Having very large PSUs is a pain in the ass. Failures tend to be catastrophic and dangerous. They're more expensive to build and maintain. (think basic economy of scale problems)
That, and they become a single point of failure.
Having seen a few commodity power supplies fail in the most spectacular manner possible makes me shudder to think that companies are willingly switching to massive power supplies just to save a few bucks.
"If they want to be really "free" from the western IT-world they don't have to care about running Windows, and when they don't have to care about that, they can just adopt gcc, the rest of GNU and Linux to run natively on their own instruction set."
If they adopt the x86 instruction set, they don't have to go through a massive porting effort.
I've no plans to drop Reiser (still using v3 dern near everywhere) over something like this, but the serious question is this: What's going to happen to ReiserFS at this point? Would Hans have to turn over the copyright? Is there a precedent to be set here, take it out of his hands, whatever?
I use ReiserFS on a home machine, my wife's laptop, and a fileserver at work (with tail-packing ENABLED) and can't imagine doing without it. Anything comparable on the horizon?
That claim seems unlikely, as they made terra preta (well, them and other cultures) and terra preta-treated lands are STILL in high demand, as the soil is HIGHLY fertile.
I'm frankly amazed that y'all seem to have more information on the Mayans than even experts on the subject...not that I'm one, but when I saw your comment, 'terra preta' went through my head.
The price of gasoline was $0.30 USD/gallon in 1961. The value of the metal content of three 1961 dimes will buy you a gallon of gas in May 2008 dollars.
I still think the current situation is ridiculous, but let's put things in perspective. Not only do you not seem to understand inflation, you seem to not understand that United States peak oil does not equal WORLD peak oil.
And I love that the definition of "peak oil" has changed definitions so many times...it used to just be "peak production" but now it's "cheap oil," with "cheap oil" being whatever definition seems to work to shoehorn current economic conditions into the Peak Oil prophesy.
Right now, crops are being fertilized with chemical fertilizers whose components are mined and derived from natural gas. Pretty stupid to waste natural gas that way as a.) natural gas has most definitely peaked (though methane is a renewable resource) and b.) what, we're using something out of the ground to get nitrogen when it just floats about in the air we breathe?
And I realize the Peak Oil doomsday cultists have pinned their current hopes on chemical fertilizers, but those were used mainly because they were cheap, not because they make sense. Indeed, it would be better to build up topsoil. What, when someone told you that topsoil took 1000 years or so to build up an inch of the stuff, you believed it? No...not so much.
I don't know why the doomsday cultists have decided that humanity is out of ideas, but it's gone from scary to damned annoying. I'll agree that it seems humanity has gotten a bit too populous, but some ogranizations outside the U.N. think the human population may be on the decline, not on the rise.
So yeah, doomsday cultists...now that it looks like we might be able to transition from oil to electric, sure, pin your hopes on peak copper and all that other stuff. The world will continue to innovate. If there is to be a mass dieoff, it will likely be a black swan event, not oil, copper, and honest to God, iridium? We can live without iridium.
You have to understand that we have these doomsday cultists who have been let down by Peak Oil, though they're still rooting for it, who have moved on to Peak Natural Gas, Peak Phosphorous, Peak Iridium, Peak Zinc, Peak Copper, even Peak Arable Land, and so on. All of it easily debunked, but it doesn't stop them from ranting and raving.
I think the strategy at this point is to just keep spreading FUD to the point that there will be such widespread panic that 95% of the population will die even if there's no good reason for it.
You know, maybe you should get your information from the EIA and IEA, instead of trusting The Oil Drum. You'd realize that production still outstrips demand, and that worldwide production increased this year. Not that it always will, but for the moment that's true. Don't confuse market herd mentality with true supply problems.
The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!
Considering the level of outsourcing and the number of companies wishing to rid themselves of the United States altogether in favor of the growing BRIC market, I'm guessing that if you don't leave you'll be a subsistence farmer, like the rest of us.
