Straw man. I'm an evironmentalist, and just about all of my friends are. None of us have ever complained, nor heard anyone complain, about poor little birdies getting chopped up by wind turbines. I've heard a lot of anti-environmentalists (do you really fathom the meaning of that stance?) use the little birdies thing as an example of how out to lunch the environmentalists are.
Forget cooking oil - try cooking water instead! Enough electric current run through water produces bubbles of the constituient materials (of water, remember what those are?). Your basic gas station has quite a bit of roof space for photovoltaic cells, neh? Nice source of hydrogen, with an added benefit of releasing oxygen as waste or storing it for other purposes.
Whoa whoa there, big fella. While I agree in principle with the concept that you're simply moving pollution around when switching to an electric car, going nooklyear is moving the pollution around too - on a different dimension to be sure than with a coal-fired plant to be sure, but you are still moving pollution around. With a coal plant, you have these huge stacks spewing out this godawful greenish, yellowish, brown smoke all over the place, and anybody who can see or smell will agree that this is pollution. But a nuke plant is more subtle - no smoke, a little steam perhaps from the cooling system, but nothing gets released into the air or water.
Fast forward about five years, when the reactor core is too hot to be of any use anymore. The plant takes the core offline, and strips it out to be replaced with fresh material. The old core, which will be hot for at least 10,000 years, is then summarily shipped off to, um, where? Did you say you wanted it in your back yard? No? You nimby! You must be from Nevada - that state is inexplicably resisting having the rest of the US dumping it's nuclear waste on it. Those Nevadans must be unpatriotic.
But I digress. My point is, with a nuke plant, you're time-shifting the pollution from your EV-1, rather than space-shifting it the way you would if your powerplant is coal. Still a pollution shift, but the rotten bit is how it's now foisted off on the great-grandkids, who had no say in the matter when it was decided.
Great. I'm all for clean sources of power, but I really think lumping hydropower in with solar and wind generation is uninformed at best. Even a basic Google Search will turn up pages like this, this, and this (note the tld on this last one). And here I'm only addressing a single issue - there are a lot of changes made when a dam is introduced into a wild river, not the least of which is that the river isn't there anymore for a few miles.
Fact is, central power generation is only "cleaner" if the source is truly renewable - and even there, I can only think of wind as a good example of appropriate clean power generation. I'd like to see a convincing argument that it's more efficient to mass a bunch of solar cells in a single location rather than, say, making roofs out of the stuff. Yes, solar cells are expensive now, but that seems to be more a matter of will, or rather the lack thereof. (As an interesting aside, I am led to understand that the large solar plant near Barstow, California, sometimes produces a bizarre reflection in the sky, making it appear that there are two suns. Does anyone have information on this?)
I'm not saying I prefer coal or (gag) nookleyear, but hydro is definately down on my list of preferences for power generation. IMHO, the best solutions are almost always local, adapting to climate, terrain, and resources.
About ten months ago, I was working on a DEC Celebris 5400 series (they make great beater boxes for the kids - the case is likely to withstand being run over by a tank). Anyhow, I left work for the evening, and returned the next day to find the entire case filled with concrete dust and rubble!
I looked up, and saw to my great displeasure that the inbred lurch-clones who were installing a sprinkler system had drilled a four-inch hole through the cinder block wall directly above the computer laying open directly below! With the worker's bootprints in the dust on the table right next to the box:(
I snapped a couple of photos, shook the dust out of the box, and the thing continues to work today (FYI - it has a Pentium I overdrive 200 proc and runs win2k, like a very sick dog, but more reliably than most of our windoze boxes).
If that weren't enough hassle from a sprinkler contractor whose name I really wish I could mention online as a word of warning, last month, I went in to figure out why I wasn't connecting to a certain printer, and found it unplugged, grease-stained, shoved into a corner, and with an out tray filled with metal shavings. I look up, and guess what? A new pipe is installed in the room, and I can see rubbish from where they cut the pipe and then cut threads on it. Out came the camera again, and a very pointed letter was sent to the project manager. Friggin' brand-new thousand dollar laser printer with metal shavings into it, and then grease stains when the moron realized he might possibly damage the printer.
