Fortunately for us, we don't need to find a single complete substitute for fossil fuels.
Agreed, and decentralization can help here. Maybe a couple nuke plants for the heavy duty power generation, supplemented by solar panels on people's roofs to take the load off when it's sunny.
Finally, we can reduce our energy consumption by making smarter choices like replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact flourescent ones
I'd really like to see some focus on efficiency on public lighting. I drove by a huge car dealership late last night, and despite the place being closed and deserted, there were probably a hundred light posts with 4 very bright bulbs each, lighting up much of the surrounding area as bright as daylight. No reflectors either, so much of it was cast off in random directions and wasted.
LED technology gets me excited because it's so efficient. I wonder if there's any way the diodes themselves can be scaled larger to avoid having to array hundreds together. It would be nice if it was more efficient than the sodium lamps that municipalities use so that they don't have that awful orange color.
Although, depending on how you think of it, we've been using stored solar energy all alone. AFAIK, the best solar cells available are plant cells. Using solar energy and storing it in hydrocarbons. When the plants are fossilized, we get fossil fuels.
Funny, I just made a similar comment in another thread. Slashdot nexus:)
The question in my mind is, can we simply bypass the 'fossilization" requirement.
Well, on a geologic scale, gasoline and even crude oil is just an energy carrier. Plant life millions of years ago used sunlight to bond simple organic molecules into more complex ones which eventually became hydrocarbons -- effectively storing up large amounts of solar energy into a liquid form.
This means that it will take a LOT of power to supply a hydrogen economy which means new power plants, which means burning more natural gas and coal. The single best leveragabile solution to a hydrogen economy is new nuclear power plants... Wait isn't nuclear bad?
Well, sorry for the tree huggers, but right now nuclear is the ONLY power source that we have that can produce enough energy to get us off fossil fuels and is viable in the long term.
Solar is too inefficient with current technologies. Wind doesn't produce enough power. Hydro is limited by location and not very scalable because of it. Geothermal is interesting but doesn't really produce much power. In order to maintain our current way of life we're going to need a massive amount of energy.
Breeder reactors (and even more traditional designs) are actually more environmentally friendly than coal plants, but scare people and can in theory be misued to produce EEEEVIL nuc-u-lar weapons.
and for any FreeBSD users out there, when you install PostgreSQL from the ports collection, it automatically sets up a cron job that will vacuum all databases nightly (at the same time the daily periodic script runs, 3:01).
You can disable it easily if you want to use a different schedule or the autovacuum daemon, but "out-of-the-box" simple databases don't need to worry about it.
Yes, you could use a cursor instead, but to avoid problems if the table gets updated while your cursor is open, you'd either have to lock the table or deal with errors from the server.
Gah, thanks for reminding me of why I love PostgreSQL so much.
Not always. FreeBSD 5.x and higher have bsdtar installed as "tar", which uses libarchive. It does all the compression in-process without using any external programs.
And here I've been buying naquadria at Costco every month. How much could I have saved if I'd just picked up a ZPM that would last 3,000 years? Well, the ones at Wal-Mart will probably only last 300, but still...
It seems that a large section of people on this site require basic economics lessons.
Scarcity is what it's about, because it's the fundamental concept that allows business to exist. Economic systems are all about how to divide limited resources. Capitalism takes the point of view that human nature is to be selfish and tries to use that to our advantage by promoting competition.
In the real world, with physical objects, capitalism works because of scarcity. There are limited resources and people will work in order to get a bigger share of those resources. Socialism tries to suppress human nature and pool resources, but we've seen that it doesn't really work that well. People will always take advantage of the system to increase their own share.
For much the same reason, capitalism doesn't work anymore when you take away scarcity. Why would anyone pay for information that can be replicated a million times over again? What is the incentive to work? Those ideas simply don't apply the same way to the digital realm.
So what should we do about it? The practice adopted so far is to cling to the ideas that we're comfortable with and attempt to force artificial scarcity, either by laws or through technical means. In the long run, this will fail. Just like socialism tried to ignore the scarcity of the physcal world, trying to prop up a model that runs contrary to the natural laws of the digital environment will inevitably fail.
