.
"Only problem with that is CO2 is still released."
It is, but google tells me "Steam Methane Reformation can achieve 65 - 75% efficiency." and "an automobile engine's efficiency is typically 30%". When using SMR, you have to add the fuel cell efficiency, but based on those numbers if it's over 40% it's better than what we are using today. The only way I've seen the fuel-cell pessimists 'calculate' lower efficiencies than 40% is if they that at a low 40% for the fuel-cell and then start adding in system losses to get an 'efficiency to the wheel' while comparing to gasoline/diesel engine-only efficiencies (convenienly forgetting that you should add-in quite a lot of transmission losses there too).
I'd say SMR is a start, because it allows us to start building an infrastructure which in the end (at the same time) will open up the possibility of using wind and solar to generate hydrogen. Neither gas, nor diesel, nor ethanol allow that.
(And if you ask me, nuclear is not the holy grail, unless they get fusion going).
I was quite put off by comments such as "This is merely denial, which is common enough -- whether it is slashdot or Forbes.". A lot of the first comments just reeked of elistism commonly found by peak oil evangelists. One comment says "otherwise you will be sitting like Cassandra as everyone blames oil company gouging for $150 per barrel oil.".
Sigh... It gets better after to ignore the first couple of comments...
The article itself is interesting, but nothing news. Of course oil is on its way out, and its price on its way up. The world, however, is not made of oil. The article tries to predict oil and then uses the results to predict the global economy. It totally ignores everything else.
So let's look at $150 per barrel, assuming that would be around $6-$9 per gallon. A lot of people would still drive at those prices, just not as much, and definitely prefering smaller cars. Flights would get extra expensive and all goods would have big transportation-related price increases. Based on that I would have to agree that it will probably give a nice big push into a recession. But a recession, even a big one is not the same as going back to the 'Stone Age', it simply means having a simpler, poorer (or less rich), less traveled, less air-conditioned, and/or a much more energy-efficient life.
Note that even already at $100 per barrel, 'the power goes out' will not be the response, but 'the wind farm gets approved' will be more close to reality. When energy get very expensive, then suddenly that windmill, solar plant, etc, will be a lot more economic to build. Expect headlines "town builds windfarm to pay for increased energy costs" to "solar panel demand outpacing supply" and "general motors' popular 70mpg mini-automobile", not "no more electricity because of expensive oil". Motorcycle demand, already strongly growing in the last decade, will increase even more when people find out how little gas a motorcycle needs.
Instead of paying for the new palace for the oil sheikh, each $150 (or more) per barrel equivalent of energy that is generated in the country is used to pay for people building and maintaining the (alternative) energy source that generates the energy. Such a new industry will create a lot more local jobs and economical activity than the $60 per barrel that is flowing into the middle east right now.
Note that the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building were built in the middle of the Great Depression, as a bold move by the rich (NY) and the working people (SF) to not only supply jobs to the people working on those projects, but to also motivate the people who were strongly depressed by the recession, and last but not in the least also to build part of the infrastructure that was needed to help the country climb out of the recession. Alternatives to oil, and its development and (frantic) construction will be the Golden Gate Bridge and Empire State building of the early to mid 21st century.
And we'll all come out of it stronger than going in. Including the environment because we'll be polluting so much less.
I'll end quoting one of the better comments below the article that points out a fundemental error in the article: "The bottom line is that everyone, oil exporters and importers, is subject to the pain of shortages and is forced to choose between a barrel of oil and $60 or $100 or whatever it is at the time. Which do you want more, the oil or the money. That is the choice that everyone faces whether they are importing or exporting. As oil gets more expensive, more and more people will choose the money over the oil, and consumption will fall regardless of the country's export or import status."
"Not all. I switched to Firefox from Mozilla, which I switched to from Netscape. Never used IE as my primary browser since I got fed up with Win95 and switched to Linux in '96."