Not that they haven't done enough, but they did install a sprinkler head right over our primary switch stack, with a t-junction directly beneath the fluoro fixture so we can't relamp it. I suppose it didn't occur to them that switches, routers, and rack servers generate heat, or that light bulbs expire and need to be replaced.
Some people should be expressly forbidden from doing remodel work. Why a network guy should have any trouble from sprinkler installation
Thank you for the first intelligent answer to the issues I had with the app. In a very short reply, you have managed to cut through my own ignorance without trolling or otherwise adding emotion to a technical debate. Put the way you put it, it makes sense. I'll drop the.Net beef now:)
Shippy, before you go spouting off about how it's not so bad as we do have Mono available, will you please read their fucking website? Jeezus, dude, the developer states explicitly that Locutus will not be an open-source app. There goes your portability. It's windoze, and only windoze.
Yes, I've done that five minutes of work. Well, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. I personally think Miguel is on to something truly wonderful with the project. But thanks for offering your help.
My point was this: as written, locutus is a pure Windows-only app, which was not in any way apparent from the original posting. And, according to the faq, the developers of locutus do not intend to release the source for the app, which means no porting to Mono, lisp, Applescript, FORTRAN, or anything else for that matter. Only for Windows.
While I have no objection to people wanting to develop for any platform they want to, it's always been my impression that/. is not primarily geared toward Windows developers. Thereareplentyofthose. All I'm saying is, it'd be nice if Michael, or anyone else posting, would at least mention something to the effect to "this app won't run unless you have windows." In the context, I don't think it's too much to ask.
I could have done many other things than reading with interest about a potentially useful P2P app, only to get down to the brass tacks and discover that it's engine is in fact.Net
Sorry, Mike, but will you at least post a Windbox-only disclaimer? I don't have any of those anymore, and am happily phasing them out of existance in my workplace - not a small task when you have to deal with 800 or so computers, with a group of users which frequently points to the monitor when talking about the "computer."
But I digress. My point is, I'd have been much happier to see something like this wrapped around something which doesn't require Windows to use. Unless, of course, someone can point me to Microsoft.Net Framework for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X:)
I'm not sure I agree with you. Not sure I disagree, either. One point of note: Where I live, the city utility built out it's own set of fiber loops, which you can then either gain acces to directly (if you gots the dough), or buy secondhand through a local ISP, which hits your door via DOCSYS cable modem. Still and all, I get 5mbps download for under thirty dollars a month, and ain't complaining. One point of note, though: we still get our outbound via Qwest, who, as most everyone knows, are a bunch of faragin bastiches!
Moral of this story? If your city is at all together, they can do really neat stuff with fiber, but it will cost a buttload of initial startup cost, and will still rely upon a monopolistic juggernaut with monopolistic partners.
Heh, you may have a point there. I do have to highlight the astonishment I would feel in the event that my iBook 2001 running Gentoo ever returned a Blue Screen of Death while running Tera Term - such a happening as this would almost certainly qualify as unique and worthy of an entire Slashdot story, complete with digital pics on a soon to be whallopped server somewhere. In truth, I only need that silly dongle maybe three times a year, and the rest of the time, it's put away in a safe place. And I think you'll find that Linux support for usb-to-serial converters is getting pretty darn solid:)
You make good points, and very funny, but... Let me answer in order: 1) Serial ports on some laptops have doors, which often are broken off within a year or two, to cover them up. 2) You obviously don't have kids, work around kids, or ever have to work in anything other than a very controlled office setting. I don't have that luxury. My hapless laptop is set down wherever it may happen to be needed, which can be in fairly unfriendly environments from an equipment point of view. It's what I do. 3) Really? I think I have a much cleaner-looking and handling computer without the serial port. I need the dongle about three times a year, and the rest of the time it is safely put away. 4)Similar to 3), with the addition that I'd be about as likely to step on my laptop, or the external firewire drive, or my mouse, or my other foot as I would be to step on my serial dongle. If I choose to throw the dongle, it's good that I had it to throw instead of the laptop, don't you think?
