Maybe I'm missing something, but unless the 6-core system is clocked slower than the 4-core one, the 6-core system should outperform it easily in all tasks.
Oh, if only it were that simple. "From the gut" it would seem that you are correct. Most people think of processing power like logs in a lumber mill - double the number of saws cutting wood, and you double the amount of wood getting cut! But that's not the only factor, and increasingly, it's not even a primary factor.
There's a *tremendous* cost in cross-connect costs when going multi-core, and often, these cross-connect costs enough to make the whole "multi-core" thing irrelevant or even detrimental. Yes, the majority of the time, more cores IS faster, particularly when you are running multiple applications on a single system. But for dedicated servers, the formula is often not nearly so simple!
If you look at it functionally, the iTunes app store is little more than a repo, and Linux has repos to beat all. I'm so horribly spoiled by tools like yum that I'm personally very remiss to EVER leave what's available at a click...
Most of good salesmanship in business is in positioning - how you compare your products to others out there can leave a very strong impression as it lets potential users immediately grasp many of the capabilities (and limitations) of your product immediately without them actually having to learn what those capabilities are.
Now that Apple has everybody understanding what a repo is, we should just rename repos to "App Stores" (or whatever Apple hasn't trademarked) so that people immediately get just how easy and capable it is to use. More so, because Linux' "app stores" are open-ended - anybody can add whatever App Repos they want!
The only thing I'd (STRONGLY!) suggest is some way to filter out all the libraries and stuff that only developers care about so that end users can avoid getting confused by 7,000 libraries that they wouldn't understand anyway. My thoughts are that packages need to describe themselves as two-stage categories: EG: Libraries, ProgrammingTools, Applications and divide each of these categories further, EG: Libraries/Graphics, Applications/Office, Applications/Games, etc. with a default of "Applications" showing.
Lastly, building in a SIMPLE payment tool so that applications can be purchased (and licenses tracked) with yum/apt...
Put all this together, and suddenly Linux has an EXCELLENT commercial alternative to the Apple "App Store".
I don't think that "long term" is in the scale of lifetimes, here. In the case of SouthWest and baggage fees, it's had a noticeable effect in just 2-3 years. I'm a fairly frequent flyer, and I'm also a private pilot.
I recently had to pay another $150 to reschedule a flight from a non-loaded plane to another non-loaded plane. (Thanks, Jet Blue!) This is something I've done many times, free of fees, at SouthWest. Who do you think I'll be buying from next?
I think baggage fees tend to target the rare/occasional traveler. There are three major markets for aviation:
1) Commercial aviation for rare/occasional travelers. This is typically a "package driven" marketplace, in that the tickets are part of a bulk package put together by travel agents. The flyers consist of moms, kids, and grandparents. People in this market tend to view fees as annoyances, and part of a much larger overall package, including fancy hotels, tickets to Disneyland, breakfast at fine restaurants, etc., and the reason this works is that travel agents get commissions from the higher-priced airlines. In this market, travelers are just sheep to be fleeced.
2) Commercial aviation for frequent/business travelers. This is a very "price driven" marketplace, and the average trip time is often 24 hours or less: Fly out one day, back the next. Because of this, every dollar gets watched - hotels are "business class" - think Best Western - Nicer than Motel 6 but only enough to include a barely passable breakfast and a drink or two at a small bar in the evening. What makes this work is volume - the MAJORITY of Southwest customers fly at least 1 or 2 times a month.
3) Private aviation (usually called "General Aviation") which is a fairly diverse marketplace primarily consisting of services given to owners of non-commercial aircraft. This is an "underground" economy in that most people aren't really aware that it exists. Many people have no idea that there's a small, GA airport very close by.
I mostly fly in groups 2 and 3. If it's fairly close by, I'll take my private plane, and if it's more than maybe 500-800 miles out, I'll fly Southwest. Rarely, I'll fly another airline if special needs or circumstances dictate, and I'm generally shocked by the lousy service and high prices.
Strangely, a private plane is generally cheaper than commercial airlines when traveling with groups, and that's not including such conveniences such as departing whenever you please, and landing at ANY airport, not just the big regionals, and having NO stupid security checkpoints and/or standing in line for 45 minutes, yatta yatta.