Ahhh. I had an 'almost all (if not all)', but I edited it to 'all', but I guess I should have left it... Myself I occasionally still use IE on other people's computers (but never for long, it's worth-while quickly to go to www.mozilla.org and get the latest real thing. Nobody ever complains that I put firefox on their desktop where the IE icon used to be... In fact, they magically stop complaining about popups and spyware)...
One free bonus tip for firefox + linux: get 'mplayerplug-in' and install both the plugin and extension, then you'll be able to see all video's on the web, including the quicktime ones and also the ones that specifically check for realplayer and wmp (you know, for those websites out there that assume you're running windos that would otherwise point your linux firefox to a microsoft webpage about wmp...).
Most people using IE don't know Firefox or Opera. There are probably more IE users that never heard of Firefox than there are Firefox users... I'd go even farther that there are more IE users who don't know what is meant by the acronym IE than there are Firefox users... It's a perfect example of ignorance is bliss: Most IE users just eat what is put in front of them, follow the flock mentality. All of the Firefox and Opera users switched _from_ IE to Firefox by choice.
Also don't forget that nobody forces anybody to use Firefox or Opera, but many big company IT departments force many office workers to use IE...
Call Firefox 'irrelevant' because it has the number '16%' associated to it if you will, but for the millions of Firefox users, it's far from irrelevant.
Firefox is not perfect, I'd like the Firefox people to fix a couple of things here and there, but boy it's a lot better than the alternative.
Editing source code and recompiling would be more akin to changing the crystal than hex-editing a binary...
Security through obscurity is no security, it may slow things down a little but that is it. A good example is how 'openhal' for the atheros cards is continuously gaining functionality even though atheros (obviously) never contributes to that project.
After somebody tells you the offset and new value for the binary file, it's very, very easy with a hex editor. Nothing but obscurity is keeping you from knowing the offset, and security by obscurity is a well know snake-oil.
"Please note that he was also responsible for this paper [flownet.com] describing a Lisp-based system that successfully flew a NASA spacecraft [nasa.gov]. He knows exactly how difficult it is to make things work from an engineering standpoint."
From the nasa link: "when the synthetic intelligence succeeded in firing Deep Space 1's ion engine on but failed to turn it back off." -> "Scientists found that the bug was related to a timing error when two parts of the program were exchanging information".
First of all, that page never mentions that the 'success' was a result of using any particular programming language.
So they had buggy spaceflight software (bad synchronization) resulting in forgetting to turn an engine off and still managed to call it a success? Spin City, no Spin Capital! What universe is that from? Not turning engine off means spacecraft lost in this universe (running out of fuel while leaving intended track/orbit).
"As a whole, the market is barreling towards an open source model."
"I see it meekly traipsing along, while MSFT earned $1400 every second of every day of fiscal year 2006, and is on pace to earn $1500 every second of every day of fiscal year 2007."
He didn't say that open source was destroying Microsoft. Maybe without open source being as widely used as it is, MSFT would be making $2400 every second today (and the combined MSFT users would be losing $1000 per second more to MSFT than they are now).
"The ability to go in and change a const or DEFINE MAXPOWER from 0xFE to 0xFF may be considered easily modifiable by the FCC."
If that's the reason why they don't release source, that is a bogus argument, because it's equally easy to open a hex-editor and replace bytw xxxx from 0xFE to 0xFF. They're essentially using security by obscurity, and if that is sufficient to keep the FCC off their back, they could also use a '#define REGISTER_F654FFD3 0xFE' and be equally safe.
I know, Star Office right now is a mere placeholder for the bigger companies that won't use something if it doesn't cost money. The only buyers of Star Office are those where Star Office is part of a service contract.
"Most non-techies I know still used MS-Office bought or pirated."
Most MS-Office (windows and mac) users I know had horrible problems with it that don't exist with Openoffice, with the only reason for staying with MS-Office is the 'status quo', or other people in any form (bosses/colleages requiring/using it, which is another form of status quo). It's never a reason of capabilities, the only other reason I've seen is compatability of the macro's in cases of horrible piles of connected 'office documents' with wads of half-broken macro's that together attempt to implement all sorts of business processes. In those cases, they stick with their now half-broken 'system' because it took so much time to get is to the state it is today and nobody dares touch it anyway because it's so broken.
