The problem with simulating reality is that reality is so incredibly BROADBAND. Every piece interacting with every other piece on every level from entangled subatomic particles to heat convection and induction to light reflections and.... wow! It's just an incredible experience, this reality thing!
Reality, by definition, is "dirty". We have dust, we have imperfections in every surface, no matter how carefully machined. Houses are never truly square, roads are never perfectly level, and points in a corner are always rounded. Always.
Computers, by definition, are "clean". Squares are always truly square, roads are as perfectly level as they were designed to be, and corners are always razor sharp, no matter how much you "zoom in".
The problem with modern graphics systems is they are computed to extreme levels of precision. If they incorporated a sort of fundamental randomness, if they were intrinsically uncertain, they just might be able to really approximate reality, which is messy, ugly, and imperfect.
Personally, I'd think that it really would take massive bandwidth, orders of magnitude beyond what we can produce today, and some pseudo-custom designed chips to get truly realistic graphics. Personally, I'm thinking about FPGAs which produce circuits at relatively low bandwidth but that are highly tuned to the task at hand. If there were a spec for FPGAs in video cards to handle specific physics handling tasks or ray-tracing, and there were a widely recognized spec for including this capability in a video card or somesuch, the problem of taking care of specialized processing problems could disappear tomorrow.
The other issue is bandwidth - and there's nothing to do about this except provide more of it. (Hypertransport, anyone? I have a 4-core Athlon Database server that outperforms an 8-core Xeon at 1.5x the "clock speed" simply by having more real, useful throughput....
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
A lot of older people, especially the elderly, have no need or desire for the internet.
My father-in-law is sixty-something. He's a bit crufty around the edges, and is proud of the cruft. He's very, very smart. Back in his day, he was into cars - he can diagnose many car ailments in cars as they drive by!
But when it came to the Internet, he was stubborn about "it's just not for me". My Mother-in-law has had a (really old, slow) computer with DSL for years, and for Christmas this year, I gave them a refurbished Athlon XP computer from parts I had laying around.
He remained thoroughly uninterested until he asked me one day: "Why would I give a damned about the Internet?" So I asked him if there was anything at all he was interested in RIGHT NOW. He said: "I love those old-time radio shows they used to air back in the 50s, and 60s." So, about 5 minutes later, I had several hours of old-time radio shows downloaded to an MP3 player and he was listening.
Suddenly, the Internet isn't something obscure, "out there" - it's something HE can benefit from, right now.
And that's makes the Internet special. It's not what somebody ELSE thought it should be, it's what EVERYBODY else thought that you might want it to be, as voted up or down based on your own tastes. And it's different for each person.
*My* Internet includes software engineering, tech-oriented news/blogs, LOLcats, and documentary/sci-fi movies delivered by NetFlix. I don't do recipes, I couldn't possibly care less about old-time country radio shows, and I don't watch "the stars". The stuff I like appears almost magically, and the stuff I don't like barely skiffs my conscious before disappearing.
The Internet represents many things, but most importantly, it's the purest ever reflection of humanity looking at ourselves.
First, the idea that watching TV doesn't constitute "real wealth" is false. The very manufacturing plants you admit are valuable exist solely to provide goods and services that consumers demand. No, TVs aren't necessities, but that doesn't mean they aren't of economic value. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and lots of people quite clearly get utility from their television sets. So televisions are just as much a form of wealth as any other good.
TV's don't generate wealth for their owners. You won't get rich, no matter how much TV you watch. While they may create something you want (such as cheap access to episodes of House) they aren't themselves a source of increased wealth. Therefore, they aren't "real wealth" and should not be viewed as "assets" but rather as "possessions".
Second, power plants are in almost all cases privately funded, at least in the U.S. The money you pay each month to your local electricity provider is going to a privately owned firm, albeit one that likely enjoys rate-of-return protection granted by government.
When a "private company" is given a regulated monopoly by a government, it's no longer private. Especially when tax dollars have been spent in its construction, which is almost always the case. See "government regulated monopoly" since this concept is apparently foreign to you.
Power is not running out, either.
Guess you never heard of rolling blackouts, then? Explain that to my servers that were down for some 2 days as a result?/Sarcasm
Will the cost of energy today persist as fossil fuels become more difficult to obtain? Probably not, but lots of neat forms of energy become viable once prices rise. By the time oil, uranium, coal, and natural gas resources all begin to dwindle, new technologies will have made new forms of elecricity generation economically feasible.
Cool. So f-ck the commons, as it disappears, we'll get more desperate. Sounds like a good long term stradegy! (er, strategy? tragedy?)
You claim that people tend to underestimate long-term costs and overestimate short-term gains. The LED example, however, actually shows that people are making the right decisions by sticking with plasma. The amount of electricity required to power a TV is still quite inexpensive--around 3 to 5 cents per hours--and so it'd take years to make up for a $300 price difference.
That is, until it ain't cheap. Then f-ck you! Thanks for helping out, eh, raping the commons?
And since pretty much any TV currently sold is going far past its obsolescence, it's fairly unimportant how long a TV will last. 8 years of 12 years are both very long timeframes among the modern consumer.
So... consumers are short sighted? Thanks for making my point!