The original three are "dreadful" by critics' standards. They're ALL predictable. Predictable is what made them funny, imho. They're supposed to be SERIALS, for Pete's sake.
I live in a broadband no-man's land but have multiple computers, and here's my solution. Warning: my primary machine is an Ubuntu box and I'm going to go light on details because I'm at work and don't have the details memorized.
First of all, I have my wireless router set up in "bridge" mode and let my main Ubuntu box handle DHCP and DNS requests. dhcpd and dnsmasq to the rescue. I had issues using dnsmasq's built-in dhcp server so I use them separately. Plus I use Firestarter for convenience's sake and Firestarter handles setting up dhcp just fine.
I have dnsmasq set up to hit OpenDNS's server rather than Earthlink's. Much faster, and way faster if the name is already cached.
Since most the internet traffic in the house is Web-based (even mail; I use gMail and my wife used Yahoo! Mail) I have squid set up to be a caching proxy.
You'd be surprised what a huge difference it's made. I mean, most the time you're visiting the same websites anyway, and when you do from multiple computers and multiple logins, it just makes sense to use a caching proxy.
There are decades of high-mileage cars. You just have to ask Exxon, Shell, etc. pretty please for all the plans they bought to keep 'em off the market.:->
Seriously, I remember reading about several such contenders in magazines such as, well, Popular Mechanics, and they never materialize.
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years? Why do I have to buy a hybrid to get a 35MPG Altima, when I owned a 6-cylinder '95 Intrepid with a 3.5L V6 just a few years ago that got a measly 35MPG when I drove with a lead foot? Who do they think they're fooling?
People, you may be mad about the price of gas, but you should be a lot madder.
Templates, a decent text editor, and a Markdown or Textile reader with the option of macros. Maybe a short Perl, Python, or Ruby script to cherry-pick your macros (I do something similar at work with vim, erb, and RedCloth.)
Bah. Macs don't cost that much money, especially when you consider how long you could be using them. Extreme case might be me; my work machine is a Sawtooth G4 running Tiger. With a tiny bit of fiddling, it does what I need to do just fine. The Sawtooth is what, 9 years old? Yeah...not too expensive. Show me someone who's using a 9-year-old knockoff PC in the same capacity I'm using that Sawtooth, and I'll show you a damn liar.
All very good. Now I'll throw in my $0.02 (which is worth what nowadays, about 0.01 Mexican pesos?)
I use Macs at work. They're very usable and aren't too much of a hassle.
I use Ubuntu at home. Once it's set up it's not much of a hassle. I switched back to GNOME 2.x from KDE 3.x mainly because of Avant Window Navigator, GNOME-Do, and GNOME's ability to work with Compiz-Fusion a bit nicer. While AWN isn't 100% feature compatible with the Tiger Dock, and while GNOME Do isn't as awesome as Quicksilver (what is?) they're close enough for me.
Both are awesome systems. If you want to take home something from the store that just works, a Mac is an awesome choice. If you'd like a "do what I want" geeky-yet-friendly experience from a PC, Ubuntu is a nice choice. If you want neither, eh, go get a PC running Vista, see if I care.;->
Dell seems to be learning a few things, though; maybe they'll figure a few things out. That neat little bamboo-covered PC they unveiled a few days ago looks pretty sweet; hey, Dell, offer me one of those with Hardy Heron on it and we'll talk.
Doesn't it seem odd though that they'd shut down Austin operations just as it became somewhat cost-effective to ship out of America?
Heh. I got a chuckle driving to work this morning listening to, of all things, NPR business news, in which Apple was described as a 'bellwether indicator.' You mean that company that was doomed to failure 10 years ago? LOL.
Give it 2-3 years and studios will give some more titles some HD love. Apparently the process used on the Star Wars classic trilogy can get enough detail out of a decent 35mm print to go to HD resolution. Apparently.
That's a fair point to make. A DVD looks fantastic on my TV. I really didn't need larger than a 32" HDTV for my living room (which is good as my budget was stretched for that;-) and DVDs look pretty damn good on it. To be fair I have an HD-A3 which upscales veeery nicely. Until prices come down a bit more I have no intention to switch.
