They do. But the undercoating combined with the zinc plated body has held up well so far. There is a little rust, but I guess four more years before the car has to be scrapped are realistic.
Even if you're right about the oil companies' behavior, I doubt they could stop all innovative approaches of turning waste into oil. One of these is using the Fischer-Tropsch process on waste biomass, on which the original patents have long expired.
Also, alternative technologies could win against the use of oil if it becomes too expensive. As an example, we have compact fluorescen lamps as alternative to lightbulbs, and LEDs are getting to a point where they are bright enough to be yet another alternative.
My car is 16 years old and still in pretty good shape. I guess it will last a few more years. So 20 years are not unrealistic for a car. Now this model was built way before ROHS, so I'm not worried about whiskers. But for a car built in the last few years it could be an issue.
If the bullshit on Slashdot was more than figuratively, we could use it for making biogas and driving a power plant. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gober_gas. Actually, my brother-in-law is running a biogas power plant on his farm, with a maximum output of 250 kW. The biomass is partly cow dung (it is a dairy farm), partly plants that are directly added to the pit.
I know what a catalyst is, but does the Purdue University prof?
Because from a catalyst that separates water on contact it is not far to a closed system that gives off excess energy: 1. Use catalyst on water. 2. Burn the resulting oxygen and hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. Use internal combustion engine to drive something - here the energy gets extracted from the system. 3. Internal combustion engine gives off water as result of burning oxygen and hydrogen. Return water to catalyst => we are at step 1 again.
An idea that i'd like to present is that, for the most part, even the oil system we have today, depends on burning more resources than it pulls out, but the costs are largely hidden from the consumer. The "energy" industry of today is largely the same thing. This shit we're burning today had to come from somewhere.
Correct. The "somewhere" are the remains of plants and animals that were somehow preserved from biodegradation, and eventually converted to coal and mineral oil over millions of years.
Obviously, we are burning that fuel much faster than it is created (in about 200 years, we have used up a significant part of what was formed in millions of years). There are two problems with this: 1) Oil and coal will eventually run out. It looks increasingly likely we have already hit "peak oil": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil 2) By blowing huge amounts of CO2 into the air, we are promoting a global greenhouse effect. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming. While such climate swings have happened before in prehistoric times, there is some danger that we are in the process of triggering a particularly fast and violent one that could give us major problems.
Because of that, I agree we need alternatives. The water car from TFA sounds like a scam to me, but wind and solar power are certainly things we will use more of in the future. Also, some improved ways of making biodiesel are in the works. Finally, maybe the physicists will eventually manage to get nuclear fusion going. The research is expensive (10 billion or so for ITER), but cheap compared to oil wars in the Middle East. For the cost of one Iraq war, you can build a lot of research reactors.
Bottom line is that Nokia won't be using Open Source Software as much as it would like to due to these restrictions. In my opinion this is not only loss on Nokia's part but also on OSS community is losing it's breakthrough to wider market and crucial steps towards general openness. The demand to meet every and all OSS requirement is not currently possible now and OSS community alone cannot figure out steps that would bring society as a whole closer to the ultimate openness target. What Nokia (and Ari Jaaksi) in my understanding is trying to suggest here is that OSS would relax a bit on some deal breakers on manufacturers side and allow them to embrace OSS more. Alternatively we will end up completely closed source solutions and this opportunity to change society in large scale is lost for now.
I think it is worthwhile to take the long term view here and avoid giving up OSS principles. The demand to meet all OSS requirements is only impossible for the popular business model of subsidizing the mobile phones up front and then charging excessive fees over the following years. But business models can be changed. If Nokia doesn't want to accept OSS rules, there might be others who do. And then we have a choice, like we do today with open vs. closed PC operating systems.
If so, we could fork it (being GPL... the BSD license wouldn't allow us that freedom).
Yes we could fork it. But we also could fork it under the BSD license.
Actually the BSD license gives you more options, as you can fork something and turn it into a closed source application. The GPL does deny you that freedom to ensure that derived works stay Open source.
But in this case it doesn't make a difference: The copyright owner (Trolltech) can always release new, closed-source versions. Unless they include other people's GPL software. The rest of the world can fork the last GPLed version and run with that.
