I suspect they merely have associated "Perl" with "bad" because the existing cruft happens to be in Perl. Because there are very few managers who understand the difference between programming languages.
Besides, you can create an unholy mess in any programming language.
While TFA does not give any prices, the Hydra chip and a mainboard with multiple PCIe x 16 slots (that is the high bandwidth variety you want for graphics cards) cost extra money too.
As an example, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe (4 PCIe x 16 slots) costs 144 Euros at my preferred online store, while cheaper ASUS boards with only one PCIe x 16 slot costs 60-70 Euros. Add the Hydra chip, and I guess you'll end up with a price difference over 100 Euros. Which will pay for a midrange modern graphics card that equals several old ones in performance.
Rebooting comes under "simple" and should be available per point & click. Not necessarily through its's own icon, but with a simple sequence of clicks. Windows got that right with Start->Shutdown (except maybe for klicking "Start" to stop the machine;-) but so do newer Linux distributions like Ubuntu.
An "advanced" command is one that offers parameters to customize its effects, often with great specificity. Something like running grep with a few of the more exotic options. This random link http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep should give you an impression of what I mean. Try, for instance, to duplicate the effect of the repetition operators in a typical Windows search mask.
Ubuntu has a clickable shutdown menu like Windows. If that fails, at least you can force things in Linux.
For example, I have a similar problem on my AMD Dual Core w/ Windows 2000: Certain programs (DOD:Source, Teamspeak) will not shut down properly. When I try to kill them with the Task Manager, the system claims they are still being debugged and I should close the debugger first. In situations like this, a reliable kill command would be appreciated.
On a more general note, having advanced terminal commands is a good thing because they are often better at complex taks than a click and point GUI. Needing to use them for tasks that should be simple (like issuing shutdown commands) is bad. In that regard, Linux is improving while Windows is getting worse if one believes the previous posts in this thread;-)
So far, Microsoft has the advantage of enough market share that hardware vendors cannot afford to neglect Windows drivers. While Linux support often sucks or does not exist. For Joe Sixpack, that is a problem. But most/. readers should be able to pick their hardware from the well supported subset.
Now if we go into comparisons of OS quality, a "fair" comparison could be based on hardware that has 1) hardware documentation available and 2) has been around for a while so the Open Source developers had time to implement drivers.
For 1), there is now AMD/ATI. 2) is a matter of time. I'm looking forward to Windows vs. Linux Open GL benchmarks once the AMD/ATI drivers are mature:-)
Well, I bet the consequences of that last conviction are sure to dissuade them this time.
Maybe not in the USA with their tame Department Of Justice (but even there, a repeat offender might eventually be hit with harsher sanctions). For the EU, however, this might be a reason for the next fine, this time exceeding a billion...
Microsoft is not after that 1% of Linux users. Its after the rest of the users.
That attitude will change if the 1% grow into 10% or more. At that point, I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft tries to kill Silverlight on Linux with lawsuits.
They have a history of fighting dirty, and cannot be trusted.
In my experience, once a defect is "well understood and documented", fixing it is usually easy enough. Or sometimes you can find a workaround that doesn't trigger the problematic behavior. Worst case, remove the feature that relies on the buggy code.
If you don't have a solution, it becomes questionable to release the software at all. Unless the bug is merely a bit annoying rather than serious.
Make that "more difficult/annoying to prove in court". Despite some documented mis-measurements, radar guns give a nice, definite number that is usually presumed to be valid. Read: The driver has to demonstrate a shortcoming in the device or the way it was used if she wants to challenge the ticket.
The "reckless driving" kind of ticket usually contains some evaluation based on the common sense of the police officer, which may be more open to dispute.
In my experince, a constant 10 mph difference is not a hazard. It may be annoying to those who want to drive faster, but usually the faster drivers can spot it early on and slow down.
It is far more dangerous if a car suddenly slows down or changes the lane. Especially if the following car is already close.
Actually the question is not stupid at all, if a company is spread over several countries. You just failed to design a scenario in which multiple legislations might apply.