Well, whenever I have to blow out a 2600 (about three times a year - the 3com switches hereabouts are much more frequent violators of common network expectations and common sense), I reach into my desk drawer and pull out - get this - a DONGLE that converts USB to SERIAL. Oh, my. Oh, my. And to think I could have had one of those ugly blue ports jutting out the side of my laptop for food to get caught in...
"Isn't that like claiming that Floppies are obsolete..." Yes. Floppies are obsolete. Rely on them at your peril. I won't. I will still use them for those machines which I have to manage which are so obsolete as to be unable to boot from cdrom, but that's it as far as their usefulness goes. Rate of failure alone is a great reason to trash the floppy disk.
"I think you should instead think about the number of printers in-use that are parallell-port only..." Yes, some printers still are parallel-only. How many of those are laser printers? Not very many. IMO, inkjets are almost never worth saving when you re-up your system, and most laser printers have multiple interfaces, so you're not tied to the parport to use those. One exception to the above is the occasional pen plotter... many of those are parport-only and definately worth saving if you need one. Which is a good reason to buy a "specialty" computer to manage it, or, um (jetdirect) an external (jetdirect) print server. (jetdirect)
All I'm trying to say is that not every single x86 mobo needs to have all this old crap hanging off the back of it. Be nice to clean things up a bit, while maintaining special models for people who need them for a particular purpose. Kind of like how you can still buy boards with ISA slots on them. Anyone want to argue that ISA isn't obsolete?
Not a bad point, although I have to add that, given the spaghetti that passes for wiring at my workplace, I don't remotely administer anything that can't talk to the network. Unless you consider remote to be the distance between the keyboard and the comp. Besides, I'm perfectly content using my usb-to-serial dongle on those blue moon occasions and forgetting about the ugly mess that my laptop doesn't have.
Actually, come to think of it, ps/2 is also a thing of the past. Imagine how much more you could get out of a mobo like this if you replaced the ps/2 ports, the parallel port, and the serial port with, say, 6 usb and 2 firewire ports. Again, why not?
is that the manufacturers still insist upon maintaining obsolete interfaces on their mobos. Seriously, how many of you are going to buy a printer tomorrow that is parellel-only? The echos resound through the hall. Similarly for the serial port. These ports are only there to support older hardware for those too uncreative to go find dongles if they're stuck with crufty old hardware. One serious advantage of, say, an iBook over a comparable PC laptop is that the designers were free to be more creative because they weren't stuck with a bunch of zillion-pin garbage sticking out the back of the computer.
Seems to me it's time to clean up the x86 motherboard. I've been happily not using parallel or serial for about two years now. YMMV.
That's just the point - here we are with this "media friendly" operating system and we have to deal with this clunky format conversion to view divx. Am wondering why the #$@%@% a native player hasn't been released - or a codec/plugin for quicktime. For the time being, I just rail against the format, lacking the chops to do the needed dev work myself.
Yes, I know divx is smaller. But you have no idea how painful a pain in the, um, what a hassle divx is for some (read OS X) people to deal with. And, personally, I think the quality of divx is somewhere around that of real video, not the purtiest horse in the stable. Naw, they would get/.ed no matter what format they use, so why not the best?
Slashdot Mirror
Straw man. I'm an evironmentalist, and just about all of my friends are. None of us have ever complained, nor heard anyone complain, about poor little birdies getting chopped up by wind turbines. I've heard a lot of anti-environmentalists (do you really fathom the meaning of that stance?) use the little birdies thing as an example of how out to lunch the environmentalists are.