"Let the market decide" is almost religious dogma in the United States. And it's not a completely unfounded idea. People tend to buy things that provide a better quality of life at a lower cost, and companies tend to provide things that are more profitable, so cheaper and better quality wins over more expensive and crappier.
But one thing that many of the "free market everywhere" people miss completely is the idea of the tragedy of the commons. I don't need to try to explain it as it's already explained well elsewhere. But it's one concept that the "free market" Libertarian types completely ignore, at their own peril.
In this case, people are notoriously bad at figuring long term expenses that are sustained and slightly elevated. People will tend to pay $10,000 over the life of a car for a "cheaper" model that costs $4,000 less. They'll tend to buy the plasma TV that costs $300 less than the $2000 LED TV that lasts twice as long and uses 30% less electricity.
And this affects the commons because power is increasingly a rare resource being squandered to provide a 5' wide screen typically viewed 15 feet back that provides the same viewing aspect ratio as a 19" TV at 4 feet at 11x the power. Power that isn't then available for running manufacturing plants, hospitals, and other things that generate real wealth, and require a tax-funded power plant to compensate for.
On the other hand, regulations take a long time to change, and marketplaces can change quickly. A bad law, once past, might take a decade to be redacted or canceled by jurisprudence, but the technology regulated by the bad law may render the law moot in 2 years due to other market forces.
I tend to feel towards deregulation, since I'm American. But I can see that Plasma tech just might be a bad idea!
I run a corporate mail server, and it's my job to combat spam. Our email addresses are simple: firstname@domain.com, and they are widely circulated. I see probably 5 or so spam per day, certainly not enough to be problematic, and my first name is very, very common.
On our mail servers, we subscribe to a couple of RBLs and use greylisting. That combination drops about 98% of the spam with basically zero false positives and almost no system administration at all. About a year ago, there was a configuration burp after a system update that caused RBLs and Greylisting to be disabled.
We were overwhelmed by the spam that we got! From 5 or so to hundreds of crap messages per day - shocking how effective these simple technologies are!
Granted, our small-ish company isn't specifically targeted by spammers like a nice, juicy "hotmail.com" domain, but it is a good indication that spam techniques are largely and effectively under control with only a modestly capable admin at the helm.
That's not what I want. I don't want to have to buy the fastest, most expensive RAM available just to use as a RAM disk. I'd prefer cheaper RAM, maybe two or three generations old, that I can get in massive quantities.
Except that you can't get two or three gen old RAM in massive quantities. At least, not for as cheap as the new stuff. See for yourself: 1 GB of PC 133 RAM is more expensive than 1 GB of DDR or DDR2 RAM. There's a very short window of "cheaper" just behind the bleeding edge that's cheaper than the very latest (DDR3) but new motherboards support this type of RAM too, negating the "two or three gen old" situation that you state.
Most people think that the older the technology, the cheaper it gets. But this is only true for a very small time window, at which point the older technology gets phased out (not profitable, anymore) at which point it becomes a "niche" marketplace with very low volume and very high prices.
Example: A PC-133 RAM stick needed to keep a $12,000 vertical-market weaving loom operational, where the cost of the additional RAM pales compared to the cost of the entire integrated system. If you need that extra 512k of RAM in your $12,000 loom, paying $100 for it isn't such a bad deal.
But there aren't many people stuck with $12,000 looms, so the price of the older technology skyrockets until it's simply not available anymore. (Ever try buying a *NEW* Cx 6x86 processor in the last year or so?)
This brings up an interesting idea. What if the ramdisk function was moved into the motherboard chipset?
OMFG! That's an AMAZING idea! This could dramatically change computing as we know it! The implications of this are, eh, well....
.... quite well understood. Somebody thought of this many years ago. Many, many, many years ago. It's called a (ahem) "ram disk" and uses system memory as if it were a drive with a software driver. Here's a howto for Linux - I did something similar with so-called "high memory" on a 80286 with DOS 3.x and ramdrive.sys - that 384k ram disk was small, but//FAST//!!!
Yes, it's true - the first worm was written in *nix, during an age where software updates were very lazily applied and "security" meant issuing passwords.
Since then, the fundamental simpleness of the *nix design has resulted in dramatic improvements in real security without any basic re-architec ing. Compare/contrast with a prominent North American software vendor based in Redmond, WA who has some 10,000 developers working on their flagship software package used by a high percentage of the world's computer users, who have developed an API so complex and so labyrinthine that providing any real security is about as likely as making ice water dance the Mac arena by playing Lawrence Welk re-runs.
In security, simpler is pretty much always better, and the fundamentally simple POSIX environment is fundamentally as simple as it can be, as a matter of ideology. The fewer things being managed/tracked/considered, the fewer things can go wrong, and the less likely a security issue will be found. See worse is better for a better understanding of what I mean by "ideologically simple".
OO.o is NOT Microsoft Office. If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.
However, OO.o has reached the point where it really and truly is "good enough" for most anybody. Enough that we now recommend it to our clients - it's on the privileged "recommended software" link in our product, effectively putting OO.o front and center for hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students.
