As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate).
You don't know how true that is. I used to work at a company that has (sells) a web 2.0 site with JavaScript / DHTML / Ajax up the ying yang. Using it makes you feel like you're trapped in Candyland. In a bunch of design meetings I brought up Craigslist as an example of a user interface that people really like. Nobody even considered that a serious comment.
I miss the nineties when Yahoo looked like Craigslist does today. I never visit Yahoo anymore.
Well it all depends on whether the Somali government will bail out the pirates. They'd better... I've got a CDO riding on the pirates not defaulting on this lady.
Mashups are mostly cool because they look hard to implement. You look at them and think oh wow that's cool it looks like a desktop. Maybe you play with one for a few hours before forgetting about it. They're one of many things that seem like impressive technical achievements- but that no one really asked for- and that people tire of quickly.
The best example that comes to mind is that voice recognition feature that works over the phone. At first, you hear, "Press 1, or say... yes!" and you decide to say "yes" and it understands you. So you think oh wow that's cool... it can recognize my voice, how impressive. But really, you've seen enough, and afterward you always use touch tones as before. Until... voice recognition infects all the phone tree systems you use like a plague, and the touch tone option disappears! "The serial number you entered is XXXXX. Is that the correct number? Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no", or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" Now since I don't want the guy taking a dump in the next stall to hear me say "yes" and find out that I'm in there on a cellphone (ew) I try to get away with what worked in the good old days... pressing 1. "Sorry, I did not understand your answer. Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no, or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" ARRGH... People who are forced to undergo credit counseling under the terms of the recent bankruptcy reform law are put on the phone with these things, and have to sit there like idiots all day talking to them. It sounds like hell. Many cellphones also have voice recognition- you set it up so you can say "Mary" and it calls Mary and you think oh wow that's cool... but have you ever seen anyone use it? Me either. Mary has a bad reputation- I don't want you to know I'm calling her.
Drag and drop is another one. I can see drag and drop is useful in some situations. You drag a file to a folder, an icon to another window to open it there, etc. So everybody has to implement drag and drop everywhere, whether it makes sense or not, even though nobody outside a feature design meeting has ever asked for it. I have never wanted to drag and drop anything on any "web 2.0" site. But a lot of times my finger clicks the mouse by accident, and I find myself dragging a mouse pointer around that's pregnant with some strange little icon dragged from who knows where. I usually keep dragging it across the screen until I see it turn into that little "no not here" thingy and then I let go. Unless I'm too slow to catch it, and I get stuck trying to figure out WTF I just did and how I can undo it to get things back to the way they were.
Touchscreens- that's another example. When you first use one, you think, oh wow that's cool. Then you put your oily fingers all over it until all you see is a mash of filthy fingerprints dimly lit from underneath... and suddenly you realize those horrible little thumb keyboards weren't so bad after all.
Yeah but what I meant when I said "pick up 100% of that electricity back" was getting all the power back in the form of electricity before the end users convert it to heat again. I didn't RTFA carefully enough and pictured the wrong scene when he said "transmission lines".
Wow I'm too tired to read all that. Actually RTFA more closely I think you win, if by "transmission lines" you meant water pipes and not wires and their intention is to reclaim the energy in a disordered form of heat instead of electricity. The article mostly talks about how they're going to "generate energy" which doesn't make it clear. (But psst... there is no "d" in "refrigerant".)
We've both made errors. I made a reference to "Swedes" and not Finns because I read too fast. However, you said:
Carnot cycles are for calculating heat engines. This is not a heat engine. There is NO WORK being done.
First of all theoretical efficiency limits apply to both types of reversible heat engines- steam engines which extract work and heat pumps (e.g. air conditioners) which require it. (In the heat pump case I guess Th would still be a temperature in the datacenter somewhere, but Tc would now be their hot water heaters' temperatures, not the temperature outside- another mistake I made. These Finns are confusing.) But RTFA- this looks like a heat engine:
Helsinki public energy company Helsingin Energia will recycle heat from a new data center to help generate energy and deliver hot water for the Finnish capital city, it said on Monday.
