And yet, things used to be built to last. Our washing machine started leaking the other day, and I went in to the parts dealer to see if it was worth fixing it. I mentioned it was old, and the guy behind the counter said, "How old? More than seven years?" I laughed and said, "Seven years?! No, more than 30!" and he said, "Oh hell, yeah - fix it - those things last forever! The new stuff is lucky to make eight years, especially now that everything's sh** made in China. So I bought a new tub, installed it in a couple of hours with the help of a YouTube video, and we're probably good for another decade or so....
Kill the FDA - there is NO reason it should even exist in a world where information can flow as freely as it does today. The FDA's foot dragging, flat-out refusal to even allow trials on many things, billion-dollar approval programs, insistence on testing only one active ingredient, and Gestapo-like enforcement costs hundreds of thousands of lives every year. We'd all be better off without it.
Yeah, that only works if the car is moving - try that in Austin at rush hour, since our crappy city government has been fooling themselves with the, "if we don't build it, they won't come" lie for decades...
Super high-end luxury brands are by definition not affected by the normal rules of economics - Economists even have a name for them: Veblen goods, after the economist that first noted the effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Connectors are evil. Every connector is a potential source of failure waiting to happen. Reliable design principles deliberately minimize the number of connections, since modulo rodents, wires almost never fail in the middle.
That kind of gouging can lead to "interesting" repairs. I had a friend whose shop fixed a customer's Aston Martin Volante's cracked head with JB-Weld. (The car was only a few years old at he time.) He told the customer the repair might not hold, but the customer decided it was the only option when my friend told him the *raw casting* was $10,000 (the machined part was a lot more) and had to be ordered and shipped from England. So for $5.00 worth of aluminum filled epoxy and a few hundred dollars worth of labor, the Aston was back on the road. My friend doesn't know how long the repair lasted, but it was still doing fine when the customer sold the car a few years later...
This kind of parts cross referencing can save big bucks. I had a 1974 FIAT X1/9 in college, and rebuilt it enough to get a good feel for what it's parts were and looked like. Several years later, I bought a 1975 Ferrari Dino 308gt4, and a *bunch* of those parts looked familiar - turns out they were often the same.
This was back in the pre-Internet days, so Italian car enthusiasts circulated and exchanged samizdata-like lists of part number crosses. One example of many: The thermostat switch was identical in the X1/9 and the gt4 (as verified by manufacturer markings), but the FIAT part was around $8.00 (in the late 80s), while the one for the gt4 was $80.00. Switchgear, door handles, etc. were likewise often identical, but sometimes, Ferrari parts were just freakishly cheap due to their inexplicable pricing: For a while in the 90s, it was bizarrely cheaper to buy new brake rotors for the gt4 than to turn the old ones! Although I sold the car a few years ago with most of its spares, I probably still have a box of rotors somewhere...
I built the worlds largest distributed solar PV panel monitoring system (wireless monitors for each panel in large arrays), and I can tell you categorically that for all practical purposes, solar panels DO only work in direct sunlight. Even very high, thin cirrus clouds can easily cut 20-30% or more off a PV plant's output. (Heck, a blob of bird crap or a leaf can slash a panel's output by 33%, frequently leading to the inability of the string to maintain bus voltage, thus causing the loss of that entire string's generating capacity!)
And you would not believe what a bunch of fluffy, fast-moving cumulus clouds do to output on an otherwise sunny day! (Hint: the "DC bus" of a PV plant is *far* from DC in the real world - you can *hear* most inverters dealing with this! There's also a "cloud lensing" effect that causes the effective irradiance to vary far more (1400+ W/m^2) and far quicker than is "physically possible" based on static assumptions...)
We definitely *should* be using a lot more nuclear, but remember, since nukes are not at all responsive, they're only good for base load...
It looks like China and India are going to wind up leading the way in next-generation nuclear power (pebble bed, etc, maybe even thorium), since the West (and especially the US) is stuck on WWII-vintage steam nuke (PWR) technology. In addition to being more open to newer technologies, they've reduced the bureaucratic costs (licensing, permitting, approvals, dealing with protestors, etc.) enough that their newest nukes cost under *half* what ours cost per MWh.
I don't believe that CO2 is a pollutant or that AGW is real, but if I did, I'd be pushing even harder to build more nukes...
