You pay through the nose for the non-standard charger when you have to replace it in a few years Never. Not once. As such it's a non issue for me. I strongly suspect my experience is the norm. If people had to replace the chargers regularly there would be a demand for a standard and we would have one already. They don't, therefore there is no demand for standardised chargers. The free market has spoken.
It is also interesting to see how the leading capitalist economies moving from laissez-faire to mono/oligopolistic capitalism, and then also a large increase in government legislation and expenditure since the Depression. It comes from the ability to print money.
If you can print money without having to raise taxation, politicians can pay for any whims that they have. They can pay for the whims of the populace. This leads inevitably to an expansion of the state to actually implement those whims. As far as 90% of the population is concerned it's free money. The free and easy money is like a wellspring to corporations so they spend a lot of time trying to inveigle government contracts.
In fact the free money is a tax on the old and the poor. Printing money causes inflation, the middle class with mortgages and the rich benefit, the economy stretches and they can arrange their finances to be in the top half of the stretch. The old and the poor generally can't and so simply get poorer.
The process of increasing state control will inevitably continue as long as the government continue run a deficit and to print money. (Note, borrowing money that you have no intention of paying back is not borrowing.) It's also worth noting that inflation is a runaway process; try 3% per year compounded over 80 years as an example.
If the government run at a surplus *cough* and actually reduce the national debt the process will reverse. Running a gold backed currency will also stop the process of increasing government and influence of corporations because they will then have to balance the budget. Gold has it's own problems though. Perhaps a world currency designed to be neither inflationary nor deflationary, free from political control would be advantageous.
Maybe neither pure socialism or pure capitalism is the answer? No, it's basically down to the monetary system. We're heading for fascist states btw rather than socialist.
If you would describe yourself as a libertarian, or classical liberal you should be making use of a currency which is independent of governmental manipulation.
Ah, everybody should be equal the world should be fair.
I get a charger for free with my phone. I don't get gas for free with my car. If people really really cared that they had the same charger for everything they would have insisted on it years ago. They don't care so it's a non issue. Given that it's a non issue why should I pay the extra cost for the design of phones which have to use USB?
You want it? You put it on the list of criteria of features for your next phone and you pay for it.
I've noticed it with Perl, Python, Ruby, Pascal, C, C++, Java. Well pretty much every single language I've ever come across except for the Unix shell.
They start off as small, fast, flexible, perhaps even elegant languages and evolve into massive bloated, and unweildy oil tankers which are too large to fix. So we start from scratch with a whizzy new better language which just needs a little tweak here or there to make it perfect.
It's expensive to implement, expensive to use (much more so than gas) and you can't control the temperature. Depends on the implementation. Modern DH implementations supply heat to a local/domestic heat exchanger which then supplies heat to radiators, with thermostatic valves. Perfectly controllable. Rolling out a District Heating network is expensive though.
15,000 btu... Is that BTU per hour, per minute, per second? BTU is a unit of energy rather than power. It's like saying you have a 5000 Joule heater. I'll assume it's 15,000 BTU per hour. Divide by 3414 to get kiloWatts. 4.4kW per burner, 8.8kW for the oven.
The question is, do you use all the burners and oven at the same time and at maximum? The oven in particular only uses power until it's hot enough inside, then it just maintains the temperature.
he annual costs of the Iraq war are on the order of $100-150 billion. And yet, funnily enough, you're running a deficit of around $600 billion. The $120 billion or so spent specifically on the war isn't the only spending dedicated to the war. You'll have noticed your interest rates creeping up. That's going to continue as long as the war lasts, and beyond. That's damaging to the economy. Since the 70s, America has exported much of it's manufacturing capacity and is already borrowing heavily to fund existing lifestyles. The lenders are now becoming unwilling to fund a lifestyle which involves warfare.
The US Army during the Vietnam war was 3x its current size. It's not the size, it's the spending. An M1 tank costs $3-$4 million each these days.
Iran isn't simply provoking Israel, its President is making statements suggesting a threat of genocide that even various Arab governments condemn. Of course they are. How else would you provoke the US and Israel? As I said, they're trying to get the US involved in a wider guerilla war.
or maybe the Iranian government is run by fanatics who have an agenda of their own that they value above Europe's carrots & sticks? Or maybe they're playing a game of brinkmanship and have specific goals. Like the end of the US as the world superpower.
Wars tend to start when one country attacks another. Iran has been sponsoring terrorism across the region, providing arms to Iraqi insurgents, and is making threats against other countries. That isn't a recipe for peace. Lol. Oh come on. Iraq, Afghanistan are because of US sponsored terrorism. Both Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden were created by the US, please don't try to get sanctimonious about geopolitical strategies.
By the way, how does suicide bombing work into this? Pawns. Like the US soldiers. It's handy to be able to persuade someone else to die for your cause/wealth.
