Just because the article is sloppy and thinks gas doesn't count as energy doesn't mean I'm going to make the same mistake. Drying laundry takes a lot of energy, as does heating the water if you wash with warm or hot. (I don't care that gas is cheaper; energy is energy.)
Do you really game so much that your gaming computers take up more juice than the water heater? If they were running full-tilt 24x7 I could certainly conceive of this, but they don't. And when a water heater is cycling on, that sucker is drawing multiple kW. (And when I was referring to food, I was mostly thinking of the fridge; unless you cook a LOT, cooking doesn't use up that much energy.)
In any case, all that is going to dwarf a dinky little cable box, no matter how badly designed.
I'm not buying this for one second... The only way that the cable box could possibly be the 2nd-largest consumer of energy would be if nobody in that house took showers, did laundry, or washed dishes, as a water heater uses an insane amount of electricity. And I'm pretty sure a fridge is going to be up there in energy-usage also.
In all fairness, the article and headline did say "many homes", but what use is a statistic if it only applies to slovenly basement-dwelling otaku?
As others have pointed out, it's also written most sloppily. The max rating of a box (500 watts) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with average power consumption. We certainly don't decide that a house uses an average of ~30kw simply because it's equipped with a pair of 150A main breakers.
That said, yes, there's no excuse for how much juice these things use in standby mode.
I agree that the test itself was largely language-independent. But the two years of CS I took to get to that point certainly were not. Nor were the some of the follow-on cources in college-level CS.
I wasn't complaining that after two years of language instruction, I was not fluent in a language. I was stating that even compared the low bar set by the standards of the class, I was horrible, even in relation to my peers, who were being taught in the same way and came from the same background.
You'll get no argument from me that waiting until high-school to teach foreign language, and then doing so in typical lecture classes, isn't very effective. But that's not what my post was addressing.
Throughout my entire educational career, I was a slacker. I got decent grades (if not straight A's) without studying, paying much attention in class, or doing homework. I have a natural aptitude for the humanities and the sciences, and am adequate in math. (Better with applied vs. theoretical math.)
My one exception was foreign languages; I have absolutely no ability whatsoever in foreign languages. In American, I can speed-read, and have reasonable facility with writing. In any other language, it mattered not at all how much I studied, practiced, or did my homework, I was horrible, even by the low standards of an American high-school foreign language class. French, Latin, even American Sign Language as an adult, and I was hopeless. I got barely passing grades in French and Latin out of pity more than anything else.
Some difficult things are simply difficult for some people, and no amount of hard work is going to fix that. Throwing students against subjects they are unable to master is a waste of resource and is discouraging for both the student and teacher. I'm not saying students shouldn't be challenged; just that the idea that "hard work" will magically enable a student to master any subject is toxic.
Waaaayyy back in the mid-90's, I took the AP CS test my junior year of HS. The test was scheduled right after I took the AP US History test in the AM (I rocked that test with a 5 and passed out of 2 semesters of history for it) and as my brain was fried, I staggered into the principal's conference room to take the AP CS test with another dozen or so kids from my class.
I completely bombed the test (a 2)... my brain was so scorched from the history exam that morning I couldn't make heads or proverbial tails of the essay questions. I got a 2, and I'm glad I did. Why? Because that was when the test was still being administered in Pascal, and by the time I got to college, my school had shifted over to C++ as their main "teaching language". It's no fun taking an advanced CS class when all your assignments take extra time while you give yourself a crash course in C-style syntax everybody else is taking for granted.
That said, despite the fact I flunked the test, my actual high school CS class was excellent. It meant that when I had to re-take intro-to-CS in college all I had to do was learn new syntax for the concepts I already knew; the overlap of the theory was pretty complete.
On another note, why would we expect the average high-schooler to pass a college-level CS exam? It's a hard test, just like it's supposed to be. And it's a subject that many students, no matter their other virtues, don't have much aptitude in. (I'd be interested to know what this one year in "Computer Science" that all Chinese kids are given actually consists of...)