People are likely to be afraid of this, but it's a necessary step forward in our evolution. As long as there are finite physical resources, there will always be a place for capitalistic ideals there. The areas where there are natural scarcity are network bandwidth, and services too complex to be automated.
Don't bemoan the death of culture yet. Musicians will always make music. They may not be able to do it full time or make millions off of it, but there are plenty of people out there who hold a regular job and form bands on the side. Many put their music up for free download. They make money off of live performances. We'd probably be better off without those who are in it just for the money.
Writers will still write. They have written for thousands of years before people paid them large amounts to do it. There will always be a market for physical books -- just because I can download the text doesn't mean I don't want the tactile feel or the ability to sit back away from the computer and read.
Go ahead, flame me or dismiss this (admittedly longer than I had planned) rant as crazy ramblings. Or sit down and think about it for a while, I mean really think about it. I dare you.
So, because a digital system would be too efficient (unlimited copies rather than only a few that must be shared), we have to cripple it to make it no better than the old physical system. Why? Because our society is too tied to the idea of scarcity?
Maybe it's not the technology that needs to change.
Hmm, that's a good point but I'm not sure there's an easy solution. I could easily see the other side of that as well, someone with 2-3 monitors and gimp windows spread out across them opens a web browser on one monitor to read about some new technique, covering another image window that's not being used at the moment. Giving focus back to an image window (even if it's already visible) causes everything to jump to the foreground, covering the web browser. Oops.
The best way to go is probably still an option that lets the user select "MDI" or "non-MDI" interface, depending on how he/she wants to work. This is complicated by the fact that X11 doesn't really have any equivalent to Windows-style MDI, but I think it can be simulated.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Once they conceded and put a menu bar in image windows in 2.x, it's not so bad anymore. Most operations I don't find any more difficult than using Photoshop or the like. Don't forget that advanced image editing is an inherently complex task. No interface can make it easy eithout sacrificing flexibility.
The only thing I can think of that is a bad interface is the gradient editor. It's awful. Look at Corel PhotoPaint for an example of what a good gradient editor is like.
If I want to edit config files by hand, I'll use command line tools. I use mutt as my primary mail client and I don't complain about having to set a lot of options in.muttrc to get things the way I want them.
The whole point of a GUI is to have a graphical interface. If I want to slip into 'point-n-drool' mode for a while, why should I have to wade through some arcane XML or registry syntax just to set some simple option that the developers don't think a "normal" user would need. How would they know? Maybe normal users don't use that particular option for no other reason than it's been hidden away.
KDE is moving in the right direction. Keep the commonly used options in plain view, and have the not as commonly used ones be in the same place, but under the "Advanced" section. Configuration shouldn't be divided between two different tools.
I'm not sure I see the point of having an MDI window if it doesn't contain the document windows. Is it just to keep the task bar tidy on MS Windows? Any decent *NIX window manager can already use window groups for that, and even Win XP can do some form of grouping.
The dumbing down of GNOME has absolutely nothing to do with OpenUsability.
I'm not saying that the OpenUsability group had anything to do with it. But the stripping of all of GNOME's useful configuration utilities was done in the name of "usability", and I do remember several big GNOME usability studies that reached the same conclusion. I just don't remember who did them.
I don't mind that so much, as long as it's an OPTION.
The thing about MDI schemes is that they make it impossible to efficiently use multi-monitor setups. Even if the tool palettes can be undocked, it makes it so you can't have different "document" windows on different heads.
DMM had made smart moves into selling motherboards and, of course, the Rio.
I actually have one of these, it's running my file server right now.
I was skeptical at first, as Diamond branded video cards tended to have driver issues and not really be the best in quality (but not terrible). However, it turned out to be one of the better Super-7 style motherboards I came across and is the only one from that generation I still have in service.
1. Crappy software that either gets cranky when fed UNC paths and doesn't work right, or ignores the system setting and tries to save things in %USERPROFILE%\My Documents even when it's redirected elsewhere.
2. Laptop users don't have access to the server when they're unplugged. In theory, offline files could be used for that, but it usually ends up getting confused and causing more problems than it solves. And don't you dare rename a share or change server names, or it'll never work right again.
Where I work we tried the whole roaming profile/folder redirection Intellimirror thingy. Used it for about 8 months before giving up and reverting back to standard local profiles. It sounds good in theory, but there are so many subtle headache-causing interactions it just isn't worth it.
