Adobe has not released a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for any platform, yet.
I'm running flash just fine on my amd64 ubuntu box. Adobe hasn't released a 64-bit native flash. So what? The 32-bit version works fine on 64-bit machines.
If all the people still using IE magically became IE7 users, at least I wouldn't have to worry about some of the retarded things like the lack of alpha PNG support.
And ditto for CSS. Although IE7's CSS support isn't perfect, it's waaaay better than IE6's.
I can understand that you might not want to upgrade if you're a business with a variety of web apps that rely on IE6--my heart goes out to you...
My heart doesn't go out to those businesses (although it might go out to their IT staffs). Anyone who hitches their wagon to software that violates www standards is... uh... an idiot who gets what he deserves.
I've been gradually trying to learn more about functional programming, partly because I think fp techniques and ways of thinking come in handy even if you're programming in a procedurally oriented language, and partly because fp seems like a paradigm that is likely to get more and more useful as we get machines with more and more cores. Okay, fp!=parallel, but, e.g., one of the big selling points of Erlang is supposed to be that it lends itself to completely transparent use of parallel processors.
The choice overload does seem like kind of an issue to me. For as long as I continue to keep programming comfortably in the procedural languages I'm comfy with (e.g., perl), I'm never going to really wrap my mind around the radically different ways of thinking that you get in a more fp world. I'm been thinking for a long time that it would be fun to do a coding project in ocaml... or haskell... or lisp... or erlang... or -- you get the idea.
The trouble is, it's really not clear what to hitch my wagon to. Ocaml seems to have a very high quality implementation, but its garbage collector isn't multithreaded, the only book you can buy is in French (it's nice that you can download the English version for free, but I'd prefer to buy something bound), and the availability of libraries (and documentation for them) isn't quite as wonderful as I've gotten used to with perl. Lisp could be cool, but I hate the fact that it's not standardized, and I'm not convinced that eschewing arbitrary syntax really carries more pros than cons. Haskell? Maybe, but it sounds like putting on a hair shirt. The list goes on. I really feel like a deer in the headlights.
I carry a 6" Pickett slide rule in my pants pocket, and have 10" slide rules on my desks at home and work. They have a lot of advantages over calculators:
No batteries to run out.
The scales on slide rules are highly standardized. When one of my students hands me an electronic calculator, I may not be able to do certain things because of a lack of standardization. For instance, it may take quite a bit of fiddling around to figure out how to set degree mode or radian mode.
A 6" pocket rule is more compact than a calculator.
Precision is a nonissue, IMO; I'm a physicist, and I essentially never need to multiply or divide numbers with more than three sig figs of precision. As far as speed, the most time-consuming step of any numerical calculation is checking your answer in as many ways as you can think of; the actual operation of doing a multiplication or a division takes negligible time either device.
If I'm going to do a calculation, my preferred tools are a computer or a slide rule. An electronic calculator is essentially the worst possible way to do a numerical calculation, because it's so hard to detect mistakes. It's really, really easy to hit the wrong key, or transpose digits, and not notice it. Also, you're looking at your calculation through a keyhole on that tiny little screen, which means you can't see whether all the steps fit together properly. Even if your calculator allows you to scroll back and forth, you're still looking at it through a keyhole. Computer software is nice, because you can look at a whole screenful of data. On a slide rule, I write out the calculation on paper, estimate the answer, write it down, and then get a more precise answer on the slide rule; that way, it's almost certain that I'm not messing up.
I found the traditional slide rule large and bulky
That's what 6" pocket slide rules are for!
and often I would try to use the wrong index so my answer was off the scale off the other end (those who use them know what I'm talking about) so I was the owner of a circular slide rule.
There are some simple techniques for avoiding that. For instance, to X by Y, I find X on the D scale, position the slide so that Y on the CI scale is above X, and then move the cursor to 1 on the C scale, and read the result off of the D scale. If you do that, you'll never go off the end of the scale. For division do the same thing, but use C rather than CI.
That rule has always annoyed me, since it removes the incentive to use your roof's insolation to the extent possible. I wonder if there is some way around it, perhaps by going co-op with your neighbors
Yeah, it's a total distortion of the free market, just rent-seeking behavior by the electric companies. One other conceivable way around it is to find something you can do with the extra electricity that will make you money. For instance, you could go into webhosting, and use a PV array to run your server racks.