In my mind, I really see the reason for most people to switch to Blu-Ray to be two things: 1.) more shiny gizmos on the discs and 2.) studios will probably drop DVD for BD at some point, if all goes well. And for that second reason, people will switch, and it's the same reason most people went to DVD.:->
Yep; the joy of our market-based economy. If you're not growing, who needs you?
It's amazing to me to read financial blogs and whatnot and find that many people think of lack of growth as "flatlining," as in dead. Um...no...to me, that would be maintaining your operations. But since that's not "profitable" that's not allowed. Plus there's that whole "inflation" thing that seems to be so necessary.
Silly me, I just figured that when MS had 98% of the market, that was pretty much it, time to improve the product lines and improve image, but noooo, they get put under pressure to keep trying new crap like consoles, competing with AppleTV, and whatnot.
That, and (assuming you're from the U.S.) the dollar is worth quite a bit less right now--remember, since they're largely from Japan, it's an international good, subject to the whims of the markets (which seem to be in full-on Armageddon mode right now.:-( )
And now to go even further off topic:
I find it hard to panic, and I hope not to have us all proven wrong for our optimism, but I suppose my problem is grasping how the world economy is going to fail because a bunch of asshats in urban markets bought a house that was far too expensive for their incomes. If I have to default on mine because of this, I'll be pissed--not that I would unless I had to, I feel it's my duty as one entity in a contract to fulfill my obligation. Now, if my expenses were to go prohibitively up and/or I lost my job, that's another story...let's hope this is basically a hiccup and that buttheads in SoCal will have to eat the soup they shat in.
Having said all that, I look forward to the inevitable Blu-Ray price drops later on. I have an HD DVD player and most the titles I want (which weren't many--I don't have, or want, a boatload of movies) and want something that justifies that TV I shelled out $600 in cash for! LOL
Sure, I work at a newspaper, but would likely have an IT job if I didn't like my job, and the area I work in, so well.:-)
The thing is, it's all part of the slow death spiral that journalism has been doing for a long time. Before amateurs were let loose on "news sites" doing the sort of work journalists were doing for free instead of the moderate living wage real journalists were getting.
The downside is that most the online journalists don't do their own research. Take a look at most the popular 'sites. Someone listed Fark, right? Fark's basically just a human-powered news aggregator with a snarky attitude. Slashdot? Sorry, but people submitting stories to this 'site are rarely right. Digg? Relies on other users to police whether or not a story is "accurate," meaning something totally inaccurate can get to the front and stay there...unless it's about Scientology, of course. *wink* And again, on Digg, they rely on--you guessed it--other sources.
I mention this because traditional news outlets have a "brilliant" new strategy: Let the reader provide the news. That's right, kids: Instead of someone leaving the office at the end of the day to cover council meetings, school board meetings, etc. we'll just rely on John Q. Citizen to be politically active enough to go cover that stuff. And we'll support it all with online advertising! And we'll centralize it all instead of leaving it to the local markets! Or even better, we'll have people creating the ad content on services like Mechanical Turk! Then we'll be rich, rich, rich!!!
Ugh. Whether it's a brilliant new downsizing strategy or the last gasp of old media, I can't tell, but I do wonder if any of these brilliant businessmen in several fields have considered something: After you've outsourced all the information jobs, just as you've done with manufacturing jobs, to foreign markets and to volunteers and/or to virtual sweatshops like mturk (some companies brag they pay "tens of dollars" for things they used to pay thousands for), who will the advertisers get their revenue from, since darn near everyone (at least in America) will be broke and out of work? And who will volunteer, since most unemployed people can't afford the computers to do volunteer work?
Slashdot Mirror
We pay more for less, don't we? MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
No, but HD-DVD players ran Windows CE.
I have an HD-A3 in my house I use as an upscaler. I think it might be the only thing in the house that runs Windows.
