Exactly... I worked in a asphalt testing lab once upon a time. My role was to quantify the strength of different asphalt against different traffic load...
My boss was a very experienced road engineer. He told me the road damage by overloaded vehicle could be instantaneous and clearly a function of vehicle weight and tyre type....
There was an extreme case involving an overloaded logging truck... In a cold winter dawn, the truck driver decided to drive off at the max speed regardless... The chips broke off from the asphalt and left a couple of tracks along a 10km stretch of just-sealed road. The damage is in the range of millions....
The frequency of update unfortunately is linked to the amount of cash I get hold of... On the other hand, whenever that's the time for update, I will depend upon the catalog... Especially for computer related deals, you can notice that there is a sharp rise in performance/price ratio starting from some mid range item. Usually, that's the most cost effective solution.
When I read the title of the article, I thought they are talking about Christopher Reeve's funeral. I would not be surprised if he decided to arrange his ash in that way (fly to the Space)...
In soviet whereever, it is called the abolish of political rights....
In former communist bloc, the felony disenfranchisement laws were implemented as part of the sentence.... The news might report such and such political prisoner (or real criminal) was sentenced to n years of jail and the *abolish of political rights* for m years....
It is plainly stupid to keep such a backward law. With exception to convictions like corruption/ sabotage charges related to previous elections, most democratic nations have got rid of such law. The criminals have already served the time in jail.
I can imagine that guy is genuinely happy. Even the Chinese space agency is not deep pocket when compared with NASA, it is still much richer than the average local village and any citizen living in that sort of house.
The satellite's reentry capsule, which is orders of magnitude more expensive than that guys' house, can be now retrieved. The officiers, engineers and scientist were happy... They bought in the helicopter initially. But, the air movement generated is deemed a bit dangerous to the roof surrounding that house... Then they call in a specialist crane to take it out... None is cheap
That guy will be in very good mood if they promise to fix that guy's fairly fragile house. Only about $1000 will do....
I always view the goal of robotics development as the advance of intelligent mechantronics device... The cool things mentioned are cool mechantronics device (Honda humanoid robot, the tiny swimming bot etc). They are remotely controlled, make possible because of the improvements in control theory (humanoid robot) and MEMS (tiny bots).
In terms of the intelligence, there aren't much improvements...
How about just delivery? Early stage experiment suggests that "rail gun" type of approach is a much cheaper way in substitute for the next generation of cruise missile. Maybe it is possible to get a fixed link to fire parcel from NY to LA.... To avoid excessive damage to the parcel, some parachute mechanism will be neccessary... But, hey, nothing is impossible.... esp for something economically marginally viable in the near future.
BTW, I should now pop to the accountant's office to register my ICBM Delivery Inc now:-)
Put that the other way round, antimatter bomb may make sense in terms of energy. Now, we know 1MT of TNT equals to about 4.6e15 J.
A typical modern nuclear station is rated at 1000MW. 1000MW * 3600 *24 *365 = 3.2e16 J / yr = 6.9 MT TNT of energy/yr. Say, after a decade, the scientists manage to improve the process such that the energy conversion efficiency reaches about 1%. The production of antimatter would equal to 69000 T of TNT of energy/yr.
Consider the mini-nuke DoD wants to develop has about 1kT yield. A nuclear plant can give sufficient energy for make about 70 antimatter bombs. That's quite a lot and I am quite sure Pentagon is rich enough to devote more than a nuclear plant for the production if it wants.
Some may ask why small antimatter bomb matters. Mini-nuke bomb can be delivered by a cruise missile or even a 155mm cannon shell anyway... However, it paves the way for satellite based antimatter bomb program. You can load a geosync satellite, place that above whoever you don't like and annihilate at will... That's pretty evil.... but.....
OTOH, I see there may be peaceful use for this... The energy content of this is so high that it may be useful for triggering fusion reaction for electricity generation. Any physics people around here to comment on this?
I just think of a funny story when I was in an international robotics conference a couple of years ago... The organiser gave all of us a 10mW (yes, 10mW rather the legal limit of 5mW) red laser pointer as a sourvneir... A oldish professor started using it in the first workshop right after he had got that.... The big problem was he fired the laser on the highly glossy white board surface almost continously. In the next fifteen minutes, I found the majority of the participants were staring down the floor. Every one was sick of that....
Or that India's cryogenic engine came of age on April 18, 2001 when India bustled into the exclusive GSL club?