If you rephrase it as "what if Apple had a factory in china, did something that is illegal in both countries, and the workers there try to sue in the US", we get all sorts of interesting questions:
- Can the workers pick the venue, or is that regulated by some law? - If they can sue in the US, do they get compensated by US standards?...and so on. Stuff like that can get madly complicated.
How about if this was a law in China but not here?
Then it would apply to workers Apple employees in China, and those Chinese employees could sue Apple in China (assuming China has similar legal procedures). But according to TFA this is happening in California so US law applies.
If I understand current US copyright law (DCMA, cough) correctly, the IOC can demand that YouTube yanks the clip now. But at least in theory, they do so under penalty of perjury.
The person who put it up can file a counterclaim and say that he believes the video does not infringe any copyright. I think fair use might cover this use of the Olympic Rings, and I'd really like to see the EFF getting behind a lawsuit in such a case.
I have one older PC that had this sort of problem - until a driver update that brought a workaround.
AFAIK the VIA chipset had a fundamental flaw in the first place (data loss on the PCI bus under high load) but such flaws happen to other vendors too and a workaround in the driver is usually acceptable. In this case, the problem showed up in the field and VIA only fixed it after getting bad publicity.
But First Solar are not the only ones who have innovative solar cell technology. There are some more companies entering the market with cheap thin-film panels. Eventually, production will catch up with demand and turning individual homeowners away will mean lost sales.
Yes, promoting solar power was a political goal of the left-ish government several years ago, and they pushed it at a point when the panels were still quite expensive to make. A decline of the subsidies over time was built into the law, but it turned out that the cost improvements in manufacturing happened faster.
A faster cutback was recently discussed in the Bundestag(our parliament) but did not get a majority.
If the delta is large enough, the subsidies can be reduced without strangling the industry.
Germany (my country) is doing that BTW: A new solar plant gets a subsidized prize for the energy, but that price depends on the year in which the plant goes online. Each year it is lowered by a few percent. Now it is sometimes argued that the subsidies could be cut faster because of the large increase in cost efficiency in making the panels. But at least we got the trend right.
I think subsidies are helpful to get the industry started early, before Peak Oil hits in earnest. Right now companies like First Solar can attract investor money because subsidies guarantee a market. Of course the same investments would happen once prices of conventional energy rise high enough, but I think without the subsidies serious development of better solar cells would have started a few years later. Which might really hurt if the more pessimist forecasts about Peak Oil are true.
Note that I'm not calling for permanent subsidies here: I think that this change from oil/coal to renewables is inevitable and the subsidies are only necessary for a while. Prices for oil and coal are going up while the panels get cheaper. Eventually, and probably within a few years now, the best thin film solar technologies will be able to compete without subsidies.
You get the point, but there is still a logic flaw in your argumentation.
If the panel generates roughly the same amount of energy as 10 barrels of oil, we've broken even in terms of energy, since the panel has provided power to some end product that would have been provided by the oil otherwise. What was wasted is the effort to build the panel, since it would have been more convenient to use the oil directly. Alternatively, each panel could produce the energy for making a new panel, so we could have successive generations of panels built with solar energy. Pointless so far but we'll get somewhere when get more energy out of each panel. See below...
If the panel generates significantly more energy than 10 barrels of oil, each panel can deliver the energy for making its successor panel plus some energy for powering end products. So you get a sustainable power source at the expense of a one time investment of 10 barrels of oil. An example: If the panel generated roughly twice the amount of energy it took to produce, we've got the energy for making the second generation of panels plus the same amount of energy for our end product that the 10 barrels of oil would have provided. So we have more than broken even, because we got our energy back and the second generation of panels.
Back to real life numbers: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/17219 has an article in which a number of estimates is cited from literature. Except for the most pessimistic high estimates, most numbers promise that a panel could deliver more than twice the energy for its manufacture within a lifetime of 20 years (my assumption).
What everyone seems to be waiting for is a cost-per-watt that is low enough so that ordinary people will decide to start buying them in large quantities without government subsidization.
And that is exactly what you need in countries that don't have a subsidization program. In the USA, I can see some of the more "green" states like California providing subsidies, but the current federal government seems more inclined to support the petroleum industry. How much change Obama would bring remains to be seen.