Also there is perceived value in the "status" derived from such a purchase, and the value of "feel good" has supported many causes.
It's true that the feel-good effect was a factor in my family's decision to get photovoltaics. As far as status, you actually can't see our panels very easily from the street, so I don't think most of the neighbors even know:-) To the extent that you can classify motives as rational and nonrational, I've also noticed some nonrational reasoning by people who could get a PV system, but don't. They do the math, and figure out that they can get a guaranteed 5% ROI over 25 years, and possibly much higher if electric rates continue their historical upward trend. (Of course the ROI depends on a lot of factors -- which way your roof faces, how much shade you get, etc.). They then compare with what they're hoping to make on the stock market, or what the stock market has returned in a good year, and conclude that PV is a bad investment. I think people respond well to any investment that offers them the possibility of daydreaming about getting rich quickly with no effort. A risk-free 5% return, with the possibility of being significantly higher, is actually a much better investment then government bonds, but people don't think about it that way.
Your back-of-the-envelope calculation is fine, but it's just that, a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
The present situation is that PV panels are already at the break-even point for some people -- we're the ones who have done more than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and found out that it makes sense for us. It depends on your latitude, how much sunny weather you get every year, which way your roof faces, how much electricity you use, how much roof space you have, and the alternatives that you have available for investing your money in (paying off credit cards? buying stocks? bonds?). If it wasn't already at the break-even point for some people, the industry wouldn't exist. (Government subsidies are neither here nor there. The government heavily subsidizes fossil fuels by not making users pay for their political and environmental consequences.) Technological improvements will just make it a more attractive decision for more people -- maybe people who don't get quite as much sun in their area, or who don't have quite as much capital available, etc.
Your figures look reasonable to me (I have a PV system), but here are a couple of things to consider:
There's a big difference between a variable-return investment with an expected return of 5% and a fixed-return investment at 5%. The former would be idiotic, since historically, the stock market gives much more than a 5% average return. The latter is quite a reasonable investment, similar to buying safe government bonds. Most investment advisers will suggest that you put most of your investment money in stocks, but some in bonds. If you're guaranteed a 5% return on a PV setup, that's as good a deal as bonds (except maybe when you get into tax incentives for buying government bonds). But it's even better than that, because historically, electric rates have always gone up in real dollars. Over the 25-year life of a PV installation, you can be pretty confident that electric rates will go up significantly, and that makes your ROI much, much greater. So really, a PV install based on your numbers is an excellent investment. It's as safe as a bond, it's pretty much guaranteed to pay as much as a bond, and it may pay much, much more.
It's not valid to say that PV requires government subsidies while fossil fuels don't. We wouldn't be fighting the war in Iraq if there wasn't oil in the Middle East; the entire cost of the war is in effect on massive government subsidy to fossil fuels. Same deal for global warming: the Bush administration and the Republican party, by refusing to take action on global warming, are in effect forcing our grandchildren to subsidize our current use of fossil fuels.
The real question here is how will these panels stack up to current poly panels with regards to their life span? All solar panels degrade over time - that is, produce less power as they get older. Rule of thumb for a poly panel is around 25 years.
Like you, I have a residential grid-tied system. The panels cost roughly $5/kW, plus a similar amount for the inverter, installation, etc., and I decided it was a reasonable investment if the lifetime of the panels was 25 years. If the panels only cost $1/kW, then the whole thing would have been a reasonable investment even if the projected lifetime of the panels was 5 years. Actually I find it a little frightening to have so much of my money tied up in this physical object sitting on my roof. It's covered by insurance in case of an earthquake, etc., and by warranty under some other conditions, but in general, if someone offered me a system with much cheaper panels, and told me I might have to get them replaced more often, I would probably prefer that, because it would tie up less of my capital in the system.
Even if you use more power then your panels can produce, it's actually all to the good because it means the panels are recovering the highest-tier electricity costs for you, dropping you down to a lower tier with your utility company.