And no, ripping one genuine key out of a genuine device does you no good. If you try to use the same key in multiple devices then they will spot that that key is duplicated and they will place that key on a revokation list. All devices with that key then drop dead.
Well, that's easy enough to solve. It shouldn't be difficult for a large Taiwanese manufacturer to rip the keys out of MANY of their competitors devices, and design theirs to cycle through all the keys until it finds one that works.
Sure, whoever's running the DRM could revoke all those keys, but just imagine the backlash when a large portion of people's devices stop working. Even blaming the "evil pirates" won't be enough to calm them down -- they'll either have to voluntarily replace all of them or be forced by the courts to do it. Repeat as often as necessary to bankrupt the DRM providers.
the product itself, manufacturing the product, importing the product, selling the product, using the product, ALL of those things will be ILLEGAL. Illegal in the US under the DMCA. Illegal in the EU under the EUCD. Illegal in Australia under the AUSFTA. Illegal in much of Central and South America under the CAFTA. Illegal in pretty much any country that the US can bully into a so-called "Free Trade Agreement" which always imposes exactly this sort of law.
Don't forget that technologies that implement controls such as region coding are already ILLEGAL in countries such as Australia. All DVD players sold there have to be "pre-hacked" to be able to bypass region coding. If it's illegal to sell devices such as these as-is, and also illegal to bypass the DRM, then they won't be selling them period in these countries.
And these DRM monitors are nothing compared to Trusted Network Connect (TNC). TNC is fully documented on the Trusted Computing Group website. TNC is at least a couple of years out before it becomes a real threat, but if/when it is fully deployed it can effectively ban you from the internet unless you have a fully locked down computer. Everything is optional and opt-in, but if you refuse to submit then eventually you may be effectively banned from using computers at all. I just wish it *were* the paranoid delusion that it sounds like.
TNC is already a failed bit. I've yet to encounter ANYONE important in the networking circles who thinks it's good idea. They only people who seem to think so are the ones designing it.
The backbone providers will never implement it because there's so much traffic already they can barely keep up with simple routing (and there is no financial benefit to them either way). ISPs won't implement it because there is enough competition that they don't want to alienate their customers with forced OS upgrades and such. Non-US networks won't implement it because their governments are already paranoid about vendor lock-in.
It may be deployed on a FEW private networks, but that's it. General concensus among network admins is that layers 2 and 3 are the wrong place to apply that sort of "security", and unneeded complexity just makes things more likely to break.
The point is, like old-school software copy protection, DRM accomplishes nothing except to make life more difficult for legitimate users. Even if they manage to push through DRM EVERYWHERE, someone will still break it. It has never worked and it never will. The level of control they're trying to accomplish simply isn't possible. Physical access to the device trumps any encryption you think you have.
I've gotten exactly one ticket in my life. I was driving 66 in a 65 -- with the flow of traffic -- and a state trooper pulls me over, accuses me of weaving in and out, and writes me a ticket for 89. Which is coincidentally the maximum amount over the limit for which a straight fine is applied.
I was going to fight it, but when I got to the justice of the peace's office I saw he was a cranky old man, and his bailiff in jeans and cowboy boots (this is in rural Texas). Sigh. One look and I took the defensive driving to get it removed...
It's all one big racket (just when I thought I couldn't get any more cynical). Now I don't bother obeying the speed limit much anymore, since it doesn't seem to matter even if I do.
At high enough power levels, visible light can be quite damaging. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun is right next to visible light in the spectrum and can be ionizing and cause serious health problems with enough exposure. Most naturally occuring radio and lower band signals are extremely low power compared with what we're now broadcasting.
In theory, the lower frequencies used by radio signals should be harmless non-ionizing radition, but I'd still feel better if more research and study was done before we go crazy with more and more medium-to-high band and microwave signals all over the place. After all, people thought visible light was harmless for a long time...
The main difference is that your skin blocks visible light and to some extent other radition, but the lower frequencies will pass right through and have a greater chance of affecting something internal.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately for us, we don't need to find a single complete substitute for fossil fuels.
Agreed, and decentralization can help here. Maybe a couple nuke plants for the heavy duty power generation, supplemented by solar panels on people's roofs to take the load off when it's sunny.