In order to remain safely in flight, a plane has what's called a "performance envelope" - it's the range of conditions during which a plane can still safely fly. Go too slow, the plane falls out of the sky. (stalls) Go too fast, parts start falling off. Turn too sharply, you overstress the airframe, etc. etc.
When a twin engine plane loses 50% of its power, it suddenly behaves very differently. It climbs very slowly, making it easy to go too slow and stall. It pulls sharply to one side, forcing the pilot to compensate with very heavy rudder action. These and other, related factors make it very likely that the pilot will make a mistake that takes the plane out of its performance envelope and crash. Pilots of twins are much more likely to try to keep flying the plane rather than land it safely off-field.
Combine that with the fact that twice the engines mean that it's twice as likely to have an engine failure, and you end up with a confluence of factors that actually decrease safety by a significant volume.
Compare this to a single-engine plane: Engine's out = "Where's the best place to land?" Pretty simple decision, during which time the plane is gliding smoothly, it's quiet, and there is only one choice to make. The vast majority of the time, even over mountains and/or populated cities, there's a safe place to land! Freeways/roads, fields, even the roof of a large building can all make good emergency landing spots in a pinch. In General Aviaation, less than 10% of "forced landings" result in fatalities.
Things have changed, a bit. The once radical idea of domain names have become so infrastructural that the failure of the DNS system would cause a DOS attack on the global economy. Basically, there probably isn't a single system that is more critical to the global economy than DNS except perhaps the IMF.
So, 7 months to roll out... pretty aggressive, if you ask me! I can't imagine the pressure that people in these positions actually have to endure...
I put about 40 hours/year in a C-182 in my flight club.
Strangely, it's actually much cheaper for me to "have" a private plane in the flight club than it is to pay for my 2005 Toyota Matrix, and it's just a little economy car!
It appears to be operating well within expectations, looking at the linked website from the Japanese space administration, it's looking to be well within expectations.
But even so, we're talking about a very, very small acceleration effect - if you were on board, you basically wouldn't notice it at all. It's what, 2/10,000 of a pound of thrust, with a 700 pound payload? Since it takes 1 pound of thrust acting on 1 pound of material to equal 1 G, the amount of accelleration on this is something like 2/(10,000 * 700) or 1/3,500,000 of 1 G.
Unless I missed something basic, this satellite is going to be accelerating for a *long* time...
Kind of hard to believe considering how many terrible pilots I've seen out there.
And yet, even with all those despicable actions taken by pilots, the general safety record of Single-engine piston based General Aviation is roughly the same as the safety record of automobiles, despite flight being an inherently much riskier activity. While any failure rate could be improved, most people here are comfortable with the relative risks involved with driving from point A to point B, and the relative risk of getting from point A to point B is about the same in a private plane as a car by actual DOT statistics.
Wanna improve your odds when flying private?
1) Don't run out of gas. Seriously, almost 1/3 of fatalities involve (gulp!) running out of the stuff. I DO my checklist EVERY time I fly, and I don't take off without knowing exactly how much fuel is on board, EVER.
2) Don't fly into storms. About 1/5 of fatalities involve icing and thunderstorms. Can you say preflight briefing?!?! It's a TOLL FREE CALL!!! (that I generally make, often while on the way to the airport)
For years, I've used the serial number on the bottom of the router written backwards as the admin password. If you have physical access to the box, you have access a la reset button, and there's nothing obvious about the router that says "Here's my password", and the password is thereafter never forgotten.
Only by mistake or when there's no ready option available. We recycle cans, plastic, glass, etc.
Do you use air conditioning?
(Dang!) Does it help that I live in an area that gets the vast majority of its power by hydroelectric generation? (shrug) I guess you could say that I'm a California Hippie, 'cept that I also fly private planes!
Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity, or selling the power to a neighboring network.
Oh, but only if it were! Power companies DO produce a bit of extra power that they purposefully waste so that they can have some "instant demand" power available if demand should suddenly increase. It's not much, perhaps less than 1%, but it's still there because it takes an hour or more from the moment of increasing the fuel going into a major power plant to the time that the power output increases. These are very big power plants we are talking about!.