So a cost-per-watt that doesn't need subsidies will be an important step forward in making solar power widespread. A deteriorating distribution grid will also do its part, especially if the cost-per-watt-hour of batteries decreases. Here I guess that new Li-Ion chemistries will do their part when more manufacturers make them and competition kicks in.
I've briefly played one of the later Elite versions for the PC, but didn't like the flight model (fully realistic physics don't make for good dogfights). Plus it had a few stupid graphics bugs, and the copy protection was rather obnoxious.
But Elite on the C64 was one of my favorite games, and OOlite might have gone rid of the bugs and the copy protection. Time to try it again...:-)
Perhaps the really gifted engineers have already moved on to the next big thing.
Having said that, I suspect the same is true of gifted CEOs and business managers.
The sort of managers that found companies like Google.
The interesting thing is that I rarely hear those guys bitching about a lack of skilled workers. Those who complain are usually second rate managers of second rate companies, or spokespersons of some employers' association (frequently with the goal of getting the politicians to approve more immigration of engineers).
Actually, you might see a GTA clone some day. There is already an Elite clone (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/). Development on Vega Strike is slow compared to commercial projects but there is a handful of hobbyists who keep the project going.
Now industry specific software is far less fun and enticing (read: boooring). In that case, I believe it will take real money in the form of salaries for the developers;-)
Team Fortress 2 crashes on exit for me, every single time. Happened on XP, then on Vista 32, now on Vista 64. Meh, could be worse.
So I'm not the only one who has that sort of problem. Day Of Defeat:Source often crashes on exit for me, blocking normal shutdown of the OS (Windows 2000) because it claims the program is still being debugged. That is annoying because shutting down the computer by the power switch always carries a risk of corrupting the file system.
More of an issue is how long OEMs will be prepared to continue providing XP drivers (right now dell provides them for almost all thier buisness machines but very few of thier consumer machines).
That's one thing that might force people to drop XP. The question is where to go from there?
My best guess is that most will grudgingly go to Vista or Windows 7, but some will find that Linux with WINE does everything they need. For me personally, WINE is not quite there, the biggest obstacle being the weak Direct3D performance. But I could imagine it shaping up enough within one or two years. At that point, my Windows partition will be seriously in danger of getting wiped...
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I suspect they merely have associated "Perl" with "bad" because the existing cruft happens to be in Perl. Because there are very few managers who understand the difference between programming languages.
Besides, you can create an unholy mess in any programming language.
While TFA does not give any prices, the Hydra chip and a mainboard with multiple PCIe x 16 slots (that is the high bandwidth variety you want for graphics cards) cost extra money too.
As an example, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe (4 PCIe x 16 slots) costs 144 Euros at my preferred online store, while cheaper ASUS boards with only one PCIe x 16 slot costs 60-70 Euros. Add the Hydra chip, and I guess you'll end up with a price difference over 100 Euros. Which will pay for a midrange modern graphics card that equals several old ones in performance.
Rebooting comes under "simple" and should be available per point & click. Not necessarily through its's own icon, but with a simple sequence of clicks. Windows got that right with Start->Shutdown (except maybe for klicking "Start" to stop the machine ;-) but so do newer Linux distributions like Ubuntu.
An "advanced" command is one that offers parameters to customize its effects, often with great specificity. Something like running grep with a few of the more exotic options.
This random link http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep should give you an impression of what I mean. Try, for instance, to duplicate the effect of the repetition operators in a typical Windows search mask.
Ubuntu has a clickable shutdown menu like Windows. If that fails, at least you can force things in Linux.
For example, I have a similar problem on my AMD Dual Core w/ Windows 2000:
Certain programs (DOD:Source, Teamspeak) will not shut down properly. When I try to kill them with the Task Manager, the system claims they are still being debugged and I should close the debugger first. In situations like this, a reliable kill command would be appreciated.