This may vary from place to place. I live in Southern California, and my electric company is SCE. The way the deal here works, it's a really bad idea to pay for a system that generates more in a year than you use in a year. SCE bills me yearly. If I generate a little less than I use, they send me a small bill at the end of the year, which is fine. (If you realize you're consistently generating less than you use, you can always add more panels later, assuming you have the roof space. You've already invested in the inverter, so it's not a big deal to add more capacity.) If I generate more than I use, then they don't send me a check, they just say, "Thanks for the free electricity." If I overproduce, it means I goofed big-time, because I spent more money than I needed to on my system, and it isn't returning any more on my investment than a smaller system would. Basically if you do things right, you end up with something that almost exactly covers your yearly electricity, and that means you couldn't care less what the rates are on your schedule (schedule D, TOU, whatever) -- when you pay zero, you don't care what rate you're paying at.
If the program doesn't terminate just reset the printer after you get bored. Simple.
A few problems with that:
On a shared printer, the user who printed may be out having Chinese food. Other people shouldn't be left guessing whether there's any point in letting his job continue to run.
You may be left wondering whether it ever would have printed anything.
The insolvability of the halting problem for Turing machines is just one example of a broader fact, which is that programs written in a Turing-complete language typically can't be machine-analyzed by any reliable, surefire algorithm. A program written in a Turing-incomlete language typically can be machine-analyzed. That has significant implications for security, for example. That's one reason that I'm not wild about the idea of embedding a Turing-complete language like JS into a language like PDF that was made Turing-incomplete by design.
It wasn't long before hardware hackers (and there were many then) realized that by carefully removing the 64K chips and replacing them with 256K chips, the new Mac could perform almost as well as a CPM machine or even a RadioShack Trash-80.
Well, for the benefit of anyone who didn't use computers in that era, one thing to explain here is that you're comparing apples and oranges. The mac was a GUI, and that was why it got popular. TRSDOS didn't have a GUI, and CP/M didn't either. (Digital Research did eventually develop an interest in marketing an OS with a GUI, but it wasn't a marketplace reality in 1984.)
Another thing to consider is that when the TRS-80 first came out, Radio Shack envisioned it as a closed platform. For the first year or two there actually wasn't any software, except for what you could code up yourself or type in from a computer magazine, but eventually there was Radio Shack-branded software in wire racks at Radio Shack stores, and that was what you were supposed to buy. They eventually bowed to marketplace reality and stopped trying to lock out third-party developers, but they were by no means paragons of openness.
The comparison with CP/M is also bogus, because CP/M was a generic OS that would run on a wide variety of hardware. Digital Research didn't sell hardware like Apple or Radio Shack did, so it was in their best interests be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.
Realistically, the benefit of buying a Mac in 1984 was that I got a computer with a GUI, and the hardware and software had been carefully designed to work together. The downside was that nothing matched up with the emerging PC standard, so peripherals were often expensive and/or only available from Apple. I got my ram upgraded by a third-party shop, however, and never had a problem with it. I can't remember now whether I had a 128k or 512k mac, or what the rom version was, but it sounds like you're just complaining about standard early-adopter issues. I don't remember the early Macs as being a closed system at all. The whole system was pretty well documented. They sold a book called "Inside Mac" that was the size and format of a telephone book, and it documented all the system calls; it was even reasonably cheap.
Apple's strong suit has always been providing a good user experience by making the hardware and software work well together. If you want that, you buy Apple; if you don't, you don't. There have always been some things about their systems that were open, and others that were highly proprietary. If you want that, you buy Apple; if you don't, you don't.
The first system referred to in the article is at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert. Links:
1, 2. Angelenos, next time you're passing by that way, keep an eye peeled. It's really cool.
That's why you have an electric grid. Different generating systems come on and off line in response to demand and different times. Where I live, in Southern California, the big crunch always comes when we have a heat wave. Everybody's cranking up their AC during the day, and the load gets higher than the system can supply. That's a perfect time for photovoltaics to come to the rescue.
The efficiency of power supplies is also non-linear. They only peak when under a fair load. If a switching supply is minimally loaded, its efficiency is very bad (50%).
You'll find a variety of statements about this running around on the web. It's true that a switching power supply is a wildly nonlinear device (which is why, for example, you can't test it without a load). But there's no simple, reliable rule for when it will be most efficient. You'll hear some people saying a PS is most efficient when used near 100% of its rated capacity, and others who say 50%. Some usenet folks did systematic measurements (you can probably turn up the thread on google groups, I don't have it handy), and they found that basically none of these statements was generally true. There was no clear relationship between % load and efficiency that held true across a variety of power supplies.