Killer? No. I honestly don't know how many people pay attention to our "recommended software" download link. However, we've been pretty up-front about all-but-requiring Firefox for all our users, and we have about 80% hit rate on Firefox.
Officially, we support Firefox, IE, and Safari, but FF is in first place. We develop for Firefox and backport reported bugs in IE or Safari as they are reported. Honestly, since we stick to relatively simple HTML for our web-based product, we haven't had much problem with this strategy.
But the killer reason why most of our FF switchers have switched? When you hit the "Back" button in FF, it remembers what you typed in on a form. IE forgets. Such a simple thing, yet we've switched thousands of users (possibly forever!) to FF for this one feature ALONE.
Now, back to OO.o - I use it on my Fedora Core laptop, and have used it instead of MS Office for years. It's plenty good enough. I can read/write Office dox with minimal translation problems, and it does everything I've ever really wanted.
The only limit I've run into is that when I produce a presentation using Impress, where it's going to be displayed in MS Power Point, I open the file in MS PowerPoint before presenting to make sure it's going to display OK. Sometimes, fonts will be different, carefully aligned elements will be out of order, graphics scale the wrong size, etc.
But there have been a few times that I had to present "in the raw" and still haven't had much problem. The dirty secret of MS Office is that it's often incompatible with itself! If you're using Office 2000 or 2003 and try to use 2007 to render your presentation, you are probably about as likely to experience similar issues!
Perhaps the only issue is that if you open a file in MS Office and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault the file - "these things happen!". But if you open the same file in OO.o and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault OO.o - "Software just doesn't work right!".
And this may take a while to overcome. But OO.o is clearly doing it!
Running 300W 24x7 assuming a 30 day month at $0.25 per KWH (which is about what I pay here in sunny NoCal) comes to a monthly cost of $54/month. At standard loan rates, that implies a purchase of $5,400 at fairly standard loan rates. (EG: 10% -ish over 20-ish years)
$5,400 isn't that far from $12,500. It's only a off by about ~2 1/3 times. Factor in the advance of technology or other special circumstances, and you'll find that this may well make perfect sense. And while the numbers haven't "uncrossed", it certainly isn't outlandish.
Gasoline prices have fluctuated more than that in the last year!
Everything has a gravitational field. Both Earth and satellites have electromagnetic fields. Neither has any effect on the time reference of the object in question, and though strong gravitational fields *can* cause objects to move faster and thus change its time reference, this effect disappears as soon as the object (EG: satellite) hits the surface of the planet.
We've abolished the Machian idea of an absolute reference frame by now.
No we haven't.
We're here on Earth. We have our time reference. We launch a satellite, and check it's time reference, and find that it's moving a tad slower than ours, even when it's not accelerating in its orbit. (This has already been done) The fact that it is moving faster than we are moves it closer to c and that means its time reference is slower than ours.
The satellite is in orbit around the Earth, so it's easy to see that it's moving faster than we are, and that makes it rather difficult to sort out this whole "no absolute reference frame" thing.
So let's simplify things a bit: Rather than orbit the Earth, we launch it directly into outer space, heading directly away from Earth. Without any absolute reference, we have two points heading directly away from each other, at exactly identical speeds. If there's a perfect lack of absolute reference, both items would slow down exactly the same amount relative to each other, because the only reference involved is the other point!
Yet, that's not what happens. We launch a spacecraft, send it directly away from the Earth, and find that its time reference slows compared to ours. We send it out a ways, we send it back, and find that it's clocks are simply slow.
So there *is* a reference to something other than just Earth, there is something more absolute about the Earth reference than the spacecraft's reference, which makes the "there are no absolutes" argument specious, if often convenient!
There is no such thing as a hub with wifi. Hubs are devices that are "dumb" and essentially just extend a physical wire. Wifi has no wires so the wifi equivalent of hubs would be repeaters. Most consumers have wifi routers though.
If we were talking ONLY wifi, you would be correct. However, it's very typical to combine a modem, a 4-5 port wired hub, a NAT router, and a wireless bridge into a single device, usually managed through a web interface on the wired hub.
In this case, it's a single box that does it all, usually sold for $20 at your local electronics warehouse, and it therefore makes perfect sense to talk about a "wi-fi hub".
I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.
Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.
What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.
I think you missed something rather fundamental - in the case of PP "dodgy" behavior meant doing illogical things with routing paths, not publishing unpopular or dissenting content!
In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
Au Contraire - there is lots of room for improvement!
Electricity use follows a 24 hour cycle that typically peaks somewhere between 2 and 7 PM and hits a low point around 2-6 AM. And it's a pretty deep cycle: usage in the early hours of the day is dramatically lower than in the late afternoon! And this dramtic cycle continues because there's really no incentive to use less electricity in the afternoon or more in the early hours.
But if electricity was priced on an hourly basis, if the average price of money rose during the late afternoon and dropped to low points early in the morning, then people would have incentive to offset the "base load" with more dynamic energy usage patterns.
You could set your thermostat to two variables: preferred temperature and energy cost. If electricity is especially expensive, it could accept a warmer temperature (summer) or cooler temperature at significant savings to you. You may find that electric vehicles pay for themselves because electricity would be much cheaper during the hours they typically charge - at night.