"There is Star Office, but it still needs work and most people have never heard of it."
Euh... 'Star Office'? Wow flashback to the nineties? Did you really miss that Sun bought it in 1999 and put it out for free as OpenOffice? It actually has has a lot of work (see www.openoffice.org), and a lot of people have heard of it and are using it.
"What few people seem to realize is that the parentheses in Lisp code are actually a very natural representation of trees. This is no accident; Lisp was originally invented as a notation for parse trees, so that program transformations could be discussed and studied. Try that with C code, and you will see that it's a whole lot more difficult to map C to syntax trees than Lisp."
That may lead to think that speed synthesis would be the ideal application to show off the power of scheme... Yet festival does use scheme and it is horrible.
... for the same reasons why we must learn history (to know not to make the same mistakes ourselves)...
scheme code unevitably turns into an unreadable pile of ((((((((((()((() junk
Actually, I could not give an accurate representation of scheme, because slashdot kept saying 'Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.'
And don't get me started in functional programming languages.
Flamebait? It's the truth mods, the web site takes 5 minutes to show an empty page. Web designers: Please use technologies that work, not ones that sound cool.
"of course it won't help. people will just grind for rep and then vandalize"
It's a form of 'payment'. Need to 'do good' before can 'do bad'. How wouldn't that help if vandals need to make (e.g.) 10 useful contributions for each vandalization instead of just vandalizing like it's possible now?
With the example above, for every 10 vandals, there only needs to be one more vandal still building up his reputation to undo the vandalism of all the others...
And that's without the people who don't vandalize.
What about the notion that much-contested pages/content is visible as such. It's not a secret that those pages are flame wars, it's very obvious.
It simply means that wikipedia is not absolutely objective. But as you say yourself, a printed encyclopedia is none the better, as it will simply choose a side and pretent it's the objective truth.
The absolute objective truth is not known. Mathematics is the only absolute truth we can ever know, all the rest (science, history, 'facts') is a documentation of observations, and observations are not the same from all viewpoints, can be incomplete, biased, etc.
In wikipedia, showing the amount of disagreement should be considered part of its documentation purpose. There are a lot of people who's experiences/opinions/'knowledge' differ a lot on certain subjects, so naturally, a documentation of the subject will be riddled by differences between people.
Of course, that can become a mess if, for example, uninformed opinions start to overcast more reputable sources of scientific findings and agreement. If wikipedia were to deal with this scientifically, it would be a combination of reputation and peer review. Forking is not the answer.
"Flex is free (the compiler), ease of use is a subjective measure, and people are using Flex now too."
And god knows why. I you want your webpage to be visible on the Internet, don't use it.
I RTFM, and decided to give flex a try by following the "Check here for my favorite Flex 2 demo app;". Well, I had enough time to go back to/., find your post, click reply, and type this: The tab with the flex demo is still loading. Cool demo: Trashcan here it comes.
Ok, now right when I'm typing this, it has stopped loading and shows me a blank page (well, blank, I think the color is called 'slate blue'). Wow great. I can do that in much less code with plain html.
Is that supposed to be the professional way to do it?
Slashdot Mirror
There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)
If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.
There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.
"Only problem with that is CO2 is still released."
It is, but google tells me "Steam Methane Reformation can achieve 65 - 75% efficiency." and "an automobile engine's efficiency is typically 30%". When using SMR, you have to add the fuel cell efficiency, but based on those numbers if it's over 40% it's better than what we are using today. The only way I've seen the fuel-cell pessimists 'calculate' lower efficiencies than 40% is if they that at a low 40% for the fuel-cell and then start adding in system losses to get an 'efficiency to the wheel' while comparing to gasoline/diesel engine-only efficiencies (convenienly forgetting that you should add-in quite a lot of transmission losses there too).
