It seems to me that hybrid cars aren't economically viable compared to lower-powered higher efficiency plain-old internal combustion cars when you're basing viability on a simple cost-benefit analysis.
They're selling because they're trendy, and stupid people who don't do math feel good about themselves for buying one.
The amount of oil used to transport nuclear materials, were we to go all nuclear, would be irrelevant relative to our current consumption.
Of course, switching to electric cars isn't going to help all that much either, since we don't use as much oil for cars as people think we do. (When they cite the transportation figure, that includes trucking, maritime shipping, and air travel, which consume more than half of that transportation oil). We'd be better off in terms of overall investment to switch our heating systems to use electricity, than we would to switch our cars to electricity. There would be no need for inefficient, hazardous, toxic power storage devices in that case.
That does assume, though, that we switch to some form of clean electricity generation.
And that will continue to be true until there is some massive advance in the viability of wind or solar, or people stop voting against nuclear power.
I wouldn't hold your breath for either of those two things occurring. Progress in wind technology has likely been near exhausted and progress in solar is promising, yet slow. People have irrational fears of nuclear based on obsolete knowledge of the risks, and a lack of knowledge about how truly awful coal power is.
So we'll keep burning coal, and we'll only see clear skies for the few days after a rare New York City blackout.
... "Sorry honey, but you're cut off. You'll hate me now, but in a couple years you'll realize it was for your own good."... Then go play golf for a few years with the money you save until she comes to her senses.
Best part: Now you can break the news over voicemail.
I'm sure they call the provider's "check your voicemail remotely" number.
For example, with Sprint, you can dial the area-code, and exchange followed by 6245 (mail), and then proceed to enter a mailbox number to check (with password) or send (without password) a message to.
Other providers have a similar number.
So instead telling people this, these guys are having you listen to an advertisement and dialing the number for you.
Translation: Not to start a flamewar, but let's talk about something off topic, since it's sure to be something that will get under the skin of the types of people who would read this particular article..
Maybe it's just me, but isn't that the definition of trying to start a flamewar?
You can be 100% certain that your MMS message is open to the world to see, sure. But you can never be 100% certain that your e-mail message is not visible to the general public unless you encrypt it, because you have no control over the transmission or the receiving server.
If you are confident that the unencrypted e-mail you send is only visible to the intended recipient, you are (and there's no nice way to say this) a fool.
I know that I personally use it to reduce stomach acid, to reduce the acidity of the soil in my back yard so I can grow vegetables under a pine tree...
I'm pretty sure that the location was chosen using the time honored political methods...
In other words, it was picked based on which locality was willing to bribe the judges the most, while at the same time having the best means with which to hide the bribes, or make them look legitimate.
You're right in that I meant to say white LED lighting, since I assumed that's what we were talking about. My statement was only accurate in that context.
The rest of your comment, however, seems to be you reveling in the fact that you thought you were smarter than somebody. Classy.
Not only that, but part of it is just flat wrong. Multi-color white LEDs cannot yet produce a satisfactory white light and be more energy efficient (though they have successfully achieved one or the other). Making such a mistake displays a level of ignorance which could easily have been corrected had you simply read the Wikipedia article you mentioned.
For example, the dichromatic white LEDs have the best luminous efficiency (120 lm/W), but the lowest color rendering capability. Oppositely although tetrachromatic white LEDs have excellent color rendering capability, they often have poor luminous efficiency. Trichromatic white LEDs are in between, having both good luminous efficiency (>70 lm/W) and fair color rendering capability.
[note that 70 lm/W is substantially less efficient than a fluorescent lamp, which can achieve 100-110 lm/W]
Look at the sun and at a CFL though a spectroscope. With the sun, you'll see even intensity across the spectrum. When you look at the CFL, you'll see several distinct bars of light at specific wavelengths. While both average out to about the same color temperature, the sun will have a black-body spectrum, evenly illuminating the pigments in the items in your room, while the CFL will make certain colors in the room jump out more than others.
Intensity and light output are two different things. LED lighting doesn't exceed the efficiency of fluorescent lighting in terms of lumens per watt yet. Many LED manufacturers continue to announce products they claim exceed the efficiency of fluorescent lighting, but they haven't actually managed to do it yet. That said, they're getting very close.
There is no such thing as a good young cheese in the US, since they can only be made with pasteurized milk... Aged cheeses, however, don't have that limitation, and there are plenty of good aged cheeses available here. They're expensive, so you won't find them unless you're looking.
