Little short line of code. Surely for such an obvious, non-esoteric task, C can't be much harder, right? Any takers?
(Don't bother responding if your code can't meet all of the boldface conditions... in the real world, you can't simplify the system requirements to meet the deficiencies of your coding language)
Somebody else answered this already and I prefer the C solution. But this example seems rather contrived anyway. Let's do something much simpler: Write a matrix multiplication routine for arbitrary-sized matrices which is not allowed to use the heap.
void mat_mul(int A, int B, int C, double out[A][C], double in1[A][B], double in2[B][C]) {
for (int i = 0; i A; i++) {
for (int k = 0; k C; k++) {
out[i][k] = 0.;
for (int j = 0; i B; j++)
out[i][k] += in1[i][j] * in2[j][k];
}
} }
First, one can extend X11 fairly easily, this has been done in the past. Second, X11 already has asynchronous IPC.
First, you don't extend X, you work around it and leave one more bit of dead code to be maintained forever. Second, it is not async.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X... "In the X Window System core protocol, only four kinds of packets are sent, asynchronously, over the network: requests, replies, events, and errors."
Again: bullshit. X11 can do take advantage of the hardware in exactly the same way as Wayland
Sorry you're lying. X11 has no concept of surfaces.
It is called a pixmap.
The only way of taking advantage of the hardware is to write an extension that composites the scene for X11 and hands it back to X11 to page flip. So X11 is just a 3rd wheel that involves extra context switches for no reason at all.
The extensions already exist. The thing which does this is called a compositing manager. Yes, being a separate process means there are extra context switches (if both run on a single core). I don't think this matters, but I gain, this not a problem of the X protocol. One could just integrate the compositing manager into the server if one really wanted to.
I don't want RDP. RDP is not compatible with X. RDP is also a propriertary protocol fron Microsoft with a core standardized by the ITU. I sure hell to not want this as a replacement for X.
Oh boo hoo then implement something else.
Why? You are confused: I just continue to use X. No need to re-implement anything.
Yes, implement X. Then come back.
Run X over wayland if you're so desperate for some crappy broken network protocol. VNC, RDP and others are more efficient.
In X there are no differences between local and remote applications and there are powerful and generic ways in which local and remote programs can interoperate. This makes a much better protocol in my opinion. Yes, on low-latency links performance sucks, but one can always use VNC and RDP or XPRA on top of it. But one never gets the ful integration and flexibility of X back when using the other protocols, so they are no replacement.
I am not playing games. I want my new applications to work with old display servers and old applications to work with new servers.
And Wayland stops you how? Run X11 over wayland and stop crying.
I am not crying. In fact, I am happy with X. I just point out that I don't see how Wayland has *anything* to offer for a desktop user. Not even performance. But it has disadvantages: And breaking compatibility is most serious one. XWayland only solves one direction (running X clients on Wayland) and not the other (running Wayland clients on X). Finally, there are already mobile devices with Wayland without XWayland, e.g. Jolla. It breaks compatibility with the excellent N9, which is really stupid.
I do not think that X is badly engineered. Quite the opposite.
Cairo, for example, is considered to be so good that it has been proposed that it becomes part of the ISO C++ standard. I guess if it were still called Xr, people would hate it just because they "know" from reading Phoronix tha everything related to X is bloated and slow.
Redirecting X11 applications over a network doesn't work well if the application sends a ton of commands synchronously, unless the network is low latency (eg, local LAN). Redirecting X11 applications over the network doesn't work well if the application sends the entire graphics window as a single pixmap, untless it's a high bandwith network (eg, local GbE LAN).
True, application (or toolkits) are getting worse in this respect. This is sad and just one of the many areas where Linux is regressing. But still, many work well and for those who don't work well over high latency or low bandwidth networks, it is always possible to use a proxy and this would be no worse than with Wayland.
Wayland works over a Unix socket too. And you can set which socket the application will attach to with WAYLAND_DISPLAY.
Yes, wayland basically has the same design as X - exept it removes a lot of features. This is not progress.
The first problem is that the protocol assumes shared memory but it would have not complicated things that much to make it work without requiring shared memory.
Yes, then it would be basically an incompatible version of X.
But the real problem is that the only method Wayland applications have to draw is by sending the entire window (surface) as a single pixmap. Works wonderfully over shared memory, works like crap over my cell phone's 3G connection.