On a more general note, having advanced terminal commands is a good thing because they are often better at complex taks than a click and point GUI. Needing to use them for tasks that should be simple (like issuing shutdown commands) is bad. ;-)
In that regard, Linux is improving while Windows is getting worse if one believes the previous posts in this thread
So far, Microsoft has the advantage of enough market share that hardware vendors cannot afford to neglect Windows drivers. While Linux support often sucks or does not exist. For Joe Sixpack, that is a problem. But most /. readers should be able to pick their hardware from the well supported subset.
Now if we go into comparisons of OS quality, a "fair" comparison could be based on hardware that has
1) hardware documentation available and
2) has been around for a while so the Open Source developers had time to implement drivers.
For 1), there is now AMD/ATI. 2) is a matter of time. I'm looking forward to Windows vs. Linux Open GL benchmarks once the AMD/ATI drivers are mature :-)
Maybe not in the USA with their tame Department Of Justice (but even there, a repeat offender might eventually be hit with harsher sanctions).
For the EU, however, this might be a reason for the next fine, this time exceeding a billion...
That attitude will change if the 1% grow into 10% or more. At that point, I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft tries to kill Silverlight on Linux with lawsuits.
They have a history of fighting dirty, and cannot be trusted.
In my experience, once a defect is "well understood and documented", fixing it is usually easy enough. Or sometimes you can find a workaround that doesn't trigger the problematic behavior. Worst case, remove the feature that relies on the buggy code.
If you don't have a solution, it becomes questionable to release the software at all. Unless the bug is merely a bit annoying rather than serious.
Make that "more difficult/annoying to prove in court". Despite some documented mis-measurements, radar guns give a nice, definite number that is usually presumed to be valid. Read:
The driver has to demonstrate a shortcoming in the device or the way it was used if she wants to challenge the ticket.
The "reckless driving" kind of ticket usually contains some evaluation based on the common sense of the police officer, which may be more open to dispute.
In my experince, a constant 10 mph difference is not a hazard. It may be annoying to those who want to drive faster, but usually the faster drivers can spot it early on and slow down.
It is far more dangerous if a car suddenly slows down or changes the lane. Especially if the following car is already close.
Actually the question is not stupid at all, if a company is spread over several countries. You just failed to design a scenario in which multiple legislations might apply.
If you rephrase it as "what if Apple had a factory in china, did something that is illegal in both countries, and the workers there try to sue in the US", we get all sorts of interesting questions:
- Can the workers pick the venue, or is that regulated by some law? ...and so on. Stuff like that can get madly complicated.
- If they can sue in the US, do they get compensated by US standards?
How about if this was a law in China but not here?
Then it would apply to workers Apple employees in China, and those Chinese employees could sue Apple in China (assuming China has similar legal procedures).
But according to TFA this is happening in California so US law applies.
If I understand current US copyright law (DCMA, cough) correctly, the IOC can demand that YouTube yanks the clip now. But at least in theory, they do so under penalty of perjury.
The person who put it up can file a counterclaim and say that he believes the video does not infringe any copyright. I think fair use might cover this use of the Olympic Rings, and I'd really like to see the EFF getting behind a lawsuit in such a case.
I have one older PC that had this sort of problem - until a driver update that brought a workaround.
AFAIK the VIA chipset had a fundamental flaw in the first place (data loss on the PCI bus under high load) but such flaws happen to other vendors too and a workaround in the driver is usually acceptable. In this case, the problem showed up in the field and VIA only fixed it after getting bad publicity.
So far, they can afford to pick their customers.
But First Solar are not the only ones who have innovative solar cell technology. There are some more companies entering the market with cheap thin-film panels. Eventually, production will catch up with demand and turning individual homeowners away will mean lost sales.
Yes, promoting solar power was a political goal of the left-ish government several years ago, and they pushed it at a point when the panels were still quite expensive to make. A decline of the subsidies over time was built into the law, but it turned out that the cost improvements in manufacturing happened faster.
A faster cutback was recently discussed in the Bundestag(our parliament) but did not get a majority.
If the delta is large enough, the subsidies can be reduced without strangling the industry.