Sure, hydroelectric storage is used, but that has its own problems: 1) You have to have some REALLY BIG power lines between your power plant and the hydroelectric storage facility; 2) you have to have a dam nearby with lots of "down low" water available to pump uphill, 3) you need a place uphill to store all that water; 4) Lastly, you need some way to get that power back later.
There are precious few locations that have *all* of these properties!
Problems of this scale can be enormously difficult to solve, just because the size of the problem. It's easy to put together a proof of concept in your back yard out of old car parts. It's quite another thing altogether to use that concept at the scale of thousands of gigawatt-hours.
At the beginning, where Isaac describes the slowly decaying Galactic civilization; that's what the United States reads like more and more.
The signs are everywhere: Leadership that's seriously out of touch with the people; infrastructure that's still good but getting worse; dwindling education, increasing racial tension and population segregation; etc.
We remember the good old days, and the good old days WERE brighter. Technology overall still advances, but what's not advancing is our position in it. Thanks to a distinctly anti-intellectual culture and an increasing distrust of "da gubbmint" combined with a ridiculous war, our economy is in a shambles, our regulations are a mess, and our population often seems more interested in "being heard" than listening long enough to identify the problems.
Funny enough, the last time I was in Japan I asked my host why she kept turning her headlights off at red lights - it turns out it wasn't to be polite. It was because she wanted to make the lamps in her headlights last longer.
But from what I've heard, there's this really, REALLY odd kicker - Japanese cars are almost *never* run anywhere near as long as they are in the United States. They just don't have clunkers on the road like we do here - rust buckets with dents and so on. If you have a car, it's because you can afford one, and that means something, apparently. There's an underground market in used japanese engines from cars in Japan because they scrap their cars right about the point where the American counterparts are just getting "broke in".
Wouldn't it be a better idea for people to walk those short distances, given how fat people are these days?
The biggest problem with these "short" distances is that they aren't short. They are typically anywhere from 1 to 5 miles, in most towns, in most places, in the United States. Suburban sprawl accounts for most of that - all the distance people travel around lawns that most people hate to mow, anyway, and the roads to service the houses comprise some 50% of the land area in most cities in the United States.
5 miles is a pretty big jump when you are used to driving. The obvious answer, Bicycles, are a pain in the rear. They are big and bulky. You can't intermingle your bike and your car throughout the day without lots of hassle, and then only if you have a bike rack. And if anything breaks you are stuck, and bikes are more prone to small "problems".
Enter the folding bike. It's smaller than a typical bike - mine has 16" wheels -but don't let that scare you. I get better than 90% of the performance of a "normal" bike in terms of efficiency and speed, and it sits easily next/under me on the elevator without crowding. It has a luggage rack on the back so I can easily carry anything up to the size of a midsized suitcase (such as my laptop case) without worry. If I need to go in a car, or on a bus, boat, or plane, it folds up into a small 24"x14"x16" package that weighs about 20 pounds. It's perfectly legal to carry on to Southwest Airlines, for example. Combine that with small toolkit that attaches under the back seat, and a micro-sized bike pump, and I basically don't get stuck *anywhere*.
And while at first it might seem a bit "odd", I've learned to accept that it sticks out a bit. I get compliments EVERYWHERE I ride my bike, and I love it enough that it's my primary means of transportation now, even though I do have the 2 cars parked in front of my suburban house with the mostly ignored lawn.
So, I joined a startup about 2002, and we decided to grow organically. Growth has been solid and almost swift: 25%-70% per year. When we started, cash was crazy tight, since I was working after work hours and on weekends and funding everything myself. So, I got the cheapest thing I could find that would qualify as "our server" (a 1U PIV with generic parts) and got everything else for free with the Linux ISO. LAPP (Postgres/PHP) and we are good to go, with no worries about growth or licenses down the road.
So now, here we are, 8 years later. The company is now working towards its 2nd million in value, and the growth ratio is starting to get a bit crazy - after rapid growth in the beginning and a few years of weak growth, our curve is picking up again sharply. And now, the licensing savings are really starting to pay off.