All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.
Due to their commanding smartphone marketshare, along with millions of devices with embedded Linux shipped every year, wouldn't Samsung be the largest UNIX vendor?
Oh? What's that? You weren't counting embedded Linux and I'm a pedantic #$(*#$&@!!!. Can't argue with that!
Along with the new O/S, they are also working on getting both Linux, and (oddly) Android running on it.
If you RTFA, you'd see that they'd like to re-structure the O/S to take full advantage of the systems planned giganto memory capacity, instead of being built around shuffling data on and off disk.
Yeah, they are a for-profit corporation, I'm pretty sure most of what they do is a "money grab"; it's kind of their job.
And where is all the "walled garden" crap coming from? The O/S will be open source and they are looking to also release a Linux variant that will run on the thing.
The article yammers on and on about how the O/S will be built based on memory-driven I/O instead of file-system based I/O. However, IBM's i/OS (a.k.a. OS/400) has been built on memory-mapped I/O from the beginning (circa 1988.) (And it has a DB-driven "filesystem" that Microsoft has been unable to ship despite about 25 years of failure.)
I know it's not quite the same thing, but I cannot imagine that this new O/S will somehow eliminate the need for flash and/or disk. I don't see them managing to get the memristor cost down enough to entirely replace disk/flash. If they had actually shipped some of the things before now, I could maybe believe it, but they haven't.
A pure political story, with absolutely no geek angle whatsoever, has no place here. It brings in a lot of page hits, and a lot of comments from politically-frothy Slashdot posters, but long-term it rather undermines the credibility of the site.
The headline implies that the systems are too large to meet some statutory obligation. This is not the case; the truth is that they are saying their systems are too large to comply with this new, not-previously-existing requirement.
I'm not saying I believe them, but it's certainly a plausible argument. It's perfectly normal for the subject of a subpeona or other court order to object to it on the grounds that compliance would prevent the ordinary course of business. I can certainly conceive of a system that takes in huge amount of data and discards 99.99 percent of it; it's par for the course in Business Intelligence systems in the private sector. Wal-Mart, for instance, does not need to retain indefinitely which transactions at particular times contain particular sets of items. After a year or so, the data is far less useful, and ever-larger datasets are harder to search and process. It makes perfect sense to completely discard the data after a certain period of time and have no provisions in the system to archive it on a long-term basis. (This whole concept is referred to as Information Lifecycle Management.)
A court order saying "Wal-Mart, keep all transaction data indefinitely, starting Right Now" is certainly going to result in Wal-Mart objecting on the grounds that it cannot do so without completely destroying it's business.
I was thinking about the fiberglass, and realized it doesn't necessarily refer to fiber-reinforced resin sheets. Fiberglass insulation has very little in the way of other ingredients in it...
And cellulose has a long history as an insulation material (it has pluses and minuses), anything that would make it lighter on a volume basis would improve it's insulation properties.
Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public. Once there, he could have happily Schengen'd himself nearly anywhere in Western Europe at will, as there are precisely zero border checks within the Schengen agreement. It would be fairly easy to hide for months.
I expect the NSA figured out the source of the leaks within 24 hours, as a simple check of passenger manifests showing an unauthorized trip by an NSA clearance-holder to Hong Kong would have been pretty damning. If, on the other hand, he had merely told his boss he was going on a long vacation to Europe, it would have been a while before they were able to pin it on him.
I can't say Western Europe would have been safe indefinitely, but he would have had much more time and more options than HK and Russia.
Funny, I must have missed the part where Hong Kong is an independent country. (Hint: It isn't.)
While Hong Kong does have a high degree of autonomy, they have no control over the political policy regarding foreign affairs, while they have as much control as the mainland feels like allowing over economic affairs. I guarantee the PRC took direct control of the "Snowden Situation".
I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.
Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.
