Granted, with a five-hour power surplus, you'll never break even on the cost and time for warming up your smelting plant, but if these periods of electricity surplus become longer, smelting aluminium becomes a lot more investment-worthy than mining bitcoin.
At least, I'm having a hard time to imagine a future world that can make better use of bitcoin than aluminium...
If it's big enough to pay for itself in 5 hours of mining, then its power draw is also big enough to prevent the negative power prices from happening in the first place.
Given that VIDEO doesn't work in Skype for Linux Beta (only audio and chat), and video is pretty much the whole point of using Skype, this news should be read as "Microsoft kills off Skype on Linux".
"We'll keep supporting (platform X/technology Y/...)" these days seems to be a promise that can be made easily to generate goodwill with the FTC and its European counterpart, only to be broken afterward without consequences.
I'm appaled at all the "what's the use of this?" posts. When the principles behind lasers were discovered, they were regarded a physical curiosity with no real practical consequences. It's almost the definition of fundamental research that you can't immediately see the applications - else it's applied research. And DARPA's very mission is to fund research that currently borders on science fiction but one time may have practical consequences. They also played a big role in the development of what would eventually become the internet. With this HIVE project (horrible acronym BTW), they're even being quite conservative, as one can easily see a host of potential applications that are quite relevant to society.
"What's the use of this" is exactly the wrong question to ask when it comes to funding science/tech. Yeah, it's something populist politicians like to wave around, but in reality, fundamental research pays for itself as a driving force for future economic growth. There will be failed projects that get nowhere and are never heard of again (except in arguments to cut funding), but the success stories easily make up for them. To again cite a very conservative example that is a bit in the gray zone between "fundamental" and "applied": think of Xerox putting a bunch of smart people together at PARC and giving them an allowance to fool around with.
One could even argue that the generous funding with few questions asked that existed in a "distant" past has helped the US to be at the forefront of tech for decades.
To be clear, yes, ESR does seem to be a bit of a jerk, but so does RMS (in a totally different way). I nevertheless feel that both have things to say about Open Source that are very much worth considering, even if one ends up discarding them. More generally spoken, I think the coexistence of these kind of dissenting opinions is essential to the viability of the Free / Open Source Software community. One may even take that as a metaphor for society (though I must admit I haven't deeply thought about how much merit that metaphor really has).
Back on topic: TFA merely seems to be a short and perfectly innocuous reminisce on an inspiring moment (at least for ESR). I don't see anything remotely wingnutty or offensive in it, and even if you're right about him presently having lost his relevance, the story is set more than 30 years ago... Maybe I'm too naive, but I see it as an edifying story: have the guts to stand up and do what's right, and maybe someone will be citing you as an inspiration some 30-odd years later. I really don't see much wrong with that, other than the fact that it's not exactly earth-shattering news.
I don't like to see him being given a platform here.
Oh, so you're an SJW who believes in no-platforming. Right. Drop dead. Hacker culture doesn't need you.
With that statement, you're doing the exact same thing that you're deriding in it. I'm agreeing with neither of you on this particular subject, but I do find it interesting to know both of your opinions on it. Wishing for dissenting opinions to be suppressed is often a first sign of a myopic worldview taking hold in your brains. Even if you totally can't stand each other, think "know your enemy".
That, and it's a "test flight", not a demo... Whoever originally wrote that headline should take their "talent" to the Daily Mail or Breitbart or some other place where people like to be trolled with inaccurate and suggestive headlines/content.
Game engines (actually just a special case of HPC - but a commercially important one)
Embedded computing (think IOT)
Things that necessarily have to work low level, like operating systems and compilers
The kinds of big software projects you're citing, of which browsers will keep or increase their importance regardless of how much the IT world "cloudifies"
And they don't even have to take our word for it - just look at recent data figures published by the likes of GitHub and StackOverflow, which show that, while C and C++ are not dominant, they're pretty stable, and very miuch alive and kicking.