And it wouldn't be difficult to implement - BPL taught us that while it's not feasible to transmit data over long distances via power lines, it's perfectly reasonable at low signal rates and distances - easily done within a household.
When planes rent for $100 / hour (including fuel) logging 100 hours for $5,000 is going to be mighty tough, especially when you consider that flight instructors (who accompany you on most of your flights, especially early on) cost around $40-$50/hour. However, you don't need 100 hours to get a private license, you need a minimum of 40. (most people are proficient at around 60 hours, I got my license at just over 50 hours) You can get a new type of limited license in just 20 hours - Light-sport, which limits you to small, slow planes with only two seats.
$100/hour sounds ridiculously expensive, and it is not cheap, but it's also not as unreasonable as it might seem. Small planes go about 2x as fast as a car on the freeway, and only have meaningful delays when flying out of major airports, which private flights rarely do - usually there's a small airport much closer to your destination. The Cessna 172 that I rent costs $103/hour, has four seats, and flies about 125 MPH.
But your car out in the driveway costs you about $0.50 per mile (average) to drive when you include all expenses - gas, insurance, purchase cost, maintenance, etc. which puts its freeway driving cost at around $30-$40/hour. And since planes go 2x as fast, they replace your car at around $60-$80 per hour equivalent. So even though getting a pilot's license isn't cheap, it can make more sense than you think.
That said, it's seriously FUN TO FLY! Until you've done it, you have no idea!
The other day I took two of my sons out for a 1.5 hour flight just for some sight-seeing. It was late in the day, smoke/haze on the ground, otherwise a beautiful day. We took off, and after climbing 500 ft, busted through the haze into gorgeously clean, cool air. Visibility was unlimited, snow-capped mountains 200 miles away were crystal clear. Traffic was light, so ATC was very quiet. We joked, looked at the local college, flew over some lakes, a local military base, and some mountains while we watched the sun set off our left wing. As we headed home, night fell, and the moon split the horizon and our right wing. We got a gorgeous picture of the sharp, full moon reflected below by water in irrigated fields, and above by the wing bottom.
We floated in low over a gorgeous blanket of city lights at just 1,200 AGL as we entered a gradual, straight-in final at our local airport. The air was as smooth as glass. I landed a bit long, but touchdown was a gentle bump with just a mild squeak of the tires.
My take is that it'd be a long time. We don't have much in space that requires products from Earth. Even though a space elevator has good economies of scale, there's no scale to exploit.
You think this this because you don't know what the benefits are, any more than anybody could have predicted email. There are distinct advantages to a space elevator. For example, carbon nanofiber in the 5,5 "armchair" configuration is highly conductive, making it possible to build a solar power station in space and send the electricity home over the elevator cable!
What other advantages are there when the cost of going into space drops from $10,000 per pound down to $25?
I mean, seriously, if you want to implement digital right protection, you either do it completely (hint : you can't) or not at all. Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
I see this mentality all the time, the mentality that "if it isn't perfect, it might as well not be there". This mentality is just wrong.
The idea that writing your name on a piece of paper is a security device is just stupidly silly, yet this concepts is the very foundation of our legal and financial systems. The idea that policing the population with less than 1 active cop for every 10,000 citizens will dramatically reduce crime is just dumb, yet it really works.
I could go on all day with other examples like security checks at airports, but I don't need to - security isn't a situation where you are either secure or not secure, it's a relativistic situation where things are more secure or less secure.
Yes, DRM has always been crackable, there has always been the "security hole" at the speakers and screen, etc. but the truth is that many people don't have the skills to change/remove their email address, wouldn't bother with registering a fake name, and so wouldn't circumvent the security built into the itunes files.
And we have no way of knowing whether or not the obvious email address embedded in the file is all there is, either - there could be any number of ways that this information could be embedded in other, less obvious ways, much like the obscured vehicle ID number that's tapped into your car's frame that protects you right this very second from having your car stolen.
Security doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough to be effective.
... and as a tech weenie extraordinaire, it's not uncommon for me to run pretty loose firewall rules, or use a computer without current patches. Example: I still use Windows 2000 in a controlled, production environment, which was EOL'd a while back.
How many "2.0" Internet businesses exist only because of the unexpected consequences of humanity building the largest peer based computer network in existence?
Slashdot itself, and other newcomers like Netflix "on demand" only exist because of the Internet. Did we build the Internet so that we could stream "Superman" in real time, or argue politics with people from around the world?
No. but they all happened because we built the Internet!
So build it! Society will profit in ways we can't today imagine today any more than Bob Metcalfe imagined Slashdot when he co-invented Ethernet!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with simulating reality is that reality is so incredibly BROADBAND. Every piece interacting with every other piece on every level from entangled subatomic particles to heat convection and induction to light reflections and .... wow! It's just an incredible experience, this reality thing!
Reality, by definition, is "dirty". We have dust, we have imperfections in every surface, no matter how carefully machined. Houses are never truly square, roads are never perfectly level, and points in a corner are always rounded. Always.
Computers, by definition, are "clean". Squares are always truly square, roads are as perfectly level as they were designed to be, and corners are always razor sharp, no matter how much you "zoom in".