This is not really true. Wayland applications indicate which part of the buffer has changed - so only the changed area would need to be copied. The problem is for cases like scrolling where X applications can copy screen content on the server without transmitting pixel data over the network. Wayland applications cannot really do this, because the protocol is much less flexible (you can do everything you could to with Wayland also with X but not vice versa).
Adding to Wayland the rich set of server-side rendering features would complicate things too much for Wayland to be possible.
This is a surprising statement. Why would it not be possible? X demonstrates that this is possible!
And it would be a somewhat futile exercise because, increasingly, X11 applications are doing less server side rendering and more pushing of large pixmaps.
Most X applications (as of today) use Xrender to compose pixmaps on the server. This is still efficient. The main problem with performance on X over the network is latency caused by applications essentially using the protocol in a synchronous way. But it would be much more useful to fix this than to replace everything with a fundamentally less capable graphics layer - which does provide NO functional advantage.
You can't "improve" X11 without making it not X11. e.g. make IPC async and it's not X any more.
First, one can extend X11 fairly easily, this has been done in the past. Second, X11 already has asynchronous IPC. Wayland copies this model exactly: Async IPC over a UNIX domain socket (locally). There is no fundamental difference or improvement here.
And at that point you may as well ditch the lot and write it properly, taking advantage of the hardware that every modern PC has to render a desktop decently locally first (the common use case) and taking advantage of existing remoting tech to take care of the uncommon use case.
Again: bullshit. X11 can do take advantage of the hardware in exactly the same way as Wayland. So this whole argument is build around the misconception that X11 is slow because of something it does to support remoting. This is not true: 1. X11 is not slow (Valve found OpenGL on X11 to be faster than on Windows). 2. Direct rendering essentially works in the same way as Wayland (atleast with DRI3).
And that's what Wayland does - it describes a protocol for a client application to talk directly with a window manager that cuts X11 out of the picture.
So maybe combining the compositing manager and the server into one piece has a small advantages. I doubt this. But if this is the case, this could be done with X11 as well. No need to ditch a protocol with decades of compatibility.
Weston already demonstrates built in RDP support.
I don't want RDP. RDP is not compatible with X. RDP is also a propriertary protocol fron Microsoft with a core standardized by the ITU. I sure hell to not want this as a replacement for X.
It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine VNC or other protocols appearing in time to serve different remoting scenarios.
Yes, implement X. Then come back.
I'm sure that unless you're expecting to play video or games in realtime they would suffice and if you are expecting to play video or games in realtime there are better ways to do those things already.
I am not playing games. I want my new applications to work with old display servers and old applications to work with new servers. I also want to have perfect integration of remote applications. This is not really about shuffling bits.
, the only annoyance I have ever found with X11 code is that its error handler calls exit(-1) if it panics without letting you deal with it in the calling program
You mean the default error handler in xlib? You can set your own.
Actually the price of electricity in Finland is among the lowest in Europe. This is one of the chief reasons how our system works. You see, we have a lot of traditionally extremely energy-intensive industry related to forestry (i.e. paper, carton and cellulose production), metalworks (both smelting and advanced machining such as shipbuilding) and so on. As a result, one of the primary goals of the entire country's energy policy is to ensure that electricity would be as cheap as possible. This kind of forward planning is what allows for those record profits. Not electricity prices, that are very cheap in Finland by European standards to the point that it was one of the chief reasons why most of the heavy industry stays in the country, and why modern energy intensive industries like heavy datacenters (i.e. Google) find Finland so interesting for their European operations.
The thing is: Cheap electricity prices make nuclear (and everything else) less economical. So the question still is why should nuclear plants be more profitable in Finland than elsewhere. Weren't the current plants not build by a government-owned power company (Imatran Voima Oy) which was then privatized later? Considering this, I assume that the existing nuclear plants in Finland were probably not really economical, but if nobody does an audit of how much this government-owned power company actually has spent when building these plants this will never become apparent. Looking at old press articles about how Loviisa started out has a hybrid of Sowijet and Western technology and needed costly repairs and changes, I somehow doubt that it was so economical as claimed.
Some other things you should understand before arguing on the topic of "eating profits".
.... Ok. But my point was that you should not sectively pick the successful projects while ignoring the cost of the failures when discussing the overall economics of nuclear. If the French tax payers pick up the bill for that disaster this is certainly good new for Fins, but does not really make nuclear more economical in the overall scheme of things.
Olkiluoto #3 is, as the name implies, the THIRD unit. Other two are the most profitable endeavours ever, after two units at Loviisa.