Finally, we can reduce our energy consumption by making smarter choices like replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact flourescent ones
I'd really like to see some focus on efficiency on public lighting. I drove by a huge car dealership late last night, and despite the place being closed and deserted, there were probably a hundred light posts with 4 very bright bulbs each, lighting up much of the surrounding area as bright as daylight. No reflectors either, so much of it was cast off in random directions and wasted.
LED technology gets me excited because it's so efficient. I wonder if there's any way the diodes themselves can be scaled larger to avoid having to array hundreds together. It would be nice if it was more efficient than the sodium lamps that municipalities use so that they don't have that awful orange color.
Although, depending on how you think of it, we've been using stored solar energy all alone. AFAIK, the best solar cells available are plant cells. Using solar energy and storing it in hydrocarbons. When the plants are fossilized, we get fossil fuels.
:)
Funny, I just made a similar comment in another thread. Slashdot nexus
The question in my mind is, can we simply bypass the 'fossilization" requirement.
Isn't that basically the concept of biodiesel?
Well, on a geologic scale, gasoline and even crude oil is just an energy carrier. Plant life millions of years ago used sunlight to bond simple organic molecules into more complex ones which eventually became hydrocarbons -- effectively storing up large amounts of solar energy into a liquid form.
This means that it will take a LOT of power to supply a hydrogen economy which means new power plants, which means burning more natural gas and coal. The single best leveragabile solution to a hydrogen economy is new nuclear power plants... Wait isn't nuclear bad?
Well, sorry for the tree huggers, but right now nuclear is the ONLY power source that we have that can produce enough energy to get us off fossil fuels and is viable in the long term.
Solar is too inefficient with current technologies. Wind doesn't produce enough power. Hydro is limited by location and not very scalable because of it. Geothermal is interesting but doesn't really produce much power. In order to maintain our current way of life we're going to need a massive amount of energy.
Breeder reactors (and even more traditional designs) are actually more environmentally friendly than coal plants, but scare people and can in theory be misued to produce EEEEVIL nuc-u-lar weapons.
and for any FreeBSD users out there, when you install PostgreSQL from the ports collection, it automatically sets up a cron job that will vacuum all databases nightly (at the same time the daily periodic script runs, 3:01).
You can disable it easily if you want to use a different schedule or the autovacuum daemon, but "out-of-the-box" simple databases don't need to worry about it.
Yes, you could use a cursor instead, but to avoid problems if the table gets updated while your cursor is open, you'd either have to lock the table or deal with errors from the server.
Gah, thanks for reminding me of why I love PostgreSQL so much.
MVCC rules.
John Titor is that you?
I second the nomination!
Not always. FreeBSD 5.x and higher have bsdtar installed as "tar", which uses libarchive. It does all the compression in-process without using any external programs.
Whaaa... when did Wal-Mart start carring ZPMs?
And here I've been buying naquadria at Costco every month. How much could I have saved if I'd just picked up a ZPM that would last 3,000 years? Well, the ones at Wal-Mart will probably only last 300, but still...
It seems that a large section of people on this site require basic economics lessons.
Scarcity is what it's about, because it's the fundamental concept that allows business to exist. Economic systems are all about how to divide limited resources. Capitalism takes the point of view that human nature is to be selfish and tries to use that to our advantage by promoting competition.
In the real world, with physical objects, capitalism works because of scarcity. There are limited resources and people will work in order to get a bigger share of those resources. Socialism tries to suppress human nature and pool resources, but we've seen that it doesn't really work that well. People will always take advantage of the system to increase their own share.
For much the same reason, capitalism doesn't work anymore when you take away scarcity. Why would anyone pay for information that can be replicated a million times over again? What is the incentive to work? Those ideas simply don't apply the same way to the digital realm.
So what should we do about it? The practice adopted so far is to cling to the ideas that we're comfortable with and attempt to force artificial scarcity, either by laws or through technical means. In the long run, this will fail. Just like socialism tried to ignore the scarcity of the physcal world, trying to prop up a model that runs contrary to the natural laws of the digital environment will inevitably fail.