So that leads to the hypothesis that the statement comes from someone who doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. And yes indeed: "the president of one job leadership consultancy" is basically a motivational speaker with a one-person company featuring a poorly chosen name and a not-all-too-professional-looking website. Seems to me that "one InfoWorld journalist" decided to give a friend of a family member a big, free publicity boost by interviewing her on something she doesn't know the first thing about.
It's uncanny how closely this post reflects my own experience & opinion. In fact, I'm starting to wonder whether I have been sleep-posting on/. as an AC last night. And if yes, would that count as "sock puppeteering"? Oh noes!;-)
Doesn't even need to be "stripped" - I find that anything running MATE will do fine on a lot of really old computers. In general office use, the web browser is by far the biggest load on CPU and memory, and it has come to a point that one just can't get by with 2GB total RAM anymore (running Firefox at least - dunno about Opera but Chrome is definitely a bad idea).
But as for MATE... 15 years ago, its direct predecessor GNOME 2 was the desktop environment that was so polished you wouldn't even notice it was there. Its code base has been kept alive by the MATE project but hasn't been subject to the bloat everyone else fell prey to. Result is that it's still nearly as smooth as it used to be, and really flies on remotely-close-to-modern hardware; in my subjective experience, its responsiveness is even better than XFCE. Just don't expect to be "in" with the UI-fad-du-jour.
By the same logic, I present you a few fine organizations that cannot possibly have anything to hide because they have a website that tells you what they do: The FSB The mossad (hope this is the right site because I didn't much care to enable javascript) The CIA The NSA
On a completely unrelated note, would you by any chance be in the market for a bridge? I can make you a really good price, because you're my friend!
You obviously didn't experience the bad old days when the BIOS was on ROM, and if it had a bug or was incompatible with a new piece of hardware, tough luck! Having the ability to update firmware is in fact a feature; it just needs to be secured properly.
Mine captures the condensate in a storage compartment that needs to be taken out and emptied into the sink, so it doesn't need to be connected to anything. It does add one short step to the process of doing laundry, but I found the condensate quite suitable for refilling the steam iron, so that saves on shopping for distilled water. There's a lot of surplus too, so I'm sure it can be used for other (non-food) water evaporating applications as well.
All in all, the thing is worth every penny I spent on it. As you said, it really is gentler on the clothes, and I'm saving energy to boot. Only downside is that it's quite slow. By the time it wears out, I might be able to buy an ultrasonic one:)
This crap is right up there with Teflon and other supposedly good inventions, that only serve to make you pay more, and let U.S. businesses own more custom by the way of patents.
To me, this sentence was a dead giveaway that parent was a parody (that went over a lot of people's heads).
Of course, there's the remote possibility that parent doesn't realize that Teflon is a rare example of a "wonder material" that is virtually irreplaceable for a host of applications including medical devices, scientific research, data transmission, chemical industry, aerospace, mechanical applications,... You never know with Poe's law.
AC science in all its glory! This is why we can only have nice things when China starts manufacturing them and selling them to us.
Please, don't buy Chinese-manufactured ACs. Murkin ACs are 50% more A* and every bit as as C, and buying them promotes job growth in the domestic astroturf industry.
You could just as well say that wind energy is a relic form times before the steam engine was invented, or that the electric car is a relic from times before the internal combustion engine became mature. Sometimes old ideas regain their relevance in the face of new developments, deal with it.
As for consumption tax being regressive, that would have been a good point, except that TFA quite explicitly talked about progressive tax on consumption (i.e. don't tax basic goods but do tax luxury items).
Slashdot Mirror
...I'll get my coat.
Granted, with a five-hour power surplus, you'll never break even on the cost and time for warming up your smelting plant, but if these periods of electricity surplus become longer, smelting alumin i um becomes a lot more investment-worthy than mining bitcoin.
At least, I'm having a hard time to imagine a future world that can make better use of bitcoin than aluminium...