That, and they become a single point of failure.
Having seen a few commodity power supplies fail in the most spectacular manner possible makes me shudder to think that companies are willingly switching to massive power supplies just to save a few bucks.
"If they want to be really "free" from the western IT-world they don't have to care about running Windows, and when they don't have to care about that, they can just adopt gcc, the rest of GNU and Linux to run natively on their own instruction set."
If they adopt the x86 instruction set, they don't have to go through a massive porting effort.
I've no plans to drop Reiser (still using v3 dern near everywhere) over something like this, but the serious question is this: What's going to happen to ReiserFS at this point? Would Hans have to turn over the copyright? Is there a precedent to be set here, take it out of his hands, whatever?
I use ReiserFS on a home machine, my wife's laptop, and a fileserver at work (with tail-packing ENABLED) and can't imagine doing without it. Anything comparable on the horizon?
That claim seems unlikely, as they made terra preta (well, them and other cultures) and terra preta-treated lands are STILL in high demand, as the soil is HIGHLY fertile.
I'm frankly amazed that y'all seem to have more information on the Mayans than even experts on the subject...not that I'm one, but when I saw your comment, 'terra preta' went through my head.
And I don't think you understand the role of inflation...
http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Chart.asp
The price of gasoline was $0.30 USD/gallon in 1961. The value of the metal content of three 1961 dimes will buy you a gallon of gas in May 2008 dollars.
I still think the current situation is ridiculous, but let's put things in perspective. Not only do you not seem to understand inflation, you seem to not understand that United States peak oil does not equal WORLD peak oil.
And I love that the definition of "peak oil" has changed definitions so many times...it used to just be "peak production" but now it's "cheap oil," with "cheap oil" being whatever definition seems to work to shoehorn current economic conditions into the Peak Oil prophesy.
"And what are they fertilizing with?"
Right now, crops are being fertilized with chemical fertilizers whose components are mined and derived from natural gas. Pretty stupid to waste natural gas that way as a.) natural gas has most definitely peaked (though methane is a renewable resource) and b.) what, we're using something out of the ground to get nitrogen when it just floats about in the air we breathe?
And I realize the Peak Oil doomsday cultists have pinned their current hopes on chemical fertilizers, but those were used mainly because they were cheap, not because they make sense. Indeed, it would be better to build up topsoil. What, when someone told you that topsoil took 1000 years or so to build up an inch of the stuff, you believed it? No...not so much.
How to make topsoil
Bat guano sales are on the rise as well.
I don't know why the doomsday cultists have decided that humanity is out of ideas, but it's gone from scary to damned annoying. I'll agree that it seems humanity has gotten a bit too populous, but some ogranizations outside the U.N. think the human population may be on the decline, not on the rise.
So yeah, doomsday cultists...now that it looks like we might be able to transition from oil to electric, sure, pin your hopes on peak copper and all that other stuff. The world will continue to innovate. If there is to be a mass dieoff, it will likely be a black swan event, not oil, copper, and honest to God, iridium? We can live without iridium.
You have to understand that we have these doomsday cultists who have been let down by Peak Oil, though they're still rooting for it, who have moved on to Peak Natural Gas, Peak Phosphorous, Peak Iridium, Peak Zinc, Peak Copper, even Peak Arable Land, and so on. All of it easily debunked, but it doesn't stop them from ranting and raving.
I think the strategy at this point is to just keep spreading FUD to the point that there will be such widespread panic that 95% of the population will die even if there's no good reason for it.
You know, maybe you should get your information from the EIA and IEA, instead of trusting The Oil Drum. You'd realize that production still outstrips demand, and that worldwide production increased this year. Not that it always will, but for the moment that's true. Don't confuse market herd mentality with true supply problems.
Inelastic demand?
Not so much.
Peak oil a current reality? Perhaps, but you should look elsewhere for an explanation on why prices are sky high.
The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!
Considering the level of outsourcing and the number of companies wishing to rid themselves of the United States altogether in favor of the growing BRIC market, I'm guessing that if you don't leave you'll be a subsistence farmer, like the rest of us.
