Geeks are in love with the idea of "data haven": offshore data centers that supposedly put your data out of reach of the local authorities. Thing is, if you do business in a country, the authorities can force you to give up your data no matter where you keep it. The leverage the authorities have is not physical access to the data, it's physical access to you.
What Google is doing is not creating "data havens". They're just putting some of their operations outside U.S. jurisdiction. So, for example, if California ever imposes a tax on disk space on CA soil, Google won't have to pay it. (Boeing already does this when it sells airplanes: the buyers take delivery in international airspace, thus avoiding the Washington state sales tax.) But unless Google wants to move all its staff onto those ships and reincorporate in Sealand, their data is still subject to subpoena.
Do the airwaves even have the spare bandwidth to pump through a billion bits per second? Right now, providers are fighting over parts of the spectrum with much lower bandwidth.
Do you understand the difference between owning a company and running it? Yes, the government (and through it, the Party) owns all the major economic concerns in China. That does not imply that the CEOs of these companies check with the Party every time they make a decision. If they did, you'd be back to the centrally-planned economic structure they had in Mao's day, and China wouldn't the economic powerhouse it is today.
My god, an intelligent answer on the nuclear power issue. Give me a moment to recover from the shock...
OK then, your point about renewable resources being unproven is a good one. So maybe the expenses of nuclear power can be justified. I do emphasize "maybe".
But I think you're totally off base when you claim that most of these costs are avoidable. Congress can't legislate away training, mining, or construction costs. In theory they can legislate away the NIMBY lawsuits, but politically speaking, that's a non-starter. And:
Disposing of the wastes could be solved in the future
No, it has to be solved now, because it's already an issue, even with the small number of nuclear plants we currently have online. Storing on site, is not an answer — they're already doing that (because of the delays in getting disposal sites open) and the cost is horrendous. Besides, the lifetime of a nuclear power plant is maybe 50 years, whereas the waste has to be stored for centuries before it ceases to be dangerous.
Now consider: solar thermal wonks claim they can supply 90% of all U.S. energy needs with plants that would collectively cover about 9,000 square miles. Note that this is 90% of all our energy needs, not just our current consumption of electricity.
As you say, that's unproven technology, and also horrendously expensive (especially when you add in the costs of converting existing non-electrical systems to use electricity). But If I have to choose between a horrendously expensive program that promises to meet most of our needs, and a horrendously expensive program that would never meet more than a fraction of our needs, the choice is pretty clear.
And face it: however much you do to offset the risks of nuclear power, the risks are there. True, people overreact to them (you can blame knee-jerk enviromentalists, but I think bad SF movies are a bigger factor).That does not mean that all concerns are bogus. It may not be possible for a power plant to produce a nuclear explosion (something most people have trouble understanding), but there are real issues that won't go away completely.
When you tackles these kinds of issues, you always consider the worst case scenario, and never assume that you can engineer it away (as the designer of the Titanic learned the hard way. Maybe you can reduce the risks of nuclear power to an acceptable level, but let's stop pretending they don't exist.
If we didn't have other options, and nuclear power had the potential to make more than a marginal difference, I'd say the risks were worth taking. Not otherwise.
I would prefer they used Sears and Zemansky College version, but am afraid that schools couldn't afford it.
Gee, why not? It's only $150 (workbook $25 extra).
Of course, that's the 12th edition. You can get the 11th or 10th edition online for less than five bucks plus shipping. The 10th edition is only 8 years old. Has freshman physics changed that much in 8 years?
To avoid a monoculture, all we need is two rendering engines: one piece of bloatware that almost everybody uses because it's the de-facto standard, and one ubertech thing everybody else uses because we're so cool.
MSHTML has played the first role to everybody's satisfaction for many years now. We don't need a second candidate — unless you think a bloatware monoculture is a bad thing.
Actually, I saved about 50% when I switched from Progressive to Gecko, I mean GEICO. It's the insurer if well off enough be worth suing, but too cheap to replace your 10-year-old Honda that still runs great but has a negative Blue Book value.