It's a BS argument, essentially.
Hey, what about your post-apocalyptic babe stash? Is it really as good as they say? Or do you have the cloning lab up and running already?
Forget cooking oil - try cooking water instead! Enough electric current run through water produces bubbles of the constituient materials (of water, remember what those are?). Your basic gas station has quite a bit of roof space for photovoltaic cells, neh? Nice source of hydrogen, with an added benefit of releasing oxygen as waste or storing it for other purposes.
Whoa whoa there, big fella. While I agree in principle with the concept that you're simply moving pollution around when switching to an electric car, going nooklyear is moving the pollution around too - on a different dimension to be sure than with a coal-fired plant to be sure, but you are still moving pollution around. With a coal plant, you have these huge stacks spewing out this godawful greenish, yellowish, brown smoke all over the place, and anybody who can see or smell will agree that this is pollution. But a nuke plant is more subtle - no smoke, a little steam perhaps from the cooling system, but nothing gets released into the air or water.
Fast forward about five years, when the reactor core is too hot to be of any use anymore. The plant takes the core offline, and strips it out to be replaced with fresh material. The old core, which will be hot for at least 10,000 years, is then summarily shipped off to, um, where? Did you say you wanted it in your back yard? No? You nimby! You must be from Nevada - that state is inexplicably resisting having the rest of the US dumping it's nuclear waste on it. Those Nevadans must be unpatriotic.
But I digress. My point is, with a nuke plant, you're time-shifting the pollution from your EV-1, rather than space-shifting it the way you would if your powerplant is coal. Still a pollution shift, but the rotten bit is how it's now foisted off on the great-grandkids, who had no say in the matter when it was decided.
Great. I'm all for clean sources of power, but I really think lumping hydropower in with solar and wind generation is uninformed at best. Even a basic Google Search will turn up pages like this, this, and this (note the tld on this last one). And here I'm only addressing a single issue - there are a lot of changes made when a dam is introduced into a wild river, not the least of which is that the river isn't there anymore for a few miles.
Fact is, central power generation is only "cleaner" if the source is truly renewable - and even there, I can only think of wind as a good example of appropriate clean power generation. I'd like to see a convincing argument that it's more efficient to mass a bunch of solar cells in a single location rather than, say, making roofs out of the stuff. Yes, solar cells are expensive now, but that seems to be more a matter of will, or rather the lack thereof. (As an interesting aside, I am led to understand that the large solar plant near Barstow, California, sometimes produces a bizarre reflection in the sky, making it appear that there are two suns. Does anyone have information on this?)
I'm not saying I prefer coal or (gag) nookleyear, but hydro is definately down on my list of preferences for power generation. IMHO, the best solutions are almost always local, adapting to climate, terrain, and resources.
About ten months ago, I was working on a DEC Celebris 5400 series (they make great beater boxes for the kids - the case is likely to withstand being run over by a tank). Anyhow, I left work for the evening, and returned the next day to find the entire case filled with concrete dust and rubble!
:(
I looked up, and saw to my great displeasure that the inbred lurch-clones who were installing a sprinkler system had drilled a four-inch hole through the cinder block wall directly above the computer laying open directly below! With the worker's bootprints in the dust on the table right next to the box
I snapped a couple of photos, shook the dust out of the box, and the thing continues to work today (FYI - it has a Pentium I overdrive 200 proc and runs win2k, like a very sick dog, but more reliably than most of our windoze boxes).
If that weren't enough hassle from a sprinkler contractor whose name I really wish I could mention online as a word of warning, last month, I went in to figure out why I wasn't connecting to a certain printer, and found it unplugged, grease-stained, shoved into a corner, and with an out tray filled with metal shavings. I look up, and guess what? A new pipe is installed in the room, and I can see rubbish from where they cut the pipe and then cut threads on it. Out came the camera again, and a very pointed letter was sent to the project manager. Friggin' brand-new thousand dollar laser printer with metal shavings into it, and then grease stains when the moron realized he might possibly damage the printer.