When people say that it's most efficient when almost 100% loaded (I know, you didn't say that, but other people do), there are two things to keep in mind: (a) it's not necessarily true, and (b) even if it was, you wouldn't want to design your system so that it used almost 100% of the PS's rated power. What typically happens if your PS is on the ragged edge of having enough power for your system is that you get random failures to boot which are hard to reproduce. The reason is that booting tends to require a lot of power (spinning up the drives, running the CPU full-out), and may go over what the PS can supply.
The main thing is to get an 80PLUS power supply. Not only can you be sure it will be efficient, but it won't contain any lead.
What Intel is doing seems laudable, but it seems like it's likely to be a very time-consuming way for an individual to cut one watt off of their system's power consumption. You want to pick the low-hanging fruit first. Get a power consumption meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some measurements. I used to have a pair of speakers that drew 12 W, even when the computer was off, and I didn't know it. If you've got a CRT, replace it with an LCD. Another big issue is doing your word processing on a machine with a video card that gets hot enough to fry an egg on.
The other big issue on Linux is poor support for power management. There are some success stories, such as the fact that the kernel automagically supports AMD cool'n'quiet, but in general, there are serious problems with sleep and hibernation on linux, and the reason is that manufacturers of peripherals refuse to publicly release the documentation for all the registers that need to be saved in order to restore their states when the machine wakes back up. Personally, I've never had any luck with sleep or hibernation on any machine I've ever installed linux on.
So in the interest of the public, what alternative PDF readers can people use?
On Linux, I prefer to use xpdf as my Firefox plugin, simply because it loads extremely quickly. The UI is pretty primitive, however (think X Windows, 1985). For Gnome, the standard reader now seems to be evince. For KDE, it's kpdf.
I spent some time websurfing for instructions on how to disable javascript in Adobe Reader 7 on Linux. I found a lot of pages claiming that you could do it via Edit>Preferences>JavaScript, but there was no such item in my preferences menu. What apparently does work on linux is this:
cd ~/.adobe/Acrobat/7.0/JavaScripts rm glob.settings.js ln -s/dev/null glob.settings.js
(I didn't have a pdf file containing js available to test it on -- does anyone know of one?) Even if you're not worried about this particular stack overflow, there's also a privacy issue: javascript support can be used to track who's reading a particular document.
On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
No. Postscript is a Turing-complete language. People have, e.g., written calculator programs in postscript, and implemented Conway's game of life in it. PDF is not Turing-complete, and that was an intelligent, intentional design decision. I think it had less to do with concerns about security than with not wanting to run a program on your printer without having any possible way to tell whether the program would ever terminate.
Reading the license, it looks like a pretty ordinary, simple, GPL-ish license. IANAL, and I'm sure the OSI knows what they're talking about when it says it's incompatible with lots of other OSI-approved licenses, but after reading the article and the license, I'm still completely in the dark about why it's so incompatible.
You said around 2000 you had the slowness problems; Gnome 2.0 was released late 2001.
I said I had performance problems then, with an old version, and am still having performance problems now, with a new version.
Gnome 2.x is alot faster than gnome 1.x. Also a new memory allocating routine has been added in gnome 2.17 that drastically improves load time when starting programs. Give it a try? Its free.
The performance I was describing (32 seconds to start up, delays in drawing menus, on a new high-end machine) was with Gnome 2.18.1.
Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.
I was looking forward to seeing them delisted from NASDAQ. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to wait
180 days to get that gratification. They filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sept. 14; I guess a company can still be listed on NASDAQ even though it's bankrupt!
I switched from ameritrade to scottrade. Pros: they're not idiots about security, and their website seems to work better than ameritrade's with Firefox/linux. Cons: no free trades when you open an account, and they make it a hassle to withdraw money (have to request a check, can't do an ACH).
This isn't a new problem, it's been going on for months and even years where there's clear evidence that the data is being lifted by spammers.
Yep, it's been going on for years, and they just thought they could brazen it out. I switched to scottrade earlier this year because of it. Today I got a paper mail from Ameritrade about it:
Once we discovered the unauthorized code, we took immediate action to eliminate it.