I can't find you the source right away, however this was a part of investigative story made by YLE, our state broadcaster. They were doing an analysis of profitability of investments, I believe as a part of their story on which of our traditional industries are competitive and which are not, and then they hit the fact that there were four extreme outliers in their statistics which were extremely profitable. Loviisa unit 1, Loviisa unit 2, Olkiluoto unit 1 and Olkiluoto unit 2.
Maybe this is true - but is rather irrelevant. I don't doubt that some nuclear power plant built at sometime somewhere was/is profitable. Those plants have been build at a time where electricity market was highly regulated in Finland. The price of electricity is determined by the least efficient plant (in terms of marginal cost) which is needed to satisfy demand. In the past, and without much competition this may have been a rather expensive source of power. Nuclear power plants only needed to be cheaper than this plant to be a good investment. Nowadays, this is unlikely to be true even in Finland.
Olkiluoto unit 3 is the experimental new reactor Areva was selected to build, and they failed at it. It's fairly obvious to even a casual observer that I could not have been talking about Olkiluoto unit 3 because it's not operating yet - as a result it can post no revenue.
But I guess it eats all profts from the other plants.
But text log files are a big SECURITY RISK. Example? I want to hack into server and hide my presence. 1st thing I do is edit your/var/log files when I install a rootkit.
You are deeply confused. Binary log files can be changed by a hacker as easily a text log files.
You can protect yourself against this by cryptographically sealing the logs, but this works for text log files too.
Although I have a lot of difficulty to connect the reporting about this study which you have linked to with the actual conclusions from the published study. The study rules out a certain mechanism for damage from low-dose radiation which has been hypothesized, but does not say that damage does not exist. Quite the opposite: "We note that despite the minor direct impact of radiation on redox status of the cell and on antioxidant concentrations, it is well known that even low dose ionizing radiation can cause negative effects via DNA damage. Such damage is direct—caused by strand breaks and deletions—or indirect, from the free-radical products of water radiolysis in the immediate vicinity of nucleotides. At dose rates of order of 417 Gy h1 (representing the most contaminated parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone), radiation effects on organisms would be expected, and have indeed been observed [16,17]. The present study shows that observed effects are unlikely to be due to radiolysis products directly causing oxidative stress, significantly clarifying discussions about low-level radiation and oxidative stress."
Also note the clear statement "it is well known that even low dose ionizing radiation can cause negative effects via DNA damage". Which is indeed well known, but disputed for example by Mr D.
Anyway, wildlife near Chernobyl certainly benefits a lot from not having humans close by anymore, so probably is better off now than before Chernobyl - despite increased radiation levels.
Sorry, if you look at those studies, they are predicted cancers based on the never validate LNT model from the war era studies. None of those observe actual statistical associations. You simply are not looking at the details.
Nonsense. Both studies provide direct empirical evidence.
Pearson et al., The Lancet:
- "We did a study to directly assess the question of whether cancer risks are increased after CT scans in childhood and young adulthood." - "In this retrospective cohort study, we show significant associations between the estimated radiation doses provided by CT scans to red bone marrow and brain and subsequent incidence of leukaemia and brain tumours." - "We noted little evidence of non-linearity of the dose-response, using either linear-quadratic or linear-exponential forms of departure from linearity (leukaemia exponential p=02672 and quadratic p=04683, brain tumour exponential p=09203 and quadratic p=08993)."
Mathews et al., BMJ:
- "In this paper, we derived direct estimates of the increased cancer risk in the first decade or so after CT scan exposure by comparing cancer incidence in over 680000 people exposed to CT scans at ages 0-19 years with cancer incidence in a comparison cohort of over 10 million unexposed persons of similar age." - "Our results are also generally consistent with the linear no threshold theory (that is, there is no threshold dose below which there is a zero risk)."
First, the first citation is published under "Reviews and Commentary". I added it because I thought it might be easier to understand. This means you are critizing the Lancet study because somebody commenting on it in a seperate publication does not mention "margin of error" or "control groups". The purpose of this commentary is to put it into perspective, not to repeat the data. If you want to critize this study, you should go to the original (it is the second link I gave). You will find all the data there, and also the results are in agreement with the LNT model:
"We noted little evidence of non-linearity of the dose-response, using either linear-quadratic or linear-exponential forms of departure from linearity (leukaemia exponential p=02672 and quadratic p=04683, brain tumour exponential p=09203 and quadratic p=08993)."
And to make this clear, I am not going to discuss the merits of these studies with some random person on the internet. If you find problems with these studies, please write letters to the editors of Lancet and BMJ etc.