In the US anyway, Google/Motorola has been raising the bar on what's possible with inexpensive smartphones. I have a Moto G targeted to the Boost no-contract plan for which I paid $80, out the door. It has a decent (if non-removable) battery, excellent screen of a decent size, runs KitKat/Dual-Core/1GB RAM, and is even waterproof (plenty of YouTube videos showing the phone functioning in a bowl of water.) The next version (coming out soon) will add a much-needed MicroSD slot and LTE. The only significant con is the camera, which is pretty mediocre (but what do you expect for that price?)
The CDMA one I bought was easily flashed over to PagePlus/Verizon (Boost inexplicably did not request Moto permanently lock the bootloader; you can obtain a bootloader unlock code for free from Moto.) The GSM version is sold unlocked directly by Google for all of $180; the 4G will be $220.
And they just announced the Moto E; a slightly lower-spec phone for only a puny $130.
There's rampant speculation if Lenovo will continue this trend of well-spec'd cheap phones. The consensus seems to be no, given how Lenovo actually wants to make money on the purchase, and nobody thinks Google has any kind of usable margin on these superb value-priced phones.
I suspect the volume of the entire world's damable valleys is pretty darn low in relation to the Antarctic and Icelandic ice caps. And the number of sub-sea-level valleys is even lower.
Yes, I know that most programmers write internal software where it doesn't actually matter if it's "Free" or not, because it never leaves the company. (Does it even really have a license at all? I know I never have to agree to a license agreement to use software internal to my company.)
But for that software (like OS's and other back-end infrastructure) of a more universal nature it makes the most sense to NOT develop that internally. And writing that software requires a radically different skill set from database apps. How are programmers that write that software supposed to be paid? Answer (from this example, anyway): Not much. Shocker: There's very little money in support contracts for small-ish low-level libraries.
I have no problem whatsoever with the GPL. But I DO have a problem with RMS's insistence that NOT giving away your work to anybody who wants it free of charge is the only ethical means of programming. If you want to give your work away, that's great, and I'll support efforts to fight against anybody that tries to then charge for your efforts. But if I want to write some software and get somebody to pay for it, that should be my option too.
And he's actually quite horrible at predicting problems down the road... if he was better at it, the Hurd would have shipped or been canceled well over a decade ago.
It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.
And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.
When you have a widely-used, yet complex, product that nobody has to pay for, doesn't require tech support (unlike, say, an OS), doesn't have any provisions for proprietary (i.e. non-free) features, and isn't really much fun to work on (unlike, say, a compiler), it should come as no shock that it's somewhat difficult to recruit enough eyeballs to look for all those bugs.
Yep, a patch can be issued quickly, but a project with sufficient access to resource ahead of time breaks less to begin with.
One follows from the other. If your Free license says that anybody that works on your product is required to give away their efforts for free-beer free, it should not be surprising that it's difficult to find companies to spend money on something (like paying a developer) that won't give them a competitive advantage. This, incidentally, is why we have taxes; it forces people (and companies) to pay for the common good. We wouldn't have much in the way of public works if they relied solely on charitable donations and user fees.
This is a persistent weakness of Free software, but you'll never get RMS to admit that money to pay for programmers does not magically fall from the sky. People are cheap, and if they can get something for free, it's no shock that few of them will pay for it.
In my mind, an ideal software license would have the following;
1) Mandatory Code Release (This gives you some software Freedom) 2) Payment required to copy and/or use the software. 3) Some sort of revenue sharing scheme so that any contributors to the code receive a portion of the funds collected.
Think of it like a "software co-op license"
(This, incidentally, is how industry standards commonly work in the hardware business. You want to implement the IEEE 1234.567 standard? You pay up a standard fee per implementation, and that's doled out to the contributing companies.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just because the article is sloppy and thinks gas doesn't count as energy doesn't mean I'm going to make the same mistake. Drying laundry takes a lot of energy, as does heating the water if you wash with warm or hot. (I don't care that gas is cheaper; energy is energy.)