The recycled heat from the data center, being built by IT and telecom services company Academica, could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by Helsingin Energia's system in the summer, according to Juha Sipilä, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
You DO have more to stand on here if the water were flowing (say) into some hot water heater before being heated to a desired temperature, so the heater would has less work to do- but what's this then in your post about "transmission lines"? It's clear that work is being done here if they're generating electricity in the summer.
I put electricity into a chip. The chip uses X amount of energy and ~100% of the (electrical) energy is converted to heat energy.
Yes that's conservation of energy. But notice that the energy has been converted into a less useful form, even if the flow goes directly off that chip into someone's bathwater. There isn't enough water being heated by that chip, or if there is, it's too cold for anyone to notice. Finns want water to come out of their hot water faucets at temperatures greater than if it were just pumped through datacenters.
If I run water over the chips (lets assume fully submerged for simplicity) and maintain their temperature at 20 degC. ~100% of the heat is removed by the water.
Whoa whoa slow down there, Tex. You're still thinking in terms of conservation of energy. But there are entropy losses- how will you maintain the temperature at 20 deg C unless you're pumping loads of water across the chip- so much that the heat is dissipated across a volume of water too large to make any difference? Or if you're not- say you pump a low flow across the chip so it maintains a temperature at 30 deg C. A heat engine running on that potential difference (back to generating electricity for transmitting over these transmission lines) you won't be able to extract all the electrical energy that you needed to run the chip. Most of it will heat the great outdoors. But that's not what's going on- either in the article, or an imagined situation involving generation of electricity to go across power lines.
I realize there are line losses in the electrical wires. There are heat losses from the pipes piping away the heat. There are also radiation losses in the form of light and other waves that transmit through the water.
Yes yes I realize that too, but we're both waving that stuff away.
Well, the spellchecker does underline "asswipes" when I type it, but it doesn't underline "assholes", and it doesn't underline "Verizon" either, so make your own assumptions.
On slashdot, that ain't flaming or spamming, that's preaching to the choir.
...including, but not limited to...
According to this AUP, Verizon still has leeway in including "preaching to the choir" as a possible violation of the Agreement even if it has not been specifically enumerated as one like flaming and spamming have been.
You're taking conservation of energy into account, but you're forgetting entropy. Think about it... do you really suppose, even in theory, that you could pump electricity into a datacenter, put pretty pictures on people's screens all over the world, and then pick up 100% of that electricity back for use in heating your hot water? As if the electricity were merely waving "Hi" to the datacenter on its way to this water being boiled?
You can shorten the line to as much as you want. Assume no energy is lost to heat in the transmission lines. You'd still have a heat loss problem near the datacenter and whatever heat reclamation gizmo it's using. The max efficiency that can be extracted from a heat engine is 1-(Tc/Th) where Tc and Th are the absolute temperatures of the inside and outside in Kelvin. And 1-(273 / 300) = 0.1 or 10%. Meaning that (assuming it's freezing outside and 27 degrees C in the datacenter), 10% of the electrical power going to the datacenter could be reclaimed, in theory, if they were to extract all the energy that went into heating it from freezing (so the datacenter is freezing again). They're proud of themselves for getting 40% of that or 4%.
The rest of that energy goes toward warming the great outdoors which is at Tc. The Swedes have an advantage being so far North, but if they were to move their datacenter inside the Large Hadron Collider- or if they were to move the population of Sweden into the datacenter- your post would have more merit.
(b) transmit uninvited communications, data or information, or engage in other similar activities, including without limitation, "spamming", "flaming" or denial of service attacks;
Well, in general, if you petition a large number of others for advice on a decision you're not sure of, you'll probably be less likely to do something stupid.
After all, the general public has a low but well-known level of intelligence, and as an individual you may be stupider than that yourself.