Finally, nobody is using "scare tactics" here. I am myself not arguing with you because I think the health impact from nuclear power is serious problem. In my opinion, nuclear power is very safe. I am arguing with you, because you clearly misrepresent what the current scientific consensus is, based on some questionable information you found on the internet when googling for things which could confirm your existing opinion. This is a dangerously misleading way to build an opinion.
What you don't realize is that those all base their 'predicted' cancer rates on a data model that was only validated for very high acute exposures, with an assumption of proportional rates for lower doses.
Two of the studies I quoted were not predictions. The cancer from CT has been predicted a *long time* ago. These are the studies *confirming* the predictions using large scale statistical studies.
The study about Fukushima was a prediction based on the LNT model, I cited it because it is relevant in the context of this discussion and to show that the LNT is taken seriously by many different people (including researchers at Stanford - a respected scientific institution).
Those models stem from post war Japan bomb research, but all physical evidence to date shows those models NEVER stand up and rates are ALWAYS much lower than predicted.
You may read such nonsense on the internet - but the scientific consensus is actually in favor of the LNT model. Allmost all evidence we have (and this does not only include the Japan bomb research, but for example the studies I cited about CT) is in argreement with the LNT model.
So, citing a bunch of studies that based prediction on the old, inaccurate model is really of no help.
Again, the CT studies are not predictions - but large scale statistical studies which confirm the effect predicted by the LNT model.
"that statistical real world evidence of actual cancer cases attributable to CT scans is non-existent" I gave you empirical studies published in highly regarded journals which provide exactly such evidence. You counter this with some blog post (which I didn't read) you found on the internet. You don't see what is wrong here?
Since you are obviously cherry-picking your sources again (which I have pointed out to you before), let me add some recent sources from highly respected journals about the risk of low-dose radiation. Ofcourse, according to Mr. D. all these journals just publish pseudo-science. Reminds me of the old joke with the wrong-way driver.
"... First, it is clear that we have now passed a watershed in our field, where it is no longer tenable to claim that CT risks are "too low to be detectable and may be non-existent" (5). A large well-designed epidemiologic study has clearly shown that the individual risks are small but real..." Journal: Radiology Link: http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/...
"...We noted a positive association between radiation dose from CT scans and leukaemia (...) and brain tumours (...)." Journal: The Lancet Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
"Conclusions The increased incidence of cancer after CT scan exposure in this cohort was mostly due to irradiation...." Journal: British Medical Journal Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/346...
"The study supports the extrapolation of high-dose rate risk models to protracted exposures at natural background exposure levels." Journal: Leukemia Link: http://www.nature.com/leu/jour...
And with respect to Fukushima there were recent estimates from a Stanford guy: "We estimate an additional 130 (15â"1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24â"1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study. We also discuss the LNT model's uncertainty at low doses..... Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional [similar]600 mortalities have been reported due to non-radiological causes such as mandatory evacuations." Journal: Energy & Environmental Science Link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...
But should Linux drop X many applications will stop supporting X properly. They will then not run properly on any X server anymore, neither on Mac, Windows, or Linux or elsewhere. Or in other words, your X server on Windows or Mac OS X is only useful, because there is currently a large ecosystem based around X.
If Linux switches to Wayland, this ecosystem will be gone. X currently offers compatibility across different architectures, along time (currently, you can still run decades-old X application just fine), and space (network transparency). X as a standard provides as much value as POSIX. Why do you want to break this?
On the few new Linux-based mobile platforms which currently use Wayland, X compatibilty is alread lost. Just sad.
And what do we gain if we replace X? Will it be faster? No, Wayland has basically the same design as X: Message passing using a UNIX domain socket and buffer sharing for direct rendering. Performance wise, there is not really anthing to gain. X is bloated? Do you really think a few kilobytes of old and unused rendering code needed for backwards compatibility are bloat? The design of X is unfixable? Nonsense, X was designed from the beginning on to be extensible. It would be very easy to add a special screensaver extension, if really needed.
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It will also throw a runtime exception with my default version of g++ if I don't add a '-pthread' line. Why is this not a compile time error? Insane.
Not at all the same thing. This would give me templatic code for static - not dynamic - arrays.
Little short line of code. Surely for such an obvious, non-esoteric task, C can't be much harder, right? Any takers?