I can take a disk image of any of our production servers, reload the database(s) and tweak a few settings (like IP address and/or host name) to roll out another system. Hassle? No. I can build an image just by re-enabling Raid 1 on an otherwise active partition and have my new server up, pre-configured. Total time per system might be 1 or 2 hours, without incurring any downtime, licensing costs, or (possibly most importantly) any licensing headaches.
And all this, for software that confidently works reliably, 24x7/365 with less than 0.05% downtime per server per year with reasonable quality hardware. Only an idiot would think this is anything less than a very, very good idea.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." - Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin
The United States would do well to understand what this means. We can benefit immensely by being the "central hub" of the Internet but we are pissing this historical advantage away at a frightening pace by not living up to our ideals with respect to "freedom of speech". The Patriot Act did wonders to ensure that we couldn't host data for other countries; and now this retarded "kill switch" idea will do the same for our ability to broker connections.
There really should be an actual litmus test so that people in charge of sectors of our economy have some clue how that sector works. Unfortunately for us, the world doesn't work that way.
Recently,Dell seems to have done this, at least internally. My 4 year old Inspiron uses the same plug as my Wifes 1 year old Inspiron uses the same plug as my daughter's 4 month old Vostro. The only real change between them is the wattage - I briefly had a Dell Studio 15 that had a 90 Watt PS instead of the 65 watters that the other laptops use, and other than a warning about not being able to run at "full speed" because of insufficient power, it worked fine.
I returned the Studio 15 because of terrible lockups under Windows 7 and Fedora/64, and am now waiting for my Dell Precision, so we'll see if they are the same... but it's obvious that Dell is standardizing where possible.
Do realize, however, that standardizing power has a split advantage - on one side, a standard power plug means that yours will work everywhere. On the other side, it also means that nifty innovations like "plug-less" power becomes more difficult to accept. Personally, I'd like to see a power plug much like Apple's that's magnetic and that simply pulls off when yanked too hard from any direction so that we don't have power plugs that wear rapidly in highly mobile lifestyles.
I worship the back button. It's my bestest friend, and I happen to know the keyboard shortcut (Alt-Left-Arrow) just so I don't have to reach for the mouse to use it.
But the truth is, sometimes you *have* to break the back button. Sometimes, you have to update portions of a page in order to keep it "fresh". Sadly, doing so breaks the back button. You can kinda get around some of these things, but increasingly, websites aren't websites anymore - they are weblications, and do real work, right now, in your browser. I use them for everything from calculating grades to processing transcripts to distributed notifications.
So while the back button still more or less "works", it won't take you back to the exact page you left earlier. And that's kinda sad, but it's a reflection of the fact that the document model of the original web is disappearing like nail polish in a dish out on the patio on a hot, hot day.
Microsoft has a really tough time coming up with anything with a future outside of Windows Desktops. Even that was suspect for a while when Vista sucked so horribly badly for so godawfully long.
They've had OVER A DECADE to get Windows Mobile "right". I have a Winmo 6.0 phone, and while it's quite capable, it's also clear that a designer never got anywhere NEAR it. Buttons move randomly. It's slow. Some buttons (EG: green "call" button) work the same everywhere except where they do something else - a result that's immensely maddening. I could be looking at a number that I KNOW is a cell phone, but I have no way to simply send a text message to it without exiting everything and go back in through contacts... as one of too many examples to name.
Future?
Remember Plays4Sure? It was Microsoft's answer to the iTunes store, and it almost worked. Numerous music manufacturers were beginning to rally behind it, until Microsoft came out with their Zune, which didn't use PlaysForSure at all. Instead, it had its own marketplace!
How much louder of a vote of "no confidence" could Microsoft give their own product than to refuse to use it in their own development? To this day, you can't buy music with Microsoft's music store and have it work on their own player.
Slashdot Mirror
PS: I know, he reduced the cores from 8 to 1. But still, my point remains?
Maybe I'm missing something, but unless the 6-core system is clocked slower than the 4-core one, the 6-core system should outperform it easily in all tasks.
Oh, if only it were that simple. "From the gut" it would seem that you are correct. Most people think of processing power like logs in a lumber mill - double the number of saws cutting wood, and you double the amount of wood getting cut! But that's not the only factor, and increasingly, it's not even a primary factor.