The problem with modern graphics systems is they are computed to extreme levels of precision. If they incorporated a sort of fundamental randomness, if they were intrinsically uncertain, they just might be able to really approximate reality, which is messy, ugly, and imperfect.
Personally, I'd think that it really would take massive bandwidth, orders of magnitude beyond what we can produce today, and some pseudo-custom designed chips to get truly realistic graphics. Personally, I'm thinking about FPGAs which produce circuits at relatively low bandwidth but that are highly tuned to the task at hand. If there were a spec for FPGAs in video cards to handle specific physics handling tasks or ray-tracing, and there were a widely recognized spec for including this capability in a video card or somesuch, the problem of taking care of specialized processing problems could disappear tomorrow.
The other issue is bandwidth - and there's nothing to do about this except provide more of it. (Hypertransport, anyone? I have a 4-core Athlon Database server that outperforms an 8-core Xeon at 1.5x the "clock speed" simply by having more real, useful throughput....
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
But fire *is* a monster! Literally, this pix was taken just a few miles from my house - the nearest point of the fire was about 2 miles away!
We almost lost our community college. Don't tell me fire isn't a monster, you insensitive clod!
A lot of older people, especially the elderly, have no need or desire for the internet.
My father-in-law is sixty-something. He's a bit crufty around the edges, and is proud of the cruft. He's very, very smart. Back in his day, he was into cars - he can diagnose many car ailments in cars as they drive by!
But when it came to the Internet, he was stubborn about "it's just not for me". My Mother-in-law has had a (really old, slow) computer with DSL for years, and for Christmas this year, I gave them a refurbished Athlon XP computer from parts I had laying around.
He remained thoroughly uninterested until he asked me one day: "Why would I give a damned about the Internet?" So I asked him if there was anything at all he was interested in RIGHT NOW. He said: "I love those old-time radio shows they used to air back in the 50s, and 60s." So, about 5 minutes later, I had several hours of old-time radio shows downloaded to an MP3 player and he was listening.
Suddenly, the Internet isn't something obscure, "out there" - it's something HE can benefit from, right now.
And that's makes the Internet special. It's not what somebody ELSE thought it should be, it's what EVERYBODY else thought that you might want it to be, as voted up or down based on your own tastes. And it's different for each person.
*My* Internet includes software engineering, tech-oriented news/blogs, LOLcats, and documentary/sci-fi movies delivered by NetFlix. I don't do recipes, I couldn't possibly care less about old-time country radio shows, and I don't watch "the stars". The stuff I like appears almost magically, and the stuff I don't like barely skiffs my conscious before disappearing.
The Internet represents many things, but most importantly, it's the purest ever reflection of humanity looking at ourselves.
First, the idea that watching TV doesn't constitute "real wealth" is false. The very manufacturing plants you admit are valuable exist solely to provide goods and services that consumers demand. No, TVs aren't necessities, but that doesn't mean they aren't of economic value. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and lots of people quite clearly get utility from their television sets. So televisions are just as much a form of wealth as any other good.
TV's don't generate wealth for their owners. You won't get rich, no matter how much TV you watch. While they may create something you want (such as cheap access to episodes of House) they aren't themselves a source of increased wealth. Therefore, they aren't "real wealth" and should not be viewed as "assets" but rather as "possessions".
Second, power plants are in almost all cases privately funded, at least in the U.S. The money you pay each month to your local electricity provider is going to a privately owned firm, albeit one that likely enjoys rate-of-return protection granted by government.
When a "private company" is given a regulated monopoly by a government, it's no longer private. Especially when tax dollars have been spent in its construction, which is almost always the case. See "government regulated monopoly" since this concept is apparently foreign to you.
Power is not running out, either.
Guess you never heard of rolling blackouts, then? Explain that to my servers that were down for some 2 days as a result? /Sarcasm
Will the cost of energy today persist as fossil fuels become more difficult to obtain? Probably not, but lots of neat forms of energy become viable once prices rise. By the time oil, uranium, coal, and natural gas resources all begin to dwindle, new technologies will have made new forms of elecricity generation economically feasible.
Cool. So f-ck the commons, as it disappears, we'll get more desperate. Sounds like a good long term stradegy! (er, strategy? tragedy?)
You claim that people tend to underestimate long-term costs and overestimate short-term gains. The LED example, however, actually shows that people are making the right decisions by sticking with plasma. The amount of electricity required to power a TV is still quite inexpensive--around 3 to 5 cents per hours--and so it'd take years to make up for a $300 price difference.
That is, until it ain't cheap. Then f-ck you! Thanks for helping out, eh, raping the commons?
And since pretty much any TV currently sold is going far past its obsolescence, it's fairly unimportant how long a TV will last. 8 years of 12 years are both very long timeframes among the modern consumer.
So... consumers are short sighted? Thanks for making my point!
"Let the market decide" is almost religious dogma in the United States. And it's not a completely unfounded idea. People tend to buy things that provide a better quality of life at a lower cost, and companies tend to provide things that are more profitable, so cheaper and better quality wins over more expensive and crappier.
But one thing that many of the "free market everywhere" people miss completely is the idea of the tragedy of the commons. I don't need to try to explain it as it's already explained well elsewhere. But it's one concept that the "free market" Libertarian types completely ignore, at their own peril.