I'd say SMR is a start, because it allows us to start building an infrastructure which in the end (at the same time) will open up the possibility of using wind and solar to generate hydrogen. Neither gas, nor diesel, nor ethanol allow that.
(And if you ask me, nuclear is not the holy grail, unless they get fusion going).
I was quite put off by comments such as "This is merely denial, which is common enough -- whether it is slashdot or Forbes.". A lot of the first comments just reeked of elistism commonly found by peak oil evangelists. One comment says "otherwise you will be sitting like Cassandra as everyone blames oil company gouging for $150 per barrel oil.".
Sigh... It gets better after to ignore the first couple of comments...
The article itself is interesting, but nothing news. Of course oil is on its way out, and its price on its way up. The world, however, is not made of oil. The article tries to predict oil and then uses the results to predict the global economy. It totally ignores everything else.
So let's look at $150 per barrel, assuming that would be around $6-$9 per gallon. A lot of people would still drive at those prices, just not as much, and definitely prefering smaller cars. Flights would get extra expensive and all goods would have big transportation-related price increases. Based on that I would have to agree that it will probably give a nice big push into a recession. But a recession, even a big one is not the same as going back to the 'Stone Age', it simply means having a simpler, poorer (or less rich), less traveled, less air-conditioned, and/or a much more energy-efficient life.
Note that even already at $100 per barrel, 'the power goes out' will not be the response, but 'the wind farm gets approved' will be more close to reality. When energy get very expensive, then suddenly that windmill, solar plant, etc, will be a lot more economic to build. Expect headlines "town builds windfarm to pay for increased energy costs" to "solar panel demand outpacing supply" and "general motors' popular 70mpg mini-automobile", not "no more electricity because of expensive oil". Motorcycle demand, already strongly growing in the last decade, will increase even more when people find out how little gas a motorcycle needs.
Instead of paying for the new palace for the oil sheikh, each $150 (or more) per barrel equivalent of energy that is generated in the country is used to pay for people building and maintaining the (alternative) energy source that generates the energy. Such a new industry will create a lot more local jobs and economical activity than the $60 per barrel that is flowing into the middle east right now.
Note that the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building were built in the middle of the Great Depression, as a bold move by the rich (NY) and the working people (SF) to not only supply jobs to the people working on those projects, but to also motivate the people who were strongly depressed by the recession, and last but not in the least also to build part of the infrastructure that was needed to help the country climb out of the recession. Alternatives to oil, and its development and (frantic) construction will be the Golden Gate Bridge and Empire State building of the early to mid 21st century.
And we'll all come out of it stronger than going in. Including the environment because we'll be polluting so much less.
I'll end quoting one of the better comments below the article that points out a fundemental error in the article: "The bottom line is that everyone, oil exporters and importers, is subject to the pain of shortages and is forced to choose between a barrel of oil and $60 or $100 or whatever it is at the time. Which do you want more, the oil or the money. That is the choice that everyone faces whether they are importing or exporting. As oil gets more expensive, more and more people will choose the money over the oil, and consumption will fall regardless of the country's export or import status."
"Not all. I switched to Firefox from Mozilla, which I switched to from Netscape. Never used IE as my primary browser since I got fed up with Win95 and switched to Linux in '96."
Ahhh. I had an 'almost all (if not all)', but I edited it to 'all', but I guess I should have left it... Myself I occasionally still use IE on other people's computers (but never for long, it's worth-while quickly to go to www.mozilla.org and get the latest real thing. Nobody ever complains that I put firefox on their desktop where the IE icon used to be... In fact, they magically stop complaining about popups and spyware)...
One free bonus tip for firefox + linux: get 'mplayerplug-in' and install both the plugin and extension, then you'll be able to see all video's on the web, including the quicktime ones and also the ones that specifically check for realplayer and wmp (you know, for those websites out there that assume you're running windos that would otherwise point your linux firefox to a microsoft webpage about wmp...).