For example, the Federal Reserve is made up of a bunch of private banks. These banks create money out of nothing and loan it to the US government at currently 5.25% interest rate. The government spends the money and then taxes the people to eventually pay it back. The US citizens are taxed to pay money to a bunch of private banks interest on money which they created out of nothing. Essentially the whole of the US population is working for the member (privately owned) banks of the Federal Reserve.
Guess who owns the private banks which own the Federal Reserve?
Heating and A/C are simply ways of moving heat from here to there. Yet the power stations which produced the electricity almost certainly simply threw away the "waste" heat from the generation process. When you consider that a typical coal fired power station is about 35% efficient at producing electricity, the 65% which is lost as heat might conceivably be better used.
Google for "District Heating", "District Cooling" and "Combined Heat and Power". Processes which use the "waste" heat from power stations to provide domestic/business heating and cooling. Finland for instance have power stations which are 85%->90% efficient. They sell heat and cold as well as electricity, to customers.
OOo simply stopped working with my NFS shares. I don't recall the specifics (& I'm not going to waste the time searching now so I can link it, but it had something to do with file locking), but whenever I tried to load or save a file to the NFS share I got an error to the effect that it was read-only (Word, Kword, Abiword, etc., had no problem) Sounds like you went from the kernel space NFS server to the user space NFS server. They use different locking systems (flock vs fcntl). Yeah really. Check your NFS server/clients. The kernel space one is preferable.
The unholy trinity. This is the real Axis of Evil.
These three nations are deliberately provoking each other to war. Lets get rid of some pretensions. It's about resources, nothing to do with spreading democracy or a War on Terror. It's all about control of resources, particularly oil.
The Iranians know that America can't afford another conventional ground war, Iraq is already destroying the US economy. Iran is using Israel to provoke the US into overextending itself, there's a load of talk about replacing Israel with an Islamic state which is pure provocation to Israel, who retaliate by announcing that Iran has a nuclear weapon programme able to produce a bomb within 3 years. Both are trying to get the US involved. Which is quite convenient for the US because Iran has huge oil reserves and they're planning to sell them for Euros, not dollars. Doing so will cause the US economy further damage, causing the dollar to slide further.
Iran wants a guerilla ground war to bring the US to it's knees, Israel wants the US to give Iran a kicking for them, with a nuclear response if necessary and the US wants to make sure the oil remains tradable for dollars, so preventing soaring inflation in the US. So, everyone's spoiling for a fight, which is very dangerous, this is how world wars start.
If they use black fabric they may not require fuel
on
New Type of Hot Air Blimp
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· Score: 4, Informative
What I don't understand is that a wealthy and educated country like America sees air-conditioning as the solution to being too hot and not quadruple glazing. Insulation keeps you cool too (and makes it cheaper to run said air-conditioning if nothing else). Energy is cheap. Who cares how much is used.
Indeed. When you have RAM to spare for caching. Um, yeah, that was my point. They've added this kludge because they think one, possibly two of two things...
1: The most probable is that most existing machines won't have remotely enough RAM spare for caching and so Vista will suck badly. And they won't have enough RAM spare because... 2: They think the NTFS buffer cache is crap.
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
It'll probably have to be re-written but I'd have thought that would be a good way to design a game running over a high latency connection like the Internet.
Have the client and most of the server running on the user's computer, only interacting with other machines when needed.
It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff". It's slower, not in fact cheaper, particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years. Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.
Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ? I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.
They think vista is going to consume too much RAM.
on
David Pogue Takes On Vista
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The advantage comes not from the bandwith, but from the latency. That's what filesystem cache is for. What they're saying really is that Vista is going to blow the RAM on all of the existing PCs out there, and this is a kludge to get round spending the extra £20 for the RAM rather than a USB stick.
They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original? Especially when the TCO for Apple systems are a fraction of those for equivalent Windows systems.
Any one article may contain bias, but the point is that bias in one article is subject to peer review and the results are reproduced by someone else under similar conditions. It's part of the process, bias and systemic error are eventually removed.
If the IT, computing profession want to be taken seriously, then they have to take a leaf from science, engineering and start taking a more rigorous approach.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can print money without having to raise taxation, politicians can pay for any whims that they have. They can pay for the whims of the populace. This leads inevitably to an expansion of the state to actually implement those whims. As far as 90% of the population is concerned it's free money. The free and easy money is like a wellspring to corporations so they spend a lot of time trying to inveigle government contracts.
In fact the free money is a tax on the old and the poor. Printing money causes inflation, the middle class with mortgages and the rich benefit, the economy stretches and they can arrange their finances to be in the top half of the stretch. The old and the poor generally can't and so simply get poorer.
The process of increasing state control will inevitably continue as long as the government continue run a deficit and to print money. (Note, borrowing money that you have no intention of paying back is not borrowing.) It's also worth noting that inflation is a runaway process; try 3% per year compounded over 80 years as an example.