...they could revoke the sweeping powers they gave the government. But that would amount to admitting they made a mistake in the first place. A very un-politician act;-)
It's sad to see the auto industry get caught with it's pants down again. Doesn't their memory go back to the '70s? Here's what kills me: Why the heck wasn't a natural gas Honda Pilot an option in 2008? It just seems stupid.
The auto industry is an ultraconservative bunch, worldwide. I'm from Germany, and while we have more small and efficient cars due to the already high gas prices, the general trend still goes towards more equipment in the cars. The technology is the same old.
Maybe once every 10 years, one of the larger auto makers dares to try something significantly different. In the late 80s we had Audi bringing direct injection diesel engines to the passenger car, in 1997 Toyota launched the first hybrid in Japan.
Compared to the effort that goes into promoting the latest comfort gadgets, this seems pretty meager.
The typical SUV (I'm talking of the fashionable, "citified" ones like BMW X5 or Chevy Trailblazer) does a lot of things but none really well. Some examples and what car is best:
1) Drive comfortably, while being easy on the gas bills: any not too large and heavy car. Mostly sedans, hatchbacks... 2) Transport a big family with lots of luggage: station wagon or minvan. Tends to have more room than a SUV, and will probably give more miles per gallon. 3) Take you through rough country: a REAL offroad car like a Landrover Defender, Mercedes G class, Hummer... most SUVs would give up long before those.
Now you may live in a corner where the roads are lousy but not quite bad enough to require a serious offroad car. Then a SUV may be a reasonable compromise between 2) and 3)
But I agree with GP that most SUV buyers are posers.
Metallica were indeed of one of the founders of thrash metal, and in their earlier years I count them among the best musicians in the genre (as it was back then). Certainly up to "Justice For All", and the Black Album was OK too.
But after that, they sort of lost their drive and did some so-so hard rock stuff. I think they never quite recovered from that, and the metal scene in general has produced a lot of really good bands since. Overall I think thrash/speed/black metal has grown up some and it is more difficult these days to stand out. The Metallica from the 80s would still count as good band but I don't think they could reach superstar status anymore.
I've followed the reports on http://www.groklaw.net/, and it seems to me that it was SCO which abused the legal system. As in
-making public threats to Linux users without providing evidence for their claims -using all sorts of delay tactics in court to prevent a quick trial -filing for bankruptcy a few days before an important court decison, which smacks of an attempt to get a venue change (because the bankruptcy court gets jurisdiction)
IBM's and Novell's legal teams looked much more respectable by comparison. If they have gamed the legal system themselves at a few points, it was insignificant beside SCO's behavior.
In other words, even a moderately sleazy lawyer will look good compared to SCO's legal team. So don't be surprised if some minor abuses from SCO's opponents were overlooked (I'm not saying there were such abuses, I merely consider the possibility).
Considering DOD and TS, they run fine on my old P4 under Windows 2000, same patch level. So it could be some unfixed driver issue or maybe a flaw in Windows 2000 that only shows up with a dual core processor.
But I refuse to use a Windows version that requires activation, so it is Windows 2000 or Linux. Linux might win that contest soon...
Why is it that the *nix users seem to have BSOD issues on an infinitely higher rate than the rest of the world?
Maybe they went *nix because of too many BSOD issues, while happy Windows users see no reason to switch?
Personally, I had my share of Windows problems over the years, despite choosing reliable hardware over cheap crap where possible. Currently I have two programs that reproducably crash my AMD dual core under Windows 2000, taking down the entire OS: -Day of Defeat: Source and -Teamspeak. Updating BIOS and drivers does not help, Memtest shows no errors. So I have little hope to fix this under Win2000.
Things like that were my biggest reason to try Linux once a year or so. It is not quite at the point where I consider Windows redundant (mostly due to games), but thanks to WINE making nice progress it's getting closer. BTW, Day of Defeat: Source runs crash-free under Ubuntu 8.04 and WINE since WINE 1.0-RC2. The performance still sucks, but once that is fixed I'll have my first Windows game that runs better under Linux;-)
This is a 100% Linux laptop and still I need to rely on wine and Vmware to use the applications I really want/need.