(Don't bother responding if your code can't meet all of the boldface conditions... in the real world, you can't simplify the system requirements to meet the deficiencies of your coding language)
Somebody else answered this already and I prefer the C solution. But this example seems rather contrived anyway. Let's do something much simpler: Write a matrix multiplication routine for arbitrary-sized matrices which is not allowed to use the heap.
void mat_mul(int A, int B, int C, double out[A][C], double in1[A][B], double in2[B][C])
{
for (int i = 0; i A; i++) {
for (int k = 0; k C; k++) {
out[i][k] = 0.;
for (int j = 0; i B; j++)
out[i][k] += in1[i][j] * in2[j][k];
}
}
}
First, one can extend X11 fairly easily, this has been done in the past. Second, X11 already has asynchronous IPC.
First, you don't extend X, you work around it and leave one more bit of dead code to be maintained forever. Second, it is not async.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X...
"In the X Window System core protocol, only four kinds of packets are sent, asynchronously, over the network: requests, replies, events, and errors."
Again: bullshit. X11 can do take advantage of the hardware in exactly the same way as Wayland
Sorry you're lying. X11 has no concept of surfaces.
It is called a pixmap.
The only way of taking advantage of the hardware is to write an extension that composites the scene for X11 and hands it back to X11 to page flip. So X11 is just a 3rd wheel that involves extra context switches for no reason at all.
The extensions already exist. The thing which does this is called a compositing manager. Yes, being a separate process means there are extra context switches (if both run on a single core). I don't think this matters, but I gain, this not a problem of the X protocol. One could just integrate the compositing manager into the server if one really wanted to.
I don't want RDP. RDP is not compatible with X. RDP is also a propriertary protocol fron Microsoft with a core standardized by the ITU. I sure hell to not want this as a replacement for X.
Oh boo hoo then implement something else.
Why? You are confused: I just continue to use X. No need to re-implement anything.
Yes, implement X. Then come back.
Run X over wayland if you're so desperate for some crappy broken network protocol. VNC, RDP and others are more efficient.
In X there are no differences between local and remote applications and there are powerful and generic ways in which local and remote programs can interoperate. This makes a much better protocol in my opinion. Yes, on low-latency links performance sucks, but one can always use VNC and RDP or XPRA on top of it. But one never gets the ful integration and flexibility of X back when using the other protocols, so they are no replacement.
I am not playing games. I want my new applications to work with old display servers and old applications to work with new servers.
And Wayland stops you how? Run X11 over wayland and stop crying.
I am not crying. In fact, I am happy with X. I just point out that I don't see how Wayland has *anything* to offer for a desktop user. Not even performance. But it has disadvantages: And breaking compatibility is most serious one. XWayland only solves one direction (running X clients on Wayland) and not the other (running Wayland clients on X). Finally, there are already mobile devices with Wayland without XWayland, e.g. Jolla. It breaks compatibility with the excellent N9, which is really stupid.
I do not think that X is badly engineered. Quite the opposite.
Cairo, for example, is considered to be so good that it has been proposed that it becomes part of the ISO C++ standard.
I guess if it were still called Xr, people would hate it just because they "know" from reading Phoronix tha everything
related to X is bloated and slow.
I see. It seems to do this for fatal errors. Yes, xlib sucks. XCB should be better.
Redirecting X11 applications over a network doesn't work well if the application sends a ton of commands synchronously, unless the network is low latency (eg, local LAN).
Redirecting X11 applications over the network doesn't work well if the application sends the entire graphics window as a single pixmap, untless it's a high bandwith network (eg, local GbE LAN).
True, application (or toolkits) are getting worse in this respect. This is sad and just one of the many areas where Linux is regressing. But still, many work well and for those who don't work well over high latency or low bandwidth networks, it is always possible to use a proxy and this would be no worse than with Wayland.
Wayland works over a Unix socket too. And you can set which socket the application will attach to with WAYLAND_DISPLAY.
Yes, wayland basically has the same design as X - exept it removes a lot of features. This is not progress.
The first problem is that the protocol assumes shared memory but it would have not complicated things that much to make it work without requiring shared memory.
Yes, then it would be basically an incompatible version of X.
But the real problem is that the only method Wayland applications have to draw is by sending the entire window (surface) as a single pixmap. Works wonderfully over shared memory, works like crap over my cell phone's 3G connection.
This is not really true. Wayland applications indicate which part of the buffer has changed - so only the changed area would need to be copied. The problem is for cases like scrolling where X applications can copy screen content on the server without transmitting pixel data over the network. Wayland applications cannot really do this, because the protocol is much less flexible (you can do everything you could to with Wayland also with X but not vice versa).