If it's big enough to pay for itself in 5 hours of mining, then its power draw is also big enough to prevent the negative power prices from happening in the first place.
Given that VIDEO doesn't work in Skype for Linux Beta (only audio and chat), and video is pretty much the whole point of using Skype, this news should be read as "Microsoft kills off Skype on Linux".
"We'll keep supporting (platform X/technology Y/...)" these days seems to be a promise that can be made easily to generate goodwill with the FTC and its European counterpart, only to be broken afterward without consequences.
I'm appaled at all the "what's the use of this?" posts. When the principles behind lasers were discovered, they were regarded a physical curiosity with no real practical consequences. It's almost the definition of fundamental research that you can't immediately see the applications - else it's applied research. And DARPA's very mission is to fund research that currently borders on science fiction but one time may have practical consequences. They also played a big role in the development of what would eventually become the internet. With this HIVE project (horrible acronym BTW), they're even being quite conservative, as one can easily see a host of potential applications that are quite relevant to society.
"What's the use of this" is exactly the wrong question to ask when it comes to funding science/tech. Yeah, it's something populist politicians like to wave around, but in reality, fundamental research pays for itself as a driving force for future economic growth. There will be failed projects that get nowhere and are never heard of again (except in arguments to cut funding), but the success stories easily make up for them. To again cite a very conservative example that is a bit in the gray zone between "fundamental" and "applied": think of Xerox putting a bunch of smart people together at PARC and giving them an allowance to fool around with.
One could even argue that the generous funding with few questions asked that existed in a "distant" past has helped the US to be at the forefront of tech for decades.
To be clear, yes, ESR does seem to be a bit of a jerk, but so does RMS (in a totally different way). I nevertheless feel that both have things to say about Open Source that are very much worth considering, even if one ends up discarding them. More generally spoken, I think the coexistence of these kind of dissenting opinions is essential to the viability of the Free / Open Source Software community. One may even take that as a metaphor for society (though I must admit I haven't deeply thought about how much merit that metaphor really has).
Back on topic: TFA merely seems to be a short and perfectly innocuous reminisce on an inspiring moment (at least for ESR). I don't see anything remotely wingnutty or offensive in it, and even if you're right about him presently having lost his relevance, the story is set more than 30 years ago... Maybe I'm too naive, but I see it as an edifying story: have the guts to stand up and do what's right, and maybe someone will be citing you as an inspiration some 30-odd years later. I really don't see much wrong with that, other than the fact that it's not exactly earth-shattering news.
Modded down; irony +1 :)
I don't like to see him being given a platform here.
Oh, so you're an SJW who believes in no-platforming. Right. Drop dead. Hacker culture doesn't need you.
With that statement, you're doing the exact same thing that you're deriding in it. I'm agreeing with neither of you on this particular subject, but I do find it interesting to know both of your opinions on it. Wishing for dissenting opinions to be suppressed is often a first sign of a myopic worldview taking hold in your brains. Even if you totally can't stand each other, think "know your enemy".
That, and it's a "test flight", not a demo... Whoever originally wrote that headline should take their "talent" to the Daily Mail or Breitbart or some other place where people like to be trolled with inaccurate and suggestive headlines/content.
GP didn't say "bad", they said "not good". If it does absolutely nothing, it doesn't do anything good either, does it? *rimshot*
"It's not the nitrogen that kills you, it's the lack of oxygen"
, he said to the dead body.
Good for you. Do you also know what Poe's law is?
I have circumstantial evidence suggestin Trump is the reason...
No, you don't. You have one, unverifiable anecdote.
Please find a dictionary (there are some online) and look up "circumstantial evidence".
Misformatted link in previous post that was auto-sanitized by slashcode.
Let's see: C and C++ still rule when it comes to
And they don't even have to take our word for it - just look at recent data figures published by the likes of GitHub and StackOverflow, which show that, while C and C++ are not dominant, they're pretty stable, and very miuch alive and kicking.