The more things change, the more they stay the same - Here's my post reacting to a similar 1.0GHz CPU announcement nearly 20 years ago: https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Google is now thoroughly committed to evil, and needs to have every aspect of their businesses subjected to competition, by force of antitrust law, if necessary, which it clearly is, now.. (I'm pretty libertarian, but Google and Facebook are clearly beyond the power of any monopoly in the history of capitalism. It's time to split up Big Tech, and undo 95% of the corporate mergers the government has approved over the past 30 years (especially the ones that have consolidated hundreds of banks into five...))
Good point - I actually mistook Vevo for Vimeo when I wrote my post - thanks for the reminder. At least it's not Vongo, which was supposed to be a video streaming service ala Netflix, but goes down in my book as the nastiest PC virus ever (preinstalled on Compaq PCs years ago, it cannot be removed through the filesystem - you have to hack the registry, too, or it keeps coming back - nasty...)
Agreed - Beef standards in the US are actually pretty high - and if you want even higher quality, it's not at all hard to ensure you're getting 100% local beef with a known history (drug/hormone/antibiotic-free, assured feed/finish, etc.), especially here in Texas, where we've taken our beef pretty seriously for nearly two centuries...
Of course you millennials have no scruples about muching down on a handful of cockroaches - they're a huge upgrade from Tide Pods, after all...;-)
And no, powdered crickets are most likely NOT here to stay - they're just fawned over by hipsters thinking that they somehow "save the planet". In reality, they provoke, (and some early evidence seems to show, even invoke and initially sensitize), severe allergic reactions to shellfish. All "cricket powder" vendors warn users to NOT consume their products if you have ever shown any allergy to shellfish - if they don't, they're just begging for a lawsuit.
Perhaps GEM on a Commodore 64 is more impressive? Fairly effectively emulating the entire Macintosh OS, GUI, and a solid basic apps suite on a machine that was never designed to work with a real mouse and has only 64KB of RAM has to go down as one of the most sophisticated commercial programs ever. (It's hard to beat Stuxnet in the non-commercial category...)
And it's a good decision. Unicode support is not necessary. Hell, is there really anything on a board for which you need more than 7-bit ASCII? (Foreign language support doesn't count, as/. is an English board....)
After Google's extremely heavy-handed demonitization and de-platforming of content producers that simply violate their increasingly puritan ideas of Political Correctness (viz, Dennis Prager's Prager U, etc.), I was really hoping to see the alternative video sites like Vevo start to take up the slack. With the death of Vevo, which was clearly one of YouTube's largest viable competitors, does a free and open video platform alternative to YouTube even exist anymore? (Seriously, I want answers/suggestions here...)
Yeah, it's a bit staggering to realize that I joined the./ community (long before actually acquiescing to sign up for an account) when my son was just a toddler. He graduated from Texas Tech last year as a well-raised third-generation engineer!
FWIW, I've always allowed ads on Slashdot, and never took them up on their offers saying, "you're eligible to disable ads" - I always wanted to do at least that little bit to support the site.
Wasn't that always the correct answer? Seriously, now would be a good time for/.'s current management to realize they have perhaps not been adequately shepherding the community they inherited through acquisition. I think perhaps the thing that saddens me most about Rob's passing is that I saw it first on Hacker News.
A lot of us (I was one) were part of the Slashdot community early on, but preferred to post w/o an account - I didn't get one until/. made changes that required an ID (which kind of miffed me, really), even though I'd been an active poster for years as an AC who put my actual name and sometimes email address in my sig... Slashdot was once THE place to find out what was new on the net (I'm old enough to remember when that was NCSA's What's New page, or the UMN Gopher server), and Rob was a huge part of shaping/. into the front page of the Internet for those actually building it. It's sad to hear of his passing - RIP to a friend I never actually met. P.S.: I think the one thing I really miss about the decline of/. is the quality of those posting and participating in those days - It wasn't unusual to have several big-name folks like ESR or Russ Nelson mixing it up with anyone in credible discussions/arguments. It seems the ill-advised "update" several years ago was largely responsible for raising the pain threshold enough that many great users just stopped dropping by...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but "fairly quickly" is still glacial compared to what a natural gas peaker plant can do...