Do you really game so much that your gaming computers take up more juice than the water heater? If they were running full-tilt 24x7 I could certainly conceive of this, but they don't. And when a water heater is cycling on, that sucker is drawing multiple kW. (And when I was referring to food, I was mostly thinking of the fridge; unless you cook a LOT, cooking doesn't use up that much energy.)
In any case, all that is going to dwarf a dinky little cable box, no matter how badly designed.
I'm not buying this for one second... The only way that the cable box could possibly be the 2nd-largest consumer of energy would be if nobody in that house took showers, did laundry, or washed dishes, as a water heater uses an insane amount of electricity. And I'm pretty sure a fridge is going to be up there in energy-usage also.
In all fairness, the article and headline did say "many homes", but what use is a statistic if it only applies to slovenly basement-dwelling otaku?
As others have pointed out, it's also written most sloppily. The max rating of a box (500 watts) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with average power consumption. We certainly don't decide that a house uses an average of ~30kw simply because it's equipped with a pair of 150A main breakers.
That said, yes, there's no excuse for how much juice these things use in standby mode.
I agree that the test itself was largely language-independent. But the two years of CS I took to get to that point certainly were not. Nor were the some of the follow-on cources in college-level CS.
I wasn't complaining that after two years of language instruction, I was not fluent in a language. I was stating that even compared the low bar set by the standards of the class, I was horrible, even in relation to my peers, who were being taught in the same way and came from the same background.
You'll get no argument from me that waiting until high-school to teach foreign language, and then doing so in typical lecture classes, isn't very effective. But that's not what my post was addressing.
Throughout my entire educational career, I was a slacker. I got decent grades (if not straight A's) without studying, paying much attention in class, or doing homework. I have a natural aptitude for the humanities and the sciences, and am adequate in math. (Better with applied vs. theoretical math.)
My one exception was foreign languages; I have absolutely no ability whatsoever in foreign languages. In American, I can speed-read, and have reasonable facility with writing. In any other language, it mattered not at all how much I studied, practiced, or did my homework, I was horrible, even by the low standards of an American high-school foreign language class. French, Latin, even American Sign Language as an adult, and I was hopeless. I got barely passing grades in French and Latin out of pity more than anything else.
Some difficult things are simply difficult for some people, and no amount of hard work is going to fix that. Throwing students against subjects they are unable to master is a waste of resource and is discouraging for both the student and teacher. I'm not saying students shouldn't be challenged; just that the idea that "hard work" will magically enable a student to master any subject is toxic.
Waaaayyy back in the mid-90's, I took the AP CS test my junior year of HS. The test was scheduled right after I took the AP US History test in the AM (I rocked that test with a 5 and passed out of 2 semesters of history for it) and as my brain was fried, I staggered into the principal's conference room to take the AP CS test with another dozen or so kids from my class.
I completely bombed the test (a 2)... my brain was so scorched from the history exam that morning I couldn't make heads or proverbial tails of the essay questions. I got a 2, and I'm glad I did. Why? Because that was when the test was still being administered in Pascal, and by the time I got to college, my school had shifted over to C++ as their main "teaching language". It's no fun taking an advanced CS class when all your assignments take extra time while you give yourself a crash course in C-style syntax everybody else is taking for granted.
That said, despite the fact I flunked the test, my actual high school CS class was excellent. It meant that when I had to re-take intro-to-CS in college all I had to do was learn new syntax for the concepts I already knew; the overlap of the theory was pretty complete.
On another note, why would we expect the average high-schooler to pass a college-level CS exam? It's a hard test, just like it's supposed to be. And it's a subject that many students, no matter their other virtues, don't have much aptitude in. (I'd be interested to know what this one year in "Computer Science" that all Chinese kids are given actually consists of...)
All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.
GNU stands for GNU's Not UNIX.