People are likely to be afraid of this, but it's a necessary step forward in our evolution. As long as there are finite physical resources, there will always be a place for capitalistic ideals there. The areas where there are natural scarcity are network bandwidth, and services too complex to be automated.
Don't bemoan the death of culture yet. Musicians will always make music. They may not be able to do it full time or make millions off of it, but there are plenty of people out there who hold a regular job and form bands on the side. Many put their music up for free download. They make money off of live performances. We'd probably be better off without those who are in it just for the money.
Writers will still write. They have written for thousands of years before people paid them large amounts to do it. There will always be a market for physical books -- just because I can download the text doesn't mean I don't want the tactile feel or the ability to sit back away from the computer and read.
Go ahead, flame me or dismiss this (admittedly longer than I had planned) rant as crazy ramblings. Or sit down and think about it for a while, I mean really think about it. I dare you.
So, because a digital system would be too efficient (unlimited copies rather than only a few that must be shared), we have to cripple it to make it no better than the old physical system. Why? Because our society is too tied to the idea of scarcity?
Maybe it's not the technology that needs to change.
I actually expected 'Troll' but was going for 'Funny'...
Not sure where insightful came from.
Hmm, that's a good point but I'm not sure there's an easy solution. I could easily see the other side of that as well, someone with 2-3 monitors and gimp windows spread out across them opens a web browser on one monitor to read about some new technique, covering another image window that's not being used at the moment. Giving focus back to an image window (even if it's already visible) causes everything to jump to the foreground, covering the web browser. Oops.
The best way to go is probably still an option that lets the user select "MDI" or "non-MDI" interface, depending on how he/she wants to work. This is complicated by the fact that X11 doesn't really have any equivalent to Windows-style MDI, but I think it can be simulated.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Once they conceded and put a menu bar in image windows in 2.x, it's not so bad anymore. Most operations I don't find any more difficult than using Photoshop or the like. Don't forget that advanced image editing is an inherently complex task. No interface can make it easy eithout sacrificing flexibility.
The only thing I can think of that is a bad interface is the gradient editor. It's awful. Look at Corel PhotoPaint for an example of what a good gradient editor is like.
If I want to edit config files by hand, I'll use command line tools. I use mutt as my primary mail client and I don't complain about having to set a lot of options in .muttrc to get things the way I want them.
The whole point of a GUI is to have a graphical interface. If I want to slip into 'point-n-drool' mode for a while, why should I have to wade through some arcane XML or registry syntax just to set some simple option that the developers don't think a "normal" user would need. How would they know? Maybe normal users don't use that particular option for no other reason than it's been hidden away.
KDE is moving in the right direction. Keep the commonly used options in plain view, and have the not as commonly used ones be in the same place, but under the "Advanced" section. Configuration shouldn't be divided between two different tools.
I'm not sure I see the point of having an MDI window if it doesn't contain the document windows. Is it just to keep the task bar tidy on MS Windows? Any decent *NIX window manager can already use window groups for that, and even Win XP can do some form of grouping.
The dumbing down of GNOME has absolutely nothing to do with OpenUsability.
I'm not saying that the OpenUsability group had anything to do with it. But the stripping of all of GNOME's useful configuration utilities was done in the name of "usability", and I do remember several big GNOME usability studies that reached the same conclusion. I just don't remember who did them.
I don't mind that so much, as long as it's an OPTION.
The thing about MDI schemes is that they make it impossible to efficiently use multi-monitor setups. Even if the tool palettes can be undocked, it makes it so you can't have different "document" windows on different heads.
Now the "usability" people will ruin GIMP the same way they ruined GNOME.
DMM had made smart moves into selling motherboards and, of course, the Rio.
I actually have one of these, it's running my file server right now.
I was skeptical at first, as Diamond branded video cards tended to have driver issues and not really be the best in quality (but not terrible). However, it turned out to be one of the better Super-7 style motherboards I came across and is the only one from that generation I still have in service.
Two problems with that:
1. Crappy software that either gets cranky when fed UNC paths and doesn't work right, or ignores the system setting and tries to save things in %USERPROFILE%\My Documents even when it's redirected elsewhere.
2. Laptop users don't have access to the server when they're unplugged. In theory, offline files could be used for that, but it usually ends up getting confused and causing more problems than it solves. And don't you dare rename a share or change server names, or it'll never work right again.