And yet, things used to be built to last. Our washing machine started leaking the other day, and I went in to the parts dealer to see if it was worth fixing it. I mentioned it was old, and the guy behind the counter said, "How old? More than seven years?" I laughed and said, "Seven years?! No, more than 30!" and he said, "Oh hell, yeah - fix it - those things last forever! The new stuff is lucky to make eight years, especially now that everything's sh** made in China. So I bought a new tub, installed it in a couple of hours with the help of a YouTube video, and we're probably good for another decade or so....
Kill the FDA - there is NO reason it should even exist in a world where information can flow as freely as it does today. The FDA's foot dragging, flat-out refusal to even allow trials on many things, billion-dollar approval programs, insistence on testing only one active ingredient, and Gestapo-like enforcement costs hundreds of thousands of lives every year. We'd all be better off without it.
Yeah, that only works if the car is moving - try that in Austin at rush hour, since our crappy city government has been fooling themselves with the, "if we don't build it, they won't come" lie for decades...
Super high-end luxury brands are by definition not affected by the normal rules of economics - Economists even have a name for them: Veblen goods, after the economist that first noted the effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Connectors are evil. Every connector is a potential source of failure waiting to happen. Reliable design principles deliberately minimize the number of connections, since modulo rodents, wires almost never fail in the middle.
That kind of gouging can lead to "interesting" repairs. I had a friend whose shop fixed a customer's Aston Martin Volante's cracked head with JB-Weld. (The car was only a few years old at he time.) He told the customer the repair might not hold, but the customer decided it was the only option when my friend told him the *raw casting* was $10,000 (the machined part was a lot more) and had to be ordered and shipped from England. So for $5.00 worth of aluminum filled epoxy and a few hundred dollars worth of labor, the Aston was back on the road. My friend doesn't know how long the repair lasted, but it was still doing fine when the customer sold the car a few years later...
This kind of parts cross referencing can save big bucks. I had a 1974 FIAT X1/9 in college, and rebuilt it enough to get a good feel for what it's parts were and looked like. Several years later, I bought a 1975 Ferrari Dino 308gt4, and a *bunch* of those parts looked familiar - turns out they were often the same.
This was back in the pre-Internet days, so Italian car enthusiasts circulated and exchanged samizdata-like lists of part number crosses. One example of many: The thermostat switch was identical in the X1/9 and the gt4 (as verified by manufacturer markings), but the FIAT part was around $8.00 (in the late 80s), while the one for the gt4 was $80.00. Switchgear, door handles, etc. were likewise often identical, but sometimes, Ferrari parts were just freakishly cheap due to their inexplicable pricing: For a while in the 90s, it was bizarrely cheaper to buy new brake rotors for the gt4 than to turn the old ones! Although I sold the car a few years ago with most of its spares, I probably still have a box of rotors somewhere...
This is just utter and complete bullcrap.
I built the worlds largest distributed solar PV panel monitoring system (wireless monitors for each panel in large arrays), and I can tell you categorically that for all practical purposes, solar panels DO only work in direct sunlight. Even very high, thin cirrus clouds can easily cut 20-30% or more off a PV plant's output. (Heck, a blob of bird crap or a leaf can slash a panel's output by 33%, frequently leading to the inability of the string to maintain bus voltage, thus causing the loss of that entire string's generating capacity!)
And you would not believe what a bunch of fluffy, fast-moving cumulus clouds do to output on an otherwise sunny day! (Hint: the "DC bus" of a PV plant is *far* from DC in the real world - you can *hear* most inverters dealing with this! There's also a "cloud lensing" effect that causes the effective irradiance to vary far more (1400+ W/m^2) and far quicker than is "physically possible" based on static assumptions...)
We definitely *should* be using a lot more nuclear, but remember, since nukes are not at all responsive, they're only good for base load...
It looks like China and India are going to wind up leading the way in next-generation nuclear power (pebble bed, etc, maybe even thorium), since the West (and especially the US) is stuck on WWII-vintage steam nuke (PWR) technology. In addition to being more open to newer technologies, they've reduced the bureaucratic costs (licensing, permitting, approvals, dealing with protestors, etc.) enough that their newest nukes cost under *half* what ours cost per MWh.
I don't believe that CO2 is a pollutant or that AGW is real, but if I did, I'd be pushing even harder to build more nukes...