Very misleading. People gave them evidence at least as far back as 2005 that they had a security breach. They didn't take "immediate action." What they're really saying is, "We stonewalled for year after year because we thought we could get away with denying the existence of the problem; once things finally got too hot, we immediately stopped lying and told the truth for the first time."
While Social Security Numbers are stored in this particular database, we have no evidence to establish that they were retrieved or used to commit identity theft. As part of our effort to protect privacy, we have hired ID Analytics, which specializes in identity risk, ro investigate and monitor potential identity theft. [...] Following its initial evaluation, ID Analytics found no evidence of identity theft as a result of this data breach.
Translation: we hired someone to write a report saying everything is really okay, and guess what -- they wrote a report saying that!
So, what is the current status of integrating samba with desktop linux? Maybe four years ago, I brought my own FreeBSD box to work, plugged it in to the network, and got samba working. Getting samba to work was a big hassle (editing lots of text config files, reading lots of poorly written documentation), and once I did get it to work, it was flaky, e.g., my print jobs would sometimes freeze up the queue, which didn't make me very popular:-) Today, I have ubuntu on that same machine on my desk at work, but I haven't even messed with samba. When I need to print, I upload my file to my own server, download it onto a windows machine, and print from there.
So for someone using a modern Gnome/Ubuntu setup, is samba automatically installed? Is it discoverable via the Gnome UI? Does it Just Work for basic functions like printing?
Although I'm rooting for the samba folks to seize the day and remove the obstacles in the way of putting a linux box on a Windows network, I'm a little skeptical that it will ever work well enough for a non-enthusiast to want to use it. For instance, where I work we have a Minolta photocopier that also functions as a printer, and it's really useful for doing things like double-sided printing. To get that to work, though, you need to open a Windows dialog box that gives you access to all the zillion different options. Even if MS published all the specs for their networking stuff, I'm not holding my breath for Minolta to write a similar GUI interface that will work on a linux box via samba.
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I'm running flash just fine on my amd64 ubuntu box. Adobe hasn't released a 64-bit native flash. So what? The 32-bit version works fine on 64-bit machines.
And ditto for CSS. Although IE7's CSS support isn't perfect, it's waaaay better than IE6's.
I can understand that you might not want to upgrade if you're a business with a variety of web apps that rely on IE6--my heart goes out to you... ... uh ... an idiot who gets what he deserves.
My heart doesn't go out to those businesses (although it might go out to their IT staffs). Anyone who hitches their wagon to software that violates www standards is
I've been gradually trying to learn more about functional programming, partly because I think fp techniques and ways of thinking come in handy even if you're programming in a procedurally oriented language, and partly because fp seems like a paradigm that is likely to get more and more useful as we get machines with more and more cores. Okay, fp!=parallel, but, e.g., one of the big selling points of Erlang is supposed to be that it lends itself to completely transparent use of parallel processors.
The choice overload does seem like kind of an issue to me. For as long as I continue to keep programming comfortably in the procedural languages I'm comfy with (e.g., perl), I'm never going to really wrap my mind around the radically different ways of thinking that you get in a more fp world. I'm been thinking for a long time that it would be fun to do a coding project in ocaml ... or haskell ... or lisp ... or erlang ... or -- you get the idea.
The trouble is, it's really not clear what to hitch my wagon to. Ocaml seems to have a very high quality implementation, but its garbage collector isn't multithreaded, the only book you can buy is in French (it's nice that you can download the English version for free, but I'd prefer to buy something bound), and the availability of libraries (and documentation for them) isn't quite as wonderful as I've gotten used to with perl. Lisp could be cool, but I hate the fact that it's not standardized, and I'm not convinced that eschewing arbitrary syntax really carries more pros than cons. Haskell? Maybe, but it sounds like putting on a hair shirt. The list goes on. I really feel like a deer in the headlights.
I carry a 6" Pickett slide rule in my pants pocket, and have 10" slide rules on my desks at home and work. They have a lot of advantages over calculators:
Precision is a nonissue, IMO; I'm a physicist, and I essentially never need to multiply or divide numbers with more than three sig figs of precision. As far as speed, the most time-consuming step of any numerical calculation is checking your answer in as many ways as you can think of; the actual operation of doing a multiplication or a division takes negligible time either device.