I never said that the problems involved with nuclear power were insoluble. I said that they were too expensive. That was the whole point of my post. You simply ignored my argument and threw the Stupid Luddite Hippie boilerplate at me. Which is what happens any time I'm stupid enough to try to argue with a nuclear power fanboy.
No, they are all named after animals about whom you can make cute alliterations. I guess they could have named it Jovial Jellyfish or Junior Jaguar. Personally, I would have liked to see Jerky Jacksnipe. Perhaps somebody is just fond of the Jackalope "meme".
We've already beaten the safety issue to death — and true believers on both sides are never going to change their minds. So lets table the safety issue.
Instead, lets look at cost. Digging up fissionables is expensive (and uses a fair amount of fossil fuels). Building nuclear power plants is expensive. Training people to run them is expensive. Disposing of the waste (assuming you can find a place to put it) is expensive. Guarding the waste from Osama is expensive (especially if you factor in the thousands of years you need to guard it!). Decommissioning worn out plants is expensive.
Fighting NIMBY lawsuits related to all of the above: not cheap.
So instead of revisiting all the tired old arguments, just answer me one question: why bother? Why spend all that money just to provide power that will never meet more than a small percentage of our needs, when the same money spent on renewable sources seems much more likely to make a difference.
His version is that he used to be a fanatic, but got over it. Your version is that there nobody in the OS/2 community is a fanatic, but Brad is a jerk. Frankly, I find his version more credible.
If I may say so, Oz has a weird attitude towards time. Its the only country where the central region uses a time zone that's one half hour behind the eastern region. (Sign near the border: "Turn your clock back 30 minutes and your calendar back 30 years.") Then there's Western Australia, which tries to put things back in sync by making the whole huge state 2 hours behind the east coast. Doesn't quite work, because there's a tiny area near the border with South Australia that has its own unofficial time zone, 45 minutes ahead of the rest of the state!
In 2006, several Australian states decided at the last minute to postpone the end of DST, so more people could stay up and watch the Commonwealth Games. This was a major hassle for software platforms with embedded time zone information.
And in fact people who work with animals are the biggest opponents of DST. Their livestock refuses to change its habits just because clock time has changed.
What, you say you don't work with animals? Yes you do. You're a cat servant.
I have problems with most of your arguments, but I find I lack any inclination to argue with you point-by-point. Because all your arguments ignore one simple fact: there are no more proprietary systems any more. Everybody uses commodity technology. The closest thing we have to a proprietary system is the Mac, and even it is no longer proprietary on the hardware level.
The used to be tons of proprietary desktop system makers: Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, DEC, Convergent Technologies (my own former employer), Sinclair, Acorn, SGI, many more you never heard of. They're pretty much all gone. The biggest exception is Sun, and it's primarily a server company these days. And even that business is in trouble, because too much of the product line is proprietary technology.
So, an entire marketplace completely taken over by commodity computers, and you claim that one particular proprietary hardware platform (with a proprietary OS!) could have survived if their management hadn't been lazy. That's too absurd to argue about.
Building hybrids uses machinery that pollutes the environment. The solution? Ship the parts of a hybrid individually and get your customers to put the car together themselves.
And shipping stuff doesn't pollute the environment? You ship a bunch of parts to somebody, and it's going to go by diesel truck, diesel-powered ship, and jet airplane, all notorious polluters. Plus all the boxes and packing materials are going to go into the trash bin and/or recycling bin, where they will be hauled away by still more diesel trucks.
I'm getting a little tired of these green gimmicks. People think they can spend a little money or put up with a little inconvenience and Save the Planet. They're fooling themselves — and supplying material to those Nuke the Whales assholes who think the solution to all environmental issues is to poke fun at environmentalists.
If you really want to StP, agitate for real measures. Unfortunately, real measures hurt: taxes on non-renewable resources, taxes on pollution, putting up with slow and inconvenient public transit instead of convenient private vehicles, using less convenient forms of distribution that don't rely on monumental use of packaging.
As any athlete will tell you, change hurts. People who want to be green without making real sacrifices are as much in denial as any global warming "skeptic".