It is still an impressive development. However, the cryogenic engine that they are using is a Russian import. The Indians build their own fuel tank and pumping system... Quote from the article "India is using the (Russian) engine as a component in the GSLV, but without a technology transfer." "It is a technology which has never been used by India before," Narasimha (Director of Indian National Institute of Advanced Studies) said.
And finally, when the heck were space programs within on close to their budget? 88 million? More like 500-900 million $.
I don't believe such a mission can be completed in $88M either.
Let's forget about the more expensive US or EU rockets in the mean time.... The cost of a Russian Proton Rocket is about $100M. The cost of the Soyuz-Fregat is about $50M... But, the thrust is probably too low to push a meaningful size payload to the moon orbit. The Chinese Long March is on par of that... Indian's IT infrastructure is better than the Russian and the Chinese. But, heavy industry is what the Russian is very very good at. I can see no cost advantage from India at this stage. In terms of labour cost, China is as cheap. In terms of natural resources, Russia is the king.
So, the $88M is likely to be the cost of consumables... excluding any running cost of the space centre, extra equipment purchased for the project, labour cost associated with R&D. These associated costs are usually a one to two orders of magnitude higher for the initial flight. (compare the price of F22 with the initial development cost) $500M to $1000M is about reasonable.
The Indian Space Agency may try to create an impression that they can do the project under a very very low budget...
Yes, but, you've overlooked the fact that the radioactivity for such isotopes (half life > 1x10^9) is very very low... Basically, you are fine if you don't inhale its dust, make you spoon out of it or sleep on it...
The most hazardous substance in nuclear waste are those substance with a fairly long, but not extremely long half life (Plutonium-239, half life 24000 yr)...
I strongly agree with your analysis regarding North Korea... No one in Asia (the world??) really likes them. The only reason China and Russia kind of support them is because they want to avoid American Army from setting up bases too close to their border...
There was an alleged spying incidence last year, in which the North Korea spies tried to infiltrate Japan using a fish boat with fake Chinese fishing boat registration and flag. The Japanese coastal guard carried out a hot pursuit and entered the Chinese economic exclusion zone... After a brief gun fight, the North Korean spies set off a bomb to sink their boat and committed suicide... Initially, the diplomats between China and Japan all got mad and started pointing fingers... After the boat sank, items scattered around indicates a North Korea origin. At the end, every one wants to give Kim Jin II a punch....
By the way, the North Korea spies are known to be well trained in language (remember they hijacked some Japaneses before so that the spies can learn the latest slangs...). It makes them indistinguable from the other Asians in wartime. You cannot discount the possiblity that other lunatics in the world may employ similar strategy in the future... The most likely route to deliver a surprise nuclear attack is through cargo ship, fishing boat, trucks or even at the back of an elephant. Missile is just way too obvious, expensive and ineffective.
Interesting numbers (from another post I saw here). Maybe the most telling is how the average person makes $5000 (US Equiv), but how many more cellphone there are. Does this mean there is a higher willingness to adopt new technology in China? Or do they just like cellphones more than 'we' do? Maybe they don't have to put up with Sprint....
I noticed that the East Asian markets (Japan, South Korea, big cities in China, Singapore...) have a much stronger demand for some high tech products, e.g. cell phone, PDA then the "West". And I tried to explain this in terms of the culture... After a while, I found my analysis is inconclusive. Now, I think there are two main camps of customers in a developed region: suburban vs city dweller. In the first camp, the customers enjoy a more comfortable living area. They tend to spend more of their disposable income in car, home improvement, outdoor sport, travel etc. Most places in US, Canada, Australia are like that. In the second camp, people simply don't have that much of space in their houses; resorts, ski-field or surf beaches are far far away. The extra cash will more likely to go into gadgets (new cell phone, PDA/laptop, iPod etc) more delicated restaurant food and such. The mentioned East Asian cities and metropolitian area in the West, e.g. London and New York are good examples... So, I guess it is more related to the urban development pattern than just culture.
It depends on who is going to develop Linux in China (or other developing countries). If the govt officially hire some programmer to do that with the entire country using the same binary, then the contribution may not release back to the community and thus a violation of GPL and blahblah...
On the other hand, if the development process is done by academics, hackers, multiple number of companies, they will have to share the new development with their fellow programmers.
One of the main concern in terms of FOSS development is how to merge these contribs back to the main tree. Language/culture factors make them (to a certain extend, Japanese as well) shy/relunctant to participate in the main site dominated by English speaking people.