The original three are "dreadful" by critics' standards. They're ALL predictable. Predictable is what made them funny, imho. They're supposed to be SERIALS, for Pete's sake.
The second one is dreadful by MY standards.
I live in a broadband no-man's land but have multiple computers, and here's my solution. Warning: my primary machine is an Ubuntu box and I'm going to go light on details because I'm at work and don't have the details memorized.
First of all, I have my wireless router set up in "bridge" mode and let my main Ubuntu box handle DHCP and DNS requests. dhcpd and dnsmasq to the rescue. I had issues using dnsmasq's built-in dhcp server so I use them separately. Plus I use Firestarter for convenience's sake and Firestarter handles setting up dhcp just fine.
I have dnsmasq set up to hit OpenDNS's server rather than Earthlink's. Much faster, and way faster if the name is already cached.
Since most the internet traffic in the house is Web-based (even mail; I use gMail and my wife used Yahoo! Mail) I have squid set up to be a caching proxy.
You'd be surprised what a huge difference it's made. I mean, most the time you're visiting the same websites anyway, and when you do from multiple computers and multiple logins, it just makes sense to use a caching proxy.
There are decades of high-mileage cars. You just have to ask Exxon, Shell, etc. pretty please for all the plans they bought to keep 'em off the market. :->
Seriously, I remember reading about several such contenders in magazines such as, well, Popular Mechanics, and they never materialize.
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years? Why do I have to buy a hybrid to get a 35MPG Altima, when I owned a 6-cylinder '95 Intrepid with a 3.5L V6 just a few years ago that got a measly 35MPG when I drove with a lead foot? Who do they think they're fooling?
People, you may be mad about the price of gas, but you should be a lot madder.
Templates, a decent text editor, and a Markdown or Textile reader with the option of macros. Maybe a short Perl, Python, or Ruby script to cherry-pick your macros (I do something similar at work with vim, erb, and RedCloth.)
Hand-coding everything is just plain silly.
Bah. Macs don't cost that much money, especially when you consider how long you could be using them. Extreme case might be me; my work machine is a Sawtooth G4 running Tiger. With a tiny bit of fiddling, it does what I need to do just fine. The Sawtooth is what, 9 years old? Yeah...not too expensive. Show me someone who's using a 9-year-old knockoff PC in the same capacity I'm using that Sawtooth, and I'll show you a damn liar.
All very good. Now I'll throw in my $0.02 (which is worth what nowadays, about 0.01 Mexican pesos?)
;->
I use Macs at work. They're very usable and aren't too much of a hassle.
I use Ubuntu at home. Once it's set up it's not much of a hassle. I switched back to GNOME 2.x from KDE 3.x mainly because of Avant Window Navigator, GNOME-Do, and GNOME's ability to work with Compiz-Fusion a bit nicer. While AWN isn't 100% feature compatible with the Tiger Dock, and while GNOME Do isn't as awesome as Quicksilver (what is?) they're close enough for me.
Both are awesome systems. If you want to take home something from the store that just works, a Mac is an awesome choice. If you'd like a "do what I want" geeky-yet-friendly experience from a PC, Ubuntu is a nice choice. If you want neither, eh, go get a PC running Vista, see if I care.
Dell seems to be learning a few things, though; maybe they'll figure a few things out. That neat little bamboo-covered PC they unveiled a few days ago looks pretty sweet; hey, Dell, offer me one of those with Hardy Heron on it and we'll talk.
Doesn't it seem odd though that they'd shut down Austin operations just as it became somewhat cost-effective to ship out of America?
Heh. I got a chuckle driving to work this morning listening to, of all things, NPR business news, in which Apple was described as a 'bellwether indicator.' You mean that company that was doomed to failure 10 years ago? LOL.
Give it 2-3 years and studios will give some more titles some HD love. Apparently the process used on the Star Wars classic trilogy can get enough detail out of a decent 35mm print to go to HD resolution. Apparently.