I deliberately omitted BSD because there's still a lot of development going on for it. Plus, Berkeley Unix was pretty big in the workstation world for a while (SunOS was originally based on it, before they switched to System V.) True, its advocates get a little rabid, but I was talking about denial, not fanaticism.
Yes, there are Windows fanatics. Even (and this boggles the mind) Vista fanatics. But once again, these folks are not in denial — or at least not in denial about the viability of their platform.
When I say "critical mass" I mean a self-sustaining level of adoption. Acorn MOS once dominated home computers in the UK. QNX once dominated computers in the Ontario provincial school system. Where are they now? Most people have never heard of them. (Though QNX is still widely used in embedded systems.) Temporarily dominating a small market is not "critical mass".
Yeah, and so what? The marketplace is littered with the corpses of superior OSs that didn't make it in the general-purpose marketplace (a few have survived as embedded systems): CP/M, QNX, GEOS, CTOS, etc. I'd prefer any of them to what we currently have. But we don't, and that's not going to change. Get over it.
Get real. I knew exactly one person who had one. Don't get me wrong, it was a great system, but there was just no market for it. Maybe if the Commodore execs had been total marketing geniuses, they could have stood off the IBM-compatible tsunami (which wiped out a dozen makers of proprietary platforms, including the one I worked for), and withstood Apple. But they faced long odds, and their failure to beat them had little to do with their work ethic.
In 1985 my sister and her husband asked for my advice on buying their first computer. Since he was a musician and the Amiga had some nice sound hardware, that's what I recommended. (I wasn't about to suggest the expensive business workstations my own company made.) But they ended up with a Mac. Why? Because his publisher used them, and he needed to share files with them. And once they had the system, they found the local Apple users community an essential resource—a resource they wouldn't have had if they'd followed my advice.
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks are in love with the idea of "data haven": offshore data centers that supposedly put your data out of reach of the local authorities. Thing is, if you do business in a country, the authorities can force you to give up your data no matter where you keep it. The leverage the authorities have is not physical access to the data, it's physical access to you.
What Google is doing is not creating "data havens". They're just putting some of their operations outside U.S. jurisdiction. So, for example, if California ever imposes a tax on disk space on CA soil, Google won't have to pay it. (Boeing already does this when it sells airplanes: the buyers take delivery in international airspace, thus avoiding the Washington state sales tax.) But unless Google wants to move all its staff onto those ships and reincorporate in Sealand, their data is still subject to subpoena.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/1822237&from=rss
Do the airwaves even have the spare bandwidth to pump through a billion bits per second? Right now, providers are fighting over parts of the spectrum with much lower bandwidth.
Now if they can just accept user feedback without acting like assholes, they'd really have something.
Do you understand the difference between owning a company and running it? Yes, the government (and through it, the Party) owns all the major economic concerns in China. That does not imply that the CEOs of these companies check with the Party every time they make a decision. If they did, you'd be back to the centrally-planned economic structure they had in Mao's day, and China wouldn't the economic powerhouse it is today.
My god, an intelligent answer on the nuclear power issue. Give me a moment to recover from the shock...
OK then, your point about renewable resources being unproven is a good one. So maybe the expenses of nuclear power can be justified. I do emphasize "maybe".
But I think you're totally off base when you claim that most of these costs are avoidable. Congress can't legislate away training, mining, or construction costs. In theory they can legislate away the NIMBY lawsuits, but politically speaking, that's a non-starter. And:
Disposing of the wastes could be solved in the future
No, it has to be solved now, because it's already an issue, even with the small number of nuclear plants we currently have online. Storing on site, is not an answer — they're already doing that (because of the delays in getting disposal sites open) and the cost is horrendous. Besides, the lifetime of a nuclear power plant is maybe 50 years, whereas the waste has to be stored for centuries before it ceases to be dangerous.
Now consider: solar thermal wonks claim they can supply 90% of all U.S. energy needs with plants that would collectively cover about 9,000 square miles. Note that this is 90% of all our energy needs, not just our current consumption of electricity.
As you say, that's unproven technology, and also horrendously expensive (especially when you add in the costs of converting existing non-electrical systems to use electricity). But If I have to choose between a horrendously expensive program that promises to meet most of our needs, and a horrendously expensive program that would never meet more than a fraction of our needs, the choice is pretty clear.