As far as I can get the applications I want to run with WINE, I consider Linux desktop ready. WINE is technically a 3rd party app but easily enough available. Ubuntu actually has it as part of the distribution.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
I think these offers would be reasonable for a lower price. As it is, they are overpriced and deserve to be whacked by competition (albeit they get brownie points for being honest about the volume limits). For comparison: My own internet connection (in Germany) costs about 20 Euro (30 US dollars/month), telephone is on a separate bill. It is a 2MBit/s ADSL with "flat rate", and I guess the provider would tolerate 40 Gbyte/month - there are stories floating around the net where people got dropped for extreme usage, but those are more like 100 GByte/month. So I got a price similar to the cheapest TW tier, but better throughput and a data volume similar to the $54.90 package.
There's actually a slight argument for some form of open source here, since if NVidia, ATI, Intel, et al were willing to give the source code for their drivers to Microsoft, to include in the Windows OS builds, it would almost certainly lead to much higher reliability, since Microsoft would be able to spot a lot of these bugs through review of the code and stress testing (in contrast to the "many eyes" nonsense, Microsoft developers actually would be able to spot and fix bugs).
I think we will see over the next years if Microsoft or Linux developers are better: ATI/AMD is now giving away specifications for their chips, and the Linux community is willing to work with that documents and create drivers. Microsoft has the opportunity to do the same. Eventually, Linux will have mature ATI Open Source drivers and there can be a direct comparison to drivers for Windows. Microsoft can choose to compete or keep relying on the drivers from ATI to save money. Either way, there won't be many excuses left if the Windows drivers look bad by comparison.
Windows XP was much faster than 2000. Yes, 2000 had the "bare essentials," but XP had internal improvements all over the place (system call performance anyone?) that made just about everything faster.
On a software project I was working on last year, two computers with XP Professional per site had to exchange data via a network share (mapped to a drive letter and treated much like a local drive). Buying server licenses was considered too expensive.
Now, with lots of data in the shared directory, performance sucked. So we did a lot of testing with various Windows versions as "server" and client. Both with the "main" software project and with a small test application one of us whipped up.
XP Professional -> XP Professional was the worst by far. The test application showed delays that depended on filesize, with the filesize/delay curve showing some really weird peaks.
Windows 2000 Professional -> Windows 2000 Professional was better. But still inferior to what I'd expect from sharing data over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Using an actual Windows 2000 Server to serve the data was fastest. This test case actually showed the sort of performance I expected over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Finally and to our surprise, Windows 98 as client performed best with the test application. As if the later versions performed some time-consuming negotiations that Windows 98 simply did not bother with.
I conclude that XP Professional (and to a lesser degree 2000 Professional) has either design issues or the performance was intentionally crippled, to make it less attractive for use as a "small server".
From a technical point of view, that might be the best they can do. Having the source code to the original Win32 stuff, they should be able to do better than the WINE team.
But I don't think they will use WINE as it is, because it is a Windows -> Linux API translation layer. So their new system would have to implement the Linux API, which is design restriction of its own. Also, WINE is GPL'ed, so they would have to give away any improvements they make along with their version. Which would mean that Windows 7 backward compatibility would be pretty much equal to Linux + WINE. Not a good situation if you want to charge a few hundred dollars for the better versions of your OS.
You're correct about Konqueror, and Linux with KDE is similar to XP in memory consumption. I find this a tad disappointing on part of the Open Source desktop developers, even if my current PCs can handle it easily. Well, maybe I'll have too much time someday and go into Gnome/KDE hacking...
AFAIK Microsoft's biggest cash cows are Windows and Office. Immediate competitors are Linux and Apple's Mac OS X for Windows and Open Office for Microsoft Office. All of these are not specifically "enterprise" software, but aimed at pretty much every user. And the Open Source alternatives look pretty nice at least from a user perspective.
There is also stuff like Exchange/Outlook, SQL Server and the developer tools. This is what I would call "enterprise" software. Here Microsoft looks good and Open Source seems to lag behind (feel free to correct me) but I don't think that is where the big money is.
