I have a friend who was a software engineer at a plant. You have never worked in an environment with such anal change control and code auditing. Every change, no matter how small or insignificant, went through the whole process, signed, documented, indexed, microfiched and stored.
Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, supports nuclear energy for environmental reasons. It really is the most environmentall-friendly, achievable alternative to large-scale fossil-fuel plants.
"global cooling"? At least that's the scare I remember when I was a kid. Chicken little science sure produces a lot of research grants and fame, and the people who get in the way get smeared.
I was running on a P90. IT department finally gave me a new system (just remembered not PIII, but PII 266, confused it with another upgrade) and I reinstalled and downloaded the MMX core plug-in since my version of Photoshop was pre-MMX. I think it was v4.
I believe Photoshop is already optimized for the 64-bit PPC and AMD, but you can only go so far without a 64-bit OS. Adobe has a history of optimizing Photoshop early and well for older technologies like MMX and hyperthreading (I remember downloading an MMX-optimized replacement core plugin and lighting filters when I moved Photoshop to a PIII machine). I'd expect Photoshop to support 64-bit OS X and 64-bit Windows not long after they come out.
And also: I used to use Photoshop on a Sun Solaris box in the early/mid 90s. I am sure the Solaris market then was much smaller than the Linux market now.
But back then you needed a Solaris or SGI box in order to crunch the big files that neither Mac nor PC were capable of. I knew Army people who used PS on Solaris for mapping, 500MB+ files in the early 90s. Nowadays PC or Mac will do that easily, so the *NIX Photoshop market hasn't been commercially viable in the last several years.
Much as I love the Elise, I wouldn't want to take it out on the road where a huge proportion of vehicles consists of multi-ton monster trucks
I drove it around lots of semis and large work trucks, never had a problem. You are far quicker than them and can easily make up for their mistakes.
And the Elise isn't a good straightaway car, so the long-straight roads aren't too disappointing (got blown away by a Golf TDi on the Autobahn). 120hp just can't drive something with that bad of a drag coefficient much past 120mph, although it does stick to the road like glue at that speed (it takes drag to create downforce).
Like a small, very light sports car being able to come over here without throwing 200kg of extra weight on it, thus ruining the whole point of the car? I speak, of course, of the Lotus Elise.
I've posted this before, but here's a bit of the Windows XP license, and a lot of other software has essentially the same thing in the license:
Privacy: (MS) 16. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES.... ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE.
Translation: We don't guarantee we own it (CONDITION OF TITLE), don't guarantee you won't get legally harrassed because of using it (QUIET ENJOYMENT), and don't guarantee it doesn't infringe on anyone else's copyright (NON-INFRINGEMENT). Your employer has no more guarantee using commercial software unless specifically stated otherwise in a contract.
Show your boss the licenses to the commercial software you're using and watch the sparks fly.
If you know JavaScript and a little XML you should be able to write an extension for it yourself. I tried it recently and had a running extension within two days, counting installer problems because I didn't know that Firefox-only installers are a cinch.
Download one of the other bookmark manager extensions, see how bookmarks are manipulated, check the tutorial and references at XUL Planet (but ignore their installer instructions), and get hacking! Building the UI is easy using XUL widgets, and you only need JavaScript to run it. Send me a message if you get caught up in the installer.
Why do these Apple fans, who justifiably claim that comparing a homebuilt PC to a "take it out of the box and plug it in" Apple system is silly, want to compare a build it yourself supercomputer to one that's just plug and go?
Apple does build a plug-and-go cluster for bioinformatics. And they're relatively cheap, $75K for a 16-node (32-proc) cluster. Of course three XD1 cabinets (36-proc) would probably run circles around the Mac cluster with their better memory architecture and fast interconnects, but at what price? I've heard "Starting at under $100,000" and I doubt very much under that number.
The Mac is just the great modern way of doing easy clusters cheaply.