I'd like to see some competition in the market, and Bing does a pretty dang good job.
I often have that same thought. I have to smack myself to make sure I'm not dreaming that helping to create competition means switching over to Microsoft.
Yeah yeah "I'm a PC"... the mere slogan reeks of desperation.
I think Occam's Razor will give that second paragraph a nice shave. After RTFA I seem to recall that it assumed they were using a referrer header and giving you their own cookie stamped "idiot". If I were implementing such a thing that's surely how I would do it. Client-side jiggery pokery sounds like more work.
As true as that may be, if you refuse to serve pages to people with old browsers they won't "get the message" you imagine.
Essentially what you suggested would require that everyone in the world who serves HTML pages should join in a concerted effort to dictate terms to those in the larger public who request them. HTML is too cheap to get away with that.
...a simple redirection to a page explaining that they are using a non-standards compliant virus sink with links to getfirefox.com and articles backing up the claim would be much more effective in the long run. In fact, if there weren't so many web designers with root flaws in their logic akin to yours, it would benefit in the short run. About the third or fourth time the user had to choose to use a standards compliant web browser or stop visiting the site(s) they want to visit, they would get the message.
It sounds like a repetitive Ayn Rand novel with all the intellectual web designers going on a new strike every time less buggy browser versions come out.
What frigen company has managed to hang on to totally shit piece of web software that depends on windows 6 or 7 to function? Who ever they are, they have bigger IT problems than this exploit will ever generate.
A lot of people- you'd be surprised. Earlier this year I worked for a place where at least a third of their customers (from academic departments, mostly) were still using IE6 and various IE5 versions.
Slashdot Mirror
As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate).
You don't know how true that is. I used to work at a company that has (sells) a web 2.0 site with JavaScript / DHTML / Ajax up the ying yang. Using it makes you feel like you're trapped in Candyland. In a bunch of design meetings I brought up Craigslist as an example of a user interface that people really like. Nobody even considered that a serious comment.
I miss the nineties when Yahoo looked like Craigslist does today. I never visit Yahoo anymore.
And they don't have to worry about implementing a cap-and-trade program because if sea level rises they'll just float.
Well it all depends on whether the Somali government will bail out the pirates. They'd better... I've got a CDO riding on the pirates not defaulting on this lady.
Do you need an interactive website? Is telecommuting OK?
Mashups are mostly cool because they look hard to implement. You look at them and think oh wow that's cool it looks like a desktop. Maybe you play with one for a few hours before forgetting about it. They're one of many things that seem like impressive technical achievements- but that no one really asked for- and that people tire of quickly.
The best example that comes to mind is that voice recognition feature that works over the phone. At first, you hear, "Press 1, or say... yes!" and you decide to say "yes" and it understands you. So you think oh wow that's cool... it can recognize my voice, how impressive. But really, you've seen enough, and afterward you always use touch tones as before. Until... voice recognition infects all the phone tree systems you use like a plague, and the touch tone option disappears! "The serial number you entered is XXXXX. Is that the correct number? Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no", or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" Now since I don't want the guy taking a dump in the next stall to hear me say "yes" and find out that I'm in there on a cellphone (ew) I try to get away with what worked in the good old days... pressing 1. "Sorry, I did not understand your answer. Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no, or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" ARRGH... People who are forced to undergo credit counseling under the terms of the recent bankruptcy reform law are put on the phone with these things, and have to sit there like idiots all day talking to them. It sounds like hell. Many cellphones also have voice recognition- you set it up so you can say "Mary" and it calls Mary and you think oh wow that's cool... but have you ever seen anyone use it? Me either. Mary has a bad reputation- I don't want you to know I'm calling her.