In this case, people are notoriously bad at figuring long term expenses that are sustained and slightly elevated. People will tend to pay $10,000 over the life of a car for a "cheaper" model that costs $4,000 less. They'll tend to buy the plasma TV that costs $300 less than the $2000 LED TV that lasts twice as long and uses 30% less electricity.
And this affects the commons because power is increasingly a rare resource being squandered to provide a 5' wide screen typically viewed 15 feet back that provides the same viewing aspect ratio as a 19" TV at 4 feet at 11x the power. Power that isn't then available for running manufacturing plants, hospitals, and other things that generate real wealth, and require a tax-funded power plant to compensate for.
On the other hand, regulations take a long time to change, and marketplaces can change quickly. A bad law, once past, might take a decade to be redacted or canceled by jurisprudence, but the technology regulated by the bad law may render the law moot in 2 years due to other market forces.
I tend to feel towards deregulation, since I'm American. But I can see that Plasma tech just might be a bad idea!
Yeah, but the cost of this really is rather low.
I run a corporate mail server, and it's my job to combat spam. Our email addresses are simple: firstname@domain.com, and they are widely circulated. I see probably 5 or so spam per day, certainly not enough to be problematic, and my first name is very, very common.
On our mail servers, we subscribe to a couple of RBLs and use greylisting. That combination drops about 98% of the spam with basically zero false positives and almost no system administration at all. About a year ago, there was a configuration burp after a system update that caused RBLs and Greylisting to be disabled.
We were overwhelmed by the spam that we got! From 5 or so to hundreds of crap messages per day - shocking how effective these simple technologies are!
Granted, our small-ish company isn't specifically targeted by spammers like a nice, juicy "hotmail.com" domain, but it is a good indication that spam techniques are largely and effectively under control with only a modestly capable admin at the helm.
That's not what I want. I don't want to have to buy the fastest, most expensive RAM available just to use as a RAM disk. I'd prefer cheaper RAM, maybe two or three generations old, that I can get in massive quantities.
Except that you can't get two or three gen old RAM in massive quantities. At least, not for as cheap as the new stuff. See for yourself: 1 GB of PC 133 RAM is more expensive than 1 GB of DDR or DDR2 RAM. There's a very short window of "cheaper" just behind the bleeding edge that's cheaper than the very latest (DDR3) but new motherboards support this type of RAM too, negating the "two or three gen old" situation that you state.
Most people think that the older the technology, the cheaper it gets. But this is only true for a very small time window, at which point the older technology gets phased out (not profitable, anymore) at which point it becomes a "niche" marketplace with very low volume and very high prices.
Example: A PC-133 RAM stick needed to keep a $12,000 vertical-market weaving loom operational, where the cost of the additional RAM pales compared to the cost of the entire integrated system. If you need that extra 512k of RAM in your $12,000 loom, paying $100 for it isn't such a bad deal.
But there aren't many people stuck with $12,000 looms, so the price of the older technology skyrockets until it's simply not available anymore. (Ever try buying a *NEW* Cx 6x86 processor in the last year or so?)
This brings up an interesting idea. What if the ramdisk function was moved into the motherboard chipset?
OMFG! That's an AMAZING idea! This could dramatically change computing as we know it! The implications of this are, eh, well....
.... quite well understood. Somebody thought of this many years ago. Many, many, many years ago. It's called a (ahem) "ram disk" and uses system memory as if it were a drive with a software driver. Here's a howto for Linux - I did something similar with so-called "high memory" on a 80286 with DOS 3.x and ramdrive.sys - that 384k ram disk was small, but //FAST//!!!
Sorry to break the news to you.
Yes, it's true - the first worm was written in *nix, during an age where software updates were very lazily applied and "security" meant issuing passwords.
Since then, the fundamental simpleness of the *nix design has resulted in dramatic improvements in real security without any basic re-architec ing. Compare/contrast with a prominent North American software vendor based in Redmond, WA who has some 10,000 developers working on their flagship software package used by a high percentage of the world's computer users, who have developed an API so complex and so labyrinthine that providing any real security is about as likely as making ice water dance the Mac arena by playing Lawrence Welk re-runs.
In security, simpler is pretty much always better, and the fundamentally simple POSIX environment is fundamentally as simple as it can be, as a matter of ideology. The fewer things being managed/tracked/considered, the fewer things can go wrong, and the less likely a security issue will be found. See worse is better for a better understanding of what I mean by "ideologically simple".
OO.o is NOT Microsoft Office. If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.
However, OO.o has reached the point where it really and truly is "good enough" for most anybody. Enough that we now recommend it to our clients - it's on the privileged "recommended software" link in our product, effectively putting OO.o front and center for hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students.
Killer? No. I honestly don't know how many people pay attention to our "recommended software" download link. However, we've been pretty up-front about all-but-requiring Firefox for all our users, and we have about 80% hit rate on Firefox.
Officially, we support Firefox, IE, and Safari, but FF is in first place. We develop for Firefox and backport reported bugs in IE or Safari as they are reported. Honestly, since we stick to relatively simple HTML for our web-based product, we haven't had much problem with this strategy.