If I'm going to do a calculation, my preferred tools are a computer or a slide rule. An electronic calculator is essentially the worst possible way to do a numerical calculation, because it's so hard to detect mistakes. It's really, really easy to hit the wrong key, or transpose digits, and not notice it. Also, you're looking at your calculation through a keyhole on that tiny little screen, which means you can't see whether all the steps fit together properly. Even if your calculator allows you to scroll back and forth, you're still looking at it through a keyhole. Computer software is nice, because you can look at a whole screenful of data. On a slide rule, I write out the calculation on paper, estimate the answer, write it down, and then get a more precise answer on the slide rule; that way, it's almost certain that I'm not messing up.
That's what 6" pocket slide rules are for!
and often I would try to use the wrong index so my answer was off the scale off the other end (those who use them know what I'm talking about) so I was the owner of a circular slide rule.
There are some simple techniques for avoiding that. For instance, to X by Y, I find X on the D scale, position the slide so that Y on the CI scale is above X, and then move the cursor to 1 on the C scale, and read the result off of the D scale. If you do that, you'll never go off the end of the scale. For division do the same thing, but use C rather than CI.
That rule has always annoyed me, since it removes the incentive to use your roof's insolation to the extent possible. I wonder if there is some way around it, perhaps by going co-op with your neighbors
Yeah, it's a total distortion of the free market, just rent-seeking behavior by the electric companies. One other conceivable way around it is to find something you can do with the extra electricity that will make you money. For instance, you could go into webhosting, and use a PV array to run your server racks.
Also there is perceived value in the "status" derived from such a purchase, and the value of "feel good" has supported many causes. :-) To the extent that you can classify motives as rational and nonrational, I've also noticed some nonrational reasoning by people who could get a PV system, but don't. They do the math, and figure out that they can get a guaranteed 5% ROI over 25 years, and possibly much higher if electric rates continue their historical upward trend. (Of course the ROI depends on a lot of factors -- which way your roof faces, how much shade you get, etc.). They then compare with what they're hoping to make on the stock market, or what the stock market has returned in a good year, and conclude that PV is a bad investment. I think people respond well to any investment that offers them the possibility of daydreaming about getting rich quickly with no effort. A risk-free 5% return, with the possibility of being significantly higher, is actually a much better investment then government bonds, but people don't think about it that way.
It's true that the feel-good effect was a factor in my family's decision to get photovoltaics. As far as status, you actually can't see our panels very easily from the street, so I don't think most of the neighbors even know
Your back-of-the-envelope calculation is fine, but it's just that, a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The present situation is that PV panels are already at the break-even point for some people -- we're the ones who have done more than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and found out that it makes sense for us. It depends on your latitude, how much sunny weather you get every year, which way your roof faces, how much electricity you use, how much roof space you have, and the alternatives that you have available for investing your money in (paying off credit cards? buying stocks? bonds?). If it wasn't already at the break-even point for some people, the industry wouldn't exist. (Government subsidies are neither here nor there. The government heavily subsidizes fossil fuels by not making users pay for their political and environmental consequences.) Technological improvements will just make it a more attractive decision for more people -- maybe people who don't get quite as much sun in their area, or who don't have quite as much capital available, etc.
Your figures look reasonable to me (I have a PV system), but here are a couple of things to consider:
Like you, I have a residential grid-tied system. The panels cost roughly $5/kW, plus a similar amount for the inverter, installation, etc., and I decided it was a reasonable investment if the lifetime of the panels was 25 years. If the panels only cost $1/kW, then the whole thing would have been a reasonable investment even if the projected lifetime of the panels was 5 years. Actually I find it a little frightening to have so much of my money tied up in this physical object sitting on my roof. It's covered by insurance in case of an earthquake, etc., and by warranty under some other conditions, but in general, if someone offered me a system with much cheaper panels, and told me I might have to get them replaced more often, I would probably prefer that, because it would tie up less of my capital in the system.
This may vary from place to place. I live in Southern California, and my electric company is SCE. The way the deal here works, it's a really bad idea to pay for a system that generates more in a year than you use in a year. SCE bills me yearly. If I generate a little less than I use, they send me a small bill at the end of the year, which is fine. (If you realize you're consistently generating less than you use, you can always add more panels later, assuming you have the roof space. You've already invested in the inverter, so it's not a big deal to add more capacity.) If I generate more than I use, then they don't send me a check, they just say, "Thanks for the free electricity." If I overproduce, it means I goofed big-time, because I spent more money than I needed to on my system, and it isn't returning any more on my investment than a smaller system would. Basically if you do things right, you end up with something that almost exactly covers your yearly electricity, and that means you couldn't care less what the rates are on your schedule (schedule D, TOU, whatever) -- when you pay zero, you don't care what rate you're paying at.