Even better: Looks like if you dumped the individual enclosures and hard connectors and packed them together, you could probably fit four into the space of a 3.5" drive (although you might be pushing the height by a mm or two).
Add some electronics and presto -- ultra-fast four-drive RAID5 in one drive enclosure! Of course, over $3,300 for 219GB is a bit pricey.
That acutally should go for the smaller drive. 1/3 the mass = 1/3 the damaging force on the drive upon impact if you drop it (assuming the difference in aerodynamic drag is negligible for short drops).
Thinking about it, I'd say no general hot spot, since it's actually keeping the sun from hitting the ground.
And I believe they put insulator and coolant between the tanks and the ground to keep it from drying out. Heaven forbid they get dry ground in the desert (???), but I guess they had a good reason.
Unlike the Greens I know there are many factors to consider, and solar-only or wind-only is a pipe dream. But that doesn't mean we can't use solar where it'll do some good and save some fuel, pollution and/or nuclear waste.
A 200MW plant should take a total of about 2.5 million square meters of land area (~600 acres), the 10MW prototype took 81,000 (~20 acres). But about land use, they're sticking them out in the desert for now. It would be best as an addition to the current grid, and only in sunny areas, but there are some cool (hot?) advantages:
Produces highest electricity during peak usage hours, but can still add to the grid after dark due to the heat stored in the tanks. Models expected around 2010 will be able to operate 24/7.
It's very safe unless you touch the collector (1,000F!). Spills from the huge tanks would quickly freeze on the ground so could just be shoveled up and recycled.
It requires less infrastructure than coal, gas or oil. Unlike nuclear, the currently paranoid insane regulations would be missing, and there would be no need for radioactive fuel generation, transport or disposition (and the associated security concerns).
The big technical hurdles have been solved, such as how to design the collector to absorb 95% of sunlight, run the sodium through it, and withstand heat cycles ranging between 500 and 1,000 F. It works now, but better materials would make it more efficient. One of the big problems now is the expense of the heliostats, but that would be solved with mass production.
Generating electricity from solar energy is far more polluting than nuclear energy.
They do actually have a new technology using simple heliostats (controlled mirrors that point to the sun) concentrating the sun on a central tower, through which is pumped liquid sodium. It's fairly clean, cheap, efficient, long-lasting (a problem with solar cells), safe and with the storage tanks it can actually produce electricity at night (a big problem with conventional solar).
The Greens would probably be most useful if they just had several seats in Congress and could nudge legislation and block blatant anti-environmental moves (James Watt anyone?). But no way would I want them in power.
Donations to political parties aren't a sign of corruption, they're a sign that government has power.
You skirted the true solution right there:
Donations and corruption exist because the government has power. Reduce the government's power, you reduce the corruption. Unfortunately, Cobb doesn't want to reduce government power, but simply shift it from regulating personal relations to regulating business to the point of strangulation.
That's rediculous because it's the businesses that have most money combined with a concentrated agenda. Government would probably be more corrupt if he had his way.
The only party that seems to get that basic truth is the Libertarians.
one needs only to contact the organizing agency before they finalize things and start doing press releases.
1992 Lenora Fulani tried (ignored).
1996 Ross Perot petitioned the FEC on grounds that excluding other parties violated election law (ignored although FEC general counsel said Perot was right).
2000 Pat Buchannan filed FEC complaint (ignored).
2000 Ralph Nader filed a lawsuit, and IIRC was part of another, challenging the FEC to reign in the debate commission. Both thrown out.
Think about it: One of the richest men in the country put his weight behind forcing the commission to accept others, and he lost. What chance does anyone else have?
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one here who believes Disney will probably do a decent job?
Probably. It's not just about buying talent. Pixar has something Disney lost years ago -- the desire to make quality movies.
Nuclear plant maintenance is so anal
I have a friend who was a software engineer at a plant. You have never worked in an environment with such anal change control and code auditing. Every change, no matter how small or insignificant, went through the whole process, signed, documented, indexed, microfiched and stored.