For example, here's an interesting write-up about a guy who experienced a six-fold performance increase by reducing the number of active CPU cores on his server from 4 to just 1.
There's a *tremendous* cost in cross-connect costs when going multi-core, and often, these cross-connect costs enough to make the whole "multi-core" thing irrelevant or even detrimental. Yes, the majority of the time, more cores IS faster, particularly when you are running multiple applications on a single system. But for dedicated servers, the formula is often not nearly so simple!
If you look at it functionally, the iTunes app store is little more than a repo, and Linux has repos to beat all. I'm so horribly spoiled by tools like yum that I'm personally very remiss to EVER leave what's available at a click...
Most of good salesmanship in business is in positioning - how you compare your products to others out there can leave a very strong impression as it lets potential users immediately grasp many of the capabilities (and limitations) of your product immediately without them actually having to learn what those capabilities are.
Now that Apple has everybody understanding what a repo is, we should just rename repos to "App Stores" (or whatever Apple hasn't trademarked) so that people immediately get just how easy and capable it is to use. More so, because Linux' "app stores" are open-ended - anybody can add whatever App Repos they want!
The only thing I'd (STRONGLY!) suggest is some way to filter out all the libraries and stuff that only developers care about so that end users can avoid getting confused by 7,000 libraries that they wouldn't understand anyway. My thoughts are that packages need to describe themselves as two-stage categories: EG: Libraries, ProgrammingTools, Applications and divide each of these categories further, EG: Libraries/Graphics, Applications/Office, Applications/Games, etc. with a default of "Applications" showing.
Lastly, building in a SIMPLE payment tool so that applications can be purchased (and licenses tracked) with yum/apt...
Put all this together, and suddenly Linux has an EXCELLENT commercial alternative to the Apple "App Store".
I don't think that "long term" is in the scale of lifetimes, here. In the case of SouthWest and baggage fees, it's had a noticeable effect in just 2-3 years. I'm a fairly frequent flyer, and I'm also a private pilot.
I recently had to pay another $150 to reschedule a flight from a non-loaded plane to another non-loaded plane. (Thanks, Jet Blue!) This is something I've done many times, free of fees, at SouthWest. Who do you think I'll be buying from next?
I think baggage fees tend to target the rare/occasional traveler. There are three major markets for aviation:
1) Commercial aviation for rare/occasional travelers. This is typically a "package driven" marketplace, in that the tickets are part of a bulk package put together by travel agents. The flyers consist of moms, kids, and grandparents. People in this market tend to view fees as annoyances, and part of a much larger overall package, including fancy hotels, tickets to Disneyland, breakfast at fine restaurants, etc., and the reason this works is that travel agents get commissions from the higher-priced airlines. In this market, travelers are just sheep to be fleeced.
2) Commercial aviation for frequent/business travelers. This is a very "price driven" marketplace, and the average trip time is often 24 hours or less: Fly out one day, back the next. Because of this, every dollar gets watched - hotels are "business class" - think Best Western - Nicer than Motel 6 but only enough to include a barely passable breakfast and a drink or two at a small bar in the evening. What makes this work is volume - the MAJORITY of Southwest customers fly at least 1 or 2 times a month.
3) Private aviation (usually called "General Aviation") which is a fairly diverse marketplace primarily consisting of services given to owners of non-commercial aircraft. This is an "underground" economy in that most people aren't really aware that it exists. Many people have no idea that there's a small, GA airport very close by.
I mostly fly in groups 2 and 3. If it's fairly close by, I'll take my private plane, and if it's more than maybe 500-800 miles out, I'll fly Southwest. Rarely, I'll fly another airline if special needs or circumstances dictate, and I'm generally shocked by the lousy service and high prices.
Strangely, a private plane is generally cheaper than commercial airlines when traveling with groups, and that's not including such conveniences such as departing whenever you please, and landing at ANY airport, not just the big regionals, and having NO stupid security checkpoints and/or standing in line for 45 minutes, yatta yatta.
In order to remain safely in flight, a plane has what's called a "performance envelope" - it's the range of conditions during which a plane can still safely fly. Go too slow, the plane falls out of the sky. (stalls) Go too fast, parts start falling off. Turn too sharply, you overstress the airframe, etc. etc.