Germany (my country) is doing that BTW:
A new solar plant gets a subsidized prize for the energy, but that price depends on the year in which the plant goes online. Each year it is lowered by a few percent. Now it is sometimes argued that the subsidies could be cut faster because of the large increase in cost efficiency in making the panels. But at least we got the trend right.
I think subsidies are helpful to get the industry started early, before Peak Oil hits in earnest. Right now companies like First Solar can attract investor money because subsidies guarantee a market. Of course the same investments would happen once prices of conventional energy rise high enough, but I think without the subsidies serious development of better solar cells would have started a few years later. Which might really hurt if the more pessimist forecasts about Peak Oil are true.
Note that I'm not calling for permanent subsidies here:
I think that this change from oil/coal to renewables is inevitable and the subsidies are only necessary for a while. Prices for oil and coal are going up while the panels get cheaper. Eventually, and probably within a few years now, the best thin film solar technologies will be able to compete without subsidies.
You get the point, but there is still a logic flaw in your argumentation.
If the panel generates roughly the same amount of energy as 10 barrels of oil, we've broken even in terms of energy, since the panel has provided power to some end product that would have been provided by the oil otherwise. What was wasted is the effort to build the panel, since it would have been more convenient to use the oil directly.
Alternatively, each panel could produce the energy for making a new panel, so we could have successive generations of panels built with solar energy. Pointless so far but we'll get somewhere when get more energy out of each panel. See below...
If the panel generates significantly more energy than 10 barrels of oil, each panel can deliver the energy for making its successor panel plus some energy for powering end products. So you get a sustainable power source at the expense of a one time investment of 10 barrels of oil. An example:
If the panel generated roughly twice the amount of energy it took to produce, we've got the energy for making the second generation of panels plus the same amount of energy for our end product that the 10 barrels of oil would have provided. So we have more than broken even, because we got our energy back and the second generation of panels.
Back to real life numbers:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/17219 has an article in which a number of estimates is cited from literature. Except for the most pessimistic high estimates, most numbers promise that a panel could deliver more than twice the energy for its manufacture within a lifetime of 20 years (my assumption).
And that is exactly what you need in countries that don't have a subsidization program. In the USA, I can see some of the more "green" states like California providing subsidies, but the current federal government seems more inclined to support the petroleum industry. How much change Obama would bring remains to be seen.
So a cost-per-watt that doesn't need subsidies will be an important step forward in making solar power widespread. A deteriorating distribution grid will also do its part, especially if the cost-per-watt-hour of batteries decreases. Here I guess that new Li-Ion chemistries will do their part when more manufacturers make them and competition kicks in.
Heh, now you got me to download and try it.
I've briefly played one of the later Elite versions for the PC, but didn't like the flight model (fully realistic physics don't make for good dogfights). Plus it had a few stupid graphics bugs, and the copy protection was rather obnoxious.
But Elite on the C64 was one of my favorite games, and OOlite might have gone rid of the bugs and the copy protection. Time to try it again... :-)
The sort of managers that found companies like Google.
The interesting thing is that I rarely hear those guys bitching about a lack of skilled workers. Those who complain are usually second rate managers of second rate companies, or spokespersons of some employers' association (frequently with the goal of getting the politicians to approve more immigration of engineers).
Actually, you might see a GTA clone some day. There is already an Elite clone (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/). Development on Vega Strike is slow compared to commercial projects but there is a handful of hobbyists who keep the project going.
Now industry specific software is far less fun and enticing (read: boooring). In that case, I believe it will take real money in the form of salaries for the developers ;-)
So I'm not the only one who has that sort of problem. Day Of Defeat:Source often crashes on exit for me, blocking normal shutdown of the OS (Windows 2000) because it claims the program is still being debugged. That is annoying because shutting down the computer by the power switch always carries a risk of corrupting the file system.
That's one thing that might force people to drop XP. The question is where to go from there?
My best guess is that most will grudgingly go to Vista or Windows 7, but some will find that Linux with WINE does everything they need. For me personally, WINE is not quite there, the biggest obstacle being the weak Direct3D performance. But I could imagine it shaping up enough within one or two years. At that point, my Windows partition will be seriously in danger of getting wiped...