That's a fair point to make. A DVD looks fantastic on my TV. I really didn't need larger than a 32" HDTV for my living room (which is good as my budget was stretched for that ;-) and DVDs look pretty damn good on it. To be fair I have an HD-A3 which upscales veeery nicely. Until prices come down a bit more I have no intention to switch.
:->
In my mind, I really see the reason for most people to switch to Blu-Ray to be two things: 1.) more shiny gizmos on the discs and 2.) studios will probably drop DVD for BD at some point, if all goes well. And for that second reason, people will switch, and it's the same reason most people went to DVD.
Yep; the joy of our market-based economy. If you're not growing, who needs you?
It's amazing to me to read financial blogs and whatnot and find that many people think of lack of growth as "flatlining," as in dead. Um...no...to me, that would be maintaining your operations. But since that's not "profitable" that's not allowed. Plus there's that whole "inflation" thing that seems to be so necessary.
Silly me, I just figured that when MS had 98% of the market, that was pretty much it, time to improve the product lines and improve image, but noooo, they get put under pressure to keep trying new crap like consoles, competing with AppleTV, and whatnot.
That, and (assuming you're from the U.S.) the dollar is worth quite a bit less right now--remember, since they're largely from Japan, it's an international good, subject to the whims of the markets (which seem to be in full-on Armageddon mode right now. :-( )
And now to go even further off topic:
I find it hard to panic, and I hope not to have us all proven wrong for our optimism, but I suppose my problem is grasping how the world economy is going to fail because a bunch of asshats in urban markets bought a house that was far too expensive for their incomes. If I have to default on mine because of this, I'll be pissed--not that I would unless I had to, I feel it's my duty as one entity in a contract to fulfill my obligation. Now, if my expenses were to go prohibitively up and/or I lost my job, that's another story...let's hope this is basically a hiccup and that buttheads in SoCal will have to eat the soup they shat in.
Having said all that, I look forward to the inevitable Blu-Ray price drops later on. I have an HD DVD player and most the titles I want (which weren't many--I don't have, or want, a boatload of movies) and want something that justifies that TV I shelled out $600 in cash for! LOL
Sure, I work at a newspaper, but would likely have an IT job if I didn't like my job, and the area I work in, so well. :-)
The thing is, it's all part of the slow death spiral that journalism has been doing for a long time. Before amateurs were let loose on "news sites" doing the sort of work journalists were doing for free instead of the moderate living wage real journalists were getting.
The downside is that most the online journalists don't do their own research. Take a look at most the popular 'sites. Someone listed Fark, right? Fark's basically just a human-powered news aggregator with a snarky attitude. Slashdot? Sorry, but people submitting stories to this 'site are rarely right. Digg? Relies on other users to police whether or not a story is "accurate," meaning something totally inaccurate can get to the front and stay there...unless it's about Scientology, of course. *wink* And again, on Digg, they rely on--you guessed it--other sources.
I mention this because traditional news outlets have a "brilliant" new strategy: Let the reader provide the news. That's right, kids: Instead of someone leaving the office at the end of the day to cover council meetings, school board meetings, etc. we'll just rely on John Q. Citizen to be politically active enough to go cover that stuff. And we'll support it all with online advertising! And we'll centralize it all instead of leaving it to the local markets! Or even better, we'll have people creating the ad content on services like Mechanical Turk! Then we'll be rich, rich, rich!!!
Ugh. Whether it's a brilliant new downsizing strategy or the last gasp of old media, I can't tell, but I do wonder if any of these brilliant businessmen in several fields have considered something: After you've outsourced all the information jobs, just as you've done with manufacturing jobs, to foreign markets and to volunteers and/or to virtual sweatshops like mturk (some companies brag they pay "tens of dollars" for things they used to pay thousands for), who will the advertisers get their revenue from, since darn near everyone (at least in America) will be broke and out of work? And who will volunteer, since most unemployed people can't afford the computers to do volunteer work?