When a twin engine plane loses 50% of its power, it suddenly behaves very differently. It climbs very slowly, making it easy to go too slow and stall. It pulls sharply to one side, forcing the pilot to compensate with very heavy rudder action. These and other, related factors make it very likely that the pilot will make a mistake that takes the plane out of its performance envelope and crash. Pilots of twins are much more likely to try to keep flying the plane rather than land it safely off-field.
Combine that with the fact that twice the engines mean that it's twice as likely to have an engine failure, and you end up with a confluence of factors that actually decrease safety by a significant volume.
Compare this to a single-engine plane: Engine's out = "Where's the best place to land?" Pretty simple decision, during which time the plane is gliding smoothly, it's quiet, and there is only one choice to make. The vast majority of the time, even over mountains and/or populated cities, there's a safe place to land! Freeways/roads, fields, even the roof of a large building can all make good emergency landing spots in a pinch. In General Aviaation, less than 10% of "forced landings" result in fatalities.
Things have changed, a bit. The once radical idea of domain names have become so infrastructural that the failure of the DNS system would cause a DOS attack on the global economy. Basically, there probably isn't a single system that is more critical to the global economy than DNS except perhaps the IMF.
So, 7 months to roll out... pretty aggressive, if you ask me! I can't imagine the pressure that people in these positions actually have to endure...
What is this gopher thing you write about?
Is it newer than telnet?
Just curious: what do you fly?
I put about 40 hours/year in a C-182 in my flight club.
Strangely, it's actually much cheaper for me to "have" a private plane in the flight club than it is to pay for my 2005 Toyota Matrix, and it's just a little economy car!
It appears to be operating well within expectations, looking at the linked website from the Japanese space administration, it's looking to be well within expectations.
But even so, we're talking about a very, very small acceleration effect - if you were on board, you basically wouldn't notice it at all. It's what, 2/10,000 of a pound of thrust, with a 700 pound payload? Since it takes 1 pound of thrust acting on 1 pound of material to equal 1 G, the amount of accelleration on this is something like 2/(10,000 * 700) or 1/3,500,000 of 1 G.
Unless I missed something basic, this satellite is going to be accelerating for a *long* time...
Kind of hard to believe considering how many terrible pilots I've seen out there.
And yet, even with all those despicable actions taken by pilots, the general safety record of Single-engine piston based General Aviation is roughly the same as the safety record of automobiles, despite flight being an inherently much riskier activity. While any failure rate could be improved, most people here are comfortable with the relative risks involved with driving from point A to point B, and the relative risk of getting from point A to point B is about the same in a private plane as a car by actual DOT statistics.
Wanna improve your odds when flying private?
1) Don't run out of gas. Seriously, almost 1/3 of fatalities involve (gulp!) running out of the stuff. I DO my checklist EVERY time I fly, and I don't take off without knowing exactly how much fuel is on board, EVER.
2) Don't fly into storms. About 1/5 of fatalities involve icing and thunderstorms. Can you say preflight briefing?!?! It's a TOLL FREE CALL!!! (that I generally make, often while on the way to the airport)
For years, I've used the serial number on the bottom of the router written backwards as the admin password. If you have physical access to the box, you have access a la reset button, and there's nothing obvious about the router that says "Here's my password", and the password is thereafter never forgotten.
Do you drive a car to work?
Mostly, no. I ride my bike.
Do you buy reusable shopping bags?
Not just buy - use!
Do you throw recyclable materials in the trash?
Only by mistake or when there's no ready option available. We recycle cans, plastic, glass, etc.
Do you use air conditioning?
(Dang!) Does it help that I live in an area that gets the vast majority of its power by hydroelectric generation? (shrug) I guess you could say that I'm a California Hippie, 'cept that I also fly private planes!
Dallas, Cleveland, Atlanta, Tampa, and Indianapolis are the top 5, in that order.
Citation needed
Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity, or selling the power to a neighboring network.
Oh, but only if it were! Power companies DO produce a bit of extra power that they purposefully waste so that they can have some "instant demand" power available if demand should suddenly increase. It's not much, perhaps less than 1%, but it's still there because it takes an hour or more from the moment of increasing the fuel going into a major power plant to the time that the power output increases. These are very big power plants we are talking about!.