Even Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, supports nuclear energy for environmental reasons. It really is the most environmentall-friendly, achievable alternative to large-scale fossil-fuel plants.
"global cooling"? At least that's the scare I remember when I was a kid. Chicken little science sure produces a lot of research grants and fame, and the people who get in the way get smeared.
And what were you running on before?
I was running on a P90. IT department finally gave me a new system (just remembered not PIII, but PII 266, confused it with another upgrade) and I reinstalled and downloaded the MMX core plug-in since my version of Photoshop was pre-MMX. I think it was v4.
More like "We tried this before and it wasn't commercially viable, but Linux has grown since then so let's check it out again."
I believe Photoshop is already optimized for the 64-bit PPC and AMD, but you can only go so far without a 64-bit OS. Adobe has a history of optimizing Photoshop early and well for older technologies like MMX and hyperthreading (I remember downloading an MMX-optimized replacement core plugin and lighting filters when I moved Photoshop to a PIII machine). I'd expect Photoshop to support 64-bit OS X and 64-bit Windows not long after they come out.
If I could have Adobe coolness on an operating system with a sane VM, I'd be happy as a Troll at a Natalie Portman convention.
I believe you're thinking of Photoshop on a Mac.
And also: I used to use Photoshop on a Sun Solaris box in the early/mid 90s. I am sure the Solaris market then was much smaller than the Linux market now.
But back then you needed a Solaris or SGI box in order to crunch the big files that neither Mac nor PC were capable of. I knew Army people who used PS on Solaris for mapping, 500MB+ files in the early 90s. Nowadays PC or Mac will do that easily, so the *NIX Photoshop market hasn't been commercially viable in the last several years.
The latest Firefox has an Explorer-like view for the bookmark manager.
Much as I love the Elise, I wouldn't want to take it out on the road where a huge proportion of vehicles consists of multi-ton monster trucks
I drove it around lots of semis and large work trucks, never had a problem. You are far quicker than them and can easily make up for their mistakes.
And the Elise isn't a good straightaway car, so the long-straight roads aren't too disappointing (got blown away by a Golf TDi on the Autobahn). 120hp just can't drive something with that bad of a drag coefficient much past 120mph, although it does stick to the road like glue at that speed (it takes drag to create downforce).
Like a small, very light sports car being able to come over here without throwing 200kg of extra weight on it, thus ruining the whole point of the car? I speak, of course, of the Lotus Elise.
Translation: We don't guarantee we own it (CONDITION OF TITLE), don't guarantee you won't get legally harrassed because of using it (QUIET ENJOYMENT), and don't guarantee it doesn't infringe on anyone else's copyright (NON-INFRINGEMENT). Your employer has no more guarantee using commercial software unless specifically stated otherwise in a contract.
Show your boss the licenses to the commercial software you're using and watch the sparks fly.
Or is it all going into aol's pockets (mozilla is netscape is aol right?)?
The Mozilla Foundation is an independent non-profit 501(c) organization (i.e., a legal public charity). Your donations are tax-deductible.
If you know JavaScript and a little XML you should be able to write an extension for it yourself. I tried it recently and had a running extension within two days, counting installer problems because I didn't know that Firefox-only installers are a cinch.
Download one of the other bookmark manager extensions, see how bookmarks are manipulated, check the tutorial and references at XUL Planet (but ignore their installer instructions), and get hacking! Building the UI is easy using XUL widgets, and you only need JavaScript to run it. Send me a message if you get caught up in the installer.
Apple does build a plug-and-go cluster for bioinformatics. And they're relatively cheap, $75K for a 16-node (32-proc) cluster. Of course three XD1 cabinets (36-proc) would probably run circles around the Mac cluster with their better memory architecture and fast interconnects, but at what price? I've heard "Starting at under $100,000" and I doubt very much under that number.