Drag and drop is another one. I can see drag and drop is useful in some situations. You drag a file to a folder, an icon to another window to open it there, etc. So everybody has to implement drag and drop everywhere, whether it makes sense or not, even though nobody outside a feature design meeting has ever asked for it. I have never wanted to drag and drop anything on any "web 2.0" site. But a lot of times my finger clicks the mouse by accident, and I find myself dragging a mouse pointer around that's pregnant with some strange little icon dragged from who knows where. I usually keep dragging it across the screen until I see it turn into that little "no not here" thingy and then I let go. Unless I'm too slow to catch it, and I get stuck trying to figure out WTF I just did and how I can undo it to get things back to the way they were.
Touchscreens- that's another example. When you first use one, you think, oh wow that's cool. Then you put your oily fingers all over it until all you see is a mash of filthy fingerprints dimly lit from underneath... and suddenly you realize those horrible little thumb keyboards weren't so bad after all.
Yeah but what I meant when I said "pick up 100% of that electricity back" was getting all the power back in the form of electricity before the end users convert it to heat again. I didn't RTFA carefully enough and pictured the wrong scene when he said "transmission lines".
Wow I'm too tired to read all that. Actually RTFA more closely I think you win, if by "transmission lines" you meant water pipes and not wires and their intention is to reclaim the energy in a disordered form of heat instead of electricity. The article mostly talks about how they're going to "generate energy" which doesn't make it clear.
(But psst... there is no "d" in "refrigerant".)
Yeah I read too fast. Although when I was a kid I used to have a Finnish pen pal in Turku. She stopped writing.
Carnot cycles are for calculating heat engines. This is not a heat engine. There is NO WORK being done.
First of all theoretical efficiency limits apply to both types of reversible heat engines- steam engines which extract work and heat pumps (e.g. air conditioners) which require it. (In the heat pump case I guess Th would still be a temperature in the datacenter somewhere, but Tc would now be their hot water heaters' temperatures, not the temperature outside- another mistake I made. These Finns are confusing.) But RTFA- this looks like a heat engine:
Helsinki public energy company Helsingin Energia will recycle heat from a new data center to help generate energy and deliver hot water for the Finnish capital city, it said on Monday.
The recycled heat from the data center, being built by IT and telecom services company Academica, could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by Helsingin Energia's system in the summer, according to Juha Sipilä, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
You DO have more to stand on here if the water were flowing (say) into some hot water heater before being heated to a desired temperature, so the heater would has less work to do- but what's this then in your post about "transmission lines"? It's clear that work is being done here if they're generating electricity in the summer.
I put electricity into a chip. The chip uses X amount of energy and ~100% of the (electrical) energy is converted to heat energy.
Yes that's conservation of energy. But notice that the energy has been converted into a less useful form, even if the flow goes directly off that chip into someone's bathwater. There isn't enough water being heated by that chip, or if there is, it's too cold for anyone to notice. Finns want water to come out of their hot water faucets at temperatures greater than if it were just pumped through datacenters.
If I run water over the chips (lets assume fully submerged for simplicity) and maintain their temperature at 20 degC. ~100% of the heat is removed by the water.
Whoa whoa slow down there, Tex. You're still thinking in terms of conservation of energy. But there are entropy losses- how will you maintain the temperature at 20 deg C unless you're pumping loads of water across the chip- so much that the heat is dissipated across a volume of water too large to make any difference? Or if you're not- say you pump a low flow across the chip so it maintains a temperature at 30 deg C. A heat engine running on that potential difference (back to generating electricity for transmitting over these transmission lines) you won't be able to extract all the electrical energy that you needed to run the chip. Most of it will heat the great outdoors. But that's not what's going on- either in the article, or an imagined situation involving generation of electricity to go across power lines.
I realize there are line losses in the electrical wires. There are heat losses from the pipes piping away the heat. There are also radiation losses in the form of light and other waves that transmit through the water.
Yes yes I realize that too, but we're both waving that stuff away.
Well, the spellchecker does underline "asswipes" when I type it, but it doesn't underline "assholes", and it doesn't underline "Verizon" either, so make your own assumptions.
On slashdot, that ain't flaming or spamming, that's preaching to the choir.