Even at this moment, my observation is the Chinese hackers are fairly active in the embedded development front (ARM on new chips, ucLinux etc). It is not that surprising considering electronics device is a rapid growing industry over there (c.f. India is more on the entreprise software side)...
I was working on some embedded project recently. The only working toolset is available from China (jtag/uclinux toolchain for a not very mainstream Samsung ARM chip). They do share code in forum, but, not in a conveinent way. Usually, some "big shrimp" (elite hacker) will release something that have worked on when replying one of the dicussion thread. It makes life hell searching for the useful info.
The Dragon Chip has a MIPS instruction set. Basically, you cannot run windows on it... The intention is not to run that as a desktop CPU either. According to an interview to the chip designer, they stay away from x86 worrying about royalities, patent and other IP issues. They also know it is tough to compete in the x86 low end market....
The main market they want to penetrate should be something that runs embedded linux for routers, settop box etc. At this moment, most existing implementations uses either ARM or MIPS type of chips. The performance of Dragon Chip should be on par of those on the market... On the other hand, I cannot see any real commerical design using it on the market just yet. Any idea whether their commericalisation plan is still on track?
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it is a real concern. Considering that the best anti-tank missile nowadays can penentrate to a equivalent of about 1-m steel plate, it is hard to design a shield that can survive that sort of attack... The next crucial question to ask is whether it will fail gracifully like the pebble bed reactor mentioned in yestersday's slashdot question...
If not so, this new portable reactor design will probably be more suitable for powering remote area in developed country, e.g. Alaska, arctic region in Finland, Norway etc.
The social cost of coal-fired power plant is especially high in China.... The number of coal miners directly killed in mining accident is close to 7000 each year. Those miner killed by chronic respiration disease due to the exposure to dust is a few times more than this.... One more bad news is the coal ore is generally of poor quality (high sulphur varient) over there... Combining all these factors, modern nuclear plants can be considered as clean and green to many Chinese....
Re:Supply of uranium for nuclear power is limited?
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Yes and no. The current nuclear technology relies on the U-235. The natural uranium ore consists of about 0.7% of U-235, with the rest U-238. In other words, even if the utilisation is 100% (far from reality, more like only 1 % of U-235 has been fissioned), we have used up only 0.7% of the material.
In a normal pressurised water reactor, one third of the energy is contributed by plutonium (Pu-239), produced by the bombardment of U-238 with neutrons. It is possible to optimise the production of Pu-239 using a design known as fast breeder reactor. With reprocessing downstream, new fuel rods can be generated... This can extend the available fuel by hundreds of times. Not to mention the possiblity to go for the thorium route... Thorium is at least three times as abundant as uranium, on par of lead.
The breeding and reprocessing technologies are quite messy at this moment. But, there are a lot of rooms for improvement.
The 30 reactor is refering to conventional 1000MW PWR they are going to build... But, the Chinese has figure out they need about 300,000MW of electricity at the end. This equivalent to 300 conventional reactors...
As mentioned in the Wired article, one of the main advantage of the pebble bed is modular design... For small rural town transforming into big city, they can daisy chain 4-5 pebble bed reactors to generate 1000MW.... So, if China is really going to roll out the grand pebble bed reactor plan, they will need about 5 times more reactors than using conventional pressurised water reactors...
I don't care, neither do the younger guys in my lab.
But, my supervisor does that. The simple reason is he has a couple of kids... He only allows them to use the CD copies. I do see scratch marks on his CDRs.
In other words, he is telling me the movie or software or music in the DVD/CD is something I physically own. If I like, I can borrow, give, hire the cognac glasses to whoever I want (I don't think I can hire video to my neighbour. it can get busted by MPAA). I can re-export the item to whereever I like (I don't think I can sell DVD to out-of zone area or there is any zoning issue regarding the use of cognac glasses)....
They can't pick everything only to their advantage. I am talking about play fair. If I am not buying your movie, but buying the right to watch the movie for myself, give me back the goddamned right to make copies. If I am phyiscally owning a movie, I am fine for that. Remove the DVD zoning and the video rental restrictions then.
The CNet articles explains why the 12-way version is cheaper on a per CPU basis. The chips of the smaller 12CPU version are all mounted on single board and connected with 1Gb ethernet... While the 96-way version connects eigth 12-way CPU board with 10Gb ethernet... The high speed communication may make the 96-way system more expensive to start with.
There is also the utilization isssue, programming tasks hardly require 96 processors except on compile and link.