Adding to Wayland the rich set of server-side rendering features would complicate things too much for Wayland to be possible.
This is a surprising statement. Why would it not be possible? X demonstrates that this is possible!
And it would be a somewhat futile exercise because, increasingly, X11 applications are doing less server side rendering and more pushing of large pixmaps.
Most X applications (as of today) use Xrender to compose pixmaps on the server. This is still efficient. The main problem with performance on X over the network is latency caused by applications essentially using the protocol in a synchronous way. But it would be much more useful to fix this than to replace everything with a fundamentally less capable graphics layer - which does provide NO functional advantage.
You can't "improve" X11 without making it not X11. e.g. make IPC async and it's not X any more.
First, one can extend X11 fairly easily, this has been done in the past. Second, X11 already has asynchronous IPC. Wayland copies this model exactly: Async IPC over a UNIX domain socket (locally). There is no fundamental difference or improvement here.
And at that point you may as well ditch the lot and write it properly, taking advantage of the hardware that every modern PC has to render a desktop decently locally first (the common use case) and taking advantage of existing remoting tech to take care of the uncommon use case.
Again: bullshit. X11 can do take advantage of the hardware in exactly the same way as Wayland. So this whole argument is build around the misconception that X11 is slow because of something it does to support remoting. This is not true: 1. X11 is not slow (Valve found OpenGL on X11 to be faster than on Windows). 2. Direct rendering essentially works in the same way as Wayland (atleast with DRI3).
And that's what Wayland does - it describes a protocol for a client application to talk directly with a window manager that cuts X11 out of the picture.
So maybe combining the compositing manager and the server into one piece has a small advantages. I doubt this. But if this is the case, this could be done with X11 as well. No need to ditch a protocol with decades of compatibility.
Weston already demonstrates built in RDP support.
I don't want RDP. RDP is not compatible with X. RDP is also a propriertary protocol fron Microsoft with a core standardized by the ITU. I sure hell to not want this as a replacement for X.
It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine VNC or other protocols appearing in time to serve different remoting scenarios.
Yes, implement X. Then come back.
I'm sure that unless you're expecting to play video or games in realtime they would suffice and if you are expecting to play video or games in realtime there are better ways to do those things already.
I am not playing games. I want my new applications to work with old display servers and old applications to work with new servers. I also want to have perfect integration of remote applications. This is not really about shuffling bits.
I know that. But X11 tunneling does not work.
, the only annoyance I have ever found with X11 code is that its error handler calls exit(-1) if it panics without letting you deal with it in the calling program
You mean the default error handler in xlib? You can set your own.
Not being able to simple use 'ssh -X' from my chromebook is the one thing I really miss. Ofcourse, crouton comes to the rescue...
Actually the price of electricity in Finland is among the lowest in Europe. This is one of the chief reasons how our system works. You see, we have a lot of traditionally extremely energy-intensive industry related to forestry (i.e. paper, carton and cellulose production), metalworks (both smelting and advanced machining such as shipbuilding) and so on. As a result, one of the primary goals of the entire country's energy policy is to ensure that electricity would be as cheap as possible. This kind of forward planning is what allows for those record profits. Not electricity prices, that are very cheap in Finland by European standards to the point that it was one of the chief reasons why most of the heavy industry stays in the country, and why modern energy intensive industries like heavy datacenters (i.e. Google) find Finland so interesting for their European operations.
The thing is: Cheap electricity prices make nuclear (and everything else) less economical. So the question still is why should nuclear plants be more profitable in Finland than elsewhere. Weren't the current plants not build by a government-owned power company (Imatran Voima Oy) which was then privatized later? Considering this, I assume that the existing nuclear plants in Finland were probably not really economical, but if nobody does an audit of how much this government-owned power company actually has spent when building these plants this will never become apparent. Looking at old press articles about how Loviisa started out has a hybrid of Sowijet and Western technology and needed costly repairs and changes, I somehow doubt that it was so economical as claimed.
Some other things you should understand before arguing on the topic of "eating profits".
....
Ok. But my point was that you should not sectively pick the successful projects while ignoring the cost of the failures when discussing the overall economics of nuclear. If the French tax payers pick up the bill for that disaster this is certainly good new for Fins, but does not really make nuclear more economical in the overall scheme of things.
Olkiluoto #3 is, as the name implies, the THIRD unit. Other two are the most profitable endeavours ever, after two units at Loviisa.