You know what? A browser doesn't get any better by people using it. Popularity doesn't make something the best choice.
i ght-usat_x.htm
If the majority always made the right choices, it would be smart to be overweight: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2002-10-08-we
Most people using IE don't know Firefox or Opera. There are probably more IE users that never heard of Firefox than there are Firefox users... I'd go even farther that there are more IE users who don't know what is meant by the acronym IE than there are Firefox users... It's a perfect example of ignorance is bliss: Most IE users just eat what is put in front of them, follow the flock mentality. All of the Firefox and Opera users switched _from_ IE to Firefox by choice.
Also don't forget that nobody forces anybody to use Firefox or Opera, but many big company IT departments force many office workers to use IE...
Call Firefox 'irrelevant' because it has the number '16%' associated to it if you will, but for the millions of Firefox users, it's far from irrelevant.
Firefox is not perfect, I'd like the Firefox people to fix a couple of things here and there, but boy it's a lot better than the alternative.
Editing source code and recompiling would be more akin to changing the crystal than hex-editing a binary...
Security through obscurity is no security, it may slow things down a little but that is it. A good example is how 'openhal' for the atheros cards is continuously gaining functionality even though atheros (obviously) never contributes to that project.
"It is the easy part that counts."
After somebody tells you the offset and new value for the binary file, it's very, very easy with a hex editor. Nothing but obscurity is keeping you from knowing the offset, and security by obscurity is a well know snake-oil.
"Please note that he was also responsible for this paper [flownet.com] describing a Lisp-based system that successfully flew a NASA spacecraft [nasa.gov]. He knows exactly how difficult it is to make things work from an engineering standpoint."
From the nasa link: "when the synthetic intelligence succeeded in firing Deep Space 1's ion engine on but failed to turn it back off." -> "Scientists found that the bug was related to a timing error when two parts of the program were exchanging information".
First of all, that page never mentions that the 'success' was a result of using any particular programming language.
So they had buggy spaceflight software (bad synchronization) resulting in forgetting to turn an engine off and still managed to call it a success? Spin City, no Spin Capital! What universe is that from? Not turning engine off means spacecraft lost in this universe (running out of fuel while leaving intended track/orbit).
"As a whole, the market is barreling towards an open source model."
"I see it meekly traipsing along, while MSFT earned $1400 every second of every day of fiscal year 2006, and is on pace to earn $1500 every second of every day of fiscal year 2007."
He didn't say that open source was destroying Microsoft. Maybe without open source being as widely used as it is, MSFT would be making $2400 every second today (and the combined MSFT users would be losing $1000 per second more to MSFT than they are now).
"The ability to go in and change a const or DEFINE MAXPOWER from 0xFE to 0xFF may be considered easily modifiable by the FCC."
If that's the reason why they don't release source, that is a bogus argument, because it's equally easy to open a hex-editor and replace bytw xxxx from 0xFE to 0xFF. They're essentially using security by obscurity, and if that is sufficient to keep the FCC off their back, they could also use a '#define REGISTER_F654FFD3 0xFE' and be equally safe.
"Star Office is the commercial version: http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp [sun.com] , whereas is OpenOffice is the name for the free version."
I know, Star Office right now is a mere placeholder for the bigger companies that won't use something if it doesn't cost money. The only buyers of Star Office are those where Star Office is part of a service contract.
"Most non-techies I know still used MS-Office bought or pirated."
Most MS-Office (windows and mac) users I know had horrible problems with it that don't exist with Openoffice, with the only reason for staying with MS-Office is the 'status quo', or other people in any form (bosses/colleages requiring/using it, which is another form of status quo). It's never a reason of capabilities, the only other reason I've seen is compatability of the macro's in cases of horrible piles of connected 'office documents' with wads of half-broken macro's that together attempt to implement all sorts of business processes. In those cases, they stick with their now half-broken 'system' because it took so much time to get is to the state it is today and nobody dares touch it anyway because it's so broken.
"why should anyone complain that the United States government was lifting a finger to possibly help one of its interests?"
Is Microsoft a government agency today? Microsoft should not be any more one of the US government's interest than IBM's Linux division.