However, computer users are more than just programmers and/or IT people... Many scientific applications and animations require parallel computing... Basically, the more the better for them. They can use up any resources you throw to them. To them, the $800/CPU pricetag is not that expensive... A Sun 8-CPU machine costs them way more than $10k... A dual Xeon Dell machine with 8GB RAM/ 800GB HDD cost more than $7200...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly... I worked in a asphalt testing lab once upon a time. My role was to quantify the strength of different asphalt against different traffic load...
... In a cold winter dawn, the truck driver decided to drive off at the max speed regardless... The chips broke off from the asphalt and left a couple of tracks along a 10km stretch of just-sealed road. The damage is in the range of millions....
My boss was a very experienced road engineer. He told me the road damage by overloaded vehicle could be instantaneous and clearly a function of vehicle weight and tyre type....
There was an extreme case involving an overloaded logging truck
The frequency of update unfortunately is linked to the amount of cash I get hold of... On the other hand, whenever that's the time for update, I will depend upon the catalog... Especially for computer related deals, you can notice that there is a sharp rise in performance/price ratio starting from some mid range item. Usually, that's the most cost effective solution.
When I read the title of the article, I thought they are talking about Christopher Reeve's funeral. I would not be surprised if he decided to arrange his ash in that way (fly to the Space)...
In soviet whereever, it is called the abolish of political rights....
In former communist bloc, the felony disenfranchisement laws were implemented as part of the sentence.... The news might report such and such political prisoner (or real criminal) was sentenced to n years of jail and the *abolish of political rights* for m years....
It is plainly stupid to keep such a backward law. With exception to convictions like corruption/ sabotage charges related to previous elections, most democratic nations have got rid of such law. The criminals have already served the time in jail.
I can imagine that guy is genuinely happy. Even the Chinese space agency is not deep pocket when compared with NASA, it is still much richer than the average local village and any citizen living in that sort of house.
The satellite's reentry capsule, which is orders of magnitude more expensive than that guys' house, can be now retrieved. The officiers, engineers and scientist were happy... They bought in the helicopter initially. But, the air movement generated is deemed a bit dangerous to the roof surrounding that house... Then they call in a specialist crane to take it out... None is cheap
That guy will be in very good mood if they promise to fix that guy's fairly fragile house. Only about $1000 will do....
I always view the goal of robotics development as the advance of intelligent mechantronics device... The cool things mentioned are cool mechantronics device (Honda humanoid robot, the tiny swimming bot etc). They are remotely controlled, make possible because of the improvements in control theory (humanoid robot) and MEMS (tiny bots).
In terms of the intelligence, there aren't much improvements...
How about just delivery? Early stage experiment suggests that "rail gun" type of approach is a much cheaper way in substitute for the next generation of cruise missile. Maybe it is possible to get a fixed link to fire parcel from NY to LA.... To avoid excessive damage to the parcel, some parachute mechanism will be neccessary... But, hey, nothing is impossible.... esp for something economically marginally viable in the near future.
:-)
BTW, I should now pop to the accountant's office to register my ICBM Delivery Inc now
Put that the other way round, antimatter bomb may make sense in terms of energy. Now, we know 1MT of TNT equals to about 4.6e15 J.
/yr. Say, after a decade, the scientists manage to improve the process such that the energy conversion efficiency reaches about 1%. The production of antimatter would equal to 69000 T of TNT of energy /yr.
A typical modern nuclear station is rated at 1000MW.
1000MW * 3600 *24 *365 = 3.2e16 J / yr = 6.9 MT TNT of energy
Consider the mini-nuke DoD wants to develop has about 1kT yield. A nuclear plant can give sufficient energy for make about 70 antimatter bombs. That's quite a lot and I am quite sure Pentagon is rich enough to devote more than a nuclear plant for the production if it wants.
Some may ask why small antimatter bomb matters. Mini-nuke bomb can be delivered by a cruise missile or even a 155mm cannon shell anyway... However, it paves the way for satellite based antimatter bomb program. You can load a geosync satellite, place that above whoever you don't like and annihilate at will... That's pretty evil.... but.....
OTOH, I see there may be peaceful use for this... The energy content of this is so high that it may be useful for triggering fusion reaction for electricity generation. Any physics people around here to comment on this?
I know their agenda. Their next is to block the access to the devil avocating BSD and its submissive linux partner.