The Mac is just the great modern way of doing easy clusters cheaply.
I believe HP leases time, and have done it for the rendering on a couple recent movies.
Even better: Looks like if you dumped the individual enclosures and hard connectors and packed them together, you could probably fit four into the space of a 3.5" drive (although you might be pushing the height by a mm or two).
Add some electronics and presto -- ultra-fast four-drive RAID5 in one drive enclosure! Of course, over $3,300 for 219GB is a bit pricey.
Unless you drop it I suppose.
That acutally should go for the smaller drive. 1/3 the mass = 1/3 the damaging force on the drive upon impact if you drop it (assuming the difference in aerodynamic drag is negligible for short drops).
The nature of the Internet already levels the paying field, so why regulate it.
Because it levels the playing field, something the current duopoly would consider to be a threat to its power.
Thinking about it, I'd say no general hot spot, since it's actually keeping the sun from hitting the ground.
And I believe they put insulator and coolant between the tanks and the ground to keep it from drying out. Heaven forbid they get dry ground in the desert (???), but I guess they had a good reason.
Unlike the Greens I know there are many factors to consider, and solar-only or wind-only is a pipe dream. But that doesn't mean we can't use solar where it'll do some good and save some fuel, pollution and/or nuclear waste.
A 200MW plant should take a total of about 2.5 million square meters of land area (~600 acres), the 10MW prototype took 81,000 (~20 acres). But about land use, they're sticking them out in the desert for now. It would be best as an addition to the current grid, and only in sunny areas, but there are some cool (hot?) advantages:
Produces highest electricity during peak usage hours, but can still add to the grid after dark due to the heat stored in the tanks. Models expected around 2010 will be able to operate 24/7.
It's very safe unless you touch the collector (1,000F!). Spills from the huge tanks would quickly freeze on the ground so could just be shoveled up and recycled.
It requires less infrastructure than coal, gas or oil. Unlike nuclear, the currently paranoid insane regulations would be missing, and there would be no need for radioactive fuel generation, transport or disposition (and the associated security concerns).
The big technical hurdles have been solved, such as how to design the collector to absorb 95% of sunlight, run the sodium through it, and withstand heat cycles ranging between 500 and 1,000 F. It works now, but better materials would make it more efficient. One of the big problems now is the expense of the heliostats, but that would be solved with mass production.
Generating electricity from solar energy is far more polluting than nuclear energy.
They do actually have a new technology using simple heliostats (controlled mirrors that point to the sun) concentrating the sun on a central tower, through which is pumped liquid sodium. It's fairly clean, cheap, efficient, long-lasting (a problem with solar cells), safe and with the storage tanks it can actually produce electricity at night (a big problem with conventional solar).
The Greens would probably be most useful if they just had several seats in Congress and could nudge legislation and block blatant anti-environmental moves (James Watt anyone?). But no way would I want them in power.
Donations to political parties aren't a sign of corruption, they're a sign that government has power.
You skirted the true solution right there:
Donations and corruption exist because the government has power. Reduce the government's power, you reduce the corruption. Unfortunately, Cobb doesn't want to reduce government power, but simply shift it from regulating personal relations to regulating business to the point of strangulation.
That's rediculous because it's the businesses that have most money combined with a concentrated agenda. Government would probably be more corrupt if he had his way.
The only party that seems to get that basic truth is the Libertarians.
one needs only to contact the organizing agency before they finalize things and start doing press releases.
1992 Lenora Fulani tried (ignored).
1996 Ross Perot petitioned the FEC on grounds that excluding other parties violated election law (ignored although FEC general counsel said Perot was right).
2000 Pat Buchannan filed FEC complaint (ignored).
2000 Ralph Nader filed a lawsuit, and IIRC was part of another, challenging the FEC to reign in the debate commission. Both thrown out.
Think about it: One of the richest men in the country put his weight behind forcing the commission to accept others, and he lost. What chance does anyone else have?