Where I work we tried the whole roaming profile/folder redirection Intellimirror thingy. Used it for about 8 months before giving up and reverting back to standard local profiles. It sounds good in theory, but there are so many subtle headache-causing interactions it just isn't worth it.
And no, ripping one genuine key out of a genuine device does you no good. If you try to use the same key in multiple devices then they will spot that that key is duplicated and they will place that key on a revokation list. All devices with that key then drop dead.
Well, that's easy enough to solve. It shouldn't be difficult for a large Taiwanese manufacturer to rip the keys out of MANY of their competitors devices, and design theirs to cycle through all the keys until it finds one that works.
Sure, whoever's running the DRM could revoke all those keys, but just imagine the backlash when a large portion of people's devices stop working. Even blaming the "evil pirates" won't be enough to calm them down -- they'll either have to voluntarily replace all of them or be forced by the courts to do it. Repeat as often as necessary to bankrupt the DRM providers.
the product itself, manufacturing the product, importing the product, selling the product, using the product, ALL of those things will be ILLEGAL. Illegal in the US under the DMCA. Illegal in the EU under the EUCD. Illegal in Australia under the AUSFTA. Illegal in much of Central and South America under the CAFTA. Illegal in pretty much any country that the US can bully into a so-called "Free Trade Agreement" which always imposes exactly this sort of law.
Don't forget that technologies that implement controls such as region coding are already ILLEGAL in countries such as Australia. All DVD players sold there have to be "pre-hacked" to be able to bypass region coding. If it's illegal to sell devices such as these as-is, and also illegal to bypass the DRM, then they won't be selling them period in these countries.
And these DRM monitors are nothing compared to Trusted Network Connect (TNC). TNC is fully documented on the Trusted Computing Group website. TNC is at least a couple of years out before it becomes a real threat, but if/when it is fully deployed it can effectively ban you from the internet unless you have a fully locked down computer. Everything is optional and opt-in, but if you refuse to submit then eventually you may be effectively banned from using computers at all. I just wish it *were* the paranoid delusion that it sounds like.
TNC is already a failed bit. I've yet to encounter ANYONE important in the networking circles who thinks it's good idea. They only people who seem to think so are the ones designing it.
The backbone providers will never implement it because there's so much traffic already they can barely keep up with simple routing (and there is no financial benefit to them either way). ISPs won't implement it because there is enough competition that they don't want to alienate their customers with forced OS upgrades and such. Non-US networks won't implement it because their governments are already paranoid about vendor lock-in.
It may be deployed on a FEW private networks, but that's it. General concensus among network admins is that layers 2 and 3 are the wrong place to apply that sort of "security", and unneeded complexity just makes things more likely to break.
The point is, like old-school software copy protection, DRM accomplishes nothing except to make life more difficult for legitimate users. Even if they manage to push through DRM EVERYWHERE, someone will still break it. It has never worked and it never will. The level of control they're trying to accomplish simply isn't possible. Physical access to the device trumps any encryption you think you have.
I've gotten exactly one ticket in my life. I was driving 66 in a 65 -- with the flow of traffic -- and a state trooper pulls me over, accuses me of weaving in and out, and writes me a ticket for 89. Which is coincidentally the maximum amount over the limit for which a straight fine is applied.
I was going to fight it, but when I got to the justice of the peace's office I saw he was a cranky old man, and his bailiff in jeans and cowboy boots (this is in rural Texas). Sigh. One look and I took the defensive driving to get it removed...
It's all one big racket (just when I thought I couldn't get any more cynical). Now I don't bother obeying the speed limit much anymore, since it doesn't seem to matter even if I do.
At high enough power levels, visible light can be quite damaging. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun is right next to visible light in the spectrum and can be ionizing and cause serious health problems with enough exposure. Most naturally occuring radio and lower band signals are extremely low power compared with what we're now broadcasting.
In theory, the lower frequencies used by radio signals should be harmless non-ionizing radition, but I'd still feel better if more research and study was done before we go crazy with more and more medium-to-high band and microwave signals all over the place. After all, people thought visible light was harmless for a long time...
The main difference is that your skin blocks visible light and to some extent other radition, but the lower frequencies will pass right through and have a greater chance of affecting something internal.