A few problems with that:
Well, for the benefit of anyone who didn't use computers in that era, one thing to explain here is that you're comparing apples and oranges. The mac was a GUI, and that was why it got popular. TRSDOS didn't have a GUI, and CP/M didn't either. (Digital Research did eventually develop an interest in marketing an OS with a GUI, but it wasn't a marketplace reality in 1984.)
Another thing to consider is that when the TRS-80 first came out, Radio Shack envisioned it as a closed platform. For the first year or two there actually wasn't any software, except for what you could code up yourself or type in from a computer magazine, but eventually there was Radio Shack-branded software in wire racks at Radio Shack stores, and that was what you were supposed to buy. They eventually bowed to marketplace reality and stopped trying to lock out third-party developers, but they were by no means paragons of openness.
The comparison with CP/M is also bogus, because CP/M was a generic OS that would run on a wide variety of hardware. Digital Research didn't sell hardware like Apple or Radio Shack did, so it was in their best interests be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.
Realistically, the benefit of buying a Mac in 1984 was that I got a computer with a GUI, and the hardware and software had been carefully designed to work together. The downside was that nothing matched up with the emerging PC standard, so peripherals were often expensive and/or only available from Apple. I got my ram upgraded by a third-party shop, however, and never had a problem with it. I can't remember now whether I had a 128k or 512k mac, or what the rom version was, but it sounds like you're just complaining about standard early-adopter issues. I don't remember the early Macs as being a closed system at all. The whole system was pretty well documented. They sold a book called "Inside Mac" that was the size and format of a telephone book, and it documented all the system calls; it was even reasonably cheap.
Apple's strong suit has always been providing a good user experience by making the hardware and software work well together. If you want that, you buy Apple; if you don't, you don't. There have always been some things about their systems that were open, and others that were highly proprietary. If you want that, you buy Apple; if you don't, you don't.
The first system referred to in the article is at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert. Links: 1, 2. Angelenos, next time you're passing by that way, keep an eye peeled. It's really cool.
That's why you have an electric grid. Different generating systems come on and off line in response to demand and different times. Where I live, in Southern California, the big crunch always comes when we have a heat wave. Everybody's cranking up their AC during the day, and the load gets higher than the system can supply. That's a perfect time for photovoltaics to come to the rescue.
You'll find a variety of statements about this running around on the web. It's true that a switching power supply is a wildly nonlinear device (which is why, for example, you can't test it without a load). But there's no simple, reliable rule for when it will be most efficient. You'll hear some people saying a PS is most efficient when used near 100% of its rated capacity, and others who say 50%. Some usenet folks did systematic measurements (you can probably turn up the thread on google groups, I don't have it handy), and they found that basically none of these statements was generally true. There was no clear relationship between % load and efficiency that held true across a variety of power supplies. When people say that it's most efficient when almost 100% loaded (I know, you didn't say that, but other people do), there are two things to keep in mind: (a) it's not necessarily true, and (b) even if it was, you wouldn't want to design your system so that it used almost 100% of the PS's rated power. What typically happens if your PS is on the ragged edge of having enough power for your system is that you get random failures to boot which are hard to reproduce. The reason is that booting tends to require a lot of power (spinning up the drives, running the CPU full-out), and may go over what the PS can supply.
The main thing is to get an 80PLUS power supply. Not only can you be sure it will be efficient, but it won't contain any lead.
What Intel is doing seems laudable, but it seems like it's likely to be a very time-consuming way for an individual to cut one watt off of their system's power consumption. You want to pick the low-hanging fruit first. Get a power consumption meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some measurements. I used to have a pair of speakers that drew 12 W, even when the computer was off, and I didn't know it. If you've got a CRT, replace it with an LCD. Another big issue is doing your word processing on a machine with a video card that gets hot enough to fry an egg on.