:-)
For those who have not caught the joke, please load the images
I just think of a funny story when I was in an international robotics conference a couple of years ago... The organiser gave all of us a 10mW (yes, 10mW rather the legal limit of 5mW) red laser pointer as a sourvneir... A oldish professor started using it in the first workshop right after he had got that.... The big problem was he fired the laser on the highly glossy white board surface almost continously. In the next fifteen minutes, I found the majority of the participants were staring down the floor. Every one was sick of that....
It is still an impressive development. However, the cryogenic engine that they are using is a Russian import. The Indians build their own fuel tank and pumping system... Quote from the article "India is using the (Russian) engine as a component in the GSLV, but without a technology transfer." "It is a technology which has never been used by India before," Narasimha (Director of Indian National Institute of Advanced Studies) said.
I don't believe such a mission can be completed in $88M either.
Let's forget about the more expensive US or EU rockets in the mean time....
The cost of a Russian Proton Rocket is about $100M. The cost of the Soyuz-Fregat is about $50M... But, the thrust is probably too low to push a meaningful size payload to the moon orbit. The Chinese Long March is on par of that... Indian's IT infrastructure is better than the Russian and the Chinese. But, heavy industry is what the Russian is very very good at. I can see no cost advantage from India at this stage. In terms of labour cost, China is as cheap. In terms of natural resources, Russia is the king.
So, the $88M is likely to be the cost of consumables... excluding any running cost of the space centre, extra equipment purchased for the project, labour cost associated with R&D. These associated costs are usually a one to two orders of magnitude higher for the initial flight. (compare the price of F22 with the initial development cost) $500M to $1000M is about reasonable.
The Indian Space Agency may try to create an impression that they can do the project under a very very low budget...
Yes, but, you've overlooked the fact that the radioactivity for such isotopes (half life > 1x10^9) is very very low... Basically, you are fine if you don't inhale its dust, make you spoon out of it or sleep on it...
The most hazardous substance in nuclear waste are those substance with a fairly long, but not extremely long half life (Plutonium-239, half life 24000 yr)...
In terms of DIY, not many people can beat that guy
I strongly agree with your analysis regarding North Korea... No one in Asia (the world??) really likes them. The only reason China and Russia kind of support them is because they want to avoid American Army from setting up bases too close to their border...
There was an alleged spying incidence last year, in which the North Korea spies tried to infiltrate Japan using a fish boat with fake Chinese fishing boat registration and flag. The Japanese coastal guard carried out a hot pursuit and entered the Chinese economic exclusion zone... After a brief gun fight, the North Korean spies set off a bomb to sink their boat and committed suicide... Initially, the diplomats between China and Japan all got mad and started pointing fingers... After the boat sank, items scattered around indicates a North Korea origin. At the end, every one wants to give Kim Jin II a punch....
By the way, the North Korea spies are known to be well trained in language (remember they hijacked some Japaneses before so that the spies can learn the latest slangs...). It makes them indistinguable from the other Asians in wartime. You cannot discount the possiblity that other lunatics in the world may employ similar strategy in the future... The most likely route to deliver a surprise nuclear attack is through cargo ship, fishing boat, trucks or even at the back of an elephant. Missile is just way too obvious, expensive and ineffective.
I noticed that the East Asian markets (Japan, South Korea, big cities in China, Singapore...) have a much stronger demand for some high tech products, e.g. cell phone, PDA then the "West". And I tried to explain this in terms of the culture... After a while, I found my analysis is inconclusive. Now, I think there are two main camps of customers in a developed region: suburban vs city dweller. In the first camp, the customers enjoy a more comfortable living area. They tend to spend more of their disposable income in car, home improvement, outdoor sport, travel etc. Most places in US, Canada, Australia are like that. In the second camp, people simply don't have that much of space in their houses; resorts, ski-field or surf beaches are far far away. The extra cash will more likely to go into gadgets (new cell phone, PDA/laptop, iPod etc) more delicated restaurant food and such. The mentioned East Asian cities and metropolitian area in the West, e.g. London and New York are good examples... So, I guess it is more related to the urban development pattern than just culture.
It depends on who is going to develop Linux in China (or other developing countries). If the govt officially hire some programmer to do that with the entire country using the same binary, then the contribution may not release back to the community and thus a violation of GPL and blahblah...
On the other hand, if the development process is done by academics, hackers, multiple number of companies, they will have to share the new development with their fellow programmers.
One of the main concern in terms of FOSS development is how to merge these contribs back to the main tree. Language/culture factors make them (to a certain extend, Japanese as well) shy/relunctant to participate in the main site dominated by English speaking people.