But the killer reason why most of our FF switchers have switched? When you hit the "Back" button in FF, it remembers what you typed in on a form. IE forgets. Such a simple thing, yet we've switched thousands of users (possibly forever!) to FF for this one feature ALONE.
Now, back to OO.o - I use it on my Fedora Core laptop, and have used it instead of MS Office for years. It's plenty good enough. I can read/write Office dox with minimal translation problems, and it does everything I've ever really wanted.
The only limit I've run into is that when I produce a presentation using Impress, where it's going to be displayed in MS Power Point, I open the file in MS PowerPoint before presenting to make sure it's going to display OK. Sometimes, fonts will be different, carefully aligned elements will be out of order, graphics scale the wrong size, etc.
But there have been a few times that I had to present "in the raw" and still haven't had much problem. The dirty secret of MS Office is that it's often incompatible with itself! If you're using Office 2000 or 2003 and try to use 2007 to render your presentation, you are probably about as likely to experience similar issues!
Perhaps the only issue is that if you open a file in MS Office and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault the file - "these things happen!". But if you open the same file in OO.o and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault OO.o - "Software just doesn't work right!".
And this may take a while to overcome. But OO.o is clearly doing it!
... and why my house is 100% CFL, among other things!
I think that problem is very easy to solve.
Me too! I live in California.
Don't allow any more coal plants to be built
Done.
and resolve the shortage using rolling blackouts.
Done.
Significant opposition to nuke plants will disappear after two or three days.
Eh....
After a week or two, you'll have a pro-nuke movement.
Really? 'Cause that's not what's happening here... Perhaps this quote has some bearing?
"For every complex question, there is a simple answer-- and it's wrong."
-- H.L. Mencken
Running 300W 24x7 assuming a 30 day month at $0.25 per KWH (which is about what I pay here in sunny NoCal) comes to a monthly cost of $54/month. At standard loan rates, that implies a purchase of $5,400 at fairly standard loan rates. (EG: 10% -ish over 20-ish years)
$5,400 isn't that far from $12,500. It's only a off by about ~2 1/3 times. Factor in the advance of technology or other special circumstances, and you'll find that this may well make perfect sense. And while the numbers haven't "uncrossed", it certainly isn't outlandish.
Gasoline prices have fluctuated more than that in the last year!
Everything has a gravitational field. Both Earth and satellites have electromagnetic fields. Neither has any effect on the time reference of the object in question, and though strong gravitational fields *can* cause objects to move faster and thus change its time reference, this effect disappears as soon as the object (EG: satellite) hits the surface of the planet.
How does somebody here miss something so obvious? Google helped me find this in less than 60 seconds. It's a combination DSL modem, router, hub, and wireless gateway. (?!)
I have one, the WRT 54G which has the same features as the first link sans the DSL Modem.
Try crawling out of your mother's basement and visit the local Best Buy / Circuit City / Fry's ?!?!
We've abolished the Machian idea of an absolute reference frame by now.
No we haven't.
We're here on Earth. We have our time reference. We launch a satellite, and check it's time reference, and find that it's moving a tad slower than ours, even when it's not accelerating in its orbit. (This has already been done) The fact that it is moving faster than we are moves it closer to c and that means its time reference is slower than ours.
The satellite is in orbit around the Earth, so it's easy to see that it's moving faster than we are, and that makes it rather difficult to sort out this whole "no absolute reference frame" thing.
So let's simplify things a bit: Rather than orbit the Earth, we launch it directly into outer space, heading directly away from Earth. Without any absolute reference, we have two points heading directly away from each other, at exactly identical speeds. If there's a perfect lack of absolute reference, both items would slow down exactly the same amount relative to each other, because the only reference involved is the other point!
Yet, that's not what happens. We launch a spacecraft, send it directly away from the Earth, and find that its time reference slows compared to ours. We send it out a ways, we send it back, and find that it's clocks are simply slow.
So there *is* a reference to something other than just Earth, there is something more absolute about the Earth reference than the spacecraft's reference, which makes the "there are no absolutes" argument specious, if often convenient!
There is no such thing as a hub with wifi. Hubs are devices that are "dumb" and essentially just extend a physical wire. Wifi has no wires so the wifi equivalent of hubs would be repeaters. Most consumers have wifi routers though.
If we were talking ONLY wifi, you would be correct. However, it's very typical to combine a modem, a 4-5 port wired hub, a NAT router, and a wireless bridge into a single device, usually managed through a web interface on the wired hub.
In this case, it's a single box that does it all, usually sold for $20 at your local electronics warehouse, and it therefore makes perfect sense to talk about a "wi-fi hub".
I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.
Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.
What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.
Ease off that hair trigger a bit, eh?
I think you missed something rather fundamental - in the case of PP "dodgy" behavior meant doing illogical things with routing paths, not publishing unpopular or dissenting content!
In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
Au Contraire - there is lots of room for improvement!
Electricity use follows a 24 hour cycle that typically peaks somewhere between 2 and 7 PM and hits a low point around 2-6 AM. And it's a pretty deep cycle: usage in the early hours of the day is dramatically lower than in the late afternoon! And this dramtic cycle continues because there's really no incentive to use less electricity in the afternoon or more in the early hours.