So that leads to the hypothesis that the statement comes from someone who doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. And yes indeed: "the president of one job leadership consultancy" is basically a motivational speaker with a one-person company featuring a poorly chosen name and a not-all-too-professional-looking website. Seems to me that "one InfoWorld journalist" decided to give a friend of a family member a big, free publicity boost by interviewing her on something she doesn't know the first thing about.
This. A thousand times this.
It's uncanny how closely this post reflects my own experience & opinion. In fact, I'm starting to wonder whether I have been sleep-posting on /. as an AC last night. And if yes, would that count as "sock puppeteering"? Oh noes! ;-)
Doesn't even need to be "stripped" - I find that anything running MATE will do fine on a lot of really old computers. In general office use, the web browser is by far the biggest load on CPU and memory, and it has come to a point that one just can't get by with 2GB total RAM anymore (running Firefox at least - dunno about Opera but Chrome is definitely a bad idea).
But as for MATE... 15 years ago, its direct predecessor GNOME 2 was the desktop environment that was so polished you wouldn't even notice it was there. Its code base has been kept alive by the MATE project but hasn't been subject to the bloat everyone else fell prey to. Result is that it's still nearly as smooth as it used to be, and really flies on remotely-close-to-modern hardware; in my subjective experience, its responsiveness is even better than XFCE. Just don't expect to be "in" with the UI-fad-du-jour.
By the same logic, I present you a few fine organizations that cannot possibly have anything to hide because they have a website that tells you what they do:
The FSB
The mossad (hope this is the right site because I didn't much care to enable javascript)
The CIA
The NSA
On a completely unrelated note, would you by any chance be in the market for a bridge? I can make you a really good price, because you're my friend!
You obviously didn't experience the bad old days when the BIOS was on ROM, and if it had a bug or was incompatible with a new piece of hardware, tough luck! Having the ability to update firmware is in fact a feature; it just needs to be secured properly.
Cue the sack.
It does have a water drain for the condensate.
Mine captures the condensate in a storage compartment that needs to be taken out and emptied into the sink, so it doesn't need to be connected to anything. It does add one short step to the process of doing laundry, but I found the condensate quite suitable for refilling the steam iron, so that saves on shopping for distilled water. There's a lot of surplus too, so I'm sure it can be used for other (non-food) water evaporating applications as well.
All in all, the thing is worth every penny I spent on it. As you said, it really is gentler on the clothes, and I'm saving energy to boot. Only downside is that it's quite slow. By the time it wears out, I might be able to buy an ultrasonic one :)
Heh, your not-so-typical /. conversation.
This crap is right up there with Teflon and other supposedly good inventions, that only serve to make you pay more, and let U.S. businesses own more custom by the way of patents.
To me, this sentence was a dead giveaway that parent was a parody (that went over a lot of people's heads).
Of course, there's the remote possibility that parent doesn't realize that Teflon is a rare example of a "wonder material" that is virtually irreplaceable for a host of applications including medical devices, scientific research, data transmission, chemical industry, aerospace, mechanical applications,... You never know with Poe's law.
You know all those clothes with a "don't tumble dry" symbol
Oh yeah, the ones I never ever buy.
AC science in all its glory! This is why we can only have nice things when China starts manufacturing them and selling them to us.
Please, don't buy Chinese-manufactured ACs. Murkin ACs are 50% more A* and every bit as as C, and buying them promotes job growth in the domestic astroturf industry.
* "A" value of Murkin ACs may decrease over time.
You could just as well say that wind energy is a relic form times before the steam engine was invented, or that the electric car is a relic from times before the internal combustion engine became mature. Sometimes old ideas regain their relevance in the face of new developments, deal with it.
As for consumption tax being regressive, that would have been a good point, except that TFA quite explicitly talked about progressive tax on consumption (i.e. don't tax basic goods but do tax luxury items).