And then there is customer-specific "enterprise" software that is written for the particular needs of some company, department or project. Usually by some small vendor that does custom development or inhouse developers. Here you will find lots of abysmal software, but AFAIK Microsoft is not in that market. Too bad for them, because in this area they could outcompete most of the others on quality;-)
FYI, the "Windows explorer" for the local filesystem is actually another browser window. Type an URL into the address field, and hey presto - you're surfing the internet;-)
Personally, I'd like to get rid of that too. Not because I'm anti-surfing but because it is a waste of system ressources to use a full-blown web browser for looking at your directories. Bloat like that is responsible for Windows getting more ressource-hungry every new version.
As the discussion was about what PC to buy for Linux, I assumed that the customer would buy the (cheaper) PC that is bundled with Windows, then reformat right away and install Linux. Result: The crapware vendor is screwed out of whatever he paid to have his crapware installed in the first place, but that is all. That computer never shows up in his system anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
They do.
But the undercoating combined with the zinc plated body has held up well so far. There is a little rust, but I guess four more years before the car has to be scrapped are realistic.
Even if you're right about the oil companies' behavior, I doubt they could stop all innovative approaches of turning waste into oil. One of these is using the Fischer-Tropsch process on waste biomass, on which the original patents have long expired.
Also, alternative technologies could win against the use of oil if it becomes too expensive. As an example, we have compact fluorescen lamps as alternative to lightbulbs, and LEDs are getting to a point where they are bright enough to be yet another alternative.
My car is 16 years old and still in pretty good shape. I guess it will last a few more years. So 20 years are not unrealistic for a car.
Now this model was built way before ROHS, so I'm not worried about whiskers. But for a car built in the last few years it could be an issue.
If the bullshit on Slashdot was more than figuratively, we could use it for making biogas and driving a power plant. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gober_gas.
Actually, my brother-in-law is running a biogas power plant on his farm, with a maximum output of 250 kW. The biomass is partly cow dung (it is a dairy farm), partly plants that are directly added to the pit.
I know what a catalyst is, but does the Purdue University prof?
Because from a catalyst that separates water on contact it is not far to a closed system that gives off excess energy:
1. Use catalyst on water.
2. Burn the resulting oxygen and hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. Use internal combustion engine to drive something - here the energy gets extracted from the system.
3. Internal combustion engine gives off water as result of burning oxygen and hydrogen. Return water to catalyst => we are at step 1 again.
Correct. The "somewhere" are the remains of plants and animals that were somehow preserved from biodegradation, and eventually converted to coal and mineral oil over millions of years.
Obviously, we are burning that fuel much faster than it is created (in about 200 years, we have used up a significant part of what was formed in millions of years). There are two problems with this:
1) Oil and coal will eventually run out. It looks increasingly likely we have already hit "peak oil": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
2) By blowing huge amounts of CO2 into the air, we are promoting a global greenhouse effect. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming.
While such climate swings have happened before in prehistoric times, there is some danger that we are in the process of triggering a particularly fast and violent one that could give us major problems.
Because of that, I agree we need alternatives. The water car from TFA sounds like a scam to me, but wind and solar power are certainly things we will use more of in the future. Also, some improved ways of making biodiesel are in the works.
Finally, maybe the physicists will eventually manage to get nuclear fusion going. The research is expensive (10 billion or so for ITER), but cheap compared to oil wars in the Middle East. For the cost of one Iraq war, you can build a lot of research reactors.
...if you are my opponent in Day Of Defeat (I'll keep the camo) ;-)
I think it is worthwhile to take the long term view here and avoid giving up OSS principles. The demand to meet all OSS requirements is only impossible for the popular business model of subsidizing the mobile phones up front and then charging excessive fees over the following years.
But business models can be changed. If Nokia doesn't want to accept OSS rules, there might be others who do. And then we have a choice, like we do today with open vs. closed PC operating systems.
Yes we could fork it. But we also could fork it under the BSD license.
Actually the BSD license gives you more options, as you can fork something and turn it into a closed source application. The GPL does deny you that freedom to ensure that derived works stay Open source.
But in this case it doesn't make a difference:
The copyright owner (Trolltech) can always release new, closed-source versions. Unless they include other people's GPL software. The rest of the world can fork the last GPLed version and run with that.