And face it: however much you do to offset the risks of nuclear power, the risks are there. True, people overreact to them (you can blame knee-jerk enviromentalists, but I think bad SF movies are a bigger factor).That does not mean that all concerns are bogus. It may not be possible for a power plant to produce a nuclear explosion (something most people have trouble understanding), but there are real issues that won't go away completely.
When you tackles these kinds of issues, you always consider the worst case scenario, and never assume that you can engineer it away (as the designer of the Titanic learned the hard way. Maybe you can reduce the risks of nuclear power to an acceptable level, but let's stop pretending they don't exist.
If we didn't have other options, and nuclear power had the potential to make more than a marginal difference, I'd say the risks were worth taking. Not otherwise.
I would prefer they used Sears and Zemansky College version, but am afraid that schools couldn't afford it.
Gee, why not? It's only $150 (workbook $25 extra).
Of course, that's the 12th edition. You can get the 11th or 10th edition online for less than five bucks plus shipping. The 10th edition is only 8 years old. Has freshman physics changed that much in 8 years?
You stated problems that no longer exist with nuclear power as being too expensive.
Really? OK then, how do you guard a nuclear waste dump for 1000 years at a reasonable cost?
To avoid a monoculture, all we need is two rendering engines: one piece of bloatware that almost everybody uses because it's the de-facto standard, and one ubertech thing everybody else uses because we're so cool.
MSHTML has played the first role to everybody's satisfaction for many years now. We don't need a second candidate — unless you think a bloatware monoculture is a bad thing.
Actually, I saved about 50% when I switched from Progressive to Gecko, I mean GEICO. It's the insurer if well off enough be worth suing, but too cheap to replace your 10-year-old Honda that still runs great but has a negative Blue Book value.
I never said that the problems involved with nuclear power were insoluble. I said that they were too expensive. That was the whole point of my post. You simply ignored my argument and threw the Stupid Luddite Hippie boilerplate at me. Which is what happens any time I'm stupid enough to try to argue with a nuclear power fanboy.
No, they are all named after animals about whom you can make cute alliterations. I guess they could have named it Jovial Jellyfish or Junior Jaguar. Personally, I would have liked to see Jerky Jacksnipe. Perhaps somebody is just fond of the Jackalope "meme".
Right. Nuclear power problems aren't real, it's just a disinformation campaign. Never mind, I thought I was talking to somebody with an open mind.
We've already beaten the safety issue to death — and true believers on both sides are never going to change their minds. So lets table the safety issue.
Instead, lets look at cost. Digging up fissionables is expensive (and uses a fair amount of fossil fuels). Building nuclear power plants is expensive. Training people to run them is expensive. Disposing of the waste (assuming you can find a place to put it) is expensive. Guarding the waste from Osama is expensive (especially if you factor in the thousands of years you need to guard it!). Decommissioning worn out plants is expensive.
Fighting NIMBY lawsuits related to all of the above: not cheap.
So instead of revisiting all the tired old arguments, just answer me one question: why bother? Why spend all that money just to provide power that will never meet more than a small percentage of our needs, when the same money spent on renewable sources seems much more likely to make a difference.
His version is that he used to be a fanatic, but got over it. Your version is that there nobody in the OS/2 community is a fanatic, but Brad is a jerk. Frankly, I find his version more credible.
If I may say so, Oz has a weird attitude towards time. Its the only country where the central region uses a time zone that's one half hour behind the eastern region. (Sign near the border: "Turn your clock back 30 minutes and your calendar back 30 years.") Then there's Western Australia, which tries to put things back in sync by making the whole huge state 2 hours behind the east coast. Doesn't quite work, because there's a tiny area near the border with South Australia that has its own unofficial time zone, 45 minutes ahead of the rest of the state!
In 2006, several Australian states decided at the last minute to postpone the end of DST, so more people could stay up and watch the Commonwealth Games. This was a major hassle for software platforms with embedded time zone information.
And in fact people who work with animals are the biggest opponents of DST. Their livestock refuses to change its habits just because clock time has changed.