Sure, hydroelectric storage is used, but that has its own problems: 1) You have to have some REALLY BIG power lines between your power plant and the hydroelectric storage facility; 2) you have to have a dam nearby with lots of "down low" water available to pump uphill, 3) you need a place uphill to store all that water; 4) Lastly, you need some way to get that power back later.
There are precious few locations that have *all* of these properties!
Problems of this scale can be enormously difficult to solve, just because the size of the problem. It's easy to put together a proof of concept in your back yard out of old car parts. It's quite another thing altogether to use that concept at the scale of thousands of gigawatt-hours.
At the beginning, where Isaac describes the slowly decaying Galactic civilization; that's what the United States reads like more and more.
The signs are everywhere: Leadership that's seriously out of touch with the people; infrastructure that's still good but getting worse; dwindling education, increasing racial tension and population segregation; etc.
We remember the good old days, and the good old days WERE brighter. Technology overall still advances, but what's not advancing is our position in it. Thanks to a distinctly anti-intellectual culture and an increasing distrust of "da gubbmint" combined with a ridiculous war, our economy is in a shambles, our regulations are a mess, and our population often seems more interested in "being heard" than listening long enough to identify the problems.
I find it sad to see our nation on the decline.
Funny enough, the last time I was in Japan I asked my host why she kept turning her headlights off at red lights - it turns out it wasn't to be polite. It was because she wanted to make the lamps in her headlights last longer.
But from what I've heard, there's this really, REALLY odd kicker - Japanese cars are almost *never* run anywhere near as long as they are in the United States. They just don't have clunkers on the road like we do here - rust buckets with dents and so on. If you have a car, it's because you can afford one, and that means something, apparently. There's an underground market in used japanese engines from cars in Japan because they scrap their cars right about the point where the American counterparts are just getting "broke in".
Wouldn't it be a better idea for people to walk those short distances, given how fat people are these days?
The biggest problem with these "short" distances is that they aren't short. They are typically anywhere from 1 to 5 miles, in most towns, in most places, in the United States. Suburban sprawl accounts for most of that - all the distance people travel around lawns that most people hate to mow, anyway, and the roads to service the houses comprise some 50% of the land area in most cities in the United States.
5 miles is a pretty big jump when you are used to driving. The obvious answer, Bicycles, are a pain in the rear. They are big and bulky. You can't intermingle your bike and your car throughout the day without lots of hassle, and then only if you have a bike rack. And if anything breaks you are stuck, and bikes are more prone to small "problems".
Enter the folding bike. It's smaller than a typical bike - mine has 16" wheels -but don't let that scare you. I get better than 90% of the performance of a "normal" bike in terms of efficiency and speed, and it sits easily next/under me on the elevator without crowding. It has a luggage rack on the back so I can easily carry anything up to the size of a midsized suitcase (such as my laptop case) without worry. If I need to go in a car, or on a bus, boat, or plane, it folds up into a small 24"x14"x16" package that weighs about 20 pounds. It's perfectly legal to carry on to Southwest Airlines, for example. Combine that with small toolkit that attaches under the back seat, and a micro-sized bike pump, and I basically don't get stuck *anywhere*.
And while at first it might seem a bit "odd", I've learned to accept that it sticks out a bit. I get compliments EVERYWHERE I ride my bike, and I love it enough that it's my primary means of transportation now, even though I do have the 2 cars parked in front of my suburban house with the mostly ignored lawn.
Think outside the box.
So, I joined a startup about 2002, and we decided to grow organically. Growth has been solid and almost swift: 25%-70% per year. When we started, cash was crazy tight, since I was working after work hours and on weekends and funding everything myself. So, I got the cheapest thing I could find that would qualify as "our server" (a 1U PIV with generic parts) and got everything else for free with the Linux ISO. LAPP (Postgres/PHP) and we are good to go, with no worries about growth or licenses down the road.
So now, here we are, 8 years later. The company is now working towards its 2nd million in value, and the growth ratio is starting to get a bit crazy - after rapid growth in the beginning and a few years of weak growth, our curve is picking up again sharply. And now, the licensing savings are really starting to pay off.