...they could revoke the sweeping powers they gave the government. But that would amount to admitting they made a mistake in the first place. A very un-politician act ;-)
The auto industry is an ultraconservative bunch, worldwide. I'm from Germany, and while we have more small and efficient cars due to the already high gas prices, the general trend still goes towards more equipment in the cars. The technology is the same old.
Maybe once every 10 years, one of the larger auto makers dares to try something significantly different. In the late 80s we had Audi bringing direct injection diesel engines to the passenger car, in 1997 Toyota launched the first hybrid in Japan.
Compared to the effort that goes into promoting the latest comfort gadgets, this seems pretty meager.
The typical SUV (I'm talking of the fashionable, "citified" ones like BMW X5 or Chevy Trailblazer) does a lot of things but none really well. Some examples and what car is best:
1) Drive comfortably, while being easy on the gas bills: any not too large and heavy car. Mostly sedans, hatchbacks...
2) Transport a big family with lots of luggage: station wagon or minvan. Tends to have more room than a SUV, and will probably give more miles per gallon.
3) Take you through rough country: a REAL offroad car like a Landrover Defender, Mercedes G class, Hummer... most SUVs would give up long before those.
Now you may live in a corner where the roads are lousy but not quite bad enough to require a serious offroad car. Then a SUV may be a reasonable compromise between 2) and 3)
But I agree with GP that most SUV buyers are posers.
Metallica were indeed of one of the founders of thrash metal, and in their earlier years I count them among the best musicians in the genre (as it was back then). Certainly up to "Justice For All", and the Black Album was OK too.
But after that, they sort of lost their drive and did some so-so hard rock stuff. I think they never quite recovered from that, and the metal scene in general has produced a lot of really good bands since.
Overall I think thrash/speed/black metal has grown up some and it is more difficult these days to stand out. The Metallica from the 80s would still count as good band but I don't think they could reach superstar status anymore.
I've followed the reports on http://www.groklaw.net/, and it seems to me that it was SCO which abused the legal system. As in
-making public threats to Linux users without providing evidence for their claims
-using all sorts of delay tactics in court to prevent a quick trial
-filing for bankruptcy a few days before an important court decison, which smacks of an attempt to get a venue change (because the bankruptcy court gets jurisdiction)
IBM's and Novell's legal teams looked much more respectable by comparison. If they have gamed the legal system themselves at a few points, it was insignificant beside SCO's behavior.
In other words, even a moderately sleazy lawyer will look good compared to SCO's legal team. So don't be surprised if some minor abuses from SCO's opponents were overlooked (I'm not saying there were such abuses, I merely consider the possibility).
As far as Microsoft is concerned, yes with some limitations:
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=18&y=10&p1=3071
But driver supply for 3rd party hardware is starting to dry up.
Considering DOD and TS, they run fine on my old P4 under Windows 2000, same patch level. So it could be some unfixed driver issue or maybe a flaw in Windows 2000 that only shows up with a dual core processor.
But I refuse to use a Windows version that requires activation, so it is Windows 2000 or Linux. Linux might win that contest soon...
Maybe they went *nix because of too many BSOD issues, while happy Windows users see no reason to switch?
Personally, I had my share of Windows problems over the years, despite choosing reliable hardware over cheap crap where possible. Currently I have two programs that reproducably crash my AMD dual core under Windows 2000, taking down the entire OS:
-Day of Defeat: Source and
-Teamspeak.
Updating BIOS and drivers does not help, Memtest shows no errors. So I have little hope to fix this under Win2000.
Things like that were my biggest reason to try Linux once a year or so. It is not quite at the point where I consider Windows redundant (mostly due to games), but thanks to WINE making nice progress it's getting closer.
BTW, Day of Defeat: Source runs crash-free under Ubuntu 8.04 and WINE since WINE 1.0-RC2. The performance still sucks, but once that is fixed I'll have my first Windows game that runs better under Linux
As far as I can get the applications I want to run with WINE, I consider Linux desktop ready. WINE is technically a 3rd party app but easily enough available. Ubuntu actually has it as part of the distribution.