You can find some aged Vermont cheddars (usually marked "special reserve", that will rival good English cheddar in quality and taste.
You're right though. The stupid USDA regulations on what you can and can't do with milk mean that the cheese selection in Europe and Canada is much better than what you can get here. Only the aged cheeses have the chance at being good. And that goes for the imported cheeses too...
IE has the same problem. In fact they were first to the table with the over-the-top warning.
It's especially hard on vendors who sell browser-based applications which run locally. The customer wants SSL, even on their local network, and even for non-sensitive data... But then they go to their local machine and get a big warning from Firefox or IE that their connection is insecure... But they don't want to pay for a certificate.
I assumed Microsoft did it to reduce competition for native and.NET apps from browser based apps, but I don't know what Mozilla's reasoning is... Just to copy IE, maybe?
Your first paragraph describes the dream, and the second describes the reality.
My comment simply offered a possible explanation as to why people see the dream instead of the reality.
What is so fulfilling to you about performing your correspondence out in public over one of the many, more private and less exploited methods? I have yet to hear anybody answer that question with something that doesn't boil down to "everybody else is doing it". Hence the high school comment.
I don't really agree that the video games extending into adulthood thing is part of the same trend. After all, adults have always had their games. The technology has simply advanced from dice and cards and balls and sticks to also include electronics. The existence of gaming as a source of entertainment throughout the duration of adult life, though, is nothing new.
It seems to me that video gaming is replacing pinochle and golf, more than it is turning adults into over-aged kids.
It is valuable throughout your life to learn how to relax and have a good time (as long as it's balanced with your responsibilities). That's completely different from basing your self worth on popularity instead of achievements.
It seems to me that you're in the minority. Regardless there are plenty of technologies out there to allow you to keep in touch with friend and family over great distances without posting your personal life to the public on the internet, including sending quick messages.
I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy.
Of course it also amazes me how popular these social networking sites are with adults. It's understandable that kids and teenagers want to climb a social ladder of sorts, since it is human nature to attempt to achieve more than your peers, and there is little available in the environments we provide to kids other than social hierarchy to climb... But when you grow up, generally people move on to trying to get ahead in other types of accomplishments. It seems things like MySpace and Facebook have extended High School into adulthood. When you place that much value on your social network, perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that people are willing to give up their privacy to maintain it.
I'm not confusing a driver with firmware. I'm talking about code that runs on the host and sends instructions to the device. It isn't firmware.
The fact that you said "an open source driver" means you really don't know what you're talking about. Let me give you an example. The QLA23xx from QLogic has three open-source drivers in the kernel. Each makes the device into something different.... An IP networking interface, a SCSI adapter, a target-mode SCSI adapter... Yet several vendors write drivers to make the same device do different things. And that's a relatively simple device compared ot other multi-purpose hardware. Most end-users don't want the utilization of a device to be based on their coding skills (though they have that option, since the hardware specs are open). They want a solution that works.
These cases are, IMHO, a particularly good example of how consumers would benefit from open drivers, because it forces the manufacturers to compete purely at the hardware level: performance (optimized paths for certain features, processor speed, memory size), quality (reliability, heat production) and cost are the only ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. While this certainly does make things harder for producers, tougher competition does tend to benefit society as a whole. There's also the potential for additional beneficial side-effects: older hardware can be made to last longer, limited only by its actual capabilities and not the vendor's desire to make it obsolete by not supporting it.
That really makes no sense. Much of this hardware is general purpose or slightly specific, but runs arbitrary instructions. Consumers wouldn't benefit from open drivers because nobody would invest the millions of dollars required to write that code if they couldn't keep how it worked secret for sufficiently long to get a return on their investment before somebody copied their techniques. (These are techniques that are non-obvious, and couldn't necessarily be copied easily simply from having seen the idea.) Additionally, the end user might want a driver that makes the device do something completely different. There are many examples of hardware which is sold off the shelf and made into completely different things (like an internet router, or a dynamic web cache, or a storage array) just by what the driver makes it do.
These drivers are "drivers" simply because they operate at that layer in the OS. They are more like applications. It's almost like saying that Microsoft Office (not Windows) is a driver for an Intel processor that makes it run its word processing functions.