640 GB should be enough for anybody, then...
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
The more things change, the more they stay the same - Here's my post reacting to a similar 1.0GHz CPU announcement nearly 20 years ago:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Google is now thoroughly committed to evil, and needs to have every aspect of their businesses subjected to competition, by force of antitrust law, if necessary, which it clearly is, now.. (I'm pretty libertarian, but Google and Facebook are clearly beyond the power of any monopoly in the history of capitalism. It's time to split up Big Tech, and undo 95% of the corporate mergers the government has approved over the past 30 years (especially the ones that have consolidated hundreds of banks into five...))
Good point - I actually mistook Vevo for Vimeo when I wrote my post - thanks for the reminder. At least it's not Vongo, which was supposed to be a video streaming service ala Netflix, but goes down in my book as the nastiest PC virus ever (preinstalled on Compaq PCs years ago, it cannot be removed through the filesystem - you have to hack the registry, too, or it keeps coming back - nasty...)
Agreed - Beef standards in the US are actually pretty high - and if you want even higher quality, it's not at all hard to ensure you're getting 100% local beef with a known history (drug/hormone/antibiotic-free, assured feed/finish, etc.), especially here in Texas, where we've taken our beef pretty seriously for nearly two centuries...
And those bugs are both much tastier and not nearly so gross after they've been eaten by chickens, turkeys, pheasants, quail, ducks, etc....
Of course you millennials have no scruples about muching down on a handful of cockroaches - they're a huge upgrade from Tide Pods, after all... ;-)
And no, powdered crickets are most likely NOT here to stay - they're just fawned over by hipsters thinking that they somehow "save the planet". In reality, they provoke, (and some early evidence seems to show, even invoke and initially sensitize), severe allergic reactions to shellfish. All "cricket powder" vendors warn users to NOT consume their products if you have ever shown any allergy to shellfish - if they don't, they're just begging for a lawsuit.
And yes, eating bugs is gross.
Perhaps GEM on a Commodore 64 is more impressive? Fairly effectively emulating the entire Macintosh OS, GUI, and a solid basic apps suite on a machine that was never designed to work with a real mouse and has only 64KB of RAM has to go down as one of the most sophisticated commercial programs ever. (It's hard to beat Stuxnet in the non-commercial category...)
And it's a good decision. Unicode support is not necessary. Hell, is there really anything on a board for which you need more than 7-bit ASCII? (Foreign language support doesn't count, as /. is an English board....)
After Google's extremely heavy-handed demonitization and de-platforming of content producers that simply violate their increasingly puritan ideas of Political Correctness (viz, Dennis Prager's Prager U, etc.), I was really hoping to see the alternative video sites like Vevo start to take up the slack.
With the death of Vevo, which was clearly one of YouTube's largest viable competitors, does a free and open video platform alternative to YouTube even exist anymore? (Seriously, I want answers/suggestions here...)
Yeah, it's a bit staggering to realize that I joined the ./ community (long before actually acquiescing to sign up for an account) when my son was just a toddler. He graduated from Texas Tech last year as a well-raised third-generation engineer!
FWIW, I've always allowed ads on Slashdot, and never took them up on their offers saying, "you're eligible to disable ads" - I always wanted to do at least that little bit to support the site.
Wasn't that always the correct answer? Seriously, now would be a good time for /.'s current management to realize they have perhaps not been adequately shepherding the community they inherited through acquisition. I think perhaps the thing that saddens me most about Rob's passing is that I saw it first on Hacker News.
Naked and petrified...
A lot of us (I was one) were part of the Slashdot community early on, but preferred to post w/o an account - I didn't get one until /. made changes that required an ID (which kind of miffed me, really), even though I'd been an active poster for years as an AC who put my actual name and sometimes email address in my sig... /. into the front page of the Internet for those actually building it. It's sad to hear of his passing - RIP to a friend I never actually met. /. is the quality of those posting and participating in those days - It wasn't unusual to have several big-name folks like ESR or Russ Nelson mixing it up with anyone in credible discussions/arguments. It seems the ill-advised "update" several years ago was largely responsible for raising the pain threshold enough that many great users just stopped dropping by...
Slashdot was once THE place to find out what was new on the net (I'm old enough to remember when that was NCSA's What's New page, or the UMN Gopher server), and Rob was a huge part of shaping
P.S.: I think the one thing I really miss about the decline of