Not that they haven't done enough, but they did install a sprinkler head right over our primary switch stack, with a t-junction directly beneath the fluoro fixture so we can't relamp it. I suppose it didn't occur to them that switches, routers, and rack servers generate heat, or that light bulbs expire and need to be replaced.
Some people should be expressly forbidden from doing remodel work. Why a network guy should have any trouble from sprinkler installation
a Beowulf cluster of these!
Sorry, I couldn't resist, and besides, you've got to admit such a cluster could potentially be truly badass.
Thank you for the first intelligent answer to the issues I had with the app. In a very short reply, you have managed to cut through my own ignorance without trolling or otherwise adding emotion to a technical debate. Put the way you put it, it makes sense. I'll drop the .Net beef now :)
According to the locutus faq, the developers will not be releasing source to the app. Doesn't look like they're interested in ports.
Shippy, before you go spouting off about how it's not so bad as we do have Mono available, will you please read their fucking website? Jeezus, dude, the developer states explicitly that Locutus will not be an open-source app. There goes your portability. It's windoze, and only windoze.
Yes, I've done that five minutes of work. Well, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. I personally think Miguel is on to something truly wonderful with the project. But thanks for offering your help.
/. is not primarily geared toward Windows developers. There are plenty of those. All I'm saying is, it'd be nice if Michael, or anyone else posting, would at least mention something to the effect to "this app won't run unless you have windows." In the context, I don't think it's too much to ask.
My point was this: as written, locutus is a pure Windows-only app, which was not in any way apparent from the original posting. And, according to the faq, the developers of locutus do not intend to release the source for the app, which means no porting to Mono, lisp, Applescript, FORTRAN, or anything else for that matter. Only for Windows.
While I have no objection to people wanting to develop for any platform they want to, it's always been my impression that
I could have done many other things than reading with interest about a potentially useful P2P app, only to get down to the brass tacks and discover that it's engine is in fact .Net
.Net Framework for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X :)
Sorry, Mike, but will you at least post a Windbox-only disclaimer? I don't have any of those anymore, and am happily phasing them out of existance in my workplace - not a small task when you have to deal with 800 or so computers, with a group of users which frequently points to the monitor when talking about the "computer."
But I digress. My point is, I'd have been much happier to see something like this wrapped around something which doesn't require Windows to use. Unless, of course, someone can point me to Microsoft
I'm not sure I agree with you. Not sure I disagree, either. One point of note: Where I live, the city utility built out it's own set of fiber loops, which you can then either gain acces to directly (if you gots the dough), or buy secondhand through a local ISP, which hits your door via DOCSYS cable modem. Still and all, I get 5mbps download for under thirty dollars a month, and ain't complaining. One point of note, though: we still get our outbound via Qwest, who, as most everyone knows, are a bunch of faragin bastiches!
Moral of this story? If your city is at all together, they can do really neat stuff with fiber, but it will cost a buttload of initial startup cost, and will still rely upon a monopolistic juggernaut with monopolistic partners.
Heh, you may have a point there. I do have to highlight the astonishment I would feel in the event that my iBook 2001 running Gentoo ever returned a Blue Screen of Death while running Tera Term - such a happening as this would almost certainly qualify as unique and worthy of an entire Slashdot story, complete with digital pics on a soon to be whallopped server somewhere. :)
In truth, I only need that silly dongle maybe three times a year, and the rest of the time, it's put away in a safe place. And I think you'll find that Linux support for usb-to-serial converters is getting pretty darn solid
You make good points, and very funny, but...
Let me answer in order:
1) Serial ports on some laptops have doors, which often are broken off within a year or two, to cover them up.
2) You obviously don't have kids, work around kids, or ever have to work in anything other than a very controlled office setting. I don't have that luxury. My hapless laptop is set down wherever it may happen to be needed, which can be in fairly unfriendly environments from an equipment point of view. It's what I do.