If the government run at a surplus *cough* and actually reduce the national debt the process will reverse. Running a gold backed currency will also stop the process of increasing government and influence of corporations because they will then have to balance the budget. Gold has it's own problems though. Perhaps a world currency designed to be neither inflationary nor deflationary, free from political control would be advantageous. Maybe neither pure socialism or pure capitalism is the answer? No, it's basically down to the monetary system. We're heading for fascist states btw rather than socialist.
If you would describe yourself as a libertarian, or classical liberal you should be making use of a currency which is independent of governmental manipulation.
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_gold_currenc
Ah, everybody should be equal the world should be fair.
I get a charger for free with my phone. I don't get gas for free with my car. If people really really cared that they had the same charger for everything they would have insisted on it years ago. They don't care so it's a non issue. Given that it's a non issue why should I pay the extra cost for the design of phones which have to use USB?
You want it? You put it on the list of criteria of features for your next phone and you pay for it.
I've noticed it with Perl, Python, Ruby, Pascal, C, C++, Java. Well pretty much every single language I've ever come across except for the Unix shell.
They start off as small, fast, flexible, perhaps even elegant languages and evolve into massive bloated, and unweildy oil tankers which are too large to fix. So we start from scratch with a whizzy new better language which just needs a little tweak here or there to make it perfect.
It's quite deliberate. You have to buy the cable from them so they can charge you several thousand percent margin on it.
15,000 btu... Is that BTU per hour, per minute, per second? BTU is a unit of energy rather than power. It's like saying you have a 5000 Joule heater. I'll assume it's 15,000 BTU per hour. Divide by 3414 to get kiloWatts. 4.4kW per burner, 8.8kW for the oven.
The question is, do you use all the burners and oven at the same time and at maximum? The oven in particular only uses power until it's hot enough inside, then it just maintains the temperature.
For example, the Federal Reserve is made up of a bunch of private banks. These banks create money out of nothing and loan it to the US government at currently 5.25% interest rate. The government spends the money and then taxes the people to eventually pay it back. The US citizens are taxed to pay money to a bunch of private banks interest on money which they created out of nothing. Essentially the whole of the US population is working for the member (privately owned) banks of the Federal Reserve.
Guess who owns the private banks which own the Federal Reserve?
Heating and A/C are simply ways of moving heat from here to there. Yet the power stations which produced the electricity almost certainly simply threw away the "waste" heat from the generation process. When you consider that a typical coal fired power station is about 35% efficient at producing electricity, the 65% which is lost as heat might conceivably be better used.
Google for "District Heating", "District Cooling" and "Combined Heat and Power". Processes which use the "waste" heat from power stations to provide domestic/business heating and cooling. Finland for instance have power stations which are 85%->90% efficient. They sell heat and cold as well as electricity, to customers.
The unholy trinity. This is the real Axis of Evil.
These three nations are deliberately provoking each other to war. Lets get rid of some pretensions. It's about resources, nothing to do with spreading democracy or a War on Terror. It's all about control of resources, particularly oil.
The Iranians know that America can't afford another conventional ground war, Iraq is already destroying the US economy. Iran is using Israel to provoke the US into overextending itself, there's a load of talk about replacing Israel with an Islamic state which is pure provocation to Israel, who retaliate by announcing that Iran has a nuclear weapon programme able to produce a bomb within 3 years. Both are trying to get the US involved. Which is quite convenient for the US because Iran has huge oil reserves and they're planning to sell them for Euros, not dollars. Doing so will cause the US economy further damage, causing the dollar to slide further.
Iran wants a guerilla ground war to bring the US to it's knees, Israel wants the US to give Iran a kicking for them, with a nuclear response if necessary and the US wants to make sure the oil remains tradable for dollars, so preventing soaring inflation in the US. So, everyone's spoiling for a fight, which is very dangerous, this is how world wars start.
There are solar heated hot air balloons...
e.g.
http://perso.orange.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.htm
1: The most probable is that most existing machines won't have remotely enough RAM spare for caching and so Vista will suck badly. And they won't have enough RAM spare because
2: They think the NTFS buffer cache is crap.
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
20 years and it'll be a collectors item.
Cables?
It'll probably have to be re-written but I'd have thought that would be a good way to design a game running over a high latency connection like the Internet.
Have the client and most of the server running on the user's computer, only interacting with other machines when needed.
They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original? Especially when the TCO for Apple systems are a fraction of those for equivalent Windows systems.
Any one article may contain bias, but the point is that bias in one article is subject to peer review and the results are reproduced by someone else under similar conditions. It's part of the process, bias and systemic error are eventually removed.
If the IT, computing profession want to be taken seriously, then they have to take a leaf from science, engineering and start taking a more rigorous approach.
You simply need peer review and reproducible results. The level of ojectivity in most computing journals is abysmal.
Capitalism doesn't require a government. It may be more efficient with one, but a single overriding authority isn't required.