"There is Star Office, but it still needs work and most people have never heard of it."
Euh... 'Star Office'? Wow flashback to the nineties? Did you really miss that Sun bought it in 1999 and put it out for free as OpenOffice? It actually has has a lot of work (see www.openoffice.org), and a lot of people have heard of it and are using it.
"And while I'm extremely pleased with my recently-purchased E2700 Core 2 Duo box"
i croprocessors
_ microprocessors
Sorry to break it to you, but...
I guess Intel's fog screen is working.
There is no E2700 "Core 2 Duo". You have a Yonah, not a Conroe, the "Core Duo E2700: 2.33 GHz, FSB 667" Yonah is not the same core as the Core 2...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2
"What few people seem to realize is that the parentheses in Lisp code are actually a very natural representation of trees. This is no accident; Lisp was originally invented as a notation for parse trees, so that program transformations could be discussed and studied. Try that with C code, and you will see that it's a whole lot more difficult to map C to syntax trees than Lisp."
That may lead to think that speed synthesis would be the ideal application to show off the power of scheme... Yet festival does use scheme and it is horrible.
A crutch does not unbreak a bone.
"Who knows enough to condense it into a few sentences?"
Here is comes: you'd be better off using the whitespace programming language: http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
It would result in better readable and maintainable code.
... for the same reasons why we must learn history (to know not to make the same mistakes ourselves)...
scheme code unevitably turns into an unreadable pile of ((((((((((()((() junk
Actually, I could not give an accurate representation of scheme, because slashdot kept saying 'Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.'
And don't get me started in functional programming languages.
"(Score:-1, Funny)"
Do we have a new rating for bad humour?
Well, that would mean that the Vista TCO for Europe is a chunk of 50000 people's worth higher than what they are using now.
Flamebait? It's the truth mods, the web site takes 5 minutes to show an empty page. Web designers: Please use technologies that work, not ones that sound cool.
"of course it won't help. people will just grind for rep and then vandalize"
It's a form of 'payment'. Need to 'do good' before can 'do bad'. How wouldn't that help if vandals need to make (e.g.) 10 useful contributions for each vandalization instead of just vandalizing like it's possible now?
With the example above, for every 10 vandals, there only needs to be one more vandal still building up his reputation to undo the vandalism of all the others...
And that's without the people who don't vandalize.
What about the notion that much-contested pages/content is visible as such. It's not a secret that those pages are flame wars, it's very obvious.
It simply means that wikipedia is not absolutely objective. But as you say yourself, a printed encyclopedia is none the better, as it will simply choose a side and pretent it's the objective truth.
The absolute objective truth is not known. Mathematics is the only absolute truth we can ever know, all the rest (science, history, 'facts') is a documentation of observations, and observations are not the same from all viewpoints, can be incomplete, biased, etc.
In wikipedia, showing the amount of disagreement should be considered part of its documentation purpose. There are a lot of people who's experiences/opinions/'knowledge' differ a lot on certain subjects, so naturally, a documentation of the subject will be riddled by differences between people.
Of course, that can become a mess if, for example, uninformed opinions start to overcast more reputable sources of scientific findings and agreement. If wikipedia were to deal with this scientifically, it would be a combination of reputation and peer review. Forking is not the answer.
Whodathunk?
$ factor 14827
14827: 14827
Do I win a prize now?
"Flex is free (the compiler), ease of use is a subjective measure, and people are using Flex now too."
/., find your post, click reply, and type this: The tab with the flex demo is still loading. Cool demo: Trashcan here it comes.
And god knows why. I you want your webpage to be visible on the Internet, don't use it.
I RTFM, and decided to give flex a try by following the "Check here for my favorite Flex 2 demo app;". Well, I had enough time to go back to
Ok, now right when I'm typing this, it has stopped loading and shows me a blank page (well, blank, I think the color is called 'slate blue'). Wow great. I can do that in much less code with plain html.
Is that supposed to be the professional way to do it?