I can't find you the source right away, however this was a part of investigative story made by YLE, our state broadcaster. They were doing an analysis of profitability of investments, I believe as a part of their story on which of our traditional industries are competitive and which are not, and then they hit the fact that there were four extreme outliers in their statistics which were extremely profitable. Loviisa unit 1, Loviisa unit 2, Olkiluoto unit 1 and Olkiluoto unit 2.
Maybe this is true - but is rather irrelevant. I don't doubt that some nuclear power plant built at sometime somewhere was/is profitable. Those plants have been build at a time where electricity market was highly regulated in Finland. The price of electricity is determined by the least efficient plant (in terms of marginal cost) which is needed to satisfy demand. In the past, and without much competition this may have been a rather expensive source of power. Nuclear power plants only needed to be cheaper than this plant to be a good investment. Nowadays, this is unlikely to be true even in Finland.
Olkiluoto unit 3 is the experimental new reactor Areva was selected to build, and they failed at it. It's fairly obvious to even a casual observer that I could not have been talking about Olkiluoto unit 3 because it's not operating yet - as a result it can post no revenue.
But I guess it eats all profts from the other plants.
France has to shut down nuclear power plants every few years when there is a heat wave in Europe. Google is your friend.
The problem with load-following is economics. Nuclear power is already uneconomical. Load-following does not help.
But text log files are a big SECURITY RISK. Example? I want to hack into server and hide my presence. 1st thing I do is edit your /var/log files when I install a rootkit.
You are deeply confused. Binary log files can be changed by a hacker as easily a text log files.
You can protect yourself against this by cryptographically sealing the logs, but this works for text log files too.
Binary log files are simply insane.
Although I have a lot of difficulty to connect the reporting about this study which you have linked to with the actual conclusions from the published study. The study rules out a certain mechanism for damage from low-dose radiation which has been hypothesized, but does not say that damage does not exist. Quite the opposite:
"We note that despite the minor direct impact of radiation on redox status of the cell and on antioxidant concentrations, it is well known that even low dose ionizing radiation can cause negative effects via DNA damage. Such damage is direct—caused by strand breaks and deletions—or indirect, from the free-radical products of water radiolysis in the immediate vicinity of nucleotides. At dose rates of order of 417 Gy h1 (representing the most contaminated parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone), radiation effects on organisms would be expected, and have indeed been observed [16,17]. The present study shows that observed effects are unlikely to be due to radiolysis products directly causing oxidative stress, significantly clarifying discussions about low-level radiation and oxidative stress."
Also note the clear statement "it is well known that even low dose ionizing radiation can cause negative effects via DNA damage". Which is indeed well known, but disputed for example by Mr D.
Anyway, wildlife near Chernobyl certainly benefits a lot from not having humans close by anymore, so probably is better off now than before Chernobyl - despite increased radiation levels.
Sorry, if you look at those studies, they are predicted cancers based on the never validate LNT model from the war era studies. None of those observe actual statistical associations. You simply are not looking at the details.
Nonsense. Both studies provide direct empirical evidence.
Pearson et al., The Lancet:
- "We did a study to directly assess the question of whether cancer risks are increased after CT scans in childhood and young adulthood."
- "In this retrospective cohort study, we show significant associations between the estimated radiation doses provided by CT scans to red bone marrow and brain and subsequent incidence of leukaemia and brain tumours."
- "We noted little evidence of non-linearity of the dose-response, using either linear-quadratic or linear-exponential forms of departure from linearity (leukaemia exponential p=02672 and quadratic p=04683, brain tumour exponential p=09203 and quadratic p=08993)."
Mathews et al., BMJ:
- "In this paper, we derived direct estimates of the increased cancer risk in the first decade or so after CT scan exposure by comparing cancer incidence in over 680000 people exposed to CT scans at ages 0-19 years with cancer incidence in a comparison cohort of over 10 million unexposed persons of similar age."
- "Our results are also generally consistent with the linear no threshold theory (that is, there is no threshold dose below which there is a zero risk)."
First, the first citation is published under "Reviews and Commentary". I added it because I thought it might be easier to understand. This means you are critizing the Lancet study because somebody commenting on it in a seperate publication does not mention "margin of error" or "control groups". The purpose of this commentary is to put it into perspective, not to repeat the data. If you want to critize this study, you should go to the original (it is the second link I gave). You will find all the data there, and also the results are in agreement with the LNT model:
"We noted little evidence of non-linearity of the dose-response, using either linear-quadratic or linear-exponential forms of departure from linearity (leukaemia exponential p=02672 and quadratic p=04683, brain tumour exponential p=09203 and quadratic p=08993)."