This has nothing to do with making hardware that becomes obsolete through non support. It has everything to do with hardware having many general purposes, and the specific purposes are defined by software. In fact, most of the time this type of device is fully, openly documented. Anybody could write a driver for it. The last two chips I worked with like this had documentation (thousands of pages) right on the manufacturer's website. The chip the current company I work for used is also used by dozens of other companies, all of which make vastly different devices using the same bit of hardware combined with a complex driver.
Let me give you an example device, and based on that you may or may not chose to reconsider your position.
Consider a Fibre Channel HBA with a storage virtualization processor on it. Depending on the driver software, it has the power to be a simple HBA to connect you to a storage array, a RAID card, a CDP processor... If can fully virtualize your storage, perform optimizations based on what arrays it's connected to, or it can provide base functionality. The simple functions of the device are basically the same as any other HBA, but the more complex functions haven't even all been dreamed up yet, and some that have require dozens of developers working on the code for years.
Should all the code that runs on that device be GPLed and in the kernel tree? Does it really seem unreasonable to be able to sell a closed-source driver for that device?
Now, consider that many other devices contain programmable elements like DSPs, Video Processors, etc... Devices that don't simply need a driver to connect them to the rest of the system... Devices where the driver defines the functionality of the device...
Sure... For "free". Unfortunately upkeep can simply mean making sure the driver compiles... Or disabling features and reducing functionality until the maintainer re-adds it (as was the case in the instance that led to the creation of the "api_nonsense" document in the first place).
And then there's the definition of "free". What is the cost to the vendor to put their code in the mainstream kernel? Sometimes feature-rich drivers are sold independently of white-box hardware. (I have written such software under contract in the past and, in fact, make my primary living doing such work) You're basically saying that device-level software isn't fair-game for commercial development... Only as a carrot to support hardware sales.
Lastly there are people who use code that interfaces to the kernel for private use. Code that probably isn't interesting to anybody else, and wouldn't be accepted back into the kernel anyway, or can't be submitted for security-clearance reasons, etc... These people are "users" of the kernel too, and they deserve the same stability as users of the system call interface (or at least a basic attempt at stability).
Regardless, we've gotten off on a tangent on whether closed commercial development is appropriate, which pretty much illustrates my point. That's what the debate is really about when it comes to stabilizing interfaces. Not that the kernel will get "crufty".
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It seems to me that hybrid cars aren't economically viable compared to lower-powered higher efficiency plain-old internal combustion cars when you're basing viability on a simple cost-benefit analysis.
They're selling because they're trendy, and stupid people who don't do math feel good about themselves for buying one.
The amount of oil used to transport nuclear materials, were we to go all nuclear, would be irrelevant relative to our current consumption.
Of course, switching to electric cars isn't going to help all that much either, since we don't use as much oil for cars as people think we do. (When they cite the transportation figure, that includes trucking, maritime shipping, and air travel, which consume more than half of that transportation oil). We'd be better off in terms of overall investment to switch our heating systems to use electricity, than we would to switch our cars to electricity. There would be no need for inefficient, hazardous, toxic power storage devices in that case.
That does assume, though, that we switch to some form of clean electricity generation.
And that will continue to be true until there is some massive advance in the viability of wind or solar, or people stop voting against nuclear power.
I wouldn't hold your breath for either of those two things occurring. Progress in wind technology has likely been near exhausted and progress in solar is promising, yet slow. People have irrational fears of nuclear based on obsolete knowledge of the risks, and a lack of knowledge about how truly awful coal power is.
So we'll keep burning coal, and we'll only see clear skies for the few days after a rare New York City blackout.
... "Sorry honey, but you're cut off. You'll hate me now, but in a couple years you'll realize it was for your own good." ... Then go play golf for a few years with the money you save until she comes to her senses.
Best part: Now you can break the news over voicemail.
I'm sure they call the provider's "check your voicemail remotely" number.
For example, with Sprint, you can dial the area-code, and exchange followed by 6245 (mail), and then proceed to enter a mailbox number to check (with password) or send (without password) a message to.
Other providers have a similar number.
So instead telling people this, these guys are having you listen to an advertisement and dialing the number for you.
Translation: Not to start a flamewar, but let's talk about something off topic, since it's sure to be something that will get under the skin of the types of people who would read this particular article..
Maybe it's just me, but isn't that the definition of trying to start a flamewar?
I wasn't joking, and you're wrong.
You can be 100% certain that your MMS message is open to the world to see, sure. But you can never be 100% certain that your e-mail message is not visible to the general public unless you encrypt it, because you have no control over the transmission or the receiving server.