What, you say you don't work with animals? Yes you do. You're a cat servant.
I have problems with most of your arguments, but I find I lack any inclination to argue with you point-by-point. Because all your arguments ignore one simple fact: there are no more proprietary systems any more. Everybody uses commodity technology. The closest thing we have to a proprietary system is the Mac, and even it is no longer proprietary on the hardware level.
The used to be tons of proprietary desktop system makers: Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, DEC, Convergent Technologies (my own former employer), Sinclair, Acorn, SGI, many more you never heard of. They're pretty much all gone. The biggest exception is Sun, and it's primarily a server company these days. And even that business is in trouble, because too much of the product line is proprietary technology.
So, an entire marketplace completely taken over by commodity computers, and you claim that one particular proprietary hardware platform (with a proprietary OS!) could have survived if their management hadn't been lazy. That's too absurd to argue about.
Gee, how can I disagree with your when your arguments are so persuasive?
Building hybrids uses machinery that pollutes the environment. The solution? Ship the parts of a hybrid individually and get your customers to put the car together themselves.
And shipping stuff doesn't pollute the environment? You ship a bunch of parts to somebody, and it's going to go by diesel truck, diesel-powered ship, and jet airplane, all notorious polluters. Plus all the boxes and packing materials are going to go into the trash bin and/or recycling bin, where they will be hauled away by still more diesel trucks.
I'm getting a little tired of these green gimmicks. People think they can spend a little money or put up with a little inconvenience and Save the Planet. They're fooling themselves — and supplying material to those Nuke the Whales assholes who think the solution to all environmental issues is to poke fun at environmentalists.
If you really want to StP, agitate for real measures. Unfortunately, real measures hurt: taxes on non-renewable resources, taxes on pollution, putting up with slow and inconvenient public transit instead of convenient private vehicles, using less convenient forms of distribution that don't rely on monumental use of packaging.
As any athlete will tell you, change hurts. People who want to be green without making real sacrifices are as much in denial as any global warming "skeptic".
I deliberately omitted BSD because there's still a lot of development going on for it. Plus, Berkeley Unix was pretty big in the workstation world for a while (SunOS was originally based on it, before they switched to System V.) True, its advocates get a little rabid, but I was talking about denial, not fanaticism.
Yes, there are Windows fanatics. Even (and this boggles the mind) Vista fanatics. But once again, these folks are not in denial — or at least not in denial about the viability of their platform.
When I say "critical mass" I mean a self-sustaining level of adoption. Acorn MOS once dominated home computers in the UK. QNX once dominated computers in the Ontario provincial school system. Where are they now? Most people have never heard of them. (Though QNX is still widely used in embedded systems.) Temporarily dominating a small market is not "critical mass".
Yeah, and so what? The marketplace is littered with the corpses of superior OSs that didn't make it in the general-purpose marketplace (a few have survived as embedded systems): CP/M, QNX, GEOS, CTOS, etc. I'd prefer any of them to what we currently have. But we don't, and that's not going to change. Get over it.
Amiga PCs were everywhere
Get real. I knew exactly one person who had one. Don't get me wrong, it was a great system, but there was just no market for it. Maybe if the Commodore execs had been total marketing geniuses, they could have stood off the IBM-compatible tsunami (which wiped out a dozen makers of proprietary platforms, including the one I worked for), and withstood Apple. But they faced long odds, and their failure to beat them had little to do with their work ethic.
In 1985 my sister and her husband asked for my advice on buying their first computer. Since he was a musician and the Amiga had some nice sound hardware, that's what I recommended. (I wasn't about to suggest the expensive business workstations my own company made.) But they ended up with a Mac. Why? Because his publisher used them, and he needed to share files with them. And once they had the system, they found the local Apple users community an essential resource—a resource they wouldn't have had if they'd followed my advice.
Probably worked better on OS/2! I think all replacement shells play havoc with Windows. Too many poorly documented APIs to screw up with.
It's not fair to make fun of OS/2.
We're not making fun of OS/2. We're making fun of the losers who wont admit to themselves that the ship has sailed.