I can take a disk image of any of our production servers, reload the database(s) and tweak a few settings (like IP address and/or host name) to roll out another system. Hassle? No. I can build an image just by re-enabling Raid 1 on an otherwise active partition and have my new server up, pre-configured. Total time per system might be 1 or 2 hours, without incurring any downtime, licensing costs, or (possibly most importantly) any licensing headaches.
And all this, for software that confidently works reliably, 24x7/365 with less than 0.05% downtime per server per year with reasonable quality hardware. Only an idiot would think this is anything less than a very, very good idea.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
- Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin
The United States would do well to understand what this means. We can benefit immensely by being the "central hub" of the Internet but we are pissing this historical advantage away at a frightening pace by not living up to our ideals with respect to "freedom of speech". The Patriot Act did wonders to ensure that we couldn't host data for other countries; and now this retarded "kill switch" idea will do the same for our ability to broker connections.
There really should be an actual litmus test so that people in charge of sectors of our economy have some clue how that sector works. Unfortunately for us, the world doesn't work that way.
Recently,Dell seems to have done this, at least internally. My 4 year old Inspiron uses the same plug as my Wifes 1 year old Inspiron uses the same plug as my daughter's 4 month old Vostro. The only real change between them is the wattage - I briefly had a Dell Studio 15 that had a 90 Watt PS instead of the 65 watters that the other laptops use, and other than a warning about not being able to run at "full speed" because of insufficient power, it worked fine.
I returned the Studio 15 because of terrible lockups under Windows 7 and Fedora/64, and am now waiting for my Dell Precision, so we'll see if they are the same... but it's obvious that Dell is standardizing where possible.
Do realize, however, that standardizing power has a split advantage - on one side, a standard power plug means that yours will work everywhere. On the other side, it also means that nifty innovations like "plug-less" power becomes more difficult to accept. Personally, I'd like to see a power plug much like Apple's that's magnetic and that simply pulls off when yanked too hard from any direction so that we don't have power plugs that wear rapidly in highly mobile lifestyles.
I worship the back button. It's my bestest friend, and I happen to know the keyboard shortcut (Alt-Left-Arrow) just so I don't have to reach for the mouse to use it.
But the truth is, sometimes you *have* to break the back button. Sometimes, you have to update portions of a page in order to keep it "fresh". Sadly, doing so breaks the back button. You can kinda get around some of these things, but increasingly, websites aren't websites anymore - they are weblications, and do real work, right now, in your browser. I use them for everything from calculating grades to processing transcripts to distributed notifications.
So while the back button still more or less "works", it won't take you back to the exact page you left earlier. And that's kinda sad, but it's a reflection of the fact that the document model of the original web is disappearing like nail polish in a dish out on the patio on a hot, hot day.
I could not agree more. I was ready to post something about "Huge Brass Ones" only to find that it's the first post!
Fast, Easy, Secure. Pick any two.
Sorry, pal - it's those pesky laws of the universe or something gettin' in the way...
Sadly, I was watching kin ads last night on Hulu. They may have killed Kin, but it's not dead yet!
PS: 48 days is more than a month.
Microsoft has a really tough time coming up with anything with a future outside of Windows Desktops. Even that was suspect for a while when Vista sucked so horribly badly for so godawfully long.
They've had OVER A DECADE to get Windows Mobile "right". I have a Winmo 6.0 phone, and while it's quite capable, it's also clear that a designer never got anywhere NEAR it. Buttons move randomly. It's slow. Some buttons (EG: green "call" button) work the same everywhere except where they do something else - a result that's immensely maddening. I could be looking at a number that I KNOW is a cell phone, but I have no way to simply send a text message to it without exiting everything and go back in through contacts... as one of too many examples to name.
Future?
Remember Plays4Sure? It was Microsoft's answer to the iTunes store, and it almost worked. Numerous music manufacturers were beginning to rally behind it, until Microsoft came out with their Zune, which didn't use PlaysForSure at all. Instead, it had its own marketplace!
How much louder of a vote of "no confidence" could Microsoft give their own product than to refuse to use it in their own development? To this day, you can't buy music with Microsoft's music store and have it work on their own player.
You can't make up this kind of ineptitude.