3) Really? I think I have a much cleaner-looking and handling computer without the serial port. I need the dongle about three times a year, and the rest of the time it is safely put away.
4)Similar to 3), with the addition that I'd be about as likely to step on my laptop, or the external firewire drive, or my mouse, or my other foot as I would be to step on my serial dongle. If I choose to throw the dongle, it's good that I had it to throw instead of the laptop, don't you think?
Well, whenever I have to blow out a 2600 (about three times a year - the 3com switches hereabouts are much more frequent violators of common network expectations and common sense), I reach into my desk drawer and pull out - get this - a DONGLE that converts USB to SERIAL. Oh, my. Oh, my. And to think I could have had one of those ugly blue ports jutting out the side of my laptop for food to get caught in...
I'll take this one at a time:
"Isn't that like claiming that Floppies are obsolete..."
Yes. Floppies are obsolete. Rely on them at your peril. I won't. I will still use them for those machines which I have to manage which are so obsolete as to be unable to boot from cdrom, but that's it as far as their usefulness goes. Rate of failure alone is a great reason to trash the floppy disk.
"I think you should instead think about the number of printers in-use that are parallell-port only..."
Yes, some printers still are parallel-only. How many of those are laser printers? Not very many. IMO, inkjets are almost never worth saving when you re-up your system, and most laser printers have multiple interfaces, so you're not tied to the parport to use those. One exception to the above is the occasional pen plotter... many of those are parport-only and definately worth saving if you need one. Which is a good reason to buy a "specialty" computer to manage it, or, um (jetdirect) an external (jetdirect) print server. (jetdirect)
All I'm trying to say is that not every single x86 mobo needs to have all this old crap hanging off the back of it. Be nice to clean things up a bit, while maintaining special models for people who need them for a particular purpose. Kind of like how you can still buy boards with ISA slots on them. Anyone want to argue that ISA isn't obsolete?
Not a bad point, although I have to add that, given the spaghetti that passes for wiring at my workplace, I don't remotely administer anything that can't talk to the network. Unless you consider remote to be the distance between the keyboard and the comp. Besides, I'm perfectly content using my usb-to-serial dongle on those blue moon occasions and forgetting about the ugly mess that my laptop doesn't have.
Actually, come to think of it, ps/2 is also a thing of the past. Imagine how much more you could get out of a mobo like this if you replaced the ps/2 ports, the parallel port, and the serial port with, say, 6 usb and 2 firewire ports. Again, why not?
is that the manufacturers still insist upon maintaining obsolete interfaces on their mobos. Seriously, how many of you are going to buy a printer tomorrow that is parellel-only? The echos resound through the hall. Similarly for the serial port. These ports are only there to support older hardware for those too uncreative to go find dongles if they're stuck with crufty old hardware. One serious advantage of, say, an iBook over a comparable PC laptop is that the designers were free to be more creative because they weren't stuck with a bunch of zillion-pin garbage sticking out the back of the computer.
Seems to me it's time to clean up the x86 motherboard. I've been happily not using parallel or serial for about two years now. YMMV.
Now John Smith at 123 Main Street, Anytown, CA 95555 won't get the radio shack catalog courtesy of yours truly anymore!
Duh :)
That's just the point - here we are with this "media friendly" operating system and we have to deal with this clunky format conversion to view divx. Am wondering why the #$@%@% a native player hasn't been released - or a codec/plugin for quicktime. For the time being, I just rail against the format, lacking the chops to do the needed dev work myself.
Which, on a good enough story, would result in the world's first recursive slashdotting.
Yes, I know divx is smaller. But you have no idea how painful a pain in the, um, what a hassle divx is for some (read OS X) people to deal with. And, personally, I think the quality of divx is somewhere around that of real video, not the purtiest horse in the stable. Naw, they would get /.ed no matter what format they use, so why not the best?