Linux is just "Linus with an 'x' at the end to make the name look UNIX-y"
Due to their commanding smartphone marketshare, along with millions of devices with embedded Linux shipped every year, wouldn't Samsung be the largest UNIX vendor?
Oh? What's that? You weren't counting embedded Linux and I'm a pedantic #$(*#$&@!!!. Can't argue with that!
News Flash! Company legally buys competitor's gear on the open market!
What, precisely, is the story here?
I think the idea is more about user data (rather than applications themselves) not being shuffled in and out on File I/O, the SCSI stack, LBA's, etc.
Along with the new O/S, they are also working on getting both Linux, and (oddly) Android running on it.
If you RTFA, you'd see that they'd like to re-structure the O/S to take full advantage of the systems planned giganto memory capacity, instead of being built around shuffling data on and off disk.
Yeah, they are a for-profit corporation, I'm pretty sure most of what they do is a "money grab"; it's kind of their job.
And where is all the "walled garden" crap coming from? The O/S will be open source and they are looking to also release a Linux variant that will run on the thing.
The article yammers on and on about how the O/S will be built based on memory-driven I/O instead of file-system based I/O. However, IBM's i/OS (a.k.a. OS/400) has been built on memory-mapped I/O from the beginning (circa 1988.) (And it has a DB-driven "filesystem" that Microsoft has been unable to ship despite about 25 years of failure.)
I know it's not quite the same thing, but I cannot imagine that this new O/S will somehow eliminate the need for flash and/or disk. I don't see them managing to get the memristor cost down enough to entirely replace disk/flash. If they had actually shipped some of the things before now, I could maybe believe it, but they haven't.
A pure political story, with absolutely no geek angle whatsoever, has no place here. It brings in a lot of page hits, and a lot of comments from politically-frothy Slashdot posters, but long-term it rather undermines the credibility of the site.
The headline implies that the systems are too large to meet some statutory obligation. This is not the case; the truth is that they are saying their systems are too large to comply with this new, not-previously-existing requirement.
I'm not saying I believe them, but it's certainly a plausible argument. It's perfectly normal for the subject of a subpeona or other court order to object to it on the grounds that compliance would prevent the ordinary course of business. I can certainly conceive of a system that takes in huge amount of data and discards 99.99 percent of it; it's par for the course in Business Intelligence systems in the private sector. Wal-Mart, for instance, does not need to retain indefinitely which transactions at particular times contain particular sets of items. After a year or so, the data is far less useful, and ever-larger datasets are harder to search and process. It makes perfect sense to completely discard the data after a certain period of time and have no provisions in the system to archive it on a long-term basis. (This whole concept is referred to as Information Lifecycle Management.)
A court order saying "Wal-Mart, keep all transaction data indefinitely, starting Right Now" is certainly going to result in Wal-Mart objecting on the grounds that it cannot do so without completely destroying it's business.
I was thinking about the fiberglass, and realized it doesn't necessarily refer to fiber-reinforced resin sheets. Fiberglass insulation has very little in the way of other ingredients in it...
And cellulose has a long history as an insulation material (it has pluses and minuses), anything that would make it lighter on a volume basis would improve it's insulation properties.
Instead of flying from Honolulu to Hong Kong, there are any number of Western European states he could have flown to prior to going public. Once there, he could have happily Schengen'd himself nearly anywhere in Western Europe at will, as there are precisely zero border checks within the Schengen agreement. It would be fairly easy to hide for months.
I expect the NSA figured out the source of the leaks within 24 hours, as a simple check of passenger manifests showing an unauthorized trip by an NSA clearance-holder to Hong Kong would have been pretty damning. If, on the other hand, he had merely told his boss he was going on a long vacation to Europe, it would have been a while before they were able to pin it on him.
I can't say Western Europe would have been safe indefinitely, but he would have had much more time and more options than HK and Russia.
Funny, I must have missed the part where Hong Kong is an independent country. (Hint: It isn't.)