And to make this clear, I am not going to discuss the merits of these studies with some random person on the internet. If you find problems with these studies, please write letters to the editors of Lancet and BMJ etc.
Finally, nobody is using "scare tactics" here. I am myself not arguing with you because I think the health impact from nuclear power is serious problem. In my opinion, nuclear power is very safe. I am arguing with you, because you clearly misrepresent what the current scientific consensus is,
based on some questionable information you found on the internet when googling for things which could confirm your existing opinion. This is a dangerously misleading way to build an opinion.
What you don't realize is that those all base their 'predicted' cancer rates on a data model that was only validated for very high acute exposures, with an assumption of proportional rates for lower doses.
Two of the studies I quoted were not predictions. The cancer from CT has been predicted a *long time* ago. These are the studies *confirming* the predictions using large scale statistical studies.
The study about Fukushima was a prediction based on the LNT model, I cited it because it is relevant in the context of this discussion and to show that the LNT is taken seriously by many different people (including researchers at Stanford - a respected scientific institution).
Those models stem from post war Japan bomb research, but all physical evidence to date shows those models NEVER stand up and rates are ALWAYS much lower than predicted.
You may read such nonsense on the internet - but the scientific consensus is actually in favor of the LNT model. Allmost all evidence we have (and this does not only include the Japan bomb research, but for example the studies I cited about CT) is in argreement with the LNT model.
So, citing a bunch of studies that based prediction on the old, inaccurate model is really of no help.
Again, the CT studies are not predictions - but large scale statistical studies which confirm the effect predicted by the LNT model.
Irrelevant. I was correcting Mr. D.'s claims, not commenting on anything else.
"that statistical real world evidence of actual cancer cases attributable to CT scans is non-existent"
I gave you empirical studies published in highly regarded journals which provide exactly such evidence. You counter this with some blog post (which I didn't read) you found on the internet. You don't see what is wrong here?
Since you are obviously cherry-picking your sources again (which I have pointed out to you before), let me add some recent sources from highly respected journals about the risk of low-dose radiation. Ofcourse, according to Mr. D. all these journals just publish pseudo-science. Reminds me of the old joke with the wrong-way driver.
"... First, it is clear that we have now passed a watershed in our field, where it is no longer tenable to claim that CT risks are "too low to be detectable and may be non-existent" (5). A large well-designed epidemiologic study has clearly shown that the individual risks are small but real..."
Journal: Radiology
Link: http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/...
"...We noted a positive association between radiation dose from CT scans and leukaemia (...) and brain tumours (...)."
Journal: The Lancet
Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
"Conclusions The increased incidence of cancer after CT scan exposure in this cohort was mostly due to irradiation. ..."
Journal: British Medical Journal
Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/346...
"The study supports the extrapolation of high-dose rate risk models to protracted exposures at natural background exposure levels."
Journal: Leukemia
Link: http://www.nature.com/leu/jour...
And with respect to Fukushima there were recent estimates from a Stanford guy: .... Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional [similar]600 mortalities have been reported due to non-radiological causes such as mandatory evacuations."
"We estimate an additional 130 (15â"1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24â"1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposureâ"dose and doseâ"response models used in the study. We also discuss the LNT model's uncertainty at low doses.
Journal: Energy & Environmental Science
Link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...
Yes, and isn't great that you can do this?
But should Linux drop X many applications will stop supporting X properly. They will then not run properly on any X server anymore, neither on Mac, Windows, or Linux or elsewhere. Or in other words, your X server on Windows or Mac OS X is only useful, because there is currently a large ecosystem based around X.
If Linux switches to Wayland, this ecosystem will be gone. X currently offers compatibility across different architectures, along time (currently, you can still run decades-old X application just fine), and space (network transparency). X as a standard provides as much value as POSIX. Why do you want to break this?
On the few new Linux-based mobile platforms which currently use Wayland, X compatibilty is alread lost. Just sad.
And what do we gain if we replace X? Will it be faster? No, Wayland has basically the same design as X: Message passing using a UNIX domain socket and buffer sharing for direct rendering. Performance wise, there is not really anthing to gain. X is bloated? Do you really think a few kilobytes of old and unused rendering code needed for backwards compatibility are bloat? The design of X is unfixable? Nonsense, X was designed from the beginning on to be extensible. It would be very easy to add a special screensaver extension, if really needed.
Yes, Ubuntu still uses X. Maybe they are using Mir on their phone OS or something?
This straightforward solution is that time travel does not exist.