According to this AUP, Verizon still has leeway in including "preaching to the choir" as a possible violation of the Agreement even if it has not been specifically enumerated as one like flaming and spamming have been.
You're taking conservation of energy into account, but you're forgetting entropy. Think about it... do you really suppose, even in theory, that you could pump electricity into a datacenter, put pretty pictures on people's screens all over the world, and then pick up 100% of that electricity back for use in heating your hot water? As if the electricity were merely waving "Hi" to the datacenter on its way to this water being boiled?
You can shorten the line to as much as you want. Assume no energy is lost to heat in the transmission lines. You'd still have a heat loss problem near the datacenter and whatever heat reclamation gizmo it's using. The max efficiency that can be extracted from a heat engine is 1-(Tc/Th) where Tc and Th are the absolute temperatures of the inside and outside in Kelvin. And 1-(273 / 300) = 0.1 or 10%. Meaning that (assuming it's freezing outside and 27 degrees C in the datacenter), 10% of the electrical power going to the datacenter could be reclaimed, in theory, if they were to extract all the energy that went into heating it from freezing (so the datacenter is freezing again). They're proud of themselves for getting 40% of that or 4%.
The rest of that energy goes toward warming the great outdoors which is at Tc. The Swedes have an advantage being so far North, but if they were to move their datacenter inside the Large Hadron Collider- or if they were to move the population of Sweden into the datacenter- your post would have more merit.
(b) transmit uninvited communications, data or information, or engage in other similar activities, including without limitation, "spamming", "flaming" or denial of service attacks;
You people at Verizon are a bunch of asswipes.
That's right- I feel smarter just being here.
Well, in general, if you petition a large number of others for advice on a decision you're not sure of, you'll probably be less likely to do something stupid. After all, the general public has a low but well-known level of intelligence, and as an individual you may be stupider than that yourself.
Examine the vendor's page in Firebug, look for the DIV with id='sergey', and raise its z-order to see the awful truth with its current holiday logo.
I'd like to see some competition in the market, and Bing does a pretty dang good job.
I often have that same thought. I have to smack myself to make sure I'm not dreaming that helping to create competition means switching over to Microsoft.
Yeah yeah "I'm a PC"... the mere slogan reeks of desperation.
I think Occam's Razor will give that second paragraph a nice shave. After RTFA I seem to recall that it assumed they were using a referrer header and giving you their own cookie stamped "idiot". If I were implementing such a thing that's surely how I would do it. Client-side jiggery pokery sounds like more work.
Thanks!
As true as that may be, if you refuse to serve pages to people with old browsers they won't "get the message" you imagine.
Essentially what you suggested would require that everyone in the world who serves HTML pages should join in a concerted effort to dictate terms to those in the larger public who request them. HTML is too cheap to get away with that.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just calling 'em as I see 'em, like Sarah Palin.
...a simple redirection to a page explaining that they are using a non-standards compliant virus sink with links to getfirefox.com and articles backing up the claim would be much more effective in the long run. In fact, if there weren't so many web designers with root flaws in their logic akin to yours, it would benefit in the short run. About the third or fourth time the user had to choose to use a standards compliant web browser or stop visiting the site(s) they want to visit, they would get the message.
It sounds like a repetitive Ayn Rand novel with all the intellectual web designers going on a new strike every time less buggy browser versions come out.
I think most worms these days will check the version and refuse to run until you provide an update for them to infect.
The problem isn't anything Microsoft doing, it's users who don't upgrade their OS.
That may be a true description of this problem as it currently stands- but it stems from what Microsoft screwed up in the past.
What frigen company has managed to hang on to totally shit piece of web software that depends on windows 6 or 7 to function?
Who ever they are, they have bigger IT problems than this exploit will ever generate.
A lot of people- you'd be surprised. Earlier this year I worked for a place where at least a third of their customers (from academic departments, mostly) were still using IE6 and various IE5 versions.