But if electricity was priced on an hourly basis, if the average price of money rose during the late afternoon and dropped to low points early in the morning, then people would have incentive to offset the "base load" with more dynamic energy usage patterns.
You could set your thermostat to two variables: preferred temperature and energy cost. If electricity is especially expensive, it could accept a warmer temperature (summer) or cooler temperature at significant savings to you. You may find that electric vehicles pay for themselves because electricity would be much cheaper during the hours they typically charge - at night.
And it wouldn't be difficult to implement - BPL taught us that while it's not feasible to transmit data over long distances via power lines, it's perfectly reasonable at low signal rates and distances - easily done within a household.
When planes rent for $100 / hour (including fuel) logging 100 hours for $5,000 is going to be mighty tough, especially when you consider that flight instructors (who accompany you on most of your flights, especially early on) cost around $40-$50/hour. However, you don't need 100 hours to get a private license, you need a minimum of 40. (most people are proficient at around 60 hours, I got my license at just over 50 hours) You can get a new type of limited license in just 20 hours - Light-sport, which limits you to small, slow planes with only two seats.
$100/hour sounds ridiculously expensive, and it is not cheap, but it's also not as unreasonable as it might seem. Small planes go about 2x as fast as a car on the freeway, and only have meaningful delays when flying out of major airports, which private flights rarely do - usually there's a small airport much closer to your destination. The Cessna 172 that I rent costs $103/hour, has four seats, and flies about 125 MPH.
But your car out in the driveway costs you about $0.50 per mile (average) to drive when you include all expenses - gas, insurance, purchase cost, maintenance, etc. which puts its freeway driving cost at around $30-$40/hour. And since planes go 2x as fast, they replace your car at around $60-$80 per hour equivalent. So even though getting a pilot's license isn't cheap, it can make more sense than you think.
That said, it's seriously FUN TO FLY! Until you've done it, you have no idea!
The other day I took two of my sons out for a 1.5 hour flight just for some sight-seeing. It was late in the day, smoke/haze on the ground, otherwise a beautiful day. We took off, and after climbing 500 ft, busted through the haze into gorgeously clean, cool air. Visibility was unlimited, snow-capped mountains 200 miles away were crystal clear. Traffic was light, so ATC was very quiet. We joked, looked at the local college, flew over some lakes, a local military base, and some mountains while we watched the sun set off our left wing. As we headed home, night fell, and the moon split the horizon and our right wing. We got a gorgeous picture of the sharp, full moon reflected below by water in irrigated fields, and above by the wing bottom.
We floated in low over a gorgeous blanket of city lights at just 1,200 AGL as we entered a gradual, straight-in final at our local airport. The air was as smooth as glass. I landed a bit long, but touchdown was a gentle bump with just a mild squeak of the tires.
Man I love flying!
My take is that it'd be a long time. We don't have much in space that requires products from Earth. Even though a space elevator has good economies of scale, there's no scale to exploit.
You think this this because you don't know what the benefits are, any more than anybody could have predicted email. There are distinct advantages to a space elevator. For example, carbon nanofiber in the 5,5 "armchair" configuration is highly conductive, making it possible to build a solar power station in space and send the electricity home over the elevator cable!
What other advantages are there when the cost of going into space drops from $10,000 per pound down to $25?
I mean, seriously, if you want to implement digital right protection, you either do it completely (hint : you can't) or not at all. Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
I see this mentality all the time, the mentality that "if it isn't perfect, it might as well not be there". This mentality is just wrong.
The idea that writing your name on a piece of paper is a security device is just stupidly silly, yet this concepts is the very foundation of our legal and financial systems. The idea that policing the population with less than 1 active cop for every 10,000 citizens will dramatically reduce crime is just dumb, yet it really works.
I could go on all day with other examples like security checks at airports, but I don't need to - security isn't a situation where you are either secure or not secure, it's a relativistic situation where things are more secure or less secure.
Yes, DRM has always been crackable, there has always been the "security hole" at the speakers and screen, etc. but the truth is that many people don't have the skills to change/remove their email address, wouldn't bother with registering a fake name, and so wouldn't circumvent the security built into the itunes files.
And we have no way of knowing whether or not the obvious email address embedded in the file is all there is, either - there could be any number of ways that this information could be embedded in other, less obvious ways, much like the obscured vehicle ID number that's tapped into your car's frame that protects you right this very second from having your car stolen.
Security doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough to be effective.
... and as a tech weenie extraordinaire, it's not uncommon for me to run pretty loose firewall rules, or use a computer without current patches. Example: I still use Windows 2000 in a controlled, production environment, which was EOL'd a while back.
How is that different?
How many "2.0" Internet businesses exist only because of the unexpected consequences of humanity building the largest peer based computer network in existence?
Slashdot itself, and other newcomers like Netflix "on demand" only exist because of the Internet. Did we build the Internet so that we could stream "Superman" in real time, or argue politics with people from around the world?
No. but they all happened because we built the Internet!
So build it! Society will profit in ways we can't today imagine today any more than Bob Metcalfe imagined Slashdot when he co-invented Ethernet!