I think these offers would be reasonable for a lower price. As it is, they are overpriced and deserve to be whacked by competition (albeit they get brownie points for being honest about the volume limits). For comparison:
My own internet connection (in Germany) costs about 20 Euro (30 US dollars/month), telephone is on a separate bill. It is a 2MBit/s ADSL with "flat rate", and I guess the provider would tolerate 40 Gbyte/month - there are stories floating around the net where people got dropped for extreme usage, but those are more like 100 GByte/month.
So I got a price similar to the cheapest TW tier, but better throughput and a data volume similar to the $54.90 package.
I think we will see over the next years if Microsoft or Linux developers are better:
ATI/AMD is now giving away specifications for their chips, and the Linux community is willing to work with that documents and create drivers. Microsoft has the opportunity to do the same.
Eventually, Linux will have mature ATI Open Source drivers and there can be a direct comparison to drivers for Windows. Microsoft can choose to compete or keep relying on the drivers from ATI to save money. Either way, there won't be many excuses left if the Windows drivers look bad by comparison.
On a software project I was working on last year, two computers with XP Professional per site had to exchange data via a network share (mapped to a drive letter and treated much like a local drive). Buying server licenses was considered too expensive.
Now, with lots of data in the shared directory, performance sucked. So we did a lot of testing with various Windows versions as "server" and client. Both with the "main" software project and with a small test application one of us whipped up.
XP Professional -> XP Professional was the worst by far. The test application showed delays that depended on filesize, with the filesize/delay curve showing some really weird peaks.
Windows 2000 Professional -> Windows 2000 Professional was better. But still inferior to what I'd expect from sharing data over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Using an actual Windows 2000 Server to serve the data was fastest. This test case actually showed the sort of performance I expected over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Finally and to our surprise, Windows 98 as client performed best with the test application. As if the later versions performed some time-consuming negotiations that Windows 98 simply did not bother with.
I conclude that XP Professional (and to a lesser degree 2000 Professional) has either design issues or the performance was intentionally crippled, to make it less attractive for use as a "small server".
From a technical point of view, that might be the best they can do. Having the source code to the original Win32 stuff, they should be able to do better than the WINE team.
But I don't think they will use WINE as it is, because it is a Windows -> Linux API translation layer. So their new system would have to implement the Linux API, which is design restriction of its own.
Also, WINE is GPL'ed, so they would have to give away any improvements they make along with their version. Which would mean that Windows 7 backward compatibility would be pretty much equal to Linux + WINE. Not a good situation if you want to charge a few hundred dollars for the better versions of your OS.
You're correct about Konqueror, and Linux with KDE is similar to XP in memory consumption. I find this a tad disappointing on part of the Open Source desktop developers, even if my current PCs can handle it easily.
Well, maybe I'll have too much time someday and go into Gnome/KDE hacking...
AFAIK Microsoft's biggest cash cows are Windows and Office. Immediate competitors are Linux and Apple's Mac OS X for Windows and Open Office for Microsoft Office. All of these are not specifically "enterprise" software, but aimed at pretty much every user. And the Open Source alternatives look pretty nice at least from a user perspective.
;-)
There is also stuff like Exchange/Outlook, SQL Server and the developer tools. This is what I would call "enterprise" software. Here Microsoft looks good and Open Source seems to lag behind (feel free to correct me) but I don't think that is where the big money is.
And then there is customer-specific "enterprise" software that is written for the particular needs of some company, department or project. Usually by some small vendor that does custom development or inhouse developers. Here you will find lots of abysmal software, but AFAIK Microsoft is not in that market. Too bad for them, because in this area they could outcompete most of the others on quality
FYI, the "Windows explorer" for the local filesystem is actually another browser window. Type an URL into the address field, and hey presto - you're surfing the internet ;-)
Personally, I'd like to get rid of that too. Not because I'm anti-surfing but because it is a waste of system ressources to use a full-blown web browser for looking at your directories. Bloat like that is responsible for Windows getting more ressource-hungry every new version.
As the discussion was about what PC to buy for Linux, I assumed that the customer would buy the (cheaper) PC that is bundled with Windows, then reformat right away and install Linux.
Result:
The crapware vendor is screwed out of whatever he paid to have his crapware installed in the first place, but that is all. That computer never shows up in his system anymore.