If you are confident that the unencrypted e-mail you send is only visible to the intended recipient, you are (and there's no nice way to say this) a fool.
Wouldn't lime lower the acidity of the seawater?
I know that I personally use it to reduce stomach acid, to reduce the acidity of the soil in my back yard so I can grow vegetables under a pine tree...
Meanwhile I can always send users a picture by email with confidence that picture is not anywhere on the web.
That's pretty funny.
I'm pretty sure that the location was chosen using the time honored political methods...
In other words, it was picked based on which locality was willing to bribe the judges the most, while at the same time having the best means with which to hide the bribes, or make them look legitimate.
You're right in that I meant to say white LED lighting, since I assumed that's what we were talking about. My statement was only accurate in that context.
The rest of your comment, however, seems to be you reveling in the fact that you thought you were smarter than somebody. Classy.
Not only that, but part of it is just flat wrong. Multi-color white LEDs cannot yet produce a satisfactory white light and be more energy efficient (though they have successfully achieved one or the other). Making such a mistake displays a level of ignorance which could easily have been corrected had you simply read the Wikipedia article you mentioned.
[note that 70 lm/W is substantially less efficient than a fluorescent lamp, which can achieve 100-110 lm/W]
Here's some links:
A white LED's spectrum
A CFL's spectrum
Not perceptions... Quanta
Look at the sun and at a CFL though a spectroscope. With the sun, you'll see even intensity across the spectrum. When you look at the CFL, you'll see several distinct bars of light at specific wavelengths. While both average out to about the same color temperature, the sun will have a black-body spectrum, evenly illuminating the pigments in the items in your room, while the CFL will make certain colors in the room jump out more than others.
Intensity and light output are two different things. LED lighting doesn't exceed the efficiency of fluorescent lighting in terms of lumens per watt yet. Many LED manufacturers continue to announce products they claim exceed the efficiency of fluorescent lighting, but they haven't actually managed to do it yet. That said, they're getting very close.
There is no such thing as a good young cheese in the US, since they can only be made with pasteurized milk... Aged cheeses, however, don't have that limitation, and there are plenty of good aged cheeses available here. They're expensive, so you won't find them unless you're looking.
You can find some aged Vermont cheddars (usually marked "special reserve", that will rival good English cheddar in quality and taste.
You're right though. The stupid USDA regulations on what you can and can't do with milk mean that the cheese selection in Europe and Canada is much better than what you can get here. Only the aged cheeses have the chance at being good. And that goes for the imported cheeses too...
IE has the same problem. In fact they were first to the table with the over-the-top warning.
It's especially hard on vendors who sell browser-based applications which run locally. The customer wants SSL, even on their local network, and even for non-sensitive data... But then they go to their local machine and get a big warning from Firefox or IE that their connection is insecure... But they don't want to pay for a certificate.
I assumed Microsoft did it to reduce competition for native and .NET apps from browser based apps, but I don't know what Mozilla's reasoning is... Just to copy IE, maybe?
Actually, that's the exact definition of sloshed. Having a beer on a hot day doesn't count. Having 6 after work does.
Your first paragraph describes the dream, and the second describes the reality.
My comment simply offered a possible explanation as to why people see the dream instead of the reality.
What is so fulfilling to you about performing your correspondence out in public over one of the many, more private and less exploited methods? I have yet to hear anybody answer that question with something that doesn't boil down to "everybody else is doing it". Hence the high school comment.
I don't really agree that the video games extending into adulthood thing is part of the same trend. After all, adults have always had their games. The technology has simply advanced from dice and cards and balls and sticks to also include electronics. The existence of gaming as a source of entertainment throughout the duration of adult life, though, is nothing new.
It seems to me that video gaming is replacing pinochle and golf, more than it is turning adults into over-aged kids.
It is valuable throughout your life to learn how to relax and have a good time (as long as it's balanced with your responsibilities). That's completely different from basing your self worth on popularity instead of achievements.
It seems to me that you're in the minority. Regardless there are plenty of technologies out there to allow you to keep in touch with friend and family over great distances without posting your personal life to the public on the internet, including sending quick messages.
I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy.
Of course it also amazes me how popular these social networking sites are with adults. It's understandable that kids and teenagers want to climb a social ladder of sorts, since it is human nature to attempt to achieve more than your peers, and there is little available in the environments we provide to kids other than social hierarchy to climb... But when you grow up, generally people move on to trying to get ahead in other types of accomplishments. It seems things like MySpace and Facebook have extended High School into adulthood. When you place that much value on your social network, perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that people are willing to give up their privacy to maintain it.