While Hong Kong does have a high degree of autonomy, they have no control over the political policy regarding foreign affairs, while they have as much control as the mainland feels like allowing over economic affairs. I guarantee the PRC took direct control of the "Snowden Situation".
I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.
Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.
In the US anyway, Google/Motorola has been raising the bar on what's possible with inexpensive smartphones. I have a Moto G targeted to the Boost no-contract plan for which I paid $80, out the door. It has a decent (if non-removable) battery, excellent screen of a decent size, runs KitKat/Dual-Core/1GB RAM, and is even waterproof (plenty of YouTube videos showing the phone functioning in a bowl of water.) The next version (coming out soon) will add a much-needed MicroSD slot and LTE. The only significant con is the camera, which is pretty mediocre (but what do you expect for that price?)
The CDMA one I bought was easily flashed over to PagePlus/Verizon (Boost inexplicably did not request Moto permanently lock the bootloader; you can obtain a bootloader unlock code for free from Moto.) The GSM version is sold unlocked directly by Google for all of $180; the 4G will be $220.
And they just announced the Moto E; a slightly lower-spec phone for only a puny $130.
There's rampant speculation if Lenovo will continue this trend of well-spec'd cheap phones. The consensus seems to be no, given how Lenovo actually wants to make money on the purchase, and nobody thinks Google has any kind of usable margin on these superb value-priced phones.
I suspect the volume of the entire world's damable valleys is pretty darn low in relation to the Antarctic and Icelandic ice caps. And the number of sub-sea-level valleys is even lower.
Yes, I know that most programmers write internal software where it doesn't actually matter if it's "Free" or not, because it never leaves the company. (Does it even really have a license at all? I know I never have to agree to a license agreement to use software internal to my company.)
But for that software (like OS's and other back-end infrastructure) of a more universal nature it makes the most sense to NOT develop that internally. And writing that software requires a radically different skill set from database apps. How are programmers that write that software supposed to be paid? Answer (from this example, anyway): Not much. Shocker: There's very little money in support contracts for small-ish low-level libraries.
I have no problem whatsoever with the GPL. But I DO have a problem with RMS's insistence that NOT giving away your work to anybody who wants it free of charge is the only ethical means of programming. If you want to give your work away, that's great, and I'll support efforts to fight against anybody that tries to then charge for your efforts. But if I want to write some software and get somebody to pay for it, that should be my option too.
And he's actually quite horrible at predicting problems down the road... if he was better at it, the Hurd would have shipped or been canceled well over a decade ago.
It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.
And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.
When you have a widely-used, yet complex, product that nobody has to pay for, doesn't require tech support (unlike, say, an OS), doesn't have any provisions for proprietary (i.e. non-free) features, and isn't really much fun to work on (unlike, say, a compiler), it should come as no shock that it's somewhat difficult to recruit enough eyeballs to look for all those bugs.
Yep, a patch can be issued quickly, but a project with sufficient access to resource ahead of time breaks less to begin with.
One follows from the other. If your Free license says that anybody that works on your product is required to give away their efforts for free-beer free, it should not be surprising that it's difficult to find companies to spend money on something (like paying a developer) that won't give them a competitive advantage. This, incidentally, is why we have taxes; it forces people (and companies) to pay for the common good. We wouldn't have much in the way of public works if they relied solely on charitable donations and user fees.
This is a persistent weakness of Free software, but you'll never get RMS to admit that money to pay for programmers does not magically fall from the sky. People are cheap, and if they can get something for free, it's no shock that few of them will pay for it.
In my mind, an ideal software license would have the following;
1) Mandatory Code Release (This gives you some software Freedom)
2) Payment required to copy and/or use the software.
3) Some sort of revenue sharing scheme so that any contributors to the code receive a portion of the funds collected.
Think of it like a "software co-op license"
(This, incidentally, is how industry standards commonly work in the hardware business. You want to implement the IEEE 1234.567 standard? You pay up a standard fee per implementation, and that's doled out to the contributing companies.)