Even at this moment, my observation is the Chinese hackers are fairly active in the embedded development front (ARM on new chips, ucLinux etc). It is not that surprising considering electronics device is a rapid growing industry over there (c.f. India is more on the entreprise software side)...
I was working on some embedded project recently. The only working toolset is available from China (jtag/uclinux toolchain for a not very mainstream Samsung ARM chip). They do share code in forum, but, not in a conveinent way. Usually, some "big shrimp" (elite hacker) will release something that have worked on when replying one of the dicussion thread. It makes life hell searching for the useful info.
The Dragon Chip has a MIPS instruction set. Basically, you cannot run windows on it... The intention is not to run that as a desktop CPU either. According to an interview to the chip designer, they stay away from x86 worrying about royalities, patent and other IP issues. They also know it is tough to compete in the x86 low end market....
The main market they want to penetrate should be something that runs embedded linux for routers, settop box etc. At this moment, most existing implementations uses either ARM or MIPS type of chips. The performance of Dragon Chip should be on par of those on the market... On the other hand, I cannot see any real commerical design using it on the market just yet. Any idea whether their commericalisation plan is still on track?
Yes, it is a real concern. Considering that the best anti-tank missile nowadays can penentrate to a equivalent of about 1-m steel plate, it is hard to design a shield that can survive that sort of attack... The next crucial question to ask is whether it will fail gracifully like the pebble bed reactor mentioned in yestersday's slashdot question...
If not so, this new portable reactor design will probably be more suitable for powering remote area in developed country, e.g. Alaska, arctic region in Finland, Norway etc.
The social cost of coal-fired power plant is especially high in China.... The number of coal miners directly killed in mining accident is close to 7000 each year. Those miner killed by chronic respiration disease due to the exposure to dust is a few times more than this.... One more bad news is the coal ore is generally of poor quality (high sulphur varient) over there... Combining all these factors, modern nuclear plants can be considered as clean and green to many Chinese....
Yes and no. The current nuclear technology relies on the U-235. The natural uranium ore consists of about 0.7% of U-235, with the rest U-238. In other words, even if the utilisation is 100% (far from reality, more like only 1 % of U-235 has been fissioned), we have used up only 0.7% of the material.
In a normal pressurised water reactor, one third of the energy is contributed by plutonium (Pu-239), produced by the bombardment of U-238 with neutrons. It is possible to optimise the production of Pu-239 using a design known as fast breeder reactor. With reprocessing downstream, new fuel rods can be generated... This can extend the available fuel by hundreds of times. Not to mention the possiblity to go for the thorium route... Thorium is at least three times as abundant as uranium, on par of lead.
The breeding and reprocessing technologies are quite messy at this moment. But, there are a lot of rooms for improvement.
The 30 reactor is refering to conventional 1000MW PWR they are going to build... But, the Chinese has figure out they need about 300,000MW of electricity at the end. This equivalent to 300 conventional reactors...
As mentioned in the Wired article, one of the main advantage of the pebble bed is modular design... For small rural town transforming into big city, they can daisy chain 4-5 pebble bed reactors to generate 1000MW.... So, if China is really going to roll out the grand pebble bed reactor plan, they will need about 5 times more reactors than using conventional pressurised water reactors...
I don't care, neither do the younger guys in my lab.
But, my supervisor does that. The simple reason is he has a couple of kids... He only allows them to use the CD copies. I do see scratch marks on his CDRs.
In other words, he is telling me the movie or software or music in the DVD/CD is something I physically own. If I like, I can borrow, give, hire the cognac glasses to whoever I want (I don't think I can hire video to my neighbour. it can get busted by MPAA). I can re-export the item to whereever I like (I don't think I can sell DVD to out-of zone area or there is any zoning issue regarding the use of cognac glasses)....
They can't pick everything only to their advantage. I am talking about play fair. If I am not buying your movie, but buying the right to watch the movie for myself, give me back the goddamned right to make copies. If I am phyiscally owning a movie, I am fine for that. Remove the DVD zoning and the video rental restrictions then.
However, computer users are more than just programmers and/or IT people... Many scientific applications and animations require parallel computing... Basically, the more the better for them. They can use up any resources you throw to them. To them, the $800/CPU pricetag is not that expensive... A Sun 8-CPU machine costs them way more than $10k... A dual Xeon Dell machine with 8GB RAM/ 800GB HDD cost more than $7200...