I'm not confusing a driver with firmware. I'm talking about code that runs on the host and sends instructions to the device. It isn't firmware.
The fact that you said "an open source driver" means you really don't know what you're talking about. Let me give you an example. The QLA23xx from QLogic has three open-source drivers in the kernel. Each makes the device into something different.... An IP networking interface, a SCSI adapter, a target-mode SCSI adapter... Yet several vendors write drivers to make the same device do different things. And that's a relatively simple device compared ot other multi-purpose hardware. Most end-users don't want the utilization of a device to be based on their coding skills (though they have that option, since the hardware specs are open). They want a solution that works.
These cases are, IMHO, a particularly good example of how consumers would benefit from open drivers, because it forces the manufacturers to compete purely at the hardware level: performance (optimized paths for certain features, processor speed, memory size), quality (reliability, heat production) and cost are the only ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. While this certainly does make things harder for producers, tougher competition does tend to benefit society as a whole. There's also the potential for additional beneficial side-effects: older hardware can be made to last longer, limited only by its actual capabilities and not the vendor's desire to make it obsolete by not supporting it.
That really makes no sense. Much of this hardware is general purpose or slightly specific, but runs arbitrary instructions. Consumers wouldn't benefit from open drivers because nobody would invest the millions of dollars required to write that code if they couldn't keep how it worked secret for sufficiently long to get a return on their investment before somebody copied their techniques. (These are techniques that are non-obvious, and couldn't necessarily be copied easily simply from having seen the idea.) Additionally, the end user might want a driver that makes the device do something completely different. There are many examples of hardware which is sold off the shelf and made into completely different things (like an internet router, or a dynamic web cache, or a storage array) just by what the driver makes it do.
These drivers are "drivers" simply because they operate at that layer in the OS. They are more like applications. It's almost like saying that Microsoft Office (not Windows) is a driver for an Intel processor that makes it run its word processing functions.
This has nothing to do with making hardware that becomes obsolete through non support. It has everything to do with hardware having many general purposes, and the specific purposes are defined by software. In fact, most of the time this type of device is fully, openly documented. Anybody could write a driver for it. The last two chips I worked with like this had documentation (thousands of pages) right on the manufacturer's website. The chip the current company I work for used is also used by dozens of other companies, all of which make vastly different devices using the same bit of hardware combined with a complex driver.
Let me give you an example device, and based on that you may or may not chose to reconsider your position.
Consider a Fibre Channel HBA with a storage virtualization processor on it. Depending on the driver software, it has the power to be a simple HBA to connect you to a storage array, a RAID card, a CDP processor... If can fully virtualize your storage, perform optimizations based on what arrays it's connected to, or it can provide base functionality. The simple functions of the device are basically the same as any other HBA, but the more complex functions haven't even all been dreamed up yet, and some that have require dozens of developers working on the code for years.
Should all the code that runs on that device be GPLed and in the kernel tree? Does it really seem unreasonable to be able to sell a closed-source driver for that device?
Now, consider that many other devices contain programmable elements like DSPs, Video Processors, etc... Devices that don't simply need a driver to connect them to the rest of the system... Devices where the driver defines the functionality of the device...
Sure... For "free". Unfortunately upkeep can simply mean making sure the driver compiles... Or disabling features and reducing functionality until the maintainer re-adds it (as was the case in the instance that led to the creation of the "api_nonsense" document in the first place).
And then there's the definition of "free". What is the cost to the vendor to put their code in the mainstream kernel? Sometimes feature-rich drivers are sold independently of white-box hardware. (I have written such software under contract in the past and, in fact, make my primary living doing such work) You're basically saying that device-level software isn't fair-game for commercial development... Only as a carrot to support hardware sales.
Lastly there are people who use code that interfaces to the kernel for private use. Code that probably isn't interesting to anybody else, and wouldn't be accepted back into the kernel anyway, or can't be submitted for security-clearance reasons, etc... These people are "users" of the kernel too, and they deserve the same stability as users of the system call interface (or at least a basic attempt at stability).
Regardless, we've gotten off on a tangent on whether closed commercial development is appropriate, which pretty much illustrates my point. That's what the debate is really about when it comes to stabilizing interfaces. Not that the kernel will get "crufty".