The other big issue on Linux is poor support for power management. There are some success stories, such as the fact that the kernel automagically supports AMD cool'n'quiet, but in general, there are serious problems with sleep and hibernation on linux, and the reason is that manufacturers of peripherals refuse to publicly release the documentation for all the registers that need to be saved in order to restore their states when the machine wakes back up. Personally, I've never had any luck with sleep or hibernation on any machine I've ever installed linux on.
On Linux, I prefer to use xpdf as my Firefox plugin, simply because it loads extremely quickly. The UI is pretty primitive, however (think X Windows, 1985). For Gnome, the standard reader now seems to be evince. For KDE, it's kpdf.
I spent some time websurfing for instructions on how to disable javascript in Adobe Reader 7 on Linux. I found a lot of pages claiming that you could do it via Edit>Preferences>JavaScript, but there was no such item in my preferences menu. What apparently does work on linux is this:
(I didn't have a pdf file containing js available to test it on -- does anyone know of one?) Even if you're not worried about this particular stack overflow, there's also a privacy issue: javascript support can be used to track who's reading a particular document.
On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
No. Postscript is a Turing-complete language. People have, e.g., written calculator programs in postscript, and implemented Conway's game of life in it. PDF is not Turing-complete, and that was an intelligent, intentional design decision. I think it had less to do with concerns about security than with not wanting to run a program on your printer without having any possible way to tell whether the program would ever terminate.
Reading the license, it looks like a pretty ordinary, simple, GPL-ish license. IANAL, and I'm sure the OSI knows what they're talking about when it says it's incompatible with lots of other OSI-approved licenses, but after reading the article and the license, I'm still completely in the dark about why it's so incompatible.
You said around 2000 you had the slowness problems; Gnome 2.0 was released late 2001.
I said I had performance problems then, with an old version, and am still having performance problems now, with a new version.
Gnome 2.x is alot faster than gnome 1.x. Also a new memory allocating routine has been added in gnome 2.17 that drastically improves load time when starting programs. Give it a try? Its free.
The performance I was describing (32 seconds to start up, delays in drawing menus, on a new high-end machine) was with Gnome 2.18.1.
Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.
I was looking forward to seeing them delisted from NASDAQ. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to wait 180 days to get that gratification. They filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sept. 14; I guess a company can still be listed on NASDAQ even though it's bankrupt!
I switched from ameritrade to scottrade. Pros: they're not idiots about security, and their website seems to work better than ameritrade's with Firefox/linux. Cons: no free trades when you open an account, and they make it a hassle to withdraw money (have to request a check, can't do an ACH).
This isn't a new problem, it's been going on for months and even years where there's clear evidence that the data is being lifted by spammers.
Yep, it's been going on for years, and they just thought they could brazen it out. I switched to scottrade earlier this year because of it. Today I got a paper mail from Ameritrade about it:
Very misleading. People gave them evidence at least as far back as 2005 that they had a security breach. They didn't take "immediate action." What they're really saying is, "We stonewalled for year after year because we thought we could get away with denying the existence of the problem; once things finally got too hot, we immediately stopped lying and told the truth for the first time."
Translation: we hired someone to write a report saying everything is really okay, and guess what -- they wrote a report saying that!
So, what is the current status of integrating samba with desktop linux? Maybe four years ago, I brought my own FreeBSD box to work, plugged it in to the network, and got samba working. Getting samba to work was a big hassle (editing lots of text config files, reading lots of poorly written documentation), and once I did get it to work, it was flaky, e.g., my print jobs would sometimes freeze up the queue, which didn't make me very popular :-) Today, I have ubuntu on that same machine on my desk at work, but I haven't even messed with samba. When I need to print, I upload my file to my own server, download it onto a windows machine, and print from there.
So for someone using a modern Gnome/Ubuntu setup, is samba automatically installed? Is it discoverable via the Gnome UI? Does it Just Work for basic functions like printing?
Although I'm rooting for the samba folks to seize the day and remove the obstacles in the way of putting a linux box on a Windows network, I'm a little skeptical that it will ever work well enough for a non-enthusiast to want to use it. For instance, where I work we have a Minolta photocopier that also functions as a printer, and it's really useful for doing things like double-sided printing. To get that to work, though, you need to open a Windows dialog box that gives you access to all the zillion different options. Even if MS published all the specs for their networking stuff, I'm not holding my breath for Minolta to write a similar GUI interface that will work on a linux box via samba.